Alone, 1932-1940

by William Manchester

  In Nicolson’s diary one senses the momentum, the rush of events that weekend. On Friday evening, March 11, he noted Schuschnigg’s capitulation after “a pathetic farewell broadcast saying that he is yielding to ‘brutal force.’ ” Saturday Hitler crossed the border and entered Linz, where he had spent his boyhood. Göring, reproached by the vacillating Henderson, replied with “a diatribe against Schuschnigg’s lack of good faith.” Nicolson, mingling with his working-class constituents, wrote: “They are all anti-Chamberlain, saying ‘Eden has been proved right.’ ”95

  At No. 10 on Saturday Chamberlain told the cabinet that Eden, in opposing friendly approaches to the Duce, had been proved wrong: “It might be said that we were too late in taking up the conversation with Italy…. Signor Mussolini would have moved troops to the Brenner Pass at the time of the Berchtesgaden talks, but he had not felt sure of his position in the Mediterranean.” Cadogan blamed his predecessor, Vansittart (“an idiot with an idée fixe—all facade and nothing else”), for being obsessed with Austria “when we can’t do anything about it.” But to the prime minister, Eden remained the scapegoat. Writing his sister the next day Chamberlain reflected that “very possibly this might have been prevented if I had had Halifax at the Foreign Office instead of Anthony.” He added: “What a fool Roosevelt would have looked like if he had launched his precious proposal. What would he have thought of us if we had encouraged him to publish it, as Anthony wanted us to do? And now we too would have made ourselves the laughing stock of the world.” Chamberlain did not consider that a prime minister who had wined and dined with the Nazi foreign minister while Hitler was seizing Austria might look like a bigger fool and a greater laughingstock.96

  Mapping out strategy for a forthcoming parliamentary debate on military policy, Horace Wilson had written to Chamberlain on Thursday predicting that Churchill would demand an air defense inquiry. Now he noted that at the cabinet meeting the P.M. decided that “an enquiry should be refused and refused flatly and firmly, the decision to be adhered to notwithstanding any criticism that may be raised during the debate.” According to the meeting’s official minutes, all present were informed “that the Right Hon Winston Churchill was intending to attack the Government on the inadequacy of their Air Force programme, and to support the motion of the Opposition for an enquiry into the Air Ministry. It was suggested that a speech belittling our efforts might have a very adverse effect on the international position just now,” when dealings with Germany might be better served “by creating the impression of force.” How the Nazis could be gulled when they already knew the frailty of Britain’s defenses—particularly the RAF—was among the questions unraised by the cabinet.97

  It is Sunday, March 13, the day Schuschnigg had set for his plebiscite, but 100,000 German troops, led by General Heinz Guderian’s Second Panzer Division and the SS Leibstandarte Adolf Hitler are being pelted with flowers by their Austrian admirers—Goebbels calls it a “Blumenkrieg” (“flower war”). Seyss-Inquart presents his führer with a proclamation declaring that Austria no longer exists. It is now the Ostmark, “a province of the German Reich.”

  By Monday the Austrian scene is clearer. The enthusiasm of the crowds cheering Wehrmacht and Waffen SS troops is beyond doubt, but they are a minority. Churchill writes Unity Mitford: “It was because Herr Hitler feared the free expression of opinion that we are compelled to witness the present dastardly outrage.” The Führer has added another seven million subjects to his expanding Reich, while seizing a military position of priceless strategic value without the firing of a single shot.98

  In permitting the Führer to take Austria, the governments of Europe have betrayed tens of thousands of anti-Nazis, not only Austrians but also German citizens of Austria. Many have fled for their lives and choke the roads to Czechoslovakia, Poland, and Hungary. Some are turned back at the border; others, more affluent, possess passports and are passed through the frontier roadblocks, only to be rejected because they have no visas. Acquiring these documents is, for thousands, a matter of life or death. When they return to the Austrian capital their visa applications at the British and French consulates are rejected. In Vienna alone seventy thousand are arrested. Before the month is out virtually all who tried to flee have been shot by SS firing squads, have died by their own hands, or have been sent to the Reich’s new Austrian concentration camps.

  No photographs of the refugees appear in The Times. Instead, Dawson runs pictures of Austrian Nazis beaming on Wehrmacht battalions, creating an impression of a tumultuous, wildly enthusiastic welcome from all their countrymen. It is a shocking distortion; foreign tourists and foreign correspondents, particularly the Americans, give it the lie. Shirer is among them. Later he will recall that “the behavior of the Vienna Nazis was worse than anything I had seen in Germany. There was an orgy of sadism.”99

  In one of his syndicated newspaper columns Churchill writes, “The Austrian Nazis are a peculiarly virulent type who carried pillage, corruption and brutality beyond the wide limits of political discretion.” Reports reaching Chartwell from his Austrian informants confirm him. An emaciated, haggard Schuschnigg will spend the next seven years in Dachau and then Neiderdorf, a concentration camp in the South Tyrol, whence he will be rescued by American troops just as a Gestapo guard is about to execute him. The litany of misery which will end there may be glimpsed in Churchill’s post-Anschluss mail from Austrian informants: “My many friends in this city are in the depths of despair”; “… many sickening incidents. A family of six Jews have just shot themselves, a few houses down the street”; “Yesterday morning I saw two well-dressed women forced to their knees to scrub out a ‘Heil Schuschnigg!’ on the pavement.” Churchill writes Dawson, asking why this side of the story is unreported and is frostily told: “There is no doubt, I think, that the impression of jubilation was overwhelming.”100

  That would have been enough to satisfy his readers two years earlier. But the mood of the British public has shifted since the Rhineland. MPs hear from their constituents: even if most Austrians wanted to live under the swastika, those who don’t have rights, too; are they being persecuted? Replies from the Foreign Office are vague. The temper of the upper classes has also changed. Their wealth has permitted them to visit the Continent often. The Rhineland was declassé; one couldn’t have been seen there by one’s equals, gaping at the Cologne Cathedral like shopkeepers’ wives on tour. Hitler’s seizure of it menaced few of their peers. Austria is another matter. They have friends there, even cousins, in Vienna, in lodges on the slopes of the Austrian Alps, and in shooting boxes in the deep, dark evergreen woods. And now they are worried about them. Among the worriers are Lady Londonderry, Lady Halifax, and the wife of the British prime minister. Ambassador Henderson cannot fob these people off with excuses. They send him names. He submits the lists to Ribbentrop, inquiring as to their whereabouts. The Reich’s foreign minister replies that he finds their interest “incomprehensible. The British Government never lifted a finger for the victims of the Schuschnigg regime.” It is an insolent note, and inauspicious. The Germans are beginning to feel like Germans again—like the Germans of the Second Reich, Bismarck’s great creation in the wake of Prussia’s victory over Louis Napoleon’s France in 1871, memorable for its faith in Blood and Iron, its allegiance to ein Volk, ein Kaiser, ein Reich, the pigheadedness of its Junker leaders, and the rising hauteur of their officers, monocled and rude, who slapped “insolent” civilians in Alsace-Lorraine, and expected even German ladies to step in gutters and let them pass.101

  Neurath strengthens this impression of arrogance by returning Henderson’s initial note of protest with the comment: “Relations between the Reich and Austria can only be regarded as an internal affair of the German people which is no concern of third powers…. For this reason the German Government must from the outset reject as inadmissible the protest lodged by the British Government.” If His Majesty’s envoy wants proof of Seyss-Inquart’s telegram inviting the Führer’s troops into the Ostmark,
he will find it “already published in the German press.”102

  On Monday, March 14, Nicolson heard the P.M. make “a dry statement” in the Commons, “giving little indication of real policy.” The House had expected to hear more about Austria, but there seemed to be a conspiracy on the Treasury Bench (and in the FO, under its new permanent under secretary) to sidestep the Anschluss and turn to other matters. Of Hitler’s conquest the prime minister declared: “The hard fact is that nothing could have arrested what actually happened—unless this country and other countries had been prepared to use force.” A backbencher called: “What about rearmament?” Chamberlain’s reply was evasive; the government “would make a fresh review” of the subject and “in due course we shall announce what further steps we may think it necessary to take.” Nicolson wrote: “There is a sense of real national crisis.” But it was felt in neither Downing Street nor the corridors of Whitehall.103

  Since the defrocking of Vansittart the Foreign Office had drifted under uncertain leadership. Cadogan, whose office gave him such wide discretionary powers that they rivaled Halifax’s, seemed incapable of contemplating meeting force with force. As early as Saturday, March 12, he wrote in his diary: “We are helpless as regards Austria—that is finished. We may be helpless as regards Czechoslovakia…. Must we have a death-struggle with Germany again?… I’m inclined to think not. But I shall have to fight Van… and all the forces of evil. God give me courage. So far we’ve not done wrong.”104

  A month before the crisis, after Schuschnigg’s mortification at Berchtesgaden, Cadogan had “almost” wished that “Germany would swallow Austria and get it over,” and now that Hitler had devoured it he wrote Nevile Henderson: “Thank goodness, Austria’s out of the way. I can’t help thinking we were very badly informed about that country…. We should evidently have been very wrong to try to prevent Anschluss against the wishes of a very considerable proportion of the population. After all, it wasn’t our business: We had no particular feelings for the Austrians: We only forbade Anschluss to spite Germany.”105

  Churchill was ready with an answer for both the prime minister and the Foreign Office during that same House session Monday. Nicolson wrote: “Winston makes the speech of his life.” Churchill’s instinctive response to the Anschluss had been that the issue should be laid before the League of Nations. He and Lord Cecil had approached Halifax with that suggestion, but the foreign secretary told them that “such procedure would be of no practical advantage in redressing the present situation.” So Churchill offered the House of Commons a foreign policy which, we now know, would almost certainly have led to a military coup in Berlin, toppling the Nazi regime.106

  Churchill saw the need for British unity, British action, and a firm policy to discourage new aggression. He surveyed the wreckage in Austria, submitting that the damage had been great. Nazi mastery of Vienna, “the center of all the communications of all the countries which formed the old Austro-Hungarian Empire, and of all the countries lying to the southeast of Europe,” threatened the entire Danube basin, particularly Czechoslovakia, which had been “the greatest manufacturing area” in the Austro-Hungarian Empire. No doubt its name “sounds outlandish” to English ears, he said, but the Czech army was “two or three times as large” as Britain’s, its munitions supplies were triple Italy’s, and “they are a virile people; they have their treaty rights, they have a line of fortresses, and they have a strongly manifested will to live freely.” At present, however, they were isolated.107

  As Leo Amery had pointed out earlier in the day, England lacked a foreign policy. The country should acquire one, Churchill said, and swiftly. “Why,” he asked the House, “should we assume that time is on our side?” Each day dawned on a Reich stronger than the day before. Parliament was “in no position to say tonight, ‘The past is the past.’ We cannot say ‘The past is past’ without surrendering the future.” Churchill’s proposed geopolitical concept, he declared, would assure peace for Britain and indeed for all European nations alarmed by Hitler’s huge, teeming Wehrmacht.108

  Winston told the House that England’s neglected defenses were too shaky for her to stand alone against the pullulating Reich and the lands it dominated: “Over an area inhabited perhaps by 200,000,000 people Naziism and all it involves is moving on to absolute control.” Even a rearmament crash program would be inadequate. Britain, he said, needed allies. The House was alert. They knew where Winston’s line of thought was leading, and a few catcalls were heard from Tory backbenchers. He said quickly: “I know that some of my hon. Friends on this side of the House will laugh when I offer them this advice. I say, ‘Laugh, but listen.’ ”109

  Those who listened heard an imaginative, closely reasoned plan to confront Nazi aggression with an interlocking alliance of nations, each country inadequate in itself, but together mighty enough to give pause to Hitler’s generals, if not to Hitler himself. Churchill directed their attention to the three states of the Little Entente: Czechoslovakia, Rumania, and Yugoslavia. Each was a power of the second rank, “but they are very vigorous states, and united they are a Great Power.” The first had the Skoda munitions plants, the second oil, the third minerals and raw materials—and all had large armies. The Anschluss had driven “a wedge” into the Little Entente, but if that had roused them, perhaps the price was not exorbitant. Each faced a simple choice: “to submit, like Austria, or else to take effective measures while time remains to ward off the danger and, if it cannot be warded off, to cope with it.” Coping, he said, could include widening the Little Entente by offering membership to other Danube countries lying in Hitler’s path: Hungary and Bulgaria. That would thwart the Reich’s drive for lebensraum in the east. Meantime Britain, with France, should vow to declare war on Germany if Hitler attacked any country in eastern Europe. Should Churchill’s alliance become a reality, Germany’s Generalstab would face the specter they had sworn to avoid since 1918: a two-front war. Winston turned on the jeering backbenchers; his voice rose: “Our affairs have come to such a pass that there is no escape without running risks. On every ground of prudence as well as of duty I urge His Majesty’s Government to proclaim a renewed, revivified, unflinching adherence to the Covenant of the League of Nations. What is there ridiculous about collective security? The only thing that is ridiculous about it is that we haven’t got it.”

  But Churchill knew that restoring the balance of power, however practical, reasonable, and even essential, would not in itself satisfy a British public still haunted by the memory of a million British corpses in the trenches. Winston believed in statecraft on a higher level, and he believed the British public could be swayed at this level. He insisted that there must be a “moral basis” for British rearmament and foreign policy, that only on those terms could the British people be united. Parliament could on this basis “procure their wholehearted action, and”—Churchill, typically, included America in his plan—“stir the English-speaking people throughout the world.”

  Meantime, he argued for the virtual encirclement of the Third Reich. Treaties binding Europe’s Western democracies and the Danube states in a united front would turn back German aggression, and England would regain the security she had lost in 1914. He closed:

  If a number of states were assembled around Great Britain and France in a solemn treaty for mutual defence against aggression; if they had their forces marshaled in what you may call a Grand Alliance;… if all this rested, as it can honourably rest, upon the Covenant of the League of Nations, in pursuance of all the purposes and ideals of the League of Nations; if that were sustained, as it would be, by the moral sense of the world; and if it were done in the year 1938—and, believe me, it may be the last chance there will be for doing it—then I say that you might even now arrest this approaching war. Then perhaps the curse which overhangs Europe would pass away. Then perhaps the ferocious passions which now grip a great people would turn inwards and not outwards in an internal rather than an external explosion, and mankind would be spared the dea
dly ordeal towards which we have been sagging and sliding month by month…. Before we cast away this hope, this cause and this plan, which I do not at all disguise has an element of risk, let those who wish to reject it ponder well and earnestly upon what will happen to us if, when all else has been thrown to the wolves, we are left to face our fate alone.110

  Such a speech, and such a proposal, coming from a senior statesman known throughout Europe, could not be ignored or set aside for future “study” and “discussion.” In Moscow, Maksim Litvinov, the Soviet foreign commissar, praised the Grand Alliance strategy, condemned the Anschluss as an act of aggression and a threat to the chain of small countries between the Soviet Union and the Reich, and—though Churchill had not mentioned Russia as a grand ally—declared that his government was ready “to participate in collective actions… checking the further development of aggression and eliminating the increased danger of a new world massacre.” The U.S.S.R., he said, was “prepared immediately to take up in the League of Nations or outside of it the discussion with other Powers of the practical measures which the circumstances demand.”111

  Ambassador Maisky delivered Litvinov’s statement to the Foreign Office, which, by diplomatic custom, was bound to respond within a week. France was also heartened; Joseph Paul-Boncour, the minister now presiding over the Quai d’Orsay, submitted a similar demarche through Corbin, his ambassador in London. Halifax received these overtures with elegant courtesy, expressing a gratitude for Russian and French interest which he did not feel. The noble lord despised Bolsheviks and was a lifelong Francophobe. “The French are never ready to face up to realities,” he remarked after Corbin had departed; “they delight in vain words and protestations.” Cadogan agreed. Although Paul-Boncour had been in politics since 1899—serving variously as minister of war, minister of labor, and premier except between 1914 and 1918, when he had commanded an infantry battalion and won the Croix de Guerre—Cadogan thought him “not a Foreign Minister who at so serious a moment could be a worthy partner in a discussion of the European crisis.”112