These anti-Polish feelings dominated the traditionally pro-Russian diplomatic and military circles and the old Prussian landowning class as well. Yet Hitler brushed them aside with hardly a qualm. On the other side Marshal Piłsudski displayed equal resolution: faced with France’s halfhearted and nervous policy, he restructured Poland’s entire pattern of alliances. Essentially he was acting on the premise that Hitler, as a South German, a Catholic and a “Hapsburger,” could disassociate himself from the political traditions that Poland feared.
Here Hitler once more gave the lie to the popular view of him as an emotional politician, the victim of his whims and manias. Unquestionably he shared the national German enmity toward Poland. But he did not allow this to affect his policy. Although he had not yet defined what place Poland would occupy within his general concept of a vast eastward expansion, it may be assumed that there was no room for an independent Polish ministate within the framework of Hitler’s continental visions. As recently as April, 1933, Hitler had made it plain to Ambassador François-Poncet that no one could expect Germany to accept in the long run the present state of her eastern border. But as long as Poland was independent, militarily strong, and protected by alliances, he acted on the basis of the situation he could not change and coolly tried to turn it to his advantage. “Germans and Poles will have to learn to accept the fact of each other’s existence,” he stated in his anniversary report to the Reichstag on January 30, 1934. “Hence it is more sensible to regulate this state of affairs which the last thousand years have not been able to remove, and the next thousand years will not be able to remove either, in such a way that the highest possible profit will accrue from it for both nations.”
The profit Hitler derived from the treaty did in fact prove to be enormous. In Germany itself the pact was scarcely popular; but to the outside world Hitler could repeatedly adduce it as evidence of his conciliatory temper even with regard to notorious enemies. British Ambassador Sir Eric Phipps commented in a report to London that the German Chancellor had now proved that he was a statesman by sacrificing some of his popularity to a rational foreign policy.33 At the same time, Hitler had succeeded, by his Polish alliance, in discrediting the system of the League of Nations, which in all the preceding years had not managed to dampen the Polish-German tinderbox. Things had been left, as Hitler convincingly complained, so that the “tensions gradually… assumed the character of a hereditary political taint on both sides.” And now, seemingly without effort, in the course of a few bilateral conversations, he eliminated the problem.
Finally, the pact proved that the barriers which had been erected around Germany were not nearly as stout as had been assumed. “With Poland, one of the strongest pillars of the Treaty of Versailles falls,” General von Seeckt had once said, expressing one of the tenets of the Weimar Republic’s foreign policy—and obviously suggesting that the problem could be solved by military action. Hitler was now demonstrating that imaginative political methods could achieve great effects. For the alliance not only freed Germany from the Franco-Polish threat on two fronts; it also knocked a sizable piece out of the system of collective guarantees of peace and left that system permanently irreparable. The Geneva experiment had, fundamentally speaking, already failed; Hitler had destroyed it with his first assault. Moreover, he had maneuvered France into the role of international troublemaker. The Foreign Ministers of the Weimar Republic had worn themselves out trying to wring concessions from an all-powerful and unyielding France. Hitler had simply turned his back on her temporarily. Henceforth he could devote himself to those bilateral negotiations, alliances, and intrigues that were central to his strategy of international relations. For he could win only if he confronted isolated opponents, never a united front. The game he had so skillfully staged in the domestic arena was now beginning again on the international plane. Already his fellow players were pressing forward. The first of them, in February, 1934, was the British Keeper of the Privy Seal, Anthony Eden.
The unpredictability of Hitler’s manner must be counted among his prime tricks as a negotiator. Just as Hugenberg, Schleicher, Papen, and a vast entourage had once done, Eden, Sir John Simon, André François-Poncet, and Benito Mussolini thought they would be meeting a moody, limited, booted party boss who, to be sure, possessed a certain demagogic talent. The fellow who had obviously had to overcome his insignificance and borrow character for himself from a mustache, a forelock, and a uniform, who in an ordinary business suit looked rather like an imitation of the man he pretended to be, was for some time the favorite butt of European humor. He was pictured as a kind of “Gandhi in Prussian boots” or a feeble-minded Charlie Chaplin seated on a much too high chancellor’s throne—at any rate “to the highest degree exotic,” as a British observer, Arnold Toynbee, wrote ironically, “one of these political ‘mad mullahs,’ non-smokers, non-drinkers of alcohol, non-eaters of meat, non-riders on horseback, and non-practisers of blood-sports in their cranky private lives.”34 Negotiators and visitors who came to Hitler with such preconceptions were therefore all the more surprised. For years he astonished them by a schooled statesmanlike manner which he could easily put on and for which they were totally unprepared. Eden was amazed at Hitler’s smart, almost elegant appearance, and wondered at finding him controlled and friendly. He listened readily to all objections, Eden wrote, and was by no means the melodramatic actor he had been described as being. Hitler knew what he was talking about, Eden commented in retrospect, and respect still rings in his remark that the German Chancellor had had complete command of the subject under discussion and had not once found it necessary to consult his experts even on questions of detail. Sir John Simon remarked to von Neurath on a later occasion that Hitler was “excellent and very convincing” in conversation, and that before meeting him he had had a completely false picture of him. Hitler also surprised his interlocutors by his quickwittedness. When the British Foreign Minister hinted that the English liked people to abide by treaties, Hitler showed ironic surprise and replied: “That was not always the case. In 1813 the German Army was prohibited by treaty. Yet I do not recollect that at Waterloo Wellington said to Blucher: Your Army is illegal. Kindly leave the field.”
When Hitler met Mussolini in Venice in June, 1934, he contrived to combine “dignity with friendliness and candor” in his manner, according to a diplomatic eyewitness, and left a “strong impression” behind among the initially skeptical Italians. Arnold Toynbee was surprised to hear him discourse on Germany’s guardian role in the East; his remarks, moreover, made excellent sense. In his relations with foreign visitors Hitler showed himself quick-witted, well prepared, often charming; and as François-Poncet noted after one meeting with him, he also contrived to give the impression of “fullest sincerity.”35
Like the Germans who had once come to gape at Hitler as if he were an acrobat in a circus, the foreigners came in growing numbers, and in so doing extended the aura of greatness and admiration that surrounded him. They listened all too eagerly to his words about the people’s longing for order and work, to his assurances of his love of peace, which he was fond of connecting with his personal experiences as a soldier at the front. The foreigners showed understanding for his sensitive sense of honor. It was already beginning to be customary, especially within Germany itself, to distinguish between the fanatical partisan politician of the past and the responsible realist of the present. For the first time since the days of the Kaiser a majority of the German people had the feeling that they could identify with their own government without feelings of pity, anxiety, or shame. Papen, who otherwise was certainly no spokesman for the general mood, was probably expressing a widely held view when he paid tribute, at a cabinet meeting of November 14, 1933, to the “genius of the Chancellor.”