1939

CHAPTER 1: THE DEMONIC ORGANIST

On January 4, 1939, Kurt Hirschberg lay barely alive in the bedroom of his Berlin apartment with his frost-bitten hands, feet, and ears swaddled in bandages. After seven weeks of misery, he had just been released from the Sachsenhausen concentration camp near Oranienburg, about twenty miles north of Berlin, where he and hundreds of other German Jews had been made to stand in ranks for fifteen hours at a stretch in near-zero temperatures. With shaven heads, hats in hand, nothing to eat, and nothing to drink, they were to never allowed step out of ranks for any reason. The slightest misstep would earn them a smack in the face or a rifle to the groin. To crown all, the Nazi guards had celebrated Christmas by hanging two Jews on the gallows beside a lighted Christmas tree and making all the other Jews sing "O Tannenbaum," "O Christmas Tree" (Andreas-Friedrich 33-34).

Hirschberg had been sent to Oranienburg in early November of the year just passed, when the Nazis took fearful revenge for the death of Ernst von Rath, a young Third Secretary at the German Embassy in Paris who had been fatally wounded on November 7 by a 17-year-old Polish Jew named Herschel Grynzspan. While studying in Paris, Grynzspan learned that his parents were trapped without food or shelter on the border between Germany and Poland. Along with thousands of other Polish Jews, they had been rounded up for deportation and thrust at Polish frontier guards who threatened to shoot them if they tried to cross. Infuriated by their plight, Grynzspan bought a revolver, walked into the German Embassy, fired several times at the first official he saw, and surrendered.

The death of this minor official, who succumbed to his wounds the next day, was avenged on a staggering scale. In the dark early morning hours of November 10, Nazi Storm Troopers led by an ex- naval officer named Reinhard Heydrich burned or damaged synagogues all over Germany, looted Jewish shops and offices, and smashed plate-glass windows, giving the night its fearful name: Kristallnacht. The Nazis also seized twenty thousand Jews for deportation to Dachau, Buchenwald, and Oranienburg (where Hirschberg wound up), and as further punishment for the Paris murder, the Jewish community was fined a billion Reichmarks--400 million dollars. Also, all Jewish children were expelled from public schools, and starting on the first day of the new year (1939), no Jew was allowed to run a business.

On January 4, three days after this New Year's Day edict, two days after Time magazine featured Adolph Hitler as its Man of the Year 1938 (see below), and on the same day that Kurt Hirschberg lay barely alive in Berlin, President Franklin Delano Roosevelt delivered his New Year address to Congress. This long speech was a masterpiece of evasion. Nowhere does it mention Hitler, the plight of German Jews, or the vulnerability of a Czechoslovakia freshly shorn of the fortified frontier that had protected it from Germany. But Roosevelt had good reason for his reticence. Given the Neutrality Act of 1937, which forbade U.S. ships to furnish any passengers or goods to belligerents, let alone send troops, the president could do little more than wring his hands in the face of German belligerence. In late September 1938, when Hitler's determination to sieze the frontier lands of Czechoslovakia had driven Europe to the brink of war, Roosevelt had written twice to Hitler and Czech president Edvard Benĕs, urging both to reach a "fair, peaceful, and constructive settlement of the questions at issue." They reached a settlement only because England and France forced Benĕs to swallow terms that were grossly unfair--and thus to reward Hitler's relentless campaign of intimidation. Since FDR's letters helped to midwife this brutal resolution, it is ironic to find him not only declaring that "God-fearing democracies of the world . . . cannot forever let pass, without effective protest, acts of aggression against sister nations," but also stating that "at the very least, we can and should avoid any action, or lack of action, which will encourage, assist, or build up the aggressor." Could he himself make "effective protest" without even mentioning either Hitler or Czechoslovakia? And since, he says, "we rightly decline to intervene with arms to prevent acts of aggression," could the U.S. avoid any action or inaction that might help the aggressor? FDR's only answer to this question is to challenge the wisdom of neutrality laws, which "may operate unevenly and unfairly--may actually give aid to an aggressor and deny it to the victim." Implicitly, then, in the face of all the voices raised for isolationism, he begins to make the case for intervention. But all he dares to say explicitly is that the United States must have "adequate defense": "armed forces and defenses strong enough to ward off sudden attack."

Let us now look closely at Time's cover picture of the man whose name is so conspicuously absent from Roosevelt's very first speech of 1939.

The picture was drawn by Baron Rudolph Charles von Ripper, a 33-year-old Austrian artist who had endured three and half months in a Nazi concentration camp in the winter of 1933-34, had been rescued by the Austrian government (then still independent), and had already depicted his ordeal in a series of Goyesque etchings called écraser l'Infâme--"Wipe out Infamy."

For Time von Ripper drew Adolph Hitler as a demonic organist playing in a desecrated cathedral whose cross appears at the top of the picture. We do not see the Führer's face. Shown from behind at the base of the picture and dressed in his Nazi uniform, he sits beneath the pipes of a gigantic organ supporting a medieval instrument of torture known as a St. Catherine wheel: a large wooden wheel to which victims were bound so that their limbs could be broken by repeated blows with a cudgel or club, after which the wheel was sometimes erected on a pole so that its victims could be left there to rot. Though this method of execution ended in Germany about a hundred years before Hitler's time, the fate of the emaciated figures shown hanging from the wheel in this picture fittingly represents what Nazism had already done to thousands of its victims by the end of 1938.¹

Hitler's organ playing is witnessed by several living figures standing at his left and seated at his right. Though it is not easy to identify any of them, the elbow-length ermine cape (mozzetta) worn by the man standing in the lower left foreground plainly identifies him as a high clerical figure--quite possibly Monsignor Cesare Vincenzo Orsenigo, who served as the Apostolic Papal Nuncio to Berlin from 1930 to 1945 and who in that capacity was a key conduit between two popes-- Pius XI and XII-- and the Nazi regime.² To say that these two popes condoned Nazism and did nothing for German Jewry would be grossly unfair--especially since Pius XI's 1937 encyclical Mit Brennende Sorge (With Burning Anxiety) condemned racism (section 11), implicitly attacked Nazism (sections 34-37), and even implied that Hitler himself was a "prophet of nothingness" (section 17). But in spite of their loathing for Nazism, there is ample evidence that both Pius XI and the future Pius XII acquiesced to Hitler's regime in the 1930s. Starting with the Concordat signed between the German Reich and the Vatican in July of 1933, they did so largely because, in the words of Pius XI, Hitler "raised his voice against Bolshevism."³ Also, the man who represented both popes in Germany--Monsignor Orsenigo--was a pro-Nazi, anti-Semitic fascist who met regularly with Hitler and his leading henchmen and who would warmly and publically congratulate the Führer on his fiftieth birthday in April of 1939--on orders from the newly installed Pius XII.⁴ It may be argued that the political pragmatism of both Piuses ultimately saved Jewish lives as well as protecting some of Germany's Roman Catholics while individual priests and nuns were martryed. But in making a high Catholic cleric conspicuous among the witnesses to Hitler's demonic organ playing, von Ripper aptly represents the official position of the Roman Catholic Church.

Hitler himself is fittingly portrayed as the organist of an instrument whose pipes support a wheel of torture. More than any other dictator who came before or after him, Hitler gained and kept his power by means of his own vocal pipes: by a torrent of speeches whose manic stridency mesmerized his hearers. His very voice inspired them with his virulent antisemitism, his hatred of anyone who opposed him, and his megalomaniacal lust for war. On the eve of the Nazi party rally held in Nuremberg in September 1934, the American journalist William F. Shirer was struck by the rapture on the faces of those gathered in thousands around Hitler's hotel: when he appeared on the balcony, wrote Shirer, "they looked up at him as if he were a Messiah." At the opening of the rally the next morning, Hitler showed himself a master of spectacle as well as sound: a god of pageantry. The first meeting of the day, Shirer wrote, "was more than a gorgeous show; it also had something of the mysticism and religious fervor of an Easter or Christmas Mass in a great Gothic cathedral." No wonder von Ripper placed him in a desecrated cathedral rededicated to the religion of fascism, whose very name derives from the bundle of rods (fasces) so vividly evoked by the close-bound vertical pipes of the organ.

Hitler's rise to power in Germany had been breathtakingly swift. On January 30, 1933, not long after the Nazi party had gained a plurality of seats in the German Reichstag (its parliament), the old and ailing President of Germany, Field Marshall von Hindenberg, was persuaded to name Hitler himself, the party leader, as Chancellor. Less than a month later, on February 27, the Nazis set fire to the Reichstag building, causing widespread panic, blaming the Communists, and thus setting the stage for what they called a "Law for Removing the Distress of the People and the Reich." (One of the many Communists who fled the consequences of this decree was the playwright Berthold Brecht.) In getting this law passed by an overwhelming majority of the Reichstag, the Nazis gained absolute power for Hitler, who wielded it ruthlessly against anyone who stood in his way. Among them was General Kurt von Schleicher, who had been both Minister of Defense and Chancellor just before Hitler and who had ventured to criticize his cabinet in the spring of 1934. On June 30, 1934 (the Night of the Long Knives), Shleicher and his wife were both gunned down along with hundreds of others that Hitler distrusted. By the summer of 1934 he had also ended German democracy. According to Cameron Watt, he broke all political parties of the right and left, abolished or Nazified "all the multifarious professional organizations, trades unions and so on which made Germany a plural society," and made himself "head of state, demanding and receiving oaths of loyalty . . . from all officers and civil servants in the State's employ" (Watt 20). By October 1938, after forcing the resignation of General Ludwig von Beck as well as other generals who had tried to oppose him, Hitler not only became Supreme Commander of the Armed Forces but gained "entire control over the greatest and most powerful nation in Europe" (Watt 21). What other European nation could simply swallow another, as Germany did when it annexed Austria in March of 1938?

By the following October Hitler had also outmaneuvered the conspiracy against him that Beck had joined and that had been plotting to overthrow him in September. Though Hitler did not know of the conspiracy, he foiled it by the Munich agreement, gaining a large swath of Czechoslovakian territory without firing a single shot, let alone sacrificing a drop of German blood. By sheer force of will, as explained below, he led the western democracies--France and Great Britain--to let Germany swallow the so-called "Sudetenland" below its southern border.

A brief review of what led up to the Munich agreement, I hope, will show how it set the stage for the momentous year to come. The last two weeks of September 1938 furnished not only the most dramatic example of shuttle diplomacy in the history of the twentieth century, and perhaps the world; they also showed how Hitler gained effective control of an entire nation--and of Western Europe for a time-- by means of lies, superficial civility, and relentless intimidation.

At the time, the Czechs themselves knew only too well that they had been sold out. A week before the Munich agreement was signed, Jan Masaryk, the Czech ambassador to London, learned that Chamberlain--a onetime businessman before he entered politics-- thought he could "do business" with Hitler, and that Hitler had promised to leave Europe in peace "with no further territorial claims upon Czechoslovakia" once he had seized its northern tier and thus reclaimed the "Sudetenland" of Germany. So incredulous that he had to hear this stated again, Masaryk told Winston Churchill that it was the "Hitler-Chamberlain auction sale" (Carley 65). Within days of the Munich agreement, Churchill himself denounced it on the floor of the British parliament as "a total and unmitigated defeat" (qtd. Carley 36).

And in response to Chamberlain's claim that he had brought back "peace with honour" and "peace for our time," Churchill presciently stated: "You were given the choice between war and dishonor. You chose dishonour, and you will have war." ("Dishonour and War," September 30, 1938).

Events proved Churchill absolutely right. Less than six months after the Munich agreement, Germany seized all of Czechoslovakia without opposition, and in less than twelve it invaded and occupied half of Poland-- with only the Poles themselves resisting until they were crushed. But the aftermath of Munich makes a clouded lens through which to read what happened there. To understand Munich, we must not only strive to learn what its participants thought, said, and did, but also--as far as we can-- to recover their ignorance, to imagine what they felt and believed would or might happen before any of them could know what eventually did. We must also ponder the weight of their memories. Just twenty years before Munich, the Great War (as it was then called) had taken over 17 million lives, including about a million fighters from the British Empire and well over a million from France. On a single day, the first day of the Battle of the Somme (July 1, 1916), the British Fourth Army took more than 57,000 casualties, including over 19,000 dead. It is impossible to overstate the burden of such memories on the vast majority of French and British minds, the anguish they felt at the prospect of another war, or the ecstasy of relief with which they hailed the prospect of averting it. On the evening of September 14, British diplomats dining in Geneva were thrilled to learn that Chamberlain was about to fly off--literally-- to seek peace from Hitler:

Towards the end of the Banquet came the news, the great world-stirring news, that Neville, on his own initiative, seeing war coming closer and closer, had telegraphed to Hitler that he wanted to see him, and asked him to name an immediate rendezvous. The German Government, surprised and flattered, had instantly accepted and so Neville, at the age of 69, for the first time in his life, gets into an aeroplane tomorrow morning and flies to Berchtesgaden! It is one of the finest, most inspiring acts of all history. The company rose to their feet electrified, as all the world must be, and drank his health. History must be ransacked to find a parallel.

Of course a way out will now be found. Neville by his imagination and practical good sense, has saved the world. I am staggered. (Channon, Diaries Sept 14)

These are not the words of an ordinary citizen. They come from a British politician named Sir Henry Channon, an American-born conservative M.P. who knew enough about European history to write a highly praised study of Bavarian royalty. He need not have ransacked history much to have learned how utterly impervious Hitler would be to Chamberlain's "practical good sense." Channon had to know that by re-militarizing the Rhineland in March of 1936 and then annexing all of Austria in March of 1938, Hitler had unilaterally shredded the Treaty of Versailles. But Chamberlain was more than ready to sympathize with Hitler's resentment of this treaty--and even his spurious pledge to liberate and rescue the would-be "tortured" Germans living in the Sudetenlands of Czechoslovakia.

Hitler thundered this pledge at the Nuremberg Congress on September 12. The very next day, the Sudeten uprising led both the French and the British to conclude that the Sudetens were irresistibly bent on joining the Reich, and on the night of September 13/14, with the uprising in full force, Hitler got a message from Neville Chamberlain via the British Embassy in Berlin: the PM proposed to "come over at once to see you with a view to try and find a peaceful solution" (Hauner 133, Self, 310). This proposal, which Chamberlain cabled just before midnight on September 13 and which struck like a "bombshell" when he announced it to his cabinet the next morning, gained not only its unanimous approval but also Hitler's assent (Self 311).

By September 15, however, when Chamberlain first met Hitler at Berchtesgarten, a group of high-ranking German military officers had fully hatched a plot to overthrow the Nazis as soon as Hitler ordered the attack on Czechoslovakia.⁵ Eight days earlier, on September 7, the British Foreign Minister Lord Halifax received a message from Ernst von Weizsäcker, State Secretary in the Foreign Ministry in Berlin. Loathing both Hitler's foreign policy and the Nazi regime, Weizsäcker desperately sought British help in deterring Hitler's war-making plans. To this end, he sent a message to Theo Kordt, Chargé d'Affaires at the German Embassy in London, calling for "an unequivocal stand on the part of Britain that, in turn, would allow the opposition to deploy its 'forces'" (Klemperer 101-02).

Bearing this message in person to 10 Downing Street in London, residence of the British prime minister, and identifying himself to Halifax as the "speaker for political and military circles in Berlin" which "by all means wanted to prevent a war," Kordt asked Britain for a "public declaration" by radio to the German people so as to enable "the leaders of the army" to "move against Hitler's policies by force of arms" (Klemperer 102). But as Halifax told Kordt much later, the British government was already thinking about sending Chamberlain to Germany at the time of Kordt's visit (Klemperer 105), for the PM and his closest advisers still believed that they could somehow wring peace from Hitler without a show of force. On September 6, the day before Kordt's visit, Halifax had received a startlingly upbeat letter from Nevile Henderson, British ambassador to Germany. Looking ahead to Hitler's closing speech at the Nazi party congress in Nuremberg on September 12, Henderson reckons that while the chances of Hitler's coming out for peace rather than war are "about 50-50," he guesses it will be peace, and he even wishes that The Times and other British papers might be urged "to write up Hitler as an apostle of Peace" and "give him a chance of being a good boy."

Delusional as this sounds, it might have been confirmed by one thing Hitler would say at Nuremberg, which is that "Germany is determined to accept . . . [its] borders as inviolable and unchangeable in order to give Europe a feeling of security and peace." But Hitler makes this statement only after charging at great length that Czechoslovakia has brutally persecuted the three and half million ethnic Germans who live within its borders, and that "if these tortured creatures can find neither justice nor help by themselves, then they will receive both from us."⁶ This thinly veiled declaration of war sprang from a gross distortion of the facts. Even though the Czechs were torturing no one and had accepted nearly all demands made by the Nazi leader of the Sudetens, Konrad Henlein, the Czechs had stopped just short of granting them complete autonomy. Here was Hitler's pretext for a war of liberation.

The Sudetens themselves made up the front line of this war, for as Igor Lukes has shown, Hitler's Nuremberg speech gave the Sudeten German Party (SdP) all the signal it needed to launch an open rebellion against the Czech government. Armed with rifles and machine guns and already trained in Germany by the Wehrmacht and SS, its 40,000 paramilitaries--the Sudetendeutches Freikorps--wasted no time in wreaking havoc. By the morning of September 13, barely 12 hours after Hitler gave his speech, they had murdered at least four Czech police officers and kidnapped 26 others who were never heard from again. By September 15, however, after calmly retaking several German districts that had been captured by the Freikorps, the Czechs declared the SdP illegal and issued a warrant for the arrest of Henlein, who promptly fled to Germany even while urging his followers to fight "Czech tyranny."⁷ But with Henlein's fellow officers fleeing in his wake, the remaining Sudetens had no heart for fighting. According to Lukes, in fact, "leading members of the former SdP [now disbanded] publically welcomed the restoration of order by the [Czech] authorities and proposed to cooperate with the Prague government" (Lukes 214). Could anything have more dramatically demolished Hitler's endlessly repeated claim that the Sudetens were tortured and persecuted, and desperately yearned to join the Reich?

Unfortunately, however, good news typically lags behind bad. By the late evening of September 13, after French premier Edouard Daladier learned of the just-begun Sudeten uprising, he told the British that Hitler's invasion of Czechoslovakia had to be checked by means of negotiation, and through the British ambassador in Paris he begged Chamberlain to conduct it (Lukes 215). Shortly before midnight, then, Chamberlain cabled Hitler, and by the morning of the 14^th Hitler had agreed to a meeting on the next day.

On the rainy morning of Thursday, September 15, therefore, the 69-year-old prime minister took off from Croyden Airport (south of London) in a twin-engined Lockheed Electra. With him was Sir Horace Wilson, his most trusted adviser, who fully shared his determination to make peace. Both men also firmly believed that the French and Czechs would accept whatever concessions Britain made to Germany.⁸ France, Chamberlain knew, would swallow any agreement that would keep it out of war, and his own Chiefs of Staff had just told him that no western forces could stop Germany's invasion of Czechoslovakia, that trying to do so would start an "unlimited war," and that once it started Britain would get at least 500 tons of bombs a day for two months (Self, 310-12). Chamberlain had good reason to seek almost any alternative to that.

It was the first time in his life that he had ever flown out of England, and the plane "rocked and bumped" as it flew through storm clouds over Munich (Self 312). But after being greeted on the runway by Germany's Foreign Minister Joachim von Ribbentrop and a Nazi guard of honor, he was cheered by crowds braving the rain while he rode in an open car from the airport to the railroad station. From there a special train took him to Berchtesgarten, Hitler's grand airie in the Bavarian Alps (Self 312, Kershaw 110). Given the urgency of the Czech crisis and the white-knuckle strain of flying so far for the very first time, one wonders why Hitler did not meet Chamberlain in Munich (where of course they would later meet) instead of subjecting him to a three-hour train ride climbing slowly up into the Bavarian Alps. Was it to make sure that Chamberlain would see and hear-- clacking past him as he climbed-- a steady stream of military trains filled with freshly-uniformed, gun-toting shock troops headed for the Czech border (Kershaw 110, Lukes 216)? The whole process of ascending to Hitler's Berghof, his mountain house, seems to have been calculated to ensure that Chamberlain would arrive as a nervous supplicant.

By himself, the PM looked every inch the old-fashioned statesman in his prime: slim, silver-haired, mustachioed, topcoated, and wing-collared with a long dark necktie. At six feet two inches, he was five inches taller than Hitler, who even in his Nazi Party uniform (black trousers and khaki jacket with red swastika armband and First Class Iron Cross) struck Chamberlain as "the commonest little dog he had ever seen" (Self 312). But Hitler was really an alpha dog.⁹ In a photograph of the two taken midway up a long flight of stairs leading to the Berghof (see above), the British prime minister stands at least five inches below Hitler as they shake hands for the very first time. Looking up at Hitler with a smile of anticipation and hope, he holds in his left hand his hat and his furled umbrella--his indispensable accessory, his would-be dress sword.¹⁰ Barely bowing his head, Hitler greets him with condescension. He will allow himself to be importuned by his English visitor before he works his unshakable will.

What he wanted was something the Czechs had vowed to keep. Besides being part of their country, the Sudetenland was a natural as well as man-made frontier--a fortified mountain range guarding the western half of Czechoslovakia, which looks on a map as if about to be caught in the jaws of a wolf. Without the Sudetenland, the rest of the country would be powerless against a German advance.

Whether or not Chamberlain ever grasped this crucial point, he gave no sign of doing so. On the contrary, he came to Hitler's Berghof ready to give him the Sudetenland without a fight, or more precisely to buy peace--for however long it might last--in return for persuading the Czechs to give up their well-fortified frontier. He did not ask if the Sudeten Germans had any right to vote themselves out of Czechoslovakia, or question Hitler's claim to know what they wanted, or his evidence for claiming that Czechoslovakia was actually threatening Germany in any way. All Chamberlain wanted to know was whether Hitler would be satisfied with the Sudetenland. "Is there nothing more you want?" said the prime minister. "I ask because there are many people who think that is not all, that you wish to dismember Czechoslovakia."

Hitler's answer was so alarmingly vague and diversionary that Chamberlain fumed. If Hitler was bent on making war without even waiting for discussion, Chamberlain said, why did he let me come? But when Hitler answered that he'd be willing to talk if the British Government accepted "the principle of self-determination" for the Sudeten Germans, Chamberlain replied that he "had nothing to say" against their "separation . . . from the rest of Czechoslovakia, provided that the practical difficulties could be overcome"-- meaning the "immense practical difficulties in a plebiscite." They then agreed to meet again after Chamberlain went home for further consultations, and meanwhile Hitler "promised not to give the order to march unless some outrageous incident forced his hand."¹¹

Having thus held off the dogs of war for at least a few days, Chamberlain believed he had done reasonably well. "[I]n spite of the hardness & ruthlessness I thought I saw in his face," he told his sister Ida, "I got the impression that here was a man who could be relied upon when he had given his word" (Self 314, 511n113). At his next meeting with Hitler, he would promptly discover what that word was worth.

In Prague, the sleep-deprived Czech president Edvard Beneš found himself forced to accept the word of his would-be allies. At noon on September 21, when the British and French ambassadors demanded immediate acceptance of the Anglo-French proposal, Beneš asked what guarantees he would have if he did so. If he withdrew the Czech army from the fortified frontier, he said, would the British or French protect his nation from attack by Hitler? He could no more get a straight answer from the ambassadors than Chamberlain could get one from Hitler. But there was no way of postponing the decision indefinitely. So just before 5 PM, after Benĕs and his ministers had met tearfully twice for more than an hour each time, Foreign Minister Krofta told the ambassadors that Prague "sadly accepts the French and British proposals." Krofta also said he assumed the allies would protect what remained of Czechoslovakia and that details of the transfer would be decided "in agreement with" Prague (Lukes 227-28). Could Krofta fail to see that nothing justified either of these assumptions, that nothing made it probable the allies would protect any part of Czechoslovakia, or even consult with Prague again before delivering another ultimatum? But this was not a time for strictly rational calculation. Like Benĕs and indeed like all of his countrymen, Krofta could only hope for the best. Nothing was guaranteed.

That night, Prague was a city in anguish. While angry crowds demonstrated against both Britain and France and shouted their support of the Czech army, the government broadcast its own message throughout the streets. Saluting the Czechs as an "unvanquished people," it called its decision a "sacrifice for the cause of peace under pressure unprecedented in history."¹²

Having wrung this sacrifice from the Czechs, Chamberlain flew back to Germany the next day--Thursday, September 22-- for his second meeting with Hitler. Had he read the German papers that morning or even the London Times, he could have seen that so far from stopping with the Sudetenland, Germany was already planning to carve up all of Czechoslovakia with the aid of Hungary and Poland.¹³ Chamberlain should also have known what Soviet Foreign Minister Litvinov told the League of Nations in Geneva on September 21: that the Anglo-French capitulation was bound to lead to catastrophe.¹⁴ But on September 22, Chamberlain flew right over these portents. In Cologne, where he landed this time, the "flying messenger of peace"--as Mussolini had just called him-- was lavishly welcomed with flowers, gifts, and a German band playing "God Save the King" (Corvaja 72). Though Chamberlain had left that morning under "a heavy load of anxiety" because of domestic opposition to his policy, he probably found fresh reason to believe reports that he was now "the most popular man in Germany" (Shirer 391, Self 315) .

In any case, the most powerful man in Germany awaited him at the Rheinhotel Dreesen in Bad Godesberg, a spa district of the city of Bonn spread out under the hills on the west bank of the Rhine. Hitler was not exactly in a welcoming mood. On the morning before Chamberlain's arrival, he had been seen walking down from the hotel to his yacht at the riverbank with a nervous tic and black patches under his eyes--looking mad enough to chew a carpet, which he had quite literally done more than once in the previous few days.¹⁵ Chamberlain felt much calmer. Leaving the Petershof, his castle-like hotel standing high above the right bank of the Rhine, he crossed the river by ferry with the westering sun of a late September afternoon casting shadows on the Petersberg behind him. Walking into the Dreesen at 4:00 PM, he felt fully confident that Hitler would be pleased with his news. When they met (once again mostly in private, with only Schmidt the interpreter between them), it was Chamberlain who did all the talking-- for more than an hour. By "laborious negotiations," he explained to the Fuhrer, he had persuaded the Czechs as well as the French and British cabinets to accept Hitler's demands. Besides letting Germany absorb the Sudetenland without a plebiscite, he said that Czechoslovakia "would be completely neutral." Also, its treaties with France and Russia--treaties Hitler loathed--would be replaced by an international guarantee of its safety. Having said all this, Chamberlain paused expectantly for Hitler's reaction (Shirer, 391-92).

At first it looked good. Hitler was astounded to learn that his demands had been so quickly met. But as soon as Chamberlain smilingly confirmed this, the Fuhrer balked. "I am terribly sorry," he said, "but after the events of the last few days, this plan is no longer of any use." Chamberlain was shocked. He had risked his whole political career, he said, to get the French and the Czechs to accept Hitler's demands; he had been charged in his own country with selling out the Czechs; he had even been booed as he stepped onto his plane that morning (Shirer, 392-93; Self, 316). But none of this dented the brain of Hitler, who insisted that Germany must occupy the Sudeten districts "by October first, at the latest," using a map to point out the districts, with occupation to begin on September 28 (Shirer 393, Self 316). He also insisted that the whole of Czechoslovakia must be carved up and distributed to Poland and Hungary as well as to Germany. He had ample provocation, he said: just since their last meeting, fresh attacks on Germans in Czechoslovakia had forced his hand (Corvaja 87-88).

The attacks, of course, were sheer fabrication. But as an incurable addict of fake news, Hitler cared nothing for facts. He actually arranged for an outbreak of fake news during his conference with Chamberlain: a sudden report that more Germans were being killed in Czechoslovakia. Right on cue, Hitler's screamed, "I will avenge every one of them. The Czechs must be destroyed" (Corvaja 88)--echoing just what he had said to his inner circle in late May, long before he had started complaining to anyone about Czech atrocities.¹⁶ What could Chamberlain say or do now? With Hitler granting none of the Allies' demands, the meeting ended at 7:00 PM. Then, re-crossing the Rhine, Chamberlain returned to his hotel "full of foreboding" to ponder his next step (Shirer 394; Lukes 234).

After he phoned his own cabinet members and members of the French government, they all agreed that Czechoslovakia could no longer be held in check: it must be told the next morning--the 23^rd--that France and Britain no longer advised against mobilizing its forces (Shirer 394). On the phone, Chamberlain was also told by Halifax that public opinion in Britain was hardening against any more concessions to Hitler, that it was up to Hitler "to make some contribution." So the next morning, after pacing his balcony overlooking the Rhine and eating his breakfast, Chamberlain decided to write to Hitler instead of meeting him at 11:30 as they had planned (Self 317, Lukes 234). Though he offered to submit the Fuhrer's new demands to the Czechs, he was sure they would fight sooner than letting Germany occupy the Sudetenland at once. The best he could do, therefore, was to ask Prague to let the Sudeten Germans govern themselves until their part of the country became part of the Reich (Shirer 394-95).

This too Hitler rejected. While keeping the British prime minister waiting for most of the day, he dictated a long reply that rehashed all his previous charges against the Czechs, demanded that they end their "tyranny" at once by handing over the Sudetenland, and concluded that war now seemed imminent (Shirer 395, Kershaw 114). After Schmidt translated the letter and delivered it by hand to Chamberlain, the prime minister briefly responded by asking Hitler to put his new demands in a memorandum, "together with a map," so that "as mediator" Chamberlain could send them to Prague. To collect the memorandum and its accompanying map from Hitler in person, Chamberlain returned to the Hotel Dreesen at 10:30 PM.

With various advisers on both sides looking on, Schmidt translated Hitler's words aloud. They were chilling. By 8 AM on September 26, Hitler demanded, the Czech army must begin withdrawing from the territory shown on the map, and must be completely out by September 28. When Chamberlain threw up his hands and called this "nothing less than an ultimatum--a Diktat," Hitler pointed to the word at the top of the document: "memorandum," a Latin word conveniently adopted without change in both English and German (Shirer 395, Kershaw 115). But what did this matter? "With great disappointment and deep regret," said Chamberlain, "I must register, Herr Reich Chancellor, that you have not supported in the slightest my efforts to maintain peace" (qtd. Kershaw 115).

At this moment, as if on cue, an aide rushed in with a message for the Fuhrer, who in turn told Schmidt, "Read this to Mr. Chamberlain." Whereupon Schmidt stated, "Beneš has just announced over the radio a general mobilization in Czechoslovakia." After a deadly silence all around the room, Hitler spoke first. "Now, of course," he said, "the whole affair is settled. The Czechs will not dream of ceding any territory to Germany." This launched what must have come very close to a shouting match. Against Chamberlain's objections, Hitler stated that the Czechs had mobilized first. No, said the prime minister, Germany mobilized first. Whereupon Hitler denied that Germany had mobilized at all. Finally, after Hitler confirmed to Chamberlain's anxious questioning that the memorandum "was really his last word," Chamberlain said there was no point in talking any more. He had failed to find a peaceful settlement of Germany's dispute with Czechoslovakia. He was going home "with a heavy heart" (Shirer 395).

At the last minute, however, Hitler contrived to lighten it. In barely more than a whisper, he offered Chamberlain what "few men" had ever gained from him: a "concession." "I am prepared," he said, "to set one single date for the Czech evacuation--October first--if that will facilitate your task" (Shirer 395). He did not say that he had already set this date on September 3, when he had fixed the timetable for "Case Green," his attack on Czechoslovakia (Kershaw 109). Now--against all odds-- he seemed conciliatory. With his own pencil on the memorandum he not only changed the date of the Czech evacuation but also softened the word Forderungen ("demands") to Vorschläge ("proposals")--as if the second meant anything gentler, in his private vocabulary, than the first. (Self, 317).

At 1:30 A.M., having finally obtained what Hitler himself called a "concession," Chamberlain expressed his thanks, offered to take the revised memorandum--hereafter the Godesberg memorandum--to the Czechs, and bade Hitler an astonishingly cordial farewell. Thanking the prime minister in return, Hitler repeated once more what he had told him several times before. As Chamberlain reported to his cabinet on September 24, "the Czech problem was the last territorial demand which he had to make in Europe" (Shirer 395, Self 317). To our ears these words sound utterly treacherous. But since Chamberlain had already told his sister that he felt Hitler "could be relied upon when he had given his word," he would not be deterred by the awkward fact that Hitler had drastically raised his demands in the few days since their first meeting. On the contrary, everything we know about Chamberlain at this time tells us that he was desperate to believe Hitler's parting assurance, which--as Chamberlain later told the House of Commons--he pronounced "with great earnestness" (Shirer 395).

Nevertheless, Chamberlain now faced a major challenge. Returning to London on the morning of Saturday, September 24, his first task was to pitch the Fuhrer's demands to his own cabinet. As he flew up the Thames toward London and looked down at the thousands of homes spread out below him, he wondered how well Britain could defend them against the two months' hailstorm of German bombs that his Chiefs of Staff had just predicted if war broke out (Self 317). He brought this anxious question to his cabinet that afternoon, when he told its members that refusing Hitler's terms would not only bring the destruction of the Czech state but would also catch Britain with its anti-aircraft defences not yet ready for German planes. Nevertheless, Chamberlain's cabinet would not back him. Five of its members called for immediate mobilization, and Chamberlain adjourned the meeting until the next morning (Self 318, Shirer 391)--presumably so that its members could sleep on the question at hand.

Halifax, for one, did not sleep at all--as he revealed to the cabinet on Sunday morning. Though he had up to now fully supported Chamberlain's case for a peaceful transfer of territory as an alternative to war, he had concluded after a "sleepless night" that Britain should not accept the "disorderly transfer" Hitler now demanded. Shaken by the "horrible blow" of Halifax's defection, Chamberlain also faced other points of resistance. Several members urged immediate military conversations with France and perhaps even Russia (at long last!) as well as assurances that Britain would back France if it intervened on behalf of the Czechs. Others insisted that "there must be no giving way again." And re-iterating what he had said the day before, Duff Cooper argued persuasively that British public opinion was moving against capitulation (Self 319).

So too were the Czechs. By Sunday evening (September 25), when Daladier and Bonnet arrived to meet Chamberlain and his inner circle, the Czechs had formally rejected Hitler's Godesberg demands as "absolutely and unconditionally unacceptable" (Lukes 239). And no wonder. As noted by the Manchester Guardian's diplomatic correspondent, some of the districts Hitler demanded included just a few German Sudetens or none at all; Czechoslavakia would have no time to remove its factories and fortifications, which Germany would thereby gain; and emboldened by this easy conquest, it might well go on to demand "the surrender of the Maginot Line, or a 'plebiscite' in the Flemish regions of Belgium, and so on."¹⁷ More immediately, Hitler's ultimatum drove several other mid-European nations to the brink of war: since Hungary was poised to attack along with Germany, Yugoslavia and Romania had promised to help the Czechs under the terms of the Little Entente.¹⁸

France too finally felt bound to help, as Daladier told Chamberlain at their Sunday night meeting. Up to now, he and Bonnet had believed--or been persuaded to believe--that they could do nothing for the Czechs without British support. But on Saturday, the day after the Czechs had ordered a general mobilization, the French had called up some of their reservists, raising their total forces to one million (Lukes 239). Now on Sunday night, during what William Strang called "among the most painful" meetings Daladier had ever attended, he made it clear that France had to do something --with or without British support. In the face of French public opinion, he said, he could not return to his country "having agreed to the strangulation of a people" (Self 319-20).

Chamberlain's case for pacificism now seemed nearly doomed. But even after failing to gain French support for his position, he met his cabinet once more, shortly before midnight, with yet another proposal. He would send Sir Horace Wilson to Hitler as a special envoy bearing Chamberlain's personal letter saying that the Allies still sought a peaceful resolution to the Sudeten crisis. But while stopping just short of threatening war, Chamberlain agreed that Wilson should add a spoken warning to Hitler: if France went to war with Germany because of its treaty obligations with Czechoslovakia, Britain would support France (Shirer 391, Self 320).

All day Sunday, while Chamberlain was struggling to keep his own cabinet as well as the French ministers on the side of peace, England continued bracing for war. In Berlin, paradoxically, the sight of people flocking to lakes and woods in the warmth of an Indian summer day made one American reporter feel that the prospect of war was "hard to believe" (Shirer 396-97). But in various public parks of England, trenches were being dug for emergency public shelter, and throughout the day on Sunday, hundreds of thousands streamed into schools, town halls, and other public buildings all over England to be fitted for gas masks.¹⁹ In a letter to The Times, one old Tory backbencher issued his personal call to arms. "Are we to surrender [the Czechs] to ruthless brutality," he wrote, ". . . or are we still able to stand up to a bully? It is not Czechoslovakia but our own soul that is at stake."²⁰ Outraged by Hitler's latest demands, growing numbers in France as well as England felt likewise, which thrilled Jan Masaryk, Czech ambassador to Britain. "The nation of Saint Wenceslas, John Hus, and Thomas Masaryk," he had told the British Foreign Office, "will never be a nation of slaves." (Lukes 239).

But England was led by an unwavering pacifist: a man who sought peace just as ardently as Hitler sought war. To this end, he stopped just short of pledging to fight for Czechoslovakia--let alone attacking Germany. At noon on Monday, September 26, Chamberlain told his assembled Cabinet and the departing French ministers what he had said to his cabinet the night before: that Britain would go "to her assistance if France were in danger" (Self 320-21). With this assurance, both the cabinet and the French ministers agreed to his sending Wilson on yet another peace-seeking trip to Hitler. But Chamberlain's assurance makes no mention of Czechoslovakia, which is significantly sidelined even in the much more explicit press communiqué issued by Lord Halifax at this time. If France is attacked while defending Czechoslovakia, Halifax declared, Britain and Russia "will certainly stand by France" (qtd. Self 320). So far as I know, this was the first time any British diplomat publically identified Russia as an ally of the western powers. But rather than committing Britain to defending Czechoslovakia, Halifax pledges only to defend France if attacked, which meant--by a superfine covert distinction-- not attacking Germany but rather helping the French hold the Maginot line (Self, 320). Thus Chamberlain himself walked the superfine line between war and peace.

On Monday the 26^th in Berlin, where Hitler was shortly to sound yet another call to war, he received two messages pleading for peace. The first was a telegram from President Franklin D. Roosevelt, who had recently made it clear that the U.S. would not intervene if war broke out over Czechoslovakia.²¹ But in the hope of forestalling such a war, he urged both Hitler and Czech President Benĕs to resolve their differences without one, to reach "a fair, peaceful, and constructive settlement of the questions at issue."²² Did FDR have any idea what Hitler considered "fair"? At Prague castle, which (the Czechs estimated) could be struck by German bombs just 30 minutes after the Luftwaffe crossed the border, President Benĕs felt wounded by FDR's letter. Were he and Hitler equally to blame for a crisis precipitated only by Hitler's outrageous demands? But Benĕs managed to compose what has been called "a masterpiece" of statesmanship, and it was cabled to Washington by 8:00 PM, when Benĕs and his entourage left the castle--driving slowly in the dark--for the safety of a private villa outside Prague (Lukes 242-43).

Hitler also responded to FDR's letter, but before doing so he reacted to a second appeal: the letter that Chamberlain sent with Horace Wilson, who arrived at the Chancellery at 5 PM., just three hours before Hitler would speak at the Sportspalast. As soon as Schmidt started translating Chamberlain's letter, which reported that the Czech government had found the Godesberg memorandum "wholly unacceptable," Hitler exploded. "There's no sense in negotiating further!" he shouted, and bolted for the door. Though he soon came back, he repeatedly interrupted Schmidt's recitation by screaming, "The Germans are being treated like niggers. . . . On October first I shall have Czechoslovakia where I want her. If France and England decide to strike, let them.. . . I do not care a pfenning" (Shirer 397). He was clearly in no mood for any more concessions. To Chamberlain's proposal that Czech and German representatives might settle "by agreement" just how the Sudetenland should be transferred to Germany, Hitler replied that the Czechs must first accept the Godesberg memorandum (which they had just rejected) and agree to German occupation of the Sudetenland by October 1. He demanded an affirmative reply by Wednesday, September 28 at 2 PM (Shirer 397).

That night (September 26) in the cavernous Berlin Sportspalast, Hitler trumpeted his demands in a speech made to a crowd of some twenty thousand (including party faithful, diplomats, and journalists) and broadcast live on radio--with simultaneous translation--to millions more around the world. To this global audience Hitler swore that he would have the Sudetenland by October 1 as "the last territorial demand which I intend to make in Europe." Made in the opening words of his speech and reiterated at the end, where he shouted, "We want no Czechs!", this treacherous pledge was his only concession to restraint. Otherwise, after charging that Edward Benĕs had concocted Czechoslovakia in 1918 by taking--among other things-- "three and a half million Germans in violation of their right to self-determination," he went on to claim that Benĕs was waging "a war of extermination" against them. Therefore, he insisted, the area populated by Germans (Sudetenland) must come to Germany "immediately," and only after that would its occupants be allowed a plebiscite to decide which country would be theirs --as if they had more than one choice. Near the end of his speech, he thanked "Mr. Chamberlain for all his efforts" and added, "I have assured him that the German People wishes nothing else than peace." But he ended by declaring that unless Benĕs accepts his "offer" by giving up the Sudetenland, "we will go in and take our freedom personally."²³

At noon on Tuesday, the following day, Horace Wilson returned to the Chancellory--along with Nevile Henderson, the British Ambassador in Berlin--in order to tell Hitler first of all what Chamberlain had said to the press in London that morning. Calling on Germany to abandon the threat of force, he offered British help in making sure the Czechs cooperated "fairly and fully and . . . with all reasonable promptitude." (Self 321). But Hitler was unmoved. The fate of the Czechs, he said, was now up to the Czechs. If they rejected his demands, he shouted, "I shall destroy Czechoslovakia!" and shouted it again and again with manic glee.

Hitler thus oscillated between superficial civility and brute intimidation. Earlier that day, in response to Roosevelt's telegram urging peaceful settlement of the crisis, he had replied with a telegram praising the president's "lofty intention" but reciting at length his own standard litany of lies. Germany was "shamefully betrayed" by the founding of Czechoslovakia, which denied to the Sudeten Germans "the right of self-determination"; the Czech regime has brutally abused the 3 ½ million Germans living within its borders, leaving "countless dead" and "thousands wounded"; Germany seeks nothing more than a "peaceful understanding" of its claim to the Sudetenland, which the Czechs have already agreed should be transferred to the Reich; the question of peace or war is now up to the Czechs.²⁴ But at 1:00 PM on the very day he sent this telegram, Hitler secretly ordered seven divisions of his army to the Czech frontier, and a few hours later he mobilized five new divisions for the west (Shirer 399).

In doing so, of course, he gave the lie to the claim he had made to millions the night before-- "that the German People wishes nothing else than peace." Yet in spite of himself, Hitler unwittingly spoke the truth. Three days earlier, when Chamberlain left Godesberg in the wee hours of September 24, Hitler's leading henchmen--including Goering, Goebbels, Rippentropp and General Keitel--reportedly "seemed dazed by the prospect of war" (Shirer 395). Now Hitler was made to see that it also revolted the German people as a whole. "To impress foreign diplomats and journalists with German military might," as his Luftwaffe adjutant later recalled (Kershaw 118), Hitler ordered a "grand parade" with a motorized division rolling through the capital at dusk on September 27. But as hundreds of thousands of Berliners filled the streets on their way home from work, they quietly staged what Shirer called "the most striking demonstration against war I've ever seen." In the workers' quarters the motorized troops were reportedly greeted with "clenched fists," and when a bareheaded Hitler stepped out on the balcony of the Wilhelmstrasse Chancellory, a tight-lipped crowd of less than two hundred kept "icy silence" while not raising a single arm. Utterly disgusted, Hitler turned back inside and poured out his rage to Goebbels. "I can't lead a war with such a people!" he said (Shirer 399, Klemperer 106, Andreas-Friedrich 2).

Inside the Chancellery came news of what his army would be up against. Yugoslavia and Romania had just told the Hungarian government that they would attack Hungary if she joined Germany in attacking Czechoslovakia. The French were also ready to fight--at last. In late May, some of Hitler's top commanders had warned him that Germany could hold its western front against a French attack for no more than three weeks (Lukes, 209). Now that attack was imminent. In a telegram from Paris, the German military attaché reported that France's would-be "partial" mobilization was in fact almost total, and by the sixth day of mobilization, he estimated, "the first 65 divisions [would be] on the German frontier." They would face what Hitler knew were barely a dozen German divisions, half of them unreliable reserve units. If Germany turns belligerent, the attaché added, the French will probably strike from Lower Alsace and Lorraine in the direction of Mainz. Finally, though Benito Mussolini had just publically placed Italy on the side of Germany "against Prague," Italian troops were doing nothing to the French on the Franco-Italian frontier. (Stercho, 215; Shirer 399-400). On this night too the British admiralty mobilized the entire British navy.²⁵

By now the pressure on Hitler to desist nearly matched the pressure on Chamberlain to resist. On the afternoon of the 27^th, soon after Hitler sent seven divisions to the Czech frontier, a message from the King of Sweden--relayed from Stockholm by the German ambassador-- told him that war would break out if Hitler did not extend by ten days his deadline of October 1. Germany, said the king, would be solely responsible for it and would inevitably lose it "in view of the present combination of the Powers" (Shirer 400). From Washington came news that the powers ranged against Hitler might end up including the United States. Even though Roosevelt had recently ruled out U.S. intervention on behalf of Czechoslovakia, the German Ambassador to Washington knew very well that this did not preclude all intervention. In a "very urgent" cable, therefore, he warned that if Hitler's resort to force was opposed by Britain, he assumed "the whole weight of the United States [would] be thrown into the scale" on Britain's side (Shirer 400). Much more pressingly, according to a telegram received that evening, the German military attaché in Prague estimated the total Czech call-up at a million men, with a field army of 800,000. "Together," writes William Shirer, the mobilized Czechs and French "outnumbered the Germans by more than two to one." (Shirer 401).

Given these all these omens, it would have been hard for any German leader--even Hitler--not to waver. And waver he did. Early on the evening of September 27, just about the time he told both Ribbentropp and Weizacher that he still planned to attack the Czechs on October 1 if they did not yield, Hitler sat down and dictated a letter to Chamberlain. Whether or not he knew that the British fleet had been mobilized (a move made at 8:00 PM and publically announced at 8:30, which was 9:30 in Germany), he may well have been swayed in part by Admiral Erich Raeder, Chief of the German Naval Staff, who arrived at 10 to urge him against going to war.²⁶ In any case, Hitler's letter was so conciliatory that it might have been written by Chamberlain himself. As the PM reported its contents in a speech made to the House of Commons on September 28, it promised that German troops would not move beyond the red line (the Sudetenland border), that a plebiscite would be freely held with "no outside influence," and that Hitler would abide by its result. Denying that he aimed to annihilate Czechoslovakia or push beyond the Sudetenland, he stood ready, he said, to negotiate and to join an international guarantee of the rest of the country. Almost miraculously, in view of his apparent lust for war at any price, Hitler asks Chamberlain to consider making one more try at "bring[ing] the Government of Prague to reason at the very last hour."²⁷

By the time this letter reached him at 10:30 PM, Chamberlain had all but abandoned his hope for peace. In the afternoon, when he met his cabinet to discuss the news brought back from Berlin by Horace Wilson, its members largely opposed any further concessions to Hitler. Though Chamberlain urged acceptance of Hitler's demands as "perhaps the last opportunity for avoiding war," and though Wilson said they simply had to advise the Czechs to evacuate the Sudetenland, no other members supported what Halifax called a "capitulation": forcing the hand of the Czechs. Given the "powerful and perhaps convincing" case against doing so, and the likelihood that the House of Commons would also oppose it, Chamberlain concluded that he was "prepared" to accept "the general view" (Self 322).

Yet that very evening, starting at 8:30 PM on BBC radio, Chamberlain kept on making the case for peace. While announcing the mobilization of the navy, he called it a "purely precautionary measure," and he said that he would go to Germany a third time "if I thought it would do any good." He also issued a cri de coeur, the cry of a nearly heartbroken leader faced with the imminence of German bombs:

How horrible, fantastic, incredible it is that we should be digging trenches and trying on gas-masks here because of a quarrel in a far away country between people of whom we know nothing. It seems still more impossible that a quarrel which has already been settled in principle should be the subject of war. (Self 321)

Only a man desperate for peace would claim to know nothing--nothing!--about peoples whose history he knew so well. In this very speech he uses that history to explain Hitler's claims on the Sudeten Germans: claims he would review at length in a speech to the House of Commons on the very next day.

After working on the speech until 2 AM, he went to bed knowing that Hitler's ultimatum was due to expire just twelve hours later--at 2:00 PM. on September 28. Walking in the garden of 10 Downing Street early that morning, Chamberlain told his wife that he would "gladly stand up against that wall and be shot if only I could prevent war." But he had not yet given up trying to stop it by less bloody means. On one hand, as gas masks were issued, as the Auxiliary Air Force was mobilized, and as the first anti-aircraft batteries were rolled out on Horse Guards Parade and Westminster Bridge, Chamberlain felt that he and his people were being driven "to the edge of the abyss with a horrifying certainty and rapidity" and that "all the prayers of the people of the world including Germany might break against the fanatical obstinacy of one man" (Self, 322). On the other hand, the letter he had just received from Hitler at 10:30 the previous night moved him to have one more go at that obstinacy. Early in the morning of the 28^th, therefore, he drafted a fresh appeal to Hitler: "one more last letter," he called it: "the last last."²⁸ He was ready, he wrote, to come to Berlin once more and to discuss the transfer of the Sudetanland with representatives of France and Italy as well with Hitler and the Czechs themselves. Certain they could "reach agreement in a week," he added: "I cannot believe that you will take [the] responsibility of starting a world war which may end civilization for the sake of a few days delay in settling this long standing problem" (Self 322). To buttress this appeal, he also wrote to Mussolini seeking his support for a conference aiming to "keep all our peoples out of war" (Kershaw 119).

Mussolini turned out to be the key that unlocked Hitler's mind. By late morning, when the Italian ambassador rushed into the Chancellory with an urgent message from Il Duce, Hitler had already received another telegram from Roosevelt and was being importuned by the French ambassador, who warned him that invading Czechoslovakia would set Europe aflame, and that it would be senseless to ignite a war when he could get almost all he wanted without one. Whatever Hitler thought of this argument, he was suddenly distracted by a message from Ambassador Attolico, who asked to see Hitler at once.

Leaving the French ambassador, Hitler strode off with Schmidt, his interpreter, to see the red-faced Attolico, who brought an urgent message from Mussolini. Having just received the message that Chamberlain sent him earlier that morning, Mussolini now reported that the British government had asked his help in mediating the Sudeten dispute. Since it would be "advantageous," he said, for Hitler to accept the British proposal for a multi-national conference on the dispute, Mussolini asked that he postpone his invasion of Czechoslovakia. It was just before noon, with his announced deadline for mobilization only two hours off, that Hitler relented. "Tell the Duce I accept his proposal," he said. This of course was the British proposal, but since Chamberlain's "last last" letter--hand carried by British ambassador Nevile Henderson--would not arrive until 12:15, the British proposal first reached his ears from the man who had just put Italy on Germany's side against Czechoslovakia (Kershaw 120). Though Italy was not yet fighting on Germany's side, as noted above, Mussolini's endorsement of the British proposal made it "his proposal," which finally proved enough to stay the Fuhrer's hand. When the British ambassador arrived with Chamberlain's letter, Hitler gave Mussolini full credit. He had postponed the mobilization for 24 hours, he said, at the request of his "great friend and ally, Signor Mussolini," and Attolico broke in to remind him that Mussolini had also agreed to British proposals for a four-power conference (Kershaw 120).

Later that afternoon, at precisely 2:54 PM London time, Chamberlain began a long speech in the House of Commons. Starting with the constitution of the modern Czech state, he reviewed the history of the conflict between the Czech government and the Sudeten Germans. Describing also his two meetings with Hitler, he took the House right up to the presently imminent threat of a German invasion, which by this time--for all Chamberlain knew--might already have started. (Its announced starting time of 2 PM would have been 1 PM in London, now nearly two hours past). He ended by reporting that the Czechs had agreed to an international conference on the dispute, that he had received a conciliatory letter from Hitler on the previous night, and that in return he had sent personal appeals to both Hitler and Mussolini early on the very day of the speech.

To this point, he had expected to end on a note of gloomy uncertainty. But when he had spoken for nearly 90 minutes, he was handed the message that furnished his dramatically unexpected conclusion. "I have now been informed by Herr Hitler," he said,

that he invites me to meet him at Munich to-morrow morning [September 29]. He has also invited Signor Mussolini and M. Daladier. Signor Mussolini has accepted and I have no doubt M. Daladier will also accept. I need not say what my answer will be. We are all patriots, and there can be no hon. Member of this House who did not feel his heart leap that the crisis has been once more postponed to give us once more an opportunity to try what reason and good will and discussion will do to settle a problem which is already within sight of settlement. Mr. Speaker, I cannot say any more.

(Speech to the House of Commons, September 28, 1938)

As the House erupted in tumultuous joy, the 69-year-old prime minister--who might surely have aged another ten years in what he had just been through--was rejuvenated by this "news of . . . deliverance" arriving just in time: "a piece of drama," he shortly called it, "that no work of fiction ever surpassed" (Self 323). Exactly two weeks earlier, when M.P. Henry Channon learned at a banquet in Geneva that Chamberlain was headed to Germany for his first meeting with Hitler, he euphorically concluded that Chamberlain had already "saved the world." Now, marveling at Chamberlain's "amazing spirits . . . as he stood there, alone, fighting the gods of war single-handed and triumphant," Channon thought "he seemed the incarnation of St. George" (qtd. Self 324).

On the following morning he seemed more like the embodiment of British pluck. Standing by the stairs to his plane at Heston Aerodrome, to the east of what is now Heathrow, he gave a little parting speech--obviously prepared beforehand-- to the press and to members of his cabinet, who had nearly all come to cheer him off on his third trip to Germany. "When I was a little boy," he said, "I used to repeat: If at first you don't succeed, try, try, try again. That is what I am doing. When I come back, I hope I will be able to say as Hotspur says in Henry IV, 'Out of this nettle, danger, we pluck this flower, safety.'" Like "Peace for our time," the phrase he would soon pronounce on his return from Munich, his valedictory words bristled with irony. For or one thing, he evidently had no idea that someone at the Foreign Office had already concocted a parody of his boyhood motto: "If at first you can't concede, Fly, Fly, Fly again" (Self 321). Secondly, in quoting the words of Hotspur from Shakespeare's play Henry IV, Part I (2.3.9-10), the old statesman flying off again in quest of peace takes his cue--strangely enough-- from a young hothead thrilled by nothing so much as riding headlong into battle, as his name suggests. Having joined a conspiracy to overthrow King Henry, Hotspur gets a letter warning him that his purpose is "dangerous." Though Hotspur testily replies that he will pluck the flower of safety from the nettle of danger, he ends up dead on the battlefield, where his rebellion is crushed. The words quoted by a presumably wise old statesman, therefore, are those of a reckless, fatally self-deluded young man.

Was Chamberlain a self-deluded old one? This question is not easily answered. Like the evidence from his first two meetings with Hitler, the evidence from the third one can be read in at least two different ways. On one hand, the conference on Czechoslovakia that he joined included men from Germany, Britain, France, and Italy but no one from Czechoslovakia itself, and the proposals he accepted as coming from Mussolini had actually been drafted by the German Foreign office to create the illusion that they were comparatively generous: they were "skillfully contrived," writes Chamberlain's biographer, to look as if Hitler's Godesberg terms had been mollified: softened enough for "Chamberlain to claim that he had obtained real concessions, while giving Hitler all he demanded regarding the occupation of the Sudetenland."²⁹ Yet on returning to London, as Chamberlain's biographer also notes, the prime minister justified his claim that "he had done his best for Czechoslovakia" by explaining to his cabinet ten main points of difference between the Godesberg memorandum and the final agreement (Self 324).

Whatever the worth of those differences, the most precious souvenir that Chamberlain brought back from Munich was not the multi-lateral agreement but the separate, Anglo-German Declaration signed only by Hitler and himself. This was the single sheet of paper that Chamberlain held up-- literally against the wind, symbolically against the winds of war--and proudly displayed to the cheering crowd that greeted him when he returned to Heston Aerodrome on September 30.

How did he get this piece of paper? At about 2:30 AM on the morning of September 30, the four leaders of Italy, Germany, Britain, and France signed an agreement (dated September 29) on "the cession to Germany of the Sudeten German territory." The agreement differed from the Godesberg Memorandum chiefly in two ways. It allowed ten days for the Czechs to evacuate the territory (in specified stages), and it declared that an "international commission" including Czechoslovakia would set detailed conditions for the transfer as well for plebiscites to be held in parts of the transferred territory by the end of November.³⁰ Neither Chamberlain nor anyone else questioned the likelihood that such plebiscites would have any effect on the German occupation, or would even take place.³¹

But Chamberlain cared far less about Czechoslovakia--that "faraway country" of which he had just publically claimed to "know nothing"--than he did about Britain. At one o'clock in the morning of September 30, while technical specialists were tweaking the final version of the Munich agreement, Chamberlain took Hitler aside--without consulting Daladier--and asked to see him later that morning for a private chat about Anglo-German relations. Jumping at this proposal, Hitler suggested they meet at his private flat in Munich. There for the first time Chamberlain got exactly what he wanted out of Hitler. After what Chamberlain called "a very friendly & pleasant talk" about Spain, Southeast Europe, and disarmament, the PM presented for the Fuhrer's signature a brief Declaration that he had drafted earlier with the help of William Strang of the Foreign Office. While listening to the interpreter's translation of it, Hitler repeatedly said "Ja! Ja!" and wound up by saying he would "certainly sign it." Whereupon he and Chamberlain signed the two copies that the prime minister had brought with him (Self 324).

In this strictly bi-lateral Declaration, the two leaders pledge a separate peace. Taking the multilateral Munich agreement along with the Anglo-German Naval Agreement as "symbolic of the desire of our two peoples never to go to war with one another again," they resolve that any future questions arising between them shall be settled by "the method of consultation, and by this means they will work"to assure the peace of Europe." Getting Hitler's signature on this piece of paper was Chamberlain's proudest boast. When he returned to his hotel for lunch, he told Strang, "I've got it!" while patting his breast pocket. He had no way of knowing what Hitler said to Ribbentropp in Berlin later that day, when the Foreign Minister objected to his signing the little Declaration. "Oh," he was overheard saying, "don't take it all so seriously. That piece of paper is of no significance whatsoever" (Young, 254). Yet this was the paper that Chamberlain brandished and read aloud to the welcoming crowd at Heston Aerodrome after saying that the Munich agreement was "only the prelude to a larger settlement in which all Europe may find peace" (Self 325, Oxford Dictionary of Quotations).

If there were any historians in the crowd, they might have winced at Chamberlain's reference to the Anglo-German Naval Agreement of 1935, which allowed Germany to exceed the ship-building limits set by the Treaty of Versailles.³² But Chamberlain had much more agreeable matters in prospect. Since the Heston greeters included the Earl of Clarendon with a letter from King George VI, who thanked the PM on behalf of the British Empire and also asked him to come straight to Buckingham Palace, the prime minister did so. Nowadays, his impenetrably sealed motorcade would have zipped through a wide-open, side-barricaded route to the palace in about ten minutes. On September 30, 1938, however, his car took one and a half hours to travel nine miles through streets "lined from one end to the other," as he told his sisters, "with people of every class, shouting themselves hoarse, leaping on the running board, banging on the windows & thrusting their hands in to the car to be shaken." At Buckingham Palace, he joined the King and Queen on the balcony in waving to the crowd gathered in the rain, and at Downing Street he spoke from the same upper window that Disraeli had used when he announced "peace . . . with honour" after the Congress of Berlin in 1878.³³ On his way up to the window, he was urged by someone to recycle Disraeli's phrase, and reportedly said, "No, I don't do that sort of thing." But if his reaction sprang from any reluctance to claim that trading away Czechoslovakia's northern frontier was an honorable bargain, the cheering crowd standing under the window must have changed his mind. After reading aloud again the declaration he had signed with Hitler, he added: "My good friends, for the second time in our history, a British Prime Minister has returned from Germany bringing peace with honour. I believe it is 'peace for our time.'"³⁴

The irony of these phrases was instantly recognized by the Manchester Guardian. The Czechs, it noted, could hardly see the siezure of their territory as an honorable price to pay for peace, especially since their nation would now be "helpless" against Hitler any time he chose to "advance again" (Guardian, October 1, 1938, qtd. Kershaw 124).

A feeling of helplessness also struck at least one leading member of the German Resistance. Its plot to assassinate Hitler--the Oster conspiracy-- had been led by Lieutenant Colonel Hans Oster. A highly decorated veteran of World War I, he now ran the Abwer, the counterintelligence section of the military High Command. Hating Nazism, Oster did all he could to dethrone its god until his own execution in 1945. On September 20, between Hitler's first and second meeting with Chamberlain, Oster met General Franz Halder, chief of the operation, and Captain Friedrich Wilhelm Heinz, head of the assault team, to discuss final plans for their coup. And in the early morning hours of September 28, just before Chamberlain's final meeting with Hitler, Heinz summoned to the Army headquarters of the Berlin Military District fifty hand-picked anti-Nazi commandoes who were given automatic weapons, ammunition, and hand grenades. They were thus prepared to escort General Erwin von Witzleben to the Chancellery so that he could arrest Hitler as soon as the Fuhrer ordered an attack on Czechoslovakia. Since Heinz's fifty commandoes would face no more than fifteen SS guards at the Chancellery, they had every chance to arrest him or kill him on the spot, as Heinz and Oster intended (McMenamin).

In the early morning of September 28, it seemed all but certain that Hitler would indeed attack Czechoslovakia. Four days earlier, right after his second meeting with Chamberlain had achieved nothing and right after all Czech men under 40 had been mobilized, Hitler declared--via the Godesberg memorandum--that if the Czechs did not cede the Sudetenland by 2 PM on September 28, Germany would take it by force.³⁵ But about noon that day, just two hours before the deadline, Hitler accepted Chamberlain's proposal for a four power conference at which Germany would be allowed to take the Sudetenland on October 1 without attacking it--or consulting Czechoslovakia. As a result, General Halder--the operational leader of the coup-- was utterly demoralized. At the very end of September, when he learned what Chamberlain and Daladier had done at Munich, he reportedly "collapsed over his desk" (Klemperer 109). Once Hitler gained the Sudetenland without firing a shot, he became politically invincible, the resistance lost heart, and the assault squad was dispersed. "What are we supposed to do now?" Halder asked. "He [Hitler] succeeds in everything!" (qtd. Klemperer 112).

Indeed he does--or did. In thwarting the conspiracy, Hitler dodged assassination for the twenty-sixth time in his life. Diabolically lucky in his adversaries as well as his timing, he succeeded at Munich only because the powers that could have stopped him overestimated German strength and underestimated--or willfully understated-- their own. At the Nuremberg trials, Field Marshal Wilhelm Keitel, Supreme Commander of the German Armed Forces for most of World War II, was asked whether Hitler would have attacked Czechoslovakia if France and Britain had stood behind the Czechs. "Certainly not," he answered. "We were not strong enough militarily" (Parssinen).

Whether or not Chamberlain knew this, or could have known it, he bathed in a sea of English gratitude. In the days after Munich, he received more than 20,000 letters of thanks and countless gifts for sparing his nation from the horrors of a second World War while memory of the first was just 20 years old (Self 328-29). But even his staunchest supporters knew that the price of this peace was fearfully high. "By keeping the peace," wrote Nevile Henderson, British ambassador to Berlin, "we have saved Hitler and his regime" (Parssinen). Hitler's bloodless conquest of the Sudetenland not only raised his popularity to unprecedented heights but demoralized the Resistance, as just noted. Carl Geordeler, the former mayor of Leipzig who had become the Resistance Chancellor designate, did not sleep for two weeks after the Munich agreement, which he called "that sheer capitulation of France and England to puffed-up charlatans" (qtd. Klemperer 113). And in the British parliament, as we have already seen, Churchill branded the Munich agreement "a total and unmitigated defeat." Speaking on October 5, the very day on which Benĕs resigned his presidency of Czechoslovakia, Churchill poignantly elegized the nation he had vainly struggled to save: "Silent, mournful, abandoned, broken, Czechoslovakia recedes into the darkness."

But for all it did to Czechoslovakia, can any single verdict on the Munich agreement be right? Shortly before the agreement was signed, a young man who would later play a leading role in the British Labour party--Patrick Gordon Walker-- shrewdly foresaw the ambivalence of public feeling in England. Citing the words of Leon Blum, the French socialist and former prime minister, Walker wrote:

I think Blum has expressed the public feeling well when he said his own feelings were a mixture of cowardly relief and shame. If this is so, it is to be expected that many people--to hide their cowardice from themselves--will vent their shame on Chamberlain. . . . People who would not want a stand to be made, had it actually been made, may now damn Chamberlain for not making a stand.³⁶

It is likewise easy for us to damn him now. But besides recognizing the immensity of relief--however cowardly--that he brought to the British people, we should recall the arguments made by his supporters: he proved to Hitler that "legitimate grievances could be settled without war"; he gained time for the under-equipped British to re-arm; and by exhausting every means of averting war in September of 1938, he laid the moral ground for declaring it one year later (Self 327). Beyond that, he personified Peace in what was almost an allegorical contest with the living embodiment of War: a contest held, as he said himself, on the edge of the abyss. He won neither peace with honor nor peace for his time but only peace for a time, but that was probably the best he could do in September 1938.

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