Hitler (109 page)

Thus everything was prepared, more thoroughly and with seemingly greater chances of success than ever again. Heinz's shock troop, well provided with arms and explosives, was in readiness in private houses in Berlin. All military and police measures had been arranged for. Plans for the smooth take-over of the radio were ready, and proclamations to the populace drafted. Halder had announced that the signal to strike would be given the moment Hitler issued the marching order against Czechoslovakia. Everyone was waiting.

With the London declaration of September 26 that in case of an attack on Czechoslovakia England would take her place at France's side, the other side at last seemed to have taken that resolute posture that was so essential to the conspirators' plans. In the course of September 27 they even succeeded in drawing the hesitating Brauchitsch into the operation. At noon Hitler issued readiness orders for the first wave of attacks and a few hours later ordered the mobilization of nineteen divisions. General mobilization was expected for the following day at 2
P.M.
Erich Kordt was going to insure that the big double door behind the guard at the entrance to the chancellery was opened. Toward noon Brauchitsch went to hear Hitler's decision. Witzleben's group waited impatiently in the defense district headquarters on Hohenzollerndamm; the general himself was visiting Halder at army High Command headquarters. Heinz's shock troop awaited orders in its quarters. At this point, with all in readiness, a courier brought word to Chief of Staff Halder that Hitler had, on Mussolini's mediation, consented to a softer line and had agreed to a conference in Munich.

The news was a bombshell. Each of the participants in the plot instantly realized that the basis for the whole plan of action had been removed. Confusion and numbness gripped them all. Only Gisevius, one of the civilian conspirators, tried in a desperate torrent of words to persuade Witzleben to strike anyhow. The whole undertaking had been based too exclusively upon a single pivot in foreign policy; now, any chance for action was lost. This, strictly speaking, had been the crucial though perhaps inevitable dilemma of the project for a coup all along: it depended on certain moves of Hitler, on certain reactions of the Western powers. The conspirators were not mistaken about Hitler's nature; their plan failed because they had not realized that England's intentions had always been to give Hitler the chance, by concessions, “to be a good boy,” as Henderson put it. “We could not be as candid with you as you were with us,” Halifax regretfully told Theo Kordt after the Munich Conference.
⁹³

The shock had reverberations that extended far beyond the moment. Merely the news of Chamberlain's flight to Berchtesgaden had had a paralyzing effect on the conspirators; now the resistance as a whole suffered a collapse from which it never again really recovered. Granted that it had all along been burdened by scruples, conflicts of loyalty and problems with the oath of allegiance. Granted, too, that the participants, in their protracted nocturnal discussions and private soul-searchings, had repeatedly come up against the limits forged by upbringing and reinforced by habit: the limits where the call of conscience ended and overthrow of Hitler seemed like betrayal. The entire history of the German resistance displays this conflict, which robbed the actors of that ultimate resolution without which they could not succeed. But now, in addition, the conspirators were forced to the belief that Hitler could master any situation, that fortune was with him, that history was on his side.

“It would have been the end of Hitler,” Goerdeler wrote to an American friend at this time. And though this statement leaves open a number of questions, the prediction that immediately followed was fulfilled to the letter: “In shrinking from a small risk, Mr. Chamberlain made war inevitable. The English and the French people will now have to defend their freedom with arms, unless they prefer a slave's existence.”
⁹⁴

 

On the following day, toward 12:45 P.M. on September 29, the conference of the heads of government of England, France, Italy, and Germany began in Munich. Hitler had insisted on an immediate meeting because he was firmly determined to march into the Sudetenland on October 1. In order to synchronize policy with Mussolini, he went to Kufstein to meet II Duce; and there is every indication that at this time he was still half determined to wreck the conference so that he could after all force through a total triumph. At any rate, over a map he explained to Mussolini his plans for a blitzkrieg against Czechoslovakia and the subsequent campaign against France. He let himself be persuaded, much against his will, to postpone these plans for the present, but left no doubt about his intentions: “Either the conference is successful in a short time, or the solution will take place by force of arms.”
⁹⁵

However, there was no need for such sharp alternatives. The game of the Western powers, especially England, was to let Hitler know that he could have the Sudetenland without war; all four powers had long since conceded the justice of his claim, and the meeting served solely to draw up the text of this agreement.
⁹⁶
The absence of any differences of opinion, as well as the sudden convocation of the conference, were the reasons for its unusually smooth course. After the exchange of greetings Hitler preceded the other participants into the meeting hall of the newly built Führerbau on Munich's Königsplatz. He dropped into one of the heavy armchairs around the low round table and invited his guests with a nervous gesture to take seats also. He was pale and excited, and initially copied Mussolini's selfassured manner, talking, laughing, or looking grim when Mussolini did. Chamberlain seemed careworn and aristocratic, Daladier quiet and uncomfortable.

Right at the start Hitler categorically rejected the request that representatives of Czechoslovakia participate. The powers remained among themselves, and soon Daladier, to whom Hitler turned in particular, was complaining about “the pigheadedness of Benes” and the influence of the “warmongers in France.”
⁹⁷
Gradually ambassadors and advisers entered the room and took up positions around the negotiating table as auditors. There was a constant coming and going as the conference repeatedly dissolved into a number of individual conversations. Early in the afternoon Mussolini had presented the draft of an agreement that in reality had been worked out the night before by Göring, Neurath, and Weizsäcker in order to anticipate Ribbentrop, who was pushing for military action. That draft was the basis for the Munich Agreement, which was signed that night, between 2:00 and 3:00
A.M.
It provided for occupation of the Sudeten region between October 1 and 10; a commission consisting of representatives of the four powers and Czechoslovakia were to work out the details. England and France undertook to guarantee the integrity of the diminished republic. All the participants seemed content for a moment; only French Ambassador François-Poncet exclaimed with a touch of uneasiness:
“Voilà comme la France traite les seuls alliés qui lui étaient restés fidèles.”
⁹⁸
While secretaries and aides were busy making copies, the heads of state sat and stood around indecisively. Daladier had slumped exhausted into one of the armchairs; Mussolini chatted with Chamberlain. But Hitler, as one of the participants reported, stood motionless to one side, arms folded, staring into space.

His glumness continued throughout the next day. When Chamberlain called on him during the noon hours in his apartment on Prinzregentenstrasse, he was unusually monosyllabic and far from responding enthusiastically to Chamberlain's proposal for a further agreement that they henceforth settle problems by consultation. His irritation increased when he learned that the populace had hailed the British Prime Minister with loud ovations as he drove through Munich. Clearly, the experience of two days before in Berlin was being repeated: the people wére not yet ready for the “first-class tasks” Hitler meant to set them. Chamberlain seemed to be the man of the hour.

But Hitler was upset not only by jealousy and the all too apparent apathy of the people toward the prospect of war. Under closer study his annoyance can be traced to far more complex causes. To be sure, the Munich Agreement was a personal triumph for him. Without the application of open force he had won an extensive area from a superior coalition. He had divested Czechoslovakia of its famous system of fortifications, dramatically improved his own strategic position, acquired new industries, and forced the hated President Benes into exile. In fact “in the history of Europe there had not been for centuries... such profound changes without war.”
⁹⁹
To top it all, Hitler had won the approval of the selfsame great powers who were paying the piper. Once again he had created the classical Fascist constellation, the league between revolutionary force and established power. Significantly, shortly after the signing of the Munich Agreement, Czechoslovakia repudiated her pact with the Soviet Union and banned the Communist Party.

But all these triumphs seemed to Hitler too dearly bought. For he had been forced to set his signature to an agreement that could bind him, if not for the long run, yet long enough to upset his timetable and thus his grand design. He had wanted to march into Prague in the fall, just as he had marched into Vienna six months ago; and now he felt that he had been cheated out of both his timetable and the conqueror's glory. Schacht heard him say: “That damned Chamberlain has spoiled my parade into Prague.” And in January, 1939, shaking his head in astonishment, he told the Hungarian Foreign Minister that he had not thought it possible “that Czechoslovakia would be served up to me by her friends.” As late as February, 1945, in those ruminations in the bunker, he discharged his rage against the “big capitalist philistines”: “We should have started the war in 1938. That was our last chance to keep it localized. But they yielded to us everywhere. Like cowards they gave in to all our demands. That actually made it difficult to seize the initiative for hostilities. We missed a unique opportunity at Munich.”
¹⁰⁰

Back of all this there was also his old tendency to drive matters to the extreme, to try the great gamble with his back to the wall. The Munich Agreement had been too facile to satisfy his nerves. He despised quick solutions and found, as he put it, “the prospect of being able to buy oneself off cheaply... dangerous.” Again and again, his peculiar notions of fate overlaid his political sagacity. And apparently, from Munich on, he had determined how to deal with this refractory nation, which still resisted him in spite of all its cheering: he would bind it irrevocably to him by an extreme challenge sealed in blood.

Against this triple background of cool scheduling, the requirements of his nerves, and mythologizing conceptions of politics, Hitler became more and more bent on war. Chamberlain's complaisance had taken him “in a sense by surprise,” he later almost apologized. He now felt nothing but comtempt for his opponents. Speaking to his generals he mocked the enemy as “little worms.” In a speech in Weimar on November 6 he alluded, with unmistakable reference to Chamberlain, to the “umbrella types of our former bourgeois party world,” and called the French Maginot Line the
limes
of a nation preparing to die.
¹⁰¹

Hitler's bellicosity scarcely accorded with the real relations of forces and can be viewed as a first sign of his incipient loss of contact with reality. For today it is generally accepted that in the fall of 1938 he would have survived an armed conflict for only a few days. The opinion of Allied and German military experts, the documents and statistics, permit no room for doubt. General Jodi declared at the Nuremberg trial: “It was entirely out of the question, with five fighting divisions and seven armored divisions in the western fortification, which was nothing but a large construction site, to keep 100 French divisions at bay. From a military point of view that was impossible.”
¹⁰²
The softness of the Western powers therefore seems all the more incomprehensible. Beyond all the practical reasons for the policy of appeasement, their conduct seems most convincingly explained as Hitler explained it, as a form of political resignation. The peculiar compound of agreement with Hitler, submission to blackmail and sheer bewilderment, might possibly explain their betrayal of solemn obligations to their allies. But they were also betraying traditional European values, inasmuch as Hitler proclaimed his hostility to those values in almost every one of his speeches, his decrees, and his actions. Oddly enough, the Western powers did not seem to have considered the long-range political repercussions, in particular, the devastating loss of prestige that Munich would inevitably produce. England and France lost almost all credibility. Henceforth their word, their pacts, seemed to be written in water; and soon other countries, especially those of Eastern Europe, began making their own deals with Hitler. But above all the Soviet Union did not forget that the Western powers had excluded it from Munich; and only four days after the conference the German ambassador in Moscow indicated that Stalin was “drawing conclusions” and would be reviewing his foreign policy.

Meanwhile, Chamberlain and Daladier had returned to their capitals. But instead of the outraged demonstrations they had expected, they were lustily cheered as though, a Foreign Office official commented, the people were “celebrating a great victory over an enemy, instead of the betrayal of a small ally.” Depressed, Daladier pointed to the cheering thousands and whispered: “The idiots!” Chamberlain, more naive and more optimistic than his French colleague, waved a sheet of paper in the air on his arrival in London and announced “peace in our time.” It is difficult in retrospect to empathize with the spontaneous feeling of relief that once more united Europe; it is difficult to summon up respect for the illusions of the time. In London the crowd in front of 10 Downing Street began singing “For He's a Jolly Good Fellow.”
Paris Soir
offered Chamberlain “a patch of French soil” for fishing, and commented that it would be impossible “to imagine a more fruitful symbol of peace.”'
¹⁰³
When, in the subsequent House of Commons debate, Winston Churchill began his speech with the words, “We have sustained a total unmitigated defeat,” there was a great outcry.