Hitler

he had just takenup as Chief of the German Police existed only on paper. As head of the SS, Himmler was personally subordinate only to Hitler himself. With the politicization of conventional ‘criminal’ actions through the blending of the criminal and political police in the newly-formed ‘security police’ a week later, the ideological power-house of the Third Reich and executive organ of the ‘Führer will’ had essentially taken shape.
    The instrument had been forged which saw the realization of the Führer’s
Weltanschauung
as its central aim. Intensification of radicalism was built into the nature of such a police force which combined ruthlessness and efficiency of persecution with ideological purpose and dynamism. Directions and dictates from Hitler were not needed. The SS and police had individuals and departments more than capable of ensuring that the discrimination kept spiralling. The rise of Adolf Eichmann from an insignificant figure collecting information on Zionism, but located in what would rapidly emerge as a key department – the SD’s ‘Jewish Desk’ in Berlin – to ‘manager’ of the ‘Final Solution’ showed how initiative and readiness to grasp opportunities not only brought its rewards in power and aggrandizement to the individual concerned, but also pushed on the process of radicalization precisely in those areas most closely connected with Hitler’s own ideological fixations.
    In the mid-1930s this process was still in its early stages. But pressures for action from the party in ideological concerns regarded as central to National Socialism, and the instrumentalization of those concerns through the expanding repressive apparatus of the police, meant that there was no sagging ideological momentum once power had been consolidated. And as initiatives formulated at different levels and by different agencies of the regime attempted to accommodate the ideological drive, the ‘idea’ of National Socialism, located in the person of the Führer, thus gradually became translated from utopian ‘vision’ into realizable policy objectives.
    II
    The beginnings of this process were also visible in Germany’s foreign relations. Hitler’s own greatest contribution to events with such momentous consequences lay in his gambling instinct, his use of bluff, and his sharp antennae for the weak spots of his opponents. He took the keydecisions; he alone determined the timing. But little else was Hitler’s own work. The broad aims of rearmament and revision of Versailles – though each notion hid a variety of interpretations – united policy-makers and power-groups, whatever the differences in emphasis, in the military and the Foreign Office.
    Once Germany’s diplomatic isolation was sealed by its withdrawal from the League of Nations, any opportunity of bilateral agreements in eastern Europe which would prevent German ambitions being contained by the multilateral pacts strived for by the French was to be seized. The first indicator of such a move – marking a notable shift in German foreign policy – was the startling ten-year non-aggression pact with Poland, signed on 26 January 1934. Germany’s departure from the League of Nations had intensified the mutual interest in an improved relationship. The pact benefited Germany in undermining French influence in eastern Europe (thereby removing the possibility of any combined Franco-Polish military action against Germany). For the Poles, it provided at least the temporary security felt necessary in the light of diminished protection afforded through the League of Nations, weakened by the German withdrawal.
    Hitler was prepared to appear generous in his dealings with the Poles. There was a new urgency in negotiations. Neurath and the Foreign Office, initially set for a different course, swiftly trimmed their sails to the new wind. ‘As if by orders from the top, a change of front toward us is taking place all along the line. In Hitlerite spheres they talk about the new Polish-German friendship,’ noted Józef Lipski, Polish minister to Berlin, on 3 December 1933. In conditions of great secrecy, a ten-year non-aggression treaty was prepared and sprung on an astonished Europe on 26 January 1934. This early shift in German foreign policy plainly bore Hitler’s imprint. ‘No parliamentary minister between 1920 and 1933 could have gone so far,’ noted Ernst von Weizsäcker, at that time German ambassador in Bern.
    The rapprochement with