Review: 1938: Hitler’s Gamble - The Jewish Chronicle

By Giles MacDonogh
Constable, £20

Few would disagree with Giles MacDonogh’s assertion that 1938 was a year of “cataclysmal [sic] change” for Germany. At the beginning of the year, Hitler was in firm control but the army still wielded considerable independence, Germany lay within the borders laid down by the Treaty of Versailles, and its Jews, though barred from public life, retained their property and, in the author’s words, “continued to lead relatively normal lives” — a disputable assertion.

By the end of the year, all that had changed utterly: Germany had annexed Austria and the Sudetenland and was poised to mop up the rest of Czechoslovakia; Hitler was in total command of the armed forces; and the Jews had suffered the full force of Nazi persecution, culminating in Kristallnacht in November and a huge increase in deportation to the newly built concentration camps. Perhaps, in the spirit of sardonic Jewish humour, MacDonogh should have titled his book Hitler: No More Mr Nice Guy.

MacDonogh takes us meticulously through that fateful year, day by day, month by month, to show how Hitler gradually consolidated his hold on all the levers of state power. His thesis is that, far from planning the way forward, Hitler was a consummate opportunist who seized on every chance opening to advance his cause, such as the scandals that hit the Minister of War, Blomberg, who married a prostitute, and the anti-Nazi head of the army, General von Fritsch, accused of homosexual dalliances. Both careers ended at the right moment for Hitler.

The ultimate gamble was, of course, Munich, which demonstrated that the Western powers had no stomach for a fight — as Ribbentrop had constantly reassured the more sceptical Führer.

Would that the chiefs of the German Army had possessed the same gambler’s instinct, as, disgusted by Hitler’s incompetence and dishonesty and appalled at the Nazis’ disastrous handling of the economy, they prepared a coup in the autumn only to have Chamberlain’s weakness pull the rug out from under their feet.

A major proportion of the book is devoted to the deteriorating situation of Central Europe’s Jews as 1938 progressed. Most of that terrible story will be familiar to this newspaper’s readers, which does nothing to lessen the frustration and outrage evoked — seven decades on — of the Nazi noose inexorably tightening.

Surprise, too: it seems barely believable that Adolf Eichmann, of all people, was a keen supporter of Jewish emigration — albeit forced — to Palestine, until the sheer weight of numbers of Jews to be disposed led him to switch his focus to mass extermination.

MacDonogh marshals his material and his sources skillfully, and his interest in this side of the story of 1938 becomes clear in his Epilogue, where he reveals that his paternal grandfather’s family were wealthy, influential (and decidedly racy) Viennese Jews who were caught up in the events of that year.

Astonishingly, all but one of them managed to escape and rebuild their lives elsewhere, one long-term result of
which is this excellent and stimulating book.