“The man who doesn’t hold these fortifications,” Hitler shouted, “is a scoundrel!”*
Nevertheless doubts on this score were rising in the minds of generals other than Adam. On September 3, Hitler convoked the chiefs of OKW and OKH, Keitel and Brauchitsch, to the Berghof. Field units, it was agreed, were to be moved into position along the Czech border on September 28. But OKW must know when X Day was by noon on September 27. Hitler was not satisfied with the operational plan for “Green” and ordered that it be changed in several respects. From the notes of this meeting kept by Major Schmundt it is clear that Brauchitsch at least—for Keitel was too much the toady to speak up—again raised the question of how they were going to hold out in the west. Hitler fobbed him off with the assurance that he had given orders for speeding up the western fortifications.30
On September 8 General Heinrich von Stuelpnagel saw Jodl and the latter noted in his diary the General’s pessimism regarding the military position in the west. It was becoming clear to both of them that Hitler, his spirits whipped up by the fanaticism of the Nuremberg Party Rally, which had just opened, was going ahead with the invasion of Czechoslovakia whether France intervened or not. “I must admit,” wrote the usually optimistic Jodl, “that I am worried too.”
The next day, September 9, Hitler convoked Keitel, Brauchitsch and Halder to Nuremberg for a conference which began at 10 P.M., lasted until 4 o’clock the next morning and, as Keitel later confided to Jodl, who in turn confided it to his diary, was exceedingly stormy. Halder found himself in the ticklish position—for the key man in the plot to overthrow Hitler the moment he gave the word to attack—of having to explain in great detail the General Staff’s plan for the campaign in Czechoslovakia, and in the uncomfortable position, as it developed, of seeing Hitler tear it to shreds and dress down not only him but Brauchitsch for their timidity and their military incapabilities.31 Keitel, Jodl noted on the thirteenth, was “terribly shaken” by his experience at Nuremberg and by the evidence of “defeatism” at the top of the German Army.
Accusations are made to the Fuehrer about the defeatism in the High Command of the Army … Keitel declares that he will not tolerate any officer in OKW indulging in criticism, unsteady thoughts and defeatism … The Fuehrer knows that the Commander of the Army [Brauchitsch] has asked his commanding generals to support him in order to open the Fuehrer’s eyes about the adventure which he has resolved to risk. He himself [Brauchitsch] has no more influence with the Fuehrer.
Thus a cold and frosty atmosphere prevailed in Nuremberg and it is highly unfortunate that the Fuehrer has the whole nation behind him with the exception of the leading generals of the Army.
All of this greatly saddened the aspiring young Jodl, who had hitched his star to Hitler.
Only by actions can [these generals] honorably repair the damage which they have caused through lack of strength of mind and lack of obedience. It is the same problem as in 1914. There is only one example of disobedience in the Army and that is of the generals and in the end it springs from their arrogance. They can no longer believe and no longer obey because they do not recognize the Fuehrer’s genius. Many of them still see in him the corporal of the World War but not the greatest statesman since Bismarck.32
In his talk with Jodl on September 8, General von Stuelpnagel, who held the post of Oberquartiermeister I in the Army High Command, and who was in on the Halder conspiracy, had asked for written assurances from OKW that the Army High Command would receive notice of Hitler’s order for the attack on Czechoslovakia five days in advance. Jodl had answered that because of the uncertainties of the weather two days’ notice was all that could be guaranteed. This, however, was enough for the conspirators.
But they needed assurances of another kind—whether, after all, they had been right in their assumption that Britain and France would go to war against Germany if Hitler carried out his resolve to attack Czechoslovakia. For this purpose they had decided to send trustworthy agents to London not only to find out what the British government intended to do but, if necessary, to try to influence its decision by informing it that Hitler had decided to attack the Czechs on a certain date in the fall, and that the General Staff, which knew the date, opposed it and was prepared to take the most decisive action to prevent it if Britain stood firm against Hitler to the last.
The first such emissary of the plotters, selected by Colonel Oster of the Abwehr, was Ewald von Kleist, who arrived in London on August 18. Ambassador Henderson in Berlin, who was already anxious to give Hitler whatever he wanted in Czechoslovakia, advised the British Foreign Office that “it would be unwise for him [Kleist] to be received in official quarters.”* Nevertheless Sir Robert Vansittart, chief diplomatic adviser to the Foreign Secretary and one of the leading opponents in London of the appeasement of Hitler, saw Kleist on the afternoon of his arrival, and Winston Churchill, still in the political wilderness in Britain, received him the next day. To both men, who were impressed by their visitor’s sobriety and sincerity, Kleist repeated what he had been instructed to tell, stressing that Hitler had set a date for aggression against the Czechs and that the generals, most of whom opposed him, would act, but that further British appeasement of Hitler would cut the ground from under their feet. If Britain and France would declare publicly that they would not stand idly by while Hitler threw his armies into Czechoslovakia and if some prominent British statesmen would issue a solemn warning to Germany of the consequences of Nazi aggression, then the German generals, for their part, would act to stop Hitler.34
Churchill gave Kleist a ringing letter to take back to Germany to bolster his colleagues:
I am sure that the crossing of the frontier of Czechoslovakia by German armies or aviation in force will bring about renewal of the World War. I am as certain as I was at the end of July, 1914, that England will march with France … Do not, I pray you, be misled upon this point … †
Vansittart took Kleist’s warning seriously enough to submit immediately a report on it to both the British Prime Minister and the Foreign Secretary, and though Chamberlain, writing to Lord Halifax, said he was inclined “to discount a good deal of what he [Kleist] says,” he added: “I don’t feel sure that we ought not to do something.”36 What he did was to summon Ambassador Henderson, in the wake of some publicity, to London on August 28 “for consultations.”
He instructed his ambassador in Berlin to do two things: convey a sober warning to Hitler and, secondly, prepare secretly a “personal contact” between himself and the Fuehrer. According to his own story, Henderson persuaded the Prime Minister to drop the first request.37 As for the second, Henderson was only too glad to try to carry it out.*
This was the first step toward Munich and Hitler’s greatest bloodless victory.
Ignorant of this turning in Chamberlain’s course, the conspirators in Berlin made further attempts to warn the British government. On August 21, Colonel Oster sent an agent to inform the British military attaché in Berlin of Hitler’s intention to invade Czechoslovakia at the end of September. “If by firm action abroad Hitler can be forced at the eleventh hour to renounce his present intentions, he will be unable to survive the blow,” he told the British. “Similarly, if it comes to war the immediate intervention by France and England will bring about the downfall of the regime.” Sir Nevile Henderson dutifully forwarded this warning to London, but described it “as clearly biased and largely propaganda.” The blinkers on the eyes of the debonair British ambassador seemed to grow larger and thicker as the crisis mounted.
General Halder had a feeling that the conspirators were not getting their message through effectively enough to the British, and on September 2 he sent his own emissary, a retired Army officer, Lieutenant Colonel Hans Boehm-Tettelbach, to London to make contact with the British War Office and Military Intelligence. Though, according to his own story, the colonel saw several important personages in London, he does not seem to have made much of an impression on them.
Finally, the plotters
resorted to using the German Foreign Office and the embassy in London in a last desperate effort to induce the British to remain firm. Counselor of the embassy and chargé d’affaires was Theodor Kordt, whose younger brother, Erich, was chief of Ribbentrop’s secretariat in the German Foreign Office. The brothers were protégés of Baron von Weizsaecker, the principal State Secretary and undoubtedly the brains of the Foreign Office, a man who after the war made a great fuss of his alleged anti-Nazism but who served Hitler and Ribbentrop well almost to the end. It is clear, however, from captured Foreign Office documents, that at this time he opposed aggression against Czechoslovakia on the same grounds as those of the generals: that it would lead to a lost war. With Weizsaecker’s connivance, and after consultations with Beck, Halder and Goerdeler, it was agreed that Theodor Kordt should sound a last warning to Downing Street. As counselor of the embassy his visits to the British authorities would not be suspect.
The information he brought on the evening of September 5 to Sir Horace Wilson, Chamberlain’s confidential adviser, seemed so important and urgent that this official spirited him by a back way to Downing Street and the chambers of the British Foreign Secretary. There he bluntly informed Lord Halifax that Hitler was planning to order a general mobilization on September 16, that the attack on Czechoslovakia had been fixed for October 1 at the latest, that the German Army was preparing to strike against Hitler the moment the final order for attack was given and that it would succeed if Britain and France held firm. Halifax was also warned that Hitler’s speech closing the Nuremberg Party Rally on September 12 would be explosive and might precipitate a showdown over Czechoslovakia and that that would be the moment for Britain to stand up against the dictator.39
Kordt, too, despite his continuous personal contact with Downing Street and his frankness on this occasion with the Foreign Secretary, did not know what was in the London wind. But he got a good idea, as did everyone else, two days later, on September 7, when the Times of London published a famous leader:
It might be worth while for the Czechoslovak Government to consider whether they should exclude altogether the project, which has found favor in some quarters, of making Czechoslovakia a more homogeneous State by the secession of that fringe of alien populations who are contiguous to the nation with which they are united by race … The advantages to Czechoslovakia of becoming a homogeneous State might conceivably outweigh the obvious disadvantages of losing the Sudeten German district of the borderland.
There was no mention in the editorial of the obvious fact that by ceding the Sudetenland to Germany the Czechs would lose both the natural mountain defenses of Bohemia and their “Maginot Line” of fortifications and be henceforth defenseless against Nazi Germany.
Though the British Foreign Office was quick to deny that the Times leader represented the views of the government, Kordt telegraphed Berlin the next day that it was possible that “it derived from a suggestion which reached the Times editorial staff from the Prime Minister’s entourage.” Possible indeed!
In these crisis-ridden years that have followed World War II it is difficult to recall the dark and almost unbearable tension that gripped the capitals of Europe as the Nuremberg Party Rally, which had begun on September 6, approached its climax on September 12, when Hitler was scheduled to make his closing speech and expected to proclaim to the world his final decision for peace or war with Czechoslovakia. I was in Prague, the focus of the crisis, that week, and it seemed strange that the Czech capital, despite the violence unleashed by the Germans in the Sudetenland, the threats from Berlin, the pressure of the British and French governments to yield, and the fear that they might leave Czechoslovakia in the lurch, was the calmest of all—at least outwardly.
On September 5, President Beneš, realizing that a decisive step on his part was necessary to save the peace, convoked the Sudeten leaders Kundt and Sebekovsky to Hradschin Palace and told them to write out their full demands. Whatever they were he would accept them. “My God,” exclaimed the deputy Sudeten leader, Karl Hermann Frank, the next day, “they have given us everything.” But that was the last thing the Sudeten politicians and their bosses in Berlin wanted. On September 7 Henlein, on instructions from Germany, broke off all negotiations with the Czech government. A shabby excuse about alleged Czech police excesses at Moravská-Ostrava was given.
On September 10, Goering made a bellicose speech at the Nuremberg Party Rally. “A petty segment of Europe is harassing the human race … This miserable pygmy race [the Czechs] is oppressing a cultured people, and behind it is Moscow and the eternal mask of the Jew devil.” But Beneš’ broadcast of the same day took no notice of Goering’s diatribe; it was a quiet and dignified appeal for calm, good will and mutual trust.
Underneath the surface, though, the Czechs were tense. I ran into Dr. Beneš in the hall of the Czech Broadcasting House after his broadcast and noted that his face was grave and that he seemed to be fully aware of the terrible position he was in. The Wilson railroad station and the airport were full of Jews scrambling desperately to find transportation to safer parts. That weekend gas masks were distributed to the populace. The word from Paris was that the French government was beginning to panic at the prospect of war, and the London dispatches indicated that Chamberlain was contemplating desperate measures to meet Hitler’s demands—at the expense of the Czechs, of course.
And so all Europe waited for Hitler’s word on September 12 from Nuremberg. Though brutal and bombastic, and dripping with venom against the Czech state and especially against the Czech President, the Fuehrer’s speech, made to a delirious mass of Nazi fanatics gathered in the huge stadium on the last night of the party rally, was not a declaration of war. He reserved his decision—publicly at least, for, as we know from the captured German documents, he had already set October 1 for the attack across the Czech frontier. He simply demanded that the Czech government give “justice” to the Sudeten Germans. If it didn’t, Germany would have to see to it that it did.
The repercussions to Hitler’s outburst were considerable. In the Sudetenland it inspired a revolt which after two days of savage fighting the Czech government put down by rushing in troops and declaring martial law. Henlein slipped over the border to Germany proclaiming that the only solution now was the ceding of the Sudeten areas to Germany.
This was the solution which, as we have seen, was gaining favor in London, but before it could be furthered the agreement of France had to be obtained. The day following Hitler’s speech, September 13, the French cabinet sat all day, remaining hopelessly divided on whether it should honor its obligations to Czechoslovakia in case of a German attack, which it believed imminent. That evening the British ambassador in Paris, Sir Eric Phipps, was fetched from the Opéra Comique for an urgent conference with Prime Minister Daladier. The latter appealed to Chamberlain to try at once to make the best bargain he could with the German dictator.
Mr. Chamberlain, it may be surmised, needed little urging. At eleven o’clock that same night the British Prime Minister got off an urgent message to Hitler:
In view of the increasingly critical situation I propose to come over at once to see you with a view to trying to find a peaceful solution. I propose to come across by air and am ready to start tomorrow.
Please indicate earliest time at which you can see me and suggest place of meeting. I should be grateful for a very early reply.40
Two hours before, the German chargé d’affaires in London, Theodor Kordt, had wired Berlin that Chamberlain’s press secretary had informed him that the Prime Minister “was prepared to examine far-reaching German proposals, including plebiscite, to take part in carrying them out, and to advocate them in public.”41
The surrender that was to culminate in Munich had begun.
CHAMBERLAIN AT BERCHTESGADEN: SEPTEMBER 15, 1938
“Good heavens!” (“Ich bin vom Himmel gefallen!”) Hitler exclaimed when he read Chamberlain’s message.42 He was astounded but highly pleased that the man who presided over the d
estinies of the mighty British Empire should come pleading to him, and flattered that a man who was sixty-nine years old and had never traveled in an airplane before should make the long seven hours’ flight to Berchtesgaden at the farthest extremity of Germany. Hitler had not had even the grace to suggest a meeting place on the Rhine, which would have shortened the trip by half.
The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich: A History of Nazi Germany Page 61