The Führer’s expectation of a long war was reflected in two interrelated anxieties. Firstly, he was acutely conscious of the dire state of the German economy, which slowed rearmament and raised domestic tensions. This drove him to war, not because he wished to head off domestic unrest, but because he could see that he was losing the battle of production with the western powers.189 Secondly, Hitler feared that the vulnerability of Germany’s food supply would bring down the home front as it had done in the First World War. He fretted about the effects of a new British wartime blockade,190 and even about Roosevelt’s peacetime economic sanctions. Hitler lamented the propensity of ‘so-called democratic statesmen’ to cut off a people from its markets ‘for example through boycotts’, though he obviously also had wartime blockades in mind, in order to ‘starve’ it.191 Clearly, Hitler believed that the economic war with the United States had already begun.
By the summer of 1939, in short, the enemy which Hitler had identified at the start of his political career twenty years earlier, was in full view again: the western capitalist powers, democracy, plutocracy and the supposed world Jewish conspiracy. Strikingly, Hitler had dropped all reference to the communist threat. In early June 1939, he declined an invitation to publish a collection of his previous pronouncements on ‘Jewry and Bolshevism’, either out of regard for the Soviet Union, or to avoid diluting his anti-capitalist message, or (as he claimed) because he did not like his thoughts being ‘chopped up’.192 Even his Spanish intervention was redefined from a rescue of Europe from Bolshevism to a blow against plutocracy. He now spoke of ‘Spain’s struggle against the internationally organized destruction of its country’, by which he meant the depredations of the ‘international plutocracy’ of the west, and their ‘encirclement politicians, war hawks and war profiteers’.193
In mid June 1939, the machinery of the Third Reich swung into action against Poland. Operational orders for Fall Weiss were issued to the troops. Only now was an intense propaganda campaign unleashed against Warsaw.194 Hitler was using the same modus operandi which he had deployed to such devastating effect against Czechoslovakia: demoralizing and isolating the victim, while deterring Britain and France from intervening. This time it did not work. It was clear that, whatever happened, Poland would fight, and that it was likely that the west would deliver on its guarantee, however reluctantly.
The imminence of war drove Hitler to try to weld German society closer together, to stiffen it for the fight and to forestall the kind of fragmentation which he believed had so bedevilled it in the past. Depending on the context and the likelihood of success, this sometimes meant taking radical action or attacking established structures. The approach of conflict affected Hitler’s sense of racial time. The gradual elevation of the German Volk would not be completed before the outbreak of hostilities. This accentuated Hitler’s ambivalence about war. On the one hand, he saw it as a purifying phenomenon, which toughened the fittest and weeded out the unfit; on the other hand he feared that, paradoxically, it would kill the best and spare the weak or cowardly by a process of negative selection. Hitler therefore stepped up the attack on those ‘unworthy of life’, immediately before and during war. In late July 1939, his doctor Karl Brandt killed a deformed child in a Leipzig hospital, at the request of the parents and as ordered by Hitler himself. The Führer also sought to prepare the German people for a euthanasia programme. In early August 1939, his entourage screened Unworthy Life, a film about the life of the incurably mentally ill.195
Hitler also continued his campaign against the conservatism of the officer corps. In mid July 1939, he was once again caught up in a sex scandal. His naval liaison officer, Captain Alvin Albrecht, married a woman who had previously enjoyed the favours of several men. When Admiral Raeder, who had acted as witness at the wedding, tried to have Albrecht disciplined for entering into a ‘socially inappropriate’ union, citing the Blomberg affair, a shouting-match with Hitler ensued. The Führer condemned the ‘typical officer-style intrigue’, expressed his contempt for the gossip of officers wives, and demanded to meet the woman himself so that he could form a judgement. They spoke for about ninety minutes on the following day. Afterwards, the new Mrs Albrecht announced in a state of some emotion that the Führer had shown ‘complete understanding for her as a woman’. Hitler himself expressed indifference to ‘private matters between man and woman’, which ‘were no business of anyone else so long as they did not affect the public’.196 It transpired that while the new Mrs Albrecht was extremely affectionate and highly sexed, she was in no sense promiscuous. There the matter rested, though to spare Raeder’s feelings her husband was discharged from the service and made the Führer’s personal adjutant. What was remarkable here was that Hitler did not run for cover, even after the Blomberg crisis, but stood his ground against what he regarded as the outdated norms of the armed services.
Underlying Hitler’s attitude over the Albrecht affair was his contempt for the ‘lying nature of the officer corps, for [their] hypocritical moralizing’, in judging others on matters which had nothing to do with behaviour, attitude and performance. In his opinion, the real threat to the armed services came from ‘cowards and defeatists’, a swipe at military opposition to his plans.197 A month later, Hitler erupted again, this time against the army, which he claimed had privileged traditional military flags over those of the Nazi movement on parade. His own preference was very much for a single national flag with a small corner or a ribbon to indicate the formation in question. The French, he claimed, had done this since the Revolution. ‘Unfortunately,’ he concluded, ‘his army was anything but a revolutionary army.’198 Hitler’s quarrel with the Wehrmacht thus already encompassed a whole range of issues: its alleged cowardice, its partiality to the traditions which had divided Germans for so long and its obsession with the sexual lives of its members at the expense of professionalism.
Meanwhile, Hitler continued the cultural mobilization and elevation of the German people. He pronounced ‘the first objective for a new German artistic production’ as ‘achieved’.199 German ‘architecture’ and ‘the perhaps even more devastated fields of sculpture and painting’ had been ‘healed’. At around the same time, Hitler gave Hans Posse, the director of the gallery at Dresden, the task of putting together a collection of pictures for a special ‘Führer Museum’ at Linz. He followed the progress of the ‘Sonderauftrag Linz’ and the various purchases associated with it very closely. The Führer Museum was to be embedded in a larger remodelling of the city, including eventually a planned Führerpfalz, a Gauforum with a massive tower in the shape of the Lighthouse of Alexandria, and a bridge over the Danube. The city was also gifted thousands of new residential buildings to house the workers in the mammoth ‘Hermann-Göring Werke’.200 These were known as Hitlerbauten, and, unlike most of the planned monumental structures, many of them were actually erected (by slave labour) in his lifetime.
In late July 1939 Hitler headed to Bayreuth for what would turn out to be the last peacetime festival. He spent a week there, taking a day off to inspect the Westwall, evidence that the approaching war was much on his mind. Hitler spoke with the Mitford sisters, who were also attending the festival, about the deteriorating international situation. He told Diana that he believed that Britain wanted war, which was therefore inevitable. On 27 July, Hitler met with the British press baron Lord Kemsley at Wahnfried and reiterated his view that Germany must have ‘colonies’, by which he meant space in the east.201 A day later, Hitler sought solace in the assurances of Diana Mosley, who claimed that ‘anti-Semitism in England was steadily increasing’, and of her sister Unity Mitford, who dismissed Britain’s military readiness.202
In the first week of August 1939, Hitler repaired to the Berghof to make the last preparations for war. Three related forces were driving Hitler forward. Firstly, he feared that he was nearly out of time. Much better, Hitler told Ciano, to go to war with the west while he and the Duce were still young.203 Later in the month, the Führer warned his generals t
hat the current favourable constellation would not last more than two or three years. ‘Nobody knows,’ he added, ‘how long I will live.’ ‘An assassination attempt on Mussolini or myself,’ Hitler explained, ‘can change the situation to our disadvantage.’ For this reason, he continued, the sooner war broke out the better. Secondly, the Führer was conscious that the existing very high level of economic, military and psychological mobilization could not be sustained for long. ‘One cannot confront one another with cocked rifles for ever,’ he explained.204 Soon, Germany would either have to strike at Britain’s eastern ally Poland, and perhaps take on the western powers, or back down. Thirdly, Hitler was determined to resolve the Lebensraum question in the near future, an issue to which he returned repeatedly in the course of the month. But while the Führer was acutely aware of the bottlenecks in the German economy, and the threat to standards of living, there is no evidence at all that his decision for war was driven by immediate considerations of domestic politics.205
Frustrated by the attitude of Poland and the west, Hitler summoned Carl Jakob Burckhardt, the Swiss League of Nations high commissioner for Danzig, to the Obersalzberg. ‘There is something in the Anglo-Saxons (and the Americans) which profoundly divides them and us. What is it?’ he asked Burckhardt.206 Hitler swore that he wanted nothing from the west. ‘I don’t need anything from the most densely inhabited regions of the world,’ he explained. Rather, he demanded ‘a free hand in the east’. ‘Everything I do,’ Hitler continued, ‘is directed against Russia.’ If the west was ‘too stupid and too blind to understand that,’ the Führer went on, then he would be ‘forced to come to terms with the Russians, to attack the west and then after its defeat turn back with all his forces against the Soviet Union’.207 A fortnight later, he returned to the space argument in an exchange with the British ambassador, Henderson. ‘The claim that Germany wishes to conquer the world,’ Hitler argued, ‘is ridiculous. The British Empire comprises 40 million square kilometres, Russia 19 million, America 9.5 million, whereas Germany does not even stretch to 600,000 square kilometres.’208
The key variable throughout August 1939 was Britain. Hitler was under no illusion about her power, nor about her hostility. His only hope was that Britain could be persuaded or bullied into remaining neutral, at least for now. For this reason he huffed and puffed about Germany’s ability, unlike in 1914–18, to outlast the enemy, rhetoric which was less a sign of hubris than of his continuing acute sense of vulnerability. ‘If there is no more butter,’ he assured the Swedish mediator Birger Dahlerus, ‘then I will be the first to stop eating butter. My German people will happily and loyally do the same.’209 Contrary to his confident predictions to some German interlocutors, which were designed to keep spirits up at home, Hitler did not believe that he could call Britain’s bluff again, as he had done at Munich. The Führer let it be known to Chamberlain that he knew ‘that if war should break out between Germany and Poland Great Britain will be in it’. Hitler threatened London with a ‘fight to the finish’ if it intervened, but offered a partnership if it was prepared to cooperate.210 London, however, left Berlin in no doubt that it would defend Poland, and to Hitler’s distress, was engaged in military discussion with Stalin on how best to deal with the Nazi threat. He attributed British false consciousness to the machinations of the Jews and their allies. ‘The attitude towards Germany was not the will of British people,’ he complained to Henderson with reference to the Jewishness of the minister of war, Leslie Hore-Belisha, but ‘should be traced back to Jews and anti-Nazis’.211
Faced with a united Polish and Franco-British front, Hitler had no option but to turn to Moscow, as he had indicated to Burckhardt.212 His motivation was partly tactical, in that he wanted to isolate Poland and to derail the Anglo-Russian negotiations. It was also strategic, in that he needed to mitigate the effect of a blockade in the event of a prolonged war with the west.213 Fear of Soviet military power, which he estimated to be low, played no part in the Führer’s calculations.214 Like most anti-communist observers in the west, Hitler thought of the USSR as a country of shoddy goods, low morale and chaotic violence and purges. On 19 August, he concluded an economic agreement by which the Soviet Union would supply Germany with vital raw materials. The day after, the Führer sent a telegram to Stalin offering him an immediate non-aggression pact. Stalin replied positively on 21 August, and two days later, Molotov and Ribbentrop signed a ten-year non-aggression treaty in the Kremlin.215 A secret annex delineated the respective spheres of influence: Hitler was granted Lithuania and the western part of Poland, Stalin received Finland, Estonia and Latvia, as well as Poland east of the Rivers Narew, Vistula and San. Hitler received the news on the Obersalzberg and reacted by jumping up from his meal and shouting ‘[I have] won!’216 Some Nazis felt a revolutionary affinity with the Soviet Union–Ribbentrop remarked that he had felt as if among old comrades in Moscow–but at this stage Hitler’s interest in the pact was purely strategic. His antagonism with the west had made a temporary accommodation with Stalin necessary.217
On 22 August 1939, as the pact was being negotiated, Hitler convened his generals on the Obersalzberg for a carefully choreographed meeting.218 The fifty-odd senior military men were ordered to appear in civilian clothes, probably in order not to attract attention on the journey, while Hitler wore the brown uniform of the party. Göring was resplendent in ‘fantastic hunting gear, baggy trousers, blouse-style white shirt and an open green waistcoat’.219 The meeting was held in Hitler’s study, whose enormous picture window provided impressive views over the mountains. The venue was intended to make an impression, and the Führer himself had told an earlier meeting that he had called them here so that they could see ‘in what surroundings I like to make my decisions’.220 That morning, news had broken of the imminent conclusion of a non-aggression pact between Russia and Germany. Hitler used the resulting relief among the military to reassure them about the planned attack on Poland. The Führer told them that he did not expect Britain or France to intervene. Hitherto, he claimed, the two powers had been relying on the Soviet Union, ‘but I have now knocked that card out of their hands’. As we have seen, Hitler was expressing more of a hope than an expectation here, but what is striking is that he continued to conceive of the Soviet Union largely in terms of his relationship with the west.
The whole event was as much a performance as a briefing, and Hitler was far from feeling the confidence he simulated. His reference to 1918 and the lack of the ‘psychological basis’ to fight on showed the continuing concern with German weakness.221 He was deeply anxious about how his audience would respond. The Führer asked his adjutant, Rudolf Schmundt, ‘to find out what the reaction’ to his words had been. Hitler fancied himself as something of a ‘really good popular psychologist’, who could read the mood of any crowd, but he freely admitted that senior military were something of a closed book to him. ‘They put on a stiff mask-like demeanour,’ he complained, ‘from which one could deduce nothing.’222 Hitler was right to be worried. There were profound reservations among the military, who expected Britain and France to intervene in some way, but there was no doubt that they would do as they were told.
It was Hitler who wobbled, albeit briefly. On 22 August 1939, with a Russo-German pact obviously imminent, Chamberlain wrote to emphasize that the British guarantee to Poland still stood; Henderson delivered it a day later. On the 24th, President Roosevelt sent Hitler a telegram warning that the ‘catastrophe’ of a general war was ‘very near at hand indeed’. He made clear that ‘the people of the United States are as one in their opposition to policies of military conquest and domination’. The import of these words was clear. Washington would not stand idly by for long. Meissner, the head of the Führer’s Chancellery, recalls the impact of Roosevelt’s intervention. ‘In verbal remarks during those days,’ he writes, ‘Hitler called this sudden interest of America in central European matters a superfluous interference which he would have to reject sharply.’223 The following morning brought more
bad news. Mussolini announced his intention to stay neutral, at least for now. Italy, he said, was simply not ready for a war which had come much earlier than envisaged.224 Hitler was visibly ‘very cast down’, and one observer recalled that he seemed ‘stumped’.225 The attack on Poland, which had been scheduled for 26 August, was postponed. The next few days were unbearably tense, as tempers frayed in Berlin, especially Hitler’s, as he lashed out against the army, the Foreign Office, Italy and anyone else who crossed his path.
Over the next seventy-two hours the Führer struggled to regain his nerve. He sought to persuade his entourage, and himself, that the western powers would not intervene and that even if they did, the outcome would be very different than in 1918. There were frantic last-minute overtures to Britain, reviving the idea of a grand bargain between Berlin and London, but only after the Polish question had been resolved.226 These went nowhere. In the end, Hitler turned almost helplessly to Göring’s confidant Birger Dahlerus, who had been acting as an intermediary. ‘You know Britain so well,’ he said to the Swede, ‘can you explain the origin of my constant failure to come to an agreement with her?’227 It was the same question he had asked Burckhardt, and which was to haunt him for the rest of his life. On 28 August, Hitler set a new date for the attack on Poland: 1 September 1939.228
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