Churchill, Hitler, and The Unnecessary War

by Patrick J. Buchanan

Now two men stand arrayed one against the other: there is Herr Benes, and here am I. We are two men of a different make up. In the great struggle of the peoples, while Herr Benes was sneaking about through the world, I as a decent German did my duty. And now today I stand over against this man as a soldier of my people…. The world must take note that in four and a half years of war, and through the long years of my political life, there is one thing which no one could ever cast in my teeth: I have never been a coward. Now I go before my people as its first soldier, and behind me—this the world should know—there marches a different people from that of 1918.

  We are determined!96

  Hitler had overreached.

  Though the democracies were not strong enough to defeat him, they suddenly seemed ready to fight. At Chamberlain’s direction, First Lord Duff Cooper ordered mobilization of the fleet.97 France and Czechoslovakia began to mobilize. Their armies would outnumber Hitler’s two-to-one. Mussolini was doing nothing to pin down French divisions on the Italian border. “What Hitler did know,” writes Shirer, “was that Prague was defiant, Paris rapidly mobilizing, London stiffening, his own people apathetic, his leading generals dead against him, and that his ultimatum [to the Czechs to accept]…the Godesberg proposals expired at 2 P.M. the next day.”98

  On September 27, an event in Berlin caused Hitler to reconsider and back away from war. Nevile Henderson describes it in his memoirs:

  A chance episode had…produced a salutary revulsion in Hitler’s mind. In the afternoon of that Tuesday, a mechanized division had rumbled through the streets of Berlin and up the Wilhelmstrasse past the Chancellor’s window. For three hours Hitler stood at his window, and watched it pass. The Germans love military display, but not a single individual in the streets applauded its passage. The picture which it represented was almost that of a hostile army passing through a conquered city. Hitler was deeply impressed. At that moment he realized for the first time that the cheers of his sycophants in the Sportspalast were far from representing the true spirit and feelings of the German People.99

  Hitler was heard to mutter, “I can’t wage war with this nation yet.”100 Bluff called, Hitler sat down and wrote to Chamberlain, urging him not to give up his efforts for a peaceful resolution.

  On September 28, as he spoke in the House of Commons of how “horrible, fantastic, incredible that we should be digging ditches and trying on gas masks because of a quarrel in a far-away country between people of whom we know nothing,” the prime minister was interrupted. He stopped speaking, read a note, and then, in what Harold Nicolson said was one of the most dramatic moments he ever witnessed, Chamberlain announced: “Herr Hitler has just agreed to postpone his mobilisation for twenty-four hours and meet me in conference with Signor Mussolini and Signor [sic] Daladier at Munich.”101

  For a while there was silence and then the whole House of Commons broke into ecstatic cheering and sobbing. Churchill went up to Chamberlain and said to him, sourly, “I congratulate you on your good fortune. You were very lucky.”102

  On that third and final trip to Munich, according to aides present, Hitler was surly, angry, rude, brusque. Lord Dunglass, the future prime minister Sir Alec Douglas-Home, described it as the worst experience of his career. Never had he expected to see a British prime minister treated in the manner that Adolf Hitler treated Neville Chamberlain.103

  Which raises the question still unanswered by history.

  How could Chamberlain believe that by getting the signature of such a man on a three-sentence statement, he had created a bond of trust and he and Hitler would now work together for peace in Europe? When Hitler said the Sudetenland was his last territorial demand, did Chamberlain think he had given up Danzig and Memel? Given Mein Kampf, Hitler’s record as a leader of street thugs who had attempted a putsch in Bavaria, his Night of the Long Knives, his trashing of Locarno, his warmongering at Godesberg, his crudity at Munich, why did Chamberlain trust him not to do what he had boasted repeatedly he intended to do?

  Chamberlain was right in believing the Sudetenland not worth a war. He was wrong in believing that by surrendering it to Hitler he had bought anything but time, which he should have used to rally Britain. A good man who wanted peace, he deceived himself into believing he had achieved it. Instead of returning home and reporting that, while war had been averted, Britain must prepare for the worst, Chamberlain came home boasting that he had brought back “peace for our time.” Devastating to his reputation in history, Chamberlain then presented himself to the nation as the only leader who really understood and could deal with Hitler.

  Chamberlain staked his place in history on his assessment that Hitler was a man he could do business with and trust to keep his word. Returning from Berchtesgaden, he had told Parliament: “In spite of the hardness and ruthlessness I thought I saw in his face, I got the impression that here was a man who could be relied upon when he had given his word.”104

  After Godesberg, Chamberlain assured the Cabinet that Hitler “would not deliberately deceive a man whom he respected and with whom he had been in negotiation.”105

  Thus did Chamberlain permit himself to be made history’s fool. Thus did he morally disarm his people, who were so desperate to avoid war they were ready to be deceived. By reveling in the celebration of Munich, Chamberlain disarmed himself. He could not now say what had to be said. He could not now do what had to be done: tell the nation it must sacrifice and prepare, for war with Germany was now a possibility and, if British vital interests were imperiled, a certainty. But having declared he had brought home “peace for our time,” how could Chamberlain ask the British to sacrifice to finance the weapons of war? As Sir Harold Nicolson mused, “It is difficult to say: ‘This is the greatest diplomatic achievement in history, therefore we must redouble our armament in order never again to be exposed to such humiliation.’”106 Chamberlain had put all Britain’s eggs in one basket and handed it to Hitler, who, within hours of Munich, was cursing him for having robbed him of the pleasure of smashing the Czechs and exacting vengeance upon Beneš.

  Chamberlain was a perfect foil for Hitler—and for Churchill, who, in the euphoria of Munich, declared that Britain had concluded a shameful betrayal and Hitler would digest the Sudetenland and be back for more: “We have sustained a great defeat without a war, the consequences of which will travel far with us. We have passed an awful milestone in our history. And do not suppose that this is the end. This is only the beginning.”107

  In January 1939, Chamberlain went to Rome to confer with the Italian dictator he had met at Munich. He returned satisfied that he had established a rapport. He had asked Il Duce for his thoughts on Hitler. In the Cabinet minutes, Chamberlain described the Duce’s response:

  [He, Mussolini] had never taken the opportunity offered to him, but had remained throughout absolutely loyal to Herr Hitler. The Prime Minister said that at the time he had been somewhat disappointed at this attitude, but on reflection he thought that it reflected credit in Signor Mussolini’s character.108

  Chamberlain thought it a “truly wonderful visit.”109 In describing his British guests to his son-in-law, Foreign Minister Count Ciano, Mussolini had taken away another impression: “These men are not made of the same stuff as the Francis Drakes and the other magnificent adventurers who created the empire. These, after all, are the tired sons of a long line of rich men, and they will lose their empire.”110

  THE FAILURE OF APPEASEMENT

  HAD THE BALDWIN-CHAMBERLAIN POLICY of redressing grievances and accommodating legitimate demands been adopted by Britain before 1933, when Germany was ruled by democrats, it might have worked. With their face cards stripped from their hands by Allied magnanimity, Hitler and the Nazis might never have come to power. But once they did, and began to bang the table, Germans concluded it was Allied fear of Hitler and of them that made them so reasonable now. What doomed Chamberlain’s policy was that, in Hitler and his Nazi cohorts, he was confronted by hard, coarse men, full of resentment, who preferred brutal
ity to get what they wanted, who relished humiliating the weak, and whose ambitions extended beyond what Britain could assent to. Hitler knew he would prevail at Munich, said Henderson, for he had put himself in his adversaries’ shoes. Henderson describes Hitler’s thinking:

  In September…[Hitler] had not believed that…the French nation would be ready to fight for the Czechs or that England would fight if the French did not. He argued as follows: Would the German nation willingly go to war for General Franco in Spain, if France intervened on the side of the Republican Government at Valencia? The answer that he gave himself is that it would not; and he was consequently convinced that no democratic French Government would be strong enough to lead the French nation to war for the Czechs. That was the basis of his calculations, and his policy was in accordance therewith.111

  Hitler’s calculation proved correct. The German generals who were near panic over the prospect of a war over the Sudetenland were discredited.

  Though Czechoslovakia had a powerful army, Beneš, abandoned by the British and French, did not order it to resist. Unlike Schuschnigg, who remained in Vienna to face Hitler’s wrath, Eduard Beneš fled.

  With Austria and the Sudetenland now his, Hitler in 1938 had added ten million Germans to the Reich without firing a shot. It was a Bismarckian achievement. Yet it is a myth to say Munich led directly to World War II. It was a diplomatic debacle, but it was not why Britain went to war.

  The casus belli of World War II emanated from a decision, six months later, that would drag England into a six-year death struggle at the wrong time, in the wrong place, for the wrong reason. That decision would prove the greatest blunder in British history.

  CHAPTER 9

  Fatal Blunder

  [THE DICTATORS] HAVE HAD good cause to ask for consideration of their grievances & if they had asked nicely after I appeared on the scene they might already have got some satisfaction.1

  —NEVILLE CHAMBERLAIN,

  February 1939

  AS THE FALL OF 1938 slipped into winter, Chamberlain continued to defend his Munich accord. His Christmas cards bore a picture of the plane that had carried him to Munich.2 But the bloom was off the rose. A poll in October revealed that 93 percent of the British did not believe that Hitler had made his last territorial demand in Europe.3

  After the Godesberg ultimatum, the Czechs had been ready to fight. France had begun to mobilize. First Lord Duff Cooper, at Chamberlain’s direction, had called out the fleet. It was Hitler who had backed away from his ultimatum and agreed to a third meeting—at Munich. Though realpolitik may have dictated telling the Czechs that Britain could not fight for the Sudetenland, the British, a moral people, came to be ashamed of what they had done. And public opinion soon took a hard turn against Germany.

  On November 7, seventeen-year-old Herschel Grynszpan, whose family had been ordered deported from Hamburg to Poland with twenty thousand other Jews—when Warsaw threatened to cancel their passports, leaving them stateless in Germany and thus Berlin’s responsibility—walked into the German embassy in Paris and shot Third Secretary Ernst vom Rath. When Rath died two days later, all hell broke loose in the Reich.

  On the night of November 9–10, Nazi storm troopers went on a rampage, smashing windows, looting Jewish shops, burning synagogues, beating and lynching Jews. Scores perished. Hundreds were assaulted in what would be known as Kristallnacht, the night of broken glass, the greatest pogrom in Germany since the Middle Ages.

  Kristallnacht was a shameful crime and a historic blunder. Much of the goodwill garnered by the 1936 Berlin Olympics and Munich, which the democracies still believed had averted war, was washed away. The United States called its ambassador home. “Nazi treatment of the Jews,” wrote Taylor, “did more than anything else to turn English moral feeling against Germany, and this moral feeling in turn made English people less reluctant to go to war.”4

  Some historians claim Kristallnacht, shocking, revolting, and stupid as it was, evoking only disgust and contempt for Germany in the West, was not ordered by Hitler but was the work of Goebbels, his propaganda minister. But moral responsibility rests with Hitler. For those who carried out the rampage were not punished, Goebbels was not fired, and the German Jews were forced to pay a billion marks to clean up the damage.

  “The bestial wave of anti-Semitism which Goebbels unleashed in Germany during November completed the route of the appeasers,” writes Paul Johnson. “During the winter of 1938–9 the mood in Britain changed to accept war as inevitable.”5

  POLAND’S TURN

  AS CHAMBERLAIN WAS BASKING in his triumph, Hitler had turned to the next item on his menu. On October 24, Foreign Minister Ribbentrop made a surprise offer to Polish ambassador Jozef Lipski. If Warsaw would permit the “reunion of Danzig with the Reich” and consent to Germany’s building of “an extra-territorial motor road and railway line” across the Corridor, Berlin would leave Warsaw in control of the economic and railway facilities in Danzig and guarantee Poland’s frontiers.6 With the issues of Danzig and the Corridor resolved, Ribbentrop told Lipski, a “joint policy towards Russia on the basis of the anti-Comintern pact” could be adopted.7 Ribbentrop was offering the Poles a Berlin-Warsaw alliance against Russia.

  Ribbentrop had reason to expect a positive response. Like Hungary, Poland had joined in the dismemberment of Czechoslovakia after Munich. As Hitler seized the Sudetenland, the Poles, “like a carrion fish swimming in the wake of a shark,” seized the coal-rich region of Teschen.8 Also, Danzig was 95 percent German. Before Versailles, the town had never belonged to Poland. Danzig had been detached from Germany at Paris and declared a Free City to be administered by a High Commissioner appointed by the League of Nations to give Poland a port on the Baltic. As the Poles were now developing their own port, Gdynia, and could continue to use Danzig, Warsaw no longer needed to rule Danzig. Moreover, the 350,000 Danzigers were agitating for a return to Germany.

  The Corridor had also been cut out of Germany at Versailles. This slice of land now severed East Prussia from Berlin and was Poland’s corridor to the Baltic Sea. Mistreatment of the 1.5 million Germans still living in the Corridor was bitterly resented. On the issues of Danzig and the Corridor, the German people were more bellicose than Hitler, who wanted the return of Danzig but did not want war. What Hitler sought was a Polish-German alliance, modeled on the Rome-Berlin axis.

  A bit of history. By 1933, Marshal Jozef Pilsudski, the Polish hero of the Great War, was dictator. His August 1920 victory that hurled Trotsky’s army back from Warsaw had been compared by the British ambassador in Berlin to Charles Martel’s triumph at Tours. As the Hammer of the Franks saved Europe from Islam, Pilsudski had saved Europe from Bolshevism.

  In Hitler Pilsudski saw a mortal threat. In early 1933, when Hitler became chancellor, Pilsudski massed five Polish army corps on his western border and “sounded out Paris about a joint application of pressure against Hitler while the Nazi regime was still insecure.”9 Pilsudski intended to kill the infant Nazi regime in its cradle.

  “[T]here is plenty of evidence to suggest that Pilsudski seriously considered a preventive war against Hitler if only the western powers had shown themselves willing,” writes Norman Davies.10 German historian Hillgruber adds that these “‘preventive war’ designs came to nothing because of France’s immobility in foreign affairs. Thereupon Pilsudski himself undertook a rapprochement with Hitler in May 1933.”11

  Taking the measure of his French ally, Pilsudski decided his country would be better served by a ten-year nonaggression pact with Hitler. It was signed in January 1934. Hitler had removed the first foreign threat to his rule. The first and best opportunity to deal preemptively with the man who had laid out his vision in Mein Kampf had passed by.

  Half a decade later, Hitler wanted Poland in his Anti-Comintern Pact. The fiercely anti-Bolshevik, anti-Russian, Catholic Poles seemed natural allies in a crusade to eradicate Communism. As an Austrian, Hitler did not share the Prussian bias against Poles. The role he had in min
d for Poland was that of partner in his New Order in Europe. Italy, and eventually Hungary and Rumania, would accept this role. To Hitler’s astonishment, Poland refused.

  “In the early days of 1939,” writes U.S. historian Charles Callan Tansill, “Hitler believed that [Polish Foreign Minister] Beck was so well versed in the principles of Realpolitik that he would be glad to go hand in hand with the Nazi leaders in a joint search for plunder that was weakly guarded by the broken-down states of Europe.”12 Hitler believed Beck was a man he could do business with. So it would seem, for, as Manchester writes,

  No one questioned Jozef Beck’s ability. His remarkable diplomatic skills had led to his appointment, at the age of thirty-eight, as Poland’s foreign minister. Respected for his intellect and powerful will, he was also distrusted—even detested—for his duplicity, dishonesty, and, in his private life, depravity. In Rome, where he had spent an extended visit-cum-vacation, the Princess of Piedmont had said of him that he had the “sort of face you might see in a French newspaper as that of a ravisher of little girls.”13

  But Beck rebuffed Ribbentrop’s offer. For, after their 1920 victory over the Red Army, the Poles considered themselves a Great Power. They were not. Writes A.J.P. Taylor,

  [T]hey…forgot that they had gained their independence in 1918 only because both Russia and Germany had been defeated. Now they had to choose between Russia and Germany. They chose neither. Only Danzig prevented cooperation between Germany and Poland. For this reason, Hitler wanted to get it out of the way. For precisely the same reason, Beck kept it in the way. It did not cross his mind that this might cause a fatal breach.14

  Chamberlain also believed Danzig should be returned. As Taylor wrote, “The British cared nothing for Danzig, or, if they did, sympathized with the German case.”15 Lord Halifax considered Danzig and the Corridor “an absurdity.”16 Indeed, of all the German claims to lost lands, the claim to Danzig was strongest. It had always been a German city. Its population was 95 percent German. Any plebiscite would have produced a 90 percent vote to return to the Fatherland. And Britain had no objection to Danzig’s return, as long as it came about peacefully through negotiation, not violently through military force. On Danzig, the basic British and German positions were almost identical. Both wanted its peaceful return to Germany.