so on. Such improvised vehicles gave rise to colourful rumours that were repeated everywhere abroad and even got into foreign newspapers. They said the German army was no more than a sham force built for parades, and designed solely to intimidate other nations. A more accurate picture of the expanding war machine was available to motor-racing enthusiasts.
During the Thirties the victories of the German motor-racing team shocked and dismayed its competitors. Many, if not most, British racing drivers were competing simply for fun; using the same cars to journey to the circuits, race there and then travel home. The Nazis were quick to see the propaganda benefits of international racing victories. German cars – Mercedes and Auto-Union – were highly specialized designs with engineering that was years ahead of their rivals. The drivers – some of them non-Germans – and fitters were highly trained and dedicated. The team organization was managed with a professional resolution quite unlike anything from other European countries. It could be said that the Germans invented the racing team as we now know it. In every respect those victorious German racing teams of the Thirties provided a glimpse of blitzkrieg to come.
It wasn’t only racing cars that Germany was manufacturing: in the period 1930–38 German car production went from 189,000 to 530,000 vehicles. Industrial production soared and unemployment plunged from its 1932 peak.
Mercedes and Auto-Union racing cars
Hitler’s defiant stance, and his violent speeches against the injustices of the peace treaty, gave Germans a new sort of pride. It was the ‘stick and carrot’ technique. Most Germans turned a blind eye to the persecution of the Jews, and all the other legalized crimes of the Nazis, when the stick might be a spell in a labour camp. Those who objected were arrested; many were never seen again. Article 48 of the Weimar Constitution legalized protective custody and enabled all the fundamental rights of a citizen to be withheld. Using this the Nazis sent thousands of opponents to concentration camps without due process of law. The lawyers found legal reasons to classify such prisoners as citizens assisting in upholding the law.
Here and there a brave German spoke up against the regime. The view that Nazi Germany – whatever its faults – had to be supported because of the ‘protection’ it provided against the spread of Russian Communism was echoed by the rich and powerful everywhere. It was certainly a view aired in the British cabinet. In Rome the Pope did nothing to stop the anti-Semitic excesses of the ‘anti-Bolshevik’ state Hitler had created as a bulwark against the Reds.
The German trade unions had been silenced by arrests and threats. The Nazi labour organizations which replaced them gave workers cheap vacations and luxury cruises but deprived them of the right to strike, demonstrate or make any kind of objection to the regime. It succeeded. Working-class Germans – like middle-class ones – offered no serious opposition to the Nazis.
It is difficult to give a balanced picture of the respective strengths of the great powers in that period immediately before the war. But in an attempt to provide some sort of estimate, Table 2 looks at three aspects of each nation. Manpower is a guide to the size of the army that could be put into the field. Annual steel-making capacity estimates the ability to build ships, submarines, tanks and artillery. Annual aircraft production is a guide to the potential production of such items as trucks, cars and infantry weapons, as well as aircraft.
Relative strengths of the Great Powers in 1939
British population figures do not take account of men in the Dominions. For steel, the figures given are the best for the 1930s, with German figures including Austrian production. Aircraft numbers take no account of size (tending to underrate UK and USA, which were building more large aircraft than the other nations).2
The British and their prime minister: Chamberlain
It has become convenient to think of the war as a confrontation between Adolf Hitler and Winston Churchill, but Britain’s leader in the years leading up to the war was Neville Chamberlain. Although very much in the minority, there are still those who say that Chamberlain was an astute statesman. They prefer to believe that Chamberlain, by appeasing Hitler and letting him march into Austria and then Czechoslovakia, gained time for Britain to rearm. There is nothing to support this contention.
By 1937 Hitler had provided Germany with formidable fighting forces. His troops had reoccupied the demilitarized Rhineland in open defiance of the peace treaty. In Britain there were no signs of a resolve to confront Germany. According to the foreign minister, Anthony Eden, the elder men of the cabinet were not convinced of the need to rearm.3 Chamberlain thought armaments were a wasteful form of expenditure and saw no reason to believe that war was bound to come.4
In the previous cabinet, Chamberlain had been chancellor of the exchequer. He knew how much a government’s popularity depended upon keeping income taxes low. Opposition politicians were certainly not demanding rearmament. Clement Attlee, leader of the Labour (Socialist) party, had said in December 1933: ‘We are unalterably opposed to anything in the nature of rearmament.’ His party stuck to that line and campaigned against rearmament right up to the outbreak of war. Prominent churchmen and intellectuals said little about the persecution of German Jews, even though refugees brought ever more appalling stories of what was happening. Priests, politicians and writers combined in such pacifist organizations as the Peace Pledge Union, and the influential voices of Aldous Huxley, Siegfried Sassoon and Vera Brittain were heard arguing persuasively against any preparations for war.
Everywhere pacifism was coloured by the fear of what fleets of bombing aircraft might do to large cities. The writings of General J. F. C. Fuller and Bertrand Russell, and the H. G. Wells science-fiction book Things to Come (and the frightening Alexander Korda film based upon it), fanned fears of impending devastation and chaos by bomber fleets. It was against this background that Chamberlain made his decisions about rearmament.
Seen in photographs and cartoons, Chamberlain appears a wretched and ridiculous figure with drawn face and craning neck, but an American who met him in 1940 was impressed:
Mr Chamberlain was seated alone at his place at the Cabinet table when we were both shown in. He was spare, but gave the impression both of physical strength and energy. He appeared to be much younger than his seventy-one years. His hair was dark, except for a white strand across his forehead. His dominating features were a pair of large, very dark, piercing eyes. His voice was low, but incisive.5
Chamberlain was concerned with his personal popularity and he spoke of it frequently. The welcoming crowds he saw on his visits to Munich and Rome were reassuring to him. He even remarked that Mussolini did not seem jealous at being welcomed less warmly than Chamberlain and the British party. Chamberlain’s ego led him to believe that his personal negotiations with Hitler were a statesmanlike contribution to world peace. In fact he did little but give way to Hitler’s bullying, and ratify and assist the aggressions he claimed to be stopping. In addition Chamberlain’s well publicized meetings with Hitler encouraged the more extreme Nazis while demoralizing the few influential Germans who opposed Hitler’s methods.
