Authors: Giles MacDonogh
It is as well to remember, nevertheless, that although 1938 was a grim year for Germany’s Jews, many ordinary people reaped the benefits of the “racial community” or
Volksgemeinschaft
. Both the proletariat, purged of its left-wing allegiances, and the peasantry in particular enjoyed the benefits of social welfare organizations such as Kraft durch Freude (Strength through Joy). For the German poor, there was the possibility of a holiday for the first time in their lives, and there was the chance to place a down payment on a Volkswagen Beetle. Distractions came in all shapes and sizes, such as the many sparkling parades and festive occasions orchestrated by Joseph Goebbels at the Ministry of Propaganda. Only slowly did they realize—if they noticed at all—that the Führer was leading them to war.
O
n November 5, 1937, in the course of a two-hour monologue at the Reich Chancellery, Hitler set out his new vision for Germany, proposing to smash the shackles of Versailles. No notes were to be taken at the top secret session, which lasted from 4:15 to 8:30 PM. Hitler’s aim was to test his service chiefs and see how ready they were to subscribe to his more radical plans. Present at the meeting were Field Marshal Werner von Blomberg, Colonel-General Werner von Fritsch, Admiral Erich Raeder, and Hermann Göring (representing the Luftwaffe), together with the foreign minister, Constantin von Neurath. Blomberg’s adjutant, Colonel Friedrich Hossbach (who was also present) thought the discussion might interest his mentor, the chief of staff, Colonel-General Ludwig Beck, and scribbled down the main points in his diary.
Hitler told those present that his aim was to maintain the “racial community” and enlarge it. Germany required
Lebensraum
, not in the country’s former African colonies, which had been confiscated in 1918 (and which did not interest him), but in Europe, where new agricultural land would provide Germany with the self-sufficiency—or autarky—it craved.
He warned the generals that Germany was also painfully short of raw materials. It had to strike before potential enemies such as the Soviet Union could catch up. He predicted that the Russians would be ready to fight at any moment between 1943 and 1945, which would allow Germany precious time to annex Czechoslovakia and Austria. The strike could come as early as 1938. By acquiring these two territories Germany’s frontiers would be made that much more secure, and the manpower would provide him with twelve fresh divisions for the army.
Operations of this sort required minute planning. Sensing the opposition of his military chiefs, Hitler reassured them that there was no hurry. He predicted that the fragile bonds between Britain and France on the one hand and Italy on the other would collapse by the summer of 1938, leaving Mussolini resolutely in the German camp. He was convinced that Britain would recoil from fighting and that France would not participate either, as the country would be confined to its bed by yet another political crisis: During the waning years of the Third Republic, French governments came and went with indecent speed.
BLOMBERG AND FRITSCH were the first to throw up their hands in exasperation after the meeting. Neurath was also jittery. Much of what Hitler had said may have looked dangerously radical, but to nationalists and National Socialists, Austria and Czechoslovakia were the obvious targets. The treaties of Versailles and Saint Germain that followed the defeat of Germany and Austria-Hungary had accorded the precious right to self-determination only to the victors in the First World War, or the formerly oppressed peoples of their enemies. Austria had been shorn of all its territories and left in possession of only its German-speaking core. It was expressly forbidden to link up with Germany, because the creation of a superstate might have made Germany stronger than the Allies desired.
British politicians had also begun to question the wisdom and morality of the Versailles settlement and were increasingly conscious of these open sores. There was much discussion of the former German colonies and whether Hitler should be granted an African empire. In general the British were happier with the idea of concessions on the European mainland that did not threaten their empire. Many—particularly in the British Foreign Office—saw revision of the Austrian and Czech borders as inevitable and a German presence in Bohemia and Moravia as preferable to a Soviet one. It was unfortunate, perhaps, that the man who clamored loudest for such changes should be Adolf Hitler.
When Hitler became chancellor in 1933, Germany had been a modestly wealthy, partly modernized society. The Third Reich had taken steps to change that, but the diversion of so many of the country’s resources into the arms program had left many other areas underfunded. The German economy was simply not strong enough for the tasks imposed on it by the Nazis. Troops slept in bivouacs while money was plowed into arms construction. The German railway network, together with its rolling stock, was falling apart. The finance minister, Graf Lutz Schwerin von Krosigk, was tearing his hair out over Germany’s economic crisis, which he thought would last to 1940 at the very least. He told the propaganda minister and gauleiter of Berlin, Joseph Goebbels, about it, but Goebbels came out with a typically Nazi line: He did not believe a country could be killed by debt, only lack of weapons. Raw materials were vital to Nazi Germany’s survival. Austria had the iron ore of the Erzberg, but Czechoslovakia had much more. Both countries could offer foreign currency, which was vital for purchasing arms and materials abroad.
On November 19, two weeks after the meeting with his service chiefs, Hitler received Lord Halifax at the Berghof, his opulent country house above Berchtesgaden in the Bavarian Alps. As lord president of the Council, Halifax was a member of the British cabinet and would shortly replace Anthony Eden as foreign secretary. Halifax let it be known that Britain was not opposed to a revision of the Versailles settlement regarding Austria, Czechoslovakia, and Danzig, provided it came about peacefully. Halifax clearly had the backing of the British government: In December, Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain told the German ambassador, Joachim von Ribbentrop, that he was prepared to discuss both Austrian and Czech issues.
When Halifax left, Hitler emerged in an ebullient mood and told his entourage that Halifax was “a clever politician who fully supported Germany’s claims.” He summoned the Austrian Legion, an SS unit composed of Austrian Nazis, and told them, “The hour approaches when your wishes will be fulfilled.”
Hitler did not talk of his need to become absolute master in his own house when he addressed his service chiefs earlier that month, but this was not far from his mind. It would mean removing from power all those who were less than a hundred percent committed to National Socialism. Like a balloonist, he was going to divest himself of the lead weights that impeded his ascent.
Göring took over Germany’s finances from Hjalmar Schacht at the beginning of December. Schacht had suggested Göring receive an economic role in the first place, but Göring was increasingly impatient and wanted to use more draconian methods to find money for his projects. Göring now had the job of making Germany self-sufficient while financing German rearmament. Schacht had not thought this autarky feasible. Those who voiced objections to Hitler’s more radical plans were in the firing line. Foreign Minister Neurath was the next victim: He had been appointed by Chancellor Franz von Papen in 1932 and had only joined the NSDAP (Nazi Party) in 1937. He was to be replaced by Ribbentrop, Hitler’s “Second Bismarck.” Three ambassadors were to be jettisoned too: Ulrich von Hassell in Rome, Herbert von Dirksen in Tokyo, and Papen in Vienna.
It seems unlikely, however, that Hitler had a master plan for these changes and no grand strategy that was specific to 1938. He responded to each crisis as it came along, and it was invariably he who came out strongest.
As the silver candelabra had been placed on the table, a
wonderful light lit up the red and golden wine in all its
splendor that was majestically mirrored in the noble wood
of ancient furniture and in the wings and clothes of the
golden angel together with the balls on the Christmas tree.
Every feast day comes and goes in our house as our own
new, clear and silent celebration: and the magnificence and
the serenity become ever greater with every earthly joy. . . .
The angels and silver baubles shine from within the
dark baroque room: everything is still steeped in Christmas,
and therefore from renewed festivity, a new year!
—JOCHEN KLEPPER,
JANUARY 1, 1938
I
n the first weeks of January 1938, much of Germany lay under a thick blanket of snow. The Nazi regime’s secret police were equally ubiquitous. For those who had no reason to love the Third Reich, it was best to keep your head down and talk to no one. Communists, Socialists, and Jews had most to fear.
At the beginning of a year that would prove thoroughly disastrous for the European Jewish population, it was not the Germans but the Romanians who turned up the heat. A Fascist government led by Octavian Goga had come to power in Bucharest in December. On January 12 he revoked the citizenship of the country’s three-quarters of a million Jews, causing large numbers to flee. Some of these surfaced in Austria (“a gift,” mocked Goebbels), and there was a fear that they might join the other groups of foreign Jews in Germany.
While the Nazi leaders were delighted to find a new ally in the Balkan state, they were less than pleased to become a haven for its Jews. “The Jewish question has become a global problem once again,” wrote Goebbels. The Nuremberg-based weekly
Der Stürmer
celebrated the precipitate departure of the Jews from Romania with a series of cartoons by Philipp Rupprecht (known as Fips). One showed Jews in France, Britain, and the United States weeping impotently over the fate of their Romanian brothers; another, an avalanche of Jews descending on France; and a third, a Jew arriving at an Austrian hotel to find it “fully occupied.”
Der Stürmer
was the unofficial organ for the state persecution of the Jews, and it also reported that the French foreign minister, Yvon Delbos, had been in Warsaw for talks before Christmas, discussing the possibility of dispatching Poland’s three and a half million Jews to Madagascar. The editor, Julius Streicher, preened himself: He had been one of the first to suggest the French colony as a new home for the Jews. On January 21,
Der Stürmer
published a special issue calling for the death penalty for
Rassenschänder
, Jews who slept with Gentiles. Goebbels—who had slept with at least one Jew—heartily approved. The cover showed the fourteenyear-old starlet Deanna Durbin on the arms of elderly Hollywood Jews. The periodical contained a regular column in which all Gentiles who continued to have professional or personal dealings with Jews were named and shamed.
Victor Klemperer, a rabbi’s son married to a Gentile, had been fired from his position as professor of Romance languages at Dresden University. He was reduced to writing a diary that recorded each new blow leveled at his race. Like many Jews, he was beginning to have second thoughts about wanting to be more German than the Germans and complained of the “tragedy of the Jew, misled by his desire to assimilate.” Sometimes it seemed the state’s bugbears were Catholic priests, at others Protestant pastors. In January 1938 it was Jews.
Hitler was fully in sympathy with the persecution of the Jews, but as 1937 turned into 1938, he was thinking more about territory and how he would ensure that he remained absolute master of the Third Reich. There had been difficult moments in the past, but time and again, circumstances had come to his rescue, and he had been able—as he would put it, with the instinct of a sleepwalker—to turn difficult situations to his advantage. One such circumstance, the Blomberg-Fritsch affair, began with the first social occasion of the Nazi New Year, although it was a while before Hitler realized how events could be shaped to his advantage. Indeed, this time he was so innocent of the plot going on around him that he was able to accompany Goebbels to see
Die Fledermaus
that evening. The Führer was in complete raptures at the Strauss operetta and wholly unaware that behind his back his underlings were about to provoke a two-week crisis and bring the state to a standstill.
Hermann Göring’s position was emblematic of the peculiar structure of power within the Nazi state: Officially Hitler’s successor, he was also a minister of state and president of the emasculated Reichstag. As commander of the air force, he answered to Minister of War Blomberg but at the same time was on an equal footing with Colonel-General von Fritsch, the head of the army.
At forty-four, the former air ace Göring was one of the oldest in the gang, the same age as his enemy Ribbentrop. Goebbels was forty and Heinrich Himmler only thirty-seven. Hitler himself was a mere forty-eight. Nazism retained its appeal to an unfulfilled element in German youth—a generation born around 1910 who had failed to find employment during the depressed years of the Weimar Republic.
At his suitably gigantic birthday party on January 12, Göring was feted in the way he loved best—no one dared to stint on the presents. Hitler had just returned from his Christmas break and gave his old friend a splendid hunting scene by the Austrian painter Hans Makart. The party was interrupted, however: Göring and Hitler were due at the town hall in the Tiergarten district of Berlin to be witnesses at the wedding of the aging Blomberg to one Eva Gruhn. As he left the festivities, Göring permitted himself a loud chuckle. For some time now, Göring had been looking for a means to extend the Party’s influence over the army. Now he saw his chance.