On 21 April, Hitler revealed his plans to Keitel: a ‘strategic attack out of the blue without any reason or possible justification’ had to be ruled out. Instead, he was assuming that a war would be sparked either ‘after a period of diplomatic conflict that gradually escalates’ or ‘through lightning action on the basis of some incident’, for which he gave as a piquant example the ‘murder of the German ambassador during an anti-German demonstration’.7 The attack itself should be carried out through rapid advances into the heart of the country; the first four days of military action would be decisive. If they were not successful militarily, ‘there would undoubtedly be a European crisis’, and so they would have to create a ‘fait accompli’.
At the beginning of May, Brauchitsch gave Hitler a memorandum by the Chief of the General Staff, Ludwig Beck, in which he expressed strong opposition to the ‘Führer’s’ plans for war. Beck argued that, in the event of a move against Czechoslovakia, Germany risked intervention by the western powers and would be unable militarily to survive the lengthy war that would follow. Beck emphasized, in particular, the continuing strength of Britain as a ‘world power’ and its determination to resist a German policy of expansion in Central Europe. After consulting Keitel, Brauchitsch had ensured that Hitler received only the military conclusions, keeping back the foreign policy sections; however, it was clear that the memorandum was intended to provide a point-by-point rebuttal of Hitler’s statement to the military leadership on 5 November 1937, namely that a move against Austria and Czechoslovakia during 1938 would be successful. Hitler was furious, making it clear that Beck no longer possessed his full confidence.8
On 18 March Hitler made another speech to the Reichstag in order to celebrate his triumph: ‘Germany has once again become a world power. However, what power in the world can in the long run tolerate millions of its own countrymen being seriously mistreated right in front of its own gates? There are moments when it becomes impossible for a self-confident nation to go on accepting it!’ Apart from that, he was ‘happy to have been the one who has fulfilled this supreme historical mission’; and he specifically thanked ‘the leader of the great Fascist state, who is a personal friend of mine and whose understanding attitude [I] will never forget’. Finally, Hitler announced a plebiscite on the Anschluss with Austria and simultaneous elections to the Reichstag for 10 April.9
Between 25 March and 2 April Hitler made election speeches in Königsberg, Leipzig, in the Berlin Sportpalast, in Hamburg, Cologne, and Frankfurt, as well as in Stuttgart and Munich, then in Graz, Klagenfurt, Innsbruck, and, finally, on 9 April in Vienna. There he was initially received in the city hall, where, at 12 noon, Goebbels proclaimed from the balcony ‘Greater German Reich Day’. At his command, broadcast over the radio at 12 noon exactly, throughout the Reich swastika flags were raised to the sound of factory sirens. A mass of 30,000 carrier pigeons were released from the city hall square to fly back to their lofts all over Germany; squadrons of aeroplanes flew over the city.10
Later, in their hotel, Hitler outlined to Goebbels the far-reaching aims he was pursuing in his meeting with Vienna’s Cardinal Innitzer, arranged for the same day. ‘We need a prince of the Church, if we want to get away from Rome. And we must do that. There must be no authority outside Germany that can issue orders to Germans.’ After the meeting, Hitler reported to Goebbels that Innitzer had been ‘very depressed’, a state of mind that could be attributed to the fact that he had come into conflict with the Vatican over his publicly declared support for the Anschluss.11 Innitzer had stated that he did not want to be dissuaded from his ‘commitment to the German cause’. Hitler commented: ‘this could be our chance to organize a dissenting movement and liquidate the Counter-Reformation.’ Goebbels’s diary shows that, even if only for a moment, Hitler was toying with the idea of a national Catholic Church free of papal influence under Innitzer’s leadership, another bizarre example of his plans for ecclesiastical reorganization.12 These ideas were then reflected in his next speech, which he gave from the hotel balcony. Hitler claimed to be God’s instrument by stating ‘that it was also the will of God to send a boy from here to the Reich, to allow him to become powerful, to raise him up to become leader of the nation, in order to enable him to bring his homeland into the Reich’.13
Arriving back in Berlin late in the evening of 10 April, Hitler was able to revel in the overwhelming election result: with an electoral participation rate of 99.6 per cent, no less than 99 per cent had voted ‘yes’; in Austria it was the incredible figure of 99.75 per cent.14 Nearly two weeks later, on 23 April, he appointed his Anschluss specialist, Josef Bürckel, to be ‘Reich Commissar for the Reunification of Austria with the German Reich’.15 At the same time, Hitler decided to abolish the ‘state of Austria’, which he had created in March – the aim was to minimize any remaining sense of Austrian identity as far as possible – and to divide the Austrian Party organization into Gaus. On 23 May, he appointed Gauleiters and made a few border corrections, which he later reversed.16
This reorganization of the Party in Austria provided the basis for the creation of so-called Reich Gaus. It had been initiated by Hess’s office, effectively the Party headquarters and, after lengthy ministerial discussions, Hitler approved it in April 1939. The reorganization affected the intermediate-level state administration within the territory of the former state of Austria (and in the Sudetenland, which had been annexed in the meantime), with the borders of the provinces now made coterminous with those of the Party Gaus. Reich Gaus were also introduced into the annexed Polish territories after September 1939. Under the new system the Party Gauleiter simultaneously ran the state administration at Gau level as Reich Governor (subordinate to the Reich Interior Ministry and the various departmental ministries), thereby allegedly ensuring the much vaunted ‘unity of Party and state’.17 The constitution of these new Reich Gaus then became the model for the Party’s demand for a transfer of power from state officials to the Gauleiters in the ‘old’, that is, pre-1938, Reich as well. The whole process clearly shows how Hitler, in his role as the final authority, actively supported Hess’s office in carrying out an ‘administrative reform’ in stages, by which the traditional state bureaucracy was gradually disempowered through the Party’s claim to ‘lead the administration’. In this sphere too the ‘Führer’ was by no means simply a puppet in the hands of Party functionaries operating in the background, with him merely nodding through their proposals, but rather a decisive politician, who, during the development phase of his regime, single-mindedly and with lasting effect, changed the structures by which he ruled and turned them in a particular direction. However, when, during the war, powerful elements in the Party wanted to use the impending administrative rationalization for further structural reforms in its favour, Hitler proved less accommodating. He followed the pragmatic principle of avoiding unnecessary upheaval in the administrative apparatus during difficult times.
On 2 May, Hitler embarked on a state visit to Italy with a large entourage, including Goebbels, Hans Frank, Lammers, Keitel, and Himmler. During the following days, he had to get through a very full programme: receptions, the laying of wreaths, parades, and sightseeing. He visited Rome, Naples, where there was an impressive naval review, and then went back to Rome. On 8 May, he attended a display of the Italian air force near Civitavecchia and then travelled on his special train to Florence, in order to visit the Pitti Palace, the Uffizi, and also the Palazzo Vecchio.18
As far as the political aspects of the visit were concerned, the German delegation had failed in its aim of getting the German–Italian relationship confirmed in a written ‘agreement’. The Italians were wary of entering such an agreement for fear of impairing their relations with Britain.19 However, the Reich government assumed that the results of the visit were basically reflected in the two speeches that Hitler and Mussolini had made on 7 May in the Palazzo Venetia.20 Apart from their joint reaffirmation of German–Italian friendship, the most important political statement was Hitler’
s announcement that it was his ‘unshakeable determination and his testament to the German people that . . . they will always regard the Alpine border, which nature has established between us, as inviolate’.21
After the conclusion of the visit to Italy, Ribbentrop informed German embassies about its most important results. The ‘Rome–Berlin axis’ had proved to be a ‘thoroughly reliable component of our future policy’. Austria had ‘ceased to be a problem between Germany and Italy’. The essential precondition for this had been Hitler’s renewed commitment to the ‘inviolate status of our common border’.22 State secretary von Weizsäcker noted ‘for internal use’ another essential point, though it too had only been communicated orally, namely that Mussolini and Ciano had unambiguously stated ‘that, in the event of a conflict between Germany and Czechoslovakia, Italy would remain neutral’.23
‘The week-end crisis’
After his Italian ally had made clear his intention to remain neutral, Hitler intensified his pressure on Czechoslovakia. As a result, only a few days after his return from Italy, a serious crisis developed, in which the propaganda machine, the Wehrmacht leadership, the Foreign Ministry, and Sudeten German activists all played the roles assigned to them. On 19 May, Goebbels launched a massive propaganda campaign against Czechoslovakia while at the same time the SdP provoked more incidents.24 Meanwhile, on 20 May, Hitler received the draft plan for a military operation against Czechoslovakia that he had requested from Keitel on 21 April. Its first sentence confirmed what Hitler had told Keitel of his intentions at the time: ‘It is not my intention to crush Czechoslovakia by military action in the immediate future without provocation unless an unavoidable development of the political situation within Czechoslovakia forces the issue, or political events in Europe create a particularly favourable opportunity, one that may never present itself again’.25
The ‘provocation’, without which Hitler did not wish to attack Prague, the ‘unavoidable development’ within Czechoslovakia, on which he was basing his future policy, then unexpectedly occurred. Alarmed by the German press campaign and made nervous by false reports of alleged German troop movements near the frontier, on the evening of 20 May the Czech government decided to order a partial mobilization of its armed forces for the following day, a Saturday. This resulted in a ‘week-end crisis’ that brought Europe to the brink of war. On 21 May, the British ambassador twice called on Ribbentrop, warning him unequivocally about military operations against Czechoslovakia. The French ambassador indicated that France would fulfil its alliance obligations.26 While the Reich government refrained from taking military counter-measures, its propaganda fanned the flames. From 21 May onwards, it reported new incidents occurring in Prague, Brünn, and Eger. Hitler expressly ordered Goebbels to ‘take a hard line’.27 This was the start of a press campaign against Czechoslovakia lasting several months.28
The week-end crisis marks an important, indeed dramatic turning point in Hitler’s policy. For he now began to reckon on war with the western powers. Colonel-General Alfred Jodl, chief of the Wehrmacht Leadership Office, and thus one of the most important generals in Hitler’s entourage, noted in his diary that the crisis had led ‘to a loss of prestige for the Führer as a result of Germany’s failure to act’ that he ‘is not prepared to put up with a second time’.29 Hitler had gained the impression that the Czech mobilization and the diplomatic intervention by the western powers had been deliberately designed to expose German policy towards Czechoslovakia as a series of empty threats. This intolerable loss of face for Hitler was the decisive psychological moment, prompting him to press ahead with the rapid elimination of Czechoslovakia. Its destruction was intended, above all, to prevent it from presenting a threat to Germany’s rear in a future war against the western powers. And that was the most important aspect of this new turn in his aggressive foreign policy.
On 28 May, Hitler invited the military leadership, together with Neurath and Ribbentrop, to a meeting in the Reich Chancellery.30 Beck’s are the only notes of this meeting to have survived. According to him, Hitler began by insisting on the need for ‘increasing our space’, a task, which ‘our generation’ must carry out. He named France (‘it will always be our enemy’), Britain, and ‘Czechia’ as Germany’s opponents in this attempt at territorial expansion. In November 1937, Hitler had still been telling the military and political leadership that Austria and Czechoslovakia were the targets for territorial expansion that he had envisaged for his time in government. He had assumed that, provided the Germans acted quickly and had effectively secured their western borders, they would avoid intervention by the main western powers. Now, however, he was envisaging a very different scenario, namely an inevitable war with Czechoslovakia and France and Britain. For Hitler ‘Czechia’ was no longer a primary target for his territorial spatial policy, but the main threat in the event of a war with the western powers: ‘It stands in the way of certain success in the West’. He now described the strategic goal for the ‘war in the West’ against Britain and France as ‘the extension of our coast line (Belgium, Holland)’.
Thus, if Czechoslovakia had to be neutralized first, he said, there were many reasons why ‘quick action’ was necessary. In two or three years the Czechoslovak fortifications would be too strong; they had to exploit Germany’s lead over the western powers in armaments (British rearmament would not ‘have an effect before 1941/42’, and the French would also ‘take many more years’); the present tensions between France and Britain, on the one hand, and Italy, on the other, also had to be exploited. Finally, he went into some detail about the need for extensive fortifications on the western frontier, and then described the kind of sudden attack he envisaged launching on Czechoslovakia. In his address Hitler was quite evidently talking about two wars: a Blitzkrieg against Czechoslovakia, with the western powers prevented from intervening by large-scale fortifications in the West; and then the ‘war in the West’, made possible by the neutralization of Czechoslovakia. This war would have to be launched within the next three years.
The notes show that, by comparison with the comments he had made to the leadership six months before as recorded in the Hossbach memorandum, Hitler’s aggressive intentions towards the western powers – at that point still relatively ‘moderate’ – had in the meantime decisively hardened. The triumph of the Austrian Anschluss and the hubris that it encouraged undoubtedly played a very significant role in radicalizing Hitler’s diplomatic and military aims. For him, however, the decisive psychological factor was the intolerable humiliation of the week-end crisis. It led to him ordering a number of specific armaments measures and naming a date for the occupation of Czechoslovakia. The growing readiness for war he had shown during the previous months had now become a programme.
During the following months, Hitler kept emphasizing the significance of the week-end crisis for his war policy. In a number of important speeches he repeatedly returned to the measures he had taken on 28 May. Thus, on 12 September, he declared that, in response to Czechoslovakia’s ‘dastardly attack’ in May, he had ‘hugely expanded’ the army and Luftwaffe and had ‘ordered the immediate strengthening of our fortifications in the West’.31 On 10 November, in a secret speech to representatives of the press, he told them that ‘after 21 May it had been quite clear that this problem had to be resolved’.32 Similarly, in his speech on 30 January 1939, he stated that Beneš had intended ‘first, to provoke the German Reich, and, secondly, to damage Germany’s international reputation’. Despite his assurances to the Czech president that this was not the case, Beneš had ‘maintained the fiction’ and spread the message that it was ‘only through his decisive measures [that Germany] had been put back in its proper place’, which had undoubtedly led ‘to a serious loss of prestige for the Reich’. As a result of this ‘intolerable provocation’, he had decided, on 28 May, to give the order ‘to prepare for military action against this state on 2 October’ and to order ‘the vast and accelerated extension of our line of defence in the west’.
33 And, in his address to the Reichstag on 28 April 1939, he declared that ‘giving in to this Czech mobilization’ would have meant ‘accepting a shameful defeat’ and that had led him ‘to resolve this question’ and, at the latest, by 2 October 1938.34
Following the meeting on 28 May, Hitler did in fact take a number of far-reaching decisions on military and armaments matters. They resulted in another major expansion of rearmament, seriously distorting the whole economy, and requiring new state regulations, all of which represented, in effect, the start of a war economy.
Decisions on military policy
On 30 May, Hitler signed the ‘Führer directive re: Case Green’, to which he added the first sentence: ‘It is my unalterable decision to crush Czechoslovakia by military action in the near future’.35 This meant that the existing military preparations for ‘Case Green’, in other words the attack on Czechoslovakia, had effectively become a war plan ordered from the top.36 In his directive Hitler further stated that it depended on the ‘decisive utilization of a favourable moment’, on ‘acting with lightning speed in response to an incident’. In the event of such an opportunity arising then within the first three or four days a situation must already have been created such that ‘the opposing states who are longing to intervene’ realize the hopelessness of Czechoslovakia’s military situation, while the countries with territorial claims on her, in other words Hungary and Poland, would have an incentive to intervene. It is clear from Keitel’s accompanying statement that Hitler had ordered that the requisite planning for ‘Green’ be completed by 1 October at the latest.
On the day after Hitler’s address of 28 May, Beck, Chief of the General Staff, composed a memorandum, in which he supported a war against Czechoslovakia in principle, but vigorously disputed Hitler’s premise that Britain and France could be kept from intervening through strong fortifications in the West. Above all, according to Beck, a war against the western powers would rapidly develop into a European war, indeed into a world war. Although Germany would certainly win a campaign against Czechoslovakia, it would lose the war. In a further statement, dated 3 June, Beck described the plans for ‘Green’ as disastrous and declined to accept any responsibility on behalf of the General Staff.37
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