The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich: A History of Nazi Germany

by William L. Shirer

  Late in the afternoon the Prime Minister crossed the Rhine by ferry to the Hotel Dreesen* where Hitler awaited him. For once, at the start at least, Chamberlain did all the talking. For what must have been more than an hour, judging by Dr. Schmidt’s lengthy notes of the meeting,51 the Prime Minister, after explaining that following “laborious negotiations” he had won over not only the British and French cabinets but the Czech government to accept the Fuehrer’s demands, proceeded to outline in great detail the means by which they could be implemented. Accepting Runciman’s advice, he was now prepared to see the Sudetenland turned over to Germany without a plebiscite. As to the mixed areas, their future could be determined by a commission of three members, a German, a Czech and one neutral. Furthermore, Czechoslovakia’s mutual-assistance treaties with France and Russia, which were so distasteful to the Fuehrer, would be replaced by an international guarantee against an unprovoked attack on Czechoslovakia, which in the future “would have to be completely neutral.”

  It all seemed so simple, so reasonable, so logical to the peace-loving British businessman become British Prime Minister. He paused with evident self-satisfaction, as one eyewitness recorded, for Hitler’s reaction.

  “Do I understand that the British, French and Czech governments have agreed to the transfer of the Sudetenland from Czechoslovakia to Germany?” Hitler asked.† He was astounded as he later told Chamberlain, that the concessions to him had gone so far and so fast.

  “Yes,” replied the Prime Minister, smiling.

  “I am terribly sorry,” Hitler said, “but after the events of the last few days, this plan is no longer of any use.”

  Chamberlain, Dr. Schmidt later remembered, sat up with a start. His owllike face flushed with surprise and anger. But apparently not with resentment that Hitler had deceived him, that Hitler, like a common blackmailer, was upping his demands at the very moment they were being accepted. The Prime Minister described his own feelings at this moment in a report to the Commons a few days later:

  I do not want the House to think that Hitler was deliberately deceiving me—I do not think so for one moment—but, for me, I expected that when I got back to Godesberg I had only to discuss quietly with him the proposals that I had brought with me; and it was a profound shock to me when I was told … that these proposals were not acceptable …

  Chamberlain saw the house of peace which he had so “laboriously” built up at the expense of the Czechs collapsing like a stack of cards. He was, he told Hitler, “both disappointed and puzzled. He could rightly say that the Fuehrer had got from him what he had demanded.”

  In order to achieve this he [Chamberlain] had risked his whole political career … He was being accused by certain circles in Great Britain of having sold and betrayed Czechoslovakia, of having yielded to the dictators, and on leaving England that morning he actually had been booed.

  But the Fuehrer was unmoved by the personal plight of the British Prime Minister. The Sudeten area, he demanded, must be occupied by Germany at once. The problem “must be completely and finally solved by October first, at the latest.” He had a map handy to indicate what territories must be ceded immediately.

  And so, his mind “full of foreboding,” as he later told the Commons, Chamberlain withdrew across the Rhine “to consider what I was to do.” There seemed so little hope that evening that after he had consulted with his own cabinet colleagues and with members of the French government by telephone it was agreed that London and Paris should inform the Czech government the next day that they could not “continue to take the responsibility of advising them not to mobilize.”*

  At 7:20 that evening General Keitel telephoned Army headquarters from Godesberg: “Date (of X Day) cannot yet be ascertained. Continue preparations according to plan. If Case Green occurs, it will not be before September 30. If it occurs sooner, it will probably be improvised.”53

  For Adolf Hitler himself was caught in a dilemma. Though Chamberlain did not know it, the Fuehrer’s real objective, as he had laid it down in his OKW directive after the May crisis, was “to destroy Czechoslovakia by military action.” To accept the Anglo–French plan, which the Czechs already had agreed to, however reluctantly, would not only give Hitler his Sudeten Germans but would effectively destroy the Czech state, since it would be left defenseless. But it would not be by military action, and the Fuehrer was determined not only to humiliate President Beneš and the Czech government, which had so offended him in May, but to expose the spinelessness of the Western powers. For that, at least a military occupation was necessary. It could be bloodless, as was the military occupation of Austria, but it must take place. He must have at least that much revenge on the upstart Czechs.

  There was no further contact between the two men on the evening of September 22. But after sleeping on the problem and spending the early morning pacing his balcony overlooking the Rhine, Chamberlain sat down following breakfast and wrote a letter to Hitler. He would submit the new German demands to the Czechs but he did not think they would be accepted. In fact, he had no doubt that the Czechs would forcibly resist an immediate occupation by German troops. But he was willing to suggest to Prague, since all parties had agreed on the transfer of the Sudeten area to Germany, that the Sudeten Germans themselves maintain law and order in their area until it was turned over to the Reich.

  To such a compromise Hitler would not listen. After keeping the Prime Minister waiting throughout most of the day he finally replied by note with a bitter tirade, again rehearsing all the wrongs the Czechs had done to Germans, again refusing to modify his position and concluding that war “now appears to be the case.” Chamberlain’s answer was brief. He asked Hitler to put his new demands in writing, “together with a map,” and undertook “as mediator” to send them to Prague. “I do not see that I can perform any further service here,” he concluded. “I propose therefore to return to England.”

  Before doing so he came over once again to the Dreesen for a final meeting with Hitler which began at 10:30 on the evening of September 23. Hitler presented his demands in the form of a memorandum with an accompanying map. Chamberlain found himself confronted with a new time limit. The Czechs were to begin the evacuation of the ceded territory by 8 A.M. on September 26—two days hence—and complete it by September 28.

  “But this is nothing less than an ultimatum!” Chamberlain exclaimed.

  “Nothing of the sort,” Hitler shot back. When Chamberlain retorted that the German word Diktat applied to it, Hitler answered, “It is not a Diktat at all. Look, the document is headed by the word ‘Memorandum.’”

  At this moment an adjutant brought in an urgent message for the Fuehrer. He glanced at it and tossed it to Schmidt, who was interpreting. “Read this to Mr. Chamberlain.”

  Schmidt did. “Beneš has just announced over the radio a general mobilization in Czechoslovakia.”

  The room, Schmidt recalled afterward, was deadly still. Then Hitler spoke: “Now, of course, the whole affair is settled. The Czechs will not dream of ceding any territory to Germany.”

  Chamberlain, according to the Schmidt minutes, disagreed. In fact, there followed a furious argument.

  The Czechs had mobilized first [said Hitler]. Chamberlain contradicted this. Germany had mobilized first … The Fuehrer denied that Germany had mobilized.

  And so the talks continued into the early-morning hours. Finally, after Chamberlain had inquired whether the German memorandum “was really his last word” and Hitler had replied that it was indeed, the Prime Minister answered that there was no point in continuing the conversations. He had done his utmost; his efforts had failed. He was going away with a heavy heart, for the hopes with which he had come to Germany were destroyed.

  The German dictator did not want Chamberlain to get off the hook. He responded with a “concession.”

  “You are one of the few men for whom I have ever done such a thing,” he said breezily. “I am prepared to set one single date for the Czech evacuation—October first—
if that will facilitate your task.” And so saying, he took a pencil and changed the dates himself. This, of course, was no concession at all. October 1 had been X Day all along.*

  But it seems to have impressed the Prime Minister. “He fully appreciated,” Schmidt recorded him as saying, “the Fuehrer’s consideration on the point.” Nevertheless, he added, he was not in a position to accept or reject the proposals; he could only transmit them.

  The ice, however, had been broken, and as the meeting broke up at 1:30 A.M. the two men seemed, despite all that had happened, to be closer together personally than at any time since they had first met. I myself, from a vantage point twenty-five feet away in the porter’s booth, where I had set up a temporary broadcasting studio, watched them say their farewells near the door of the hotel. I was struck by their cordiality to each other. Schmidt took down the words which I could not hear.

  Chamberlain bid a hearty farewell to the Fuehrer. He said he had the feeling that a relationship of confidence had grown up between himself and the Fuehrer as a result of the conversations of the last few days…. He did not cease to hope that the present difficult crisis would be overcome, and then he would be glad to discuss other problems still outstanding with the Fuehrer in the same spirit.

  The Fuehrer thanked Chamberlain for his words and told him that he had similar hopes. As he had already stated several times, the Czech problem was the last territorial demand which he had to make in Europe.

  This renunciation of further land grabs seems to have impressed the departing Prime Minister too, for in his subsequent report to the House of Commons he stressed that Hitler had made it “with great earnestness.”

  When Chamberlain arrived at his hotel toward 2 A.M. he was asked by a journalist, “Is the position hopeless, sir?”

  “I would not like to say that,” the Prime Minister answered. “It is up to the Czechs now.”55

  It did not occur to him, it is evident, that it was up to the Germans, with their outrageous demands, too.

  In fact, no sooner had the Prime Minister returned to London on September 24 than he attempted to do the very thing he had informed Hitler he would not do: persuade the British cabinet to accept the new Nazi demands. But now he ran into unexpected opposition. Duff Cooper, the First Lord of the Admiralty, firmly opposed him. Surprisingly, so did Lord Halifax, though very reluctantly. Chamberlain could not carry his cabinet. Nor could he persuade the French government, which on the twenty-fourth rejected the Godesberg memorandum and on the same day ordered a partial mobilization.

  When the French ministers, headed by Premier Daladier, arrived in London on Sunday, September 25, the two governments were apprised of the formal rejection of the Godesberg proposals by the Czech government.* There was nothing for the French to do but affirm that they would honor their word and come to the aid of Czechoslovakia if attacked. But they had to know what Britain would do. Finally cornered, or so it seemed, Chamberlain agreed to inform Hitler that if France became engaged in war with Germany as a result of her treaty obligations to the Czechs, Britain would feel obliged to support her.

  But first he would make one last appeal to the German dictator. Hitler was scheduled to make a speech at the Sportpalast in Berlin on September 26. In order to induce him not to burn his bridges Chamberlain once again dashed off a personal letter to Hitler and on the afternoon of the twenty-sixth rushed it to Berlin by his faithful aide, Sir Horace Wilson, who sped to the German capital by special plane.

  On the departure of Chamberlain from the Dreesen in the early-morning hours of September 24, the Germans had been plunged into gloom. Now that war seemed to face them, some of them, at least, did not like it. I lingered in the hotel lobby for some time over a late supper. Goering, Goebbels, Ribbentrop, General Keitel and lesser men stood around earnestly talking. They seemed dazed at the prospect of war.

  In Berlin later that day I found hopes reviving. In the Wilhelmstrasse the feeling was that since Chamberlain, with all the authority of the British Prime Minister, had agreed to present Hitler’s new demands to Prague, it must be assumed that the British leader supported Hitler’s proposals. As we have seen, the assumption was quite correct—so far as it went.

  Sunday, September 25, was a lovely day of Indian summer in Berlin, warm and sunny, and since it undoubtedly would be the last such weekend that autumn, half of the population flocked to the lakes and woods that surround the capital. Despite reports of Hitler’s rage at hearing that the Godesberg ultimatum was being rejected in Paris, London and Prague, there was no feeling of great crisis, certainly no war fever, in Berlin. “Hard to believe there will be war,” I noted in my diary that evening.*

  On the Monday following there was a sudden change for the worse. At 5 P.M. Sir Horace Wilson, accompanied by Ambassador Henderson and Ivone Kirkpatrick, First Secretary of the British Embassy, arrived at the Chancellery bearing Chamberlain’s letter.57 They found Hitler in an ugly mood—probably he was already working himself down to a proper level for his Sportpalast speech three hours hence.

  When Dr. Schmidt began to translate the letter, which stated that the Czech government had informed the Prime Minister that the Godesberg memorandum was “wholly unacceptable,” just as he had warned at Godesberg, Hitler, according to Schmidt, suddenly leaped up, shouting, “There’s no sense at all in negotiating further!” and bounded for the door.58

  It was a painful scene, says the German interpreter. “For the first and only time in my presence, Hitler completely lost his head.” And according to the British present, the Fuehrer, who soon stamped back to his chair, kept further interrupting the reading of the letter by screaming, “The Germans are being treated like niggers … On October first I shall have Czechoslovakia where I want her. If France and England decide to strike, let them … I do not care a pfennig.”

  Chamberlain had proposed that since the Czechs were willing to give Hitler what he wanted, the Sudeten areas, a meeting of Czech and German representatives be called immediately to settle “by agreement the way in which the territory is to be handed over.” He added that he was willing to have British representatives sit in at the meeting. Hitler’s response was that he would negotiate details with the Czechs if they accepted in advance the Godesberg memorandum (which they had just rejected) and agreed to a German occupation of the Sudetenland by October 1. He must have an affirmative reply, he said, within forty-four hours—by 2 P.M. on September 28.

  That evening Hitler burned his bridges, or so it seemed to those of us who listened in amazement to his mad outburst at the jammed Sportpalast in Berlin. Shouting and shrieking in the worst paroxysm I had ever seen him in, he venomously hurled personal insults at “Herr Beneš,” declared that the issue of war or peace was now up to the Czech President and that, in any case, he would have the Sudetenland by October 1. Carried away as he was by his angry torrent of words and the ringing cheers of the crowd, he was shrewd enough to throw a sop to the British Prime Minister. He thanked him for his efforts for peace and reiterated that this was his last territorial claim in Europe. “We want no Czechs!” he muttered contemptuously.

  Throughout the harangue I sat in a balcony just above Hitler, trying with no great success to broadcast a running translation of his words. That night in my diary I noted:

  … For the first time in all the years I’ve observed him he seemed tonight to have completely lost control of himself. When he sat down, Goebbels sprang up and shouted into the microphone: “One thing is sure: 1918 will never be repeated!” Hitler looked up to him, a wild, eager expression in his eyes, as if those were the words which he had been searching for all evening and hadn’t quite found. He leaped to his feet and with a fanatical fire in his eyes that I shall never forget brought his right hand, after a grand sweep, pounding down on the table, and yelled with all the power in his mighty lungs: “Ja!” Then he slumped into his chair exhausted.

  He was fully recovered when he received Sir Horace Wilson for the second time the next noon, September 27. The specia
l envoy, a man with no diplomatic training but who was as anxious as the Prime Minister, if not more so, to give Hitler the Sudetenland if the dictator would only accept it peacefully, called Hitler’s attention to a special statement issued by Chamberlain in London shortly after midnight in response to the Fuehrer’s Sportpalast speech. In view of the Chancellor’s lack of faith in Czech promises, the British government, Chamberlain said, would regard itself “as morally responsible” for seeing that the Czech promises were carried out “fairly, fully and with all reasonable promptitude.” He trusted that the Chancellor would not reject this proposal.

  But Hitler showed no interest in it. He had, he said, no further message for Mr. Chamberlain. It was now up to the Czechs. They could accept or reject his demands. If they rejected them, he shouted angrily, “I shall destroy Czechoslovakia!” He kept repeating the threat with obvious relish.