Hari Viswanath

November 5, 1937. Nearly two years before the war, Adolf Hitler gathers his top military and foreign-policy chiefs in Berlin and, behind closed doors, lays out his intention to wage wars of conquest in Europe. A colonel named Hossbach takes notes, and the record he produces, the Hossbach Memorandum, would one day be used at Nuremberg as evidence that the Second World War was not a tragic accident but a plan. The meeting was supposed to be about something mundane, a squabble over the allocation of steel and raw materials among the armed services. But Hitler turned it into something far larger. For hours he held forth to the assembled leaders, his war and foreign ministers, the heads of the army, navy, and air force, about his vision for Germany's future, and that vision was war. He declared that Germany needed Lebensraum, living space, which could only be won by force, and he laid out a timetable for aggression, aiming to secure Germany's position by around 1943 to 1945 at the latest, with the first targets being Austria and Czechoslovakia, to be seized to strengthen Germany for the greater struggle to come. It was a chilling preview of exactly what happened. Within months Hitler would annex Austria, and within a year he would take the Sudetenland and then all of Czechoslovakia, precisely the steps he outlined. The Hossbach meeting is one of the clearest windows into his intentions, a moment when he spelled out to his own commanders that he meant to plunge Europe into war for conquest and racial empire. And it is fascinating partly for the reaction in the room. This was not a gathering of fanatical Nazis nodding along. Several of the professional military men present, and the foreign minister, were alarmed. The war minister, Blomberg, and the army commander, Fritsch, raised objections, warning of the dangers, cautioning that Britain and France might not stand aside, that Germany was not ready, that this course was reckless. These were conservative officers of the old school, willing to rebuild German power but wary of Hitler's headlong rush toward a general war. Their caution did not save them; it may have doomed them. Within a few months of this meeting, both Blomberg and Fritsch were gone, forced out in scandals, the Blomberg affair over his wife's past and the Fritsch affair on trumped-up charges, and Hitler used the opportunity to purge the conservative military leadership and take ever tighter personal control of the armed forces, replacing doubters with more compliant men. The objections raised at the Hossbach meeting were, in a sense, the last gasp of the old military establishment's independence before Hitler brought the army fully to heel. Historians argue about exactly how to read the memorandum, whether it was a firm, fixed war plan or more of Hitler thinking aloud, testing his advisers, laying out aspirations that shifted with circumstances. The exact weight of it is debated. But its broad significance is not seriously in doubt: here, in November 1937, Hitler told his own leaders that he intended to wage aggressive war for conquest, named his first victims, and set a rough timetable, and then events followed the blueprint with grim fidelity. That is why, after the war, the Hossbach Memorandum became a key piece of evidence at the Nuremberg trials, offered by the prosecution as proof that the Nazi leadership had conspired and planned to wage aggressive war, that the catastrophe that killed tens of millions had been, from early on, an intention and a design. The conference on the 5th was one of the signposts on the road to war, the day the plan was spoken aloud in a Berlin room, with the professional soldiers who doubted it soon to be swept aside.