Hitler

by Brendan Simms

  Throughout the late summer and early autumn of 1938, Hitler psychologically and militarily prepared Germany for action against Czechoslovakia.93 On 2 September 1938, Hitler met with Henlein, and instructed him to subvert any attempt at a negotiated solution. Goebbels, encouraged by the Führer,94 turned the propagandistic heat back up again. Tension rose across Europe. Hitler warned Unity Mitford to go home for her own safety.95 War was already in the air when the party faithful gathered for the annual rally at Nuremberg.96 There Hitler was handed a memorandum by General Thomas, the head of the War Economics Office, the body which oversaw the economic side of German rearmament. It stated that while Germany would begin any contest with an economic advantage over Britain, this would soon be eroded, and in any case the conflict would soon widen into an unwinnable war with the United States, whose resources were inexhaustible.97 Hitler was furious, and gave Thomas a dressing-down; Dieckhoff, who made similar points about America in a brief private encounter at Nuremberg, received equally short shrift.98 But both his rhetoric and his policies showed that Hitler had got the message. For those worried about conflict with the west, the Führer had reassuring words at the Nuremberg rally about Germany’s ability ‘already now’ to survive a blockade, adding somewhat contradictorily that true security could only be achieved ‘on the basis of our own living space’,99 which by implication had not yet been achieved. In the meantime, Hitler put on a massive military display designed to maintain German morale, to deter the Western Allies and intimidate the Czechs.

  These efforts were flanked by a carefully coordinated series of moves. On 20 September 1938, Hitler met with the Hungarians, and suggested that they demand a plebiscite in the Magyar districts of Czechoslovakia.100 That same day, he met with the Polish ambassador and agreed that Warsaw could demand the district of Teschen. Propagandistically, Hitler redoubled his attacks on the Jews. In early September 1938, he once again attacked ‘the greatest enemy which threatened to destroy our people, the international Jewish world enemy’,101 warning them–and their putative creatures in Washington and London–off intervening in support of Prague. But when all was said and done, Hitler was pursuing a high-risk strategy, in which war with the Czechs was virtually certain, and conflict with the west perfectly possible. The strain was visible even to outsiders. The American journalist William Shirer, who observed Hitler during this period, wrote that ‘he seemed to have a peculiar tic. Every few steps he cocked his right shoulder nervously, his left leg snapping up as he did so. He had ugly black patches under his eyes. He seemed to be… on the edge of a nervous breakdown’.

  Throughout late September, the tension mounted yet further. In a series of meetings with the British prime minister, Neville Chamberlain, at Berchtesgaden, Bad Godesberg and finally in Munich, Hitler threatened war unless his demands were met. There were times when it appeared that Britain and France would intervene. On 26 September, President Roosevelt sent Hitler, and the other main protagonists, a telegram calling for a negotiated solution and hinting, albeit very obliquely, that the United States would otherwise intervene by ‘recognizing’ its ‘responsibilities as a part of a world of neighbors’. This démarche was obviously directed against Nazi Germany, the first such open move, albeit a circumspect one, by the US administration.102 Brauchitsch warned that the army was still not ready.103 Hitler, who was well informed by Göring’s surveillance teams about the negotiating positions of the other side,104 and tensions between Prague and London, held firm. He paraded an infantry division through Berlin en route to its deployment on the Czech border to show that he meant business. At the very end of September 1938, Chamberlain buckled at Munich. He eventually agreed to the more or less instantaneous German occupation of the Sudetenland. Not long after, Poland seized Teschen and the Hungarians helped themselves to a large slice of southern Slovakia.

  War had been averted. The collective sigh of relief was audible across Europe, and in Germany it was palpable. Hitler had been vindicated once again, just as Goebbels and Ribbentrop had said he would be. He had forced a militarily superior coalition to back down.105 The naysayers in the army and Foreign Office had been confounded. The Führer, General von Reichenau marvelled, had played for ‘high stakes’. ‘If he had been a poker player,’ Reichenau continued, ‘he could win hundreds of thousands of marks every night.’106 The German public, which had dreaded the prospect of war, rejoiced.

  Hitler himself felt no sense of relief or satisfaction. On the contrary, he was frustrated and dispirited. Time was running out. He had hoped to overrun the whole of Czechoslovakia before the end of the year. Now he would have to sort out the rump Czech state in the spring. Hitler was also unsettled by Roosevelt’s intervention, as evidenced by his detailed reply to the president, which was more than twice the length of the original, in the midst of the crisis. In it, he rehearsed his outrage at the way in which Wilson had turned Germany into a ‘pariah’ after the war, lamented the plight of the Sudeten Germans and voiced various other grievances.107 Most worryingly of all for someone who placed such importance on intangibles such as will and national coherence, Hitler was shocked by the evident reluctance of the German people to embark on another conflict. He watched in appalled silence from a window of the Imperial Chancellery as the infantry division parading through Berlin was greeted with fear and averted faces. Goebbels warned Hitler that the people were not ready for war.108 Hitler was a victim of his own rhetoric here. The German people, like so much of Europe, had believed his constant promises of peace.109 For all these reasons, Hitler never reckoned the Munich settlement a famous victory but rather a massive concession on his part.110

  No sooner had he prevailed at Munich, therefore, than Hitler was planning the next move. He told his generals that he was ‘determined to solve the question of [the rest of] Czechoslovakia’.111 This, however, was only to be the first step. The real objective was to gain a launchpad to attack the Soviet Union and, as Halder told the American chargé d’affaires in Berlin, Raymond H. Geist, at some length, to seize the Ukraine.112 On 21 October, Hitler ordered the OKW to prepare for the destruction of the rump Czech state and the occupation of the Memelland, a small Lithuanian-held former Prussian territory. Two days later, he asked Fritz Todt to investigate the possibility of an extra-territorial railway across the Polish Corridor. Ideally, he wanted to ally with Poland against Russia, or to use eastern Poland as a staging ground. If that was not possible, Hitler hoped to secure ‘runways’ from which to launch his attack against the Soviet Union.113 The Lebensraum he sought in late 1938 was emphatically not in Poland, but much further east.114 In late October 1938, Hitler set out his demands of Poland to Ribbentrop: Danzig, an extra-territorial railway, the emigration of Jews from Poland, her accession to the Anti-Comintern Pact and a common policy towards the Soviet Union (which was code for a joint war of aggression). To be sure, granting these requests would have put Poland firmly in the German orbit, but unlike those presented to the Czechs they were not designed to be unacceptable. On the contrary, Hitler fervently hoped for Polish cooperation.

  As he prepared his next moves abroad, Hitler was haunted by his continuing sense of German weakness at home. In early November 1938, he once again attacked the ‘fragmentation of the national community into classes’. Hitler blamed both the Bürgertum and the ‘international-Jewish parasites who had penetrated into the German people’ for the resulting ‘false selection’ in the German people. A ‘leadership selection’ was needed.115 This, however, would take time. Meanwhile, the home front needed to be secured, and the popular enthusiasm for confrontation so obviously lacking during the Czech crisis needed to be rekindled. Hitler also wanted to take action against the alleged ‘parasites’ at home and their puppetmasters abroad. He sought to encourage Jews to emigrate more quickly, and the outside world to accept them. The Juni-Aktion had plainly not sufficed. Another shot across the bows of international Jewry was required. In late October 1938, the SS expelled about 17,000 Polish Jews, many of whom ended up in the no man’s
land between the borders of Poland and the Reich.

  On 7 November 1938, the Pole Herschel Grynszpan shot and mortally wounded the German diplomat Ernst vom Rath in the Paris embassy. His motivation is not entirely clear, but it seems likely that he was protesting against the deportation of his Jewish parents from Germany back to Poland. One way or the other, his deed was interpreted by the Nazis as another blow by international Jewry against the Third Reich.116 Hitler, who was kept informed of Rath’s condition, seized the opportunity to retaliate. On receipt of the news of the diplomat’s death, the Führer–perhaps at Goebbels’s suggestion–ordered a demonstration of ‘spontaneous’ popular fury against the Jews. The resulting orgy of vandalism, broken glass, harassment, incarceration and murder directed at Jews and Jewish property such as synagogues and shops on 9 November 1938 has gone down in history as the Reichskristallnacht.117

  Normally, Hitler strongly disapproved of pogroms, which he regarded as inefficient, unscientific and unconducive to public order, but on this occasion–perhaps impressed by their recent effectiveness in Austria–he made an exception. His aim was to whip the German people into a frenzy against their supposed enemies at home and abroad, to send the strongest possible signal to international Jewry that any further interference in German affairs would not be tolerated, to speed up Jewish emigration, and to ensure that–if war with the west could not be averted–German Jews would be removed before the outbreak of hostilities.118 Unlike after the Night of the Long Knives, Hitler made no public speech justifying these measures. Kristallnacht was still primarily his work, launched by the Führer for strategic purposes defined by him.119 His intent seems to have been well understood by some of the wider public. ‘The Jews are the enemies of the new Germany [and] last night they had a taste of what this means,’ wrote Melitta Maschmann, who worked for the Bund Deutscher Mädel, the day after Kristallnacht. ‘Let us hope that western Jewry, which has resolved to hinder Germany’s “new steps to greatness”, will take the events of last night as a warning. If the Jews sow hatred against us all over the world, they must learn that we have hostages for them in our hands.’120

  The weeks following the violence of 9 November saw an escalation of the legal restrictions against Jews. They were now to be completely shut out of the German economy. Three days later, his ‘Decree for the elimination of Jews from the economic life of Germany’ laid down that no Jews should be employed in trade or retail by the end of the year.121 Kristallnacht did not yet resolve the tension at the heart of the war on the Jews between the desire to force out the Jews and the desire to keep them as hostages. Emigration was still a priority for the regime. The same day as the Decree was issued, Hitler told Göring that he planned to launch a diplomatic initiative to shame other states into accepting the Jews.122 A month later, he suggested that the outside world should pay for this solution; Schacht was instructed to investigate the raising of the necessary international loan.123 Hitler’s hope at this stage was that he would cooperate with the Polish government, and perhaps other European authorities, in assisting the departure of as many Jews as possible. The Jewish question, Hitler told the visiting South African defence minister, Oswald Pirow, the child of German immigrants, was ‘not only a German but a European problem’. ‘The problem,’ he reassured his interlocutor, ‘would be solved in the near future.’ Hitler even went so far as to predict that ‘the Jews would one day disappear from Europe’.124

  These events, and the general sense that Hitler was repressive at home and heading towards war abroad, damaged his previously substantial international appeal. Kristallnacht caused particular outrage in Anglo-America, especially in the United States. The press was almost uniformly critical, confirming Hitler in his view that they were agents of international Jewry.125 The US ambassador, Hugh Wilson, was recalled for ‘consultations’. From now until the end of the Third Reich, all matters were handled by more junior staff. Hitler retaliated by recalling his own ambassador. Britain’s diplomatic response was more muted, but the general sense that Hitler was heading for war was palpable in press and politics. Global opinion more generally was shocked. 1938 saw ‘peak Hitler’ in what was then regarded as the civilized world. By then 1333 street and squares outside Germany were named for him.126 Hitler was named ‘man of the Year’, by Time Magazine, admittedly a two-edged compliment. Thereafter, approval of Hitler began to slide, at least in western democracies.

  To the Führer, therefore, the battle lines were clear by November 1938. Anglo-America and world Jewry had ‘thrown off the mask’ and were arrayed against him. This was a political, diplomatic, economic and racial struggle. It pitted the Germans against not only the Jews, but British and Americans as well. Increasingly, Hitler’s rhetoric spoke of the ‘Anglo-Saxons’ as a group.127 Hitler saw all these fronts as interconnected. If war broke out over the ‘Jewish question’, he claimed, then ‘that would prove that England was governed by a mentality which wanted no peace with Germany’. Indeed, Hitler said that he had formed the impression that Chamberlain and Halifax were merely ‘dancing on a rope, behind them stood the real string-pullers, the press and the opposition’, that is the Jews.128 The man the Führer really feared, next to Roosevelt, was Winston Churchill, whose fire-breathing speeches against the Third Reich he had been following closely, and whom he accused of wanting to ‘destroy’ not merely the regime but Germany itself.129 Hitler pointed out with astonishing prescience that as a result of the British political system ‘tomorrow or the day after tomorrow Mr Churchill could well become prime minister’.130 The duel between Hitler and Churchill, which was to explode onto the world stage eighteen months later, had already begun.

  Hitler’s concern was not just the supposed power of the Jewish lobby in London, Washington and New York, but the sheer size and quality of the Nordic element in Anglo-America. He knew that anxiety about the power of the British Empire and the United States, which had vanquished the Reich in the Great War, was widely shared in Germany. For this reason, Hitler decided to take the press into his confidence, to brief them on the struggle which lay ahead, and to reassure them that the contest was winnable. Circumstances, he explained at a private meeting of senior press figures, ‘have forced me to speak for decades almost only of peace’. Only by constantly emphasizing the German ‘desire for peace’, Hitler continued, had it been possible to ‘win back the freedom of the German people bit by bit and to give it the armaments which were always necessary for the next step’. The problem was, he said, no doubt referring to the lack of martial spirit during the Czech crisis, that ‘many people’ had therefore come to the erroneous conclusion that the ‘regime’ (sic) ‘wanted to maintain peace under all circumstances’. The result of this, Hitler warned, would be ‘defeatism’ at the very moment when the Reich needed to steel itself for the next challenge.

  For this reason, the Führer explained, it was ‘now necessary to reorient the German people psychologically’ and to show it that there were aims which could only be secured by force. The purpose of this careful work was to ensure that the Volk was ready ‘to stand up even when it starts to thunder and lightning’. The key to this was ‘self-confidence’. The task of propaganda was to instil the German people with ‘the self-confident conviction that, first of all, the Volk itself represented an asset in Germany, and, secondly, that the leadership of the Volk was sound’. Germans would ‘have to learn to believe so fanatically in final victory that even if there were defeats, the Nation would persevere, just as Blücher had done in the face of multiple setbacks’. It is clear from these passages that the great transformation of the German people begun in 1933 was by no means complete. Many Germans, Hitler feared, were mere fair-weather friends of Nazism, who would desert when the going got tough.

  Right at the end of his remarks, Hitler turned to the elephant in the room: the might of Anglo-America, Germany’s likely enemy in the coming contest. He sought to persuade his audience that all Germans needed to fear was fear itself, that the imbalance was nowhere as great
as they thought. Concealing his well-established reservations about the German people, reiterated only minutes earlier, Hitler now sought to boost national self-confidence, and to persuade the listening journalists to do so. ‘The value of the German people,’ he said, ‘is incomparable.’ ‘I will never allow anybody to tell me,’ Hitler continued in blatant contradiction of his previous adverse comparisons with Anglo-America, ‘that any other people can have greater value.’ He insisted that ‘our people, particularly today, represents in its gradual racial improvement [sic!] the highest value which exists on earth today’. This was still a very aspirational superiority. From what we know about the Führer’s impatience with the progress of this ‘gradual improvement’ and his general sense of Anglo-Saxon superiority, this huffing and puffing was just more racial whistling in the wind.

  Hitler now did some very elementary and idiosyncratic maths. The United States, he averred, might have ‘126 or 127 million inhabitants’, but if you stripped out the ‘Germans, Irish, Italians, blacks, Jews’ and so on, that would leave ‘not even 60 million Anglo-Saxons’. Likewise, ‘the British Empire had hardly 46 million Englishmen and women in the motherland’. By contrast, Germany would have about ‘80 million people of one race by 1940’.131 ‘Whoever does not believe in the future of this great bloc,’ he concluded, ‘is himself a weakling.’ What was striking about this peroration was not merely its innumeracy–even according to Hitler’s own best-case scenario Anglo-America would have 106 million Anglo-Saxons to pit against 80 million Germans–but also the fact that it subtracted German America from the US total. It was, after all, the spectre of millions of German emigrants fighting on the American side which had driven Hitler to seek land in the east.