Hitler

already in a fortnight. Then it will depend on the Russians whether the eastern front becomes Europe’s fate or not. In any case, a victorious army, filled with the spirit of gigantic victories attained, will be ready either to confront Bolshevism or … to be hurled against the West …’
    On Poland, there was no divergence between Hitler and his Chief of the General Staff. Both wanted to smash Poland at breakneck speed, preferably in an isolated campaign but, if necessary, even with western intervention (though both thought this more improbable than probable). And both looked beyond Poland to a widening of the conflict, eastwards or westwards, at some point. Hitler could be satisfied. He need expect no problems this time from his army leaders.
    The contours for the summer crisis of 1939 had been drawn. It would end not with the desired limited conflict to destroy Poland, but with the major European powers locked in another continental war. This was in the first instance a consequence of Hitler’s miscalculation that spring. But, as Halder’s address to the generals indicated, it had not been Hitler’s miscalculation alone.
    V
    Following one extraordinary triumph upon another, Hitler’s self-belief had by this time been magnified into full-blown megalomania. Even among his private guests at the Berghof, he frequently compared himself with Napoleon, Bismarck, and other great historical figures. The rebuilding programmes that constantly preoccupied him were envisaged as his own lasting monument – a testament of greatness like the buildings of the pharaohs or Caesars. He felt he was walking with destiny. In the summer of 1939, such a mentality would drive Germany towards European war.
    Hitler made public the abrupt shift in policy towards Poland and Great Britain in his big Reichstag speech of 28 April 1939. The speech, lasting two hours and twenty minutes, had been occasioned by a message sent by President Roosevelt a fortnight earlier. Prompted by the invasion of Czecho-Slovakia, the President had appealed to Hitler to give an assurance that he would desist from any attack for the next twenty-five years on thirty named countries – mainly European, but also including Iraq, Arabia, Syria, Palestine, Egypt, and Iran. Were such an assurance to be given, the United States, declared Roosevelt, would play its part in working for disarmament and equal access to raw materials on world markets. Hitler was incensed by Roosevelt’s telegram. That it had been published in Washington before even being received in Berlin was taken as a slight. Hitler also thought it arrogant in tone. And the naming of the thirty countries allowed Hitler to claim that inquiries had been conducted in each, and that none felt threatened by Germany. Some, such as Syria, however, had been, he alleged, unable to reply, since they were deprived of freedom and under the military control of democratic states, while the Republic of Ireland, he asserted, feared aggression from Britain, not from Germany. Roosevelt’s raising of the disarmament issue (out of which Hitler had made such capital a few years earlier) handed him a further propaganda gift. With heavy sarcasm, he tore into Roosevelt, ‘answering’ his claims in twenty-one points, each cheered to the rafters by the assembled members of the Reichstag, roaring with laughter as he poured scorn on the President.
    Many German listeners to the broadcast thought it one of the best speeches he had made. William Shirer, the American journalist in Berlin,was inclined to agree: ‘Hitler was a superb actor today,’ he wrote. The performance was largely for internal consumption. The outside world – at least those countries that felt they had accommodated Hitler for too long – was less impressed.
    Preceding the vaudeville, Hitler had chosen the occasion to denounce the Non-Aggression Pact with Poland and the Naval Agreement with Britain. He blamed the renunciation of the naval pact on Britain’s ‘encirclement policy’. In reality, he was complying with the interests of the German navy, which felt its construction plans restricted by the agreement and had been pressing for some time for Hitler to denounce it. The intransigence of the Poles over Danzig and the Corridor, their mobilization in March, and the alignment with Britain against Germany were given as reasons for the ending of the Polish pact.
    Since the end of March, which had brought the British guarantee for Poland, followed soon