Misreading Hitler

As the Nazis seized Austria and prepared aggressively for war, Britain and France sought to avoid conflict

POTENT SYMBOLISM The Nazis held a rally near Berlin’s Brandenburg Gate in January 1933.

Carrying Out an Aryan Vision

After being elected German chancellor, Adolf Hitler made good on his vow to promote what he called the “master race”

ONE WILL In a speech in April 1937, Hitler declared that only one political party was needed in a nation "united with one will."

Adolf Hitler’s rise as Germany’s dictator was swift and bold. In January 1933, having assumed the leadership of the Nationalist Socialist (Nazi) Party, he was elected chancellor of a multiparty German government. Just a month later, he used a fire in the German parliament building, or Reichstag, to justify the suspension of civil liberties. In March, he strong-armed the government into passing the Enabling Act, which transferred state powers to the Nazis, in effect creating a totalitarian regime. Within four months, Hitler would declare trade unions and any remaining political parties illegal, and in June 1934, he ordered the “Night of the Long Knives,” a purge in which SS guards murdered his rivals within the Nazi Party. By August, Hitler’s triumph was complete. Having abolished the title of president, he declared himself “Führer and Reich Chancellor.”

From the beginning Hitler preached a venomous brand of ethnic nationalism in which the “superior” Aryan “master race” was destined to replace the inferior peoples around it. At home, this ideology took the form of virulent anti-Semitism. In 1935, Hitler announced the Nuremberg Laws, which legislated the elimination of Jewish participation in many sectors of German society. Over the course of the next three years, the discrimination escalated. In 1936, the Ministry of Education banned Jewish teachers from public schools. In 1937, the mayor of Berlin banned Jewish students from the public schools. In April 1938, Jews were required to report all property valued at more than 5,000 reichsmarks. In October, the Decree on the Confiscation of Jewish Property mandated the transfer of assets from Jews to non-Jewish Germans. Finally, on the night of November 9–10, known as Kristallnacht—or night of broken glass—rampaging Nazi-inspired mobs destroyed 7,500 Jewish shops, burned 1,000 synagogues and killed an estimated 100 Jews throughout Germany, Austria and the Sudetenland, a portion of western Czechoslovakia. In the aftermath, some 30,000 Jews were arrested and sent to concentration camps, marking what many historians view as the beginning of the Holocaust, directed against Jews and others Hitler considered “undesirable.”

Hitler’s hateful ideology defined his foreign policy, too. At the same time that he was persecuting the Jews, he was pursuing Lebensraum, or “living space,” an innocuous-sounding doctrine that called for expanding Germany’s borders so the master race could grow and flourish. In 1936, he moved Nazi forces into the Rhineland, a section of western Germany, in violation of the Treaty of Versailles that had ended World War I. In March 1938, after engineering a Nazi seizure of power in neighboring Austria, Hitler ordered his army across the border into Vienna and declared the joining of the two nations. In October, under an agreement negotiated with Great Britain, France and Italy, Hitler’s forces occupied the Sudetenland.

While the Führer prepared Germany for war, Great Britain and France looked for ways to avoid conflict. Both nations had suffered grievously in World War I, with France losing some 1.4 million and the United Kingdom and its colonies sacrificing about 700,000. French commander-in-chief Maurice Gamelin supported limited rearmament and focused on reinforcing the Maginot Line, the fortifications along France’s eastern border with Germany designed to make a German invasion difficult and time-consuming.

For their part, the British hoped that providing the French with air and naval power would be enough to defeat Germany should war become unavoidable. The government stopped investing in the country’s mechanized weapons program and mobilized just a fraction of the troops who had fought in World War I. They only agreed to form a relatively small “expeditionary force” in February 1939.

The British also hoped that Hitler could be reasoned with. In 1935, in a first attempt at appeasement, they agreed to allow the German leader to rebuild his navy if he would limit its size to just 35 percent of the British fleet. And in 1938, Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain made his famous bargain in Munich, in which he allowed Hitler to take possession of the Sudetenland in exchange for a promise that German aggression would stop.

Hitler, however, was not to be appeased. In March 1939, just six months after Munich, his troops took control of the rest of Czechoslovakia. On September 1, 1939, he invaded Poland too, forcing Britain and France to declare war. Both nations did so reluctantly, fearing that Hitler’s mighty air force, the Luftwaffe, would make short work of their soldiers on the ground.

As France put its trust in the strength of the Maginot Line, few entertained the idea that Hitler would invade France through the heavily wooded Ardennes Forest to the north of the line, an area once considered completely impassible.

GERMANY ÜBER ALLES The Berlin section of the Hitler youth arrived at the 1935 Nuremberg Rally on their own special trains.

Nazi followers had begun saluting Hitler with the "Heil" salute in autumn 1923; by 1938, it had become ubiquitous.

During Kristallnacht in 1938, German officials allowed rioters to destroy Jewish property but instructed police to protect the businesses of non-Jews.

AFTER THE FALL Ethnic Germans in the Sudetenland cheered the German takeover in October 1938, but the rest of the nation was less enthusiastic when Hitler marched into Prague Castle in March 1939.

NEVILLE CHAMBERLAIN

Abandoning Czechoslovakia

THE AFTERMATH On November 9, 1939, two years after the Munich Pact, Chamberlain died of cancer.

HITLER’S INTENTION of creating a Greater Germany by expanding eastward may seem obvious in retrospect. But from 1935 to 1938, as Hitler annexed Austria and began eyeing Czechoslovakia, British prime minister Neville Chamberlain, with considerable public support, continued to work for a negotiated settlement. Chamberlain made three trips to Germany in September 1938 to seek peace. The first took place at Hitler’s residence in Berchtesgaden on September 15 and ended with no agreement. On September 22, Chamberlain returned, but again the two failed to reach a pact because Hitler kept changing positions. After signaling his openness to an agreement that would limit German expansion to Czechoslovakia, he began claiming that violence against ethnic Germans in Poland and Hungary justified Nazi occupation of those countries as well. Finally, Chamberlain and representatives from France and Italy met with Hitler in Munich on September 29. When the Führer agreed to limit German occupation to the section of western Czechoslovakia known as the Sudetenland, Chamberlain believed he’d wrested a concession. The agreement was signed by all four nations at 1:30 in the morning on September 30. Chamberlain was pleased with his work, describing the pact in a speech to a wildly enthusiastic London audience as guaranteeing “peace with honour.” Within 10 days, the Sudetenland was completely under Nazi control.

France at Risk

The Nazis planned to circumvent the vast Maginot Line and invade via Belgium—but not where the Allies expected

BRITISH BUILDUP After the Germans invaded Poland, factories in England ramped up production.

When Hitler invaded Poland in September 1939, the Polish government hoped, in vain, for assistance from the Allies. But instead of attacking Germany on its western border and diverting Nazi resources, France continued to advocate a defensive posture. Similarly, the Soviets offered no help—arguing that their hands were tied by a month-old nonaggression pact with the Germans—and on September 17 even invaded Poland from the east. Fighting with obsolete weaponry and aircraft and outnumbered by the Germans, Poland was defeated in about a month. Hitler was rewarded yet again for his boldness.

Despite their success, the Nazis feared a French attack in this period. Hitler and his generals knew that Germany could not keep up for long with the combined production power of Britain and France, Hitler was anxious to strike quickly, before his enemies grew stronger. France had to be next.

The eight-month period that followed, between the fall of Poland in September 1939 and the invasion of France in May 1940, was known as the Phoney War because nothing seemed to happen. The Allies built up their military forces and waited, as did the German generals, despite pressure from Hitler as early as November 1939 for a move into France. Again and again, bad weather prevented any attack, delays that secretly pleased the German High Command. The Polish campaign had exposed Nazi weaknesses, including poor coordination between the Luftwaffe and the troops on the ground and, in some cases, a lack of aggressiveness on the part of German forces.

With the additional time, the generals were able not only to address the issues but also to plan a surprise incursion that circumvented the Maginot Line, moved German troops south and ultimately led to the occupation of France.

Some 950,000 British women worked in munitions factories during the war. Polish forces in Gdansk held off the Germans for nearly a week before surrendering the city on September 7, 1939.

WAR PREPARATIONS The British put great faith in the Royal Air Force and its Blenheim bombers, which were rushed into production during the Phoney War.

ADOLF HITLER

His Strategy

ETHNIC PURITY By the time Hitler gave his welcoming address at the 1935 Nuremberg Rally, his power was unchallenged.

THE EARLY YEARS of Adolf Hitler’s life were neither happy nor successful. He was one of five children, born on April 20, 1889, in Austria. His father, Alois, was troubled and emotionally distant, and he ridiculed his son's interest in art. Alois died when Hitler was 13, and after his mother, Maria, died in 1907, Hitler moved to Vienna, where he spent the next six years eking out a living as a watercolor painter and occasional laborer. He was twice denied admission to the Academy of Fine Arts and was frequently homeless during this period.

Even as a child, Hitler had considered Austria-Hungary an illegitimate state and himself a German, so in 1913, discouraged by his lack of success as an artist, he moved to Munich. The next year, he volunteered for duty in the German army in World War I, where he mostly served as a courier. The young soldier was present at several significant battles and was wounded at the Somme, where 164,000 other German soldiers lost their lives. Embittered by the German surrender in 1918 and by the punitive terms the Treaty of Versailles imposed on Germany, Hitler was convinced that the civilian leadership had betrayed the military.

He emerged from the war a changed man. No longer interested in art, Hitler joined the German Workers Party in 1919, soon establishing himself as a powerful orator, able to whip his audiences into a frenzy about the unjust treatment of Germany after the war and the increasing threat to the German identity from Jews and other people he deemed not truly German. When the party changed its name to the National Socialist (Nationalsozialistische or Nazi) Party, Hitler himself designed the party banner with a swastika placed in a white circle on a red background. In 1921, he was elected chairman of the party and began drawing large crowds for his nationalist, anti-Semitic speeches, frequently delivered in beer halls. He led a poorly planned coup—known as the Beer Hall Putsch—that failed in 1923 and landed him in jail for nine months. There he wrote Mein Kampf (My Struggle), a polemic that combined racism, anti-Semitism and nationalism into a call for a revitalized and ethnically pure Germany. Finally, with the German economy in free-fall in the 1930s, conditions were right for Hitler’s rise to absolute power.

America Unmoved

In spite of efforts by President Roosevelt to support the Allied cause, U.S. citizens remained wary of war

QUIET SUPPORT FDR officially declared the U.S. as neutral in a radio address, delivered just days after Britain and France declared war on Germany.

President Franklin Roosevelt was always clear about the danger posed by Adolf Hitler. Remaining on the sidelines while U.S. allies battled fascism was not an option. He also knew that he faced an uphill battle persuading the American people of his position. As late as June 1940, polls showed public sentiment opposed U.S. involvement in the war by a margin of two to one, even if inaction meant defeat for Great Britain. Much of this was due to the perception that World War I, which resulted in 117,000 American dead, was unnecessary and perhaps even pointless.

Unlike Britain’s Neville Chamberlain, Roosevelt never believed that territorial concessions would halt Hitler’s advance. Early on, FDR was clear that the Axis powers—Germany, Japan and Italy—sought world domination. Despite legislation intended to prevent U.S. involvement, FDR searched behind the scenes for ways to support the Allied cause and to prepare America for war. In September 1939, riding a shift in American sentiment after the German invasion of Poland, Roosevelt persuaded Congress to pass the Pittman Act, expanding the policy known as “cash and carry.” The U.S. could sell arms to Great Britain and France as long as the buyer paid in cash and transported the arms themselves. A year later, after the fall of France, FDR circumvented the provisions of the act by negotiating a “lend-lease” agreement with Great Britain. This pact allowed the U.S. to “lend” 50 destroyers to Britain in exchange for the use of eight British military bases in Newfoundland, Bermuda and the Caribbean.

Meanwhile, to help his cause, FDR stacked his cabinet with interventionists such as Henry Stimson and Frank Knox, who took over the War and Navy departments, respectively. He gradually increased the military budget, from $1.7 billion in 1938 to $1.9 billion in 1939, $2.2 billion in 1940 and $7.24 billion in 1941—still just a fraction of the $93.7 billion spent on defense in 1945. He strong-armed the nation’s industrialists into preparing to shift their production facilities to the needs of a wartime economy. His rhetoric, always highly critical of Fascism, took on an even harder edge. While public support for offering aid to the Allies increased, most Americans still opposed direct U.S. involvement. Only the shock of Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941, would alter that view.

Privately, the president believed his nation would rally to help, and he visited facilities like the Boston Navy Yard to show his support for a military buildup.

AERIAL ASSIST In 1939, France ordered the first Douglas DB-7 bombers. The Royal Air Force, which ended up taking delivery of the planes in November 1940, nicknamed them “Bostons” in honor of their provenance.

JOSEPH KENNEDY AND CHARLES LINDBERGH

Democracy in Britain is "Finished"

Lindbergh told a radio audience in September 1939 that “if we enter fighting for democracy abroad, we may end up losing it at home.”

THERE WERE many isolationist voices in America during the 1930s, but none were louder or more widely noted than those of Joseph Kennedy and Charles Lindbergh. In the case of Kennedy, his views were little known until he became U.S. ambassador to Great Britain in 1938. He openly supported British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain’s policy of appeasement and expressed his opinion that America should find a way to do business with Hitler. In a letter to Lindbergh after Kristallnacht—the Nazi pogrom against German and Austrian Jews in November 1938—Kennedy expressed no outrage regarding the German atrocities. His primary objection, he wrote, was that the violence generated negative publicity for the Nazi regime. Throughout his two years in London, Kennedy sought a private meeting with Hitler, without U.S. State Department approval, in hopes of fostering “a better understanding between the United States and Germany” and keeping America out of the war. Finally, after the fall of France in 1940, Kennedy told journalists that Britain was likely to be defeated by Germany and that the fight against Hitler had nothing to do with democracy but was being waged for self-preservation. America should stay out of the fight, he warned, and be prepared for the likely outcome.

Lindbergh, who became a national hero after his solo flight across the Atlantic Ocean in 1927, was urged by the U.S. military to make several trips to Germany between 1936 and 1938 to inspect Nazi aviation facilities. He came back praising the new German planes—the Junkers and Messerschmitts, in particular—as superior to anything in the Allied arsenals. (Historians believe Luftwaffe commander Herman Göring misled Lindbergh into believing the planes were more efficient than they were.) In 1939, after Hitler occupied Czechoslovakia, Lindbergh wrote a letter to the British government expressing his belief that any military action against Germany was destined to fail. He urged the Allies to build up their military capacities in hopes of persuading Hitler to turn his attention eastward against “Asiatic communism.” In late 1940, he became the primary spokesman for the antiwar America First Committee and traveled the country arguing against intervention. This work helped contribute to the belief that Lindbergh was anti-Semitic, especially after a 1941 speech in which he presented the three groups in favor of U.S. involvement as the British, the FDR administration and “the Jews.” In spite of a national outcry about the remarks, Lindbergh refused to retract them and continued to make fuzzy-headed comments through the years about the importance of maintaining the ties of “European blood” against the onslaught of Asian and Slavic peoples. He remained a staunch isolationist until Pearl Harbor.

Kennedy’s address endorsed FDR for president in 1940. Earlier, in a line from a speech censored by Roosevelt, he posed the question: “I should like to ask you all if you know of any dispute or controversy existing in the world which is worth the life of your son?”