Hitler

By means of deliberately provoked border incidents and oasis conflicts, he stirred up feeling for his colonial war, which had an oddly anachronistic air. While France assured him passive support, for fear that a further pillar of her system of alliances would collapse, he dismissed all attempts at mediation with one of those virile Caesarian gestures he had at his command. Surprisingly, it was England who then came forward. After having refused as recently as April to counter Hitler’s troublemaking with sanctions, in September England demanded that sanctions be imposed on Mussolini, and to emphasize her resolve ostentatiously reinforced her Mediterranean fleet. Now, however, France objected; France found herself unwilling to risk her good relations with Italy for the sake of an England that had just demonstrated her unreliability as an ally by coming to an arrangement with Hitler. This refusal in turn angered the British. In Italy outrage was whipped up to the point of boastful talk about a preventive war against Great Britain (mockingly referred to as “Operation Madness”). In short, all understandings and time- tested loyalties now disintegrated. In France, influential partisans of Mussolini, including many intellectuals, openly came out in favor of the Italian expansionist policies. Charles Maurras, the spokesman of the French Right, publicly threatened with death all deputies who demanded sanctions against Italy. Ironic defeatists queried, “Mourir pour le Negus?” Soon the same question would be applied to Danzig.

There could be only one justification for the British gesture, especially in view of Hitler’s stance: if the British government were prepared to counter Mussolini’s act of aggression with all resolution, not shrinking from the risk of war. Obviously, British determination did not go quite that far, and thus it merely brought on the misfortune more speedily. Mussolini felt that the threat of sanctions had been such an insult to the pride and honor of Italy that he was bound to go ahead. On October 2, 1935, at a mass demonstration to which 20 million people, assembled in the streets and plazas throughout Italy, listened enthusiastically, he declared war on Ethiopia: “A great hour in the history of our country has struck…. Forty million Italians, a sworn community, will not let themselves be robbed of their place in the sun!” It would have taken only the closing of the Suez Canal or an oil embargo to render the Italian expeditionary army with its modern equipment incapable of battle. The Ethiopians would then have inflicted upon the Italians a devastating defeat, as the Emperor Menelik had done on the same ground forty years earlier. Mussolini later admitted that this would have been “an inconceivable disaster” for him. But England and France shrank from such a course, as did the other members of the League of Nations. A few half-hearted measures were taken, their feebleness only diminishing what prestige the democracies and the League of Nations still had. There were many reasons for caution. President BeneS, for example, who emerged as a particularly vigorous advocate of economic sanctions, prudently excepted Czechoslovakia’s own exports to Italy.

The internal contradictions and antagonisms of Europe afforded Mussolini almost unlimited freedom to maneuver. And with unprecedented brutality, which established a new style of inhumane warfare, the modern Italian army set about destroying an unprepared and nearly defenseless enemy. It even employed poison gas. No less unprecedented was the way in which prominent military officers, including Mussolini’s sons Bruno and Vittorio, boasted of the sport they had had in their fighter planes harassing fleeing hordes of human beings and raining death upon them with incendiary bombs and machine guns.¹⁸ On May 9, 1936, the Italian dictator stood on the balcony of the Palazzo Venezia announcing his “triumph over fifty nations” to an ecstatic mob, and proclaimed the “reappearance of the Empire upon the fated hills of Rome.”

Hitler had at first observed strict neutrality in the conflict, and not only because he had sufficient reasons to be annoyed with Mussolini. This Ethiopian adventure disturbed his fundamental design in foreign policy. That design had always envisioned a partnership with England and Italy. But the crisis was setting his two prospective allies against one another and confronting Hitler with an unforeseen alternative.

Surprisingly, after prolonged hesitation he decided to take Italy’s side, and supplied the Italians with raw materials, especially coal, although only a few months earlier he had hailed the Anglo-German treaty as the beginning of a new era. He was obviously not prompted by ideological sympathy. Economic factors did not seem to play a decisive part, either, although he was certainly influenced by such considerations. Much more important was the fact that he saw in the war another chance to create havoc within the established order of things. His trick for manipulating any crisis consisted in supporting the weaker opponent against the stronger. Thus, as late as the summer of 1935, in two highly secret transactions, Hitler had supplied the Emperor of Ethiopia with war materials valued at approximately 4 million marks. Included were thirty antitank guns that were clearly meant to serve against the Italian aggressor. Out of similar considerations he now supported Mussolini against the Western powers. The decision came all the easier for him because, as a secret speech he delivered in April, 1937, makes plain, he did not take England’s commitment very seriously. The principles England was defending—the integrity of small nations, the protection of peace, the right of self-determination—meant nothing to him, whereas he saw Italy’s imperialistic gamble as representing the true laws and logic of politics. He made the same grave mistake in August and September, 1939, caused, no doubt, by his inability to think in terms other than those of naked-power interests. Moreover, in the exultation of his rapid successes he felt sufficiently secure to test the newly concluded pact with England by a certain degree of strain, provided he could win over another potential ally who up to then had refused to march with him despite all his overtures.

In addition to using the Ethiopian War to break his isolation in the south, Hitler seized upon the obvious indecisiveness of the Western powers and the paralysis of the League of Nations to launch another of his surprise coups. On March 7, 1936, German troops occupied the Rhineland, which had been demilitarized since the conclusion of the Locarno Pact. By the logic of events, that would have had to be his next step, but to all appearances it came unexpectedly even to Hitler himself. If we may judge by the documents, the action had originally been planned for the spring of 1937. But in the middle of February he began to wonder whether he could not advance the date, in view of the international situation. Apparently he made up his mind only a few days later, when Mussolini twice in quick succession informed him that the spirit of Stresa was dead and Italy would not participate in any sanctions against Germany. Yet this time, too, Hitler waited for a pretext that would enable him to assume before the world’s eyes his favorite role of one who had been abused. He wanted to be able to cry out against the shame that had been inflicted upon him.

This time he took his cue from the Franco-Soviet mutual assistance pact. The agreement had been negotiated some time before, but not yet ratified. It lent itself all the better to Hitler’s purposes because it had been the subject of protracted domestic controversies within France and had stirred considerable concern internationally as well, especially in England. In order to disguise his intentions, on February 21 Hitler granted an interview to Bertrand de Jouvenel. He expressed his desire for rapprochement and in particular repudiated the intense anti-French bias of Mein Kampf. At the time he was writing the book, he explained, France and Germany had been enemies; but by now there were no longer any grounds for conflict. Jouvenel then asked why the book, widely regarded as a kind of political bible, was still being reprinted in unaltered form. Hitler replied that he was not a writer who revised his books, but a politician: “I make my corrections every day in my foreign policy, which is aimed entirely at rapprochement with France…. My corrections will be written in the great book of History.” But when the interview was not published in Paris- Midi until a full week later, and in fact not until the day after the Chamber of Deputies had ratified the Franco-Soviet Pact, Hitler felt he had been hoodwinked. When Francois-Poncet called on him on March 2, Hitler angrily told the ambassador that he had been made a fool of. Political intrigues had kept the interview from being published in time; all his statements had since been outstripped by events, and he would be making new proposals.

The directive that War Minister von Blomberg prepared for the occupation of the Rhineland was dated that same March 2. On March 7 his troops crossed the Rhine, with the population cheering and throwing flowers. But Hitler was well aware of the risk he had taken. Later he referred to the forty-eight hours after the occupation as the “most nerve-racking” period in his life. He did not want to go through another such strain for the next ten years, he said. The build-up of the army had only just begun. If it came to fighting, he had only a handful of divisions against the nearly 200 divisions of France and her East European allies, for in the meanwhile the forces of the Soviet Union had also to be added. And although Hitler himself did not appear to have suffered a nervous breakdown, as one of the participants later asserted, the nerves of the sanguine War Minister did give out. Shortly after the beginning of the operation, he was all for withdrawing the troops in view of the French intervention that could certainly be expected. “If the French had marched into the Rhineland,” Hitler admitted, “we would have had to withdraw with our tails between our legs, for the military resources at our disposal would have been wholly inadequate for even a moderate resistance.”¹⁹

Nevertheless, Hitler did not hesitate to take the risk, and his readiness to do so was undoubtedly connected