Hitler. 1936-1945: Nemesis полностью

Hitler was scornful, too, of his generals after Munich.⁴⁰⁷ Their opposition to his plans had infuriated him all summer. How he would have reacted had he been aware that no less a person than his new Chief of Staff, General Haider, had been involved in plans for a coup d’état in the event of war over Czechoslovakia can be left to the imagination.⁴⁰⁸ Whether the schemes of the ill-coordinated groups involved in the nascent conspiracy would have come to anything is an open question. But with the Munich Agreement, the chance was irredeemably gone. Chamberlain returned home to a hero’s welcome, proclaiming to cheering crowds from the window of the Prime Minister’s residence in 10 Downing Street — choosing words which he associated with Benjamin Disraeli, Prime Minister under Queen Victoria, following the Berlin Conference six decades earlier — that he had brought ‘peace with honour’ and ‘peace for our time’.⁴⁰⁹ Distancing itself from the general euphoria, the Manchester Guardian shrewdly noted the external consequences: the Czechs could scarcely see the forcible break-up of their country as ‘peace with honour’; Czechoslovakia was now ‘rendered helpless’; ‘Hitler will be able to advance again, when he chooses, with greatly increased power.’⁴¹⁰ The consequences within Germany were also profound. For German opponents of the Nazi regime, who had hoped to use Hitler’s military adventurism as the weapon of his own deposition and destruction, Chamberlain was anything but the hero of the hour. ‘Chamberlain saved Hitler’, was how they bitterly regarded the appeasement diplomacy of the western powers.⁴¹¹

Hitler’s own popularity and prestige reached new heights after Munich. He returned to another triumphant welcome in Berlin. But he was well aware that the elemental tide of euphoria reflected the relief that peace had been preserved. The ‘home-coming’ of the Sudeten Germans was of only secondary importance. He was being feted not as the ‘first soldier of the Reich’, but as the saviour of the peace he had not wanted.⁴¹² At the critical hour, the German people, in his eyes, had lacked enthusiasm for war. The spirit of 1914 had been missing. Psychological rearmament had still to take place. A few weeks later, addressing a select audience of several hundred German journalists and editors, he gave a remarkably frank indication of his feelings: ‘Circumstances have compelled me to speak for decades almost solely of peace,’ he declared. ‘It is natural that such a… peace propaganda also has its dubious side. It can only too easily lead to the view establishing itself in the minds of many people that the present regime is identical with the determination and will to preserve peace under all circumstances. That would not only lead to a wrong assessment of the aims of this system, but would also above all lead to the German nation, instead of being forearmed in the face of events, being filled with a spirit which, as defeatism, in the long run would take away and must take away the successes of the present regime.’ It was necessary, therefore, to transform the psychology of the German people, to make it see that some things could only be attained through force, and to represent foreign-policy issues in such a way that ‘the inner voice of the people itself slowly begins to cry out for the use of force’.⁴¹³

The speech is revealing. Popular backing for war had to be manufactured, since war and expansion were irrevocably bound up with the survival of the regime. Successes, unending triumphs, were indispensable for the regime, and for Hitler’s own popularity and prestige on which, ultimately, the regime depended. Only through expansion — itself impossible without war — could Germany, and the National Socialist regime, survive. This was Hitler’s thinking. The gamble for expansion was inescapable. It was not a matter of personal choice.

The legacy of Munich was fatally to weaken those who might even now have constrained Hitler. Any potential limits — external and internal — on his freedom of action instead disappeared. Hitler’s drive to war was unabated. And next time he was determined he would not be blocked by last-minute diplomatic manoeuvres of the western powers, whose weakness he had seen with his own eyes at Munich.