Hitler’s domestic vision encapsulated the idea of ‘war against all by all’. This included a crusade against twentieth century modernity, liberal parliamentary democracy and ‘Jewish-Bolshevism’. The divisions within Germany, based on class or regionalism were to be swept away and replaced by a new Volksgemeinschaft (people’s community), based on common ties of blood, race, history, culture, ‘values’ and a belief in a shared national socialist destiny for Germany. Historians who view the entire process of the Nazis’ time in power as a process of ‘cumulative radicalisation’ have argued that Hitler, ever aware of his role as the integrating and unifying force within the movement, was driven to taking ever greater risks. Wracked with impatience, Hitler attempted to secure a rapid succession of high stakes foreign policy gambles against the advice of his generals and other leading Nazis. At the same time, the overriding priority for Nazi propaganda became binding the masses and the party to their Führer and quelling the public’s disenchantment with the corruption, brutality and cronyism of the Nazi Party. The propaganda worked; Hitler remained more popular than the party throughout the history of the Third Reich, and although he had not come close to attaining a majority of the voting public’s support before his accession to power, he certainly increased his popularity once there. Nevertheless, with the opposition killed, imprisoned or in exile, and all the levers of power and propaganda in the party’s hands, it is impossible to gauge the true level of support the Nazis attained between 1933–39, before the outbreak of the war. What certainly increased their popularity initially was their rapid success in overcoming Germany’s mass unemployment with a huge expansion in infrastructure programmes. These included the building of Germany’s famous Autobahns (motorways) as well as a wealth of other public works projects, such as dams, new railways, stadia for the Olympic Games and sporting events, and many new public facilities and administrative buildings.
In 1933, there had been 6 million unemployed, by 1935 there were only 2.5 million, and by 1939 the burgeoning rearmament programme created full employment, which soon even led to employment shortages. Getting the economy back on its feet and Germans back to work was the priority in the first three years of Nazi rule. It was not all about rearmament initially. Hitler believed the German people had to see the benefits of National Socialist rule before they could be prepared for the coming conflict. Living standards improved considerably, overtaking where they had been before the crash, in the boom year of 1929. More consumer goods flowed into the shops, with new and modern luxuries such as radios becoming all the rage. Workers appreciated improvements in their benefits, retailers welcomed higher taxes being levied on the big department stores, farmers welcomed protective tariffs, skilled tradesmen appreciated measures limiting the number of new master’s licences that could be issued, and big business welcomed the end of workers’ participation in decision-making. More people were also able to take holidays; not all on the vaunted luxury Nazi cruise liners of the ‘Strength Through Joy’ movement, but many took holidays in Germany and Austria and looked back on this period, even long after the war, as a golden age of peace and prosperity.clxxvi Hitler’s succession of foreign policy triumphs undoubtedly also increased his popularity. Within the first three years of his rule, he overturned many aspects of the Versailles treaty, freeing the German people from their sense of humiliation and subjugation. He went on to crown this with the Anschluß of Austria to Germany, and the incorporation of the Sudeten Germans and German Bohemia into the Reich. Nazi propaganda portrayed Hitler as ‘a man of peace’ and Germany as ‘having no further territorial claims in Europe’. However, the propaganda did not conceal growing concern at Hitler’s dangerous and escalating appetite for risk, and the attendant fear that this would lead to war.
Perhaps the leading biography of Adolf Hitler by Professor Sir Ian Kershaw has summarised Hitler’s role within the National Socialist movement as the fundamental catalyst that drove it forward, and ultimately, in the realm of foreign policy, drove it to its own self-destruction:
(The) bureaucracy, economy and not least the army… increasingly bound themselves to Hitler’s ‘charismatic’ authority, to the politics of national salvation and the dream of European mastery embodied in the personalised ‘vision’ and power of one man. Hitler’s essential, unchanging, distant goals had inexorably become the driving force of the entire Nazi regime… In reality the Third Reich was incapable of settling into ‘normality’. This was not simply a matter of Hitler’s personality and ideological drive — though these should not be underestimated. His temperament, restless energy, gambler’s instinctive readiness to take risks to retain the initiative, were all enhanced through the gain in confidence that his triumphs in 1935 and 1936 had brought him. His expanding messianism fed itself on the drug of mass adulation and the sycophancy of almost all in this company. His sense that time was against him, the impatience to act, were heightened by the growing belief that he might not have much longer to live… [so that] the dynamism of the regime not only did not subside but intensified… the spiral of radicalisation kept turning upwards.(17)
FOREIGN POLICY: A FOOL’S ERRAND?
Hitler’s most decisive input was in the sphere of foreign policy. He initially played along with the objectives of his conservative allies for a revision of the Treaty of Versailles, the restoration of Germany’s pre-war borders, rearmament and the restoration of Germany’s economic and political status in Europe and the wider world. However, his aims far outstripped those of even the most radical of his right-wing conservative allies. Hitler argued, ‘Calling for the restoration of the 1914 boundaries is so absurd as to make it a crime.’(1) Hitler believed war was not only inevitable; it was necessary for Germany again to become a world power.(2) The question as to just what kind of war Hitler envisaged and planned for has raged ever since. Was it a series of local conflicts, a European war or a Second World War? Hitler lost no time in pulling Germany out of the League of Nations and the Disarmament Conference during his first year in office. He did this on the pretext that the League had stopped arbitrating minority disputes in Eastern Europe, and because the Allies showed neither serious interest in disarmament, nor in even giving Germany parity of arms with France.
In March 1935, he openly breached the Treaty of Versailles by announcing a six-fold increase in the size of the Wehrmacht from 100,000 to 600,000 men, as well as announcing the re-establishment of a German air force. The Western Allies, and guarantors of the post-First World War order, not only did nothing other than offer feeble protests, but Britain actually acquiesced in undermining the post-war Versailles order by signing the Anglo-German Naval Agreement with Germany later the same year.clxxvii In this agreement, Hitler promised to limit Germany’s navy to 35 per cent of that of Britain, thus removing the main reason for Anglo-German distrust, and the arms race that had helped to lead to the First World War. With this policy, Hitler demonstrated he had laboured long and hard over the reasons for Germany’s defeat in the First World War, acknowledging the mistakes of previous governments, which he was determined not to repeat. But that did not prevent him from committing new mistakes of his own; history never stands still, and you cannot win a new war by simply attempting to refight the battles of the last one. Nevertheless, from 1933–38, Hitler consciously ticked off the list of factors he felt had cost Germany the last war. First among his objectives was to secure an alliance with Great Britain, or at least a guarantee of her neutrality. This was a determination and hope he maintained from the time of writing Mein Kampf in 1924, right up to the defeat of France in 1940. Upon conclusion of the Anglo-German Naval Agreements in June 1935, Hitler was quoted as saying, ‘This is the happiest day of my life.’ He falsely believed that it was only a question of time before he secured a ‘non-aggression treaty’ or even a treaty of alliance. The British Foreign Secretary, Lord Halifax, had unwittingly encouraged Hitler’s belief in this regard, telling him that Britain had no security interests or guarantees in Eastern Europe and that Britain cou
ld, in the fullness of time, envisage peaceful territorial revisions and concessions to Germany’s interests in Austria and Czechoslovakia, as long as these revisions were not attempted by force of arms.(3)
The year of 1936 was one of frenetic activity. Hitler was able to showcase Nazi Germany during the Olympics in Berlin, at which German athletes won the highest number of gold medals, and medals overall. Also, as the economy recovered, he was able to switch greater resources into a programme of rearmament, and he continued to break one shackle after another of Versailles. Hitler remilitarised the Rhineland in March, and then made an unusual offer to Britain; he offered to send twelve German divisions to the Far East if she would sign an alliance with Germany. Hitler was effectively offering to help protect British colonial possessions against the Japanese, who were soon to become his allies.
In October, Hitler sent his Foreign Minister as Ambassador to Great Britain with the words:
Ribbentrop… get Britain to join the Anti Comintern (Axis),clxxviii that is what I want most of all. I have sent you as the best man I’ve got. Do what you can… But if in future all our efforts are still in vain, fair enough, then I’m ready for war as well. I would regret it very much, but if it has to be, there it is. But I think it would be a short war and the moment it is over, I will then be ready at any time to offer the British an honourable peace acceptable to both sides. However, I would then demand that Britain join the Anti Comintern, or perhaps some other pact. But get on with it Ribbentrop… Do your best… I will follow your efforts with interest.(5)
In the same month, the German-Italian Axis was proclaimed. With this Hitler was continuing a long-term policy of wooing Mussolini’s Italy, attempting to ensure she remain a reliable ally, even sacrificing the interests of the German-speaking minority of the South Tirol in Northern Italy (whom Mussolini’s Fascists wanted to forcibly assimiliate), much to the chagrin of German nationalists. Hitler insisted that Italy could not be allowed to change sides as she did in the First World War, that she must be anchored into the system of German alliances. Hitler supported Mussolini’s efforts to help Franco in Spain and to establish a new Italian Empire in North Africa. Hitler hoped Italian expansion in the Mediterranean would lead to a direct conflict of interest and eventually a war between Italy and France.clxxix
In November 1936, Japan joined the Anti Comintern Pact directed against the Soviet Union. Hitler then began to take all necessary measures to prevent his East European neighbours slipping away to join Germany’s future adversaries. With a combination of inducements and intimidation, and by paying heed to the diplomatic mistakes of the First World War, Hitler ensured that Bulgaria, Romania and Hungary remained on side when the time for war came.clxxx Even Poland was briefly considered and courted as a potential member of the Anti Comintern. Under the Foreign Ministry of Jozef Beck (from 1932–39), the Poles adopted a policy of appeasement towards Germany, and endorsed the use of force in politics and international relations, expressing sympathy for Franco in the Spanish Civil War and approving Mussolini’s invasion of Abyssinia. Poland had its own expansionist foreign policy aims, namely the re-establishment of the ‘Union of Lublin’ and a renewed Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth. Poland’s government also maintained a deep-rooted loathing of Soviet Russia and was virulently anti-Semitic. For a time, Hitler considered Poland to be a viable ally against Russia. But the Poles were not willing to become unwitting satellites at the mercy of the whims of German foreign policy, nor were they willing to cede their claim to Danzig and the Polish Corridor and soon relations again began to deteriorate.(6)
The year of 1937 proved to be the lull before the storm, during which inflationary pressures depleted Germany’s foreign currency and gold reserves. This made it imperative for the Third Reich to replenish its reserves in order to continue the spending spree, both on the rearmament programme and to maintain levels of public consumption. The national treasuries of Vienna and Prague became tempting targets for Hitler’s attentions. In 1938, Hitler tore the Versailles treaty to shreds, pushed his diplomatic game of brinkmanship to the edge of war, and similtaneously orchestrated a campaign of violence against the Reich’s Jews.
Since the end of the First World War the majority of Austrians had wanted, voted and hoped for Anschluß (incorporation/link up) with Germany. It had been denied them in 1919, as had their attempts at a customs union with Germany. But in March 1938, in breach of the post-First World War settlements, Hitler secured a bloodless Anschluß with Austria. Germany’s former First World War adversaries offered no more than weak protests. The Führer was welcomed into Vienna by jubilant crowds, who threw garlands of flowers, and the Allies were not willing to risk starting a war in order to ‘liberate’ Austria from her desire to be united with Germany. Hitler then lost no time in switching the world’s attentions to the former Austrian-German inhabitants of Czechoslovakia. Months of sabre rattling frayed the nerves of leaders across the Continent, as Hitler seemed ready to go to war for the interests of the Sudeten Germans in Czechoslovakia. The outcome was the Munich Agreement, signed at the end of September 1938, which became the high water mark of Allied appeasement. This saw Czechoslovakia stripped of her German-speaking territories, and the trade-off for the Anglo-French Alliance was Hitler’s promise of ‘peace in our time’ with ‘no more territorial ambitions in Europe’. Then in November 1938, there was an explosion of orchestrated violence against the Reich’s Jews. Goebbels launched Reichscristalnacht (the night of broken glass), in which virtually every synagogue in Germany and Austria was burned to the ground, cemeteries were desecrated, and Jewish shops were looted. Between the nights of 7th to 13th November, as many as 300 Jews were murdered and a further 30,000 ended up in concentration camps, many of them never to see the light of day again.
Shortly after this, rump Czechoslovakia teetered over the edge into collapse. The state of nationalities no longer had the support of anyone but its Czech inhabitants. Hitler threw his weight behind the declaration of independence by the Slovaks and marched into Prague to occupy the rest of the Czech state on the pretext of restoring ‘order and security’. He then declared the territory a ‘Reich protectorate’, effectively annexing the remainder of Bohemia and Moravia to the Reich. He did not realise that this act — his premeditated and unprovoked invasion of the rump of the Czech lands in April 1939 — was actually the tipping-point for war. Hitler’s repeated commitments of peaceful intentions and of having no further territorial ambitions were now no longer believed in Paris or London.
The French alliance system, established in Central Europe after the First World War, was in ruins. Hitler had achieved another key objective on the road to dismantling the Versailles settlement. In their humiliation, the French leadership managed to press one last concession from their old Entente allies across the Channel. Britain agreed to France’s request that they jointly give a security guarantee to Poland. However, a secret protocol stated that their guarantee would only hold if Poland were attacked by Germany. Britain had thus reversed the position outlined by Lord Halifax to Hitler; she now did have apparent security interests in Eastern Europe and had given her guarantee to Poland. Hitler still clung to the belief that Britain would continue to appease his expansionist policy in Eastern Europe. Recently released, long-held secret MI5 files on this crucial period in British history give credence to Hitler’s belief. The files reveal that Lord Halifax and the Foreign Office sanctioned high-level diplomatic meetings with the Nazi leadership, which were carried out on their behalf by James Lonsdale Bryans. These meetings essentially offered Germany all she wanted in Eastern Europe as long as Britain was given guarantees on her empire. Hitler had clearly been led to believe that an accommodation with Britain was possible.clxxxi (7)
No sooner had Hitler ridden through Prague in his open-top Mercedes, acknowledging the adulation of Prague’s German minority,clxxxii than he began to increase the pressure again. This must have felt relentless, interminable, and excruciating for those who believed they had made a sa
crifice to avert war at Munich, as they watched it all begin again. This time it was the overwhelmingly German city of Danzig and the ‘Polish Corridor’ that were in Hitler’s sights. The sabre rattling began in the summer of 1939. Hitler believed his nerve would hold and the Anglo-French Alliance would crack, that they would offer him another ‘Munich’ to avoid a European war; they had not been prepared to fight for ‘democratic’ Czechoslovakia, what was the chance they would go to war for authoritarian Poland? Nevertheless, to cover Germany’s back Hitler opened the door to the previously unthinkable — negotiations with the Soviet Union. It became a race between the West and Hitler to see who could win the favour of Stalin’s Russia. Hitler fixed the date for the invasion of Poland as 1st September; still hoping the Allies would cave in. All the while, the German Foreign Minister and Ambassador to Great Britain, Ribbentrop, was feverishly working away on a highly secret agreement with his Russian counterpart, Vyacheslav Molotov. On 23rd August they announced, to an astounded world, the signing of a non-aggression pact between Nazi Germany and Soviet Russia. If the Anglo-French Alliance did decide to make good on their guarantee to Poland, they would have to face Germany alone, in a single-front war, with no hope of assistance from either the Soviet Union or the United States.
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