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Hitler Tears Up The Treaty Of Versailles

The crowning irony of prewar efforts to appease Hitler was Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain's "triumphal" return from his negotiating mission with Hitler in Munich. He stands before a welcoming British crowd and waves the so-called Anglo-German peace declaration that Hitler had signed with Chamberlain that morning. The document was useless: Hitler had already secretly agreed with Mussolini that they would have to join in a future war against Britain.

Three soldiers on bicycles came first. Below their steel helmets their faces were young, their figures brawny. Approving murmurs rippled through the crowds that were standing in Cologne's Cathedral Square. Then the sounds swelled to an ecstatic roar. Into the square marched line after line of German infantrymen, goose-stepping in perfect unison.

As the troops passed in review before their commanding general, the onlookers fell respectfully silent. They held off until a small girl handed the general a bouquet of red carnations. That ended the solemnities. Cheering, singing, surging through the square, the people of Cologne erupted in joy. A dignified businessman announced loudly: "The first soldier I get my hands on is going to get as cockeyed drunk at my expense as I did when I was a soldier in 1914-and I'm going to get cockeyed with him. Heil Hitler! Thanks be to God! Deutschland uber Alles!"

Cologne was not the only German city in a fever of rejoicing on Saturday, March 7, 1936. Two other towns along the west bank of the Rhine saw similar scenes as German troops streamed across bridges from the river's east bank. The significance of their arrival was clear to the Rhineland's residents: Hitler was moving to remilitarize the region, bringing Germany's rapidly reviving armed powerto thevery doorstep of its once and future foe, France.

To statesmen around the world, the message was also clear: Hitler had torn up the Treaty of Versailles, the world's insurance policy against the threat of a revived and aggressive Germany. Few parts of the treaty had galled the Germans as much as the sections concerning the Rhineland. These terms required that all 9,450 square miles of the Rhineland west of the Rhine, and a 30-mile-wide zone east of the river, be permanently demilitarized to form a buffer between Germany and a perpetually wary France. Germany was not permitted to maintain any forces there; existing fortifications were to be dismantled and no new ones built. To ensure compliance, there would be a 15-year period of occupation by Allied soldiers.

The Allied forces were gone by mid-1930,four years ahead of schedule. By then the Germans seemed reconciled to the Rhineland's status; in fact, they had voluntarily renewed their pledge to keep it demilitarized under the terms of the Locarno Pact, the mutual-security treaty they had signed with the French in 1925. Hitler himself had since endorsed this action. As recently as May 1935, he had publicly hailed an unarmed Rhineland as Germany's "contribution" to European peace. Now, only 10 months later, German troops again patrolled along the Rhine - and Europe's leaders could not decide what to do about it.

The French began planning a military sweep into the Rhineland, then reconsidered and settled for a protest to the League of Nations. The League pronounced Germany guilty of violating the Locarno Pact, then failed to suggest any way to enforce it. In the end, a rationale was found for Hitler's coup - by the British. After all, the London Times noted, it was not as if the Fuhrer were invading foreign soil: "He is only going into his own back garden."

The military units that marched into the garden for him seemed formidable - well-drilled, and ready for whatever might happen. In point of fact, they were but a token force, with little more to back them up than their leader's boldness. The troops were equipped only with rifles, carbines and machine guns. The planes that were sent up in a show of strength by the Luftwaffe, Germany's new air force, were not combat-ready; they lacked guns or ammunition or both, and the Luftwaffe pilots kept looking apprehensively westward, expecting a mass onslaught by French planes. Had France moved in, Hitler later admitted, "we would have had to withdraw with our tails between our legs."

Instead, the Rhineland provided Hitler with a wildly successful formula for future action elsewhere: An avowal of peaceful intentions followed by a lightning-swift military move - preferably made on a weekend, when most European statesmen liked to relax. The episode marked his first open display of force to gain an objective, stamping him as a consummate gambler, coolly ready for the ultimate risk - war. In the next three years Hitler was to place larger and larger piles of chips on this bet in places that could hardly be described as Germany's "own back garden." The places were Austria, Czechoslovakia and Poland.

In Paris and London and other capitals, despite the implicit threat of the Rhineland move, most officials were very slow to accept the vision of Hitler's Germany as a real menace to world peace. They were willing to concede that Hitler himself was troublesome, erratic, altogether an odd duck by conventional standards of statesmanship. But they found it inconceivable that he would want war, let alone relish the prospect. They preferred to believe that he was motivated solely by the desire to undo the humiliating damage that he felt had been done to Germany at Versailles-a feeling some of them had come to share.

Any of them could have known otherwise had they troubled to read Mein Kampf, the lengthy book of intent that Hitler had written in 1924. Few had read it and fewer still had taken it seriously. (Mussolini, in a triumph of illogic, dismissed it as "that boring book I have never been able to read.") But in it Hitler had clearly stated his aims for Germany, and not all of them involved rectifying Versailles. Hitler proposed not only to restore Germany's place in the sun, but to enlarge it - to make the German state, in his own grandiose words, "lord of the earth."

The march into the Rhineland was just one step in pursuit of his goal, and not the first step, at that. His first move, made within months after he came to power in 1933, had been to launch a campaign to absorb his native Austria into a Greater Germany - an objective recorded on the very first page of Mein Kampf. The operation began undercover; Hitler was not then prepared for overt military action. Instead he sent secret agents south into Austria. The agents had a potent, ready-made weapon at their disposal: hundreds of thousands of Austrian Nazis, belligerently asserting that their country was German by reason of racial ties and common language. Along with the Fuhrer they passionately wanted what they called Anschluss - political union with Germany.

The chief obstacle to Anschluss was Austria's Chancellor, Engelbert Dollfuss. He was a tiny man, less than five feet tall; Viennese wags called him "Millimetternich," a miniature replica of his great 19th Century predecessor in diplomacy, Prince Metternich. But Dollfuss had a will out of all proportion to his size. He had clamped a lid on his country's seething politics by outlawing both its Nazi and Socialist parties and setting up an authoritarian regime. Italy was its model; to Dollfuss, Mussolini was not only mentor but acknowledged protector.

Driven underground, the Austrian Nazis resorted to terror tactics. In July 1934, after a bomb wrecked a power station and paralyzed Vienna's transport, Chancellor Dollfuss issued an ultimatum: a death sentence awaited any Nazi who was caught with explosives in his possession.

A few days later, the Chancellor was meeting with members of his cabinet when 10 men burst in, pistols in hand. Dressed in the uniforms of Austria's army and police, they had slipped in unchallenged by the sentries at the Chancellery entrance. Without saying a word, one gunman shot Dollfuss in the chest and neck; two others dumped him, bleeding, on a sofa. The Austrian cabinet members were seized as hostages while the Nazis occupied the building for six hours. Meanwhile, Dollfuss' agonized pleas for a doctor and a priest went ignored, and he slowly bled to death. Austria seemed ripe for Nazi plucking.

But at that moment the drama took a sudden turn, directed by the hand of one cabinet member the Nazis had failed to snare. Minister of Education Kurt von Schuschnigg had left the cabinet meeting for an early luncheon. When he discovered what had happened, he directed Austrian troops to lay siege to the Chancellery. Inside, the gunmen nervously telephoned the German envoy to Vienna, who arrived to arrange a truce. It lasted only until the gunmen emerged, expecting safe conduct to the German border. Instead, they were thrown into jail. Their leaders were promptly hanged, and the plot appeared to have collapsed.

Schuschnigg became the new Chancellor. The murder of Dollfuss sent shock waves around the world. In New York, stock prices tumbled as headlines blazoned the "war scare." The English press, lately fascinated by the exploits of an American gangster, dubbed Germany "the Dillinger of Europe." Even the London Times lost its usual air of detachment. The assassination of Dollfuss, the Times commented, "makes the name of Nazi stink in the nostrils of the world."

Officially, the British and French deplored the tragedy, declared that they stood ready to preserve Austria's independence from Germany, then made it plain that any action to be taken was up to Austria's best friend, Italy. In short, the buck was passed to Mussolini.

He took it. Mussolini had felt personally affronted by the assassination: Dollfuss had been killed while his young wife and two children were house guests of the Mussolini family at their Adriatic vacation retreat. The Duce's eyes brimmed with tears as he put the widow aboard a plane for Vienna. He then ordered 50,000 troops rushed to the Brenner Pass, on Italy's frontier with Austria.

Mussolini's ploy worked. The German government issued a denial of any connection with the Dollfuss murder. The Fuhrer himself piously professed an earnest desire to restore relations with Austria "to normal and friendly paths." There was no confrontation with Mussolini's troops. For his decisive action in the crisis, the Duce was to earn an ironic sort of credit from history. He proved to be the only one among Europe's leaders to have faced Hitler down in the stormy era preceding World War II.

Hitler's embarrassment over the fiasco soon vanished. A final reckoning with Austria could wait, and meanwhile he had another move to make - this time entirely out in the open. In March 1935, he announced to the world that he was reintroducing compulsory military service and forming a new German air force. Until now, German rearmament had been accomplished by ruse and subterfuge, in order to get around the limits that had been imposed by the Versailles Treaty. Now Hitler was dropping all pretense. A new German war machine was going to be built, taking into full account the revolution in warfare that had been wrought by airplanes and by tanks.

The implications were staggering. Every country on the continent, and Britain as well, stood in potential jeopardy if Germany's dictator ever decided to send his new war machine on the rampage. The prospect looked grim enough to warrant a conference on the highest levels. A month after Hitler's announcement, Prime Minister Ramsay MacDonald of Britain and Premier Pierre Flandin of France journeyed to the little Italian town of Stresa for intensive talks with Mussolini. The result was an agreement that the three powers would use all suitable means to oppose any aggression by Germany. The agreement was nicknamed the "Stresa Front," and for a brief time it seemed solid.

Yet, within nine weeks it lay in ruins - wrecked by a new Hitler move, this one a masterpiece of political chicanery. Blandly ignoring Stresa, Hitler sent a private message to the British assuring them of his deep desire for their country's continued supremacy of the seas. Completely seduced by this appeal to their heart of hearts, the British, without consulting their Stresa partners, signed a pact fixing Germany's naval strength at one third Britain's. But what was presumably intended as a restraint on German naval expansion was in fact a green light. At the time of signing Germany had no navy to speak of; in order to reach the limit of 35 per cent; the Reich's shipyards would be kept humming for years. Moreover, the pact recognized the Germans' right to have submarines, expressly denied them by the Versailles Treaty.

Ten months later, Hitler's troops marched into the "demilitarized" Rhineland, tramping the remaining tatters of the treaty beneath their boots. The Rhineland move paid a quick dividend. Reading the portents, the new Austrian Chancellor, Schuschnigg, sought an accommodation with his increasingly fearsome neighbor to the north. In the summer of 1936 the two countries signed an agreement by which Germany promised not to interfere in Austria's internal affairs and Austria pledged to conduct itself as a "German state" in foreign matters. But two secret clauses made a mockery of Germany's part of the bargain. Schuschnigg had to promise to grant amnesty to Austrian Nazis then in prison, and to make room in his government for Nazi sympathizers.

Austria's once staunch defender, Mussolini, showed no sign of alarm over this development. Instead, he accepted an assurance from Hitler that Germany would continue to respect Austrian sovereignty. This tacit approval of Hitler was a quick and dramatic bit of side-switching by Mussolini. He had been much impressed by the Fuhrer's unopposed march into the Rhineland. The Anglo-German pact had shattered the anti-Nazi Stresa Front. And to Mussolini, Britain and France now appeared increasingly weak; neither nation had done anything about the Rhineland, and Britain had appeared almost servile in signing the naval agreement. If, as seemed likely, the Fuhrer was on his way to upsetting the old balance of power in Europe, it could benefit Italy to be on the winning side.

The Munich pact had spelled Czechoslovakia's doom. Loss of the Sudetenland not only stripped the country of its principal line of fortifications against Germany, but also whetted the appetite of Czechoslovakia's other enemies. Poland and Hungary simply walked in and took some 8,000 square miles of Czech territory. The provinces of Slovakia and Ruthenia demanded and got a large degree of autonomy.

Meanwhile President Benes resigned and went into exile in England. His aging successor, Emil Hacha, had a weak heart and little skill in politics or diplomacy. In March 1939 he tried to halt his country's further disintegration by dismissing the fractious governments of Slovakia and Ruthenia. Slovakia, at Hitler's orders, proclaimed its independence; Hungary, posing as the protector of Ruthenia, demanded that province's evacuation by the Czechoslovak army.

In this new crisis Hacha and his Foreign Minister sought an audience with Hitler in Berlin. Hitler received them at one in the morning - an hour deliberately chosen with the thought that the ailing Hacha would be at his lowest ebb. Without further ado the Fuhrer announced that he intended to impose German "protectorates" on Bohemia and Moravia, the two provinces remaining to Czechoslovakia. If Hacha did not sign by 5 a.m., the Fuhrer shouted, German bombers would begin saturation bombing of Prague that morning. At 4 a.m. Hacha, near collapse, signed away his country's independence.

By daybreak German troops were in Bohemia and Moravia, and a few hours later a proclamation by Hitler informed the world that "Czechoslovakia had ceased to exist." That evening he personally arrived in Prague to impose the "protectorate" on his latest victims. To emphasize his new triumph, he chose to sleep overnight in Hradcany Castle, the traditional home both of the anient kings of Bohemia and their modern democratic successors.

With the final occupation of Bohemia and Moravia, the British and French could no longer continue to deceive themselves about Hitler. Here was a clear case of aggression involving peoples and territories that had never before been under German rule. But the two countries hesitated to act - and Hitler moved again.

Before March was out he forced the little Baltic republic of Lithuania to cede the city of Memel, once a part of German East Prussia. Next, he fixed his eyes on Poland. That shredded document, the Versailles Treaty, had carved a corridor out of Germany in order to give Poland an outlet to the sea; it had also given the former German seaport of Danzig the status of a free city. An overwhelming majority of Danzig's residents were Nazis, clamoring for reunion with the Reich. But the city lay within the corridor, at its very tip. Hitler ordered Foreign Minister von Ribbentrop to discuss a settlement of the questions of both Danzig and the corridor with Poland's Foreign Minister, Colonel Joseph Beck.

Chamberlain, still searching for ways to restrain Hitler, had also decided to approach Beck. But this involved some prior negotiating with Russia. Against his own deeply ingrained opinions about the Russians, Chamberlain proposed that they join with the British and French in a guarantee of Polish independence. But Beck declared he wanted no Russian guarantee whatever; he believed his country was best served by keeping both Germany and Russia at arm's length.

On March 31, Chamberlain made a move that was to stun his own countrymen. He offered Beck a unilateral British guarantee of Poland's security. This was too good for Beck to refuse. He accepted, as one observer put it, "between two flicks of ash from his cigarette." The unilateral guarantee - though France soon joined in it - was a complete reversal of the policy England had firmly maintained since the close of World War I: Chamberlain had, in effect, placed the decision for war or peace for his people in the hands of another nation. He had done so on the preposterous assumption that Poland was in no immediate danger and that it was militarily strong - an illusion Beck did his best to encourage. In any event, Britain was in no position to give any effective aid to its new ally if it were suddenly attacked.

Hitler knew this too, but the British guarantee sent him into a fresh fury against Chamberlain and his countrymen. "I'll cook them a stew they'll choke on!" he said. He was no happier with the Poles; they had rebuffed Ribbentrop's proposal to settle the questions of Danzig and the corridor. The German Army was alerted to prepare a new plan of operation: Case White, an attack on Poland. The date was set for September 1, 1939. This time, Hitler warned his generals, "We cannot expect a repetition of the Czech affair. We must prepare ourselves for conflict."

When Chamberlain informed an astonished House of Commons of his guarantee to Poland, he was barraged with shouts of "What about Russia?" Former Prime Minister Lloyd George had voiced the misgivings of many men: "If we are going into this without the help of Russia we are walking into a trap." Chamberlain had assured his listeners that Britain and France were still in touch with Moscow. In fact, talks with Moscow were stalled. Chamberlain had wanted Russia to give its own guarantee to Poland; the Russians preferred an Anglo-French-Soviet alliance that would also guarantee the Baltic states against German aggression.

Then, in May, Stalin made a move that portended no good for the British and French. He appointed Vyacheslav Molotov as his new Foreign Minister, replacing Maxim Litvinov, a staunch believer in collective security with the West. In Molotov's first public speech he criticized the British and French for their half-hearted efforts at rapprochement with the Soviet Union. But in any case, he added pointedly, continuing to negotiate with the Western Democracies in no way precluded the simultaneous strengthening of Russia's trade relations with Germany and Italy.

In July, prodded into action by Molotov's speech and by Polish intelligence reports that a German attack on Poland might come as early as the end of August, the British and French agreed to talks in Moscow between their military representatives and Russia's, as a preliminary to a military accord. But the Anglo-French mission took its time getting organized and elected to go to Russia by sea, taking a slow boat to Leningrad. Once in Moscow, the members of the mission proved unable to answer key questions of strategy posed by the Russians; for example, would the Poles allow the Red Army to cross Polish territory to make contact with the enemy? The talks adjourned, never to be resumed.

The Germans, meanwhile, had read Molotov's speech with great care. When the German Ambassador in Moscow asked him what he meant by his reference to improving trade relations between their two countries, Molotov replied that Stalin wanted to improve political relations as well. To Hitler this was a clear signal that Russia might be neutralized in the coming war with Poland.

Despite his long-time hatred of "Jewish Bolshevism," Hitler instructed Foreign Minister von Ribbentrop to express his willingness to go to Moscow to settle "all territorial questions" between the two countries. On August 23 Ribbentrop landed at Khodynka airport at Moscow. After lunch he went to see Stalin and Molotov at the Kremlin and the three hammered out a mutual nonaggression pact that freed Hitler to invade Poland, and allowed Stalin to move as he chose, into Finland, Estonia, Latvia, the Rumanian province of Bessarabia-and the eastern half of Poland as well. Only the nonaggression pact would be publicly announced; the rest was kept in a secret protocol.

That night the conferees and their retinues celebrated with toasts in vodka and champagne to Russia, to Germany and to Stalin. Then Stalin rose to offer the final toast. "I know how much the German nation loves its Fuhrer," he said. "I should like to drink his health."

The news of the Nazi-Soviet treaty burst over Europe like a clap of thunder before the deluge. But even now, a few ears refused to hear its real meaning. In France, there was talk of renouncing the guarantee to Poland: many feared that with Britain's army yet to be put into shape the brunt of war would fall on the French alone. In the end, however, they stood firm behind Daladier's determination that France would "be true to her solemn promises."

In Britain, the pact forged a unity of solemn, angry purpose that had been hitherto lacking. Conservatives, Liberals and Laborites outdid one another in denouncing Stalin's treachery. And the country braced itself. On September 1, exactly as Hitler had planned all along, the German Army poured over the Polish border. The French and the British declared war on Germany on September 3. Chamberlain told Parliament: "Everything I have worked for, everything I have hoped for, everything I have believed in has crashed in ruins." The prelude to war had ended.

Robert T. Elson. . Time Life Education. 1976.

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