Hitler. 1936-1945: Nemesis полностью

The real response among the German people to the rape of Czechoslovakia was, however, more mixed — in any event less euphoric — than that of the cheering multitudes, many of them galvanized by Party activists, in Berlin. This time there had been no ‘home-coming’ of ethnic Germans into the Reich. The vague notion that Bohemia and Moravia had belonged to the ‘German living-space’ for a thousand years left most people cold — certainly most north Germans who had traditionally had little or no connection with the Czech lands.¹⁰⁶ For many, as one report from a Nazi District Leader put it, whatever the joy in the Führer’s ‘great deeds’ and the trust placed in him, ‘the needs and cares of daily life are so great that the mood is very quickly gloomy again’.¹⁰⁷ There was a good deal of indifference, scepticism, and criticism, together with worries that war was a big step closer. ‘Was that necessary?’ many people asked. They remembered Hitler’s precise words following the Munich Agreement, that the Sudetenland had been his ‘last territorial demand’.¹⁰⁸ In the industrial belt of Rhineland-Westphalia, according to a report from the Social Democrat underground movement, there was a good deal of condemnation of the invasion while sympathy for the Czechs was openly expressed in coal-pits, workers’ washrooms, and on the streets. The Nazi regime was criticized; but there was also contempt for the way France and Britain had let Hitler do what he wanted.¹⁰⁹ Similar sentiments were commonplace among those who detested the Nazis. ‘No shot fired. Nowhere a protest,’ noted one woman in her diary — adding to her comment the forecast of a friend: ‘I bet they now get Danzig and Poland still without war… and if they’re lucky, even the Ukraine.’¹¹⁰ ‘Can’t he get enough?’ murmured the mother of a fourteen-year-old girl in Paderborn. The young girl herself, who had been appalled the previous summer at the ‘outrages’ allegedly perpetrated against the German minority in the Sudetenland, now found herself sympathizing with the Czechs, and at the same time asking what Germany was doing in annexing the territory of ‘an entirely alien people’ who could under no circumstances be ‘germanized’. She consoled herself with the thought that no blood had been shed, that it could even be an advantage for a small country to be under the protection of a great power, and that the German people would be ‘much more generous, tolerant, and fair’ protectors than ‘some Slavic people’.¹¹¹ It was a reflection of the widespread latent hostility towards Slavs, the impact of propaganda, and of the confused sentiments that continued to accompany Hitler’s expansionism. Even opponents of Hitler recognized that moral scruples carried little weight in the face of another major prestige success. ‘Internal opponents, too, are now declaring that he’s a great man,’ ran a report sent to the exiled Social Democrat leadership in Paris. It indicated the difficulty in challenging those lauding his ‘achievements’. Counterarguments, it was said, were pointless — not least ‘the argument that Czechoslovakia has been invaded and Hitler has done something wrong’.¹¹²

Hitler had been contemptuous of the western powers before the taking of Prague. He correctly judged that once more they would protest, but do nothing. However, everything points to the conclusion that he miscalculated the response of Britain and France after the invasion of Czecho-Slovakia. The initial reaction in London was one of shock and dismay at the cynical demolition of the Munich Agreement, despite the warnings the British government had received. Appeasement policy lay shattered in the ruins of the Czecho-Slovakian state. Hitler had broken his promise that he had no further territorial demands to make. And the conquest of Czecho-Slovakia had destroyed the fiction that Hitler’s policies were aimed at the uniting of German peoples in a single state. Hitler, it was now abundantly clear — a recognition at last and very late in the day — could not be trusted. He would stop at nothing. Chamberlain’s speech in Birmingham on 17 March hinted at a new policy. ‘Is this the last attack upon a small State, or is it to be followed by others?’ he asked. ‘Is this, in fact, a step in the direction of an attempt to dominate the world by force?’¹¹³ British public opinion was in no doubt. Hitler had united a country deeply divided over Munich. On all sides people were saying that war with Germany was both inevitable and necessary. Recruitment for the armed forces increased almost overnight.¹¹⁴ It was now clear both to the man in the street and to the government: Hitler had to be tackled.