issue a protest, but in the very protest note inquired whether Hitler still wished to receive the Foreign Secretary. To the German side that was a “regular sensation,”12 as one of the persons closely involved commented. France and Italy, on the other hand, were prepared to take some strong countermeasures, and in the middle of April arranged for a Conference of the three powers in Stresa on Lake Maggiore. Mussolini took the lead in urging that Germany be stopped in her tracks. But the representatives of Great Britain made it clear from the start that they had no intention of imposing sanctions. The result was that the conference petered out in an exchange of ideas. Mussolini observed that consultations are the last refuge of indecisiveness when confronted with reality.
Hitler drew his conclusions, and when Simon and Eden arrived in Berlin at the end of March, they found him thoroughly self-confident. With patient courtesy he waited to hear their proposals, but he himself made no promises. After going on at great length about the Bolshevist menace he once again referred to the German nation’s lack of living space and offered a global alliance, the first stage of which was to be the proposed naval pact. When the British statesmen said a firm no to the establishment of a special Anglo-German relationship, and above all refused to sacrifice Britain’s close co-operation with France, Hitler found himself in a difficult negotiating position. For a moment the whole idea of the alliance, his grand design, seemed to have failed. But he remained impassive. When the following day’s talks threw a new opportunity his way, he used it for a bold bluff. Sir John Simon responded to the German demand for parity in the air by asking what the present strength of the German air force was. Hitler, after a brief pause of seeming hesitation, answered that Germany had already attained parity with England. This information took the others’ breath away. For a while no one said a word; the British negotiators’ faces betrayed embarrassed surprise and doubt. Yet this was the turning point. Now it became evident why Hitler had postponed the talks until he could announce the building of the air force and the introduction of conscription. England could not be won by wooing alone; Hitler could lend weight to his proposals only by pressure and threats. Not fondness but weapons brought nations to the conference table. Immediately after this round of negotiations Hitler, together with Goring, Ribbentrop, and several cabinet members, went to the British Embassy for a breakfast. Sir Eric Phipps, the ambassador, had lined up his children in the reception room. They stretched out their little arms toward Hitler in the German greeting, and brought out a bashful
The British, at any rate, had been deeply impressed. Another opportunity to isolate Hitler soon arose when the League of Nations, on April 17, condemned Germany’s violation of the Versailles Treaty. Shortly afterward, France concluded a treaty of alliance with the Soviet Union. Nevertheless, the British abided by the date for signing the naval pact that had been agreed on in Berlin. It seems clear that Hitler saw this as a telling admission of weakness and planned to exploit it. He therefore instructed his special envoy, Ribbentrop, to initiate the talks in the Foreign Office on June 4 by putting the agreement in the form of an ultimatum. England must accept the proportion of naval strength of 35 to 100; that was not a German proposal but an unshakable decision on the Fuhrer’s part. Acceptance of it was the precondition for the beginning of negotiations. Flushed with anger, Sir John Simon reproved the head of the German delegation and walked out of the session. But Ribbentrop gruffly stuck to his terms. Arrogant and limited as he was, he obviously lacked any sense of how to handle the matter. For here right at the start of the negotiations he was pushing the other party to accept the very method they had recently condemned in their White Paper, then in their protest note after the reintroduction of universal military service, later in Stresa, and most recently in the Council of the League of Nations. He dismissed all the remonstrances “categorically,” to use one of the favorite words in his subsequent report; he wanted the alliance to be no less than “eternal”; and when the British objected that he was reversing the order of business, he declared it came to the same thing whether difficult matters were discussed at the beginning or the end. The negotiators parted with nothing accomplished.
Two days later, however, the British asked for another meeting; their opening statement declared that the British government had decided to accept the Chancellor’s demand as the basis for further naval discussions between the two countries. And, as if the special relationship of trust that Hitler wanted of England had already been established, Sir John Simon remarked, with a discreet gesture of complicity, that they would have to let a few days pass in consideration of the situation in France, where governments were “unfortunately not so stable as in Germany and England.”14 A few days later the text of the treaty had been worked out. With some feeling for symbolism, the day for signing was fixed as June 18, the hundred and twentieth anniversary of the day the British and Prussians had defeated the French at Waterloo. Ribbentrop returned home to be hailed by Hitler as a great statesman, “greater than Bismarck.” Hitler himself called this day “the happiest of [my] life.”15
It was in fact an extraordinary success, and it granted Hitler everything he could hope for at the moment. British apologists have ever since pointed to Great Britain’s security requirements and to the possibility that Hitler could have been tamed by concessions. But the question remains whether those requirements and vague hopes could justify an agreement that condoned a policy of brash violation of treaties, sabotaged Western solidarity, and set the political situation in Europe in motion in such a way that there was no knowing when and where it would come to a stop. The naval agreement has rightly been called an “epochal event whose symptomatic importance was greater than its actual content.”16 Above all, it proved to Hitler once again that the methods of blackmail could accomplish absolutely anything, and it nourished his hopes of ultimately concluding the grand alliance for the partition of the world. This pact, he exulted, was “the beginning of a new age.” He firmly believed, he said, “that the British have sought the understanding with us in this area only as the initial step to very much broader co-operation. A German-British combination will be stronger than all other powers together.” Given the seriousness of his historical pretensions, it was more than a gesture of empty ceremony when Hitler, in Nuremberg at the beginning of September, accepted the presentation of a reproduction of Charlemagne’s sword.
The Anglo-German naval treaty had a further consequence that once and for all demolished all the existing political relationships in Europe. In the two and a half years since Hitler had been appointed Chancellor, Mussolini had pursued a policy of critical reserve toward Hitler in spite of their ideological fraternity. He had shown “a keener sense of the extraordinary and menacing character of National Socialism than most western statesmen.”17 Gratified though he was by the victory of the Fascist principle in Germany, he could not suppress his deep uneasiness about this neighbor to the north who was bursting with the dynamism, vitality, and discipline he had laboriously been trying to instill into his own people. The meeting in Venice had only served to confirm his mistrust of Hitler. But it seems also to have aroused that inferiority complex for which he thereafter tried to compensate more and more by posturings, imperial actions, or the invoking of a vanished past. Ultimately, it would drive him deeper and deeper into his fateful partnership with Hitler. In a speech shortly after the Venice meeting he had declared, with a glance at Hitler’s racial ideas, that thirty centuries of history permitted Italians “to look with sublime indifference upon certain doctrines on the other side of the Alps which have been developed by the descendants of those who in the days of Caesar, Virgil and Augustus were still illiterates.” According to another source he had called Hitler a “clown,” denounced the race doctrine as “Jewish,” and expressed sarcastic doubts about whether anyone would succeed in transforming the Germans into “a racially pure herd,” adding: “According to the most favorable hypothesis… six centuries are needed.” Unlike France, let alone England, he was prepared at various times to counter Hitler’s breaches of treaties by military gestures: “The best way to check the Germans is by calling up the military class of 1911.” At the time of Dollfuss’s assassination he had ordered several Italian divisions to the northern border, telegraphed the Austrian government that he was prepared to offer it all support in defending the country’s independence, and finally even permitted the Italian press to publish popular lampoons on Hitler and the Germans.
He now wished to cash in on all this good conduct. His glance fell upon Ethiopia, which had been occupying Italy’s imperialistic fantasies ever since the end of the nineteenth century, when an attempt to extend the colonies of Eritrea and Somaliland had failed miserably. England and France, he decided, would impose no obstacles to a conquest, since they would continue to need Italy in the defensive front against Hitler. Addis Ababa, situated in a kind of no man’s land, could not really be more important to the two great powers than Berlin. Mussolini interpreted the half-promises that Laval had made in January, when he visited Rome, and the silence of the British at Stresa, as signs of discreet consent. The Duce also reasoned that the Anglo-German naval pact had increased the value of Italy to the Western powers, especially to France.
