Doom appears in many forms, but none more naked than fixed bayonets. Even as Labour and Liberal pacifists were fuming that Baldwin, prodded by the warmonger Churchill, was returning England to its militant, imperialist past, genuine militarism was forming ranks on a riverbank 375 miles to the east. On the moonbright Rhine it was Friday, March 6, 1936. Night was thickening. In London’s Savoy ballroom that evening, couples were dancing to the popular American tune “Red Sails in the Sunset.” Across the Atlantic, where it was still afternoon, teenagers leaving school were arguing over the Lucky Strike Hit Parade’s ranking of “In the Chapel by the Moonlight,” “The Way You Look Tonight,” and “Pennies from Heaven.” In Atlanta Margaret Mitchell, an obscure newspaperwoman, was correcting proof for her first novel—she had named her heroine Pansy and titled the book Tomorrow Is Another Day, but her editor had changed them to Scarlett and Gone with the Wind. Meanwhile, for the first time since 1918, the hobnailed boots of German soldiers would march. Adolf Hitler’s first invasion would begin at daybreak.
After the failure of his Austrian coup two years earlier, the Führer had been looking for a quick military victory elsewhere, and increasingly he had found himself looking westward, toward the Rhineland. Although it was the French who had christened this seventeen-year-old state la région zone démilitaire, it remained a part of the Reich, inhabited by Germans and including within its borders some of their greatest cities—Cologne, Aachen, Frankfurt, and Düsseldorf—industrial hubs separated by lovely vineyards producing some of the world’s finest wines. Here the Versailles peacemakers had carved out, from land on both banks of the Rhine, a strip of territory thirty-one miles wide. French troops had occupied the zone after the war but left early at British urging. Under the treaty, Germany was forbidden to billet troops or build fortifications there. The buffer had been designed to provide France and Belgium with security, or at least a warning, should the Germans decide to give the Schlieffen Plan a second try and knife swiftly westward. Even more important, the zone was the keystone to France’s arch of postwar alliances with Poland and Czechoslovakia. If the Germans attacked eastward, the French could race across the Rhineland and strike at the Ruhr, the Reich’s industrial heartland and the center of its armaments works, including Krupp’s flagship plant, the Gusstahlfabrik, in Essen.
At Versailles the losers had had no choice, but six years later Germany had freely joined the Locarno Pact, accepting the demilitarized zone as a permanent buffer. Should German troops enter the zone under any pretext, the Locarno agreement provided, they would be guilty of “an unprovoked act of aggression,” and the other European powers bound by Locarno—France, Britain, Belgium, and Italy—would have not only the right, but the duty, to expel them from the Rhineland by force. Before 1914 generations of Rhinelander children had been taught to sing “Die Wacht am Rhein,” with its rousing challenge: “The Rhine, the Rhine, the German Rhine! Who guards tonight our Stream Divine?” In Wilhelmine Germany the reply had always been: the Sword of Germany. But for the past eighteen years guards had been unnecessary, for under Locarno soldiers of France or Belgium who entered the buffer would also have been guilty of une violation de propriété. The zone was one of the few postwar political achievements blessed by the Führer; as late as his Friedensrede of May 21, 1935, delivered to the Reichstag, he had hailed the unarmed Rhineland as the Third Reich’s “contribution” to European peace. The Reich, he had solemnly declared, would “unconditionally respect” the “territorial” provisions of Versailles and the pledge, freely made by the republic of Germany at Locarno, to honor the inviolability of the Rhineland.31
Churchill was suspicious. The Führer, he believed, was likelier to remain faithful to his “great lie” credo, set forth in Mein Kampf. Winston had adopted, as a working thesis, the assumption that any given foreign policy statement by Hitler was the exact opposite of the truth. On January 17, eight months after the May Friedensrede, he wrote Clemmie that if his intelligence sources were right, the Führer was planning a major announcement which “may well be that Germany will… reoccupy the neutral zone with troops and forts.” Should that happen, he wrote, the French with British help would be obliged to drive the invaders out. He added: “Baldwin and Ramsay, guilty of neglecting our defences in spite of every warning, may well feel anxious not only for the public but for their own personal skins.”32
He was wrong about the British reaction but right about Hitler’s intentions. Three weeks before promising to respect the territorial integrity of the Rhineland, the Führer had ordered the OKW (Oberkommando der Wehrmacht), the high command of Germany’s armed forces, to draw up plans for seizing it. The operation was encoded Schulung (Schooling) and was, according to the Führer, to be “executed by a surprise blow at lightning speed,” with “only the very smallest number of officers” to be informed. Meanwhile he was building an excuse for aggression. He began with the same Reichstag speech, observing, in an aside, that the mutual assistance treaty between France and Russia, initialed two months previously but not yet ratified by the Chamber of Deputies, would alter the status of Locarno by introducing “an element of insecurity.”33
The French government knew what was coming. As early as October 21, 1935, the Deuxième Bureau informed the ministry that German troops were “actively preparing” to invade the zone; on October 21 the French high command sent an alert to the Quai: “The hypothesis of a German repudiation of the Rhineland statutes must be envisaged before the autumn of 1936, at the latest.” The most plausible warnings came from the able French ambassador in Berlin. After a lengthy talk with the Führer in November, André François-Poncet wrote that Hitler had lost his temper “dans une longue tirade contre le pacte franco-soviétique qu’il considérait comme criminel.” François-Poncet was convinced that Hitler now awaited only the appropriate moment to attack.34
Laval wired the French ambassador in London on January 11, 1936, advising him that four German divisions had been moved to the Rhineland’s border. In Whitehall, the FO acknowledged receipt of the message but made no comment. A week later Laval and his cabinet learned from General Maurice Gamelin, the French commander in chief, that intelligence reports left little doubt that the Germans would invade the zone “as soon as possible.” Again the British were informed; again the FO was unresponsive. This silence troubled Pierre-Étienne Flandin, who had succeeded Laval as ministre des affaires étrangères, and in the last week in January, Flandin crossed the Channel, officially to join the mourners at George V’s state funeral but actually to discuss the approaching crisis with Eden.35
The timing was unpropitious. During the past eight months relations between the two allies had become strained; after the Anglo-German Naval Agreement and the Hoare-Laval affair, France seethed with Anglophobia. “With Hitler against bolshevism!” cried L’Ami du peuple, and in Gringoire the fiery journalist Henri Béraud raged: “I hate England. I hate her by instinct and by tradition. I say, and I repeat, that England must be reduced to slavery!” Knowledge of all this had preceded Flandin to London, and diplomatic jargon did not ease the tension. Men charged with managing a nation’s foreign affairs are expected to rise above petty bickering, but Eden’s reception of Flandin on Monday, January 27, 1936, was frosty. On Tuesday the Frenchman talked to Baldwin. Flandin had come to ask precisely what Britain planned to do if Hitler attempted to seize the Rhineland. To his consternation, neither Englishman would say. When he pressed them, they countered by asking him what France would do. It was hardly the sort of encouragement one is entitled to expect from an ally.36
Eden’s own account of the French minister’s mission is almost self-incriminating. To Flandin’s question, he wrote, he had “replied that the French attitude to a violation of the Rhineland was clearly a matter for the judgment of the French government…. If they wished to negotiate with Hitler, they should do so; if they intended to repel a German invasion of the zone, they should lay their military plans. Any forcible action would depend on France.” His “impression??
? was that “while not prepared to use force to defend the zone,” his French guest had been “equally reluctant to negotiate about it.” The young foreign secretary even entertained the uncharitable thought that Flandin “might be tempted” to “put the blame for inaction on either count elsewhere.” In a cable to the British ambassador in Paris, Eden warned against “hypothetical” discussions and added: “Taking one thing with another, it seems undesirable to adopt an attitude where we would either have to fight for the zone or abandon it in the face of German reoccupation. It would be preferable for Great Britain and France to enter betimes into negotiations with the German Government for the surrender on conditions of our rights in the zone while such surrender still has bargaining power.”37
None of this makes sense. You cannot bargain rights over territory which you are not prepared to defend. If the Allies meant to surrender the Rhineland—and an invitation to open negotiations would tell the Germans that they did—there was nothing left to discuss. The Germans would know they could march into a void, encountering no opposition. But the appeasers assumed that everyone preferred peace to war.
In the early hours of that Saturday, March 7, 1936, darkness and patchy fog lay over long stretches of the ancient Rhine, a river beloved by German poets and a source of exasperation to foreign conquerors from Caesar to Eisenhower, Bradley, and Montgomery. Despite the hour, few Rhinelanders were asleep. All week hearsay had been spreading among them, gathering in momentum, and it was accurate to the last particular. In Germany even the rumors were precise.
As the first streaks of dawn flushed the sky they heard a faint hum coming from the direction of Berlin. It grew to a growl which reached a thundering crescendo as Messerschmitt fighters, flying in tight V formations and bearing the broken cross of the German Reich on their wings, swarmed out of the eastern sky, circled the spires of Cologne Cathedral, and raced back eastward. Then the infantry began approaching from the right bank. Brawny young soldiers in the old, familiar coal-scuttle helmets crossed the bridges on bicycles and entered the squares of cities and towns in the demilitarized zone. Crowds already gathered there murmured their approval, a susurration which rose to an ovation as German battalions wearing red carnations in their belts goose-stepped over the Rhine and into the square under the eyes of their commanding officers, who stood, in full uniform, their medals twinkling, on small platforms which had miraculously appeared to give them eminence. The Volk in the squares rejoiced. Local Nazi leaders, many of them Oberbürgermeisters, appeared in their sausage-tight Sturmtruppen uniforms to lead the singing:
Deutschland, Deutschland über alles…
And then the Nazi anthem, the “Horst Wessel Song”:
Die Fahne hoch! Die Reihen dicht geschlossen.
S.A. marschiert mit ruhig festem Schritt….
Raise the banners! Stand rank on rank together.
S.A. march on, with steady, quiet tread….38
The entire Rhineland was aflame with excitement, but the world was unaware of Hitler’s move until, at the stroke of noon, he addressed the Reichstag in the Kroll Opera House, his deep, resonant voice thundering that the German Reich no longer felt “bound” by Locarno. Therefore, in the “interests of the basic rights of its people to the security of their frontier and the safeguarding of their defense,” he had “reestablished, as from today, the absolute and unrestricted sovereignty of the Reich in the demilitarized zone of the Rhineland.” The Reichstag exploded in delirium. Its six hundred deputies stiffened their right arms in Hitlergrussen and bellowed “Heil! Heil! Heil! Heil! Heil!” until the Führer raised his hand to silence them. “Men of the German Reichstag!” His deep voice was throbbing now. He vowed at “this historic moment,” while German troops were on the march, that he would never yield to force in “Wiederherstellung der Ehre” (“restoring the honor of our people”). But neither would he threaten other nations. He pledged that “now, more than ever,” he would work toward understanding between the people of all European countries, “particularly our Western neighbor nations.”39
This was Hitler at his wiliest. Here he was speaking, not to the Reichstag, but to Frenchmen, Belgians, Italians, and Britons frightened of bolshevism. In an ingenious distortion of carefully worded state documents, he embroidered his argument that the Russo-French agreement was a breach of Locarno directed against the Reich—that it might even force France to join the Soviet Union in a war against Germany. France, said the Führer, “has destroyed the political system of the [Locarno] pact, not only in theory but in fact.” Then, in a characteristic Friedensrede touch, he offered a string of meaningless carrots: immediate negotiations for a new demilitarized zone on both sides of the Franco-German and Belgo-German frontiers; the return of the Reich to the League of Nations; a twenty-five-year nonaggression pact between France and Germany; nonaggression treaties between the Reich and France, Czechoslovakia, Poland, and the smaller countries of eastern Europe. Deeply moved, he paused, his eyes moist and his voice choked. Then he made his last two vows. First, he once more pledged: “Wir haben in Europa keine territorialen Fordernungen zu stellen” (“We have no territorial demands to make in Europe”). And then: “Deutschland wird niemals den Frieden brechen!” (“Germany will never break the peace!”).40
The cheering went on and on, but the diplomats, who had to inform their governments, and the foreign correspondents, who had to tell the world, slipped out. Shirer was among them. He observed a few generals making their way out toward the Tiergarten. Their smiles seemed forced. Then he encountered Blomberg and was shocked at his appearance: “His face was white, his cheeks twitching.” In his diary Shirer wrote: “You could not help detecting a nervousness.”41
War Minister Blomberg, General Fritsch, General Beck, and a handful of other senior members of the army hierarchy were now convinced that Nazi Germany would collapse within a week or less. Blomberg bore the immediate responsibility; hence his pallor and his nervous tic. In deciding to invade the buffer zone Hitler had acted in defiance of their advice. The generals knew that the occupation, stripped of the Führer’s thespian eloquence and his hand-picked, carefully rehearsed battalions now camped on forbidden soil, was a gigantic scam. By canceling leaves and putting every trained poilu into battle dress, France could retake the Rhineland in a matter of hours. Outnumbering the half-trained, inadequately equipped Wehrmacht conscripts ten to one, the French infantrymen would be supported by tanks and the finest artillery in the world. Blomberg had agreed to assume command only after receiving written assurance from the Führer that he could take “any military countermeasures” he felt appropriate. If he so much as glimpsed a single French bayonet, he intended to beat “a hasty retreat” back across the Rhine.42
And that, in the opinion of the Militärbehörden—the senior military authorities on Behrenstrasse—would be the end of Adolf Hitler. How many generals had discussed the approaching debacle and shared in planning how to exploit the aftermath is unknown. Blomberg and Beck were excluded; the disgrace of the Führer would also reflect on the army, they were to be the commanding officers, and if they acknowledged defeat before the operation began, their honor would be compromised. But almost certainly a majority of the Generalstab believed France was committed, by a treaty Hitler had approved, to take military action against the presence of German troops in the demilitarized zone. The moment the French infantry moved, calling his bluff, the same treaty required Britain to support France with her own armed forces. The fledgling Wehrmacht would be routed. Hitler and his Nazis would be the laughingstock of Europe. Once the German people realized that they had been betrayed, a military government would move into the Reich Chancellery pending a constitutional convention and free elections.43
It is impossible to overestimate the strength of the belief within Germany’s officer corps that France’s advantage was overwhelming. Ten years later General Alfred Jodl, who became Hitler’s chief of staff, would testify to it before the Nuremberg tribunal. At the time of the Rhineland coup, he said, “Con
sidering the situation we were in”—they knew Gamelin had thirteen French divisions near the frontier—“the French covering army could have blown us to pieces.” Afterward Hitler himself acknowledged it. His interpreter, Paul Schmidt, heard him say: “A retreat on our part would have spelled collapse.” Still later he said: “The forty-eight hours after the march into the Rhineland were the most nerve-racking [die aufregendste Zeitspanne] in my life. If the French had then marched into the Rhineland, we would have had to withdraw with shame and disgrace [mit Schimpfe und Schande zurückziehen müssen], for the military resources at our disposal would have been wholly inadequate for even a moderate resistance.”44
But in that blustery March week of 1936, Hitler, unlike his generals, saw the Rhineland as a risk worth taking. How much he knew of the democracies’ impotence is unfathomable, but he had been surprised by the feeble Allied response to his earlier moves. In these years, before he became intoxicated with his own triumphs, his intuitive grasp of how far he could go with Allied leaders was uncanny.
Nearly an hour passed before François-Poncet could cable Flandin a terse summary of Hitler’s new sensation. Premier Albert Sarraut immediately summoned his inner cabinet, including the minister of war, General Joseph-Léon-Marie Maurin, and the constable of France, Généralissime Gamelin. Their talks were already under way when the text of Hitler’s Reichstag speech arrived.45