Hitler. 1936-1945: Nemesis

foreign policy, with the prospect of international conflict never far away, ‘Crystal Night’ seems to have reinvoked — certainly to have re-emphasized — the presumed links, present in his warped outlook since 1918–19 and fully expounded in Mein Kampf, between the power of the Jews and war.

He had commented in the last chapter of Mein Kampf that ‘the sacrifice of millions at the front’ would not have been necessary if ‘twelve or fifteen thousand of these Hebrew corrupters of the people had been held under poison gas’.¹²³ Such rhetoric, appalling though the sentiments were, was not an indication that Hitler already had the ‘Final Solution’ in mind. But the implicit genocidal link between war and the killing of Jews was there. Goring’s remarks at the end of the meeting on 12 November had been an ominous pointer in the same direction: ‘If the German Reich comes into foreign-political conflict in the foreseeable future, it can be taken for granted that we in Germany will think in the first instance of bringing about a great showdown with the Jews.’¹²⁴

With war approaching again, the question of the threat of the Jews in a future conflict was evidently present in Hitler’s mind. The idea of using the Jews as hostages, part of Hitler’s mentality, but also advanced in the SS’s organ Das Schwarze Korps in October and November 1938, is testimony to the linkage between war and idea of a ‘world conspiracy’. ‘The Jews living in Germany and Italy are the hostages which fate has placed in our hand so that we can defend ourselves effectively against the attacks of world Jewry,’ commented Das Schwarze Korps on 27 October 1938, under the headline ‘Eye for an Eye, Tooth for a Tooth’.¹²⁵ ‘Those Jews in Germany are a part of world Jewry,’ the same newspaper threatened on 3 November, still days before the nationwide pogrom was unleashed. ‘They are also responsible for whatever world Jewry undertakes against Germany, and — they are liable for the damages which world Jewry inflicts and will inflict on us.’ The Jews were to be treated as members of a warring power and interned to prevent their engagement for the interests of world Jewry.¹²⁶ Hitler had up to this date never attempted to deploy the ‘hostage’ tactic as a weapon of his foreign policy.¹²⁷ Perhaps promptings from the SS leadership now reawakened ‘hostage’ notions in his mind. Whether or not this was the case, the potential deployment of German Jews as pawns to blackmail the western powers into accepting further German expansion was possibly the reason why, when stating that it was his ‘unshakeable will’ to solve ‘the Jewish problem’ in the near future, and at a time when official policy was to press for emigration with all means possible, he showed no interest in the plans advanced by South African Defence and Economics Minister Oswald Pirow, whom he met at the Berghof on 24 November, for international cooperation in the emigration of German Jews.¹²⁸ The same motive was probably also behind the horrific threat he made to the Czechoslovakian Foreign Minister Franzisek Chvalkovsky on 21 January 1939. ‘The Jews here (bei uns) will be annihilated (vernichtet),’ he declared. ‘The Jews had not brought about the 9 November 1918 for nothing. This day will be avenged.’¹²⁹

Again, rhetoric should not be mistaken for a plan or programme. Hitler was scarcely likely to have revealed plans to exterminate the Jews which, when they did eventually emerge in 1941, were accorded top secrecy, in a comment to a foreign diplomat. Moreover, ‘annihilation’ (Vernichtung) was one of Hitler’s favourite words. He tended to reach for it when trying to impress his threats upon his audience, large or small. He would speak more than once the following summer, for instance, of his intention to ‘annihilate’ the Poles.¹³⁰ Horrific though their treatment was after 1939, no genocidal programme followed.

But the language, even so, was not meaningless. The germ of a possible genocidal outcome, however vaguely conceived, was taking shape. Destruction and annihilation, not just emigration, of the Jews was in the air. Already on 24 November Das Schwarze Korps, portraying the Jews as sinking ever more to the status of pauperized parasites and criminals, had concluded: ‘In the stage of such a development we would therefore be faced with the hard necessity of eradicating (auszurotten) the Jewish underworld just as we are accustomed in our ordered state (Ordnungsstaat) to eradicate criminals: with fire and sword! The result would be the actual and final end of Jewry in Germany, its complete annihilation (Vernichtung).,’¹³¹ This was not a preview of Auschwitz and Treblinka. But without such a mentality, Auschwitz and Treblinka would not have been possible.

In his speech to the Reichstag on 30 January 1939, the sixth anniversary of his takeover of power, Hitler revealed publicly his implicitly genocidal association of the destruction of the Jews with the advent of another war. The ‘hostage’ notion was probably built into his comments. And, as always, he obviously had an eye on the propaganda impact. But his words were more than propaganda.¹³² They gave an insight into the pathology of his mind, into the genocidal intent that was beginning to take hold. He had no idea how the war would bring about the destruction of the Jews. But, somehow, he was certain that this would indeed be the outcome of a new conflagration. ‘I have very often in my lifetime been a prophet,’ he declared, ‘and was mostly derided. In the time of my struggle for power it was in the first instance the Jewish people who received only with laughter my prophecies that I would some time take over the leadership of the state and of the entire people in Germany and then, among other things, also bring the Jewish problem to its solution. I believe that this once hollow laughter of Jewry in Germany has meanwhile already stuck in the throat. I want today to be a prophet again: if international finance Jewry inside and outside Europe should succeed in plunging the nations once more into a world war, the result will be not the bolshevization of the earth and thereby the victory of Jewry, but the annihilation (Vernichtung) of the Jewish race in Europe!’¹³³ It was a ‘prophecy’ that Hitler would return to on numerous occasions on several occasions in the years 1941 and 1942, when the annihilation of the Jews was no longer terrible rhetoric, but terrible reality.¹³⁴

4. MISCALCULATION

‘I will go down as the greatest German in history.’

Hitler, speaking to his secretaries after imposing a German Protectorate over the remainder of Czechoslovakia, 15 March 1939

‘In the event of any action which clearly threatened Polish independence… His Majesty’s Government would feel themselves bound at once to lend the Polish Government all support in their power.’

The British Prime Minister, Neville Chamberlain, addressing the House of Commons, 31 March 1939

‘I’ll brew them a devil’s potion.’

Hitler, on hearing of the British Guarantee to Poland, 31 March 1939

I

After Munich things started to move fast. None but the most hopelessly naive, incurably optimistic, or irredeemably stupid could have imagined that the Sudetenland marked the limits of German ambitions to expand. Certainly, neither the British nor the French governments thought that to be the case. Chamberlain had been rapidly disabused of his initial naive belief, following his first meeting with the German Dictator, that Hitler was a man of his word, and of any hopes that the Munich Agreement would bring lasting peace. He and the British government were resigned to Germany’s further expansion in south-eastern Europe, but thought that Hitler could be contained for at least two more years.¹ Both France and Britain were now rearming furiously. Fears of an imminent strike against Britain most probably stirred up by Colonel Hans Oster — at the hub of Germany’s counter- intelligence service as Chief of Staff at the Abwehr, and a key driving-force in the plot against Hitler that had petered out with the signing of the Munich Agreement — proved groundless.² But there was serious