1938: Hitler's Gamble

by MacDonogh, Giles

  In Breslau Hitler and Goebbels endured a four-hour parade of 150,000 gymnasts, but the real purpose of the visit was talks with Henlein, who was instructed to step up the agitation.88 Goebbels found Henlein ebullient: there was no chance of negotiation – ‘The hatred between the Czechs and the Germans was insuperable.’89 ‘What are we going to do with six million Czechs when we have finally got the country? It is a difficult, almost insoluble question.’90 They flew back to Bayreuth via Nuremberg the next day to see Götterdämmerung with Lorenz and Ludwig Hofmann playing Hagen. There was a reception that night to celebrate the fact that Winifred’s son Wieland had joined the Party. It was a dull evening, despite a number of animal games with the soprano Germaine Lubin doing an imitation of the duck. Hitler indulged in one of his interminable monologues that lasted until 6 a.m.91

  The 25th was party-time in Austria. It was the fourth anniversary of the assassination of Engelbert Dollfuss. The thirteen Nazi thugs who had left him to bleed to death in his study on the Ballhausplatz had been executed, but were now to be elected to the Valhalla of Nazi martyrs. By 28 July a third of Jewish property in Vienna had been transferred to Aryan hands. Göring’s Office of the Four Year Plan had located 2.29 milliard RM in the hands of just 50,000 Jews, the vast majority of whom lived in Vienna. Forty per cent of Jews fitted into the lowest income group, those possessing between 5,000 and 20,000 RM. There were still 102 Jewish millionaires. The report also signalled that 16,000 had already left the city.92 In Vienna they had been cleared out of their villas in plush Hietzing and moved into Judenhäuser in the Leopoldstadt. Their former homes were to be had for a pittance. Dressed in borrowed robes, horny-handed Nazis and their toadies moved into the refined elegance of the former elite. Dachau’s Jews were also on the move. That month the bulk of them were transferred to Buchenwald to help expand the camp.

  BUCHENWALD

  Ernst Wiechert had been in Gestapo custody in Halle for weeks. Now he too was taken to Buchenwald. The train journey to Weimar was torture in itself. Then there were cars to take them to the camp:

  The doors slammed shut and the motors started up, and then they set off towards the Ettersberg, the same hill from which Goethe and Charlotte von Stein had looked out over the Thuringian Forest and where now, wrapped in electrified fences, the camp now awaited them.vi

  Wiechert was a Gentile. Jews had been sent to Buchenwald since the round-ups in Berlin and other large cities in May and June. Maximilian Reich was one of those who were transferred from Dachau later that summer. He noted that Dachau was a kindergarten beside Buchenwald, where brutality and sadism were coupled with a degree of corruption he had yet to experience. One favourite method of creating space in the camp was to toss the prisoners’ caps into the no-man’s-land next to the wire. They were forbidden to approach the fences. When guards ordered them to fetch their caps the machine guns opened up from the towers. He estimated that 117 prisoners had been killed in this way since the camp opened.93

  The senior prisoner in Dachau saw them off with a stirring speech about what good people the Jews were, something he had not known before he had met them in the camp. Compared to the Bavarian camp, Reich’s new home was filthy and the huts only half built. The food was even more paltry, and as a Jew Reich would have received only half as much bread as the Gentiles, and nothing whatsoever on Sunday. Prisoners were expected to work for thirteen hours a day in gruelling summer heat, without a drop of water. The only liquid provided was half a cup of warm broth at lunch. In July alone, 103 prisoners died.94 A homosexual guard (‘Johnny’ Hartmann, thought to have been the son of a Lutheran pastor95) wandered around the buildings at night, hoping to find the prisoners indulging in illegal sex – presumably with a view to punishing them. It was quite prevalent, with the older, richer prisoners buying favours from the younger men. Very few of those who indulged in homosexual sex were incarcerated under article 175.96

  The smell of corruption in Buchenwald went all the way down to the capos. In the beginning these had been members of the Communist and Social Democratic parties, who had been locked up after the Reichstag fire. In 1938, the reds were replaced by greens (criminals). They brought all their knowhow to bear and very soon anything could be obtained in the camp for those with money: food, alcohol, cigarettes. Money was pumped from the prisoners on all occasions. When the SS had something to celebrate, a ‘contribution’ was raised from the prisoners. The inadvertent killing of Commandant Rödl’s pet wolf cost the inmates 8,000 RM. News of the corruption in the camp got out when production began to drop off. An investigation revealed large sums of money hidden in the capos’ lockers.

  The greens were then again replaced by reds. Conditions improved very briefly, but life was so bad that it was wise to develop a thick skin to deal with it. Wiechert was told: ‘You must hear and see nothing. You have to get through everything like a stone . . . Anyone who feels pity here falls apart.’ One way he found of dealing with the camp was to make for Goethe’s oak.97 Wiechert was suffering for having defied Goebbels, who described the distinguished novelist as a ‘piece of dirt’. On 3 August the minister wrote, ‘After three months in a concentration camp I shall win him over to my cause.’98

  One cruelly tortured inmate was a Pastor Schneider, who could be heard occasionally from the punishment block shouting ‘Jews, fear this devil not! Your God will deliver you . . .’99 His speech turned to screams when the guards rushed round to deal with him. He spent a year in the bunker before yielding up his spirit.100 Many became religious in the camps. Maximilian Reich learned later of an extraordinary phenomenon that occurred at Buchenwald at the Jewish New Year. A young Viennese rabbi had led prayers for an hour, undisturbed by the guards. Hundreds of Christians had come out of their huts to join the Jews in their orisons. There was a clear, starlit night sky. ‘Jews and Christians, united in their great misery, were praying to the one immortal, the God of all men.’101

  8

  AUGUST

  Goebbels had been using the garden pavilions at his houses in Lanke on the Schwanenwerder peninsula near Berlin to entertain ‘Babkova’, the Czech actress Lida Baarova, who lived round the corner in Schwanenwerder with the actor Gustav Fröhlich. Although Goebbels calls the summer ‘the loveliest holidays of my life!’1 his journal does not allude directly to the affair, but there are hints at problems within the Goebbels ménage. At the beginning of August he decided it was time to tell Magda. Rather than asking for a divorce or a separation, Goebbels proposed retaining both wife and mistress. At first Magda does not seem to have been too put out: ‘It is so good to possess a person who is so totally dedicated to you,’ he wrote.2 On the 3rd he had an ‘important discussion’ with Magda. ‘She is of great importance to me. I am happy that it is now out on the table.’ Clearly there were arguments for all that. On the 9th he recorded unity with Magda: ‘Let us hope it lasts.’3

  For two weekends Lida lived in the house at Schwanenwerder. Magda tried to make both her husband and his lover see reason, but she also asked his second-in-command at the Ministry of Propaganda, Karl Hanke, to compile a dossier on his infidelities. When she learned how numerous they were she had him banned from the house. Goebbels then behaved in such an outrageous way that Magda took flight and poured her heart out to Emmy Göring. Hermann Göring naturally knew all about the affair from the Braune Blätter (Brown Sheets) – reports from his Research Office – that his manservant Robert brought him with his morning coffee. He called Hitler and told him that Magda desired to see him urgently: she wanted a divorce.

  On 15 August Hitler returned to Berlin. The Goebbelses, husband and wife, were summoned in turns. Magda informed the Führer that she wanted no more to do with her husband. Goebbels went to see Hitler next. Hitler told him that he was a public figure and could not give in to private scandal. He had a choice between dropping Lida or forfeiting his career. This was a Führerbefehl: an order from the Führer. He was not allowed to see the actress again. Goebbels’ conversation with Hitler shook him to the mar
row: ‘The Führer is like a father to me. I am so grateful to him. At this difficult time I need something like this. I am taking very difficult decisions, but they are final.’4

  Hitler was not only sentimentally attached to Magda but had a horror of scandals, as he had demonstrated at the time of the Blomberg–Fritsch Crisis. He was also preoccupied with his Czech project. It transpired that Goebbels’ various conquests had been found work through the Ministry of Propaganda. When he discovered this Hitler was even angrier with Goebbels.5 Goebbels rang Lida: ‘ . . . a very long and very sad telephone conversation. And now a new life begins. My youth is at an end,’6 he concluded in his diary and wallowed in self-pity, pouring out his heart to Göring, his mother and his sister. In the end ambition got the better of him.

  The actress, who was genuinely smitten with Goebbels, was summoned by Police President Helldorf and informed that she was forbidden to see her lover for at least six months. She reacted so hysterically that Helldorf was obliged to call Hitler for guidance. She insisted on speaking to Goebbels. He called her later that day. He was, he said, at the house of ‘his friend’ Hermann Göring. Hitler had allowed him to call only if there was a witness in the room. Magda was slow to forgive him. Goebbels was wasting away, refusing to eat: ‘Humiliation . . . She is so hard and horrible . . . I have never seen her like this.’ At the end of the month Hitler allowed him to come to the Berghof. He was still bitter about Magda: ‘She is not nice and so hard-hearted.’7

  THE ETERNAL JEW

  The Nazis continued to heap repressive measure on repressive measure against the Jews. On the 1st Austrian Jews lost their servants as the Nuremberg Laws were fully enforced for the first time, although the measure was rescinded by Globocnik on the 3rd after complaints from the servants themselves, who had lost their jobs as a result. There was a spate of divorces after the Laws were applied, non-Jewish spouses dropping their wives and husbands to save themselves.

  On the 8th Jewish doctors were banned from practising. In Vienna they represented 52 per cent of the profession. In Berlin, Goebbels was happy to report it was going according to plan. The next day Viennese Jews were obliged to leave Aryan flats and the streets were clogged with removal vans. As many Jews no longer possessed the means to pay off arrears of rent, their furniture was detained by their landlords. In Italy Mussolini also introduced new drastic measures against foreign Jews. On the 6th a numerus clausus came into force. The price of support for Germany over Czechoslovakia had been increasing the pressure on the Germans in Southern Tyrol where the place names were Italianized.

  The Ewige Jude (Eternal Jew) exhibition opened in the empty hall of the North West Station in Vienna on the 3rd in the presence of the Reichsstatthalter Seyss-Inquart and Gauleiter Globocnik. The whole front of the building was covered by a poster of a ‘Kaftan Jew’ that could be clearly seen from the heavily Jewish Taborstrasse in the Second District. The aim of the exhibition was to demonstrate how German life had been weakened by Jewish influence.

  There was an international dimension too. In London, the Daily Telegraph reported that it exhibited ‘repulsive caricatures of Jewish individuals of all nations’.8 The worst Jewish films were pilloried together with various prominent British Jews. The Rothschilds had a room to themselves. Space was given to the Goldschmidts, Charlie Chaplin and Richard Tauber, the half-Jewish, Viennese-born tenor.9 The show had been put on first in Munich, but new elements had been specially designed for Vienna by two local antisemitic businessmen: Dr Robert Körber, author of a literary spin-off, Rassesieg in Wien (Racial Victory in Vienna) that came out the following year, and one Zettl.10

  Ten thousand people are reported to have visited the exhibition on its first day. For a time it attracted between seven and eight thousand visitors a day, but they rapidly declined and by September numbers had dropped to around two thousand. Yet it was claimed that 350,000 saw it before it was taken down at the end of September. The organizers asked Bürckel if they could keep it open, particularly as it was the start of the new school year.11 From the capital of the Ostmark, the exhibition took off on its travels again. The Quaker Robert Yarnall saw it on his visit to Germany that winter. It was ‘the same as in Vienna – a terrible display of demagoguery – one felt like taking a shower bath after coming out, in order to wash away the impressions. [There was] just enough truth in it to make it take hold of the people.’12 The London Times claimed the exhibition was the inspiration behind attacks on Jews in Vienna’s cafés13 and could only add to their despair. Instead of making for Baden, as the Jews would normally do in summer, they continued to try to find a means of escaping. There were only four hotels in Baden open to them anyway.14

  On 17 August the Party forced Jews to adopt the middle names of Israel (for men) and Sarah (for women). From then on, Jews would no longer be able to use Gentile names and Gentiles had to forgo the use of Jewish ones. The list was drawn up by Counsellor Globke in the Ministry of the Interior. There were certain exceptions such as Peter, Julius, Elisabeth, Marie or Charlotte, as they had been wholly assimilated – Julius was Streicher’s name – while others, like Joseph and Jakob, were not mentioned; Joseph was Goebbels’ Christian name and Jakob that of the Reichskommissar for Austria, Bürckel. Old Testament names were nonetheless discouraged and it was deemed that Sepp was better than Josef, Jutta preferable to Judith, and Jochen less questionable than Joachim.15 Three days later, the various Jewish organizations became the Central Office for Jewish Emigration in the old Rothschild place in the Prinz-Eugen-Strasse.16 The aim was to expedite the business at an even greater speed. The general director was to be Dr Stahlecker. The jumpy Swiss responded by once again closing their border.17

  The Swiss action occasioned a limp British protest. The next day the British press reported that 30,000 now had permission to leave Austria but had no visas to enter another country. This was celebrated in a ‘Fips’ cartoon, which showed a Jew sitting in a wastepaper basket, where he offered comparison to the contents. Another showed a Jew being grabbed by a Brobdingnagian hand at the frontier: they could leave, but not without observing the formalities.18

  On 12 August the Pope had spoken out in favour of tolerance for Jews and ‘coloured’ people. The following day Vienna thrilled to the news of the trial of a Dr Kurt Popper, who had tried to reach the Czech border with his wife and mother on the night of 11 March and had nearly run over a gendarme on the Prague road. It had been discovered that he was also concealing assets in a Zurich bank account. He was sent to prison for two months.19

  GENERAL BECK RESIGNS

  Hitler was aware of dissent within his army but he was determined not to let it stand in his way. His dissatisfaction with the army may have contributed to the decision, taken that August, to allow Himmler to upgrade the armed force within the SS organization. The Waffen-SS (SS in arms) were to be modern, political soldiers and under the ultimate control of Hitler himself. The army was to have no access to their command structure. Their aim was to eliminate the ideological enemies of the Reich: Jews, freemasons, Marxists and the Church.

  On 9 August Goebbels found Hitler dividing Czechoslovakia up into Nazi Gaue. Hitler quarrelled with Brauchitsch, who was in broad agreement with Beck over Germany’s readiness to engage in a major European war. Brauchitsch can have had little doubt by now of Hitler’s expansionist dreams. Talking to him about the Balkans later that month, Hitler said, ‘We don’t want these people, we want their land.’20 The next day he summoned a conference at the Berghof from which most of the senior generals were excluded. The younger men gave Hitler little solace. It appeared that some of them also sided with Beck and thought that Germany could not fight a long war yet. Hitler cursed his generals.

  Five days after the Berghof meeting, artillery exercises on the old Prussian ranges at Juterbog were taken as another opportunity to show the generals that Hitler was right about the feasibility of invading Czechoslovakia, and they were wrong. Beck thought Brauchitsch might have seized the moment to drive home the army’s p
oint of view, but he lacked the courage. Instead Beck honoured his threat and resigned on the 18th. For reasons of state, Hitler required Beck to keep his resignation a secret until 31 October. The Opposition could gain nothing from the éclat. At the Foreign Office, Weizsäcker and the Kordt brothers thought Beck had played his last card too soon. The Bavarian general Franz Halder took his place from 1 September.

  Hitler was also encountering resistance from another Bavarian general, Wilhelm Adam, who made no secret of his misgivings about the possibility of bringing France and Britain into a war over Czechoslovakia. Adam rode the storm for a while, even after an explosive meeting at the West Wall, which he was in charge of building as regional military commander. Hitler told him he was doing it all wrong and assaulted him with a barrage of statistics, some of which were correct, but only some. Adam pointed out that if Germany was so well prepared, and the Western allies so little of a threat, there was little point in building the wall in the first place. Meanwhile Germans became aware that war was in the offing as more and more people were despatched to help build the wall.21 Adam was stripped of his command in November.

  Göring was increasingly worried about Hitler’s bellicose policy and it was rumoured that fatherhood had rendered the Luftwaffe chief dove-like. On the 18th he was given the job of pacifying the Gauleiters who had got wind of Hitler’s plans, although his heart cannot have been in it. Hitler let it be known that he would negotiate if he had to. Goebbels was for a short war: the German people would not stand for more. ‘We must aim for surprise victories.’22