What Hitler Knew - By Zachary Shore 2003

Imagine yourself as one of Hitler’s diplomats. From the very beginning of
Hitler’s rule in , you find yourself serving a violent regime. Each day
you read or hear about mass arrests, beatings, and murders. Communists,
Socialists, trade unionists, Catholics, Jews, and others are being perse-
cuted by your government. SA thugs in uniforms roam the streets in para-
military bands, picking fights with those who fail to salute them, beating
and sometimes slaying their victims.
You try to convince yourself that you are safe, that you are not an “un-
desirable.” You do not belong to any of the targeted groups. But you are
also not a Nazi Party member. And your colleagues at the ministry, all aris-
tocratic, “old school” diplomats, are under increasing pressure from the
newly formed state security services.
You can no longer speak freely on the telephone without fear that your
line is tapped and your voice recorded. Conversations among colleagues
and friends are charged with an undercurrent of tension. Your mail and
telegrams are monitored, so you take greater care in choosing your words.
The newspapers you read are censored or banned. And after two months of
serving this new regime, parliamentary democracy disappears.
If this were not enough, your position and purview are threatened by
Party interlopers. Your authority is challenged as rival institutions are charged with handling aspects of foreign policy previously within your
domain. And these ministries and their ministers are aggressively seeking
control of the information they need to get ahead—and get you out.
And you face yet another dilemma. Your boss, the führer, holds his
cards so close to his chest that you often don’t know precisely what he
wants. Wanting to serve your country and keep your job, you try to over-
come this uncertainty by ascertaining the chancellor’s will however you
can, even circumventing standard operating procedures, withholding and
manipulating information, and spying when you must.
In the back of your mind you worry that the Party might one day turn
against you. Then, in the summer of , after eighteen months of mount-
ing tension, you witness the end of the rule of law. As thousands are
arrested and an unknown number murdered, you soon learn that conser-
vatives of your ilk are among the victims. Of the three most recent chan-
cellors, you hear that one was shot to death in his home along with his
wife. Another was placed under house arrest as his staff members were
shot to death across their desks or sent to concentration camps. A third,
you are told, fled into exile. And within your own ministry, colleagues are
arrested and others are sent into hiding, fearing for their lives.
Then the situation worsens. Your government imposes racial purity
laws, and some of your most trusted colleagues—the ones you counted on
for information and support—are forced to resign, some left to flee the
country, others doomed to concentration camps. Gestapo and SS intimida-
tion intensify. By the end of , an extraordinary outburst of violence
sweeps across your country leaving thousands of German Jews dead,
wounded, or arrested, synagogues and businesses burned to the ground—
all under your government’s watchful eye. And with each passing day, your
country marches ever closer to the abyss of total war.For much of the s, Hitler enjoyed immense popularity. Torchlight pa-
rades, symbols of strength and unity, the restoration of German power
and pride, all held tremendous appeal, not simply for the masses, but for
the elites as well. Hitler’s leading diplomats—the advisers he inherited
from the Weimar regime and on whom he depended for continuity, intelli-
gence, and knowledge of foreign capitals—shared many of the führer’s broader political aims. They cheered the recapture of the Rhineland; they
applauded the dismantling of the Versailles Treaty. They welcomed a re-
turn of Germany’s rightful place as a great power and basked in Hitler’s
torchlit glory. This was one world in which the diplomats existed. It was
the outer world, the one they could safely share with others. But below the
surface of Germany’s foreign policy successes lay a darker world, cast in
the shadow of torchlight parades. And its climate was one of tension, un-
certainty, and fear.
What Hitler Knew examines how governmental officials reached deci-
sions on foreign policy under the stresses and strains of a violent dictator-
ship. It considers both the regime’s domestic political environment and its
control of information. Both are critical to understanding why Hitler made
some of the key diplomatic and military decisions that have preoccupied
historians for more than fifty years. Why did Stalin sign the Nazi-Soviet
pact if he knew Hitler planned to invade? Why did Hitler risk a war with
France in  when Germany was almost certain to lose? Did British
Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain actually seek a secret nonaggression
pact with Hitler on the eve of war? As important as these questions are for
an understanding of the period and the Cold War that followed, they are
not the principal subjects of this book. Rather, they are the key moments
through which decision making in Nazi Germany is examined.
What Hitler Knew asks upon what information Hitler’s decisions
were based. It attempts to determine what information his advisers brought
him and what they manipulated or withheld altogether. Given that Hitler
was not the sole decision maker in his regime, it also focuses on the diplo-
mats who influenced Germany’s foreign policy. How Foreign Ministry per-
sonnel, from Neurath to Ribbentrop, reached their own decisions is as
much the subject of this study as is Hitler. Although at times it will be nec-
essary to assess these men’s own personal inclinations to determine how
their respective ideologies and psychologies affected their behavior, the
primary focus remains the manner in which they received, controlled, and
forwarded information.
Information control exists in every regime, and in most bureaucracies
information really does equal power. But in Hitler’s Reich the near obses-
sive control of information held consequences for war and peace. Between
 and , there was a gradual breakdown of traditional decision-making processes, yet this never reduced the advisers’ influence. In fact, it
increased it. Until the outbreak of war in , with the signing of the Nazi-
Soviet pact and the secret Anglo-German negotiations, Hitler’s advisers
manipulated policy by limiting what Hitler knew.
Ironically, Hitler’s power to make informed decisions was limited by
the very system he created. By rarely confiding in his advisers and by pit-
ting each against the other, he produced a constant sense of uncertainty
within the regime. Uncertainty grew to a climate of fear as state-sponsored
violence and intimidation affected even the leading decision makers. Yet in-
stead of making his advisers more cautious, the frenzied environment fos-
tered greater risk. They tightened their grip on information and advocated
more dangerous policies.
The reasons why Hitler’s advisers exerted unusually strong control
over the “information arsenal” (the cache of intelligence reports, sensitive
diplomatic traffic, and other vital sources of information) are numerous.
Sometimes they reacted to political rivalries, seeking to gain favor with the
führer and outshine their colleagues. Sometimes they wanted to affect pol-
icy outcomes more in line with their individual worldviews. And some-
times they reacted out of fear. Whatever their motivations, they rose or fell
in Hitler’s Reich depending on how well they could wield the only weapon
at their command—the knowledge they gathered from the documents
that crossed their desks.
If the dictum “knowledge is power” contains any truth, then it must be
equally true that lack of knowledge limits power. This is a book about power
and its limitations. It is a study of how the control of knowledge—or in-
formation—affected decision making in Nazi Germany. And it is a por-
trait of how a dictator’s seeming strength can actually be his weakest link.
The common perception of a dictator is of a man who rules with an
iron fist. He decides independently what course he will take, he outlines
policy, and his orders are obeyed. The actual power of a dictator, of
course, is far more limited—limited in part by the information at his dis-
posal. Once a leader ceases to make rational decisions, as was increas-
ingly the case with Hitler during the war, the flow of information be-comes far less relevant. So long as a leader operates with a semblance of
rational thinking, as Hitler indeed did from  to , he remains con-
strained in part by what he knows. This is not to suggest that the more in-formation an individual possesses, the better his decisions will necessarily
be. However, the less he receives vital information, the more his options
will be limited.
The book proceeds chronologically, exploring most of Hitler’s major
foreign policy decisions from the seizure of power to the outbreak of war. It
investigates the background and motivations behind the alignment with
Germany’s sworn enemy Poland, the brazen and bloodless recapture of
the Rhineland, the removal of Neurath and rise of Ribbentrop, the secret
Anglo-German nonaggression pact talks, and the internal intrigues be-
hind the Nazi-Soviet pact. Each case study highlights the role of informa-
tion flow and the domestic political environment for their impact on each
decision’s outcome. The book draws on a range of sources from several
countries and languages, including newly available KGB archives and
records from the former East Germany.
One of the challenges for any study of Nazi Germany is to explain why,
given the Third Reich’s brutal nature, the non-Nazi diplomats continued to
serve. It is impossible to reconstitute all the influences that affected deci-
sion makers. How can the historian know of the important telephone call
about which Neurath made no record but which shaped his position on a
particular issue, or of the hushed conversation made in ministry corridors
that no one chose to record, or of the incriminating document that someone
deliberately destroyed? Undoubtedly, some continued to serve because they
agreed with Hitler’s general aims: revision of Versailles, reduction of Po-
land, and the restoration of German power, But even given their general
agreement, their continued support seems odd in light of state-sponsored
terror, and especially after the murder and arrest of many of their own col-
leagues during the “Night of the Long Knives” in . Some surely be-
lieved that they could act as breaks on the regime’s excesses or could steer
it in the proper direction. This they could only do from within the govern-
ment, since opposition from without appeared futile. Some must have felt
beholden to principles of duty and service to the Fatherland and believed
that resignation would be a betrayal of this sacred oath. Or is that how they
rationalized their inability to resign in protest? Still others came gradually,
and far more gradually than one might expect, to sabotage the regime, and
some of these men paid with their lives.