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, i
n 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.
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