The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich: A History of Nazi Germany (88 page)

   The insurance executive was slow to see the point.

   H
ILGARD
: All the insurance companies are the losers. That is so, and remains so. Nobody can tell me differently.

G
OERING
: Then why don’t you take care of it that a few windows less are being smashed!

   The Field Marshal had had enough of this commercial-minded man. Herr Hilgard was dismissed, disappearing into the limbo of history.

A representative of the Foreign Office dared to suggest that American public opinion be considered in taking further measures against the Jews.
^*
This inspired an outburst from Goering: “That country of scoundrels! … That gangster state!”

After further lengthy discussion it was agreed to solve the Jewish question in the following manner: eliminate the Jews from the German economy; transfer all Jewish business enterprises and property, including jewelry and works of art, to Aryan hands with some compensation in bonds from which the Jews could use the interest but not the capital. The matter of excluding Jews from schools, resorts, parks, forests, etc., and of either expelling them after they had been deprived of all their property or confining them to German ghettos where they would be impressed as forced labor, was left for further consideration by a committee.

As Heydrich put it toward the close of the meeting: “In spite of the elimination of the Jews from economic life, the main problem remains, namely, to kick the Jew out of Germany.” Count Schwerin von Krosigk, the Minister of Finance, the former Rhodes scholar who prided himself on representing the “traditional and decent Germany” in the Nazi government, agreed “that we will have to do everything to shove the Jews into foreign countries.” As for the ghettos, this German nobleman said meekly, “I don’t imagine the prospect of the ghetto is very nice. The idea of the ghetto is not a very agreeable one.”

At 2:30
P.M
.—after nearly four hours—Goering brought the meeting to a close.

   I shall close the meeting with these words: German Jewry shall, as punishment for their abominable crimes, et cetera, have to make a contribution for one billion marks. That will work. The swine won’t commit another murder. Incidentally, I would like to say that I would not like to be a Jew in Germany.

   Much worse was to be inflicted on the Jews by this man and this State and its Fuehrer in the course of time, and a brief time it turned out to be. On the flaming, riotous night of November 9, 1938, the Third Reich had deliberately turned down a dark and savage road from which there was to be no return. A good many Jews had been murdered and tortured and robbed before, but these crimes, except for those which took place in the concentration camps, had been committed mostly by brown-shirted rowdies acting out of their own sadism and greed while the State authorities looked on, or looked the other way. Now the German government itself had organized and carried out a vast pogrom. The killings, the looting, the burning of synagogues and houses and shops on the night of November 9 were its doing. So were the official decrees, duly published in the official gazette, the
Reichsgesetzblatt
—three of them on the day of Goering’s meeting—which fined the Jewish community a billion marks, eliminated them from the economy, robbed them of what was left of their property and drove them toward the ghetto—and worse.

World opinion was shocked and revolted by such barbarity in a nation which boasted a centuries-old Christian and humanist culture. Hitler, in turn, was enraged by the world reaction and convinced himself that it merely proved the power and scope of “the Jewish world conspiracy.”

In retrospect, it is easy to see that the horrors inflicted upon the Jews of Germany on November 9 and the harsh and brutal measures taken against them immediately afterward were portents of a fatal weakening which in the end would bring the dictator, his regime and his nation down in utter ruin. The evidences of Hitler’s megalomania we have seen permeating hundreds of pages of this narrative. But until now he had usually been able to hold it in check at critical stages in his rise and in that of his country. At such moments his genius for acting not only boldly, but usually only after a careful calculation of the consequences, had won him one crashing success after another. But now, as November 9 and its aftermath clearly showed, Hitler was losing his self-control. His megalomania was getting the upper hand. The stenographic record of the Goering meeting on November 12 reveals that it was Hitler who, in the final analysis, was responsible for the holocaust of that November evening; it was he who gave the necessary approval to launch it; he who pressed Goering to go ahead with the elimination of the Jews from German life. From now on the absolute master of the Third Reich would show little of that restraint which had saved him so often before. And though his genius and that of his country would lead to further startling conquests, the poisonous seeds of eventual self-destruction for the dictator and his land had now been sown.

Hitler’s sickness was contagious; the nation was catching it, as if it were a virus. Individually, as this writer can testify from personal experience, many Germans were as horrified by the November 9 inferno as were Americans and Englishmen and other foreigners. But neither the leaders of the Christian churches nor the generals nor any other representatives of the “good” Germany spoke out at once in open protest. They bowed to what General von Fritsch called “the inevitable,” or “Germany’s destiny.”

The atmosphere of Munich soon was dissipated. At
Saarbruecken,
at Weimar, at Munich, Hitler delivered petulant speeches that fall warning the outside world and particularly the British to mind their own business and to quit concerning themselves “with the fate of Germans within the frontiers of the Reich.” That fate, he thundered, was exclusively Germany’s affair. It could not be long before even Neville Chamberlain would be awakened to the nature of the German government which he had gone so far to appease. Gradually, as the eventful year of 1938 gave way to ominous 1939, the Prime Minister got wind of what the Fuehrer whom he had tried so hard to personally accommodate in the interest of European peace was up to behind the scenes.
^*

Not long after Munich Ribbentrop journeyed to
Rome
. His mind was “fixed” on war, Ciano noted in his diary of October 28.
⁹

To the young Italian Foreign Minister, Ribbentrop was “vain, frivolous, and loquacious,” and in so describing him in his diary he added, “The Duce says you only have to look at his head to see that he has a small brain.” The German Foreign Minister had come to Rome to persuade Mussolini to sign a military alliance between Germany, Japan and
Italy
, a draft of which had been given the Italians at Munich; but Mussolini stalled for time. He was not yet ready, Ciano noted, to shut the door on Britain and France.

Hitler himself toyed that autumn with the idea of trying to detach France from her ally over the Channel. When on October 18 he received the French ambassador, François-Poncet, for a farewell visit in the eerie fastness of Eagle’s Nest, high above Berchtesgaden on a mountaintop.
^†
he broke out into a bitter attack on Great Britain. The ambassador found the Fuehrer pale, his face drawn with fatigue, but not too tired to inveigh against Albion. Britain re-echoed “with threats and calls to arms.” She was selfish and took on “superior” airs. It was the British who were destroying the spirit of Munich. And so on. France was different. Hitler said he wanted more friendly and close relations with her. To prove it, he was willing to sign at once a pact of friendship, guaranteeing their present frontiers (and thus again renouncing any German claims to
Alsace-Lorraine
) and proposing to settle any future differences by consultation.

The pact was duly signed in
Paris
on December 6, 1938, by the German and French foreign ministers. France, by that time, had somewhat
recovered from the defeatist panic of the Munich days. The writer happened to be in Paris on the day the paper was signed and noted the frosty atmosphere. When Ribbentrop drove through the streets they were completely deserted, and several cabinet ministers and other leading figures in the French political and literary worlds, including the eminent presidents of the Senate and the Chamber, MM.
Jeanneney
and
Herriot
respectively, refused to attend the social functions accorded the Nazi visitor.

From this meeting of Bonnet and Ribbentrop stemmed a misunderstanding which was to play a certain part in future events. The German Foreign Minister claimed that Bonnet had assured him that after Munich France was no longer interested in Eastern Europe and he subsequently interpreted this as meaning that the French would give Germany a free hand in this region, especially in regard to rump
Czecho
slovakia
and Poland. Bonnet denied this. According to Schmidt’s minutes of the meeting, Bonnet declared, in answer to Ribbentrop’s demand that Germany’s sphere of influence in the East be recognized, that “conditions had changed fundamentally since Munich.”
¹¹
This ambiguous remark was soon stretched by the slippery German Foreign Minister into the flat statement, which he passed along to Hitler, that “at Paris Bonnet had declared he was no longer interested in questions concerning the East.” France’s swift surrender at Munich had already convinced the Fuehrer of this. It was not quite true.

What had happened to the German guarantee of the rest of Czechoslovakia which Hitler had solemnly promised at Munich to give? When the new French ambassador in Berlin,
Robert Coulondre
, inquired of Weizsaecker on December 21, 1938, the State Secretary replied that the destiny of Czechoslovakia lay in the hands of Germany and that he rejected the idea of a British–French guarantee. As far back as October 14, when the new Czech Foreign Minister, František Chvalkovsky, had come humbly begging for crumbs at the hand of Hitler in Munich and had inquired whether Germany was going to join Britain and France in the guarantee of his country’s shrunken frontiers, the Fuehrer replied sneeringly that “the British and French guarantees were worthless … and that the only effective guarantee was that by Germany.”
¹²

Yet, as 1939 began, it was still not forthcoming. The reason was simple. The Fuehrer had no intention of giving it. Such a guarantee would have interfered with the plans which he had begun to lay immediately after Munich. Soon there would be no Czechoslovakia to guarantee. To start with, Slovakia would be induced to break away.

A few days after Munich, on October 17, Goering had received two Slovak leaders, Ferdinand Durcansky and Mach, and the leader of the German minority in Slovakia,
Franz Karmasin
. Durcansky, who was
Deputy Prime Minister of the newly appointed autonomous Slovakia, assured the Field Marshal that what the Slovaks really wanted was “complete independence, with very close political, economic and military ties with Germany.” In a secret Foreign Office memorandum of the same date it was noted that Goering had decided that independence for Slovakia must be supported. “A Czech State minus Slovakia is even more completely at our mercy. Air base in Slovakia for operation against the East very important.”
¹³
Such were Goering’s thoughts on the matter in mid-October.

We must here attempt to follow a double thread in the German plan: to detach Slovakia from Prague, and to prepare for the liquidation of what remained of the state by the military occupation of the Czech lands,
Bohemia
and
Moravia
. On October 21, 1938, as we have seen, Hitler had directed the Wehrmacht to be ready to carry out that liquidation.
^*
On December 17, General Keitel issued what he called a “supplement to Directive of October 21”:

Try as it might to please Hitler, the new pro-German government of Czechoslovakia began to realize as the new year began that the country’s goose was cooked. Just before Christmas, 1938, the Czech cabinet, in order to further appease the Fuehrer, had dissolved the Communist Party and suspended all Jewish teachers in German schools. On January 12, 1939, Foreign Minister Chvalkovsky, in a message to the German Foreign Office, stressed that his government “will endeavor to prove its loyalty and good will by far-reaching fulfillment of Germany’s wishes.” On the same day he brought to the attention of the German chargé in Prague the spreading rumors “that the incorporation of Czechoslovakia into the Reich was imminent.”
¹⁵

To see if even the pieces could be saved Chvalkovsky finally prevailed upon Hitler to receive him in Berlin on January 21. It turned out to be a painful scene, though not as painful for the Czechs as one that would shortly follow. The Czech Foreign Minister groveled before the mighty
German dictator, who was in one of his most bullying moods. Czecho
slovakia
, said Hitler, had been saved from catastrophe by “Germany’s moderation.” Nevertheless, unless the Czechs showed a different spirit, he would “annihilate” them. They must forget their “history,” which was “schoolboy nonsense,” and do as the Germans bade. That was their only salvation. Specifically, Czechoslovakia must leave the
League of Nations
, drastically reduce the size of her Army—“because it did not count anyway”—join the
Anti-Comintern Pact
, accept German direction of her foreign policy, make a preferential trade agreement with Germany, one condition of which was that no new Czech industries could be established without German consent,
^*
dismiss all officials and editors not friendly to the Reich and, finally, outlaw the Jews, as Germany had done under its
Nuremberg Laws
. (“With us, the Jews will be destroyed,” Hitler told his visitor.) On the same day Chvalkovsky received further demands from Ribbentrop, who threatened “catastrophic consequences” unless the Czechs immediately mended their ways and did as they were told. The German Foreign Minister, so much the lackey in the presence of Hitler but a boor and a bully with anyone over whom he had the upper hand, bade Chvalkovsky not to mention the new German demands to the British and French but just to go ahead and carry them out.
¹⁷