The Storm of War - Andrew Roberts [5]
A week after receiving Blomberg’s letter, Hitler published the full text of Hindenburg’s Last Will and Testament in the Nazi Party newspaper, Völkischer Beobachter. This document stressed that in the Third German Reich:
The guardian of the state, the Reichswehr, must be the symbol of and firm support for this superstructure. On the Reichswehr as a firm foundation must rest the old Prussian virtues of self-realized dutifulness, of simplicity, and of comradeship… Always and at all times, the Reichswehr must remain the pattern of state conduct, so that, unbiased by any internal political development, its lofty mission for the defence of the country may be maintained… The thanks of the Field Marshal of the World War and its Commander-in-Chief are due to all the men who have accomplished the construction and organization of the Reichswehr.4
The next day, 19 August, the German people voted in a plebiscite on whether Hitler should hold the combined offices of president and Reich chancellor, with more than thirty-eight million people, or 89.9 per cent, voting yes.
On 20 August, Hitler continued to repay his Deutschland debt, writing to Blomberg and in effect confirming that the secret Pact was still operative. He thanked the general for the Army’s oath of loyalty, and added, ‘I shall always regard it as my highest duty to intercede for the existence and inviolability of the Wehrmacht, in fulfilment of the testament of the late Field Marshal, and in accord with my own will to establish the Army firmly as the sole bearer of the arms of the nation.’
Nothing so consolidated the Führer’s standing with his generals as the series of politico-diplomatic coups that he pulled off around the borders of Germany between March 1936 and August 1939, which turned the humiliated power of the Versailles Treaty – under which she had lost 13.5 per cent of her territory – into the potentially glorious Third Reich. Hitler’s regular protestations of pacific intentions worked well in lulling foreigners’ suspicions, but were correctly seen as utterly bogus by the senior commanders of the Wehrmacht, Kriegsmarine and Luftwaffe whom he was simultaneously ordering to prepare for a general European conflict sooner rather than later. ‘Germany will of its own accord never break the peace,’ he told the journalist G. Ward Price of London’s Daily Mail in February 1935, for example, but a few days later he decided that the Wehrmacht needed to be increased from twenty-one to thirty-six divisions as soon as possible. His intention was to have a sixty-three-division army – almost the same size as in 1914 – by the year 1939.5
The tempo of Hitlerian aggression increased exponentially during the second half of the 1930s, as the German dictator gained in confidence and the generals absented themselves from political decision-making. Hermann Göring’s official announcement of the existence of the Luftwaffe took place in March 1935, the same month that Germany publicly repudiated the disarmament clauses of the Versailles Treaty, clauses that she had been secretly ignoring ever since Hitler had come to power. That September the Nuremberg laws effectively outlawed German Jews, and made the Swastika the official flag of Germany.
It was on 7 March 1936 that Hitler comprehensively violated the Versailles Treaty by sending troops into the industrial region of the Rhineland, which under Article 180 had been specifically designated a demilitarized zone. Had the German Army been opposed by the French and British forces stationed near by, it had orders to retire back to base and such a reverse would almost certainly have cost Hitler the chancellorship. Yet the Western powers, riven with guilt about having imposed what was described as a ‘Carthaginian peace’ on Germany in 1919, allowed the Germans to enter the Rhineland unopposed. ‘After all,’ said the influential Liberal politician and newspaper director the Marquis of Lothian, who had been Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster