Alone, 1932-1940

  Even more troubling was the U.S. absence from Geneva. It had dealt a devastating blow to the League of Nations. But in turning their backs on the problems of other great powers American isolationists were not alone. Immediately after the signing of the peace treaties in 1919 London drifted into a mild form of the American introversion, and one by one the chancelleries on the Continent followed their example, leaving the intricacies of external affairs to their foreign ministries.

  The professional diplomats, delighted, turned to what they did best, assembling in huge conferences, immaculate in their striped trousers, wing collars, and pince-nez, solemnly initialing pacts and protocols which were later signed, on their recommendation, by their governments. By the end of the 1920s plenipotentiaries had bound the Continent in a fantastic web of signed documents bearing waxed seals and streaming ribbons, documents which, had they been honored, would have kept the peace. Czechoslovakia, Yugoslavia, and Rumania were linked in the Little Entente. France was pledged to the defense of Poland; Italy to Yugoslavia, Albania, Hungary, and Austria. The climax was the cluster of pacts solemnized at Locarno, Switzerland, in 1925. Locarno guaranteed the German-French and German-Belgian frontiers and provided for the arbitration of any disputes between Germany on the one hand, and France, Belgium, Poland, and Czechoslovakia on the other. Finally, to assure the territorial integrity of the Czechs, France signed a separate treaty promising to declare war on Germany if the Germans violated Czechoslovakia’s borders. Italy and Britain joined in the mutual guarantee of peace in western Europe, and though British obligations were vague, Britain was already pledged to stand by France in any war.

  The Wilhelmstrasse had sent a delegation to Locarno. Its legates moved gracefully through the great halls, elegant and charming, clicking heels, kissing hands, and in the “spirit of Locarno,” as it was being hailed, added their signatures to the others on December 1, 1925. Foreign correspondents were baffled. Why were Germans there? These pacts were negotiated by nations with armies and navies. As a military power Germany had ceased to exist. The Treaty of Versailles had drawn the Junkers’ teeth. Their army, or Reichswehr, as it had been renamed, could not exceed 100,000 men, including officers. Even tiny Belgium outnumbered them. They were allowed no military aircraft, no General Staff, no conscription, and no manufacture of arms and munitions without written permission from the triumphant Allies. Their navy was restricted to six battleships, six light cruisers, twelve torpedo boats—and no submarines. Weimar Germany was forbidden fortification of her own frontiers, and a demilitarized buffer zone, the Rhineland, separated her from the French and Belgians. Violation of any of these provisions were to be regarded as a declaration of war, punishable by an Allied military occupation of the German republic. Thus manacled, the defeated country constituted a threat to no one. Her delegation, the inquiring newspapermen were told, had been invited to Locarno as a gracious gesture, a sign that the wounds of 1918 were healing.29

  Veteran correspondents were skeptical. The foreign policies of great powers, they knew, are not guided by generosity. Nor were they in this instance. The fact was that the Germans had acquired their invitations by diplomatic blackmail. Versailles had stigmatized not one, but two great nations; the victors had turned their backs on both the defeated Second Reich, excluded from the peace conference, and the new Soviet Union, which in 1917 had taken Russia—then an Allied power, fighting Germany—out of the war. Walter Rathenau, a brilliant Weimar statesman, had seized his chance. Taking advantage of a Genoa conference at which European diplomats were discussing the economic prospects of the Continent, he had slipped away to meet a Bolshevik delegation at nearby Rapallo. Since the Russians had not participated in the 1919 peace settlement, they could join Germany in renouncing all war claims. Extensive agreements, signed at the same time, drew them closer together. Two months later, on June 24, 1922, Rathenau was murdered by right-wing German nationalists. But the Rapallo Treaty stood.30

  The Allies had been shocked. They realized, for the first time, that the independent German government could make important commitments without their consent. Thus the invitation to Locarno. There, Rathenau’s successor, Gustav Stresemann, smoothly reassured them. Nervous Allied ministries were reminded that Germany was their shield against the Soviet Union.

  Germany’s former enemies listened carefully, wanting to believe. The Second Reich was dead. They cherished the hope that a stable German republic would serve as a bulwark against Russian adventurism. Another Allied incentive was anxiety; they knew that the kaiser’s embittered officer corps refused to believe their army had been defeated on the battlefield and that the fighting qualities of German men were awesome.

  A third motive was guilt. The Great War, by bankrupting both sides and destroying an entire generation of future leaders, eroded the confidence of the victors. Man, shocked by his inhumanity to man, was uncomfortable; he sought ways to ease his conscience. The transformation was not achieved overnight, but as the years passed a feeling deepened in London and Paris that the Central Powers had been shabbily treated at the Versailles peace conference. Allied casualties had been appalling, but at least they knew the jubilation of winning. When Germany and the two weaker members of her alliance had laid down their arms, they had lost 3,393,193 dead and 8,267,532 wounded. In defeat every conceivable humiliation had been visited upon them. Private property abroad belonging to German citizens had been summarily confiscated. The Kiel Canal and the country’s five great rivers had been designated international waterways, like the English Channel or the Mediterranean. German representatives at the peace conference had been forced to sign the treaty’s Article 231, accepting responsibility “for causing all the loss and damage to which the Allied and Associated Governments and their nationals have been subjected as a consequence of the war imposed upon them by the aggression of Germany and her allies.”

  Friedrich Ebert, provisional president of the new Weimar Republic, had called it “unbearable.” The chancellor cried: “May the hand wither that signs this treaty!” The Allies, unmoved, issued an ultimatum. If the terms were not accepted, Allied troops would invade Germany. Ebert appealed to wartime chief of staff Paul von Hindenburg. Could such an attack be resisted? No, the field marshal replied, but he could not “help feeling that it were better to perish than sign such a humiliating peace [Schmachfrieden].” This was an outright evasion of responsibility. Because of it, Ebert, unsupported by the officer corps—the men who had actually lost the war—approved the treaty nineteen minutes before the Allied ultimatum ran out. It was an inauspicious start for the German republic.31

  In November 1932 Churchill urged revision of Versailles “in cold blood and in a calm atmosphere and while the victor nations still have ample superiority, [rather] than to wait and drift on, inch by inch and stage by stage, until once again vast combinations, equally matched confront each other face to face.” As the searing memoirs, best-selling novels, gripping plays, and popular films put the conflict in a new perspective, newspapers on both sides revealed the vast profits reaped by munitions tycoons. Holding the Germans solely responsible for the tragedy of 1914–1918, people now realized, had distorted the truth and violated the honor of the losers. It had amounted to an imposition of vindictive conditions on helpless men, forbidden, at the time, even to protest.32

  By the early 1930s, however, the strongest emotion aroused in Germany’s neighbors was primitive terror. The Germans knew it; they had deliberately provoked it in two wars, and had even given it a name, Schrecklichkeit (frightfulness). The nineteenth-century Prussian strategist Karl von Clausewitz had encouraged it as a means of shortening wars by putting the enemy “in a situation in which continuing the war is more oppressive to him than surrender.” Teutonic troops, armed and dangerous, were frightful. They had practiced Schrecklichkeit in 1914, when bands of French and Belgian guerrillas defending their own soil had led to German executions of civilians, hostages, and prisoners of war. “Suddenly,” Barbara Tuchman writes, “the world became aw
are of the beast beneath the German skin.”33

  In the 1920s and 1930s, accounts of these crimes were suppressed by pacifists in das Ausland, that revealing German term which welded all nations outside the Reich into a single collective noun. The new line was that all tales of German atrocities in the Great War had been Allied propaganda. But Belgians who had treated their invaders with disrespect had in fact been led before firing squads as early as the second day of the war. German records proved it. If Belgian refugees slowed the German advance, hostages were picked at random and killed.34 One can find their gravestones today, inscribed: “1914: Fusillé par les Allemands”—“Shot by the Germans.”

  It was the dread of another such nightmare which provided the more powerful drive behind the grid of interlocking treaties culminating at Locarno. Even after Versailles, Germany remained the most powerful nation in Europe, with a population exceeding that of either Britain or France by thirty million. Geographical position alone seemed fated to guarantee Germany domination of Europe. Hitler’s Nazis attracted the attention of chancelleries of Europe as Hitler set forth his goals, giving priority to the union of all Germans in a greater Germany. The very idea made foreign ministries tremble. Were it achieved, the smaller nations would confront a monolith of eighty-two million Teutons. A reconstituted Reich under strong leadership could reassemble the kaiser’s dismantled juggernaut.35

  Thus German signatures on the Locarno Pact had been welcomed. Despite Germany’s violation of Belgian neutrality in 1914—dismissing the Wilhelmstrasse’s written pledge not to do so as “ein Fetzen Papier” (“a scrap of paper”)—it was still inconceivable that a civilized nation would break its word. Great powers did not invade other states until war had been formally declared. If Locarno and Weimar’s other postwar commitments were to be treated as scraps, diplomacy would be meaningless. Therefore, foreign ministries watched the tumultuous course of German politics in 1932 with increasing uneasiness. The Nazis were scum, men bereft of honor as Europe’s ruling classes understood it. Late in the year a French agent, burrowed in the Wilhelmstrasse, sent the Quai d’Orsay a shocking report on the ten-year-old Russo-German treaty which Walter Rathenau had negotiated in Rapallo. A secret protocol, drafted by Foreign Minister Rathenau himself, had specified that the Russians would set aside tracts of land where the Germans would lay new foundations for the development of armament technique. There, too, German bombers and fighter planes were being assembled and German pilots, navigators, and bombardiers trained. The agent in Berlin was absolutely reliable. His French control in the Deuxième Bureau was badly shaken, but after he had regained his poise he felt baffled by one detail. Rathenau’s assassins had been identified and interrogated. Their militant nationalism was clear. They wanted a new, rearmed Reich. Why had they slain a diplomat who had rendered their cause so priceless a service? The decoded reply was: “Rathenau was a Jew.”36 The Quai d’Orsay was dumbfounded. Would they, they wondered, ever understand the Germans?

  In Berlin the world’s longest breadline stretched down the Kurfürstendamm. Over fifteen million Germans were on the dole. In the streets husky, brown-shirted storm troopers (Sturmtrupper), wearing their high-crowned caps and black-on-white-on-red swastikas (Hakenkreuz, literally “hooked cross”), clubbed and battered men suspected of leftist sympathies, Jews of every age and sex, and anyone who failed to raise a stiff-armed heil when a Nazi band marched past under the banner “Deutschland erwache!” (“Germany awake!”).

  None of this was, in itself, extraordinary. In 1932 hunger and bloodshed haunted every great capital. But there was a significant difference in German turmoil. The drafters of Versailles had mutilated the kaiser’s Second Reich in every way except the one which counted most. The internal structure of Wilhelmine Germany had been left intact. Because the judges in Weimar courtrooms had belonged to the prewar privileged class and regarded the republic as a puppet regime installed by enemies of the Reich, Nazi street fighters who murdered their political opponents in broad daylight, with dozens of witnesses testifying against them, received suspended sentences and five-mark fines. At the same time, supporters of the republic were sentenced to long prison terms for revealing, in speeches or newspapers, that the Reichswehr was rebuilding the army in defiance of Germany’s pledge to the Allies. Franz L. Neumann writes: “It is impossible to escape the conclusion that political justice is the blackest page [schwärzeste Seite] in the life of the German Republic.”37

  Leniency was extended even to those rightists for whom the aristocracy had little sympathy. After the Armistice, Munich became the center of revolutionary conspiracies, including the successful plot to kill Rathenau and Hitler’s unsuccessful putsch of 1923, an act of high treason in which nineteen men lost their lives while the Nazi leader fled the scene and hid from the police. Tracked down and arrested, Hitler spent only nine months in Landsberg prison, cossetted by every comfort the warden could provide, including writing materials. When he left his spacious “cell,” he carried the manuscript of Mein Kampf under his arm, and as he emerged from the prison gate his supporters hailed him as a victorious hero.38

  Until the Depression the Nazis had been a lunatic fringe. In 1928 they polled some 810,000 votes—2.6 percent of those cast. The economic crises brought them swollen rolls and made Hitler a national figure. Oswald Spengler wrote: “In the heart of the people the Weimar Constitution is already doomed!” Two elections—in 1930 and 1932—demonstrated that the Nazis, although shy of a working majority, had emerged as the country’s largest political party. It was also the most violent. “We want a dictatorship!” Hitler cried, and his deputies left no doubt of their scorn for democratic procedures. In the Reichstag and the Prussian Diet they wore their uniforms, swung their fists and clubs, and disrupted any session which seemed about to reach agreement on a substantive issue by hurling any object which came to hand, including, according to one account, “inkwells, water bottles, desk drawers, chairs, ledgers, broken table legs.” Having driven all others from the chamber, the Nazis “spent the next half-hour triumphantly roaring old war songs.”

  With few exceptions, Churchill among them, foreign politicians were unalarmed by Hitler. To Time, amused by his pretentiousness, Hitler was a “bristle-lipped, slightly pot-bellied” forty-three-year-old who often “stroked his tuft of brown mustache.” Those with no command of the German tongue regarded him as a comical figure bearing a close resemblance to Charlie Chaplin. Even foreign correspondents underrated him. They reasoned that the heart of the Nazi constituency lay in the lower middle class, and that the upper classes would be alienated by the party’s leader, whose wartime rank had been that of corporal.39

  Until 1932 they had been right. National Socialism had been a stigma. Among well-born Germans, the Nazi party was regarded as coarse. But that autumn they were beginning to understand that the door of history had been shut on their Augustan Age of princes and potentates and plumed marshals and glittering little regular armies—on all the fanfaronade that had marked their disciplined, secure world. In the waning autumn of 1932, when Americans were voting Franklin D. Roosevelt into the White House, the German patriciate was reassessing its view of Hitler. The eminent Deutsche Allgemeine Zeitung, always reflective of their opinion, abruptly abandoned its hostile treatment of National Socialism and urged Reich President Hindenburg to overcome his “strong personal dislike” of the Nazi leader and appoint him chancellor “in the interests of that tranquillity required for business revival.”40

  Once Hitler moved, he moved fast. Nazi deputies, though still short of an absolute majority, outnumbered the Social Democrats nearly two-to-one and dominated the Reichstag. Nevertheless, Field Marshal Hindenburg, Ebert’s successor to the figurehead post of president, refused to appoint Hitler chancellor. The Chancellor Crisis followed. Running the government was impossible without the Nazi deputies, who, on Hitler’s orders, vetoed each Hindenburg nominee for the office. Then Franz von Papen and General Kurt von Schleicher, the two strongest conservatives, agreed on
a remarkable solution. Name Hitler chancellor, they told the Reich president, and they would manipulate him. Pandora’s box was thereupon pried open, and on January 30, 1933, Hitler was sworn in as chancellor, or, as he preferred to be called, Reich chancellor—chancellor of the Empire. His expression, caught by a cameraman, was one of ecstasy. With his grasp of the Teutonic mind, he knew that now, having acquired Autorität by legal means, he would be accepted and obeyed by the German people, and that if he continued to pay lip service to Weimar’s constitution, he could use it to destroy itself.41

  He appointed Hermann Göring president of the Reichstag, and Göring moved into the Präsidentenpalast (Reichstag President’s Palace). An underground passage, part of the central heating system, connected the Präsidentenpalast and the Reichstag building. Less than a month after Hitler became chancellor—five days before a new election—an arsonist or arsonists entered the Reichstag building through this tunnel and set it ablaze. Hitler swiftly exploited the tumult; he persuaded the anxious, confused Hindenburg to sign a decree for the protection of Volk und Staat which, in effect, put the entire country under martial law. The chancellor could and did gag his political opponents, terrorize them, and silence all but the boldest, who were arrested. Over four thousand figures in public life, including Reichstag deputies, were thrown into jail. Later the hard core of his opposition were moved to Dachau, the first Nazi concentration camp, and never knew freedom again.