As a traditional conservative, Chamberlain was disgusted by Nazism, and he privately described Hitler as “the blackest devil he had ever met.”196 But because the PM was unwilling to ally with Stalin, the result was not just the Munich debacle, which had severely narrowed his options, but the two-faced guarantee to Poland, the wishful thinking that Hitler might calm down once all the Germans lived under one roof or be removed by Germans worried about the socioeconomic costs of his adventurism, or, barring all that, that Germany might even serve as a bulwark against the dangerous Communists.197 Such views seem delusional, but Chamberlain was hardly alone in holding them. George Kennan, the American foreign service officer in Moscow, made precisely the same argument regarding Hitler—he merely wanted to unite all Germans—and precisely the same contrast with the supposedly graver threat of Communism.198 Kennan, too, was wrong, however. Hitler was at least as great a threat as Stalin. Up until 1939, Stalin had been by far the more murderous, and Communism had a clearly stated global ambition as well as party members and fellow travelers in all the main countries, but Stalin was more susceptible to deterrence than Hitler.
Despite Stalin’s domestic house of horrors, as well as the Comintern’s unscrupulous, albeit often pitiful, machinations abroad, the main armed, expansionist power seeking domination of Europe was Nazi Germany (and in Asia, Japan). Hitler’s Versailles revisionism was limitless; Stalin’s was limited to opportunities others might present. Chamberlain’s final, related error, also self-serving, was his belief that the decapitated Red Army could not really fight anyway.199 Of course, the Red Army
Figuring out a way to both engage and contain Stalin would not have been simple, but it was the strategic choice among two odious options, if only because Hitler’s rabid revisionism would be vastly empowered should the Nazi leader reach his own understanding with a spurned Stalin. Here, too, Chamberlain and much of the British establishment had been smug.200 The defector Krivitsky, a top intelligence operative for the Soviets in Europe, had in 1938 warned MI5 of Stalin’s strenuous efforts at a Soviet-German rapprochement. Additionally, General Karl Bodenschatz, for a time the military adjutant to Göring and his liaison to Hitler, relayed the fact of secret Nazi-Soviet talks to London. Foreign Secretary Halifax—no friend of Communism—had warned Chamberlain and the cabinet as early as May 3, 1939, that Stalin and Hitler could cut a deal. But at a cabinet meeting on July 19, according to the minutes, “the Prime Minister said that he could not bring himself to believe that a real alliance between Russia and Germany was possible.”201 Even at this point, there was time for the British government. Hitler did not begin his definitive move to Stalin until late July/early August, when the war to annihilate Poland—the traditional hinge of German-Russian relations—was just weeks away.202
MORE SURPRISES
Hitler’s decision making appears linear only in retrospect. He was a gambler, but also a vacillator. He seems to have assumed that the Pact with Stalin would force the British and the French to back down over Poland, an assertion that Ribbentrop parroted, as did almost all the ingratiating German reports out of London and Paris. When Dirksen, the German ambassador to London, changed his tune, his communications stopped reaching Hitler.203 It is not clear whether anyone brought the Führer information that contradicted what he wanted to hear.204 “The people in the streets,” William Shirer, in Berlin, recorded in his diary on August 24, 1939, “are still confident Hitler will pull it off again without war.”205 But after the Pact was made public, the British and French governments publicly reaffirmed their commitments to Poland, hoping, for their part, that these renewed pledges would force Hitler to back down, averting war.206 In fact, Hitler did now hesitate.