Hitler. 1936-1945: Nemesis

be the last cabinet meeting in the Third Reich. Afterwards, Hitler told Goebbels he felt in the same position with regard to the Wehrmacht that he had been in regarding the German people in 1933. ‘He would first have to fight for his position. But he would soon succeed.’³⁴⁷

Two weeks later, on 20 February, Hitler addressed the Reichstag. His extraordinarily lengthy speech — replacing the one he ought to have given on 30 January — predictably had nothing new to offer on the Blomberg- Fritsch crisis.³⁴⁸ In countering rumours of rifts between Party and Wehrmacht, he returned to the ‘two pillars’ notion of political and military props of the state. To the careful listener, it was, however, plain. Any semblance that the Wehrmacht was a power in its own right, standing above politics, had now vanished. ‘In this Reich, everyone in any responsible position is a National Socialist,’ Hitler intoned. Party and Wehrmacht simply had separate functions, both of which were united in his undisputed leadership.³⁴⁹

Though the crisis was unforeseen, not manufactured, the Blomberg– Fritsch affair engendered a key shift in the relations between Hitler and the most powerful non-Nazi elite, the army. At precisely the moment when Hitler’s adventurism was starting to cause shivers of alarm, the army had demonstrated its weakness and without a murmur of protest swallowed his outright dominance even in the immediate domain of the Wehrmacht. Hitler recognized the weakness, was increasingly contemptuous of the officer corps, and saw himself more and more in the role not only of Head of State, but of great military leader.

The outcome of the Blomberg-Fritsch affair amounted to the third stepping-stone — after the Reichstag Fire and the ‘Rohm-Putsch’ — cementing Hitler’s absolute power and, quite especially, his dominance over the army. With the military emasculated and the hawkish Ribbentrop at the Foreign Office, Hitler’s personal drive for the most rapid expansion possible — blending with the expansionist dynamic coming from the economy and the arms race — was unshackled from the forces which could have counselled caution. In the months that followed, the radical dynamic that had been building up through 1937 would take foreign and domestic developments into new terrain. The threat of war would loom ever closer. Racial persecution would again intensify. Hitler’s ideological ‘vision’ was starting to become reality. The momentum which Hitler had done so much to force along, but which was driven too by forces beyond his personality, was carrying him along with it. ‘Vision’ was beginning to overcome cold, political calculation. The danger-zone was being entered.

2. THE DRIVE FOR EXPANSION

‘Perhaps I’ll appear some time overnight in Vienna; like a spring storm.’

Hitler to Kurt Schuschnigg, the Austrian Chancellor, 12 February 1938

‘I am utterly determined that Czechoslovakia should disappear from the map.’

Hitler, addressing his generals on 28 May 1938

‘If you recognize the principle of self-determination for the treatment of the Sudeten question, then we can discuss how to put the principle into practice.’

Hitler to Neville Chamberlain, the British Prime Minister, 15 September 1938

‘I got the impression that here was a man who could be relied upon when he had given his word.’

Chamberlain, in a private letter of 19 September 1938, on return from his first meeting with Hitler

Hitler’s ‘mission’ since he entered politics had been to undo the stain of defeat and humiliation in 1918 by destroying Germany’s enemies — internal and external — and restoring national greatness. This ‘mission’, he had plainly stated on many occasions during the 1920s, could only be accomplished through ‘the sword’.¹ It meant war for supremacy. The risk could not be avoided. ‘Germany will either be a world power, or there will be no Germany,’ he had written in Mein Kampf.² Nothing had changed over the years in his fanatical belief in this ‘mission’. He had made necessary dove-like noises for international consumption. And his early speeches and writings had often been dismissed as no more than wild rantings which had little to do with the practical realities of international diplomacy and were not to be taken over-seriously as true expressions of intent.³ But, whatever the public rhetoric, the first five years since he became Chancellor had in fact over and again confirmed the belief of a Leader becoming ever more convinced of his own messianism, certain that his ‘mission’ was on course to fulfilment. His own actions — decisions such as those in 1936 to remilitarize the Rhineland and to introduce the Four-Year Plan — had been instrumental in making the ‘mission’ seem more realizable.

Powerful forces beyond ‘triumph of the will’ had made those actions possible. The final decision had invariably been Hitler’s. He had determined the timing of the critical moves in foreign policy. But the significant steps taken since 1933 had in every case been consonant with the interests of the key agencies of power in the regime, above all with those of the Wehrmacht.⁴ Hitler’s own obsessively held convictions had served as a spur to, and blended in with, the ambitious armaments plans of the armed forces, varying notions of restoration of hegemony in Europe entertained by the Foreign Office (along with the ‘amateur’ agencies involved in international affairs), and autarkic aims of big industrial firms. His vision of Germany’s greatness through racial purity, strength of arms, and national rebirth had proved an inspiration for hundreds of thousands of fervent activist followers, anxious to put his maxims into practice and forcing along the pace of radicalization by ‘working towards the Fuhrer’. Not least, the ideological fanaticism which Hitler embodied had been institutionalized in the massive Party and its affiliate organizations, above all in the growing power of the SS. Controlling the German police and entertaining unconcealed military ambitions, the SS had become the key organization behind the regime’s ideological dynamism.

By the end of 1937, as his remarks at the ‘Ho?bach meeting’ showed, Hitler acutely sensed that time was not on Germany’s side. The Reich, he had concluded, could not simply wait passively on international developments; by 1943–5 at the latest it had to be prepared to take military action, sooner if circumstances presented themselves. His keenness to accelerate the momentum of expansionism was partly sharpened by his growing feeling that he might not have long to live in order to accomplish his aims.⁵ But beyond that it reflected an awareness that the pressures accumulating could not be contained without the expansion which he in any case strove after, and a recognition that Germany’s current advantage in armaments build-up would be lost as other countries undertook their own armaments programmes. At precisely this juncture, with Hitler already in such a frame of mind, the Blomberg–Fritsch affair served to underline his absolute supremacy, to highlight the compliance of the army, and further to weaken the lingering influence of the diminishing number of voices advising caution.

Before the reverberations of the crisis had subsided, a fatal miscalculation by the Austrian Chancellor Kurt Schuschnigg over a plebiscite to back Austrian independence gave Hitler a welcome opportunity to turn the spotlight away from his domestic troubles — as Jodl had hinted he would like to do — through the drama of the Anschlu?.⁶ It amounted to a defining moment in the Third Reich. Even more than following the Rhineland triumph two years earlier, Hitler felt after the Anschlu? that he could take on the world — and win. And both internally and externally, the impetus to radicalization provided by the Anschlu? formed a crucial link in the chain of events that eventually plunged Europe into a new war in September 1939.

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