by Conrad Black
As Hitler proceeded to tear off and digest chunks of that empire, it not only demonstrated the proportions of the mistake in carving up that amorphous (or as future British prime minister Winston Churchill later described it, “bovine”) empire in 1919, but even exposed Bismarck’s error in conducting the anti-Catholic Kulturkampf. If Imperial Germany had divided the Habsburg Empire unevenly (in its favor) with Russia, and made a durable arrangement with that country, it would never have faced a two-front war. It was always going to be difficult to reconcile the Habsburg and Romanov interests in Central Europe, but Germany and Russia could have partitioned it on generally ethnic lines, with Russia taking most of the Slavs and Germany taking Romania, the Czechs, Hungary, and part of Yugoslavia.
Hitler torqued up the pressure through the spring and summer, and provoked a couple of incidents. Czechoslovakia had been guaranteed by France, Britain, and the Soviet Union, which should have been sufficient to deter Hitler, but, as was his custom, he quickly detected the weakness underlying the Western democratic governments, and the unfathomable cynicism of Stalin. Hitler’s threats reached a crescendo at the annual Nuremberg rally in late summer, where he explicitly threatened, to great enthusiasm from his partisans, to take the Sudetenland by force. In the midst of this choreographed terror campaign, British prime minister Neville Chamberlain asked Hitler to receive him, which the German leader did, at Berchtesgaden, near Nuremberg, where he had a mountain-top chalet, on September 15. Hitler made various demands, and Chamberlain returned to London and managed over the next few days to secure agreement on most of them. On September 22–23, he returned to see Hitler at Bad Godesberg on the Rhine, where Hitler raised his demands; Chamberlain returned to London amidst a general gloom that Europe might be on the brink of war.
Roosevelt was in frequent touch with his principal ambassadors in Europe, and told the British ambassador in Washington, Sir Ronald Lindsay, that Britain had to shed its “We who are about to die” attitude if it expected any encouragement from the United States. He told Lindsay that if Britain and France concerted with the Soviet Union and the Balkan countries and threatened imposition of a blockade on Germany, he would announce that the United States would observe the blockade and would supply the British and French war materiel at advantageous prices. He told his ambassador in Madrid, the historian Claude Bowers, who was dispiritedly watching the approach of Franco’s army as the Civil War neared its dreadful end, that he opposed concessions of principle, and disagreed with the appeasement of Hitler; he thought that if Chamberlain really managed to buy peace, he would be a hero, but doubted that would be the outcome.
The threat of war apparently rattled even Hitler, and after final appeals from the pope, Roosevelt, and others, Mussolini suggested to Hitler that he could get what he wanted without war and he might wish to do so. Hitler deferred his announced general mobilization on September 28, and invited Mussolini, Chamberlain, and the French premier, Edouard Daladier, to join him in Munich for a conference the next day. This was communicated, in a dramatic moment, to Chamberlain as he was addressing Parliament about the crisis. He interrupted his address to read the cable that had just arrived from Hitler inviting him to Munich, and advised the House of Commons of its contents and that he would accept. There was immense relief. The Munich Agreement of September 29, 1938, required the Czechs to hand over the Sudetenland at once, and the Great Powers guaranteed the succeeding, emasculated Czechoslovak state.
This was a fantasy, of course, as Poland and Hungary then each tore a chunk out of the stricken country. Stalin was ignored throughout, and Chamberlain considered, from start to finish, that he was better off trying to work with Hitler and Mussolini than paying any attention at all to Roosevelt, whose overtures, including an invitation to confer, he coldly rebuffed. (One such episode contributed to the resignation of the promising young foreign secretary, Anthony Eden, 41, in early 1938.)
Chamberlain has been reviled by posterity, and not without reason, but he could not possibly have taken Britain to war to prevent the right of Sudetenlanders to be Germans. Neither the British nor the French public would have countenanced war, nor should have, for such a cause. But he should have achieved as much solidarity as possible with Stalin and Roosevelt (as his successor did, and they were the only non-fascist Nazi leaders of Great Powers who had some idea of what they were doing), and held the line for a staged handover of the Sudetenland and a real guarantee of the continuing Czechoslovak state. Instead, Chamberlain revived Disraeli’s entirely justified phrases from the Congress of Berlin in 1878, when he had stood up to Bismarck and emerged with more than he had originally sought (including the island of Cyprus, which he had not particularly coveted): “Peace with Honour” and “Peace in our time.”
He should have spoken cautiously and warned of the need for vigilance, and he did in fact increase aircraft production, which proved critically important two years later. But he seized the euphoria of the occasion and elected to be an international hero, a small evanescent Woodrow Wilson, without the ascetic intellectualism and moral and military authority, but uplifting the world with a vision of peace, whose realization was left entirely in the hands of the most psychotically belligerent statesman in history. (Wilson was never interested in appeasing anyone.)
Winston Churchill, veteran parliamentarian and a prominent member of four former governments, led a small parliamentary opposition to the Munich Agreement, which he called an “unmitigated defeat,” and said that Britain faced “the bleak choice between war and shame” and predicted “We shall choose shame and then war.” He warned that this was the first of many offerings from a bitter cup of humiliation unless Britain regained “the martial vigour ... of olden time.”103 Roosevelt told his ambassador in Britain, the singularly inappropriate Joseph Kennedy (an indiscreet semi—fascist sympathizer whom Roosevelt had appointed as an Irish joke and to get him out of the United States), that he could express no congratulations to the British government on Munich, other than for himself and not his government, and then only verbally. As Chamberlain emplaned for Munich, Roosevelt sent him the ambiguous message, “Good man.” He still hoped for something less than the complete sell-out that occurred.
The world was still relaxing from the settling down of the war scare when a Polish Jew assassinated an official of the German embassy in Paris. Germany erupted in officially orchestrated riots and pogroms, called “Kristallnacht,” the night of broken glass (November 5, 1938), because of thousands of shattered Jewish storefronts. Dozens were killed and dozens of synagogues were burned down, as Nazi anti-Semitism achieved new depths of violence and repression. The Jewish community was made to pay the whole cost of cleaning up after the disturbances, and suffered the imposition of new confiscatory taxes and restrictions.
It has never been clear, other than rank opportunism, what the source of Hitler’s animosity to the Jews was, but it was not as repugnant a policy at the time as it became, because it was not clear in what murderous atrocities it would end, and anti-Semitism, in milder forms, was widespread. The Jews were widely regarded as the descendants of Christ-killers in the more perfervid Christian circles, and as commercial and professional sharpers by less righteous philistines. There were frequent Western complaints about Hitler’s mistreatment of the Jews, and he replied by offering to send the German Jews “in luxury liners” to any liberal democracy that would welcome them. There were no takers. The Latin American dictators, the Turks, and Franco, once in power in Spain, were more generous refuges than most of the Western democracies, and, as usual, Hitler closed in quickly and effectively on the weakness and hypocrisy of Western interwar democratic leadership.
Roosevelt had a defensible record in reception of fugitives from Nazi Europe, ultimately accepting over 100,000 Jews, about 15 percent of the Jewish population of Germany. But with the Jews as with the Spanish Civil War, he would not be maneuvered into fragmenting the broad political mosaic he had assembled that provided him a permanent majority, in public opinion, the
Congress, and in presidential elections, throughout his long reign (for reign it was). Most Americans disapproved of any physical or civic discrimination against Jews, but most also opposed the admission of large numbers of outsiders, perhaps especially Jews, to the United States. Similar attitudes prevailed in Britain, Canada, France, and other democratic countries.
Following Kristallnacht, Roosevelt pulled his ambassador (Hugh Wilson) from Berlin, and Hitler withdrew his from Washington, the able Hans Dieckhoff, just before Roosevelt expelled him. Dieckhoff (who was infinitely more capable than his brother-in-law, Hitler’s insufferable and very limited foreign minister, Joachim von Ribbentrop) had warned Hitler that Roosevelt was mortally hostile to Nazism and was capable of being the first president to seek a third term, and of using his position as commander-in-chief to provoke war through naval incidents, if Germany were at war with Britain. A few weeks after Kristallnacht, Roosevelt told a public forum on the radio and in widely distributed newsfilm that “There can be no peace as long as there are millions of innocent wayfarers hounded from country to country with no place to lay their heads.”
In one of his few political miscues, Roosevelt set out to purge his party, in the midterm elections of 1938 of some of its legislators who had failed to give his programs what he considered adequate support, including Georgia senator Walter George, Maryland senator Millard Tydings, and New York congressman John O‘Connor. He knocked off O’Connor, but his personal intervention against the two senators did not appreciably reduce their popularity and both were renominated and reelected. The Republicans gained 81 congressmen and seven senators, but that still left the Democrats in firm control of both houses. Roosevelt would be more dependent on southern Democrats, whose views on treatment of African Americans, including on anti-lynching laws, he deplored, but the southerners would be amenable to his plan to shift the focus of his workfare and unemployment-reduction programs from public works to defense production of munitions, aircraft, and warships.
6. THE DESCENT TO WAR
Chamberlain’s honeymoon was short and Munich was revealed as a false dawn in March 1939, when Hitler summoned the Czech president, Emil Hacha, to Berlin, and his deputy, the elephantine air force Reich Marshal Hermann Goering, chased him physically around a writing table until Hacha collapsed, and on revival signed a request for German intervention in Bohemia. It was an even more undignified and outrageous interview than had been Hitler’s with Schuschnigg a year before. Hitler invaded and occupied Bohemia and Moravia, without resistance, but certainly unwelcomed by the Czechs, despite the solemn guarantee of the remains of that country by the signatories of the Munich Agreement, five months before. Slovakia and Carpatho-Ukraine, the other constituent parts of Czechoslovakia, declared their independence, and Czechoslovakia ceased to exist. Later in March, Hitler sliced the ethnically German province of Memel out of Lithuania, arriving in a sea-sick condition on a German armored cruiser to take possession personally of this new acquisition. His statement after Munich that he had “no more territorial demands to make in Europe” was thus laid bare as completely fraudulent, and he was no longer confining himself to assimilations of ethnic Germans. He immediately identified Poland as his next target and began public threats and demands for Danzig and the Polish Corridor, that country’s access to the Baltic Sea. Compounding their previous errors, Chamberlain and the French, at the end of March, guaranteed Poland if that country were attacked. Chamberlain apparently believed that Poland would be a greater military power than the Soviet Union, the country with which the British and the French, whatever they thought of Bolshevism, should have been concerting policy.
Finally, very late, Chamberlain sent a diplomatic mission to Moscow to explore arrangements with the Soviet government. Unknown to Chamberlain, Stalin had lost all regard for the British and the French, having witnessed in astonishment their endless retreats before Hitler, for whom he had conceived considerable admiration, which was reciprocated. (They were, with Mao Tse-tung, the most formidable totalitarian dictators in history.) On April 7, Mussolini, desperate to keep up with Hitler, invaded and occupied Albania, and on April 15, Roosevelt sent identical letters to Hitler and Mussolini (via the king of Italy for protocol reasons as the king was chief of state and technically the analogue of Roosevelt and Hitler). He asked them if they could assure the world that they had no designs on 31 countries and areas in Europe and the Middle East.
Hitler took the unusual step of addressing the Reichstag, with Goering, in his capacity as its president, sitting behind him lolling in laughter in his chair while Hitler recited all 31 places of interest in a mocking tone and then gave an acidulous response that “You, Mr. Roosevelt, may think that your interventions will succeed everywhere”; he continued with a self-conscious description of the contrast between mighty America and cramped Germany and of his own success compared with what he implied was the lethargy of the Roosevelt administration, which had come to office just a month after Hitler. The German government had extorted assurances from most of the countries Roosevelt referred to that they had not felt threatened, and he essentially told Roosevelt to stay out of European affairs. As Roosevelt suspected might happen, while Hitler enjoyed himself and amused his countrymen, Americans were offended at seeing their president held up to ridicule for posing what most Americans considered a reasonable question.
The slide toward war accelerated now. Britain’s King George VI and Queen Elizabeth visited Canada and the United States in May and June 1939, and made a very good impression. They had been coming to Canada, and Roosevelt invited them to visit the U.S. also as a goodwill and relationship-building gesture, as he had given up on Chamberlain. The American public found the royal couple attractive and unpretentious, and Roosevelt, who had known this king’s father and brother (George V and Edward VIII), found them intelligent, conscientious, and unaffected. Like most people, they were impressed by Roosevelt’s overpowering personality and his evident mastery of American public affairs and opinion, as well as his familiarity with the complicated European arena. The trip was a huge success. Roosevelt drove them to the royal train at the little Hyde Park railway station near his Hudson River home. Large crowds on both sides of the river sang “Auld Lang Syne,” and Roosevelt called out “All the luck in the world.” Ten weeks later, Britain was at war.
The Anglo-Russian negotiations proceeded desultorily, while Hitler sent the Wilhelmstrasse’s crack diplomatic negotiators secretly to Moscow. Roosevelt was cruising in northern waters on the USS Philadelphia, in late August 1939. He was in the habit, when he wished to take a holiday, of requisitioning a heavy cruiser and purporting to visit defense installations while in fact fishing and playing cards with his cronies (and waiving, for his party and himself, the rule he had brought in when assistant secretary of the navy in World War I against alcohol on the ships). He received an alert that the German foreign minister, Ribbentrop, was about to go to Moscow, and Hull requested his immediate return to Washington. Roosevelt sent a message to Stalin at once, warning him that if he made an arrangement with Hitler, Hitler might overwhelm France and would then turn on Russia. The Russo-German pact, which included public clauses of reciprocal non-aggression and neutrality in the event of attacks by third parties, and a private agreement on the partition of Poland between them, should Germany attack that country, was signed on August 23. The effect was electrifying, considering the long and acrimonious hostility between the two regimes and Hitler’s pose as a bulwark against both Bolshevism and the Asiatic hordes of central and eastern Russia. (An amiable Stalin told von Ribbentrop: “Your Fuehrer and I have poured pails of dung over each other’s heads but I want you to know I think he’s a hell of a fellow.”)
Roosevelt sent the customary message to the parties proposing conciliation, under no illusions about the effect of it. Germany invaded Poland in overwhelming strength on September 1. Britain and France declared war on Germany on September 3, the Soviet Union invaded Poland on September 17, Warsaw fell to the Germans on Septe
mber 27, the country was partitioned between the invading powers on September 28, and the last organized Polish resistance was crushed on October 5. It was a swift and horrifying demonstration of German military efficiency, with heavy use of armored (tank) divisions and heavy tactical aerial bombing, including the indiscriminate bombing of residential areas. Roosevelt declared American neutrality but did not ask Americans to be “neutral in thought,” as Wilson had in 1914. He spoke to the Congress and called for avoidance of any reference to “a peace-party—we are all part of it,” but he called for repeal of the Neutrality Acts in order to permit military sales to the Allies, and this was accomplished on November 4.
On October 11, Professor Albert Einstein (with whom Roosevelt always spoke in German) informed him of the possible development of an atomic bomb and Roosevelt began to take the project directly into the War Department. On October 14, the Soviet Union attacked Finland, but suffered a bloody nose for several months before overwhelming Russian forces finally forced the cession of a Finnish province. The British and the French considered sending forces to assist the Finns, and were preparing to do so when the Finns were forced to negotiate. Entering into combat with the Soviet Union would have been an unimaginable catastrophe for the Allies. Winston Churchill and Anthony Eden had been recalled to government by Chamberlain, Churchill in charge of the navy, the position he had held at the start of the World War I. And Roosevelt, relieved to have a warrior in a position of influence in the British government, initiated direct correspondence with Churchill, as he found Chamberlain hopeless and antagonistic. Hitler made a peace offering, proposing that the combatants end the war with exactly what they now possessed, no concessions by Germany, Britain, or France. Even Chamberlain was no longer interested, having been so bitterly disillusioned by Hitler’s bad faith and barbarity.