The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich: A History of Nazi Germany

by William L. Shirer

Sir Nevile Henderson dutifully forwarded this warning to London, but described it “as clearly biased and largely propaganda.”

Though, according to his own story, the colonel saw several important personages in London, he does not seem to have made much of an impression on them.

Though the British Foreign Office was quick to deny that the Times leader represented the views of the government, Kordt telegraphed Berlin the next day that it was possible that “it derived from a suggestion which reached the Times editorial staff from the Prime Minister’s entourage.”

Whatever they were he would accept them. “My God,” exclaimed the deputy Sudeten leader, Karl Hermann Frank, the next day, “they have given us everything.” But that was the last thing the Sudeten politicians and their bosses in Berlin wanted.

The Wilson railroad station and the airport were full of Jews scrambling desperately to find transportation to safer parts.

He was astounded but highly pleased that the man who presided over the destinies of the mighty British Empire should come pleading to him, and flattered that a man who was sixty-nine years old and had never traveled in an airplane before should make the long seven hours’ flight to Berchtesgaden at the farthest extremity of Germany. Hitler had not had even the grace to suggest a meeting place on the Rhine, which would have shortened the trip by half.

He did not fail to notice train after train of German troops and artillery passing on the opposite track.

Chamberlain, who had scarcely been able to get a word in, was a man of immense patience, but there were limits to it.

In this period the Prime Minister had great confidence in the Fuehrer’s word, remarking privately a day or two later, “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.”

He strongly recommended the stifling of all criticism of Germany in Czechoslovakia “by parties or persons” through legal measures.

But the British and French were in no mood to allow such a matter as the sanctity of treaties to interfere with the course they had set.

And when at 2:15 on the morning of September 21 Newton and Lacroix got Beneš out of bed, bade him withdraw his note of rejection and declared that unless this were done and the Anglo–French proposals were accepted Czechoslovakia would have to fight Germany alone, the President asked the French minister to put it in writing. Probably he had already given up, but he had an eye on history,

But apparently not with resentment that Hitler had deceived him, that Hitler, like a common blackmailer, was upping his demands at the very moment they were being accepted.

military action, and the Fuehrer was determined not only to humiliate President Beneš and the Czech government, which had so offended him in May, but to expose the spinelessness of the Western powers.

When Chamberlain retorted that the German word Diktat applied to it, Hitler answered, “It is not a Diktat at all. Look, the document is headed by the word ‘Memorandum.’”

It did not occur to him, it is evident, that it was up to the Germans, with their outrageous demands, too.

Sunday, September 25, was a lovely day of Indian summer in Berlin, warm and sunny, and since it undoubtedly would be the last such weekend that autumn, half of the population flocked to the lakes and woods that surround the capital.

Throughout the harangue I sat in a balcony just above Hitler, trying with no great success to broadcast a running translation of his words.

When he sat down, Goebbels sprang up and shouted into the microphone: “One thing is sure: 1918 will never be repeated!”

…There weren’t two hundred people there. Hitler looked grim, then angry, and soon went inside, leaving his troops to parade by unreviewed.

President Roosevelt, as perhaps was necessary in view of American sentiment, had weakened his two appeals for peace by stressing that the United States would not intervene in a war nor even assume any obligations “in the conduct of the present negotiations.”

He did not want the German government to stumble into the same mistaken assumptions it had made about America in 1914.

What Hitler did know at this moment was that Prague was defiant, Paris rapidly mobilizing, London stiffening, his own people apathetic, his leading generals dead against him, and that his ultimatum on the Godesberg proposals expired at 2 P.M. the next day.

Under such a domination, life for people who believe in liberty would not be worth living; but war is a fearful thing, and we must be very clear, before we embark on it, that it is really the great issues that are at stake.

I cannot believe that you will take responsibility of starting a world war which may end civilization for the sake of a few days delay in settling this long-standing problem.

Though it was obvious to the smallest mind in Britain that in case of war with Germany, Soviet participation on the side of the West would be of immense value, as Churchill repeatedly tried to point out to the head of the British government, this was a view which seems to have escaped the Prime Minister.

If there were really no risk of a big war, if Chamberlain were going to give Hitler what he wanted in Czechoslovakia without a war, then they saw no point in trying to carry out a revolt.

In the second place, although some of the members of the conspiracy complacently assumed, as did the people of Britain, that Chamberlain was flying to Berchtesgaden to warn Hitler not to make the mistake that Wilhelm II had made in 1914 as to what Great Britain would do in the case of German aggression, Kordt knew better.

In his memoirs Sir Nevile Henderson gave most of the credit for saving the peace at this moment to Mussolini, and in this he has been backed by most of the historians who have written of this chapter in European history.* But surely this is being overgenerous.

Great Britain and France were the only powers that counted in German calculations.

Chamberlain, not Mussolini, made Munich possible, and thus preserved the peace for exactly eleven months.

The answer can be given briefly in their own words—spoken much later when all was over and they were anxious to prove to the world how opposed they had been to Hitler and his catastrophic follies which had brought Germany to utter ruin after a long and murderous war.

Dr. Schacht, who at Nuremberg and in his postwar books clearly exaggerated the importance of his role in the various conspiracies against Hitler, also blamed Chamberlain for the failure of the Germans to carry out the plot on September 28:

Or was this merely an excuse of the German civilians and generals for their failure to act?

For had there been “clear and resolute leadership” why should the generals have hesitated for four days?

We have only the statements of a handful of participants who after the war were anxious to prove their opposition to National Socialism, and what they have said and written in self-defense is often conflicting and confusing.

The Germans, if one may risk a generalization, have a weakness for blaming foreigners for their failures.

But they may be pardoned to some extent for not taking very seriously the warnings of a “revolt” of a group of German generals and civilians most of whom had served Hitler with great ability up to this moment.

Whatever blame may be heaped on the archappeasers in London and Paris, and great it undoubtedly is, the fact remains that the German generals themselves, and their civilian coconspirators, failed at an opportune moment to act on their own.

Chamberlain made no similar effort to see Daladier beforehand to work out a joint strategy for the two Western democracies with which to confront the two fascist dictators.

Chamberlain, as perhaps might have been expected from an ex-businessman and former Chancellor of the Exchequer, wanted to know who would compensate the Czech government for the public property which would pass to Germany in the Sudetenland.

When the Prime Minister objected to the stipulation that the Czechs moving out of the Sudetenland could not even take their cattle (this had been one of the Godesberg demands)—exclaiming, “Does this mean that the farmers will be expelled but that their cattle will be retained?”—Hitler exploded.

After what must have seemed to the morose German dictator an interminable exposition by Chamberlain in proposing further cooperation in bringing an end to the Spanish Civil War (which German and Italian “volunteers” were winning for Franco), in furthering disarmament, world economic prosperity, political peace in Europe and even a solution of the Russian problem, the Prime Minister drew out of his pocket a sheet of paper on which he had written something which he hoped they would both sign and release for immediate publication.

“My good friends,” he said, “this is the second time in our history that there has come back from Germany to Downing Street peace with honor.* I believe it is peace in our time.”

Only Duff Cooper, the First Lord of the Admiralty, resigned from the cabinet, and when in the ensuing Commons debate Winston Churchill, still a voice in the wilderness, began to utter his memorable words, “We have sustained a total, unmitigated defeat,” he was forced to pause, as he later recorded, until the storm of protest against such a remark had subsided.

President Beneš resigned on October 5 on the insistence of Berlin and, when it became evident that his life was in danger, flew to England and exile.

A prosperous industrial nation was split up and bankrupted overnight.

Within the short space of six months, they reminded you, Hitler had conquered Austria and the Sudetenland, adding ten million inhabitants to the Third Reich and a vast strategic territory which opened the way for German domination of southeastern Europe.

In scarcely four and a half years this man of lowly origins had catapulted a disarmed, chaotic, nearly bankrupt Germany, the weakest of the big powers in Europe, to a position where she was regarded as the mightiest nation of the Old World, before which all the others, Britain even and France, trembled.

Winston Churchill, in England, alone seemed to understand. No one stated the consequences of Munich more succinctly than he in his speech to the Commons of October 5: We have sustained a total and unmitigated defeat… We are in the midst of a disaster of the first magnitude. The road down the Danube… the road to the Black Sea has been opened… All the countries of Mittel Europa and the Danube valley, one after another, will be drawn in the vast system of Nazi politics… radiating from Berlin… And do not suppose that this is the end. It is only the beginning… But Churchill was not in the government and his words went unheeded.