To be sure, the generals had few objections in principle to a takeover of Czechoslovakia, which obtruded geographically into the newly created Greater Germany in a strategically dangerous manner. Hatred and contempt for Slavs and democrats fused in their minds with a broader belief in the eventual creation of a German empire in East-Central Europe. Moreover, the acquisition of the Czech arms industry, skilled labour and plentiful raw materials would alleviate the Third Reich’s increasingly dire supply situation in these fields. All of this added to the general strategic importance of Czechoslovakia in the eyes of Hermann Goring, whose prestige had been notably boosted by the annexation of Austria. Yet Goring and the generals were unconvinced that the moment was right for a move against the Czechs. It seemed to be a reckless and foolhardy act, running a real risk of a general war for which Germany in their view was quite unprepared. It would, they thought, be far more prudent to wait, pile on the pressure and secure piecemeal concessions. Their doubts grew as it began to become clear that Britain would not stand aside this time. As Goebbels unleashed a massive propaganda campaign full of horror stories about the supposed mistreatment of the Sudeten Germans by the Czechs, a sense of crisis started to grip the senior army commanders.118
On 5 May, the Chief of the Army General Staff, Ludwig Beck, informed Hitler that Germany was in no position to win a war should, as he thought likely, Britain intervene to protect the Czechs. Later in the month he repeated his warnings with greater insistence, and on 16 July he issued a memorandum to senior generals warning of dire consequences should the invasion go ahead. He even canvassed the idea of getting the top generals to resign en masse in protest against Hitler’s plans. The other generals, however, were still demoralized by the Blomberg-Fritsch scandal. They were locked in a tradition of belief that the duty of soldiers was to obey orders and not involve themselves in politics. They feared that breaking their personal oath of loyalty to Hitler would be an act of dishonour. They were all too aware of Hitler’s increased prestige and power after the annexation of Austria. And they did not in any case disagree with Hitler’s aim of attacking Czechoslovakia, only with its timing. So although they shared many of Beck’s concerns, they refused to back him this time. Nevertheless, Hitler still felt it necessary to appeal for the officers’ support at meetings on 13 June and 10 August 1938. He was backed by the head of the army, General Brauchitsch, after subjecting him to a lengthy tirade when he submitted to him Beck’s memorandum of 16 July 1938. Meanwhile, some of the ground had been cut from under Beck’s feet by war games ordered by his own General Staff in June, which showed that Czechoslovakia could be conquered within eleven days, allowing the rapid transfer of troops to the West to mount a defence against any possible Franco-British military action. Objections that the defensive West Wall was not yet ready met with another tirade from Hitler. The British and French would not intervene, he said. And Fritz Todt, whom he had put in over the army’s head in May to push on the building the West Wall, would have the fortifications ready by the onset of winter anyway.119
Feeling totally isolated, Beck resigned as Chief of the Army General Staff on 18 August 1938, to be succeeded by General Franz Halder, his deputy. The choice was an obvious one, but Halder was in fact not at all what he seemed to be from the Nazi leadership’s point of view. Born in 1884, he was an artillery officer who came from a Franconian military family with strongly conservative leanings. Far from being a reliable tool of Nazi aggression, he shared many of Beck’s reservations about the risky nature of Hitler’s policy. In these, he was joined by a number of other conservative officers and diplomats, notably Admiral Wilhelm Canaris, head of military intelligence, and Erwin von Witzleben, a senior infantry general and commander of the Berlin military district. So deep was their disapproval of Hitler’s reckless drive to war that they began to make plans to overthrow him. They joined forces with a group of younger officers who had already been plotting Hitler’s downfall, notably Hans Oster, a Brigadier-General in Canaris’s intelligence department. And they extended the conspiracy to include civilians who, they knew, would be needed to staff a post-Nazi government, including conservative figures who had developed more or less serious reservations about the direction in which the regime was heading, such as Schacht and Goerdeler, Foreign Ministry officials such as State Secretary Ernst von Weizsäcker and his juniors Adam von Trott zu Solz and Hans-Bernd von Haeften, and senior civil servants, including Hans Bernd Gisevius, a former assistant secretary in the Interior Ministry, and Count Peter Yorck von Wartenburg from the Reich Price Commissioner’s office. The conspirators put out feelers to other alarmed conservatives and started detailed planning for the coup, sketching out troop deployments and debating whether Hitler should be assassinated or merely put into custody. A number of them, notably Goerdeler, travelled to other countries, especially Britain, to issue private warnings to senior politicians, government ministers, civil servants and anyone else who would listen about Hitler’s bellicose intentions. They were met with polite expressions of interest, but were unable to secure any concrete pledges of support, though it is difficult to see exactly what these might have involved in concrete terms at this stage.120
The fundamental weakness of the conspiracy was that its members, by and large, did not disapprove of Hitler’s basic aim of dismembering Czechoslovakia; they only deplored what they considered his irresponsible haste in doing so while the German economy and the armed forces were still unprepared for the general European war to which they feared it would lead. Thus if Hitler succeeded in his aim without provoking a general war, the rug would be pulled from under their feet. 121 Moreover, the men involved in the conspiracy had no support in the Nazi Party or in the vast apparatus of organizations through which it ruled Germany. Both the officer corps and the Foreign Office, the two centres of the plot, had been repeatedly discredited in the previous months, particularly over Austria. The War Ministry, Goring told the officers in the middle of the crisis, housed ‘the spirit of faint-heartedness. This spirit’, he added, ‘must go!’122 If Halder and his fellow conspirators had succeeded in arresting Hitler, the army’s image, branded reactionary by Goebbels, would have had little popular appeal even supposing the other generals had rallied to their cause. Success was unlikely, therefore. But in any case it was soon put out of the question by developments on the diplomatic front.123
II
By early September, events were coming to a head. Unlike the annexation of Austria, the takeover of Czechoslovakia required a lengthy build-up in view of the far greater military and international obstacles that stood in Hitler’s way. It took him several months to overcome the objections of the generals and to develop the military planning, in which he involved himself personally since he did not trust the generals to do it to his satisfaction. Throughout the summer, Goebbels’s ceaseless stream of anti-Czech propaganda made it abundantly clear to the international community that an invasion was being prepared in Berlin. Day after day, banner headlines in the newspapers blared forth stories about alleged Czech atrocities, the shooting of innocent Sudeten Germans, ‘women and children mowed down by Czech armoured cars’, the terrorization of the population by the Czech police, threatened gas attacks on Sudeten German villages, and the machinations of the ‘world arsonists’ centre Prague’, the Trojan horse of Bolshevism in Central Europe.124 The Czechs did in fact have an alliance with the Soviet Union, but it meant very little in practice, as they were soon to find out. Far more important was the fact that the integrity of Czechoslovakia was guaranteed by treaty with France. If France came to the Czechs’ aid, then Britain would be bound to intervene too, as it had over Belgium under comparable circumstances in 1914. The British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain was aware that Britain, though now hurriedly rearming, was in no condition to wage a general European war. He felt that the strain on British public finances would be unsustainable. Moreover, a general war, he thought, would bring upon British cities aerial bombardments that would make Guernica look like a tea-party. No
t only was there no defence against them, it was believed, but they would probably, like the Italian bombardment of the Ethiopians, involve the use of poison gas on the defenceless people below. At the height of the crisis, indeed, the British government issued gas-masks to the civilian population and ordered the evacuation of London. In any case, Britain’s global strategy dictated that the Empire, by far the largest in the world, came first, and Europe, in which the United Kingdom had little direct interest, a distant second. ‘How horrible, fantastic, incredible it is’, Chamberlain told his listeners during a BBC Radio broadcast towards the end of September 1938, ‘that we should be digging trenches and trying on gas-masks here because of a quarrel in a far-away country between people of whom we know nothing.’125
Czechoslovakia was clearly further away than India, South Africa or Australia in the mental map of the British people as well as in the imagination of their Prime Minister. Chamberlain knew above all that he would find little or no public support for a war against Germany over the Sudeten question, even though by this time voices were being raised in the British political world demanding that Hitler’s march of European conquest had to be stopped.126 It still seemed unclear to Chamberlain that Hitler was bent on European conquest rather than merely determined to right the wrongs of the Treaty of Versailles and protect beleaguered ethnic German minorities. If he could be appeased on the Sudeten question then maybe he would be satisfied and a general war could be avoided. Chamberlain determined to intervene decisively to prevent a war by forcing the Czechs to give way. When Hitler gave a speech at the Nuremberg Party Rally on 12 September 1938 threatening war if the Sudeten Germans were not granted self-determination, Chamberlain demanded a meeting. As Henlein’s thugs, acting on orders from Hitler, staged a wave of violent incidents designed to provoke Czech police repression, thus providing the excuse for German intervention, Chamberlain boarded an airplane for the first time in his life - in a sharp contrast to Hitler’s embrace of this most modern means of travel years before - and flew to Munich. During a lengthy one-to-one meeting, witnessed only by an interpreter, Chamberlain agreed to a revision of Czech boundaries to accommodate the Sudeten Germans’ wishes. But this did not seem to satisfy the German Leader. Chamberlain reacted to Hitler’s bluster by asking him why he had agreed to meet him if he would admit no alternative to war. Faced with such an ultimatum, Hitler reluctantly agreed to another meeting.127
On 22 September 1938, after consulting the British cabinet about his concessions, Chamberlain flew once more to Germany and met Hitler in the Hotel Dreesen, in Bad Godesberg, on the river Rhine. The French, he assured Hitler, had agreed to his terms. So there would be no problem in reaching a settlement. To his astonishment, however, Hitler presented him with a fresh set of demands. The recent violence in Czechoslovakia meant, he said, that he would have to occupy the Sudetenland almost at once. Moreover, Poland and Hungary, both led by military, authoritarian nationalist governments that had scented blood in the atmosphere surrounding the negotiations, had also put in claims on Czech territory bordering their own, and these too, said Hitler, had to be met. The fronts now began to harden. The Czech government, recognizing the realities of the situation, had accepted the Anglo-French terms. But at the same time, a military government came to power in Prague under the impact of the crisis, and it was clear that no more concessions would be made. The British cabinet rejected the Bad Godesberg proposals, worried that the British public would see them as a humiliation for the government. Chamberlain sent a high-level mission to Berlin to make it clear to Hitler that Britain would not tolerate unilateral action. Hitler, furious, invited Sir Horace Wilson, the delegation’s leader, to a speech he was to give at the Sports Palace on the evening of 26 September. It culminated in a violent tirade against the Czechs. William L. Shirer, who was at the rally, noted that Hitler was ‘shouting and shrieking in the worst state of excitement I’ve ever seen him in . . . with a fanatical fire in his eyes’. Working himself up into a frenzy, he declared, to the tumultuous applause of 20,000 Nazi supporters, that the Czech genocide of the German minority could not be tolerated. He himself would march into the country at the head of his troops. October 1 would be the date.128
While the British and the Czechs prepared for war, it was in the end Hitler who backed down. Surprisingly, perhaps, the decisive influence here was that of Hermann Goring, who had been so hawkish over Austria. Like the generals, he was appalled that a general war was being risked over an issue where the key concessions to Germany had been made already. So, behind Hitler’s back, he brokered a conference with the British, the French and, crucially, the Italians, who asked Hitler to postpone the invasion until the conference had met. Persuaded by Göring’s strong reservations about a war, and seeing in Mussolini’s request a way out of the situation without being humiliated, Hitler agreed. The conference met in Munich on 29 September 1938, without the Czechs, who had not been invited. Goring had drafted an agreement in advance, and had it put into formal terms by Weizsäcker in the Foreign Ministry. Ribbentrop was all for war (‘he has a blind hatred of England,’ noted Goebbels in his diary).129 So he was not informed about the draft document, which was given to the Italian ambassador, who presented it to Hitler on 28 September as the work of Mussolini. After thirteen hours of negotiations on the fine print, the Munich Agreement was signed by the four powers on 29 September 1938. The following day, Chamberlain presented Hitler with a declaration that Britain and Germany would never go to war again. Hitler signed it without demur. On his return to England, Chamberlain waved it at cheering crowds from the first-floor window of 10, Downing Street. ‘I believe it is peace for our time,’ he told them. He genuinely seems to have believed that he had achieved a settlement that was satisfactory to all, including the Czechs, who, he declared, had been saved for a happier future. Hitler, he had told his sister after first meeting the German leader, was a man whose word could be trusted. All his experiences during the to-and-fro of negotiation do not seem to have disillusioned him.130
The sense of relief was as palpable in Germany as it was in Britain. Since May, there had been widespread popular anxiety in Germany about the possibility of war, made more acute by the Czech government’s military mobilization in the same month. On previous occasions, the panic had been short-lived. But this time, the crisis dragged on for months. Even the SS Security Service admitted that there was a ‘war psychosis’ among the population that had lasted until the Munich Agreement had been signed. ‘With reference to the superiority of the opponent, a defeatism emerged, that escalated into the strongest criticism of the “adventurous policy of the Reich”.’ Many people thought that the incorporation of the crisis-ridden Sudetenland into Germany would impose a severe economic burden on the Reich. At the tensest moments of the crisis, people were withdrawing their savings from the banks in panic; inhabitants of the areas bordering Czechoslovakia were making preparations to flee westward. Many Germans, regrettably from the Security Service point of view, preferred to get their information from foreign radio stations, and this further increased their pessimism. The Security Service blamed intellectuals above all for this trend.131
But it was not merely intellectuals who were worried. Hitherto, Hitler had won the plaudits of the great mass of Germans by securing foreign policy triumphs without bloodshed. Now that it looked as if blood really would be spilled, things seemed very different. The general anxiety, Social Democratic agents noted in May 1938, stood in sharp contrast to the enthusiasm of August 1914. To be sure, most people thought the demands of the Sudeten Germans justified. But they wanted them to be realized without war.132 Nobody, it was reported in July, thought that Germany could win a war against Britain and France. Some embittered ex-Social Democrats even hoped it would happen because defeat was the best way to get rid of the Nazis. But amongst many workers, there was also a widespread fatalism. Young people were frequently swept away by the vision of a great Germany, bestriding a vanquished Continent. Many older people were confused and felt t
hey lacked detailed information. 133 As preparations for war intensified, popular anxiety grew.134 The ‘war psychosis’ in the population, reported Goebbels in his diary on 31 August, was growing.135 In the Ruhr, Social Democratic observers reported shortly before the Munich Agreement,There reigns a gigantic restlessness. People are afraid that it will come to war, and that Germany will go under in it. Nowhere is any enthusiasm for war to be found. People know that a war against the greater part of Europe and against America must end in defeat for Germany . . . If it comes to a war, this war will be as unpopular in Germany as possible.136
Even the young, for all their enthusiasm for a Greater Germany, were now anxious about the situation.137
It was not just the working classes or the interview partners of Social Democratic agents who were worried. ‘War, war, war’, wrote Luise Solmitz in her diary on 13 September 1938, ‘ - wherever one goes, one hears nothing else.’ For a while her fear of a general war outweighed her customary patriotism. Suddenly 1914 meant something other than a spirit of national union: ‘1914 is eerily reviving. Every Sudeten German killed is a Franz Ferdinand.’138 Nevertheless, her patriotic Jewish husband Friedrich Solmitz still volunteered for military service in his country’s hour of need. His application was refused.139 Among the population at large, confidence in Hitler’s ability to make foreign policy gains without bloodshed was dented far more than it had been on previous occasions such as the Rhineland remilitarization or the annexation of Austria, precisely because the Czech crisis went on for so long. In the late summer and early autumn of 1938 there was a marked increase in the number of people brought before the Special Courts for criticism of Hitler himself.140
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