In the first few days after 30 June, Hitler avoided appearing in public, although his propaganda minister urged him to in order to combat negative foreign press headlines. “Everywhere we’re coming into discredit,” Goebbels noted on 7 July. “High time for the Führer to speak.”295 The previous day Hitler had flown to Berchtesgaden to rest on the Obersalzberg. But by 9 July, he was already back in Berlin announcing that he wanted to issue an explanation in front of the Reichstag. He discussed the details with Goebbels the following day.296 On the evening of 13 July, when Hitler approached the Reichstag podium, he initially seemed inhibited. “Pale as a corpse with tired facial features and a voice that was still hoarse,” was how François-Poncet recalled him.297 The atmosphere was tense. After all, there had been thirteen Reichstag deputies among the executed SA men. Papen, who had asked Hitler to be excused, was missing from the government bench,298 and SS men in pith helmets had been posted next to the speaker’s lectern and throughout the hall. In his two-hour speech, Hitler repeated the lies about a conspiracy between Röhm, Schleicher and Strasser he had told to his cabinet on 3 July, and he did not neglect to mention that “certain shared predilection” of the Röhm clique as a main motive for their “high treason.” He talked about the “bitterest decisions” of his life, for which he assumed responsibility “before history.” Hitler told his audience: “Mutinies are broken according to never-changing laws. If someone tries to criticise me for not enlisting the regular courts, I can only say: in that hour, I was responsible for the fate of the German nation and was therefore the supreme judge of the German people.”299
The constitutional lawyer Carl Schmitt was tasked with providing academic justification for this twisted notion in an article in the legal journal Deutsche Juristen-Zeitung. He wrote: “The Führer is only protecting the law from the worst sort of abuse, if in a moment of danger he creates immediate law on the basis of his status as leader and supreme judge.”300 Hitler’s speech to the Reichstag was well received not just by the Third Reich’s star lawyer, but also by the German people. Nazi reports on the public mood concluded that the speech had had a “liberating effect.”301 “I wish you could have heard these words instead of merely reading them,” Elisabeth Gebensleben wrote to her daughter. “The greatness, honesty and openness of such a man make you feel small.”302
Nonetheless, no matter how loquacious and inventive Hitler often was when recalling earlier episodes in his life, from now on he maintained steely silence about the Night of the Long Knives, when his murderous side had been on clear display. The topic was absolutely taboo, even for his closest intimates. When Heinrich Hoffmann once tried to broach it, Hitler brusquely waved him off. “Not a single word more!” Hitler said in a tone of voice that brooked no contradiction.303
On 30 June 1934, the true criminal nature of the Nazi regime was revealed, but only a few observers inside and outside Germany were able to see it. “The horrible thing is that a European people has delivered itself up to such a band of lunatics and criminals and continues to tolerate them,” Victor Klemperer complained in his diary.304 Thomas Mann, who had left Germany in February for initial exile in Switzerland, saw all his dark premonitions confirmed. In comparison with the “dirty swindler and murderous charlatan” Hitler, Mann wrote, Robespierre was positively honourable. The circles around Hitler were little better than “gangsters of the lowest sort.” The Nobel laureate went on: “In any case, after little more than a year, Hitlerism is proving to be what we always saw, recognised and deeply felt it to be: the absolute nadir of baseness, decadent stupidity and bloodthirsty humiliation—it is becoming clear that Hitlerism will continue, certainly and unerringly, to prove itself as precisely that.”305 Mann’s judgement was not only on the mark. It was astonishingly prescient.
The Reichswehr leadership, by contrast, felt it had got what it wanted. Röhm had been dispensed with as a rival and the status of the Reichswehr as the only “weapons-bearer of the nation” had been explicitly confirmed. The fact that a former Reichswehr minister and a ranking general had fallen victim to the bloodthirsty “cleansing” did nothing to dampen the triumphant mood. The former state secretary in the Reich Chancellery, Erwin Planck, may have entreated Kurt von Hammerstein’s successor as army chief of staff, General Werner von Fritsch, to rein in the regime’s proclivity for violence—“If you look on without acting, sooner or later you’ll suffer the same fate’306—but the Reichswehr leadership did not heed any such warnings. At a commanders’ conference on 5 July, Blomberg declared that Hitler had acted in the interest of the Wehrmacht, and that the military was now obliged “to thank him with even greater fidelity and loyalty if possible.”307 Such kowtowing weakened the Reichswehr’s position within the Hitler state. The military had become an accomplice to Hitler’s criminal polices, and there was no turning back.
It was the SS, and not the military, that actually profited from the Night of the Long Knives. On 20 July, Hitler decreed that as a reward for the “great service performed in conjunction with the events of 30 June,” the SS was to be separated from the SA and henceforth run as an autonomous organisation. Reichsführer-SS Himmler was put directly under Hitler’s own authority.308 In the years to follow, the power of the SS would constantly grow, whereas under Viktor Lutze’s leadership, the SA gradually devolved into little more than a veterans’ organisation for “old street fighters.”309
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In late July, Hindenburg’s condition deteriorated dramatically. His death was only a matter of days away. On the morning of 1 August, Hitler travelled to Neudeck, where he found the dying man still conscious. “Recognised him briefly,” Goebbels wrote after Hitler’s return to Berlin. “Expressed thanks and love. And hallucinated about the Kaiser.”310 Hindenburg died in the early hours of 2 August. The previous evening, before his death was even confirmed, Hitler had presented his cabinet with the Law on the Head of State of the German Reich, which regulated the question of Hindenburg’s successor in Hitler’s favour. It united the offices of Reich president and chancellor and transferred the powers of the former to the “Führer and Reich chancellor,” as Hitler now officially referred to himself. Although this clearly violated the provisions of the Enabling Act, which specified that the responsibilities of the Reich president remain untouched, the cabinet approved the new law. Moreover, without any prompting by Hitler, Blomberg announced his intention to have German soldiers swear an oath of loyalty to the new commander-in-chief as soon as Hindenburg had died.311 On 2 August, members of the Wehrmacht were forced to recite: “I swear by God this holy oath that I will show absolute obedience to the Führer of the German Reich and People, Adolf Hitler, the commander-in-chief of the Wehrmacht, and that as a brave soldier I will be willing to sacrifice my life at any time for this oath.”312 It may be that the military leadership hoped such a display of loyalty would secure them a measure of autonomy. In fact their actions hastened the transformation of the army into a tool for Hitler to use at will.
In his cabinet meeting on 2 August, Hitler played the role of someone mourning for Hindenburg so convincingly that Goebbels wrote: “Everyone was very moved.”313 Hitler declared that he “had lost a paternal friend” and reminded everyone “that the current Reich government would not exist without the hallowed Reich president.” Given the “greatness of the deceased,” Hitler declared that the title Reich president would be retired for all eternity. And he announced that the people would be asked to vote on the new organisation of state leadership on 19 August.314 Hindenburg had asked to be buried next to his deceased wife at his Neudeck estate. But the Nazi leadership ignored this final wish and organised a pompous state funeral inside the Tannenberg Memorial on 7 August. In his address, Hitler once again invoked the myth of the hero of the Great War, which he had so successfully exploited in the previous months. “Deceased field commander, enter now into Valhalla” were the words with which Hitler sent Hindenburg to his tomb.315
That evening, Berlin was rocked by the news that Hindenburg had left
behind a political testament. There were fears it might contain something politically explosive,316 so Hitler dispatched Papen to Neudeck to retrieve it. On 14 August, it was opened in the Reich Chancellery. It consisted of two documents: a longer one that was Hindenburg’s political testament and a personal letter to Hitler in which Hindenburg pleaded for a restoration of the monarchy, once political circumstances allowed. Hitler kept the letter to himself—it has never been found—but he had the other document published on 15 August. Not only was its content harmless, it actually worked in Hitler’s favour. Hindenburg expressed his gratitude at being allowed to witness “the hour of Germany’s restrengthening” during the twilight of his life. “My Chancellor Adolf Hitler and his movement have made a decisive, historic step towards the great goal of restoring to the German people its inner unity above any differences of caste or class,” Hindenburg had written. The president took his leave from life in hope that what had led to 30 January 1933 “will ripen into the absolute fulfilment and completion of the historic mission of our people.”317 The Nazis could hardly have wished for a better endorsement ahead of the 17 August plebiscite. On the eve of the poll, Hindenburg’s son Oskar addressed the German people by radio, calling upon them to “approve the transferral of the office my father previously occupied as Reich president to the Führer and Reich chancellor.”318
On 19 August, the official results were announced: 89.9 per cent had voted in favour, with voter turnout recorded at 95.7 per cent. Nonetheless Goebbels was disappointed: “I expected more,” he wrote.319 The result apparently reflected disappointment among parts of the populace at corruption among Nazi functionaries. One voter in Potsdam, for instance, had scrawled on his ballot paper: “For Hitler, Yes, for his Big Shots, No.”320 In Swiss exile, Thomas Mann was positively surprised: “Five million ‘no’ votes plus two million abstentions are a respectable national performance under the current circumstances.”321 Victor Klemperer took a similar view, even if he ultimately had to acknowledge that a vast majority of Germans had voted for the Führer and Reich chancellor: “Hitler is the clear victor, and there’s no end in sight.”322
The popular referendum of August 1934 completed Hitler’s consolidation of power. Over the space of a few months, Hitler had succeeded in outmanoeuvring his conservative coalition partners and removing or neutralising all political opposition. Step by step, he had made himself into the lord and master of the German Reich and transformed Germany into a dictatorship. “One man has been given a power that no one now alive has ever possessed,” wrote Denmark’s ambassador in Berlin. “He is now more powerful than any monarch, more powerful than the president of the United States, and more powerful than Mussolini.”323 And now that his absolute domestic power was secured, Hitler could turn his attention to dismantling the system put in place by the Treaty of Versailles.
15
Eviscerating Versailles
“No one else has ever explained and written down what he intends to do more often than I have,” Hitler stated in a speech on 30 January 1941. “And I have written over and over about the eradication of Versailles.”1 That was true. From the very start of his political career as a popular agitator in the autumn of 1919, Hitler left no doubt that he would seek to remove the constraints of the Treaty of Versailles should he achieve power. Revising the post–First World War geopolitical order was only the first step—not the ultimate goal—of Hitler’s foreign policy. After being named chancellor, Hitler did not at all lose sight of one of the other core points of his programme, the conquest of “living space” in eastern Europe. He made that clear in his speech to Germany’s army and navy commanders on 3 February 1933. By late January 1941, when Hitler commemorated the eighth anniversary of the Nazi “seizure of power” in Berlin’s Sportpalast, the racist, annihilationist war Hitler had envisioned against the Soviet Union was soon to become reality. A little over a month before, on 18 December 1940, Hitler had signed Order 21, which launched Operation Barbarossa.
Nonetheless, in the first years of his regime, Hitler scrupulously avoided any public mention of his radical expansionist aims. The Third Reich’s precarious international position forced him to manoeuvre carefully. It was logical to assume that France, in particular, would not simply accept German rearmament and might launch a pre-emptive military strike. The phase between “the theoretical recognition of Germany’s equal military rights and the achievement of a certain level of armament” would be “the most difficult and dangerous one,” Hitler explained at a meeting of the Committee for the Creation of Work on 9 February 1933, where he stressed that rearmament would be given “absolute priority.”2 In a confidential speech to select representatives of the press in April 1940, a few weeks before Germany’s invasion of France, Goebbels frankly admitted how much the Nazi leadership had feared a pre-emptive French strike in the early phase of rearmament. “A French premier,” Goebbels admitted, “should have said in 1933, as I certainly would have, had I been French premier: ‘The author of Mein Kampf, which contains this and that, has become German chancellor. This man cannot be tolerated as a neighbour. Either he will have to disappear, or we will start marching.” That would have been completely logical, but it was not done. They let us be, and we were able to proceed unhindered through the zone of risk.”3
Hitler was at pains during the first phase of rearmaments to conceal his real intentions and placate the other European powers with conciliatory gestures. He repeatedly insisted that Germany only desired equal status within the community of nations, and that this was in the interest of world peace. These clichéd assurances of benevolence were completely calculated, as he admitted in a confidential speech to select members of the press in November 1938. The circumstances of the past few years, Hitler told them, meant that he had been forced to speak “almost exclusively” of peace: “It was only by constantly emphasising Germany’s peaceful desires and intentions that I was able, bit by bit, to liberate the German people and give them the arms that were the necessary precondition of the next step.”4 Hitler was essentially applying the same tactics of reassurance and deception that had worked so well with his conservative coalition partners in his “seizure of power” to the arena of foreign policy. And much like German conservatives, most foreign diplomats were mistaken in their appraisals of Hitler. They, too, thought that his compulsive need for action could be “tamed” by binding him in international treaties. In November 1933, Sir Eric Phipps, the new British ambassador in Berlin, declared that Hitler could not be treated simply as the author of Mein Kampf since to do that would have left no option other than a pre-emptive military strike. On the other hand, Hitler could not be ignored. Would it not be more advisable, Phipps reasoned, to tie down this terribly dynamic politician in an agreement that he himself had freely and proudly signed?5
Only a handful of foreign observers realised that Hitler would never be content with a mere revision of the Treaty of Versailles. One man who did was the U.S. consul general in Berlin, George S. Messersmith. As early as May 1933, he warned that while the Hitler regime would probably desire peace in the next few years in order to consolidate its position, ultimately the “new Germany” would “strive in every way to impose its will on the rest of the world.”6
One reason foreign politicians widely underestimated Hitler was the initial lack of personnel changes at the German Foreign Ministry after 30 January 1933. Baron Konstantin von Neurath stayed on as foreign minister at Hindenburg’s express wish, as did Neurath’s deputy, Bernhard von Bülow. Germany’s ambassadors to the world’s leading nations also retained their posts. The only one to leave the diplomatic service in the spring of 1933 was Germany’s ambassador to the United States, Friedrich von Prittwitz und Gaffron.7 The appearance was thus maintained that German foreign policy was still being determined by the Foreign Ministry, and that seemed to the rest of the world to be a guarantee of not just personnel but policy continuity. In early February, when Germany’s ambassador to the Soviet Union, Herbert von Dirksen, reported the
Moscow government’s unease about the new Hitler government, Bülow told him:
I think people there overestimate the effect of the change of government on German foreign policy. In government, the National Socialists are of course different people and pursue different policies than the ones they have previously supported. That is always the way it is, and all parties are the same…They, too, put their pants on one leg at a time.8
Just as, domestically, hopes that the responsibility of government would make Hitler and the Nazis more “moderate” quickly proved illusory, similar ideas also emerged as dangerously misjudged in the arena of foreign policy, even if it took longer for the mistake to become clear. In the first months of his regime, Hitler’s emphasis was on consolidating and expanding his power domestically. Abroad he was content to take a back seat and let the career diplomats at the Foreign Ministry go about their business. That changed once Hitler had established his dictatorship. Increasingly he took the reins in dealing with other countries. “[Hitler is] entirely occupied with foreign policy,” wrote Goebbels as early as March 1934.9 Henceforth Hitler would determine the direction of all important decisions, and as he had in destroying the political Left and subjugating his conservative coalition partners, he displayed a sure sense for his adversaries’ weaknesses, boldly and unscrupulously exploiting them on what was for him new terrain. As a result he needed only three years to engineer a succession of remarkable coups that eviscerated the system put in place by the Treaty of Versailles.
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