Churchill, Hitler, and The Unnecessary War

by Patrick J. Buchanan

  But the Poles adamantly refused to negotiate.

  Hitler invited Beck to Berchtesgaden on January 5, 1939. There, in terms unlike those he had used on Schuschnigg, Hitler explained that if Danzig was returned, it could remain under Polish economic control. He impressed on Beck that a connection “with East Prussia was as vital a matter for the Reich as the connection with the sea was for Poland.”17 Ribbentrop “hinted very heavily” to Beck “that Polish concessions over Danzig could be compensated at Slovakia’s expense”18

  “On Hitler’s part it was a remarkably moderate demand,” writes the British historian Basil Liddell Hart.19 But, again, Beck rebuffed Hitler. Hitler offered to guarantee Poland’s borders and accept permanent Polish control of the Corridor, if Beck would simply agree to the return of Danzig and the construction of a German rail-and-road route across the Corridor. Beck again refused. So matters stood in March 1939, when the rump state of Czechoslovakia suddenly began to collapse and fall apart, as Hitler had warned Chamberlain at Berchtesgaden it would. By Chamberlain’s own notes of that first meeting, Hitler had said that, once the Sudeten Germans were free of Prague, the Hungarians, Poles, and Slovaks left inside the multiethnic state would also secede.20 Indeed, agents of the Reich were stoking the fires of secession, subverting the Czech state.

  As Hitler had predicted, planned, and promoted, the disintegration of Czechoslovakia began as soon as Munich had been implemented. Slovakia and Ruthenia, or Carpatho-Ukraine, a hotbed of Ukrainian nationalism, set up parliaments. Hungary, which had lost Slovakia to Prague in the Treaty of Trianon, asked Hitler to mediate a border dispute.

  “[B]y the Vienna Award of November 2, 1938, Ribbentrop and Ciano, the Italian Foreign Minister, assigned a sizable portion of southern Slovakia to Hungary.”21 Hungary also had designs on Ruthenia, a slice of which it had already received, including the city of Kosice, in the Vienna Award. But when Budapest began to move on the remnant in mid-November, Hitler sent an ultimatum. The annexation of Ruthenia by Hungary would be regarded as an unfriendly act. Budapest backed off.

  By New Year’s Day 1939, Germany, Poland, and Hungary had all taken bites out of Czechoslovakia to reclaim lost kinsmen, and the ethno-nationalists of Slovakia and Ruthenia were agitating for independence.

  In March, the remnant of Czechoslovakia fell apart.

  On March 7, Czech president Emil Hacha dismissed the Ruthenian government.

  On March 10, following a rancorous quarrel between Czechs and Slovaks over the latter’s push for independence, Emil Hácha ousted the Slovak prime minister, Father Tiso, occupied Bratislava, and forcibly installed a new government loyal to Prague.

  On March 11, Tiso fled to Vienna and appealed to Berlin for protection.

  On March 13, Tiso met Hitler, who told him if he did not declare immediate independence, Germany would not interfere with Hungary’s forcible reannexation of all of Slovakia. Budapest was moving troops to the border of both Slovakia and Ruthenia.

  On March 14, Slovakia declared independence. “Ruthenia quickly followed and this action dissolved what was left of the Czech state.”22

  The same day, Hungary, told by Hitler it could move on Ruthenia but must keep hands off the rest of Slovakia, occupied Ruthenia, establishing a border between Poland and Hungary both had sought. Admiral Horthy “was delighted and sent Hitler a fulsome telegram of gratitude.”23

  Stationed in Prague, George Kennan saw it coming. As he wrote in early March 1939, after visiting Ruthenia, “[S]omehow or other, and in the not too distant future, the unwieldy remnant of what was once Ruthenia will find its way back to the economic and political unit in which it most naturally belongs, which is Hungary.”24

  Thus, at the expense of Prague, Hitler had brought the Germans of Bohemia and Moravia back under German rule, and appeased four nations. Hungary had the Vienna Award of the Hungarian lands and peoples in Slovakia and regained control of Ruthenia. Slovakia had independence and freedom from Prague, and a promise of German protection from Hungary. Poland had gained the coal-rich region of Teschen and a new border with a friendly Hungary. And Hitler had done Stalin a huge favor, for Ruthenia was ablaze with Ukrainian nationalism and Horthy would put the fire out. Historian John Lukacs notes that George Kennan was among the few to see in Hitler’s partition of Czechoslovakia something no one else saw:

  Hitler’s tacit consent to let Ruthenia (also called Carpathian Ukraine) go to Hungary was significant because it indicated that, whether temporarily or not, Hitler now dropped the promotion of Ukrainian nationalism that had been directed against the Soviet Union. We know (or ought to know) that this was but a first step in the direction of an eventual accord between Hitler and Stalin.25

  Rapprochement with Stalin may have been in Hitler’s mind by early 1939.

  President Hacha asked to see Hitler. Elderly and sick, he was invited to Berlin and accompanied by his daughter, to whom Ribbentrop presented a bouquet at the train station. Hitler sent a box of chocolates.

  After 1 A.M., Hacha was ushered in to see the Fuehrer, who bullied him for three hours, telling him the Wehrmacht and Luftwaffe were preparing to strike his country. After Hacha suffered an apparent heart attack, German doctors revived him. Just before 4 A.M., Hacha signed a statement by which he “confidently placed the fate of the Czech people and country in the hands of the Fuehrer of the German Reich.”26 As he left the Chancellery at 4:30, his foreign minister Chvalkovsky said to him, “Our people will curse us, and yet we have saved their existence. We have preserved them from a horrible massacre.”27

  Hacha would serve Hitler faithfully through the end of the war. As British historian Donald Cameron Watt writes, “[Hitler] was remarkably kind (for him) to the Czech Cabinet after the march into Prague, keeping its members in office for a time and then paying their pensions.”28

  As Hitler stayed up into the morning to savor his triumph with aides, his physician, Dr. Morell, interrupted to say that had it not been for him, there might have been no communiqué. “Thank God,” said Morell, “that I was on the spot and in time with my injections.”29

  “You go to hell with your damn injections,” Hitler bellowed. “You made the old gentleman so lively that for a moment I feared he would refuse to sign!”30

  Emerging from the negotiations, Hitler ecstatically told his two middle-aged secretaries: “Children, quickly, give me a kiss! Quickly!”31 The ladies bussed him on both cheeks, as Hitler exclaimed: “It is the greatest triumph of my life! I shall enter history as the greatest German of them all!”32

  Indeed, as of that night, Hitler had brought the Saar, Austria, and the Sudetenland under Berlin’s rule, made Bohemia and Moravia protectorates of the Reich, overthrown the detested Versailles regime in Central Europe, and raised Germany from the depressed and divided nation of 1933 to the first economic and military power in Europe—in six years without firing a shot. He was a figure in German history to rival Bismarck. But Hitler could say, as Bismarck could not, that he had done it all with diplomacy and without bloodshed.

  On March 15, Hitler entered Prague. Hungary marched into Ruthenia. The Ruthenians appealed to Berlin. Hitler said “No!” On the afternoon of the fourteenth, German troops had occupied the vital strategic area of Ostrava to preempt an expected Polish move.

  Thus the Munich agreement, altarpiece of Chamberlain’s career, pillar of his European policy, lay in ruin. “It was the final shipwreck of my mission to Berlin,” wrote Henderson. “Hitler had crossed the Rubicon.”33

  Up till that March…the German ship of state had flown the German national flag. On those Ides of March, its captain defiantly hoisted the skull and crossbones of the pirate, and appeared under his true colors as an unprincipled menace to European peace and liberty.34

  Historians mark Hitler’s march into Prague as the crossroads where he started down the path of conquest by imposing German rule on a non-Germanic people. The “destruction of Czechoslovakia,” writes Kissinger, “made no geopolitical sense whatever; it showed that H
itler was beyond rational calculation and bent on war.”35

  But did it? And war with whom? From the vantage point of Hitler, raised in Linz near the Czech border when both were ruled from Vienna, it appeared far different from the way it did in London or Washington. And the motives behind Hitler’s actions in the Czech crisis of March remain in dispute. Here is Taylor’s take, half a century ago:

  All the world saw this as a culmination of a long-planned campaign. In fact, it was the unforeseen by-product of developments in Slovakia; and Hitler was acting against the Hungarians rather than against the Czechs. Nor was there anything sinister or premeditated in the protectorate over Bohemia. Hitler, the supposed revolutionary, was simply reverting in the most conservative way to the pattern of previous centuries. Bohemia had always been a part of the Holy Roman Empire; it had been part of the German Confederation between 1815 and 1866; then it had been linked to German Austria until 1918. Independence, not subordination, was the novelty in Czech history….

  Hitler took the decisive step in his career when he occupied Prague. He did it without design; it brought him slight advantage. He acted only when events had already destroyed the settlement of Munich. But everyone outside Germany, and especially the other makers of that settlement, believed that he had deliberately destroyed it himself.36

  Taylor here seems too benign. While historians disagree on whether Hitler harangued the old man, there is no doubt he threatened Hacha with bombing and invasion if he did not sign away his country. Michael Bloch, the author of Ribbentrop, writes that Hitler was no passive observer to the breakup of the country after Munich. “Hitler’s plan was to provoke a civil war in Czecho-Slovakia, by secretly encouraging secessionist movements in Slovakia and Ruthenia: German troops would then intervene to ‘restore order.’”37

  Bullock, too, contradicts Taylor, contending that, after Munich, Hitler began a campaign of subversion to liquidate the independent Czecho-Slovak state. German archives document the pressure Hitler put on Prague. What were Hitler’s motives?

  The German Army was anxious to replace the long, straggling German-Czech frontier, with a short easily-held line straight across Moravia from Silesia to Austria. The German Air Force was eager to acquire new air bases in Moravia and Bohemia. The seizure of Czech Army stocks and of the Skoda arms works, second only to Krupp’s, would represent a major reinforcement of German strength.38

  Moreover, Hitler had long “detested” Czechoslovakia as both a “Slav state…and one allied with the Bolshevik arch-enemy and with France.”39

  A deep-seated hatred of the Czechs—a legacy of his Austrian upbringing (when rabid hostility towards the Czechs had been endemic in the German-speaking part of the Habsburg Empire)—added a further personal dimension to the drive to destroy a Czechoslovakian state allied with the arch-enemies of Germany: the USSR in the east and France in the west.40

  Whatever triggered the crisis or motivated Hitler, it was a blunder of historic magnitude and utterly unnecessary. Having lost the Sudetenland, and now facing a hostile breakaway Slovakia to the east and Germans to the north, west, and south, Prague was already a vassal state. Why send in an army and humiliate a British prime minister who had shown himself willing to accommodate Hitler’s demands for the return of German territories and peoples, if Hitler would only proceed peacefully?

  For little gain, Hitler had burned his bridges to the political leaders of a British Empire he had sought to befriend and who were prepared to work with him for redress of grievances from Versailles. Hitler now had the Skoda arms works. But he had also made a bitter enemy of Great Britain.

  CHAMBERLAIN’S ABOUT-FACE

  AS HITLER RODE INTO Prague, Chamberlain initially reaffirmed his policy of appeasement. On March 15, he rose in the Parliament to say that the British guarantee to preserve the integrity of Czechoslovakia, given after Munich, was no longer binding, for the state of Czechoslovakia no longer existed. The government’s position, the prime minister told the House, has

  radically altered since the Slovak Diet declared the independence of Slovakia. The effect of this declaration put an end by internal disruption to the State whose frontier we had proposed to guarantee and His Majesty’s government cannot accordingly hold themselves bound by this obligation.41

  “It is natural that I should bitterly regret what has now occurred,” Chamberlain went on, “but do not let us on that account be deflected from our course. Let us remember that the desire of all the peoples of this world still remains concentrated on the hopes of peace.”42

  MP Harold Nicolson recorded in his diary that the “feeling in the lobbies is that Chamberlain will either have to go or completely reverse his policy. Unless in his speech tonight, he admits that he was wrong, they feel that resignation is the only alternative. All the tad-poles are beginning to swim into the other camp.”43

  Halifax now began to take command of British policy toward the Reich. He informed the prime minister that his speech of March 15 would no longer do. And there now began to transpire the events that would lead to the decision that would change the history of the world.

  On March 16, Rumania’s minister in London, Virgil Tilea, ran to the Foreign Office to warn that he had learned “from secret and other sources” that the Nazis planned to overrun Hungary and “disintegrate Rumania in the same way as they had disintegrated Czechoslovakia…establishing a German protectorate over the whole country.”44 Hitler’s objective: the Ploesti oil fields. Noting the “extreme urgency” of Britain taking a stand against this imminent “threat,” Tilea asked for a loan of ten million pounds to strengthen Rumania’s defenses.45

  No such German plans or preparations existed. Berlin had no border with Rumania or any quarrel with Rumania, and was negotiating a trade treaty to be signed in a week. Consulted by London, Bucharest emphatically denied it had received any ultimatum and refused to back up its ambassador.

  Yet Tilea spread his wild story through the diplomatic corps and on March 17 “called on Lord Halifax in a state of considerable excitement.”

  As Halifax listened intently, Tilea

  poured forth a story of imminent German action against Romania, of economic demands presented as a virtual ultimatum. What would Britain do? If Romania fought, would Britain support her? Would Britain draw a line beyond which Hitler must not go?…He again asked for a loan to enable Romania to buy armaments from Britain.46

  The British government believed Tilea.

  Writes Manchester, “It was Tilea who suggested that Britain’s position might be strengthened if Poland joined them as a third ally. Halifax and Chamberlain found the prospect appealing.”47

  On March 17 came the first sign of a major policy shift. In a speech in his home city of Birmingham, Chamberlain, to rising applause, charged Hitler with “a flagrant breach of personal faith.” Bitterly reciting Hitler’s words at Munich—“This is the last territorial claim I have to make in Europe…. I shall not be interested in the Czech state anymore and I can guarantee it. We don’t want any Czechs any more”—Chamberlain declaimed: “Is this the last attack upon a small state or is it to be followed by another? Is this in fact a step in the direction of an attempt to dominate the world by force?”48

  On March 21, hosting Daladier, Chamberlain discussed a joint front with France, Russia, and Poland to act together against aggressive German behavior. Chamberlain had drafted the proposal. The four nations were to agree “immediately to consult together as to what steps should be taken to offer joint resistance to any action which constitutes a threat to the political independence of any European state.”49

  Beck torpedoed the joint front. The Poles feared Russia more than Germany. “With the Germans we risk losing our liberty,” Polish marshal Eduard Smigly-Rydz told the French ambassador, “with the Russians we lose our soul.”50 Even Halifax appreciated Poland’s reluctance to rely on Russia for her security: “An intelligent rabbit would hardly be expected to welcome the protection of an animal ten times its size, whom it credite
d with the habits of a boa constrictor.”51

  The same day, March 21, during a stop-off in Berlin on his return from Rome, Lithuania’s foreign minister was invited in to see Ribbentrop. The Lithuanian was given an ultimatum: Return Memel now or the Fuehrer “would act with lightning speed.” Memel was the East Prussian city of 150,000 that Lithuania had seized from a disarmed Germany in 1923. Its people were clamoring to return to Germany. Having seen what happened to the Czechs, the Lithuanian foreign minister needed no further prodding.

  On March 22, Memel was reannexed by the Reich.

  On March 23, the German army marched in.

  On March 24, a seasick Hitler, who had sailed across the Baltic in the pocket battleship Deutschland, rode in triumph through the newest city of the Reich and addressed a delirious throng in the Staadtheater.

  On March 26 came another shock. German-Polish talks on Danzig had broken down.

  On March 29, Ian Colvin, a twenty-six-year-old News-Chronicle correspondent in Berlin with excellent sources inside Hitler’s regime, came to London with “hair-raising details of [an] imminent [Nazi] thrust against Poland.”52 Like Tilea’s report, Colvin’s was a false alarm.

  Four days earlier, March 25, Hitler had issued a secret directive to his army commander in chief: “The Fuehrer does not wish to solve the Danzig question by force. He does not wish to drive Poland into the arms of Britain by this.”53 Hitler did not want war with Poland, he wanted an alliance with Poland. But Halifax and Chamberlain believed Colvin and feared that Beck might cut a deal with Hitler, which was what Hitler had in mind—a deal, not a war. Immediately after the meeting with Colvin, as Chamberlain wrote to his sister, “we then and there decided” Poland must be guaranteed.54