Hitler. 1936-1945: Nemesis

undeterred even by that eventuality. It was little wonder that, if Paul Schmidt’s account is to believed, when Hitler received the British ultimatum on the morning of 3 September, he angrily turned to Ribbentrop and asked: ‘What now?’³⁰⁵

VI

‘Responsibility for this terrible catastrophe lies on the shoulders of one man,’ Chamberlain had told the House of Commons on 1 September, ‘the German Chancellor, who has not hesitated to plunge the world into misery in order to serve his own senseless ambitions.’³⁰⁶ It was an understandable over-simplification. Such a personalized view necessarily left out the sins of omission and commission by others — including the British government and its French allies — which had assisted in enabling Hitler to accumulate such a unique basis of power that his actions could determine the fate of Europe.

Internationally, Hitler’s combination of bullying and blackmail could not have worked but for the fragility of the post-war European settlement. The Treaty of Versailles was ‘the blackmailer’s lucky find’.³⁰⁷ It had given Hitler the basis for his rising demands, accelerating drastically in 1938–9. It had provided the platform for ethnic unrest, that Hitler could easily exploit, in the cauldron of central and eastern Europe. Not least, it had left an uneasy guilt-complex in the West, especially in Britain. Hitler might rant and exaggerate; his methods might be repellent; but was there not some truth in what he was claiming? The western governments, though Britain more than France, backed by their war-weary populations, anxious more than all-else to do everything possible to avoid a new conflagration, their traditional diplomacy no match for unprecedented techniques of lying and threatening, thought so, and went out of their way to placate Hitler. The blackmailer simply increased his demands, as blackmailers do. By the time the western powers fully realized what they were up against, they were no longer in any position to bring the ‘mad dog’ to heel.

Within Germany, Hitler’s personal power had expanded after 1933 at the expense of other power-groups — notably the army — until it was absolute and unchallenged. The year 1938, beginning with the near-showdown with the army over the Blomberg–Fritsch affair, crossing the triumph of the Anschlu?, and ending with peace just about saved at Munich — but no thanks to the German army or to those in powerful positions in the regime who opposed Hitler — brought vital steps in this process.

As war loomed in 1939, a number of individuals who had begun to establish contact with each other the previous year and whose disparate approaches and aims would eventually coalesce into the 1944 attempt on Hitler’s life — nationalists, with access to the levers of power, horrified at the madness of the risks being taken to court war — had warned the West of the dictator’s plans. Colonel Oster of the Abwehr had leaked vital information. Lieutenant-Colonel Gerhard Graf von Schwerin had tried to encourage a greater show of British belligerence to undermine Hitler’s claims that Britain would not fight. Adam von Trott zu Solz, former Oxford Rhodes scholar with a wide circle of friends in high places in Britain, had attempted — reflecting Weizsacker’s views — to suggest a deal restoring Czech independence but acceding to German claims over Danzig and the Corridor. The attempts of Hitler’s opponents fell on stony ground. The mood in Britain had changed drastically following the march into Czecho- Slovakia. There was too much suspicion of motives, too few certainties that there was any coherent ‘opposition’ (which there was not), too little clarity of how, if at all, Hitler was to be replaced. Well-intentioned though the efforts were, it was hardly surprising that nothing came of them.³⁰⁸

Within Germany in the last days of peace, the conservative opponents of Hitler were uncoordinated, unclear about what was happening, and uncertain how to act themselves. An example was their behaviour when Hitler rescinded his order to attack on 26 August, just hours after it had been given. Hans-Bernd Gisevius, one-time Gestapo officer but by now radically opposed to Hitler, went straight to Schacht, and both had the news confirmed by General Thomas, head of office of the War Economy (Wehrwirtschaft). All three now thought the time was ripe to persuade Halder and Brauchitsch to intervene by deposing Hitler. Whether any scheme involving Brauchitsch had a hope of success is highly doubtful. But the matter was never even broached. Oster, second to none in his detestation of the regime, and his boss Canaris thought a putsch would prove unnecessary. Their misunderstanding of political realities was breathtaking. A supreme warlord who rescinds such a decisive order as that over war and peace within a few hours was finished, ran their wildly over-optimistic view.³⁰⁹ Canaris added: ‘He’ll never recover from this blow. Peace has been saved for twenty years.’³¹⁰ Armed with such ‘insights’, Hitler’s opponents did nothing.

Nor, unless the army leadership could have been stirred into action, could they have achieved anything. But the army leadership, as we have seen, was weakened and divided. We noted something of the feeling among the generals after Hitler’s speech at the Berghof on 22 August. The mood was much the same in the tense days that followed. Some leading officers thought Hitler’s optimism about the non-intervention of the West was likely to prove false. Others still thought the conflict could be localized. Most were sceptical, anxious even, but fatalistic and in depressed frame of mind. Resignation, not gung-ho enthusiasm for war, prevailed. But it was no platform for opposition.³¹¹ Compliance, even if reluctant on the part of some generals, was all that was needed. Hitler remained unhindered by any action such as that which Beck had mooted at the height of the Sudeten crisis the previous year, by any threat of refusal to collaborate in the destruction of Poland.

Close to the epicentre of power in the Reich, but following a line that differed from that of both Hitler and Ribbentrop, was Goring, now attempting something of a comeback after months in the doldrums. Over the summer he had tried through three intermediaries — the Swedish millionaire Axel Wenner-Gren, his own deputy in the Four-Year Plan organization Helmut Wohltat, and, as we have seen, Birger Dahlerus, also a Swede — to coax the British into negotiations.³¹² Predictably, nothing had come of such moves. The mood in the British government was not amenable to initiatives resting on major concessions to Germany, based on unclear authority, and leaving Hitler’s power untouched, the future potential for aggression undiminished. Goring was certainly anxious to avoid war with Britain, at least until Germany was ready for the big showdown. His entire political thinking over the previous years had rested on a rapprochement with Britain. This strategy was faced with imminent ruin, a development which Goring blamed exclusively on Ribbentrop. But, ultimately, Goring had no real alternative to offer Hitler. His informal approaches were no more successful than Hitler’s threats in severing the British from the Poles. Nor did he have the will to stand up against Hitler. For all the differences in emphasis, Goring remained Hitler’s man through and through.³¹³

Goring was scarcely alone in blaming the war not on Hitler, but on Ribbentrop. It was the view, among others, of Dahlerus, Hassell, Hewel, Papen, Weizsacker, and the British Ambassador Henderson.³¹⁴ Unquestionably, Ribbentrop’s self-certainty, derived from his ‘understanding’ of the British and his absolute conviction that in the end they would not fight over Poland, helped to influence Hitler in his miscalculation.³¹⁵ Despite the impression he tried to leave behind in his memoirs, Ribbentrop had — as in the previous year — been an outright warmonger, his crass aggression fuelled by smouldering resentment at his treatment in Britain. Alongside Goebbels and Himmler he could always be relied upon to egg on Hitler. While he acted, as always, as an amplifier, it is — given the domineering assertiveness of Hitler and his own fawning subservience — difficult to imagine Ribbentrop as the moving force. Hitler’s liaison officer with army command, Nikolaus von Vormann, had in retrospect no doubts about the relationship: ‘Hitler did not believe in a war with the western powers because he did not want to believe in it. From the difference in character and on the basis of the entire atmosphere in the Fuhrer headquarters’ — he evidently meant, since he was writing of the last days before the war, the Reich Chancellery — he concluded ‘that the initiative rested with Hitler and that the essentially submissive (weiche) Ribbentrop, who in any case represented no opinion of his own, thought it appropriate and expedient to reinforce him in this view’.³¹⁶

Hitler decided. That much is clear. The fracturing of any semblance of collective government over the previous six years left him in the position where he determined alone. No one doubted — the suffocating effect of years of the expanding Fuhrer cult had seen to that — that he had the right to decide, and that his decisions were to be implemented. His style was not to listen to differing or conflicting advice, weigh up the pros and cons, and arrive at a conclusion. He would ponder things overnight, hit on what he saw as a solution, and put it forward for acclaim.³¹⁷ Or he would expound his ideas in endless monologues until he had convinced himself that they were right.³¹⁸ In the critical days, he saw a good deal of Ribbentrop, Goring, Goebbels, Himmler, and Bormann. Other leading figures in the Party, government ministers, even court favourites like Speer,