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The next bombshell dropped on 26 January 1934 when the German Reich and Poland announced the conclusion of a non-aggression pact that was supposed to last for ten years and that required both sides to seek peaceful solutions to any conflicts of interest. The author of this coup was not the Foreign Ministry, but rather Hitler himself. In early May 1933, he had expressed his wish to the Polish envoy, Alfred Wysocki, “that both countries dispassionately take stock of and embrace their mutual interests.”47 The resulting exchange of ideas was intensified in the autumn of 1933. In late September Goebbels met with Polish Foreign Minister Józef Beck in Geneva. “He wants to break free from France and move towards Berlin,” Goebbels noted. “These threads will continue to be pursued.”48 In mid-November, Hitler received and held lengthy talks with Poland’s new ambassador to Germany, Józef Lipski. With that, the official negotiations that led to the non-aggression pact commenced between Berlin and Warsaw.49
Understandably, this spectacular development created a stir both inside and outside Germany. It represented a break with previous German foreign policy, which had never accepted the territorial concessions the Treaty of Versailles had forced Germany to make to Poland, in particular the creation of the Polish Corridor that separated East Prussia from the rest of the Reich. For this very reason, Neurath had rejected the idea of Germany’s reaching any understanding with its eastern neighbour in the spring of 1933. Now Hitler appeared to have engineered just that. “A diplomatic miracle has occurred!” wrote Ebermayer in his diary. “Germany and Poland have reached an agreement!”50
Of course Hitler’s change of tack was not motivated by a sudden fondness for the authoritarian regime of Marshal Józef Piłsudski. On the contrary, the German chancellor had weighed up the advantages of the non-aggression pact. On the one hand, it offered protection against a joint pre-emptive strike by Poland and France—a danger that Hitler’s regime initially took very seriously.51 “Ten years of calm, even with sacrifices,” was how Hitler summarised his foreign policy in November 1933.52 On the other hand, the agreement with Poland served Hitler as a welcome means of proving that he was the man of peace he constantly claimed to be. And that was exactly how foreign diplomats now saw him—British Ambassador Phipps called the non-aggression pact the “achievement of a great statesman.”53 Nevertheless, despite pledging not to resort to violence, Hitler had not accepted the territorial integrity of the Polish state. The pact was not a “Locarno for the east.” For Hitler, the priority was to keep his eastern flank safe. The future would offer opportunities for redrawing Germany’s borders there, even if Hitler was careful not to mention this in public. On the contrary, in his speech to the Reichstag on the first anniversary of his coming to power, he touted the agreement with Poland as a new chapter in the history of the two peoples: “Germans and Poles will have to learn to live with the fact of their mutual existence. It is therefore more effective to shape a situation, which the previous thousand years could not eradicate and the years after us will not be able to either, in such a way that both nations can derive the greatest possible benefit from it.”54
The pact chiselled away at France’s security concept of a cordon sanitaire in eastern Europe. It also “resolutely reversed the ABCs of Germany’s eastern European policy,” as the historian Klaus Hildebrand put it. “Instead of pursuing, as it had previously, an anti-Polish policy together with the Soviet Union, Germany now pursued an anti-Soviet policy together with Poland.”55 The regime may have renewed the German–Soviet Neutrality and Non-aggression Pact of April 1926 on 5 May 1933, but Hitler also made it clear that closer ties to Poland implied distancing Germany from the Soviet Union. That meant that the ideological conflict with the wielders of power in Moscow would determine future German foreign policy. “The burdensome moments in our relations with Russia have always been greater than the fruitful ones,” Hitler told his cabinet in late September 1933.56 And in fact, German–Soviet relations markedly worsened throughout 1933 and 1934. The cooperation between the Reichswehr and the Red Army in the Weimar Republic was abruptly terminated and Soviet foreign policy now reorientated itself westwards, particularly towards France. In September 1934, the Soviet Union joined the League of Nations, after the United States had politically recognised the Communist government the preceding November.
One year after taking power, Hitler was now determining the direction and pace of German foreign policy. If the diplomats in the Foreign Ministry had reservations about the methods Hitler used, they still loyally served the new regime. “Our kind must support the new era,” the ambitious young envoy Ernst von Weizsäcker said. “What would succeed it, were it to fail?” The “expertise” of career diplomats had to complement the “idealistic drive of the national revolution,” Weizsäcker argued, in order to prevent unfortunate developments.57 Yet although they so eagerly placed themselves at his disposal, Hitler thoroughly mistrusted the elites at the Foreign Ministry. He still felt the inferiority complex of an arriviste when confronted by experienced and usually very worldly civil servants. In Hitler’s eyes, the career diplomats lacked agility, were plagued by doubts and stuck in their bureaucratic ways. For that reason, he began early on to promote a number of competing organisations that could pursue foreign policy independent of traditional diplomacy. One of them was the NSDAP Foreign Policy Office, which was founded on 1 April 1933 by Alfred Rosenberg, the chief Nazi ideologue and one of Hitler’s main foreign-policy advisers. Others were the NSDAP Foreign Organisation under Ernst Wilhelm Bohle and Joachim von Ribbentrop’s office, which as of 1934 functioned as Hitler’s extended arm on foreign-policy matters.58
Although Hitler disliked reading diplomatic reports—studying documents was never his forte—his vast memory allowed him to get enough of a grasp of foreign policy to impress diplomats with his knowledge of details. After meeting the new man in charge of the Chancellery for the first time, Weizsäcker came away with a positive impression: “Hitler was very serious and introverted, without doubt far beyond all the others. Something like a metaphysical quality gives him his advantage.”59 French Ambassador André François-Poncet, whom Hitler first received in early April 1933, found the Führer “thoroughly polite, by no means self-conscious, but rather unconstrained, if somewhat reticent, almost cool.” Hitler, François-Poncet wrote, expressed himself “clearly and decisively” and gave “the impression of being completely honourable.”60 Anthony Eden, the British government’s expert on disarmament and later Britain’s foreign secretary, was surprised when he first visited Berlin in February 1934 to find Hitler a charming conversational partner: measured, friendly, well prepared and open to counter-arguments. Hitler had “nothing Prussian” about him, Eden wrote, but was instead a “typical Austrian.”61 Hitler assured Eden that the German government did not have any “aggressive intentions.” On the contrary, it was prepared to accept “every European combination that can be seen as a guarantee for the preservation of peace.”62
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But even in 1933 and 1934, there was reason to doubt Hitler’s assurances. In Germany’s relations with Austria, for example, the Nazi regime charted a course that was anything but conciliatory and moderate. The native Austrian Hitler had dreamed about creating a greater Germany ever since his years in Vienna, and on the very first page of Mein Kampf he had supported the return of German Austria “to the great motherland” since “the same blood…belongs in a joint empire.”63 After 30 January 1933, National Socialists in Austria sensed a change of fortunes. They began demanding that Austria be united with the Reich and received massive support from the German NSDAP. But their initiative was blocked when Austrian Chancellor Engelbert Dollfuss of the conservative Christian Social Party dissolved parliament in March 1933 and began creating an authoritarian, caste-based state that was soon described as “Austro-fascist.” It insisted on its autonomy and looked to Fascist Italy and not Nazi Germany as a role model.
In early May 1933, in response to the increasingly subversive activities of A
ustrian Nazis, the Dollfuss regime prohibited them from wearing their brown uniforms in public. On 19 June, the party was officially banned. Hitler countered with what amounted to a ban on Germans travelling to Austria: any Germans wanting to visit their southern neighbour were required to pay a fee of 1,000 reichsmarks—a serious blow to Austrian tourism. “This measure is likely to lead to the collapse of the Dollfuss government and new elections,” Hitler told his cabinet. “These new elections will bring Austria into line from within so that an external annexation will not be necessary.”64 He was wrong. The Austrian government reacted by introducing visa requirements for local border traffic, a move that primarily affected National Socialists commuting between the two countries. The Austrian chapter of the NSDAP led by National Inspector Theodor Habicht now went on the offensive and staged a number of attacks throughout the country.65
At this point Mussolini, who viewed German plans to incorporate Austria with great mistrust, offered protection for the Dollfuss regime. In a joint declaration on 17 February 1934, Italy, France and Britain pledged to ensure Austrian independence and territorial integrity. The following month, Italy, Austria and Hungary signed the “Rome Protocols,” which mandated close, primarily economic, cooperation between the three countries. Nazi Germany’s designs on its neighbour seemed to have been thwarted, and a gap had opened up between the Reich and Italy, Hitler’s preferred ally.
Thus the first meeting between Hitler and Mussolini on 14 and 15 June 1934 in Venice—the first trip abroad by the new German head of state—took place under inauspicious circumstances. On Neurath’s advice, the Führer wore civilian clothing, and he did not cut a good figure next to the uniformed Duce. Visibly uncomfortable and insecure, he looked “more like a subordinate than a partner,” his photographer Heinrich Hoffmann recalled.66 More than likely, Hitler’s thoughts were distracted by the imminent domestic purge of Ernst Röhm and the SA. The two men held their political talks in private, after Mussolini, who knew some German, refused an interpreter, and they failed to reach agreement about the Austrian issue. Afterwards, Mussolini gave a less than flattering account of Hitler to his wife, calling the German chancellor a violent man incapable of self-control. “He is more mule-headed than intelligent,” Mussolini said, “and nothing positive came from our discussion.”67
Only six weeks after the Venice meeting, the situation came to a head when the Austrian National Socialists staged a putsch. On 25 July Viennese SS men forced their way into the Chancellery on Ballhausplatz, shot Dollfuss dead and took over the headquarters of the Austrian Broadcasting Service. But the attempted coup was ill-prepared, and the Austrian army was able to put it down, albeit at the cost of 200 casualties. Former Justice Minister Kurt von Schuschnigg formed a new government and had the putschists arrested.68
That day, Hitler was at the Wagner Festival in Bayreuth. There is no doubt that he not only knew of but had approved the attempted coup. On Sunday, 22 July, three days before the putsch, he had summoned Habicht, the Austrian SA leader Hermann Reschny and Franz Pfeffer von Salomon, the former head of the SA who had a post in the intermediary staff of the NSDAP in Berlin, to Bayreuth, where they discussed the details of the action. Prior to that, he had received Major General Walther von Reichenau, the head of the Wehrmacht office in the Reichswehr Ministry, which suggests that the German military was also in the know. Goebbels noted: “Sunday: with the Führer [are] Gen v. Reichenau, then Pfeffer, Habicht, Reschny. The Austrian question. Will it succeed? I’m very sceptical.”69
On 25 July, a nervous jolt went through Hitler’s immediate circle. Goebbels confided to his diary: “Alarm from Austria. Chancellery and the Broadcasting Service occupied. Much to do, major excitement, terrible waiting. I remain sceptical. Pfeffer utterly optimistic, as is Habicht. Wait and see!”70 That evening, during a performance of Rheingold in the Bayreuth Festspielhaus, the first news arrived that the putsch had failed. “In turns, Schaub and Brückner ran between Hitler’s box and the room in front of ours which had a telephone,” Friedelind Wagner observed. “One received the news over the phone, while the other hastened to Hitler and whispered it in his ear.” After the performance, Hitler accompanied the Wagners to the restaurant in the Festspielhaus, where he had some liver dumpling soup. “I have to hold out here for an hour and let people see me,” he said. “Otherwise people will think I had something to do with this matter.”71 Indeed, Hitler and Goebbels had their hands full denying and concealing any connection with the putschists. Goebbels’s diaries reveal the hectic atmosphere: “One report after another. Prop[aganda] Ministry working well. Foreign Ministry still asleep. German envoy recalled from Vienna. Committed a boundless stupidity. Got involved in domestic Austrian affairs. Border closed. Anyone crossing it will be arrested. No other choice.”72
Around 2 a.m., Hitler woke up a completely uninitiated Papen in Berlin to inform him “in an extremely agitated voice” that he would have to go to Vienna as Germany’s new envoy. The situation was “extraordinarily serious.” In Papen’s recollection, Hitler even referred to the Austrian situation as a “second Sarajevo.” The vice-chancellor initially demurred, saying that after the events of 30 June he could hardly be expected to take over a new function within the government. Hitler plied him with pleas and flattery. Papen, he said, “was the only man who could bring this gnarled and dangerous situation back to normal.” He could at least come to Bayreuth to discuss the issue face to face. Hitler would send his personal aeroplane to pick him up.73
It is possible that Papen overdramatised this early-morning telephone call in his memoirs, but he did arrive in Bayreuth early on 26 July and was immediately named special German envoy in Vienna. The previous envoy was recalled, and Theodor Habicht was summoned to Bayreuth to answer extremely angry accusations. Several days later the directorate of the Austrian NSDAP was dissolved. In Papen’s estimation, Hitler was still in a state of hysteria on 26 July. He had good reason to be. After learning of Dollfuss’s assassination, Mussolini had sent two army divisions to Italy’s Austrian border near the Brenner Pass. This threatening gesture unleashed panic within the Führer’s entourage. For a time, Goebbels even saw “the danger of an intervention by the major powers.”74
Rightly, no one in Rome believed a word of the German government’s declaration on 26 July that “no German office had any connection with these events.”75 The Italian press was full of angry attacks on the Reich, and Goebbels instructed German newspapers to fire back in kind. A war of words unfolded that would last for months. Mussolini expressed the anti-German mood on 6 September at the Fair of the Levant in Bari, declaring: “Thirty centuries of history allow us to look down with pity on certain theories beyond the Alps, put forth by the descendants of a people that at a time when Rome had Caesar, Virgil and Augustus did not even possess a written language with which to keep records of its existence.”76
German–Italian relations had hit a low point. “It’s all over with Italy,” Goebbels complained on 30 July. “The same old disloyalty. The Führer has internally written [Italy] off…He has broken with Rome once and for all.”77 That same day, in a conversation with the chief of the general staff, Colonel General Ludwig Beck, State Secretary Bülow stated that no one in the world believed that Hitler had not been involved in the events of 25 July. The putsch, Bülow said, had been “staged with unbelievable carelessness,” and Germany’s foreign position was now “dismal.” “Everything is at risk, in particular all our rearmament…” was Bülow’s gloomy prediction. “All the major powers that matter are against us. France, which continues to represent a threat in the background, does not need to lift a finger to create a favourable situation for itself.”78
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For Hitler, the failed putsch and the international reaction to it was a major embarrassment and setback in his quest to fundamentally revise the post–First World War political order of Europe. The lesson he drew from it was that he had to be more careful on the issue of incorporating Austria into the Reich and wait for a mor
e promising moment. He continued his strategy of numbing the vigilance of Europe’s leading powers with assurances of his peaceful intentions while secretly pursuing his rearmament policies. “Keep our traps shut and keep rearming” was how Goebbels summarised his master’s tactical restraint in the latter half of 1934. “We cannot provoke anyone right now. We have to be completely gentle and mild.”79 At a Reich governors’ conference in early November, Hitler asserted that the foreign-policy situation had improved since the summer but remained somewhat precarious. “The Reich government has no interest in getting drawn into a war,” he said. “If we are granted ten to twelve years of peace, the National Socialist reconstruction will be complete. Then war against Germany would represent a serious danger for any enemy.”80 The long-term goals of Hitler’s foreign policy still went well beyond a mere revision of the Treaty of Versailles. He made this clear in a confidential talk with his propaganda minister on the evening of 26 July 1934, after he had calmed down from the agitation of the previous hours, and the tension had yielded to a kind of euphoria. “Hitler talked about the future,” Goebbels recorded. “He wore the expression of a prophet. Germany as the master of the world. The mission of a century.”81
With this remark, Goebbels unwittingly underlined one of the most bewildering contradictions of Hitler as a politician. As realistic as he was about the scope of his foreign policy in the first years of his regime, he increasingly ignored Bismarck’s axiom that politics was the art of the possible. Germany’s ambassador to Italy, Ulrich von Hassell, was always struck in his encounters with the Führer by the “puzzling proximity of clear-sighted, realistic thoughts and wild, confused constellations of ideas.”82 Following this logic, Hitler was both a realist and a fantasist, and this unusual combination made it equally difficult for admirers and adversaries to know what Hitler really thought.