In many parts of the Saarland, the local Nazi Party exerted massive intimidation and violence behind the scenes to deter the opposition from voting against reunification with Germany. The terror it unfolded was reminiscent of the early months of 1933 in Germany. Social Democratic meetings were broken up by brownshirts wielding steel bars. People distributing propaganda against reunification were beaten up with rubber truncheons or even shot. Anti-fascist pubs were attacked and their windows shattered in a hail of bullets. Opposition meetings were turned into riots. The atmosphere resembled that of a civil war, as one local inhabitant remarked. The local police stood by while all this went on. While German SS units were sent into the area to help escalate the terror, rumours put about by the ‘yes’ campaign encouraged voters to believe that the ballot would not be secret, a plausible enough suggestion in view of what had been going on in plebiscites and elections in Germany itself. Strong hints were dropped that those known to have voted ‘no’ would be carted off to concentration camps once the Germans came in. Especially in small communities, the identity of the local Communists and Social Democrats was generally known anyway, so anti-Nazis were aware that this was no empty threat. The international monitors appointed to oversee the plebiscite admitted that the campaign was violent and called for the terror to stop, but their soldiers on the ground were commanded by officers strongly hostile to the Communists and Social Democrats, and so took no action.24 It was not surprising that a majority of former Communist and Social Democratic voters decided that unity with Germany was the best course; they had not experienced the reality of life in the Third Reich, and their national identity as Germans was strong. The labour movement had always been weak in the Saarland, where, one German trade unionist noted, the Prussian state had been a major employer, putting miners in uniform and disciplining dissidents, and the big industrialists had wielded huge influence. ‘The population of the Saar’, he concluded resignedly, ‘belongs among the politically most backward population in Germany.’25 How far it was possible to draw general conclusions from the plebiscite about the attitude of the majority of Germans to the Third Reich must remain in doubt, particularly given the small size of the population and its peculiar political culture as a border region. For most Saarlanders, the vote was a ‘yes’ for Germany irrespective of Hitler and the Nazis.26
Under pressure, the government in Berlin had been obliged to promise that German laws and practices would only be introduced gradually into the Saar, and that Jews in particular would not be exposed to the kind of violence that had been common in the Reich since the end of January 1933. However, it was not long before the Saarlanders began to experience the realities of life in the Third Reich. ‘Prussian’ carpet-baggers moved in to take over offices and jobs, the Gestapo set up its headquarters in the old trade union building, and people suspected of pro-French sympathies were unceremoniously sacked from their jobs. Prominent Communists and Social Democrats fled the country without delay. The mass of ordinary Saarlanders doubtless never wished they had voted otherwise than for reunification, but all the same, it failed to bring them the immediate improvements they had been promised. Unemployment did not vanish overnight, and food shortages quickly began to affect the region. The region’s Jews were initially allowed to emigrate on more favourable terms than those on offer in the rest of Germany, but from September 1935, with the promulgation of the Nuremberg Laws, they were exposed to the full rigours of Nazi antisemitism. There were mutterings, even strikes, but no real resistance; conditions in this largely rural and small-town society, with its weak labour movement traditions, made it virtually impossible.27 It was not until 1938 that economic recovery, fuelled by rearmament, began to reconcile the Saarlanders to their lot, and the continuing propaganda barrage from Berlin, the Nazification of education, and compulsory enrolment in the Hitler Youth, began to spread acceptance of the Third Reich amongst young Saarlanders in particular.28
All this was still to come when, on 1 March 1935, the day of formal incorporation, Hitler spoke in Saarbrücken of his joy at the Saarlanders’ decision. It was a great day for Germany, he said, and a great day for Europe. It showed the power and popularity of the Third Reich and its ideas for all Germans. ‘In the end’, he proclaimed, ‘blood is stronger than any documents of mere paper. What ink has written will one day be blotted out by blood.’ The implications for German-speaking minorities in other European countries, notably Poland and Czechoslovakia, were unmistakeable.29 The Hamburg schoolteacher Luise Solmitz celebrated the ‘Day of the Saar’s Homecoming’ by hoisting up her old black-white-red Imperial banner for the last time, before raising her new one, decorated with the swastika, over her house.30 All over Germany, flags were flown to celebrate the event. Correspondingly, the vote spread despondency among the clandestine Social Democratic and Communist opposition in Germany and gave a boost to the self-confidence of the Nazi rank and file.31
It also injected a new boldness in foreign affairs into the German Leader. Hitler was increasingly unable to conceal the pace or extent of rearmament from the world, and indeed the Saar plebiscite provided the spur to fresh demands from the military which would be completely impossible to keep from prying eyes abroad if they were carried out. The success of the Saar plebiscite seems to have prompted his announcement of the existence of a German air force and the introduction of conscription, on 16 March 1935. The army would be expanded to more than half a million men, five times the size permitted by the Treaty of Versailles, he said. The following day saw a grandiose military parade in Berlin, at which Defence Minister General Werner von Blomberg announced that Germany was about to take up its rightful place in the world of nations once again.32 Naturally Hitler assured everyone that all Germany wanted was peace. Many of his middle-class sympathizers believed him. ‘We’ve got general conscription again!’ wrote Luise Solmitz triumphantly in her diary:The day that we have longed for since the disgrace of 1918 . . . In the morning France had its much-fought-over two-year period of military service in its pocket, in the evening we had general conscription as an answer to it. We would never have experienced Versailles if such actions had always been taken, such answers always given . . . General conscription is to serve not war but the maintenance of peace. For a defenceless country in the midst of heavily armed people must necessarily be an invitation and encouragement to maltreat it as territory to march into or to plunder. We haven’t forgotten the invasion of the Ruhr.33
As the formal announcement came over the radio, Luise Solmitz reported, ‘I rose to my feet. It overcame me, the moment was too great. I had to listen standing.’34
But the announcement sparked widespread anxiety amongst many Germans too, particularly those who had experienced the First World War. Many young men groaned at the prospect of being conscripted after they had already spent many months doing labour service. At the same time, however, some older workers welcomed the relief that would be given to the unemployment situation by the move. And accompanying what one report called a general ‘really particularly strong war psychosis’, often in the very same people, was also a widespread feeling of satisfaction that Germany was at last achieving international respect again. ‘There is no doubt’, reported a Social Democratic agent in Rhineland-Westphalia, ‘that the perpetual banging-on about equality of honour and German freedom has had an effect far into the ranks of the formerly Marxist working-class and caused confusion there.’35
International reaction was sobering. The British, French and Italian governments responded by meeting at Stresa, in Italy, on 11 April 1935, and declaring their determination to defend the integrity of Austria against the German threat that had been obvious since July 1934 and now seemed to be looming once again. Less than a week later, the League of Nations formally censured Germany’s rearmament programme. Shortly after this, France concluded an agreement with the Soviet Union. These moves had more rhetorical effect than real clout. Continuing the policy of bilateral negotiations with individual countries begun with the Polish pact.
Hitler had been discussing a naval agreement with the British since November 1934. He realized that it would be a very long time before the renascent German fleet could hope to match the size of Britain’s enormous navy, and for the time being at any rate he wanted to reassure the British so that they would not interfere with Germany’s achievement of Continental hegemony. Later on, as he told the head of the navy, Admiral Raeder, in June 1934, the fleet could be built up to its full strength and turned against Britain, as Raeder and his fellow officers envisaged; but not now. Hitler accompanied his reassurances to the British with threats. He warned British negotiators that German rearmament was far advanced, particularly in air power (more so, indeed, than it actually was). In the long run Germany needed colonies to expand its living-space (a scarcely veiled threat to the far-flung British Empire). But Hitler declared that his preferred choice was to take the first step along this road with Britain rather than against, in the hope of smoothing things over later on. The British, realizing they were not going to get Germany to rejoin the League of Nations, and worried about the growing naval strength of Japan, agreed to what seemed perfectly reasonable terms, and on 18 June 1935 a joint Anglo-German Naval Agreement was signed, allowing the Germans to build up their navy to 35 per cent of the strength of the British navy and to reach parity with the British in the number of submarines. This rode a coach and horses through the Stresa agreement, concluded only a few months before, and was a major diplomatic triumph for Hitler.36
The German negotiating team in London was led by a man who was soon to join the top rank of Nazi leaders: Joachim von Ribbentrop. Born in 1893 in the Rhineland, son of a professional soldier of bourgeois origin, Ribbentrop had graduated from grammar school, but instead of going to university he spent time in a variety of jobs in Britain, Canada and Francophone Switzerland, gaining a good command of English and French, and making a number of contacts that were to prove useful later on. He served on both the western and eastern fronts in the First World War, and was awarded the Iron Cross for bravery. At the end of the war, he was at the Prussian military mission in Constantinople, after which he was assigned to a military team preparing for the Peace Conference. By the time he left the army in 1919, therefore, Ribbentrop’s travels and diplomatic activities had given him a strong interest in foreign affairs. But it was business to which he initially returned - first cotton, then the drinks trade, through his marriage to Annelies Henkell, the daughter of a well-known manufacturer of Sekt, German sparkling wine. The marriage gave him financial security and an entrée into high society. By getting himself adopted by an aunt from the aristocratic branch of his family, he was able to add the noble prefix ‘von’ to his name. But the move backfired. It was rumoured that he had paid his aunt for this service. Moreover, some noted that while the complicated adoption legislation governing his choice treated the ‘von’ as part of the adoptive parent’s name and therefore transferable with it to the adopted children, it insisted at the same time that the transfer of the noble prefix did not in any way transfer noble status to the adoptee. The incident was characteristic as much of Ribbentrop’s social pretentiousness as it was of his social ineptitude: in London, in the 1930s, he was sometimes known as ‘von Ribbensnob’.37
Ribbentrop was far from being a Nazi of the first hour. For most of the Weimar Republic he shared the hatred of most middle-class Germans for the Peace Settlement, despised the parliamentary system, and was considerably alarmed by the menace of Communism, but he did not gravitate towards the far right until 1932. As a member, inevitably, of the fashionable Herrenclub, the gentlemen’s club in Berlin patronized by the aristocracy, including Papen and his friends, Ribbentrop met Hitler and became involved in the complex negotiations that eventually led to his appointment as Reich Chancellor in January 1933. To the provincial Hitler, Ribbentrop, rather like the Nazi Leader’s old intimate Putzi Hanfstaengl, seemed a man of the world, experienced in foreign travel, multi-lingual, socially adept. Hitler began to use him for special diplomatic missions, bypassing the conservative, routine-bound Foreign Ministry. Doubtless with Hitler’s approval, Ribbentrop set up his own independent office, along the lines of Alfred Rosenberg’s, to develop and influence policy on foreign affairs. Before long it had a staff of 150, who were engaged in a kind of institutional guerrilla warfare with the mandarins of the Foreign Ministry. Ribbentrop’s success in negotiating the Anglo-German Naval Agreement brought him the reputation of getting on with the British, and in the late summer of 1936 Hitler appointed him ambassador to London, his mission to improve relations still further and if possible deliver a formal Anglo-German alliance.38
Unfortunately, all of this was something of a misapprehension. Ribbentrop’s style of diplomacy - brusque, peremptory, authoritarian - may have appealed to Hitler, but it did not go down well with diplomats, and in London the new ambassador soon acquired another derisive nickname: ‘von Brickendrop’. Soon he was burning with resentment at imagined slights by British high society. Many of these were of his own making. A low point was reached at a reception at court in 1937, when he startled the shy, stuttering King George VI by greeting him with clicked heels and a Nazi salute. Ribbentrop did not in fact like Britain and the British at all. When Sir John Simon, the British Foreign Secretary, expressed his pleasure during the naval negotiations at Ribbentrop’s unusual frankness, he probably did not mean it as a compliment. Ribbentrop did not want the London posting, delayed taking it up for three months, and went home to Berlin so often that the humorous London magazine Punch called him ‘the Wandering Aryan’. Hated and despised by the ‘old fighters’ in the Nazi leadership, including Goebbels and Goring, who resented the influence wielded by this Johnny-come-lately, Ribbentrop needed to maintain a presence in Berlin if he was not to be marginalized. But he was not without influence on Hitler himself. He bombarded Hitler with dispatches from London proclaiming the total incompatibility of British and German aims in the world and forecasting war between the two powers in the end. At the same time, however, he also considered the British effete and vacillating and so he repeatedly told Hitler not to take the possibility of British intervention in Europe too seriously. Hitler listened to him. But this too proved in the end to be bad advice.39
IV
Initally, however, it seemed all too plausible. For, towards the end of 1935, the international situation in Europe had begun to undergo a dramatic series of changes. First of all, Mussolini launched an invasion of Abyssinia, the last major uncolonized African state remaining, in October 1935, in pursuit of his dream of creating a new Roman Empire, and revenge for the humiliating defeat of an Italian army by Ethiopian forces at the battle of Adowa in 1896. The motley feudal armies of the Ethiopian Emperor Haile Selassie were no match for the mechanized legions of the Italians. The brief war demonstrated perhaps for the first time the murderous potential of supremacy in the air. Without any serious opposition, Italian planes obliterated the Ethiopian forces by bombing them incessantly, using not only high explosives to destroy the gaudily arrayed cavalry but also poison gas to wipe out the poorly discipined foot-soldiers. It was no contest. But Abyssinia was a vast country, and it took time for the Italian forces to penetrate to its interior and place it under occupation. Haile Selassie made a dramatic journey to Geneva, where he earned widespread sympathy with a moving appeal for help to the League of Nations. For his part, Mussolini had supposed that the French and British would not intervene, but public opinion forced the hand of the new British Foreign Secretary, Anthony Eden, who lent his support to the imposition of economic sanctions on Italy by the League. Suddenly isolated, the Italian dictator, urged on by his pro-German son-in-law Galeazzo Ciano, turned to Hitler for help.40
Hitler saw this as an opportunity to break out of Germany’s diplomatic isolation. The murder of Dollfuss had marked a low point in his relations with Mussolini, from whom he had taken so many ideas, and whom he still greatly admired.41 Things now began to improve. The German Foreign Ministry was still deeply suspicious of the I
talians’ motives, however. Summoning the German Ambassador in Rome, Ulrich von Hassell, to Berlin, Hitler told him in the presence of Foreign Minister Neurath that it was time to regard the tensions of 1934 as ‘a closed chapter’ and to come to Italy’s aid. ‘We must do everything’, he said, ‘to prevent the various opponents throughout the world of the authoritarian system of government from concentrating upon us as their sole object.’ If Italian Fascism were destroyed, Germany would be alone. Accordingly, Germany, while remaining formally neutral on the Abyssinian issue, refused to impose sanctions on Italy, and carried on business as usual. Grateful for this support, Mussolini let Hitler know that as far as he was concerned, from now on, Austria lay within the German sphere of influence. Stresa, he told von Hassell, was dead.42 Sanctions in any case proved totally without effect. The Italians pressed the war on to a successful conclusion in May, 1936, while Britain, France and the League continued to bicker and dither. These events sealed the fate of the League, whose ineffectiveness was now palpable. They also convinced Hitler and Mussolini that they had nothing to fear from Britain and France. More immediately, the Italian victory seemed to provide concrete evidence that air supremacy was the key to military success. The British, who had hitherto dominated the Mediterranean by virtue of their naval power, now seemed suddenly vulnerable. To cement his new friendship with Germany, Mussolini sacked his pro-French Foreign Minister and replaced him on 9 June 1936 with Ciano.43
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