Hitler meeting with commanders of the German army and navy, 3rd February 1933

on the evening of 3 February ... Hitler paid his introductory visit to the commanders of the German army and navy ... The meeting called by new Defence Minister Werner von Blomberg took place in the official apartment of the army chief of staff, Kurt von Hammerstein, and Hitler was initially ill at ease among all the high-ranking officers. “He made strange humble little bows in every direction and was at a loss,” one participant remarked. Only after dinner, when he began a speech that would last two hours, did he shed his nervousness. No trace was left of the moderation he had displayed only two days earlier in his radio address. On the contrary, Hitler, with astonishing frankness, laid out for his military commanders what he intended to do in the years to come.

Hitler defined his government’s first goal as to “reclaim political power,” which would have to be the “purpose of the entire state leadership.” Domestically there would have to be a “complete reversal” of present conditions. Pacifist tendencies would no longer be tolerated. “Anyone who refuses to convert has to be forced,” an officer attending the meeting quoted Hitler. “Marxism is to be utterly rooted out.” Germany’s youth and its entire population, Hitler declared, had to be aligned along the ideas that “only battle can save us and everything else must be subordinated to this thought.” The “sternest, authoritarian state leadership” and “the removal of the cancerous damage of democracy” were necessary to strengthen Germany’s “will to defend itself.” In the part of his speech that dealt with foreign policy, Hitler said his first goal would be “to fight against Versailles” by achieving military equality and rearming the Wehrmacht. “Universal conscription has to be reintroduced,” Hitler demanded. The phase of rearmament, Hitler said, would be the most “dangerous” one, since France could decide to launch pre-emptive military strikes. Hitler apparently did not specify what he intended for Germany once it had regained its status as a major military power. But he did hint at two options, and left the officers in no doubt as to which one he favoured: “Perhaps the achievement of new export possibilities; perhaps—and probably better—conquest of new living space in the east and its ruthless Germanification.”

With that, Hitler had pulled back the curtains and given military leaders a backstage look at his plans for territorial expansion, the same ones he had laid out in principle in Mein Kampf. It is unlikely that the generals in attendance realised that they could be heading for a racist war of extermination with the Soviet Union. What Hitler told them largely reflected the military leadership’s own ideas. The generals could easily identify with a battle against Marxism and pacifism, demands for a revision of the Treaty of Versailles, a rearming of Germany’s military and the restoration of its status as world power. The military leadership was especially pleased to hear Hitler promise that the Wehrmacht would remain the country’s only legitimate military force and that it would not be used to put down domestic opponents. The latter, Hitler declared, was the job of National Socialist organisations, particularly the SA. General Ludwig Beck, who was named chief of the Troop Office in the autumn of 1933, may have later claimed that he soon forgot what Hitler had actually said at the meeting, but this is scarcely credible. Beck was among the officers who had unreservedly greeted the change of power in January 1933 as, in his own words, “one of the first major rays of light since 1918.” Admiral Erich Raeder, the navy chief of command, was probably more truthful when he testified after the war that Hitler’s keynote speech had been “extraordinarily well received by everyone who heard it.”

The partnership concluded by Hitler and the military leadership on 3 February 1933 benefited both sides. The Reich chancellor could now concentrate on crushing the political Left and bringing German society as a whole into line with Nazi ideals without any fears of the military intervening. The military leadership in turn had received a guarantee for its monopoly position and was assured that its concerns would enjoy the highest priority within the new government. “For the next four or five years,” Hitler told his cabinet, “our main principle will be: everything for the Wehrmacht.” Germany’s future, Hitler pontificated, depended “solely and exclusively on the rebuilding of the Wehrmacht.”