That, or something like it, had indeed happened. A profound shift in public opinion was noted all over Britain. Hitler’s Prague coup—which was followed, in a week, by his annexation of Memel, part of Lithuania—was the pivotal event in turning round British public opinion. The spirit of friendship between London and Berlin, which Chamberlain believed had been the fruit of Munich, had, in A. J. P. Taylor’s phrase, “lost its glitter.” And Robert Rhodes James, after reviewing the period, concludes:
All that can be said, and said with absolute justice, is that after the annexation of Czechoslovakia in March 1939, the possibility of averting war with Germany was entertained only by a minority in Britain. By some strange process which is inexplicable to those who were not alive that year, the fear of war which had been so evident in 1938 seemed to evaporate. The British did not want war, but… there was a weariness with procrastination, an aversion to false promises and wishful thinking, and a yearning for a simple, clear solution.60
Later in the year a scrap-iron drive was launched, but an exception had to be made for Lord Baldwin; the wrought-iron gates leading to his estate were needed to control angry men who, only two years before, had cheered his every appearance. Malcolm Muggeridge bitterly recalled Chamberlain’s return from Munich and his response to the airport crowd: “He showed them the very document, pointed to the signature upon it; then told them to go home and sleep quietly in their beds, confident that they were secure against molestation, not just for that night and tomorrow night, but for many nights, perhaps for ever. Peace in our time; peace in his time—not even that. The first ecstasy soon passed.”61
Muggeridge was considered a crank and was disregarded by the House because of his contempt for everything trendy. But for once he was in the mainstream; MPs knew it because their constituents told them so in every mail delivery. Only the prime minister remained blind to the shift in the national mood. Addressing the House of Commons on March 15 he ignored the Nazis’ exploitation of ethnic feuds which had always riven eastern Europe. Slovakia, he solemnly noted, had proclaimed her “independence.” What had happened in Bratislava hardly resembled the American Declaration of Independence—in fact the proclamation had been issued by an extremist band of Slovakian Fascists—but you would never have known it from the prime minister’s remarks to the House. He said: “The effect of this [Slovakian] declaration put an end by internal disruption to the State whose frontier we had proposed to guarantee. His Majesty’s Government cannot accordingly hold themselves any longer bound by this obligation.”62
Back in Downing Street his ministers told him this made no sense. He turned away, refusing to concede that the issue which had made him a national hero had boomeranged. But his cabinet persisted, and he was under growing pressure from his whips, his closest colleagues, even from the King. Finally, on March 17, Chamberlain grasped the humiliating fact that the Führer had deceived him, exposing the paper they had signed for the placebo it was.
Another statesman might have abandoned his discredited policies, and at first it seemed that the P.M. had decided to do precisely that. Actually his commitment to appeasement lay too deep, and he could never entirely relinquish his conviction that the path to enduring peace lay through continuing compromise. So his public positions became schizoid, swinging from one extreme to another. That Friday he was decidedly hawkish. The Prague betrayal had angered him, and speaking before a large crowd in Birmingham, the arena most sympathetic to Joe Chamberlain’s son, he executed what was, for the moment at least, an about-face. He believed, he said, that most Englishmen had not only approved of the Munich Agreement but had “shared my honest desire that that policy be carried further.” Now he shared “their disappointment,” their “indignation.” Hitler claimed that his ingestion of what was left of Czechoslovakia was “justified by disturbances [there]. Is this the last attack upon a small state or is it to be followed by another? Is this in fact a step in the direction of an attempt to dominate the world by force?” If so, he said, Britain would take part “in resisting the challenge to the utmost of her power.”63
Halifax told Dirksen: “In Anglo-German relations the clocks [have] been put back considerably.” But Chamberlain did not let a formal protest leave the FO until March 18, three days after the occupation of Prague. Bonnet, having been put under similar pressure, did the same. Couriers from the French and British embassies sped along the Wilhelmstrasse bearing stiffly worded notes protesting the “denial of the spirit of Munich” to the Foreign Ministry. Ribbentrop discarded them unread.64
Ribbentrop’s contempt was deserved. There had been so many such notes, deploring Hitler’s seizure of the Rhineland and then its fortification, objecting to the Anschluss, remonstrating against the Kristallnacht and subsequent anti-Semitic pogroms. Ribbentrop knew the drill. Presently Henderson would appear and explain that friendship between the two countries must not be jeopardized, that mistakes would be resolved by negotiation. And, sure enough, the British envoy arrived within the hour.
Meantime a meeting in Düsseldorf between British and German industrialists had been scheduled to open on March 15. It went ahead as planned. Even as Hitler rode through Prague, the participants signed a preliminary agreement, one clause of which permitted Germany to spend the foreign exchange resources of the country he had just seized—in short, providing the Reichsbank with stolen funds to finance Hitler’s regime.65
The disposition of Czech gold deposited abroad soon became the focus of heated disagreement in England. Though the Bank of England quickly froze its Czech assets, some of the Czech gold it held—six million pounds’ worth—was controlled by the Bank for International Settlements, which wanted it transferred to the Reichsbank. By mid-May rumors were rife that a German representative was in London to conclude negotiations—and HMG was refusing to intervene. The House of Commons erupted on May 26. Where, indignant MPs asked, was the six million pounds in gold? Why was the government willing to permit its transfer to Germany? Chancellor of the Exchequer Simon replied that he was not sure he was even entitled to ask the bank about Czech deposits. But MPs were persistent. After the Anschluss, Vienna’s Threadneedle Street had been a gold mine for Hitler, transferring all Austrian assets to the Nazis, and Parliament wanted no encore. “Really,” said Bracken, “this is the most squalid form of appeasement… appeasing the Germans with the money of the unfortunate Czechs.”66
Chamberlain was evasive, Churchill apoplectic. British rearmament was picking up speed; the lag with the Germans continued, but an effort had begun at last. He told the House:
Here we are going about urging our people to enlist, urging them to accept new forms of military compulsion; here we are paying taxes on a gigantic scale to protect ourselves. If at the same time our mechanism of government is so butter-fingered that this £6,000,000 can be transferred to the Nazi Government of Germany, which only wishes to use it and is only using it, as it does all its foreign exchange, for the purpose of increasing its armaments, if this money is transferred out of our hands, to come back in certain circumstances quicker than it went, it stultifies the efforts people are making in every class and in every party to secure National Defence and rally the whole forces of the country.67
The prime minister flushed when Winston added that he could not understand how this matter could have escaped him. Churchill demanded that he put a halt to “the transference of this £6,000,000 of Czech money into the hands of those who have overthrown and destroyed the Czech republic.” This, in Chamberlain’s view, was another example of Churchill’s lack of judgment, of his misunderstanding of the business world. Sentiment had no place in the City. The government in Prague had changed legally, since the Czech government had signed Hitler’s documents, and Hácha had a perfect right to the gold Beneš had deposited here in the name of Czechoslovakia.68
Because of legerdemain—a hasty change in the Bank of England’s bookkeeping methods—and the fact that vital Reichsbank records were later lost in the bombing of Berlin, to this day
no one knows the degree to which the Nazis succeeded in obtaining these Czech assets. Gilbert and Gott state that Germany “never claimed the gold.” But even if Nazi Germany lost a windfall, the Reich kept most of its powerful British friends.69
In London, Hitler was praised—praise which was entirely unmerited—for his generosity and restraint in suppressing violence in Prague. During the months following his entry into the city, 250,000 Czechs were killed, over half of them Jews. That was unknown at the time, for it was extremely difficult to get precise accounts of German behavior in Prague. The Nazi grip there had begun to tighten even before the coup. “Everywhere the Nazi salute and ‘Heil Hitler’ are to be found,” one of Churchill’s sources had written, “with pictures of the Führer in German restaurants.” Nazis insulted young Czechs and clubbed them, Jews were required to register, and—a glint of black humor—“At the Capitol Cinema here [he was reporting from Brno] the German film ‘Olympia’ is showing. All the Nazis are itching to go, but there is a Nazi picket outside… because the cinema is owned by a Jew!” The same source described the Nazis’ arrival: “I saw the first German troops entering the town…. The local Germans were very enthusiastic, but the rest of the population has been extremely and amazingly quiet. Everything is now draped in swastikas. Yesterday morning Hitler paid a surprise visit; the reception was very cool, and he drove straight back and did not make his intended speech here this evening. Few people saw him or even recognized him.”70
Although the full scope of Nazi atrocities in Czechoslovakia was concealed from foreign correspondents, they could not be prevented from witnessing clubbings, the persecution of Jews, and the disappearance of Czech intellectuals once concentration camps had been built, wired, and equipped with watchtowers for machine guns and searchlights. There was no blinking the fact that this time Hitler had acted not as the champion of Germans living in a neighboring country but as a Genghis Khan bent upon pillage, enslavement, slaughter, and destruction. The Czechs were the first Slavs he had subjugated. He frequently broke his promises; his threats he always made good. In a secret Führerordnung he decreed that the Czechs were to be “assimiliert,” chiefly as “Sklavenarbeit” (“slave labor”) in the Reich; the others, “besonders die Intellektuellen” (“particularly the intellectuals”), were to be “entmanntet und ausgeschaltet” (“castrated and eliminated”). All this had been set forth in Mein Kampf, the best-seller read by few and dismissed by most of them as ravings. Churchill, virtually the only public man who had taken Hitler at his word, published a collection of his own Evening Standard and Daily Telegraph columns under the title Step by Step. Clement Attlee wrote him, “It must be a melancholy satisfaction to see how right you were,” and Lord Wolmer wrote: “The book is a record of perspicacity and courage on your part.”71
Powerful Nazis had become British celebrities, however. On March 18, R. H. S. Crossman, a future cabinet member, spoke in the House of Göring’s “courage and capability.” “Apart from Hitler,” he said, “he is the only statesman of any caliber in the Third Reich…. Moreover, it was his energy in reorganizing the Prussian police and establishing the Gestapo which enabled Hitler to consolidate his position in 1933, and since then the triumphs of the Nazi foreign policy would have been impossible without his work.”72
Parliament’s indifference to the lot of the Czech Jews infuriated Churchill. Dispossessed by the Nazis, they wandered the roads of eastern Europe. Photographs of their ordeal were profoundly moving, but Dawson refused to run any of them in The Times; he couldn’t help the victims, he explained to his staff, and if they were published Hitler would be offended. Then, nine weeks after Prague, the Chamberlain government announced that British policy in Palestine had been changed. Unlimited Jewish immigration was over; strict limits would be imposed on the number entering Palestine for the next five years, and after that all Jews would be turned away “unless the Arabs of Palestine are prepared to acquiesce in it.” This closed the chief refuge for European Jews fleeing the growing Nazi empire, and it gave the Arabs veto power over the eventual establishment of a Jewish state.73
This was popular in the Reich. But it was also a renunciation of the Balfour declaration, which in 1917 had promised British support in “the establishment [in Palestine] of a national home for the Jewish people.” To Churchill, who had been a Zionist for thirty years, it constituted a shocking act of treachery and a violation of his personal honor. In 1921, as colonial secretary, he had committed Britain to the founding of a homeland for the Jews; it would be called “Judea” or “Israel.” And in 1937, he had reaffirmed his support of such a nation publicly and, privately, to Chaim Weizmann, president of the World Zionist Organization, who had become a close friend. In May 1939, the new Middle Eastern policy was defended in the House by Malcolm MacDonald, who now presided over the Colonial Office. Amery denounced it in blistering terms, and Churchill, after reviewing his speech with Weizmann (who said he wouldn’t change a word; he thought it perfect), addressed the issue in Parliament on May 22.
As one “intimately and responsibly concerned in the earlier stages of our Palestine policy,” he could not “stand by and see solemn engagements into which Britain has entered before the world set aside.” Perhaps the government’s purpose was “administrative convenience.” It was unlikely. No one had suggested it. Or perhaps—and here Winston hinted at the darker, more obvious, and most reprehensible motive, an attempt by His Majesty’s Government to ingratiate itself with the Führer—it was being done “for the sake of a quiet life,” which, he predicted, would be “a vain hope.” Of the Arab veto he said, “There is the breach; there is the violation of the pledge; there is the abandonment of the Balfour Declaration; there is the end of the vision, of the hope, of the dream.” He asked: “What will our potential enemies think?… Will they not be tempted to say: ‘They’re on the run again. This is another Munich.’ ” At the end he stared straight at the prime minister’s eyes and recalled that twenty years earlier, in this chamber, Chamberlain had said—he was quoting him directly—“A great responsibility will rest upon the Zionists, who, before long, will be proceeding, with joy in their hearts, to the ancient seat of their people. Theirs will be the task to build up a new prosperity and a new civilisation in old Palestine, so long neglected and misruled.” Churchill closed with three shattering sentences: “Well, they have answered his call. They have fulfilled his hopes. How can he find it in his heart to strike them this mortal blow?”74
The House witnessed its first sign of revolt by Tory MPs against their leadership on March 28, when thirty distinguished Conservatives—among them Churchill, Eden, Duff Cooper, and Macmillan—appealed for a new national government, with ministers drawn from the benches of all three parties.
Chamberlain, a better politician than a statesman, was ready for them. He knew the country no longer shared his faith in Munich. Indeed, it was apparent to all the appeasers that they could not survive another such sellout. Daladier told a secret meeting of his Foreign Affairs Commission that all agreements between France and Germany were “en ruines.” He said that “if France does not face up to the consequences there will be a stampede among friendly countries which until now have been firm. It will be a rush toward servitude [à la servitude]. And we must have no illusion as to what will happen thereafter. New invasions will come to our country and threaten to submerge it [risqueront de le submerger].” At both No. 10 and in the Élysée Palace it was agreed that the Führer’s next victim must be identified and bound to the democracies in a tight military alliance.75
It is a marvel that the Third Reich, now in its seventh year, had survived without precipitating a general conflict. It was coming now; historian Brian Gardner recalls that “While nations busily armed themselves for the war which statesmen said they had averted, there was a sort of political hush in Europe. Where would Hitler strike next, and when?” Appropriately, the answer found in London and Paris reflected their diplomatic incompetence. They picked the wrong country.76
Less than two weeks after the Führer had devoured Czechoslovakia the prime minister wrote one of his sisters: “There is always the possibility that Germany will act more cunningly & that instead we shall be faced with a new ‘commercial agreement’ which in effect puts Roumania at her mercy.” Although the Rumanians shared no common border with the Reich, Hungary did; the government in Budapest was hostile toward Bucharest and would not object—in fact, would not dare object—if Nazi panzers raced across Hungarian soil to penetrate Rumania, a primitive Balkan country which was nevertheless rich in oil and controlled the mouth of the Danube.77
In Paris, Phipps asked Bonnet whether he thought Rumania would be “the next course on the Nazi menu.” Bonnet told the British ambassador that he thought it “very likely.” He was in fact convinced of it; his prediction was later found in Quai d’Orsay files. Henderson agreed that Hitler’s next target would be “domination by force of the whole Danube basin.” All this seemed supported by Virgil Tilea, the Rumanian minister in London. Tilea called at the Foreign Office on Thursday, March 16, the day after Prague fell. He told his tale to an FO assistant under secretary, then to Halifax and Cadogan—and, going public, to The Times and the Daily Telegraph. The gist of it was that his government, “from secret and other sources,” had learned that the Germans planned to overrun Hungary and “disintegrate Roumania in the same way as they had disintegrated Czechoslovakia… establishing a German protectorate over the whole country.” Their greatest prize would be the oil fields at Ploesti. He asked for a loan of ten million pounds to strengthen his country’s defenses, emphasizing the “extreme urgency” of a “precise indication” of Britain’s position “in the event of Roumania becoming a victim of German aggression.” The “gravity” of the “imminent danger” was heightened by new German demands that the Reich receive preferred treatment in trade between the two countries, terms set forth in such language that they “seemed very much like an ultimatum,” an impression reinforced by Wehrmacht troop movements along the Rumanian border. The eruption of hostilities “might possibly be a question of days.”78