The War of the World: History's Age of Hatred

by Niall Ferguson

  The British Empire Group… were fundamentally racist; they weren’t anti-Semitic in any overt sense, but they believed in the Aryan ascendancy. They didn’t want Italy or France to be part of them, really. They believed in Germany, Scandinavia, the White Empire, you see? And that, fundamentally, had a kind of Cecil Rhodes aspect to it.

  There was much truth in this. ‘The Teuton and the Slav are irreconcilable – just as are the Briton and the Slav,’ observed Henderson in a letter to Halifax. ‘[The Canadian premier] Mackenzie King told me last year after the Imperial Conference that the Slavs in Canada never assimilated with the people and never became good citizens.’

  However, as Berlin had to acknowledge, the appeasers had another and rather stronger argument on their side, and that was their aversion to Stalin’s Soviet Union:

  The Russians were quite outside [their notion of an extended Commonwealth], quite apart from being communists and terrible that way… That was the basis of it, the defence of what might be called white Western values against the horrors of the East. The Germans were a dubious case because they misbehaved. Hitler was rather a misfortune, but still, it was better to be friends with Hitler – I mean protection against Communism, fundamentally, is what stirred them.

  Among the many arguments for appeasement perhaps the best was this: that even as late as 1939 Hitler had done nothing to compare with the mass murder that Stalin had unleashed against the people of the Soviet Union. Many a Tory grandee may have knowingly shut one eye to the realities of Nazi rule, but an even larger number of people on the British Left had shut both eyes to the horrors of Stalinism – and they took much longer to open their eyes. Berlin understood that these were two evils between which it was far from easy to choose. As he wrote to his father in November 1938:

  All the old conservatives are very nervous… They all want to fight for the colonies. But they won’t. I feel absolutely certain that one day a Russian-Slavic bloc will form in Europe &sweep away the German penetration. The mood is depressed. Everyone is conscious of defeat.

  Such was the Establishment consensus. Fortunately, as we have seen, it was not shared by the British people at large. That was just as well. If it had been, the Second World War might well have been lost.

  10

  The Pity of Peace

  Of course they want to dominate Eastern Europe; they want as close a union with Austria as they could get without incorporating her in the Reich, and they want much the same things for the Sudetendeutsche as we did for the Uitlanders in the Transvaal.

  Neville Chamberlain to his sister Hilda, November 1937

  If a number of States were assembled around Great Britain and France in a solemn treaty for mutual defence against aggression; if they had their forces marshalled in what you may call a grand alliance; if they had their staff arrangements concerted; if all this rested, as it can honourably rest, upon the Covenant of the League of Nations, agreeable with all the purposes and ideals of the League of Nations; if that were sustained, as it would be, by the moral sense of the world; and if it were done in the year 1938 – and believe me, it may be the last chance there will be for doing it – then I say that you might even now arrest this approaching war.

  Winston Churchill, March 1938

  A FAR-AWAY COUNTRY

  Who were the Sudeten Germans? In Neville Chamberlain’s notorious phrase they were ‘people… in a far-away country… of whom we know nothing’. Yet Czechoslovakia is not so very far from Britain: London to Prague is just 643 miles, slightly less than the distance between New York and Chicago (711 miles). And the implications of the Sudetenland’s annexation by Nazi Germany had a profound bearing on Britain’s security. It was therefore unfortunate that Chamberlain took so little trouble to inform himself about the people whose fate he helped to decide in 1938. Had he known more, he might have acted differently.

  The term Sudetenland was not much used before the 1930s. At the end of the First World War an attempt had been made to associate the predominantly Germanophone periphery of Bohemia and Moravia with the new post-imperial Austria by constituting Sudeten-land as a new Austrian province, but this had come to nothing. The Germans who found themselves under Czechoslovakian rule after the First World War – they accounted for over a fifth of the population, not counting the mainly German-speaking Jews – had at no time been citizens of the Reich of which Hitler was Chancellor. They were first and foremost Bohemians. The role of Bohemia in the evolution of National Socialism had nevertheless been seminal. It had been there that, before the First World War, German workers for the first time defined themselves as both nationalists and socialists in response to mounting competition from Czech migrants from the countryside (see Chapter 1). It had been in Bohemia that some of the most bitter political battles in the history of inter-war Czechoslovakia had been fought, over issues like language and education (see Chapter 5). The industrial regions where German settlement was concentrated were hard hit by the Depression; Germans were over-represented among the unemployed, just as they were under-represented in government employment. On the other hand, Czechoslovakia was unusual in Central and Eastern Europe. It was the only one of the ‘successor states’ that had arisen from the ruins of the Habsburg Empire that was still a democracy in 1938. It also occupied a strategically vital position as a kind of wedge jutting into Germany, dividing Saxony and Silesia from Austria. Its politics and its location made Czechoslovakia the pivot around which inter-war Europe turned.

  The first and greatest weakness of Chamberlain’s foreign policy was that by accepting the legitimacy of ‘self-determination’ for the Sudeten Germans, it implicitly accepted the legitimacy of Hitler’s goal of a Greater Germany. Chamberlain’s aim was not to prevent the transfer of the Sudeten Germans and their lands to Germany, but merely to prevent Hitler’s achieving it by force.* ‘I don’t see why we shouldn’t say to Germany,’ so Chamberlain reasoned, ‘give us satisfactory assurances that you won’t use force to deal with the Austrians and Czecho-Slovakians and we will give you similar assurances that we won’t use force to prevent the changes you want if you can get them by peaceful means.’ His comparison with the English settlers in the Transvaal on the eve of the Boer War said it all; Chamberlain did not mean to imply that a war was likely, but that the German demands for the Sudetenlanders were as legitimate as his father’s had been for the Uitlanders.† To use a different analogy, it had taken generations for British Conservatives to reconcile themselves to the idea of Home Rule for the Irish; they conceded the Sudeten Germans’ right to it in a trice. Since Versailles, Germany had been aggrieved. The transfer of the Sudetenland was intended to redress her grievances in what Chamberlain hoped would be a full and final settlement. Nothing better captures the inability of the appeasers to grasp the Nazi mentality than the analysis offered by Edward Hale, a Treasury official, in August 1937. Hale maintained that

  the Nazi struggle is primarily one of self-respect, a natural reaction against the ostracism that followed the war; that its military manifestations are no more than an expression of the German military temperament (just as our temperament expresses itself in terms of sport); that Hitler’s desire for friendship with England is perfectly genuine and still widely shared; and that the German is appealing to the least unfriendly boy in the school to release him from the Coventry to which he was sent after the war.

  But the problems of Central and Eastern Europe could not so easily be translated into the terms of the Victorian Empire, much less into the language of the public school playing fields. Hitler was not some kind of Teutonic Cecil Rhodes. Nor was Germany remotely like a character from Tom Brown’s Schooldays. What Chamberlain and his advisers failed to grasp was the simple fact that Hitler was most unlikely to rest satisfied with the Sudetenland. As others pointed out, there were many more minorities in East Central Europe, each with its own grievances, each with its own desire to redraw Europe’s borders. In particular, as we have seen, there were numerous German minority communities, scattered all
the way from Danzig, at the end of the Polish Corridor, and Memel, an enclave in Lithuania, down to the picturesque Saxon villages of the Siebenbürgen, now in Romania, and as far east as the banks of the River Volga, in the very heart of Soviet Russia. In all, according to the Nazis’ inflated estimates, there were no fewer than thirty million Volksdeutsche living outside the Reich – nearly ten times the number of Sudeten Germans. Conceding Hitler’s right to the Sudetenland therefore set a very dangerous precedent. The more Hitler was able to cite the trials and tribulations of the Volksdeutsche as the basis for border ‘rectifications’ in one place, the more resources – both economic and demographic – he could stake a claim to in the other states of Central and Eastern Europe. Chamberlain and his advisers were apparently blind to the implications of the rapid spread of National Socialism among not just the Sudeten Germans but nearly all ethnic German minorities after 1933. This ideological conquest was well advanced by 1938. ‘From our viewpoint,’ recalled Gregor von Rezzori, a young ethnic German in Romania,

  the developments in Germany [after 1933] were welcome: a profusion of optimistic images of youth bursting with health and energy, promising to build a sunny new future – this corresponded to our own political mood. We were irked by the disdain with which we as the German-speaking minority were treated, as if the former Austrian dominion in Romania had been one of Teutonic barbarism over the ancient and highly cultured Czechs, Serbs, Slovaks and Wallachians, as if these had freed themselves from their oppressive bondage in the name of civilizing morality.

  As early as 1935 the Romanian Germans had found in Fritz Fabritius a confirmed Nazi to act as their leader. To be a National Socialist in Austria, Neville Laski found in 1934, was to be ‘a contingent holder of the job. To be a Nazi was to be an optimist’. By 1938 the Hungarian Germans, too, had formed their own Nazi organization, the Volksbund. Before even bidding for living space, Hitler was already winning the ‘thinking space’ of the Volksdeutsche. They became, in effect, his advance guard in the East.

  SEPTEMBER 1938

  The failure to appreciate the significance of Hitler’s appeal to the ethnic Germans was only the first of five flaws in the policy of appeasement. The second fatal weakness of Chamberlain’s policy was that it assumed the existence of ‘moderate’ elements within the Nazi regime that could be strengthened through conciliation. In reality, the apparently ‘polycratic’ nature of the regime – the fact that, as the French ambassador to Berlin complained, ‘There is not… only one foreign office. There are a half-dozen’ – was something of an illusion. Hitler was in charge, his broad objectives were no secret and his subordinates ‘worked towards the Führer’ when he did not specify the means of achieving what he wanted. Talking to Schacht about colonial concessions therefore turned out to be a waste of time, as was talking to Göring about deals on raw materials. Chamberlain’s early ‘grand design’ – which involved such bizarre proposals as the creation of a Central African raw materials consortium and an arms limitation agreement to abolish strategic bombing – was a flop because Hitler had no interest in either. Even more fantastic was the hope, to which the British clung until the war was nearly over, that the German working class would eventually tire of the economic sacrifices demanded by the Nazis and revolt against them.

  The third flaw was the assumption, first enunciated by the Permanent Under-Secretary at the Foreign Office, Sir Robert Vansittart, that Britain gained by waiting. As he observed in December 1936, ‘Time is the very material commodity which the Foreign Office is expected to provide in the same way as other departments provide other war material… To the Foreign Office falls therefore the task of holding the situation until at least 1939.’ In reality, the ‘policy of cunction’ (from the Latin cunctor, ‘I delay’) gave Hitler just as much time to build up his military forces and, as we shall see, was positively disadvantageous to Britain from an economic point of view. Fourthly, Chamberlain persisted with the idea – which should have been discredited as early as 1935 – that good relations with Mussolini might be a way of checking Hitler or at least limiting British liability on the continent. Finally, Chamberlain was too arrogant to attach a significant probability to the worst-case scenario that appeasement would fail, so that Britain’s position was unnecessarily exposed when, in due course, it did. Although he undeniably presided over substantial if belated increases in defence expenditure, Chamberlain also did a number of things that positively weakened Britain’s military position, notably his surrender of the ports still controlled by Britain in Southern Ireland when he recognized the independence of Eire in 1938. He also forced Viscount Swinton to resign as Secretary of State for Air for having quite legitimately accelerated the construction of modern fighters for the purpose of defending Britain from the Luftwaffe. Having earlier committed Britain to build an air force designed to attack Germany, Chamberlain offered to give even that ineffectual deterrent away if Hitler would only agree to a ban on strategic bombing.

  Largely as a result of decisions taken during Chamberlain’s premiership, by September 1939 the United Kingdom found herself at war in circumstances significantly worse than those of August 1914. By June 1940 she found herself in the most parlous strategic position in her modern history, standing alone – or rather, with only the Dominions and colonies as allies – against a Germany that bestrode the European continent. What, however, if Britain had stood up to Hitler sooner than in 1939? There were numerous moments prior to that year when Hitler had openly flouted the status quo:

  in March 1935, when he announced his intention to restore conscription in Germany, in violation of the Versailles Treaty;

  in March 1936, when he unilaterally reoccupied the demilitarized Rhineland, in violation of both the Versailles and the Locarno Treaties;

  in late 1936 or 1937, when he and Mussolini intervened in the Spanish Civil War, in contravention of the Non-Intervention Agreement they had signed in the summer of 1936;

  in March 1938, when a campaign of intimidation of the Austrian government culminated in the replacement of its Chancellor, Schuschnigg, an ‘invitation’ to German troops to march into Austria and Hitler’s proclamation of the Anschluss; or

  in September 1938, when he threatened to go to war to separate the Sudetenland from Czechoslovakia.

  Of all of these moments, the most propitious was without doubt the Sudeten crisis of 1938. Even if Austria’s disappearance as an independent state had not opened Chamberlain’s eyes – to him it was just ‘spilt milk’ – it opened the eyes of many others in Britain to the nature of Hitler’s ambitions. To be sure, if Hitler had wanted no more than to stick up for the rights of the Sudeten Germans, it would have been hard to justify a war. Konrad Henlein, their leader,* struck the British politicians who met him (Churchill included) as a reasonable man whose stated programme of autonomy had the backing of the majority of his people. However, as became apparent in the course of the crisis, Hitler was merely using the Sudeten Germans to provoke a war which he intended would wipe Czechoslovakia off the map.

  In the opening phase of the crisis, from May until the first week of September, Sir Nevile Henderson – a quite disastrous choice to represent Britain in Berlin – was almost completely hoodwinked by the Germans into thinking the Czechs were the villains of the piece. Chamberlain’s emissary, Lord Runciman, also fell into this trap. Lord Halifax, now Foreign Secretary, allowed himself to be persuaded by Henderson that firmness with Hitler would only ‘drive him to greater violence or greater menaces’ – a wholly incorrect inference from a war scare in May when the Czechs had mobilized in the mistaken belief that Hitler was about to attack. Throughout this period, the Cabinet did not give serious thought to the option of threatening the use of force. When First Lord of the Admiralty Duff Cooper proposed ‘bringing the crews of our ships up to full complement which would amount to semi-mobilization’, Chamberlain dismissed the idea as ‘a policy of pin-pricking which… was only likely to irritate’ Hitler. Only four Cabinet members besides Cooper* had se
rious reservations about Chamberlain’s policy at this stage, and all were dispensable. French requests for explicit British warnings to Berlin were politely rebuffed; the Permanent Under-Secretary at the Foreign Office, Sir Alexander Cadogan, was prepared to countenance nothing stronger than a ‘private warning’ that ‘if Hitler thinks that we shall in no circumstances come in, he is labouring under a tragic illusion’. Halifax came very close to sending such a warning – to the effect that Britain ‘could not stand aside’ if Germany invaded Czechoslovakia and France came to her defence – but despite Churchill’s vigorous encouragement (or perhaps because of it) Chamberlain overruled him. Henderson was prepared to go only as far as: ‘I begged his Excellency to remind Herr Hitler that if France felt obliged by her honour to intervene on behalf of the Czechs, circumstances might be such as to compel us to participate, just as I realized that there were possibly other circumstances which might compel Herr Hitler to intervene on behalf of the Sudet-en[s].’ Unfortunately, he issued this feeble warning to the wrong man. Konstantin von Neurath, of whom he was ‘begging’, had ceased to be Foreign Minister precisely seven months before. Chamberlain was thus able to use all the political means at his disposal to pressurize the Czech government into making concessions. The Czech President Edvard Beneš at length gave in and accepted Henlein’s demands for Sudeten autonomy, but Henlein, under Hitler’s instructions, at once broke off the negotiations. Mere autonomy had never been the German objective. It was Hitler who determined the content of Sudeten ‘self-determination’.

  Reports now reached London that Hitler was planning unilaterally to send in his troops. Now the second act of the drama began. The French premier, Daladier, informed the British ambassador in Paris, Sir Eric Phipps, that if Germany invaded Czechoslovakia, France would declare war. Here was another chance to stand firm. At last, on September 9, Chamberlain was prevailed upon by his inner cabinet to send an explicit warning to Berlin that, if France intervened, ‘the sequence of events must result in a general conflict from which Great Britain could not stand aside’. But Chamberlain, with the encouragement of Halifax and Henderson, decided at the last minute that the telegram should not be handed to Ribbentrop, now the German Foreign Minister. Halifax’s rationale for this was, as he put it to the Cabinet on September 12, that ‘If [Hitler] made his mind up to attack, there was nothing that we could do to stop him… Any serious prospect of getting Herr Hitler back to a sane outlook would probably be irretrievably destroyed by any action on our part… involving him in a public humiliation.’ Four months earlier, when it had seemed the Germans might send in troops, Halifax had blown hot and cold; many believed (wrongly) that Hitler had drawn back for fear of Anglo-French intervention. Now, however, Halifax warned the French not to count on British support ‘automatically’. He was unimpressed by Daladier’s assurance that, ‘if German troops cross the Czechoslovak frontier, the French will march to a man. They realise perfectly well that this will be not for les beaux yeux of the Czechs but for their own skins, as, after a given time, Germany would, with enormously increased strength, turn against France.’ As far as Halifax was concerned, Czechoslovakia was already as good as finished: