It was the vision of national disaster that led for the first time to the tentative emergence of significant strands of opposition to what was regarded as Hitler’s madness. In the army leadership (still smarting from the Fritsch scandal), in the Foreign Office, and in other high places, the germs of resistance were planted among those certain that Germany was being driven headlong into catastrophe.175 In the military, the leading opponents of Hitler’s high-risk policy emerged as Colonel-General Beck, who resigned as Chief of Staff in the summer, and Admiral Wilhelm Canaris, head of the Abwehr (military intelligence).176 In the Foreign Office, the State Secretary Ernst von Weizsäcker was at the forefront of those in opposition to the policy supported avidly by his immediate superior, Foreign Minister von Ribbentrop.177 Among civilians with inside knowledge of what was going on, Carl Goerdeler, the former Reich Price Commissar, used his extensive foreign contacts to warn about Hitler’s aims.178
Nor was there any popular pressure for a foreign adventure, let alone one which was thought likely to bring war with the western powers. Among ordinary people, excluded from the deliberations in high places which kept Europe on the thinnest of tightropes between war and peace in September, the long-drawn-out crisis over Czechoslovakia, lasting throughout the late spring and summer, unlike earlier crises allowed time for the anxieties about war to gather momentum. The acute tension produced what was described as a ‘real war psychosis’.179 No love was lost on the Czechs. And the relentless propaganda about their alleged persecution of the German minority was not without impact. There were indeed some feelings of real gung-ho aggression, though these were largely confined to gullible younger Germans, who had not lived through the World War. The overwhelming sentiment was a fervent desire that war should be avoided and peace preserved. For the first time there was a hint of lack of confidence in Hitler’s policy. Most looked to him to preserve peace, not take Germany into a new war.180 But this time, both to the leading actors in the drama and to the millions looking on anxiously, war looked a more likely outcome than peace.
Among those with power and influence, the most forthright supporter of war to destroy Czechoslovakia was the new Foreign Minister, Joachim von Ribbentrop, an entirely different entity to the displaced conservative, von Neurath. Ribbentrop was more than keen to stamp his imprint on the Foreign Office — and to make up for the embarrassment he had sustained when, largely at Göring’s doing, he had been sidelined in London and allowed to play no part in the Austrian triumph that his arch-rival in foreign policy had been instrumental in orchestrating.181 He provided Hitler with his main backing in these months. His hatred of Britain — the country which had spurned and ridiculed him — as well as his fawning devotion to the Führer made him the most hawkish of the hawks, a warmonger second only to Hitler himself. When he was not directly spurring on Hitler, he was doing his utmost to shore up the conviction that, when it came to it, Britain would not fight, that any war would be a localized one. State Secretary von Weizsäcker was sure of Ribbentrop’s baleful influence on Hitler in this respect. When, in the middle of August, Weizsäcker contradicted Ribbentrop’s assertion that the western powers would not act, the Foreign Minister retorted that ‘the Führer had so far never made a mistake; his most difficult decisions and actions (Rhineland occupation) were already behind him. One had to believe in his genius, just as he, Ribbentrop, did from long years of experience.’ He hoped that Weizsäcker could also come to have ‘such blind faith’. The State Secretary would later regret it if that were not the case, and the facts then spoke against him.182
For all Ribbentrop’s influence, however, there could be no doubt that the crisis that brought Europe to the very brink of war in the summer of 1938 was instigated and directed by Hitler himself. And unlike the rapid improvisation and breakneck speed which had characterized previous crises, this one was consciously devised to escalate over a period of months.
