Remilitarisation of the Rhineland

• 1. Introduction

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  Not long after dawn on the 7th of March 1936, the remilitarisation of the Rhineland began. Nineteen German infantry battalions moved into territory where German soldiers had been forbidden for nearly two decades. By eleven in the morning the forces reached the Rhine. Three battalions then crossed to its west bank. Hearst wire service reporter William L. Shirer was in the Reichstag press gallery that morning. He recorded in his diary how Hitler suddenly told the assembled deputies that German troops were already moving. The chamber erupted. In Cologne, a vast cheering crowd formed spontaneously to greet the soldiers with flowers.

  Neither France nor Britain moved to reverse the incursion. Both had been parties to the treaties Germany had just torn up. After 1939, commentators argued that a firm military response in 1936 could have ended the Nazi regime before it consumed Europe. What had made this borderland so strategically decisive? And what stripped France and Britain of the will to act?

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• 2. The Hinge of Peace

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  American historian Gerhard Weinberg called the demilitarised Rhineland 'the single most important guarantee of peace in Europe.' The military geometry behind that claim was exact. Under Articles 42, 43, and 44 of the 1919 Treaty of Versailles, Germany was barred from any military presence on the Rhine's left bank. It was equally forbidden from the right bank within fifty kilometres of the river. Any violation 'in any manner whatsoever' was to be treated as a hostile act against world peace.

  France had signed defensive treaties with Poland in 1921, Czechoslovakia in 1924, Romania in 1926, and Yugoslavia in 1927. These states formed what became known as the cordon sanitaire, intended as France's collective substitute for its prewar alliance with Russia. The whole system rested on one assumption. If Germany threatened any of those states, France could respond by driving its army into Germany's exposed western flank. Without a demilitarised buffer to hold that option open, the alliances had no credibility.

  The Locarno Treaties of October 1925 reinforced what Versailles had imposed. Germany, France, Belgium, Britain, and Italy all signed. German Foreign Minister Gustav Stresemann accepted the Rhineland's permanent demilitarised status voluntarily, not under duress. Locarno carried more moral authority than Versailles for precisely that reason. Britain and Italy vaguely pledged to guarantee the Franco-German border against any 'flagrant violation.'

  French soldiers withdrew from the Rhineland in June 1930. From that point, enforcement rested on German goodwill. French intelligence knew that Germany had been quietly violating Versailles through the 1920s, partly with Soviet assistance. German military planners had never treated the arrangement as permanent. In December 1918, the army's senior commanders were already mapping plans to recover what they called Germany's lost 'world power status.' The Rhineland was always, in their view, a temporary condition waiting to be reversed.

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• 3. Fracture Lines

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  On the 14th of April 1935, Ramsay MacDonald, Pierre Laval, and Benito Mussolini met at the Italian resort of Stresa. They pledged to oppose any further German violations of Versailles. France and Italy opened joint military staff talks with the aim of a formal anti-German alliance. Germany, for the moment, appeared to face a united opposition from its three major western neighbours.

  On the 3rd of October 1935, Italy invaded Ethiopia and that appearance collapsed. Britain, responding to strong public pressure for collective security, supported League of Nations sanctions against Mussolini. France cared more about preserving its relationship with Italy and resisted. A leaked proposal known as the Hoare-Laval Pact would have partitioned Ethiopia between Italy and a rump state. Its exposure produced a public scandal in both countries and forced British Foreign Secretary Samuel Hoare to resign. The Abyssinia Crisis had done more to fracture the western alliance than Germany had yet managed on its own.

  Baron Konstantin von Neurath, Germany's foreign minister, had been assembling a justification for remilitarisation ever since. Hitler had always publicly pledged to honor Locarno but not Versailles, since only Locarno had been freely signed. The Franco-Soviet Treaty of Mutual Assistance, signed in Moscow on the 2nd of May 1935, gave Neurath his pretext. France had made a bilateral arrangement that Germany could argue violated Locarno's intent. In January 1936, Neurath told British Foreign Secretary Anthony Eden that Germany would reconsider its Locarno commitments if other signatories kept making such deals. Eden's response gave Neurath the impression that Britain might not stand firmly behind France.

  On the 26th of February 1936, the French National Assembly ratified the Franco-Soviet pact. Five days later, Hitler made his final decision, accelerating a plan originally set for 1937.

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• 4. The Decision

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  General Ludwig Beck's memo of March 1935 had accepted that remilitarisation should wait until it was diplomatically feasible. Beck warned Hitler in February 1936 that the German Army was not prepared for a conflict with France. Field Marshal Werner von Blomberg, Hitler's war minister, shared that assessment. Despite those warnings, several converging pressures in early 1936 pushed Hitler to move.

  Albert Sarraut formed a caretaker government in France in February 1936, and its divided cabinet was largely unable to act. Germany was simultaneously under economic stress. The Abyssinia Crisis was consuming British and French diplomatic attention. Each factor made the moment look more favourable than any that might follow.

  Neurath held the most consequential intelligence. On the 10th of January 1936, he received a report from Gottfried Aschmann, chief of the Foreign Office press division. Aschmann had recently returned from a visit to Paris. There, he had spoken to a minor French politician named Jean Montiny, a close friend of former premier Laval. Montiny had stated frankly that French economic problems had hampered military modernisation and that France would do nothing if Germany remilitarised the Rhineland. Neurath withheld this from Hitler but used it privately to project an air of prescient intuition. By repeatedly assuring Hitler that France would not act, without revealing his source, Neurath appeared to possess an uncanny diplomatic gift. It strengthened his standing in a regime where Joachim von Ribbentrop ran a rival foreign policy operation and openly sought his post.

  Goring travelled to Warsaw to ask Poland to remain neutral if France chose to respond. Hitler made his final decision on the 1st of March 1936. The League of Nations was consumed that week debating oil sanctions against Italy over Ethiopia, diverting international attention at a critical moment. On the 7th of March he ordered what was called Operation Winter Exercise into motion.

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• 5. Operation Winter Exercise

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  Thousands of French soldiers were reported gathering along the Franco-German border when German reconnaissance relayed the news. General Werner von Blomberg immediately begged Hitler to order a withdrawal before the situation turned into a war. Hitler nearly relented. Neurath, however, stayed composed in a way Blomberg did not. He asked Hitler whether French troops had actually crossed the border yet. When Hitler was told they had not, he agreed to wait. Blomberg was visibly alarmed; Neurath remained steady throughout.

  At the Wilhelmstrasse, Neurath summoned three ambassadors. Baron Bernardo Attolico of Italy, Sir Eric Phipps of Britain, and Andre Francois-Poncet of France each received formal notes. The notes accused France of violating Locarno by ratifying the Franco-Soviet pact. They announced that Germany was therefore renouncing that treaty and remilitarising the Rhineland.

  Hitler's address to the Reichstag that day offered to return to the League of Nations. He also proposed a pact against aerial bombing and a non-aggression agreement with France, if the other powers accepted the remilitarisation. He cast the entire operation as a defensive act, forced on Germany by French and Soviet threats. Shirer wrote in his diary that this framing was 'a pure fraud.' He noted that Francois-Poncet had told a friend he had been lied to three times that day by the German Foreign Office. German official statements had claimed first two thousand troops, then nine thousand five hundred with thirteen detachments of artillery. Shirer's own information put the figure at four divisions, roughly fifty thousand men.

  On the 29th of March 1936, Hitler called a referendum. The official count returned a 99% yes vote. Ian Kershaw described the popular reaction as genuine mass enthusiasm. People were 'besides themselves with delight' at the reversal of what most Germans viewed as the humiliations of Versailles. Reports to the exiled Social Democratic leadership confirmed that many former opponents of the Nazis approved of the move. Those who knew Hitler well later said that after March 1936 there was a real psychological change in him. He was now utterly convinced of his own infallibility in a way he had not been before.

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• 6. Neither Army Moved

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  France possessed 100 divisions, vastly outnumbering the German force in the Rhineland. The failure to act became the central historical puzzle of the crisis. General Maurice Gamelin told the French government that challenging Germany would require full national mobilisation. That mobilisation, he said, would cost thirty million francs per day and risked escalating into a full-scale war. The Deuxieme Bureau complicated matters further. French intelligence analysts overestimated German troop numbers in the Rhineland, making the proposed response appear even more daunting.

  France was facing a severe financial crisis in early 1936, with the franc under intense pressure. The German remilitarisation alone caused a major outflow of capital from French markets. French planners also considered the Luftwaffe superior to their own air force. French aircraft factories were struggling with productivity problems that would hamper any ability to replace losses. Only Czechoslovakia among France's eastern allies was firmly committed to war with Germany if France moved in the Rhineland.

  Polish foreign minister Jozef Beck privately told the German ambassador, Count Hans-Adolf von Moltke, that the Franco-Polish alliance would not apply. Germany was not invading France, Beck argued, so the treaty's conditions had not been met. Beck told Moltke on the 9th of March that his promise to stand with France was 'in practice, without effect.' At the same moment, Beck was assuring the French ambassador of the opposite.

  In Britain, Lord Lothian said publicly that Germany was merely walking into its own backyard. Britain's War Secretary, Alfred Duff Cooper, met the German ambassador on the 8th of March. He told him the British public did not care 'two hoots' about Germans reoccupying their own territory. Prime Minister Stanley Baldwin cited British military unreadiness. Rearmament had only begun in 1934, and the most Britain could field within three weeks was two divisions with obsolete equipment. British ministers also feared that a war with Germany might give Japan the opportunity to seize British colonial territories in Asia.

  Georges Mandel was the only French minister who argued for immediate military action to expel the German troops. French Foreign Minister Pierre Etienne Flandin travelled to London seeking a firm commitment. He left with a vague statement linking British security to French security and a promise of limited staff talks. Those talks were cancelled five days after they began.

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• 7. The New Constellation

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  On the 18th of May 1936, American ambassador William C. Bullitt met Baron von Neurath in Germany and reported back to President Roosevelt. Neurath said Germany planned to do nothing active in foreign affairs until 'the Rhineland had been digested.' He meant that Germany was constructing fortifications along its borders with France and Belgium. Once those were complete, he predicted, Central European states would 'feel very differently about their foreign policies and a new constellation will develop.'

  Belgium had maintained a defensive alliance with France since 1920, but that arrangement did not survive the Rhineland crisis. On the 14th of October 1936, King Leopold III of Belgium renounced it in a formal speech. He declared that Belgium would pursue a policy 'exclusively and entirely Belgian' and remain outside 'the quarrels of our neighbors.' German leaders knew that neither Britain nor France would violate Belgian neutrality. This declaration effectively removed the threat of any Allied western offensive. Belgium returned to the neutral stance it had held before 1914. Germany's leaders had already shown in 1914 that they had no such scruples.

  Czechoslovak President Edvard Benes seriously considered renouncing the alliance with France and seeking accommodation with Germany. He abandoned the idea only when it became clear that the price would be effective Czech independence. King Carol II of Romania likewise concluded that his country might need to move from the French to the German sphere of influence.

  Pope Pius XI was direct with the French ambassador about the missed opportunity. 'Had you ordered the immediate advance of 200,000 men into the zone the Germans had occupied,' he told the ambassador, 'you would have done everyone a very great favour.' General Heinz Guderian spoke to French officers after the Second World War. 'If you French had intervened in the Rhineland in 1936,' he told them, 'we should have been sunk and Hitler would have fallen.'

  From the 15th to the 20th of June 1936, the chiefs of staff of Czechoslovakia, Romania, and Yugoslavia met to assess the changed situation. They concluded that Eastern Europe now had only two great powers: Germany and the Soviet Union. The best that any of the small states could hope for was to avoid another war. Such a war, they agreed, would almost certainly cost them their independence regardless of who won.

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