Europe in the Vise

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Balance of Power

The only Great Power to initially protect Germany from the harsher consequences of the Versailles Treaty, Britain ironically became Hitler’s primary obstacle in negotiating its revision. This reversal actually conformed to a British policy known as the “balance of power.” England traditionally supported Europe’s weaker states to prevent any one country from becoming too powerful and imposing her will on her neighbors. When the Reich was down-and-out after World War I, the British favored its recovery, but as German prosperity improved under Hitler, English support declined.

Das ist England (That’s England), a set of essays the NSDAP published in 1941, pointed out that

“England no longer regards herself as a member bound by fate to the European community, but as the motherland of an overseas colonial empire.”

A separate German study maintained that English diplomacy strives for

“a balance of power among the nations and states of the mainland, but not to create tranquility, security, living space and peace for them. On the contrary, it is purely to square them off against one another in as equal, long and lingering a struggle as possible. England wants to weaken the states of the European mainland. Without the major wars of the last few centuries and without continuous interference from England, the European states would undoubtedly have consolidated sooner and England would not have been able to build her own empire so undisturbed.” [2]

Das ist England summarized that, for the English, “it was never a matter of protecting the weak, but always of securing their own power.” [3]

The British opposed awarding German territory to Poland in 1919. Their disapproval of France’s military occupation of the Ruhr in 1923 discouraged the French from joining with Pilsudski to attack Germany. Many prominent Englishmen, among them the editorial staff of the London Times, supported the Reich’s right to rearm. The Daily Express argued that Germany only wanted parity, but France wanted superiority.[4]

Once chancellor, Hitler hoped to nurture good relations with England. In January 1934, the German army returned seven drums of the Gordon Highlanders which the Germans had captured in Belgium in 1914. At a ceremony in the Berlin War Ministry, the Germans presented the former trophies to General Ian Hamilton to restore them to their regiment in Scotland. Hitler also concluded the Anglo-German Naval Agreement in June 1935, which imposed restrictions on German rearmament but not on England’s.[5]

Hitler additionally gave a conciliatory interview to Ward Price, the European correspondent of the Daily Mail:

“On August 4, 1914, I was very distressed that the two great Germanic peoples, who had lived at peace with one another throughout all the disputes and fluctuations in human history for so many centuries, were drawn into war. I would be pleased if this poisonous atmosphere would finally come to an end and the two related nations could rediscover their old friendship. The assertion that the German people are enthusiastically preparing for war is for us a simply incomprehensible misinterpretation of the German revolution. We leaders of the German nation had almost without exception served as frontline soldiers. I should like to see the frontline soldier who wants to prepare for another war.”[6]

The Reich’s economic revival and development of overseas markets for manufactured goods created competition for England abroad. Hitler’s emphasis on German autarky and opposition to free trade, the system of unlimited international exchange of wares promoted by Britain, deepened the rivalry. The Führer’s persistent disarmament proposals and endeavors to improve relations with neighboring states provided a basis for a continental unity that was contradictory to English balance-of-power diplomacy.

No less repugnant to Britain was the state form and social structure evolving within Germany. The fall of the Hohenzollern and Hapsburg dynasties in 1918 had substantially diminished the influence of the German aristocracy. The National Socialists were replacing it with a leadership cadre based on talent and initiative rather than on wealth and social status. The British ruling class intuitively sensed the danger such a revolution, if successful, posed for its own privileged position. German programs to improve the well-being of labor were unprecedented in the British Commonwealth. The German example evoked the specter of English workers demanding disability benefits, safer on-the-job conditions, state-sponsored holidays for their families and better housing.

One German journalist wrote this on the subject:

“Just when the vacation cruises were about to begin, a representative of the British consul general arrived at the Hamburg office of the Strength through Joy organization. He asked whether there were any plans to have German workers’ vacation ships put in at English ports. He was instructed to advise us that the British government regards putting in at English harbors, or even cruising within sight of the English coast, unwelcome.”[7]

As a champion of liberal democracy, England took umbrage at the German socialist principle of subordinating the rights of the individual to the welfare of the community. English labor objected to the well-publicized dissolution of Germany’s trade unions, unaware that protection of the worker was nevertheless a primary thrust of Hitler’s chancellorship. Germans who had chosen exile in England influenced British public opinion against the Reich with stories of oppression under National-Socialist rule. They received ample coverage in the English media.

By 1936, relations between the two countries had approached genuine antagonism. Germany’s flourishing economy continually increased her leverage in European trade. Rearmament had strengthened Hitler’s hand in diplomacy, and the remilitarization of the Rhineland had demonstrated France’s inability to check Germany. Furthermore, the Führer supported Italy’s conquest of Ethiopia despite the League of Nations’ opposition. England’s foreign secretary, Anthony Eden, added to the mix a questionnaire sent in March to Berlin that the Germans considered an affront. It asked whether Germany was ready to conclude “sincere” treaties she would adhere to.[8]

Hitler appointed Ribbentrop ambassador to Britain in August. His primary mission was to win the English for the Anti-Comintern. Arriving in London in October, Ribbentrop declared that he had come to warn his host nation of the dangers of Bolshevism and to negotiate an alliance against the Soviet Union. Eden put such notions to rest. In a speech at Leamington on November 20, he announced that a lasting arrangement with Germany could only be realized within the framework of the British-sponsored “general settlement” in Europe. Hitler understood this as a “slightly revised edition” of the Versailles construction.[9]

Winston Churchill, a career politician who had held various administrative posts over previous decades, was already vocalizing the anti-German sentiments that earned him and his devotees the nickname “war party” in Hitler’s vocabulary. Exaggerating the strength of Germany’s “terrible war machine,” he predicted that her demands for a free hand in Eastern and Southern Europe and for the return of her colonies may lead to war. An editorial in the periodical Deutsche diplomatisch-politische Korrespondenz (German Diplomatic-Political Correspondence) gives insight into the impasse in Anglo-German relations:

“The Churchill cabal misrepresents any removal of or attempt to remove a sore spot by Germany as really preparations for implementing belligerent intentions somewhere else, therefore evidence of a ‘German threat.’ If this method of misrepresentation becomes common practice, all trust will vanish and the incentive for any sort of international cooperation will be lost.”[10]

Mutual mud-slinging by newspapers in Germany and England continued into 1937. From London, Ribbentrop cautioned the Führer that the war of words “is spoiling every hope of peace and promoting hatred in both countries.”[11] Hitler, unwilling to leave the “bottomless effrontery” of the English media unanswered, ordered German journalists to resume discussing the previously blacked-out subject of the Reich’s stolen colonies. This would unsettle the English, who had acquired three quarters of Germany’s African territory after World War I.[12] Britain introduced a massive rearmament program early in 1937 to triple military capabilities. Hitler commented that he had expected “nothing less.”[13]

Hitler temporarily halted the anti-English press campaign in November 1937. This was to establish a more congenial atmosphere before the visit of the British statesman Lord Halifax. At the Berghof, Halifax told Hitler he had come to discuss major differences between London and Berlin. The Führer replied only that he was unaware of such differences. His visitor cited National Socialism’s antagonism toward the church. Hitler parried that the USSR pursues far more repressive measures against religious institutions, without any objection from England. Halifax changed the subject to Austria, Czechoslovakia, and Danzig. He advised his host that any change in their status must be accomplished peacefully. Hitler merely replied that these issues have nothing to do with London’s interests.

Halifax inquired about Germany’s colonial aspirations, suggesting that Britain might be prepared to offer certain Portuguese territories in Africa. Hitler tactfully reminded him that Germany was only interested in the colonies taken away at Versailles. The Führer further recommended that England adopt a neutral position regarding territorial revisions in Europe, instead of “creating difficulties for no reason at all beyond pure malice.”[14] The British envoy returned to London without having mended any fences.

In May 1937, Chamberlain became Britain’s prime minister. An advocate of rearmament, he was a disciple of traditional balance-of-power diplomacy. He described Germany as “the chief cause of war scares in Europe.”[15] At this time, Commonwealth nations helped determine British policy. The government could no longer make arbitrary decisions affecting the Empire without mutual consultation. Canada, Australia, New Zealand, and South Africa considered the maritime powers Japan and Italy greater threats to their interests than Germany. At the Empire Conference in July 1937, the dominions urged London to assist Hitler in revising the Versailles system. They warned England not to count on their assistance should she enter into an armed conflict in Europe. South African Prime Minister Jan Smuts had already recommended that the British government stop treating Germany “like a pariah in Europe.”[16]

Chamberlain faced a dilemma: To enforce the provisions of the Versailles Treaty, which the English themselves compromised by concluding the 1935 Anglo-German Naval Agreement, could bring Britain and Germany to blows. Such a policy would disregard the temperate influence of the Dominions and adversely affect the cohesion of the Commonwealth. On the other hand, to allow Hitler a free hand would lead to German hegemony in Europe and upset the balance of power.

The formula for defeating German ambitions while simultaneously bringing the British Commonwealth, and for that matter the English public, aboard was as follows: block revisions most vital to Germany, yet feign a willingness to make concessions. Superficial compromises would publicly demonstrate Chamberlain’s desire for peace, thereby defusing German propaganda. Halifax’s 1937 mission to Germany helped satisfy the dominions that Britain was willing to negotiate. Chamberlain privately confided to the American Henry Morgenthau that he needed to buy time to achieve “military superiority.”[17]

During the Czech crisis in 1938, many British believed that Hitler was prepared to go to war to settle his differences with Prague. Chamberlain told Daladier in April that Britain’s arms program, somewhat neglected from 1925 to 1935, was just getting under way again. Only when this program was complete, he explained, could England wage war anew.[18] In July, Chamberlain asked Arthur Robinson of the Supply Board when their country would be in a position to fight the Germans. Robinson answered, “In a year.”[19] As England’s former treasurer, Chamberlain knew well that an accelerated rearmament agendum would adversely impact English exports and unduly strain the economy.[20] Regarding Czechoslovakia, war was therefore not an option.

Chamberlain remained influential in continental affairs by sending Viscount Walter Runciman to Prague on August 3 to help mediate the crisis. French and Czech observers were skeptical. The French diplomat René Massigili told the Czechoslovakian ambassador in Paris, Štefan Osuský, that the English

“know it will come down to war and are trying everything to delay it… Gaining time plays a significant if not decisive role in sending Lord Runciman to Prague. Sir Arthur Street (undersecretary in the British Air Ministry), who has been assigned a leading role in realizing the objectives of the air ministry, said he will have the English air force ready in six months.”[21]

Negotiating the Sudetenland’s transfer to Germany during talks with Hitler in September, Chamberlain suffered the rebuke of political rivals in his own country. His primary critics, Churchill and Eden, lacked detailed knowledge of Britain’s military unpreparedness available to the prime minister. Chamberlain had in fact postponed a war England could not yet fight. He gained the approval of the English public, the dominions, and even the people of Germany for his efforts to sustain peace. Furthermore, he parried German propaganda’s charge that Britain was attempting to encircle Germany with enemies.[22]

One who saw rearmament as a factor was Charles Corbin, the French ambassador in London. He wrote Paris that the British wish

“to avoid at all costs the reproach that in case a conflict breaks out and England becomes compelled to declare herself against Germany, she had not done everything to allay the fear of encirclement which Hitler has so often emphasized in the course of the last few months. Only in this way does she expect to gain the unanimous acceptance of the British public, which is indispensable for mobilizing all forces of the country.”[23]

Less than a week after signing the Munich Accord, Chamberlain announced an increase in armaments spending from £400 million to £800 million per annum, the planned construction of 11,000 new combat aircraft over the next 14 months, and the formation of 19 more army divisions.[24] This must have been welcome news to Britain’s foreign secretary. According to the minutes of the September 25, 1938, cabinet session, Lord Halifax “felt some uncertainty about the ultimate end which he wished to see accomplished, namely the destruction of Nazism.” Halifax also speculated that if Hitler “was driven to war the result might be to help bring down the Nazi regime.”[25]

The anti-German tenor of the British press did not abate. The parliamentary war party placed increasing pressure on Chamberlain. The German media was not shy in response. It quoted the New York Times of May 9, 1938, reporting on a speech by Churchill in Manchester:

“Churchill proposes encircling Germany.”[26]

According to German journalist Dr. Otto Kriegk, the British believed that

“without a two-front war against Germany … a war is not winnable for England.”[27]

Anglo-French newspapers repeatedly censured Hitler for alleged war scares. The English also provided some of their own. On December 6, 1938, their deputy ambassador in Berlin, Sir Ivone Kirkpatrick, warned the British Foreign Office that the German air force is preparing to bomb London. A German staff officer supposedly leaked Hitler’s secret plan to a member of the British mission in a Berlin park after dark.[28] No such operation was in fact even contemplated, nor was the Luftwaffe yet equipped for one. This air strike, the British reasoned, would be a prelude to a German invasion of Holland. Although there was no tangible evidence of this impending attack, the Foreign Policy Committee and the English chiefs of staff conducted serious deliberations regarding countermeasures. Halifax notified British embassies abroad that the Foreign Office has “definite information” substantiating Kirkpatrick’s story.[29]

The cabinet met on February 1, 1939. Chamberlain stirred Switzerland into the pot, remarking that a German invasion there “would be clear evidence of an attempt to dominate Europe by force.”[30] The cabinet discussed planning a war against Germany and Italy, even though the two countries were not yet allies. Topics included involving the Dutch and Belgian General Staffs in joint defense talks. Cadogan summarized in the meeting’s minutes:

“I agree that in the event of a German invasion of Holland resisted by the Dutch, we should go to war with Germany. There could appear some doubt about the position in the event the Dutch not resisting. For my part, I should say that in this case too we should go to war with Germany.”[31]

The attitude of the “threatened” nation apparently played no role. Decisive was the fact that the Foreign Policy Committee defined German military control over Holland as a peril to England’s security.

Kirkpatrick’s “Holland scare” did not alarm the Dutch and Belgian governments. Holland’s foreign minister noted no German troop movements near the frontier. His Belgian colleague declined London’s offer for military talks, replying that he cannot believe the Germans intend to invade Holland.[32] Chamberlain exploited the rumors of a German attack to step up arms production. The English significantly reinforced their air defenses. That the British government and normally well-informed Foreign Office could base allegations of such far-reaching war preparations on Kirkpatrick’s insubstantial story, suggests that Hitler was offering little in the way of genuine, exploitable war scares to publicly justify such measures.

In March, Berlin negotiated a commercial agreement with Bucharest. In exchange for favorable options to purchase grain and oil, the Germans proposed sending engineers to Romania to reorganize the agrarian economy and build modern refineries to boost oil production. The arrangement was advantageous to both countries. It corresponded to Hitler’s program to release Germany from dependency on overseas markets. He himself stated:

“I don’t want free trade, open borders. That all sounds wonderful. But we’ve had it if everything depends on the queen of the waves, if we’re subject to a blockade. Then it’s my duty to create the prerequisites for my people to provide their own nourishment. That’s the real issue.”[33]

Chamberlain’s cabinet discussed developments in Bucharest at the session on March 18, 1939. The prime minister described Germany’s economic talks as a “threat to Romanian independence.” [34] With military advisors present, the cabinet speculated that German domination of Romanian trade would augment the Reich’s political influence in the Balkans. This could spread to Greece and Turkey, endangering Britain’s position in the eastern Mediterranean and Near East. Under these circumstances, the cabinet had to decide whether Germany’s economic advantages from the trade agreement with Bucharest produce any need for Britain to “take action.”[35] The aide-mémoire prepared for the meeting by the minister for coordination and defence stated that England’s only recourse was to start a war in the West. The cabinet weighed armed aggression as an option to block a harmless economic compact between two European states.

The London Times and Daily Telegraph wrote only of imminent German aggression. This coincided with allegations by Virgil Tilea, a Romanian diplomat in London. He claimed that the Germans were threatening to invade his country unless given complete control over her agriculture and industry.[36] The British ambassador in Bucharest, Reginald Hoare, urged Halifax to quash the lurid publicity about Hitler’s ultimatum:

“There was not a word of truth in it.”

Hoare added that the Romanian foreign minister, Grigorie Gafencu, assured him that negotiations with Germany were “on completely normal lines as between equals.”[37] Chamberlain read Hoare’s telegram aloud at the March 18 cabinet session. This report, together with the fact that Romania is nearly 300 miles from Germany, did not discourage him from telling the Foreign Policy Committee that Romania is “most probably the next victim of a German aggression.”[38] The American emissary in Bucharest, Franklin Gunther, dismissed Tilea as an “Anglophile.” In his diary, Cadogan ventured that Tilea probably collaborated with advisors in the British Foreign Office to ensure that “panic was artificially raised.”[39]

That same week, Czechoslovakia imploded and the German army occupied the Czech portion. The British initially reacted with indifference; Ambassador Newton in Prague had forewarned them of the irreconcilable Slovak-Czech dissonance.[40] The Foreign Office had also predicted eventual German “domination” of Prague.[41] On March 15, Halifax notified Ribbentrop that

“His Majesty’s Government have no desire to interfere in a matter with which other governments may be more directly concerned.”[42]

At the cabinet session in London that day, ministers agreed that

“this renewed rift between the Czechs and the Slovaks showed that we nearly went to war last autumn on behalf of a state which was not viable.”[43]

Ribbentrop correctly observed that German military intervention in Prague offered England a credible alibi for war preparations. Speaking in Birmingham just two days later, Chamberlain asked:

“Is this in fact a step in the direction of an attempt to dominate the world by force?”[44]

Though informed of the genuine causes of Czechoslovakia’s collapse, Halifax attributed it solely to “German military action.”[45] Even though the Bank of England remitted £6,000,000 in Czech gold reserves to the German administration in Prague,[46] Halifax condemned its new administration as “devoid of any basis of legality” – an indication of the legitimacy English leaders still attached to the Versailles system.[47]

Chamberlain accused Hitler of a “breach of faith.” The prime minister cited the document both statesmen had signed in Munich on September 30, 1938, pledging to discuss matters of mutual concern before taking action, and the Führer’s assurance that the Sudetenland was his last territorial demand in Europe. Hitler had supposedly broken his word, since he had promised in a Berlin speech last September 26 that he had no further interest in the Czech state after Munich. The September 30 document Chamberlain referred to reads:

“We are resolved that the method of consultation shall be the method adopted to deal with any other questions that may concern our two countries.”[48]

The German text of the agreement translates to the verb betreffen – “affect” – for the English word “concern.” From Hitler’s standpoint, his arrangement with Hacha did not affect England, hence no consultation was required.

As for the Berlin speech, Hitler said word for word:

“I further assured him that from the moment that Czechoslovakia resolves her problems; that means, when the Czechs have come to an arrangement with their other minorities peacefully and without using force, then I am no longer interested in the Czech state. And I for my part will guarantee it.”[49]

Hitler made his disinterest in the Czechs and guarantee of their sovereignty contingent on the solution of the country’s minority issues. He in no sense broke his word to Chamberlain. As for the British government’s true (and unpublicized) reaction to the events in Prague, Halifax confided to the cabinet:

“It had brought to a natural end the somewhat embarrassing commitment of a guarantee in which we and the French had both been involved.”[50]

During the March 18 cabinet meeting, Chamberlain’s ministers agreed that it would not be possible to protect Romania without an ally in the East. With the Czechs neutralized, the prime minister saw Poland as “the key to the situation.”[51] He proposed asking the Poles whether they were prepared to join ranks with the countries “threatened by German aggression.”[52] The minutes of the meeting two days later reveal the extent of the cabinet’s trifling concern for Polish independence:

“The real issue was if Germany showed signs that she intended to proceed with her march for world domination, we must take steps to stop her by attacking her on two fronts. We should attack Germany not in order to save a particular victim but in order to pull down the bully.”[53]

On March 24, the day the Germans signed the trade agreement with Romania, Halifax met with U.S. Ambassador Joseph Kennedy. Kennedy reported to the State Department that Halifax “felt the inevitability of war sooner or later should be met right now.”[54]

With no evidence whatsoever, Halifax told the cabinet on March 30 that “plans have been prepared by Germany for a number of adventures including an attack on Poland.”[55] At this time, Hitler strove for a peaceful settlement, offering the Poles generous concessions in exchange for Danzig’s return to the Reich and permission to construct an Autobahn across the corridor. Chamberlain said he was “somewhat uneasy at the fact that our ambassador in Warsaw could obtain no information as to the progress of the negotiations between Germany and Poland. One possible, but very distasteful, explanation of this was that Polish negotiators were in fact giving way to Germany”[56] (in other words, becoming receptive to compromise).

Chamberlain stated that if the Poles consider the Danzig issue “a threat to their independence and were prepared to resist by force then we should have to come to their help.” Asked whether there was “a distinction between the seizure of Danzig by Germany and a German attack on the rest of Poland,” Halifax told the chancellor of the Exchequer that it was up to the Poles to decide.[57] First clearing it with Polish Foreign Minister Beck, Chamberlain announced Britain’s commitment to Poland in Parliament the next day. London’s guarantee of Polish sovereignty, differing little from a military alliance, drew Warsaw into the British camp just as German-Polish negotiations were entering the critical phase.

The British government publicly defined the purpose of its guarantee as to protect Poland from possible German aggression. Privately, the Foreign Office cabled its Paris ambassador on April 1 that there is “no official confirmation of the rumors of any projected attack on Poland and they must not therefore be taken as accepting them as true.”[58] The English invited Beck to London for discussions.

On April 3, the Foreign Office distributed its confidential “Brief for Colonel Beck’s Visit.” It defined objectives for the next day’s talks. It described Danzig as “an artificial structure, the maintenance of which is a bad casus belli.” The brief speculated that “it is unlikely that the Germans would accept less than a total solution of the Danzig question.” The text then reveals the true priority of the Foreign Office:

“Such a corrupt bargain would, however, have many disadvantages for England. It would shake Polish morale, increase their vulnerability to German penetration and so defeat the policy of forming a bloc against German expansion. It should not therefore be to our interest to suggest that the Poles abandon their rights in Danzig on the ground that they are not defensible.”[59]

Beck took the bait. As William Strang of the Foreign Office summarized:

“Both sides agreed that the occupation of Danzig by German armed forces would be a clear threat to Polish independence and that it would bring our assurance into operation.”[60]

On April 17, Sir George Ogilvie-Forbes relayed from Berlin a conversation he had with a Polish journalist acquainted with Poland’s Ambassador Lipski. The journalist told the British diplomat that according to Lipski, good prospects for resolving the Danzig issue had existed prior to March 31. With the English guarantee however, Beck had decided to reject Berlin’s offer even if the Germans limit it to Danzig. Ogilvie-Forbes added that information from other emissaries in Berlin confirmed the journalist’s statement.[61]

Representatives of the French and the British General Staffs met for a ten-day conference in London on April 24. They debated Anglo-French military cooperation in North African and Far Eastern colonies, along sea lanes and in Gibraltar, Singapore, and other strong-points against Germany, Italy and Japan. The publicly announced purpose of the conference, the defense of Poland, was not discussed.[62] For the English it was a matter of preparing a global confrontation against commercial rivals.

Throughout these months, Hitler strove to improve relations with London. In a nationally broadcast speech on January 30, 1939, he asked:

“What conflicts of interest exist between England and Germany? I have declared more often than necessary, that there is no German and especially no National Socialist who even in his thoughts wants to create difficulties for the English world empire… It would be a blessing for the whole world if these two peoples could cooperate in full confidence with one another.”[63]

After Chamberlain announced the British guarantee to Poland, Hitler recognized the influence Britain exercised on Warsaw’s refusal to compromise. He therefore appealed directly to the British to enter negotiations.

On March 31, a Mr. Bellenger, Member of Parliament (MP), asked Chamberlain in the House of Commons how the government planned to respond to Hitler’s appeal. The prime minister answered, “No negotiations are at present contemplated with the German government.” Another MP, Arthur Henderson, received the same reply. Pressed again about entering talks with Germany by the MP Mr. Pilkington, Chamberlain repeated the formula response and concluded, “I have nothing to add.”[64]

Halifax received an embassy report on April 23 that Hitler wished to meet with an “especially prominent British personality” fluent in German for a “man-to-man” conversation to reach an understanding with England. Two weeks later Sir Francis Freemantle, a renowned physician and conservative MP unaware of Hitler’s request, suggested sending the former prime minister, Stanley Baldwin, to meet with the Führer. Halifax replied to Freemantle:

“At the moment unfortunately Hitler shows no disposition to receive an Englishman or even to discuss outstanding questions with us.”[65]

This was a plain lie.

Paris and London concluded a military convention with Warsaw on May 19. The French pledged that should Germany invade Poland or “threaten” Danzig (which was still a German city), their air force would strike immediately, and their army would mount a limited attack three days after mobilization. A major offensive would follow in twelve days. General Gamelin privately cautioned the French defense committee that the army could not launch a full-scale operation for at least two years.[66] The British General Ironside noted in his diary:

“The French have lied to the Poles in saying they are going to attack. There is no idea of it.”

The British and French General Staffs had already agreed that the “major strategy would be defensive.”[67]

Nevile Henderson advised the Foreign Office in May that the “blank cheque given by His Majesty’s Government to Poland” is obstructing a “compromise solution” to Danzig.[68] William Strang noted in a memo:

“It is probably impossible at this hour for any British Cabinet Minister to take any step that would appear to be a satisfaction of German ambitions at the expense of Poland; on the other hand, such a step may be the only thing that can avert war. This is our terrible dilemma.”[69]

The English decided “to let the Poles play their own hand in this question,”[70] while acknowledging that this would probably bring Poland and Germany to blows, even though the cabinet had agreed in its May 25 session that

“German claims in Danzig did not go beyond what we ourselves had thought would constitute a reasonable settlement three years ago.”[71]

In June, Cadogan’s secretary Jebb returned from an official visit to Warsaw. He told the Foreign Office that were England “to wiggle out of the guarantee,” Poland would seriously revise its present position regarding Germany.[72] This was a tacit admission that the British guarantee was responsible for the Poles’ refusal to negotiate with Germany. On the 16th, the Foreign Office cabled Ambassador Kennard in Warsaw:

“You have the discretion to inform Colonel Beck if suitable opportunity offers that the preparatory measures we had in mind were progressive, mobilization measures of all three services.”[73]

Notifying Beck of the good progress of Britain’s war preparations could only reinforce his resolve to defy Germany.

The assistant undersecretary of the Foreign Office, Orme Sargent, speculated on July 4, 1939:

“We cannot as matters stand at present expect Hitler to negotiate with us unless in advance we make him a firm offer of one or other of the two things which he wants from us, i.e. either the return of full sovereignty of all the German colonies or their equivalent, or the abandonment of the policy of encirclement by cancelling our guarantees to Poland, Romania, and Turkey and by dropping our treaty with Russia.”[74]

As Strang summarized with resignation:

“The truth is that there is a fundamental irreconcilability between German and British policy.”[75]

“One’s objective should be… a war in which Germany’s aggressiveness should be patent to all the world including the Germans themselves.”[76]

These words, which Henderson cabled to the Foreign Office on May 12, 1939, define Britain’s propaganda goal for the approaching conflict. Denouncing Hitler for pushing toward war and lauding Chamberlain’s supposed endeavors to salvage peace, the British hoped to drive a wedge between the German people and their leadership. A Berlin journalist wrote:

“England’s proven policy toward Germany shuns no means to bring the Reich again into a state of impotence and international bondage. This is what England regards today as ideal for diffusing power in Europe.”[77]

For Henderson, the manner of presenting Britain’s case was crucial:

“If we are ever to get (the) German army and nation to revolt against the intolerable government of Herr Hitler.”[78]

The British continued to avoid direct conversations with Germany. In mid-August, the Foreign Office noted once more:

“Herr Hitler would like to have a secret conversation, presumably of a general character with a German-speaking Englishman.”[79]

Halifax wrote Chamberlain on August 14:

“We are considering the idea of getting someone who speaks German to go and talk to Hitler, but apart from the difficulty of finding the individual, I find it a bit difficult to imagine what he would say. In as much as Hitler’s whole line of thought seems to be the familiar one of the free land in the East on which he can settle Germans to grow wheat, I confess I don’t see any way of accommodating him.”[80]

Even for someone with as mediocre a public career as Lord Halifax, it seems unlikely that after four months, no one suitable could be found by the Foreign Office who speaks German, or that the foreign secretary could fail to grasp that the pivotal issue was not about raising crops. Britain’s senior career diplomat Leslie Burgin and General Edmund Ironside, whom Hitler had personally suggested, were both fluent in German. Also, Henderson and Kennard had been reporting to Halifax for months that Poland’s abuse of her ethnic German colony was the Reich’s primary complaint.

Henderson was among the few in the Foreign Office opposed to war. He endorsed on August 18 sending General Ironside to Hitler with a personal letter discussing the British position regarding Danzig and Poland. London rejected the idea: “In view of our undertaking to Poland it is almost inconceivable that we could give such a promise to Germany and the effect of such a promise on our negotiations with our actual and potential allies would be catastrophic.”[81]

On August 24, Henderson warned his superiors in London that there is “no longer any hope of avoiding war unless the Polish Ambassador is instructed to apply … for a personal interview with Hitler.”[82] At the cabinet session that day, the ministers agreed to take no steps to pressure Poland to negotiate with Germany.[83] Chamberlain was back in Parliament within hours, falsely maintaining that the Poles were “ready at any time to discuss the differences with Germany.”[84] Halifax contributed to the prime minister’s mendacity two days later, telling the Polish ambassador in London, Edward Raczynski:

“Hitler has not given the slightest indication of what he sees as the solution to the German-Polish problem.”[85]

In another effort to compromise with Britain, the Führer discussed proposals with Henderson at the Berghof on August 25. The same afternoon, London formally ratified its treaty with Poland. According to Dahlerus, the Swedish businessman helping mediate the crisis, the Germans regarded Britain’s pact “as a flagrant challenge and a clear statement that she does not want a peaceful resolution.”[86]

Publicly, Halifax claimed that his office was “ready to assist” in promoting direct conversations between Berlin and Poland. On August 28, he sent Kennard instructions to ask Beck whether he is ready to negotiate with Germany. Kennard was to reassure Beck that the British are not necessarily recommending a compromise, and still stand behind Poland.[87] In this way, Halifax publicly gave the impression that London and Warsaw were prepared to enter talks with the Germans to avoid an armed confrontation. In Berlin, Lipski had previously cabled Beck that

“Henderson told me, took the stand that we should abstain from any conversation with the Reich.”[88]

Without consulting England, the Polish government declared general mobilization on August 30. The British cautioned Warsaw that the measure will appear to the international community that Poland is set on war.[89] The Daily Telegraph pointed out that the Poles have not honored their expressed willingness to negotiate with Germany, but instead called up their armed reserves. The British government immediately confiscated the entire edition. The revised issue which hit the newsstands deleted mention of Poland’s mobilization.[90]

Trusting in Britain’s offer to mediate, Hitler read his 16-point Marienwerder Proposals to Henderson. Göring furnished the ambassador with a copy of the document to forward to London. Halifax instructed Kennard to inform Beck that Germany has accepted an English suggestion about a five-power guarantee as a basis for direct Polish-German talks. Instead of disclosing Hitler’s Marienwerder overture, however, Halifax wrote:

“It looks as though the German Government is working on new proposals.”[91]

The Marienwerder points were so moderate that were war to break out, Halifax feared it may be difficult to sell the British, French and American publics on the argument that Hitler is forcing Poland to the wall with unreasonable demands. Henderson urged London to keep the proposals out of the press.[92] According to Lady Diane Duff-Cooper, wife of the former first lord of the Admiralty, her husband was “horrified” upon learning of how modest Germany’s proposals were. He telephoned the editors of the Daily Telegraph and the Daily Mail and asked them to comment on the Marienwerder Proposal as negatively as possible.[93] Cadogan fumed in his diary:

“They aren’t proposals at all and the most impudent document I have ever seen.”[94]

Hitler insisted to the English on August 30 that Poland must send an emissary to Berlin authorized to negotiate. Halifax cabled Henderson:

“We cannot advise Polish Government to comply with this procedure which is wholly unreasonable.”[95]

Frank Roberts in the Foreign Office remarked:

“It is of course unreasonable to expect that we can produce a Polish representative in Berlin today… So outrageous was Hitler’s demand that it was not even forwarded to Warsaw until twenty-four hours later.”[96]

The next day, Henderson sent Ogilvie-Forbes to the Polish embassy to show Lipski the Marienwerder Proposals. Dahlerus accompanied Ogilvie-Forbes. Dahlerus read Lipski the 16 Points, describing them as a reasonable basis for an honorable settlement. His host remained unmoved, saying the terms are “out of the question.”[97]

Returning to the British embassy with Ogilvie-Forbes, Dahlerus received Henderson’s permission to telephone Number 10 Downing Street, the prime minister’s office in London. Dahlerus stated on the line that the Marienwerder Proposals “had been formulated in order to show how extremely anxious the Führer was to reach an agreement with Great Britain,” as Cadogan reported in a memo.[98] The Swede further blamed the Poles for “obstructing possibilities of negotiation.” With Europe only hours from war, Halifax responded by admonishing Henderson:

“In the future please prevent persons not belonging to the English mission from using its telephone line.”[99]

Throughout August, the English exerted none of their substantial influence over Poland to bring Warsaw to the conference table. Beck confided to U.S. Ambassador Anthony Biddle that he based Polish foreign policy on the orientation of the Western powers.[100] London’s unconditional support encouraged Beck in his decision to defy and provoke Berlin. For their part, Halifax and Chamberlain were aware of the effect maintaining a potentially hostile military presence in Germany’s flank would exercise on Hitler. According to a Foreign Office memo, aides

“kept Halifax supplied with information which supported Henderson’s line that Hitler was unlikely to risk his life’s work on the throw of the dice of war, unless he felt encircled.”[101]

Duff-Cooper’s remark, “in Munich we lost 35 superbly equipped divisions” (referring to the Czech army), the Germans interpreted as proof of England’s hostile intentions.[102] Had Chamberlain compelled the Poles to peacefully resolve the Danzig and minority issues with Hitler, then Britain would have lost Poland as an ally. The Polish diplomat Count Michal Lubienski confessed that without Chamberlain’s guarantee:

“A settlement with Germany could very easily have been reached.”[103]

On September 1, 1939, the German invasion of Poland began. On its second day, Hitler arranged through his foreign minister another appeal to England. He offered to withdraw his army from Poland and compensate the Poles for damages, if London would mediate the Danzig/corridor dispute.[104] Chamberlain declared war on Germany instead, privately noting, “but I believe he sincerely did believe in an arrangement with us.” Allied with England, France followed suit. Halifax announced in the House of Commons:

“Now we have forced Hitler to war.”[105]

On September 4, French and British military leaders, including Gamelin and Ironside, privately agreed not to launch an offensive against the Reich. They also decided against aerial bombardment, fearing German retaliation. At a session of the Inter-Allied Supreme War Council one week later, the same generals speculated that any significant military pressure on the Germans might cause them to transfer troops from Poland to fight in the West. Anxious to avoid such a development, Chamberlain summarized:

“There is no hurry as time is on our side.”[106]

Norwid Neugebauer, chief of the Polish Military Mission in London, visited Ironside that same week to solicit aid for his beleaguered nation. The British general, “short of time,” terminated the interview.[107] The German army overran Poland in three weeks. Entering exile in Romania, Marshal Rydz-Smigly declared that he never should have trusted the assurances of the Allies. Polish President Moscicki acknowledged that Poland should have accepted Germany’s offer.[108]

Hitler looked beyond the immediate, localized perspective of the conflict with Britain. He privately remarked:

“England doesn’t see that the distribution of power in the world has changed. Europe no longer means ‘the world.’ Major blocs have formed. Their dimensions are clearly recognizable. They stand outside of the individual European states and any possible combination of ‘balance’ alliances. Only a unified Europe can assert itself amid this world of blocs.”[109]

In Hitler’s view, the balance of power had shifted from Europe to the entire globe. The former German army officer Heinrich Jordis von Lohausen summarized that by 1900, England’s Royal Navy and Germany’s continental army had already represented an unbeatable combination, but that a prerequisite for Europe’s undisputed supremacy in the world was that the pair never turn against one another.[110] Throughout the pre-war years, Hitler had regarded Anglo-German friendship as indispensable for maintaining European world leadership. The failure of this foreign policy objective led to the continent’s abdication as pioneer and steward of civilization, a role it had discharged for centuries with prudence, authority and majesty.

The Unwelcome Alliance

In 1989, in the bleak remoteness of the southern Ural Mountain Range, Russian archeologists excavated an abandoned gold mine near Chelyabrinsk. Unlike members of related crafts in other countries, they were not digging for prehistoric fossils or for evidence of ancient settlements. Some 300,000 corpses ultimately exhumed from the mine were victims of Soviet purges. Discovery of another mass burial site near Minsk yielded the remains of 102,000 more, including a large number of women.[111] Archeologists uncovered nearly 50,000 bodies at an isolated grave site between Chabarovsk and Vladivostok, plus 46,000 buried around Gorno-Altaisk, Bykovnya, and St. Petersburg.

Adding numerous smaller, secret resting places found filled with corpses from the same period, some contemporary British and Russian historians have estimated that as many as 8,000,000 people may have been arrested from 1937-1938 alone, of whom less than 15 percent ever returned home.[111]^a

Stalin and the Politburo employed mass executions to crush public opposition to their program to transform Russia’s agrarian economy into one based on heavy industry. Industrialization was a prerequisite for remolding the Red Army into a modern, mechanized strike force capable of supporting Communist revolutions abroad through direct intervention. Moscow financed the purchase of the required military technology and machinery from the United States and Weimar Germany by exporting timber and grain. It brought huge quantities of grain to market annually: Soviet functionaries, aided by the state police, the NKVD, simply confiscated harvests from the rural population. Contemporary researchers estimate that the resulting famine claimed approximately a million lives in southern Russia and in the northern Caucasus region, another million in Kazakhstan, and four million in the Ukraine.

In 1932, at the peak of this state-sponsored mass starvation, Stanislav Kosior, the general secretary of the Communist Party of the Ukraine, implored the Politburo to provide foodstuffs for the distressed populace. That June, Stalin personally wrote in response to the high party official Lazar Kaganovich:

“In my opinion, the Ukraine has received more than it is entitled to.”[112]

The NKVD combated local resistance to Soviet “collectivism” through terror and mass arrests. Between May and September 1931, for example, it shipped 1,243,860 farmers and their family members to forced labor camps called gulags, sited in remote and inhospitable regions such as northern Siberia. Over 40 percent of those deported were children. In May 1935, Soviet records listed 1,222,675 people confined to gulags, almost all of whom had been farmers.[113] A large percentage of them subsequently perished from disease, hunger and the cold. Those who had fought back, labeled “saboteurs” or “counter-revolutionaries” in Communist jargon, the NKVD dealt with less mercifully. It arrested an estimated 20 million people from 1935 to 1941, seven million of whom suffered summary execution. In October/November 1937, during a five-night period, the Leningrad NKVD Deputy Matveyev, assisted part-time by another official, personally shot 1,100 inmates.[114]

Like democracy, Communism was an ideology for export: The Soviet economist Joseph Davidov stated in 1919:

“Not peace, but the sword will carry the dictatorship of the proletariat to the world.”

Marshal Tukhachevsky wrote in 1920:

“The war can only end with the establishment of a worldwide proletarian dictatorship.”

The USSR’s secret police chief, Felix Dzerzhinski, announced:

“We’re starting to take over the entire world without concern for the sacrifices we must make.”

The senior Soviet official Karl Radek remarked:

“We were always in favor of revolutionary wars… A bayonet is a very important thing and indispensable for introducing Communism.”

Stalin himself said this to a graduating class of Red Army officer cadets:

“The Soviet Union can be compared to a savage, predatory beast, concealed in ambush in order to lure his prey in and then pounce on him with a single leap.”[115]

Hitler had no illusions about the Soviet threat. His party membership included German army veterans who had served on the eastern front during World War I and had witnessed the Bolshevik Revolution in 1917. Testimony of refugees and reports from diplomatic missions inside Russia provided ample evidence of Soviet intentions and methods. Lenin had publicly stated that the key to Europe’s domination was controlling Germany. The Comintern, Moscow’s international organization for subversion and revolution, assigned priority to the German Reich and to China. At the Communist Party Congress in January 1934, Stalin told delegates:

“The war will not just take place on the front lines, but in the enemy’s hinterland as well.”[116]

Hitler made protecting Germany from Soviet aggression the cornerstone of his foreign policy. In so doing, he encountered resistance from the German aristocracy, a stratum ironically near the top of Marxism’s hit list.

Less wealthy than its social counterpart in England, Germany’s titled class dominated the army’s leadership cadre and the foreign office. Both contributed to an era of Soviet-German cooperation that began with ratification of the Rapallo Treaty in 1922. War Minister Otto Gessler negotiated an agreement with Moscow enabling the Germans to build factories inside the USSR to design, manufacture, and test weapons forbidden the Reich by the Versailles system. The Junkers aeronautic firm developed new combat aircraft there without the knowledge of the Western powers, thus avoiding retaliatory sanctions. A secret military compact in 1923 arranged for German pilots to participate in six-month flight instruction courses in Soviet air academies. Russian engineers learned how to construct aircraft assembly plants from Junkers.[117] German General Staff officers sent to the Soviet Union helped modernize the Red Army, by schooling its commanders in strategic operations and logistics.

During the 1920s, the prominent German industrialist Arnold Rechberg strengthened ties with French and Belgian heavy industry in order to develop an anti-Soviet economic bloc. The German army thwarted his endeavors. In 1926, the Soviet and German governments expanded the Rapallo Treaty through the Berlin Agreement. This was primarily a safeguard against Poland, and corresponded to the anti-Polish tendency in the Reich’s Foreign Office and in the Soviet hierarchy. Many German career diplomats advocated Bismarck’s previous policy of maintaining good relations with Russia.

In 1933, the German ambassador in Moscow, Rudolf Nadolny, presented the newly appointed Chancellor Hitler with a memorandum arguing the merits of an Eastern orientation over a pro-Western policy. He pleaded his case to the Führer in a personal interview. Throughout the Weimar period of superficial cooperation, however, the Comintern had worked hand-in-hand with the Communist Party of Germany to provoke a revolution. Hitler rejected Nadolny’s proposal explaining:

“I want nothing to do with these people.”[118]

The chancellor favored formation of a central European bloc to check Soviet expansion, with England and France covering its back. During Hitler’s first year in office, covert military cooperation with the Red Army came to an end. Germany continued to trade with the USSR, extending a credit of RM 200 million in March 1935 to purchase German industrial machinery, but the Führer forbade the export of military hardware to Stalin’s empire.

Neither France nor England displayed interest in Hitler’s concept of an alliance system to check Soviet expansion. Paris concluded a pact with the USSR in May 1935. After their Pyrrhic victory in World War I, the English realized that they were too weak to prevent German hegemony in Europe. A two-front war, requiring the support of the Soviet Union, offered a better prospect for destroying their commercial rival in central Europe. In 1935 Vansittart, then permanent undersecretary in the British Foreign Office, emphasized the “great importance” of amalgamating British and Soviet objectives. He later cautioned his colleagues:

“For us Englishmen Russia is in all respects a much less dangerous member of the international community than Germany.”[119]

London’s courtship of the Kremlin led Stalin to relax the Comintern’s subversive propaganda in British colonies. The Foreign Office concluded that Britain’s imperial interests were best secured by cooperation with Stalin.[120] The German diplomat Ribbentrop conceded:

“I found in Eden a complete lack of understanding. No one in England is willing to recognize the Communist danger.”[121]

Meanwhile, Hitler saw an emerging Soviet threat in southwestern Europe. Since overthrowing the monarchy in 1931, the Spanish Republic had been fighting for survival against internal opponents. In November 1934, Hitler received a report from Germany’s ambassador in Madrid, Count Johannes von Welczeck, which stated:

“The systematic Bolshevisation of Spain carried on since the fall of the monarchy by the Communist-anarchist side represents a European danger. With the success of this flanking position, an important stage on the way to Communist world revolution will be reached, and central Europe will be threatened on two sides.”[122]

Conspiring with fascist radicals known as the Falange, the Spanish army attempted a coup to overthrow the republic in July 1936; the rebels considered the present government too weak to prevent a Communist takeover. They gained only partial control of the country, which plunged Spain into civil war.

The Reich’s Government at first limited itself to the evacuation by sea and air of some 10,000 Germans residing in Spain. The rebellion’s leader, General Francisco Franco, solicited Berlin’s aid to airlift Spain’s African army – comprising nearly 18,000 Spanish foreign legionnaires and 15,570 Moroccans – to the mainland.[123] The Spanish navy remained loyal to the republic, its crews sympathetic to Communism. They refused to obey their officers and would not ferry these well-disciplined professional soldiers from Morocco to reinforce the rebels.

Although the republican government had been friendly to Germany, Hitler decided to help Franco. He told Ribbentrop:

“If they really succeed in creating a Communist Spain, then considering the present situation in France, the Bolshevization of this country would only be a question of time as well, and Germany can pack it in. Wedged between the powerful Soviet bloc in the East and a strong Communist, French-Spanish bloc in the West, we could hardly do anything should Moscow want to move against Germany.”[124]

England, the Führer reasoned, was indifferent to these developments, and prominent French politicians advocated militarily assisting the republican forces, which were saturated with Marxists. In a memorandum composed in August 1936 for top government officials, Hitler wrote:

“Marxism, through its victory in Russia, has taken over one of the biggest empires in the world as a jumping-off point for further operations. This has become an ominous issue. A concentrated will to conquer, consolidated in an authoritative ideology, is assailing an inwardly divided democratic world.”[125]

The Soviet Union contributed weapons and troops to reinforce the republican forces. Stalin opined that

“in peacetime, it’s impossible to have a Communist movement in Europe that’s strong enough for a Bolshevik party to seize power. A dictatorship of this party will only be possible through a major war.”[126]

The Soviet defense minister, Kliment Voroshilov, stated that the purpose of the USSR’s commitment in Spain is to tie Hitler down in the West and weaken Germany militarily.[127] Over the next three years, 18,000 German soldiers, primarily air-force personnel, fought in the Spanish Civil War. German Foreign Minister Neurath defined the deployment as defensive in nature, to prevent Spain “from falling under Bolshevik domination and infecting the rest of Western Europe.” Though the Germans rotated their troops so that more would gain combat experience, General Erhard Milch later remarked that exploiting the Spanish war as an opportunity to test new weapons

“was neither discussed nor even thought of… In the beginning it was just a transport mission, protected by a few Heinkel 51 fighter planes and some anti-aircraft batteries.”[128]

The Luftwaffe deployed these obsolete aircraft until the military situation forced it to commit modern fighters. In April 1938, Hitler wanted to withdraw the contingent to train new Luftwaffe units in Austria, but reluctantly had to keep the men in action against the Soviet-backed republicans.

Despite the indirect confrontation in Spain, the USSR began shifting its orientation from the Western democracies toward improving relations with Germany in 1937. The Soviet commerce representative, David Kandelaki, conducted economic negotiations with the Germans. Eventually Schacht and Göring represented the Reich in these talks. Soviet Trade Commissioner Anastas Mikoyan participated as well. The Kremlin instructed Walter Krivizki, chief of the Soviet secret service for Western Europe, to suspend espionage within Germany in order to cultivate an atmosphere of confidence for the discussions.[129]

The Red Army remained a potent force on Germany’s flank. Soviet arms expenditures in 1936 climbed from 6.5 billion rubles the previous year to 14.8 billion.[130] Stalin gradually discouraged London and Paris from pursuing an alliance with the USSR, extricating himself from his Western commitments by casting doubts on the Red Army’s potential. In February 1937, he began receiving lists identifying leading military personnel and civil servants suspected of disloyalty. Of the 44,477 names appearing on the lists, Stalin ordered the execution without trial of 38,955.[131] In one day he condemned 3,167 people and that evening watched a movie. The victims had not been plotting against the regime, but served as scapegoats for the lack of progress in Stalin’s program to modernize the Red Army. The purge of officers cost the Soviet army three of its five field marshals, twelve of an original 14 army commanders, 60 of its 67 corps commanders, and 136 of 199 divisional commanders. All eight admirals were executed. Just ten members of the 108-man Military Council survived. Of the officers promoted to fill the leadership vacuum, 85 percent were younger than 35 years of age.[132]

Prior to this purge, the Soviet commissar for foreign affairs, Maxim Litvinov, had registered a healthy respect for the Red Army in Western circles. With the decimation of the officer corps sank the esteem of Russia’s fighting forces among Allied statesmen. “Collective security,” the cornerstone of Litvinov’s policy to check Germany, collapsed.[133] Hitler benefited from the West’s wavering confidence in the USSR’s military value during its most vulnerable period, annexing Austria and the Sudetenland in 1938. He remained unwilling to mollify his position on the USSR. In a Reichstag speech on February 20, 1938, he said:

“With one state we have not sought a relationship, nor do we wish to establish a closer association; Soviet Russia. We see in Bolshevism even more than ever the incarnation of a human mania for destruction.”[134]

Later that year, the Führer began to revise his policy. For five years, England and France had turned a cold shoulder to his appeal for friendship. The United States endorsed their strategy to isolate the Reich. Douglas Miller, attached to the U.S. embassy in Berlin, announced that trade negotiations with Germany “in the near future” were unlikely. The State Department declared “no commerce” with the Germans to be official policy.[135]

The Reich imported 80 percent of its rubber, 60 percent of its oil, 65 percent of its iron ore, and 100 percent of its chrome. The last mineral was indispensable to make steel for armored vehicles and was purchased primarily from Turkey and South Africa. In the event of war, a British naval blockade would disrupt deliveries. The situation was similar for most other strategic materials required by the Reich. Toward the end of 1938, German economists urged Hitler to resume commerce with the Soviets. The OKW maintained that only close economic cooperation with the USSR could offset the catastrophic effect of a blockade.[136]

Ribbentrop told his staff:

“Unless we want to become completely encircled, we must talk now with the Russians.”[137]

Developments within the USSR influenced Hitler’s deliberations. Stalin’s purge targeted not just the military, but the old Bolsheviks as well. Soviet propaganda simultaneously idealized traditional Russian national heroes such as Czar Peter the Great, Alexander Nevsky, and Aleksandr Suvorov, who had defeated the Turks in the late 18th Century. These circumstances the Germans interpreted as a shift in Soviet policy, from Communist internationalism to domestic patriotism. A nationalist Russia was a palatable ally for Hitler. In their endeavors to isolate Germany, the Western democracies drove him into Stalin’s arms.

On March 10, 1939, Stalin delivered a foreign-policy speech at the Communist Party Congress. He denounced Britain, France, and the United States for their press campaigns to incite Germany into a war against the Soviet Union. He defined his objective as

“to observe events cautiously, without giving the war provocateurs, who are accustomed to letting others pull the chestnuts out of the fire for them, the opportunity to drag our country into a conflict.”[138]

Ribbentrop noted:

“This declaration by Stalin showed that he was thinking about a path to a German-Soviet understanding.”[139]

When the Germans marched into Prague a few days later, the Russians cooperated with Hitler’s diplomatic restructuring of Bohemia/Moravia. In April, the German press discontinued criticism of the Soviet Union.

Hitler considered Stalin’s dismissal of Litvinov on May 3, 1939 the decisive step toward rapprochement. As foreign-affairs commissar, Litvinov had established diplomatic relations with the USA, brought the USSR into the League of Nations, concluded mutual-assistance pacts with Czechoslovakia and France, and promoted an alliance system against Germany. Though Stalin himself ran foreign policy, the removal of the representative publicly associated with “collective security” was a gesture that impressed Hitler. On May 10, the Führer discussed the Soviet question with foreign-policy advisors Gustav Hilger and Julius Schnurre. Hilger gave Hitler a detailed report on Moscow’s endeavors for the last three years to improve relations. Less than a month before, for example, Soviet Ambassador Alexei Merekalov had told Weizsäcker that there was no reason not to normalize and consistently strengthen Soviet-German ties.[140] On May 9, the Russian diplomat Georgi Astachov had told Schnurre that Stalin was prepared to conclude a non-aggression pact with Germany. He also thanked the Reich’s Foreign Office for recent “correct” press coverage of the Soviet Union.

On June 6, Berlin hosted a parade of German military personnel who had served in the Spanish Civil War. In his welcoming speech, Hitler avoided criticism of the “Bolshevik menace” which had threatened Spain. He denounced instead the Western democracies for mendacious news reporting:

“For years, British and French newspapers lied to their readers, claiming that Germany and Italy intended to conquer Spain, divide her up and especially steal her colonies. This way of thinking seems more natural to the representatives of these countries than to us, since robbing colonies is already among acceptable and practiced methods of the democracies.”[141]

Around this time, Stalin conducted trade negotiations with Anglo-French delegates, not very sincerely but to indirectly pressure Germany to ally with the USSR. Hitler realized that cooperation with the Russians offered the best chance to tip the scales in his country’s favor. Were Moscow to join forces with the Western powers, the Reich would become economically and militarily encircled.

The Kremlin hosted an Anglo-French military delegation in August. At the conference, Voroshilov offered to commit 120 infantry divisions, 16 cavalry divisions and 10,000 tanks to invade Germany in the event of war. France’s General Joseph Doumenc and England’s Admiral Reginald Drax, second-rate negotiators with limited authority, proposed a more or less defensive strategy, a token commitment compared to what the Russians were pledging.[142] Voroshilov insisted that the alliance would be contingent on the Red Army’s right to cross Poland and Romania to reach the German frontier. Since both these buffer states controlled territory taken from Russia in 1919, their governments justifiably feared that once allowed in, the Soviets would permanently occupy the borderline regions. Bucharest and Warsaw rejected the proposal and the talks failed. Moscow made no attempt to negotiate directly with the Poles to win their cooperation, an indication of Stalin’s blasé attitude toward a compact with the Allies.

That month, the USSR concluded an expansive trade agreement with the German Reich. On August 19, the new foreign affairs commissar, Vyacheslav Molotov, told the German ambassador, Count Friedrich von der Schulenburg:

“We have come to the conclusion that to ensure the success of economic negotiations, a corresponding political basis must be created.”[143]

He proposed a non-aggression pact, something the Russians had first suggested to the Germans in July 1936. Hitler avoided the example of his Western adversaries, who had offended the Soviets by sending second-class representatives to the military talks in Moscow. He telegraphed to Stalin an offer to dispatch Ribbentrop himself. He stated:

“The Reich’s foreign minister has full authority for the wording and signing of the non-aggression pact as well as the protocol.”[144]

Stalin replied on August 21, inviting Ribbentrop to fly to Moscow for a meeting on the 23rd.

Stalin personally participated in the conference. He demanded that Germany recognize the Baltic States, Finland and Bessarabia as Soviet spheres of interest. He promised his guest that the USSR did not wish to disturb the inner structure of these lands. Regarding Poland, Stalin recommended that the signatories fix a demarcation line in the event of war, to prevent German-Soviet friction when dividing the country. Ribbentrop reassured his host that the Reich’s new Soviet orientation represented a fundamental shift in foreign policy, and was not a tactical maneuver to enable Germany to isolate and crush Poland. He assured Stalin, “From the German side, everything will be attempted to resolve the matter in a diplomatic and peaceful way.”[145] On August 24, the German delegation flew back to Berlin with the signed pact. Hitler did not regard the treaty as a green light to attack Poland, but continued fruitless attempts at negotiation for another week.[146] With war under way in September, Ribbentrop cabled the German mission in Moscow to press the Soviets to occupy the eastern half of Poland according to the secret protocol. He hoped to draw the USSR into the war against England and France. Molotov stalled for two weeks. Stalin finally ordered the Red Army to advance on September 17. The Germans had already driven the Poles back 120 miles beyond the demarcation line. Stalin feared that Hitler’s troops would keep the additional territory instead of relinquishing it to Soviet forces. Upon Poland’s defeat, the German and Soviet armies staged a joint military parade in Brest-Litovsk.

Having eliminated Poland as a military threat, Hitler hoped to reach a compromise with England and France. He planned to offer to restore sovereignty to the Czech state and to German-occupied Western Poland. Ribbentrop had advised the Soviet government of this intention in a note on September 15. At a conference with the OKW on October 17, Hitler stated:

“Poland shall be made independent. It will not become part of the German realm nor be under the administration of the Reich.”[147]

Two weeks later, Molotov expressed Moscow’s position on Poland:

“Nothing is left of this miscarriage of the Versailles Treaty, which owed its existence to the suppression of non-Polish nationalities.”

Stalin sent a telegram to Ribbentrop on December 27, reminding him that “the friendship of the peoples of Germany and Soviet Union” has been “forged in blood” on the battlefields of Poland.[148] Any endeavor to resurrect the Polish State, Stalin pleaded, was therefore contrary to this spirit. Aware of his country’s dependency on Soviet trade, Hitler abandoned the plan to reestablish Polish statehood. Stalin sought to stifle any action that might bring Germany and the Allies to the conference table.

On November 30, 1939, the Red Army invaded Finland. The Finns had done nothing to prompt the attack beyond refusing Moscow’s demands to cede portions of their frontier territory and some islands in the Gulf of Finland to the USSR. The Russians described their “counterattack” as a response to the “provocations of Finnish militarists.”[149] The three-and-a-half-month winter war that followed cost the Finnish army 27,000 dead and 55,000 wounded. The Red Army lost 126,875 killed in action and 264,908 wounded. Though German public opinion overwhelmingly favored Finland, Hitler blocked ongoing attempts by the Allies to deliver war materiel to the Finns via Norway when the Germans conquered that country in April 1940.

The Führer personally penned an unattributed editorial defining the government’s position on Scandinavia, which the German press published early in December:

“Since the establishment of the League of Nations, the northern states were the most loyal supporters of this system, whose only purpose was to perpetually tie down Germany… When National Socialism took power in Germany, scarcely a day passed that many newspapers of the northern states did not vent their arrogant and insulting criticism of German policies… It is naïve and sentimental to expect that the German people, fighting for their future, should presently side with these little countries that previously couldn’t do enough to revile and discredit Germany.”[150]

Fearing Anglo-French intervention, Stalin suspended operations in Finland in March 1940, just as his army had gained the upper hand. He demanded little more than the territories the USSR had sought to annex during negotiations with Helsinki the previous October. The Soviets soon dispelled any good will such mild terms evoked. Less than a week after concluding the peace treaty in Moscow, the Russians realized that the newly defined frontier left the town of Enso just inside the Finnish border. It was home to one of the world’s largest complexes for the manufacture of paper and cellulose. The latter is a polymer necessary for producing high-grade explosives. The Red Army simply crossed into Finland and occupied Enso.[151]

On June 2, 1940, the Soviets demanded “restitution” for wares the Finns had allegedly evacuated during the fighting from areas now under Russian control. No provision for this compensation existed in the original Moscow treaty. Finland had to surrender 75 locomotives and 2,000 freight cars to the USSR. On June 14, Soviet fighters shot down a Finnish passenger plane flying French and American diplomats to Helsinki. The Soviets deported the entire population, 420,000 persons, from the part of Finland now under their control.[152]

Soviet pressure on Finland became a German problem. In April 1940, Schnurre negotiated a trade agreement with Helsinki. It allowed the Reich to purchase 60 percent of Finnish nickel ore, necessary for steel production. Germany mined just five percent of her own nickel requirements. In June, the USSR insisted on the option to purchase a large amount of the Finnish output. Since the Soviet Union already enjoyed sufficient domestic production, the Germans viewed Moscow’s initiative as a ploy to make the Reich more dependent on Russia for raw materials. Admiral Nikolai Nesvizki of the Soviet Baltic Sea Fleet submitted a confidential report on how “to solve the problem of the independent existence of Sweden and Finland.”[153] The Soviets prepared plans for a renewed invasion of Finland in September.

The German-Finnish trade agreement, signed on June 24, made Finland an important source of natural resources for the Reich’s war industry. In August 1940, the OKW received intelligence about Soviet troop concentrations near the Finnish frontier. Upon Hitler’s orders, the Germans reinforced their army and Luftwaffe contingents in northern Norway (then under German occupation). They gave the Finns the Allied ordnance originally intended for the winter war against Russia, which the German army had confiscated in Norwegian ports. Finland arranged to begin discreetly purchasing German weapons as well. During the winter of 1940/41, the Soviets broke a trade agreement with Helsinki and suspended grain deliveries to Finland. The Finns turned to Germany to fill the void, strengthening the bond between the two countries.

The USSR moved against the other countries which the 1939 German-Soviet pact defined as Soviet spheres of interest. Late that year, Moscow had pressured Lithuania, Estonia, and Latvia to sign treaties permitting the Red Banner Fleet to establish naval bases in their Baltic ports. In June 1940, Molotov complained of insufficient protection for Russian military personnel stationed there. An ultimatum followed, forcing the governments of the three Baltic nations to allow the Soviets to reinforce their garrisons. The Red Army sent 18-20 divisions.[154] This overwhelming military presence enabled Communists there to declare the Baltic countries Soviet republics on July 21, following sham elections and a “popular uprising.”

Stalin sent two representatives, Andrei Zdanov and Andrei Vysinskiy, to rid the territory of political undesirables. The Soviets deported over 140,000 Estonians, 155,000 Latvians, and 300,000 Lithuanians to Siberian labor camps. Scarcely any ever returned.[155] Referring to the USSR’s occupation of the Baltic States and simultaneous seizure of Bessarabia from Romania, Stalin told the Communist Party Central Committee in September 1940:

“This is a blessing for humanity. The Lithuanians, White Russians, and Bessarabians whom we have liberated from oppression by landowners, capitalists, policemen, and similar scum consider themselves lucky. This is the people’s attitude.”[156]

During these Soviet land grabs, world attention focused on Western Europe. In April 1940, the German armed forces occupied Norway and Denmark. The following month, the Germans invaded Holland, Belgium, and France, all three of which surrendered within six weeks. The British Expeditionary Force withdrew to England. Germany so smoothly vanquished her continental adversaries that Britain went over to the defensive. The protracted war of attrition Stalin had predicted would exhaust the “capitalist” states did not materialize. The Reich’s augmenting influence over the European economy partially relieved its dependency on Soviet trade. The rapid German victory unsettled Stalin, who expressed the opinion that war with Germany was inevitable.[157]

Soviet expansion disquieted Hitler, and Russian efforts to improve relations with England, then at war with Germany, compounded his suspicions. On April 23, 1940, Weizsäcker telegraphed Karl von Ritter, a secretary in the German embassy in Moscow, that “yesterday almost every London newspaper wrote about Soviet-English economic talks, supposedly started on Soviet initiative.” Weizsäcker directed the German mission to inform Molotov,

“with respect to the course so far of Soviet deliveries of raw materials, the Reich’s Government is not satisfied that they correspond to its perception of mutual assistance. It implores the Soviet government to increase and continue deliveries during the months favorable for transportation, and immediately put larger shipments of oil and grain in motion.”[158]

Moscow negotiated a trade agreement with London while simultaneously slackening on its obligations to Germany.

The British ambassador, Sir Stafford Cripps, conferred with Stalin in July. To win Russia for an anti-German alliance, Cripps promised that England would accept Soviet control over the Dardanelles, the Balkans, eastern Poland, and practically any arrangement for post-war Europe Stalin wanted.[159] Considering traditional British foreign policy, these were lavish concessions. The Soviet dictator confided that he considered Germany the only threat. He more or less opened the door to an alliance with London.

Aware that the conference with Cripps would arouse mistrust in Berlin, Stalin ordered Molotov to provide the German ambassador with a written summary of the talks. The Molotov version, which Schulungberg forwarded to his government, gave the impression that Stalin had remained loyal to the German alliance and rejected the Cripps proposals. However, Hitler received more-reliable information from Rome; Italian agents were secretly monitoring the dispatches of the Yugoslavian ambassador in Moscow, Milan Gavrilovic, to Belgrade. This intelligence they relayed to Berlin. Gavrilovic wrote about Moscow’s interest in signing with England. In this way, Hitler learned of Stalin’s duplicity.[160]

Also during July, Hitler and Ribbentrop began mediating a border dispute among Bulgaria, Hungary and Romania. The Red Army massed along the common frontier with Romania. It prepared to invade and “restore order” if war broke out among the Balkan States.[161] Reports of Soviet troop concentrations in Bessarabia induced Hitler to order two German armored divisions stationed in southwestern Poland, plus ten infantry divisions, to rapidly occupy the Romanian oil fields at Ploesti in case the region became unstable.

On August 24, the Hungarian-Romanian talks broke down. Hitler forced their diplomats back to the conference table. Germany’s powerful economic influence in the region, together with justifiable fear of Soviet intervention, led them to accept the Führer’s arbitration. At a session conducted by Ribbentrop and Italian Foreign Minister Galeazzo Ciano in Vienna on August 30, Romania agreed to cede the northern part of Siebenbürgen to Hungary. In exchange, Germany and Italy guaranteed Romania against foreign aggression. Upon Bucharest’s request, the Germans dispatched a military mission including mechanized units and air force units to train and upgrade the Romanian army in October.[162]

Moscow had contributed to the crisis by attempting to provoke Hungary and Bulgaria against Romania. The Kremlin now protested that the Vienna Arbitration violated Article II of the German-Soviet Pact. The 1939 treaty required consultation in questions of mutual interest, but the Russians had not been invited to the negotiations in Vienna. Ribbentrop replied that Soviet interests in the Balkans had already been satisfied with the occupation of Bessarabia in June. He reminded Molotov that the USSR seized all of Lithuania, including a portion defined as within the German sphere of influence, without notifying Berlin. Ribbentrop argued that German diplomatic intervention in the Balkan controversy had restored stability to a region bordering the Soviet Union, which could only be in Moscow’s interests.

Molotov responded in a memorandum on September 21, 1940. He disputed Ribbentrop’s position, complaining that the German-Italian guarantee for Romania is directed against the USSR (its actual purpose was to protect Romania from Hungary, whose regent was dissatisfied with the final arrangement). Although the Germans addressed Molotov in a manner the Romanian foreign minister Mihail Manoilescu described as “well-meaning and conciliatory,” relations between Moscow and Berlin cooled that summer.[163] Regarding the Soviet occupation of the Baltic States in June, the German ambassador in Riga wrote this to his superiors:

“Pro-Russian circles are for the moment claiming with great vehemence that the entire action is directed against Germany, and in a short time an offensive into German territory will begin.”[164]

Soviet authorities in Bessarabia advised ethnic Germans settled there not to exercise the option to migrate to Germany. They explained that the Red Army would invade the Reich soon, so there was no point in moving.[165] In October, the Germans came into possession of an original Soviet military document containing a plan to attack Romania and capture Ploesti.[166] The Soviet chief of staff, Georgi Zhukov, transferred the 5th, 9th and 12th Armies to Bessarabia, deploying them 110 miles from the Romanian oil fields. The 9th Army alone possessed more tanks than the entire German armed forces.[167]

On October 13, Ribbentrop wrote Stalin, suggesting that Molotov visit Berlin. Stalin accepted, sending his foreign-affairs commissar on November 12. During the conferences, the Führer reminded his guest of Germany’s support during the Finnish war and regarding the military occupation of the Baltic States and of Bessarabia. He argued that Germany and Russia always profited when working together; when they turned against one another, only foreign powers benefited. Hitler told Molotov that Germany had no political interest in Finland, but urgently needed her trade to acquire nickel and lumber. The only German troops there were en route to northern Norway, a transfer soon to be completed. He emphasized that Germany requires peace in the Baltic Sea region to continue the war against Britain.

Hitler and Ribbentrop, who remained cordial and patient throughout the conferences, urged Soviet expansion southward toward Persia and India. Molotov showed no interest in the suggestion. He repeatedly returned to his demands for increased Soviet influence over Finland and the Balkans, especially Bulgaria. The meeting, which ended with Molotov’s departure on November 14, failed to reach a viable compromise. This compelled Hitler to gradually transfer more troops to the Reich’s eastern frontier to hold possible Soviet expansion in check. As a result, he lacked adequate military resources to subdue Britain. By weakening Germany and indirectly encouraging the British to continue their belligerence, Stalin prevented a conclusion of the fighting in the West.[168]

An event beyond Hitler’s control further disrupted Soviet-German relations. On October 28 Italy, having entered the war on Germany’s side in June, launched an unprovoked invasion of Greece. Mussolini’s troops suffered heavy losses and made no progress. The tenacity of the Greek defenders, mountainous terrain, bad weather, and the poor leadership and ordnance of the Italian army hampered the offensive. Italian defeats in Greece and in Libya against the British substantially lowered Axis prestige among European neutrals.[169] The Italian press simultaneously publicized Mussolini’s claims to certain Yugoslavian territory as well. In August, Yugoslavia’s regent, Prince Paul, told the German representative in Belgrade, Viktor von Heeren:

“Regarding the public’s attitude toward Germany, Germany’s position on this aggressive policy of Italy’s is of the greatest significance. The people respect Germany, but have contempt for Italy.”[170]

A Yugoslavian diplomat whom the Germans bribed revealed to Berlin details of Moscow’s endeavors to win the Balkans for a pan-Slavic, anti-German coalition.

In December, Hitler directed the OKW to plan a military expedition against Greece. Athens began accepting British aid; were the Royal Air Force to transfer bomber squadrons to Greek air fields, they would be within range of Ploesti. The Germans needed to prevent England from forming a second front in southeastern Europe against Germany, protect the Romanian oil wells and help the Italian army bogged down in Greece. Hitler hoped that a strong German military presence would persuade Athens to compromise and conclude peace with Italy. The prospect vanished when British troop contingents landed on March 10, 1941, to reinforce the Greeks.

The Soviet Union objected when the Germans concentrated troops in southern Romania in January. The German 12th Army planned to cross from there into Bulgaria at the beginning of March, and deploy along the country’s border with Greece. On January 13, the Soviet news agency Tass announced that the transfer of German troops to Bulgaria was taking place “with neither the knowledge nor the approval of the USSR.”[171] Berlin responded that the operation was necessary to keep British forces off the continent. Ribbentrop publicly fixed the strength of the 12th Army on February 12 at the exaggerated figure of 680,000 men. This included “an especially high percentage of technological troops with the most modern ordnance, especially armored personnel.” The purpose of the boast was to discourage the Russians from risking a military confrontation. They protested in a memorandum to the German Foreign Office:

“With regard to all of these circumstances, the Soviet government considers it its duty to warn that the presence of any armed force on Bulgarian territory and in the Bosporus will be regarded as a threat to the security of the USSR.”[172]

Yugoslavia joined Germany’s alliance system, the Three Power Pact, on March 25. Even though the Reich purchased grain from the country, there was a strong pan-Slavic movement in Yugoslavia and the armed forces leadership was hostile toward Germany. Two days later, a military coup toppled the government. The army arrested prominent members of the former administration. The new head of state, General Dusan Simovic, confided to the British that he needed time to upgrade his armed forces but would then join with the USA, England and Russia to attack the Germans.[173]

Hitler disbelieved Simovic’s public pledge to respect Yugoslavia’s obligation to the Three Power Pact. The very day of the overthrow, the Führer told the OKW:

“The military coup in Yugoslavia has altered the political situation in the Balkans. Even should she declare her loyalty for the present, Yugoslavia must be considered an enemy and therefore be beaten as quickly as possible.”[174]

Moscow congratulated the new regime in Belgrade by telegram, declaring that the “Yugoslavian people have again proven worthy of their glorious past.” Hungary’s regent, Nicolaus von Horthy, warned Hitler:

“Yugoslavia could scarcely have let herself be led down this path without a certain Soviet influence.”[175]

The German army invaded Yugoslavia and Greece on April 6. Although American newspapers estimated the British expeditionary force in Greece at 240,000 men, the Germans more accurately fixed its strength at around 60,000.[176] Handicapped by ethnic dissonance within its ranks, unpreparedness and a poor command structure, the Yugoslavian army failed to offer cohesive resistance against the Germans. The Greek army fared no better. The British troops, who according to a German combat correspondent “got drunk during the day and chased girls at night,” soon prepared to evacuate the mainland.[177] The German armed forces occupied both countries with minimal losses.

The Balkan debacle strained German-Soviet rapprochement. Moscow had concluded a non-aggression pact with the Simovic regime on April 5. Hitler correctly judged this as an unfriendly gesture. German soldiers discovered documents in Belgrade supporting this opinion. One found in the Soviet embassy read:

“The USSR will only react at a given moment. The Axis powers have widely dispersed their fighting forces, and for this reason the USSR will suddenly move against Germany.”[178]

German diplomatic analyst Ernst Woermann prepared a summary of the former Yugoslavian foreign minister’s correspondence. Woermann concluded that the Soviets “encouraged Yugoslavia toward eventual opposition against Germany… The Soviets are making hasty preparations.” Viktor Prinz zu Wied, the German ambassador in Stockholm, cabled Berlin on May 16:

“The Soviet Russian representative here, Mrs. (Alexandra) Kollontai, said today as I found out, that in no time in Russian history have stronger troop contingents been concentrated on the western frontier of Russia than at present.”[179]

Hitler received ominous signs of potential Soviet belligerence from other sources as well. From Helsinki came an encrypted telegram relating how the Soviet naval attaché there, Smirnov, disclosed to his American colleague Huthsteiner that

“Russia will in all probability have to enter the war on the side of the other great democracies.”[180]

Walter Schellenberg, a senior official in the Sicherheitsdienst (SD), a branch of Himmler’s law enforcement network responsible for counterintelligence and security, reported a dramatic increase in Soviet espionage, subversion and sabotage. Harbor police in various European ports captured dock workers placing explosives aboard German, Italian and Japanese merchant ships. In most cases the perpetrators were Communist agents. The Danish criminal police broke up a particularly destructive ring of Communist saboteurs run by Ernst Wollweber. Since 1938, its members had smuggled explosives aboard and sunk nearly 70 vessels bound from Scandinavian ports for Germany.[181] The OKW registered daily Soviet reconnaissance flights over German airspace. It continuously supplied Hitler with assessments of steadily increasing Russian forces deploying along the mutual frontier:

“The growing threat to Germany from the deployment of the Soviet-Russian army corresponds to the anti-German sentiment that is constantly nurtured and kept in the foreground by hostile propaganda.”[182]

Five weeks after the abortive talks with Molotov in November 1940, Hitler ordered the OKW to plan for an offensive against the USSR. He deliberated for the next several months on whether to exercise the option. After the fall of France, the Führer decided that a direct invasion of the British Isles was too risky. The alternate strategy of challenging English power in the Mediterranean depended largely on the capture of Gibraltar for success. The Germans could not launch an operation against this salient British position unless Spain entered the war, but Franco chose neutrality. With American aid for England mounting, Hitler saw no way of ending the war. The shift in Soviet orientation toward the West evoked the specter of an Anglo-American-Soviet alliance. The Russians could strike at Germany’s flanks, Finland and Romania, without warning. This could curtail vital deliveries of nickel and petroleum.

The Führer sensed the strategic initiative passing to the hands of his enemies. Only a dramatic thrust could rescue the situation, delivering a knock-out blow to Russia before she could join forces with the USA and confront Germany with an overwhelming military coalition. Eliminating the Soviet threat in a rapid campaign would enable the Reich to consolidate its position in Europe and concentrate on the war against England. A victory over the USSR would also strengthen Japan’s influence in the Far East. Hitler believed that taking Russia out of the game would influence London to conclude a peace with Germany and discourage American intervention.

In April 1941, the Soviet government permitted a delegation of engineers from German armaments manufacturers, including Mauser, Henschel, and Daimler-Benz, to tour aeronautic research and production facilities inside the USSR. The organization, size and quality of the installations made a telling impression on the visitors. In a detailed evaluation prepared for the Reich’s Air Ministry, the German delegates described among other things a single Soviet airplane engine factory that was larger than six German plants combined. Göring and the Luftwaffe staff considered the report exaggerated. He denounced the armaments engineers as defeatists who had fallen victim to a Soviet ruse. Hitler however, took the analysis seriously. He remarked, “You see how far these people have come. We’d better get started.”[183] Since 1939, in fact, mass production of modern combat aircraft in the Soviet Union had increased by 70 percent. Though Hitler did not necessarily consider the Russians an immediate military threat, the danger their expanding armaments program posed down the road was of great concern.

Though German army commanders harbored reservations about starting a two-front war, most were optimistic about the prospects of a swift victory over the USSR.[184] The German General Staff predicted a campaign of two to four months. Chief of Staff Franz Halder underestimated the strength of the Red Army by half[185], and Foreign Armies East, a branch of German army intelligence, also understated the size of the Red Army. Analysts fixed the number of armored divisions at ten. In reality, the Soviets possessed 100 mechanized divisions, all with armor.[186]

The Germans received another disparaging assessment of Russian capabilities from Japan. The Soviet secret police chief in Manchuria, General Lyushkov, defected to the Japanese in 1938. They forwarded the transcripts of his interrogation to the German embassy in Tokyo. Lyushkov described the disorganization and incompetence of Red Army leadership. He offered examples demonstrating that the political structure inside the USSR was unstable and in the event of a major war, the entire system would collapse.[187]

Pursuant to the tradition of the Foreign Office, Ribbentrop tenaciously argued for a compromise with Moscow. On January 10, 1941, economist Schnurre signed an expansive trade agreement with the Soviet Union, surpassing in scope all previous compacts and clearing away potential bottlenecks in Germany’s supply of raw materials.[188] In addition to providing the Reich with Russian oil, cotton, fodder, phosphates, iron ore, scrap metal, chrome, and platinum, the Soviets purchased rubber in the Far East for the Germans and delivered it by rail. The Reich furnished industrial machinery and armaments in return. Schnurre and Ribbentrop presented the trade agreement to Hitler at the Berghof on January 26. In his lecture, Schnurre pointed out that it would nullify the effect of the English continental blockade. As this was virtually London’s only hope for victory, Schnurre concluded that the Russian treaty “is a firm basis for a victorious peace for Germany.”[189]

Hitler replied that he could not give priority to the deliveries necessary for Germany to uphold the new trade agreement. The military situation in the Mediterranean, including North Africa, compelled him to give precedence to the requirements of the German and Italian armed forces. Schnurre wrote later that Ribbentrop’s bearing “clearly demonstrated that at this time he opposed the Russian war.”[190] After some wrangling, the two diplomats persuaded Hitler to approve the treaty.

Despite the war against Britain, the Germans were in a solid bargaining position with respect to the Soviet Union in January 1941. They largely dominated the European economy, and the success of their armed forces against Poland and France had impressed Soviet leaders. The Red Army General Boris Shaposhnikov overestimated the number of tanks and aircraft available to the German armed forces by more than double.[191] The German military was far superior to Finland’s, whose soldiers had previously inflicted heavy losses on the Red Army despite being outnumbered. Further, Stalin mistrusted the British: During the 1940 French campaign, the Germans had captured and published Allied plans to use air bases in Turkey to bomb the Russian oil fields in Baku, even though the USSR was a non-belligerent.[192] The purpose was to indirectly disrupt Germany’s fuel supply.

In some respects, Stalin regarded Germany as a buffer between the USSR and the capitalist powers. He told Ribbentrop in 1939:

“I will never tolerate Germany becoming weak.”[193]

The Russian historian Irina Pavlova summarized:

“For Stalin the growing power of National Socialism was a positive factor in the evolution of international relations, because in his view it aggravated the dissonance between the principal capitalist powers and was primarily directed against Great Britain and France.”[194]

Were Germany and Russia to come to blows, Stalin would indeed “pull the chestnuts out of the fire” for the democracies; something he himself had warned against in 1939.

The Reich’s Foreign Office persistently opposed the plan to invade the USSR. Exasperated, Hitler called the unyielding Ribbentrop “my most difficult subordinate.”[195] Schnurre even appealed to Field Marshall Wilhelm Keitel and General Alfred Jodl of the OKW to promote an understanding with the Kremlin:

“I described the consequences of the Moscow negotiations and their great advantages for Germany; securing the supply of raw materials and a reserve of foodstuffs, plus far-reaching opportunities to trade with the East.”

Schnurre borrowed arguments about the expansiveness of Russia, her inexhaustible manpower pool and climate once employed by the Marquis Augustin de Caulaincourt, who had advised Napoleon against invading the Czar’s empire in 1812. Schnurre recalled:

“My explanation sadly fell on deaf ears. Jodl answered that all this has been taken into account; from every indication it will be a short war.”[196]

German diplomats never abandoned the view that the Soviet-German pact could be salvaged, considering the Reich strong enough to hold Stalin to his obligations.

The Soviet military leadership prepared two operational plans for an invasion of central Europe, dated March 11 and May 15, 1941. The latter study stated that the Red Army must “deploy before the enemy does, and attack the German armed forces at the moment it is in the deployment stage, and is as yet unable to organize the coordination of the individual branches of service.” A Soviet propaganda directive instructed journalists:

“The fighting in this war has demonstrated so far that a defensive strategy against superior motorized troop units brought no success and ended in defeat. An offensive strategy against Germany is therefore advisable, one which relies a great deal on technology.”[197]

Whether Stalin ultimately decided to attack Germany, or had a fixed date in mind, is still a subject of debate. Thanks to German traitors, he received the text of Hitler’s OKW directive to prepare an invasion plan of the USSR. Germany’s support of Finland and military penetration into Romania, Bulgaria, Greece, and Yugoslavia also worried the Soviet dictator. The Germans lagged on deliveries of machinery and weapons obligated by treaty. By June 1941, the Red Army had massed 81.5 percent of its forces opposite German-controlled territory.[198] Hitler opened hostilities on June 22, 1941, repeatedly warned by Keitel of the concentration of Soviet divisions on the frontier.

In justifying his resolve to launch a campaign against Russia, Hitler told Ribbentrop, “sooner or later, the so-called east-west pincers will be engaged against Germany.”[199] Ribbentrop recalled after the war:

“Confronted with the danger of an attack from both sides, the Führer saw the initial elimination of the Soviet Union as the only way out. He attacked mainly to avoid being besieged from the West and East at the same time, which later actually was the case.”[200]

The decision came neither swiftly nor easily. His aide Walter Hewel recalled that anxiety over whether to invade the USSR so tormented Hitler that he required medication to sleep.[201]

Democratic court historians, especially in post-war Germany, attribute the Russian campaign to Hitler’s ambition to gain Lebensraum, or living space, in the East. The theory rests on a tenuous assumption: Namely, that deadlocked in the fight against Britain and practically at war with the United States, Hitler launched a colonial expedition against one of the world’s most powerful empires, the principal supplier of natural resources vital to Germany’s wartime economy, in order to secure surplus land for future German settlers. In truth, the Reich was short a million laborers in 1939, and the government offered incentives to foreign workers, especially Czechs, to migrate to Germany to fill vacancies in industry. After conquering Poland, Hitler told Mussolini that newly recovered German provinces like Posen would require 40-50 years to resettle and fully integrate into the economy.[202] Where would Hitler find colonists to export to Russia?

Further, the German Race and Resettlement Office promoted a program entitled “Come Home to the Reich.” It encouraged ethnic Germans living in Poland, the Baltic States and the Balkans to migrate into Germany. In this way, the state hoped to partially cover the manpower shortfall in the economy. Were Hitler planning to colonize Russia, he would not have authorized an agency to draw Germans living in the East home to the Reich. At no time did the question of Lebensraum enter Hitler’s deliberations on whether to invade the Soviet Union.

The “Number One Enemy”

Mercantile rivalry among nations is often the genesis of armed conflicts, though those profiting from the adventures publicly describe them as defensive wars or waged for altruistic reasons. The former U.S. President William Taft confessed that modern diplomacy is “fundamentally commercial,” but cloaked in “idealistic feelings of humanitarianism and moral obligations.”[203] Regarding American hostility toward Germany, which plagued Hitler throughout his tenure in office, economic considerations played a major role.

His country drained of gold reserves, Hitler created a novel money system to get the national economy back on its feet. Accordingly capital came to represent human productivity; work itself became money. Currency was no longer a commodity to be speculated upon, loaned at high interest, or wielded to manipulate economic life, but solely a means to facilitate transactions. Germany introduced new principles to international commerce as well. Hitler, in the words of the Canadian historian Helmut Gordon, “was firmly convinced that as long as the international monetary system remains based on the value of gold, nations able to hoard the most gold can force those nations lacking gold to their will. That makes it easy for the gold-rich nations to dry up the sources of currency and compel others to accept loans at high interest rates to dissipate their assets.”[204] Hitler believed that a country’s power of production should determine the strength of her economy, and not the amount of gold in her treasury.

Germany concluded trade agreements with 25 financially distressed countries in southeastern Europe, the Near East, and South America. The treaties based transactions on an exchange of wares without monetary payments. In return for foodstuffs and raw materials, Germany supplied poorer nations with agricultural machinery, locomotives, and manufactured goods.[205] This was a barter system, which spared trade partners having to borrow from foreign banks to finance purchases – a relief for countries already in debt during the world-wide depression.

The mutually beneficial arrangement gradually deprived the United States, France, and Britain of markets they had previously dominated. Financial institutions in London and New York, accustomed to providing credit to smaller nations, lost a lucrative portion of their international commerce. British General Fuller wrote that Hitler’s “economic policy of direct barter and subsidized exports struck a deadly blow to British and American trade.”[206] Lord Forbes, belonging to an English trade commission visiting South America, warned:

“We don’t want the Germans continuing to conduct their system of an exchange of goods and other disrespectful trade methods right under our nose.”[207]

In 1941, President Roosevelt asked rhetorically:

“Will anyone suggest that Germany’s attempt to dominate trade in central Europe was not a major contributing factor to war?”[208]

Churchill remarked in 1938:

“What we desire is the complete destruction of the German economy.”[209]

He told Lord Robert Boothby:

“Germany’s most unforgivable crime before the Second World War was her attempt to extricate her economic power from the world’s trading system and to create her own exchange mechanism which would deny world finance its opportunity to profit.”[210]

Addressing newly commissioned officers of the armed forces in May 1942, Hitler explained the challenge Germany’s foreign trade treaties posed for the USA. He described how America enjoyed an abundance of grain and natural resources, plus maintained her own manufacturing industry. Countries wishing to trade with the United States therefore, had little to offer in exchange:

“So America began taking gold for her labors, piling up this gold into the billions. Naturally this mineral threatens to become utterly worthless once it’s realized that a new world is forming, one that no longer recognizes the concept of gold, but substitutes the concept of work and human productivity, and from then on begins to trade what is produced through labor without using gold.”[211]

As far as the Germans were concerned, the U.S. Government and corporate America pursued the same goals. In the words of Giselher Wirsing, there was

“practically no longer any force in the United States that could resist the unbridled domination of big business. There appeared to be no more difference between the interests of high finance and those of the state.”[212]

In Roosevelt, America elected a president inordinately concerned with foreign affairs. “Roosevelt was a determined internationalist and interventionist,” observed Congressman Hamilton Fish.[213] New York Times correspondent Arthur Krock described FDR as “considering himself absolutely indispensable to mankind.”[214] A proponent of liberal democratic globalization, the new president strongly believed in the Versailles structure. Hitler’s step-by-step eradication of the post-war order, German competition in European and South American markets, and the Reich’s stand for the sovereignty of nations over the one-world concept made Roosevelt an irreconcilable enemy of Germany.

During the peacetime years, Washington opposed Hitler’s efforts to revise the Versailles construction. In April 1933, Roosevelt told the French ambassador André Lefebvre de Laboulaye, “The situation is alarming. Hitler is a madman and his advisors, some of whom I know personally, are crazier than he is.” (So far, Ambassador Hans Luther was the only German official the president had met.) FDR told his French guest:

“France must not disarm and no one will demand it to.”[215]

A month later, Roosevelt wrote the heads of 54 countries urging disarmament, including France.

The president discussed foreign affairs before an audience in Chicago in October 1937. He told listeners, “The present reign of terror and international lawlessness began a few years ago,” referring to Germany and Italy. Aggressor nations were supposedly “piling up armament on armament… Their national income is being spent directly for armaments. It runs from 30 to as high as 50 percent in most of those cases.” He suggested that such diseased countries should be quarantined, in other words economically boycotted. After publication of the speech, the Reich’s War Ministry notified German military commanders:

“Roosevelt’s words may be regarded as America’s formal decision to join the front of the democracies against the fascist states, abandoning the policy of isolationism.”[216]

The Reich’s press described FDR’s speech as the “prelude to a huge armaments appropriation planned for the near future” by the Roosevelt administration.[217]

Upon orders from the White House, U. S. Navy Captain Royal Ingersoll went to London in December to discuss fleet cooperation with the British. The prospect of American naval support against Japan, Italy and Germany strengthened England’s hand in negotiations with Hitler.

The German annexation of Austria on March 12, 1938 initially produced a mild reaction from the American press and from Secretary of State Cordell Hull. This altered abruptly within 24 hours. The German ambassador Hans-Heinrich Dieckhoff reported to Berlin that the Anschluss suddenly became

“regarded as a breach of treaty, as militarism, as the rape of defenseless little Austria by a neighbor armed to the teeth, and as a product of the policy of might makes right.”

As to the probable genesis of the about-face in American attitude,

“the president probably became personally involved and gave both the State Department and the press corresponding guidelines.”[218]

The ambassador warned the Reich’s Foreign Office that

“were it ever to come to a major confrontation that England would be drawn into, the United States would not stand aside in the long run, but would join in the conflict against us.”[219]

Roosevelt reached beyond America’s borders – and his authority – during the Sudeten crisis that September. To prevent this crucial revision of the Versailles system, he proposed to British Ambassador Sir Ronald Lindsay that the U.S. and Royal Navies blockade the entire European Atlantic coast and the Mediterranean to cut Germany off from overseas imports.[220] Sea blockades are by international law an act of belligerency. FDR was prepared to abandon neutrality and wage war to preserve Czechoslovakia’s claim to the Sudetenland. Chamberlain, wary of Roosevelt’s endeavors to extend U.S. influence into Europe, rejected the idea.

The editor of Germany’s Völkischer Beobachter (National Observer) wrote:

“Then Washington began a savage campaign to malign the ‘appeasers’ who had again backed down before the dictators. Chamberlain and Daladier were branded in the U.S. press as downright traitors to the democratic world cause.”[221]

Washington’s intrigues impeded diplomatic resolution of Germany’s bid for Danzig in 1939. On December 2, 1938, America’s ambassador in Poland, Anthony J. Biddle, met with the Free City’s Commissioner Burckhardt. Biddle, Burckhardt recalled,

“declared with genuine glee that the Poles are ready to wage war over Danzig… Never since the torpedoing of the Lusitania has such a religious hatred against Germany existed in America like today. Chamberlain and Daladier will be blown away by public opinion. It will be a holy war.”[222]

Roosevelt disrupted negotiations between Germany and England regarding a trade agreement in February 1939 during which Berlin offered far-reaching concessions to improve diplomatic relations by making London a substantially better offer.[223] In this way he obstructed another attempt at Anglo-German reconciliation. The following month, Hans Thomsen, Ribbentrop’s chargé d’affaires in Washington, advised Berlin:

“Roosevelt is personally convinced that Germany is the enemy that must be destroyed, because she is seriously disrupting the balance of powers and the status quo.”[224]

On March 23, the president promised the British to transfer more U.S. Navy warships to Hawaii, thereby freeing the English Pacific fleet for deployment in the Atlantic and in the Mediterranean. He instructed the American ambassador in London, Joseph Kennedy, to shore up Chamberlain’s resolve to guarantee Poland. On FDR’s instructions, the U.S. military attaché in Paris pledged American naval support to protect the French colony of Indochina from the Japanese. In this way, the president gradually increased Anglo-French dependency on the United States, indirectly augmenting his influence over the democracies in their negotiations with Hitler. The April 14, 1939 edition of the Washington Times Herald reported that Roosevelt had warned the English, in the form of an ultimatum, to make no concessions to Germany.[225]

The American ambassador in Paris, William Bullitt, informed the French government during the summer that if England and France did not come to Poland’s aid in the event of a German attack, then they could expect no assistance from Washington in a general European war. They could on the other hand, reckon with the “full support” of the USA if they declared war on Germany on Poland’s behalf.[226] The former French Foreign Minister Georges Bonnet later wrote that Bullitt

“urged France to take a strong stand against Hitler. I am convinced also that he persuaded Daladier that Roosevelt would intervene (in the war) if he saw that France and England were in danger… Bullitt in 1939 did everything he could to make France enter the war.”[227]

Congressman Fish concluded:

“If Roosevelt had refrained from meddling in the European situation by encouraging England and France to believe that we would fight their battles, they would have reached an agreement by peaceful means to settle the Danzig issue … (and) avoided the disastrous war.”[228]

On August 17, Hans Herwarth von Bittenfeld, a traitor on the Reich’s embassy staff in Moscow, disclosed information about German-Soviet negotiations to the American diplomat Charles Bohlen. The German government had reassured the Kremlin that there “are no conflicts of interest (between us) regarding the countries from the Baltic Sea to the Black Sea” and it was prepared to discuss “every territorial question in eastern Europe” with Stalin. The State Department’s Sumner Wells relayed this intelligence to British Ambassador Lindsay. He in turn forwarded news of the German-Soviet understanding, which implied dire consequences for Poland, to the Foreign Office in London. A Soviet spy there, Herbert King, notified Stalin of the intrigue. The Soviet dictator most likely assumed that the British would forewarn Beck of the danger facing his country, leading him to seek rapprochement with Germany. “But Stalin overestimated British and American fairness,” as a German historian put it.[229] Neither democratic government passed this vital information on to Warsaw.

Herwarth also leaked the complete text, including the secret protocol about dividing Poland, of the August 23 agreement Ribbentrop had concluded in Moscow.[230] Bohlen likewise communicated it to Washington. Bullitt, fully aware of the text and import of the German-Soviet secret protocol, told a Polish diplomat in Paris, Count Lukasiewicz, that the document addressed only the status of the Baltic States and not Poland.[231] As a result, Beck remained doubtful about serious cooperation between Moscow and Berlin.

The result of Germany’s rapid victory over Poland in September, France’s passive strategy of defense, and England’s token commitment to the continental war was a stalemate. On October 6, 1939, Hitler addressed the Reichstag, asking for a peace conference. Chamberlain himself admitted in his diary that the Führer presented some “very attractive proposals.” Roosevelt however, pressured the British not to allow a “second Munich.”[232] Göring, Hitler’s number-two man, met with the American consul general in Berlin on October 9 and urged that FDR mediate peace talks. Offering to travel to Washington personally to represent Germany in the negotiations, Göring expressed Berlin’s willingness to re-establish Polish and Czech independence as a demonstration of good faith.[233] Roosevelt formally refused to arbitrate a cease fire. During a press conference that month, he described the German offer as the product of anonymous subordinates in the Reich’s Propaganda Ministry and without substance.[234]

Two American tycoons visited Germany in October, hoping to open the road to negotiations. On the 19th, Göring told James Mooney, a senior executive of General Motors:

“If we could conclude a treaty with the English today, we’ll throw Russia and Japan overboard tomorrow.”[235]

Göring again offered to reinstate Poland and the Czech state to William Davis, a Texas oil magnate on a semi-official visit to Berlin. Even American newspapers acknowledged that considering Roosevelt’s outspoken hostility toward Germany, for the Germans to nominate him and accept his judgment as arbitrator in a peace conference was a generous concession.[236] Upon returning home, Davis was unable to obtain an audience with the president. Hull yanked his passport, to prevent Mr. Davis from returning to Europe and interfering with the progress of the war.[237]

In Warsaw, Ribbentrop’s staff compiled the pre-war diplomatic correspondence between Warsaw and its missions in Washington, London, and Paris. The Völkischer Beobachter published the content on October 27. Its editor summarized:

“The Polish documents prove that Roosevelt’s diplomacy bears a major, if not the greatest measure of responsibility for the outbreak of the English war. The Polish documents also refute Anglo-Saxon propaganda’s claim that the major shift in democratic policy to encirclement and then to war did not take place until the middle of March 1939, that is after the German occupation of Prague. The embassy reports about Bullitt’s intrigues were without exception submitted before this magic date. They are actually dated beginning right after the pact at Munich, which was accepted not only by the nations of Europe but by the democratic signatories themselves as an instrument of peace, and not regarded as an example of ‘aggression’.”[238]

One letter for example, was dated August 8, 1938, from the Polish General Staff to Beck. It summarized assurances made by British and U.S. military attachés in Portugal to army officers at the Polish embassy there:

“Lieutenant N. Chamberlain, member of the British military mission, said, ‘We know that Germany and Italy are bluffing. Together with the younger officers of our staff I am of the opinion that we should start war immediately.’”

Remarks by the American naval attaché, Commander John A. Gade, the author of the Polish embassy report summarized as follows:

“At present the possibilities for speedy aid to Great Britain and France are being studied in America. One must conclude that help shall not be sent as in the World War, only after one year when the first American soldiers intervened actively, but in the course of seven to ten days. As soon as the war begins 1,000 airplanes are to be sent.”

The Polish staff officer described Gade as

“a man who enjoys the confidence of Roosevelt and is a personal friend of his. He is very unfriendly towards Germany. Personally he is very wealthy.”[239]

Another document the Germans brought to light was a report by Count Jerzy Potocki, the former Polish ambassador in Washington, about a conversation he had had with Bullitt in November 1938:

“About Germany and Chancellor Hitler, he (Bullitt) spoke vehemently and with great hatred. He said that only energy at the end of the war would put an end to a future great German expansionism. To my question asking how he visualized this future war, he replied that above all the United States, France, and England must rearm tremendously in order to be in a position to cope with German power. Only then, when the moment is ripe, declared Bullitt further, will one be ready for the final decision. I asked him in what way the conflict would arise, since Germany probably would not attack England and France. I simply could not see the starting point in this entire speculation… In reply to my question whether the United States would take part in such a war, he said, ‘Undoubtedly yes, but only after Great Britain and France had made the first move!’”[240]

Ribbentrop presented the original Polish foreign policy letters to the international press for inspection. The editor of the American edition of the German White Book, which published 16 of the letters in English, concluded:

“It is likely that they are authentic documents. This is the opinion of many Washington correspondents, including Sir Willmott Lewis of the London Times, who might be expected to be skeptical of them.”[241]

Roosevelt and Hull publicly claimed that the Polish documents were forgeries.

During this time, the White House focused on persuading Congress to amend the 1937 neutrality law. The law imposed an embargo on the sale of war materiel to belligerents in Europe. Already in September, the president had managed to have the restrictions partially relaxed. As a result, U.S. arms manufacturers sold $4,429,323 worth of ordnance to France that month, and $1,422,800 to England.[242] Germany’s share in armaments purchases from America, according to the State Department Bulletin of October 28, 1939, was $49.[243] By the close of 1940, Britain had purchased $2.7 billion in arms from the United States. Roosevelt told a cabinet member:

“We have been milking the British financial cow, which had plenty of milk at one time but which has now about become dry.”[244]

The president speculated on how to keep the British at war “until their supply of dollars runs out.”[245]

Giselher Wirsing, editor of Germany’s popular Signal magazine, made this observation about the arsenal of democracy:

“The armaments business has grown to one of the worst rackets in American history and has amassed billions in profits through this ‘trading in death.’ During 1940, there was an enormous increase in dividends. According to an exhibit of the National City Bank in New York, the pure profit of around 2,600 shareholding companies in 1940 amounted to $4,253 million, compared to $3,565 million in 1939. When one considers that the actual business of selling arms didn’t really begin until 1940, then it may be assumed that the profit margin projected for 1941 will be 40 percent above what it was in 1939.”[246]

Congressman Fish recalled:

“Roosevelt’s war cabinet had a great deal of cooperation from the powerful Eastern press, largely for war… Pro-war propaganda was heavily financed by the international bankers, armament makers, and big business, numerically few in numbers but exceedingly powerful in financial resources and control over vast publicity and propaganda.”[247]

Reverend John McNicholas, the Archbishop of Cincinnati, remarked in January 1941:

“Ten percent of our people are cunningly forcing the United States into a world conflict, while the majority of 90 percent, which is for peace, stands aside silently and helplessly.”[248]

As Congress eased restrictions on selling weapons to belligerents, America provided logistical support for England to continue the war. Under Washington’s leadership, the Western Hemisphere countries proclaimed a nautical security zone southward from Canada. This zone, 300 to 1,000 miles wide in places, was off-limits to combat operations of warring powers. Hitler ordered his navy to refrain from attacking British merchant vessels inside this belt. It substantially reduced the sea lanes the English Royal Navy had to patrol to guard cargo ships en route to Britain. U.S. warships eventually assisted in protecting convoys, monitoring the movement of German U-boats, and reporting their findings to the Royal Navy.[249]

During September 1941, Roosevelt decided to become “more provocative,” adding that if the Germans “did not like it they could attack American forces.” He ordered U.S. warships “to attack any U-boat which showed itself, even if it were 200 or 300 miles away from the convoy.”[250] In three separate incidents in September and October, U.S. destroyers on anti-submarine patrol crossed lances with German U-boats. In one occurrence, the USS Greer assisted a British bomber in a depth-charge attack against U-652. Bombarded for four hours, the U-boat finally launched two torpedoes against its assailant.[251] The Greer eventually broke off the engagement. Roosevelt told the American public in a September 11 radio address:

“I tell you the blunt fact that the German submarine fired first upon the American destroyer without warning and with deliberate design to sink her… We have sought no shooting war with Hitler.”[252]

The Navy Department refused to furnish the Greer’s log to the Senate.[253]

Hitler instructed his U-boats to avoid confrontations with the U.S. Navy and to fire only in self-defense. According to a Gallup survey, 87 percent of Americans opposed involvement in a European war, and in that day and age Congress still had many representatives who understood their duty to respect the wishes of the majority.[254] Roosevelt could not arbitrarily start a war against Germany. Unless the enemy fired the first shot, and Hitler was eschewing incidents, the United States would remain sidelined: a silent partner in the Allied war effort. The president therefore sought what an American historian described as the “back door to war”; to provoke a conflict with Germany’s ally, Japan.

Like Germany, Japan is a country that relies heavily on imports. The European war seriously curtailed her commerce. As a result, the Japanese depended on increased trade with the United States. Supporting China in her war against Japan, Roosevelt imposed various embargoes on the island empire. On October 10, 1940, the secretary of the navy told Admiral James Richardson, commander-in-chief of the fleet, that the president wants U.S. warships deployed “across the western Pacific in such a way as to make it impossible for Japan to reach any of her sources of supply.”[255] Richardson objected that distributing our navy in such a vulnerable manner against a formidable maritime adversary, and in so doing provoking it to belligerency, would be militarily senseless. Roosevelt dropped the idea.

Considering the USSR the greater menace, Tokyo sought an understanding with the United States. In November 1940, Foreign Minister Yosuke Matsuoka asked Bishops James Walsh and Pater Drought of the Catholic Missionary Society of Maryknoll, New York to deliver his peace proposal to Washington. Meeting with the president and secretary of state on January 23, 1941, the emissaries relayed Japan’s willingness to negotiate cancelling her pact with Germany, evacuating her army from China, and respecting Chinese sovereignty.[256] At the close of the two-hour meeting, Roosevelt and Hull agreed to consider the proposals. Walsh and Drought heard nothing further from the White House.

In February, Tokyo appointed Admiral Kichisaburo Nomura, acquainted with Roosevelt from World War I, ambassador to the United States. Meeting with the president on the 14th, and in over 40 sessions with Hull during the next several months, Nomura was unable to reach a compromise with the administration. Washington was in fact more interested in the action proposal submitted on October 7, 1940 by navy Lieutenant Commander Arthur McCollum. This memorandum stated:

“Prompt aggressive naval action against Japan by the United States would render Japan incapable of affording any help to Germany and Italy in their attack on England. … It is in the interest of the United States to eliminate Japan’s threat in the Pacific at the earliest opportunity.”[257]

McCollum suggested among other things, that America “completely embargo all U.S. trade with Japan, in collaboration with a similar embargo imposed by the British Empire,” and pressure the Dutch to “refuse to grant Japanese demands for undue economic concessions, particularly oil.” McCollum cautioned:

“It is not believed that in the present state of political opinion the United States government is capable of declaring war against Japan without more ado.”

The author introduced an eight-point program to provoke the Japanese:

“If by these means Japan could be led to commit an overt act of war, so much the better. At all events we must be fully prepared to accept the threat of war.”[258]

In November 1941, Secretary of War Henry Stimson speculated in his diary on how to maneuver Japan into “firing the first shot without allowing too much danger to ourselves.”[259]

Without Congress’s knowledge, Hull delivered an antagonistic ultimatum to Japanese negotiators on November 26. He himself confessed:

“We had no serious thought that Japan would accept our proposal.”[260]

The terms, had Tokyo agreed to them, would have so substantially weakened Japan’s position in the Far East, especially with respect to China and the Soviet Union, that they were unacceptable.[261] The Japanese responded by opening hostilities against U.S. and British bases in the Pacific. The infamous air raid on the U.S. naval base at Hawaii, conducted by 350 carrier-based Japanese bombers and fighters, galvanized American public opinion and Congress to enter the war.

The Three-Power Pact that Germany had concluded with Italy and Japan in September 1940 was a defensive alliance. It did not obligate the Reich to declare war on the United States, since Japan had struck the first blow. The Japanese, for example, had done nothing to assist the Germans in their war against the Soviet Union, which had been raging for six months. But U.S. warships were taking part in the battle of the Atlantic. Federal attorneys in fact had determined that Roosevelt’s swap in September 1940 of 50 destroyers in exchange for British bases in the Caribbean and Newfoundland not only violated American laws, but by international law put the USA in a technical state of war with Germany.[262]

The primary influence in Hitler’s deliberations was the situation in Eastern Europe. During the summer of 1941, the German armed forces had advanced far into Russia, winning impressive victories over the Red Army. Dogged Soviet resistance, overextended German supply lines and a severe winter then forced the invaders onto the defensive. Another factor contributed to the shift of the initiative to the Russians: logistical support from the United States. Less than five weeks after Germany had invaded the USSR, Roosevelt’s emissary, Harry Hopkins, was in Moscow offering aid to Stalin:

“The president regards Hitler as the enemy of all humanity and therefore wishes to help the Soviet Union in its war against Germany.”[263]

Without demanding any payment whatsoever, and despite protests from the U.S. Army, Roosevelt prioritized supplying the Russians with immense quantities of war materiel by sea. Stalin confessed in 1943 that without American aid, “we would lose the war.”[264]

Hitler believed that it would only be possible to regain the initiative against this military behemoth were the flow of supplies from the United States curtailed. Unrestricted submarine warfare could sever the nautical lifelines keeping the Soviet fighting forces combat-effective. His U-boat commanders were still under orders not to torpedo American ships and to avoid the expansive security zone of the Western Atlantic. These orders not only prevented the German navy from disrupting the delivery of ordnance to England and Russia, but were demoralizing the U-boat crews. Declaring war on the USA would free the German navy to fight the battle of the Atlantic with the gloves off, and buy the army time for another major thrust against Russia during the 1942 campaign season.[265] Against the advice of Ribbentrop, Hitler declared war on December 11, 1941. This gained Germany a temporary tactical advantage.

The Reichstag convened on the 11th to hear the Führer’s announcement. He recapped the history of his country’s poor relations with Washington, beginning with Roosevelt’s 1937 quarantine speech, through the president’s promises to Poland in 1939, and finally the U.S. Navy’s operations on behalf of Britain. Hitler also offered a personal comparison of his own experience as a combat soldier during World War I with that of FDR, who had then been undersecretary of the navy:

“Roosevelt comes from a super-rich family, belonging from the start to that class of people whose birth and background pave the way to advancement in a democracy. I myself was just the child of a small and poor family, and had to struggle through life through toilsome work and by personal industry.

When the World War came, Roosevelt found a spot in the shade under Wilson and experienced the war from the sphere of those who reaped dividends from it. He therefore knew only the pleasant consequences of the clash of nations and states; those that provide opportunity for one to do business while another bleeds. I wasn’t one of those who made history or did business, but one who simply carried out orders. As an ordinary soldier I tried to do my duty in the face of the enemy during these four years, and naturally returned home from the war as impoverished as I had entered it in the fall of 1914. I shared the fate of millions. Mr. Franklin Roosevelt shared his with the so-called upper ten thousand. While Mr. Roosevelt after the war was already trying his hand at financial speculation… I, together with hundreds of thousands of others, was still lying in a hospital.”[266]

The German U-boat fleet launched its first coordinated operation, Paukenschlag (Drumbeat or Pounding), against American shipping on January 13, 1942. During the balance of the month, the Germans sank 49 merchant vessels in the Atlantic and in the North Sea. They tallied 84 steamers during a second naval offensive in March. By the end of 1942, the U-boats had conducted five major operations, sinking 1,160 ships totaling 6,266,215 tons.[267] They targeted both convoys bound for English harbors and those delivering supplies to the Soviet port of Murmansk. This brought some relief to the German armies fighting in the East. In the long run, however, American shipyards built more ships than the U-boats could sink. As the 1942 summer offensive against Russia lost impetus, Germany gradually became snared in the “east-west pincers” as Hitler had feared.

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Notes

[1] Pahl, Walther, Die britische Machtpolitik, p. 22
[2] Helberg, Hermann, England und wir, pp. 42-43
[3] Pahl, Walther, Die britische Machtpolitik, pp. 16-17
[4] Thost, Hans, Als Nationalsozialist in England, pp. 165, 183
[5] Ibid., p. 272
[6] Ibid., p. 223
[7] Kessemeier, Heinrich, Der Feldzug mit der anderen Waffe, p. 156
[8] Helberg, Hermann, England und wir, p. 128
[9] Kunert, Dirk, Hitlers kalter Krieg, p. 123
[10] Rose, Franz, Das ist Churchill, pp. 76-77
[11] Kunert, Dirk, Ein Weltkrieg wird programmiert, p. 66
[12] Winkelvoss, Peter, Die Weltherrschaft der Angelsachsen, p. 153
[13] Kunert, Dirk, Hitlers kalter Krieg, p. 225
[14] Kunert, Dirk, Ein Weltkrieg wird programmiert, p. 223
[15] Ibid., p. 221
[16] Ibid., p. 220
[17] Ibid., p. 222
[18] Schultze-Rhonhof, Gerd, Der Krieg, der viele Väter hatte, p. 223
[19] Klüver, Max, Den Sieg verspielt, p. 39
[20] Charmley, John, Churchill: The End of Glory, p. 325
[21] Schultze-Rhonhof, Gerd, Das tschechisch-deutsche Drama, p. 239
[22] Kunert, Dirk, Deutschland im Krieg der Kontinente, p. 209
[23] Kunert, Dirk, Hitlers kalter Krieg, p. 103
[24] Schultze-Rhonhof, Gerd, Das tschechisch-deutsche Drama, p. 311
[25] PRO CAB 23/95 cab 43 (38)
[26] Rose, Franz, Das ist Churchill, p. 78
[27] Kriegk, Otto, Die englischen Kriegshetzer, p. 65
[28] Klüver, Max, Die Kriegstreiber, pp. 107-108
[29] Halifax, Viscount, Fullness of Days, p. 200
[30] PRO FO 371/22988
[31] Ibid.
[32] Klüver, Max, Die Kriegstreiber, p. 102
[33] Ibid., p. 301
[34] PRO CAB 23/98 cab 12 (39)
[35] Klüver, Max, Die Kriegstreiber, p. 300
[36] Klüver, Max, War es Hitlers Krieg?, p. 196
[37] Hoggan, David, The Forced War, p. 301
[38] Klüver, Max, War es Hitlers Krieg?, p. 196
[39] PRO FO 800/294
[40] Klüver, Max, War es Hitlers Krieg?, p. 388
[41] Klüver, Max, Die Kriegstreiber, p. 284
[42] Klüver, Max, War es Hitlers Krieg?, p. 417
[43] PRO CAB 23/98 cab 11 (39)
[44] Taylor, A.J.P., The Origins of the Second World War, p. 205
[45] Hoggan, David, The Forced War, p. 304
[46] Taylor, A.J.P., The Origins of the Second World War, p. 205
[47] Hoggan, David, The Forced War, p. 304
[48] Taylor, A.J.P., The Origins of the Second World War, p. 186
[49] Domarus, Max, Hitler: Reden und Proklamationen, p. 932
[50] PRO FO 371/22993
[51] Klüver, Max, War es Hitlers Krieg?, p. 197
[52] PRO CAB 23/98 cab 12 (39)
[53] Klüver, Max, War es Hitlers Krieg?, p. 391
[54] Kunert, Dirk, Deutschland im Krieg der Kontinente, p. 222
[55] PRO CAB 23/98 cab 16 (39)
[56] Ibid.
[57] Ibid.
[58] Klüver, Max, War es Hitlers Krieg?, p. 162
[59] Klüver, Max, Die Kriegstreiber, p. 402
[60] PRO FO 371/23017 c6454
[61] PRO FO 371/23017 c5469
[62] Schultze-Rhonhof, Gerd, Der Krieg, der viele Väter hatte, p. 455
[63] Domarus, Max, Hitler: Reden und Proklamationen, p. 1065
[64] PRO FO 371/22988
[65] PRO FO 371/22989 c6670
[66] Karski, Jan, The Great Powers and Poland, p. 332
[67] Ibid., p. 333
[68] Klüver, Max, War es Hitlers Krieg?, p. 194
[69] PRO FO 371/22976 c11573
[70] PRO FO 371/23017
[71] PRO FO 371/23019
[72] Wellems, Hugo, Das Jahrhundert der Lüge, p. 123
[73] Klüver, Max, Es war nicht Hitlers Krieg, p. 180
[74] PRO FO 371/22974 c9475
[75] PRO FO 371/22991
[76] PRO FO 371/22019 c16211
[77] Wanderscheck, Hermann, Höllenmaschinen aus England, p. 78
[78] PRO FO 371/22979 c12476
[79] PRO FO 371/22976
[80] PRO PREM 1/331A
[81] Klüver, Max, War es Hitlers Krieg?, p. 431
[82] PRO FO 371/23026 c11948
[83] Klüver, Max, Die Kriegstreiber, p. 311
[84] Schultze-Rhonhof, Gerd, Der Krieg, der viele Väter hatte, p. 493
[85] Ibid., p. 503
[86] Ribbentrop, Annelies von, Die Kriegsschuld des Widerstandes, p. 345
[87] Schultze-Rhonhof, Gerd, Der Krieg, der viele Väter hatte, p. 508
[88] Klüver, Max, War es Hitlers Krieg? p. 421
[89] Tansill, Charles, Die Hintertür zum Kriege, p. 333
[90] Schultze-Rhonhof, Gerd, Der Krieg, der viele Väter hatte, p. 532
[91] Ibid., p. 520
[92] Ibid., p. 528
[93] Ibid., p. 430
[94] Klüver, Max, Die Kriegstreiber, p. 408
[95] Ibid., p. 414
[96] Ibid., p. 379
[97] Ibid., p. 412
[98] Ibid.
[99] Schultze-Rhonhof, Gerd, Der Krieg, der viele Väter hatte, p. 525
[100] Kunert, Dirk, Deutschland im Krieg der Kontinente, p. 216
[101] Klüver, Max, Die Kriegstreiber, p. 380
[102] Helberg, Hermann, England und wir, p. 152
[103] Kunert, Dirk, Deutschland im Krieg der Kontinente, p. 224
[104] Ibid., p. 238
[105] Bieg, Hans-Henning, Amerika, die unheimliche Weltmacht, p. 160
[106] Karski, Jan, The Great Powers and Poland, pp. 376-377
[107] Piekalkiewicz, Janusz, Polenfeldzug, p. 123
[108] Kunert, Dirk, Deutschland im Krieg der Kontinente, p. 241
[109] Giesler, Hermann, Ein anderer Hitler, p. 364
[110] Bieg, Hans-Henning, Amerika, die unheimliche Weltmacht, p. 103
[111] Kunert, Dirk, Hitlers kalter Krieg, p. 14
111a.        Martin Papst, Roter Terror, pp. 77, 65.
[112] Musial, Bognan, Kampfplatz Deutschland, p. 282
[113] Ibid., p. 269
[114] Weber, Hermann und Ulrich Mählert, Verbrechen im Namen der Idee, p. 99
[115] Suworov, Viktor, and Dmitrij Chmelnizki, Überfall auf Europa, pp.111,128
[116] Post, Walter, Das Unternehmen Barbarossa, p. 25
[117] Kurowski, Franz, Balkenkreuz und Roter Stern, p. 8
[118] Ribbentrop, Rudolf von, Mein Vater Joachim von Ribbentrop, p. 202
[119] PRO FO 371/23022, C9571
[120] Kunert, Dirk, Hitlers kalter Krieg, pp. 303-304
[121] Ribbentrop, Rudolf von, Mein Vater Joachim von Ribbentrop, p. 131
[122] Abendroth, Hans Henning, Hitler in der spanischen Arena, p. 28
[123] Ibid., p. 15
[124] Ribbentrop, Rudolf von, Mein Vater Joachim von Ribbentrop, p. 96
[125] Abendroth, Hans-Henning, Hitler in der spanischen Arena, p. 33
[126] Suworov, Viktor, Stalins verhinderter Erstschlag, p. 89
[127] Kunert, Dirk, Hitlers kalter Krieg, p. 150
[128] Abendroth, Hans-Henning, Hitler in der spanischen Arena, p. 37
[129] Suworov, Viktor, and Dmitrij Chmelnizki, Überfall auf Europa, p. 85
[130] Abendroth, Hans-Henning, Hitler in der spanischen Arena, p. 35
[131] Baberowski, Jörg, Der rote Terror, p. 174
[132] Kunert, Dirk, Hitlers kalter Krieg, pp. 12-13
[133] Ibid., p. 72
[134] Post, Walter, Das Unternehmen Barbarossa, p. 102
[135] Kunert, Dirk, Ein Weltkrieg wird programmiert, p. 277
[136] Post, Walter, Das Unternehmen Barbarossa, p. 136
[137] Ribbentrop, Rudolf von, Mein Vater Joachim von Ribbentrop, p. 200
[138] Post, Walter, Das Unternehmen Barbarossa, p. 107
[139] Ribbentrop, Rudolf von, Mein Vater Joachim von Ribbentrop, p. 209
[140] Suworov, Viktor, and Dmitrij Chmelnizki, Überfall auf Europa, p. 91
[141] Domarus, Max, Hitler: Reden und Proklamationen, p. 1210
[142] Thadden, Adolf von, Stalins Falle, pp. 77, 79
[143] Suworov, Viktor, Chmelnizki, Dmitrij, Überfall auf Europa, p. 122
[144] Ribbentrop, Rudolf von, Mein Vater Joachim von Ribbentrop, p. 221
[145] Ibid., p. 218, 226
[146] Ibid., p. 230
[147] Becker, Fritz, Kampf um Europa, p. 52
[148] Hoffmann, Joachim, Stalins Vernichtungskrieg, pp. 144-145
[149] Post, Walter, Die Ursachen des Zweiten Weltkrieges, p. 451
[150] “Deutschland und die finnische Frage”, Völkischer Beobachter, 12/8, 1939
[151] Suworov, Viktor, and Dmitrij Chmelnizki, Überfall auf Europa, p. 203
[152] Papst, Martin, Roter Terror, p. 78
[153] Suworov, Viktor, and Dmitrij Chmelnizki, Überfall auf Europa, pp. 221,218
[154] Post, Walter, Das Unternehmen Barbarossa, p. 147
[155] Papst, Martin, Roter Terror, p. 78
[156] Suworov, Viktor, and Dmitrij Chmelnizki, Überfall auf Europa, p. 126
[157] Post, Walter, Das Unternehmen Barbarossa, p. 145
[158] Becker, Fritz, Kampf um Europa, pp. 114-115
[159] Klüver, Max, Präventivschlag 1941, p. 185
[160] Post, Walter, Das Unternehmen Barbarossa, p. 153
[161] Klüver, Max, Präventivschlag 1941, p. 126
[162] Piekalkiewicz, Janusz, Krieg auf dem Balkan, p. 33
[163] Klüver, Max, Präventivschlag 1941, p. 140
[164] Ibid., p. 51
[165] Becker, Fritz, Kampf um Europa, p. 70
[166] Klüver, Max, Präventivschlag 1941, p. 113
[167] Naumann, Andreas, Freispruch für die deutsche Wehrmacht, p. 24
[168] Post, Walter, Das Unternehmen Barbarossa, p. 184
[169] Fabry, Philipp, Balkan-Wirren, p. 93
[170] Ibid., p. 62
[171] Ibid., p. 95
[172] Ibid., p. 131, 99
[173] Olshausen, Klaus, Zwischenspiel auf dem Balkan, p. 86
[174] Piekalkiewicz, Janusz, Krieg auf dem Balkan, p. 65
[175] Klüver, Max, Präventivschlag 1941, pp. 257, 256
[176] Bathe, Rolf, and Erich Glodschey, Der Kampf um den Balkan, p. 126
[177] Hünger, Heinz, and Erich Strassl, Kampf und Intrige um Griechenland, p. 104
[178] Becker, Fritz, Kampf um Europa, p. 123
[179] Ibid., p. 221
[180] Kunert, Dirk, Deutschland im Krieg der Kontinente, p. 80
[181] Meiser, Hans, Verratene Verräter, p. 244
[182] Becker, Fritz, Kampf um Europa, p. 179
[183] Post, Walter, Das Unternehmen Barbarossa, p. 243
[184] Below, Nicolaus von, Als Hitlers Adjutant, p. 277
[185] Zürner, Bernhard, Der verschenkte Sieg, p. 14
[186] Post, Walter, Das Unternehmen Barbarossa, pp. 242-243
[187] Ibid., p. 225
[188] Fabry, Philipp, Balkan-Wirren, p. 96
[189] Ribbentrop, Rudolf von, Mein Vater Joachim von Ribbentrop, pp. 302-303
[190] Ibid., p. 304
[191] Post, Walter, Das Unternehmen Barbarossa, p. 263
[192] Fabry, Philipp, Balkan-Wirren, p. 32
[193] Ribbentrop, Rudolf von, Mein Vater Joachim von Ribbentrop, p. 314
[194] Suworov, Viktor, and Dmitrij Chmelnizki, Überfall auf Europa, p. 118
[195] Ribbentrop, Rudolf von, Mein Vater Joachim von Ribbentrop, p. 430
[196] Ibid., p. 305
[197] Suworov, Viktor, and Dmitrij Chmelnizki, Überfall auf Europa, pp. 36-37, 52
[198] Ibid., p. 58
[199] Klüver, Max, Präventivschlag 1941, p. 279
[200] Ribbentrop, Rudolf von, Mein Vater Joachim von Ribbentrop, p. 310
[201] Ibid., p. 300
[202] Klüver, Max, Präventivschlag 1941, p. 14
[203] Bavendamm, Dirk, Roosevelts Krieg, p. 80
[204] Gordon, Helmut, Es spricht: Der Führer, p. 70
[205] Schultze-Rhonhof, Gerd, Der Krieg, der viele Väter hatte, p. 241
[206] Fuller, J.F.C., The Second World War, p. 29
[207] Schadewaldt, Hans, Was will Roosevelt?, p. 53
[208] Roosevelt, Elliot, As He Saw It, p. 37
[209] Schweiger, Herbert, Mythos Waffen-SS, p. 38
[210] Bieg, Hans-Henning, Amerika, die unheimliche Weltmacht, p. 105
[211] Picker, Henry, Hitlers Tischgespräche im Führerhauptquartier, p. 499
[212] Wirsing, Giselher, Der masslose Kontinent, p. 66
[213] Fish, Hamilton, FDR: The Other Side of the Coin, p. 15
[214] Ibid., p. 13
[215] Franz-Willing, Georg, Roosevelt, p.31
[216] Kunert, Dirk, Ein Weltkrieg wird programmiert, p. 233
[217] Kunert, Dirk, Hitlers kalter Krieg, p. 212
[218] Post, Walter, Die Ursachen des Zweiten Weltkrieges, p. 229
[219] Ibid., p. 247
[220] Schultze-Rhonhof, Gerd, Der Krieg, der viele Väter hatte, p. 172
[221] Seibert, Theodor, Das amerikanische Rätsel, p. 28
[222] Schultze-Rhonhof, Gerd, Der Krieg, der viele Väter hatte, p. 446
[223] Ibid., p. 447
[224] Post, Walter, Die Ursachen des Zweiten Weltkrieges, p. 296
[225] Ribbentrop, Rudolf von, Mein Vater Joachim von Ribbentrop, p. 207
[226] Tansill, Charles, Die Hintertür zum Kriege, p. 338
[227] Fish, Hamilton, Tragic Deception, p. 11
[228] Fish, Hamilton, FDR: The Other Side of the Coin, p. 18
[229] Kunert, Dirk, Deutschland im Kriege der Kontinente, p. 233
[230] Post, Walter, Die Ursachen des Zweiten Weltkrieges, p. 470
[231] Schultze-Rhonhof, Gerd, Der Krieg, der viele Väter hatte, p. 531
[232] Bavendamm, Dirk, Roosevelts Krieg, p. 130
[233] Ibid., p. 133
[234] Meiser, Hans, Gescheiterte Friedens-Initiativen 1939-1945, p. 112
[235] Ibid., p. 117
[236] Bavendamm, Dirk, Roosevelts Krieg, p. 135
[237] Meiser, Hans, Gescheiterte Friedens-Initiativen 1939-1945, p. 116
[238] Seibert, Theodor, Das amerikanische Rätsel, p. 38
[239] Grattan, Hartley, The German White Paper, p. 16
[240] Ibid., p. 20
[241] Ibid., p. 11
[242] Post, Walter, Die Ursachen des Zweiten Weltkrieges, pp. 448-449
[243] Hedin, Sven, Amerika im Kampf der Kontinente, p. 92
[244] Charmley, John, Churchill: The End of Glory, p. 443
[245] Bieg, Hans-Henning, Amerika, die unheimliche Weltmacht, p. 105
[246] Wirsing, Giselher, Der masslose Kontinent, p. 306
[247] Fish, Hamilton, FDR: The Other Side of the Coin, p. xiv
[248] Hedin, Sven, Amerika im Kampf der Kontinente, p. 106
[249] Post, Walter, Die Ursachen des Zweiten Weltkrieges, p. 448
[250] Bailey, Thomas, and Paul Ryan, Hitler vs. Roosevelt, p. 165
[251] Ibid., p. 172
[252] Fish, Hamilton, Tragic Deception, p. 36
[253] Barnes, Harry Elmer, Perpetual War for Perpetual Peace, p. 218
[254] Bieg, Hans-Henning, Amerika, die unheimliche Weltmacht, p. 61
[255] Flynn, John, The Roosevelt Myth, p. 296
[256] Post, Walter, Die Ursachen des Zweiten Weltkrieges, p. 578
[257] Stinnett, Robert, Day of Deceit, p. 276
[258] Ibid., p. 275
[259] Bailey, Thomas, and Paul Ryan, Hitler vs. Roosevelt, p. 235
[260] Barnes, Harry Elmer, Perpetual War for Perpetual Peace, p. 345
[261] Kurowski, Franz, So war der Zweite Weltkrieg 1941, p. 375
[262] Barnes, Harry Elmer, Perpetual War for Perpetual Peace, p. 486
[263] Bavendamm, Dirk, Roosevelts Krieg, p. 168
[264] Franz-Willing, Georg, Roosevelt, p. 112
[265] Sudholt, Gert, So war der Zweite Weltkrieg 1942, pp. 267-268, 275
[266] Bouhler, Philipp, Der grossdeutsche Freiheitskampf, Band III, pp. 133-134
[267] Sudholt, Gert, So war der Zweite Weltkrieg 1942, pp. 267-268, 275