rise-and-fall-of-the-third-reich-william-shirer-pdf

256 THE RISE AND FALL OF THE THIRD REICHencouragement to expand it, in the naval arm, as rapidly as Germany could findthe means to do so.To add insult to the injury already done France, the British government, infulfillment of a promise to Hitler, refused to tell her closest ally what kind of shipsand how many Great Britain had agreed that Germany should build, except thatthe German submarine tonnage – the building of submarines in Germany wasspecifically forbidden by Versailles – would be 60 per cent of Britain’s and, ifexceptional circumstances arose, might be 100 per cent. 235 Actually the Anglo-German agreement authorized the Germans to build five battleships, whosetonnage and armament would be greater than that of anything the British hadafloat, though the official figures were faked to deceive London – twenty-onecruisers and sixty-four destroyers. Not all of them were built or completed bythe outbreak of the war, but enough of them, with the U-boats, were ready tocause Britain disastrous losses in the first years of the second war.Mussolini took due notice of the ”perfidy of Albion.” Two could play at thegame of appeasing Hitler. Moreover, England’s cynical attitude of disregardingthe Versailles Treaty encouraged him in the belief that London might not taketoo seriously the flouting of the Covenant of the League of Nations. On October3, 1935, in defiance of the Covenant, his armies invaded the ancient mountainkingdom of Abyssinia. The League, led by Great Britain and supported halfheartedlyby France, which saw that Germany was the greater danger in the longrun, promptly voted sanctions. But they were only partial sanctions, timidlyenforced. They did not prevent Mussolini from conquering Ethiopia but theydid destroy the friendship of Fascist Italy with Britain and France and bring anend to the Stresa front against Nazi Germany.Who stood the most to gain from this chain of events but Adolf Hitler?On October 4, the day after the Italian invasion began, I spent the day in theWilhelmstrasse talking with a number of party and government officials. A diarynote that evening summed up how quickly and well the Germans had sized upthe situation:The Wilhelmstrasse is delighted. Either Mussolini will stumble andget himself so heavily involved in Africa that he will be greatly weakenedin Europe, whereupon Hitler can seize Austria, hitherto protectedby the Duce; or he will win, defying France and Britain,and thereupon be ripe for a tie-up with Hitler against the Westerndemocracies. Either way Hitler wins. 236This would soon be demonstrated.A COUP IN THE RHINELANDIn his Reichstag ”peace” speech of May 21, 1935, which, as we have seen, hadso impressed the world and, above all, Great Britain, Hitler had mentioned that”an element of legal insecurity” had been brought into the Locarno Pact as aresult of the mutual-assistance pact which had been signed between Russia andFrance on March 2 in Paris and on March 14 in Moscow, but which up to theend of the year had not been ratified by the French Parliament. The GermanForeign Office called this ”element” to the attention of Paris in a formal noteto the French government.