Alone, 1932-1940

by William Manchester

  At Munich the prime minister was clearly delighted to see Hitler again, eager to stand at his side. Here he made a cardinal error. Afterward he happily wrote his sister that the Astors’ son William, recently returned from a trip to Berlin, had the impression that “Hitler definitely liked me & thought he could do business with me.” This was true in the sense that an armed robber thinks he can do business with a bank teller. In fact, Hitler had taken a strong personal dislike to Chamberlain, who impressed him as an “insignificant” man. The Führer dealt with him because he believed him to be infinitely malleable. Other men in Parliament, he knew, were dangerous. On the eve of Munich he said he was “fully aware” that one day Chamberlain might be replaced by Churchill, whose “aim would be to unleash at once a new world war against Germany.”257

  The Führer was right. He had never met Churchill, but he understood him, as Winston understood Hitler. Walter Lippmann observed that the supreme qualification for high office is temperament, not intellect, and on that level the two men had more in common than either would have acknowledged. The countless millions spellbound by Winston’s genius would angrily reject any comparison of the two. Nevertheless they were mirror images of one another. Since the embattled defender of Western civilization was the one who was ultimately successful, his vision has prevailed. What would have happened had victory gone to the Nazi leader doesn’t bear thinking about. In the mid-1980s a poll reported that a large majority of Germans believe the worst thing that could have happened to them would have been the triumph of the Third Reich.258

  Satan was once angelic; he and God had much in common. Similarly, both the Führer and his English nemesis were born demagogues. Each believed in the supremacy of his race and in national destiny; each had artistic talent—Churchill had more, but Hitler, though dismissed as a shallow painter of picture postcards, was a charismatic figure moved by dark but profound passions, the man whose voice at Nuremberg inspired men to lay down their lives, shouting “Heil, Hitler!” as they died. The inescapable fact is that Hitler and Churchill both were ruled not by reason but by intuition.

  Chamberlain, the businessman, accustomed to the friendship of other good fellows who met on the level and parted on the square, understood neither man. The P.M. respected success. He assumed that any man who had risen to rule the most powerful nation on the Continent was a man with whom he could deal. Neville seems to have been oblivious to the fact that nearly everyone who had tried to bargain with this extraordinary man had been murdered, sent to a concentration camp, or hounded into exile.

  Chamberlain could not have comprehended the depth of the horrors plumbed by the Third Reich. The Führer vowed that restoring their beloved homeland to the mistreated Sudetendeutsche was his last claim, and Chamberlain believed him. The P.M. had not been deceptive in his “faraway country” broadcast. Although the “Czech problem” had been on his desk for months, to him Czechoslovakia remained precisely that: a problem, not a land inhabited by real people. He knew nothing of eastern European geography, not to mention the Serbs, Croats, Slavs, Slovaks, Czechs, Poles, and gypsies inhabiting the region; he disregarded all the warnings of the FO and swallowed everything he was told by the Reich’s Kriegsherr.

  Churchill knew better. He had studied Adolf Hitler’s career with intensity, and remembered his remarkable history of broken promises. When the Führer broke the Versailles treaty he promised to honor Germany’s signature on Locarno; when he broke the Locarno Pact—long before the Sudetenland became a synonym for crisis—he had sworn that the Rhineland would be his last territorial claim. When he sent Wehrmacht bayonets into Austria he grandly guaranteed Czechoslovakia’s borders. His position had subtly evolved; he was interested only in Germans, he said—including, of course, Germans living beyond the borders of the Reich. But over the past two thousand years Europe had become a mix, racially, culturally, and ethnically. As Duff Cooper observed, “There are Germans in Switzerland, in Denmark, and in Alsace; I think that one of the few countries in Europe in which there are no Germans is Spain, and there are rumors that Germany has taken an interest in that country.”259

  Churchill’s sources in the Reich reported that the great Ruhr munitions factories, on orders from Berlin, continued to work around the clock. In Kiel and Hamburg new U-boats slid into the water like the litters of an incredibly fertile sea monster; Luftwaffe observation planes, equipped with long-range cameras, overflew eastern Europe, Scandinavia, the Low Countries, even France. Churchill carried graphs when he entered the House of Commons now. They revealed that the gap between British and German arsenals was widening. Since fighting was inevitable, he argued, better that it come now, with France prepared to meet her treaty obligations to Czechoslovakia, thus confronting German strategists with the specter of a two-front war.

  Now the crisis had reached its climax. Violet Bonham Carter recalled Churchill’s mood then. “He rightly mistrusted Chamberlain, who, he was convinced, was still searching desperately for a way out” when no honorable way existed. That same September 29, as the so-called Four-Power Meeting began in Bavaria, the Focus group lunched in the Savoy’s Pinafore Room. Violet saw that “Winston’s face was dark with forboding. I could see he feared the worst, as I did. I finally suggested that during the afternoon a few of us should draft a telegram to the Prime Minister adjuring him to make no further concessions at the expense of the Czechs and warning him that if he did so he would have to fight the House of Commons on his return.” The wire was to be signed by, among others, Churchill, Lord (Robert) Cecil, Attlee, Archie Sinclair, Eden, Liddell Hart, Lloyd George, and Lord Lloyd.260

  It was drafted—after eliminating the threat—and at 7:00 P.M. they again met at the Savoy. Winston then called for the signatures, and Sinclair, Lloyd, and Cecil came quickly forward. But some who had said they would come had not. Eden, reached by telephone, declined to permit the use of his name. Attlee was then phoned. He, too, refused; he said he would need the approval of his party. As Nicolson wrote in his diary, they “sat there gloomily realising that nothing could be done. Even Winston seemed to have lost his fighting spirit…. So far as one can see, Hitler gets everything he wants.”261

  It was decided to send no telegram. One by one the group drifted away. Violet wrote: “Winston remained, sitting in his chair immobile, like a man of stone. I saw the tears in his eyes. I could feel the iron entering his soul. His last attempt to salvage what was left of honor and good faith had failed.” She spoke bitterly of those who refused to put their names to their principles. Then Churchill spoke. He said: “What are they made of? The day is not far off when it won’t be signatures we’ll have to give but lives—the lives of millions. Can we survive? Do we deserve to do so when there’s no courage anywhere?”262

  Shortly after noon that Thursday—as Churchill, heavy with despair, lunched at the Savoy—Hitler led his guests from a buffet at the Führerbau (the working headquarters of the Nazi party) and into his private office, to determine the future of a country in a conference from which that nation’s elected leaders had been excluded. Two Czechs—Hubert Masařík and Vojtech Mastny—were in the city as “observers” attached to the British delegation, but when Chamberlain weakly suggested they attend the discussions the Führer had said “Nein!” The issue was then dropped, with the tacit understanding that the delegation from Prague would be informed of the Hitler-Chamberlain-Mussolini-Daladier decisions later.

  “O Oysters, come and walk with us!”

  The Walrus did beseech.

  “A pleasant walk, a pleasant talk,

  Along the briny beach.”

  Mussolini produced a memorandum, ostensibly drawn up by him but actually the work of Göring, Neurath, and Weizsäcker. The Englishmen—Horace Wilson had again accompanied Chamberlain—assumed that it was a base for negotiations, but Hitler did not negotiate. He simply repeated, over and over, what he was going to take, when he would take it, and what he might or might not do with it. Nevertheless, the men from Paris and London kept batt
ering away, through the evening and past midnight. At 1:00 A.M. Chamberlain capitulated. Virtually all of the claims Hitler had made in the past were accepted, including many he could never have won by force of arms. He now held the strategic center of Europe. The agreement signed in the early hours of September 30 (though it was dated September 29) specified that Czechoslovakia should begin evacuation of the Sudetenland at once. All Czechs in the Sudetenland must be gone—no one thought to ask where they might go—by October 10. Their departure would be supervised by an international commission which would also decide when plebiscites should be held, determine where the borders of the rump Czech state should be drawn, and see to it that all “existing installations” remain intact in Czechoslovakia’s lost territories. Poland, exploiting the turmoil, was placated by a slice of the pie, some three hundred square miles of Teschen Silesia. If other “problems of Polish and Hungarian minorities in Czechoslovakia” were not settled by negotiations with Prague, they would “form the subject” of another four-power meeting.263

  The proceedings ended briskly, with efficient young German diplomats tidying up and disposing of loose strings. It had been a disgraceful business, but only Daladier and François-Poncet saw it for what it really was. The French premier was glum and silent; his ambassador to Germany, mortified by his country’s sellout of a faithful ally, was overheard by Ciano as he spoke in a voice broken by shame: “Voilà comme la France traite les seuls alliés qui lui étaient restés fidèles.” (“See how France treats the only allies who remained faithful to her.”)264

  As they were about to break up Horace Wilson gave a little start and asked: “What to do about the Czechs?”265

  “But wait a bit,” the Oysters cried,

  “Before we have our chat;

  For some of us are out of breath,

  And all of us are fat!”

  While others discussed who was to inform the Czechs and how to assure their cooperation, the P.M. and Hitler discussed the Reich’s economic difficulties. Then the Führer consented to glance at a joint declaration regarding future Anglo-German relations which the prime minister had brought with him. This, for Chamberlain, was the high point in the conference. According to him, “As the interpreter translated the words into German, Hitler frequently ejaculated ‘Ja, Ja,’ and at the end he said, ‘Yes, I will certainly sign it; when shall we do it?’ I said ‘Now,’ and we went at once to the writing table, and put our signatures to the two copies which I had brought with me.” Neither Schmidt nor Alec Douglas-Home, Chamberlain’s parliamentary private secretary, who were looking on, shared the prime minister’s conviction that the Führer was as elated as Chamberlain thought him to be. Schmidt wrote afterward that Hitler agreed to sign “with a certain reluctance,” because the wording was too vague to be described as a commitment, and “to please Chamberlain.” Douglas-Home thought he signed “perfunctorily.” Compared with his signature on other documents, this one was careless, even sloppy.266

  At 2:30 A.M. the P.M. joined a delegation to tell the Czechs—who were being held in the Regina Hotel, prisoners, in effect, of the Gestapo—the fate of their country. Hubert Masařík, who was given the text to read aloud, later said that the French seemed “embarrassed.” Certainly the agreement was an occasion for Allied embarrassment. To the Czechs the terms were shocking. Yet Chamberlain, according to Masařík, “yawned without ceasing and with no show of embarrassment.” Both he and Daladier said Czech approval was not, strictly speaking, necessary. It was indeed irrelevant; the agreement was final. According to Horace Wilson’s later notes, Mastny was given “a pretty broad hint that… the best course for his Government was to accept what was clearly a considerable improvement upon the German Godesberg memorandum.” It wasn’t. Hitler had yielded nothing. Every outrageous demand he had made at Godesberg had been meekly met.267

  As the Czechs were facing those who had betrayed them, Churchill had returned to the Savoy, joining fellow members of the Other Club for a very late dinner, to be followed by a meeting. Sleep was out of the question. According to Colin Coote, a member of the Other Club and also a member of the Times staff, they were awaiting the first editions of London’s newspapers, which were expected to be carrying the Munich settlement. In the meantime, Coote remembered, discussion of the Godesberg terms and whether the P.M. would succeed in modifying these demands sparked “a violent argument. One began to understand why, in the House of Commons, a red line on the carpet, just beyond rapier reach of the opposite bench, marks the limit beyond which the speaker must not stray.” One defender of Chamberlain was insulted so grossly that he left the table and, upon reaching home, sent a letter of resignation from the club.268

  “Winston,” Coote remembered, “was snarling and clawing at the two unhappy ministers [First Lord Duff Cooper and Walter Elliot, secretary for Scotland]…. One could always tell when he was deeply moved, because a minor defect in his palate gave an echoing timbre to his voice. On this occasion it was not an echo, but a supersonic boom.” He asked them: “How could honourable men with wide experience and fine records in the Great War condone a policy so cowardly? It was sordid, squalid, sub-human, and,” he said, “suicidal…. The sequel to the sacrifice of honour” would be “the sacrifice of lives, our people’s lives.” In his memoirs Cooper charges, quite rightly, that Churchill was fouling him. He agreed with Winston, but since he was still a cabinet minister, he felt it was “honorable to defend them for the last time.”269

  At last one man produced his watch and remarked that the early papers must be on the streets. The member pocketed his watch, left, and returned with a stop press. Duff Cooper snatched it from him and read the terms out loud, according to Coote’s account “with obvious anger and disgust.” Then he rose and departed without a word. Behind him he left silence. In Coote’s words: “Nobody attempted to defend them. Humiliation took almost material shape.” Churchill left with Richard Law, a young Tory MP. They passed the open door of a restaurant, from which issued the sounds of loud laughter. It was “packed,” Law remembered long afterward, “and everyone was very gay. I was acutely conscious of the brooding figure beside me.” As they turned away Winston muttered: “Those poor people. They little know what they will have to face.” In the darkness they may have passed E. M. Forster, an English writer who resembled Churchill in only two traits: both possessed genius and remarkable intuition. Forster heard of the agreement in Munich and wrote that he “trailed about reading the notices, some of which had already fallen into the gutter.” It was “good news,” he wrote, “and it ought to have brought great joy; it did bring joy to the House of Commons. But unimportant and unpractical people often foresee the future more clearly than do those who are engaged in shaping it, and I knew at once that the news was only good in patches. Peace flapped from the posters, and not upon the wings of angels.”270

  Later in the morning, still September 30, Winston, Clemmie, and Lord Cecil seriously discussed gathering a group of friends who shared their wrath, marching to No. 10, and heaving a brick through a window. By then the two Czech delegates in the Regina had agreed not to fight. The need for their approval was urgent. By 5:00 P.M. that day an international commission would convene in Berlin to fix the details for evacuation of the first zone of the Sudetenland, which was to commence October 1, and the transfer of policing power from local officials to the German Wehrmacht.

  The Czechs were angry, of course—they would have been certifiable otherwise—and the Frenchmen were the focus of their wrath. Chamberlain, to them, was contemptible. Masařík’s narrative concluded: “The atmosphere was becoming oppressive for everyone present. It had been explained to us in a sufficiently brutal manner, and that by a Frenchman, that this was a sentence without right of appeal and without possibility of modification. Mr. Chamberlain did not conceal his fatigue. After the text had been read, we were given a second slightly corrected map. We said ‘Good-bye’ and left. The Czechoslovak Republic as fixed by the frontiers of 1918 had ceased to exist.”271

/>   “I weep for you,” the Walrus said:

  “I deeply sympathize.”

  With sobs and tears he sorted out

  Those of the largest size,

  Holding his pocket-handkerchief

  Before his streaming eyes.

  Masařík had not, however, formally accepted Czechoslovakia’s subjugation. Nor could he; that decision had to be made in Prague. But he knew all hope had fled. The Führer didn’t even have to send an ultimatum to Prague—Englishmen did it for him. Frank Ashton-Gwatkin, the member of the British delegation who had been given this dubious honor, arrived from Munich September 30, breakfasted with Lieutenant Colonel H. C. T. Stronge, the British military attaché, and showed him the Munich Agreement. Stronge said Czechoslovakia could never accept such terms; it would mean a sacrifice of their defenses, leaving them helpless. Ashton-Gwatkin said they had to accept. Stronge, to use his own word, was “staggered.”272

  Later in the day, after heated arguments with his advisers, military and civilian, Beneš capitulated. He also resigned five days later, but decided, at the urging of his ministers, to speak to the entire nation in a 7:00 P.M. broadcast, telling them what lay in the hearts of those they had elected to govern them. “They wished,” Churchill later wrote, “to register their protest against a decision in which they had no part.” On the air Beneš said that he remained “what I have always been, a convinced democrat.” That was why he was stepping down; he thought it “best not to disturb the new European constellation which is arising.” (He would be succeeded by an anti-Semitic banker who, in the words of one newspaper, “enjoys the confidence of Germany.”) Beneš said: “Do not expect from me a single word of recrimination. But this I will say,”—here he came as close to bitterness as a gentle man could—“that the sacrifices demanded from us were immeasurably great, and immeasurably unjust. This the nation will never forget, even though they have borne these sacrifices quietly.” He departed to set up a government-in-exile in London. The SS moved in swiftly. No one knows how many Czechs were murdered in the week that followed, though it has been estimated that more than half of them were Jews. Exact figures were unavailable; with the Führer’s men reigning over the Sudetenland, the news blackout was absolute.273