In any event he had to state at this time with all distinctness that Italy was in no position financially to sustain a long war. He could not afford to spend a billion lire a day, as England and France were doing.
This remark seems to have set Ribbentrop back for a moment and he tried to pin the Duce down on a date for Italy’s entry into the war, but the latter was wary of committing himself. “The moment would come,” he said, “when a definition of Italy’s relations with France and England, i.e., a break with these countries, would occur.” It would be easy, he added, to “provoke” such a rupture. Though he persisted, Ribbentrop could not get a definite date. Obviously Hitler himself would have to intervene personally for that. The Nazi Foreign Minister thereupon suggested a meeting at the Brenner between the two men for the latter part of March, after the nineteenth, to which Mussolini readily agreed. Ribbentrop, incidentally, had not breathed a word about Hitler’s plans to occupy Denmark and Norway. There were some secrets you did not mention to an ally, even while pressing for it to join you.
Though he had not succeeded in getting Mussolini to agree to a date, Ribbentrop had lured the Duce into a commitment to enter the war. “If he wanted to reinforce the Axis,” Ciano lamented in his diary, “he has succeeded.” When Sumner Welles, after visiting Berlin, Paris and London, returned to Rome and saw Mussolini again on March 16, he found him a changed man.
He seemed to have thrown off some great weight [Welles wrote later] … I have often wondered whether, during the two weeks which had elapsed since my first visit to Rome, he had not determined to cross the Rubicon, and during Ribbentrop’s visit had not decided to force Italy into the war.26
Welles need not have wondered.
As soon as Ribbentrop had departed Rome in his special train the anguished Italian dictator was prey to second thoughts. “He fears,” Ciano jotted in his diary on March 12, “that he has gone too far in his commitment to fight against the Allies. He would now like to dissuade Hitler from his land offensive, and this he hopes to achieve at the meeting at the Brenner Pass.” But Ciano, limited as he was, knew better. “It cannot be denied,” he added in his diary, “that the Duce is fascinated by Hitler, a fascination which involves something deeply rooted in his makeup. The Fuehrer will get more out of the Duce than Ribbentrop was able to get.” This was true—with reservations, as shortly will be seen.
No sooner had he returned to Berlin than Ribbentrop telephoned Ciano—on March 13—asking that the Brenner meeting be set earlier than contemplated, for March 18. “The Germans are unbearable,” Mussolini exploded. “They don’t give one time to breathe or to think matters over.” Nevertheless, he agreed to the date.
The Duce was nervous [Ciano recorded in his diary that day]. Until now he has lived under the illusion that a real war would not be waged. The prospect of an imminent clash in which he might remain an outsider disturbs him and, to use his words, humiliates him.27
It was snowing when the respective trains of the two dictators drew in on the morning of March 18, 1940, at the little frontier station at the Brenner Pass below the lofty snow-mantled Alps. The meeting, as a sop to Mussolini, took place in the Duce’s private railroad car, but Hitler did almost all the talking. Ciano summed up the conference in his diary that evening.
The conference is more a monologue … Hitler talks all the time … Mussolini listens to him with interest and with deference. He speaks little and confirms his intention to move with Germany. He reserves to himself only the choice of the right moment.
He realized, Mussolini said, when he was finally able to get in a word, that it was “impossible to remain neutral until the end of the war.” Co-operation with England and France was “inconceivable. We hate them. Therefore Italy’s entry into the war is inevitable.” Hitler had spent more than an hour trying to convince him of that—if Italy did not want to be left out in the cold and, as he added, become “a second-rate power.”28 But having answered the main question to the Fuehrer’s satisfaction, the Duce immediately began to hedge.
The great problem, however, was the date … One condition for this would have to be fulfilled. Italy would have to be “very well prepared” … Italy’s financial position did not allow her to wage a protracted war …
He was asking the Fuehrer whether there would be any danger for Germany if the offensive were delayed. He did not believe there was such a danger … he would [then] have finished his military preparations in three to four months, and would not be in the embarrassing position of seeing his comrade fighting and himself limited to making demonstrations … He wanted to do something more and he was not now in a position to do it.
The Nazi warlord had no intention of postponing his attack in the West and said so. But he had a “few theoretical ideas” which might solve Mussolini’s difficulty of making a frontal attack on mountainous southern France, since that conflict, he realized, “would cost a great deal of blood.” Why not, he suggested, supply a strong Italian force which together with German troops would advance along the Swiss frontier toward the Rhone Valley “in order to turn the Franco–Italian Alpine front from the rear.” Before this, of course, the main German armies would have rolled back the French and British in the north. Hitler was obviously trying to make it easy for the Italians.
When the enemy has been smashed [in northern France] the moment would come [Hitler continued] for Italy to intervene actively, not at the most difficult point on the Alpine front, but elsewhere …
The war will be decided in France. Once France is disposed of, Italy will be mistress of the Mediterranean and England will have to make peace.
Mussolini, it must be said, was not slow at seizing upon this glittering prospect of getting so much after the Germans had done all the hard fighting.
The Duce replied that once Germany had made a victorious advance he would intervene immediately … he would lose no time … when the Allies were so shaken by the German attack that it needed only a second blow to bring them to their knees.
On the other hand,
If Germany’s progress was slow, the Duce said that then he would wait.
This crude, cowardly bargain seems not to have unduly bothered Hitler. If Mussolini was personally attracted to him, as Ciano said, by “something deeply rooted in his make-up,” it might be said that the attraction was mutual, for the same mysterious reasons. Disloyal as he had been to some of his closest associates, a number of whom he had had murdered, such as Roehm and Strasser, Hitler maintained a strange and unusual loyalty to his ridiculous Italian partner that did not weaken, that indeed was strengthened when adversity and then disaster overtook the strutting, sawdust Roman Caesar. It is one of the interesting paradoxes of this narrative.
At any rate, for what it was worth—and few Germans besides Hitler, especially among the generals, thought it was worth very much—Italy’s entrance into the war had now at last been solemnly promised. The Nazi warlord could turn his thoughts again to new and imminent conquests. Of the most imminent one—in the north—he did not breathe a word to his friend and ally.
THE CONSPIRATORS AGAIN FRUSTRATED
Once more the anti-Nazi plotters tried to persuade the generals to depose the Leader—this time before he could launch his new aggression in the north, of which they had got wind. What the civilian conspirators again wanted was assurance from the British government that it would make peace with an anti-Nazi German regime, and, being what they were, they were insistent that in any settlement the new Reich government be allowed to keep most of Hitler’s territorial gains: Austria, the Sudetenland and the 1914 frontier in Poland, though this last had only been obtained in the past by the wiping out of the Polish nation.
It was with such a proposal that Hassell, with considerable personal courage, journeyed to Arosa, Switzerland, on February 21,1940, to confer with a British contact whom he calls “Mr. X” in his diary and who was a certain J. Lonsdale Bryans. They conferred in the greatest secrecy at four meetings on February 22 and 23. Bryans, who
had cut a certain figure in the diplomatic society of Rome, was another of those self-appointed and somewhat amateurish negotiators for peace who have turned up in this narrative. He had contacts in Downing Street, and Hassell, once they had met, was personally impressed by him. After the fiasco of the attempt of Major Stevens and Captain Best in Holland to get in touch with the German conspirators, the British were somewhat skeptical of the whole business, and when Bryans pressed Hassell for some reliable information as to whom he was speaking for the German envoy became cagey.
“I am not in a position to name the men who are backing me,” Hassell retorted. “I can only assure you that a statement from Halifax would get to the right people.”29
Hassell then outlined the views of the German “opposition”: it was realized that Hitler had to be overthrown “before major military operations are undertaken”; that this must be “an exclusively German affair”; that there must be “some authoritative English statement” about how a new anti-Nazi regime in Berlin would be treated and that “the principal obstacle to any change in regime is the story of 1918, that is, German anxiety lest things develop as they did then, after the Kaiser was sacrificed.” Hassell and his friends wanted guarantees that if they got rid of Hitler Germany would be treated more generously than it was after the Germans had got rid of Wilhelm II.
He thereupon handed over to Bryans a memorandum which he himself had drawn up in English. It is a wooly document, though full of noble sentiments about a future world based “on the principles of Christian ethics, justice and law, social welfare and liberty of thought and conscience.” The greatest danger of continuing “this mad war,” Hassell wrote, was “a bolshevization of Europe”—he considered that worse than the continuance of Nazism. And his main condition for peace was that the new Germany be left with almost all of Hitler’s conquests, which he enumerated. The German acquisition of Austria and the Sudetenland could not even be discussed in any proposed peace; and Germany would have to have the 1914 frontier with Poland, which, of course, though he did not say so, was actually the 1914 frontier with Russia, since Poland had not been allowed to exist in 1914.
Bryans agreed that speedy action was necessary in view of the imminence of the German offensive in the West and promised to deliver Hassell’s memorandum to Lord Halifax. Hassell returned to Berlin to acquaint his fellow plotters with his latest move. Although they hoped for the best from Hassell’s “Mr. X” they were more concerned at the moment with the so-called “X Report” which Hans von Dohnanyi, one of the members of the group in the Abwehr, had drawn up on the basis of Dr. Mueller’s contact with the British at the Vatican.* It declared that the Pope was ready to intervene with Britain for reasonable peace terms with a new anti-Nazi German government, and it is a measure of the views of these opponents of Hitler that one of their terms, which they claimed the Holy Father would back, was “the settlement of the Eastern question in favor of Germany.” The demonic Nazi dictator had obtained a settlement in the East “in favor of Germany” by armed aggression; the good German conspirators wanted the same thing handed to them by the British with the Pope’s blessings.
The X Report loomed very large in the minds of the plotters that winter of 1939–40. At the end of October General Thomas had shown it to Brauchitsch with the intention of bucking up the Army Commander in Chief in his efforts to dissuade Hitler from launching the offensive in the West that fall. But Brauchitsch did not appreciate such encouragement. In fact, he threatened to have General Thomas arrested if he brought the matter up again. It was “plain high treason,” he barked at him.
Now, with a fresh Nazi aggression in the offing, Thomas took the X Report to General Halder in the hope that he might act on it. But this was a vain hope. As the General Staff Chief told Goerdeler, one of the most active of the conspirators—who had also begged him to take the lead, since the spineless Brauchitsch would not—he could not at this time justify breaking his oath as a soldier to the Fuehrer. Besides:
England and France had declared war on us, and one had to see it through. A peace of compromise was senseless. Only in the greatest emergency could one take the action desired by Goerdeler.
“Also, doch!” exclaimed Hassell in his diary on April 6, 1940, in recounting Halder’s state of mind as explained to him by Goerdeler. “Halder,” the diarist added, “who had begun to weep during the discussion of his responsibility, gave the impression of a weak man with shattered nerves.”
The accuracy of such an impression is to be doubted. When one goes over Halder’s diary for the first week of April, cluttered as it is with hundreds of detailed entries about preparations for the gigantic offensive in the West, which he was helping to mastermind, this writer at least gets the impression that the General Staff Chief was in a buoyant mood as he conferred with the field commanders and checked the final plans for the greatest and most daring military operation in German history. There is no hint in his journal of treasonable thoughts or of any wrestling with his conscience. Though he has misgivings about the attack on Denmark and Norway, they are based purely on military grounds, and there is not a word of moral doubt about Nazi aggression against the four small neutral countries whose frontiers Germany had solemnly guaranteed and whom Halder knew Germany was about to attack, and against two of whom, Belgium and Holland, he himself had taken a leading part in drafting the plans.
So ended the. latest attempt of the “good Germans” to oust Hitler before it was too late. It was the last opportunity they would have to obtain a generous peace. The generals, as Brauchitsch and Halder had made clear, were not interested in a negotiated peace. They were thinking now, as was the Fuehrer, of a dictated peace—dictated after German victory. Not until the chances of that had gone glimmering did they seriously return to their old and treasonable thoughts, which had been so strong at Munich and at Zossen, of removing their mad dictator. This state of mind and character must be remembered in view of subsequent events and of subsequent spinning of myths.
THE TAKING OF DENMARK AND NORWAY
Hitler’s preparations for the conquest of Denmark and Norway have been called by many writers one of the best-kept secrets of the war, but it has seemed to this author that the two Scandinavian countries and even the British were caught napping not because they were not warned of what was coming but because they did not believe the warnings in time.
Ten days before disaster struck, Colonel Oster of the Abwehr warned a close friend of his, Colonel J. G. Sas, the Dutch military attaché in Berlin, of the German plans for Weseruebung and Sas immediately informed the Danish naval attaché, Captain Kjölsen.30 But the complacent Danish government would not believe its own naval attaché, and when on April 4 the Danish minister in Berlin sent Kjölsen scurrying to Copenhagen to repeat the warning in person his intelligence was still not taken seriously. Even on the eve of catastrophe, on the evening of March 8, after news had been received of the torpedoing of a German transport laden with troops off the south coast of Norway—just north of Denmark—and the Danes had seen with their own eyes a great German naval armada sailing north between their islands, the King of Denmark had dismissed with a smile a remark at the dinner table that his country was in danger.
“He really didn’t believe that,” a Guards officer who was present later reported. In fact, this officer related, the King had proceeded after dinner to the Royal Theater in a “confident and happy” frame of mind.31
Already in March the Norwegian government had received warnings from its legation in Berlin and from the Swedes about a German concentration of troops and naval vessels in the North Sea and Baltic ports and on April 5 definite intelligence arrived from Berlin of imminent German landings on the southern coast of Norway. But the complacent cabinet in Oslo remained skeptical. Not even on the seventh, when several large German war vessels were sighted proceeding up the Norwegian coast and reports arrived of British planes strafing a German battle fleet off the mouth of the Skagerrak, not even on April 8, when the British Admiralty informe
d the Legation of Norway in London that a strong German naval force had been discovered approaching Narvik and the newspapers in Oslo were reporting that German soldiers rescued from the transport Rio de Janeiro, torpedoed that day off the Norwegian coast at Lillesand by a Polish submarine, had declared they were en route to Bergen to help defend it against the British—not even then did the Norwegian government consider it necessary to take such obvious steps as mobilizing the Army, fully manning the forts guarding the harbors, blocking the airfield runways, or, most important of all, mining the easily mined narrow water approaches to the capital and the main cities. Had it done these things history might have taken a different turning.
Ominous news, as Churchill puts it, had begun filtering into London by the first of April, and on April 3 the British War Cabinet discussed the latest intelligence, above all from Stockholm, which told of the Germans collecting sizable military forces in its northern ports with the objective of moving into Scandinavia. But the news does not seem to have been taken very seriously. Two days later, on April 5, when the first wave of German naval supply ships was already at sea, Prime Minister Chamberlain proclaimed in a speech that Hitler, by failing to attack in the West when the British and French were unprepared, had “missed the bus”—a phrase he was very shortly to rue.*
The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich Page 110
