Alone, 1932-1940

  The speech constituted the basic draft of what diplomats came to call Hitler’s Friedensrede (peace speech), to be delivered before the Reichstag after each German act of aggression, assuring the world that no one wanted peace more than he did, that he had just made his last territorial claim upon Europe. His reply to Roosevelt was a fraud, of course, but it was the work of a master swindler, and it took almost everyone in. London’s Daily Herald, the official organ of the Labour party, declared that Hitler, as a trustworthy statesman, should be taken at his word. The conservative weekly Spectator called him the hope of a tormented world; to The Times his claim was “irrefutable.”89

  But there was a catch, and Churchill had spotted it. Implicit in Hitler’s offer to disarm whenever other powers did likewise was Nazi Germany’s assertion of its right to rearm unchallenged by Ausländer. Winston made this point in the House, and after the first few minutes the chamber emptied. The German chancellor had given the MPs a present, the illusion that he had no intention of becoming a warlord, and Churchill was trying to take it away. Beaverbrook wrote a friend that “if he continues on his present course, I would not be surprised if Baldwin put a veto on him in his constituency. And believe me, Baldwin can do it.”90

  Yet every time Churchill seemed on the verge of being driven out of politics, Hitler came to his rescue by building his brutal record, outrage succeeding outrage, each a flagrant betrayal of his most recent Friedensrede. His lightning prewar strokes startled a sane world unable to grasp the stark fact that he was not sane. On October 14, 1933, without warning, he made three announcements. The important one was that Germany was withdrawing from both the disarmament conference and the League of Nations. But there was more. One arose from the eternal language problem. Lord Hailsham, MacDonald’s secretary for war, had told Hitler that German rearmament would violate Versailles, answerable, under the treaty’s terms, by sanctions. In German, Sanktionen implies armed invasion; therefore Hitler added that if the league attempted to impose sanctions, his new minister of defense, General Werner von Blomberg, would order German troops to fight. Blomberg did in fact instruct his soldiers to man the Reich’s frontiers and “hold out as long as possible.” However, as he and his fellow officers were well aware, that wouldn’t be long. Serious German resistance was impossible, and they were horrified.91

  They were not, however, politicians. Hitler, the transcendent politician, knew that he couldn’t lose, because in his third and final announcement he declared that he had dissolved the Reichstag and was submitting his decision to quit Geneva to a national plebiscite. No democracy, he knew, would intervene in a German election. He could also be certain of the results. The ballots would offer a single-party Nazi slate of Reichstag nominees, and the plebiscite—which, carefully worded, omitted the disarmament issue, turning the poll into a ja–nein on the Versailles treaty—would be held on November 12, the day after the anniversary of the hated Armistice. Ausländskorrespondenten—foreign correspondents—skeptical by profession and especially distrustful of the Nazis, monitored the election and reluctantly agreed that it was fair. The results were astounding. Some 96 percent of the electorate went to the polls and 95 percent of them approved of Germany’s Geneva walkout. Nazi candidates for the Reichstag received 92 percent of the vote. Ausländspolitiker—political leaders in other countries—could no longer speculate over whether the Nazi chancellor had the support of his people. In the entire history of the Reich, no German leader, including the kaiser, had matched his popularity.92

  The diplomats droned on in Switzerland, and in June 1934 the last truncated session adjourned. The chairman had been Arthur Henderson, a Labour MP, who, as a tribute to his tireless efforts in Geneva, was declared winner of the Nobel Peace Prize. In his closing words, according to a contemporary account, he openly charged France with “responsibility for its failure to accomplish any practical results.” The French furiously denied it, and history confirms them. Their peers, however, did not.93

  The breadline on Berlin’s Kurfürstendamm had vanished. The Third Reich had become the only great power without massive unemployment, beggary, or hunger—a country freed from the shackles of the worldwide Depression. Since Hitler had moved into the Reich Chancellery on January 30, 1933, Germany’s income had doubled; production had risen 102 percent; her Volk were riding a crest of affluence, euphoria, and throbbing patriotism not seen since their fathers had lustily marched off to war twenty years earlier. The Aladdin with the lamp was Reichsbank president Dr. Hjalmar Schacht. To foreign economists he seemed to be a magician. His genius was undeniable, but he possessed an extraordinary advantage, a gift of power from Hitler. Exercising this authority, Schacht created credit for a country without liquid capital or monetary reserves by manipulating the currency. So adroit was his jugglery that at one point bankers assigned the mark 237 different values.94

  Europe had never seen anything like it, but Americans had. Under Roosevelt the new economists had been fueling a recovery a full year before August 1934, when Hitler appointed Schacht the Reich’s economics minister. There was a difference, however. Germany was now bankrupt, and with a trade deficit approaching a half-billion marks Schacht was, under the laws of the German republic, a counterfeiter. In the City of London or in Wall Street his wizardry would have consigned him to prison. But in the Third Reich he was quite safe. Members of the government were untroubled by legalities, courts, and traditional stock trading principles. Indeed, the central fact about Nazi Germany, obvious now but visible to only a few at the time, is that it was a criminal conspiracy. When President Hindenburg died on August 2, 1934, at the age of eighty-six, Hitler announced that he was combining his office of chancellor with that of the dead president. He then appointed himself Führer—leader. This, unlike Hitler’s appointment as chancellor, was illegal. In taking this step, Hitler committed a major felony under the German constitution, which stipulated that if a president should die while in office, his title and powers should pass, not to the chancellor, but to the president of the supreme court, to be safeguarded by him until the people could cast their votes in a new election.95

  Laws are effective only when authorities enforce them and society submits. But in Germany the felons were the men invested with the greatest authority, and the handful of brave demonstrators who protested the transformation of a democracy into a dictatorship were beaten by the Strassenkämpfer and found themselves, not their assailants, facing criminal charges. The Strassenkämpfer, Hitler biographer Alan Bullock writes, “had seized control of the resources of a great modern State; the gutter had come to power.” Hitler now announced his second nationwide plebiscite, this one on his assumption of dictatorial rule. Virtually no voices of dissent were heard from the universities, the eminent Jews having already left; from Germany’s industrialists, who had in fact contributed heavily to Nazi election funds after he had promised to abolish trade unions; or from office-holders sworn to protect and defend the constitution now being raped. None even resigned in protest. On August 19, 1934, after a week of massive Nazi rallies, torchlight parades, and storm troopers marching through neighborhoods roaring, “Wir wollen das Gesetz—sonst Mord und Totschlag!” (“We want power—otherwise death and destruction!”), the plebiscite was held. Over 42.5 million Germans went to the polls—95 percent of those registered—and 38 million, nine out of every ten, voted ja.96

  The self-anointed Führer declared that he was now head of state and commander in chief of the country’s military establishment. Every German officer was required to swear an oath of loyalty to him. The officer corps knew how momentous this step was. The kaiser had never dreamed of asking personal allegiance. The oath bound them not to the government or even the country, but to the commands of a single individual whose stability, even then, was widely questioned. Nevertheless, to their eternal shame, each of them pledged “by God” that he would “render unconditional obedience to Adolf Hitler, the Führer of the German Reich and people, Supreme Commander of the Armed Forces, and will be r
eady as a brave soldier to risk my life at any time for this oath.” Hitler was now absolute ruler of Europe’s most powerful state, a phenomenon unknown to the Continent since Napoleon.

  Meanwhile, anti-Semitism, which had troubled Churchill from the outset, was becoming increasingly vicious. His informants reported that all over Germany Bierkeller, motion picture theatres, shops, and restaurants were displaying prominent signs reading “Juden unerwünscht” (“Jews not welcome”). Day-to-day existence was becoming increasingly difficult for non-Aryans. “Für Juden kein Zutritt” (“Jews not admitted”) placards hung outside grocery and butchers’ shops; they could not enter dairies to buy milk for their infants, or pharmacies to fill prescriptions, or hotels to find lodging. At every turn they were taunted: “In dieser Stadt ist Juden der Zutritt streng verboten” (“Jews absolutely forbidden in this city”); “Juden betreten diesen Ort auf eigene Gefahr” (“Jews enter this place at their own risk”); and, at a dangerous highway curve on the west bank of the Rhine opposite Mannheim: “Vorsicht! Scharfe Kurve! Juden 100 km!” (“Caution! Sharp Curve! Jews 60 mph!”).97

  Visitors attending the Berlin Olympics in 1936 would ask how Germany had ended the breadlines and found jobs for the jobless. Their hosts suavely assured them that the Führer had solved the Depression in Germany by expanding public works programs and stimulating private enterprise. It sounded plausible, and the tourists left believing it. Yet any persistent searcher for the real source of the Reich’s booming economy could have found it by visiting the Ruhr valley—the Ruhrgebiet—and the industrial areas of the Rhineland, where the great factories of Krupp, Thyssen, Flick, and I. G. Farben, looming like kolossale cathedrals through the smoke belching from their smokestacks, were working shifts around the clock. It was, for those who saw it, a vision of stark Teutonic power. In the peak years of Victorian energy, when England had been called “the workshop of the world,” Londoners had a word for the sound of their toiling city. It was the Hum. Now the Ruhr was Germany’s Bienenstock—its beehive. But the yield of a beehive is benign; the Ruhr’s sweating workers were intent on building a more powerful military juggernaut than the army General Erich Ludendorff had guided in 1918.

  No one who held high office in the 1920s, Churchill included, can be completely absolved of responsibility for the shocking deterioration of England’s defenses between the wars. After the Armistice Lloyd George’s government, at Winston’s urging, had adopted a “ten-year rule”—an assumption, in drawing up service budgets, that “no great war is to be anticipated within the next ten years.” Year after year the principle was reaffirmed. Ministers saw no reason to drop it. Germany was disarmed; Russia still in turmoil; France pacifistic; America isolationist. Nevertheless, as early as 1929 Basil Liddell Hart had written in the Daily Telegraph that “every important foreign power has made startling, indeed ominous, increases of expenditure on its army” and declared that the British government “would be false to its duty to this nation if it reduced our slender military strength more drastically.” The Admiralty recommended building a submarine base at Hong Kong. “For what?” asked Winston. “A war with Japan! But why should there be a war with Japan? I do not believe there is the slightest chance of it in our lifetime.”98

  Churchill had an unusual, if unorthodox, grasp of military strategy, but was weak on tactics. In hindsight his observations of weapons seem odd. “The submarine,” he wrote, “is not now regarded as the menace it used to be.” Similarly, he told readers of the News of the World that he doubted “very much” whether the tank “will ever again see the palmy days of 1918…. Nowadays the anti-tank rifle and the anti-tank gun have made such great strides that the poor tank cannot carry thick enough skin to stand up to them.” Anticipating “How Wars of the Future Will Be Waged,” he envisioned “great prepared lines of fortifications which it will be very difficult indeed for the other army to break through…. The idea that enormous masses of mechanical vehicles and tanks will be able to overrun these fortifications will probably turn out to be a disappointment.” He foresaw deadlock; any ground gained “will very often be only as moles.” Doubtless there would be new developments, but nothing dramatic: “One thing is certain about the next war; namely, that the armies will use their spades more often than they use their bayonets.”99

  He also underestimated air power. In 1936 the first reports of civil war in Spain led him to conclude that events there demonstrated “the limitations rather than the strength of the air weapon” and proved that “so far as the fighting troops are concerned, aircraft are an additional complication rather than a decisive weapon.” This, he felt, together with “the undoubted obsolescence of the submarine… should give a feeling of confidence and security so far as the seas and oceans are concerned, to the western democracies.” On one point he had no doubt whatever. No warplane, he declared, could sink a warship. Over a decade had passed since Brigadier General William (“Billy”) Mitchell, the American airman, had proved it could be done—proved it by actually doing it, sending six obsolete battleships to the floor of the Atlantic. But as late as January 14, 1939, Churchill told subscribers to Collier’s that “even a single well-armed vessel will hold its own against aircraft.”100

  A friend of his later recalled a dinner party in the mid-1930s: “Winston was laughing at the idea that any bombers could put ships out of commission. He thought it ridiculous, so terribly funny. He said to get a ship you would have to be sure to put the bomb down the funnel. He had been told it had to go down the funnel or these armor-plated ships wouldn’t blow up…. You know, he was making this great joke about the whole thing. I just remember how he amazed me at the time. Of course, the bomb didn’t have to go down the funnel at all.”

  Winston’s most striking tactical gaffe was a memorandum he sent to Neville Chamberlain, then prime minister, only six months before the Munich Agreement, and it sharply criticized the two fighter planes which would prove to be England’s salvation in 1940. On March 12, 1938, Churchill wrote: “We have concentrated upon the forward-firing fixed gun Fighter (Hurricane and Spitfire). The latest developments increasingly suggest that hostile aircraft can only be engaged with certainty on parallel or nearly parallel courses, hence that the turret type of equipment will be paramount.” This revealed a total failure to grasp the evolution of aerial rearmament. Churchill was thinking in terms of the Tiger Moth and other old wood-and-fabric two-gun biplanes. To send such slow, fragile aircraft against the Nazis’ Messerschmitt fighters would have meant the sacrifice of the RAF, followed by catastrophe; the Luftwaffe’s bombers, arriving in fleets, would have leveled their targets, unchallenged by a single British fighter pilot.101

  But if he misunderstood armored warfare, so did every officer on Britain’s Imperial General Staff; and if he underrated air power and believed it would be ineffective against capital ships, the Admiralty agreed with him. The essence of England’s armaments dilemma was not inaccurate views on weaponry. The real problem was that the most powerful and influential men in Britain were determined not to offend Hitler. And in this matter Churchill’s vision was clear. He warned that whenever absolute rulers assemble great armies, they eventually make war: “Dictators ride to and fro upon tigers which they dare not dismount. And the tigers are getting hungry.” Appeasing Germany was folly, he said; Hitler would spare no one; and there was no refuge in neutrality, no sense in urging the Nazis to turn their wrath against others or pursue a policy based on the hope that the Führer would be satisfied with half a loaf—even the whole loaf would leave him unglutted; he would never stop until he was stopped by force. British rearmament was therefore essential.

  After the Japanese seized Shanghai in 1932 the cabinet had quietly dropped the ten-year rule, adding, however, that expenditures on arms would be determined by existing economic conditions. Existing economic conditions being what they were, arms budgets were depressed, and England, as Churchill put it, remained a “rich and easy prey.” Winston said: “No country is so vulnerable and no country wou
ld better repay pillage than our own”; with London “the greatest target in the world,” Britain was “a kind of tremendous, fat, valuable cow tied up to attract the beast of prey.”102

  Yet except for Austen Chamberlain, who as foreign secretary had been the architect of Locarno, no eminent parliamentarian backed Winston’s calls for rearmament and for binding military alliances with European states under the shadow of the swastika. Even England’s Chiefs of Staff were wary of commitment to other states; without such pacts, they argued, Britain could choose when and where to apply pressure. Alliances—even a League of Nations alliance—would mean that each member nation would be obliged, at the very least, to apply sanctions to an aggressor, who in response could declare war on England. Anthony Eden agreed with the chiefs. Answering Churchill in the House of Commons on one occasion, he had said that “where I differ, with respect, from my Right hon Friend the Member for Epping, is that he seems to conceive that in order to have an effective world consultative system nations have to be heavily armed. I do not agree…. General disarmament must continue to be the ultimate aim.”103

  Labour regarded Churchill’s demands for rearmament with a suspicion which can only be called paranoid. Clement Attlee, the party’s deputy leader, denounced all arms appropriations and denied that Hitler’s attentions were aggressive. He told Parliament: “We are back in a prewar atmosphere… in a system of alliances and rivalries and an armaments race,” adding: “We deny the proposition that an increased British air force will make for the peace of the world.” In the military estimates of HMG—His Majesty’s Government, the prime minister and his cabinet—which were so inadequate in Churchill’s view, Attlee discerned familiar, sinister themes. They were “nationalist and imperialist delusions… far more wild than any idealist dreams of the future we hold.” He declared: “We on our side are for total disarmament because we are realists.” When Winston recited a list of over twenty-four German factories producing airframe components and “considerably more” than eight plants turning out parts for warplane engines to be assembled by Heinkel, Junker, and Dornier, “on whose behalf the majority of other factories are working,” Attlee replied that anyone could draw up lists. One Labourite suggested that Baldwin was building a force which could be sent “abroad to fight in foreign countries.” Vansittart, who knew the MP had indicted the government of the wrong country, read that a Labour party conference had recommended a policy “subordinating our defense to the permission of Geneva, abolishing allegiance and loyalty to England, and pledging British citizens to a world-commonwealth which would ‘override any national duty in time of war.’ ” They had decided to take this position, they explained to the press, because “we have abandoned the whole idea of the national order.” In his memoirs Van acidly noted: “Hitler hadn’t.”104