Der Fuehrer - Hitler's Rise to Power (1944) - Heiden

FRANCE IS TO BLAME 691trality from which we should never be drawn except by the will andconscience of the overwhelming mass of our people.'Two days later Prime Minister Ramsay MacDonald replied that thismeant war sooner or later. On November 9, in a speech at the Guild Hallin London, he said he knew that a point might be reached where thepolicy of disarmament could no longer be continued: 'But let none of usimagine that by so doing wc are establishing peace. . . . Thoseprecautions [he meant: rearming] may postpone the day of war' — thatwas all he hoped for.Actually the policy of disarmament had come to an end. Englanddecided to rearm in the air. But when, on November 29, the Marquess ofLondonderry, chief of the Air Ministry, made a pessimistic speech inthe House of Lords about the danger to which England was exposed inthe air, he did not mention Germany in the first place; in fact, he did notname her at all. But France, he said, had 1650 military planes and wasthe strongest air power in the world; Great Britain had only 750 andoccupied fifth place.Ten days after Germany's withdrawal from the League of Nations,Daladier's cabinet fell in France, because it tried to cut salaries of thecivil servants; Albert Sarraut became Premier in one of thoseinnumerable cabinet changes behind which the petrifaction of Frenchpolitical life was hidden. At the same time Hitler's plebiscite was beingprepared throughout Germany. National Socialist officials — the socalled'block wardens' of the party — visited every family; and theslogans, 'Your vote for the Fuhrer!' . . . 'Germany says Yes!' ... 'To voteis a duty!' etc., were plastered in huge letters all over the walls, blaredall day long over the radio, spread across the front pages of thenewspapers, so that the idea of resistance could find no room inanyone's mind. On voting day, November 12, in many places,particularly in the small communities, the vote was public. Even voterswho seemed to be alone in the booths often did not believe in theirsolitude, but imagined that they were being spied upon in somemysterious way. An idea of the way the plebiscite was conducted can begleaned from the fact that ballots were cast in the concentration camps,and that more than ninety per cent of the inmates voted allegedly forHitler. Yet all these details about the freedom and secrecy of the ballotdo not explain what took