psychosis’.179 No love was lost on the Czechs. And the relentless propaganda about their alleged persecution of the German minority was not without impact. There were indeed some feelings of real gung-ho aggression, though these were largely confined to gullible younger Germans, who had not lived through the World War. The overwhelming sentiment was a fervent desire that war should be avoided and peace preserved. For the first time there was a hint of lack of confidence in Hitler’s policy. Most looked to him to preserve peace, not take Germany into a new war.180 But this time, both to the leading actors in the drama and to the millions looking on anxiously, war looked a more likely outcome than peace.
Among those with power and influence, the most forthright supporter of war to destroy Czechoslovakia was the new Foreign Minister, Joachim von Ribbentrop, an entirely different entity to the displaced conservative, von Neurath. Ribbentrop was more than keen to stamp his imprint on the Foreign Office — and to make up for the embarrassment he had sustained when, largely at Goring’s doing, he had been sidelined in London and allowed to play no part in the Austrian triumph that his arch-rival in foreign policy had been instrumental in orchestrating.181 He provided Hitler with his main backing in these months. His hatred of Britain — the country which had spurned and ridiculed him — as well as his fawning devotion to the Fuhrer made him the most hawkish of the hawks, a warmonger second only to Hitler himself. When he was not directly spurring on Hitler, he was doing his utmost to shore up the conviction that, when it came to it, Britain would not fight, that any war would be a localized one. State Secretary von Weizsacker was sure of Ribbentrop’s baleful influence on Hitler in this respect. When, in the middle of August, Weizsacker contradicted Ribbentrop’s assertion that the western powers would not act, the Foreign Minister retorted that ‘the Fuhrer had so far never made a mistake; his most difficult decisions and actions (Rhineland occupation) were already behind him. One had to believe in his genius, just as he, Ribbentrop, did from long years of experience.’ He hoped that Weizsacker could also come to have ‘such blind faith’. The State Secretary would later regret it if that were not the case, and the facts then spoke against him.182
For all Ribbentrop’s influence, however, there could be no doubt that the crisis that brought Europe to the very brink of war in the summer of 1938 was instigated and directed by Hitler himself. And unlike the rapid improvisation and breakneck speed which had characterized previous crises, this one was consciously devised to escalate over a period of months.
Until 1938, Hitler’s moves in foreign policy had been bold, but not reckless. He had shown shrewd awareness of the weakness of his opponents, a sure instinct for exploiting divisions and uncertainty. His sense of timing had been excellent, his combination of bluff and blackmail effective, his manipulation of propaganda to back his coups masterly. He had gone further and faster than anyone could have expected in revising the terms of Versailles and upturning the post-war diplomatic settlement. From the point of view of the western powers, his methods were, to say the least, unconventional diplomacy — raw, brutal, unpalatable; but his aims were recognizably in accord with traditional German nationalist clamour. Down to and including the Anschlu?, Hitler had proved a consummate nationalist politician. During the Sudeten crisis, some sympathy for demands to incorporate the German-speaking areas in the Reich — for another Anschlu? of sorts — still existed among those ready to swallow Goebbels’s propaganda about the maltreatment of the Sudeten Germans by the Czechs, or at any rate prepared to accept that a further nationality problem was in need of resolution. It took the crisis and its outcome to expose the realization that Hitler would stop at nothing. Some of the shame felt at the Munich settlement in the western democracies as soon as the elation at the salvation of peace had evaporated was that they had merely bought off Hitler for a time through sacrificing Czechoslovakia. Before that point was reached, there had been increasing incomprehension among western statesmen during the course of the summer about Hitler and his aims. Some of the comments doubting his sanity reflect the sense of British statesmen at the time that they were dealing with someone who had crossed the bounds of rational behaviour in international politics. In the view of the British Ambassador, Nevile Henderson, Hitler had ‘become quite mad’ and, bent on war at all costs, had ‘crossed the borderline of insanity’.183
They were not far wrong. The spring of 1938 marked the phase in which Hitler’s obsession with accomplishing his ‘mission’ in his own lifetime started to overtake cold political calculation. As Goebbels had put it in the passage already cited, Hitler wanted to experience the ‘Great Germanic Reich’ himself.184 Probably, as we have already noted, his increased health worries and preoccupation with his own mortality played their part in heightening his sense of urgency. A deep-seated hatred of the Czechs — a legacy of his Austrian upbringing (when rabid hostility towards the Czechs had been endemic in the German-speaking part of the Habsburg Empire) — added a further personal dimension to the drive to destroy a Czechoslo-vakian state allied with the arch-enemies of the USSR in the east and France in the west. Prestige — as always — also came into it. He was to feel slighted and embarrassed at the diplomatic outfall from sudden Czech military mobilization in May (generally, though mistakenly, believed to have been in response to initial threatening moves by Germany).185 This at the very least reinforced his decision to act with speed to crush Czechoslovakia by the autumn.186 Finally, the sense of his own infallibility, massively boosted by the triumph of the Anschlu?, underscored his increased reliance on his own will, matched by his diminished readiness to listen to countervailing counsel. That he had invariably been proved right in his assessment of the weakness of the western powers in the past, usually in the teeth of the caution of his advisers in the army and Foreign Office, convinced him that his current evaluation was unerringly correct. He had come during 1937 to be dismissive about the strength and will to fight both of Britain, which had spurned his advances, and of France, wracked by internal divisions. Partly prompted, and at any rate greatly amplified, by Ribbentrop, his views had hardened to the point where he felt the western powers would do nothing to defend Czechoslovakia. At the same time, this strengthened his conviction that the Reich’s position relative to the western powers could only worsen as their inevitable build-up of arms began to catch up with that of Germany. To remain inactive — a recurring element in the way he thought — was, he asserted, not an option: it would merely play into the hands of his enemies. Therefore, he characteristically reasoned: act without delay to retain the initiative.
These various strands of his thinking came together in the conclusion that the time was ripe to strike against Czechoslovakia. Until Czechoslovakia was eliminated — this was the key strategic element in Hitler’s idea — Germany would be incapable of taking action either in the east or in the west. He had moved from a position of a foreign policy supported by Great Britain to one where he was prepared to act without Britain, and, if need be, against Britain. Despite the forebodings of others, war against Czechoslovakia in his view carried few risks. And if the western powers, contrary to expectation, were foolish enough to become involved, Germany would defeat them.
More important even than why Hitler was in such a hurry to destroy Czechoslovakia is why he was by this time in a position to override or ignore weighty objections and to determine that Germany should be taken to the very brink of general European war. Decisive in this was the process, which we have followed, of the expansion of his power, relative to other agencies of power in the regime, to the point where, by spring 1938, it had freed itself from all institutional constraints and had established unchallenged supremacy over all sections of the ‘power cartel’.187 The five years of Hitler’s highly personalized form of rule had eroded all semblance of collective involvement in policy-making. This fragmentation at one and the same time rendered the organization of any opposition within the power-elite almost impossible — not to speak of any attached dangers to life and liberty — and inordinately strengthened Hitler’s own power. The scope for more cautious counsel to apply the brakes had sharply diminished. The constant Hobbesian ‘war of all against all’, the competing power fiefdoms that characterized the National Socialist regime, took place at the level below Hitler, enhancing his extraordinary position as the fount of all authority and dividing both individual and sectional interests of the different power entities (the Movement, the state bureaucracy, the army, big business, the police, and the sub-branches of each). Hitler was, therefore, as the sole linchpin, able internally to deal, as in foreign policy, through bilateral relations — offering his support here, denying it there, remaining the sole arbiter, even when he preferred (or felt compelled) to let matters ride and let his subordinates battle it out among themselves. It was less a planned strategy of ‘divide and rule’ than an inevitable consequence of Fuhrer authority. Without any coordinating bodies to unify policy, each sectional interest in the Third Reich could thrive only with the legitimacy of the Fuhrer’s backing. Each one inevitably, therefore, ‘worked towards the Fuhrer’ in order to gain or sustain that backing, ensuring thereby that his power grew still further and that his own ideological obsessions were promoted.
The inexorable disintegration of coherent structures of rule was therefore not only a product of the all- pervasive Fuhrer cult reflecting and embellishing Hitler’s absolute supremacy, but at the same time underpinned the myth of the all-seeing, all-knowing infallible Leader, elevating it to the very principle of government itself. Moreover,
