Hitler

with his increasingly contemptuous assessment of France. In his time-tested manner he made the operation as safe as possible. Once again he ordered it for a Saturday, knowing that the decision-making committees of the Western powers could not meet on weekends. Once again he accompanied his breach of a treaty, this time a double violation of the treaties of Versailles and Locarno, with pledges of good behavior and emphatic offers of alliances, even proposing a twenty-five-year nonaggression pact with France and a return of Germany to the League of Nations. Again he had his step legitimized by the democratic process, making it the issue of an election in which he for the first time achieved the “totalitarian dream figure”²⁰ of 99 per cent of the vote. “Abroad and domestically that always has enormous effect,” he later said. How consciously he combined this plan of surprise blows with reassuring talk is evident from a remark in the table talk in which he criticized Mussolini’s indulgence toward the Curia: “I would march into the Vatican and fetch out the whole crew. I would then say: ‘Sorry, I made a mistake!’—But they would be gone!” Quite rightly he called this phase, which left the strongest imprint on his tactics, the “age of faits accomplis.”²¹

The Reichstag speech in which Hitler supported his action exploited to the hilt the contradictions, fears, and longings for peace in Germany and the rest of Europe. Again he drew a picture of the “horror of the Communist international dictatorship of hate,” the danger from the sinister East, which France was bringing into Europe. He pleaded for “raising the problem of the general antagonisms among European nations and states out of the sphere of irrationality and passion and placing it under the quiet light of higher insight.” Specifically, he justified his action on the grounds that in the German legal view the Franco-Soviet Pact must be regarded as a violation of the Locarno Pact, since it was undeniably aimed against Germany. And although the French disagreed, Hitler’s argument had a certain validity, even if his own policy of revisionism was what had prompted a France concerned for her security to enter the alliance with Russia.

His arguments and assurances did not fail to make an impression. The Paris government did consider a military counterblow for a moment—as we now know—but shrank from general mobilization in view of the prevailing pacifist mood. England, for her part, had difficulty understanding the French excitement; the British thought that the Germans were merely returning “to their own back garden.” And when Eden advised Prime Minister Stanley Baldwin to respond to France’s anxiety at least by having the military staffs make contact, he was told: “The boys won’t have it.”²² Of all of France’s allies, only Poland indicated any readiness to intervene. But, left dangling by the passive French government, it ended by falling into considerable embarrassment in its efforts to find even a reasonably plausible explanation vis-a-vis Berlin for its seeming aggressiveness.

Thus everything followed the model of the preceding crises. Hitler’s abrupt action was followed by loud protests and threats, then serious consultations, finally conferences (with and without Germany), until the prolonged palavers had used up all the energy that might have been produced by injured righteousness. The Council of the League of Nations, which came hastily to London for a special session, unanimously declared Germany in violation of her treaties, but it also took grateful note of Hitler’s repeatedly announced “desire for co- operation.” And, as if to say that its own vote sprang from a rather absurd whim, it recommended negotiations with the treaty breaker. When the Council set up a neutral zone in the Rhineland about thirteen miles in width and demanded that Germany refrain from building fortifications in this area, Hitler merely replied that he would not bow to any dictates, that German sovereignty had not been restored in order to be restricted or eliminated immediately afterward. This was the last time the powers were to speak in the forceful tone of victors; in any case they had been using that tone less and less of late. That was certainly implied by the London Times, which saw in Hitler’s conduct “a chance for reconstruction.”

What all these reactions added up to was the admission that the Western powers were no longer able or no longer willing to defend the peace system they had established in and after Versailles. Only a year before, after the weak reaction to Germany’s reintroduction of universal military service, Francois-Poncet noted anxiously that Hitler must now be convinced that he could “permit himself anything and prescribe the laws for Europe.” Encouraged by the cheers of his own people and by the weakness and egotism of the other side, he continued to climb higher and higher. Returning from his triumphal ride through the reoccupied Rhineland, after a speech preceded by pealing bells at Cologne Cathedral and followed by fifteen minutes of radio silence, he turned to his cronies in the special train and once again expressed his relief at the limpness of the Western powers: “Am I glad! Good Lord, am I glad it’s gone so smoothly. Sure enough, the world belongs to the brave man. He’s the one God helps.” Passing by glowing blast furnaces, slag heaps, and derricks in the nocturnal Ruhr district, he was overcome by one of those moods of euphoria that brought on in him a desire for music. He asked that a record of Wagner’s music be played, and, listening to the prelude of Parsifal, meditated: “I have built up my religion out of Parsifal. Divine worship in solemn form… without pretenses of humility… One can serve God only in the garb of the hero.” But even in such moments, spoiled by almost incomprehensible successes and virtually stunned by the cheers he had received, he was still very close to his early days with their dreary resentments. Even in good fortune he was incapable of summing up much serenity or magnanimity. That is clear from the remark he made at the next selection, the funeral march from Gotterdammerung: “I first heard it in Vienna. At the Opera. And I still remember as if it were today how madly excited I became on the way home over a few yammering Yids[14] I had to pass. I cannot think of a more incompatible contrast. This glorious mystery of the dying hero and this Jewish crap!”²³

At first the occupation of the Rhineland scarcely affected the actual balance of forces among the European powers. But it gave Hitler that safety in his rear troops—in the West—which was essential to him if he were to realize his aims in the Southeast and East. And the time was now drawing nearer. No sooner had the excitement over his operation faded than he began building a strongly fortified line of defense along the German western frontier. Germany’s face was now turning to the East.

An intensified sense of the Communist threat would have to be whipped up in order to prepare the people psychologically for the turn to the East. And as if he himself were pulling all the stops in the historical process, Hitler once more found circumstances meeting him halfway. The Communist International had resolved upon its new Popular Front tactics in the summer of 1935. Those tactics met with spectacular success in the Spanish elections of February, 1936, and shortly afterward in France, where the electoral victory of the united French Left benefited chiefly the Communists, who increased their seats in the Chamber of Deputies from ten to seventy-two. On June 4, 1936, Leon Blum formed a Popular Front government. Six weeks later, on July 17, a military revolt in Morocco touched off the Spanish Civil War.

When the Spanish Popular Front government turned to France and the Soviet Union for aid, General Franco, the rebel leader, asked for similar backing from Germany and Italy. Together with a Spanish officer, two Nazi functionaries set out from Tetuan in Morocco for Berlin, to transmit personal letters from Franco to Hitler and Goring. Both the Foreign Office and the War Ministry declined to receive the delegation officially, but Rudolf Hess decided to take the matter straight to Hitler, who was in Bayreuth for the annual festival. On the evening of July 25 the three envoys met Hitler as he was returning from the Festspielhaus on its hill above the town and handed him the letters. Out of the euphoric mood of the moment, without consulting the ministers concerned, the decision was taken to lend active support to Franco. Goring, as commander in chief of the air force, and von Blomberg as War Minister, immediately received directives to this effect. The most important immediate measure, and perhaps the decisive one, consisted in the dispatch of several formations of Junkers 52’s. With the help of these planes Franco was able to transport his troops across the Mediterranean and create a bridgehead on the Spanish mainland. During the following three years he received support in the form of war materiel, technicians, advisers, and the Condor Legion. Nevertheless, the German aid did not significantly affect the conduct of the war, and in any case lagged far behind the forces placed at Franco’s disposal by Mussolini. Documents reveal the interesting fact that here again Hitler acted chiefly with tactical ends in view and showed a rational coolness entirely devoid of ideology.²⁴ For years he did virtually nothing to bring about a victory by Franco, but he did all in his power to keep the conflict going. He was always fully aware that crisis was useful to him. Every critical situation demands a frank admission of real interests, like a creditor’s oath that he is concealing none of his assets. Every critical situation produces discord, ruptures and reorientations. And such troubles offer a springboard for the political imagination. The real profit Hitler was able to derive from the Spanish Civil War consisted in the turmoil it introduced into European conditions.

Compared with that, all other gains paled—even that of putting the German air force and tank troops to test