Hitler: Ascent, 1889-1939 (132 page)

The addition of Austria also strengthened the Reich’s economic and military position. Austrian iron reserves could now be exploited for the German rearmament programme, and a huge steel-processing facility, the Hermann Göring Works, was built on the outskirts of Linz. Germany also got its hands on 1.4 billion reichsmarks’ worth of gold and currency reserves, and masses of jobless Austrians, many of whom were highly qualified, relieved the tight German labour market. Incorporating the Austrian army, the Bundesheer, increased the strength of the Wehrmacht by 1,600 officers and 60,000 regular soldiers. Moreover, the Reich’s strategic position had improved since it could now put pressure on Czechoslovakia from two sides.
¹⁷⁷

Two months previously, Hitler had had difficulty extracting himself from the Blomberg–Fritsch affair. Now he was riding on a wave of popular approval. Once again, he had used a foreign-policy triumph to ease domestic troubles. And once more, his instincts had led him to act at precisely the right moment. For four weeks after German troops entered Austria, he was celebrated like a god by cheering masses. It is no wonder, then, that he became ever more convinced of his own greatness and began losing touch with reality. In his speeches, he increasingly referred to Providence choosing him as its instrument. His sense of self-importance, which had already been greatly bolstered by his successful gamble in remilitarising the Rhineland in 1936, began increasingly to take on a nearly pathological character. Even Nicolaus von Below, who later admitted to being an “unconditional Hitler admirer” in the spring of 1938, was unsettled by the fact that Hitler began to talk incessantly in private about the historic mission he still had to fulfil. “Except for him there was no one now or in the near future…who could perform the tasks facing the German people,” Below quoted him saying.
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And there was no doubt about which task was next on Hitler’s agenda.

—

“People generally believe that Czechoslovakia will be up next,” observers reported to the SPD leadership in exile in Prague.
¹⁷⁹
In fact, only a few days after the
Anschluss
, Hitler set his sights on his next target for expansion. “Now it’s the Czechs’ turn,” he told Goebbels on the evening of 19 March. “Without hesitation at the next opportunity.”
¹⁸⁰
On 28 March, the dictator received the leader of the Sudeten German Party, Konrad Henlein, in Berlin and informed him of his decision to “resolve” the Czechoslovakian issue in the not-too-distant future. He also instructed Henlein as to tactics to bring about that result, telling him that the Sudeten Germans should “always demand so much that they can never be satisfied.”
¹⁸¹

Along with Slovaks, Hungarians and Poles, the 3.5 million Sudeten Germans were one of the largest minorities in Czechoslovakia which, unusually for a state formed after the First World War, had remained a democracy despite post-war political crises and the Great Depression. Although they enjoyed full rights as citizens, many Sudeten Germans felt disadvantaged, and they were particularly hard hit by unemployment. Demanding economic improvements and regional autonomy, a protest movement coalesced around the Sudeten German Homeland Front, which was founded by Henlein in 1933 and renamed the Sudeten German Party two years later. Voices calling for amalgamation into the German Reich quickly became louder and louder. On 19 November 1937, Henlein wrote to Hitler, declaring that “It is practically impossible…for Czechs and Germans to reach agreement and the Sudeten German question can only be resolved by the Reich.”
¹⁸²
After the
Anschluss
, the slogan “Back home to the Reich” became popular among Sudeten Germans, and Hitler used it as dynamite with which to demolish Czechoslovakia. The hatred for Czechs he had nurtured in his Vienna years re-emerged in full force. In conversation with Goebbels, he dismissed them as “impudent, mendacious, craven and subservient.”
¹⁸³

On 21 April, Hitler and Wilhelm Keitel explored the possibilities for moving militarily against Czechoslovakia. The resulting plan was code-named “The Green Scenario.” Hitler did not want a “sudden, out-of-the blue attack for no reason.” Instead, military action was to be preceded by “a period of diplomatic confrontations that would gradually intensify and lead to war.” But Hitler did not entirely rule out the possible need for “a lightning strike on account of some incident.”
¹⁸⁴
And the manifesto that the Sudeten German Party agreed on in the spa town of Karlsbad (today’s Karlovy Vary) on 24 April made it clear how such incidents could be staged. The party demanded the recognition of the Sudeten Germans as a “legal entity” with complete autonomy, and called for reparations for all the economic damage they had suffered since 1918 and “complete liberty to declare their allegiance to German ethnic identity and the German world view”—that is, National Socialism.
¹⁸⁵
Following Hitler’s instructions, Henlein had made the sort of extreme demands that the Czech government could never concede. This tactic instantly ratcheted up tensions and kicked off a war of nerves that would determine the fate of Czechoslovakia.

Before Hitler further escalated the crisis, however, he paid his promised return visit to Mussolini in Italy. On 2 May, three chartered trains stood ready in Berlin’s Anhalter Station to transport the 500-strong travelling party that included half of the Reich government, high-ranking party functionaries, generals, diplomats, journalists and the wives of Nazi VIPs. Eva Braun boarded almost unnoticed in Munich and travelled not with the official delegation, but with the Brandts, the Morells and the wife of the owner of the Rheinhotel Dreesen—all familiar faces at the Berghof. We do not know whether she even saw Hitler on the seven-day state trip.
¹⁸⁶
The following evening, the trains arrived in Rome, where they were greeted by King Victor Emmanuel III, Mussolini and Count Ciano. The Italians had done everything in their power to outdo the pomp of Mussolini’s visit to Germany the previous autumn. Four-horse carriages were waiting in front of the train station to convey the guests, to the applause of thousands of Romans, through the festively decorated and brightly lit city to their accommodations.
¹⁸⁷

Hitler entered the eternal city not with Mussolini but with the king, since, as the Italian head of state, Victor Emmanuel was his official host. For that reason, the German dictator and the closest members of his entourage stayed in the Quirinal Palace, the king’s residence in the capital, while most of the remaining visitors had to make do with the Grand Hotel Plaza. Eva Braun stayed in the Hotel Excelsior, away from all the others.
¹⁸⁸
Hitler had difficulty adapting to the protocol that had the diminutive king and not Il Duce playing the leading role, and the stiff-necked court ceremonies irritated him right from the start. The aristocratic members of the court made it abundantly clear that they considered him a parvenu, treating him with a pompous arrogance that pricked his most sensitive spot, his inferiority complex. “This entire horde of royal flunkies should be taken out and shot. It’s revolting,” wrote Goebbels, no doubt expressing what Hitler felt too. “How they treat us like parvenus! An outrage and a provocation.”
¹⁸⁹

Hitler reacted increasingly sensitively to what he perceived as his supercilious treatment and Mussolini’s undignified relegation to second-fiddle status. Already at the state banquet hosted by Victor Emmanuel on the evening of 4 May at the palace, Hitler had trouble controlling his temper. He was seated to the left of the queen. “The two of them did not say a word to one another during the entire meal,” Fritz Wiedemann noted.
¹⁹⁰
Afterwards Hitler could no longer hold his tongue: “It terrible how this great man, Il Duce, is treated by royal society. Did you see that he was seated all the way down at the far end of the table, behind the youngest princesses?”
¹⁹¹
Of course, the Italians also hoped to impress their German visitors with the progress they had made on the military front. On 5 May, Hitler, Mussolini, Victor Emmanuel and the crown prince boarded the warship MS
Cavour
in Naples to watch naval manoeuvres. The highlight was an exercise in which one hundred submarines simultaneously submerged and then, as if obeying some secret command, surfaced with equal precision a short time later.
¹⁹²

But Hitler remained irritable, and that evening he exploded at Ribbentrop and the head of the Foreign Ministry protocol department, Vicco von Bülow-Schwante. The spark that lit the fuse was comparatively harmless. After Hitler had donned his hated tuxedo for a special performance of the opera
Aida
, he was supposed to inspect a military parade with the king. He wanted to change into his uniform, and twenty minutes had been allocated in the strictly planned programme to that end. But suddenly an assistant to the king appeared and announced that they were behind schedule and that they needed to go outside immediately. Hitler was forced to inspect the troops at the royally attired king’s side with his tuxedo tails flapping in the wind. “An unusually comic sight,” Wiedemann reported. “The German Führer and Reich chancellor looked like an insane head waiter. It was all the more comic as you could see that he realised what a ridiculous figure he was cutting.”
¹⁹³
Hitler was seething with rage, and on the trip back to Rome he levelled bitter accusations at Ribbentrop. The foreign minister, in turn, immediately fired his head of diplomatic protocol.

Hitler had further reason to get upset at a military parade the following morning, when the Italian troops performed the
passo romano
, modelled on the German goose-step. The grandstand only contained enough chairs for the members of the Italian royal court and their German state guest, so that Mussolini had to stand. “That made me so angry I almost caused a public scandal,” Hitler told his secretary Christa Schroeder.
¹⁹⁴
In the afternoon, the Governor of Rome, Prince Colonna, held a reception. Several hundred guests attended, and the royal court turned up in its entirety. Hitler had the unpleasant task of opening the polonaise with the queen on his arm through an honour guard of guests, some of whom fell to their knees, while others kissed the hem of the queen’s dress. “When Hitler noticed this, he went red in the face,” his pilot Hans Baur remarked. “He positively dragged the queen forward to get through the long rows of guests as quickly as possible. The way he looked, we thought he was going to have a stroke.”
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That evening, Hitler complained that people had “stared at him as if he were an exotic animal.” He simply could not warm to the “ceremonies of court lackeys.”
¹⁹⁶

To a degree, Hitler’s intemperate reaction recalled his behaviour in Munich salons in the early 1920s. Bavarian high society had also treated the ambitious beer-cellar rabble-rouser as a curiosity, and he had concealed his insecurities with eccentric poses. He had, of course, acquired many social graces since becoming chancellor, and he was no longer uncomfortable during official receptions or talks with career diplomats. Moreover, his successes had increased his self-confidence. Nonetheless, he felt ill at ease in the royal court in Rome, not just because he sensed the tacit antipathy its members maintained towards him, but also because he did not know how to react. There was nothing in his regular repertoire that allowed him to master unfamiliar situations like being dropped in amongst Italy’s
grandezza
. Even at a point when his popularity had reached unprecedented heights in his home country and he was deified like no German politician before or since, his visit to Italy revealed that he still lived in fear of looking laughable. His megalomania was the flipside of his deep feelings of inferiority.

Hitler’s mood only improved when Mussolini devoted his full attention to him, away from the disruptive presence of the king and his court. Together they jointly visited a major archaeological exhibition about the Roman emperor Augustus, and on 7 May Il Duce hosted a gala dinner in honour of his guest at the Palazzo Venezia. There, they once again exchanged assurances of their mutual regard and of the eternal friendship of their two peoples. Hitler declared that he saw “the natural border of the Alps between the two countries as inviolable,” signalling that he had no territorial designs on southern Tyrol.
¹⁹⁷
To conclude Hitler’s visit, the two dictators travelled to Florence on 9 May, where they decamped at the Palazzo Pitti and visited the Uffizi Gallery. Years later in the monologues he held in his wartime headquarters, Hitler still rhapsodised about the magic of Rome, Florence and the Tuscan and Umbrian countryside: “How I wish I could travel around like an unknown painter in Italy!”
¹⁹⁸
Around midnight on 9 May, Mussolini accompanied Hitler to the train station, taking his leave with the words: “Now no power in the world can divide us!”
¹⁹⁹

In a memorandum to Germany’s foreign embassies, Ribbentrop deemed Hitler’s visit to Italy a great success. The Berlin–Rome axis, he wrote, had proved a “reliable component in our general policy,” and the friendship between Hitler and Mussolini had been “further deepened.”
²⁰⁰
Although the hectic agenda had left hardly any time for serious political discussions, the German side had read into certain statements by their Italian counterparts a willingness not to put any obstacles in Germany’s way should it decide to move against Czechoslovakia. “Mussolini is not interested in our intentions concerning Czechoslovakia,” wrote State Secretary von Weizsäcker. “He is prepared to stand back and watch what we do there.”
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