a few stick together up on top; it makes it easier for the people to stick together down at the bottom.105
The pace of events themselves, which Hitler deliberately accelerated after the Munich conference, also formed part of the process of psychological mobilization. At times the observer had to ask himself whether this was breathless politics or whether breathlessness was assuming political form. Week after week the pressures against defenseless Czechoslovakia increased from within and from without. On March 13 Hitler summoned the Slovak nationalist leader Tiso to Berlin and pressed him to defect from Prague. A day later, at a Parliament session in Bratislava, the Slovak Declaration of Independence was read aloud; it had been drafted by Ribbentrop and handed to Tiso already translated into Slovak. The evening of that same day Czech President Hacha, accompanied by Foreign Minister Chvalkovsky, arrived in Berlin. There he was put through a special ordeal which Hitler later gloatingly called “Hachaizing.” The guests were received with all the honors required by protocol; but only after a nerve-wracking waiting period, in the course of which they vainly tried to discover the subject to be negotiated, were they admitted to the chancellery. It was by then between one and two o’clock in the morning. Hacha, old and sickly, had to tramp wearily through the endless corridors and halls of the newly built chancellery before he reached Hitler, who sat at his desk in the semidarkness of a gigantic study illuminated only by a few bronze floor lamps. Beside him were the pompous Goring and once more Hitler’s bogeyman, General Keitel. The President’s opening remarks were steeped in the servility of a country fully aware of her own haplessness. The minutes of the meeting note:
President Hacha greets the Fuhrer and expresses his gratitude for being received by him. He said he had long desired to meet the man whose wonderful ideas he had frequently read and followed. He himself had until recently been an unknown. He had never dealt with politics, but had been merely a judicial official in the Viennese administrative apparatus and… had been summoned to Prague in 1918 and in 1925 had become Chief Justice of the Supreme Court. As such he had had no relations with the politicians, or as he preferred to call them, the “politicos”…. He had never been persona grata. He’d met President Masaryk only once a year at a dinner for judges, and Benes even more rarely. The one time he had had a meeting with Benes, they had quarreled. Moreover, the whole regime had been alien to him, so that immediately after the great change he had asked himself whether independence had even been at all good for Czechoslovakia. This past autumn the task had fallen to him to head the State. He was an old man… and he believed that the fate of Czechoslovakia was well safeguarded in the Fuhrer’s hands.106
When Hacha concluded this astonishing speech with the request that his people nevertheless be accorded the right to their own national existence, Hitler launched into one of his rambling monologues. He complained about the oft-demonstrated hostility of the Czechs, the impotence of the present government to control domestic conditions. He referred to the continuing Benes spirit, and finally heaped reproach on reproach upon his guests, who sat there silent and “as if turned to stone,” with “only their eyes… showing they were alive.” His patience was now exhausted, he continued.
At six o’clock the German army would be advancing into Czechia from all sides, and the German air force would occupy the airfields. There were two possibilities. The first was that the advance of the German troops would develop into a battle. In that case this resistance would be broken by force of arms, using all means. The other possibility was that the entry of the German troops would take place in a tolerable manner; in that case the Fuhrer would find it easy, when reshaping Czech conditions, to permit Czechoslovakia a generous life of her own, autonomy and a degree of national freedom….
This was the reason he had asked Hacha to come here. This invitation was the last kindness he would be able to show the Czech people…. The hours were passing. At six o’clock the troops would march in. He was almost ashamed to say that there was a German division to match every Czech division. The fact was that the military operation was no small one; it had been organized on a very liberal scale.
Hacha, in a virtually extinct voice, asked how with four hours at his disposal he could arrange to restrain the entire Czech nation from offering resistance. Hitler replied haughtily:
The military machine that was now rolling could not be stopped. Let him get in touch with his officials in Prague. It was a major decision, but he saw dawning the possibility of a long period of peace between the two peoples. If the decision were otherwise, he saw the annihilation of Czechoslovakia…. His own decision was irrevocable. Everyone knew what a decision of the Fuhrer meant.
Dismissed from Hitler’s study shortly after two o’clock, Hacha and Chvalkovsky tried to get through to Prague by telephone. Goring pointed out that time was running out and his planes would soon be bombing the Czech capital. With rough good humor he began describing the destruction, when the President suffered a heart attack. For a moment the group standing around him feared the worst. “Tomorrow the whole world will be saying he was murdered during the night in the chancellery,” one of those present noted. But Dr. Morell, held in readiness by a careful stage manager, helped to revive the broken man. Thus the authorities in Prague were given their instructions not to resist the German invasion, and shortly before four o’clock in the morning Hacha signed the document of submission, by which he “placed the fate of the Czech people and country in the hands of the Fuhrer of the German Reich.”
As soon as Hacha had left, Hitler lost all his customary control. Exuberantly he rushed into the room where his secretaries were sitting and invited them to kiss him. “Girls,” he cried, “Hacha has signed. This is the greatest day of my life. I shall be known as the greatest German in history.”107 Two hours later his troops crossed the border. The first formations arrived in Prague, in a snowstorm, by nine o’clock. Once more cheering people were waiting on the sidewalks, but they were only a minority; the majority turned away or stood mute, tears of helplessness and rage in their eyes. That same evening Hitler himself entered the city and spent the night in Hradschin Palace. “Czechoslovakia,” he announced, drunk with victory, “has herewith ceased to exist.” It had all been the work of two days. When on March 18 the British and French ambassadors submitted protest notes in Berlin, Hitler had already set up the Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia. As a placatory gesture he placed at its head Konstantin von Neurath, then Minister of Foreign Affairs, now “protector” of Bohemia and Moravia, who was regarded as a moderate. He had arranged a protective treaty with Slovakia and was already on his way back to Berlin. It seemed as if Mussolini’s remark shortly before Munich was once again proving true: “The democracies exist to swallow toads.”
Nevertheless, the seizure of Prague ushered in the turning point. The Western powers were too deeply disillusioned; they felt hoodwinked, their good will and patience abused. As late as March 10, Chamberlain had told some journalists that the danger of war was abating and a new era of
But the occupation of Prague was a turning point only for Western policy. In the apologias of the appeasers, and in the attempts at selfexoneration by German accomplices of the regime, the argument constantly recurs that it was Hitler who changed with his entry into Prague; that only then had he set out on the road of injustice and radically expanded his valid revisionist aims; that after Prague it was no longer the right of self-determination but the glory of a conqueror that became his goal. We have since learned, however, how such considerations miss Hitler’s motives and intentions, and in fact the very core of his nature. He had long ago decided on his course. Prague was only a tactical problem for him, and the Moldau was certainly not his Rubicon.
And yet, the undertaking was an act of self-revelation. Colonel Jodi had once smugly noted, in the days of continuous triumphs in foreign policy: “This kind of politics is new for Europe.” In fact, the dynamic conjunction of
