Hitler's Master of the Dark Arts by Bill Yenne

Author:Bill Yenne
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: MBI
Published: 2010-08-20T04:00:00+00:00

This contact strip included snapshots taken of an SS man enjoying himself with some local women during the 1941 push by German forces into the Balkans and Greece. U.S. National Archives

In September 1938, at the now infamous summit conference, Britain’s prime minister, Neville Chamberlain, and France’s president, Edouard Daladier, flew to Munich, the mother city of the NSDAP, to meet with Adolf Hitler. The Führer told them that the Sudetenland should properly be part of Germany, and he promised that this was the end of his territorial ambition. Czechoslovakia naturally complained, but Chamberlain and Daladier ignored the Czechs and acceded to the Führer’s demands. When Chamberlain flew home, he happily announced that he had helped to negotiate “peace for our time.”

When the uniformed German troops marched into Austria and the Sudetenland, smiling to the cheers of German-speaking, pro-Hitler crowds, most but not all, were wearing the field gray (feldgrau) uniforms of the Wehrmacht. At the head of the column, as the troops entered Vienna, were the Black Knights of the Leibstandarte Adolf Hitler. The SS Verfügungstruppe also contributed a symbolic contingent in the Sudetenland. In addition to these units, small SS/SD special operations task forces called Einsatzgruppen or Sonderkommandos were assigned to specific tasks such as securing government buildings.

In March 1939, Hitler decided that he wanted the rest of Czechoslovakia. The price tag for “peace for our time” had gone up. Chamberlain and Daladier were willing to go to almost any lengths to appease Adolf Hitler and avoid war. Czechoslovakia had no choice. The poor country was chopped into bits. Slovakia was sliced off as a quasiautonomous satellite of Germany, while the remainder of Czechoslovakia became the Reich Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia.

Two months later, Hitler inked a deal with Italy’s Fascist “duce,” Benito Mussolini. Known as the Pact of Steel, the agreement called for cooperation in time of war—a war that seemed all that much closer because of the pact.

On August 24, Hitler sent his foreign minister to Moscow. There, Joachim von Ribbentrop signed a nonaggression pact with the Soviet Union’s own brutal strongman, Josef Stalin. Much to the surprise of the global media, which demonized and caricaturized both leaders, the right-wing demon Hitler had tumbled into bed with the left-wing demon Stalin.

A week later, Hitler, the man who held the best hand at the table of European politics that year decided that negotiating had taken him as far at it could. It was time for war.

German bombs began falling on Poland the morning of September 1, 1939, as German troops raced across the border. In London, Neville Chamberlain proposed more negotiations. Chamberlain consulted with Daladier, and together they came to realize that the time for negotiating was indeed over. On September 3, Britain and France declared that a state of war between them and the Third Reich had existed for two days.

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