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And—what is most important to this history at this point—the German generals agree unanimously that Germany would have lost the war, and in short order.
But from what is now known of the Luftwaffe’s strength at this moment, the Londoners and the Parisians, as well as the Prime Minister and the Premier, were unduly alarmed.
As Churchill, backed up by every serious Allied military historian, has written, “The year’s breathing space said to be ‘gained’ by Munich left Britain and France in a much worse position compared to Hitler’s Germany than they had been at the Munich crisis.”
Germany was in no position to go to war on October 1, 1938, against Czechoslovakia and France and Britain, not to mention Russia. Had she done so, she would have been quickly and easily defeated, and that would have been the end of Hitler and the Third Reich.
Because her Army, when the Reich was fully mobilized, could never be much more than half the size of that of Germany, which had nearly twice her population, and because her ability to produce arms was also less, France had laboriously built up her alliances with the smaller powers in the East on the other flank of Germany—and of Italy: Czechoslovakia, Poland, Yugoslavia and Rumania, which, together, had the military potential of a Big Power. The loss now of thirty-five well-trained, well-armed Czech divisions, deployed behind their strong mountain fortifications and holding down an even larger
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The Poet Laureate, John Masefield, composed a poem, a paean of praise, entitled “Neville Chamberlain,” which was published in the Times September 16.
All commercial and transport materials, “especially the rolling stock of the railway system,” were to be handed over to the Germans undamaged. “Finally, no foodstuffs, goods, cattle, raw material, etc., are to be removed.”54 The hundreds of thousands of Czechs in the Sudetenland were not to be allowed to take with them even their household goods or the family cow.
At the conclusion of the Godesberg talks, the British and French correspondents—and the chief European correspondent of the New York Times, who was an English citizen—had scurried off for the French, Belgian and Dutch frontiers, none of them wishing to be interned in case of war.
It must be remembered that all three of these men, who had begun by serving the Nazi regime, were anxious after the war to prove their opposition to Hitler and their love of peace.
The reference is to Disraeli’s return from the Congress of Berlin in 1878.
For the first time Hitler is on the verge of setting out to conquer non-Germanic lands.
And though the British Prime Minister was gullible almost beyond comprehension in accepting Hitler’s word, there was some ground for his believing that the German dictator would halt when he had digested the Germans who previously had dwelt outside the Reich’s frontier and were now within it.
But also—and perhaps this was forgotten in London—he had preached in many a turgid page in Mein Kampf that Germany’s future lay in conquering Lebensraum in the East. For more than a millennium this space had been occupied by the Slavs.
The youth’s father had been among ten thousand Jews deported to Poland in boxcars shortly before, and it was to revenge this and the general persecution of Jews in Nazi Germany that he went to the German Embassy intending to kill the ambassador, Count Johannes von Welczeck.
There was irony in Rath’s death, because he had been shadowed by the Gestapo as a result of his anti-Nazi attitude; for one thing, he had never shared the anti-Semitic aberrations of the rulers of his country.
A number of German insurance firms faced bankruptcy if they were to make good the policies on gutted buildings (most of which, though they harbored Jewish shops, were owned by Gentiles) and damaged goods. The destruction in broken window glass alone came to five million marks ($1,250,000) as a Herr Hilgard, who had been called in to speak for the insurance companies, reminded Goering; and most of the glass replacements would have to be imported from abroad in foreign exchange, of which Germany was very short.
Hilgard, on behalf of the insurance companies, pointed out that if their policies were not honored to the Jews, the confidence of the people, both at home and abroad, in German insurance would be forfeited. On the other hand, he did not see how many of the smaller companies could pay up without going broke.
The insurance companies would pay the Jews in full, but the sums would be confiscated by the State and the insurers reimbursed for a part of their losses. This did not satisfy Herr Hilgard, who, judging by the record of the meeting, must have felt that he had fallen in with a bunch of lunatics.
The Field Marshal had had enough of this commercial-minded man. Herr Hilgard was dismissed, disappearing into the limbo of history.
A representative of the Foreign Office dared to suggest that American public opinion be considered in taking further measures against the Jews.
After further lengthy discussion it was agreed to solve the Jewish question in the following manner: eliminate the Jews from the German economy; transfer all Jewish business enterprises and property, including jewelry and works of art, to Aryan hands with some compensation in bonds from which the Jews could use the interest but not the capital.
As Heydrich put it toward the close of the meeting: “In spite of the elimination of the Jews from economic life, the main problem remains, namely, to kick the Jew out of Germany.” Count Schwerin von Krosigk, the Minister of Finance, the former Rhodes scholar who prided himself on representing the “traditional and decent Germany” in the Nazi government, agreed “that we will have to do everything to shove the Jews into foreign countries.”
A good many Jews had been murdered and tortured and robbed before, but these crimes, except for those which took place in the concentration camps, had been committed mostly by brown-shirted rowdies acting out of their own sadism and greed while the State authorities looked on, or looked the other way. Now the German government itself had organized and carried out a vast pogrom.
World opinion was shocked and revolted by such barbarity in a nation which boasted a centuries-old Christian and humanist culture.
But neither the leaders of the Christian churches nor the generals nor any other representatives of the “good” Germany spoke out at once in open protest.
When Ribbentrop drove through the streets they were completely deserted, and several cabinet ministers and other leading figures in the French political and literary worlds, including the eminent presidents of the Senate and the Chamber, MM. Jeanneney and Herriot respectively, refused to attend the social functions accorded the Nazi visitor.
They must forget their “history,” which was “schoolboy nonsense,” and do as the Germans bade.
Specifically, Czechoslovakia must leave the League of Nations, drastically reduce the size of her Army—“because it did not count anyway”—join the Anti-Comintern Pact, accept German direction of her foreign policy, make a preferential trade agreement with Germany, one condition of which was that no new Czech industries could be established without German consent,* dismiss all officials and editors not friendly to the Reich and, finally, outlaw the Jews, as Germany had done under its Nuremberg Laws. (“With us, the Jews will be destroyed,” Hitler told his visitor.)
The one courageous move of this government, which had become so servile to Berlin, quickly turned into a disaster which destroyed it.
this time the Nazi “telegram” technique had been perfected.
And in so doing he could make it appear—he, who, alone in Europe, had mastered the new technique of bloodless conquest, as the Anschluss and Munich had proved—that the President of Czechoslovakia had actually and formally asked for it. The niceties of “legality,” which he had perfected so well in taking over power in Germany, would be preserved in the conquest of a non-Germanic land.
And once on it, and hurtling down it, Hitler, like Alexander and Napoleon before him, could not stop.
That night he slept in Hradschin Castle, the ancient seat of the kings of Bohemia high above the River Moldau where more recently the despised Masaryk and Beneš had lived and worked for the first democracy Central Europe had ever known.
Neither Britain nor France made the slightest move to save it, though at Munich they had solemnly guaranteed Czechoslovakia against aggression. Since that meeting not only Hitler but Mussolini had reached the conclusion that the British had become so weak and their Prime Minister, as a consequence, so accommodating that they need pay little further attention to London.
“These men are not made of the same stuff,” he was saying, “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.”
It is interesting that the Prime Minister did not even wish to accuse Hitler of breaking his word.
Coulondre, unlike Henderson at this period, was not an envoy who could be browbeaten by the Germans.
He jettisoned his prepared speech and quickly jotted down notes for one of quite a different kind.
The Prime Minister at last saw that Adolf Hitler had deceived him.
While I am not prepared to engage this country by new and unspecified commitments operating under conditions which cannot now be foreseen, yet no greater mistake could be made than to suppose that because it believes war to be a senseless and cruel thing, this nation has so lost its fiber that it will not take part to the utmost of its power in resisting such a challenge if it ever were made.
At this meeting Ribbentrop also assured Ciano that Munich had revealed the strength of the isolationists in the U.S.A. “so that there is nothing to fear from America.”
Hitler also demanded that the Czechoslovak National Bank turn over part of its gold reserve to the Reichsbank.
“When I get worked up,” he once told Dr. Paul Schmidt, “I eat half a pound of ham, and that soothes my nerves.”
Later, at his trial in Nuremberg, the State Secretary argued that in his memoranda of such meetings he had purposely exaggerated his Nazi sentiments in order to cover his real anti-Nazi activities.
Poland, like Germany and indeed in connivance with her, had just seized a strip of Czech territory.
This apparently did not impress Beck, but in the end he agreed to think the problem over further.
It had taken Colonel Beck, like so many others who have figured in these pages, some time to awaken and to arrive at such a pessimistic view.
Even the weak and peaceful Weimar Republic had never accepted what it regarded as the Polish mutilation of the German Reich.
The Germans forgot—or perhaps did not wish to remember—that almost all of the German land awarded Poland at Versailles, including the provinces of Posen and Polish Pomerania (Pomorze), which formed the Corridor, had been grabbed by Prussia at the time of the partitions when Prussia, Russia and Austria had destroyed the Polish nation.
In 1926 Marshal Pilsudski, the hero of the 1918 revolution, had marched on Warsaw, seized control of the government and, though an old-time Socialist, had gradually replaced a chaotic democratic regime with his own dictatorship.
