A Patriot's History of the Modern World (48 page)

While Hitler's interference did saddle the development of some strategic Luftwaffe planes and weaponry, his support nonetheless made them the most aggressive arm when it came to mobilizing for war. Ratcheted up on Christmas Day, 1936, by Herman Göring, after years of preliminary development, the Luftwaffe reestablished its power quickly, making a mockery of Versailles's ban on German military aviation. For the next four years, the Luftwaffe enjoyed unrestricted budgets, consuming much of the Four Year Plan introduced in October 1936 that sucked up a quarter of all investment in the German economy. Among other goals, it placed the German economy on a timetable to be fit for war in four years; have the German army operational within the same time span; and to reject devaluation of the
money. But of all the armed forces, the Luftwaffe was to receive special attention when it came to resources, and this objective immediately clashed with daunting shortages of rubber, iron ore, steel, and particularly oil, which were obtained only in Romania, Czechoslovakia, and Russia. Without “entry into foreign states or the attack and seizure of foreign property,” Hitler noted in May 1939, “the solution to [the problem of raw materials] is not possible.”
⁷⁰
None of these ideas were new. Prior to World War I Germans had lusted for French ores, sought iron in Sweden and Austria, and looked toward the east to supply all foodstuffs at some future point. What had changed was Hitler's willingness to risk national existence to achieve a high standard of living (which up to that point had been necessary to mobilize civilian support for military expansion), and his unwillingness to tamper with that standard of living until well into World War II. Relentlessly, then, Germany's insufficiency in raw materials gnawed at it, driving it toward martial conclusions. Having decided that the free market would not produce the desired outcome, Hitler set himself on a course of deceit and violence—but then again, many argue that was his intended path from the beginning.

Hindsight seems to make clear Hitler's intentions. It is worth considering, though, that most of his actions were to be expected, not only in Europe, but in the United States as well. Hitler put his young men into his army, Roosevelt and Stalin theirs into massive civilian work camps—the incentives differed, but the programs themselves, and their intention of full employment, looked remarkably similar. Did French socialism differ significantly? Were not leaders everywhere threatening, bullying, and cajoling private industry with little complaint from the putative watchdog press? Through the prism of nearly universal and outrageous soft socialism of New Deal America and western European governments and the hard communism of Stalin, Hitler's policies appeared, indeed, less radical than those of the Soviets. If Western intellectuals had praised Stalin and brushed off his murder and thuggery, why would they have raised any eyebrows to Hitler?

At any rate, Hitler seemed uncaring about the Western press. He marched ahead with his agenda. Whatever could not be obtained through diplomacy, trickery, and bluster would necessitate war with France and Britain, and to that end Hitler had already foolishly ordered an increase in naval construction, swelling spending on the Kriegsmarine (German Navy) to challenge Britain by 1939. A wary Britain and France responded to this
buildup, France doubling her military budget in 1938 and Britain launching a new aircraft production program that would add twelve thousand combat planes to the RAF by 1940. From 1933 to 1939 the “democracies” outspent Germany, Japan, and Italy by 1.5 to 1.
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And whereas Britain and America could continue to ramp up their naval spending dramatically, such a level of expenditures on ships was unsustainable for Germany. Even later, after the 1939 “Pact of Steel” between Germany and Italy potentially supplemented the Nazi fleet with numerous warships from the Italian fleet, Germany never came close to challenging Britain or America in the Atlantic. In the end, monies poured into shipbuilding, except for the invasion of Norway and submarines, were thrown away.

In May 1938 Hitler ordered the economy to shift into wartime production as its primary objective. Civilian needs would take a backseat to the military, the exception being the
Volkswagen
, Hitler's pet project to rival the productive genius of Henry Ford. A marketing plan was developed that allowed customers to set up a no-interest-paying bank account (the interest went to the bank), and when they had a balance of 750 Reichsmarks, they could order a Volkswagen. The goal was to achieve a price of 990 Reichsmarks per auto, but to meet that target, the Porsche factory had to produce 450,000 cars per year, or more than twice the entire German auto industry at the time. In the event, all the cars produced went to Reich officials until the factory was converted into military production. Except for military and governmental traffic the
Autobahns
saw little use, and Hitler's “people's car” never came close to reality.
⁷²
In contrast, with no government support at all, Henry Ford had succeeded in producing a car for the average American, while the Volkswagen, funded and marketed heavily by the government, never sold a single car to a civilian until long after the war.

Mobilization brought new financial pressures on the Third Reich, and escalating taxes had to be avoided to retain the support of the German middle class and industrialists. Citizens wishing to leave Germany had already been subjected to a “flight tax” in 1931, which by 1938—as Jews grew more desperate to leave—became a major source of revenue. Jews were fortunate to escape with 8 percent of their assets intact, and from 1938 to 1940 brought in almost 850 million Reichsmarks to the Nazi government, or about 5 percent of the Reich's total income. Heightened persecution of Jews also brought unforeseen economic dislocations.
Kristallnacht
, a night of attacks against Jews and their property in November 1938 after a Jew assassinated a Nazi official in France, for example, cost the government three
million Reichsmarks for clean-up expenses, and Jews had to rebuild their houses at their own cost and pay an “atonement fee” that amounted to a billion Reichsmarks.

News of Nazi violence against Jews began to reach other nations on a regular basis, permanently turning some in the upper echelon of the British government against Germany, such as Britain's formerly appeasement-oriented foreign secretary, Lord Halifax. It generated a storm of protest in the United States, leading Roosevelt to recall the American ambassador from Germany, but otherwise taking no punitive action. Of course, this only served to reinforce in Hitler's mind the fact that “international Jewry” was headquartered in the United States and to harden his long-term expectation of an inevitable war with America.

Eventually, after the invasion of Poland in September 1939, Hitler drafted a memo to the commander-in-chief of the German army, General Walther von Brauchitsch, and his chief of staff, Franz Halder, providing his strategic assessment of a western war, which he insisted needed to begin immediately because of the expected intervention of the United States. “Because of its neutrality laws, America is
not yet
dangerous to us,” he wrote a few weeks later. While the “reinforcement of our enemies by America is
not yet
significant,” he noted, it soon would be, and although at that time the situation was “propitious, in six months, however, it may not be.”
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Fritz Todt, the Reich minister for armaments and munitions, told General Georg Thomas, head of the Wehrmacht's Defense Economy and Armaments Office, that the “Fuehrer has again emphasized energetically that everything is to be done so that the war [against England and France] can be ended in 1940 with a great military victory. From 1941 onwards, time works against us (USA-potential).”
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Even after the Battle of Britain in the fall of 1940—with a massive invasion of the USSR looming before them in May of the next year—Luftwaffe leadership focused as much on “the industrial prerequisites for the coming war with Britain and America as on the imminent invasion of the Soviet Union.”
⁷⁵
As early as July 1940 after the fall of France, Hitler instructed the high command to “consider seriously the Russian and
American
question (emphasis ours),” indicating that one full year before invading Russia, Hitler was already planning for a war against both the USSR and the United States.
⁷⁶

Some German opponents of Hitler based their positions on the fear that America would quickly enter a European war. General Ludwig Beck, chief of the German General Staff from 1935 to 1938, opposed a war from
the beginning and enlisted Graf Schwerin von Krosigk, the finance minister of the Reich, to prepare such a memo for Hitler in June 1938. Krosigk warned of the “soon-expected active participation of the United States of America in the war,” calling it the British “trump card.”
⁷⁷
Thus, at an early stage, the stars were aligning in Germany for an eventual conflict with the United States. America's alliance with Britain, combined with (from Hitler's perspective) the manipulation of Roosevelt's government by a Jewish cabal and the realities of Allied rearmament, all meant that for Germany, the sooner war came, the better. If Germany acted quickly enough, Britain and possibly the Bolshevik Soviet Union could be knocked out before American power might be brought to bear.

Diplomatic Failure of Will

America's absence left the economically distressed, wobbling, and weak-willed European democracies to deal with the aggressive dictator. None of the Western allies wanted the burden of military expenditures added on top of existing public works and socialist outlays. Diplomatic gymnastics were employed to concoct alliances that would substitute fantasies of mutual support for genuine martial power: France and the Italians discussed military cooperation if Hitler invaded Austria, and the “Little Entente” of Yugoslavia, Romania, and Czechoslovakia, backed by France, seemed to offer hope of uniting to stop Hitler in the East. Each of these alliances collapsed under clever negotiating by German diplomats or as a result of economic pressures brought by the Third Reich. Indeed, it did not take long for Mussolini to abandon France and throw in with Hitler.

When local Nazis killed Austrian chancellor Engelbert Dollfuss in his office, reaction by the democracies was swift in condemning the assassination and threatening action, and Mussolini actually moved four divisions to the Austrian border to support the Austrian army in the event of an invasion from Germany. Though not yet ready to provoke armed confrontation, Hitler publicly announced the following March that the German army had already expanded to more than double the size permitted by the Versailles Treaty, and soon cast aside all secrecy surrounding the Luftwaffe. Hitler also admitted Germany's treaty-busting naval expansion. Shocked emissaries from France, Italy, and Britain quickly met at Stresa, Italy, in April 1935 to present a united front and denounce Germany's military buildup. Like League protests, the Stresa Front lacked any teeth whatsoever, pledged no specifics, and was washed away by Hitler's May 1935
speech proclaiming that Germany “wants peace and desires peace.” Western papers, such as the London
Times
, accepted Hitler's words at face value, saying they showed his “sincerity and peaceful intentions.”
⁷⁸
Britain foolishly leaped into negotiations to “limit” the German fleet through the Anglo-German Naval Agreement, which “held” the Nazis to 35 percent of the Royal Navy's power—a ceiling that the Germans would never reach. The agreement represented a diplomatic coup for Hitler that scrapped the last remnants of Versailles between Britain and Germany, and created a wedge between Britain, Italy, and Japan.

At every critical point, comprehensive resistance to Hitler foundered on confusion about his character and goals. There was the parade of British elites who trekked into Germany as apologists for Hitler's positions, foremost among them David Lloyd George and Neville Chamberlain. To them, Hitler seemed rational and sane, just another politician doing his best for his people. British ambassador Nevile Henderson even proposed giving Germany certain African territories that belonged to Belgium and Portugal, though he was careful to exclude British territories in Africa from discussions.
⁷⁹
His 1939 book,
Failure of a Mission,
offers an interesting study in delusion. “For two years I hoped against hope that the Nazi revolution, having run its course, would revert to a normal and civilized conduct of internal and international life,” he stated. “Even today I do not regret having tried to believe in Germany's honor and good sense.”
⁸⁰
The Western press was generally helpful to the Nazis, and sympathizers such as Geoffrey Dawson, editor of the
Times
of London, wrote a correspondent in Germany in 1937, “I do my utmost, night after night, to keep out of the paper anything that might hurt [German] sensibilities.”
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Of course, German colonies in Africa—should they have actually been transferred—would have left Hitler with the ever-present problem of supply lines being subject to interdiction by the British Royal Navy. A more rational sphere of influence—because it did not involve confronting the Royal Navy, but was well within range of the Luftwaffe—was eastern Europe and the Balkans, and leaders in those states knew it. If they didn't, British diplomats were quick to remind them: in 1938, Romania's King Carol II was bluntly informed that German economic dominance of the region was “inevitable” and was a “German monopoly field.”
⁸²
Talk of that kind unnerved Mussolini, who scrambled all the more frantically to form a “Third Europe” coalition of Yugoslavia, Hungary, Poland, Romania, and Italy.

The Dictator's Ball

Italy had remained quite independent from German ambitions throughout most of the 1930s, finally throwing in with Hitler in the May 1939 “Pact of Steel.” The traditional view that Hitler and Mussolini were bosom buddies was accurate only after the Munich Agreement of September 1938, where the Western allies handed over the Czech Sudetenland to Germany without a fight. Mussolini, always alert to who was gaining and losing power, sized up the allies as weak. Until that time, however, the Italians flitted incessantly on the fringes of various alliances with Britain, France, Czechoslovakia, and other states.