Hitler conducted foreign policy in a different fashion from other leaders. In March 1939, the Germans occupied what was left of the Czech state after they had already taken its western regions in October 1938. The prelude to the invasion was a bullying meeting between Hitler and the sixty-seven-year-old Czech President Emil Hácha. The President had flown to Berlin to try to save his country from German attack. During the stressful meeting with Hitler, Hácha collapsed with a heart attack as Prague was threatened with destruction. He had to be revived with an injection by Hitler’s doctor.1 Finally, he agreed to ‘invite’ the Germans in, to spare his people from violent assault. Thus, the Germans could maintain the fiction that they had not invaded. Just how it had come to this state of affairs is the subject of this chapter.
When Hitler came to power in 1933, the relationship of Germany with its European neighbours was overshadowed by the effects of the Treaty of Versailles (1919). German politicians of all persuasions were committed to revising this treaty in order to regain land lost by Germany at the end of the First World War. Even as respectable a Weimar statesman as Gustav Stresemann – whilst agreeing to accept the western borders of Germany in the Locarno Treaties (or Locarno Pact) of 1925 – left those on the eastern border open to revision. Here there was unfinished business with the Poles and also the Czechs. In this respect, much of Hitler’s foreign policy in the 1930s was not that dissimilar from what might have been pursued by any other German regime at the time, especially a nationalist one. And he was also part of a much longer tradition of German politicians who aimed to dominate central Europe (in German, Mitteleuropa, literally ‘middle Europe’) and expand German territory and influence eastward. In fact, this Drang nach Osten (drive to the east) can be dated back to the twelfth and thirteenth centuries when it targeted the territory between the rivers Elbe and Oder for conquest and colonization. Later, in the eighteenth century, Prussia had joined Russia and Austria in the dismemberment of Poland.2 More recently, in 1918, the Treaty of Brest Litovsk had exacted a high price for allowing the new Bolshevik government of Russia to exit the disastrous First World War. By it, 25 per cent of Russia’s population and industry was stripped from it by the Germans; the Baltic States (Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania), Russian-administered Poland, Belorussia and the Ukraine passed into German domination and economic exploitation. This situation was rapidly reversed by the German collapse, in the summer of 1918, and eventually defeat. However, it gives a flavour of German plans for Eastern Europe and its savage terms should be borne in mind when recalling German protests at how they were treated by the Treaty of Versailles.3
All of this is important to remember because it helps explain the popularity of much of the foreign policy of the Third Reich within Germany in the 1930s. And it explains why many civil servants in the German foreign office found they could accommodate themselves within the objectives of the Nazi government in its relationship with its neighbours. In the same way, wars of conquest were quite acceptable to the military elite, especially as such wars would accompany a massive expansion of the size and influence of the German military.
Nevertheless, despite the continuity between traditional German foreign relations and the Nazi actions of the 1930s, Hitler added a distinct radicalism and aggressiveness to it, which grew out of the racial ideology of the Nazi Party.4 This was not a new element in German outlook (especially with regard to Poles and other Slavic peoples of the East) but under the Nazis its intensity increased. This was driven by the Nazi obsession with gaining Lebensraum for the German people in the East.5 In Mein Kampf, Hitler had written:
If one wanted land and soil in Europe, then, by and large, this could only have been done at Russia’s expense, and then the new Reich would again have to start marching along the road of the knights of the orders of former times to provide, with the help of the German sword, the soil for the plough and the daily bread for the nation.6
As a result, we must avoid interpreting the foreign policy of the Third Reich as traditional German aims that escalated accidentally into a general European war. Wars of conquest were hard-wired into the Nazi outlook. And these always had the potential to develop a brutality whose scale would be shocking. But even these aspects of Nazi planning and outlook were, at the same time, related to long-established German attitudes towards neighbouring states. For, whilst Hitler had no blueprint for his actions and could not predict the course of events in the 1930s, his cynical and cunning manipulation of the weakness of others was always aimed in a general direction: the destruction of the Treaty of Versailles, the domination of Europe by Germany and wars of racial conquest in the East.7 But as the 1930s unfolded, this was far from clear to many observers of Europe, because, in many ways, Hitler appeared to have a limited set of goals, focused on revising the most objectionable aspects of the Treaty of Versailles. And to many, these objectives might even appear reasonable. It was a misapprehension that Hitler would ruthlessly manipulate.
As Göring commented, ‘Foreign policy above all was the Führer’s very own realm’, along with military matters. Hitler, ‘busied himself exceptionally with the details in both these spheres’.8 Given the issues we have just explored, this should come as no surprise.
Hitler was skilful at anticipating the actions of others and trapping them in their own self-interest. In May 1933, he called for other European nations to follow Germany in being disarmed. This was disingenuous of course because Hitler was committed to re-armament. But when the French rejected a British proposal for the reduction in the size of the large French army accompanied by an increase in the size of the small German one, it gave Hitler the excuse to leave both the Disarmament Conference and the League of Nations. The insincerity of Hitler’s position was immediately obvious in that he pressed on with German rearmament while at the same time (1934) signing a non-aggression pact with Poland. This clearly meant nothing since, by September 1939, he was conducting a murderous war in Poland, but it gave the impression that Germany had no aggressive plans for Eastern Europe and it weakened French influence since it reduced Polish anxieties.
The fact that Germany was not yet ready for any openly aggressive moves was revealed in reactions to the murder of the Austrian Chancellor, Dollfuss, by Austrian Nazis in July 1934. So concerned was the Italian dictator, Mussolini, at the possibility of German control of Austria that he moved troops to the Austrian border and promised assistance to Austria to safeguard its independence. As a result, the German government made no attempt to exploit Austria’s crisis.
In 1936, Hitler took his first major risk. Under the Treaty of Versailles, Germany was forbidden to station troops in the Rhineland, on the border with France. But Hitler felt ready for his first foreign policy gamble for a number of reasons. First, in March 1935, he had announced the existence of a German air force (the Luftwaffe) and the reintroduction of conscription. Both broke the Treaty of Versailles but no retribution followed. Second, no sooner had Britain, France and Italy condemned Germany’s actions in a meeting at Stresa, Italy, in April 1935 (the Stresa Front), than Britain had undermined it by agreeing to an increase in the size of the German navy. This lack of a united front against the challenges offered by Hitler would be a characteristic of the 1930s. Third, the Italian invasion of Abyssinia, in October 1935, split the potential opponents of Germany. When even the weak response of the British and French to this blatant act of Italian aggression proved too much for Mussolini, he drifted into the German orbit.
As a result, on 7 March 1936, Hitler ordered German troops into the Rhineland. Had Britain and France opposed this, the German troops had orders to withdraw and Hitler would have been humiliated. Indeed, so nervous was Hitler that he only moved in twelve infantry battalions and eight groups of artillery and most of these were ordered to stay on the Rhine’s eastern bank. But the British and French did nothing. As a result, the Locarno Pact was a dead letter, the League of Nations (whose job it was to uphold the Treaty of Versailles) was seen to have no authority and the resolve of the British and French to control Hitler was seen to be nonexistent. A number of historians have argued that, in retrospect, this was the last opportunity to prevent the Second World War and it has been claimed that within France a sense of inferiority in the face of a resurgent Germany led to a failure to maintain the advantages France had gained from the legacy of the First World War: Germany disarmed and the Rhineland demilitarized.9
Pablo Picasso’s famous painting of the destruction of the Basque town of Guernica illustrates the horrors of the Spanish Civil War (1936–9). Its monochrome starkness and its central image of a grieving woman and a wounded, screaming horse impress themselves on the memory. The whole design communicates grief and anger.10 But what the painting does not show is the nationality of the planes that dropped the bombs. For the aircraft that devastated Guernica were German.
Both Germany and Italy actively supported General Franco and the Spanish Nationalists in the Spanish Civil War and drew closer together as they did so.11 In October 1936, the Rome–Berlin axis was signed, which showed how far Mussolini had shifted since the Stresa Front.12 In November of that same year, Germany signed the Anti-Comintern Pact with Japan, which committed both countries to opposing the spread of communism. Hitler was no longer isolated and his successes so far had won him widespread support within Germany.
It was about this time that Hitler abandoned hopes of some kind of alliance with Britain. The failure of von Ribbentrop (the new German ambassador in London) to gain British acceptance of German ambitions in Eastern Europe in return for a promise of non-interference in the British Empire indicated that Britain remained a potential adversary in any future war. However, the arrogant and awkward von Ribbentrop was unlikely to win over the British..13 His social gaffes – including greeting George VI with the Nazi salute – soon won him the nickname ‘Herr Brickendrop’. During a dinner with Winston Churchill, Ribbentrop is reputed to have boasted: ‘The next war will be different, for we will have the Italians on our side.’ To which Churchill replied: ‘That’s only fair; we had ’em last time!’
Exactly what was going through Hitler’s mind at this time is revealed by a document known as the ‘Hossbach Memorandum’. This was the minutes of a meeting that took place in the Reich Chancellery, Berlin, on 5 November 1937, between 4.15 and 8.30 p.m. In just over four hours, Hitler outlined to the five senior officers present, along with von Neurath, the Foreign Minister, his long-term ambitions. The name of the document recording the gist of the meeting is derived from Colonel Hossbach, who made notes. This document is not without its difficulties. Hossbach only made notes at the time and it was five days later – on his own initiative – that he filled in the gaps from memory. The original document has not survived. Modern versions are based on a typed copy, which, by the time it appeared as evidence at the Nuremberg Trials in 1946 (as evidence PS-386), could not be definitely identified by Hossbach as an exact copy of his original minutes. Nevertheless, the message of the original meeting is clear enough.14
The policy of German autarky was, Hitler explained, only partly achievable. Britain and France would oppose German domination of Europe. Consequently, in the long term, the problems Germany faced could ‘only be solved by means of force’. Hossbach noted that it was Hitler’s ‘unalterable resolve to solve Germany’s problem of space at the latest by 1943–5’. However, earlier opportunities might arise if France was seriously distracted by internal problems. In such a scenario: ‘Time for action against the Czechs had come’. The situation would be similar if France was distracted by war. Either way, the objective ‘must be to overthrow Czechoslovakia and Austria simultaneously’. This would be prior to action against the French.15 Whilst long-term plans for war against Poland and the USSR – clearly objectives from the contents of Mein Kampf and other evidence – were not included on the agenda of this meeting, the Hossbach Memorandum shows clearly that Hitler’s tactical opportunism should not be used to obscure the clear evidence of long-term planning for domination of Europe by military means.
It is surely no coincidence that the year following the meeting in the Reich Chancellery has been identified by a number of historians as one that saw a ratcheting up of Nazi radicalism. Abroad it was a year that ended with the rule of the Third Reich extended to include Austria and the Sudeten area of Czechoslovakia. In Austria, this was accompanied by vicious assaults on the Jewish community. At home the events were similarly seismic. The more cautious nationalist Schacht had recently been replaced by Göring as driver of the German economy, and, in early 1938, the Foreign Minister, Neurath, lost his job to the Nazi Ribbentrop. Within the army, General von Blomberg, Minister for War, was forced to resign when police records revealed that his wife, Erna, had once posed for pornographic photographs. The fact that Hitler had acted as best man at their wedding added a further twist of embarrassment to the scandal. Shortly afterwards, Göring and Himmler presented evidence implicating army Commander-in-Chief Colonel-General von Fritsch in involvement with a rent boy. The fact that he was innocent emerged too late. By that time, Hitler was free of two leading generals who had expressed opposition to war with Britain and France. Hitler took this opportunity to abolish the post of Minister for War and took on the role of supreme commander of the armed forces himself. In October, Jews of Polish origin were expelled from Germany. Then, in November, came the brutal outpouring of violent anti-Semitism in Kristallnacht. No wonder that Giles MacDonogh described the year 1938 as ‘one of cataclysmal change for Germany’.16
Q: Which part of the world has the hottest climate?
A: Austria, of course; lots of people turned brown there overnight.17
So ran a joke popular in Germany in 1938, brown being the colour of the uniforms of Nazi paramilitaries. For in March of that year, Austria had been brought into the Reich and the event had been accompanied by widespread displays of loyalty to the new Nazi order.
Even before the Nazi takeover, Austria in 1938 was a semi-fascist one-party state. The Socialist Party and the Communist Party were banned and freedom of the press had been abolished. But it was independent of Germany and its leader, Schuschnigg, was determined to keep it that way. But Austrian Nazis were increasingly causing his government problems and were being encouraged from Berlin. A meeting with Hitler bullied Schuschnigg into including Nazis in his cabinet, but, on returning to Vienna, Schuschnigg decided to put Austrian independence to a referendum. Hitler was furious and as the level of threat from Germany increased, Schuschnigg resigned and was replaced by the Austrian Nazi Seyss-Inquart, who invited in the Germans. On 12 March 1938, German army units crossed the border to put into effect the Anschluss with Germany.
The final decision to fully absorb Austria into the Reich was confirmed by a referendum in which 99.73 per cent of the votes were cast in favour of union with Germany. Another joke at the time cynically commented on the fate of Austria:
Q: Why was the YES column on the voting form printed in capital letters and the NO column in small ones?
A: The YES was meant for the short-sighted and the NO for the far-sighted.18
However, despite the evidence of widespread support for the Anschluss in Austria, the later defeat of the Third Reich gave Austrians an opportunity to reinvent their recent past. In April 1945 – while many Austrians were still fighting for the Third Reich – the ‘Proclamation of 27 April’ by the provisional Austrian government embraced the concept of Austria as victim. That summer the new Austrian Foreign Ministry put forward the new orthodoxy that Austria had not been a willing ally of Germany; instead, Austria had been ‘occupied and liberated’. This presented the Anschluss as the forcible occupation of a helpless people and Austria’s first post-war government encapsulated this view in a famous publication in 1946: Justice for Austria! Red-White-Red-Book.19 It was (as the historian Günter Bischof put it) a ‘“Rip van Winkle myth” of dormant Austrian statehood.’20 It is the same myth that is perpetuated in the charming musical The Sound of Music, where a concert audience sings Edelweiss as a sign of Austrian independence and defiance, to the annoyance of Nazi officials.
With Austria absorbed, western Czechoslovakia was surrounded on three sides by German territory. The next crisis centred on the area of the Czech state called the Sudetenland, which bordered Germany and contained a minority of 3.5 million Germans. For years the Nazis had funded the Sudeten German Party, whose leader, Henlein, demanded self-determination. As tension mounted between Berlin and Prague, a short-lived united front by the Czechs, France, the USSR and Britain forced Hitler to back down in May. But this prompted him to set 1 October as the date by which he would deal with the Czechs. As the threat of war increased, the British Prime Minister, Chamberlain, flew on his own initiative to negotiate with Hitler at Berchtesgaden. Returning home he persuaded the French and coerced the Czechs into falling in line with Hitler’s demands. But on returning to Germany for a second meeting at Bad Godesberg, Chamberlain found Hitler had upped his demands. An immediate German occupation of the Sudetenland was now the only solution he would accept.
War seemed inevitable. But Mussolini suggested a conference, which met at Munich in September. Here Germany, Britain, France and Italy agreed that Germany could take the Sudetenland. There was a vague promise – never ratified – to guarantee the security of the rest of Czechoslovakia. This was ‘appeasement’ in action. As such it built on the earlier inaction in the face of treaty-breaking and aggression by both Hitler and Mussolini.21 The Czechs were not invited to the conference talks. Neither were the Russians. At the same time as Germany carved off the Sudetenland, the Poles and Hungarians took the opportunity to seize disputed parts of the borderland of the Czech state. With Germany triumphant and Britain and France clearly impotent, the countries of central Europe came to terms with the new realities. Romania guaranteed oil supplies to Germany; Yugoslavia signed a trade agreement; Hungary joined the Anti-Comintern Pact.
Despite gaining all he had demanded, Hitler was angered at the outcome. The evidence suggests that he had wanted the crisis to result in a localized war and felt cheated of his ‘entry into Prague’. For now the Czechs had been reprieved. But it was a stay of execution that would last for only six months.
In all Hitler’s moves so far, those who hoped for the best could delude themselves that he was simply righting the wrongs of the peace treaties that followed the end of the First World War. Furthermore, his actions had brought Germans under one common government and could be described as within the principle of self-determination. However, in March 1939, Hitler dismembered Czechoslovakia. ‘For the first time, Germany lacked even the pretence of a respectable ethnic rationale for its action.’22 The expansionist ambitions of Hitler were clear for all to see.
On 15 March, German troops occupied the remainder of the Czech state. Technically, since November 1938, it had been titled Czecho-Slovakia, since the weakened government in Prague had been forced to accede to demands for autonomy in Slovakia and Ruthenia. The Hungarians took the opportunity afforded by the German invasion to annex parts of Ruthenia and parts of Slovakia. Slovakia itself became a German puppet state.
In the same month, Hitler seized Memel from Lithuania, which was now dominated by Nazi Germany. The betrayal of the Czechs by the British and French at Munich had created a landslide of change in central Europe.
Now it was the turn of the Poles. Germany demanded the German-speaking city of Danzig (loosely administered by the League of Nations) and the ‘Polish Corridor’ (which divided East Prussia from the Reich and gave Poland access to the Baltic). Faced with the disaster that had occurred in central Europe the British offered a guarantee of support for Poland if it was attacked by Germany. But even now the British were slow in their pursuit of an alliance with the USSR. The matter was further complicated by Poland’s refusal to allow Soviet troops onto Polish soil. Consequently, the world was shocked when, on 23 August, Germany and the USSR signed a non-aggression treaty. It was a meeting of enemies that satisfied both – temporarily. Hitler now knew that he could attack Poland without the USSR becoming involved. Stalin knew he had bought time. And Hitler was confident that the French and British would not intervene. In a meeting with his generals on 22 August, he concluded, ‘Our enemies are little worms; I saw them at Munich.’ This was the legacy of appeasement.
In the run up to war the usual atrocity stories were manufactured in the German press. This time though they were accompanied by macabre ‘evidence’ when prisoners from concentration camps were dressed in Polish uniforms and gunned down beside the German border radio station they had allegedly been attacking.
At 0445 hours on the morning of 1 September 1939, Germany attacked Poland. On 3 September, Britain and France declared war. Hitler, as always personally incapable of taking responsibility for any problem he had wilfully caused, bitterly blamed von Ribbentrop for the fact that Britain had defied his wishes and gone to war with the Third Reich. It was a strange start to Hitler’s war. The British, whom he had long hoped would be neutral or an ally, were at war with him, and the USSR, whom he loathed, was his ally. Clearly, not everything had gone according to Hitler’s long-term planning.
By the 1970s there was a hotly contested school of thought, particularly associated with the British historian A. J. P. Taylor, which argued that the Second World War was preventable but the events leading to it had been badly handled by the West. In this interpretation, Hitler did not have a clear plan for a general European war. Instead, his plans were largely pragmatic and developed with time and success. In his foreign policy plans, Hitler was not greatly different from many earlier German politicians of the Second Reich and the Weimar Republic.23 Indeed, his ambitions were not greatly different from those of other – Western – leaders who similarly wanted their nations to be the leading state within Europe. When war occurred in 1939 it was more a case of accident than design and resulted from errors made by many of the leading players. Hitler, in Taylor’s view, was largely an opportunist whose only distinguishing features were his pursuit of power and anti-Semitism. He had little by way of a programme and his foreign policy drifted from one opportunistic action to another. More central to any explanation of the outbreak of the Second World War was the flawed nature of the Treaty of Versailles.24
By the early twenty-first century this way of explaining the foreign policy of the Third Reich has been largely abandoned. In conversation with the film-maker, author and former head of history at the BBC, Laurence Rees, in September 2009, a number of leading historians outlined their understanding of how the Second World War came about. And their comments reveal how far the views of historians have developed since the 1970s. Richard Evans identified the crucial part played by Nazi ideology in that, in his opinion, ‘Hitler’s beliefs are absolutely paramount as a causal factor in the Second World War … he intended there to be a general European war really absolutely from the outset.’ This is a point corroborated by Evans’s fellow historian of the Third Reich, Ian Kershaw: ‘The German expansion, as Hitler repeatedly said, could only come about through the sword.’ And this was an area in which the military ambitions of the Third Reich were deeply entangled with Nazi economics. Adam Tooze has focused on the economic aspects of Nazi policy and the way in which it was geared to expansionist aggression. As he reminds us, ‘The idea that the Nazis could have somehow just extended the prosperity of the 1930s into some sort of peaceful VW future of modernity and satisfaction – well, it’s just not on the cards for Hitler’s regime.’ Furthermore, the kind of political persona that Hitler had developed meant that such a conventional set of aims was never remotely on his agenda. As Tooze reminds us: ‘This is a man for whom politics is drama, a tragic drama that may not have a happy ending’. This is an interpretation strongly supported by the hard facts of Nazi economic activity. By 1939, Nazi spending on rearmament was running at about 33 per cent of German GDP, compared with a normal state’s spending of up to 4 per cent of GDP. In fact, military expenditure in the Third Reich by the end of the 1930s was ten times what NATO expected of its members at the height of the Cold War in the 1970s and 1980s. The conclusion is clear: Nazi Germany was driving relentlessly towards a war of conquest.
But while this programme was fundamental to the implementation of Nazi race-based foreign policy (and indeed was inspired by this ideology) it was also one that struck a chord with large sections of German society because it drew together many strands of dissatisfaction with the outcome of the Treaty of Versailles. As the historian Richard Overy reminds us, while Hitler was the prime factor, his ideology had combined with the consequences of the Versailles settlement and consequently had fused his racial radicalism with a widespread German desire to destroy that settlement, along with a long-standing German foreign policy aim of dominating Central Europe alongside a drive to the East. It was this combination of the traditional aims of the Second Reich and nationalist anger at the 1919 settlement with Hitler’s racial worldview that so ‘distorted the international order’ and made the circumstances of September 1939 possible.
And by September 1939, the invasion of Poland left even the architects of appeasement in Paris and London with little choice, if they were to maintain any credibility and influence in the world. Anita Prazmowska identifies how an attack by Germany on Poland in 1939 dangerously tipped the balance of power in Europe in Germany’s favour. As a result, the Western Allies had little alternative but to act, despite the fact that their failure to bring the USSR on board meant that there was little they could actually do to save the Poles. She sums up the significance of the declaration of war in September 1939: ‘It is not a fight for Poland, it is actually an attempt to indicate to Germany the unacceptability of her behaviour.’ Little wonder that Laurence Rees concluded that, ‘Hitler emerges, surely without question now, as the person most responsible for the war.’25
As a result, we can conclude that Hitler was not a politician like any other. Rather, he was committed to a Europe-wide war and was obsessed with a racially distorted version of geopolitics. 26 Unlike the traditional nationalist consensus, which even Stresemann had subscribed to, Hitler was determined to move beyond dismantling the restrictions imposed by the Treaty of Versailles; instead, his aim was the conquest of a massive slave empire in the east of Europe as far as the Urals. As a consequence, throughout the 1930s, he was committed to a desperate rearmament programme and a policy of expansion before other states were strong enough to stop him. From 1938, his drive to war went up a gear and was accelerated by his obsession that he did not have long to accomplish his tasks; that growing international condemnation of Nazism after the Anschluss signalled the start of a grouping of adversaries; that US involvement in the Evian Conference on Jewish refugees in the summer of 1938 (however ineffective) signalled – to Hitler – that the real centre of the ‘World Jewish Conspiracy’ was in the USA and that this would eventually cause the USA to back Britain and France in a general war. Finally, growing British rearmament from early 1939 suggested that by the early 1940s the odds would be stacked more heavily against Germany’s gamble, and this was coupled with Hitler’s fear of the eventual power of the USSR. Having started a clock ticking towards war, Hitler was then driven by the inexorable logic of his own extremist position. As Richard Overy has argued, war with Poland was inevitable but Hitler, the gambler, still hoped it would not involve the Western Allies. He hoped he could achieve the destruction of Poland without Britain and France getting involved. But this time Britain and France were determined to stand firm in the hope of deterring further escalation. The two-day delay (1–3 September 1939) was not preparatory to another act of appeasement but was necessary in order to coordinate British and French mobilization.27
Consequently, the Second World War broke out because Hitler was prepared to gamble on the possibility of German victory in a swift war, despite the size of the risk. This failed because the British and French finally resisted. Nevertheless, by the summer of 1940 – even with Britain still defiant – it looked as if that massive gamble had actually paid off. However, even then Hitler was preparing for the even bigger future confrontation with the USSR that was more in keeping with the war he had originally envisaged.28 But these are the subjects of other chapters.
1. Noakes, J. and Pridham, G., Nazism 1919–1945, vol. III, Foreign Policy, War and Racial Extermination, University of Exeter Press, 1988, pp. 727–8.
2. Ingrao, Charles W. and Szabo, Franz A. J. (eds), The Germans and the East, Purdue University Press, 2008, gives an overview of the relationship between Germany, German speakers and German colonists in Eastern Europe from the medieval period to the modern day.
3. See Young, William, German Diplomatic Relations 1871–1945, iUniverse, 2006, for a detailed examination of the extent to which continuity can be demonstrated in German foreign policy and the extent to which the Nazi leadership dominated the German foreign office.
4. For an analysis of the way in which German foreign policy after 1933 was dominated by the Nazi plans for ruthless German exploitation of Eastern Europe, see Carr, William, Arms, Autarky and Aggression: Study in German Foreign Policy, 1933–1939, Hodder Arnold, 1972.
5. Bendersky, Joseph W., A History of Nazi Germany: 1919–1945, Burnham Inc., 2000, p. 177.
6. Quoted in Jäckel, Eberhard, Hitler’s World View: A Blueprint for Power, the President and Fellows of Harvard College, 1981, pp. 34–5.
7. Noakes, J. and Pridham, G., op. cit., pp. 609–16, explains how Hitler’s foreign-policy aims changed between 1919 and 1924. An earlier focus on opposition to Britain and France, in order to revise the Treaty of Versailles, gave way to one that stressed conquering Lebensraum at the expense of the USSR – which he had come to think of as a Jewishdominated state. And this might be accompanied by an alliance with Britain, which would isolate France.
8. Quoted in McDonough, Frank, Hitler and Nazi Germany, Cambridge University Press, 1999, p. 70.
9. Aron, Raymond and Mahoney, Daniel, Peace and War: A Theory of International Relations, Transaction Publishers, 2003, p. 42.
10. Patterson, Ian, Guernica and Total War, Profile Books, 2007, p. 68. See also Russell, Frank, D., Picasso’s Guernica: The Labyrinth of Narrative and Vision, Allanheld & Schram, 1980.
11. Thomas, Hugh, The Spanish Civil War, Modern Library, 2001, provides a detailed examination of the conflict. See also Esenwein, George Richard, The Spanish Civil War: A Modern Tragedy, Routledge, 2005.
12. Noakes, J. and Pridham, G., op. cit., pp. 667–75, outlines the process by which the creation of the Rome–Berlin axis accompanied a growing disillusionment with the possibility of working with Britain.
13. Weitz, John, Hitler’s Diplomat: The Life and Times of Joachim von Ribbentrop, Houghton Mifflin, 1992, provides a detailed biography of von Ribbentrop.
14. Noakes, J. and Pridham, G., op. cit., p. 680, while recognizing the omission of the east from Hitler’s conversation, concludes that the Memorandum did constitute something of a programme by which Germany would ‘pursue a more aggressive policy abroad’. The details of the Memorandum are provided on pp. 680–7.
15. Source: Documents on Germany Foreign Policy 1918–1945, Series D, vol. I, From Neurath to Ribbentrop (September 1937 – September 1938), Washington, United States Government Printing Office, 1949.
16. MacDonogh, Giles, 1938: Hitler’s Gamble, Constable, 2009, p. xiii.
17. Hillenbrand, Fritz Karl Michael, Underground humour in Nazi Germany, 1933–1945, Routledge, 1995, p. 133.
18. Ibid., p. 133.
19. Utgaard, Peter, Remembering & Forgetting Nazism: Education, National Identity, and the Victim Myth in Postwar Austria, Berghahn Books, 2003, pp. 28–9.
20. Cited in Williams, Warren W., ‘The Road to the Austrian State Treaty’, in Journal of Cold War Studies, vol. II, no. 2, Spring 2000, pp. 97–107. See also Steininger, Rolf, Bischof and Günter, Gehler, Michael (eds), Austria in the Twentieth Century, Transaction Publishers, 2008.
21. Shen, Peijian, The Age of Appeasement, The Evolution of British Foreign Policy in the 1930s, Sutton, 1999, explores the origin, evolution and nature of appeasement.
22. Gray, Colin S., War, Peace and International Relations: An Introduction to Strategic History, Routledge, 2007, p. 110.
23. Taylor, A. J. P., The Course of German History, Hamish Hamilton, 1945.
24. Taylor, A. J. P., The Origins of the Second World War, Hamish Hamilton, 1961.
25. For this insightful set of conversations, see BBC History Magazine, vol. X, no. 9, September 2009, pp. 70–2.
26. For an accessible and succinct overview of the interpretation that Hitler bears primary responsibility for the outbreak of war in 1939, see Henig, Ruth, ‘The Origins of the Second World War’, New Perspective, vol. 3, no. 1, September 1997.
27. Overy, Richard, 1939: Countdown to War, Allen Lane, 2009.
28. Henig, Ruth, op. cit.