Page 122 - Was Hitler a Riddle?

The French Diplomats 109

with regard to the Polish Corridor, a region that had been severed from
Germany. these goals, the ambassador suggested, went far in explaining
Hitler’s domestic program: Germany, the Führer believed, could restore its
“liberty and honor” only by destroying Marxism and democracy and unify-
ing the “reich under the symbol of the swastika.” 28
François-Poncet believed that, given Germany’s weakness, the best pol-
icy for France and its allies was to seek an agreement with Hitler on rearma-
ment. the agreement should be structured in such a way as to enable West-
ern countries “to control, to watch, to constrain, for as long as possible,
the [country’s] rearmament.” the ambassador conceded that the approach
he proposed might be criticized as simply gaining time for the West to
consider other options. But this breathing space would be significant, since
what Germany would be like in one year, let alone five years, remained
unpredictable. in other words, François-Poncet still considered it likely, or
at least possible, that the country might turn away from Nazism. as he
29
had suggested in a dispatch two weeks earlier, on april 27, 1933, “nothing
. . . permits us to affirm that [Hitler] retains control over men and over
events.” the ambassador was never again this explicit in depicting Hit-
30
ler’s control over Germany as so shaky, but for the next few years this view
tended to be an undercurrent of his thinking and his recommendations to
his superiors in Paris on how to deal with the new authorities in Berlin.
in fact, as early as mid-November 1933, François-Poncet’s thinking had
shifted and he now contended that the new regime enjoyed wide support.
in the plebiscite of November 12, the Nazis scored an impressive victory,
and although the ambassador knew that it was a charade in which 96.3
percent of eligible voters had participated, he feared that the Nazis would
seize upon the victory as constituting a mandate to pursue their program
without restraint. eight months earlier, in the elections of March 5, Hitler’s
party had received seventeen million votes; now that figure had jumped to
over forty million. true, government officials had shepherded people to the
polls who were retarded, sick, or very old and many others who simply did
not wish to vote, but the outcome of the vote nevertheless demonstrated
to the world that the National socialists were efficient in “persuading” the
populace to do their bidding. it also demonstrated that the opponents to
the New Order were politically impotent. Nazism had evidently not ex-
hausted itself. On the contrary, Hitler could claim that the people supported
him and that they were grateful to him for having restored the honor and
grandeur of the German nation.
François-Poncet hoped that Hitler would now assume the mantle of