Hitler

by Volker Ullrich

  The addition of Austria also strengthened the Reich’s economic and military position. Austrian iron reserves could now be exploited for the German rearmament programme, and a huge steel-processing facility, the Hermann Göring Works, was built on the outskirts of Linz. Germany also got its hands on 1.4 billion reichsmarks’ worth of gold and currency reserves, and masses of jobless Austrians, many of whom were highly qualified, relieved the tight German labour market. Incorporating the Austrian army, the Bundesheer, increased the strength of the Wehrmacht by 1,600 officers and 60,000 regular soldiers. Moreover, the Reich’s strategic position had improved since it could now put pressure on Czechoslovakia from two sides.177

  Two months previously, Hitler had had difficulty extracting himself from the Blomberg–Fritsch affair. Now he was riding on a wave of popular approval. Once again, he had used a foreign-policy triumph to ease domestic troubles. And once more, his instincts had led him to act at precisely the right moment. For four weeks after German troops entered Austria, he was celebrated like a god by cheering masses. It is no wonder, then, that he became ever more convinced of his own greatness and began losing touch with reality. In his speeches, he increasingly referred to Providence choosing him as its instrument. His sense of self-importance, which had already been greatly bolstered by his successful gamble in remilitarising the Rhineland in 1936, began increasingly to take on a nearly pathological character. Even Nicolaus von Below, who later admitted to being an “unconditional Hitler admirer” in the spring of 1938, was unsettled by the fact that Hitler began to talk incessantly in private about the historic mission he still had to fulfil. “Except for him there was no one now or in the near future…who could perform the tasks facing the German people,” Below quoted him saying.178 And there was no doubt about which task was next on Hitler’s agenda.

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  “People generally believe that Czechoslovakia will be up next,” observers reported to the SPD leadership in exile in Prague.179 In fact, only a few days after the Anschluss, Hitler set his sights on his next target for expansion. “Now it’s the Czechs’ turn,” he told Goebbels on the evening of 19 March. “Without hesitation at the next opportunity.”180 On 28 March, the dictator received the leader of the Sudeten German Party, Konrad Henlein, in Berlin and informed him of his decision to “resolve” the Czechoslovakian issue in the not-too-distant future. He also instructed Henlein as to tactics to bring about that result, telling him that the Sudeten Germans should “always demand so much that they can never be satisfied.”181

  Along with Slovaks, Hungarians and Poles, the 3.5 million Sudeten Germans were one of the largest minorities in Czechoslovakia which, unusually for a state formed after the First World War, had remained a democracy despite post-war political crises and the Great Depression. Although they enjoyed full rights as citizens, many Sudeten Germans felt disadvantaged, and they were particularly hard hit by unemployment. Demanding economic improvements and regional autonomy, a protest movement coalesced around the Sudeten German Homeland Front, which was founded by Henlein in 1933 and renamed the Sudeten German Party two years later. Voices calling for amalgamation into the German Reich quickly became louder and louder. On 19 November 1937, Henlein wrote to Hitler, declaring that “It is practically impossible…for Czechs and Germans to reach agreement and the Sudeten German question can only be resolved by the Reich.”182 After the Anschluss, the slogan “Back home to the Reich” became popular among Sudeten Germans, and Hitler used it as dynamite with which to demolish Czechoslovakia. The hatred for Czechs he had nurtured in his Vienna years re-emerged in full force. In conversation with Goebbels, he dismissed them as “impudent, mendacious, craven and subservient.”183

  On 21 April, Hitler and Wilhelm Keitel explored the possibilities for moving militarily against Czechoslovakia. The resulting plan was code-named “The Green Scenario.” Hitler did not want a “sudden, out-of-the blue attack for no reason.” Instead, military action was to be preceded by “a period of diplomatic confrontations that would gradually intensify and lead to war.” But Hitler did not entirely rule out the possible need for “a lightning strike on account of some incident.”184 And the manifesto that the Sudeten German Party agreed on in the spa town of Karlsbad (today’s Karlovy Vary) on 24 April made it clear how such incidents could be staged. The party demanded the recognition of the Sudeten Germans as a “legal entity” with complete autonomy, and called for reparations for all the economic damage they had suffered since 1918 and “complete liberty to declare their allegiance to German ethnic identity and the German world view”—that is, National Socialism.185 Following Hitler’s instructions, Henlein had made the sort of extreme demands that the Czech government could never concede. This tactic instantly ratcheted up tensions and kicked off a war of nerves that would determine the fate of Czechoslovakia.

  Before Hitler further escalated the crisis, however, he paid his promised return visit to Mussolini in Italy. On 2 May, three chartered trains stood ready in Berlin’s Anhalter Station to transport the 500-strong travelling party that included half of the Reich government, high-ranking party functionaries, generals, diplomats, journalists and the wives of Nazi VIPs. Eva Braun boarded almost unnoticed in Munich and travelled not with the official delegation, but with the Brandts, the Morells and the wife of the owner of the Rheinhotel Dreesen—all familiar faces at the Berghof. We do not know whether she even saw Hitler on the seven-day state trip.186 The following evening, the trains arrived in Rome, where they were greeted by King Victor Emmanuel III, Mussolini and Count Ciano. The Italians had done everything in their power to outdo the pomp of Mussolini’s visit to Germany the previous autumn. Four-horse carriages were waiting in front of the train station to convey the guests, to the applause of thousands of Romans, through the festively decorated and brightly lit city to their accommodations.187

  Hitler entered the eternal city not with Mussolini but with the king, since, as the Italian head of state, Victor Emmanuel was his official host. For that reason, the German dictator and the closest members of his entourage stayed in the Quirinal Palace, the king’s residence in the capital, while most of the remaining visitors had to make do with the Grand Hotel Plaza. Eva Braun stayed in the Hotel Excelsior, away from all the others.188 Hitler had difficulty adapting to the protocol that had the diminutive king and not Il Duce playing the leading role, and the stiff-necked court ceremonies irritated him right from the start. The aristocratic members of the court made it abundantly clear that they considered him a parvenu, treating him with a pompous arrogance that pricked his most sensitive spot, his inferiority complex. “This entire horde of royal flunkies should be taken out and shot. It’s revolting,” wrote Goebbels, no doubt expressing what Hitler felt too. “How they treat us like parvenus! An outrage and a provocation.”189

  Hitler reacted increasingly sensitively to what he perceived as his supercilious treatment and Mussolini’s undignified relegation to second-fiddle status. Already at the state banquet hosted by Victor Emmanuel on the evening of 4 May at the palace, Hitler had trouble controlling his temper. He was seated to the left of the queen. “The two of them did not say a word to one another during the entire meal,” Fritz Wiedemann noted.190 Afterwards Hitler could no longer hold his tongue: “It terrible how this great man, Il Duce, is treated by royal society. Did you see that he was seated all the way down at the far end of the table, behind the youngest princesses?”191 Of course, the Italians also hoped to impress their German visitors with the progress they had made on the military front. On 5 May, Hitler, Mussolini, Victor Emmanuel and the crown prince boarded the warship MS Cavour in Naples to watch naval manoeuvres. The highlight was an exercise in which one hundred submarines simultaneously submerged and then, as if obeying some secret command, surfaced with equal precision a short time later.192

  But Hitler remained irritable, and that evening he exploded at Ribbentrop and the head of the Foreign Ministry protocol department, Vicco von Bülow-Schwante. The spark that lit the fuse was compar
atively harmless. After Hitler had donned his hated tuxedo for a special performance of the opera Aida, he was supposed to inspect a military parade with the king. He wanted to change into his uniform, and twenty minutes had been allocated in the strictly planned programme to that end. But suddenly an assistant to the king appeared and announced that they were behind schedule and that they needed to go outside immediately. Hitler was forced to inspect the troops at the royally attired king’s side with his tuxedo tails flapping in the wind. “An unusually comic sight,” Wiedemann reported. “The German Führer and Reich chancellor looked like an insane head waiter. It was all the more comic as you could see that he realised what a ridiculous figure he was cutting.”193 Hitler was seething with rage, and on the trip back to Rome he levelled bitter accusations at Ribbentrop. The foreign minister, in turn, immediately fired his head of diplomatic protocol.

  Hitler had further reason to get upset at a military parade the following morning, when the Italian troops performed the passo romano, modelled on the German goose-step. The grandstand only contained enough chairs for the members of the Italian royal court and their German state guest, so that Mussolini had to stand. “That made me so angry I almost caused a public scandal,” Hitler told his secretary Christa Schroeder.194 In the afternoon, the Governor of Rome, Prince Colonna, held a reception. Several hundred guests attended, and the royal court turned up in its entirety. Hitler had the unpleasant task of opening the polonaise with the queen on his arm through an honour guard of guests, some of whom fell to their knees, while others kissed the hem of the queen’s dress. “When Hitler noticed this, he went red in the face,” his pilot Hans Baur remarked. “He positively dragged the queen forward to get through the long rows of guests as quickly as possible. The way he looked, we thought he was going to have a stroke.”195 That evening, Hitler complained that people had “stared at him as if he were an exotic animal.” He simply could not warm to the “ceremonies of court lackeys.”196

  To a degree, Hitler’s intemperate reaction recalled his behaviour in Munich salons in the early 1920s. Bavarian high society had also treated the ambitious beer-cellar rabble-rouser as a curiosity, and he had concealed his insecurities with eccentric poses. He had, of course, acquired many social graces since becoming chancellor, and he was no longer uncomfortable during official receptions or talks with career diplomats. Moreover, his successes had increased his self-confidence. Nonetheless, he felt ill at ease in the royal court in Rome, not just because he sensed the tacit antipathy its members maintained towards him, but also because he did not know how to react. There was nothing in his regular repertoire that allowed him to master unfamiliar situations like being dropped in amongst Italy’s grandezza. Even at a point when his popularity had reached unprecedented heights in his home country and he was deified like no German politician before or since, his visit to Italy revealed that he still lived in fear of looking laughable. His megalomania was the flipside of his deep feelings of inferiority.

  Hitler’s mood only improved when Mussolini devoted his full attention to him, away from the disruptive presence of the king and his court. Together they jointly visited a major archaeological exhibition about the Roman emperor Augustus, and on 7 May Il Duce hosted a gala dinner in honour of his guest at the Palazzo Venezia. There, they once again exchanged assurances of their mutual regard and of the eternal friendship of their two peoples. Hitler declared that he saw “the natural border of the Alps between the two countries as inviolable,” signalling that he had no territorial designs on southern Tyrol.197 To conclude Hitler’s visit, the two dictators travelled to Florence on 9 May, where they decamped at the Palazzo Pitti and visited the Uffizi Gallery. Years later in the monologues he held in his wartime headquarters, Hitler still rhapsodised about the magic of Rome, Florence and the Tuscan and Umbrian countryside: “How I wish I could travel around like an unknown painter in Italy!”198 Around midnight on 9 May, Mussolini accompanied Hitler to the train station, taking his leave with the words: “Now no power in the world can divide us!”199

  In a memorandum to Germany’s foreign embassies, Ribbentrop deemed Hitler’s visit to Italy a great success. The Berlin–Rome axis, he wrote, had proved a “reliable component in our general policy,” and the friendship between Hitler and Mussolini had been “further deepened.”200 Although the hectic agenda had left hardly any time for serious political discussions, the German side had read into certain statements by their Italian counterparts a willingness not to put any obstacles in Germany’s way should it decide to move against Czechoslovakia. “Mussolini is not interested in our intentions concerning Czechoslovakia,” wrote State Secretary von Weizsäcker. “He is prepared to stand back and watch what we do there.”201

  Nonetheless, Hitler retained a deep-seated aversion to Italian high society and the Italian aristocracy. He told a small circle in the Chancellery that he had never seen “so many degenerate fools, mindless parrots and old frumps at the same time in one place.” He characterised the polonaise in the palace as “the worst trial of martyrdom he had ever been through” and described the “thick as a pig” Italian queen as the “mutton thief from Montenegro,” as the army attaché Gerhard Engel recalled: “He said that women had surrounded him and had almost put out his eyes with their wine glasses. Nothing should be left undone to support Mussolini in his battle against this corrupt society.”202 Hitler repeatedly expressed his satisfaction that he had never listened to those who had tried to talk him into a restoration of the monarchy in Germany. He even praised the “old middle-of-the-road Social Democrats” for doing away with the “spectre of the monarchy” in 1918 and suggested that their pensions should be increased.203

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  Hitler only remained in Berlin for a single day after returning from Italy. On 11 May he flew to Munich and withdrew for the next two weeks to the Obersalzberg.204 During this time, Nazi propaganda whipped up the anti-Czech mood, and tensions increased in the Sudeten German regions of Czechoslovakia. On 20 May, worried about concentrations of German troops on their border, the Czech government ordered a partial mobilisation of the country’s armed forces. France reaffirmed its commitment to come to Czechoslovakia’s aid in case of a German attack, and Britain warned the Third Reich that it also would not stand by and do nothing. Hitler’s government in Berlin saw itself compelled to offer reassurances that it had no intentions of invading Germany’s neighbour.205

  But the “weekend crisis” of 20 and 21 May did not bring an end to the tensions. As soon as London and Paris were convinced that Germany did not in fact intend to attack, and that the Czechs had unnecessarily dramatised the situation, the mood turned against Prague. Hitler, on the other hand, was enraged that the foreign press wrote of Germany backing down and suffering a diplomatic defeat. Far from encouraging a more prudent course, therefore, the May crisis made him all the more aggressive. On 26 May he returned to Berlin. Goebbels, who saw him on the morning of 28 May, noted: “He’s brooding about what decision to make. That usually goes on for a while. But once he’s made up his mind, he’ll make sure his will is carried out.”206 By that afternoon, the dictator knew what he wanted to do. In the conservatory of the Chancellery, he told the leaders of the Wehrmacht and the Foreign Ministry: “It is my iron will that Czechoslovakia disappear from the map.” No matter what threatening gestures they made, Hitler asserted, the Western powers were unlikely to intervene. Britain still needed time to build up its military, France would not act independently of Britain, and Italy was indifferent. So the chances of keeping the conflict local, Hitler concluded, were good.207

  The revised orders for the Green Scenario on 30 May directly reflected Hitler’s instructions. “It is my irrevocable decision to break up Czechoslovakia through military action,” he said. “The task of waiting for the right time, in military and political terms, to carry this out falls to the political leadership.” He ordered the Wehrmacht to make all the necessary preparations by 1 October.208 After that point, as he made clear in a supplemental o
rder on 18 June, Hitler wanted to be able “to exploit every favourable circumstance for achieving this end.”209

  The military leaders present at the meeting on 28 May did not raise any objections. Even Army Chief of the General Staff Ludwig Beck stayed silent: Nicolaus von Below described him maintaining a “face of stone” throughout the meeting.210 However, Beck did express his reservations in a series of memoranda to Army Commander-in-Chief von Brauchitsch in late May and June. Like most of Germany’s military leadership, Beck supported the idea of the Reich expanding its power; he had welcomed the Anschluss and had nothing in principle against the division of Czechoslovakia. But he feared that the way Hitler was proceeding would compel the Western allies to intervene, and he felt that Germany was insufficiently prepared for the protracted war that would inevitably come about.211

  When informed by Brauchitsch about Beck’s concerns, Hitler heaped scorn upon the chief of the general staff, calling him “an officer who is still stuck on the idea of an army of 100,000 men and for whom the desk chair is more important than the trenches.” He had nothing against Beck personally, he said, but he had no use for people who did not share his convictions, so Beck’s days were numbered.212 Beck enjoyed little support within the military leadership and even among those who worked under him. A simulation of war which the general staff conducted in the second half of June concluded that an offensive against Czechoslovakia would only last a few days and that German troops could be redeployed to the western front more quickly than Beck thought. Increasingly, Beck found himself pegged as an “unconvincing Cassandra.”213