The Third Reich in Power

by Evans, Richard J.

  Map 21. The Dismemberment of Czechoslovakia, 1938-9

  Real power lay in the hands of the Reich Protector. The man Hitler appointed to fill this post was Konstantin von Neurath, the former Foreign Minister, an old conservative to whom Hitler felt grateful for his role in resolving the Munich crisis the previous September. Neurath, together with German army officers such as the commanding general in Bohemia, Johannes Blaskowitz, attempted to steer a relatively moderate course, maintain discipline amongst the occupiers, and act with restraint towards the Czechs. Gradually, however, the mask of moderation began to slip. His resolve stiffened by Karl Hermann Frank, his deputy, who ran the SS and the police in the Protectorate, Neurath ordered the arrest of thousands of Communists, who were interrogated by the Gestapo and mostly released, and of the many German exiles, including Social Democrats, who had been caught by the German invasion in Prague. Most of these were sent to concentration camps in Germany. On 8 June 1939, the Gestapo arrested the entire town council of the mining community of Kladno after a German policeman was murdered; they were badly beaten, and some died. At the same time, six municipal councils elsewhere were dismissed, to be replaced by German administrators. More repressive laws followed, and steps were taken to identify the Jewish population of the Protectorate with a view to applying the Nuremberg Laws to them.157

  Meanwhile, special units had moved into the occupied area to seize huge quantities of military equipment, arms and ammunition, including over 1,000 airplanes, 2,000 field artillery pieces, more than 800 tanks and much more besides. All of this, however, amounted to only a tiny fraction of Germany’s military requirements; some was sold abroad in any case to earn much-needed foreign currency. Jewish firms were immediately expropriated and their assets transferred to German firms. The gold reserves of the Czech state were seized (the Bank of England, somewhat to the irritation of the British government, allowed over 800,000 ounces of gold to be shipped from the Czech government’s London account to the new occupying authorities in Prague in June 1939). Nevertheless, representatives of the Four-Year Plan and the Reich Economics Ministry who arrived in Prague on 15 March were careful not to undermine the Czech economy or alienate non-Jewish Czech businessmen. Czech-owned international companies like the Bata shoe empire, for instance, brought in valuable profits, and were not seriously restricted by the German occupiers. The Skoda and other heavy industry and manufacturing enterprises continued to produce goods mainly for export to countries other than Germany. At the same time, however, the Germans rapidly introduced measures, already in place at home, for the conscription and direction of labour. Jobless Czech agricultural workers had already tried to escape unemployment at home by taking temporary jobs in the expanding German economy - over 105,000 in 1938 - and now German agents moved in to recruit still more. Thirty thousand new workers, most of them skilled industrial operatives, were persuaded to go to the Old Reich within the first month of the occupation.158

  Building on the experience of the annexation of Austria, and extending it for the first time to a country which the Nazis regarded as a conquered foreign land, the occupation of Czechoslovakia created a number of institutions that formed a model for other countries later on. Native industry was left to get on with things under German direction, and with expanded German involvement through takeovers by German firms, especially of expropriated Jewish businesses. A native bureaucracy and a nominal native government was left in place under the control of a German administrator, the Reich Commissioner. The economy was integrated into the larger German sphere of influence, involving a division of labour with Germany - in this case, Czech industry was encouraged to export to South-east Europe, Germany to the West. Assets of the state, and of the Jewish population, were ruthlessly plundered (the Czech crown jewels went to Germany, and much more was soon to follow).159

  Czech workers drafted into the Old Reich were given a special, inferior legal status. Previously, because of the need to maintain good relations with their states of origin, foreign labourers in Germany had been threatened mainly with deportation if they contravened the law. Now, however, such a threat was considered not only unnecessary but counterproductive. New regulations issued on 26 June and 4 July 1939 ordered protective custody in a concentration camp for Czech labourers in Germany who stole, looted, engaged in political activity, showed an attitude hostile to the National Socialist state, or refused to work. This placed them effectively outside the law. Despite this, 18,000 Czech workers migrated voluntarily to jobs in other parts of the Reich in March 1939, and over 16,000 in each of the following two months. Thereafter, numbers fell off rapidly. They were nowhere near enough to plug the gap in the Reich’s labour supply. Coercion seemed increasingly likely. On 23 June 1939, looking forward to the coming European conflict, Goring remarked: ‘During the war, hundreds of thousands will be deployed in Germany, in barracks and under supervision, from plants in the Protectorate not engaged in the war economy, and put to work especially in agriculture.’160 The way to the systematic deportation and exploitation of millions of Europeans for the purposes of the German war economy had been opened.

  This pattern was also foreshadowed in Slovakia, which was similarly incorporated into the German economic empire. Encouraged by Hitler, the Hungarians, who had ruled Slovakia for several centuries before the Treaty of Versailles had taken it away from them, had originally hoped to get the territory back. They were irritated by the decision of the Slovaks, backed by the German government, to declare independence under German protection. Hitler attempted to placate the Hungarian Regent Admiral Horthy by announcing on 12 March that he had a free hand to annex the Carpatho-Ukrainian region of Czecho-Slovakia, on which Hungary had long had a claim. Both governments justified this course of action by pointing out that on 6 March 1939 the Czecho-Slovak government had effectively brought Carpatho-Ukrainian autonomy to an end, citing the widespread abuse of power by the authorities; occupation could now plausibly be presented as another case of Czech oppression requiring intervention from outside. Only just over 12 per cent of the region’s 552,000 inhabitants were Magyar, but the government in Budapest believed that the area belonged to Hungary by historic right. It sent in troops on 16 March 1939, also moving units across the Slovak border until the Germans ordered them to stop.161 Finally, as a last act in this rapid series of events, Ribbentrop told the Lithuanian Foreign Minister, summoned to Berlin on 20 March, that German planes would bomb their capital city, Kovno (Kaunas), if his government did not agree to cede Memel to Germany, as demanded by the town’s Nazi-dominated German community. The fate of Czecho-Slovakia and Carpatho-Ukraine was enough to persuade the Lithuanians to agree, and the transfer document was signed on 23 March 1938. German troops entered the Memelland the same day, and early in the afternoon Hitler himself arrived on a German warship to address the jubilant local German crowds; he departed for Berlin the same evening.162

  Once more, he had succeeded in annexing large amounts of territory without bloodshed. The crisis of March 1939 was a brief one, and it did not allow time for the build-up of the kind of ‘war psychosis’ that had dominated the summer months of the previous year. Approval of the incorporation of Memel into the Reich was almost universal, even amongst former Social Democrats. Nevertheless, Social Democratic agents reported widespread anxiety about the consequences of the invasion of Czecho-Slovakia, not least because it could not be justified as the rescue of a German minority from oppression despite the fact that Goebbels’s propaganda claimed that the Czechs had been abusing the German minority in their midst. ‘I think’, one worker was reported as saying, ‘they should have left the Czechs in peace amongst themselves, it won’t end well.’ It was not until the announcement that the occupation had taken place without loss of life that people began to applaud Hitler’s latest success. Many people were reported as being indifferent, their nationalist sensibilities dulled by previous successes in Austria and the Sudetenland. Amongst the middle classes, there was a widespread feeling that it did not really m
atter so long as war was avoided. But doubts on this score were reported as being more widespread than ever. It was Hitler’s least popular victory to date. ‘We were always winning once before,’ said one worker cynically, looking back to the propaganda claims of the First World War, ‘and it came to a bad end.’163

  MARCH INTO THE EAST

  I

  The anxiety that many ordinary Germans felt about war was, if anything, increased by the international reaction to the destruction of CzechoSlovakia. The British government, led by Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain, had regarded the hard-fought Munich Agreement as sacrosanct, a great diplomatic achievement that settled all remaining problems in Central Europe. Chamberlain had believed Hitler’s assurances that he had no more territorial demands to make. Now the piece of paper that Chamberlain had waved at his ecstatic supporters as evidence that he had secured ‘peace for our time’ had been torn to shreds. British opinion, reflected on the back benches of the House of Commons, shifted dramatically against the Germans. Hesitantly, following the advice of the Foreign Office, Chamberlain gave public voice in a speech on 17 March to the suspicion that Hitler was seeking not to right the wrongs of the 1919 Peace Settlement but ‘to dominate the world by force’.164

  The next day, the British cabinet agreed to open talks with the Polish government to see how best to stop the Germans threatening their country next. While Britain and France redoubled their efforts to rearm, and feverish negotiations continued with the Poles, news of the German threat to Poland was made public in reports from Berlin carried in the British press on 29 March. Chamberlain immediately issued a public guarantee that if Poland’s independence were threatened, Britain would step in to defend it. The guarantee was intended to deter the Germans. However, it was hedged about with secret qualifications that left the door open for the policy of appeasement to continue. The British cabinet agreed that the guarantee would only come into effect if the Poles did not show ‘provocative or stupid obstinacy’ in the face of German demands for the return of Danzig and the Polish Corridor. Chamberlain, therefore, was still thinking of a negotiated settlement: one which would have left Poland as vulnerable as the Munich Agreement had left Czechoslovakia. Poland, after all, was a far-away country too. Moreover, the guarantee would be effective only if the Polish national forces were mobilized to resist a German invasion by force. The British coupled this condition with dire - and entirely justified - warnings to the Poles about the consequences to them should they actually do this. Chamberlain still continued to hope for peace, therefore, while shifting his ground from outright appeasement to a mixture of appeasement and containment.165

  From the German point of view, Chamberlain’s guarantee lacked credibility on a number of grounds. How, to begin with, was Britain actually going to come to the aid of Poland if war really did break out? How could the geographical and logistical problems be overcome? The vagueness of the guarantee, and Chamberlain’s continued equivocations, only served to reinforce these questions. Above all, the experience of the previous years, from the Rhineland to Austria to the Munich Agreement, had implanted in Hitler’s mind the firm conviction that Britain and France would shy away from taking action. Their leaders were spineless nonentities, he thought.166 Moreover, unlike the situation of the previous year, the German army and its leadership had no hesitation about taking on the Poles, who - in contrast to the modern and well-armed Czechs - they regarded as backward, poorly led and poorly equipped. Already at the end of March 1939, Brauchitsch, informed by Hitler that military action would be required against Poland if negotiations over Danzig and the Corridor failed, had drafted a plan of invasion, codenamed ‘Case White’. Hitler approved it, wrote the introduction, in which he declared that he would aim to localize the conflict, and ordered it to be ready for action by the beginning of September 1939. Just as in the previous year, a propaganda campaign now began in Berlin against the object of Germany’s hostile attentions. A five-hour military parade through the city on Hitler’s fiftieth birthday, on 20 April 1939, provided, as Goebbels wrote in his diary, ‘a brilliant representation of German power and strength. Our heaviest artillery’, he added, ‘is being displayed for the first time.’ Just over a week later, on 28 April 1939, Hitler formally announced to the Reichstag the abrogation of the Non-Aggression Pact with Poland signed in 1934 and the Naval Agreement with Britain signed the following year. Early in April 1939, Weizsäcker informed the Poles that the time for negotiation over Danzig and the Corridor was now at an end.167

  On 23 May 1939 Hitler told military leaders, including Goring, Halder and Raeder, that ‘further successes cannot be won without bloodshed’. ‘It is not Danzig that is at stake,’ he went on. ‘For us it is a matter of expanding our living-space in the East and making food supplies secure . . . If fate forces us into a showdown with the West it is a good idea to possess a largish area in the East.’ It was necessary therefore to attack Poland at the first suitable opportunity. Hitler conceded that Britain and France might come to Poland’s aid. ‘England is therefore our enemy and the showdown with England is a matter of life and death.’ If possible, Poland would perish alone and unaided. But in the longer run, war with England and France was inevitable. ‘England is the motive force driving against Germany.’ It was to be hoped that such a war would be short. But it was as well to prepare, he said, for a war lasting ten or fifteen years. ‘Time will decide against England.’ If Holland, Belgium and France were occupied, English cities bombed and overseas supplies cut off by a maritime and airborne blockade, England would bleed to death. However, Germany would probably not be ready for the conflict for another five years, he added. German policy in 1939 therefore had to isolate Poland as far as possible and to ensure that the coming military action did not lead immediately to a general European war.168 These rambling and in places even incoherent remarks betrayed Hitler’s uncertainty about the consequences of invading Poland. However, they were accompanied by a concerted diplomatic campaign to cut the Poles off from any possible support. On 22 May the German alliance with Italy was upgraded to a ‘Pact of Steel’, while non-aggression agreements were concluded successfully with Latvia, Estonia and Denmark. A treaty signed in March 1939 gave Germany access to Romanian oil supplies in the event of a war, while similar, if less one-sided, trade links were also negotiated with Sweden and Norway, important sources of iron ore. However, negotiations with Turkey, Yugoslavia and Hungary proved less successful, leading to expressions of goodwill, especially on the economic front, but to few really concrete results.169 The most startling opening was made in the direction of Moscow. Already in May, Hitler was beginning to realize that securing the benevolent neutrality of the Soviet Union, whose long border with Poland was of central strategic importance, would be vital for the success of the invasion. There was a danger that Britain and France would secure Soviet backing for the attempt to contain German aggression. By 6 June 1939, Hitler was no longer including in his speeches his customary diatribes against the menace of world Bolshevism. Instead, he began directing his fire against the Western democracies.170 Behind the scenes, Ribbentrop began pushing for a formal pact with the Soviets. He was encouraged by a speech given by Stalin on 10 March 1939, in which he declared that he would not be willing to come to the rescue of the Western capitalist powers if they got into a conflict with Germany, since their policy of appeasing Hitler’s demands had obviously strengthened Hitler’s long-term aim of attacking the Soviet Union. On 3 May 1939, Stalin sent an unmistakable signal to Berlin by dismissing Maxim Litvinov, his long-term Foreign Minister and a proponent of collective security and civilized relations with the West. He replaced him with his hard-line henchman Vyacheslav Molotov. It escaped nobody’s attention that Litvinov was a Jew, and Molotov was not.171

  Stalin was in a difficult position in 1939. Over the previous few years he had carried out violent purges of his top generals, munitions factory managers and senior army officers. There were few left in the higher echelons of the regime with any direct e
xperience of warfare. Competent technical experts had been arrested and killed in their thousands. Soviet military preparedness was lamentable.172 Stalin was aware from June 1939 onwards of Hitler’s intention to invade Poland in late August or early September.173 More than anything else, he needed to ensure that the invasion went no further. He needed time to regroup and rebuild the Red Army, refashion his arms and equipment production, and get ready for the assault he was sure would follow some time after the German conquest of Poland. To some extent, he left open the option of forging an alliance with the Western powers; but they were hesitant, regarding him as unreliable, and Ribbentrop and the German Foreign Office were eager, despite Hitler’s own personal reservations. As the hints from Moscow grew stronger, Ribbentrop saw an opportunity to shock the British, whom he still hated intensely after the humiliations of his time as ambassador in London, and deliver a coup that would win Hitler’s undying gratitude and approval. Negotiations on improving Soviet- German trade relations started, faltered, and started again. Molotov and Ribbentrop both indicated that an economic agreement should have a political dimension. This was not long in taking shape. By early August 1939, Ribbentrop and Weizsäcker, with Hitler’s approval, had drawn up plans for a joint partition of Poland with the Soviets. Still Stalin hesitated. Finally, however, on 21 August he agreed to Hitler’s increasingly urgent requests for a formal pact. Sidelining half-hearted British attempts to reach an agreement, the Soviet dictator invited Ribbentrop to Moscow. By 23 August, Ribbentrop had arrived. By the early hours of the following morning, the Non-Aggression Pact had been signed.174