Remilitarisation of the Rhineland
[16] To promote that goal, the global triumph of communism, the Soviet Union tended to support German efforts to challenge the Versailles system by assisting the secret rearmament of Germany, a policy that caused much tension with France.
[17] The cordon sanitaire states were intended as a collective replacement for Imperial Russia as France's chief eastern ally and emerged as areas of French political, military, economic and cultural influence.
A key British goal at Locarno was to enable Germany's peaceful territorial ambitions in Eastern Europe, believing improved Franco-German ties would weaken France's cordon sanitaire.
[31] General Ludwig Beck's memo of March 1935 on the need for Germany to secure Lebensraum (living space) in Eastern Europe had accepted that remilitarisation should take place once it was diplomatically possible.
[34] When British rearmament began in 1934, the army received the lowest priority in terms of funding, after the air force and the navy, which was partly to rule out the option of "continental commitment".
[35] Increasingly, the British came to favor the idea of "limited liability" under which if the "continental commitment" were to be made, Britain should send only the smallest-possible expeditionary force to Europe but reserve its main efforts towards the war in the air and on the sea.
[36] Britain's refusal to make the continental commitment on the same scale as World War I caused tensions with the French, who believed that it would be impossible to defeat Germany without another large-scale ground force and deeply disliked the idea that they should do the bulk of the fighting on their land.
In response, Mussolini mobilized the Italian Army, concentrated several divisions at the Brenner Pass and warned Hitler that Italy would go to war against Germany if it tried to follow up the Putsch by invading Austria.
[37] The Austrian-born Hitler, although deeply offended by Mussolini's blunt assertions that his birthplace was within the sphere of influence of any power other than Germany, realized that he was in no position to do anything except to beat a humiliating retreat.
On 7 January 1935, during a summit in Rome, Laval essentially told Mussolini that Italy had a "free hand" in the Horn of Africa and that France would not oppose an Italian invasion of Abyssinia (now Ethiopia).
[38] In his "peace speech" of May 21, 1935, Hitler stated, "In particular, they [the Germans] will uphold and fulfill all obligations arising out of the Locarno Treaty, so long as the other parties are on their side ready to stand by that pact".
[43] British Foreign Secretary Anthony Eden believed that by 1940, Germany might rejoin the League of Nations, accept arms restrictions, and give up European territorial claims if they could remilitarise the Rhineland, reclaim former African colonies, and have "economic priority along the Danube".
[47] Later that month, during a London visit, Neurath informed Eden that Germany would reconsider its stance on the Locarno Pact if other signatories made bilateral agreements that conflicted with its spirit.
[49] Both Neurath and State Secretary Prince Bernhard von Bülow felt the Franco-Soviet Pact violated the Locarno agreement but advised Hitler against seeking arbitration, fearing it would remove their excuse for remilitarisation.
This decision was influenced by several factors, including France's ratification of the Franco-Soviet pact, political instability in Paris, Germany's economic challenges, and the disruption caused by the Second Italo-Abyssinian War, which weakened the Stresa Front.
French Ambassador André François-Poncet confronted Prince Bernhard von Bülow, the State Secretary at the Auswärtiges Amt, in a January 1936 meeting, accusing Germany of planning to send troops back to the Rhineland.
[61] The Rhineland coup is often seen as the moment when Hitler could have been stopped with very little effort; the German forces involved in the move were small, compared to the much larger, and at the time more powerful, French military.
[72] With his eye on public opinion abroad, Hitler made a point of stressing that the remilitarisation was not intended to threaten anyone else, but was instead only a defensive measure imposed on Germany by what he claimed were the menacing actions of France and the Soviet Union.
Former British Prime Minister David Lloyd George stated in the House of Commons that Hitler's actions in the wake of the Franco-Soviet pact were fully justified, and he would have been a traitor to Germany if he had not protected his country.
[76] In Germany, the news that the Rhineland had been remilitarised was greeted with wild celebrations all over the country; the British historian Sir Ian Kershaw wrote of March 1936 that: "People were besides themselves with delight ...
[82] General Maurice Gamelin, for instance, informed the French government that challenging Germany in the Rhineland would require full mobilisation, costing 30 million francs per day and possibly escalating into a full-blown war.
[citation needed] The British Foreign Office for its part expressed a great deal of frustration over Hitler's action in unilaterally taking what London had proposed to negotiate.
Besides opposition within the cabinet, the Anglo-French staff talks generated furious criticism from David Lloyd George and the Beaverbrook and Rothermere press who fumed, as the Daily Mail put it in a leader, over "military arrangements that will commit us to some war at the call of others".
[111] During a House of Commons Foreign Affairs Committee meeting on 12 March, Winston Churchill, a backbench Conservative MP, argued for Anglo-French co-ordination under the League of Nations to help France challenge the remilitarisation of the Rhineland,[112] but this never happened.
On 14 October 1936 King Leopold III of Belgium said in a speech: "The reoccupation of the Rhineland, by ending the Locarno arrangement, has almost brought us back to our international position before the war... We must follow a policy exclusively and entirely Belgian.
[120] A major problem for the Soviet Union to go to war with Germany was the lack of a common German-Soviet frontier, which would require both the Polish and Romanian governments to grant transit right to the Red Army.
[126] At the time, the British Foreign Office estimated that Britain, France, Romania, Belgium, Czechoslovakia and the Soviet Union were the only nations in the entire world willing to impose sanctions on Germany.
[127] The Swedish, Danish, Norwegian, Polish, Dutch, Greek, Swiss, Turkish, Chilean, Estonian, Portuguese, Spanish, and Finnish ambassadors to the League all let it be known that they regarded sanctions on Germany as "economic suicide" for their countries.
[136] The meeting ended with the conclusion that there now were only two great powers in Eastern Europe (Germany and the Soviet Union), and the best that could be hoped for was to avoid another war, which would almost certainly mean the loss of their small nations' independence, regardless of the winner.
Together with its millions killed and the destruction of its cities, he believed that from the German viewpoint, the best thing to do would have been accepting Versailles, rather than starting a new war, which ended with Germany being totally crushed, partitioned and occupied.
