The Times Great Lives. Anna Temkin

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      Suspicion of Hitler was now growing, though the world did not yet grasp the full baseness of Nazi technique, with its deliberate use of the lie as an instrument of policy whereby to lull future victims into a sense of security while some nefarious scheme was being developed elsewhere. Yet the Führer and Chancellor himself had asserted that the bigger the lie the better the chance of its being believed.

      The Rhineland coup was followed by two years of digestion and consolidation, during which time German military preparations were pushed forward with increasing activity, and an economic reorganization aiming at self-sufficiency was undertaken. Events outside Germany in 1936 and 1937 increased the nervous tension in Europe and did much to strengthen Hitler’s position. The policy of sanctions against Italy incompletely carried out through the machinery of the League of Nations made the worst of both worlds. It fell short of what was needed to save Ethiopia, but served to turn Mussolini from friendship and collaboration with the Western Powers to an increasingly close connection with Hitler, the foremost critic in Europe of the League of Nations. This understanding was given substantive form by the support accorded by the two totalitarian States to General Franco’s cause in Spain, and was finally registered by the official establishment in September, 1937, of the Rome–Berlin Axis. By this diplomatic revolution Hitler won an important European ally at the expense of the Powers of the Versailles ‘Diktat’, whose prestige, both moral and material, had as a result of these various events suffered a considerable diminution.

      Seizure of Austria

      Entry into Vienna

      In the early weeks of 1938 the storm centre of Europe shifted back to Berlin. Hitler engineered an abrupt crisis in Austro-German relations, which ended on March 11 by the violation of the frontier by the German Army and the forcible incorporation of Austria in the Reich. Mussolini, who in 1934, on the murder of Herr Dollfuss, had massed troops on the Brenner frontier, made no move, and received the effusive thanks of the Führer: ‘Mussolini: Ich soll es Ilnen nie vergessen.’ Hitler’s dramatic entry into Vienna a few days later, after nearly a quarter of a century’s absence, during which he had experienced every vicissitude of hope, despair, and triumph, was watched with curiosity and even sympathy by millions of people outside the Reich, whose Governments had in the past resoundingly refused to the constitutional requests of both Berlin and Vienna the union which the German Dictator had now achieved by force.

      The union of the Reich and the Ostmark, as Austria was now called, immediately raised the problem of Czechoslovakia, which contained a minority of some 3,500,000 Germans and was now surrounded by German territory on three sides. The question asked all over Europe was how soon would Bohemia share the fate of Austria. Hitler’s assurance to the Czech Government that it had nothing to fear did not allay suspicion. A series of communal elections throughout Czechoslovakia in May raised to fever-pitch the excitement created in the German minority by the inclusion in the Reich of their Austrian co-racialists. At the annual meeting in September of the National-Socialist Party at Nuremberg Hitler stood as the avowed champion of the Sudeten Germans, and their demands immediately precipitated an acute European crisis involving the imminent risk of general war. Hitler, with the German Army mobilized, his western front approaching a state of impregnability, faced by potential opponents who were mentally bewildered and militarily unprepared, and divided both geographically and ideologically, was in a position to dictate his terms. In conferences at Berchtesgaden and Godesberg with Mr Neville Chamberlain, and then at Munich, where M. Daladier and Mussolini, as well as Mr Chamberlain, were present, he put forward demands that France and Britain were not in a position to refuse. To save the peace of the world and to avoid their own destruction the Czechs were told that they must submit to the arrangements made by the four Great Powers at Munich, whereby all the German districts of Bohemia, together with the immense fortifications of the Erzgebirge, were handed over absolutely to Germany. In eight months Hitler had added 10,000,000 of Germans to the Third Reich, had broken the only formidable bastion to German expansion south-eastwards, and had made himself the most powerful individual in Europe since Napoleon i.

      Czechoslovakia a ‘protectorate’

      In the course of his conversations with Mr Chamberlain Hitler had assured him that he had no more territorial claims to make in Europe – a phrase he had also used after the seizure of Austria. On March 15, 1939, the world was, however, startled to hear that the German Army was invading and overwhelming Bohemia, Moravia, and Slovakia, all that remained of the independent Republic. President Hacha, who under German pressure had succeeded Dr Benesh in the autumn, was summoned to Berlin and forced to accept terms which made his country a ‘Protectorate’ of the Reich. Hitler went to Prague to proclaim there another bloodless victory and then while the going was good travelled to Memel, which had been ceded under the Versailles Treaty to Lithuania, and announced its annexation on March 23.

      Poland had profited from the dismemberment of Czechoslovakia by being allowed to annex the disputed region of Teschen. But she was marked down as the next victim. While German troops were still moving into Slovakia Hitler proposed to the Polish Government that Danzig should be returned to Germany and that Germany should build and own a road connecting East Prussia with the rest of the Reich, in return for which Germany would guarantee the Polish frontiers for 25 years – though a 10-year treaty of non-aggression already existed between the two countries, of which five years had still to run. Poland rejected the proposals and appealed to Great Britain and France for support. These countries at once gave Poland pledges to defend her independence, if necessary by war. The action of the Western Powers came as a shock to Hitler, who was further alarmed by negotiations shortly afterwards set on foot in Moscow by the French and British with the Soviet Government. The spectre of war on two fronts again arose to damp the German ardour for acquisition. Hitler, faced with the prospect of a check and a rebuff, fatal contingencies for an aspiring dictator, made his decision. Rather than give up his cherished, and indeed loudly proclaimed design of seizing Danzig and the Polish Corridor, he was prepared to eat every word he had uttered in condemnation, derision, and defiance of the Bolshevist regime, and to invite the Russians to agree to a non-aggression pact. Stalin on his side, finding the danger of a German attack suddenly exorcized, and distrusting the constancy of the Western Powers, was not unwilling to accept Hitler’s overtures, and the Pact was signed on August 23.

      Hitler Starts War

      With the disappearance of any likelihood of Russian assistance being given to the western allies Hitler saw no further obstacle in the way of an immediate attack on Poland, and on August 31, 1939, he ordered the German Armies to cross the frontier. The Second World War had begun. With typical falsity Hitler and Ribbentrop – now his intimate and most pernicious adviser – had offered the Polish Ambassador terms of settlement, and broadcast them to the world, a few hours before the soldiers began the invasion, without, however, allowing the Ambassador time or means to convey them to his Government.

      The attack on Poland gave the world its first taste of the horrors of a German Blitzkrieg. Hitler went East to superintend the slaughter in person. It was a swift and terrible war which he waged in bitter hatred and, when the issue was clear, with crude boastings and gross lies at the expense of a broken nation. In a speech at Danzig on September 19 he had the effrontery to declare that: ‘Poland has worked for this war’ and ‘peace was prevented by a handful of (British) warmongers’. On the same occasion he took up what he called the British ‘challenge’ to a three years’ conflict and announced that Germany possessed a new weapon. The grim business was over in a few weeks. Warsaw surrendered on September 24 and on October 5 Hitler visited it and swaggered among the ruins which were garlanded for the occasion.

      The next day, speaking in the Reichstag, he made what he called his last offer to the allies. It was a remarkable rhetorical performance, though, obviously nervous, he hurried through the phrases in which he described his new friendship with the Russians. As a plea for peace it could, if only one of its premises had been sound and СКАЧАТЬ