of overseas territory, was an essential part of Hitler’s design.
It is certainly hard to see how, either on a short-range or a long-range view, a decision to give Hitler a free hand in the East would have worked out more disastrously for the western powers than the policy which was actually followed. From every standpoint, military, political, and psychological, it would have been far more advantageous if Hitler’s first blows had fallen on Stalin’s totalitarian empire, not on Britain, France, and the small democracies of the West.
A new element of strife and tension was introduced into the European scene by the outbreak of civil war in Spain in 1936. The victory at the polls of a left-wing Popular Front coalition was followed by a period of disorder, with many political assassinations and burnings of churches. Spanish conservatives rebelled under the leadership of General Francisco Franco.
This civil war soon acquired an international character. Germany and Italy sent aid in men and supplies to Franco. Soviet airplanes and tanks, with Soviet soldiers, appeared on the side of the government. Volunteer “antifascist” units, largely under Communist leadership, were recruited in various European countries and sent to Spain. Britain and France tried to steer a neutral course of nonintervention. The prestige of Hitler and Mussolini rose further when the civil war ended with the victory of Franco in 1939, after much destruction and many acts of ruthless cruelty committed by both sides.
Meanwhile the European structure established at Versailles had been shaken to its foundations. By 1938 Hitler felt strong enough to move outside his own frontiers. His first and easiest objective was his native country, Austria. Since the murder of Dollfuss in the summer of 1934, Austria had been governed by a conservative dictatorship, headed by Dr. Kurt Schuschnigg.
There were two considerable dissatisfied groups in Austria, the local Nazis and the Social Democrats, who had been politically suppressed since 1934. Austria was a solidly German-speaking country, and there was much suffering from economic stagnation. This was especially true in Vienna, once the capital of an empire of fifty million people, now the chief city of a mountain republic with some seven million inhabitants. There was an economic as well as a sentimental case for the union of Austria with Germany.
Hitler summoned Schuschnigg to Berchtesgaden, stormed at him, and induced him to admit Nazis to his cabinet. A last flicker of independence on Schuschnigg’s part, a decision to hold a plebiscite on the question of maintaining Austria’s independence, brought a threat of German military action. Schuschnigg resigned on March 11, and his successor, the Nazi Seyss-Inquart, invited German troops to enter Austria. The familiar machine of propaganda and terror began to roll. A Nazi-organized plebiscite resulted in a vote of more than 99 per cent for Anschluss.
A witty Italian political exile once described Mussolini’s attitude toward Hitler as that of a cat who had given birth to a tiger. The Italian dictator no longer felt able to oppose the German frontier on the Brenner. The western powers only offered feeble and unconvincing protests against the absorption of Austria.
This absorption meant the encirclement of long, narrow Czechoslovakia by German territory on three sides. A serious international crisis soon developed over the fate of some three million people of German origin who lived in the so-called Sudetenland area of northern and western Czechoslovakia.
These Sudeten Germans had not wished to be Czech citizens in the first place, but their protests were ignored by the peacemakers of Versailles. Although the Czech record in treatment of national minorities was better than the East European average, there was discrimination against the Sudeten Germans in state employment, and this cause of discontent was aggravated by the impact of the world economic crisis. There was much unemployment in the glass and pottery industries, in which many Sudeten Germans were employed.
Moreover, the Third Reich exerted a magnetic influence upon German national minorities. A considerable number, although by no means all of the Sudeten Germans, followed the leadership of Konrad Henlein, organizer of a Sudeten Nazi party.
A storm blew up in May 1938. Unfounded rumors of a German mobilization along the Czech frontier, accompanied by some disorders in the Sudeten area, led to a partial mobilization in Czechoslovakia. France intimated readiness to fulfill its treaty of alliance with Czechoslovakia if German troops should cross the border. Lord Halifax, the British Foreign Secretary, warned the German Ambassador that Great Britain might not stand aloof in the Franco-German war which would follow an invasion of Czechoslovakia.
Hitler for the moment accepted the rebuff, but only to spring more effectively later. He decided to make October 1, 1938, the deadline for Operation Green, which called for military action against Czechoslovakia.8
Meanwhile, opinion in Britain and France was confused and divided. The military key to eastern Europe had been thrown away when Hitler was permitted to fortify the Rhineland. Poland and Hungary had territorial ambitions of their own at the expense of Czechoslovakia. The attitude of Russia was uncertain. France and Britain had no means of directly aiding Czechoslovakia, and the prospect of another war was terrifying, with chaos and communism as the most probable victors.
So there was a strong impulse in London and Paris to seek peaceful means of adjusting the controversy. Lord Runciman, a British elder statesman, went to Prague as head of an unofficial mission of inquiry. From far-reaching autonomy, which Czechoslovak President Beneš slowly and reluctantly agreed to concede, the demands of the Sudeten Germans gradually expanded to secession and union with Germany.
The climax of the crisis was reached in September. The London Times opened the door to territorial readjustment when it suggested in a much-quoted editorial of September 7:
It might be worth while for the Czechoslovak Government to consider whether they should exclude altogether the project, which has found favour in some quarters, of making Czechoslovakia a more homogeneous state by the secession of that fringe of alien populations who are contiguous to the nation with which they are united by race.
Hitler delivered a speech at the Nürnberg Nazi rally on September 12 which was raucous and militant, but fell short of being an ultimatum. Sporadic fighting broke out in the Sudetenland, and Henlein, moving to Germany, for the first time demanded reunion with the Reich.
The French Cabinet was divided, and Prime Minister Daladier was eager for some British lead in mediation. It was in this situation that Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain decided to fly to Hitler’s mountain retreat at Berchtesgaden and discuss the question directly. The upshot of the three-hour conversation was that Hitler consented to refrain from military action (which had been set for the end of the month) while Chamberlain would discuss with his cabinet ways and means of applying the principle of self-determination to the case of the Sudeten Germans. The question of whether to fight or yield was threshed out at top-level conferences of French and British government representatives on September 18 and 19. These conferences, in Chamberlain’s words, were “guided by a desire to find a solution which would not bring about a European war and, therefore, a solution which would not automatically compel France to take action in accordance with her obligations.”
The result was a decision to transfer to the Reich areas in which the Sudeten Germans were more than 50 per cent of the population. This solution was rather brusquely imposed upon President Beneš in Prague. The French Foreign Minister, Georges Bonnet, was especially emphatic in pressing for Czechoslovak acceptance.
A snag was encountered when Chamberlain went to the Rhineland resort of Godesberg for a second meeting with Hitler and found the latter insistent upon an immediate German military occupation of regions where the Sudeten Germans were more than half of the population. Hitler also refused to participate in the proposed international guarantee of the new Czechoslovak frontier until the claims of the Polish and Hungarian minorities had been satisfied.
The
