The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich: A History of Nazi Germany

Three of the men present at the fateful meeting of November 5, 1937—Field Marshal Blomberg, General Fritsch, and Foreign Minister Neurath—objected to Hitler’s planned aggression. By February 1938, all three had been forced out of their posts, along with Dr. Schacht, Hitler’s Minister of Economics.

Schacht was the first to resign. Having helped finance Hitler’s secret rearmament, Schacht now believed that the Fuehrer was leading Germany down a path that would lead to total economic ruin. Hitler dismissed Blomberg after receiving reports that the general’s new bride had once worked as a sex worker. Meanwhile, the Gestapo framed General Fritsch, accusing him of covering up his alleged identity as a gay man, as relationships between members of the same sex were criminalized. Hitler sent Fritsch on indefinite leave. Finally, on February 4, 1938, Hitler replaced Neurath with Joachim von Ribbentrop. The generals and cabinet officials who had opposed Hitler’s war plans were now gone. Hitler took personal command of the German armed forces. The Army officer corps seethed with resentment but did nothing to stop the Fuehrer.

Near the end of 1937, Shirer took a new job as a radio correspondent and was transferred from Berlin to Vienna, where he had a first-hand view of the March 1938 Anschluss, Hitler’s forced annexation of Austria into the Third Reich.

Following the dismissal of troublesome officers and cabinet officials, Hitler moved swiftly to apply pressure on neighboring Austria. On February 12, the Austrian Chancellor, Dr. Kurt von Schuschnigg, arrived at Berchtesgaden for what proved to be a tense meeting with Hitler. For two hours, the Fuehrer harangued Schuschnigg on Austria’s treacherous history and issued an ultimatum, demanding, in effect, that Austria surrender its sovereignty. The Austrian Nazis already constituted a formidable minority, and Hitler had several highly-placed turncoats ready to betray Austrian independence at a moment’s notice. President Wilhelm Miklas, however, resisted a Nazi takeover of his country. Schuschnigg, having returned to Vienna and recovered from the shock of the February 12 meeting, rejected Hitler’s ultimatum and called for a plebiscite on March 13 to affirm Austrian independence.

Hitler flew into a rage and resolved to invade unless the Austrian government resigned. Schuschnigg finally capitulated and was replaced as Chancellor by Dr. Arthur Seyss-Inquart, an Austrian Nazi who spent much of the day on the phone with Goering helping to orchestrate the coup. Left with little choice, the stubborn and courageous Miklas also resigned. Mussolini endorsed Hitler’s move. Britain and France lodged feeble protests. Hitler made a triumphant entrance into Vienna on March 14 and then scheduled a new plebiscite to affirm the Anschluss. So great was Hitler’s prestige at this moment that Shirer believes an honest vote of the Austrian people would have produced a close result. As it happened, Nazi officials in Austria reported 99% in favor of incorporation into the Third Reich.

Chapter 12, the book’s lengthiest, describes the tense situation in Europe during the summer and early fall of 1938, when Hitler set his sights on Czechoslovakia. This chapter highlights two major developments. The first was the birth in 1938 of a tepid, semi-organized, anti-Hitler conspiracy inside German officialdom. The second was the stupendous failure of French and especially British statesmen to halt Hitler’s aggression before it was too late.

In May 1938, Hitler ordered his generals to begin preparations for an invasion of Czechoslovakia by October 2. Several of Hitler’s top commanders were horrified, for they believed that such a move would trigger a European war in which Germany would be crushed. General Ludwig von Beck, Chief of the Army General Staff, led the opposition. Hitler outmaneuvered Beck, however, by appealing to younger officers eager for promotion. Beck resigned but was replaced by General Franz Halder, who, like Beck, came to regard Hitler as a threat both to the Army and to Germany. Although it was difficult to organize and maintain anything resembling effective resistance inside a police state, the anti-Hitlerite ranks swelled as war approached. By the late 1930s, the conspiracy included Carl Goerdler, mayor of Leipzig; Ulrich von Hassell, Ambassador to Rome; Johannes Popitz, Prussian Minister of Finance; and a few dozen others. The conspirators carefully cultivated a handful of like-minded generals, who agreed that Hitler would have to be arrested before he could plunge Germany into a war it certainly would lose. Quietly, they sent emissaries to London to determine whether the British government would go to war to defend Czechoslovakia.

To the conspirators’ dismay, the British government under Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain appeared determined to appease Hitler at all costs. As the summer waned, the British increased diplomatic pressure, not on Hitler but on the Czech government to make concessions to the Fuehrer. Chamberlain and others believed—or desperately wanted to believe—that Hitler would be satisfied with the Sudetenland, a region of western Czechoslovakia with a large percentage of German-speaking residents. On September 15, Chamberlain made the long journey by plane and train from London to confer with Hitler at Berchtesgaden. Hitler immediately and correctly surmised that Chamberlain would not risk war for Czechoslovakia. Indeed, the British Prime Minister was prepared to agree to the cession of the Sudetenland. At Godesberg on September 22-23, however, Hitler changed the terms by insisting on a Nazi military occupation of the region. Chamberlain returned to London, and war appeared inevitable. Meanwhile, the conspirators were ready to arrest Hitler, or so they claimed after the war. At the last possible moment, however, Chamberlain agreed to a conference at Munich, which made it impossible for the conspirators to move against the Fuehrer. At Munich, Hitler achieved all his goals—everything he demanded at Godesberg—without firing a shot.

In the weeks and months following the British and French capitulation at Munich, an emboldened Hitler, with his band of loyal and fanatical thugs, showed the world the true nature of the Nazi regime.

On November 7, 1938, a Jewish teenager shot and killed a German diplomat in Paris. Two nights later, in an act of barbaric retribution, the Nazi government unleashed an unprecedented wave of terror known as the “Night of the Broken Glass.” Thousands of Jewish shops were looted. Tens of thousands of Jews were arrested and packed off to concentration camps. All of this occurred under the direction of Reinhard Heydrich, head of the SS Security Service. At a grotesque meeting on November 12, Goering and Goebbels joked about subjecting Jews to various forms of humiliation.

Meanwhile, Hitler’s lies multiplied. At Munich, he had promised not to seek additional Czech territory. In truth, long before Munich, Hitler had cast covetous eyes on all of Eastern Europe. On March 14, 1939, he completed a coup to detach Slovakia from the rest of Czechoslovakia. Then, on the following day, German troops invaded what remained of Czech territory, Bohemia and Moravia. Hitler entered Prague that evening. Britain and France did nothing.