Hitler also became convinced that he had nothing to fear from the Americans—at least not yet. Historians who have argued that Hitler paid no attention to the United States and ignored the dire warnings of his diplomats in Washington, notably Dieckhoff and Thomsen, miss the point concerning Hitler’s intentions and the timing he thought they required. He knew all along that behind Britain stood the United States, and he did not want to go to war with either in the first place. But should Britain enter a European war, when would the United States be able to intervene militarily? Throughout the 1930s Hitler’s America “experts,” whether foreign office personnel or self-appointed pundits, reported that the people of the United States were still facing economic hardships that made them loath to get involved in the affairs of Europe. But the old-style diplomats—Dieckhoff, Weizsäcker, and Neurath—warned that the United States was potentially a grave danger to Germany. They also agreed that it would take the United States at least two years to rearm massively before it could challenge the Reich. As previously mentioned, Hitler took a jaundiced view of the German Foreign Office, which he saw as one of the last strongholds of the old conservative elites; he called them pin-striped snobs and rarely bothered to read any of their reports, except when they were specifically earmarked by his trustworthy advisors. From time to time, Hitler made reference to specific reports he received from Washington, or from unusual sources he trusted or agreed with. The same was true of Roosevelt, who frequently bypassed regular government channels, dispatching trusted friends or business contacts to foreign capitals to sound out people and find out what was really going on. These informal observers were often no better than the “experts,” picking up irrelevant gossip, reporting rumors, or plainly misjudging people and events.
Czechoslovakia and Appeasement at Munich
With Austria in his pocket, Hitler had not only acquired more territory and 7 million more people, but had also gained direct access to the whole of southeastern Europe. From Vienna it was only a stone’s throw to Czechoslovakia and the Balkans. His next target, in fact, was the small democratic state of Czechoslovakia, where more than 3.5 million frustrated Germans, called Sudeten Germans, had been living under Czechoslovak control since 1919. Hitler’s strategy was to use the Sudeten Germans, most of whom lived in the mountainous territory between Bohemia and Silesia, as a battering ram against the fragile new Republic, just as he would later use the Slovaks to foster irreparable separatism that made the Republic ripe for German picking. Telling his military chiefs in March that he intended to smash the Czech state in the near future, he whipped up such a frenzy of war hysteria that the Western powers, headed chiefly by Great Britain, bullied the Czechs into making concessions but stopped short of creating a Sudeten state within a state. The infuriated führer was ready to strike, though some of his generals, especially Ludwig Beck, were so alarmed by the prospect of another war with the Western powers that they seriously planned to topple the dictator and try him in front of the Volksgericht (People’s Court).
This did not happen for three reasons. During the Czech crisis in the summer of 1938, Hitler took another important step to protect himself from possible opposition from the traditionalists in the German army. Ostensibly to clarify the relationship between the elite guard or “defense squad” (Schutzstaffel or SS) and the regular Wehrmacht, he authorized a top-secret decree on August 17, 1938, that made the two SS Verfügungstruppen (Reserve Troops), hitherto subject to the regular army, independent armed forces at the disposal of the führer.13 Also, at the time of the Czech crisis, two regiments had grown up around Hitler’s personal body guard, the Leibstandarte SS “Adolf Hitler.” The decree of August 17, 1938, essentially turned these troops into Hitler’s private army and police force, whose soldiers were told that they owed personal loyalty and “blind obedience” to the führer. During World War II these Verfügungstruppen, renamed the Waffen-SS, were the most feared soldiers of Nazi Germany.
The traditionalists in the army, some of whom would later become resisters, had good reasons to worry, because their control was slipping as the army became increasingly Nazified. At the time of the Czech crisis, they still might have been able to take steps to remove Hitler, but their means of control were being steadily eroded by the wily führer, who never trusted them, and by the weaknesses of the Allies. Whether the SS, including its armed regiments, the police (Gestapo, Kripo, Security Service or SD), and the brown-shirted storm troopers, could have prevented an army coup in 1938 is debatable, for that would have required a concerted and unified opposition. Only a small group of vocal resisters around Colonel General Ludwig Beck and General Erwin von Witzleben, however, were willing to take active steps in the summer of 1938. The rest were fence-sitters. All of them knew that opposition to the Nazi regime would have to be conducted against the will of the German people. Hitler was immensely popular, a second major reason why the military opposition that briefly gathered in the summer of 1938 never got off the ground.
A third and most decisive reason why Hitler was not stopped in 1938 was that the Western powers blinked and agreed to appease Hitler. The Western betrayal of Czechoslovakia is a sordid and tragic story, which justifies W. H. Auden’s characterization of the 1930s as a “low and dishonest decade.” The British prime minister, Neville Chamberlain, visiting the dictator in his lair at Berchtesgaden on September 15, was so impressed by Herr Hitler’s seriousness over the Sudetenland that he made up his mind to pressure the Czechs to give it up. After bringing the Czechs into line, Chamberlain met Hitler again, this time at Bad Godesberg on the Rhine. Hitler told the stunned prime minister that their earlier agreement was no longer of any use because of Czech provocations. Hitler now demanded an immediate Czech withdrawal from the Sudetenland or he would send in his army to expel them. By October 1, he warned Chamberlain, he would occupy the Sudetenland. Chamberlain flew back to London, horrified by the prospect of war, and in his radio address to the British people he called on them to keep calm and work for the defense of their country. There were no Churchill-like exhortations to stand up to Hitler; instead, Chamberlain wondered aloud whether it was fair for a small nation—the reference was obviously to Czechoslovakia—to involve the whole British Empire in a war simply on its account. He answered, “If we are to fight it must be on larger issues than that.”14 The prime minister was hoping for a last-minute miracle that would avert war. This came in the form of a conciliatory message from Hitler, who gave assurances that he did not have designs on all of Czechoslovakia. He hoped that Chamberlain would continue to pursue his negotiations and bring the government in Prague to see reason at the very last hour. Hitler knew his man. Chamberlain then appealed to Mussolini for help in brokering a settlement. Il Duce was only too willing to oblige, partly because Italy was unprepared for war and partly because he did not think that Czechoslovakia was worth another world war.
What came next was the notorious Four-Power Munich Conference (September 28–29) between Germany, Italy, Britain, and France that made appeasement a household word.15 For Hitler, Munich was another personal triumph and a validation of his risk-taking, aggressive foreign policy. Although Hitler received the Sudetenland, he was dissatisfied because, as he later said, he should have pushed the appeasers into making even greater concessions. German troops marched into the designated areas, annexing sixteen thousand square miles of Czech territory, including its richest industrial sites and