The Last Lion Box Set: Winston Spencer Churchill, 1874 - 1965 (185 page)

Although ill served by ministers who refused to recognize the truth, the British public, enjoying a free press, was aware of some of the more flagrant abuses in the Third Reich. On May 10, 1933, Nazis had celebrated their contempt for learning by building an enormous bonfire of books, incinerating all works on psychology and philosophy and all written by Jews, socialists, and liberals. On July 1 Nazi fliers began dropping leaflets and urging all Austrians to support the country’s tiny Nazi party in plans to overthrow the government of Engelbert Dollfuss, which, though Fascist, had come to office through free elections. If that didn’t work, Hitler confided to subordinates, he would have Dollfuss killed.

On July 14 the Reich chancellor dissolved the coalition of parties which had brought him to power. Any political speech or pamphlet not endorsed by the Nazis was verboten. Of Germany’s three greatest newspapers, the 230-year-old
Vossische Zeitung
, comparable to
The Times
of London and the
New York Times
, was forced to close; the
Berliner Tageblatt
’s Jewish owner was driven out of business, and the
Frankfurter Zeitung
’s editorial hierarchy, largely Jewish, was replaced by Nazis.
Völkischer Beobachter
and
Der Angriff
, the two official Nazi organs, glorified Nazi street terrorists and ran flattering front-page pictures of those responsible for the desecration of synagogues. Germans who protested Nazi outrages were sent to Dachau or other, newer stockades. Teachers were told in the official publication of their profession,
Der Deutsche Erzieher
, that
Mein Kampf
was their “
unfehlbarer Leitstern
” (“infallible star”). Those who actually read the book could have had no doubts that the chancellor’s infallible star would eventually lead their children to far-flung battlefields.

Central Europe lay under an “evil and dangerous” cloud, Churchill told an audience of his constituents in Theydon Bois after reading Group Captain Herring’s report in 1933. “No one,” he said, “can watch the events which are taking place in Germany without increasing anxiety about what their outcome will be. At present Germany is only partly armed and most of her fury is turned upon herself. But already her smaller neighbors, Austria, Switzerland, Belgium, and Denmark, feel a deep disquietude. There is grave reason to believe that Germany is arming herself, or seeking to arm herself, contrary to the solemn treaties exacted from her in her hour of defeat.” He told the House: “At a moment like this, to ask France to halve her army while Germany doubles hers, to ask France to halve her air force while the German air force”—here he must have been sorely tempted to quote Herring—“remains whatever it is, is a proposal likely to be considered by the French Government, at present at any rate, as somewhat unreasonable.”
⁸⁵

In Geneva, however, there was little support for the Quai d’Orsay’s lonely stand. This may puzzle those who remember the great alliance of 1914–1918. But England and France had been enemies for nearly a thousand years before then, leaping back and forth across the Channel to fly at each other’s throats. In Geneva the French believed they were conducting themselves
sans peur et sans reproche
. Actually they weren’t. To their new allies in eastern Europe the delegates from Paris asked not “What can we do for you?” but “What can you do for us?” The instinctive French response to battlefield disasters, in 1870 and 1914—it would be heard again in 1940—was the wail: “
Nous sommes trahis!
” (“We are betrayed!”). As other nations in Geneva drew away from them, the French foreign minister declared: “Henceforth France will guarantee her security by her own means.” Alistair Horne comments: “For sheer arrogant folly [this declaration] is hard to beat.”
⁸⁶

Had the Geneva disarmament talks continued, British Foreign Office documents reveal, France herself would have been betrayed by her greatest ally; but the conference never reached that point. On March 27 Japan, offended by the League of Nations’ censure of her Manchurian aggression, had announced that she would quit the league. It was a precedent and Hitler liked it. He had been provoked by the conferees’ decision that his storm troopers—there were now 500,000 of them—counted as fighting men, and he declared that league overflights, checking upon the Reich’s compliance with any agreement, were “
beschimpfend
” (“insulting”). In the light of French provocations, said the Wilhelmstrasse, the German Reich refused to apologize for its glorious past. Nor need it give reasons for its present position. The Reich was a sovereign state, though it was not being treated like one, which was intolerable and “
unverschämt
” (“shameless”).
⁸⁷

President Roosevelt had tried to free the conferees from their gridlock by suggesting a ban on all offensive weapons. Privately, Hitler was furious. Nevertheless, he saw great political possibilities in the message from the White House, and on May 17, 1933, he exploited them in a deeply moving, breathtakingly meretricious speech before the Reichstag. FDR, he said, had earned the “
warmen Dank
” of the Reich. He accepted the president’s proposals and stood ready to scrap the Reich’s offensive weapons the moment other powers did the same. Germany was indeed prepared to disband her entire military establishment, together with uniforms, weapons, and ammunition, under the same circumstances, and would sign any nonaggression treaty, “because she does not think of attacking but only of acquiring security.” The National Socialists cherished no ambition to “
germanisieren
” (“Germanize”) other nations: “Frenchmen, Poles, and others are our neighbors, and we know of no event, compatible with history, which can conceivably change this reality.”
⁸⁸

The speech constituted the basic draft of what diplomats came to call Hitler’s
Friedensrede
(peace speech), to be delivered before the Reichstag after each German act of aggression, assuring the world that no one wanted peace more than he did, that he had just made his last territorial claim upon Europe. His reply to Roosevelt was a fraud, of course, but it was the work of a master swindler, and it took almost everyone in. London’s
Daily Herald
, the official organ of the Labour party, declared that Hitler, as a trustworthy statesman, should be taken at his word. The conservative weekly
Spectator
called him the hope of a tormented world; to
The Times
his claim was “irrefutable.”
⁸⁹

But there was a catch, and Churchill had spotted it. Implicit in Hitler’s offer to disarm whenever other powers did likewise was Nazi Germany’s assertion of its right to rearm unchallenged by
Ausländer
. Winston made this point in the House, and after the first few minutes the chamber emptied. The German chancellor had given the MPs a present, the illusion that he had no intention of becoming a warlord, and Churchill was trying to take it away. Beaverbrook wrote a friend that “if he continues on his present course, I would not be surprised if Baldwin put a veto on him in his constituency. And believe me, Baldwin can do it.”
⁹⁰

Yet every time Churchill seemed on the verge of being driven out of politics, Hitler came to his rescue by building his brutal record, outrage succeeding outrage, each a flagrant betrayal of his most recent
Friedensrede
. His lightning prewar strokes startled a sane world unable to grasp the stark fact that he was not sane. On October 14, 1933, without warning, he made three announcements. The important one was that Germany was withdrawing from both the disarmament conference and the League of Nations. But there was more. One arose from the eternal language problem. Lord Hailsham, MacDonald’s secretary for war, had told Hitler that German rearmament would violate Versailles, answerable, under the treaty’s terms, by sanctions. In German,
Sanktionen
implies armed invasion; therefore Hitler added that if the league attempted to impose sanctions, his new minister of defense, General Werner von Blomberg, would order German troops to fight. Blomberg did in fact instruct his soldiers to man the Reich’s frontiers and “hold out as long as possible.” However, as he and his fellow officers were well aware, that wouldn’t be long. Serious German resistance was impossible, and they were horrified.
⁹¹

They were not, however, politicians. Hitler, the transcendent politician, knew that he couldn’t lose, because in his third and final announcement he declared that he had dissolved the Reichstag and was submitting his decision to quit Geneva to a national plebiscite. No democracy, he knew, would intervene in a German election. He could also be certain of the results. The ballots would offer a single-party Nazi slate of Reichstag nominees, and the plebiscite—which, carefully worded, omitted the disarmament issue, turning the poll into a
ja–nein
on the Versailles treaty—would be held on November 12, the day after the anniversary of the hated Armistice.
Ausländskorrespondenten
—foreign correspondents—skeptical by profession and especially distrustful of the Nazis, monitored the election and reluctantly agreed that it was fair. The results were astounding. Some 96 percent of the electorate went to the polls and 95 percent of them approved of Germany’s Geneva walkout. Nazi candidates for the Reichstag received 92 percent of the vote.
Ausländspolitiker
—political leaders in other countries—could no longer speculate over whether the Nazi chancellor had the support of his people. In the entire history of the Reich, no German leader, including the kaiser, had matched his popularity.
⁹²

The diplomats droned on in Switzerland, and in June 1934 the last truncated session adjourned. The chairman had been Arthur Henderson, a Labour MP, who, as a tribute to his tireless efforts in Geneva, was declared winner of the Nobel Peace Prize. In his closing words, according to a contemporary account, he openly charged France with “responsibility for its failure to accomplish any practical results.” The French furiously denied it, and history confirms them. Their peers, however, did not.
⁹³

T
he breadline on Berlin’s Kurfürstendamm had vanished. The Third Reich had become the only great power without massive unemployment, beggary, or hunger—a country freed from the shackles of the worldwide Depression. Since Hitler had moved into the Reich Chancellery on January 30, 1933, Germany’s income had doubled; production had risen 102 percent; her
Volk
were riding a crest of affluence, euphoria, and throbbing patriotism not seen since their fathers had lustily marched off to war twenty years earlier. The Aladdin with the lamp was Reichsbank president Dr. Hjalmar Schacht. To foreign economists he seemed to be a magician. His genius was undeniable, but he possessed an extraordinary advantage, a gift of power from Hitler. Exercising this authority, Schacht created credit for a country without liquid capital or monetary reserves by manipulating the currency. So adroit was his jugglery that at one point bankers assigned the mark 237 different values.
⁹⁴

Europe had never seen anything like it, but Americans had. Under Roosevelt the new economists had been fueling a recovery a full year before August 1934, when Hitler appointed Schacht the Reich’s economics minister. There was a difference, however. Germany was now bankrupt, and with a trade deficit approaching a half-billion marks Schacht was, under the laws of the German republic, a counterfeiter. In the City of London or in Wall Street his wizardry would have consigned him to prison. But in the Third Reich he was quite safe. Members of the government were untroubled by legalities, courts, and traditional stock trading principles. Indeed, the central fact about Nazi Germany, obvious now but visible to only a few at the time, is that it was a criminal conspiracy. When President Hindenburg died on August 2, 1934, at the age of eighty-six, Hitler announced that he was combining his office of chancellor with that of the dead president. He then appointed himself
Führer
—leader. This, unlike Hitler’s appointment as chancellor, was illegal. In taking this step, Hitler committed a major felony under the German constitution, which stipulated that if a president should die while in office, his title and powers should pass, not to the chancellor, but to the president of the supreme court, to be safeguarded by him until the people could cast their votes in a new election.
⁹⁵

Laws are effective only when authorities enforce them and society submits. But in Germany the felons were the men invested with the greatest authority, and the handful of brave demonstrators who protested the transformation of a democracy into a dictatorship were beaten by the
Strassenkämpfer
and found themselves, not their assailants, facing criminal charges. The
Strassenkämpfer
, Hitler biographer Alan Bullock writes, “had seized control of the resources of a great modern State; the gutter had come to power.” Hitler now announced his second nationwide plebiscite, this one on his assumption of dictatorial rule. Virtually no voices of dissent were heard from the universities, the eminent Jews having already left; from Germany’s industrialists, who had in fact contributed heavily to Nazi election funds after he had promised to abolish trade unions; or from office-holders sworn to protect and defend the constitution now being raped. None even resigned in protest. On August 19, 1934, after a week of massive Nazi rallies, torchlight parades, and storm troopers marching through neighborhoods roaring, “
Wir wollen das Gesetz—sonst Mord und Totschlag!
” (“We want power—otherwise death and destruction!”), the plebiscite was held. Over 42.5 million Germans went to the polls—95 percent of those registered—and 38 million, nine out of every ten, voted
ja
.
⁹⁶