In chess what matters is the result, the endgame.
The opening moves and the middle play are all
directed to achieving such a superiority of position
that the endgame is preordained, the annihilation
of the opponent. The analogy holds for
Hitler’s foreign policy. Much confusion of interpretation
is avoided if one essential point is
grasped: Hitler never lost sight of his goal – wars
of conquest that would smash Soviet Russia, and
subordinate France and the smaller states of the
continent of Europe to the domination of a new
Germany. This new order would be based on the
concept of race. ‘Races’ such as the Jews were so
poisonous that there was literally no place for
them in this new Europe. Other inferior races
would be handled ruthlessly: the Slavs unless they
sided with Hitler would not be permitted any
national existence and could only hope for a
servile status under their Aryan masters. Logically,
this biological foreign policy could not be confined
to Europe alone. From the mastery of the
European continent, the global conflict would
ensue. Hitler was vague about details; this would
be a task for his successors and future generations.
But he took some interest in German relations
with Japan in the 1930s because he recognised
that Japan’s war in Asia and threat to British
interests could be exploited. He preferred to concentrate
on the ‘limited’ task of gaining mastery
of the European continent.
It is interesting to compare Hitler’s aims with
those of his Weimar and Wilhelmine predecessors.
The desire for predominance on the continent of
Europe was shared by both Wilhelmine Germany
in 1914 and Hitler’s Germany of the 1930s. The
foreign policy of Weimar’s Germany, like Hitler’s
included secret rearmament and the objective of
restoring German military power by abolishing
the restrictions imposed by the Treaty of
Versailles. Furthermore, Weimar’s foreign policy
was ultimately directed towards recovering the
territories lost to Poland. Differences between
Hitler’s policy and earlier policies are also very
evident. Wilhelmine Germany was brought to the
point of launching war only after years of trying
to avoid such a war. An alternative to war was
always considered both possible and desirable.
War would become unnecessary if the alliance
between France and Russia ‘encircling’ Germany
could have been broken by the threat of force
alone. Even when Wilhelmine Germany made
peace plans in the autumn of 1914 in the flush of
early victories, the German leaders did not contemplate
the enslavement of peoples or mass
murder. Wilhelmine Germany’s vision was a
utopian one of a prosperous Europe led by a powerful
Germany. Of course what appeared as utopia
to the German leaders, a Pax Germanica, was
intolerable to its neighbours.
When we next contrast Hitler’s aims with
those of Stresemann the differences are equally
great. Weimar Germany was not bent on either
racialist barbarism or continental domination. The
reconciliation with France was genuine, as was
Stresemann’s assumption that another European
war with France and Britain would spell Germany’s
ruin. A realistic objective, he believed, was
for Germany to recover the position it had held as
a great power before 1914. To strive for more was
to make the mistake that had led other powers to
combine against imperial Germany and so had
brought about the catastrophic defeat of Germany
and the harsh peace. The essence then of
Stresemann’s diplomacy was to win as much for
Germany as possible without provoking the slightest
chance of war. It followed that this ‘weapon’
was to make repeated pleas for trust and reconciliation.
He conducted Weimar’s diplomacy with
skill and success, overcoming many difficulties.
Tragically, it was Hitler who became the heir of
Germany’s much improved international position;
furthermore, he derided Weimar’s achievements
as the work of the ‘November criminals’.
It is commonplace since the publication of
A. J. P. Taylor’s The Origins of the Second World
War to discredit the findings of the Nürnberg
War Crimes Tribunal that Hitler and his associates
carefully and precisely planned their aggressions
culminating in the attack on Poland in
September 1939. It is true that Hitler was following
no such precise and detailed plan of
aggression. He clearly reacted to events and, as
the documents show, was ready at times to be
flexible when it came to timing and detail. After
all he could not disregard contemporary circumstances
or the policies of the other powers, nor
could he foretell what opportunities would arise
for Germany to exploit.
But all this does not lead to the opposite conclusion
that he had no plan. No one can read
Mein Kampf, or his other writings and the existing
documents expressing his views, without
being struck by their general consistency. His
actions, moreover, conformed to the broad plans
he laid down. This was no mere coincidence.
Unlike his predecessors, Hitler was working
towards one clear goal: a war, or several wars,
which would enable Germany to conquer the
continent of Europe. Once a dictator has acquired
sufficient power internally there is nothing difficult
about launching a war. The difficulty lies in
winning it, and in getting right the timing of
aggression. The task of preserving peace, of
solving conflicts, of deciding when war cannot be
avoided because of the ambitions and aggressions
of other nations – that requires skill and good
judgement. Hitler was not prepared to compromise
his ultimate goal. Only to a very limited
degree, was he prepared to modify the steps by
which he intended to attain this goal. Hitler
showed a greater degree of skill as a propagandist
by hiding his true objectives for a time when in
power. His repeated assurances that he was
making his ‘last territorial demands’ fooled some
people abroad, as well as the majority of Germans,
who certainly did not imagine they would be led
again into another war against Britain, France,
Russia and the US.
Why were Hitler and resurgent Germany not
stopped before German power had become so
formidable that it was too late, except at the cost
of a devastating war? There can be little doubt
that British and French policy between the wars
and, more especially, in the 1930s was disastrous.
But the real interest of these years lies in the contrast
between a single-minded Hitler bent on a
war of conquest from the start and the reaction
of his neighbours who were uncertain of his ultimate
intentions, who had to grapple with the
problem of how best to meet ill-defined dangers
abroad, while facing economic and social difficulties
at home. The leaders of the Western democracies,
moreover, were incessantly concerned with
the problems of domestic political rivalries and
divisions within their own parties. In France political
divisions had escalated into violence and
greatly weakened the capacity of unstable governments
to respond decisively to the German
danger. In the circumstances it is perhaps all the
more remarkable that a real attempt on the level
of diplomacy was made by the French to check
Hitler. In Britain, despite the overwhelming parliamentary
strength won by the nationalist government
in 1931, continuing widespread distress
and unemployment gave the Conservatives much
cause for concern from an electoral point of view.
Foreign policy also played a considerable role
in the November election of 1935. Baldwin
reflected the public mood by simultaneously
expressing Conservative support for the League of
Nations while reassuring the electorate that there
would be no extensive rearmament. After another
electoral victory in 1935, almost as massive as the
1931 landslide, the Conservatives had most to
fear from their own supporters, and from one in
particular, Winston Churchill, who from the
backbenches constantly attacked the government’s
weak response to German rearmament.
When, on coming to power, Hitler accelerated
German rearmament in defiance of the Versailles
Treaty, he was in fact taking no real risk. The lack
of effective Allied reaction during the period from
1933 to 1935 was not due to the finesse of Hitler
or of his diplomats, nor even to Hitler’s deceptive
speeches proclaiming his peaceful intentions.
The brutal nature of the Nazi regime in Germany
revealed itself quite clearly to the world with the
accounts of beatings and concentration camps,
reinforced by the exodus of distinguished, mainly
Jewish, refugees. Britain tolerated Hitler’s illegal
actions just as rearmament in the Weimar years
had been accepted. France, though more alarmed
than Britain by the development of German military
strength, would not take action without the
certainty of British support in case such actions
should lead to war with Germany. But until 1939
British governments refused to back France unless
France herself were attacked by Germany. The
French army would have been much stronger
than Germany’s in 1933 and 1934 at the outset
of any war, but France’s military and industrial
potential for war was weaker.
The weakness of the French response was not
wholly due to the defensive military strategy symbolised
by the great Maginot fortress line. The
French had reached a conclusion diametrically
opposite to the Germans. The French did not
believe that a lightning strike by its own armies,
before Germany had a chance to mobilise its
greater manpower and industry for war, could
bring rapid victory. In short, the French abandoned
the notion of a limited punitive military
action such as they had undertaken in the Ruhr
ten years earlier. Any military response, so the
French high command advised the governments
of the day, could lead to general war; therefore,
it could not be undertaken without prior
mobilisation placing France on a war footing.
This left the French governments with no alternative
but diplomacy, aimed at aligning allies
against Germany in order to exert pressure in time
of peace. But no British government was prepared
to face another war unless Britain’s own national
interests were clearly imperilled.
This nexus between the rejection of any limited
military response and Britain’s and France’s perfectly
understandable desire to avoid outright
war unless there was an attack on their territories,
or a clear threat of one, made possible Hitler’s
rake’s progress of treaty violations and aggressions
until the serious crisis over Czechoslovakia in
September 1938. All Hitler required was the nerve
to seize where there would be no resistance. He
had only to push against open doors.
A disarmament conference under the auspices of
the League was proceeding in Geneva when
Hitler came to power. It served as a useful smokescreen
for the Nazis. The Germans argued a
seemingly reasonable case. It was up to the other
powers to disarm to Germany’s level, or Germany
should be allowed to rearm to theirs. The French
could never willingly give their blessing to this
proposition, so they were placed in the position
of appearing to be the unreasonable power,
blocking the progress of negotiations which the
British wished to succeed for they had no
stomach for increasing armaments expenditure in
the depth of the depression. The British argued
that some agreement, allowing but limiting
German rearmament, was better than none.
The French, however, refused to consent to
German rearmament. In fact, it made no difference
whether the British or the French policy was
pursued. In April 1933 the German delegate to
the disarmament negotiations confidentially
briefed German journalists, telling them that,
while Germany hoped to secure the consent of
the other powers to a standing army of 600,000,
it was building the army up to this size anyway.
Hitler was giving rearmament first priority,
regardless of the attitude of other nations, though
any cover which Anglo-French disagreements
gave for his own treaty violations was naturally
welcome to him. In June 1933 he happily signed
a four-power treaty proposed by Mussolini which
bound Britain, France, Germany and Italy, in no
more than platitudes of goodwill, to consult with
each other within the framework of the League.
In Germany, meanwhile, a National Defence
Council had been secretly set up in April 1933 to
coordinate military planning. It would take time
to build up the necessary infrastructure – to set
up and equip factories to manufacture large quantities
of tanks, planes and the weapons of mechanised
warfare. The lack of swift early progress
was an inherent problem of complex modern
rearmament, as Britain was to discover to its cost
later on. Financial responsibility for providing the
regime with all the credit it needed belonged
to Hjalmar Schacht, who was appointed head of
the Reichsbank by Hitler when the incumbent
showed reluctance to abandon orthodox financial
practice. Hitler in February 1933 secretly
explained to the army generals and to the Nazi
elite that the solution to Germany’s problems
could be found only in the conquest of territory
in the east. It is clear that Hitler did not expect
France simply to stand by and allow Germany to
aggrandise its power in the east. ‘I will grind
France to powder’, he told the visiting prime
minister of Hungary in June 1933. But until a
superior German military strength could be built
up, Hitler explained to his henchmen, he would
have to talk the language of peace.
Deeds were more convincing than words. In
October 1933, in a deliberately aimed blow at the
League of Nations, Germany withdrew from the
disarmament conference at Geneva and from the
League of Nations as well. Hitler then sought
approval by a plebiscite and claimed in November
that 95 per cent of the German people had
expressed their approval in the ballot box. While
he exaggerated the manipulated vote, he did
secure overwhelming approval, the people were
elated by Hitler’s handling of this aspect of the
Versailles Diktat – Germany would no longer be
pushed around. What followed? An outburst of
anger by the other powers? Talk of sanctions? The
British government decided Germany should be
conciliated and coaxed back to Geneva, and put
pressure on the French to make concessions.
Hitler’s priorities in 1933 and 1934 were
clear: first rearmament and conscription, then a
Nazi takeover in Austria and the return of the
Saar, and at home the consolidation of power.
Although Hitler’s next diplomatic move startled
Europe it was obvious Realpolitik. He wished to
weaken the two-front threat posed by the alliance
between Poland and France. And so in January
1934 he concluded a non-aggression pact with
Poland, thereby renouncing German claims to
Danzig and to the Polish corridor, the strip of
territory separating East Prussia from the rest
of Germany. It was no more than a temporary
expedient. It shows how little faith the Poles
placed in the French alliance. In April 1934 the
French broke off further disarmament discussions
with Germany. French political weakness at home
turned this apparently tough stand into an empty
gesture. French ministers were under no illusions
about Hitler’s intentions, but a preventive war
was again rejected. All that was left was diplomacy;
but the mood was profoundly pessimistic,
and although France would seek closer ties with
Britain, little headway was made until 1936.
The foreign minister, Louis Barthou, made a
determined effort for some months in 1934 to
revive France’s Eastern and Danubian alliances
and alignments of the 1920s and to couple this
pressure on Germany with the offer to bind
Germany to an ‘Eastern Locarno’, whereby the
Soviet Union, Germany, Poland, Czechoslovakia,
the Baltic states and Finland would all guarantee
each others’ territories and promise to assist one
another. This pact was to be linked to the League
of Nations. No one can deny that Barthou was a
man of real energy, but the idea of an ‘Eastern
Locarno’ was pure moonshine. Hitler had rather
cleverly pre-empted Poland’s possible involvement.
Poland preferred to maintain its own nonaggression
treaty with Russia and with Germany
and to retain a free hand. Hitler would not agree
either. Although he did not feel bound by treaties,
he preferred, for the sake of public feeling at home
and in order not to antagonise Germany’s neighbours
prematurely, to sign no unnecessary treaties
which he would have to break later on.
More promising was France’s rapprochements
in 1934 with Russia and with Italy, which were
to bear fruit in 1935. Barthou also sought to draw
closer to Yugoslavia. His diplomacy was tragically
cut short in October 1934 when he met King
Alexander in Marseilles. A Croat terrorist assassinated
both Alexander and Barthou, an event dramatically
captured by the newsreel cameras. His
successor, Pierre Laval, who was to play an infamous
role in the wartime Vichy government, in
1935 pursued Barthou’s policy skilfully. Barthou
had wooed Mussolini for Italy’s friendship and
even an alliance for France. In 1934 and 1935
this was a realistic aim – though Mussolini was
notoriously fickle and impulsive – but, militarily
speaking, the Italian alliance was of limited value.
Although Mussolini had hoped that Germany
would follow the fascist path of Italy, he was not
so sure about Hitler personally. Hitler, for his
part, admired the duce, who, so he thought was
trying to make something of the Italian people.
The duce was seen by Hitler as a ruthless man of
action who, like himself, believed in superior
force. His framed photograph stood on Hitler’s
desk in Munich. Mussolini’s admiration for Hitler
was not uncritical. He patronised him and sent
him advice; there were times when Mussolini suspected
Hitler might be mad. Many Italian fascists
naturally resented Germany’s emphasis on Nordic
racialism and the supposed superiority of lightskinned
blonds over swarthy Latins. In Italy there
was no tradition of anti-Semitism. Indeed, few
Jews lived there and some were prominent fascists.
In June 1934 Mussolini and Hitler met in
Venice. Mussolini stage-managed the whole visit
to impress Hitler with his superiority. Hitler
looked decidedly drab in a raincoat: the junior
partner. As they discussed the questions over
which German–Italian conflict might arise, the
agitation of the German-speaking inhabitants in
the South Tyrol and the future of the Austrian
Republic, Hitler said he was ready to abandon the
Germans of the South Tyrol in the interests of
Italian friendship, but Mussolini remained suspicious
as the irredentist movement was encouraged
by Nazi Party officials. More immediately serious
was Hitler’s pressure on Chancellor Engelbert
Dollfuss to resign and allow an internal takeover
by the Austrian Nazi movement. Dollfuss reacted
robustly. The Austrian Nazis were now conspiring
to seize power.
Austria, with a population of 6.5 million, was one
of Europe’s smallest nations. Some 3.5 million
former German Austrians were now subjects of
the Italians and the Czechs. Austria had not
exactly been created by the Allies at Paris; it consisted
of what was left of the Habsburg Empire
after the territories of all the successor states had
been shorn off. The Austrian state made very little
economic sense with its large capital in Vienna
and impoverished provinces incapable of feeding
the whole population. Economically the Republic
had been kept afloat only by loans arranged
through the League of Nations, whose representatives
supervised the government’s finances. The
depression had hit Austria particularly hard and
unemployment soared. Not surprisingly it was in
Vienna in 1931 that the general European
banking collapse began. This impoverished state
was also deeply divided politically and socially.
Austrian labour was united behind the Social
Democratic Party, which supported the parliamentary
constitution and rejected the solutions
both of revolutionary communism and of fascism.
On the right, supported by the Catholic Church,
stood the Christian Social Party and groups of
right-wing nationalist extremists. For a short
while from 1918 to 1920 the Social Democrats
had held power. After 1920, although the Social
Democrats maintained their strength they no
longer commanded an absolute majority. Except
for a year from 1929 to 1930, the Bürgerblock, a
coalition of Christian Socials and Nationalist and
pan-German parties, was in power until the
extinction of the multi-party system in 1934.
The only issue that united this coalition was a
common hatred of labour and socialism.
So deep were the political and social divisions
that the danger of civil war was always close. The
(Catholic) Christian Socials favoured authoritarian
solutions, and their fascist and Nazi allies set
up paramilitary organisations such as the SA, the
SS and the Heimwehr. The Social Democrats also
sought to defend themselves by enrolling armed
workers in a Republican Defence Corps. Meanwhile
many Austrians regarded their state as a
wholly artificial creation; loyalties were provincial
rather than national. There were many Austrians
who looked towards a union with Germany.
208 THE CONTINUING WORLD CRISIS, 1929–39
Austria’s internal problems were exacerbated by
its more powerful neighbours. Germany posed a
threat to its independence. But Mussolini would
defend Austrian independence only if Austria
modelled herself on the fascist state. He specifically
insisted that the Social Democrats should be
excluded from participation in politics. Dollfuss,
who became chancellor in May 1932, leant
increasingly on the duce’s support against the
Nazis. In the spring and summer he banned the
Communist Party, the Republican Defence Corps
and the Nazis, and a few months later, early in
1934, banned the Social Democrat Party as well.
The Social Democrats determined to oppose this
attack on their existence. They offered armed
resistance when their strongholds were attacked.
They were then brutally beaten into submission
during a brief civil war in February 1934. Democratic
Europe was particularly shocked by the
bombardment of the municipal blocks of flats
of the workers in Vienna. In fact, Dollfuss had
destroyed the one political force able to resist
the Nazis.
The Austrian Nazi conspiracy to take over
power came to fruition in July 1934. The Nazis
seized the government buildings in Vienna and
forced their way into Dollfuss’s office and there
murdered him. Although Dollfuss had lost much
of the support of the ordinary people, few rallied
to the Nazis. The coup failed. Kurt Schuschnigg
was appointed chancellor and promised to continue
the policies of Dollfuss. Whether Hitler had
connived at this Nazi conspiracy and, if so, how
far remains uncertain. But, coming as it did just
a month after his visit to Venice, Mussolini was
outraged and rushed troops to the Brenner frontier,
warning Hitler not to interfere in Austria.
For a few years longer Austria survived.
In Britain, the growing turbulence in Europe and
in Asia alarmed even a government as committed
to pacific solutions as that led by Ramsay
MacDonald. Even before Hitler had come to
power, the famous ‘ten-year rule’ was scrapped.
It had been adopted in 1919 to save on armaments
expenditure and postulated that such
expenditure should be based on the assumption
that there would be no war for ten years. But
there was no real move to rearm for several years
after 1932. Throughout the 1920s and in the
1930s, too, every British government, Labour
and Conservative, believed that to spend money
on arms would worsen Britain’s economic plight,
making it weaker and less able to resist aggression.
It was a perverse and paradoxical conclusion.
In February 1933, the Cabinet was informed of
the gross military deficiency on land, sea and air
caused by a decade of inadequate finance, but the
chancellor of the exchequer and future prime
minister, Neville Chamberlain, replied, ‘today
financial and economic risks are far the most
serious and urgent that the country has to face
. . . other risks have to be run until the country
has had time and opportunity to recuperate and
our financial situation to improve’. The depression
was Hitler’s best ally. When Churchill, in
Parliament, attacked the government’s neglect of
Britain’s security, especially in the air, Anthony
Eden, under secretary of state at the Foreign
Office, replied that the solution was to persuade
the French to disarm so that Germany would
limit its rearmament. Otherwise ‘they could not
secure for Europe that period of appeasement
which is needed’. And, speaking in Birmingham,
Chamberlain added:
it is our duty by every effort we can make, by
every influence we can exert, to compose differences,
and to act as mediators to try and
devise methods by which other countries may
be delivered from this great menace of war.
These speeches from the government side in
1933 encapsulate the main tenets of British policy
over the next few years.
Too little was done for defence. The great fear
was that the new form of aerial warfare would
lead to devastation and huge civilian casualties.
German superiority in the air could thus become
a potent form of blackmail. Increased defence
spending was accordingly concentrated on the air
force. Curiously, though, it was spent not on
defensive fighter planes but on bombers. The
thinking behind this was that the ‘bombers would
always get through’ anyway. The only credible
form of defence was to build up a deterrent
bomber force that could carry the war to the
enemy. Deterrence was preferable to war. In the
Far East, the construction of the Singapore naval
base was resumed, even though neglect of the
British fleet meant that there would be few warships
to send east if trouble simultaneously
occurred in Europe. Worst affected by the parsimony
of defence expenditure was the British
army. In the event of war, only a token force
could be despatched to France. This limited military
commitment to the defence of the European
continent was adhered to by governments and
critics until 1939. The main burden of containing
Germany on land would rest on the French.
British foreign policy followed its own logic.
Both France and Germany needed to be restrained.
Britain would mediate between them.
Even though Hitler secretly and openly defied
treaties, Britain would go far to conciliate
Germany and assure it that ‘reasonable’ rearmament
would be acceptable to the other powers.
When Eden visited Berlin in February 1934 he
attempted to persuade Hitler to return to the
League, and thought him sincere in wishing to
conclude a disarmament convention. Eden’s
policy was to gain Hitler’s signature to a treaty
which would permit German rearmament but
also, by its very provisions, place a limit on it.
When the British government in July 1934
announced rearmament in the air, the search for
an Anglo-German agreement did not slacken.
Hitler was outwardly cautious during the six
months from the summer of 1934, which opened
with the failure of the Nazis in Austria and ended
in January 1935 with the holding of the plebiscite
in the Saar which would decide that region’s
future.
The Saar was ‘brought home’ to the Reich by
votes through the ballot box and not by force,
under the supervision of the League of Nations.
Dr Goebbels had, however, mounted a propaganda
campaign and so helped to ensure a Nazi
‘yes’ vote of 90 per cent. Hitler’s prestige was
further enhanced.
In the spring of 1935 Hitler was simply
waiting for a good opportunity to announce the
reintroduction of conscription and Germany’s
open repudiation of the military restrictions of the
Versailles Treaty. Everyone, of course, already
knew that they had been ‘secretly’ broken for
years. Indeed, a British defence White Paper, published
in March 1935, which justified modest
British rearmament by referring to Germany’s
‘illegal’ rearmament, provided the kind of pretext
Hitler sought. It was followed by the approval of
the French Chamber on 15 March 1935 to
extend military service from one to two years. On
the very next day Hitler sprang a ‘Saturday surprise’,
proclaimed conscription in Germany and
‘revealed’ the existence of the Luftwaffe. Britain’s
reaction was characteristically weak. Sir John
Simon, the foreign secretary, and Anthony Eden,
minister for League affairs, hastened to Berlin to
exchange views with Hitler. The Führer was now
ready to receive them. With conscription in the
bag, Hitler could afford to be affable. Britain’s
conciliatory gesture vitiated the meeting of the
Locarno powers at Stresa a short while later in
April 1935. Hitler’s unilateral breach of Versailles
and Locarno was condemned and the need to
uphold treaties spelt out in the final communiqué.
Significantly Mussolini had lined up with Britain
and France and not with Germany. The League
then joined in the condemnation.
If Hitler was impressed by this united front –
and there is no reason to believe he was much –
any apprehensions he might have felt were soon
dispelled by the British government. Without consulting
its French ally, Britain signified that
Germany could also breach the Versailles limitations
on its naval development by concluding the
Anglo-German Naval Agreement in June 1935.
This now permitted Germany to develop its formidable
‘Pocket’ battleships and submarines; all
Germany undertook was not to construct a fleet
whose total tonnage would exceed 35 per cent of
the combined fleets of the British Commonwealth.
Even so this treaty also held out the
eventual prospect of equality with Britain in submarines.
Hitler did not have to push to open
doors, they were flung open for him. Already
Hitler was considering his next step, the remilitarisation
of the Rhineland in violation of that part
of the Versailles Treaty that France held dear as a
guarantee of its own security.
Had he moved in the summer of 1935 he
would almost certainly have got away with that too
– but the cautious streak in his make-up gained the
upper hand. There would be a much better opportunity
in 1936 when Mussolini was looking for
German support instead of opposing it.
The Stresa meeting in April 1935 was not
only concerned with Germany. Mussolini was,
himself, planning a breach of the League Covenant,
at Abyssinia’s expense. The French were
willing to connive at Mussolini’s aggression.
They were searching for a diplomatic bargain to
gain Mussolini’s support against Hitler. Foreign
Minister Laval had paved the way when he visited
Rome in January 1935. Mussolini and Laval
then agreed that France and Italy would check
Hitler’s militaristic ambitions. On the question
of Abyssinia, Laval appears to have reassured the
duce that France would not impede Italy. But at
Stresa Mussolini was left in no doubt about the
strength of British public feeling if Italy should
attack Abyssinia. The final Stresa communiqué,
which upheld the sanctity of treaties and condemned
Germany’s breach of them, carefully
avoided reference to any but European conflicts.
What was left undone was more important. The
powers realised that Hitler’s next step would be
to remilitarise the Rhineland. But the three Stresa
powers, Italy, Britain and France, took no
decisions on how this threat might be met in
time. The British government remained anxious
to conciliate.
In the autumn of 1935 Europe’s attention was
fixed not on Hitler but on Mussolini’s war of
aggression waged against Abyssinia, the practically
defenceless kingdom of Emperor Haile
Selassie. Mussolini felt he had adequately prepared
the ground diplomatically with France and
Britain and that in view of the German danger,
which he exploited, the two democracies would
acquiesce. The British government, he believed,
would defy pro-League outbursts of public
opinion. But Mussolini had miscalculated the
British government’s resolve in an election year.
Throughout 1935 he built up a huge army, eventually
reaching 650,000 men, with modern
weapons and poison gas, to overcome the
Abyssinian tribesmen. On 3 October 1935 he
launched his war on Abyssinia. The Italian army
after some initial success became bogged down.
The democratic world admired the plucky resistance
of the underdog. At Geneva the League
condemned Italy as an aggressor and voted for
sanctions. But sanctions were not rigidly imposed
nor did they include oil, necessary to fuel Italy’s
war machine. In any case Italy had stockpiled oil
in Africa in expectation of sanctions. Sanctions
proved an irritant, the main result of which was
to create a patriotic reaction in Italy itself.
In Britain in June 1935, Ramsay MacDonald
finally retired and Stanley Baldwin became prime
minister. Sir Samuel Hoare, who replaced Sir John
Simon at the Foreign Office, conferred with Laval
in December 1935 on partition plans of Abyssinia
which, it was hoped, would bring the war to an
end through secret mediation between Mussolini
and the Abyssinians. The so-called Hoare–Laval
Pact was a ‘compromise’ plan which would have
given Mussolini a large part of Abyssinia. He
might well have accepted such a solution but
when the French leaked the agreement, in Britain
there was a great public protest that the League
was being betrayed and the aggressor rewarded.
The British Cabinet, finding itself in an embarrassing
position after fighting an election on the
issue of support for the League, placed the blame
on Hoare and refused to endorse the proposals he
and Laval had agreed upon. Hoare resigned on 19
December 1935. That is how Anthony Eden, who
had himself favoured compromise, now inherited
the Foreign Office.
Mussolini resumed his military campaign, and
his troops occupied Addis Ababa in May 1936.
The war was being conducted in the most barbarous
fashion. The Abyssinians had no means of
defence against air attack or poison gas. The brutality
of the Italian occupation and the suppression
of tribesmen still resisting in 1937 was a
precursor of Nazi terror in occupied Europe
during the Second World War. Thousands of
defenceless Abyssinians were massacred, while
Haile Selassie made his dignified protests in
Geneva. The war had brought Mussolini cheap
glory, but it also isolated him and drove him to
seek closer relations with Germany.
The disunity of the ‘Stresa front’ made Hitler’s
next move, the remilitarisation of the Rhineland,
even less risky than it appeared to be. Hitler later
was to call his boldness in March 1936 the
turning point when he had ‘bluffed’ the French.
It was not a real turning point, but just another
step along the road he had already successfully
followed. Hitler was looking for a new pretext.
The Franco-Soviet pact, concluded in 1934, provided
it. When the French Chamber ratified the
treaty, Hitler on 7 March 1936 declared it to be
contrary to the Locarno Treaties and ordered the
Wehrmacht to move into the demilitarised zone
of the Rhineland. In its final timing Hitler’s move
came as a surprise, but the occupation of the
Rhineland had been anticipated and discussed.
French ministers were clear they could not react
with anything but immediate protests and, later
on, possible recourse to the machinery of League
sanctions. The chief of the army general staff,
General Maurice Gamelin, insisted that no military
moves were possible without prior fullscale
mobilisation, placing more than 1 million
Frenchmen under arms. He pointed out to the
French ministers that there was no immediate
striking force available. The British, meanwhile,
were not prepared to consider mere German
troop movements into the Rhineland zone as sufficient
reason for a military counterstroke.
Thus France, rent by internal conflict, could
not, and Britain would not, consider stopping
Hitler. Hitler, for his part, was careful to enter
the Rhineland with only a small force of lightly
armed Wehrmacht troops. Rather like rearmament,
the open remilitarisation of the Rhineland
had been preceded by ‘secret’ remilitarisation as
the so-called ‘police’ already stationed in the
demilitarised zone were, in fact, trained infantry.
The total force of ‘police’ and Wehrmacht
amounted to less than 40,000 men and could not
possibly threaten France.
But Hitler was not bluffing. He had no intention
of accepting defeat had the French marched.
It is a myth that all that was required to humiliate
Hitler in March 1936 was a French show of
strength. In the hastily drawn-up final war plans,
the German troops were to withdraw as far as the
Ruhr and there to stay and fight. But in view of
earlier French political and military decisions it
was obvious that the only French countermoves
would be diplomatic.
These countermoves were handled with skill
by the French foreign minister, Pierre Flandin.
He proposed to the British that economic and
military sanctions be applied to force Hitler to
withdraw. But Eden was looking for mediation.
The British Cabinet had ruled out force. Flandin’s
sanction plan raised the spectre of war with
Germany. Tortuous negotiations in London and
Geneva did not this time end entirely without
result. The expected League condemnation was
the usual empty gesture. But Flandin extracted
from the British government an avowal that
Britain still stood by its Locarno commitment to
France and Belgium. The British Cabinet had
been pushed by the French further than it wished
to go in the direction of a strictly defensive Anglo-
French alliance backed up by staff talks in place
of the more flexible Locarno agreements. There
was now a much closer Anglo-French alignment
and Britain began to rearm, though still at far too
slow a pace. On the debit side, Belgium reverted
to absolute neutrality.
The year 1936 was to be the year of international
goodwill. Berlin was host to the Olympic
Games that year. Defiance of treaties and the
Nürnberg Laws proved no obstacle to the
holding of the games in Berlin. Hitler wanted the
world to come to Berlin and admire the National
Socialist state. No effort was spared to make the
games a spectacular success. For the duration of
the games anti-Jewish propaganda was toned
down in Berlin. Hitler, moreover, assured the
Olympic Committee that there would be no discrimination
between ‘Aryans’ and ‘non-Aryans’, a
promise he did not keep as far as German Jewish
athletes were concerned. It was of course discomfiting
that the outstanding athlete of the
games was the African American Jesse Owens.
Nazi commentators explained this success,
embarrassing to racial doctrines of superiority, by
stressing that black people were racially lower in
the scale of development, closer to a state of
nature, like animals and hence faster. For Hitler
the holding of the games in Berlin served as an
international recognition of his regime.
World History
