Hitler

by Joachim C. Fest

  Adolf Hitler

  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 gui
lty 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:

  We and all nations have a sense that we have come to the turning point of an age. Not only we, the former defeated, but the victors also have the inner conviction that something is wrong, that men seem to have taken leave of reason…. Everywhere the nations seem to feel that a new order must come, especially on the Continent where the people are so closely crowded together. The motto for this new order must read: reason and logic, understanding and mutual consideration! Those who think that the word “Versailles” could possibly stand at the entrance to this new order are sadly mistaken. That would not be the cornerstone of the new order, but its gravestone.8

  Thus Europe offered Hitler as many gateways for invasion as Germany had. A belated opposition would hammer away at the antitheses between Hitler and Europe; this was a misconception, for there were a large number of shared feelings and interests. With some bitterness Thomas Mann, voicing the attitudes of a minority, spoke of the “painfully slow and reluctant way in which we Germans, those of us who are exiles at home or exiles abroad, who have believed in Europe and thought we had Europe morally behind us, were forced, to realize that in fact we do not have it behind us.”9

  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 a
s 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.