Germany Invades the Rhineland

The fate of you who are listening, of nation, of the world, as often hung upon accident or upon decisions that made the other way, would have substantially altered the course of human events. Suppose by a stroke of fate, Pickett's famous charge at Gettysburg had been successful.

Suppose fate had decreed that the assassin who shot President Lincoln had missed. Yes, much depends upon a stroke of fate. and tonight we rewrite history as we present a dramatic conception of what might have happened if by a stroke of fate the French in 1936 had opposed by military force Hitler's occupation of the Rhineland.

On March 7, 1936 the German army marched into the Rhineland, which had been demilitarized under the terms of the Versailles Treaty which ended World War I. The German march was in defiance of the Versailles Treaty.

could have been stopped through forceful action by the French and the British, but they did not take the necessary action. Tonight's story is historically true, up to our stroke of fate, in this case, a decision.

After that speculation, based on genuine historical possibility, had the stroke of fate really occurred, our story might have been related by the German Army's Chief of Staff in 1936, General Ludwig von Beck. On August 2, 1934, a year after Germany had withdrawn from the League of Nations, President von Hintonbork died, and Adolf Hitler became head of the German state.

That same morning, the army took an oath of fidelity, not to the state, but to the Führer personally. Many of us on the general staff resented the Führer as being something of an upstart, but our respect for him grew somewhat when he was able to increase the pace of German rearmament in contradiction to the terms of their side treaty without penalty.