1938 (29 page)

Ten thousand people are reported to have visited it on its first day, and 350,000 saw it before it was taken down at the end of September. By September the number of visitors had declined to around 2,000 daily. The organizers nonetheless asked Bürckel if they could keep it open, particularly as it was the start of the new school year. From the capital of the Ostmark, the exhibition took off on its travels again. The Quaker Robert Yarnall saw it on his visit to Germany that winter. It was “the same as in Vienna—a terrible display of demagoguery—one felt like taking a shower bath after coming out, in order to wash away the impressions. [There was] just enough truth in it to make it take hold of the people.” The London
Times
claimed the exhibition was the inspiration behind attacks on Jews in the city’s cafés and could only add to their despair.

On August 17, the Party forced Jews to adopt the middle names of Israel (for men) and Sarah (for women). From then on, Jews would no longer be able to use Gentile names, and Gentiles had to forgo the use of Jewish ones. The list of names was drawn up by Counsellor Globke in the Ministry of the Interior. There were certain exceptions, such as Peter, Julius, Elisabeth, Marie, or Charlotte, as they had been wholly assimilated; Julius was Streicher’s name; others, like Joseph and Jakob, were not mentioned. Joseph was Goebbels’s Christian name and that of the Reichskommissar for Austria, Bürckel. Old Testament names were nonetheless discouraged, and it was deemed that Sepp was better than Josef, Jutta preferable to Judith, and Jochen less questionable than Joachim.

Three days later, the various Jewish organizations became the Central Office for Jewish Emigration in the old Rothschild palace in the Prinz-Eugen Strasse. The aim was to expedite the business at an even greater speed. The jumpy Swiss responded by once again closing their border. The Swiss action occasioned a limp British protest. The next day the British press reported that 30,000 now had permission to leave Austria but had no visas to enter another country. This was celebrated in a Fips cartoon, which showed a Jew sitting in a wastepaper basket, where he offered comparison to the contents. Another showed a Jew being grabbed by a Brobdingnagian hand at the frontier: They could leave, but not without observing the formalities. On August 12, the pope had spoken out in favor of tolerance for Jews and “colored people.” The following day Vienna thrilled to the news of the trial of a Dr. Kurt Popper, who had tried to reach the Czech border with his wife and mother on the night of March 11 and had nearly run over a gendarme on the Prague Road. It had been discovered that he was also concealing assets in a Zurich bank account. He was sent to prison for two months.

Hitler was aware of dissent within his army, but he was determined not to let it stand in his way. His dissatisfaction with his army may have contributed to the decision, made that August, to allow Himmler to upgrade the armed force within the SS organization. The “Waffen-SS” or “SS in arms” were to be modern, political soldiers and under the ultimate control of Hitler himself. Their aim was to eliminate the ideological enemies of the Reich: Jews, freemasons, Marxists, and the Church. The army was to have no access to their command structure.

On August 9, Goebbels found Hitler poring over a map once again, dividing Czechoslovakia up into Nazi
Gaue
. Hitler quarreled with Brauchitsch, who was in broad agreement with Beck over Germany’s readiness to engage in a major European war. Brauchitsch could have had little doubt by now of Hitler’s expansionist dreams. Talking to him about the Balkans later that month, Hitler said, “We don’t want these people, we want their land.” The next day, he summoned a conference at the Berghof from which most of the senior generals were excluded. The younger men gave Hitler little solace. It appeared that some of them also sided with Beck and thought that Germany could not fight a long war yet. Hitler cursed his generals, young and old.

Artillery exercises on the old Prussian ranges at Juterbog five days after the Berghof meeting were taken as another opportunity to show the reluctant senior generals that Hitler was right about the feasibility of invading Czechoslovakia and they were wrong. Beck thought Brauchitsch might have seized the moment to drive home the army’s point of view, but he lacked the courage. Nevertheless, Beck honored his threat and resigned on the 18th. For reasons of state, Hitler required Beck to keep his resignation a secret until October 31. The opposition could gain nothing from the éclat. At the Foreign Office, Weizsäcker and the Kordt brothers thought Beck had played his last card too soon. The Bavarian general Franz Halder took his place from September 1.

Hitler encountered resistance from another Bavarian general, Wilhelm Adam, who made no secret of his misgivings about the possibility of bringing France and Britain into a war over Czechoslovakia. Adam rode the storm for a while, even after an explosive meeting at the West Wall, which he was in charge of building as regional military commander. Hitler told him he was doing it all wrong and assaulted him with a barrage of statistics about the rival strengths of various European armies, some of which were correct (but only some). Adam pointed out that if Germany was so well prepared, and the Western Allies so little of a threat, there was little point in building the wall in the first place. Meanwhile ordinary Germans became increasingly aware that war was in the offing, as more and more people were being dispatched to help build the wall. Adam was stripped of his command in November.

Göring was increasingly worried about Hitler’s bellicose policy, and it was rumored that fatherhood had rendered the Luftwaffe chief dovelike. On the 18th he was given the job of pacifying the gauleiters who had gotten wind of Hitler’s plans, although his heart cannot have been in it. Even Goebbels was for a short war. The German people would not stand for more than that: “We must aim for surprise victories.” Göring spent five hours alone with Hitler at the Berghof on the last day of the month. The upshot was a message sent in a roundabout way to the U.S. State Department, transmitted via Göring’s chief economic advisor, Helmut Wohltat, and Edgar Mowrer of the
Chicago Daily News
: A highly placed gentleman in Berlin wished to know that if Germany were to lose another war, would Britain and America combine to prevent France from imposing an even more draconian peace? It was Göring’s first peace feeler; there would be more in 1939.

THE CZECH Crisis was now causing international concern. In some circles in Britain the mood was shifting from appeasement to confrontation. In the Foreign Office, Sir Robert Vansittart felt that the moment had come to strike. On August 7 he wrote a memorandum calling for an emergency cabinet meeting to discuss Czechoslovakia. The intelligence he was receiving from Germany showed that an invasion was imminent. To prevent the mistakes committed by the British government in the weeks prior to the First World War, the prime minister needed to make a crystal-clear statement of intent—otherwise Europe would plunge into war. His plea fell on deaf ears. In early August, Vansittart sent an emissary to the resister Goerdeler, who reported back that Hitler was mad and his successes had made him believe he was God. The only man with any influence on him was Himmler. Meanwhile Germany was heading for bankruptcy, as they could no longer afford their rearmament program.

Trouble was brewing elsewhere. Catchpool had been in the former German town of Memel in Lithuania and visited the German political prisoners in the jails. Germany had been hoping to take Memel back when the bad relations between the Warsaw and Kovno governments degenerated into war. Catchpool sent Vansittart a report, claiming that there had been an improvement in the position, but he thought that the German Memelländer might well want more: “Probably Anschluss,” excited by the “tireless propaganda of the Nazi Party, which here as elsewhere is determined to prevent the consolidation of any position won by a foreign country at Germany’s expense as a result of the war.”

Both before and after war broke out in September 1939, the British government was visited by a number of unaccredited German emissaries: men and women generally representing the German opposition, but who left the British government in a state of perplexity as to what they actually wanted. Possibly the confusion resulted from a lack of desire to learn or listen. One of these was Ewald von Kleist-Schmenzin, who had made no bones about his feelings about Hitler and who had seen the insides of the Führer’s prisons. His usefulness to the opposition was severely limited, as he was closely watched as soon as he left his Pomeranian estate. Already in May Canaris and Oster had made Kleist aware of the situation: Hitler was extremely vulnerable if he wanted to make war on the Czechs. A few hours later Kleist relayed this to the journalist Ian Colvin. Colvin needed to tell the British that they had to stand firm and not waver when it came to German demands.

At the beginning of August Kleist reported Beck’s message back to Colvin: “Through yielding to Hitler . . . the British government will lose its two main allies here, the German General Staff and the German people. If you can bring me positive proof from London that the British will make war if we invade Czechoslovakia I will make an end of this regime.” Kleist wanted to know what the proof was. “An open pledge to assist Czechoslovakia in the event of war.”

On August 16, Ambassador Henderson let Whitehall know that Kleist was coming to London. Detailed plans were drawn up, and Kleist arrived the next day armed with a false passport obtained for him by Canaris. In London Kleist met Halifax’s friend Lord Lloyd, chairman of the British Council, and explained that Britain needed to take a firm stand and the opposition would remove Hitler. Kleist told him that all the German generals were opposed to the invasion. Lloyd took the story to Halifax, and Kleist then had a meeting with Vansittart.

Once again Vansittart missed the point. Kleist was in favor of a territorial link between Pomerania and East Prussia. This was not currently a Nazi cause, but it had always been a German national one, ever since the land between the two provinces was taken away at Versailles to give the Poles a path to the sea. Kleist had no truck with Hitler’s claims to the Sudetenland, however, and thought that Prussia and Austria had nothing in common. Hitler was “Revenge for Königgrätz.” Hitler was not asking for the Corridor, and that would take the wind out of his sails. Deny him Sudetenland, but make the much more popular move of altering the Polish frontier. Goerdeler had burned his boats with Vansittart by supporting the cause of the Sudeten Germans who wanted to be part of the Reich. The Corridor was a cause close to Kleist’s heart; he was a Pomeranian landowner after all.

Kleist’s next appointment was with Winston Churchill. Kleist told Churchill the generals needed encouragement, but once again Kleist insisted on the Corridor. Churchill thought the idea of the restoration of prewar German borders inopportune but nonetheless wrote Kleist a letter of support to show his German friends; it went to Berlin in the diplomatic bag. Kleist passed it on to Canaris, and the German foreign office edited it for internal use. It spoke of the inevitability of war, a war in which Germany would be “utterly and terribly defeated.”

Chamberlain obstinately maintained that there was no opposition to Hitler in Germany. In a handwritten note to Halifax about Kleist, he made his now infamous disparaging remark that compared the anti-Nazis with the Jacobites at the court of Louis XIV: “We must discount a good deal of what he said” and duly reported to Canaris. Two days later Sir Nevile Henderson was summoned back to London for a meeting. He conferred with Chamberlain, Halifax, Sir Horace Wilson, and Vansittart. It was now that Henderson suggested direct talks between Chamberlain and Hitler. It was decided that Germany should be admonished, but Chamberlain was for a “softly, softly” approach, the one he would demonstrate at Berchtesgaden, Bad Godesberg, and Munich.

The opposition was increasingly worried. On the 27th, the Sudeten leader Karl Hermann Frank told the General Staff officer Helmuth Groscurth what he had probably gleaned from Henlein, that Hitler was bent on war and that Hitler had heaped insult on Beneš, saying that he wanted to catch him alive and hang him in person. Hitler boasted that Britain would stay neutral. Meanwhile the younger of the two Kordt brothers, Erich, had been working on the French journalist Pierre Maillaud in an attempt to influence French policy, and in Moscow he was in contact with Hans von Herwarth, the private secretary of Ambassador Werner von der Schulenburg. Herwarth was leaking information to the diplomatic community in the Soviet capital. Wilhelmstrasse officials like Kordt, Albrecht von Kessel, and Edward von Selzam did their level best to influence foreign diplomats, but their efforts were dismissed by Sir Nevile Henderson—and probably many others—as “a lot of treason.” Many believed siding with this strange array of upper-class emissaries, many of whom were asking for large-scale territorial adjustments, was considered risky. Hitler was the bulwark against Bolshevism, and the removal of the bulwark might mean civil war and a victory by the Left.