A Patriot's History of the Modern World

by Larry Schweikart

  In spite of their advantages and the reluctance of the General Staff to countenance war to achieve Hitler’s aims, the Czechs watched helplessly as their most defensible territory was bargained away in a September 15, 1938, preliminary meeting between Hitler and Chamberlain at Berchtesgaden. Czech president Edvard Beneš, left without British support, knew that all of Czechoslovakia was now on the menu.

  Hitler had drafted orders to “smash Czechoslovakia by military action in the near future” in May, setting deployment for September.107 His generals continued to object strenuously, convinced the Wehrmacht was still unprepared for war. But their attempts to dissuade Hitler were met with ridicule. Pleas by the regent of Hungary, Admiral Miklós Horthy, were interrupted by Hitler with shouts of “Nonsense! Shut up!” Hitler canceled the invasion only because Mussolini, likewise assessing the military positions of Germany and Italy as unfavorable compared with those of the allies, implored him to wait.

  In a second meeting with Chamberlain at Bad Godesberg on September 22, Hitler raised the ante, and a stunned Chamberlain, after presenting his plan to meet all of Hitler’s earlier demands, was told “Es tut mir Leid, aber das geht nicht mehr” (“I’m sorry, but that won’t work anymore”).108 Hitler made new demands for German troops to immediately occupy the Sudetenland, for additional Czech territory to be ceded to Hungary and Poland, and for Czechs forced from their property to receive no compensation, demands Chamberlain could not possibly meet. After returning to England depressed and distraught, Chamberlain consulted with his cabinet, then announced he would go to Munich on September 29 for one last round of negotiations, this time in a four-power meeting with French, Italian, and German leaders to avoid war. Secretly, the British had already dispatched a mission to Prague to convince the Czechs to give up.

  France, however, still seemed ready (though not eager) to fight. In September 1938, French premier Édouard Daladier told Chamberlain he would attack if German forces crossed into Czechoslovakia proper. He was dissuaded by Chamberlain, his own foreign minister Georges Bonnet, and the hundred centrist deputies who visited him and unanimously instructed him to avoid war. Bonnet was an appeaser of the highest level (“rodently for peace,” as U.S. ambassador to Russia William Bullitt described him), and no doubt manipulated information to bring yet additional pressure on Daladier to capitulate. It worked: by the time of the Munich Conference, according to Hermann Göring, “Neither Chamberlain nor Daladier were in the least bit interested in sacrificing or risking anything to save Czechoslovakia…. We got everything we wanted, just like that [snapping his fingers].”109

  Before going to Munich, Chamberlain gave a radio broadcast on September 27, in which he lamented Britain’s being involved in a “quarrel in a far-away country between people of whom we know nothing.”110 On the contrary, it seems everyone by then knew a great deal about the Germans. The infamous Munich Conference of September 1938, conducted without Czechoslovakia being present, followed and actually increased German territory over what Hitler had demanded a week earlier, stripping Czechoslovakia of 70 percent of its electricity-generating plants, most of its chemical works, and its border defenses. Hungary and Poland also acquired the Czechoslovakian territory they wanted. Chamberlain, returning to Britain, stated, “I believe it is peace for our time,” while Daladier—seeing the crowd at the Paris airport—was afraid to land as he expected he would be lynched. According to Jean-Paul Sartre, when Daladier saw the people were cheering him, he turned to his aide and said, “Ah, the fools.”

  Chamberlain’s appeasement has been the subject of great historical debate. Critics blame him for failing to stop Germany soon enough, while defenders argue he bought precious time. In any case, the public remained behind him upon his return, with 51 percent of those polled saying they were satisfied with the result.111 (More ominously, though, a whopping 86 percent of the British population did not think Hitler’s territorial demands in Europe were satiated.112) A heated debate had occurred within British military and diplomatic circles for years regarding the advisability of allowing Hitler to move eastward. The British ambassador to Germany, Nevile Henderson, viewed German hegemony east of the Rhine as an unpalatable fact. Others insisted German expansion eastward would weaken Russia to Britain’s benefit, but military expert and London Times correspondent B. H. Liddell Hart warned that “in the long run, this would be like feeding the tiger” and that Britain, not Russia, remained the “ultimate obstacle to Germany’s ambition as in the past.”113 Of course, all that was contained in Mein Kampf if anyone cared to read it. When Lord Halifax, in a 1938 memo, asked, “Are we prepared to stand by and allow these vast districts to pass completely under German domination?” Chamberlain scathingly dismissed the question, arguing it was impossible for Britain to do anything about it.

  In fact, Chamberlain had bungled the entire run-up to war, not just the last months. Of course, the best chance for Britain to stop Hitler easily and probably bloodlessly had come and gone under Stanley Baldwin’s government when Germany marched into the Rhineland in 1936. Since then, however, Chamberlain had consistently failed to appreciate Hitler’s appeal to Germans of all types, and the absence of “moderate” elements inside the country who could (and would) oppose Hitler. Perhaps his worst mistake was assuming that Britain and France benefited from delaying the conflict. In terms of financing, that was certainly false. Britain’s gold reserves dwindled from 1936 to 1939 due to the high cost of imports, while Germany was still constrained by shortages of raw materials and food that would later become available from Czechoslovakia, Poland, and the United States. Almost one third of German phosphate during this time came from the United States, as did one fourth of its copper, two thirds of its uranium, half of all iron and scrap metal, not to mention $206 million in direct investment.114

  The advent of war would have almost certainly shrunk these imports to nothing, either by the direct decision of American suppliers or by the British blockade, which in 1938 would have faced even less German resistance than in 1940. Overall, the German economy, while at nearly full employment, nevertheless flirted with bankruptcy as a result of its trade deficiencies. Hitler virtually admitted as much in his widely misinterpreted January 30, 1939, speech, in which he reiterated his support for the Anti-Comintern Pact and emphasized Germany’s determination to resist democratic influences from the outside. But he threw in just enough sops to peace that the allies were reassured of the unlikelihood of war. Yet every new concession by the democracies brought not gratitude and stability, but new demands and scorn. Lord Halifax dourly noted in June 1939 that “we were living in what was virtually a state of concealed war.”115 Even more stunning was the shift in military power brought about by waiting: England had 71 fewer combat aircraft in September 1939 than it had in January of that year, while Germany had added 800 more planes.116

  To add insult to injury, handing over Czechoslovakia to the Nazis proved foolish even in purely military terms. Germany was able to add more than 460 new thirty-eight-ton tanks to its arsenal, along with close to 1,500 aircraft and a million rifles, not to mention the massive Skoda arms works. (By comparison, the Nazi panzer units had only 300 Panzer III and IV tanks—the most advanced in their armored units—in early 1940, meaning that the Czech additions essentially doubled Germany’s tank forces.) Acquisitions such as these inflated foreign and uninformed estimates of German military power: Charles Lindbergh returned from a trip to Germany and announced the Nazis had 8,000 military aircraft and could manufacture 1,500 a month. In fact, the Germans had 1,500 (plus the Czech planes) and could make another 280 per month. But Lindbergh’s overblown tales spread panic in Paris and London, and introduced something close to a state of hysteria among some in Britain.117 The point was that accurate information was hard to come by, and overinflation of Germany’s war-making capacity could prove as dangerous as underestimating the enemy.

  One problem with calls for rearmament by realists such as Winston Churchill was that Hitler was not uniformly feared or
hated in England. The Church of England was openly pro-appeasement, portraying the Germans as victims of the Treaty of Versailles. Large newspapers were similarly aligned. London’s oldest newspaper, the Observer, and its sister paper, the Guardian, under the control of William Waldorf Astor, echoed these sentiments. Astor and the “Cliveden set” of upper-class conservatives saw Hitler as a useful buffer against Soviet expansion, and at any rate expected the French military to fold under pressure from Germany. Intellectuals such as Edward Hallett Carr enthusiastically defended appeasement. Treasury official Edward Hale called the “Nazi struggle…primarily one of self-respect, a natural reaction against the ostracism that followed the war…[and] Hitler’s desire for friendship with England is perfectly genuine and still widely shared….”118

  Perhaps Hitler’s greatest admirer across the channel was King Edward VIII, who abdicated his throne in 1936 to marry an American divorcée, Wallis Simpson. Edward’s abdication made his reign of less than a year the shortest of any monarch not to have died or been assassinated on the throne, and he was the only British monarch who voluntarily stepped down. But the embarrassment for England was only beginning: Edward visited Hitler at Obersalzberg after the abdication, delivering the Nazi salute for photographers and providing the Nazis with stellar publicity. Albert Speer later quoted Hitler as saying, “I am certain through him permanent friendly relations could have been achieved. If he had stayed, everything would have been different. His abdication was a severe loss for us.”119 Some speculated that had Hitler ever conquered England, he would have attempted to reinstate Edward. At the beginning of the war, Edward was stationed in France as a major-general in the British Military Mission, where allegations arose that he leaked war plans for Belgium’s defense. Holed up in Lisbon, Edward gave an interview viewed by Churchill as “defeatist,” whereupon he was instructed to return to Britain or face court martial, and he complied. Shipped to the Bahamas as governor (“a third-class British colony,” as he described it), he still was viewed with sufficient suspicion that Franklin Roosevelt placed him under surveillance.120 One investigator in the 1980s claimed an MI5 agent was secretly sent to Germany after the surrender to retrieve correspondence between Edward and Hitler that might prove embarrassing.121

  Certainly Britain was not alone in refusing to stand up to Hitler, and one of the greatest tragedies of World War II is that at any point prior to the acquisition of Czechoslovakia, Germany was vastly outnumbered by potential allied armies. When the Germans marched into the Rhineland, her neighbors could put more than ten times as much military force immediately into the field. Certainly the League of Nations did nothing to blunt Hitler’s violation of the Versailles Treaty. The German chancellor had no intention of keeping the Anglo-German Naval Agreement of 1935, and privately announced he would break it at the first opportunity.

  Hitler also sought to favorably shape American popular opinion. Initially, Roosevelt was praised by the German press—one paper called him a man of “irreproachable, extremely responsible character and immovable will.”122 After a year in office, Hitler sent FDR a letter congratulating his “heroic efforts” for the American people and vowing to do the same for Germans. In a letter to William Dodd, the U.S. ambassador, Hitler said that his nation and the United States were both demanding the same “virtue of duty, readiness for sacrifice, and discipline” of their people.123 Mussolini likewise wrote glowingly of the New Deal, labeling it a spiritual renewal of a “sole will [who] silences dissenting voices.” However, when Americans recoiled at the notion that the New Deal was fascism, although the NIRA certainly would have done either Mussolini or Hitler proud, Mussolini quickly squelched such talk from his press office. Nevertheless, years later Roosevelt still spoke of how he was “deeply impressed” with what the Italian dictator had accomplished.124

  Only a few clamored for military preparedness on either side of the Atlantic, one of whom was wealthy Wall Street financier Bernard Baruch. Having urged Woodrow Wilson to prepare for World War I, in 1935, Baruch looked with concern on developments in Europe. America’s duty, he told The New York Times, was to “think peace, talk peace, and act peace,” but if war came, the United States needed to be prepared to fight. With some prescience, he predicted, “if the nation has to go to war it will be ready to go in and sock them in the eye and win.”125 Even Norman Angell, who had prophesied the dawning of a new era of peace prior to World War I, first called for the League of Nations to resist aggression, then eventually joined Churchill in criticizing Chamberlain’s appeasement. Angell joined a few other English dignitaries to welcome exiled Ethiopian emperor Haile Selassie to London in 1936 when the prime minister, Stanley Baldwin, exited a gathering for tea to avoid greeting him. Worse than that, King Edward VIII would not receive Selassie at Buckingham Palace.126

  Had no further aggression by Hitler or Mussolini ever occurred, by the end of the 1930s the totalitarian moment had nevertheless arrived. The number of so-called democracies in the world had shrunk dramatically, from a high point in 1922 when 37 percent of the world’s nations were democracies (more or less), to 1939 when only 14 percent remained free. But even this measure was misleading, as many of the existing democracies lacked anything close to the degree of liberty found in America. In France, for example, powerful antiparliamentary forces marshaled to push the nation toward the fascists. The 1934 Stavisky Crisis, triggered by the embezzlement and pilferage of Alexandre Stavisky, a Russian swindler known as the “Handsome Sasha,” and his cronies who sold bonds from pawnshops, helped destabilize the French government through Sasha’s connections to important officials. Subsequent public outcry, along with an organized campaign by the right, forced the government of Camille Chautemps out and let the radical Socialist Édouard Daladier in. Constant demonstrations from January to February 1934 culminated with riots and several French right-wing groups, including the Ligue des Patriotes, the Action Française (founded by Maurras), and the Jeunesses Patriotes (the “Patriot Youth”), among others, descended on the Place de la Concorde in front of the National Assembly on February 6, commencing an hours-long battle with police that resulted in sixteen deaths. Inside the Assembly, fistfights broke out between left-wing and right-wing deputies, leading to Daladier’s resignation and sparking counterriots by Communists. The French radical Right lost all faith in parliamentary democracy and the Third Republic, and looked for new opportunities to establish a fascist or national-socialist alternative. “Rather Hitler than the Republic” became the accepted sentiment.127

  Only in Britain was there steadfast resistance against more government control. But in all the Nazi client states, any semblance of genuine democracies had vanished. In addition, Franco held Spain, Mussolini Italy, Stalin Russia. The question was not democracy or totalitarianism in Europe, but whose variant of totalitarianism, the Fascists’ or the Communists’? Even in Asia, the choices were between the theocratic autocracy of Imperial Japan or the dictatorships vying for power in China, one under the quasi-socialist Kuomintang government of Chiang Kai-shek and the other under Communists led by Mao Zedong. By 1939, freedom was a rare flower, blooming only in a handful of carefully cultivated fields.

  The End of the Fascist Façade

  Hitler planned to invade Poland in the spring of 1939, even as he occupied the remainder of Czechoslovakia (an event Chamberlain described as the latest in “a series of unpleasant surprises”). Additionally in March, the Memel district of Lithuania, formerly German territory before Versailles, was returned through a treaty forced on Lithuania by Germany. Shortly thereafter, der Fuehrer spoke to his generals, noting that with few exceptions, “German unification” had been achieved, and promised next to secure food supplies. There was no question of “sparing Poland,” and while the goal was to isolate Poland from the West, if Britain and France fought for Poland, it would be “better to attack the West and finish off Poland at the same time.”128 He doubted whether the West would interfere, however: “I experienced those poor worms Daladier and Chamberlain in
Munich. They will be too cowardly to attack.” Comparing himself to Genghis Khan, Hitler instructed the generals to use “quickness and…brutality.”129 Yet the West hesitated to support Poland too overtly, wary of feeding Hitler’s paranoia of encirclement, leading one British writer to urge that policy makers keep references to British support of Poland out of the German press if at all possible. Meanwhile, Hitler’s new demands for the return of Danzig and the Polish Corridor separating East Prussia from Pomerania received a warm reception in Germany.

  Less enthusiastic was German popular opinion for a coming war. Czechoslovakia had been a low-hanging fruit, yet even then (unlike with the Sudetenland) the Nazis were not greeted by cheers, flowers, or elation in Prague.130 Hitler’s Reichstag speech of September 1, 1939, justifying the coming invasion of Poland, excited few Czechs, even Czech Nazis. George Kennan, at the American Embassy, found the streets of Prague deserted, defying even the efforts of professional Nazi Party agitators to whip up public support through demonstrations. At the same time, opinion in Great Britain moved firmly against appeasement. Poland would therefore finally align Britain and France in an active alliance over territory neither could hope to defend, having already ceded the best defensive ground in Europe to Germany with the Sudetenland. Nonetheless, British attitudes swung toward a determination to resist the Nazis.