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Schuschnigg cancelled the plebiscite and resigned, handing over power to his Nazi interior minister. On 12 March, German forces entered Austria. Driving in a motorcade of open-topped Mercedes through ecstatic crowds, Hitler passed through Linz, where he looked up at the window of his Jewish doctor Eduard Bloch who nodded back at him, and then into Vienna, where he appeared on the balcony of the Hofburg before visiting the grave of his niece Geli Raubal. This Anschluss – Union – unleashed a host of tragedies: Nazi thugs forced Jews to clean the streets. Himmler’s Jewish expert Adolf Eichmann, a former Dachau guard and son of an accountant who now ran the SD’s Jewish Department, Section II/112, commandeered one of the five Rothschild palaces for his Central Agency for Jewish Emigration, to oversee the confiscation of Jewish wealth, particularly that of 100,000 Jews who wished to leave.

Baron Louis de Rothschild, debonair brother of Alphonse, polo player, botanist, aesthete, married to an Austrian countess, was visited by SS officers who were told by his butler to return after lunch. When he tried to leave, he was arrested at Aspern airport. Göring and Himmler vied with each other to extract a Rothschildian ransom. Himmler won, visiting Rothschild in jail to negotiate the handover of $21 million of assets in return for freedom. Louis joined his brother in America.^* Freud refused to leave.

In the Nazis’ wake followed the profiteers, led by Krupp, who now, aided by Göring, seized the chief Austrian steelworks. Just as the Wagners were Hitler’s cultural dynasty, the Krupps were for him industrial royalty. When Mussolini visited, he showed him round Krupp’s Essen works. Krupp celebrated Hitler’s fiftieth birthday by presenting him with a swastika-spangled steel table engraved with a Mein Kampf quotation. Hitler was thrilled. Gustav’s son Alfried, hook-nosed, cadaverous and sunken-eyed, an SS member since 1931, joined the board, developing tanks for the new, mobile warfare.

‘Now it’s the Czechs’ turn,’ a euphoric Hitler told Goebbels, preparing for war against Czechoslovakia on behalf of its German minority in the Sudetenland. On 17 September 1938, the British prime minister, Neville Chamberlain, beakily uninspiring, now determined to save European peace, arrived at the Berghof, the Führer’s spectacular Alpine home, where he was treated to foam-flecked rants and rational negotiations. Chamberlain disdained Hitler – ‘entirely undistinguished’, he said, ‘you’d take him for the housepainter he once was’. Hitler mocked Chamberlain as ‘schoolmarmish’ and ‘a worm’. After subsequent meetings, Chamberlain boasted that he would try to avoid war ‘because of a quarrel in a far-away country between people of whom we know nothing’. At a Munich conference mediated by Mussolini, Chamberlain and the French premier Daladier agreed the ‘cession to Germany of the Sudeten German territory’ of Czechoslovakia.

Chamberlain flew home triumphantly. ‘My good friends,’ he said at the airport. ‘I believe it’s peace for our time. Go home and get a nice quiet sleep.’ Wise men did not sleep. ‘You were given the choice between war and dishonour. You chose dishonour, and you will have war,’ warned Churchill, calling Munich an ‘unmitigated defeat’. Watching from Washington, Roosevelt privately agreed, noting the ‘blood on their Judas Iscariot hands’. Keen to divert Joe Kennedy from a presidential bid at home, FDR promoted him to London as ambassador. There the cocksure Irishman revelled in society but supported the antisemitic coterie around Viscountess Astor, who favoured appeasement of Hitler. The German ‘kikes’, Kennedy said, ‘had brought it upon themselves’, telling a friend that ‘individual Jews are alright but as a race they stink. They spoil everything they touch.’ FDR was horrified by Hitler – ‘His shrieks, his histrionics and the effect on the audience – they did not applaud – they made noises like animals,’ FDR told his confidante and cousin Daisy Suckley. ‘Europe is full of world dynamite.’

The Sudetenland was not enough for Hitler, who, cheated out of war, planned to ‘rapidly occupy’ the rest of Czechoslovakia, then, ‘When the time is right, we’ll soften up Poland using tried and tested methods.’