On October 23, Hitler met Franco for a one-day summit in France, at Hendaye, a railway station near the Spanish border. The caudillo arrived late, in an aged train once used by King Alfonso XIII, with his foreign minister and brother-in-law Ramón Serrano Súñer in tow. Franco and Hitler went into the parlor coach of the Führer’s train. Admiral Canaris, head of the Abwehr (military intelligence), had warned Hitler that Franco would resemble “not a hero but a little sausage.” During the talks and dinner, which lasted some nine hours, Franco made breathtaking territorial claims, mostly at French expense, as his price for entering the war on the Nazis’ side. In Hitler’s mind, Franco’s regime would never have survived had it not been for German military aid back in 1936—and yet the caudillo now saw fit to point out that even if Germany were to defeat Britain on the home isles, the British government would sail with its navy to Canada or the United States and continue the war from there. This cheek provoked a riled Hitler to his feet. “Rather than go through that again,” Hitler would tell Mussolini of the meeting, “I would prefer to have three or four teeth taken out.”219
The next day, Hitler held a one-day summit with Marshal Pétain of Vichy France, also to explore a potential new ally for the anti-British fight. The French leader put forth a relatively more modest territorial wish list as his price to turn against France’s erstwhile ally Britain, but Pétain did not appear overly enthusiastic. The elderly marshal kept pretending not to hear Hitler very well. The conversation was vague enough that Hitler could imagine France was going to support his proposal, but nothing concrete was achieved. Only in Romania did the Führer come upon a kindred spirit: General Ion Antonescu. At the general’s insistent requests, Hitler had moved German troops into Romania, nominally to help “reorganize” its army.220 But Mussolini, Hitler’s formal ally, bristled at Germany’s “fait accompli” in Romania, and viewed inclusion of the Spanish or the French in a bloc as a threat to his own fantastic wish list of spoils. Hitler felt constrained to try to mollify the duce, redirecting his train to Florence for a summit meeting on October 28.221 That very morning, Mussolini launched an invasion of Greece. “He will learn from the newspapers that I have occupied Greece,” the duce privately boasted. “This way, things will be even once again.”222
Franco, Pétain, and now Mussolini. Greece was already ruled by a pro-Nazi dictator who had studied in Germany, and the gratuitous Italian invasion was launched in the fall rains, on the eve of the winter snows in the Balkan uplands.223 Moreover, the Balkans were Germany’s jumping-off point for attacking British positions in the Near East, in the so-called peripheral strategy. Already on November 4, 1940, the Wehrmacht had been directed to plan its own invasion of Greece, via either Hungary and Romania or Yugoslavia and then Bulgaria.224 Hitler did not abandon some sort of cooperation with France and Spain against Britain.225 But Molotov committed to visiting Berlin after the USSR’s November 7 holiday.226 Ribbentrop reminded Molotov of his promise to bring along a portrait of Stalin, and Molotov eagerly agreed to do so.227 Perhaps the lunatic scheme pushed by the Nazi foreign minister of adding Stalin to the Axis, in a four-power pact, to force Britain into submission, seemed no worse than any of the other (non) options on Hitler’s table? If so, it was clear that Hitler would require German dominance of the entire Balkans.228
MESSAGE FROM BERLIN
