What I Am Reading: "The Nazi Menace" by Benjamin Carter Hett

“This is only a respite, and if we don’t make use of it, we’ll all be shot.” - Édouard Daladier, after Munich (quoted in Chapter 10).

I wasn't going to read this book initially. I am a big fan of Benjamin Carter Hett's books on German history, but this book seemed like a re-tread of well-trodden ground, possibly an effort to cash in after his big Trump-era success with The Death of Democracy. I mean, the subtitle is "Hitler, Churchill, Roosevelt, Stalin, and the Road to War." Total dad book, focusing on the big names.

But, a gap came up in my reading schedule, and I decided to knock it down this time. After a couple years now of having read books like Appeasement by Tim Bouverie, Defying Hitler by Gordon Thomas and Greg Lewis, Hitler's American Friends by Bradley W. Hart, 1940 by Susan Dunn, and others, a lot of this material was not new to me. The book especially focused on the Chamberlain government and its appeasement policies, and the bureaucratic and (aborted) direct action resistance to Hitler among the highest reaches of the German officer class.

What Hett brings to it is an occasional spotlight on grand strategy, economic, and migration issues that I find provides a very modern flavor (as well as a few notes on Hett's legal specialty, such as the lawsuit to establish the status of Jews in Upper Silesia). He describes part of Hitler's planning as an effort to create an autarky, where a state produces everything it needs within its own borders; and says part of the appeal of the Nazi ideology as a protest against the economic globalization that had been crafted to Germany's detriment in the interwar years. The book also focuses throughout on the crisis of democracy in that era, when totalitarianism appealed to many constituencies as a result of the failure of parliamentary governments to respond to the threats of the Great Depression and to the tense social fabric of new countries with unfamiliar ethnic configurations.

The book definitely isn't pro-Chamberlain, as it often paints him in an unflattering light as a mini-autocrat who surrounded himself with yes-men and did not appreciate dissent. However, it posits, as some do, that Chamberlain was right about the grand strategic outlook, and that he shared a foundation in this with Hitler. In Hett's formulation, both countries knew that Britain would win a longer war, as Basil Liddell Hart theorized: their economic might and naval supremacy would starve another country into submission, as long as they survived an early knockout blow. Thus, Chamberlain, though hoping that war might be avoided, focused on a defensive strategy, intended to buy time for Britain by the sacrifice of other countries (often considered inferior). Technologically, this meant a focus on the Spitfire and on RADAR installations, and the book covers the funding wars of the RAF fighter efforts under Hugh Dowding versus the bomber command under Hugh Trenchard. It also meant that a healthy economy was necessary, so a conversion to a war footing would have to be gradual, and avoid the massive debt to the United States that resulted from the First World War.

Hitler had the opposite side of that coin: he could win a war if he won fast, and didn't have the chance to starve. Thus, he focused on daring, risk-taking tactics, in defiance of his high command’s more risk-averse preferences. His technology, complementary to the Spitfire, was the Panzer, a weapon of rapid attack. He heavily converted his economy to a war footing, despite the medium-term damage that might do, since winning the war came first. All was in obedience to Erich Ludendorff’s total war strategy, describing a state that would be necessary to win. These efforts, as well as later atrocities against Jews and Poles, won him enemies in the officer corps, but those officers did not enact any of their plans to remove him. They also caught Chamberlain off guard, who had not had a clear sense of Hitler's aggressiveness and blood thirst.

Thus, Britain had a British strategy and British technology, and the Germans had a German strategy and German technology. At one point, the British even tried to call an international conference to ban tanks. However, I lean toward the position expressed at least by Bouverie in his book: though some revisionists think that Chamberlain was right to play the long game and sacrifice Czechoslovakia in order to have more years to make planes and such, a more decisive engagement in 1938 (or even earlier of course) would not have been "WW2 but a couple years earlier.” There may not have even been a need to defend the home islands against bombers if the British, French, and Czechs took on the Nazis together when they themselves had a years' fewer number of Panzers. The book only touches upon this, but it is also true that a nation with a better ability to project bombers to its enemies' capitals is one better able to dictate terms, and can afford a more muscular foreign policy or even their own decisive knock-out blow.

Roosevelt, meanwhile, was trying to massage the electorate to war, and struggled with the idea of how to fight a modern war without becoming a "garrison state," as theorized by Harold D. Lasswell (a negative spin on Ludendorff’s similar idea). Similarly to how the New Deal worked for democracy by providing for people within a democratic system and thus prevented their turn to communism or fascism, so did Roosevelt want to actively prevent a Nazi takeover of Europe so that America would not become a bristling totalitarian military state out of defensive necessity. As the situation deteriorated and people became readier to fight, both he and Churchill turned to rhetoric of the importance of both democracy and Christianity in standing up to totalitarianism. This eventually achieves thesis form with the Atlantic Charter. Churchill is of course an important figure, and his journey back from the wilderness is catalogued, as he comes around from the position of an elite let down by democracy to see that it is this main ideological counterweight to the totalitarian system. The book also covers some of Churchill's fellow anti-fascist MPs, especially Eleanor Rathbone, an independent and anti-fascist MP who especially concerned herself with the plight of Jewish refugees fleeing the Nazi regime and unwelcomed anywhere.

So the book was a good complement to the general late interwar or rise of fascism period. It is not entirely comprehensive, as the French and Soviets (despite Stalin's inclusion in the subtitle) appear mostly on the peripheries; and overall I'd say that there are better places to turn for anti-Nazi activity in Britain, the United States, and Germany itself, as referenced above. I hope that this book provides Dr. Hett with the income he needs to get back to legal-focused German history.