A Patriot's History of the Modern World (51 page)

Hitler's actions in the Spanish Civil War suggest he may have actively sought to prolong it to distract the West from Germany's military preparations and other diplomatic efforts. For example, German officers misdirected the attacks at the battle for Madrid, and from that point forward until the Catalan campaign at the end of 1938, German aid came primarily to keep the Nationalists from being defeated, not to help them win when they were on the offensive. It would later appear that Franco was aware of this policy, and he paid Hitler back by not allowing the Nazis to move through Spain to attack Gibraltar after 1939 or significantly assisting Germany on the Eastern Front.

On March 31, 1939, the Nationalists finally took the remaining Republican cities of Almería, Murcia, and Cartagena, and the following day, the United States recognized Franco's government, leaving the Soviet Union as the only major power not to recognize the Nationalist regime. By summer, all foreign troops had been sent home. In Germany, these returning veterans would figure prominently in World War II, whereas most Soviet returnees
were shot or demoted in Stalin's purges because they had been contaminated by their association with the West. Khrushchev publicly regretted their deaths in his speech denouncing Stalin in 1956.
¹⁰³

The Serpent Unwinding

While the rest of Europe was concentrated on Spain's ongoing civil war, Germany marched from the easy
Anschluss
with Austria in March 1938 to demands for the Sudetenland (Southland) in the newly created state of Czechoslovakia. About 3,200,000 ethnic Germans lived in Czechoslovakia, along with 7,450,000 Czechs, 2,300,000 Slovaks, 720,000 Hungarians, 560,000 Ukrainians, and 100,000 Poles in a pot that refused to melt. A majority of the Sudetenland population was ethnically German, so Hitler focused on this German-speaking population, regurgitating Wilson's “self-determination” phrase to argue in favor of taking the territory. Again, he was aided and abetted by the democracies. Chamberlain told his cabinet that if Hitler sought a popular vote there, “it would be difficult for the democratic countries to go to war,” despite the fact that Britain and France had already moved millions of people after World War I without a single ballot cast.
¹⁰⁴

Through it all, many in the British government—particularly Chamberlain—fretted endlessly about treating Hitler as a legitimate and reasonable head of state, convinced that the right concoction of rewards and reason would bring him into the family of nations. Indeed, they continued to appease Hitler
despite
the lack of credible evidence that Germany could fight, let alone win, a war. Just before the democracies buckled to Hitler's demands, the Czechs were getting the Sudetenland under control and away from Nazi agitators and had mobilized their army to handle any German attack.

Significantly, the Czech army in April 1938 was larger and better equipped than the Wehrmacht, comprising forty-six divisions, of which twenty-five were field divisions, twenty-one infantry, and four mechanized cavalry, the remainder being static and service troops manning the excellent Czech fortifications facing Germany. German forces that occupied Austria during the
Anschluss
in March had embarrassed themselves; many tanks and motor transport vehicles had broken down and troop mobilization was poor, leaving the Czechs unimpressed. In April the General Staff could count on only twenty-four infantry, one tank, one cavalry, and one mountain division. Although the balance of power was changing rapidly,
by autumn the best the Wehrmacht could hope to deploy was fifty-five divisions of varied strength, equipment, and training.
¹⁰⁵
General Ludwig Beck, head of the German General Staff, concluded a war with Czechoslovakia spelled the end of Germany if Britain and France entered the conflict. He warned Hitler and wrote a memo for distribution throughout the General Staff: “In order to safeguard our position before history and to keep the repute of the Supreme Command of the Army unstained, I hereby place on record that I have refused to approve any warlike adventures of the National Socialists.”
¹⁰⁶
Beck resigned when he saw it was impossible to change Hitler's policy, and later perished in the abortive July 1944 plot against Hitler.

In spite of their advantages and the reluctance of the General Staff to countenance war to achieve Hitler's aims, the Czechs watched helplessly as their most defensible territory was bargained away in a September 15, 1938, preliminary meeting between Hitler and Chamberlain at Berchtesgaden. Czech president Edvard Beneš, left without British support, knew that all of Czechoslovakia was now on the menu.

Hitler had drafted orders to “smash Czechoslovakia by military action in the near future” in May, setting deployment for September.
¹⁰⁷
His generals continued to object strenuously, convinced the Wehrmacht was still unprepared for war. But their attempts to dissuade Hitler were met with ridicule. Pleas by the regent of Hungary, Admiral Miklós Horthy, were interrupted by Hitler with shouts of “Nonsense! Shut up!” Hitler canceled the invasion only because Mussolini, likewise assessing the military positions of Germany and Italy as unfavorable compared with those of the allies, implored him to wait.

In a second meeting with Chamberlain at Bad Godesberg on September 22, Hitler raised the ante, and a stunned Chamberlain, after presenting his plan to meet all of Hitler's earlier demands, was told “
Es tut mir Leid, aber das geht nicht mehr
”
(“I'm sorry, but that won't work anymore”).
¹⁰⁸
Hitler made new demands for German troops to immediately occupy the Sudetenland, for additional Czech territory to be ceded to Hungary and Poland, and for Czechs forced from their property to receive no compensation, demands Chamberlain could not possibly meet. After returning to England depressed and distraught, Chamberlain consulted with his cabinet, then announced he would go to Munich on September 29 for one last round of negotiations, this time in a four-power meeting with French, Italian,
and German leaders to avoid war. Secretly, the British had already dispatched a mission to Prague to convince the Czechs to give up.

France, however, still seemed ready (though not eager) to fight. In September 1938, French premier Édouard Daladier told Chamberlain he would attack if German forces crossed into Czechoslovakia proper. He was dissuaded by Chamberlain, his own foreign minister Georges Bonnet, and the hundred centrist deputies who visited him and unanimously instructed him to avoid war. Bonnet was an appeaser of the highest level (“rodently for peace,” as U.S. ambassador to Russia William Bullitt described him), and no doubt manipulated information to bring yet additional pressure on Daladier to capitulate. It worked: by the time of the Munich Conference, according to Hermann Göring, “Neither Chamberlain nor Daladier were in the least bit interested in sacrificing or risking anything to save Czechoslovakia…. We got everything we wanted, just like that [snapping his fingers].”
¹⁰⁹

Before going to Munich, Chamberlain gave a radio broadcast on September 27, in which he lamented Britain's being involved in a “quarrel in a far-away country between people of whom we know nothing.”
¹¹⁰
On the contrary, it seems everyone by then knew a great deal about the Germans. The infamous Munich Conference of September 1938, conducted without Czechoslovakia being present, followed and actually
increased
German territory over what Hitler had demanded a week earlier, stripping Czechoslovakia of 70 percent of its electricity-generating plants, most of its chemical works, and its border defenses. Hungary and Poland also acquired the Czechoslovakian territory they wanted. Chamberlain, returning to Britain, stated, “I believe it is peace for our time,” while Daladier—seeing the crowd at the Paris airport—was afraid to land as he expected he would be lynched. According to Jean-Paul Sartre, when Daladier saw the people were cheering him, he turned to his aide and said, “Ah, the fools.”

Chamberlain's appeasement has been the subject of great historical debate. Critics blame him for failing to stop Germany soon enough, while defenders argue he bought precious time. In any case, the public remained behind him upon his return, with 51 percent of those polled saying they were satisfied with the result.
¹¹¹
(More ominously, though, a whopping 86 percent of the British population did not think Hitler's territorial demands in Europe were satiated.
¹¹²
) A heated debate had occurred within British military and diplomatic circles for years regarding the advisability of allowing Hitler to move eastward. The British ambassador to Germany, Nevile
Henderson, viewed German hegemony east of the Rhine as an unpalatable fact. Others insisted German expansion eastward would weaken Russia to Britain's benefit, but military expert and London
Times
correspondent B. H. Liddell Hart warned that “in the long run, this would be like feeding the tiger” and that Britain, not Russia, remained the “ultimate obstacle to Germany's ambition as in the past.”
¹¹³
Of course, all that was contained in
Mein Kampf
if anyone cared to read it. When Lord Halifax, in a 1938 memo, asked, “Are we prepared to stand by and allow these vast districts to pass completely under German domination?” Chamberlain scathingly dismissed the question, arguing it was impossible for Britain to do anything about it.

In fact, Chamberlain had bungled the entire run-up to war, not just the last months. Of course, the best chance for Britain to stop Hitler easily and probably bloodlessly had come and gone under Stanley Baldwin's government when Germany marched into the Rhineland in 1936. Since then, however, Chamberlain had consistently failed to appreciate Hitler's appeal to Germans of all types, and the absence of “moderate” elements inside the country who could (and would) oppose Hitler. Perhaps his worst mistake was assuming that Britain and France benefited from delaying the conflict. In terms of financing, that was certainly false. Britain's gold reserves dwindled from 1936 to 1939 due to the high cost of imports, while Germany was still constrained by shortages of raw materials and food that would later become available from Czechoslovakia, Poland, and the United States. Almost one third of German phosphate during this time came from the United States, as did one fourth of its copper, two thirds of its uranium, half of all iron and scrap metal, not to mention $206 million in direct investment.
¹¹⁴

The advent of war would have almost certainly shrunk these imports to nothing, either by the direct decision of American suppliers or by the British blockade, which in 1938 would have faced even less German resistance than in 1940. Overall, the German economy, while at nearly full employment, nevertheless flirted with bankruptcy as a result of its trade deficiencies. Hitler virtually admitted as much in his widely misinterpreted January 30, 1939, speech, in which he reiterated his support for the Anti-Comintern Pact and emphasized Germany's determination to resist democratic influences from the outside. But he threw in just enough sops to peace that the allies were reassured of the unlikelihood of war. Yet every new concession by the democracies brought not gratitude and stability, but new demands and scorn. Lord Halifax dourly noted in June 1939 that “we were living in
what was virtually a state of concealed war.”
¹¹⁵
Even more stunning was the shift in military power brought about by waiting: England had 71
fewer
combat aircraft in September 1939 than it had in January of that year, while Germany had added 800 more planes.
¹¹⁶

To add insult to injury, handing over Czechoslovakia to the Nazis proved foolish even in purely military terms. Germany was able to add more than 460 new thirty-eight-ton tanks to its arsenal, along with close to 1,500 aircraft and a million rifles, not to mention the massive Skoda arms works. (By comparison, the Nazi panzer units had only 300 Panzer III and IV tanks—the most advanced in their armored units—in early 1940, meaning that the Czech additions essentially doubled Germany's tank forces.) Acquisitions such as these inflated foreign and uninformed estimates of German military power: Charles Lindbergh returned from a trip to Germany and announced the Nazis had 8,000 military aircraft and could manufacture 1,500 a month. In fact, the Germans had 1,500 (plus the Czech planes) and could make another 280 per month. But Lindbergh's overblown tales spread panic in Paris and London, and introduced something close to a state of hysteria among some in Britain.
¹¹⁷
The point was that accurate information was hard to come by, and overinflation of Germany's war-making capacity could prove as dangerous as underestimating the enemy.

One problem with calls for rearmament by realists such as Winston Churchill was that Hitler was not uniformly feared or hated in England. The Church of England was openly pro-appeasement, portraying the Germans as victims of the Treaty of Versailles. Large newspapers were similarly aligned. London's oldest newspaper, the
Observer
, and its sister paper, the
Guardian
, under the control of William Waldorf Astor, echoed these sentiments. Astor and the “Cliveden set” of upper-class conservatives saw Hitler as a useful buffer against Soviet expansion, and at any rate expected the French military to fold under pressure from Germany. Intellectuals such as Edward Hallett Carr enthusiastically defended appeasement. Treasury official Edward Hale called the “Nazi struggle…primarily one of self-respect, a natural reaction against the ostracism that followed the war…[and] Hitler's desire for friendship with England is perfectly genuine and still widely shared….”
¹¹⁸