Hitler

to me: in the end England and France stand behind me.”

And now, my fellow-countrymen, I believe that the time has come when one must mince matters no longer…. He will have to hand this territory over to us on October 1…. The decision now lies in his hands: Peace or War!

Once again he gave assurances that he was not interested in wiping out or annexing Czechoslovakia: “We want no Czechs!” he shouted, and as he came to his peroration worked himself up into a state of ecstasy. Eyes raised to the roof of the hall, fired by the greatness of the hour, the cheering of the masses, and his own paroxysm, he ended on a rapturous note:

Now I go before my people as its first soldier and behind me—let the world know this—there marches a people, and a different people from that of 1918…. It will feel my will to be its will. Just as in my eyes it is its future and its fate which gave me the commission for my action. And we wish now to make our will as strong as it was in the time of our struggle, the time when I, as a simple unknown soldier, went forth to conquer a Reich…. And so I ask you, my German people, take your stand behind me, man by man, and woman by woman…. We are determined!

Now let Mr. Benes make his choice!

Storms of applause followed, and while Hitler, bathed in sweat, glassyeyed, sat down, Goebbels sprang up. “One thing is sure: 1918 will never be repeated!” he shouted. William Shirer observed from the balcony the way Hitler looked up at Goebbels “as if those were the words which he had been searching for all evening and hadn’t quite found. He leaped to his feet and with a fanatical fire in his eyes that I shall never forget brought his right hand, after a grand sweep, pounding down on the table, and yelled with all the power of his mighty lungs: la!’ Then he slumped into his chair exhausted.”⁸⁶ That evening Goebbels coined the slogan: Fuhrer befiehl, wir folgen! (“Fuhrer command, we obey!”) The masses went on chanting it long after the end of the meeting. As Hitler departed, they began to sing Der Gott, der Eisen wachsen Hess, a combat song repudiating subjection.

Still inspired by the heat and the hysteria of the previous night, Hitler once again received Sir Horace Wilson next day at noon. If his demands were rejected he would destroy Czechoslovakia, he threatened; and when Wilson replied that England would intervene militarily if France found herself compelled to hasten to the aid of Czechoslovakia, Hitler declared he could merely note the fact: “If France and England strike, let them do so. It is a matter of complete indifference to me. I am prepared for every eventuality. It is Tuesday today, and by next Monday we shall all be at war/’⁸⁷ That same day he ordered additional mobilization measures.

But the afternoon of September 27 again dampened his euphoria. In order to test and increase the populace’s enthusiasm for war, Hitler had ordered the second motorized division to pass through the capital on its way from Stettin to the Czechoslovak border and to roll down the broad East-West axis, through Wilhelmstrasse past the chancellery. Perhaps he hoped the military spectacle would bring people pouring into the streets and awaken a fighting spirit which, whipped up by a last appeal from the chancellery balcony, could be converted into a general “cry for violence.” What actually happened has been recorded by the American journalist William Shirer in his diary:

I went out to the corner of the Linden where the column was turning down the Wilhelmstrasse, expecting to see a tremendous demonstration. I pictured the scenes I had read of in 1914 when the cheering throngs on this same street tossed flowers at the marching soldiers, and the girls ran up and kissed them…. But today they ducked into the subways, refused to look on, and the handful that did stood at the curb in utter silence…. It has been the most striking demonstration against war I’ve ever seen.

…I walked down the Wilhelmstrasse to the Reichskanzlerplatz, where Hitler stood on a balcony of the Chancellery reviewing the troops…. There weren’t two hundred people there. Hitler looked grim, then angry, and soon went inside, leaving his troops to parade by unreviewed.⁸⁸

The sobering effect of this incident was reinforced by a flood of bad news indicating that France’s, England’s, and Czechoslovakia’s preparations for war were going further than expected and the strength of these Allies evidently surpassed by a good deal Germany’s potentialities. Prague alone had mobilized a million men and together with France would be able to commit three times as many troops as Germany. In London air raid shelters were being dug and hospitals evacuated. The population of Paris was leaving the city in droves. War seemed inevitable. In the course of the day Yugoslavia, Rumania, Sweden, and the United States issued warnings declaring in favor of Germany’s adversaries. And since the deadline Hitler had set expired in a few hours, the either-or mood in the chancellery began to swing around. During the late evening hours of September 27 Hitler started to dictate a letter to Chamberlain that struck a definitely conciliatory tone, offering a formal guarantee for the continued existence of Czechoslovakia and ending with an appeal to reason. But in the meantime other things had been happening which promised to give developments an unexpected twist at the last moment.

A plot had been forming and had made considerable progress in the course of the preceding year. The conspirators were a small but influential group, for the first time people from all political camps. Their joint initial purpose had been to prevent war; but the boldness with which Hitler was heading toward a conflict caused them to raise their own sights, until they arrived at plans for assassination and rebellion. The motive force and the middleman for all the groups was the head of the Central Section of the Abwehr (Army Counterintelligence), Lieutenant Colonel Hans Oster. If it is true that German military tradition has always been entirely divorced from political opposition, and that the German character, too—as Bernardo Attolico, the Italian ambassador in Berlin, remarked at the time—lacks all conspiratorial qualities such as patience, knowledge of human nature, psychology, tact, or the capacity for hypocrisy, then Oster was one of the exceptions. A curious mixture of morality and cunning, ingenuity, psychological calculation and loyalty to principles, he had early taken a critical attitude toward Hitler and Nazism. For some time he had tried vainly to persuade his fellow soldiers to share his views. The officer corps was a group of narrow specialists wedded to inaction. But they finally began to stir when they could no longer blink at the fact that Hitler was headed toward war, and when the Fritsch affair had roused their caste pride. Other groups, too, began to be mobilized; and Oster consistently drew them in. Covered by the apparatus of the Abwehr and its chief, Admiral Canaris, he succeeded in forming a widely ramified resistance group.

The resistance had realized that a totalitarian regime, once entrenched, could be overturned only by the combined action of internal and external enemies. On this principle, representatives of the German opposition made virtual pilgrimages to Paris and London, trying to contact influential figures. Early in March, 1938, Carl Goerdeler was in Paris urging the French government to take an uncompromising position on the Czechoslovakian question. A month later he set out once more, but both times he received only noncommittal replies. His visit to London brought similar results. It throws significant light upon the complex of problems involved in this and subsequent missions that Sir Robert Vansittart, chief diplomatic advisor to the British Foreign Secretary, exclaimed in consternation to his German visitor that what he was saying was actual treason to his country.⁸⁹

Much the same reception was accorded Ewald von Kleist-Schwenzin, a conservative politician who had long ago retreated in disgust to his Pomeranian estates, but now used his connections with England to urge the British government to stiffen its resistance to Hitler’s expansionist plans. Hitler would not be content with the Anschluss of Austria, he warned; there was reliable information that his plans aimed far beyond the annexation of Czechoslovakia and that he was striving for nothing less than world dominion. In the summer of 1938 von Kleist himself went to London. Chief of Staff Ludwig Beck had given him a kind of assignment: “Bring me certain proof that England will fight if Czechoslovakia is attacked, and I will put an end to this regime.”⁹⁰

Two weeks after von Kleist, the industrialist Hans Bohm-Tettelbach went to London on the same mission; and no sooner was he back from his trip than several new efforts were undertaken on the part of a resistance group in the Foreign Office headed by State Secretary von Weizsacker, who used Embassy Councillor Theo Kordt in London as his intermediary. On September 1 Weizsacker himself asked Danzig High Commissioner Carl Jacob Burckhardt to urge the British government to use “unambiguous language” toward Hitler. Probably the most effective step, he told Burckhardt, would be to send a “blunt, plainspoken Englishman, a general with a riding crop,