The Times Great Lives
Early Years
Adolf Hitler was born on April 20, 1889, at Braunau-am-Inn, on the frontier, as he said himself, of the two German States, the reunion of which he regarded as a work worthy to be accomplished by any and every means. His parents were of Bavarian, and perhaps Bohemian, peasant descent, and his father – who until his fortieth year was known as Schicklgruber – was a Customs officer in the Austrian service and married three times – Adolf being the only son of his young third wife. Adolf was sent to the best school available, being intended for the Government service, though he himself had artistic inclinations. In 1902 his father died suddenly, leaving no resources available for the continued education of his son.
From 1904 to 1909 the young Hitler lived a life of hardship. He moved after the loss of his mother to Vienna where he had dreams of becoming an architect, but could earn only a hazardous livelihood as assistant to a house-painter and by selling sketches. For three years he lived the life of the poorest man in Vienna, sleeping in a men’s hostel, eating the bread of charity at a monastery, occasionally reduced to begging. The food for thought also presented gratuitously by life in a great city, to such as care to receive it, was not left untasted by him. Hazy legends like the Nordic saga jostled in his mind with illusions regarding the ennobling effect of war and with more rational dreams of German national unity. He saw and hated the growing Slav ascendancy and the enfeeblement of the German elements in the racially mixed Austro-Hungarian Monarchy. He drank in the pan-Germanism of Luege, in which all the original elements of ‘Hitlerism’ are to be found. He read assiduously the works of Marx and his disciples, and thoroughly disagreed with their conclusions. He discovered the Jews and acquired a fanatical aversion to them. By 1910 he had so far improved his professional position as to be able to set up as an independent draughtsman; and, still hoping to become an architect, removed to Munich thinking to find wider scope in the Bavarian capital.
A year or two later the 1914–18 war broke out, and Hitler, preferring to enrol himself in the German national army rather than in the polyglot forces of the Hapsburgs, although he was an Austrian subject, joined the 16th Bavarian Reserve Regiment as a volunteer. His war service was meritorious, but not distinguished. He won the Iron Cross, and rose to the rank of corporal. He was wounded in the battle of the Somme in 1916, and badly gassed in the later stages of the war. It was while lying in a Berlin hospital, temporarily blinded, that he learned of the events known as the November Revolution of 1918.
Political Career Begun
On leaving hospital he returned to Munich. That pleasant city soon became the prey of his enemies the Marxists. The reaction against their regime made a breeding-ground for Fascism. It was at that moment that Hitler began his political career. Thousands of bewildered and workless young Germans were meeting and talking and propounding every sort of theory and scheme. Hitler possessed what most of these fumblers lacked, a few definite ideas and a knowledge of the value and of the art of propaganda. One night he attended in Munich a meeting of a newly formed German Workers’ Party, and decided to join it. He was its seventh member, and was not long in making himself its leader and his nationalist and anti-Marxist creed its programme. The movement soon took hold in Bavaria.
Hitler discovered his remarkable oratorical powers and proved himself an adept in the management of large meetings. He realized to the full the value of repetition and of reiterating a single theme over and over again in a slightly different form. ‘All propaganda,’ he said, ‘should adapt its intellectual level to the receptive ability of the least intellectual of those whom it is desired to address.’ A pillar of strength in these days was Captain Röhm, a staff officer at Munich and a valued organizer in the councils of his military superiors. He won for Hitler the tacit approval of the local high command and certain financial resources without which two-fold help little progress could have been achieved.
Thus supported and encouraged, Hitler, in conjunction with Röhm, Göring, General Ludendorff, and others, made his first attempt to seize power in the notorious Munich Putsch of November 10, 1923. They were met outside the Feldherrnhalle by police, who fired upon them, killing Hitler’s nearest companion and 15 others. Hitler lay flat on his face. Only Ludendorff marched straight on. As soon as the firing slackened Hitler, with a dislocated shoulder, fled in a motor-car, but was arrested two days later and imprisoned in the fortress of Landsberg. During the nine months he spent there he wrote the greater part of Mein Kampf, that turgid, rambling, remarkable book of nearly 1,000 pages, which became the Bible of the Nazi movement.
Hitler’s authority declined after the fiasco of Munich, and for a while Gregor Strasser, the creator of the Nazi Party in North Germany, counted for more than he in the party ranks, whose strength in the Berlin Reichstag was no more than 12. Hitler gradually reasserted himself, however, and in the elections of 1930, when Dr Brüning was Chancellor, and when the economic crisis was already creating widespread unemployment and distress, the number of National-Socialist Deputies jumped to 107.
The political situation rapidly deteriorated. Faced by the growth of the extremist vote and the chaotic state of the party system, the Chancellor was forced increasingly to govern by decree, and though his intentions were most genuinely liberal, he led Germany far along the road to dictatorship. On May 30, 1932, he fell after dealing Hitler two shrewd blows – the dissolution of the Brown Army and the re-election of Field Marshal Paul von Hindenburg as Reichspräsident in face of the fully mobilized Nazi vote in support of Hitler’s own candidature. Hitler regarded himself as heir to the Chancellorship. But he had still 10 months to wait, 10 months of crisis during which he was thwarted, not by the now impotent Liberal and Socialist vote, not even by the vociferous Communists, who by their threats to the bourgeoisie were indirectly a help, but by the veiled resistance of the Right Wing of the old regime, with its backing of Junkers, trade magnates, Monarchists, and the entourage of the now senile Reichspräsident.
The appointment of the shifty von Papen as Chancellor to succeed Brüning was followed by the rescinding of the latter’s ban on the Brown Army as a bait to catch the Nazi support, and by a general election. At the polls Hitler more than doubled his vote, being returned with 230 followers, the largest party in the Reichstag. He demanded the Chancellorship, but Papen manoeuvred him into an interview with the Field Marshal, where Hitler, who was nervous and showed to little advantage, received a pre-arranged rebuff. His prestige suffered considerably thereby, but worse was to follow. After three months of hopeless struggle in a hostile Reichstag Papen held another election. The Nazis lost 2,000,000 votes. A feeling of defeat spread throughout the party. Some of the leaders were in despair. In Germany and abroad it was thought that Hitler had passed his zenith.
In the meantime the affairs of Germany prospered little better than those of the Bavarian ex-corporal. Papen had to resign in November, 1932, and was followed by General Kurt von Schleicher, the last Chancellor of the old regime, a clever man, who came near to destroying Hitler and paid the forfeit on June 30, 1934. Schleicher had the confidence of the Army, and, as far as anyone could, that of President von Hindenburg, but he had no Parliamentary support, and was threatened by Papen, who regarded him as the cause of his own fall from power. Schleicher in December made a bid for independence. He thought to propitiate the Nazi strength by attracting to himself in a semi-Socialist administration Gregor Strasser.
Chancellor at Last
Reichstag Fire
It was a critical moment. Hitler, who had borne the recent setbacks with surprising calm, now lost heart. ‘If the party breaks up,’ he confided to Goebbels, ‘I’ll end matters with my pistol in three minutes.’ Schism indeed seemed imminent. But Strasser himself spoilt the scheme. He dallied and hesitated. The discussions were deferred, and before they could be resumed Schleicher had fallen. The tables had been suddenly turned by von Papen, who in January made an alliance with Hitler in order to overthrow Schleicher. The Nazi leader, whom he regarded as humbled by recent ill-fortune, was to be Chancellor and he himself Vice-Chancellor, with a majority of non-Nazi colleagues, the good will of the President, and, he confidently hoped, the real power. The plan took shape, and on January 30, 1933, Adolf Hitler was formally invested with the seals of office as Reichskanzler.
The new Government was a minority one, and decided to dissolve the Reichstag and hold another election, the third in nine months. In an unparalleled propaganda campaign, in which the opposition parties had to remain passive observers, voters were belaboured with the Communist menace. Yet the voting gave an absolute majority only to the combined Nazi and Nationalist Parties, and the uneasy alliance between Hitler and Hugenberg, the Nationalist leader, would perhaps have continued but for an event of the first importance, the Reichstag fire. Whoever lit the match, it was the Nazis who arranged and profited by this act of incendiarism. Interpreted by them as a Communist act of terrorism, it was made the pretext for the suspension of all constitutional liberties and the setting up of the Nazi dictatorship under Hitler.
The seizure of power by the Nazis in March, 1933, brought to an end the hollow alliance with the Nationalists under Hugenberg, who was forced to resign shortly afterwards. At the same time the German Press was muzzled and put under the control of Goebbels. Unhampered by Parliamentary restrictions or Press criticism, Hitler and his lieutenants pushed on with the Nazi revolution. Force and unity were the guiding ideals, and every element within or outside Germany which withstood the overriding claims of German nationalism was marked down for destruction.
The long struggle for power was now ended. The National-Socialist Party was faced with the task of consolidation, and this was set about with more zeal than unity of conception or purpose. The position of Röhm’s Brown Army in the State and its relation to the Reichswehr and the position of the Stahlhelm, the armed organization of the Nationalists, were among the most thorny problems and involved much bitterness and heart-burning.
The ‘Blood Bath’; Shooting of Röhm
On July 1, 1934, the civilized world learnt with horror of the killings that had taken place the day before and have since been known as the purge or the ‘blood bath’. How many people lost their lives will never be known. The outstanding victims were Röhm, Schleicher, and Strasser. On the night of June 29 Hitler flew from the Rhineland to Munich and on to the place where Röhm was staying. Röhm was taken from his bed to Munich and shot. All over Germany similar scenes were being enacted. Leading officials of the party and comparative nonentities alike lost their lives. Many an act of private revenge was carried out that night. Hitler, in his statement to the Reichstag, said he had saved Germany from a plot of reactionaries, dissolute members of the Brown Army and the agents of a foreign Power. The reason for the massacre of June 30 may never be exactly known, but apart from private rancours and rivalries it is generally believed that Röhm aimed at having the Reichswehr embodied in his sa organization – which Hitler had the sense to refuse.
The ‘blood bath’ was officially approved by Field Marshal von Hindenburg, who probably understood nothing of it. A month later, on August 2, the old man died, and within an hour Adolf Hitler was declared his successor. He abjured the title of Reichspräsident and elected to be known as Führer and Kanzler. The poor man of Vienna was now the master of Germany, absolute lord of 60,000,000 Europeans.
Armaments
Hitler’s advent heralded a series of increasingly grave breaches of treaty obligations and challenges to European opinion. Dr Brüning had already claimed equality in armaments. This claim was vigorously repeated by Hitler, and it was on the pretext that it had been too tardily admitted by the Powers that he abruptly left the League of Nations in October, 1933. Franco-British discussions in London in February, 1935, for a general settlement were brusquely forestalled by Hitler’s announcement of conscription for an army of half a million and the creation of an Air Force. The British Government joined the French and Italian Governments in condemning the unilateral repudiation of treaty obligations, but a few weeks later, in June, 1935, it concluded a naval agreement with Hitler granting him 35 per cent of the naval strength of Great Britain and equality in submarines. To ‘his people’, as he now called the Germans, it looked as though their Führer’s tactics paid, while Europe could no longer ignore the fact that Germany was again a great Power.
In March, 1936, Adolf Hitler, taking advantage of the embroilment of Great Britain and France with Italy over Abyssinia, suddenly occupied the demilitarized zone of the Rhineland, at the same time denouncing the Treaty of Locarno, which he claimed had already been abrogated by the formation of the Franco-Russian Alliance. The military occupation of the Rhineland was the most serious as well as the most spectacular breach made so far in the facade of the Versailles Treaty. In conjunction with the introduction of conscription it transformed the military situation. It deprived the Western Powers in one moment of the strongest weapon in their armoury, one that had been used in early post-war years, the freedom of entry into German territory. Henceforward Hitler could hope to hold off an attack on his western front with one hand, while the other was free elsewhere.
The occupation of the Rhineland was accompanied by a series of proposals addressed by Hitler to the world at large, and for the special attention of the French and British peoples. He offered a 25-year non-aggression pact, an aid pact for Western Europe, non-aggression pacts with his eastern neighbours, and he even announced his readiness to return to the League of Nations under certain conditions. None of these proposals was taken seriously enough by the outside world for any concrete result to follow.
Suspicion of Hitler was now growing, though the world did not yet grasp the full baseness of Nazi technique, with its deliberate use of the lie as an instrument of policy whereby to lull future victims into a sense of security while some nefarious scheme was being developed elsewhere. Yet the Führer and Chancellor himself had asserted that the bigger the lie the better the chance of its being believed.
The Rhineland coup was followed by two years of digestion and consolidation, during which time German military preparations were pushed forward with increasing activity, and an economic reorganization aiming at self-sufficiency was undertaken. Events outside Germany in 1936 and 1937 increased the nervous tension in Europe and did much to strengthen Hitler’s position. The policy of sanctions against Italy incompletely carried out through the machinery of the League of Nations made the worst of both worlds. It fell short of what was needed to save Ethiopia, but served to turn Mussolini from friendship and collaboration with the Western Powers to an increasingly close connection with Hitler, the foremost critic in Europe of the League of Nations. This understanding was given substantive form by the support accorded by the two totalitarian States to General Franco’s cause in Spain, and was finally registered by the official establishment in September, 1937, of the Rome–Berlin Axis. By this diplomatic revolution Hitler won an important European ally at the expense of the Powers of the Versailles ‘Diktat’, whose prestige, both moral and material, had as a result of these various events suffered a considerable diminution.
Seizure of Austria
Entry into Vienna
In the early weeks of 1938 the storm centre of Europe shifted back to Berlin. Hitler engineered an abrupt crisis in Austro-German relations, which ended on March 11 by the violation of the frontier by the German Army and the forcible incorporation of Austria in the Reich. Mussolini, who in 1934, on the murder of Herr Dollfuss, had massed troops on the Brenner frontier, made no move, and received the effusive thanks of the Führer: ‘Mussolini: Ich soll es Ilnen nie vergessen.’ Hitler’s dramatic entry into Vienna a few days later, after nearly a quarter of a century’s absence, during which he had experienced every vicissitude of hope, despair, and triumph, was watched with curiosity and even sympathy by millions of people outside the Reich, whose Governments had in the past resoundingly refused to the constitutional requests of both Berlin and Vienna the union which the German Dictator had now achieved by force.
The union of the Reich and the Ostmark, as Austria was now called, immediately raised the problem of Czechoslovakia, which contained a minority of some 3,500,000 Germans and was now surrounded by German territory on three sides. The question asked all over Europe was how soon would Bohemia share the fate of Austria. Hitler’s assurance to the Czech Government that it had nothing to fear did not allay suspicion. A series of communal elections throughout Czechoslovakia in May raised to fever-pitch the excitement created in the German minority by the inclusion in the Reich of their Austrian co-racialists. At the annual meeting in September of the National-Socialist Party at Nuremberg Hitler stood as the avowed champion of the Sudeten Germans, and their demands immediately precipitated an acute European crisis involving the imminent risk of general war. Hitler, with the German Army mobilized, his western front approaching a state of impregnability, faced by potential opponents who were mentally bewildered and militarily unprepared, and divided both geographically and ideologically, was in a position to dictate his terms. In conferences at Berchtesgaden and Godesberg with Mr Neville Chamberlain, and then at Munich, where M. Daladier and Mussolini, as well as Mr Chamberlain, were present, he put forward demands that France and Britain were not in a position to refuse. To save the peace of the world and to avoid their own destruction the Czechs were told that they must submit to the arrangements made by the four Great Powers at Munich, whereby all the German districts of Bohemia, together with the immense fortifications of the Erzgebirge, were handed over absolutely to Germany. In eight months Hitler had added 10,000,000 of Germans to the Third Reich, had broken the only formidable bastion to German expansion south-eastwards, and had made himself the most powerful individual in Europe since Napoleon i.
Czechoslovakia a ‘protectorate’
In the course of his conversations with Mr Chamberlain Hitler had assured him that he had no more territorial claims to make in Europe – a phrase he had also used after the seizure of Austria. On March 15, 1939, the world was, however, startled to hear that the German Army was invading and overwhelming Bohemia, Moravia, and Slovakia, all that remained of the independent Republic. President Hacha, who under German pressure had succeeded Dr Benesh in the autumn, was summoned to Berlin and forced to accept terms which made his country a ‘Protectorate’ of the Reich. Hitler went to Prague to proclaim there another bloodless victory and then while the going was good travelled to Memel, which had been ceded under the Versailles Treaty to Lithuania, and announced its annexation on March 23.
Poland had profited from the dismemberment of Czechoslovakia by being allowed to annex the disputed region of Teschen. But she was marked down as the next victim. While German troops were still moving into Slovakia Hitler proposed to the Polish Government that Danzig should be returned to Germany and that Germany should build and own a road connecting East Prussia with the rest of the Reich, in return for which Germany would guarantee the Polish frontiers for 25 years – though a 10-year treaty of non-aggression already existed between the two countries, of which five years had still to run. Poland rejected the proposals and appealed to Great Britain and France for support. These countries at once gave Poland pledges to defend her independence, if necessary by war. The action of the Western Powers came as a shock to Hitler, who was further alarmed by negotiations shortly afterwards set on foot in Moscow by the French and British with the Soviet Government. The spectre of war on two fronts again arose to damp the German ardour for acquisition. Hitler, faced with the prospect of a check and a rebuff, fatal contingencies for an aspiring dictator, made his decision. Rather than give up his cherished, and indeed loudly proclaimed design of seizing Danzig and the Polish Corridor, he was prepared to eat every word he had uttered in condemnation, derision, and defiance of the Bolshevist regime, and to invite the Russians to agree to a non-aggression pact. Stalin on his side, finding the danger of a German attack suddenly exorcized, and distrusting the constancy of the Western Powers, was not unwilling to accept Hitler’s overtures, and the Pact was signed on August 23.
Hitler Starts War
With the disappearance of any likelihood of Russian assistance being given to the western allies Hitler saw no further obstacle in the way of an immediate attack on Poland, and on August 31, 1939, he ordered the German Armies to cross the frontier. The Second World War had begun. With typical falsity Hitler and Ribbentrop – now his intimate and most pernicious adviser – had offered the Polish Ambassador terms of settlement, and broadcast them to the world, a few hours before the soldiers began the invasion, without, however, allowing the Ambassador time or means to convey them to his Government.
The attack on Poland gave the world its first taste of the horrors of a German Blitzkrieg. Hitler went East to superintend the slaughter in person. It was a swift and terrible war which he waged in bitter hatred and, when the issue was clear, with crude boastings and gross lies at the expense of a broken nation. In a speech at Danzig on September 19 he had the effrontery to declare that: ‘Poland has worked for this war’ and ‘peace was prevented by a handful of (British) warmongers’. On the same occasion he took up what he called the British ‘challenge’ to a three years’ conflict and announced that Germany possessed a new weapon. The grim business was over in a few weeks. Warsaw surrendered on September 24 and on October 5 Hitler visited it and swaggered among the ruins which were garlanded for the occasion.
The next day, speaking in the Reichstag, he made what he called his last offer to the allies. It was a remarkable rhetorical performance, though, obviously nervous, he hurried through the phrases in which he described his new friendship with the Russians. As a plea for peace it could, if only one of its premises had been sound and one of its promises could have been believed, scarcely have been bettered; but he had by that time to pay the price of his habitual contempt for truth. In early November he made a speech at Munich, on the anniversary of the Putsch of 1923, in which he said that he had given Göring orders to prepare for a five years’ war. He ended earlier than had been expected and left the Burgerbräu beer cellar in which he made it for Berlin. Shortly afterwards there was an explosion in which six people were killed and over 60 injured. The official German News Agency claimed that the attempt had been inspired by foreign agents and offered a reward of half a million marks for the discovery of the instigators. One George Elsen was arrested. Official Germans were infuriated with The Times for suggesting that the explosion was no surprise to the Führer and that he had left early to avoid it.
France Crushed
On New Year’s Day, 1940, Hitler declared that he was fighting for ‘a new Europe’. On March 18 he met Mussolini on the Brenner, a presage, as it was later recognized to be, of great events. In April came the invasions of Norway and Denmark, and in early May he was congratulating his troops on their success and authorizing decorations for them. On May 10 his armies invaded Belgium, Holland, and Luxembourg, and on the same day he went to the Western Front. On the morrow he proclaimed that the hour for the decisive battle for the future of the German nation had come. In less than a month the bells were rung in Germany to celebrate the victorious conclusion of what he called ‘the greatest battle of all time’. A few days later he congratulated Mussolini on the entry of Italy into the war. On June 22 the Armistice with France was signed. At that moment Hitler stood at the zenith of his success and power. Western Europe was his and there remained no one there to crush except Great Britain, weakened by her losses on the Continent and without an effective ally. As usual Goebbels was turned on to prepare the way.