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The fly-by-night ones were closed down and larger ones constructed, the chief of which (until the war came, when they were expanded into occupied territory) were Dachau near Munich, Buchenwald near Weimar, Sachsenhausen, which replaced the Oranienburg camp of initial fame near Berlin, Ravensbrueck in Mecklenburg (for women) and, after the occupation of Austria in 1938, Mauthausen near Linz—names which, with Auschwitz, Belsec and Treblinka, which were later established in Poland, were to become all too familiar to most of the world.
Under the expert hand of Heydrich, a former intelligence officer in the Navy who had been cashiered by Admiral Raeder in 1931 at the age of twenty-six for refusing to marry the daughter of a shipbuilder whom he had compromised, the S.D. soon spread its net over the country, employing some 100,000 part-time informers who were directed to snoop on every citizen in the land and report the slightest remark or activity which was deemed inimical to Nazi rule. No one—if he were not foolish—said or did anything that might be interpreted as “anti-Nazi” without first taking precautions that it was not
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They had a grotesque interest in such side lines as the study of Teutonic archeology, the skulls of the inferior races and the eugenics of a master race.
They not only kept out of the spotlight because of the nature of their work but, in 1934 and 1935 at least, because a number of them who had spied on Roehm and his confederates in the S.A. were bumped off by a secret band that called itself “Roehm’s Avengers” and took care to pin that label on the bodies. One of the interesting, if subordinate, tasks of the S.D. was to ascertain who voted “No” in Hitler’s plebiscites.
The control was affected in the following way: some members of the election committee marked all the ballots with numbers.
The marking was done on the back of the ballot with skimmed milk.
The Third Reich, as is inevitable in the development of all totalitarian dictatorships, had become a police state.
Though the Weimar Republic was destroyed, the Weimar Constitution was never formally abrogated by Hitler. Indeed—and ironically—Hitler based the “legality” of his rule on the despised republican constitution. Thus thousands of decreed laws—there were no others in the Third Reich—were explicitly based on the emergency presidential decree of February 28, 1933, for the Protection of the People and the State, which Hindenburg, under Article 48 of the constitution, had signed.
The Enabling Act too, which the Reichstag had voted on March 24, 1933, and by which it handed over its legislative functions to the Nazi government, was the second pillar in the “constitutionality” of Hitler’s rule. Each four years thereafter it was dutifully prolonged for another four-year period by a rubber-stamp Reichstag, for it never occurred to the dictator to abolish this once democratic institution but only to make it nondemocratic. It met only a dozen times up to the war, “enacted” only four laws,* held no debates or votes and never heard any speeches except those made by Hitler.
Local self-government, the only field in which the Germans had seemed to be making genuine progress toward democracy, was also wiped out.
Old party comrades such as Goering, Goebbels, Himmler, Ley and Schirach were given free rein to carve out their own empires of power—and usually profit.
Indeed, he often encouraged them, because they added status to his position as supreme arbiter and prevented any closing of the ranks against him.
Such was the government of the Third Reich, administered from top to bottom on the so-called leadership principle by a vast and sprawling bureaucracy, having little of the efficiency usually credited to the Germans, poisoned by graft, beset by constant confusion and cutthroat rivalries augmented by the muddling interference of party potentates and often rendered impotent by the terror of the S.S.-Gestapo.
Also, in contrast to the Soviet Union, Nazi Germany permitted all but a few thousand of its citizens who were in the black book of the secret police to travel abroad, though this was severely curtailed by currency restrictions because of the country’s lack of foreign exchange.
For months prior to July 1934 the Austrian Nazis, with weapons and dynamite furnished by Germany, had instituted a reign of terror, blowing up railways, power stations and government buildings and murdering supporters of the Dollfuss clerical-fascist regime.
“We are faced with a new Sarajevo!” Papen says he shouted at him when the two conferred about how to overcome the crisis.
All that Hitler could do was to preach peace, get along with his secret rearmament and wait and watch for opportunities. Besides the Reichstag, Hitler had another means of communicating his peace propaganda to the outside world: the foreign press, whose correspondents, editors and publishers were constantly seeking interviews with him.
Goebbels was admonished never to allow the words “General Staff” to appear in the press, since Versailles forbade the very existence of this organization. The annual official rank list of the German Army ceased to be published after 1932 so that its swollen lists of officers would not give the game away to foreign intelligence. General Keitel, chairman of the Working Committee of the Reich Defense Council, admonished his aides-as early as May 22, 1933, “No document must be lost, since otherwise enemy propaganda will make use of it. Matters communicated orally cannot be proven; they can be
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For the Navy had commenced the construction of two battle cruisers of 26,000 tons (16,000 tons above the Versailles limit) which would eventually be known as the Scharnhorst and the Gneisenau. Submarines, the building of which Versailles had prohibited, had been secretly constructed in Finland, Holland and Spain during the German Republic, and recently Raeder had stored the frames and parts of a dozen of them at Kiel.
Thus the dues of the German workers were to finance the naval program.
As Krupp would boast in 1942, when the German armies occupied most of Europe, “the basic principle of armament and turret design for tanks had already been worked out in 1926… Of the guns being used in 1939–41, the most important ones were already fully complete in 1933.” Farben scientists had saved Germany from early disaster in the First World War by the invention of a process to make synthetic nitrates from air after the country’s normal supply of nitrates from Chile was cut off by the British blockade.
The problem of making synthetic gasoline from coal had actually been solved by the company’s scientists in the mid-Twenties.
By that time the company had also discovered how to make synthetic rubber from coal and other products of which Germany had a sufficiency, and the first of four plants was set up at Schkopau for large-scale production of buna, as the artificial rubber became known.
These powers, led by Great Britain, had been flirting with the idea of recognizing a fait accompli, that is, German rearmament, which was not nearly so secret as Hitler supposed. They would concede Hitler complete arms equality in return for Germany’s joining in a general European settlement which would include an Eastern Locarno and thus provide the Eastern countries, especially Russia, Poland and Czechoslovakia, with the same security which the Western nations enjoyed under the Locarno Treaty—and, of course, furnish Germany with the same guarantees of security.
Hitler confidently awaited the reaction in London to this unilateral abrogation of Versailles. It was just what he expected. Sir John Simon told the Commons that he still counted on going to Berlin.
That was the end of the military restrictions of Versailles—unless France and Britain took action. As Hitler had expected, they protested but they did not act.
Sunday, March 17, was a day of rejoicing and celebration in Germany. The shackles of Versailles, symbol of Germany’s defeat and humiliation, had been torn off.
Strong lights played on the stage, where young officers stood like marble statues holding upright the nation’s war flags. Behind them on an enormous curtain hung an immense silver-and-black Iron Cross.
The generals, one could see by their faces, were immensely pleased.
There now took place a series of empty gestures of warning to Hitler by the other powers.
In the headlines this closing of ranks against Germany sounded somewhat ominous and even impressed a number of men in the German Foreign Office and in the Army, but apparently not Hitler.
It was time, he decided, to pull out the stops again on his love of peace and to see whether the new unity of the powers arrayed against him might not be undermined and breached after all.
A little after ten in the evening, Hitler came to his peroration: Whoever lights the torch of war in Europe can wish for nothing but chaos. We, however, live in the firm conviction that in our time will be fulfilled not the decline but the renaissance of the West. That Germany may make an imperishable contribution to this great work is our proud hope and our unshakable belief.11 These were honeyed words of peace, reason and conciliation, and in the Western democracies of Europe, where the people and their governments desperately yearned for the continuance of peace on any reasonable basis, on
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This great journal, one of the chief glories of English journalism, would play, like the Chamberlain government, a dubious role in the disastrous British appeasement of Hitler.
Though much that he wrote for the Times from Berlin in those days was not published,* as he often complained to this writer and as was later confirmed, the Times editors must have read all of his dispatches and have been in the position therefore of knowing what was really going on in Nazi Germany and how hollow Hitler’s grandiose promises were.
Hitler had expressed similar sentiments in Mein Kampf, where he had stressed that one of the Kaiser’s greatest mistakes had been his enmity toward England and his absurd attempt to rival the British in naval power.
Actually the Anglo–German agreement authorized the Germans to build five battleships, whose tonnage and armament would be greater than that of anything the British had afloat, though the official figures were faked to deceive London—twenty-one cruisers and sixty-four destroyers.
On October 3, 1935, in defiance of the Covenant, his armies invaded the ancient mountain kingdom of Abyssinia.
They did not prevent Mussolini from conquering Ethiopia but they did destroy the friendship of Fascist Italy with Britain and France and bring an end to the Stresa front against Nazi Germany.
Either Mussolini will stumble and get himself so heavily involved in Africa that he will be greatly weakened in Europe, whereupon Hitler can seize Austria, hitherto protected by the Duce; or he will win, defying France and Britain, and thereupon be ripe for a tie-up with Hitler against the Western democracies.
François-Poncet, probably the best-informed ambassador in Berlin, knew what he was talking about, though he was undoubtedly unaware that as early as the previous spring, on May 2, nineteen days before Hitler’s assurances in the Reichstag that he would respect the Locarno Pact and the territorial clauses of Versailles, General von Blomberg had issued his first directive to the three armed services to prepare plans for the reoccupation of the demilitarized Rhineland.
Nothing should be committed to writing that was not absolutely necessary, he warned, and he added that “without exception such material must be kept in safes.”
Two days later, on March 1, Hitler reached his decision, somewhat to the consternation of the generals, most of whom were convinced that the French would make mincemeat of the small German forces which had been gathered for the move into the Rhineland.
But the French, their nation already paralyzed by internal strife and the people sinking into defeatism, did not know this when a small token force of German troops paraded across the Rhine bridges at dawn on March 7 and entered the demilitarized zone.
“Hitler struck his adversary in the face,” François-Poncet wryly observed, “and as he did so declared: ‘I bring you proposals for peace!’”
Actually, when the blow occurred,* it was the French government which wanted to act and the French General Staff which held back.
It could have—and had it, that almost certainly would have been the end of Hitler, after which history might have taken quite a different and brighter turn than it did, for the dictator could never have survived such a fiasco.
It was Hitler’s iron nerves alone, which now, as during many crises that lay ahead, saved the situation and, confounding the reluctant generals, brought success.
“What would have happened,” Hitler exclaimed in a bull session with his cronies at headquarters on the evening of March 27, 1942, in recalling the Rhineland coup, “if anybody other than myself had been at the head of the Reich! Anyone you care to mention would have lost his nerve. I was obliged to lie, and what saved us was my unshakable obstinacy and my amazing aplomb.”
Hitler’s sincerity might have been judged by his proposal to demilitarize both sides of the Franco–German border, since it would have forced France to scrap her Maginot Line, her last protection against a surprise German attack.
