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By1936, Hitler Was on the Road to War, DoYou Agree?

Militarybuild up.

In the yearsthat led up to 1936, Hitler pursued, with remarkable energy, his policy ofrearming Germany. The wehrmacht was ordered to increase its numerical strengthfrom 100,000 to 300,000 by October 1^st 1934. In April 1934 GeneralBeck was told by the Fuhrer that by April of 1935 he would issue an edictinstating conscription and publicly reject the terms of the Versailles treaty.Lutz and, far more significantly, Guderian were assigned a form a new command.Guderian was a revolutionary thinker, a man who did more than any other toadvance the philosophy of blitzkrieg. He wrote in his Panzer Leader, I wasconvinced that the head of the government would approve my proposals for theorganisation of an up-to-date wehrmacht if only I could manage to lay my viewsbefore him.Guderian had such an opportunity in 1934 when he met Hitler for 30 minutes andwas allowed to demonstrate the basic elements of a panzer division:a motorcycle platoon, an anti-tank platoon, a platoon of the first experimentallight tanksand some reconnaissance vehicles. This demonstration showed Guderianswidespread new thinking, a force that had the tank as its most fundamentalunit. Hitler is reported to have responded by saying That's what I need!That's what I have to have.The wehrmacht could not have achieved anything like the successes that it didduring the first half of the war without Guderians new philosophy.

Goebbels wasforbidden to use the words general staff in any communication, as such anorganisation had been banned under the treaty and the annual publication of theofficer lists was disbanded in 1932 so as to hide the ever increasing numbersthat would otherwise have appeared.

The navy'sreconstruction had also begun. Germany had commenced the construction of twocruisers of 26,000 tonnes,which would later be known as the Scharnhorst and the Gneisenau. Submarineshad also been constructed in Finland, Holland and Spain; frames and parts of adozen more had been stored in readiness for easy construction. In November1934, Kiel had asked the Fuhrer for permission to have six of them assembled bythe beginning of 1935, but Hitler told him that he would be informed when thesituation demanded that the assembly should commence.Raeder also pointed out in 1934 that the new ship building programme, alongwith the tripling of navy personnel, would take more money than had been madeavailable to him. Hitler reacted by making more funds available, nothing was tostand in the way of Germany's rearming.

Goering wasalso busy at this time; he had been charged with the reconstruction of theLuftwaffe. Goering had been appointed minister of civil aviation, againto disguise the real activities underway. While in this post he put aircraftmanufacturers and designers to work on new military aircraft. Training ofpilots also got underway under the guise of the League for Air Sports.

Economy.

A visitor tothe Ruhr Valley or the Rheinland at this time would no doubt have been struckby the intensity of the activity in the armaments factories; especiallycompanies like Krupp,chief gun maker for almost a quarter of a century, although banned fromarmaments production by the Versailles treaty, it was not standing idle.

Shortly after1933, the Nazi party gave I. G. Farben permission to increase its synthetic oilproduction to 300,000 tonnes a year by 1937. The company had also discoveredhow to manufacture rubber from coal and other products which Germany had inabundance: the first of what became four plants was set up in Schkopau for thelarge scale production of buna, as the synthetic rubber was to becomeknown.

By thebeginning of 1934, plans had been submitted and approved by the workingcommittee of the Reich Defence Council for the mobilisation of 240,000factories for the exclusive production of armaments. By the end of 34, thescale of the rearmament was so massive that it could no longer be kept hiddenfrom the Versailles powers.

During thisperiod, however, Germany was in a significant financial crisis. If Germany wasto fully recover from the deprivations of the First World War, and was to againbecome a significant power in Europe then the economy would be fundamental.With this in mind, in September 1934 Schact,in order to deal with the foreign exchange crisis, introduced a number of newpolicies. He imposed an absolute moratorium on Germany's foreign debtrepayments in order to check the out poring of marks in the form of interestpayments. He also introduced a new plan, which represented a radicalextension of a trade policy adopted in 1933.The principle of this new plan was the regulation of imports through Governmentsupervision of the allocation of foreign currency; this was not, in reality, anew plan however. The new plan was an attempt to control foreign exchanges andto regulate imports and was a more comprehensive strategy than had existedpreviously.

Schacht's newplan solved the balance of payments problem of 1934 and in 1935 there was atrade surplus for the first time in many years. The surplus did not last longand by the end of 1935 fears grew that an even larger crisis was looming.Germany's problems were three fold:

• Export prices declined 9% between 1933 and 1936; meaning she had to export 18% more in 1936 in order to balance the same amount of imports as she was receiving in 1933.
• Germany's massively increased need for imports due to its rearmaments program.
• The conflict between butter and guns. That is to say the conflicting priorities of rearmament and of importing enough food to feed the populace. Germany's food production had not kept pace with increasing demand and so imports were necessary but financially the Reich could not afford to import armaments and food in the qualities it desired.

The very factthat such a problem existed, guns or butter, is at least suggestive of Hitler'sintentions for later in the decade.

Schact's fouryear plan, launched by Hitler on March 7^th was designed to mobilisethe German economy for a large scale war by the autumn of 1940.This is certainly one possibility, but it is not the only interpretation, seeconclusion below.

Society.

For anysociety it is vital for internal peace and security that the populace consentto rule by their leaders. This is even truer in a society that may havebeen preparing for potential conflict. It is true to say that the Nazi regimedeployed a formidable apparatus of terror, it is also clear that its rule wasalso based to a very large degree upon consent from significant portions of thepopulation. Much of this popularity was the Nazi's success in creating apositive image of the Fuhrer and in identifying that Fuhrer image with theregime. Goebbles proved to be a master propagandist, portraying Hitler as anational leader, distinct from the party, above politics, selfless in hisdedication to the German people, a master politician and statesman.Even within his first two months, Hitler had succeeded in securing a remarkableposition of personal authority in the eyes of large sections of the Germanpeople.

It wouldappear that, if Hitler was bent on war, he recognised that securing hisposition at home was of vital importance, and much time was spent by himself,and most particularly by Goebbles and his ministry in achieving this end.

Last MissedOpportunity.

As notedabove, economically and strategically, the Rhineland and the Ruhr Valley wereof massive significance to a recovering Germany. Much of Germany's naturalresources were in this region,yet it was poorly defended and open to attach from overwhelming French forces.The Germans began moving small numbers of troops into the region, for defensivepurposes the French, who possessed overwhelming forces at this time, didnothing. This French inaction led to the breaking of the alliance by anincreasingly worried Belgium.

AfterGermany's annexation of Austria and the loss of the demilitarised zone of theRhineland by the Versailles powers, Europe had lost her guarantee againstGerman aggression.

We can thinkof March 1936 as a missed opportunity, a last missed chance to stop Hitlerbefore he had become a deadly menace. Probably the greatest misfortune of theWestern powers at the time was that they lacked leaders, at this moment ofcrisis, with the wisdom and vision to fully appreciate the situation and strongenough to overcome inertia.Had the French chosen to use their military power before 1936 there is noquestion that they would have been successful in driving German troops out ofthe Rhineland, and removing most of Germany's economic base. Britishencouragement or support of such a French policy could have been decisive;instead the Baldwin Government was so fearful of air attacks against Britainthat they were unwilling to act.

Character ofHitler.

The entirequestion hinges on the character of the Fuhrer himself. There seems no doubtthat Germany was preparing for war from the early 1930's. The wehrmacht hadtripled in size and there was a new emphasis on the tank as the main offensivearm. The new philosophy, developed largely by Heinz Guderian, was an entirelyoffensive strategy; it was not a philosophy that would be applicable to thedefence of the Rhineland. The Fuhrer had also taken steps to secure his ownposition in Germany, becoming enormously popular with large swaths of thepopulace through the actions of Goebbles ministry and his own charismaticspeeches. He had also planned for the improvement of the German economy,realising that a potential war would be expensive. But, despite all of this,War was not, in my opinion, inevitable in 1936. Germany had prepared for thepossibility of war, but it was only the character of Hitler himself, his desirefor domination, that made the war inevitable at this point.

Hitler'stactics in the years 1934-36 can be summed up by saying that he talked ofpeace, but secretly prepared for the possibility of war; proceeding with enoughcaution in foreign policy and clandestinely rearming the German state so as toavoid alarming the Versailles powers.

Bibliography.

A. P.Adamthwaite, France and the Coming of the Second World War 1936-1939(London 1977)

P. M. H. Bell,The Origins of the Second World War (London 1986)

J. G. Blight& D. A. Welch, On the Brink (New York 1989)

J. T. Emmerson, TheRhineland Crisis (London 1977)

G. Martel, TheOrigins of the Second World War Reconsidered (Boston 1986)

H. Guderian, Achtung-Panzer(London 1992)

D. Kagan, Onthe Origins of War (London 1995)

K. Macksay,Guderian: Panzer General (London 1992)

J. Noakes &G Pridham (eds.), Nazism: 1919-1945, Volume 2: State, Economy and Society1933-1939 (Exeter 2000)

E. M. Robertson,The Origin of the Second World War (London 1971)

W. L. Shirer, TheRise and Fall of the Third Reich (London 1959)

A. J. P. Taylor,The Origins of the Second World War (New York 1985)

D. C. Watt, TooSerious a Business: European Armed Forces and the Approach of the Second WorldWar (London 1975)

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