Hitler’s Triumphs and the Consensus of the National-Community (Volksgemeinschaft)
Chapter 3 Section 6
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This below is Chapter 3 Section 6:
6. Hitler’s Triumphs and the Consensus of the National-Community (Volksgemeinschaft)
While Stalin, according to respected observers, was weakening his army and disorganizing his party, Hitler in 1938 achieved successes that no statesman before him had been able to achieve in peacetime: he united 10 million people with the German Reich, invoking the right to self-determination, by wiping out one state of Central Europe and crippling another. In this way he made Germany by far the most powerful state in Europe, and at the same time eliminated the Soviet Union from the concert of powers to such an extent that the great concord he had always striven for seemed to be established. But the peaceful means had nevertheless consisted of threats of war and methods which, by all human judgment, could only be used once, and the hitherto greatest triumph of self-determination was self-contradictory. Thus the great year 1938 ended for Hitler in October-November, and the driver quickly became the driven man by his own actions, making Stalin the arbiter of the fate of Europe.
On November 5, 1937, Hitler summoned his closest associates to a meeting in the Reich Chancellery, namely Foreign Minister von Neurath, War Minister von Blomberg, and the Commanders-in-Chief of the Army, Navy and Luftwaffe Fritsch, Raeder and Göring. The Wehrmacht adjutant, Colonel Hossbach, was also present, who soon afterwards produced a transcript, a copy of which ended up in the hands of the Allies after the war, the so-called Hossbach Protocol. Apparently Hitler’s intention was to announce to this smallest leadership the imminent transition to an active foreign policy. The objective situation was favorable: although rearmament was far from complete, Germany had spent more resources on it in the last two years than the Western powers, including the USA, combined; Axis friendship seemed firmly established after Mussolini’s visit; the victory of the Popular Front in France had to all appearances been accompanied by the victory of laziness, as anyone who had seen the German and French construction sites at the 1937 World Fair could attest; in England, in May 1937, Neville Chamberlain had taken office as Baldwin’s successor, and that meant a considerable advance of “appeasement” mood; the Soviet Union was in the throes of the Great Purge, and Göring, in an interview with the American Ambassador in Paris, William C. Bullitt, was able to argue that the Red Army was no longer a serious force and that, of the 5,000 tractors that were manufactured annually in the Soviet Union, not a single one was fit for use two years later. But Hitler did not say a word about the fact that this happy constellation finally offered the Germans the opportunity to assert their right to self-determination. Nor did he discuss the possibility of settling accounts with Bolshevism as the general enemy of the world. Rather, his spoke exclusively of a “solution to the German question,” and by this he understood nothing other than the elimination of the “lack of space,” i.e., the acquisition of a larger living space: according to him, a striving that at all times had been the cause of the formation of states and movements of peoples. The present is an age of economic empires, in which the impulse for colonization is again approaching its original state, as the example of Italy and Japan shows, while the “saturated states” are understandably only interested in maintaining their possessions. “Economic motives” were the decisive factor here as well as there; Germany could only in Europe seek the space it needs to secure its food situation. The use of force was unavoidable, Germany was “forced to go on the offensive” and it was therefore his unalterable decision to solve the German spatial question by 1943/1945 at the latest. Earlier action would depend on the circumstances; if necessary, the first objective must be “to crush the Czechs and, at the same time, Austria.” The annexation of these two states could mean the “gain of food for 5-6 million people,” provided “a forced emigration from the Czech Republic of two million people and from Austria of one million people is carried out.” As a thought experiment, Hitler developed the scenario of a war between Italy and France and England, which would offer a favorable opportunity for the realization of these plans.
It was entirely the Hitler of the “political testament” from “Mein Kampf” who spoke here, and at the beginning he actually described his remarks as a “testamentary legacy” in the event of his death. Hitler revealed himself again for who he was: a man completely fixed on 1917/18 and here on the Allied blockade, but who at the same time, probably unconsciously of himself, embodied in a paradigmatic way the position that arises when one detaches the Marxist doctrine of class struggle from the moments of internationalism and humanism, as, by the way, Marx and Engels themselves had occasionally done to some extent. But the biologistic Marxist or the Social Darwinist was not the whole Hitler. Even here, underneath the conquest-addicted confidence of the protagonist of the “better race,” the concern, even fear, with which he pursues a process that does not really fit into the biologistic worldview, is noticeable, namely “the economic destruction emanating from Bolshevism” which he parallels with the “dissolving effect emanating from Christianity” that had caused the Roman Empire to succumb to the onslaught of the Germans, the Empire whose greatness and permanence Hitler unmistakably orientated himself with. Obviously, he only had to take a small step to get to the alleged author of this resolution, but the word “Jew” does not appear. A possible “military intervention by Russia” is mentioned, but quickly dismissed with reference to Japan.
The question is why Hitler presented himself to his closest associates in such provocative one-sidedness. The most likely answer is that he wanted to subject these collaborators to some sort of scrutiny. In fact, Neurath and Fritsch objected with some vigor, pointing to French superiority, and Neurath soon fell victim to heart attacks. Hitler thus had to realize that he could not pursue an active foreign policy with Neurath, Fritsch and even Blomberg. True, he was the autocrat, but within a system whose elements showed considerable traces of the old autonomy. Therefore, he was far from powerful enough to simply remove these three men from their offices. But he knew quickly and unscrupulously how to seize an opportunity that presented itself a little later, and here too it became clear that the old determination, though checked or modified in its effects by the particular circumstances, but was by no means essentially altered.
The Wehrmacht was still very far from being a brown army. Rather, its main components embodied three different periods of German history: the army was Christian-Prussian-conservative, the Navy was bourgeois-German-nationalist, and the Luftwaffe could be called National Socialist. The rivalries between the “Wehrmacht Office” in the War Ministry under General Keitel and the Army General Staff under its chief Ludwig Beck had an ideological undertone. This was even more pronounced for the tensions between the Army and the SS, which gradually built up armed troop units as “state security police.” The National Socialist spirit penetrated from below through the young officers and, as a result of general conscription, into the army as well. The generals of the army, still by far the most important part of the Wehrmacht, were almost certainly not National Socialists, but even Ludwig Beck was hardly a political opponent of Hitler before 1938. All of them were completely occupied with rearmament, which was, after all, their old heart’s desire. But not a single one was inclined to adventurism, all were guided by an objectivist picture of preparation and had little understanding of psychological and political factors. In this respect Hitler was far superior to them. But the correct feeling that Hitler’s methods could become dangerous for the existence of the German people formed the starting point for a seemingly pragmatic and yet principled resistance.
Blomberg’s old-age folly of marrying a woman "with a past life" was a desirable compulsion for Hitler to part with the Reich Minister of War, but a shameful intrigue by Göring and the Gestapo created the opportunity to dismiss the Commander-in-Chief of the Army at the same time and thus to a certain extent to decapitate the Wehrmacht leadership. When the accusations against Fritsch turned out to be baseless, it was too late (except for a formal rehabilitation): the major organizational and personnel changes of February 4, 1938 had already taken place. Hitler personally took over the direct supreme command of the Wehrmacht, and the Wehrmacht office of the former Ministry of War was now directly subordinate to him as “High Command of the Wehrmacht,” Colonel General von Brauchitsch is Commander-in-Chief of the Army, the National Socialist Joachim von Ribbentrop has replaced Neurath at the head of the Foreign Ministry. Göring did not achieve his goal of becoming Minister of War, but is now Field Marshal. The Wehrmacht has suffered a new heavy blow to its independence and traditional sense of honor. If it was a purge, it was not remotely comparable in scale and character to the purge of the Red Army: instead of the tens of thousands of shootings, there were only a few retirements, and even in this the difference in social systems came to light. But seven people were able to see the actual result of these changes: the three men who had objected or had expressed uncertainty on November 5, 1937 were eliminated, and the way to an active foreign policy was clear, i.e., to a policy of direct warfare or a concrete threat of war, a policy which had corresponded to the origins of National Socialism in the positive experience of war and which was also pursued by Soviet Russia for other motives and for other purposes in the immediate post-war period, but had long since been abandoned.
And at the same time, Hitler used foreign policy, which was after all the the end, as a means. This connection is evident from a diary entry by Colonel Jodl on January 31, 1938: “Führer wants to divert spotlight from the Wehrmacht, keep Europe in suspense and, by reassigning various posts, not give the impression of a moment of weakness, but of a concentration of strength. Schuschnigg should not take heart, but tremble…”
That the Austrian question would be ready for a solution in the spring of 1938 had been predicted by many observers. In fact, it was one of the most difficult problems in German history, and its mere existence was a symptom of the unique position of the German people in Europe, for neither the English, nor the French, nor the Italians lived in two states. But no foreign power had forced this situation, but rather the Prussia of the founder of the Empire, Bismarck, as the “successful separate state” that it was, excluded Austria from the German Confederation (or Empire) of which it had been a part for many centuries, and thus completed the “division of Germany.” In 1918/19 the time seemed to have come when German Austria, as the remnant of the destroyed Habsburg monarchy, would unite with the Bismarck Empire, due to the will of the overwhelming majority of the population, freed of its minorities and confirmed in its existence, to form the genuine nation-state of all Germans, but this unification would have meant that Germany, despite the defeat, would have emerged from the World War as by far the largest state in non-Russian Europe, and the Allies, who, according to their proclamations, had fought for democracy and self-determination, placed considerations of power politics higher than principles and, by means of the “annexation ban” (Anschlußverbot) denied the Germans the self-determination they secured for the West Slavic nations of the Poles and Czechs. Although it soon became clear that Austria’s independence was not merely artificial, the Allies had created an irredenta in the German-speaking world and thus created a situation strikingly similar to that which the Soviet Union claimed to have vis-à-vis the workers’ movement throughout the world. National Socialist Germany could support a popular movement in the neighboring state that was obviously revolutionary because it denied the existence of that state; but the charge could also be leveled that the large state was merely using the popular movement, which was unable to gain a majority, as an instrument for overarching objectives. And what the class movement in its cooperation with the Soviet state had failed to achieve up to 1938, or had only achieved in marginal areas, was put into practice by the national movement in a spectacular manner with great attention from the whole world, and there could be no talk of a mere “defeat” of Austria. Even after the agreement of July 1936, the radical National Socialists remained an extremely active opposition, the fascist and pro-Italian Heimwehr lost more and more power in the Schuschniggian state of a militant but also emphatically German Catholicism, and foreign political support in Italy became weaker and weaker. The situation was almost hopeless when, on February 12, 1938, Hitler received Schuschnigg for a conversation in Berchtesgaden that bore little resemblance to a conversation between statesmen. Hitler treated the Austrian Chancellor as the leader of a well-established ruling party might treat a recalcitrant opposition figure; he boasted that he had created a people in Germany in which there were “no more parties, classes, divisions” and in which everyone wanted the same thing. Schuschnigg, on the other hand, was a persecutor and oppressor in his small state, who would not be able to hold out for a moment if he, Hitler, perhaps “the greatest German in history,” might overnight be “like the spring storm” in Vienna. After Schuschnigg made major concessions and a last attempt at resistance by means of a planned referendum, this spring storm did indeed break out on March 12, but initially it had the character of a threat and manipulation on the part of Göring, even towards the moderate National Socialists such as the later Reich Governor Seyss-Inquart. But below what was happening at the upper level, the radical National Socialists, as in Germany in February and March 1933, resorted to mass demonstrations and violent actions that no longer met with no determined resistance. The threat from above and the violence from below, however, quickly became insubstantial when, in an unexpected outburst of almost universal enthusiasm, the advancing German troops were showered with flowers, and when Hitler himself was hailed as a savior by jubilant crowds. History seemed to concentrate all its paradoxes when the biologistic materialist of the Hossbach discussion led the democratic right of self-determination to the most bloodless of his successes and at the same time destroyed the remnants of Marxism in Austria as well. Mussolini agreed, the Western powers barely stirred, and the Soviet Union lamented the actions of the “aggressive states,” after proclaiming itself the status quo’s greatest enemy for so many years.
If the suspicion was expressed in many places that it was now Czechoslovakia’s “turn,” there were all too good reasons for this. As early as June 1937, Blomberg had signed the “Directive for Uniform War Preparations by the Wehrmacht,” which distinguished between a “Red” case (west) and a “Green” case (southeast); the latter was primarily related to the Czechoslovak Republic and explicitly declared to be an “invasion.” Although the overall planning was defensive, this character was already invalidated by the introductory sentence that Germany could probably not expect an attack. On December 21, 1937, an addition was made, in which there was talk of a “war of aggression” against Czechoslovakia, which would have to be waged even if one or the other great power intervened in the fight against Germany, in order to solve the German space problem. The war objective was “the rapid seizure of Bohemia and Moravia while at the same time solving the Austrian question in the sense of including Austria in the German Reich.” This planning was not changed in essence despite the March events, although Hitler expressed the view that Austria had to be digested first and that he had no intention of smashing Czechoslovakia by military action in the near future without a challenge. The exploitation of a particularly favorable opportunity was always reserved, and an “incident” such as “the assassination of the German ambassador following an anti-German action” was contemplated in a strange way.
But with the simple realization of such military plans, Hitler would have immediately triggered the world war on the basis of the great resistance. His chance lay in the fact that here, too, he was not just a military aggressor.
The question of the Sudeten Germans was of a similar nature to that of the German-Austrians, but all the facts were aggravated and pointed. The 3.5 million Germans living in the mountainous outskirts of Bohemia had been the leading group during the period of the Habsburg monarchy, also were also very strong in Prague itself; after the collapse of 1918 they had spoken out in favor of an annexation to German Austria, although in some cases they had no geographical connection with it. If it had gone according to the will of the population, Austrians and Sudeten Germans would have become citizens of the German Reich at that time. But in the case of the Sudeten Germans, this solution was opposed not only by the will of the Allies, but also by the long history and vigorous reality of the land of Bohemia, which for centuries had been considered a common homeland by its inhabitants. On the other hand, “ethnic struggles” (Volkstumskämpfe) had an old tradition here in particular, and new types of parties calling themselves “National Socialist” had emerged earlier than elsewhere, both on the Czech and German sides.
At least potentially, the disputes were extraordinarily intensified when, immediately after the end of the World War, the Czechs, under the leadership of Masaryk and Benes, managed through clever manipulations to draw into their state the Slovaks, who were related to their ancestors but who were quite different from a social and cultural point of view, from the Hungarian hereditary mass, and make this a pillar of the “Versailles System” directed against Germany. Nevertheless, the hardships and difficulties of the Germans in the Czechoslovak Republic in Weimar Germany and even during the early days of the Third Reich did not receive nearly as much attention as the hardships and difficulties of the Germans in Poland, especially since they were attributed with considerable reasons to the economically unfavorable situation of most industrialized areas of the country. But here, as always and everywhere, business and politics intertwined, and it was also not unjustified to point out the systematic disadvantages that the residents of the Sudeten districts suffered from the Prague government, even though the activist German parties had been involved in parliament since 1926.
The demand for full self-determination was thus neither incomprehensible nor illegitimate from the outset, but it encountered far greater difficulties than in the case of Austria: the Germans were only a minority, annexation to Germany would have to destroy the “Bohemian State Law” and with it a centuries-old community, and would seriously impair the Czechs’ right to self-determination in the sense of their claim to an independent state, because how were the 7 million Czechs to retain genuine independence in the German sea of 75 million that surrounded them on three sides? All the problems of the right to self-determination, which seemed so obvious, were brought together as if in a burning mirror, and the the most essential question was the following: can the self-determination of the West Slavic peoples, which was secured by the Versailles Treaty, be reconciled with the self-determination of the Germans? Or must one override the other and, if the Germans took precedence, re-establish the old condition of dependence and immaturity of the Poles and Czechs, after they had only just freed themselves from the German (and Russian) rule?
The Sudeten German Social Democrats probably made the answer to the question too easy for themselves when they declared a good relationship with the “emerging Slavic world” to be a central imperative, because they overlooked, in how inconsistent and downright hubristic a manner the self-determination of the Poles and the Czechs had been placed on the basis of a temporary state of weakness on the part of the Germans and Russians, but the opposite view could lead to the even worse consequence that the small peoples’ right to self-determination was denied in principle. A higher concept, however, in which the contradictions of the right to self-determination could have been resolved, as Lenin possessed or believed he possessed in the concept of socialism, existed in Central Europe only as a powerless postulate, and at the latest during the great purge serious doubts were bound to arise as to whether the higher concept in the Soviet Union did not merely cloak the old reality of Russian domination. Hitler possessed only one counter-concept, namely that of the rule of the larger and stronger nation or race; therefore the concept of self-determination was just as little a supreme maxim for him as it was for Lenin, and he knew how to use it just as successfully.
The fact that Hitler could even think of using the right to self-determination to serve his actual goals was due, apart from the inner strength of the concept, precisely on the fact that that higher concept of socialism had prevented the disintegration of the Russian Empire and had created a worldwide claim that was felt in many countries of Europe to be the worst of all threats, and was by no means limited to the narrow circles of the bourgeoisie. It is true that there were manifold motives for the Chamberlain government’s “appeasement policy,” which was the policy of the main part of the Conservatives and was supported by the Times and not least by the so-called “Cliveden set” of the Astor family: an effort to gain time, striving for the integrity of the British Empire, a love of peace and a sense of the injustices of the Versailles Treaty. But when Lord Edward Halifax, at that time still Lord Privy Seal and shortly afterwards Foreign Secretary, paid a visit to Hitler on November 19, 1937 at Obersalzberg, he must have inwardly agreed with Hitler’s statement: the only catastrophe was Bolshevism, everything else could be sorted out. Right at the beginning of the conversation he had already described Germany as a “bulwark of the West against Bolshevism.” Thus anti-Bolshevism was undoubtedly the central point of agreement between the two politicians, but the serious differences stood out even where the practical question of the next steps seemed to be discussed. While Halifax seemed to concede to his interlocutor “changes in the European order” and specifically included “Danzig, Austria and Czechoslovakia” among the issues in question, he not only tied the solution to the “path of peaceful evolution,” but at the same time encouraged a return of Germany in the League of Nations and on the idea of disarmament.
Halifax, then, was far removed in this conversation from the plans that the Soviet Union in many statements accused the Chamberlain government of and which had to be imputed if the assumption of the essential sameness of Germany and England in capitalism and therefore in their hostility to socialism was correct: that the British government wanted to encourage German fascism to engage in aggression against the Soviet Union. Thus Stalin said to the American Ambassador Davies that the ultimate aim behind the policy of the reactionary elements in England represented by the Chamberlain government was to make Germany strong against Russia. This policy, however was likely to fail, he added, because “the fascist dictators would push the bargain too far.” Almost the same day, the French ambassador in Washington reported that President Roosevelt, in a conversation with him, had given free vent to “his dislike of the totalitarian states and their policy of brutal rapacity” and finally added “in the tone of deepest conviction”: “Should France go down, we would obviously go down with her.” The ambassador derived from this the confidence that America would stand firmly with France and England when they came into conflict “with the fascist powers” in defense of democracy and liberty. Hitler’s policy thus undoubtedly brought about the possibility that all the opponents of the World War, including America, would unite against Germany under the new standard of overarching anti-fascism. On the other hand, while Roosevelt evidently understood the term totalitarian to mean fascist, his sympathy was just as evidently primarily with England and France, and there is little reason to suspect that he held Stalin’s Soviet Union for a liberal democracy. The anti-fascist was opposed to the anti-communist and potentially anti-totalitarian conception of world politics, and if the communist ideology was right, the anti-communist conception was bound to prove stronger, since the unity of capitalism was more powerful than internal differences. But if the Soviet Union, England and the USA were primarily anti-fascist, then Lenin’s thesis was wrong and the world was in a different epoch than that of the proletarian world revolution.
In any case, Stalin had to apply the prescription that Lenin had given his delegation to the Genoa conference in 1922: try to separate the pacifist part of the bourgeoisie from its activist part. Litvinov did his best to keep the Soviet Union in the game and reinforce the notion of collective resistance to the aggressive powers, but just how widespread the anti-Communist conception was among French leaders, a statement by French Ambassador to Moscow, Robert Coulondre reveals: who, after a report by Count von der Schulenburg, said in August 1938: “I hope with all my heart that there will be no Franco-German conflict. You know as well as I do for whom we are working if we come to blows.”
But the Soviet Union held a key position. It was linked to both France and Czechoslovak Republic by pacts of mutual assistance, and the policy of great resistance, which seemed imperative according to all premises, depended entirely on it. On the other hand, the distrust that it faced even on the part of the Czechoslovak Republic was reflected in the clause desired by the Czechs, according to which the USSR’s obligation to provide aid would only come into effect after France had first fulfilled its own. Moreover, the Czechoslovak Republic and the USSR had no common border. Russian troops would have to march through Poland or Romania if they wanted to intervene, and it was certain that neither country would permit a passage. Although some French officers did not shy away from the idea that Poland and Romania would then have to be forced to make concessions, Stalin could be confident that, despite all assurances of compliance to the treaty, he would retain his freedom of action once the Western powers and Germany were involved in a war. This, according to Schulenburg, was the opinion of the entire diplomatic corps in Moscow, and this opinion corresponded exactly to Stalin’s opinion, which was unknown at the time because he had expressed it in a secret speech in 1925: the Soviet Union would not be able to escape a war, but she will the last to act.
With this widespread assumption or suspicion, however, the most obvious reaction of any political power, namely to resist the disproportionate gain in power of a rival power, came into serious tension with the overarching anti-Bolshevism, on which all non-Russian states of Europe agreed, albeit to very different degrees. On the other hand, the Sudeten Germans’ demands for self-determination, which were becoming more and more radical, were only tentative and seemingly identical to Hitler’s idea of solving the space problem. Overall, the motives and tactics from the spring to the fall of 1938 merged into a whole that was difficult to understand. Simplifying and with a grain of salt, one could say: the objective interaction of the Sudeten German demand for self-determination with Chamberlain’s will to pacify or appease against the background of fear of Stalin’s ultimate intentions made Hitler’s greatest triumph possible, which seemed to be the completion of the Greater German right of self-determination and yet was only the basis for an ultimate intention, which was opposed to that of Stalin and yet akin to it. The real determining factor was therefore the existence of the two new and hostile ideological states, through which all the enduring problems and tensions of the European power system took on a character that would have been unimaginable before 1914, because at that time two supranational parties, the philo-fascists and the anti-fascists, did not divide Europe and involve it in a potential civil war.
The most important events can now be summarized quickly: On February 20, 1938, Hitler’s speech on the “ten million oppressed Germans,” which also contained extremely violent attacks on Communism and the Soviet Union, officially opened the Sudeten question before the Austrian question had been resolved. In March he instructed the leader of the Sudeten German Home Front, Konrad Henlein, to always demand so much that no fulfillment was possible. The partial Czech mobilization of May 20, which was based on misleading reports in English newspapers, genuinely angered Hitler because it seemed to mean a loss of prestige for him. However, it did not prevent Henlein’s party from winning about 90% of the German votes in the local elections that were roughly simultaneous. The German press reports about “Bolshevik Czechoslovakia” as the Soviet Union’s aircraft mothership in Central Europe since then took the character of an unbridled campaign, which, however, received some support in the press of the French Right and in the British Rothermere newspapers; even the protests of the Sudeten German party against the “Bolshevik-Hussite elements” which the Prague government no longer had under control, increasingly lost the character of experience and became propaganda barrage. The appointment of Lord Runciman as mediator and various articles in the Times prepared President Benes and the Czechoslovak government for a very far-reaching concession in September, which practically fulfilled the autonomy demands of the so-called “Carlsbad Program.” On the other hand, Hitler’s will to go to war evoked genuine resistance among German generals and diplomats for the first time, which was entirely determined by patriotic motives, i.e. by the fear of a “finis Germaniae” and that brought a military coup d’état against Hitler within reach. Hitler’s and Göring’s speeches at the Nuremberg Party Congress could only base their unbridled and at the same time haughty emotionality on the sensational reports of persecution in German newspapers, invented or trimmed by an official of the Ministry of Propaganda. In truth, the “Sudeten German Freikorps” was already the aggressor, and what had taken place in Georgia in 1921, the support of local rebellion movements by a foreign power, was now a tangible reality in the middle of Europe under completely different circumstances. But Chamberlain's flight to Berchtesgaden on September 15 rendered the plans of the German opposition unreal, and on September 21 the Prague government, under the heaviest pressure, had to accept the proposal to ceding the Sudeten German territories. But when the British Prime Minister met Hitler for the second time in Godesberg on September 23, the latter, again citing alleged atrocities by the Czechs, demanded the immediate occupation of the areas by German troops and a solution to the question of the remaining minorities in Czechoslovakia. The negotiations threatened to fail, and on September 26 Hitler gave a speech in the Berlin Sportpalast that, with its attacks on Benes and the Czechs, was an incomparable piece of uninhibited demagogy. But when he was surrounded by frenetic cheering from the masses, he had to realize the next day that the demonstrative passage of an panzer division through the streets of Berlin did not arouse any enthusiasm for the war among the population, only horror and fear. An appeal by Roosevelt went unheeded, but Hitler accepted Mussolini’s proposal for mediation, and on September 29 he met with Chamberlain, Daladier and Mussolini for the Munich Conference, at which all of his demands were met with minor modifications. A representative of the Soviet Union was not invited. Hitler and Chamberlain signed a declaration on September 30 in which they expressed in an optimistic tone the desire of both peoples “never again to wage war against one another,” and after his arrival in London Chamberlain spoke of the “honorable peace” which he had brought back from Germany and which gave him hope that peace would reign “all our lives.” Benes left Prague a few days later and went into exile. The advancing German troops were greeted by the population with even more unanimous jubilation than had been the case in Austria. Even Hitler’s fiercest opponents could now hardly doubt that, despite having overcome the fear of war, the overwhelming majority of the German nation stood as a “national-community” (Volksgemeinschaft) behind the man who at that moment could be regarded as the personification of the people’s spirit, that people’s spirit whose will to right the “wrongs of Versailles” Lenin and Lansing, Rosa Luxemburg and Humanité had predicted in one way or another twenty years earlier.
From the point of view of world politics, the Munich conference appears in retrospect to be the last opportunity at which the European powers solved a European problem on their own, to the exclusion of both the Soviet Union and the USA. In this concert of the four powers, Hitler undoubtedly had the lead voice. England and France had had to yield, but one cannot say that they were raped, since in the end they had only said yes to the consequence of a principle of their own. Neither Chamberlain nor Daladier warned pro-German, but Hitler could not expect in England and France governments that would have been better for him because men like Oswald Mosley and Marcel Déat were separated from power by impassable barriers. His own interest, one would think, should have led Hitler to align his policy on the lines of the Anglo-German and somewhat later Franco-German declaration and endeavored to ensure that the ingredients of brutal threats, lies, hubris and recklessness, which had appeared in the speeches of some of his followers in an even more frightening way than in his own speeches, should be consigned to oblivion as quickly and thoroughly as possible. It is true that there is not the slightest indication that one of the responsible statesmen of England and France ever gave him the slightest hint of encouraging him to wage a war against the Soviet Union in 1938 or 1939. But he might have relied on a strong underlying current in England, which was described in December 1938 by Edward Raczynski, the Polish ambassador in London, as saying that all events and problems in Eastern Europe were viewed below the level of “public opinion” by the population as a “lesser evil” that could be used to avert the danger from one’s own empire. On the other hand, at the forefront of the opposition was the very politician who, according to his precedents, might have been most likely to have been assumed to have embraced the conception of a crusade against Bolshevism, namely, Winston Churchill. And Hitler’s diplomats in England and in the USA had repeatedly and emphatically pointed out to him that it was by no means just “the Jewish press agitation” that filled ordinary Englishmen and Americans with distrust of National Socialist Germany, but that there was a centuries-old tradition that took offense at the suppression of freedom of the press and the anti-Jewish and anti-church measures. No ideologue ever showed moderation in victory, but Hitler did not even show tactical wisdom. As early as October he decided to make a speech that pointed in the exact opposite direction of sensible policy, and in November he even allowed anti-Jewish events to take place, which for the first time had the character of a full-scale pogrom. As a result, his great year 1938 came to an end for him several weeks before December 31, and the destruction of what was left of Czechia in March 1939 brought about a change in the situation in which Stalin, who had just been something like the “sick man of Europe” and almost a marginal figure, became more and more the target of courtship between two hostile power groups.