The Life and Death of Adolf Hitler by Robert Payne

Author:Robert Payne [Payne, Robert]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Endeavour Press
Published: 2017-01-03T18:00:00+00:00

Victory at Munich

Neville Chamberlain was one of those quiet, ineffective men who enter politics more by accident than by design. The family fortune derived from his grandfather’s bootmaking and leather goods shop in Birmingham, and Neville Chamberlain, with his protruding teeth and skimpy mustache, looked a little like a Victorian bootmaker. Unlike his half-brother Austen Chamberlain, who wore a monocle and carried himself as though he were the scion of an ancient and distinguished family, Neville Chamberlain had no elegance of manner or of thought. He was rich, kindly, and garrulous among his friends. He became Prime Minister of England as the result of quiet intrigues, and had little talent for the job.

Hitler’s judgments of men were notably ill-formed and capricious. He trusted people who were wholly untrustworthy, like Himmler and Goering, and intensely distrusted people like his army chiefs, who might, but for his distrust, have helped him to even greater victories. What Hitler had detected in Chamberlain long before they met face to face was a horror of coercion in all its forms. This was not a recent attitude but was ingrained in him. Hitler, who reveled in violence and coercion, concluded that the Prime Minister was weak-willed and easily maneuvered, and at the first sign of violence he would immediately run away. Hitler was profoundly wrong in his assessment of the Prime Minister’s character. Neville Chamberlain was not a strong man, but neither was he weak. He was patient, stubborn, cautious, and long-suffering. He had taken Hitler’s measure and knew that Europe was in mortal danger and only a miracle would save the Continent from coming under Hitler’s domination.

There was one other aspect of the Prime Minister’s character that deserves to be mentioned. He was the least calculating of men. If someone told him anything, he would believe it without inquiring into the man’s motives. He had an almost childlike trust in a man’s word, and this was in some way connected with his deep religious convictions. If Hitler had promised to reform, if he had said, “I have put away all dreams of conquest and in future I shall always act peacefully,” Neville Chamberlain would not have been in the least incredulous.

Ever since the rape of Austria Hitler had made it clear that he was determined to gather the Sudeten Germans into the Greater German Reich. The Sudeten Germans, named after the Sudeten Mountains separating Bohemia from Germany, comprised about 2 million people whose ancestry was German, though they had intermarried with Czechs. Hitler had decided to march into the Sudetenland, to organize uprisings there, or both. There was nothing especially difficult in the undertaking, and he discounted from the beginning any real possibility of intervention by England, France, or the Soviet Union, the three countries that might be expected to be sympathetic to the government in Prague. But above and beyond possession of the Sudetenland he also wanted to crush Czechoslovakia, because it had been created by the Versailles Treaty, because it lay on the

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