The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich: A History of Nazi Germany (59 page)

As for disarmament, Hitler was ready to go the limit:

   The German government is ready to agree to any limitation which leads to abolition of the heaviest arms, especially suited for aggression, such [as] the heaviest artillery and the heaviest tanks … Germany declares herself ready to agree to any limitation whatsoever of the caliber of artillery, battleships, cruisers and torpedo boats. In like manner, the German government is ready to agree to the limitation of tonnage for submarines, or to their complete abolition …

   In this connection Hitler held out a special bait for Great Britain. He was willing to limit the new German Navy to 35 per cent of the British naval forces; that, he added, would still leave the Germans 15 per cent below the French in naval tonnage. To the objections raised abroad that this would be only the beginning of German demands, Hitler answered, “For Germany, this demand is final and abiding.”

   A little after ten in the evening, Hitler came to his peroration:

   Whoever lights the torch of war in Europe can wish for nothing but chaos. We, however, live in the firm conviction that in our time will be fulfilled not the decline but the renaissance of the West. That Germany may make an imperishable contribution to this great work is our proud hope and our unshakable belief.
¹¹

   These were honeyed words of peace, reason and conciliation, and in the Western democracies of Europe, where the people and their governments desperately yearned for the continuance of peace on any reasonable basis, on almost any basis, they were lapped up. The most influential newspaper in the British Isles, the
Times
of London, welcomed them with almost hysterical joy.

   This great journal, one of the chief glories of English journalism, would play, like the Chamberlain government, a dubious role in the disastrous British appeasement of Hitler. But to this writer, at least, it had even less
excuse than the government, for in its Berlin correspondent, Norman Ebbutt, it had, until he was expelled on August 16, 1937, a source of information about Hitler’s doings and purposes that was much more revealing than that provided by other foreign correspondents or foreign diplomats, including the British. Though much that he wrote for the
Times
from Berlin in those days was not published,
^*
as he often complained to this writer and as was later confirmed, the
Times
editors must have read
all
of his dispatches and have been in the position therefore of knowing what was really going on in Nazi Germany and how hollow Hitler’s grandiose promises were.

   The British government, no less than the
Times
, was ready and anxious to accept Hitler’s proposals as “sincere” and “well-considered”—especially the one by which Germany would agree to a Navy 35 per cent the size of Britain’s.

Hitler had shrewdly thrown out a hint to Sir John Simon, when the British Foreign Secretary and Eden made their postponed visit to him at the end of March, that a naval agreement might easily be worked out between the two powers which would guarantee English superiority. Now on May 21 he had made a public and specific offer—a German fleet of only 35 per cent of the tonnage of the British—and he had added in his speech some especially friendly words for England. “Germany,” he had said, “has not the intention or the necessity or the means to participate in any new naval rivalry”—an allusion, which apparently was not lost on the English, to the days before 1914 when Tirpitz, enthusiastically backed by Wilhelm II, was building up a high-seas fleet to match England’s. “The German government,” continued Hitler, “recognizes the overpowering vital importance, and therewith the justification, of a dominating protection for the
British Empire
on the sea … The German government has the straightforward intention to find and maintain a relationship with the British people and state which will prevent for all time a repetition of the only struggle there has been between the two nations.” Hitler had expressed similar sentiments in
Mein Kampf
, where he had stressed that one of the Kaiser’s greatest mistakes had been his enmity toward England and his absurd attempt to rival the British in naval power.

With incredible naïveté and speed, the British government fell for Hitler’s bait. Ribbentrop, who had now become Hitler’s messenger boy for foreign errands, was invited to come to London in June for naval talks. Vain and tactless, he told the British that Hitler’s offer was not subject to negotiation; they must take it or leave it. The British took it. Without consulting their allies of the Stresa front, France and Italy, which were
also naval powers and much concerned over German rearmament and German flouting of the military clauses of Versailles, and without even informing the
League of Nations
, which was supposed to uphold the 1919 peace treaties, they proceeded, for what they thought was a private advantage, to wipe out the naval restrictions of Versailles.

For it was obvious to the most simple mind in Berlin that by agreeing to Germany’s building a navy a third as large as the British, the London government was giving Hitler free rein to build up a navy as fast as was physically possible—one that would tax the capacity of his shipyards and steel mills for at least ten years. It was thus not a limitation on German rearmament but an encouragement to expand it, in the naval arm, as rapidly as Germany could find the means to do so.

To add insult to the injury already done France, the British government, in fulfillment of a promise to Hitler, refused to tell her closest ally what kind of ships and how many Great Britain had agreed that Germany should build, except that the German submarine tonnage—the building of submarines in Germany was specifically forbidden by Versailles—would be 60 per cent of Britain’s and, if exceptional circumstances arose, might be 100 per cent.
¹³
Actually the Anglo–German agreement authorized the Germans to build five battleships, whose tonnage and armament would be greater than that of anything the British had afloat, though the official figures were faked to deceive London—twenty-one cruisers and sixty-four destroyers. Not all of them were built or completed by the outbreak of the war, but enough of them, with the
U-boats
, were ready to cause Britain disastrous losses in the first years of the second war.

Mussolini took due notice of the “perfidy of Albion.” Two could play at the game of appeasing Hitler. Moreover, England’s cynical attitude of disregarding the Versailles Treaty encouraged him in the belief that London might not take too seriously the flouting of the Covenant of the League of Nations. On October 3, 1935, in defiance of the Covenant, his armies invaded the ancient mountain kingdom of Abyssinia. The League, led by Great Britain and supported halfheartedly by France, which saw that Germany was the greater danger in the long run, promptly voted sanctions. But they were only partial sanctions, timidly enforced. They did not prevent Mussolini from conquering Ethiopia but they did destroy the friendship of Fascist Italy with Britain and France and bring an end to the Stresa front against Nazi Germany.

Who stood the most to gain from this chain of events but Adolf Hitler? On October 4, the day after the Italian invasion began, I spent the day in the Wilhelmstrasse talking with a number of party and government officials. A diary note that evening summed up how quickly and well the Germans had sized up the situation:

   The Wilhelmstrasse is delighted. Either Mussolini will stumble and get himself so heavily involved in Africa that he will be greatly weakened in Europe, whereupon Hitler can seize Austria, hitherto protected by the Duce; or he will
win, defying France and Britain, and thereupon be ripe for a tie-up with Hitler against the Western democracies. Either way Hitler wins.
¹⁴

This would soon be demonstrated.

In his Reichstag “peace” speech of May 21, 1935, which, as we have seen, had so impressed the world and, above all, Great Britain, Hitler had mentioned that “an element of legal insecurity” had been brought into the
Locarno Pact
as a result of the mutual-assistance pact which had been signed between Russia and France on March 2 in Paris and on March 14 in Moscow, but which up to the end of the year had not been ratified by the French Parliament. The German Foreign Office called this “element” to the attention of Paris in a formal note to the French government.

On November 21, François-Poncet, the French ambassador, had a talk with Hitler in which the Fuehrer launched “into a long tirade” against the Franco-Soviet Pact. François-Poncet reported to Paris he was convinced that Hitler intended to use the pact as an excuse to occupy the demilitarized zone of the Rhineland. “Hitler’s sole hesitancy,” he added, “is now concerned with the appropriate moment to act.”
¹⁵

François-Poncet, probably the best-informed ambassador in Berlin, knew what he was talking about, though he was undoubtedly unaware that as early as the previous spring, on May 2, nineteen days before Hitler’s assurances in the Reichstag that he would respect the Locarno Pact and the territorial clauses of Versailles, General von Blomberg had issued his first directive to the three armed services to prepare plans for the reoccupation of the demilitarized Rhineland. The code name
Schulung
was given to the operation, it was to be “executed by a surprise blow at lightning speed” and its planning was to be so secret that “only the very smallest number of officers should be informed.” In fact, in the interests of secrecy, Blomberg wrote out the order in handwriting.
¹⁶

On June 16 further discussion of the move into the Rhineland took place at the tenth meeting of the Working Committee of the Reich Defense Council, during which a Colonel Alfred
Jodl
, who had just become head of the Home Defense Department, reported on the plans and emphasized the need for the strictest secrecy. Nothing should be committed to writing that was not absolutely necessary, he warned, and he added that “without exception such material must be kept in safes.”
¹⁷

All through the winter of 1935–36 Hitler bided his time. France and Britain, he could not help but note, were preoccupied with stopping Italy’s aggression in Abyssinia, but Mussolini seemed to be getting by with it. Despite its much-publicized sanctions, the
League of Nations
was proving itself impotent to halt a determined aggressor. In Paris the French Parliament seemed to be in no hurry to ratify the pact with the Soviet Union; the growing sentiment in the Right was all against it. Apparently Hitler
thought there was a good chance of the French Chamber or Senate rejecting the alliance with Moscow. In that case he would have to look for another excuse for
Schulung
. But the pact came before the Chamber on February 11 and it was approved on the twenty-seventh by a vote of 353 to 164. Two days later, on March 1, Hitler reached his decision, somewhat to the consternation of the generals, most of whom were convinced that the French would make mincemeat of the small German forces which had been gathered for the move into the Rhineland. Nevertheless, on the next day, March 2, 1936, in obedience to his master’s instructions, Blomberg issued formal orders for the occupation of the Rhineland. It was, he told the senior commanders of the armed forces, to be a “surprise move.” Blomberg expected it to be a “peaceful operation.” If it turned out that it was not—that is, that the French would fight—the Commander in Chief reserved the “right to decide on any military countermeasures.”
¹⁸
Actually, as I learned six days later and as would be confirmed from the testimony of the generals at Nuremberg, Blomberg already had in mind what those countermeasures would be: a hasty retreat back over the Rhine!

But the French, their nation already paralyzed by internal strife and the people sinking into defeatism, did not know this when a small token force of German troops paraded across the Rhine bridges at dawn on March 7 and entered the demilitarized zone.
^*
At 10
A.M
. Neurath, the compliant Foreign Minister, called in the ambassadors of France, Britain and
Italy
, apprised them of the news from the Rhineland and handed them a formal note denouncing the Locarno Treaty, which Hitler had just broken—and proposing new plans for peace! “Hitler struck his adversary in the face,” François-Poncet wryly observed, “and as he did so declared: ‘I bring you proposals for peace!’”
²⁰

Indeed, two hours later the Fuehrer was standing at the rostrum of the Reichstag before a delirious audience, expounding on his desire for peace and his latest ideas of how to maintain it. I went over to the
Kroll Opera House
to see the spectacle, which I shall never forget, for it was both fascinating and gruesome. After a long harangue about the evils of Versailles and the threat of Bolshevism, Hitler calmly announced that France’s pact with Russia had invalidated the Locarno Treaty, which, unlike that of Versailles, Germany had freely signed. The scene that followed I noted down in my diary that evening.

   “Germany no longer feels bound by the Locarno Treaty [Hitler said]. In the interest of the primitive rights of its people to the security of their frontier and the safeguarding of their defense, the German government has re-established,
as from today, the absolute and unrestricted sovereignty of the Reich in the demilitarized zone!”

Now the six hundred deputies, personal appointees all of Hitler, little men with big bodies and bulging necks and cropped hair and pouched bellies and brown uniforms and heavy boots … leap to their feet like automatons, their right arms upstretched in the Nazi salute, and scream “Heils” … Hitler raises his hand for silence…. He says in a deep, resonant voice, “Men of the German Reichstag!” The silence is utter.