The first volume of Ian Kershaw's monumental study-biography (now, by the way, available in a Penguin paperback) set high standards, and this sequel lives up to these expectations fully. It is, however, almost inevitably a saddening and even depressing book, not through any fault of its own but because of the vast human tragedy it encompasses, and from which Europe has still not recovered fully. In the first volume we saw Hitler, in spite of his incipient destructiveness and racial manias, bring back self-respect and reasonable prosperity to a humiliated, divided country and place her again among the European powers. In this one, however, we see him drag it down with him into the abyss.
The early section is dominated, almost inevitably, by the Czechoslovakian crisis, and by Hitler's determination to bring it into the German Reich, by force if needed. Few Germans loved the Czechs, particularly as they had changed their coat in 1918 and the new Czech state was almost a client state of France, which had armed it. Its treatment of three million Sudetan Germans, too, was a sore point which Hitler relentlessly exploited through his chief follower in the Sudetenland, Conrad Heinlein, while the Slovaks intrigued with him also through their leader, Mgr Tiso. So outwardly Germany did have a case and Chamberlain, the British Premier, was not unsympathetic to it.
Hitler duly got the Sudetenland, but he was by then thinking not only of conquest, but of war. Britain and France could not stop him for the moment and the "men of Munich" tamely stood by while German forces rolled over the rump of Czechoslovakia, and Prague became a German city. It is interesting that Ribbentrop, the German Foreign Minister, acted like a hawk in this instance, while Goering lost much of his influence with Hitler by working for peace. In the end, Hitler felt cheated of the war he wanted, but with Poland next on the list, it was not far away. And this time, the Western democracies (or plutocracies, to be more accurate) could not afford to stand by and watch him gobble up Eastern and Central Europe. (The 1938 incorporation of Austria into the Reich had been a relatively simple affair, with almost no bloodshed, particularly since many or most Austrians were eager to share in Germany's outward commercial prosperity.). With the invasion of Poland, Europe and much of the world faced war.
However, war does not dominate the book entirely. There is a description of the 1936 Olympic Games, a triumph of organisation which boosted the prestige of the Nazi regime - though the story that Hitler refused to shake the hands of the great negro athlete Jessie Owens has been much exaggerated. Protocol dictated that it was not his job to congratulate winners, and the Olympic Council told him so. There is also the struggle with the Christian Churches, particularly the Catholic Church which had strong popular roots in Bavaria in particular, and whose supranational allegiances exasperated the Nazi hierarchy. However, in the end the churches put up little more than token resistance, and some prominent churchmen even enthusiastically endorsed the regime - though at least one courageous bishop denounced its euthanasia programme.
The economic boom of the early Thirties, which had done so much to bring popular support behind the Nazis, was beginning to peter out. Schacht, the banker-economist who had been Hitler's financial oracle for some years, was increasingly shunted sideways as Germany moved more and more towards a war-oriented economy and arms manufacture placed increasing strains on other sectors. There were trade deficits and various signs of incipient danger, but Hitler ignored them, pushed Schacht out, and gave Goering, his next-in-command, the task of organising the nation's economy according to Nazi policies. It was a major blunder, since Goering had little administrative or fiscal ability and merely created an army of bureaucrats under picked party men, who were responsible to him personally. The result was fragmentation and even chaos. Why Hitler, who was well aware of Goering's shortcomings, entrusted him with such a responsibility is hard to fathom.
And, above all, there was the campaign against the Jews. After the Nuremberg Laws of 1935 they had always been under threat, but the squeeze grew tighter as one after another of their civil and other rights was removed and they were increasingly hounded from professional and business life. The infamous "Cristallnacht" shocked many ordinary Germans, who could not believe that Hitler himself was directly responsible and blamed it on the work of some of his lieutenants. Some of them even helped or sheltered Jews, though relentless racial propaganda was already biting deep into the minds of the younger generation of Germans. Many Jews (who were only about one per cent of the population) emigrated, though it became increasingly hard to do so as other nations closed their frontiers or else imposed strict emigrant quotas. However, the mass methodical slaughter of the "Final Solution" did not come until well into the war years.
Hitler had always hoped for friendship with England, the country he most admired, but after Munich Chamberlain plainly could take no more, and the invasion of Poland in September 1939 provoked Britain and France into declaring war. The power struggle between the Nazis and the German army high command, mostly upper-class Prussians, had been facilitated for the Fuhrer when one top commander was disgraced for marrying a prostitute and had to resign, while another was also disgraced by a (mistaken) accusation of homosexuality. This allowed Hitler to take over command personally, and his prestige increased after the quick victory over the gallant Poles, who also had to cope with Stalin and his hordes invading from the East.
The Poles, after all the promises of aid, were left to fight alone and neither Britain nor France fired a shot in their defence until Hitler broke the deadlock of the "Phoney War" in 1940 with the invasion of France. Guderian's Panzers duly swept through the demoralised French soldiers almost to the Atlantic, though at Dunkirk Goering (did he ever do anything right, one wonders?) failed abysmally to finish the retreating British off with his air force. Paris was arrogantly occupied and Hitler, remembering the humiliation of Versailles when he had been a mere corporal, visited it for the first and last time in his life, with his entourage. Meanwhile, baulked of an invasion of England by the Battle of Britain which was won by the RAF, he turned - like Napoleon before him - to the East and began planning Operation Barbarossa against his ally, Stalin. The rest of that catastrophic invasion is history, though it is clear that he had the full support of most of the German high command, however much they denied it afterwards.