A senior army general involved in the aborted coup said later, ‘I had already passed the order to Witzleben to start the coup when the information reached us that Chamberlain and Daladier were coming to Munich and therefore I had to withdraw the order … the coup d’état was to have been justified before the people by saying that Hitler was provoking a war and that, without a violent coup d’état war could not be prevented. Now that was no longer possible.’ Another asked sharply, ‘What can troops possibly do against a leader this victorious?’
Though they would try again many times in the coming years to replicate the coup of 1938, this was the best chance the conspirators would get to remove Hitler – and, thanks to the British prime minister, they had lost it.
French ambassador François-Poncet, as famous for his merciless eye as he was for his magnificent moustaches, described Chamberlain arriving at Munich on 30 September: ‘Grey, stooped, with bushy eyebrows, blotched skin and chapped hands – he seemed typical of a grand Englishman from a bygone age.’
As all the world knows, what followed was the Munich agreement which gifted the Sudetenland to Hitler without a shot being fired.
Chamberlain returned in triumph to Croydon Aerodrome, with a flutter of paper in his hand, announcing ‘peace for our time’. In the House of Commons and across Britain that day there was cheering and jubilation. But not from Winston Churchill, who denounced Chamberlain’s deal as ‘the first foretaste of a bitter cup’ to shouts of abuse from all sides of the Commons chamber. For a Britain dangerously underprepared for war, there was a substantial upside to Munich – the country now had more time to get ready. But the cost to national prestige, standing and influence was huge. And the consequence of now having to deal with a Hitler magnified in size to his own people, and in his own sense of destiny, would be very great.
The French prime minister Édouard Daladier understood perhaps better than Chamberlain what had happened. Waving to cheering crowds on his return to Paris, he was heard to mutter under his breath. ‘Ah, les cons. S’ils savaient!’†
Hitler celebrated a triumph too, though it was not the one he had wanted. He was initially furious at the outcome of Munich, flying into a rage and shouting that Chamberlain had tricked him out of the military victory over the whole of Czechoslovakia that he wanted so badly. But he soon realised that the British prime minister had delivered him victory enough for the moment. The rest of Czechoslovakia could come later.
As the Commons debated in London, German troops marched through jubilant crowds into the Czech Sudetenland. They were followed four days later by the Führer standing in the front of an open-topped Mercedes, his right arm stretched out ramrod-straight in the Nazi salute, which the crowd returned with cheers, children bearing flowers and a forest of extended arms. Czechoslovakia, brought into existence by the Versailles Treaty, would over the next years lose 70 per cent of its iron, steel and electricity production, a third of its people, and enough weapons and ammunition from its arsenals and armaments factories to equip half the Wehrmacht.
Two days later, on 5 October, Churchill pronounced a final accusatory obsequy in the House of Commons over the dismembered remains of Hitler’s prey: ‘Silent, mournful, abandoned, broken, Czechoslovakia recedes into the darkness … terrible words have for the time being been pronounced against the Western democracies: “Thou art weighed in the balance and found wanting.”’
On 4 November, five weeks after Munich, members of Churchill’s Epping Constituency Conservative Association moved a motion of no confidence in their MP. Churchill survived by the skin of his teeth, thanks to what he later described as ‘the speech of my life’. Thus was Hitler denied a double victory: one at Munich which gave him the Sudetenland; and one at Epping, where fate came within a hair’s breadth of removing his most capable adversary in the coming conflict.
The Abwehr’s ‘eternal plotter’ Hans Bernd Gisevius, who had been amongst the most active of the conspirators right from the start, commented bitterly after the war: ‘Peace for our time? Let us put it a bit more realistically. Chamberlain saved Hitler.’
In a letter to an American friend, Carl Goerdeler wrote: ‘The Munich agreement was just sheer capitulation by France and England … By refusing to take a small risk, Chamberlain has made a war inevitable. Both the British and French nations will now have to defend their freedom with arms in hand …’
In his memoirs written after the war, Erich Kordt recorded: ‘Never since 1933 was there such a good chance to free Germany and the world.’
On the evening the Munich agreement was signed, the key Berlin plotters gathered in the grand house of the commander of the Berlin garrison, Erwin von Witzleben. In the words of one of those present, ‘all our lovely plans’ were unceremoniously burnt in Witzleben’s baronial fireplace.
One general wept, and the world, unchecked, marched on to war.
* Respectively: Generals Franz Halder and Ludwig Beck; General Walther von Brauchitsch; Graf Wolf von Heldorf, Graf Fritz-Dietlof von der Schulenberg and Arthur Nebe; General Erwin von Witzleben and Walter Brockdorff-Ahlefeldt; Ernst von Weizsäcker and Erich Kordt; Hjalmar Schacht; Theo Kordt; Hans von Dohnányi; and Paul Schmidt.
† The polite English translation would be, ‘Ah, the bloody idiots. If they only knew!’
8
It did not take long for London to understand the opportunities that had been lost at Munich by its failure to act on the warnings it had received of Hitler’s intentions towards Czechoslovakia.
A late-1938 MI6 analysis concluded that the German generals ‘strove unremittingly and courageously to restrain Hitler’. Even the strongly pro-appeasement British ambassador in Berlin, Sir Nevile Henderson, found himself unable to gloss what had happened in his customary diplomatic language. ‘By keeping the peace, we have saved Hitler and his regime,’ he wrote to foreign secretary Halifax a week after Munich was signed. In December 1938 the British chargé d’affaires in Berlin noted that ‘authoritative circles’ in London now hoped that a revolt would remove Hitler, the man Chamberlain’s flight to Munich had rescued from removal just two months previously.
But the damage was done.
The West’s surrender to Hitler’s demands at Munich caused a catastrophic decline of morale and will amongst the September plotters. Carl Goerdeler, who had spent the week of the Czech crisis in Switzerland, on the shores of Lake Constance, waiting for the call to take up his post as the new chancellor of Germany, wrote to a friend predicting that war was now inevitable. The majority of those closely involved in the plot considered that they had risked their lives to rid the world of a war-obsessed tyrant, only to be abandoned by those they had most trusted among the Western powers. The word ‘betrayal’ was on many lips.
The truth was that there had been a shameful failure of communication between the Berlin plotters and the governments of France and, perhaps especially, of Britain. There were several factors which produced this ‘dialogue of the deaf’ in which the last, best chance of avoiding the coming war was lost.
Chief among these was Chamberlain’s conviction that Hitler would be amenable to reason, and that appeasement (in the 1930s the word meant putting peace first, and did not carry the pejorative overtones it does today) was the way to persuade him to back away from war. This, added to the sense of personal responsibility Chamberlain felt for ensuring the peace of his age, created a deadly cocktail in which hubris and sense of mission combined to distort the British prime minister’s judgement and reduce his capacity to take measured, thought-through actions.