Escalation: Rhineland, Axis and Anti-Comintern
The Rhineland Gamble
On the morning of 7 March 1936, three battalions of German troops crossed the Rhine bridges and entered the demilitarised zone of the Rhineland. The territory was German — but Versailles had banned any German military presence west of the Rhine, and the 1925 Locarno Treaties had committed Britain, France, Italy and Germany itself to keep it that way. Hitler was tearing up two treaties at once. He privately admitted afterwards that the ‘forty-eight hours after the march into the Rhineland were the most nerve-racking in my life’. His commanders had explicit orders to retreat at once if the French Army crossed the border.
On 7 March 1936 Hitler reoccupied the Rhineland in defiance of both the Versailles Treaty and the 1925 Locarno Pact. German forces had orders to retreat at once if challenged, but France did not act and Britain accepted the move as Germany ‘going into its own back garden’.
Why Hitler Got Away With It
The reoccupation succeeded as a fait accompli: an action carried out so fast that opponents could not reverse it without firing first. Hitler chose the moment carefully. France was mid-election and led by a caretaker government with no appetite for war. Britain was preoccupied with the Abyssinian Crisis and reluctant to confront Germany while sanctions on Italy were unravelling. The British public mood, shaped by memories of 1914-18, leaned toward a ‘reasonable’ settlement — the Rhineland was, after all, German territory. Lord Lothian’s widely quoted remark that the Germans were ‘only going into their own back garden’ captured the prevailing British view. France could have acted alone but feared moving without British backing.
The result was a watershed. Versailles had made the demilitarised Rhineland a buffer for France — without it, German forces could now build the West Wall (Siegfried Line) facing the French frontier, a fortified line that would tie down French troops in any future conflict. Czechoslovakia and Poland, which depended on French willingness to march east in their defence, watched the moment carefully. After 1936, that defensive logic looked shakier, and the smaller central European democracies began to wonder whether French treaties were worth anything at all.
The British argument that the Rhineland was simply German territory missed the strategic point. The demilitarised zone existed not because the land was disputed (it was not) but because German forces stationed there could attack France or threaten France’s ability to defend its eastern allies. With the zone gone, France could no longer make a credible threat to march east into Germany if Hitler attacked Poland or Czechoslovakia. The whole French alliance system in eastern Europe rested on a buffer that disappeared on 7 March 1936.
The Rome-Berlin Axis, October 1936
The collapse of the Stresa Front in 1935 had pushed Mussolini away from Britain and France. By autumn 1936 the two dictators had begun to align openly. In October 1936, Italy and Germany signed agreements covering Austria, the Balkans, Spain and economic cooperation. Mussolini’s public speech in Milan on 1 November 1936 referred for the first time to the ‘Axis’ between Rome and Berlin around which European affairs would now turn. The Axis was not yet a military alliance — that came in 1939 with the Pact of Steel — but it locked in a new diplomatic geometry. Britain and France faced one fascist bloc, not two separate threats.
The Anti-Comintern Pact, November 1936
Within weeks of the Axis announcement, Germany signed a separate agreement with Japan: the Anti-Comintern Pact of 25 November 1936. The pact was framed as a defensive arrangement against the Communist International (Comintern), the Soviet-led organisation that coordinated communist parties around the world. Italy joined in November 1937. The pact mattered for two reasons. It was openly anti-Soviet, which appealed to British and French conservatives who feared Bolshevism more than Nazism. And it linked the European fascist powers with Japan — meaning that any future European war would now have a Pacific dimension.
The Axis and the Anti-Comintern Pact were powered by genuine ideological alignment, not just shared interests. All three powers — Nazi Germany, fascist Italy and militarist Japan — opposed parliamentary democracy, communism, and what they called ‘international finance’. All three saw themselves as ‘have-not’ nations entitled to expand at the expense of decadent empires. Cooperation in Spain (where German and Italian forces fought for Franco from 1936) and in propaganda showed the alignment in action. By the end of 1936 Hitler had moved from diplomatic isolation to leadership of a fascist bloc.
1936 transformed Europe’s diplomatic balance. The March Rhineland reoccupation showed Britain and France would not act; the October Rome-Berlin Axis aligned Hitler with Mussolini; the November Anti-Comintern Pact added Japan. By the year’s end Hitler led a fascist bloc Britain and France had to confront together.