The Third Reich

by Thomas Childers

Göring also expressed his growing apprehension about British military intervention. As Hitler’s September 28 deadline for Benes to accept or reject his terms loomed ever nearer, Göring grew less confident that the British were bluffing, and, he argued, it made little sense to risk a world war over details when Hitler had already gained essentially what he wanted. Goebbels, too, urged restraint. Only Ribbentrop remained unflinchingly supportive of Hitler’s war plans, and Ribbentrop’s judgment, Goebbels noted, was clouded by his “blind hatred against England.”

  Influenced by Göring and Weizsäcker, Hitler responded to Chamberlain’s letter with one of his own. He denied that he had any desire to “cripple Czechoslovakia in her national existence or in her political and economic independence.” He had no intention of occupying the whole country. He wanted no Czechs. The Sudetenland, as he had repeated several times in meetings with French and British diplomats, was his last territorial demand to make in Europe. The Czechs had until two o’clock on the 28th, forty-eight hours, to decide.

  The ensuing hours were filled with frantic telephone messages, telegrams, and letters. On the morning of September 28, French ambassador François-Poncet delivered a message to Hitler in the Reich Chancellery, presenting a new French proposal that went further than that of the British. According to François-Poncet, France was willing to see Germany occupy the entire Sudetenland so long as force was not used and other guarantees were in place. The occupation would proceed in phases, between October 1 and October 10. If Hitler accepted the proposal, France would demand acceptance by the Czechs. At roughly the same time, Chamberlain sent a message to Berlin indicating that he would be willing to make another trip to Germany to discuss the arrangements for the transfer of territory. He also suggested that Mussolini and French premier Edouard Daladier join the discussion. Mussolini, whom he had already contacted, agreed to act as mediator.

  Mussolini, whose support Hitler desperately wanted, signaled Berlin that he would stand beside the Führer come what may, but he noted that the differences between the parties were now so small that in his opinion “the proposal ought to be accepted.” Hitler agreed, and sent invitations to Rome and Paris—but not to Prague or Moscow. The Duce, who was not keen on the prospect of war with Britain and France, for which Italy was unprepared, readily accepted; Daladier did as well. It was agreed that the meeting of the four major powers would take place on the following day, September 29, in Munich.

  The arrangements for the conference had to be thrown together at the last moment. It was decided that the four leaders would meet in the newly completed Führer Building on the Königsplatz. Hitler’s official residence in Munich was a neoclassical building of white stone with marble floors, immense hallways, interior columns, and a sweeping staircase that led to the first floor (second floor in American usage) where Hitler’s office was located. The discussions were to take place in a spacious conference room just adjacent. A dinner was to be held in the evening for the participants in the banquet room.

  Early in the morning Hitler decided to meet the Duce’s train in Kufstein in the Tyrolean Alps near the Italian border, so that the two dictators could confer before the conference convened. Daladier arrived in Munich before noon, and shortly thereafter Chamberlain’s plane touched down at the Oberwiesenfeld aerodrome after a seven-hour flight. He was met, as was Daladier, by Ribbentrop, an SS honor guard, and the obligatory band. Without stopping at the hotel, where the British delegation was to stay, he was driven through the city directly to the Führer Building in an open car. Along the way from the airport to the Königsplatz, excited, friendly crowds clogged the sidewalks, waving and cheering both men, but especially Chamberlain. He had come to save the peace.

  When the four leaders gathered in the conference room, the improvised character of the conference became painfully clear. There was no agenda, no chairman, no arrangements for minutes to be taken, and not even pencil and paper for the participants. The four principals sat in plush easy chairs in a semicircle around the large marble fireplace, a low coffee table between them. As the day wore on, the room filled up, as assistants, interpreters, foreign ministers and their staffs, and other members of the different delegations came and went. It was, one of the British delegation recalled, “a hugger-bugger affair.” Mussolini, the only participant who spoke all the languages represented, acted as de facto chair and presented a memorandum that was to serve as the conference’s working document. He had composed it during the night, he said, but it was, in fact, based on a draft by Göring and Weizsäcker. The two men had drafted the memorandum and dispatched it to Italy without the knowledge of Ribbentrop, who remained opposed to a peaceful settlement of the crisis. The document basically reiterated the terms of the Godesberg agreement. Chamberlain and Daladier both made weak efforts to include the Czechs in the meeting, but Hitler was adamant.

  The meeting dragged on into the early hours of the morning, when the four heads of state affixed their signatures to the document at 1:30 a.m. According to the terms agreed upon, German troops would occupy “predominantly German territory” beginning on October 1. The territory would be divided into four military zones, and Italy, Britain, and France would guarantee that the evacuation of Czechs would be completed by October 10 and that no military installations would be destroyed. A newly created international committee of these powers plus Germany would determine the conditions for the plebiscites to be held in certain areas and would propose a final frontier. The Munich Agreement was, in effect, the Godesberg Memorandum, with certain adjustments. The Czechoslovakian Republic had been dismantled without having a say in the matter.

  Chamberlain had promised the two-man Czech delegation that was waiting in its hotel that he would negotiate with Czech interests in mind. Now he received them in his suite at the Regina Palast and broke the news of their country’s dismemberment. Daladier was also present, and the two sought to explain, though not too vigorously, what had happened and why. It was, they insisted, a far better arrangement than the Godesberg Memorandum, but no words could disguise or soften their cruel betrayal. Jan Mastny, the Czech ambassador, wept. The Czechs were informed that their agreement was not really required. If Prague refused, Czechoslovakia would be left to deal with the Germans alone. “Then they were finished with us,” wrote Hubert Masaryk, the other Czech representative, “and we were allowed to go.”

  The next morning Chamberlain paid a visit to Hitler’s apartment on the Prinzregentenplatz. It was not a scheduled meeting; during a break in the proceedings on the previous day, the prime minister surprised the Führer by requesting a personal meeting, and Hitler, pleased but puzzled, agreed. When Chamberlain arrived at the apartment, he produced from his briefcase a one-page document, a declaration that pledged that the two countries would never go to war with one another again. “We regard the Agreement signed last night, and the Anglo-German Naval Agreement, as symbolic of the desire of our two peoples never to go to war with each other again,” it read. Hitler hesitated momentarily, then signed to wan smiles and handshakes all round. For Chamberlain this was the crowning achievement of a successful mission to Munich, and it was this paper that he waved in triumph upon his return to London, uttering words that would soon prove painfully ironic: “I believe this means peace in our time.”

  Chamberlain’s trip back to the Munich aerodrome was even more triumphant than on his arrival. Tumultuous crowds cheered as the hero of the hour passed by. To interpreter Paul Schmidt, riding with Chamberlain in the open car, “these obviously spontaneous and unorganized ovations for Chamberlain implied a certain criticism of Hitler.” Hitler, “the man of war,” received “a certain tribute of routine applause,” but “it lagged far behind the spontaneous manifestations of sympathy . . . accorded to Chamberlain . . . and Daladier” outside their hotels.

  For all the drama surrounding the meeting in the Führer Building, the Munich Agreement did not end the Czech crisis; it was merely the beginning of the multinational republic’s dismemberment. Germany emerged from
the Munich Conference with eleven thousand square miles of strategically important territory, acquiring in the process the extensive Czech system of fortifications, much of its armaments industry, and 3.5 million new German speakers. And once German troops marched into the Sudetenland, Hitler simply ignored the few restrictions and conditions the Western powers had attempted to impose on him: no plebiscites were held and the boundaries that were finally set reflected Hitler’s strategic concerns more than ethnic considerations (some 250,000 Germans were left in Czechoslovakia and 800,000 Czechs were marooned in areas annexed to the Reich). The Czech state was left virtually defenseless, and within days Poland, with Hitler’s encouragement, seized territory on the Czech-Polish border, the Hungarians grabbed a strip of territory in southern Slovakia, and the Slovaks, with Hitler’s blessing, declared autonomy within the rump Czech state.

  To Hitler, Chamberlain’s Anglo-German declaration was meaningless. He had no intention of abiding by the previous night’s four-power agreement, and he signed this bilateral protocol with England without a care. Although he came to view the conference as a failure, entangling him in agreements that left him far short of his goal, Hitler’s prestige soared. Once again he had plunged Germany into an international crisis, and once again he had emerged triumphant without a shot being fired. But war was the ultimate terminus of Nazi policy, and after the statesmen had returned home and a sense of profound relief settled over Europe, Hitler found himself deflated, disappointed, cheated of his war. Throughout the Sudeten crisis he had possessed an enormous advantage in dealing with the Western democracies: while Britain and France scrambled to maintain the peace at virtually all costs, Hitler was not only willing to go to war, he wanted to go to war. Confident that Britain and France would not intervene, he was determined to have his war, though a limited one, only to find that Chamberlain had robbed him of it.

  Munich had profound repercussions. It convinced Hitler that the Western powers, even when sorely provoked, would not risk war, especially over his ambitions in Eastern Europe. Britain and France were, as he had concluded after his march into the Rhineland in 1936, “no longer heroic peoples.” His designs for acquiring Lebensraum in the East, which had animated his foreign policy from the outset, were reinforced by Western weakness. Stalin drew much the same conclusion. The West was weak and, worse, was determined to channel German aggression eastward. Although the Soviets had continued to voice their support for the beleaguered Czechs throughout the crisis, they, too, felt certain that France would not act and hence Russia would be relieved of its treaty obligations to Prague. The West, in short, was not to be trusted.

  Munich also confirmed Hitler’s faith in his own “intuition” and emboldened him for further action. His military, his Foreign Office, and even his ally, Mussolini, had been wrong, and he had, again, been proven right. The embryonic military conspiracy collapsed, and the army’s trust in its own judgment suffered another blow, one that would keep it quiescent until the latter stages of the coming war. The peaceful conclusion of the Sudeten crisis also sent his domestic popularity skyrocketing and undermined what had been a mounting undercurrent of dissatisfaction with his reckless policies.

  By the close of 1938, Hitler had gutted the Versailles Treaty, overturned the postwar European order, and raised German power and prestige to dizzying heights, all without bloodshed. The radical turn in German foreign policy accompanied a radicalization of Nazi racial policy, culminating in the nationwide violence of Kristallnacht just over a month after the Munich conference. The regime, in both foreign and racial policy, had turned a corner. Nor was Hitler through. While synagogues were still smoldering all over the Reich on November 10, Hitler held a remarkably candid meeting with German journalists. “For decades, circumstances caused me to speak almost exclusively of peace,” he began.

  Only by constantly emphasizing the German Volk’s desire for peace and peaceful intentions was I able to gain the German prerequisite for accomplishing the next step. It is self-evident that this peace propaganda throughout the decades may well have had quite questionable effects. It might well leave the mistaken impression in the minds of many that the present regime stands for the resolution and the willingness to preserve peace under all conditions. . . . For years, I spoke only of peace because of this forced situation. Now it has become necessary to slowly prepare the German Volk psychologically for the fact that there are things that cannot be achieved by peaceful means. Some goals can only be achieved through the use of force. That meant that certain of these events needed to be portrayed in a manner in which they would automatically trigger certain reactions in the brains of the mass of the German Volk: if you cannot stop these things in a peaceful manner, then you will just have to stop them by force—in any event, things cannot go on like this.

  13

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  EARLY SUCCESS

  On January 30, 1939, Adolf Hitler addressed the German Reichstag on the sixth anniversary of his ascension to power, and with a year of stupendous foreign policy victories behind him, he had much to boast about. He began with a recital of the triumphs of the past year, but he could not let an opportunity pass without enumerating the perils facing the new Germany. The menace of Bolshevism, Jewry, and plutocracy had been met at home, but “the Jewish world enemy” was still lurking beyond Germany’s borders, always scheming. This international Jewish conspiracy, the “wire pullers” of both Bolshevism and Wall Street plutocracy, was driving the peoples of Europe toward a cataclysmic war. These themes were inextricably entwined in Hitler’s fantasies, and on this day he explicitly fused the two obsessions more directly, more menacingly than ever before.

  France and England were not Germany’s enemies, he declared. Germany had “no feelings of hatred towards England, America, or France.” Germany wished to live “in peace and quiet,” and all “the assertions about the Reich’s intended attacks on other nations” were lies spread by Jewish agitators and their unwitting front men. The threat to European, indeed, world peace was not the work of a nation or a state but the machinations of a single enemy, “international Jewry.” Some countries, especially the benighted democracies, refused to recognize the menace, but National Socialist Germany, with its systematic campaign of enlightenment and propaganda, was raising the alarm. Thanks to that tireless effort, the nations of Europe would “no longer be willing to die on the battlefield so that this unstable international race may profiteer from a war or satisfy its Old Testament vengeance. The Jewish watchword ‘Workers of the world unite’ will be conquered by a higher realization, namely ‘Workers of all classes and of all nations, recognize your common enemy!’ ” But if the nations of the world would not learn this lesson, Hitler offered a chilling prophecy for the future: “In the course of my life,” he said,

  I have very often been a prophet and have usually been ridiculed for it. During the time of struggle for power it was in the first instance the Jewish race which only received my prophecies with laughter when I said that I would one day take over the leadership of the state, and with it that of the whole nation and that I would then among many other things settle the Jewish question. Their laughter was uproarious, but I think that now that once ringing laughter is choking in their throats. Today I will once more be a prophet: If the international Jewish financiers in and outside Europe should succeed in plunging the nations once more into a world war, then the result will not be the bolshevization of the earth, and thus the victory of Jewry, but the annihilation of the Jewish race in Europe.

  The Nazis’ use of such apocalyptic language was not new. For years the Nazis had spoken, with mounting ferocity, of the world Jewish conspiracy, the global enemy, and Judeo-Bolshevism. But in the crisis-laden months of 1938 and 1939, terms such as “annihilation,” “eradication,” and “extermination” grew exponentially and infused the already threatening environment with mounting anxiety. Nazi Jewish policy was at this time still emigration, but Nazi rhetoric grew increasingly violent. Speaking to the Czech foreign min
ister in January 1939, Hitler fumed that Germany had been too lenient with the Jews. “Our own kindness was nothing but weakness and we regret it. This vermin must be destroyed. The Jews are our sworn enemies and at the end of this year there will not be a Jew left in Germany.” They were not going to get away with what they had done in November 1918. “The day of reckoning has come.”

  In 1939 war was in the air. The Munich Agreement had provided a much needed respite from the serial crises of 1938, but that pause proved to be of short duration. From the outset of the Sudeten crisis Hitler’s objective, stated explicitly to his generals, was a war against Czechoslovakia that would wipe the multinational state off the map, and although he emerged from the fall crisis a great hero and savior in Germany, he was frustrated. Chamberlain, for whom he had nothing but contempt, had denied him the smashing military victory he so ardently desired. He was livid at the idea that this “old man,” this senile, umbrella-toting Englishman had managed to ensnare him in international agreements that had denied him his conqueror’s entry into Prague. This state of affairs could not be allowed to stand. After encouraging Poland and Hungary to seize border territory from the crumbling Czech state, he proceeded in early 1939 to foment unrest among the Slovaks and Ruthenians in Czechoslovakia’s eastern provinces. Both had attained far-reaching autonomy within the rump Czech state, but now Hitler pressed separatist elements in both provinces to agitate for full independence from Prague.

  Following the script that had played so well in both Austria and the Sudetenland, anti-Czech agitation reached crisis proportions among the restive Slovaks and Ruthenians. On March 6 and 9 Czech president Emil Hacha, who had succeeded Benes, disbanded first the Slovak and then the Ruthenian governments and declared martial law. Although the move was unexpected, Hitler quickly seized the initiative. German arms were slipped into Slovakia from across the former Austrian border and distributed to the well-organized German minority. On March 13, Hitler summoned Slovak leader Jozef Tiso to Berlin. There Hitler demanded that either the Slovaks declare their immediate independence, which would be guaranteed by Berlin, or be left to their own devices. Ribbentrop also noted pointedly that Hungarian troops were preparing to seize Ruthenia, and parts of Slovakia were being restrained only by Germany. Tiso rushed back to Bratislava where, before the Slovak parliament, he read out a declaration of independence that had been composed by Ribbentrop. On March 14 Slovakia became an independent nation, recognized by Germany, and another Czech crisis broke over Europe.