Part 2 Road to War

Accurate scholarship can

Unearth the whole offence

From Luther until now

That has driven a culture mad

— SEPTEMBER 1, 1939, by W.H. AUDEN

When the German delegation of 180 diplomats and technicians went to Versailles in 1919 to negotiate a peace treaty ending World War I, the French forced their train to creep along at 10 m.p.h. so that the Germans would get a vivid sense of the devastation their armies had wrought. In Versailles’s Hall of Mirrors, Premier Georges Clemenceau had ominous words for them: “The hour has struck for the weighty settlement of our account.”

That account dated back not just to the murderous offensives on the Somme in 1916, but to 1870, when Prussian Chancellor Otto von Bismarck provoked Emperor Napoleon III into declaring war, then smashed him at Sedan, annexed the iron- rich provinces of Alsace and Lorraine and imposed on France a heavy financial indemnity. But the Germans had their own view of this account, in which they had repeatedly been attacked and despoiled by the French, by Napoleon, by Louis XIV. Indeed, this conflict went back beyond the birth of either nation, to the time when the Romans subdued the Gauls but not the Germans, thus establishing the Rhine as the frontier of what was then considered the civilized world.

The Allied terms at Versailles were harsh. France would regain Alsace and Lorraine, as well as a trusteeship over the rich coal mines of the Saar. The Austro-Hungarian and Turkish empires would be chopped up into a goulash of new nations like Czechoslovakia and Yugoslavia. A newly independent Poland acquired parts of the German industrial area of Upper Silesia, Posen and West Prussia, providing it with a corridor to the Baltic Sea. Germany alone would be disarmed, forbidden to maintain more than 100,000 troops or have any major warships, submarines, warplanes or tanks. Germany would have to admit formally to being guilty of aggression and pay all war damages, a sum estimated at more than $100 billion (around $600 billion in today’s dollars). Until the Germans accepted these terms, the Allies would continue the strangling naval blockade they imposed in 1915. The Germans signed.

Germany was in a state of turmoil, ruin and mass hunger. It had lost nearly 2 million men, and its mutinous army had virtually disintegrated. Kaiser Wilhelm II had fled into exile in Holland. The Social Democrats had proclaimed a republic, with themselves in charge, and the Communists were challenging them for control of the streets. And in a hospital northeast of Berlin, raging at the nation’s defeat, lay a 29-year-old Austrian corporal partly blinded by mustard gas. “In vain all the sacrifices,” Adolf Hitler later wrote in Mein Kampf (My Struggle). “In vain the death of 2 million . . . Hatred grew in me, hatred for those responsible for this deed . . . I decided to go into politics.”

His start was less than auspicious. He joined a tiny Bavarian outfit that called itself the German Workers Party. He began making speeches, denouncing Bolsheviks, capitalists, the Jews, the French. Germany had lost the war only because it had been betrayed at home by a “stab in the back.” By 1923, as the new Weimar Republic was sinking into deep economic troubles, Hitler staged an absurd “beer-hall putsch” and led a march through Munich. He was arrested and sentenced to five years in prison (he served nine months). “You may pronounce us guilty a thousand times over,” he declared at his trial, “but the goddess of the eternal court of history acquits us.”

Larger forces were aggravating the conflicts that Hitler would eventually exploit. In 1923 the Germans stalled on their reparations payments and the French seized the industrial Ruhr to compel payment. The German mark, declining ever since the war, began plunging: 7,000 to the dollar in January, 160,000 in July, 1 million in August. A kind of madness swept the country. People carried suitcases of money to a store to buy a sausage. And the mark kept falling, to an all-time low of 4.2 trillion that November. Everything was for sale, all savings were destroyed, and nothing seemed to have any value any longer. No less than military defeat and social upheaval, the hyperinflation undermined all the traditional securities of German society.

Recovery did come eventually, with lots of American and British loans, but the Wall Street Crash of 1929 started a worldwide depression to which the shaky German economy was especially vulnerable. Unemployment soared. The feeble Social Democratic coalition government collapsed. And Adolf Hitler, whose Nazi Party held an insignificant twelve seats in the Reichstag, suddenly became a voice that attracted attention. He was one of the first 20th century figures to master radio as an important political medium. His message: Down with the system. Vote for a leader who will bring us back to greatness.

The economic crisis provided Hitler not only with a strong message but also with manpower. He recruited the unemployed as his Storm Troopers, put them in brown shirts and boots and sent them out to do battle. “Hate exploded suddenly, without warning, out of nowhere, at street corners, in restaurants, cinemas, dance halls,” wrote Christopher Isherwood in The Berlin Stories, which eventually became Cabaret. “Knives were whipped out, blows were dealt with spiked rings, beer-mugs, chair-legs or leaded clubs.” In September 1930 the Nazis won 6.5 million votes, and their 107 Reichstag seats made them the second strongest party.

Split between Nazis and Communists as well as several traditional parties, the Reichstag became ungovernable. That gave crucial political power to a man who was supposed to be a figurehead, President Paul von Hindenburg, commander of Germany’s armies during the war. Hindenburg was 83, vain, righteous and inclined to long naps. Since the Reichstag could not agree on a policy, he appointed some of his favorites as Chancellors, letting them rule by presidential decree.

But the Nazis kept winning elections. In the summer of 1932, the Nazis doubled their Reichstag seats, to 230 out of 608; Hitler’s blustering, barrel- shaped lieutenant, Hermann Goring, became president of the legislature. Hindenburg despised Hitler, “that Austrian corporal,” but he asked him to serve as Vice Chancellor under Hindenburg’s protege, Franz von Papen. Hitler rejected any compromises.

In the first week in January, everything suddenly changed. Papen, bent on revenge for having been replaced as Chancellor by General Kurt von Schleicher, decided to make a deal with Hitler. At a secret meeting, several prominent financiers promised credit to the financially pressed Nazis. Once again, Hindenburg proposed a Papen-Hitler coalition, only with Hitler as Chancellor. & This time Hitler agreed. And so, on Jan. 30, 1933, this half-educated ex- Austrian with a genius for manipulation and deceit became, quite legally, the leader of Germany.

Hindenburg and the other conservatives were confident that they could keep Hitler under control. They held eight of the eleven Cabinet seats, including such power centers as the Foreign Ministry and the Economics Ministry. What they did not seem to appreciate was that Goring was not only a national Minister Without Portfolio but also the Prussian interior minister; that put him in charge of the police in the state of Prussia, which covered Berlin and two-thirds of Germany.

Hitler had no sooner taken office than he had Hindenburg dissolve the Reichstag and order new elections. With Goring in charge of the police, 40,000 Nazis became special officers, invading opposition meetings, beating and arresting opposition speakers. Just a week before the election, Berliners saw a red glow in the night sky and learned that the Reichstag was on fire. At the scene, Goring was shouting wildly: “This is a Communist crime against the new government! We will show no mercy! Every Communist deputy must be shot!”

Independent experts assumed from the beginning that the Nazis had started the fire, but Hitler immediately made it his pretext for seizing power. He persuaded Hindenburg to sign a decree that gave the government broad powers to make arrests, search homes, confiscate property and impose “restrictions on personal liberty, on the right of free expression of opinion.” The Storm Troopers were in power now, and mass arrests began. “My mission is only to destroy and exterminate,” said Goring.

In their last free (or semifree) elections, held March 5, 1933, the Germans gave their new dictator 44% of their votes. Hitler never won a majority in an election, but that 44% brought the Nazis, along with their right-wing allies of the Nationalist Party, their first majority in the Reichstag. So Hitler presented the Reichstag with an “enabling act” that would surrender most of its powers to what was now very much his Cabinet. Some Communists and socialists — those not already in jail — protested, but while the Nazi delegates cheered and shouted, the Reichstag docilely voted itself out of business. All that remained for Hitler’s assumption of total power was the death of Hindenburg, which occurred the following year. Hitler simply abolished the presidency, named himself Fuhrer and had his decision ratified in a plebiscite by nearly 90% of the people.

Throughout these first years of the Third Reich, Hitler imposed a process that the Nazis called Gleichschaltung, which means standardization or making things the same. All political parties except the Nazis were banned as divisive. Leftist union leaders were arrested and replaced by Nazis preaching the harmonious unity of the working classes (strikes were banned). Joseph Goebbels, the Propaganda Minister, rallied students to a vast bonfire outside the University of Berlin, where the works of illustrious liberals (Emile Zola) and Jews (Heinrich Heine) were consigned to the flames. Jews were barred from public office, the civil service and professions like teaching and journalism. The basic idea behind all this was embodied in the slogan “Ein Volk, Ein Reich, Ein Fuhrer” (One people, one nation, one leader).

Some of the best and brightest left the country. Thomas Mann left, and Albert Einstein, Hans Bethe, Bertolt Brecht, Kurt Weill, Paul Tillich, Walter Gropius, Mies van der Rohe, Fritz Lang, Billy Wilder. Some of the less fortunate fell into the hands of Goring’s police and ended up in a little village outside Munich where the Nazis had built their first concentration camp. It was called Dachau. This was not yet the era of the gas chambers but rather of the truncheon, not mass murder but the gradual silencing of all opposition. “They came first for the Communists, and I didn’t speak up because I wasn’t a Communist,” said Pastor Martin Niemoller, a former U-boat commander who had once briefly supported the Nazis but eventually spent four years in Dachau. “Then they came for the Jews, and I didn’t speak up because I wasn’t a Jew. Then they came for the Catholics, and I didn’t speak up because I was a Protestant. Then they came for me, and by that time there was no one left to speak up.”

Throughout these ugly years, though, the majority of Germans seemed fairly content with their New Order. “The Nazi terror in the early years affected the lives of relatively few Germans,” recalled William Shirer, author of The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich, who went to report on Germany in 1934, “and a newly arrived observer was somewhat surprised to see that the people of this country did not seem to feel that they were being cowed and held down by an unscrupulous and brutal dictatorship. On the contrary, they supported it with genuine enthusiasm. Somehow it imbued them with a new hope.”

They had some very practical reasons. Hitler had substantially revived the economy. Unemployment, so pivotal in bringing him to power, had dropped from 6 million to less than 1 million between 1933 and 1937, this at a time when the U.S. was still wallowing in the Depression. National production and income doubled during the same period. This was partly owing to Hitler’s rearmament policy, but also to more benign forms of public spending. The world’s first major highway system, the autobahns, began snaking across the country, and there was talk of providing every citizen with a cheap, standardized car, the people’s car, or Volkswagen.

One of the most impressive of the new public buildings was the Olympic stadium in Berlin, and there Hitler welcomed the powerful and famous of other lands — for example, the celebrated American aviator Charles Lindbergh — to his refurbished capital. And despite the fuss over a black American, Jesse Owens, winning four gold medals at the 1936 Berlin Olympics, the team that scored the most points overall was Nazi Germany’s.

It was inevitable that an economically reviving Germany would increase its pressure for major revisions in the Versailles Treaty. When the new President Roosevelt proposed the abolition of all major offensive weapons, Hitler was quick to agree — easy enough since Germany had been forbidden to possess such weapons. “Germany would also be perfectly ready to disband her entire military establishment . . . if the neighboring countries will do the same,” Hitler declared. That “if” was the shield behind which he planned to rearm. When Britain and France declined, Hitler indignantly announced that Germany was leaving the Geneva disarmament talks and the League of Nations.

In secret, Hitler had already told his generals that he wanted to triple the German army from the Versailles ceiling of 100,000 men to 300,000 by October 1934. The navy, which was not supposed to have any ships of more than 10,000 tons, got orders to start building two 26,000-ton battle cruisers. In the spring of 1935, Hitler announced that he was reintroducing universal military service to create an army of 500,000 men. The Allies protested but did nothing.

At dawn on March 7, 1936, Hitler made the first bold use of his growing Wehrmacht. Though his generals had warned him that the French would resist and that Germany was still too weak to fight, Hitler sent three battalions across the Rhine to occupy the supposedly demilitarized Rhineland. “We have no ) territorial demands to make in Europe,” he proclaimed. “Germany will never break the peace!” It was all bluff. “If the French had then marched into the Rhineland, we would have had to withdraw with our tails between our legs,” Hitler later said. “A retreat on our part would have spelled collapse.”

There were several reasons for this Western irresolution. The memories of the war ran deep, and nobody was eager for more bloodshed. Both Britain and France were concerned with their own serious economic troubles. But particularly in Britain, there was a widespread view that Versailles had indeed been unfair, that the Germans had a strong case. George Bernard Shaw, for example, spoke of Hitler’s “triumphant rescue of his country from the yoke the Allies imposed.”

With hindsight it is clear that the Allies should and easily could have stopped Hitler by force, and their failure has long been condemned as “appeasement.” But to the leaders of Britain and France, appeasement was a proudly proclaimed policy, meaning simply negotiating rather than fighting. “Appeasement between the wars was always a self-confident creed,” Churchill biographer Martin Gilbert wrote in The Roots of Appeasement. “It was both utopian and practical. Its aim was peace for all time, or at least for as long as wise men could devise it.”

Unlike the Allied leaders, though, Hitler was fully prepared to back up his policies by force, even if only obliquely or by proxy. When General Francisco Franco launched a military revolt against the Republican government of Spain in 1936, Hitler saw a chance not only to acquire a new ally but also to discomfit the neighboring French. He sent bombers, tanks and “volunteers.” Goring used Spain as a training ground for “my young Luftwaffe.” Its most notorious action, one that other nations would soon experience, was the aerial destruction of the Basque town of Guernica.

The Allied leaders also did not understand that Hitler repeatedly lied about his plans and intentions. In a speech justifying rearmament in 1935, he declared, “Germany neither intends nor wishes to interfere in the internal affairs of Austria, to annex Austria or to conclude an Anschluss ((unification)).” He even signed a treaty with Austria in 1936 promising not to interfere in its internal affairs. But he was an Austrian, after all, and the idea of uniting the two Germanic nations can never have been far from his mind. By 1937, when he called in his generals and told them to prepare for war, he said, “Our first objective . . . must be to overthrow Czechoslovakia and Austria.”

He had actually made an abortive attempt to seize Austria in 1934, when some 150 SS men dressed in Austrian army uniforms burst into the Chancellery in Vienna and shot down Conservative Chancellor Engelbert Dollfuss. That was supposed to be the start of a Nazi coup, but Justice Minister Kurt von Schuschnigg rallied the police and had the assassins arrested. Italy, which had guaranteed Austrian independence, mobilized four divisions on the frontier. Hitler backed down. By 1938, however, he had built a threatening army and had won the support of Italy’s Mussolini (they had signed a secret protocol in 1936 creating what Mussolini called the Rome-Berlin axis). It was time to try again.

Hitler’s strategy was a classic example of what came to be known as a war of nerves. All through 1937, Austrian Nazis, armed and financed from Germany, staged demonstrations, street fights, midnight bombings. Schuschnigg, now Chancellor, banned the party and kept arresting its agents. In February 1938 Hitler invited the Austrian leader to his Alpine retreat in Berchtesgaden. There he stormed at his visitor, declaring that the Austrian problem must be solved or his army would demand its “just revenge.” When Schuschnigg asked what it was that Hitler wanted, he was handed a typed “agreement” and told that no changes would be allowed. It called for all arrested Nazis to be amnestied, the ban on the party to be lifted, Nazis to be appointed to head the Police and War ministries and an economic merger of the two nations. When Schuschnigg balked, Hitler shouted, “Fulfill my demands within three days, or I will order the march into Austria!”

Schuschnigg surrendered and returned home. But President Wilhelm Miklas, who had not experienced Hitler’s persuasion, refused to accept the deal. When Hitler heard that, he ordered the Wehrmacht to mobilize, as publicly as possible. Schuschnigg tried to defend his regime by announcing a plebiscite in four days, on March 13, to decide whether Austrians wanted “a free, independent, social, Christian and united Austria.” Hitler, apoplectic, ordered the Wehrmacht to invade Austria on March 12 unless Schuschnigg called off the plebiscite. Once again Schuschnigg surrendered, but Hitler kept increasing his demands. Now he insisted that Schuschnigg resign and be replaced by Nazi leader Arthur Seyss-Inquart. Schuschnigg again surrendered, and resigned, but President Miklas refused to name Seyss-Inquart.

By now Nazi mobs had encircled the Chancellery, shrieking “Sieg Heil! Heil Hitler!” On the telephone from Berlin, Goring dictated a telegram to Seyss- Inquart in which “the provisional Austrian government” asked Germany to send troops to restore order. On March 12 the Wehrmacht came streaming across the border — not only unopposed but warmly welcomed by thousands of Austrians who genuinely wanted union with Germany. Next day, Seyss-Inquart issued a decree that announced, “Austria is a province of the German Reich.” Hitler returned in triumph to the Vienna where he had once lived as a virtual derelict. Papen described him as being “in a state of ecstasy.”

Britain and France again protested but did nothing, so Hitler’s aggressiveness had conquered a whole country without a shot being fired. And with that conquest came severe repression. When Hitler went to Vienna, Heinrich Himmler’s police began to arrest 79,000 “unreliables.” Schuschnigg was kept in a single room at police headquarters and assigned to cleaning toilets for 17 months, then shipped to Dachau. Jews were rounded up and made to get on their hands and knees and scrub away Schuschnigg campaign slogans.

In Germany too the treatment of Jews kept getting worse. The Nuremberg racial laws of 1935 deprived them of German citizenship and forbade them to marry or have sexual relations with “Aryans.” In 1938 they were barred from practicing law or medicine or engaging in commerce. Along with such laws came all forms of discrimination — signs barring them from grocery stores or drugstores or even whole towns — and the constant threat of violence from any bad-tempered policeman, any unruly crowd.

In November 1938, after a Jewish student assassinated the Third Secretary at the German embassy in Paris, the Nazis staged a nationwide pogrom, burning Jewish homes and synagogues and smashing so many windows that the rampage became known as Kristallnacht (death toll: 91). Yet again the Western Allies protested but did nothing. London maintained its strict limits on Jews’ going to British-ruled Palestine, and the U.S. resisted any increase in its immigration quotas.

Each triumph filled Hitler with ever greater confidence in his invincibility, in his political instincts and in the irresolution of his antagonists. Having easily conquered Austria, he decided in the spring of 1938 to attack Czechoslovakia. Like Poland, Czechoslovakia had been carved out of the Habsburg Empire by the mapmakers at Versailles, and its boundaries included an awkward mixture of roughly 6.5 million Czechs, 3.3 million Germans, 2.5 million Slovaks and about 800,000 Hungarians and Poles. Unlike Poland, it was a genuine democracy with a large and well-equipped army; it also had signed a treaty that pledged France to defend it against any attack.

As in Austria, Hitler’s war of nerves began with a wave of terrorist bombings and street riots. Berlin sponsored this violence with payments to Konrad Henlein, leader of Czechoslovakia’s Sudeten German Party. It also gave him his instructions, which Henlein himself once summed up: “We must always demand so much from the Czechs that we can never be satisfied.” When Czech President Eduard Bene first asked Henlein what he wanted, the list included political autonomy, payment of damages, separate citizenship for Sudeten Germans and freedom to practice “the ideology of Germans.” Bene refused.

Rumors, possibly false, suddenly spread in May 1938 that German troops were concentrating on the Czech frontier. Bene ordered a partial mobilization, the British expressed “grave concern,” and the French warned Berlin that they were ready to fight. One of Hitler’s top generals thereupon announced that it had all been a mistake, that there had been no German troop movements. By appearing to stand firm for the first time, the Allies seemed to have made Hitler back down. But this apparent victory had two important results: the Allies were appalled at how near to war they had come, and Hitler determined on revenge. He told his generals, “It is my unalterable decision to smash Czechoslovakia by military action in the near future.” He even set a date: Oct. 1.

Hitler’s antagonists had changed over the years, and now the important newcomer on the international scene was Neville Chamberlain, who had replaced Stanley Baldwin as Conservative Prime Minister of Britain in the spring of 1937. Chamberlain’s background was in business; he believed in orderly negotiations. He had no experience in dealing with an unscrupulous improviser like Hitler, but he nonetheless invited himself to a meeting with the Fuhrer. Hitler received him in Berchtesgaden, and soon began ranting about the Czechs. He said he would not “tolerate any longer that a small, second-rate country should treat the mighty thousand-year-old German Reich as something inferior.” Shocked, Chamberlain threatened to leave. Hitler, who had never ) previously asked to take over part of Czechoslovakia, now claimed that he wanted “the principle . . . of self-determination.”

Chamberlain said he would have to consult with his associates, which amounted to seeing whether either the British or the French were ready to fight for Czechoslovakia. They were not. Chamberlain then had to persuade Bene to give Germany every area inhabited more than 50% by Germans. That would mean the surrender of the entire Sudetenland, which represented not only one-fifth of Czechoslovakia’s territory but also its industrial heartland and its defensible natural frontier. Bene at first refused, but when the British and French told him that he would have to fight alone, he gave in.

The next day Chamberlain returned to Germany to tell Hitler he could have everything he asked. “Do I understand,” asked the Fuhrer, “that the British, French and Czech governments have agreed to the transfer of the Sudetenland from Czechoslovakia to Germany?”

“Yes,” said Chamberlain.

“I am terribly sorry,” said Hitler, “but that no longer suits me.” The German leader seemed determined to humiliate the Czechs and expose the weakness of the British and French. He no longer wanted a plebiscite. The Czechs would simply have to hand over the Sudetenland by Oct. 1, or the Germans would invade. Now Chamberlain was angry. Returning to London, he found that the French were reluctantly ready to meet a German invasion with force, a decision in which he unhappily concurred. In London people began digging trenches to provide shelter from the expected air raids. “How horrible, fantastic, incredible it is,” Chamberlain said in a radio speech to the nation, “that we should be digging trenches . . . here because of a quarrel in a faraway country between people of whom we know nothing.”

Having reached the brink of war, the warriors hesitated. Chamberlain sent a message to Mussolini suggesting a meeting with Hitler and French Premier Daladier. Hitler agreed. Chamberlain was in the midst of addressing Parliament when he received Hitler’s invitation to Munich the following day; he almost gasped with relief as he announced his acceptance. The Czechs were not even invited, so it took only twelve hours for the four leaders to agree on Sept. 30 on the dismemberment of Czechoslovakia. And they were pleased with what they had done. When Chamberlain returned to London, he proudly uttered his most famous and most tragically mistaken declaration: “I believe it is peace for our time.” The crowds outside 10 Downing Street sang, “For he’s a jolly good fellow.”

Having won everything, Hitler still could not be satisfied. The following spring, deciding that he now wanted more than just the Sudetenland, he held a conference with Czech President Emil Hacha in Berlin (Bene had resigned and gone into exile after Munich). Hacha was 66 and suffering from heart trouble, so it did not help to have the meeting begin at 1:15 a.m. on March 15, 1939. Hitler told his guest that the Czechs were still guilty of “Bene tendencies,” and therefore the Wehrmacht would invade Czechoslovakia at 6 that morning. The only question was whether the Czechs would resist and be “ruthlessly broken” or cooperate and gain a certain “autonomy.” Hacha and his Foreign Minister “sat as though turned to stone,” said a German witness. “Only their eyes showed that they were alive.”

The Czechs then withdrew to another room to decide their course. The documents had already been laid out for them to sign, and Goring and Ribbentrop pursued them around the table, pushing documents and pens at them. Hacha fainted dead away. Hitler’s personal doctor came and gave him an injection, and just before 4 a.m. he recovered sufficiently to sign away his country. The western provinces of Bohemia and Moravia became a German “protectorate”; Slovakia was granted a shadowy “independence.”

There were the usual protests, with the usual results, but Hitler’s seizure of Bohemia and Moravia had two important consequences. First, Chamberlain finally realized that appeasement would not suffice to restrain Hitler. So when Hitler began talking to the Poles in that same month about the Germans’ need to regain the port of Danzig, plus free passage through the Polish Corridor, Chamberlain offered the Poles an unsolicited guarantee of British military support. It was that guarantee that Hitler flouted the following September.

The second important consequence was convincing Stalin that the Western powers would never resist Hitler’s increasingly aggressive expansion eastward. Stalin had several times proposed a treaty with the Western powers to check Hitler’s ambitions, but he had been ignored. With the treachery characteristic of him — he had purged dozens of his top army officers on false charges of conspiring with the Germans to overthrow him — he began exploring the possibility of signing an alliance with those same Germans. To Hitler, who had been ranting about “the struggle against Bolshevism” for nearly 20 years, it seemed like an offer he couldn’t refuse.

If the German conflicts with France ran back for centuries, so did those with the Poles, conflicts tinged with contempt. Long before Hitler, General Hans von Seeckt, the haughty army commander during the Weimar Republic, had said of the frontiers established by Versailles, “Poland’s existence is intolerable, incompatible with the essential conditions of Germany’s life. Poland must go and will go.” That was the mission that Hitler now vowed to carry out.