Page 135 - Was Hitler a Riddle?

122 The French Diplomats

years rose to the rank of lieutenant-general and who at times also worked
as a diplomat. Pappenheim was well-informed and appeared to be echoing
the words of senior officials in the German government. “the proposition
is simple,” according to Pappenheim. “Germany is a country that suffo-
cates under present conditions; endowed with a powerful dynamism in the
midst of people for whose weakness it has contempt, it is not content with
amputated territories that are broken into pieces.” as a country of sixty-
five million soon to grow to one hundred million, Germany must secure
Lebensraum. Pappenheim assured his interlocutor that “Germany did not
plan to expand in the west, but rather in the east, northeast, and the south.”
a primary goal was to reoccupy the danzig Corridor, then under Polish
rule; Poland was to be compensated in part with land severed from lithu-
ania and in part from the Ukraine. and if Czechoslovakia was dissolved,
part of its territory would go to Poland, the rest to Germany. Pappenheim
also indicated that Germany would soon have an army of four hundred
thousand and that by 1936 it was expected to be even larger. He was sure
that all these ambitions could be accomplished quite easily: neither France
nor Great Britain would prevent them because they would be preoccupied
with maintaining their empires. Germany, Pappenheim assured the French
diplomat, had no intention of meddling in the colonial affairs of these two
countries. it was an astonishingly frank description of Germany’s plans that
could leave the authorities in France with little doubt about the dangers
that confronted europe. 59
after the annual meeting of the Nazi Party in Nuremberg on september
11–17, 1935, François-Poncet sent his first detailed account of the persecution
of the Jews to Paris. in his view, it was at that meeting that Hitler, who for
a long time had been silent on the internal divisions within National social-
ism, made it clear that he sided with “the old guard, his first companions
in the struggle for the realization of the revolutionary program.” the party
congress extolled the army and lauded the ideas of streicher, Goebbels,
Himmler, and robert ley, all of whom espoused a “new war against Jews,
Catholics, [and Marxist] revolutionaries.” immediately after the congress
adjourned, the government promulgated new laws that officially defined
the Jews as a race and placed a series of new restrictions on them: “aryan”
women under the age of forty-five could no longer work for Jews as ser-
vants, and intermarriage, as well as any sexual relationship between Jews
and aryans, was prohibited. this prohibition was consistent with streich-
er’s contention that even one sexual encounter between a Jewish man and
an aryan woman would make it impossible for the woman ever to produce