I had to do that. A grand liberating act that everyone could understand was essential. I had to pull the German people out of this whole clinging network of dependencies, empty phrases and false ideas. I had to restore our freedom of action. I am not concerned here with the politics of the day. For the moment the difficulties may have mounted. So be it—that will be balanced out by the trust the German people will place in me as a result. It would have made no sense to us to go on debating the subject, as the Weimar parties did for ten long years…. [The people] want to see something being done, not the same fraud being continued. What was needed was not what the brooding intellect thinks is useful, but the dramatic act which demonstrates a resolute will to make a new beginning. Whether it was done wisely or not, the people at any rate understand only such acts, not the futile bargaining that leads to nothing. The people are sick of being led around by the nose.31
Shortly afterward it became apparent that he had reasoned rightly. For Hitler characteristically linked withdrawal from the League of Nations with another step that went considerably beyond the original pretext. He decided to hold a plebiscite on the issue, the first such plebiscite of his regime, and one staged with an enormous display of propaganda. This in turn was combined with new elections. For the Reichstag that had been elected on March 5 was to some extent still anachronistically divided on the pattern that had prevailed under the Weimar Republic.
The outcome of the voting could not be in doubt. Feelings of humiliation harbored for years, deep-seated resentment over the tricks by which Germany had been kept under since Versailles—all such emotions now broke forth, and even critics of the regime, who would soon be going over to active resistance, hailed Hitler’s gesture. As the British ambassador reported to London, all Germans were united in the desire to avenge themselves upon the League of Nations for its manifold failures. Since Hitler had intertwined his policies as a whole with the resolution to withdraw from the League by framing his plebiscite question in general terms, there was no way for the voter to express approval of his position on the League of Nations and at the same time condemn his domestic policies. Thus the plebiscite was one of the most effective chess moves in the process of consolidating his power within Germany.
Hitler himself opened the campaign on October 24 with a major speech in the Berlin Sportpalast. He announced that the plebiscite was to take place on November 12, one day after the fifteenth anniversary of the 1918 Armistice. Once more facing an electoral challenge, Hitler worked himself up into a trancelike paroxysm. “For my part I declare,” he cried out to the masses, “that I would sooner die than sign anything that in my most sacred conviction is not tolerable for the German people.” He also asserted that “if ever I should be mistaken in this matter or if the people should ever believe that they can no longer support my actions… I wish them to have me executed. I will quietly await the blow!” As always, when he felt slighted, he ranted demagogically about the injustice that had been done to him. Speaking to the workers of the Siemens-Schuckert Works, dressed in boots, military trousers, and dark civilian jacket, standing on an enormous derrick, he stated:
We are gladly willing to co-operate in any international agreement. But we will do so only as equals. I have never, in private life, forced myself upon any distinguished company that did not want to have me or did not regard me as an equal. I don’t need such people, and the German nation has just as much character. We are not taking part in anything as shoeshine boys, as inferiors. No, either we have equal rights or the world will no longer see us at any conferences.
Once again, as in earlier years, a frantic “poster war” was launched. “We want honor and equality!” In Berlin, Munich, and Frankfurt a procession of crippled veterans in wheelchairs was mounted. The veterans held signs: “Germany’s Dead Demand Your Vote!” Considerable use was made of quotations from the wartime British Prime Minister, Lloyd George, who asserted that right was on Germany’s side and that England would not have put up with such a humiliation for any length of time.32 A wave of gigantic marches, protest festivals, and mass appeals once again rolled over the country. A few days before the election the nation was asked to observe two minutes of total silence in remembrance of its dead heroes. Hitler declared that the military tone of life in Germany was not for the sake of demonstrating against France “but to exemplify the political decisionmaking that is necessary for the conquest of Communism…. When the rest of the world barricades itself in indestructible fortresses, builds vast fleets of airplanes, constructs giant tanks, makes enormous cannon, it can scarcely talk about a menace when German National Socialists march entirely weaponless in columns of four and thus provide a visible expression of the German racial community and effective protection for it…. Germany has a right to security no less than other nations.”
All the resentments of the people were expressed in the results of the plebiscite—but it also showed the effects of an intensification of propaganda. Ninety-five per cent of the voters approved the government’s decision to withdraw from the League. And although this result was manipulated and accompanied by terroristic electioneering practices the outcome still more or less corresponded to public mood. In the simultaneous Reichstag election 39 million of the 45 million eligibles gave their vote to the Nazi “unity” candidates. The day was exuberantly hailed as “the miracle of the birth of the German nation.”
During his coming to power Hitler had proved the value of a series of surprise actions on the domestic front; now he applied the same tactics to foreign affairs. The dismay at his break with Geneva was not yet over, and there was still indignation at his arrogant attempt to turn the democratic principle of the plebiscite against the democracies themselves, when he again seized the initiative. His purpose now was to arrange a dialogue on a new and more favorable plane with the powers he had just offended. In a memorandum issued in mid-December he rejected the idea of disarmament but declared himself willing to accept a general limitation of armaments to defensive weapons, provided Germany was allowed to raise a conscript army of 300,000 men.
This was the first of those offers, placed with such remarkable feeling for the situation, which for years prefaced each of his foreign-policy coups right up to the outbreak of the war. For the British the terms were just barely acceptable as a basis for negotiations, for the French unacceptable, just as Hitler had calculated in each case. And while the two Allies took council endlessly—the consultations protracted by French distrust—on how far each was willing to go in making concessions, Hitler could exploit their differences, and the fact that no binding agreements had yet been arranged, to push forward his own plans.
Again, about a month later—on January 26, 1934—a new move of Hitler’s abruptly changed the picture: he concluded a ten-year nonaggression pact with Poland. To understand the startling effect of this move, we must call to mind the traditionally tense relations between Germany and Poland and the fund of old resentment between the two countries. Some of the bitterest points of the Versailles Treaty had been those concerned with territorial losses to the new Polish state, the creation of the Polish Corridor, which cut off East Prussia from the rest of the Reich, and the establishment of the Free City of Danzig. These areas became bones of contention between the two countries and the focuses of constant menaces. The Germans had been greatly disturbed by Polish border violations and injustices during the early years of the Weimar Republic, partly because they had pointed up Germany’s general impotence, partly because of the offense to the old German sense of being able to lord it over the Slavic vassals. As France’s ally, moreover, Poland fed the Germans’ encirclement complex. Weimar foreign policy, including that of Gustav Stresemann, had stubbornly resisted any suggestions that Germany guarantee Poland’s possession of her existing territory.