The persistent belief that war could be avoided by appeasement made Chamberlain reluctant to form an alliance with Stalin’s USSR. He and his colleagues shared a well merited distaste for Stalin’s violent and repressive empire, and yet an alliance with Russia – as the British chiefs of staff pointed out – might be the only practical way to stop Hitler. When, in the summer of 1939, General Ironside (inspector-general of Overseas Forces) returned from a trip to Danzig, Chamberlain asked him to confirm that it seemed impossible to come to terms with the Russians. Ironside would not confirm it; he said it was the only thing that Britain could do. Chamberlain was not pleased at this response and retorted: ‘The only thing we cannot do.’6
Many military men said that the Red Army was worthless, and that an alliance with the USSR would be only an encumbrance. Britain’s ambassador in Berlin added to Chamberlain’s confusion with a ridiculous warning that a British alliance with Russia would provoke Germany into an immediate war. (To prepare peacetime Germany for a war against Russia would have taken many months.) While Chamberlain vacillated it was Hitler who saw the advantages that a pact with Russia would provide.
Hitler’s occupation of the Rhineland and then Austria had been welcomed by virtually the whole population of those German-speaking regions. Blumenkriege the German soldiers called these occupations; flower wars in which the soldiers got kisses and posies, not bullets and shells. But the people of Czechoslovakia – apart from the vociferous Volksdeutschen who lived in the border regions – had no love for the Germans.
Czechoslovakia – the Munich crisis
Czechoslovakia had been created in ten minutes at the end of the First World War. The imperial governor of defeated Austria-Hungary telephoned the illegal Czech National Committee and told them to come up to Hradcany Castle and pick up his seals and keys.7
Within Czechoslovakia’s boundaries remained many of the old Empire’s munitions factories. With the newly minted Czech crown unwanted on the international money markets, the Czechs were pleased to find that their armaments could be sold for hard currency.8 The new government strongly supported the armaments industry – Skoda at Plzen and Zbrojovka at Brno – and the chemical plants too. Within a decade Czech arms salesmen had 10 per cent of the world arms market. In the violent interwar years Czech arms were used by the Japanese and the Chinese, by the Ethiopians and by both sides in the Spanish Civil War. The British army’s best light machine-gun was named the Bren because it was evolved by the Czechoslovak factory at Brno and the British factory at Enfield.
British Bren light machine-gun
The German army greedily eyed the Czech arsenals. Rightly so: tanks and guns of Czech design and manufacture were to serve that army throughout the war. Czechoslovakia’s production of aero engines and aircraft components was to prove even more important. Hitler would now add all this to his empire. There was no one in France and Britain with the will and wherewithal to stop him, and yet this was the crisis that eventually signalled the war.
Hitler’s claim to Czechoslovakia’s Sudetenland was based upon spurious complaints that the German communities resident there were being harshly treated by the government in Prague. It was not true, but German newspapers, manipulated by Goebbels, told the story the way the Nazis wanted it told. The Sudeten Germans lived in the borderlands, an area well fortified against German attack. The Czechs stood firm and mobilized their army. Chamberlain, convinced that Hitler was a rational individual with whom an agreement could be reached, offered to meet him. Old and somewhat frail, he made his first flight in order to meet Hitler at the Führer’s mountainside retreat near Berchtesgaden. There were more fruitless meetings and for a time outsiders began to think that war was inevitable. Then at the last moment Chamberlain sent a secret message to Italy’s leader, Benito Mussolini, asking him to intercede.9
In September 1938 Hitler, Chamberlain, Mussolini and Daladier, the French PM, met in Munich to discuss Hitler’s claim. It was a fiasco that might call to mind a Marx Brothers comedy. The room was crammed with all kinds of officials and hangers-on, milling around and eating the buffet food. Hitler, Daladier and Chamberlain had no common language and their interpreters found it difficult to work in such a restless crowd. Mussolini delighted in the fact that he could manage all their languages. He strode about, turning the meeting into a quiz show in which he played question-master. Eventually, at twenty-five minutes past midnight, the Munich Pact was signed.
Chamberlain came back from Munich waving the agreement, and a supplementary joint declaration renouncing war, and saying that it meant peace for our time. The end had always been a foregone conclusion. The meeting was a futile attempt to preserve the dignity of France and Britain, while allowing Hitler to seize the Czech border regions. By occupying the fortified border the Germans rendered the rest of Czechoslovakia defenceless. The only consolation for the Czechs, who were given no say about the dismemberment of their land, was that Britain and France guaranteed the new frontiers against unprovoked aggression. Germany was also asked to do so, but never did.
Winston Churchill, a rebel back-bench member of Parliament with patchy influence, stood up in the House of Commons and said: ‘We have sustained a total, unmitigated defeat. We are in the midst of a disaster of the first magnitude … And do not suppose that this is the end. It is only the beginning.’ He was shouted down by his fellow members of Parliament.
Any last idea that Chamberlain, and his colleagues, were temporizing, permitting Hitler to march into the Sudetenland to give Britain time to rearm, is refuted by Chamberlain himself. When, after the Munich meeting, Lord Swinton (one-time secretary of state for Air) said to Chamberlain: ‘I will support you, Prime Minister, provided that you are clear that you have been buying time for rearmament,’ Chamberlain would have none of it. He took from his pocket the declaration that Hitler had so cynically signed and said: ‘But don’t you see, I have brought back peace.’10
Most of the cabinet, in fact most of the British public, tried to believe that the joint Anglo-German declaration affirming that the British and German peoples would ‘never go to war with one another again’ meant the ‘peace for our time’ which Chamberlain promised. But, according to Chamberlain’s account of that meeting, when Hitler went to sign the declaration there was no ink in the inkwell. A more wary man might have wondered about the sincerity of German preparations that didn’t include filling the inkwells.
The German occupiers of the Sudeten region treated the Czechs spitefully. Families who had lived in the same house for many generations were expelled without household goods or farm animals. SS Einsatzkommandos – a newly formed unit which later, in occupied regions of Poland and the USSR, organized mass murders – were manning the checkpoints to be sure the Czechs took nothing with them. When Hitler, on a tour of inspection, noticed Czech refugees being given bread and soup from German field kitchens he asked General Reichenau: ‘Why do we waste good German bread on those pigs?’ In fact the bread was good Czech bread.
Some Germans were shocked at this first sight of the behaviour of Himmler’s SS units. One Abwehr (Army Intelligence) officer wrote in his diary: ‘The SS Standarte Germania has murdered, pillaged and evicted in a bestial fashion. I saw one unfortunate girl who had been raped nine times by a gang of these rascals while her father had been murdered … these troops believe all they have read in the newspapers about Czech atrocities against our brothers.’11
Those Sudeten Germans who had encouraged Hitler’s claim, by totally