The rise of Hitler and fall of Versailles
Failure of the German Republic
The origins of the Nazi Third Reich must be sought not only in the appeal of Hitler and his party but also in the weakness of the Weimar Republic. Under the republic, Germany boasted the most democratic constitution in the world, yet the fragmentation of German politics made government by majority a difficult proposition. Many Germans identified the republic with the despised Treaty of Versailles and, like the Japanese, concluded that the 1920s policy of peaceful cooperation with the West had failed. What was more, the republic seemed incapable of curing the Depression or dampening the appeal of the Communists. In the end, it self-destructed. The first Depression-era elections, in September 1930, reflected the electorate’s flight from the moderate centrist parties: Communists won 77 seats in the Reichstag, while the Nazi delegation rose from 12 to 107. Chancellor Heinrich Brüning, unable to command a majority, governed by emergency decree of the aged president, Paul von Hindenburg.
The National Socialist German Workers’ Party (Nazis) exploited the resentment and fear stemming from Versailles and the Depression. Its platform was a clever, if contradictory, mixture of socialism, corporatism, and virulent assertion in foreign policy. The Nazis outdid the Communists in forming paramilitary street gangs to intimidate opponents and create an image of irresistible strength, but unlike the Communists, who implied that war veterans had been dupes of capitalist imperialism, the Nazis honoured the Great War as a time when the German Volk had been united as never before. The army had been “stabbed in the back” by defeatists, they claimed, and those who signed the Armistice and Versailles had been criminals; worse, international capitalists, Socialists, and Jews continued to conspire against the German people. Under Nazism alone, they insisted, could Germans again unify under ein Reich, ein Volk, ein Führer and get on with the task of combating Germany’s real enemies. This amalgam of fervent nationalism and rhetorical socialism, not to mention the charismatic spell of Hitler’s oratory and the hypnotic pomp of Nazi rallies, was psychologically more appealing than flaccid liberalism or divisive class struggle. In any case, the Communists (on orders from Moscow) turned to help the Nazis paralyze democratic procedure in Germany in the expectation of seizing power themselves.
Brüning resigned in May 1932, and the July elections returned 230 Nazi delegates. After two short-lived rightist cabinets foundered, Hindenburg appointed Hitler chancellor on January 30, 1933. The president, parliamentary conservatives, and the army all apparently expected that the inexperienced, lower-class demagogue would submit to their guidance. Instead, Hitler secured dictatorial powers from the Reichstag and proceeded to establish, by marginally legal means, a totalitarian state. Within two years the regime had outlawed all other political parties and coopted or intimidated all institutions that competed with it for popular loyalty, including the German states, labor unions, press and radio, universities, bureaucracies, courts, and churches. Only the army and foreign office remained in the hands of traditional elites. But this fact, and Hitler’s own caution at the start, allowed Western observers fatally to misperceive Nazi foreign policy as simply a continuation of Weimar revisionism.
Adolf Hitler recounted in Mein Kampf, the autobiographical harangue written in prison after his abortive putsch of 1923, that he saw himself as that rare individual, the “programmatic thinker and the politician become one.” Hitler distilled his Weltanschauung from the social Darwinism, antisemitism, and racialist anthropology current in prewar Vienna. Where Marx had reduced all of history to struggles among social classes, in which revolution was the engine of progress and the dictatorship of the proletariat the culmination, Hitler reduced history to struggle among biologic races, in which war was the engine of progress and Aryan hegemony the culmination. The enemies of the Germans, indeed of history itself, were internationalists who warred against the purity and race-consciousness of peoples—they were the capitalists, the Socialists, the pacifists, the liberals, all of whom Hitler identified with the Jews. This condemnation of Jews as a racial group made Nazism more dangerous than earlier forms of religious or economic antisemitism that had long been prevalent throughout Europe. For if the Jews, as Hitler thought, were like bacteria poisoning the bloodstream of the Aryan race, the only solution was their extermination. Nazism, in short, was the twisted product of a secular, scientific age of history.
Hitler’s worldview dictated a unity of foreign and domestic policies based on total control and militarization at home, war and conquest abroad. In Mein Kampf he ridiculed the Weimar politicians and their “bourgeois” dreams of restoring the Germany of 1914. Rather, the German Volk could never achieve their destiny without Lebensraum (“living space”) to support a vastly increased German population and form the basis for world power. Lebensraum, wrote Hitler in Mein Kampf, was to be found in Ukraine and intermediate lands of eastern Europe. This “heartland” of the Eurasian continent (so named by the geopoliticians Sir Halford Mackinder and Karl Haushofer) was especially suited for conquest since it was occupied, in Hitler’s mind, by Slavic Untermenschen (subhumans) and ruled from the center of the Jewish-Bolshevik conspiracy in Moscow. By 1933 Hitler had apparently imagined a step-by-step plan for the realization of his goals. The first step was to rearm, thereby restoring complete freedom of maneuver to Germany. The next step was to achieve Lebensraum in alliance with Italy and with the sufferance of Britain. This greater Reich could then serve, in the distant third step, as a base for world dominion and the purification of a “master race.” In practice, Hitler proved willing to adapt to circumstances, seize opportunities, or follow the wanderings of intuition. Sooner or later politics must give way to war, but because Hitler did not articulate his ultimate fantasies to the German voters or establishment, his actions and rhetoric seemed to imply only restoration, if not of the Germany of 1914, then the Germany of 1918, after Brest-Litovsk. In fact, his program was potentially without limits.
European responses to Nazism
European reaction to the rise of Nazism was cautious, but not at first overtly hostile. The Four-Power Pact and a concordat with the Vatican (July 20, 1933), negotiated by the Catholic Franz von Papen, conferred a certain legitimacy on the Nazi regime. (Hitler sought to end Vatican support for the Catholic Centre Party while he proceeded to subordinate the churches and to corrupt Christianity into a state-centered form of neo-paganism. Pope Pius XI, like every other European statesmen after him, thought that he could appease and moderate the Nazis.) On January 26, 1934, Hitler shocked all parties by signing a nonaggression pact with Poland. This bit of duplicity neutralized France’s primary ally in the east while helping to secure Germany over the dangerous years of rearmament. The new Polish foreign minister, Józef Beck, was in turn responding to the dilemma of Poland’s central position between Germany and the U.S.S.R. He hoped to preserve a balance in his relations with the two giant neighbors (Poland signed a three-year pact with Moscow in July 1932) but feared the Soviets (from whom Poland had grabbed so much territory in 1921) more than the still-weak Germans. The pact with Germany was meant to run for 10 years.
France was the nation most concerned by the Nazi threat and most able to take vigorous action. But fear of another war, the defeatist mood dating from the failure of the Ruhr occupation, the passivity engendered by the Maginot Line (due for completion in just five years), and domestic strife exacerbated by the Depression and the Stavisky scandal of 1933, all served to hamstring French foreign policy. As in the Weimar Republic, Communists and monarchists or Fascist groups like the Croix de Feu and Action Française battled in the streets. In February 1934 a crowd of war veterans and rightists stormed the parliament, and the Édouard Daladier Cabinet was forced to resign to head off a coup d’état. The new foreign minister, Louis Barthou, had been a friend of Poincaré and made a final effort to shore up France’s security system in Europe: “All these League of Nations fancies—I’d soon put an end to them if I were in power. . . . It’s alliances that count.” But alliances with whom? The French Left was adamantly opposed to cooperation with Fascist Italy, the Right despised cooperation with the Communist Soviet Union. Britain as always eschewed commitments, while Poland had come to terms with Germany. Nevertheless, the moment seemed opportune; both Italy and the U.S.S.R. now made clear their opposition to Hitler and desire to embrace collective security.
To be sure, Mussolini was gratified by the triumph of the man he liked to consider his younger protégé, Hitler, but he also understood that Italy fared best while playing off France and Germany, and he feared German expansion into the Danubian basin. In September 1933 he made Italian support for Austrian Chancellor Engelbert Dollfuss conditional on the latter’s establishment of an Italian-style Fascist regime. In June 1934 Mussolini and Hitler met for the first time, and in their confused conversation (there was no interpreter present) Mussolini understood the Führer to say that he had no desire for Anschluss. Yet, a month later, Austrian Nazis arranged a putsch in which Dollfuss was murdered. Mussolini responded with a threat of force (quite likely a bluff) on the Brenner Pass and thereby saved Austrian independence. Kurt von Schuschnigg, a pro-Italian Fascist, took over in Vienna. In Paris and London it seemed that Mussolini was one leader with the will and might to stand up to Hitler.
Stalin, meanwhile, had repented of the equanimity with which he had witnessed the Nazi seizure of power. Before 1933, Germany and the U.S.S.R. had collaborated, and Soviet trade had been a rare boon to the German economy in the last years of the Weimar Republic. Still, the behaviour of German Communists contributed to the collapse of parliamentarism, and now Hitler had shown that he, too, knew how to crush dissent and master a nation. The Communist line shifted in 1934–35 from condemnation of social democracy, collective security, and Western militarism to collaboration with other anti-Fascist forces in “Popular Fronts,” alliance systems, and rearmament. The United States and the U.S.S.R. established diplomatic relations for the first time in November 1933, and in September 1934 the Soviets joined the League of Nations, where Maksim Litvinov became a loud proponent of collective security against Fascist revisionism.
Thus, Barthou’s plan for reviving the wartime alliance and arranging an “Eastern Locarno” began to seem plausible—even after October 9, 1934, when Barthou and King Alexander of Yugoslavia were shot dead in Marseille by an agent of Croatian terrorists. The new French foreign minister, the rightist Pierre Laval, was especially friendly to Rome. The Laval–Mussolini agreements of January 7, 1935, declared France’s disinterest in the fate of Abyssinia in implicit exchange for Italian support of Austria. Mussolini took this to mean that he had French support for his plan to conquer that independent African country. Just six days later the strength of German nationalism was resoundingly displayed in the Saar plebiscite. The small, coal-rich Saarland, detached from Germany for 15 years under the Treaty of Versailles, was populated by miners of Catholic or social democratic loyalty. They knew what fate awaited their churches and labor unions in the Third Reich, and yet 90 percent voted for union with Germany. Then, on March 16, Hitler used the extension of French military service to two years and the Franco-Soviet negotiations as pretexts for tearing up the disarmament clauses of Versailles, restoring the military draft, and beginning an open buildup of Germany’s land, air, and sea forces.
In the wake of this series of shocks Britain, France, and Italy joined on April 11, 1935, at a conference at Stresa to reaffirm their opposition to German expansion. Laval and Litvinov also initialed a five-year Franco-Soviet alliance on May 2, each pledging assistance in case of unprovoked aggression. Two weeks later a Czech-Soviet pact complemented it. Laval’s system, however, was flawed; mutual suspicion between Paris and Moscow, the failure to add a military convention, and the lack of Polish adherence meant that genuine Franco-Soviet military action was unlikely. The U.S.S.R. was in a state of trauma brought on by the Five-Year Plans, the slaughter and starvation of millions of farmers, especially in Ukraine, in the name of collectivization, and the beginnings of Stalin’s mass purges of the government, army, and Communist party. It was clear that Russian industrialization was bound to overthrow the balance of power in Eurasia, hence Stalin was fearful of the possibility of a preemptive attack before his own militarization was complete. But he was even more obsessed with the prospect of wholesale rebellion against his regime in case of invasion. Stalin’s primary goal, therefore, was to keep the capitalist powers divided and the U.S.S.R. at peace. Urging the liberal Western states to combine against the Fascists was one method; exploring bilateral relations with Germany, as in the 1936 conversations between Hjalmar Schacht and Soviet trade representative David Kandelaki, was another.
Italy and Britain looked askance at the Franco-Soviet combination, while Hitler in any case sugar-coated the pill of German rearmament by making a pacific speech on May 21, 1935, in which he offered bilateral pacts to all Germany’s neighbors (except Lithuania) and assured the British that he, unlike the Kaiser, did not intend to challenge them on the seas. The Anglo-German Naval Agreement of June 18, which countenanced a new German navy though limiting it to not larger than 35 percent the size of the British, angered the French and drove a wedge between them and the British.