218. Surprised by the man of no suprises

We start this week with Hitler announcing that there would be no more surprises, though we immediately question whether his word could always be wholly trusted.

We go on to look at the way Hitler was building a regime which didn’t just want war, above all against what he saw as a Jewish-Bolshevik menace, but actually needed it as the only way to obtain basic products for the German population, and raw materials that the military machine itself had to have.

Meanwhile, British foreign policy was under new management, with Anthony Eden as Foreign Secretary in place of the disgraced Samuel Hoare. The Prime Minister, Stanley Baldwin, told him he wanted better relations with Germany and when Eden asked how he was to obtain them, he told him that it was Eden’s job to work that out. But then Baldwin stood down, and his successor, Neville Chamberlain, had a different approach. He wanted to run foreign affairs himself, and he was intent on going flat out for appeasement.

That finally brought the Prime Minister and his Foreign Secretary into a head-on clash, over concessions to Italy, in the hope of securing Mussolini’s assistance. Chamberlain was prepared to recognise that Italy had the right to invade and occupy Abyssinia (Ethiopia today), even though that was a breach of international law. Eden was in favour of appeasement, but not at the cost of unreasonable concessions, and this one he decided really wasn’t reasonable. Eden went. His replacement was Lord Halifax. He’d recently been on a hunting trip to Germany as the guest of Hermann Goering, and came back convinced that the Nazi leaders were reasonable men with whom a sensible set of arrangements could be negotiated.

Then Hitler showed that the age of surprises really wasn’t over. He sent troops over the border into neighbouring Austria, to absorb it into the German Reich. There was no resistance in the country, and none from outside either, including from Britain.

European great powers didn’t greatly rate the rights of Africa’s native peoples. Writing off the rights of the Abyssinians therefore was no great shock. But this was Austria, a European country, and Hitler invaded and annexed it without the slightest attempt to stop him from abroad.

It seemed that appeasers were prepared to step across some red lines in their bid to buy peace through concessions to dictators.

Illustration: Members of the Nazi organisation, the League of German Girls, celebrating the arrival of German troops in Vienna. Dokumentationsarchiv des Oesterreichischen Widerstandes

Music: Bach Partita #2c by J Bu licensed under an Attribution-NonCommercial-No Derivatives (aka Music Sharing) 3.0 International License