Hitler

by Joachim C. Fest

  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. S
till 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 collea
gues 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.