1938: Hitler's Gamble
Page 1
1938
HITLER’S GAMBLE
1938
HITLER’S GAMBLE
Giles MacDonogh
Constable • London
Constable & Robinson Ltd
3 The Lanchesters
162 Fulham Palace Road
London W6 9ER
www.constablerobinson.com
This edition published by Constable,
an imprint of Constable & Robinson, 2009
Copyright © Giles MacDonogh, 2009
The right of Giles MacDonogh to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs & Patents Act 1988.
All rights reserved. This book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, re-sold, hired out or otherwise circulated in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.
A copy of the British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data is available from the British Library
ISBN 978-1-84529-845-6
Printed and bound in the EU
1 3 5 7 9 10 8 6 4 2
For Augi
Wiedergefunden
Ich ging dann nach draußen, wo die Sterne funkelten und die Abschüsse am Himmel wetterleuchteten. Die ewigen Zeichen und Male – der Große Wagen, der Orion, die Wega, das Siebengestirn, der Gürtel der Milchstraße – was sind wir Menschen und unsere Erdenjahre vor diesem Glanz? Was ist unsere flüchtige Qual? Um Mitternacht, bei Lärm der Zecher, gedachte ich lebhaft meiner Lieben und fühlte, wie auch ihre Grüße durchdrangen.
Ernst Jünger, 31 December 1942
CONTENTS
List of Illustrations
Acknowledgements
Introduction
Prologue
Chapter 1 January
Chapter 2 February
Chapter 3 March
Chapter 4 April
Chapter 5 May
Chapter 6 June
Chapter 7 July
Chapter 8 August
Chapter 9 September
Chapter 10 October
Chapter 11 November
Chapter 12 December
Conclusion
Epilogue
Notes
Index
LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS
Hitler with Emmy and Hermann Goering at their daughter’s christening. © akg-images (akg_5772).
Hitler with Josef Goebbels, his wife Magda, and their three children. © Hulton Archive / Getty Images (56257021).
The Führerbau in Munich, 1938. © Time & Life Pictures / Getty Images (50537906).
The New Reich’s Chancellery, designed by Albert Speer. © German Federal Archive.
Hitler’s flat on the second floor of the Prinzgegentenplatz in Munich, 1948. © Time & Life Pictures / Getty Images (50715894).
Crowds greet German soldiers as they enter Salzburg on 12 March. © The Granger Collection / TopFoto (gr007869_H).
Jews queue for visas outside the Polish consulate in Vienna. © akg-images (akg_269491).
The rubber goods shop, ‘Gummi-Weil’ in Frankfurt. © akg-images (akg_134464).
Juden Raus board game. © Wiener Library, London.
Basil Staunton Batty, Bishop of Fulham, responsible for the Anglican parishes of northern Europe. © Lambeth Palace (MS 3438 no. 19).
The Reverend Hugh Grimes, chaplain in Vienna. © Jewish Quarterly, 2004.
The British Embassy chapel in Vienna. © Author’s photograph.
Herschel Grynszpan at his first police interrogation. © Hulton Archive / Getty Images (56461916).
Field Marshal Von Blomberg and General Von Fritsch. © TopFoto (0847177).
German boxing heavyweight, Max Schmeling. © Popperfoto / Getty Images (79666169).
Jugendalija (organised emigration of young Jews to Palestine): Jewish teenagers depart from the Anhalter station in Berlin. © akg-images (akg_423963).
Jewish children after their arrival in Harwich. © akg-images (akg_134363).
The half-Jewish dramatist Cark Zuckmayer. © akg-images (akg_1 24622).
Buchenwald concentration camp, 1944. © Sammlung Gedenkstätte Buchenwald.
Political prisoners at Dachau concentration camp. © akg-images (akg_134401).
Hitler and Nazi leaders assemble with Mussolini in Rome. © akg-images (akg_74441).
Hitler’s state visit to Naples. © Time & Life Pictures / Getty Images (50654588).
Germans read cases containing copies of Der Stürmer. © German Federal Archive.
‘Jewish Advertising Revenue: the so-called pressure of public opinion is the weight of Jewish sacks of gold’. Propaganda cartoon from Der Stürmer. © Author’s collection.
Aryan women defiled by Jewish gold. Propaganda cartoon from Der Stürmer. © Author’s collection.
Corrupt Jewish businessmen. Propaganda cartoon from Der Stürmer. © Author’s collection.
Hitler and Goebbels at the Imperial Hotel in Vienna. © Hulton Archive / Getty Images (56461557).
The ‘aryanized’ Zu den Drei Husaren,Vienna’s best restaurant. © Author’s photograph.
Göring admires a painting presented to him by Hitler for his 45th birthday. © Hulton Archive / Getty Images (3248591).
Albert Speer’s model for a new Berlin. © German Federal Archive.
The Munich art parade in July. © Hulton Archive / Getty Images (3425683).
Jewish men from Baden-Baden are led to the concentration camp. © akg-images (akg_391980).
A wrecked synagogue after Kristallnacht. © akg-images (akg_157554).
Jewish women in Munich are singled out for humiliation. © akg-images (akg_185861).
The Evian Conference in July. © akg-images (akg_395031).
Neville Chamberlain arrives for the Munich Conference. © Time and Life Pictures / Getty Images (50537899).
Hitler crosses the frontier into the Sudetenland. © Hulton Archive / Getty Images (3275411).
A Czech pro-Nazi family make a string of swastika pennants to welcome Hitler’s occupying troops. © Time & Life Pictures / Getty Images (50609593).
Hungarian troops enter Csallokez, ceded to Hungary by Czechoslovakia. © Popperfoto / Getty Images (79656758).
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
Many people have given me helpful suggestions and references, or have delved deep into their memories of a now distant time: Rupert Allison, John Aycoth, Annabel Barker, Richard Bassett, Angela Bohrer, Ann Bone, the late Gerhard Bronner, Professor Michael Burleigh, Professor Andrew Chandler, George Clare, Tim Clarke, Venerable Patrick Curran, Wolf-Erich Eckstein, the late Sir Dudley Forwood Bt, Georg Gaugusch, the late Litzi Gedye, Lydia Hall, Gerhard Heilig, Uwe Kohl, the late Peter Leighton-Langer, Mairin Lodle, Celia Male, Patricia Meehan, Professor Lucien Meysels, Fritz Miesbauer, Gisela Müller, Stefan Popper, Professor Munro Price, Lorli Rudov, Arnold Sayers, Professor Hans Schneider, Father Franz Schuster OSB, Henry Wellisch, August Zirner and Ed Zwieback.
Particular thanks are due to people who lent or sent books and papers, such as my friends Christopher Wentworth-Stanley and Sebastian Cody in Vienna. Sebastian also read the typescript and made a number of important points. Michael Smith of the Daily Telegraph gave me a copy of an interview with the Viennese MI6 deputy chief, Kenneth Benton, recorded before Benton’s death. Peter Ede very kindly sent me his manuscript translation of Gräfin Maltzan’s memoirs and other helpful suggestions.
I should also like to thank the staffs of the DÖW archive and the Staatsbibliothek in Vienna; the Bundesarchiv in Koblenz; and the library at Swarthmore College in Pennsylvania for providing me with copies of the Corder Catchpool papers. In London I received wonder
ful support from a number of institutions: the Public Record Office, Friends House Library, the London Metropolitan Archive for the papers of the British Board of Deputies, the Guildhall Library for the Anglican Church abroad, Lambeth Palace Library, the Newspaper Library in Colindale, the British Library, the Wiener Library and the German Historical Institute.
Thanks too to my agent Georgina Capel and her staff, to Lara Heimert and Leo Hollis, my editors in New York and London respectively, to Douglas Matthews for compiling the index as well as to my wife Candida, who agreed to read the manuscript, and to the rest of my family, for giving me a few moments of peace and quiet.
INTRODUCTION
The year 1938 was one of cataclysmal change for Germany. On 1 January the Reich was administered by a right-wing coalition led by the Chancellor, Adolf Hitler, and dominated by members of the Nazi Party. The army had sworn a personal oath of allegiance to Hitler, but its commanders had managed to retain a degree of independence. The country lay confined within borders decreed by the Treaty of Versailles nearly twenty years before. Hitler had so far contented himself with policing his own house and grabbing back the Demilitarized Zone in the Rhineland. He had yet to pursue any foreign ‘adventures’. Although they had been stripped of their roles in German public life, the Jews were still in possession of their property, and many of them continued to lead relatively normal lives. They were evidently in no hurry to leave.
By New Year’s Day 1939, all that had changed. The non-Nazis had been purged of all but a few insignificant roles in government; Hitler had assumed total control of the armed forces; Germany had invaded first Austria then the German-speaking areas of Czechoslovakia; the Jews had been robbed, beaten and imprisoned and many had been driven into penurious exile. Hundreds had been killed. Hitler had emerged deus ex machina with all the powers of the Nazi regime consolidated in his own person. And worse was to come. That Germans felt an increase in stress and anxiety during those twelve months is perhaps borne out by one telling statistic: their consumption of strong alcohol doubled in the course of the year.1
We remember 1938 now above all for Munich, that moment at the end of September when Western leaders apparently gave in to the Führer’s demands. Peace was hanging by a thread: Hitler had launched his second foreign ‘gamble’, and French and British statesmen met their fascist counterparts in a bid to avoid war. We are also painfully aware of the condition of much of Europe in May 1945: a collection of smouldering ruins filled with fresh or festering corpses. In those intervening years some fifty million people had died violent deaths. There is, however, a danger in hindsight, and it would be unfair to seek to draw a direct line between the two situations, for the line is not straight at all. Before the outbreak of war in 1939, no grown man or woman could have accurately predicted the depths to which Nazi Germany would sink by the end.
Nonetheless the events that took place in 1938 make it easy to conclude that Hitler had already mapped out the entire series of conquests by which he would regain the old Imperial German borders in the east, and more besides; but we must not race to such conclusions: Hitler could be more pragmatic than his writings and public utterances suggest and he was probably hoping to get what he could without fighting the great powers. If all went well, and the West made no trouble, other territories might fall into his lap. It was only in the spring of 1939, for example, that he began to make plans to take the Polish Corridor by force, after the Poles refused to agree to Danzig reverting to the Reich. Poland suffered its fourth partition in September 1939.
It is similarly tempting to connect the injustice and violence directed against Austria’s and Germany’s Jews in 1938 with the industrialized slaughter of the Final Solution. Nazi antisemitism certainly took a new turn in 1938, but it would be difficult to argue that plans had already been drawn up to murder the Jews in specially created camps in east-central Europe. Some would say that Hitler had already made up his mind by 30 January 1939, when he delivered a notorious speech to celebrate the sixth anniversary of the Nazi takeover. Maybe so, but he had to find a means of putting his thoughts into action, and, even then, German leaders were remarkably sensitive to foreign opinion. It is more likely that the speech contained a veiled warning to the Jews in the United States, that there would be trouble for their co-religionists if they continued to stifle German trade and rob the country of the foreign currency it so desperately needed to survive.
Words like vernichten and ausrotteni came easily to Hitler’s lips. As a front-line soldier in the Great War he had experienced the effects of poison gas, but even by the end of 1938 it was unlikely that he had made the connection between ‘problem’ and ‘solution’. Wartime conditions vastly accelerated projects that had yet to be formulated; only then was the smoke thick enough to cover the activities of the zealots. Massive troop deployment, inadequate communications and inurement to violent death, brought about by casualties on an unprecedented scale, helped remove the last moral barriers to genocide.
Yet 1938 was the crucial year in the history of Nazi Germany before Europe tumbled into war. Every month resounded with shocks or sensations: the Blomberg–Fritsch Crisis in January, which shook faith in the armed forces; the end of Cabinet government in February; the Anschluss in March that melded Austria to the Reich; the Plebiscite in April that revealed overwhelming support for the Führer; Hitler’s trip to Rome in May that laid the keel of a proper alliance with Mussolini; Edda Göring’s birth in June, which provided Germans with a welcome social event and demonstrated the popularity of Hitler’s chosen successor; the Evian Conference in July, which revealed that the countries opposing Hitler’s racial policies were not prepared to put their money where their mouths were; the Kendrick Crisis in August, which destroyed the British intelligence network in Germany; Chamberlain’s visits to Berchtesgaden and Bad Godesberg in September followed by the notorious Munich Conference; the occupation of the Sudetenland in October and later that month the expulsion of the Polish Jews from the Reich; Goebbels’ re-creation of a mediaeval pogrom in November’s Reichskristallnacht. While the Jews repaired their broken homes and shops in December, the Kindertransporte began to ferry their children to safety.
In 1938, the blood was scarcely cold on the battlefields of the Great War and few people were ready for more; yet, in the course of those twelve months, Hitler, Göring and Ribbentrop prodded the West’s defences and found out how thin they were. Germany gambled, and with each easy victory they decided they could push even further. Hitler’s eyes were already roving, but for the time being he was looking to the southeast. Germany required Lebensraum (living space), raw materials and industry. It was Austria and Czechoslovakia that appealed to him at the beginning of 1938, not right-wing Poland, where many people abominated the Jews as much as he did, and which was still considered a useful bulwark against Bolshevik Russia.
In 1938 the deportation of the Reich’s Jews began in earnest. Germany gained experience in forcible expulsion with the eviction of the Polish Jews in October, and after Reichskristallnacht two weeks later. Following the pogrom of 9–10 November, as many as 30,000 Jews were shoved into the concentration camps that Himmler had been extending and expanding all year. This was the first large-scale, organized strike against the Jews of the Altreich, as Germany north of the former Austro-German border on the River Inn was now called. A few thousand rich Austrian Jews had been languishing in Dachau and Buchenwald since April. The aim was to speed up emigration, but it also oiled the cogs of a machine that would be used again and again once war began. And when that happened it would mostly mean murder.
PROLOGUE
On 5 November 1937 Hitler set out his new vision for Germany. He proposed to smash the shackles of the Versailles Treaty. This programme is revealed in the now infamous Hossbach Memorandum. This was to be his ‘political testament’. Hitler’s aim was to test his service chiefs and see how ready they were to subscribe to his more radical plans. No notes were to be taken at the session, which was top secret.1 Field Marshal
Werner von Blomberg’s adjutant, the staff officer Colonel Friedrich Hossbach, witnessed the meeting between Hitler and the military chiefs: Blomberg, Werner von Fritsch, Erich Raeder and Hermann Göring together with the Foreign Minister, Constantin von Neurath. Hossbach thought the discussion might interest his mentor, the Chief of the General Staff, Colonel General Ludwig Beck, and scribbled down the main points in his diary.2
In the course of a two-hour monologue,i Hitler told those present that his aim was to maintain the ‘racial community’ and enlarge it. Germany required Lebensraum – not in the country’s confiscated African colonies (which did not interest him) but in Europe, where new agricultural land would provide Germany with the self-sufficiency, or autarky, that it craved. He warned the generals that Germany was also painfully short of raw materials. It had to strike before potential enemies such as the Soviet Union could catch up. He predicted that the Russians would be ready to fight some time between 1943 and 1945, which would allow time for Germany to annex Czechoslovakia and Austria. The strike could come as early as 1938. By acquiring these two territories Germany’s frontiers would be made that much more secure and the increased manpower would provide him with twelve fresh divisions for the army.
Blomberg and Fritsch were the first to throw up their hands in exasperation, since operations of this sort required minute planning, but Hitler reassured them that there was no hurry. He predicted that the fragile bonds between Britain and France on the one hand and Britain and Italy on the other would collapse by the summer of 1938, leaving Mussolini resolutely in the German camp. He was convinced that Britain would recoil from fighting, and that France would not participate either, as the country would be confined to its bed by yet another political crisis: during the waning years of the Third Republic, French governments came and went with indecent speed.