3
The Dictator
THE DEATH OF DEMOCRACY
‘Hitler is Reich Chancellor. Just like a fairytale,’ was the reaction of Josef Goebbels to the Führer’s appointment as chancellor. Hitler’s waiting game had paid off. The Linz mummy’s boy, the Vienna dreamer and down-and-out, the World War I regimental runner, the police spy, the beer-hall ranter on the outer limits of Munich’s political lunatic fringe – a man with no qualifications for heading a national government – was now at the helm of one of the most important states in Europe. From the moment he was released from Landsberg prison, Adolf Hitler’s message had been clear to all those who listened: Marxism would be crushed; the Jews would be removed; parliamentary government would be suspended; a rearmed Germany would break the bonds of Versailles; Lebensraum in the East would be seized, by force of arms if necessary. He had not minced his words.
On the Left, few had taken him seriously; on the Right he had been underestimated by those who imagined that they could muzzle him and use him for their own ends. It was these grave political miscalculations, rather than Hitler’s genius as a demagogue – the one political skill he possessed in super-abundance – which ensured that in January 1933 he was placed at the heart of government in Germany. At every step along the way he had enjoyed the Devil’s own luck: coming within a hair’s breadth of death in the Munich putsch and then getting away with a ludicrously lenient sentence in the subsequent trial; the arrival of the Depression at a time when the NSDAP’s fortunes were at a low ebb; and the machinations and miscalculations of right-wing politicians who levered him into power at the very moment when there was an upturn in the German economy.
Perhaps democracy never stood a chance in postwar Germany. By 1932 it was dead on its feet, and with it the Weimar Republic. It was this unique combination of circumstances – national humiliation after World War I, chronic fear of Bolshevism, yearning by many for authoritarian government, institutional racism – which enabled Hitler to preach national redemption and allowed his followers to build a personality cult around him. For Germany in 1933, and for Europe, it represented a terrifying leap in the dark.
From the outer reaches of the German Right echoed the voice of a now forgotten hero, Hitler’s fellow conspirator in the Munich putsch, Erich Ludendorff, who wrote to his wartime colleague Hindenburg about the new chancellor: ‘I solemnly prophesy that this accursed man will cast our Reich into the abyss and bring our nation inconceivable misery. Future generations will damn you in your grave for what you have done.’
In Berlin, on the evening of 30 January, there was an indication of what the future held in store. Goebbels seized the opportunity to organize torchlit processions of SA and SS men through the capital. He claimed that a million took part, although some onlookers estimated that the numbers were as few as fifteen thousand. In any event, when the marchers passed under the balcony from which Hitler was viewing the spectacle, the chancellor was greeted with furious acclaim. Hitler had not seized power, as one sometimes still reads, he had acceded to the highest office in government at the invitation of the Reich President, standing a few feet away and acknowledging the more restrained cheers of the crowd, just as his predecessors had done. However, after 30 January 1933, Germany would never be the same again. To Vice-Chancellor Papen, standing behind Hitler on the balcony that evening, Hitler’s appointment signalled the transition ‘from a moribund regime to the new revolutionary forces’.
That evening Hindenburg was persuaded to grant Hitler a dissolution of the Reichstag and thus enable the German people to confirm their support for the new government in elections, set for 5 March. Strictly, this measure should have first been put to the vote in the Reichstag. A decision which properly should have been parliament’s was thus being placed directly before the people. It smacked of a plebiscite.
Hindenburg and Hitler, one a former German warlord and the other already contemplating his role as the future Felderr. Hindenburg had taken office in May 1925 but had declined to be drawn into the bear-pit of German politics. He first met Hitler in October 1931 and took an instant dislike to him, referring to the leader of the Nazi Party as ‘the Austrian corporal’. Hitler considered Hindenburg a senile reactionary, but the old soldier remained in office until the day of his death, 2 August 1934, at the age of eighty-six.
Hitler opened his campaign on 10 February with his first speech in the Sportpalast since becoming chancellor. It was also carried live on radio – Goebbels, who introduced the broadcast, claimed that there were twenty million listeners that night: ‘Amid the tones of the German anthem the flags are borne through the wide hall. The entire mass is rapturously singing the German anthem … The Sportpalast offers a wonderful, imposing picture of a mass demonstration. The people stand and wait and sing with raised hands. You see only people, people, people. All around, the galleries are decked with swastika flags. The mood intensifies, the expectancy is full of tension … Any moment the Reich Chancellor can arrive …’
Hitler was at his most mesmerizing but the message was familiar. Weimar had ransacked the nation … Rebuilding would be a ground-up operation… it could only be accomplished by the German people themselves, abiding by eternal laws rather than class theories … Gradually, Hitler upped the tempo. This was a struggle for the very existence of Germany, in which political parties and class divisions would disappear and the menace of Marxism would be vanquished. Germany would emerge victorious, and national unity, based on an alliance between German workers and peasants, would triumph. There would be stern resistance to all forms of parliamentary democracy in the process of national revival and absolute intolerance towards anyone who worked against it. At the climax of his speech, Hitler made an appeal: ‘German people, give us four years, then judge and sentence us. German people, give us four years, and I swear that as we and I entered into this office, I will then be willing to go.’
The election campaign ushered in an orgy of political violence from which Hitler, as chancellor, was able conveniently to disassociate himself, hypocritically urging ‘extreme discipline’ on the SA thugs who had been brought in by Göring as ‘auxiliary police’ to terrorize the Nazi Party’s opponents and authorized ‘where necessary to make ruthless use of firearms’. In Prussia and other Nazi-controlled states, Communist meetings and demonstrations were banned, along with their newspapers. This, and the blatant terror tactics which left the SA’s calling cards of broken bodies and lives, were the first signs that the state itself had lifted all constraints on violence. The actions were, if nothing else, even-handed; along with the Communists and the SPD, the right-wing Centre Party did not escape the attentions of the SA. Faced with this lawlessness, Papen and the cabinet were quite happy to accept Hitler’s repeated reassurances that he would rein in the more radical elements in the Party: ‘We all agreed that there was no reason to doubt Hitler’s intentions, and hoped that experience in the cabinet would have a beneficial effect on him.’
THE REICHSTAG FIRE
On 27 February 1933, as the election campaign moved towards a blood-boltered climax, a twenty-four-year-old Dutch Communist, Marinus van der Lubbe, a modern Herostratus if ever there was one, set fire to the Reichstag as an act of protest against what he termed the ‘Government of National Concentration’.
Van der Lubbe was arrested at the scene of the crime, which had gutted the Chamber of Deputies and went on to consume much of the building. Göring, in his capacity as President of the Reichstag, was first to arrive, followed by Hitler and Goebbels who had been dining together that night. Göring told Hitler, ‘This is a Communist outrage, and one of the culprits has been arrested.’ Hitler, who was in a state of manic excitement, declared that the fire was ‘a sign from heaven’ – a signal to mark the beginning of a Communist putsch. The Communist pests would have to be crushed with an iron fist. Later, the mood verged on the hysterical as Göring issued a stream of frenzied orders – a full police alert, wholesale use of firearms, and the mass arrest of Socialists and Communists. Rudolf Diels, a protégé of Göring’s and the first head of the Gestapo,17 was present, and recalled that the atmosphere was like that in a madhouse.
The day after the fire, the Reich Minister of the Interior, Wilhelm Frick, using as a model a draft scheme for a state of emergency prepared during Papen’s chancellorship, presented Hitler with a decree ‘For the Protection of the People and State’. This extended emergency powers to the whole of Germany and gave the Reich government powers of intervention in the state legislatures. Significantly, the powers provided by the decree were vested in the Reich government and not in the Army.
The decree was signed into law by Hindenburg using Article 48 of the Weimar constitution. At a stroke, the individual freedoms enshrined in the constitution – freedom of speech and association, of the press, and of the privacy of postal and telephone communications – were suspended indefinitely. It was a charter for the Third Reich, and in the hysterical mood of the time was widely welcomed throughout Germany. A Bavarian newspaper, the Miesbacher Anzeiger, reflected the views of many when it commented that the emergency decree had ‘finally got the centre of the German disease, the ulcer which had for years poisoned and infected the German blood, Bolshevism, the deadly enemy of Germany’.
Like many others, the Hamburg schoolteacher Luise Solmitz returned to the Nazi fold. Nazi propaganda had convinced her that Germany was on the verge of a Communist takeover: ‘They [Communists] wanted to send armed gangs into the villages to murder and start fires. Meanwhile, the terror was to take over large cities stripped of their police. Poison, boiling water, all tools from the most refined to the most primitive, were to be used as weapons. It sounds like a robber’s tale – if it were not Russia that had experienced Asiatic methods and orgies of torture that a Germanic mind, even if sick, cannot imagine, and if healthy cannot believe.’
In fact, the horrifying violence which was stalking Germany was not perpetrated by scheming Communists against a helpless civilian population but by the SA and the Steel Helmets against the defenceless Jews and the German Left. It mattered little to Luise Solmitz, who now resolved to cast her vote for Adolf Hitler, ‘the saviour of a wicked, sad German world’.
When the results of the election were declared, the Nazis had won 43.9 per cent of the total votes cast. With their allies, the nationalists and the Centre Party, this gave them a slim majority but one that was insufficient to ensure the passing of an enabling act, an ‘Act for the Removal of Distress from People and Reich’, which would transfer the power of law-making from the Reichstag to the cabinet, that is to Hitler, who could then rule by decree.18 To do this, a two-thirds majority was required. Frick found a simple solution to the problem. The Communist deputies would be simply deducted from the total membership of the Reichstag. Göring suggested that, if necessary, some SPD members could also be ejected from the chamber (relocated in the Kroll Opera House since the fire). To make doubly certain of the desired result, Frick made a further suggestion: deputies who were absent without leave should now be counted as present. All too ominously present for the vote, would be squads of SA men inside the chamber and outside the opera house.
On 23 March 1933, the Reichstag voted itself out of existence as a democratic body. Only the SPD voted against the Enabling Act, which became law on 27 March. Political power had now passed into the hands of the NSDAP. It was not the first time that Hitler had got his own way with a combination of bullying and pseudo-legality, and it would not be the last. He no longer needed to rely on the Reichstag or on the Reich President.
CONCENTRATION CAMPS AND CO-ORDINATION
The Nazi takeover was also under way outside Berlin. One by one, the state governments had been taken over by the Nazis. The pattern in every case was similar: pressure on those not controlled by the NSDAP to place a Nazi in charge of the police department; the mounting of ominous SA marches through large towns and cities, and the raising of a swastika banner at the town hall. The finishing touch in each case was the appointment of a Reich Commissar on the pretext of maintaining order. In Bavaria, for example, Heinrich Himmler was appointed Reich Commissar for Police and Reinhard Heydrich, the head of NSDAP security, became commissar for the state’s political police.
Both men went to work with a will, arresting some ten thousand Communists in March and April. By June, there were twenty thousand political prisoners in Bavaria, many of them arrested after denunciations by neighbours or fellow workers, a measure sanctioned by the Malicious Practices Act of 21 March 1933. On the same day, Himmler held a press conference at Dachau, twelve miles outside Munich, to announce the opening of Germany’s first concentration camp. He told the attentive journalists that its purpose was to hold five thousand Communists and Social Democrats and was intended as a deterrent.
Heinrich Himmler (second left) and Reinhard Heydrich (second right) in Prague in 1941 after the latter’s appointment as the Reich Protector of Bohemia-Moravia. In this role Heydrich moved ruthlessly against the Czech Resistance. He was assassinated on 27 May 1942 by Czech agents trained by the British Special Operations Executive (SOE).
The day of the Dachau press conference also saw the opening ceremony of the new parliament. The date marked the anniversary of the meeting of the first Reichstag after Chancellor Otto von Bismarck had founded the First Reich in 1871. The venue was the garrison church in Potsdam, in whose crypt lay Frederick the Great. The ceremony was staged to demonstrate reconciliation between the revolutionary Nazi movement, represented by Hitler in a dark morning suit, and the ‘Old Prussia’, embodied by Hindenburg wearing the uniform of a field marshal and raising his baton to the empty throne of the exiled Kaiser.
A French observer called the ceremony the ‘comedy of Potsdam’.
Here was Hitler the consummate actor, now cast as the humble servant of the war hero and president, bowing deeply and offering his hand. The theme of Hitler’s address was national unity. In a deeply ambiguous phrase, he vowed that those who formed no part of that unity would be rendered ‘unharmful’. An unaligned observer reflected that ‘it can’t be denied that he has grown. Out of the demagogue and party leader, the fanatic and agitator, the true statesman seems – for his opponents surprisingly enough – to be developing.’
One by one the bastions of political opposition, and former allies, yielded to the Nazis, usually without a fight. The Communist Party (KPD) had already been smashed, and there was no longer any need to take formal steps to outlaw it. It was time to deal with the rest, on the Left and on the Right. On 2 May, the Social Democratic trade union movement, the largest in the world, was wound up within a few hours and its members incorporated into the German Labour Front (Deutsche Arbeitsfront, DAF) led by Robert Ley. By the end of the year, the DAF itself had been reduced to the status of a propaganda machine for mobilizing the German workforce in the service of the new regime. Workers now faced a confident, increasingly aggressive management, backed by the full powers of the state.
Since 1929, the Social Democratic Party, the SPD, had compromised itself to death. Now it needed only the gentlest of pushes to send it toppling into the grave. Its paramilitary arm, the Reichsbanner, was dissolved in April, and many of its activists had fled abroad. The publication in Prague of an SPD magazine, Neuer Vorwärts, was used as the pretext for the banning of all SPD activities in Germany, the abolition of its parliamentary representation and the confiscation of its assets. The Nazis’ coalition partner, the DNVP (now renamed the DNF), whose leader Hugenberg had become an isolated figure in Hitler’s cabinet, went the same way as the SPD at the end of June. Hugenberg, who many had confidently predicted in January 1933 would be the dominant figure in the cabinet, was forced to resign. Far from ‘boxing in’ Hitler, Alfred Hugenberg was now yesterday’s man. Tomorrow belonged to the Führer. The parties of the Catholic Right were the next to go. On 5 July the last, the Centre Party (Zentrum), dissolved itself, a turkey voting for Christmas. A week later, the Law Against the New Construction of Parties made the NSDAP the only legal party in Germany. The penalty for breaking this law was three years’ imprisonment.
The so-called co-ordination of Germany (Gleichschaltung) extended far beyond the dissolution of political parties. It affected every aspect of society, from town councils to gardening clubs, and the intellectual life of the nation. Mayors and town councillors who had been members of the left-wing parties were quickly driven from their posts. Their conservative counterparts were happier to join the NSDAP, whose membership grew by one 1.6 million after Hitler became chancellor, prompting a ban on new entrants imposed on 1 May.
Many associations, clubs and societies already had a majority of members who belonged to the NSDAP. Nevertheless, the Party now took under its wing every voluntary grouping imaginable, from business associations to choral societies and sports clubs. Indeed, if you wanted to form a club to pursue any form of social activity whatsoever, it had to be done under the aegis of the NSDAP. Everything was seen through a Nazi filter. There were many artists who were eager to clamber aboard the NSDAP bandwagon, the reins of which were in the hands of Josef Goebbels, who had been appointed Reich Minister of Public Enlightenment and Propaganda on 13 March. The role of the new ministry, which was housed in handsome offices in the Leopold Palace on Wilhelmstrasse, opposite the Reich Chancellery, was the centralization of state control over all aspects of German cultural and intellectual life: the press, the radio and the visual and performing arts.
Magda and Josef Goebbels and three of their children with Hitler at the Berghof. Goebbels was probably the most intelligent of the Nazi hierarchy and totally committed to Hitler. His skills as an administrator and orator were of immense importance in promulgating Nazi ideology. His flair for propaganda never deserted him. In the closing stages of the war, Goebbels’s fabrication of a ‘Last Redoubt’ in Bavaria became a fixation of the Allied Supreme Commander, General Eisenhower.
Goebbels was the Reich’s master of spectacle and had organized and staged the National Day of Labour on 1 May, which preceded the destruction of Germany’s trade unions. Now his canvas was the reconfiguring of German cultural life. Those who signed up for the programme were often idealists, sooner or later to be disillusioned, or careerists flattered by the attention given them by the new regime and eager to repay the favour.
The stage and screen star Emil Jannings, who had played the pompous professor enslaved by Marlene Dietrich’s immortal Lola-Lola in The Blue Angel (1930) was recruited by Goebbels and, although not a Party member, was only too eager to endorse Nazi ideology. In 1938 he became head of Tobis, the company which distributed his films. In contrast, Dietrich travelled in the opposite direction, emigrating to Hollywood in 1930. In 1937, while filming in England, she turned down an offer, allegedly made by Hitler himself, to return to German cinema. The Allies later awarded her the Medal of Freedom and created her Chevalier of the French Legion of Honour for her war work.
However, for every Hollywood exile, like Dietrich or Peter Lorre, there was a Gustav Gründgens or Werner Krauss who, in the Nazi years, was made an Actor of State. The careers of composer Richard Strauss and the conductors Wilhelm Furtwängler and Herbert von Karajan, however, indicate the pressures brought to bear on individuals by the Nazi state. Without any consultation, Goebbels appointed Strauss president of the State Music Bureau in November 1933. Much of the composer’s subsequent behaviour can be explained if not necessarily excused by his desire to protect his Jewish daughter-in-law, an endeavour in which he succeeded by enlisting the help of Baldur von Schirach, former head of the Hitler youth, later the Gauleiter of Vienna, and a man with the blood of many Jews on his hands. Throughout the war Furtwängler was kept on a very tight rein by the Nazis and only managed to escape to Switzerland in January 1945. Of the three, Karajan seems the most culpable, a Party member from 1933 who opened every concert with the ‘Horst Wessel Lied ‘, a Nazi anthem composed by an SA man who was killed by a communist in January 1930.
For modernists and Jews, exile beckoned. Arnold Schoenberg and Kurt Weill were no longer welcome in Germany, nor were conductors Bruno Walter and Otto Klemperer. In 1933, the Jewish film director Fritz Lang found himself in an invidious position. His film The Testament of Dr Mabuse (1932) was banned by Goebbels, who then summoned him to the Wilhelmstrasse. Goebbels apologized for the banning of the film and, to Lang’s stupefaction, extended an offer from the Führer himself to supervise and direct Nazi film productions. Lang, whose mother was Jewish, caught the train to Paris that evening, leaving everything behind including his wife, Thea von Harbou, who divorced him the same year and went on to make propaganda films for the Nazis. Like Harbou, others had no problem with the Nazis, notably Leni Riefenstahl, director of Triumph of the Will (1935), a documentary record of the Nuremberg rally of 1934 and one of the most brilliant and chilling examples of propaganda on film. Perhaps the foremost Nazi film propagandist was Veidt Harlan, whose Jud Süss (1940) was a savage anti-Semitic distortion of an anti-Fascist book by the Jewish author Lion Feuchtwanger.
The distinguished philosopher Martin Heidegger, the author of Time and Being (1927) joined the Nazi Party in 1933. That same year, in his inaugural lecture as Rector of Freiburg University, he talked of German students being on the march, leaving behind questionable academic freedom in the service of the völkisch state. It was the National Socialist German Students Association and its rival, the German Students Association, which were the driving forces behind the notorious burning of twenty thousand books unacceptable to the new regime in Berlin’s Opernplatz on 10 May 1933. This was a thoroughgoing demonstration of co-ordination. The police and the local authorities had volunteered to clear out public libraries of the books to be burned. There was hardly a squeak of protest. The poet Heinrich Heine, whose works were among those consigned to the flames, once wrote: ‘Where books are burnt, in the end people are also burnt.’
First books are burned, then men. The book-burning campaign, led by German students, was a key element in Nazi ‘co-ordination’. On 10 May 1933, students burned over 30,000 volumes of ‘un-German’ books, ushering in an era of rigid censorship and control. The burnings continued through June and were covered by German radio, which broadcast many of the speeches and much of the communal singing which accompanied the bonfires.
CHURCH AND STATE
One significant section of the German establishment, the churches, contrived to escape the full effects of the policy of co-ordination. Hitler’s reflex was always to dominate and control, and this led to the appointment of Ludwig Müller, a former naval chaplain and head of the pro-Nazi German Christians in East Prussia, as Reich Bishop to bring all the Protestant churches under NSDAP control. But the installation of Müller, after a campaign marked by chicanery and terror tactics, proved a Pyrrhic victory. There was mounting opposition to Müller, led by Pastor Martin Niemöller, a World War I submarine commander and postwar Freikorps commander, and the Confessing Church was established to oppose the Nazis. For his pains, Niemöller was imprisoned in Sachsenhausen concentration camp, then Dachau, between 1938 and 1945.
The Roman Catholic Church, with its substantial membership, strong discipline and efficient organization threatened to be an even tougher nut to crack. In July 1933 Hitler signed a concordat with the papal nuncio, later Pope Pius XII (ratified the following September), the aim of which was to protect the Catholic Church in Germany. The concordat was a poisoned chalice, but as the Catholic leader of Bavaria, Cardinal Michael von Faulhaber of Munich, observed, ‘With the concordat we are hanged, without the concordat we are hanged, drawn and quartered.’
At the time, the bishops of Austria, which was still an independent country, expressed their view of the concordat in a letter written in December 1933: ‘The concordat recently concluded between the Holy See and Germany does not mean that the Catholic Church approves of the religious errors of Nazism. Everybody knows how tense is the situation between the Church and State in Germany … The Catholic Church has never agreed with the three fundamental errors of Nazism which are first, race madness, second violent anti-Semitism and third extreme nationalism.’
Like some of Nazi Germany’s most distinguished writers and musicians, Faulhaber was obliged to pick a path through the moral minefields of the Third Reich. He had greeted the concordat with the warmest of praise for Hitler: ‘What the old parliament and parties did not accomplish in sixty years, your statesmanlike foresight has achieved in six months … May God preserve the Reich Chancellor for our people.’
Subsequently Faulhaber’s sermons contained veiled but nevertheless pointed criticisms of the Nazis, prompting some Party diehards to call for his assassination. In 1938, after he had condemned the racism of Kristallnacht, a mob broke the windows of his episcopal palace. He was also an opponent of the euthanasia programme. In a letter to the head of the Reich Chancellery, he wrote: ‘I have deemed it my duty to speak out in this ethico-legal, non-political question, for as a Catholic bishop I may not remain silent when the preservation of the moral foundations of all public order is at stake.’
However, the Cardinal was an enthusiastic supporter of Operation Barbarossa, Germany’s 1941 invasion of the Soviet Union. In December 1941, in a pastoral letter, he wrote:
We attend our soldiers with our prayers and commemorate in grateful love the dead ones, who gave their life for our nation. We have repeatedly, have insistently, appealed to our believers for faithful fulfilment of their duties, to persevere boldly, for self-sacrificing work and for fighting in service of our country in the hardest times of war … We gave warning to the German Catholic of Bolshevism and called for vigilance in many pastoral letters from 1921 to 1936, as the German government well knows, and so we observe this fight against Bolshevism with great satisfaction.
THE NIGHT OF THE LONG KNIVES
Although he was now chancellor, Hitler’s daily routine had still not noticeably changed since the late 1920s. Only Göring, Goebbels and Himmler saw him with any degree of regularity. Access for anyone else was all but impossible. Hitler rose late and often chose to spend much of the day with his disreputable crew of chauffeureska cronies and hangers-on, among them the photographer Heinrich Hoffmann, his driver Julius Schreck (Emil Maurice’s successor) and adjutant Julius Schaub. They were happy stooges, sounding boards for Hitler’s interminable monologues. Lunch, the high point of the day, was a moveable feast, which could never be strictly scheduled because Hitler remained a creature of whim and sudden impulse. He stayed up late at night, often enjoying films in his private cinema – one of his favourites was King Kong. Only his personal authority could sustain such an unconventional regime, although, as Goebbels observed, this routine encouraged and enabled subordinates to embark on the implementation of radical policies on the mere understanding that they were in line with the Führer’s thinking and wishes, but without his direct authorization.
On many major issues, Hitler remained a great prevaricator. Action was endlessly delayed until he made a sudden and irrevocable decision. One such, perhaps the most dramatic of the early years of his chancellorship, concerned the thorny problem of the SA, which by 1934 was presenting a growing threat to the sway that Hitler held over the NSDAP.
By the spring of 1934, relations between the Army and the SA had reached crisis point. The SA, which had been responsible for most of the violence and disorder in the year of five elections, was now some four and a half million strong. Its leader, Ernst Röhm, had been appointed a cabinet minister without portfolio, but his ambition lay elsewhere. He wanted to initiate an era of ‘permanent revolution’ which would transform the SA into a people’s army, supplanting the Reichswehr and reducing it to a mere feeder organization for the Sturmabteilung.
Both the Army and Röhm lobbied Hitler strongly for his support, the former attempting to curry favour by introducing for the German officer corps the notorious Aryan Paragraph which, in April 1933, barred Jews from the civil service. However, forced to choose between the Army, which was backed by Hindenburg, and the SA, the Party army, Hitler stayed his hand. This was not a posture he could maintain indefinitely; as one of his generals reminded him in a pointed reference to Röhm, ‘Re-armament is too serious and difficult to permit the participation of speculators, drunkards and homosexuals.’
Hitler waited on events while, from February 1934, Röhm was kept under surveillance by the Prussian Gestapo (Geheimestaatspolizei, or secret police established in 1933) which had now passed into the hands of Heinrich Himmler and Reinhard Heydrich, who were both itching to expand their embryonic SS empire which was still subordinated to the SA. It was decidedly in the interests of this predatory duo, and their boss in Prussia, Hermann Göring, to see the SA emasculated. Röhm was rapidly acquiring a portfolio of determined enemies, while Hitler was finessing his position. Early in 1934, with his eye on the current disarmament negotiations, he indicated in a meeting with Anthony Eden, then the British government’s Lord Privy Seal, that he was determined to demilitarize the SA.
It was left to Heydrich to set the ball rolling. In concert with Himmler, he concocted a plot whereby by the SA would appear to launch a putsch against Hitler. The conspiracy was wholly imaginary, but by now Röhm had antagonized too many powerful players in the Party. Röhm and his senior lieutenants were ordered to meet Hitler in Bad Wiessee on the morning of 30 June. The Army was placed on alert while Hitler travelled to Bad Godesberg, there to be joined by Goebbels and Sepp Dietrich, head of Hitler’s SS bodyguard. Goebbels was under the impression when he arrived that a move was imminent against Papen and a conservative cabal who were, belatedly and wholly ineffectually, attempting to sideline Hitler. He was quickly disabused of this notion. Röhm was the target.
Hitler flew on to Munich in the company of his adjutants, Goebbels, Viktor Lutze, an SA officer loyal to the Führer, and Sepp Dietrich. They landed at dawn, to be greeted by news that the SA had been demonstrating against Hitler in the city’s streets. This was the last straw for the Führer. He and his entourage sped on to the Bavarian Ministry of the Interior, where two local SA leaders were summoned, stripped of their rank, and carted off to prison. Hitler then raced to Bad Wiessee, arriving at 6.30 a.m. to find Röhm and his lieutenants sleeping off a night of heavy drinking.
Hitler, waving a pistol and followed by his entourage, burst into Röhm’s room and accused the SA chief of treachery. Röhm was led away under arrest to Munich’s Stadelheim prison while, in a neighbouring room, Edmund Heines, the SA chief in Breslau, was discovered in bed with a young man, a fact from which Goebbels was subsequently to gain much mileage. Arrests followed thick and fast as Hitler and his party made their way back to Munich’s Brown House, where he addressed a gathering of SA leaders in the Senators’ Hall. The Führer was incandescent with rage, saliva dribbling from the corners of his mouth, as he launched himself on an arc of hyperbole. In the ‘worst betrayal in world history’, he declared, Röhm had taken bribes from the French to have him arrested and killed, but now the boot was on the other foot and the SA traitors would be executed.
In Munich the executions began shortly afterwards, but Röhm’s was not among them. While Hitler’s cronies, notably among them Rudolph Hess, clamoured for the honour of despatching the SA chief, Hitler dithered. This was partly out of of lingering loyalty, but also, perhaps, because of fear of embarrassment. It was no simple matter to order the shooting, out of hand, of one of your principal lieutenants.
In Berlin, Göring and Goebbels had no such inhibitions. The code-word for the death squads – Kolibri – was issued and the executioners went about their work. They were taking no chances. Anyone who was considered a threat to Hitler, real or potential, was executed after a one-minute ‘trial’. Many of the victims had nothing to do with the SA but died in the settling of old scores. Among them were Gregor Strasser; the former Chancellor, General Schleicher and his wife; one of Schleicher’s right-hand men, General Bredow; and Hitler’s old adversary of the 1920s, Ritter von Kahr, who was hacked to death near Dachau by a squad of SS men. Father Bernhard Stempfle, one of the men who had laboured to turn Mein Kampf into readable prose, was also killed by the SS. Perhaps his death was a case of mistaken identity which, as the blood-letting raced out of control, sealed the fate of the music critic Wilhelm Eduard Schmid, whose executioners had confused him with Dr Ludwig Schmitt, a former associate of Gregor Strasser.
Ernst Röhm, however, was still alive when Hitler’s plane touched down at Tempelhof airfield at 10 p.m. on the evening of 30 June. Göring and Himmler urged Hitler to order Röhm’s execution, but it was not until Sunday 1 July, during a garden party at the Reich Chancellery, that he agreed to the liquidation of the SA chief, who, as a final grisly courtesy, was to be offered the chance to shoot himself. The pistol was presented to Röhm in his cell by Theodor Eicke, the commandant of Dachau, but the veteran front fighter declined to do the decent thing. After ten minutes had elapsed, the pistol was removed and Röhm was despatched by Eicke and his deputy, SS-Sturmbahnführer Michael Lippert, as he stood before them, bare-chested and still struggling to speak.
On 2 July, Hitler halted the so-called cleansing action, and Göring ordered the burning of all police files connected with the affair. The weeding out was insufficiently rigorous to cover all the tracks, however, and surviving documents list eighty-five victims, of whom fifty were SA men. It is likely that during the Night of the Long Knives, some two hundred people were killed by the SS. The action marked the end of the Sturmabteiling as an alternative power base in Nazi Germany and its demise was not mourned by many. The SA’s arrogance and undisciplined behaviour had alienated the German middle class, who applauded Hitler’s apparent readiness to grasp the nettle. Within a year the SA’s numbers had been slashed by 40 per cent and many of its senior officers had been disciplined or dismissed. The SA still had its uses, as was to be shown in 1938 on Kristallnacht, but it had been cut down to size with a swiftness and brutality which no one could ignore.
The Army, which had supplied weapons to the SS death squads and then stood back during the slaughter, was unstinting in its praise. The Defence Minister, General von Blomberg, thanked Hitler for his ‘resolute and courageous action … [which] called forth a pledge for attainment, loyalty and devotion in this difficult hour’. The fact that two generals had died in the bloodbath counted for little. The Army, too, believed that it could deal with Hitler. It was only later that the terrible implications of the deal it had struck with him dawned on the Army high command.
Hitler covered his own tracks with the Law for the Emergency Defence of the State, which was agreed by the cabinet on 3 July and which read, ‘The measures taken on 30 June and 1 and 2 July for the suppression of high treasonable and state treasonable attacks are, as emergency defence of the state, legal.’ On 13 July, Hitler addressed the Reichstag, which had lost thirteen deputies on the Night of the Long Knives. To a storm of cheering, he justified the abandonment of the rule of law and the adoption of a policy of state-backed murder with the following words:
Mutinies are broken according to eternal, iron laws. If I am reproached with not turning to the law courts for sentence, I can only say: in this hour, I was responsible for the fate of the German nation and thereby the supreme judge of the German people … I gave the order to shoot those men most guilty of this treason and I further gave the order to burn out down to the raw flesh the ulcers of our internal well-poisoning and the poisoning from abroad.
Hitler had got away with murder, and so had the SS, which was now free from its subordination to the SA. Henceforth it would be responsible to Hitler alone. The unruly mass of the SA had been replaced by an elite praetorian guard whose sinister empire inexorably expanded. By 1944 the Waffen (armed) SS was seven hundred thousand strong and made up 10 per cent of the German Army.
The ailing President Hindenburg died on 2 August 1934. The old man had been ill for months and Hitler was well-prepared for the inevitable. Scarcely an hour after Hindenburg had breathed his last, an announcement was made that heneceforth the office of the chancellor would be merged with that of president. Hitler was now the sole and undisputed head of the German Reich.
The Army was now keen to turn over a new leaf. Acting on his own initiative, General von Reichenau, General von Blomberg’s deputy, devised a new oath to the head of state to be sworn the moment he took office. Hitler was delighted with it, and on the afternoon and late evening of 2 August, the anniversary of German mobilization in 1914, at ceremonies throughout Germany, soldiers and sailors took their oath of allegiance to their new Head of State and Supreme Commander with the words: ‘I swear by God this holy oath, that I will render to Adolf Hitler, Führer of the German Reich and People, Supreme Commander of the Armed Forces, unconditional obedience, and that I am ready, as a brave soldier, to risk my life at any time for this oath.’
By this oath, every serviceman in Germany’s armed forces placed himself at the sole disposal of one man, Adolf Hitler, in his position as Reich Chancellor and President, the power of which offices had been extended by the Enabling Law which swept away all legal or constitutional constraints. Henceforth, Hitler was not obliged to render account to any man for the use to which his soldiers were put.
Hitler was, if anything, pathetically grateful for the manner in which Germany’s armed forces had acknowledged him as head of state. In a letter to Blomberg, he wrote: ‘… I wish to express my thanks to you, and through you, to the Armed Forces, for the oath of loyalty which has been sworn to me. Just as the officers and men of the Armed Forces have obligated themselves to the new state in my person, so I shall always regard it as my highest duty to intercede for the existence and inviolability of the Armed Forces, in fulfilment of the testament of the late Field-Marshal, and in accord with my own will to establish the Army formally as the sole bearer of arms of the nation.’
The Army and the Führer were now as one. As supreme commander, Hitler ordered the Army to appear at the Party rally at Nuremberg in September 1934, where it delighted the audience with its displays of drill, tactics and weaponry. There was one more brick to lay in the wall. In a mid-August plebiscite, the merging of the offices of chancellor and president, and Hitler’s assumption of the role of supreme commander, were approved by 84.6 per cent of the electorate. Now there were no checks and balances left on Hitler’s power. He was ready to roll.
Hitler at Nuremberg, in Franconia, the geographical and cultural centre of the Third Reich, where the Gauleiter was Hitler’s old comrade Julius Streicher. Josef Goebbels called the Nuremberg rallies the ‘high mass’ of the Nazi Party. From 1933, the rallies were held in early September under the title of National Congress of the German People, a deliberate attempt to underline the solidarity between the German people and the Nazi Party. By the late 1930s, the rallies were attended by over half a million people from all sections of the Party, armed forces and the state. In September 1939, the eleventh Party Congress, the ‘Rally of Peace’, was cancelled at the last minute as Hitler prepared to invade Poland.
HITLER AND THE GENERALS
The German Army was long accustomed to following an autocratic ruler. Until the end of World War I, the rule of the Kaiser, theoretically circumscribed by parliament, was in practice absolute. The Kaiser enjoyed the absolute privilege to conduct foreign affairs, hold supreme command of the armed forces and declare war. In periods of acute internal crisis he could assume the powers of a military dictator, and it was to the Kaiser that, under the 1871 constitution, the Army pledged its loyalty. The personal bond between soldier and Emperor was the source of great pride to the Army and underlined the deep commitment of the officer corps to the monarchy; any open criticism of the monarchy was considered a serious offence, punishable before a military Court of Honour. The men of the officer corps inhabited a world which was deeply inimical to the concepts of democracy and Socialism.
This stern world of order and authority was turned upside down by Germany’s defeat in 1918. In its immediate aftermath it led to the formation of the Freikorps and the crisis of the Kapp putsch. The situation had been stabilized by General Hans von Seeckt, the C-in-C of the one-hundred-thousand-strong army, the Reichswehr, which the Allies permitted Germany to retain under the terms of the Treaty of Versailles. Seeckt restored discipline, re-establishing the Army’s apolitical credentials (Überparteilichkeit), and the officer corps was instructed to avoid the unpredictable, often chaotic ebb and flow of politics in the Weimar Republic. Seeckt’s view was absolutely straightforward: ‘Hands off the Army! is my cry to all parties. The Army serves the state and the state alone.’ In 1930, as the Republic was entering its prolonged death throes, the then defence minister, Wilhelm Gröner, reasserted the concept of unconditional obedience as the fundamental requirement of military service.
In the Weimar years the Army had become a reliable, albeit unthinking pillar of state. It had been no friend of the Nazi Party and declined to come out to support it during the abortive Munich putsch in 1923. After the 1930 trial in Leipzig of young officers for distributing National Socialist literature, at which Hitler appeared as a witness, Gröner felt it necessary to issue a special circular to senior officers, asserting that the actions of the three lieutenants had shattered his ‘faith in the Reichswehr as an unshakeable rock of obedience and devotion to duty, on which is founded the whole edifice of the state’. The Army was to be a bulwark against threats to the Republic whether from the Left or the Right.
Nevertheless there were many in the Army, particularly among the officer class, who were attracted to aspects of National Socialism, not least Hitler’s denunciation of the Versailles settlement and his promises of a general rearmament. They had a natural sympathy with a politician who could declare: ‘We will see to it that, when we have come to power, out of the present Reichswehr shall rise the great Army of the German people.’The appointment of Hitler as Chancellor released them from the strain of Überparteilichkeit and enabled them to return to a policy of vigorous patriotism, rearmament and the reintroduction of conscripton.
Hitler signalled his intentions towards the Army within twenty-four hours of his appointment as Chancellor. He addressed, without invitation, the leading officers of the Berlin garrison. In a two-hour speech, he promised rearmament and the ‘strengthening of the will to defence by all possible means’; confirmed their vital position within the state against the rival claims of the SA, and also confirmed that they were to remain ‘unpolitical and above parties’.
At the opening of the new Reichstag on 21 May, held at the old garrison church at Potsdam, Hitler had bowed low before the aged President Hindenburg, his wartime commander-in-chief, in a symbolic gesture that united Prusso-German tradition with the new political wind blowing through Germany. Field Marshal Eberhard von Mackensen, one of the most able field commanders of World War I, enthused over Germany’s new chancellor: ‘We German officers used to be called representatives of reaction, whereas we were really bearers of tradition. It is in the sense of that tradition that Hitler spoke to us, so wonderfully, and so directly from the heart, at Potsdam.’
The Army high command, and indeed many Germans, both believed and backed Hitler’s assurances that he would restore national honour. In March 1933 he had argued that Germany had been the only country to disarm in accordance with the Treaty of Versailles. If other nations would not disarm, then Germany should be allowed to rearm. Later, in October 1933, Germany withdrew from the League of Nations’ disarmament talks and then walked out of the League of Nations itself. In a plebiscite held on 12 November 1933, Hitler’s actions were approved by 95 per cent of the electorate.
So far, so good. Hitler continued to move cautiously in his relations with the Army, scrupulously avoiding interfering with internal Army affairs. The Army saw only his charming side. He gracefully accepted Hindenburg’s rejection of his recommendations for senior appointments, accepted the advice he was given by military subordinates, and did not participate in the planning of operations or the considering of promotions. He tried to allay fears about the SA expressed – not unreasonably – by senior officers, telling them: ‘I know that you accuse me of many wrongs which exist in the Party. I admit that you are one hundred per cent correct, but you must remember … I still have to work with persons of low quality.’ In May 1933, he sanctioned an agreement between the Army and the SA which provided for the Army’s unquestioned superiority. Using a tried and trusted tactic, he asked Röhm, and his Defence Minister, General von Blomberg, to sign an agreement confirming Hitler’s statement of policy. This enraged Röhm, who subsequently told his SA lieutenants, ‘What the ridiculous corporal [Hitler] says in this brutal jostling of egos, means nothing to us … I have not the slightest intention of keeping this agreement. Hitler is a traitor and at the very least must go on leave … If we can’t get there with him, we’ll get there without him.’
In June 1934, with the Night of the Long Knives Hitler had the last word. The Army, which had been careful to avoid direct entanglement in the gruesome bloodletting, was relieved that it was not to be absorbed into the Brownshirt empire. Hitler’s half-formulated promise that the stormtroopers would become the new soldiers of Germany was to be made good only in one sense: after March 1935 when, in a breach of the Treaty of Versailles, he announced the reintroduction of conscription, the younger members of the SA received call-up papers and found themselves in the armed forces alongside hundreds of thousands of others who had never worn the brown shirt.
REOCCUPATION OF THE RHINELAND
The military reoccupation of the Rhine-land was a move which radically changed Hitler’s relations with not only the German Army’s high command but also with the British and French. Hitler and his generals believed that the move was essential to secure the vital strategic, economic and communications centres of the Ruhr and the Rhine valley. But the generals were fearful that such an operation, in contravention of the Versailles Treaty and the Locarno Pact, would prompt an overwhelming military response from Britain and France for which Germany was ill-prepared. The General Staff regarded Hitler as a roulette player, prepared to gamble everything on a single throw of the dice. Hitler’s nerve held, and he was proved correct in his assumption that the British and French would do nothing and the League of Nations, preoccupied with Mussolini’s occupation of Abyssinia, would remain inactive. The reoccupation, code-named Winter Exercise (Winterübung), went ahead on 7 March 1936, initially conducted by only three battalions of German infantry but reinforced later that day by four divisions of state police (Landespolizei). Hitler later observed that ‘the first forty eight hours of the march … were the most nerve-racking of my life’. The peaceful re-occupation of the Rhineland was celebrated by the Germans, consolidated Hitler’s dictatorship, and confirmed his belief that his own intuition outweighed the professional expertise of his commanders. He was able to embark on an aggressive foreign policy. In the summer of 1936, German ‘volunteers’ and much materiel were despatched for combat testing in the Nationalist cause in the Spanish Civil War.
By 1936 the reintroduction of conscription had given Hitler an army with a skeleton strength of thirty-six divisions, a five-fold increase on the Reichswehr’s seven. The elimination of the SA as the armed wing of the Nazi Party earned Hitler high favour in the military, but these feelings were not necessarily reciprocated. Hitler was enough of a military snob to see that the SA was little more than a disorderly militia – the army which he intended to recreate was to be modelled on the one in which he had served on the Western Front in World War I. And this personal experience, which had won him the Iron Cross (First Class), had deeply marked him and placed limits on his loyalty to the Army with which he had to deal as chancellor and subsequently as commander-in-chief. The men who were now in many of the most senior positions in the Army had, in the main, not fought in the front line in 1914-18 - their brains were considered too valuable to be risked beyond headquarters, the inside of which Corporal Hitler never saw.
Hitler, however, was also a combat snob and no worshipper of rank or title for its own sake. He had never forgotten the trial which followed the failed Munich putsch, at which the head of the Bavarian Army, General von Lossow, had slightingly referred to him as a mere ‘political drummer boy’, a wound salted by the state prosecutor’s assertion that the drummer boy had ‘allowed himself to be carried beyond the position assigned to him’. Now he felt keenly that many of the Army’s new elite were inclined to patronize him. It was now he who assigned positions everywhere – except in the Army, which jealously guarded its own promotional structure. But Hitler wanted to move into a higher gear, and for this he needed commanders who were more combative than those with whom he had been obliged to deal when he became chancellor.
At the head of the German Armed Forces, or Wehrmacht, was General Werner von Blomberg, who had been appointed Reich Minister of Defence on 29 January 1933, having been manoeuvred into position by Hindenburg with the object keeping Hitler under control. Blomberg, a much-decorated veteran of World War I, was an imposing figure who nevertheless had been nicknamed the ‘Rubber Lion’ because his character did not measure up to his impressive physical presence. Hindenburg believed that Blomberg epitomized the ‘soldier above politics’ but, alas for Hindenburg, the Rubber Lion became an devoted admirer of Hitler. When he was questioned on the unqualified support he gave the Führer, Blomberg’s reply was that he was acting in the best interests of the country and the Army: ‘The Führer is cleverer than we are, he will plan and do everything correctly.’ In May 1935 Blomberg was appointed commander-in-chief of the three armed services in addition to his ministerial responsibilities, elevating him to a position of military authority surpassing any other German general in peacetime history. In 1936, on the occasion of Blomberg’s fifty-seventh birthday, he was made field marshal.
The commander-in-chief of the Army was General Werner von Fritsch, another Hindenburg appointment and an exceptionally fine military professional who, however, possessed no political skills or interest in politics. A man of immense reserve, never known to talk about himself, Fritsch’s only interest outside the military was horses. His monocle, needed to correct a weakness in his left eye, was also a feature of his personal defences. He once confessed, ‘I wear a monocle so that my face remains stiff, especially when I confront the Führer.’
Military manoeuvres – Hitler confers with Generals Fritsch (left) and Blomberg in 1935. In 1938 he removed them from their posts as, respectively, commander-in-chief of the Army and head of the armed forces (Wehrmacht) and replaced them with men more inclined to back without reservation his plans to pursue an increasingly aggressive foreign policy.
Both Blomberg and Fritsch were to clash with Hitler over rearmament and foreign policy. On the face of it, rearmament should have been the strongest link between Hitler and the Army. Soldiers recognized that the new regime would provide the means by which they could regain their former prestige and ensure the defence of their homeland, while Hitler considered the creation of a large and powerful army as crucial to the success of his foreign ambitions. However, the soldiers were increasingly alarmed by the scale and pace of the rearmament programme. In five years the Army grew from one hundred thousand men to three million, three hundred and forty-three thousand. Senior generals complained that this was more like a mobilization than a peacetime build-up. Fritsch grumbled that Hitler’s policy was ‘forcing everything, overdoing everything, rushing everything far too much and destroying every healthy development’.
The military leaders urged caution, fearing the reaction of the major powers to Germany’s defiance of Versailles. In the event, they need not have worried. The major powers remained inert. Hitler had taken their measure. The announcement of the reintroduction of conscription in March 1935 had been prompted by a French government announcement that, because of France’s falling birth rate, it was doubling the length of conscripts’ military service. Hitler then offered the French a pact which would limit the size of the German Army to three hundred thousand men and that of his new air force, the Luftwaffe, to 50 per cent of theirs. France’s refusal of his offer enabled him to go for larger totals. The French, and Germany’s generals, were powerless against Hitler’s will. He had already realized this in the matter of the military reoccupation of the Rhineland in March 1936, which proved to his satisfaction that his willpower and intuition were immeasurably superior to the combined expertise of his military advisers, a theme to which he would return time and again in later years.
Worse was to come over sending the Army to war. Hitler’s grand strategy was aggressive and expansionist, while his generals, as so often happens in peacetime, were horrified by the thought of war. In June 1937, Blomberg issued the following directive:
The general political situation justifies the supposition that Germany does not have to reckon on an attack from any side. This is due mainly to the lack of desire for war on the part of all nations, especially the Western powers. It is also due to the lack of military preparedness on the part of a number of states, notably Russia. Germany has just as little intention of unleashing a European war. Nonetheless, the international situation, politically unstable and not exclusive of surprising incidents, requires readiness for war on the part of German Armed forces (a) so that attacks from any side may be countered; and (b) so that any favourable political opportunities may be militarily exploited.
The German Army’s preparations for war remained wholly defensive, and fearful of aggressive action. Blomberg had opposed the introduction of general conscription and the rearmament programme and, during the reoccupation of the Rhineland, had behaved, in Hitler’s words, like ‘a hysterical maiden’. In 1941 Hitler reminisced: ‘Before I became chancellor I thought that the General Staff was like a mastiff which had been held tight by the collar because it threatened all and sundry. Since then I have had to recognise that the General Staff is anything but that. It has consistently tried to impede every action that I have thought necessary … It is I who have always had to goad on this mastiff.’
HITLER AND EVA BRAUN
Hitler, Eva Braun, and one of Eva’s terriers, Negus, on the terrace at the Berghof. Braun became Hitler’s mistress in 1932, after the death of Geli Raubal, and remained discreetly in the background until late in the war, a position which she bitterly resented but over which she had no control. In the 1930s she made two suicide attempts, after the second of which Hitler bought her a villa in the suburbs of Munich with some of the royalties from Heinrich Hoffmann’s photographs. Braun was a great lover of cosmetics and nude sun-bathing, neither of which was to Hitler’s taste. It was not until late in the war that she made public appearances, and then only because in June 1944 her sister Gretl had married SS Gruppenführer Hermann Fegelein, the ex-jockey who was Himmler’s representative with Hitler and who was summarily executed in the last mad days in the Führerbunker. Loyal to Hitler to the end, Braun was nevertheless an unexceptional woman – in the postwar words of Albert Speer, who knew her well, all the historians coming to the subject of Eva Braun were doomed to find her ‘a great disappointment’.
‘FOR GOOD OR ILL’
At the beginning of February 1933, within a month of assuming power, Hitler had aired with the military the topic of the establishment of a Greater Germany and the acquisition Lebensraum, by force of arms, in the East. The generals received the latter part of Hitler’s proposal – one of the key elements in his world view – with less than enthusiasm. Nor did this change on the occasions when Hitler returned to this theme.
He raised it again in a significant confrontation with his military advisers at a conference at the Reich Chancellery on 5 November 1937, minuted by Hitler’s military adjutant, Colonel Count Friedrich Hossbach. A Greater Germany, he announced, would be created by amalgamating into the Reich German-speaking Austrians, the Germans of the Czech Sudetenland, and the areas lost in post-World War I plebiscites. He also indicated that he would turn East to acquire Lebensraum, warning that Germany would have to launch an outward expansion by 1943 at the latest because, by then, the nation’s war-making capacity would have been overtaken by those of its future enemies. If the Western powers would not permit this eastward drive, they would have to be dealt with first. Hitler stressed that history had shown that such expansion was vital to Germany’s survival and could not be achieved without risk. The only questions to be answered were when, and how.
Blomberg and Fritsch forcefully opposed this line of thinking. Any move against Czechoslovakia might drag France, an ally of the Czechs, and Britain into war with Germany. An all-out war with such opponents was unthinkable. Four days later, on the anniversary of the Munich putsch, Fritsch again attempted to impress on Hitler, in no uncertain terms, the unpalatable military realities of this line of thinking. His words fell on deaf ears.
Hitler did not abandon hope of winning over his senior military commanders but he badly bungled his last attempt at a meeting at the War Ministry on 22 January 1938. This time he directed his appeal over the heads of Blomberg and Fritsch to their subordinates. However, on this occasion the Führer fluffed his lines. Talk of replacing Christianity with National Socialism, the securing of living space as the only solution to Germany’s problems, and world domination by the Aryan peoples, might have gone down well with the Party faithful but struck all the wrong notes with this audience. Frustrated, Hitler ended the address by reproving the generals for their conservatism and lack of foresight.
Hitler no longer had any use for Blomberg and Fritsch. The fundamental elements of his future policy were anathema to the men upon whom Hitler had relied for their execution, and they had forfeited his confidence. They would have to be removed. They also had other powerful enemies in Göring (commander of the Luftwaffe since 1935), who considered them his rivals and had been accused by Fritsch, not without reason, of being a dilettante; and in Himmler and his associates who saw the Army as an important sector of German society which as yet remained free of their influence.
Blomberg was the first to fall, and by his own hand. In January 1938 the widowed War Minister had married Erna Gruhn, a twenty-six-year-old shorthand typist who worked in the Reich Egg Marketing Board and was already carrying his child. Hitler had been a witness at the wedding. Unfortunately for Blomberg, Erna had had a previous life as a prostitute, and there were photographs and a police record to prove it. The Berlin Police President, Count von Helldorff, took the photographs to Göring, giving him the means to destroy Blomberg and succeed him as Defence Minister, a coveted post which both Blomberg and Fritsch had actively prevented him from acquiring.
On 26 January, Blomberg was forced to resign on the grounds that he had brought the officer corps into disrepute. At their final meeting the next day, Hitler told him that ‘when Germany’s time comes you shall be at my side’.19 Fritsch was removed a few days later, although this proved a harder task. As a middle-aged and unmarried man, he was a ripe target for a charge of homosexuality. In 1935 Otto Schmidt, a petty criminal, alleged during a police interrogation that he had witnessed a homosexual act between a man with a monocle and a youth. Now he was wheeled out to testify that he had subsequently blackmailed the middle-aged man, who was none other than the commander-in-chief of the Army. In fact, the middle-aged homosexual, if he was indeed involved in this farrago at all, was apparently another man with a similar-sounding name.
It was a flimsy frame-up, and at first Hitler refused to accept it. However, Fritsch’s fate was unwittingly sealed by Blomberg when he met Hitler on the day he left office. Hitler had asked him to suggest a successor, and the departing field marshal had observed that the Führer himself should take over the post of Defence Minister and C-in-C of the armed forces. Thus the disgraced Blomberg had unwittingly presented Hitler with the perfect answer to his problems in reordering the top of the military chain of command. Hitler then asked Blomberg who had been his chief of staff. Blomberg told him that it was General Wilhelm Keitel, adding the rider, ‘He’s only the man who runs my office.’ Hitler realized in an instant that the subservient Keitel, a conscientious yes-man to his fingertips, was exactly the officer he was looking for. And, with that, Blomberg departed into oblivion, having performed his last service for the Führer and his greatest disservice to the German Army. Hitler could now start looking for a compliant Army chief.
The hapless Fritsch, his services no longer required, was now to appear before a special court convened by the Gestapo. Before this, Hitler had confronted him in the Chancellery in the company of Göring and Himmler. Fritsch, who thus far had maintained a stony silence in this sorry affair, succumbed to a paroxysm of rage when the blackmailer was produced. Afterwards, Göring collapsed on a sofa, shrieking, ‘He did it! He did it!’
Göring was appointed the court president at Fritsch’s trial, which opened on 10 March. The verdict, however, was a surprise that temporarily wiped the smile off Göring’s face: ‘Acquitted on the grounds of proven innocence.’ But the moment passed. There was no protest from the Army, most of whose officers were unaware of the details behind the removal of Blomberg and Fritsch. Those who knew more could not bring themselves to believe that Adolf Hitler, the Army’s friend and ally in the fight against the SA, could have turned so swiftly against its commanders without reason. After the war, General Heinz Guderian reflected: ‘These serious allegations against our most senior officers, whom we knew to be men of spotless honour, cut us to the quick. They were quite incredible, and yet our immediate reaction was that the first magistrate of the German state could not simply have invented these stories out of the air.’
Pressure from the Army, and many threats of resignation, obliged Hitler to make Fritsch an honorary colonel in his old regiment. Fritsch retreated ever deeper into his austere shell, from which he occasionally emerged to shower Hitler with derisive praise: ‘This man [Hitler] is Germany’s destiny for good or ill, and this destiny will run its course to the end; if it leads us into the abyss he will take us all with him – there is nothing to be done about it.’
The enforced retirement of Blomberg and Fritsch did not immediately bring Hitler generals of the bellicose temper he required, but it provided him with the pretext to replace the Defence Ministry with an over-arching stratum of command, the Oberkommando der Wehrmacht (OKW), headed by the pliant Keitel, who was answerable to Hitler. OKW was given responsibility for strategic planning, a move which inevitably placed it on a collision course with the separate Oberkommando des Heeres (OKH, the German Army High Command) and led to a great deal of unproductive jostling in the war years.
There was no recall for Blomberg, but in September 1939 Fritsch went to war with his regiment in Poland and was killed by a sniper’s bullet. A memorial was erected on the spot, only to be destroyed later in the war, as was his grave. The news of his death was given to Hitler on the evening of 22 September, when General Alfred Jodl, OKW chief of staff, delivered his daily report: ‘Today there fell one of the finest soldiers Germany has ever had, Generaloberst Baron von Fritsch.’ Hitler started but remained silent. He later declined to attend Fritsch’s funeral.
The removal of Fritsch was followed by the appointment of General Walther von Brauchitsch as his successor. Hitler had a considerable moral hold over Brauchitsch, having personally secured his divorce and financed his marriage to the divorced wife of a fellow officer, a woman with an extremely shady past. Blomberg’s replacement was indeed General Wilhelm Keitel, although he held a post of much lower status than his former boss. Keitel was little more than a tirelessly efficient clerk, totally subservient to the Führer, and exercised no influence over the conduct of operations; he was simply a functionary, faithfully carrying out his master’s orders.
Friday, 4 February 1938 was a day of immense importance both to the Army and to Germany. It was a day which marked a crucial shift in the balance of power within the Third Reich and began the concentration of military leadership into Hitler’s hands. At midnight on 3 February, a Führer decree was broadcast on German radio:
From henceforth I exercise personally the immediate command over the whole Armed Forces. The former Wehrmacht Office in the War Ministry becomes the High Command of the Armed forces [OKW] and comes immediately under my command as my military staff. At the head of the staff of the High Command stands the former chief of the Wehrmacht Office [Keitel]. He is accorded the rank equivalent to that of Reich Minister. The High Command of the Armed Forces also takes over the functions of the War Ministry, and the chief of the High Command exercises, as my deputy, the powers hitherto held by the Reich War Minister. The task of preparing the unified defence of the Reich in all fields, in accordance with my instructions, is the function of the High Command in time of peace.
At the same time, Hitler seized the opportunity presented by this dramatic reshuffle to remove and retire a large number of senior officers, including sixteen generals, on whom he could not rely. Göring, Fritsch’s nemesis, had been denied the Defence Ministry but was nonetheless rewarded by being given the rank of General-Field Marshal (Generalfeldmarschall). As Brauchitsch was only a Colonel-General (Generaloberst), this made Göring the senior officer of the armed forces. Finally, on the day the announcement was made, in one of his several acts of supreme cynicism Hitler also announced the elevation of Walther Funk, Goebbels’s Secretary of State, to the post of Minister of Economics. Funk was a notorious homosexual.
At the centre of the third Reich’s military direction after February there was only one reality – Adolf Hitler. He was the sole military and political authority, from whom all power flowed. General Guderian later wrote: ‘Up to that time Hitler had been receptive to practical considerations, and had at least listened to advice and been prepared to discuss matters with others; now, however, he became increasingly autocratic. One example of his change in behaviour is furnished by the fact that after 1938 the cabinet never met. The Ministers did their work in accordance with instructions issued by Hitler to each of them singly. There was no longer any collective examination of major policy … The national administration was emasculated.’
ANTI-SEMITISM IN GERMANY
In the nineteenth century, anti-Semitism was a European-wide phenomenon, and in Germany after 1918 the Jews became scapegoats for the country’s defeat and humiliation at the hands of the Allies. In 1933 there were approximately half a million Jews living in Germany, just under one per cent of the total population. However, the proportion of Jews in the professions was higher (16.6 per cent of lawyers and 10.9 per cent of doctors) which fuelled a general popular resentment but in no way confirmed the Nazi propaganda picture – a picture relentlessly retailed in rabid publications like Julius Streicher’s Der Stürmer, of a deadly Jewish threat to German society. Indeed, most German Jews were culturally assimilated, seeing themselves as Germans of Jewish faith.
The early years of Nazi rule, however, witnessed an escalating campaign against Germany’s Jews. In part it was orchestrated from the top by Hitler and his lieutenants, notably Josef Goebbels, who lost no opportunity to portray the Jews as an alien menace; but pressure also came from below, from violent and undisciplined elements in the Nazi apparat, notably, regional Gauleiter and the SA, both acting on their own initiative but nevertheless taking their cue from the top, provided a striking example of ‘working towards the Führer’(see Working Towards the Führer).
On 1 April 1933 there was an official one-day boycott of Jewish shops. The fact that the boycott was limited to one day was the result of the lobbying of Hitler by cabinet colleagues, notably Foreign Minister Neurath and Reichsbank President Schacht, that an all-out boycott of Jewish businesses would lead to a retaliatory boycott of German goods in important markets in the United States and Britain. In April 1933 Jews were banned from the civil service and the legal and medical professions. In the same month, a decree was passed identifying non-Aryans as any people who had a Jewish parent or grandparent. They were presumed to be Jewish if they practised the Jewish religion. If there was any doubt, there would be recourse to an opinion delivered by ‘an expert on racial research’. Limits were placed on the number of Jews teaching in higher education institutions and all Jewish business enterprises had to be identified as such. By the end of 1933, nearly forty thousand Jews had left Germany, among them twenty Nobel Prize winners, the most celebrated being Albert Einstein.
Preoccupations with foreign policy and the task of cutting the SA down to size meant that the Nazi leadership temporarily took its foot off the pedal. This led to a growing number of spontaneous outbursts of grassroots violence against the Jews. In turn, these prompted more protests from Hjalmar Schacht about the damage this was doing to Germany’s image abroad. However, Himmler’s deputy, Reinhard Heydrich, approached the problem from a different angle, observing that ‘the methods of rowdy anti-Semitism are to be rejected. One does not fight rats with a revolver, but with poison and gas. Foreign political damage has no relationship to local success.’ The debate was resolved at a meeting of the Reichstag in Nuremberg on 15 September 1935, when Hitler announced the hastily drafted Nuremberg Laws. These prohibited marriage, and sexual relations outside marriage, between Jews and ethnic Germans, and the employment of Aryan women aged under forty-five in Jewish households. Jews were also deprived of citizenship and political rights.
In 1936, the year of the Berlin Olympics, there was a temporary slackening of anti-Jewish pressure, but the momentum was stepped up thereafter. In November 1937 the dismissal of Schacht removed another stumbling block to the hardening of policy. From 1934, Schacht had added the post of Minister of Economics to his portfolio, and had continued to counsel against the more extreme forms of actions against the Jews, principally on the utilitarian grounds of disruption to industry and the closing of export markets. In December 1937, Göring, now in charge of the Four-Year Plan, issued a decree restricting the ability of Jews to buy raw materials or deal in currency, part of a strategy to ‘Aryanize’ Jewish businesses.
Anschluss with Austria in March 1938, which incorporated another two hundred thousand Jews into the Reich, was followed by an unbridled eruption of looting and violence. In Vienna, Heydrich and his subordinate, Adolf Eichmann, established the Central Office for the Emigration of Austrian Jewry to encourage emigration and hasten the de-judaization of the Austrian economy. By the end of the year, thousands of Jewish homes had been forcibly expropriated and the psychological green light given for the events of Kristallnacht in November 1938. Kristallnacht was sparked on 7 November by the shooting in Paris of a German embassy official by a young Polish Jew, Herschel Grynzspan, who was protesting against the expulsion of thousands of Jews from Germany. Encouraged by Goebbels, hundreds of Jews were murdered, business premises and synagogues were ransacked and destroyed, and over thirty thousand Jews arrested and sent to concentration camps. Although the SS and SA were involved at local level, neither Himmler nor Heydrich was informed of the pogrom until after it had started. Göring, who was nominally in charge of Jewish affairs, also felt that his turf had been invaded by Goebbels. However, along with Himmler and Heydrich, he was obliged to bite his tongue as Hitler had given Goebbels’s initiative his full support.
In the immediate aftermath of Kristallnacht, Göring presided over a meeting, attended by Goebbels and Heydrich, to discuss further measures against the Jews. On the urging of Goebbels, the breathtakingly cynical decision was taken to impose a massive fine – 1.25 thousand million Reichsmark – on the Jews for the damage which had been inflicted on them. It was to be a demonstration of how all Jews were to be held collectively guilty of any crime. Three days later, all Jewish pupils were expelled from German schools. In December, a decree was issued excluding Jews from all aspects of Germany’s economic life. By assiduously working towards the Führer, Goebbels had pushed the persecution of the Jews into an ominously higher gear.
A poster put up by the National Socialist Workers’ Party for a 1930 election. A Nazi sword is shown slaying the Jewish menace, represented by a serpent.
ANSCHLUSS
Within eighteen months of becoming chancellor, Hitler had turned his attention to three foreign policy goals which were central to his aim of restoring German national prestige. First, the military restrictions imposed by the Treaty of Versailles were to be lifted. Second, Germany was to be restored to its rightful place as the strongest European power, and a ‘Greater Germany’ was to be created to include German-speaking Austria, the Czech Sudetenland and the territories lost after World War I. The removal of Blomberg and Fritsch, and the Army reorganization announced in February 1938 enabled Hitler to pursue the Greater Germany part of his programme without opposition or obstruction.
The first target in Hitler’s sights was Austria, the scene of a grave political embarrassment for him in 1934. The Austrian chancellor, Engelbert Dollfuss, was a Fascist, but also a vigorous opponent of union with Germany. In May 1933 he had dissolved parliament and banned political parties, including the Austrian NSDAP. Like their German counterparts, the Austrian Nazis were wedded to political violence, but resented Hitler’s apparent closeness to the Italian dictator Mussolini, who was an ardent supporter of the Dollfuss regime. For his part, Hitler was unwilling to ruffle Mussolini’s feathers and attempted to muzzle the Austrian Nazis, who were itching for a fight.
In Austria, political violence worsened. In May 1934 Dollfuss put down an armed uprising and subsequently unveiled a new constitution modelled on Fascist Italy. Then, in July 1934, Dollfuss was assassinated by the Austrian Nazis in a hare-brained attempted putsch. Mussolini, who saw Austria as a useful buffer between Italy and Hitler’s Germany, despatched three divisions towards the Brenner Pass. The gesture made it clear that if Germany came to the aid of the Austrian Nazis there would be war. Hitler could only watch as the new Austrian government, led by another autocrat, Kurt von Schuschnigg, slapped a new ban on the Austrian NSDAP and executed the putschists.
Hitler had to wait four years to turn the tables. The new Austria was a shadow of the empire into which Hitler had been born, with its population of fifty-four million shrunk to seven million, two million of them in Vienna. Nevertheless, the union of Germany with Austria (Anschluss) had been stated in the NSDAP programme of 1920, and on the first page of Mein Kampf Hitler had stated that Austria must be reunited with the German mother country, not for economic reasons but because ‘one blood demands one Reich’. However, it was undeniable that Austria’s strategic position, industries and mineral resources would give an enormous boost to a German economy now struggling to meet the demands of its Four-Year Plan.
Hitler had clearly stated his position on Austria in November 1937 and it had been noted in the Hossbach memorandum. That same month Hitler had discussed ‘possible alterations in the European order’ with the British Lord Privy Seal Lord Halifax, but had left Halifax with the impression that ‘Germany did not want to annex Austria or to reduce her to political dependence – her desire was to bring about by peaceful means full economic, cultural, commercial, and possibly monetary and currency union with Austria, and to see in Austria a Government really friendly to Germany and ready to work hand in hand for the common welfare of both branches of the Teutonic race’.
Hitler had his own way of dealing with the problem. On 12 February, Schuschnigg accepted an invitation to meet him at the Berghof. Waiting for the small Austrian party were Hitler, Joachim von Ribbentrop – former champagne salesman and diplomat, now Hitler’s foreign minister – Keitel, and two of the Führer’s most intimidating-looking generals, Reichenau and Sperrle, who in 1937 had commanded the Kondor Legion in Spain. By the time Schuschnigg arrived, Hitler had worked himself up into a towering rage and subjected the Austrian chancellor to a protracted rant in his study, threatening to turn up unexpectedly in Vienna, ‘like a spring storm’.
THE BERGHOF
The Berghof was Hitler’s residence in the Obersalzberg of the Bavarian Alps near Berchtesgaden. It had started life as a small chalet, Haus Wachenfeld, owned by a Buxtehude businessman, Otto Winter. In 1928 Winter’s widow rented the house to Hitler, who bought it in 1933 with royalties from the sales of Mein Kampf. In the mid-1930s he embarked on a substantial expansion of the premises which reflected his tastes in domestic architecture. The Berghof’s Great Hall groaned with heavy Teutonic furniture and hid a projection booth behind one of its walls to screen the Führer’s favourite movies. A huge picture window afforded stunning views of the mountains of his native Austria. The British Homes and Gardens magazine described Hitler as ‘his own decorator, designer, and furnisher, as well as architect’, and noted that many of the rooms contained caged canaries and were hung with Hitler’s own watercolours. Silent home-movie footage, shot by Eva Braun in the late 1930s, caught Hitler relaxing on the Berghof’s massive terrace while his German shepherd, Blondi, and Eva’s terriers mingled with the Führer’s lieutenants, Himmler, Heydrich, Goebbels, Göring and Ribbentrop. Braun herself posed for the camera, laughing coquettishly in a dirndl skirt. Hitler spent much time in the Berghof, obliging the Nazi paladins to acquire or build residences in the area. The site of Göring’s house now boasts the Intercontinental Hotel. A landing strip was built to ease the entourage’s comings and goings. From the mid-1930s, public access to the area was prevented by heavy security restrictions. Hitler’s final visit to the Berghof was in July 1944. On 25 April 1945 it was bombed by RAF Lancasters; on 4 May it was set on fire by its withdrawing SS guards, and it was subsequently sacked by Allied troops.
Meanwhile, Ribbentrop was presenting Guido Schmidt, an official of the Austrian Foreign Ministry, with a set of demands that included an end to all restrictions on the Austrian NSDAP and the appointment of a Nazi sympathizer, Artur von Seyss-Inquart,20 as Minister of the Interior. Remarkably, all was sweetness and light at lunch, with the generals, then Hitler and Schuschnigg returned to the Führer’s study, where Hitler threatened to march into Austria if his demands were not met in full.
Schuschnigg did not buckle, but informed Hitler that only the Austrian president could sanction such measures. However, he had been left in no doubt whatsoever as to Hitler’s deadly seriousness, and before he departed he signed the list of demands. He declined Hitler’s offer of dinner. Three days later Hitler’s demands were implemented.
But Schuschnigg had one more card to play. On 9 March he announced, out of the blue, that within four days he would hold a referendum on Austrian autonomy, a measure for which the Austrian Nazis had long been agitating. But the wording of the referendum, asking the electorate to back ‘a free and German, independent and social, Christian and united Austria…’ was calculated to produce the worst possible result for the Austrian Nazis. The biter had been bitten. Hitler was dumbfounded, then seized by rage at what he considered a betrayal of the agreement signed at the Berghof.
Goebbels and Göring were summoned, as was Seyss-Inquart, who was visiting southern Germany. Hitler sat up with Goebbels, outlining his plans. At midnight on 11 March, Goebbels wrote in his diary, ‘The die is cast. On Saturday march in. Push straight to Vienna. Big aeroplane action. The Führer is going himself to Austria. Göring and I are to stay in Berlin. In eight days Austria will be ours.’ On the 10th Hitler had ordered General Ludwig Beck, the Army chief of staff, and Becks’ deputy, General Erich von Manstein, to prepare for an immediate invasion of Austria. This they did with some reluctance, telling Hitler that in their opinion the Army was not ready for such a task. But as Keitel later observed, ‘their objections were summarily brushed aside by Hitler.’ On 11 March OKW issued a directive which included the announcement that the Führer himself would take charge of operations. And on the 12th, German troops proceeded to incorporate a recalcitrant Austria into the Greater German Reich.
Hitler had snatched triumph from disaster. Mussolini did not intervene, prompting Hitler to shower him with extravagant thanks: ‘Please tell Mussolini I will never forget him for it, never, never, never, come what may.’ Schuschnigg, whose pleas to the British for help had fallen on deaf ears, had been replaced by Seyss-Inquart, and his cabinet was succeeded by an Austrian Ministerial Council. In a final broadcast to the Austrian people, Schuschnigg declared that Austria had yielded to force and, to spare bloodshed, the Austrian Army would offer no resistance.
Shortly before 4 p.m. on 12 March 1938, Hitler crossed the Austrian border over the bridge at his birthplace, Braunau am Inn. Church bells pealed as his cavalcade of grey Mercedes limousines inched their way through streets packed with delirious crowds. The convoy pushed on to Linz, where a vast crowd halted its progress. Hitler reached the town hall on foot. Tears streaked his cheeks as he addressed the heaving mass from the balcony. He told them that they were witnesses to the accomplishment of his mission, adding, ‘I do not know on which day you will be called. I hope it is not far off.’
He remained in Linz for the next day, Sunday, taking rooms with his party in the Hotel Weinzinger on the banks of the Danube. The hotel’s single telephone was reserved for his use alone. He told a British journalist that Austria would become a German province, ‘like Bavaria or Saxony’. He went to Leonding to lay flowers on the graves of his parents. He used the hotel’s telephone to pour a second paean of praise on Mussolini, and that evening signed the law by which Austria became a German province.
On the morning of 14 March, Hitler drove to Vienna. The crowds massed in front of the hotel in which he was staying, the Imperial, drew him out on to his balcony time after time, chanting, ‘We want our Führer.’ The next day he gave a speech to a colossal crowd, estimated at a quarter of a million, in Vienna’s Heldenplatz. But there was a terrible ugliness lurking behind the unbridled enthusiasm on display. Himmler, Heydrich, and their subordinate Adolf Eichmann, had arrived in Vienna on the 12th, and a wave of arrests had begun.
Hitler addressing a vast crowd in the Heldenplatz in Vienna during the Anschluss, or reunification, of Germany and Austria on 15 March 1938. The Anschluss demonstrated that Britain and France were unwilling to stand up to him and that Mussolini was happy to accept the sacrifice of his Austrian buffer for the sake of friendship with Germany.
The violence which they set in train was of a ferocity and on a scale far greater than in 1933 when Hitler came to power. The Gestapo immediately got their hands on Vienna’s police records and began hauling in Socialists, Communists and Jews. Many of the Jews were subjected to brutal beatings, during which their valuables were plundered at will. Some were forced to scrub the pavements while they were drenched with water by crowds jeering ‘work for the Jews at last’. A seventeen-year-old Jew watched, horrified, from his apartment window in the Nussdorferstrasse, when ‘I suddenly heard a muffled shout from right below … I craned my neck and saw an Austrian policeman, a swastika brassard already over his dark green uniform, his truncheon in his fist, lashing out with berserk fury at a man writhing at his feet. I immediately recognised that policeman. I had known him all my life …’
THE FOUR-YEAR PLAN
Hitler had no time for received ideas about the structure of government and the development and implementation of policy. From 1933, the Nazi state was characterized by the emergence of new and competing agencies advancing radical agendas tailored to coincide with or anticipate the Führer’s world view. In 1936 Hitler personally wrote a memorandum setting out the goals of the so-called Four-Year Plan, to be implemented under the direction of Hermann Göring who was handed sweeping powers in the economic sphere. Anticipating war, Hitler stipulated a timetable for rearmament which would give the Wehrmacht an operational capability and the German economy a degree of self-sufficiency to enable it to weather wartime conditions. Autarky was to be secured by German expansion and the securing of vital raw materials. Great emphasis was also placed on the development of synthetic materials and the control of labour. Important industrialists were recruited to develop and administer the Plan, for example Carl Krauch of IG Farben the chemical giant, which had worked closely with Nazi officials during the take over of Czech chemical plants in 1938–39. During World War II, IG Farben also built plants – one of them in the Auschwitz complex – to produce synthetic oil and rubber (from coal). IG Farben held the patent for Zyklon B, a cyanide compound originally developed for fumigation. It was first used against human victims in 1939 in the euthanasia programme, and again later in the extermination camps. The steady expansion of Göring’s sprawling empire forced the resignation in November 1937 of Economics Minister Hjalmar Schacht, who was replaced by the more compliant Nazi, Walther Funk. During the war the powers vested in Göring were extended to the industries and economies of occupied countries, whose resources were, as a matter of policy, ruthlessly plundered for the benefit of the Third Reich. Göring also directed the deportation of millions of people from the occupied territories to forced labour camps.
THE SUDETENLAND
The Anschluss had immensely strengthened Hitler’s position. The groundswell of opposition in the Army high command, stirred by the Blomberg–Fritsch affair, had been stilled by the triumphant reception of the troops in Austria. The overwhelming majority of army officers were, like the German people, firmly behind the Führer. Moreover, Hitler had pulled off the coup without bloodshed – that is, if you chose to ignore the barbaric treatment of thousands of terrorized and brutalized Jews.
The German takeover of Austria left Czechoslovakia horribly exposed. The Czechs, Slavs whom Hitler had despised since his days in Vienna, offered an even greater prize than Austria. However, any move made by Germany would be fraught with danger. A Franco-Czech treaty bound the French to support Czechoslovakia in the event of aggression and, since Britain was allied with France, armed conflict with the Czechs risked lighting the touchpaper for a European conflict. Looming ominously in the background was the Soviet Union, which also had treaty obligations to the Czechs and had indicated its willingness to help the French. But the Red Army had no direct access to Czech territory. Poland, deeply hostile to the Soviets, and Romania, extremely pro-German, blocked its passage westward.
Hitler put his foot down on the accelerator. The web of alliances between the Czechs and his enemies to the east and west made it imperative to move quickly. And, just as with Austria, there were compelling economic reasons to press ahead. Czechoslovakia had a thriving industrial base, with important armaments factories, notably the Skoda works in Pilsen, and was an important source of raw materials.
The three million ethnic Germans living in the Sudetenland, on Czechoslovakia’s western border with Germany, gave Hitler a ready-made pretext for demanding that they be brought home to the Reich. In the summer of 1938 he steadily increased the pressure on the Czechs, instructing the local Nazi leader, Konrad Henlein, to campaign for greater autonomy for the Sudeten Germans. Every time the Czech government offered concessions, Henlein came back for more. The Czech president, Edvard Beness, prepared for war.
War seemed likely, but this was not a prospect which struck a chord with the German people. Too many of them remembered the Great War. They were only happy with bloodless conquests, and the Army, as usual, was dragging its heels. The Chief of the General Staff, General Ludwig Beck, urged the military leadership to take a collective stand, and on 16 July sent a memorandum to General von Brauchitsch, summarizing the views of many of the generals: ‘There was no doubt that an attack on Czechoslovakia would bring France and Britain into the conflict at once … the outcome would be a general catastrophe for Germany, not only a military defeat. The German people did not want this war, the purpose of which they do not understand. Similar thoughts were abroad in the Army … Military preparations have attracted foreign attention … Any hope of achieving surprise had thereby been dashed.’
Brauchitsch wriggled around on the hook but agreed to hold a secret meeting where the military foolishness of a war with Czechoslovakia was discussed, but no decision was taken on a plan of action. Hitler faced down the generals on 15 August after attending manoeuvres, telling them of his absolute determination to smash the Czechs in the autumn. He warned them that, despite all advice to the contrary, he had been proved right in the past. The generals remained silent. By the end of August, Beck21 had resigned.
The generals still had the most profound misgivings about Hitler’s plans and some may have entertained hopes, however faint, of removing Hitler should he order the Army to move against Czechoslovakia. These hopes were destroyed by the British prime minister, Neville Chamberlain. Sadly for the Czechs, Chamberlain believed he could deal with Hitler. Somewhere in this extraordinary creature, he thought, there must lurk a man of reason, and this creature could be coaxed, blinking into the sunlight, if only Chamberlain could convince him that he could get his way by negotiating rather than going to war. Chamberlain felt he was the man to convince him.
Chamberlain, who had never flown before, now embarked on the first example of shuttle diplomacy. On 15 September he flew to meet Hitler at Berchtesgaden, then a week later at Bad Godesberg. The only result was that Hitler increased his demands. Chamberlain pressed on, persuading himself that Hitler was speaking the truth in desiring no more than ‘racial unity’ with the Sudeten Germans, but his personal appeal to the Führer cut no ice. War seemed inevitable.
Then Hitler backed down. The British, supported by the French, pressed the Czechs into ceding the Sudetenland to Germany. Chamberlain was unable to contemplate a war like that of 1914–18, and had been advised by his military chiefs that Britain’s forces were not ready for a new armed conflict. Mussolini then stepped forward, appealing to Hitler to postpone a mobilization and accept a negotiated settlement along the lines proposed by the British. This was the last thing Hitler wanted, but he reluctantly had to accept when what he fervently wanted was war, and the complete destruction of Czechoslovakia. However, as Goebbels reminded him, ‘We have no jumping off point for war. You can’t carry out a world war on account of modalities.’
In Munich at the end of September 1938 a four-power conference was held. Attending were the Germans, British, French and Italians – but not the Czechs. They were to have no say in the mutilation of their own country. Chamberlain had, admittedly, been dealt a very poor hand, but had then proceeded to play it disastrously because of his mistaken assessment of Hitler’s aims and his over-eagerness to placate the Führer with territorial concessions.
Nevertheless, Chamberlain was given a hero’s welcome when he returned from Munich, brandishing in his hand the famous piece of paper signed by the Führer. Hitler later said that Chamberlain was such a nice old gentleman that it would have been impolite not to sign it, but the truth was staring everyone in the face. Peace had been secured, but probably temporarily and only at the expense of sacrificing the Czechs. It was clear that Hitler would make more demands. Lord Halifax (British foreign secretary 1938–40) was cheerfully of the opinion that Poland, and other nations in Eastern Europe, would inevitably be drawn into the German orbit. It was not long before the hopes raised at Munich were dashed.
On the night of 14–15 March 1939, Hitler received Emil Hacha at the Chancellery in Berlin. The elderly, frail Hacha, president of Czechoslovakia since the previous November, was kept waiting until the small hours of the 15th while Hitler enjoyed watching a movie called A Hopeless Case. The same could now be said about Czechoslovakia. The wretched Hacha, who was accompanied by his foreign minister and the Czech ambassador in Berlin, was subjected to a brutal haranguing by Hitler in front of intimidating ranks of Nazi paladins. Hitler ranted and raved. German troops were on the march and would cross the border at 6 a.m., information which was conveniently confirmed by General Keitel; Hacha must telephone Prague immediately if he wished to avoid bloodshed. Göring then threatened Hacha with the Luftwaffe, which was poised to level the historic city of Prague.
At this point Hacha fainted, only to be revived by an injection from Hitler’s personal physician, Dr Morell. When a telephone line was established with Prague, the browbeaten Hacha gave the order that Czech troops were not to fire on the invading Germans. Shortly before 04:00 hours he signed the document which placed the fate of his nation in the hands of Hitler. The Führer was overcome, telling the two secretaries who were on duty that night, ‘I will go down as the greatest German in history.’
Czechoslovakia had been swallowed whole, and later that day Hitler drove into Prague, accompanied by the SS and the Gestapo. Snow was falling and no crowds lined the streets, only a sullen smattering of onlookers, some of whom were bold enough to shake their fists at the Führer. He spent the night in the Hradschin Castle, ancient home of the kings of Bohemia, dotting the ‘I’s and crossing the ‘T’s on the document that transformed Czechoslovakia into the protectorate of Bohemia-Moravia. Its preamble, dictated by Hitler, stated that, ‘the Bohemian and Moravian lands had belonged to the living space of the German people for a thousand years’. For the Czechs, it was the start of six long years of subjugation.
On 31 March the British government guaranteed to protect Poland against aggression. From this moment, Britain and France were on the hook. In reality, neither could do anything effective to aid the Poles if they were attacked, nor could they wring concessions from Poland as they had done with Czechoslovakia. They could only hope that nothing would happen. But they knew something would.
POLAND
At the same time that he was swallowing Czechoslovakia, Hitler was putting pressure on Poland, the next country on his list. Poland had no effectively defensible frontiers, a strategic problem which gave rise to the aphorism, ‘Poland has no history, only neighbours.’ In the Middle Ages, Poland’s Baltic littoral was settled and taken over by German crusaders, the Teutonic Knights. This territory became the state of Prussia, which was later dynastically united with Germany by the Hohenzollern rulers of Brandenburg, the last reigning incumbent of which was Kaiser Wilhelm II. In the late eighteenth century, Poland had been partitioned out of existence by the central European powers, only to rise like a phoenix from the ashes as an independent state in the Versailles settlement after World War I.
Versailles gave Poland access to the sea by extending her boundaries to include the mouth of the Vistula river. This Polish corridor cut Prussia off from Germany. As a concession to the Germans, the German-speaking city of Danzig, at the mouth of the Vistula, was established as a free city under the supervision of the League of Nations. Even before he had digested Czechoslovakia, Hitler was demanding an adjustment of the corridor and the status of Danzig. With the sorry example of Czechoslovakia staring them in the face, the Poles ignored Hitler’s demands and continued to do so even when, on 23 March 1939, as an earnest of his intentions, he occupied the Lithuanian port of Memel. It was the last ‘peaceful’ German conquest.
The Poles had an inflated belief in their own power, further sustained by the know-ledge that Britain and France were preparing to extend them a guarantee of protection. On 31 March 1939, a week after announcing that they would defend Belgium, Holland and Switzerland if they were attacked, Britain and France issued a joint declaration guaranteeing the independence of Poland. This did nothing to deter Hitler, who had profited from French and British inaction over Czechoslovakia. In August 1939 he told his generals, ‘Our enemies are small worms. I saw them in Munich.’
Poland now became the epicentre of the gathering storm. The British and French attempted to take the heat out of the crisis by drawing the Soviet Union into a protective agreement, even though they were well aware that the Poles were reluctant in the extreme to enter into an agreement with the Russians. The Poles hated the Russians more than they feared the Germans and suspected, rightly as it turned out, that the Soviet Union, given the chance, would annex large parts of Poland as part of the price for their intervention. The British and French were also hobbled by their own deep distrust of the Soviet dictator, Josef Stalin, who returned the feeling with interest.
Throughout the summer of 1939, British and French negotiations with the Soviets inched painfully forward. Hitler, on the other hand, had a freer hand. That spring and summer he, too, had been negotiating with Stalin, encouraged by hints that the Soviet Union had no desire to risk war, even over the future of a nation on its western border. However, neither the German nor the Russian dictator would show his hand.
Hitler broke the logjam in late July when he dangled a thinly veiled offer to hand Stalin a slice of eastern Poland if he agreed not to impede a German invasion of Poland from the west. The Russian eagerly responded, and on 22 August the German and Soviet Union foreign ministers, Ribbentrop and Molotov, signed a non-aggression pact in Moscow. It contained secret clauses which permitted the Soviet Union, in the event of a war between Germany and Poland, to annex eastern Poland up to the line of the Vistula, as well as the Baltic states of Latvia, Lithuania and Estonia.
There was nothing more that diplomacy could do. Poland was now doomed. By mid-June OKH, the Army high command, had settled on a plan which provided for two Army Groups, North and South, to attack simultaneously. Their objective was the Polish capital, Warsaw. Poland was deeply vulnerable along the entire length of its two most important borders. Northern Poland was dominated by East Prussia while in the south it was threatened from Czechoslovakia, which was now an extension of German territory. The Polish government did not know the secret provisions of the Nazi-Soviet non-aggression pact and the new threat it posed to its rear. And, in the event of war, it counted on the French, aided by the British, to attack Germany’s western frontier to draw off German divisions from the east.
Hitler’s calculations ran on different lines. He was convinced, correctly as it transpired, that the French would make no aggressive moves in the west, which he left defended by only forty-four divisions to oppose the nominal hundred of the French Army; and he was also sure that the British could do little or nothing to hurt Germany during the short time he needed to overrun Poland. Moreover, he was fully mobilized; the British and French were not. Finally, the German Army and the Luftwaffe were immeasurably better armed than their Polish opposite numbers. Between them, Army Groups North and South fielded sixty-two divisions, six of them armoured and ten mechanized, supported by thirteen hundred modern combat aircraft. As war loomed, the Poles had begun to mobilize, but by 1 September 1939 they had not fully deployed their forty divisions, none of which was armoured. The tanks they did field were obsolete, as were half of the nine hundred and fifty aircraft of the Polish air force.
The rush to war had now gained a seemingly irresistible momentum. There was a brief pause following the announcement, on 25 August, that the British had entered into a formal alliance with the Poles which guaranteed protection against aggression by a third party. A flurry of inconclusive diplomatic sparring followed, and on 28 August Hitler abrogated Germany’s 1934 non-aggression pact with Poland, which had been signed at a time when Poland’s and Germany’s relative military strengths had been reversed.
Hitler still expected France and Britain to flinch from taking any military action, as they had done over Czechoslovakia. To give them a means of doing so without losing face, he created a ‘border outrage’, in fact staged by a unit of the SS, to make it appear as if the Poles were the aggressors.22 Responding to this ‘provocation’, German troops crossed the border into Poland at 4.30 a.m. on 1 September. Britain and France immediately attempted to avoid the unavoidable. They mobilised but said they would negotiate with Germany if Hitler pulled his troops back. There was a last exchange of notes but the German Army was not reined in.
German infantry march into Poland, 1 September 1939. Three of the five armies used in the operation employed armoured spearheads but the dominant force remained the infantry divisions, which formed approximately 75 per cent of all participating formations. The German high command concluded that in the campaign, ‘German infantry formations added one more to their list of triumphs’.
At 11.15 on the morning of 3 September, a weary Neville Chamberlain announced to the British people that they were at war with Germany. As he finished his speech the air raid sirens began to wail. Within a few hours, the French, too, had declared war.
When the news was given to Hitler, he listend to his interpreter, Paul Schmidt, translate the diplomatic language. He sat, slumped in his chair, for a few moments. Then he looked up and asked, ‘Well … what do we do now?’
