Map 17. Ethnic Germans in Central and Eastern Europe, 1937
Thus in effect all Hitler had to do to get through the initial, dangerous phase of rearmament was to appease international opinion by assuring everybody that all he wanted to do was to redress the wrongs of the Peace Settlement, achieve an acceptable degree of national self-determination for the Germans and restore his country to its rightful, equal place in the world of nations, complete with adequate means with which to defend itself against potential aggressors. And this, essentially, is what he did up to the middle of 1938, with the backing not only of the Nazi Party’s Foreign Policy Office under Alfred Rosenberg but also of the conservative bureaucrats who still dominated the German Foreign Office under Baron Konstantin von Neurath. Nationalists to a man, the officials had chafed at the policy of fulfilment pursued by Foreign Minister Gustav Stresemann in the 1920s, and welcomed the change of tack brought about by Reich Chancellor Heinrich Bruning, who had replaced Stresemann’s senior aide with the more aggressively inclined Bernhard von Bülow as State Secretary in 1930. The diplomats welcomed the new regime in January 1933, especially since Neurath, who continued as Foreign Minister from the previous government at the express wish of President Hindenburg, was one of their own. On 13 March 1933 Bulow submitted a memorandum to Neurath and Defence Minister Blomberg in which he stressed that the medium-term aims of foreign policy, now that reparations had been wound up and the French, British and Americans had ended their military occupation of the Rhineland, should be to get back the territory lost to the Poles in 1918-19, and to incorporate Austria into the Reich. In the immediate future, however, he advised, Germany should avoid any aggressive moves until rearmament had restored its strength.11
But the road to achieving this was a rocky one. International disarmament negotiations begun in Geneva early in 1932 had run into the sands because the British and French had been unwilling to allow parity to Germany either by running down their own armed forces or permitting the Germans to build up theirs. Increasingly keen to introduce conscription, particularly in view of the growing threat of Ernst Röhm’s brownshirts as an ersatz army, Defence Minister Blomberg, with the support of the Foreign Ministry, bypassed Hitler and encouraged the German representatives in Geneva to take a hard line in the face of continuing Anglo-French objections to the removal of limitations on German arms. As negotiations reached deadlock, Blomberg persuaded Hitler to pull out on 14 October 1933, and to underscore the significance of this move by withdrawing Germany from the League of Nations, the main sponsor of the negotiations, at the same time.12 The move was made, Hitler declared, ‘in view of the unreasonable, humiliating and degrading demands of the other Powers’. Protesting his desire for peace and his willingness to disarm if the other Powers did the same, Hitler declared, in a lengthy speech broadcast on the radio the same evening, that the deliberate degradation of Germany could no longer be tolerated. Germany had been humiliated by the Peace Settlement and plunged into economic disaster by reparations; to add insult to injury by refusing to grant equality in disarmament talks was too much to bear. The decision, he announced, would be put to the German people in a plebiscite.13 Held a few weeks later, it delivered the predictably overwhelming majority in favour of Hitler’s decision, thanks not least to massive intimidation and electoral manipulation. Although it is impossible to say with certainty, it is likely that a majority of the electors would have backed withdrawal in a free vote; only former Communists and left-wing Social Democrats would have been likely to have voted ‘no’ if voting had been free.14
Departure from the League of Nations was the first decisive step in the foreign policy of the Third Reich. It was followed rapidly by another move that caused general astonishment both within Germany and without: a ten-year non-aggression pact with Poland, signed on 26 January 1934, forced through by Hitler personally over serious reservations on the part of the Foreign Office. For Hitler, the pact’s advantage was that it covered Germany’s vulnerable eastern flank during the period of secret rearmament, improved trade relations, which were extremely poor at the time, and provided some security for the free city of Danzig, which was now run by a Nazi local government under League of Nations suzerainty but was cut off from the rest of Germany by the corridor to the Baltic granted to Poland by the Peace Settlement. The pact could be used to demonstrate to Britain and other powers that Germany was a peaceful nation; even the much-admired Gustav Stresemann, Foreign Minister during the Weimar Republic, had not concluded an ‘Eastern Locarno’, only managing to settle matters in the West through the treaty of that name. For the Poles, it served as a substitute for the security formerly provided by the League of Nations, and replaced the alliance concluded in 1921 with France, whose internal political and economic situation was making it look increasingly unsatisfactory as a defensive support against German aggression (undermining French influence was another bonus for Hitler, of course). The pact was, however, a purely temporary expedient on Hitler’s part: a piece of paper, serving its purpose for the moment, to be torn up without ceremony when it was no longer of any use. There were to be many more like it.15
I I
For most of 1934, Hitler’s attention was directed towards internal politics, particularly with the tensions that led up to and followed the purge of the SA carried out at the end of June. Just before the purge, Hitler paid his first visit abroad as German Chancellor, to the Fascist leader Mussolini, in Venice, to try and secure his understanding for the events that were about to unfold. Hitler’s admiration for Mussolini was patently sincere. However, the atmosphere at the meeting was distinctly frosty. Mussolini was deeply suspicious of the Nazis’ intentions in Austria, which he felt lay within his own sphere of influence. A small, landlocked country half in the Alps bordering Italy, German-speaking Austria had experienced repeated political turbulence since the international rejection of the proposal to merge it into Germany after the collapse of the Habsburg monarchy in 1918-19. Few Austrians had much confidence in the viability of their state. Massive inflation in the early 1920s had been followed by deflation, and then came the Depression, much as in Germany. The country was divided politically into two great political camps, the Socialists, based mainly in the working class of ‘Red’ Vienna, where nearly a third of the country’s seven million inhabitants lived, and the Catholic-oriented Christian Social Party, which drew its strength from the Viennese middle classes and from conservative farmers and small-town voters in the provinces. Tension between them had broken out into open hostility in 1933, when the Christian Social Chancellor, Engelbert Dollfuss, permanently dissolved parliament and established an authoritarian regime. Increased police harassment of the Socialists provoked an armed uprising in the working-class districts of Vienna in February 1934. It was put down with brutal force by the Austrian army. Leading Socialists, including their most influential ideologue, Otto Bauer, fled to safety through Vienna’s famous underground sewers. Dollfuss now outlawed the Socialists altogether. Thousands were arrested and put in prison. On 1 May 1934 the Austrian dictator pushed through a new constitution for his country. It abolished elections and established, at least on paper, a pale version of the Corporate State based on the model devised by Mussolini.16
For all their seeming decisiveness, these moves left Dollfuss looking distinctly shaky. The economic situation was worse than ever. The large Viennese working class was seething with resentment. On the right, the paramilitary Home Defence Brigades, who wanted a more radical kind of fascism, based more clearly on the Italian model, were causing unrest. The previously tiny Austrian Nazi Party was growing rapidly in size and ambition. Its formal banning by Dollfuss in July 1933 had little effect. Bringing together tradesmen and small shopkeepers in Vienna and the Austrian hinterland, lower civil servants, army veterans, recent university graduates and significant elements of the police and gendarmerie, the Party counted nearly 70,000 members at the time of its banning. It gained a further 20,000 in the following months. Held together, though always somew
hat precariously, by a violent, vicious brand of antisemitism, fortified by anticlericalism and anti-Catholicism, it looked back to the pan-Germanism of Georg Ritter von Schönerer, whose ideas had so powerfully influenced the young Adolf Hitler in Linz and Vienna before 1914. Its main aim was immediate unification with the Third Reich. As its members listened to the constant stream of Nazi propaganda poured out by radio stations across the border, they became ever more convinced that unification was imminent. Violence and terror became their favoured means of undermining the Austrian state so as to leave it easy prey for the Third Reich. 17
By the early summer of 1934, the moment seemed ripe for action. Fridolin Glass, leader of the SS Standard 89 in Vienna, decided to overthrow the Austrian government. On 25 July 1934, 150 of his men, mostly unemployed workers and soldiers who had been cashiered from the army because of their Nazism, dressed themselves in borrowed Austrian army uniforms and entered the Austrian Chancellery. The cabinet had already left the building, but the SS men caught Dollfuss trying to leave by a side-entrance and shot him dead on the spot. Rushing into the neighbouring headquarters of the Austrian broadcasting corporation, the putschists commandeered a radio microphone and announced to the country that the government had resigned. Sympathizers in the police had probably made it easy for them to enter the buildings. But this was about the extent of the backing they got from anybody. The Austrian SA, whose leaders were gathered in a nearby hotel, pretended they had known nothing of the putsch at any stage, and refused to intervene. Less than four weeks after the German SA leaders had been shot by the SS, they could not bring themselves to let bygones be bygones. Uprisings in many parts of the country, triggered off, as arranged, by the putschists’ radio broadcasts, were put down by the Austrian army, aided in places by the Home Defence Brigades. There were several hundred deaths and injuries. Where the SA did stage an uprising, the SS refused to support them. Even Nazi officers in the army and police in many places took part willingly in the suppression of the revolt. The Austrian Nazis turned out to be poorly trained and ill prepared for such a venture, over-confident, internally divided and incompetent. In Vienna, the Minister of Justice, Kurt von Schuschnigg, formed a new government and after brief negotiations with the putschists had them all arrested. Hitler abandoned them to their fate. The two men who had fired the fatal shots at Dollfuss were hanged in the yard of the Vienna Regional Court. Their last words were ‘Hail, Hitler!’ The German Ambassador in Rome, who had been implicated in the plot, tried unsuccessfully to commit suicide. Even before these events, an Austrian Nazi had complained that ‘the Austrian on average is incapable as an organizer. In the organizational field he needs Prussian help! . . . Without the Prussian power of organization there will always be chaos at decisive moments.’ The bloody but farcical putsch seemed to bear him out. From now on, Schuschnigg was able to reconstruct the clerico-fascist dictatorship on a firmer basis, curbing the Home Defence Brigades and sending the Nazis underground, from where they continued to commit acts of violence and sabotage against state institutions, for the moment without much effect.18
Hitler undoubtedly knew about these events in advance. The Austrian SS had undergone training for the putsch at the Dachau concentration camp. After the banning of the Austrian Nazi Party in June 1933 Dr Theo Habicht, a German Reichstag deputy whom Hitler had appointed to lead the Austrian Nazis, had organized its underground activities from exile in Munich. He poured clandestine antisemitic propaganda into Austria, accusing Dollfuss of presiding over a regime run by Jews. It was in Habicht’s flat in Munich that leading Austrian Nazis met shortly before the putsch to finalize preparations. He told Hitler what was being planned, and Hitler gave his blessing for a general uprising - though in the belief, evidently inspired by Habicht’s exaggerated optimism on the occasion, that the Austrian army would back the putsch. From his exile in Munich, Habicht in reality was less than well informed about the true state of affairs in Austria. Not only did the putsch fail, and the army stick by the government, but Mussolini moved his troops to the Brenner Pass and made it abundantly clear that he would intervene on the side of the Austrian government if the situation got out of control. Hitler was beside himself with rage and embarrassment. Amidst assurances of disapproval that convinced nobody, he dismissed Habicht and closed down the Munich office of the Austrian Party.19
In one respect, however, the catastrophe provided an opportunity. Such was the gravity of the breach in relations with Germany’s neighbour, Hitler told Deputy Chancellor von Papen, who was still under effective house arrest after the ‘Night of the Long Knives’, that it required a senior statesman to smooth things over: as a personal friend of the murdered Austrian Chancellor, and a well-known Catholic statesman, Papen was the man to pour oil on the troubled waters of Austro-German relations. So Hitler appointed him ambassador in Vienna. Realizing he had little choice, Papen accepted. At his request, his secretary, Günther von Tschirschky-Bögendorf, was released from the prison where he had been held since the action of 30 June and accompanied him to Austria. The last remaining independent-minded conservative politician in the government was finally out of the way - an unexpected by-product of the mismanaged putsch.20
III
Germany’s diplomatic isolation in the winter of 1934-5 seemed complete. 21 The only light in the gloom was provided by the results of a plebiscite held in the small territory of the Saarland, on the western side of the Rhineland on 13 January 1935. At the peace negotiations in 1919 the French, who clearly hoped they would be able to detach it from Germany, given enough time, had the Saarland mandated to them by the League of Nations, with the commitment that a referendum would be held after fifteen years to give the area’s inhabitants a final choice as to which country they wanted to belong to. The fifteen years were up at the end of 1934. The Saarland’s mainly German-speaking citizens had never wanted to be separated from Germany in the first place: 445,000 Saarlanders, nearly 91 per cent of those who cast their ballots, duly expressed their desire to become citizens of the Third Reich. They did so from a number of motives. The prospect of living as a German-speaking minority in France was not an enticing one: in Alsace-Lorraine, the French authorities had gone to great lengths to try and suppress the German language and culture of the inhabitants and discriminated heavily against those who remained loyal to their heritage. In the Saarland too, the French rulers had been tactless and exploitative. They were almost universally seen not as democrats but as imperialists. In Germany, relations between Nazis and Catholics had not deteriorated at this stage to such a point where the Catholic Church, representing the vast majority of Saarlanders, would have felt it necessary to advise a continuation of the status quo, still less adherence to France, where the Communist Party seemed to be gaining steadily in strength. To encourage priests to advise their flocks to vote for Germany, the Nazis toned down their anti-Catholic propaganda in the run-up to the plebiscite. The clergy duly obliged with their support.22
Moreover, when the Centre Party had voluntarily dissolved itself in Germany in 1933 as a quid pro quo for the Concordat, it had done the same in the Saarland too, though it was not strictly necessary. Throughout the 1920s it had vigorously campaigned for a return of the Saarland to Germany - indeed, every political party in the Saarland had done the same - and in June 1934 it joined forces with the Nazis and the remnants of the Nationalists and other parties to fight for a ‘yes’ vote in a unified ‘German Front’ which projected itself to voters as being above politics. Only the Communists and Social Democrats remained outside, but since they too had fought for reunification for many years, their sudden volteface confused their supporters and was accepted by few as sincere. Up to this point, indeed, patriotic rituals, war memorials to the German dead, national festivals and much more besides, supported financially and in other ways by nationalist enthusiasts within Germany, had worked to strengthen German national consciousness in the Saar. Their effect was not going to be undone in a couple of years. The Nazi Party in Germany also offered
a variety of material inducements to the Saarlanders, sending Winter Aid over the border to help the needy, pointing out to teachers and other state employees the superior pension and other financial arrangements for them that could be obtained in Germany, and contrasting the economic recovery in the Reich with the rapidly deepening Depression in France. Goebbels’s Propaganda Ministry blared out propaganda on German radio and exported large numbers of cheap ‘People’s Receivers’ into the Saar to help the population receive the message. Rhenish printing presses rolled off millions of leaflets that were soon being read all over the Saarland; 80,000 posters went up in the region urging people to vote for Germany. Fifteen hundred public meetings were held to help convince people of the rightness of reunification. For the vote itself, 47,000 Saarlanders living in the Reich were brought in to cast their ballots, further strengthening the nationalists’ support. The campaign against reunification scarcely existed in comparison, and was hamstrung by internal divisions over whether to campaign for a continuation of the status quo or for absorption into France.23
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