Hitler: Ascent, 1889-1939 (89 page)

By 17 October, Hitler could reassure his cabinet: “Neither have threatening steps been taken against Germany not are they to be expected…The critical moment seems to have passed. The excitement will probably calm down shortly.”
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Goebbels, too, was relieved: “World echo fabulous. Better than I thought. The others are already looking for ways out. We have the upper hand again. Hitler’s coup was daring but correct.”
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On 18 October, Hitler gave a lengthy interview to the correspondent of the
Daily Mail
, George Ward Price, in which he sought to dispel the worries of the British government and populace about Germany going it alone in foreign policy. Hitler stressed how happy he would be if Germany and Britain, which he characterised as related nations, rediscovered their former friendship. He also emphasised his desire for an honest agreement with France and denied planning war against Poland. He did not rule out Germany rejoining the League of Nations, but only on the condition that it was recognised as a full equal. He also promised that Germany would honour all its agreements and treaties: “What we have signed up to we will fulfil to the best of our abilities.”
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On 24 October, Hitler opened the campaign for the Reichstag election and the referendum on his foreign policy with a speech in Berlin’s Sportpalast. With great pathos, he announced that he would “rather die” than sign anything he was convinced was not in the interest of the German people. “If I ever lose my way in this regard or if the German people should come to believe that it cannot stand behind my actions, it can have me executed,” Hitler exclaimed. “I will stand calm and still.”
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During the days that followed, he flew from city to city—Hanover, Cologne, Stuttgart, Frankfurt am Main, Weimar, Breslau, Elbing and Kiel—as he had during the hotly contested elections of 1932. On his approach to Kiel on 6 November, Captain Hans Baur briefly lost his orientation, and Hitler’s plane only just reached Travemünde airport.
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On 8 and 9 November, Hitler interrupted his election tour to celebrate the tenth anniversary of the 1923 putsch in Munich. On the evening of 8 November, he spoke in the Bürgerbräukeller, the spot where he had proclaimed a “national revolution” a decade earlier. Back then, he said, he had not acted rashly, but rather “on behalf of a higher power.” It was down to the “wisdom of Providence” that the putsch had not succeeded, since the time had not been ripe. Nonetheless, it was then that the young National Socialist movement had gained the “heroism” that had led to the successful “rebellion” of 1933.
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At noon on 9 November, a parade of the “old fighters” from the beer hall to the Feldherrnhalle underscored the mythic reinterpretation of the events of 1923. The ceremony would be repeated every year and became a fixed component of the Nazi holiday calendar.

“Hitler looked very pale,” Goebbels noted after seeing his performance at the ceremony at the Feldherrnhalle.
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What the chancellor had put himself through in the preceding weeks would have exhausted even a man of the strongest physical constitution. On 10 November, the day after the Munich festivities, he appeared before workers in the Berlin factory district of Siemensstadt, with Goebbels producing the accompanying radio report as he had in March. Hitler cleverly adapted to his audience by presenting a home-made legend about his childhood and passing himself off as a man of proletarian origins and sentiment. “In my youth, I was a worker like you,” he told his audience. “I worked my way up by working hard, learning and, I can also say, by going hungry.” He went on to brag about the government’s initial successes in combating unemployment and reiterated his desire for peace: “I should not be accused of being insane enough to want war.”
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It seems that the role of peace-loving labour leader allowed Hitler to score some points. Goebbels, in any case, wrote of the audience’s reaction: “Great celebrations. Only workers. A year ago they would have struck us dead. The boss in his best form. Huge success. Hard to get out of the hall.”
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Victor Klemperer, who listened to the speech on the radio, had an entirely different reaction: “A largely hoarse, overly shouted, excitable voice, long passages in the self-pitying tone of a preaching sectarian…disordered but passionate. Every sentence was a lie, but I almost think an unconscious lie. The man is a narrow-minded fanatic. And he’s learned nothing.”
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As accurate as Klemperer’s assessment might have been, the fact that Hitler was an
arriviste
autodidact led even an educated and intelligent person like the Dresden professor to underestimate him. The same was doubly true of Count Harry Kessler, who noted in his diary in mid-October that Hitler was “ultimately nothing more than a hysterical, half-educated house painter, whose big mouth has earned him a position for which he is not qualified.”
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On 12 November, 45 million Germans had their say on the question: “Do you, German man and German woman, approve of this policy of your Reich government and are you prepared to declare it to be your own view and your own will to solemnly profess your belief in it?” A total of 40.5 million (95.1 per cent) voted yes, 2.1 million (4.9 per cent) voted no, and 0.75 per cent of the ballots were declared invalid. In the Reichstag elections, the Nazi Party list received 39.6 million (92.2 per cent) valid and 3.4 million invalid votes.
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The Nazi leadership celebrated this as a great triumph. “Moved, Hitler put his hands on my shoulders,” noted Goebbels, who himself took most of the credit for the result. “It has been achieved. The German people are unified. Now we can confront the world.”
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Electoral approval may have been higher than expected, but the picture of a single unified people was propaganda. Klemperer, who had twice voted no, in so far as his non-Jewish wife turned in two empty ballots, concluded: “That was almost an act of bravery since the entire world expected that the ballots would not be secret.”
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Indeed, there were so many irregularities in the election that the result can only be seen as a partially accurate reflection of the prevailing mood.
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On the other hand, there is no denying that the vast majority of Germans willingly gave the Hitler regime their approval. In the estimation of the Swiss envoy in Berlin, Paul Dinichert, the broad masses of Germans voted yes to the question “because they believed that they had to defend ‘German honour,’ saw inequalities in disarmament as intolerable and never had much affection for the League of Nations, and also because the vast majority pins its hopes for a better future on Hitler, whom they regard as their saviour from political, social and economic misery.”
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Even the observers working for the SPD leadership in exile could not deny that “the mood of patriotism” had gained “the upper hand” among blue-collar workers.
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Within Catholic and Social Democratic milieus, too, which had resisted National Socialism prior to 1933, Hitler’s standing had demonstrably improved.

Within the cabinet, Papen took on the task of expressing positively Byzantine thanks to Hitler on behalf of the conservative ministers: “Everyone was completely bowled over by the unique, overwhelming expression of faith such as no nation ever before had given to its leader.” In just nine months, Papen added, Hitler’s “genius” had succeeded in converting “an internally divided people into a Reich unified by its hopes for and belief in the future.”
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What the vice-chancellor must have repressed at this point was his own dramatic loss of political influence, which meant that he could no longer serve as a counterweight to the Nazi leader and his lust for power. The fact that after Papen’s encomium, the ministers all rose from their seats to honour the chancellor spoke louder than any words at how completely Hitler now dominated the cabinet. And in foreign-policy matters, too, he began increasingly to take the lead.

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The next bombshell dropped on 26 January 1934 when the German Reich and Poland announced the conclusion of a non-aggression pact that was supposed to last for ten years and that required both sides to seek peaceful solutions to any conflicts of interest. The author of this coup was not the Foreign Ministry, but rather Hitler himself. In early May 1933, he had expressed his wish to the Polish envoy, Alfred Wysocki, “that both countries dispassionately take stock of and embrace their mutual interests.”
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The resulting exchange of ideas was intensified in the autumn of 1933. In late September Goebbels met with Polish Foreign Minister Józef Beck in Geneva. “He wants to break free from France and move towards Berlin,” Goebbels noted. “These threads will continue to be pursued.”
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In mid-November, Hitler received and held lengthy talks with Poland’s new ambassador to Germany, Józef Lipski. With that, the official negotiations that led to the non-aggression pact commenced between Berlin and Warsaw.
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Understandably, this spectacular development created a stir both inside and outside Germany. It represented a break with previous German foreign policy, which had never accepted the territorial concessions the Treaty of Versailles had forced Germany to make to Poland, in particular the creation of the Polish Corridor that separated East Prussia from the rest of the Reich. For this very reason, Neurath had rejected the idea of Germany’s reaching any understanding with its eastern neighbour in the spring of 1933. Now Hitler appeared to have engineered just that. “A diplomatic miracle has occurred!” wrote Ebermayer in his diary. “Germany and Poland have reached an agreement!”
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Of course Hitler’s change of tack was not motivated by a sudden fondness for the authoritarian regime of Marshal Józef Piłsudski. On the contrary, the German chancellor had weighed up the advantages of the non-aggression pact. On the one hand, it offered protection against a joint pre-emptive strike by Poland and France—a danger that Hitler’s regime initially took very seriously.
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“Ten years of calm, even with sacrifices,” was how Hitler summarised his foreign policy in November 1933.
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On the other hand, the agreement with Poland served Hitler as a welcome means of proving that he was the man of peace he constantly claimed to be. And that was exactly how foreign diplomats now saw him—British Ambassador Phipps called the non-aggression pact the “achievement of a great statesman.”
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Nevertheless, despite pledging not to resort to violence, Hitler had not accepted the territorial integrity of the Polish state. The pact was not a “Locarno for the east.” For Hitler, the priority was to keep his eastern flank safe. The future would offer opportunities for redrawing Germany’s borders there, even if Hitler was careful not to mention this in public. On the contrary, in his speech to the Reichstag on the first anniversary of his coming to power, he touted the agreement with Poland as a new chapter in the history of the two peoples: “Germans and Poles will have to learn to live with the fact of their mutual existence. It is therefore more effective to shape a situation, which the previous thousand years could not eradicate and the years after us will not be able to either, in such a way that both nations can derive the greatest possible benefit from it.”
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The pact chiselled away at France’s security concept of a cordon sanitaire in eastern Europe. It also “resolutely reversed the ABCs of Germany’s eastern European policy,” as the historian Klaus Hildebrand put it. “Instead of pursuing, as it had previously, an anti-Polish policy together with the Soviet Union, Germany now pursued an anti-Soviet policy together with Poland.”
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The regime may have renewed the German–Soviet Neutrality and Non-aggression Pact of April 1926 on 5 May 1933, but Hitler also made it clear that closer ties to Poland implied distancing Germany from the Soviet Union. That meant that the ideological conflict with the wielders of power in Moscow would determine future German foreign policy. “The burdensome moments in our relations with Russia have always been greater than the fruitful ones,” Hitler told his cabinet in late September 1933.
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And in fact, German–Soviet relations markedly worsened throughout 1933 and 1934. The cooperation between the Reichswehr and the Red Army in the Weimar Republic was abruptly terminated and Soviet foreign policy now reorientated itself westwards, particularly towards France. In September 1934, the Soviet Union joined the League of Nations, after the United States had politically recognised the Communist government the preceding November.

One year after taking power, Hitler was now determining the direction and pace of German foreign policy. If the diplomats in the Foreign Ministry had reservations about the methods Hitler used, they still loyally served the new regime. “Our kind
must
support the new era,” the ambitious young envoy Ernst von Weizsäcker said. “What would succeed it, were it to fail?” The “expertise” of career diplomats had to complement the “idealistic drive of the national revolution,” Weizsäcker argued, in order to prevent unfortunate developments.
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Yet although they so eagerly placed themselves at his disposal, Hitler thoroughly mistrusted the elites at the Foreign Ministry. He still felt the inferiority complex of an
arriviste
when confronted by experienced and usually very worldly civil servants. In Hitler’s eyes, the career diplomats lacked agility, were plagued by doubts and stuck in their bureaucratic ways. For that reason, he began early on to promote a number of competing organisations that could pursue foreign policy independent of traditional diplomacy. One of them was the NSDAP Foreign Policy Office, which was founded on 1 April 1933 by Alfred Rosenberg, the chief Nazi ideologue and one of Hitler’s main foreign-policy advisers. Others were the NSDAP Foreign Organisation under Ernst Wilhelm Bohle and Joachim von Ribbentrop’s office, which as of 1934 functioned as Hitler’s extended arm on foreign-policy matters.
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