The Second World War (6 page)

This was a message that magnetised Hitler’s audiences, which grew steadily in size throughout 1919-23. He had become a brilliant speaker and, as his power with words increased, so did the numbers who heeded them. ‘I cast my eyes back’, he was to say in 1932, ‘to the time when with six other unknown men I founded [the Nazi Party], when I spoke before eleven, twelve, thirteen, fourteen, twenty, thirty, fifty persons. When I recall how after a year I had won sixty-four members of the movement, I must confess that that which has today been created, when a stream of millions is flowing into our movement, represents something unique in German history.’ The stream of millions had not yet begun to flow in 1923; his followers were still only numbered in thousands. They responded ecstatically, however, to his call for revenge. ‘It cannot be’, he said at Munich in September 1922, ‘that two million Germans should have fallen in vain and that afterwards one should sit down at the same table as friends with traitors. No, we do not pardon, we demand – vengeance!’ Some of them also responded to his call for violent action; for the other side of Hitler’s double life was as an organiser of a ‘parallel’ army within the Weimar Republic as a conspirator against it. By 1923 the
Sturmabteilung
(SA) numbered 15,000 uniformed men, with access to an ample store of hidden arms, including machine-guns; moreover, Hitler believed it had the promise of support by the legitimate army of the state, the Bavarian division of the
Reichswehr
. Hitler had been encouraged in that belief by many of the division’s officers, most importantly by Captain Ernst Röhm, the future head of the SA, who until 1923 was also a serving soldier. Through him, but also because of the attitude of the army commander in Bavaria, General Otto von Lossow, Hitler had formed the impression that if the SA and its associated militias, together forming the extreme right-wing
Kampfbund
(Battle League), were to stage a
Putsch
the army would not oppose it. What such a
Putsch
needed was leadership and a pretext for action. Hitler would supply the leadership – though he conceded the role of figurehead to General Erich Ludendorff, the retired First World War chief of staff (technically First Quartermaster General), who had put the
Kampfbund
under his patronage. The pretext was provided by the French. In January 1923, in order to force the German government to sustain its reparations payments, which it insisted it was incapable of meeting, the French government sent troops to occupy the Ruhr, Germany’s industrial heartland, to extract payment at source.

This intervention intensified a currency crisis within Germany, in part engineered by its own treasury to substantiate the payment difficulties, and it had the effect of fuelling an inflation that destroyed both the working man’s purchasing power and the middle classes’ savings. The value of the mark, which stood at 160,000 to the dollar in July (in 1914 it had exchanged at four), declined to a million to the dollar in August and 130,000 million in November. Gustav Stresemann, the German Chancellor, at first declared a campaign of passive resistance in the Ruhr, but this did nothing to deter the French, while the example of illegality it gave encouraged communists in Saxony and Hamburg, separatists in the Rhineland and former
Freikorps
men in Pomerania and Prussia to threaten civil disobedience. When, after quelling these disorders, Stresemann announced the end of the passive resistance campaign, Hitler decided his moment had come. On 8 November, at a prearranged public meeting in the Bürgerbräu Keller in Munich, which General von Lossow and the Bavarian Commissioner of State had unwisely agreed to attend, Hitler arrived armed, with armed men outside, put Lossow and the other notables under arrest and announced the formation of a new German regime: ‘The government of the November criminals and the Reich President are declared to be removed. A new National Government will be nominated this very day, here in Munich. A German National Army will be formed immediately. . . . The direction of policy will be taken over by me. Ludendorff will take over the leadership of the German National Army.’

Next day, 9 November 1923, the nucleus of the National Army, the
Kampfbund
, set out to march on the former Bavarian War Ministry building, with Hitler and Ludendorff at its head. Röhm and the SA had taken possession of the War Ministry and were awaiting their arrival; interposed between were armed policemen, barring Hitler’s way across the Odeonsplatz. Hitler bargained his way through the first cordon. The second held its ground, opened fire, killed the man at Hitler’s side (who pulled Hitler to the ground in his dying grasp), put a bullet into Goering, the future commander of the Luftwaffe, but left Ludendorff untouched. He marched ahead, indifferent to the bloodshed about him, but reached the War Ministry to find only one other at his side. The German National Army had disintegrated.

The immediate consequences of the ‘Beer Hall
Putsch
’ were banal: nine of the conspirators were tried; Ludendorff was acquitted and Hitler was sentenced to five years’ imprisonment, of which he served only nine months, just long enough to dictate to Rudolf Hess (an old comrade of Hitler’s regiment) the text of his political manifesto,
Mein Kampf
. The long-term consequences of the trial had a deeper significance. In his closing speech to the court, a speech reported throughout Germany and which made him, for the first time in his career as a demagogue, a national figure, Hitler expressed his relief that it was the police and not the
Reichswehr
, the army, which had fired on him and the
Kampfbund
. ‘The
Reichswehr
’, he said, ‘stands as untarnished as before. One day the hour will come when the
Reichswehr
will stand at our side, officers and men. . . . The army we have formed is growing from day to day. . . . I nourish the proud hope that one day the hour will come when these rough companies will grow to battalions, the battalions to regiments, the regiments to divisions, that the old cockade will be taken from the mud, that the old flags will wave again, that there will be a reconciliation at the last great divine judgement which we are prepared to face.’

This was both Hitler’s public and his private verdict on his
Putsch
tactics. ‘We never thought to carry through a revolt against the army,’ he disclosed at Munich in 1933. ‘It was
with it
we believed we should succeed.’ After the Munich
Putsch
he changed tactics decisively. He never again undertook illegal action against the state but sought instead to achieve power constitutionally through the ballot box. The point of seeking power, however, though he did not disclose this aim publicly, was to acquire constitutional command of the army and the War Ministry and budgetary authority to vote military credits for rearmament. In the ten years that followed the failure of the
Putsch
Hitler did nothing to discourage the growth of the SA, which on the eve of his seizure of power in 1933 had reached a strength of 400,000, four times the size of the
Reichswehr
. Nor did he discourage the stormtroopers from believing that, when the day came, they would put off their brown, put on field-grey and emerge as soldiers of the ‘National Army’ he had promised to bring into being in Munich in 1923. He did, however, take care to see that the SA was kept under strict discipline, that its boasts of being ready to seize power by force were silenced, that its pretensions to be a replacement rather than a reinforcement for the
Reichswehr
were deflated, and that its leaders were dissuaded from representing themselves as military rather than political figures. After Munich Hitler remained in no doubt that the generals, with their creed of
Überparteilichkeit
(‘being above party’), were a power in the land he could not afford to alienate.

Economic crisis had provided Hitler with a false opportunity in 1923. Economic crisis again provided him with opportunity in 1930, and between then and his assumption of the German chancellorship in January 1933 he used it with discreet and consummate skill. In the six years after the catastrophic inflation of 1923, Germany had made a good recovery. The currency had been stabilised, credit restored, industry revitalised and unemployment successfully contained. The sudden world crisis of 1929, which destroyed credit across central Europe, brought much of that achievement to naught. Unemployment in Germany, a nation of 60 million people, rose from 1,320,000 in September 1929 to 3 million a year later, 4.5 million the year after that and over 6 million in the first two months of 1932. Hardship once again spread through the land and the moderate parties of the Weimar Republic, committed to orthodox, pre-Keynesian policies of budget balancing, could find no means to redress it. The parties of the extreme right and left benefited accordingly at the parliamentary elections called as one government after another collapsed under the pressure of events. In the election of September 1930 the Nazi Party polled 18.3 per cent of the vote, but in July 1932 it increased its share to 37.3 per cent, winning 230 seats and becoming the largest party in the Reichstag. In the words of Alan Bullock, ‘with a voting strength of 13,700,000 electors, a party membership of over a million and a private army of 400,000 SA and SS . . . [Hitler] was the most powerful political leader in Germany, knocking on the doors of the Chancellery at the head of the most powerful political party Germany had ever seen.’ The parallel success of the Communist Party positively reinforced Hitler’s appeal to those voters who were terrified by the spectre of Bolshevism, which they believed had been laid by the violent defeat of the Spartacists in 1919; the Communist Party enormously increased its support in 1930 and again in 1932, when it won 6 million votes and a hundred seats.

The communists too had their private army, the Red Front, which fought street battles with the SA that frequently ended in death. Nazi street violence tainted the Nazi cause; communist street violence – which in July 1932 alone caused the deaths of thirty-eight Nazis and thirty communists – raised the prospect of communist revolution. Though that could not win Hitler a parliamentary majority – which he failed to achieve by 6.2 per cent even after the seizure of power in 1933 – it could and did frighten the moderate politicians into accepting Hitler as a counterweight who might be used to offset revolutionary with merely radical extremism, as they believed Nazism to be. In January 1933, after a number of makeshift ministries had fallen, President Paul von Hindenburg, the war hero, was advised by his ministers to offer Hitler the chancellorship. On 30 January he was installed.

What followed was one of the most remarkable and complete economic, political and military revolutions ever carried through by one man in a comparable space of time. Between 30 January 1933 and 7 March 1936 he effectively restored German prosperity, destroyed not only opposition but also the possibility of opposition to his rule, re-created, in a spectacularly expanded German army, the principal symbol of the nation’s pride in itself, and used this force to abrogate the oppressive treaties which defeat had imposed on the nation while he was still a humble soldier. He had luck, notably in the timely death of Hindenburg in August 1934, and in the incendiary attack on the Reichstag building in February 1933. The Reichstag fire allowed him to conjure the fiction of a communist threat to parliamentary institutions, and so panic the moderates into voting with the Nazis for a suspension of parliamentary powers: the Enabling Bill they enacted conferred on Hitler the right to pass binding laws by appending his signature to the necessary document. Hindenburg’s death opened the way for him to combine the office of the presidency with his own as Chancellor under the title of Führer, a position in which he exercised the authority of both head of government and head of state. But Hitler did not succeed between 1933 and 1936 purely by luck. His economic policy was not based on theory, certainly not Keynesian theory; but it amounted to a programme of deficit budgeting, state investment in public works and state-guaranteed industrial re-equipment of which Keynes would have approved. This was accompanied by a calculated destruction of the trade-union movement, which removed at a blow all restrictions on free movement of labour between jobs and workplaces, and the effect on unemployment was startling: between January 1933 and December 1934 the number of unemployed declined by more than half, many of the 3 million new workers finding jobs in the construction of the magnificent network of motorways (
Autobahnen
) which were the first outward symbol of the Nazi economic miracle.

Moreover, he succeeded in his plan to rearm Germany not by rushing bullheaded at the disabling clauses of the Versailles Treaty but rather by waiting until the victor nations gave him pretext. Thus he did not announce the reintroduction of conscription until March 1935, when the French, beset as before the First World War by a falling birth-rate, themselves announced that they were doubling the length of their conscripts’ military service. Hitler was able to represent this move as a threat to German security which justified the enlargement of the 100,000-man army; on 17 March he also announced the creation of an air force – another breach of the Versailles Treaty. Even so he blurred his intentions by offering France a pact which would limit the size of his army to 300,000 men and that of his new air force to 50 per cent of hers. France’s refusal permitted him to fix larger totals.

The reintroduction of conscription gave him by 1936 an army with a skeleton strength of thirty-six divisions, a fivefold increase from the seven of the
Reichswehr
. Few were as yet fully equipped or manned, and, as his generals warned him, he certainly lacked the strength to resist any armed reaction to his anti-Versailles policies. In seeking to realise his deeply held ambition to remilitarise the Rhineland, therefore, he waited once again until he could find the semblance of a legal cause, which he claimed to see in the French parliament’s ratification of a mutual-assistance pact with the Soviet Union in March 1936. Since the pact bound France to take action against Germany in the event of German aggression against the USSR, Hitler was able to represent it as a unilateral violation of the provision that France would never make war on Germany except by resolution of the League of Nations – a creation of Versailles from which he had withdrawn in 1933 – and to allege that such a violation justified his taking measures to improve Germany’s defence of its frontier with France. On 7 March 1936 he accordingly ordered the reoccupation of the Rhineland, where no German soldier had been stationed since November 1918, correctly confident that the French would not move to expel the force he sent, even though it numbered not even one division but a mere three battalions.