France was in another dilemma. Her British assurances took effect only if she acted defensively. But to protect her eastern allies, she had to go on the attack. Her insurance policies thus canceled each other out. If she attacked Germany to aid Poland or Czechoslovakia, she lost Britain. If she remained inside the Maginot Line to await a German attack, she abandoned and lost her eastern allies, whom one historian dismissed as three small hens penned up with a large fox harboring a grievance. Wrote historian Correlli Barnett brutally but accurately, “The French system of alliances…rested on strategic nonsense.”82
By the 1930s, German and British assessments of Versailles and the requirements of peace had converged. Hitler argued that Germany had been dealt with unjustly at Versailles after she laid down her arms. Chamberlain did not disagree. Writes Ernest May,
Abhorring Lloyd George, the British prime minister who was partly accountable for the Versailles Treaty, Chamberlain adopted every chapter of the “revisionist” critique. He believed that emotion had ruled in the 1919 peacemaking, that Germans have been wronged in ways harmful to the world economy and dangerous both politically and economically. He deemed Hitler’s grievances real and Hitler’s demands not unreasonable.83
The British people, too, wished to right the wrongs of Versailles. If that meant granting self-determination to the German-speaking peoples of the Sudetenland, they approved. Appeasement of a Germany they now believed to have been wronged was broadly supported. But with appeasement came the old insoluble problem—and several new ones.
First, restoration of German lands and peoples to the Reich, even if done by plebiscite, meant reconstituting the Germany of Bismarck and the Kaiser that almost defeated a coalition of Britain, France, Russia, Japan, Italy, and the United States. Second, restoring lost German provinces and peoples meant that two allies of France, Czechoslovakia and Poland, must undergo amputation. How were Britain and France to persuade Czechoslovakia to surrender the Sudetenland or Poland to give up Danzig?
The third problem with appeasement was that the new chancellor of Germany was no Ebert, Stresemann, or Brüning. The Hitler of Mein Kampf had made it starkly clear that overturning Versailles and bringing Germans home to the Reich was not the end of his life’s mission. Having let slip the chance to accommodate German democrats, Britain and France now had to deal with a coarse, brutal German dictator who had cold-bloodedly executed the comrades who had helped hoist him to power.
The Allies had been warned of what they were inviting. But they had not listened. Shortly before his death, “exhausted and disillusioned,” Gustav Stresemann, the widely respected German foreign minister, summed up his dealings with the Allies: “I gave and gave and gave until my followers turned against me…. If they could have granted me just one concession, I would have won my people. But they gave nothing…. That is my tragedy and their crime.”84
Thus, long before he flew to Munich for his final meeting, Chamberlain had come to believe that keeping the Sudeten Germans under a Czech rule they despised was not worth a war. And even should Britain go to war, she could not prevent German annexation of the Sudetenland. So, to make a virtue of necessity, he would fly to Munich and effect the peaceful transfer. While there, he would persuade Hitler that German grievances for the return of peoples who wished to belong to the Reich could be met, if only Hitler would renounce force. “Halifax had already visited Germany and had assured Hitler that Danzig, Austria, and Czechoslovakia could be settled in Germany’s favour, provided that there were no ‘far-reaching disturbances.’”85
Finally, after Hitler annexed the Sudetenland, Britain, France, and Germany would guarantee the remnant of Czechoslovakia in which Hitler had professed no interest. An Eastern Locarno. But this guarantee raised a logical question. If Britain and France could not prevent amputation of the Sudetenland, how could they prevent Hitler from overrunning the remnant of Czechoslovakia after it had been stripped of its mountain fortifications, should he decide to occupy that as well?
Thus did Chamberlain volunteer to officiate at the peaceful transfer of the Sudetenland to Germany—rather than have Hitler take it by force.
CHURCHILL’S ALTERNATIVE
AT THE TIME OF MUNICH, Churchill was frozen out of Chamberlain’s Cabinet but still in Parliament and a voice heard not only in England but in Germany and the world. And the more insistent the demands of Hitler, the wider and more attentive his audience.
What alternative did Churchill offer?
Self-determination be damned! Rather than force the Czechs to give up the Sudetenland, Britain should go to war. Yet, in Churchill’s position, there was a contradiction. If Britain was as inferior to Germany in airpower as he had proclaimed, and she had no army in Europe, how could she win Churchill’s war? How could Britain, with two divisions that could be sent to France, stop fifty German divisions from overrunning a Czechoslovakia bordered on three sides by Germany and that harbored a fifth column of three million ethnic Germans? Churchill’s answer: an alliance with Stalin.
But no Western statesman had been more eloquent than Churchill in excoriating Bolshevism. He had described the 1917 decision of the German General Staff to transport Lenin in the famous sealed train from Switzerland across Germany as comparable to having introduced a “plague bacillus” into Russia, adding, “[I]n the cutting off of the lives of men and women, no Asiatic conqueror, not Tamerlane, not Jengiz Khan, can match the fame” of Lenin.86
Since Lenin’s death, Stalin had surpassed him in mass murders that included the forced starvation of the Ukrainians and the Great Terror that began with the torture, show trials, and executions of his revolutionary comrades and went on to consume hundreds of thousands of lives. Was Churchill willing to ally the Mother of Parliaments with this monster?
If Churchill’s assessment of Hitler’s character and Munich were spot-on, his strategic alternative—bring the Red Army into Europe to stop him—appalled Chamberlain, who despised and distrusted the Bolsheviks more than the Nazis and Fascists. Forced to choose between Nazi Germany and Stalin’s Soviet Union controlling Eastern and Central Europe, he would have preferred the former. “Better Hitler than Stalin” was a sentiment shared by leaders of all the nations bordering on Stalin’s empire: Finland, Estonia, Lithuania, Latvia, Poland, Rumania. They had all heard the screams from over the border. Living next door, they had none of the romantic illusions about a “brave new world” held by British Labourites and American liberals.
By Munich, when the number of Hitler’s victims still numbered in the hundreds, Stalin had murdered millions in his “prison house of nations” stretching from Ukraine to the Pacific. Chamberlain also believed any alliance with Russia meant certain war with Germany, a war from which Hitler or Stalin would emerge as master of Eastern and Central Europe. Neither result, Chamberlain thought, was worth Britain’s fighting another horrific European war. Here, too, argues Taylor, Chamberlain and the appeasers were prescient:
Again the appeasers feared that the defeat of Germany would be followed by a Russian domination over much of Europe. Later experience suggests that they were right here also. Only those who wanted Soviet Russia to take the place of Germany are entitled to condemn the “appeasers” and I cannot understand how most of those who condemn them are now equally indignant at the inevitable result of their failure.87
In 1938, Chamberlain perceived clearly and correctly the probable outcome of a war with Nazi Germany that Churchill would not perceive until 1944 and 1945. The only force that could save Czechoslovakia in September 1938 was the Red Army. But how does bringing the Bolsheviks’ Red Army into Czechoslovakia save Czechoslovakia?
Nor were the Poles or Rumanians willing to let the Red Army tramp through to save the Czechs. They believed—rightly, it turned out—that if the Red Army came into Europe, it would not go home and they would lose their freedom. Eastern and Central Europe preferred the risks of a German invasion to the certain horrors of a Russian rescue.
But if Chamberlain’s strategic a
ssessment was right and Britain’s vital interests dictated staying out of a war for the Sudetenland, why was Munich a disaster? Why is Chamberlain virtually without defenders?
THE GODESBERG MEETING
CHAMBERLAIN’S FAILURE LAY NOT in his refusal to take Britain to war with Germany over the Sudetenland. There he was right. His failure was in how he behaved at Munich and after Munich.
The prime minister made three trips to Germany that September to persuade Hitler to agree to a plebiscite and the peaceful transfer of the Sudetenland to the Reich. On his first, to Berchtesgaden, he had received Hitler’s demands and taken them back to England, where he won Cabinet acceptance. Chamberlain then returned to meet Hitler at Bad Godesberg, to report on the success of his mission to London.
This meeting was held in a hotel kept by one Dreesen, a backer of the Nazi cause. As Henderson relates, it was at Dreesen’s hotel that Hitler “had taken the decision for the ‘blood bath’ of June 1934, and it was thence that he flew with Goebbels to Munich for the arrest and execution of Roehm.”88
At Godesberg, Chamberlain was shaken by the new truculence and intransigence of Hitler. The Fuehrer announced that acceding to his earlier demands was now insufficient. He threatened an immediate occupation of the Sudetenland and war should he meet resistance. Chamberlain replied that Britain could not accept an outcome imposed by naked force. When Neville Chamberlain returned with Hitler’s new demands, the Cabinet rejected them. The French rejected them. The Czechs rejected them.
As Chamberlain did not want the error of 1914 repeated, where the Kaiser and Bethmann-Hollweg were still uncertain, in the final hours before war, whether Britain would fight, he sent Sir Horace Wilson to read Hitler a clear message. If Germany invaded, and the Czechs resisted, and France honored her word to Prague, Britain would fight at France’s side in a new European war. Facing Hitler directly, Wilson read him this message:
The French Government has told us that in the case of a German attack against Czechoslovakia it will faithfully fulfill its obligations. If in carrying out these obligations deriving from its treaties, France became actively engaged in hostilities against Germany, the United Kingdom would feel obliged to come to her aid.89
In Dark Summer, Gene Smith describes Hitler’s reaction as Wilson slowly read to him Chamberlain’s note.
“So! That settles it!” shouted Hitler. “Now I will really smash the Czechs.”90 Hitler’s interpreter Paul Schmidt had never seen him so out of control. “That old shit-hound must be crazy if he thinks he can influence me in this way,” Hitler said of Chamberlain.91
Photo Insert
Lord Salisbury. “Isolation is much less dangerous than the danger of being dragged into wars which do not concern us.” (Getty)
Otto von Bismarck. “[Germany] has hay enough for her fork.” (Getty)
Sir Edward Grey. “If we are engaged in war, we shall suffer but little more than we shall suffer if we stand aside.” (Getty)
David Lloyd George. “I never want to be cheered by a war crowd.” (Getty)
Prime Minister H. H. Asquith. “Winston…has got on all his war paint…. The whole thing fills me with sadness.”(Getty)
Churchill as First Lord of the Admiralty. “My God! This is living History…. I would not be out of this glorious delicious war for anything the world could give me.” (Getty)
Kaiser Wilhelm II. “It is not I who bears the responsibility for the disaster which now threatens the entire civilized world.” (Getty)
King Edward VII. “He is Satan. You cannot imagine what a Satan he is.” —Kaiser Wilhelm II (Getty)
Admiral Tirpitz. “This war is really the greatest lunacy ever committed by the white races.” (Getty)
(Left to right) Lloyd George, Clemenceau, Wilson. “Those three all-powerful, all-ignorant men…carving continents with only a child to lead them.” —Arthur Balfour (Getty)
Marshal Ferdinand Foch. “This is not peace, it is an armistice for twenty years.” (Getty)
Prime Minister William “Billy” Hughes of Australia. “You propose to substitute for the Anglo-Japanese alliance and the overwhelming power of the British Navy a Washington conference?” (Corbis)
First Sea Lord Earl Beatty. “That extraordinary fellow Winston has gone mad.” (Corbis)
Arthur Balfour at the Washington Naval Conference (second from right). Severing the Anglo-Japanese alliance “was an act of breathtaking stupidity.” —U.S. historian Arthur Herman (Getty)
Winston Churchill as Chancellor of the Exchequer. “A war with Japan!…I do not believe there is the slightest chance of it in our lifetime.” (Getty)
Mussolini and Hitler in Venice, June 1934. “What a clown this Hitler is.” —Benito Mussolini (Library of Congress)
Austrian Chancellor Engelbert Dollfuss. “Hitler is the murderer of Dollfuss…a horrible sexual degenerate, a dangerous fool.” —Benito Mussolini, August 1934 (Getty)
King George V. “I will not have another war. I will not. The last one was none of my doing.” (Getty)
Prime Minister Stanley Baldwin. “With two lunatics like Mussolini and Hitler, you can never be sure of anything…. I am determined to keep the country out of war.” (Getty)
(Left to right) Foreign Minister Pierre Laval of France, Mussolini, Prime Minister Ramsay MacDonald of Great Britain, and French prime minister Pierre-Étienne Flandin at Stresa, Italy, 1935. “The Stresa front has been shaken, if not, indeed dissolved.” —Winston Churchill, 1935 (Corbis)
Foreign Secretary Anthony Eden. “[T]he greatness of his office will find him out…. I think you will now see what a lightweight Eden is.” —Winston Churchill (Getty)
Hitler and Lord Halifax at Berchtesgaden. “Shoot Gandhi!” —Adolf Hitler
Austrian Chancellor Kurt Schuschnigg. “This Schuschnigg was a harder bone than I first thought.” —Adolf Hitler (Getty)
Hermann Göring. “[H]is personality…was frankly attractive, like a great schoolboy.” —Lord Halifax, 1937 (Getty)
(Left to right) Chamberlain, Daladier, Hitler, and Mussolini in Munich. “I got the impression that he was a man who could be relied upon when he had given his word.” —Chamberlain on Hitler, September 1938 (Getty)
Chamberlain at Heston Aerodrome, 1938. “I’ve got it! I’ve got it! Here is a paper which bears his name.” (Getty)
Czech president Eduard Benes?. Hitler was gripped by “a burning rage to get even…with President Benes?, who, he believed, had deliberately humiliated him.” —historian William Shirer (Getty)
Colonel Jozef Beck of Poland. “If Beck was at fault as a diplomat, the fault lay…in his naïve belief in the sincerity of Allied guarantees and assurances.” —historian Norman Davies (Getty)
(Left to right) Count Ciaro, Lord Halifax, Chamberlain, and Mussolini in January 1939. “These…are the tired sons of a long line of rich men, and they will lose their empire.” —Benito Mussolini (Corbis)
Hitler in Prague, March 1939. “It is the greatest triumph of my life! I shall enter history as the greatest German of them all!” (Getty)
Sir Nevile Henderson (left) and Hermann Göring. “It was the final shipwreck of my mission to Berlin…. Hitler had crossed the Rubicon.” (Getty)
Virgil Tilea, Romania’s minister in London. Instigator of panic. (Getty)
Adolf Hitler on the eve of war, September 1939. “The last thing that Hitler wanted to produce was another great war.” —B. H. Liddell Hart (Getty)
Moscow, 1942.
CHURCHILL: “Have you forgiven me?”
STALIN: “It is not for me to forgive. It is for God to forgive.” (Corbis)
“If our country were defeated, I hope we should find a champion as indomitable to restore our courage and lead us back to our place among the nations.” —Churchill on Hitler, 1937 (Getty)
Man of the Century? “Historians are apt to judge war ministers less by the victories achieved under their direction than by the political results which flowed from them. Judged by that standard, I am not sure that I
shall be held to have done very well.” (Getty)
A shaken Wilson replied that his prime minister was only interested in peace. At this, Hitler shouted, “The comments of his ass-kissers do not interest me…. All that interests me are my people who are being tortured by that dirty———Beneš. I will not stand it any longer! It is more than a good German can bear! Do you hear me, you stupid pig?”92
Hitler shouted that the Germans “were being treated like niggers; one would not dare treat even Turks like that.”93
That night, in a speech at the Sportspalast that Alan Bullock calls a “masterpiece of invective which even he never surpassed,” Hitler gave a catalog of his diplomatic achievements—from his pact with Poland, to the Anglo-German Naval Treaty, to the renunciation of Alsace-Lorraine, the friendship with Italy, the peaceful annexation of Austria.94 “And now before us stands the last problem that must be solved and will be solved. It is the last territorial claim which I have to make in Europe, but it is the claim from which I will not recede, and, God willing, I will make good.”95
With the Czech allegations of his cowardice in the May crisis in mind, Hitler now turned the new crisis into a test of manhood between himself and Eduard Beneš:
Churchill, Hitler, and The Unnecessary War Page 23