Hitler (95 page)

It was in fact an extraordinary success, and it granted Hitler everything he could hope for at the moment. British apologists have ever since pointed to Great Britain's security requirements and to the possibility that Hitler could have been tamed by concessions. But the question remains whether those requirements and vague hopes could justify an agreement that condoned a policy of brash violation of treaties, sabotaged Western solidarity, and set the political situation in Europe in motion in such a way that there was no knowing when and where it would come to a stop. The naval agreement has rightly been called an “epochal event whose symptomatic importance was greater than its actual content.”
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Above all, it proved to Hitler once again that the methods of blackmail could accomplish absolutely anything, and it nourished his hopes of ultimately concluding the grand alliance for the partition of the world. This pact, he exulted, was “the beginning of a new age.” He firmly believed, he said, “that the British have sought the understanding with us in this area only as the initial step to very much broader co-operation. A German-British combination will be stronger than all other powers together.” Given the seriousness of his historical pretensions, it was more than a gesture of empty ceremony when Hitler, in Nuremberg at the beginning of September, accepted the presentation of a reproduction of Charlemagne's sword.

 

The Anglo-German naval treaty had a further consequence that once and for all demolished all the existing political relationships in Europe. In the two and a half years since Hitler had been appointed Chancellor, Mussolini had pursued a policy of critical reserve toward Hitler in spite of their ideological fraternity. He had shown “a keener sense of the extraordinary and menacing character of National Socialism than most western statesmen.”
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Gratified though he was by the victory of the Fascist principle in Germany, he could not suppress his deep uneasiness about this neighbor to the north who was bursting with the dynamism, vitality, and discipline he had laboriously been trying to instill into his own people. The meeting in Venice had only served to confirm his mistrust of Hitler. But it seems also to have aroused that inferiority complex for which he thereafter tried to compensate more and more by posturings, imperial actions, or the invoking of a vanished past. Ultimately, it would drive him deeper and deeper into his fateful partnership with Hitler. In a speech shortly after the Venice meeting he had declared, with a glance at Hitler's racial ideas, that thirty centuries of history permitted Italians “to look with sublime indifference upon certain doctrines on the other side of the Alps which have been developed by the descendants of those who in the days of Caesar, Virgil and Augustus were still illiterates.” According to another source he had called Hitler a “clown,” denounced the race doctrine as “Jewish,” and expressed sarcastic doubts about whether anyone would succeed in transforming the Germans into “a racially pure herd,” adding: “According to the most favorable hypothesis... six centuries are needed.” Unlike France, let alone England, he was prepared at various times to counter Hitler's breaches of treaties by military gestures: “The best way to check the Germans is by calling up the military class of 1911.” At the time of Dollfuss's assassination he had ordered several Italian divisions to the northern border, telegraphed the Austrian government that he was prepared to offer it all support in defending the country's independence, and finally even permitted the Italian press to publish popular lampoons on Hitler and the Germans.

He now wished to cash in on all this good conduct. His glance fell upon Ethiopia, which had been occupying Italy's imperialistic fantasies ever since the end of the nineteenth century, when an attempt to extend the colonies of Eritrea and Somaliland had failed miserably. England and France, he decided, would impose no obstacles to a conquest, since they would continue to need Italy in the defensive front against Hitler. Addis Ababa, situated in a kind of no man's land, could not really be more important to the two great powers than Berlin. Mussolini interpreted the half-promises that Laval had made in January, when he visited Rome, and the silence of the British at Stresa, as signs of discreet consent. The Duce also reasoned that the Anglo-German naval pact had increased the value of Italy to the Western powers, especially to France.

By means of deliberately provoked border incidents and oasis conflicts, he stirred up feeling for his colonial war, which had an oddly anachronistic air. While France assured him passive support, for fear that a further pillar of her system of alliances would collapse, he dismissed all attempts at mediation with one of those virile Caesarian gestures he had at his command. Surprisingly, it was England who then came forward. After having refused as recently as April to counter Hitler's troublemaking with sanctions, in September England demanded that sanctions be imposed on Mussolini, and to emphasize her resolve ostentatiously reinforced her Mediterranean fleet. Now, however, France objected; France found herself unwilling to risk her good relations with Italy for the sake of an England that had just demonstrated her unreliability as an ally by coming to an arrangement with Hitler. This refusal in turn angered the British. In Italy outrage was whipped up to the point of boastful talk about a preventive war against Great Britain (mockingly referred to as “Operation Madness”). In short, all understandings and time-tested loyalties now disintegrated. In France, influential partisans of Mussolini, including many intellectuals, openly came out in favor of the Italian expansionist policies. Charles Maurras, the spokesman of the French Right, publicly threatened with death all deputies who demanded sanctions against Italy. Ironic defeatists queried,
“Mourir pour le Négus?”
Soon the same question would be applied to Danzig.

There could be only one justification for the British gesture, especially in view of Hitler's stance: if the British government were prepared to counter Mussolini's act of aggression with all resolution, not shrinking from the risk of war. Obviously, British determination did not go quite that far, and thus it merely brought on the misfortune more speedily. Mussolini felt that the threat of sanctions had been such an insult to the pride and honor of Italy that he was bound to go ahead. On October 2, 1935, at a mass demonstration to which 20 million people, assembled in the streets and plazas throughout Italy, listened enthusiastically, he declared war on Ethiopia: “A great hour in the history of our country has struck.... Forty million Italians, a sworn community, will not let themselves be robbed of their place in the sun!” It would have taken only the closing of the Suez Canal or an oil embargo to render the Italian expeditionary army with its modern equipment incapable of battle. The Ethiopians would then have inflicted upon the Italians a devastating defeat, as the Emperor Menelik had done on the same ground forty years earlier. Mussolini later admitted that this would have been “an inconceivable disaster” for him. But England and France shrank from such a course, as did the other members of the League of Nations. A few half-hearted measures were taken, their feebleness only diminishing what prestige the democracies and the League of Nations still had. There were many reasons for caution. President BeneS, for example, who emerged as a particularly vigorous advocate of economic sanctions, prudently excepted Czechoslovakia's own exports to Italy.

The internal contradictions and antagonisms of Europe afforded Mussolini almost unlimited freedom to maneuver. And with unprecedented brutality, which established a new style of inhumane warfare, the modern Italian army set about destroying an unprepared and nearly defenseless enemy. It even employed poison gas. No less unprecedented was the way in which prominent military officers, including Mussolini's sons Bruno and Vittorio, boasted of the sport they had had in their fighter planes harassing fleeing hordes of human beings and raining death upon them with incendiary bombs and machine guns.
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On May 9, 1936, the Italian dictator stood on the balcony of the Palazzo Venezia announcing his “triumph over fifty nations” to an ecstatic mob, and proclaimed the “reappearance of the Empire upon the fated hills of Rome.”

Hitler had at first observed strict neutrality in the conflict, and not only because he had sufficient reasons to be annoyed with Mussolini. This Ethiopian adventure disturbed his fundamental design in foreign policy. That design had always envisioned a partnership with England and Italy. But the crisis was setting his two prospective allies against one another and confronting Hitler with an unforeseen alternative.

Surprisingly, after prolonged hesitation he decided to take Italy's side, and supplied the Italians with raw materials, especially coal, although only a few months earlier he had hailed the Anglo-German treaty as the beginning of a new era. He was obviously not prompted by ideological sympathy. Economic factors did not seem to play a decisive part, either, although he was certainly influenced by such considerations. Much more important was the fact that he saw in the war another chance to create havoc within the established order of things. His trick for manipulating any crisis consisted in supporting the weaker opponent against the stronger. Thus, as late as the summer of 1935, in two highly secret transactions, Hitler had supplied the Emperor of Ethiopia with war materials valued at approximately 4 million marks. Included were thirty antitank guns that were clearly meant to serve against the Italian aggressor. Out of similar considerations he now supported Mussolini against the Western powers. The decision came all the easier for him because, as a secret speech he delivered in April, 1937, makes plain, he did not take England's commitment very seriously. The principles England was defending—the integrity of small nations, the protection of peace, the right of self-determination—meant nothing to him, whereas he saw Italy's imperialistic gamble as representing the true laws and logic of politics. He made the same grave mistake in August and September, 1939, caused, no doubt, by his inability to think in terms other than those of naked-power interests. Moreover, in the exultation of his rapid successes he felt sufficiently secure to test the newly concluded pact with England by a certain degree of strain, provided he could win over another potential ally who up to then had refused to march with him despite all his overtures.

In addition to using the Ethiopian War to break his isolation in the south, Hitler seized upon the obvious indecisiveness of the Western powers and the paralysis of the League of Nations to launch another of his surprise coups. On March 7, 1936, German troops occupied the Rhineland, which had been demilitarized since the conclusion of the Locarno Pact. By the logic of events, that would have had to be his next step, but to all appearances it came unexpectedly even to Hitler himself. If we may judge by the documents, the action had originally been planned for the spring of 1937. But in the middle of February he began to wonder whether he could not advance the date, in view of the international situation. Apparently he made up his mind only a few days later, when Mussolini twice in quick succession informed him that the spirit of Stresa was dead and Italy would not participate in any sanctions against Germany. Yet this time, too, Hitler waited for a pretext that would enable him to assume before the world's eyes his favorite role of one who had been abused. He wanted to be able to cry out against the shame that had been inflicted upon him.

This time he took his cue from the Franco-Soviet mutual assistance pact. The agreement had been negotiated some time before, but not yet ratified. It lent itself all the better to Hitler's purposes because it had been the subject of protracted domestic controversies within France and had stirred considerable concern internationally as well, especially in England. In order to disguise his intentions, on February 21 Hitler granted an interview to Bertrand de Jouvenel. He expressed his desire for rapprochement and in particular repudiated the intense anti-French bias of
Mein Kampf.
At the time he was writing the book, he explained, France and Germany had been enemies; but by now there were no longer any grounds for conflict. Jouvenel then asked why the book, widely regarded as a kind of political bible, was still being reprinted in unaltered form. Hitler replied that he was not a writer who revised his books, but a politician: “I make my corrections every day in my foreign policy, which is aimed entirely at rapprochement with France.... My corrections will be written in the great book of History.” But when the interview was not published in
Paris-Midi
until a full week later, and in fact not until the day after the Chamber of Deputies had ratified the Franco-Soviet Pact, Hitler felt he had been hoodwinked. When François-Poncet called on him on March 2, Hitler angrily told the ambassador that he had been made a fool of. Political intrigues had kept the interview from being published in time; all his statements had since been outstripped by events, and he would be making new proposals.

The directive that War Minister von Blomberg prepared for the occupation of the Rhineland was dated that same March 2. On March 7 his troops crossed the Rhine, with the population cheering and throwing flowers. But Hitler was well aware of the risk he had taken. Later he referred to the forty-eight hours after the occupation as the “most nerve-racking” period in his life. He did not want to go through another such strain for the next ten years, he said. The build-up of the army had only just begun. If it came to fighting, he had only a handful of divisions against the nearly 200 divisions of France and her East European allies, for in the meanwhile the forces of the Soviet Union had also to be added. And although Hitler himself did not appear to have suffered a nervous breakdown, as one of the participants later asserted, the nerves of the sanguine War Minister did give out. Shortly after the beginning of the operation, he was all for withdrawing the troops in view of the French intervention that could certainly be expected. “If the French had marched into the Rhineland,” Hitler admitted, “we would have had to withdraw with our tails between our legs, for the military resources at our disposal would have been wholly inadequate for even a moderate resistance.”
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