In the Garden of Beasts: Love, Terror, and an American Family in Hitler's Berlin

by Erik Larson

The ballot also would invite the public to pass judgment upon his foreign policy through a yes-or-no plebiscite. Secretly Hitler also gave orders to General Werner von Blomberg, his minister of defense, to prepare for possible military action by League members seeking to enforce the Treaty of Versailles—although Blomberg knew full well that Germany’s small army could not hope to prevail against a combined action by France, Poland, and Czechoslovakia. “That the allies at this time could easily have overwhelmed Germany is as certain as it is that such an action would have brought the end of the Third Reich in the very year of its birth,” wrote William Shirer in his classic work, The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich, but Hitler “knew the mettle of his foreign adversaries as expertly and as uncannily as he had sized up that of his opponents at home.”