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Remilitarization of the Rhineland
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The Remilitarization of the Rhineland by the German Army took place on 7 March 1936 when German forces entered the Rhineland.
r Articles 42 and 44 of the 1919 Treaty of Versailles—imposed on Germany by the Allies after the Great War—Germany was "forbidden to maintain or construct any fortification either on the Left bank of the Rhine or on the Right bank to the west of a line drawn fifty kilometres to the East of the Rhine".
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The Remilitarization of the Rhineland by the German Army took place on 7 March 1936 when German forces entered the Rhineland.
Background
Under Articles 42 and 44 of the 1919 Treaty of Versailles—imposed on Germany by the Allies after the Great War—Germany was "forbidden to maintain or construct any fortification either on the Left bank of the Rhine or on the Right bank to the west of a line drawn fifty kilometres to the East of the Rhine". If a violation "in any manner whatsoever" of this Article took place, this "shall be regarded as committing a hostile act...and as calculated to disturb the peace of the world".
The Locarno Treaties, signed in 1925 by Germany, France, Italy and Britain, stated that the Rhineland should continue its demilitarized status permanently. Locarno was regarded as important as it was a voluntary German acceptance of the Rhineland's demilitarized status as opposed to the diktat (dictate) of Versailles.
The Versailles Treaty also stipulated that the Allied military forces would evacuate the Rhineland in 1935, although they actually evacuated in 1930. The British delegation at the Hague Conference on German reparations in 1929 (headed by Philip Snowden, Chancellor of the Exchequer, and including Arthur Henderson, Foreign Secretary) proposed that the reparations paid by Germany should be reduced and that the British and French forces should evacuate the Rhineland. Henderson persuaded the skeptical French Premier, Aristide Briand, to accept that all Allied occupation forces would evacuate the Rhineland by June 1930. The last British soldiers left in late 1929 and the last French soldiers left in June 1930.
German remilitarization
In early 1936, the British Foreign Secretary Sir Anthony Eden had secretly unveiled a plan for a “general settlement” that was intended to resolve all of Germany’s grievances. Eden’s plan called for German return to the League of Nations, acceptance of arms limitations, and renunciation of territorial claims in Europe in exchange for remilitarization of the Rhineland, return of the former German African colonies and German "economic priority along the Danube" As such, the Germans were informed that the British were willing to begin talks on allowing the Rhineland to be remilitarized in exchange for a “air pact” outlawing bombing and a German promise not to use force to change their borders. Eden defined his goal as that of a “general statement”, which sought "a return to the normality of the twenties and the creation of conditions in which Hitler could behave like Stresemann" (Gustav Stresemann was a former German foreign minister much respected in Britain) The offer to discuss remilitarizing the Rhineland in exchange for a “air pact” placed the British in a weak moral position to oppose a unilateral remilitarization, since the very offer to consider remilitarization implied that remilitarization was not considered a vital security threat, but something to be traded, which thus led the British to oppose the way that the act of remilitarization was carried out (i.e. namely unilaterally) as opposed to the act itself.
During January 1936, the German Chancellor and Führer Adolf Hitler decided to reoccupy the Rhineland. Originally Hitler had planned to remilitarize the Rhineland in 1937, but chose in early 1936 to move re-militarization forward by a year for several reasons, namely the ratification by the French National Assembly of the Franco-Soviet pact of 1935 allowed him to present his coup both at home and abroad as a defensive move against Franco-Soviet "encirclement"; the expectation that France would be better armed in 1937; the government in Paris had just fallen and caretaker government was in charge; economic problems at home required the need for a foreign policy success to restore the regime's popularity; the Italo-Ethiopian War, which had set Britain against Italy had effectively broken up the Stresa Front; and apparently because Hitler simply did not feel like waiting an extra year In his biography of Hitler, the British historian Sir Ian Kershaw argued that the primary reasons for the decision to remilitarize in 1936 as opposed to 1937 were due to Hitler’s preference for dramatic unilateral coups de grace to obtain what could be easily be achieved via quiet talks, and because of Hitler’s need for a foreign policy triumph to distract public attention from the major economic crisis which gripped Germany in 1935–36.
On the 12th of February Hitler informed his War Minister, Field Marshal Werner von Blomberg, of his intentions and asked the head of the Army, General Werner von Fritsch, how long it would take to transport a few infantry battalions and an artillery battery into the Rhineland. Fritsch answered that it would take three days organization but he was in favour of negotiation as he believed that the German Army was in no state for armed combat with the French Army. The Chief of the General Staff, General Ludwig Beck warned Hitler that the German Army would be unable to successfully defend Germany against a possible retaliatory French attack. Hitler reassured Fritsch that he would ensure that the German forces would leave at once if the French intervened militarily to halt their advance. The operation was codenamed Winter Exercise. On February 22, 1936, Benito Mussolini who was angry about the League of Nations sanctions applied against his country for aggression against Ethiopia told the German Ambassador in Rome, Ulrich von Hassell, that Italy would dishonour Locarno if Germany were to remilitarize the Rhineland. Even if Mussolini had wanted to honour Locarno, practical problems would have arisen as the bulk of the Italian Army was at that time engaged in the conquest of Ethiopia, and as there is no common Italo-German frontier.
Historians debate the relation between Hitler’s decision to remilitarize the Rhineland in 1936 and his broad long-term goals (if indeed he had any). Those historians who favour an “intentionist” interpretation of German foreign policy such as Klaus Hildebrand and the late Andreas Hillgruber see the Rhineland remilitarization as only one “stage” of Hitler’s stufenplan (stage by stage plan) for world conquest. Those historians who take a “functionist” interpretation see the Rhineland remilitarization more as ad hoc improvised response on the part of Hitler to the economic crisis of 1936 as a cheap and easy way of restoring the regime’s popularity. As Hildebrand himself has noted, these interpretations are not necessarily mutally exclusive. Hildebrand has argued that though Hitler did have a “programme” for world domination, that the way in which Hitler attempted to excute his “programme” was highly improvised and much subject to structural factors both on the international stage and domestically that were often not under Hitler’s control.
Not long after dawn on March 7, 1936, nineteen German infantry battalions and a handful of planes entered the Rhineland. They reached the river Rhine by 11:00 a.m. and then three battalions crossed to the west bank of the Rhine. When German reconnaissance learned that thousands of French soldiers were congregating on the Franco-German border, General Blomberg begged Hitler to evacuate the German forces. Hitler inquired whether the French forces had actually crossed the border and when informed that they had not, he assured Blomberg that they would wait until this happened.
Heinz Guderian, a German general interviewed by French officers after the Second World War, claimed: "If you French had intervened in the Rhineland in 1936 we should have been sunk and Hitler would have fallen". Hitler himself later said:
"The forty-eight hours after the march into the Rhineland were the most nerve-racking in my life. If the French had then marched into the Rhineland we would have had to withdraw with our tails between our legs, for the military resources at our disposal would have been wholly inadequate for even a moderate resistance."
Reactions
France
Historians writing without benefit of access to the French archives (which were not opened until the mid-1970s) such as William L. Shirer in his books The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich (1960) and The Collapse of the Third Republic (1969) have claimed that France, although possessing at this time superior armed forces compared to Germany, including after a possible mobilization 100 infantry divisions, was psychologically unprepared to use force against Germany. Historians such as the American historian Stephen A. Schuker who have examined the relevant French primary sources have rejected Shirer's claims as the work of an amateur historian writing without access to the primary sources, and have found that a major paralyzing factor on French policy was the economic situation. France's top military official, General Maurice Gamelin, informed the French government that the only way to remove the Germans from the Rhineland was to mobilize the French Army, which would cost the French treasury 30 million francs/per day. Gamelin assumed a worse case scenario in which a French move into the Rhineland would spark an all-out Franco-German war, a case which required full mobilization. Gamelin's analysis was supported by the War Minister, General Louis Maurin who told the Cabinet that it was unconceivable that France could reverse the German remilitarization without full mobilization.
At the same time, in late 1935 – early 1936 France was gripped by a financial crisis with the French Treasury informing the government that sufficient cash reserves to maintain the value of the franc as currently pegged by the gold standard in regard to the U.S. dollar and the British pound no longer existed, and only a huge foreign loan on the money markets of London and New York could prevent the value of the franc from experiencing a disastrous downfall. Because France was on the verge of elections scheduled for the spring of 1936, devaluation of the franc, which viewed as abhorrent by large sections of French public opinion was rejected by the government of Albert Sarraut as politically unacceptable. Fears of investors of a war with Germany were not conductive towards raising the necessary loans to stabilize the franc. The German remilitarization of the Rhineland by sparking fears of war, worsened the French economic crisis by causing a massive cash flow out of France as worried investors shifted their savings towards what was felt to be safer foreign markets. On March 18th, 1936 Wilfrid Baumgartner, the director of the Mouvement général des fonds (the French equivalent of a permanent under-secretary) reported to the government that France for all intents and purposes was bankrupt. Only by desperate arm-twisting from the major French financial institutions did Baumgartner managed to obtain enough in the way of short-term loans to prevent France from defaulting on her debts and keeping the value of the franc from sliding too far in March 1936. Given the financial crisis, the French government feared that there were insufficient funds to cover the costs of mobilization, and that a full-blown war scare caused by mobilization would only exacerbate the financial crisis.
Upon hearing of the German move, the French government issued a statement strongly hinting that military action was a possible option. When the French Foreign Secretary, Pierre Étienne Flandin, heard of the remilitarization he immediately went to London to consult the British Prime Minister, Stanley Baldwin, as Flandin wished for domestic political reasons to find a way of shifting the onus on not taking action onto British shoulders. Baldwin asked Flandin what the French Government had in mind but Flandin said they had not yet decided. Flandin went back to Paris and consulted the French Government what their response should be. They agreed that "France would place all her forces at the disposal of the League of Nations to oppose a violation of the Treaties". Since the French government for economic reasons had already ruled out mobilization, and hence war as a way of reversing Hitler's Rhineland coup, it was decided that the best that France could do under the situation was to use the crisis to obtain the "continental commitment" (i.e. a British commitment to send large ground forces to the defense of France on the same scale of World War I). The strategy of Flandin was to strongly imply to the British that France was willing to go to war with Germany over the Rhineland issue in the expectation that the British not willing to see their Locarno commitments lead them into a war with the Germans over a issue that many in Britain felt that the Germans were in the right over. As such, Flandin expected London to apply pressure for “restraint” on Paris. The price of the French “restraint” in regards to Rhineland provocation, an open violation of both the Versailles and Locarno treaties was to be the British “continental commitment” unequivalently linking British security to French security, and committing the British to send another large expeditionary force to defend France in the event of a German attack.
During his visit to London to consult with the British Prime Minister Stanley Baldwin and Foreign Secretary Sir Anthony Eden, Flandin carried out in what the Canadian historian Robert J. Young called "the performance of a lifetime", in which he expressed a great deal of outrage at the German move, stated quite openly that France was prepared to go to war over the issue, and strongly criticized his British hosts for the demands for French "restraint" while not offering to do anything for French sécurité (security). As intended by Flandin, Eden was opposed to the French taking military action, and appealed for French “restraint”. Not aware of what Flandin was attempting to do, French military officials urged the government to tell Flandin to tone down his language. In the face of Flandin's tactics, on March 19th, 1936 the British government made a vague statement linking British security to French security, and for the first time since World War I agreed to Anglo-French staff talks, albeit of very limited scope. Though disappointed with the British offers which the French felt were too little, the French nonetheless considered the pledges of British support gained in 1936 to be worthwhile achievement, especially given that for economic reasons mobilization was not considered a realistic option in 1936. Those French officials such as René Massigli who were believed in the idea of an Anglo-French alliance as the best way of stopping German expansionism expressed a great deal of disappointment that Britain was not prepared to do more for French sécurité. As part of an effort to secure more in the way of the long-desired "continental commitment" that had been a major goal of French foreign policy since 1919, Gamelin told the British military attaché that:
The generalissimo of the French Army, General Gamelin, told the French government that if France countered the German forces and this caused a long war, France would be unable to win fighting alone and therefore would need British assistance. The French Government, with an upcoming general election in mind, decided against general mobilization of the French Army. The remilitarization removed the last hold France had over Germany and therefore ended the security France had gained from the Treaty of Versailles. As long as the Rhineland was demilitarized, the French could easily re-occupy the area and threaten the economically important Ruhr industrial area which was liable to French invasion if France believed the situation in Germany ever became a threat.
United Kingdom
The reaction in Britain was mixed, but they did not generally regard the remilitarization as harmful. Lord Lothian famously said it was no more than the Germans walking into their own backyard. George Bernard Shaw similarly claimed it was no different than if Britain had reoccupied Portsmouth. In his diary entry for 23 March, Harold Nicolson MP noted that “the feeling in the House [of Commons] is terribly pro-German, which means afraid of war”. During the Rhineland crisis of 1936, no public meetings or rallies were held anywhere in protest at the remilitarization of the Rhineland, and instead there were several “peace” rallies where it was demanded that Britain not use war to resolve the crisis.
The Prime Minister Stanley Baldwin claimed, with tears in his eyes, that Britain lacked the resources to enforce her treaty guarantees and that public opinion would not stand for military force anyway. The British Foreign Secretary, Anthony Eden, discouraged military action by the French and was against any financial or economic sanctions against Germany. Eden instead wanted Germany to pull out all but a symbolic number of troops, the number they said they were going to put in the first place, and then renegotiate. An additional factor that influenced British policy was the lack of the Dominion support. All of the Dominion High Commissioners in London, with South Africa and Canada being especially outspoken in this regard, made it quite clear that they would not go to war to restore the demilitarized status of the Rhineland, and that if Britain did so, she would be on her own. Ever since the Chanak Crisis of 1922, Britain had been keenly conscious that Dominion support could not be automatically assumed, and remembering the huge role the Dominions had played in the victory of 1918 could not consider fighting another major war without Dominion support.
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. As a Foreign Office memo complained “Hitler has deprived us of the possibility of making to him a concession which might otherwise have been a useful bargaining counter in our hands in the general negotiations with Germany which we had it in contemplation to initiate”. Through the British had agreed to staff talks with the French as the price of French “restraint”, many British ministers were unhappy with these talks. The Home Secretary Sir John Simon wrote to Eden and Baldwin that staff talks to be held with the French after the Rhineland remilitarization would led the French perceive that:
In response to objections like Simon, the British ended the staff talks with the French five days after they had begun; Anglo-French staff talks were not to occur again until February 1939 in the aftermath of the Dutch War Scare of January 1939. However, the rather hazily phrased British statement linking British security to French sécurité was not disallowed out of the fear that it would irrepairably damage Anglo-French relations, which as the British historian A. J. P. Taylor observed meant should France become involved in a war with Germany, there would be at a minimum a strong moral case because of the statement of March 19th, 1936 for Britain to fight on the side of France.
Until the statement by Neville Chamberlain on March 31, 1939 offering the “guarantee” of Poland, there were no British security commitments in Eastern Europe beyond the Covenant of the League of Nations. For most of the inter-war period, the British were extremely reluctant to make security commitments in Eastern Europe, regarding the region as too unstable and likely to embroil Britain in unwanted wars. In 1925, the British Foreign Secretary, Sir Austen Chamberlain had famously stated in public that the Polish Corridor was “not worth the bones of a single British grenadier”. However, because of the French alliance system in Eastern Europe, the so-called Cordon sanitaire, any German attack on France’s Eastern European allies would cause a Franco-German war, and because of the statement of March 19th, 1936 a Franco-German war would create strong pressure for British intervention on the side of France. This all the case because unlike the Locarno, where Britain was committed to come to France’s defence only in the event of a German attack, the British statement of March 19th as part of an effort to be as vague as possible only stated Britain considered French security to be vital national need, and did not distinguish between a German attack on France vs. France going to war with Germany in the event of a German attack on a member of the cordon sanitarie. Thus, in this way, the British statement of March 1936 offered not only a direct British commitment to defend France (albeit phrased in exceedingly ambiguous language), but also indirectly to the Eastern European states of the cordon sanitaire. In this way, the British government found itself drawn into the Central European crisis of 1938 because of the Franco-Czechoslovak alliance of 1924 meant any German-Czechoslovak war would automatically become a Franco-German war, and if the latter event occurred, the statement of March 19th, 1936 would create strong pressure for British intervention. It was because of this indirect security commitment via the proxy of France that the British involved themselves in the Central European crisis of 1938 despite the widespread feeling that the German-Czechoslovak dispute did not concern Britain directly.
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 remilitarization of the Rhineland, but this never happened.
Belgium
Belgium concluded an alliance with France in 1920 but after the remilitarization Belgium opted again for neutrality. On 14 October 1936 King Leopold III of Belgium said in a speech:
Poland
Poland announced that the Franco-Polish Military Alliance signed in 1921 would be honoured, although the treaty stipulated that Poland would aid France only if France was invaded. Poland did agree to mobilize its forces if France did first, however they abstained from voting against the remilitarization in the Council of the League of Nations.
League of Nations
When the Council of the League of Nations met in London, the only delegate in favour of sanctions against Germany was Maxim Litvinov, the representative of the Soviet Union. The Council declared, though not unanimously, that the remilitarization constituted a breach of the Treaties of Versailles and Locarno. Hitler was invited to plan a new scheme for European security and he responded by claiming he had "no territorial claims in Europe" and wanted a twenty-five year pact of non-aggression with Britain and France. However, when the British Government inquired further into this proposed pact they did not receive a reply.
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