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Adolf Hitler (20 April 1889 – 30 April 1945) was an Austrian-born German politician and the leader of the National Socialist German Workers Party (German: Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei, abbreviated NSDAP), commonly known as the Nazi Party. He was Chancellor of Germany from 1933 to 1945 and, after 1934, also head of state as Führer und Reichskanzler, ruling the country as an absolute dictator of Germany. A
decorated veteran of World
War
I, Hitler joined the precursor of the Nazi Party (DAP)
in
1919 and became leader of NSDAP in 1921. He attempted a failed coup
called the Beer
Hall
Putsch in Munich in 1923, for which he was
imprisoned. Following his imprisonment, in which he wrote his book, Mein
Kampf, he gained support by promoting German
nationalism, anti-semitism, anti-capitalism,
and anti-communism with charismatic oratory and propaganda.
He
was appointed chancellor in 1933, and quickly transformed the Weimar
Republic into the Third Reich, a single-party dictatorship based on the totalitarian and autocratic ideals of national
socialism. Hitler
ultimately wanted to establish a New
Order of absolute
Nazi German hegemony in Europe. To achieve this,
he pursued a foreign
policy with the
declared goal of seizing Lebensraum ("living space") for the Aryan
people; directing the resources of the state towards this goal.
This included the rearmament of Germany, which culminated in 1939 when
the Wehrmacht invaded
Poland. In response, the United
Kingdom and France declared war against
Germany, leading to the outbreak of World
War
II in
Europe. Within
three years, Germany and the Axis
powers had occupied
most of Europe, and most of Northern
Africa, East and Southeast
Asia and the
Pacific Ocean. However, with the reversal of the Nazi invasion of the Soviet
Union, the Allies gained
the upper hand from
1942 onwards. By 1945, Allied armies had invaded German-held Europe
from all sides. Nazi forces engaged in numerous violent acts during the
war, including the systematic murder of as many as 17 million civilians, an estimated six million of
whom were Jews targeted in the
Holocaust and
between 500,000 and 1,500,000 were Romanis. Others targeted included ethnic
Poles, Soviet
civilians, Soviet
prisoners
of war, people
with
disabilities, homosexuals, Jehovah's
Witnesses, and other political
and
religious opponents. In the
final days of the war, during the Battle
of
Berlin in 1945,
Hitler married his long-time mistress Eva
Braun and, to avoid
capture by Soviet forces less than two days later, the two committed
suicide on 30 April 1945. Hitler's
father, Alois
Hitler, was an illegitimate child of Maria
Anna
Schicklgruber so
his paternity was not listed on his birth certificate and he bore his
mother's surname. In 1842, Johann
Georg
Hiedler married
Maria and in 1876 Alois testified before a notary and three witnesses
that Johann was his father. At age 39, Alois took the
surname Hitler. This surname was variously spelled Hiedler, Hüttler, Huettler and Hitler, and was
probably regularized to Hitler by a clerk. The origin of
the name is either "one who lives in a hut" (Standard
German Hütte),
"shepherd"
(Standard German hüten "to guard", English heed), or is from the Slavic word Hidlar and Hidlarcek.
(Regarding the first two theories: some German dialects make little or no
distinction between the ü-sound
and
the i-sound.) Despite
this testimony, Alois' paternity has been the subject of controversy.
After receiving a "blackmail letter" from Hitler's nephew William Patrick
Hitler threatening
to reveal embarrassing information about Hitler's family tree, Nazi
Party lawyer Hans
Frank investigated,
and, in his memoirs, claimed to have uncovered letters revealing that
Alois' mother, Maria
Schicklgruber, was employed as a housekeeper for a Jewish family in Graz and that the family's
19-year-old son, Leopold
Frankenberger, fathered Alois. No evidence has ever been
produced to support Frank's claim, and Frank himself said Hitler's full
Aryan blood was obvious. Frank's claims were widely
believed in the 1950s, but by the 1990s, were generally doubted by
historians. Ian
Kershaw dismisses the Frankenberger story as a "smear" by Hitler's
enemies, noting that all Jews had been expelled from Graz in the 15th
century and were not allowed to return until well after Alois was born.
Adolf
Hitler
was born on 20 April 1889 at half-past six in the evening at the
Gasthof zum Pommer, an inn in Braunau
am
Inn, Austria–Hungary, the
fourth of Alois and Klara
Hitler's six children. At the
age of three, his family moved to Kapuzinerstrasse 5 in Passau,
Germany, where the young Hitler would acquire Lower
Bavarian rather
than Austrian as his lifelong native dialect. In 1894, the family moved to Leonding near Linz,
then
in June 1895, Alois retired to a small landholding at Hafeld near Lambach,
where
he tried his hand at farming and beekeeping. During this time,
the young Hitler attended school in nearby Fischlham. As a child, he
tirelessly played "Cowboys
and
Indians" and, by his own account, became fixated on war after
finding a picture book about the Franco-Prussian
War in his father's
things. He wrote in Mein
Kampf: "It was not long before the great historic struggle had
become my greatest spiritual experience. From then on, I became more
and more enthusiastic about everything that was in any way connected
with war or, for that matter, with soldiering." His
father's efforts at Hafeld ended in failure and the family moved to
Lambach in 1897. There, Hitler attended a Catholic school located in an 11th-century Benedictine cloister whose walls were
engraved in a number of places with crests containing the symbol of the swastika. It was in Lambach that the
eight year-old Hitler sang in the church choir, took singing lessons,
and even entertained the fantasy of one day becoming a priest. In 1898, the family
returned permanently to Leonding.
His
younger brother Edmund died of measles on 2 February 1900, causing
permanent changes in Hitler. He went from a confident, outgoing boy who
found school easy, to a morose, detached, sullen boy who constantly
battled his father and his teachers. Hitler
was close to his mother, but had a troubled relationship with his authoritarian father, who frequently beat
him, especially in the years after Alois' retirement and disappointing
farming efforts. Alois wanted his son to
follow in his footsteps as an Austrian customs official, and this
became a huge source of conflict between them. Despite his son's pleas to
go to classical high school and become an artist, his father sent him
to the Realschule in Linz, a technical high school of about 300
students, in September 1900. Hitler rebelled, and in Mein
Kampf confessed
to failing his first year in hopes that once his father saw "what
little progress I was making at the technical school he would let me
devote myself to the happiness I dreamed of." But Alois never relented
and Hitler became even more bitter and rebellious. For young
Hitler, German
Nationalism quickly
became an obsession, and a way to rebel against his father, who proudly
served the Austrian government. Most people who lived along the German-Austrian border
considered themselves German-Austrians, but Hitler expressed loyalty
only to Germany. In defiance of the Austrian monarchy, and his father
who continually expressed loyalty to it, Hitler and his young friends
liked to use the German greeting "Heil", and sing the German
anthem "Deutschland
Über
Alles" instead of the Austrian
Imperial anthem. After
Alois' sudden death on 3 January 1903, Hitler's behaviour at the
technical school became even more disruptive, and he was asked to
leave. He enrolled at the Realschule in Steyr in 1904, but upon
completing his second year, he and his friends went out for a night of
celebration and drinking, and an intoxicated Hitler tore his school
certificate into four pieces and used it as toilet paper. When someone
turned the stained certificate in to the school's director, he "...
gave him such a dressing-down that the boy was reduced to shivering
jelly. It was probably the most painful and humiliating experience of
his life." Hitler was expelled, never
to return to school again. At age
15, Hitler took part in his First
Holy
Communion on Whitsunday,
22
May 1904, at the Linz Cathedral. His sponsor was Emanuel
Lugert, a friend of his late father. From 1905
on, Hitler lived a bohemian life in Vienna on an orphan's pension and
support from his mother. He was rejected twice by the Academy of
Fine Arts Vienna (1907 – 1908),
citing
"unfitness for painting", and was told his abilities lay instead
in the field of architecture. His memoirs reflect a fascination with
the subject: The
purpose of my trip was to study the picture gallery in the Court
Museum, but I had eyes for scarcely anything but the Museum itself.
From morning until late at night, I ran from one object of interest to
another, but it was always the buildings which held my primary interest. Following
the school rector's recommendation, he too became convinced this was
his path to pursue, yet he lacked the proper academic preparation for
architecture school: In a
few days I myself knew that I should some day become an architect. To
be sure, it was an incredibly hard road; for the studies I had
neglected out of spite at the Realschule were sorely needed. One could
not attend the Academy's architectural school without having attended
the building school at the Technic, and the latter required a
high-school degree. I had none of all this. The fulfilment of my
artistic dream seemed physically impossible.
On 21
December 1907, Hitler's mother died of breast
cancer at age 47.
Ordered by a court in Linz, Hitler gave his share of the orphans'
benefits to his sister Paula. When he was 21, he inherited money from
an aunt. He struggled as a painter in Vienna, copying scenes from
postcards and selling his paintings to merchants and tourists. After
being rejected a second time by the Academy of Arts, Hitler ran out of
money. In 1909, he lived in a shelter for the homeless.
By
1910, he had settled into a house
for
poor working men on Meldemannstraße. Another resident of
the house, Reinhold
Hanisch, sold Hitler's paintings until the two men had a bitter
falling-out. Hitler
said he first became an anti-Semite in Vienna, which had a large Jewish
community, including Orthodox
Jews who had fled
the pogroms in Russia. According to
childhood friend August
Kubizek, however, Hitler was a "confirmed anti-Semite" before he
left Linz. Vienna at that time was a
hotbed of traditional religious prejudice and 19th century racism.
Hitler
may have been influenced by the writings of the ideologist and
anti-Semite Lanz
von
Liebenfels and polemics from politicians such as Karl
Lueger, founder of the Christian
Social
Party and Mayor
of
Vienna, the composer Richard
Wagner, and Georg
Ritter
von Schönerer, leader of the pan-Germanic Away from Rome! movement. Hitler claims in Mein Kampf that his
transition from opposing antisemitism on religious grounds to
supporting it on racial grounds came from having seen an Orthodox
Jew. There
were very few Jews in Linz. In the course of centuries the Jews who
lived there had become Europeanised in external appearance and
were so much like other human beings that I even looked upon them as
Germans. The reason why I did not then perceive the absurdity of such
an illusion was that the only external mark which I recognized as
distinguishing them from us was the practice of their strange religion.
As I thought that they were persecuted on account of their faith my
aversion to hearing remarks against them grew almost into a feeling of
abhorrence. I did not in the least suspect that there could be such a
thing as a systematic antisemitism. Once, when passing through the
inner City, I suddenly encountered a phenomenon in a long caftan and
wearing black side-locks. My first thought was: Is this a Jew? They
certainly did not have this appearance in Linz. I carefully watched the
man stealthily and cautiously but the longer I gazed at the strange
countenance and examined it feature by feature, the more the question
shaped itself in my brain: Is this a German? If
this
account is true, Hitler apparently did not act on his new belief. He
often was a guest for dinner in a noble Jewish house, and he interacted
well with Jewish merchants who tried to sell his paintings. Hitler
may also have been influenced by Martin
Luther's On
the
Jews and their Lies. In Mein
Kampf, Hitler refers to Martin Luther as a great warrior, a true
statesman, and a great reformer, alongside Richard
Wagner and Frederick
the
Great. Wilhelm
Röpke, writing after the Holocaust, concluded that "without
any question, Lutheranism influenced the political,
spiritual and social history of Germany in a way that, after careful
consideration of everything, can be described only as fateful." Hitler
claimed that Jews were enemies of the Aryan
race. He held them responsible for Austria's crisis. He also
identified certain forms of socialism and Bolshevism,
which
had many Jewish leaders, as Jewish movements, merging his
antisemitism with anti-Marxism.
Later,
blaming Germany's military defeat in World War I on the 1918
revolutions, he considered Jews the culprits of Imperial Germany's
downfall and subsequent economic problems as well. Generalising
from
tumultuous scenes in the parliament of the multi-national Austrian
monarchy, he decided that the democratic parliamentary system was
unworkable. However, according to August Kubizek, his one-time
roommate, he was more interested in Wagner's operas than in his
politics. Hitler
received the final part of his father's estate in May 1913 and moved to Munich.
He
wrote in Mein
Kampf that he had
always longed to live in a "real" German city. In Munich, he became
more interested in architecture and, he says, the writings of Houston
Stewart
Chamberlain. Moving to Munich also helped him escape military
service in Austria
for a time, but the Munich police (acting in cooperation with the
Austrian authorities) eventually arrested him. After a physical exam
and a contrite plea, he was deemed unfit for service and allowed to
return to Munich. However, when Germany entered World War I in August
1914, he petitioned King Ludwig
III
of Bavaria for
permission to serve in a Bavarian regiment. This request was
granted, and Adolf Hitler enlisted in the Bavarian army.
Hitler
served
in France and Belgium in the 16th Bavarian Reserve Regiment
(called Regiment List after
its
first commander), ending the war as a Gefreiter (equivalent at the time to a lance
corporal in the
British and private
first
class in the
American armies). He was a runner,
"a
dangerous enough job" on the Western Front, and
was often exposed to enemy fire. He participated in a number of major
battles on the Western Front, including the First
Battle
of Ypres, the Battle
of
the Somme, the Battle
of
Arras and the Battle
of
Passchendaele. The Battle of Ypres
(October 1914), which became known in Germany as the Kindermord bei Ypern (Massacre of the Innocents)
saw approximately 40,000 men (between a third and a half) of the nine
infantry divisions present killed in 20 days, and Hitler's own company
of 250 reduced to 42 by December. Biographer John
Keegan has said
that this experience drove Hitler to become aloof and withdrawn for the
remaining years of war. Hitler
was twice decorated for bravery. He received the Iron
Cross, Second Class, in 1914 and Iron Cross, First Class, in 1918,
an honour rarely given to a Gefreiter. However,
because
the regimental staff thought Hitler lacked leadership skills,
he was never promoted to Unteroffizier (equivalent to a British
corporal). Other historians say
that
the reason he was not promoted is that he was not a German
citizen. His duties at regimental headquarters, while often dangerous,
gave Hitler time to pursue his artwork. He drew cartoons and
instructional drawings for an army newspaper. In 1916, he was wounded
in either the groin area or the left thigh during the Battle of the
Somme, but returned to the front in March 1917. He received the Wound
Badge later that
year. A noted German historian and author, Sebastian Haffner, referring to Hitler's experience at the front, suggests he
did have at least some understanding of the military. On 15
October 1918, Hitler was admitted to a field
hospital, temporarily blinded by a mustard
gas attack. The
English psychologist David
Lewis and Bernhard
Horstmann suggest the blindness may have been the result of a conversion
disorder (then
known as "hysteria"). Citing
contemporary witnesses, Claus Hant concludes that the psychotic episode
led Hitler to believe that he had received a divine mission. In fact, Hitler said it was
during this experience that he became convinced the purpose of his life
was to "save Germany." Some scholars, notably Lucy
Dawidowicz, argue that an intention to
exterminate Europe's Jews was fully formed in Hitler's mind at this
time, though he probably had not thought through how it could be done.
Most historians think the decision was made in 1941, and some think it
came as late as 1942. Two
passages in Mein
Kampf mention the
use of poison
gas: Hitler
had long admired Germany, and during the war he had become a passionate
German patriot, although he did not become a German citizen until 1932.
Hitler found the war to be 'the greatest of all experiences' and
afterwards he was praised by a number of his commanding officers for
his bravery. He was shocked by Germany's capitulation in November 1918 even while
the German army still held enemy territory. Like many other German
nationalists, Hitler believed in the Dolchstoßlegende ("dagger-stab legend")
which claimed that the army, "undefeated in the field," had been
"stabbed in the back" by civilian leaders and Marxists back on the home
front. These politicians were later dubbed the November
Criminals. The Treaty
of
Versailles deprived
Germany of various territories, demilitarised the Rhineland and imposed other
economically damaging sanctions. The treaty re-created Poland, which
even moderate Germans regarded as an outrage. The treaty also blamed
Germany for all the horrors of the war, something which major
historians such as John
Keegan now consider
at least in part to be victor's
justice: most European nations in the run-up to World War I had
become increasingly militarised and were eager to fight.
The culpability of Germany was used as a basis to impose reparations on
Germany (the amount was repeatedly revised under the Dawes
Plan, the Young
Plan, and the Hoover Moratorium).
Germany in turn perceived the treaty and especially,
Article 231 the paragraph on the German responsibility for the war, as
a
humiliation. For example, there was a nearly total demilitarisation of
the armed forces, allowing Germany only six battleships, no submarines,
no air force, an army of 100,000 without conscription and no armoured
vehicles. The treaty was an important factor in both the social and
political conditions encountered by Hitler and his Nazis as they sought
power. Hitler and his party used the signing of the treaty by the
"November Criminals" as a reason to build up Germany so that it could
never happen again. He also used the "November Criminals" as
scapegoats, although at the Paris
peace
conference, these politicians had had very little choice in
the matter. After
World War I, Hitler remained in the army and returned to Munich, where
he – in contrast to his later declarations – attended the funeral march
for the murdered Bavarian prime minister Kurt
Eisner. After the suppression of the Bavarian
Soviet
Republic, he took part in "national thinking" courses
organized by the Education
and
Propaganda Department (Dept
Ib/P)
of the Bavarian Reichswehr Group, Headquarters 4 under
Captain Karl
Mayr. Scapegoats were found in "international Jewry", communists,
and politicians across the party spectrum, especially the parties of the Weimar
Coalition. In July
1919, Hitler was appointed a Verbindungsmann (police spy) of an Aufklärungskommando (Intelligence Commando) of
the Reichswehr, both to influence other soldiers and to infiltrate a small party, the German
Workers'
Party (DAP).
During his inspection of the party, Hitler was impressed with founder Anton
Drexler's anti-semitic,
nationalist, anti-capitalist and anti-Marxist ideas, which favoured a
strong active government, a "non-Jewish" version of socialism and
mutual solidarity of all members of society. Drexler was impressed with
Hitler's oratory skills and invited him to join the party. Hitler
joined DAP on 12 September 1919 and became the party's 55th
member. He was also made the
seventh member of the executive committee. Years
later,
he claimed to be the party's seventh overall member, but it has been established that this claim is false. Here
Hitler met Dietrich
Eckart, one of the early founders of the party and member of the
occult Thule
Society. The
Thule
members believed in the coming of a “German Messiah” who would
redeem Germany after its defeat in World War I. Dietrich Eckart
expressed his anticipation in a poem he published months before he met
Hitler for the first time. In the poem, Eckart refers to ‘the Great
One’, ‘the Nameless One’, ‘Whom all can sense but no one saw’. When
Eckart met Hitler in 1919 he believed to have found the prophesied
redeemer. Eckart became Hitler's
mentor, exchanging ideas with him, teaching him how to dress and speak,
and introducing him to a wide range of people. Hitler thanked Eckart by
paying tribute to him in the second volume of Mein Kampf. To
increase the party's appeal, the party changed its name to the Nationalsozialistische
Deutsche Arbeiterpartei or National
Socialist
German Workers Party (abbreviated
NSDAP). Hitler
was discharged from the army in March 1920 and with his former
superiors' continued encouragement began participating full time in the
party's activities. By early 1921, Hitler was becoming highly effective
at speaking in front of large crowds. In February, Hitler spoke before
a crowd of nearly six thousand in Munich. To publicize the meeting, he
sent out two truckloads of party supporters to drive around with swastikas,
cause
a commotion and throw out leaflets, their first use of this
tactic. Hitler gained notoriety outside of the party for his rowdy, polemic speeches against the Treaty
of Versailles, rival politicians (including monarchists,
nationalists
and other non-internationalist socialists) and especially
against Marxists and Jews. The NSDAP was centred in Munich, a
hotbed of German nationalists who included Army officers determined to
crush Marxism and undermine the Weimar republic. Gradually they noticed
Hitler and his growing movement as a suitable vehicle for their goals.
Hitler traveled to Berlin to visit nationalist groups during the summer
of 1921, and in his absence there was a revolt among the DAP leadership
in Munich. The party
was run by an executive committee whose original members considered
Hitler to be overbearing. They formed an alliance with a group of
socialists from Augsburg.
Hitler
rushed back to Munich and countered them by tendering his
resignation from the party on 11 July 1921. When they realized the loss
of Hitler would effectively mean the end of the party, he seized the
moment and announced he would return on the condition that he replace
Drexler as party chairman, with unlimited powers. Infuriated committee
members (including Drexler) held out at first. Meanwhile an anonymous
pamphlet appeared entitled Adolf
Hitler:
Is he a traitor?, attacking Hitler's lust for power and
criticizing the violent men around him. Hitler responded to its
publication in a Munich newspaper by suing for libel and later won a
small settlement. The
executive committee of the NSDAP eventually backed down and Hitler's
demands were put to a vote of party members. Hitler received 543 votes
for and only one against. At the next gathering on 29 July 1921, Adolf
Hitler was introduced as Führer of the National Socialist
German Workers' Party, marking the first time this title was publicly
used. Hitler's
beer hall oratory, attacking Jews, social
democrats, liberals,
reactionary
monarchists, capitalists and communists, began
attracting adherents. Early followers included Rudolf
Hess, the former air force pilot Hermann
Göring, and the army captain Ernst
Röhm, who eventually became head of the Nazis' paramilitary
organization, the SA (Sturmabteilung,
or
"Storm Division"), which protected meetings and attacked political
opponents. As well, Hitler assimilated independent groups, such as the Nuremberg-based Deutsche Werkgemeinschaft, led
by Julius
Streicher, who became Gauleiter of Franconia.
Hitler
attracted the attention of local business interests, was accepted into influential circles of Munich society, and became
associated with wartime General Erich
Ludendorff during
this time. Encouraged
by
this early support, Hitler decided to use Ludendorff as a front in
an attempted coup, later known as the "Beer
Hall Putsch"
(sometimes as the "Hitler Putsch"
or
"Munich Putsch"). The Nazi Party had copied Italy's fascists in appearance and had
adopted some of their policies, and in 1923, Hitler wanted to emulate Benito
Mussolini's "March
on
Rome" by staging his own "Campaign in Berlin". Hitler and Ludendorff obtained the clandestine support of Gustav
von
Kahr, Bavaria's de
facto ruler, along
with leading figures in the Reichswehr and the police. As
political posters show, Ludendorff, Hitler and the heads of the
Bavarian police and military planned on forming a new government. On 8
November 1923, Hitler and the SA stormed a public meeting headed by
Kahr in the Bürgerbräukeller,
a
large beer hall in Munich. He declared that he had set up a new
government with Ludendorff and demanded, at gunpoint, the support of
Kahr and the local military establishment for the destruction of the
Berlin government. Kahr withdrew his support
and fled to join the opposition to Hitler at the first opportunity. The next day, when Hitler
and his followers marched from the beer hall to the Bavarian
War
Ministry to
overthrow the Bavarian government as a start to their "March on
Berlin", the police dispersed them. Sixteen
NSDAP
members were
killed. Hitler
fled to the home of Ernst
Hanfstaengl and
contemplated suicide. He was soon arrested for high
treason. Alfred
Rosenberg became temporary leader of the party. During Hitler's
trial, he was given almost unlimited time to speak, and his popularity
soared as he voiced nationalistic sentiments in his defence
speech. A Munich
personality became a nationally known figure. On 1 April 1924, Hitler
was sentenced to five years' imprisonment at Landsberg
Prison. Hitler received favoured treatment from the guards and had
much fan mail from admirers. He was pardoned and released from jail on
20 December 1924, by order of the Bavarian Supreme Court on 19
December, which issued its final rejection of the state prosecutor's
objections to Hitler's early release. Including
time
on remand, he had served little more than one year of his sentence. On 28
June 1925, Hitler wrote a letter from Uffing to the editor of The
Nation in New
York City stating how long he had been in prison at "Sandberg a. S."
[sic] and how much his privileges had been revoked. While at
Landsberg he dictated most of the first volume of Mein Kampf (My Struggle,
originally entitled Four
and
a Half Years of Struggle against Lies, Stupidity, and Cowardice)
to his deputy Rudolf
Hess. The book, dedicated to
Thule Society member Dietrich
Eckart, was an autobiography and an exposition of his ideology. Mein Kampf was influenced by The
Passing
of the Great Race by Madison
Grant which Hitler
called "my Bible." It was published in two
volumes in 1925 and 1926, selling about 240,000 copies between 1925 and
1934. By the end of the war, about 10 million copies had been sold
or distributed (newlyweds and soldiers received free copies). Hitler
spent years dodging taxes on the royalties of his book and had
accumulated a tax debt of about 405,500 Reichsmarks (€6 million in today's money) by the time he became chancellor (at which time his debt was
waived). The copyright of Mein Kampf in Europe is claimed by the
Free State of Bavaria and scheduled to end on 31 December 2015.
Reproductions in Germany are authorized only for scholarly purposes and
in heavily commented form. The situation is, however, unclear.
Historian Werner Maser, in an interview with Bild
am
Sonntag has
stated that Peter Raubal, son of Hitler's nephew, Leo
Raubal, would have a strong legal case for winning the copyright
from Bavaria if he pursued it. Raubal has stated he wants no part of
the rights to the book, which could be worth millions of euros. The uncertain status has
led to contested trials in Poland and Sweden. Mein Kampf, however,
is published in the U.S., as well as in other countries such as Turkey and Israel,
by
publishers with various political positions.
At the
time of Hitler's release, the political situation in Germany had calmed
and the economy had improved, which hampered Hitler's opportunities for
agitation. Though the "Hitler Putsch"
had
given Hitler some national prominence, his party's mainstay was
still Munich. The NSDAP
and its organs were banned in Bavaria after the collapse of the putsch.
Hitler convinced Heinrich
Held, Prime Minister of Bavaria, to lift the ban, based on
representations that the party would now only seek political power
through legal means. Even though the ban on the NSDAP was removed
effective 16 February 1925, Hitler incurred a new ban
on public speaking as a result of an inflammatory speech. Since Hitler
was banned from public speeches, he appointed Gregor
Strasser, who in 1924 had been elected to the Reichstag,
as Reichsorganisationsleiter, authorizing him to organize the
party in northern Germany. Strasser, joined by his younger brother Otto and Joseph Goebbels, steered an increasingly independent course, emphasizing
the socialist element in the party's programme. The Arbeitsgemeinschaft der
Gauleiter Nord-West became
an
internal opposition, threatening Hitler's authority, but this
faction was defeated at the Bamberg
Conference in 1926,
during which Goebbels joined Hitler. After
this encounter, Hitler centralized the party even more and asserted the Führerprinzip ("Leader
principle")
as the basic principle of party organization. Leaders were
not elected by their group but were rather appointed by their superior
and were answerable to them while demanding unquestioning obedience
from their inferiors. Consistent with Hitler's disdain for democracy,
all power and authority devolved from the top down. A key
element of Hitler's appeal was his ability to evoke a sense of offended
national pride caused by the Treaty of Versailles imposed on the defeated German
Empire by the
Western Allies. Germany had lost economically important territory in
Europe along with its colonies and in admitting to sole responsibility
for the war had agreed to pay a huge reparations bill totaling
132 billion marks.
Most
Germans bitterly resented these terms, but early Nazi attempts to
gain support by blaming these humiliations on "international Jewry"
were not particularly successful with the electorate. The party learned
quickly, and soon a more subtle propaganda emerged, combining
antisemitism with an attack on the failures of the "Weimar system" and
the parties supporting it. Having
failed in overthrowing the Republic by a coup, Hitler pursued a
"strategy of legality": this meant formally adhering to the rules of
the Weimar Republic until he had legally gained power. He would then
use the institutions of the Weimar Republic to destroy it and establish
himself as dictator. Some party members, especially in the paramilitary
SA, opposed this strategy; Röhm and others ridiculed Hitler as "Adolphe Legalité". The
political turning point for Hitler came when the Great
Depression hit
Germany in 1930. The Weimar Republic had never been firmly rooted and
was openly opposed by right-wing conservatives (including monarchists),
communists and the Nazis. As the parties loyal to the democratic, parliamentary
republic found
themselves unable to agree on counter-measures, their grand
coalition broke up
and was replaced by a minority cabinet. The new Chancellor, Heinrich
Brüning of the
Roman Catholic Centre
Party, lacking a majority in parliament, had to implement his
measures through the president's emergency
decrees. Tolerated by the majority of parties, this rule by decree
would become the norm over a series of unworkable parliaments and paved
the way for authoritarian forms of government. The Reichstag's initial opposition to
Brüning's measures led to premature elections in September 1930.
The republican parties lost their majority and their ability to resume
the grand coalition, while the Nazis suddenly rose from relative
obscurity to win 18.3% of the vote along with 107 seats. In the
process, they jumped from the ninth-smallest party in the chamber to
the second largest. In
September–October 1930, Hitler appeared as a major defence witness at
the trial in Leipzig of two junior Reichswehr officers charged with membership of the Nazi Party, which at that time was forbidden to Reichswehr personnel. The two officers, Leutnants Richard Scheringer and Hans
Ludin, admitted quite openly to Nazi Party membership, and used as
their defence that the Nazi Party membership should not be forbidden to
those serving in the Reichswehr. When the Prosecution argued
that the Nazi Party was a dangerous revolutionary force, one of the
defence lawyers, Hans
Frank, had Hitler
brought to the stand to prove that the Nazi Party was a law-abiding
party. During his testimony,
Hitler insisted that his party was determined to come to power legally,
that the phrase "National Revolution" was only to be interpreted
"politically", and that his Party was a friend, not an enemy of the Reichswehr. Hitler's testimony of 25
September 1930 won him many admirers within the ranks of the officer
corps. Brüning's
measures
of budget consolidation and financial austerity brought little economic
improvement and were extremely unpopular. Under these circumstances,
Hitler appealed to the bulk of German farmers, war veterans and the
middle class, who had been hard-hit by both the inflation of the 1920s
and the unemployment of the Depression. In September 1931, Hitler's
niece Geli
Raubal was found
dead in her bedroom in his Munich apartment (his half-sister Angela and her daughter Geli had
been with him in Munich since 1929), an apparent suicide. Geli, who was
believed to be in some sort of romantic relationship with Hitler, was
19 years younger than he was and had used his gun. His niece's death is
viewed as a source of deep, lasting pain for him. In 1932,
Hitler intended to run against the aging President Paul
von
Hindenburg in
the scheduled presidential
elections. His 27 January 1932 speech to the Industry Club in Düsseldorf won him, for the first
time, support from a broad swath of Germany's most powerful
industrialists. Though Hitler had left
Austria in 1913 and had renounced his Austrian citizenship in 1925, he
still had not acquired German citizenship and hence could not run for
public office. On 25 February, however, the interior minister of the Brunswick,
a
Nazi (the Nazis were part of a right-wing coalition governing the
state) appointed Hitler as administrator for the state's delegation to
the Reichsrat in Berlin. This appointment
made Hitler a citizen of Brunswick. In those days, the states
conferred citizenship, so this automatically made Hitler a citizen of
Germany as well and thus eligible to run for president. The new
German citizen ran against Hindenburg, who was supported by a broad range of nationalist,
monarchist,
Catholic, republican and even social democratic
parties. Another candidate was a Communist and member of a fringe
right-wing party. Hitler's campaign was called "Hitler über
Deutschland" (Hitler over Germany). The name had a double
meaning; besides a reference to his dictatorial ambitions, it referred
to the fact that he campaigned by aircraft. Hitler came in second on
both rounds, attaining more than 35% of the vote during the second one
in April. Although he lost to Hindenburg, the election established
Hitler as a realistic alternative in German politics.
Meanwhile,
Papen
tried to get his revenge on Schleicher by working toward the
General's downfall, through forming an intrigue with the camarilla and Alfred
Hugenberg, media mogul and chairman of the DNVP. Also involved were Hjalmar
Schacht, Fritz
Thyssen and other leading German businessmen and international
bankers. They
financially supported
the Nazi Party, which had been brought to the brink of bankruptcy by
the cost of heavy campaigning. The businessmen wrote letters to
Hindenburg, urging him to appoint Hitler as leader of a government
"independent from parliamentary parties" which could turn into a
movement that would "enrapture millions of people." Finally,
the president reluctantly agreed to appoint Hitler Chancellor of a
coalition government formed by the NSDAP and DNVP. However, the Nazis
were to be contained by a framework of conservative cabinet ministers,
most notably by Papen as Vice-Chancellor and by Hugenberg as
Minister of the Economy. The only other Nazi besides Hitler to get a
portfolio was Wilhelm
Frick, who was given the relatively powerless interior ministry (in
Germany at the time, most powers wielded by the interior minister in
other countries were held by the interior ministers of the states). As
a concession to the Nazis, Göring was named minister
without
portfolio. While Papen intended to use Hitler as a
figurehead, the Nazis gained key positions. On the
morning of 30 January 1933, in Hindenburg's office, Adolf Hitler was
sworn in as Chancellor during what some observers later described as a
brief and simple ceremony. His first
speech
as Chancellor took
place on 10 February. The Nazis' seizure of power subsequently became
known as the Machtergreifung or Machtübernahme. Having
become Chancellor, Hitler foiled all attempts by his opponents to gain
a majority in parliament. Because no single party could gain a majority, Hitler persuaded President Hindenburg to dissolve the Reichstag again. Elections were
scheduled for early March, but on 27 February 1933, the Reichstag building was set on fire. Since a Dutch
independent
communist was
found in the building, the fire was blamed on a communist plot. The
government reacted with the Reichstag Fire Decree of 28 February which
suspended basic rights, including habeas
corpus. Under the provisions of this decree, the German
Communist
Party (KPD)
and other groups were suppressed, and Communist functionaries and
deputies were arrested, forced to flee, or murdered. Campaigning
continued,
with the Nazis making use of paramilitary violence,
anti-communist hysteria, and the government's resources for propaganda.
On election day, 6 March, the NSDAP increased its result to 43.9% of
the vote, remaining the largest party, but its victory was marred by
its failure to secure an absolute majority, necessitating maintaining a
coalition with the DNVP. On 21
March, the new Reichstag was constituted with an
opening ceremony held at Potsdam's garrison church. This "Day of
Potsdam" was staged to demonstrate reconciliation and unity between the
revolutionary Nazi movement and "Old Prussia" with its elites and
virtues. Hitler appeared in a tail coat and humbly greeted the aged
President Hindenburg. Because
of the Nazis' failure to obtain a majority on their own, Hitler's
government confronted the newly elected Reichstag with the Enabling
Act that would have
vested the cabinet with legislative powers for a period of four years.
Though such a bill was not unprecedented, this act was different since
it allowed for deviations from the constitution. Since the bill
required a ⅔ majority in order to pass, the government needed the
support of other parties. The position of the Centre Party, the third
largest party in the Reichstag,
turned
out to be decisive: under the leadership of Ludwig
Kaas, the party decided to vote for the Enabling Act. It did so in
return for the government's oral guarantees regarding the Church's liberty, the concordats
signed by German states and the continued existence of the Centre Party. On 23
March, the Reichstag assembled in a replacement
building under extremely turbulent circumstances. Some SA men served as
guards within while large groups outside the building shouted slogans
and threats toward the arriving deputies. Kaas announced that the
Centre Party would support the bill with "concerns put aside," while
Social Democrat Otto
Wels denounced the
act in his speech. At the end of the day, all parties except the Social
Democrats voted in favour of the bill. The Communists, as well as some
Social Democrats, were barred from attending. The Enabling Act,
combined with the Reichstag Fire Decree, transformed
Hitler's government into a legal dictatorship. —Adolf Hitler to a
British correspondent in Berlin, June 1934 With this
combination of legislative and executive power, Hitler's government
further suppressed the remaining political opposition.
The
Communist Party of Germany and the Social
Democratic
Party (SPD)
were banned, while all other political parties were forced to dissolve
themselves. Finally, on 14 July, the Nazi Party was declared the only
legal
party in
Germany. Hitler
used the SA paramilitary to push Hugenberg into resigning, and
proceeded to politically isolate Vice-Chancellor Papen. Because the
SA's demands for political and military power caused much anxiety among
military and political leaders, Hitler used allegations of a plot by
the SA leader Ernst
Röhm to purge
the SA's leadership during the Night
of
the Long Knives. As well, opponents unconnected with the SA were murdered, notably Gregor
Strasser and former
Chancellor Kurt
von
Schleicher. President Paul
von
Hindenburg died
on 2 August 1934. Rather than call new elections as required by the constitution,
Hitler's
cabinet passed a law proclaiming the presidency vacant and
transferred the role and powers of the head of state to Hitler as Führer
und
Reichskanzler (leader
and
chancellor). This action effectively removed the last legal remedy
by which Hitler could be dismissed – and with it, nearly all
institutional checks and balances on his power. On 19
August a plebiscite approved the merger of the presidency with the
chancellorship winning 84.6% of the electorate. This
action technically
violated both the constitution and the Enabling Act. The constitution
had been amended in 1932 to make the president of the High Court of
Justice, not the chancellor, acting president until new elections could
be held. The Enabling Act specifically barred Hitler from taking any
action that tampered with the presidency. However, no one dared object.
As head
of state, Hitler now became Supreme Commander of the armed forces. When
it came time for the soldiers and sailors to swear the traditional
loyalty oath, it had been altered into an oath of personal loyalty to
Hitler. Normally, soldiers and sailors swear loyalty to the holder of
the office of supreme commander/commander-in-chief,
not
a specific person. In 1938,
Hitler forced the resignation of his War Minister (formerly Defense
Minister), Werner
von
Blomberg, after evidence surfaced that Blomberg's new wife had
a criminal past. Prior to removing Blomberg, Hitler and his clique
removed army commander Werner
von
Fritsch on suspicion of homosexuality. Hitler replaced the
Ministry of War with the Oberkommando
der
Wehrmacht (High
Command of the Armed Forces, or OKW), headed by the pliant General Wilhelm
Keitel. More importantly, Hitler announced he was assuming personal
command of the armed forces. He took over Blomberg's other old post,
that of Commander-in-Chief of the Armed Forces, for himself. He was
already Supreme Commander by virtue of holding the powers of the
president. The next day, the newspapers announced, "Strongest
concentration of powers in Führer's hands!"
Having
secured
supreme political power, Hitler went on to gain public support
by convincing most Germans he was their saviour from the economic Depression, the Versailles treaty, communism, the "Judeo-Bolsheviks",
and
other "undesirable" minorities.
The
Nazis eliminated opposition through a process known as Gleichschaltung ("bringing into line").
Hitler
oversaw
one of the greatest expansions of industrial production and
civil improvement Germany had ever seen, mostly based on debt flotation
and expansion of the military. Nazi policies toward women strongly
encouraged them to stay at home to bear children and keep house. In a
September 1934 speech to the National Socialist Women's Organization,
Adolf Hitler argued that for the German woman her "world is her
husband, her family, her children, and her home." This policy was
reinforced by bestowing the Cross of Honor of the German Mother on
women bearing four or more babies. The unemployment rate was cut
substantially, mostly through arms production and sending women home so
that men could take their jobs. Given this, claims that the German
economy achieved
near full
employment are at
least partly artefacts of propaganda from the era. Much of the
financing for Hitler's reconstruction and rearmament came from currency
manipulation by Hjalmar Schacht, including the clouded credits through
the Mefo
bills. Hitler
oversaw one of the largest infrastructure-improvement campaigns in
German history, with the construction of dozens of dams, autobahns,
railroads,
and other civil works. Hitler's policies emphasised the
importance of family life: men were the "breadwinners", while women's
priorities were to lie in bringing up children and in household work.
This revitalising of industry and infrastructure came at the expense of
the overall standard of living, at least for those not affected by the
chronic unemployment of the later Weimar Republic, since wages were
slightly reduced in pre-World War II years, despite a 25% increase in
the cost of living. Laborers and farmers, the
traditional voters of the NSDAP, however, saw an increase in their
standard of living. Hitler's
government sponsored architecture on an immense scale, with Albert
Speer becoming famous as the first architect of the Reich. While important as an architect in implementing Hitler's classicist
reinterpretation of German culture, Speer proved much more effective as
armaments minister during the last years of World War II. In 1936,
Berlin hosted the summer
Olympic
games, which were opened by Hitler and choreographed to demonstrate Aryan
superiority over all other races, achieving mixed results. Although
Hitler made plans for a Breitspurbahn ("broad
gauge railroad
network"), they were preempted by World War II. Had the railroad been
built, its gauge would have been three metres, even wider than the old Great
Western
Railway of
Britain. Hitler
contributed slightly to the design of the car that later became the Volkswagen
Beetle and charged Ferdinand
Porsche with its
design and construction. Production was deferred
because of the war. Hitler
considered Sparta to be the first National
Socialist state, and praised its early eugenics treatment of deformed
children. On 20
April 1939, a lavish celebration was held in honour of Hitler's
50th
birthday, featuring military parades, visits from foreign
dignitaries, thousands of flaming torches and Nazi banners. An
important historical debate about Hitler's economic policies concerns
the "modernization" debate. Historians such as David
Schoenbaum and Henry
Ashby
Turner have
argued that social and economic polices under Hitler were modernization
carried out in pursuit of anti-modern goals. Other groups of historians
centred around Rainer
Zitelmann have
contended that Hitler had a deliberate strategy of pursuing a
revolutionary modernization of German society. In a
meeting with his leading generals and admirals on 3 February 1933,
Hitler spoke of "conquest of Lebensraum in the East and its
ruthless Germanisation" as his ultimate foreign policy objectives. In March 1933, the first
major statement of German foreign policy aims appeared with the memo
submitted to the German Cabinet by the State Secretary at the Auswärtiges
Amt (Foreign
Office), Prince Bernhard Wilhelm von Bülow (not to be confused
with his more famous uncle, the former Chancellor Bernhard
von
Bülow), which advocated Anschluss with Austria, the
restoration of the frontiers of 1914, the rejection of the Part V of
Versailles, the return of the former German colonies in Africa, and a
German zone of influence in Eastern
Europe as goals for
the future. Hitler found the goals in Bülow's memo to be too modest. In March 1933, to resolve
the deadlock between the French demand for sécurité ("security") and the German
demand for gleichberechtigung ("equality of armaments")
at the World
Disarmament
Conference in Geneva, Switzerland, the British Prime
Minister Ramsay MacDonald presented
the compromise "MacDonald Plan". Hitler endorsed the "MacDonald Plan",
correctly guessing that nothing would come of it, and that in the
interval he could win some goodwill in London by making his government
appear moderate, and the French obstinate. In May
1933, Hitler met with Herbert
von
Dirksen, the German Ambassador in Moscow. Dirksen advised the Führer that he was allowing
relations with the Soviet Union to deteriorate to a unacceptable
extent, and advised to take immediate steps to repair relations with
the Soviets. Much to Dirksen's intense
disappointment, Hitler informed that he wished for an anti-Soviet
understanding with Poland, which Dirksen protested implied recognition
of the German-Polish border, leading Hitler to state he was after much
greater things than merely overturning the Treaty
of
Versailles. In June
1933, Hitler was forced to disavow Alfred
Hugenberg of the
German National People's Party, who while attending the London
World
Economic Conference put
forth
a programme of colonial expansion in both Africa and Eastern
Europe, which created a major storm abroad. Speaking to the
Burgermeister of Hamburg in
1933, Hitler commented
that Germany required several years of peace before it could be
sufficiently rearmed enough to risk a war, and until then a policy of
caution was called for. In his "peace speeches" of
17 May 1933, 21 May 1935, and 7 March 1936, Hitler stressed his
supposed pacific goals and a willingness to work within the
international system. In private, Hitler's plans
were something less than pacific. At the first meeting of his Cabinet
in 1933, Hitler placed military spending ahead of unemployment relief,
and indeed was only prepared to spend money on the latter if the former
was satisfied first. When the president of the Reichsbank, the
former Chancellor Dr.Hans
Luther, offered the new government the legal limit of
100 million Reichmarks to finance rearmament, Hitler
found the sum too low, and sacked Luther in March 1933 to
replace him with Hjalmar
Schacht, who during the next five years was to advance
12 billion Reichmarks worth of "Mefo-bills" to
pay for rearmament. A major
initiative in Hitler's foreign policy in his early years was to create
an alliance with Britain. In the 1920s, Hitler wrote that a future
National Socialist foreign policy goal was "the destruction of Russia with the help of England." In May 1933, Alfred
Rosenberg in his
capacity as head of the Nazi Party's Aussenpolitisches
Amt (Foreign
Political Office) visited London as part of a disastrous effort to win
an alliance with Britain. In October 1933, Hitler
pulled Germany out of both the League
of
Nations and World
Disarmament
Conference after
his Foreign Minister Baron Konstantin
von
Neurath made it
appear to world public opinion that the French demand for sécurité was the principal stumbling
block. In line
with the views he advocated in Mein
Kampf and Zweites
Buch about the
necessity of building an Anglo-German alliance, Hitler, in a meeting in
November 1933 with the British Ambassador, Sir Eric
Phipps, offered a scheme in which Britain would support a
300,000-strong German Army in exchange for a German "guarantee" of the British
Empire. In response, the British
stated a 10-year waiting period would be necessary before Britain would
support an increase in the size of the German Army. A
more
successful initiative in foreign policy occurred with relations
with Poland. In spite of intense opposition from the military and the Auswärtiges Amt who preferred closer ties
with the Soviet
Union, Hitler, in the fall of 1933 opened secret talks with Poland
that were to lead to the German–Polish
Non-Aggression
Pact of
January 1934. In
February 1934, Hitler met with the British Lord Privy Seal, Sir Anthony
Eden, and hinted strongly that Germany already possessed an Air Force, which had been forbidden by the Treaty of Versailles. In the fall of 1934, Hitler
was seriously concerned over the dangers of inflation damaging his popularity. In a secret speech given
before his Cabinet on 5 November 1934, Hitler stated he had "given the
working class his word that he would allow no price increases.
Wage-earners would accuse him of breaking his word if he did not act
against the rising prices. Revolutionary conditions among the people
would be the further consequence." Although
a secret German armaments programme had been on-going since 1919, in
March 1935, Hitler rejected Part V of the Versailles treaty by publicly
announcing that the German
army would be
expanded to 600,000 men (six times the number stipulated in the Treaty
of Versailles), introducing an Air Force (Luftwaffe)
and
increasing the size of the Navy (Kriegsmarine).
Britain,
France, Italy and the League of Nations quickly condemned
these actions. However, after re-assurances from Hitler that Germany
was only interested in peace, no country took any action to stop this
development and German re-armament continued. Later in March 1935,
Hitler held a series of meetings in Berlin with the British Foreign
Secretary Sir
John
Simon and
Eden, during which he successfully evaded British offers for German
participation in a regional security pact meant to serve as an Eastern
European equivalent of the Locarno
pact while the two
British ministers avoided taking up Hitler's offers of alliance. During his talks with Simon
and Eden, Hitler first used what he regarded as the brilliant colonial
negotiating tactic, when Hitler parlayed an offer from Simon to return
to the League of Nations by demanding the return of the former German
colonies in Africa. Starting
in April 1935, disenchantment with how the Third Reich had developed in practice
as opposed to what had been promised led many in the Nazi Party, especially
the Alte Kämpfer (Old Fighters; i.e., those
who joined the Party before 1930, and who tended to be the most ardent
anti-Semitics in the Party), and the SA into
lashing out against
Germany's Jewish minority as a way of expressing their frustrations
against a group that the authorities would not generally protect. The rank and file of the
Party were most unhappy that two years into the Third Reich, and despite
countless promises by Hitler prior to 1933, no law had been passed
banning marriage or sex between those Germans belonging to the "Aryan"
and Jewish "races". A Gestapo report from the spring of
1935 stated that the rank and file of the Nazi Party would "set in
motion by us from below," a solution to the "Jewish problem," "that the
government would then have to follow." As a result, Nazi Party
activists and the SA started a major wave of assaults, vandalism and
boycotts against German Jews. On 18
June 1935, the Anglo-German
Naval
Agreement (AGNA)
was signed in London which allowed for increasing the allowed German
tonnage up to 35% of that of the British navy. Hitler called the
signing of the AGNA "the happiest day of his life" as he believed the
agreement marked the beginning of the Anglo-German alliance he had
predicted in Mein
Kampf. This agreement was made
without consulting either France or Italy, directly undermined the
League of Nations and put the Treaty of Versailles on the path towards
irrelevance. After the signing of the
A.G.N.A., in June 1935 Hitler ordered the next step in the creation of
an Anglo-German alliance: taking all the societies demanding the
restoration of the former German African colonies and coordinating (Gleichschaltung)
them
into a new Reich Colonial League (Reichskolonialbund)
which
over the next few years waged an extremely aggressive propaganda
campaign for colonial restoration. Hitler had no real interest
in the former German African colonies. In Mein Kampf, Hitler had
excoriated the Imperial
German government
for pursuing colonial expansion in Africa prior to 1914 on the grounds
that the natural area for Lebensraum was Eastern Europe, not
Africa. It
was Hitler's intention
to use colonial demands as a negotiating tactic that would see a German
"renunciation" of colonial claims in exchange for Britain making an
alliance with the Reich on German terms. In the
summer of 1935, Hitler was informed that, between inflation and the
need to use foreign exchange to buy raw materials Germany lacked for
rearmament, there were only 5 million Reichmarks available for military
expenditure, and a pressing need for some 300,000 Reichmarks per day to
prevent food shortages. In August 1935, Dr. Hjalmar
Schacht advised
Hitler that the wave of anti-Semitic violence was interfering with the
workings of the economy, and hence rearmament. Following Dr. Schacht's
complaints, plus reports that the German public did not approve of the
wave of anti-Semitic violence, and that continuing police toleration of
the violence was hurting the regime's popularity with the wider public,
Hitler ordered a stop to "individual actions" against German Jews on 8
August 1935. From Hitler's perspective, it was imperative to bring in harsh new anti-Semitic laws as a
consolation prize for those Party members who were disappointed with
Hitler's halt order of 8 August, especially because Hitler had only
reluctantly given the halt order for pragmatic reasons, and his
sympathies were with the Party radicals. The annual Nazi Party Rally
held at Nuremberg in September 1935 was to feature the first session of
the Reichstag held at that city since
1543. Hitler had planned to have the Reichstag pass a law making the Nazi
Swastika flag the flag of the German Reich,
and
a major speech in support of the impending Italian aggression
against Ethiopia. Hitler felt that the
Italian aggression opened great opportunities for Germany. In August
1935, Hitler told Goebbels his foreign policy vision as: "With England
eternal alliance. Good relationship with Poland . . .
Expansion to the East. The Baltic belongs to us . . .
Conflicts Italy-Abyssinia-England, then Japan-Russia imminent." At the
last minute before the Nuremberg Party Rally was due to begin, the
German Foreign Minister Baron Konstantin
von
Neurath persuaded Hitler to cancel his speech praising Italy for
her willingness to commit aggression. Neurath convinced Hitler that his
speech was too provocative to public opinion abroad as it contradicted
the message of Hitler's "peace speeches", thus leaving Hitler with the
sudden need to have something else to address the first meeting of the Reichstag in Nuremberg since 1543,
other than the Reich Flag Law. On 13 September 1935,
Hitler hurriedly ordered two civil servants, Dr. Bernhard Lösener
and Franz Albrecht Medicus of the Interior Ministry to fly to Nuremberg
to start drafting anti-Semitic laws for Hitler to present to the Reichstag for 15
September. On the evening of 15
September, Hitler presented two laws before the Reichstag banning sex and marriage
between Aryan and Jewish Germans, the employment of Aryan women under
the age of 45 in Jewish households, and deprived "non-Aryans" of the
benefits of German citizenship. The laws of September 1935 are generally known as the Nuremberg
Laws. In
October 1935, in order to prevent further food shortages and the
introduction of rationing, Hitler reluctantly ordered cuts in military
spending. In the spring of 1936 in
response to requests from Richard
Walther
Darré, Hitler ordered 60 million Reichmarks of foreign exchange to be
used to buy seed oil for German farmers, a decision that led to bitter
complaints from Dr. Schacht and the War Minister Field Marshal Werner
von
Blomberg that
it would be impossible to achieve rearmament as long as foreign
exchange was diverted to preventing food shortages. Given the economic problems
which was affecting his popularity by early 1936, Hitler felt the
pressing need for a foreign policy triumph as a way of distracting
public attention from the economy. In an
interview with the French journalist Bertrand
de
Jouvenel in
February 1936, Hitler appeared to disavow Mein Kampf by saying that parts of his
book were now out of date and he was not guided by them, though
precisely which parts were out of date was left unclear. In March 1936, Hitler again
violated the Versailles treaty by reoccupying the demilitarized
zone in the
Rhineland. When Britain and France did nothing, he grew bolder. In July
1936, the Spanish
Civil
War began
when the military, led by General Francisco
Franco, rebelled against the elected Popular
Front government.
After receiving an appeal for help from General Franco in July 1936,
Hitler sent troops to support Franco, and Spain served as a testing
ground for Germany's new forces and their methods. At the same time,
Hitler continued with his efforts to create an Anglo-German alliance.
In July 1936, he offered to Phipps a promise that if Britain were to
sign an alliance with the Reich, then
Germany would commit to sending twelve divisions to the Far East
to protect British colonial possessions there from a Japanese attack. Hitler's offer was refused. In August
1936, in response to a growing crisis in the German economy caused by
the strains of rearmament, Hitler issued the "Four-Year Plan Memorandum" ordering Hermann
Göring to
carry out the Four
Year
Plan to have
the German economy ready for war within the next four years. During the 1936 economic
crisis, the German government was divided into two factions, with one
(the so-called "free market" faction) centring around the Reichsbank President Hjalmar Schacht
and the former Price Commissioner Dr. Carl
Friedrich
Goerdeler calling for decreased military spending and a turn away from autarkic policies, and another
faction around Göring calling for the opposite. Supporting the
"free-market" faction were some of Germany's leading business
executives, most notably Hermann Duecher of AEG,
Robert Bosch of Robert
Bosch
GmbH, and Albert Voegeler of Vereinigte
Stahlwerke
AG. Hitler hesitated for the
first half of 1936 before siding with the more radical faction in his
"Four Year Plan" memo of August. Historians such as Richard
Overy have argued
that the importance of the memo, which was written personally by
Hitler, can be gauged by the fact that Hitler, who had something of a
phobia about writing, hardly ever wrote anything down, which indicates
that Hitler had something especially important to say. The "Four-Year Plan
Memorandum" predicated an imminent all-out, apocalyptic struggle
between "Judo-Bolshevism" and German National Socialism, which
necessitated a total effort at rearmament regardless of the economic
costs. In the memo, Hitler wrote: Since
the outbreak of the French Revolution, the world has been moving with
ever increasing speed toward a new conflict, the most extreme solution
of which is called Bolshevism, whose essence and aim, however, are
solely the elimination of those strata of mankind which have hitherto
provided the leadership and their replacement by worldwide Jewry. No
state will be able to withdraw or even remain at a distance from this
historical conflict . . . It is not the aim of this
memorandum to prophesy the time when the untenable situation in Europe
will become an open crisis. I only want, in these lines, to set down my
conviction that this crisis cannot and will not fail to arrive and that
it is Germany's duty to secure her own existence by every means in face
of this catastrophe, and to protect herself against it, and that from
this compulsion there arises a series of conclusions relating to the
most important tasks that our people have ever been set. For a victory
of Bolshevism over Germany would not lead to a Versailles treaty, but
to the final destruction, indeed the annihilation of the German
people . . . I consider it necessary for the Reichstag to pass the following two
laws: 1) A law providing the death penalty for economic sabotage and 2)
A law making the whole of Jewry liable for all damage inflicted by
individual specimens of this community of criminals upon the German
economy, and thus upon the German people. Hitler
called for Germany to have the world's "first army" in terms of
fighting power within the next four years and that "the extent of the
military development of our resources cannot
be
too large, nor its pace too swift" (italics in the original) and
the role of the economy was simply to support "Germany's self-assertion
and the extension of her Lebensraum." Hitler went on to write
that given the magnitude of the coming struggle that the concerns
expressed by members of the "free market" faction like Schacht and
Goerdeler that the current level of military spending was bankrupting Germany were irrelevant.
Hitler wrote that: "However well balanced the general pattern of a
nation's life ought to be, there must at particular times be certain
disturbances of the balance at the expense of other less vital tasks.
If we do not succeed in bringing the German army as rapidly as possible
to the rank of premier army in the world . . . then
Germany will be lost!" and
"The nation does not
live for the economy, for economic leaders, or for economic or
financial theories; on the contrary, it is finance and the economy,
economic leaders and theories, which all owe unqualified service in
this struggle for the self-assertion of our nation." Documents
such as the Four Year Plan Memo have often been used by right
historians such as Henry
Ashby
Turner and Karl
Dietrich
Bracher who
argue for a "primacy of politics" approach (that Hitler was not
subordinate to German business, but rather the contrary was the case)
against the "primacy of economics" approach championed by Marxist
historians (that Hitler was a "agent" of and subordinate to German
business). In August
1936, the freelance Nazi diplomat Joachim
von
Ribbentrop was
appointed German Ambassador to the Embassy
of
Germany in London at
the Court
of
St. James's. Before Ribbentrop left to take up his post in
October 1936, Hitler told him: "Ribbentrop . . . get
Britain to join the Anti-Comintern Pact, that is what I want most of
all. I have sent you as the best man I've got. Do what you
can . . . But if in future all our efforts are still in
vain, fair enough, then I'm ready for war as well. I would regret it
very much, but if it has to be, there it is. But I think it would be a
short war and the moment it is over, I will then be ready at any time
to offer the British an honourable peace acceptable to both sides.
However, I would then demand that Britain join the Anti-Comintern Pact
or perhaps some other pact. But get on with it, Ribbentrop, you have
the trumps in your hand, play them well. I'm ready at any time for an
air pact as well. Do your best. I will follow your efforts with
interest". An Axis
was declared between Germany and Italy by Count Galeazzo
Ciano, foreign minister of Fascist dictator Benito
Mussolini, on 25
October 1936. On 25 November of the same year, Germany concluded the Anti-Comintern
Pact with Japan. At
the time of the signing of the Anti-Comintern Pact, invitations were
sent out for Britain, China, Italy and Poland to adhere; of the invited
powers only the Italians were to sign the pact, in November 1937. To
strengthen relationship with Japan, Hitler met in 1937 in Nuremberg Prince
Chichibu, a brother of emperor Hirohito.
However,
the meeting with Prince Chichibu had little consequence, as
Hitler refused the Japanese request to halt German arms shipments to
China or withdraw the German officers serving with the Chinese in the Second
Sino-Japanese
War. Both the military and the Auswärtiges
Amt (Foreign
Office) were
strongly opposed to ending the informal German
alliance
with China that
existed since the 1910s, and pressured Hitler to avoid offending the
Chinese. TheAuswärtiges Amt and the military both
argued to Hitler that given the foreign exchange problems which
afflicted German rearmament, and the fact that various Sino-German
economic agreements provided Germany with raw materials that would
otherwise use up precious foreign exchange, it was folly to seek an
alliance with Japan that would have the inevitable result of ending the
Sino-German alignment. By the
latter half of 1937, Hitler had abandoned his dream of an Anglo-German
alliance, blaming "inadequate" British leadership for turning down his
offers of an alliance. In a talk with the League
of Nations High Commissioner for the Free
City
of Danzig, the Swiss diplomat Carl
Jacob Burckhardt in
September 1937, Hitler protested what he regarded as British
interference in the "German sphere" in Europe, though in the same talk,
Hitler made clear his view of Britain as an ideal ally, which for pure
selfishness was blocking German plans. Hitler
had suffered severely from stomach pains and eczema in 1936–37, leading
to his remark to the Nazi Party's propaganda leadership in October 1937
that because both parents died early in their lives, he would probably
follow suit, leaving him with only a few years to obtain the necessary Lebensraum. About the same time, Dr.
Goebbels noted in his diary Hitler now wished to see the "Great Germanic Reich" he envisioned
in his own lifetime rather than leaving the work of building the "Great
Germanic Reich" to his successors. On 5
November 1937, at the Reich Chancellory, Adolf
Hitler held a secret meeting with the War and Foreign Ministers and the
three service chiefs, recorded in the Hossbach
Memorandum, and stated his intentions for acquiring "living space" Lebensraum for the German people. He
ordered the attendees to make plans for war in the east no later than
1943 in order to acquire Lebensraum.
Hitler
stated the conference minutes were to be regarded as his
"political testament" in the event of his death. In the memo, Hitler was
recorded as saying that such a state of crisis had been reached in the
German economy that the only way of stopping a severe decline in living
standards in Germany was to embark sometime in the near-future on a
policy of aggression by seizing Austria and Czechoslovakia. Moreover, Hitler stated that the arms
race meant that
time for action had to occur before Britain and France obtained a
permanent lead in the arms race. A striking change in the
Hossbach Memo was Hitler's changed view of Britain from the prospective
ally of 1928 in the Zweites
Buch to the
"hate-inspired antagonist" of 1937 in the Hossbach memo. The historian Klaus
Hildebrand described
the
memo as the start of an "ambivalent course" towards Britain while
the late historian Andreas
Hillgruber argued
that Hitler was embarking on expansion "without Britain," preferably
"with Britain," but if necessary "against Britain." Hitler's
intentions outlined in the Hossbach memorandum led to strong protests
from the Foreign Minister, Baron Konstantin
von
Neurath, the War Minister Field Marshal Werner von Blomberg,
and the Army Commander General Werner
von
Fritsch, that any German aggression in Eastern Europe was bound
to trigger a war with France because of the French alliance system in
Eastern Europe (the so-called cordon
sanitaire), and if a Franco-German war broke out, then Britain
was almost certain to intervene rather than risk the chance of a French
defeat. The aggression against
Austria and Czechoslovakia were intended to be the first of a series of
localized wars in Eastern Europe that would secure Germany's position
in Europe before the final showdown with Britain and France. Fritsch,
Blomberg and Neurath all argue that Hitler was pursuing an extremely
high-risk strategy of localized wars in Eastern Europe that was most
likely to cause a general war before Germany was ready for such a
conflict, and advised Hitler to wait until Germany had more time to
rearm. Neurath, Blomberg and Fritsch had no moral objections to German
aggression, but rather based their opposition on the question of timing
– determining the best time for aggression. Late in
November 1937, Hitler received as his guest the British Lord Privy Seal, Lord
Halifax who was
visiting Germany ostensibly as part of a hunting trip. Speaking of
changes to Germany's frontiers, Halifax told Hitler that: "All other
questions fall into the category of possible alterations in the
European order which might be destined to come about with the passage
of time. Amongst these questions were Danzig, Austria and
Czechoslovakia. England was interested to see that any alterations
should come through the course of peaceful evolution and that the
methods should be avoided which might cause far-reaching disturbances." Significantly, Halifax made
clear in his statements to Hitler — though whether Hitler appreciated the
significance of this or not is unclear — that any possible territorial
changes had to be accomplished peacefully, and that though Britain had
no security commitments in Eastern Europe beyond the Covenant of the
League of Nations, would not tolerate territorial changes via war. Hitler
seems to have
misunderstood Halifax's remarks as confirming his conviction that
Britain would just stand aside while he pursued his strategy of limited
wars in Eastern Europe. Hitler
was most unhappy with the criticism of his intentions expressed by
Neurath, Blomberg, and Fritsch in the Hossbach Memo, and in early 1938
asserted his control of the military-foreign policy apparatus through
the Blomberg-Fritsch
Affair, the abolition of the War Ministry and its replacement by the OKW,
and
by sacking Neurath as Foreign Minister on 4 February 1938, assuming
the rank, role and tile of the Oberster Befehlshaber
der Wehrmacht (supreme
commander
of the armed forces). The British economic
historian Richard
Overy commented that the establishment of the OKW in February 1938 was a clear sign of
what Hitler's intentions were since supreme headquarters organizations
such as the OKW are normally set up during wartime, not peacetime. The Official German history
of World War II has argued that from early 1938 onwards, Hitler was not
carrying out a foreign policy that had carried a high risk of war, but
was carrying out a foreign policy aiming at war. One of
the foundations of Hitler's social policies was the concept of racial
hygiene. It was based on the ideas of Arthur
de
Gobineau, a French count; eugenics,
a pseudo-science that advocated racial
purity; and social
Darwinism. Applied to human beings, "survival
of
the fittest" was interpreted as requiring racial purity and
killing off "life
unworthy
of life." The first victims were children with physical
and developmental disabilities; those killings occurred in a programme
dubbed Action
T4. After a public outcry,
Hitler made a show of ending this program, but the killings in fact
continued. Between
1939 and 1945, the SS,
assisted
by collaborationist governments and recruits
from occupied countries, systematically killed somewhere between 11 and
14 million people, including about six million Jews, in concentration camps, ghettos and mass executions, or
through less systematic methods elsewhere. In addition to those gassed
to death, many died as a result of starvation and disease while working
as slave
labourers (sometimes
benefiting
private German companies). Along with Jews, non-Jewish Poles,
Communists
and political opponents, members of resistance groups, homosexuals, Roma,
the
physically handicapped and mentally retarded, Soviet prisoners
of
war (possibly as
many as three million), Jehovah's
Witnesses, Adventists,
trade
unionists, and psychiatric patients were killed. One
of the biggest centres of mass-killing was the industrial extermination
camp complex of Auschwitz-Birkenau.
As
far as is known, Hitler never visited the concentration camps and
did not speak publicly about the killing in precise terms. The
Holocaust (the "Endlösung
der
jüdischen Frage" or "Final Solution of the Jewish
Question") was planned and ordered by leading Nazis, with Heinrich
Himmler and Reinhard
Heydrich playing
key roles. While no specific order from Hitler authorizing the mass
killing has surfaced, there is documentation showing that he approved
the Einsatzgruppen killing squads that
followed the German army through Poland and Russia, and that he was
kept well informed about their activities. The evidence also suggests
that in the fall of 1941 Himmler and Hitler decided upon mass
extermination by gassing. During interrogations by Soviet intelligence
officers declassified
over
fifty years later, Hitler's valet Heinz
Linge and his
military aide Otto Gunsche said Hitler had "pored over the first
blueprints of gas
chambers." His private secretary, Traudl
Junge, testified that Hitler knew all about the death camps. Göring
gave
a written authorisation to Heydrich to "make all necessary
preparations" for a "total solution of the Jewish question". To make
for smoother cooperation in the implementation of this "Final
Solution", the Wannsee
conference was held
on 20 January 1942, with fifteen senior officials participating
(including Adolf
Eichmann) and led by Reinhard Heydrich. The records of this meeting
provide the clearest evidence of planning for the Holocaust. On 22
February, Hitler was recorded saying to his associates, "we shall
regain our health only by eliminating the Jews".
In
February
1938, Hitler finally ended the dilemma that had plagued German
Far Eastern policy, namely whether to continue the informal Sino-German alliance that
existed with the Republic
of
China since
the
1910s or to create a new alliance with Japan. The military at the time
strongly favoured continuing Germany's alliance with China. China had
the support of Foreign Minister Konstantin
von
Neurath and War Minister Werner
von
Blomberg, the so-called "China Lobby" who tried to steer German
foreign policy away from war in Europe. Both men, however, were
sacked by Hitler in early 1938. Upon the advice of Hitler's newly
appointed Foreign Minister, the strongly pro-Japanese Joachim von
Ribbentrop, Hitler chose to end the alliance with China as the
price of gaining an alignment with the more modern and powerful Japan.
In an address to the Reichstag,
Hitler
announced German recognition of Manchukuo,
the
Japanese occupied puppet state in Manchuria,
and
renounced the German claims to the former colonies in the Pacific
held by Japan. Hitler ordered an end to
arms shipments to China, and ordered the recall of all the German
officers attached to the Chinese Army. In retaliation for ending
German support to China in the war against Japan, Chinese Generalissimo Chiang
Kai-shek canceled all of the Sino-German economic agreements, which
deprived the Germans of raw materials such as tungsten that the Chinese had
previously provided. The ending of the Sino-German alignment increased
the problems of German rearmament, as the Germans were now forced to
use their limited supply of foreign exchange to buy raw materials on
the open market. In March
1938, Hitler pressured Austria into unification with Germany (the Anschluss)
and
made a triumphant entry into Vienna on 14 March. Next, he intensified a
crisis over the German-speaking Sudetenland districts of Czechoslovakia. On 3
March 1938, the British Ambassador Sir Neville
Henderson met
with
Hitler and presented on behalf of his government a proposal for an
international consortium to rule much of Africa (in which Germany would
be assigned a leading role) in exchange for a German promise never to
resort to war to change the frontiers. Hitler, who was more
interested in Lebensraum in Eastern Europe than in
participating in international consortiums, rejected the British offer,
using as his excuse that he wanted the former German African colonies returned to the Reich,
not
an international consortium running Central Africa. Moreover,
Hitler argued that it was totally outrageous on Britain's part to
impose conditions on German conduct in Europe as the price for
territory in Africa. Hitler
ended
the conversation by telling Henderson he would rather wait 20
years for the return of the former colonies than accept British
conditions for avoiding war. On 28–29
March 1938, Hitler held a series of secret meetings in Berlin with Konrad
Henlein of the Sudeten Heimfront (Home Front), the largest of the ethnic German parties of the Sudetenland. During the
Hitler-Henlein meetings, it was agreed that Henlein would provide the
pretext for German aggression against Czechoslovakia by making demands
on Prague for increased autonomy for Sudeten Germans that Prague could
never be reasonably expected to fulfill. In April 1938, Henlein told
the foreign minister of Hungary that "whatever the Czech government
might offer, he would always raise still higher demands ... he
wanted to sabotage an understanding by all means because this was the
only method to blow up Czechoslovakia quickly". In private, Hitler
considered the Sudeten issue unimportant; his real intentions being to
use the Sudeten question as the justification both at home and abroad
for a war of aggression to destroy Czechoslovakia, under the grounds of
self-determination, and Prague's refusal to meet Henlein's demands. Hitler's plans called for a
massive military build-up along the Czechoslovak border, relentless
propaganda attacks about the supposed ill treatment of the
Sudetenlanders, and finally, "incidents" between Heimfront activists
and the
Czechoslovak authorities to justify an invasion that would swiftly
destroy Czechoslovakia in a few days campaign before other powers could
act. Since Hitler wished to have
the fall harvest brought in as much as possible, and to complete the
so-called "West Wall" to guard the Rhineland, the date for the invasion
was chosen for late September or early October 1938. In April
1938, Hitler ordered the OKW to start preparing plans for Fall
Grün (Case
Green), the codename for an invasion of Czechoslovakia. Further increasing the
tension in Europe was the May Crisis of 19–22 May 1938. The May Crisis
of 1938 was a false alarm caused by rumours that Czechoslovakia would
be invaded the weekend of the municipal elections in that country,
erroneous reports of major German troop movements along the
Czechoslovak border just prior to the elections, the killing of two
ethnic Germans by the Czechoslovak police, and Ribbentrop's highly
bellicose remarks to Henderson when the latter asked the former if an
invasion was indeed scheduled for the weekend, which led to a partial
Czechoslovak mobilization and firm warnings from London against a
German move against Czechoslovakia before it was realized that no
invasion was intended for that weekend. Though
no invasion had been
planned for May 1938, it was believed in London that such a course of
action was indeed being considered in Berlin, leading to two warnings
on 21 May and 22 May that the United Kingdom would go to war with
Germany if France became involved in a war with Germany. Hitler, for his part, was,
to use the words of an aide, highly "furious" with the perception that
he had been forced to back down by the Czechoslovak mobilization and
the warnings from London and Paris, when he had, in fact, been planning
nothing for that weekend. Though plans had already
been drafted in April 1938 for an invasion of Czechoslovakia in the
near future, the May Crisis and the perception of a diplomatic defeat
further reinforced Hitler in his chosen course. The May Crisis seemed
to have had the effect of convincing Hitler that expansion "without
Britain" was not possible, and expansion "against Britain" was the only
viable course. In the immediate aftermath
of the May crisis, Hitler ordered an acceleration of German naval
building beyond the limits of the A.G.N.A.,
and
in the "Heye memorandum", drawn at Hitler's orders, envisaged the
Royal Navy for the first time as the principal opponent of the Kriegsmarine. At the
conference of 28 May 1938, Hitler declared that it was his
"unalterable" decision to "smash Czechoslovakia" by 1 October of the
same year, which was explained as securing the eastern flank "for
advancing against the West, England and France". At
the
same conference, Hitler expressed his belief that Britain would not
risk a war until British rearmament was complete, which Hitler felt
would be around 1941–42, and Germany should in a series of wars
eliminate France and her allies in Europe in the interval in the years
1938–41 while German rearmament was still ahead. Hitler's determination to
go through with Fall
Grün in 1938
provoked a major crisis in the German command structure. The Chief of the General
Staff, General Ludwig
Beck, protested in a lengthy series of memos that Fall Grün would start a world war
that Germany would lose, and urged Hitler to put off the projected war. Hitler called Beck's
arguments against war "kindische Kräfteberechnungen"
("childish power play calculations"). On
4
August 1938, a secret Army meeting was held at which Beck read his
report. They agreed something had to be done to prevent certain
disaster. Beck hoped they would all resign together but no one resigned
except Beck. However his replacement, General
Franz
Halder, sympathised with Beck and together they conspired
with several top generals, Admiral
Wilhelm
Canaris (Chief of German Intelligence) and Graf
von
Helldorf (Berlin's
Police Chief), to arrest Hitler the moment he gave the invasion order.
However, the plan would only work if both Britain and France made it
known to the world that they would fight to preserve Czechoslovakia.
This would help to convince the German people that certain defeat
awaited Germany. Agents were therefore sent to England to tell
Chamberlain that an attack on Czechoslovakia was planned and their
intentions to overthrow Hitler if this occurred. However the messengers
were not taken seriously by the British. In September, Chamberlain and
French Premier Édouard
Daladier decided
not to threaten a war over Czechoslovakia and so the planned removal of
Hitler could not be justified. The
Munich
Agreement therefore preserved Hitler in power. Starting
in August 1938, information reached London that Germany was beginning
to mobilize reservists, together with information leaked by anti-war
elements in the German military that the war was scheduled for sometime
in September. Finally, as a result of
intense French, and especially British diplomatic pressure, President Edvard
Beneš unveiled on 5
September 1938, the "Fourth Plan" for constitutional reorganization of
his country, which granted most of the demands for Sudeten autonomy
made by Henlein in his Karlsbad speech of April 1938, and threatened to
deprive the Germans of their pretext for aggression. Henlein's Heimfront promptly responded to the offer of "Fourth Plan" by having a series of violent clashes with the
Czechoslovak police, culminating in major clashes in mid September that
led to the declaration of martial law in certain Sudeten districts. In a response to the
threatening situation, in late August 1938, the British Prime
Minister Neville
Chamberlain had
conceived of Plan Z, namely to fly to Germany, meet Hitler, and then
work out an agreement that could end the crisis. On 13 September 1938,
Chamberlain offered to fly to Germany to discuss a solution to the
crisis. Chamberlain had decided to execute Plan Z in response to
erroneous information supplied by the German opposition that the
invasion was due to start any time after 18 September. Though
Hitler
was not happy with Chamberlain's offer, he agreed to see the
British Prime Minister because to refuse Chamberlain's offer would
confirm the lie to his repeated claims that he was a man of peace
driven reluctantly to war because of Beneš's intractability. In a summit at Berchtesgaden,
Chamberlain
promised to pressure Beneš into agreeing to Hitler's
publicly stated demands about allowing the Sudetenland to join Germany, in return
for a reluctant promise by Hitler to postpone any military action until
Chamberlain had given a chance to fulfill his promise. Hitler had agreed to the
postponement out of the expectation that Chamberlain would fail to
secure Prague's consent to transferring the Sudetenland, and was, by
all accounts, most disappointed when Franco-British pressure secured
just that. The talks between
Chamberlain and Hitler in September 1938 were made difficult by their
innately differing concepts of what Europe should look like, with
Hitler aiming to use the Sudeten issue as a pretext for war and
Chamberlain genuinely striving for a peaceful solution. When
Chamberlain returned to Germany on 22 September to present his peace
plan for the transfer of the Sudetenland at a summit with Hitler at Bad
Godesberg, the British delegation was most unpleasantly surprised
to have Hitler reject his own terms he had presented at Berchtesgaden as now unacceptable. To
put an end to
Chamberlain's peace-making efforts once and for all, Hitler demanded
the Sudetenland be ceded to Germany no later than 28 September 1938
with no negotiations between Prague and Berlin and no international
commission to oversee the transfer; no plebiscites to be held in the
transferred districts until after the transfer; and for good measure,
that Germany would not forsake war as an option until all the claims
against Czechoslovakia by Poland and Hungary had been satisfied. The differing views between
the two leaders were best symbolized when Chamberlain was presented
with Hitler's new demands and protested at being presented with an
ultimatum, leading Hitler in turn to retort that because his document
stating his new demands was entitled "Memorandum", it could not
possibly be an ultimatum. On 25 September 1938
Britain rejected the Bad Godesberg ultimatum, and began preparations
for war. To further underline the
point, Sir Horace
Wilson, the British government's Chief Industrial Advisor, and a
close associate of Chamberlain, was dispatched to Berlin to inform
Hitler that if the Germans attacked Czechoslovakia, then France would
honour her commitments as demanded by the Franco-Czechoslovak alliance
of 1924, and "then England would feel honour bound, to offer France
assistance". Initially,
determined to
continue with attack planned for 1 October 1938, sometime between 27
and 28 September, Hitler changed his mind, and asked to take up a
suggestion, of and through the intercession of Mussolini, for a
conference to be held in Munich with Chamberlain, Mussolini, and
Daladier to discuss the Czechoslovak situation. Just
what had caused Hitler to change his attitude is not entirely clear,
but it is likely that the
combination of Franco-British warnings, and especially the mobilization
of the British fleet, had finally convinced him of what the most likely
result of Fall
Grün would be;
the minor nature of the alleged casus
belli being the
timetables for the transfer made Hitler appear too much like the
aggressor; the view from his advisors that Germany was not prepared
either militarily or economically for a world war; warnings from the
states that Hitler saw as his would-be allies in the form of Italy,
Japan, Poland and Hungary that they would not fight on behalf of
Germany; and very visible signs that the majority of Germans were not
enthusiastic about the prospect of war. Moreover,
Germany
lacked sufficient supplies of oil and other crucial raw
materials (the plants that would produce the synthetic oil for the
German war effort were not in operation yet), and was highly dependent upon imports from abroad. The Kriegsmarine reported
that should war come with Britain, it could not break a British
blockade, and since Germany had hardly any oil stocks, Germany would be
defeated for no other reason than a shortage of oil. The Economics Ministry told
Hitler that Germany had only 2.6 million tons of oil at hand, and
should war with Britain and France, would require 7.6 million tons
of oil. Starting on 18 September
1938, the British refused to supply metals to Germany, and on 24
September the Admiralty forbade British ships to sail to Germany. The
British detained the tanker Invershannon carrying 8,600 tons of
oil to Hamburg, which caused immediate economic pain in Germany. Given Germany's dependence
on imported oil (80% of German oil in the 1930s came from the New
World), and the likelihood that a war with Britain would see a blockade
cutting Germany off from oil supplies, historians have argued that
Hitler's decision to see a peaceful end to call off Fall Grün was due to concerns about
the oil problem.
On
30
September 1938, a one-day conference was held in Munich attended by
Hitler, Chamberlain, Daladier and Mussolini that led to the Munich
Agreement, which gave in to Hitler's ostensible demands by handing
over the Sudetenland districts to Germany. Since London and Paris had
already agreed to the idea of a transfer of the disputed territory in
mid-September, the Munich Conference mostly comprised discussions in
one day of talks on technical questions about how the transfer of the
Sudetenland would take place, and featured the relatively minor
concessions from Hitler that the transfer would take place over a ten
day period in October, overseen by an international commission, and
Germany would wait until Hungarian and Polish claims were settled. At the end of the
conference, Chamberlain had Hitler sign a declaration of Anglo-German
friendship, to which Chamberlain attached great importance and Hitler
none at all. Though Chamberlain was
well-satisfied with the Munich conference, leading to his infamous
claim to have secured "peace
for
our time", Hitler was privately furious about being "cheated"
out of the war he was desperate to have in 1938. As a result of the summit,
Hitler was TIME magazine's Man
of
the Year for
1938. By
appeasing Hitler, Britain and France left Czechoslovakia to Hitler's
mercy. Though Hitler professed
happiness in public over the achievement of his ostensible demands, in
private he was determined to have a war the next time around by
ensuring that Germany's future demands would not be met. In Hitler's view, a
British-brokered peace, though extremely favourable to the ostensible
German demands, was a diplomatic defeat which proved that Britain
needed to be ended as a power to allow him to pursue his dreams of
eastern expansion. In the aftermath of Munich,
Hitler felt since Britain would not ally herself nor stand aside to
facilitate Germany's continental ambitions, it had become a major
threat, and accordingly, Britain replaced the Soviet Union in Hitler's
mind as the main enemy of the Reich, with
German policies being accordingly reoriented. Hitler expressed his
disappointment over the Munich Agreement in a speech on 9 October 1938
in Saarbrücken when he lashed out against
the Conservative anti-appeasers Winston
Churchill, Alfred
Duff
Cooper and Anthony
Eden, whom Hitler described as a warmongering anti-German fraction,
who would attack Germany at the first opportunity, and were likely to
come to power at any moment. In the
same speech, Hitler claimed "We Germans will no longer endure such
governessy interference. Britain should mind her own business and worry
about her own troubles". In
November 1938, Hitler
ordered a major anti-British propaganda campaign to be launched with
the British being loudly abused for their "hypocrisy" in maintaining
world-wide empire while seeking to block the Germans from acquiring an
empire of their own. A particular highlight in
the anti-British propaganda was alleged British human rights abuses in
dealing with the Arab uprising in the Palestine
Mandate and in
India, and the "hyprocrisy" of British criticism of the November 1938 Kristallnacht event. This marked a huge change
from the earlier years of the Third Reich,
when
the German media had portrayed the British Empire in very favourable terms. In November 1938, the
Foreign Minister Joachim
von
Ribbentrop was
ordered to convert the Anti-Comintern Pact into an open anti-British
military alliance, as a prelude for a war against Britain and France. On 27 January 1939,
Hitler approved the Z
Plan, a five-year naval expansion program which called for a Kriegsmarine of 10 battleships,
four
aircraft carriers, three battlecruisers,
eight heavy cruisers, 44 light
cruisers, 68 destroyers and 249 U-boats by 1944
that was intended to crush the Royal
Navy. The importance of the Z
Plan can be seen in Hitler's orders that henceforward the Kriegsmarine was to go from third to
first in allotment of raw materials, money and skilled workers. In the spring of 1939, the Luftwaffe was ordered to start
building a strategic bombing force that was meant to level British
cities. Hitler's war plans against
Britain called for a joint Kriegsmarine-Luftwaffe offensive
that
was to stage "rapid annihilating blows" against British cities and
shipping with the expectation that "The moment England is cut off from
her supplies she is forced to capitulate" as Hitler expected that the
experience of living in a blockaded, famine-stricken, bombed-out island
to be too much for the British public. In
November 1938, in a secret speech to a group of German journalists,
Hitler noted that he had been forced to speak of peace as the goal in
order to attain the degree of rearmament "which were an essential
prerequisite ... for the next step". In the same speech, Hitler
complained that his peace propaganda of the last five years had been
too successful, and it was time for the German people to be subjected to war propaganda. Hitler stated: "It is
self-evident that such peace propaganda conducted for a decade has its
risky aspect; because it can too easily induce people to come to the
conclusion that the present government is identical with the decision
and with the intention to keep peace under all circumstances", and
instead called for new journalism that "had to present certain foreign
policy events in such a fashion that the inner voice of the people
itself slowly begins to shout out for the use of force." Later in November 1938,
Hitler expressed frustration with the more cautious advice he was
receiving from some quarters. Hitler called the economic
expert Carl
Friedrich Goerdeler, General Ludwig
Beck, Dr. Hjalmar
Schacht, the diplomat Ulrich
von
Hassell, and the economist Rudolf Brinkmann "the overbred
intellectual circles" who were trying to block him from fulfilling his
mission by their appeals to caution, and but for the fact that he
needed their skills "otherwise, perhaps we could someday exterminate
them or do something of this kind to them". In
December 1938, the Chancellery of the Führer headed by Philipp
Bouhler received a
letter concerning a severely physically and mentally disabled baby girl
named Sofia Knauer living in Leipzig. At that time, there was a
furious rivalry existing between Bouhler's office, the office of the Reich Chancellery led by
Hans-Heinrich Lammers, the Presidential Chancellery of Otto
Meissner, the office of Hitler's adjutant Wilhelm Brückner and
the Deputy Führer's office which was effectively
headed by Martin
Bormann over control over access to Hitler. As part of a power play
against his rivals, Bouhler presented the letter concerning the
disabled girl to Hitler, who thanked Bouhler for bringing the matter to
his attention and responded by ordering his personal physician Dr. Karl
Brandt to kill
Knauer. In January 1939, Hitler
ordered Bouhler and Dr. Brandt to henceforward have all disabled infants born in Germany killed. This was the origin of the Action
T4 program.
Subsequently Dr. Brandt and Bouhler, acting on their own initiative in
the expectation of winning Hitler's favour, expanded the T4 program to
killing, first, all physically or mentally disabled children in
Germany, and, second, all disabled adults. In
late
1938 and early 1939, the continuing economic crisis caused by problems
of rearmament, especially the shortage of foreign hard currencies
needed to pay for raw materials Germany lacked, together with reports
from Göring that the Four Year Plan was hopelessly behind
schedule, forced Hitler in January 1939 to reluctantly order major
defence cuts with the Wehrmacht having its steel
allocations cut by 30%, aluminium 47%, cement 25%, rubber 14% and
copper 20%. On 30 January 1939, Hitler
made his "Export or die" speech calling for a German economic offensive
("export battle", to use Hitler's term), to increase German foreign
exchange holdings to pay for raw materials such as high-grade iron
needed for military materials. The "Export or die" speech
of 30 January 1939 is also known as Hitler's "Prophecy Speech". The
name which that speech is known comes from Hitler's "prophecy" issued
towards the end of the speech: "One
thing I should like to say on this day which may be memorable for
others as well for us Germans: In the course of my life I have very
often been a prophet, and I have usually been ridiculed for it. During
the time of my struggle for power it was in the first instance the
Jewish race which only received my prophecies with laughter when I said
I would one day take over the leadership of the State, and that of the
whole nation, and that I would then among many other things settle the
Jewish problem. Their laughter was uproarious, but I think that for
some time now they have been laughing on the other side of the face.
Today I will be once more the prophet. If the international Jewish
financiers outside Europe should succeed in plunging the nations once
more into a world war, then the result will not be the bolsheviszation
of the earth, and thus the victory of Jewry, but the annihilation of
the Jewish race in Europe!" A
significant historical debate has swung around the "Prophecy Speech".
Historians who take an intentionist line such as Eberhard
Jäckel have
argued that at minimum from the time of the "Prophecy Speech" onwards,
Hitler was committed to genocide of the Jews as his central goal. Lucy
Dawidowicz and
Gerald Fleming have argued that the "Prophecy Speech" was simply
Hitler's way of saying that once he started a world war, he would use
that war as a cover for his already pre-existing plans for genocide. Functionalist
historians such as Christopher
Browning have
dismissed this interpretation under the grounds that if Hitler were
serious with the intentions expressed in the "Prophecy Speech", then
why the 30-month "stay of execution" between the outbreak of World War
II in September 1939, and the opening of the first Vernichtungslager in late 1941. In addition, Browning has
pointed to the existence of the Madagascar
Plan of 1940–41 and
various other schemes as proof that there was no genocidal master plan. In Browning's opinion, the
"Prophecy Speech" was merely a manifestation of bravado on Hitler's
part, and had little connection with actual unfolding of anti-Semitic
policies. At least
part of the reason why Hitler violated the Munich Agreement by seizing
the Czech half of Czechoslovakia in March 1939 was to obtain Czechoslovak assets to help with the economic crisis. Hitler ordered Germany's
army to enter Prague on 15 March 1939, and from Prague
Castle proclaimed
Bohemia and Moravia a German protectorate. As part
of the anti-British course, it was deemed necessary by Hitler to have
Poland either a satellite state or otherwise neutralized. Hitler
believed this necessary both on strategic grounds as a way of securing
the Reich's eastern flank and on economic
grounds as a way of evading the effects of a British blockade. Initially, the German hope
was to transform Poland into a satellite state, but by March 1939 the
German demands had been rejected by the Poles three times, which led
Hitler to decide upon the destruction of Poland as the main German
foreign policy goal of 1939. On 3 April 1939, Hitler
ordered the military to start preparing for Fall
Weiss (Case
White), the plan for a German invasion to be executed on 25 August 1939. In August 1939, Hitler
spoke to his generals that his original plan for 1939 had to "...
establish an acceptable relationship with Poland in order to fight
against the West" but since the Poles would not co-operate in setting
up an "acceptable relationship" (i.e. becoming a German satellite), he
believed he had no choice other than wiping Poland off the map. The historian Gerhard
Weinberg has argued
since Hitler's audience comprised men who were all for the destruction
of Poland (anti-Polish feelings were
traditionally very strong in the German Army), but rather less happy
about the prospect of war with Britain and France, if that was the
price Germany had to pay for the destruction of Poland, it is quite
likely that Hitler was speaking the truth on this occasion. In his private discussions
with his officials in 1939, Hitler always described Britain as the main
enemy that had to be defeated, and in his view, Poland's obliteration
was the necessary prelude to that goal by securing the eastern flank
and helpfully adding to Germany's Lebensraum. Hitler was much offended by
the British "guarantee" of Polish independence issued on 31 March 1939,
and told his associates that "I shall brew them a devil's drink". In a speech in Wilhelmshaven for the launch of the
battleship Tirpitz on 1 April 1939, Hitler
threatened to denounce the Anglo-German
Naval
Agreement if
the British persisted with their "encirclement" policy as represented by the "guarantee" of Polish independence. As
part
of the new course, in a speech before the Reichstag on 28 April 1939, Adolf Hitler, complaining of British "encirclement" of Germany, renounced
both the Anglo-German Naval Agreement and the German–Polish Non-Aggression
Pact. As a
pretext for aggression against Poland, Hitler claimed the Free
City
of Danzig and
the right for "extra-territorial" roads across the Polish Corridor which
Germany had unwillingly ceded under the Versailles
treaty.
For Hitler, Danzig was just a pretext for aggression as the Sudetenland
had been intended to be in 1938, and throughout 1939, while
highlighting the Danzig issue as a grievance, the Germans always
refused to engage in talks about the matter. A notable contradiction
existed in Hitler's plans between the long-term anti-British course, whose major instruments such as a vastly expanded Kriegsmarine and Luftwaffe would take several years to
complete, and Hitler's immediate foreign policy in 1939, which was
likely to provoke a general war by engaging in such actions as
attacking Poland. Hitler's dilemma between
his short-term and long-term goals was resolved by Foreign Minister
Joachim von Ribbentrop, who told Hitler that neither Britain nor France
would honour their commitments to Poland, and any German–Polish war
would accordingly be a limited regional war. Ribbentrop based his
appraisal partly on an alleged statement made to him by the French
Foreign Minister Georges
Bonnet in December 1938 that France now recognized Eastern Europe as Germany's exclusive
sphere of influence. In addition, Ribbentrop's
status as the former Ambassador to London made him in Hitler's eyes the
leading Nazi British expert, and as a result, Ribbentrop's advice that
Britain would not honour her commitments to Poland carried much weight
with Hitler. Ribbentrop only showed
Hitler diplomatic cables that supported his analysis. In addition, the German
Ambassador in London, Herbert
von
Dirksen, tended to send reports that supported Ribbentrop's analysis such as a dispatch in August 1939 that reported British Prime
Minister Neville
Chamberlain knew
"the social structure of Britain, even the conception of the British
Empire, would not survive the chaos of even a victorious war", and so
would back down. The extent that Hitler was
influenced by Ribbentrop's advice can be seen in Hitler's orders to the
German military on 21 August 1939 for a limited mobilization against
Poland alone. Hitler chose late August as
his date for Fall
Weiss in order to
limit disruption to German agricultural production caused by
mobilization. The problems caused by the
need to begin a campaign in Poland in late August or early September in
order to have the campaign finished before the October rains arrived,
and the need to have sufficient time to concentrate German troops on
the Polish border left Hitler in a self-imposed situation in August
1939 where Soviet co-operation was absolutely crucial if he were to
have a war that year. The
Munich agreement appeared to be sufficient to dispel most of the
remaining hold which the "collective security" idea may have had in
Soviet circles, and, on 23 August 1939,
Joseph Stalin accepted Hitler's proposal to conclude a non-aggression
pact (the Molotov - Ribbentrop Pact),
whose secret protocols contained an agreement to partition
Poland. A major historical debate about the reasons for Hitler's
foreign policy choices in 1939 concerns whether a structural economic
crisis drove Hitler into a "flight into war" as claimed by the Marxist
historian Timothy
Mason or whether
Hitler's actions were more influenced by non-economic factors as
claimed by the economic historian Richard
Overy. Historians such as William
Carr, Gerhard
Weinberg and Ian
Kershaw have argued that a non-economic reason for Hitler's rush to
war was Hitler's morbid and obsessive fear of an early death, and hence
his feeling that he did not have long to accomplish his work. In the last days of peace,
Hitler oscillated between the determination to fight the Western powers
if he had to, and various schemes intended to keep Britain out of the
war, but in any case, Hitler was not to be deterred from his aim of
invading Poland. Only very briefly, when
news of the Anglo-Polish alliance being signed on 25 August 1939 in
response to the German-Soviet Non-Aggression Pact (instead of the
severing of ties between London and Warsaw predicted by Ribbentrop)
together with news from Italy that Mussolini would not honour the Pact
of
Steel, caused Hitler to postpone the attack on Poland from 25
August to 1 September. Hitler chose to spend the
last days of peace either trying to manoeuvre the British into
neutrality through his offer of 25 August 1939 to "guarantee" the
British Empire, or having Ribbentrop present a last-minute peace plan
to Henderson with an impossibly short time limit for its acceptance as
part of an effort to blame the war on the British and Poles. On 1 September 1939, Germany invaded
western
Poland. Britain and France declared war on Germany on 3
September but did not immediately act. Hitler was most unpleasantly
surprised at receiving the British declaration of war on 3 September
1939, and turning to Ribbentrop angrily asked "Now what?" Ribbentrop had nothing to
say other than that Robert Coulondre, the French Ambassador, would
probably be by later that day to present the French declaration of war. Not long after this, on 17
September, Soviet forces invaded eastern Poland. After the
fall of Poland came a period journalists called the "Phoney
War," or Sitzkrieg ("sitting
war").
In part of north-western Poland annexed to Germany, Hitler
instructed the two Gauleiters in charge of the area,
namely Albert
Forster and Arthur
Greiser, to "Germanize" the area, and promised them "There would be
no questions asked" about how this "Germanization"
was
to be accomplished. Hitler's
orders were
interpreted in very different ways by Forster and Greiser. Forster
followed a policy of simply having the local Poles sign forms stating
they had German blood with no documentation required, whereas Greiser
carried out a brutal ethnic cleansing campaign of expelling the entire
Polish population into the Government-General of Poland. When Greiser, seconded by
Himmler, complained to Hitler that Forster was allowing thousands of
Poles to be accepted as "racial" Germans and thus "contaminating"
German "racial purity", and asked Hitler to order Forster to stop,
Hitler merely told Himmler and Greiser to take up their difficulties
with Forster, and not to involve him. Hitler's handling of the
Forster–Greiser dispute has often been advanced as an example of Ian
Kershaw's theory of "Working Towards the Führer", namely that
Hitler issued vague instructions, and allowed his subordinates to work
out policy on their own. After the
conquest of Poland, another major dispute broke out between different
factions with one centring around Reichsfüherer SS Heinrich Himmler and Arthur
Greiser championing and carrying out ethnic cleansing schemes for
Poland, and another centring around Hermann Göring and Hans
Frank calling for
turning Poland into the "granary" of the Reich. At a conference held at
Göring's Karinhall estate on 12 February 1940, the dispute was
settled in favour of the Göring-Frank view of economic
exploitation, and ending mass expulsions as economically disruptive. On 15 May 1940, Himmler
showed Hitler a memo entitled "Some Thoughts on the Treatment of Alien
Population in the East", which called for expelling the entire Jewish
population of Europe into Africa and reducing the remainder of the
Polish population to a "leaderless labouring class". Hitler called Himmler's
memo "good and correct". Hitler's remark had the
effect of scuttling the so-called Karinhall argreement, and led to the
Himmler–Greiser viewpoint triumphing as German policy for Poland. During
this period, Hitler built up his forces on Germany's western frontier.
In April 1940, German forces invaded Denmark and Norway. In May 1940,
Hitler's forces attacked France, conquering Luxembourg,
the
Netherlands and Belgium in the process. These victories persuaded
Benito Mussolini of Italy to join the war on Hitler's side on 10 June
1940. France surrendered on 22 June 1940. Britain,
whose forces evacuated France by sea from Dunkirk,
continued
to fight alongside other
British
dominions in
the Battle
of
the Atlantic. After having his overtures for peace rejected by
the British, now led by Winston Churchill, Hitler ordered bombing
raids on the United Kingdom. The Battle
of
Britain was
Hitler's prelude to a planned invasion. The attacks began by pounding Royal
Air
Force airbases
and radar stations protecting
South-East England. However, the Luftwaffe failed to defeat the Royal
Air Force. On 27 September 1940, the Tripartite Treaty was signed
in Berlin by Saburo
Kurusu of Imperial
Japan, Hitler, and Ciano. The purpose of the Tripartite Treaty,
which was directed against an unnamed power that was clearly meant to
be the United States, was to deter the Americans from supporting the
British. It was later expanded to include Hungary, Romania and Bulgaria.
They
were collectively known as the Axis
Powers. By the end of October 1940, air superiority for the invasion Operation
Sealion could not be assured, and Hitler ordered the bombing of
British cities, including London, Plymouth,
and Coventry,
mostly
at night. In the
Spring of 1941, Hitler was distracted from his plans
for
the East by
various activities in North
Africa, the Balkans,
and
the Middle East. In February, German
forces
arrived in Libya to
bolster the Italian forces there. In April, he launched the invasion
of
Yugoslavia which
was followed quickly by the invasion
of
Greece. In May, German forces were sent to support Iraqi
rebel
forces fighting against the British and to invade
Crete. On 23 May, Hitler released Fuhrer
Directive
No. 30. On 22
June 1941, three million German troops attacked the Soviet
Union, breaking the non-aggression pact Hitler had concluded with
Stalin two years earlier. This invasion seized huge amounts of
territory, including the Baltic states, Belarus,
and
Ukraine. It also encircled and destroyed many Soviet forces, which
Stalin had ordered not to retreat. However, the Germans were stopped
barely short of Moscow in December 1941 by the Russian
winter and fierce
Soviet
resistance. The invasion failed to achieve the quick triumph
Hitler wanted. A major
historical dispute concerns Hitler's reasons for Operation
Barbarossa. Some historians such as Andreas
Hillgruber have
argued that Barbarossa was merely one "stage" of Hitler's Stufenplan (stage by stage plan) for
world conquest, which Hillgruber believed that Hitler had formulated in
the 1920s. Other historians such as John
Lukacs have
contended that Hitler never had a stufenplan, and that the
invasion of the Soviet Union was an ad
hoc move on the
part of Hitler due to Britain's refusal to surrender. Lukacs has argued that the
reason Hitler gave in private for Barbarossa, namely that Winston
Churchill held out
the hope that the Soviet Union might enter the war on the Allied side,
and that the only way of forcing a British surrender was to eliminate
that hope, was indeed Hitler's real reason for Barbarossa. In Lukacs's perspective,
Barbarossa was thus primarily an anti-British move on the part of
Hitler intended to force Britain to sue for peace by destroying her
only hope of victory rather than an anti-Soviet move. Klaus
Hildebrand has
maintained that Stalin and Hitler were independently planning to attack
each other in 1941. Hildebrand has claimed that
the news in the spring of 1941 of Soviet troop concentrations on the
border led to Hitler engaging in a flucht
nach
vorn ("flight
forward" – i.e. responding to a danger by charging on rather than retreating.) A third fraction comprising
a diverse group such as Viktor
Suvorov, Ernst Topitsch, Joachim
Hoffmann, Ernst
Nolte, and David Irving have argued
that the official reason given by the Germans for Barbarossa in 1941
was the real reason, namely that Barbarossa was a "preventive war"
forced on Hitler to avert an impeding Soviet attack scheduled for July
1941. This theory has been widely attacked as erroneous; the American
historian Gerhard
Weinberg once
compared the advocates of the preventive war theory to believers in
"fairy tales". The
Nazi
invasion of the Soviet Union reached its apex on 2 December 1941 as
part of the 258th Infantry Division advanced to within 15 miles
(24 km) of Moscow, close enough to see the spires of the Kremlin. But they were not prepared
for the harsh conditions brought on by the first blizzards of winter
and in the days that followed, Soviet forces drove them back over 320
kilometres (200 miles). On 7
December 1941, Japan
attacked
Pearl Harbor, Hawaii, and four days later, Hitler's formal
declaration of war against the United States officially engaged him in
war against a coalition that included the world's largest empire (the
British Empire), the world's greatest industrial and financial power
(the United States), and the world's largest army (the Soviet Union). On 18
December 1941, the appointment book of the Reichsführer SS Heinrich
Himmler shows he
met with Hitler, and in response to Himmler's question "What to do
with the Jews of Russia?", Hitler's response was recorded as "als
Partisanen
auszurotten" ("exterminate them as partisans"). The Israeli historian Yehuda
Bauer has
commented
that the remark is probably as close as historians will ever get to a
definitive order from Hitler for the genocide carried out during the
Holocaust. In late
1942, German forces were defeated in the second
battle
of El Alamein, thwarting Hitler's plans to seize the Suez
Canal and the
Middle East. In February 1943, the Battle
of
Stalingrad ended
with the destruction of the German 6th
Army. Thereafter came the Battle
of
Kursk. Hitler's military judgment became increasingly erratic,
and Germany's military and economic position deteriorated along with
Hitler's health, as indicated by his left hand's severe trembling.
Hitler's biographer Ian
Kershaw and others
believe that he may have suffered from Parkinson's disease. Syphilis has also been suspected as
a cause of at least some of his symptoms, although the evidence is
slight. Following
the allied invasion of Sicily (Operation
Husky) in 1943, Mussolini was deposed by Pietro
Badoglio, who surrendered to the Allies. Throughout 1943 and 1944,
the Soviet Union steadily forced Hitler's armies into retreat along the Eastern
Front. On 6 June 1944, the Western Allied armies landed in northern
France in what was one of the largest amphibious operations in history, Operation
Overlord. Realists in the German army knew defeat was inevitable,
and some plotted to remove Hitler from power. In
July
1944, as part of Operation
Valkyrie in what
became known as the 20
July
plot, Claus
von
Stauffenberg planted
a
bomb in Hitler's
headquarters, the Wolfsschanze (Wolf's Lair)
at Rastenburg,
but
Hitler narrowly escaped death. He ordered savage reprisals,
resulting in the executions of more than 4,900 people, sometimes by starvation in solitary
confinement followed
by
slow strangulation. The main resistance movement was destroyed,
although smaller isolated groups continued to operate. By late
1944, the Red Army had driven the Germans back into Central Europe and
the Western
Allies were
advancing into Germany. Hitler realized that Germany had lost the war,
but allowed no retreats. He hoped to negotiate a separate peace with
America and Britain, a hope buoyed by the death of Franklin
D.
Roosevelt on 12
April 1945. Hitler's stubbornness and
defiance of military realities allowed the Holocaust to continue. He
ordered the complete destruction of all German industrial
infrastructure before it could fall into Allied hands, saying that
Germany's failure to win the war forfeited its right to survive. Rather,
Hitler
decided that the entire nation should go down with him. Execution of this scorched
earth plan was
entrusted to arms minister Albert
Speer, who disobeyed the order. In April
1945, Soviet forces attacked the outskirts of Berlin. Hitler's
followers urged him to flee to the mountains of Bavaria to make a last
stand in the National
Redoubt. But Hitler was determined to either live or die in the
capital. On 20
April, Hitler celebrated his 56th birthday in the Führerbunker ("Führer's shelter")
below the Reichskanzlei (Reich
Chancellery). Elsewhere, the garrison commander of the besieged Festung Breslau ("fortress
Breslau"),
General Hermann
Niehoff, had chocolates distributed to his troops in honour of
Hitler's birthday. By 21
April, Georgi
Zhukov's 1st
Belorussian
Front had
broken through the defences of German General Gotthard
Heinrici's Army
Group
Vistula during
the Battle
of
the Seelow Heights. The Soviets were now advancing towards
Hitler's bunker with little to stop them. Ignoring the facts, Hitler
saw salvation in the ragtag units commanded by Waffen SS General Felix
Steiner. Steiner's command became known as Armeeabteilung Steiner ("Army
Detachment
Steiner"). But "Army Detachment Steiner" existed
primarily on paper. It was something more than a corps but less than an
army. Hitler ordered Steiner to attack the northern flank of the huge salient created by the breakthrough
of Zhukov's 1st Belorussian Front. Meanwhile, the German Ninth
Army, which had been pushed south of the salient, was ordered to
attack north in a pincer
attack. Late on
21 April, Heinrici called Hans
Krebs, chief of the Oberkommando
des
Heeres (Supreme
Command of the Army or OKH), and told him that Hitler's plan could not
be implemented. Heinrici asked to speak to Hitler but was told by Krebs
that Hitler was too busy to take his call. On 22
April, during one of his last military conferences, Hitler interrupted
the report to ask what had happened to Steiner's offensive. There was a
long silence. Then Hitler was told that the attack had never been
launched, and that the withdrawal from Berlin of several units for
Steiner's army, on Hitler's orders, had so weakened the front that the
Russians had broken through into Berlin. Hitler asked everyone except
Wilhelm Keitel, Hans Krebs, Alfred
Jodl, Wilhelm
Burgdorf, and Martin
Bormann to leave
the room, and launched a tirade
against the perceived treachery and incompetence of his commanders.
This culminated in an oath to stay in Berlin, head up the defence of
the city, and shoot himself at the end. Before
the day ended, Hitler again found salvation in a new plan that included
General Walther
Wenck's Twelfth
Army. This new plan had Wenck turn his army – currently facing the Americans to the west – and attack
towards the east to relieve Berlin. Twelfth Army was to link up with Ninth Army and break through to the city. Wenck did attack and, in
the confusion, made temporary contact with the Potsdam garrison. But
the link with the Ninth Army, like the plan in general, was ultimately
unsuccessful. On 23
April, Joseph Goebbels made the following proclamation to the people of
Berlin: I call
on you to fight for your city. Fight with everything you have got, for
the sake of your wives and your children, your mothers and your
parents. Your arms are defending everything we have ever held dear, and
all the generations that will come after us. Be proud and courageous!
Be inventive and cunning! Your Gauleiter is amongst you. He and his
colleagues will remain in your midst. His wife and children are here as
well. He, who once captured the city with 200 men, will now use every means to galvanize the defence of the capital. The Battle
for
Berlin must
become the signal for the whole nation to rise up in battle ... The same
day, Göring sent a telegram from Berchtesgaden in
Bavaria. Göring
argued that, since Hitler was cut off in Berlin, he should assume
leadership of Germany as Hitler's designated successor. Göring
mentioned a time limit after which he would consider Hitler
incapacitated. Hitler responded, in anger,
by having Göring arrested. Later when Hitler wrote his will on 29 April, Göring
was removed from all his positions in the government. Further on the 23 April,
Hitler appointed General der Artillerie Helmuth
Weidling as the
commander of the Berlin Defense Area. Weidling replaced Lieutenant
General (Generalleutnant) Helmuth
Reymann and Colonel
(Oberst) Ernst
Kaether. Hitler also appointed Waffen SS General (SS
Brigadeführer) Wilhelm
Mohnke the
(Kommandant) Battle Commander for the defence of the government sector
(Zitadelle sector) that included the Reich Chancellery and
Führerbunker. By the
end of the day on 27 April, Berlin was completely cut off from the rest
of Germany. On 28
April, Hitler discovered that SS leader Heinrich Himmler was
trying to discuss surrender terms with the Western Allies (through the
Swedish diplomat Count Folke
Bernadotte). Hitler ordered Himmler's
arrest and had Hermann
Fegelein (Himmler's
representative for the SS at Hitler's HQ in Berlin) shot. During
the night of 28 April, Wenck reported that his Twelfth Army had been
forced back along the entire front. He noted that no further attacks towards Berlin were possible. General Alfred
Jodl (Supreme Army
Command) did not provide this information to Hans Krebs in Berlin until
early in the morning of 30 April. On 29
April, Hitler dictated his will and political statement to his private
secretary,Traudl
Junge. Hans Krebs, Wilhelm
Burgdorf, Joseph Goebbels, and Martin Bormann witnessed and signed this last
will
and testament of Adolf Hitler. On the same day, Hitler was
informed of the assassination of Italian dictator Benito
Mussolinion 28 April, which is presumed to have increased his
determination to avoid capture. On 30
April 1945, after intense street-to-street
combat, when Soviet troops were within a block or two of the Reich
Chancellery, Hitler committed suicide, shooting himself in the temple
with a Walther
PPK while
simultaneously biting into a cyanide capsule. Hitler had at various times
in the past contemplated suicide, and the Walther was the same pistol
that his niece, Geli
Raubal had used in
her suicide. Hitler's body and that of Eva
Braun were put in a
bomb crater, doused
in
gasoline by SS Sturmbannführer Otto
Günsche and
other Führerbunker aides,
and
cremated as the Red Army advanced and shelling continued. On 2 May,
Berlin surrendered. In the postwar years there were conflicting reports
about what happened to Hitler's remains. After the fall of the Soviet
Union, records found in the Soviet archives revealed that the remains
of Hitler, Eva Braun, Joseph and Magda
Goebbels, the six Goebbels children, General Hans Krebs and Hitler's dogs, were collected,
moved and secretly buried in graves near Rathenow in Brandenburg. In 1970, the remains were
disinterred, cremated and scattered in the Elbe
River by the
Soviets. According to the Russian
Federal Security Service, a fragment of human skull stored in its
archives and displayed to the public in a 2000 exhibition came from the
remains of Hitler's body. The authenticity of the skull has been
challenged by historians and researchers. In fact, DNA analysis
conducted in 2009 showed the skull fragment to be that of a woman, and
analysis of the sutures between the skull plates indicated an age
between 20 and 40 years old at the time of death. |