announced that the plebiscite was to take place on November 12, one day after the fifteenth anniversary of the 1918 Armistice. Once more facing an electoral challenge, Hitler worked himself up into a trancelike paroxysm. “For my part I declare,” he cried out to the masses, “that I would sooner die than sign anything that in my most sacred conviction is not tolerable for the German people.” He also asserted that “if ever I should be mistaken in this matter or if the people should ever believe that they can no longer support my actions… I wish them to have me executed. I will quietly await the blow!” As always, when he felt slighted, he ranted demagogically about the injustice that had been done to him. Speaking to the workers of the Siemens-Schuckert Works, dressed in boots, military trousers, and dark civilian jacket, standing on an enormous derrick, he stated:
We are gladly willing to co-operate in any international agreement. But we will do so only as equals. I have never, in private life, forced myself upon any distinguished company that did not want to have me or did not regard me as an equal. I don’t need such people, and the German nation has just as much character. We are not taking part in anything as shoeshine boys, as inferiors. No, either we have equal rights or the world will no longer see us at any conferences.
Once again, as in earlier years, a frantic “poster war” was launched. “We want honor and equality!” In Berlin, Munich, and Frankfurt a procession of crippled veterans in wheelchairs was mounted. The veterans held signs: “Germany’s Dead Demand Your Vote!” Considerable use was made of quotations from the wartime British Prime Minister, Lloyd George, who asserted that right was on Germany’s side and that England would not have put up with such a humiliation for any length of time.32 A wave of gigantic marches, protest festivals, and mass appeals once again rolled over the country. A few days before the election the nation was asked to observe two minutes of total silence in remembrance of its dead heroes. Hitler declared that the military tone of life in Germany was not for the sake of demonstrating against France “but to exemplify the political decisionmaking that is necessary for the conquest of Communism…. When the rest of the world barricades itself in indestructible fortresses, builds vast fleets of airplanes, constructs giant tanks, makes enormous cannon, it can scarcely talk about a menace when German National Socialists march entirely weaponless in columns of four and thus provide a visible expression of the German racial community and effective protection for it…. Germany has a right to security no less than other nations.”
All the resentments of the people were expressed in the results of the plebiscite—but it also showed the effects of an intensification of propaganda. Ninety-five per cent of the voters approved the government’s decision to withdraw from the League. And although this result was manipulated and accompanied by terroristic electioneering practices the outcome still more or less corresponded to public mood. In the simultaneous Reichstag election 39 million of the 45 million eligibles gave their vote to the Nazi “unity” candidates. The day was exuberantly hailed as “the miracle of the birth of the German nation.”
During his coming to power Hitler had proved the value of a series of surprise actions on the domestic front; now he applied the same tactics to foreign affairs. The dismay at his break with Geneva was not yet over, and there was still indignation at his arrogant attempt to turn the democratic principle of the plebiscite against the democracies themselves, when he again seized the initiative. His purpose now was to arrange a dialogue on a new and more favorable plane with the powers he had just offended. In a memorandum issued in mid-December he rejected the idea of disarmament but declared himself willing to accept a general limitation of armaments to defensive weapons, provided Germany was allowed to raise a conscript army of 300,000 men.
This was the first of those offers, placed with such remarkable feeling for the situation, which for years prefaced each of his foreign-policy coups right up to the outbreak of the war. For the British the terms were just barely acceptable as a basis for negotiations, for the French unacceptable, just as Hitler had calculated in each case. And while the two Allies took council endlessly—the consultations protracted by French distrust—on how far each was willing to go in making concessions, Hitler could exploit their differences, and the fact that no binding agreements had yet been arranged, to push forward his own plans.
Again, about a month later—on January 26, 1934—a new move of Hitler’s abruptly changed the picture: he concluded a ten-year nonaggression pact with Poland. To understand the startling effect of this move, we must call to mind the traditionally tense relations between Germany and Poland and the fund of old resentment between the two countries. Some of the bitterest points of the Versailles Treaty had been those concerned with territorial losses to the new Polish state, the creation of the Polish Corridor, which cut off East Prussia from the rest of the Reich, and the establishment of the Free City of Danzig. These areas became bones of contention between the two countries and the focuses of constant menaces. The Germans had been greatly disturbed by Polish border violations and injustices during the early years of the Weimar Republic, partly because they had pointed up Germany’s general impotence, partly because of the offense to the old German sense of being able to lord it over the Slavic vassals. As France’s ally, moreover, Poland fed the Germans’ encirclement complex. Weimar foreign policy, including that of Gustav Stresemann, had stubbornly resisted any suggestions that Germany guarantee Poland’s possession of her existing territory.
These anti-Polish feelings dominated the traditionally pro-Russian diplomatic and military circles and the old Prussian landowning class as well. Yet Hitler brushed them aside with hardly a qualm. On the other side Marshal Pilsudski displayed equal resolution: faced with France’s halfhearted and nervous policy, he restructured Poland’s entire pattern of alliances. Essentially he was acting on the premise that Hitler, as a South German, a Catholic and a “Hapsburger,” could disassociate himself from the political traditions that Poland feared.
Here Hitler once more gave the lie to the popular view of him as an emotional politician, the victim of his whims and manias. Unquestionably he shared the national German enmity toward Poland. But he did not allow this to affect his policy. Although he had not yet defined what place Poland would occupy within his general concept of a vast eastward expansion, it may be assumed that there was no room for an independent Polish ministate within the framework of Hitler’s continental visions. As recently as April, 1933, Hitler had made it plain to Ambassador Francois-Poncet that no one could expect Germany to accept in the long run the present state of her eastern border. But as long as Poland was independent, militarily strong, and protected by alliances, he acted on the basis of the situation he could not change and coolly tried to turn it to his advantage. “Germans and Poles will have to learn to accept the fact of each other’s existence,” he stated in his anniversary report to the Reichstag on January 30, 1934. “Hence it is more sensible to regulate this state of affairs which the last thousand years have not been able to remove, and the next thousand years will not be able to remove either, in such a way that the highest possible profit will accrue from it for both nations.”
The profit Hitler derived from the treaty did in fact prove to be enormous. In Germany itself the pact was scarcely popular; but to the outside world Hitler could repeatedly adduce it as evidence of his conciliatory temper even with regard to notorious enemies. British Ambassador Sir Eric Phipps commented in a report to London that the German Chancellor had now proved that he was a statesman by sacrificing some of his popularity to a rational foreign policy.33 At the same time, Hitler had succeeded, by his Polish alliance, in discrediting the system of the League of Nations, which in all the preceding years had not managed to dampen the Polish-German tinderbox. Things had been left, as Hitler convincingly complained, so that the “tensions gradually… assumed the character of a hereditary political taint on both sides.” And now, seemingly without effort, in the course of a few bilateral conversations, he eliminated the problem.
Finally, the pact proved that the barriers which had been erected around Germany were not nearly as stout as had been assumed. “With Poland, one of the strongest pillars of the Treaty of Versailles falls,” General von Seeckt had once said, expressing one of the tenets of the Weimar Republic’s foreign policy—and obviously suggesting that the problem could be solved by military action. Hitler was now demonstrating that imaginative political methods could achieve great effects. For the alliance not only freed Germany from the Franco-Polish threat on two fronts; it also knocked a sizable piece out of the system of collective guarantees of peace and left that system permanently irreparable. The Geneva experiment had, fundamentally speaking, already failed; Hitler had destroyed it with his first assault. Moreover, he had maneuvered France into the role of international troublemaker. The Foreign Ministers of the Weimar Republic had worn themselves out trying to wring concessions from an all-powerful and unyielding France. Hitler had simply turned his back on her temporarily. Henceforth he could devote himself to those bilateral negotiations, alliances, and intrigues that were central to his strategy of international relations. For he could win only if he confronted isolated opponents, never a united front. The game he had so skillfully staged in the domestic arena was now beginning again on the international plane. Already his
