54: Hitler's Road to War
By Robert Leckie
The year 1938 was fateful for Europe and the world. Only nineteen year previously Prime Minister David Lloyd George of Britain had warned his Versailles colleagues of the folly of ringing Germany with small buffer states, some of them with no experience of self-government, all of them containing large masses of Germans. Here was the racial tie, like an unseverable umbilical cord, with which Hitler might draw these states inside his Third Reich, and in 1938 he began to seize it to launch his program of Anschluss, or annexation.
The techniques would become familiar. Nazi agents inside the target countries were to excite the Anschluss aspirations of the German communities, to undermine the existing government, with no small assistance from German radio broadcasts, and to create the crisis that would give Hitler his excuse for the takeover.
Hitler had tried a coup in Austria three years earlier, when about 150 Austrian Nazis in army uniforms invaded the Chancellery, murdered Chancellor Engelbert Dolfuss and tried to proclaim a Nazi state. They were captured, eleven were hanged and most of the rest given long prison sentences. In February 1938, however, Hitler relied more upon himself than foreign agents. First he secured from Benito Mussolini a promise that he would not interfere in the subversion of his norther neighbor. Next, Austrian Chancellor Kurt von Schuschnigg was treated like a captive, bullied, made to fear for his life and forced to sign a document tantamount to the surrender of his country to Germany. German troops then streamed over the border, and with Austria firmly in Hitler's fist, the people voted almost 100 percent for Anschluss.
Hitler now cast his covetous eye on the Sudetenland of western Czechoslovakia, an area inhabited by Germans. He announced that he would 'protect' the Sudeten Germans against the 'atrocities' of the Czech government. And here, at last, it seemed that the democracies had awakened to the danger. Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain of Great Britain telegraphed Hitler requesting a meeting. Der Führer agreed to meet him at Berchtesgaden. At sixty-nine years of age, never having flow in an airplane before, Chamberlain made the four-hour flight from London to Munich.
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Neville Chamberlain was one of those rich men's sons who go into politics looking for something to do. . . . He trusted people and believed what they said. In dealing with an accomplished liar like Hitler, this was a fatal flaw.
Hitler greeted him, smiling broadly, the soul of charm. Chamberlain asked for a 'man to man' talk. Hitler agreed. They withdrew to a private chamber, a bleak, sparsely finished room. Hitler began to speak, his words punctuated by the rattle of the rain against the window pane. Chamberlain listened politely. Then his eyebrows rose. Hitler was shouting, pouring out a catalog of the crimes of Versailles. Two thirds through his speech, Der Führer exploded in rage. He became the legendary Carpet Chewer, screaming, pop-eyed, apoplectic, cursing the names of Czechoslovakia and its president, Eduard Beneš. Chamberlain was stunned. He had never seen a statesman rave before.
Hitler again changed themes, conferring, this time, a purring accolade upon himself and Germany. Two hours and a half passed, and the sound of the rain and Hitler's voice still filled Chamberlain's ears. He had spoken scarcely half a dozen sentences. At last, after Hitler warned that if a world war were to erupt over Czechoslovakia, he wanted it to come now, while he was still young, Chamberlain interrupted to insist that the use of force must be excluded.
"Force!" Hitler repeated angrily. "Who speaks of force? Herr Beneš applies force against my country in the Sudetenland. Herr Beneš mobilized in May, not I. I shall not put up with this any longer! I shall settle this question in one way or another. I shall take matters into my own hands!"
Chamberlain was visibly alarmed. "If I have understood you aright," he said, "you are determined to proceed against Czechoslovakia in any case. If this is so, why did you let me come to Berchtesgaden? In the circumstances, it is best for me to return at once. Anything else now seems pointless."
Hitler was startled. He was unaccustomed to being corrected. He adopted a soothing tone and spoke of self-determination for the Sudeten Germans. Chamberlain said he could not discuss such a proposal without consulting his colleagues. He would return home immediately -- Hitler looked up in dismay -- but come back to Germany again -- Hitler smiled in relief.
The British prime minister went home convinced that Hitler would invade Czechoslovakia to gain the Sudetenland, starting another world war if necessary. He did not realize that Der Führer was again bluffing the democracies, that he knew he was not yet strong enough to fight France, Britain and Czechoslovakia, possessor of the finest small army in Europe, easily held mountain defenses and the giant Skoda arsenal, second only to Germany's own Krupp works. Nor could he risk provoking the Soviet Union, the tradition power broker of Eastern Europe. But Neville Chamberlain still had his childlike trust in Hitler.
"I got the impression that here was a man who could be relied upon to keep his word," he said, a few days after his own ordeal at the Berghof. He believed Der Führer when he said the Sudetenland was his last territorial claim in Europe, and in the interests of peace he was prepared to give it to him.
The French were simply terrified of Hitler. Premier Daladier knew that for all its superiority in numbers, the French Army was poorly trained and equipped, and its air force was a travesty. The Popular Front's shortened work week and nationalization of the munitions industry had done their debilitating work. Worse for France, the Spanish Civil War was winding down, with the tide turning in favor of Franco's forces. France, flanked on the Mediterranean by Il Duce, facing Der Führer in the east, would soon confront still a third Fascist dictator -- El Caudillo (The Leader) -- across the Pyrenees. What was needed was time, and the sellout of the Sudetenland would provide that time.
The Soviets also informed a disillusioned and disheartened President Beneš that if France would not fight for Czechoslovakia, neither would they. There was nothing for this gallant, forsaken little country to do but to bow its head and extend its arm for the amputation.
It took place in Munich on September 30, 1938. Chamberlain, Daladier, Hitler and Mussolini were present. The Soviet Union was not invited and the Czechs were their only to sign. A memorandum was drawn acceding to German demands on the Sudetenland, and it was this that the Czechs signed. "They wished," they said, "to register their protest before the world against a decision in which they had no part."
But the world wasn't listening. It heard only Hitler's renewed pledge to make no more territorial acquisitions and the cheers that greeted Neville Chamberlain upon his triumphal return to London. He read to the ecstatic crowd a pledge of everlasting Anglo-German friendship signed by himself and Hitler. Wielding his familiar umbrella with one hand, with the other he waved this document in the air, crying: "I believe it is peace for our time."
To some other members of his party it was rather "war for our time." Winston Churchill said, "We have sustained a total and unmitigated defeat," and Duff Cooper resigned as first lord of the admiralty. In the main, however, Chamberlain was supported by both his party and his people.
Meanwhile, Nazi agents were already at work subverting Czechoslovakia for the ultimate takeover. On March 15, 1939, Hitler entered Prague in triumph. Without firing a shot, merely by running a magnificent bluff, he had annexed an entire country together with its army and its arsenal and secured his southeastern flank. Nor was Hitler the only hyena going for the carcass. Within twenty-four hours Poland demanded from Czechoslovakia and received the frontier district of Teschen.
But Der Führer had already turned north, demanding and receiving from Lithuania the port of Memel on the Baltic. Next, Mussolini, jealous as the ignored junior partner of the newly formed Rome-Berlin Axis, seized the little state of Albania across the Adriatic Sea, prompting President Roosevelt to ask both Führer and Duce to promise not to take more land for the next ten or twenty-five years. "A result of infantile paralysis!' Mussolini sneered.
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Adolf Hitler was indubitably the chief cause of World War II. But it is also true that in the beginning, after he took power in 1933, he did not actively seek it. He was only, in a sense, spurred along the war path by the collapse of the opposition to him of the German General Staff, the 'victory fever' that infected him after his early successes and inflated his ego and the complaisant, accommodating attitude of the Western Allies.
Hitler's original and true purpose, announced in November 1937, was to obtain Lebensraum, that is, living space for Germany's expanding population. Without, he believed, Germany would never be self-sufficient, especially in food. To buy food abroad would consume Germany's foreign exchange, and also make it dependent on foreign supply, which could be cut off in time of war. The thinly populated countries of Eastern Europe, often a prize of foreign conquering armies, included vast, fertile farmland.
Western statesmen generally misconstrued Hitler's expansion into the East -- particularly into the abominated Soviet Union -- as a diversion of danger from the West. They did not speak publicly of this view, but only in private conversations and in talks with Hitler himself. In November 1937, Lord Halifax, second in command of Neville Chamberlain's government, gave Hitler to understand that he would have a free hand in the East. In February 1938, Sir Neville Henderson, British ambassador in Berlin, gave much the same assurance. That same month, Anthony Eden resigned as foreign minister after Chamberlain's response to his protests was to advise him to 'go home and take an aspirin.' He was replaced by the Germanophilic Lord Halifax.
With such encouragement, Hitler prepared to implement his plans for Lebensraum, only to find them opposed by the General Staff. They protested his occupation of the Rhineland because they feared the French army; they were apprehensive of the risks of sending troops to Franco in the Spanish Civil War; and they were against his march into Austria. But these protests and objections were minimal in comparison to the solid wall of opposition erected by the generals against the move into Czechoslovakia.
General Ludwig Beck, the chief of staff and a constant critic of Hitler's intuitive style of leadership, drafted a memorandum arguing that Der Führer's aggressive Lebensraum program would lead to worldwide catastrophe and German ruin. Beck's objections were read to a conference of top generals, who approved them and then sent them to Hitler -- who ignored them. Beck resigned, and became the chief architect of a generals' plot to overthrow Hitler. Because of the Czech capitulation, however, the conspiracy fell apart, leaving the generals in disarray and Hitler, now in complete command, of the Wehrmacht, pluming himself on his own genius.
"Most people have no imagination," he cried. "They are blind to the new, the surprising things. Even the generals are sterile. They are imprisoned in the coils of their technical knowledge. The creative genius stands always outside the circle of the experts."
Prior to his entry into Prague, Hitler had already turned to Poland with what seemed moderate demands: return of part of the port of Danzig and a free passage to East Prussia through the "Polish Corridor." They were refused. The Poles had an exaggerated idea of their own strength. Also at that time there had risen in the West an incredible spirit of euphoria. It was born of the belief that their rush to rearm, during the respite granted since Munich, had placed the dictators on the defensive. Chamberlain spoke privately of a new disarmament conference and said hopes for peace had never been so sanguine. It was then that Hitler invaded Czechoslovakia. Chamberlain was crushed, then outraged. On March 29 [1939], he sent Poland an offer of support against "any action which threatened Polish independence."
History may be searched for an about face so complete and so fraught with consequence. Chamberlain placed his country's fate in the hands of a foreign, faraway government, and one never celebrated for its stability. Colonel Joseph Beck, the Polish foreign minister, later admitted that he decided to accept the British offer between 'two flicks of the ash' from the cigarette he was smoking. So casually do statesmen make decisions involving the life or death of millions!
Britain, of course, did realize that there was no way that the Western Allies could come to Poland's aid except through its neighbor, the U.S.S.R., though Chamberlain did make some half-hearted motions in that direction. But the Soviet Union quite understandably wanted no defensive arrangements except on its own typically stringent terms. Moreover, the nations of eastern Europe have always regarded Russian reinforcement as a prelude to occupation. Thus, nothing came of these dilatory talks; and yet the Anglo-French guarantee of Poland remained in force.
It stunned and frustrated Hitler. Here, the Western Powers who had been so accommodating were now without warning openly hostile. And they were also rearming. If he waited, it might be too late. So he must quicken his steps! But to do so might bring the Soviet Union in against him and so ignite another world war: for Germany, another war on two fronts, dreaded bête noire of Hitler's dreams. It seemed also to Hitler that the cool calm Britain of history would never have embarked on such a provocative course without first having secured the Soviets' approval. So he must detach the U.S.S.R. from this supposed alliance, he must swallow his hatred and fear of communism and approach with a smile the one man in the world he despised as the scum of the earth. Joseph Stalin.
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