Modern Times: The World From the Twenties to the Nineties (70 page)

In any case, whatever the generals intended, they failed to convey the message to the British cabinet. At its decisive meeting on 30 August, only one cabinet minister, Oliver Stanley, mentioned the belief of the German generals that their country was not ready for war. What Beck and his colleagues wanted was an ultimatum – a war-threat. What the cabinet decided was exactly the opposite. As Chamberlain summed up: ‘The cabinet was unanimous in the view that we should not utter a threat to Herr Hitler, that if he went into Czechoslovakia we should declare war on him. It was of the utmost importance that the decision be kept secret.’ Since publicity was of the essence of a firm line being effective, the cabinet decision is incomprehensible, except on the assumption that Chamberlain and others did not want Hitler overthrown.

This raises an important point: the Hitler phenomenon cannot be seen except in conjunction with the phenomenon of Soviet Russia. Just as the fear of Communism put him in power, so it tended to keep him there. Chamberlain was not clear, at this stage, whether Hitler was a total menace or not; he was quite clear Stalin was. The British tended to underestimate the power of the Soviet army. But they rightly feared the political potential of Communist expansion. In an oblique manner Hitler had always underlined the consanguinity of the rival totalitarianisms. The moment the Nazi Party disappeared, he reiterated, ‘there will be another 10 million Communist votes in Germany’. The alternative to him was not liberal democracy, he insisted, but Soviet collectivism. Chamberlain for one accepted this argument. When on 26 September, in the immediate prelude to Munich, General Gamelin gave him a more optimistic picture of Allied strength and they discussed the possibility of Hitler’s overthrow, Chamberlain wanted to know: ‘Who will guarantee that Germany will not become Bolshevistic afterwards?’ Of course no one could give such a pledge. Daladier took a similar line: ‘The Cossacks will rule Europe.’
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So the two men chose the lesser of two evils (as they saw it): concessions to Germany.

The second question is: would the Allies have been better advised to fight in autumn 1938 over Czechoslovakia, than in autumn 1939 over Poland? This too is in dispute; but the answer is surely ‘Yes’. It is true that the pace of Allied rearmament, especially of British air-power, was overtaking Germany’s. But in this sense alone was the strategic equation better in 1939 than in 1938. It is important to grasp that the Munich Conference, which took place in the Brown House on 29–30 September, was not only a diplomatic surrender by Britain and France but a military disaster too. Mussolini, who appeared the star of the show – he was the only one who spoke all four languages – failed to note this point: he thought the only issue was German irridentism and that ‘Hitler had no intention’ of absorbing Czechoslovakia itself.
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But the actual redrawing of the Czech frontiers at Munich was determined, at Hitler’s insistence, as much on military as on racial grounds. No plebiscite was held. Some 800,000 Czechs were absorbed into Germany, and 250,000 Germans left behind as a fifth column.
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The Czechs’ elaborate frontier defences, built with French assistance, were taken over by the Germans. There was now no possibility whatever of the Czechs offering armed resistance to an outright invasion. That involved a massive shift in the strategic balance. As Churchill, who perceived the military significance of the capitulation better than anyone, pointed out in the Munich debate (5 October 1938), the annexation of Austria had given Hitler an extra twelve divisions. Now the dismantling of Czech military power released a further thirty German divisions for action elsewhere.
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In fact the shift was worse than this. The Czechs’ forty divisions were among the best-equipped in Europe: when Hitler finally marched in he got the means to furnish equivalent units of his own, plus the huge Czech armaments industry. This ‘turnaround’ of roughly eighty divisions was equivalent to the entire French army.
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The surrender, as Churchill noted, also meant the end of France’s system of alliances in the east and brought about a moral collapse in the Danube basin. Seeing the Czechs abandoned by the democracies, the small states scuttled for cover or joined, like jackals, in the feast. Poland was allowed to tear off Teschen, which she had coveted since 1919. Hungary, too, got a slice of the Czech carcass. Throughout East—Central Europe and the Balkans, the friendship and favour of the Nazis was now eagerly courted by governments, and fascist parties swelled in influence and pride. German trade was everywhere triumphant. The German economy boomed. In the closing weeks of 1938 Hitler, without firing a shot, appeared to have restored all the splendour of Wilhelmine Germany. Was he not the most successful German statesman since Bismarck? So it appeared.

Yet the end of 1938 marked the watershed in Hitler’s career, not least with the German people. He overestimated their will to power. They supported overwhelmingly his policy of German irridentism. They applauded the
Anschluss:
plebiscites showed 99 per cent approval in Germany and 99.75 per cent in Austria.
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They wanted the Sudetenland back. But there is no evidence that they ever wanted to absorb large populations of non-Germans. There is ample evidence that most Germans did not want war. When on 27 September 1938 Hitler deliberately ordered the 2nd Motorized Division to pass through Berlin on its way to the Czech border, less than two hundred people came out to watch him review it from the Reichskanzlerplatz. He marched back into the building disgusted.
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Thereafter, his brutal moves on the European chessboard, however successful or even triumphant, evoked no spontaneous applause from the German public. There was a total lack of elation when German troops marched into Prague.

Hitler sensed this vacuum in German hearts. But he no longer sought to fill it. He would go forward with or without their enthusiasm. All he insisted on was their obedience. From 1939 he ceased to play the politician, the orator, the demagogue. He became a militarist, working from army headquarters, and by means of secret gangster-pacts. His methods of government began to approximate to Stalin’s, losing their public dimension of approbation and leadership. He ceased to woo: he now sought only to force and terrorize. His speech to the Reichstag on 1 September 1939, justifying his war on Poland, was short and flat; the streets were deserted as he drove to make it. Nor did the crowds turn out when the troops returned victorious. As George Kennan noted from the American embassy, the Berliners refused to cheer or even give the Nazi salute: ‘Not even the most frantic efforts of professional Nazi agitators could provoke them to demonstrations of elation or approval.’ It was the same even when the German troops took Paris.
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As German opinion ceased to keep pace with Hitler’s accelerating eschatology, so British opinion swung against appeasement. It was beginning to do so even at the time of Munich itself, to judge by such newspapers as the
Manchester Guardian, News Chronicle, Daily Telegraph
and
Daily Herald. The Times
, whose editor Geoffrey Dawson was Chamberlain’s closest press confidant, supported Munich; so did the left-wing
New Statesman
, whose chairman was Keynes himself.
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But their enthusiasm soon waned. The bestial wave of anti-Semitism which Goebbels unleashed in Germany during November completed the rout of the appeasers During the winter of 1938–9, the mood in Britain changed to accept war as inevitable. The German occupation of Prague on 15 March 1939, followed
swiftly by the seizure of Memel from Lithuania six days later, convinced most British people that war was imminent. Fear gave place to a resigned despair, and the sort of craven, if misjudged, calculation which led to Munich yielded to a reckless and irrational determination to resist Hitler at the next opportunity, irrespective of its merits.

This of course was precisely the kind of hysterical response which Hitler’s acceleration of history was bound to produce sooner or later. The result was to make nonsense of all his plans, and to lead him into irreparable error and the world into war. Less than a fortnight after the occupation of Prague, on 28 March, Hitler denounced his 1934 pact with Poland, and preparations went ahead for its dismemberment. Poland was to him an unfortunate geographical anomaly. It contained large subject German populations and territories he believed ought to belong to him. But more important was that it barred his invasion route into Russia and so inhibited his plans to deal with the home of ‘bacillus’. It had to submit to him or be destroyed. He saw no reason why the British and the French should resist his plans. If they were not prepared to fight over Czechoslovakia, which made some kind of military sense for them, why should they fight over Poland, which made no sense at all? In any case, why should not these capitalist countries welcome his decision to move Eastwards, ultimately against the heartland of Bolshevism?

Instead, only three days later, the British gave Poland a guarantee that if ‘action was taken which clearly threatened the independence of Poland so that Poland felt bound to resist with her national forces, His Majesty’s Government would at once lend them all the support in their power.’
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Chamberlain made this move without consulting the French government, although they were more or less bound to endorse it.
The Times
, briefed by Chamberlain, hastened to insist that the loosely worded pledge, one of the most ill-considered in British history, only guaranteed Poland’s ‘independence’ not its ‘integrity’ – thus leaving room for the alteration of the Versailles frontiers in Germany’s favour.
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That was Hitler’s interpretation. What he assumed was that the guarantee would lead Britain to put pressure on the Poles, as once on the Czechs, to satisfy his demands, including invasion routes into Russia. He had no intention of provoking war with Britain. In January 1939 he had taken the decision to build a vast high seas fleet, of ten battleships, three battlecruisers, four aircraft-carriers and no less than 249 submarines, and he told Admiral Erich Raeder that war with Britain had to be avoided until the fleet was ready in the mid-1940s.
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He thought in fact that Britain, realizing Imperial preference was not working, was likely to be driven by economic factors to turn in conciliatory mood
to Europe, now dominated by German trade; and this impression was confirmed in July by talks which Helmuth Wohlthat, Director of Goering’s Four Year Plan staff, had in London – thus foreshadowing the move into Europe which did not in fact take place until the 1970s.
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Yet the Polish guarantee did raise problems for Hitler, because the power to invoke it was placed in the hands of the Polish government, not a repository of good sense. Therein lay the foolishness of the pledge: Britain had no means of bringing effective aid to Poland yet it obliged itself to declare war on Germany if Poland so requested. The pledge, however, might become more meaningful if Britain allied herself with Russia. This had long been the aim of the European Left, which saw it as the solution to all their dilemmas – including their desire to resist Hitler while opposing rearmament. By mid-1939 the British and French chiefs of staff favoured a Russian alliance in the sense that they favoured anything which might reduce the military odds they now faced. But following Stalin’s military purges of 1938 they rated the Soviet army below Poland’s, and if it came to a choice would opt for the latter. Since the Russians would not co-operate unless the Poles allowed passage of their troops, and since the Poles were no more willing to permit Soviet troops to pass through Poland to attack Germany than they were to allow German troops through to attack Russia, there was never much possibility of an Anglo—French—Russian military agreement. Nevertheless, an Anglo—French mission set off for Russia on 1 August, by sea (appropriate air transport was not available, an interesting reflection on the present state of British air-power).
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This was enough to determine Hitler on a momentous, if temporary,
renversement des alliances.
Hitler had all along been convinced that war was unavoidable at certain stages of his programme. But at all costs he wanted to avoid the general, unlimited war of attrition and exhaustion which Germany had experienced in 1914–18. He wanted to revert to the short, limited but politically decisive wars which Bismarck had waged in the 1860s and 1870s. The
Blitzkrieg
, for which his army was being equipped and trained, was an integral part of his whole expansionist philosophy. In his view neither the German economy nor the German people could stand more than short, fierce campaigns, of overwhelming power and intensity but very limited duration.
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The last of these lightning wars was to be the decisive one against Russia: thereafter, with a vast Eurasian empire to exploit, Germany could build up the strength to sustain long and global conflict. But until that happened she must be careful to take on enemies singly and above all avoid protracted campaigns on two or more major fronts.

The result was what he privately termed ‘a pact with Satan to drive out the devil’.
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On 28 April, in his last big public oration, he savaged Roosevelt’s windy proposal for non-aggression guarantees, and
signalled in effect that all previous pacts, treaties or assumptions were now invalid. Henceforth his only guideline would be the interests of the German people, as he conceived them. Stalin’s response to this speech was eager. He feared a German invasion more than any other development, internal or external. It was the absence of a German enemy in 1918–20 which alone had permitted the Bolshevik state to survive. At the Central Committee plenary session of 19 January 1925 he had laid down Soviet policy on war between capitalist states: ‘Should [such a] war begin … we will have to take part, but we will be the last to take part so that we may throw the decisive weight into the scales, a weight which should prove the determining factor.’ Since May 1935, while publicly pursuing a Popular Front policy against ‘international fascism’, he had privately put out periodic feelers to persuade the Nazis to relinquish their anti-Soviet crusade and settle for a totalitarian brotherhood of mutual respect and divided spoils. Germany’s evident decision, in March, to carve slices out of Poland provided a promising occasion to begin such a new relationship and the prospect of the democracies fighting for Poland was an added reason for coming to terms with Hitler and keeping out of the war – for the present. On 3 May Stalin sacked the Jew Litvinov and replaced him as Foreign Minister by Molotov: a clearance of the decks for talks with Hitler. Eight days later, the outbreak of large-scale fighting with Japanese forces in the Far East gave Stalin an added incentive to make an agreement, for he, no more than Hitler, wanted a two-front struggle.
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