JEWISH WORLD

JEWISH WORLD • APRIL 1 - 7, 2022 11 admitting — bring the Nazi dicta- tor and his regime tumbling down. They let the chance slip by.” A fter World War I, the Rhine- land, a portion of Germany that borders on France, Belgium By KARL GROSSMAN I f the German army had been opposed when Hitler ordered 20,000 troops into the demilita- rized Rhineland in 1936, members of the German General Staff, in interrogations by U.S. military of- ficers and intelligence agents, said they would have moved to over- throw Hitler. In a recent interview, Peter M. F. Sichel said this was what both U.S. Army and intelligence agents were told by members of the German General Staff. Sichel was an officer duringWorld War II in the Office of Strategic Ser- vices (OSS), rising to captain, and after the Central IntelligenceAgency was established became chief of the CIA base in Berlin. He said many of the German General Staff “hated Hitler.” They looked down at his status as a cor- poral in World War I. Moreover, “the General Staff told him that they could not face the French. They did not have the means — the troops and the armaments — to do this.” S ending the German army into the Rhineland became a “gamble of Hitler’s and he was successful.” That was because France and Great Brit- ain didn’t mount a challenge, said Si- chel. This was even though the move was in contravention of the Treaty of Versailles and the Locarno Trea- ties. And it was even though the “the French had a very professional army and then they had universal con- scription.” The British, meanwhile, “had enormous problems” notably involving unemployment. “It was hended at the time.” It “opened the way as only Hitler (and Churchill, alone in England) seemed to real- ize, to vast new opportunities in a Europe which was not only shaken but whose strategic situation was irrevocably changed by the pa- rading of three German battalions the middle of the Depression.” There was also a British government policy of appeasement. A variety of historians have also said that strong military action by the French and British to oppose the German move was a moment in time when Hitler could have ended up removed. William L. Shirer in his compre- hensive 1960 book The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich, A History of Nazi Germany , quotes the testi- mony at the Nuremberg Tribunal of Alfred Jodl, chief of the Oper- ations Staff of the Wehrmacht , the German armed forces, through World War II, that: “Consider- ing the situation we were in, the French covering army could have blown us to pieces.” Shirer writes that the French army “could have” done this, and “had it, that almost certainly would have been the end of Hitler, after which history might have taken quite a different and brighter turn than it did, for the dictator could never have survived such a fiasco.” Shirer also cites Hitler himself say- ing, “The forty-eight hours after the march into the Rhineland were the most nerve-racking in my life. If the French had marched into the Rhine- land, 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.” Hit- ler also said: “A retreat on our part would have spelled collapse.” Wrote Shirer: “In retrospect, it is easy to see that Hitler’s successful gamble in the Rhineland brought him a victory more staggering and more fatal in its immense conse- quences than could be compre- across the Rhine bridges.” Declared Shirer: “In March 1936 the two Western democra- cies were given their last chance to halt, without the risk of a serious war, the rise of a militarized, ag- gressive, totalitarian Germany and, in fact — as we have seen Hitler ANALYSIS German soldiers march into the Rhineland, March 8, 1936, in direct contravention of the Treaty of Versailles and the Locarno Pact, signed after World War I. A Missed Opportunity When Hitler could have been overthrown continued on page 27 If France or Britain had responded militarily to Hitler’s sending troops into the Rhineland, he would have been nished.