The suppression of world Jewry was one way of protecting the Reich in Hitler’s eyes, but it was not enough. He would also have to implement his programme of territorial expansion in order to give the German people the living space required for its racial elevation. ‘What is the root of all our economic difficulties’, he asked during his 30 January speech, before answering that it lay in the ‘overpopulation of our Lebensraum’. He rehearsed once again the advantage which the ‘Gentlemen critics’ in Europe (meaning Britain) and ‘outside Europe’ (meaning the United States) enjoyed through their copious living space, while the Germans were jammed together in central Europe.165 Unlike the Anglo-Americans, he continued, the Germans were not born with bananas growing into their mouths but had to struggle for every crust. Hitler’s plans to attack the Soviet Union in 1939 were therefore mainly driven by positive eugenics, to provide the economic and territorial basis for the gradual elevation of the German people, rather than the desire to eliminate the Jews in Russia. The Wehrmacht was told to prepare for an assault on the Soviet Union, if possible with Polish cooperation, but if not then using Danzig and Memel as jumping-off points to enter Russia through the Baltic states.166 He also seems to have envisaged a southern front erupting from Slovakia. Hitler’s plans were so ambitious, and had been so extensively heralded in Mein Kampf and elsewhere, that they were impossible to keep secret. Talk of invading the Ukraine was so ubiquitous in the Anglo-American press that the Völkischer Beobachter was constrained to issue a rebuttal in mid February 1939 against the ‘Anglo-Saxon warmongers’.167
Hitler now took two concrete steps to prepare for the attack on the Soviet Union. First, he made one last attempt to win over Poland.168 In the first week of January 1939, Hitler met with the Polish foreign minister, Beck, at the Berghof. His request for help against the Soviet Union was rejected, but Hitler did not give up yet. Ribbentrop was dispatched to the Polish capital with a plan for a ‘global solution’ by which Poland would be compensated for any losses with territory further east. Though this overture achieved nothing, Hitler’s 30 January speech contained some flattering references to the Poles and his idol Piłsudski.169 In mid February Himmler, who enjoyed a good working relationship with his Polish counterparts, was sent to Warsaw with Hitler’s offer to guarantee all of Poland’s territory minus Danzig, which was under League of Nations administration; he too, drew a blank. A month later, Hitler was still hopeful of wooing Warsaw. ‘The Führer is brooding over the solution of the Danzig question,’ Goebbels wrote in his diary. ‘He wants to apply some pressure to the Poles and hopes that they will respond to it, but we must bite the bullet and guarantee Poland’s borders.’170
Secondly, Hitler moved to settle what he had been forced to leave unresolved at Munich: the fate of the ‘rump Czechoslovakia’. This was a strategic bone in Germany’s throat. On 21 January 1939, he met with the Czech foreign minister, František Chvalkovský, to stress his need for closer economic cooperation. Hitler’s tactic was brutally simple. He had already deprived Prague of its powerful border fortresses through the annexation of the Sudetenland. Now he intended to browbeat and intimidate the Czechs, to destroy their ‘nerves’, until their entire state ‘dissolved’. Hitler was able to monitor the effectiveness of his measures through the detailed intelligence reports on Czech intercepts he received from Göring’s Forschungsamt. This approach was what we would today call ‘hybrid warfare’. Hitler received Professor Vojtech Tuka, a Slovak separatist from the Slovak People’s Party, and Franz Karmasin, leader of the German minority in Slovakia. The Führer told Tuka that he was resolved to sort out the Czechs and urged him to declare a separate Slovak state, which Tuka agreed to do.
Prague fell into the trap Hitler had set. When the Slovaks, emboldened by Berlin, brought their separatist agitation to the boil, the government declared martial law on 10 March 1939. Hitler now dispatched his two ‘annexation specialists’, Gauleiter Bürckel and Wilhelm Keppler, to the Slovaks to ensure that they declared independence. He also received the deposed Slovak leader Monsignor Tiso in Berlin.171 The Führer offered them the choice between an independent state and annexation by Hungary. Tiso eventually agreed to a text prepared by Ribbentrop. Hitler summoned the Czech president, Emil Hácha, and his foreign minister to Berlin. Both men were kept waiting for hours in order to increase the pressure on them. Finally, Hitler appeared at 1 a.m. in the morning and browbeat his visitors, threatening to bomb Prague immediately unless his demands were met. Hácha fainted under the strain. He was revived with injections from Hitler’s personal doctor, Theodor Morell. After three hours of pummelling, Hácha signed a prepared statement that he ‘confidently placed the fate of the Czech people in the hands of the Führer’. Czechoslovakia had ceased to exist. Shortly after, German troops moved in. That night, Hitler slept in the castle overlooking Prague. Slovakia became a notionally independent state, but in reality a satellite of the Third Reich. France and Britain made no move, as Göring’s surveillance teams had correctly predicted. Hitler had done it again.
The Führer had no plans at this stage to remove the local population to make way for Germans. On the contrary, he cast himself as the guarantor of Czech national rights in a German-dominated Europe. The appellation ‘Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia’ stemmed from the language of Hitler’s proclamation on 15 March 1939 of the ‘assumption of the protection of the Czech people through the Reich’. It mimicked that of the British ‘protectorates’ throughout the world. Six weeks after the annexation, he let it be known that there was no serious historical enmity between Germans and Czechs and that he thought that the latter were adjusting well to their new role within the Reich.172 The intervening period had seen the start neither of a massive Germanization process, nor of a colonization programme, and that was the way Hitler wanted it.
Hitler’s preoccupation with Lebensraum, always intense, became an increasing obsession in the spring of 1939. In late March he ruminated that history was really a story of ‘migration of the people’ and that the same principles which had set the peoples in motion during pre-history and antiquity applied today. A ‘technologically highly developed society or a purely industrial state,’ Hitler argued, could not survive without its own ‘dedicated space’. If this space was not already available, he explained, it would have to be ‘fought for… that was a natural law’. Failure to realize this would make one ‘the booty of those who did not exercise restraint’. The most ‘brutal’ practitioners here, Hitler argued, were the Americans. Unlike them, or the British, however, Hitler did not favour overseas settlement. He returned to his old trauma, the loss of generations of Germans to emigration. ‘Every German who emigrated to America,’ Hitler lamented, ‘would be lost to the motherland.’ This was because ‘he would become an American, lose his connection to the homeland and, from our perspective [sic] he would degenerate, because he would put down roots in alien soil’. Hitler readily conceded that the colonization of the US, Canada and Australia had created states of ‘material importance and power’, but he regarded them as lacking in culture. Hitler expressed himself surprised, and perhaps also pained, that Germans had taken so readily to these new structures. ‘It is strange,’ Hitler mused, ‘that it was those of German origin who were the first to put down roots in new soil and sought to identify with it more strongly than others.’173
Shortly after the dismemberment of Czechoslovakia, Hitler suffered three blows which were to change the course of events. Warsaw dug in its heels. On 26 March 1939, Ribbentrop reported to Hitler that the Polish foreign minister, Beck, had announced that he would consider the seizure of Danzig a casus belli. Five days later, on the very last day of the month, Hitler learned that Britain and France had guaranteed Poland and Romania. Six days after that, the British-Polish treaty was signed. Stunned by Hitler’s bad faith over Czechoslovakia, London had finally decided to make a stand. The European balance of power would be defended. Roosevelt responded to the destruction of Czechoslovakia by immediately imposing punitive tariff
s on German goods. A fortnight later, he sent a personal message to Hitler demanding that he undertake not to infringe the sovereignty of a long list of European states, Poland among them. It was, in effect, a complement to the British guarantee of Poland. Anglo-America was drawing the line. The path to Lebensraum no longer ran just through Warsaw, but also through London. The day after the Franco-British guarantee to Poland he launched a ferocious attack on British encirclement plans at the launch of the new battleship Tirpitz. ‘We know from historical documents today,’ he claimed, referring to studies of the origins of the First World War, ‘how the encirclement policy of those times was systematically pursued by Britain.’ ‘England,’ he stated simply in late May 1939, ‘is the motor of opposition to us.’174
The breach with Britain represented a massive blow to Hitler’s grand strategy, and was also a matter of deep personal distress for him. On Hitler’s side, the relationship had been characterized by respect for British racial quality, admiration for the Empire and fear of British military capabilities, which he had himself experienced during four long years in France and Flanders. ‘To imagine,’ he fulminated in mid April 1939, ‘that I of all people am forced to contemplate such a conflict, I who am accused in Germany of being an incorrigible admirer of the British Empire, I who have so often tried to effect a lasting understanding between the Reich and England, an understanding which even today I consider as necessary for the preservation of European culture.’ ‘The sole blame for this,’ he concluded, ‘lies with the tenacious blindness of Britain’s leaders.’175
The prospect of war with Britain compelled Hitler to change his racial rhetoric in public as in private. ‘The Briton is proud, brave, tough, resilient and organizationally gifted,’ he conceded, ‘he has the adventurousness and courage of the Nordic race.’ That was no reason to despair, however. As the British were ‘diffused’ across the world, he continued, ‘the quality [of the Briton] drops. The German average is better.’ This was a new line for Hitler, and he probably did not really believe it himself, but the Führer now needed to give the German people the confidence in themselves they–and he–so badly lacked, much in the same way as had been demanded of the press back in November 1938. Sensitive to the (completely justified) charge that he had an inferiority complex towards Britain, Hitler pushed back vigorously. ‘I don’t suffer in the least from a sense of inferiority,’ he protested two weeks later.176 Anybody familiar with Hitler’s writings and speeches over the previous twenty years, however, would have known that the Führer was protesting too much.
Likewise, Hitler now played down the power of the United States, even in private. When told of US technological superiority, which he had freely admitted in the past, the Führer now liked to contrast American ‘quantity’ with German ‘quality’. Doubters were told that everything else was ‘typical American exaggeration and bluff’. It was clear, however, that Hitler knew better. When a film of New York shot from the air was shown in the Imperial Chancellery in the late summer of 1939, the Führer was obviously shaken. He was ‘visibly impressed,’ his foreign press chief Otto Dietrich wrote, ‘by the enormous vitality and the powerful progressive impulses radiating from this, for European sensibilities, immense spatial entity of human coexistence.’177
Hitler was preparing for conflict not just with Britain, but with the United States as well. Anglo-America, always closely linked in his mind, was fusing into one. The Führer’s original hopes of separating London and Washington had been dashed. On 28 April 1939, a full fortnight after Roosevelt’s letter, Hitler responded with a coruscating speech in the Reichstag which not merely rebutted the president’s charges and attacked the United States more generally, but also lambasted Britain, as well as signalling his hostility towards Poland.178 In the Führer’s mind, all of these questions were closely related. The culmination of the speech was Hitler’s denial that he planned to attack any of the twenty-odd states whose integrity Roosevelt had demanded he guarantee. As the Führer read out this list its length and apparent absurdity caused a moment of levity in the Reichstag as the assembled deputies roared with laughter. Hitler, in fact, genuinely did not at this point intend to attack most of the states on that list, but he was to do so almost without exception within two years.
The real issue, as always, was space. Anglo-America had it; Germany wanted it. There was, Hitler argued, more than enough to go around. What was required was that the United States and the British Empire should not intrude on German spheres just as the Third Reich respected theirs. Hitler demanded that the United States should recognize his sphere of influence in Europe while he would recognize Washington’s in the Americas. If Roosevelt, the president of a geographically remote country, required guarantees of German behaviour in Europe, then surely the Reich ‘would have the same right’ to ask the same question about US policy in Central and Latin America. If Roosevelt appealed to the Monroe Doctrine, and rejected any German demands as ‘an intervention in the internal affairs of the American continent’, then surely Germany could make the same argument. ‘We espouse exactly the same doctrine,’ the Führer went on, ‘for Europe, and in all events for the area and interest of the Greater German Reich.’ Hitler’s idea of a German Monroe Doctrine–which he had first mentioned more than a decade earlier–was picked up by the lawyer Carl Schmitt, who elaborated it into an entire theory of ‘large spaces’.179
The consequence of the looming conflict with Britain, and ultimately the United States, was twofold. First, in Hitler’s mind Poland had replaced Czechoslovakia as the cat’s paw of the western powers and was to be crushed. ‘I will brew them a devil’s potion,’ he exclaimed on hearing the news of the Franco-British guarantee.180 Secondly, the acquisition of the territory necessary to match Anglo-America would have to be speeded up. ‘Securing living space,’ he told an audience of German workers, using a phrase he repeated over and over that summer, ‘is our highest commandment.’181 If Poland could not be co-opted to this project, she would have to be brushed aside or even eliminated. The demand for Danzig and an extra-territorial railway was not driven by traditional Versailles revisionism but by the logistics of war against the Soviet Union.
On 11 April 1939, five days after the conclusion of the Polish-British treaty, Hitler issued his instructions for Fall Weiss, the attack on Poland. The instruction specified not Warsaw, but the ‘western democracies’ as the main enemy. Six weeks later, Hitler explained that ‘The problem of Poland cannot be separated from the confrontation with the west.’ Poland would see a German victory in the west as a threat and act to prevent one. His conclusion was that it was therefore pointless ‘to spare Poland’ and that he was left with the ‘decision to attack Poland at the next available opportunity’.182 In short, Hitler would go to war with Poland as part of his conflict with the western powers, not vice versa. The British guarantee, designed to protect the country, in fact precipitated her destruction.
Throughout the summer of 1939, Hitler hoped for the best. He tried to cajole or bully the Poles, failing which he would have preferred to fight a limited war to secure Danzig and the Corridor. Hitler also held the door open for London. He remained theoretically open to a ‘permanent friendship between the German and the Anglo-Saxon people’, but stated that this could only be achieved if the ‘other side also recognized that there were not only British but German interests’ to be defended.183 Hitler also prepared for the worst case. What really worried him was that the Royal Air Force would use bases in the Low Countries to attack the heart of German industry in the Ruhr. He was already planning to attack in the west, not so much to occupy France, though the French field army would have to be beaten, but to establish bases from which to continue the war against England. ‘The army is to seize positions,’ he decreed to the generals, ‘which are important for the navy and the Luftwaffe.’ ‘If we succeed in occupying and securing Holland and Belgium, and defeating France,’ Hitler continued, ‘then we can create the basis for a successful war against Britain. The Luftwaffe can
then maintain the inner blockade of Britain from western France, and the navy’s submarines can take over the broader blockade.’184
The prospect of war with Anglo-America drove Hitler to seek closer relations with his allies. On 22 May 1939, he concluded the ‘Pact of Steel’ with Italy.185 Its immediate value was somewhat unclear. A week later, Mussolini warned Hitler that he could not fight before the end of 1942 at the earliest. The Führer, for his part, sought to bind the Duce closer to him. In June 1939, he instructed Himmler to organize the resettlement of the South Tyroleans. Agreement was reached towards the end of the month. South Tyroleans were given the ‘option’ of emigration to the Reich, and staying in Italy but subjecting themselves to Italianization. Only a minority decided to stay: about 80 per cent ‘opted’ for the Reich, though only about a third of them actually moved. It was the start of a much broader strategy to ‘bring home’ somewhere between 700,000 and 900,000 Germans from Italy, the Soviet Union, the Baltic States, Hungary, Romania, Bulgaria and Yugoslavia.186
If Hitler expected war with Poland, Britain, France, the United States and the Soviet Union, the sequencing of these conflicts depended on the reactions of Warsaw, London, Paris, Moscow and Washington. He did not know, and could not know, in the summer of 1939, whether a major war would begin with the invasion of Poland, or at some later date; he could not even be sure that he would not start with an attack on the western powers, or on all three simultaneously. All he knew was that there would be war; that it would soon involve the major powers, including eventually America; and that it would not be short. The Führer was confident that Poland could be beaten quickly, but beyond that he had no expectation of a Blitzkrieg; indeed the concept had yet to be invented. ‘A rapid victory in the west,’ he admitted privately, ‘is doubtful.’ As a veteran of the Great War, and admirer of Britain, the Führer could hardly believe otherwise. Hitler had therefore rearmed in depth as well as breadth, just as the number and quality of the opposition warranted.187 ‘Every army or state leadership,’ he warned the generals, ‘must aim for a short war.’ That said, Hitler stressed that one should ‘also prepare for a war lasting ten to fifteen years’. He would try to prevail through a ‘surprise attack’, but it would be ‘criminal’ to rely on surprise alone.188
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