Modern Times: The World From the Twenties to the Nineties (69 page)

There was a general tendency (as with Stalin’s atrocities) to ignore the actual evidence of Hitler’s wickedness, which was plentiful enough, and to dismiss Hitler’s ferocious statements as mere ‘rhetoric’, which was ‘intended for home consumption’
(The Times
, 10 July 1934). Against all the evidence, the stage army persisted in believing that Hitler not only wanted peace but was a factor for it. Temple, the portly primate of York, thought he had made ‘a great contribution to the secure establishment of peace’.
²⁶
Clifford Allen wrote, ‘I am convinced he genuinely desires peace.’
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Keynes’s ‘Carthaginian peace’ argument had so captured the minds of both Left and Right that it was felt that for Hitler to smash the Treaty by force was itself a step to peace. Versailles was ‘monstrously unjust’ (Leonard Woolf), ‘that wicked treaty’ (Clifford Allen). In remilitarizing the Rhineland, said Lothian, the Germans had ‘done no more than walk into their own backyard’. Shaw agreed: it was if the British had reoccupied Portsmouth.’
²⁸

Behind all this facile rationalization, however, was simple, old-fashioned fear; a dash of cowardice, indeed. As Harold Nicolson noted during the Rhineland crisis, ‘the feeling in the House is terribly pro-German, which means afraid of war’.
²⁹
Until the coming of radar in the late 1930s, even experts accepted the views of Giulio Douhet in
The Command of the Air
(1921), that fighter aircraft could do little to prevent mass bombing. Churchill warned parliament on 28 November 1934 that up to 40,000 Londoners would be killed or injured in the first week of war. Baldwin thought the ‘man in the street’ ought to ‘realize that there is no power on earth that can protect him from being bombed. Whatever people may tell him, the bomber will always get through.’
³⁰
In fact people told him nothing of the sort: quite the contrary. The brilliant H.G.Wells film,
Things to Come
(1936), presented a terrifying scene of total devastation. The same year, Bertrand Russell (currently a pacifist) argued in
Which Way to Peace?
that fifty gas-bombers, using lewisite, could poison all London. General Fuller, another leading expert, predicted that London would become ‘one vast, raving Bedlam’, with the government ‘swept away in an avalanche of terror’.

In this highly emotional atmosphere, with an ostensible concern for humanity forming a thin crust over a morass of funk – so suggestive of the nuclear scares of the late 1950s and early 1980s – the real issue of how to organize collective security in Europe was never properly debated. The mood was set by a ridiculous debate in the Oxford Union, immediately after Hitler came to power, which voted 275–153 ‘That this House refuses in any circumstances to fight for King and Country’ – ‘that abject, squalid, shameless avowal … a very disquieting and disgusting symptom’, as Churchill called it. It
was chiefly, and quite illogically, a protest against Britain’s supine behaviour over Manchuria, as Michael Foot, then a Union officer (and a Liberal), explained.
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The League of Nations Union, supposedly the hard-headed, well-informed collective security lobby group, never put the issues clearly before the public because it was unable itself to take a clear stand on when and how force could be legitimately employed in international affairs.
³²
Its president and driving force, Lord Robert Cecil, knew that British abandonment of China was inevitable, but he was too devious to tell his supporters.
³³
The clergy, seizing on the peace issue as a remedy for declining congregations and their own flagging faith (another precursor of the 1980s), saturated the discussion in a soggy pool of lacrymose spirituality. Three divines, the Revs Herbert Grey, Maude Royden and ‘Dick’ Sheppard, proposed to go to Manchuria and ‘place themselves unarmed between the combatants’, a ludicrous echo of Strachey’s feeble witticism, but intended quite seriously.
³⁴
The Rev. Donald Soper (Methodist) argued: ‘Pacifism contains a spiritual force strong enough to repel an invader.’
³⁵
Cosmo Gordon Lang, Archbishop of Canterbury, did not quite believe that, but he was confused enough both to oppose rearmament and to write to
The Times
wagging an admonitory finger at Mussolini.

The pacifist wing of the clergy, led by Sheppard, founded a Peace Pledge Union to collect signatures to frighten off Hitler: among those who sponsored it were Aldous Huxley, Rose Macaulay, Storm Jameson, Vera Brittain, Siegfried Sassoon, Middleton Murry and other literary luminaries. Feeling the chill wind of competition from the Left, Cecil organized, in 1934–5, a nationwide ‘Peace Ballot’, which produced 87 per cent approval (over 10 million votes) of the League position, and appeared to refute both the pacifists and the pro-rearmament Tories like Churchill, but which in fact never asked the question whether Britain should rearm if the dictatorships did so first, and so confused the debate still further.
³⁶
In fact public opinion was highly volatile. In 1933–4, East Fulham was one of six by-elections fought in part on the peace issue which registered huge swings against the government (as high as 50 per cent in October 1934) and were interpreted as a public rejection of rearmament. But all these seats returned solidly to the Tory fold at the general election in 1935, just as virtually all those who voted against King and Country at Oxford fought for it when the time came. But Hitler could be excused for believing, at any rate until the end of 1938, that Britain would not oppose him by force. He therefore acted on that assumption.

Hitler’s conduct of foreign and military policy between his accession to power and the end of 1938 was brilliantly forceful and – granted the complete absence of respect for any system of law and
morals – faultless. He did not make a single error of judgement. At this stage his compulsive eschatology was an advantage: the need he felt for speed gave his moves a pace which continually wrong-footed his opponents and left them bewildered. 1933 and 1934 were devoted essentially to internal consolidation and rearmament. The action began on 13 January 1935 when Hitler won the Saar plebiscite; eleven days after the Saar reverted to Germany on 7 March, Hitler repudiated the Versailles disarmament clauses, and on 18 June – despite the Stresa Front – the British cravenly accepted the
fait accompli
of a rearmed Germany by signing the Anglo-German Naval Treaty. This inexplicable surrender not only gave Germany the right to 35 per cent strength of Britain’s surface fleet but granted her parity in submarines. It was the beginning of positive appeasement, as opposed to mere supine inactivity.
³⁷
This concession infuriated the French and contributed to the breakdown in Anglo—French policy marked by the Abyssinia crisis. Indeed, Abyssinia was an uncovenanted boon for Hitler: his one stroke of pure luck.

It is of the essence of geopolitics to be able to distinguish between different degrees of evil. This was a gift Anthony Eden, now Foreign Secretary, did not possess. He could not differentiate between Mussolini, who was corruptible but open to civilized influences too, and Hitler, a man who had already murdered hundreds and placed scores of thousands in concentration camps, and who openly claimed his intention to transform Europe. ‘My programme from the first was to abolish the Treaty of Versailles …. I have written it thousands of times. No human being has ever declared or recorded what he wanted more often than me’: so Hitler said, and it was true.
³⁸
Nor did Eden register that any threat from Italy, with her weak and already flagging economy, was not to be compared with the potential destructive power of Germany, with the world’s second largest industrial economy, already booming again, and a military tradition of unparalleled ferocity. This extraordinary lack of perspective was shared by British public opinion, or at any rate that section of it which made its voice heard. The uproar it raised over Italy’s invasion was far noisier than the hostile reaction to any of Hitler’s far more purposeful moves, then or later. The French were shaken by such frivolity, and made it clear they could not be a party to it.

Thus Abyssinia not only destroyed the Stresa Front but created bitter Anglo—French antagonism and ruled out any possibility of securing joint agreement to a firm counter-move against Hitler. France would not back Britain over Abyssinia; therefore Britain would not back France over the Rhineland. It was the Abyssinia crisis which enabled Hitler to bring forward his plan to remilitarize
the Rhine from 1937 to 1936, beautifully timed on 7 March at the height of Anglo—French confusion. Even so it was a risk. Hitler later admitted: if the French had marched into the Rhineland we would have had to withdraw with our tails between our legs.’
³⁹
The French had the physical power to act alone, as they had done in 1923. But the will to use it was lacking.

Thereafter Hitler was in a position to resist invasion from the West. In 1936–7 he benefited greatly from the turmoils in the world. First the Spanish Civil War, then the Sino—Japanese conflict burdened the guardians of legitimacy with a multitude of fast-changing problems they could not solve. Meanwhile Hitler rearmed steadily and strengthened his alliances. The Rome—Berlin Axis of 1 November 1936, followed later that month by the Anti-Comintern Pact with Japan, altered the naval-air equations just as radically as the aircraft emerging from Hitler’s new factories. By 1937 Germany had 800 bombers to Britain’s forty-eight. By May that year it was calculated the German and Italian air forces could drop 600 tons of bombs a day. It was the obsession with air-raid terror, intensified by Soviet propaganda over Guernica after July 1937, which paralysed Allied diplomacy.
⁴⁰

On 5 November 1937 Hitler told his top military and foreign policy advisers that a period of active expansion could now begin, with Austria and Czechoslovakia the first targets. Von Blomberg, the War Minister, and the Army Commander, von Fritsch, protested: the French would still be too strong.
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That was the end of them. Until this point Hitler had left the army alone, other than tell it to get on with rearmament as fast as possible. Now he decided the time had come to take it over, to clear the way for the dynamic phase of his programme. On 26 January 1938 Blomberg was dismissed: police files showed his new wife had been a prostitute and porn-model. Nine days later Fritsch went, charged with homosexuality on the evidence of a Himmler file. They were, in a sense, lucky: Stalin would have murdered them for less–he killed 200 generals in 1937–8 – or indeed for nothing at all. Some sixteen other German generals were retired, forty-four more transferred. Hitler himself took over as War Minister and head of the armed forces; the weak von Brauchitsch was made head of the army; a pliable Nazi general, Wilhelm Keitel, was told to create a new operational high command. Thus the last bastion of the old order fell to Hitler, without a murmur from anyone. He threw out Schacht from the Economics Ministry and von Neurath from the Foreign Ministry at the same time. From now on the Nazis were in total control and all was on a war footing.

A week after Fritsch was sacked, Hitler summoned the Austrian Chancellor, Kurt von Schuschnigg, to his mountain villa at Berchtesgaden. No saloon-keeper dragged to a gangster’s lair could have been
treated more brutally. Following the tirade, the terrified man signed a series of concessions, including the appointment of a Nazi as his Interior Minister. Afterwards, driving back to Salzburg with von Papen, the latter remarked: ‘Yes – that’s the way the Führer can be. Now you’ve seen it for yourself. But next time you’ll find a meeting with him a good deal easier. The Führer can be distinctly charming.’
⁴²
In fact the ‘next time’ for Schuschnigg was a summons to Dachau. Hitler’s troops entered Austria thirty days after the meeting.

Hitler’s treatment of his Austrian opponents was brutal and bestial in the extreme. University professors were made to scrub the streets with their bare hands (a form of ‘re-education’ imitated by Mao Tse-tung in the 1960s).
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The invading Nazis stole anything they could lay their hands on. When they broke into Freud’s flat in Vienna, his wife put her housekeeping money on the table: ‘Won’t the gentlemen help themselves?’ It required intervention by Roosevelt and Mussolini – and a ransom of 250,000 Austrian schillings – to get the old man permission to leave. He had to sign a statement testifying he had been well-treated, to which he appended the words ‘I can heartily recommend the Gestapo to anyone.’ The Germans were delighted. The bitter joke was beyond them. So was pity. Freud’s four aged sisters chose not to move: all died in the gas-ovens later.
⁴⁴

On 21 April, five weeks after he swallowed Austria, Hitler instructed Keitel to prepare an invasion plan for Czechoslovakia, and told the leader of the German minority there to set the crisis in motion. The previous month, on 21 March, the British Chiefs of Staff had presented the cabinet with a paper, ‘The Military Implications of German Aggression Against Czechoslovakia’. Britain was now rearming, but the paper told a fearful tale of delays and weaknesses, especially in the emotional area of air defence.
⁴⁵
Two critical questions now arise. First, would the German army have overthrown Hitler if the Allies had made it clear that war was the price of his Czech policy? This is one of the great ‘ifs’ of history, for if the answer is ‘Yes’, the Second World War – and its terrible consequences – would have been averted.

It is true that some German generals believed that war over Czechoslovakia would be a disaster for Germany. A meeting convened by Brauchitsch in July 1938 agreed that the German people were against war and that the army was still too weak to defeat ‘the powers’.
⁴⁶
The Chief of Staff, Ludwig Beck, told the politician Ewald von Kleist-Schwenzin, who was going to Britain, ‘Bring me back certain proof that England will fight if Czechoslovakia is attacked and I will put an end to this regime.’
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Hitler assured his generals on 15 August that, so long as Chamberlain and Daladier were in power, there would be no Allied declaration of war – according to
Rauschning he referred to the Appeasers scornfully as ‘My Hugenburgs’. This did not convince Beck, who declined responsibility and resigned on 27 August. There is some evidence other generals were prepared to overthrow Hitler when and if he gave the order to attack.
⁴⁸
But one must remain sceptical. The German generals had acquiesced in 1934 when Hitler murdered two of their number. They had done nothing in January when he had broken and retired their leaders. Where in the intervening months would they have found the courage they had so signally failed to possess before – and exercised it in circumstances which Hitler would have presented as desertion and treachery in the face of the enemy?