Hitler. 1936-1945: Nemesis полностью

The speech, lasting two hours and twenty minutes, had been occasioned by a message sent by President Roosevelt a fortnight earlier.³³ Prompted by the invasion of Czecho-Slovakia, and in direct response to the German dictator’s aggressive speech in Wilhelmshaven on 1 April, the President had appealed to Hitler to give an assurance that he would desist from any attack for the next twenty-five years on thirty named countries — mainly European, but also including Iraq, Arabia, Syria, Palestine, Egypt, and Iran. Were such an assurance to be given, the United States, declared Roosevelt, would play its part in working for disarmament and equal access to raw materials on world markets.³⁴ Hitler was incensed by Roosevelt’s telegram. That it had been published in Washington before even being received in Berlin was taken as a slight. Hitler also thought it arrogant in tone.³⁵ And the naming of the thirty countries allowed Hitler to claim that inquiries had been conducted in each, and that none felt threatened by Germany. Some, such as Syria, however, had been, he alleged, unable to reply, since they were deprived of freedom and under the military control of democratic states, while the Republic of Ireland, he asserted, feared aggression from Britain, not from Germany.³⁶ Roosevelt’s raising of the disarmament issue (out of which Hitler had made such capital a few years earlier) handed him a further propaganda gift. With heavy sarcasm, he tore into Roosevelt, ‘answering’ his claims in twenty-one points, each cheered to the rafters by the assembled members of the Reichstag, roaring with laughter as he poured scorn on the President.³⁷

He returned to the Reich Chancellery drenched in sweat, ready for the hot bath that had been prepared for him.³⁸ Civil servants in the Foreign Ministry thought he had ‘lashed out’ (ausgekeilt) in all directions, which Hitler took as a compliment. Many German listeners to the broadcast thought it one of the best speeches he had made.³⁹ William Shirer, the American journalist in Berlin, was inclined to agree: ‘Hitler was a superb actor today,’ he wrote.⁴⁰ The performance was largely for internal consumption. The outside world — at least those countries that felt they had accommodated Hitler for too long — were less impressed.

Preceding the vaudeville, Hitler had chosen the occasion to renounce the Non-Aggression Pact with Poland and the Naval Agreement with Britain. Memoranda to this effect had been handed over by the German embassies in Warsaw and London to coincide with the timing of the speech. Hitler, repeating his admiration for the British Empire, his search for an understanding, and that his only demand on Britain was the return of the former German colonies, blamed the renunciation of the naval pact on Britain’s ‘encirclement policy’.⁴¹ In reality, he was complying with the interests of the German navy, which felt its construction plans restricted by the pact and had been pressing for some time for Hitler to renounce it.⁴² The intransigence of the Poles over Danzig and the Corridor, their mobilization in March — in Hitler’s eyes almost as big an affront as the Czech mobilization the previous May — and the alignment with Britain against Germany were given as reasons for the ending of the Polish pact.⁴³ The reasons were scarcely regarded as compelling outside Germany.

Since the end of March, which had brought the British guarantee for Poland, followed soon afterwards by the announcement that there was to be a British-Polish mutual assistance treaty, Hitler had, in fact, given up on the Poles. The military directives of early April were recognition of this. The Poles, he acknowledged, were not going to concede to German demands without a fight. So they would have their fight. And they would be smashed. Only the timing and conditions remained to be determined.

Hitler’s new aggressive stance towards Poland was certain of a warm welcome throughout the regime’s leadership, even among those who had opposed the high risk on Czecho-Slovakia the previous summer, and among broad swathes of the German population. The traditional anti-Polish sentiment in the Foreign Ministry was reflected in the relish with which Weizsäcker had conveyed the news to the Poles in early April that Germany was ending all negotiations.⁴⁴ Anti-Polish feeling in the military was also rampant. Military leaders — even those with little time for Hitler — were enthusiastic about a revision of the disputed borders with Poland where they had been cool about Czecho-Slovakia. Ordinary soldiers were raring to be let loose at the Poles.⁴⁵ The commanders of the armed forces’ branches were, moreover, better integrated from the outset into the military planning on Poland than they had been in the early stages of the Sudeten crisis.⁴⁶ Despite the British guarantee, they had greater confidence than the previous year in Hitler pulling off yet another coup, and fewer fears of western involvement.⁴⁷