The reaction of the European nations to Hitler’s challenges is all the harder to understand because the process of seizing power, with its bloody finale in the Röhm affair, had provided some inkling of the man’s nature and policies. In a speech of January, 1941, Hitler declared, peeved, but quite rightly: “My program from the first was to abolish the Treaty of Versailles. It is futile nonsense for the rest of the world to pretend today that I did not discover this program until 1933, or 1935, or 1937…. These gentlemen would have been wiser to read what I have written-—and written thousands of times. No human being has declared or recorded what he wanted more often than I. Again and again I wrote these words: ‘The abolition of the Treaty of Versailles.’ ”2
From the very start no one could be in doubt about this particular aim, at the very least. And since abrogation of the Treaty of Versailles represented a direct threat to almost all the nations of Europe, there must have been strong though possibly somewhat hidden factors that contributed to Hitler’s effortless triumphs.
Once again Hitler’s deep inner ambiguity, which governed all his behavior, all his tactical, political, and ideological conceptions, proved of crucial importance. It has been rightly pointed out that he would surely have roused the united opposition of the European nations, or of the whole civilized world, had he been merely an excitable nationalistic spokesman for German international equality, an anti-Communist, an aggressive prophet of Lebensraum, or even a fanatical anti-Semite of the Streicher type. But he was all of these together and, moreover, had the knack of countering every fear he aroused with a hope. By “letting the one quality emerge and the other recede, as opportunity offered, he divided his opponents without ever betraying himself…. It was an ingenious recipe.”3
The basic anti-Communist mood of liberal-conservative bourgeois Europe served him as a vital means for fending off suspicions of himself and his policies. It is true that in the spring of 1933 the French writer Charles du Bos assured a German friend that an abyss had opened up between Germany and western Europe. But while this may have been true, morally, it was hardly so from the psychological view. Beyond all opposing interests, all crisscrossing enmities, Europe retained its common emotions, above all the dread of revolution, arbitrariness, and public chaos. And it was as the apostle of order that Hitler had so successfully presented himself inside Germany.
To be sure, the gospel of Communism had lost a good deal of its aggressive promise and intensity. But Europe was once more reminded of the famous specter in the Popular Front experiment in France, in the Spanish Civil War, and in the Moscow trials. Everywhere Communism had taken a severe beating, but it had nevertheless displayed sufficient energy to revive the old fears. With his keen instinct for the moods and secret motivations of his opponents, Hitler had exploited this fear factor. In countless speeches he had referred to “the undermining work of the Bolshevist wirepullers,” their “thousand channels for money and propaganda,” their “revolutionization of this continent.” He was heightening deliberately the psychosis of fear: “Then cities burn, villages collapse in ruin and rubble, and each man no longer knows his neighbor. Class fights against class, occupation against occupation, brother destroys brother. We have chosen a different plan.” He described his own mission to Arnold Toynbee by saying that he had come into the world to lead mankind in the inevitable struggle against Bolshevism.
Thus this peculiarly alienated, atavistically reactionary Hitler Germany aroused profound anxieties in Europe but also encouraged many secret expectations: that Germany would somehow assume the ancient role of serving as a bulwark against evil, or a “breakwater,” as Hitler himself said, in an age in which “the Fenris wolf seems once more to be raging over the earth.” Within the framework of such far-reaching considerations on the part of Germany’s western neighbors in particular, Hitler’s contempt for justice, his extremism, his multifarious atrocities, scarcely seemed to matter—despite all the momentary indignation they aroused. Those were problems for the Germans to worry about. To the mind of conservative Europe, the man’s sinister martial features—a good deal less strange, at any rate, than those of Stalin—were highly appropriate for a protector and the commander of a bulwark. Of course, nobody wanted or expected him to amount to anything more than that.
Here we have, down to incidentals, the same mixture of naïveté, stupidity, and vanity that all the conservative participants who collaborated with Hitler, from Kahr to Papen, had demonstrated. Of course, the statesmen felt some trepidations, but such feelings did not affect their politics. When Chamberlain heard Hermann Rauschning’s report on Hitler’s aims, he flatly refused to believe it. With a sharp sense for the repetitive nature of events and even the similarity of faces, Hitler called the appeasers in London and Paris “my Hugenbergers.”4
The popularity of the authoritarian concept, both at home and abroad, played directly into Hitler’s hands. He himself called the “crisis of democracy” the prevailing phenomenon of the age. And many a contemporary observer regarded “the idea of dictatorship as contagious at present… as in the last century the idea of freedom.”5 In spite of the shocking concomitants, regimented Germany emitted a seductive radiation that in eastern and southeastern Europe countered the hitherto dominant influence of France. It was not by chance that Foreign Minister Joseph Beck of Poland kept signed photographs of Hitler and Mussolini in his office. They and not their bourgeois counterparts in Paris or London, with their anachronistic impotence, seemed to be the true voices for the spirit of the age. The age was persuaded that reason would always be defeated in the free interplay of social and political interests; the new order’s program was power through discipline. That order’s dominant representative, whose success would transform in a trice the political atmosphere of Europe and set entirely new standards, was Adolf Hitler.
And as he combined in his own self the tendencies or moods, all worked to his advantage. He derived considerable profit from European anti-Semitism, which had a large following in Poland, Hungary, Rumania, and the Baltic countries, but was also widespread in France, and which even in England in 1935 inspired the leader of a Fascist group to propose settling the Jewish problem radically and hygienically by “death chambers.”6
Hitler wrung further profit from the contradictions within the existing peace settlements. The Treaty of Versailles had for the first time introduced moral factors into international relations, factors such as guilt, honor, equality, and self-determination. Hitler played upon these themes more and more loudly. For a time, as Ernst Nolte has trenchantly remarked, he must paradoxically have seemed the last faithful follower of Woodrow Wilson’s long-since-faded principles. In his role of heavy creditor to the victorious Allies, clutching a bundle of unpaid promissory notes, he achieved lasting effects, particularly in England. For his appeals not only touched the nation’s guilty conscience but also chanced to coincide with traditional English balance-of-power policy. British statesmen who believed in that policy had long been watching with uneasiness France’s overpowering influence on the Continent. Hence Hitler constantly received encouragement from English voices. The London Times quoted Lord Lothian as saying that any order which did not concede to the Reich the most powerful position on the Continent was “artificial.” A leading member of the Royal Air Force early in 1935 told a German that it would arouse “no indignation” in England if Germany were to announce that she was rearming in the air, contrary to the terms of the Treaty of Versailles.7 But both, the British and the continental Europeans, the victors and the vanquished, the authoritarians and the democrats, sensed an impending change in the climate of the era. And this was another element Hitler made use of. In 1936 he declared: