The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich: A History of Nazi Germany

by William L. Shirer

  Much worse was to be inflicted on the Jews by this man and this State and its Fuehrer in the course of time, and a brief time it turned out to be. On the flaming, riotous night of November 9, 1938, the Third Reich had deliberately turned down a dark and savage road from which there was to be no return. A good many Jews had been murdered and tortured and robbed before, but these crimes, except for those which took place in the concentration camps, had been committed mostly by brown-shirted rowdies acting out of their own sadism and greed while the State authorities looked on, or looked the other way. Now the German government itself had organized and carried out a vast pogrom. The killings, the looting, the burning of synagogues and houses and shops on the night of November 9 were its doing. So were the official decrees, duly published in the official gazette, the Reichsgesetzblatt—three of them on the day of Goering’s meeting—which fined the Jewish community a billion marks, eliminated them from the economy, robbed them of what was left of their property and drove them toward the ghetto—and worse.

  World opinion was shocked and revolted by such barbarity in a nation which boasted a centuries-old Christian and humanist culture. Hitler, in turn, was enraged by the world reaction and convinced himself that it merely proved the power and scope of “the Jewish world conspiracy.”

  In retrospect, it is easy to see that the horrors inflicted upon the Jews of Germany on November 9 and the harsh and brutal measures taken against them immediately afterward were portents of a fatal weakening which in the end would bring the dictator, his regime and his nation down in utter ruin. The evidences of Hitler’s megalomania we have seen permeating hundreds of pages of this narrative. But until now he had usually been able to hold it in check at critical stages in his rise and in that of his country. At such moments his genius for acting not only boldly, but usually only after a careful calculation of the consequences, had won him one crashing success after another. But now, as November 9 and its aftermath clearly showed, Hitler was losing his self-control. His megalomania was getting the upper hand. The stenographic record of the Goering meeting on November 12 reveals that it was Hitler who, in the final analysis, was responsible for the holocaust of that November evening; it was he who gave the necessary approval to launch it; he who pressed Goering to go ahead with the elimination of the Jews from German life. From now on the absolute master of the Third Reich would show little of that restraint which had saved him so often before. And though his genius and that of his country would lead to further startling conquests, the poisonous seeds of eventual self-destruction for the dictator and his land had now been sown.

  Hitler’s sickness was contagious; the nation was catching it, as if it were a virus. Individually, as this writer can testify from personal experience, many Germans were as horrified by the November 9 inferno as were Americans and Englishmen and other foreigners. But neither the leaders of the Christian churches nor the generals nor any other representatives of the “good” Germany spoke out at once in open protest. They bowed to what General von Fritsch called “the inevitable,” or “Germany’s destiny.”

  The atmosphere of Munich soon was dissipated. At Saarbruecken, at Weimar, at Munich, Hitler delivered petulant speeches that fall warning the outside world and particularly the British to mind their own business and to quit concerning themselves “with the fate of Germans within the frontiers of the Reich.” That fate, he thundered, was exclusively Germany’s affair. It could not be long before even Neville Chamberlain would be awakened to the nature of the German government which he had gone so far to appease. Gradually, as the eventful year of 1938 gave way to ominous 1939, the Prime Minister got wind of what the Fuehrer whom he had tried so hard to personally accommodate in the interest of European peace was up to behind the scenes.*

  Not long after Munich Ribbentrop journeyed to Rome. His mind was “fixed” on war, Ciano noted in his diary of October 28.9

  The Fuehrer [the German Foreign Minister told Mussolini and Ciano] is convinced that we must inevitably count on a war with the Western democracies in the course of a few years, perhaps three or four … The Czech crisis has shown our power! We have the advantage of the initiative and are masters of the situation. We cannot be attacked. The military situation is excellent: as from September [1939] we could face a war with the great democracies.*

  To the young Italian Foreign Minister, Ribbentrop was “vain, frivolous, and loquacious,” and in so describing him in his diary he added, “The Duce says you only have to look at his head to see that he has a small brain.” The German Foreign Minister had come to Rome to persuade Mussolini to sign a military alliance between Germany, Japan and Italy, a draft of which had been given the Italians at Munich; but Mussolini stalled for time. He was not yet ready, Ciano noted, to shut the door on Britain and France.

  Hitler himself toyed that autumn with the idea of trying to detach France from her ally over the Channel. When on October 18 he received the French ambassador, François-Poncet, for a farewell visit in the eerie fastness of Eagle’s Nest, high above Berchtesgaden on a mountaintop.† he broke out into a bitter attack on Great Britain. The ambassador found the Fuehrer pale, his face drawn with fatigue, but not too tired to inveigh against Albion. Britain re-echoed “with threats and calls to arms.” She was selfish and took on “superior” airs. It was the British who were destroying the spirit of Munich. And so on. France was different. Hitler said he wanted more friendly and close relations with her. To prove it, he was willing to sign at once a pact of friendship, guaranteeing their present frontiers (and thus again renouncing any German claims to Alsace-Lorraine) and proposing to settle any future differences by consultation.

  The pact was duly signed in Paris on December 6, 1938, by the German and French foreign ministers. France, by that time, had somewhat recovered from the defeatist panic of the Munich days. The writer happened to be in Paris on the day the paper was signed and noted the frosty atmosphere. When Ribbentrop drove through the streets they were completely deserted, and several cabinet ministers and other leading figures in the French political and literary worlds, including the eminent presidents of the Senate and the Chamber, MM. Jeanneney and Herriot respectively, refused to attend the social functions accorded the Nazi visitor.

  From this meeting of Bonnet and Ribbentrop stemmed a misunderstanding which was to play a certain part in future events. The German Foreign Minister claimed that Bonnet had assured him that after Munich France was no longer interested in Eastern Europe and he subsequently interpreted this as meaning that the French would give Germany a free hand in this region, especially in regard to rump Czechoslovakia and Poland. Bonnet denied this. According to Schmidt’s minutes of the meeting, Bonnet declared, in answer to Ribbentrop’s demand that Germany’s sphere of influence in the East be recognized, that “conditions had changed fundamentally since Munich.”11 This ambiguous remark was soon stretched by the slippery German Foreign Minister into the flat statement, which he passed along to Hitler, that “at Paris Bonnet had declared he was no longer interested in questions concerning the East.” France’s swift surrender at Munich had already convinced the Fuehrer of this. It was not quite true.

  SLOVAKIA “WINS” ITS “INDEPENDENCE”

  What had happened to the German guarantee of the rest of Czechoslovakia which Hitler had solemnly promised at Munich to give? When the new French ambassador in Berlin, Robert Coulondre, inquired of Weizsaecker on December 21, 1938, the State Secretary replied that the destiny of Czechoslovakia lay in the hands of Germany and that he rejected the idea of a British–French guarantee. As far back as October 14, when the new Czech Foreign Minister, František Chvalkovsky, had come humbly begging for crumbs at the hand of Hitler in Munich and had inquired whether Germany was going to join Britain and France in the guarantee of his country’s shrunken frontiers, the Fuehrer replied sneeringly that “the British and French guarantees were worthless … and that the only effective guarantee was that by Germany.”12

  Yet, as 1939 began, it was still not forthco
ming. The reason was simple. The Fuehrer had no intention of giving it. Such a guarantee would have interfered with the plans which he had begun to lay immediately after Munich. Soon there would be no Czechoslovakia to guarantee. To start with, Slovakia would be induced to break away.

  A few days after Munich, on October 17, Goering had received two Slovak leaders, Ferdinand Durcansky and Mach, and the leader of the German minority in Slovakia, Franz Karmasin. Durcansky, who was Deputy Prime Minister of the newly appointed autonomous Slovakia, assured the Field Marshal that what the Slovaks really wanted was “complete independence, with very close political, economic and military ties with Germany.” In a secret Foreign Office memorandum of the same date it was noted that Goering had decided that independence for Slovakia must be supported. “A Czech State minus Slovakia is even more completely at our mercy. Air base in Slovakia for operation against the East very important.”13 Such were Goering’s thoughts on the matter in mid-October.

  We must here attempt to follow a double thread in the German plan: to detach Slovakia from Prague, and to prepare for the liquidation of what remained of the state by the military occupation of the Czech lands, Bohemia and Moravia. On October 21, 1938, as we have seen, Hitler had directed the Wehrmacht to be ready to carry out that liquidation.* On December 17, General Keitel issued what he called a “supplement to Directive of October 21”:

  TOP SECRET

  With reference to the “liquidation of the Rump Czech State,” the Fuehrer has given the following orders:

  The operation is to be prepared on the assumption that no resistance worth mentioning is to be expected.

  To the outside world it must clearly appear that it is merely a peaceful action and not a warlike undertaking.

  The action must therefore be carried out by the peacetime armed forces only, without reinforcement by mobilization … 14

  Try as it might to please Hitler, the new pro-German government of Czechoslovakia began to realize as the new year began that the country’s goose was cooked. Just before Christmas, 1938, the Czech cabinet, in order to further appease the Fuehrer, had dissolved the Communist Party and suspended all Jewish teachers in German schools. On January 12, 1939, Foreign Minister Chvalkovsky, in a message to the German Foreign Office, stressed that his government “will endeavor to prove its loyalty and good will by far-reaching fulfillment of Germany’s wishes.” On the same day he brought to the attention of the German chargé in Prague the spreading rumors “that the incorporation of Czechoslovakia into the Reich was imminent.”15

  To see if even the pieces could be saved Chvalkovsky finally prevailed upon Hitler to receive him in Berlin on January 21. It turned out to be a painful scene, though not as painful for the Czechs as one that would shortly follow. The Czech Foreign Minister groveled before the mighty German dictator, who was in one of his most bullying moods. Czechoslovakia, said Hitler, had been saved from catastrophe by “Germany’s moderation.” Nevertheless, unless the Czechs showed a different spirit, he would “annihilate” them. They must forget their “history,” which was “schoolboy nonsense,” and do as the Germans bade. That was their only salvation. Specifically, Czechoslovakia must leave the League of Nations, drastically reduce the size of her Army—“because it did not count anyway”—join the Anti-Comintern Pact, accept German direction of her foreign policy, make a preferential trade agreement with Germany, one condition of which was that no new Czech industries could be established without German consent,* dismiss all officials and editors not friendly to the Reich and, finally, outlaw the Jews, as Germany had done under its Nuremberg Laws. (“With us, the Jews will be destroyed,” Hitler told his visitor.) On the same day Chvalkovsky received further demands from Ribbentrop, who threatened “catastrophic consequences” unless the Czechs immediately mended their ways and did as they were told. The German Foreign Minister, so much the lackey in the presence of Hitler but a boor and a bully with anyone over whom he had the upper hand, bade Chvalkovsky not to mention the new German demands to the British and French but just to go ahead and carry them out.17

  And to do so without worrying about any German guarantee of the Czech frontiers! Apparently there had been little worry about this in Paris and London. Four months had gone by since Munich, and still Hitler had not honored his word to add Germany’s guarantee to that given by Britain and France. Finally on February 8 an Anglo–French note verbale was presented in Berlin stating that the two governments “would now be glad to learn the views of the German Government as to the best way of giving effect to the understanding reached at Munich in regard to the guarantee of Czechoslovakia.”18

  Hitler himself, as the captured German Foreign Office documents establish, drafted the reply, which was not made until February 28. It said that the time had not yet come for a German guarantee. Germany would have to “await first a clarification of the internal development of Czechoslovakia.”19

  The Fuehrer already was shaping that “internal development” toward an obvious end. On February 12 he received at the Chancellery in Berlin Dr. Vojtech Tuka, one of the Slovak leaders, whose long imprisonment had embittered him against the Czechs.† Addressing Hitler as “my Fuehrer,” as the secret German memorandum of the talk emphasizes, Dr. Tuka begged the German dictator to make Slovakia independent and free. “I lay the destiny of my people in your hands, my Fuehrer,” he declared. “My people await their complete liberation from you.”

  Hitler’s reply was somewhat evasive. He said that unfortunately he had not understood the Slovak problem. Had he known the Slovaks wanted to be independent he would have arranged it at Munich. It would be “a comfort to him to know that Slovakia was independent … He could guarantee an independent Slovakia at any time, even today …” These were comforting words to Professor Tuka too.20 “This,” he said later, “was the greatest day of my life.”

  The curtain on the next act of the Czechoslovak tragedy could now go up. By another one of those ironies with which this narrative history is so full, it was the Czechs in Prague who forced the curtain up a little prematurely. By the beginning of March 1939 they were caught in a terrible dilemma. The separatist movements in Slovakia and Ruthenia, fomented, as we have seen, by the German government (and in Ruthenia also by Hungary, which was hungry to annex that little land) had reached such a state that unless they were squelched Czechoslovakia would break up. In that case Hitler would surely occupy Prague. If the separatists were put down by the central government, then the Fuehrer, just as certainly, would take advantage of the resulting disturbance to also march into Prague.

  The Czech government, after much hesitation and only after the provocation became unbearable, chose the second alternative. On March 6, Dr. Hácha, the President of Czechoslovakia, dismissed the autonomous Ruthenian government from office, and on the night of March 9–10 the autonomous Slovakian government. The next day he ordered the arrest of Monsignor Tiso, the Slovak Premier, Dr. Tuka and Durcansky and proclaimed martial law in Slovakia. The one courageous move of this government, which had become so servile to Berlin, quickly turned into a disaster which destroyed it.

  The swift action by the tottering Prague government caught Berlin by surprise. Goering had gone off to sunny San Remo for a vacation. Hitler was on the point of leaving for Vienna to celebrate the first anniversary of the Anschluss. But now the master improviser went feverishly to work. On March 11, he decided to take Bohemia and Moravia by ultimatum. The text was drafted that day on Hitler’s orders by General Keitel and sent to the German Foreign Office. It called upon the Czechs to submit to military occupation without resistance.21 For the moment, however, it remained a “top military secret.”

  It was now time for Hitler to “liberate” Slovakia. Karol Sidor, who had represented the autonomous Slovak government at Prague, was named by President Hácha to be the new Premier of it in place of Monsignor Tiso. Returning to Bratislava, the Slovak seat of government, on Saturday, March 11, Sidor called a meeting of his new cabinet. At ten o’clock in the evening
the session of the Slovak government was interrupted by strange and unexpected visitors. Seyss-Inquart, the quisling Nazi Governor of Austria, and Josef Buerckel, the Nazi Gauleiter of Austria, accompanied by five German generals, pushed their way into the meeting and told the cabinet ministers to proclaim the independence of Slovakia at once. Unless they did, Hitler, who had decided to settle the question of Slovakia definitely and now, would disinterest himself in the fate of Slovakia.22

  Sidor, who opposed severing all links with the Czechs, stalled for time, but the next morning Monsignor Tiso, who had escaped from a monastery where he supposedly was under house arrest, demanded a cabinet meeting, though he was no longer himself in the cabinet. To forestall further interruptions by high German officials and generals, Sidor called the meeting in his own apartment, and when this became unsafe—for German storm troopers were taking over the town—he adjourned it to the offices of a local newspaper. There Tiso informed him that he had just received a telegram from Buerckel inviting him to go at once to see the Fuehrer in Berlin. If he refused the invitation, Buerckel threatened, two German divisions across the Danube from Bratislava would march in and Slovakia would be divided up between Germany and Hungary. Arriving in Vienna the next morning, Monday, March 13, with the intention of proceeding to Berlin by train, the chubby little prelate* was packed into a plane by the Germans and flown to the presence of Hitler. For the Fuehrer, there was no time to waste.