Until 1938, Hitler’s moves in foreign policy had been bold, but not reckless. He had shown shrewd awareness of the weakness of his opponents, a sure instinct for exploiting divisions and uncertainty. His sense of timing had been excellent, his combination of bluff and blackmail effective, his manipulation of propaganda to back his coups masterly. He had gone further and faster than anyone could have expected in revising the terms of Versailles and upturning the post-war diplomatic settlement. From the point of view of the western powers, his methods were, to say the least, unconventional diplomacy — raw, brutal, unpalatable; but his aims were recognizably in accord with traditional German nationalist clamour. Down to and including the Anschluß, Hitler had proved a consummate nationalist politician. During the Sudeten crisis, some sympathy for demands to incorporate the German-speaking areas in the Reich — for another Anschluß of sorts — still existed among those ready to swallow Goebbels’s propaganda about the maltreatment of the Sudeten Germans by the Czechs, or at any rate prepared to accept that a further nationality problem was in need of resolution. It took the crisis and its outcome to expose the realization that Hitler would stop at nothing. Some of the shame felt at the Munich settlement in the western democracies as soon as the elation at the salvation of peace had evaporated was that they had merely bought off Hitler for a time through sacrificing Czechoslovakia. Before that point was reached, there had been increasing incomprehension among western statesmen during the course of the summer about Hitler and his aims. Some of the comments doubting his sanity reflect the sense of British statesmen at the time that they were dealing with someone who had crossed the bounds of rational behaviour in international politics. In the view of the British Ambassador, Nevile Henderson, Hitler had ‘become quite mad’ and, bent on war at all costs, had ‘crossed the borderline of insanity’.183
They were not far wrong. The spring of 1938 marked the phase in which Hitler’s obsession with accomplishing his ‘mission’ in his own lifetime started to overtake cold political calculation. As Goebbels had put it in the passage already cited, Hitler wanted to experience the ‘Great Germanic Reich’ himself.184 Probably, as we have already noted, his increased health worries and preoccupation with his own mortality played their part in heightening his sense of urgency. A deep-seated hatred of the Czechs — a legacy of his Austrian upbringing (when rabid hostility towards the Czechs had been endemic in the German-speaking part of the Habsburg Empire) — added a further personal dimension to the drive to destroy a Czechoslo-vakian state allied with the arch-enemies of the USSR in the east and France in the west. Prestige — as always — also came into it. He was to feel slighted and embarrassed at the diplomatic outfall from sudden Czech military mobilization in May (generally, though mistakenly, believed to have been in response to initial threatening moves by Germany).185 This at the very least reinforced his decision to act with speed to crush Czechoslovakia by the autumn.186 Finally, the sense of his own infallibility, massively boosted by the triumph of the Anschluß, underscored his increased reliance on his own will, matched by his diminished readiness to listen to countervailing counsel. That he had invariably been proved right in his assessment of the weakness of the western powers in the past, usually in the teeth of the caution of his advisers in the army and Foreign Office, convinced him that his current evaluation was unerringly correct. He had come during 1937 to be dismissive about the strength and will to fight both of Britain, which had spurned his advances, and of France, wracked by internal divisions. Partly prompted, and at any rate greatly amplified, by Ribbentrop, his views had hardened to the point where he felt the western powers would do nothing to defend Czechoslovakia. At the same time, this strengthened his conviction that the Reich’s position relative to the western powers could only worsen as their inevitable build-up of arms began to catch up with that of Germany. To remain inactive — a recurring element in the way he thought — was, he asserted, not an option: it would merely play into the hands of his enemies. Therefore, he characteristically reasoned: act without delay to retain the initiative.
