Hitler

years away from being ready for any conflict with Britain and France. As in 1938, military leaders’ prime fear was confrontation being forced on Germany too soon through impetuous actions andan over-risky foreign policy. Göring and Ribbentrop were advocating diametrically opposed policies towards Britain. Göring’s hopes still rested on an expansive policy in south-eastern Europe, backed for the foreseeable future by an understanding with Britain. Ribbentrop, by now violently anti-British, was pinning his hopes on smoothing the problems on Germany’s eastern front and tightening the alliance with Italy and Japan to prepare the ground for a move against Britain as soon as was feasible. But at this stage, Göring’s star was temporarily on the wane and Ribbentrop’s usually clumsy diplomacy was meeting in most instances with little success. Hitler’s thoughts, whether or not influenced by Ribbentrop’s reasoning, were broadly consonant with those of his Foreign Minister. The coming showdown with Bolshevism, though certainly not displaced in Hitler’s own mind as the decisive struggle to be faced at some point in the future, had by now moved again into the shadows. But he was, as usual, content to keep his options open and await developments.
    The one certainty was that developments
would
occur, thus providing the opportunity for German expansion. For there was no agency of power or influence in the Third Reich advocating drawing a line under the territorial gains already made. All power-groups were looking to further expansion – with or without war.
    Military, strategic, and power-political arguments for expansion were underpinned by economic considerations. By late 1938, the pressures of the forced rearmament programme were making themselves acutely felt. The policy of ‘rearm, whatever the cost’ was now plainly showing itself to be sustainable only in the short term. Further expansion was necessary if the tensions built into the overheated armaments-driven economy were not to reach explosion point. By 1938–9, it was absolutely evident that further expansion could not be postponed indefinitely if the economic impasses were to be surmounted.
    In early January 1939, the Reichsbank Directorate sent Hitler a submission, supported by eight signatories, demanding financial restraint to avoid the ‘threatening danger of inflation’. Hitler’s reaction was: ‘That is mutiny!’ Twelve days later, Schacht was sacked as President of the Reichsbank. But the Cassandra voices were not exaggerating. Nor would the problem go away by sacking Schacht. The insatiable demand for raw materials at the same time that consumer demand in the wake of the armaments boom was rising had left public finances in a desolate state.
    Beyond the crisis in public finances, the labour shortage which had been growing rapidly since 1937 was by this time posing a real threat both to agriculture and to industry. The only remedy for the foreseeable future was the use of ‘foreign labourers’ that war and expansion would bring. The mounting economic problems confirmed for Hitler his diagnosis that Germany’s position could never be strengthened without territorial conquest.
    II
    Hitler’s regrets over the Munich Agreement and feeling that a chance had been lost to occupy the whole of Czechoslovakia at one fell swoop had grown rather than diminished during the last months of 1938. His impatience to act had mounted accordingly. He was determined not to be hemmed in by the western powers. He was more than ever convinced that they would not have fought for Czechoslovakia, and that they would and could do nothing to prevent Germany extending its dominance in central and eastern Europe. On the other hand, as he had indicated to Goebbels in October, he was certain that Britain would not concede German hegemony in Europe without a fight at some time. The setback which Munich had been in his eyes confirmed his view that war against the West was coming, probably sooner than he had once envisaged, and that there was no time to lose if Germany were to retain its advantage.
    Already on 21 October 1938, only three weeks after the Munich settlement, Hitler had given the Wehrmacht a new directive to prepare for the ‘liquidation of remainder of the Czech state’. Why was Hitler so insistent on this? Politically it was not necessary. Indeed, the German leadership cannot fail to have recognized that an invasion of Czechoslovakia, tearing up the