Hitler (111 page)

 

Nevertheless, the seizure of Prague ushered in the turning point. The Western powers were too deeply disillusioned; they felt hoodwinked, their good will and patience abused. As late as March 10, Chamberlain had told some journalists that the danger of war was abating and a new era of
détente
dawning. Now, on March 17, he spoke in Birmingham of a shock more severe than any before, referred to the many breaches of pledges inherent in the action against Prague, and finally asked: “Is this the end of an old adventure or is it the beginning of a new?” On the same day he recalled Ambassador Henderson from Berlin for an indefinite time. Lord Halifax, for his part, declared that he could well understand Hitler's preference for bloodless triumphs, but the next time blood would have to be spilled.
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But the occupation of Prague was a turning point only for Western policy. In the apologias of the appeasers, and in the attempts at selfexoneration by German accomplices of the regime, the argument constantly recurs that it was Hitler who changed with his entry into Prague; that only then had he set out on the road of injustice and radically expanded his valid revisionist aims; that after Prague it was no longer the right of self-determination but the glory of a conqueror that became his goal. We have since learned, however, how such considerations miss Hitler's motives and intentions, and in fact the very core of his nature. He had long ago decided on his course. Prague was only a tactical problem for him, and the Moldau was certainly not his Rubicon.

And yet, the undertaking was an act of self-revelation. Colonel Jodi had once smugly noted, in the days of continuous triumphs in foreign policy: “This kind of politics is new for Europe.” In fact, the dynamic conjunction of threats, flatteries, pledges of peacefulness and acts of violence applied by Hitler was an unfamiliar, numbing experience; and the Western statesmen might well have been deceived for a while about Hitler's true intentions. Lord Halifax confessed his own confusion when he compared trying to make out what Hitler was up to, to the groping of a blind man seeking a way across a swamp while everyone on the shores was shouting different warnings about the next danger zone. Hitler's operation against Prague, however, had finally dispelled the fog. For the first time Chamberlain and his French counterparts seemed to begin to perceive what Hugenberg had had to realize: this man could not be controlled and tamed—except, perhaps, by force.

Prague signified another kind of turning point in Hitler's career: it was, after almost fifteen years, his first grave mistake. Tactically, he had achieved his victories by his ability to give all situations an ambiguous character, so that his opponents' front and their will to resist was splintered. Now for the first time he was acting in an unequivocal manner. Whereas until then he had always assumed dual roles and had played, as an antagonist, the part of a secret ally, or provoked conditions while alleging that he was opposing them, he now revealed his innermost nature without ambiguity. In Munich he had once more, although reluctantly, set up the “Fascist constellation,” that is to say, achieved a victory over one enemy with the help of the other. The assault on the Jews in November, 1938, seemed to be his first break with this formula. Prague wiped out any doubt that he was the universal enemy.

It was inherent in his tactics that the very first mistake was irreparable. Hitler himself later recognized the fateful significance of his seizing Prague. But his impatience, his arrogance, and his far-flung plans left him no choice. On the day after the occupation of Prague he ordered Goebbels to give the following instructions to the press: “The employment of the term ‘Greater German Empire' is undesirable...(and) reserved for later occasions.” And, in April, when he was preparing to celebrate his fiftieth birthday, he ordered Ribbentrop “to invite a number of foreign guests, among them as many cowardly civilians and democrats as possible, and I will show them a parade of the most modern of all armed forces.”
¹⁰⁹

The thought of striking was always in me.

Adolf Hitler

 

From the spring of 1939 Hitler exhibited a noteworthy inability to break his own momentum. The infallible sense of tempo he had shown only a few years before, in the course of taking power, now began to desert him and to give way to a neurasthenic craving for sheer movement. Faced with the weakness and disunity of his antagonists on the European scene, he undoubtedly could have won all his revisionist demands and probably some of his more far-reaching
Lebensraum
plans by means of his tactic of enlisting the co-operation of the conservative powers. Now he abandoned the tactic. The regime's propaganda announced that the Führer's genius consisted in his ability to wait. But now, whether out of arrogance, whether corrupted by the effectiveness of “non-negotiable demands,” or whether out of frantic restiveness—Hitler no longer waited.

Only a week after the occupation of Prague he boarded the cruiser
Deutschland
in Swinemünde and sailed toward Memel. This small seaport on the northern frontier of East Prussia had been annexed by Lithuania in 1919, in the confusion of the immediate postwar period. A demand for its return was only a matter of time. But in order to lend dramatic verve and proof of his imperiousness to the process of recovering the city, Hitler informed the Lithuanian government in Vilna on March 21 that its envoys were to arrive in Berlin “tomorrow by special plane” to sign the protocol of cession. Meanwhile, he himself, with the reply still in doubt, set out for Memel. And while Ribbentrop “Háchaed” the Lithuanian delegation, Hitler—seasick and in ill humor-—held two impatient radio conversations from on board the
Deutschland.
He demanded to know whether he would be able to enter the city peaceably or would have to force his way in with the ship's guns. On March 23, toward half past one in the morning, Lithuania consented to the cession, and at noon Hitler once again held one of his loudly cheered entries into Memel.

Two days earlier Ribbentrop had summoned Josef Lipski, the Polish ambassador in Berlin, to meet with him, and had proposed negotiations on a comprehensive German-Polish settlement. Ribbentrop returned with some emphasis to demands he had made several times before, including the return of the Free City of Danzig and the building of an extraterritorial road and rail link across the Polish Corridor. In return he offered to extend the 1934 Nonaggression Pact for twenty-five years and to guarantee formally Poland's borders. How seriously the offer was meant is evident from the simultaneous attempt to enlist Poland in the Anti-Comintern Pact. In general Ribbentrop's overtures were aimed at striking a bargain with a “distinctly anti-Soviet tendency.” One draft of a Foreign Office note, for example, rather brazenly offered Warsaw, as its reward for increased cooperation, the prospect of receiving possession of the Ukraine. Following this line, Hitler, in a conversation with Brauchitsch on March 25 rejected a violent solution of the Danzig question but thought a military action against Poland under “specially favorable political preconditions” worth considering.

There was a reason for the curious indifference with which Hitler left open the question of conquest or alliance. Actually it was not Danzig he was really concerned about. The city served him as the pretext for arranging a dialogue and, as he hoped, a deal with Poland. With some justice he considered his offer generous; it gave Poland the prospect of a gigantic acquisition in return for a meager concession. For Danzig was indeed a German city; its separation from the Reich had been imposed by the Treaty of Versailles in order to satisfy a Polish need for prestige that had steadily ebbed with the passing years. In the long run, Poland could have hardly held on to the city. The demand for a connecting link to East Prussia was likewise a relatively fair effort to amend the decision that had separated East Prussia from the Reich. What Hitler really wanted was related to the ultimate grand goal of all his policies: the winning of new living space.

Among the essentials of his planned march of conquest was a common boundary with the Soviet Union. Until that was attained, Germany was cut off from the Russian steppes by a belt of countries extending from the Baltic to the Black Sea. One or several of these must place at his disposal the area for military deployment so that he could get at Russia. Otherwise the war could not be begun.

Theoretically, Hitler could meet this condition in three possible ways. He could win the intervening states by alliances; he could annex some of them; or he could let the Soviet Union annex some, thus moving her border up to Germany. In the course of the following months Hitler made use of all these options. The alertness and iciness with which he switched, while a speechless world looked on, from one to the other, showed him for the last time at the height of his tactical intelligence. After the occupation of Prague, which had so patently put the patience of the Western powers to a hard test, he appeared determined to evoke no new tensions for the time being and to return to the first method: finding an ally against the Soviet Union. For a serious conflict with the West was bound to endanger all his expansionist goals. Among the intervening countries, Poland seemed best suited to his plans. Poland was a country with an authoritarian government and strong anti-Communist, anti-Russian, and even anti-Semitic tendencies. Thus there were “solid common factors”
¹¹⁰
on which an expansionist partnership under German leadership might be founded. Moreover, Hitler himself was partly responsible for Poland's recent good relationship with Germany, additionally secured by a nonaggression pact.

Consequently, far more than an ordinary swap, far more than satisfaction of the regime's desire to revise the terms of the Versailles Treaty depended on the Polish government's reply to Ribbentrop's proposals. For Hitler, his whole
Lebensraum
idea was at stake. It is this aspect which explains the obstinacy and the consistent radical spirit that he manifested on this question. He saw this as a question of all or nothing.

Poland, however, was extremely vexed by the German proposals. For they endangered the foundations of her whole previous policy and made her critical situation even more critical. The country had hitherto found safety by maintaining the strictest equilibrium between her two neighboring giants, Germany and Russia. Their temporary impotence in 1919 had made possible the establishment of a Polish state, and subsequently Poland had enlarged her territory at the expense of these two countries. And if the Poles had learned in the course of their long history that they had as much reason to fear the friendship of these two neighbors as their hostility—the lesson was now more important than ever. The German offer ran strictly counter to this fundament of Polish policy.

It was an exceedingly perilous situation that demanded more prudence and adaptability than a romantic people, which for centuries had felt abused, could possibly summon up. Faced with a choice between its two neighbors, Poland on the whole inclined slightly more toward Germany. But the new Germany was also more restive and greedy than a Soviet Union involved in internal power struggles, purges, and doctrinaire disputes. Polish Foreign Minister Josef Beck, a man given to intrigues and engaged in reckless juggling, complicated the situation still further by pressing ambitious plans for a “third Europe.” His idea was to establish a neutral block of powers, under Polish leadership, extending from the Baltic to the Hellespont. And he thought that he could derive advantages for Poland from Hitler's aggressive policy. His ostensibly pro-German policy secretly aimed at “methodically reinforcing the Germans in their errors,” and he hoped “not only for the unconditional integration of Danzig into Polish territory, but, also, far beyond that, for all of East Prussia, Silesia, even Pomerania... our Pomerania,” as Poland's propagandists now began saying more and more frequently and more openly.
¹¹¹

These secret Polish dreams of becoming a great power underlay the unexpectedly sharp refusal with which Beck finally rebuffed Hitler's proposal. Simultaneously, he mobilized a few divisions in the border area. In strictly objective terms he might not even have considered the German demands unjustified. Danzig, he admitted, was merely a kind of symbol for Poland.
¹¹²
But every concession must seem like a reversal of the basic aims of Polish policy, the eifort to attain both equilibrium of power in Europe and a limited degree of hegemony for Poland herself. For this reason, too, the only tactical way out of the situation—gaining time by partial concessions—was barred. Moreover, Beck and the Warsaw government feared that Hitler's first demands would be followed by an endless succession of new ones, so that only an unequivocal refusal could preserve the integrity of Poland. To sum up, Poland found herself confronted with her typical situation: she had no choice.

This impasse was fully exposed when Beck, on March 23, 1939, rejected the British proposal of consultative agreement between Great Britain, France, the Soviet Union, and Poland. He did not want to enter any group to which the Soviet Union belonged. He had rejected an anti-Soviet alliance with Germany and was still less prepared to accept an anti-German alliance with the Soviet Union. What he failed to see was that given the acuteness of the situation Hitler had created, he had to choose. From now on his only protection against the Soviet Union was the dread protection of Germany; and only the aid of the Soviet Union could save him from the German demands. He knew quite well—and the Soviet Union confirmed his knowledge in a Tass communiqué of March 22—that such aid meant the equivalent of suicide for Poland. But Beck was prepared to face destruction rather than to accept protection from Poland's old oppressor to the East. Politically, he based his attitude on the dogma of the insurmountable antagonism between Germany and the Soviet Union. But by rejecting both his neighbors with equal vehemence he unwittingly created the conditions for a rapprochement between them. The front for the outbreak of the war was beginning to take shape.