source of some useful pretexts for aggression. Until 1939, all of Germany’s forward
strategic moves were ethically and politically defensible in terms of the former Allies’
grand principle of the national self-determination of peoples. Germany reoccupied
and remilitarized the Rhineland (7 March 1936), a move illegal under the Locarno
Treaty of 1925; effected union with Austria, the Anschluss, on 12 March 193 8 , which
was expressly forbidden by Versailles; and it absorbed the largely German-populated
Sudetenland of Czechoslovakia after the Munich Conference of 29 September 193 8.
Where and when Hitler crossed his Rubicon was in the occupation of the substantial, and
emphatically non-German, remnant of Czechoslovakia on 14–15 March 1939, in flagrant
breach of the Munich Agreement. For the first time, Germany lacked even the pretence
of a respectable ethnic rationale for its action. From March 1939 it was obvious to all
except the wilfully strategically blind that Hitler’s Germany was embarked upon a path
of expansion that had no obvious limit.
Systematically, even carefully – though many of his generals did not agree – Hitler
moved step by step to alter Germany’s strategic context as the necessary enabler for
realization of his political ambitions. On 14 October 1933 he withdrew from the overlong
awaited and futile World Disarmament Conference, and from its parent, the League of
Nations. In 1935 he flouted Versailles’ injunction against Germany having any military
aviation by announcing the existence of the Luftwaffe. Also in 1935, Germany put the
final nail in the coffin of the disarmament provisions of Versailles when it reintroduced
conscription. By far the most fateful step taken by the new regime, however, was the
reoccupation and remilitarization of the Rhineland the following year. The action was
dramatic, and caused panic attacks among senior German soldiers, but Hitler was correct
in his belief that France would not move to resist the illegal action. The initial German
military advance into the Rhineland was almost trivial in scale: just twelve infantry
battalions and eight groups of artillery entered the demilitarized zone, and most of those
remained on the east bank of the Rhine. Still, France, politically and militarily the only
possible opponent of the reoccupation, was entirely incapable of mounting resistance.
Many historians and other commentators have argued that 7 March 1936 was the
last opportunity to prevent World War II (e.g. Aron, 2002: 94). It is claimed that had
France ejected German troops forcibly from the legally demilitarized zone, Hitler would
have suffered such a loss of domestic prestige that he and his Nazi regime could well
have been swept away by a military coup. One cannot know whether such speculation
is well founded. However, what is known is that the Rhineland move, succeeding as it
did the open steps towards headlong rearmament, was the first of what became a series
of political triumphs for Hitler’s statecraft. His self-confidence and popularity grew
with each further proof of the soundness of his judgement. It is not entirely obvious that
military defeat and the subsequent political humiliation over the Rhineland in 1936
would have resulted in regime change in Berlin, but it is fairly certain that after the
Rhineland the only way to avert a great war would have been by a change of German
government. Of course, what is obvious today, and was almost equally obvious to many
observers across Europe by 1939, was not at all self-evident until that year. What is
unarguable about Germany’s unopposed military occupation of the Rhineland is that it
caused a gigantic loss in French prestige. The Russians, who had signed a treaty of
alliance with France in 1935, drew the appropriate conclusion from French inaction: the
policeman of the European order was not up to the job. French alliance value suffered a
110 War, peace and international relations