Nazi efforts to solve the “Jewish problem” were in fact products of a vicious anti-Semitism that propelled the Nazi regime toward increasingly extreme measures of persecution. SA terrorism, legislation expelling Jews from the civil service and universities, boycotts of Jewish businesses and professionals, and the eventual expropriation of Jewish-owned properties had by 1938 led to the emigration of roughly half of the 1933 Jewish population of 500,000 people. Until the massive campaign of violence against Jews and Jewish property known as Kristallnacht (“Night of Broken Glass”), during the night of November 9–10, 1938, it still seemed possible for some Jews to remain in Germany, albeit in severely circumscribed circumstances. With Kristallnacht the Nazis ushered in a new level of persecution. In its aftermath Hitler put Göring in charge of Jewish policy. Göring coordinated the numerous party and governmental agencies competing for control of—and profit from—the persecutions of the Jews.
For the Nazis, to exclude Jews from the Volksgemeinschaft was as important as attracting the German working classes to it, in order to undo the long-standing alienation of the largely socialist-minded German worker from the nationalist consensus. Any success in this effort depended heavily upon the Nazis’ ability to provide employment for the millions of jobless whom they inherited in 1933. Public spending on rearmament and on public works projects such as the superhighway, or autobahn, network helped create many of the jobs so desperately needed. By 1937 Germany was beginning to suffer from a labour shortage. It was equally important to inculcate workers with a sense of being an integral part of a racially based national community. For this the Nazis devised an elaborate program of subsidies for leisure-time activities for workers. Called “Strength through Joy,” the program subsidized workers’ vacations; it made possible excursions to mountain or seaside resorts and offered the possibility of cruises in the Mediterranean or the Baltic Sea. By providing leisure activities for workers until then reserved for their economic and social superiors, the government attempted to integrate them into the Volksgemeinschaft. A new, inexpensive automobile, the Volkswagen, was designed to give workers the opportunity to own a car, which had until then in Germany been a symbol of wealth and status largely reserved for the upper classes. Hitler once said that Henry Ford had done more than anyone else to obliterate class differences in America. Foreign policy
Hitler kept tight control over foreign affairs, formulating himself both the strategy and the tactics calculated to achieve his goals. The immediate objective was to reestablish Germany’s position in world affairs; by this Hitler meant ending the humiliations attending the Treaty of Versailles, such as the demilitarized Rhineland and the limitations on German armaments. The chains of that treaty needed to fall with a loud clang, he said. The larger objective, the one he had spoken about since his entry into politics in the early 1920s, was the conquest for Germany of Lebensraum. Hitler believed that this space needed to be acquired in the east, at the expense of the Soviets, so as to secure for Germany the Ukrainian “breadbasket” and open up vast territories for German colonization. Hitler found justification for such conquests in his notions of German racial superiority over the Slavic peoples who inhabited the lands he coveted. Furthermore, he saw the Bolsheviks who now controlled the Soviet Union as the vanguard of the world Jewish conspiracy. Control of this territory was to become the foundation for Germany’s economic and military domination of Europe and eventually, perhaps, of the world.
No such domination or expansion was possible without war, of course, and Hitler did not shrink from its implications. His rearming of Germany, begun in secret in 1933, was made public in March 1935 when he announced the creation of an air force and the reintroduction of general military conscription to provide the manpower for 36 new divisions in the army. In June of that same year he signed an agreement with the British that allowed a German naval buildup of up to 35 percent of Britain’s surface naval strength and up to 45 percent of its tonnage in submarines. On March 7, 1936, he moved German forces into the demilitarized Rhineland. Versailles was dead. Neither the British nor the French had lifted a finger in its defense, choosing instead to sign agreements expressly negating the terms of Versailles. By 1936 Hitler was spending 10.2 billion marks on rearmament, and Göring was placed in charge of a so-called Four-Year Plan to prepare the German economy for war. On November 5, 1937, Hitler gathered his general staff and admonished them to be prepared for war in the east no later than 1942 or 1943.
As a cover for his true intentions during the first years of power, Hitler spoke long and often of his desire for peace. All he wanted, he said, was a Germany allowed its rightful place in world affairs. As evidence of his pacific intentions, he signed in January 1934 a 10-year nonaggression pact with Poland. A truer picture of his intentions became evident in July 1934, however, when Hitler encouraged the Nazi Party in Austria to attempt an overthrow of the government of Chancellor Engelbert Dollfuss. A Nazi squad shot and killed Dollfuss, but the coup attempt was badly managed. Benito Mussolini’s movement of Italian troops to the Austrian border forced Hitler to back away from supporting his Austrian partners.
Propaganda Minister Joseph Goebbels’s anti-Bolshevik rhetoric helped Hitler to delude France and Britain, as well as the United States—which was leery of being drawn into another European quarrel—into accepting his claim to be the West’s last bulwark against Bolshevik expansion. His agreement with the Japanese in 1936, the Anti-Comintern Pact, was directed against the Third Communist International. A year later Mussolini, after a year of German-Italian cooperation in aiding General Francisco Franco’s rebel forces in the Spanish Civil War, added his signature to the pact.
Joseph Goebbels, c. 1935.Interfoto/Friedrich Rauch, Munich
Hitler made two dramatic foreign policy moves in 1938 that helped clarify for the world the extent of his less-than-pacific intentions. In March he annexed Austria to the Reich, justifying the Anschluss (“Annexation”) as a fulfillment of the principle of German national self-determination. Britain and France stood by quietly at this additional repudiation of the Versailles treaty. Next Hitler engineered a diplomatic crisis with Czechoslovakia, claiming Czech mistreatment of its German minority in the Sudetenland. Against considerable opposition from his own military, Hitler was determined to go to war with the Czechs. Only through the intervention of Britain’s Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain, who offered to come to Germany to appease Hitler and who managed to persuade the Czechs to yield to all of Hitler’s demands, was war avoided. Chamberlain’s intervention resulted in the Munich agreement in late September 1938, in which the Italians, the French, and the British ceremoniously handed the Sudetenland over to Hitler. Since that time the very word Munich has come to symbolize caving in to the demands of a dictator.