1938
Authors: Giles MacDonogh
Table of Contents
CHAPTER FOUR - APRIL, MAY, JUNE
Praise for
1938
“Historian Giles MacDonogh chronicles Adolf Hitler’s consolidation of power over the course of one year. Until 1938, Hitler could be dismissed as a ruthless but efficient dictator, a problem to Germany alone; after 1938 he was clearly a threat to the entire world.”
—
Washington Times
“A fine book . . . well-written, combining its diverse sources with elegance and skill, and painting an engaging canvas of the disaster that was developing in Germany and was soon to engulf Europe as a whole. . . . [Giles MacDonogh’s] searing descriptions of the fate endured by Austrian Jewry—from expropriation, casual cruelty, and exile, to calculated persecution and murder—are especially impassioned and moving. . . . It ably conveys the growing desperation and alarm felt by many that year, as Germany began to flex its muscles internationally and stepped up its persecution of its perceived enemies.”
—
BBC History Magazine
“In 1938, MacDonogh writes, Hitler hadn’t yet become the allpowerful Führer who would soon march through Poland and send six millions Jews to the death camps. . . . There’s no real answer to MacDonogh’s “What if?” question, but one thing is clear: Hitler’s extremism grew steadily stronger each time the rest of the world feigned blindness and looked the other away.”
—
New York Post
“[MacDonogh] is able to mine dozens of sources in German . . . [which] help us understand the roots of genocide. The book is excellent on the details of how the Nazis turned on the Jews.”
—
Literary Review
“[MacDonogh] uses new sources to flesh out his narrative and within each month he includes verbal snapshots showing different events unfolding. He is particularly good when discussing the Nazi takeover of Austria and of Vienna in particular. He also sheds much new light on the role of the Church of England’s parishes in Austria. Poignancy is added to this superb book because Mr. MacDonogh’s maternal grandparents were Viennese Jews.”
—
Contemporary Review
“Adolf Hitler was a natural gambler, and this book graphically describes the critical year of 1938 when his winning streak took off. . . . Harrowing.”
—
Edinburgh Evening News
“This micro-focus is chillingly effective. . . . The author is at his best when interweaving individuals’ experiences with the incremental machinery of Nazi persecution. . . . This is a scholarly, highly readable work which makes a fresh and valuable contribution . . . ”
—
The Journal of Military History
“An accessible chronicle of crisis and atrocity that should especially interest readers who want to review the gathering storm of World War II.”
—
Booklist
“This well-researched, fine-grained study sketches the moral rot that made possible Hitler’s rise.”
—
Publishers Weekly
“This is not a traditional history based on dry archival sources or details about who said or did what and when. . . . Interesting and easy to read, this is recommended for avid general readers of World War II history.”
—
Library Journal
“[A] careful, thoughtful and wholly fascinating month-by-month account of the countdown to war.”
—
Jewish Journal of Los Angeles
“A powerful, disturbing and invaluable analysis of the events in 1938 that enabled Hitler to unleash the full force of his insanity and destruction on the world.”
—
Shelf Awareness
“A chilling examination of a critical year in European history.”
—
Kirkus
“Giles MacDonogh is quickly becoming a must-read historian for me. . . . His great writing style draws the reader into the horrible events he is discussing. His research, to my inexperienced eye, seems top-notch, and he brings it all together to create a powerful book.
1938
is well worth your time.”
—
Curled Up with a Good Book
For Augi
Wiedergefunden
Ich ging dann nach draußen, wo die Sterne funkelten und die
Abschüsse am Himmel wetterleuchteten. Die ewigen Zeichen
und Male—der Große Wagen, der Orion, die Wega, das Siebengestirn,
der Gürtel der Milchstraße—was sind wir Menschen
und unsere Erdenjahre vor diesem Glanz? Was ist unsere
flüchtige Qual? Um Mitternacht, bei Lärm der Zecher, gedachte
ich lebhaft meiner Lieben und fühlte, wie auch ihre
Grüße durchdrangen.
—ERNST JÜNGER,
DECEMBER 31, 1942
The year 1938 was one of cataclysmal change for Germany. On January 1, the Reich was administered by a right-wing coalition led by the chancellor, Adolf Hitler, and dominated by members of the Nazi Party. The army had sworn a personal oath of allegiance to Hitler, but its commanders had managed to retain a degree of independence. The country lay confined within borders decreed by the Treaty of Versailles nearly twenty years before. Hitler so far had contented himself with policing his own house and grabbing back the Demilitarized Zone in the Rhineland. He had yet to pursue any foreign adventures. Although stripped of their roles in German public life, Jews were still allowed to possess their own property, and many continued to lead relatively normal lives. They were evidently in no hurry to leave.
By New Year’s Day 1939, everything had changed: The non-Nazis had been purged of all but a few insignificant roles in government; Hitler had assumed total control of the armed forces; Germany had invaded Austria and the German-speaking areas of Czechoslovakia; Jews had been robbed, beaten, and imprisoned, and many had been driven into penurious exile. Hundreds had been killed. Hitler emerged
deus ex machina
, with all the powers of the Nazi regime consolidated in his own person. And worse was to come. That Germans felt an increase in stress and anxiety during those twelve months is borne out by one telling statistic: Their consumption of strong alcohol doubled in the course of the year.
We now remember 1938 above all for the Munich Agreement, that moment at the end of September in which Western leaders apparently gave in to the Führer’s demands. Peace was hanging by a thread: Hitler had launched his second foreign “gamble,” and French and British statesmen met their Fascist counterparts in a bid to avoid war. Czechoslovakia was sacrificed for the sake of détente.
We are also painfully aware of the condition of much of Europe by May 1945: a collection of smoldering ruins filled with fresh or festering corpses. In the intervening years between 1938 and 1945, some 50 million people died violent deaths. There is, however, a danger in hindsight; it would be unfair to seek to draw a direct line between the two, for the line is not straight at all. Before the outbreak of war in 1939, no one could have accurately predicted the depths to which Nazi Germany would sink by the end.
Nonetheless the events that took place in 1938 make it easy to reach the conclusion that Hitler had already mapped out the entire series of conquests by which he had regained the old imperial German borders in the east and more besides. We need to avoid racing to conclusions. Hitler could be more pragmatic than his writings and public utterances suggest, and rather than conducting his activities based on a master plan, he was probably simply hoping to get as much as he could without fighting the great powers. If all went well, and the West made no trouble, other territories might fall into his lap. It was only in the spring of 1939, for example, that he began to make plans to take the Polish Corridor by force, after the Poles refused to concede the territory of Danzig to the Reich.
It is similarly tempting to connect the injustice and violence directed against Austria and Germany’s Jews in 1938 with the industrialized slaughter of the Final Solution. Nazi antisemitism certainly took a new turn in 1938, but it would be difficult to argue that by then plans had been drawn up to murder the Jews in specially created camps in east-central Europe. Some would say that Hitler had already made up his mind by January 30, 1939, when he delivered a notorious speech to celebrate the sixth anniversary of the Nazi takeover. Nevertheless, he had to find a means of putting his thoughts into action, and even then, German leaders were remarkably sensitive to foreign opinion. It is more likely that the speech, with its prophecies of Jewish suffering, was a warning to the United States that there would be trouble for the Jews if they continued to stifle German trade and rob the country of the foreign currency it so desperately needed to survive.
Words like
vernichten
(exterminate) and
ausrotten
(wipe out) came easily to Hitler’s lips. As a frontline soldier in the Great War, he had personally experienced the effects of poison gas, but even by the end of 1938 it was unlikely that he had considered using it on his racial enemies. Wartime conditions vastly accelerated the Nazis’ as yet unformulated projects, and only when the smoke was thick enough to obscure the activities of the zealots in the extermination camps did massive troop deployment, inadequate communications, inurement to violence and death, together with casualties on an unprecedented scale, all help remove the last moral barriers to genocide.
Yet 1938 was
the
crucial year in the history of Nazi Germany before Europe tumbled into war. Every month resounded with shocks or sensations: the Blomberg-Fritsch crisis in January, which shook faith in the armed forces; the end of cabinet government in February; the Anschluss in March, which melded Austria to the Reich; the plebiscite in April, which revealed overwhelming support for the Führer; Hitler’s trip to Rome in May, which laid the keel of a proper alliance with Mussolini; the Evian Conference in July, which revealed that the countries opposing Hitler’s racial policies were not prepared to put their money where their mouths were; the Kendrick Crisis in August, which destroyed the British intelligence network in Germany; Chamberlain’s visits to Berchtesgaden and Bad Godesberg in September, followed by the notorious Munich conference; the occupation of the Sudetenland in October and, later that month, the expulsion of the Polish Jews from the Reich; Goebbels’s re-creation of a medieval pogrom in November’s Reichskristallnacht. While the Jews repaired their broken homes and shops in December, the kindertransports began to ferry their children to safety.
In 1938, the blood was scarcely cold on the battlefields of the Great War, and few people were ready for more—yet in the course of those twelve months, Hitler, Hermann Göring, and Joachim von Ribbentrop prodded the West’s defenses and found out how thin they were. They gambled, and with each easy victory they decided they could push even further. Hitler’s eyes were already searching, but for the time being he was looking to the southeast. In his mind, Germany required
Lebensraum
(living space), raw materials, and industry. It was Austria and Czechoslovakia that appealed to him at the beginning of 1938, not right-wing Poland, where many people abhorred the Jews as much as he did and which was still a useful bulwark against Bolshevik Russia.
In 1938 the deportation of the Reich’s Jews began in earnest. Germany gained experience in forcible expulsion: with the October eviction of the Polish Jews and with Reichskristallnacht two weeks later. Following the pogrom of November 9–10, as many as 30,000 Jews were shoved into the concentration camps, which Himmler had been extending and expanding all year. This was the first large-scale, organized strike against the Jews of the Altreich—as Germany north of the former Austro-German border on the river Inn was now called. A few thousand rich Austrian Jews had been languishing in Dachau and Buchenwald since April. The aim was to speed up emigration, but it also oiled the cogs of a machine that would be used again and again once war began. And when that happened the end result was mostly murder.