As we have seen, Hitler’s foreign ambitions were inseparably connected to the monumental construction projects in Berlin that began to take shape in the spring of 1937 when Speer was made general building inspector of the Reich capital. In mid-March, while fawning with Goebbels over his plans for the future world capital “Germania,” he named the first two objects of his expansionist desires. “He talked of Austria and Czechoslovakia,” the propaganda minister noted. “We need both to round off our territory. And some day we’ll get them.”38 Hitler did not specify when he intended to swallow up these two countries, but neither did he conceal the fact that, given Germany’s accelerated rearmament, the time would come sooner rather than later. “The Führer is once again unfolding the entire miracle of rearmament,” Goebbels wrote on 10 April. “We’re now almost totally secure in the west…He has achieved a miracle thanks to a bold gambit. The military leaders back then did not understand this at all. For that reason the miracle is all the greater.”39 In early August 1937, after Japan declared war on China, Hitler unambiguously came out in favour of his partner in the anti-Communist pact. “China is militarily inadequate,” Goebbels quoted Hitler proclaiming. “They’ll take a beating from Japan. That’s good because Japan will keep our backs free against Moscow.” According to Goebbels’s diaries, Hitler then immediately proceeded to speak of his own ambitions:
Some day, the Führer will make tabula rasa in Austria…He’ll throw everything into it. This state is not a real state at all. Its people belong to us, and it will come to us…And the land of Czechs is no state either. Some day it will be overrun as well.40
Over the course of 1937, while Hitler’s next foreign-policy aims gradually crystallised, he gave up on his idea of an international political deal with Britain. Lord Philip Lothian, Lloyd George’s former private secretary and the future British ambassador to the United States, was under no illusions about the new atmosphere in Berlin when he visited the city in early May. Hitler and Göring, he reported, had complained that Britain was the country that ultimately prevented Germany from achieving its rightful position in the world and asked why Britain was pursuing an “anti-German” rather than a “British” foreign policy.41 In Hitler’s egocentric view such “British” foreign policy obviously had to adjust itself to German ideas about the distribution of global power. In late May, Neville Chamberlain took over the leadership of the government from fellow Conservative Stanley Baldwin, but that did little to raise spirits in Berlin. The new British ambassador, Nevile Henderson, was considered more amenable to Germany than his predecessor, Eric Phipps,42 but that did not seem to promise change in Great Britain’s basic attitude towards Germany. Chamberlain’s policy of appeasement was aimed at gaining time to close the armaments gap with the Third Reich. Chamberlain wanted to keep the peace in Europe for as long as possible by pacifying the German dictator with concessions and keeping his larger expansionist aims in check. Never for a moment did the British prime minister consider giving Hitler a free hand in eastern Europe.43 But he would fool himself about Hitler’s willingness to come to any sensible compromise and to abide by agreements.
By early June 1937, Hitler may still have declared that “everything’s up in the air in London,” but in reality he had given up on his fantasy of an Anglo-German alliance. Over lunch at the Chancellery, he mocked Britain’s global status. “He considers it very weakened,” Goebbels wrote. “The empire is stagnating, if indeed it is not already in decline.” As of the summer of 1937, Hitler increasingly began to put his faith in the Berlin–Rome axis. “He’s now counting on Mussolini,” a sceptical Goebbels noted. “Perhaps too much. We should not completely forget England.”44 The Italian dictator requited German advances in kind. In the early days of June, during a visit by German Minister of War von Blomberg, Il Duce announced that he wanted to pay a state visit to Germany that autumn,45 and on 4 September, the press office of the German Foreign Ministry announced that the trip was officially planned. “The upcoming visit by Mussolini is creating a massive stir throughout the entire world,” wrote Goebbels, who would be occupied by it for the next two weeks. “And rightly so! This is an event of extensive significance.”46
—
At 10 a.m. on 25 September, Mussolini’s personal train arrived at Munich’s central station. He was received by Hitler personally and a large entourage in uniform, in the midst of whom Goebbels felt “entirely naked.”47 The host warmly shook both of his visitor’s hands and accompanied him to the Prinz Carl Palais, where Il Duce was staying. A little later, Mussolini was invited to Hitler’s private apartment for an hour-long chat. The interpreter Paul Schmidt—rendered superfluous because the Italian leader insisted, as he had previously in Venice, on speaking German—had the opportunity to observe and compare the two dictators. “Hitler sat at the table slightly slumped,” Schmidt recalled:
When he got more animated, the lock of hair so popular among caricaturists would fall down from his rather large forehead in front of his face, which gave him something disorderly and bohemian…Across from him, Mussolini made a totally different impression. Sitting bolt upright, his body stiff and rocking back and forth slightly at the hips whenever he spoke, the man with the head of Caesar seemed the paradigm of Ancient Rome, with a prominent forehead, a broad mouth and a broad square chin protruding in a slightly cramped way…In Munich, too, I found myself impressed by Mussolini’s concise, crystal-clear formulations of his thoughts. He never said a word too many, and everything that came out of his mouth could have been immediately published. The difference in how the two men laughed was also interesting. Hitler’s laughter always had an undertone of mockery and sarcasm, betraying traces of past disappointment and suppressed ambition. By contrast, Mussolini was able to laugh his head off without constraint. It was a liberating laugh demonstrating that the man had a sense of humour.48
Mussolini named Hitler “an honourary corporal in the Fascist militia,” and that afternoon Hitler repaid the favour by awarding Il Duce the Grand Cross of the Order of the German Eagle and the Golden Party Badge. He also insisted on giving Mussolini a personal tour of the exhibition in the House of German Art.49 But Hitler’s primary agenda was to impress upon his Italian visitor the military strength his regime had achieved. That evening the two men boarded their personal trains to travel to a series of Wehrmacht manoeuvres taking place in Mecklenburg in northern Germany. The following day, they visited the Krupp factories. “A triumphal ride without compare through Essen,” Goebbels noted. “Hundreds of thousands turned out, Mussolini completely bowled over. Celebration and enthusiasm like never before.”50
But that was overshadowed by the reception that the people of Berlin gave Mussolini on the afternoon of 27 September. Even the two men’s entry into the Reich capital was specially staged. Shortly before reaching the outlying district of Spandau, Hitler’s train appeared next to Mussolini’s. The two then travelled parallel to one another until just before the station on Heerstrasse, when Hitler’s train abruptly accelerated so that he reached the station first and was able to greet his fellow dictator on the platform. “Just like in the fairy tale of the hedgehog and hare,” commented Schmidt.51 The theatre set designer Benno von Arent had transformed key points in the capital’s city centre—the Brandenburg Gate, Pariser Platz and Wilhelmstrasse—into stage spectacles replete with “pylons, fasces, giant eagles, swastikas, flagpoles, and large numbers of nested or artfully knotted flags in Italian and German colours.”52 That evening Hitler hosted a gala dinner in Mussolini’s honour at the Chancellery. In his toast, he praised Il Duce as “the brilliant creator of Fascist Italy, the founder of a new empire.” Mussolini returned the compliment by calling Hitler “the warrior who restored to the German people the consciousness of their own greatness.”53
On 28 September, Mussolini visited the Zeughaus Military History Museum in Berlin and Friedrich the Great’s grave and the Garrison Church in Potsdam, before dining with Göring at his estate in Schorfheide. But the high point of his visit
was an evening rally at the Olympic Stadium and the Maifeld parade grounds, which drew hundreds of thousands of Berliners. After Goebbels’s introduction, Hitler took to the microphone to praise all the permanent qualities that Fascist Italy and Nazi Germany shared. Mussolini gave his response in German, but his heavy accent made him difficult to understand.54 Moreover, during his speech, a serious thunderstorm opened up and deluged the stadium. For André François-Poncet, it was “a harbinger of the torrents of blood that would soon flood Europe.”55 But the French ambassador’s judgement was informed by hindsight. At the time ordinary Berliners saw the situation less dramatically, cracking jokes that played on the similarities between the word Duce and Dusche, the German word for shower.56
On the morning of 29 September, the last day of Mussolini’s visit, Hitler had ordered a parade of all branches of the Wehrmacht. Mussolini was so taken with the soldiers’ goose-stepping that he introduced it to the Italian army as the passo romano.57 In the afternoon, Hitler accompanied his departing guest to the Lehrter Bahnhof train station. “Everything was full of gravity and melancholy,” Goebbels wrote melodramatically. “These two great men belong at one another’s side. Then the train pulled out of the station. Mussolini waved for a long time.”58 That evening, according to Winifred Wagner, Hitler was “very happy about how the entire visit had gone.”59 When Hans Frank, who had accompanied Mussolini through Germany, phoned to say that Il Duce had crossed the border near Kiefersfelden, Hitler acted relieved and, contrary to his usual teetotalling ways, drank a glass of sparkling wine to celebrate “everything having come off so marvellously.”60 Mussolini too was pleased with his visit and told his wife: “The organisation is fantastic, and the German people have an unusually great character. With these trump cards, Hitler can dare to do anything.”61
Nonetheless, the concrete results of the visit were meagre. Hitler and Mussolini hardly had any opportunity for serious talks during their five days together, and the Italian dictator had responded evasively when pressed on the Austria issue.62 The final outcome was little more than a promise to cooperate more closely in the future. On 6 November 1937, Italy joined the anti-Communist pact, and a few weeks later it quit the League of Nations. What was more important was that, in contrast to their meeting in Venice in 1934, Hitler and Mussolini had grown closer. “Thank God, this time they also got along personally,” Goebbels noted.63 And despite numerous disappointments to come, the Führer continued to feel an atypical affection for Il Duce in later years. In his later monologues in his military headquarters, Hitler called Mussolini a “man of outstanding proportions, a historic phenomenon,” and expressed his admiration for “everything he’s achieved in Italy.” On one occasion Hitler, who rarely showed his emotions, confessed: “This mighty figure—I really do like him personally!”64
—
Even during his rise to power, Hitler had repeatedly articulated his fear that he might die young, and the impatience with which he pursued his goals had its roots in this anxiety. In the autumn of 1937, as he was shifting his foreign policy from undermining the Treaty of Versailles to expansionism, he became obsessed with the idea that he had no time to lose. In late October, in a secret meeting with Nazi Party propaganda directors, Hitler was quoted as saying that “as best as anyone could tell, he did not have long to live since people in his family never reached old age.” It was thus necessary “to take care of the problems (living space!) that need to be resolved as quickly as possible so that it happens within my lifetime.” Hitler combined this statement with a reference to the uniqueness of his charismatic authority. Only he was capable of solving these problems, he said: “Later generations won’t be able to.”65
The anxiety plaguing Hitler now led him to share the foreign-policy ideas he had developed in constant back and forth with Goebbels with the regime’s military and political leadership as well. At 4:15 p.m. on the afternoon of 5 November 1937, he convened a conference in the Chancellery that included Werner von Blomberg, the commanders of the three branches of the armed forces, Werner von Fritsch, Erich Raeder and Hermann Göring, Foreign Minister Konstantin von Neurath and his Wehrmacht assistant Friedrich Hossbach, who drew up the only surviving minutes of the meeting. It would be a key document at the Nuremberg Trials to prove that the primary defendants had conspired to destroy peace in Europe.66 What had prompted the conference was a conflict between the army, the navy and the air force for scarce raw materials. Raeder in particular accused Göring of exploiting his position as the head of the Four Year Plan to promote the expansion of the Luftwaffe at the cost of the German navy. In conjunction with Raeder, Blomberg decided to end the long-simmering conflict by enlisting Hitler to make a decision.67
But as always when there were rivalries between departments and competition for preferment among his paladins, Hitler avoided making decisions. Instead, he used the opportunity to hold a more-than-two-hour monologue “informing the gentlemen in attendance about the developmental possibilities and necessities of our foreign-policy situation.” Hitler explicitly ordered that his statements be regarded as “his will and testament in case he should pass away.”68 He then reiterated what he had told his military leadership all the way back on 3 February 1933 about Germany’s future. The 85 million Germans with their “self-contained racial core,” he said, “had a right to a much larger living space.” Resolving this situation was the central task of German foreign policy. After he had discarded various alternatives for territorial expansion, Hitler had decided on the following to ensure that the German people could feed itself: “The necessary space for this will have to be found in Europe and not, as in liberal, capitalist views, by exploiting colonies…Areas containing lots of raw materials were better located in direct proximity to the Reich and not overseas.” The dictator left his listeners in no doubt that “every territorial gain will entail breaking others’ resistance and incurring risks.”
Hitler’s remarks contained nothing new for his military leaders in terms of the necessity of “gaining a larger living space,” although they probably had not fully realised how serious Hitler was. But the heads of the armed forces certainly pricked up their ears during the second part of Hitler’s monologue when he laid out how he saw the European balance of power in the autumn of 1937. For the first time, Hitler spoke of Germany confronting “its two worst enemies, England and France, which regarded a German colossus in Central Europe as a thorn in their sides.” Here Hitler was drawing the consequences from his failed efforts to reach an understanding with Great Britain. As he had in his private conversations with Goebbels, Hitler spoke less than respectfully about his potential enemies. The British empire, he said, was rotting away and “impossible to maintain in the long run in terms of power politics.” France, too, had been weakened by “domestic political difficulties.” Nonetheless, he acknowledged that the “path of violence” he pondered going down was “never without risk.” Here he invoked the wars of Friedrich the Great and those of Bismarck, which had unified Germany. They, too, Hitler claimed, had been an “unprecedented risk.”
As his choice of historical role models shows, Hitler was prepared to go all out. The final section of his monologue was devoted to the questions of when and how. The dictator sketched out three scenarios. The latest possible time for Germany to launch an attack was between 1943 and 1945 (case 1). After that, Hitler said, “things would have changed to our disadvantage” since the other powers would have closed the gap in military strength with Germany. As an additional argument, Hitler referred to “the fact that the movement and its leader are growing older,” again playing on his fears that he might die young. Should he still be alive, it was “his irrevocable will that the question of German living space be solved by 1943 to 1945 at the latest.” But it might become necessary to act earlier if the social tensions within France “grew into a domestic crisis” (case 2), or if France should become embroiled in a war with another country so that “it could not take on Germany” at the same time (case 3). In all three c
ases, the initial goal would be to “subjugate the Czechs and Austria and to head off threats of a potential attack against Germany’s flanks.” The dictator had shown his hand, specifying the most immediate targets for German expansion, which he had mulled over all that spring. To forestall possible objections from his military commanders, he told them that Britain and France had “most probably already written off the Czechs and got used to the idea…that Germany would one day settle this issue.” And if Britain did not participate in a war against Germany, France would not either.
Hitler’s views were driven by military politics as much as by strategy. Amalgamating Czechoslovakia and Austria would free up fighting forces “for others purposes” in the event of war and allow the Reich to raise twelve additional divisions. With reference to Germany’s involvement in the Spanish Civil War, Hitler declared that the Reich had no interest in a rapid victory by Franco. For Germany, it would be better if the conflict dragged on and ratcheted up tensions in the Mediterranean, which could potentially lead to war between Italy and France. If this scenario (case 3) materialised, as Hitler thought it might in the course of 1938, Germany would have to seize the chance “to take care of the Czech and Austrian question.” As he had in his previous “weekend coups,” Hitler counted on the element of surprise. A German attack against Czechoslovakia, he said, would have to be “quick as lightning.”
Hitler Page 89
