The May crisis had arisen from a misunderstanding; if the Führer had been a sane man, he would have counted himself lucky to be out of it. Hitler, not sane, personifying the underside of the Teutonic character and four horrible years which had ended in the defeat, not just of Germany, but of him, saw a wrong crying for redemption. The fact that he had been planning the invasion of Czechoslovakia—that the only real misunderstanding in May had been over timing—somehow made it worse. “Injustice is relatively easy to bear,” wrote Mencken. “What stings is justice.” On May 28 the Führer suddenly appeared in Berlin and summoned the hierarchies of the OKW, the party, and the government to the chancellery. His voice still choking with rage, he said that the Sudeten question would be solved “once and for all, and radically.” Preparations for military action must be completed by October 2, the Siegfried Line would be extended by workers toiling around the clock, and ninety-six divisions were mobilized immediately. The execution of Fall Grün “must be assured by October 1, 1938, at the latest.” In his hoarse, staccato delivery, his voice sounding like a bearing about to go, he roared: “Es ist mein unerschütterlicher Wille, die Tschechoslowakei von der Landkarte auszulöschen!” (“It is my unshakable will to wipe Czechoslovakia off the map!”).190
Churchill, unaware of Hitler’s resolution, shared a fresh sense of relief with his Daily Telegraph readers on July 6. The Anschluss, he had decided on reflection, was not the Nazi triumph it had seemed to be. At the time, he recalled, he had told Parliament that
after a boa-constrictor has devoured a goat or a deer it usually sleeps the sleep of repletion for several months. It may, however, happen that this agreeable process is disturbed by indigestion…. If the prey has not been sufficiently crushed or covered with slime beforehand, especially if it has been swallowed horns and all, very violent spasms, accompanied by writhings and contortions, retchings and gaspings, are suffered by the great snake. These purely general zoological observations… suggest a parallel—no doubt very remote—to what has happened since Austria was incorporated into the German Reich.
Extrapolating from “a continuous stream of trustworthy information” he said that the German Nazis were bedeviled by “Jews in very large numbers… Catholics by the million… Monarchists faithful to a Hapsburg restoration… strong Socialist and Left-wing elements in every working-class district… numerous remnants of what was once the high society of the Austro-Hungarian Empire.” There was also, in Austria, “the strongest and the only covert resistance to the Nazification” which “oddly enough” came from the “Austrian Nazis who were the prime cause and pretext of the invasion.” Churchill was delighted to describe their fury at finding themselves “excluded from all positions of power, profit, and control,” and their resulting rebellion.
By custom, newspaper columnists are entitled to an occasional romp in fantasy, and Churchill’s optimistic picture of the Austrian situation was, unfortunately, that. On the whole, Churchill was a highly reliable journalist. His innumerable informants assured the accuracy of his information, at least eventually. In his Daily Telegraph piece of July 6 he was, however, guilty of another lapse, flagrant now but invisible at the time. “A settlement and reconciliation in Czechoslovakia would be no humiliation to Herr Hitler,” he wrote. The Führer could take pride in having won for the Sudeten Germans “honorable status and a rightful place in the land of their birth,” reforms which would have “strengthened rather than shaken the foundations of European peace.” Churchill had been Konrad Henlein’s mark in a kind of diplomatic confidence game, generating Churchillian warnings to Prague over its treatment of the restless citizens in the Sudetenland and this mild assessment of Hitler’s goals. As late as July 26, Churchill was still lecturing Prague, writing in the Daily Telegraph that “The Czech Government owe it to the Western Powers that every concession compatible with the sovereignty and integrity of their State shall be made, and made promptly.” Englishmen who demanded that “Germany not stir up strife beyond her border” should, to be consistent, offer “no encouragement to obduracy on the part of a small state.”
In midsummer Sheila Grant Duff put Churchill straight. She wrote him of “the use which the Germans and Sudeten Germans are making of your words and actions. They claim to have your support against the Czechs and this is used by the more extreme to force the more moderate to raise their claims.” She reminded Winston that Henlein had “shown himself to be most moderate in his conversation with you and that he had told you that the fulfillment of all his Carlsbad [sic] demands was not the necessary condition of agreement with the Czechs.” But, “since his return to Prague,” she wrote, “he has in fact raised his original demands.” She believed Churchill was “the one British statesman of whom the Germans are afraid. If you are conciliated, they consider that they can expect much greater support from the British Government, whom they think are afraid…. Henlein is much more radical since he saw you.” Indeed he was. Under great pressure from Halifax, Beneš offered the Sudetens “cantonal self-government”—a concession far exceeding the Sudeten German leader’s most extravagant hopes when he had laid his case before Churchill in Morpeth Mansions. His followers rejoiced, but after conferring with Hitler at Berchtesgaden, Henlein rejected the offer, insisting on full independence, including sovereignty over the Czech fortress line in the Sudeten Mountains.191
Churchill’s informants continued to be of a much higher caliber than the government’s. Men unavailable to any other correspondent came to Chartwell to be interviewed by him. As early as July 14, 1938, less than eight weeks after the May crisis and a year before Hitler got round to Poland, Winston interrogated Albert Förster, Gauleiter (Nazi district leader) of Danzig and the Führer’s man, in his sitting room. Many of Chartwell’s visitors came at grave personal risk, though none graver than Major Ewald von Kleist-Schmenzin.
On August 18, 1938, Major von Kleist, in mufti, registered incognito at the Park Lane Hotel and was driven to Kent by Frank Jenner, the Westerham taxi driver. As the German talked, Randolph took notes; his father listened and interrupted from time to time with comments and questions. Kleist described an attack on Czechoslovakia as “imminent.” He believed it would come between the annual Nazi rally at Nuremberg in the first week of September and the end of the month. “Nobody in Germany,” Randolph’s notes read, “wants war except H.” The generals were for peace, “convinced that an attack upon Czechoslovakia would involve Germany in war with France and Britain.” They were prepared to disobey the Führer, even overthrow him, but needed “a little encouragement.” Churchill replied that though many Englishmen were unprepared to advocate war “in cold blood,” few would “stand by idly once the fighting started.” He emphasized that he and those who shared his view on this point were “anti-Nazi and anti-war but not anti-German.” Kleist replied that he would share this message with his friends and colleagues but would welcome some gesture, even from “private members of Parliament,” to help consolidate the “universal anti-war sentiment in Germany.” After Kleist departed Chartwell, his host consulted Halifax, and when Kleist left London on August 23, he carried with him a letter signed by Churchill declaring that the crossing of the Czech frontier by German troops or warplanes “in force” would mean the renewal of the world war, which would be fought out “to the bitter end,” with all the nations engaged in the struggle fighting on “for victory or death.”192
When Winston received information that could not be published, he usually sent it to men in power. Usually they disregarded it. Kleist could have been invaluable, but when a summary of his message reached the prime minister, Chamberlain waved it away, saying, “I take it that von Kleist is violently anti-Hitler and is extremely anxious to stir up his friends in Germany to make an attempt at its [sic] overthrow. He reminds me of the Jacobites at the Court of France in King William’s time, and I think we must discount a good deal of what he says.”193
Like Churchill, who also traveled armed now, Hitler worried that before he could play out hi
s role in history “something might happen” to him. It would be tragic, he told his generals, if, after so much toil in so just a cause, the war were to be fought without him. He knew they were worried about war on two fronts, and so on June 18, when he had drawn up his final directive for the invasion of Czechoslovakia, he had assured Field Marshal Wilhelm Keitel, chief of the OKW, that he would sign the order to march “only if I am firmly convinced, as in the case of the [Rhineland] demilitarized zone and the entry into Austria, that France will not march, and that therefore England will not intervene.”194
Keitel was a lickspittle, but other OKW commanders were not reassured. On June 12 Daladier had renewed France’s 1924 guarantee of Czech borders, saying it was “sacred and cannot be evaded.” The commanders were depressed further by Kleist’s failure in August in England; the letter Churchill had given Kleist had been invigorating, but he was out of power and likely to remain there. Hitler therefore gave his General Staff additional grounds for concern at the Kummersdorf Proving Ground, delivering one of his fulsome autopanegyrics: “Fortune must be seized when she strikes, for she will not come again!… I predict that by the end of the year we will be looking back at a great success!” The Siegfried Line, growing stronger with each passing hour, could hold the French and British in check, if it came to that, while they and their men overran Czechoslovakia. The man who couldn’t hold the line against odds was “a scoundrel.” At this point Major Helmuth Groscurth, an intelligence officer, scribbled in his diary that the Führer was spouting “völliger Unsinn” (“total nonsense”).195
Europe’s statesmen, if frozen in time during that late summer and early fall period in 1938, would resemble characters in a grotesque Friedrich Dürrenmatt play, each acting on assumptions the others would find startling or even preposterous. In Paris the prospect of another great war dismays Daladier, but he has faith in his British ally and the greatness of his army, and the mere suggestion that France might break her word is unthinkable. Bonnet, who breaks his own word almost daily, thinks of little else. In London His Majesty’s Government still dreams of scuttling France and forming a new alliance with the Germans. Many powerful Germans would like to reciprocate, but only one of them counts and he is demented. He has told Keitel that the Western democracies won’t fight, but even he doesn’t believe it, and neither does the chief of the German General Staff, General Ludwig Beck, who resigns on August 27. Unless one shares the Führer’s superstitious belief in intuition, his plans are ludicrous. In Beck’s words, he has put himself in an “untenable position.” William L. Shirer will write: “Germany was in no position to go to war on October 1, 1938”—the date Hitler had set, and would cling to—“against Czechoslovakia and France and Britain…. Had she done so, she would have been quickly and easily defeated, and that would have been the end of Hitler and the Third Reich.”196
It wouldn’t even have gone that far. Conspirators in the OKW would have intervened. At Nuremberg eight years later Field Marshal Keitel was asked to describe the Generalstab’s reaction to Chamberlain’s Munich sellout, and replied: “We were extraordinarily happy [ausserordentlich glücklich] that it had not come to a military operation because… we had always been of the opinion that our means of attack against the frontier fortifications of Czechoslovakia were insufficient.” General Franz Halder, interrogated by an American officer toward the end of the Nuremberg trials, testified that the Czech issue inspired the German generals’ plot against Hitler. Had the Führer ordered the attack in 1938, he said, “It had been planned to occupy by military force the Reich Chancellery and those government offices, particularly ministries, which were administered by party members and close supporters of Hitler, with the express intention of avoiding bloodshed and then trying the group before the whole German nation.”197
Meanwhile, the Czechs, trusting their formidable defenses and their two fellow democracies in the west, were ready for anything—anything, that is, except betrayal by those two. The Poles and the Hungarians were plotting ignobly; if the Germans took part of Czechoslovakia, they wanted some, too. In Rome, Mussolini imagined that the others were wondering which way he would pounce. Actually, they weren’t thinking of him at all. Since the Ethiopian fiasco the Duce’s legions had been heavily discounted.
But what of the Russians? The fate of Czechoslovakia had the highest strategic consequences for the Soviet Union. If Hitler seized the Sudetenland and the Czech fortifications, the Soviets would lose the outer bastion of their defense system. Hitler understood that; he called Beneš’s country “the Soviet Russian Aircraft Carrier.” The Foreign Office in Whitehall was aware of these implications; its career diplomats had repeatedly urged their political overseers to open “conversations” with the Russians, but although Litvinov had been trying to shoulder his way into an anti-Nazi alliance since the fall of Austria, the appeasers kept pretending the U.S.S.R. didn’t exist.198
One incident reveals how far certain men in London and in France would go to stifle an alliance with the Soviet Union. Speaking to the French chargé d’affaires in Moscow, Litvinov proposed “immediate staff talks between the Soviet, French and Czech experts.” Bonnet buried the chargé’s report in a locked file and mentioned it to no one. Two days later he misled the British ambassador in Paris, telling him that the Rumanians would not permit Russian warplanes to violate their air space in support of the Czechs. But the secretary general at the Quai, the incorruptible Alexis Léger, had already informed Phipps that permission would be granted. Despite Bonnet, the facts reached R. A. Butler, Halifax’s young new under secretary, who promptly spiked them, remarking, “Let us hope no more will come of this idea.”199
Churchill prayed that something would. Hitler had massed at least 1.5 million soldiers on Czechoslovakia’s borders and Churchill felt Russia’s help was essential. On the last day of August he wrote Halifax to advise delivery of “a joint note” to Hitler from Britain, France, and Russia expressing their “desire for peace,” their “deep anxiety at the military preparations of Germany,” their common interest in “a peaceful solution of the Czechoslovak controversy,” and their conviction that “an invasion by Germany of Czechoslovakia would raise capital issues.” Ambassadors for the three powers, he said, should hand the note to President Roosevelt, “and we should use every effort to induce him to do his utmost upon it.” To Winston it seemed “not impossible” that the president “would then address H. emphasising the gravity of the situation… saying that a world war would inevitably follow from an invasion of Czechoslovakia, and that he earnestly counselled a friendly settlement.” The “peaceful elements in German official circles”—and no one in the Foreign Office was more aware of their strength—would “make a stand,” forcing the Führer to “find a way out for himself by parleying with Roosevelt.” This sequence of events was conjectural, Churchill granted; “one only sees them as hopes.” But any hope was better than none.200
He drove to Whitehall and handed his letter to Halifax, who went across Downing Street to No. 10. There, like every other communication to the prime minister, including those bearing the royal seal, it came under the shifty eyes of Sir Horace Wilson. At his peak Rasputin was known to all Moscow. Wilson was more like one of the burrowing insectivores. A nation in peril, with hundreds of thousands of lives in jeopardy, does not refuse to answer the doorbell when a well-muscled neighbor, feeling his own future darkened by the same shadow, comes to make common cause. But that, in effect, was Horace Wilson’s advice to his patron. When Churchill’s proposal reached Chamberlain, attached to it was an admonition in his seneschal’s neat handwriting condemning it in every particular. Wilson described it as “a mixture of diplomacy and threat” which would enrage Hitler by including Russia in the coalition confronting him. He predicted that if Winston’s proposal were adopted, England would be carried closer to a situation in which “we might find ourselves… tackling Germany single-handed”—which was, of course, the one thing it would not have done.201
Winston, meantime,
was receiving confirmation that his plan would have had a warmer reception elsewhere. On September 2 the Russian ambassador sent Chartwell word that he would like to drive down and discuss “a matter of urgency.” Maisky’s mission was to inform him of conversations which had taken place in Moscow the previous day between the French chargé d’affaires and Foreign Commissar Litvinov, the essence of which was that the Soviet Union wanted to stand shoulder to shoulder with the British and French against Hitler. Churchill later recalled: “Before he had got very far, I realized that he was making a declaration to me, a private person, because the Soviet Government preferred this channel to a direct offer to the Foreign Office which might have encountered a rebuff.” He felt this implication strengthened, he wrote after the Russian had left, “by the fact that no request for secrecy was made.” Considering the matter of signal importance, Winston composed a detailed account of the conversation for Halifax, taking special care not to use language which might “prejudice its consideration by Halifax and Chamberlain.” This report, too, was received unenthusiastically by HMG; Halifax replied, Winston later wrote, “in a guarded manner, that he did not feel that action of the kind proposed… would be helpful, but that he would keep it in mind.”202
Nonetheless, when Churchill’s August 31 proposal was returned to the Foreign Office with Wilson’s comment endorsed by Chamberlain, Halifax had been uneasy. If Hitler was Britain’s enemy, then so was time; the government should make some clear statement of policy before the Reich chancellor delivered another of his incendiary speeches to the Reichstag, touching off rioting among Henlein’s Sudeten Nazis. To restore order Prague would be obliged to use force; Hitler would rant about Czech police brutality, and the cycle would be repeated again, until a single swing of an impatient policeman’s club could bring the Wehrmacht surging across the border. Therefore, the foreign secretary decided he himself should speak, establishing Britain’s disapproval of Sudeten German incidents. He sent his text across the street, and back it came, with its own Wilson critique embellished by the prime minister’s approval.
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