Hitler

The Age of Faits Accomplis

Historians have looked back upon the mid-thirties with some vexation. This was the period in which Hitler repeated, on the plane of foreign policy, those same practices of overwhelming his opponents that had yielded him such easy triumphs at home. And he applied them in the same effortless manner and with no less success. In accord with his thesis “that before foreign enemies are conquered the enemy within must be annihilated,”¹ he had behaved rather quietly in the preceding months. His only flamboyant gestures had been his withdrawal from the League of Nations and his treaty with Poland. Secretly, meanwhile, he had begun rearmament, since he was well aware that without military force a country could have only the most limited freedom of movement in the realm of foreign policy. He would have to get through the transitional phase from weakness to power without breaches of treaties and without provoking powerful neighbors. Once again, as at the beginning of his seizure of power, many observers predicted his impending fall. But by a series of foreign-policy coups he managed within a few months to throw off the restrictions imposed by the Versailles Treaty and to occupy vantage points for his intended expansionist movements.

The reaction of the European nations to Hitler’s challenges is all the harder to understand because the process of seizing power, with its bloody finale in the Röhm affair, had provided some inkling of the man’s nature and policies. In a speech of January, 1941, Hitler declared, peeved, but quite rightly: “My program from the first was to abolish the Treaty of Versailles. It is futile nonsense for the rest of the world to pretend today that I did not discover this program until 1933, or 1935, or 1937…. These gentlemen would have been wiser to read what I have written-—and written thousands of times. No human being has declared or recorded what he wanted more often than I. Again and again I wrote these words: ‘The abolition of the Treaty of Versailles.’ ”²

From the very start no one could be in doubt about this particular aim, at the very least. And since abrogation of the Treaty of Versailles represented a direct threat to almost all the nations of Europe, there must have been strong though possibly somewhat hidden factors that contributed to Hitler’s effortless triumphs.

Once again Hitler’s deep inner ambiguity, which governed all his behavior, all his tactical, political, and ideological conceptions, proved of crucial importance. It has been rightly pointed out that he would surely have roused the united opposition of the European nations, or of the whole civilized world, had he been merely an excitable nationalistic spokesman for German international equality, an anti-Communist, an aggressive prophet of Lebensraum, or even a fanatical anti-Semite of the Streicher type. But he was all of these together and, moreover, had the knack of countering every fear he aroused with a hope. By “letting the one quality emerge and the other recede, as opportunity offered, he divided his opponents without ever betraying himself…. It was an ingenious recipe.”³

The basic anti-Communist mood of liberal-conservative bourgeois Europe served him as a vital means for fending off suspicions of himself and his policies. It is true that in the spring of 1933 the French writer Charles du Bos assured a German friend that an abyss had opened up between Germany and western Europe. But while this may have been true, morally, it was hardly so from the psychological view. Beyond all opposing interests, all crisscrossing enmities, Europe retained its common emotions, above all the dread of revolution, arbitrariness, and public chaos. And it was as the apostle of order that Hitler had so successfully presented himself inside Germany.

To be sure, the gospel of Communism had lost a good deal of its aggressive promise and intensity. But Europe was once more reminded of the famous specter in the Popular Front experiment in France, in the Spanish Civil War, and in the Moscow trials. Everywhere Communism had taken a severe beating, but it had nevertheless displayed sufficient energy to revive the old fears. With his keen instinct for the moods and secret motivations of his opponents, Hitler had exploited this fear factor. In countless speeches he had referred to “the undermining work of the Bolshevist wirepullers,” their “thousand channels for money and propaganda,” their “revolutionization of this continent.” He was heightening deliberately the psychosis of fear: “Then cities burn, villages collapse in ruin and rubble, and each man no longer knows his neighbor. Class fights against class, occupation against occupation, brother destroys brother. We have chosen a different plan.” He described his own mission to Arnold Toynbee by saying that he had come into the world to lead mankind in the inevitable struggle against Bolshevism.

Thus this peculiarly alienated, atavistically reactionary Hitler Germany aroused profound anxieties in Europe but also encouraged many secret expectations: that Germany would somehow assume the ancient role of serving as a bulwark against evil, or a “breakwater,” as Hitler himself said, in an age in which “the Fenris wolf seems once more to be raging over the earth.” Within the framework of such far-reaching considerations on the part of Germany’s western neighbors in particular, Hitler’s contempt for justice, his extremism, his multifarious atrocities, scarcely seemed to matter—despite all the momentary indignation they aroused. Those were problems for the Germans to worry about. To the mind of conservative Europe, the man’s sinister martial features—a good deal less strange, at any rate, than those of Stalin—were highly appropriate for a protector and the commander of a bulwark. Of course, nobody wanted or expected him to amount to anything more than that.

Here we have, down to incidentals, the same mixture of naïveté, stupidity, and vanity that all the conservative participants who collaborated with Hitler, from Kahr to Papen, had demonstrated. Of course, the statesmen felt some trepidations, but such feelings did not affect their politics. When Chamberlain heard Hermann Rauschning’s report on Hitler’s aims, he flatly refused to believe it. With a sharp sense for the repetitive nature of events and even the similarity of faces, Hitler called the appeasers in London and Paris “my Hugenbergers.”⁴

The popularity of the authoritarian concept, both at home and abroad, played directly into Hitler’s hands. He himself called the “crisis of democracy” the prevailing phenomenon of the age. And many a contemporary observer regarded “the idea of dictatorship as contagious at present… as in the last century the idea of freedom.”⁵ In spite of the shocking concomitants, regimented Germany emitted a seductive radiation that in eastern and southeastern Europe countered the hitherto dominant influence of France. It was not by chance that Foreign Minister Joseph Beck of Poland kept signed photographs of Hitler and Mussolini in his office. They and not their bourgeois counterparts in Paris or London, with their anachronistic impotence, seemed to be the true voices for the spirit of the age. The age was persuaded that reason would always be defeated in the free interplay of social and political interests; the new order’s program was power through discipline. That order’s dominant representative, whose success would transform in a trice the political atmosphere of Europe and set entirely new standards, was Adolf Hitler.

And as he combined in his own self the tendencies or moods, all worked to his advantage. He derived considerable profit from European anti-Semitism, which had a large following in Poland, Hungary, Rumania, and the Baltic countries, but was also widespread in France, and which even in England in 1935 inspired the leader of a Fascist group to propose settling the Jewish problem radically and hygienically by “death chambers.”⁶

Hitler wrung further profit from the contradictions within the existing peace settlements. The Treaty of Versailles had for the first time introduced moral factors into international relations, factors such as guilt, honor, equality, and self-determination. Hitler played upon these themes more and more loudly. For a time, as Ernst Nolte has trenchantly remarked, he must paradoxically have seemed the last faithful follower of Woodrow Wilson’s long-since-faded principles. In his role of heavy creditor to the victorious Allies, clutching a bundle of unpaid promissory notes, he achieved lasting effects, particularly in England. For his appeals not only touched the nation’s guilty conscience but also chanced to coincide with traditional English balance-of-power policy. British statesmen who believed in that policy had long been watching with uneasiness France’s overpowering influence on the Continent. Hence Hitler constantly received encouragement from English voices. The London Times quoted Lord Lothian as saying that any order which did not concede to the Reich the most powerful position on the Continent was “artificial.” A leading member of the Royal Air Force early in 1935 told a German that it would arouse “no indignation” in England if Germany were to announce that she was rearming in the air, contrary to the terms of the Treaty of Versailles.⁷ But both, the British and the continental Europeans, the victors and the vanquished, the authoritarians and the democrats, sensed an impending change in the climate of the era. And this was another element Hitler made use of. In 1936 he declared:

The many encouragements he received from English sources tended to support Hitler in his boldest expectations. He clung to the idea he had advanced at the beginning of 1923 of an alliance with England. That remained, in fact, the central concept of his foreign policy, for it was essentially the idea of partitioning the world. England, as the dominant sea power, would command the seas and overseas territories. Germany, as the unchallenged land power, would dominate the vast Eurasian continent. Thus England occupied a key place in Hitler’s schemes in the early years of the regime, and the manner in which his actions were received across the Channel immensely fortified Hitler’s sense that he was on the right path.

To be sure, not all his actions were equally well received. In May, 1933, Rosenberg had visited London and been sharply rebuffed. The spectacular withdrawal from the League of Nations had not exactly raised Hitler’s stock in England. Another blot had been the murder, by Austrian Nazis, of Austrian Chancellor Engelbert Dollfuss in July, 1934—even though Hitler, as later became apparent, may not have been told of the planned assassination. But selfish interests proved, as always, stronger than moral outrage—especially since Hitler himself was quick to. repudiate the affair. The assassins had fled to Germany; he turned them over to the Austrian government, abruptly dismissed Theo Habicht, the inspector of the Austrian National Socialist Party, and recalled Dr. Rieth, the German ambassador, who was implicated in the events. Franz von Papen, Catholic, conservative, and once again a reassuring figure to anxious bourgeois, was sent to take his place.

The unanimity of the foreign reaction to the assassination of Dollfuss had taught Hitler that he would have to proceed more carefully. The attempted coup in Vienna had been hastily organized and poorly co-ordinated. Beyond that, Hitler recognized that his position was not yet strong enough for major challenges; he would do better to wait for provocatory pretexts or imperceptibly to work his opponents into the position known in chess as a “forced move”—when a player has only one legal move open to him. Then his own carefully premeditated actions would be disguised as countermoves.

Circumstances arranged matters favorably. Soon afterward, Hitler obtained his hoped-for increase in prestige by winning the plebiscite held in the Saar on January 13, 1935. The region, which had been separated from the Reich under the Treaty of Versailles, voted by an overwhelming majority for reunion with Germany: there were only about 2,000 votes for union with France as against 445,000 for reunion with Germany and approximately 46,000 for continuance of the status quo, administration by the League of Nations. Although the result had never been in doubt, Hitler presented the vote as a personal triumph. One of the injustices of Versailles had at last been righted, he declared three days later in an interview at Obersalzberg with the American journalist Pierre Huss. Only a few weeks later the Western powers handed him the opportunity for one of those counterstrokes that from now on became his favorite device.

The tactical weakness of the leading European powers vis-à-vis Hitler stemmed from their desire for negotiations. They were forever coming forward with proposals that were supposed to fetter the unruly fellow, or at least put him in an uncomfortable position. Early in 1935 he had received offers from England and France, among others, to extend the Locarno Pact by an agreement limiting the threat of air attacks. There were likewise offers for similar pacts from eastern and central European countries. Far from considering these proposals seriously, Hitler merely used them as a springboard for his tactical maneuvers. They permitted him to spread uncertainty, to achieve easy effects by sham declarations, and to cover up the aims he was unerringly pursuing.

During 1934 he had already taken steps to reach an accord with England on air armaments. His purpose was to induce London, merely by entering into negotiations, to treat the armaments restrictions imposed on Germany by the Treaty of Versailles as nonexistent. At the same time, Hitler proceeded on the assumption that the talks in themselves, and the aura of intimacy they would inevitably create, would be excellent means of sowing distrust between England and France. For this reason he was quite ready to encourage the English side to undertake extensive rearmament. After the talks had been broken off in the aftermath of Dollfuss’s assassination, Hitler approached the British government with a new offer at the end of 1934. Characteristically, he increased his demands, as he would always do after a defeat. Hitherto he had asked only that Germany be permitted half the British strength in the air. Now he mentioned, in a casual remark, that parity was “a matter of course”; it had ceased to be an object of negotiation, as far as he was concerned. Rather, the key offer was now for a naval agreement with England.

This proposal by Hitler has been called, with some exaggeration, his “crowning idea.”¹⁰ The negotiations on the air agreement had broken down only partly because of the Vienna events; the chief reason for their failure was that the British, though interested, were not ready for a bilateral pact. The offer for a naval agreement, on the other hand, struck them at a vulnerable spot.

Hitler’s special envoy, Joachim von Ribbentrop, launched a trial balloon in the middle of November, 1934, when he met with the then Keeper of the Privy Seal Anthony Eden and Foreign Secretary Sir John Simon. Early in 1935 the contacts were continued. On January 25 Hitler “unofficially” received Lord Allen of Hurtwood, and four days later—again “unofficially”—the liberal politician Lord Lothian. The German Chancellor complained about the limping progress of the disarmament negotiations, stressed that both sides had parallel interests, then referred to Great Britain’s uncontested dominion of the sea before he made his first specific proposal: he would be ready to conclude an agreement regulating naval strength between Germany and England in the ratio of 35 to 100. In return, Germany, in keeping with her national tradition, would be allowed the stronger land army. Such was the outline of the grand design. In his conversation with Lord Lothian Hitler gave the matter another original twist. If he might speak not as Chancellor of the Reich, he said, but as a “student of history,” he would regard as the surest guarantee of peace a joint Anglo-German statement to the effect that henceforth any disturber of the peace would be called to account and punished jointly by these two countries.

The impending visit of the British Foreign Secretary to Berlin would provide the opportunity for discussions of substance. It was set for March 7, 1935. The talks show how closely he had measured the interests and psychology of the other side. For he skillfully implanted in the British those arguments for appeasement that would dominate the politics of the following years. The British came away from the talks with the belief that Hitler urgently desired a treaty in order to legalize his rearmament and at last make Germany eligible for alliances. This need was a trump card that must not go unplayed. Here was a way to end the armaments race, to keep German rearmament within controllable bounds, and to tie Hitler’s hands after all. Of course, France would be alarmed by an Anglo-German treaty, but she would have to realize that “England has no permanent friends, but only permanent interests,” as the Naval Review wrote. These interests would be served if a great power like Germany voluntarily acknowledged the British claim to dominion on the seas, especially under the moderate conditions that Hitler had set. The Versailles era, which meant so much to France, was in any case over, and, as a Foreign Office memo of March 21, 1934, quipped, if there had to be a funeral it might as well be arranged as long as Hitler was in a mood to pay the services of the gravediggers.¹¹

The real meaning of all these considerations was simply that they spelled the end of the solidarity created during the World War and confirmed in the Treaty of Versailles. Once again Hitler had demonstrated his ability to blast apart the united front of his opponents. Even more astonishing was his faculty for spreading among the victors, as he had already done among the vanquished, the sense that the system of peace they themselves had proclaimed only fifteen years earlier was intolerable. In the election campaigns during the last years of the republic he had shown his ingenuity in taking a problematical situation and producing a stylized version of it as an absurdity and cynical injustice. Now he successfully applied the same trick to foreign affairs. For a moment it seemed as though his antagonists would organize for resistance after all. But instead they produced only an empty defensive gesture, which Hitler saw through immediately. After that they gave him even freer scope.

As if it wished to strengthen the position of its Foreign Secretary the British government on March 4 published a White Paper that condemned Germany’s rearmament as an open breach of treaty. Germany’s bellicose tone was causing growing insecurity. Therefore the British government thought it proper to increase its air power. Instead of being cowed, Hitler went into a sulk, and canceled the visit from Sir John Simon on the grounds of a sudden “cold.” Simultaneously, he exploited the alleged wrong inflicted upon him to launch a counterattack. On March 9 he made an official announcement that Germany had established an air force. The French government responded by extending the term of military service for the conscript classes from the years of low birth rate. The British Foreign Secretary, however, merely told the House of Commons that he and Mr. Eden still intended to go to Berlin.

Making the most of this disparate reaction, Hitler went a step further on the following weekend. He pointed to the measures taken by Germany’s neighbors, in whom Germany had repeatedly and vainly put her trust ever since the days of Woodrow Wilson, until she found herself in the midst of a heavily armed world reduced to “a condition of impotent defenselessness as humiliating as it is ultimately dangerous.” He was, therefore, reinstating universal military service and establishing a new army with a peacetime strength of thirty-six divisions and 550,000 men.

Hitler combined this proclamation with a brilliant military celebration. On March 17, the day of mourning that had now been renamed Heroes’ Memorial Day, he organized a grand parade in which units of the new air force already participated. Alongside von Mackensen, the only living marshal of the old imperial army, and followed by the top-ranking generals, Hitler marched along Unter den Linden to the terrace of the Schloss, where he pinned honorary crosses to the flags and emblems of the army. Then, with tens of thousands cheering, he reviewed the parade. But although the reintroduction of universal military service was popular as a sign of defiance to the Versailles Treaty, Hitler did not dare link it with another plebiscite, as he had done with comparable actions in the past.

The crucial factor at the moment was the reaction of the Versailles signatory powers to this open breach of the treaty. But after only a few hours Hitler saw that his gamble had been successful. The British government did issue a protest, but in the very protest note inquired whether Hitler still wished to receive the Foreign Secretary. To the German side that was a “regular sensation,”¹² as one of the persons closely involved commented. France and Italy, on the other hand, were prepared to take some strong countermeasures, and in the middle of April arranged for a Conference of the three powers in Stresa on Lake Maggiore. Mussolini took the lead in urging that Germany be stopped in her tracks. But the representatives of Great Britain made it clear from the start that they had no intention of imposing sanctions. The result was that the conference petered out in an exchange of ideas. Mussolini observed that consultations are the last refuge of indecisiveness when confronted with reality.

Hitler drew his conclusions, and when Simon and Eden arrived in Berlin at the end of March, they found him thoroughly self-confident. With patient courtesy he waited to hear their proposals, but he himself made no promises. After going on at great length about the Bolshevist menace he once again referred to the German nation’s lack of living space and offered a global alliance, the first stage of which was to be the proposed naval pact. When the British statesmen said a firm no to the establishment of a special Anglo-German relationship, and above all refused to sacrifice Britain’s close co-operation with France, Hitler found himself in a difficult negotiating position. For a moment the whole idea of the alliance, his grand design, seemed to have failed. But he remained impassive. When the following day’s talks threw a new opportunity his way, he used it for a bold bluff. Sir John Simon responded to the German demand for parity in the air by asking what the present strength of the German air force was. Hitler, after a brief pause of seeming hesitation, answered that Germany had already attained parity with England. This information took the others’ breath away. For a while no one said a word; the British negotiators’ faces betrayed embarrassed surprise and doubt. Yet this was the turning point. Now it became evident why Hitler had postponed the talks until he could announce the building of the air force and the introduction of conscription. England could not be won by wooing alone; Hitler could lend weight to his proposals only by pressure and threats. Not fondness but weapons brought nations to the conference table. Immediately after this round of negotiations Hitler, together with Göring, Ribbentrop, and several cabinet members, went to the British Embassy for a breakfast. Sir Eric Phipps, the ambassador, had lined up his children in the reception room. They stretched out their little arms toward Hitler in the German greeting, and brought out a bashful “Heil.”¹³

The British, at any rate, had been deeply impressed. Another opportunity to isolate Hitler soon arose when the League of Nations, on April 17, condemned Germany’s violation of the Versailles Treaty. Shortly afterward, France concluded a treaty of alliance with the Soviet Union. Nevertheless, the British abided by the date for signing the naval pact that had been agreed on in Berlin. It seems clear that Hitler saw this as a telling admission of weakness and planned to exploit it. He therefore instructed his special envoy, Ribbentrop, to initiate the talks in the Foreign Office on June 4 by putting the agreement in the form of an ultimatum. England must accept the proportion of naval strength of 35 to 100; that was not a German proposal but an unshakable decision on the Führer’s part. Acceptance of it was the precondition for the beginning of negotiations. Flushed with anger, Sir John Simon reproved the head of the German delegation and walked out of the session. But Ribbentrop gruffly stuck to his terms. Arrogant and limited as he was, he obviously lacked any sense of how to handle the matter. For here right at the start of the negotiations he was pushing the other party to accept the very method they had recently condemned in their White Paper, then in their protest note after the reintroduction of universal military service, later in Stresa, and most recently in the Council of the League of Nations. He dismissed all the remonstrances “categorically,” to use one of the favorite words in his subsequent report; he wanted the alliance to be no less than “eternal”; and when the British objected that he was reversing the order of business, he declared it came to the same thing whether difficult matters were discussed at the beginning or the end. The negotiators parted with nothing accomplished.

Two days later, however, the British asked for another meeting; their opening statement declared that the British government had decided to accept the Chancellor’s demand as the basis for further naval discussions between the two countries. And, as if the special relationship of trust that Hitler wanted of England had already been established, Sir John Simon remarked, with a discreet gesture of complicity, that they would have to let a few days pass in consideration of the situation in France, where governments were “unfortunately not so stable as in Germany and England.”¹⁴ A few days later the text of the treaty had been worked out. With some feeling for symbolism, the day for signing was fixed as June 18, the hundred and twentieth anniversary of the day the British and Prussians had defeated the French at Waterloo. Ribbentrop returned home to be hailed by Hitler as a great statesman, “greater than Bismarck.” Hitler himself called this day “the happiest of [my] life.”¹⁵

It was in fact an extraordinary success, and it granted Hitler everything he could hope for at the moment. British apologists have ever since pointed to Great Britain’s security requirements and to the possibility that Hitler could have been tamed by concessions. But the question remains whether those requirements and vague hopes could justify an agreement that condoned a policy of brash violation of treaties, sabotaged Western solidarity, and set the political situation in Europe in motion in such a way that there was no knowing when and where it would come to a stop. The naval agreement has rightly been called an “epochal event whose symptomatic importance was greater than its actual content.”¹⁶ Above all, it proved to Hitler once again that the methods of blackmail could accomplish absolutely anything, and it nourished his hopes of ultimately concluding the grand alliance for the partition of the world. This pact, he exulted, was “the beginning of a new age.” He firmly believed, he said, “that the British have sought the understanding with us in this area only as the initial step to very much broader co-operation. A German-British combination will be stronger than all other powers together.” Given the seriousness of his historical pretensions, it was more than a gesture of empty ceremony when Hitler, in Nuremberg at the beginning of September, accepted the presentation of a reproduction of Charlemagne’s sword.

The Anglo-German naval treaty had a further consequence that once and for all demolished all the existing political relationships in Europe. In the two and a half years since Hitler had been appointed Chancellor, Mussolini had pursued a policy of critical reserve toward Hitler in spite of their ideological fraternity. He had shown “a keener sense of the extraordinary and menacing character of National Socialism than most western statesmen.”¹⁷ Gratified though he was by the victory of the Fascist principle in Germany, he could not suppress his deep uneasiness about this neighbor to the north who was bursting with the dynamism, vitality, and discipline he had laboriously been trying to instill into his own people. The meeting in Venice had only served to confirm his mistrust of Hitler. But it seems also to have aroused that inferiority complex for which he thereafter tried to compensate more and more by posturings, imperial actions, or the invoking of a vanished past. Ultimately, it would drive him deeper and deeper into his fateful partnership with Hitler. In a speech shortly after the Venice meeting he had declared, with a glance at Hitler’s racial ideas, that thirty centuries of history permitted Italians “to look with sublime indifference upon certain doctrines on the other side of the Alps which have been developed by the descendants of those who in the days of Caesar, Virgil and Augustus were still illiterates.” According to another source he had called Hitler a “clown,” denounced the race doctrine as “Jewish,” and expressed sarcastic doubts about whether anyone would succeed in transforming the Germans into “a racially pure herd,” adding: “According to the most favorable hypothesis… six centuries are needed.” Unlike France, let alone England, he was prepared at various times to counter Hitler’s breaches of treaties by military gestures: “The best way to check the Germans is by calling up the military class of 1911.” At the time of Dollfuss’s assassination he had ordered several Italian divisions to the northern border, telegraphed the Austrian government that he was prepared to offer it all support in defending the country’s independence, and finally even permitted the Italian press to publish popular lampoons on Hitler and the Germans.

He now wished to cash in on all this good conduct. His glance fell upon Ethiopia, which had been occupying Italy’s imperialistic fantasies ever since the end of the nineteenth century, when an attempt to extend the colonies of Eritrea and Somaliland had failed miserably. England and France, he decided, would impose no obstacles to a conquest, since they would continue to need Italy in the defensive front against Hitler. Addis Ababa, situated in a kind of no man’s land, could not really be more important to the two great powers than Berlin. Mussolini interpreted the half-promises that Laval had made in January, when he visited Rome, and the silence of the British at Stresa, as signs of discreet consent. The Duce also reasoned that the Anglo-German naval pact had increased the value of Italy to the Western powers, especially to France.

By means of deliberately provoked border incidents and oasis conflicts, he stirred up feeling for his colonial war, which had an oddly anachronistic air. While France assured him passive support, for fear that a further pillar of her system of alliances would collapse, he dismissed all attempts at mediation with one of those virile Caesarian gestures he had at his command. Surprisingly, it was England who then came forward. After having refused as recently as April to counter Hitler’s troublemaking with sanctions, in September England demanded that sanctions be imposed on Mussolini, and to emphasize her resolve ostentatiously reinforced her Mediterranean fleet. Now, however, France objected; France found herself unwilling to risk her good relations with Italy for the sake of an England that had just demonstrated her unreliability as an ally by coming to an arrangement with Hitler. This refusal in turn angered the British. In Italy outrage was whipped up to the point of boastful talk about a preventive war against Great Britain (mockingly referred to as “Operation Madness”). In short, all understandings and time-tested loyalties now disintegrated. In France, influential partisans of Mussolini, including many intellectuals, openly came out in favor of the Italian expansionist policies. Charles Maurras, the spokesman of the French Right, publicly threatened with death all deputies who demanded sanctions against Italy. Ironic defeatists queried, “Mourir pour le Négus?” Soon the same question would be applied to Danzig.

There could be only one justification for the British gesture, especially in view of Hitler’s stance: if the British government were prepared to counter Mussolini’s act of aggression with all resolution, not shrinking from the risk of war. Obviously, British determination did not go quite that far, and thus it merely brought on the misfortune more speedily. Mussolini felt that the threat of sanctions had been such an insult to the pride and honor of Italy that he was bound to go ahead. On October 2, 1935, at a mass demonstration to which 20 million people, assembled in the streets and plazas throughout Italy, listened enthusiastically, he declared war on Ethiopia: “A great hour in the history of our country has struck…. Forty million Italians, a sworn community, will not let themselves be robbed of their place in the sun!” It would have taken only the closing of the Suez Canal or an oil embargo to render the Italian expeditionary army with its modern equipment incapable of battle. The Ethiopians would then have inflicted upon the Italians a devastating defeat, as the Emperor Menelik had done on the same ground forty years earlier. Mussolini later admitted that this would have been “an inconceivable disaster” for him. But England and France shrank from such a course, as did the other members of the League of Nations. A few half-hearted measures were taken, their feebleness only diminishing what prestige the democracies and the League of Nations still had. There were many reasons for caution. President BeneS, for example, who emerged as a particularly vigorous advocate of economic sanctions, prudently excepted Czechoslovakia’s own exports to Italy.

The internal contradictions and antagonisms of Europe afforded Mussolini almost unlimited freedom to maneuver. And with unprecedented brutality, which established a new style of inhumane warfare, the modern Italian army set about destroying an unprepared and nearly defenseless enemy. It even employed poison gas. No less unprecedented was the way in which prominent military officers, including Mussolini’s sons Bruno and Vittorio, boasted of the sport they had had in their fighter planes harassing fleeing hordes of human beings and raining death upon them with incendiary bombs and machine guns.¹⁸ On May 9, 1936, the Italian dictator stood on the balcony of the Palazzo Venezia announcing his “triumph over fifty nations” to an ecstatic mob, and proclaimed the “reappearance of the Empire upon the fated hills of Rome.”

Hitler had at first observed strict neutrality in the conflict, and not only because he had sufficient reasons to be annoyed with Mussolini. This Ethiopian adventure disturbed his fundamental design in foreign policy. That design had always envisioned a partnership with England and Italy. But the crisis was setting his two prospective allies against one another and confronting Hitler with an unforeseen alternative.

Surprisingly, after prolonged hesitation he decided to take Italy’s side, and supplied the Italians with raw materials, especially coal, although only a few months earlier he had hailed the Anglo-German treaty as the beginning of a new era. He was obviously not prompted by ideological sympathy. Economic factors did not seem to play a decisive part, either, although he was certainly influenced by such considerations. Much more important was the fact that he saw in the war another chance to create havoc within the established order of things. His trick for manipulating any crisis consisted in supporting the weaker opponent against the stronger. Thus, as late as the summer of 1935, in two highly secret transactions, Hitler had supplied the Emperor of Ethiopia with war materials valued at approximately 4 million marks. Included were thirty antitank guns that were clearly meant to serve against the Italian aggressor. Out of similar considerations he now supported Mussolini against the Western powers. The decision came all the easier for him because, as a secret speech he delivered in April, 1937, makes plain, he did not take England’s commitment very seriously. The principles England was defending—the integrity of small nations, the protection of peace, the right of self-determination—meant nothing to him, whereas he saw Italy’s imperialistic gamble as representing the true laws and logic of politics. He made the same grave mistake in August and September, 1939, caused, no doubt, by his inability to think in terms other than those of naked-power interests. Moreover, in the exultation of his rapid successes he felt sufficiently secure to test the newly concluded pact with England by a certain degree of strain, provided he could win over another potential ally who up to then had refused to march with him despite all his overtures.

In addition to using the Ethiopian War to break his isolation in the south, Hitler seized upon the obvious indecisiveness of the Western powers and the paralysis of the League of Nations to launch another of his surprise coups. On March 7, 1936, German troops occupied the Rhineland, which had been demilitarized since the conclusion of the Locarno Pact. By the logic of events, that would have had to be his next step, but to all appearances it came unexpectedly even to Hitler himself. If we may judge by the documents, the action had originally been planned for the spring of 1937. But in the middle of February he began to wonder whether he could not advance the date, in view of the international situation. Apparently he made up his mind only a few days later, when Mussolini twice in quick succession informed him that the spirit of Stresa was dead and Italy would not participate in any sanctions against Germany. Yet this time, too, Hitler waited for a pretext that would enable him to assume before the world’s eyes his favorite role of one who had been abused. He wanted to be able to cry out against the shame that had been inflicted upon him.

This time he took his cue from the Franco-Soviet mutual assistance pact. The agreement had been negotiated some time before, but not yet ratified. It lent itself all the better to Hitler’s purposes because it had been the subject of protracted domestic controversies within France and had stirred considerable concern internationally as well, especially in England. In order to disguise his intentions, on February 21 Hitler granted an interview to Bertrand de Jouvenel. He expressed his desire for rapprochement and in particular repudiated the intense anti-French bias of Mein Kampf. At the time he was writing the book, he explained, France and Germany had been enemies; but by now there were no longer any grounds for conflict. Jouvenel then asked why the book, widely regarded as a kind of political bible, was still being reprinted in unaltered form. Hitler replied that he was not a writer who revised his books, but a politician: “I make my corrections every day in my foreign policy, which is aimed entirely at rapprochement with France…. My corrections will be written in the great book of History.” But when the interview was not published in Paris-Midi until a full week later, and in fact not until the day after the Chamber of Deputies had ratified the Franco-Soviet Pact, Hitler felt he had been hoodwinked. When François-Poncet called on him on March 2, Hitler angrily told the ambassador that he had been made a fool of. Political intrigues had kept the interview from being published in time; all his statements had since been outstripped by events, and he would be making new proposals.

The directive that War Minister von Blomberg prepared for the occupation of the Rhineland was dated that same March 2. On March 7 his troops crossed the Rhine, with the population cheering and throwing flowers. But Hitler was well aware of the risk he had taken. Later he referred to the forty-eight hours after the occupation as the “most nerve-racking” period in his life. He did not want to go through another such strain for the next ten years, he said. The build-up of the army had only just begun. If it came to fighting, he had only a handful of divisions against the nearly 200 divisions of France and her East European allies, for in the meanwhile the forces of the Soviet Union had also to be added. And although Hitler himself did not appear to have suffered a nervous breakdown, as one of the participants later asserted, the nerves of the sanguine War Minister did give out. Shortly after the beginning of the operation, he was all for withdrawing the troops in view of the French intervention that could certainly be expected. “If the French had marched into the Rhineland,” Hitler admitted, “we would have had to withdraw with our tails between our legs, for the military resources at our disposal would have been wholly inadequate for even a moderate resistance.”¹⁹

Nevertheless, Hitler did not hesitate to take the risk, and his readiness to do so was undoubtedly connected with his increasingly contemptuous assessment of France. In his time-tested manner he made the operation as safe as possible. Once again he ordered it for a Saturday, knowing that the decision-making committees of the Western powers could not meet on weekends. Once again he accompanied his breach of a treaty, this time a double violation of the treaties of Versailles and Locarno, with pledges of good behavior and emphatic offers of alliances, even proposing a twenty-five-year nonaggression pact with France and a return of Germany to the League of Nations. Again he had his step legitimized by the democratic process, making it the issue of an election in which he for the first time achieved the “totalitarian dream figure”²⁰ of 99 per cent of the vote. “Abroad and domestically that always has enormous effect,” he later said. How consciously he combined this plan of surprise blows with reassuring talk is evident from a remark in the table talk in which he criticized Mussolini’s indulgence toward the Curia: “I would march into the Vatican and fetch out the whole crew. I would then say: ‘Sorry, I made a mistake!’—But they would be gone!” Quite rightly he called this phase, which left the strongest imprint on his tactics, the “age of faits accomplis.”²¹

The Reichstag speech in which Hitler supported his action exploited to the hilt the contradictions, fears, and longings for peace in Germany and the rest of Europe. Again he drew a picture of the “horror of the Communist international dictatorship of hate,” the danger from the sinister East, which France was bringing into Europe. He pleaded for “raising the problem of the general antagonisms among European nations and states out of the sphere of irrationality and passion and placing it under the quiet light of higher insight.” Specifically, he justified his action on the grounds that in the German legal view the Franco-Soviet Pact must be regarded as a violation of the Locarno Pact, since it was undeniably aimed against Germany. And although the French disagreed, Hitler’s argument had a certain validity, even if his own policy of revisionism was what had prompted a France concerned for her security to enter the alliance with Russia.

His arguments and assurances did not fail to make an impression. The Paris government did consider a military counterblow for a moment—as we now know—but shrank from general mobilization in view of the prevailing pacifist mood. England, for her part, had difficulty understanding the French excitement; the British thought that the Germans were merely returning “to their own back garden.” And when Eden advised Prime Minister Stanley Baldwin to respond to France’s anxiety at least by having the military staffs make contact, he was told: “The boys won’t have it.”²² Of all of France’s allies, only Poland indicated any readiness to intervene. But, left dangling by the passive French government, it ended by falling into considerable embarrassment in its efforts to find even a reasonably plausible explanation vis-à-vis Berlin for its seeming aggressiveness.

Thus everything followed the model of the preceding crises. Hitler’s abrupt action was followed by loud protests and threats, then serious consultations, finally conferences (with and without Germany), until the prolonged palavers had used up all the energy that might have been produced by injured righteousness. The Council of the League of Nations, which came hastily to London for a special session, unanimously declared Germany in violation of her treaties, but it also took grateful note of Hitler’s repeatedly announced “desire for co-operation.” And, as if to say that its own vote sprang from a rather absurd whim, it recommended negotiations with the treaty breaker. When the Council set up a neutral zone in the Rhineland about thirteen miles in width and demanded that Germany refrain from building fortifications in this area, Hitler merely replied that he would not bow to any dictates, that German sovereignty had not been restored in order to be restricted or eliminated immediately afterward. This was the last time the powers were to speak in the forceful tone of victors; in any case they had been using that tone less and less of late. That was certainly implied by the London Times, which saw in Hitler’s conduct “a chance for reconstruction.”

What all these reactions added up to was the admission that the Western powers were no longer able or no longer willing to defend the peace system they had established in and after Versailles. Only a year before, after the weak reaction to Germany’s réintroduction of universal military service, François-Poncet noted anxiously that Hitler must now be convinced that he could “permit himself anything and prescribe the laws for Europe.” Encouraged by the cheers of his own people and by the weakness and egotism of the other side, he continued to climb higher and higher. Returning from his triumphal ride through the reoccupied Rhineland, after a speech preceded by pealing bells at Cologne Cathedral and followed by fifteen minutes of radio silence, he turned to his cronies in the special train and once again expressed his relief at the limpness of the Western powers: “Am I glad! Good Lord, am I glad it’s gone so smoothly. Sure enough, the world belongs to the brave man. He’s the one God helps.” Passing by glowing blast furnaces, slag heaps, and derricks in the nocturnal Ruhr district, he was overcome by one of those moods of euphoria that brought on in him a desire for music. He asked that a record of Wagner’s music be played, and, listening to the prelude of Parsifal, meditated: “I have built up my religion out of Parsifal. Divine worship in solemn form… without pretenses of humility… One can serve God only in the garb of the hero.” But even in such moments, spoiled by almost incomprehensible successes and virtually stunned by the cheers he had received, he was still very close to his early days with their dreary resentments. Even in good fortune he was incapable of summing up much serenity or magnanimity. That is clear from the remark he made at the next selection, the funeral march from Götterdämmerung: “I first heard it in Vienna. At the Opera. And I still remember as if it were today how madly excited I became on the way home over a few yammering Yids[14] I had to pass. I cannot think of a more incompatible contrast. This glorious mystery of the dying hero and this Jewish crap!”²³

At first the occupation of the Rhineland scarcely affected the actual balance of forces among the European powers. But it gave Hitler that safety in his rear troops—in the West—which was essential to him if he were to realize his aims in the Southeast and East. And the time was now drawing nearer. No sooner had the excitement over his operation faded than he began building a strongly fortified line of defense along the German western frontier. Germany’s face was now turning to the East.

An intensified sense of the Communist threat would have to be whipped up in order to prepare the people psychologically for the turn to the East. And as if he himself were pulling all the stops in the historical process, Hitler once more found circumstances meeting him halfway. The Communist International had resolved upon its new Popular Front tactics in the summer of 1935. Those tactics met with spectacular success in the Spanish elections of February, 1936, and shortly afterward in France, where the electoral victory of the united French Left benefited chiefly the Communists, who increased their seats in the Chamber of Deputies from ten to seventy-two. On June 4, 1936, Léon Blum formed a Popular Front government. Six weeks later, on July 17, a military revolt in Morocco touched off the Spanish Civil War.

When the Spanish Popular Front government turned to France and the Soviet Union for aid, General Franco, the rebel leader, asked for similar backing from Germany and Italy. Together with a Spanish officer, two Nazi functionaries set out from Tetuan in Morocco for Berlin, to transmit personal letters from Franco to Hitler and Göring. Both the Foreign Office and the War Ministry declined to receive the delegation officially, but Rudolf Hess decided to take the matter straight to Hitler, who was in Bayreuth for the annual festival. On the evening of July 25 the three envoys met Hitler as he was returning from the Festspielhaus on its hill above the town and handed him the letters. Out of the euphoric mood of the moment, without consulting the ministers concerned, the decision was taken to lend active support to Franco. Göring, as commander in chief of the air force, and von Blomberg as War Minister, immediately received directives to this effect. The most important immediate measure, and perhaps the decisive one, consisted in the dispatch of several formations of Junkers 52’s. With the help of these planes Franco was able to transport his troops across the Mediterranean and create a bridgehead on the Spanish mainland. During the following three years he received support in the form of war matériel, technicians, advisers, and the Condor Legion. Nevertheless, the German aid did not significantly affect the conduct of the war, and in any case lagged far behind the forces placed at Franco’s disposal by Mussolini. Documents reveal the interesting fact that here again Hitler acted chiefly with tactical ends in view and showed a rational coolness entirely devoid of ideology.²⁴ For years he did virtually nothing to bring about a victory by Franco, but he did all in his power to keep the conflict going. He was always fully aware that crisis was useful to him. Every critical situation demands a frank admission of real interests, like a creditor’s oath that he is concealing none of his assets. Every critical situation produces discord, ruptures and reorientations. And such troubles offer a springboard for the political imagination. The real profit Hitler was able to derive from the Spanish Civil War consisted in the turmoil it introduced into European conditions.

Compared with that, all other gains paled—even that of putting the German air force and tank troops to test in battle. One further gain that counted was the militant demonstration of superiority to all rival political systems. The cries of indignation arising from the entire civilized world at the bombardment of the port of Almeria, or the air raid upon Guernica, were complemented by perverse respect for the inhuman brutality with which the Communist threat was challenged and ultimately smashed. On a vastly larger plane this matched the discovery Hitler had made in the beer-hall brawls: terrorism exerts an attraction upon the masses.

Soon, too, it became possible to discern the polarization to which the war was pushing things—and once again familiar lines appeared. Anti-Fascism created its legend on the battlefields of Spain, when the Left, split into numerous cliques and factions, rent by internal feuds, nevertheless united in the International Brigades as if for “the final conflict” and once more demonstrated the continuing force of the old myths. But the concept of the power and danger of the Left had never been much more than a legend. It had exerted its most significant function as legend: to bring together and mobilize the opposition.

This was the effect of the Left’s commitment in Spain, despite all its defeats. It finally brought together the Fascist powers that had long been at odds and had only tentatively begun to approach one another. The result was the “Berlin-Rome Axis,” presumably a new and triumphant element of strength around which the decadent democracies and the antihuman, terroristic systems with a leftist tinge rotated in jittery orbits. From this point on, there existed a Fascist International of sorts, its power center in Germany. And simultaneously the line-up of the Second World War first appeared in outline.

For all the inadvertent prodding from outside, this alliance did not come into being with ease. Several hurdles had to be taken. The reservations on the Italian side were matched by considerable reservations in Germany. Bismarck had remarked that it was impossible to engage in any political relationships with Italy because as friend and as foe she was equally untrustworthy. During the First World War that comment had become an axiom, and it was as difficult to make an alliance with Italy acceptable to the public as, for example, the one with Poland. The bias did not go quite so far as Mussolini presumed when in December, 1934, he remarked to Ulrich von Hassell, the German ambassador in Rome: “I have the feeling that no war would be so popular in Germany as a war with Italy.” Still, the Germans were hardly convinced by Ciano’s assurance that Fascist Italy had abandoned all intrigue and attempts to seek its own advantage and was no longer “the whore of the democracies.”

What strengthened the tie in the end was the personal liking Hitler and Mussolini developed for one another, after their unpropitious first meeting in Venice. Despite obvious differences between them—Mussolini’s extrovert nature, his practicality, spontaneity, and ebullience contrasted markedly with Hitler’s solemn rigidity—both men had important traits in common. They shared a craving for power, a hunger for greatness, irritability, boastful cynicism and theatricality. Mussolini felt himself the elder and liked to take a patronizing tone, a kind of Fascist precedence, toward his German partner. At any rate, a number of leading Nazi functionaries began reading Machiavelli. A heavy bronze bust of the Italian dictator stood in Hitler’s study in the Brown House; and in a most unusual burst of veneration Hitler referred to Mussolini during a visit from the Italian Foreign Minister in Berchtesgaden in October, 1936, as “the leading statesman in the world, to whom none may be remotely compared.”

Mussolini had been watching Hitler’s obvious wooing with a good measure of skeptical reserve. His inveterate fear of “Germanism” recommended restraint. So did the interests of his country, which, strictly speaking, pointed in the opposite direction. To be sure, he had won his East African colonial empire partly because National Socialist Germany had provided a distraction. But Germany could do nothing to secure this empire. Rather, everything now depended on Italy’s consolidating her new acquisitions by a policy of good behavior toward the West. That, however, was a political consideration, and, in the light of Hitler’s rapid ascent, Mussolini no longer wanted to engage in mere politics. He wanted to make history, to participate in the march to greatness, to display dynamism, to arouse faith, to satisfy the old “yearning for war,” and so on—there were many other phrases to express such fateful self-infatuation. Therefore, no matter what he might have felt originally about the German dictator, Mussolini was impressed by the boldness with which the strange fellow left the League of Nations, proclaimed universal military service, repeatedly defied the world, and broke up stultified European patterns. Mussolini was all the more provoked because it seemed as though Hitler, who had made such a poor showing at Venice, had taken over the original Fascist policy of eclat and was putting it across with remarkable energy. Concerned for his own standing, Mussolini began considering the rapprochement.

Hitler himself removed the most serious obstacle. Convinced that everything could be arranged later on among friends, he pretended to give way on the question of Austria. In July, 1936, he concluded a pact with Vienna whose main point was his recognition of Austrian sovereignty. He promised nonintervention in Austrian affairs, and in exchange for this received the concession that “decent” Nazis would no longer be barred from assuming political responsibility. Naturally, Mussolini interpreted this treaty as largely his own personal triumph. Even so, he might still have been wary of moving closer to Germany had not some curious circumstances favored such a tie at this very moment. For likewise in July the League of Nations powers revoked their not very effective edict of sanctions against Italy. Thus, with a confession of failure, they left Ethiopia to its conqueror. At the same time, Mussolini was able to satisfy his pride in Spain, where his commitment far exceeded Hitler’s and where he appeared as the leading Fascist force.

In September Hans Frank called upon Mussolini to bring him a note from Hitler. It began by the most flattering tributes to Italian hegemony in the Mediterranean region before proposing close co-operation. Mussolini still hung back; but he was obviously only displaying a great man’s majestic indolence. A month later he sent his son-in-law and Foreign Minister, Count Ciano, to Germany to reconnoiter. Shortly afterward the prominent Fascists Tullio Cianetti and Renato Ricci, Minister of Corporations, then a thousand Fascist avanguardistas, made similar trips. At last, in September, 1937, Mussolini went himself.

To honor his guest, Hitler put on a display of all the spectacle of which the regime was capable. The effects, as Munich Gauleiter Wagner attested, were of Hitler’s own devising. On arrival Mussolini found that he was to pass down a lane of busts of the Roman Emperors, flanked by laurel trees. Thus the Duce, restorer of the Roman imperium, was placed in the line of the noblest ancestry in European political history. During their first conversation Hitler conferred the highest German decoration on his guest as well as a golden party badge, which he alone had hitherto worn. Meanwhile, designer Benno von Arent had created a mile-long triumphal avenue in Berlin between the Brandenburg Gate and the West End, lined with white pylons from which were festooned garlands, banners, and streamers, reiterating the symbols of fasces and swastika. On Unter den Linden hundreds of columns were set up, crowned with gold imperial eagles. For the night show the stage managers had conceived a play of lights featuring the green-white-red of Italy and the black-white-red of Hitler Germany.

Hitler had taken leave of his guest in Munich, before Mussolini was to be conducted to Berlin. But as the Italian dictator’s special train reached the city limits of Berlin, Hitler’s train surprisingly appeared on the adjacent track and accompanied the Duce’s, their two cars side by side, for the last stretch of the way. At last it pulled a bit ahead, and when Mussolini arrived at the Heerstrasse station, his host was already waiting at the predetermined spot and holding out his hand in greeting. Standing beside Hitler in the open limousine, deeply impressed by the solemnity and the obvious sincerity of the tributes that were being paid him, Mussolini entered the capital of the Reich. Sightseeing, parades, banquets, and demonstrations followed one another in continual whirl. At a drill ground in Mecklenburg the Italian dictator was shown the newest weapons and the striking power of the new German army. At the Krupp plant in Essen he saw the capacity of German war industry. On the evening of September 28 at the Maifeld, close to the Olympic Stadium, Hitler held a “demonstration of the nations of the 115 millions,” at which he again cleverly ministered to the pride of his guest. He hailed Mussolini as “one of those lonely men of the ages on whom history is not tested, but who themselves are the makers of history.”

Obviously overwhelmed by the impressions of the past few days, the Duce delivered a speech in German in which he opposed to the “false and mendacious idols of Geneva and Moscow” the “radiant truth” that tomorrow all Europe would be Fascist. Before he had finished his speech a tremendous thunderstorm with torrents of rain scattered the audience in panic, and he found himself suddenly alone. At the Maifeld, Ciano noted ironically, there had been “beautiful choreography: lots of sentiment and lots of rain.” Drenched, Mussolini had to find his way back to Berlin. Nevertheless, the impression of that visit to Germany remained with him for the rest of his life.

“I admire you, Führer!” he had exclaimed in Essen at the sight of a giant cannon until then kept a strict secret. But the feeling was mutual. Little as Hitler was capable of undivided feelings in other respects, he manifested toward the Italian dictator a rarely candid, seemingly almost naive liking, and preserved it through the many disappointments of later years. Mussolini was one of the few persons toward whom he did not show pettiness, calculation, or envy. A contributing factor was that both had come from simple circumstances. With Mussolini he did not have that sense of constraint he felt almost everywhere else in Europe with representatives of the old bourgeois class. Their mutual understanding was spontaneous, at any rate after the unfortunate first meeting at Venice had been put behind. Trusting in this, Hitler had, in the agenda, reserved only a single hour for political discussion.

Mussolini was unquestionably a man of judgment and political acumen; but the style of personal foreign policy practiced by Hitler, the method of direct dialogue, handshakes, man-to-man talk, appealed to the stronger side of his nature. Under the influence of Hitler he yielded to it more and more, and the result was that ultimately he became curiously vulnerable, diminished, and finally drained, like so many of Hitler’s other victims. Even then, when he allowed political rationale to be corrupted by flatteries and grandiose theatrical effects, he was basically lost; the inglorious end at the gasoline station on the Piazzale Loreto, not quite eight years later, could already have been foreseen. For, in spite of all his ideological community with Hitler, his own future depended on his not losing sight of their fundamental difference of interests: the difference between a weak, saturated power and a strong, expansionist power. Under the spell of the visit he had already veered far too widely from the categories of politics to the unpolitical category of blind shared destiny. That became clear in the course of his Berlin speech, when he referred to a precept of Fascist and personal morality; that precept held, he said, that when one has found a friend, one must “march together with him to the end.”

Thus Hitler had succeeded with surprising rapidity in achieving one side of his design for alliances. For the first time in modern history two governments joined under ideological auspices to form a “community of action… and contrary to all the predictions of Lenin these were not two socialist but two Fascist governments.” The question was whether Hitler, after entering upon an alliance that flaunted its ideological nature, could win over his other dreamed-of partner, England. Or had he not, in terms of his own premises and aims, already taken the first step which was to prove fatal for him?

Some time back, shortly after the reoccupation of the Rhineland, Hitler had made a fresh effort to bring England over to his side. Once again he did not employ the Foreign Office, by now relegated to a technical apparatus for routine tasks. Hitler was bent on carrying out his designs largely by himself, with the aid of special envoys. Since the happy conclusion of the naval pact, he considered Joachim von Ribbentrop a natural-born diplomatic genius and expert on the British mentality. Hitler now assigned him the task of bringing about the alliance with England.

His choice could hardly have been worse, but also hardly more characteristic. In the end none of the leading personalities of the Third Reich came in for such unanimous contempt as Ribbentrop. Friend and foe denied that there was anything in the least likable about him, or that he had the slightest practical competence. The favor and protection that this henchman enjoyed with Hitler from the summer of 1935 on indicates to what extent the Führer was already using mere instruments and seeking relationships whose chief element was servility. For Ribbentrop’s bombast and pompousness toward the outside world were matched by an almost lunatic obsequiousness toward Hitler. Forever wearing the clouded brow of the statesman, he was the quintessence of the petty bourgeois type that had risen so rapidly with the class shifts after 1933. Now he was busily casting his resentments and catastrophic inclinations into demonic molds of historic grandeur. Soon he designed a fancy diplomatic uniform for himself; the epaulets were embroidered with a globe on which the German eagle perched proprietarily.

Ribbentrop now conveyed a message, via a mediator, to British Prime Minister Baldwin proposing a personal meeting between the Prime Minister and Hitler. Such a conversation would “determine the fate of generations,” he said, and would represent the fulfillment of the German Chancellor’s “greatest wish.” Baldwin was a great procrastinator; he was phlegmatic and loved his comfort. As one of his intimates has described it, the go-between had great difficulty in getting the Prime Minister to look up from his evening game of patience and hear out the proposal. Still less was he interested in the enthusiastic feelings the proposal awoke in his entourage. Baldwin instinctively drew away from complications of this sort. He was no more concerned with this fellow Hitler than he was with the rest of Europe, of which, as Churchill bitingly commented, he knew little and disliked what he knew. But if there had to be a meeting, let Hitler come to see him; he did not like either planes or traveling by boat. The thing was not to make any great fuss about it. Perhaps, he conceded, the Chancellor could come in August; they could meet in the mountains or in the Lake District. That was about all he cared to say about the matter. “Then a drop of Malvern soda water and to bed,” the report concludes. Later on, there was some talk of arranging the meeting on a ship off the English coast. Hitler himself, his adjutant of the time has related, “beamed with joy” at the thought of the impending meeting.²⁵

In the meantime he had enlarged his scope to include Japan in his system of alliances. In the spring of 1933 he had first mentioned that Far Eastern country as a possible ally alongside of England and Italy. In spite of all the racial incompatibilities, Japan seemed like an Asiatic version of Germany: late on the scene, disciplined, and unsatiated; moreover she had a common border with Russia. According to Hitler’s new plan, all England had to do was to keep quiet in Eastern Europe and the Far East. Germany and Japan together, each secure in her rear, could attack the Soviet Union from two sides and destroy it. They would thus be freeing the British Empire of an acute threat. At the same time, they would be extirpating the sworn enemy of the existing order, of Old Europe. And they would be securing themselves Lebensraum. Hitler pursued this concept of a world-embracing anti-Soviet alliance for two years, trying principally to make it attractive to the British. Early in 1936 he proposed it to Lord Londonderry and Arnold J. Toynbee.

The planned meeting with Baldwin fell through; why, we do not exactly know, but it would appear that Eden’s vigorous objections were a significant factor. And although Hitler was “gravely disappointed” that the British had repulsed his fourth attempt at a rapprochement, he still did not give up. In the summer of 1936 he appointed Ribbentrop to succeed Leopold von Hoesch, the deceased German ambassador in London. Ribbentrop’s assignment was to transmit to the British the offer of a “firm alliance,” in which “England was merely to allow Germany a free hand in the East.” That was, as Hitler told Lloyd George shortly afterward, “the last effort” to make Great Britain understand the aims and necessities of German policy.²⁶

The effort was accompanied by a renewed campaign against Communism, “the ancient adversary and old enemy of mankind,” as Hitler put it in a significantly theological-sounding phrase. The Spanish Civil War had provided him with a plethora of new arguments and images. Thus he evoked “the brutal mass slaughter of nationalist officers, pouring gasoline over the wives of nationalist officers and setting fire to them, slaughtering the children and babies of nationalist parents.” And he predicted similar horrors for France, which had already completed the transition to the Popular Front: “Then Europe will drown in a sea of blood and tears,” he prophesied. “European culture which—fertilized by classical antiquity—has a history that will soon reach two and a half millennia, will be replaced by the crudest barbarism of all time.” Along with this, in those apocalyptic images he so favored, he offered himself as the bulwark and refuge: “The whole world may begin to burn around us, but the National Socialist State will tower like platinum out of the Bolshevistic fire.”

But although the campaign was extended over months, it did not produce the expected result. The British, too, were certainly aware of the Communist menace, but their phlegmatic tempers, their soberness, and their distrust of Hitler were stronger than their fear. By November, 1936, however, Japan was prevailed upon to sign the Anti-Comintern Pact. The treaty provided for common defensive measures against Communist subversion; both parties swore that they would make no political agreements with the U.S.S.R., while in case of an attack by the Soviet Union they would take no measures which might be helpful to the aggressor. For the rest, Hitler hoped that the weight of the German-Japanese-Italian triangle would soon add some additional pressure to his own wooing of England. But he seems also to have begun to think of other ways to force Britain to leave him free to march eastward. At any rate, there are indications that from the end of 1936 on, he no longer totally excluded from his considerations the idea of a war against the England which obstinately resisted all his blandishments.²⁷

Psychologically, this change can undoubtedly be traced to the mounting self-confidence that followed from his series of successes. “Today we have once again become a world power!” he proclaimed in the Munich Hofbräuhaus on February 24, 1937, at the annual celebration of the party’s founding. A new tone of challenge and impatience can be detected in all his speeches of this period. In the impressive balance sheet of achievements with which he came before the Reichstag on January 30, 1937, after four years of his government, he “most solemnly” withdrew Germany’s signature from the discriminatory clauses of the Versailles Treaty. Shortly afterward, he mocked at the “Esperanto languages of peace, of reconciliation among nations” that weaponless Germany had spoken for years. “It would seem that this language is not so well understood internationally. Our language is being understood again only since we have had a large army.” And, reverting to the old Lohengrin image, the idea of the White Knight with whom he usually identified, he declared: “We move through the world as a peace-loving angel, but one armed in iron and steel.”

At any rate he was now secure enough to show considerable pique. In the course of the spring he did make still another attempt at approaching England by offering a guarantee for Belgium. But at the same time he offended the British government by abruptly canceling an announced visit of his Foreign Minister von Neurath to London. And when Lord Lothian called upon him on May 4, 1937, for a second conversation, he showed himself out of sorts and vehemently criticized British policy. The British were incapable of recognizing the Communist peril, he said, and in general did not understand their own interests. He added that he had always been pro-English, had been so during his time as a “writer.” A second war between the German and the English peoples would be tantamount to the departure of both powers from the stage of history; it would be as useless as it was ruinous. Instead, he was offering collaboration on the basis of defined interests.²⁸ Once more he waited for a reaction from London. He waited half a year. When it did not come, he reshaped his design.

Although an essential premise of Hitler’s ideal scheme had remained unfulfilled, he had nevertheless carried out his projects to an amazing extent. Italy and Japan were won over. England was wavering and had lost considerable prestige. France’s weakness had been exposed. No less important was the fact that he had destroyed the principle of collective security and restored the sacro egoismo of nations as the prevailing political principle. Faced with the swift shifts in power relationships, the smaller countries grew visibly uneasy, thus accelerating the dissolution of the anti-German front. After Poland, Belgium now turned her back on her impotent French ally. Hungary, Bulgaria, and Yugoslavia also reoriented their policies. Along with the fatal blow Hitler had inflicted upon the Versailles system, innumerable sources of conflict reappeared, which the system had only suppressed but not eliminated. All of southeast Europe began to falter. Naturally, its statesmen admired the example of Hitler, who had overcome the weakness of his own country, put an end to Germany’s humiliations, and taught the erstwhile victors “to shiver and shake.” As “Europe’s new Man of Destiny”²⁹ Hitler soon found himself the focus of a good deal of political pilgrimaging. His advice and his assistance counted for something. His stupendous achievements seemed to prove the superior capacity of totalitarian regimes to take action. Evidently the liberal democracies must lag hopelessly behind with their palavering, their judicial appeals, their sacred weekends and their Malvern soda water. French Ambassador Frangois-Poncet, who had been in the habit of meeting diplomatic colleagues of friendly or allied countries for intimate dinners at Horcher’s, Berlin’s luxury restaurant, has reported that fewer and fewer people came, with each of Hitler’s successes.³⁰

Reactions in Germany itself extended to considerably greater depths. The shrinking number of skeptics had the wind knocked out of their sails. Ivone Kirkpatrick, first secretary at the British Embassy in Berlin, recorded the fact that Germans who had been calling for caution found all their warnings refuted. Kirkpatrick observed that Hitler was reinforced in his conviction that he could do anything and that many Germans now enlisted under the Nazi banners, having held off only because they thought Hitler was going to lead the country straight to disaster.³¹ Instead he was piling up successes, winning prestige, international respect. A nation with pride still badly shaken at last found itself impressively represented, and derived a grim satisfaction from the surprise coups which left yesterday’s powerful victors stupefied. An elemental craving for righting scores was being gratified.

The regime’s achievements at home answered this craving in another way. The recently crushed country, which had seemed to incorporate all the crises and abuses of the age within its apparently hopeless national and social wretchedness, suddenly found itself admired as a model. Goebbels, characteristically self-congratulating, called this unexpected change “the greatest political miracle of the twentieth century.” Delegations from all over the world came visiting to study German measures for economic revival, for the elimination of unemployment. They looked into the widely ramified system of social benefits: the improvement of labor conditions, the factory canteens and workers’ housing, the newly established athletic fields, parks, kindergartens, the plant contests and professional competitions, the Strength-Through-Joy fleet of cruise ships and the people’s vacation resorts. The model of a hotel for the masses, planned to extend for about 2½ miles on the island of Rugen, with its own special subway system to shuttle the tens of thousands of vacationers, received the Grand Prix at the Paris World’s Fair of 1937. Even critical outsiders were impressed by the regime’s accomplishments. In a letter to Hitler, Carl J. Burckhardt hailed the “Faustian achievement of the Autobahn and the Labor Service.”³²

In his major Reichstag speech on January 30, 1937, Hitler had declared that the “period of surprise actions” was over. His next steps followed with a good deal of logic from the initial position he had assumed with each of his actions. Just as the treaty with Poland had given him the principal key to the advance against Czechoslovakia, the reconciliation with Italy offered the lever for the annexation of Austria. German politicians began paying frequent visits to Poland. Polish politicians were invited to Germany. Hitler issued assurances of friendship and statements that Germany withdrew all claims on Polish territory. By such steps he tried to draw Poland closer, and while he had Göring, on a visit to Warsaw, emphasize again that Germany took no interest in the Polish Corridor, he himself told Josef Lipski, the Polish ambassador in Berlin, that Danzig, so long a point of contention, was really in the sphere of Poland. Simultaneously he reinforced the relatively new ties with Italy. Early in November, 1937, he persuaded Italy, again with Ribbentrop’s aid, to join the Anti-Comintern Pact. Joseph C. Grew, the American ambassador in Tokyo, pointed out in an analysis of this triangle that the participating powers were not only antiCommunist but that their policy and their practices ran counter to those of the so-called democratic powers; they represented a coalition of have-nots who had made “overthrow of the status quo” their goal. Significantly, Mussolini let it be known in the conversations with Ribbentrop that preceded the signing ceremony that he was tired of playing the guardian of Austrian independence. In other words, the Italian dictator was preparing to abandon his old stand for the sake of his new friendship. He did not seem to sense that by so doing he was giving up his last card. “We cannot impose independence on Austria.”

This conversation took place in the Palazzo Venezia on November 5, 1937, the same day Hitler in the Berlin chancellery gave the Polish ambassador a guarantee for the integrity of Danzig; at 4 P.M. on the very same day Hitler met with the leaders of the armed forces. The Foreign Minister, von Neurath, was also present. In a four-hour-long, top-secret speech Hitler revealed to them his “fundamental ideas.” These were the old obsessions of racial menace, existential anxiety, and geographic constriction, for which he saw the “only and perhaps seemingly visionary relief” in the winning of new Lebensraum, in the building of a vast unbroken empire. After the assumption of power and the years of preparation these “fundamental ideas” were now ushering in—with amazing consistency—the expansionist phase.

View of an Unperson

At this point the reader may question, both on moral and literary grounds, the emphasis we have placed on Hitler’s achievements and triumphs, and wonder if the negative aspects of these years have not deliberately been ignored. But this was indeed the period when he developed remarkable control and energy, seemed to know intuitively when to push forward and when to show restraint, threatened, cajoled, and took action so forcefully that all resistance yielded before him. He managed to concentrate upon his person all the attraction, the curiosity, and the fears of the age. This capacity was further strengthened by his extraordinary gift to represent this power with overwhelming effect.

This moment in history is typical for Hitler’s peculiarly patchwork career, a career marked by such sharp breaks that it is often difficult to find the connecting links between the different phases. The fifty-six years of his life are divided between the first thirty years with their dullness, their obscure asocial circumstances, and the suddenly electrified political half. The later period, however, falls into three distinct segments. At the beginning there are approximately ten years of preparation, of ideological development, and of tactical experimentation. During this time Hitler ranked as no more than a marginal radical figure, distinguished, it is true, by an unusual talent for demagoguery and political organization. Then followed the ten years in which he riveted the attention of the age, and in retrospect seems to stand before a film of flashing scenes of mass jubilation and crowd hysteria. He himself was fairly sensitive to the fairy-tale character of this phase of his life; indeed, he could not fail to feel that he had been “elected” to his role and remarked that it “had not been the work of men alone.” And then followed six more years of grotesque errors, mistake piled upon mistake, crimes, convulsions, destructive mania, and death.

Reviewing this, we are once again drawn to look at the person of Adolf Hitler. His individual outline is still blurred; at times it might seem as if he emerged more distinctly from the imprint he made upon political and social conditions than from any account of his personal biography; as if the statue into which he stylized himself reveals, amid all the pomp of his political self-display, more of his essence than the human being behind it.

Political events during these years of success were accompanied by incessant fireworks: grand spectacles, parades, dedications, torchlight processions, demonstrations, bonfires leaping from mountaintop to mountaintop. We have already made the point of the close connection in totalitarian regimes between foreign and domestic policy; but even closer was the connection of both with propaganda policy. Memorial days, deliberately created incidents, state visits, harvest festivals or the death of a party member, the conclusion or breach of treaties—all these served as the pretext for great spectacles, whose purpose was to integrate the nation more and more closely, preparing it for mobilization in every sense of the word.

In Hitler’s government the connection between policy and propaganda was so intimate that sometimes the emphasis shifted, so that politics took second place to become merely the handmaiden of theatrical effects. In planning the grand boulevard of the future rebuilt Berlin, Hitler was even willing to conceive of a rebellion against his rule. Carried away, he described how the armored vehicles of the SS would come rolling invincibly up the 400-foot-wide avenue, advancing slowly upon his palace. His theatrical nature was never quite submerged and led him to subordinate political to histrionic categories. In this amalgam of aesthetic and political elements, Hitler’s origins in late-bourgeois bohemia and his lasting connection with that sphere can clearly be recognized.

The style of National Socialist spectacles also points back to these origins. Some have perceived the influence of the showy, colorful ritual of the Catholic Church. But equally evident is—once again—the heritage of Richard Wagner, whose splendiferous theatrical liturgy was carried to its ultimate point in the operatic excesses of the party rallies. The hypnotic fascination of these spectacles, which still comes through in the cinematic records of them, is partly due to these origins. “I had spent six years in St. Petersburg before the war in the best days of the old Russian ballet,” Sir Nevile Henderson wrote, “but for grandiose beauty I have never seen a ballet to compare with it.”³³ The spectacles testify to a precise knowledge of the dramaturgy of grand scenes and of the psychology of the common man. The forest of flags and the flickering torches, the marching columns and the blaring bands combined to make a magic that the mentality of the age, haunted by images of anarchy, could scarcely resist. Each detail was tremendously important to Hitler. Even in the festivals with their vast blocks of humanity he personally checked seemingly trivial points. He approved every scene, every movement, as he did the selection of flags or flowers, and even the seating order for guests of honor.

Significantly, Hitler’s talents as stage manager reached their summit when the object of the celebration was death. Life seemed to paralyze his inspiration, and his attempts in that direction never went beyond a dreary nod to peasant folklore: hailing the joys of dancing about the Maypole or the rearing of large families. On the other hand, he could always invent impressive effects for funeral ceremonies. Though the form may vary, the message was always the same. As Adorno said of Richard Wagner’s music: “Magnificence is used to sell death.”³⁴

He also had a distinct preference for nocturnal backdrops. Torches pyres, or flaming wheels were continually being kindled. Though such rituals were supposed to be highly positive and inspirational, in fact they struck another note, stirring apocalyptic associations and awakening a fear of universal conflagrations or dooms, including each individual’s own.

The ceremony of November 9, 1935, commemorating the dead of the march to the Feldherrnhalle twelve years before, was a model for many other such solemnities. The architect Ludwig Troost had designed two classicistic temples for Munich’s Königsplatz; these were to receive the exhumed bones, now deposited in sixteen bronze sarcophagi, of the first “martyrs” of the Nazi movement. The night before, during the traditional Hitler speech in the Bürgerbräukeller, the coffins had been placed on biers in the Feldherrnhalle, which was decorated with brown drapes and flaming braziers for the occasion. Shortly before midnight Hitler, standing in an open car, drove through the Siegestor into Ludwigstrasse, lit by flares set on masts, and on to the Odeonsplatz. SA and SS units formed a lane, their torches making two moving lines of fire down the length of the broad avenue. The audience was massed behind these lines. The car crawled slowly to the Feldherrnhalle. With raised arm, Hitler ascended the red-carpeted stair. He paused before each of the coffins for a “mute dialogue.” Six thousand uniformed followers, carrying countless flags and all the standards of the party formations, then filed silently past the dead. On the following morning, in the subdued light of a November day, the memorial procession began. Hundreds of masts had been set up with dark red pennants bearing the names of the “fallen of the movement” inscribed in golden letters. Loudspeakers broadcast the Horst Wessel song, until the procession reached one of the offering bowls, at which the names of the dead were called out. Alongside Hitler at the head of the procession walked the former corps of leaders, in brown shirts or in the historic uniforms (gray windbreaker and “Model 23” ski cap, supplied by the “Bureau for November 8–9”). At the Feldherrnhalle, where the march had once ended before the blazing guns of the army, the representatives of the armed forces now joined the marchers—a piece of revisionist symbolism. Sixteen artillery salvos boomed over the city. Then solemn silence descended while Hitler laid a gigantic wreath at the memorial tablet. While “Deutschland, Deutschland über Alles” was played at a mournful tempo, all began to move toward Königsplatz down a lane of thousands upon thousands of flags dipped in salute to the dead. United in the “March of Victory,” the names of the fallen were read out in a “last roll call.” The crowd answered, “Present!” in their behalf. Thus the dead took their places in the “eternal guard.”

A tribute to the dead also took center stage at the Nuremberg party rally. But the reference to death was present in nearly every ceremonial and in the speeches and appeals throughout the several days of the annual party congress at Nuremberg. The Bodyguard Regiment stood saluting while Hitler drove, to the pealing of bells, into the flag-decked city. The regiment’s black dress uniforms added an accent that was repeated in the ritual surrounding the “blood banner” and in the ceremonial in the Luitpoldhain: Hitler, with two leading paladins at a respectful distance behind him and to either side, walked up to the monument between more than 100,000 SA and SS men stationed in enormous squadrons along the broad ribbon of concrete, the “Street of the Führer.” While the flags dipped, he stood meditating for a long time, the manifest embodiment of the concept “leader”: in the midst of the mute soldiers of the party, but “surrounded by empty space, the insuperable gulf of Caesarian loneliness, which belongs to him alone and to the dead heroes who gave their lives because they believed in him and his mission.”³⁵

For maximum impressiveness, many spectacles were shifted to the evening or night hours. At the party rally in 1937 Hitler arrived to address the lined-up political leaders toward eight o’clock in the evening. As soon as Robert Ley had reported to him the presence of these subleaders, “the enveloping darkness was suddenly illuminated with a flood of whiteness. Like meteors,” the official report read, “the beams of the one hundred and fifty giant searchlights shoot into the obscured, gray-black night sky. The tall columns of light join against the cloud ceiling to form a luminous halo. An overwhelming sight: caught by a faint breeze, the flags in the stands ringing the field quiver gently in the glittering light…. The grandstand is… bathed in dazzling brightness, crowned by the shining golden swastikas in the oak wreath. On the left and right terminal, pyres leap from great basins.”

With fanfares blaring, Hitler entered the high central section of the grandstand, and at a command a torrent of more than 30,000 flags poured from the stands opposite into the arena. The silver tips and fringes of the flags sparkled in the beams of the searchlights. As always, Hitler himself was the first victim of this orchestration of masses, light, symmetry, and the tragic sense of life. Especially in speeches to old followers, after the period of silence in memory of the dead, he frequently fell into a tone of total rapture; in strange phrases he held a kind of mystic communion until the searchlights were lowered to strike the middle of the arena and flags, uniforms, and band instruments flashed red, silver, and gold. “I have always felt,” he cried in 1937, “that man, as long as life is given to him, ought to yearn for those with whom he shaped his life. For what would my life be without all of you! That you found me long ago and that you believed in me has given your lives a new meaning, posed a new task. That I have found you is what has made my life and my struggle possible!”

A year before he had cried to the same assemblage:

In their pontifical displays of magnificence the party rallies were the public climax in the National Socialist calendar year. In addition, they were for Hitler personally the realization of his youth’s monumental costume dreams. Members of his entourage have recorded the excitement that regularly gripped him during the week at Nuremberg. As might be expected, his displaced sexuality was released in an unquenchable torrent of speech. As a rule he delivered between fifteen and twenty speeches during those eight days, including the cultural speech devoted to basic principles, and the grand concluding address. In between he would speak as often as four times a day, speeches to the Hitler Youth, to the Women’s Corps, to the Labor Service or the army, whatever the program of the party rally required.

Almost every year, moreover, he satisfied his passion for building by a series of new cornerstone layings for the temple city that was planned on an enormous scale. Then there were parades, drills, conferences, in a whirl of color. The Nuremberg party rallies also acquired importance as the occasion for political decisions: the Reich flag law or the Nuremberg racial laws were promulgated, though rather hastily improvised, within the framework of a party rally. It is even conceivable that the rally might eventually have evolved into a kind of general assembly of a totalitarian democracy. At the end hundreds of thousands would march, wave upon wave, for up to five hours, past Hitler in the medieval market place in front of the Frauenkirche. And Hitler stood as if frozen, arm held out horizontally, in the back of his open car. Around him a mood of romantic frenzy gripped the old city, “an almost mystical ecstasy, a kind of holy madness,” as a foreign observer noted. Many others lost their critical reserve during those days and were forced to confess, as did a French diplomat, that momentarily they themselves had become Nazis.³⁶

The fixed calendar of festivals that filled the Nazi year began with January 30, the day of the seizure of power, and concluded with November 9, the anniversary of the Munich putsch.³⁷ That year was an endless succession of dedications, roll calls, processions, and memorials. A special Bureau for the Organization of Festivals, Leisure, and Celebrations saw to the creation of “model programs for celebrations of the National Socialist Movement and for organizing the setting of National Socialist demonstrations on the basis of the organizational tradition evolved during the period of struggle.” This bureau published a magazine of its own.

Alongside the regular round there were many holidays prompted by special occasions. The outstanding one—which impressed on the world the deceptive picture of a Third Reich whose citizens enjoyed the austere felicity of a welfare state accompanied, regrettably, by a few drastic features—came with the Olympic games of 1936.

The games had already been scheduled for Berlin before Hitler’s accession to power. The Nazis contrived to profit overwhelmingly by the opportunity of being hosts to the world. They did everything in their power to counter what they regarded as the distorted image of a hectically rearming Reich bent on war. Rather, they were determined to show the country in the most idyllic light. Weeks before the beginning of the games all ugly anti-Semitic tirades were stopped. No malicious caricatures were to be displayed. The district propaganda chiefs of the National Socialist Party were instructed to obliterate from building walls and fences any remaining traces of slogans hostile to the regime, even exhorted to make sure that “every home owner keep his front garden in irreproachable order.” To the solemn ringing of the Olympic bell, in the midst of royal highnesses, princes, cabinet ministers and many guests of honor, Hitler opened the games on August 1. And, while an earlier marathon winner, the Greek Spyridon Louis, handed him an olive branch as the “symbol of love and peace,” a chorus struck up the anthem composed by Richard Strauss, and swarms of doves of peace flew up. Hitler was offering a picture of a reconciled world. And, fittingly, some of the teams, including the French who had so recently been provoked, offered the Hitler salute as they marched past the grandstand. Later, in an impulse of tardy protest, they pretended that what they had given was the “Olympic salute.”³⁸ All through the two weeks a series of brilliant spectacles kept the guests breathless and filled them with admiration. Goebbels invited a thousand persons to an Italian Night on Peacock Island. Ribbentrop hosted nearly as many in his garden villa in Dahlem. Göring gave a party in the Opera House, whose hall was draped in precious silk. And Hitler received the multitude of guests who had used the games as a pretext to see the man who seemed to hold in his hands the fate of Europe and perhaps of the world.

The purpose of all the ceremonies and mass celebrations was obviously to engage the popular imagination and rally the popular will into a unitary force. But beneath the surface it is possible to discern motives that throw light upon Hitler’s personality and psychopathology. We are not referring only to his inability to endure routine, his naive craving for circuses, for the roll of drums, the blare of trumpets, the grand entrance, for dazzling illusions and the cheap brilliance of Bengal lights. The vault of light was not merely the fit symbol of Hitler’s craving to substitute illusion for reality. Albert Speer has told us how he happened to invent this device, which had the practical purpose of disguising a most prosaic reality: by a combination of darkness and glaring light effects he wanted to distract attention from the paunches of the middle and minor party functionaries who had grown fat in their prebends.³⁹

In addition, the resort to ceremonials also reveals a strenuous desire to stylize, to represent the triumph of order over a shifting existence forever threatened by chaos. We might call these efforts techniques of exorcism undertaken by a terrified mind. When certain contemporaries likened all the to-do with marching columns, forests of banners and blocks of humanity to the rites of primitive tribes, the comparison was not so artificial as it sounded. From the psychological point of view, what was operative here was the same urge to stylize that had dominated Hitler’s life from a very early period. Thus he had sought orientation and support against the world in a succession of new roles: from the early role of the son of good family and idling student, promenading in Linz with his cane and kid gloves, through the various roles of leader, genius, and savior, to the imitation Wagnerian end, where his aim was to enact an operatic finale. In every case he practiced autosuggestion, presenting himself in disguises and borrowed forms of existence. And when after one of his successful foreign-policy coups he called himself, with naive boastfulness, “the greatest actor in Europe,” he was expressing a need of his nature as well as an ability.

It was, in turn, a need that emerged from the fundamental Hitlerian motif of insecurity and anxiety. He was good at portraying feelings; he took pains not to show them. He repressed all spontaneity. But certain small peculiarities betrayed him—especially his eyes, which never stood still. They roamed restlessly even in moments of statutelike rigidity. So fearful was he of a frank emotion that he held his hand before his face whenever he laughed. He hated being surprised while playing with one of his dogs, and as soon as he knew he was being observed, one of his secretaries has reported, he would “roughly chase the dog away.” He was constantly tormented by the fear of seeming ridiculous or of making a faux pas that would cause him to forfeit the respect of members of his entourage, down to his janitor. Before he ventured to appear in public in a new suit or a new hat, he would have himself photographed so that he could check the effect. He did not swim, never got into a rowboat (“After all, what business would I have in a rowboat!”), or mounted a horse, he said; altogether he was “not at all fond of show-off stunts. How easily they might go wrong; parades teach that time and again.”⁴⁰ He regarded life as a kind of permanent parade before a gigantic audience. Thus he occasionally would try to dissuade Göring from smoking by offering the highly characteristic argument that one could not be represented on a monument “with a cigar in one’s mouth.” When Heinrich Hoffmann returned from Russia in the autumn of 1939 with photographs that showed Stalin holding a cigarette, Hitler forbade their publication; he was protecting a “colleague” in order not to detract from the constant dignity that should surround a dictator.

For similar reasons he was tormented by fears that his private life would be exposed. Significantly, not a single personal letter of his exists. Even Eva Braun received only terse, sober notes; yet he was so wary that he never entrusted even these to the mails. The comedy of aloofness from her, which he played out to the last with the less intimate members of his wider entourage, likewise testifies to his inability to lead a life without posing. The most personal letter he left is paradoxically a letter to authorities: that petition to the magistracy of the city of Linz which he wrote at the age of twenty-four in explanation of his draft evasion. On one occasion he remarked that it was “especially important” and “an old experience in the life of a political leader: One should never write down anything that one can discuss, never!” And elsewhere he stated: “Far too much is written; this begins with love letters and ends with political letters. There is always something incriminating about doing so.” He constantly observed himself and literally never spoke an unconsidered word, as Hjalmar Schacht commented. His desires were secret, his feelings hidden, and the widespread notion of an emotionally ungoverned, wildly gesticulating Hitler actually reverses the proportion of rule and exception. In fact his was the most concentrated life imaginable, disciplined to the point of unnatural rigidity.

Even Hitler’s famous outbursts of rage were apparently quite often deliberate instances of play-acting. One of the early gauleiters has described how Hitler raged so in the course of one of these fits that spittle literally ran out of the corners of his mouth and down his chin, so helplessly infuriated did he appear to be—but his consistent, intellectually controlled argumentation, which never ceased throughout the outburst, belied appearances. It would be too much to say that he deliberately tried to engender something like a “shudder of awe” at pathological frenzy. But we can assume that in such situations he did not lose control and that he was exploiting his own emotions just as purposefully as he did those of others. He usually had a reason for making such scenes and unleashed his temperament according to circumstances. He could be just as engaging and charming as he was brutal or ruthless. He was capable of shedding tears, pleading, or working himself up into one of his famous rages, which to the very end aroused the horror of all his interlocutors and often broke their resistance. He possessed “the most terrifying persuasiveness.” Along with this he had the power of exerting a hypnotic effect upon his interlocutor. The leadership of the party, the gauleiters and Old Fighters who had shoved their way to the top alongside him, undoubtedly were “a band of eccentrics and egotists all going in different directions,” and certainly were not servile in the traditional sense. The same is true for at least a part of the officers’ corps. Nevertheless, Hitler imposed his will on them as he pleased. And he did so not only at the height of his power but equally well before, when he was a marginal figure on the political Right, and at the end, when he was only the burned-out husk of a once mighty man. Several diplomats, particularly those of Germany’s allies, fell so completely under his spell that eventually they seemed to be rather his familiars than representatives of their governments.

Caricatures of Hitler long portrayed him as addressing individuals as if they were a mass meeting. But in fact he did nothing of the kind. He had a large scale of nuances at his disposal and was even more effective in personal conversations than on the platform. A public demonstration kindled in him a mood of shrill exaltation, particularly since his first use of the microphone, when he listened intoxicated to the amplification of his voice.

It has been rightly pointed out that Hitler’s ability to exploit his own temperament for demagogic purposes was most clearly manifested in his attitudes toward the German minorities outside German borders.⁴¹ Depending on his needs of the moment, he could lament or forget their fate. He did not worry about the Germans in South Tyrol, Poland, or the Baltic republics as long as they had no place in his grand design for foreign policy. But as soon as the situation changed, the “intolerable wrongs of these most loyal sons of the nation” threw him into raging indignation. His outbursts were obviously not just pretense. But the keener observer noted the element of artificial hysteria in them. Secretly, Hitler was exploiting the rage of which he seemed to be the defenseless victim. His remarkable capacity for empathy, his actor’s gift for merging wholly with a role, stood him in good stead. In the course of a conversation he would quite often show the most variegated sides of his personality, for example, would shift with pantomimic transitions from a muted tone to an abrupt outburst, pounding on the table or drumming nervously on the arm of his chair. At intervals of a few minutes he would show himself detached, sincere, suffering or triumphant. Before he became Chancellor, he would occasionally play the mimic when he was with his intimates; once, according to a participant, he put on a performance—with masterly malice—of Mathilde Kemnitz, later Ludendorff’s wife, vainly attempting to induce him, Hitler, “to marry her…. Hitler stripped the fine lady, as it were, of her priestly, philosophical, scholarly, erotic and other skins, until all that remained was a nasty, acrid onion.”⁴²

He regarded himself as a lover of music, but in actuality it meant little to him. He had, it is true, gone countless times to all of Wagner’s operas and heard Tristan or Die Weistersinger more than a hundred times each. But symphonic works and chamber music he largely ignored. On the other hand, he could sit through endless performances of Die Lustige Witwe or Die Fledermaus; it was again the characteristic grouping of grandiose and silly preferences. He listened to records only when nothing better offered, for they cheated him of the visual setting; with records, he limited himself to grand bravura scenes. After his visits to the opera he spoke exclusively on questions of stage technique or the character of the production, virtually never mentioning problems of musical interpretation.⁴³ Music meant little more to him than an extremely effective acoustic means to heighten theatrical effects; as such, however, it was indispensable, for drama without music had not the slightest appeal to him. One of his secretaries has remarked that his library contained not a single literary classic, and even on his many visits to Weimar, with its theatrical tradition going back to Goethe, he never went to the theater but only to the opera. The supreme expression of opera to him was the finale of Götterdämmerung. In Bayreuth, whenever the citadel of the gods collapsed in flames amid musical uproar, he would reach out into the darkness of the box, take the hand of Frau Winifred Wagner, who was sitting behind him, and breathe a deeply moved Handkuss upon it.⁴⁴

This craving for theater touches at the core of his being. He had the feeling that he was always acting on a stage and needed resounding alarums, explosive effects with lightnings and fanfares. Obsessed with the actor’s immemorial fear of boring the audience, he thought in terms of catchy numbers, trying to surpass the preceding scene, whatever it was. The restiveness that marked his political activities and gave them that character of surprise which so confused his opponents was as much related to this fear of being boring as his fascination with catastrophes and universal conflagrations. Fundamentally he was a theatrical person, trusting dramatic effects more than ideological persuasion, and really himself only in those sham worlds that he opposed to reality. His lack of seriousness, the hypocritical, melodramatic and cheaply villainous quality that clung to him originated in the theatricality as much as in his contempt for the appearances of reality—an element of strength whenever it coincided with his peculiarly sharp perception of underlying real conditions.

One of the conservatives who smoothed Hitler’s path to power commented that he never lost a sense of the disproportion between his lowly origins and the “successful leap to the heights.” As he had done in his youth, he continued to think in terms of social status. Occasionally he tried to divert attention from his embarrassing petty bourgeois origins by ostentatiously calling himself a “worker,” sometimes even a “proletarian.”⁴⁵ But most of the time he strove to cover up his low status by a mythologizing aura. It is an ancient, tested recipe of political usurpation that the lowliest and the most inconspicuous are summoned to rule. In the introductory passages of his speeches he again and again evoked the “myth of the man from the people,” the days when he had been an “unknown frontline soldier in the First World War,” a “man without a name, without money, without influence, without a following,” but summoned by Providence. He liked to introduce himself as the “lonely wanderer out of nothingness.” Thus he liked to have resplendent uniforms around him, for they pointed up the simplicity of his own costume. His air of unassuming austerity and soberness, together with his unwedded state and his withdrawn life, could be splendidly fused in the public mind into the image of a great, solitary man bearing the burden of his election by destiny, marked by the mystery of self-sacrifice. When Frau von Dircksen once remarked to him that she often thought of his loneliness, he agreed: “Yes, I am very lonely, but children and music comfort me.”

As such remarks reveal, he lacked cynicism in regard to his own person and role, and was rather inclined to consider himself in a deadly serious light. Looking out from the Berghof, he could see the blocklike massif of the Untersberg, where according to legend Charlemagne lay sleeping until the day when he would return to scatter Germany’s enemies. With a good deal of sentimental feeling Hitler considered the fact that his home was situated opposite this mountain a significant sign. “That is no accident. I recognize a summons in it.” More and more frequently he withdrew to his eyrie, especially when he wanted to escape the “corrosive” Berliners or the “crude” folk of Munich. He preferred the Rhineland temperament, and years later happily recalled how when he visited Cologne the crowd had begun to rock back and forth out of sheer enthusiasm. “The greatest ovation of my life.”⁴⁶ The conviction that he was the instrument of some higher power prompted him regularly to apostrophize Providence whenever he was describing the nature of his historical mission:

This conviction sustained his ideological notions and lent them the weight of a religious principle. It gave him hardness, resolution, and unmerciful drive. This conviction also kindled the cult surrounding his person, which amounted to pure idolatry. Robert Ley called him the only human being who never erred. Hans Frank declared that he was as solitary as the Lord God. And an SS group leader stated that he was even greater than that god who had had only twelve faithless disciples, whereas Hitler stood at the head of a great people vowed to loyalty to him. As long as Hitler coolly received such tributes and merely exploited the testimonials to his genius for psychological purposes, to increase his power, they were an important supplement to his energy. But when the sense of his historical mission was no longer held in check by Machiavellian calculations, when he himself succumbed to the notion that he was indeed superhuman, the descent began.

His lack of social contact was only the reverse of this mythologizing view of himself. The higher he rose, the more the area of emptiness around him widened. Increasingly, he shrank from the Old Fighters, who continued to press their unbearable claims to close personal contact. He had scarcely any but staged relationships, within the framework of which everyone was either an extra or an instrument. People had never really roused his interest and his concern. He made it a maxim that “one could not do enough to cultivate ties with the common people”; but the very phraseology betrayed the artificiality of this thought. Significantly, even his passion for architecture was limited to the building of gigantic backdrops; he would listen with utter boredom to plans for residential areas.

The fact that no conversation was possible in his presence was only another aspect of the same process of social impoverishment. Either Hitler himself talked, and all others listened, or all the others talked and Hitler sat lost in thought, apathetic, locked away from the world around him, not raising his eyes, “picking at his teeth in a frightful way,” as one participant described it. “Or else he paced restlessly. He did not give one a chance to speak; he interrupted one constantly; he jumped with incredible flights of fancy from one subject to another.”⁴⁸ His inability to listen went so far that he could not even follow the speeches of foreign statesmen on the radio; having lost the habit of being contradicted, he was either absent-minded or indulged in monologues. Since he scarcely read any longer and tolerated only yes men or admirers in his entourage, he plunged into an intellectual isolation that deepened steadily. Once and for all his mind became fixed on his early convictions, which had hardened into theses he neither expanded nor modified, but merely gave a sharper cutting edge.

He spoke incessantly of these, as if intoxicated by his own voice. The conversations recorded by Hermann Rauschning, from the early thirties, have preserved something of the self-important intonation of a man wonder-struck by his own tirades. There is a similar note, though with considerably diminished concentration, in the table talk recorded in the Führer’s headquarters. “The word,” Hitler declared, could build “bridges into unexplored regions.” When Mussolini was in Germany on a state visit, Hitler regaled him with a one-and-a-half-hour monologue after a meal, without once giving his impatient guest the opportunity for a reply. Almost all visitors and associates had similar experiences, especially during the war, when the torrent of words stretched on into the depths of the night, growing more excessive as the hour advanced. The headquarters generals, desperately struggling with their sleepiness, found themselves exposed to “solemn cosmic blather” about art, philosophy, race, technology, or history, and had to listen with defenseless respect. He always needed listeners, although they, too, were only extras, so to speak, in whose presence he could whip up the excitement that fueled his thoughts. A keen observer commented that he would dismiss his visitors in the manner of “a person who has just given himself a morphine injection.”⁴⁹ If his interlocutor managed an occasional objection, that served only as a stimulus to further, boundlessly wild associations, without limit, without order, without end.

The inability to relate, which isolated him humanly, benefited him politically, for he recognized only pieces in a game. No one could cross the belt of remoteness, and those who approached most closely to him were merely at a somewhat reduced distance. Characteristically, his strongest emotions were reserved for a few dead persons. In his private room at Obersalzberg there hung a portrait of his mother, and one of Julius Schreck, his chauffeur, who died in 1936. None of his father. Geli Raubal dead was apparently closer to him than the living girl had ever been. “In a sense Hitler is simply not human—unreachable and untouchable,” Magda Goebbels had already said in the early thirties. While still at the peak of his power, the cynosure of millions, he yet had something about him that belonged to the forgotten young man of the Vienna or early Munich years; he was a stranger even to his closest relatives. Albert Speer, whom for a time he regarded with some sentimentality as the embodiment of his youthful dream of brilliance and distinction, told the Nuremberg tribunal: “If Hitler had had any friends, I would have been his friend.” But he, too, did not cross the gulf. In spite of many days and nights of joint planning, when both men would lose themselves in their colossal projects, Speer was never more than Hitler’s preferred architect. It is true that Hitler, in an unusual tribute, spoke of his “genius,” but the dictator did not trust him in matters that went beyond technical problems.

What was lacking from this one relationship with traces of an erotic element was also lacking in the other: in contrast to Geli Raubal, Eva Braun was merely Hitler’s mistress, with all the anxieties, secrecies, and humiliations involved in such a position. She related that at a dinner in the Hotel Vier Jahreszeiten in Munich Hitler sat beside her for three hours, not allowing her to address him; shortly before everyone rose from the table he thrust into her hand “an envelope with money.” He had met her at the end of the twenties in Heinrich Hoffmann’s photographic studio, and possibly this acquaintanceship was one of the factors that drove Geli Raubal to suicide. Some time after his niece’s death Hitler made Eva his mistress. She was a simple, moderately attractive girl with unpretentious dreams and thoughts that were dominated by love, fashion, movies, and gossip, by the constant fear of being thrown over, and by Hitler’s egocentric whims and his manner of a petty domestic tyrant. With his craving for regimentation he had forbidden her sun-bathing, dancing, and smoking. (“If I were ever to see Eva smoking, I’d break off at once.”) He was quite jealous, and yet he neglected her in an offensive way. In order “not to be so alone” she had several times asked him for a dog (“that would be lovely”), but Hitler had simply passed over the request without comment. For a long time he kept her in almost insultingly mean circumstances. Her diary has been found, and the notes illuminate her unhappy situation. A characteristic passage runs:

In the middle of 1935 Hitler said “not a kind word” to her for three months, and in addition she learned that recently a “Valkyrie” had been his constant female companion (“he’s fond of such dimensions”). She obtained an overdose of sleeping pills and wrote a letter demanding some word from Hitler, even if it came through some outsider. “God, I’m afraid he won’t answer today,” the last entry of this period reads. “I’ve decided on 35 pills this time it’s going to really be a ‘dead certain’ business. If only he would have somebody call.”

Eva Braun made two attempts at suicide, the first as early as November, 1932, by shooting herself in the neck, the second on the night of May 28, 1935. Evidently Hitler was considerably irritated by these attempts, all the more so since he had not forgotten Geli’s fate. In 1936 Hitler’s half-sister, Frau Raubal (Geli’s mother), at last left the Berghof, and Hitler let Eva Braun take her place. Only after that did the tension between the two relax. Eva continued to be kept in semiconcealment, stealing in by side entrances and using rear staircases, contenting herself with a photograph of Hitler when he left her alone at mealtimes. She was hardly ever permitted to appear in Berlin, and as soon as guests arrived, Hitler almost invariably banished her to her room. But as she felt more secure, Hitler also lost some of his apprehensions, and soon she became a member of that innermost circle of persons before whom he dropped the airs of the great man and at teatime fell asleep in his armchair, or in the evening, with unbuttoned coat, invited his guests to watch movies or chat by the fireplace. But this more relaxed atmosphere also brought out his crude, unfeeling traits. Thus he said to Albert Speer in his mistress’s presence: “A highly intelligent man should take a primitive and stupid woman. Imagine if on top of everything else I had a woman who interfered with my work! In my leisure time I want to have peace.”⁵⁰ There are some amateur 8-millimeter film shots showing Eva Braun in Hitler’s company on the Berghof terrace, always in that mood of high spirits that is somewhat too ebullient to be believed.

The course of one of Hitler’s ordinary days has been described by a number of persons. He would open the door of his bedroom, which he regularly locked, a crack in the morning, and his hand would mechanically reach out for the newspapers that were lying ready at hand on a hassock beside the door; then he vanished again. Walks, traveling, conferences on building, receptions, automobile rides did not give the day an exterior framework but merely split it up into a series of distractions. Though Hitler knew so well how to impose an unmistakable style upon public display, he could not shape the little actions and whims of a day into a personal style. He had no private life.

The entourage continued to consist of adjutants, secretaries, chauffeurs, and orderlies. “Part of his circle consisted of ephebes,” one observer wrote, “men with curled hair, vulgar, square-set, with effeminate gestures.” As in the past he preferred the uncritical, dull milieu of simple people to which he had been accustomed from childhood. Whenever he was at Obersalzberg he spent the long evenings in their company in an unchangingly monotonous pattern. One of the participants has declared: “What remains in my memory of social life at Obersalzberg is a curious vacuity.”⁵¹ The evening would begin with three or four hours of movies. Hitler preferred social comedies with insipid wit and sentimental endings. He also liked many foreign films, some of which were not allowed to be shown in the public cinema houses; Hitler saw a number of his favorites as many as ten times and even more frequently. Wearily, with leaden limbs, the circle then gathered in front of the fireplace. As at the big dining table, the huge pieces of furniture, set far apart for purposes of display, hindered any exchange of ideas. Hitler himself had a paralyzing effect upon the company. “Very few people ever felt comfortable in his presence,” one of his old companions had remarked years before. For one or two hours the conversation dragged tediously along, repeatedly trickling away in banalities. Sometimes Hitler sat silently staring into space, or brooding into the fire, while the circle remained mute out of a mixture of respect and ennui. “It cost great selfcontrol to attend these endless sessions in front of the unvarying setting of the leaping flames.”⁵²

Between two and three in the morning Hitler would literally dismiss Eva Braun, and shortly afterward leave the room. Only then did the company, as if liberated, revive to brief, hectic gaiety. The evenings in Berlin followed a similar course, except that the group was larger, the atmosphere less intimate. All efforts to introduce some variation in the routine broke down against Hitler’s resistance. For in the trivial emptiness of these hours he tried to compensate for the pressure of the day, when he was prisoner of his own image.

How sharp the contrast of these evenings was with the classic totalitarian myth of the solitary lighted window. As Goebbels told it, “Every night, until six or seven in the morning, light can be seen streaming from his window.” And a recitation for a youth-group program ran:

In the summer of 1935 Hitler had decided to enlarge his modest weekend house at Obersalzberg into a rather pretentious residence, and he himself had sketched to scale the ground plan, the renderings, and crosssections of the new building. The sketches have been preserved and are clear evidence of Hitler’s fixation on any idea he had once had; he was simply incapable of attacking a task from a new point of view. The original idea always remained preserved in his sketches, with only minor changes. No less striking, however, is the loss of proportion—as, for example, in the sketch of the oversized window with the view of Berchtesgaden, the Untersberg, and Salzburg, which Hitler later liked to show to his guests as the largest lowerable window in the world. Here was the “basic infantile trait in Hitler’s nature,” which Ernst Nolte attributed chiefly to his greed to appropriate, his obstinate and uncontrollable determination to possess.

This lifelong mania for record size, speed, and numbers was characteristic of a man who had never managed to overcome his youth with its dreams, injuries, and resentments. Even at sixteen he had wanted to extend the 360-foot-long frieze on the Linz museum by another 300 feet, so that the city would have the “biggest sculptural frieze on the Continent.” And years later he wanted to provide Linz with a bridge 270 feet high above the river, a bridge “unequaled anywhere in the world.” Later on, the same urge would make him compete on the highways, preferably against heavy American cars. And years afterward he would still gloat over these races, remembering how his supercharged Mercedes would outdistance every other car on the road. The biggest lowerable window had its counterpart in the biggest marble table top made of one piece (18 feet long), the biggest domes, the vastest grandstands, the most gigantic triumphal arches, in short, in an indiscriminate elevation of gigantic abnormality. Whenever one of his architects told him that in his sketch of a building he had “beaten” the size of a historically important edifice, he was filled with enthusiasm. The megalomaniacal architectural works of the Third Reich combined this infantile mania for beating records with the traditional pharaonic complex of ambitious dictators who were trying to offset the frailty of a dominion based exclusively on themselves as individuals by building on a grand scale. This ambition sounds repeatedly in Hitler’s statements—as, for example, at the party rally of 1937:

Through these enormous architectural works Hitler was also trying to satisfy his onetime dreams of being an artist. In a speech of the same period he declared that if the First World War “had not come he would… perhaps, yes even probably, have become one of the foremost architects, if not the foremost architect of Germany.” Now he became the foremost patron of architecture. Aided by a number of select architects, he conceived the reconstruction of many German cities with vast buildings and avenues, whose oppressive size, lack of grass, and archaizing elements of form added up to an impression of solemn and deadly vacuity. In 1936 he conceived the plan of converting Berlin into a world capital, “comparable only to ancient Egypt, Babylon, or Rome.” Within some fifteen years he wanted to transform the entire inner city into a single showy monument of imperial grandeur, with vast boulevards, gleaming gigantic blocks of buildings, the whole dominated by a domed assembly hall that was to be the highest in the world, almost 900 feet, with a capacity of 180,000 people. From the Führer’s platform in the interior, under a gilded eagle big as a house, he intended to address the nationalities of the Greater Germanic Reich, and to prescribe laws to a world prostrate before him. A grand avenue over three miles long was to link the building to a triumphal arch 240 feet high, the symbol of victories in battles and empire-building wars. And, year after year, Hitler raved at the height of the war, “a troop of Kirghizes will be led through the capital of the Reich so that they may fill their imaginations with the power and grandeur of its stone monuments.”

The so-called Führer’s Building was planned on a similar scale. It was to be a fortresslike palace in the heart of Berlin, covering 6 million square feet and containing, along with Hitler’s residence and offices, many reception rooms, colonnades, roof gardens, fountains and a theater. It is hardly surprising that when his favorite architect in later life came upon the old sketches again, he “was struck by the resemblance to a Cecil B. De Mille set.”⁵³ In conceiving such architecture Hitler was in accord with the spirit of the age, from which otherwise he seemed so distant.

In drawing up comprehensive plans for rebuilding almost all the larger German cities Hitler was realizing his ideal of the artist-politician. Even in the midst of urgent government business he always found time for prolonged discussions with architects. At night when unable to sleep he would make drawings of ground plans or renderings of buildings; he often went through the so-called ministerial gardens behind the chancellery to Speer’s office, where he stood before a “model avenue” 90 feet long, illuminated by spotlights. Together with his younger associate he would wax enthusiastic over fantasy edifices that were destined never to be built. Among the buildings that were planned to give the city of Nuremberg “its future and therefore its eternal character” was a stadium for 400,000 spectators that was to be one of the most tremendous structures in history. There was to be an arena with stands seating 160,000 people, a processional avenue, and several convention halls—all clustered in a spacious “temple area.” Following a suggestion of Speer’s, Hitler devoted special attention to the materials used, so that even as ruins overgrown with ivy, the buildings would still testify to the greatness of his reign, as do the pyramids of Luxor to the power and glory of the pharaohs. At the cornerstone laying for the convention hall in Nuremberg he declared:

But while architecture was his first love, he did not ignore the other arts. The youth enthralled by painting and music drama was still present in him. To be sure, he had decided that the artistic rank of an era was only the reflection of its political greatness. By this logic he regarded cultural productions as the real legitimation of his achievements as a statesman. The proud prophecies in the initial period of the Third Reich must be understood in this sense; the dawn of an “incredible blossoming of German art” or of a “new artistic renaissance of Aryan man” was predicted because it had to come. And Hitler was therefore all the more discountenanced when this Periclean dream of his refused to come true.⁵⁴ Shutting himself off more and more from the world, he developed a pseudoromantic cult of what he called “the basic elements of life”: rich plowland, steel-helmeted heroism, peaks glistening with eternal snow, and vigorous laborers performing their work despite all obstacles. That this formula resulted in cultural atrophy was as obvious in literature as in the fine arts, even though the annual art shows, sometimes juried in part by Hitler himself, tried to cover up the prevailing dreariness by lavishly arranged celebrations. Hitler’s vituperation of “November art,” which took up a good deal of space in almost every one of his speeches on art, reveals the emphatic way in which he equated artistic and political standards. He would threaten the “cultural Neanderthalers” with custody in a mental hospital or prison; and he declared that he would annihilate those “international scribblings on art” which were nothing but “offscourings of brazen, shameless arrogance.” The exhibition of “degenerate art” organized in 1937 was partly a fulfillment of this threat.

In Hitler’s attitudes toward art we again encounter that phenomenon of early rigidity which characterizes all his mental and imaginative processes. His standards had remained unchanged since his days in Vienna, when he paid no heed to the artistic and intellectual upheavals of the period. Cool classicistic splendor on the one hand and pompous decadence on the other—Anselm von Feuerbach, for example, and Hans Makart—were his touchstones. With the resentments of the failed candidate for the academy, he raised his own taste into an absolute.

He also admired the Italian Renaissance and early baroque art; the majority of the pictures in the Berghof belonged to this period. His favorites were a half-length nude by Bordone, the pupil of Titian, and a large colored sketch by Tiepolo. On the other hand, he rejected the painters of the German Renaissance because of their austerity.⁵⁵ As the pedantic faithfulness of his own water colors might suggest, he always favored craftsmanlike precision. He liked the early Lovis Corinth but regarded Corinth’s brilliant later work, created in a kind of ecstasy of old age, with pronounced irritation and banned him from the museums. Significantly, he also loved sentimental genre painting, like the winebibbing monks and fat tavernkeepers of Eduard Grützner. In his youth, he told his entourage, it had been his dream some day to be successful enough to be able to afford a genuine Grützner. Later, many works by this painter hung in his Munich apartment on Prinzregentenstrasse. Alongside them he put gentle, folksy idyls by Spitzweg, a portrait of Bismarck by Lenbach, a park scene by Anselm von Feuerbach, and one of the many variations of Sin by Franz von Stuck. In the “Plan for a German National Gallery,” which he had sketched on the first page of his 1925 sketchbook, these same painters appear, together with names like Overbeck, Moritz von Schwind, Hans von Marees, Defregger, Böcklin, Piloty, Leibl, and, finally, Adolph von Menzel, to whom he assigned no fewer than five rooms in his gallery.⁵⁶ He early set special agents to buying up all the important works of these artists. He was bent on keeping them for the museum that some day, after the accomplishment of his goals, he intended to set up in Linz, with himself as director.

But just as everything he undertook began compulsively to shoot up into superdimensions, his plans for the Linz gallery rapidly expanded beyond all proportion. Originally, it was going to contain only a fine collection of German nineteenth-century art. But after his Italian trip in 1938, he obviously felt so overwhelmed and challenged by the riches of the Italian museums that he decided to erect a gigantic counterpart to them in Linz. His dream of “the greatest museum in the world” came to a final intensification at the beginning of the war, when it combined with a plan for redistributing the entire stock of European art. All works from so-called zones of Germanic influence would be transferred to Germany and assembled principally in Linz, which was to figure as a kind of German Rome.

In Dr. Hans Posse, director-general of the Dresden Gallery, Hitler found a respected specialist who would serve his ends. With a sizable staff of assistants, Posse scoured the European art market, buying, and later on mostly confiscating in the conquered countries, all important works of art, and cataloguing them in “Führer catalogues” running to many volumes. The paintings Hitler picked were assembled in Munich, and even during the war, whenever he came to that city he would first go to the Führerbau (the Führer’s Building) to inspect the masterpieces and, escaping from reality, to lose himself in lengthy discussions of art. As late as 1943–44, 3,000 paintings were purchased for Linz, and in spite of all the financial burdens of the war 150 million Reichsmark were spent on them. When the space in Munich no longer sufficed, Hitler had the entire collection housed in castles such as Hohenschwangau or Neuschwansteirt, in monasteries, and in caves. In the one repository of Alt-Aussee, a salt mine used since the fourteenth century, 6,755 Old Masters were stored by the end of the war, in addition to drawings, prints, tapestries, sculptures, and innumerable pieces of fine furniture—the ultimate expression of an infantile greed that had grown to monstrous dimensions. Among the paintings were works by Leonardo da Vinci and Michelangelo, as well as the Ghent Altar of the van Eyck brothers and canvases by Rubens, Rembrandt, Vermeer. Apparently considered on the same level was Hans Makart’s The Plague in Florence, which Hitler had received as a gift from Mussolini after having insistently asked for it.

From the bunker of the Führer’s headquarters during the last weeks of the war an order was issued to blow up the repository. The order was transmitted by August Eigruber, gauleiter of the Upper Danube region, on pain of execution if it were not obeyed. But it was never carried out.⁵⁷

A curious note of inferiority, a sense of stuntedness always overlay the phenomenon of Hitler, and not even the many triumphs could dispel this. All his personal traits still did not add up to a real person. The reports and recollections we have from members of his entourage do not make him tangibly vivid as a man; he moves with masklike impersonality through a setting which he nevertheless dominated with uncontested sovereignty. Though one of the greatest orators of history, he coined not a single memorable phrase. And similarly there are no anecdotes about him, although while holding power he operated entirely by his own lights, more arbitrary and unrestricted than any other political actor since the end of absolutism.

Because of this bizarre personal element, a good many observers have called Hitler a dilettante. And, in fact, if we mean by this the prevalence of inclination over duty and of mood over regularity and permanence, then the advent of Hitler did indeed mean the entrance of the dilettante into politics. The circumstances of his early life were wholly marked by the dilettantism that ultimately brought him into politics, and the period during which he exercised power was one prolonged demonstration of personal idiosyncrasy at the helm of state. The audacity and radicality that made him so successful also came from the same source. A true homo novus, he was not hampered either by experience or by respect for the rules of the game. He did not feel the scruples of the specialists and shrank from nothing he conceived. Above all, he intuitively knew how to initiate great projects but was unaware of the practical difficulties in carrying them through; he always saw everything as child’s play or dependent only on an act of will, not even realizing the extent of his boldness. With his “layman’s delight in decision making”⁵⁸ he interfered, took over everywhere, formulated and carried out what others scarcely dared conceive. He had a dilettante’s fear of admitting a mistake and the tyro’s need to show off his knowledge of tonnages, calibers, and all kinds of statistical matters. His aesthetic preferences were also uninformed; they came down to his love of massiveness, his delight in tricks, surprises, and prestidigitator’s effects. Significantly, he trusted inspiration more than he did thought and genius more than diligence.

He tried to cover up his dilettantism by utter lack of moderation, by making his amateurish projects so monumental that their amateurishness would be invisible. Magnitude justified everything, in buildings as well as in people. In this respect he was a man of the nineteenth century. He heavily concurred with Nietzsche’s saying that a nation was nothing but nature’s byway for producing a few important men. “Geniuses of the extraordinary type,” he remarked, with a side glance at himself, “can show no consideration for normal humanity.” Their superior insight, their higher mission, justified any harshness. Compared with the claims genius could make to greatness and historical fame, the sum of individuals amounted to no more than “planetary bacilli.”

These muddled images of genius, greatness, fame, mission, and cosmic struggle reveal a characteristic element of the Hitlerian imagination. He thought mythologically, not socially, and his modernity was permeated by archaic traits. The world and humanity, the intricate weft of interests, temperament, and energies, were thus reduced to a few antitheses to be grasped instinctively: friend and foe, good and evil, pure and impure, poor and rich, the radiant white knight against the horrid dragon crouched over the treasure. It is true that Hitler had objected to the “perverted title” of Rosenberg’s principal work; National Socialism, he said, did not constitute the myth of the twentieth century against reason, but “the faith and the knowledge of the twentieth century against the myth of the nineteenth century.” But in fact Hitler was far closer to the party’s philosopher than such comments would suggest. For Hitler’s rationality was always limited to methodology and did not light up the gloomy corners of his anxieties and prejudices. His sober plans were based on a few mythological premises, and this close conjunction of coolness and wrongheadedness, Machiavellianism and black magic, rounds out the picture of the man.

A few crude assumptions, borrowed at random from the trashy tracts of whole generations of patriotic professors and pseudoprophets, had shaped the traditional German view of the country’s history. It was all a matter of hereditary foes and enemies bent on encirclement. Hence the popularity of such notions as the stab in the back, Nibelungen loyalty, and the stark alternatives of victory or annihilation. National Socialism was not, it is true, quite so prone to the phenomenon of “seduction by history”⁵⁹ that characterized Italian or French Fascism, and which is in fact among the fundamental traits of Fascist thinking in general. Hitler had no ideal era he could invoke. His use of history was passionate rejection; he would operate by invoking a distorted image of past weakness and dissension. Hitler derived just as powerful a force from castigating the past as did Mussolini from singing the praises of the Roman Empire. Hitler played on national feeling by recalling concepts like “Versailles” or the “period of the Weimar System.” Sure enough, a “language regulation” issued by Goebbels to local propaganda chiefs required that the period from 1918 to 1933 be always designated as “criminal.” History, Paul Valéry once remarked, is the most dangerous product ever brewed by the chemistry of the human brain; it makes nations dream or suffer, impels them to become megalomaniacal, bitter, vain, insufferable. The hatreds and passions of the nations during the first half of this century have been stirred by false history far more than by all the racist ideologies or by envy or desire for expansion.

It was necessary for Hitler to reject the past because there was no era in German history that he admired. His ideal world was classical antiquity: Athens, Sparta (“the most pronounced racial state in history”), the Roman Empire. He always felt closer to Caesar or Augustus than to the Teutonic freedom fighter Arminius; they, and not the illiterate inhabitants of the Teutonic forests, were for him among the “most glorious minds of all history,” whom he hoped to find again in the “Olympus… that I shall enter.”⁶⁰ The downfall of those ancient dominions preoccupied him: “I often think about what destroyed the ancient world.” He made open fun of Himmler’s antediluvian primitivism and reacted sarcastically to all the potsherd cult and Teutonic herbalism: “At the same period that our forebears were presumably making the stone troughs and clay pitchers that our archaeologists fuss so much about, an Acropolis was being built in Greece.”⁶¹ And elsewhere: “The Germanic tribes who remained in Holstein were still boors after two thousand years… on no higher a level of culture than the Maori [today].” Only the tribes that had migrated to the south had risen culturally, he said. “Our country was a wallow…. If anybody asks about our ancestors, we always have to refer to the Greeks.”⁶²

In addition to the classical lands, England was the country he admired and wanted to emulate. It had known how to combine national coherence, a sense of masterfulness, and the ability to think in terms of vast areas. England was the opposite of German cosmopolitanism, German faintheartedness, German narrowness. And finally—again the object of reluctant wonder as well as of unnamable anxieties—he admired the Jews. Their racial exclusiveness and purity seemed to him no less admirable than their sense of being a chosen people, their implacability and intelligence. Basically, he regarded them as something akin to negative supermen. Even Germanic nations of relatively pure racial strains were, he declared in his table talk, inferior to the Jews: if 5,000 Jews were transported to Sweden, within a short time they would occupy all the leading positions.⁶³

Muddled and heterogeneous these ideal images might be, but out of them he constructed the idea of the “new man”: the type that combined Spartan hardness and simplicity, Roman ethos, British gentlemanly ways, and the racial morality of Jewry. Out of greed for power, patriotic devotion and fanaticism, out of persecutions and the miasma of the war, this racist phantasmagoria repeatedly arose: “Anyone who interprets National Socialism merely as a political movement knows almost nothing about it,” Hitler declared. “It is more than religion; it is the determination to create a new man.”

His sincerest and most solemn thought, the idea that compensated for all his anxieties and negations, his one positive concept, was this: to gather again the Aryan blood that had wasted itself on all the seductive Klingsor gardens of this world and to guard the precious grail for all time in the future, thus becoming invulnerable and master of the world. All the calculations of power tactics and all cynicism stopped short of this vision: “the new man.” As early as the spring of 1933 Hitler had seen to the issuance of the first laws, which were soon extended into a comprehensive catalogue of purposeful legislation partly aimed at putting an end to what he called racial decadence, partly at bringing about “the rebirth of the nation… by the deliberate breeding of a new man.” At the Nuremberg party rally of 1929 Hitler had declared in his concluding speech: “If Germany would have a million children annually and eliminate seven to eight hundred thousand of the weakest, the result in the end might be an increase in her energies.” Now the intellectual pimps of the regime took up such suggestions and codified them into a world-wide campaign against the “degenerate and the infected.” Racial philosopher Ernst Bergmann declared that he would gladly see “a million of the human sweepings of the big cities shoved aside.”⁶⁴ Many actions to “safeguard the good blood” ran parallel to the anti-Semitic measures; they ranged from special laws regulating marriage and genetic hygiene to programs of sterilization and euthanasia.

Pedagogical measures supplemented the eugenic measures; for “an intellectual race is something more solid and more durable than a race itself,” Hitler commented. He supported this remark on the grounds of the “superiority of the mind over the flesh.” A novel educational system with National Political Educational Institutions, Adolf Hitler Schools, Order Castles (Ordensburgen), and special academies organized mainly by Rosenberg (which never got beyond their bare beginnings), were to school an elite selected on racial principles, and to prepare it for a variety of tasks. In one of his monologues to an intimate, Hitler described the new type of man, which was partly realized in the SS, with predatory, demonic features, “fearless and cruel”—so that he himself was frightened by the image he conjured up. Ideals of this sort can scarcely be called political. A totalitarian regime does not require demonism from its human tools but discipline. What is wanted is not the fearless man but the brutal one, a type whose aggression is trained and can be used for specific purposes. The ideal, then, is essentially a literary one, derived at some remove from Nietzsche’s “blond beast.” But Hitler was always prone to translate literature into reality. The model new man was terrifying in other ways also. Distinguished by rigid obedience and narrow idealism, he was not so much cruel as mechanically unmoved and perfectionistic, ready for anything, and upheld by that sense of superiority which is based on the “instinct to annihilate others,” as Hitler put it in one of his last recorded monologues, that of February 13, 1945.

But only the outlines of this vision emerged. Aryan racial substance and superiority could not be recovered so rapidly from the racially muddied material. “All of us suffer from the sickness of mixed, corrupt blood,” Hitler once admitted. And in fact his ideal betrays how much he suffered from his own impurity and frailty. He reckoned in long spans of time. In a speech of January, 1939, to a group of higher-ranking military men he spoke of a process lasting a hundred years. It would take that long before a majority of the German people possessed those characteristics with which the world could be conquered and ruled. He did not doubt that this project would succeed. “A State,” he had long ago said in the concluding words of Mein Kampf, “which in the age of racial poisoning dedicates itself to the care of its best racial elements, must some day become lord of the earth.”⁶⁵

He himself did not have much time left. Both the desperate state of racial decadence and the consciousness of the shortness of a human life drove him forward. In spite of his fundamentally apathetic attitude, his life was marked by feverish unrest. A letter of his written in July, 1928, makes the point that he is now thirty-nine years old, so that “even at best” he has “barely twenty years available” for his “tremendous task.” The thought of premature death incessantly tormented him. “Time is pressing,” he said in February, 1934, and continued: “I do not have long enough to live…. I must lay the foundation on which others can build after me. I will not live long enough to see it completed.” He also feared assassination; some “criminal, an idiot” might eliminate him and thus prevent the accomplishment of his mission.

Out of such anxiety complexes he developed a pedantic carefulness about himself. From the ever-widening security system built up by Himmler, which took in the entire country, to his vegetarian diet, which he adopted at the beginning of the thirties, he tried by elaborate precautions to preserve his life—odd though it might seem to safeguard the “tremendous task” by a police apparatus and gruel. He did not smoke, did not drink, avoided even coffee or black tea, and contented himself with thin infusions of herbs. In later years, with some assistance from his personal physician Dr. Morell, he became addicted to medication; he was incessantly taking some drug or other, or at least sucking on lozenges. He observed himself with hypochondriacal concern, regarding occasional stomach cramps as signs of impending cancer. In the course of the presidential campaign in the spring of 1932 one of his followers called on him in a Hamburg hotel and Hitler told him over a plate of vegetable soup that he had no time to waste, that he could not “lose a single year more. I must come to power shortly in order to be able to solve the gigantic tasks in the time remaining to me. I must! I must!” Many remarks of later years, and a number of speeches, contain similar references; in his private circle comments to the effect that he did not have “much time left,” would “soon leave here,” or would “live only a few years” became standing phrases.

Medical findings throw little light on the matter. In later years Hitler did suffer from gastric pains, and from 1935 on he occasionally complained of circulatory problems. But we now have the files of his medical examinations and these reflect no condition that would have justified his worry. We must be content with positing psychogenic causes, which are peculiar to the biographies of many historical figures with a similar sense of mission. This assumption is supported by his pathological mania for traveling, appearing as a continuous attempt at escape, and by his increasing nervous insomnia, which during the war led him to literally turn day and night upside down in the Führer’s headquarters. His hectic temperament made him incapable of any regular activity or effort. Whatever he began had to be completed at once; and we may well believe the report that he scarcely ever read a book straight through to the end. He could spend days, in what seemed like a narcotic trance, “dozing like a crocodile in the Nile mud,” before he erupted without transition into impetuous activity. In his speech of April, 1937, at the Vogelsang Ordensburg, he spoke of his “damaged” nerves and declared almost imploringly: “I must restore my nerves…. That is self-evident. Worries, worries, worries, insane worries; it truly is a tremendous burden of worries.” And, standing before the model of his capital, he exclaimed with tears in his eyes: “If only my health were good.”⁶⁶ Many of his actions whose abruptness seemed to spring from cold-blooded calculation were apparently partly the expression of the unrest that came from his premonitions of death. “I will no longer see it completed!” In an address to the propaganda chiefs in October, 1937, he said, according to the notes of one of the participants,

But a psychological consideration also underlay this increasing insistence on Hitler’s part. From the end of 1937 on, he worried more and more that the revolution, braked by his seizure of power, might lose its dynamism and quietly fade away. The domestic moderation, the peace gestures, the everlasting holiday atmosphere, in short, the regime’s whole masquerade, might be taken at its face value. If that happened, “the leap to the great final goals might be missed.” With boundless faith in the power of propaganda, he counted on propaganda to transform the artificially constructed idyllic stage set into the idyl itself. In his important secret speech of November 10, 1938, to the top editors of the domestic press he keenly analyzed this dichotomy:

And in fact from the second half of 1937 on, the suppressed radical energies were once more released and the nation organized more consistently than ever to serve the violent intentions of the regime. Only now did the rise of the SS state begin. Its most visible expression was the increase in the number of concentration camps and the accelerated recruitment and equipping of armed SS formations. The Red Cross was instructed to prepare for possible mobilization. The Hitler Youth were ordered to be ready to step into the armaments plants, taking over for the labor force, who would be sent into the army. The regime launched massive attacks against the judiciary, the churches, and the bureaucracy, cowing those branches of society even more thoroughly. Hitler ranted more violently than ever against the skeptical intellectuals (“these impudent, shameless scribblers” who would be “useless as building blocks for a people’s community”). The simple of heart, on the other hand, were forever being hailed. In November, 1937, the press received directives to keep silent about the preparations for “total war” being initiated in all the branches of the NSDAP.⁶⁸

The economic field as well was being regeared. Once again, the businessmen, contrary to the theory that capitalist interests were the dominant force in the Third Reich, proved willing tools who “had no more influence upon the political decisions than their day laborers.”⁶⁹ Should they fail to meet the demands set for them, “it is not Germany that would be ruined, but at most a few managers,” Hitler had hinted as early as the autumn of 1936 in a memorandum concerning his economic program. As always, he was proceeding entirely from considerations of efficiency. We misread his matter-of-fact view of all practical problems if we view the regime’s economic policy in ideological terms. Basically, the economic system remained capitalist; but it was in many ways overlaid by authoritarian command structures and atypically distorted.

In his memorandum Hitler explicitly admitted his expansionist intentions—for the first time since he had become Chancellor. He had had to speed up his plans, he indicated, because of the country’s troubling situation in raw materials and foodstuffs, thus once more evoking the old terror of a hopelessly overpopulated country with the proverbial 140 inhabitants per square kilometer. A Four-Year Plan on the Soviet Russian model was to supply the sinews for the Lebensraum policy. Hermann Göring was put in charge. He promptly proceeded to bully the businessmen into carrying out the plans for autarchy and rearmament without regard to the costs or the economic consequences. At the ministerial session devoted to Hitler’s memorandum, Göring insisted that the country must act “as if we were in the stage of imminent peril of war.” A few months later he told a meeting of big businessmen that producing economically no longer mattered; what counted was simply to produce at all. It was a plan for Raubbau—strip mining the economy, as it were—and its aim was a war of conquest, for only such a war could justify it. “We must always remember that if we lose, everything’s shot anyhow,” Hitler later commented, during the war itself.

When Hjalmar Schacht criticized these methods, there was a breach which soon forced him out of the cabinet. Hitler now felt that time was running out. His memorandum had ruled that economic rearmament must be conducted “in the same tempo, with the same resolution, and if necessary with the same ruthlessness” as the political and military preparations for war. The concluding sentences were similarly dramatic: “Herewith I am setting the following task: First. The German army must be ready for commitment within four years. Second. The German economy must be ready for war within four years.”

Reports on morale during this period speak of “a certain fatigue and apathy.”⁷⁰ The overorganization of people was becoming almost unbearable. The regime’s policy toward the churches, the defamation of minorities, the racial cult, the pressure upon the arts and the sciences, and the excessive zeal of minor party functionaries engendered anxieties that could be expressed only in the most covert terms; such griping was totally ineffective. The majority tried, as far as possible, to go on living, ignoring both the regime and its injustices. The report cited above notes that “the German greeting [Heil Hitler]—which at any rate is a sensitive measure of shifts in political moods—has yielded almost entirely to the older customary salutations, or is only casually responded to, outside the circles of party members and officials.”

Though such local reports were scarcely definitive, they fed Hitler’s sense of urgency and showed him what had to be done: he must shake the populace out of its lethargy and create a situation in which anxiety, pride, and an offended sense of self-importance combined so that “the inner voice of the people itself slowly began to scream for violence.”

“Where Hitler draws perspectives, war is always in sight,” Konrad Heiden wrote around this time, and in the same passage asked whether the man could continue to exist “without disintegrating the world.”⁷¹

The “Greatest German in History”

Hitler’s real plans came to light in the secret conference of November 5, 1937, whose course we know from the record kept by one of the participants, Colonel Hossbach. To a restricted circle consisting of Foreign Minister von Neurath, War Minister von Blomberg, Commander of the Army von Fritsch, Commander in Chief of the Navy Admiral Raeder, and Air Force Commander Göring, Hitler unveiled ideas that struck some of those present as sensational at the time, and others later on when they were disclosed at the Nuremberg trial.

The psychological importance of his statements evidently outweighs their political weight. For what Hitler produced in an exalted mood, inspired by the favorable circumstances, in the course of more than four hours of nonstop speech to the group assembled in the chancellery, was nothing more than the design he had developed years before in Mein Kampf. Now he presented it as the “result of detailed considerations and the experiences of his four and a half years as head of government,” but it was the same old concept from which he had never strayed, which had become the fixed point of all his steps and maneuvers. Only the tone of impatience was new. He would ask those present, he added portentously after his introductory words, “to regard the following statement as his testamentary bequest in case of his decease.”

If the goal of German policy, he began, were considered as the safeguarding, preservation, and increase of the body of the nation, the “problem of space” must immediately be confronted. All economic and social difficulties, all racial dangers, could be mastered only by overcoming the scarcity of space; the future of Germany absolutely depended on that. The problem could no longer be solved by reaching out for overseas colonies, as had been possible for the powers of the liberalistic colonial age. Germany’s living space was situated on the Continent. Granted, every expansion involved considerable risks, as the history of the Roman Empire or the British Empire demonstrated: “Neither earlier nor at the present time has there ever been space without a master; the aggressor always comes up against the possessor.” But the gain, specifically a spatially coherent Greater Reich ruled by a solid “racial nucleus,” justified a high stake. “For the solution of the German question all that remains is the way of force,” he declared.

Once that resolve had been taken, he continued, all that remained was to decide on the most favorable time and circumstances for applying that force. Six to eight years later, conditions could develop only unfavorably for Germany. If, therefore, he was “still alive, it was his unalterable resolve to solve the question of German space between 1943–1945 at the latest.” But he was also determined, if an earlier opportunity offered, to take advantage of it—whether the occasion were a severe domestic crisis in France or a military involvement of the Western powers. In any case, the subjection of Austria and of Czechoslovakia must come first, and he made it clear that he would not be content with the demand of the racial revisionists for annexation of the Sudetenland but had in mind the conquest of all Czechoslovakia as a springboard for far-reaching imperialist aims. By that conquest Germany would win not only twelve divisions but also the food supply for an additional 5 million to 6 million persons, this in the event “that a compulsory emigration of two million from Czechia, of one million persons from Austria, would be successfully carried out.” For the rest, he considered it probable that England and France had “already written off Czechia.” There was strong likelihood that some conflicts would erupt as early as the coming year, in the Mediterranean area, for example; these conflicts would involve a heavy drain on the Western powers. In that case he was determined to strike in 1938, without waiting. In view of these circumstances, from the German viewpoint a rapid and complete victory by Franco in the Spanish Civil War was undesirable. Rather, the interests of the Reich required continuance of the tensions in the Mediterranean area. In fact, it might be wise to encourage Mussolini to undertake additional expansionist moves, in order to create a casus belli between Italy and the Western powers. Anything of that sort would provide a magnificent opportunity for Germany to begin the “assault upon Czechoslovakia” with “lightning rapidity.”

This exposition evidently stunned and disturbed some of the group, and in his description of the conference Colonel Hossbach notes that the subsequent discussion “at times took a very sharp tone.” Neurath, Blomberg, and Fritsch, in particular, opposed Hitler’s arguments and explicitly warned him against the risks of a war with the Western powers. Possibly Hitler had convoked the conference chiefly to communicate his impatience and, as he had explained to Göring before the beginning of the meeting, “to light a fire” under generals Blomberg and Fritsch “because he was by no means satisfied with the rearmament of the army.” During the heated discussion Hitler suddenly became aware of a difference of opinion that came very close to being a matter of principle. Four days later Fritsch asked him for another meeting, and Foreign Minister Neurath—“shaken to the core,” as he later declared—also tried to see him and dissuade him from his bellicose course. But Hitler had meanwhile decided to leave Berlin and had withdrawn to Berchtesgaden. Obviously ill-humored, he refused to receive the Foreign Minister before his return to Berlin in the middle of January.

It is surely more than accidental that the men who opposed him on November 5 all fell victim to the major shuffle by which Hitler, a short time later, removed the conservatives from their last remaining strongholds, especially in the army and the Foreign Office. The conference seems to have proved to him that his sweeping plans, which required steady nerves, a readiness to take risks, and a kind of brigand’s courage could not be carried out by the inhibited, cautious representatives of the old bourgeois ruling class. Their sobriety and bristly stiffness antagonized him; his old antibourgeois resentments reawakened. He hated their arrogance and their class-conscious pretensions. The ideal Nazi diplomat was, to his mind, not a proper official but a revolutionary and secret agent, an “entertainment director” who would know how “to matchmake and to forge.” A general, to his mind, should be like “a butcher’s dog who has to be held fast by the collar because otherwise he threatens to attack anyone in sight.” Neurath, Fritsch, and Blomberg scarcely fitted this conception. In this regime they were, as one of them commented, one and all “saurians.”⁷²

The November conference of 1937 marked a mutual disillusionment. The conservatives, especially the military leaders who had never learned to think beyond the narrow confines of their own goals and interests, found to their astonishment that Hitler meant what he had said. He was, as it were, actually being Hitler. And Hitler, for his part, found his contemptuous views of his conservative partners confirmed. For some years they had kept silent, obeyed, and served. Now they were manifesting their true pusillanimous nature. They wanted Germany’s greatness, but without taking risks. They wanted rearmament but no war, Nazi order but not Nazi ideology.

From this angle, we can better understand the obstinate conservative efforts during the preceding years to retain a limited independence in diplomatic and military affairs. Hitler had partly outwitted such attempts on the part of the Foreign Office by instituting his system of special envoys. On the other hand he had not been able to pry open the far more coherent social bloc of the officer caste. He now saw that this was the next order of business. And as chance had come to his aid so often before, a number of developments now played into his hands. Three months later, he had ousted his top generals and totally reorganized both the diplomatic and the military structure in accord with his program for the future.

The seemingly innocent starting point was Blomberg’s decision to remarry; his first wife had died years before. It was rather awkward that the bride, Fraulein Erna Gruhn, had “a past,” as Blomberg himself admitted. Consequently, she did not meet the strict status requirements of the officer corps. Seeking advice, Blomberg took Göring into his confidence as a fellow officer. Göring strongly urged him to go ahead with the marriage, and even assisted him in getting rid of a rival by paying the man off and arranging his emigration. On January 12, 1938, the wedding took place, in an atmosphere of some secrecy. Hitler and Göring were the witnesses.

Only a few days later, rumors began circulating that the field marshal’s marriage was a mésalliance of interest to the vice squad of the police. A police file soon provided evidence that Blomberg’s newly wedded wife had spent some time as a prostitute and had once been convicted of serving as a model for lewd photographs. Twelve days after the wedding, when Blomberg returned from a brief honeymoon, Göring informed him that he had become unacceptable. The officer corps, too, saw no reason to come to the defense of the field marshal who for so long had been devoted to Hitler with boyish exuberance. Two days later, on the afternoon of January 26, Hitler received him for a farewell visit. “The embarrassment for me and for you was too great,” he declared. “I could no longer wait it out. We must part.”

In a brief discussion about a possible successor, Hitler rejected the presumptive candidate, Fritsch, and Göring as well. The latter, in his greed for posts, had desperately tried to secure the appointment. Apparently Blomberg, still abjectly loyal, proposed what Hitler in any case intended, that he take over the position himself. “When Germany’s hour strikes,” Hitler said at the end of the interview, “I will see you at my side and the whole past will be regarded as wiped out.”

The decision had evidently been taken while Göring was still intriguing to exclude his rival, Fritsch. For now, instigated by Göring and Himmler jointly, a second police file was brought to light, this time on Fritsch, in which he was charged with homosexuality. In a scene out of a third-rate drama, the unsuspecting commander in chief of the army was confronted with a hired witness in the chancellery. The man’s accusations soon proved untenable, but that did not matter. They had served their purpose: providing Hitler with the pretext for the thoroughgoing shakeup of personnel on February 4, 1938. Fritsch, too, found himself dismissed. Hitler took over the post of commander in chief of the armed forces. The War Ministry was dissolved, replaced by the High Command of the Armed Forces (Oberkommando der Wehrmacht, abbreviated OKW), headed by General Wilhelm Keitel. For a prize specimen of Hitlerian comedy, we may read General Jodi’s diary note on Keitel’s installation: “At 1 P.M. Keitel is ordered to the Führer in civilian dress. The latter pours out his heart on the difficulties which have descended upon him. He is growing more and more lonely…. He says to K: I am relying on you; you must stick it out with me. You are my confidant and only adviser on defense questions. Unified and coherent leadership of the Armed Forces is sacred and inviolable to me.” Hitler then continued without transition and in the same tone of voice: “I shall take command of them myself with your help.” As successor to Fritsch he appointed General von Brauchitsch, who, like Keitel, seemed the natural candidate for the post because of his servility and weakness of character; he had announced that he was “ready for anything” that was asked of him. In particular, he gave assurances that he would lead the army closer to National Socialism. In the course of these measures sixteen older generals were additionally retired, forty-four transferred. In order to alleviate Göring’s disappointment, Hitler named him a field marshal.

With one blow, without a jot of opposition, Hitler had thus eliminated the last power factor of any significance. He had put across, as it were, a “bloodless June 30.” Contemptuously, he declared that all generals were cowardly. His disdain was increased by the shameless eagerness many generals had shown to occupy the vacated positions. Such behavior made it plain that the unity of the officer corps had at last been shattered and caste solidarity—which had notably failed to put in an appearance in the case of the murders of von Schleicher and von Bredow—no longer existed. Speaking for the benefit of “later historians,” General von Fritsch resignedly recorded his indignation at this “shameful treatment.” To be sure, one group of army officers began to plot some action against the dictator and tried to make contact with Fritsch. Now, and once again six months later, he refused to support them, remarking fatalistically: “This man is Germany’s fate and this fate will go its way to the end.”

Meanwhile, the reshuffling was not limited to the armed forces. At the same cabinet session in which Hitler announced the changes in the top military leadership, he also informed Neurath of his dismissal from the post of Minister of Foreign Affairs. Ribbentrop replaced Neurath. Simultaneously, several important ambassadorships (Rome, Tokyo, Vienna) were changed. The careless way in which Hitler controlled the state is evident from the manner in which he appointed Walter Funk Minister of Economics. Hitler had met him at the opera one night, and during the intermission assigned him the post. Göring, he added, would give him further instructions. At the cabinet session of February 4 he was introduced as Schacht’s successor. That was, incidentally, the last meeting of the cabinet in the history of the regime.

Throughout the crisis Hitler was worried that the events might be viewed abroad as symptoms of hidden struggles for power and therefore as a sign of weakness. He also feared new conflicts if the court-martial investigation of the Fritsch case—which he had had to concede to the generals—brought the intrigue to light and rehabilitated Fritsch. “If the troops find out about that, there’ll be a revolution,” one of the insiders had predicted. Consequently, Hitler decided to cover up the one crisis by another, far more comprehensive one. As early as January 31, Jodi had noted in his diary: “Führer wants to divert the spotlights from the Wehrmacht [the armed forces]. Keep Europe gasping and by replacements in various posts not awaken the impression of an element of weakness but of a concentration of forces. Schuschnigg is not to take heart, but to tremble.”

Thus Hitler resolutely headed into another crisis. Since the July agreement of 1936 he had done nothing to improve German-Austrian relations. Rather, he had used the terms of the agreement solely to pick an endless series of new quarrels, bickering over clauses like a shyster lawyer. With growing concern the Vienna government had observed the ring gradually tightening. The obligations under the agreement, which it had assumed only under intense pressure, limited its freedom of action as much as did the ever closer ties between Rome and Berlin. In addition, the strong Nazi underground movement within Austria, encouraged and funded by the Reich, was stirring up trouble. It had a double basis for its passionate campaign for Anschluss: the ancient German dream of unification, feasible at last with the breakup of the Dual Monarchy in 1919; and Hitler’s Austrian origin. The very idea of unity seemed to be incarnate in the person of Hitler. Nazi propaganda was operating upon a country that still remembered its days as a great power while at present living in a functionless rump state that meant nothing to most of the citizens. Humiliated, spurned by the new nations which had once been part of the shattered monarchy, impoverished, and insultingly kept in a dependent status, the population of Austria craved change. Existing conditions were so bad that few asked what would follow. With an acute sense of ethnic and historical ties, many Austrians turned their eyes more and more upon a self-assured Germany that seemed utterly transformed and was spreading panic among the arrogant victors of yesterday.

Desperately, Kurt von Schuschnigg, the successor to the assassinated Chancellor Dollfuss, looked around for help. In the spring of 1937 he vainly tried to secure a British declaration guaranteeing Austria’s independence. When that was not forthcoming, his prolonged and tenacious opposition to the Nazis, which he had backed up by bans and persecution, gradually weakened. At the beginning of February, 1938, Papen proposed a meeting between him and the German Chancellor. Reluctantly, Schuschnigg agreed. On the morning of February 12 he arrived in Berchtesgaden. Hitler received him on the steps of the Berghof.

Immediately after the two men had exchanged greetings, the Austrian Chancellor found himself the victim of a tirade. When he remarked on the impressive panorama offered by the grand living room, Hitler brushed the remark aside: “Yes, my ideas mature here. But we haven’t met to talk about the beautiful view and the weather.” Then he worked himself up. Austria’s whole history, he said, was “a continuous betrayal of the people. In the past it was the same as it is today. But this historical contradiction must at last come to its long overdue end. And let me tell you this, Herr Schuschnigg: I am firmly determined to put an end to all of it…. I have a historic mission and I am going to fulfill it because Providence has appointed me to do so…. I have traveled the hardest road that ever a German had to travel, and I have accomplished the greatest things in German history that ever a German was destined to accomplish…. You certainly aren’t going to believe that you can delay me by so much as half an hour? Who knows—perhaps I’ll suddenly turn up in Vienna overnight, like the spring storm. Then you’ll see something!” His patience was exhausted, he continued. Austria had no friends; neither England nor France nor Italy would lift a finger for her sake. He demanded the right for the Austrian National Socialists to agitate freely, the appointment of his follower, Seyss-Inquart, as Austrian Minister of Security and of the Interior, a general amnesty, and accommodation of Austrian foreign and economic policy to that of the Reich.

According to Schuschnigg’s account, when the time came to go to dinner, the man who a moment before had been gesticulating excitedly was transformed into an amiable host. But in the subsequent conversation, when the Austrian Chancellor remarked that because of his country’s constitution he could not give any conclusive assurances, Hitler wrenched open the door, gestured for Schuschnigg to leave, and shouted in an intimidating tone for General Keitel. After Keitel came in, closed the door behind him, and asked for his orders, Hitler said: “None at all. Have a seat.” Shortly afterward, Schuschnigg signed. He refused Hitler’s invitation to sup with him. Accompanied by Papen, he crossed the border to Salzburg. During the entire ride he did not say a word. But Papen chattered on easily: “Yes, that’s the way the Führer can be; now you’ve seen it for yourself. But next time you’ll find a meeting with him a great deal easier. The Führer can be distinctly charming.” The next time Schuschnigg came under guard and on his way to Dachau concentration camp.

The Berchtesgaden conference gave a great boost to the Austrian Nazis. They heralded their impending victory by a series of boastful acts of violence, and all of Schuschnigg’s efforts to stem the tide came too late. In order to offer last-minute opposition to the open disintegration of state power, he decided on the evening of March 8 to call a plebiscite for the following Sunday, March 13. In this way he hoped to refute, before the eyes of the whole world, Hitler’s claim that he had the majority of the Austrian people behind him. But Berlin immediately objected, and he was forced to drop his plan. Urged on by Göring, Hitler decided to take military action against Austria if necessary; for Ribbentrop had reported from London that England was not in the least disposed to fight for this troublesome leftover of the Versailles Treaty. Without England, Hitler knew, France would not intervene.

For a time it seemed that the German grab for Austria was stirring old allergies in Mussolini and forcing Italy toward a rapprochement with England. On March 10, therefore, Hitler sent Prince Philip of Hesse to Rome with a handwritten letter in which he spoke of the Austrian conspiracy against the Reich, the suppression of the nationalistic majority, and the prospect of civil war. As a “son of the Austrian soil” he had finally been unable to look on, inactive, he continued, but had decided to restore law and order in his homeland. “You, too, Your Excellency, could not act differently if the fate of Italy were at stake.” He assured Mussolini of his steadfast sympathy and once again pledged the inviolability of the Brenner Pass as the boundary between Germany and Italy: “This decision will never be amended or altered.” After hours of excited preparation, shortly after midnight he issued Directive No. 1 for Operation Otto:

The terse, self-assured tone of this document almost entirely concealed the mood of hysteria and indecision in which it had come into being. All reports from members of Hitler’s entourage speak of the extraordinary chaos surrounding the decision, the panicky confusion that overtook Hitler on the verge of this first expansionist action of his career. A multitude of overhasty mistaken decisions, choleric outbursts, senseless telephone calls, orders and cancellations of orders, followed in quick succession during the few hours between Schuschnigg’s call for a plebiscite and March 12. Once again, to all appearances, those “damaged nerves” were giving trouble. First, the military leadership was told in great excitement to prepare an operational plan within a few hours. Hitler flared up at Beck and later Brauchitsch for their remonstrances. Then he canceled his marching order, then issued it again. In between came pleas, threats, misunderstandings. Keitel later spoke of the period as a “martyrdom.”

If Göring had not taken the initiative at the moment he did, the public and thus the world would presumably have realized how much psychotic uncertainty and irritation Hitler showed in situations of great pressure. But Göring, who because of his part in the Fritsch affair had every interest in the operation and its obscuring effects, vigorously pressed the vacillating Hitler forward. Years later, Hitler remarked, almost stammering, with the admiration of a high-strung man for another’s phlegmatic, cold-blooded temperament:

On March 11 Göring issued an ultimatum demanding the resignation of Schuschnigg and the appointment of Seyss-Inquart as Austrian Chancellor. Upon instructions from Berlin, the Nazis all over Austria poured into the streets that afternoon. In Vienna they thronged into the chancellery, filled the stairways and corridors, and settled down in the offices until, toward evening, Schuschnigg announced his resignation over the radio and ordered the Austrian army to retreat without offering resistance to the invading German troops. When President Miklas stubbornly refused to appoint Seyss-Inquart as the new Chancellor, Göring, in one of his many telephone conversations with Vienna, gave one of his go-betweens characteristic instructions:

After a brief dialogue, Göring said in conclusion: “Now then, our troops are crossing the frontier today…. And see to it that he sends the telegram as soon as possible…. Present the telegram to him and tell him we are asking—he doesn’t even have to send the telegram, you know; all he needs to say is: Agreed.” And while the Nazis throughout the country began to occupy the public buildings, Hitler at last issued the marching order at 8:45 P.M.—even before Seyss-Inquart had been informed of his own appeal for help. Hitler rejected a later request from Seyss-Inquart to stop the German troops. A bare two hours later, the impatiently awaited word from Rome arrived: at half-past ten Philip of Hesse telephoned, and Hitler’s reaction revealed how much tension he had been under:

On the afternoon of March 12, to the peal of bells, Hitler crossed the border at his birthplace, Braunau. Four hours later, he passed flower-decked villages and hundreds of thousands of persons lining the streets to enter Linz. Just outside the city line the Austrian ministers Seyss-Inquart and Glaise-Horstenau awaited him; with them was Heinrich Himmler, who had gone to Vienna the previous night to begin purging the country of “traitors to the people and other enemies of the State.” With palpable emotion Hitler delivered a brief address from the balcony of the town hall to a crowd waiting in the darkness below him. In the speech he evoked once more the idea of his special mission:

Next morning he laid a wreath on the grave of his parents in Leonding.

Everything seems to indicate that up to this time Hitler had as yet made no specific decisions about the future of Austria. Presumably he wanted to wait to the last to see what the foreign reaction would be, to test out the chances, repercussions, and accidents of the new situation, confident that he could exploit them more rapidly than his antagonists. It would appear that he decided upon immediate Anschluss only under the impact of the triumphal ride from Braunau to Linz, the cheers, the flowers and the flags. This elemental delirium seemed to permit no alternatives. Late on the evening of March 13, in the Hotel Weinzinger in Linz, he signed the “law concerning the reunion of Austria with the German Reich.” One of those present reports that he was deeply moved. For a long time he remained quiet and motionless. Tears trickled down his cheeks. Finally he said, “Yes, the right political action saves blood.”⁷⁴

On this and the following day, when Hitler entered Vienna from the direction of Schönbrunn Palace amid cheering and the tolling of bells, he was enjoying the realization of his earliest dream. The two cities that had witnessed his failures, had disdained and humiliated him, at last lay at his feet in admiration, shame, and fear. All the aimlessness and impotence of those years were now vindicated, all his furious craving for compensation at last satisfied, when he stood on the balcony of the Hofburg and announced to hundreds of thousands in the Heldenplatz the “greatest report of a mission accomplished” in his life: “As Führer and Chancellor of the German Nation and of the Reich I hereupon report to History the entrance of my homeland into the German Reich.”

The scenes of enthusiasm amid which this “reunion” took place “mocked all description,” a Swiss newspaper wrote.⁷⁵ And although it is hard to determine how much of this clamor, how much of the flowers, the screaming and the tears, sprang from organized or spontaneous passion, there can be no doubt that the event stirred the deepest emotions of the nation. For the people who lined the streets for hours in Linz, Vienna, or Salzburg, this was the consummation of a longing for unity that had outlasted, as an elemental need, all the ancient dissensions, divisions and fraternal wars of the Germans. And it was out of this feeling that the people hailed Hitler as the man who had superseded Bismarck and brought his work to completion. The cry of “One People, One Reich, One Leader” was more than a clever slogan. That alone explains how not only the churches but also socialists like Karl Renner could let themselves be carried along by the euphoria of union.⁷⁶ The hope for an end of domestic political strife arose out of the same state of mind, though also from the existential anxiety of a nonviable republic. Added to such longings was the desire to have the powerful united Reich regain something of that brilliance that had dimmed since the end of the monarchy. Old Austria seemed to be returning in this prodigal son of Austria, however illegitimate and vulgar he might be.

In this aura of consummation and bliss the physical force that accompanied the event went unnoticed. “The Army was joined by standards of the SS detached units, 40,000 men of the police, and Death’s Head Formation Upper Bavaria as second wave,” the official journal of the High Command of the armed forces noted. These units instantly set up a system of rigorous repression. It would be mistaking Hitler’s psychology to imagine that his resentments were forgotten for any length of time in the euphoria of triumph. And in fact the uninhibited savagery with which his squads now openly fell upon opponents and so-called racial enemies betrays something of his unforgotten hatred for Vienna. The sometimes ferocious excesses, particularly of the Austrian Legion, which had just returned from Germany, nakedly revealed what might be called the “Oriental” element that Hitler had introduced into German anti-Semitism; now he was unleashing it in followers of his own origin and his own emotional structure. “With bare hands,” Stefan Zweig wrote, “university professors were compelled to scrub the streets. Devout, white-bearded Jews were dragged into the temple and forced by yowling youths to do knee bends and shout ‘Heil Hitler’ in chorus. Innocent persons were caught en masse in the streets like rabbits and dragged off to sweep out the latrines of the SA barracks. All the morbidly filthy hate fantasies orgiastically conceived in the course of many nights were released in broad daylight.”⁷⁷ A wave of refugees poured into non-German Europe. Stefan Zweig, Sigmund Freud, Walter Mehring, Carl Zuckmayer, and many others fled from Austria. The writer Egon Friedell threw himself out of his window. Nazi terror manifested itself in all openness. But these circumstances did not weigh heavily in the outside world. The impression of rejoicing was too strong, the German reference to the Wilsonian principle of self-determination too irrefutable. That principle was confirmed triumphantly with the predictable 99 per cent of the votes in the regime’s fifth and last plebiscite on March 16. The Western powers indicated that they were disturbed; but France was deeply embroiled in her domestic problems, and England refused to give France or Czechoslovakia any guarantees. England also rejected a proposal by the Soviet Union for a conference to prevent further aggression on the part of Hitler. Chamberlain and the European conservatives continued to regard Hitler as the commandant of their anti-Communist bulwark, who must be won over by generosity and simultaneously tamed. The Left, meanwhile, reassured itself with the thought that Schuschnigg was nothing but the representative of a clerico-Fascist regime ripe for overthrow, and one that had formerly fired upon workers. The League of Nations did not even hold a meeting on the question; the world by now was not bothering about mere gestures of indignation. Its conscience, as Stefan Zweig wrote bitterly, “only growled a little before it forgot and forgave.”⁷⁸

Hitler stayed in Vienna less than twenty-four hours; it is hard to say whether his bias against the hated “sybaritic city” or his impatience prompted him to return so hurriedly. In any case, the effortlessness with which he had achieved this major victory encouraged him to push at once toward the next goal. Only two weeks after the annexation of Austria he met with Konrad Henlein, the leader of the Sudeten Germans, and declared his readiness to solve the Czechoslovakian question within the foreseeable future. Another four weeks later, on April 21, he discussed with General Keitel the plan for a military attack upon Czechoslovakia. Out of regard for world opinion he rejected an “attack out of a clear sky, without any pretext or possibility of justification.” He would prefer a “lightning-like action on the basis of an incident,” for example an “assassination of the German Ambassador in conjunction with an anti-German demonstration.”

As with Austria, Hitler was again able to utilize the inherent contradictions of the Versailles system. For Czechoslovakia was one grand negation of the principle upon which it was supposedly based. Its creation had been far less connected with the right of self-determination than with France’s strategical interests. For Czechoslovakia was a small multinational state in which one minority was pitted against the majority of all the other minorities, who were all manifesting that egotistic nationalism it had itself shown during its own struggle for independence. Chamberlain had once denigratingly called it not a state but “scraps and patches.” The comparatively high degree of freedom and political participation that the government granted its citizenry did not suffice to control the centrifugal forces operating within it. The Polish ambassador in Paris spoke bluntly of a “country condemned to death.”⁷⁹

By all the laws of politics there was bound to be a clash with Czechoslovakia as German strength grew. The 3.5 million Sudeten Germans had felt oppressed ever since the foundation of the republic, and they attributed their economic distress, which was in fact very serious, less to structural causes than to the “alien rule” of Prague. Both Hitler’s seizure of power and the elections of May, 1935, when Konrad Henlein’s Sudeten German party had become the strongest political party in the country, enormously swelled their self-assurance, and the annexation of Austria had inspired massive demonstrations under the slogan of “Home to the Reich.” As early as 1936 an anonymous letter writer from the Sudetenland has assured Hitler that he looked upon him “as a Messiah”; and such hysterical expectations were now stirred up by wild speeches, provocations, and clashes. Hitler had coached Henlein to constantly present Prague with such high demands that they would “be unacceptable to the Czech government.” He encouraged him to adopt a challenging attitude. He thus laid the grounds for that crisis which would require him to intervene. In the meantime, he let events take their course. Early in May he traveled with a large retinue of ministers, generals, and party functionaries on a state visit to Italy, where Mussolini now had to try to surpass Hitler’s hospitality. The backdrop of the Eternal City was festively decorated with flags, fasces, and swastikas. The houses along the railroad line were freshly painted, and near San Paolo Outside the Walls a special station had been erected, at which the King and Mussolini received Hitler. Hitler noticed, however, with some irritation that protocol required Mussolini to keep in the background. Hitler himself, as head of state, was the guest of Victor Emmanuel III, whom he contemptuously called “King Nutcracker.” Right from the start he offended the King by small rudenesses, such as entering the royal carriage before him. He also objected to the reactionary and arrogant manners of the court. Long afterward, he justified his later acts of suspicion against his Axis partner on these grounds.

On the other hand, the reception and the tributes paid him by Mussolini deeply impressed him. In resplendent parades the new passo romano—the Roman parade steps—was displayed. At a naval show in Naples one hundred submarines simultaneously vanished beneath the waves, to reappear a few minutes later with ghostly precision. Extensive tours enabled Hitler to satisfy his aesthetic inclinations, and years later he tended to extol the “magic of Florence and Rome.” How beautiful Tuscany and Umbria were, he would exclaim. In contrast to Moscow, Berlin, or even Paris, where the architectonic proportions lacked harmony both in details and overall impression, and everything had just bypassed him, Rome had “really moved” him.

Politically, too, the trip proved a success. Since Mussolini’s visit to Germany the Axis had been subjected to considerable strains. The annexation of Austria had reawakened the old anxieties about South Tyrol. But Hitler now succeeded in allaying these. In particular, his speech during the state banquet in the Palazzo Venezia, a display both of style and psychological instinct, brought about a shift. Ciano, who mentioned an initial mood of “universal hostility,” noted with amazement the sympathy Hitler was able to win by speeches and personal contacts. The city of Florence, Ciano commented, had “welcomed the Führer with heart and head.”⁸⁰ When Hitler boarded the train for Germany on May 10, concord appeared restored, and Mussolini shook his hand vigorously, saying, “Henceforth no force will be able to separate us.”

In the few political conversations held during those days Hitler had gathered that Italy would grant Germany a free hand toward Czechoslovakia. The Western powers, too, had meanwhile called upon Prague to meet the Sudeten Germans halfway. And Hitler informed those powers that the Czechoslovakian question was soluble. The British ambassador in Berlin had told Ribbentrop that Germany would win all along the line.⁸¹ Hitler was therefore all the more surprised when the Prague government, troubled by rumors about German preparations for an attack, ordered partial mobilization on May 20, and England and France explicitly came out with references to their obligations to aid Czechoslovakia. They were, moreover, supported by the Soviet Union.

A conference was hastily called at the Berghof on May 22. Hitler felt forced to halt his preparations. He had occasionally mentioned the fall of 1938 as the moment for his action against Czechoslovakia; now it appeared that his timetable was being upset. His indignation mounted when the international press hailed the “May crisis” as finally an effective check to Germany. As had happened during the comparable humiliation of August, 1932, he remained hidden in his mountain retreat for several days, and quite probably the same cravings for revenge, the same wild fantasies of destruction, moved him now. In later years he repeatedly referred to the “grave loss of prestige” he had suffered during those days. Finally, in his neurotic fear of showing signs of weakness, he thought it appropriate to inform both Mussolini and the British Foreign Secretary in special messages that nothing could be achieved with him “by threats, pressure or force,” that in fact these “would certainly only accomplish the opposite and make him hard and unyielding.” On May 28 he came to Berlin for a conference with his top people in military and foreign affairs. With a map before him, he expatiated with growing fury on how he intended to wipe out Czechoslovakia. His former military directive for “Operation Green” had begun with the sentence: “It is not my intention to smash Czechoslovakia by military means in the immediate future without provocation….” The new version ran: “It is my unalterable decision to smash Czechoslovakia by military action in the near future.”⁸² In a defiant reaction he set the date for precisely October 1.

He now bent every effort to increase the tensions. At the end of June maneuvers were held near the Czech border, while work on the west wall at the French border was pushed at an accelerated pace. With Henlein carrying out instructions to seek confrontation, Hitler cautiously stirred the greed of Czechoslovakia’s other neighbors, especially the Hungarians and the Poles. The Western powers pressed the Prague government for more and more concessions. As if the one gesture of resolution had consumed all their strength, they returned to their former compliance, and the policy of appeasement now moved toward its climax. Honorable or understandable though their motives might be, that policy suffered equally from ignorance of Hitler and ignorance of the special problems of Central Europe. The appeasers had a deep distaste for the complex animosities in Central Europe, and they capitulated before the impossibility of threading their way through the labyrinth of ethnic, religious, national, racial, cultural, and historical grievances. For Nevile Henderson the Czechs were “the damned Czechs.” Lord Rothermere stated in the Daily Mail that the Czechs were of no concern to Englishmen. Chamberlain summed up the fundamental mood when he spoke of “a quarrel in a faraway country between people of whom we know nothing!” The mission of inquiry in Czechoslovakia on which the British government had dispatched Lord Runciman in August was an admission of indifference.⁸³

It is against this background that we must see the fateful editorial in the London Times of September 7, which proposed ceding the Sudetenland to the Reich. For after many weeks in which the crisis continued to worsen of its own accord, while Hitler seemingly restrained himself, the whole world was awaiting the speech with which he would wind up the Nuremberg party rally on September 12. It is quite possible that the many evidences of the spirit of appeasement contributed to the exceptionally violent and challenging tenor of that speech. But the unforgotten humiliation of May, to which he repeatedly reverted at length, was also a factor. He spoke of “infamous deception,” of “terroristic blackmail” and the “criminal aims” of the Prague government. He once more worked himself up over the imputation that he had retreated in the face of his opponents’ resolute posture, and he denounced their preparations for war. He had now drawn the necessary conclusions, he continued, which would permit him to strike back at once in the future. “In no circumstances shall I be willing any longer to regard with endless tranquillity a continuation of the oppression of German compatriots in Czechoslovakia…. The Germans of Czechoslovakia are neither defenseless nor deserted. Let this be noted.”

The speech was the signal for an uprising in the Sudetenland that cost many lives. In Germany a period of hectic military activity began. Blackout drills were held and automobiles requisitioned. For a moment war seemed inevitable. Then events took a surprising turn. Prime Minister Chamberlain, in a message dispatched on the night of September 13, declared his willingness to come to any desired place, without consideration of questions of prestige, for a personal discussion with Hitler. “I propose to come across by air and am ready to start tomorrow,” Chamberlain wrote.

Hitler felt exceedingly flattered, although the proposal involved slowing down on the collision course on which he had been hurtling. “I was thunderstruck,” he later declared. But the insecurity that all his life had made him incapable of gestures of magnanimity continued to govern his behavior. His guest was almost seventy and about to enter a plane for the first time in his life. But Hitler was incapable of meeting Chamberlain halfway. He proposed Berchtesgaden as the place for the conference. When the British Prime Minister arrived at the Berghof on the afternoon of September 15, after having traveled for nearly seven hours, Hitler went no farther to meet him than the top step of the large outside staircase. Once again he had placed General Keitel intimidatingly among the members of his entourage. When Chamberlain expressed the desire for a private conversation, Hitler agreed, but with the probable intention of further tiring the old man poured out upon him a rambling review of the European situation, Anglo-German relations, his own degree of resolution, and his successes. Despite his stoic equanimity, Chamberlain undoubtedly saw through Hitler’s tricks and maneuvers, and in his report to the cabinet two days later he referred to him as “the commonest little dog” he had ever seen.⁸⁴

When Hitler at last came round to talking about the current crisis, he demanded nothing less than the annexation of the Sudeten territory. Chamberlain interrupted to ask whether he would be content with that or whether he wanted to dismember Czechoslovakia entirely. Hitler replied by referring to Polish and Hungarian demands. But all that did not interest him, Hitler declared, nor was the present the time to discuss the technical arrangements: “Three hundred Sudeten Germans have been killed, and that cannot go on, that has to be settled at once. I am determined to settle it; I don’t care whether or not there is a world war.”

Chamberlain responded testily that he did not see why it had been necessary for him to take so long a journey if Hitler had nothing to say to him except that he had decided on force anyhow. Hitler then became somewhat more conciliatory. He would “today or tomorrow look into the question of whether a peaceful solution of the question was still possible.” The decisive factor, he continued, would be “whether England is now ready to consent to a detachment of the Sudeten German region on the basis of the right of peoples to self-determination; with regard to which he [the Führer] must remark that this right of self-determination had not recently been invented by him in 1938 especially for the Czechoslovakian question, but had been created in 1918 in order to establish a moral basis for the changes resulting from the Versailles Treaty.” They agreed that Chamberlain would fly back to England for a cabinet session to discuss this question; in the meantime, Hitler promised, he would take no military measures.

As soon as Chamberlain had departed, Hitler propelled the crisis and his own preparations further. The obliging attitude of the British Prime Minister had thrown him into consternation, for it threatened to frustrate his further plans for annexing the whole of Czechia. But in the hope that Chamberlain would be overruled by his own cabinet, by the French, or by the Czechs, Hitler continued his arrangements. While the German press unleashed a savage campaign of atrocity stories, he set up a Sudeten German Free Corps “for the protection of the Sudeten Germans and the continuance of disturbances and clashes.” It was placed under the leadership of Konrad Henlein, who had fled to Germany. Hitler also urged Hungary and Poland to make territorial demands upon Prague, while also encouraging the Slovaks in their efforts to secure autonomy. Finally, in order to stir clashes on a larger scale, he had members of the Sudeten German Free Corps occupy the cities of Eger and Asch.

He was consequently stunned when Chamberlain, at their second meeting in the Hotel Dreesen in Godesberg on September 22, brought word that England, France, and even Czechoslovakia acquiesced to the cession of the Sudeten territory. Moreover, in order to remove Germany’s fears that Czechoslovakia might be used as the “tip of a lance” against the flank of the Reich, the British Prime Minister proposed that the existing treaties of alliance between France, the Soviet Union, and Czechoslovakia be dissolved. Instead, an international guarantee would assure the country’s independence. All this was so astonishing that Hitler asked once more whether this offer had the approval of the Prague government. Chamberlain replied that it had. There was a brief, embarrassed pause before Hitler answered quietly: “I am very sorry, Mr. Chamberlain, that I can now no longer enter into these matters. After the developments of the past few days this solution will no longer do.”

Chamberlain showed his vexation. He asked angrily what circumstances had meanwhile changed the situation. Hitler once more evaded an answer by referring to the demands of the Hungarians and the Poles, then indulged in denunciations of the Czechs, lamented the sufferings of the Sudeten Germans, until at last he found the saving obstacle and immediately seized upon it: “It is vital to act quickly. The decision must be made in a few days…. The problem must be settled once and for all by October 1, completely settled.”

After three hours of fruitless bargaining, Chamberlain returned to the Hotel Petersberg across the Rhine. When an exchange of letters likewise proved fruitless, he asked for a written memorandum on the German demands, and announced that he was leaving. Hitler, State Secretary von Weizsäcker has related, “clapped his hands as if he had witnessed a successful entertainment” when these events were described to him. The news of the Czechoslovak mobilization, which exploded right in the middle of the chaotic, highly emotional concluding conversations, intensified the sense of approaching disaster. Nevertheless, Hitler now seemed ready to make a few trivial concessions, while Chamberlain showed signs of giving up and made it plain that he would no longer permit himself to be used by Hitler as a mediator.

The British cabinet met on Sunday, September 25, to discuss Hitler’s memorandum. It flatly rejected the new demands and promised the French government British support in case of a military involvement with Germany. Prague, too, which had accepted the Berchtesgaden conditions only under the utmost pressure, now regained its freedom of action and rejected Hitler’s proposals. Preparations for war began in England and France.

In the face of this unexpected intransigence by the opposing side, Hitler once more adopted the role of a man enraged beyond all bearing. “There’s no point at all in going on with negotiations,” he shouted at Sir Horace Wilson on September 26. “The Germans are being treated like niggers; nobody dares to treat even Turkey this way. On October 1 I’ll have Czechoslovakia where I want her.”⁸⁵ Then he set a deadline for Wilson: he would hold back his divisions only if the Godesberg memorandum were accepted by the Prague government by 2 P.M. on September 28. In the past several days he had vacillated constantly between a safe partial success and a risky total triumph that far better suited his radical temperament. He would sooner conquer Prague than receive Karlsbad and Eger as a gift. The tensions racking him during these days were discharged in the famous speech in the Berlin Sportpalast, by which he once again aggravated the crisis, while at the same time contrasting it with the tempting idyl of a continent at last entering a period of tranquillity:

Scornfully, he pointed out the contradictions between the principle of self-determination and the reality of the multinational State of Czechoslovakia. In describing the course of the crisis he again put himself into the dramatic role of the offended party, cried out against the terror in the Sudetenland, and in giving refugee figures allowed himself to be carried far beyond facts:

Once again he gave assurances that he was not interested in wiping out or annexing Czechoslovakia: “We want no Czechs!” he shouted, and as he came to his peroration worked himself up into a state of ecstasy. Eyes raised to the roof of the hall, fired by the greatness of the hour, the cheering of the masses, and his own paroxysm, he ended on a rapturous note:

Storms of applause followed, and while Hitler, bathed in sweat, glassyeyed, sat down, Goebbels sprang up. “One thing is sure: 1918 will never be repeated!” he shouted. William Shirer observed from the balcony the way Hitler looked up at Goebbels “as if those were the words which he had been searching for all evening and hadn’t quite found. He leaped to his feet and with a fanatical fire in his eyes that I shall never forget brought his right hand, after a grand sweep, pounding down on the table, and yelled with all the power of his mighty lungs: la!’ Then he slumped into his chair exhausted.”⁸⁶ That evening Goebbels coined the slogan: Führer befiehl, wir folgen! (“Führer command, we obey!”) The masses went on chanting it long after the end of the meeting. As Hitler departed, they began to sing Der Gott, der Eisen wachsen Hess, a combat song repudiating subjection.

Still inspired by the heat and the hysteria of the previous night, Hitler once again received Sir Horace Wilson next day at noon. If his demands were rejected he would destroy Czechoslovakia, he threatened; and when Wilson replied that England would intervene militarily if France found herself compelled to hasten to the aid of Czechoslovakia, Hitler declared he could merely note the fact: “If France and England strike, let them do so. It is a matter of complete indifference to me. I am prepared for every eventuality. It is Tuesday today, and by next Monday we shall all be at war/’⁸⁷ That same day he ordered additional mobilization measures.

But the afternoon of September 27 again dampened his euphoria. In order to test and increase the populace’s enthusiasm for war, Hitler had ordered the second motorized division to pass through the capital on its way from Stettin to the Czechoslovak border and to roll down the broad East-West axis, through Wilhelmstrasse past the chancellery. Perhaps he hoped the military spectacle would bring people pouring into the streets and awaken a fighting spirit which, whipped up by a last appeal from the chancellery balcony, could be converted into a general “cry for violence.” What actually happened has been recorded by the American journalist William Shirer in his diary:

The sobering effect of this incident was reinforced by a flood of bad news indicating that France’s, England’s, and Czechoslovakia’s preparations for war were going further than expected and the strength of these Allies evidently surpassed by a good deal Germany’s potentialities. Prague alone had mobilized a million men and together with France would be able to commit three times as many troops as Germany. In London air raid shelters were being dug and hospitals evacuated. The population of Paris was leaving the city in droves. War seemed inevitable. In the course of the day Yugoslavia, Rumania, Sweden, and the United States issued warnings declaring in favor of Germany’s adversaries. And since the deadline Hitler had set expired in a few hours, the either-or mood in the chancellery began to swing around. During the late evening hours of September 27 Hitler started to dictate a letter to Chamberlain that struck a definitely conciliatory tone, offering a formal guarantee for the continued existence of Czechoslovakia and ending with an appeal to reason. But in the meantime other things had been happening which promised to give developments an unexpected twist at the last moment.

A plot had been forming and had made considerable progress in the course of the preceding year. The conspirators were a small but influential group, for the first time people from all political camps. Their joint initial purpose had been to prevent war; but the boldness with which Hitler was heading toward a conflict caused them to raise their own sights, until they arrived at plans for assassination and rebellion. The motive force and the middleman for all the groups was the head of the Central Section of the Abwehr (Army Counterintelligence), Lieutenant Colonel Hans Oster. If it is true that German military tradition has always been entirely divorced from political opposition, and that the German character, too—as Bernardo Attolico, the Italian ambassador in Berlin, remarked at the time—lacks all conspiratorial qualities such as patience, knowledge of human nature, psychology, tact, or the capacity for hypocrisy, then Oster was one of the exceptions. A curious mixture of morality and cunning, ingenuity, psychological calculation and loyalty to principles, he had early taken a critical attitude toward Hitler and Nazism. For some time he had tried vainly to persuade his fellow soldiers to share his views. The officer corps was a group of narrow specialists wedded to inaction. But they finally began to stir when they could no longer blink at the fact that Hitler was headed toward war, and when the Fritsch affair had roused their caste pride. Other groups, too, began to be mobilized; and Oster consistently drew them in. Covered by the apparatus of the Abwehr and its chief, Admiral Canaris, he succeeded in forming a widely ramified resistance group.

The resistance had realized that a totalitarian regime, once entrenched, could be overturned only by the combined action of internal and external enemies. On this principle, representatives of the German opposition made virtual pilgrimages to Paris and London, trying to contact influential figures. Early in March, 1938, Carl Goerdeler was in Paris urging the French government to take an uncompromising position on the Czechoslovakian question. A month later he set out once more, but both times he received only noncommittal replies. His visit to London brought similar results. It throws significant light upon the complex of problems involved in this and subsequent missions that Sir Robert Vansittart, chief diplomatic advisor to the British Foreign Secretary, exclaimed in consternation to his German visitor that what he was saying was actual treason to his country.⁸⁹

Much the same reception was accorded Ewald von Kleist-Schwenzin, a conservative politician who had long ago retreated in disgust to his Pomeranian estates, but now used his connections with England to urge the British government to stiffen its resistance to Hitler’s expansionist plans. Hitler would not be content with the Anschluss of Austria, he warned; there was reliable information that his plans aimed far beyond the annexation of Czechoslovakia and that he was striving for nothing less than world dominion. In the summer of 1938 von Kleist himself went to London. Chief of Staff Ludwig Beck had given him a kind of assignment: “Bring me certain proof that England will fight if Czechoslovakia is attacked, and I will put an end to this regime.”⁹⁰

Two weeks after von Kleist, the industrialist Hans Böhm-Tettelbach went to London on the same mission; and no sooner was he back from his trip than several new efforts were undertaken on the part of a resistance group in the Foreign Office headed by State Secretary von Weizsäcker, who used Embassy Councillor Theo Kordt in London as his intermediary. On September 1 Weizsäcker himself asked Danzig High Commissioner Carl Jacob Burckhardt to urge the British government to use “unambiguous language” toward Hitler. Probably the most effective step, he told Burckhardt, would be to send a “blunt, plainspoken Englishman, a general with a riding crop, for instance.” That might make Hitler sit up and listen. “At the time Weizsäcker spoke with the candor of a desperate man who is risking everything on the last card!” Burckhardt wrote at the time.

Meanwhile, Oster was pressing Theo Kordt’s brother Erich, who worked in the Foreign Ministry as chief of the Ministeramt, to somehow produce threats of intervention from London. The problem was to make London use the kind of language that would impress a “half-educated and ruffianly dictator.” A flood of information and warnings about Hitler’s intentions poured into London and Paris. All to no avail. Although such envoys as von Kleist had told Vansittart that they were coming with, as it were, “a rope around their necks,” all pleas were ignored. The appeasers were too eager to make concessions, or too suspicious, or crassly uncomprehending. A high-echelon British intelligence service officer responded to the initiative of a German staff officer, who had come to London as “a damned impudence,” and Vansittart’s astonished remark about treason demonstrated how hard it was for these people of fixed ideas to grasp the conspirators’ motives.

To be sure, some of these emissaries did not exactly make a good case for themselves. Some showed monarchist tendencies or made revisionist demands not unlike Hitler’s. The German conservatives and the army circles, for whom almost all the emissaries were speaking, were also under suspicion of having kept their traditional openness toward the East. For England and France, there was an odor of faint unsavoriness about that lot: there had, after all, been the Rapallo treaty (of rapprochement between Russia and Germany in 1922) and all those years of co-operation between the Reichswehr and the Red Army, which had persisted up to the time Hitler put an end to it. It was therefore inevitable that a good many of the foreign diplomats should think that the reactionary monarchist forces of old Germany, the Junkers and the militarists, were reforming in the resistance movement. Thus the choice looked like “Hitler or the Prussians,” and few were prepared to opt for the spirit of yesterday as against the crude but at least uncompromisingly Western-oriented dictator. “Who will guarantee that Germany will not become Bolshevistic afterwards?” Chamberlain retorted when French Chief of Staff Gamelin spoke to him on that dramatic September 26 of the plans of the German resistance movement. What Chamberlain meant was that Hitler’s guarantees were more reliable than those of the German conservatives. Once again it was the old anti-Russian bias, the nightmare of the West, which Napoleon on St. Helena had evoked more than a century earlier and which French Premier Daladier now quoted anxiously: “The Cossacks will rule Europe.”

Oppositionist activities at home ran parallel to the efforts abroad. In the nature of things these activities were conducted primarily by the military. In a series of memoranda of increasing sharpness, Ludwig Beck tried to oppose Hitler’s determination for war. He was most emphatic in his memorandum of July 16, which once again warned against the perils of a major conflict, referred to the persistent weariness of the German population, and underlined Germany’s meager defensive strength to the West. Beck summed up all the political, military, and economic objections in the conclusion that Germany would in no way be able to survive the “life and death” struggle which was bound to follow from Hitler’s challenging behavior. Simultaneously Beck urged Field Marshal Brauchitsch to persuade the higher officers to act collectively. He wanted them to stage a kind of “general strike of the generals” and force an end to the preparations for war by threatening to resign in a body.

Brauchitsch at last seemed to yield to Beck’s expostulations. He convoked a conference of generals on August 4, at which he had Beck’s July memorandum read aloud and called on General Adam to report on the weakness of the west wall. By the end of the conference almost everyone present had been brought around to Beck’s point of view. Only Generals Reichenau and Busch raised a few objections. Brauchitsch himself, on the other hand, declared his complete agreement. But to Beck’s astonishment he did not make the speech that had been drafted by Beck and was to culminate in a call for a joint protest. Instead, he had Beck’s memorandum presented to Hitler, thus exposing his chief of staff. When on August 18 Hitler, at a conference in Jüterbog, announced that during the next few weeks he would solve the Sudeten question by force, Beck resigned.

Like Brauchitsch’s perfidy, this resignation was a product of the characteristic timidities of the German military leadership. But it was also a reaction, and perhaps an understandable one, to the success Hitler was having with his aggressive foreign policy. Beck gave up his struggle partly because it had proved impossible to extract more resolute language from the Western powers. Unless the British Prime Minister or the French Premier were ready to stand up to Hitler, the German resistance was bound to be halfhearted.

Nevertheless, under Beck’s successor, General Halder, the conspirators did not suspend their efforts. Even as he assumed office, Halder told Brauchitsch that he rejected Hitler’s war plans just as firmly as his predecessor and was determined “to utilize every opportunity for the struggle against Hitler.” Halder was no jrondeur; rather, he was the typical meticulous, sober General Staff officer. But Hitler, whom he hated in a rather special way, denouncing him as a “criminal,” “madman,” and “bloodsucker,” left him no choice. He himself spoke of the “compulsion to opposition,” and called it a “terrible and agonizing experience.” More coolheaded than Beck, and more consistent, he immediately expanded the ratiocinations of the conspirators into a plan for a coup d’état. On Oster’s suggestion he negotiated with Hjalmar Schacht and had concluded all the preparations before September 15.⁹¹

The plan was keyed to the outbreak of war. At the moment war was declared a sudden coup would be led by General von Witzleben, commander of the Berlin defense district. Hitler and a number of leading functionaries of the regime would be arrested and subsequently brought to trial in order to expose to the whole world the Nazis’ aggressive aims. In this way the participants hoped to avoid creating a new stab-in-the-back legend and to win support for their undertaking against an enormously popular Hitler, whose popularity was at this moment further swelled by nationalistic fervor. Thus they hoped to avert the danger of civil war. What counted was not the ideas and moral categories of a small elite, Halder thought, but the assent in principle of the population. Reichsgerichtsrat Hans von Dohnanyi, a high official in the judiciary, had been keeping a secret file since 1933 in preparation for a trial of Hitler. Oster had also drawn the police commissioner of Berlin, Count Helldorf, into the plot, and the vice-commissioner, Count Fritz-Dietlof von der Schulenburg. He had established close contact with various commanders in Potsdam, Landsberg an der Warthe, and Thuringia, with such leading Socialists as Wilhelm Leuschner and Julius Leber, and with Dr. Karl Bonhoeffer, psychiatric director of Berlin’s Charité Hospital, who in one variant of the putsch plan was to function as chairman of a committee of doctors who would declare Hitler mentally ill. Meanwhile, Friedrich Wilhelm Heinz, former leader of the Stahlhelm, was planning a kind of “conspiracy within the conspiracy.” He had been assigned the task of recruiting young army officers, workers, and students to reinforce the shock troop of the army corps staff headquarters, which at the proper moment was to invade the chancellery. But Heinz considered the idea of trying Hitler and the plan of incarcerating him in a mental hospital completely unrealistic. Hitler alone, he told Oster, was stronger than Witzleben with his entire army corps. Consequently, he gave his men secret instructions not to arrest Hitler but to shoot him down at close quarters without more ado.⁹²

Thus everything was prepared, more thoroughly and with seemingly greater chances of success than ever again. Heinz’s shock troop, well provided with arms and explosives, was in readiness in private houses in Berlin. All military and police measures had been arranged for. Plans for the smooth take-over of the radio were ready, and proclamations to the populace drafted. Halder had announced that the signal to strike would be given the moment Hitler issued the marching order against Czechoslovakia. Everyone was waiting.

With the London declaration of September 26 that in case of an attack on Czechoslovakia England would take her place at France’s side, the other side at last seemed to have taken that resolute posture that was so essential to the conspirators’ plans. In the course of September 27 they even succeeded in drawing the hesitating Brauchitsch into the operation. At noon Hitler issued readiness orders for the first wave of attacks and a few hours later ordered the mobilization of nineteen divisions. General mobilization was expected for the following day at 2 P.M. Erich Kordt was going to insure that the big double door behind the guard at the entrance to the chancellery was opened. Toward noon Brauchitsch went to hear Hitler’s decision. Witzleben’s group waited impatiently in the defense district headquarters on Hohenzollerndamm; the general himself was visiting Halder at army High Command headquarters. Heinz’s shock troop awaited orders in its quarters. At this point, with all in readiness, a courier brought word to Chief of Staff Halder that Hitler had, on Mussolini’s mediation, consented to a softer line and had agreed to a conference in Munich.

The news was a bombshell. Each of the participants in the plot instantly realized that the basis for the whole plan of action had been removed. Confusion and numbness gripped them all. Only Gisevius, one of the civilian conspirators, tried in a desperate torrent of words to persuade Witzleben to strike anyhow. The whole undertaking had been based too exclusively upon a single pivot in foreign policy; now, any chance for action was lost. This, strictly speaking, had been the crucial though perhaps inevitable dilemma of the project for a coup all along: it depended on certain moves of Hitler, on certain reactions of the Western powers. The conspirators were not mistaken about Hitler’s nature; their plan failed because they had not realized that England’s intentions had always been to give Hitler the chance, by concessions, “to be a good boy,” as Henderson put it. “We could not be as candid with you as you were with us,” Halifax regretfully told Theo Kordt after the Munich Conference.⁹³

The shock had reverberations that extended far beyond the moment. Merely the news of Chamberlain’s flight to Berchtesgaden had had a paralyzing effect on the conspirators; now the resistance as a whole suffered a collapse from which it never again really recovered. Granted that it had all along been burdened by scruples, conflicts of loyalty and problems with the oath of allegiance. Granted, too, that the participants, in their protracted nocturnal discussions and private soul-searchings, had repeatedly come up against the limits forged by upbringing and reinforced by habit: the limits where the call of conscience ended and overthrow of Hitler seemed like betrayal. The entire history of the German resistance displays this conflict, which robbed the actors of that ultimate resolution without which they could not succeed. But now, in addition, the conspirators were forced to the belief that Hitler could master any situation, that fortune was with him, that history was on his side.

“It would have been the end of Hitler,” Goerdeler wrote to an American friend at this time. And though this statement leaves open a number of questions, the prediction that immediately followed was fulfilled to the letter: “In shrinking from a small risk, Mr. Chamberlain made war inevitable. The English and the French people will now have to defend their freedom with arms, unless they prefer a slave’s existence.”⁹⁴

On the following day, toward 12:45 P.M. on September 29, the conference of the heads of government of England, France, Italy, and Germany began in Munich. Hitler had insisted on an immediate meeting because he was firmly determined to march into the Sudetenland on October 1. In order to synchronize policy with Mussolini, he went to Kufstein to meet II Duce; and there is every indication that at this time he was still half determined to wreck the conference so that he could after all force through a total triumph. At any rate, over a map he explained to Mussolini his plans for a blitzkrieg against Czechoslovakia and the subsequent campaign against France. He let himself be persuaded, much against his will, to postpone these plans for the present, but left no doubt about his intentions: “Either the conference is successful in a short time, or the solution will take place by force of arms.”⁹⁵

However, there was no need for such sharp alternatives. The game of the Western powers, especially England, was to let Hitler know that he could have the Sudetenland without war; all four powers had long since conceded the justice of his claim, and the meeting served solely to draw up the text of this agreement.⁹⁶ The absence of any differences of opinion, as well as the sudden convocation of the conference, were the reasons for its unusually smooth course. After the exchange of greetings Hitler preceded the other participants into the meeting hall of the newly built Führerbau on Munich’s Königsplatz. He dropped into one of the heavy armchairs around the low round table and invited his guests with a nervous gesture to take seats also. He was pale and excited, and initially copied Mussolini’s selfassured manner, talking, laughing, or looking grim when Mussolini did. Chamberlain seemed careworn and aristocratic, Daladier quiet and uncomfortable.

Right at the start Hitler categorically rejected the request that representatives of Czechoslovakia participate. The powers remained among themselves, and soon Daladier, to whom Hitler turned in particular, was complaining about “the pigheadedness of Benes” and the influence of the “warmongers in France.”⁹⁷ Gradually ambassadors and advisers entered the room and took up positions around the negotiating table as auditors. There was a constant coming and going as the conference repeatedly dissolved into a number of individual conversations. Early in the afternoon Mussolini had presented the draft of an agreement that in reality had been worked out the night before by Göring, Neurath, and Weizsäcker in order to anticipate Ribbentrop, who was pushing for military action. That draft was the basis for the Munich Agreement, which was signed that night, between 2:00 and 3:00 A.M. It provided for occupation of the Sudeten region between October 1 and 10; a commission consisting of representatives of the four powers and Czechoslovakia were to work out the details. England and France undertook to guarantee the integrity of the diminished republic. All the participants seemed content for a moment; only French Ambassador François-Poncet exclaimed with a touch of uneasiness: “Voilà comme la France traite les seuls alliés qui lui étaient restés fidèles.”⁹⁸ While secretaries and aides were busy making copies, the heads of state sat and stood around indecisively. Daladier had slumped exhausted into one of the armchairs; Mussolini chatted with Chamberlain. But Hitler, as one of the participants reported, stood motionless to one side, arms folded, staring into space.

His glumness continued throughout the next day. When Chamberlain called on him during the noon hours in his apartment on Prinzregentenstrasse, he was unusually monosyllabic and far from responding enthusiastically to Chamberlain’s proposal for a further agreement that they henceforth settle problems by consultation. His irritation increased when he learned that the populace had hailed the British Prime Minister with loud ovations as he drove through Munich. Clearly, the experience of two days before in Berlin was being repeated: the people wére not yet ready for the “first-class tasks” Hitler meant to set them. Chamberlain seemed to be the man of the hour.

But Hitler was upset not only by jealousy and the all too apparent apathy of the people toward the prospect of war. Under closer study his annoyance can be traced to far more complex causes. To be sure, the Munich Agreement was a personal triumph for him. Without the application of open force he had won an extensive area from a superior coalition. He had divested Czechoslovakia of its famous system of fortifications, dramatically improved his own strategic position, acquired new industries, and forced the hated President Benes into exile. In fact “in the history of Europe there had not been for centuries… such profound changes without war.”⁹⁹ To top it all, Hitler had won the approval of the selfsame great powers who were paying the piper. Once again he had created the classical Fascist constellation, the league between revolutionary force and established power. Significantly, shortly after the signing of the Munich Agreement, Czechoslovakia repudiated her pact with the Soviet Union and banned the Communist Party.

But all these triumphs seemed to Hitler too dearly bought. For he had been forced to set his signature to an agreement that could bind him, if not for the long run, yet long enough to upset his timetable and thus his grand design. He had wanted to march into Prague in the fall, just as he had marched into Vienna six months ago; and now he felt that he had been cheated out of both his timetable and the conqueror’s glory. Schacht heard him say: “That damned Chamberlain has spoiled my parade into Prague.” And in January, 1939, shaking his head in astonishment, he told the Hungarian Foreign Minister that he had not thought it possible “that Czechoslovakia would be served up to me by her friends.” As late as February, 1945, in those ruminations in the bunker, he discharged his rage against the “big capitalist philistines”: “We should have started the war in 1938. That was our last chance to keep it localized. But they yielded to us everywhere. Like cowards they gave in to all our demands. That actually made it difficult to seize the initiative for hostilities. We missed a unique opportunity at Munich.”¹⁰⁰

Back of all this there was also his old tendency to drive matters to the extreme, to try the great gamble with his back to the wall. The Munich Agreement had been too facile to satisfy his nerves. He despised quick solutions and found, as he put it, “the prospect of being able to buy oneself off cheaply… dangerous.” Again and again, his peculiar notions of fate overlaid his political sagacity. And apparently, from Munich on, he had determined how to deal with this refractory nation, which still resisted him in spite of all its cheering: he would bind it irrevocably to him by an extreme challenge sealed in blood.

Against this triple background of cool scheduling, the requirements of his nerves, and mythologizing conceptions of politics, Hitler became more and more bent on war. Chamberlain’s complaisance had taken him “in a sense by surprise,” he later almost apologized. He now felt nothing but comtempt for his opponents. Speaking to his generals he mocked the enemy as “little worms.” In a speech in Weimar on November 6 he alluded, with unmistakable reference to Chamberlain, to the “umbrella types of our former bourgeois party world,” and called the French Maginot Line the limes of a nation preparing to die.¹⁰¹

Hitler’s bellicosity scarcely accorded with the real relations of forces and can be viewed as a first sign of his incipient loss of contact with reality. For today it is generally accepted that in the fall of 1938 he would have survived an armed conflict for only a few days. The opinion of Allied and German military experts, the documents and statistics, permit no room for doubt. General Jodi declared at the Nuremberg trial: “It was entirely out of the question, with five fighting divisions and seven armored divisions in the western fortification, which was nothing but a large construction site, to keep 100 French divisions at bay. From a military point of view that was impossible.”¹⁰² The softness of the Western powers therefore seems all the more incomprehensible. Beyond all the practical reasons for the policy of appeasement, their conduct seems most convincingly explained as Hitler explained it, as a form of political resignation. The peculiar compound of agreement with Hitler, submission to blackmail and sheer bewilderment, might possibly explain their betrayal of solemn obligations to their allies. But they were also betraying traditional European values, inasmuch as Hitler proclaimed his hostility to those values in almost every one of his speeches, his decrees, and his actions. Oddly enough, the Western powers did not seem to have considered the long-range political repercussions, in particular, the devastating loss of prestige that Munich would inevitably produce. England and France lost almost all credibility. Henceforth their word, their pacts, seemed to be written in water; and soon other countries, especially those of Eastern Europe, began making their own deals with Hitler. But above all the Soviet Union did not forget that the Western powers had excluded it from Munich; and only four days after the conference the German ambassador in Moscow indicated that Stalin was “drawing conclusions” and would be reviewing his foreign policy.

Meanwhile, Chamberlain and Daladier had returned to their capitals. But instead of the outraged demonstrations they had expected, they were lustily cheered as though, a Foreign Office official commented, the people were “celebrating a great victory over an enemy, instead of the betrayal of a small ally.” Depressed, Daladier pointed to the cheering thousands and whispered: “The idiots!” Chamberlain, more naive and more optimistic than his French colleague, waved a sheet of paper in the air on his arrival in London and announced “peace in our time.” It is difficult in retrospect to empathize with the spontaneous feeling of relief that once more united Europe; it is difficult to summon up respect for the illusions of the time. In London the crowd in front of 10 Downing Street began singing “For He’s a Jolly Good Fellow.” Paris Soir offered Chamberlain “a patch of French soil” for fishing, and commented that it would be impossible “to imagine a more fruitful symbol of peace.”’¹⁰³ When, in the subsequent House of Commons debate, Winston Churchill began his speech with the words, “We have sustained a total unmitigated defeat,” there was a great outcry.

The German troops, in consonance with the agreement, moved into the Sudetenland. On October 3 Hitler crossed the former German frontier in a four-wheel-drive type of Mercedes. At the same time, Wenzel Jaksch, leader of the Sudeten German Social Democrats, flew to London. As was to be the practice in later years, the army units had been followed promptly by the Security Service and Gestapo squads in order to “begin at once with purging the liberated territories of Marxist traitors to the people and other enemies of the State.” Jaksch asked for visas and all kinds of aid for his threatened friends. Lord Runciman assured him the mayor of London was setting up a fund for the persecuted and that he personally would contribute. The London Times published photographs of the German troops marching into the Sudetenland amid a cascade of flowers and greeted by cheering crowds. But Editor in Chief Geoffrey Dawson refused to publish shots of those who were fleeing from these troops. Wenzel Jaksch was given no visas. The Poles and Hungarians now snatched sizable portions of the abandoned, mutilated country. The history of that autumn is replete with acts of blindness, egotism, weakness, and treachery. Those of Wenzel Jaksch’s friends who managed to hide out within the country were shortly thereafter handed over to Germany by the new Prague government.

Hitler’s vexation at the outcome of the Munich conference sharpened his impatience. Only ten days later he was after Keitel with a top secret list of questions about the military potentialities of the Reich. On October 21 he gave orders for the military “liquidation of the remainder of Czechoslovakia” and for “taking possession of the Memel region.” In a postscript dated November 24 he also ordered preparations for the occupation of Danzig. Simultaneously, he encouraged the Slovak nationalists to adopt the role of the Sudeten Germans in the new Czech republic and thus speed the further disintegration of Czechoslovakia from within.

He also embarked on a campaign for intensified psychological mobilization of the nation, for he had recently been given reason to doubt the public’s will. To be sure, there was great enthusiasm in Germany for the bloodless conquests. Hitler’s prestige had once again risen to dizzying heights. But he himself realized that the rejoicing held a. considerable degree of relief that war had been avoided. He found the pretext he needed when, early in November, a Jewish exile shot down Legation Secretary Ernst vom Rath in the German Embassy in Paris. Out of an assassination prompted by personal motives Hitler quickly constructed one of those “assaults of world Jewry” which he still counted on to rouse and unite the public. Solemn memorial services, complete with music by Beethoven and statements by all and sundry, were held even in schools and factories. For the last time the SA came forth in its once usual but long since abandoned role of exponent of blind popular fury. On the night of November 9, 1938, synagogues went up in flames all over Germany, Jewish homes were devastated, stores pillaged, nearly a hundred persons killed, and some 20,000 arrested. Das Schwarze Korps, the SS newspaper, was already advocating extermination “with fire and sword” as the “actual and final end of Jewry in Germany.”

But the inveterate bourgeois instincts of the populace could only take alarm at excesses supposedly produced by street mobs; this sort of thing revived memories of the years of disorder and lawlessness.¹⁰⁴ It was a further symptom of Hitler’s galloping loss of contact with reality that he could believe his own most powerful emotions would necessarily yield the most powerful psychological effect upon the people. The contrast between his own “Balkan” mania about the Jews and lukewarm German anti-Semitism was now growing more and more patent. Significantly, the campaign was successful only in Vienna.

The apathy of the masses drove him to increase his efforts. The period after the Munich conference was marked by an intensified propaganda drive, in which Hitler himself soon took part with mounting vehemence. An irritable speech at Saarbrücken on October 9, a Weimar speech on November 6, a speech in Munich on November 8, even the major summing up of 1938, compounding pride, hate, nervousness, and self-assurance, formed part of this campaign. In the latter he called for the “coherence of the racial body politic” and once more attacked Jewry, prophesying the “annihilation of the Jewish race in Europe.”

His secret addresses of the same period to German newspaper editors were motivated by the need to swing the press away from his tactics of pledging peace and appealing for reconciliation—whose bad effects he had observed in Berlin and Munich—to a tone of aggressive resolution. The speech was practically an order for psychological mobilization. Again and again, Hitler stressed the necessity of having behind him “a German people strong in faith, united, self-assured, confident.” At the same time he vented his wrath upon his critics and the seditious intellectuals:

The pace of events themselves, which Hitler deliberately accelerated after the Munich conference, also formed part of the process of psychological mobilization. At times the observer had to ask himself whether this was breathless politics or whether breathlessness was assuming political form. Week after week the pressures against defenseless Czechoslovakia increased from within and from without. On March 13 Hitler summoned the Slovak nationalist leader Tiso to Berlin and pressed him to defect from Prague. A day later, at a Parliament session in Bratislava, the Slovak Declaration of Independence was read aloud; it had been drafted by Ribbentrop and handed to Tiso already translated into Slovak. The evening of that same day Czech President Hacha, accompanied by Foreign Minister Chvalkovsky, arrived in Berlin. There he was put through a special ordeal which Hitler later gloatingly called “Háchaizing.” The guests were received with all the honors required by protocol; but only after a nerve-wracking waiting period, in the course of which they vainly tried to discover the subject to be negotiated, were they admitted to the chancellery. It was by then between one and two o’clock in the morning. Hacha, old and sickly, had to tramp wearily through the endless corridors and halls of the newly built chancellery before he reached Hitler, who sat at his desk in the semidarkness of a gigantic study illuminated only by a few bronze floor lamps. Beside him were the pompous Göring and once more Hitler’s bogeyman, General Keitel. The President’s opening remarks were steeped in the servility of a country fully aware of her own haplessness. The minutes of the meeting note:

When Hacha concluded this astonishing speech with the request that his people nevertheless be accorded the right to their own national existence, Hitler launched into one of his rambling monologues. He complained about the oft-demonstrated hostility of the Czechs, the impotence of the present government to control domestic conditions. He referred to the continuing Benes spirit, and finally heaped reproach on reproach upon his guests, who sat there silent and “as if turned to stone,” with “only their eyes… showing they were alive.” His patience was now exhausted, he continued.

This was the reason he had asked Hacha to come here. This invitation was the last kindness he would be able to show the Czech people…. The hours were passing. At six o’clock the troops would march in. He was almost ashamed to say that there was a German division to match every Czech division. The fact was that the military operation was no small one; it had been organized on a very liberal scale.

Hacha, in a virtually extinct voice, asked how with four hours at his disposal he could arrange to restrain the entire Czech nation from offering resistance. Hitler replied haughtily:

Dismissed from Hitler’s study shortly after two o’clock, Hacha and Chvalkovsky tried to get through to Prague by telephone. Göring pointed out that time was running out and his planes would soon be bombing the Czech capital. With rough good humor he began describing the destruction, when the President suffered a heart attack. For a moment the group standing around him feared the worst. “Tomorrow the whole world will be saying he was murdered during the night in the chancellery,” one of those present noted. But Dr. Morell, held in readiness by a careful stage manager, helped to revive the broken man. Thus the authorities in Prague were given their instructions not to resist the German invasion, and shortly before four o’clock in the morning Hacha signed the document of submission, by which he “placed the fate of the Czech people and country in the hands of the Führer of the German Reich.”

As soon as Hacha had left, Hitler lost all his customary control. Exuberantly he rushed into the room where his secretaries were sitting and invited them to kiss him. “Girls,” he cried, “Hacha has signed. This is the greatest day of my life. I shall be known as the greatest German in history.”¹⁰⁷ Two hours later his troops crossed the border. The first formations arrived in Prague, in a snowstorm, by nine o’clock. Once more cheering people were waiting on the sidewalks, but they were only a minority; the majority turned away or stood mute, tears of helplessness and rage in their eyes. That same evening Hitler himself entered the city and spent the night in Hradschin Palace. “Czechoslovakia,” he announced, drunk with victory, “has herewith ceased to exist.” It had all been the work of two days. When on March 18 the British and French ambassadors submitted protest notes in Berlin, Hitler had already set up the Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia. As a placatory gesture he placed at its head Konstantin von Neurath, then Minister of Foreign Affairs, now “protector” of Bohemia and Moravia, who was regarded as a moderate. He had arranged a protective treaty with Slovakia and was already on his way back to Berlin. It seemed as if Mussolini’s remark shortly before Munich was once again proving true: “The democracies exist to swallow toads.”

Nevertheless, the seizure of Prague ushered in the turning point. The Western powers were too deeply disillusioned; they felt hoodwinked, their good will and patience abused. As late as March 10, Chamberlain had told some journalists that the danger of war was abating and a new era of détente dawning. Now, on March 17, he spoke in Birmingham of a shock more severe than any before, referred to the many breaches of pledges inherent in the action against Prague, and finally asked: “Is this the end of an old adventure or is it the beginning of a new?” On the same day he recalled Ambassador Henderson from Berlin for an indefinite time. Lord Halifax, for his part, declared that he could well understand Hitler’s preference for bloodless triumphs, but the next time blood would have to be spilled.¹⁰⁸

But the occupation of Prague was a turning point only for Western policy. In the apologias of the appeasers, and in the attempts at selfexoneration by German accomplices of the regime, the argument constantly recurs that it was Hitler who changed with his entry into Prague; that only then had he set out on the road of injustice and radically expanded his valid revisionist aims; that after Prague it was no longer the right of self-determination but the glory of a conqueror that became his goal. We have since learned, however, how such considerations miss Hitler’s motives and intentions, and in fact the very core of his nature. He had long ago decided on his course. Prague was only a tactical problem for him, and the Moldau was certainly not his Rubicon.

And yet, the undertaking was an act of self-revelation. Colonel Jodi had once smugly noted, in the days of continuous triumphs in foreign policy: “This kind of politics is new for Europe.” In fact, the dynamic conjunction of threats, flatteries, pledges of peacefulness and acts of violence applied by Hitler was an unfamiliar, numbing experience; and the Western statesmen might well have been deceived for a while about Hitler’s true intentions. Lord Halifax confessed his own confusion when he compared trying to make out what Hitler was up to, to the groping of a blind man seeking a way across a swamp while everyone on the shores was shouting different warnings about the next danger zone. Hitler’s operation against Prague, however, had finally dispelled the fog. For the first time Chamberlain and his French counterparts seemed to begin to perceive what Hugenberg had had to realize: this man could not be controlled and tamed—except, perhaps, by force.

Prague signified another kind of turning point in Hitler’s career: it was, after almost fifteen years, his first grave mistake. Tactically, he had achieved his victories by his ability to give all situations an ambiguous character, so that his opponents’ front and their will to resist was splintered. Now for the first time he was acting in an unequivocal manner. Whereas until then he had always assumed dual roles and had played, as an antagonist, the part of a secret ally, or provoked conditions while alleging that he was opposing them, he now revealed his innermost nature without ambiguity. In Munich he had once more, although reluctantly, set up the “Fascist constellation,” that is to say, achieved a victory over one enemy with the help of the other. The assault on the Jews in November, 1938, seemed to be his first break with this formula. Prague wiped out any doubt that he was the universal enemy.

It was inherent in his tactics that the very first mistake was irreparable. Hitler himself later recognized the fateful significance of his seizing Prague. But his impatience, his arrogance, and his far-flung plans left him no choice. On the day after the occupation of Prague he ordered Goebbels to give the following instructions to the press: “The employment of the term ‘Greater German Empire’ is undesirable…(and) reserved for later occasions.” And, in April, when he was preparing to celebrate his fiftieth birthday, he ordered Ribbentrop “to invite a number of foreign guests, among them as many cowardly civilians and democrats as possible, and I will show them a parade of the most modern of all armed forces.”¹⁰⁹

Unleashing the War

From the spring of 1939 Hitler exhibited a noteworthy inability to break his own momentum. The infallible sense of tempo he had shown only a few years before, in the course of taking power, now began to desert him and to give way to a neurasthenic craving for sheer movement. Faced with the weakness and disunity of his antagonists on the European scene, he undoubtedly could have won all his revisionist demands and probably some of his more far-reaching Lebensraum plans by means of his tactic of enlisting the co-operation of the conservative powers. Now he abandoned the tactic. The regime’s propaganda announced that the Führer’s genius consisted in his ability to wait. But now, whether out of arrogance, whether corrupted by the effectiveness of “non-negotiable demands,” or whether out of frantic restiveness—Hitler no longer waited.

Only a week after the occupation of Prague he boarded the cruiser Deutschland in Swinemünde and sailed toward Memel. This small seaport on the northern frontier of East Prussia had been annexed by Lithuania in 1919, in the confusion of the immediate postwar period. A demand for its return was only a matter of time. But in order to lend dramatic verve and proof of his imperiousness to the process of recovering the city, Hitler informed the Lithuanian government in Vilna on March 21 that its envoys were to arrive in Berlin “tomorrow by special plane” to sign the protocol of cession. Meanwhile, he himself, with the reply still in doubt, set out for Memel. And while Ribbentrop “Háchaed” the Lithuanian delegation, Hitler—seasick and in ill humor—held two impatient radio conversations from on board the Deutschland. He demanded to know whether he would be able to enter the city peaceably or would have to force his way in with the ship’s guns. On March 23, toward half past one in the morning, Lithuania consented to the cession, and at noon Hitler once again held one of his loudly cheered entries into Memel.

Two days earlier Ribbentrop had summoned Josef Lipski, the Polish ambassador in Berlin, to meet with him, and had proposed negotiations on a comprehensive German-Polish settlement. Ribbentrop returned with some emphasis to demands he had made several times before, including the return of the Free City of Danzig and the building of an extraterritorial road and rail link across the Polish Corridor. In return he offered to extend the 1934 Nonaggression Pact for twenty-five years and to guarantee formally Poland’s borders. How seriously the offer was meant is evident from the simultaneous attempt to enlist Poland in the Anti-Comintern Pact. In general Ribbentrop’s overtures were aimed at striking a bargain with a “distinctly anti-Soviet tendency.” One draft of a Foreign Office note, for example, rather brazenly offered Warsaw, as its reward for increased cooperation, the prospect of receiving possession of the Ukraine. Following this line, Hitler, in a conversation with Brauchitsch on March 25 rejected a violent solution of the Danzig question but thought a military action against Poland under “specially favorable political preconditions” worth considering.

There was a reason for the curious indifference with which Hitler left open the question of conquest or alliance. Actually it was not Danzig he was really concerned about. The city served him as the pretext for arranging a dialogue and, as he hoped, a deal with Poland. With some justice he considered his offer generous; it gave Poland the prospect of a gigantic acquisition in return for a meager concession. For Danzig was indeed a German city; its separation from the Reich had been imposed by the Treaty of Versailles in order to satisfy a Polish need for prestige that had steadily ebbed with the passing years. In the long run, Poland could have hardly held on to the city. The demand for a connecting link to East Prussia was likewise a relatively fair effort to amend the decision that had separated East Prussia from the Reich. What Hitler really wanted was related to the ultimate grand goal of all his policies: the winning of new living space.

Among the essentials of his planned march of conquest was a common boundary with the Soviet Union. Until that was attained, Germany was cut off from the Russian steppes by a belt of countries extending from the Baltic to the Black Sea. One or several of these must place at his disposal the area for military deployment so that he could get at Russia. Otherwise the war could not be begun.

Theoretically, Hitler could meet this condition in three possible ways. He could win the intervening states by alliances; he could annex some of them; or he could let the Soviet Union annex some, thus moving her border up to Germany. In the course of the following months Hitler made use of all these options. The alertness and iciness with which he switched, while a speechless world looked on, from one to the other, showed him for the last time at the height of his tactical intelligence. After the occupation of Prague, which had so patently put the patience of the Western powers to a hard test, he appeared determined to evoke no new tensions for the time being and to return to the first method: finding an ally against the Soviet Union. For a serious conflict with the West was bound to endanger all his expansionist goals. Among the intervening countries, Poland seemed best suited to his plans. Poland was a country with an authoritarian government and strong anti-Communist, anti-Russian, and even anti-Semitic tendencies. Thus there were “solid common factors”¹¹⁰ on which an expansionist partnership under German leadership might be founded. Moreover, Hitler himself was partly responsible for Poland’s recent good relationship with Germany, additionally secured by a nonaggression pact.

Consequently, far more than an ordinary swap, far more than satisfaction of the regime’s desire to revise the terms of the Versailles Treaty depended on the Polish government’s reply to Ribbentrop’s proposals. For Hitler, his whole Lebensraum idea was at stake. It is this aspect which explains the obstinacy and the consistent radical spirit that he manifested on this question. He saw this as a question of all or nothing.

Poland, however, was extremely vexed by the German proposals. For they endangered the foundations of her whole previous policy and made her critical situation even more critical. The country had hitherto found safety by maintaining the strictest equilibrium between her two neighboring giants, Germany and Russia. Their temporary impotence in 1919 had made possible the establishment of a Polish state, and subsequently Poland had enlarged her territory at the expense of these two countries. And if the Poles had learned in the course of their long history that they had as much reason to fear the friendship of these two neighbors as their hostility—the lesson was now more important than ever. The German offer ran strictly counter to this fundament of Polish policy.

It was an exceedingly perilous situation that demanded more prudence and adaptability than a romantic people, which for centuries had felt abused, could possibly summon up. Faced with a choice between its two neighbors, Poland on the whole inclined slightly more toward Germany. But the new Germany was also more restive and greedy than a Soviet Union involved in internal power struggles, purges, and doctrinaire disputes. Polish Foreign Minister Josef Beck, a man given to intrigues and engaged in reckless juggling, complicated the situation still further by pressing ambitious plans for a “third Europe.” His idea was to establish a neutral block of powers, under Polish leadership, extending from the Baltic to the Hellespont. And he thought that he could derive advantages for Poland from Hitler’s aggressive policy. His ostensibly pro-German policy secretly aimed at “methodically reinforcing the Germans in their errors,” and he hoped “not only for the unconditional integration of Danzig into Polish territory, but, also, far beyond that, for all of East Prussia, Silesia, even Pomerania… our Pomerania,” as Poland’s propagandists now began saying more and more frequently and more openly.¹¹¹

These secret Polish dreams of becoming a great power underlay the unexpectedly sharp refusal with which Beck finally rebuffed Hitler’s proposal. Simultaneously, he mobilized a few divisions in the border area. In strictly objective terms he might not even have considered the German demands unjustified. Danzig, he admitted, was merely a kind of symbol for Poland.¹¹² But every concession must seem like a reversal of the basic aims of Polish policy, the eifort to attain both equilibrium of power in Europe and a limited degree of hegemony for Poland herself. For this reason, too, the only tactical way out of the situation—gaining time by partial concessions—was barred. Moreover, Beck and the Warsaw government feared that Hitler’s first demands would be followed by an endless succession of new ones, so that only an unequivocal refusal could preserve the integrity of Poland. To sum up, Poland found herself confronted with her typical situation: she had no choice.

This impasse was fully exposed when Beck, on March 23, 1939, rejected the British proposal of consultative agreement between Great Britain, France, the Soviet Union, and Poland. He did not want to enter any group to which the Soviet Union belonged. He had rejected an anti-Soviet alliance with Germany and was still less prepared to accept an anti-German alliance with the Soviet Union. What he failed to see was that given the acuteness of the situation Hitler had created, he had to choose. From now on his only protection against the Soviet Union was the dread protection of Germany; and only the aid of the Soviet Union could save him from the German demands. He knew quite well—and the Soviet Union confirmed his knowledge in a Tass communiqué of March 22—that such aid meant the equivalent of suicide for Poland. But Beck was prepared to face destruction rather than to accept protection from Poland’s old oppressor to the East. Politically, he based his attitude on the dogma of the insurmountable antagonism between Germany and the Soviet Union. But by rejecting both his neighbors with equal vehemence he unwittingly created the conditions for a rapprochement between them. The front for the outbreak of the war was beginning to take shape.

Simultaneously, Beck was reassured by the attitude of the British government. Still indignant at Hitler’s occupation of Prague, Chamberlain at the end of March decided upon a desperate step. Acting on the basis of several unconfirmed reports of an impending German coup de main against Danzig, he asked Warsaw whether Poland had any objections to a British declaration guaranteeing her integrity. Despite the warnings of some of his more perspicacious fellow countrymen, who regarded it as “childish, naïve and at the same time unfair to propose to a country in Poland’s situation that it compromise its relations with so strong a neighbor as Germany,”¹¹³ Beck promptly consented. He later declared that he needed less time to make his decision than was needed to flip the ash from a cigarette. On March 31 Chamberlain made his famous statement in the House ol Commons: England and France “in the event of any action which clearly threatened Polish independence… would feel themselves bound at once to lend the Polish Government all support in their power.”¹¹⁴

This promise of assistance was the great turning point in the policies of that phase. England had decided unconditionally to oppose Hitler’s expansionist ambitions wherever and whenever it encountered them. It was an extraordinary and impressive decision, though one as deficient in wisdom as it was superabundant in dramatic consequences. Its origins in the emotions of a disappointed man were all too apparent, and critics quickly pointed to the inherent flaws of such a guarantee: it required no counterguarantee from the Poles if Hitler attacked some other European country, and did not oblige the Poles to conduct negotiations for aid with the Soviet Union, whose partnership would necessarily be of crucial importance. Moreover, the grave question of war or peace for Europe was being given into the keeping of a handful of stubborn, nationalistic men in Warsaw who a short while ago had made common cause with Hitler against Czechoslovakia, betraying the very principles of independence they were now so anxiously appealing to.

Chamberlain’s decision of March 31 forced Hitler to reassess his position. He considered the British guarantee a warrant for the eccentric Poles to involve Germany in military undertakings whenever it pleased them. But far more crucial in his eyes was that England had now at last revealed herself as an enemy. She would not allow him to move freely against the East and was evidently resolved to push matters to the ultimate confrontation. He could not obtain the grand mandate of the bourgeois powers to proceed against the Soviet Union. Consequently, his whole strategic concept was threatened. It seems clear that this last day of March gave him the final impetus to that radical turn which had been hinted at in various remarks since the end of 1936, but which had been repeatedly postponed. Now he actually proceeded “to the liquidation of the Work of his youth,” as he had phrased it a short while before. He abandoned his courtship of England, which had rejected him. He concluded correctly that whenever he set out to conquer new Lebensraum in the East he would clash with England. Consequently, to achieve his central idea he would first have to defeat Great Britain. If he wished to avoid a two-front war, one more thing followed: he would have to come to a temporary arrangement with the future enemy. It so happened that the conduct of Poland provided him with an opening. An alliance with the Soviet Union was now within reach.

Hitler’s policy during the following months was one grand, large-scale maneuver to bring about this swing and so shape the antagonistic fronts in Europe to accord with his purposes. Admiral Canaris, who happened to be present when news of the British guaranty to Poland arrived, reported Hitler’s furious outburst: “I’ll cook them a stew that they’ll choke on.”¹¹⁵ The following day he utilized the launching of the Tirpitz in Wilhelmshaven for a violent speech against the British “encirclement policy.” He issued a dire warning to the “satellite states whose task is to be set against Germany” and indicated that he was about to terminate the Anglo-German Naval Treaty:

Everyone who met Hitler during this period has reported him flaring up furiously against England.¹¹⁷ Early in April the Propaganda Minister issued a directive whose tenor was that England must be represented as Germany’s most dangerous adversary. Simultaneously Hitler broke off his negotiations with Poland. He ordered State Secretary von Weizsäcker to inform the Poles that the offer had been unique and would not be repeated. At the same time new demands, as yet unspecified, were hinted at. And, as if to stress the gravity of the situation, Hitler suddenly once more expressed interest in the German minorities in Poland, whom he had overlooked for years during which they, together with the Jews, had been the favorite victims of the Poles’ resentments and outbreaks of chauvinistic arrogance.

But even more can be read from the secret message Hitler issued to the armed forces on April 3, setting up a new operation with the code name “Case White”:

A note appended to the document referred to a directive from Hitler to “make the preparations in such a way that execution will be possible at any time from September 1, 1939, on.”

Although outwardly everything remained unchanged, Europe now seemed to be gripped by a nervous tension. In Germany a propaganda campaign translated Hitler’s aggressive remarks into screeching agitation. In Poland, and for the first time in England also, there were more or less violent anti-German demonstrations. And, as if Italian pride forbade that country’s keeping out of the bickerings and brawls of Europe, Mussolini now reminded the world of his existence by a great show of Italy’s strength and courage. On April 7, 1939, he sent his troops to attack little Albania, and in imitation of his envied German model set up a protectorate over the country. Shortly before in Berlin he had let it be known that he felt called upon “to acquire something” also.

The result was that the Western powers now issued guarantees of aid to Greece and Rumania also. Germany then warned the smaller European countries against “English lures,” thus generating more nervousness. Whereupon the United States, after years of disillusioned retreat into isolation from international affairs, let its voice be heard once more. On April 14 President Roosevelt addressed a letter to Hitler and Mussolini calling upon them to give a ten-year guarantee of nonaggression to thirty-one countries, which he mentioned by name.

Mussolini at first refused to acknowledge receipt of the message. Hitler, however, was delighted at this unexpected challenge. Ever since he had first come forth as a speaker, his oratorical temperament had always responded best in argument. The naive demagoguery of Roosevelt’s appeal, with its listing of countries with which neither Germany nor Italy had common borders or differences of opinion (among them Eire, Spain, Turkey, Iraq, Syria, Palestine, Egypt, and Persia), offered Hitler an easy target. He announced through DNB, the German News Agency, that he would deliver his reply in a speech to the Reichstag.

Hitler’s speech of April 28 was one of the recognizable milestones along the course of the European crisis. It marked the destination as war. Following Hitler’s tried-and-true pattern, it was full of avowals of peace, loud in asseverations of innocence, and silent about all his real intentions. Once again Hitler tried to commend himself as the spokesman for a program of limited and moderate revisions in the East; but attacks upon the Soviet Union as evil incarnate were noticeably absent. Simultaneously he displayed all his sarcasm, all his apparent logic and hypnotic persuasiveness, so that many a listener called the speech “probably the most brilliant oration he ever gave.”¹¹⁹ He combined his attacks upon England with expressions of admiration and friendly feelings for her. He assured Poland that despite all his disappointments with her he was ready to continue negotiations. And he ranted against the “international warmongers,” the “provocateurs,” and “enemies of peace” whose aim was to recruit “mercenaries of the European democracies against Germany.” He denounced the “jugglers of Versailles who, either in their maliciousness or their thoughtlessness, placed 100 powder barrels all over Europe.”

Finally he came to the climax, his answer to the American President, which was greeted by the deputies with tempestuous enthusiasm and roars of laughter. Hitler divided Roosevelt’s letter into twenty-one points, which he answered in sections. The American President, he said, had pointed out to him the general fear of war; but Germany had participated in none of the fourteen wars that had been waged since 1919—“but in which the States of the ‘Western Hemisphere,’ in whose name President Roosevelt speaks, were indeed concerned.” Germany also had nothing to do with the twenty-six “violent interventions and sanctions carried through by means of bloodshed and force” during that period, whereas the United States, for example, had carried out military interventions in six cases. Furthermore, the President had pleaded for the solution of all problems at the conference table, but America herself had given sharpest expression to her mistrust in the effectiveness of conferences by leaving the League of Nations, “the greatest conference of all time”—from which Germany, in violation of Wilson’s pledge, was for a long time excluded. In spite of this “most bitter experience,” Germany had not followed the example of the United States until his, Hitler’s, administration.

The President was also making himself the advocate of disarmament. But Germany had, for all times, learned her lesson, ever since she had appeared unarmed at the conference table in Versailles and been “subjected to even greater degradation than can ever have been inflicted on the chieftains of the Sioux tribes.” Roosevelt was taking so great an interest in Germany’s intentions in Europe that the question necessarily arose what aims American foreign policy was pursuing, for example, toward Central or South American countries. The President would surely regard such a question as tactless and refer to the Monroe Doctrine. And although it was surely tempting for the German government to behave in the same way, it had nevertheless addressed all the countries mentioned by Roosevelt and asked whether they felt threatened by Germany. “The reply was in all cases negative, in some instances strongly so.” However, Hitler continued, “it is true that I could not cause inquiries to be made of certain of the States and nations mentioned because they themselves—as, for example, Syria—are at present not in possession of their freedom, but are occupied and consequently deprived of their rights by the military agents of the democratic States.” Then he continued:

This speech contained more than mere rhetorical effects. Implicit in it was a remarkable political decision. Two days earlier England had introduced conscription; and in reply Hitler now abrogated the Anglo-German Naval Treaty and the Nonaggression Pact with Poland. Dramatic though they seemed, these declarations had no immediate consequences; they were only a gesture. But with that gesture. Hitler liquidated the pledge contained in all such agreements, the pledge to settle disputes peaceably. In fact the speech as a whole might best be compared with the Western powers’ guarantee of Poland, or with Roosevelt’s intervention. It was a moral declaration of war. The adversaries were taking up their positions.

Hitler had delivered his speech on April 28. On April 30 the British ambassador in Paris asked French Foreign Minister Georges Bonnet what he thought about Hitler’s somewhat uncanny silence in regard to Russia. , And in fact from this moment on the Soviet Union, hitherto merely a mighty shadow on the periphery, began to move into the center of events. Hitler’s reticence was as much a symptom of the changing situation as the sudden activity of the Western powers toward Russia. A secret race for alliances was beginning, heightened on all sides by distrust, fear, and jealousy. Upon the outcome of that race the question of war or peace would be decided.

The initial move had come on April 15, with an offer by France to the Soviet Union to adjust the treaty of 1935 to the changed world situation. For the system of collective security, which the appeasers had allowed Hitler to wrest from them during the period of lovely illusions and which they were now hurriedly trying to reinstate, could have a deterrent effect only if Moscow participated, thus convincing Hitler of the hopelessness of resorting to force. From the start the negotiations, into which England too soon entered, suffered from the mutual distrust of the participants. With reason, Stalin doubted the Western powers’ determination to resist, while the Western powers in their turn, and above all Chamberlain, could never overcome the deeply rooted suspicion that the bourgeois world felt for the land of world revolution. Nor were their advances of any great interest to Moscow, since clumsy diplomacy had obligated the West to defend the entire girdle outside the Soviet Union from the Baltic to the Black Sea.

In addition, the negotiating position of the Western powers was hampered by the constant efforts of the Eastern European nations to interfere. They passionately opposed any alliance with the Soviet Union and regarded any guarantees by her as sealing their own doom. In fact the Western diplomats were soon forced to realize that Moscow could be won over only by considerable territorial, strategic, and political concessions that did not look so very dissimilar to the ones they wanted to refuse, with the Soviet Union’s aid, to grant Hitler. If the efforts of the Western powers were inspired by the principle of protecting the small and weak nations against the expansionist greed of the great nations, they could not help falling into an insoluble dilemma. “On the basis of these principles,” the French Foreign Minister formulated this impasse, “a treaty with the Kremlin cannot be arranged, for these are not the Kremlin’s principles. Where community of principles is lacking, there can be no negotiating on the basis of principles. In that case only the primitive form of human conduct can obtain: force and exchange. Interests can be bartered, advantages that are hoped for and disadvantages which one wishes to avoid, booty that one would like to seize, violence that one will not put up with. All these factors can be weighed against one another, move for move, cash for cash…. Western diplomacy, on the other hand, provides a spectacle of well-meaning and dreamlike impotence.”¹²¹

The course of the negotiations of the following months must be seen in this light, especially the still controversial question of whether the Soviet side seriously sought an agreement or was not merely bent on keeping out of the obviously approaching conflict, even of furthering it, in order later to carry the doctrine of revolution into an exhausted, shattered Europe with better chances for success than ever before. Even while the protracted negotiations were in progress, constantly interrupted by fresh scruples on the part of the West, the Soviet Union began its bold double game with Hitler. After a speech by Stalin on March 10 had dropped the first hint, the Soviet Union several times approached the German government and made plain its interest in a rearrangement of relations. Ideological differences, the Russians indicated, “need… not disturb.” The Soviet Union replaced her Foreign Minister of many years’ standing, Maxim Litvinov—a man of Western orientation and Jewish descent who figured invariably in Nazi polemics as “the Jew Finkelstein”—by Vyacheslav Molotov, and inquired in Berlin whether this shift might favorably influence the German attitude.¹²²

We have no reason to think that the leaders of the Soviet Union were unaware of Hitler’s changeless aim: the great war to the East, the conquest of an empire at Russia’s expense. But they were, unless all indications are deceptive, prepared for the moment to take into the bargain a tremendous increase in power for Hitler’s Reich, and even its first expansive step toward the East. Chief among their motives was the fear that the capitalist and Fascist powers might come to an arrangement after all, in spite of their momentary hostility, and divert German dynamism against the common Communist enemy in the East. Since the end of the World War, in which Russia had lost her western provinces and the Baltic countries, the Soviet Union had regarded itself as also a “revisionist power.” And Stalin evidently expected that Hitler would be more inclined to understand and treat generously the Soviet Union’s determination to reconquer the lost territories than would the slow-moving statesmen of the West with their scruples, principles, and moralistic pettiness. Fear and the determination to expand: these two fundamental motivations of Hitler were also Stalin’s.

Tactically, Moscow’s initiatives could not have come more conveniently for Hitler. To be sure, anti-Bolshevism had been one of the great themes of his political career. The Communist Revolution had repeatedly provided him with compelling images of horror. Thousands of times he had conjured up the “human slaughterhouses” in the interior of Russia, the “burning villages” and “deserted cities” with their destroyed churches, raped women, and GPU executioners. National Socialism and Communism were “worlds apart,” he had declared; the gulf between them could never be bridged. Unlike the ideologically indifferent Ribbentrop, who soon after Stalin’s speech of March 10 had recommended an approach to the Soviet Union, Hitler was uncertain, the captive of his own ideology. And during the months of negotiations he repeatedly wavered. Several times he ordered the contacts to be broken off. Only his profound disappointment at the conduct of England and the vast profit to be had from avoiding the nightmare of fighting on two fronts during the planned attack on Poland finally persuaded him to set aside all his scruples. And just as Stalin entered upon the desperate gamble with the “Fascist world plague” in the expectation of ultimately triumphing, so Hitler reassured himself that later on he would be able to make up for his “betrayal,” since he had not abandoned his intention of bringing about a later confrontation with the Soviet Union. In fact, he was preparing for that by establishing a common border. What was involved, he shortly afterward told his intimates, was a “pact with Satan to drive out the devil.” And, on August 11, only a few days before Ribbentrop’s sensational trip to Moscow, Hitler informed a foreign visitor with almost incomprehensible candor: “Everything I am doing is directed against Russia; if the West is too stupid and too blind to grasp this, I shall be forced to come to an understanding with the Russians, strike at the West, and then after its defeat turn against the Soviet Union with my assembled forces.”¹²³ Despite all his cynicism, his lack of scruple where tactics were concerned, Hitler was too much of an ideologist to follow the logic of his plans without uneasiness. He was never able to forget completely that the pact with Moscow was only the second-best solution.

As if circumstances were playing into his hands, a new improvement in his position came to him around this same time. Disturbed by the rumors of an impending conflict, Mussolini’s son-in-law and Foreign Minister, Count Galeazzo Ciano, invited Ribbentrop to Milan early in May and urged him to postpone the outbreak of the war for at least three years, in view of Italy’s inadequate preparations. The German Foreign Minister informed Ciano that the great conflict was planned only “after a long period of peace of from four to five years.” When the vague exchange of ideas produced a few other points of agreement, Mussolini abruptly took a hand personally in the negotiations. For years, out of an obscure feeling of anxiety, he had refused to define Italy’s relationship to Germany in a treaty of alliance specifying mutual obligations. Now he had Ciano announce without more ado that Germany and Italy had agreed on a military alliance.

Although Hitler might feel that this pact would strengthen his position vis-à-vis the Western powers, the alliance could only bring misfortune to Mussolini. The elementary rules of diplomacy should have taught him better: since he owed to the backing of Germany whatever conquests the world would ever permit him to make, his next move should have been to secure what he had acquired by coming to an agreement with the Western powers. Instead he now tied his country’s destiny unconditionally to a stronger power that was bent on war, and thus reduced himself to the status of a vassal. Henceforth he must, as he had once said in a moment of exuberance in Berlin, “march to the end” with Hitler.

The so-called Pact of Steel obligated each of the partners to provide military support to the other upon the outbreak of hostilities. It drew no distinction between attacker and attacked, between offensive and defensive arms. It was an unconditional pledge of military aid. Later, when Ciano first saw the German draft that was subsequently incorporated almost unchanged into the wording of the pact, he said: “I have never read a treaty like it. It is real dynamite.”

The pact was signed in a grand ceremony in the Berlin chancellery on May 22, 1939. “I found Hitler very well, quite serene, less aggressive, slightly aged,” the Italian Foreign Minister noted. “There are somewhat darker rings around his eyes. He sleeps little. Less and less.” Mussolini himself seems to have received the reports from his Berlin delegation with some anxiety. A week later he sent a personal memorandum to Hitler in which he once again emphasized Italy’s desire for a period of several years of peace. He recommended using this interlude for “loosening the inner cohesion of our enemies by favoring the anti-Semitic movements, supporting… the pacifistic movements, promoting aspirations for autonomy (Alsace, Brittany, Corsica, Ireland), accelerating the breakdown of morals, and inciting the colonial peoples to rebellion.”¹²⁴

The day after the signing of the Pact of Steel Hitler had summoned the commanders in chief of the army, navy, and air force to his office in the chancellery and outlined his ideas and intentions. According to the minutes kept by his chief adjutant, Lieutenant Colonel Rudolf Schmundt, he predicted with extraordinary acuteness the course of the first phase of the war: the overwhelming thrust into Holland and Belgium and subsequently—contrary to the strategy of the First World War—an advance not upon Paris but on the Channel ports, as launching places for the bombing and blockade of England. For in this speech England appeared as the chief antagonist. Hitler said:

From this point on, the signs of the war to come increased. On June 14 General Blaskowitz, commander in chief of Army Group 3, ordered his units to complete all preparations for marching against Poland by August 20. A week later the Oberkommando of the Wehrmacht (OKW) (High Command of the Armed Forces) presented the timetable for the offensive, and another two days later Hitler gave orders to work out precise plans for seizing the bridges over the lower Vistula. On July 27, finally, the directive for the conquest of Danzig was formulated. Only the date was left open.

Meanwhile, the German press, after a longish silence, resumed its anti-Polish campaign, extending the demands of Germany to the entire Corridor, Posen, and parts of Upper Silesia. An incident in Danzig, in the course of which an SA man was killed, provided fresh material for the propaganda campaign. The Polish government reacted with increasing toughness and decreasing moderation. It insisted on conducting its dialogue with the Reich in the icy tone of an outraged great power. Various signs indicated that it was gradually adjusting to the idea that war was inevitable. It tightened the Danzig customs regulations, thus initiating a crisis which led to an angry exchange of notes between Warsaw and Berlin. Provocations, warnings, and ultimatums followed in quick succession; the various white and blue books are filled with them. In Danzig itself camp followers began to arrive, “harbingers of evil and stormy petrels,” who by their actions or exaggerated reports worsened the crisis. “Everywhere they want the catastrophe,” Italian Ambassador Attolico wrote resignedly. When the German ambassador in Paris called on the French Foreign Minister Georges Bonnet on August 8, before going on vacation, both men were in a pessimistic mood. “As I listened to him,” Bonnet later wrote, “I had the feeling that everything had already been decided. And when he took his leave I realized that I would not see him again.”

Three days later Carl Jacob Burckhardt, the League of Nations high commissioner for Danzig, arrived at Obersalzberg for a conversation. Hitler seemed “much older and grayer,” as Burckhardt later described him. “He gave the impression of fear and seemed nervous.” He was also much exercised over the Poles’ arrogant determination, which in reality suited his plans. He complained, he threatened that if there were the slightest incident he would smash the Poles without warning, wipe Poland off the map. “I will strike them like lightning with the full power of a mechanized army.” When his visitor suggested that this would lead to a general war, Hitler declared excitedly: “Then so be it. If I have to wage war, I would rather do so today than tomorrow.” He said he could only laugh at the military strength of England and France; nobody was going to scare him with the Russians; the plans of the Polish General Staff exceeded “all the visions of Alexander and Napoleon by far.” Once again he tried, through Burckhardt, to launch his idea of a permanent balance of power with the West:

Next day Ciano called at the Berghof. He came to sound out the chances for a conference on a peaceful settlement of the looming conflict. But he found Hitler at a table spread with strategic maps, wholly absorbed in military problems. Germany, Hitler said, was virtually unassailable in the West. Poland would be crushed within a few days, and since Poland in the later confrontation with the Western powers would be on their side, he would be eliminating one enemy at once. In any case he was determined to utilize the next Polish provocation as the pretext for an attack, and he gave the deadline as “end of August at the latest.” If he waited too long, autumn rains would make the roads in the East too muddy for motorized forces. Ciano, who on the previous day had heard from Ribbentrop that Germany wanted neither Danzig nor the Corridor, but war with Poland, “soon realized that there is nothing more to be done. He has decided to strike and he will strike.”

By chance, an Anglo-French commission of military men had just begun negotiations in Moscow. The commission had arrived in the Soviet capital the previous day in order to conduct staff conferences exploring the military aspects of the alliance that had been under discussion for months. This group had set out for Moscow on August 5. A plane would have taken them there in a day. But with provoking casualness they had sailed to Leningrad aboard a freighter whose speed, as a later Soviet account noted with some bitterness, “was limited to thirteen knots.”

When the delegation finally arrived, it was too late. Hitler had forestalled them.

In the middle of July Moscow had once again taken the initiative and revived the German-Soviet trade negotiations broken off by Hitler three weeks earlier. This time Hitler did not hesitate, although he may have been merely counting on the discouraging effect the negotiations would have on England and Poland. Both in Moscow and in Berlin he saw to it that the thread was taken up and spun further. On the evening of July 26 Julius Schnurre, an official of the Economic Department of the German Foreign Office, had dinner with two Russian diplomats. While dining these men explored the possibilities of a political rapprochement. The Soviet charge d’affaires, Georgi Astakhov, declared that in Moscow they had never quite been able to understand why National Socialist Germany had taken so hostile an attitude toward the Soviet Union. Schnurre replied that “there could be no question of our being any threat to the Soviet Union…. German policy is aimed at England.” In any case a “far-reaching compromise of mutual interests” was quite conceivable to him, all the more so since antagonisms between their two countries did not exist “along the entire line from the Baltic to the Black Sea and to the Far East.” England could offer the Soviet Union “at best participation in a European war and the hostility of Germany,” whereas Germany could guarantee that she could continue her development unmolested. In addition, the German diplomat concluded, “in spite of all the differences in their views there is one common element in the ideology of Germany, Italy and the Soviet Union: opposition to the capitalist democracies of the West.”¹²⁷

These were the crucial phrases which for three weeks dominated a German-Soviet exchange of views conducted with growing intensiveness. And from now on it was Germany that pressed forward with undisguised eagerness, while the Russians dragged their feet. On August 14 Ribbentrop sent Count Friedrich von der Schulenburg, the German Ambassador in Moscow, telegraphic instructions containing the great bid of delimiting spheres of interest between the Baltic and the Black Sea. He referred again to the two countries’ shared opposition to the “capitalistic western democracies,” dangled the prospect of quick booty, and in order to accelerate the “historic turning point” offered to come promptly to Moscow. In excellent spirits, expecting an affirmative answer from Moscow, Hitler told his military commanders the same evening that now “the great drama is approaching its climax.”

But Molotov, who had instantly perceived the advantage that German impatience offered him, maneuvered elaborately on questions of timing and agenda. He asked about German readiness to conclude a nonaggression pact, worked out a plan for phased rapprochement, and finally proposed a “special protocol” which, as he remarked with sibylline obscurity, would define “the interests of the contracting parties in various questions of foreign policy.” By that he actually meant preparations for the partition of Poland and the liquidation of the Baltic states. He finally suggested, as the date for Ribbentrop’s trip to Moscow, August 26 or 27, and though the Germans twice nervously pressed for an earlier date, would not be budged.

Ribbentrop had asked his ambassador to explain that “German-Polish relations are growing more acute from day to day. The Führer does not wish to have our efforts to clarify German-Russian relations suddenly disturbed by the outbreak of a German-Polish conflict. He considers previous clarification necessary in order to be able to take account of Russian interests in case of such a conflict.”

Hitler, fearing that he would be unable to keep his military timetable, finally took an unconventional step to break the deadlock. In a telegram dispatched on the evening of August 20 and addressed to “Herr J. V. Stalin, Moscow,” he asked the leader of the Soviet Union to receive Ribbentrop as early as August 22 or 23. His Foreign Minister, he said, had “plenipotentiary authority to draw up and sign the nonaggression pact as well as the protocol.”

Hitler waited for the answer in a state of extreme tension. Since he could not sleep, he telephoned Göring in the middle of the night, spoke of his worries, and expressed his annoyance at Russian stolidity. Since the beginning of the second half of August he had pushed forward the preparations for war without letup. He had called up 250,000 men, concentrated rolling stock, ordered two battleships and part of the submarine fleet to prepare to sail, and in a secret instruction canceled the party rally intended for the first week in September, the so-called “Reich Party Day of Peace.” For twenty-four hours, war or peace, the success or failure of his plans, depended on Stalin. At last, at 9:35 P.M. on August 21, the reply arrived: The Soviet government “agrees to Herr von Ribbentrop’s arriving in Moscow on. August 23.”

Freed from unbearable suspense, Hitler summoned the top military command for a conference at Obersalzberg next day at noon, in order, as he said, to acquaint them with his “irrevocable decision to act.”

Once again a desperate race against the impending doom began. The Western powers had not remained unaware of the lively exchanges between Moscow and Berlin. The British cabinet, moreover, had early been informed by von Weizsäcker of the far-ranging German-Soviet contacts.¹²⁸ Everything now depended on the immediate conclusion of the Anglo-French military consultations that had begun so belatedly in Moscow.

These negotiations, which on the Soviet side had been conducted by Marshal Voroshilov, had soon come to a halt because of a seemingly insoluble problem: Poland’s determined opposition to granting any passage rights to the Red Army. While the Soviet negotiators stubbornly demanded to know how they were to make contact with the enemy, if Warsaw took this position, and while the Western delegates tried to protract the negotiations, Poland recklessly disavowed her guarantor powers and flatly declared that she absolutely refused to allow the Soviet Union to enter territory that had been hers as recently as 1921. Increasingly disturbed by news of a German-Soviet rapprochement, the West pressed Warsaw to yield. Bonnet and Halifax implored the Polish Foreign Minister, urging that the entire system of alliances would collapse if Poland persisted in her refusal. But Beck remained haughtily negative. Poland, he said on August 19, could not even permit “discussion in any form of the use of part of our territory by foreign troops. For us that is a question of principle. We have no military agreement with the U.S.S.R. We do not want one.”

Another appeal on the following day also failed. Even when faced with doom, Poland stuck to her principles with a kind of magnificent obstinacy. When the French ambassador passionately protested, Marshal Rydz-Smigly replied coldly: “With the Germans we run the risk of losing our freedom. With the Russians we lose our soul.”¹²⁹ Even on the night of August 22, when the dramatic news of Ribbentrop’s impending journey to Russia arrived, Poland remained unimpressed. The world order had been virtually turned upside down, the country was as good as lost, but Poland’s politicians commented that the visit merely showed how desperate Hitler’s situation was.

Distraught by the way things were going, France at last decided to wait no longer for Warsaw’s consent but to act on her own initiative. On the evening of August 22 General Doumenc informed Marshal Voroshilov that he had received full powers from his government to conclude a military convention granting the Red Army passage through Poland and Rumania. But when Voroshilov insistently demanded proof of Poland’s and Rumania’s consent, Doumenc had to be evasive and could only repeat that he had come to conclude the agreement. At last, alluding to Ribbentrop’s impending visit, he said: “But time is passing.” Marshal Voroshilov replied ironically: “Undoubtedly time is passing.” They parted with nothing accomplished.

Next day, in spite of strenuous efforts by Georges Bonnet to change Beck’s mind, Polish consent had still not been obtained. Toward noon Ribbentrop arrived in the Soviet capital and almost immediately went to the Kremlin. And as though the participants wanted to show the world a spectacle of uncomplicated totalitarian diplomacy, the Nonaggression Pact and the delimitation of spheres of interest was agreed upon with the first conference of three hours’ duration. A query from Ribbentrop about an unforeseen Soviet demand was answered by Hitler with a terse wire: “Yes, agreed.”

Only now was Poland ready to consent, in an involuted announcement, to the French demand. General Doumenc had permission to declare, Beck conceded, that he had “obtained assurance that in case of a joint action against a German aggression a collaboration between Poland and the U.S.S.R. under technical conditions that are to be settled later is not excluded.” The Western powers noted with satisfaction that Poland had yielded. But while Hitler, with his “Yes, agreed,” had offered the Soviet Union half of Eastern Europe, including Finland and Bessarabia, “the Western powers promised that the Poles would promise to allow the Russians to use the desired area under certain circumstances in limited fashion for a limited time as a base of operations under Polish control.”¹³⁰

During the night hours of August 23 Ribbentrop and Molotov signed the Nonaggression Pact and the secret supplementary protocol, which became known only after the war when it played into the hands of the German defense lawyers at the Nuremberg trial.¹³¹ In the protocol the contracting parties agreed that “in the event of a territorial and political transformation” Eastern Europe would be divided into spheres of interest along a line running from the northern border of Lithuania south along the rivers Narew, Vistula, and San. The question was explicitly left open “whether the interests of both parties make the maintenance of an independent Polish State appear desirable and how the frontiers of this State should be delimited.” These dry formulas exposed the fundamentally imperialistic character of the agreement, and bluntly made plain the connection with the planned war.

That connection has proved to be the rock on which all the elaborate Soviet attempts at self-exoneration have foundered. Of course Stalin could offer numerous sound reasons for the Nonaggression Pact. It let him have the famous “breathing space,” gave the country a buffer zone of possibly vital importance toward the West, and above all insured that the vacillating Western powers would be irrevocably engaged in conflict with Germany if Hitler returned to his real aim and attacked the Soviet Union. Stalin’s apologists have also asserted that on that August 23, 1939, he had done only what Chamberlain had done the previous year in Munich. Chamberlain had sacrificed Czechoslovakia, as Stalin was now abandoning Poland, in order to buy time. None of these arguments, however, allow us to forget the secret protocol which, as it were, converted the Nonaggression Pact into an Aggression Pact. Chamberlain, after all, despite Hitler’s repeated offers, had never carved out spheres of interest with the German dictator. Rather, he had scotched Hitler’s great dream of unhindered attack upon the Soviet Union, whose leaders now were proving far less scrupulous. Whatever validity we may grant the Soviet justifications on the grounds of Realpolitik, the supplementary agreement was “unworthy of an ideological movement which claimed to have the deepest insight into the historical process,”¹³² a movement that had never represented world revolution as an act of naked expansionism, but had championed and upheld it as the moral necessity of the human race.

Significantly, the evening in Moscow took an almost comradely turn. Ribbentrop later reported that Stalin and Molotov had been “very nice,” that being with them “felt like being among old party comrades.”¹³³ Although he was, somewhat embarrassed when, in the course of the night the conversation turned to the Anti-Comintern Pact, of which Ribbentrop was the author, Stalin’s geniality encouraged him to scoff at the pact. According to the account of a German participant, he declared that the agreement had “basically not been directed against the Soviet Union, but against the Western democracies…. Mr. Stalin interjected that the Anti-Comintern Pact in fact had alarmed chiefly the City of London and the English shopkeepers. The Reich Foreign Minister agreed and remarked jokingly that Mr. Stalin was surely less alarmed by the Anti-Comintern Pact than the City of London and the English shopkeepers.” The report continues:

It truly seemed as if, amid toasts and clinking glasses, the deceptive veil of old hostility had been parted and that only now, in the fateful intimacy of that night, the closeness between the two regimes was revealed to themselves and the world. In fact August 23, 1939, has been repeatedly cited by those who wish to prove a conformity in nature between the two regimes. In truth, it was much more a conformity in methods and, as now became evident, in the men. Stalin’s toast to Hitler was no empty phrase; he kept his promise with pedant loyalty. In spite of all the omens and warnings from experts, in June, 1941, barely two years later, he refused to the last to believe that Hitler was going to attack the Soviet Union. Even as the German troops advanced, the freight cars rolled westward with the supplies the Russians were obligated to deliver under the economic accord. The astonishing gullibility of the crafty Soviet ruler rested to a considerable degree upon the admiration he felt for a man who, like himself, had risen from low estate to historic importance. In Hitler he respected the only man of the period whom he regarded as his equal; and as we know, Hitler reciprocated this feeling. All “deadly enmity” could never diminish the two men’s mutual sense of the other’s greatness; and beyond ideologies they felt themselves linked by the rank that history confers. In his memoirs, Rumanian Foreign Minister Grigore Gafencu has cited the observations of the French historian Albert Sorel on the first partition of Poland: “Everything that increased Russia’s distance from other powers brought it closer to Prussia. Like Russia, Prussia was a parvenu on the great stage of the world. It had to clear the way for its own future, and Catherine saw that it had every intention of doing so with great methods, great possibilities and great aims.”

These sentences apply as neatly both to the situation and the psychology of Hitler and Stalin: their restive desire for change, their gigantic dreams, and the bold stroke that brought them together in one of the most dramatic coups in history. The ideologies of both were marked by an acute sense of power politics. Hitler once said that “he was not among those who let historic moments pass by unused,” and the same was true of Stalin. Neither man was in the least disturbed by the expostulations of uncomprehending followers. The Moscow Pact threw the Communist parties of the world into one of those crises that consumed what was left of their influence. Similarly, on the morning of August 25 indignant followers of Hitler threw hundreds of swastika armbands over the fence of the Brown House in Munich.¹³⁵

On the same day the Western military missions left Moscow. Subordinate Soviet generals saw them off. The day before, they had asked Marshal Voroshilov for a meeting, but Voroshilov later apologized, saying that he had been duck hunting.

From Hitler’s point of view, the conclusion of the Moscow Pact had paved the way for a quick, stunning victory over Poland. What followed was merely a mechanical procedure, “as when a fuse bums to the end.” In the interval he was concerned entirely with the effort to strengthen his alibi, to fend off any mediation, and to separate the Western powers from Poland even further than he had done so far so successfully. All the initiatives and final offers of the remaining week, all those sham negotiations to which so many vain hopes were attached, sprang from this triple aim.

Hitler’s address to the High Command on August 22 at Obersalzberg had already been dominated by these considerations. In the best of spirits, fully confident of success in Moscow, he reported on the situation and once more justified his unshakable determination to go to war. His own standing and authority, as well as the economic situation, required the conflict. “There is no other choice left to us; we must act.” Political considerations and the alliances also argued for a rapid decision: “In two or three years all these fortunate circumstances will no longer exist. No one knows how long I may live. Therefore conflict better now,” one of the jottings taken by a participant reads.¹³⁶ Once more Hitler outlined why the Western powers would not seriously intervene:

In the second part of his address, held after a simple meal, Hitler seemed somewhat less certain about the attitude of the Western powers. “There can be no other outcome.” Consequently, “the most iron resolution” was requisite. “Shrink from nothing… life-and-death struggle.” This formula promptly transported him into one of his mythologizing moods in which history appeared before him as a bloody panorama filled with battles, victories, and downfalls. In the earlier part of his address he had referred to the “founding of Greater Germany” as “a great achievement,” but commented that it was “regrettable that it was achieved by a bluff on the part of the political leadership.” Now he declared:

Hitler dismissed his generals by remarking that the order for commencing hostilities would be issued later, probably for Saturday morning, August 26. On the following day General Halder noted in his diary: “Y [Day] = Aug. 26 (Saturday) final—no further orders.”

This timetable, however, was once again upset. For although practically the entire framework of Western policy had collapsed as soon as the pact was signed, England led the way in demonstrating a stoic equanimity. Poland was as good as doomed, but the British cabinet dryly announced that the latest events had changed nothing. Military preparations were ostentatiously continued and increased. In a letter to Hitler Chamberlain warned against any doubts of the British determination to fight:

No greater mistake could be made…. It has been alleged that, if His Majesty’s Government had made their position more clear in 1914, the great catastrophe would have been avoided…. His Majesty’s Government are resolved that on this occasion there shall be no such tragic misunderstanding.¹³⁷

The Prime Minister also made a statement to the House of Commons pitched in the same tone. England would not retreat an inch—unlike France, which kept up an air of resolution with considerable difficulty and whose press expressed its defeatist attitude in the question, “Mourir pour Dantzig?” Danzig was no more the issue for Chamberlain than for Hitler. For him, as for the French, it was “a far-away city in a foreign land.” No one was going to have to die for it. But now, when the Moscow Pact had shattered her whole policy, England recognized the things her people would have to fight and die for. The policy of appeasement had been partly based on and sustained by the bourgeois world’s fear of Communist revolution. In the script of English statesmen, Hitler was assigned the role of a militant defender of the bourgeois world. That was why they had endured all his slaps in the face, his provocations and outrages. But this was the only reason. By coming to an agreement with the Soviet Union, he indicated that he was not the opponent of revolution that he had pretended to be; he was no protector of the bourgeois order, no “General Wrangel of the world bourgeoisie.” Although the pact with Stalin was a masterpiece of diplomacy, it contained an inconspicuous flaw: it abrogated the premises on which Hitler and the West had carried on their dealings. Here was something that could not be glossed over, and with rare unanimity the British, including the stoutest spokesmen for appeasement, now showed their resolve to oppose him. Although Hitler had a deserved reputation for psychological acuity, it became clear in this decisive moment that, after all, he was the psychologist only of the exhausted, the resigned, the doomed. And he was far better able to estimate the moves of victims than of adversaries.

Consequently, Hitler reacted with extreme ire to the many evidences of British determination. When Ambassador Henderson delivered his Prime Minister’s letter at Obersalzberg, he had to listen to a tirade which ended with Hitler’s saying he was now finally convinced that Germany and England would never be able to come to an agreement. Nevertheless, two days later, in the early afternoon of August 25, he repeated his “great bid” to divide the world. He offered a German guarantee for the existence of the British Empire, a limit on armaments, and a formal acknowledgment of the German western border in return for the right of Germany to move to the East without restriction. And as he had done so often before, he linked his outrageous demand with one of those ploys with which he tried to prove his essential harmlessness. “He said he was an artist by nature and not a politician and once the Polish question was settled he would conclude his life as an artist and not as a warmaker; he did not want to transform Germany into a great military barracks; and he would do so only if he were forced to. Once the Polish question was settled, he would retire.”

Ambassador Henderson was implored to pass the offer on at once. But no sooner had he left the room, at 3:02 P.M. on August 25, than Hitler sent for General Keitel and confirmed his order to attack Poland at dawn the next day.

A few hours later, he was once more deep in doubt. Two messages had arrived at the chancellery in the course of the afternoon. One came from London and made it plain that Hitler’s last attempt to drive a wedge between England and Poland had failed. After months of protracted negotiations, the British government now transformed the temporary guarantee of aid to Poland into a treaty of assistance. Hitler could not fail to see in this the most resolute rejection of his great offer. Nor could there any longer be doubt that England was determined to intervene. One of those present saw Hitler after receiving the news “sitting at the table for a considerable time, brooding.”

He was harder hit by the other message, which roused him from his brooding. It came from Rome and made it clear that Italy was trying to creep out of the alliance so recently and pompously concluded. For weeks, as the conflict seemed to be coming closer, Mussolini had alternated abruptly between sanguine exultation and moods of despair. Ciano’s diary notes with some irony the way the Duce rocked back and forth on his “emotional seesaw.” At one time he appeared determined to keep out of Hitler’s war; “then he says that honor compels him to march with Germany. Finally he states that he wants his part of the booty in Croatia and Dalmatia.” Two days later “he wants time to prepare the break with Germany”; then again “he still thinks it possible that the democracies will not march and that Germany might do good business cheaply, from which business he does not want to be excluded. Then, too, he fears Hitler’s rage.”

Amid this confusion of crisscrossing impulses, at 3:30 P.M. on August 25, Mussolini assured the German ambassador of unconditional assistance, only to send a telegram to Hitler two hours later taking it all back, or at any rate making his assistance dependent on a vast amount of material aid that Germany could not possibly deliver—“enough to kill a bull,” Ciano commented. Reminding Hitler that they had not envisaged the war’s coming so soon and that Italy’s army was not equipped, Mussolini tried to wriggle out of the alternative between doom and betrayal.

Strictly speaking, Hitler had no reason to be upset. The Italians might well feel miffed; they had been offended countless times by contemptuous treatment; and even the belated letter in which Hitler had informed Mussolini of the pact with Moscow had been a model of diplomatic slighting. It had dismissed an ally’s claim to consultation with trivial phrases and an allusion to newspaper atrocity propaganda, but had said not a word about the ideological and political consequences resulting from Hitler’s reversal of his previous positions. Nevertheless, Hitler dismissed Italian Ambassador Attolico “with an icy face” and “the chancellery echoed with unkind words about ‘the disloyal Axis partner.’ ” A few minutes later Hitler canceled the order to advance. “Führer rather shaken,” Halder noted in his diary.

Once again events seemed to undergo a dramatic slowdown. Three days passed before Hitler, sleepless, his voice cracking, appeared before an assemblage of high party and military leaders and attempted to justify Mussolini’s conduct. He was in a bleak mood and commented that the impending war would be “very difficult, perhaps hopeless.” But he did not change his mind; rather, as always, opposition seemed to reinforce his determination: “As long as I live there will be no talk of capitulation.” The new date he set for launching the attack was September 1.

As a result, the events of the last few days—the passionate efforts to preserve peace, the messages, travels and exchanges between the capitals, all have an unreal air. To the observer with hindsight much of it seems a kind of late-night show, full of sham dialogue, transparent confusion, and grotesque intermezzos. Daladier’s moving personal appeal was futile. The French ambassador Coulondre, who told Hitler everything “that my heart as a man and a Frenchman could inspire me to say,” wasted his words. England’s conciliatory gesture was answered by Hitler with a torrent of fresh reproaches, so that even the patient Henderson lost his self-control and began to outshout Hitler, telling him he did not want “to hear such language from him or anyone else…. If he wanted war, he could have it.” In vain, finally, was Mussolini’s imploring letter; he had tried to persuade Hitler to settle for a solution by conference so that “the rhythm of your magnificent creations will not be interrupted.”

Only two antagonists seemed to know that they had reached a dead end: Hitler and Beck. They alone thought exclusively of war, the former urgently, impatiently fixated upon his self-appointed timetable, the other fatalistically, wearily, facing an ineluctable fate. Hitler was so obsessed with the employment of his military power that he did not even see the political opportunities the moment offered. We have private notes from British diplomats from which we can deduce the maneuvers London expected and the concessions it was preparing. Merely for renouncing war Hitler probably could have obtained not only Danzig and the road and rail link through the Polish Corridor, but also an assurance by Great Britain of restitution of Germany’s colonies and negotiations for a grand new settlement.¹³⁸

But Hitler was no longer thinking of alternatives. Here was the first sign of his inability to think beyond military goals or to examine the military situation for its political potentialities. That inability was to grow worse in the course of the following years. Thus he took up the British proposal for direct negotiations with Poland but promptly twisted it into an ultimatum, demanding that a Polish plenipotentiary negotiator come to Berlin within twenty-four hours. The intention behind this particular chess move was all too obvious. He meant to force the Poles either to capitulate or, as had happened to the Czechoslovaks, to appear as the troublemakers. The list of demands the Germans had prepared for the negotiations was studded with sham concessions. There was still the insistence on the return of Danzig, but otherwise there was a play for world opinion: the proposal of a series of plebiscites, offers of compensation, international controls, guarantees of minority rights, and plans for demobilization. After a conversation with Hitler on the afternoon of August 29, Halder noted: “Führer has hope of driving a wedge between England, French and Poles. Underlying idea: Bombard with demographic and democratic demands. Then came the actual timetable: August 30: Poles in Berlin. August 31: Blow up. Sept. 1: Use of force.”

But the Poles did not come to Berlin; Schuschnigg’s and Hächa’s shadows loomed too large before Colonel Beck. To the steady urgings of the British and French, to which the Italians soon lent their voice, he responded that there was nothing to negotiate. On the morning of August 31 Henderson was informed that Hitler would issue the order to attack unless the Polish government consented by twelve o’clock to send a negotiator. Once again, as recently in Moscow, a struggle against the clock was waged with Polish indolence. Henderson tried, through two envoys, to change the minds of his Polish colleagues in Berlin. Ambassador Lipski received the visitors, as one of them reported, in his already partly evacuated office. He was “white as a sheet,” with trembling hands took the document offered him, stared absently at the German demands, and finally murmured that he could not understand what was written there; all he knew was that they must remain firm and that “even a Poland abandoned by her Allies is ready to fight and to die alone.”¹³⁹ Death was Poland’s only idea. Nor was the content of the telegram that Beck sent to his ambassador in Berlin at 12:40 P.M. any different. It was a document of perplexity, and remarkable only for the coincidence in time. For at the very same minute Hitler signed “Directive Number 1 for the Conduct of the War.” A short while later he told the Italian ambassador that it was all over.¹⁴⁰ The directive began:

At nine o’clock that night all radio stations broadcast the list of the German proposals to Poland, which had never been submitted to Poland herself. Approximately at the same time SS Sturmbannführer (Major) Alfred Naujocks staged a sham Polish attack on the German radio station at Gleiwitz, broadcast a brief proclamation, fired some pistol shots, and left behind the corpses of several concentration camp inmates. A few hours later, at dawn on September 1, the Polish commander of the fortress on the peninsula Westerplatte, near the harbor of Danzig, a Major Sucharski, reported: “At 4:45 A.M. the cruiser Schleswig Holstein opened fire upon the Westerplatte with all her guns. The bombardment is continuing.” Simultaneously, the troops emerged from their prepared positions all along the German-Polish border. No declaration of war was issued. The Second World War had begun.

Hitler, it is true, was still hoping to limit the conflict. Shortly before ten o’clock he drove to a session of the Reichstag at the Kroll Opera House. The streets were almost deserted; the few pedestrians watched silently as the car passed in which Hitler sat in a field-gray uniform. His speech to the Reichstag was brief, serious, and peculiarly flat. Once again he asseverated his love of peace and “endless patience.” Again he tried to arouse hopes in the West, evoked the new friendship with the Soviet Union, made some embarrassed remarks about his Italian ally, and finally heaped charge upon charge on the Polish government. After a wild flight of fancy about the number of border incidents in the preceding days, he declared that “tonight for the first time Polish regular soldiers fired on our own territory. Since 5:45 A.M. we have been returning the fire, and from now on bombs will be met with bombs.” Henceforth, he wanted simply to be the first soldier of the Reich. “I have once more put on that coat that was most sacred and dear to me. I will not take it off again until victory is secured, or I will not survive the outcome.”

Hitler’s persistent hope of limiting the conflict to Poland was nourished chiefly by the hesitation of the Western powers. Contrary to their obligation under their alliance, they did not answer the German attack with an immediate declaration of war. The French government in particular resorted to a series of evasions: advice of the General Staff, a renewed attempt at mediation by Mussolini, the uncompleted evacuation of the big cities; and finally it tried to delay the beginning of the dreaded war by at least another few hours.¹⁴¹ Although England’s attitude was more determined, the gravity of the situation was fully realized. In Parliament Chamberlain declared on September 1: “Eighteen months ago I prayed that the responsibility would not fall upon me to ask this country to accept the awful arbitrament of war.” Now, he continued, he was on the point of demanding assurances from the German government that it would cease its aggressive action against Poland and withdraw its troops. When an MP angrily called out to ask whether a time limit had been set, the Prime Minister replied: “If the reply to this last warning is unfavorable—and I do not suggest it is likely to be otherwise—His Majesty’s Ambassador is instructed to ask for his passport. In that case we are ready.”¹⁴² But Hitler failed to hear the warning, or understood only that England, in spite of the clear terms of the alliance, was still ready to temporize. Initially, therefore, he did not even answer the British note of September 1. And while England and France engaged in complicated negotiations in order to arrive at a joint procedure, the German troops advanced tempestuously in Poland. It seems probable that these signs of weakness on the opposing side encouraged Hitler to rebuff Mussolini, who on September 2 enumerated the advantages of the situation and tried to persuade him to accept a solution by conference. “Danzig is already German,” he informed Hitler, “and Germany has in her hands pledges which guarantee her the greater part of her claims. Moreover, Germany has already had her ‘moral satisfaction.’ If she accepted the proposal for a conference she would achieve all her aims and at the same time avoid a war, which even now looks like becoming general and of extremely long duration.”

During the night hours of September 2 England at last decided to forgo joint action with France. Ambassador Henderson was told to deliver to the German Foreign Minister at 9 A.M. Sunday an ultimatum that would expire at 11 A.M. Ribbentrop did not receive Henderson personally; in his place he sent his chief interpreter, Dr. Paul Schmidt. Schmidt has described the scene when he brought the British note to the chancellery. Hitler’s antechamber was so crowded with members of the cabinet and party leaders that he had difficulty making his way through the throng. When he entered Hitler’s office, he saw Hitler sitting at his desk, while Ribbentrop stood by the window.

When Ambassador Coulondre called on the German Foreign Minister toward noon, England was already at war with the Reich. The French ultimatum corresponded to the British one with the exception of one significant detail. As though even now the government in Paris shrank from using the word “war,” it threatened, if Germany refused to withdraw her troops from Poland at once, to fulfill those “contractual obligations which France has undertaken toward Poland and which are known to the German government.” When Coulondre returned to his embassy, he burst into tears in the presence of his associates.¹⁴⁴

But England, too, had difficulty adjusting to the reality of war. In desperation Poland waited for military aid, or at least some relief; when she realized that she was without actual assistance, it was far too late. The ponderousness of the British responses was, however, not simply a matter of temperament or of inadequate military preparation. The guarantee for Poland had never been popular in England. There was no traditional friendship between the two countries, and Poland was regarded as one of those dictatorial regimes that merely showed up the constriction and oppressiveness of authoritarian government, but not the glamour and allure of power.¹⁴⁵ When in the early days of September an opposition conservative urged a member of the cabinet to provide help for Poland and mentioned the plan then being discussed, of setting fire to the Black Forest with incendiary bombs, he was answered: “Oh, we can’t do that, that’s private property. Next you’ll be insisting that we bomb the Ruhr region.”

France, for her part, had pledged to launch an offensive with from thirty-five to thirty-eight divisions by the sixteenth day of the war. But the country was psychologically fixed on defense and incapable of planning an offensive. General Jodi declared at Nuremberg: “If we did not collapse in 1939, that was only because the approximately one hundred and ten French and English divisions in the West, which during the campaign in Poland were facing twenty-five German divisions, remained completely inactive.”¹⁴⁶

Under these circumstances the modernized German armies were able to overrun Poland in a single victorious onslaught. To their perfection and smoothly functioning impetus the opposing side would offer, as was later admitted, mere gestures of “touching absurdity.” The co-operation of hitherto unknown swarms of armored formations with motorized infantry units and the dominant air force, whose Stuks plummeted with deafening screams upon their targets, the precision of the intelligence and supply system—all the might of this advancing, mechanized colossus—left the Poles little more than their courage. Beck had declared with assurance that his country’s forces were “organized for a flexible, delaying war of movement. There will be great surprises.” But the real significance of this campaign was that the Second World War was, so to speak, fighting against the First. Nowhere was the disproportion so evident as in the cavalry attack on Tuchel Heath, when a Polish mounted unit rode its horses against German tanks.

As early as the morning of September 5 General Halder noted after a military conference: “Enemy as good as beaten.” On September 6 Cracow fell; a day later the Warsaw government fled to Lublin; and in still another day the German advance units reached the Polish capital. All organized resistance began to collapse. In two great pincer movements initiated on September 9 the remnants of the Polish forces were encircled and slowly crushed. Eight days later, when the campaign was nearly ended, the Soviet Union fell upon the already overwhelmed country from the East—having first prepared an elaborate legalistic and diplomatic smoke screen to shield her from the charge of aggression. On September 18 the German and Soviet troops met in Brest-Litovsk. The first blitzkrieg was over. When Warsaw fell a few days later, Hitler ordered all the bells in Germany to be rung for a week, every day between noon and one o’clock.

The question nevertheless remains whether he felt unclouded satisfaction at the rapid military triumph or whether, through all the cheering and all the pealing of bells, he had not recognized that victory was already eluding him. His grand design was turned upside down. He was fighting on the wrong front, not against the East, as he might have been able to persuade himself during the far too brief Polish campaign, but henceforth against the West. For nearly twenty years all this thinking and talking had been determined by a diametrically opposite idea. Now his nervous restiveness, his arrogance, and the corrupting effect of great successes had overriden all rational considerations and finally destroyed the “Fascist” constellation. He was “at war with the conservatives before he had defeated the revolutionaries.”¹⁴⁷ There are some indications that he was already aware of this most fatal of errors during those early days of victory. His entourage has spoken of fits of pessimism and sudden attacks of anxiety: “He would have been glad to draw his head out of the noose.”¹⁴⁸ Shortly after the war with England became a certainty, he remarked to Rudolf Hess: “All my work is now disintegrating. My book was written for nothing.” Occasionally he compared himself to Martin Luther, who had no more wanted to fight against Rome than he himself against England. Then again, he would muster all the casual knowledge about England he had picked up to persuade himself of England’s weakness and democratic decadence. Or he would try to quiet his apprehensions by speaking of a “sham war,” by which the British government was formally satisfying an unpopular duty to an ally. As soon as Poland was finished, he had declared at the end of August: “We’ll hold a great peace conference with the Western powers.” Now Poland was finished and he was hoping for just that.

It is within this context that we must see Hitler’s attempts, immediately after the Polish campaign and later, in conjunction with the defeat of France, to wage the war against England lackadaisically and halfheartedly. The propaganda threats were louder than the actual blows; it was for this that the British coined the phrase “phony war.” For almost two years Hitler’s conduct of the war was partly governed by the effort to set the topsy-turvy constellation back on its feet again, to return to the design that he had frivolously abandoned. He tried repeatedly, but in vain.

A few weeks before the outbreak of the war—on July 22, 1939—he had said to Admiral Donitz that on no account must a war with England be allowed to develop; a war with England would mean nothing less than “finis Germaniae.”¹⁴⁹

Now he was at war with England.

Interpolation III The Wrong War

In regard to the Second World War there can be no question about whose was the guilt. Hitler’s conduct throughout the crisis, his highhandedness, his urge to bring things to a head and plunge into catastrophe, so shaped events that any wish to compromise on the part of the Western powers was bound to come to nothing. Who caused the war is a question that cannot be seriously raised. Hitler’s policy during the preceding years, in the strict sense his entire career, was oriented toward war. Without war his actions would have lacked goal and consistency, and Hitler would not have been the man he was.

He had said that war was “the ultimate goal of politics.” That sentence must be taken as one of the key premises of his world view. In many passages in his writings, speeches, and conversations he repeatedly developed the underlying train of thought: the aim of politics was to guarantee a people’s Lebensraum; the requisite living space had from time immemorial been conquered and held only by struggle; consequently, politics was a kind of permanent warfare, and armed conflict was only its actualization and maximum intensification. War was, as Hitler formulated it, the “strongest and most classic manifestation” of politics and indeed of life itself. In pacifism, on the other hand, human beings would necessarily fade away and “be replaced by animals” who more obediently conformed to the law of nature. “As long as the earth turns around the sun,” he declared in solemn, half-poetic accents to Bulgarian Ambassador Dragonoff, “as long as there are cold and warmth, fertility and infertility, storm and sunshine, so long will struggle continue, among men and among nations…. If people lived in the Garden of Eden they would rot. What mankind has become, it has become through struggle.” And during the war he maintained to his table companions that a peace of more than twenty-five years would do great harm to a nation.¹

In these mythologizing realms of his thought, the lust for conquest, the desire for fame, or revolutionary beliefs were not sufficient reason for unleashing a war. Hitler actually called it “a crime” to wage war for the acquisition of raw materials. Only the issue of living space permitted resort to arms. But in its purest form war was independent even of this factor, and sprang solely from the almighty primal law of death and life, of gain at the expense of others. War was an ineradicable atavism: “War is the most natural, the most ordinary thing. War is a constant; war is everywhere. There is no beginning, there is no conclusion of peace. War is life. All struggle is war. War is the primal condition.”² Unmoved by friendships, ideologies, and present alliances, he occasionally told his table companions that some distant day, when Mussolini’s reforestation program had taken effect, it might be necessary to wage war against Italy, too.

These ideas also make it clear why National Socialism had no utopian concept, but only a vision. Hitler called the notion of a grand, comprehensive order of peace “ridiculous.” Even his dreams of empire did not culminate in the panorama of a harmonious age; they were filled with the clash of arms, riot, and tumult. No matter how far Germany’s power might one day stretch, somewhere sooner or later it would come upon a bleeding, fought-over frontier where the race would have been hardened and a constant selection of the best would be taking place. This cranky fixation on the idea of war once again showed, far beyond the Social-Darwinist starting point, the degree to which Hitler and National Socialism were a product of the First World War. It had molded their sentiments, their practical handling of power, and their ideology. The World War, Hitler repeated incessantly, had never stopped for him. To him, as to that whole generation, the idea of peace seemed curiously stale and unpleasant. It was certainly not a theme to arouse their imaginations, which were fascinated rather by struggle and hostility. Soon after the end of the struggle for power, shortly after the domestic opponents had been eliminated, Goebbels told a foreign diplomat that “he often thought back full of longing to those earlier times when there were always opportunities for combat.” A member of Hitler’s most intimate entourage spoke of his “pathologically militant nature.” So dominant was this urge that ultimately it crushed and devoured everything else, including Hitler’s long demonstrated political genius.

‘ But if all his thoughts were bent on war, the one that began on September 3, 1939, with the declarations of war by the Western powers, the one marked by absurdly reversed fronts, was not the war he had sought. Shortly before he became Chancellor, he had told his entourage that he would begin the war that had to come free of all romantic emotions, guided only by tactical considerations. He would not play at war and would not be tricked into a trial at arms. “I shall wage the war. I shall determine the suitable time for attack. There is only one most favorable moment. I will wait for it. With iron resolution. And I will not miss it. I will employ all my energy to compelling it to come. That is my task. If I succeed in forcing that, I have the right to send the young to their deaths.”³

Apparently he had failed in this self-imposed task. But had he really failed? The question cannot be why or even whether Hitler began the Second World War of his own free will. It can only be why he, who up to this point had almost alone determined the course of events, stumbled into war at this time contrary to all his plans.

Certainly he misread England’s attitude and once more gambled in defiance to all common sense. He had too frequently emerged triumphant from similar situations not to have been misled; he had come to think of the possibility of the impossible as a kind of law of his life. Hence, too, the many vain hopes he harbored in the following months. First he told himself that England would come around after the rapid subjugation of Poland. Then he expected the intervention of the Soviet Union on the German side. For a while he counted on the effects of reduced military activity against Great Britain, later on the effects of heavy bombing, and then expected the turning point to come from victory over England’s continental vassal: “The war will be decided in France,” he told Mussolini in March, 1940. “If France were finished… England would have to make peace.”⁴ After all, he argued, England had entered the war without any strong motive, chiefly because of Italy’s indecisive attitude. Any of these factors, he thought, might prompt England to withdraw from the conflict. He simply did not see what else might actuate the enemy. So sure was he of his reasoning that in the so-called Z Plan he treated the U-boat building program, which had already been cut back, with noticeable neglect; instead of twenty-nine monthly launchings the plan called for only two.

But illusions about England’s determination to fight cannot sufficiently explain Hitler’s decision to go to war. He was after all conscious of the high degree of risk. When the British government made its intentions clearer by signing the pact of assistance with the Poles on August 25, Hitler rescinded an order to attack already issued. Nor did the following week give him any reason to reassess the situation. When, therefore, he renewed the order to attack on August 31, there must have been some special feeling that overrode his sense of risk.

One of the striking aspects of his behavior is the stubborn, peculiarly blind impatience with which he pressed forward into the conflict. That impatience was curiously at odds with the hesitancy and vacillations that had preceded earlier decisions of his. When, in the last days of August, Göring pleaded with him not to push the gamble too far, he replied heatedly that throughout his life he had always played vabanque. And though this metaphor was accurate for the matter at hand, it hardly described the wary, circumspect style with which he had proceeded in the past. We must go further back, almost to the early, prepolitical phase of his career, to find the link with the abruptness of his conduct during the summer of 1939, with its reminders of old provocations and daredevil risks.

There is, in fact, every indication that during these months Hitler was throwing aside more than tried and tested tactics, that he was giving up a policy in which he had excelled for fifteen years and in which for a while he had outstripped all antagonists. It was as if he were at last tired of having to adapt himself to circumstances, tired of the eternal talking, dissimulation, and diplomatic wirepulling, and were again seeking “a great, universally understandable, liberating action.”

The November putsch of 1923, one of the great caesuras that so strikingly divide up his life, was also an example of such a liberating action. As we have noted earlier, it marked Hitler’s specific entry into politics. Until that point, he had made a name for himself by the boldness of his agitation, by the radical alternatives of either/or that he announced the night before the march to the Feldherrnhalle: “When the decisive struggle for to be or not to be calls us, then all we want to know is this: heaven above us, the ground under us, the enemy before us.” Until that time he had recognized only frontal relationships, both inwardly and outwardly. His thrusting, offensive style as an orator was matched by his rude tone of command as party chairman. Orders were issued in a brusque, categorical tone. Only after the collapse of November 9, 1923, did Hitler realize the possibilities of the political game, the use that might be made of tactical devices, coalitions, and sham compromises. That insight had transformed the rude putschist into a politician who played his cards with deliberation. But even though he had learned to play his new part with sovereign skill, he had never been able entirely to conceal how much it had gone against the grain and that his innate tendency continued to be against detours, rules of the game, legality, and in fact against politics in general.

Now he was returning to his earlier self. He was going to slash through the web of dependencies and false concessions, to recover the putschist’s freedom to call any politician a swine for presenting him with a proposal for mediation. Hitler had behaved “like a force of nature,” Rumanian Foreign Minister Gafencu reported in April, 1939, after a visit to Berlin. That phrase would also describe the demagogue and rebel of the early twenties. Significantly, along with his decision for war, his old apolitical alternatives about victory or annihilation, world power or doom, cropped up once more. In his heart of hearts he had always preferred them; now they regularly recurred, sometimes several times in the same speech. “All hope for compromise is childish: victory or defeat,” he told his generals on November 23, 1939. And later: “I have led the German people to a great height even though the world now hates us. I am risking this war. I have to choose between victory or annihilation. I choose victory.” And then a few sentences further: “It is not a single problem that is at stake, but whether the nation is to be or not to be.”

It was wholly in keeping with this retreat from the game of politics that he increasingly lapsed, in terminology and in the tenor of his statements, back into the plane of irrationality. “Only he who struggles with fate can have Providence on his side,” he remarked in the above-mentioned speech. A member of his entourage noted, during the last days in August, a striking “tendency toward a Nibelungentod.” Hitler again defined the war as a “fateful struggle which cannot be dispensed with or negotiated away by any clever political or tactical skill, but really represents a kind of struggle with the Huns [as in the Nibelungenlied]… in which one either stands or falls and dies; either/or.”⁵

The following years were to show that Hitler’s defection from politics did not spring from a passing mood. Strictly speaking, he never again returned to politics. All efforts on the part of his entourage, the urgent pleas of Goebbels, the proposals of Ribbentrop or Rosenberg, even the occasional recommendations of such foreign statesmen as Mussolini, Horthy, and Laval, were in vain. His consultations with chiefs of the satellite states (which took place more and more rarely as the war went on) finally became the last vestige of former maneuverings. But they had nothing to do with political activity. Hitler himself accurately called them “hypnotic treatments.” His attitude may be summed up in the reply he gave to Ambassador Havel, the Foreign Office’s liaison man at headquarters, when in the spring of 1945 Havel urged him to seize the last opportunity for a political initiative: “Politics? I don’t engage in politics any more. All that disgusts me so.” In a totally contradictory way, he justified his political inaction on grounds of changing circumstances. While the war was going well, he held that time was working for him; in periods of setbacks he feared that his negotiating position would be unfavorable. “I see myself as a sort of spider,” he declared during the second phase of the war, “lying in wait for a run of luck. The thing is only to be alert and ready to pounce at the right moment.” In fact, such images concealed his continuing distaste for politics, whose stakes seemed to him too small, whose points too insipid, and which offered none of the excitement that transformed successes into triumphs. Many a time during the war years he commented that one must oneself “cut off possible lines of retreat… for then one fights more easily and resolutely.”⁶ Politics, according to his later viewpoint, was merely a possible line of retreat.

In renouncing politics, Hitler also returned to the principled ideological positions he had formerly held. The intellectual rigidity that had so long been hidden by his boundless tactical and methodical adroitness emerged again, becoming increasingly marked as time went on. The war brought on a process of petrifaction which soon gripped his whole personality. An alarming sign of the dehumanizing process came right at the start in Hitler’s casual order of September 1, 1939, the day the war began, that incurably ill persons be granted a “mercy death.”⁷ The phenomenon assumed most tangible form in Hitler’s insanely mounting anti-Semitism, which itself was a form of mythologizing atrophy of consciousness. Early in 1943 he told a foreign chief of state: “The Jews are the natural allies of Bolshevism and the candidates for the positions now held by those intellectuals who would be assassinated in case of Bolshevization. Therefore… the more radically one proceeds against the Jews, the better.” He said he preferred a naval battle like Salamis to an ambiguous skirmish and would rather smash all bridges behind him, since Jewish hatred was in any case gigantic. In Germany there was “no turning back on the course once taken.” His sense of entering upon the final conflict was obviously deepening. And the figure of the diplomat had no place in eschatology, he thought.

In our search for the specific impulse that set these processes in motion we cannot pretend that Hitler’s boredom with politics and his impatience are the whole explanation. Some writers have posited a shattering of his personality structure caused by illness. But evidence is lacking for this thesis. And often this sort of argument represents the effort of a disillusioned partisan of the regime to explain the difference between the successful and the unsuccessful phases in Hitler’s life. What comes to the fore during this second phase is the totally unchanged, rigid character of his ideas and ideologies. What stands revealed is not so much a break as the immutable core in Hitler’s nature.

But certainly his impatience was operative in all of it: the craving for dramatic intensifications, the rapid satiation with successes, the dynamism, whose author he was and whose victim he now became, and, finally, the phenomenon of temporal anxiety, which from 1937 on stamped his style of action, and was now reinforced by a sense that time was not only running out on him but working against him. Through sleepless nights, he told Mussolini, he had brooded over the advisability of postponing the war for two years. But then, considering the inevitability of the conflict and the growing strength of the enemy, he had “abruptly attacked Poland in the autumn.” On September 27, 1939, he said something similar to von Brauchitsch and Halder, and in a memorandum composed two weeks later he affirmed: “Given the situation… time can more probably be regarded as an ally of the Western powers than as our ally.” He was forever rationalizing his decision, speaking of “the good fortune of being permitted to lead this war in person” and even of his jealousy at the idea that someone after him might begin this war. Again, with a withering glance at any possible successor, he declared that he did not want “stupid wars” Coming after his death. His address to his generals on November 23, 1939, sums up his reasons for timing the war when he did. After an analysis of the situation he commented:

It is clear that Hitler was no longer speaking in political terms. The mood is visionary. And he found his new approach vindicated by his sensational successes in the initial phase of the war. Against Poland he had played the role of generalissimo[15] with some restraint. But he fell more and more in love with the part; and something of the infantilism that made him seek to perpetuate all pleasant experiences could be recognized in his total devotion to the map table at the Führer’s headquarters. Playing general brought new stimuli, new excitements to his nerves, but also posed a dangerous challenge. Here was the supreme test of his “strength of brain,” of his hardness and resolution, and of his theatrical temperament. He faced decisions of the “most gigantic sort” and of the most deadly seriousness. His remark that only artistic people have the qualities for great generalship underlines this aspect. The effortless victories of the early period strengthened his conviction that after the fame of demagogue and politician he would also win glory as the supreme commander. And when, as the war went on and on, this glory failed to come his way, he began to pursue it—breathlessly, defiantly, until he attained doom.

Hitler’s urge for war was so compelling that he not only conceded to reverse his fundamental design but went into the conflict in spite of inadequate preparation. The downcast mood in the streets, the ostentatious refusals to cheer on various occasions in the preceding months, testified to inadequate psychological preparation of the people; and in his impatience Hitler did little to improve it. After the Reichstag speech of April 28, 1938, he avoided going before the masses. Presumably he acted on the assumption that the drama of events would in itself generate sufficient mobilizing energies. But the satisfaction the people had obviously felt upon the reoccupation of the Rhineland, the annexation of Austria, and the entry into the Sudetenland had evaporated by the time Prague was occupied. Such gratifications were no longer to be had. Neither Danzig nor the Polish Corridor seemed of great importance to the prestige of the nation that had recovered from its long humiliation. Granted, the war against Poland was more popular than any of the other engagements of the Second World War; but it lacked the magnetic element. Neither the atrocity stories about murdered, tortured, or raped Germans nor the actual number of some 7,000 victims of Polish persecution could fire the popular mind. A few months after the beginning of the war expressions of discontent increased; the SD noted that the mood of the population was “that’s what comes when a war is started without sufficient preparation.” Between Christmas and New Year’s Day police power had to be used for the first time against crowds of discontented people.⁸

Hitler had obviously hastened the war for fear that the population’s preparedness might sink to a still lower level. He must have thought that it would be wise to begin the struggle while he could still draw on the abating momentum of former years. “Those who avoid battles,” he had once remarked, “will never acquire the strength to fight battles.” And in one of his last speeches, in which he justified his timing of the war (“there could not have been… a more fortunate moment than that of 1939”), he acknowledged that his decision had also been influenced by the psychological consideration that “enthusiasm and readiness to sacrifice… cannot be bottled and preserved. Such spirit arises once in the course of a revolution and will gradually fade away. Dull routine and the comforts of life will once more exert their spell on people and make them philistines again. It would have been wrong to let slip away all we had been able to achieve by National Socialist education, by the tremendous wave of enthusiasm that lifted our people.” On the contrary, he continued, war offered the chance to kindle that spirit anew.⁹

In the psychological realm, then, the war was supposed to partly create the spirit necessary to wage it. And in a certin sense this was Hitler’s basic idea for the entire conflict—which once again revealed his gambler’s temperament. In a speech delivered at the beginning of July, 1944, he publicly admitted this principle when he conceded that the war was “a prefinancing of the future achievements, the future work, the future raw materials, the future nutritional base; but it is also tremendous training for mastering the tasks which will face us in the future.”

Preparations in the fields of economics and armaments were actually far sketchier than the psychological preparations. To be sure, official propaganda repeatedly referred to enormous defensive efforts; and the whole world believed this, as it believed the speeches of leading members of the regime who boasted that the German economy had been geared for war for years. Thus Göring, when appointed commissioner of the Four-Year Plan, averred that Germany was already at war, though not yet a shooting war. The reality, however, was quite different. The country was, it is true, ahead of its enemies in steel production. Its coal supplies were also larger and its industries in many cases capable of greater production than those of the Allies. But in spite of all the efforts at autarchy Germany was still heavily dependent on foreign sources for crucial war materials. For example, she imported 90 per cent of her tin, 70 per cent of her copper, 80 per cent of her rubber, 75 per cent of her oil, and 99 per cent of her bauxite. She had stockpiled sufficient raw materials for approximately a year; but supplies of copper, rubber, and tin had been almost consumed by the spring of 1939. Without the vigorous economic support of the Soviet Union Germany would probably have succumbed to a British economic blockade within a short time. Molotov himself pointed this out in a conversation with Hitler.

The situation with regard to military equipment was not much different. In his Reichstag speech of September 1, 1939, Hitler declared that he had expended 90 billion marks on armaments. But this was one of those highflying fictions he regularly indulged in when he cited figures.¹⁰ In spite of all expenditures in the preceding years Germany was armed only, for the war that Hitler launched on September 1, not for the war of September 3. The army did consist of 102 divisions, but only half of these were active and battle-ready. The state of its training left much to be desired. The navy was distinctly inferior to the British and even to the French fleets; not even the strength permissible under the Anglo-German Naval Treaty of 1935 had been attained. Shortly after the Western declarations of war reached Berlin, Grand Admiral Raeder declared tersely that the German fleet, or rather “the little that is finished or will be finished in time, can only go down fighting honorably.” The air force alone was stronger than the forces of the enemy; it had 3,298 planes at its disposal. On the other hand, the ammunition supply had been half consumed by the end of the Polish campaign, so that the war could not have been actively continued for even three or four weeks. At Nuremberg, General Jodi called the existing reserves at the outbreak of the war “literally ridiculous.” Troop equipment also amounted to considerably less than the four-month stock that the High Command of the army had demanded. Even a small-scale attack from the West in the fall of 1939 would probably have brought about Germany’s defeat and the end of the war, military experts have concluded.¹¹

There is no doubt that Hitler saw these difficulties and risks. In his memorandum of October 9, 1939, “on the waging of the war in the West” he discussed these matters and devoted a special section to analyzing “the dangers of the German situation.” His chief concern was a protracted war, for which he considered Germany not sufficiently armed politically, materially, or psychologically. But he thought such weaknesses were intrinsic to Germany’s general plight, and thus believed that “by no matter what efforts they cannot be essentially improved within a short time.” Essentially, this meant that as things stood Germany was in no position to wage a world war.

Hitler reacted to this dilemma with an enormously significant twist that revealed all his shrewdness and all his cunning—cunning even toward himself. If Germany was incapable of waging a major, protracted war against an enemy coalition, she must bring her power to bear as events demanded, in spaced, short and concentrated blows against selected individual opponents, thus step by step enlarging her economic base until she finally reached the position to wage world war. This was the strategic concept of blitzkrieg.¹²

For a long time the idea of blitzkrieg was understood merely as a tactical or operative method of annihilating the enemy’s military forces by surprise attack. But in fact it was a prescription for total warfare, which took account of the specific weaknesses and strengths of the German situation and ingeniously combined them in a novel method of conquest. By using the interval between successive campaigns for a fresh build-up of armaments, the material burden on the economy and the public could be kept relatively low. Moreover, the preparations could be attuned directly to the next enemy. Each time a triumph was celebrated, the fanfares provided psychological stimulation for the next thrust. In the final analysis, it was an attempt to get around that discouraging saying of the days of the First World War, that Germany won her battles but lost her wars, by breaking up the war into a series of victorious engagements. But though the plan corresponded so well to the nature of the regime and to Hitler’s improvising style, which depended so largely on momentary inspirations, it had a serious flaw. It was bound to fail as soon as a strong enemy coalition came into being, committed to fight a protracted war.

Hitler had such faith in the blitzkrieg concept that he was in no way prepared for the alternative of large-scale warfare. In the summer of 1939 the armed forces operations staff suggested that it would be wise to draw up contingency plans and undertake war games in view of a full-scale conflict. Hitler ruled against this, emphasizing that the war against Poland would be localized. His memorandum of October 9 was the first concrete attempt to define the situation and the goals of a conflict with the West. He also repeatedly rejected proposals to retool the economy for the needs of a protracted total war; industrial production in 1940 went down slightly from the previous year. And shortly before the winter of 1941–42 production of military goods was actually cut back in anticipation of the impending blitz victory over the Soviet Union. Here, too, the experience of the First World War was influencing Hitler. He wanted to avoid the psychologically wearing effects of a rigorously restricted economy that for years scanted the wants of the people.

The continuity between the First and the Second World War is tangibly present on a variety of planes, and not only as a matter of interpretation. Hitler himself would often say that behind him lay only an armistice, whereas before him was “the victory we threw away in 1918.” In his speech of November 23, 1939, referring to the First World War, he wrote: “Today the second act of this drama is being written.” In the light of this continuity, Hitler appears as the specifically radical representative of a concept of German world hegemony that can be traced back to the late Bismarck period. As early as the turn of the century, it had condensed into specific war aims, and after the failed attempt of 1914–18 a fresh attempt was made to carry it out, with new and greater resolution, in the Second World War. An imperialistic drive nearly a century old culminated in Hitler.¹³

This view can be upheld on many grounds. The general connection between Hitler and the prewar world, his origins in its complexes, ideologies, and defensive reactions, in itself represents a weighty argument. For in spite of all his modernity Hitler was a profoundly anachronistic phenomenon. In his naive imperialism, in his magnitude complex, in his conviction of the inescapable choice between ascent to world power or doom, he was a leftover of the nineteenth century. In principle the biased young man of the Vienna days repeated the typical and fundamental movement of the conservative ruling classes of the period: flight from their fears of the socialist menace into expansionist ideas. Hitler merely extended and radicalized that tendency. Whereas the conservatives expected war and conquest to bring about a “general clean-up” that would bolster the social and political status (“strengthening of the patriarchal order and principles” was the way they phrased it), Hitler always thought in gigantically expanded categories, regarding war and expansion as something that went far beyond class interests, as the nation’s and even the race’s sole chance for survival. In Hitler’s thinking social imperialism of the traditional variety was peculiarly mixed with biologizing elements.

The direction of Hitler’s expansionist plans also corresponded to tradition reaching into the past. It had long been a part of German ideology that the East was the natural Lebensraum for the Reich. The fact that Hitler had come from the Dual Monarchy reinforced his tendency to look in this direction. As far back as 1894 a statement by the strident Pan-German Association had guided the nation’s interest toward the East and Southeast, “in order to assure the Germanic race those living conditions which it needs for the full development of its energies.” At the notorious “council of war” held on December 8, 1912, Chief of Staff von Moltke insisted that “the press should be used to build up sentiment for a war against Russia.” Hence some papers were soon calling for the inevitable decisive struggle with the East. The question, according to the press, was whether the hegemony over Europe would fall to Teutons or Slavs. A few days after the outbreak of the First World War the Foreign Office put forth a plan for the “formation of several buffer states” in the East, all of which were to stand in military dependence on Germany. A memorandum by the president of the Pan-Germans, Heinrich Class, “On the German War Aim,” which was distributed as a leaflet in 1917, went even further. It demanded extensive provinces in the East and suggested a “racial clean-up” by exchange of Russians for Volga Germans, transference of the Jews to Palestine, and a relocation to the East of Germany’s Polish population. Hitler’s design for an Eastern policy surely derived from such grandiose wartime proposals. When we add to this the influence of Russian exile circles in Munich and his own bent for intellectual extremism, we have the full-blown Hitlerian plan.

Similarly, Hitler’s ideas about alliances were by no means without precedent. That Germany must obtain England’s neutrality in order to join with Austria-Hungary in a war of conquest to the East, with possibly a simultaneous war against France, was not wholly alien to the foreign policy of the Wilhelminian Empire. Shortly after the outbreak of the 1914 war, the German Chancellor Bethmann-Hollweg discussed the very same idea, even thinking, by means of a blitzkreig in the West, to arrive at an alliance with England in order to proceed jointly with England against Russia. Toward the end of the war he declared that the conflict “could have been avoided only by an understanding with England.” Here was the original sketch for Hitler’s ideal plan as formulated in Mein Kampf; and when he came to power, Hitler did in fact promptly seek an understanding with England and British neutrality. The Weimar Republic, especially under the guidance of Gustav Stresemann, had given precedence to rapprochement with France.

But beyond these matters of ideology, geopolitics, and alliances, the continuity of German military ambitions can also be seen embodied in the attitudes of social groups. It was chiefly the conservative ruling class whose spokesmen drafted the expansive projects of the period of the monarchy and in whom the collapse of 1918 had bred an exacerbated status complex. Ever since, they had been bent on restoring Germany’s shaken selfconfidence and winning back the lost territories (especially from Poland). Throughout the Weimar period even the most temperate representatives of that class had always been averse to offering a guarantee of the Eastern borders. A 1926 memorandum for the Foreign Office from the army chiefs, for example, set forth in highly characteristic fashion the following guidelines for German foreign policy: liberation of the Rhineland and the Saar, elimination of the Polish Corridor and repossession of Polish Upper Silesia, Anschluss of German Austria, and finally elimination of the demilitarized zone. Here we have, in somewhat different order, the foreign-policy schedule followed by Hitler during the thirties.

The members of the former ruling class looked to the Führer of the National Socialist Party to carry out their revisionist aims. He seemed well qualified for this mission since he was supremely skillful in manipulating the Versailles Treaty and the widespread feelings of humiliation it evoked as integrating factors for the mobilization of the nation. Significantly, at the beginning of his chancellorship, they actually encouraged him to take a still bolder course. In the matter of withdrawal from the Disarmament Conference, or from the League of Nations, the conservative members of the cabinet pressed the hesitating Hitler to take the plunge. The same applied to the question of disarmament. Up to the occupation of Prague they approved entirely of his objectives, even though they questioned his gambler’s methods.

At this point the continuity ends. For what the revisionistic conservatives of the type of von Neurath, von Blomberg, von Papen, or von Weizsäcker regarded as the goal was to Hitler not even a stage, but merely a preliminary step. He despised his halfhearted partners because they stopped short of reaching out for world power as he did. His fixed aim continued to be not new (or even old) borders, but vast new areas, over half a million square miles, indeed all the land as far as the Urals and eventually beyond. “We shall impose our laws upon the East. We shall break through and gradually smash forward to the Urals. I hope that our generation will live to accomplish that…. Then we shall have a healthy selection [of the fittest] for the entire future. In this way we will create the preconditions allowing the whole of Europe—directed, ordered and led by us, the Germanic race—to survive for generations its destined battles with an Asia that will undoubtedly flare up again. We do not know when that will be. But if the mass of humanity amounting to one to one and a half billions surges forward, then the Germanic race with its, as I hope, 250 to 300 millions, together with other European races totaling from 600 to 700 million people, and with a deployment area extending to the Urals or in a century beyond the Urals, will pass the test of its struggle for survival against Asia.”¹⁴

What made this kind of imperialism qualitatively different from that under the kaisers, what shattered the continuity, was less the enormous hunger for sheer space (for that had been already suggested among the Pan-Germans and in more specific terms of power politics in Ludendorff’s 1918 plans for handling the East) than the ideological additives that lent it coherence and impetus: the notions of selection, racial bloc, and eschatological mission. Something of the sudden insight into this difference—which as a rule came much too late—breaks through in the assessment of Hitler’s character by a conservative at the time: “This man doesn’t even belong to our race. There is something utterly alien about him, as if he belonged to an otherwise extinct primitive race.”¹⁵

Hitler’s statement that the Second World War was the continuation of the First was also not the imperialistic commonplace for which it has generally been taken. He himself knew better. For the last time he wanted the generals and his conservative partners to believe that he was the trustee of their unrealized dreams of power, who would deliver to them their rightful victory of 1918. But he had far more sweeping victories in mind. The revisionist sentiments merely served him as useful links with the past. Once more we have the peculiar duality of proximity and distance that characterized all his relationships. Against the background of an undialectic concept of continuity it is easy to overlook the nature of the phenomenon. Hitler was not Wilhelm III!

Long ago, in Mein Kampf, he had written that his program represented a declaration of war against the existing order, against the known state of affairs, in short, against the established view of life in general. In September, 1939, he began waging that struggle by armed force and beyond the frontiers. The First World War had already been in part a clash of ideologies and systems of rule; the Second became such a clash in an incomparably more acute and doctrinaire fashion, a kind of world-wide civil war to decide not so much the kind of power that would henceforth rule the world as the kind of morality.

The enemies who faced one another after the unexpectedly rapid subjugation of Poland had no avowed territorial object of dispute, no aims of conquest; and for a time, during the “phony war” of that autumn, it seemed as if the war had lost its rationale. Might this mean that peace could be restored again? On October 5 Hitler had gone to Warsaw for the victory parade and had announced an important “appeal for peace” for the following day. Hardly anyone suspected how pointless the announcement of these vague hopes was. Two weeks earlier Stalin had informed Hitler that he had little use for an independent rump Poland. With his newly arisen antipathy for cautious politics, Hitler promptly agreed to the proposed negotiations. When they ended on October 4, Poland had once more been partitioned by her overpowering neighbors. But along with that act, all chance was lost of ending the war with the Western powers by a political solution. A foreign diplomat remarked after Hitler’s Reichstag address that he had threatened peace with the punishment of forced labor.

Within the framework of his larger design, Hitler had acted with total consistency. Although he would have welcomed a once more neutralized West, Stalin’s offer, at last provided him with a common border with the Soviet Union. And, after all, he had begun the war against Poland to achieve just that. As early as October 17 he had issued a significant order to General Keitel, chief of the High Command of the armed forces. Keitel had been instructed to consider, in future planning, that the occupied Polish region “has military importance for us as an advanced glacis and can be utilized for deployment. To that end the railroads, road and communications must be kept in order and exploited for our purpose. Any signs of consolidation of conditions in Poland must be stamped out.”

Morally, too, he now crossed the boundary that made the war irrevocable. In the same conversation he demanded the repression of any sign “that a Polish intelligentsia is coming forward as a class of leaders. The country is to continue under a low standard of living; we want to draw only labor forces from it.” Territory that went far beyond the borders of 1914 was incorporated into the Reich. The remainder was set up as a general government under the administration of Hans Frank; one part was subjected to a ruthless process of Germanization, the other to an unprecedented campaign of enslavement and annihilation. And while the commandos, the Einsatzgruppen, commenced their reign of terror, arresting, resettling, expelling, and liquidating—so that one German army officer wrote in a horrified letter of a “band of murderers, robbers and plunderers”—Hans Frank extolled the “epoch of the East” that was now beginning for Germany, a period, as he described it in his own peculiar brand of bombastic jargon, “of the most tremendous reshaping of colonizing and resettlement implementation.”

With the intensified stress on ideology, Heinrich Himmler was now visibly gaining more power. Hitler had occasionally remarked in private that Himmler did not shrink from proceeding “with reprehensible methods” and by doing so not only established order but also created accomplices. It would seem that this motive, quite aside from all expansionist plans, contributed to the more and more undisguised criminalization of the system. The idea was to bind the entire nation to the regime by complicity in an enormous crime, to engender the feeling that all the ships had been burned, that Salamis feeling of which Hitler had spoken. This, too, like his relinquishing the means of politics, was an attempt to cut off all avenues of retreat. In nearly every speech Hitler delivered after the beginning of the war the formula recurs: a November, 1918, will not be repeated. No doubt he sensed what General Ritter von Leeb wrote in his diary on October 3, 1939: “Poor mood of the population, no enthusiasm at all, no flags flying from the houses. Everyone waiting for peace. The people sense the needlessness of the war.” The annihilation policy in the East, which began immediately, was one of the ways of making the war irrevocable.

Now Hitler again no longer had a way out; once more, reliving old excitements, he stood with his back to the wall. The conflict would have to be, as he habitually phrased it, “fought out to the end.” To United States Undersecretary of State Sumner Welles, who called on him on March 2, 1940, he said that it was “not a question of whether Germany would be annihilated.” Germany would defend herself to the utmost; “at the very worst, all will be annihilated.”