Hitler

incomprehensible. Beyond all the practical reasons for the policy of appeasement, their conduct seems most convincingly explained as Hitler explained it, as a form of political resignation. The peculiar compound of agreement with Hitler, submission to blackmail and sheer bewilderment, might possibly explain their betrayal of solemn obligations to their allies. But they were also betraying traditional European values, inasmuch as Hitler proclaimed his hostility to those values in almost every one of his speeches, his decrees, and his actions. Oddly enough, the Western powers did not seem to have considered the long-range political repercussions, in particular, the devastating loss of prestige that Munich would inevitably produce. England and France lost almost all credibility. Henceforth their word, their pacts, seemed to be written in water; and soon other countries, especially those of Eastern Europe, began making their own deals with Hitler. But above all the Soviet Union did not forget that the Western powers had excluded it from Munich; and only four days after the conference the German ambassador in Moscow indicated that Stalin was “drawing conclusions” and would be reviewing his foreign policy.

Meanwhile, Chamberlain and Daladier had returned to their capitals. But instead of the outraged demonstrations they had expected, they were lustily cheered as though, a Foreign Office official commented, the people were “celebrating a great victory over an enemy, instead of the betrayal of a small ally.” Depressed, Daladier pointed to the cheering thousands and whispered: “The idiots!” Chamberlain, more naive and more optimistic than his French colleague, waved a sheet of paper in the air on his arrival in London and announced “peace in our time.” It is difficult in retrospect to empathize with the spontaneous feeling of relief that once more united Europe; it is difficult to summon up respect for the illusions of the time. In London the crowd in front of 10 Downing Street began singing “For He’s a Jolly Good Fellow.” Paris Soir offered Chamberlain “a patch of French soil” for fishing, and commented that it would be impossible “to imagine a more fruitful symbol of peace.”’¹⁰³ When, in the subsequent House of Commons debate, Winston Churchill began his speech with the words, “We have sustained a total unmitigated defeat,” there was a great outcry.

The German troops, in consonance with the agreement, moved into the Sudetenland. On October 3 Hitler crossed the former German frontier in a four-wheel-drive type of Mercedes. At the same time, Wenzel Jaksch, leader of the Sudeten German Social Democrats, flew to London. As was to be the practice in later years, the army units had been followed promptly by the Security Service and Gestapo squads in order to “begin at once with purging the liberated territories of Marxist traitors to the people and other enemies of the State.” Jaksch asked for visas and all kinds of aid for his threatened friends. Lord Runciman assured him the mayor of London was setting up a fund for the persecuted and that he personally would contribute. The London Times published photographs of the German troops marching into the Sudetenland amid a cascade of flowers and greeted by cheering crowds. But Editor in Chief Geoffrey Dawson refused to publish shots of those who were fleeing from these troops. Wenzel Jaksch was given no visas. The Poles and Hungarians now snatched sizable portions of the abandoned, mutilated country. The history of that autumn is replete with acts of blindness, egotism, weakness, and treachery. Those of Wenzel Jaksch’s friends who managed to hide out within the country were shortly thereafter handed over to Germany by the new Prague government.

Hitler’s vexation at the outcome of the Munich conference sharpened his impatience. Only ten days later he was after Keitel with a top secret list of questions about the military potentialities of the Reich. On October 21 he gave orders for the military “liquidation of the remainder of Czechoslovakia” and for “taking possession of the Memel region.” In a postscript dated November 24 he also ordered preparations for the occupation of Danzig. Simultaneously, he encouraged the Slovak nationalists to adopt the role of the Sudeten Germans in the new Czech republic and thus speed the further disintegration of Czechoslovakia from within.

He also embarked on a campaign for intensified psychological mobilization of the nation, for he had recently been given reason to doubt the public’s will. To be sure, there was great enthusiasm in Germany for the bloodless conquests. Hitler’s prestige had once again risen to dizzying heights. But he himself realized that the rejoicing held a. considerable degree of relief that war had been avoided. He found the pretext he needed when, early in November, a Jewish exile shot down Legation Secretary Ernst vom Rath in the German Embassy in Paris. Out of an assassination prompted by personal motives Hitler quickly constructed one of those “assaults of world Jewry” which he still counted on to rouse and unite the public. Solemn memorial services, complete with music by Beethoven and statements by all and sundry, were held even in schools and factories. For the last time the SA came forth in its once usual but long since abandoned role of exponent of blind popular fury. On the night of November 9, 1938, synagogues went up in flames all over Germany, Jewish homes were devastated, stores pillaged, nearly a hundred persons killed, and some 20,000 arrested. Das Schwarze Korps, the SS newspaper, was already advocating extermination “with fire and sword” as the “actual and final end of Jewry in Germany.”

But the inveterate bourgeois instincts of the populace could only take alarm at excesses supposedly produced by street mobs; this sort of thing revived memories of the years of disorder and lawlessness.¹⁰⁴ It was a further symptom of Hitler’s galloping loss of contact with reality that he could believe his own most powerful emotions would necessarily yield the most powerful psychological effect upon the people. The contrast between his own “Balkan” mania about the Jews and lukewarm German anti-Semitism was now growing more and more patent. Significantly, the campaign was successful only in Vienna.

The apathy of the masses drove him to increase his efforts. The period after the Munich conference was marked by an intensified propaganda drive, in which Hitler himself soon took part with mounting vehemence. An irritable speech at Saarbrucken on October 9, a Weimar speech on November 6, a speech in Munich on November 8, even the major summing up of 1938, compounding pride, hate, nervousness, and self-assurance, formed part of this campaign. In the latter he called for the “coherence of the racial body politic” and once more attacked Jewry, prophesying the “annihilation of the Jewish race in Europe.”

His secret addresses of the same period to German newspaper editors were motivated by the need to swing the press away from his tactics of pledging peace and appealing for reconciliation—whose bad effects he had observed in Berlin and Munich—to a tone of aggressive resolution. The speech was practically an order for psychological mobilization. Again and again, Hitler stressed the necessity of having behind him “a German people strong in faith, united, self-assured, confident.” At the same time he vented his wrath upon his critics and the seditious intellectuals:

When I look at the intellectual classes among us, well, unfortunately we need them, you know; otherwise we might some day, I don’t know, exterminate them or something. But unfortunately we need them. Now then, when I look at these intellectual classes and call to mind their behavior and consider it, the way they’ve behaved toward me, toward our work, I become almost fearful. For ever since I have been politically active and especially since I have led the Reich, I have had nothing but successes. And nevertheless this crowd floats around in an abominable, disgusting way. What would happen if we had a failure for once? Because that too is possible, gentlemen. Then how would this flock of chickens act up?… In the past it was my greatest pride to have built up a party which stood pigheadedly and fanatically behind me even in times of setbacks, stood fanatically especially in such times. That was my greatest pride and… we must educate the whole nation to that attitude. It must be trained to absolute, pigheaded, unquestioning, confident faith that in the end we will achieve everything that is necessary. We can do that, we can succeed in doing that, only by a continuous appeal to the vigor of the nation, by emphasizing the affirmative values of a people and as far as possible omitting the so-called negative sides.

To that end it is also necessary that the press in particular blindly adhere to the principle: What the leadership does is right!… Only in that way will we free the people from, I would put it this way, from a doubt that can only make the people unhappy. The masses do not want to be burdened with problems. The masses desire only one thing: to be well led and to be able to trust the leadership, and they want the leaders not to quarrel among themselves, but to appear before them unified. Believe me, I know precisely what I am talking about, the German people will regard nothing with greater joy than when I, for example, let’s say on a day like November 9 [anniversary of the Beer Hall Putsch] go out on the street and all my associates are standing beside me, and the people say: “That’s so-and-so and that’s so-and-so and that’s so-and-so and that’s so-and-so.” And these people all feel so secure at the idea that everyone sticks together, all follow the Fuhrer, and the Fuhrer sticks to all these men; these are our idols. Maybe some intellectuals won’t understand this at all. But these ordinary people out there… that’s what they want! That has been so in past German history too. The people are always glad whenever