Henlein was an intelligent, nearsighted, somewhat paunchy former gymnastics instructor with a receding hairline. There was little alarming about his demeanor, but to counter fears of extremism, he denied any affiliation with Hitler or animus toward Jews. He also disclaimed interest in pushing Czechoslovakia’s foreign policy in a pro-German direction. His only concern was to protect the rights of his people, which were, he alleged, being routinely abused by the chauvinistic government in Prague.
Henlein was motivated less by Nazi ideology than by the lure of power and fame. His skill as a politician stemmed from his gift for lying with apparent sincerity. Few, having heard him describe the racial superiority of the Aryan race, suspected that his own mother was Czech. He did not fool the authorities in Prague, but that didn’t matter as the men he sought most to influence spoke neither German nor Czech but English. Late in 1935, the first secretary to the British legation sent a dispatch regarding him to London: “To judge by his personality, as well as by his speeches, he seems to be a moderate and man of his word.” A month later, the envoy added, “One wonders why Dr. Beneš makes no attempt to take advantage of the moderation shown by Henlein before it is too late.”
The Sudeten champion made several trips to London, where he was introduced by sympathetic Britons to well-placed friends. In those encounters, he voiced his bewilderment at the refusal of Czechoslovak officials to see reason. He was, he insisted, fully committed to the republic and warned that if his modest requests were rejected, a figure more radical than he would surely emerge. In July 1936, one of the most seasoned English diplomats, Sir Robert Vansittart, took his measure. “He makes a most favorable impression,” the nobleman reported. “I should say he was . . . honest and clear-sighted. . . . [He] said that he had always been the advocate and leader of the effort for reconciliation with the government.”
Henlein received a less rapturous welcome when, accompanied by a hulking Gestapo agent, he paid a call on the Czechoslovak ambassador to London, Jan Masaryk. The younger Masaryk lacked his father’s self-discipline but compensated with an irreverent sense of humor and a unique personal style. On this occasion, he ushered the Sudeten leader into his study and was surprised when the bodyguard came too. “He goes wherever I do,” Henlein explained. Masaryk nodded agreeably and arranged four chairs around his table. “You won’t mind, then,” asked Jan, “if I am joined by my assistant, who goes wherever I go?” The ambassador opened the door and gave a whistle. In bounded Gillie, his pet Aberdeen terrier, who leaped into place on the appropriate chair. Notwithstanding this incident, Henlein’s personal diplomacy had a telling effect. Repeatedly, he accused Beneš of playing a dangerous game by failing to satisfy Hitler. If the British wanted to stop worrying about Central Europe, he argued, they would have to persuade the Czechs to back down. As the months passed, he was able to convince even experienced British opinion makers that peace hinged entirely on whether this demand was met.
In truth, Sudeten German grievances, though legitimate to a degree, were hardly of a magnitude to warrant an international crisis. Yes, Sudetens were underrepresented in such institutions as the postal service and military. Out-of-work Germans resented the awarding of government contracts in their region to firms that employed Czech workers. Because the area was heavily industrialized, the Depression hit harder and its effects lasted longer than elsewhere in the country. Still, Sudeten families had easy access to German-language schools, an equitable ratio of teachers to students, and a fair share of social services. They had politicians to speak for them, newspapers and magazines to argue on their behalf, and more liberty to express dissenting opinions than did their ethnic brethren in Hamburg, Frankfurt, and Berlin.
At the center of many an argument were statistics. Germans cited data from the 1910 census, when the region had been ruled by the Austro-Hungarian Empire and it was often more beneficial to be German than Czech. The Czechoslovak government relied on the 1930 survey, which tilted the other way. Sudetens complained that the percentage of schools that were German had declined from 43 percent to 22 percent. The government pointed out that Germans made up only 21 percent of the population. However, the federal authorities could fairly be criticized for worrying more about the rights of Czechs living in German regions than of Germans living in Czech areas.
A more basic problem was that the country’s system of ethnically distinct schools and social organizations was an obstacle to building a unified Czechoslovakia. In the 1920s, there was a sharp divide among Sudeten Germans over whether to teach their young to accept or reject integration in the state. The rise of the fascists pushed schools rapidly in the direction of separation despite the opposition of more liberal elements, including Jews. While the embattled moderates continued to defend a traditional approach to education, Henlein and his followers looked to the pedagogical model on display next door.
In the Third Reich, children were taught to believe that they were part of something far greater than just another country. They were members of an exceptional race, one hundred million strong, chosen by God and led by a führer who was God’s prophet. From an early age, boys and girls were trained as warriors, conditioned to hate Jews, and led to feel contemptuous toward Slavs, who were dismissed as dirty and slow-witted. Thomas Mann was one of many German intellectuals to flee Germany and to live for a time in Prague.* In May 1938, he described the Nazi educational program as
an inexorable first draft of what the German of the future is to be. . . . The result is that education is never for its own sake; its content is never confined to training, culture, knowledge, [and] the furtherance of human advancement through instruction. Instead, it has sole reference . . . to the idea of national preeminence and warlike preparedness.
Mann observed that “the glory of the German nation has always lain in a freedom which is the opposite of patriotic narrow-mindedness, and in a special and objective relation to mind. ‘Patriotism corrupts history.’ It was Goethe who said that.” It was Hitler who said that “education must have the sole object of stamping the conviction into the child that his own people and his own race are superior to all others.”
In Czechoslovakia, fascist doctrines were bravely resisted by profederalist Germans, many of whom had close ties to the Catholic Church. Like their neighbors, their families had lived in the Sudeten region for generations. Their leaders had advocated on behalf of provincial interests within the republic and had little sympathy for Czech nationalism, but their sense of what it meant to belong to their race did not coincide with Hitler’s. They judged the warmth and humanism that characterized German Romanticism to be a sign of strength, not of sentimentality or softness. Throughout the confrontation between fascism and democracy, a group of Sudeten parliamentarians stood their ground, declaring support for freedom and the rule of law. In so doing, they underwent the challenge faced by moderates in any political maelstrom, which is to make their voices heard amid the roar emanating from the extremes. To Sudeten fascists, the moderates were traitors; to Czech nationalists, German moderates were still German.
As the symptoms of crisis began to manifest themselves in open discrimination and localized violence, the obvious, albeit painful, option for German democrats and especially for Jews was to seek refuge elsewhere within Czechoslovakia. Many fled to Prague, where they joined like-minded people who had emigrated earlier from Germany proper. For a time, the city was the European capital of humanist discourse. Among the topics most avidly discussed was the question of identity. According to the laws of the republic, Jews had the right, but not an obligation, to declare Jewish nationality. Roughly one half did, while the remainder identified themselves as Czechoslovak, German, Hungarian, Polish, or other. Although the Jewish population made up less than 3 percent of the country, it accounted for more than a third of capital investment and 10 percent of students at university. It was hardly a monolithic group; the rate of marriage outside the faith was the highest in Central Europe, and there wer
e constant debates about worship obligations, ethics, language, social customs, dietary restrictions, and politics. With Hitler next door, many Jews with relatives living elsewhere used those contacts to emigrate. Several thousand moved to Palestine. Still others sought, often in vain, to obtain visas for travel to the West. Thinking to improve their chances of obtaining passage, some converted to Christianity or obtained forged certificates of baptism—which were readily available from the growing (and ecumenical) antifascist underground.
German-speaking Jews who stayed in Czechoslovakia were embraced, at least by the more liberal elements of society, who, in the tradition of Masaryk, supported human rights. Between 1935 and 1937, some nine hundred German émigrés, many of whom were Jews, were granted citizenship. In 1937, a statue of Moses the lawgiver was unveiled in Prague’s Old Town and a street was named in honor of Louis Brandeis, a Jewish-American jurist with Bohemian ancestry. Ordered by Hitler to report on the treatment of Jews, the German ambassador to Prague replied that he could find no evidence of discrimination.
“HISTORY IS REPLETE with examples of men who have risen to power by employing stern, grim, and even frightful methods, but who, nevertheless, when their life is revealed as a whole, have been regarded as great figures whose lives have enriched the story of mankind. So may it be with Hitler.” This assessment, authored by an Englishman in 1935, was not just another example of British naïveté. On the contrary, it was the testimony of a man who had been among the first to warn of Germany’s plans to rearm and to denounce Hitler’s persecution of Jews and democrats: Winston S. Churchill.
Looking back, we tend to see only the ranting Hitler of scratchy films, the screaming dictator who appeared to command the right arms of an entire German generation and whose agenda was a litany of hate. We wonder how any person of intelligence—let alone an observer as tough-minded as Churchill—could have arrived at a more positive assessment. Mein Kampf, even in the bowdlerized versions then available in the West, made clear Hitler’s animosity toward France, his fantasies about Aryan superiority, and his desire to bend every part of Europe to his will. But were these writings mere puffery designed to lift the spirits of downtrodden Germany? And wasn’t it natural that Germany would reassert itself as a leading power? “Those who have met Hitler face to face,” continued Churchill, “have found a highly competent, cool, well-informed functionary with an agreeable manner [and] a disarming smile. . . . Thus the world lives on hopes that the worst is over, and that we may yet live to see Hitler a gentler figure in a happier age.”
A gentler figure in a happier age. Those impressed by Hitler included Arnold Toynbee, the prestigious if far from the most discerning British historian of the era. David Lloyd George, who had led England through the Great War, lamented after meeting the führer that “I only wish we had a man of his supreme quality as the head of affairs in our country.” A third who fell under the spell was Edward Albert Christian George Andrew Patrick David Windsor, formerly King Edward VIII. In 1937, shortly after his controversial marriage to the American socialite Wallis Simpson, he paid a friendly call on Hitler, greeting him snappily with the Nazi salute.
Then there was Lord Halifax, previously viceroy of India and for many years a close associate of Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain. Edward Wood was born with an atrophied left arm and three sickly older brothers, each of whom died before the age of nine. This left Wood heir to the title and a vast estate in Yorkshire. Like many of his social standing, the slender and hawk-faced Halifax measured politicians primarily by the intensity of their distaste for Bolshevism. In 1936, he visited Germany for the first time and pronounced Hitler’s regime—which had locked up every Communist it could find—“fantastic.” In November of the following year, he went back, at the request of Chamberlain, ostensibly to attend a hunting exhibition. When the sport was concluded, he made his way to Hitler’s villa in the mountainous retreat of Berchtesgaden. Exiting his car, he was about to hand his coat to the footman when he was alerted by an aide’s urgent whisper, “Der Führer! Der Führer!” Halifax scrutinized the “footman” more closely, held on to his coat, and greeted his host.
During their three-hour meeting, Halifax informed Hitler that British opinion was offended by some aspects of the Nazi administration but that his government desired nonetheless to work with him on behalf of European peace. To that end, the Englishman cited three potential trouble spots: Austria, Czechoslovakia, and the Polish port city of Danzig. “On all these matters,” he told Hitler, “we are not necessarily concerned with preserving the status quo, but are concerned to avoid such treatment of them as would be likely to cause trouble.” British policy, then, was to tolerate changes to the European order, but with the earnest hope that any adjustments could occur without confrontation among the major powers.
This head-in-the-sand thinking stemmed from Great Britain’s weakened condition. For three hundred years, the country had been a leading arbiter in world affairs. By the nineteenth century, its empire stretched from Canada and the Caribbean to South Africa, India, and Australia, with many outposts in between. Due to the breakup of the Ottoman Empire, it had gained valuable mandates in the oil-rich Middle East. The British had no doubt of the civilizing benefits of their rule: educating the backward, enlightening the heathen, training administrators, and stepping in with billy clubs raised when needed to maintain order. From their public schools to the House of Commons, from the great London banks to the pages of the Times, they treasured their institutions. They had reached the mountaintop and found the view magnificent. They were discovering, however, that from that lofty vantage point, all trails led down.
The First World War had been a shock, the Allied victory hard won; the feeling persisted that too many had died for too little. The romantic notion of battle, the exhilarating vision of King Henry V at Agincourt, had run aground in the trenches of Verdun and the Somme. Fifteen or twenty years later, portraits of slain fathers, brothers, and sons were arranged carefully on many a mantelpiece; middle-aged men with limbs missing were still a common sight on English streets; greedy weapons manufacturers remained objects of contempt; and any future conflict was expected to be far worse. Poison gas was everywhere feared, and the warning of one parliamentarian had been accepted as gospel: “It is well . . . for the man in the street to realize that there is no power on Earth that can protect him from being bombed. Whatever people may tell him, the bomber will always get through.”
Economic considerations also weighed heavily. Administering an empire in the twentieth century generated more headaches and less income than in earlier times; the people of India, led by the charismatic Mahatma Gandhi, seemed a particular nuisance. Long a creditor nation, Great Britain had become a debtor, with a trade ledger tipped in the wrong direction. Pressure was intense to balance the budget through arms reductions, which, in the era of the League of Nations, were thought essential for world peace. The fourth of Woodrow Wilson’s famous Fourteen Points had called for the reduction of weaponry “to the lowest level consistent with domestic safety.” This objective was echoed in a series of disarmament conferences held in Geneva in the 1920s. Efforts to promote pacifism and to end war by enacting laws against it enjoyed a modest vogue. Words alone, however, mean little. Of the major powers, Great Britain was the only one to actually cut spending for defense.
The Nazis’ entrance upon the European stage did not, at first, alarm the British. After all, under the Versailles treaty, the size of the German army and navy was limited and the defeated country was forbidden to maintain an air force. The wake-up bell began sounding only when, in March 1935, Hitler renounced the treaty and declared that his country would indeed rebuild its military. The following year, when Germany reoccupied the Rhineland, Britons were unsettled to learn that his army was already three times the legal size and that his air force, or Luftwaffe, would soon surpass their own.
His Majesty’s government began then to rethink its needs, especially in the air a
nd on the sea. Rearmament proceeded sluggishly, however, and paid scant attention to the army, which remained well below authorized strength and was not intended in any case for deployment on the European continent. An American who observed all this while writing his senior-year college thesis compared the English attitude to that of a gentleman who requires a new suit but concludes that what he needs more is a good dinner. John F. Kennedy, a son of the U.S. ambassador to London, titled his study Why England Slept. “It takes time to change men’s minds,” he wrote, “and . . . violent shocks to change an entire nation’s psychology.” The emergence of Nazism was a disturbance, not a shock. To many Britons, including those high up in government, fascism seemed a phase that the Germans would grow out of once their more legitimate needs were satisfied.
Neville Chamberlain had assumed the responsibilities of prime minister in May 1937. His policy, which combined appeasement with rearmament, aimed to restore confidence in European security. Sixty-eight when he took the job, Chamberlain had spent much of his career in the shadow of his father, a wealthy industrialist, and of his brother, who had served as foreign secretary. Now, late in his life, he rose higher than either. He was fortunate to live in an era when one could thrive in politics without liking people; his primary passions were music, gardening, and the relentless pursuit of fish.
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