Making Friends with Hitler by Ian Kershaw

Author:Ian Kershaw [Kershaw, Ian]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781101567982
Publisher: Penguin Publishing Group
Published: 2005-10-25T04:00:00+00:00

IV

By now, the crisis over Czechoslovakia was boiling up. German troop movements in the middle of August were seen as a warning. An offer by the Czech President, Beneŝ, in early September fleetingly looked to provide a possible way of defusing the situation by granting partial autonomy to the Sudeten Germans. But Hitler remained aggressively unbending. War seemed ever more likely. Halifax, maintaining the strategy of keeping Hitler guessing about British intentions, issued a statement that Britain would stand by France in a general conflict, at the same time as the French were again made aware that they could not rely upon armed British support.96 Meanwhile, powerful voices supported a political solution – meaning, in effect, pressure to ensure the Czechs gave in to German demands. Most notably, The Times, known to have the ear of the British government, recommended in early September that Czechoslovakia cede the Sudetenland to Germany.97 A week later, on 14 September, Chamberlain told the Cabinet of his decision, already taken more than a fortnight earlier without consultation, to go to Germany to meet Hitler. No minister objected to the meeting, though the eventual outcome, short of war, could only have been foreseen as an almost inevitable transfer of territory to Germany.98 By this time, Hitler had violently denounced the Czechs and threatened German intervention in his closing speech at the Reich Party Rally in Nuremberg, martial law had been declared in some parts of the Sudetenland, the British Ambassador in Berlin, Nevile Henderson, was warning of imminent German attack and urging the British government to put pressure on Beneŝ to stop ‘haggling’, and it was plain that the French did not want to fight.99

On 15 September, Chamberlain flew to Germany for the hastily arranged meeting with Hitler that he had requested (to the German dictator’s astonishment), at the Berghof in the mountains above Berchtesgaden. Chamberlain offered, in order to stave off war, to consult his Cabinet colleagues on an agreement providing self-determination for the Sudeten Germans, and, when he had done so, to meet Hitler again. Hitler was pleased at the outcome, feeling he had forced Chamberlain into cession of the Sudetenland. For his part, Chamberlain told the Cabinet on his return that Hitler’s objectives were ‘strictly limited’ to the Sudeten problem and that it would be wrong to go to war to prevent self-determination for the Sudeten Germans. Privately, he told his sister that Hitler ‘was a man who could be relied upon when he had given his word’.100

He was rapidly disabused of such confidence. The Cabinet had agreed to a transfer of territory, without a plebiscite, though with a guarantee of the new borders of Czechoslovakia. But at the start of their next meeting, on 22 September in the Rhineland resort Bad Godesberg, to Chamberlain’s dismay, Hitler increased his demands and threatened immediate occupation of the Sudetenland before eventually backing down at least on the immediacy of action and agreeing on 1 October as the deadline. Yet even now Chamberlain felt able to

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