Nazi Germany remilitarizes the Rhineland

Nazi Germany remilitarizes the Rhineland was Adolf Hitler’s calculated gamble: on March 7, 1936, 30,000 German troops entered the demilitarized Rhineland in defiance of the Treaty of Versailles and the Locarno Pact. The absence of a military response emboldened the Nazi leadership, while the backlash abroad revealed a different cost: Germany’s leaders believed they needed to reshape the country’s image before the world.

The gamble

The move was the boldest step Adolf Hitler had yet attempted, and its risk was real. Germany did not yet possess enough military strength to withstand a war with Britain or France, much less both. For two days, Hitler, Joseph Goebbels, and the Nazi leadership waited anxiously for the powers to react. Hitler later described the next forty-eight hours as the tensest of his life: the incursion’s significance depended not only on the troops crossing into the Rhineland, but on whether other governments would enforce the restrictions Germany had accepted.

The western response

Britain’s foreign secretary, Anthony Eden, said that he deeply regretted the news, then worked to discourage France from taking a forceful response. France did nothing. With no military intervention from either power, the gamble succeeded on its immediate terms. Goebbels recorded the leadership’s relief: England remained passive, France would not act alone, Italy was disappointed, and the United States was uninterested.

The inaction clarified for Hitler how little resolve the powers to Germany’s west were prepared to show. The troops’ entry had openly challenged the international agreements, yet the response did not match the scale of that challenge. The episode thus strengthened Hitler’s confidence not because Germany had proved itself ready for war, but because its adversaries had declined to test that readiness.

A victory with a public-relations cost

The lack of military resistance did not make the move cost-free. The reoccupation provoked a public-relations uproar in foreign capitals, and more people in Europe and the United States began to see Germany as they had during the First World War: as a nation of lawless barbarians. Hitler understood the political danger in that image. A West convinced that Germany was barbaric, he believed, would be easier to mobilize against than one that regarded it as civilized. The military gamble therefore produced an urgent reputational problem even as it demonstrated the weakness of opposition.

The Olympic masquerade

The Nazi leadership turned toward the approaching Olympic Games, scheduled for August, as an opportunity to counter that damage. Germany would be presented as clean, efficient, modern, cultured, vigorous, reasonable, and hospitable. This was not a retreat from the Rhineland policy but a parallel effort to manage its reception: street sweepers, hoteliers, government clerks, and the propaganda apparatus were enlisted in preparing the country’s public face.

Goebbels’s ministry temporarily removed antisemitic references from the German press and circulated fictions about peaceful intentions and a welcome extended to people from around the world. In Berlin, Leni Riefenstahl began work on Olympia with 2.8 million reichsmarks secretly routed to her by the Nazi government through the Ministry of Propaganda. The incursion had shown Hitler that foreign powers might not act against German defiance; the campaign around the Olympics sought to make that defiance harder to see.