Hossbach Memorandum

At 4:15 p.m. on the afternoon of 5 November 1937, he [Hitler] convened a conference in the Chancellery that included Werner von Blomberg, the commanders of the three branches of the armed forces, Werner von Fritsch, Erich Raeder and Hermann Göring, Foreign Minister Konstantin von Neurath and his Wehrmacht assistant Friedrich Hossbach, who drew up the only surviving minutes of the meeting. It would be a key document at the Nuremberg Trials to prove that the primary defendants had conspired to destroy peace in Europe. What had prompted the conference was a conflict between the army, the navy and the air force for scarce raw materials. Raeder in particular accused Göring of exploiting his position as the head of the Four Year Plan to promote the expansion of the Luftwaffe at the cost of the German navy. In conjunction with Raeder, Blomberg decided to end the long-simmering conflict by enlisting Hitler to make a decision.

But as always when there were rivalries between departments and competition for preferment among his paladins, Hitler avoided making decisions. Instead, he used the opportunity to hold a more-than-two-hour monologue “informing the gentlemen in attendance about the developmental possibilities and necessities of our foreign-policy situation.” Hitler explicitly ordered that his statements be regarded as “his will and testament in case he should pass away.” He then reiterated what he had told his military leadership all the way back on 3 February 1933 about Germany’s future. The 85 million Germans with their “self-contained racial core,” he said, “had a right to a much larger living space.” Resolving this situation was the central task of German foreign policy. After he had discarded various alternatives for territorial expansion, Hitler had decided on the following to ensure that the German people could feed itself: “The necessary space for this will have to be found in Europe and not, as in liberal, capitalist views, by exploiting colonies…Areas containing lots of raw materials were better located in direct proximity to the Reich and not overseas.” The dictator left his listeners in no doubt that “every territorial gain will entail breaking others’ resistance and incurring risks.”

Hitler’s remarks contained nothing new for his military leaders in terms of the necessity of “gaining a larger living space,” although they probably had not fully realised how serious Hitler was. But the heads of the armed forces certainly pricked up their ears during the second part of Hitler’s monologue when he laid out how he saw the European balance of power in the autumn of 1937. For the first time, Hitler spoke of Germany confronting “its two worst enemies, England and France, which regarded a German colossus in Central Europe as a thorn in their sides.” Here Hitler was drawing the consequences from his failed efforts to reach an understanding with Great Britain. As he had in his private conversations with Goebbels, Hitler spoke less than respectfully about his potential enemies. The British empire, he said, was rotting away and “impossible to maintain in the long run in terms of power politics.” France, too, had been weakened by “domestic political difficulties.” Nonetheless, he acknowledged that the “path of violence” he pondered going down was “never without risk.” Here he invoked the wars of Friedrich the Great and those of Bismarck, which had unified Germany. They, too, Hitler claimed, had been an “unprecedented risk.”

As his choice of historical role models shows, Hitler was prepared to go all out. The final section of his monologue was devoted to the questions of when and how. The dictator sketched out three scenarios. The latest possible time for Germany to launch an attack was between 1943 and 1945 (case 1). After that, Hitler said, “things would have changed to our disadvantage” since the other powers would have closed the gap in military strength with Germany. As an additional argument, Hitler referred to “the fact that the movement and its leader are growing older,” again playing on his fears that he might die young. Should he still be alive, it was “his irrevocable will that the question of German living space be solved by 1943 to 1945 at the latest.” But it might become necessary to act earlier if the social tensions within France “grew into a domestic crisis” (case 2), or if France should become embroiled in a war with another country so that “it could not take on Germany” at the same time (case 3). In all three cases, the initial goal would be to “subjugate the Czechs and Austria and to head off threats of a potential attack against Germany’s flanks.” The dictator had shown his hand, specifying the most immediate targets for German expansion, which he had mulled over all that spring. To forestall possible objections from his military commanders, he told them that Britain and France had “most probably already written off the Czechs and got used to the idea…that Germany would one day settle this issue.” And if Britain did not participate in a war against Germany, France would not either.

Hitler’s views were driven by military politics as much as by strategy. Amalgamating Czechoslovakia and Austria would free up fighting forces “for others purposes” in the event of war and allow the Reich to raise twelve additional divisions. With reference to Germany’s involvement in the Spanish Civil War, Hitler declared that the Reich had no interest in a rapid victory by Franco. For Germany, it would be better if the conflict dragged on and ratcheted up tensions in the Mediterranean, which could potentially lead to war between Italy and France. If this scenario (case 3) materialised, as Hitler thought it might in the course of 1938, Germany would have to seize the chance “to take care of the Czech and Austrian question.” As he had in his previous “weekend coups,” Hitler counted on the element of surprise. A German attack against Czechoslovakia, he said, would have to be “quick as lightning.”

A two-hour discussion followed, which Hossbach only recorded cursorily in his transcript. The military leaders expressed concerns. They had nothing against an Anschluss of Austria and an annexation of Czechoslovakia. In typical Wilhelmine fashion, they saw German hegemony in Central Europe as a worthwhile goal, even if they did not share Hitler’s racist belief in the need for “living space.” But they worried that Hitler’s impatience would spark new European hostilities and inevitably lead to a second world war. Fritsch and Blomberg were of one mind that “England and France must not emerge as our enemies.” Even in the event of a Franco-Italian war, Fritsch pointed out, France would still be capable of concentrating large numbers of forces on Germany’s western front. Blomberg drew attention to the fact that the West Wall, Germany’s series of western fortifications, was far from complete and that Czech fortifications would hinder German advances “in the extreme.” Neurath objected that “a Franco-Italian conflict was by no means as imminent as the Führer seemed to assume.”

Hossbach’s report does not say how Hitler reacted to these objections, but apparently he merely reassured his audience “that he was convinced England would not take part in any war and did not believe that France would commence hostilities.” It was exactly this optimistic prognosis that led to the criticism of the military leaders. Yet despite his scepticism, Blomberg was in no way prepared to oppose Hitler’s wishes. On the contrary, in early December he issued the “First Supplement to the Order on Unified Preparation for War of the Wehrmacht of 24 June 1937,” which reflected the ideas Hitler had put forward the previous month. It read: “If Germany has attained full military readiness in all areas, the military preconditions will have been laid to wage an offensive war against Czechoslovakia and to bring the solution of the German space problem to a successful conclusion, even if one or another of the major powers attacks us.” Blomberg was, of course, mistaken if he truly believed that the annexation of Czechoslovakia would resolve “Germany’s space problem” as Hitler saw it. For Hitler, such an annexation was only the first stage in a war for living space encompassing all of eastern Europe.

Despite Blomberg’s compliance, Hitler must have sensed that parts of the Wehrmacht leadership still had serious reservations about his risky strategy. Fritsch’s first reaction to Hitler’s revelation was to cancel a multi-week holiday in Egypt that he had planned for some time, but Hitler succeeded in reassuring him “that the chance of conflict cannot be regarded as that imminent.” The relationship between the Führer and the commander of the army had by no means been irreparably ruptured, as some historians have contended, but it had noticeably cooled. Moreover, Hitler seems to have been particularly disappointed by Neurath’s attitude, which reminded him of the reservations German diplomats had expressed ahead of the remilitarisation of the Rhineland in March 1936. Neurath would testify before the Nuremberg War Crimes Tribunal that in mid-January 1938 he had warned Hitler that “his policies would necessarily lead to a world war” and “that many of his plans could be realised, albeit more slowly, through peaceful means.” But the dictator, Neurath testified, had simply replied that he was “running out of time.” Whatever the truth may have been, Hitler must have known that his plans would not attract the sort of unconditional support from military leaders and top diplomats to which he believed himself entitled. What could be more logical, especially after he had got rid of Hjalmar Schacht, than to grind down the last remaining pillars of his conservative coalition partners? And chance now gave Hitler the opportunity for a major clear-out among the upper echelons of both the military and the Foreign Ministry.