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been over the remilitarisation of the Rhineland, Hitler decided to end the system. He wanted a war army, led by commanders determined to take revenge on the victors of 1918 and their creature states erected on the back of Germany’s defeat.
    Werner von Fritsch, the army commander-in-chief, was a particular bugbear among the fainthearts; in November 1937 he sought a private interview with Hitler to warn against policies that might provoke war. Two months later, the indiscreet remarriage of the Minister of War, General Werner von Blomberg, provided Hitler with an opportunity to get rid of both men: Blomberg’s young bride was discovered to have been a prostitute; while the unmarried Fritsch, his obvious successor, fell speechless when confronted by trumped-up charges of homosexual behaviour. Their enforced retirement did not immediately bring him generals of the bellicose temper he wanted; but it provided him with the pretext to establish a new supra-service command in place of the War Ministry, the
Oberkommando der Wehrmacht
(OKW), of which Hitler made himself the head, and the OKW was given responsibility for the highest level of strategic planning. This was a crucial move, for 1938 was to be the year in which Hitler moved from rearmament to the diplomatic offensive. He had already outlined his intentions to his service commanders on 5 November 1937, when he had argued that Britain and France were unlikely to oppose with military force German moves to strengthen its military position in the east. His first priority was to take advantage of the enthusiasm among German nationalists in Austria for union (
Anschluss
) with the Reich; his second was to attempt the annexation of the German-speaking parts of Czechoslovakia, the Sudetenland. Further, he hoped that Italy, Austria’s protector, would shortly be brought to Germany’s side by a formal alliance with Mussolini, his fellow dictator. Poland, on which he had longer-term designs, he believed would be immobilised by the speed of Germany’s action.
    In November 1937 Mussolini did indeed accept a German alliance, the Anti-Comintern Pact against the Soviet Union (originally signed by Germany and Japan a year earlier), thus reinforcing the ‘Rome-Berlin Axis’ agreement of October 1936. By March 1938 Hitler felt free to act against Austria. He first demanded that Austrian Nazis should be installed in key government posts. When Kurt von Schuschnigg, the Austrian Chancellor, refused, Arthur Seyss-Inquart, the Austrian Nazi leader, was instructed to declare himself the head of a provisional government and request German intervention. On 12 March German troops marched in,
Anschluss
was declared the following day, and on 14 March Hitler made a triumphal entry into Vienna, where he had spent his unhappy and aimless youth. Britain and France protested but did no more. Their inactivity was the confirmation Hitler needed that he could safely proceed to his diplomatic offensive against Czechoslovakia. In April he ordered OKW to prepare plans for a military operation, meanwhile instructing the Nazi groups among the Sudetenland Germans to sustain demands for secession. In August he fixed October as the date for military action and on 12 September, when he delivered a fiery anti-Czech speech at Nuremberg, German troops moved to the frontier.
    This ‘Czech crisis’ seemed to threaten war, even though it was not clear who would fight it. The Czechs were not powerful enough to resist the rearmed Wehrmacht without help, but the Red Army, the only nearby source of assistance, could come to their aid only by crossing Polish territory (or Romanian, but the Romanians were pro-German), a manoeuvre which the Poles, with their deep hostility to and well-founded suspicion of the Russians, were not disposed to permit. The British and the French were also disinclined to see Russia intervening in central Europe and, though France had a treaty with Czechoslovakia, and both Britain and France recognised