The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich: A History of Nazi Germany (60 page)

“In this historic hour, when, in the Reich’s western provinces, German troops are at this minute marching into their future peacetime garrisons, we all unite in two sacred vows.”

He can go no further. It is news to this “parliamentary” mob that German soldiers are already on the move into the Rhineland. All the militarism in their German blood surges to their heads. They spring, yelling and crying, to their feet … Their hands are raised in slavish salute, their faces now contorted with hysteria, their mouths wide open, shouting, shouting, their eyes, burning with fanaticism, glued on the new god, the Messiah. The Messiah plays his role superbly. His head lowered, as if in all humbleness, he waits patiently for silence. Then his voice, still low, but choking with emotion, utters the two vows:

“First, we swear to yield to no force whatever in restoration of the honor of our people … Secondly, we pledge that now, more than ever, we shall strive for an understanding between the European peoples, especially for one with our Western neighbor nations … We have no territorial demands to make in Europe! … Germany will never break the peace!”

It was a long time before the cheering stopped … A few generals made their way out. Behind their smiles, however, you could not help detecting a nervousness … I ran into General von Blomberg … His face was white, his cheeks twitching.
²¹

And with reason. The Minister of Defense, who five days before had issued in his own handwriting the order to march, was losing his nerve. The next day I learned that he had given orders for his troops to withdraw across the Rhine should the French move to oppose them. But the French never made the slightest move. François-Poncet says that after his warning of the previous November, the French High Command had asked the government what it would do in case the ambassador proved right. The answer was, he says, that the government would take the matter up with the
League of Nations
.
²²
Actually, when the blow occurred,
^*
it was the French government which wanted to act and the French General Staff which held back. “General Gamelin,” François-Poncet declares, “advised that a war operation, however limited, entailed unpredictable risks and could not be undertaken without decreeing a general
mobilization.”
²³
The most General Gamelin, the Chief of the General Staff, would do—and did—was concentrate thirteen divisions near the German frontier, but merely to reinforce the
Maginot Line
. Even this was enough to throw a scare into the German High Command. Blomberg, backed by
Jodl
and most of the officers at the top, wanted to pull back the three battalions that had crossed the Rhine. As Jodl testified at Nuremberg, “Considering the situation we were in, the French covering army could have blown us to pieces.”
²⁴

It could have—and had it, that almost certainly would have been the end of Hitler, after which history might have taken quite a different and brighter turn than it did, for the dictator could never have survived such a fiasco. Hitler himself admitted as much. “A retreat on our part,” he conceded later, “would have spelled collapse.”
²⁵
It was Hitler’s iron nerves alone, which now, as during many crises that lay ahead, saved the situation and, confounding the reluctant generals, brought success. But it was no easy moment for him.

“The forty-eight hours after the march into the Rhineland,” Paul Schmidt, his interpreter, heard him later say, “were the most nerve-racking in my life. If the French had then marched into the Rhineland, we would have had to withdraw with our tails between our legs, for the military resources at our disposal would have been wholly inadequate for even a moderate resistance.”
²⁶

Confident that the French would not march, he bluntly turned down all suggestions for pulling back by the wavering High Command. General Beck, Chief of the General Staff, wanted the Fuehrer to at least soften the blow by proclaiming that he would not fortify the area west of the Rhine—a suggestion, Jodl later testified, “which the Fuehrer turned down very bluntly”—for obvious reasons, as we shall see.
²⁷
Blomberg’s proposal to withdraw, Hitler later told General von Rundstedt, was nothing less than an act of cowardice.
²⁸

“What would have happened,” Hitler exclaimed in a bull session with his cronies at headquarters on the evening of March 27, 1942, in recalling the Rhineland coup, “if anybody other than myself had been at the head of the Reich! Anyone you care to mention would have lost his nerve. I was obliged to lie, and what saved us was my unshakable obstinacy and my amazing aplomb.”
²⁹

It was true, but it must also be recorded that he was aided not only by the hesitations of the French but by the supineness of their British allies. The French Foreign Minister, Pierre Etienne Flandin, flew to London on March 11 and begged the British government to back France in a military counteraction in the Rhineland. His pleas were unavailing. Britain would not risk war even though Allied superiority over the Germans was overwhelming. As Lord Lothian remarked, “The Germans, after all, are only going into their own back garden.” Even before the French arrived in London, Anthony Eden, who had become Foreign Secretary in the previous December, had told the House of Commons, on March 9, “Occupation of the Rhineland by the Reichswehr deals a heavy blow to the principle of
the sanctity of treaties. Fortunately,” he added, “we have no reason to suppose that Germany’s present action threatens hostilities.”
³⁰

And yet France was entitled, under the terms of the Locarno Treaty, to take military action against the presence of German troops in the demilitarized zone, and Britain was obligated by that treaty to back her with her own armed forces. The abortive London conversations were a confirmation to Hitler that he had gotten away with his latest gamble.

The British not only shied away from the risk of war but once again they took seriously the latest installment of Hitler’s “peace” proposals. In the notes handed to the three ambassadors on March 7 and in his speech to the Reichstag, Hitler had offered to sign a twenty-five-year nonaggression pact with
Belgium
and France, to be guaranteed by Britain and
Italy
; to conclude similar nonaggression pacts with Germany’s neighbors on the east; to agree to the demilitarization of
both
sides of the Franco–German frontier; and, finally, to return to the
League of Nations
. Hitler’s sincerity might have been judged by his proposal to demilitarize
both
sides of the Franco–German border, since it would have forced France to scrap her
Maginot Line
, her last protection against a surprise German attack.

In London, the esteemed
Times
, while deploring Hitler’s precipitate action in invading the Rhineland, headed its leading editorial “A Chance to Rebuild.”

In retrospect, it is easy to see that Hitler’s successful gamble in the Rhineland brought him a victory more staggering and more fatal in its immense consequences than could be comprehended at the time. At home it fortified his popularity
^*
and his power, raising them to heights which no German ruler of the past had ever enjoyed. It assured his ascendancy over his generals, who had hesitated and weakened at a moment of crisis when he had held firm. It taught them that in foreign politics and even in military affairs his judgment was superior to theirs. They had feared that the French would fight; he knew better. And finally, and above all, the Rhineland occupation, small as it was as a military operation, opened the way, as only Hitler (and Churchill, alone, in England) seemed to realize, to vast new opportunities in a Europe which was not only shaken
but whose strategic situation was irrevocably changed by the parading of three German battalions across the Rhine bridges.

Conversely, it is equally easy to see, in retrospect, that France’s failure to repel the Wehrmacht battalions and Britain’s failure to back her in what would have been nothing more than a police action was a disaster for the West from which sprang all the later ones of even greater magnitude. In March 1936 the two Western democracies were given their last chance to halt, without the risk of a serious war, the rise of a militarized, aggressive, totalitarian Germany and, in fact—as we have seen Hitler admitting—bring the Nazi dictator and his regime tumbling down. They let the chance slip by.

For France, it was the beginning of the end. Her allies in the East, Russia, Poland,
Czechoslovakia
, Rumania and
Yugoslavia
, suddenly were faced with the fact that France would not fight against German aggression to preserve the security system which the French government itself had taken the lead in so laboriously building up. But more than that. These Eastern allies began to realize that even if France were not so supine, she would soon not be able to lend them much assistance because of Germany’s feverish construction of a
West Wall
behind the Franco–German border. The erection of this fortress line, they saw, would quickly change the strategic map of Europe, to their detriment. They could scarcely expect a France which did not dare, with her one hundred divisions, to repel three German battalions, to bleed her young manhood against impregnable German fortifications while the Wehrmacht attacked in the East. But even if the unexpected took place, it would be futile. Henceforth the French could tie down in the West only a small part of the growing German Army. The rest would be free for operations against Germany’s Eastern neighbors.

The value of the Rhineland fortifications to Hitler’s strategy was conveyed to William C. Bullitt, the American ambassador to France, when he called on the German Foreign Minister in Berlin on May 18, 1936.

Von Neurath said [Bullitt reported to the State Department] that it was the policy of the German Government to do nothing active in foreign affairs until “the Rhineland had been digested.” He explained that he meant that until the German fortifications had been constructed on the French and Belgian frontiers, the German Government would do everything possible to prevent rather than encourage an outbreak by the Nazis in Austria and would pursue a quiet line with regard to Czechoslovakia. “As soon as our fortifications are constructed and the countries of Central Europe realize that France cannot enter German territory at will, all those countries will begin to feel very differently about their foreign policies and a new constellation will develop,” he said.
³¹

This development now began.

“As I stood at the grave of my predecessor [the murdered Dollfuss],” Dr. Schuschnigg related in his memoirs, “I knew that in order to save
Austrian independence I had to embark on a course of appeasement … Everything had to be avoided which could give Germany a pretext for intervention and everything had to be done to secure in some way Hitler’s toleration of the status quo.”
³²

The new and youthful Austrian Chancellor had been encouraged by Hitler’s public declaration to the Reichstag on May 21, 1935, that “Germany neither intends nor wishes to interfere in the internal affairs of Austria, to annex Austria or to conclude an Anschluss”; and he had been reassured by the reiteration at Stresa by Italy, France and Britain of their determination to help safeguard Austria’s independence. Then Mussolini, Austria’s principal protector since 1933, had become bogged down in Abyssinia and had broken with France and Britain. When the Germans marched into the Rhineland and began to fortify it, Dr. Schuschnigg realized that some appeasement of Hitler was due. He began negotiating a new treaty with the wily German minister in Vienna, Papen, who, though the Nazis had come within an ace of murdering him during the June purge, had nevertheless gone to work on his arrival
in Austria
in the late summer of 1934, after the Nazi assassination of Dollfuss, to undermine Austria’s independence and capture Hitler’s native land for the Leader. “National Socialism must and will overpower the new Austrian ideology,” he had written Hitler on July 27, 1935, in giving an account of his first year of service in Vienna.
³³

In its published text the Austro–German agreement signed on July 11, 1936, seemed to show an unusual amount of generosity and tolerance on the part of Hitler. Germany reaffirmed its recognition of Austria’s sovereignty and the promise not to interfere in the internal affairs of its neighbor. In return, Austria pledged that in its foreign policy it would always act on the principle that it acknowledged itself to be “a German state.”

But there were secret clauses in the treaty,
³⁴
and in them Schuschnigg made concessions which would lead him—and his little country—to their doom. He agreed secretly to amnesty Nazi political prisoners in Austria and to appoint representatives of the “so-called ‘National Opposition’”—a euphemism for Nazis or Nazi sympathizers—to positions of “political responsibility.” This was equivalent to allowing Hitler to set up a Trojan horse in Austria. Into it would crawl shortly Seyss-Inquart, a Viennese lawyer, who will cut a certain figure in the subsequent narrative.

Although Papen had obtained Hitler’s approval of the text of the treaty, making a personal visit to Berlin for the purpose early in July, the Fuehrer was furious with his envoy when the latter telephoned him on July 16 to notify him that the agreement had been signed.

   As it turned out, it was a trap for Schuschnigg, not for Hitler.

The signing of the Austro–German treaty was a sign that Mussolini had
lost his grip on Austria. It might have been expected that this would worsen the relations between the two fascist dictators. But just the opposite occurred—due to events which now, in 1936, played into Hitler’s hands.