Hitler’s European Diplomacy

The following article was taken, with generous permission from Castle Hill Publishers, from the recently published second edition of Richard Tedor’s study Hitler’s Revolution: Ideology, Social Programs, Foreign Affairs (Castle Hill Publishers, Uckfield, December 2021; see the book announcement in Issue No. 1 of this volume of Inconvenient History). In this book, it forms the second chapter. This is the third sequel of a serialized version of the entire book, which is being published step by step in Inconvenient History. The last installment will also include a bibliography, with more info on sources mentioned in the endnotes. Illustrated print and eBook versions of this book are available from Armreg at armreg.co.uk.

Part 1 | Part 2 | Part 3 | Part 4 | Part 5 | Part 6

Africa

Throughout his tenure in office, Hitler was active in foreign affairs. A major goal, abolishing the restrictions imposed on Germany by the Versailles Treaty, required him to negotiate with the signatory powers that had ratified it. This was an uphill battle, since these nations benefited from the compact. The Führer strove to realize his goal through non-belligerent means. The last war had provoked a Communist revolution in Russia. His own country had nearly suffered a similar fate in 1918. Hitler believed that another European conflict would be exploited by the Soviets to overthrow existing governments:

“An outbreak of such an insane, endless carnage would lead to the collapse of the present-day social and state order. A Europe descending into Communist chaos would cause a crisis of unimaginable proportions and inestimable duration.”[1]

The Reich’s chancellor weighed foreign policy decisions according to their advantages for Germany. Contrary to the cosmopolitan attitude of today’s democratic leaders, he allowed no particular obligation to the collective interests of an abstract “global community” to influence his actions. In his own words:

“I cannot feel responsible for the fate of a world which showed no sympathy for the miserable plight of my own people. I regard myself as called upon by providence to serve only my own nation and rescue it from its terrible distress.”[2]

Great Britain and France were among the primary advocates of the Versailles system. Though aware of the treaty’s injustices, neither of their governments initiated a single voluntary concession to Germany from 1920-1939.

The objective of National-Socialist foreign affairs was securing Lebensraum, sufficient living space to provide nourishment for Germany’s increasing population and natural resources for industry. A serious hindrance to economic well-being was her lack of overseas colonies. Prior to World War I, the control of expansive territories in Africa had provided the imperial Reich with raw materials. Nearly 12,000,000 native inhabitants had offered a market for German manufactured goods, and the flourishing trade had made a substantial contribution to industrial growth and prosperity.

Woodrow Wilson’s 14 Points, which lulled the Reich’s Government into accepting an armistice in 1918, promised “a free, open-minded and absolutely impartial adjustment of all colonial claims.” This proved to be an illusion. In Africa, France gained the former German colony of Kamerun totaling nearly 50,000 square miles. The Versailles settlement awarded Ruanda and Burundi to Belgium. England took the lion’s share, incorporating German East Africa, German Southwest Africa and Togo, augmenting the British Empire by over 630,000 square miles. Italy received about 50,000 square miles. Britain and Japan divided Germany’s Pacific colonies.

The Allies classified the seized colonies as mandate states that England and France administered as trustees. This avoided the appearance of outright annexation, which would have raised the inconvenient argument that so much valuable territory appropriated from Germany should be credited to the reparations account. The League of Nations charter stated that administering colonies “inhabited by peoples not yet able to stand by themselves under the strenuous conditions of the modern world” was a “sacred trust of civilization.”[3] It sanctioned Anglo-French colonial administration as a blessing for underdeveloped nations, overlooking the fact that Syria, India, Egypt and several other countries under British and European subjugation had requested independence after World War I.

The peace treaty created other impediments for German commerce. Beginning in 1922, the Allies imposed a 26 percent duty on all German export wares. Despite this disadvantage, Germany continued to conduct overseas trade in order to meet reparations payments and import necessities previously available from Africa. The Germans’ profit margin was too small to alleviate the economic distress to industry. A German delegate at Versailles, Otto Landsberg, stated, “This peace is a slow murder of the German people.”[4] The worldwide financial crisis caused German exports to sink by two thirds between 1930 and 1933.

Hitler publicly reopened the colonial issue in September 1935. Speaking in Nuremberg, he announced that Germany would not relinquish her claims in Africa. Days later, Britain’s foreign secretary, Sir Samuel Hoare, addressed the topic before the League of Nations in Geneva. Dismissing the notion that the former German colonies should be returned, Hoare argued that it was necessary only to guarantee that countries without possessions on the Dark Continent should have fair access to their natural resources through an “open-door” policy. Berlin pointed out that the mother countries England, France, and Belgium would unavoidably enjoy preference in trade. The option to buy raw materials from mandate states was of little use to Germany anyway; she lacked the purchasing power to do so, thanks to the loss of her colonies. Nearly a year and a half passed before the League of Nations appointed a committee to investigate. Its findings endorsed Hoare’s position.[5]

In 1936, Hitler authorized Schacht to negotiate settlements with France and England regarding some of their major differences with Germany. Schacht introduced a proposal to change the status of French-controlled Kamerun and of Togo, Britain’s smaller African acquisition. Under the plan, the Germans would assume economic management of, but not sovereignty over, the two mandate states. Both would maintain an open-door trade policy with other countries as Hoare had suggested, while the Reich would enjoy commercial advantages to compensate for the previous forfeiture of its African territories. The compromise avoided the impression that the Allies were returning the German colonies, which would have represented a tacit admission that their seizure was unjust. Considering Germany’s poverty of natural resources and the pride of its populace, Schacht’s proposal was moderate. London and Paris categorically rejected it the following winter.[6]

Subsequent personal dialogs between Hitler and British statesmen proved equally fruitless. In November 1937, the Führer hosted the English emissary Lord Halifax at Berchtesgaden. He asked his guest what London proposed regarding Africa. Halifax admitted that “the mistakes of the Versailles Treaty must be set right.”[7] He stipulated that England could not negotiate this without the other continental powers and that redistribution of the colonies could only take place within the framework of an overall European settlement. Halifax offered no proposals.

The following March, Nevile Henderson, the British ambassador in Berlin, warned Hitler that English public opinion was “especially sensitive” about the African issue. He vaguely suggested that Germany could perhaps receive administration of the Congo. This was not even a British dominion. Hitler questioned the purpose of such an arrangement, instead of solving the colonial problem “in the simplest and most natural way, namely by giving back the German colonies.” He again pledged not to force the issue, expressing willingness to “patiently wait four, six or ten years” for a favorable solution. As for the genuine attitude of the British government, Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain confided to his cabinet a year later that discussing with Germany the return of her colonies was “completely out of the question.”[8] In March 1939, British Secretary of Trade Robert Hudson told the German economist Helmuth Wohlthat that the English people would never accept the transfer. For his part, Hitler kept the promise once made to Chamberlain, that he would not present Germany’s appeal as a “belligerent demand.”[9]

Geneva

With Germany lacking colonies, Hitler consolidated the Reich’s commercial position on the continent, focusing on the southeastern European market. This coincided with his intention to regain frontier provinces of Germany proper, some with valuable industry, which the Versailles provisions took from the Reich and awarded to neighboring states. Italy, France, Belgium, Denmark, Lithuania, Poland, and Czechoslovakia now controlled territories populated by ethnic Germans, whose loss weakened Germany.

The diplomatic question that received Hitler’s initial priority was national security. Article 160 of the treaty stated that the armed forces, the Reichswehr, may be deployed “exclusively for maintaining order within German territory and as border police.”[10] The Allies therefore denied Germany the right to protect her frontiers from foreign aggression.

The lack of adequate defense forces had already caused negative consequences for the Reich. When the Germans fell 1.6 percent behind on the crippling reparations payments to France, the French and Belgian armies militarily occupied the Ruhr industrial region in January 1923. In Essen, French troops shot 14 German miners resisting the invaders’ attempt to confiscate coal. Others the French arrested and deported to France’s colonies. They forced 80,000 Germans to leave their homes in the Ruhr and relocate further into Germany.[11] Clemenceau told his secretary, “We’ll stay longer than 15 years, we’ll stay 100 years if we must, until they pay what they owe us… And after we’ve withdrawn, if these swine violate their obligation, then fine, we’ll occupy again. Isn’t that just as good as if we had the Rhine?”[12] French and Belgian troops remained until the summer of 1925.

The governments of Germany and Austria arranged to form a customs union in 1931. The elimination of tariffs would boost commerce between the two countries and lessen the economic distress, particularly in Austria. France interpreted this “fearsome bloc” of her former antagonists as a violation of the Treaty of St. Germaine, which forbade Austria to become part of the Reich. Paris threatened to boycott German wares and initiate price wars to disrupt continental trade. Possessing the largest army in Europe, France was in a position to dictate terms without arbitration. That September, Austrian Chancellor Johannes Schober announced that his government would abandon plans for a trade agreement with Germany. U.S. President Hoover remarked:

“A customs union between a little state of six million people and a large one of 50 million people can scarcely be conceived as a serious threat. But France and England immediately declared that they won’t allow it. This is outwardly nothing more than a new, crass example of European power politics.”[13]

The incident demonstrated that without armed forces, Germany and Austria would remain unable to conduct an independent foreign policy.

The League of Nations had been holding preliminary talks for several years in preparation for a universal disarmament conference scheduled for 1932. In February 1927, Belgian Foreign Minister Emile Vandervelde predicted:

“Either the other powers must reduce their armies in proportion to the German Reichswehr, or the peace treaty becomes invalid and Germany claims the right to possess fighting forces capable of defending her territory.”[14]

The disarmament conference opened in Geneva in February 1932. Germany, a member of the League since 1927, demanded military parity with the other European powers. Delegates debated the issue for over four months without progress. In June, President Hoover proposed the reduction by two thirds of all ground and naval forces. He recommended sending bombers to the scrap yard and banning strategic aerial bombardment. The plan found favor with Italy and the USSR, but France rejected it.

Berlin saw in Franco-German dissonance a primary hindrance to the conference. On August 23, 1932, the Reichswehr and the Reich’s Foreign Office therefore asked France’s ambassador, André François-Poncet, for a private audience. At the meeting, General Kurt von Schleicher presented moderate suggestions to François-Poncet. Germany wished to develop prototypes of combat aircraft, armored vehicles and heavy artillery, but pledged not to put them into mass production. Schleicher’s plan called for an increase in military personnel by 30,000 soldiers each year. Considering that the French army numbered 655,000 men, it would take the Reich over 18 years to achieve parity. Further, the 30,000 annual recruits would serve an enlistment of just three months. Paris rejected Berlin’s modest proposals in a note on September 11, 1932. The French bluntly reminded the Germans of their obligation to observe the arms limitations imposed by the Versailles Treaty.

Within two days, the Germans notified the president of the Geneva conference that Germany was withdrawing from the talks. Three months later, England, France, and Italy conceded that “Germany must receive the same rights in a security system valid for all nations,” and that this would be on the agenda.[15] The German delegation thereupon returned to Geneva. This was the state of Europe’s arms race when Hitler became chancellor in January 1933. He inherited a military establishment whose ordnance department had recently estimated that there was only enough ammunition stockpiled for one hour of combat.

British Prime Minister Ramsay MacDonald introduced a comprehensive armaments plan on March 16. It permitted Germany to double the size of the Reichswehr to 200,000 men. It called for France to reduce her continental army to the same number, but granted her an additional 200,000 to police the colonies. MacDonald proposed a 200,000-man fighting force for Italy as well, plus 50,000 more for her overseas possessions. The USSR would maintain 500,000 men under arms, Poland 200,000, and Czechoslovakia 100,000. All countries except Germany would have an air force. Almost every nation affected responded favorably. France however, categorically rejected the plan.

The German diplomat Freiherr von Freytag-Loringhoven summarized the implications confronting Hitler in his deliberations:

“The plan was anything but favorable for Germany… The forces it allowed Germany in no way guaranteed her parity with the other Great Powers, nor corresponded to the size of her population and natural resources… Germany would be permitted to maintain a field army of 200,000 men. France, on the other hand, was promised 200,000 men for the mother country and just as many for the colonies. In case of war these colonial troops would be immediately transported to Europe, so France would have twice as strong a standing army right from the start, not even including reservists. For Poland, too, whose population is just half of Germany’s, the plan also envisioned 200,000 men. Considering the entire French alliance system, which in 1933 in addition to Poland and Belgium also included the Little Entente (Czechoslovakia, Yugoslavia and Romania), there was a fighting force on the French side of 1,025,000 men, whereas Germany could only parry with an army one-fifth as strong.”[16]

In the Reichstag on May 17, 1933, Hitler publicly responded:

“Germany would be ready without delay to disband her entire military establishment and destroy what little remains of her arsenal, if the other nations involved will do the same. But if the other states are unwilling to implement the conditions of disarmament the peace treaty of Versailles obligates them to, then Germany must at least insist on her right to parity. The German government sees in the English plan a possible basis to solve these questions… Germany therefore agrees in essence to accept a transitional period of five years for the establishment of her national security, in the expectation that Germany’s equal footing with the other states will result.”[17]

The only objection to MacDonald’s proposal Hitler posed was that his country should be permitted to develop an air force. Since the 1932 Reichswehr plan envisioned a maximum of just 200 planes by 1938, this was a minor exception. The Führer’s acceptance of the MacDonald plan meant leaving Germany virtually defenseless for nearly five years, basing national security purely on the good faith of neighboring powers to honor the agreement; an obligation which they had not met so far. Even after the five-year period, the Reichswehr would be heavily outnumbered and outgunned. As Hitler pointed out in his speech:

“The only nation justified in fearing an invasion is Germany, which has not only been forbidden offensive weapons but even the right to defensive ones, as well as not being allowed to construct border fortifications.”[18]

Hitler’s approval of the MacDonald plan received mixed reviews. The chairman of the conference, Arthur Henderson, stated on May 19 that Hitler’s speech clearly demonstrates that Germany’s desire to achieve balance rests not with expanding the Reichswehr, but with multilateral disarmament. Anthony Eden, representing Britain in Geneva, called the speech encouraging. The American delegate, Norman Davis, declared his country’s readiness to accept MacDonald’s proposals. Only France reacted unfavorably. At the session in Geneva on May 23, the French delegate Paul Boncour insisted that Germany’s political organizations, the Stahlhelm (Steel Helmet), SA, and SS, represent a military fighting force augmenting the size of the German army by nearly a million men.

In his May 17 speech, Hitler defended the Stahlhelm as a veterans’ society preserving the comradeship forged in World War I. Its members had helped quell Communist uprisings in the Reich from 1919 to 1923. He added:

“In a few years, the SA and SS lost over 350 dead and 40,000 injured as a result of Communist murder attempts and terrorism. If Geneva counts these organizations serving an exclusively internal political purpose as part of the army, then the fire department, athletic associations, police societies, gun lodges, sailing clubs, and other sports leagues might as well also be considered armed forces.”[19]

Hitler in fact had no interest in militarizing the party’s affiliates. The Stahlhelm soon all but disappeared, and SA chief Ernst Röhm caused so much trouble demanding that his storm troops, not the army, take over national defense that Hitler had him shot a year later.

During a recess at Geneva, French statesmen conducted confidential deliberations with England and the United States regarding the MacDonald plan. Supported by the French press, Paris advocated a minimum four-year period before even initiating multilateral disarmament. The German army, they recommended, should be restructured, replacing the present system of long-term enlistments with an active-duty tour of eight months for every soldier. Under this arrangement, the Reichswehr would forfeit in less than a year its professional officer corps and NCO cadre of instructors. On October 7, the German government announced its acceptance of the proposal. The Reich agreed not to develop offensive weapons such as heavy artillery, bombers and heavy tanks. With the exception of a demand for modern defensive weaponry, Hitler voluntarily agreed to the reshaping of his country’s armed forces by a foreign power.

One week later, a British delegate, Sir John Simon, announced revisions to the MacDonald plan based on consultation with other nations. He extended the original five-year disarmament period – which Hitler had already accepted – to eight years. The new arrangement expressly forbade all signatories from producing more weapons. The Germans therefore would not have the right to sufficiently arm the additional 100,000 soldiers the plan allowed for. Germany withdrew from the conference the same day, and from the League of Nations.

Despite the concessions Hitler had offered, he reaped harsh criticism from the international press. As Freytag-Loringhoven summarized:

“Most of its readers must have gained the impression that Germany frivolously sabotaged all the grand work toward disarmament, and by withdrawing from the Geneva League of Nations, parted ways with the community of civilized states.”[20]

America’s new president, Franklin Roosevelt, had already told a German emissary that he considered “Germany the only possible obstacle to a disarmament treaty.”[21] The military advisor with the English delegation to the disarmament conference sent a report to the Foreign Office in London, describing Hitler as a “mad dog running around loose” who needs to be “either destroyed or locked away.”[22] The permanent undersecretary in the Foreign Office, Robert Vansittart, added a note of approval to the analysis and distributed copies to the staff. French newspapers published bogus reports of secret German war plans. Le Journal in Paris described how Stahlhelm, SS and SA men receive extensive combat training from the Reichswehr.[23]

Explaining Germany’s withdrawal from Geneva on October 14, Hitler reminded his countrymen how the Allies had pledged in their own peace treaty to reduce their military establishments.

“Our delegates were then told by official representatives of the other states in public speeches and direct declarations that at the present time, Germany could no longer be granted equal rights.”

The Führer maintained that “the German people and their government were repeatedly humiliated” during the negotiations. He concluded that this

“world peace, so ultimately necessary for us all, can only be achieved when the concepts of victor and vanquished are supplanted by the loftier vision of the equal right to life for everyone.”[24]

Conscious of the gravity of this foreign policy decision, Hitler presented it to the German public for approval. He asked Reich’s President Paul von Hindenburg to authorize new parliamentary elections coupled with a referendum on Geneva. The Führer repeated his position on the League to employees of the Siemens factory in Berlin on November 10, and the national radio broadcast his speech. In the referendum two days later, 95 percent of German voters endorsed their chancellor’s break with Geneva.

Even after leaving the League that October, Hitler still sought rapprochement. In January 1934, he petitioned Geneva to approve a 300,000-man army for his country. The British government asked him to settle for a force somewhere between 200,000 and 300,000 instead. Hitler agreed. France’s foreign minister, Jean-Louis Barthou, insisted that the SA be counted as part of Germany’s army. The Führer expressed willingness to eliminate the SA’s paramilitary structure. He stood firm for an air force, but pledged not to expand its size beyond 50 percent of that of France. He completely renounced German development of bombers. Hitler was content to wait five years for the Great Powers to begin arms reduction, if France would accept the proposals.

Many prominent Frenchmen endorsed the compromise. The novelist Alphonse de Chateaubriant observed:

“Germany neither seeks war with France nor even considers it.”

Henri Pichot stated:

“The youth who did not experience the war don’t know what war is. It’s up to us to tell them. It is our duty, and that of those we fought, to build bridges across the trenches that still divide us.”

An editorial in the French newspaper La Victoire argued:

“With political sense and a clear patriotism that we could wish for our own leaders, the Germans support that man of the people who rose from among them and wants to get them back on their feet. Once the Germans entrusted him with the reins of government, Hitler’s first thought was to obtain the right to military parity from the Versailles victors or to simply take it back. This was not a question of prestige for him, not even purely one of national honor, but much more a question of security. A disarmed nation is not a free nation; it is an enslaved one.”[25]

France’s ambassador in Berlin, François-Poncet, supported the compromise with Germany. French statesman André Tardieu told him:

“You’re wasting your time! The agreement you advocate will never be concluded. We’ll never sign it. Hitler won’t be at the helm much longer… When war breaks out, a week won’t pass before he’s ousted and replaced by the crown prince.”[26]

On April 17, 1934, Barthou issued an official reply to the British mediation plan and Hitler’s offer:

“The French government formally refuses to allow Germany to rearm… From now on, France will guarantee her security through her own resources.”[27]

This caused the collapse of the Geneva disarmament conference.

France

Bordering France, the Saar is a 741-square mile German mining region just south of Luxembourg. During the 1919 peace conference, France sought to annex the Saar. Clemenceau falsely claimed that the province’s ethnic French colony numbered 150,000. He protested that a post-war German administration of the Saar would rob the inhabitants of the opportunity “to enjoy the freedom the French government wants to give them.”[28] Wilson and Lloyd George, however, arranged for the region to come under League of Nations jurisdiction for 15 years. The population could then vote whether the Saar should return to Germany, join France, or maintain status quo.

From 1920 to 1935, the five-member Saar Commission governed the region. French became the official language in public schools. The German miners opted for their own ethnic schools. German societies supported their children’s education through traveling libraries, delivering German language study books to even remote villages. The French arrested Hermann Röchling, a publisher and sponsor of the program.[29] Violating the Versailles Treaty, Paris transferred 5,000 soldiers to the Saar. They expelled most of the German civil servants and replaced them with French officials. The French assumed control of the coal industry.

Political analysts – German and French alike – predicted that the overwhelming majority of voters would cast for reunion with Germany in the 1935 plebiscite. Paris encouraged the populace to vote for status quo. This would deprive Hitler of a strategic buffer dividing the two powers. France recruited German Communists, former trade union officials, and other opponents of the Hitler administration who had migrated to the Saar in 1933 to campaign for status quo; their propaganda vehemently criticized National Socialism.

The media campaign marred Franco-German relations. Hitler expressed his concern in a well-publicized interview on November 24, 1934, with the chairman of the Union of French Front Fighters, Jean Goy:

“The French press draws the conclusion that we Germans are preparing a coup. It’s pure insanity to think that Germany would want to disrupt the coming plebiscite by resorting to force. We will accept the results of the plebiscite no matter how it turns out.”

Hitler added that he had once suggested to Barthou that the pair draft a joint protocol to regulate “eventual difficulties” that might surface, “but never received an answer.”[30]

Hitler proposed cancelling the plebiscite in favor of a more cordial settlement: The Saar would return to Germany, and French industry would retain control of its coal-rich natural resources. This was a magnanimous gesture, considering that Hitler expected to carry the vote: Tens of thousands of Saar residents had crossed into Germany in special trains and motor columns to attend his campaign speech in Koblenz the previous August. Paris rejected the proposal. Supervised by the League of Nations, the plebiscite took place on January 13, 1935. The result was a landslide, with 90.8 percent of the voters casting for union with Germany, 8.8 percent favoring status quo, and just 2,124 out of 526,857 eligible voters opting for France.

With the plebiscite settled, Hitler hoped for better relations with France. He had already renounced any future claim to Alsace-Lorraine. This was a large frontier region of mixed heritage which Germany had annexed from France in 1871. Clemenceau reclaimed the territory after 1918. Hitler explained to Jean Goy in 1934:

“It would be no solution to wage war every 20 or 30 years to take back provinces that always cause France problems when they’re French, and Germany when they’re German.”[31]

In his official proclamation announcing the recovery of the Saar, he described it as a “decisive step on the road to reconciliation” with France.

On March 6, the French reacted to the Saar plebiscite by extending military enlistments to two years. Soldiers scheduled for discharge remained on active duty, gradually expanding the size of the armed forces. Paris then announced a proposed mutual assistance pact with the Soviet Union. This would pledge military support in case a signatory “is exposed to the threat or danger of attack from a European state.”[32] With 45 French army divisions already stationed near Germany’s frontier, Hitler announced on March 16 that his government would no longer comply with the Versailles armament restrictions. He introduced compulsory military service with one-year enlistments.

Hitler summoned Dr. Friedrich Grimm, an authority on international law, to the chancery. The Führer was preparing his Reichstag speech to justify instituting the draft. He asked his guest, “Were you in my place, how would you explain the legal issue?” Grimm replied:

“We’re in the right. According to the Versailles Treaty, the obligation to disarm is a mutual legal obligation. We’ve already done so. We’ve disarmed. This the opponents officially acknowledge. But they have not followed with their own disarmament. They’re in arrears. Germany therefore demands freedom of action. It’s amazing that the Reich’s Government was so patient and accepted this circumstance for over 15 years.”[33]

In his Reichstag speech on March 21, 1935, Hitler announced his intention to build an armed force that was “not an instrument of belligerent attack, but exclusively for defense and in this way to maintain peace.”[34] He included a renewed, ultimately failed proposal for all industrial nations to outlaw aerial bombardment and limit naval armaments, heavy artillery and armored fighting vehicles. The German diplomat Joachim von Ribbentrop met with Grimm at the Kaiserhof Hotel in Berlin. Hitler wished to promote better relations through the German-French Society, founded in 1934, with its sister association in France, the Comité France-Allemagne. Ribbentrop asked that Grimm become president of the Berlin-based society, a post he accepted. The German government sponsored the activities with financial aid, while the French counterpart had to rely on private contributions in its own country.

The Franco-Soviet agreement tarnished relations between Paris and Berlin. On May 25, the Germans protested that it violated the 1925 Locarno Pact. In this compact, France, Belgium, and Germany pledged “under no circumstances to attack, fall upon, or wage war against one another.”[35] The German government argued that the Franco-Soviet understanding was directed against the Reich.

In January 1936, Hitler attempted again to persuade France to change course by offering a non-aggression pact. Paris refused. The French described their arrangement with the USSR as purely political and not a military alliance, hence not repugnant to the spirit of Locarno. In February, however, Soviet Marshal Mikhail Tukhachevsky met in Paris with General Maurice Gamelin, commander-in-chief of the French army. The German intelligence service, the Abwehr, learned that the French General Staff was preparing a plan to coordinate operations with the Red Army. The blueprint envisioned a French advance into the demilitarized Rhineland, together with a thrust further south to link up with Soviet forces invading Germany from the east.[36]

Hitler granted a cordial interview to the French journalist Bertrand de Jouvenel in mid-February at Berchtesgaden. German newspapers published the interview on the front page, including Hitler’s retractions of anti-French statements he previously wrote in Mein Kampf. The German diplomat Otto Abetz, who had arranged the Jouvenel interview, delivered a copy of it to Paris. The French press delayed publication until after the Chamber of Deputies ratified the Franco-Soviet pact on February 27. The following morning, the Jouvenel interview appeared in the Paris Midi.

Had the French public read Hitler’s placatory comments sooner, this might have cast doubt on France’s need for a security pact with the USSR. Publishing the interview after its ratification gave the appearance that fear, not good will, had prompted Hitler’s offer of friendship. The French newspaper Oeuvre even wrote that the Führer gave the interview after the Soviet treaty’s ratification. The affair left Hitler mortified and angry.

Informed of Franco-Soviet General Staff talks, the Führer became concerned that the demilitarized Rhineland represented an open door for France to invade. He responded by transferring 19 infantry battalions to garrison Aachen, Saarbrücken and Trier, and then other Rhineland cities. He publicly withdrew Germany from the Locarno Pact, by which the Reich had agreed to keep the province free of troops.

The Reich’s Foreign Office pointed out that France already maintained military alliances with Belgium, Poland and Czechoslovakia. She had constructed a formidable line of frontier fortifications bordering Germany, concentrating an “enormous mass of troops” there. It summarized that military experts the world over

“agree that it would be hopeless to attack this system of fortifications… Despite this historically unparalleled guarantee for the existence of a state, France nonetheless still feels it necessary to rely on the support of the huge Soviet empire with its 195 million inhabitants. Germany has never provided the remotest grounds for France to feel threatened”, yet Paris “describes the 19 battalions entering (the Rhineland) as a threat to French security, which is guaranteed by practically half the world.”[37]

Hitler proposed that both France and Germany withdraw military units from borderline areas and that Belgium, Germany and France conclude a 25-year non-aggression pact and establish an international court of arbitration to enforce compacts “whose decisions shall be binding on all parties.” The Reich offered to return to the League of Nations for a new multilateral disarmament conference. The proposal stated,:

“Germany and France… pledge to take steps to see that regarding the education of the young, as well as in the press and publications of both nations, everything shall be avoided which might be calculated to poison the relationship between the two peoples.”[38]

The French government responded by placing the army on alert. It transferred North African divisions from southern France to the German frontier. It unsuccessfully petitioned Britain to mobilize her army. The English delegate to the League of Nations concluded:

“The entry of the German troops into the Rhineland… is not a threat to peace… Without doubt the reoccupation of the Rhineland weakens the power of France, but in no sense diminishes its security.”[39]

In Paris, Grimm summarized the public attitude among his hosts:

“It’s difficult to make the French people understand what remilitarization of the Rhineland has to do with the Russian pact. They think it’s just an excuse and that we’re carrying out a long-range plan. The French public thinks that Hitler wants to attack France.”[40]

Complaining to the French statesman, Camille Chautemps, about war scares in the French news media, Grimm warned:

“If this keeps up, it will surely be the press that one day drives the nations back to war.”

Chautemps shrugged in response:

“We’re a democracy. We have freedom of the press.”[41]

From 1932 to 1936, the German government introduced seven proposals to limit or reduce world armaments. In none of these did the Reich demand parity: Hitler offered to maintain an air force half the size of France’s and was prepared to accept a national defense force vastly inferior to the combined strength of surrounding countries allied to one another. He appealed to the Great Powers to abolish offensive weapons and outlaw aerial bombardment. He was the only European leader willing to entrust the security of his nation to the good faith of neighboring states – an astonishing concession for an industrial power. None of Germany’s proposals kindled interest among the former enemy coalition. It pursued an escalating arms race, and denounced Hitler as a warmonger.

Austria

Austria-Hungary, ruled by the Hapsburg dynasty, had been Germany’s ally during World War I. In 1919, the victorious powers dismembered this vast, motley empire. Hungary and Czechoslovakia became independent countries. Other components fell to Poland, Romania, Yugoslavia and Italy. Multiple cultures often populated each region. It was impossible to apportion provinces to their respective new countries without placing some of the ethnic colonies inhabiting them under the dominion of the prevailing foreign nationality. Austria, the nucleus of the old realm, shrank from sovereignty over nearly 52 million people to a diminutive, landlocked republic of 6,500,000 persons.

Southern and eastern Europe’s smaller nations had traditionally belonged to larger empires. The decision to establish independent states for them conformed to Wilson’s proclaimed ideal of self-determination; the right of every people to govern themselves.

Addressing the Reichstag on April 28, 1939, Hitler condemned Wilson’s cartographic experiment:

“Thousand-year-old habitats and states were forcibly broken apart and dissolved, related peoples who had lived together for an eternity were torn from one another, economic prerequisites disregarded… The right to self-determination of nearly 115 million people was violated, not by the victorious soldiers but by sick politicians. Their old communities vanished and they were forced into new ones without regard for blood, their ancestry, for common sense or for economic requirements of life… An order formed by nearly 2,000 years of historic development was simply ripped away and transformed into disarray.”[42]

On November 12, 1918, Austria’s provisional national assembly declared its country “a component of the German republic.” It officially adopted the name “German Austria.” This arrangement contradicted the Allied objective of eliminating the former Central Powers as a future rival. To sanction the Austrian-German union would have helped restore the Reich to its pre-war magnitude. It would also have facilitated German economic influence in the Balkan and Danube regions.

Allied delegates at the peace conference informed Austria that she must “abstain from any act which might directly or indirectly, or by any means whatsoever, compromise her independence.”[43] It also forbade the country from using the name German Austria. Chancellor Karl Renner protested to the Allies that this violates the population’s right to self-determination, to which they responded that this right does not extend to defeated enemy countries. Britain forced Vienna to comply by threatening to resume the blockade of foodstuffs.

Post-war Austria became the only part of the former Habsburg realm from which the Entente demanded reparations. Deprived of its industrial base, which fell to Czechoslovakia, Hungary’s agrarian economy and the Danube export market, this was catastrophic for the little country. Discharged soldiers and German-speaking civil servants from the lost provinces returned to the homeland, unable to find work. Unemployment rose to 557,000.[44]

Most Austrians favored unification with Germany. Hitler, reared in Linz, shared this sentiment. In April 1934, he assigned the Reich’s Foreign Office to prepare a report defining policy. Regarding possible annexation of the country, the report opined that “German efforts in this direction will be frustrated by the unanimous resistance of all European Great Powers.”[45] In a Reichstag speech in May, Hitler declared:

“The German people and the German government have, out of the simple feeling of solidarity toward common national heritage, the understandable wish that not just foreign peoples, but also German people everywhere will be guaranteed the right to self-determination.”[46]

The Austrian government had become a dictatorship. In 1931, the country elected Engelbert Dollfuss Bundeskanzler (National Chancellor). He dissolved parliament in 1933, founded the Fatherland Front, and proscribed other political parties. Dollfuss established detention camps in September, which corralled members of the Communist and National-Socialist parties. Dollfuss reinstituted the death penalty. The following February, he ordered the police to disarm the Social Democrats’ Defense League. This led to armed resistance in Vienna and in Linz. Dollfuss deployed the army, which bombarded workers’ housing districts in the capital with artillery. Over 300 people died in the fighting. Having suppressed the revolt, he banned the Social Democratic Party, abolished the trade unions, and hanged eleven Defense League members.

The bantam dictator died in July 1934, during an equally abortive coup staged by Vienna’s National-Socialist underground. Minister of Justice Kurt Schuschnigg replaced Dollfuss. Under the new chancellor, 13 of the conspirators received death sentences, based on a proposed statute not signed into law until the day after their execution. The police arrested the chief defense attorney three days after the trial. Without a hearing, he spent the next six months in the Wöllersdorf detention camp.[47]

Having attained power without a single vote, Schuschnigg relied on the Fatherland Front to maintain the dictatorship. Political dissidents, lumped together as “national opposition,” landed in concentration camps. Documented cases of inmate abuse include confinement without trial, house arrest for prisoners’ relatives, two or more trials and sentences for the same crime, convictions and fines without evidence, the presumption of guilt until proven innocent, withholding medical care from inmates who were ill, sometimes resulting in death, and forced confessions.[48] The regime denied persons of “deficient civic reliability” the right to practice their occupation. Schuschnigg judicially persecuted Austrians who favored unification with the Reich. The verdict often fell on members of choral societies and sports clubs nurturing cultural ties with Germany. “Suspicion of nationalistic convictions” cost civil servants their jobs. This included forfeiture of pension and loss of unemployment compensation.

The dictator sought an alliance with Italy to support Austrian sovereignty. The Italian head of state, Benito Mussolini, anticipated that an Austrian-German union would jeopardize his country’s control of southern Tirol. The Entente had awarded this province, populated by 250,000 ethnic Germans, to Italy after World War I. During Dollfuss’s tenure, Mussolini had supplied aid to Austria. The new Bundeskanzler failed to maintain the good relationship that Dollfuss had cultivated with Rome. The vivacious Mussolini did not relate well to the austere, impersonal Schuschnigg. The Austrian government’s human rights violations alienated France and Czechoslovakia. The Italian-German dissonance that Schuschnigg hoped to capitalize on diminished in 1936. When Italy invaded Abyssinia, she was able to defy League of Nations sanctions through Hitler’s economic support. Mussolini advised Schuschnigg to normalize relations with Germany.

Hitler, unjustly blamed for the 1934 coup to topple Dollfuss, sought to break the diplomatic deadlock. He appointed Franz von Papen, a conservative aristocrat distant from National Socialism and a devout Catholic, special ambassador to Vienna. Papen presented Austrian Foreign Minister Egon Berger with the draft for an Austrian-German “Gentleman’s Agreement.” The compact corroborated Hitler’s strategy for incorporating Austria as an evolutionary process, promoting economic and cultural ties between both countries.[49] The preamble stated:

“The German Reich’s Government recognizes the complete sovereignty of the Austrian national state.”

It bound Germany not to interfere in Austria’s internal political affairs, but placed an obligation on Schuschnigg as well:

“The Austrian national government will maintain the basic position in its policies in general, and especially with respect to the German Reich, that conforms to the fact that Austria sees herself as a German state.”[50]

The document required that

“all decisive elements for shaping public opinion in both countries shall serve the purpose of developing mutual relations which are once again normal and friendly.”[51]

The agreement offered general guidelines for promoting commerce, such as lifting restrictions on travel and trade across the frontier. Schuschnigg agreed to allow members of the “national opposition” to participate in government. He released 15,583 political prisoners. Many were National Socialists whom Hitler arranged to resettle in Germany. Upon the Führer’s insistence, Schuschnigg relaxed restrictions on the press. An important element of the agreement stipulated:

“Both governments agree to exchange views in foreign policy matters that affect both countries.”[52]

Papen and Schuschnigg signed the agreement in Vienna on July 11, 1936. Germany’s assurance to respect Austrian independence drew praise from the international press, even in France. Hitler summoned Josef Leopold, leader of the Austrian National Socialists, and instructed him to take the new treaty “very seriously.” The Führer warned Leopold that he wanted no encore of the 1934 coup:

“The Austrian National Socialists must maintain exemplary discipline and regard unification as an internal German matter, a solution to which can only be found within the scope of negotiations between Berlin and Vienna.”[53]

Hitler was hopeful, thanks in part to Schuschnigg’s encouraging remark that Austrian-German unification was “an attainable political objective for the future.”

The Bundeskanzler, however, had no interest in honoring the compact. He openly criticized Hitler for allegedly misinterpreting the mission of the Reich:

“With his assertion that the unity of the Reich is based on the harmony of the race and the language of the people living within it, Hitler has falsified and betrayed the spirit of the Reich. The Reich is not determined by race and is not heathenish; it is Christian and universal.”[54]

Schuschnigg publicly described Austria as “the last bulwark of civilization in central Europe,” a studied insult to his ethnic neighbor to the north. During 1937, Schuschnigg entreated the British government to guarantee Austrian sovereignty. This clandestine diplomatic maneuver, as well as the unfriendly public statements regarding Germany, directly violated the agreement signed in July.[55]

Europe was in the age of nationalism; the average Austrian rejected Schuschnigg’s liberal perception of Austria as a universal realm transcending ethnic roots and customs. While the country wallowed in the throe of economic depression, commerce in the Reich flourished. Unification with Germany promised employment and prosperity. Schuschnigg was himself a dictator; he could not argue that incorporating his country into the German authoritarian state would cost Austrians their liberties. England and France showed no interest in guaranteeing a country that flouted democratic principles. In an atmosphere of internal unrest and diplomatic isolation, the Bundeskanzler turned again to Germany.

Hitler invited Schuschnigg to meet at the Berghof on February 12, 1938. The Führer hoped to get Austrian-German relations back on track toward unification as an evolutionary process. A member of Austria’s “national opposition,” Arthur Seyss-Inquart, prepared a list of proposals for Schuschnigg as a basis for negotiations in Berchtesgaden. These included bringing political opponents into the government. Informed of the proposals, Hitler prepared his own list.

The ten German proposals, among others, called for joint consultation in foreign policy matters mutually affecting Austria and Germany, amnesty for political prisoners, pensions for dismissed civil servants, and legalization of the National-Socialist Party in Austria. They demanded freedom of the press and preparations to merge the two countries’ economic systems. This last would be particularly beneficial to the Austrian population. The list recommended several names – none of them hard-line National Socialists – for cabinet posts, including Seyss-Inquart.[56] Point Eight proposed a military-officers exchange program, joint general-staff conferences, promoting camaraderie, and sharing knowledge in weapons development.

Schuschnigg attended the Berchtesgaden session with his military adjutant, Lieutenant-Colonel Georg Bartl, and Guido Schmidt. During the initial private session between the two heads of state, Schuschnigg became defensive and asserted that it was he, not Hitler, who represented Austria. Hitler, who was born there, retorted:

“I could say the same, and have far more right than you to describe myself as an Austrian, Herr Schuschnigg. Just once, try holding a free election in Austria, with you and me opposing each other as candidates. Then we’ll see.”[57]

During parallel talks between Guido Schmidt and Germany’s newly appointed foreign minister, Joachim von Ribbentrop, the Austrian government won significant concessions. It reduced the obligation to joint consultation on foreign policy matters to “an exchange of thoughts.” It limited the political activity of National Socialists in Austria. Hitler agreed to publicly condemn illegal acts, such as sabotage, by his followers there. The Führer approved Vienna’s request that aggressive National Socialists be relocated to Germany. The Germans withdrew those candidates suggested for Austrian cabinet posts that Schuschnigg objected to. Berlin abandoned its plan for a joint economic system and reduced the scope of military cooperation. At the conclusion of the conference, Hitler told Schuschnigg:

“This is the best way. The Austrian question is settled for the next five years.”[58]

Newspapers in England, France, and the USA claimed that Hitler presented his demands as an ultimatum, intimidated Schuschnigg by inviting three German generals to the conference, and threatened invasion if the Bundeskanzler failed to sign. The fact that the Austrians negotiated significant modifications demonstrates that Germany’s proposals were not an ultimatum. The generals attended to provide consultation on questions of integrating the two countries’ armed forces. Schuschnigg brought along his own military advisor. Guido Schmidt testified later that he had no recollection of a German threat to invade Austria.[59]

Papen stated that it was his impression that Schuschnigg enjoyed full freedom of decision throughout the sessions. The Bundeskanzler confessed that he had been under considerable mental stress but nothing more. The British ambassador to Austria, Sir Charles Palairet, reported to London on a number of initial demands which Hitler withdrew. He confirmed that Schmidt told him nothing of German threats. Palairet cited

“Herr Hitler’s desire to achieve his aims in regard to Austria by evolutionary means.”[60]

Schuschnigg appointed Hitler’s choice, Arthur Seyss-Inquart, interior minister and national police chief on February 15. The next day in Berlin, Seyss-Inquart told Hitler of his intention to operate “strictly on the basis of a self-sufficient and independent Austria” and “within the framework of the constitution.”[61] Hitler accepted this. Addressing the German parliament on February 20, the Führer thanked Schuschnigg for his “understanding and kindness.” He predicted that “friendly cooperation between the two countries in every field has been assured.” The following day, he received Austria’s underground National-Socialist leader, Josef Leopold. Calling his activities “insane,” he brusquely ordered Leopold and his four chief lieutenants to pack up and move to Germany.[62]

Hitler believed that the compact ensured a period of harmony that would gradually bring Austria into the German realm through democratic means. Schuschnigg did not share this belief. Theodor Hornbostel, chief of the Austrian State Chancery, told the British ambassador that month, that the agreement with Hitler represents no threat to his country’s independence. The loosely defined guidelines of the agreement with Hitler would be easy to circumvent. Hornbostel confided that his government “really doesn’t want to put them into practice.”[63]

Stability in Austria however, deteriorated. The international stock exchange, with its usual nose for ominous developments, experienced a sudden flight from the Austrian schilling. Austrian government bonds plummeted in value, especially in London and Zurich. National-Socialist sympathizers in the Fatherland Front and in the Austrian youth organizations steadily transformed the political disposition of these groups. Spontaneous mass demonstrations by National Socialists enjoyed popular support. Graz, for all practical purposes, came under their control. In many areas, Schuschnigg’s followers scarcely risked appearing in public.

Displaying his customary lack of political finesse, Schuschnigg took a desperate step to rescue his career. In Innsbruck on March 9, he announced a national plebiscite to take place in four days’ time. The purpose was to give voters the opportunity to affirm their confidence in the government and preference for Austrian independence. Such a poll could only accentuate the division between German and Austrian. It transgressed against the spirit of the evolutionary process of assimilating the two cultures, a process Schuschnigg had accepted by signing the agreement with Germany.

Since no elections had taken place since 1932, there were no current lists of registered voters. There was insufficient time to prepare new rosters. Only citizens above 25 years of age were eligible. This prevented young adults, a disproportionately large percentage of whom backed National Socialism, from participating. The general secretary of the Fatherland Front, Guido Zernatto, prepared guidelines that allowed only members of the reigning political party to staff the balloting stations. The ballot cards had the word “yes” printed on one side but were blank on the other. This required people voting “no” to write the word in the same size characters on the back of the card. Polling station personnel, all members of the Fatherland Front, would therefore be able to identify dissenters. During preparations for the election, the government press announced that anyone voting “no” would be guilty of treason.[64]

Publication of these details evoked protests from the “national opposition.” Fearing German intervention, Schuschnigg appealed to France and Britain for assistance. In the midst of another cabinet crisis, France could not respond. The British recognized the plebiscite as a flagrant challenge to Hitler. Chamberlain called the plebiscite a “blunder.” Foreign Secretary Lord Halifax considered Schuschnigg’s maneuver “foolish and provocative.”[65] He blandly informed the Austrian dictator that England could offer neither advice nor protection. Halifax could not help adding that Schuschnigg failed to seek Britain’s counsel before announcing the plebiscite, “which has caused so much trouble.”[66]

Hitler was aghast that Schuschnigg violated their agreement only weeks after signing. At first he simply refused to believe the news; however, once he did, his reaction was temperate. He flew his diplomatic trouble-shooter Wilhelm Keppler to Vienna. Keppler’s instructions were to either prevent the plebiscite “without military threats” or at least arrange for it to include the opportunity to vote for Anschluss, or unification, with Germany.[67] Seyss-Inquart and General Edmund von Glase-Horstenau, minority representative in the Austrian cabinet, confronted Schuschnigg. They pointed out that the entire balloting process drawn up by the Fatherland Front violated the constitution. They demanded a postponement, allowing time to prepare a plebiscite in which all parties would be fairly represented.

The dictator summoned Defense Secretary General Wilhelm Zehner, Security Chief Colonel Michael Skubl, and Lieutenant-Marshal Ludwig Hülgerth of the Fatherland Front militia. He asked whether armed resistance against a German invasion was feasible. The Austrian army, reduced to 30,000 men by the 1919 treaty, was not mobilized. Skubl dismissed the police force as too saturated with National Socialists to be reliable. Only the militia, Hülgerth assured the Bundeskanzler, was prepared. Recognizing this force as insufficient, Schuschnigg attempted without success to telephone Mussolini to solicit military aid.[68] Out of options, he resigned as chancellor. This terminated the era of a politician who entreated Austria’s wartime enemies France, Britain, and Italy, and called upon his own followers as well, to transform his country into a battleground in a war against his German brethren and former comrades-in-arms of the World War.

Schuschnigg’s entire cabinet withdrew, and Austria was, practically speaking, without a government. Throughout the land, members of Austria’s SA and its smaller, elite cousin, the SS, began assuming administrative functions. The following day, March 12, 1938, German troops crossed into Austria. Schuschnigg ordered the Austrian army not to resist.

Hitler’s decision to militarily occupy Austria was neither premeditated nor desired by him. He had hoped to maintain a semblance of legality in assimilating Austria. With Seyss-Inquart as Bundeskanzler and a new cabinet, the two governments could have coordinated the transition smoothly via an evolutionary process. In fact, the German army’s General Staff had no operational plan for an invasion of Austria in place; the entire maneuver was impromptu. The Führer was aware of the bad publicity abroad such an apparent act of force would generate; however, he feared that Austrian Marxists might capitalize on the country’s momentary political vacuum and stage an uprising. Göring warned of the possibility that the Alpine republic’s neighbors might also exploit its temporary weakness. Italy could occupy eastern Tirol, Yugoslavia the province Carinthia, and Hungary the Burgenland. Yugoslavia had already annexed part of Carinthia in 1919 during Austria’s post-war impotence.[69]

Described as aggression by the foreign press, the German army’s advance made a welcome impression inside Austria. A sergeant in the SS Signals Battalion related his experience while sent with a comrade ahead of the column to reconnoiter the route to Vienna. Two days under way, the pair stopped at an inn:

“The moment that we entered through the big glass door, it was a Sunday afternoon, almost everyone present rose and greeted us with shouts of ‘Heil!’ We were pressed to a table, the waiters hurried over, brought us coffee and pastries, and we were fully occupied shaking hands with people, answering questions and thanking everyone for all of the attention… It was even more difficult to leave the place. The patrons rose, clapped their hands, wished us well and stuffed packs of cigarettes into our coat pockets.”[70]

Another member of the battalion gave this account:

“The closer the column approached Vienna, the greater was the rejoicing of the people lining the roads. Often with tears in their eyes, they gave full expression to their joy, shook hands with the soldiers in the vehicles and tossed flowers and packs of cigarettes to them. Everyone seemed seized with frenzy.”[71]

Throughout the military occupation of Austria, largely symbolic in nature, not a single shot was fired nor was one person injured.

Hitler scheduled joint plebiscites in Austria and Germany for April 10, 1938. Both populations decided on whether to incorporate the two countries into a single state. The people of Austria cast 99.73 percent of their ballots in favor of Anschluss with Germany. The Germans voted 99.08 percent for unification. As testimony to how distant Schuschnigg had been from the heartbeat of his nation, he had personally estimated in early March that 70 percent of the Austrian populace supported his regime’s policy of independence.[72]

On March 18, 1938, the German government notified the League of Nations that Austria had cancelled its affiliation. This international body, which had never manifested concern for the plight of the distressed little nation, now debated whether Germany should be responsible for paying Austria’s delinquent membership dues of 50,000 Swiss francs from January 1 to March 13.[73] This ended the chain of circumstances leading to the unification of Hitler’s homeland with the German Reich, an event known to history as “the rape of Austria.”

Czechoslovakia

A few months after the Anschluss, Germany annexed the Sudetenland, the ethnic German territory lining the periphery of western Czechoslovakia. The transfer of the region to German control provoked a serious war scare. The controversy traced its origin to the 1919 Versailles system.

During World War I, Czechs served in the Austro-Hungarian army. Immigrants in London and Paris established the Czech Committee on November 14, 1915. Two Czechs in exile, Tomáš Masaryk and Eduard Beneš, won the Entente’s endorsement for a future Czechoslovak state to be carved from portions of the Hapsburg realm. On October 18, 1918, Czechs in Paris and in the USA proclaimed Czechoslovakian independence.

The new country had three components. Furthest east was Ruthenia, the population of which voluntarily joined Czechoslovakia. In the center was Slovakia, and many Slovaks wanted independence or at least considerable autonomy. The western part consisted of Bohemia and Moravia, where three million German Austrians dwelled with the Czechs. These Germans wished to remain with Austria.

Masaryk and Beneš enjoyed prevailing influence in fashioning the post-war structure of Czechoslovakia. Masaryk persuaded Wilson to alter his 14 Points, which promised each nationality of Austria-Hungary the opportunity for autonomous development, to exclude Germans. Beneš consciously underestimated the number of Sudeten Germans by nearly a million. He falsely claimed that they were not a unified minority, but lived in settlements integrated with Czechs. “The Germans in Bohemia are only colonists,” he asserted.[74]

Rich in raw materials and industry, the border territory offered Czechoslovakia a topographical defensive barrier against Germany. Beneš based his deliberations more on economic and strategic advantages than on the natural rights of the population. The 1910 census offered a comparison of the number of German “colonists” wishing to remain with Austria in the affected areas to Czechs residing there. In Bohemia lived 2,070,438 Germans to 116,275 Czechs; in the Sudetenland 643,804 Germans to 25,028 Czechs; in the Bohemian Forest 176,237 Germans to 6,131 Czechs; in southern Moravia 180,449 Germans compared to 12,477 Czechs.[75]

Since the Paris peace conference continued until mid-1919, the German provinces were technically still part of Austria when the Austrian Republic held its first democratic election that February 16. The Sudeten Germans prepared ballots to participate. The Czech army forcibly disrupted the arrangements. On March 4, thousands of Sudeten Germans organized peaceful demonstrations in their towns and villages to protest. Czech soldiers fired into the unarmed crowds, killing 54 Germans, 20 of them women.[76]

The Allies finalized a compact with Czechoslovakia formally recognizing her statehood. The preamble to the document endorsed the arrangement,

“in consideration that the peoples of Bohemia, Moravia, and part of Silesia, as well as the people of Slovakia have decided of their own free will to join into a lasting union.”

Beneš promised the Allies

“to give the Germans all rights they are entitled to… It will all in all be a very liberal regime.”[77]

Denigrating the ethnic German population to “immigrant” status, the Czech government instituted a policy of “rapid de-Germanizing” in Bohemia and in the Sudetenland. Prague transferred military garrisons, railroad personnel, civil servants, prison populations and even hospital patients in large numbers there to manipulate the census figures. Czech officials tallied Czech transients as residents, even though “residency” seldom extended beyond two days. In Trautenau in northern Bohemia, a 600-man Czech infantry battalion spent one winter day in an unfinished barracks to be counted in the survey. The resulting statistics deprived German districts of adequate representation in parliament. Prague occasionally employed less subtle means to maintain its minorities’ political impotence. At an election rally of the Sudeten German Party in Teplitz-Schönau in 1937, the key speaker, Karl Frank, criticized Beneš. Czech police scattered the assembly. Fifty-three Germans died in the melee and hundreds suffered injuries.[78]

Prague authorities closed smaller German schools throughout the Sudetenland. They replaced them with Czech-language institutions, often requiring German youngsters to attend. The government closed nine of Bohemia’s 19 German universities. Only 4.7 percent of state financial assistance went to German college students, although ethnic Germans comprised nearly a fourth of Czechoslovakia’s population. The government issued all public forms and applications in Czech language, even in the Sudetenland. Half the German municipal and rural officials lost their jobs, 41 percent of German postmen and 48.5 percent of railroad personnel.[79]

The Czechoslovakian government’s Land Reform Act redistributed real estate so that every rural family would receive sufficient acreage to subsist from the soil. The head of the program, Karel Viskovsky, defined the results as follows: “The soil is passing from the hands of the foreigners into the hands of the Czech people.”[80] Most went to Czech legionnaires and their families. Viskovsky auctioned off the balance to affluent Czechs and Slovaks. They purchased the properties below market value, allowing the former owners to return as tenant farmers. The Germans in Bohemia and Moravia lost 25 percent of their land to Czechs through the state-sponsored land reform.

Approximately one third of the Sudetenland consisted of woodlands, of which the state took over administration. The authorities dismissed some 40,000 German forestry workers, replacing them with Czechs. By 1931, the number of ethnic German tradesmen out of work was three times that of Czechs. Relief efforts concentrated on areas with predominantly Czech populations. A study by the British Foreign Office in 1936 estimated that Czechoslovakia’s German colony – approximately 22 percent of the population – comprised 60 percent of the unemployed.[81] Among the most economically distressed areas was Reichenberg, once home to a thriving glass and textile industry. Between 1922 and 1936, 153 factories there closed. Prague awarded contracts for construction and other public works projects for Reichenberg to foreign companies that brought in their own labor.[82]

Beneš described his people as “mortal enemies of the Germans.”[83] In May 1919, during the inauguration ceremony in Pilsen for President Tomáš Masaryk, Czechs broke into an apartment not displaying a flag in the window for the occasion. The resident, a German widow and mother of four, was bedridden from illness. The intruders dragged her down the staircase feet first and into the street, her head bouncing off the steps during the descent. She died from her injuries.[84]

In 1921, Masaryk deployed Czech troops in German settlements without provocation. In Grasslitz, four miles from the frontier with Germany, protestors clashed with entering Czech military personnel. The soldiers shot 15 Bohemian Germans dead. Under the “Law to Protect the Republic,” Czech authorities arrested Sudeten Germans demanding self-determination as traitors or spies. They jailed for espionage tourists from Germany visiting Czechoslovakia for sports competitions or for ethnic festivals. Between 1923 and 1932, the state conducted 8,972 legal proceedings against dissident members of ethnic minorities. Defendants in sedition trials often included Sudeten Germans belonging to sports leagues, youth groups, singing societies, or backpacking clubs.[85]

Prague established an immense “border zone” in which lived 85 percent of all Sudeten Germans, the entire Polish and Ruthenian populations, and 95 percent of the Hungarian colony. It came under permanent martial law. The army supervised the administration of factories, major construction projects, public works, the telephone service and forestry. Military authorities limited the civil liberties of citizens in the “border zone,” which comprised 56 percent of the entire country. This did not prevent Beneš from lauding Czechoslovakia as a “lighthouse of democracy.”[86]

Although during the first years of Hitler’s chancellorship, few among the German public were concerned with Czechoslovakia, for Hitler himself, the fate of the Sudetenland symbolized the tragedy of Germans under foreign rule. The Sudeten people waged a dogged, solitary struggle to maintain their German identity. Hitler made it his personal mission to recover the Sudetenland. He introduced the topic during the Reichstag speech on February 20, 1938:

“It cannot be disputed that so long as Germany was herself weak and defenseless, she had to simply accept the continuous persecution of German people along our borders… The interests of the German Reich also include the protection of those fellow Germans who are unable on their own, on our very frontier, to ensure their right to basic human, political and ideological freedoms.”[87]

Another circumstance turned Hitler’s attention to Czechoslovakia. Geographically, the country resembled a spear point penetrating deeply into the Reich’s territory. This constituted a potential national security threat no responsible leader could ignore. In January 1924, Paris and Prague concluded a “friendship pact” containing a military clause. This envisioned mutual general-staff talks to prepare a joint defensive strategy in case of attack by a common enemy. The signatories followed with a formal military treaty in October 1925.

Beneš replaced the 85-year old Masaryk as president of the republic in December 1935. Only months before becoming president, Beneš as foreign minister had concluded a military alliance with the Soviet Union. The pact provided for significant Czech-Russian cooperation. By the beginning of 1936, the Czechs had completed 32 airfields sited near the German frontier as bases for the rapidly expanding Red Air Force.[88] They established depots to stockpile aviation fuel, aerial bombs and other war materiel.

The Red Army stationed troops in Bohemia and Moravia to undergo parachute training for a possible airborne assault against Germany.[89] It transferred officers to the Czechoslovakian War Ministry in Prague and to local command centers. On February 12, 1937, the London Daily Mail reported that immediately after ratification of the Prague-Moscow pact, Russian flight officers inspected Czech air bases and fuel dumps for their air force.[90]

Prague was a converging point for Communist immigrants who had fled Germany in 1933 and Austria after the Anschluss. Sir Orme Sargent of the British Foreign Office called Czechoslovakia a “distribution center” for Stalin’s Comintern propaganda against Germany.[91] With France, Czechoslovakia and the USSR connected by military alliances since 1936, the Führer felt boxed in. When he re-garrisoned the Rhineland on March 7 of that year, Beneš offered France the support of the Czechoslovakian army for a joint invasion of Germany. During the months to follow, it swelled to a force of 1,453,000 men.[92]

The Germans were undecided on how to recover the Sudetenland. In 1938, the British ambassador in Prague, Sir Basil Newton, advised the Foreign Office:

“How precisely they will proceed it is impossible to prophesy, but the indications are that they will at first seek to achieve their aims by friendly diplomacy rather than by physical or economic terrorism.”[93]

On May 6, British newspaper magnate Lord Harold Rothermere praised the Germans as “very patient people” in an editorial in the Daily Mail:

“I myself cannot imagine for a moment that Great Britain would calmly look on for twenty years while three and a half million Britons lived under the lash of a thoroughly abominable people who speak a foreign language and have a completely different world outlook.”[94]

The Austrian Anschluss encouraged the Sudeten German Party, the SdP. Under the leadership of its founder, Konrad Henlein, it had already won 44 seats in the Czechoslovakian Chamber of Deputies and 23 in the Senate in the May 1935 elections. At an SdP assembly in Carlsbad on April 25, 1938, Heinlein demanded autonomy for the ethnic German region. With 90 percent of Sudeten voters behind him, he had sufficient influence to compel the Czechs to enter negotiations.

Henlein and Karl Frank had met with Hitler on March 28, but were unable to persuade the Führer to pressure the Czechs. Ribbentrop told the two guests that it was not Germany’s task “to offer individual suggestions as to what demands should be made of the Czechoslovakian government.” Berlin instructed the German embassy in Prague to limit support of the SdP to private talks with Czechoslovakian statesmen, “if the occasion presents itself.”[95] The allegation of post-war historians that at the meeting, Hitler ordered Henlein to impose impossible terms in order to provoke the Czechs, is without substance.

The British government monitored the escalating controversy. “The plain fact is that the Sudetendeutsche are being oppressed by the Czechs,” noted Sir Robert Vansittart.[96] Newton sent London a detailed analysis from Prague on March 15. He predicted that as long as they can reckon with Anglo-French support in the event of an armed clash with Germany, the Czechs will pursue their present policy. The Germans cannot be deterred from aggression if they consider it necessary. If Paris and London encourage Prague to resist compromise, war is inevitable.

England and France, Newton continued, cannot prevent Czechoslovakia from being overrun. At most they can wage war to restore a status quo that is already proving unworkable. He concluded that no German government will accept “a hostile Czechoslovakia in their flank.” Having read Newton’s report, the British ambassador in Berlin, Henderson, cabled his ministry on March 17:

“I share unreservedly and in all respects views expressed by Mr. Newton in his telegram.”[97]

The Cabinet Committee on Foreign Policy discussed Newton’s analysis the following day. As its minutes record:

“The Minister for Co-ordination of Defence said that he had been struck by Mr. Newton’s view that Czechoslovakia’s present political position was not permanently tenable and that she was in fact an unstable unit in Central Europe. If, as he believed, this truly represented the position he could see no reason why we should take any steps to maintain such a unit in being.”[98]

On March 21, the chiefs of staff submitted a report to the committee explaining that the British and French armies were too weak to go to war against Germany, Italy, and Japan in an expanding conflict over Czechoslovakia. Chamberlain and Halifax considered the military assessment “an extremely melancholy document.” Halifax summarized on April 27:

“Neither we nor France were equipped for a war with Germany.”[99]

France’s new prime minister, Eduard Daladier, visited London on April 28 to persuade Chamberlain to publicly guarantee English protection for Czechoslovakia. His British colleague retorted that Beneš has never treated the German minority in the territories he annexed in a liberal manner as promised. Chamberlain declared that the people of England would never begin a war to prevent the nationalities of central Europe from expressing their will in a plebiscite.

That month, Hitler ordered General Wilhelm Keitel, chief of the Armed Forces Supreme Command (OKW), to prepare a study on the possible invasion of Czechoslovakia. He told Keitel that he did not at present intend to invade.[100] Guidelines Hitler furnished the OKW emphasized that he would reject any scenario proposing a “strategic surprise attack out of the clear sky without grounds or possibility of justification.” The Führer described

“an untenable situation for us should the major confrontation in the East … with Bolshevism ever come… Czechoslovakia would then be the springboard for the Red Army and a landing place for its air force.”[101]

On May 20, Beneš called up over 150,000 military reservists to active duty, claiming that the measure was necessary because of a secret mobilization of the German armed forces. The Czech War Office charged that eight to ten German divisions were marching toward the common frontier. The French military attaché in Berlin cabled his government that he saw no evidence of larger troop movements. Henderson sent two British army officers on his Berlin embassy staff on an extensive reconnaissance through the German border provinces of Saxony and Silesia. He wrote later:

“They could discover no sign of unusual or significant Germany military activity, nor indeed could any of the military attachés of other foreign missions in Berlin, who were similarly engaged in scouring the country.”[102]

Hitler more or less ignored Beneš’s provocation and took no action, military or otherwise. Journalists in Paris, Prague, London, and New York accepted Beneš’s spurious allegations about German troop deployments. They published stories about how the Führer had massed his divisions to bluff the Czechs into submitting to his demands. When Beneš defiantly countered with his own partial mobilization, Hitler supposedly “backed down” and recalled his formations, a profound humiliation for a dictator who was “incapable of acting on his own threats.”[103] His declarations regarding the Sudetenland were “nothing but hot air.”

Halifax warned Herbert von Dirksen, the German ambassador in London, that a Czech-German war would bring France and Britain into the conflict against the Reich. The foreign secretary then composed a personal letter to Ribbentrop admonishing him of the hazards any “rash actions” would lead to for European civilization.[104] Henderson recorded:

“What Hitler could not stomach was the exultation of the press… Every newspaper in Europe and America joined in the chorus. ‘No’ had been said, and Hitler had been forced to yield. The democratic powers had brought the totalitarian states to heel, etc.”[105]

The British conducted partial mobilization of their fleet and the French garrisoned their fortifications along the German border, even though both knew that their Czech ally had instigated the crisis. For Hitler, threats and accusations of cowardice were his reward for the forbearance he had exercised.

The May crisis impressed Hitler with how hostile the western democracies and Czechoslovakia were toward Germany. Even the USSR had publicly reaffirmed its military obligation to the Czechs. He concluded that a peaceful settlement of the Sudeten issue was unlikely. On May 30, he revised the earlier armed forces directive addressing potential war with the Czechs to begin with the sentence:

“It is my unalterable resolve to smash Czechoslovakia through a military action in the foreseeable future.”

The document stressed that “preparations are to be implemented without delay.”[106]

Historians present this statement as proof of Hitler’s warlike intentions. Yet just 18 days later, he revised the classified directive, deleting the sentence about the resolve to smash the Czechs. He stated instead that the “solution of the Czech question” was “the near-term objective.” There is little evidence here of a clear intent to wage war. Henderson wrote Halifax:

“It stands to reason that Hitler himself must equally be prepared for all eventualities. But from there to say that he has already decided on aggressive action against Czechoslovakia this autumn is, I think, untrue.”[107]

The British ambassador wrote again in August:

“But I do not believe he wants war.”

In his own memoirs, Henderson later reflected on the May crisis:

“When we were thinking only that Germany was on the point of attacking the Czechs, the Germans were apprehensive lest the latter meant to provoke a European war before they themselves were ready for it.”[108]

Hitler still possessed a diplomatic trump; democracy’s own arguments about human rights. The Führer publicly stated:

“What the Germans insist on is the right to self-determination that every other nation also possesses and not just words. This isn’t supposed to be a gift for these Sudeten Germans from Mr. Beneš. They have the right to demand a life of their own just like every other people… I demand that the oppression of the three-and-a-half million Germans in Czechoslovakia stop, and that in its place the free right to self-determination step in.”[109]

This was the Achilles heel of his adversaries. Henderson confessed:

“On the broadest moral grounds it was thus difficult to justify offhand the refusal of the right to self-determination to the 2,750,000 Sudetens living in solid blocks just across Germany’s border. Its flat denial would have been contrary to a principle on which the British Empire itself was founded, and would consequently never have rallied to us the wholehearted support either of the British People or of that Empire.”[110]

The permanent undersecretary for the Foreign Office, Alexander Cadogan, concluded that the Sudeten problem

“was not an issue on which we should be on very strong ground for plunging Europe into war.”[111]

Chamberlain assessed England’s position: His country had not yet sufficiently rearmed to honor the commitment to support France in the event of war. To allow Hitler a free hand to settle accounts with Beneš would have marred British esteem abroad; “We shall be despised forever,” ventured Halifax’s secretary, Sir Oliver Harvey.[112] A plebiscite for the Sudetenland also had pitfalls. Prague opposed the idea because the precedent would encourage the Slovaks, Hungarians, Poles, and Ruthenians to demand one as well. Since these minorities suffered under-representation in government and from oppression, the result would likely dissolve Czechoslovakia.

Daladier proposed a compromise: Czechoslovakia would cede the Sudetenland to Germany without conducting a plebiscite. In this way, the Czech state would remain reasonably intact. Its importance to France, as Daladier explained to Chamberlain, was that

“in any military operation there are wonderful possibilities for attacking Germany from Czechoslovak territory.”[113]

French Aviation Minister Pierre Cot echoed this attitude with a remark quoted in London’s News Chronicle of July 14, 1938. Cot stated that France and England needed Czechoslovakia,

“because from this state the German economy and the German industry can most easily be destroyed with bombs… Joint attacks of the French and Czech air forces can very quickly destroy all German production facilities.”[114]

In August, Chamberlain proposed travelling to Germany to meet with Hitler to settle the Sudeten question together. He elicited a promise from his host that Germany would take no military action during the negotiations. Czech Foreign Minister Kamil Krofta told the British and French governments that his country refused to cede the Sudetenland to Germany. London countered bluntly:

“The Franco-British plan is the only means of preventing the threat of a German attack,”

and that if Prague rejects it, England and France will not intervene if Germany invades Czechoslovakia.[115] On September 21, Beneš unconditionally acquiesced to the proposal.

During September, Chamberlain visited Germany three times. The first meeting with Hitler took place in Berchtesgaden on September 15. The session was cordial and constructive. Chamberlain approved Hitler’s proposals for the Sudeten areas to be annexed. Halifax wrote his ambassadors:

“In fact it corresponded very closely to the line we have been examining.”[116]

Chamberlain spent the following week in meetings with Daladier and the Czechs to obtain their consent. In Berlin, the German monitoring station in the Reich’s Ministry of Aviation eavesdropped on a telephone conversation between Beneš and French Colonial Minister Georges Mandel. Undermining Daladier, Mandel told Beneš:

“Paris and London have no right to dictate your attitude to you. If your territory is violated, you should not wait a second to issue orders to your army to defend the homeland… If you fire the first shot in self-defense, there will be a huge reverberation around the world. The cannons of France, Great Britain and also Soviet Russia will begin firing on their own.”[117]

The Germans also intercepted communications between Prague and its London and Paris embassies. The Beneš government had instructed them to stall for time until the “war parties” in England and in France topple Chamberlain and Daladier.

On September 22, Hitler conferred with Chamberlain at the Hotel Dreesen in Bad Godesberg. Reports of mounting unrest in the Sudetenland clouded the atmosphere. Henlein had formed an ethnic German militia, numbering nearly 40,000 men, which skirmished with Czech soldiers and police.[118] The Czech government correspondingly implemented more repressive measures. In 14 days, 120,000 Sudeten Germans crossed into the Reich to escape the violence. Henlein appealed to Hitler to send in the German army, “to put an end to any more murders resulting from Czech fanaticism.”[119]

At Bad Godesberg, the Führer demanded the right to militarily occupy the territory to be annexed in four days. He cited mounting turmoil there as justification. Chamberlain was taken aback. Bitter haggling followed. The tension pervaded the next night’s conference, until an orderly interrupted with news that Beneš had just declared general mobilization. Another 1.2 million Czech reservists were returning to active duty. Hitler thereupon reassured his English guest that he would keep his promise to withhold any military response, “despite this unheard-of provocation.”[120] This relaxed the atmosphere and the discussion assumed a friendlier tone.

In the days following the conference, Chamberlain negotiated with the Czechs. British and French diplomats ultimately prevailed upon Hitler to relax his additional demands. Göring showed Henderson transcripts of the telephone dialogs between Beneš and Jan Masaryk illuminating the Czech intrigues. Neither the British nor the French doubted their authenticity.[121] At Munich on September 28, Chamberlain, Hitler, Daladier, and Mussolini finalized details of the annexation of the Sudetenland which Prague had agreed to on the 21st.

Angry with Chamberlain, Jan Masaryk could only bluster:

“What bad luck that this stupid, badly informed person is the English prime minister.”[122]

French Foreign Minister Georges Bonnet praised Hitler for softening his Godesberg terms. The Führer also reaped an accolade in the London Times on October 2 for his concessions and for reducing military measures to “solely a symbolic partial occupation.”[123] Choosing exile in London, Beneš later told an associate:

“We needed a war and I did everything to bring the war on.”[124]

Once Beneš was gone, Germany attempted to improve relations with Prague. There remained 378,000 ethnic Germans in portions of Bohemia-Moravia not annexed by the Reich. Hitler ordered on October 3 that this minority, while nurturing its cultural heritage, was to refrain from political activity toward autonomy or returning its lands to German sovereignty. He met with the new Czech foreign minister, Frantisek Chvalkovsky, on the 14th. Hitler urged him to help “normalize relations in a friendly way.”[125]

In November, the legal department of the German Foreign Office submitted a draft for a Czech-German friendship treaty. Though Hitler postponed the matter until January 1939, the initiative indicates his interest in working with Prague. His first gesture to the new regime was a generous policy toward Czech residents of the annexed Sudetenland. There were 743,000 of them who initially came under German dominion. 260,000 Czech soldiers, civil servants and their families returned to Czech territory under orders from their government. Another 160,000 not wishing to live under German jurisdiction migrated voluntarily.

A treaty the two states ratified on November 20 permitted Czechs and Slovaks remaining in the Sudetenland to choose their citizenship. Men at least 28 years of age, together with their wives and children, received German citizenship upon request. The Reich’s Government allowed people opting to remain Czechoslovak nationals to stay on as guest residents. People leaving the Sudeten Territory retained ownership of private property there with the option to sell or rent it. Under the treaty’s provisions, the German and Czech governments respectively could expel foreigners considered a political risk. Out of the more than 300,000 Czechs choosing to continue to live in the Sudetenland, the Germans deported just 140 “undesirable persons.” Hitler exempted Czechs and Slovaks absorbed into the Reich from service in its armed forces.[126]

The ethnic German minority residing in Prague-controlled sections of Bohemia-Moravia experienced the resentment of the Czechs after their defeat at Munich. Thousands of Germans lost their jobs. Many were unnecessarily watched by the police. The government denied them and their families unemployment benefits. Czech health insurance companies refused claims for the German university clinic in Prague. Hitler confronted Chvalkovsky on January 21, 1939 with a list of grievances resulting from what he called a lingering “Beneš mentality” throughout the republic. Citing the hostile tone of the Czech press, the Führer warned that no Great Power can tolerate a smaller neighboring country representing a perpetual threat in its flank. He stressed once more the necessity of improving relations.[127]

Ribbentrop read Chvalkovsky passages from prominent Czech newspapers. One predicted:

“Four months after Munich it is already clear that a war is unavoidable.”

Another read:

“The momentary political situation will not be regarded as unchangeable and a permanent circumstance.”[128]

Henderson advised Voytech Mastny, the Czech ambassador in Berlin, to urge his government to avoid abuse of its ethnic German residents. In exile in London, Beneš sought to maintain political influence through his contacts in Prague. His followers there conducted a press campaign criticizing the present regime for compliance toward Berlin.[129]

None of the rivalries in this political constellation would matter long. The Munich Accord, engineered by the western democracies to save Czechoslovakia, was ironically her death sentence. Its precedent for self-determination encouraged the country’s other captive minorities to follow the example of the Sudeten Germans. Most prominent among them were the Slovaks. The Czech army and militia had occupied their land in 1919. Tomáš Masaryk failed to deliver on his promise of regional autonomy. Nor were Slovaks equally represented in public administration; of 8,000 civil servants in Prague’s government offices, just 200 were Slovak.[130]

Hitler wished to remain neutral in the schism dividing Czechs and Slovaks. On November 19, the Reich’s Foreign Office directed its mission in Prague to watch events with reserve. The German press received instructions to maintain a non-partisan attitude in reporting on tensions in Slovakia. Hitler ordered:

“For the time being, no political talks with the Slovaks are opportune.”[131]

Prague lost its grip on the disaffected minorities. In October, the Slovaks and Ruthenians established regional parliaments; a right finally conceded by the central government as a step toward autonomy. Delegates used their influence and authority to steer the regions more toward independence. The new Czech president, Dr. Emil Hacha, resorted to the usual hammer methods. On March 6, he deployed troops in the Carpatho-Ukraine and appointed General Lev Prchala, their commander, minister of the interior and finance. In Slovakia, Hacha dissolved the regional parliament. He placed the capital, Pressburg, under martial law and jailed 60 Slovak politicians. Czech soldiers and police transferred to Pressburg. Hacha faced mounting chaos and the threat of open rebellion. He appealed to Dr. Joseph Tiso, whom the Slovaks had elected their prime minister, to help restore order.

On March 13, Tiso visited Berlin to ask Hitler how he would react to a Slovak declaration of independence. The Führer replied only that he has no interest in occupying Slovakia, since the land had never belonged to the German Reich. Tiso returned to Pressburg. He proclaimed national independence in parliament the next day. Fearing that the Hungarian army would invade and annex Slovakia, Tiso asked for German protection. Hitler replied:

“I acknowledge the receipt of your telegram and hereby assume the security of the Slovak state.”

On this day, Czechoslovakia ceased to exist as a republic. The German chancellor pacified the Hungarians by allowing them to occupy the Carpatho-Ukraine.

Hacha requested an audience with Hitler. He and Chvalkovsky arrived in Berlin by train the night of the 14th. Since taking office, both men had worked to improve relations with Germany. The machinations of Beneš’s remaining associates, the anti-German press, and a public attitude tainted by nearly 20 years of Czech chauvinism promoted by Beneš had sabotaged their efforts. Prior to meeting Hitler, Hacha told Ribbentrop that he had come to “place the fate of the Czech state in the hands of the Führer.”[132]

During their subsequent conversation, Hitler told Hacha that he was sending the German army across the frontier the following day. He had ordered the OKW to prepare the operation three days earlier. The Führer advised his guests to order the Czech army not to resist:

“In this case your people still have good prospects for the future. I will guarantee them autonomy far beyond what they could ever have dreamed of in the time of Austria.”[133]

Hacha duly relayed instructions to his army chief, General Jan Syrovy, to stand down. The German troops who entered Czech territory at 6:00 a.m. on March 15 had orders forbidding them to fire their weapons.

Advance elements of the German army occupied the Morava-Ostrava industrial complex near the Polish frontier. Warsaw was about to exploit the momentary turmoil in Czechoslovakia to militarily seize the center and hold it for Poland. Local Czech residents understood the German initiative and offered no resistance.[134] The Polish government was angry with Hitler for this rebuff of their ambitions.

The Germans mollified the initial hostility of the Czech people, largely thanks to the efforts of the Nationalsozialistische Volkswohlfahrt (NSV), Germany’s national social welfare organization. In the first ten days of the occupation, it distributed RM 7,000,000 worth of food to the distressed population. The NSV freely handed out RM 5,000,000 worth of clothing. The organization concentrated on cities and industrial regions, where shortages were more likely to occur than in rural areas. The German military authorities also arranged for the prompt restocking of grocery and department stores. Relief efforts favored the Czech populace and not the remaining ethnic German colony. The army also guarded against spontaneous attempts by members of the local Volksdeutsche Partei (Ethnic German Party) to gain control of the economy or of public administration.[135]

The Germans entered a land with 148,000 unemployed. Demobilization of the Czech army substantially increased the number. The Reich’s Ministry of Labor established offices in the Czech Protectorate – as it now became known – to recruit out-of-work persons for German industry. During the first month of the occupation, 15,000 people took advantage of the opportunity and found jobs. Over the next few months, unemployment continued to decline, and in June, the Czech government negotiated trade agreements with Norway, Holland, and several other nations to boost commerce.[136]

Hitler ordered the Czechs’ peacetime standing army of 150,000 men reduced to 7,000 including 280 officers. Only citizens of Czech nationality could serve. In consideration of the mortification suffered by officers dismissed by the reduction in force, he arranged for them to receive a full military pension regardless of their length of service.[137] The German military administration lasted just one month. The German army commander, Walther von Brauchitsch, dispersed the permanent garrisons to ethnic German communities to reduce offense to the Czechs. At no time during the 1939-1945 war did the Germans induct Czech nationals into their armed forces. Their country remained virtually unscathed throughout the devastating world conflict.

Hacha and his new cabinet resumed control of the government on April 27, 1939. Czech remained the official language. Administrative responsibilities included the interior, education, agriculture, justice, transportation, culture, social services, and public works. Germany managed foreign policy and finance. Hitler appointed Konstantin von Neurath to discharge these duties. In his long diplomatic career, Neurath had often demonstrated sympathy and admiration for the Czechs.

German Army Group Command 3 estimated there were roughly 140,000 German refugees and immigrants in the Sudetenland and Bohemia-Moravia who had settled there to escape National-Socialist rule. The German police arrested 2,500 Communists. The assistance of the Czech police facilitated the round-up. On June 7, Hitler declared general amnesty for all Czech political prisoners in the Sudetenland and in their own country.[138] The Germans maintained a permanent force of 5,000 police officers throughout the Protectorate to combat sabotage and Communist subversion. The Czech population experienced more autonomy, civil liberty and absence of discrimination under German hegemony than Tomáš Masaryk and Beneš had accorded the Sudeten German, Slovak, and Hungarian minorities during the earlier years of the republic.

The Germans confiscated most Czech army ordnance and integrated it into their own armed forces. German troops briefly entered Slovak territory to empty Czech military depots near the frontier. The vast quantity of war materiel substantiated Hitler’s protest that Czechoslovakia in a coalition with other European powers represented a threat to Germany. During the first week of the occupation, the Germans shipped 24 freight trains filled with military hardware into the Reich. They estimated 500 trains would be necessary to complete the transfer.

Quartermaster General Eduard Wagner wrote his wife on March 30 that the quantity of combat ordnance discovered in this small country was “downright frightening.”[139] The inventory included 1,582 aircraft, 2,175 field guns, 468 tanks, 501 anti-aircraft guns, 785 mortars, 43,856 machine guns, over a million rifles, three million artillery rounds, a considerable array of military specialty items such as bridge building equipment and searchlights, plus over a billion rifle rounds for the infantry. It consisted of up-to-date, well-designed weaponry. Modern production facilities such as the Skoda plant were expansive enough to simultaneously fulfill defense contracts for the USSR.

Ribbentrop sent Dr. Friedrich Berber to Prague with a special research staff to peruse documents in the Czech diplomatic archives dating from March 1938 to March 1939. The team examined records “related to the English and French approach to the Czech question.” Based on an abundance of documentary evidence assessed both in Prague and a few months earlier in Vienna, Berber’s analysis concluded that London had systematically intervened “in the politics of these countries” in order to “maintain their independence and weaken Germany.” The records also revealed that the British “have acted in the same manner regarding Poland,” the report deduced. Hitler concluded from the findings that “England wants war.”[140]

Poland

Poland declared independence upon the collapse of Russia and the defeat of the Central Powers in 1918. France supported Polish claims for additional territory in order to strengthen the emerging state. Wilson remarked:

“The only real interest of France in Poland is in weakening Germany by giving Poland territory to which she has no right.”[141]

The French historian and political analyst Jacques Bainville observed:

“The liberated peoples of the East have been entrusted with the task of serving as a counterweight to the German multitude.”[142]

At this time, the Bolsheviks under Lenin were consolidating their control of Russia. The Red Army invaded Lithuania, which had declared independence in January 1919. The Polish army drove the Bolshevik forces back. Poland’s popular military leader, Marshal Joseph Pilsudski, became head of state. An aggressive field commander, he invaded the Ukraine in April 1920 to destroy a Soviet troop concentration on the frontier. Believing that Poland must become “a power equal to the great powers of the world,” Pilsudski conquered territories where less than five percent of the population was Polish.[14] The Treaty of Riga ended the see-saw war against the Red Army on March 18, 1921, with Poland gaining Galicia.

On Poland’s western frontier in December 1918, the Polish secret military organization, Polska Organizacya Wojskova (POW), seized Posen, where Polish and German residents lived in harmony. German Freikorps militia launched a successful counterthrust. France’s Field Marshal Ferdinand Foch demanded that the Reich’s government withdraw these troops from Posen. Too weak to resist the French ultimatum, German Prime Minister Friedrich Ebert complied. Polish insurgents continued attacking German villages in the region.[144]

President Wilson proposed a plebiscite for Upper Silesia to allow the inhabitants to choose their country. 22,000 POW men staged an insurrection in August 1919 to take the region by force.[145] The Freikorps broke the revolt in less than a week. In February 1920, the Inter-Allied Control Commission assumed the administration of Upper Silesia. Over 11,000 French soldiers, supported by small contingents from the Italian and British armies, arrived to supervise the plebiscite. In the spring 1921 poll, 706,820 Silesians cast for union with Germany and 479,414 for Poland. Many Polish residents voted for Germany.[146]

While the Allied commission fumbled with determining the ultimate boundaries, the POW staged another uprising in May 1921. Supplied with French weapons, the insurgents organized an army of 30,000 men. The Polish government officially denied supporting Wojciech Korfanty, the instigator of the revolts. The correspondent for the London Times observed ammunition trains passing regularly from Poland into Upper Silesia. The frontier was as “freely traversed as our London Bridge” he wrote on May 10.[147]

Though outnumbered, 25,000 Freikorps volunteers counterattacked on May 21, and forced the Poles onto the defensive. Once the Germans began to advance, the French and British stepped in to restore order. In October, the League of Nations awarded nearly a third of the contested territory to Poland. Based on the plebiscite, the entire region should have fallen to Germany. In the portion granted Poland dwelled 40 percent of the Upper Silesian population. It contained six-sevenths of the zinc and lead production, all the iron, and 91 percent of the coal.[148]

Among the lands Germany lost was a 6,300 square-mile vertical strip of West Prussia extending from the Baltic coast down to Upper Silesia. Poland required this corridor, the Allies reasoned, to permit her to have unrestricted access to the sea. Within the corridor was the German port of Danzig. Just 15,000 of the city’s 400,000 inhabitants were Polish. The people of Danzig overwhelmingly demonstrated for union with Germany, but the Peace Commission favored Poland. Lloyd George’s tenacious resistance forced a compromise: the town became a “Free City” under League of Nations jurisdiction, subject to Polish customs administration.

During the Weimar Republic, every German administration and most influential political parties had advocated Poland’s destruction. This attitude prevailed in the Reich’s Foreign Office and in the Reichswehr as well. In September 1922, General Hans von Seeckt wrote to Chancellor Joseph Wirth:

“Poland’s existence is intolerable and incompatible with Germany’s vital interests. It must disappear, and will do so through its own weakness and through Russia with our aid.”[149]

The Polish government’s oppressive minorities policy provoked the ire of other European states. Poland’s Jewish, Ukrainian, and German populations suffered legal persecution to disenfranchise them, strip them of political influence, or force their migration out. The regime dismissed German officials and employees from civil service. It confiscated German farms, closed ethnic schools and forced the pupils to enroll in Polish educational institutions. These measures compelled many Prussian and Silesian Germans to move into Germany. A quarter of the ethnic German population had left Poland by 1926.

Heinrich Brüning, German chancellor from 1930-1932, pursued a trade policy the Poles considered disadvantageous to their commerce. Pilsudski responded by conducting military maneuvers and massing troops near Germany’s border. The Polish army concentrated formations in a ring around East Prussia, geographically separated by the corridor from the Reich. In 1930, Mocarstwowiec (The League of Great Powers), a newspaper mirroring Pilsudski’s views, published this editorial:

“We know that war between Poland and Germany cannot be avoided. We must prepare for this war systematically and energetically… Our ideal is a Poland with the western frontier on the Oder and Neisse Rivers, rounded off in Lusatia, and annexing Prussia from the Pregel to the Spree Rivers. In this war there will be no prisoners taken. There will be no place for humanitarian feelings.”[150]

The Polish General Staff had been weighing options for invading the Reich since 1921.[151] German diplomats considered the appointment to Polish foreign minister of Joseph Beck, an army colonel and confidant of Pilsudski’s, in November 1932 as indicative of a more militant policy.[152]

Polish saber-rattling provoked resentment in Germany. The Reich’s Foreign Office refused to renew even minor compacts with Poland about to expire. When Hitler became chancellor in January 1933, relations with his eastern neighbor were strained to the utmost. The Polish press launched a campaign of vilification against the new chancellor. Pilsudski deployed combat divisions near Danzig and reinforced the 82-man garrison guarding the Westerplatte. This was an army depot situated on an islet bordering metropolitan Danzig. A Pilsudski subordinate wrote in the quasi-official Gazeta Polska:

“For the western territories, Poland can and will speak only with the voice of her cannons.”[153]

In April 1933, Pilsudski asked Paris for the second time in less than two months to join in a “preventive war” to invade the Reich. The French showed no interest. The German representative in Warsaw, Hans von Moltke, discovered the plan and duly warned Hitler.[154] The Führer sidestepped a confrontation. During his first meeting with the Polish envoy on May 2, 1933, he proved gracious and reassuring. Hitler agreed to a public declaration that his government would observe all Polish-German treaties currently in force. In his foreign-policy speech to the Reichstag on May 17, the German chancellor spoke of “finding a solution to satisfy the understandable demands of Poland just as much as Germany’s natural rights.”[155]

In November, Hitler offered Pilsudski a friendship and non-aggression pact. Only after another discreet, unsuccessful bid to enlist France for his “preventive war” hobbyhorse did the marshal agree. The two governments ratified a ten-year treaty the following January. New trade agreements provided a fresh market for Poland’s depressed economy. Hitler banned newspaper editorials addressing German claims in the East. Warsaw relaxed the anti-German tendency of its own press. The Führer directed Danzig’s National-Socialist Senate to cease complaining to the League of Nations about Polish violations of legal compacts there.

The German public disapproved of Hitler’s rapprochement toward Poland. U.S. Ambassador William Dodd reported that even committed National Socialists were disillusioned that the Führer had concluded a pact with Warsaw.[156] Prussian nobles in the General Staff and foreign office harbored anti-Polish sentiments and likewise rejected the change of policy. In October 1935, Moltke cabled from Warsaw:

“Today the German minority in Poland feels left in the lurch by the German Reich.”[157]

Hitler stayed the course. Warsaw’s new emissary in Berlin, Joseph Lipski, experienced a warmth and popularity among his hosts previously unimaginable for a Polish diplomat.

After Pilsudski’s death in May 1935, two government officials assumed virtual autonomy in their respective ministries, much to the detriment of Polish-German relations. These were Foreign Minister Beck and the army commander-in-chief, Marshal Edward Rydz-Smigly. Both were disciples of an expansionist foreign policy.

The friendship treaty with Germany evoked little sense of obligation on Poland’s part. From Warsaw, Moltke informed his superiors.

“The Poles think that they no longer need to restrict their steps against the German minority. They must be gaining the impression from the lack of any reaction in the German press, that all infringements will be accepted by German public opinion without objection.”[158]

In February 1936, the German consul general in Thorn, Ernst von Küchler, wrote Berlin about the disproportionate transfer of German farms into Polish hands through government-implemented land reform:

“As much German property as possible is supposed to be broken up before expiration of the ten-year agreement.”[159]

Consul Wilhelm Nöldeke in Katowice described how on March 15:

“In Königshütte, an assembly of the German Farmers Union was dispersed by a mob armed with sticks and clubs, during which German performers of the Upper Silesian country theater who were uninvolved bystanders were physically abused.”[160]

Diplomatic relations between Poland and the Reich further deteriorated due to a simultaneous tariff dispute. Dissatisfied with Germany’s compensation for coal trains crossing the corridor from the Reich to supply East Prussia’s energy needs, Warsaw announced in January 1936 that it would curtail 50 to 80 percent of German rail traffic there. The Polish Ministry of Transportation threatened to block it completely during negotiations.[161] In March, Beck informed the French that Poland was ready to join France in a war against Germany.[162] Marshal Rydz-Smigly visited Paris in September. He persuaded the French to loan Poland $500 million in cash and war materiel to upgrade the Polish army. Warsaw already devoted over a third of the budget to armaments, even though the country suffered one of the highest illiteracy rates in Europe and much of the population lived in poverty.[163] Rydz-Smigly ordered General Tadeusz Kutrzeba to draft a war plan against Germany. Completed in January 1938, the study envisioned a war with the Reich for 1939. To date, Hitler had never made a threatening gesture to Poland.

Of all territories robbed from the Reich after World War I, the German people felt most keenly the loss of Danzig and the lands taken by Poland. To placate his own public and remove one more obstacle to improving relations with Warsaw, Hitler required at least a nominal correction of the Versailles arrangement. He limited his proposal to two revisions. First, he asked to construct an Autobahn and railroad line across the corridor to connect Germany with East Prussia. The German diplomat Julius Schnurre had already suggested this to Beck in 1935 without receiving an answer.[164] Secondly, Hitler wanted Danzig to come under German sovereignty. In return, he was prepared to acknowledge Germany’s eastern border fixed by the Allied Peace Commission as final, something no Weimar administration had hitherto done, and offer Poland a 25-year non-aggression pact.

The Autobahn plan meant that Hitler was willing to renounce an entire province in exchange for a strip of real estate wide enough to accommodate a highway. Financed by the Reich, the project would utilize Polish labor and construction materials to help relieve unemployment in Poland. The recovery of Danzig required even less of Warsaw. The Danzig territory, encompassing 730 square miles, was under League of Nations, not Polish, jurisdiction. Regarding the city’s value as a harbor, the Poles no longer needed it for nautical export; further up the coast they had constructed the port city of Gdingen (Gdynia), which opened in 1926. Offering economic incentives to shippers, they had taken more than half of Danzig’s commerce by 1930.

Hitler’s package called for the Reich’s forfeiture of Upper Silesia with its valuable industry, Posen and West Prussia. These provinces had been German for centuries and had belonged to Germany less than 20 years before. Nevertheless, it would abandon nearly a million ethnic Germans residing there to foreign rule, despite the fact that since March 1933, the Reich’s Foreign Office had documented 15,000 cases of abuse against Poland’s ethnic German colony.[165] The Führer was willing to publicly announce that no more territorial issues exist with Poland. No Weimar administration could have survived such an offer.

Meeting in Berchtesgaden with Polish Ambassador Lipski on October 24, 1938, Ribbentrop brought the German revisions to the table. His guest disputed the Reich’s perception of Danzig’s status as a “product of Versailles.” Only Poland’s rise, Lipski contended, had lifted the city from “insignificance.” He told Ribbentrop that public opinion would never accept the city’s transfer to Germany.[166] Warsaw reaffirmed Lipski’s position in writing on October 31. The letter conceded that Poland was prepared to guarantee the right of “Danzig’s German minority” to preserve its national and cultural identity.[167] Describing the population of a city that was 96 percent German as a minority was a studied provocation which Hitler decided to overlook. The Polish press campaign against Germany resumed.

On January 5, 1939, Beck visited Germany to negotiate with Hitler. The Führer insisted that Danzig’s return to Germany must be a part of any final settlement with Poland. He reassured Beck that the Reich would never simply declare that the city has returned to Germany and present Warsaw with a fait accompli. He pledged that no final arrangement would deprive Poland of her access to the sea. Beck asked for time to weigh the situation carefully.

In mid-January, Beck told Rydz-Smigly of his decision to reject the German proposals, though two weeks later he mendaciously reassured Ribbentrop that he was still contemplating the matter. A wave of fresh persecution swept over the ethnic German minority. On February 25, the British ambassador there, Sir Howard Kennard, reported to Halifax on a dialog with Moltke concerning farmhands and industrial workers in Poland:

“The land that had belonged to the big German landowners was practically confiscated by the agrarian reform, German job holders of all sorts in the industry and on the farms are being dismissed because they happen to be Germans.”

In addition to the forced closing of German schools, it was becoming practically impossible for a German living in Poland to earn enough to exist. Kennard concluded that there was “little likelihood of the Polish authorities doing anything to improve matters.”[168]

An unrelated episode aggravated tensions. On March 22, the Germans recovered Memel from Lithuania. This was a narrow, 700-square-mile strip of northeastern Prussia which the Lithuanians had seized by force in 1923. The League of Nations demanded that the territory be governed according to democratic principles. In the 1925 elections, 94 percent of the voters – including many Lithuanian residents – cast for German parties. The Lithuanian government in Kaunas refused to recognize the results. The entire country fell under a dictatorship the following year. The authorities began jailing Prussian residents found guilty of “preserving German heritage.”[169]

After the Austrian Anschluss, Memel-Germans organized public demonstrations. In November 1938, Kaunas offered to negotiate with Berlin over the region’s future. In an internationally supervised plebiscite in December, 87 percent of voters decided for union with Germany. Ribbentrop promised Lithuanian Foreign Minister Juozas Urbsys economic incentives for his country. Upon the transfer of Memel back to Germany, the Lithuanians employed their own dock workers and administrative personnel at the harbor there. They also operated a railroad across the now-German strip of Memel territory directly connecting the port to Lithuania. This was the same solution that Hitler had proposed to Warsaw regarding Danzig and the corridor.

During the weeks before the final settlement with Kaunas, Berlin deployed the three army divisions garrisoned in East Prussia on the border with Memel. Rydz-Smigly declared this to be evidence that Germany was about to annex Danzig.[170] On March 23, 1939, he accordingly mobilized a large part of Poland’s army reserve. Since Memel was at the opposite end of the province from Danzig, the three divisions were actually moving away from the city that Rydz-Smigly claimed they were about to seize. The Memel affair coincided with Germany’s occupation of the Czech rump-state on March 15. Beck exploited the occasion to negotiate with London to form an alliance against Germany. On March 24, Beck told Lipski and senior members of his staff that Hitler was losing the faculty to think and act rationally. Poland’s “determined resistance” might bring him to his senses. Otherwise, Beck proclaimed:

“We will fight!”[171]

Hitler maintained a conciliatory posture. His army commander-in-chief, General Brauchitsch, noted:

“Führer does not want to settle the Danzig question by force.”

Hitler cancelled a March 24 directive that the diplomat Ernst von Weizsäcker had prepared for Moltke as a guideline for resuming negotiations. The Führer considered it “somewhat harshly formulated” and objected to its tenor “confronting the Poles with a sort of friend-or-foe option.”[172]

Returning to Berlin, Lipski delivered a letter to Ribbentrop on March 26 formally rejecting the Danzig-Autobahn proposal. Lipski bluntly told his host:

“Any further pursuit of these German plans, especially as far as the return of Danzig to the Reich is concerned, will mean war with Poland.”[173]

This threat, together with Rydz-Smigly’s partial mobilization against Germany, violated the 1934 non-aggression and friendship treaty: The pact stated word for word:

“Under no circumstances will (the signatories) resort to the use of force for the purpose of settling issues in controversy.”[174]

The British responded favorably to an alliance with Poland. The western democracies had just lost Czechoslovakia as an ally flanking the Reich. Her military-industrial resources were now at German disposal. The British army chief of staff warned Chamberlain that in the event of war against Germany, it would be better to have Poland on the Allies’ side. On March 30, Kennard received instructions from London to present the British offer to guarantee Poland. Beck accepted immediately. The next day, Chamberlain explained the details in the House of Commons:

“In the event of any action which clearly threatens Polish independence and which the Polish government accordingly considered it vital to resist with their national forces, His Majesty’s Government would feel themselves bound at once to lend the Polish government all support in their power.”[175]

Beck visited London to conclude details for the alliance on April 3. On the 23rd, Warsaw mobilized another 334,000 army reservists, again in the absence of threats from Germany.[176]

Hitler addressed the Reichstag on April 28. He explained how the Anglo-Polish agreement obligated the Poles to take a military position against the Reich, should it enter into an armed conflict with any state guaranteed by England. Hitler continued:

“This obligation contradicts the agreement I previously made with Marshal Pilsudski; since the (1934) agreement only takes into account obligations already in existence at that time, namely Poland’s commitments regarding France. To subsequently expand these commitments is contrary to the German-Polish non-aggression pact. Under these circumstances, I would never have concluded this pact back then; for what sense does it make to have a non-aggression pact, if it leaves a number of exceptions for one partner practically wide open?”[177]

Hitler voided the compact. He added in his speech that he would welcome a Polish initiative to negotiate a new treaty governing Polish-German relations.

Warsaw’s agreement with London opened a floodgate of war scares and hostile editorials in the Polish press. The German consul general in Posen reported to Berlin on March 31:

“For months, the Polish press in the western regions has been trying to poison public opinion against Germans… The press expresses its hostility toward Germans without reservations and scarcely a day goes by in which Posen newspapers don’t publish more or less aggressive articles or insulting observations about Germans.”[178]

Although Hitler had personally instructed his foreign office that there must be “no talk of war” in the negotiations, the French ambassador in Warsaw, Leon Noel, reported to Paris:

“Patriotic sentiment among the Poles of all parties and in every class of society has reached a zenith thanks to the German threats. Labor and farmers are conscious of the danger and ready to make great sacrifices… Military measures and requisitions are being accepted with enthusiasm.”[179]

Poland’s ethnic German community suffered the backlash of media-generated Polish chauvinism. On April 13, the German consul in Danzig cabled to Berlin that rural Germans in the corridor

“are so cowed that they have already buried their most valuable possessions. They no longer risk traversing roads and fields by daylight. They spend their nights in hiding places beyond the farms, for fear of being attacked. The local Polish population claims to be in possession of weapons.”[180]

The May 11 edition of the Polish newspaper Dziennik Bydgoski (Bromberg Daily News) published an editorial asserting that the Germans in Poland

“know that in case of war, no indigenous enemy will escape alive. The Führer is far away but the Polish soldier close by, and in the woods there’s no shortage of limbs.”

The previous month, the Polish mayor of Bromberg, a town with a comparatively large German population, told journalists that if Hitler invaded there, he’d be stepping over the corpses of Bromberg’s Germans.[181]

Beck explained his policy to the Polish parliament on May 5. He claimed that Danzig was not German, but has belonged to Poland for centuries. He attributed the city’s prosperity to commerce conducted by Poland ferrying export wares into Danzig via the Vistula River, omitting the fact that the waterway was no longer navigable, thanks to 19 years of improper maintenance under Polish administration. Beck disparaged Hitler’s offer to recognize Polish sovereignty over the corridor, Posen, and Upper Silesia in exchange for Danzig. Since the provinces were already incorporated into Poland, he argued, Hitler was giving nothing in return. “A nation with self-respect makes no one-sided concessions,” he crowed.[182]

Historians praise Beck for defiantly defending his country from becoming a German satellite. Since Hitler’s proposal included an offer for Poland to join the Anti-Comintern Pact, reaching a Danzig settlement with the Reich would have supposedly drawn the Poles into an alliance with Germany against the USSR. Warsaw would then have eventually become embroiled in Hitler’s planned military crusade against Russia. Beyond the fact that no German documents exist to support this theory, it overlooks the essence of the Anti-Comintern Pact. Its purpose was to promote cooperation among civilized nations to prevent internal Communist subversion. Governments would share intelligence, much in the same way that Interpol affiliates do to combat global terrorism today. Also, Hitler had expressed his often-quoted ideas about invading Russia when he wrote Mein Kampf during the previous decade. After the Bolsheviks consolidated power in the former Czarist empire, the Führer no longer advocated such an option.

Through personal observation and discussions with diplomats in Berlin, Henderson was able to convey to London a realistic picture of German opinion. He wrote Halifax in May:

“It must be borne in mind that Danzig and the corridor was the big question prior to 1933. One of the most unpopular actions which Hitler ever did was his 1934 treaty with Pilsudski. He had the whole of his party against him. Today the most moderate Germans, who are opposed to a world war, are behind him in his present offer to Poland.”

Henderson added that foreign emissaries in Berlin also consider Hitler’s proposals justifiable:

“According to my Belgian colleague, practically all the diplomatic representatives here regard the German offer in itself as a surprisingly favorable one. The Dutch minister, the United States Chargé d’Affaires and my South African colleague have themselves spoken to me in that sense. I consequently ask myself whether, if we are going to fight Germany, is it well-advised to do so on a ground on which the world will not be united as to the immorality of Germany’s case? Will even our Empire be united?”[183]

Henderson grasped that Hitler’s package was not a demand for Polish territory but accepted a significant loss of formerly German lands to Poland. In a May 17 dispatch to Halifax, Henderson wrote:

“The fact that what was regarded here as a generous offer of a 25-year German guarantee of the existing Polish frontier in exchange for a satisfactory settlement of the Danzig and Corridor problem had been rejected out of hand by Poland has not only incensed Herr Hitler personally, but has made a deep impression on the country as a whole.”[184]

The ambassador also referred to “the traditional German feeling of hatred for Poland, particularly in the army, and Polish ingratitude for Germany’s past services.” On May 16, Henderson summarized a conversation with Weizsäcker in a letter to Sir Alexander Cadogan, the undersecretary in the Foreign Office:

“He like all Germans feels bitterly about the Poles. They grabbed what they could after Vienna and Munich and then bit the hand that fed them on these occasions. That is the German view nor is there a single German who does not regard Hitler’s offer to Poland as excessively generous and broadminded.”[185]

Hitler understood that he could never normalize relations with Poland without a Danzig settlement. The British guarantee for Poland had robbed Hitler of the opportunity to withdraw his demands without losing face. On April 3, 1939, he ordered the OKW to draft a study for combat operations against Poland. He stipulated, however, that

“the German attitude toward Poland will remain guided by the principle of avoiding trouble. Should Poland revise her policy toward Germany, which so far has been based on the same principle, and assume a threatening posture toward the Reich, then a final reckoning may become necessary.”[186]

Berlin continued to receive reports from its consulates in Poland regarding harsh treatment of the German colony there. On May 8, on instructions from Hitler, Press Chief Otto Dietrich directed newspaper editors to “practice a certain restraint in reporting such incidents” and not publish them on the front page: “Sensational headlines are to be avoided.”[187] Regarding the Polish media, Henderson observed:

“The fantastic claims of irresponsible Polish elements for domination over East Prussia and other German territory afford cheap fuel to the flames.”[188]

In June, Hubert Gladwyn Jebb and Sir William Strang of the British Foreign Office visited Warsaw. Jebb sent back a report on the 9th that summarized the discussions with Polish government ministers and army officers. He quoted a Polish economist in Warsaw’s Foreign Ministry as describing how Polish farmers anticipated generous grants of German land after the war with Germany.[189] Jebb opined that the Polish General Staff was “overly optimistic” and that officials in Warsaw had become “amazingly arrogant” since the British guarantee.[190] The following month, British General Sir Edmund Ironside visited Poland. Rydz-Smigly told him that war with Germany is unavoidable.[191] None of the British emissaries said anything to the Poles to mollify this bellicose attitude.

Since June, as reported by Moltke, 70 percent of the Germans in Upper Silesia were out of work, compared to Poland’s national unemployment rate of 16 percent. The Reich’s government registered 70,000 ethnic German refugees who had recently fled Polish sovereign territory. Another 15,000 had taken refuge in Danzig. Among the acts of brutality inflicted on those still in Poland were five documented cases of castration. Kennard protested to the Polish government about the abuse of the German minority. The complaint “did not appear to have had any definite results,” he notified his superiors.[192]

The crisis also focused on Danzig, still administered by League of Nations Commissioner Carl Burckhardt but under Poland’s customs union. The city’s senate was embroiled in a perpetual controversy over the conduct of the Polish tariff inspectors. Originally numbering six, in 1939 the roster had climbed to well over 100. Polish officials performing these duties roamed areas beyond their jurisdiction, primarily interested in potential military details.[193] They rendezvoused at Danzig’s rail terminal, which was under Polish administration. A transmitter there relayed intelligence to Warsaw. In the event of war, the inspectors were to lead irregular troops, supplied from arms caches concealed in the city, to hold positions in Danzig until the Polish army arrived.[194]

Danzig’s senate president, Arthur Greiser, protested to the Polish commissioner in Danzig, Marian Chodacki, on June 3, 1939, about the customs inspectors. Chodacki replied that the number of his customs agents was still insufficient, because German inspectors were not doing their job. He threatened economic sanctions against Danzig. In another note on August 4, Chodacki stated that Polish customs officials would henceforth be armed. Interference with their activity would result in an immediate reprisal against Danzig; the Poles threatened to block the importation of foodstuffs. Beck informed Kennard that Poland would intervene militarily if the Danzig senate failed to comply with Polish terms.[195]

On August 9, Weizsäcker met with the Polish chargé d’affaires in Berlin, Michael Lubomirski. He protested the Polish ultimatum to Danzig of August 4. Sanctions against the “Free City”, Weizsäcker warned, may result in Danzig seeking stronger economic ties with Germany herself. The next day, an undersecretary in Warsaw’s foreign ministry told the German chargé d’affaires that any involvement by the Reich’s Government in the Danzig issue would be regarded by Poland as an act of war.[196] Rydz-Smigly contributed to tensions with remarks made in a public speech:

“Soon we’ll be marching against the hereditary German enemy to finally knock out his poison fangs. The first step on this march will be Danzig… Keep ready for the day of reckoning with this arrogant Germanic race! The hour of revenge is nigh!”[197]

Burckhardt described Poland’s intentions as “excessively belligerent.”[198]

Warsaw issued an official press release detailing how Greiser had withdrawn his demands after the note exchange with Chodacki. According to the Polish press, a single, mildly harsh note had “forced Hitler to his knees.”[199] The Anglo-French media triumphantly reported that the Führer had had to “climb down.” Hitler told Burckhardt on August 11:

“The press said I lost my nerve, that threats are the only way to deal with me. That we backed down when the Poles stood firm, that I had only been bluffing last year, and my bluff flopped thanks to Poland’s courage that the Czechs didn’t have. I’ve read idiotic remarks in the French press that I lost my nerve while the Poles kept theirs.”[200]

Hitler asked Burckhardt:

“Could you go yourself to London? If we want to avoid catastrophes, the matter is rather urgent.”[201]

Halifax, certainly no friend of Germany, cabled Kennard on August 15:

“I have the impression that Hitler is still undecided and anxious to avoid war.”[202]

The day before, Roger Makins in the British Foreign Office wrote England’s delegate in Geneva, Frank Walter, that the Führer wanted to open negotiations to prevent an armed clash.

Historians assert that Hitler was determined to invade Poland. However, had this been his intention, he could have instructed the Danzig senate to pass a resolution abolishing League of Nations jurisdiction and returning the city to the Reich’s sovereignty. This would have provoked the Polish military response Beck warned of, and Germany could then intervene with her own army in order to defend the Danzig population’s right to self-determination. Given the sensitive issue of democratic principles, and the fact that Poland was striking the first blow, it would then have been difficult for Britain to justify support for Poland under the provisions of the guarantee.

The Polish government rounded up “disloyal” ethnic Germans and transported them to concentration camps.[203] Authorities closed daily traffic between Upper Silesia and Germany, preventing thousands of ethnic Germans from commuting to their jobs in the Reich. Polish coastal anti-aircraft batteries fired on Lufthansa passenger planes flying over the Baltic Sea to East Prussia.[204] The Luftwaffe provided fighter escorts for the airliners. In Danzig, the police chief formed his law enforcement personnel into two rifle regiments. In defiance of the League of Nations charter, the city re-militarized. The Germans transferred a battalion from SS Death’s Head Regiment 4 to Danzig. The 1,500-man “SS Home Guard Danzig” paraded publicly on Danzig’s May Field on August 18. The Poles evacuated the families of their civil servants, fortified public buildings and installations with armor plate or barbed wire and posted machine gun nests at bridges.[205]

In his directive to the armed forces the previous April, Hitler had cited isolating Poland as a prerequisite for the military option. On August 23, Germany concluded a non-aggression pact with the Soviet Union. The pact, signed in Moscow, contained a secret clause defining mutual spheres of interest. It stated:

“The question of whether or not maintaining an independent Polish state will appear desirable for both parties’ interests, and how this state should be divided, can only be clarified in the course of further political developments.”

In return for roughly half of Poland, the Soviet dictator gave Germany a free hand to invade. The Germans hoped that news of Soviet-German rapprochement would demonstrate to Beck that his country’s position had become precarious, compelling him to return to the conference table. [206] Beck, however, dismissed the alliance as untenable, because Russia and Germany harbored a serious ideological rivalry. A Warsaw communiqué on August 22 stated:

“The announcement of the impending signing of a non-aggression pact between Germany and the Soviet Union has made little impression on Polish circles in Warsaw, since in essence this pact does not alter the parity of the armed forces of Europe. This announcement demonstrates the desire of the Soviet government to stay out of the European game, a fact that had already come to light during the English-French-Soviet-Russian negotiations. The conclusion of the non-aggression pact will have no influence on the situation or on Poland’s policy.”[207]

On August 23, Hitler told his armed forces adjutant that the military must be ready to invade Poland by the morning of the 26th. The Führer then postponed the attack, explaining to General Keitel that he needed to “gain time for further negotiations,” still seeking a “solution without bloodshed.”[208] The Poles, without provocation from Germany, closed Danzig’s borders. Since the metropolis imported much of its foodstuffs, this created a critical situation for the populace.

Hitler and Göring requested British mediation to help persuade Warsaw to resume talks. From Warsaw, Kennard cabled London on August 25 that were Beck or Lipski to seek an audience with Hitler, the Führer would consider this a “sign of weakness” and respond with an ultimatum.[209] Chamberlain concluded the alliance with Poland the same day.

Along the German-Polish frontier, Polish border guards fired on ethnic German refugees attempting to flee into Germany. German infantry patrols crossed into Poland and fought to free them. On the 26th, a Polish cavalry unit rode boldly through German villages near Neidenburg in East Prussia. The German army’s Artillery Regiment 57 engaged the horsemen on sovereign Reich territory. The Poles withdrew, leaving 47 dead on the battlefield.[210] Hitler told Ribbentrop:

“As I already said to Mr. Henderson, I would like to think that Beck and Lipski have good intentions. But they are no longer in control of the situation. They are captives of a public opinion that has become white-hot through the excesses of their own propaganda and the bragging of the military. Even if they wanted to negotiate, they aren’t in a position to do so. This is the real root of the tragedy.”

Ribbentrop handed Hitler a telegram describing three further incidents of Polish gunners firing on German commercial aircraft. The Führer responded:

“This is pure anarchy. What are we supposed to do?”[211]

On August 29, Hitler received a half-hearted pledge from London to urge the Poles to enter negotiations, without, however, stating when. Tired of these dilatory tactics, Hitler wrote back that he expected a Polish diplomat empowered to negotiate by the following day. Examining the note in front of Hitler that evening, Henderson protested that it “has the ring of an ultimatum.” The Führer retorted:

“This sentence only emphasizes the urgency of the moment. Consider that at any time it could come to a serious incident, when two mobilized armies are confronting one another.”

Henderson insisted that the deadline was too short. Hitler responded:

“We’ve been repeating the same thing for a week. This senseless game can’t go on forever… Keep in mind that my people are bleeding day after day.”[212]

In Warsaw, Beck, Rydz-Smigly and the defense minister, Tadeusz Kasprzycki, conferred. They decided to declare general mobilization the next morning.

German diplomats and lawyers spent the morning of August 30 preparing the 16-point Marienwerder Proposal as a basis for discussions with the Poles. The salient points were Danzig’s immediate return to the Reich, a German transit route linking East Prussia to Germany, Gdingen remaining under Polish sovereignty, a minority-protection treaty, and a plebiscite for the population of the northern corridor region. Göring emphasized that the Führer is trying to avoid infringement of Poland’s vital interests.[213] Henderson confessed to London that Hitler is considering how generous he can be.

Chamberlain’s cabinet concluded that the proposal does not harm Poland’s interests nor threaten her independence. Even the suggested corridor plebiscite should not have concerned Warsaw, since it claimed that the population there was 90 percent Polish.[214] The French government recommended to the Poles that they negotiate. London telegraphed Kennard, instructing him to formally protest Poland’s recent practice of shooting at German refugees.

The Polish Foreign Office assumed that Hitler would interpret any willingness on its part to negotiate as a sign of weakness. In reality, simply receiving the German 16-point plan represented no threat to Poland. It would have opened a dialog, and at the very least postponed the outbreak of war. The Poles could have broken off the discussions if Berlin imposed an ultimatum. They could then have fully relied on the support of the Western powers. Beck, however, wanted no negotiations. On August 31, he cabled Lipski with instructions to inform Ribbentrop that Warsaw will

“weigh the recommendation of the British government (to negotiate) in a favorable light and give a formal answer to this question in a few hours.”[215]

In the same message, Beck instructed his ambassador not to discuss anything with the Germans, and that he is not authorized to receive their proposals. That morning, Sir George Ogilvie-Forbes tried to give a copy of Hitler’s 16-point program to Lipski at the Polish embassy in Berlin. The Pole refused, replying that

“in the event of war, civil strife will break out in this country and Polish troops will march victoriously toward Berlin.”[216]

The radio-monitoring station in the Reich’s Air Ministry intercepted Beck’s transmission ordering Lipski not to accept a copy of Germany’s Marienwerder Proposals. Hitler now knew that Poland would not compromise over Danzig and the corridor. He nonetheless postponed the military operation once more, upon Göring’s request for a last-minute conference with Henderson and the Swedish mediator Birger Dahlerus.[217] Later that day, Göring’s conference took place. He showed Henderson a transcript of Beck’s instructions sent to Lipski. Henderson wrote Halifax:

“The highly efficient German intelligence system proved its worth that afternoon in Berlin. Beck’s telephone call, including the secret message, was instantly decoded. Here was proof to the German Government of Poland’s delaying tactics and refusal to negotiate seriously.”[218]

The meeting between Henderson and Göring was cordial, but failed to reach a solution. A session between Lipski and Ribbentrop the same evening was also fruitless. Hitler summoned Keitel at 9:00p.m. The directive he gave the general began, “Now that all political possibilities for relieving the intolerable conditions for Germany on her eastern border by peaceful means are exhausted, I have decided for a solution by force.”[219] Less than eight hours later, the German armed forces invaded Poland.

Historical documents reveal that the attack on Poland was not a step in a long-planned, systematic program to expand Germany’s living space. Hitler ordered the offensive upon the failure to achieve a negotiated settlement. Among the most important issues was the welfare of the ethnic German colony beyond the Reich’s borders, though to wage war for the sake of people related by blood, but no longer by nationality, may today seem unjustified. The present-day “global community” concept rejects the notion that a nation can be defined more by its race than by geographical boundaries. During the 1930s, however, pride of ethnic heritage was a powerful force in the consciousness of the European peoples.

The 1938 Munich Accord, by which Germany regained the Sudeten Territory populated by ethnic Germans under foreign rule, was regarded by the Reich’s Foreign Office as a legal precedent:

“The right of protection from the mother state was fundamentally acknowledged once and for all through an international act in which the four Great Powers and three other states took part.”[220]

In August 1939, Hitler confronted a serious situation regarding Danzig and the German minority in Poland. Blockaded by the Poles since August 24, the Free City’s German population faced economic ruin and potential starvation. During the month’s final days, Polish radicals murdered over 200 ethnic German residents of western Poland.[221] As a German diplomat asserted:

“German intervention was completely legitimate in accordance with, on the one hand, the right of the mother state to protect its ethnic families living under foreign rule, and on the other hand, with respect to their right to self-determination.”[222]

Hitler wrote Daladier on August 27:

“I would despair of an honorable future for my people, if under such circumstances we were not resolved to settle the matter no matter what.”[223]

Beyond the moral and legal issues was that of national security. As mentioned, the Germans had discovered documents in Vienna and Prague revealing a covert policy of the British Foreign Office to weaken Germany. Chamberlain’s arbitration of the 1938 Sudetenland crisis had satisfied Hitler’s demands but also had rescued Czechoslovakia; at that time, Britain and France had not been equipped to wage war to defend this small but useful ally. Once Czechoslovakia collapsed in March 1939, the Anglo-French lost an integral component of their “collective security” alliance system. London’s public guarantee of Poland followed immediately. Hitler surmised that Chamberlain’s purpose for this declaration was to turn Poland against Germany, to replace one hostile state on the Reich’s eastern frontier with another. The Führer told his architect, Hermann Giesler, that he believed that the coalition forming against Germany wanted war:

“This conflict, the contours of which are forming before my eyes quite clearly, I can only avoid by yielding and in this way waiving the natural rights of the German people. But even that would only postpone the confrontation… I must strive to prevent the encirclement of Germany or punch through it, regardless of in what direction.”[224]

On August 9, 1939, Henderson had written Undersecretary Cadogan in London that both the Germans and the Italians believed that Poland would attempt to settle the dispute with the Reich by force that year, before British support becomes lukewarm.[225] In Warsaw, army commanders and certain Polish politicians recommended challenging Germany soon, since the cost of indefinitely maintaining so many soldiers on active duty was too great a strain on the national budget.[226] The general mobilization Poland announced on August 30 was another ominous sign for Hitler. Feeling threatened both to the east and to the west, he opted to strike first. One could perhaps judge his decision in the spirit of a maxim of Prussia’s 18th-Century monarch Friedrich the Great. He declared that in war, the real aggressor is he who forces the enemy to fire the first shot.

Part 1 | Part 2 | Part 3 | Part 4 | Part 5 | Part 6

Notes

[1] Schoenfelder, Roland, Deutschlands Ja für den Frieden, p. 66
[2] Hitler, Adolf, Rede des Führers vor dem Reichstag am 28. April 1939, p. 60
[3] Benns, F. Lee, European History since 1870, p. 489
[4] Schultze-Rhonhof, Gerd, Der Krieg, der viele Väter hatte, p. 80
[5] Freytag-Loringhoven, Freiherr von, Deutschlands Aussenpolitik, p. 207
[6] Schultze-Rhonhof, Gerd, Der Krieg, der viele Väter hatte, p. 233
[7] Ibid., p. 233
[8] Klüver, Max, War es Hitlers Krieg?, pp. 38-39
[9] Schultze-Rhonhof, Gerd, Der Krieg, der viele Väter hatte, p. 234
[10] Ibid., p. 257
[11] Ibid., p. 84
[12] Römer, Heinrich, Rhein, Reich, Frankreich, p. 19
[13] Preradovich, Nikolaus, Grossdeutschland 1938, p. 311
[14] Schultze-Rhonhof, Gerd, Der Krieg, der viele Väter hatte, p. 253
[15] Schultze-Rhonhof, Gerd, Der Krieg, der viele Väter hatte, p. 256
[16] Freytag-Loringhoven, Freiherr von, Deutschlands Aussenpolitik, pp. 8-9
[17] Schoenfelder, Roland, Deutschlands Ja für den Frieden, p. 72
[18] Ibid., p. 74
[19] Ibid., pp. 70-71
[20] Freytag-Loringhoven, Freiherr von, Deutschlands Aussenpolitik, p. 23
[21] Tansill, Charles, Die Hintertür zum Kriege, p. 30
[22] Schultze-Rhonhof, Gerd, Der Krieg, der viele Väter hatte, p. 267
[23] Bömer, Karl, Das Dritte Reich im Spiegel der Weltpresse, p. 122
[24] Schoenfelder, Roland, Deutschlands Ja für den Frieden, pp. 7, 8
[25] Reipert, Fritz, Was will Frankreich?, p. 41
[26] Meiser, Hans, Das Ringen um Frankreich, pp. 118-119
[27] Schultze-Rhonhof, Gerd, Der Krieg, der viele Väter hatte, p. 268
[28] Meiser, Hans, Das Ringen um Frankreich, p. 27
[29] Kern, Erich, Adolf Hitler und das Dritte Reich, p. 184
[30] Ibid., pp. 190-191
[31] Ibid.
[32] Meiser, Hans, Das Ringen um Frankreich, p. 134
[33] Ibid., p. 131
[34] Kern, Erich, Adolf Hitler und das Dritte Reich, p. 204
[35] Schultze-Rhonhof, Gerd, Der Krieg, der viele Väter hatte, p. 99
[36] Ibid., p. 102
[37] Meiser, Hans, Das Ringen um Frankreich, p. 137
[38] Stieve, Friedrich, What the World Rejected, pp. 6-7
[39] Schultze-Rhonhof, Gerd, Der Krieg, der viele Väter hatte, p. 104
[40] Meiser, Hans, Das Ringen um Frankreich, p. 140
[41] Ibid., p. 155
[42] Hitler, Adolf, Rede des Führers und Reichskanzlers Adolf Hitler vor dem Reichstag am 28. April 1939, p. 5-6
[43] Benns, F. Lee, European History since 1870, p. 499
[44] Schultze-Rhonhof, Gerd, Der Krieg, der viele Väter hatte, p. 112
[45] Post, Walter, Die Ursachen des Zweiten Weltkrieges, p. 202
[46] Ibid., p. 209
[47] Schultze-Rhonhof, Gerd, Der Krieg, der viele Väter hatte, p. 116
[48] Ibid., p. 118
[49] Preradovich, Nikolaus, Grossdeutschland 1938, p. 370
[50] Post, Walter, Die Ursachen des Zweiten Weltkrieges, pp. 207-208
[51] Preradovich, Nikolaus, Grossdeutschland 1938, p. 371
[52] Ibid., p. 372
[53] Post, Walter, Die Ursachen des Zweiten Weltkrieges, p. 208
[54] Ibid., p. 207
[55] Klüver, Max, War es Hitlers Krieg?, p. 51
[56] Post, Walter, Die Ursachen des Zweiten Weltkrieges, p. 213
[57] Schultze-Rhonhof, Gerd, Der Krieg, der viele Väter hatte, p. 119
[58] Klüver, Max, War es Hitlers Krieg?, pp. 60-61
[59] Ibid., p. 59
[60] BD Second Series, XIX No. 506
[61] Post, Walter, Die Ursachen des Zweiten Weltkrieges, p. 215
[62] Taylor, A.J.P., The Origins of the Second World War, p. 144
[63] Klüver, Max, War es Hitlers Krieg?, p. 62
[64] Post, Walter, Die Ursachen des Zweiten Weltkrieges, p. 219
[65] Klüver, Max, War es Hitlers Krieg?, pp. 67, 379
[66] Ibid., p. 66
[67] Ibid., p. 68
[68] Post, Walter, Die Ursachen des Zweiten Weltkrieges, p. 222
[69] Schultze-Rhonhof, Gerd, Der Krieg, der viele Väter hatte, p. 127
[70] Schütter, Fritz, Wir woll’n das Wort nicht brechen, p. 93
[71] Ibid., p. 92
[72] Post, Walter, Die Ursachen des Zweiten Weltkrieges, p. 217
[73] Freytag-Loringhoven, Freiherr von, Deutschlands Aussenpolitik, p. 147
[74] Schultze-Rhonhof, Gerd, Das tschechisch-deutsche Drama, p. 61
[75] Kunert, Dirk, Hitlers kalter Krieg, p. 285
[76] Schultze-Rhonhof, Gerd, Das tschechisch-deutsche Drama, p. 52
[77] Ibid., p. 61
[78] Ibid., pp. 140, 186
[79] Ibid., pp. 108, 123
[80] Ibid., p. 124
[81] Klüver, Max, War es Hitlers Krieg?, p. 80
[82] Schultze-Rhonhof, Gerd, Das tschechisch-deutsche Drama, p. 169
[83] Ibid., p. 60
[84] Ibid., p. 89
[85] Ibid., pp. 115, 119, 120, 147
[86] Ibid., pp. 166, 154
[87] Domarus, Max, Hitler: Reden und Proklamationen, p. 802
[88] Kunert, Dirk, Hitlers kalter Krieg, p. 280
[89] Kunert, Dirk, Ein Weltkrieg wird programmiert, p. 126
[90] Schultze-Rhonhof, Gerd, Das tschechisch-deutsche Drama, p. 154
[91] Kunert, Dirk, Hitlers kalter Krieg, p. 289
[92] Schultze-Rhonhof, Gerd, Das tschechisch-deutsche Drama, p. 190
[93] BD I, Third Series, 86
[94] Schultze-Rhonhof, Gerd, Das tschechisch-deutsche Drama, p. 206
[95] Klüver, Max, War es Hitlers Krieg?, p. 76
[96] PRO FO 371/20375 C 5216
[97] BD I, Third Series, 86
[98] PRO CAB 27/623
[99] PRO CAB 23/93 cab 21138
[100] Schultze-Rhonhof, Gerd, Das tschechisch-deutsche Drama, p. 227
[101] Schultze-Rhonhof, Gerd, Der Krieg, der viele Väter hatte, p. 159
[102] Henderson, Nevile, Failure of a Mission, p. 137
[103] Post, Walter, Die Ursachen des Zweiten Weltkrieges, p. 237
[104] Klüver, Max, War es Hitlers Krieg?, p. 93
[105] Henderson, Nevile, Failure of a Mission, p. 142
[106] Klüver, Max, War es Hitlers Krieg?, pp. 96-97
[107] BD II, Third Series, 665
[108] Henderson, Nevile, Failure of a Mission, p. 142
[109] Hitler, Adolf, Reden des Führers am Parteitag Grossdeutschland, pp. 77-78
[110] Henderson, Nevile, Failure of a Mission, p. 131
[111] BD II, Third Series, 8
[112] Klüver, Max, War es Hitlers Krieg?, p. 107
[113] Schultze-Rhonhof, Gerd, Das tschechisch-deutsche Drama, p. 260
[114] Meiser, Hans, Das Ringen um Frankreich, p. 171
[115] Schultze-Rhonhof, Gerd, Der Krieg, der viele Väter hatte, p. 173
[116] BD II, Third Series, 1038
[117] Meiser, Hans, Das Ringen um Frankreich, p. 166
[118] Post, Walter, Die Ursachen des Zweiten Weltkrieges, p. 262
[119] Klüver, Max, War es Hitlers Krieg?, p. 119
[120] Schultze-Rhonhof, Gerd, Das tschechisch-deutsche Drama, p. 275
[121] Klüver, Max, War es Hitlers Krieg?, p. 122
[122] Schultze-Rhonhof, Gerd, Das tschechisch-deutsche Drama, p. 280
[123] Ibid., p. 297
[124] Meiser, Hans, Das Ringen um Frankreich, p. 184
[125] Klüver, Max, War es Hitlers Krieg?, p. 160
[126] Schultze-Rhonhof, Gerd, Das tschechisch-deutsche Drama, pp. 313-315, 304
[127]  Ibid., p. 334
[128] Klüver, Max, War es Hitlers Krieg?, p. 162
[129] Post, Walter, Die Ursachen des Zweiten Weltkrieges, p. 304
[130] Schultze-Rhonhof, Gerd, Das tschechisch-deutsche Drama, p. 129
[131] Klüver, Max, War es Hitlers Krieg?, p. 161
[132] Schultze-Rhonhof, Gerd, Das tschechisch-deutsche Drama, p. 340
[133] Ibid., p. 342
[134] Hoggan, David, The Forced War, p. 248
[135] Umbreit, Hans, Deutsche Militärverwaltungen 1938-1939, pp. 59, 56, 54
[136] Hoggan, David, The Forced War, p. 251
[137] Schultze-Rhonhof, Gerd, Das tschechisch-deutsche Drama, p. 344
[138] Ibid.
[139] Umbreit, Hans, Deutsche Militärverwaltungen 1938-1939, p. 55
[140] Kunert, Dirk, Ein Weltkrieg wird programmiert, p. 242
[141] Ruhnau, Rudiger, Die freie Stadt Danzig, p. 9
[142] Bainville, Jacques, Frankreichs Kriegsziel, p. 53
[143] Watt, Richard, Bitter Glory, pp. 93, 99
[144] Venner, Dominique, Söldner ohne Sold, p. 217
[145] Oertzen, F.W., Die deutschen Freikorps, p. 132
[146] Watt, Richard, Bitter Glory, p. 158
[147] Venner, Dominique, Söldner ohne Sold, p. 222
[148] Der Tod sprach polnisch, p. 9
[149] Karski, Jan, The Great Powers and Poland, p. 84
[150] Schultze-Rhonhof, Gerd, Der Krieg, der viele Väter hatte, p. 401
[151] Elble, Rolf, Die Schlacht an der Bzura, p. 41
[152] Preradovich, Nikolaus, Deutschland und Polen, p. 20
[153] Karski, Jan, The Great Powers and Poland, p. 147
[154] Schultze-Rhonhof, Gerd, Der Krieg, der viele Väter hatte, p. 405
[155] Schoenfelder, Roland, Deutschlands Ja für den Frieden, pp. 67-68
[156] Tansill, Charles, Die Hintertür zum Kriege, p. 178
[157] Preradovich, Nikolaus, Deutschland und Polen, p. 30
[158] Ibid.
[159] Ibid.
[160] Ibid., p. 31
[161] Schultze-Rhonhof, Gerd, Der Krieg, der viele Väter hatte, pp. 376-377
[162] Klüver, Max, Die Kriegstreiber, p. 115
[163] Schultze-Rhonhof, Gerd, Der Krieg, der viele Väter hatte, p. 399
[164] Klüver, Max, Es war nicht Hitlers Krieg, p. 8
[165] Klüver, Max, Die Kriegstreiber, p. 246
[166] Klüver, Max, War es Hitlers Krieg?, p. 176
[167] Klüver, Max, Die Kriegstreiber, p. 131
[168] Ibid., p. 397
[169] Schultze-Rhonhof, Gerd, Der Krieg, der viele Väter hatte, p. 221
[170] Ibid., p. 420
[171] Karski, Jan, The Great Powers and Poland, p. 247
[172] Klüver, Max, Es war nicht Hitlers Krieg, p. 11
[173] Schultze-Rhonhof, Gerd, Der Krieg, der viele Väter hatte, p. 423
[174] Ibid., p. 422
[175] Karski, Jan, The Great Powers and Poland, p. 268
[176] Ruhnau, Rudiger, Die freie Stadt Danzig, p. 163
[177] Hitler, Adolf, Rede des Führers und Reichskanzlers am 28. April 1939, pp. 36-37
[178] Preradovich, Nikolaus, Deutschland und Polen, p. 44
[179] Wellems, Hugo, Das Jahrhundert der Lüge, p. 117
[180] Preradovich, Nikolaus, Deutschland und Polen, p. 45
[181] Der Tod sprach polnisch, pp. 18, 23
[182] Schultze-Rhonhof, Gerd, Der Krieg, der viele Väter hatte, p. 426
[183] Klüver, Max, Es war nicht Hitlers Krieg, pp. 53-54
[184] Klüver, Max, Die Kriegstreiber, p. 193
[185] Ibid., p. 404
[186] Kern, Erich, Adolf Hitler und das Dritte Reich, p. 365
[187] Piekalkiewicz, Janusz, Polenfeldzug, p. 44
[188] Klüver, Max, Die Kriegstreiber, p. 194
[189] Wellems, Hugo, Das Jahrhundert der Lüge, p. 119
[190] Ibid., pp. 122, 119
[191] Klüver, Max, War es Hitlers Krieg?, p. 251
[192] Ibid., p. 271, 273
[193] Ruhnau, Rudiger, Die freie Stadt Danzig, p. 76
[194] Ibid., p. 318
[195] Hoggan, David, The Forced War, p. 413
[196] Klüver, Max, Die Kriegstreiber, p. 324
[197] Preradovich, Nikolaus, Deutschland und Polen, p. 210
[198] Klüver, Max, War es Hitlers Krieg?, p. 277
[199] Schultze-Rhonhof, Gerd, Der Krieg, der viele Väter hatte, p. 476
[200] Klüver, Max, War es Hitlers Krieg?, p. 258
[201] Klüver, Max, Die Kriegstreiber, p. 333
[202] BD VII, Third Series, 4
[203] Preradovich, Nikolaus, Deutschland und Polen, p. 211
[204] Schultze-Rhonhof, Gerd, Der Krieg, der viele Väter hatte, p. 442
[205] Sudholt, Gerd, So war der Zweite Weltkrieg 1939, p. 57
[206] Klüver, Max, War es Hitlers Krieg?, p. 319
[207] Preradovich, Nikolaus, Deutschland und Polen, p. 212
[208] Klüver, Max, War es Hitlers Krieg?, p. 320
[209] Schultze-Rhonhof, Gerd, Der Krieg, der viele Väter hatte, p. 500
[210] Sturm, Gero, Mit Goldener Nahkampfspange, p. 20
[211] Schultze-Rhonhof, Gerd, Der Krieg, der viele Väter hatte, pp. 505, 506
[212] Ibid., pp. 513-514
[213] Meiser, Hans, Gescheiterte Friedens-Initiativen 1939-1945, p. 32
[214] Klüver, Max, War es Hitlers Krieg?, pp. 361-362, 305
[215] Meiser, Hans, Gescheiterte Friedens-Initiativen 1939-1945, p. 33
[216] Ibid.
[217] Schultze-Rhonhof, Gerd, Der Krieg, der viele Väter hatte, p. 527
[218] PRO FO 371/22979 C 12480
[219] Post, Walter, Die Ursachen des Zweiten Weltkrieges, p. 423
[220] Freytag-Loringhoven, Freiherrn von, Deutschlands Aussenpolitik, p. 234
[221] Danco, Walter, Der Weltveränderer, p. 200
[222] Freytag-Loringhoven, Freiherrn von, Deutschlands Aussenpolitik, p. 233
[223] Domarus, Max, Hitler: Reden und Proklamationen, p. 1275
[224] Giesler, Hermann, Ein anderer Hitler, p. 366
[225] Klüver, Max, War es Hitlers Krieg?, p. 345
[226] Klüver, Max, Die Kriegstreiber, p. 414