production of aircraft, ships and explosives. In January 1935, after a plebiscite, the Saarland was returned to German jurisdiction. In March 1935 the rearmament programme, the existence of a German air force and the introduction of one year’s conscription (raised to two years in August 1936), were made public. These clear breaches of the Treaty of Versailles were censured by the so-called Stresa Front of Italy, France and Britain, and by the League of Nations, in April 1935, but to little effect. By June of that year Britain and Germany had concluded a Naval Agreement under which Germany was permitted to increase her Navy to one-third the strength of the British Navy. The ‘Stresa Front’ was in any case less than solid. Hitler on the whole tended to admire Italy’s Fascist leader Mussolini, and, despite tensions between Italy and Germany over Austria after the attempted coup by Austrian Nazis in 1934, Hitler was concerned to foster good relations with his fellow-dictator. Hitler was also a prime opportunist. Taking advantage of British and French preoccupation with the Italian invasion of Abyssinia in October 1935, and under some pressure from domestic discontent over a deteriorating economic situation, Hitler took his first major foreign policy risk in March 1936. German troops marched over the Rhine to reoccupy the demilitarized left bank, in clear defiance of the Versailles Treaty. This served to boost Hitler’s domestic popularity considerably, and occasioned only very limited criticism from abroad.
From then on, foreign policy moved into a new gear. Under the Four Year Plan, presided over by Goering, rather unorthodox economic policies were initiated, which marked a clear break with Hjalmar Schacht’s notions of economic management. Schacht’s resignation as Minister of Economics in November 1937 came partly as a result of conflicts between the Economics Ministry and Goering’s office. There were similar conflicts between Nazis and more traditional conservative nationalists on the diplomatic front. For some time Ribbentrop had been running a diplomatic service in rivalry with the Foreign Ministry. In 1936 Ribbentrop became Ambassador to Britain. The Spanish Civil War, which broke out in July 1936, fostered closer relations between Italy and Germany (with both supporting Franco), and helped to bring about a new alignment. The emergent ‘Rome–Berlin Axis’ was strengthened as, in the course of 1936, it had become clear to Hitler that he would have to abandon his ideas about an alliance with Britain; and, in 1938, under Ribbentrop’s influence, Hitler opted for Japan as the third member of the ‘Axis’. The Tripartite Pact was finally signed in September 1940. Meanwhile, it was becoming increasingly clear that the attempt to combine preparation for war with domestic consumer satisfaction was in the long run economically impracticable and that it was essential for Germany to go to war sooner rather than later. This realization occasioned a new rift between the increasingly radical Nazi regime and the old elites: Hitler’s clash with army leaders in the winter of 1937–8 marked a further step in the gathering momentum of the Nazi regime.
In November 1937, at a meeting with leaders of the army, navy and air force, together with the Foreign Minister and War Minister, Hitler delivered a lengthy harangue on Germany’s need for Lebensraum. Notes of this meeting were taken unofficially by Hitler’s military adjutant Colonel Hossbach, in what has become known as the ‘Hossbach memorandum’. Some of Hitler’s audience were not convinced by his ideas, which were greeted with grave reservations. Notwithstanding criticisms, in the following weeks Nazi military planning became offensive. Rather than responding or listening to criticism, Hitler simply removed the critics from their strategic positions. By February 1938 a significant purge had been effected: Blomberg’s post of War Minister was abolished; the old Wehrmacht office was replaced by the Oberkommando (High Command) of the Wehrmacht (OKW) under General Keitel; Fritsch was replaced as Commander-in-Chief of the army by General von Brauchitsch; fourteen senior generals were retired, and forty-six others had to change their commands; and, in the Foreign Ministry, Ribbentrop officially replaced Neurath as Foreign Minister. Hitler, who was already Supreme Commander of the army by virtue of his position as head of state since the death of Hindenburg, now also became Commander-in-Chief of the Armed Forces. The regime was now more specifically Nazi, less conservative–nationalist, in complexion.
The overthrow of Hitler was first seriously contemplated by members of the elite during 1938–9. Army leaders including Beck and Halder, as well as the head of the Foreign Ministry Ernst von Weizsäcker, considered the 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
