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East Germany Foreign Policy
As führer, Hitler directed foreign policy. In 1933 he
withdrew Germany from the League of Nations, aiming to destroy
the league's collective security system, and began German
rearmament in preparation for eastward expansion. Hitler's
demands, carefully timed and swiftly executed, brought about
first diplomatic, then military, dominance of the Third Reich
over Europe. The announcement of German rearmament in March 1935
was the Third Reich's first overt violation of the Treaty of
Versailles. In this announcement, the führer proclaimed general
conscription, stated his intention to expand the army from its
legal size of 100,000 to 550,000 troops, and declared the
creation of a German air force. Britain, France, and Italy
responded by sending representatives to a conference in Stresa,
Italy, to discuss countermeasures. Hitler succeeded, however, in
fomenting the rapid disintegration of the Stresa Front by drawing
Britain into an Anglo-German naval agreement that would guarantee
British naval superiority. The Anglo-German Naval Pact of June
1935, itself a violation of the Treaty of Versailles, implied
tacit British acceptance of German rearmament. France and Italy
subsequently abandoned their plans for punitive action against
Germany.
Hitler next endeavored to draw Italy away from the Western
powers. After lending verbal support to Benito Mussolini's
invasion of Ethiopia. Hitler marched German troops into the
Rhineland in March 1936. The German military presence in the
Rhineland, a violation of the Versailles and Locarno treaties,
suggested the forthcoming alliance between Nazi Germany and
fascist Italy and revealed the weakness of the Western
democracies. Shortly thereafter, Hitler and Mussolini joined to
assist General Francisco Franco in overthrowing Spain's
republican government during the Spanish Civil War (1936-39); in
November 1936, Germany and Italy formed the Berlin-Rome Axis. In
the same year, Germany, Italy, and Japan were diplomatically
united in the Anti-Comintern Pact.
The next phase in the führer's tactics of encroachment was
the execution of a plan aimed at eastward expansion. The plan for
eventual military aggression was originally discussed at a
conference in November 1937 in which Hitler met in secret with
German military and political advisers. His immediate aims--the
annexation of Austria and the Czechoslovak Sudetenland--were to
be accomplished by pseudolegal means on the basis of a unilateral
national-ethnic revision of the Treaty of Versailles that
provided for the incorporation of territories with German
populations into the Third Reich. In February 1938, Hitler
announced his intention to annex Austria and called for the
resignation of Chancellor Kurt von Schuschnigg. The chancellor
attempted to avert annexation (Anschluss) by calling for a
national plebiscite that would ratify Austria's independence. The
attempt failed, and Schuschnigg stepped down. Arthur von SeyssInquart , the new Austrian chancellor and a Nazi puppet, invited
German troops to enter Austria. On March 13, Austria was declared
a province of the German Reich.
Hitler next prepared to annex Czechoslovakia. In April 1938,
he instructed the Sudeten Nazi leader to organize disruptive
nationalist agitation in the German-populated Sudetenland.
Czechoslovakia, aware of Hitler's annexationist ambitions,
appealed to Britain and France for assistance. British prime
minister Neville Chamberlain, however, refused to commit his
country to defend Czechoslovakia and instead organized the Munich
Conference of September 1938 in which Britain and France agreed
to German annexation of the Sudetenland. The territory was
annexed on October 1. In March 1939, Germany occupied the Czechpopulated western provinces of Bohemia and Moravia, and Slovakia
was made a German puppet-state.
When Germany occupied Bohemia and Moravia, Britain and France
finally became convinced of Hitler's imperialist-expansionist
objectives and announced their intention to defend the
sovereignty of Poland, a country that was not German culturally,
politically, or linguistically. In April 1939, Hitler raised
claims to the Polish city of Danzig; anticipating war, the führer
instructed the military to prepare invasion plans. A month later,
Germany and Italy signed the Pact of Steel, a formal military
alliance. After negotiations to form an anti-Nazi alliance with
the Western powers had repeatedly stalemated, the Soviet Union
signed a nonaggression pact with Germany, thus freeing Hitler to
act against Poland. On September 1, 1939, German troops invaded
Poland. Britain and France declared war on Germany two days
later.
Data as of July 1987
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