Hitler was by this stage impervious to the alarm signals being registered in diplomatic circles. When Admiral Canaris returned from Italy with reports that the Italians were urgently advising against war, and would not participate themselves, Hitler took them simply as a reflection of the divisions between the general staff and the Duce, similar to those he was experiencing with the army in Germany.304 He remained adamant that Britain was bluffing, playing for time, insufficiently armed, and would stay neutral.305 Warnings about the poor state of the German navy met with the same response.306 The present time, with the harvest secured, he continued to argue, was the most favourable for military action. By December, it would be too late.307 He was equally dismissive about warning noises from France. When the German ambassador in Paris, Johannes von Welczek, reported his strong impression that France would reluctantly be obliged to honour the obligation to the Czechs, Hitler simply pushed the report to one side, saying it did not interest him.308 Hearing of this, Lord Halifax pointed it out to the British cabinet as evidence that ‘Herr Hitler was possibly or even probably mad.’309
With German propaganda reaching fever-pitch, Hitler delivered his long-awaited and much feared tirade against the Czechs at the final assembly of the Party Congress on 12 September. Venomous though the attacks on the Czechs were, with an unmistakable threat if ‘self-determination’ were not granted, Hitler fell short of demanding the handing over of the Sudetenland, or a plebiscite to determine the issue.310 In Germany there was an air of impending war and great tension.311 The anxious Czechs thought war and peace hung in the balance that day.312 But in Hitler’s timetable, it was still over two weeks too early.313
Even so, Hitler’s speech triggered a wave of disturbances in the Sudeten region.314 These incidents, and the near-panic which had gripped the French government, persuaded Neville Chamberlain that, if the German offensive expected for late September were to be avoided, face-to-face talks with Hitler — an idea worked out already in late August — were necessary.315 On the evening of 14 September, the sensational news broke in Germany: Chamberlain had requested a meeting with Hitler, who had invited him to the Obersalzberg for midday on the following day.316
Early on the morning of 15 September, the sixty-nine-year-old British Prime Minister — a prim, reserved, austere figure — took off from Croydon airport in a twin-engined Lockheed, hoping, as he said, to secure peace.317 He was apprehensive at what lay in store for him; and nervous about flying.318 It was his first flight, and his first experience of what a later age would call shuttle-diplomacy.
Chamberlain was cheered by the Munich crowds as he was driven in an open car from the airport to the station to be taken in Hitler’s special train to Berchtesgaden. Along with his accompaniment of Sir Horace Wilson, his close adviser, and William Strang, head of the central European section of the Foreign Office, the British Ambassador Sir Nevile Henderson, and Ribbentrop, Chamberlain had to watch one troop-transport train after another pass by during the three-hour journey. It was raining, the sky dark and threatening, by the time Chamberlain reached the Berghof.
Hitler was waiting to greet him on the steps. Chamberlain noticed the Iron Cross, First Class, pinned to his uniform. Like all visitors, Chamberlain was impressed by the grandeur of Hitler’s alpine residence, regretting that the view of breathtaking mountain scenery from the vast window looking towards Salzburg was spoilt by the low cloud. He was less impressed by the physical appearance of Germany’s leader. He found Hitler’s expression, he told one of his sisters, Ida, on return to London, ‘rather disagreeable… and altogether he looks entirely undistinguished. You would never notice him in a crowd…’319
