Alone, 1932-1940

  Hitler neither accepted nor rejected the cabinet’s terms, because Chamberlain never gave them to him. He never had a chance. Expecting to please the Führer, he told him of the Anglo-French agreement to the Sudeten annexation. To his dismay, Hitler replied brusquely, “Ja, es tut mir leid, aber das geht nicht mehr” (“Yes, I am very sorry, but that is no longer possible”). He had decided to raise the stakes, indifferent to the outcome; war was his objective, and this old man was obstructing that. The Führer now said he thought Warsaw and Budapest were right in advancing claims on Czech territory, and peace could “not be firmly established until these claims had been settled.” Furthermore, the Sudetenland problem must be completely solved by October 1—there would be no time to adhere to the idea of self-determination. The Führer produced a marked map defining the area which must be occupied at once by German troops. Chamberlain, Kirkpatrick’s notes recorded, professed himself “disappointed and puzzled.” He had, he told Hitler, “risked his whole political career” to obtain his cabinet’s approval of the principles agreed to at Berchtesgaden. After three hours of inconclusive and, as Chamberlain reported by telephone to London that night, “most unsatisfactory” talks, the meeting was adjourned, to be resumed the next day.239

  Meanwhile, German troops were reported to have entered Egerland, on the Czech side of the Ohre, and Prague wanted to mobilize. As a sovereign power, Czechoslovakia needed no one’s permission to take defensive measures, but Beneš sought the advice of the two great democracies, if only because alienating them was unthinkable. The Czech request to mobilize was forwarded to Godesberg and answered by Henderson, who, predictably, replied: “Wait awhile.” The exchange had been relayed to London, however, and the cabinet, overruling Henderson, gave Beneš a green light. It was promptly changed back to red on instructions from Sir Horace Wilson in Godesberg, who had consulted no one. But the French told the Czechs to proceed. Prague, understandably confused, hesitated.

  Phipps, in Paris, was indignant. “All that is best in France is against war,” he wired Whitehall. “His Majesty’s Government should realize extreme danger of even appearing to encourage small, but noisy and corrupt war group here.” Cadogan, in the unaccustomed role of a hawk, angrily rebuked him: “By war group you surely do not include all those who feel that France must carry out her treaty obligations to Czechoslovakia.” Phipps, equally angry, answered wildly: “I meant the communists who are paid by Moscow and have been working for war for months.”240

  Halifax was not a Communist, but he had begun to think seriously about approaching the Russians. In London he was encouraged by Winston Churchill, uninvited but nevertheless welcomed in this anxious hour when all lines to Godesberg seemed dead. The talks between the Führer and the prime minister had been suspended until Friday the twenty-third. War seemed very near. At 1:15 P.M. on Friday the foreign secretary instructed Butler, in Geneva: “It would be useful if you would have a conversation with M. Litvinov on the present situation, and endeavour to elicit from him anything concerning the views and intentions of his Government.”241

  At 10:00 P.M. Halifax, with the approval of the cabinet, sent Chamberlain word that the “great mass of public opinion seems to be hardening in sense of feeling that we have gone to the limit of concession and that it is up to the Chancellor to make some contribution…. From point of view of your own position, that of Government, and of the country, it seems to your colleagues of vital importance that you should not leave without making it plain to Chancellor if possible by special interview that, after great concessions made by Czechoslovak Government, for him to reject opportunity for peaceful solution… would be an unpardonable crime against humanity.” Godesberg was again quiescent. An hour passed; two hours. Then, to Halifax’s astonishment, Chamberlain sent him a brief report, assuring the nervous FO that Hitler’s demands and a lasting European peace were reconcilable. Whitehall wondered what had happened. The answer was that the prime minister had been duped.242

  The Friday meeting between Chamberlain and Hitler, originally scheduled to begin at 11:30 A.M., had been several times delayed while the two exchanged letters and notes laying out their positions. It was not until 10:30 P.M. that Chamberlain again crossed the Rhine; the German chancellor was waiting at the water’s edge to meet the ferry and accompany the prime minister into the hotel lounge. But the cordial atmosphere soon evaporated as the British party studied the lengthy memorandum the Germans had prepared detailing the Führer’s final position.

  The document demanded that the Czechs begin evacuating the Sudetenland at 8:00 A.M. September 26, with the process to be completed two days later. Any who remained would be arrested or shot as trespassers, because the region would be Reich soil. During the two days of evacuation German troops would be moving in to “protect” the area and to “restore order.”243

  Chamberlain was appalled; the talks became agitated and had reached an impasse when an adjutant entered with word that Beneš had just announced Czech general mobilization over the radio. According to Schmidt, the room was “deadly still” (“totenstill”). Suddenly, it erupted in furious argument. One of the few German words the prime minister knew was Diktat, and after rereading Hitler’s memorandum and conferring with Schmidt about the translation, which was still incomplete, he said heatedly: “But this is an ultimatum!” Not at all, snapped the Führer. Pushing the paper under the P.M.’s eyes, he invited him to see for himself. It wasn’t a Diktat at all, he said: “Es steht ja ‘Memorandum’ darüber” (“It is headed by the word ‘Memorandum’ ”). Chamberlain ignored this childish duplicity and rose, saying he would fly home with a heavy heart. Hitler, determined to keep him hooked, quickly offered a Konzession, something, he said, he had never done before. The Czech evacuation needn’t end till October 1. This was flimflam; Chamberlain did not know that the Generalstab had told the Führer that they couldn’t possibly move in before the first of the month. But the prime minister was impressed, and expressed his appreciation. When the meeting broke up about 1:30 A.M., noted Schmidt, “Chamberlain bid a hearty farewell to the Führer.” As he left the Dreesen, a newspaperman intercepted him to ask: “Is it hopeless, sir?” Chamberlain replied: “I would not like to say that. It is up to the Czechs now.” In other words, peace was possible unless the Czechs stubbornly insisted on defending their homeland.244

  When the Führer’s terms became known in London, they were met with consternation. “Hitler’s memo. now in,” wrote Cadogan in his diary. “It’s awful.” Over the past week, he noted, they had “moved from ‘autonomy’ to cession,” and “we salved our consciences, at least I did, by stipulating it must be an ‘orderly’ cession.” This meant “safeguards for the exchange of populations, compensation, etc. Now,” Cadogan continued, “Hitler says he must march into the whole area at once (to keep order!) and the safeguards—and plebiscites! can be held after! This is throwing away every last safeguard we had. The P.M. is transmitting this ‘proposal’ to Prague. Thank God he hasn’t yet recommended it for acceptance.”245

  The prime minister arrived in London on Saturday afternoon, carrying with him Hitler’s memorandum, a map showing which regions would pass into the hands of the Wehrmacht (followed by the Gestapo), and an evacuation timetable for the Czechs. At 5:30 P.M. he met with an anxious cabinet. At first, he told them, he had been “indignant” that Hitler was “pressing new demands on me.” Eventually, however, “I modified my view on this point.” The prime minister added that he thought he had “established some degree of personal influence over Hitler,” who had told him, “ ‘You are the first man for many years who has got any concessions from me.’ ” Hitler had told him, he said, that if they “solved this question without conflict, it could be a turning-point in Anglo-German relations.” The Führer had voluntarily added that (as he had already said several times) the Czech problem was “the last territorial demand” which he had to make in Europe. The prime minister thought this so important that he had instructed a bilingual young diplomat to write it out
in German, and here it was: “die letzte territoriale Forderung.” Chamberlain stressed that the Führer had not been prompted and had spoken “with great earnestness.” (As Eden said later, “Chamberlain knew that Hitler lied. He just could not believe that Hitler would lie to him.”) Now it was Chamberlain’s conclusion that “We should accept those [Hitler’s] terms and should advise the Czechs to do so.”246

  Duff Cooper protested. Hitherto, he said, they had faced the unpleasant alternatives of peace with dishonor or war. He now saw “a third possibility, namely war with dishonor, by which I mean being kicked into war by the boot of public opinion when those for whom we were fighting have already been defeated.” But the other ministers endorsed the prime minister’s view.

  Czechoslovakia’s leaders could hardly believe that Chamberlain had done what he had done. In France, Daladier was still troubled by “the moral issue,” as he called it. Churchill wanted him to stay on that course. On Monday, September 26, Winston called on Halifax at the FO, asked that Rex Leeper be summoned, and with the foreign secretary’s tacit agreement, stood over Leeper dictating a Churchillian communiqué: “If… a German attack is made upon Czechoslovakia… France will be bound to come to her assistance, and Great Britain and Russia will certainly stand by France.” It is a measure of Churchill’s powerful presence that Halifax then “authorized” the communiqué. As A. J. P. Taylor has observed, Halifax approved this announcement “but did not sign it. In this roundabout way, he secured his position both present and future: he retained Chamberlain’s confidence, yet was later the only ‘Man of Munich’ who continued to stand high in favor with Churchill.”247

  The communiqué was ineffective. In Paris, Bonnet dismissed it as a forgery, and Chamberlain quashed it that evening by issuing a statement reaffirming his vow to meet all Hitler’s demands. On Sunday an FO minute had set forth Britain’s new stance vis-à-vis the Czechs: “It can be taken for granted that the only hope of preventing or at least localizing war is for His Majesty’s Government… to make it absolutely clear that they [the Czechs] must accept German plan or forfeit claim to further support from Western Powers.” Nevertheless, Jan Masaryk formally rejected the memorandum that Hitler had handed to Chamberlain, describing it as “a de facto ultimatum of the sort usually presented to a vanquished nation and not a proposition to a sovereign state…. The nation of St. Wenceslas, John Hus and Thomas Masaryk will not be a nation of slaves.” Chamberlain sent Horace Wilson to Germany on Monday as his personal envoy, asking that the details of the annexation be settled by a commission of Germans, Czechs, and English. If Hitler rejected this proposal, Wilson was authorized to inform him that France and England would fight with the Czechs. The request was a bad idea. In his one concession at Godesberg, the Führer had specified that the annexation be complete by October 1. When Sir Horace brought up the commission, Hitler told him that acceptance of the memorandum was a precondition and must be received by 2:00 P.M. on Wednesday, September 28. Wilson called this a “very violent hour.” To his horror Hitler fell to the floor, writhing in one of his famous fits. Henderson, who had accompanied Wilson, noted that the Reich chancellor “shrieked a good deal.” It was effective. Following Henderson’s example, Sir Horace decided not to deliver Chamberlain’s warning.248

  That night Hitler, still raging, delivered a venomous attack on Beneš in Berlin’s Sportpalast. William L. Shirer thought he had “completely lost control of himself.” On orders from the Czech president, the Führer charged, “whole stretches of country were depopulated, villages burned down, attempts were made to smoke out Germans with hand grenades and gas.” He paused. “Now two men stand arrayed against one another: there is Mr. Beneš and here stand I.” Another pause. Then: “Now let Mr. Beneš make his choice.”249

  Chamberlain’s reaction to the Sportpalast speech was, even for him, extraordinary. Hitler had referred to him in passing, and now he told the press: “I have read the speech of the German Chancellor and I appreciate his references to the efforts I have made to save the peace.” He stood ready, he said, to make further efforts. Wilson paid a farewell call on the Führer on Tuesday, and, according to Schmidt, the interpreter, he told him: “I will try to make those Czechos sensible.” Hitler, in turn, handed him the Reich’s final concession to England, a letter to Chamberlain offering a formal guarantee from him, as Führer, of truncated Czechoslovakia’s new frontiers. That evening of the twenty-seventh the prime minister spoke to the country over the BBC, a speech most memorable for a single sentence which might be called the epitome of defeatism. “How horrible, fantastic, incredible it is that we should be digging trenches and trying on gas masks here because of a quarrel in a faraway country between people of whom we know nothing.”250

  If Chamberlain knew nothing of Czechoslovakia after the past five months, he was a very slow learner. And, as Harold Macmillan later pointed out, “In this message to the nation, nothing was said of the sufferings of the Czech people, only sympathy with Hitler ‘and his indignation that German grievances had not been dealt with before this,’ together with an offer to ‘guarantee’ that the Czech Government would ‘carry out their promises.’ ”251

  The people of Britain and France, conditioned by ghastly descriptions of what another European war would be like, were genuinely frightened. Macmillan recalled that “In the last few days of September—the five days that followed Chamberlain’s return from Godesberg—they were grimly… making up their minds to face war,” the “unthinkable” which was now “round the corner.” Air attacks, they had been told, would wreak destruction “beyond all imagination,” and they must “expect civilian casualties on a colossal scale.” Baldwin had predicted sixty thousand Londoners dead after the first Luftwaffe offensive. (In fact, ninety thousand Britons were killed by Nazi bombers during the entire war.) Given these astounding figures, the mind-set of Londoners and Englishmen living in the great industrial cities of the Midlands can be compared to that of Americans in the 1980s if told that missiles with nuclear warheads were on their way to major U.S. cities. His Majesty’s Government did not handle it well. Panic was the inevitable consequence of official notice instructing parents of infants under two years to bring their children to designated centers where they would be “fitted with helmets for protection against the effects of gas.” There were even rumors, some of which found their way into print, that trenches were being dug in Hyde Park.252

  As September 28 dawned, war seemed very near; the Führer’s ultimatum would expire at 2:00 P.M. But late that morning, Chamberlain, through his ambassador in Rome, asked Mussolini to save the peace by intervening. The Duce telephoned Berlin, and within an hour Hitler had agreed to see the British prime minister again. He invited Mussolini to join them, and the Duce, flattered, replied that he was “willing to be present.”253

  The scene in Parliament later in the day was a piece of stage management from the people who had brought Britain to the brink of catastrophe. At about noon Hitler’s invitation to Chamberlain had reached the German embassy in London, where it was immediately decoded and dispatched to No. 10. Three hours passed. Chamberlain, addressing the House of Commons in its first session since the August adjournment, was describing the tangled diplomatic skein when a messenger arrived. Normally so important a dispatch would have been taken straight to the front bench. This one was delivered to Halifax, seated in the Peers’ Gallery. He passed it down to Simon, who read it and pushed it in front of the prime minister. The House watched all this with mounting interest. In a voice that could be heard throughout the hall, Chamberlain asked: “Shall I tell them now?” and, when Simon smiled and nodded, announced: “Herr Hitler has just agreed to postpone his mobilisation for twenty-four hours and to meet me in conference with Signor Mussolini and [Monsieur] Daladier at Munich.” One independent MP, a diarist, described what followed as “one of the most dramatic moments which I have ever witnessed. For a second, the House was hushed in absolute silence. And then the whole House burst into a roar of cheering, since they
knew that this might mean peace.” Harold Macmillan remembered that “I stood up with the rest, sharing the general emotion.”254

  Some were undeceived by the contrivance. Macmillan recalled that “Eden just could not bear it; he got up and walked out of the Chamber. Another Member sat bravely still and refused to rise. It was Harold Nicolson.” Amery also remained in his bench, arms folded. Men all round them were shouting “Get up! Get up!” and “Thank God for the Prime Minister!” Then, Macmillan recalled, “I saw one man silent and seated—with his head sunk on his shoulders, his whole demeanour depicting something between anger and despair. It was Churchill.” But Winston, ever magnanimous, rose as Chamberlain passed him, shaking his hand, wishing him “Godspeed.”255

  The German army’s anti-Nazi conspirators had been about to spring. The order to arrest Hitler and occupy all government buildings, including the chancellery, had been on General Franz Halder’s desk at noon, and General Erwin von Witzleben was standing by to witness his signature, when his orderly entered with a bulletin: Chamberlain and Daladier would travel to Munich for further talks. Halder later testified: “I therefore took back the order of execution because, owing to this fact, the entire basis for the action had been taken away.” The next day, as Telford Taylor writes, “the four men of Munich danced their quadrille.”256

  Webster defines “munich” as “an instance of unresisting compliance with and capitulation to the demands of an aggressor nation.” Actually, nothing of great consequence happened at the Munich Conference. The Czechs’ fate had been decided at Berchtesgaden and Godesberg. Britain’s participation was a gross violation of parliamentary government. Unnoticed after the prime minister had been swept out of the chamber by hysterical MPs was a singular omission. His (and Horace Wilson’s) inconclusive, ambiguous, highly questionable exchanges with the German führer had never been subjected to a House debate. The entire cabinet assembled at the airport the next morning to wish him luck, but neither the cabinet (including the foreign secretary) nor Parliament had shared in the formation of the policy that led to Munich.