Munich, 1938: Appeasement and World War II by Faber David

Author:Faber, David [Faber, David]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Published: 2009-08-20T00:00:00+00:00

At 9:30 P.M., almost as soon as Hitler had finished speaking at Nuremberg, the Inner Circle of ministers convened in the Cabinet Room at Downing Street, translated copies of the speech laid out on the table before them. Although this was in effect the fifth such meeting, it was the first to be formally minuted by the new Cabinet Secretary, Edward Bridges.74 The four ministers present were Chamberlain, Halifax, Simon and Hoare, supported by Vansittart, Cadogan and Wilson. There was relief that the “first impressions of the speech … were that Herr Hitler had not committed himself to any violent action.” There was also a short discussion about the wisdom of sending two bodyguards to Prague to protect Runciman; French intelligence sources had warned that there was “a grave and very real danger of some murderous attack … on Lord Runciman from a supposedly Czech quarter, engineered by the Germans, with a view to alienating the British.”75 Newton, however, argued that “the Germans would hail the arrival of two English detectives to guard Lord Runciman as a proof of the incapacity of the Czech Government to preserve order.”76

Two weeks later, Chamberlain was to tell the House of Commons that the general effect of Hitler’s speech had been “to leave the situation unchanged, with a slight diminution of the tension.”77 If that was indeed true, then it was only for a matter of hours at most. While stopping short of a declaration of war, Hitler’s words provided the signal for a rising in the Sudetenland. Within minutes of the speech ending at 8:40 P.M., Henlein’s supporters were out on the streets chanting “Ein Volk, Ein Reich, Ein Führer,” and indulging in sporadic acts of violence against the Czech police.78 Within two hours the fighting had escalated, and there was widespread rioting throughout the night. SdP storm troopers had been under instructions to gather in town centers to listen to the speech and, around Eger and Karlsbad in particular, they took it as their cue to bring rifles, grenades and machine guns out onto the streets; the hope was that German tanks would soon be rolling into Czechoslovakia to support them. In Prague, meanwhile, the SdP quietly closed their offices, burning all records, while married and older members of staff were sent away on indefinite leave.

By the following morning, the streets of a number of Sudeten towns and villages were strewn with broken glass and the looted wreckage of Czech and Jewish shops. Overnight police stations had been attacked, and attempts made to seize railway stations, post offices and customs houses. Nearly all public buildings were now flying huge swastika banners. The streets were manned by Nazi storm troopers, and even the majority of civilians were going about their business wearing swastika armbands. During the day the revolt spread further afield. Four Czech gendarmes were killed trying to halt an attack on a local school, and several others died during rioting in the frontier districts. A larger group of twenty-six gendarmes, sent

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