Keitel’s name, but dismissed the possibility of using him. ‘He’s nothing but the man who runs my office,’ he said. ‘That’s exactly the man I am looking for,’ Hitler replied (Walter Warlimont, Inside Hitler’s Headquarters, 1939–1945, London, 1964, 13).
325. Jan?en/Tobias, 136.
326. Muller, Heer, 636.
327. Jan?en/Tobias, 140.
328. TBJG, I/3, 424 (1 February 1938). Hitler had hinted to Keitel and Brauchitsch that the reshuffle was aimed at heading off the negative impression that could be prompted abroad at the departure of Blomberg and Fritsch (Keitel, 112).
329. TBJG, I/3, 423–4 (1 February 1938).
330. IMG, xxviii.362, Doc. 1780-PS, Jodl-Tagebuch (31 January 1938): ‘Fuhrer will die Scheinwerfer von der Wehrmacht ablenken, Europa in Atem halten… Schu?nig [sic] soll nicht Mut fassen sondern zittern.’
331. Jan?en/Tobias, 150; Domarus, 783, has sixty military posts, including fourteen generals, as well as Blomberg and Fritsch. General Liebmann remarked of the senior army officers removed, that there could be no doubt that they were all figures who in some way were ‘uncomfortable’ (‘unbequem’) for the Party {IfZ, ED 1, Fol.416, Liebmann memoirs).
332. Jan?en/Tobias, 199–200. Brauchitsch told the generals that he had accepted the post ‘only unwillingly and with considerable reservations’ (‘nur widerstrebend und unter erheblichen Bedenken’) (IfZ, ED 1, Fol.416, Liebmann memoirs).
333. TBJG, I/3, 424 (1 February 1938).
334. Lothar Gruchmann, ‘Die “Reichsregierung” im Fuhrerstaat. Stellung und Funktion des Kabinetts im nationalsozialistischen Herrschaftssystem’, in Gunther Doeker and Winfried Steffani (eds.), Klassenjustiz und Pluralismus, Hamburg, 1973, 187–223, here 200–201.
335. Jan?en/Tobias, 154.
336. TBJG, I/3, 431 (5 February 1938); Domarus, 783. Hitler told his generals on 5 February that, for prestige reasons both at home and abroad, he could not possibly disclose the real reason for Blomberg’s dismissal (IfZ, ED 1, Fol.415, Liebmann memoirs).
337. Jan?en/Tobias, 79. Hitler’s view of Blomberg, as disclosed to his generals in early February 1938, was less favourable. He described him as a weak character (‘einen schwachen Charakter’) who in every critical situation, especially during the occupation of the Rhineland, had lost his nerve (IfZ, ED 1, Fol.415, Liebmann memoirs).
338. Jan?en/Tobias, 182.
339. Jan?en/Tobias, 148.
340. Jan?en/Tobias, 247–9.
341. Domarus, 728.
342. DBS, v.9–22; and see Ian Kershaw, The ‘Hitler Myth’. Image and Reality in the Third Reich, Oxford, (1987), paperback edn, 1989, 129–30.
343. TBJG, I/3, 434 (6 February 1938).
344. Towards the end of 1944, in the wake of the bomb-plot against him, Hitler would once more refer to the Fritsch case. He was, according to Goebbels, more convinced than ever that Fritsch had been the head of the generals’ conspiracy — in its early stages — ‘and that the indictment against him for homosexuality was in the last resort correct’ (TBJG, II/14, 333 (2 December 1944)).
345. IfZ, ED 1, Fol.416, Liebmann memoirs: ‘Der Eindruck dieser Eroffnungen — sowohl der uber Blomberg, wie der uber Fritsch, war geradezu niederschmetternd, besonders deshalb, weil Hitler beide Sachen so dargestellt batte, dass uber die tatsachliche Schuld kaum noch ein Zweifel bestehen konnte. Wir alle hatten das Gefuhl, dass das Heer — im Gegensatz zur Marine, Luftwaffe und Partei — einen vernichtenden Schlag erlitten hatte.’ See also Jan?en/Tobias, 153 and 294 n.31 for the date of 5 February and not, as Liebmann, Fol.416, has it, the 4th.
346. TBJG, I/3, 434 (6 February 1938). In speaking to the generals, Hitler had mentioned that during the Rhineland crisis, when Blomberg’s nerve had deserted him, of all his advisers only the ‘thick-skulled Swabian Neurath’ had been in favour of holding out. (‘Von alien seinen Beratern sei damais nur der “dickschadelige Schwabe Neurath” fur Durchhalten gewesen.’) (IfZ, ED 1, Liebmann memoirs, Fol.415.) Neurath was able to be so sanguine about the plans to remilitarize the Rhineland because the Foreign Office had received accurate intelligence indicating that the French would not resort to military action in such an event (Zach Shore, ‘Hitler, Intelligence, and the Decision to Remilitarize the Rhine’, JCH, 34 (1999), 5–18).
347. TBJG, I/3, 434 (6 February 1938).
348. Domarus, 792.-804, here especially 796–7, 799–800.
349. Domarus, 797. See Jan?en/Tobias, 157.
CHAPTER 2: THE DRIVE FOR EXPANSION
1. Plainly implied in numerous speeches in the later 1920s, emphasizing Germany’s ‘lack of space’ (Raumnot) equivalent to the needs of its population, man’s eternal struggle for existence and survival of the fittest, and analogies with the eastern colonization during the Middle Ages or the attainment and defence of the British Empire. See e.g. Hitler. Reden, Schriften, Anordnungen: Februar 1925 bis Januar 1933, ed. Institut fur Zeitgeschichte, 5 vols, in 12 parts, Munich/London/New York/Paris, 1992–8 (=RSA), II/2, 447 (6 August 1927), 546 (16 November 1927), 554 (21 November 1927), 733 (3 March 1928), 778 (17 April 1928).
2. Adolf Hitler, Mein Kampf[= MK], 876–88oth reprint, Munich, 1943, 742; trans. Adolf Hitler, Mein Kampf, London, 1969, trans, by Ralph Manheim, with an introduction by D. C. Watt (= MK Watt), 597.
3. One country with no illusions about Hitler was the Soviet Union. At his meeting with the United States’ Ambassador to the Soviet Union, Joseph E. Davies, on 4 February 1937, the People’s Commissar for Foreign Affairs, Maxim M. Litvinov, had commented ‘that Hitler’s policy had not changed from that which he had announced in his book Mein Kampf; that he was dominated by a lust for conquest and for the domination of Europe; that he could not understand why Great Britain could not see that once Hitler dominated Europe he would swallow the British Isles also’. In Davies’s view, Litvinov ‘seemed to be very much stirred about this and apprehensive lest there should be some composition of differences between France, England, and Germany’ (Joseph E. Davies, Mission to Moscow, New York, 1941, 59–60).
4. See Dirks and Jan?en, 58–72, for a summary of the Wehrmacht’s aims in the rearmament programme.
5. Werner Maser, Adolf Hitler. Legende-Mythos-Wirklichkeit, 3rd paperback edn, Munich/Esslingen, (1971), 1976, 374, 455–6; Gerhard L. Weinberg, ‘Hitler’s Private Testament of May 2, 1938’, in JMH, 27 (1955), 415–19, here 415. In 1942, Hitler referred to his testament four years earlier and his fears at the time that he had cancer (Picker, 222 (29 March 1942)).
6. IMG, xxviii.367, Doc. 1780-PS (Jodl-Tagebuch).
7. See Gerhard Botz, Der 13. Marz 38 und die Anschlu?-Bewegung. Selbstaufgabe, Okkupation und Selbstfindung Osterreichs 1918–1945, 5–14; Bruce F. Pauley, Hitler and the Forgotten Nazis. A History of Austrian National Socialism, London/Basingstoke, 1981, 4–10.
8. Walther Hofer (ed.), Der Nationalsozialismus. Dokumente 1933–1945, Frankfurt am Main (1957), 1974, 28.
9. MK, 1; MK Watt, 3.
10. See Kube, 233, where it is suggested that this arose from internal rivalries in the Austrian party, and was also an indication that Goring had received no equivalent commission from Hitler to operate in Austrian affairs and was acting quasi-independently.
