On 18 September, Hitler told Goebbels, who had been summoned to the Obersalzberg the previous day, that he believed that in the meantime ‘public opinion in Paris and London had come to accept the idea of a plebiscite’. Would Prague give way to the pressure? ‘The Führer thinks it won’t; I think it will.’136 On the following day, news arrived on the Obersalzberg that the British and French governments had agreed that the areas where Germans formed the majority should be ceded to the Reich without the need for a plebiscite. As compensation, they were going to guarantee the territorial integrity of the rest of Czechoslovakia. Moreover, Chamberlain now declared that he would be willing to come to Germany for a second meeting with Hitler.137
Hitler decided that at this meeting he would ‘make quite categorical demands’ and began to outline his territorial demands on a map.138 The previous day he had begun to mobilize the other parties who had an interest in the destruction of Czechoslovakia, inviting the Hungarian prime minister, Imrédy, and his foreign minister, Kánya,139 as well as the Polish ambassador, Lipski, to visit the Obersalzberg on 20 September, where he encouraged them to make their demands on Czechoslovakia.140 The Hungarians wanted a role in determining the future status of the Hungarian minority in Czechoslovakia; the Poles claimed the whole of the Olsa region, which, in 1918, had been divided between Poland and Czechoslovakia. The Slovaks also began to stir and, on 20 September in Prague, demanded full autonomy within the state of Czechoslovakia, which they then managed to achieve at the beginning of October.141 On 21 September, the Czech government gave way to French and British pressure, announcing that they accepted the proposals of the two governments ‘with a sense of pain’.142
The German press was instructed to play down Prague’s now evident willingness to compromise and instead to point out that the territorial demands on Czechoslovakia raised by Poland and Hungary in the meantime had created a new situation. The press was thereby already adopting the position that Hitler was going to take during his next meeting with Chamberlain.143 Moreover, it continued to play up the bogus ‘frontier incidents’.144
On 22 September, Hitler and Chamberlain continued their discussions, this time in Bad Godesberg. Hitler employed shock tactics at his first meeting with the British prime minister in the Hotel Dreesen. He confronted Chamberlain, who had come in order to sort out the modalities of the cession of the territories with mixed populations, with an ultimatum for the withdrawal of Czech troops from all the disputed territories and with the announcement that the Werhrmacht would invade if the matter had not been settled to Germany’s satisfaction by 1 October. A plebiscite and appropriate frontier corrections could take place at a later date. Hitler adopted a threatening tone: ‘At any moment, while we’re having these discussions, an explosion may occur somewhere in the Sudeten territory, which would render all attempts at a peaceful resolution redundant’. Hitler then presented the map on which he had already marked in the territories that were to be ceded.145 Chamberlain was extremely ‘disappointed and puzzled’, since, as he told Hitler, he had ‘put his whole political career at risk’ to achieve this solution.
Chamberlain did not appear at the meeting scheduled for the following morning, but instead sent a message initiating an exchange of correspondence between him and Hitler that lasted until the evening. In the late evening they met again in the Hotel Dreesen.146 During these negotiations on 23 September, Hitler did not show the least willingness to compromise, but instead presented an ultimatum, according to which Czechoslovakia should withdraw from the disputed territories between 26 and 28 September; frontier corrections could follow later on the basis of a plebiscite. Chamberlain finally agreed to pass on this document to the Czech government; he succeeded only in getting Hitler to postpone the Czech withdrawal he was demanding to 1 October.147
On 25 September, once more in Berlin, Hitler discussed the crisis with Goebbels. He said he was convinced that Beneš would give way; Goebbels, however, was sceptical.148 While on a walk together, Hitler told him of his immediate plans. The military build-up would be completed by 27–28 September. He would then have five days with room for manoeuvre in which finally to clarify the question of the Sudeten German territories. Then, he planned to order the full mobilization of the Wehrmacht during a period of eight to ten days in order to attack Czechoslovakia.
On the following day, 26 September, Hitler received the news from Sir Horace Wilson, Chamberlain’s closest advisor, that the Prague government had rejected his ultimatum.149 Hitler firmly dismissed Chamberlain’s proposal, through Wilson, that he should continue negotiating with Prague;150 indeed, according to the interpreter, Schmidt, ‘it was the one and only time that Hitler lost his temper in my presence’, furiously attacking Beneš and the Czechs.151
On the same day, Hitler gave an account of the crisis to an audience in the Berlin Sportpalast. His speech was expressly intended to provide a detailed justification for the coming war with Czechoslovakia and to give his position quasi-plebiscitary support from an enthusiastic public. Goebbels noted in his diary that he had prepared the meeting ‘down to the last detail’. ‘The audience is intended to represent the people.’152 In his speech Hitler used the backdrop provided by Goebbels to project himself as the executor of the ‘people’s will’: ‘Now it is no longer the Führer who is speaking or an individual, now the German people is speaking!’ He insisted on a solution of the Sudeten question in the interests of Germany, but also promised that, afterwards ‘Germany will no longer have any territorial issues in Europe!’ After the Sudeten issue had been resolved he would no longer have any interest in Czechoslovakia: ‘We don’t want any Czechs at all!’ Beneš now had the choice between ‘war and peace’.153 The press were instructed viciously to attack the president of Czechoslovakia in order to drive a wedge between him and his population.154
Fired up by his speech, Hitler replied to Chamberlain in a letter he handed to Wilson on the morning of the 27 September.155 In it he rejected the reasons the Czech government had given for its refusal to accept the German ultimatum as spurious. During the meeting at which the letter was handed over, Wilson produced another personal communication from Chamberlain stating that France would stand by its commitments to Czechoslovakia and Britain would support her. But Hitler was unimpressed and began making threats against Czechoslovakia, which, if its government rejected his demands, he would ‘crush’.156
In the meantime, Göring and Ribbentrop were pressing the Hungarian government to take part in a joint military engagement. The Hungarians, however, remained hesitant, having become convinced that that they would be able to win back at least the Magyar-speaking southern areas of Slovakia and Ruthenia without the use of military force, which involved the risk of a confrontation with Romania and Yugoslavia. Göring, with whom Horthy was staying during this period in order to hunt, reported to Hitler on 26 September in the Reich Chancellery on a conversation he had had with the Hungarian regent: his behaviour had been ‘totally feeble and cowardly’.157
On the afternoon of 27 September, on Hitler’s orders, a motorized division paraded through the centre of Berlin.158 Contrary to Hitler’s expectations, however, the Berlin population did not respond to this display of military strength and readiness for war with the same enthusiasm as had ‘the people’ in the Sportpalast. The population ostentatiously ignored the troops; it was obvious that they were depressed about the prospect of an impending war.159 Hitler’s Luftwaffe adjutant, Nicolaus von Below, noted in his memoirs that Goebbels ‘could have organized more cheering’.160 The distinct lack of enthusiasm for war could indeed be explained by the fact that this time Goebbels did not turn on the ‘people machine’, as he was dubious about Hitler’s war policy, and the parade was not going to prompt spontaneous jubilation from Berliners. To add to the pressure, the following day, at Hitler’s regular lunch party in the Reich Chancellery, Goebbels declared that the population was not in favour of war.161 This scene in Berlin mirrored the widespread rejection of war by the majority of the popul
ation throughout the Reich. This ‘war psychosis’, which was being openly referred to by the authorities, reached its high point in the second half of September.162
Hitler appears to have taken note of the lack of enthusiasm for war, particularly since this situation represented a significant decline in his prestige. He declared his willingness to participate in a last round of negotiations, proposed on 28 September by Mussolini, acting above all on behalf of Chamberlain. On the same day, the four governments of Britain, France, Italy, and Germany agreed on a conference to solve the problem, to be held in Munich.163 The German leadership was divided: while Ribbentrop was strongly in favour of war, Goebbels and Göring were much less enthusiastic. ‘The situation does not provide a springboard for war’, Goebbels noted. One cannot fight a world war over ‘modalities’.164
On the evening before the Munich conference, the regime organized a wave of demonstrations, involving several million people, throughout the Reich under the slogan ‘Enough of Beneš’. Goebbels spoke at the main event in Berlin to a crowd of 500,000 people. He noted in his diary that he had been unable to say anything about the Munich conference, as ‘there would undoubtedly have been demonstrations too obviously in favour of it’.165 He did not want to give the Berlin population another opportunity publicly to demonstrate their opposition to war.166 The great enthusiasm with which the Munich population greeted the participants the following day was also interpreted by numerous observers mainly as a clear expression of a desire for peace. The cheering was directed above all at Chamberlain, who was greeted much more warmly than Hitler.167
During the night of 29–30 September, Chamberlain, Daladier, Mussolini, and Hitler, meeting in the so-called Führer building in Munich, agreed the draft treaty proposed by Mussolini, according to which the Wehrmacht would enter the Sudeten German territories on 1 October and complete their occupation in stages by 10 October. An international committee composed of representatives of Germany, Britain, France, Italy, and Czechoslovakia was to define those territories where, as a result of an ethnically mixed population, a plebiscite appeared necessary. It was to supervise the plebiscites and, on the basis of the results, define the final borders. Every individual would have the right to decide whether he or she wished to stay in the disputed territories and the Czech government was to amnesty Sudeten German prisoners. Britain and France gave a guarantee for the remainder of Czechoslovakia and Germany and Italy agreed to join this guarantee as soon as the issue of the ‘Polish and Hungarian minorities within Czechoslovakia had been sorted out’. No decision had been reached about the future of the non-German minorities after Hitler, in his opening speech, had declared that he could only speak for the interests of the Germans in Czechoslovakia.168 The agreement covered an area of 29,000 square kilometres with a population of 3.6 million, of whom 3.1. million were German-speaking.169 Following a Polish ultimatum of 1 October, Prague was also forced to cede the Olsa region to Poland.170 By contrast, Hungary, for the time being, did not subject Czechoslovakia to any territorial claims.171 However, under the so-called First Vienna Award of 2 November 1938, proclaimed by Ribbentrop and Ciano, Hungary received parts of Slovakia as well as a part of Carpatho-Ukraine.172
On the 30 September, the day after the long night of negotiations, Chamberlain visited Hitler around midday in his private apartment on Prinzregentenplatz. The interpreter, Schmidt, later recalled that, while listening to what Chamberlain had to say, Hitler looked pale, irritable, and distracted, and, unusually, did not respond with lengthy counter arguments.173 Chamberlain presented Hitler with the draft of a brief Anglo-German peace declaration that met the demands Hitler had made in his Sportpalast speech of 26 September and which he now felt obliged to sign. The declaration stated, in particular, that ‘all other questions that affect our two countries, should be dealt with through the method of consultation’.174 At the beginning of December, Ribbentrop agreed with his French counterpart, Georges Bonnet, a Franco-German consultation declaration, which also recognized the frontiers between the two countries as ‘final’. Both declarations were without political consequences and served only – temporarily – to reassure the western powers.175
Although in the eyes of most of his contemporaries Hitler had achieved a remarkable success, he had not succeeded in annexing the whole of Czechoslovakia, for which the demand for a solution to the Sudeten German question had always only been a pretext. Indeed, he had to accept that, with his increasingly strident demands for the ‘liberation’ of the Sudeten Germans, he had manoeuvred himself into a cul-de-sac. For the western powers had taken him at his word and fulfilled all his demands based on ethnicity. They anticipated binding him into a four-power guarantee for the rest of Czechoslovakia, a development that he wished to avoid at all costs. For such a four-power guarantee threatened to lock him into a four-power bloc, thereby preventing him from continuing his expansionist policy. Moreover, on the domestic front he had been deeply disappointed to discover that not only were the German people not enthusiastic for war, but were actually afraid of it. The population had been so jubilant about the Munich Agreement not because they had seen it as a national success but rather because it averted war at the very last minute. Equally disappointing for Hitler was the lack of enthusiasm for his war policy among sections of the regime’s leadership, in particular the military and the diplomats.
During the weeks following Munich, Hitler came to the conclusion that he must rectify the failure to crush Czechoslovakia at the earliest possible moment after the winter was over. The remaining months had to be used to prepare domestically for war.
27
After Munich
After Munich Hitler was determined to go ahead as soon as possible with the plan he had been nursing since May 1938 of destroying Czechoslovakia, a plan that, for the time being, had been thwarted by a combination of domestic and foreign opponents. To achieve this, from October onwards, he set about destabilizing Czechoslovakia through internal and external pressure, making the border established in Munich appear merely provisional. Above all, however, during the Munich conference he was already engaged in strengthening ties with Japan and Italy, in order to avoid the Reich being integrated into a European four-power bloc, into which he was being forced against his will, and to establish a rival bloc against the western powers. At the same time, he wanted to achieve a ‘general settlement’ with Poland in order to place the alliance with this important partner on a permanent basis. However, in order to achieve greater diplomatic freedom of action and to continue his power politics he had to accelerate rearmament, which he also set in motion during the Munich conference. Apart from that, he was determined to take radical steps to overcome the German population’s evident lack of enthusiasm for war, as spectacularly demonstrated in September, and to underline the Party’s leadership role through a reorientation of domestic politics.
At Munich the issue of the cession of Czechoslovak territories mainly populated by Poles and Hungarians to these two countries had been initially postponed for three months. Germany and Italy were going to guarantee the integrity of Czechoslovakia only after this matter had been settled; the two western powers had already done so. Hitler was determined at all costs to avoid Germany having to give such a guarantee, for his aim was instead to encourage the ongoing disintegration of Czechoslovakia. Thus, during the coming months, he pursued the policy of declaring that the question of the non-German minorities in Czechoslovakia had not yet been ‘finally’ settled, the internal situation in Czechoslovakia must return to normal and so on, and, therefore, that the guarantee could not yet be given.1 He also soon found supporters of his destabilizing policy within Czechoslovakia itself.
Hitler gave up his previous plan of handing Slovakia over to Hungary after an autonomous Slovakian government was established on 6 October under Jozef Tiso, which succeeded in securing recognition from the central government in Prague. The opportunity of acquiring the Slovakian prime minister as a loyal ally, by supporting him against Prague and Bud
apest, and then using him to further German expansionist policy, was too tempting. Moreover, in view of Hungary’s passive stance during the Munich crisis, Hitler saw no further need to support its territorial claims.2
Hitler acquired another totally dependent ally and a land bridge to Romania through the creation, a few days later, of an autonomous government in Carpatho-Ukraine, the easternmost part of Czechoslovakia. Here too he gave up, albeit only for a few months, his previous plan of giving this territory to Hungary in order to meet Poland’s and Hungary’s wish for a common frontier.3 A further motive for this temporary change of policy was probably the thought that Carpatho-Ukraine could become the centre of a Ukrainian nationalist movement and therefore offer the possibility – albeit at this stage very vague – of influencing the Ukrainian minority in eastern Poland and in the Soviet Ukraine. At any rate, from 10 October onwards, German radio stations began broadcasting programmes in Ukrainian and supporting the cause of Ukrainian independence.4
Negotiations between Czechoslovakia and Hungary about a new definition of the border had just been broken off when, on 14 October, Hitler received the new Czechoslovak foreign minister, František Chvalkovský, and the former Hungarian prime minister, Kálmán Darányi, whom Budapest had sent as an emissary, for separate talks in Munich. During these talks, Hitler pressed both states to reach a rapid agreement about the future border based on ethnic criteria. He was determined to avoid at all costs this question being settled at an international conference, a second Munich, in other words once again having to submit to a process in which he would have to appear as an equal among equals.
Hitler Page 77
