The crisis over Czechoslovakia in the summer of 1938 took Germany’s expansionist drive on to a new plane. This crisis was different from those which had preceded it in a number of significant ways. Down to the Anschluß, the major triumphs in foreign policy had been in line with the revisionist and nationalist expectations of all powerful interests in the Reich, and quite especially those of the army. The withdrawal from the League of Nations in 1933, the reintroduction of general military service in 1935, the reoccupation of the Rhineland in 1936, and probably the Anschluß, too, would have been sought by any nationalist government in Germany at the time. The methods — on which the army, the Foreign Office, and others often looked askance — were Hitlerian. The timing had been determined by Hitler. The decisions to act were his alone. But in each case there had been powerful backing, as well as some hesitancy, among his advisers. And in each case, he was reflecting diverse currents of revisionist expression. The immense popularity of his triumphs in all sections of the political élite and among the masses of the population testified to the underlying consensus behind the revisionism. The earlier crises had also all been of brief duration. The tension had in each case been short-lived, the success rapidly attained. And in each case, the popular jubilation was in part an expression of relief that the western powers had not intervened, that the threat of another war — something which sent shivers of horror down the spines of most ordinary people — had been averted. The resulting popularity and prestige that accrued to Hitler drew heavily upon his ‘triumphs without bloodshed’.166 In reality, as we have seen, there had in every instance been little chance of allied intervention, even to counter the reoccupation of the Rhineland. The weakness and divisions of the western powers had in each case been the platform for Hitler’s bloodless coups.
For the first time, in the summer of 1938, Hitler’s foreign policy went beyond revisionism and national integration, even if the western powers did not grasp this. Whatever his public veneer of concern about the treatment of the Sudeten Germans,167 there was no doubt at all to the ruling groups in Germany aware of Hitler’s thinking — his comments at the ‘Hoßbach meeting’ had already made it plain — that he was aiming not just at the incorporation of the Sudetenland in the German Reich, but at destroying the state of Czechoslovakia itself. By the end of May this aim, and the timing envisaged to accomplish it, had been outlined to the army leadership. It meant war — certainly against Czechoslovakia, and probably (so it seemed to others), despite Hitler’s presumption of the contrary, against the western powers. Hitler, it became unmistakably plain, actually wanted war. ‘Long live war — even if it lasts from two to eight years,’ he would proclaim to the Sudeten leader Konrad Henlein in September, at the height of the crisis.168 ‘Every generation must at one time have experienced war,’ his adjutant Fritz Wiedemann recalled him commenting around the same time.169 Whatever the warnings, he was even prepared for war (though he did not think it likely at this juncture) against Britain and France.
The sheer recklessness of courting disaster by the wholly unnecessary (in their view) risk of war at this time against the western powers — which they thought Germany in its current state of preparation could not win — appalled and horrified a number of those who knew what Hitler had in mind.
