What Hitler Knew: The Battle for Information in Nazi Foreign Policy by Zachary Shore

What Hitler Knew: The Battle for Information in Nazi Foreign Policy Reviews

• 
  Tim Pendry

  This is a superb bit of diplomatic micro-history covering a series of foreign policy crises between 1933 and 1939, using the question of what facts Hitler had to hand when he made a number of important decisions.
  
  This book is illuminating about German and European history in the run-up to the cataclysmic Second World War but it should really be seen as a contribution to a much deeper contemporary concern - how can we be sure that we have true information in making policy decisions?
  
  This issue is going to become one of ever more vital importance under conditions where the veracity of any claim being made about the world is increasingly subject to serious questions about the prior manipulation of information, as well as about its control by interested parties.
  
  Shore refers to the contemporary Middle East in passing in his conclusions - the book was published in 2003 - and we have our own intimate experiences during precisely that period of how information was supplied, blocked and hidden as inconvenient by officials.
  
  He covers each of six cases in intimate but not dull detail. I admire, above all, his courage in making intelligent judgments about what would most likely have filled those gaps where evidence is not direct and clear.
  
  I argued in a Lobster article before this book was published that 'truth' in contemporary political analysis required both a rigorous attitude to the evidence but equally a sensible judgment on the gaps in the record.
  
  There is a tendency in the less intelligent historian to restrict themselves only to the evidence to hand yet where the gaps are is where something happened. We must adopt a Japanese approach to silences and voids as things of a sort.
  
  Our founding engasgement with the Exaro project -
  www.exaronews.com - represents the first part of the necessary equation: the forensic uncovering of evidence without making conspiratorial leaps or allowing ideology or partisanship get in the way.
  
  Shore is a good historian and fulfils this primary requirement brilliantly. However, he goes further, as he should do, and becomes an equally brilliant intelligence analyst in interpreting the facts in the most probable way.
  
  Once or twice I might demur on his judgments - once or twice - but that goes with the territory. For example, he possibly over-eggs the 'terror' aspect of Naziism in policy-making as opposed to the impacts of careerism and the standard bureaucratic obsession with position.
  
  This is not to deny the terror represented by the Nazi regime or the reality of collaboration and resistance amongst the conservative elite - the case of Von Papen is instructive in how terror can work with almost scalpel-like precision in the hands of political genius.
  
  It is simply to point out that second-guessing human motivation is perhaps a judgment too far and to say that much of the conduct Shore describes in closed political and bureaucratic systems is far from unique to national socialist Germany.
  
  Our own experience of working inside the New Labour culture from 1992 to 1996 indicated precisely the same processes of competitive control of information, manipulation of facts, deliberate denial of access for bearers of inconvenient truths and so on. The rest is history.
  
  Almost all political and state systems operate in much the same way - as do corporations, churches, NGOs and probably clubs and societies - anywhere where individuals have a career or personal stake in the retention or acquisition of power.
  
  As for the history, Shore throws new insight on several problems that make this book an invaluable additional secondary source to set against the 'big histories' that most people will buy.
  
  I draw attention here to only two of many - the factional struggle about whether to support Ethiopia or not in its struggle against Italian imperialism in 1934 and the final decision of Hitler and Stalin to cut a deal before partitioning Poland.
  
  The first provides particular insight on the balance of power betwen traditional conservate realism and the more intuitive and ideological approach of Hitler.
  
  It is interesting that conservative realist and ideological aims were similar in terms of the issue at hand - ultimately anschluss with Austria - but the conservatives took a traditional line of national interest that saw Italy as threat to the dream of German unification.
  
  Hitler saw things differently, bigger perhaps, exploiting Italian resentments at Western refusal to respect its rights in order to build an axis of resentful powers (Germany, Italy and Japan) where anschluss could be positioned as relatively small beer to imperial domination of 'spheres'.
  
  It is not too fanciful to see the struggle between traditional State Department realism and the hysteria of both neo-conservatism and liberal internationalism mirroring this story in our own time.
  
  The second set of insights come from the account of the information flows surrounding the Nazi-Soviet Pact which is positioned in our conventional history as a particularly heinous act - it looks less so in the light of the information provided by Zachary Shore.
  
  On the contrary, Stalin now looks as if he had no alternative because of the blundering of that utter fool Chamberlain whose commitment to appeasement seems to have been much deeper than any of us might ever have thought.
  
  We can never know what might have happened if Chamberlain had not blundered, working behind the backs of his own nation and much of his party.
  
  Chamberlain gave Germany the opportunity to demonstrate itself and have demonstrated by the facts to the Soviet Union that Britain would never provide the security guarantees for the Soviet Union that might have saved Poland.
  
  Litvinov was only the first of many sacrifices to Chamberlain's errors of judgment.
  
  The Soviet Union left the decision to join with Germany very late but it had every cause to make that decision given the asinine handling of the situation by the British Government - I refer you to Chapter 6 which is damning.
  
  We have got into the habit of pouring all the blame for killing on the tyrants but blundering fools must also take their share of the blame.
  
  If Chamberlain had not been such a fool, it is quite possible that millions would not have died, or at least have had some more years of life.
  
  Never again should not just mean no war but no more blundering fools - regrettably they still continue to appear with alarming regularity.
  
  As Shore points out if indirectly, the information flow at the hands of Saddam was a material fact in a fairly recent war. We now know that a misreading of a diplomat's statements were interpreted as giving the green light to an invasion that need not have happened.
  
  This brings us back to information flow in our culture and the importance of process, system and transparency (within limits).
  
  Elected politicians can and should define the national interest as the needs and desires of the people through the democratic process (which must be more than competing party cadres)
  
  But, as in war, the performance of policy needs to be left to the professionals. By all means get new professionals if the old ones are not up to the job but let them be professionals.
  
  Hitler's 'achievements' from a German nationalist perspective were quite remarkable but he was, in my opinion, pushing at an open door.
  
  Most of Europe, fifteen years on from Versailles, knew that Germany had to be accommodated. There is scarcely a claim of the nationalists that might not have been 'sorted out' by professional diplomacy within ten or twenty years of a determined commitment to do so.
  
  What Germany required was Bismarckian conservatism or internal transformation from its militaristic and rather strange culture into something truly liberal. What it got was a violent emotional reaction to humiliation under a charismatic hysteric.
  
  One of the virtues of this book is that it raises questions about Hitler himself. He was undoubtedly a political genius but he was not and never could be a statesman.
  
  The stories here should help knock on the head any lingering idea that he was quite the decisive all-knowing courageous leader (in foreign policy) who just went too far of revisionist legend.
  
  The real story is that he was an ideologue and fantasist about power - just like today's liberal internationalists, neo-conservatives and Islamists - riding for a fall.
  
  His tactical genius in domestic politics was translated into 'wins' in foreign policy but he was well served by his supine (UK) or weak (France) or distracted (Italy) potential opponents.
  
  But underlying his tactical skills was a degree of strategic nonsense that had defeat in-built into it - the exact reverse of Stalin whose domestic ideology had ultimate defeat written into it while his realist foreign policy built a short-lived empire.
  
  Germans are ashamed of Hitler for some very good reasons - thuggery being one - but they should add to the charge sheet that they allowed a genuine ideologue to operate the machinery of state. Let us hope we never make the same mistake today.
• 
  William

  This is an interesting study of information flow, or the lack of it, in the making of Nazi foreign policy. Dr Zachary Shore, Associate Professor of National Security Affairs at the Naval Postgraduate School at Monterey and a Senior Fellow at the Institute of European Studies, University of California at Berkeley, argues the importance of information control during the Third Reich and its impact on decision-making in German foreign policy. The study is the published version of Shore’s doctoral thesis in modern history titled “Dictatorship, Information, and the Limits of Power: Hitler and Foreign Policy Decision Making, 1933-1939″ (University of Oxford, 1999). Shore is also known for his Breeding Bin Ladens: America, Islam, and the Future of Europe (2006) and Blunder: Why Smart People Make Bad Decisions (2008).
  
  This study looks at several issues and how they unfolded. Shore is most interested in the manner in which certain German officials received, controlled, and forwarded information. He argues that there was a gradual breakdown in the traditional decision-making process in the German government from 1933 to 1939. In its place, certain advisors manipulated the flow of information, limiting what Hitler knew, to keep, and possibly increase, their influence with the Führer. Hitler did not have the “full picture” when making decisions. Strange enough, as the author points out, Hitler was the one who created the system, one full of competition between government agencies that kept him ill-informed.
  
  Shore describes information flow during several important foreign policy decisions. In April 1933, German Foreign Ministry officials, especially Bernhard Wilhelm von Bülow, the State Secretary, had knowledge of a possible Polish preemptive military strike against a still vulnerable Germany (p.19). The ministry also received reports of secret Polish-Romanian-Soviet alliance talks. As such, Bülow and the Foreign Ministry, armed with such knowledge, guided Hitler’s anti-Polish position, especially the desire to regain Danzig, towards improving German-Polish relations. The Foreign Ministry was instrumental in the decision to negotiate the German-Polish nonaggression pact of January 1934.
  
  In another episode, Shore describes the role of the German Foreign Minister Constantin Freiherr von Neurath in Hitler’s decision to remilitarize the Rhineland in March 1936. Neurath possessed information that France would not respond militarily to a German attempt to remilitarize the Rhineland. He closely guarded this information, and strongly urged Hitler to take action. The Foreign Minister gained significant credibility with Hitler and his inner circle when the French failed to oppose the German action. Nevertheless, Neurath was challenged for control of the Foreign Ministry by the rising Joachim von Ribbentrop. The author believes that Neurath was replaced by Ribbentrop in February 1938 because the Foreign Minister had lost the battle for information with his Nazi rival.
  
  Shore next addresses British appeasement with Hitler’s Germany. The Chamberlain government continued to seek an agreement with Hitler after the Munich Conference in 1938. The author argues that an Anglo-German agreement failed to materialize in 1939 because Hermann Göring and Ribbentrop kept the secret British proposals from the Führer’s ears. Ribbentrop sought a pact with the Soviet Union, not Britain.
  
  The study connects the failed Anglo-German talks with the making of the Nazi-Soviet pact. Shore points out that Hitler was kept uninformed about Stalin reaching out publicly at the Communist Party Congress for an agreement with Germany in March 1939. According to the author, Ernst von Weizsäcker, State Secretary at the Foreign Ministry, “withheld information on Stalin’s speech in an effort to prevent or forestall a Nazi-Soviet rapprochement” (p.112). He also leaked information about a possible German-Soviet alliance to the British Foreign Office. Stalin knew of “secret” British attempts to negotiate with Germany. These are the same talks that German officials failed to provide information on British offers to Hitler. These talks, according to the author, may have added more fuel for Stalin to seek an immediate agreement with Germany. Hitler finally became aware of Stalin’s interest in an agreement, and German and Soviet officials hammered out and signed the Nazi-Soviet nonaggression pact in August 1939, which included the creation of German and Soviet spheres of influence in Eastern Europe.
  
  This is a fascinating study concerning the making of Nazi foreign policy. It points out how the chaotic flow of information limited what Hitler knew and how it affected his decisions in the making of foreign policy. The study adds to our knowledge of German policy by focusing on information flow, giving a fresh look at certain events as they unfolded. The work is based on archival research in Germany. The study is now available in a paperback version (ISBN 978-0-19-518261-3) published in 2005 for $30.00. There are numerous other studies concerning German foreign policy during the Third Reich. Some of these works are Jonathan Wright’s Germany and the Origins of the Second World War (2007), William Young’s German Diplomatic Relations, 1871-1945: The Wilhelmstrasse and the Formulation of Foreign Policy (2006), Christian Leitz’s Nazi Foreign Policy, 1933-1941: The Road to Global War (2004), Klaus Hildebrand’s The Foreign Policy of the Third Reich (1984), Norman Rich’s Hitler’s War Aims (two volumes, 1972-73), William Carr’s Arms, Autarky and Aggression: A Study in German Foreign Policy (1972), and Gerhard L. Weinberg’s The Foreign Policy of Hitler’s Germany (2 volumes, 1970-80).