The Second World War (7 page)

Although Hitler’s generals had been apprehensive about the Rhineland adventure, they were not fundamentally disposed to argue with his diplomatic or strategic judgements, since the armed forces, among all the other institutions of state, had up to that moment been the principal beneficiaries of the National Socialist revolution. They had been spared
Gleichschaltung
, the process by which every organ of German life was brought directly under Nazi control; moreover, the leaders of the body which had threatened them with
Gleichschaltung
, the SA, had been summarily and brutally killed in June 1934. Hitler’s half-formulated promise that the stormtroopers would one day become soldiers of the new Germany had been made good only in the sense that after March 1935 the younger of them received their call-up papers and found themselves embodied in the Wehrmacht as conscripts among hundreds of thousands of others who had never worn the brown uniform. The armed forces had also benefited more generously than any other body from the programme of state investment. Tanks and aeroplanes – enough to equip a Panzer force of six divisions (soon to be raised to ten) and a Luftwaffe of 2000 combat aircraft – were now coming out of the new armaments factories in a steady stream. The design work which underlay their development had been done in Russia during the brief period of Russo-German friendship in the 1920s. In an ill-calculated act of appeasement in 1935 the British Admiralty had agreed that the German navy should also be partially liberated from the provisions of the Versailles Treaty, and it had begun to acquire capital ships and even U-boats, in numbers equivalent to 33 and 60 per cent respectively of the Royal Navy’s fleets. This material largesse enormously enhanced the institutional
amour propre
of the Wehrmacht which, after fifteen years in which it had starved for both men and equipment, suddenly found itself advanced to the front rank of the armed forces of Europe, almost as strong as the largest and better armed than any. Professionally, moreover, Hitler’s rearmament programme transformed the career prospects of individual officers: in 1933 the average age of a colonel was fifty-six; by 1937 it had been reduced to thirty-nine, while many in the
Reichswehr
who had reconciled themselves to retirement found themselves by 1937 commanding regiments, brigades, even divisions.

Hitler’s seduction of his professional officers was as calculated as any other part of his programme, though he rightly attached more importance to it than the rest. His attitude to the SA had always been duplicitous; though he had needed and been glad to use the political fighting force it had given him in the ‘time of struggle’ before 1933, he was himself too much the true veteran, the seasoned ‘front fighter’, to reckon its street bullies proper military material. Hitler was, in many respects, a military snob – and with reason: he had fought in the First World War from beginning to end, suffered wounds and won a high decoration for bravery. The army he wished to re-create would be a model of the one in which he had served, not a disorderly political militia reclothed in field-grey. The Blood Purge of June 1934, when Hitler organised the murder of Röhm and the rest of the paramilitary radicals who had thought to leap to general’s rank by political hopscotch, had ensured that he had his way. One consequence of the purge of the SA was the rise of the rival military arm of the Nazi Party – the blackshirted
Schutzstaffel
(SS), a highly disciplined elite corps led by Heinrich Himmler.

Although the generals had been careful to know nothing of the 1934 murders, the results had none the less put Hitler high in their favour; but the reverse was not the case. There was a strict limit to Hitler’s military snobbery. He was a combat snob, not a worshipper of rank or title. As he well knew, many of the Wehrmacht’s elite, the Great General Staff officers who were now senior commanders, had not fought at the front in the First World War, their brains being thought too valuable to be risked beyond headquarters. Their military as well as their social
hauteur
therefore grated with him. One of the innumerable rancours that he nursed dated back to the Munich trial, when General von Lossow, his fainthearted ally, had testified that he regarded him as no more than ‘a political drummer boy’; the wound had been salted by the state prosecutor’s statement that the drummer boy had ‘allowed himself to be carried beyond the position assigned to him’. It was Hitler who now assigned positions everywhere – except within the army, which retained control of its own promotion structure. However, since the generals continued to choose officers as timorous as they themselves had been over the remilitarisation of the Rhineland, Hitler decided to end the system. He wanted a war army, led by commanders determined to take revenge on the victors of 1918 and their creature states erected on the back of Germany’s defeat.

Werner von Fritsch, the army commander-in-chief, was a particular bugbear among the fainthearts; in November 1937 he sought a private interview with Hitler to warn against policies that might provoke war. Two months later, the indiscreet remarriage of the Minister of War, General Werner von Blomberg, provided Hitler with an opportunity to get rid of both men: Blomberg’s young bride was discovered to have been a prostitute; while the unmarried Fritsch, his obvious successor, fell speechless when confronted by trumped-up charges of homosexual behaviour. Their enforced retirement did not immediately bring him generals of the bellicose temper he wanted; but it provided him with the pretext to establish a new supra-service command in place of the War Ministry, the
Oberkommando der Wehrmacht
(OKW), of which Hitler made himself the head, and the OKW was given responsibility for the highest level of strategic planning. This was a crucial move, for 1938 was to be the year in which Hitler moved from rearmament to the diplomatic offensive. He had already outlined his intentions to his service commanders on 5 November 1937, when he had argued that Britain and France were unlikely to oppose with military force German moves to strengthen its military position in the east. His first priority was to take advantage of the enthusiasm among German nationalists in Austria for union (
Anschluss
) with the Reich; his second was to attempt the annexation of the German-speaking parts of Czechoslovakia, the Sudetenland. Further, he hoped that Italy, Austria’s protector, would shortly be brought to Germany’s side by a formal alliance with Mussolini, his fellow dictator. Poland, on which he had longer-term designs, he believed would be immobilised by the speed of Germany’s action.

In November 1937 Mussolini did indeed accept a German alliance, the Anti-Comintern Pact against the Soviet Union (originally signed by Germany and Japan a year earlier), thus reinforcing the ‘Rome-Berlin Axis’ agreement of October 1936. By March 1938 Hitler felt free to act against Austria. He first demanded that Austrian Nazis should be installed in key government posts. When Kurt von Schuschnigg, the Austrian Chancellor, refused, Arthur Seyss-Inquart, the Austrian Nazi leader, was instructed to declare himself the head of a provisional government and request German intervention. On 12 March German troops marched in,
Anschluss
was declared the following day, and on 14 March Hitler made a triumphal entry into Vienna, where he had spent his unhappy and aimless youth. Britain and France protested but did no more. Their inactivity was the confirmation Hitler needed that he could safely proceed to his diplomatic offensive against Czechoslovakia. In April he ordered OKW to prepare plans for a military operation, meanwhile instructing the Nazi groups among the Sudetenland Germans to sustain demands for secession. In August he fixed October as the date for military action and on 12 September, when he delivered a fiery anti-Czech speech at Nuremberg, German troops moved to the frontier.

This ‘Czech crisis’ seemed to threaten war, even though it was not clear who would fight it. The Czechs were not powerful enough to resist the rearmed Wehrmacht without help, but the Red Army, the only nearby source of assistance, could come to their aid only by crossing Polish territory (or Romanian, but the Romanians were pro-German), a manoeuvre which the Poles, with their deep hostility to and well-founded suspicion of the Russians, were not disposed to permit. The British and the French were also disinclined to see Russia intervening in central Europe and, though France had a treaty with Czechoslovakia, and both Britain and France recognised that honour and prudence demanded that they should not allow Czechoslovakia to be dismembered, they could see no way of protecting her except by military action of their own in the west, from which government and people in both countries shrank. Neither had yet modernised their forces, though they had begun reluctantly to rearm; more to the point, neither had yet developed the will to back protest with force, as was lamentably demonstrated by their succession of failures to implement collective action against aggressors through the League of Nations machinery – against Japan for its aggression in Manchuria in 1931 and in China in 1937, against Italy for its aggression against Ethiopia in 1936. Edouard Daladier and Neville Chamberlain, the French and British Prime Ministers, therefore counselled President Eduard Beneš of Czechoslovakia to acquiesce in Hitler’s demands, even though the cession of the Sudetenland meant the cession also of the country’s frontier fortifications; once surrendered, Czechoslovakia would have no protection whatsoever against further German demands. Nevertheless Benesβ felt obliged to agree, since the Western democracies would not stand by him. The crisis seemed to be settled, but on 22 September Hitler decided to harden his terms. Instead of waiting for an international commission to delimit the revised frontier, he demanded the Sudetenland at once. It was this turning of the screw which provoked the crisis called ‘Munich’, since it was there that Chamberlain and Daladier went to treat with Hitler again on 29-30 September, in a series of craven meetings that conceded him even more than he had initially demanded.

Munich, it is generally said, marked ‘the end of appeasement’; certainly it sent Daladier and Chamberlain home, superficially relieved, but convinced – Chamberlain more strongly than Daladier – that rearmament must henceforth proceed apace. More accurately, however, Munich marked the moment when Hitler abandoned caution in his campaign of aggressive diplomacy and began to take the risks which would stiffen the will of the Western democracies to meet challenge with firm response and eventually force with force. The turning-point was Hitler’s treatment of browbeaten Czechoslovakia. Having seized the Sudetenland only six months before, on 11 March 1939 he arranged for the pro-German separatist party in the Slovakian half of what remained of the country to announce their secession and request that he become their protector. When the new Czech President, Emil Hacha, arrived in Berlin to protest, he was physically bullied into requesting a German protectorate over the whole of Czechoslovakia. The following day, 15 March, German troops marched into Prague just in time to form a guard of honour and a protective screen for Hitler when he entered the city on their heels.

The rape of Czechoslovakia drove the democracies to act. The French cabinet agreed that when Hitler next moved he must be stopped. On 17 March Chamberlain publicly announced that if there were further attacks on small states Britain would resist ‘to the utmost of its power’, a clear warning that Hitler now risked war. Hitler did not believe or did not fear the threat. Since January he had been menacing Poland, to which belonged the largest slice of territory that had been German before 1918, in particular the ‘corridor’ which divided East Prussia and the German-speaking Free City of Danzig from the Reich heartland. The Poles doggedly resisted his threats and continued to do so even when on 23 March, as an earnest of intentions, he occupied the port of Memel, a former League of Nations territory on Poland’s border which had been German until 1918. They were chiefly sustained by the knowledge that Britain and France were now preparing to extend them a guarantee of protection; and on 31 March, eight days after publicly announcing that they would defend Belgium, Holland or Switzerland against attack, Britain and France issued a joint declaration guaranteeing the independence of Poland. Two weeks later, on 13 April, to demonstrate the general hardening of their attitude, they issued similar guarantees to Romania and Greece after Mussolini, in imitation of Hitler, annexed Albania.

Poland, however, was the focus of the growing crisis, which France and Britain now hoped best to solve by drawing the Soviet Union into a protective agreement, even though they knew the Poles were reluctant to accept any help from their traditional enemy. The French and British were themselves mistrustful of the Soviets, besides harbouring a deep dislike of their political system, feelings which were exactly reciprocated. Without Polish resistance, however, an agreement might have been reached; but the Poles adamantly refused to contemplate the Red Army operating on their soil, since they rightly suspected that the Russians desired to annex large parts of Polish territory and might hold these under occupation as their reward for intervention. The British and French could offer Stalin no compensatory inducement to act with them in a hypothetical crisis; during the summer of 1939 the negotiations between the Western democracies and Stalin hung fire.

Hitler, on the other hand, could offer powerfully tempting inducements. He too had been negotiating desultorily with Stalin during the spring and summer, encouraged by hints that Russia had no taste for risking war, even over the future of a country as important to the security of its western border as Poland. The discussions seemed to make no progress, since neither side would reveal its hand. Then in late July Hitler decided to gamble with a thinly veiled offer to let Stalin take a slice of eastern Poland if he agreed not to impede a German invasion of the country from the west. The Russians responded with keen interest and on 22 August the two Foreign Ministers, Molotov and Ribbentrop, signed a nonaggression pact in Moscow. Its secret clauses effectively permitted the Soviet Union, in the event of a German-Polish war, to annex eastern Poland up to the line of the Vistula and the Baltic states of Latvia, Lithuania and Estonia.