It was apparent that the Stresa front was ineffective, which prompted Hitler to take an audacious risk on 7 March 1936 by advancing German troops into the Rhineland in the interest of re-establishing military control of sovereign German territory. This was a violation of the Treaty of Versailles that had designated this region as a demilitarised zone, as well as the freely negotiated Locarno Treaties, in the face of Britain and France that were in a position to take military action against Nazi Germany before rearmament was completed. Hitler argued that this was necessary to protect Germany against France, claiming that the French government’s ratification of the Franco-Soviet Pact on 27 February was incompatible with the Locarno Treaty, claiming that this agreement drew “Bolshevik” Russia into European affairs that threatened Germany as well as the integrity of all of Europe. France had depended on the demilitarised Rhineland for its security against potential German aggression, and thus immediately lost this advantage, while planning for a purely defensive strategy, as was demonstrated by the construction of the Maginot Line in 1929. Both Britain and France did not take action against Germany, which consequently composed a new success further enhanced Hitler’s popularity. This remilitarisation of the Rhineland also had strategic importance, since German troops were to be deployed to the French border in order to defend against a French attack after a German attack on the Soviet Union. Hitler consequently became increasingly closer to fulfilling his underlying foreign political aims.
Hitler then started to intensify war preparations, proclaiming the Four Year Plan to set up a command economy for rearmament to prepare Germany for war by 1940, under the guise of stressing that its purpose was creating full employment in order to placate public concerns. The politics of economic autarchy and rearmament took precedence over fiscal responsibility, as well as the freedom of capital. A new law governing foreign currency was promulgated on 1 December 1936 under the guise of perpetrating “economic sabotage,” which made it illegal for German citizens to shift capital or maintain assets abroad. A rationing scheme was instituted to limit domestic consumption and contribute to facilitating armaments production that was financed through bank loans based on citizens’ bank savings while also imposing higher taxation. A Reichswerke was instituted to prepare for war by establishing a national iron, steel and coal conglomerate consisting of public and private companies, which was further reinforced by exploiting resources from occupied territories that would later supply eighty percent of the coal that German industry required.
Hitler also adopted a more vociferous anti-communist foreign policy in 1936 that followed the regimentation of society and the economy. This anti-communist orientation was implemented into practice through Germany’s intervention in the Spanish civil war that was sparked in July 1936 by General Francisco Franco leading fascist militias organised after the Italian model in reaction to the election of a leftist government. Hitler supported this coup while completing the first stages of rearmament, superficially to “defend Europe against Bolshevism,” to bring Mussolini into an alliance with Germany by launching a common fascist initiative, hoping that Spain would not join the French-Russian alliance against Germany, and establish an alliance with Spain that would threaten France on two fronts, while also hoping that a prolonged conflict in Spain would lead to armed conflict between Italy against France and Britain, which would divert the western powers’ resources from German armed aggression in eastern Europe.
This intervention could also enable Germany to acquire raw materials, and rearmament provided an opportunity to demonstrate its military strength through applying air power, and provided an ideal testing ground for the German air force’s aircraft and tactics. The viability of different types of aircraft were demonstrated during this time, which led to relegating the Junkers 52 to a transport role following demonstrating its limitations as a bomber, while the relative worth of the BF 109 fighter, and the Heinkel 111 and Dornier 17 bombers, as well as the Junkers 87 dive bombers, and the effectiveness of the 88 mm antiaircraft gun against both aircraft and ground targets. The newly established Luftwaffe deployed aircraft in the Condor Legion in August 1937 as a tactical air force that was tested for the first time in combat conditions in which personnel operating fighters and bombers were trained and acquired invaluable experience in bomber, fighter, reconnaissance and coastal patrol units, along with creating operations and signals staffs, and an anti-aircraft artillery unit. Developing tactics included bombing military targets on the ground from the air, while coordinating ground and air attack units, and aerial units functioning in loose formations to maximise visibility and increased freedom of action among pilots. The chief of staff of the Condor Legion, Wolfram von Richthofen, developed close air support and cooperation with ground forces in offensive operations as a direct result of these experiences during the Spanish Civil War An estimated twenty-thousand German air crew thus acquired combat flying experience operating bombers, fighters, ground attack aircraft and reconnaissance squadrons, along with highly mobile anti-aircraft, communications and supply units.
A further Nazi foreign policy success took place on 25 November 1936, when Hitler signed a treaty with Italy, the so-called “Axis alliance,” for their common opposition against international Communism. This agreement paved the way for future German-Japanese collaboration, when Japan joined in a so-called Anti-Comintern Pact in November 1937 in reaction to the potential of the extension of Soviet power in eastern Asia, whereas Hitler considered this vague understanding to potentially impose pressure on Britain to reach an understanding with Germany, while the Japanese remained non-committal about forming a military alliance. Franco’s victory in 1939, Spain maintained a state of benevolent neutrality supporting Axis interests.
After withdrawing Germany from the League of Nations and disarmament talks in October 1937, Admiral Erich Raeder, the commander-in-chief of the navy was given the authority to begin a naval building programme in March 1938. Raeder thereafter submitted the “Z Plan” for naval rearmament in January 1939 that would enable Germany to challenge the power of the British Royal Navy and also wage economic warfare against British commerce. Hitler approved this plan on 27 January, which called for the gradual construction of ten battleships, four aircraft carriers, three battle cruisers, eight heavy cruisers, forty-four light cruisers, sixty-eight destroyers, and two hundred and forty-nine U-boats, among numerous other vessels, to be completed by 1948. The design for the first aircraft carrier, the Graf Zeppelin, to deploy air power at sea was adopted from earlier blueprints and technical data for the Japanese Akagi class aircraft carrier, which was to be supplemented with heavy naval guns along with spaces for aircraft. It was first launched while it remained under construction in 1938 and a second was under construction, and then moved from Kiel to Gotenhafen at the outbreak of the war when the German navy remained unprepared to challenged the combined forces of the British and French navies. It was never deployed since the guns from both ships were removed and repurposed as coastal gun batteries following the invasion and occupation of Norway, while the construction of the second aircraft carrier was scrapped altogether with submarine construction taking precedence as a higher priority.
While the Nazi regime lacked financial resources for rearmament, military spending was enabled through artificial means. The Minister of the Economy and the president of the Reichstag, Hjalmar Schacht, created Mefo bills in 1934 as an artificial currency in the form of a bond with a four percent interest yields, and were guaranteed by the state during a time of economic uncertainty. These six-month promissory notes issued by the Metallurgische Forschungsgesellschaft (Metallurgical Research Corporation) were used to conceal rearmament from external sources, and pay for military spending by this shell corporation created in coordination with leading industrialist that was devoid of any form of production, and only served to issue bonds to provide funding for rearmament from 1934, when less than half of the regime’s official four billion RM military expenditure was entered into the national budget, whereas leading industrialists were suspected of hoarding cash reserves remaining outside of circulation. The military funding recipients were to be duly compensated with valid currency at a later date, when the regime was in a financial position to pay these exchange bill debts that were issued by the state, and used as temporary artificial currency among energy and arms manufacturers to finance production, while also circumventing currency inflation, which did not affect the everyday costs of goods and services. Expenditures on armaments increased from 720 million RM in 1933 to 10.8 billion in 1937. A total of 90 billion RM was spent on armaments from 1933 to 1939. Although rearmament contributed to restoring economic growth, this speculation of plundering resources through waging war in the future by insufficient spending in the national economy, which delayed the effect of real, albeit disguised, inflation for consumer items in a controlled economy by the spring of 1938, causing a balance of payments crisis that could not sustain this spending on armaments.
During the same time, living conditions remained austere for working classes, while concentration on rearmament led to acute foreign exchange shortages and raw materials remaining in short supply. The regime reconciled workers with long hours, low wages that did not reach their 1928 levels until 1941, and revoking concessions that had been made to labour workforces during the Weimar republic in the face of rapidly rising food prices and shortages of consumer goods with party-directed educational and leisure programs in the so-called “Strength through Joy” programmes. German citizens in the “national community” were inculcated with Nazi propaganda while enjoyed various benefits, which included heavily subsidised holidays abroad, such as on state-owned cruise liners, and subsidised cinema or theatre performances, new factory cafeterias and travelling musical performances, to garner support from underprivileged members of the population. This attempt at social engineering on a national scale also necessarily displaced those who were not German citizens, most especially Jews who were deprived of the benefits of citizenship, and could be targeted for scapegoating for the nation’s ills. In contrast to garnering popular support from citizens, thirty forced labour camps were set up by 1939 for non-citizens or those taken into custody for punitive purposes. Meanwhile, the population was oblivious to Hitler’s foreign policy planning through rearmament to establish national strength through military potential, which would inevitably lead to wartime hardships.
Hitler directly expressed his plans for future expansion through war aims on 5 November 1937 to the foreign minister, Konstantin von Neurath, and his closest military advisers, Minister of War Field-Marshal Werner von Blomberg, and the three military commanders-in-chief, Colonel-General Thomas Werner von Fritsch for the army, Admiral Erich Raeder for the navy, and Field-Marshall Göring for the air force, which were recorded in a memorandum by Colonel Hoβbach, an army adjutant attending this meeting. Hitler elucidated his long term vision for the future order of Europe by defining the aim of German foreign policy as an effort to safeguard and secure the “racial community” nation and its growth, which could only be achieved by a solution of the problem of “overcrowding” through achieving greater “living space for the German people “in the immediate proximity of the Reich in Europe” to acquire essential resources for the nation to establish economic autarchy to have the necessary resources to achieve self-sufficiency while reducing the need for vital imports of raw materials and food resources, which could be precluded by a British blockade, and rejecting the need for depending on international capitalism through increased integration with a world economy. Hitler posited that forcibly acquiring territorial strength, specifically in eastern Europe that was occupied by so-called “inferior people,” would resolve Germany’s economic difficulties, and food scarcity that was evident during the First World War.
This enormously ambitious programme of joining German speaking peoples into a “greater Germany,” followed by wide territorial expansion could only be achieved by force before other nations could counter Germany’s invasion plans, and it was his “irrevocable decision” to solve Germany’s “living space problem” at the latest by 1943 to 1945. Launching war could take place as early as 1938 if the political circumstances were favourable, with the first steps being the annexation of Czechoslovakia and Austria, prior to British and French rearmament that could overwhelm German military strength, as well as what Hitler claimed as a deteriorating diplomatic situation while Germany faced hostility from both France and Britain, in addition to conflict against Poland and the Soviet Union, as well as envisaging American support for Britain. Germany’s economic difficulties would increasingly worsen, in view of the scarcity of foreign exchange, requiring importing food and raw materials that could not sustain both a large Germany army and the population’s standard of living, and therefore expansion was to resolve these problems through waging a war of aggression to execute expansion in Europe to acquire territorial and economic resources.
Hitler believed that rapid industrialisation in the Soviet Union that was also capable of generating food resources would eventually cease acquiring industrial goods from western countries, which would in turn lead to not exporting its food resources that would be necessary for its own interests in growing urban industrial centres, which would in turn lead to the less privileged elements of society in western countries to wage class warfare against the privileged who would remain being able to benefit from having access to food resources, which he believed Jews who were devoid of their own nation and supposedly weakened the distinctive” “racial blood group” of a nation and supposedly bring about its downfall, and also encouraged trade between nations, or capitalism that he described as “international Jewish finance,” with either primarily industrial or agricultural resources, would encourage to bring about a Marxist revolution, while claiming that Marxism was a peculiarly Jewish notion of establishing equality in society. Underlying this notion of supposedly shrinking amounts of limited amounts of resources was his racist ideology that a nation would collapse in the event of intercourse between peoples that would weaken the nation, as intercourse between Jews and peoples of different nations. Hence, the “Aryan blood” of the German nation composing a unique “race” with its distinctive “racial blood” was to be established that could conquer other nations of supposedly lesser peoples whose “blood” was “impure” due to their intercourse with other races, and seize their resources, while only an “Aryan nation” could compose a nation, whereas alleged “contamination” of “Aryan blood” would lead to the end of civilisation. Hitler therefore sought to build a nation based on “the Aryan race” by uniting its economic classes, purging Jews to prevent them from diluting its “blood,” and establish economic self-sufficiency for Germany by seizing the Soviet Union’s resources, especially its food and oil production. The economic life of Germany was thus to be mobilised for this purpose through economic controls that increasingly worsened state finances through artificial controls, including over wages, prices, and resources while limiting international trade through exchanging in imports and exports, and instituting massive public expenditure increases that reduced available foreign currency reserves, which would inevitably lead to the outbreak of war for this purpose while economic resources were subordinated to the interests of the “national racial community.”
It was thus essential for a two front war to be waged to fulfill these intertwined military and political plans to achieve ideological goals. A rational war would be waged on the western front with underlying concerns regarding strategy and the balance of power, which was necessary to overcome the economic power of the western powers by controlling as much territory and having access to equal amounts of resources available to them. Waging an ideological war on the eastern front to achieve “racial purity” by extirpating Europe’s Jewish population and create “living space” for future German colonisation would be enabled by subduing the western powers, particularly Britain and the United States, that had achieved their economic power through the conquest, displacement and subjugation of native populations. Hitler thus believed Germany was to achieve comparable economic power by expanding eastward and displacing “racially inferior” eastern Europe’s Jewish and Slavic populations, and thereby establish its own economic hegemonic power. German rearmament had thus begun following his seizure of power to restore national pride and more importantly, the German economy through military power to overcome resistance from the western powers and deal decisive blows to Britain and France, prior to the intervention of the United States. It was therefore necessary to seize the Soviet Union’s natural resources, including oil and foodstuffs, to sustain further resistance while establishing Nazi Germany’s hegemony in Europe and lacking sufficient resources for a protracted conflict during the short term, which had led to Germany’s defeat during the First World War when wartime burdens could not be endured during the ongoing sea blockade.
The future course of events showed Hitler expressed his ideas that guided this policy, which necessitated using military force to execute these plans. Blomberg and Fritsch expressed a sharp and fundamental difference of views with their political and military objections at this meeting by expressing doubts about Germany’s preparation for war by 1940, and facing the risk of opposition from Britain and France would lead to their being removed from their positions in reaction to their opposition to Hitler’s plans to execute a new stage of subordination of the army to the regime. Due to the general staff’s resistance on several occasions until this time, such as hesitating about carrying out rearmament as an antidote to the Treaty of Versailles, entertaining doubts about introducing conscription, and advising against the occupation of the Rhineland as being too risky, Hitler remained undeterred by reasoning about feasibility concerns, and countered this opposition from military leaders to purge the army leadership.
Hitler would use the Gestapo to nullify the division between military and political leadership by having its operatives find compromising contents on two leading military leaders as a pretext to break the independence of the German general staff. The foremost of the military leaders who opposed rapid rearmament that would inevitably lead to war were Blomberg and Fritsch. After Blomberg had married a woman who had been a police record for theft and prostitution, he was dismissed on 20 January 1938 due to her reputation, which was inappropriate for someone of his public stature, and thereby compromised the honour and tradition of the officer corps. Göring, who wanted to take over from Blomberg, or at least the joint supreme command of the army and the air force, presented Hitler with this evidence on 24 January 1938. Hitler responded by abolishing the Ministry of War, and established the Oberkommando der Wehrmacht (OKW) as the supreme command to replace the War Ministry with Hitler himself as the supreme commander of all of the armed forces, with his personal staff under the command of the complacent General Keitel as the chief of staff of the OKW, as a new cabinet member taking direct orders from Hitler. While the Oberkommando der Heeresleitung (OKH) functioned as the army general staff, the military command structure was undermined by the OKH as a separate command entity that reduced its influence and power, with Hitler as the head of the new military hierarchy that was robustly enforced as part of the Führer principle, by which Hitler’s statements were unconditionally above the law, and were therefore to be followed with unconditional obedience.
Himmler, who also wanted to discredit the officer corps to extend the control of the SS over the armed forces, falsely accused Fritsch on 25 January of being a homosexual, in reaction to Fritsch having pressed for the SS to be excluded from exercising military functions and functioning independently outside of army command. Hitler responded to this charge, as well as Himmler intimating that Fritsch was leading a conspiracy against the regime while in fact merely refraining from political speculations, by forcing him to resign on the basis of a violations of morals charge on 4 February 1938, although it was later proven he was not homosexual, since he had been confused with another ex-officer called von Frisch. He was reinstated in the army, but was not publicly rehabilitated, and was replaced as the commander-in-chief of the army by General Walther von Brauchitsch, who also obsequiously supported Hitler by pledging for the army to conform to the regime and its ideology. Göring was promoted to the rank of Field-Marshal, while Hitler replaced Blomberg on the same day as the commander of all of the armed forces in the High Command of the Armed Forces (Oberkommando der Wehrmacht, or OKW), administered by Wilhem Keitel as another thoroughgoing admirer of Hitler, exercising the former functions of the Minister of War.
A major upheaval of the military leadership thus took place that firmly established Hitler’s ascendancy over the armed forces by transferring forty-four other generals to new duties to unfamiliar surrounding and command relationships, and fourteen other high-ranking generals forced into retirement after being accused of not being sufficiently loyal to the cause of National Socialism. These changes thus completed the Gleichschaltung of military personnel that had begun with their complicity in the murders that were perpetrated during the “Night of Long Knives” and accepting the oath of allegiance to Hitler in August 1934, and thereby deprived the population of protection from establishing National Socialist absolutism. Personnel changes in the diplomatic field were combined with the changes in the command of the army, with the most important change being appointing the Joachim von Ribbentrop, his diplomatic advisor and a committed Nazi possessing inferior intelligence, replacing Neurath as Foreign Minister in 1938. Apart from facing the possibility of becoming subject to dismissal or prosecution, Hitler would also attempt to ensure the loyalty of his subordinates to the regime by an elaborate system of gifts. The chief of the Reich chancellory, Hans Lammers, created a secret slush fund, codenamed Konto 5, with an initial budget of 150,000 RM in 1933, which would increase to 40 million RM by 1945, with these payments being disbursed to the highest ranking military leaders from 1938 as supplements to their official salaries, as well as for cash disbursements on their birthdays, in addition to tax exemptions, along with other benefits hereafter, including promotions.
With potential opposition being eliminated in the foreign service as well as in the military, Hitler was then prepared to take military action to pursue his foreign policy aims, with increasing pressure on the Austrian government to allow Austrian Nazis to participate in the government, and having received Mussolini’s assurance that he would not oppose Germany’s annexation of Austria. Following the Austrian government continued rejection of cooperation with the Austrian Nazis, Hitler invaded Austria on 12 March 1938, immediately prior to Chancellor Kurt Schuschnigg having had announced holding a plebiscite to determine whether the Austrian population would choose to remain independent. This invasion took place in conjunction with the new Austrian government led by Seyss-Inquart who ordered the Austrian military not to offer any resistance, and precluding a plebiscite would deprive Schuschnigg the possibility of a moral base on which to further Nazi encroachments could be resisted. This peaceful annexation of Austria that was fraught with economic difficulties further contributed to Germany’s rearmament efforts through the acquisition of Alpine iron ore mines, and seizing Austria’s cash reserves that were the equivalent of 782 million RM.
Successfully annexing Austria with Germany without facing international resistance, which Britain recognised only two weeks after it took place, encouraged Hitler to increase pressure on Czechoslovakia and redeem the Sudetenland by returning this territorial possession to Germany, in which most of Czechoslovakia’s border forts and the enormous Skoka armament works were located, in coordination with Karl Henlein, the local leader of the Nazi party, who demanded its complete autonomy within Czechoslovakia, while Nazi propaganda aggressively cultivated claims of undefended German residents were subjected to oppression. Losing the Sudetenland would render Czechoslovakia largely defenceless, as well as lose a great deal of its resources. Hitler also considered launching a rapid armed attack on Czechoslovakia, ordering planning for this Operation Green by 30 May 1938, before Britain and France could intervene, which nevertheless appeared unlikely, as they did not make any efforts to coordinate policy with the Soviet Union, regardless of the alliances between France and the Soviet Union, and with Czechoslovakia.
German conservatives, including General Ludwig Beck, the chief of the general staff who had initially supported the National Socialist regime while believing an authoritarian government could restore stability, argued with Hitler about attaining peaceful resolutions with Britain as well as the Soviet Union to prevent the possibility of a two-front war. He was compelled to resign as on 18 August 1938 for protesting against Hitler’s aggressive and irresponsible foreign policy during the Sudeten crisis that be anticipated would ultimately lead to the outbreak of war and a resulting national catastrophe, expecting that Germany could not endure another prolonged conflict following an invasion of Czechoslovakia. He was subsequently replaced by General Franz Halder, while Wilhelm Canaris the chief of the Abwehr and his subordinate Hans Oster began meeting with Beck to plan to take action against the Nazi regime, beginning with providing intelligence reports to the Czechoslovakian authorities about Hitler’s aggressive plans toward the Sudetenland. Canaris also sent reports to British authorities about these plans to encourage taking defensive action, which Karl Gördeler corroborated in a visit to Britain in April 1938.
A group of Catholic military officers petitioned the canon at St. Hedwig’s Cathedral in September 1938 to be released from their oath of loyalty to Hitler, to which the canon agreed that they were not obliged to be obedient to a tyrant. Among them was Colonel Hans Oster from military counterintelligence who was convinced that Hitler would lead Germany headlong into war, while recognising that the military during this time was understaffed, undertrained and understrength to engage in a major continental conflict, just as Blomberg and Fritsch had expressed prior to be being ousted from office on the strength of Gestapo orchestrated scandals, and replacing them with the more compliant Otto von Brauchitsch. Karl Görderler, the former mayor of Leipzig secretly warned the British political authorities about having to take a firm stand against Hitler’s demands. They were supported from Erwin von Witzleben, the commander of the army in Berlin, and Fritz von Schulenberg, the vice-president of the Berlin police, who were opposed to Hitler’s reckless foreign policy that risked war against Britain and France, and planned to remove Hitler from power. Beck’s successor as the chief of the general staff, Franz von Halder, formulated detailed plans with other military leaders to stage a coup, prior to Hitler giving the order to invade Czechoslovakia. However, the conspirators were left demoralised when lacking a pretext to take action, as these plans were stymied by Chamberlain’s unlimited policy of appeasement, whereas the French government stated on 1 July 1938 that they would not provide military assistance in the event of the outbreak of war over the question of ceding the Sudetenland.
Chamberlain chose to continue following a policy of appeasement when Britain was more concerned with Japanese expansion in East Asia, and was therefore willing to grant Hitler concessions in Europe hoping to preserve peace there. In addition, Mussolini’s attack on Ethiopia and involvement in the Spanish civil war had alienated Italy from the western powers, and therefore joined Mussolini joined Hitler in an alliance in order to gain a foreign policy success and stabilise his dictatorship after having had preached about expansion. With Mussolini as an ally, Hitler did not encounter any resistance to the Anschluß, and further aggression was not countered with force. During this time, both the UK and France remain unprepared to intervene against German military aggression with force, while there were also concerns about the potential strength of its land troop strength and especially the potential of the air force, in comparison to their own wartime preparedness. French military planning remained entrenched in maintaining a defensive strategy, while both British and French military planners underestimated the dangers of mobile warfare that the German military planners were preparing, and therefore concentrated on maintaining defences. Czechoslovakia’s national sovereignty was thus sacrificed to placate Nazi Germany’s aggressive plans as a matter of expediency, while the UK and France were unprepared to mount an armed confrontation, until their own national interests were threatened.
Chamberlain met Hitler at Berchtesgaden on 15 September 1938, where he stated neither Britain nor France would object to the German annexation of parts of the Czech Sudetenland, initially agreeing to force Czechoslovakia to hold a plebiscite in those regions inhabited predominantly by Germans, which would likely lead to integration of this region with its predominantly German ethnic minority into Germany. Hitler continued making further demands when they met again on 22 September, following having had informed the Polish and Hungarian governments that he would support their claims against Czechoslovakia, stating to Chamberlain he was prepared to use force to acquire the Sudetenland for Germany, demanding the immediate annexation of the Sudetenland without a plebiscite, on the pretext of Sudeten German remaining allegedly subject to continued oppression, while pledging that the annexation of the Sudetenland was Germany’s last territorial claim in Europe in the interest of uniting Germans into a unified nation-state. In the interest of hoping to prevent war, Britain and France issued an ultimatum to Czechoslovakia on 21 September to either surrender the Sudetenland to Germany, or else they would withdraw their support, to which President Edvard Benes and his cabinet reluctantly agreed.
Although the loss of the Sudetenland exposed Czechoslovakia to further invasion, aggressive plans remained in place to seize its industrial capacity and considerable bank assets. Moreover, seizing this region did not alleviate Nazi Germany’s grave economic concerns that reduced allocations for continued rearmament. Hitler secretly ordered the German army to be ready for war by 1 October, and war appeared to be inevitable, while Czechoslovakia and France mobilised, Britain prepared for war, the Soviet Union promised support for Czechoslovakia, and Hitler moved seven army divisions to the Czech border. Chamberlain then asked Mussolini for mediation, and a conference was called to Munich, where there were not any representatives from Czechoslovakia. Canaris dispatched Friedrich Wilhelm Heinz led approximately fifty armed troops on 28 September to stage a coup to take Hitler into custody, while there were also other troops in Berlin who were prepared to confront fifteen SS guards at the Chancellery in the event that Hitler would order an invasion of the Sudetenland, which they expected would lead to the outbreak of war, and thereby provide a pretext for a coup. Their plan was pre-empted by Chamberlain’s meeting Hitler to reach a compromise peaceful solution while sacrificing the interests of Czechoslovakia. The agreement between Nazi Germany, Britain, France and Italy on 29 September to allow for the annexation of the Sudetenland ultimately led to the dissolution of this Oster Conspiracy that could only be set into motion in the event of an outbreak of war, which French and British decision makers would not risk facing over Hitler’s this claim that they had expected would trigger a cause for launching a coup, which lost its justification and Chamberlain vindicated Hitler’s aggression, and the threat of war neutralised. A peace agreement between Nazi Germany and Britain on 30 September. The annexation of the Sudetenland would take place from 1 to 10 October, with further details to be formulated by an international commission. Poland would annex the Cieszyn region, Hungary would annex territory in the south,
Losing twenty percent of Czechoslovakia and eight hundred thousand citizens led to losing an important industrial area with rich natural resources and a highly skilled workforce, which left it virtually defenceless with a ruined economy. The Czechoslovakian government meanwhile feared that accepting only Soviet aid would lead to civil war, as in Spain, and therefore would not fight without British and French aid, while Germany controlled the Danube valley following the Anschluß, which made Czechoslovakia vulnerable from three different flanks. The British and French governments sought to prevent war while not considering Germany to pose a threat to either Britain or France. Meanwhile, both countries were not in a military position to fight or to negotiate effectively, and also have Hitler the impression that Britain and France would not be willing to wage war against Nazi Germany. Moreover, this diplomatic coup elevated Hitler’s approval among the German public who could not yet envisage how the international situation would worsen, while being oblivious about Hitler’s further aggressive plans, whereas other European powers would not yet take action to contain further threats to continued peace.
Britain and France had diminished abilities to be prepared for an outbreak of hostilities, and Nazi Germany was likewise not yet prepared for war. Engagement in rearmament and developing military technological advancements, in addition to creating new military units under demobilised experienced non-commissioned officers who were often re-enlisted as commissioned reserve officers, recalling retired commissioned officers, and enlisting conscripts who were fast-tracked into officer level leadership positions on the basis of demonstrating exceptional service, along with reservists who met rigorous educational standards who underwent extensive specialised training, all led to preparing for war, but the probability of success against determined resistance against an offensive remained unclear. Although France possessed an overwhelming superiority in aircraft and tanks, the Germans had more effective and modern military equipment and better tactics, while France concentrated on its defensive measures that were not matched with striking potential. Britain committing its military forces to a conflict in Europe was considered to potentially encourage greater Japanese aggression in eastern Asia. Moreover, there were underlying beliefs in governmental and public circles in England and France that was the Treaty of Versailles was unduly harsh and arbitrary, including restricting German disarmament that did not correspond to international standards. There was also limited opposition to merging Austria and the Sudetenland, where the local populations did not appear to resent their annexation to Germany, which conformed to the principle of national self-determination.
Hitler signed a non-aggression pact with Britain on 30 September. The outbreak of war that Britain and France remained hoping to avoid was temporarily averted at the cost of eliminating Czechoslovakia’s sovereignty, while neither France nor Britain considered themselves to be threatened by Germany. (See Yale, Avalon Project: Nuremberg Trials: Munich Conference.) Chamberlain returned to Britain proclaiming: “peace in our time.” He believed that he had preserved peace in Europe with the unfortunate conviction that the policy of appeasement, granting concessions to Hitler while expecting him to respect the international commitment he would sign, had succeeded. As a consequence of the Munich Agreement, the western allies had agreed to reduce the territories of one of the new states of the Versailles settlement, and the remainder of Czechoslovakia was rendered powerless, since the Czechoslovak army had to surrender its most effective military defences against German aggression in the mountains along its borders after German troops entered the Sudetenland on 1 October.
During this time, the German economy remained dangerously subject to inflationary pressures while rearmament paid through unproductive MEFO bills and economic activity that did not generate sufficient income. Hitler continued ignoring Schacht’s final warning on 7 January 1939 about those bonds that were due to mature within weeks, and calls for drastic cuts to rearmament spending, reductions in expenditures, and balancing the national budget as the only means to prevent inflation. Hitler had planned to sustain the national economy through forcibly extracting resources for the state, and dismissed Schacht on 20 January while disregarding realistic economic considerations and would not tolerate advice about acting cautiously. The Four Year Plan to prepare Nazi Germany for waging war would inevitably lead to its outbreak as a necessity to implement ideological tenets of National Socialism, and also an economic solution entailing expansions through continued economic exploitation that would forcibly resolve the negative national balance of payments while rearmament artificially inflated the supply of liquidity in the form of national debt. There were exceedingly high amounts of imports, particularly for rearmament purposes, which greatly outweighed exports. The national economy could not produce sufficient amounts of goods for both rearmament and consumer demands, which was further aggravated by agriculture lacking expansion as a result of Hitler’s reorganisation through the Reich Food Estate. Assets would merely have to be forcibly seized from abroad, in addition to executing Hitler’s visions for the country’s future.
The Munich conference made Hitler more popular in Germany as a national hero who appeared to have effectively dismantled the Versailles postwar system, which demoralised the justification for a military coup led by Oster that was intended to prevent war. In spite of Chamberlain exchanging making territorial concessions to maintain peace and avert war rather than assisting Czechoslovakia, these actions that showed Hitler’s ambitions exceeded the boundaries of German-speaking territory shifted British opinion away from appeasement and toward an approach to the Soviet Union. Jozef Tiso, a Slovak separatist who had already met with Hitler in Berlin on 13 March ratified establishing Slovakia as an “independent state.” Further dismemberment was approved by granting 12,000 square kilometres of Czech territory, the self-proclaimed Carpatho-Ukraine in which there were ethnic Hungarians, to Hungary in mid-March 1939, and Poland receive the town of Tesin in which there were ethnic Poles. Hitler threatened Benes’s successor, Emil Hacha, on 14 March with invading the remainder of the country on the following day if there was resistance to Germany establishing a protectorate over Czechoslovakia. Hacha succumbed to this demand, and ordered Czechoslovak troops not offer resistance.
Hitler later dispatched German troops to occupy Bohemia and Moravia on 14-15 March 1939 that had become vulnerable to attack, claiming this intervention was necessitated by resolving internal political troubles, and arguing that these provinces had been part of Germany for a thousand years, which further reinforced Hitler’s popularity in Germany, regardless of denunciations of this invasion in France, Britain and the Soviet Union that did not react with military force. There was only armed resistance by one local garrison from the Chayankov Barracks in the Moravian town of Frydek-Mistek who were inevitably subdued. Apart from this new territorial annexation, a special staff from Germany’s central bank seized the country’s liquidity reserves, just as it had done following Nazi Germany’s annexation of Austria, to temporarily stabilise the national economy during the ongoing rearmament. This practice of seizing national assets would be continued throughout the Second World War. The Prague government was to cede Teschen as a result of a Polish ultimatum, yield territory holding a million people to Hungary, and grant full autonomy to Slovakia and Ruthenia to Hungary, both with Germany’s encouragement in October and November. Germany also acquired the Skoda manufacturing works and their supply networks in Czechoslovakia, which provided Nazi Germany with supplemented capacity and quality for tank production.
The invasion of the remainder of Czechoslovakia alarmed Britain and France, and ultimately led to their belated intensified rearmament, following the policy of appeasement that allowed Hitler to continually eliminate the terms of the Versailles Treaty that reinforced Hitler’s popularity in the view of the German population, which had already begun with introducing military service in 1935, reoccupying the Rhineland in 1936, followed by Austria and the Sudetenland in 1938, and Memel in 1939. Hitler’s vision for the future of Germany and the world itself could not be realized without launching a major war. He accordingly ordered a fivefold increase in the Luftwaffe to create a strategic arm in the form of long-range bombers, as well as tactical aircraft, in October 1938, which was followed by the Luftwaffe starting to plan for war against Britain in the winter of 1938-1939.
Memel was extorted from Lithuania by a simple ultimatum on 19 March 1939, and was altogether ceded on 23 March under the threat of German bombardment. Hitler then ordered the German general staff on 3 April to plan for the invasion of Poland. Chamberlain attempted to reinforce the British stance against Nazi Germany’s aggression by guaranteeing Poland’s sovereignty against attack on 31 March, leading to a British-Polish defence treaty concluded on 6 April. After Mussolini invaded Albania on 13 April, he also sent guarantees to Greece and Rumania. Hitler continued planning further aggression while expecting to discourage Britain and France from supporting Poland by rescinding the Anglo-German Naval Agreement of 1935 on 27 April and the Non-Aggression Pact of 1934 with Poland on 28 April. Good relations between Germany and Hungary, Bulgaria and Yugoslavia were cultivated to keep Poland isolated. The alliance between Germany and Italy was further reinforced on 22 May 1938 in the “Pact of Steel,” by which they pledged to launch an invasion against Russia. However, this agreement lacked substance since Mussolini expressed Italy would not be prepared for war until 1943.
As Hitler was scoring foreign policy successes that augmented his popularity among Germans, the repression against German Jews worsened. The first phase of racist policies had ranged from 1933 to 1938, when the regime predominantly implemented restriction and segregation. The Nazi state tried to reduce and stop Jewish immigration, limited the rights of German Jews, and forbade them to intermarry with German non-Jews. Most specifically, this stage of policy meant to push the Jews out of Germany’s economic life. Jewish specialists, such as physicians and lawyers, were allowed to practice only for Jews, who were thus defined as an entirely separate group in society. Then came indirect expulsion and exclusion. The Nazi regime made life more uncomfortable for Jews in Germany and then removed them from most positions of power and influence, while encouraging them to emigrate, but they were not forced to do so. The Nazis set up Jewish committees that prepared Jews for emigration to Palestine, and took care of the formalities. Violence had occurred only occasionally, most notoriously during the SA directed boycott of Jewish stores on 1 April 1933, and then the Nuremberg Laws of 1935, or “Law for the Protection of German Blood and German Honour,” restricted civil right for Jews while only German citizens who had “German or similar blood,” with German heritage defined to different degrees in correspondence with any Jewish heritage that did not make them “fully Aryan.” These terms defined whether they could retain civil rights, made confiscation of Jewish property legal, and sanctioned the removal of Jews from government offices, from the military, and most professions. Economic motives dominated this policy, in addition to interfering with their personal lives in terms of making marriage and sexual intercourse between Jews and non-Jews criminal offences, and forbidding Jews from employing female non-Jews as domestic workers. About one fourth of Germany’s six hundred thousand Jews emigrated during this time, although many early emigrants came back after 1933 after the terror had subsided.
The second phase involved pogrom, resettlement and expulsion of the Jews from 1938 onward. Before this time Jews had been excluded from the civil service and the professions, and sixty percent of Jewish owned businesses had been confiscated. Over 250,000 German Jews emigrated, and their assets were often seized by the state, while approximately half of their population remained. The formerly prosperous Jewish community became poverty-stricken and subjected to incessant humiliation and harassment, including being banned from visiting public parks and entertainment venues. They were given special identity cards in July, followed by their passports stamped with “J.” Jewish children were forbidden to attend state schools in November. Jews were forced to full disclose their assets in April 1938. Jewish owned businesses were “aryanised” in the Decree for the Registration of Jewish Property further excluded them from economic life, which banned them from owning businesses, and were forced to sell them to “Aryan Germans” at reduced costs.
Goebbels intensified the harassment of Jews through heavily and carefully orchestrating a national day of committing violence against them, which was provided by a pretext for these incidents to take place throughout Germany in the forms of physical assaults, murders, burning synagogues, and vandalising Jewish-owned shops and businesses. The Third Secretary at the German embassy, Ernst vom Rath, in Paris by a seventeen year old German born Polish Jew, Herschel Gryszpan, on 7 November 1938 as a direct response to Nazi anti-Semitism. Gangs of SA and SS thugs as separate private armies of the NSDAP supported by the Gestapo were ordered to use this murder as a pretext to destroy a thousand Jewish synagogues and seven thousand businesses, kill an estimated ninety-one victims, and conduct mass arrests of tens of thousands of Jews and taken into concentration camps during the so-called Kristallnacht – “the Night of Broken Glass” – on the night of 9-10 November, which was calculated at instilling terror of the state among the population, especially among Jews, to further motivate emigration from Nazi Germany in response to a supposedly spontaneous pogrom as a mass scale attack in full public view. The police under Nazi control did not interfere against the SA thugs who perpetrated these acts of untrammelled violence and vandalism in this first single instance of a large-scale public and organised mass assault against German and Austrian Jews before the Second World War, who had hitherto been ostracised and humiliated by discriminatory legislation.
The Propaganda Minister Josef Goebbels instigated a widespread pogrom that led to mob violence that culminated in the destruction of hundreds of synagogues and over eight thousand Jewish owned businesses, the killing of ninety-one Jews and assaulting others, and another 30,000 were taken into concentration camps by the Gestapo. Hundreds of Jews committed suicide as a result of despair. Another 150,000 German or Austrian Jews emigrated after the Kristallnacht, but it was difficult for Jews to obtain visas to emigrate to other countries, most of which had adopted restrictive immigration policies. The remaining 250,000 German Jews were fined one billion Reichsmarks, constituting 6.5 percent of the national income at the time, for the 220 million Reichsmarks of damages caused by the SA, and Göring seized all insurance claims proceeds. All remaining Jewish-owned businesses were confiscated and sold by the state, as the state was on the verge of insolvency as a result of rearmament costing an estimated forty-five billion Reichsmarks. Hitler also increased his public anti-Semitism and put all racial affairs under SS control while realising that direct violence against Jews still alienated many Germans, so the Nazi leadership decided to carry out most of its anti-Jewish measures without spectacular public action. The atrocities staged on 9 November 1938 and the subsequent deportation of Polish Jews from Germany thus marked the beginning a bureaucratised and systematic drastic approach toward “a final solution.”
The military leadership did not intervene during this time. Hitler had already been able to secure his regime, and surround himself with generals who would conform to his demands, which resulted in members of the military establishment distancing themselves from political decision-making. There were different reasons why the Wehrmacht, especially the officer corps and the general staff, failed to confront the gathering strength of National Socialism and put an end to or at least set limits to Hitler’s regime. The army of 100,000 to which Germany was allowed under the Treaty of Versailles was deliberately trained to be nonpolitical, and therefore the officer corps lacked perspective. Hitler’s initial successes, including the elimination of unemployment and the communist threat as well as the annexation of former German territories to the Greater German Reich restored confidence to the German people and their growing Wehrmacht, leading to a widely popular restoration of national pride. Throughout the Weimar period, Germans had been constantly told they had started the First World War, which Germans felt was a false accusation, and were penalised by having territories lost to other countries, among other severe consequences that Hitler disavowed that had done grievous economic harm, and expanding the military to allow for national defence that had hitherto made this impossible. Youngsters who were called up for military service were recruited mainly from the Hitler Youth that was organised into paramilitary formations and other National Socialist organisations, where they had been inculcated with Nazi propaganda barrages to ensure conformity to the regime, and were correspondingly indoctrinated to adhere to Nazi ideology. Among the most decisive actions toward establishing regimentation of society composed of a “people’s community” conforming with unconditional subordination to the state was the oath of allegiance as the creed of the officer corps, which Hitler was conscious of and thoroughly exploited accordingly as Hitler continually prepared Nazi Germany to wage war.
Since the Munich conference did not include representatives from the Soviet Union, Stalin drew his own conclusions about this settlement indicating Britain and France could not be relied on as trustworthy allies against Germany, and therefore contemplated reaching an agreement with Hitler in the face of its aggressive expansionism, while pledging to be neutral rather than be drawn into a conflict with Germany, which Hitler welcomed. Both Britain and France were communicating with the Soviet Union from March 1939 for a defensive alliance that would include Poland in a collective attempt to contain Germany, but Poland did not accept Stalin’s demand that Soviet armies be given the right to occupy some Polish territory in case of war, considering that they would not leave after they had been admitted. Stalin was also deeply distrustful of Britain and France as “imperialist powers,” which would not consent to Stalin’s demand for guaranteeing the sovereignty of all nations from the Baltic to the Black Sea in a treaty of mutual alliance between the Soviet Union and the western powers, while these countries dismissed Stalin’s proposal to provide Soviet assistance. After Poland did not respond to Hitler’s proposal for exchanging Danzig and the corridor on the Baltic to East Prussia for Polish gains in Ukraine, Hitler turned to the idea of a partition of Poland in conjunction with the Soviet Union. While the British and French did not show any hastiness to come to terms with the Soviet Union after having appeased Germany, Hitler was planning to attack Poland, and agreed to pay the Soviet price for non-aggression to undertake this risk without allies.
While the Soviets needed time for rearmament and suspected that the British and the French were irrevocably opposed to cooperating defensive plans, Hitler was concerned about precluding a potential western alliance with the Soviet Union, and therefore sought to negate the viable threat of a two-front war, while it became apparent to the Russian by May 1939 that Britain and France were unlikely to provide for the security interests of the Soviet Union, as they would not offer any concessions, in addition to risking war with Nazi Germany without any pledge of acquiring any gains. Western delegates who arrived in Moscow on 11 August to begin conversations for a possible military convention were confronted with demands for establishing a Soviet sphere of influence in eastern Europe, from the Baltic Sea to the western shore of the Black Sea, which were not met with consent. In contrast, Germany could fulfill the Soviet Union’s requirements for defence against aggression from the west, as well as offer the Russians a free hand in eastern Europe by establishing a sphere of influence and recovering territory in eastern Poland. Germany would also rely on the Soviet Union to complete the isolate of Poland, which would be unable to rely on support from the western powers without Russian support. A Nazi-Soviet trade treaty was signed on the night of 19 August, which was followed by the conclusion of a Nazi-Soviet Pact on 23 August between the German foreign minister Joachim Ribbentrop and Vyacheslav Molotov, the Soviet commissar for foreign affairs. The public text was an agreement of non-aggression and neutrality to last for ten years, referring to the precedent of the non-aggression treaty of 24 April 1926, with both signatories pledging to remain neutral of either went to war with a third party. Germany also pledged to restrain Japanese foreign policy as it would pertain to Soviet interests. The real agreement was in a secret protocol that partitioned Poland along the line of the Vistula, Narev and San rivers and also much of Eastern Europe. The Soviets were allotted Finland, Estonia, Latvia and Bessarabia, while Germany would receive everything to the west of these regions, including Lithuania, and thereby regain its former frontiers. Provisions were also made for continued economic cooperation, by which Germany received valuable food and raw materials until 1941, which would preclude fighting a two front war and avert the effects of an allied blockade by ensuring the deliveries of essential raw material supplies from the east. The Soviet Union acquired temporary immunity from aggression from Germany, along Germany mitigating Japanese pressure on Siberia, and its agreement to create a defensive buffer in Poland, whereas Hitler acquired freedom of action to launch aggression in the west, while Stalin temporarily acquired immunity from attack in exchange for providing vital raw materials for Germany’s continually reinforcing its war waging potential.
The Soviets rebuffed the possibility of forming a military alliance with Britain and France, claiming that the Poles obstinately refused to allow for its troops to advance through Poland to stage an attack on Germany, while suspicion was further increased by the policy of appeasement over Czechoslovakia and subsequent hesitations to enter an alliance with the Soviet Union in the summer of 1939, which were interpreted as tacit support for further eastward aggression. Britain and France then declared their intention to support Poland, which was reinforced with the signing of a British-Polish alliance on 25 August. Hitler responded to this agreement by offering a non-aggression pact between Germany and the British empire on the same day, on the condition of allowing Germany to resolve the matter of acquiring restored overland access to Danzig, to which Britain responded on 28 August by affirming its alliance with Poland, while recommending direct Polish-German negotiations on this matter. Poland rebuffed this possibility, and began mobilising on 29 August. Operation Himmler, the staging of an alleged Polish attack on Germany to provide a false pretext for an invasion of Poland, was staged by the Gestapo through planting the corpses of victims of the Dachau concentration camps dressed in Polish military uniforms at Gleiwitz, and were supposedly killed during an attack on the radio station there on 31 August.
Any remaining hope for maintaining peace through appeasement were finally eliminated when Nazi Germany attacked Poland on 1 September 1939, when Hitler was duly more prepared for war than the western powers, which finally recognised the extent of Hitler’s aggressive foreign policy. Hitler would receive the declarations of war that he had anticipated, and economic conditions in Germany made a war of exploiting resources abroad inevitable. Nationalism became a primary factor, and reservations about the Nazi regime were subsided when the national interests took precedence, while the cult of leadership remained ongoing during the early military successes as a result of waging “lightning warfare.” The outbreak of the war also made it possible for Hitler to fulfill his more radical plans and racist visions, while the German population were further subjected to more far-reaching consequences in their everyday lives. Apart from wartime austerity and threats to their living conditions, whatever remained of the rule of law was eliminated. Britain and France declared war on Germany on 3 September following the expiry of an ultimatum to withdraw German forces from Poland had a direct impact on the national security organisation with the stated purpose of monitoring all domestic and foreign opposition to the regime.
The apparatus of a central dictatorship was established on 27 September 1939 by consolidating various police functions under Reinhard Heydrich, the head of the Sicherheitsdienst (SD) since 1931, into the Reich Main Security Office (Reichssicherheitshauptamt – RSHA) to provide oversight over all policing and security functions under the jurisdiction of the SS, which served as the central apparatus for various police forces, along with the SD (Sicherheitsdienst) that had been established in 1929 to conduct surveillance on NSDAP members and potential opposition to the party, espionage, intelligence and counterintelligence functions. Heinrich Müller, a police officer in Munich who had studied the surveillance methods applied by the Soviet Joint State Political Directorate (OGPU) to maintain totalitarian power and suppress political dissent while investigating communists in Bavaria, was appointed the chief of the Gestapo by Heydrich who had recognised his expertise in advanced surveillance techniques in 1933, and then became its operations chief in 1936. The Gestapo would extend its functions from investigating any form of political or social deviance, such as scrutinising sources of any form of dissent among leftists, in the media, Catholic clergy and homosexuals, treason, espionage, sabotage, and politically-motivated criminal attacks to also taking Jews into custody, among other “enemies of the state,” administering security in occupied territories against resistance groups, counterintelligence against Allied spy networks, and prisoner-of-war escape organisations. The SS was divided into three main branches, including the general SS without any specific functions, the SS Totenkopfverbände responsible for concentration and then extermination camps, and several other units were organised into armed units as its operational military wing after the outbreak of the Second World War, which operated outside the jurisdiction of the military command structure and directly under the command of the NSDAP.
Leave a Reply