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By 1936, Hitler Was on the Road to War, Do You Agree?
Military build up.
In the years that led up to 1936, Hitler pursued, with remarkable energy, his policy of rearming Germany. The wehrmacht was ordered to increase its numerical strength from 100,000 to 300,000 by October 1st 1934. In April 1934 General Beck was told by the Fuhrer that by April of 1935 he would issue an edict instating 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 to advance the philosophy of blitzkrieg. He wrote in his Panzer Leader, I was convinced that the head of the government would approve my proposals for the organisation of an up-to-date wehrmacht if only I could manage to lay my views before him. Guderian had such an opportunity in 1934 when he met Hitler for 30 minutes and was allowed to demonstrate the basic elements of a panzer division: a motorcycle platoon, an anti-tank platoon, a platoon of the first experimental light tanks and some reconnaissance vehicles. This demonstration showed Guderians widespread new thinking, a force that had the tank as its most fundamental unit. 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 did during the first half of the war without Guderians new philosophy.
Goebbels was forbidden to use the words general staff in any communication, as such an organisation had been banned under the treaty and the annual publication of the officer lists was disbanded in 1932 so as to hide the ever increasing numbers that would otherwise have appeared.
The navy's reconstruction had also begun. Germany had commenced the construction of two cruisers of 26,000 tonnes, which would later be known as the Scharnhorst and the Gneisenau. Submarines had also been constructed in Finland, Holland and Spain; frames and parts of a dozen more had been stored in readiness for easy construction. In November 1934, Kiel had asked the Fuhrer for permission to have six of them assembled by the beginning of 1935, but Hitler told him that he would be informed when the situation demanded that the assembly should commence. Raeder also pointed out in 1934 that the new ship building programme, along with the tripling of navy personnel, would take more money than had been made available to him. Hitler reacted by making more funds available, nothing was to stand in the way of Germany's rearming.
Goering was also busy at this time; he had been charged with the reconstruction of the Luftwaffe. Goering had been appointed minister of civil aviation, again to disguise the real activities underway. While in this post he put aircraft manufacturers and designers to work on new military aircraft. Training of pilots also got underway under the guise of the League for Air Sports.
Economy.
A visitor to the Ruhr Valley or the Rheinland at this time would no doubt have been struck by the intensity of the activity in the armaments factories; especially companies like Krupp, chief gun maker for almost a quarter of a century, although banned from armaments production by the Versailles treaty, it was not standing idle.
Shortly after 1933, the Nazi party gave I. G. Farben permission to increase its synthetic oil production to 300,000 tonnes a year by 1937. The company had also discovered how to manufacture rubber from coal and other products which Germany had in abundance: the first of what became four plants was set up in Schkopau for the large scale production of buna, as the synthetic rubber was to become known.
By the beginning of 1934, plans had been submitted and approved by the working committee of the Reich Defence Council for the mobilisation of 240,000 factories for the exclusive production of armaments. By the end of 34, the scale of the rearmament was so massive that it could no longer be kept hidden from the Versailles powers.
During this period, however, Germany was in a significant financial crisis. If Germany was to fully recover from the deprivations of the First World War, and was to again become 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 new policies. He imposed an absolute moratorium on Germany's foreign debt repayments in order to check the out poring of marks in the form of interest payments. He also introduced a new plan, which represented a radical extension of a trade policy adopted in 1933. The principle of this new plan was the regulation of imports through Government supervision of the allocation of foreign currency; this was not, in reality, a new plan however. The new plan was an attempt to control foreign exchanges and to regulate imports and was a more comprehensive strategy than had existed previously.
Schacht's new plan solved the balance of payments problem of 1934 and in 1935 there was a trade surplus for the first time in many years. The surplus did not last long and 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 fact that such a problem existed, guns or butter, is at least suggestive of Hitler's intentions for later in the decade.
Schact's four year plan, launched by Hitler on March 7th was designed to mobilise the German economy for a large scale war by the autumn of 1940. This is certainly one possibility, but it is not the only interpretation, see conclusion below.
Society.
For any society it is vital for internal peace and security that the populace consent to rule by their leaders. This is even truer in a society that may have been preparing for potential conflict. It is true to say that the Nazi regime deployed a formidable apparatus of terror, it is also clear that its rule was also based to a very large degree upon consent from significant portions of the population. Much of this popularity was the Nazi's success in creating a positive image of the Fuhrer and in identifying that Fuhrer image with the regime. Goebbles proved to be a master propagandist, portraying Hitler as a national leader, distinct from the party, above politics, selfless in his dedication to the German people, a master politician and statesman. Even within his first two months, Hitler had succeeded in securing a remarkable position of personal authority in the eyes of large sections of the German people.
It would appear that, if Hitler was bent on war, he recognised that securing his position 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 Missed Opportunity.
As noted above, economically and strategically, the Rhineland and the Ruhr Valley were of massive significance to a recovering Germany. Much of Germany's natural resources 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 defensive purposes the French, who possessed overwhelming forces at this time, did nothing. This French inaction led to the breaking of the alliance by an increasingly worried Belgium.
After Germany's annexation of Austria and the loss of the demilitarised zone of the Rhineland by the Versailles powers, Europe had lost her guarantee against German aggression.
We can think of March 1936 as a missed opportunity, a last missed chance to stop Hitler before he had become a deadly menace. Probably the greatest misfortune of the Western powers at the time was that they lacked leaders, at this moment of crisis, with the wisdom and vision to fully appreciate the situation and strong enough to overcome inertia. Had the French chosen to use their military power before 1936 there is no question that they would have been successful in driving German troops out of the Rhineland, and removing most of Germany's economic base. British encouragement or support of such a French policy could have been decisive; instead the Baldwin Government was so fearful of air attacks against Britain that they were unwilling to act.
Character of Hitler.
The entire question hinges on the character of the Fuhrer himself. There seems no doubt that Germany was preparing for war from the early 1930's. The wehrmacht had tripled in size and there was a new emphasis on the tank as the main offensive arm. The new philosophy, developed largely by Heinz Guderian, was an entirely offensive strategy; it was not a philosophy that would be applicable to the defence of the Rhineland. The Fuhrer had also taken steps to secure his own position in Germany, becoming enormously popular with large swaths of the populace through the actions of Goebbles ministry and his own charismatic speeches. 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 the possibility of war, but it was only the character of Hitler himself, his desire for domination, that made the war inevitable at this point.
Hitler's tactics in the years 1934-36 can be summed up by saying that he talked of peace, but secretly prepared for the possibility of war; proceeding with enough caution in foreign policy and clandestinely rearming the German state so as to avoid 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, The Rhineland Crisis (London 1977)
G. Martel, The Origins of the Second World War Reconsidered (Boston 1986)
H. Guderian, Achtung-Panzer (London 1992)
D. Kagan, On the 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 Society 1933-1939 (Exeter 2000)
E. M. Robertson, The Origin of the Second World War (London 1971)
W. L. Shirer, The Rise 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, Too Serious a Business: European Armed Forces and the Approach of the Second World War (London 1975)
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