Hitler. 1936-1945: Nemesis

and growing concern in London at the prospect of a new ‘mad dog act’ by Hitler in the near future. Where and when he might strike were matters of guesswork.³

The diplomatic turmoil in central Europe certainly opened up further opportunities of revisionism — and not just from Germany. Almost before the ink was dry on the Munich Agreement, Hungary — egged on by Poland, looking to its own interests in a strong central European cordon of states between Germany and the Soviet Union — was eyeing up the eastern tip of Czechoslovakia known as Ruthenia (or the Carpatho-Ukraine), a mountainous tract so backward that some of its peasant population had never heard of Hitler.⁴ Hungary had disappointed Hitler through its hesitancy during the Sudeten crisis. And it suited Germany at this point to encourage the Ukrainian nationalists in the ethnically divided Ruthenian population.⁵ Hungarian hopes of gaining Ruthenia were, therefore, for the time being firmly vetoed.⁶ Hitler’s own aims for the total destruction of Czechoslovakia had, as we noted, only been temporarily interrupted, not halted, by the Munich settlement.⁷ With the dismembered state of Czechoslovakia now friendless and, with its border fortifications lost, exposed, and at Germany’s mercy, the completion of the plans made in 1938 for its liquidation was only a matter of time. As we have seen, that had been Hitler’s view even before he acceded to the Munich Agreement.

Beyond the rump of Czechoslovakia, German attention was immediately turned on Poland. There was no plan at this stage for invasion and conquest. The aim — soon proving illusory — was to bind Poland to Germany against Russia (thereby also blocking any possibility of an alliance with the French). At the same time, the intention was to reach agreement over Danzig and the Corridor (the land which Germany had been forced to cede to Poland in the Versailles Treaty of 1919, giving the Poles access to the sea but leaving East Prussia detached from the remainder of the Reich).⁸ Already by late October, Ribbentrop was proposing to settle all differences between Germany and Poland by an agreement for the return of Danzig together with railway and road passage through the Corridor — not in itself a novel idea — in return for a free port for Poland in the Danzig area and an extension of the non-aggression treaty to twenty-five years with a joint guarantee of frontiers.⁹

The proposal met with a predictably stony response from the Polish government.¹⁰ Most vehement of all was the refusal to join the Anti-Comintern Pact, which would have been tantamount to admitting to a position as Germany’s puppet.¹¹ The obduracy of the Poles, especially over Danzig, rapidly brought the first signs of Hitler’s own impatience, and an early indication of preparations to take Danzig by force.¹² Hitler was nevertheless at this point more interested in a negotiated settlement with the Poles. Misleadingly informed by Ribbentrop of Polish readiness in principle to move to a new settlement of the Danzig Question and the Corridor, he emphasized German-Polish friendship during his speech to the Reichstag on 30 January 1939.¹³ Some army leaders, a few days earlier, had been more belligerent. In contrast to their overriding fears of western intervention during the Sudeten crisis, a number of generals now argued that Britain and France would remain inactive — a direct reflection of the weakness of the western powers fully revealed at Munich — and that negotiations with the Poles should be abandoned in favour of military measures. A war against Poland, they claimed, would be popular among the troops and among the German people.¹⁴

Ribbentrop, aided by Goring, played — for strategic reasons — the moderate on this occasion. For him, the main enemy was not Poland, but Britain. He countered that, through a premature attack in 1939 on Poland and Russia, Germany would become isolated, would forfeit its armaments advantage, and would most likely be forced by western strength to give up any territorial gains made. Instead, Germany needed to act together with Italy and Japan, retaining Polish neutrality until France had been dealt with and Britain at least isolated and denied all power on the Continent, if not militarily defeated.¹⁵ War by Germany and Italy to defeat France and leave Britain isolated had been the basis of the military directives laid down by Keitel, in line with Hitler’s instructions, in November 1938.¹⁶ The priority which Hitler accorded in January 1939 to the navy’s Z-Plan, for building a big battle-fleet directed squarely at British naval power, indicates that he was looking at this stage to an eventual showdown with the western powers as the prime military objective. The construction at the same time of an ‘East Wall’ — limited defensive fortifications for the event of possible conflict with Poland over Danzig — is a further pointer in that direction.¹⁷ Russia, and the eradication of Bolshevism, could wait. But neither Hitler nor anyone in his entourage expected war with Britain and France to come about in the way that it would do that autumn. Hitler had told Goebbels in October 1938 that he foresaw ‘for the more distant future a very serious conflict’, to decide European hegemony. This would be ‘probably with England’.¹⁸ Goring — who had lost face with Hitler since helping to engineer the Munich Agreement that had thwarted his intention of taking Czechoslovakia by force, and by this time no longer initiated into his plans — had no expectation of any general war before about 1942.¹⁹ Keitel had seen his right-hand man in the High Command of the Wehrmacht, General Jodl, transferred to Vienna at the end of October 1938, a move he later stated he would have prevented had he had any notion that war might have been imminent.²⁰

In the late autumn and winter of 1938–9, differing views about foreign-policy aims and methods existed within the German leadership. The army was more ready to turn to military action against Poland than it had been against Czechoslovakia. But the specific measures adopted, particularly the building of the eastern fortifications, were still defensive in nature. The ‘Ostwall’ comprised little more than basic fortifications — castigated by Hitler as grossly lacking in fire-power and death-traps for those manning them — along a bend in the river Oder some sixty miles east of Berlin.²¹ Long-term military preparations were directed towards eventual confrontation with the West, but it was well recognized that the armed forces were years away from being ready for any conflict with Britain and France.²² As in 1938, military leaders’ prime fear was confrontation being forced on Germany too soon through impetuous actions and an over-risky foreign policy. Goring and Ribbentrop were advocating diametrically opposed policies towards Britain. Goring’s hopes still rested on an expansive policy in south-eastern Europe, backed for the foreseeable future by an understanding with Britain.²³ Ribbentrop, by now violently anti-British, was, as we have noted, pinning his hopes on smoothing the problems on Germany’s eastern front and tightening the alliance with Italy and Japan to prepare the ground for a move against Britain as soon as was feasible. But at this stage, Goring’s star was temporarily on the wane and Ribbentrop’s usually clumsy diplomacy was meeting in most instances with little success.²⁴ Hitler’s thoughts, whether or not influenced by Ribbentrop’s reasoning, were broadly consonant with those of his Foreign Minister. The coming show-down with Bolshevism, prominent in the foreground in 1936, though certainly not displaced in Hitler’s own mind as the decisive struggle to be faced at some point in the future had by now moved again into the shadows. Hitler favoured at this point rapprochement with the Poles, to bring them into the German orbit, and preparations for confrontation with the West (which he continued to indicate would not be before 1943 or 1944).²⁵ But he was, as usual, content to keep his options open and await developments.

The one certainty was that developments would occur, thus providing the opportunity for German expansion. For there was no agency of power or influence in the Third Reich advocating drawing a line under the territorial gains already made. All power-groups were looking to further expansion — with or without war.

Military, strategic, and power-political arguments for expansion were underpinned by economic considerations. By late 1938, the pressures of the forced rearmament programme were making themselves acutely felt. The policy of ‘rearm, whatever the cost’ was now plainly showing itself to be sustainable only in the short term. Bottlenecks were building up in crucial areas of the economy.²⁶ Lack of coherent and comprehensive economic planning exacerbated them. Expansion into Austria, with its well developed industrial areas around Vienna, Steyr, north Styria, and the Sudetenland, a relatively well industrialized part of Czechoslovakia, had eased matters somewhat. The unemployed from these additions to the Reich were swiftly put to work. New sources of skilled labour became available. Existing industrial plant could be extended into armaments factories, as in the huge steel complex erected at Linz by the state-run Reichswerke Hermann Goring. Iron ore from Austria and high-quality lignite from the Sudetenland were valuable for synthetic fuel production. The Sudeten area also yielded stocks of tungsten and uranium ore, which Germany had not previously possessed.²⁷ In economic terms, expansion in 1938 had given German industry a significant boost. But further expansion was necessary if the tensions built into the overheated armaments-driven economy were not to reach explosion point. The Four-Year Plan had been implicitly directed at offloading the costs of German rearmament on to the areas of Europe to be exploited after a successful war.²⁸ By 1938–9, it was absolutely evident that further expansion could not be postponed indefinitely if the economic impasses were to be surmounted.

When Goring met the members of the Reich Defence Council (Reichsverteidigungsrat) at its first meeting on