The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich: A History of Nazi Germany

by William L. Shirer

And finally, and above all, the Rhineland occupation, small as it was as a military operation, opened the way, as only Hitler (and Churchill, alone, in England) seemed to realize, to vast new opportunities in a Europe which was not only shaken but whose strategic situation was irrevocably changed by the parading of three German battalions across the Rhine bridges. Conversely, it is equally easy to see, in retrospect, that France’s failure to repel the Wehrmacht battalions and Britain’s failure to back her in what would have been nothing more than a police action was a disaster for the West from which sprang all the later ones of even greater magnitude. In March 1936 the two Western democracies were given their last chance to halt, without the risk of a serious war, the rise of a militarized, aggressive, totalitarian Germany and, in fact—as we have seen Hitler admitting—bring the Nazi dictator and his regime tumbling down. They let the chance slip by.

Her allies in the East, Russia, Poland, Czechoslovakia, Rumania and Yugoslavia, suddenly were faced with the fact that France would not fight against German aggression to preserve the security system which the French government itself had taken the lead in so laboriously building up.

These Eastern allies began to realize that even if France were not so supine, she would soon not be able to lend them much assistance because of Germany’s feverish construction...

He agreed secretly to amnesty Nazi political prisoners in Austria and to appoint representatives of the “so-called ‘National Opposition’”—a euphemism for Nazis or Nazi sympathizers—to positions of “political responsibility.” This was equivalent to allowing Hitler to set up a Trojan horse in Austria.

Two weeks later, on July 16, Franco staged a military revolt in Spain and civil war broke out.

On the night of July 22, after he had returned from the theater, a German businessman from Morocco, accompanied by the local Nazi leader, arrived in Bayreuth with an urgent letter from Franco.

Though German aid to Franco never equaled that given by Italy, which dispatched between sixty and seventy thousand troops as well as vast supplies of arms and planes, it was considerable. The Germans estimated later that they spent half a billion marks on the venture37 besides furnishing planes, tanks, technicians and the Condor Legion, an Air Force unit which distinguished itself by the obliteration of the Spanish town of Guernica and its civilian inhabitants. Relative to Germany’s own massive rearmament it was not much, but it paid handsome dividends to Hitler. It gave France a third unfriendly fascist power on its borders. It exacerbated the internal strife in France between Right and Left and thus weakened Germany’s principal rival in the West. Above all it rendered impossible a rapprochement of Britain and France with Italy, which the Paris and London governments had hoped for after the termination of the Abyssinian War, and thus drove Mussolini into the arms of Hitler.

A perusal of the captured German documents makes plain that one of Hitler’s purposes was to prolong the Spanish Civil War in order to keep the Western democracies and Italy at loggerheads and draw Mussolini toward him.

Incompetent and lazy, vain as a peacock, arrogant and without humor, Ribbentrop was the worst possible choice for such a post, as Goering realized. “When I criticized Ribbentrop’s qualifications to handle British problems,” he later declared, “the Fuehrer pointed out to me that Ribbentrop knew ‘Lord So and So’ and ‘Minister So and So.’ To which I replied: ‘Yes, but the difficulty is that they know Ribbentrop.’”

But the pact did serve a certain propaganda purpose among the world’s gullible and it brought together for the first time the three have-not and aggressor nations.

Completely isolated at first, he had found a loyal ally in Mussolini and another in Franco, and he had detached Poland from France.

Everyone could see the contrast between this thriving, martial, boldly led new Germany and the decadent democracies in the West, whose confusions and vacillations seemed to increase with each new month of the calendar.

And now, as the year 1937 began, they were cutting a sorry figure by their futile gestures to prevent Germany and Italy from determining the outcome of the Spanish Civil War. Everyone knew what Italy and Germany were doing in Spain to assure Franco’s victory. Yet the governments of London and Paris continued for years to engage in empty diplomatic negotiations with Berlin and Rome to assure “nonintervention” in Spain.

It was a year devoted to forging armaments, training troops, trying out the new Air Force in Spain, † developing ersatz gasoline and rubber, cementing the Rome–Berlin Axis and watching for further weak spots in Paris, London and Vienna.

Thus placated on Austria and still smarting from the opposition of France and Britain to almost all of his ambitions—in Ethiopia, in Spain, in the Mediterranean—Mussolini accepted an invitation from Hitler to visit Germany, and on September 25, 1937, outfitted in a new uniform created especially for the occasion, he crossed the Alps into the Third Reich.

A gigantic crowd of one million persons was gathered on the Maifeld to hear the two fascist dictators speak their pieces.

This was a serious blow to the collective defense of the West, but in April 1937 Britain and France accepted it—an action for which they, as well as Belgium, would soon pay dearly.

The British need for tranquillity is great. It would be profitable to find out what England would be willing to pay for such tranquillity.

“Otto” stood for Otto of Hapsburg, the young pretender to the Austrian throne, then living in Belgium.

Not in some far-off African or Asian colonies, but in the heart of Europe “in immediate proximity to the Reich.”

There had never… been spaces without a master, and there were none today; the attacker always comes up against a possessor.

Hitler then outlined some of the advantages of the “annexation of Czechoslovakia and Austria”: better strategic frontiers for Germany, the freeing of military forces “for other purposes,” acquisition of some twelve million “Germans,” additional foodstuffs for five to six million Germans in the Reich, and manpower for twelve new Army divisions.

That was the reason, he explained, for his policy in trying to prolong the Spanish Civil War; it kept Italy embroiled with France and Britain.

Not, so far as the Hossbach records show, because they were struck down by the immorality of their Leader’s proposals but for more practical reasons: Germany was not ready for a big war; to provoke one now would risk disaster.

Within three months all of the three were out of office and Hitler, relieved of their opposition, such as it was—and it was the last he was to suffer in his presence during the Third Reich—set out on the road of the conqueror to fulfill his destiny. In the beginning, it was an easier road than he—or anyone else—had foreseen.

Foreign correspondents who visited the polling places found some irregularities—especially, open instead of secret voting—and there was no doubt that some Germans feared (with justification, as we have seen) that a Nein vote might be discovered by the Gestapo. Dr. Hugo Eckener told this writer that on his new Zeppelin Hindenburg, which Goebbels had ordered to cruise over German cities as a publicity stunt, the Ja vote, which was announced by the Propaganda Minister as forty-two, outnumbered the total number of persons aboard by two.

“A hundred per cent victory for Franco,” he told them, was “not desirable from the German point of view. Rather we are interested in a continuance of the war and in keeping up the tension in the Mediterranean.”

In his testimony at Nuremberg on March 14, 1946, Goering spoke proudly of the opportunities which the Spanish Civil War gave for testing “my young Luftwaffe. With the permission of the Fuehrer I sent a large part of my transport fleet and a number of experimental fighter units, bombers and antiaircraft guns; and in that way I had an opportunity to ascertain, under combat conditions, whether the material was equal to the task. In order that the personnel, too, might gather a certain experience, I saw to it that there was a continuous flow [so] that new people were constantly being sent and others recalled.”

As for Beck, he immediately committed to paper a devastating critique of Hitler’s plans, which apparently he showed to no one—the first sign of a fatal flaw in the mind and character of this estimable general who at first had welcomed the advent of Nazism and who, in the end, would give his life in an abortive effort to destroy it.

But there was a limit beyond which the country could not go without becoming bankrupt, and by 1936 he believed Germany was approaching that limit.

To add to his discouragement had been the attitude of many of the nation’s leading industrialists and businessmen, who, as he later recounted, “crowded into Goering’s anteroom in the hope of getting orders when I was still trying to make the voice of reason heard.”

At Hitler’s insistence Schacht remained in the cabinet as Minister without Portfolio and retained the presidency of the Reichsbank, thus preserving appearances and blunting the shock to German and world opinion.

Indeed, he would shortly endorse publicly and enthusiastically the Leader’s first gangster act of naked aggression, for, like the generals and the other conservatives who had played such a key role in turning over Germany to the Nazis, he was slow to awaken to the facts of life.

“What influence a woman, even without realizing it, can exert on the history of a country and thereby on the world!” Colonel Alfred Jodl exclaimed in his diary on January 26, 1938.

Perhaps only in the eerie, psychopathic world in which the inner circle of the Third Reich moved at this time with such frenzy would it have been possible.

Realizing that for the senior officer of the German Army to wed a commoner would not go down well with the haughty, aristocratic officer corps, he sought out Goering for advice.

There was a rival lover involved, the Field Marshal confided. To Goering that was no problem. Such nuisances in other cases had been carted off to concentration camp.

He knew that Himmler, who had been feuding with the Army High Command for more than a year and was now coming to be regarded by it as more of a sinister threat than Roehm had been, would use the file to blackmail the Field Marshal and make him his tool against the conservative generals. Courageously, Helldorf took the police papers to General Keitel instead.

Like so many other promises of Hitler, this one was not kept.

As was the case of a former English King of the same era he remained to the end loyal to the wife who had brought his downfall. That end came with his death on March 13, 1946, in Nuremberg jail, where he was waiting, a pitiful, emaciated man, to testify in the trial.

The Fuehrer, however, knew his old Nazi henchman better than anyone else; Goering, he said, was too self-indulgent and lacked both patience and diligence.

Colonel Hossbach, the Fuehrer’s adjutant, who was present when the Gestapo file was shown, was horrified and, in defiance of Hitler’s orders that he was to say nothing to Fritsch, went immediately to the Army commander’s apartment to inform him of the charge and to warn him of the dire trouble he was in.

The spectacle of the head of the German State, the successor of Hindenburg and the Hohenzollerns, introducing such a shady character in such a place for such a purpose was too much for him.

Beck too, his biographer makes clear, had not yet attained that understanding of the rulers of the Third Reich which was later to come to him—when it was too late.

Nor would Goering and Hitler disapprove of a divorce, which the new commander of the Army actually obtained a few months after assuming his new post. For both of them knew that Frau Charlotte Schmidt, the woman he wanted to marry, was, as Ulrich von Hassell said, “a two hundred per cent rabid Nazi.”

The last of the conservatives who stood in the way of Hitler’s embarking upon the course which he had long determined to follow, once Germany was sufficiently armed, were swept away. Blomberg, Fritsch and Neurath had been put in office by Hindenburg and the old-school conservatives to act as a brake upon Nazi excesses, and Schacht had joined them.

They had neither the moral strength nor the political shrewdness to stand up to him, let alone to triumph over him. Schacht quit. Neurath stepped aside. Blomberg, under pressure from his own brother generals, resigned. Fritsch, though he was framed in gangster fashion, accepted his dismissal without a gesture of defiance. Sixteen top generals meekly accepted theirs—and his.

Although he scarcely knew me, except as one of the many American correspondents in Berlin, he poured out a running fire of sarcastic remarks about the S.S., the party and various Nazi leaders from Hitler on down.

According to Milton Shulman (Defeat in the West, p. 10), Hitler himself intervened with the first Frau von Brauchitsch in order to obtain her consent to the divorce and helped provide a financial settlement for her, thus putting the Army Commander in Chief under personal obligation to him.

Though I would spend most of the period of the next three crucial years in Germany, my new assignment, which was to cover continental Europe, gave me a certain perspective of the Third Reich and, as it happened, set me down in those very neighboring countries which were to be victims of Hitler’s aggression just prior to and during the time the aggression took place.