Hitler

by Ian Kershaw

  There were other reasons for occupying the rump of Czechoslovakia that went beyond Hitler’s personal motivation. Economic considerations were of obvious importance. However pliant the Czechs were prepared to be, the fact remained that even after the transfer of October 1938, which brought major raw material deposits to the Reich, immense resources remained in Czecho-Slovakia (as the country, the meaningful hyphen inserted, was now officially called) and outside direct German control. The vast bulk of the industrial wealth and resources of the country lay in the old Czech heartlands of Bohemia and Moravia, not in the largely agricultural Slovakia. An estimated four-fifths of engineering, machine-tool construction, and electrical industries remained in the hands of the Czechs. Textiles, chemicals, and the glass industry were other significant industries that beckoned the Germans. Not least, the Skoda works produced locomotives and machinery as well as arms. Czecho-Slovakia also possessed large quantities of gold and foreign currency that could certainly help relieve some of the shortages of the Four-Year Plan. And a vast amount of equipment could be taken over and redeployed to the advantage of the German army. The Czech arsenal was easily the greatest among the smaller countries of central Europe. The Czech machine-guns, field-guns, and anti-aircraft guns were thought to be better than the German equivalents. They would all be taken over by the Reich, as well as the heavy guns built at the Skoda factories. It was subsequently estimated that enough arms had fallen into Hitler’s possession to equip a further twenty divisions.

  But of even greater importance than direct economic gain and exploitation was the military-strategic position of what remained of CzechoSlovakia. As long as the Czechs retained some autonomy, and possession of extensive military equipment and industrial resources, potential difficulties from that quarter could not be ruled out in the event of German involvement in hostilities. More important still: possession of the rectangular, mountain-rimmed territories of Bohemia and Moravia on the south-eastern edge of the Reich offered a recognizable platform for further eastward expansion and military domination. The road to the Balkans was now open. Germany’s position against Poland was strengthened. And in the event of conflict in the west, the defences in the east were consolidated.

  As late as December 1938, there was no indication that Hitler was preparing an imminent strike against the Czechs. There were hints, however, that the next moves in foreign policy would not be long delayed. Hitler told Ernst Neumann, the German leader in Memel (a seaport on the Baltic with a largely German population, which had been removed from Germany by the Versailles Treaty), on 17 December that annexation of Memelland would take place in the following March or April, and that he wanted no crisis in the area before then. On 13 February, Hitler let it be known to a few associates that he intended to take action against the Czechs in mid-March. German propaganda was adjusted accordingly. The French had already gleaned intelligence in early February that German action against Prague would take place in about six weeks.

  Hitler’s meeting at the Berghof with the Polish Foreign Minister and strong man in the government, Józef Beck, on 5 January had proved, from the German point of view, disappointing. Hitler had tried to appear accommodating in laying down the need for Danzig to return to Germany, and for access routes across the Corridor to East Prussia. Beck implied that public opinion in Poland would prevent any concessions on Danzig. When Ribbentrop returned empty-handed from his visit to Warsaw on 26 January, indicating that the Poles were not to be moved, Hitler’s approach to Poland changed markedly.

  From friendly overtures, the policy moved to pressure. Poland was to be excluded from any share in the spoils from the destruction of the Czech state. And turning Slovakia into a German puppet-state would intensify the threat to Poland’s southern border. Once the demolition of Czecho-Slovakia had taken place, therefore, the Germans hoped and expected the Poles to prove more cooperative. The failure of negotiations with the Poles had probably accelerated the decision to destroy the Czech state.

  Around this time, according to Goebbels, Hitler spoke practically of nothing else but foreign policy. ‘He’s always pondering new plans,’ Goebbels noted. ‘A Napoleonic nature!’ The Propaganda Minister had already guessed what was in store when Hitler told him at the end of January he was going ‘to the mountain’ – to the Obersalzberg – to think about his next steps in foreign policy. ‘Perhaps Czechia is up for it again. The problem is after all only half solved,’ he wrote.

  III

  By the beginning of March, in the light of mounting Slovakian nationalist clamour (abetted by Germany) for full independence from Prague, the break-up of what was left of the state of Czecho-Slovakia looked to close observers of the scene to be a matter of time. When the Prague government deposed the Slovakian cabinet, sent police in to occupy government offices in Bratislava, and placed the former Prime Minister, Father Jozef Tiso, under house arrest, Hitler spotted his moment. On 10 March, he told Goebbels, Ribbentrop, and Keitel that he had decided to march in, smash the rump Czech state, and occupy Prague. The invasion was to take place five days later. ‘Our borders must stretch to the Carpathians,’ noted Goebbels. ‘The Führer shouts for joy. This game is dead certain.’

  On 12 March orders were given to the army and Luftwaffe to be ready to enter Czecho-Slovakia at 6 a.m. on the 15th, but before then not to approach within ten kilometres of the border. German mobilization was by that stage so obvious that it seemed impossible that the Czechs were unaware of what was happening. The propaganda campaign against the Czechs had meanwhile been sharply stepped up. That evening, Tiso had been visited by German officials and invited to Berlin. The next day he met Hitler. He was told the historic hour of the Slovaks had arrived. If they did nothing, they would be swallowed up by Hungary. Tiso got the message. By the following noon, 14 March, back in Bratislava, he had the Slovak Assembly proclaim independence. The desired request for ‘protection’ was, however, only forthcoming a day later, after German warships on the Danube had trained their sights on the Slovakian government offices.

  Goebbels listened again to Hitler unfolding his plans. The entire ‘action’ would be over within eight days. The Germans would already be in Prague within a day, their planes within two hours. No bloodshed was expected. ‘Then the Führer wants to fit in a lengthy period of political calm,’ wrote Goebbels, adding that he did not believe it, however enticing the prospect. A period of calm, he thought, was necessary. ‘Gradually, the nerves aren’t coping.’

  On the morning of 14 March, the anticipated request came from Prague, seeking an audience of the Czech State President Dr Emil Hácha with Hitler. Hácha, a small, shy, somewhat unworldly, and also rather sickly man, in office since the previous November, arrived in Berlin during the course of the evening, after a five-hour train journey. Hitler kept him nervously waiting until midnight to increase the pressure upon him – ‘the old tested methods of political tactics’, as Goebbels put it. It was around 1 a.m. when, his face red from nervousness and anxiety, the Czech President was eventually ushered into the intimidating surroundings of Hitler’s grandiose ‘study’ in the New Reich Chancellery. A sizeable gathering, including Ribbentrop, the head of his personal staff Walther Hewel, Keitel, Weizsäcker, State Secretary Otto Meissner, Press Chief Otto Dietrich, and interpreter Paul Schmidt, were present. Göring, summoned back from holiday, was also there.

  Hitler was at his most intimidating. He launched into a violent tirade against the Czechs and the ‘spirit of Beneš’ which, he claimed, still lived on. It was necessary in order to safeguard the Reich, he continued, to impose a protectorate over the remainder of Czecho-Slovakia. Hácha and Chvalkovský, the Czech Foreign Minister, who had accompanied the President to Berlin, sat stony-faced and motionless. The entry of German troops was ‘irreversible’, ranted Hitler. Keitel would confirm that they were already marching towards the Czech border, and would cross it at 6 a.m. Hácha said he wanted no bloodshed, and asked Hitler to halt the military build-up. Hitler refused: it was impossible; the troops were
already mobilized. Göring intervened to add that his Luftwaffe would be over Prague by dawn, and it was in Hácha’s hands whether bombs fell on the beautiful city. At the threat, the Czech President fainted. He was revived by an injection from Hitler’s personal physician, Dr Morell.

  Meanwhile, Prague could not be reached by telephone. Eventually, contact was made. The browbeaten President went immediately to the telephone and, on a crackly line, passed on his orders that Czech troops were not to open fire on the invading Germans. Just before 4 a.m., Hácha signed the declaration, placing the fate of his people in the hands of the Leader of the German Reich.

  Overjoyed, Hitler went in to see his two secretaries, Christa Schroeder and Gerda Daranowski, who had been on duty that night. ‘So, children,’ he burst out, pointing to his cheeks, ‘each of you give me a kiss there and there … This is the happiest day of my life. What has been striven for in vain for centuries, I have been fortunate enough to bring about. I have achieved the union of Czechia with the Reich. Hácha has signed the agreement. I will go down as the greatest German in history.’

  Two hours after Hácha had signed, the German army crossed the Czech borders and marched, on schedule, on Prague. By 9.00 a.m. the forward units entered the Czech capital, making slow progress on ice-bound roads, through mist and snow, the wintry weather providing an appropriate backcloth to the end of central Europe’s last, betrayed, democracy. The Czech troops, as ordered, remained in their barracks and handed over their weapons.

  Hitler left Berlin at midday, travelling in his special train as far as Leipa, some sixty miles north of Prague, where he arrived during the afternoon. A fleet of Mercedes was waiting to take him and his entourage the remainder of the journey to Prague. It was snowing heavily, but he stood for much of the way, his arm outstretched to salute the unending columns of German soldiers they overtook. Unlike his triumphal entries into Austria and the Sudetenland, only a thin smattering of the population watched sullenly and helplessly from the side of the road. A few dared to greet with clenched fists as Hitler’s car passed by. But the streets were almost deserted by the time he arrived in Prague in the early evening and drove up to the Hradschin Castle, the ancient residence of the Kings of Bohemia. When the people of Prague awoke next morning, they saw Hitler’s standard fluttering on the castle. Twenty-four hours later he was gone. For the Czechs, six long years of subjugation had begun.

  Hitler returned to Berlin, via Vienna, on 19 March, to the inevitable, and by now customary, triumphator’s reception. Despite the freezing temperatures, huge numbers turned out to welcome the hero. When Hitler descended from his train at the Görlitzer Bahnhof, Göring, tears in his eyes, greeted him with an address embarrassing even by the prevailing standards of sycophancy. Thousands cheered wildly as Hitler was driven to the Reich Chancellery. The experienced hand of Dr Goebbels had organized another massive spectacular. Searchlights formed a ‘tunnel of light’ along Unter den Linden. A brilliant display of fireworks followed. Hitler then appeared on the balcony of the Reich Chancellery, waving to the ecstatic crowd of his adoring subjects below.

  The real response among the German people to the rape of CzechoSlovakia was, however, more mixed – in any event less euphoric – than that of the cheering multitudes, many of them galvanized by party activists, in Berlin. This time there had been no ‘home-coming’ of ethnic Germans into the Reich. The vague notion that Bohemia and Moravia had belonged to the ‘German living space’ for a thousand years left most people cold – certainly most north Germans who had traditionally had little or no connection with the Czech lands. For many, as one report from a Nazi District Leader put it, whatever the joy in the Führer’s ‘great deeds’ and the trust placed in him, ‘the needs and cares of daily life are so great that the mood is very quickly gloomy again’. There was a good deal of indifference, scepticism, and criticism, together with worries that war was a big step closer. ‘Was that necessary?’ many people asked. They remembered Hitler’s precise words following the Munich Agreement, that the Sudetenland had been his ‘last territorial demand’.

  Hitler had been contemptuous of the western powers before the taking of Prague. He correctly judged that once more they would protest, but do nothing. However, everything points to the conclusion that he miscalculated the response of Britain and France after the invasion of Czecho-Slovakia. The initial reaction in London was one of shock and dismay at the cynical demolition of the Munich Agreement, despite the warnings the British government had received. Appeasement policy lay shattered in the ruins of the Czecho-Slovakian state. Hitler had broken his promise that he had no further territorial demands to make. And the conquest of Czecho-Slovakia had destroyed the fiction that Hitler’s policies were aimed at the uniting of German peoples in a single state. Hitler, it was now abundantly clear – a recognition at last and very late in the day – could not be trusted. He would stop at nothing.

  Chamberlain’s speech in Birmingham on 17 March hinted at a new policy. ‘Is this the last attack upon a small State, or is it to be followed by others?’ he asked. ‘Is this, in fact, a step in the direction of an attempt to dominate the world by force?’ British public opinion was in no doubt. Hitler had united a country deeply divided over Munich. On all sides people were saying that war with Germany was both inevitable and necessary. Recruitment for the armed forces increased almost overnight. It was now clear both to the man in the street and to the government: Hitler had to be tackled.

  The following day, 18 March, amid rumours circulating that Germany was threatening Romania, the British cabinet endorsed the Prime Minister’s recommendation of a fundamental change in policy. No reliance could any longer be placed on the assurances of the Nazi leaders, Chamberlain stated. The old policy of trying to come to terms with the dictatorships on the assumption that they had limited aims was no longer possible. The policy had shifted from trying to appease Hitler to attempting to deter him. In any new aggression, Germany would be faced at the outset with the choice of pulling back or going to war. The Prime Minister had little doubt as to where trouble might next flare up. ‘He thought that Poland was very likely the key to the situation … The time had now come for those who were threatened by German aggression (whether immediately or ultimately) to get together. We should enquire how far Poland was prepared to go along these lines.’ The British Guarantee to Poland and the genesis of the summer crisis which, this time, would end in war were foreshadowed in Chamberlain’s remarks.

  Similar reactions were registered in Paris. Daladier let Chamberlain know that the French would speed up rearmament and resist any further aggression. The Americans were told that Daladier was determined to go to war should the Germans act against Danzig or Poland. Even strong advocates of appeasement were now saying enough was enough: there would not be another Munich.

  IV

  Before the Polish crisis unfolded, Hitler had one other triumph to register – though compared with what had gone before, it was a minor one. The incorporation of Memelland in the German Reich was now to prove the last annexation without bloodshed. After its removal from Germany in 1919, the Memel district, with a mainly German population but a sizeable Lithuanian minority, had been placed under French administration. The Lithuanians had marched in, forcing the withdrawal of the French occupying force there in January 1923. The following year, under international agreement, the Memel had gained a level of independence, but remained in effect a German enclave under Lithuanian tutelage.

  Politically, the return of the territory to Germany was of no great significance. Even symbolically, it was of relatively little importance. Few ordinary Germans took more than a passing interest in the incorporation of such a remote fleck of territory into the Reich. But the acquisition of a port on the Baltic, with the possibility that Lithuania, too, might be turned into a German satellite, had strategic relevance. Alongside the subordination to German influence of Slovakia on the southern borders of Poland, it gave a further edge to German pressure on the Poles.

 
; On 20 March, Ribbentrop subjected the Lithuanian Foreign Minister, Joseph Urbšys, to the usual bullying tactics. Kowno would be bombed, he threatened, if Germany’s demand for the immediate return of the Memel were not met. Urbšys returned the next day, 21 March, to Kowno. The Lithuanians were in no mood for a fight. A Lithuanian delegation was sent to Berlin to arrange the details. ‘If you apply a bit of pressure, things happen,’ noted Goebbels, with satisfaction.

  Hitler left Berlin the following afternoon, 22 March, for Swinemünde, where, along with Raeder, he boarded the cruiser Deutschland. Late that evening, Ribbentrop and Urbšys agreed terms for the formal transfer of the Memel district to Germany. Hitler’s decree was signed the next morning, 23 March. He was back in Berlin by noon next day. This time, he dispensed with the hero’s return. Triumphal entries to Berlin could not be allowed to become so frequent that they were routine.

  Wasting no time, Ribbentrop had pushed Ambassador Lipski on 21 March to arrange a visit to Berlin by Beck. He indicated that Hitler was losing patience, and that the German press was straining at the leash to be turned loose on the Poles. He repeated the requests about Danzig and the Corridor. In return, Poland might be tempted by the exploitation of Slovakia and the Ukraine.

  But the Poles were not prepared to act according to the script. Beck, noting Chamberlain’s Birmingham speech, secretly put out feelers to London for a bilateral agreement with Britain. Meanwhile, the Poles mobilized their troops. On 25 March, Hitler still indicated that he did not want to solve the Danzig question by force to avoid driving the Poles into the arms of the British. He had remarked to Goebbels the previous evening that he hoped the Poles would respond to pressure, ‘but we must bite into the sour apple and guarantee Poland’s borders’.