Hitler: Ascent, 1889-1939 (133 page)

Nonetheless, Hitler retained a deep-seated aversion to Italian high society and the Italian aristocracy. He told a small circle in the Chancellery that he had never seen “so many degenerate fools, mindless parrots and old frumps at the same time in one place.” He characterised the polonaise in the palace as “the worst trial of martyrdom he had ever been through” and described the “thick as a pig” Italian queen as the “mutton thief from Montenegro,” as the army attaché Gerhard Engel recalled: “He said that women had surrounded him and had almost put out his eyes with their wine glasses. Nothing should be left undone to support Mussolini in his battle against this corrupt society.”
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Hitler repeatedly expressed his satisfaction that he had never listened to those who had tried to talk him into a restoration of the monarchy in Germany. He even praised the “old middle-of-the-road Social Democrats” for doing away with the “spectre of the monarchy” in 1918 and suggested that their pensions should be increased.
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Hitler only remained in Berlin for a single day after returning from Italy. On 11 May he flew to Munich and withdrew for the next two weeks to the Obersalzberg.
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During this time, Nazi propaganda whipped up the anti-Czech mood, and tensions increased in the Sudeten German regions of Czechoslovakia. On 20 May, worried about concentrations of German troops on their border, the Czech government ordered a partial mobilisation of the country’s armed forces. France reaffirmed its commitment to come to Czechoslovakia’s aid in case of a German attack, and Britain warned the Third Reich that it also would not stand by and do nothing. Hitler’s government in Berlin saw itself compelled to offer reassurances that it had no intentions of invading Germany’s neighbour.
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But the “weekend crisis” of 20 and 21 May did not bring an end to the tensions. As soon as London and Paris were convinced that Germany did not in fact intend to attack, and that the Czechs had unnecessarily dramatised the situation, the mood turned against Prague. Hitler, on the other hand, was enraged that the foreign press wrote of Germany backing down and suffering a diplomatic defeat. Far from encouraging a more prudent course, therefore, the May crisis made him all the more aggressive. On 26 May he returned to Berlin. Goebbels, who saw him on the morning of 28 May, noted: “He’s brooding about what decision to make. That usually goes on for a while. But once he’s made up his mind, he’ll make sure his will is carried out.”
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By that afternoon, the dictator knew what he wanted to do. In the conservatory of the Chancellery, he told the leaders of the Wehrmacht and the Foreign Ministry: “It is my iron will that Czechoslovakia disappear from the map.” No matter what threatening gestures they made, Hitler asserted, the Western powers were unlikely to intervene. Britain still needed time to build up its military, France would not act independently of Britain, and Italy was indifferent. So the chances of keeping the conflict local, Hitler concluded, were good.
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The revised orders for the Green Scenario on 30 May directly reflected Hitler’s instructions. “It is my irrevocable decision to break up Czechoslovakia through military action,” he said. “The task of waiting for the right time, in military and political terms, to carry this out falls to the political leadership.” He ordered the Wehrmacht to make all the necessary preparations by 1 October.
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After that point, as he made clear in a supplemental order on 18 June, Hitler wanted to be able “to exploit every favourable circumstance for achieving this end.”
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The military leaders present at the meeting on 28 May did not raise any objections. Even Army Chief of the General Staff Ludwig Beck stayed silent: Nicolaus von Below described him maintaining a “face of stone” throughout the meeting.
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However, Beck did express his reservations in a series of memoranda to Army Commander-in-Chief von Brauchitsch in late May and June. Like most of Germany’s military leadership, Beck supported the idea of the Reich expanding its power; he had welcomed the
Anschluss
and had nothing in principle against the division of Czechoslovakia. But he feared that the way Hitler was proceeding would compel the Western allies to intervene, and he felt that Germany was insufficiently prepared for the protracted war that would inevitably come about.
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When informed by Brauchitsch about Beck’s concerns, Hitler heaped scorn upon the chief of the general staff, calling him “an officer who is still stuck on the idea of an army of 100,000 men and for whom the desk chair is more important than the trenches.” He had nothing against Beck personally, he said, but he had no use for people who did not share his convictions, so Beck’s days were numbered.
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Beck enjoyed little support within the military leadership and even among those who worked under him. A simulation of war which the general staff conducted in the second half of June concluded that an offensive against Czechoslovakia would only last a few days and that German troops could be redeployed to the western front more quickly than Beck thought. Increasingly, Beck found himself pegged as an “unconvincing Cassandra.”
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In a further major memorandum of 15–16 July, Beck made a last-ditch effort to win over Brauchitsch, stating flat-out: “The prospect of destroying Czechoslovakia with military force without alerting England and France does not exist for the foreseeable future.” The conflict, Beck argued, would “automatically expand into a European or world war, which as far as anyone could predict would end in a general catastrophe and not just a military defeat for Germany.” The chief of staff called upon Brauchitsch to dissuade Hitler of the idea of a violent resolution of the Czech question “until the military situation has changed decisively.”
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In a presentation he gave to Brauchitsch, Beck went even further and mooted the idea of a collective resignation among military leaders in an attempt to get Hitler to abandon his risky policies of conflict. “Soldiers’ obedience reaches its limits when their knowledge, their conscience and their sense of responsibility forbids them to carry out an order,” Beck declared. “Extraordinary times demand extraordinary measures.”
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But neither Brauchitsch nor the majority of Germany’s military leaders had the slightest inclination to rebel in a way that was utterly atypical of Prussian officers. That became clear at a meeting of high-ranking military leaders on 4 August. Most of the participants were critical of Hitler’s plans for war, but no one said a single word about coming together to resist them.
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Hitler got wind of the meeting and immediately summoned Walther von Brauchitsch to the Berghof. Hitler was already convinced that there were too many doomsayers among his military leadership. “Our generals in Berlin of course once more have their pants full,” he had scoffed in late July in Bayreuth.
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He read Brauchitsch the Riot Act, raising his voice so much that the guests taking some fresh air on the terrace below Hitler’s office decided they would be best advised to go inside. In his many years of service to Hitler, Nicolaus von Below recalled, this was “the only time he had got that loud during a conversation with a general.”
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On 10 August, Hitler ordered the heads of the general staff of the armies and army groups earmarked for mobilisation to come to the Berghof. Most of them were younger generals, and for many it was the first time that they had met their supreme commander in person. Hitler put on a completely different persona to the one he had presented to Brauchitsch. Before lunch, he talked to them casually, “expressing moderate, sensible views, calm in tone and open to objections—in short, he was playing the role of a man you could talk to, and not that of the wild dictator,” Fritz Wiedemann reported.
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In an afternoon speech that went on for hours, Hitler tried to win the officers’ support for his plans, but in the following discussion he encountered both reservations and approval. In the days that followed, according to Gerhard Engel, his disappointment expressed itself in “a long critical litany about the lukewarm, nerveless leaders of the army.”
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Hitler suspected that Beck was behind the resistance, and he interpreted the latter’s memorandum of 15–16 July, which Brauchitsch brought to his attention, as confirmation of that belief. In his diary, Hitler’s military attaché described the dictator’s reaction:

He said people were trying to sabotage his work. Instead of the general staff being glad that it could work in line with its very own way of thinking, it refused any thought of war…It was high time for the chief of staff to disappear…It was a scandal that he now sat in the chair once occupied by Moltke. Moltke had to be restrained by Bismarck. Now the situation was the exact opposite.
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On 15 August, in a speech in Jüterbog to his commanding generals, Hitler rejected Beck’s ideas in no uncertain terms. Three days later, after Brauchitsch had declined to defend him, Beck submitted his resignation. Hitler accepted it after three further days, but insisted that the resignation initially be kept secret because of the tense foreign-policy situation. On 1 September, Quartermaster General and Artillery General Franz Halder was named Beck’s successor.
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In early August 1938, the British government sent Lord Walter Runciman to Prague to try to get the Czechoslovakian government and the Sudeten German Party to come to an agreement. “Runciman’s whole mission stinks,” wrote William Shirer. “He says he has come here to mediate between the Czech government and the Sudeten Party of Konrad Henlein. But Henlein is not a free agent. He cannot negotiate. He is completely under the orders of Hitler.”
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Although Prague yielded to British pressure and made one concession after another, even going as far as accepting nearly all the demands in the Sudeten Party’s Karlsbad manifesto, the representatives of the German minority always found a pretext to demand more and more. Hitler, of course, was not interested in a peaceful settlement. In early June he had told Goebbels to ramp up anti-Czech propaganda: “We have to keep on stirring up trouble and rebellion. Never let them relax.”
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That entire summer, German newspapers published reports about alleged “atrocities” carried out by Czechs against Sudeten Germans, stoking popular anger.

In mid-July, Fritz Wiedemann made an unofficial trip to London with a message from Hitler to Lord Halifax. Wiedemann was to tell the British foreign secretary that Britain was showing too little regard for Germany’s interests and should learn to accept “German existential necessities.” The Führer was “still quite embittered” about the British government’s behaviour in the “weekend crisis” and dismayed about the British press’s criticism of him. And Hitler formulated his central message in unmistakable terms: “The Sudeten German question must be resolved one way or the other. If the Czechs do not give in, one day it will be solved with violence.” Halifax received Wiedemann on 18 July in his private apartment. When the foreign minister asked for a written statement to confirm that Germany planned no violent measures against Czechoslovakia, Wiedemann answered, as instructed: “You will not be getting this declaration.” The trip did nothing to relax the tension, even though Halifax did articulate the hope that he would some day greet the Führer side by side with the king of England at Buckingham Palace.
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In July, as he did every year, Hitler attended the Wagner Festival in Bayreuth, but this time he was preoccupied by thoughts of the imminent military conflict. He inspected the latest designs of fortifications for the West Wall on Germany’s border and made sketches of how he wanted them built.
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Over lunch he declared: “I want to finally get a good night’s sleep. That’s why I’ve ordered the construction of fortifications that will prevent the enemy from invading from the west. Germans shall be able to sleep peacefully again.” Minister Hanns Kerrl, one of the lunch guests, was craven enough to respond: “My Führer, the German people will always sleep peacefully as long as you’re alive.”
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On 31 July, Hitler interrupted his visit for a day to attend the German Gymnastics and Sports Festival in Breslau. There, Sudeten Germans marched by the VIP stand, shouting “Back home to the Reich!,” Goebbels noted. “The people yelled, cheered and cried. The Führer was deeply moved. When the hour is at hand, there will be a true storm.”
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But Hitler still had not set a date for attacking Czechoslovakia. “The Führer is still brooding over the Prague question,” Goebbels wrote on 10 August. “In his mind’s eye he’s already solved it and divided [the country] up into new Gaue.”
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Apparently at this point Hitler still thought that it would take some time to move against Prague. Eight days later, Goebbels summarised Hitler’s thoughts on the western fortifications as: “By the first frost, they’ll be finished. Then we’ll be unassailable from the west, and France will no longer be able to do anything. With that, the solution of our central European problems can begin to ripen. In any case, we’ll have our back free.”
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From 27 to 29 August, Hitler, Keitel and Jodl went on an inspection tour of Germany’s western border. In Aachen, in the salon carriage of Hitler’s special train, the commander of Army Group 2, Colonel General Wilhelm Adam, reported that only a third of the fortifications would be completed by the end of October. When Adam proceeded to express his opinion that the Western powers would not sit back and do nothing if Germany attacked Czechoslovakia, Hitler went into a rage. “We have no time to listen to this stuff any longer,” he fumed. “The English have no army reserves, and the French are facing massive domestic problems. They’ll be wary of taking us on.” Adam responded coolly that there was no need then for further discussion and suggested they go out into the field. As was so often the case when someone stood up to him, Hitler regained his composure on the spot, and the inspection continued.
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