Meanwhile, Chamberlain and Daladier had returned to their capitals. But instead of the outraged demonstrations they had expected, they were lustily cheered as though, a Foreign Office official commented, the people were “celebrating a great victory over an enemy, instead of the betrayal of a small ally.” Depressed, Daladier pointed to the cheering thousands and whispered: “The idiots!” Chamberlain, more naive and more optimistic than his French colleague, waved a sheet of paper in the air on his arrival in London and announced “peace in our time.” It is difficult in retrospect to empathize with the spontaneous feeling of relief that once more united Europe; it is difficult to summon up respect for the illusions of the time. In London the crowd in front of 10 Downing Street began singing “For He’s a Jolly Good Fellow.” Paris Soir offered Chamberlain “a patch of French soil” for fishing, and commented that it would be impossible “to imagine a more fruitful symbol of peace.”’103 When, in the subsequent House of Commons debate, Winston Churchill began his speech with the words, “We have sustained a total unmitigated defeat,” there was a great outcry.
The German troops, in consonance with the agreement, moved into the Sudetenland. On October 3 Hitler crossed the former German frontier in a four-wheel-drive type of Mercedes. At the same time, Wenzel Jaksch, leader of the Sudeten German Social Democrats, flew to London. As was to be the practice in later years, the army units had been followed promptly by the Security Service and Gestapo squads in order to “begin at once with purging the liberated territories of Marxist traitors to the people and other enemies of the State.” Jaksch asked for visas and all kinds of aid for his threatened friends. Lord Runciman assured him the mayor of London was setting up a fund for the persecuted and that he personally would contribute. The London Times published photographs of the German troops marching into the Sudetenland amid a cascade of flowers and greeted by cheering crowds. But Editor in Chief Geoffrey Dawson refused to publish shots of those who were fleeing from these troops. Wenzel Jaksch was given no visas. The Poles and Hungarians now snatched sizable portions of the abandoned, mutilated country. The history of that autumn is replete with acts of blindness, egotism, weakness, and treachery. Those of Wenzel Jaksch’s friends who managed to hide out within the country were shortly thereafter handed over to Germany by the new Prague government.
Hitler’s vexation at the outcome of the Munich conference sharpened his impatience. Only ten days later he was after Keitel with a top secret list of questions about the military potentialities of the Reich. On October 21 he gave orders for the military “liquidation of the remainder of Czechoslovakia” and for “taking possession of the Memel region.” In a postscript dated November 24 he also ordered preparations for the occupation of Danzig. Simultaneously, he encouraged the Slovak nationalists to adopt the role of the Sudeten Germans in the new Czech republic and thus speed the further disintegration of Czechoslovakia from within.
He also embarked on a campaign for intensified psychological mobilization of the nation, for he had recently been given reason to doubt the public’s will. To be sure, there was great enthusiasm in Germany for the bloodless conquests. Hitler’s prestige had once again risen to dizzying heights. But he himself realized that the rejoicing held a. considerable degree of relief that war had been avoided. He found the pretext he needed when, early in November, a Jewish exile shot down Legation Secretary Ernst vom Rath in the German Embassy in Paris. Out of an assassination prompted by personal motives Hitler quickly constructed one of those “assaults of world Jewry” which he still counted on to rouse and unite the public. Solemn memorial services, complete with music by Beethoven and statements by all and sundry, were held even in schools and factories. For the last time the SA came forth in its once usual but long since abandoned role of exponent of blind popular fury. On the night of November 9, 1938, synagogues went up in flames all over Germany, Jewish homes were devastated, stores pillaged, nearly a hundred persons killed, and some 20,000 arrested. Das Schwarze Korps, the SS newspaper, was already advocating extermination “with fire and sword” as the “actual and final end of Jewry in Germany.”
But the inveterate bourgeois instincts of the populace could only take alarm at excesses supposedly produced by street mobs; this sort of thing revived memories of the years of disorder and lawlessness.104 It was a further symptom of Hitler’s galloping loss of contact with reality that he could believe his own most powerful emotions would necessarily yield the most powerful psychological effect upon the people. The contrast between his own “Balkan” mania about the Jews and lukewarm German anti-Semitism was now growing more and more patent. Significantly, the campaign was successful only in Vienna.
The apathy of the masses drove him to increase his efforts. The period after the Munich conference was marked by an intensified propaganda drive, in which Hitler himself soon took part with mounting vehemence. An irritable speech at Saarbrücken on October 9, a Weimar speech on November 6, a speech in Munich on November 8, even the major summing up of 1938, compounding pride, hate, nervousness, and self-assurance, formed part of this campaign. In the latter he called for the “coherence of the racial body politic” and once more attacked Jewry, prophesying the “annihilation of the Jewish race in Europe.”
His secret addresses of the same period to German newspaper editors were motivated by the need to swing the press away from his tactics of pledging peace and appealing for reconciliation—whose bad effects he had observed in Berlin and Munich—to a tone of aggressive resolution. The speech was practically an order for psychological mobilization. Again and again, Hitler stressed the necessity of having behind him “a German people strong in faith, united, self-assured, confident.” At the same time he vented his wrath upon his critics and the seditious intellectuals:
When I look at the intellectual classes among us, well, unfortunately we need them, you know; otherwise we might some day, I don’t know, exterminate them or something. But unfortunately we need them. Now then, when I look at these intellectual classes and call to mind their behavior and consider it, the way they’ve behaved toward me, toward our work, I become almost fearful. For ever since I have been politically active and especially since I have led the Reich, I have had nothing but successes. And nevertheless this crowd floats around in an abominable, disgusting way. What would happen if we had a failure for once? Because that too is possible, gentlemen. Then how would this flock of chickens act up?… In the past it was my greatest pride to have built up a party which stood pigheadedly and fanatically behind me even in times of setbacks, stood fanatically especially in such times. That was my greatest pride and… we must educate the whole nation to that attitude. It must be trained to absolute, pigheaded, unquestioning, confident faith that in the end we will achieve everything that is necessary. We can do that, we can succeed in doing that, only by a continuous appeal to the vigor of the nation, by emphasizing the affirmative values of a people and as far as possible omitting the so-called negative sides.
To that end it is also necessary that the press in particular blindly adhere to the principle: What the leadership does is right!… Only in that way will we free the people from, I would put it this way, from a doubt that can only make the people unhappy. The masses do not want to be burdened with problems. The masses desire only one thing: to be well led and to be able to trust the leadership, and they want the leaders not to quarrel among themselves, but to appear before them unified. Believe me, I know precisely what I am talking about, the German people will regard nothing with greater joy than when I, for example, let’s say on a day like November 9 [anniversary of the Beer Hall Putsch] go out on the street and all my associates are standing beside me, and the people say: “That’s so-and-so and that’s so-and-so and that’s so-and-so and that’s so-and-so.” And these people all feel so secure at the idea that everyone sticks together, all follow the Führer, and the Führer sticks to all these men; these are our idols. Maybe some intellectuals won’t understand this at all. But these ordinary people out there�
�� that’s what they want! That has been so in past German history too. The people are always glad whenever a few stick together up on top; it makes it easier for the people to stick together down at the bottom.105
The pace of events themselves, which Hitler deliberately accelerated after the Munich conference, also formed part of the process of psychological mobilization. At times the observer had to ask himself whether this was breathless politics or whether breathlessness was assuming political form. Week after week the pressures against defenseless Czechoslovakia increased from within and from without. On March 13 Hitler summoned the Slovak nationalist leader Tiso to Berlin and pressed him to defect from Prague. A day later, at a Parliament session in Bratislava, the Slovak Declaration of Independence was read aloud; it had been drafted by Ribbentrop and handed to Tiso already translated into Slovak. The evening of that same day Czech President Hacha, accompanied by Foreign Minister Chvalkovsky, arrived in Berlin. There he was put through a special ordeal which Hitler later gloatingly called “Háchaizing.” The guests were received with all the honors required by protocol; but only after a nerve-wracking waiting period, in the course of which they vainly tried to discover the subject to be negotiated, were they admitted to the chancellery. It was by then between one and two o’clock in the morning. Hacha, old and sickly, had to tramp wearily through the endless corridors and halls of the newly built chancellery before he reached Hitler, who sat at his desk in the semidarkness of a gigantic study illuminated only by a few bronze floor lamps. Beside him were the pompous Göring and once more Hitler’s bogeyman, General Keitel. The President’s opening remarks were steeped in the servility of a country fully aware of her own haplessness. The minutes of the meeting note:
President Hacha greets the Führer and expresses his gratitude for being received by him. He said he had long desired to meet the man whose wonderful ideas he had frequently read and followed. He himself had until recently been an unknown. He had never dealt with politics, but had been merely a judicial official in the Viennese administrative apparatus and… had been summoned to Prague in 1918 and in 1925 had become Chief Justice of the Supreme Court. As such he had had no relations with the politicians, or as he preferred to call them, the “politicos”…. He had never been persona grata. He’d met President Masaryk only once a year at a dinner for judges, and Benes even more rarely. The one time he had had a meeting with Benes, they had quarreled. Moreover, the whole regime had been alien to him, so that immediately after the great change he had asked himself whether independence had even been at all good for Czechoslovakia. This past autumn the task had fallen to him to head the State. He was an old man… and he believed that the fate of Czechoslovakia was well safeguarded in the Führer’s hands.106
When Hacha concluded this astonishing speech with the request that his people nevertheless be accorded the right to their own national existence, Hitler launched into one of his rambling monologues. He complained about the oft-demonstrated hostility of the Czechs, the impotence of the present government to control domestic conditions. He referred to the continuing Benes spirit, and finally heaped reproach on reproach upon his guests, who sat there silent and “as if turned to stone,” with “only their eyes… showing they were alive.” His patience was now exhausted, he continued.
At six o’clock the German army would be advancing into Czechia from all sides, and the German air force would occupy the airfields. There were two possibilities. The first was that the advance of the German troops would develop into a battle. In that case this resistance would be broken by force of arms, using all means. The other possibility was that the entry of the German troops would take place in a tolerable manner; in that case the Führer would find it easy, when reshaping Czech conditions, to permit Czechoslovakia a generous life of her own, autonomy and a degree of national freedom….
This was the reason he had asked Hacha to come here. This invitation was the last kindness he would be able to show the Czech people…. The hours were passing. At six o’clock the troops would march in. He was almost ashamed to say that there was a German division to match every Czech division. The fact was that the military operation was no small one; it had been organized on a very liberal scale.
Hacha, in a virtually extinct voice, asked how with four hours at his disposal he could arrange to restrain the entire Czech nation from offering resistance. Hitler replied haughtily:
The military machine that was now rolling could not be stopped. Let him get in touch with his officials in Prague. It was a major decision, but he saw dawning the possibility of a long period of peace between the two peoples. If the decision were otherwise, he saw the annihilation of Czechoslovakia…. His own decision was irrevocable. Everyone knew what a decision of the Führer meant.
Dismissed from Hitler’s study shortly after two o’clock, Hacha and Chvalkovsky tried to get through to Prague by telephone. Göring pointed out that time was running out and his planes would soon be bombing the Czech capital. With rough good humor he began describing the destruction, when the President suffered a heart attack. For a moment the group standing around him feared the worst. “Tomorrow the whole world will be saying he was murdered during the night in the chancellery,” one of those present noted. But Dr. Morell, held in readiness by a careful stage manager, helped to revive the broken man. Thus the authorities in Prague were given their instructions not to resist the German invasion, and shortly before four o’clock in the morning Hacha signed the document of submission, by which he “placed the fate of the Czech people and country in the hands of the Führer of the German Reich.”
As soon as Hacha had left, Hitler lost all his customary control. Exuberantly he rushed into the room where his secretaries were sitting and invited them to kiss him. “Girls,” he cried, “Hacha has signed. This is the greatest day of my life. I shall be known as the greatest German in history.”107 Two hours later his troops crossed the border. The first formations arrived in Prague, in a snowstorm, by nine o’clock. Once more cheering people were waiting on the sidewalks, but they were only a minority; the majority turned away or stood mute, tears of helplessness and rage in their eyes. That same evening Hitler himself entered the city and spent the night in Hradschin Palace. “Czechoslovakia,” he announced, drunk with victory, “has herewith ceased to exist.” It had all been the work of two days. When on March 18 the British and French ambassadors submitted protest notes in Berlin, Hitler had already set up the Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia. As a placatory gesture he placed at its head Konstantin von Neurath, then Minister of Foreign Affairs, now “protector” of Bohemia and Moravia, who was regarded as a moderate. He had arranged a protective treaty with Slovakia and was already on his way back to Berlin. It seemed as if Mussolini’s remark shortly before Munich was once again proving true: “The democracies exist to swallow toads.”
Nevertheless, the seizure of Prague ushered in the turning point. The Western powers were too deeply disillusioned; they felt hoodwinked, their good will and patience abused. As late as March 10, Chamberlain had told some journalists that the danger of war was abating and a new era of détente dawning. Now, on March 17, he spoke in Birmingham of a shock more severe than any before, referred to the many breaches of pledges inherent in the action against Prague, and finally asked: “Is this the end of an old adventure or is it the beginning of a new?” On the same day he recalled Ambassador Henderson from Berlin for an indefinite time. Lord Halifax, for his part, declared that he could well understand Hitler’s preference for bloodless triumphs, but the next time blood would have to be spilled.108
But the occupation of Prague was a turning point only for Western policy. In the apologias of the appeasers, and in the attempts at selfexoneration by German accomplices of the regime, the argument constantly recurs that it was Hitler who changed with his entry into Prague; that only then had he set out on the road of injustice and radically expanded his valid revisionist aims; that after Prague it was no longer the right of self-determination but the glory of a
conqueror that became his goal. We have since learned, however, how such considerations miss Hitler’s motives and intentions, and in fact the very core of his nature. He had long ago decided on his course. Prague was only a tactical problem for him, and the Moldau was certainly not his Rubicon.
And yet, the undertaking was an act of self-revelation. Colonel Jodi had once smugly noted, in the days of continuous triumphs in foreign policy: “This kind of politics is new for Europe.” In fact, the dynamic conjunction of threats, flatteries, pledges of peacefulness and acts of violence applied by Hitler was an unfamiliar, numbing experience; and the Western statesmen might well have been deceived for a while about Hitler’s true intentions. Lord Halifax confessed his own confusion when he compared trying to make out what Hitler was up to, to the groping of a blind man seeking a way across a swamp while everyone on the shores was shouting different warnings about the next danger zone. Hitler’s operation against Prague, however, had finally dispelled the fog. For the first time Chamberlain and his French counterparts seemed to begin to perceive what Hugenberg had had to realize: this man could not be controlled and tamed—except, perhaps, by force.
Prague signified another kind of turning point in Hitler’s career: it was, after almost fifteen years, his first grave mistake. Tactically, he had achieved his victories by his ability to give all situations an ambiguous character, so that his opponents’ front and their will to resist was splintered. Now for the first time he was acting in an unequivocal manner. Whereas until then he had always assumed dual roles and had played, as an antagonist, the part of a secret ally, or provoked conditions while alleging that he was opposing them, he now revealed his innermost nature without ambiguity. In Munich he had once more, although reluctantly, set up the “Fascist constellation,” that is to say, achieved a victory over one enemy with the help of the other. The assault on the Jews in November, 1938, seemed to be his first break with this formula. Prague wiped out any doubt that he was the universal enemy.
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