Theo Kordt; Hans von Dohnányi; and Paul Schmidt.
† The polite English translation would be, ‘Ah, the bloody idiots. If they only knew!’
8
It did not take long for London to understand the opportunities that had been lost at Munich by its failure to act on the warnings it had received of Hitler’s intentions towards Czechoslovakia.
A late-1938 MI6 analysis concluded that the German generals ‘strove unremittingly and courageously to restrain Hitler’. Even the strongly pro-appeasement British ambassador in Berlin, Sir Nevile Henderson, found himself unable to gloss what had happened in his customary diplomatic language. ‘By keeping the peace, we have saved Hitler and his regime,’ he wrote to foreign secretary Halifax a week after Munich was signed. In December 1938 the British chargé d’affaires in Berlin noted that ‘authoritative circles’ in London now hoped that a revolt would remove Hitler, the man Chamberlain’s flight to Munich had rescued from removal just two months previously.
But the damage was done.
The West’s surrender to Hitler’s demands at Munich caused a catastrophic decline of morale and will amongst the September plotters. Carl Goerdeler, who had spent the week of the Czech crisis in Switzerland, on the shores of Lake Constance, waiting for the call to take up his post as the new chancellor of Germany, wrote to a friend predicting that war was now inevitable. The majority of those closely involved in the plot considered that they had risked their lives to rid the world of a war-obsessed tyrant, only to be abandoned by those they had most trusted among the Western powers. The word ‘betrayal’ was on many lips.
The truth was that there had been a shameful failure of communication between the Berlin plotters and the governments of France and, perhaps especially, of Britain. There were several factors which produced this ‘dialogue of the deaf’ in which the last, best chance of avoiding the coming war was lost.
Chief among these was Chamberlain’s conviction that Hitler would be amenable to reason, and that appeasement (in the 1930s the word meant putting peace first, and did not carry the pejorative overtones it does today) was the way to persuade him to back away from war. This, added to the sense of personal responsibility Chamberlain felt for ensuring the peace of his age, created a deadly cocktail in which hubris and sense of mission combined to distort the British prime minister’s judgement and reduce his capacity to take measured, thought-through actions.
Chamberlain’s appeasement, however, was not based only on a naïvely utopian view of Hitler’s true nature. It was also firmly founded on what had been, with the terrible exception of the Great War, British foreign policy for the past hundred years. It is important to remember that Chamberlain’s analysis was shared by the majority of British political and public opinion of the day – especially among the generals: ‘Of our top military and air people whom I questioned on the subject, I don’t think I found one who did not think that appeasement was right,’ wrote Sir Alexander Cadogan, who succeeded Sir Robert Vansittart as head of the Foreign Office in 1938.
It was Churchill and those closest to him, along with the Labour Party and the Liberals, who were regarded as being out of step with reality and with history, not Chamberlain.
Since the post-Napoleonic settlement, Britain’s strategy had been to stay out of military engagements on the European mainland. Successive British governments were, in the main, sniffily indifferent to what the Europeans did on their continent, so long as they did not threaten the wider peace or interfere in the process of building and maintaining the British Empire. The Europeans could have the Continent, was London’s unspoken motto, provided Britain could have the sea. Chamberlain’s ‘betrayal’ of Czechoslovakia was thus fully consistent with Britain’s traditional policy of managing the European peace not through armies, but through constantly-shifting diplomatic alliances designed to preserve the balance of power established at the Congress of Vienna in 1815. What matter if this policy earned Britain the French insult ‘Albion perfide’ – so long as it kept her powerful, prosperous, peaceful, and out of the wars that convulsed Europe in the nineteenth century. In the view of the appeasers in 1938, it was the abandonment of this policy in 1914 that had caused such ghastly consequences for the generation that had fought in the First World War, and who now governed Britain. It was to this traditional policy that the country should now return, they insisted, so that the terrible blood sacrifice which was the inevitable consequence of modern total war should never again be allowed to happen. When Hitler hinted, in a ‘peace speech’ to the Reichstag on 21 May 1935, that he favoured a broad settlement based on ‘leaving Europe to the Europeans and letting Britain have the sea’, he was skilfully playing both to Britain’s traditional foreign policy and to popular and official British sentiment.
It was for this reason that when Goerdeler and his plotters started appearing in Whitehall in 1937 and 1938 with their warnings of an approaching apocalypse, they were seen not as good men seeking to save the world from tyranny, but as meddlers and interferers in a policy which everyone believed in, and which had proved its worth over the previous hundred years. If it is the case, as seems likely, that Chamberlain’s hurried first flight to Bad Godesberg on 15 September 1938 was intended, at least in part to forestall the plot Goerdeler and his friends had been hatching, then in all probability what would have been on his mind was ‘Better the devil you know, than the conspirators you don’t.’
Herein also lay the last major ingredient of the tragically missed opportunity of September 1938. Goerdeler and his fellow plotters knew and understood the exceptional nature of the demonic power they were seeking to remove. Chamberlain and the British, on the other hand, saw Hitler as just the latest in the long line of Continental tyrants behaving badly, as Continental tyrants always had, from Napoleon to Bismarck to Kaiser Wilhelm II. Worse still, the 1938 plotters were, in the British government’s eyes, yet another bunch of conservative Prussian landowners, monarchists and militarists with no attachment to democracy. Their primary aim, like that of Hitler, was to recover the lands Germany had lost under the Versailles settlement. What Chamberlain, Halifax and Henderson did not see was that, whatever the democratic deficiencies of the September plotters, they were nevertheless motivated by conventional religious and European values of morality, which were totally absent from the character and actions of Adolf Hitler. The plotters understood the unique moral bankruptcy of the Hitler phenomenon. Chamberlain and his government, it seems, did not.
Behind the September plotters’ complaints about the moral failures of Britain and France during the Czech crisis lay a crucial failure of their own – one which was fatally to hobble them right through to 1944. They wanted to be rid of Hitler, but they were never prepared to take the initiative to do so. They shied away from triggering events themselves, and depended on others to do this for them (in the case of the Czech crisis, the trigger was Hitler’s order to mobilise). They were actors in the wings, always waiting for a cue to come onto the stage which never came. Eventually, as successive ‘ripe moments’ for their ‘lovely plans’ came and went, waiting became a kind of strategy in itself – until finally an impetuous, headstrong young man strode into their midst in 1944 and shook them from their torpor.
In the immediate aftermath of Munich, most of the plotters slunk away into the shadows to wait and watch for the next propitious moment to strike. Goerdeler spent the end of September and the first week of October writing a series of long, impatient and rather self-righteous memos to London and Washington – including his first proposition for a united Europe as a solution to the rising threat of European nationalism. In the middle of October he called Vansittart’s ‘agent’ A.P. Young to a meeting at a private address in Zürich. There he passed on some useful intelligence, including
