A Patriot's History of the Modern World (52 page)

Perhaps Hitler's greatest admirer across the channel was King Edward VIII, who abdicated his throne in 1936 to marry an American divorcée, Wallis Simpson. Edward's abdication made his reign of less than a year the shortest of any monarch not to have died or been assassinated on the throne,
and he was the only British monarch who voluntarily stepped down. But the embarrassment for England was only beginning: Edward visited Hitler at Obersalzberg after the abdication, delivering the Nazi salute for photographers and providing the Nazis with stellar publicity. Albert Speer later quoted Hitler as saying, “I am certain through him permanent friendly relations could have been achieved. If he had stayed, everything would have been different. His abdication was a severe loss for us.”
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Some speculated that had Hitler ever conquered England, he would have attempted to reinstate Edward. At the beginning of the war, Edward was stationed in France as a major-general in the British Military Mission, where allegations arose that he leaked war plans for Belgium's defense. Holed up in Lisbon, Edward gave an interview viewed by Churchill as “defeatist,” whereupon he was instructed to return to Britain or face court martial, and he complied. Shipped to the Bahamas as governor (“a third-class British colony,” as he described it), he still was viewed with sufficient suspicion that Franklin Roosevelt placed him under surveillance.
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One investigator in the 1980s claimed an MI5 agent was secretly sent to Germany after the surrender to retrieve correspondence between Edward and Hitler that might prove embarrassing.
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Certainly Britain was not alone in refusing to stand up to Hitler, and one of the greatest tragedies of World War II is that at any point prior to the acquisition of Czechoslovakia, Germany was vastly outnumbered by potential allied armies. When the Germans marched into the Rhineland, her neighbors could put more than ten times as much military force immediately into the field. Certainly the League of Nations did nothing to blunt Hitler's violation of the Versailles Treaty. The German chancellor had no intention of keeping the Anglo-German Naval Agreement of 1935, and privately announced he would break it at the first opportunity.

Hitler also sought to favorably shape American popular opinion. Initially, Roosevelt was praised by the German press—one paper called him a man of “irreproachable, extremely responsible character and immovable will.”
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After a year in office, Hitler sent FDR a letter congratulating his “heroic efforts” for the American people and vowing to do the same for Germans. In a letter to William Dodd, the U.S. ambassador, Hitler said that his nation and the United States were both demanding the same “virtue of duty, readiness for sacrifice, and discipline” of their people.
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Mussolini likewise wrote glowingly of the New Deal, labeling it a spiritual renewal of a “sole will [who] silences dissenting voices.” However, when
Americans recoiled at the notion that the New Deal was fascism, although the NIRA certainly would have done either Mussolini or Hitler proud, Mussolini quickly squelched such talk from his press office. Nevertheless, years later Roosevelt still spoke of how he was “deeply impressed” with what the Italian dictator had accomplished.
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Only a few clamored for military preparedness on either side of the Atlantic, one of whom was wealthy Wall Street financier Bernard Baruch. Having urged Woodrow Wilson to prepare for World War I, in 1935, Baruch looked with concern on developments in Europe. America's duty, he told
The
New York Times
, was to “think peace, talk peace, and act peace,” but if war came, the United States needed to be prepared to fight. With some prescience, he predicted, “if the nation has to go to war it will be ready to go in and sock them in the eye and win.”
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Even Norman Angell, who had prophesied the dawning of a new era of peace prior to World War I, first called for the League of Nations to resist aggression, then eventually joined Churchill in criticizing Chamberlain's appeasement. Angell joined a few other English dignitaries to welcome exiled Ethiopian emperor Haile Selassie to London in 1936 when the prime minister, Stanley Baldwin, exited a gathering for tea to avoid greeting him. Worse than that, King Edward VIII would not receive Selassie at Buckingham Palace.
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Had no further aggression by Hitler or Mussolini ever occurred, by the end of the 1930s the totalitarian moment had nevertheless arrived. The number of so-called democracies in the world had shrunk dramatically, from a high point in 1922 when 37 percent of the world's nations were democracies (more or less), to 1939 when only 14 percent remained free. But even this measure was misleading, as many of the existing democracies lacked anything close to the degree of liberty found in America. In France, for example, powerful antiparliamentary forces marshaled to push the nation toward the fascists. The 1934 Stavisky Crisis, triggered by the embezzlement and pilferage of Alexandre Stavisky, a Russian swindler known as the “Handsome Sasha,” and his cronies who sold bonds from pawnshops, helped destabilize the French government through Sasha's connections to important officials. Subsequent public outcry, along with an organized campaign by the right, forced the government of Camille Chautemps out and let the radical Socialist Édouard Daladier in. Constant demonstrations from January to February 1934 culminated with riots and several French right-wing groups, including the Ligue des Patriotes, the Action Française (founded by Maurras), and the Jeunesses Patriotes (the “Patriot Youth”), among others,
descended on the Place de la Concorde in front of the National Assembly on February 6, commencing an hours-long battle with police that resulted in sixteen deaths. Inside the Assembly, fistfights broke out between left-wing and right-wing deputies, leading to Daladier's resignation and sparking counterriots by Communists. The French radical Right lost all faith in parliamentary democracy and the Third Republic, and looked for new opportunities to establish a fascist or national-socialist alternative. “Rather Hitler than the Republic” became the accepted sentiment.
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Only in Britain was there steadfast resistance against more government control. But in all the Nazi client states, any semblance of genuine democracies had vanished. In addition, Franco held Spain, Mussolini Italy, Stalin Russia. The question was not democracy or totalitarianism in Europe, but whose variant of totalitarianism, the Fascists' or the Communists'? Even in Asia, the choices were between the theocratic autocracy of Imperial Japan or the dictatorships vying for power in China, one under the quasi-socialist Kuomintang government of Chiang Kai-shek and the other under Communists led by Mao Zedong. By 1939, freedom was a rare flower, blooming only in a handful of carefully cultivated fields.

The End of the Fascist Façade

Hitler planned to invade Poland in the spring of 1939, even as he occupied the remainder of Czechoslovakia (an event Chamberlain described as the latest in “a series of unpleasant surprises”). Additionally in March, the Memel district of Lithuania, formerly German territory before Versailles, was returned through a treaty forced on Lithuania by Germany. Shortly thereafter, der Fuehrer spoke to his generals, noting that with few exceptions, “German unification” had been achieved, and promised next to secure food supplies. There was no question of “sparing Poland,” and while the goal was to isolate Poland from the West, if Britain and France fought for Poland, it would be “better to attack the West and finish off Poland at the same time.”
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He doubted whether the West would interfere, however: “I experienced those poor worms Daladier and Chamberlain in Munich. They will be too cowardly to attack.” Comparing himself to Genghis Khan, Hitler instructed the generals to use “quickness and…brutality.”
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Yet the West hesitated to support Poland too overtly, wary of feeding Hitler's paranoia of encirclement, leading one British writer to urge that policy makers keep references to British support of Poland out of the German press if at all possible. Meanwhile, Hitler's new demands for the return of
Danzig and the Polish Corridor separating East Prussia from Pomerania received a warm reception in Germany.

Less enthusiastic was German popular opinion for a coming war. Czechoslovakia had been a low-hanging fruit, yet even then (unlike with the Sudetenland) the Nazis were not greeted by cheers, flowers, or elation in Prague.
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Hitler's Reichstag speech of September 1, 1939, justifying the coming invasion of Poland, excited few Czechs, even Czech Nazis. George Kennan, at the American Embassy, found the streets of Prague deserted, defying even the efforts of professional Nazi Party agitators to whip up public support through demonstrations. At the same time, opinion in Great Britain moved firmly against appeasement. Poland would therefore finally align Britain and France in an active alliance over territory neither could hope to defend, having already ceded the best defensive ground in Europe to Germany with the Sudetenland. Nonetheless, British attitudes swung toward a determination to resist the Nazis.

Poland had been on the carving block since April 1939, when Germany renounced its 1934 nonaggression pact with Poland and made Polish territory a way-station on the drive to destroy the USSR. Hitler could not imagine the British coming to the aid of Poland after sacrificing Czechoslovakia, and he had ordered the German High Seas Fleet to move into full-scale production of battleships, cruisers, and submarines based on a long-range plan for war with England after Jewish Bolshevism had been eradicated. Nonetheless, the stubborn British gave Poland a territorial guarantee in August 1939, complicating Hitler's schemes. As an Anglo-French mission left for Moscow to discuss alliances with Stalin, Hitler was forced to abruptly modify his plans.

Stalin despised the Nazis and feared a German invasion as much as Hitler hated Bolshevism and wished to avoid a two-front war. This focus on a common desire for harmonious relations (temporarily) between their two nations produced a terrifying international alignment of totalitarian gangsters. Moreover, there was a precedent indicating coming events—Mussolini had aligned with Germany in May 1939 with the “Pact of Steel,” and promptly plunged into Albania two weeks later. Now the Nazis wooed Stalin, sending Joachim von Ribbentrop to meet with the Soviet dictator, not least to forestall any possible rapprochement between Britain and the Soviet Union. Ribbentrop's reply indicated that the Soviets, too, wanted an arrangement. A division of Poland seemed just the sweetener for the deal.

Addressing the German High Command on August 22, Hitler announced
he would “provide the propagandistic pretext for launching the war, no matter whether it is credible,” and directed his generals to “Close your hearts to pity. Proceed brutally.”
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The next night, in the Kremlin, Ribbentrop sealed the agreement with Stalin, receiving the dictator's toasts to Hitler, looking much like Chicago mobsters from a decade earlier as they divided up territory between phony handshakes and sloppy kisses. The nonaggression pact virtually ensured that Poland would vanish as a state. Wisely, the Soviets waited until September 17 to seize their part of Poland, allowing Germany to attack first on September 1 and Britain and France to declare war on Germany as the sole aggressor. Stalin was correct that neither Britain nor France would desire war with the Soviet Union in addition to Germany and would overlook the Soviet role in dismembering Poland. In fact, they would turn a blind eye to anything else Stalin would do while at war with Germany, and the pact allowed Stalin to crush the Baltic states and move with impunity against Finland and parts of Romania. Stalin reveled in the deal as he now had free rein, and declared war on Finland in November. Germany, described as a “partner” by Stalin, suddenly benefited from an ironic and ridiculous overnight shift in worldwide Communist propaganda. Whereas only a week earlier Communist publications in England and America had denounced fascism, now Hitler was a friend; war was to be resisted and peace sought.
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As long as the pact lasted, Stalin guaranteed Hitler raw materials, including copper, zinc, tin, and food. Both dictators slobbered over each other with grandiose statements, Stalin becoming an originator of “Slavonic-Muscovite nationalism” and creator of “Slavonic fascism.” The Soviet premier described Hitler as much like himself, weeding out “extremists.”
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Samurai and Supermen

Germany's obsessive march to war in Europe would have occurred without any similar actions in the Far East by Japan during the 1930s. Indeed, except for the Anti-Comintern Pact of 1936—which jointly pledged Japan and Germany to resist the Communist International, or Comintern—Japan and Germany had few initial mutual goals. But as European colonial possessions in the Far East became vulnerable after 1940, the Empire of Japan and Nazi Germany found their interests aligning. Germany's Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact of 1939 constituted the sole hiccup in the relationship: it seemed to violate the anti-Communist understanding with Japan. Under this pledge, Germany and Russia agreed to a nonaggression pact that permitted
the Soviets to invade Poland from the east without fear of German retaliation as the Nazis moved into Poland from the west. Hitler personally saw the German-Soviet agreement as a mere truce to be broken at a time of his choosing, and he assumed Stalin did as well.

Japan remained to be drawn into Germany's alliances, in spite of Hitler's agreement with Stalin, for two reasons: to act as a diversion to keep the United States occupied in the Far East, and as a possible partner in the eventual war against the Soviet Union, whenever Hitler decided to take that plunge or if Stalin attacked Germany first. Not wanting to unduly alarm Stalin and provoke an untimely conflict while Britain and France remained undefeated, Hitler put off Japan for a year.