Hitler. 1936-1945: Nemesis

In the foreign-policy arena, the shifts which had begun during the Abyssinian crisis were hardening across the summer and autumn of 1936. Clearer contours were beginning to emerge. Diplomatic, strategic, economic, and ideological considerations — separable but often closely interwoven — were starting to take Germany into more dangerous, uncharted waters. The possibility of a new European conflagration — however unimaginable and horrifying the prospect seemed to most of the generation that had lived through the last one — was starting to appear a real one.

The long-desired alliance with Britain, which had seemed a real possibility in June 1935 at the signing of the Naval Pact, had remained elusive. It was still a distant dream. The Abyssinian crisis and the reoccupation of the Rhineland, now the Spanish Civil War, had all provided hurdles to a closer relationship despite German efforts to court those they imagined had power and influence in Britain and some British sympathizers in high places.⁹⁸ Ribbentrop, appointed in the summer an unwilling Ambassador to London with a mandate from Hitler to bring Britain into an anti-Comintern pact, had since his triumph with the Naval Treaty become increasingly disillusioned about the prospects of a British alliance.⁹⁹

Hitler pointed out to Mussolini in September that Ribbentrop’s appointment marked the last attempt to win over Great Britain.¹⁰⁰ But the new ‘Ambassador Brickendrop’, as he was lampooned on account of the innumerable faux pas (such as saluting the King with the ‘Hitler Greeting’) for which he became renowned in London diplomatic circles, or ‘Half-Time Ambassador’ because of his frequent absences, in any case made his own personal contribution to the growing alienation felt in Britain towards the Third Reich.¹⁰¹

Hitler saw the abdication on 11 December 1936 of King Edward VIII, in the face of opposition in Britain to his proposed marriage to a twice-divorced American, Mrs Wallis Simpson, as a victory for those forces hostile to Germany.¹⁰² Ribbentrop had encouraged him in the view that the King was pro-German and anti-Jewish, and that he had been deposed by an anti-German conspiracy linked to Jews, freemasons, and powerful political lobbies.¹⁰³

By the end of the year (according to a reported indication of his view), Hitler had become more lukewarm about a British alliance, claiming — whether with total conviction may be doubted — that it would at best bring some minor colonial gains but would, on the other hand, hinder Germany’s plans for expansion in central and south-eastern Europe. The reason he gave was that Italy would, through an Anglo-German alliance which undermined its policy in the Mediterranean, be forced on to the side of France, leading to a block by the two countries on any attempt at a new order in south-eastern Europe. Germany, he concluded, had its interests better served by close ties with Italy.¹⁰⁴

The rapprochement with Italy — slow and tenuous in the first half of 1936 — had by then come to harden into a new alliance of the two fascist-style militaristic dictatorships dominating central and southern Europe. The Abyssinian crisis, as we have noted, had turned Italy towards Germany. The repercussions on Austria were not long in the waiting. Deprived de facto of its Italian protector, Austria was swept inevitably further into the German slipstream.¹⁰⁵ Encouraged by the Italians as well as put under pressure by the Germans, Austria was ready by 11 July 1936 to sign a wide-ranging agreement with Germany, improving relations, ending restrictions placed upon the German press, and upon economic and cultural activities within Austria.¹⁰⁶

Though recognizing Austrian independence, the agreement in reality turned the Reich’s eastern neighbour into an economic and foreign-policy dependency.¹⁰⁷ It was a development which by this time suited both Germany and Italy.¹⁰⁸ And within weeks, the aid provided by the two dictatorships to the nationalist rebels in Spain, and the rapidly deepening commitment to the Spanish Civil War, brought Italy and Germany still closer together. German and Italian pilots in Spain were soon operating in unison.¹⁰⁹ The annihilation of the small Basque market town of Guernica, leaving over 2,500 citizens dead or injured, in a devastating three-hour bombing raid on the afternoon of 26 April 1937 by combined German and Italian forces, immortalized in Picasso’s famous painting, would become an emblem of the horror of the Spanish Civil War, and of innocent civilians defenceless against the new menace of terror from the skies.¹¹⁰