Read The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich: A History of Nazi Germany Online
Authors: William L. Shirer
The secret German minutes of the meeting reveal a pitiful scene at the very outset. The unhappy Dr. Hácha, despite his background as a respected judge of the Supreme Court, shed all human dignity by groveling before the swaggering German Fuehrer. Perhaps the President thought that only in this way could he appeal to Hitler’s generosity and save something for his people; but regardless of his motive, his words, as the Germans recorded them for their confidential archives, nauseate the reader even so long afterward as today. He himself, Hácha assured Hitler, had never mixed in politics. He had rarely seen the founders of the Czechoslovak Republic, Masaryk and Beneš, and what he had seen of them he did not like. Their regime, he said, was “alien” to him—“so
alien that immediately after the change of regime [after Munich] he had asked himself whether it was a good thing for Czechoslovakia to be an independent state at all.”
He was convinced that the destiny of Czechoslovakia lay in the Fuehrer’s hands, and he believed it was in safekeeping in such hands … Then he came to what affected him most, the fate of his people. He felt that it was precisely the Fuehrer who would understand his holding the view that Czechoslovakia had the right to live a national life … Czechoslovakia was being blamed because there still existed many supporters of the Beneš system … The Government was trying by every means to silence them. This was about all he had to say.
Adolf Hitler then said all there was to say. After rehearsing all the alleged wrongs which the Czechoslovakia of Masaryk and Beneš had done to Germans and Germany, and reiterating that unfortunately the Czechs had not changed since Munich, he came to the point.
He had come to the conclusion that this journey by the President, despite his advanced years, might be of great benefit to his country because it was only a matter of hours now before Germany intervened … He harbored no enmity against any nation … That the Rump State of Czechoslovakia existed at all was attributable only to his loyal attitude … In the autumn he had not wished to draw the final conclusions because he had thought a coexistence possible, but he had left no doubt that if the Beneš tendencies did not disappear completely he would destroy this state completely.
They had not disappeared, and he gave “examples.”
And so last Sunday, March 12, the die was cast
… He had given the order for the invasion by the German troops and for the incorporation of Czechoslovakia into the German Reich
.
*
“Hácha and Chvalkovsky,” noted Dr. Schmidt, “sat as though turned to stone. Only their eyes showed that they were alive.” But Hitler was not quite through. He must humble his guests with threats of Teutonic terror.
The German Army [Hitler continued] had already marched in today, and at a barracks where resistance was offered it had been ruthlessly broken.
Tomorrow morning at six o’clock the German Army was to enter Czechia from all sides and the German Air Force would occupy the Czech airfields. There were two possibilities. The first was that the entry of German troops might develop into fighting. In that case, resistance would be broken by brute force. The other possibility was that the entry of the German troops would
take place in a peaceful manner, in which case it would be easy for the Fuehrer to accord Czechoslovakia a generous way of life of her own, autonomy, and a certain measure of national freedom.
He was doing all this not from hatred but in order to protect Germany. If last autumn Czechoslovakia had not given in, the Czech people would have been exterminated. No one would have prevented him doing it. If it came to a fight … in two days the Czech Army would cease to exist. Naturally, some Germans would be killed too and this would engender a hatred which would compel him, in self-preservation, not to concede autonomy. The world would not care a jot about this. He sympathized with the Czech people when he read the foreign press. It gave him the impression which might be summed up in the German proverb: “The Moor has done his duty; the Moor can go.” …
That was why he had asked Hácha to come here. This was the last good turn he could render the Czech people … Perhaps Hácha’s visit might prevent the worst …
The hours were passing. At six o’clock the troops would march in. He was almost ashamed to say it, but for every Czech battalion there was a German division. He would like now to advise him [Hácha] to withdraw with Chvalkovsky and discuss what was to be done.
What was to be done? The broken old President did not have to withdraw to decide that. He told Hitler at once, “The position is quite clear. Resistance would be folly.” But how, he asked—since it was now a little after 2
A.M
.—could he, in the space of four hours, arrange to restrain the whole Czech people from offering resistance? The Fuehrer replied that he had better consult with his companions. The German military machine was already in motion and could not be stopped. Hácha should get in touch at once with
Prague
. “It was a grave decision,” the German minutes report Hitler as saying, “but he saw dawning the possibility of a long period of peace between the two peoples. Should the decision be otherwise, he saw the annihilation of Czechoslovakia.”
With these words, he dismissed his guests for the time being. It was 2:15
A.M
. In an adjoining room Goering and Ribbentrop stepped up the pressure on the two victims. According to the French ambassador, who in an official dispatch to Paris depicted the scene as he got it from what he believed to be an authentic source, Hácha and Chvalkovsky protested against the outrage to their nation. They declared they would not sign the document of surrender. Were they to do so they would be forever cursed by their people.
The German ministers [Goering and Ribbentrop] were pitiless [M.
Coulondre
wrote in his dispatch]. They literally hunted Dr. Hácha and M. Chvalkovsky round the table on which the documents were lying, thrusting them continually before them, pushing pens into their hands, incessantly repeating that if they continued in their refusal, half of Prague would lie in ruins from bombing
within two hours, and that this would be only the beginning. Hundreds of bombers were waiting the order to take off, and they would receive that order at six in the morning if the signatures were not forthcoming.
*
At this point, Dr. Schmidt, who seems to have managed to be present whenever and wherever the drama of the Third Reich reached a climax, heard Goering shouting for Dr. Morell.
“Hácha has fainted!” Goering cried out.
For a moment the Nazi bullies feared that the prostrate Czech President might die on their hands and, as Schmidt says, “that the whole world will say tomorrow that he was murdered at the Chancellery.” Dr. Morell’s specialty was injections—much later he would almost kill Hitler with them—and he now applied the needle to Dr. Hácha and brought him back to consciousness. The President was revived sufficiently to be able to grasp the telephone which the Germans thrust into his hand and talk to his government in
Prague
over a special line which Ribbentrop had ordered rigged up. He apprised the Czech cabinet of what had happened and advised surrender. Then, somewhat further restored by a second injection from the needle of Dr. Morell, the President of the expiring Republic stumbled back into the presence of Adolf Hitler to sign his country’s death warrant. It was now five minutes to four in the morning of March 15, 1939.
The text had been prepared “beforehand by Hitler,” Schmidt recounts, and during Hácha’s fainting spells the German interpreter had been busy copying the official communiqué, which had also been written up “beforehand,” and which Hácha and Chvalkovsky were also forced to sign. It read as follows:
Berlin, March 15, 1939
At their request, the Fuehrer today received the Czechoslovak President, Dr. Hácha, and the Czechoslovak Foreign Minister, Dr. Chvalkovsky, in Berlin in the presence of Foreign Minister von Ribbentrop. At the meeting the serious situation created by the events of recent weeks in the present Czechoslovak territory was examined with complete frankness.
The conviction was unanimously expressed on both sides that the aim of all efforts must be the safeguarding of calm, order and peace in this part of Central Europe. The Czechoslovak President declared that, in order to serve this object and to achieve ultimate pacification, he confidently placed the fate of the Czech people and country in the hands of the Fuehrer of the German Reich. The Fuehrer accepted this declaration and expressed his intention of taking the Czech people under the protection of the German Reich and of
guaranteeing them an autonomous development of their ethnic life as suited to their character.
Hitler’s chicanery had reached, perhaps, its summit.
According to one of his woman secretaries, Hitler rushed from the signing into his office, embraced all the women present and exclaimed, “Children! This is the greatest day of my life! I shall go down in history as the greatest German!”
It did not occur to him—how could it?—that the end of Czechoslovakia might be the beginning of the end of Germany. From this dawn of March 15, 1939—the Ides of March—the road to war, to defeat, to disaster, as we now know, stretched just ahead. It would be a short road and as straight as a line could be. And once on it, and hurtling down it, Hitler, like Alexander and
Napoleon
before him, could not stop.
28
At 6
A.M
. on March 15 German troops poured into
Bohemia
and
Moravia
. They met no resistance, and by evening Hitler was able to make the triumphant entry into
Prague
which he felt Chamberlain had cheated him of at Munich. Before leaving Berlin he had issued a grandiose proclamation to the German people, repeating the tiresome lies about the “wild excesses” and “terror” of the Czechs which he had been forced to bring an end to, and proudly proclaiming, “Czechoslovakia has ceased to exist!”
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. The Fuehrer’s revenge was complete, and that it was sweet he showed in the series of proclamations which he issued. He had paid off all the burning resentments against the Czechs which had obsessed him as an Austrian in his vagabond days in Vienna three decades before and which had flamed anew when Beneš dared to oppose him, the all-powerful German dictator, over the past year.
The next day, from Hradschin Castle, he proclaimed the Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia, which though it professed to provide “autonomy and self-government” for the Czechs brought them, by its very language, completely under the German heel. All power was given to the “Reich Protector” and to his Secretary of State and his Head of the Civil Administration, who were to be appointed by the Fuehrer. To placate outraged public opinion in Britain and France, Hitler brought the “moderate” Neurath out of cold storage and named him Protector.
*
The two top Sudeten leaders,
Konrad Henlein
and the gangster Karl Hermann Frank, were given an opportunity to get revenge on the Czechs by being appointed
Head of the Civil Administration and Secretary of State respectively. It was not long before Himmler, as boss of the German police, got a stranglehold on the protectorate. To do his work, he made the notorious Frank chief of police of the protectorate and ranking S.S. officer.
*
For a thousand years [Hitler said in his proclamation of the protectorate] the provinces of
Bohemia
and
Moravia
formed part of the
Lebensraum
of the German people … Czecho
slovakia
showed its inherent inability to survive and has therefore now fallen a victim to actual dissolution. The German Reich cannot tolerate continuous disturbances in these areas … Therefore the German Reich, in keeping with the law of self-preservation, is now resolved to intervene decisively to rebuild the foundations of a reasonable order in Central Europe. For in the thousand years of its history it has already proved that, thanks to the greatness and the qualities of the German people, it alone is called upon to undertake this task.
A long night of German savagery now settled over Prague and the Czech lands.
On March 16, Hitler took Slovakia too under his benevolent protection in response to a “telegram,” actually composed in Berlin, as we have seen, from Premier Tiso. German troops quickly entered Slovakia to do the “protecting.” On March 18, Hitler was in Vienna to approve the “Treaty of Protection,” which, as signed on March 23 in Berlin by Ribbentrop and Dr. Tuka, contained a secret protocol giving Germany exclusive rights to exploit the Slovak economy.
30
As for
Ruthenia
, which had formed the eastern tip of Czechoslovakia, its independence as the “Republic of Carpatho-Ukraine,” proclaimed on March 14, lasted just twenty-four hours. Its appeal to Hitler for “protection” was in vain. Hitler had already awarded this territory to Hungary. In the captured Foreign Office archives there is an interesting letter in the handwriting of Miklós
Horthy
, Regent of Hungary, addressed to Adolf Hitler on March 13.
Y
OUR
E
XCELLENCY
: Heartfelt thanks! 1 cannot express how happy I am, for this headwater region [Ruthenia] is for Hungary—I dislike using big words—a
vital question.…
We are tackling the matter with enthusiasm. The plans are already laid. On Thursday, the 16th, a frontier incident will take place, to be followed Saturday by the big thrust.
31
As things turned out, there was no need for an “incident.” Hungarian troops simply moved into Ruthenia at 6
A.M
. on March 15, timing their entry with that of the Germans to the west, and on the following day the territory was formally annexed by Hungary.
Thus by the end of the day of March 15, which had started in Berlin at 1:15
A.M
. when Hácha arrived at the Chancellery, Czecho
slovakia
, as Hitler said, had ceased to exist.