The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich: A History of Nazi Germany (43 page)

Roehm expressed the deep sense of frustration in the ranks of the storm troopers in a speech to fifteen thousand S.A. officers in the Sportpalast in Berlin on November 5, 1933. “One often hears … that the S.A. had lost any reason for existence,” he said, warning that it had not. But Hitler was adamant. “The relation of the S.A. to the Army,” he had warned at Bad Godesberg on August 19, “must be the same as that of the political leadership.” And on September 23 at
Nuremberg
he spoke out even more clearly:

Some time before this, Hitler had secretly given the armed forces assurances which had brought many of the higher officers to his side. On February 2, 1933, three days after assuming office, he had made a two-hour address to the top generals and admirals at the home of General von
Hammerstein
, the Army Commander in Chief. Admiral Erich Raeder revealed at Nuremberg the tenor of this first meeting of the Nazi Chancellor with the officer corps.
²²
Hitler, he said, freed the military elite from its fears that the armed services might be called upon to take part in a civil war and promised that the Army and Navy could now devote themselves unhindered to the main task of quickly rearming the new Germany. Admiral Raeder admitted that he was highly pleased at the prospect of a new Navy, and General von Blomberg, whose hasty assumption of the office of Minister of Defense on January 30, 1933, had stamped out any temptation on the part of the Army to revolt against Hitler’s becoming
Chancellor, declared later in his unpublished memoirs that the Fuehrer opened up “a field of activities holding great possibilities for the future.”

Further to augment the enthusiasm of the military leaders Hitler created, as early as April 4, the Reich Defense Council to spur a new and secret rearmament program. Three months later, on July 20, the Chancellor promulgated a new Army Law, abolishing the jurisdiction of the civil courts over the military and doing away with the elected representation of the rank and file, thus restoring to the officer corps its ancient military prerogatives. A good many generals and admirals began to see the Nazi revolution in a different and more favorable light.

As a sop to Roehm, Hitler named him—along with
Rudolf Hess
, the deputy leader of the party—a member of the cabinet on December 1 and on New Year’s Day, 1934, addressed to the S.A. chief a warm and friendly letter. While reiterating that “the Army has to guarantee the protection of the nation against the world beyond our frontiers,” he acknowledged that “the task of the S.A. is to secure the victory of the National Socialist Revolution and the existence of the National Socialist State” and that the success of the S.A. had been “primarily due” to Roehm. The letter concluded:

“It is no victory, for the enemies were lacking,” observed Oswald Spengler in commenting on how easily Hitler had conquered and Nazified Germany in 1933. “This seizure of power—” the author of
The Decline of the West
wrote early in the year, “it is with misgiving that I see it celebrated each day with so much noise. It would be better to save that for a day of real and definitive successes, that is, in the foreign field. There are no others.”
²⁴

The philosopher-historian, who for a brief moment was an idol of the Nazis until a mutual disenchantment set in, was unduly impatient. Hitler
had to conquer Germany before he could set out to conquer the world. But once his German opponents were liquidated—or had liquidated themselves—he lost no time in turning to what had always interested him the most: foreign affairs.

Germany’s position in the world in the spring of 1933 could hardly have been worse. The Third Reich was diplomatically isolated and militarily impotent. The whole world had been revolted by Nazi excesses, especially the persecution of the Jews. Germany’s neighbors, in particular France and
Poland
, were hostile and suspicious, and as early as March 1933, following a Polish military demonstration in Danzig, Marshal Pilsudski suggested to the French the desirability of a joint preventive war against Germany. Even Mussolini, for all his outward pose of welcoming the advent of a second fascist power, had not in fact been enthusiastic about Hitler’s coming to power. The Fuehrer of a country potentially so much stronger than Italy might soon put the Duce in the shade. A rabidly Pan-German Reich would have designs on Austria and the Balkans, where the Italian dictator had already staked out his claims. The hostility toward Nazi Germany of the
Soviet Union
, which had been republican Germany’s one friend in the years since 1921, was obvious. The Third Reich was indeed friendless in a hostile world. And it was disarmed, or relatively so in comparison with its highly armed neighbors.

The immediate strategy and tactics of Hitler’s foreign policy therefore were dictated by the hard realities of Germany’s weak and isolated position. But, ironically, this situation also provided natural goals which corresponded to his own deepest desires and those of the vast majority of the German people: to get rid of the shackles of Versailles without provoking sanctions, to rearm without risking war. Only when he had achieved these dual short-term goals would he have the freedom and the military power to pursue the long-term diplomacy whose aims and methods he had set down so frankly and in such detail in
Mein Kampf
.

The first thing to do, obviously, was to confound Germany’s adversaries in Europe by preaching disarmament and peace and to keep a sharp eye for a weakness in their collective armor. On May 17, 1933, before the Reichstag, Hitler delivered his “Peace Speech,” one of the greatest of his career, a masterpiece of deceptive propaganda that deeply moved the German people and unified them behind him and which made a profound and favorable impression on the outside world. The day before, President Roosevelt had sent a ringing message to the chiefs of state of forty-four nations outlining the plans and hopes of the United States for disarmament and peace and calling for the abolition of all offensive weapons—bombers, tanks and mobile heavy artillery. Hitler was quick to take up the President’s challenge and to make the most of it.

There was much else in the speech, whose moderateness and profession of love for peace pleasantly surprised an uneasy world. Germany did not want war. War was “unlimited madness.” It would “cause the collapse of the present social and political order.” Nazi Germany had no wish to “Germanize” other peoples. “The mentality of the last century, which led people to think that they would make Germans out of Poles and Frenchmen, is alien to us … Frenchmen, Poles and others are our neighbors, and we know that no event that is historically conceivable can change this reality.”

There was one warning. Germany demanded equality of treatment with all other nations, especially in armaments. If this was not to be obtained, Germany would prefer to withdraw from both the Disarmament Conference and the
League of Nations
.

The warning was forgotten amid the general rejoicing throughout the Western world at Hitler’s unexpected reasonableness. The
Times
of London agreed that Hitler’s claim for equality was “irrefutable.” The
Daily Herald
of London, official organ of the Labor Party, demanded that Hitler be taken at his word. The conservative weekly
Spectator
of London concluded that Hitler had grasped the hand of Roosevelt and that this gesture provided new hope for a tormented world. In Washington the President’s secretary was quoted by the official German news bureau as saying, “The President was enthusiastic at Hitler’s acceptance of his proposals.”

From the Nazi firebrand dictator had come not brutal threats, as so many had expected, but sweetness and light. The world was enchanted. And in the Reichstag even the Socialists’ deputies, those who were not in jail or in exile, voted without dissent to make the assembly’s approval of Hitler’s foreign policy declaration unanimous.

But Hitler’s warning was not an empty one, and when it became clear early in October that the Allies would insist on an interval of eight years to bring their armaments down to Germany’s level, he abruptly announced on October 14 that, denied equality of rights by the other powers at Geneva, Germany was immediately withdrawing from the Disarmament Conference and from the League of Nations. At the same time he took three other steps: He dissolved the Reichstag, announced that he would submit his decision to leave Geneva to a national plebiscite and ordered General von Blomberg, the Minister of Defense, to issue secret directives to the armed forces to resist an armed attack should the League resort to sanctions.
²⁵

This precipitate action revealed the hollowness of the Hitler conciliatory speech in the spring. It was Hitler’s first open gamble in foreign affairs. It meant that from now on Nazi Germany intended to rearm itself in defiance of any disarmament agreement and of Versailles. This was a calculated risk—also the first of many—and Blomberg’s secret directive to the Army and Navy, which came to light at Nuremberg, reveals not only that Hitler gambled with the possibility of sanctions but that Germany’s position would have been hopeless had they been applied.
^*
In the West against France and in the East against
Poland
and Czechoslovakia, the directive laid down definite defense lines which the German forces were ordered “to hold as long as possible.” It is obvious from Blomberg’s orders that the German generals, at least, had no illusions that the defenses of the Reich could be held for any time at all.

This, then, was the first of many crises over a period that would extend for three years—until after the Germans reoccupied the demilitarized left bank of the Rhine in 1936—when the Allies could have applied sanctions, not for Hitler’s leaving the Disarmament Conference and the League but for violations of the disarmament provisions of Versailles which had been going on in Germany for at least two years, even before Hitler. That the Allies at this time could easily have overwhelmed Germany is as certain as it is that such an action would have brought the end of the Third Reich in the very year of its birth. But part of the genius of this one-time Austrian waif was that for a long time he knew the mettle of his foreign adversaries as expertly and as uncannily as he had sized up that of his opponents at home. In this crisis, as in those greater ones which were to follow in rapid succession up to 1939, the victorious Allied nations took no action, being too divided, too torpid, too blind to grasp the nature or the direction of what was building up beyond the Rhine. On this, Hitler’s calculations were eminently sound, as they had been and were to be in regard to his own people. He knew well what the German people would say in the plebiscite, which he fixed—along with new
elections of
a single-party Nazi slate to the Reichstag—for November 12, 1933, the day after the anniversary of the 1918 armistice, a black day that still rankled in German memories.

“See to it that this day,” he told an election rally at
Breslau
on November 4, “shall later be recorded in the history of our people as a day of salvation—that the record shall run: On an eleventh of November the German people formally lost its honor; fifteen years later came a twelfth of November and then the German people restored its honor to itself.” On the eve of the polling, November 11, the venerable
Hindenburg
added his support in a broadcast to the nation: “Show tomorrow your firm national unity and your solidarity with the government. Support with me and the
Reich Chancellor the principle of equal rights and of peace with honor, and show the world that we have recovered, and with the help of God will maintain, German unity!”

The response of the German people, after fifteen years of frustration and of resentment against the consequences of a lost war, was almost unanimous. Some 96 per cent of the registered voters cast their ballots and 95 per cent of these approved Germany’s withdrawal from Geneva. The vote for the single Nazi list for the Reichstag (which included Hugenberg and a half-dozen other non-Nazis) was 92 per cent. Even at the Dachau concentration camp 2,154 out of 2,242 inmates voted for the government which had incarcerated them! It is true that in many communities threats were made against those who failed to vote or who voted the wrong way; and in some cases there was fear that anyone who cast his vote against the regime might be detected and punished. Yet even with these reservations the election, whose count at least was honest, was a staggering victory for Adolf Hitler. There was no doubt that in defying the outside world as he had done, he had the overwhelming support of the German people.