Hitler. 1936-1945: Nemesis полностью

In his speech to the Reichstag on 30 January 1939, the sixth anniversary of his takeover of power, Hitler revealed publicly his implicitly genocidal association of the destruction of the Jews with the advent of another war. The ‘hostage’ notion was probably built into his comments. And, as always, he obviously had an eye on the propaganda impact. But his words were more than propaganda.¹³² They gave an insight into the pathology of his mind, into the genocidal intent that was beginning to take hold. He had no idea how the war would bring about the destruction of the Jews. But, somehow, he was certain that this would indeed be the outcome of a new conflagration. ‘I have very often in my lifetime been a prophet,’ he declared, ‘and was mostly derided. In the time of my struggle for power it was in the first instance the Jewish people who received only with laughter my prophecies that I would some time take over the leadership of the state and of the entire people in Germany and then, among other things, also bring the Jewish problem to its solution. I believe that this once hollow laughter of Jewry in Germany has meanwhile already stuck in the throat. I want today to be a prophet again: if international finance Jewry inside and outside Europe should succeed in plunging the nations once more into a world war, the result will be not the bolshevization of the earth and thereby the victory of Jewry, but the annihilation (Vernichtung) of the Jewish race in Europe!’¹³³ It was a ‘prophecy’ that Hitler would return to on numerous occasions on several occasions in the years 1941 and 1942, when the annihilation of the Jews was no longer terrible rhetoric, but terrible reality.¹³⁴

After Munich things started to move fast. None but the most hopelessly naïve, incurably optimistic, or irredeemably stupid could have imagined that the Sudetenland marked the limits of German ambitions to expand. Certainly, neither the British nor the French governments thought that to be the case. Chamberlain had been rapidly disabused of his initial naïve belief, following his first meeting with the German Dictator, that Hitler was a man of his word, and of any hopes that the Munich Agreement would bring lasting peace. He and the British government were resigned to Germany’s further expansion in south-eastern Europe, but thought that Hitler could be contained for at least two more years.¹ Both France and Britain were now rearming furiously. Fears of an imminent strike against Britain most probably stirred up by Colonel Hans Oster — at the hub of Germany’s counter-intelligence service as Chief of Staff at the Abwehr, and a key driving-force in the plot against Hitler that had petered out with the signing of the Munich Agreement — proved groundless.² But there was serious and growing concern in London at the prospect of a new ‘mad dog act’ by Hitler in the near future. Where and when he might strike were matters of guesswork.³