Hitler. 1936-1945: Nemesis

Above all, the Olympics were an enormous propaganda success for the Nazi regime. Hitler attended almost every day — underlining the significance of the Games — the crowd rising in salute each time he entered the stadium.¹⁹ The German media coverage was massive. Over 3,000 programmes were transmitted worldwide in around fifty languages; over 100 radio stations in the USA alone took transmission; they were even the first Games to be shown on television — though the coverage, confined to Berlin, gave out only fuzzy pictures.²⁰ Almost 4 million spectators had watched the games (spending millions of Reich Marks for the privilege).

²¹ Many more millions had read reports of them, or seen newsreel coverage. And of paramount importance: Hitler’s Germany had been open to viewing for visitors from all over the world. Most of them went away mightily impressed.²² ‘I’m afraid the Nazis have succeeded with their propaganda,’ noted the American journalist William Shirer. ‘First, they have run the games on a lavish scale never before experienced, and this has appealed to the athletes. Second, they have put up a very good front for the general visitors, especially the big businessmen.’²³

An outsider within Germany, the Jewish philologist Victor Klemperer, living in Dresden, took a similarly pessimistic view. He saw the Olympics as ‘wholly and entirely a political affair… It’s incessantly drummed into the people and foreigners that here you can see the revival (Aufschwung), the blossoming, the new spirit, the unity, the steadfastness, the glory, naturally too the peaceful spirit of the Third Reich lovingly embracing the whole world.’ The anti-Jewish agitation and warlike tones had disappeared from the newspapers, he noted, at least until 16 August — the end of the Games. Guests were repeatedly reminded of the ‘peaceful and joyful’ Germany in stark contrast to the pillage and murder carried out (it was claimed) by ‘Communist hordes’ in Spain.²⁴ The enthusiastic Hitler Youth activist Melita Maschmann later recalled young people returning to their own countries with a similar positive and peaceful image of Germany. ‘In all of us,’ she remembered, ‘there was the hope in a future of peace and friendship.’

²⁵ In her eyes and those of the many sharing her enthusiasm, it was a future which had no place for the Victor Klemperers and others regarded as racial misfits. In any case, the expectations of peaceful coexistence would reveal themselves only too soon as no more than pipe-dreams.

Away from the glamour of the Olympic Games and out of the public eye, the contrast with the external image of peaceful goodwill was sharp. By this time, the self-induced crisis in the German economy arising from the inability to provide for both guns and butter — to sustain supplies of raw materials both for armaments and for consumption — was reaching its watershed. A decision on the economic direction the country would take could not be deferred much longer. The outcome in the summer of 1936 was an economic policy geared inexorably to expansion, making international conflict all the more certain. By then, the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War had already started to move Europe closer towards explosion.

II

By the spring, it had become clear that it was no longer possible to reconcile the demands of rapid rearmament and growing domestic consumption. Supplies of raw materials for the armaments industry were by then sufficient for only two months.²⁶ Fuel supplies for the armed forces were in a particularly critical state.²⁷ Economics Minister Hjalmar Schacht was by now thoroughly alarmed at the accelerating tempo of rearmament and its inevitably damaging consequences for the economy. Only a sharp reduction in living standards (impossible without endangering the regime’s stability) or a big increase in exports (equally impossible given the regime’s priorities, exchange rate difficulties, and the condition of external markets) could in his view provide for an expanding armaments industry. He was adamant, therefore, that it was time to put the brakes on rearmament.²⁸

The military had other ideas. The leaders of the armed forces, uninterested in the niceties of economics but fully taken up by the potential of modern advanced weaponry, pressed unabatedly for rapid and massive acceleration of the armaments programme. Within weeks of the reoccupation of the Rhineland, General Ludwig Beck, Chief of the General Staff of the army, had come up with plans to expand the thirty-six divisions envisaged in March 1935, when military service was reintroduced, into forty-one divisions. By the summer, the projections had been worked out for an army to be bigger in 1940 than the Kaiser’s war army had been in 1914.²⁹