• Giles MacDonogh, 1938: Hitler’s Gamble, New York: Basic Books, 2009, 324 pages, $27.50.
Probably no historical figure personifies “evil genius” more than Adolf Hitler. As an orator he could beguile or terrorize with words alone, and starting from scratch he built the machinery that turned his will into power and made a disarmed and defeated nation the masters of Europe. Few world leaders saw it coming.
In 1938: Hitler’s Gamble, Giles MacDonogh argues that may have been because Hitler himself was working from a broad outline. Instead of a diabolical master plan, Hitler’s ascent may have been the result of brilliant opportunism.
This is the year when Hitler annexed Austria and carved up Czechoslovakia, started the expulsion and internment of Jews, and began to show his hand to the rest of Europe. It was probably the high point of Hitler’s political game, as he consolidated power to himself and successfully called the diplomatic turn of dozens of nations surrounding him. Unlike other leaders, or indeed his own General Staff, Hitler realized that thousands of French troops on his western border were meaningless if France lacked the will to mobilize them — and correctly predicted it would not.
Like the history of the Southern Confederacy, the rise and fall of Nazi Germany is dominated by the war it fought and the inhumanities it sought to preserve. MacDonogh opens an interesting window into the economic side of National Socialism, though, and the effects of massive re-armament coupled with inept fiscal policy.
Before he commanded the Luftwaffe, Hermann Goering was the chief financial officer of the Reich, and he was an ardent supporter of territorial acquisitions in proportion to their wealth. Austria, for example, contained not only large foreign currency reserves but also rich iron deposits, and both could feed the German arms machinery. Czechoslovakia possessed extensive heavy manufacturing facilities. As it happened, Germany remained on the brink of bankruptcy during the whole period and quickly dissipated any new gains.
The digestion of Austria by the Reich was a classic illustration of unintended consequences as well. While Adolf Eichmann proposed and acted to evict the Jews from Austria as quickly as possible, Goering threw up confiscatory taxes and fees to plunder them on their way out, delaying or preventing their departure. Anti-Semitic policies boomeranged on the populace; confiscation of rich Jews’ homes put their large household staffs out of work, and the edict forbidding Jews to practice medicine eliminated half the nation’s doctors.
As a people, the Austrians get very bad press from MacDonogh. In an afterword, he relates that his maternal grandparents were Viennese Jews who were dispossessed by the coming of the Nazis. While he doesn’t introduce his relatives into the narrative of the book, the Austria he portrays is not alive with the sound of music, but of breaking glass.
Rodgers and Hammerstein do not reflect the facts that Austria already had a semi-fascist government, a concentration camp for dissidents, and a population that looted their Jewish neighbors so quickly after the Anschluss that advancing German troops found the spoils disappointingly slim.
It was not a bright period for the rest of Europe, either. This was the year of Neville Chamberlain’s greatest blunders in both Austria and Czechoslovakia, with the latter nation thought by the Foreign Office as “not worth the bones of a single Grenadier.” France still reeled from its losses in the previous war, its government vacillating and transitory while its large army sat paralyzed on the German flank.
To some extent, every nation held its doors against Jewish refugees, including Switzerland, Britain, and the United States. Others such as Poland, Romania and Hungary, took Germany’s cue and began pushing their own Jewish population toward any border that remained porous. Heroic individuals stand out, such as Church of England officials in Austria who baptized hundreds of Jewish “converts” to enable them to pass immigration barriers, but the governments behind them failed to counter Hitler’s advance in any meaningful way.
Or could Hitler have been stopped by 1938 anyway, had the will been present? McDonogh suggests several occasions where he may have been turned aside or overthrown. Had Britain and France honored their commitments to Czechoslovakia, or shown more opposition to Hitler’s aggression toward Austria, the dictator may have paused for diplomatic reasons. The General Staff was strongly opposed to both incursions, fearing the response of the French divisions and their own forces’ inadequacies; had France made a move of any significance, the Germans may have retreated to reinforce their own frontiers.
In fact, some of the central figures in the failed 1944 assassination attempt were already forming their conspiracy in 1938. Hitler was no more a Junker of the Prussian elite than he was a blond Aryan, and his disgraceful treatment of two generals fueled resentment at high levels in the army’s command. McDonogh points out several times when a diplomatic check to Hitler’s adventures would have activated a military plot to arrest or kill the dictator.
This is a difficult book to read. MacDonogh’s descriptions of street brutality against Jews and the political thuggery practiced by Hitler and his lieutenants are chilling. The shameful inaction, and sometimes shameful action, of the Western powers can produce guilt feelings and our own question of conscience: Though the Holocaust memorials say, “Nie wieder”, never again, do we have the political and diplomatic – or military – will to halt such a monstrosity today?
Successful regime change in Iraq leaves the question unanswered in southwest Asia and the Pacific Rim; only the future will know if we are living through our own generation’s 1938.