Hitler: Ascent, 1889-1939 (126 page)

Nonetheless, such expressions of Hitler admiration in aristocratic circles hardly reflected official British policy, which continued to pursue a balance of power in Europe and preferred to see the Third Reich bound in a system of collective treaties rather than bilateral Anglo-German agreements. In May 1936, the press attaché at the German embassy in London, Fritz Hesse, wrote that it would be incorrect “if people on the Continent assumed that Great Britain were willing to give up the policies of collective security and the League of Nations.”
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Still, Hitler clung to his preferred foreign-policy constellation. After Joachim von Ribbentrop became German ambassador in August 1936 following the death of Leopold von Hoesch, Hitler told him: “Ribbentrop, bring me an alliance with England!”
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The problem was that there was hardly anyone less suitable to achieving this aim than the vain diplomatic amateur, who was soon nicknamed “von Brickendrop.” In October 1936, having barely arrived in London, Ribbentrop made a most undiplomatic speech in which he laid his cards on the table. “How about…just giving Germany a free hand in the east?” he said. “Bolshevism is a global plague that must be eradicated anyway, and Germany’s eye is trained on Russia. In return for a free hand in the east, Hitler would be prepared to conclude every sort of alliance with England.”
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No British government would have been willing to give Hitler a free hand in eastern Europe, which would have essentially meant German hegemony over the entire Continent.

Hitler was already growing frustrated with the British by November 1936. “The Führer complains a lot about England,” Goebbels noted. “It keeps refusing and refusing. Its leadership has no instincts.”
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Hitler’s attitudes were fed by reports from Ribbentrop, who could scarcely conceal his growing aversion to the British establishment. The anti-British faction in the Reich leadership was further strengthened by the crisis in the royal family that saw the Germanophile Edward VIII abdicate the throne in December 1936 in order to be able to marry the twice-divorced American Wallis Simpson. Hitler repeatedly stressed that he thought this was a great loss. “I am sure that with him we could have achieved permanent cordial relations with England,” he told Albert Speer. “With him everything would have been different.”
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The hospitality with which Hitler received the Duke of Windsor and his wife on the Obersalzberg in October 1937 expressed his special regard for Edward. But Hitler also clearly did not understand the British political system. He seems to have assumed that the king could have changed the country’s foreign policy by decree.

Although Hitler did not abandon the idea of an alliance with Great Britain, he began looking around for alternatives. Here, Japan came into view. On 25 November 1936 in Berlin, Nazi Germany signed an anti-Communist agreement with the Asian power. Its published section bound the signatories to “keep one another informed about the activities of the Communist International, consult about the necessary measures for defence and carry them out in close cooperation.” Third parties were to be invited “to take defensive measures in the spirit of this treaty and sign on to it.” In a secret addendum, Germany and Japan assured one another of neutrality in the case of an unprovoked attack or threat by the Soviet Union. In addition, the two sides pledged not to conclude political agreements with Moscow “in contradiction of the spirit of this pact without the other’s permission.”
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Ribbentrop, in particular, had pushed for the anti-Communist treaty and had deliberately gone over the heads of the Foreign Ministry, which traditionally favoured good relations with China.
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In late October 1936, he secured Hitler’s agreement for the pact. Goebbels, who was spending time on the Obersalzberg, noted: “He just signed a treaty with Japan. Alliance against Bolshevism. When it’s published in three weeks, it will change the entire situation. The seeds we planted are starting to grow.”
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But Goebbels overestimated the impact of the arrangement. Berlin and Tokyo never cooperated closely with one another. The new connection was, in the words of the historian Theo Sommer, “a hesitant alliance—an international peck on the cheek between two very unequal brothers who felt hardly any need to act in solidarity with one another.”
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There was a deceptive calm over Europe for the whole of 1937. Hitler used the respite to decide upon his next foreign-policy moves. Goebbels’s diaries reveal how, parallel to the intensification of anti-Semitic measures at home, Hitler gradually became more radical in trying to realise his ambitions abroad. In late January 1937, while delivering a broad summary of his foreign policy over lunch in the Chancellery, Hitler expressed his hope that Germany would have “six years yet” before the decisive battle. But he added that he would not fail “to seize an auspicious chance should it happen to arise.”
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One month later, he reiterated that he expected “a major world conflict in five to six years,” but he now spoke more universally of reversing the relations of power that had dominated Europe since the end of the Thirty Years War in 1648. “In fifteen years, he will have destroyed the Peace of Westphalia,” Goebbels noted. “He’s developing fantastic prospects for the future. Germany will either triumph in the coming battle or cease to exist.” Victory or death—that had been the slogan of the Wilhelmine elites in Germany in the First World War, and the former private who had become the most powerful man in Europe still subscribed to this all-or-nothing perspective. For that, Goebbels admired him blindly: “As always, his foresight is enormous and brilliant. He sees history with the prophetic vision of an oracle.”
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As we have seen, Hitler’s foreign ambitions were inseparably connected to the monumental construction projects in Berlin that began to take shape in the spring of 1937 when Speer was made general building inspector of the Reich capital. In mid-March, while fawning with Goebbels over his plans for the future world capital “Germania,” he named the first two objects of his expansionist desires. “He talked of Austria and Czechoslovakia,” the propaganda minister noted. “We need both to round off our territory. And some day we’ll get them.”
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Hitler did not specify when he intended to swallow up these two countries, but neither did he conceal the fact that, given Germany’s accelerated rearmament, the time would come sooner rather than later. “The Führer is once again unfolding the entire miracle of rearmament,” Goebbels wrote on 10 April. “We’re now almost totally secure in the west…He has achieved a miracle thanks to a bold gambit. The military leaders back then did not understand this at all. For that reason the miracle is all the greater.”
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In early August 1937, after Japan declared war on China, Hitler unambiguously came out in favour of his partner in the anti-Communist pact. “China is militarily inadequate,” Goebbels quoted Hitler proclaiming. “They’ll take a beating from Japan. That’s good because Japan will keep our backs free against Moscow.” According to Goebbels’s diaries, Hitler then immediately proceeded to speak of his own ambitions:

Some day, the Führer will make
tabula rasa
in Austria…He’ll throw everything into it. This state is not a real state at all. Its people belong to us, and it will come to us…And the land of Czechs is no state either. Some day it will be overrun as well.
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Over the course of 1937, while Hitler’s next foreign-policy aims gradually crystallised, he gave up on his idea of an international political deal with Britain. Lord Philip Lothian, Lloyd George’s former private secretary and the future British ambassador to the United States, was under no illusions about the new atmosphere in Berlin when he visited the city in early May. Hitler and Göring, he reported, had complained that Britain was the country that ultimately prevented Germany from achieving its rightful position in the world and asked why Britain was pursuing an “anti-German” rather than a “British” foreign policy.
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In Hitler’s egocentric view such “British” foreign policy obviously had to adjust itself to German ideas about the distribution of global power. In late May, Neville Chamberlain took over the leadership of the government from fellow Conservative Stanley Baldwin, but that did little to raise spirits in Berlin. The new British ambassador, Nevile Henderson, was considered more amenable to Germany than his predecessor, Eric Phipps,
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but that did not seem to promise change in Great Britain’s basic attitude towards Germany. Chamberlain’s policy of appeasement was aimed at gaining time to close the armaments gap with the Third Reich. Chamberlain wanted to keep the peace in Europe for as long as possible by pacifying the German dictator with concessions and keeping his larger expansionist aims in check. Never for a moment did the British prime minister consider giving Hitler a free hand in eastern Europe.
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But he would fool himself about Hitler’s willingness to come to any sensible compromise and to abide by agreements.

By early June 1937, Hitler may still have declared that “everything’s up in the air in London,” but in reality he had given up on his fantasy of an Anglo-German alliance. Over lunch at the Chancellery, he mocked Britain’s global status. “He considers it very weakened,” Goebbels wrote. “The empire is stagnating, if indeed it is not already in decline.” As of the summer of 1937, Hitler increasingly began to put his faith in the Berlin–Rome axis. “He’s now counting on Mussolini,” a sceptical Goebbels noted. “Perhaps too much. We should not completely forget England.”
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The Italian dictator requited German advances in kind. In the early days of June, during a visit by German Minister of War von Blomberg, Il Duce announced that he wanted to pay a state visit to Germany that autumn,
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and on 4 September, the press office of the German Foreign Ministry announced that the trip was officially planned. “The upcoming visit by Mussolini is creating a massive stir throughout the entire world,” wrote Goebbels, who would be occupied by it for the next two weeks. “And rightly so! This is an event of extensive significance.”
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At 10 a.m. on 25 September, Mussolini’s personal train arrived at Munich’s central station. He was received by Hitler personally and a large entourage in uniform, in the midst of whom Goebbels felt “entirely naked.”
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The host warmly shook both of his visitor’s hands and accompanied him to the Prinz Carl Palais, where Il Duce was staying. A little later, Mussolini was invited to Hitler’s private apartment for an hour-long chat. The interpreter Paul Schmidt—rendered superfluous because the Italian leader insisted, as he had previously in Venice, on speaking German—had the opportunity to observe and compare the two dictators. “Hitler sat at the table slightly slumped,” Schmidt recalled:

When he got more animated, the lock of hair so popular among caricaturists would fall down from his rather large forehead in front of his face, which gave him something disorderly and bohemian…Across from him, Mussolini made a totally different impression. Sitting bolt upright, his body stiff and rocking back and forth slightly at the hips whenever he spoke, the man with the head of Caesar seemed the paradigm of Ancient Rome, with a prominent forehead, a broad mouth and a broad square chin protruding in a slightly cramped way…In Munich, too, I found myself impressed by Mussolini’s concise, crystal-clear formulations of his thoughts. He never said a word too many, and everything that came out of his mouth could have been immediately published. The difference in how the two men laughed was also interesting. Hitler’s laughter always had an undertone of mockery and sarcasm, betraying traces of past disappointment and suppressed ambition. By contrast, Mussolini was able to laugh his head off without constraint. It was a liberating laugh demonstrating that the man had a sense of humour.
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Mussolini named Hitler “an honourary corporal in the Fascist militia,” and that afternoon Hitler repaid the favour by awarding Il Duce the Grand Cross of the Order of the German Eagle and the Golden Party Badge. He also insisted on giving Mussolini a personal tour of the exhibition in the House of German Art.
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But Hitler’s primary agenda was to impress upon his Italian visitor the military strength his regime had achieved. That evening the two men boarded their personal trains to travel to a series of Wehrmacht manoeuvres taking place in Mecklenburg in northern Germany. The following day, they visited the Krupp factories. “A triumphal ride without compare through Essen,” Goebbels noted. “Hundreds of thousands turned out, Mussolini completely bowled over. Celebration and enthusiasm like never before.”
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But that was overshadowed by the reception that the people of Berlin gave Mussolini on the afternoon of 27 September. Even the two men’s entry into the Reich capital was specially staged. Shortly before reaching the outlying district of Spandau, Hitler’s train appeared next to Mussolini’s. The two then travelled parallel to one another until just before the station on Heerstrasse, when Hitler’s train abruptly accelerated so that he reached the station first and was able to greet his fellow dictator on the platform. “Just like in the fairy tale of the hedgehog and hare,” commented Schmidt.
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The theatre set designer Benno von Arent had transformed key points in the capital’s city centre—the Brandenburg Gate, Pariser Platz and Wilhelmstrasse—into stage spectacles replete with “pylons, fasces, giant eagles, swastikas, flagpoles, and large numbers of nested or artfully knotted flags in Italian and German colours.”
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That evening Hitler hosted a gala dinner in Mussolini’s honour at the Chancellery. In his toast, he praised Il Duce as “the brilliant creator of Fascist Italy, the founder of a new empire.” Mussolini returned the compliment by calling Hitler “the warrior who restored to the German people the consciousness of their own greatness.”
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