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On the battlefields of Spain, side by side with the new Axis partner Italy, the youthful Wehrmacht tested its new fighting power. While German guns and German bombs killed Spaniards, German warships sailed the Mediterranean and Atlantic on "nonintervention" patrol. The Axis, conceived in 1934, proclaimed in 1936, was developed by state visits between Berlin and Rome, cemented by a military alliance in May 1939. And in the capitals of Western Europe appeasement grew.
National Socialism was Depression's angry child. Say Authors Weyl and Jansen: "In the elections of May 1928 the National Socialists polled a total of only 809,000 votes in all Germany. By September 1930 the brown flood had swollen to 6,500,000 votes. . . . At the end of July 1932, with more than 13,500,000 votes and 230 [Reichstag] deputies, the Nazis reached the peak of their legal power in the Weimar State."
Appeasement's Food. As they had in Germany, so the Nazis strode to power in Europe. In February 1938 Hitler purged his generals' ranks, took over supreme command of the fighting forces, welded diplomacy and military might to Nazi policy. Six weeks later Austria was annexed. The next summer Nazi fury was unleashed in Czecho-Slovakia; in September Munich gave away the Sudetenland. Back to London went Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain waving a scrap of paper, croaking "peace in our time."
National Socialism grew to brutal manhood on appeasement's food. Hitler's Enabling Act had passed in 1933 because the Catholic Center Party voted for it, thinking that Hitlerism would run its brief course to ruin if left alone. Said a local Social Democratic leader whom Authors Weyl and Jansen call Kurt Riemann: "If we stick to the legal way our enemies will be destroyed, because right will be on our side." But Social Democracy was destroyed. "In the case of Germany the democrats of Weimar had relinquished the bastion without raising a hand in its defense; in the case of Czecho-Slovakia, it was the democrats of the world."
On the crest of a wave the Nazis rode into the fateful year of 1939. In March they took the remnants of the Czechoslovak State and appeasement died. On Sept. 1 German guns and bombs boomed forth the start of World War II. After Poland and the "phony war," Norway fell; Western Europe awoke—too late. On May 10, 1940, four years and two months after its first thin columns had marched into the Rhineland, the Wehrmacht roared into the Lowlands and France to Paris and the Armistice of Compiégne.
The Darkest Hour. Of the German Underground, Authors Weyl and Jansen write: "The collapse of the Western Front in 1940 ushered in the opposition's darkest hour in the war period.... Men and women who for years had worked in the Underground gave up their organizational connections. . . . 'Our attitude toward the Nazis and toward the regime has not changed one iota,' but what was the use?"