“There never was in all history a war easier to prevent by timely action than the one which has just desolated such great areas of the globe.” – Winston Churchill on World War WII
This week (March 7) in 1936, Nazi Germany’s leader Adolf Hitler made his first move in the military chess game that made him king of Europe from 1940 to 1944. He captured the Rhineland.
In doing so he broke both the Treaty of Versailles and the Treaty of Locarno, which guaranteed the Rhineland’s demilitarization. This strip of land between Germany and France had been taken from Germany after World War I and demilitarized to provide a buffer zone protecting France from future German invasions. As a further protection, the Locarno Treaty, signed in 1925, stipulated that England would aid France militarily if Germany tried to re-take the Rhineland.
Fast forward to 1936. Hitler wants to initiate his plan to create a German empire — a “Thousand-Year Reich.” While his priority was always to conquer eastern territory — Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union — he worried that any move east left him vulnerable to a military response by France to his west. Thus, taking the Rhineland would help protect his western flank, while also solidifying his domestic political base. The German people had seethed at the indignity of losing the Rhineland, which was a symbol of national pride and an important economic region.
Still, Hitler’s move into the Rhineland was a huge gamble that was opposed by all of his top generals. In 1936 the German army was no match for the French army, let alone the French army joined by Britain under its Locarno treaty obligation. Hitler’s generals feared an attack on the Rhineland would be easily repulsed, humiliating Germany. But Hitler sensed that French and British leaders had no stomach for a confrontation with Germany. And so Hitler invaded the Rhineland. England and France offered verbal protests and nothing more.
So Hitler was proven right and his generals wrong, which convinced Hitler that he was a better military strategist than his generals, when what the Rhineland victory really proved was that he was very good at sizing up his political opposition. Political genius is very different from military genius, and as the war progressed Hitler made military decisions that constantly overruled his far more experienced generals, often ordering them to stand and fight when retreat and regrouping was the far more sensible decision. That led to incalculable losses of men and military equipment and hastened Germany’s defeat.
And so, ironically, while Hitler’s Rhineland victory moved him one step closer to starting World War II, in a way it also helped ensure that he would lose it.
