That night, assisted by Frick and Stuckart, Hitler issued a decree establishing the Reich Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia. It granted Czechs a measure of autonomy.323 Hitler named former Foreign Minister von Neurath as “Reich Protector.” As a member of the old conservative elites, he was considered a moderate, and thus his appointment served to camouflage the fact that the Czechs were being subjected to German occupation.324 At the same time, at Jozef Tiso’s request, Slovakia was also placed under German protection, and German troops advanced to Bratislava. On the afternoon of 16 March, Hitler left Prague, returning to Berlin on 19 March via Brünn, Linz and Vienna. Goebbels had once again succeeded in mobilising thousands of people in the capital to turn out and cheer the Führer as he drove from the Görlitzer station to the Chancellery. “We have a week behind us that out of all the astonishing events we have experienced thus far has probably brought the most astonishing thing of all,” former Reich negotiator and museum director Rudolf Buttmann noted in his diary. Hitler’s “great statesmanship” had once again led to a “massive increase in power” without bloodshed. “He is always lucky,” an acquaintance told Buttmann in the street.325
But such sentiments did not reflect the mood of the entire population. The annexation of the remnants of the Czech state was anything but universally welcomed. Many people remembered Hitler promising in his Sportpalast speech on 26 September that the Sudetenland would be his last territorial demand, asking “Was this really necessary?”326 The executive committee of the SPD in exile, which had been forced to relocate from Prague to Paris, spoke on the basis of reports from within Germany of widespread “concern that with its latest ‘victory’ Germany had taken another step towards a major war and another defeat.”327
The significance of the destruction of Czechoslovakia for Hitler’s war plans was considerable. The German Reich gained not only the largest Czechoslovakian armaments facilities, the Skoda factories in Pilsen and Prague; it also acquired enough weapons and supplies to outfit twenty further divisions. In addition to industrial resources, the German war effort gained access to Czechoslovakian copper, nickel, lead, aluminium, zinc and tin. The door was also wide open for Germany to penetrate the Danube and Balkan region economically. And in terms of military strategy, the Reich was now better positioned to launch campaigns to conquer further “living space in the east.”328
On the evening of 15 March, Hitler was convinced that “in a fortnight, no one will be talking about this any more,”329 but he was fundamentally mistaken. Hitler’s seizure of Prague was a wake-up call to leaders in London, where the British government realised that it had been duped and that Hitler’s promises were not worth the paper they were written on. The policy of appeasement and the idea that Hitler could be restrained by treaties and conciliation were revealed as utterly misguided. Ambassador Henderson was withdrawn from Berlin until further notice,330 and in a speech in Birmingham on 17 March, Chamberlain announced an about-turn in British policy. The prime minister accused Hitler of crassly violating the principle of national self-determination that he himself had always invoked, concluding his address by asking: “Is this in fact a step towards trying to dominate the world by force?”331
The Nazi leadership did not take seriously the protests from London, which the French government seconded. “This is just hysterical, after-the-fact wailing that leaves us entirely cold,” Goebbels scoffed.332 Indeed, Hitler thought that he could exploit the situation to stage his next foreign-policy coup. On 20 March, Ribbentrop summoned Lithuanian Foreign Minister Joseph Urbsys, who was visiting Berlin, and demanded the immediate return of the Klaipeda Region, known in Germany as the Memel Territory, a part of East Prussia that had been put under French control after the First World War and was subsequently annexed by Lithuania in 1923. Two days later, the Lithuanian council of ministers approved the handover, and that afternoon Hitler boarded the battleship MS Deutschland in the port of Swinemünde. Around midnight, Ribbentrop announced the signing of a treaty reuniting the Memel Territory with the Reich. Hitler declared a corresponding law the following morning while still on board the ship. “You live in a great age,” he declared to his manservant Heinz Linge. “We now take care of little matters like this on the side.”333 At 2 p.m., Hitler disembarked at the port of Memel and gave a short speech from the balcony of the city’s main theatre, in which he welcomed “our old German racial comrades as the newest citizens of our Greater German Empire.”334 That same evening he departed the city, and by noon on 24 March he was back in Berlin.
The amalgamation of the Memel Territory was the last foreign triumph Hitler would achieve without bloodshed. In the night of 21–22 March, while awaiting the decision of the Lithuanian government, he held a long conversation with Goebbels in the Chancellery about his future foreign policy. “He wants to calm things down a bit so that we regain trust,” Goebbels reported in his diary.335 Should Hitler have said anything of the kind, he was doubly deceiving himself. On the one hand, as we have seen, neither the Nazi system of rule nor Hitler’s own personality allowed for any periods of extended peace and quiet. Less than three days after their conversation, Goebbels once again found him pondering how he could “solve the question of Danzig,” or Gdansk, which had been declared a free city after the First World War. “He intends to apply some pressure on Poland and hopes that Poland responds,” Goebbels noted.336 With that, there was no more doubt about the next target of Hitler’s free-flowing aggression. And Hitler also deceived himself about the possibility of regaining the trust of the Western powers, which he had forfeited once and for all by breaking the Munich Agreement. He had removed the mask of the peace-loving politician who only wanted to revise the status quo, and everyone could now see the brutal nature of his regime, which demanded unlimited expansion. The real problem, as British Foreign Secretary Lord Halifax put it at a cabinet meeting on 18 March, was Germany’s drive for world domination, which it was in the interests of all states to resist.337 On 31 March, Britain and France issued a statement guaranteeing the independence of Poland. The two sides of what in a few months would become the Second World War had been formed.
With the Kristallnacht pogrom the preceding November, Hitler had broken with all norms of civilisation. Now, by marching on Prague, he had crossed a comparable line in foreign policy. Ulrich von Hassell was right when he diagnosed this as “a first case of open hubris, a violation of all boundaries and also of all standards of decency.”338 There was no going back. On 15 March, Hitler believed he was at the zenith of his unprecedented career, but in reality his descent had already begun. He had gone down a path that would lead to his own demise. “That day,” as François-Poncet aptly put it, “his fate was sealed.”339
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Of course, contemporary observers had to have a particularly keen eye to see the seeds of future catastrophe within Hitler’s triumphs.340 On 20 April 1939, as Germany’s dictator celebrated his fiftieth birthday, the shadows of nemesis were far off in the future. Goebbels once again did his utmost to encourage cultish worship of the Führer. “The creator of Greater Germany is fifty years old,” wrote Victor Klemperer. “Two days of lavish special editions of the newspapers. People falling over themselves to deify him.”341 Goebbels had begun preparing this event the previous summer. Then, in early December, Hitler had mentioned in passing that he did not wish for any particular festivities on his birthday, which Goebbels interpreted as an order to halt the preparations.342 But the propaganda minister must have realised that Hitler had not wanted to be taken at his word. In terms of sheer volume, the programme that he came up with in January and which Hitler approved went beyond any previous festivities marking the Führer’s birthday. Several days before the big event Goebbels noted drily: “A lot of work with the Führer’s birthday. This time it is truly going to be celebrated.”343
The press was issued detailed instructions about how the man at the top was to be honoured. Journalists were told not to write about “his childhood, his family or his private li
fe” as “unbelievable amounts of nonsense have been published on these three subjects in the past.” By contrast, they were encouraged to spill lots of ink about Germany’s political turnaround and the political career of Adolf Hitler, and newspapers were instructed to publish large-scale, beautifully designed special editions.344 The unusual significance of Hitler’s fiftieth birthday as the ceremonial high point of the year was underscored when, at short notice, Wilhelm Frick declared 20 April 1939 a national holiday. That allowed large numbers of Germans from every corner of the Reich to take part in the festivities.
A radio address by Goebbels broadcast on all stations in Germany at 6:30 p.m. on 19 April kicked off the official programme. In his customary Byzantine style, the propaganda minister lauded Hitler as a “man of historic stature,” whom the German people willingly and obediently followed in everything he undertook. “Like a miracle,” Goebbels declared, Hitler had found a “basic solution to a central European question previously regarded as nearly insoluble.” He called Hitler’s forced break-up of Czechoslovakia an act of “peace based on practical reality.”345 At seven that evening, the entire NSDAP leadership—1,600 people in total—offered their congratulations in the Mosaic Hall of the Chancellery. Hess reassured the Führer of the unconditional loyalty of his vassals, should the “conflict-mongers of the world take things to the extreme,” and presented Hitler with the gift of fifty original letters written by his hero Friedrich the Great.346 These were only one of the many presents that lay stacked upon tables in the same Chancellery hall where Bismarck had convened the Berlin Congress in 1878. Many of them were kitsch, but some gifts—for instance, works by two of Hitler’s favourite painters, Franz von Defregger and Carl Theodor von Piloty—were quite valuable. The economics minister and Reichsbank president, Walther Funk, outdid everyone else with his present for the art lover Hitler: Venus in Front of the Mirror by Titian.347
The main spectacle on the eve of Hitler’s birthday was the dedication of the East–West Axis, the first major stretch of the new traffic system envisioned for the makeover of the capital. Accompanied by Albert Speer, Hitler drove down the broad, 7-mile road in an open car, where hundreds of thousands of Berliners had responded to Goebbels’s call to turn out and form a guard of honour. “A celebration without compare,” a satisfied Goebbels noted. “The street was bathed in a fairy-tale glow. And an unprecedented atmosphere. The Führer beamed with glee.”348 Shortly after 10 p.m. at the Wehrmacht’s Grand Tattoo, fifty members of the “old guard” from each of the Gaue paraded by torchlight down Wilhelmstrasse. The Führer greeted the columns of Brownshirts from the Chancellery balcony.
At midnight, Hitler accepted the congratulations and gifts of his inner entourage. He seemed especially taken by the 4-metre-high model of the gigantic triumphal arch that Speer had had installed in the hall on Pariser Platz. “Visibly moved, he gazed for a long time at the model that physically manifested the dream of his younger years,” Speer recalled. “Completely overcome, he shook my hand without saying a word, before telling the other guests in a euphoric voice about the significance of this structure for the future history of the Reich.”349 Almost compulsively, Hitler returned to stare at the model numerous times that night, abandoning himself to his fantastical vision of the future “world capital Germania.”
The festivities continued the following morning with a concert by the band of the SS Leibstandarte in the Chancellery garden. The doyen of the diplomatic corps, the Papal nuncio Monsignor Cesare Orsenigo, led the ranks of those congratulating Hitler on his birthday. He was followed by the Reich Protector of Bohemia and Moravia, Konstantin von Neurath, with Emil Hácha in his wake, Jozef Tiso, members of the Reich government and the heads of the Wehrmacht. Symbolically for Hitler’s immediate plans was the fact that he received the Gauleiter of Danzig, Albert Forster, who brought along a document naming Hitler an honorary citizen of the city intended as a “sign of its profound blood relation” to the German people.350
At 11 a.m., the Wehrmacht commenced its parade up and down the East–West Axis. It lasted four hours and aimed at illustrating the military strength the Reich had built up. All Wehrmacht formations took part, and the most modern weaponry, particularly tanks and heavy artillery, was put on display. A grandstand had been erected in front of Berlin’s Technical University, where Hitler inspected the parade from under a canopy with a throne and the Führer’s banner. “I always wonder where he gets his strength,” Christa Schroeder wrote in a letter to a friend. “To stand there and greet people for four hours is damn taxing. We all felt dead tired just watching him.”351
At Hitler’s behest, Ribbentrop had invited 150 prominent foreign guests whom he sought to impress with such a display of military force. Absent from the grandstand, however, were the ambassadors of Britain and France, who had been recalled after Hitler’s violation of the Munich Agreement. The United States had withdrawn its ambassador in November 1938 after the Kristallnacht pogrom. After the parade, Hitler invited his foreign guests to take tea with him, the Reich ministers, the Reich directors of the Nazi Party and the military leadership at the Chancellery.352
The German newsreels covering the week from 16 to 23 April were devoted exclusively to Hitler’s fiftieth birthday. Twelve cameramen had shot more than 10,000 metres of film, which had been edited down to the standard newsreel length of 546 metres. The military parade, praised by the narrator as “the greatest military display of the Third Reich,” was the centrepiece of the reports. No doubt this emphasis was intended to get the populace psychologically used to war, as Hitler had called for in his speech to the officer corps on 10 November 1938. Hitler no longer presented himself in the guise of the infallible statesman, but in the martial pose of a field commander who was displaying the fearsome might of his military machine to the eyes of an astonished world.353
Goebbels was extremely satisfied with how the two-day festivities had gone. “The Führer was celebrated by the people,” he wrote, “as no mortal man before him has ever been celebrated.”354 SPD-in-exile observers had a more nuanced view of the event. If you looked at the amount of effort that went into the birthday, they wrote, you might easily think that Hitler’s popularity was on the rise. “But anyone who really knows the people,” opined one observer, “knows that a lot, if not all of this, is just show.” Even the readers of the Nazified press were under no illusions about the fact that “Hitler’s foreign-policy star is on the wane and the system is heading towards a second world war that seems lost right from the start.” The observers concluded that “the paralysing fear of war hung over all the bannered splendour and celebratory din.” But they hastened to add that this did not mean that the German people’s faith in the Führer was “extinguished.” On the contrary, it was “alive and well in broad swathes of the populace.”355 Ultimately Hitler’s popularity was due to his aura as someone who always managed to maintain peace despite all his risky manoeuvres. When he unleashed world war at the start of September 1939 and when it became apparent in the winter of 1941–42 that, despite Germany’s lightning-quick early triumphs, the conflict was turning into a military catastrophe, the myth surrounding the Führer would begin to decay, at first slowly but then faster and faster.
Notes
Introduction
1 In Thomas Mann, An die gesittete Welt: Politische Schriften und Reden im Exil, Frankfurt am Main, 1986, p. 253f.
2 Norbert Frei, 1945 und wir: Das Dritte Reich im Bewusstsein der Deutschen, Munich, 2005, p. 7.
3 Jens Jessen, “Gute Zeiten für Hitler,” Die Zeit, 11 Oct. 2012; idem, “Was macht Hitler so unwiderstehlich?,” Die Zeit, 23 Sept. 2004.
4 Konrad Heiden, Adolf Hitler: Das Zeitalter der Verantwortungslosigkeit. Eine Biographie, Zurich, 1936; idem, Adolf Hitler: Ein Mann gegen Europa. Eine Biographie, Zurich, 1937; Alan Bullock, Hitler: A Study in Tyranny, London, 1990 (first published 1952); Joachim Fest, Hitler, Frankfurt am Main, Berlin and Vienna, 1973; Ian Kershaw, Hitler 1889–1936: Hubris, London, 1998; idem, Hi
tler 1936–1945: Nemesis, London, 2000. In addition, Sebastian Haffner’s essay Anmerkungen zu Hitler is consistently thought-provoking.
5 Heiden, Adolf Hitler: Ein Mann gegen Europa, p. 267.
6 Heiden, Adolf Hitler: Das Zeitalter der Verantwortungslosigkeit, p. 6.
7 See Rainer Zitelmann, “Hitlers Erfolge: Erklärungsversuche in der Hitler-Forschung,” Neue Politische Literatur, 27 (1982), pp. 47–69, at p. 47 f.; John Lukacs, Hitler: Geschichte und Geschichtsschreibung, Munich, 1997, p. 20f.; Ulrich Nill, “ ‘Reden wie Lustmorde’: Hitler-Biographen über Hitler als Redner,” in Josef Kopperschmidt (ed.), Hitler als Redner, Munich, 2003, pp. 29–37, at pp. 35–7.
8 Thea Sternheim, Tagebücher 1903–1971. Vol. II: 1925–1936, eds. Thomas Ehrsam und Regula Wyss, Göttingen, 2002, p. 664 (entry for 31 Oct. 1935). In a letter to Konrad Heiden, Thea Sternheim wrote that he was the first to say “decisive words on these matters.” She added: “How marvellous to see such a finely honed rapier gleaming.” Ibid., pp. 665f. (entry for 4 Nov. 1935).
9 Harry Graf Kessler, Das Tagebuch. Vol. 9: 1926–1937, ed. Sabine Gruber and Ulrich Ott, with Christoph Hilse and Nadin Weiss, Stuttgart, 2010, p. 663 (entry for 14 April 1936).
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