From Stalin’s point of view,
rapprochement
with the West offered several advantages. It would increase trade, and with it the import of technology. It would improve the USSR’s image, whilst keeping the Nazis guessing. It would give Moscow’s loyal communist parties abroad the chance to win acceptance and, by entering the Popular Fronts—as in Spain—to penetrate democratic parliaments and unions. Again there was a public-relations problem, since the Stalinists were given to calling democratic politicians everything from ‘bourgeois exploiters’ to ‘lackeys of international imperialism’; but this did not mean that Stalin had to abandon his discreet relations with Berlin, or the possibility of an eventual deal with Hitler. For the time being, he could keep all options open.
In the years that followed, the Nazis reacted to the rumblings of the West with thinly disguised contempt. Their every step spelled disaster for the Versailles settlement. In July 1934 they almost brought off a coup in Austria, where they murdered the Chancellor, Dr Engelbert Dolfuss, whose Fatherland Front had organized a one-party but anti-Nazi state. In 1935 they celebrated the Saarland’s accession to the Reich, through a plebiscite envisaged by the Treaty, then promptly reintroduced conscription, reconstituted the Luftwaffe, and renounced the disarmament clauses. In March 1936 they openly defied the Treaty by reoccu-pying the demilitarized zone in the Rhineland. In 1937 they pulled out of the British-backed Non-intervention Committee that was trying to keep foreign
forces out of Spain, and signed the Anti-Comintern Pact with Italy. In March 1938 Hitler engineered the
Anschluss
or ‘merger’ with Austria, proclaimed the Greater German Reich, and drove to Vienna in triumph (see Appendix III, p. 1323).
Throughout this period Hitler was boasting of, and exaggerating, the scale of German rearmament. He kept quiet about the fact that he had already told his staff to prepare for war. [
HOSSBACH
] This does not mean that he had prepared a timetable for the events which ensued; on the contrary, the major conflict for which German industrialists and generals were preparing was not envisaged before 1942. In the mean time Hitler would be engaged in the tactics of bluff and threat, in what has aptly been called the policy of ‘peaceful aggression’. He felt that he could get what he wanted either without war or at most by localized conflict. To this end, in the spring of 1938 he began to make noises about the intolerable oppression of Germans in the Sudetenland of Czechoslovakia. By that time the Western leaders could not fail to notice that Nazi Germany was bent on expansion, and that collective security was not producing concrete results. So, at the instigation of the new British Prime Minister, Neville Chamberlain, they embarked on appeasement. Chamberlain was acutely aware that renewed war in Europe would undermine Britain’s fragile economic recovery and her imperial position overseas.
Appeasement, despite its later reputation, need not necessarily have been a policy of abject surrender. It contained elements both of realism and of magnanimity; certainly, in the form that favoured negotiations with Germany, it rejected the cynicism revealed in earlier Franco-British dealings with Italy. As Chamberlain well knew, the Hoare–Laval Pact of December 1935, which simply sought to acquiesce in the Italian attack on Abyssinia, had been disowned both in London and Paris, and had led to the downfall of its inventors. What is more, twenty years after the Great War, liberal opinion largely accepted that German grievances over their minorities in Eastern Europe deserved discussion. Many also agreed with the MacDonald Plan of 1933, which had proposed a balance of armaments in Europe in place of the indefinite prolongation of Allied supremacy. The generals advised that there were only two ways of effective Allied intervention against eventual German aggression in the East. Yet co-operation with Stalin’s Red Army was fraught with dangers; and direct action against Germany in the West could only be undertaken by starting the full-scale war whose avoidance was so heartily desired. All in all, it was not dishonourable for Chamberlain to seek out ‘Herr Hitler’ in Germany, or to seek a resolution of the Sudeten question. It was not the fact of negotiation that was at fault, only the skills and priorities of the negotiators. Chamberlain went as a lamb into the lion’s den, woefully ignorant of the ‘faraway country ’ whose fate hung in the balance. Nor should one imagine that the history of appeasement was confined to the policy of the Western Powers towards Hitler. It has an even longer chapter in their relations at a slightly later date with Stalin. Democratic governments who neglect the moral fundamentals negotiate with dictators at their peril.
53
The Munich Crisis, as it came to be called, unfolded in September 1938 on terms set by Hitler and never seriously challenged. It was concerned with Germany’s
designs on France’s ally Czechoslovakia. Yet France took a back seat; the Czechoslovak government was excluded from the main discussions; and no thought was given to keeping Czechoslovakia’s defences viable. The negotiations were supposed to draw a line on German expansion to the East. Yet they proceeded without the participation of the two most interested parties, namely Poland and the USSR. They were supposed to impress on Hitler the risk he was running. Yet the Western negotiators did not lay their strongest cards on the table. As Hitler rightly sensed, the more outrageous aspects of his contentions were not going to be tested. This, plus Chamberlain’s limitless gullibility, determined the outcome. ‘In spite of the hardness and ruthlessness of his face,’ Chamberlain mused of Hitler, ‘I got the impression that here was a man who could be relied on.’
54
HOSSBACH
O
N
5 November 1937, from 4.15 to 8.30 p.m., a conference was held in the Reich Chancellery in Berlin. It was attended by a group of leading German dignitaries, including Goering, Neurath, and Raeder, and was addressed by Hitler on the subject of ‘opportunities for the development of our position in the field of foreign affairs.’ The contents of his speech, the Führer melodramatically announced, were, in the event of his death, to be regarded as his last testament. They are known from a memorandum written up by Hossbach, the man who took the minutes:
The aim of German policy was to secure and preserve the
Volksmasse
, the racial community and to enlarge it. It was a question of space … German policy had to reckon with two hate-inspired antagonists, Britain and France, to whom a German colossus … was a thorn in the flesh.
Germany’s problem could only be solved by means of force, and this was never without risk … There still remain the questions of ‘when’ and ‘how’. In this matter, there were three cases to be dealt with:
Case 1: the period 1943–5. After this date only a change for the worse, from our point of view, could be expected … If the Führer was still living, it was his unalterable determination to resolve Germany’s problem of space by 1943–5 at the latest.
Case 2: If internal strife in France … should absorb the French completely, then the time for action against the Czechs had come.
Case 3: If France is so ambivalent in war with another state that she cannot proceed against Germany … our first objective, if embroiled in war, must be to overthrow Czechoslovakia and Austria simultaneously …
Poland—with Russia at her rear will have little inclination to engage …
Military intervention by Russia was, in view of Japan’s attitude, more than doubtful…
It was to be assumed that Britain—herself at war with Italy—would decide not to act against Germany …
1
The Hossbach Memorandum has featured more than any other document in controversies over the origins of the Second World War. It was produced by Allied prosecutors at the Nuremberg Trial, and was used to accuse Goering and others for their part in planning the war 1939–45. However, the significance of the Memorandum was greatly deflated when a British historian demonstrated that the Memorandum did not support the views of the Allied prosecutors at Nuremberg. On the contrary, it showed that in November 1937 the Nazis had no concrete plans for war, and that Hitler had no clear assessment of the developing situation. It showed the Führer ranting rather vaguely about the possibility of a very limited war sometime before 1943–5:
Hitler’s exposition was in large part day-dreaming … He did not reveal his innermost thoughts … The memorandum tells us what we know already, that Hitler (like every other German statesman) intended to become the dominant Power in Europe. It also tells us that he speculated how this might happen. His speculations were mistaken. They bear hardly any relation to the actual outbreak of war in 1939. A racing tipster who only reached Hitler’s level of accuracy would not do well for his clients …
2
A. J. P. Taylor’s analysis was all the more surprising since it came from a historian noted for his germanophobia.
Outraged critics denounced Taylor’s alleged disregard for ‘historical context’ and for the dynamics of Nazi expansionism. In mid-December 1937, they insisted, the German Army’s directives were changed to envisage military aggression against Austria and Czechoslovakia. They took this change as justification for their interpretation of the Memorandum, and the conference, as marking ‘the point where the expansion of the Third Reich ceased to be latent and became explicit’.
3
They failed to notice that German military aggression against Austria and Czechoslovakia did not materialize any more than any of the Führer’s other faulty scenarios.
In effect, by overturning the ‘almost universal view that Hitler planned the Second World War’, Taylor was wrongly accused of trying to absolve Hitler from blame. What Taylor successfully demonstrated was the strange combination in the Führer’s make-up of a general aggressive intent and an inability to formulate systematic war plans.
Almost thirty years later, one of the striking features of the debate about the origins of the Second World War may be seen in the absence of any mention of Stalin, or of the dynamic interplay of German and Soviet policy. All the participants, including Taylor, confined themselves to a discussion of Germany’s intentions. None thought it worthwhile to comment on the intentions of the USSR. Historians were faced with the locked doors of Soviet archives. If a Soviet equivalent of the Hossbach memorandum exists, it has never yet seen the light of day. There is no way of knowing whether Stalin did or did not speculate about war in a similar way to Hitler. So, in the absence of documentary evidence about Stalin’s intentions, most commentators have preferred to assume that there is nothing to discuss.
The long tradition of documentary-history writing, therefore, has fostered two opposite extremes. One is to say, in effect: if no documents can be examined, then nothing happened. The other view, well expressed in ‘Taylor’s Law’ as formulated by Taylor’s detractors, says: documents do not signify anything. Both extremes are equally pernicious.
Chamberlain made three visits to Germany. At Berchtesgaden, on 15 September, he received a demand from Hitler for the secession of the Sudetenland—positively ‘the Führer’s last demand’. He promised to have it examined. At Godesberg, on the 23rd, he was faced by an unexpected ultimatum for the evacuation and annexation of the Sudetenland within five days. This was rejected by the British Cabinet, and by all concerned. France and Germany began to mobilize. At Munich, on 29–30 September, Chamberlain met the Führer for the final confrontation in the company of Daladier and of Mussolini, who had suggested the meeting. He handed over a memorandum accepting the substance of the (unacceptable) Godesberg ultimatum. With the help of his distinguished colleagues, he then gave an ultimatum to the Czechs, huddled in an adjoining room, pressing them to accept the unacceptable themselves or to pay for the consequences. His final contribution was to underline the Allied guarantee of a rump Czechoslovakian state, shorn of its magnificent frontier fortifications, and to draft a declaration on Anglo-German friendship. He alighted from his plane waving a paper which he claimed to bring ‘Peace in our time’. He did so in the same spirit which underlay the British Foreign Office’s advice to the England football team that same year—to give the Nazi salute at the start of their match against Germany in Berlin.
Chamberlain’s three rounds with Hitler must qualify as one of the most degrading capitulations in history. Under pressure from the ruthless, the clueless combined with the spineless to achieve the worthless. Chamberlain had no need to concede any part of the Führer’s demands without making cast-iron arrangements for Czechoslovakia’s security; but he did. Beneš, the Czechoslovak President, had no right to sign away his country’s integrity with nothing more than a personal protest; but he did. The outcome was to be summarized by Churchill in the House of Commons:
‘£1 was demanded at the pistol’s point. When it was given, £2 was demanded at the pistol’s point. Finally the Dictator consented to take £1.17s.
6d
. and the rest in promises of goodwill for the future … We have suffered a defeat without a war.’
55
Elsewhere, Churchill wrote that Britain had a choice ‘between shame and war’; ‘we have chosen shame, and we will get war’. Within six months the remnant of Czechoslovakia disintegrated, and Hitler entered Prague.
Munich undoubtedly marked the crucial psychological moment in inter-war diplomacy. It did not yet make war inevitable; what it did do was to sow the confusion in which two fatal assumptions were born. First, it convinced Hitler, and probably Stalin too, that further peaceful aggression would bring further cost-free dividends. Secondly, it created the impression in the West that talking to the Nazis had been a mistake. In the next round of the game, where the map ensured that Poland would be. threatened, Munich ensured that Hitler and Stalin would seek to aggress by peaceful methods; that the West would seek to deter without negotiating; and that the Poles would seek to avoid the fate of Czechoslovakia at all costs. This was the deadly recipe.