Berlin Games (13 page)

The greatest victor of the Games was Adolf Hitler. He had presided over them genially and diplomatically. He had gone so far as to send his personal congratulations to the victorious British hockey team and had autographed each of the British players' cards. Visitors to Germany were able to see that this man was not the monster that their newspapers had described, and that he seemingly had a heart. The regime could not be that bad, and besides, getting tough on a few unruly elements was something that many felt should be imitated back home in the democracies. There were therefore no grounds for athletes to fulfil the prediction of Kirby's anonymous source by shouting ‘to hell with Hitler!' In fact, there were no reported demonstrations of any kind. As Arnold Lunn wrote to the Archbishop of York later in the year, the Germans ‘were extremely affable, as it is their policy at the moment to keep Great Britain friendly while they deal with their enemies elsewhere'. Lunn, however, saw ‘nothing reassuring at Garmisch so far as the peace of Europe is concerned'.

Neither was there much reassurance to be found elsewhere in Germany. One thing the Olympic visitors did not see was the arrest in Düsseldorf, on 10 February, of sixteen Catholics for activities ‘inimical to the security of the German State'. Their ‘crime' was their refusal to disband their youth club in favour of joining the Hitler Youth. Their previous leader had been shot dead ‘while trying to escape' from prison in July 1934. Düsseldorf was also the subject of a letter written to Avery Brundage while he was staying in Garmisch. Purporting to come from one ‘Lester Jack Brown', the clumsily handwritten letter was clearly written by a fearful German, as the inverted commas lay on the baseline.

It was a confidence that was misplaced. The letter showed just how desperate some Germans were to tell their visitors the true situation. Unfortunately, this particular German had written to the wrong visitor.

As well as not seeing anything untoward, something the visitors did not hear was a speech made by Hitler on 12 February in Schwerin at the funeral of Wilhelm Gustloff, the German leader of the Swiss Nazi Party, who had been shot by David Frankfurter, a Jewish medical student.

But Hitler had another challenge facing him, a challenge that would see him take the biggest gamble of his life. The Winter Olympics had provided him not only with an opportunity to reflect, but also a distraction that turned the eyes of the world away from a part of Germany that he so desperately coveted–the Rhineland.

O
N THE SAME
day as Gustloff's funeral, Hitler convened a meeting with his minister for foreign affairs, Baron von Neurath, and Joachim von Ribbentrop, the eponymous head of the Büro Ribbentrop, a separate Nazi foreign office. Neurath and Ribbentrop despised each other, the latter regarding the sixty-three-year-old Neurath as a dinosaur who stood in his way. Neurath, however, saw Ribbentrop as a parvenu, a sycophantic upstart whose activities were encroaching on those of the official Foreign Office. According to Neurath, Ribbentrop was a man ‘who did not have even the most primitive notions about foreign and political affairs'. As well as being professionally inferior, Neurath was disgusted by the forty-two-year-old Ribbentrop's social pretensions. Neurath would have agreed with Goebbels when he wrote that Ribbentrop had ‘bought his name, married his money, and swindled his way into office'. Indeed, Ribbentrop's aristocratic ‘von' was the product of his persuading his aunt–who had married a knight, and was thus able to use ‘von'–to adopt him in return for providing her with an allowance. His wife Annelies did indeed have money, as she was the daughter of Otto Henkell, the largest manufacturer of Sekt, German sparkling wine. Nevertheless, Hitler was impressed by Ribbentrop, partly because he spoke French and English, and partly because as a former champagne salesman he exuded an air of faux sophistication. Despite his shortcomings, Ribbentrop had managed to pull off the ‘impossible' Anglo-German Naval Treaty of June 1935, which enabled Germany to strengthen her navy while Britain agreed to withdraw her ships from the Baltic. As far as Hitler was concerned, Ribbentrop was a diplomatic genius, a man who delivered far more than the crustily timid Neurath.

The atmosphere was therefore less than warm at the meeting between the three men. The topic of conversation was the Rhineland. Under the terms of the Treaty of Versailles in 1919, the Germans were forbidden from engaging in any military activity whatsoever on the left bank of the Rhine, be it building fortifications or carrying out exercises. This exclusion also applied to a 50-kilometre strip along the right bank, thus providing a vast and reassuring buffer zone between France, the Low Countries and Germany. The Locarno Treaties of 1925 reinforced the demilitarisation, as well as providing a diplomatic Mexican stand-off, in which Germany, France and Belgium promised not to attack each other, with Britain and Italy acting as guarantors. If any of the first three countries attacked another, then the remaining three were obliged to help the country being attacked. The peace of Europe rested on ‘the spirit of Locarno', and any violation would undoubtedly cause that spirit to dissipate. For Hitler, however, the fact that German troops were not allowed to occupy the Rhineland was a repellent affront to German pride. The Rhineland was, after all, Germany's, so why could Germany not station her troops there? In Hitler's eyes, the Rhine provided a line of defence against France, which Hitler regarded as a threat, one he distastefully described in
Mein Kampf
:

At the meeting on 12 February, Hitler presented Neurath and Ribbentrop with three options concerning the Rhineland, the third of which was the boldest–remilitarisation. Whereas Neurath was hesitant when asked which of the options he favoured, Ribbentrop
instantly exclaimed: ‘The third,
mein Fuehrer
, the third!' Neurath could only inwardly fume, knowing that this was just what Hitler wanted to hear. The object of Ribbentrop's adoration returned to the Winter Olympics with a more resolute outlook on the matter, although his mind was not yet fully made up.

Hitler knew that the repercussions of occupying the Rhineland would be immense. If it were seen by the fellow Locarno signatories as an act of straightforward aggression, then there was a strong possibility that the move could lead to war, a war for which Germany was ill prepared. A defeated Hitler would be a severely weakened Hitler, as all his nationalistic talk of a strong Germany would be seen to be nothing more than guff. If the gamble paid off, however, then Hitler's position would be immeasurably stronger. The occupation would be seen as a brilliant and daring
coup de main
, ensuring his esteem not only in the eyes of the German people, but also in those of the senior army officers, many of whom sceptically viewed the Chancellor as little more than a pipsqueak of a corporal. Furthermore, a military defeat would enlarge cracks that were beginning to appear in the regime. In his report to the Foreign Office at the beginning of the year, Sir Eric Phipps, the British ambassador to Berlin, opined that had Hitler really allowed free elections, then he would probably have lost. Many, he said, felt affronted by the Nazis' attitude to the Jews and the Catholics, and the food queues were far too long, especially when housewives found butter costing 1.6 Reichsmarks per pound (£5 or $8.50 in 2005) at the end of them.

The diplomatic community had been watching Hitler warily. They knew that 1936 would see her making some sort of bold move, but then there was a long list of potential bold moves. At the end of January, Phipps wrote to Sir Robert Vansittart, the permanent under-secretary at the British Foreign Office, outlining what he understood to be Hitler's demands. The first was cultural autonomy for the Germans in Czechoslovakia. The second was a referendum in Austria under British supervision. The third was a desire for greater economic opportunities in south-eastern Europe. The fourth was the return to Germany of her colonies. Phipps also noted that Hitler wanted to cultivate ‘cordial relations' with Britain, and if this failed, to reconcile
France and Germany. But ‘no mention was made [by Hitler or those close to him] of Locarno or the demilitarised zone'. The fact that it had not been mentioned did not mean that it was not an option that Hitler was considering.

Phipps ended his letter with a short paragraph about the Americans:

Phipps's analysis was correct. The United States had indeed seemingly adopted an isolationist stance, by passing the Neutrality Act of 1935, which was strengthened by the Neutrality Act passed in February 1936. The acts prohibited American citizens from selling arms and war materials to belligerents at war, as well as outlawing the extending of credit to belligerents. The acts were indeed neutral, as they made no distinction between aggressor and victim. Nevertheless, they were supported by many in the United States, among them Avery Brundage, who was concerned that the Roosevelt administration was ‘definitely committed to the British and French empires'. Roosevelt would later work around the acts, much to Brundage's disgust, but in the meantime, as far as Hitler was concerned, the United States posed no conceivable threat.

Phipps and Vansittart had much in common. As well as being brothers-in-law–Vansittart's wife Sarita was the sister of Frances Phipps–they shared a near-identical opinion of Germany and her leading figures. Their greatest odium, after Hitler, was reserved for Ribbentrop, who Phipps regarded as ‘a lightweight (I place him near the bottom of the handicap), irritating, ignorant and boundlessly conceited'. Vansittart found him ‘shallow, self-seeking and not really friendly'. ‘No one who studies his mouth will be reassured,' Vansittart was to write. Whereas Ribbentrop was a
nouveau
, both Phipps and Vansittart were typically British old school. ‘Van' was an Old Etonian, his intelligence matched by the tall and somewhat dandyish
bella figura
he cut. With his taste for whisky and his ‘deft hand at intrigue', Vansittart was sometimes known as ‘Machiavelli-and-soda', an appella
tion that was perhaps more common in the newspapers than within the corridors of the Foreign Office. Phipps was shorter than Vansittart, but just as well groomed. He was described by William Shirer as resembling a ‘Hungarian dandy, with a perfect poker face'. Martha Dodd, the daughter of the US ambassador to Berlin, found Phipps's mandarin inscrutability almost inhuman. ‘You felt that if suddenly you said, “Your grandmother has just been murdered,” his facial muscles would not twitch, would show no sign of having heard your declaration, that he would go on quietly in the clipped, caught-in-throat, potato-laden English-well-bred voice, “Yes, yes, you don't say, yes, really, how extraordinarily interesting.” ' The difficulty in reading him was not helped by his sporting of a monocle–he had damaged an eye in a childhood accident.

Both Vansittart and Phipps held those who wished to appease Hitler in low regard. ‘I realise that in our free country the Government cannot always prevent Mayfair from rushing Hitlerwards,' wrote Phipps, ‘but if some of the visitors could be choked off I think it would be a good thing.' Many of the pro-Germans were indeed of the aristocratic ‘Mayfair set'. Among them were Lord Redesdale–the father of the celebrated Mitford sisters; Sir Oswald Mosley–the leader of the British Union of Fascists and soon to be married to the Mitford sister Diana Guinness; Lord Londonderry–the former air minister whose rabid affection for Germany saw him nicknamed the ‘Londonderry Herr'; the Duke of Wellington; and Lord Sempill–a noted aviator. There were countless other lords and MPs who flocked to Nazi Germany, many of whom were members of somewhat shadowy pro-German clubs such as the Link and the Anglo-German Fellowship. It would be wrong, however, to claim that those keen on improving relations with Germany were an upper-class collection of anti-Semitic quasi-Nazis. Appeasement was born not out of a love for Germany, but more out of hatred of war. There was much about Nazi Germany not to like, but then there was much about war that was even more repugnant. The public mood was certainly one of ‘peace with Germany', and those such as Vansittart, Phipps and, of course, Winston Churchill were seen as Cassandras.

‘Berlin trembles with tension,' wrote Goebbels on the morning of Saturday, 7 March. There was much to be tense about. That morning,
30,000 German troops had marched, ridden or driven into the Rhineland. Hitler had taken his gamble–his Rubicon was in fact the Rhine. It was to be the beginning of a tumultuous day, a day after which Europe would never be the same again. At the same time as his troops moved west, Hitler made a speech to the assembled members of the Reichstag. Nobody knew exactly what to expect, but there were many rumours. After a typically long rant against the injustices of the Treaty of Versailles, Hitler then announced: ‘Germany no longer feels bound by the Locarno Treaty. In the interest of the primitive rights of its people to the security of their frontier and the safeguarding of their defence, the German government has re-established, as from today, the absolute and unrestricted sovereignty of the Reich in the demilitarised zone!'

One of those watching was Richard Helms, a twenty-two-year-old American reporter for the United Press. ‘Suddenly […] I noticed that Hitler had become pale,' he wrote, ‘and that he was passing a handkerchief back and forth between his hands beneath the lectern. A few seconds later, he slowed his speech. Leaning forward over the lectern to command special attention, he said slowly, “At this moment German troops are crossing the Rhine bridges and occupying the Rhineland.” '

The reaction was predictable. Six hundred deputies, all appointed by Hitler, showed an instant display of Nazi congratulation. William Shirer looked down from the gallery to see the ‘little men with big bodies and bulging necks and cropped hair and pouched bellies and brown uniforms and heavy boots, little men of clay in his fine hands, leap to their feet like automatons, their arms outstretched in the Nazi salute, and scream ‘
Heils
,' the first two or three wildly, the next twenty-five in unison, like a college yell'. A further volley of cheers rang out when Hitler announced a general election to be held on 29 March, which would ‘pass judgement' on his leadership.

Now all Hitler could do was to wait for the reaction of the Locarno powers. Would France mobilise her army? As Hitler had said in his speech, he had removed from the German press all hatred directed against the French. ‘When, a few weeks ago, our French guests marched into the Olympic Stadium at Garmisch-Partenkirchen, they probably had occasion to determine whether, and how far, I have succeeded in
bringing about such a remoulding of the German people.' There was no doubt that the Winter Games had been vitally important to Hitler. Through the reaction of the French team, he was able to gauge French public opinion. Had the French not attended the Games, then Hitler would have been far less likely to call their bluff. But they did come, and therefore he did gamble.

What would Britain do? In London, the British Foreign Secretary, Anthony Eden, was personally briefed by the German ambassador, Leopold von Hoesch. In a triumph of British understatement, the dapper Eden told the German that he ‘deeply regretted the information' that Hoesch had given him. Nevertheless, Eden thought Hitler had made a cunning move. ‘Most members of the British public would certainly see very little harm in Hitler's action,' he wrote. ‘It would merely appear that he was taking full possession of a territory which was his by right.' Eden then summoned the French ambassador, and after telling him that he ‘deeply regretted' Germany's action, he urged the French not to do anything to inflame the situation. Eden then rushed to Chequers, the British prime minister's country house some forty miles north-west of London. There, Stanley Baldwin told Eden that the British would not support any military action by the French, to which Eden agreed. When he arrived back in London, Eden found a cable from Phipps. ‘I judged from [the cable] that Baron von Neurath had had the grace to seem embarrassed when announcing to him Hitler's decision,' Eden later wrote.