“I was very worried,” Annelise acknowledged, “that he was going to commit suicide with my two children there.” But George advised him and other Jewish friends to go straight to the German army and apply to emigrate: “It’s going to be easier than when they have the SS in.” This worked, and they made their way safely out of the country.
By noon the Germans had taken the city: there were hundreds of vehicles plastered with snow, the occupants’ faces red with what some thought was shame but what George feared was mostly the cold. Annelise noted that many of the Czechs “hissed, showed their fists, and shouted pfui.” On the next day Hitler arrived, and the Kennans watched him pass by. “One thing which rather pleased me,” Annelise commented, “was the quiet in the streets. They marched the Germans up to cheer for Hitler, but it was might[y] few and seemed like a drop in the bucket to what he was accustomed to.” George too found the silence striking. “Hitler rode quietly past our front door, without even a crowd on the side-walk to impede the view.”
With the extinction of Czechoslovak independence, most foreign embassies and legations left Prague. But the State Department kept the American consulate general open, making Kennan responsible for political reporting from what was now the German “protectorate” of Bohemia and Moravia. “The job,” he explained to Jeanette, “is, all in all, an enviable one. I have my own office and staff, . . . and am more or less independent.” He and Annelise would keep their apartment but would be ready to send the children to Norway at any moment if that seemed necessary. And George had to recommend, reluctantly, that Jeanette defer her trip, because “the whole situation is now too shaky for anyone to make any plans for more than a few days.”16
III.
With Czechoslovakia the first non-German state the Nazis had taken over, their policies might well set a precedent for what to expect elsewhere in Europe, now that Hitler’s intentions were clear. Kennan’s job would be to convey this preview to Washington. Berlin, he thought, should want “peace, quiet, and a minimum of bad feeling,” because Czechoslovakia was incidental to more distant objectives. Even Hitler had to worry about public opinion. Here Kennan was echoing one of the few shrewd insights in his 1938 “Prerequisites” essay: that dictators, “having deprived themselves of all legal means of retreat, have the bear by the tail.” He now could watch how this dictator handled that problem.17
The Czechs, at first, did not seem bearlike. “Toward their rulers they show—like the ‘brave soldier Svejk’ of Czech literary fame—a baffling willingness to comply with any and all demands.” They coupled this, though, with “an equally baffling ability to execute them in such a way that the effect is quite different from that contemplated by those who did the commanding.” Beneath the surface, they were bitter indeed—so much so that they were the only Europeans who wanted a great war, because only that could liberate them. Clandestine political groups were already forming, ready to become resistance movements as soon as hostilities commenced. Nor would the Czechs, if victory came, treat their tormentors gently: “Retaliation will be fearful to contemplate.”18
If the Germans were to have a trouble-free occupation, therefore, they would have to show tact and restraint, for which they were not noted. Their failure to do so appeared quickly. The military authorities allowed the Czechoslovak president, Emil Hacha, to retain his position and his residence in Hradcany Palace but rendered him honors in ways that suggested ridicule rather than respect. It was small recompense to have Hitler as an unannounced houseguest whenever it suited his convenience. Berlin appointed Konrad Henlein, the leader of the Sudeten German separatists, to administer all of Bohemia, but then removed him. Since nothing could have done more to harden Czech hostility, it was difficult to see why he had been selected in the first place. By the end of May, arrests were increasing, prisons were filling up, and old ones were reopening. Reports of brutality were all too well authenticated. Terror had now begun, and the Czechs “are quite powerless to oppose it.”19
Meanwhile, the Slovaks’ “independence” was turning out to be that “of a dog on a leash.” Their leaders were mismanaging their economy, the Hungarians were openly coveting their territory, and the Slovaks themselves, who were hardly pro-Czech, were beginning to realize that they were not apt to fare as well as they had before dismantling their former shared state. If war broke out, the Bratislava regime would prove too undependable to be of use to the Germans, and they would take it over as well.20
Jews had even less to hope for. There had been no Jew-baiting in the streets of Prague, as had followed the
The Czechs, being realists, might have reconciled themselves to German rule had it been “firm in its purposes, conscious of its responsibilities, integrated in its activities, and incorruptible in the performance of its duties.” But it had been none of these things; instead the Germans had given the impression “of a regime in an advanced state of moral disintegration.” All of this had implications for the future of Europe, because until the Nazis developed greater maturity, they would stand little chance of successfully managing responsibilities borne for centuries—“and at times not uncreditably”—by the Roman Catholic Church and the Hapsburg Empire.22
Although Messersmith praised Kennan’s reports, there is no evidence that they went beyond the State Department, or that they had any impact on American foreign policy in the final months of peace in Europe. They did reflect, though, a conviction that would grow stronger in Kennan’s mind, the more he saw of the Germans over the next few years: “that even in the event of a complete military victory the Nazis would still face an essentially insoluble problem in the political organization and control of the other peoples of the continent.” The reason was that Nazi ideology had nothing to offer apart from “glorification of the supposed virtues of the German people,” an argument that had “no conceivable appeal” to anyone else.23
That conclusion, in time, would also shape Kennan’s view of the country that eventually defeated Nazi Germany and sought its own domination of Europe. For the moment, though, the Soviet Union was moving toward an uneasy alliance with Hitler, the surprise announcement of which, on August 24, 1939, made possible Germany’s attack on Poland a week later, and the beginning of the Second World War.
IV.
For all of his skill in analyzing Russia and Germany, Kennan failed to anticipate the Nazi-Soviet Pact. He had noted, in 1935, the Soviet Union’s propensity to seek “non-aggression” treaties with capitalist states while building up its military strength for an eventual confrontation with them. He had wondered, after Hitler extinguished Czechoslovakia’s independence in 1939, why the Germans were discouraging the Ruthenians’ ambitions to make themselves the nucleus of a Nazi Ukraine. But Kennan did not put these two things together, assuming instead that if the Soviet Union aligned itself with anyone, it would be Britain and France. He did not know that an old Moscow acquaintance, Hans-Heinrich (Johnnie) Herwarth von Bittenfeld, a part-Jewish German diplomat, was using tennis matches and horseback rides at the American dacha to pass along top-secret information to Bohlen on the negotiations leading up to the Hitler-Stalin accord. But Bohlen hedged his reports to Washington, and when the State Department did at last alert the British and French ambassadors, their governments did nothing.24
Kennan, still in German-occupied Prague, had no espionage service to draw upon. The only people “who could tell us things,” he explained to Messersmith in April, were no longer people worth trusting—presumably Germans. The best alternative was to attempt to guess, from an understanding of the past and an analysis of the present,
