BY 1935, WITH HITLER FULLY IN CONTROL OF GERMANY, HIS long-simmering hatred of Jews began to surface more publicly. Although fewer than 1 percent of Germany’s fifty-five million residents were Jewish, Hitler announced at the annual Nuremberg Rally in September a law with restrictive provisions aimed directly at Jews, including barring marriage to Germans. Violations were punishable by hard labor or prison.
In his speech, Hitler said the laws were designed to “achieve the legislative regulation of a problem which, if it breaks down again, will then have to be transferred by law to the National Socialist Party for final solution.”
Millions of words have been written about Hitler, charting the course of his life and trying to explain his inherent evil, to dissect the monster within the man. Still, it is important here to recall some of the basics and how he began to focus on building the country’s military might and establishing himself as a force on the world’s geopolitical stage.
He instituted a military draft and boosted the German Army to five hundred fifty thousand men, two acts that were in direct violation of the Treaty of Versailles signed by Germany after World War I. The treaty had required that Germany give up considerable portions of its territory, pay financial reparations, and reduce the size of its military. Under the treaty, the area known as the Rhineland— the industrial heart of the nation, an area that stretched to the border with France — became a demilitarized zone overseen by Great Britain and France.
Despite Hitler’s violations of the treaty, there was no reaction from the rest of the world. Still, just to reassure potential opponents, Hitler, in a speech at the German legislature, said, “Our love of peace perhaps is greater than in the case of others, for we have suffered most from war. None of us wants to threaten anybody, but we all are determined to obtain the security and equality of our people.”
He promised Germany would honor all other provisions of the Treaty of Versailles and vowed to cooperate in maintaining peace in Europe. But in March 1936, Hitler violated the treaty again when he sent three German Army battalions across the Rhine River into Rhineland. When he announced this action at the German legislature, the lawmakers leaped to their feet and began to cheer him, with shouts of “Heil!”
Again, the rest of the world was silent. The French did nothing. Neither did the British.
Weeks later, in a nationwide referendum, virtually all registered voters went to the polls and nearly all of them voted to support Hitler’s action. Emboldened again, he became determined to use that year’s Summer Olympic Games in Berlin — awarded to Germany in 1931, before Hitler came to power —as a showcase for the nation and himself.
These games immediately became mired in controversy after non-Aryans were banned from Germany’s team. After the Nazis agreed to let foreign Jews take part, the U.S. Amateur Athletic Union barely approved a measure to participate. While Hitler had hoped the games would prove a testament to Aryan superiority — and indeed the Germans did best the Americans in the overall medal count, eight-nine to fifty-six — Jesse Owens, a black American, stole much of the limelight by winning four gold medals.
Still, the games were a public-relations success for Hitler and the Nazi Party. The media lavishly praised the games, and favorable reports poured in from tourists who attended. Not long after, a schoolteacher from Idaho spent several weeks traveling in Germany and filed dispatches that appeared in the local paper back home: “The whole country looked like the stage of an opera, with lovely, red, white and black Swastika flags everywhere. Every hour or so in Munich, a handsome group of magnificently uniformed soldiers came stepping around the corner in absolute precision and singing a rousing military song in perfect time to their march. Really, it was most exhilarating.”
She felt fortunate to have obtained a ticket to the Bayreuth Wagner Festival. She marveled at “many of Europe’s crown princes and politicians in tuxedoes, accompanied by women wearing the latest Parisian fashions enthusiastically saluting Hitler with ‘Heil’ as he stepped out of his Mercedes upon his arrival at the theater. They repeated this act of adoration once they saw him emerge in the balcony to take his seat for the performance.”
She attended the German Art Festival in Munich and saw Hitler review a three-hour parade. “I felt like I was living in the days of ancient Rome while in Munich,” she wrote. “For three nights, the big buildings of Munich had tremendous iron braziers atop each of them with fire shooting from them high into the sky.
“Everywhere I talked politics without getting into trouble and everywhere the Germans told me that they loved Hitler. I refuse to believe that the Germans are completely controlled through fear. It is a lie. I have watched their faces when he comes in their midst. Their countenances are transfixed and they ‘Heil, heil, heil, heil’ over and over again with a worshipful attitude that would make anyone conclude that they are happy. He has brought order out of chaos.”
Hitler strongly believed in the concept of lebensraum, a term coined in the twentieth century, which referred to the unification of the country and the acquisition of other countries. General Karl Ernst Haushofer, a geopolitics professor at the University of Munich who was well known to Hitler, claimed this idea justified the creation of an expansionist-minded Germany. Haushofer declared: “I intend to teach Political-Geography as a weapon to reawaken Germany to fulfill its destined greatness. I shall re-educate the whole nation to an awareness of the role of geography in history so that every young German shall cease to think parochially but think instead in terms of whole continents.”
Haushofer believed that the Aryan race had originated in distant Asia. This justified extending Germany’s land grab beyond Eastern Europe. Haushofer further argued that the nation that controlled the continental heartland of Eurasia could dominate the entire world. Whether he intended to do so or not, Haushofer armed Hitler with an intoxicating vision and rationale for Aryan world domination.
In Mein Kampf, Hitler wrote that the German people needed lebensraum to grow and prosper — even if it meant slaughtering others to take their land.
If anyone in Germany had any doubts about Hitler’s plans, they were erased on February 4, 1938, when he assembled his cabinet and declared that he was personally taking over command of all German armed forces. Factories began to hum, producing weapons at breakneck speed. The nation was being indoctrinated that duty to Hitler was of paramount importance. By then the Treaty of Versailles was essentially worthless, trampled to bits.
Hitler went after Austria first. At dawn on Saturday, March 12, 1938, German soldiers in tanks and armored vehicles met no resistance as they rumbled into Austria.
Czechoslovakia was next. On Saturday, October 1, German soldiers and tanks shot into the Sudetenland, a portion of western Czechoslovakia occupied by about three million ethnic Germans. That led to the signing of the Munich Agreement by Germany, France, Britain, and Italy, which officially sanctioned the occupation of the Sudetenland.
British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain, who signed the agreement, along with Italy’s Benito Mussolini and French Prime Minister Edouard Daladier, considered it the beginning of a time of peace in Europe. Upon his return to England, Chamberlain told a crowd of supporters that the settlement of the Czechoslovakian problem was a “prelude to a larger settlement in which all Europe may find peace.” He famously said, “I believe it is peace for our time.” He was famously mistaken.
Three weeks after the agreement was signed, Hitler told his staff that their list of future tasks should include “the liquidation of the remainder of Czechoslovakia.”
Up to this time, there had been little anti-Semitic violence in Germany. But in Vienna, Jews were being forced into humiliating labor such as cleaning public toilets. Thousands were jailed. The Nazis opened the first concentration camp outside Germany at Mauthausen, near Linz. Within weeks, Poland declared that it was withdrawing the passports of Polish citizens who had been abroad for more than five years. Faced with accepting more than fifteen thousand Polish Jews, including more than two thousand children, the SS was ordered to send them to Poland with one night’s notice. Allowed just one suitcase per person, the Jews were packed onto trains and sent to Poland. But the Polish government refused legal entry to more than half of them. They were forced into refugee camps at the border that quickly became hellholes of disease and death.
Among those ousted was the family of Herschel Grynszpan, a teenager who was studying in Paris at the time. When Grynszpan heard what had happened to his family, he bought a pistol, went into the German Embassy in Paris, and shot to death a junior member of the staff. Hitler used the incident as an excuse to launch violent attacks on Jews on November 9 – 10, 1938.
It was essentially the beginning of the Holocaust, and throughout Germany and Austria, mobs of Hitler youth, SS members, and storm troopers smashed windows and looted Jewish shops and department stores. Synagogues were attacked and set ablaze. Sacred Torah scrolls were pulled apart and burned. The attacks came to be known collectively as Kristallnacht, or the Night of Broken Glass. An estimated seven thousand five hundred Jewish businesses were destroyed. More than two hundred fifty synagogues were torched. A total of ninety-one Jews were reported murdered, and more than twenty-five thousand others were transported to concentration camps in Dachau, Buchenwald, and Sachsenhausen, where many of them were killed.
All doubt of Hitler’s new power should have been erased on his fiftieth birthday on April 20, 1939, when the Nazis put on an extravaganza of military force unlike any ever seen.
The morning began with a serenade from an Army band as Hitler emerged in full dress uniform from the Chancellery, the seat of the German government, and stood at attention, his hands folded before him. He then led a parade of fifty limousines that slowly cruised down the Avenue of Splendor carrying representatives from many countries, including Italy, Japan, Spain, Hungary, Belgium, Bolivia, Brazil, Bulgaria, Denmark, Finland, Greece, Yugoslavia, Lithuania, the Netherlands, Norway, Romania, Sweden, Slovakia, and Siam. Their number did not include representatives of Britain, France, or the United States.
Massive crowds — men and women, the elderly, and young children — lined the street, and everywhere in the city, banners proclaimed Hitler a “Guardian of Peace.” Storefronts were festooned with his photograph. One building bore a portrait two stories tall. Flags bearing swastikas fluttered from hundreds of balconies.
Shortly before noon, Hitler left his limousine and strode to a canopied reviewing stand. As he took a seat in a gilded chair covered in red upholstery and raised his arm in the Nazi salute, tens of thousands of enthralled onlookers raised their arms and roared, “Seig heil!”
Their voices were nearly drowned out when more than 160 fighter planes thundered overhead in formation. Hitler stared straight ahead, his hand outstretched, as the first of forty thousand — soldiers, sailors, paratroopers, and airmen — began goose-stepping past the reviewing stand. Tanks rumbled down the avenue. There was a steady stream of fire- and manpower — troop transport trucks, horse-drawn cannons, antiaircraft guns, motorcycles with sidecars, and jeeps — along with every type of military equipment imaginable.
Flatbed semitrucks lumbered past, hauling massive artillery never seen publicly before. One cannon was so large that four trucks were required to carry its disassembled parts.
The parade lasted more than four hours.
Afterward, Hitler moved on to the Chancellery, the building that housed the many gifts that had begun arriving days earlier. Scores of presents were laid out on tables in the massive main hall.
There were marble statues and Meissen porcelain. The Nazi Party gave him a collection of letters of Frederick the Great, the eighteenth century king of Prussia, which had been purchased in various parts of the world. Other gifts included original scores by Richard Wagner, Hitler’s favorite composer. There were many oil portraits, including what was said to be Titian’s Venus with a Mirror (questions would later arise about its authenticity). The tributes seemed unending: silver, antique weapons, tapestries, rare artifacts, and vases of flowers. There were dozens of cakes, some in the shape of tanks, and chocolate tarts neatly arranged in the shape of swastikas.
Perhaps the most spectacular gift, also from the Nazi Party, was a mountaintop chalet, called the Eagle’s Nest. It was a lavishly built and furnished lodge atop a mountain that overlooked the Obersalzberg, a compound of eighty buildings in the Bavarian mountains near Berchtesgaden, southeast of Munich. This compound included a house for Hitler, the Berghof, as well as an underground bunker system, offices, meeting rooms, and government archives connected by four miles of tunnels. It would serve as Hitler’s second seat of government and would one day be a focal point in a massive manhunt for the dictator.
Birthday greetings by the thousands poured in from across the country and abroad, from lowly and powerful people, all praising Hitler.
“I believe in God, protector of heaven and earth, and that he has chosen Adolf Hitler as his son to relieve his people of the brood of Jews — and their dynasties,” read a letter from a hotel porter.
Another was even more direct: “I have no God but you and no gospel but your teachings.”
Hitler’s top aide, Field Marshal Hermann Goering, declared the dictator “the greatest German of all times.” And Paul Goebbels, Hitler’s chief propagandist, said Hitler’s “name wanders around the earth almost like a legend.”
By the summer of 1939, Hitler and the Nazis had taken over Czechoslovakia and began looking toward Poland. Now, he was prepared to go to war. His troops, he declared, must be ready and not falter.
“Close your hearts to pity!” Hitler ordered his soldiers. “Act brutally! Eighty million people must obtain what is their right. Their existence must be made secure.”
The presents from his fiftieth birthday party had by then been packed away in various places. Among them was a case containing a semiautomatic pistol. It was gold-plated with ivory grips. Hitler’s initials were inlaid with gold on the grip. The gun was a gift from Carl Walther, the scion of the family that made hundreds of thousands of weapons sold worldwide. An inscription on the right side of the barrel said the gun was made by the armament manufacturing company in the German city of Zella-Mehlis.
Hitler was familiar with guns and often carried one for protection. He prized this new pistol and kept it in his Munich apartment, neatly tucked into a drawer of the desk in his office.