A History of Germany 1918 - 2020. Mary Fulbrook

possibility of a coup. Their ideas were conveyed to the British government but ignored. Similarly, any prospect of success for Adam von Trott’s visit to Britain in June 1939 was marred by suspicions of his real intentions: while Trott was seeking to buy time for a military coup to be successful, his official reports back to the German Foreign Ministry and his proposals for further concessions to Hitler, as well as his sincere German nationalism, sufficiently opened his aims to misinterpretation and misrepresentation for the Americans as well as the British to choose to take little notice of his mission.¹⁷ But these early attempts at resistance in high places were deflected, first by the apparent success of Hitler’s foreign policy – and the ‘appeasement’ with which he was met – and then, after the final outbreak of war in September 1939, by the combination of rapid early military success and unwillingness to commit an act of treason against the head of state when the fatherland was at war.

      In the course of 1938–9 Hitler achieved certain major foreign policy goals without igniting an international conflict. In March 1938, after considerable exertion of pressure on the Austrian chancellor Schuschnigg – who attempted to organize a plebiscite which would avoid German takeover, but was outmanoeuvred and forcibly replaced by the Nazi sympathizer Seyss-Inquart – the peaceful invasion of Austria by German troops and its annexation into an enlarged German Reich was effected. Later myths of ‘the rape of Austria’ and being ‘Hitler’s first victim’ notwithstanding, the entry of German soldiers was greeted by many Austrians with considerable enthusiasm. While those Austrians of left-wing and liberal opinions viewed the Anschluss with foreboding, others gave a rapturous welcome to the triumphant return of Adolf Hitler to his native land, in which, over a quarter of a century earlier, he had collected his ideas and fomented his rag-bag of prejudices while a drifting failed art student in Vienna. Austrian Jews had good reason to be worried: a virulent anti-Semitism was unleashed, soon making their situation even more demoralizing and unpleasant than that of the Jews in Germany, against whom discriminatory measures had unfolded more gradually and legalistically. As far as international responses were concerned, the reaction was muted. For one thing, since Austria had been a dominant force in ‘German’ affairs for centuries, and had only recently been excluded from Bismarck’s small Germany (and forbidden any union under the Versailles Treaty), it did not seem entirely unnatural that Germans in the two states should be united under the Austrian-born leader of Germany. For another, the major powers were at this time not prepared for military confrontation with Hitler. The United States was adopting an isolationist, neutralist stance with respect to European affairs; the Soviet Union under Stalin was preoccupied with domestic purges of perceived internal opposition; neither France nor England was ready for a military challenge to Hitler, although rearmament had been underway since the mid-1930s.

In the summer of 1938 Hitler turned his attention to Czechoslovakia. The Sudeten German Party under Henlein, with help from the German Nazis, had been cultivating unrest among ethnic Germans in the border areas, the Sudetenland. There was a heightened sense of crisis as misperceptions of German mobilization led to an actual Czech mobilization, and for a week in August 1938 it appeared that war was about to break out. By September the threat of war had been averted, and attempts were made to resolve the Czech crisis by diplomatic means. The British prime minister Neville Chamberlain, braving the novelty of airborne diplomacy, returned from the Munich conference of September 1938 – at which Czechoslovakia, whose fate was to be decided, was not represented – waving the famous piece of paper with Hitler’s signature and proclaiming ‘peace in our time’. The Western powers – apparently overlooking the catastrophic longer-term consequences of failing to protect the interests of smaller central European states – appear to have felt that, by ceding portions of the Czech border territories, they had fulfilled legitimate ethnic demands and averted the threat of a war for which they were not yet ready. Whether or not their policy of appeasement was justifiable, it certainly served to buy further time for rearmament. While most Germans breathed a sigh of relief that the threat of imminent war had been averted, Hitler, for his part, felt cheated out of war by the Munich Agreemnt.

      Plate 3 Hitler’s triumphal arrival to popular acclaim in his former home town of Linz during the 1938 Anschluss of Austria (which subsequently represented itself as ‘Hitler’s first victim’).

      Czechoslovakia’s loss of the Western border territories also meant loss of key border defences – and the will to defend herself, after the debacle of the summer. When, in March 1939, Hitler’s armies invaded Prague, there was little the Czechs could do to resist German take-over. Bohemia and Moravia became a German protectorate, while Slovakia became a satellite state of the German Reich. As far as Britain was concerned, it was prudent to allow this ‘faraway country’ of which they knew little (as it was put in September 1938) fall without Western military intervention.

Emboldened by the feeble Western response to the invasion of Czechoslovakia, Hitler now turned his attention to Poland and the Baltic states. Lithuania ceded Memel to Germany, but the Poles stood firm on Danzig. At this point, the British took a stronger stand, issuing a guarantee of Polish independence. Hitler chose not to take too much notice of this, given the British record of appeasement. In August 1939, in a surprise move – and putting an end to parallel British negotiations with the Russians – Hitler concluded a pact with his ideological arch-enemy, the communist leader Joseph Stalin. In conjunction with a further agreement in September, Hitler and Stalin mutually carved up the Polish and Baltic states, and achieved certain strategic aims; while Stalin bought time for further rearmament, Hitler sought to avoid the possibility of war on two fronts. Again, the longer-term consequences were to prove catastrophic.

      Map 4.2 Territorial annexation,84 1935–1939.

      On 1 September 1939 German troops used the pretext of incited border incidents for a well-organized invasion of Poland. By 3 September Britain and France had concluded that this clear act of German aggression now meant that they were, at last, at war with Germany. The precarious attempt at stabilizing European affairs and achieving a new international order after the First World War had collapsed. Germany under Hitler was again unleashing war in Europe. But this time – unlike the mood of August 1914, however exaggerated by nationalist mythology – there was little enthusiasm for war among the German people. The peaceful gains of the preceding years had been greeted with an acclaim tinged by relief at the avoidance of bloodshed; now, in the main, the Germans took up arms in sombre mood, with considerable foreboding, clinging to the hope that Hitler was right in his predictions of an assured and early German victory. But, as it was to turn out, Hitler’s aims for the ‘master race’ were so ambitious as to pave the way for eventual total defeat.