The secret meeting at the Reich Chancellery

On the afternoon of 5 November 1937 six men who were to prepare Germany for war gathered at the Reich Chancellery in Berlin. Adolf Hitler had invited the War Minister, Field Marshal Werner von Blomberg, the commanders of the three services – General Werner von Fritsch (the army), Admiral Erich Raeder (the navy) and General Hermann Göring (the air force) – and the Foreign Minister, Konstantin von Neurath. Notes were taken by Hitler’s Wehrmacht adjutant, Colonel Friedrich Hossbach. The meeting lasted from 4.15 to 8.30 p.m. It was supposed to deal with a dispute over the allocation of steel to the navy and the air force, but for most of it Hitler spoke about something else: that Germany had to win “living space” by force, and that its first targets would be Austria and Czechoslovakia, perhaps as early as 1938. It is most often said that Hitler discussed the need to acquire Lebensraum on this occasion. That is correct, except that what was new in his argument was not the ideas themselves, familiar since Mein Kampf, but the concrete dates and targets. Hossbach’s note, known as the Hossbach Memorandum, became one of the most important documents on the origins of the Second World War.

The dispute over steel

By the autumn of 1937 German rearmament was running up against the limits of the economy. Raw materials and foreign currency were scarce, and there was not enough steel to go round. Raeder complained that the navy was not getting enough steel to build ships, while Göring, for a year the Plenipotentiary for the Four-Year Plan, was distributing allocations in favour of the air force. Blomberg asked Hitler to settle the matter, and Hitler called the meeting. According to some historians he also wanted to use the occasion to push rearmament forward and to test whether the military were ready to follow him further than before.

Hitler’s monologue

Hitler began by stressing that the matter was so important that in other countries it would be dealt with by the whole cabinet, and that he was deliberately discussing it in a small circle. He asked that his exposition, the fruit of four and a half years in power, be regarded in the event of his death as his “testament”.

The aim of German policy, he said, was to secure, preserve and enlarge the “national community”, and it was therefore a question of space. Germany could not feed itself from its own territory, and dependence on world trade left it defenceless in the event of war. Overseas colonies would not solve the problem. Space had to be won in Europe, in the Reich’s immediate neighbourhood. “Germany’s problem could only be solved by means of force and this was never without attendant risk,” Hossbach recorded. What remained were the questions of “when” and “how”. Hitler described Britain and France as hate-filled opponents for whom a strong Germany at the heart of Europe was unacceptable.

He then set out three possibilities. Germany had to act by 1943–1945 at the latest, because after that its armaments would become obsolete, its opponents would rearm and there would be a shortage of food at home. If he was still alive then, it was his “unalterable resolve” to solve the problem of space by those years at the latest. If, however, France were paralysed earlier by an internal crisis, or if it became embroiled in a war with another state – with Italy in the Mediterranean, for instance – Germany would have to strike sooner, even in 1938.

The first objective was to be the simultaneous destruction of Czechoslovakia and seizure of Austria, which would remove the threat to the flank in a possible war in the west, shorten the borders and provide the manpower for a dozen or so new divisions. Hitler calculated that annexing the two countries would provide food for five to six million people, if two million people “emigrated compulsorily” from Czechoslovakia and one million from Austria. He believed that Britain, and probably France too, had “already tacitly written off the Czechs”. Poland would not move against a strong Germany, the USSR was tied down by Japan, and Italy would not protest over Czechoslovakia, although on Austria everything depended on Mussolini. He also spoke about the Spanish Civil War: a complete victory for Franco was not in Germany’s interest, because a prolonged war kept up the tension between Italy on the one hand and France and Britain on the other.

The objections of the generals and Neurath

According to Hossbach, the discussion at times became very heated. Blomberg and Fritsch repeated that Britain and France must not be allowed to appear as Germany’s enemies. They argued that France, even at war with Italy, would have enough strength to attack in the west, where Germany had only weak fortifications, and that the Czechoslovak fortifications would be hard to take. Neurath doubted that an Anglo-French–Italian conflict was as close as Hitler thought. Hitler repeated that Britain would not go to war, and that without Britain neither would France. Fritsch asked whether in that case he should cancel the holiday abroad he had planned for 10 November. He was told there was no need, because the conflict was not that close. Only then did the meeting return to the question of steel.

The military men’s criticism was not opposition to war as such. As historians point out, Blomberg and Fritsch argued with Hitler about pace and risk, not about the goal. Neurath later claimed at Nuremberg that he had been “deeply shaken” and had wanted to resign for that reason. The Chief of the General Staff, Ludwig Beck, to whom Hossbach showed the note, set down critical comments on 12 November. Raeder claimed after the war that he had not taken the exposition as an announcement of war. Göring supported Hitler.

The Blomberg–Fritsch crisis

A few months later Hitler got rid of everyone who had had doubts on 5 November. On 12 January 1938 Blomberg married Margarethe Gruhn, a woman much younger than himself, with Hitler and Göring as witnesses. Soon afterwards the Berlin police handed Göring files showing that the bride had a police record as a prostitute. On 27 January Blomberg stepped down. His natural successor was Fritsch, but Göring, who wanted the supreme command for himself, and Heinrich Himmler, who was hostile to the officer corps, pulled from the Gestapo archives a dossier that Reinhard Heydrich had prepared back in 1936. In it a blackmailer, Otto Schmidt, testified that he had seen Fritsch with a man in 1933. On 26 January 1938 Hitler confronted the general with Schmidt at the Reich Chancellery. Fritsch denied the charge, but he had to go. Hossbach, who had warned him of the accusation in defiance of orders, lost his post as adjutant.

On 4 February 1938 Hitler announced a sweeping change. He abolished the War Ministry and personally assumed supreme command of the armed forces. His staff became the Oberkommando der Wehrmacht under the compliant General Wilhelm Keitel. Command of the army passed to Walther von Brauchitsch, Neurath was replaced by Joachim von Ribbentrop, and Göring received a field marshal’s baton. A dozen or so generals were retired or transferred. It soon emerged that Schmidt had confused Fritsch with a retired cavalry captain with a similar name, von Frisch, and according to historians’ findings the Gestapo had known this even before the confrontation. The Reich Court Martial, presided over by Göring, acquitted Fritsch on 18 March 1938. By then, however, a week had passed since the Wehrmacht’s entry into Austria, which overshadowed the whole affair. Fritsch did not return to his post.

The fate of the document

Hossbach wrote up the note on 10 November 1937 on his own initiative, from memory and on the basis of rough notes. Hitler neither saw nor approved it, and the participants’ remarks were given only in summary, so it is not minutes in the strict sense. The original was lost. In 1943 Colonel Hans-Hugo von Kirchbach of the military history department of the General Staff made a copy of it, which fell into Allied hands in 1945. At the Nuremberg trials the prosecution presented it as document PS-386, evidence that the Reich’s leaders had knowingly prepared a war of aggression. The defence of Göring and Raeder tried to play down its significance.

In 1961 the British historian A.J.P. Taylor, in his book on the origins of the war, argued that the meeting was a manoeuvre in domestic politics and that its content was “daydreaming” rather than a plan. Questions about the reliability of the copy were later also stirred up by writers who wanted to whitewash Hitler. In 1989, however, the Kirchbach copy was found in British archives. It proved identical to the Nuremberg document, and its content is also confirmed by Beck’s notes. Today most historians consider that the note faithfully reflects Hitler’s exposition. They do not treat it as a detailed plan of war, since the events of 1938–1939 unfolded differently from what Hitler foresaw, but they see in it a clear turn: from cautious revision of Versailles to readiness for war within the next few years.

Significance

The meeting of 5 November 1937 closed the period in which Hitler tore up treaties while professing peaceful intentions. Only three weeks earlier Germany had given its guarantee to Belgium, and in London and Paris people still believed that Hitler wanted to redress the wrongs of Versailles. Meanwhile the leader of the Reich was telling his commanders about a war for space, about the expulsion of millions of people and about a deadline of 1943 at the latest.

The consequences came quickly. The Blomberg–Fritsch crisis gave Hitler full control over the army and diplomacy, and their places were taken by men who asked no questions. On 12 March 1938 the Wehrmacht marched into Austria; in the autumn Czechoslovakia had to give up the Sudetenland; and in March 1939 Germany occupied the rest of the Czech lands. The war that broke out in September 1939 began differently from what Hitler had foreseen in November 1937: with Poland, and without the understanding with Britain that he had thought possible. But the direction he had set out at the Reich Chancellery remained the same.