The disunity of the ‘Stresa front’ made Hitler’s
next move, the remilitarisation of the Rhineland,
even less risky than it appeared to be. Hitler later
was to call his boldness in March 1936 the
turning point when he had ‘bluffed’ the French.
It was not a real turning point, but just another
step along the road he had already successfully
followed. Hitler was looking for a new pretext.
The Franco-Soviet pact, concluded in 1934, pro-
vided it. When the French Chamber ratified the
treaty, Hitler on 7 March 1936 declared it to be
contrary to the Locarno Treaties and ordered the
Wehrmacht to move into the demilitarised zone
of the Rhineland. In its final timing Hitler’s move
came as a surprise, but the occupation of the
Rhineland had been anticipated and discussed.
French ministers were clear they could not react
with anything but immediate protests and, later
on, possible recourse to the machinery of League
sanctions. The chief of the army general staff,
General Maurice Gamelin, insisted that no mili-
tary moves were possible without prior full-
scale mobilisation, placing more than 1 million
Frenchmen under arms. He pointed out to the
French ministers that there was no immediate
striking force available. The British, meanwhile,
were not prepared to consider mere German
troop movements into the Rhineland zone as suf-
ficient reason for a military counterstroke.
Thus France, rent by internal conflict, could
not, and Britain would not, consider stopping
Hitler. Hitler, for his part, was careful to enter
the Rhineland with only a small force of lightly
armed Wehrmacht troops. Rather like rearma-
ment, the open remilitarisation of the Rhineland
had been preceded by ‘secret’ remilitarisation as
the so-called ‘police’ already stationed in the
demilitarised zone were, in fact, trained infantry.
The total force of ‘police’ and Wehrmacht
amounted to less than 40,000 men and could not
possibly threaten France.
But Hitler was not bluffing. He had no inten-
tion of accepting defeat had the French marched.
It is a myth that all that was required to humili-
ate Hitler in March 1936 was a French show of
strength. In the hastily drawn-up final war plans,
the German troops were to withdraw as far as the
Ruhr and there to stay and fight. But in view of
earlier French political and military decisions it
was obvious that the only French countermoves
would be diplomatic.
These countermoves were handled with skill
by the French foreign minister, Pierre Flandin.
He proposed to the British that economic and
military sanctions be applied to force Hitler to
withdraw. But Eden was looking for mediation.
The British Cabinet had ruled out force. Flandin’s
sanction plan raised the spectre of war with
Germany. Tortuous negotiations in London and
Geneva did not this time end entirely without
result. The expected League condemnation was
the usual empty gesture. But Flandin extracted
from the British government an avowal that
Britain still stood by its Locarno commitment to
France and Belgium. The British Cabinet had
been pushed by the French further than it wished
to go in the direction of a strictly defensive Anglo-
French alliance backed up by staff talks in place
of the more flexible Locarno agreements. There
was now a much closer Anglo-French alignment
and Britain began to rearm, though still at far too
slow a pace. On the debit side, Belgium reverted
to absolute neutrality.
The year 1936 was to be the year of inter-
national goodwill. Berlin was host to the Olympic
Games that year. Defiance of treaties and the
Nürnberg Laws proved no obstacle to the
holding of the games in Berlin. Hitler wanted the
world to come to Berlin and admire the National
Socialist state. No effort was spared to make the
games a spectacular success. For the duration of
the games anti-Jewish propaganda was toned
down in Berlin. Hitler, moreover, assured the
Olympic Committee that there would be no dis-
crimination between ‘Aryans’ and ‘non-Aryans’, a
promise he did not keep as far as German Jewish
athletes were concerned. It was of course dis-
comfiting that the outstanding athlete of the
games was the African American Jesse Owens.
Nazi commentators explained this success,
embarrassing to racial doctrines of superiority, by
stressing that black people were racially lower in
the scale of development, closer to a state of
nature, like animals and hence faster. For Hitler
the holding of the games in Berlin served as an
international recognition of his regime.