Hitler’s success in the Rhineland was possible because Mussolini had changed sides. Britain, with France as a very reluctant associate and the smaller European powers following along, had committed the blunder of hitting soft in response to the invasion of Ethiopia.
Faced with this challenge, the British Government could have chosen one of two logical courses. It could have reflected that Mussolini was a desirable friend in a Europe overshadowed by Hitler, that colonial conquest was not a novelty in British history, and let events in Ethiopia take their course. Or it could have upheld the authority of the League by imposing sanctions that would have hurt, such as closing the Suez Canal and cutting off Italy’s oil imports.
Unfortunately the British people were in a schizophrenic mood. They wanted to vindicate international law and morality. But they were averse to the risk of war. As Winston Churchill put it later, with caustic clarity:
“The Prime Minister had declared that sanctions meant war; secondly, he was resolved there must be no war; and, thirdly, he decided upon sanctions.”4
The feeble sanctions imposed by the League irritated Mussolini without saving Ethiopia. The foundations of the Berlin-Rome Axis were laid.
There was a similar absence of clearheaded logic in solving the far more important problem of how to deal with Hitler. Up to March 1936, German remilitarization could have been stopped without serious bloodshed. There was still sufficient military preponderance on the side of the western powers. What was lacking was the will to use that power.
The French had been bled white in the preceding war. When I was driving with French friends in Paris, one of them objected to taking a route that would lead past the Gare de l’Est. “So many of my friends went there as soldiers and never returned from that frightful war,” she said. It was a wrench to lose the protection of the demilitarized Rhineland. But once that was lost, there was a strong and not unnatural French impulse to sit tight behind the supposedly impregnable Maginot Line, to concentrate upon the French overseas empire, and to forget about eastern Europe.
The psychological climate in Britain was also favorable to steps of expansion on Hitler’s part which were short of war. Disillusionment with the results of World War I contributed to the spread of pacifist sentiment. A resolution against “fighting for King and country” in any cause won a majority of votes in the Oxford Union, a debating club of the intellectual elite. And the British belatedly suffered from an uneasy conscience about the Treaty of Versailles.
Many of the German demands would have been reasonable if they had not been made by a paranoid dictator and would-be conquerer like Hitler. The principle of self-determination did make a case for the absorption into Germany of a solidly German-speaking Austria and also of the Sudeten Germans who lived in a fairly compact area in western Czechoslovakia. The reparations settlement foreshadowed in the Versailles Treaty was hopelessly unworkable for reasons which have already been set forth. Equality in limitation of armaments was a fair general principle.
It was a psychological tragedy that Hitler took by force and unilateral action many things which reasonable German statesmen like Stresemann and Brüning had been unable to obtain by peaceful negotiation. French and British policy was hard and inflexible when it should have been generous and conciliatory, when there was still an opportunity to draw Germany as an equal partner into the community of European nations. This policy became weak, fumbling, and irresolute when in the first years of Hitler’s regime, firmness would have been the right note.
After 1936 there was little prospect of stopping Hitler without a war which was likely to be disastrous to victors as well as vanquished. There was still, however, an excellent chance to keep the free and civilized part of Europe out of this war. One can never speak with certainty of historical “might have beens,” but, on the basis of the available evidence, the failure of Britain and France to canalize Hitler’s expansion in an eastward direction may reasonably be considered one of the greatest diplomatic failures in history.
Hitler had written in Mein Kampf:
We terminate the endless German drive to the south and west of Europe, and direct our gaze towards the lands in the east. We finally terminate the colonial and trade policy of the pre-war period, and proceed to the territorial policy of the future.
But if we talk about new soil and territory in Europe today, we can think primarily only of Russia and its vassal border states.5
That Hitler was treacherous, mercurial, and unpredictable is true. But there are many other indications that his program of conquest was eastward, not westward in orientation. His overtures to Poland for joint action against the Soviet Union have been noted. Without superior naval power, the prospects of conquering Great Britain or holding overseas colonies in the event of war were slight.
Much less was there any likelihood of a successful invasion of the American continent. Even after the Nazi archives were ransacked, no concrete evidence of any plan to invade the Western Hemisphere was discovered, although loose assertions of such plans were repeated so often before and during the war that some Americans were probably led to believe in the reality of this nonexistent design.
Hitler showed little interest in building a powerful surface navy. A former American officer who had opportunities to observe German military preparations in the years before the war informed me that the character of training clearly indicated an intention to fight in the open plains of the East, not against fortifications in the West. Emphasis was on the development of light tanks and artillery; there was little practice in storming fortified areas.
Two among many unofficial overtures which Germany addressed to Great Britain in the prewar years indicate that Hitler’s political ambitions were in the East, not in the West. Hermann Göring, after entertaining the British Ambassador to Germany, Sir Nevile Henderson, at a stag hunt in his hunting lodge at Rominten, suggested that there should be an agreement between Germany and England limited to two clauses. Germany would recognize the supreme position of Great Britain in overseas affairs and would place all her resources at the disposal of the British Empire in case of need. Great Britain would recognize the predominant continental position of Germany in Europe and undertake nothing to hinder Germany’s legitimate expansion.6
About the same time Joachim von Ribbentrop, German Ambassador in London, offered a virtually identical suggestion in a conversation with Winston Churchill. Germany was willing to underwrite the British Empire. It wanted a free hand in Eastern Europe. Churchill expressed his conviction that the British Government would never accept these terms. Ribbentrop said abruptly: “In that case war is inevitable.”
Churchill replied with a warning:
“Do not underrate England. She is very clever. If you plunge us all into another Great War, she will bring the whole world against you like [sic] last time.”7
So there was an alternative to the policy which the British and French governments followed after March 1939. This alternative would have been to write off eastern Europe as geographically indefensible, to let Hitler move eastward, with the strong probability that he would come into conflict with Stalin. Especially in the light of the Soviet aggressive expansion that has followed the war, this surely seems the sanest and most promising course western diplomacy could have followed.
Critics of this realistic policy of letting the totalitarian rulers fight it out to their hearts’ content object that Hitler might have won a quick victory in the East and then turned against the West. But both these assumptions are very hypothetical. The Nazi war machine might just as probably have bogged down indefinitely in Russia, and there is no convincing evidence that the conquest
