The Third Reich in Power

by Evans, Richard J.

  Correspondingly, the wave of relief that swept over the country on the announcement of the Munich Agreement was enormous. ‘All of us can live on,’ wrote Luise Solmitz in her diary, ‘relaxed, happy, a terrible pressure removed from us all . . . Now this wonderful, unique experience. The Sudetenland gained, in peace with England and France.’141 In Danzig, as a Social Democratic agent reported, almost everyone saw the Munich Agreement ‘as a hundred per cent success for Hitler’.142 But this was hardly surprising given the town’s situation. Among Catholic workers in the Ruhr, by contrast, there were, reports of worries that Hitler’s success would lead to an even more ruthless campaign against the Church. Nevertheless everyone was relieved that Hitler had obtained new territory for Germany without bloodshed. No wonder that Chamberlain was cheered as he passed through the streets of Munich after signing the Agreement. Everyone agreed that the Agreement had greatly strengthened Hitler’s power and prestige. Only die-hard opponents of the regime were embittered by what they saw as the betrayal of the Czechs by the Western democracies. Only the gloomiest concluded ‘that it’ll go further’.143

  Hitler himself was far from triumphant over the outcome. He had been cheated of the war for which he had been planning. He felt resentful at Göring’s intervention. From this point on, relations between the two men cooled, leaving Ribbentrop, effectively excluded from the Munich negotiations, in a stronger position, as it did Himmler, who had also stood by Hitler in his desire for war. The army generals and their co-conspirators had to abandon their plans for a coup in the light of the peaceful outcome of the crisis, but they too were left weakened in their standing with Hitler, and in addition the more radical amongst them felt cheated by Chamberlain’s intervention. Moreover, Hitler was only too aware of the fact that the majority of Germans did not want war, for all the efforts of the Third Reich to persuade them of its desirability. On 27 September 1938, he had organized a military parade through Berlin just at the time when Berliners were pouring out of their offices on their way home and could be expected to pause to cheer as the lorries and tanks rolled past. But, reported William L. Shirer,They ducked into subways, refused to look on, and the handful that did stood at the curb in utter silence unable to find a word of cheer for the flower of their youth going away to the glorious war. It has been the most striking demonstration against war I’ve ever seen. Hitler himself reported furious. I had not been standing long at the corner when a policeman came up the Wilhelmstrasse from the direction of the Chancellery and shouted to the few of us standing at the curb that the Führer was on his balcony reviewing the troops. Few moved. I went down to have a look. Hitler stood there, and there weren’t two hundred people in the street . . .144

  Angry and dismayed, Hitler went inside.

  On 10 November 1938 (immediately after the antisemitic pogrom, when Jewish men were being arrested all over Germany), Hitler expressed his dismay to a closed meeting of German press representatives:Only by constantly emphasizing the German desire for peace and peaceful intentions was I able to gain the German people’s freedom step by step and thus give it the armament necessary as a prerequisite for accomplishing the next step. It is self-evident that such a peace propaganda, carried on throughout the decades, also has its questionable aspect, for it can all too well lead to the impression in the minds of many people that the present regime is identified with the resolution and the willingness to preserve peace under all circumstances. This would, however, above all, lead to the German nation, instead of being prepared for events, being filled by a spirit of defeatism in the long run, and this would take away the successful achievements of the present regime.145

  Hitler went on to rant against ‘intellectuals’ who were undermining the will to war. It was the role of the press, he said, to convince the people that war was necessary. They had to be brought to believe blindly in the correctness of the leadership’s policies, even when these included war. Doubt only made them unhappy. ‘Now it has become necessary gradually to reorient the German people psychologically, and to make it clear to them that there are things that cannot be achieved by peaceful means but must be carried through by force.’146 That more than five years of indoctrination and preparation at every level had not achieved this aim already was an astonishing admission of failure. It showed that the vast majority of Germans, in Hitler’s view, were falling far short of giving the regime the popular support it demanded, even in the area - foreign policy - where its aims supposedly had their broadest appeal.147

  III

  On 1 October 1938 German troops marched across the border into Czechoslovakia as the well-equipped Czech army withdrew from the strong positions it occupied in the mountainous and easily defensible border regions. The scenes that had greeted the German annexation of Austria were repeated in the Sudetenland. Ecstatic supporters of Henlein’s Sudeten German Party lined the streets, cheering the German soldiers as they marched by, strewing flowers in their path and raising their arms in the Hitler salute. Amongst those who did not sympathize with the Nazis, a very different mood prevailed. Over 25,000 people, mostly Czech, had already fled from the Sudetenland into predominantly Czech areas in September. Now they were followed by another 150,000 from the same territory and other border areas between the signature of the Munich Agreement and the end of 1938, and almost 50,000 more in the following few months. The refugees included Czechs and Germans who qualified as Jewish under the Nuremberg Laws; they knew only too well what awaited them if they stayed. By May 1939 the number of Jews in the Sudetenland had fallen from 22,000 to fewer than 2,000 in all. A fifth of the Czech population of the border areas fled. Almost a quarter of the Sudeten German population had opposed Henlein’s party, and 35,000 of them fled too, mostly German Social Democrats and Communists. The fate of those who remained showed that they had been wise to leave. The Gestapo and the SS Security Service moved in behind the German troops, and they arrested about 8,000 ethnic German and 2,000 Czech opponents of Nazism, putting the majority of them into concentration camps, a minority in state prisons following formal trials. Little over a month later, the violence of the pogrom of 9-10 November was extended to the Sudetenland too, and those Jews who remained there were subject to widespread violence, looting and destruction of their property. Fifty thousand employees of the Czechoslovak state, in the railways, the post office, the schools and local administration, were dismissed to make way for Germans, and also left for the rump CzechoSlovak Republic, as it was now called.148

  The predominantly German-speaking areas of western and northern Bohemia, northern Moravia and southern Silesia were incorporated into the Third Reich as the Reich Region Sudetenland, while southern Bohemia became part of Bavaria and southern Moravia was assigned to the former Austria. Henlein was made Reich Commissioner of the new region under the Reich Interior Ministry, and civil servants were drafted in from other parts of Germany to fill the posts in regional and local administration vacated by Czechs, Jews and leftists. Nevertheless, most administrators at all levels were Sudeten Germans, and - in sharp contrast to Austria - the Nazi regime took great care to perpetuate a distinctive sense of identity for the Sudetenland, leaving only the Gestapo and the SS (including its Security Service) in the hands of men from the Old Reich. Sudeten Germans themselves flocked to join the Nazi Party and enrol in the SA. Yet they were soon to be disillusioned. Long-standing local voluntary associations and clubs were dissolved or incorporated into Nazi Party organizations run from Berlin. Resentment against carpetbaggers from the Old Reich, limited though their numbers were, was soon widespread. Unemployment fell sharply, but industrial workers had to live with the long hours and poor pay that had become the norm in the Old Reich. Twenty-two per cent of Czech industrial production was located in the annexed areas, and it was rapidly incorporated into the German war economy, with German firms moving quickly in to take advantage of the Germanization and Aryanization of Czech and Jewish businesses. I.G. Farben, Carl Zeiss Jena and major German banks and insurance companies made significa
nt acquisitions, though Sudeten German companies benefited from the loot as well. The 410,000 Czechs who remained in the annexed areas found their language banned for official use, their secondary schools closed and their voluntary associations and clubs shut down. They had now become second-class citizens.149

  The Munich Agreement also gave the signal to smaller powers to take their slice of the Czechoslovak cake. On 30 September 1938 the Polish military government demanded the cession of the strip of land around Teschen on the northern border of Czechoslovakia, which had a substantial Polish-speaking population; the Czechs had little option but to agree, and Polish troops marched in on 2 October 1938. The Czech general who handed over the region remarked to his Polish counterpart that he would not enjoy its possession for long: Poland was surely next in line itself. But the principle of maintaining the boundaries drawn by the 1919 Peace Settlement counted little in the face of the aggrandizing nationalism of the Polish colonels, who subjected the conquered region to the same policies of Polonization and authoritarian rule that they had already applied at home.150 Along the southern frontier of Czechoslovakia, the authoritarian government of Hungary, under Admiral Horthy, also made its claim to a long strip of land in which the Magyar minority predominated. Its armed forces were poorly prepared for an invasion, however, and so the Hungarians had to resort to negotiation. The position was complicated by the fact that tensions between Czechs and Slovaks now came to the surface, reflecting long-standing economic, social, religious and cultural differences between the two main constituent groups of the Republic. On 7 October 1938, leaders of the Slovak political parties established an autonomous region with its own government, but nominally at least within the rump state left after the Munich Agreement. Competing claims by the Slovaks and Hungarians were eventually settled by the intervention of the Italians, who imposed a settlement (with German agreement) on 2 November 1938. It gave the Hungarians additional territory of 12,000 square kilometres of land with over a million inhabitants, including a sizeable minority of more than 200,000 Slovaks. This was less than they had originally demanded, but enough to satisfy them for the moment, and Hitler made it clear that he would not tolerate any military action on their part to secure further gains. The complete absence of Britain and France from the negotiations demonstrated with startling clarity the degree to which Axis powers now controlled affairs in this part of Europe.151

  In recognition of this brutal fact of life, the governments of the region now did their best to accommodate themselves to German wishes. In the new tripartite rump state governed from Prague, right-wing governments suppressed the Communists and cracked down on Social Democrats. The military government in the Czech area did its best not to offend the Germans who now surrounded much of its territory. The autonomous Slovak authorities in Bratislava created a one-party state and enforced its policies through a paramilitary force, the Hlinka Guard, which soon earned a justified reputation for brutality. In a third, newly created autonomous region in the east, known at the time as Carpatho-Ukraine, where the German consul exercised a dominant influence, national minorities were rigorously suppressed and Ukrainian was made the sole official language. On 7 December 1938 a treaty of economic cooperation was signed with Germany, giving the Third Reich control over the area’s mineral resources. The Hungarians joined the Anti-Comintern Pact and the Romanian government offered Germany its friendship; in both countries the governments moved sharply to the right, with King Carol of Romania carrying out a coup against his own cabinet. In Hungary, Poland and Romania, anti-Jewish measures were stepped up. All these measures testified to something of a panic amongst the smaller nations of East-Central Europe. For many years, France had been trying to cement them together as a bulwark against German expansion. The Munich Agreement put paid to all that.152

  Hitler had regarded Munich as no more than a temporary setback to his plans for invading and taking over the whole of Czechoslovakia, whatever the Western powers might think. Strategically, possession of the rest of the country would provide an additional jumping-off point for moving against Poland, whose military government steadfastly rejected Hitler’s overtures to come into the Anti-Comintern Pact. The Polish government also refused to make concessions to Germany over Danzig, a Free City under League of Nations suzerainty, and the Corridor that gave Poland access to the Baltic but cut off West and East Prussia from the rest of the Reich. The largely German population of Danzig had rallied to the Nazi cause, as had that of another city on the borders of East Prussia and Lithuania, Memel, which had been given to the Lithuanians at the end of the First World War: Hitler now wanted both towns to return to Germany, and after the final collapse of negotiations with the Polish government, he decided to start piling on the pressure. Occupying the rest of the rump Czecho-Slovak state would also bring major economic resources into the Reich, since the bulk of the Czech arms industry was located there, along with very significant mineral resources, engineering, iron and steel, textiles, glass and other industries and the skilled workers who manned them. As the economic situation of the Reich deteriorated in the winter of 1938-9, the acquisition of these resources became an ever more tempting prospect. The Czecho-Slovak army’s large stocks of advanced military equipment would help alleviate bottlenecks in German military supplies. Czech foreign currency reserves would be extremely useful too. Already on 21 October 1938 Hitler ordered the armed forces to prepare for the liquidation of the CzechoSlovak state and the occupation of Memel and its surrounding territory. In the first two months of 1939 he gave three speeches to different, large groups of army officers, meeting in closed session, reiterating his vision for a Germany that was the dominant power in Europe, his belief that the problem of living-space in Eastern Europe had to be solved and his conviction that military force had to be used to achieve these goals.153

  The opportunity to make good the enforced compromises of the Munich Agreement was provided by the rapid deterioration of relations between Czechs and Slovaks in the rump Republic over the issue of financial resources. As the squabble grew into a crisis, the mistaken belief that the Slovaks were about to declare full independence prompted the Czech government to send in troops to occupy Bratislava on 10 March 1939. A flurry of negotiations led to the Slovak leaders being flown to Berlin, where they were given the stark choice of either declaring complete independence under German protection or being taken over by the Hungarians, who had already been made aware of the opportunity. They decided on the former course. On 14 March 1939 the Slovak parliament proclaimed the country’s independence, and the following day its leaders reluctantly asked the Third Reich for protection against the Czechs, after German gunboats on the Danube had targeted their guns on government buildings in Bratislava. Confronted with the imminent dissolution of his state, the President of Czecho-Slovakia, Emil Hácha, travelled with his Foreign Minister, Franzisek Chvalkovsky, to Berlin to meet Hitler. Just like Schuschnigg before him, Hácha was kept waiting far into the night (while Hitler watched a popular film), then was mercilessly bullied by the German Leader in the presence of senior civil servants, military officers and others, including Goring and Ribbentrop. German troops were already on the move, said Hitler. When Goring added that German bombers would be dropping their payloads on Prague within a few hours, the elderly, sick Czech President fainted. Revived by Hitler’s personal physician, Hácha phoned Prague, ordering his troops not to fire on the invading Germans, then signed a document agreeing to the establishment of a German protectorate over his country shortly before four in the morning on 15 March 1939. ‘I shall enter history as the greatest German of them all,’ Hitler told his secretaries ecstatically as he emerged from the negotiations.154

  IV

  At six in the morning German troops crossed the Czech border. They reached Prague by nine. This time there were no crowds strewing flowers in their path, only groups of sullen and resentful Czechs who did nothing except raise their fists in the occasional gesture of defiance. That was only to be expected, Hitler later
remarked; one could not expect them to be enthusiastic. During the afternoon, Hitler went by train to the border, then drove in an open-topped car through the snow, saluting the German troops as he passed them by. Prague was empty by the time he got there. The Czech troops were in their barracks, surrendering their arms and equipment to the invading Germans; civilians were staying at home. Hitler spent the night in the Hradschin Castle, the symbolic seat of Czech sovereignty, where he had a frugal meal - nothing had been prepared for his arrival - and worked out the terms of the decree establishing the German Protectorate, together with Interior Minister Frick and State Secretary Wilhelm Stuckart, who had already drafted the details of the post-annexation administration of Austria.155

  Read out by Ribbentrop on Prague radio on the morning of 16 March 1939, the decree declared that the remaining Czech lands were henceforth to be known as the Reich Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia, recalling their names under the old Habsburg monarchy. Democratic institutions, including the parliament, were abolished, but a nominal Czech administration remained in place, headed by Hácha as President, with a Prime Minister and an appointed, fifty-member Committee of National Solidarity under him. Altogether some 400,000 Czech state employees and civil servants remained in post, alongside, or subordinate to, a mere 2,000 administrators imported from Germany. Other Czech institutions, including the courts, were also preserved; but Czech law remained valid only where it dealt with matters not covered by the laws of the German Reich, which were now extended across the whole of the Protectorate and took precedence in every respect. Czechs and other nationalities were subject to all these laws, and to decrees issued by the Protectorate, but all Germans living in the Protectorate, including ethnic Germans already resident there, were German citizens and subject only to German law. Crucially, Czechs were not granted German citizenship. This introduced a difference in rights that was to become far more extensive, and touch far larger groups of people, later on.156