The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich: A History of Nazi Germany (63 page)
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Authors: William L. Shirer
But now the Wehrmacht chiefs and the Foreign Minister were confronted with specific dates for actual aggression against two neighboring countries—an action which they were sure would bring on a European war. They must be ready by the following year, 1938, and at the latest by 1943–45.
The realization stunned them. Not, so far as the
Hossbach
records show, because they were struck down by the immorality of their Leader’s proposals but for more practical reasons: Germany was not ready for a big war; to provoke one now would risk disaster.
On those grounds Blomberg, Fritsch and Neurath dared to speak up and question the Fuehrer’s pronouncement. Within three months all of the three were out of office and Hitler, relieved of their opposition, such as it was—and it was the last he was to suffer in his presence during the Third Reich—set out on the road of the conqueror to fulfill his destiny. In the beginning, it was an easier road than he—or anyone else—had foreseen.
*
Earlier that day Hitler had promulgated the secret Reich Defense Law, putting Dr. Schacht, as we have seen, in charge of war economy and thoroughly reorganizing the armed forces. The Reichswehr of Weimar days became the Wehrmacht. Hitler, as Fuehrer and Chancellor, was Supreme Commander of the Armed Forces (Wehrmacht) and Blomberg, the Minister of Defense, was designated as Minister of War with the additional title of Commander in Chief of the Armed Forces—the only general in Germany who ever held that rank. Each of the three services had its own commander in chief and its own general staff. The camouflage name of “Truppenamt” in the Army was dropped for the real thing and its head, General Beck, assumed the title of Chief of the General Staff. But this title did not denote what it did in the Kaiser’s time, when the General Staff Chief was actually the Commander in Chief of the German Army under the warlord.
*
“I do my utmost, night after night, to keep out of the paper anything that might hurt their [German] susceptibilities,” Geoffrey Dawson, the editor of the
Times
, wrote on May 23, 1937, to his Geneva correspondent, H. G. Daniels, who had preceded Ebbutt in Berlin. “I can really think of nothing that has been printed now for many months past to which they could possibly take exception as unfair comment.” (John Evelyn Wrench,
Geoffrey Dawson and Our Times.
)
*
According to Jodl’s testimony at Nuremberg, only three battalions crossed the Rhine, making for Aachen, Trier and Saarbruecken, and only one division was employed in the occupation of the entire territory. Allied intelligence estimates were considerably larger: 35,000 men, or approximately three divisions. Hitler commented later, “The fact was, I had only four brigades.”
19
*
Despite François-Poncet’s warning of the previous fall, Germany’s action apparently came as a complete surprise to the French and British governments and their general staffs.
*
On March 7 Hitler had dissolved the Reichstag and called for a new “election” and a referendum on his move into the Rhineland. According to the official figures of the voting on March 29, some 99 per cent of the 45,453,691 registered voters went to the polls, and 98.8 per cent of them approved Hitler’s action. Foreign correspondents who visited the polling places found some irregularities—especially, open instead of secret voting—and there was no doubt that some Germans feared (with justification, as we have seen) that a
Nein
vote might be discovered by the Gestapo. Dr. Hugo Eckener told this writer that on his new Zeppelin
Hindenburg
, which Goebbels had ordered to cruise over German cities as a publicity stunt, the
Ja
vote, which was announced by the Propaganda Minister as forty-two, outnumbered the total number of persons aboard by two. Nevertheless, this observer, who covered the “election” from one corner of the Reich to the other, has no doubt that the vote of approval for Hitler’s coup was overwhelming. And why not? The junking of Versailles and the appearance of German soldiers marching again into what was, after all, German territory were things that almost all Germans naturally approved. The “No” vote was given as 540,211.
*
More than a year later, on November 5, 1937, Hitler would reiterate his Spanish policy in a confidential talk with his generals and his Foreign Minister. “A hundred per cent victory for Franco,” he told them, was “not desirable from the German point of view. Rather we are interested in a continuance of the war and in keeping up the tension in the Mediterranean.”
38
*
Wilhelmstrasse officials used to say jokingly that Hitler pulled his surprises on Saturdays because he had been told that British officials took the weekend off in the country.
†
In his testimony at Nuremberg on March 14, 1946, Goering spoke proudly of the opportunities which the Spanish Civil War gave for testing “my young Luftwaffe. With the permission of the Fuehrer I sent a large part of my transport fleet and a number of experimental fighter units, bombers and antiaircraft guns; and in that way I had an opportunity to ascertain, under combat conditions, whether the material was equal to the task. In order that the personnel, too, might gather a certain experience, I saw to it that there was a continuous flow [so] that new people were constantly being sent and others recalled.”
44
*
Chamberlain wrote in his diary: “The German visit [of Halifax] was from my point of view a great success because it achieved its object, that of creating an atmosphere in which it is possible to discuss with Germany the practical questions involved in a European settlement.” (Keith Feiling,
The Life of Neville Chamberlain
, p. 332.)
Halifax himself seems to have been taken in by Hitler. In a written report to the Foreign Office he said: “The German Chancellor and others gave the impression that they were not likely to embark on adventures involving force or at least war.” To Chamberlain Halifax reported orally, says Charles C. Tansill, that Hitler “was not bent on early adventures, partly because they might be unprofitable, and partly because he was busy building up Germany internally … Goering had assured him that not one drop of German blood would be shed in Europe unless Germany was absolutely forced to do it. The Germans gave him [Halifax] the impression … of intending to achieve their aims in orderly fashion.” (Tansill,
Back Door to War
, pp. 365–66.)
*
This is the first of many such code names for German military plans which we shall meet in the ensuing narrative. The Germans used the word
Fall
, literally “Case” (
Fall Rot, Fall Gruen—
Case Red, Case Green—the code names for operations in the West and against Czechoslovakia, respectively) and in the beginning, according to the arguments of the German generals in Nuremberg, it was merely the designation commonly used by all military commands for plans to cover hypothetical situations. But as will become obvious in the course of these pages, the term, as the Germans used it, soon became a designation for a plan of armed aggression. The word “Operation” would probably be a more accurate rendering of
Fall
than the word “Case.” However, for the sake of convenience, the author will go along with the word “Case.”
*
From here on, the reader will note that what obviously is indirect discourse has been put within quotation marks or in quotations in the form of extracts. Almost all the German records of the remarks of Hitler and of others in private talks were written down in the third person as indirect discourse, though frequently they abruptly slipped into direct, first-person discourse without any change of punctuation. This question posed a problem for American English.
Because I wanted to preserve the accuracy of the original document and the exact wording used or recorded, I decided it was best to refrain from tampering with these accounts by rendering them into first-person direct discourse or by excluding them from within quotation marks. In the latter case it would have looked as though I were indulging in liberal paraphrasing when I was not.
It is largely a matter in the German records of verb tenses being changed by the actual recorders from present to past and of changing the first-person pronoun to third-person. If this is borne in mind there will not be, I believe, any confusion.
STRANGE, FATEFUL INTERLUDE: THE FALL OF BLOMBERG, FRITSCH, NEURATH AND SCHACHT
T
HE DECISION TO USE
armed force against Austria and Czechoslovakia even if it involved Germany in a war with Great Britain and France, which Hitler laid down on November 5, came as such a shock to his Foreign Minister that Baron von Neurath, easygoing, complacent and morally weak though he was, suffered several heart attacks.
1
“I was extremely upset at Hitler’s speech,” he later told the Nuremberg tribunal, “because it knocked the bottom out of the whole foreign policy which I had consistently pursued.”
2
In this frame of mind, and despite his heart attacks, he sought out General von Fritsch and General Beck, Chief of the General Staff, two days later and discussed with them what could be done “to get Hitler to change his ideas.” The impression on Beck of Hitler’s harangue, according to Colonel
Hossbach
, who informed him of it, had been “shattering.” It was agreed that Fritsch should again remonstrate with the Fuehrer at their next appointment, pointing out to him the military considerations which made his plans inadvisable, while Neurath would follow up by again stressing to Hitler the political dangers. As for Beck, he immediately committed to paper a devastating critique of Hitler’s plans, which apparently he showed to no one—the first sign of a fatal flaw in the mind and character of this estimable general who at first had welcomed the advent of Nazism and who, in the end, would give his life in an abortive effort to destroy it.
General von Fritsch saw Hitler on November 9. There is no record of their talk but it may be presumed that the Commander in Chief of the Army repeated his military arguments against Hitler’s plans and that he got nowhere. The Fuehrer was in no mood to brook opposition either from the generals or from his Foreign Minister. He refused to receive Neurath and took off for a long rest at his mountain retreat at Berchtesgaden. It was not until the middle of January that the stricken Neurath was able to arrange an appointment with the Leader.
On that occasion I tried to show him [Neurath later testified at Nuremberg] that his policy would lead to a world war, and that I would have no part in it … I called his attention to the danger of war and to the serious warnings of the generals … When despite all my arguments he still held to his opinions I told him that he would have to find another Foreign Minister …
3
Though Neurath did not then know it, that was precisely what Hitler had decided to do. In a fortnight he would celebrate the fifth anniversary of his coming to power and he intended to mark it by cleaning house not only in the Foreign Office but in the Army, those two citadels of upper-class “reaction” which he secretly distrusted, which he felt had never completely accepted him nor really understood his aims and which, as Blomberg, Fritsch and Neurath had shown on the evening of November 5, stood in the way of realizing his ambitions. The last two gentlemen in particular, and perhaps even the accommodating Blomberg, to whom he owed so much, would have to follow the inimitable Dr. Schacht into retirement.
For the crafty financier, the early enthusiast for Nazism and backer of Hitler, had already fallen.
Schacht, as we have seen, had devoted his energies and his wizardry to financing Hitler’s speedy rearmament. As Plenipotentiary for War Economy, as well as Minister of Economics, he had concocted any number of fancy schemes, including the use of the printing press, to raise the money for the new Army, Navy and Air Force and to pay the armament bills. But there was a limit beyond which the country could not go without becoming bankrupt, and by 1936 he believed Germany was approaching that limit. He warned Hitler, Goering and Blomberg, but to little avail, though the War Minister for a time sided with him. With Goering’s appointment in September 1936 as Plenipotentiary for the Four-Year Plan, a farfetched scheme to make Germany self-sufficient in four years—a goal which Schacht regarded as impossible—the Luftwaffe chief became, in fact, the economic dictator of Germany. To a man as vain and ambitious
*
and as contemptuous of Goering’s ignorance of economics as Schacht was, this made his own position untenable and after months of violent controversy between the two strong-minded men Schacht asked the Fuehrer to place the further direction of economic policies solely in his rival’s hand and to allow him to resign his post in the cabinet. To add to his discouragement had been the attitude of many of the nation’s leading industrialists and businessmen, who, as he later recounted, “crowded into Goering’s anteroom in the hope of getting orders when I was still trying to make the voice of reason heard.”
4
To make the voice of reason heard in the frenzied atmosphere of Nazi Germany in 1937 was an impossible task, as Schacht realized, and after a further exchange of blows with Goering during the summer in which he
denounced as unsound “your foreign-exchange policy, your policy regarding production and your financial policy,” he traveled down to the Obersalzberg in August to submit his formal resignation to Hitler. The Fuehrer was loath to accept it in view of the unfavorable reaction both at home and abroad which the departure of Schacht would almost certainly bring, but the battered Minister was adamant and Hitler finally agreed to release him at the end of two months. On September 5 Schacht went on leave, and his resignation was formally accepted on December 8.
At Hitler’s insistence Schacht remained in the cabinet as Minister without Portfolio and retained the presidency of the
Reichsbank
, thus preserving appearances and blunting the shock to German and world opinion. His influence as a brake on Hitler’s feverish rearmament for war, however, had come to an end, though by remaining in the cabinet and at the Reichsbank he continued to lend the aura of his name and reputation to Hitler’s purposes. Indeed, he would shortly endorse publicly and enthusiastically the Leader’s first gangster act of naked aggression, for, like the generals and the other conservatives who had played such a key role in turning over Germany to the Nazis, he was slow to awaken to the facts of life.