The remilitarisation of the Rhineland

At dawn on Saturday 7 March 1936, Wehrmacht units crossed into the demilitarised zone and entered the Rhineland. Before midday soldiers stood on the Rhine at Cologne, Düsseldorf and Mainz, and three battalions crossed to the left bank of the river and occupied garrisons in Aachen, Trier and Saarbrücken. At noon Adolf Hitler announced in the Reichstag that Germany had regained “full sovereignty” over the whole of its territory, and in the same speech he proposed a new security system for Europe. It was an open violation of Articles 42 and 43 of the Treaty of Versailles and of the Locarno Treaties, which Germany had signed of its own free will. France, which at the time enjoyed a manifold military superiority, did not stir, and Britain took the view that the Germans had merely walked into “their own back garden”. Seen from 1939, March 1936 looks like the last moment at which Hitler could have been stopped at little cost. Historians argue over whether that was really so, but they agree that this was when the balance of power in Europe began to tilt in Germany’s favour.

The demilitarised zone

At the Paris Peace Conference France had failed to detach the left bank of the Rhine from Germany. Instead, the Treaty of Versailles forbade Germany to keep troops, build fortifications or carry out any mobilisation on the left bank and in a 50-kilometre strip on the right bank of the river. Any violation of these prohibitions was to be regarded as a “hostile act” towards the signatories. At Locarno in 1925 Germany, France and Belgium undertook to respect their common borders, and Britain and Italy guaranteed the arrangement. A flagrant violation of the demilitarised zone gave France and Belgium the right to respond immediately and obliged the guarantors to come to their aid. After the withdrawal of the last occupation troops in June 1930, demilitarisation was the last tangible guarantee of French security and at the same time the precondition of France’s alliances in the east: only an open Rhineland allowed the French to strike at Germany’s industrial heart, the Ruhr, should Germany attack Poland or Czechoslovakia.

German soldiers had regarded the zone as a temporary state of affairs long before Hitler. The Reichswehr had had plans to occupy it since 1933, and the zone was garrisoned by units of the armed state police (Landespolizei), which were quietly trained as soldiers. Generals and diplomats nevertheless assumed that remilitarisation would be possible in 1937 at the earliest, once the army had grown following the reintroduction of conscription in March 1935.

Why March 1936

The decision to bring it forward was driven by the international situation. Italy’s invasion of Ethiopia in October 1935 had shattered the Stresa Front, the common stance of Britain, France and Italy against Germany’s breaches of the treaties. London demanded sanctions against Italy, Paris wanted to keep Mussolini as an ally, and the scandal over the Hoare–Laval Pact poisoned relations between the two democracies. On 22 February 1936 Mussolini gave the German ambassador in Rome to understand that Italy would not support any action against Germany in defence of Locarno. France was governed by the caretaker cabinet of Albert Sarraut, with elections scheduled for April and May in which the Popular Front was gaining strength. The country was going through a financial crisis and a flight of capital.

The pretext was provided by the Franco-Soviet Treaty of Mutual Assistance, signed in May 1935 by Pierre Laval as the culmination of the plans of his predecessor, Louis Barthou. For months German propaganda had presented it as the encirclement of the Reich and a breach of the spirit of Locarno. On 27 February 1936 the French Chamber of Deputies ratified the treaty (the Senate did so only on 12 March). Hitler hesitated for a few more days: on 27 February, according to the diary of Joseph Goebbels, he still thought it “a little too early”. He took the final decision around 1 March. On 2 March the War Minister, Werner von Blomberg, issued the preliminary order for an operation codenamed “Winter Exercise” (Winterübung), and on 5 March the date was fixed for Saturday 7 March, the eve of Germany’s Heroes’ Memorial Day. The Reich cabinet learnt of the whole affair a day in advance. The Chief of the Army General Staff, Ludwig Beck, warned that the army was not ready for a clash with France.

Peaceful assurances before the blow

Some chronologies list under this date two conversations Hitler had, with the French journalist Bertrand de Jouvenel and the British historian Arnold Toynbee, in which he is said to have stressed the limited scope of his aims and his wish for an understanding with Britain, placing them after the entry into the Rhineland. In fact both took place earlier and formed part of the preparations for that move.

Hitler gave the interview to Jouvenel on 21 February 1936. In it he spoke of reconciliation with France and insisted that he had no claims against it; of the anti-French passages of Mein Kampf he said that he had written them in prison, while the French were occupying the Ruhr, and that he was making his corrections “in the great book of history”, that is, in politics. The text appeared in the Paris daily Paris-Midi on 28 February (some works give 29 February), after the Chamber had already ratified the treaty with the USSR. Its message was clear: it was France that had rejected the outstretched hand. Jouvenel was later criticised for a tone that was too indulgent towards the dictator.

On 28 February Hitler received in Berlin Toynbee, the director of studies at London’s Chatham House, who had come to give a lecture. The conversation lasted about two hours. Hitler spoke of the Bolshevik threat and of colonies, and said that Germany wanted only the unification of the German nation and desired friendship with Britain; he even suggested that Germany could help Britain in the Far East. Toynbee did not publish the interview but wrote a confidential report for the Prime Minister and the Foreign Secretary in which he judged these assurances to be sincere. According to researchers, his account strengthened the hand of those in London who after 7 March counselled leniency.

The entry

On the morning of 7 March 19 infantry battalions with artillery and several air squadrons entered the zone, some 20,000–22,000 troops in all. According to some accounts, a further ten thousand or more members of the state police in the zone were incorporated into the army, but only three battalions crossed to the left bank of the Rhine. The people of Cologne and other cities greeted the soldiers with flowers, and Catholic priests blessed them. The orders provided that in the event of an armed French response the units would fall back behind the Rhine and confine themselves to delaying actions. In Berlin the correspondent William Shirer noted that the Foreign Ministry gave out ever higher figures for the number of troops.

That same morning the Foreign Minister, Konstantin von Neurath, handed a memorandum to the ambassadors of France, Britain, Italy and Belgium. In it the Reich government declared that the Franco-Soviet treaty was incompatible with Locarno, and that Germany therefore no longer considered itself bound by that treaty. In its place it proposed a demilitarised zone on both sides of the border with France and Belgium, 25-year non-aggression pacts with those states, an air pact, non-aggression agreements with its eastern neighbours modelled on the declaration with Poland, and a return to the League of Nations. Hitler presented the same offer in the Reichstag, opening with a lengthy indictment of the Treaty of Versailles. At the end he dissolved the Reichstag and called elections combined with a plebiscite.

Hitler himself later admitted that the 48 hours after the entry were the most nerve-racking of his life, and that if the French had marched into the Rhineland Germany would have had to withdraw “in shame and disgrace”. These words are known from the account of his interpreter, Paul Schmidt. On hearing that French troops were concentrating, Blomberg asked for a withdrawal. Neurath, who knew from French sources that Paris would not risk war, kept calm and persuaded Hitler to wait.

France: big words, no action

On the evening of 8 March Prime Minister Sarraut declared on the radio that France would not leave “Strasbourg under the fire of German guns”. Nothing followed these words. The Commander-in-Chief, Maurice Gamelin, told the government that any action in the Rhineland would require at least partial and most probably general mobilisation, and he overestimated German strength by counting the police and the Party’s paramilitary formations as well. The French army had no plan for a swift, limited strike; its whole doctrine rested on the defence of the Maginot Line. Mobilisation a few weeks before an election, in the middle of a financial crisis, would have been political suicide. Within the government only the minister Georges Mandel really argued for immediate military action. In the end France merely reinforced the garrisons of the Maginot Line and complained to the League of Nations. The Foreign Minister, Pierre-Étienne Flandin, went to London to seek British support, but presented no plan of action. The Socialist leader Léon Blum praised France at the time for having chosen the path of peace; after the defeat of 1940 he admitted that this had been naive.

Britain: “their own back garden”

In London nobody wanted a war over the Rhineland. Lord Lothian remarked that the Germans had merely gone into “their own back garden”, and the phrase captured the public mood well. Many Britons considered the Treaty of Versailles unjust. The Prime Minister, Stanley Baldwin, explained to Flandin that the country lacked the strength and that public opinion would not support the use of force. The Chiefs of Staff warned that Britain could send at most two poorly equipped divisions to France. The Dominions, especially Canada and South Africa, made it clear that they would not support a war. The Foreign Secretary, Anthony Eden, condemned Hitler’s methods but regarded his offer as a basis for talks on a “general settlement”. The British had in fact themselves considered handing the zone over to Germany in exchange for other concessions; now Hitler had taken it for nothing. The only concrete results were limited British, French and Belgian staff talks and an assurance on 19 March that France’s security was a vital British interest.

King Edward VIII’s role: a story without evidence

It is also often said that King Edward VIII, who had been on the throne since January, went over the heads of Baldwin’s government and ordered the armed forces not to react. This claim finds no support in the sources. A British constitutional monarch could not give orders to the armed forces against the government’s wishes, and Baldwin’s government had no intention of using force anyway, so there was nothing to “call off”. The rumour originated in the circles of the German embassy in London. Fritz Hesse, the embassy’s press attaché, wrote in his post-war memoirs that the ambassador, Leopold von Hoesch, had heard from the King over the telephone that he had threatened Baldwin with abdication if the government went to war. Hesse’s account is not corroborated by British documents, and Hoesch died in April 1936. Edward VIII’s sympathy for Germany and his aversion to confrontation are well documented, but the King’s influence on the decisions over the Rhineland remains an unconfirmed story.

The Polish declaration

On 7 March the Foreign Minister, Józef Beck, told the French ambassador, Léon Noël, that Poland would honour its obligations under the alliance of 1921 if France took action. In Polish memory this grew into a readiness to wage a joint war against Hitler, rejected by a cowardly France. The assessment of this gesture is disputed. The alliance applied in the event of an unprovoked German attack, not of French action in the Rhineland. At the same time Beck assured the German ambassador, Hans-Adolf von Moltke, that Poland had not signed Locarno and would not fight for it, and that his statement to France would apply only if Germany invaded France. Some historians see this as an ambiguous game on two fronts, others as the sensible insurance of a state that did not know whether France intended to do anything at all. Paris did not take up the Polish declaration.

The League of Nations and the plebiscite

The Council of the League of Nations met in London and on 19 March, though not unanimously, found that Germany had broken the Versailles and Locarno treaties. There it stopped. No one seriously contemplated economic sanctions against a state whose economy was four times the size of Italy’s; essentially only the Soviet delegate, Maxim Litvinov, argued for them. Germany was even given the opportunity to put its case to the Council through Joachim von Ribbentrop. On 31 March Hitler announced an elaborate “peace plan”. He never replied to the British questionnaire of May in which London asked what exactly Germany was proposing.

On 29 March 1936 Germans voted in Reichstag elections with a single list, combined with a plebiscite on Hitler’s policy. According to the official figures, 98.8 per cent of those voting backed the list. The result was inflated and obtained under pressure, but reports by the underground SPD confirmed that remilitarisation had been greeted in Germany with genuine enthusiasm, including among former opponents of the Nazis.

Significance

The remilitarisation of the Rhineland was Hitler’s first great foreign-policy gamble, and it ended in complete success. After the Saar plebiscite, the reintroduction of conscription and the naval agreement with Britain, the last obstacle of Versailles with real military significance had fallen. People who knew Hitler said that after March 1936 he came to believe in his own infallibility: the generals and diplomats had warned him, and he had been right. In later crises he listened to them less and less.

The Germans began building fortifications on their western border, from which the Siegfried Line grew. In May 1936 Neurath told the American ambassador that the Reich would do nothing in Austria or Czechoslovakia until “the Rhineland had been digested”, after which the states of Central Europe would “begin to feel very differently about their foreign policies”. And so it proved. In October 1936 Belgium returned to neutrality, and France’s system of alliances in the east lost its meaning, since France would not defend even its own security on the Rhine. Poland, Czechoslovakia, Romania and Yugoslavia drew their conclusions. Italy, released from the Stresa Front, moved closer to Germany, a rapprochement sealed in the autumn by the Rome–Berlin Axis. Britain committed itself still more firmly to the policy of appeasement that led to the Anschluss and Munich.

The question of whether France could have toppled Hitler in 1936 returns in every discussion of the origins of the war. The French army was many times stronger than the German, and German generals admitted after the war that they could not have resisted. More recent research stresses, however, that neither French nor British public opinion, nor the French army, nor the economy was ready for war, and that a retreat from the Rhineland would not necessarily have brought Hitler down, since the generals disagreed with him about timing, not about the goal itself. One thing is certain: on 7 March 1936 France lost the ability to strike quickly into western Germany, and with it the ability to give real help to its allies in the east. In September 1939 Poland learnt what that meant.