The Hitler–Hess Deception. Martin Allen

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СКАЧАТЬ were sent to Czechoslovakia on Hitler’s secret orders for private talks about the Sudetenland. However, ‘they were forbidden to have any contact with the German diplomatic mission in Czechoslovakia, and the then German Foreign Minister, von Neurath’.³⁷

      The end of the 1930s saw the pressure-cooker of European politico-diplomatic tensions rise inexorably towards bursting point as the Nazis strained to expand Germany beyond her frontiers, to absorb every part of Europe containing ethnic Germans, as outlined by Karl Haushofer in the 1920s (see maps, pp. 16, 23). This objective closely followed Professor Haushofer’s theories, and like his son he was very active throughout the 1930s, contacting Ukrainian nationalists and working extensively with the Ukrainian Hetman Organisation, which supported the freeing of the Ukraine from Soviet domination. All of this would come together in June 1941, for Hitler would not attack the Soviet Union merely out of political ideology, but because western Russia played a critical role in the Nazis’ plans for their future Reich. The Nazis intended that the Ukraine would become the Reich’s breadbasket, while the Caucasus became her source of oil. Karl Haushofer was very important to this plan, and within his theories, his extensive range of contacts and his knowledge of the region lay the key, the Nazis hoped, to the Reich’s future success.

      When Rudolf and Ilse Hess’s son, Wolf Rüdiger, was born in 1938, one of the child’s godfathers was Adolf Hitler; the other was Albrecht Haushofer. It may seem extraordinary that the co-signer of the infamous Nuremberg Laws (which removed German Jews’ political and social rights) chose the part-Jewish Albrecht Haushofer as his child’s godfather, despite the fact that he, Hitler, and all the top Nazis knew full well the Haushofer family’s Jewish connections. Indeed, at the christening party held at Hess’s Munich home in the affluent suburb of Harlaching, guest of honour Adolf Hitler mingled freely and happily with his and Hess’s friends, chatting gaily to his long-time acquaintance Martha Haushofer, who was half-Jewish.

      1938 was a time of great change. The zenith of Nazi foreign policy successes was passing, and the Hess christening party was marred towards the end by a disagreement between Karl Haushofer and Hitler. The by-now elderly Professor Haushofer, who had become used to being regarded as the Nazis’ geopolitical guru, sought out for his wise counsel, now sensed that he too was passing his zenith. Hitler, like some Frankenstein’s monster of his own creation, was showing increasing signs that he intended to pursue Nazi foreign policy in an aggressive manner that the old Professor felt increasingly at odds with, and which he felt might well lead to war. Needless to say, when he voiced his opinion to Hitler, it was not well received.

      Hitler should have listened to his old friend, for there would soon be signs that Germany’s European neighbours would no longer stand back and turn a blind eye to the Nazis’ expansionist agenda.

      Following the autumn 1938 Munich Conference to settle the Sudeten Question, which was to strip Czechoslovakia of her western territories and leave her open to German conquest a mere six months later, certain high-ranking British civil servants and politicians regretfully concluded that Poland was likely to be next on Hitler’s agenda. He would demand the return of Danzig and the Corridor – the last remaining major strip of territory taken from Germany in 1919. However, what Hitler did next shocked everyone. Rather than sticking to Karl Haushofer’s plan for expanding Germany to encompass all ethnic Germans (which the British Foreign Office was well aware of), the German Führer swallowed up the rest of Czechoslovakia as well, in direct contravention of the agreement he had signed with Britain’s Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain in Munich the previous year.

      Czechoslovakia proper had never been part of Germany, and there were few, if any, ethnic Germans living there. Yet Hitler had simply marched in and taken a foreign nation over. This raised the frightening prospect that no one was safe, if not from direct invasion, then from belligerent German aggression to protect their interests – and who could say where the Nazis might judge those to be?

      British MP Sir Henry ‘Chips’ Channon summed up these feelings succinctly on the day Germany invaded Czechoslovakia, writing in his diary: ‘Hitler has entered Prague, and Czechoslovakia has ceased to exist. No balder, bolder departure from the written bond has ever been committed in history. The manner of it surpasses comprehension and his callous desertion of the Prime Minister is stupefying … The country is stirred to its depths, and rage against Germany is rising.’³⁸

      It was not only the democrats of western Europe who were concerned by Hitler’s ill-judged departure from Karl Haushofer’s geopolitical game plan, which although blatantly nationalistic, at least made it appear that the Führer’s territorial ambitions were limited. No one could feel safe if Hitler could so easily tear up a treaty. Italy’s Fascist Foreign Minister, Count Ciano, immediately perceived the dangers of the situation: ‘The thing is serious, especially since Hitler had assured everyone that he did not want to annex one single Czech. This German action does not destroy the Czechoslovakia of Versailles, but the one that was constructed at Munich and Vienna. What weight can be given in the future to those declarations and promises which concern us more directly?’³⁹

      Hitler’s move against Czechoslovakia also took Albrecht Haushofer by surprise. Despite his position close to the centre of Nazi geopolitical planning, he had remained largely unaware of Hitler’s true strategy for attaining his Greater Germany. Haushofer thought in terms of discussion, negotiation and plebiscite. Hitler, on the other hand, was running to a different timetable. He was aware that Germany would not be able to sustain her military superiority for very long before Britain and France attained parity.

      Back in November 1937, Hitler had held a secret conference at the Chancellery to discuss this very situation, with War Minister Field Marshal Werner von Blomberg, commander-in-chief of the army General Werner von Fritsch, commander-in-chief of the navy Admiral Erich Raeder, Reich Minister for Air and commander-in-chief of the Luftwaffe as well as President of the Reichstag Hermann Göring, Foreign Minister von Neurath, and a certain Colonel Hossbach, who took the minutes. Hitler had begun by ‘stating that the subject of the present conference was of such importance that its discussions would, in other countries, certainly be a matter for a full Cabinet meeting, but he – the Führer – had rejected the idea of making it a subject of discussion before the wider circle of the Reich Cabinet just because of the importance of the matter’.

      After much debate on the subject of a Greater Germany, and how the nation was to attain Lebensraum for its people, Hitler declared: ‘Germany’s problem could only be solved by means of force and this was never without attendant risks … If one accepts as the basis of the following exposition the resort to force with its attendant risks, then there remain still to be answered the questions of “when” and “how” …’⁴⁰ The ‘when’ and ‘how’ were then divided into three criteria.

      Firstly, Hitler judged that after 1943–45 Germany’s military position would become increasingly unfavourable, as ‘our relative strength would decrease in relation to the rearmament which would by then have been carried out by the rest of the world’.

      Secondly, he declared it was hoped that ‘internal strife’ would occur in France (indeed, the Nazis began covertly financing the right-wing Cagoulards, who were gearing up to attempt a coup d’état⁴¹), precipitating a crisis that would absorb the French army completely and ‘render it incapable of use in a war against Germany’.

      Thirdly, it was hoped that France might become ‘so embroiled by a war with another state that she cannot proceed against Germany’.

      The implication was clear to the men seated around the conference table at the Reich Chancellery: Hitler was gearing up the German economy, as well as her politico-military bodies, for war.

      Finally, Hitler revealed that he intended to absorb the Czech state into the Reich. Thus, what in the spring of 1939 appeared to be a belligerent Hitler whim was in fact part of his overall long-term strategy, for as he explained СКАЧАТЬ