up around Hitler’s personal body guard, the Leibstandarte SS “Adolf Hitler.” The decree of August 17, 1938, essentially turned these troops into Hitler’s private army and police force, whose soldiers were told that they owed personal loyalty and “blind obedience” to the führer. During World War II these Verfügungstruppen, renamed the Waffen-SS, were the most feared soldiers of Nazi Germany.
The traditionalists in the army, some of whom would later become resisters, had good reasons to worry, because their control was slipping as the army became increasingly Nazified. At the time of the Czech crisis, they still might have been able to take steps to remove Hitler, but their means of control were being steadily eroded by the wily führer, who never trusted them, and by the weaknesses of the Allies. Whether the SS, including its armed regiments, the police (Gestapo, Kripo, Security Service or SD), and the brown-shirted storm troopers, could have prevented an army coup in 1938 is debatable, for that would have required a concerted and unified opposition. Only a small group of vocal resisters around Colonel General Ludwig Beck and General Erwin von Witzleben, however, were willing to take active steps in the summer of 1938. The rest were fence-sitters. All of them knew that opposition to the Nazi regime would have to be conducted against the will of the German people. Hitler was immensely popular, a second major reason why the military opposition that briefly gathered in the summer of 1938 never got off the ground.
A third and most decisive reason why Hitler was not stopped in 1938 was that the Western powers blinked and agreed to appease Hitler. The Western betrayal of Czechoslovakia is a sordid and tragic story, which justifies W. H. Auden’s characterization of the 1930s as a “low and dishonest decade.” The British prime minister, Neville Chamberlain, visiting the dictator in his lair at Berchtesgaden on September 15, was so impressed by Herr Hitler’s seriousness over the Sudetenland that he made up his mind to pressure the Czechs to give it up. After bringing the Czechs into line, Chamberlain met Hitler again, this time at Bad Godesberg on the Rhine. Hitler told the stunned prime minister that their earlier agreement was no longer of any use because of Czech provocations. Hitler now demanded an immediate Czech withdrawal from the Sudetenland or he would send in his army to expel them. By October 1, he warned Chamberlain, he would occupy the Sudetenland. Chamberlain flew back to London, horrified by the prospect of war, and in his radio address to the British people he called on them to keep calm and work for the defense of their country. There were no Churchill-like exhortations to stand up to Hitler; instead, Chamberlain wondered aloud whether it was fair for a small nation—the reference was obviously to Czechoslovakia—to involve the whole British Empire in a war simply on its account. He answered, “If we are to fight it must be on larger issues than that.”14 The prime minister was hoping for a last-minute miracle that would avert war. This came in the form of a conciliatory message from Hitler, who gave assurances that he did not have designs on all of Czechoslovakia. He hoped that Chamberlain would continue to pursue his negotiations and bring the government in Prague to see reason at the very last hour. Hitler knew his man. Chamberlain then appealed to Mussolini for help in brokering a settlement. Il Duce was only too willing to oblige, partly because Italy was unprepared for war and partly because he did not think that Czechoslovakia was worth another world war.
What came next was the notorious Four-Power Munich Conference (September 28–29) between Germany, Italy, Britain, and France that made appeasement a household word.15 For Hitler, Munich was another personal triumph and a validation of his risk-taking, aggressive foreign policy. Although Hitler received the Sudetenland, he was dissatisfied because, as he later said, he should have pushed the appeasers into making even greater concessions. German troops marched into the designated areas, annexing sixteen thousand square miles of Czech territory, including its richest industrial sites and superb fortifications. President Benes resigned in favor of Dr. Emil Hacha, a more compliant figure who further appeased the Nazis by renouncing the Czech alliance with Russia and surrendering the Teschen district to Poland and the Carpathian Ukraine to Hungary. The end of Czechoslovakia was in sight. Chamberlain and his appeasers may have breathed a sigh of relief, proclaiming peace in our time, but Hitler had clearly triumphed on all fronts: seizing the Sudetenland, excluding Russia from the European alliance system, isolating Poland, and diffusing the gathering resistance against him within the German High Command. General Jodl pointedly declared that the genius of the führer had once more triumphed, which, he said, ought to convert the “incredulous, the weak, and the doubters.”16 But Churchill described the Munich agreement as an act of abject surrender, “a disaster of the first magnitude” that had befallen Great Britain and France. He compared Hitler’s method of negotiating to a series of extortions. At Berchtesgaden, Godesberg, and Munich, he said, “one pound was demanded at the pistol’s point. When it was given two pounds were demanded at the pistol’s point. Finally the dictator consented to take one pound, seventeen shillings and sixpence and promises of good will for the future.” He added prophetically that “you will find that in a period of time which may be measured by years, but may be measured only in months, Czechoslovakia will be engulfed in the Nazi regime.”17
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
