The Storm of War - Andrew Roberts [8]
On 15 September the British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain flew to Hitler’s Alpine home at Berchtesgaden to try to negotiate a resolution of the crisis. On his return he wrote to his sister Ida, ‘In short I had established a certain confidence which was my aim and on my side in spite of the hardness and ruthlessness I thought I saw in his face I got the impression that here was a man who could be relied upon when he had given his word.’12 It required a second meeting with Hitler, at Bad Godesberg a week later, before Chamberlain was able to come to specific terms that Britain and France could urge the Czechs to accept, in order to avoid a war for which the Western powers were still (unforgivably) unprepared. Reporting to the Cabinet after his return from Godesberg, Chamberlain said that he believed that Hitler ‘would not deliberately deceive a man whom he respected with whom he had been in negotiation’.13
It took a third meeting, at Munich at the end of September, before agreement could be reached between the Germans, Italian, British and French over the geographical extent and the timetable for the Sudetenland’s absorption into the Reich. Recommending the Munich Agreement to the House of Commons, Chamberlain said on 3 October: ‘It is my hope, and my belief, that under the new system of guarantees the new Czechoslovakia will find a greater security than she has ever enjoyed in the past.’14 For all the gross naivety of that statement, at least we can be sure that Chamberlain believed it.
During the Munich period the British Government received a number of indications from anti-Nazi German generals that they would overthrow Hitler if the Western powers refused his blandishments over the Sudetenland. Yet these promises could not be relied upon, not least because they were not representative of the Wehrmacht officer class as a whole. The reasons why the German generals never overthrew their Führer, even once the war was certainly lost, are many. They include the vital fact that they could not necessarily count on the loyalty of their own men against Hitler, they were still isolated from public affairs, they felt bound by the oath of obedience to the Führer which they had sworn, they stood for a conservative order which did not appeal to German youth, and they found it impossible as a group to put their duty to Germany over their personal interests and ambitions.15 They were far too weak a reed for Chamberlain (and later Churchill) to base British foreign policy upon.
A month after Munich, on 2 November 1938, Hitler and Mussolini supported Hungary’s annexation of southern Slovakia, which took place suddenly and without consultation with Britain and France. This reduced Chamberlain to stating in the House of Commons that ‘We never guaranteed the frontiers as they existed. What we did was to guarantee against unprovoked aggression – quite a different thing.’ A week later the Nazis unleashed the vicious six-day pogrom against German Jews known to history as Kristallnacht, leaving few under any illusions about the vile nature of Hitler’s regime.
When on 15 March 1939 German troops occupied the Bohemian and Moravian rump of Czechoslovakia and dragged non-Germans into the Reich for the first time – and Hitler was driven through a sullen Prague in further triumph – the Chamberlain ministry ran out of explanations and excuses, especially when later that month Hitler denounced the non-aggression pact that he had signed with Poland five years before.
On 1 April Britain and France therefore guaranteed Poland, promising to go to war against Germany if she invaded. The guarantee was intended as a trip-wire to deter any future adventures by Hitler, and similar promises were made to Romania