The Second World War

by John Keegan

  This intervention intensified a currency crisis within Germany, in part engineered by its own treasury to substantiate the payment difficulties, and it had the effect of fuelling an inflation that destroyed both the working man’s purchasing power and the middle classes’ savings. The value of the mark, which stood at 160,000 to the dollar in July (in 1914 it had exchanged at four), declined to a million to the dollar in August and 130,000 million in November. Gustav Stresemann, the German Chancellor, at first declared a campaign of passive resistance in the Ruhr, but this did nothing to deter the French, while the example of illegality it gave encouraged communists in Saxony and Hamburg, separatists in the Rhineland and former Freikorps men in Pomerania and Prussia to threaten civil disobedience. When, after quelling these disorders, Stresemann announced the end of the passive resistance campaign, Hitler decided his moment had come. On 8 November, at a prearranged public meeting in the Bürgerbräu Keller in Munich, which General von Lossow and the Bavarian Commissioner of State had unwisely agreed to attend, Hitler arrived armed, with armed men outside, put Lossow and the other notables under arrest and announced the formation of a new German regime: ‘The government of the November criminals and the Reich President are declared to be removed. A new National Government will be nominated this very day, here in Munich. A German National Army will be formed immediately. . . . The direction of policy will be taken over by me. Ludendorff will take over the leadership of the German National Army.’

  Next day, 9 November 1923, the nucleus of the National Army, the Kampfbund, set out to march on the former Bavarian War Ministry building, with Hitler and Ludendorff at its head. Röhm and the SA had taken possession of the War Ministry and were awaiting their arrival; interposed between were armed policemen, barring Hitler’s way across the Odeonsplatz. Hitler bargained his way through the first cordon. The second held its ground, opened fire, killed the man at Hitler’s side (who pulled Hitler to the ground in his dying grasp), put a bullet into Goering, the future commander of the Luftwaffe, but left Ludendorff untouched. He marched ahead, indifferent to the bloodshed about him, but reached the War Ministry to find only one other at his side. The German National Army had disintegrated.

  The immediate consequences of the ‘Beer Hall Putsch’ were banal: nine of the conspirators were tried; Ludendorff was acquitted and Hitler was sentenced to five years’ imprisonment, of which he served only nine months, just long enough to dictate to Rudolf Hess (an old comrade of Hitler’s regiment) the text of his political manifesto, Mein Kampf. The long-term consequences of the trial had a deeper significance. In his closing speech to the court, a speech reported throughout Germany and which made him, for the first time in his career as a demagogue, a national figure, Hitler expressed his relief that it was the police and not the Reichswehr, the army, which had fired on him and the Kampfbund. ‘The Reichswehr’, he said, ‘stands as untarnished as before. One day the hour will come when the Reichswehr will stand at our side, officers and men. . . . The army we have formed is growing from day to day. . . . I nourish the proud hope that one day the hour will come when these rough companies will grow to battalions, the battalions to regiments, the regiments to divisions, that the old cockade will be taken from the mud, that the old flags will wave again, that there will be a reconciliation at the last great divine judgement which we are prepared to face.’

  This was both Hitler’s public and his private verdict on his Putsch tactics. ‘We never thought to carry through a revolt against the army,’ he disclosed at Munich in 1933. ‘It was with it we believed we should succeed.’ After the Munich Putsch he changed tactics decisively. He never again undertook illegal action against the state but sought instead to achieve power constitutionally through the ballot box. The point of seeking power, however, though he did not disclose this aim publicly, was to acquire constitutional command of the army and the War Ministry and budgetary authority to vote military credits for rearmament. In the ten years that followed the failure of the Putsch Hitler did nothing to discourage the growth of the SA, which on the eve of his seizure of power in 1933 had reached a strength of 400,000, four times the size of the Reichswehr. Nor did he discourage the stormtroopers from believing that, when the day came, they would put off their brown, put on field-grey and emerge as soldiers of the ‘National Army’ he had promised to bring into being in Munich in 1923. He did, however, take care to see that the SA was kept under strict discipline, that its boasts of being ready to seize power by force were silenced, that its pretensions to be a replacement rather than a reinforcement for the Reichswehr were deflated, and that its leaders were dissuaded from representing themselves as military rather than political figures. After Munich Hitler remained in no doubt that the generals, with their creed of Überparteilichkeit (‘being above party’), were a power in the land he could not afford to alienate.

  Hitler and the Nazi revolution

  Economic crisis had provided Hitler with a false opportunity in 1923. Economic crisis again provided him with opportunity in 1930, and between then and his assumption of the German chancellorship in January 1933 he used it with discreet and consummate skill. In the six years after the catastrophic inflation of 1923, Germany had made a good recovery. The currency had been stabilised, credit restored, industry revitalised and unemployment successfully contained. The sudden world crisis of 1929, which destroyed credit across central Europe, brought much of that achievement to naught. Unemployment in Germany, a nation of 60 million people, rose from 1,320,000 in September 1929 to 3 million a year later, 4.5 million the year after that and over 6 million in the first two months of 1932. Hardship once again spread through the land and the moderate parties of the Weimar Republic, committed to orthodox, pre-Keynesian policies of budget balancing, could find no means to redress it. The parties of the extreme right and left benefited accordingly at the parliamentary elections called as one government after another collapsed under the pressure of events. In the election of September 1930 the Nazi Party polled 18.3 per cent of the vote, but in July 1932 it increased its share to 37.3 per cent, winning 230 seats and becoming the largest party in the Reichstag. In the words of Alan Bullock, ‘with a voting strength of 13,700,000 electors, a party membership of over a million and a private army of 400,000 SA and SS . . . [Hitler] was the most powerful political leader in Germany, knocking on the doors of the Chancellery at the head of the most powerful political party Germany had ever seen.’ The parallel success of the Communist Party positively reinforced Hitler’s appeal to those voters who were terrified by the spectre of Bolshevism, which they believed had been laid by the violent defeat of the Spartacists in 1919; the Communist Party enormously increased its support in 1930 and again in 1932, when it won 6 million votes and a hundred seats.

  The communists too had their private army, the Red Front, which fought street battles with the SA that frequently ended in death. Nazi street violence tainted the Nazi cause; communist street violence – which in July 1932 alone caused the deaths of thirty-eight Nazis and thirty communists – raised the prospect of communist revolution. Though that could not win Hitler a parliamentary majority – which he failed to achieve by 6.2 per cent even after the seizure of power in 1933 – it could and did frighten the moderate politicians into accepting Hitler as a counterweight who might be used to offset revolutionary with merely radical extremism, as they believed Nazism to be. In January 1933, after a number of makeshift ministries had fallen, President Paul von Hindenburg, the war hero, was advised by his ministers to offer Hitler the chancellorship. On 30 January he was installed.

  What followed was one of the most remarkable and complete economic, political and military revolutions ever carried through by one man in a comparable space of time. Between 30 January 1933 and 7 March 1936 he effectively restored German prosperity, destroyed not only opposition but also the possibility of opposition to his rule, re-created, in a spectacularly expanded German army, the principal symbol of the nation’s pride in itself, and used this force to abrogate the op
pressive treaties which defeat had imposed on the nation while he was still a humble soldier. He had luck, notably in the timely death of Hindenburg in August 1934, and in the incendiary attack on the Reichstag building in February 1933. The Reichstag fire allowed him to conjure the fiction of a communist threat to parliamentary institutions, and so panic the moderates into voting with the Nazis for a suspension of parliamentary powers: the Enabling Bill they enacted conferred on Hitler the right to pass binding laws by appending his signature to the necessary document. Hindenburg’s death opened the way for him to combine the office of the presidency with his own as Chancellor under the title of Führer, a position in which he exercised the authority of both head of government and head of state. But Hitler did not succeed between 1933 and 1936 purely by luck. His economic policy was not based on theory, certainly not Keynesian theory; but it amounted to a programme of deficit budgeting, state investment in public works and state-guaranteed industrial re-equipment of which Keynes would have approved. This was accompanied by a calculated destruction of the trade-union movement, which removed at a blow all restrictions on free movement of labour between jobs and workplaces, and the effect on unemployment was startling: between January 1933 and December 1934 the number of unemployed declined by more than half, many of the 3 million new workers finding jobs in the construction of the magnificent network of motorways (Autobahnen) which were the first outward symbol of the Nazi economic miracle.

  Moreover, he succeeded in his plan to rearm Germany not by rushing bullheaded at the disabling clauses of the Versailles Treaty but rather by waiting until the victor nations gave him pretext. Thus he did not announce the reintroduction of conscription until March 1935, when the French, beset as before the First World War by a falling birth-rate, themselves announced that they were doubling the length of their conscripts’ military service. Hitler was able to represent this move as a threat to German security which justified the enlargement of the 100,000-man army; on 17 March he also announced the creation of an air force – another breach of the Versailles Treaty. Even so he blurred his intentions by offering France a pact which would limit the size of his army to 300,000 men and that of his new air force to 50 per cent of hers. France’s refusal permitted him to fix larger totals.

  Hitler and the generals

  The reintroduction of conscription gave him by 1936 an army with a skeleton strength of thirty-six divisions, a fivefold increase from the seven of the Reichswehr. Few were as yet fully equipped or manned, and, as his generals warned him, he certainly lacked the strength to resist any armed reaction to his anti-Versailles policies. In seeking to realise his deeply held ambition to remilitarise the Rhineland, therefore, he waited once again until he could find the semblance of a legal cause, which he claimed to see in the French parliament’s ratification of a mutual-assistance pact with the Soviet Union in March 1936. Since the pact bound France to take action against Germany in the event of German aggression against the USSR, Hitler was able to represent it as a unilateral violation of the provision that France would never make war on Germany except by resolution of the League of Nations – a creation of Versailles from which he had withdrawn in 1933 – and to allege that such a violation justified his taking measures to improve Germany’s defence of its frontier with France. On 7 March 1936 he accordingly ordered the reoccupation of the Rhineland, where no German soldier had been stationed since November 1918, correctly confident that the French would not move to expel the force he sent, even though it numbered not even one division but a mere three battalions.

  Although Hitler’s generals had been apprehensive about the Rhineland adventure, they were not fundamentally disposed to argue with his diplomatic or strategic judgements, since the armed forces, among all the other institutions of state, had up to that moment been the principal beneficiaries of the National Socialist revolution. They had been spared Gleichschaltung, the process by which every organ of German life was brought directly under Nazi control; moreover, the leaders of the body which had threatened them with Gleichschaltung, the SA, had been summarily and brutally killed in June 1934. Hitler’s half-formulated promise that the stormtroopers would one day become soldiers of the new Germany had been made good only in the sense that after March 1935 the younger of them received their call-up papers and found themselves embodied in the Wehrmacht as conscripts among hundreds of thousands of others who had never worn the brown uniform. The armed forces had also benefited more generously than any other body from the programme of state investment. Tanks and aeroplanes – enough to equip a Panzer force of six divisions (soon to be raised to ten) and a Luftwaffe of 2000 combat aircraft – were now coming out of the new armaments factories in a steady stream. The design work which underlay their development had been done in Russia during the brief period of Russo-German friendship in the 1920s. In an ill-calculated act of appeasement in 1935 the British Admiralty had agreed that the German navy should also be partially liberated from the provisions of the Versailles Treaty, and it had begun to acquire capital ships and even U-boats, in numbers equivalent to 33 and 60 per cent respectively of the Royal Navy’s fleets. This material largesse enormously enhanced the institutional amour propre of the Wehrmacht which, after fifteen years in which it had starved for both men and equipment, suddenly found itself advanced to the front rank of the armed forces of Europe, almost as strong as the largest and better armed than any. Professionally, moreover, Hitler’s rearmament programme transformed the career prospects of individual officers: in 1933 the average age of a colonel was fifty-six; by 1937 it had been reduced to thirty-nine, while many in the Reichswehr who had reconciled themselves to retirement found themselves by 1937 commanding regiments, brigades, even divisions.

  Hitler’s seduction of his professional officers was as calculated as any other part of his programme, though he rightly attached more importance to it than the rest. His attitude to the SA had always been duplicitous; though he had needed and been glad to use the political fighting force it had given him in the ‘time of struggle’ before 1933, he was himself too much the true veteran, the seasoned ‘front fighter’, to reckon its street bullies proper military material. Hitler was, in many respects, a military snob – and with reason: he had fought in the First World War from beginning to end, suffered wounds and won a high decoration for bravery. The army he wished to re-create would be a model of the one in which he had served, not a disorderly political militia reclothed in field-grey. The Blood Purge of June 1934, when Hitler organised the murder of Röhm and the rest of the paramilitary radicals who had thought to leap to general’s rank by political hopscotch, had ensured that he had his way. One consequence of the purge of the SA was the rise of the rival military arm of the Nazi Party – the blackshirted Schutzstaffel (SS), a highly disciplined elite corps led by Heinrich Himmler.

  Although the generals had been careful to know nothing of the 1934 murders, the results had none the less put Hitler high in their favour; but the reverse was not the case. There was a strict limit to Hitler’s military snobbery. He was a combat snob, not a worshipper of rank or title. As he well knew, many of the Wehrmacht’s elite, the Great General Staff officers who were now senior commanders, had not fought at the front in the First World War, their brains being thought too valuable to be risked beyond headquarters. Their military as well as their social hauteur therefore grated with him. One of the innumerable rancours that he nursed dated back to the Munich trial, when General von Lossow, his fainthearted ally, had testified that he regarded him as no more than ‘a political drummer boy’; the wound had been salted by the state prosecutor’s statement that the drummer boy had ‘allowed himself to be carried beyond the position assigned to him’. It was Hitler who now assigned positions everywhere – except within the army, which retained control of its own promotion structure. However, since the generals continued to choose officers as timorous as they themselves had been over the remilitarisation of the Rhineland, Hitler decided to end the system. He wanted a war army, led by comman
ders determined to take revenge on the victors of 1918 and their creature states erected on the back of Germany’s defeat.

  Werner von Fritsch, the army commander-in-chief, was a particular bugbear among the fainthearts; in November 1937 he sought a private interview with Hitler to warn against policies that might provoke war. Two months later, the indiscreet remarriage of the Minister of War, General Werner von Blomberg, provided Hitler with an opportunity to get rid of both men: Blomberg’s young bride was discovered to have been a prostitute; while the unmarried Fritsch, his obvious successor, fell speechless when confronted by trumped-up charges of homosexual behaviour. Their enforced retirement did not immediately bring him generals of the bellicose temper he wanted; but it provided him with the pretext to establish a new supra-service command in place of the War Ministry, the Oberkommando der Wehrmacht (OKW), of which Hitler made himself the head, and the OKW was given responsibility for the highest level of strategic planning. This was a crucial move, for 1938 was to be the year in which Hitler moved from rearmament to the diplomatic offensive. He had already outlined his intentions to his service commanders on 5 November 1937, when he had argued that Britain and France were unlikely to oppose with military force German moves to strengthen its military position in the east. His first priority was to take advantage of the enthusiasm among German nationalists in Austria for union (Anschluss) with the Reich; his second was to attempt the annexation of the German-speaking parts of Czechoslovakia, the Sudetenland. Further, he hoped that Italy, Austria’s protector, would shortly be brought to Germany’s side by a formal alliance with Mussolini, his fellow dictator. Poland, on which he had longer-term designs, he believed would be immobilised by the speed of Germany’s action.