HITLER IN POWER

Hitler's revolution: 1933-1934
Hitler moves swiftly to consolidate his hold on power. At his first cabinet meeting, on the day of his appointment as chancellor, he argues that new elections must be held if the coalition fails to command an immediate majority in the Reichstag. He overcomes the qualms of Papen and his colleagues by promising that whatever the result of the election, the present balance within the cabinet will be maintained (the three Nazi members are Hitler, Goering and Wilhelm Frick). The election is fixed for 5 March 1933. The campaign is one of unprecedented violence. Gangs of Hitler's Brownshirts are unleashed on the streets to break up the meetings of opposition parties. The police are instructed not to intervene.
During the election campaign, on the night of February 27, the Reichstag building burns down. Many assume at the time that this was contrived by the Nazis, but it seems probable that it was an isolated act of arson by a mentally disturbed Dutchman, Marinus van der Lubbe. Whatever the precise origin of the fire, it provides Hitler with a heaven-sent opportunity. Proclaiming it as part of a Communist plot to seize control, he passes a decree suspending all rights of the individual and giving the government emergency powers. In spite of these circumstances, the Nazis and their coalition allies fail by a narrow margin to win an overall majority within the Reichstag. Steps are immediately taken to remedy this.
On March 23, at the first session of the newly elected Reichstag (using a a Berlin opera house as a temporary home), the 81 Communist members and about 20 Social Democrats are conspicuous by their absence. They are either in hiding or are already in the hands of Hitler's police. Even without their hostile votes, Hitler cannot immediately muster the two-thirds majority which he requires for the business scheduled for the day - an 'enabling act' which will give his government the power to pass decrees independently of the Reichstag and without any restriction by the president.
In the event, with gangs of threatening Brownshirts mustered outside the building, only the Social Democrats have the courage to oppose the Enabling Act. The most significant measure in Hitler's political career is passed by the comfortable margin of 441 to 94. With this constitutional step achieved, he is an elected dictator. Subsequent decrees, passed with this new authority, tidy up Hitler's mechanism for controlling the nation. In May 1933 trades unions are brought under Nazi control. In July 1933 the Nazi party is declared to be the only legitimate political organization within Germany. In January 1934 the powers of Germany's proudly independent regions, the Länder, are transferred to the central government.
Meanwhile the apparatus of state is being rapidly equipped to cope with personal dissent. In March 1933 the Nazis establish their first concentration camp, organized by Heinrich Himmler at Dachau near Munich. The pattern is soon followed in other parts of the country. By that summer as many as 30,000 Germans are being held without trial in these punitive establishments. The two main groups of victims are Communists and Jews, the twin targets of Hitler's long-standing obsession.
Hitler and the Jews: 1933-1938
Immediately after the Enabling Act is passed, the world is given clear warning that the anti-Semitism of Mein Kampf is not merely the raving of a theorist. It is a basis for action. The German government declares an open-ended boycott of all Jewish shops. The announcement receives wide international attention. On March 27 (just four days after the passing of the act) a mass rally is held in New York. A resolution is taken to boycott all German goods if Hitler's measure is put into effect. Hitler compromises, revealing his sure touch in international diplomacy. He announces that the boycott will be limited to one day. On the designated day Brownshirts stand outside every Jewish establishment in Germany, warning people not to enter.
But the underlying policy remains unaltered. On April 7 a law is passed ordering the immediate 'retirement' of all civil servants 'not of Aryan descent'. This requires the dismissal of Jewish teachers in schools and universities as well as all those employed in government departments. Some of the German towns, in their enthusiasm, develop the policy beyond the immediate demands of the law. They ban performances by Jewish actors and musicians. A 'non-Aryan' is defined as anyone with one or more Jewish grandparents. At first some exceptions are made, because of the insistence of the president, Hindenburg, that the law should not apply to Jews who had fought in the 1914-18 war or had lost a father or son in that conflict. But the law of April 7 is amended in 1935, after Hindeburg's death, and by the end of the following year there are no 'non-Aryans' in public employment.
Meanwhile, in 1935, even harsher measures are imposed, in the so-called Nuremberg Laws. At a Nazi rally in Nuremberg in September of that year it is announced that Jews are to be deprived of German citizenship, and that any sexual relationship between a Jew and a German citizen is henceforth illegal. The penalty, where the Jew in question is male, is to be death. As yet there is no systematic and coordinated violence against Jews, but this changes drastically in November 1938. The pretext is the murder by a Jew of a diplomat in the German embassy in Paris. This occurs on November 7. Two days later a nation-wide pogrom is unleashed on the Jews of Germany and Austria (recently annexed by Hitler in the Anschluss). Organized bands of Nazis rampage through the towns, burning synagogues, smashing the windows of Jewish shops and looting their contents.
The smashed windows provide Germans with a name for this night of terror - Kristallnacht, the night of cut glass. Hitler personally orders the violence to continue throughout the night, telling Goebbels (who notes it in his diary) that 'the Jews should be made to feel the wrath of the people' and ordering 20,000 or 30,000 Jews to be arrested immediately. Approximately 20,000 are sent to the concentration camps during the next few days. To pile on the agony, it is decreed that insurance money due on the damaged buildings is to be paid to the state. The Jews themselves are to bear the cost of repairs to their premises. And for good measure a fine of one billion marks is imposed on the German Jewish community.
Some 7500 Jewish shops are looted during Kristallnacht. At first sight it seems an anomaly - in view of Hitler's anti-Semitism - that so many Jewish firms are still trading in 1938. Yet it is entirely consistent with his cautious economic policy. Hitler is invariably careful not to damage Germany's economy or upset those with influence in commerce and industry. In this conservative approach he is at odds with the more radical members of the Nazi party, who are eager to unleash the power of the Brownshirts to sweep away all that remains of the fusty old Germany of pre-war days. Hitler, by contrast, has a romantic notion of Germany's past. He dreams of reviving the nation's ancient greatness, in the form of a new Reich.
SA and SS: 1933-1934
Hitler and his colleagues are as one in seeing their Nazi movement as a revolution. The question is whether the revolution should end once power is achieved, or whether it should then evolve into a second revolution to create a radically new Germany. The leading exponent of the second view is Ernst Roehm, the founder and commander of Hitler's thuggish support group, the SA (Sturmabteilung, or 'storm section'), commonly known as the Brownshirts. Roehm and his men have good reason to want a continuing revolution, because once Hitler is in power (in 1933) they are in danger of being sidelined. Uneducated and violent, in effect little more than gangsters, the Brownshirts could now be seen as a disreputable liability.
As such, they represent a major problem. By 1933 the SA consists of more than 2 million men. This is far larger than Germany's army. Roehm's solution is that the SA and the army should be merged under a single commander, with no prizes for guessing who he has in mind. But the army, the most reactionary element in German life owing to Prussia's long military tradition, will entertain no thought of any cooperation with the upstart SA - except perhaps as a pool of useful young manpower when required. Moreover the army is directly answerable to the president (one of their own, being field marshal Hindenburg). And Hitler, as a condition of becoming chancellor, has promised Hindenburg that he will keep the army out of politics.
On his accession to power, Hitler proves adept at reassuring the army commanders that he has their interests at heart. He knows that he needs their support in the early years of his regime, and in 1934 he needs it for a very specific purpose. It becomes evident that the aged Hindenburg has only months or weeks to live. Hitler is determined to succeed him. He cannot be sure of doing so without the army's endorsement. The need to resolve the problem of Roehm and the SA becomes urgent. In solving it, Hitler demonstrates his ruthlessness. After some painful deliberation, for Roehm is an old friend, he decides on a purge.
His agents in the purge are members of the SS (Schutzstaffel, or 'defence squadron'). Formed originally as a personal bodyguard for Hitler, and commanded since 1929 by Heinrich Himmler, the SS (whose members are known as the Blackshirts) is from 1931 a subsidiary part of the SA (the Brownshirts). Hitler personally flies to confront Roehm, in the middle of the night of 29 June 1934, in the hotel bedroom near Munich where he is taking a cure. After being accused of attempting to stage a putsch (for which there is no evidence at all), Roehm is shot by SS men.
During the course of the same night (which becomes known as the Night of the Long Knives) some 150 SA commanders in Berlin are meeting the same fate, under the personal supervision of Goering and Himmler. Meanwhile some personal grudges are settled which have nothing to do with the SA. The body of an old man, Gustav von Kahr, is found in a swamp near Munich. Long retired from political life, he has been hacked to death with a pickaxe. His offence is that he made a fool of Hitler, eleven years earlier, in the failed Munich putschof 1923.
The international community is profoundly shocked when news of the night's slaughter echoes round the world. But Hitler brazens it out, maintaining that he has saved Germany from the dangers of a treacherous counter-revolution. With the transfer of power from the SA to the SS, he has now a much more sophisticated means of suppressing future dissent. Under Himmler's command (which lasts until 1945) the SS expands to include the Gestapo (Geheime Staatspolizei, 'secret state police'), the Totenkopfverbände ('death's-head battalion', providing guards in the concentration camps) and the crack army units known as the Waffen SS (Weapons SS). The Night of the Long Knives refines the machinery of terror. All that is needed now is a final touch of legitimacy.
The Thousand-Year Reich: from1934
Hitler's last step in achieving total control of Germany is eased by his willing accomplices, the senior army commanders. Indifferent to the naked evidence of criminality in the government, they welcome the taming of the SA. And when Hindenburg dies, on August 2, they immediately agree that Hitler will now combine the roles of president, chancellor and supreme commander of the armed forces. Moreover the allegiance of the army is now to be personal. On the very day of Hindenburg's death, each officer and man in the German army swears by God to 'render unconditional obedience to the Führer of the German Reich and People, Adolf Hitler' and to 'be ready, as a brave soldier, to stake my life at any time for this oath'.
On August 19 a plebiscite is put to the German people, asking whether Hitler shall now become head of state as Führer (leader) and Reich Chancellor. More than 38 million voters say yes (and more than 4 million have the courage to say no). At the party rally in Nuremberg in September Hitler declares that the Nazi revolution is now complete; and 'in the next thousand years there will be no other revolution in Germany'. Thus begins the heady concept of the Third Reich, the Thousand-Year Reich, completing the trio of the First Reich (the Holy Roman Empire) and the Second Reich (achieved by Bismarck for the Hohenzollern dynasty). In the event it will be the shortest of the three, lasting eleven years rather than a thousand.
The economy and the nation: 1933-1938
There are three main planks to Hitler's economic and national policy: the reduction of unemployment, rearmament to make Germany strong again, and the restoration of the greater Germany diminished by the treaty of Versailles. Unspoken aspects of the third aim are the annexation of Austria and the eventual need to expand into Slav areas to the east in order to give the German people Lebensraum or 'living space' (both the phrase and the concept were probably suggested to Hitler by Rudolf Hess in their shared prison cell in 1923). By a policy of massive investment in public works such as road building (the German autobahns, the world's first motorways, bring widespread international admiration), Hitler achieves rapid success with unemployment. The figure of 6 million unemployed when he takes power, in January 1933, is down to 2.6 million by December 1934.
The following month brings him a great success in the rich mining district of the Saar. This region has been part of Germany from 1815. But a hundred years later the treaty of Versailles places it under the control of the League of Nations - with the output of the mines going to France as part of Germany's reparations. At the same time the treaty stipulates that the inhabitants shall vote in 1935 whether to merge with Germany or France or stay with the League. Anti-French feeling in the district would no doubt have provided the same result, but powerful Nazi propaganda ensures a 90% majority for merging with Germany when the plebiscite is held in January 1935. Hitler acquires a valuable industrial region.
Two months later, in March 1935, Hitler takes his first calculated international gamble. In blatant violation of the terms of the treaty of Versailles he announces that he is reintroducing conscription in order to build up a peacetime army and navy. The great European powers duly register their protests but take no action. A year later Hitler chances another equally bold step. The treaty of Versailles has specified that the Allies can occupy until 1935 the Rhineland, the important strategic area in the west of Germany bordering France. The foreign divisionshave been withdrawn early, in 1930, but the treaty also states that the region shall be permanently demilitarized. In March 1936 Hitler moves troops into the Rhineland. Again he hears only verbal objections.
The build-up of an army requires a build-up of armaments. In further violation of the treaty, Hitler launches a massive rearmament programme. German expenditure on arms rises from 2 billion Reichsmarks in 1933 to 16 billion in 1938. Unemployment, and the attendant public unrest, becomes a thing of the past. And foreign governments seem strangely willing to believe Hitler's protestations that his army and navy will be for defensive purposes only. Britain even signs a naval pact with Germany in 1935. Even when Hitler first uses his army in a display of strength on foreign territory, he contrives to argue that his troops have been invited across the border, in March 1938, into neighbouring German-speaking Austria. And certainly there is cheering on the streets.
Germans abroad: 1938
From the start it has been part of Hitler's dream, expressed in Mein Kampf, that he will unite the German-speaking peoples of Europe in a recreation of the great Reich which once held them together. This first Reich, in the form of the Holy Roman Empire, was disbanded in 1806 when under threat from Napoleon. There was a chance to reconstitute it in 1871, with the creation of the second German Reich. But Bismarck, influenced by the long rivalry between Prussia and the Habsburgs, was determined to exclude Austria from his new Germany. How satisfactory then if a new leader, born in Austria but rising to be head of state in Germany, should rectify Bismarck's failure of vision and bring Austria into the German fold.
By the time Hitler wins power, in 1933, there is already a sizable Nazi party in Austria. In July 1934 they overreach themselves in attempting a coup which has disastrous results. Although they seize the chancellery in Vienna and murder the chancellor, Engelbert Dollfuss, the putsch ends in their surrender and execution. Hitler, delighted at the first news of their action but not himself actively involved, finds himself compelled to disown them. He shares their aim but must bide his time in achieving it. He begins a slow game of cat and mouse with Dollfuss's successor as chancellor, Kurt von Schuschnigg.
The first agreement between Hitler and Schuschnigg is ostensibly an attempt to bring relations between their two nations back to a state of normalcy two years after the failed Nazi putsch of 1934. In the Austro-German Agreement of July 1936 Hitler recognizes Austria's full sovereignty and both nations agree not to interfere in each other's internal affairs; but Austria does promise to maintain a foreign policy in keeping with her identity as 'a German state'. Moreover, among other clauses about normalizing trade and border relations, there is an agreement by Schuschnigg to allow some Nazi sympathisers into his government. The Nazi party itself is still banned in Austria. But Hitler now has a toe in the door.
Two years later, leading a much stronger Germany, Hitler is in a very different mood. He effectively summons the Austrian chancellor to a meeting in his residence at Berchtesgaden on 12 February 1938. When Schuschnigg arrives, he is treated to a two-hour rant by Hitler about the perfidious behaviour of Austria. It includes the open threat 'I can tell you here and now, Herr Schuschnigg, that I am absolutely determined to make an end of all this. The German Reich is one of the Great Powers, and nobody will raise his voice if it settles its border problems.' Schuschnigg is informed that unless he agrees to everything that Hitler demands, Germany will settle the matter by force.
Over the next few hours Schuschnigg is browbeaten into accepting an agreement which allows the Nazi party in Austria full freedom, together with a guaranteed role in developing economic and military collaboration between the two countries. Schuschnigg is then dismissed, to return home and put the agreement into effect. But back in Vienna, after weeks of indecision, he gambles upon what seems his last practical chance. A central plank of Hitler's argument has been that a majority of Austrians want union with Germany. Schuschnigg now determines to put this to the test. On March 9 announces that a plebiscite will be held in four days' time, on Sunday March 13. The people will be asked to say whether they want an Austria which is free and independent.
Hitler is outraged at this act of defiance, but he also knows that he cannot allow the plebiscite to take place. On such occasions the people usually answer yes to whatever question is phrased for their own purposes by the politicians. There is no immediate plan to invade Austria, for Hitler assumes that Schuschnigg will bend to his will. But arrangements are hurriedly put in place, and German tanks are ready to cross the border at the appointed time - dawn on Saturday March 12, the day before the plebiscite. Everything is in place for Hitler's long desired outcome, the Anschluss. It will be his first reunion with neighbouring Germans. But there are others to the north, in the Sudetenland, for whom he has similar intentions.

Anschluss: 1938
On the morning of March 11 Germany closes the border with Austria. There follows a day of frantic last-minute diplomacy, conducted by telephone and telegram. Hitler is determined that the German army shall be invited into Austria. To this end a succession of ultimatums are made to the Austrians, with the threat of immediate invasion if each is not accepted. The first is that the proposed plebiscite be postponed. The second is that Schuschnigg resign. He does so just before the deadline of 7.30 pm, declaring in a broadcast to the nation that he is yielding to force. The third, which the Austrian president (Wilhelm Miklas) resists until around midnight, is that Austria's leading Nazi sympathiser be appointed chancellor.
The man in question is Arthur Seyss-Inquart, whom Schuschnigg has taken into his government in 1937 under pressure from Hitler. Anticipating his new powers by an hour or two, Seyss-Inquart sends a message to Berlin during the evening of March 11, requesting the use of German troops to restore order in Austria. So there is no opposition when German troops cross the border at dawn on March 12. Hitler decides to follow them, encouraged by reports of German Austrians lining the streets to cheer. That evening in Linz, a town where he went to school and where his parents are buried, he is greeted by an ecstatic gathering of Austrian Nazis.
He speaks to them in terms of a mission fulfilled: 'If Providence once called me forth from this town to be the leader of the Reich, it must, in so doing, have charged me with a mission - to restore my dear homeland to the German Reich. I have believed in this mission, I have lived and fought for it, and I believe I have now fulfilled it.' In his enthusiasm he makes an abrupt change of plan. His intention has been to place Seyss-Inquart in control of the country. Now he decides, before moving on to spend a day in Vienna, that Austria is to be absorbed within a greater Germany. It is to be known simply as Ostmark, the eastern frontier. The Anschluss ('union' or 'annexation') is complete.
And there will be a plebiscite after all. On April 10 every citizen within the new borders will be asked to approve Hitler's action in creating Grossdeutschland, the greater Germany. Of those who vote, 99.08% in Germany say yes. In Austria the figure is even higher, at 99.75%. Those non-citizens who have no vote, including Vienna's large population of Jews (one sixth of the city), have already had drastic evidence of what life in this greater Germany will mean. Himmler is in Vienna two days before Hitler's arrival, organizing the future activities of the SS and Gestapo. On the day of the Anschluss the first arrests are made.
The victims will include politicians, trade unionists, more than two thirds of the officers in the Austrian army and some 30,000 Jews. Most of them are despatched to concentration camps in Germany. The Nuremberg Laws, depriving Jews of their rights, now automatically apply in this eastern province of the Reich. Austria's Jewish community experiences, as if overnight, the full force of the persecution which in Germany has taken the five years of the Nazi regime to build up. In the very first days after the Anschluss Jewish shops and businesses are looted throughout Austria, and individual Jews are attacked and humiliated. By the time of Kristallnacht, later in this same year, Austria is merely one small part of the greater anti-Semitic Germany.
The Sudetenland: 1938
Two days before marching into Austria, Hitler assures the Czech ambassador in Berlin that he has no designs on his nation. But within a month he is developing a plan to annexe the western part of Czechoslovakia, the Sudetenland. He is considerably helped in this ambition by the principles of the treaty of Versailles, for the region has a predominantly German population. Many of these Germans are already Nazi sympathisers. It is easy to argue that the notion of self-determination, so important at Versailles, gives them the right to merge with Germany. During the summer of 1938 Hitler threatens the Czech government at the diplomatic level, while massing troops on the border. But unlike his fait accompli in Austria, this challenge to Czechoslovakia prompts international concern.
Chamberlain flies from London to confer with Hitler, on September 15 and 22, but by September 27 it seems certain that Hitler's forces will cross the Czech border. France has a defensive treaty with Czechoslavakia. Britain would have to support France. The result would be war. On September 27 Chamberlain broadcasts to the British people, expressing his appalled dismay at being dragged into the affairs of such a 'Faraway country'. The next day he sends a telegram to Hitler, offering to fly again to Germany to discuss the peaceful transfer of the Sudetenland. Hitler postpones the invasion, planned for September 28, and invites Chamberlain, Daladier (the French premier since April) and Mussolini to an immediate meeting in Munich.
Munich and after: 1938-1939
The discussion in Munich between Hitler, Chamberlain, Daladier and Mussolini lasts a little over twelve hours, beginning in the middle of the day on September 29 and ending with the signing of an agreed document at 1.30 a.m. on September 30. Though the dismantling of their country is under discussion, Hitler refuses to allow any Czech representative to take part. Two Czech diplomats sit in a nearby hotel, effectively waiting to be told what has been decided. The conclusion is all that Hitler would wish. The Sudeten areas are to be ceded to Germany during the next ten days. Thereafter plebiscites, organized by the four Munich powers and Czechoslovakia, will reveal exactly where the new border should run.
Before boarding his plane, later on September 30, Chamberlain has another meeting with Hitler in which he asks him to sign a joint declaration. This is the document which Chamberlain waves in the air for the cameras on his return to Britain, stating that he has brought back from Germany 'peace for our time... peace with honour'. The text above Hitler's signature, on which Chamberlain bases his optimism, declares a determination to remove possible sources of difference between countries 'and thus to contribute to assure the peace of Europe'. Chamberlain's hope is that the sacrifice of the Sudetenland has preserved not only peace but the rest of Czechoslovakia.
The occupation of Sudetenland brings some 3.5 million people within Nazi Germany, 75% of them German and 25% Czech. But in the event these Czechs are no more unfortunate than their compatriots elsewhere. Three weeks after signing Chamberlain's document, Hitler orders the German army to prepare for a move into the rest of Czechoslovakia. The invasion comes in March 1939. Hitler, in Prague, declares that Bohemia, Moravia and Slovakia are now under the protection of the German Reich. But such a brutal betrayal of the Munich agreement transforms the appeasers. When it becomes evident that Poland is the next likely victim, Britain and France are suddenly resolute.
Danzig and the Polish corridor: 1938-1939
At the very moment of the Munich agreement the Polish government presents its own demand for a slice of Czechoslovakia. There is logic to the claim. If the Sudetenland with its largely German population is to be annexed by Germany, then there is a clear case for the rich industrial area of Teschen Silesia, inhabited mainly by Poles, to be transferred to Poland. On the day the Munich agreement is announced, 30 September 1938, Poland asserts this claim - not for the first time, but now it is instantly acceded to by Czechoslavakia. Unfortunately the ethnic-majority argument has dangerous implications for Poland herself, confronted by a Hitler increasing day by day in confidence.
The great port of Gdansk (in Polish) or Danzig (in German) has long been a bone of contention between Polish and German interests. Though first brought to prominence by the Hanseatic merchants, the city and its hinterland (eastern Pomerania, or in its Polish name Pomorze) have historically been part of Poland. But from time to time they have been seized by Germans - first by the Teutonic knights in 1308 - and in recent times they have again been German, from the late 18th-century partitions of Poland until the end of World War I. In 1919 the treaty of Versailles restores Pomorze to Poland and gives Danzig, with its almost entirely German population, the status of a free city within the borders of Poland.
This arrangement is probably unworkable at the best of times, and more so from the mid-1930s when Danzig has an elected Nazi city council. Moreover in this area the provisions of Versailles provide a further cause for German grievance. In returning Pomorze to Poland, and restoring her historical access to the sea at Danzig, the treaty has the effect of severing the province of East Prussia from the rest of Germany. Pomorze becomes known in the terminology of the 1920s as the Polish corridor, linking Poland and the sea. Hitler now demands a more literal German corridor - a narrow strip of German territory through Poland to East Prussia. Together with this goes his claim to bring Danzig within the Reich.
Both claims are pressed by Hitler with new vigour in October 1938, within days of his winning the Sudetenland from Czechoslovakia. The Polish government firmly rejects the German demands. Unlike unfortunate Czechoslovakia, this stance wins a positive response from the western powers. In March 1939 Neville Chamberlain, speaking with the approval of both France and the USSR, gaurantees help to Poland if her independence is threatened. In April Hitler abrogates his own ten-year nonaggression treaty with Poland, signed in 1934, and secretly orders his army to prepare for a Polish invasion. In May France commits herself to military action against Germany if a conflict begins. But then, in August, Hitler produces a diplomatic bombshell.
Ribbentrop-Molotov Pact: 1939
In August 1939 a Franco-British military mission is in Moscow trying to persuade Stalin to commit to a treaty for the defence of Poland. Little progress is made, ostensibly because the Poles are refusing to allow Soviet troops to cross their territory to attack Germany. But there is another hidden reason which soon becomes apparent. The Soviet Union and Communism have always been twin forces of demonic evil in Hitler's oratory, but he now proves himself happy to sup with the devil for a very real strategic advantage. It is important to his plans that he shall not be distracted by a major war on his eastern front. In August he opens negotiations with Stalin. Poland is his bait.
Stalin, invited by the western powers to join an alliance which will almost certainly involve him in a costly war against Germany for no very evident benefit, now finds himself offered a more attractive option - inactivity and a sizable increase in his territory. It takes the Russian dictator little time to choose. The world is astonished on August 21 by the announcement from Berlin that Ribbentrop is flying to Moscow to sign a nonaggression pact with his opposite number, the Russian foreign minister Molotov. This sudden friendship of two implacable enemies would seem less inexplicable if people knew of the secret protocol which accompanies the pact.
The protocol agrees a new set of international boundaries. As modified slightly in a second visit by Ribbentrop to Moscow, in September, it acknowledges Germany's approval of the Russian annexation of the independent nations Finland, Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania (should any such opportunity occur). And it establishes an agreed division of Poland between Germany and Russia. With this much achieved, Hitler is ready to take his next step - launched, for propaganda purposes, with a grisly little charade.

The act of war: 1939

During the night of August 31 a group of German soldiers, 
dressed as Poles, attack the German radio station in the border
 town of Gleiwitz. They have brought with them a German criminal,
 taken for the purpose from a concentration camp. 
They shoot him and leave his body as evidence of the night's dark deeds.

Berlin radio broadcasts to the world the news of this act of Polish
 aggression, together with details of the necessary German response. 
In the early hours of the morning of September 1 Hitler's tanks move
 into Poland. His planes take off towards Warsaw on the first bombing
 mission of a new European war.
 
After a final desperate day of diplomacy, attempting even at this late stage
 to find a peaceful solution, Chamberlain and Daladier each sends an ultimatum
 to Hitler. 
When no answer is received, both nations declare war on September 3.

The Polish army, airforce and civilian population put up a brave resistance 
to massive German force - increased, from September 17, by a Russian invasion 
from the east. Within a few weeks 60,000 Polish soldiers and 25,000 civilians die. 
By September 28 Warsaw has fallen. Poland is once again partitioned, with an eastern
 slice going to Russia (as so recently agreed in Moscow) and the lion's share to Germany.

Hitler's triumphs: 1939-1941

The rapid blitzkrieg against Poland is only the first of Hitler's extraordinary military successes during the opening eighteen months of the war. From the start he launches a vigorous and deadly U-boat campaign against Allied shipping in the Atlantic, but on land he allows his enemies and neutral neighbours a deceptive period of calm, in what becomes known as the Phoney War.

This is rudely shattered by his sudden attack on neutral Denmark and Norway in April 1940. German troops come onshore from warships and rapidly overrun both countries. It is a foretaste of even more dramatic events in western Europe a month later.


From May 10German panzer divisions smash their to the coast through neutral Luxembourg, the Netherlands and Belgium. At the same time other divisions push west through northern France. British and French armies are trapped in a pincer movement at the coast. They escape only by means of the dramatic rescue achieved at Dunkirk.

Now the invasion force wheels south towards Paris. German troops enter the capital city on June 14. Two days later the French sue for peace. Hitler savours the moment of triumph, revenge for Germany's humiliation in 1918. He arrives in person to witness the signing of the armistice - and then goes sightseeing in Paris. 
Britain is the next object of his attention. While German forces are assembled below for an invasion, Messerchmidts battle in the sky with British Spitfires and Hurricanes for control of the Channel. This encounter (the Battle of Britain, lasting from June to September 1940) is the first in the war to go against Hitler. It is a defeat in the sense that he fails to prevail, and therefore has to cancel his invasion plans. But from September he merely diverts his might against Britain in a different context - in the nightly pounding of British cities, which becomes known as the Blitz.

At this same period Hitler's U-boats, refuelling now on France's Atlantic coast, are sinking an ever greater tonnage of Allied merchant shipping in the Atlantic.
 
The first half of 1941 brings continuing success. Rommel, despatched by Hitler to take over the campaign in north Africa, pushes the British ever further back towards Egypt. At the same time a rapid German thrust south through the Balkansoverwhelms Yugoslavia and drives the British out of mainland Greece (in April 1941) and Crete (in May).

Less than two years after the world war was provoked by his invasion of Poland, Hitler can look around at a Europe dominated by Germany. The situation is, to say the least, satisfactory. But his sudden invasion in June 1941 of his ally, Russia, introduces an unpredictable element.


A turning point: June-December 1941

The nations of continental Europe are now either neutral (Switzerland, Sweden), neutral but Fascist (Spain, Portugal), merged with Germany (Austria), occupied by Germany (Czechoslovakia, Poland, Luxembourg, Belgium, Netherlands, Denmark, Norway, most of France), forcibly neutralized (Vichy France), allied to Germany (Italy, USSR), suppressed by the USSR (Finland), or a patchwork of such conditions (Hungary and the Balkans).

For a dictator who found himself at war with the world a year or two earlier than he would have wished, it is an impressive achievement. The only failure has been the Battle of Britain, frustrating his plans to cross the Channel - but these were anyway somewhat half-hearted.
 
Admittedly in the very month when this situation is achieved, May 1941, there is one major setback. Germany's newest and most magnificent battleship, the Bismarck, has been launched earlier this year at Kiel. On her first sortie out of the Baltic she is spotted by the British navy. After doing much damage to the pack pursuing her, the vast ship is sunk on May 27 with the loss of nearly all her crew of 2222 sailors.

The state of the navy is a sore point between Hitler and his naval commander in chief, Erich Raeder. In the mid-1930s Hitler has assured Raeder, responsible for building up the fleet, that the coming war will not begin until 1944. Raeder therefore regards Germany's strength at sea as inadequate. After the loss of the Bismarck, his naval campaign focuses largely on U-boats.
 
If this is one of the significant turning points of 1941, two more are to follow before the end of the year. The first is Hitler's own doing. The second he has regarded as inevitable sooner or later. But together they will have a decisive effect on the outcome of the war.

The first involves Hitler's eastern policy. The USSR, the proselytizing force of world communism, has always been seen by Hitler as his main enemy. And it is to the east, through Poland and into the Ukraine, that his policy of Lebensraum and German expansion has been directed. An attack into these regions is part of his grand strategy. Hitler's skill has been to create the lull, with the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact, which enables him to secure his western flank before turning his attention eastwards.

In this strategy he is, in effect, carrying out the Schlieffen Planwhich his predecessors in World War I had been unable to achieve. They failed in the first part of the plan, the conquest of France. With that behind him, Hitler is now ready to move on to stage two - the attack on Russia. His mistake, failing to learn the lesson of Napoleon's campaign, is to believe that this can be a quick affair (though he might reasonably expect the speed of motorized transport to make the difference).

When the first Russian winter is bringing home the harsh reality, the other great turning point of 1941 takes place without Hitler even being forewarned. His Japanese allies tell him nothing of their plan for a secret attack on the US fleet in Pearl Harbor on December 7.
 
The events of the second half of 1941 add four major powers to the cast list of the world war. Hitler has dragged in the USSR, just as Japan's action forces the full involvement of the USA. Japan herself, until now engaged only in a regional conflict with China, also becomes a new player on the global scene. And China, as Japan's enemy, is automatically now an ally of the western powers.

Thus by the end of 1941 the final alignment of the war is established, in terms of the major powers involved. The Allies are Britain and the Commonwealth, France, the USA, the USSR and China; the Axis powers are Germany, Italy and Japan. (In fact even this alignment is not yet quite final - in 1943 Italy changes sides.)

Ominous signs: 1941-1943

The failure to clinch the Russian campaign before the onset of winter in 1943 profoundly alarms Hitler's generals and would put the idea of a tactical withdrawal into the mind of anyone less obsessively obstinate than the Nazi leader. Yet Hitler's refusal to give an inch seems vindicated when the German armies are still in place to launch an aggessive new campaign on the eastern front during the summer of 1942.

By contrast in 1942-3 there are unmistakable reverses. In October 1942 the French forces in north Africa join the Allies. In January 1941 the entire German Sixth Army is captured at Stalingrad. In May, with the fall of Tunis, the Germans and Italians are driven out of north Africa. In September Italy surrendersunconditionally to the Allies.


Yet these disasters have the paradoxical effect of bringing Hitler even greater swathes of western Europe. The French action in north Africa enables him to sweep aside the armistice. His occupation of Vichy Francebrings the whole country into German hands. Similarly the Italian surrender, when the Allies are not yet much beyond Naples in their drive up the peninsula, leaves the whole of the rest of Italyunder German control.

Although the tide of war has now turned, the autumn of 1943 gives Hitler the broadest canvas so far on which to create his vision of a new order. In his ideal world Germans will rule as a master race, inferior groups such as Slavs will be made use of as slave labour, and undesirables (Jews, Gypsies and Communists) will be exterminated.



Hitler's vision for Europe

These principles underlie the gradual development of the Nazis' murderous schemes. The appalling story unfolds in three separate stages.

Before the outbreak of war, with Germany and Austria exposed to the eyes of the world, persecution of Hitler's hated groups is limited to intimidation and violence. His underlying aim is to rid German territory of Jews by terrifying them into moving elsewhere. Visas to leave Germany are freely available, and the willingness to do so can even be enough to bring release from a concentration camp. By 1939 more than half the Jews in Germany and Austria have moved to other countries.

With the outbreak of war and the closing of borders, escape by emigration becomes difficult (though not at first absolutely impossible). And the German authorities are now free to carry out atrocities unobserved by the wider international community.

At first they largely refrain from doing so, at any rate on a systematic basis (the exception is Poland in 1939-40). After Germany's first conquests in the west, in the summer of 1940, the newly occupied countries (Luxembourg, Netherlands, Belgium, northern France) experience the horrors of an alien police state and the anti-Semitic measures long familiar within Germany. But German rule here is less brutally repressive than in the east. And the explanation lies in Hitler's theories.


Germans are to rule the united Europe of Hitler's dreams, but they will need assistance. This can only be provided, he believes, by 'Aryans' in the countries to the west of Germany, in those regions settled in the distant past by Germanic peoples such as Franks, Goths, Angles, Saxons and Vikings. He expects, ultimately, cooperation from the west. And he likes to emphasize that the future belongs not to a dominant nation, but a dominant race.

By contrast the regions to the east of Germany, inhabited by the Slavs whom he categorizes as Untermenschen('subhumans'), are suitable only for subjugation. This explains the treatment of the Poles in 1939, and the sudden gear-change in German brutality with the invasion of Russia in 1941.
 
German treatment of Russian prisoners of war symbolizes the change. On June 27, five days after the invasion, the town of Minsk is surrounded. More than 100,000 Russian soldiers are captured and are herded into open fields, surrounded by barbed wire and armed guards. They are given no food, and so over the next few weeks they starve to death. When winter comes, hundreds of thousands of Russian prisoners captured elsewhere on the front are even more easily got rid of. They freeze.

Subsequently the Germans realize that this policy is losing them a valuable reserve of slave labour. It is better that such people should die working for the Reich. In a speech to SS leaders Himmler emphasizes that there is no need to be concerned about 'What happens to a Russian'.
 
The invasion of Russia provides the same turning point in the German treatment of the Jews. In planning the campaign, Hitler and Himmler set up four Einsatzkommando(Special Task Commandos) to follow in the wake of the army. The special task for these SS men is to exterminate two groups of people, the most potent figures in Hitler's demonology, Communist officials and Jews.

The work is carried out with ruthless efficiency. Victims are rounded up in villages and towns, are herded into the countryside, are forced to dig long trenches and then are machine-gunned to fall into the ready-made graves. Within the first few weeks of the German presence in Russia tens of thousands of Jews are murdered in this systematic way. It is the beginning of the Holocaust.

The Holocaust: 1941-1942

The term holocaust, originally meaning a sacrifice consumed by fire in a Greek temple, has been used since the early 19th century for the murder of a large number of people. In recent decades it has acquired a much more specific significance. It now defines, almost exclusively, the systematic attempt by Hitler and the Nazis to exterminate the Jewish people. In the 20th century, which far outstripped all others in the horrors perpetrated by humans on their own kind, the Holocaust has come to stand as the defining atrocity.

It is also the atrocity, in the whole of world history, most deliberately planned as the fulfilment of a theory. A flawed and fanatic theory, but one of fatal potency.
 
The theory, articulated by Hitler in Mein Kampf and in frequent ranting speeches, taps into a deep-rooted European tradition of anti-Semitism, blends in some 19th-century fantasies about ethnic identity and racial purity, and finally adds a dash of 20th-century neurosis about socialism. The troubles of Germany and Austria are thereby blamed on a conspiracy of Jews , working like a virus in all spheres of national life to take over the economy and even, through sexual intermingling, to degrade the pure Aryan stock.

The misfortune underlying the tragedy of the Holocaust is that someone with these views succeeds in becoming the leader of a powerful nation and then, for a brief while, the conqueror of Europe.
From achieving power in 1933 until the outbreak of war in 1939 (an event for which he holds the Jews responsible), Hitler's ambition is to rid Germany and Austria of the nations' long-resident Jews by making them move elsewhere. But with his invasion of Russia in 1941 he begins to conceive a more drastic outcome. The 'final solution of the Jewish problem' (a phrase used in Nazi documents from early in 1942) will be death.

Within the first few days of the Russian campaign Hitler's Special Task forcesround up and shoot large numbers of Jews. In two weeks of continual executions in early July, in the city of Kishinev alone, one such task force kills 10,000 people.
 
On June 27, in Bialystok, German soldiers chase Jews through the narrow streets around a blazing synagogue, like devils in a medieval scene of the Last Judgement. Hundreds of Jews have been locked into the synagogue before it is set on fire. Once it is blazing, the doors are broken down and others are shoved into the cauldron.

But the Nazis are already working on a less visible and more efficient method of achieving their purpose. It is first employed at Chelmno, in Poland, during 1941. Three vans are specially adapted for the killing of people through exposure to lethal gas. During the first six months 97,000 Jews die in these vans. The scheme is considered highly successful. So steps are taken to provide larger-scale death camps with permanent buildings.


These death camps are built on Polish or Russian soil. One of the first and largest is Treblinka (in Poland) where more than 750,000 Jews are killed during 1942, most of them brought there from the Warsaw ghetto.

The placing of the concentration camps in the east, relatively out of sight, is a practical measure of discretion by the Nazi high command. On 20 January 1942 a meeting is convened at Wannsee, a lakeside villa near Berlin, by Himmler's second-in-command in the SS, Reinhard Heydrich. Heydrich has been put in charge of the 'final solution'. The purpose of the meeting is to discuss the practical arrangements.


It is taken for granted by now in these high Nazi circles that the solution must apply to Jews in all the nations occupied by the Germans. But death camps in France or the Netherlands will be more exposed to view. So it is decided that Jews from such countries must be brought to the Polish camps.

Thus begins one of the abiding images of the holocaust - trains of cattle trucks into which Jews are crowded, heading for an unknown destination. The programme is described as 'transportation of the Jews towards the Russian East'. Early in 1942 the prospect facing these people is immediate death. But later there are two possibilities - immediate death by gas, or slow death by hard labour and deprivation.


The Holocaust: 1942-1945

During 1942 it occurs to the Nazis that, as with the Soviet prisoners of war, they are wasting valuable slave labour in their policy of automatic murder of the Jews. So a new form of camp is planned in which those on the trains will be classified, on arrival, as 'fit' or 'unfit' to work. The fit go one way, to the prison huts where they will live for a while as unpaid and underfed labourers. The unfit go the other way, to the gas chambers.

The first camp of this kind, ready for use in March 1942, is built at Auschwitz in Poland. An unknown number of people (certainly well in excess of a million) die in this camp in the next three years. More than half of them - the unfit, the elderly, the children - are killed in the four gas chambers within a day or two of their arrival.


Those judged fit 'to be worked to death' (a phrase used by Himmler) are put to the service of Germany's war production. Factories are moved from the vulnerable Ruhr, in the west, to the neighbourhood of Auschwitz - beyond the range of Allied bombers. Several of Germany's great industrial enterprises tarnish their reputation by benefiting during these years from Jewish slave labour.

By the end of 1942 knowledge of what is going on is not limited to those actively involved on the German side. On December 17 Anthony Eden tells the House of Commons in London that reliable reports have been received 'regarding the barbarous and inhuman treatment to which Jews are being subjected in German-occupied Europe'.



Eden is putting before the House an international declaration, published on that day, which is more direct in its account of what is actually going on. Issued jointly by the USA, the USSR, Great Britain and the governments in exile of nine occupied European countries, the declaration condemns in the strongest possible terms Germany's 'bestial policy of cold-blooded extermination'.

This is straightforward language, in stark contrast to the terms used in Nazi documents about a solution to the Jewish question and journeys to the east. But it is this veil of German euphemism which has enabled a few extreme right-wing historians to argue the preposterous theory that Hitler did not know what the terms meant and so was perhaps personally unaware of the Holocaust.



Although by far the largest group of victims to die because of Hitler's theories (about 6 million), the Jews are not alone. Gypsies too are considered a polluting threat to an Aryan society. Rounded up and sent to the camps, most of them are marked down for Sonderhandlung('special treatment' - another Nazi euphemism, meaning murder). It is calculated that in all some 400,000 Gypsies are killed.

Even 'Aryans' are not immune from the obsession with purity and perfection. In 1939 Hitler signs an ultra-secret decree authorising the death of any German judged 'incurably ill'. This covers mental illness, and the victims (probably about 100,000 in the next two years) are later described as 'useless defectives'. They too should be considered victims of the Holocaust.



Fighting on four fronts: 1944

Since 1941 Stalinhas in vain urged the Allies to open up a new front in the west to relieve German pressure on Russia. Now finally, by 1944, he is supported on two other fronts - both of them directly threatening the Nazi heartlands of Germany and Austria.

From November 1943 the Allies are pushing north in an Italy now hostile to Germany, though it is nine months before they reach Florence and not until the spring of 1945 that they make any further progress. More effective by far is the second front, the one which Stalin always had in mind - an attack through France and Belgium aimed directly at Germany's industrial base in the Ruhr

The British and American landings in Normandy take place in June 1944. Initial progress is slow, but Paris is liberated in August and Brussels in September. Thereafter there is another long delay caused by an Allied failure to cross the Rhine (at Arnhem) and a German counter-attack (battle of the Bulge).

Meanwhile the Russians have been making rapid progress on the original front, in the east. They advance steadily from January 1944, and by early 1945 Russian forces are in control of Poland, Rumania and Bulgaria. And on a fourth front, at home, German cities have been suffering the Blitz previously inflicted on Britain. Berlin is bombed almost nightly from November 1943. Dresden is flattened in February 1945.

The noose tightens: 1945

During the spring of 1945 the collapse of Germany comes, after so long, with surprising speed. German commanders in the field, no longer feeling any enthusiasm for a fight which is clearly lost, begin to disregard the stream of hysterical instructions from Hitler to stand firm whatever the cost. To the armies defending the Rhine his order includes the statement that the battle shall be conducted 'without consideration for our own population'.

A scorched earth policy within Germany is now the order of the day. All public utilities in the path of the Allies (water, gas, electricity) are to be destroyed. To protests from within his inner group, Hitler replies that if the war is lost, the German nation is lost. There is no need to consider the future requirements of a vanquished people.


In this situation, and with Hitler's final reserves sent to the eastern front, the Allies meet little opposition when they cross the Rhine at various points on March 22-4 (first the Third US Army led by George Patton in the south, followed by the British and Canadians in the north). Both groups, pressing on east, reach the Elbe in mid-April. On the way they discover the horrors which bring home to the west, more powerfully than ever before, the true nature of the Nazi regime.

On April 10 the Americans reach the concentration camp at Buchenwald. Five days later the British come across Belsen, where there are 35,000 unburied bodies and as many emaciated prisoners still just alive. And these are not even the death camps - merely places where prisoners are subjected to hard work, little food and Nazi indifference.



Meanwhile the Russians, pushing westwards, have entered Vienna on April 6. Within three weeks, by April 25, they reach and encircle Berlin, where Hitler is at last beginning to recognize that there can be no miraculous outcome.

News of the death of Roosevelt, on April 12, has been enough to make him hope for a sudden reversal of fortune. But on April 29, against his specific orders, the German army in Italy surrenders to the Allies. Hitler also knows that Himmler, his trusted SS commander, has been making peace overtures behind his back. Livid with anger at this betrayal, he now recognizes the end and prepares to meet it. In the elaborate bunker beneath the Chancellery he puts his affairs in order.
 
The traitor Himmler is formally expelled from the party. Admiral Dönitz is appointed as Hitler's successor and the names of his cabinet are selected. Hitler then retires for a while to dictate his last will and testament, a tract of self-justification in which the Jews are still blamed for the war and the Nazi party is urged to continue the necessary campaign against them.

On this same day, April 29, in the early hours of the morning, Hitler rewards a woman who has always been quietly faithful to him. He marries his mistress, Eva Braun, following the ceremony with a small champagne party at which Goebbels (the Nazi minister of propaganda) and Martin Bormann (Hitler's secretary and close adviser) are the principal guests.


On April 30 Hitler holds his usual daily conference while the Russians, in the streets above, are only two blocks away from the Chancellery. Then Hitler and Eva Braun retire to their quarters. She takes poison, he shoots himself in the mouth. On the following day Goebbels orders SS men to give his six children lethal injections and to shoot his wife and himself.

Hitler was appalled that his nation had surrendered in World War I without a single foreign soldier setting foot on German soil. His own unbreakable resolve results in the opposite extreme. When he dies, the enemy is in the heart of Berlin. A week later, on May 7, the unconditional surrender of all the German forces is signed at General Eisenhower's headquarters. May 8 is celebrated by the Allies as V-E Day - victory in Europe.








This History is as yet incomplete.