Throughout this first Czech crisis, Roosevelt’s administration stood on the sidelines and watched events unfold without knowing what to do about it. On September 26, Roosevelt had sent a brief message to Hitler, Benes, and the prime ministers of Great Britain and France, but his note did not contain an offer of mediation. With an eye to the isolationists, he chose not to take sides in the dispute. This was good news to Hitler, who had not ignored Roosevelt’s movements; in fact, he decided to answer the president’s telegram and its “lofty intentions” about finding peaceful solutions for the future good of humanity. He reminded the president that Germany had laid down its arms in 1918 in hopes that peace would be conducted according to Woodrow Wilson’s ideals. In creating the new state of Czechoslovakia, Hitler pointed out, the peacemakers willfully ignored the rights of the Sudeten Germans, making a mockery of Wilson’s principles of national self-determination. Furthermore, he accused Prague of making every effort to violate the basic rights of the Sudeten Germans. Hitler claimed that 214,000 persecuted Sudeten Germans had fled across the border into Germany. If the president objectively reviewed the history of the Sudeten Germans, he would realize that the German government had been more than patient, and willing to find a peaceful solution to a problem that Germany did not create. The fault, he said, rested with Czechoslovakia rather than Germany.18 Roosevelt sent a second appeal to Hitler on September 28, but it was not answered. The fact is that the Americans were indecisive and inactive; the spirit of appeasement was as strong on their part as it was among the English and the French. It cannot be overemphasized that they acquiesced in appeasement over the heads of the Czechs, who were not even invited to Munich—an egregious betrayal of the fragile democratic Republic. But then neither Chamberlain nor Édouard Daladier wanted to fight another world war, and certainly not over a territorially flawed state. Roosevelt’s diplomats basically felt the same way. Ambassador Wilson, who had replaced Dodd in Berlin, sympathized with the Sudeten Germans and hoped that the Czechs would make concessions rather than jeopardize peace. Ambassador Joseph Kennedy was much more vocal and pro-German, favoring appeasement at almost any price, confessing, “I can’t for the life of me understand why anybody would want to go to war to save the Czechs.”19 Roosevelt’s ambassador to Prague, Wilbur J. Carr, had just assumed his new post, had never served abroad, and knew next to nothing about the country he was sent to.
Since there was no official or even unofficial U.S. response to appeasement, some historians have concluded that Roosevelt was on the side of the appeasers in the fall of 1938. This is misleading. The president did send a two-word telegram to Chamberlain after he learned that the British prime minister was going to attend the Munich conference: it said, “Good Man.”20 Trying to prevent war was hardly appeasement, but giving Hitler everything he wanted was. It was Chamberlain, not Roosevelt, who appeased Hitler without calling his bluff. Roosevelt had a sinking feeling that the Munich settlement had not really settled anything and that peace through fear was unlikely to endure.21 If he knew that, why did he remain on the sidelines, limiting himself to sending appeals to the dictator? The president’s small-stick approach to international relations was prompted by several causes, such as isolationism, fear of another devastating world war, the president’s banking on the British and the French as his first line of defense, domestic blows to the New Deal, and so forth. Some historians have pointed to a kind of “What’s the use” attitude on the part of the president in 1938—for it should be remembered that Roosevelt saw himself as a lame duck, wondering what to do after his retirement from the presidency.22 At the time of the conference at Munich, Roosevelt was still in this indecisive mood, letting things drift until new outrages by Hitler and the Japanese later roused him to renewed efforts, sending ineffective appeals abroad and encouraging more effective military preparedness at home. Like Chamberlain and Daladier, he resigned himself to the dismemberment of Czechoslovakia.
Abandoned and betrayed, the Czechs had little choice but to let go of the Sudetenland. During this first Czech crisis, Hitler gave solemn promises that this would be the last territorial demand he would make; he even swore to God that he would fulfill this promise! He also went on record that he only wanted Germans and not Czechs, giving the false impression that he would not grab the rest of Czechoslovakia.23 But since it had all been so easy at Munich, with the British and the French “acting like little worms” rather than real men of action, his intention to dismember the whole of Czechoslovakia was greatly strengthened. It was just a matter of timing, and of neutralizing the democracies—Britain, France, and, more remotely, the United States.
Kristallnacht
On November 7, 1938, a secretary in the German embassy in Paris, Ernst vom Rath, was fatally shot by a seventeen-year-old Polish refugee named Herschel Grynszpan, acting in response to the mistreatment of his family and seventeen thousand others by the Nazi government. In March 1938, Poland had passed a law specifying that Polish nationals who had resided outside Poland for a period of five years would be stripped of their citizenship. The law was specifically aimed at about fifty thousand Polish Jews who had been residing in Germany, and whom the Polish government did not want to return to Poland. Grynszpan’s parents, who had emigrated from Poland and had lived in Hanover since 1914, automatically became stateless. The German government regarded the Polish law as a provocation designed to dump their Jews permanently in Germany. In response, the Gestapo rounded up some seventeen thousand Polish Jews and transported them to the Polish border, but since the Polish authorities refused to accept them, they were herded into camps where they lived under deplorable conditions. Young Grynszpan wanted to send a message of protest through his desperate deed.
The Nazis were quick to retaliate. On November 9, the day the Nazi leadership celebrated the anniversary of the 1923 beer hall Putsch (coup) in Munich, Ernst vom Rath died in Paris. News of his death was conveyed to Hitler while he was eating dinner with his “old fighters” (alte Kämpfer) in the Old Town Hall in Munich. The evidence indicates that Hitler authorized a proposal by Goebbels to set in motion “spontaneous demonstrations” against the Jews throughout Germany, slyly suggesting that the storm troopers “should be allowed to have a fling.”24 Hitler then playacted his typical script of fading into the background to immunize himself in case the pogrom should backfire. The result was an orchestrated nationwide pogrom later referred to as Kristallnacht (Crystal Night), after the glass shards from the shattered windows of Jewish businesses that littered the streets of Germany. The actions of party functionaries, storm troopers, and incited mobs produced widespread devastation of property and many injuries and deaths. It is estimated that 267 synagogues were burned to the ground and their contents looted or defiled. More than 7,500 businesses were vandalized, and 91 Jews were killed, while others in despair committed suicide.25 These crimes were perpetrated openly and blatantly because they were sponsored by the government. The police were helpless because orders had been given that the führer did not want them to interfere except when German lives and property were directly involved—and he did not regard German Jews as Germans.
The American reaction to Kristallnacht was one of outrage. The German ambassador in Washington,