The Saar and the Rhineland had already been reincorporated into the Reich, the former by popular plebiscite as promised at Versailles, and the latter by a bold and uncontested military operation in March 1936. In February 1938 Hitler had a personal meeting with the Austrian chancellor Kurt von Schuschnigg at the Obersalzberg, and he berated the Austrian leader for resisting the Nazification of his country and its eventual incorporation into the Reich. Hitler demanded a series of concessions from Schuschnigg that amounted to an ultimatum.7 The Austrian government was to lift the ban on the Nazi Party, release all pro-Nazi agitators, and appoint the pro-Nazi Arthur Seyss-Inquart as minister of the interior with full authority to enforce the terms of these demands. Schuschnigg realized that if he signed the document outlining these demands he would sign away the independence of Austria. He temporized by telling the impatient dictator that, under the terms of the Austrian constitution, only the Austrian president had the legal power to ratify such an agreement. He then slipped down the mountain and headed back to Austria.
Schuschnigg realized that the day of reckoning had arrived. He remembered vividly how pro-German Austrians, supported by the Nazis, had assassinated the Austrian chancellor Engelbert Dollfuss in 1934. The reason they had not succeeded in carrying out their coup was that Mussolini, who considered Austria a buffer against a resurgent Reich, had mobilized his troops and threatened to intervene on behalf of Austria if the Nazis did not desist. That was 1934. In 1938, the diplomatic situation was different: neither Mussolini nor the Western powers were likely to lift a finger for Austria, though Hitler was not entirely sure of their reaction if he chose to move against Austria. He preferred to subvert the independence of Austria without provoking a military confrontation, hoping that harassment and intimidation would do the trick.8 In the end, Schuschnigg forced his hand by resorting to a desperate and fatal expedient: the plebiscite asking the Austrian people whether they favored an “independent and social Austria, a Christian and united Austria.” Hitler could not allow such a plebiscite to be held, for suppose the Austrian people voted for independence rather than German annexation? Hitler threatened Schuschnigg with military intervention if he did not call off the plebiscite. On March 9, the Austrian chancellor called off the plebiscite scheduled for March 13, 1938. The Nazis then engineered a hastily improvised coup in Austria, forcing Schuschnigg to resign. German troops marched into Austria without encountering any serious opposition. On March 14, Hitler entered Vienna, the city of his unhappy youth, in great triumph, to the Viennese shouting, “One People, One Reich, One Leader, and One Victory.”9 The Western powers did nothing, having resigned themselves to the inevitable. Mussolini took the whole thing “in a very friendly manner,” as the German ambassador to Italy reported. Hitler thanked him profusely, telling him that he would never forget him for his stance.10
In the United States, Roosevelt was not greatly surprised, though the rapidity of Hitler’s annexation caught his administration off-balance. Newspaper headlines and editorials claimed that Austria was “murdered” or “raped.” Such indignant reactions were generally prompted by the brutal treatment Nazi officials meted out to the Jews, especially in Vienna. American papers generalized what happened to the Austrian Jews to the whole of Austria, claiming that the country had “been made over into a hell of hate, prejudice, vicious cruelty, and sadism.”11 Allied statesmen on both sides of the ocean had been caught napping. At the suggestion of the Under-Secretary of State, Sumner Welles, Roosevelt had planned an international conference to settle the potentially explosive issues in Europe. Scheduled for January 22, 1938, the conference never got beyond the planning stage outlined to Roosevelt in Welles’s memorandum, because the British, notably Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain and his intimate adviser Horace Wilson, did not like the plan, calling it “wooly rubbish.”12 Chamberlain cabled Roosevelt that the American plan would hurt the British efforts to reach a settlement with Germany and Italy. The major reasons why nothing came of the joint effort by the United States and Britain to draw up a program of international conduct that would preserve the peace were the warlike attitudes of the Fascist powers and the discrepancy between rhetoric and action that characterized the divided democracies. The British subtext in the interwar period was that the United States had chosen to sit on a moral high horse, lecturing the world about international peace, disarmament, and free markets, but did so ensconced behind the safety of two oceans and a paper wall of neutrality acts. The British prime minister, Neville Chamberlain, was later blamed by opponents of Hitler for not following up on Roosevelt’s proposal to draw up standards of international conduct to preserve the world peace. Instead, Chamberlain and the appeasers decided to deal with Hitler on their own, without the participation of the United States. They were frustrated by American lectures on international conduct, suspecting that these lectures would not be backed up by military commitments.
Hitler also became convinced that he had nothing to fear from the Americans—at least not yet. Historians who have argued that Hitler paid no attention to the United States and ignored the dire warnings of his diplomats in Washington, notably Dieckhoff and Thomsen, miss the point concerning Hitler’s intentions and the timing he thought they required. He knew all along that behind Britain stood the United States, and he did not want to go to war with either in the first place. But should Britain enter a European war, when would the United States be able to intervene militarily? Throughout the 1930s Hitler’s America “experts,” whether foreign office personnel or self-appointed pundits, reported that the people of the United States were still facing economic hardships that made them loath to get involved in the affairs of Europe. But the old-style diplomats—Dieckhoff, Weizsäcker, and Neurath—warned that the United States was potentially a grave danger to Germany. They also agreed that it would take the United States at least two years to rearm massively before it could challenge the Reich. As previously mentioned, Hitler took a jaundiced view of the German Foreign Office, which he saw as one of the last strongholds of the old conservative elites; he called them pin-striped snobs and rarely bothered to read any of their reports, except when they were specifically earmarked by his trustworthy advisors. From time to time, Hitler made reference to specific reports he received from Washington, or from unusual sources he trusted or agreed with. The same was true of Roosevelt, who frequently bypassed regular government channels, dispatching trusted friends or business contacts to foreign capitals to sound out people and find out what was really going on. These informal observers were often no better than the “experts,” picking up irrelevant gossip, reporting rumors, or plainly misjudging people and events.
Czechoslovakia and Appeasement at Munich
With Austria in his pocket, Hitler had not only acquired more territory and 7 million more people, but had also gained direct access to the whole of southeastern Europe. From Vienna it was only a stone’s throw to Czechoslovakia and the Balkans. His next target, in fact, was the small democratic state of Czechoslovakia, where more than 3.5 million frustrated Germans, called Sudeten Germans, had been living under Czechoslovak control since 1919. Hitler’s strategy was to use the Sudeten Germans, most of whom lived in the mountainous territory between Bohemia and Silesia, as a battering ram against the fragile new Republic, just as he would later use the Slovaks to foster irreparable separatism that made the Republic ripe for German picking. Telling his military chiefs in March that he intended to smash the Czech state in the near future, he whipped up such a frenzy of war hysteria that the Western powers, headed chiefly by Great Britain, bullied the Czechs into making concessions but stopped short of creating a Sudeten state within a state. The infuriated führer was ready to strike, though some of his generals, especially Ludwig Beck, were so alarmed by the prospect of another war with the Western powers that they seriously planned to topple the dictator and try him in front of the Volksgericht (People’s Court).
This did not happen for three reasons. During the Czech crisis in the summer of 1938, Hitler took another important step to protect himself from possible opposition from the traditionalists in the German army. Ostensibly to clarify the relationship between the elite guard or “defense squad” (Schutzstaffel or SS) and the regular Wehrmacht, he authorized a top-secret decree on August 17, 1938, that made the two SS Verfügungstruppen (Reserve Troops), hitherto subject to the regular army, independent armed forces at the disposal
