The Führer, ratcheting up the pressure, had ordered that the harvest be gathered as quickly as possible (to free up horses for the Wehrmacht), private trucks be requisitioned, border defenses with France be fully manned, and reserves be called up for fall “maneuvers” in East Prussia. But no peacetime market economy had ever managed Germany’s level of military expenditures, and Germany was already the highest-taxed major economy, and approaching insolvency. The German stock market had dropped 13 percent between April and August 1938.54 German military circles had begun plotting to remove the reckless Führer in a palace coup before he could embroil Germany in a new world war for which the country and the army were not ready.55 Troops of the elite 23rd Infantry Division, stationed in Potsdam, were to occupy Berlin’s ministries, its radio station, and the facilities of the regular police, the Gestapo, and the SS. Hitler’s bodyguard division, the SS-Leibstandarte, who were stationed in Saxony near the border with Czechoslovakia, would be blocked on-site. A final action involved seizure of the Chancellery and of Hitler himself. The plotters were not fully coordinated, but some sort of putsch seemed to be coming to a head right after Hitler’s Nuremberg rally closing speech on September 12, when many expected him to declare war on Czechoslovakia. He did not. Still, one conspirator told his brother on September 14 that “Hitler will be arrested tomorrow.”56
Then the news broke: on September 15, Neville Chamberlain boarded an airplane for the second time in his sixty-nine years and, for the first time, would meet with Hitler. The British PM touched down only one day after the Nazi party had concluded its annual weeklong rally in Nuremberg, a ferocious, torchlit spectacle whose images were seen worldwide.
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A MAJORITY OF THE BRITISH establishment believed, or wanted to believe, that an agreement with Germany over Czechoslovakia was possible.57 But what kind? The PM proposed awarding Germany the Czechoslovak border territories with majority ethnic German populations in exchange for Hitler’s not resorting to force and a great-power “guarantee” of rump Czechoslovakia’s territorial integrity.58 A diplomatic deal, even such a stunningly advantageous gift, was precisely what the war-thirsty Hitler feared. He had been startled by Chamberlain’s offer to come to Berlin.59 During a fortnight, as the Führer got ever more expansive in his demands, the elderly, unwell Chamberlain would fly to him three times. (“If at first you can’t concede,” went a nasty ditty that made the rounds, “fly, fly again.”)60 On the eve of the first encounter, Chamberlain had written to his sister Ida, “Is it not positively horrible to think that the fate of hundreds of millions depends on one man and he is half mad?”61 Eight days later (September 19), he wrote to her again: “Here was a man who could be relied upon when he had given his word.”62
Of course, Stalin had been straining to elicit his own deal with Hitler, who would have none of it. Sorge, the agent of Soviet military intelligence at the German embassy in Japan, was reporting on secret German-Japanese negotiations for a binding military alliance.63 In Moscow, three meetings of the Main Military Council took place on September 19, with Stalin in attendance, and much of the discussion was taken up with shortcomings and planned construction in Soviet Far Eastern military districts.64 That same day, Beneš, in receipt of Anglo-French proposals that day for territorial concessions to Germany—which he was inclined to reject—asked Alexandrovsky specifically if the Soviets would support Czechoslovakia should Germany attack