The Last Lion Box Set: Winston Spencer Churchill, 1874 - 1965 (213 page)

Emboldened, a few months later the appeasers actually tried to imprison one of Churchill’s few parliamentary followers. Duncan Sandys had his own clandestine sources; on June 17, 1938, armed with facts and figures, he sent the War Office a question—concerning London’s air defenses—which clearly revealed access to classified information. Summoned by the attorney general, he was told that unless he disclosed the name of his informant, he would be prosecuted under the Official Secrets Act. Sandys told his tale in Parliament and requested the appointment of a select committee to study the applicability of the act to MPs carrying out their official duties. Winston delightedly wrote Lord Hugh Cecil, one of his oldest friends—he had been best man when Churchill married Clementine thirty years earlier—“The fur is going to fly.”
⁶⁹

Tempers were up, and skyrocketed the next day when Sandys informed a crowded House that as a reserve officer he had been ordered to appear, in uniform, before a court-martial. This, he submitted, was a “gross breach” of Parliamentary privileges. He was backed by Attlee and Sinclair, the Labour and Liberal leaders, and, of course, by his father-in-law, who tartly remarked that an act designed to protect the national defense should not shield ministers who had neglected national defense. When the House cleared Sandys without dissent, Oliver Harvey of the Foreign Office noted in his diary, “I hear Winston is in the highest spirits over it.” The appeasers, unchastened, reopened the inquiry on a technicality. It compounded the original blunders; Churchill took advantage of every opportunity to maul his critics. To a fellow MP he wrote that he was “quite content with my corner seat.”
⁷⁰

Of course he wasn’t, but a political outcast enjoys a freedom denied those charged with responsibility, and this was particularly true in Winston’s case; even Hankey had conceded that he was “a leading Statesman… patriotic beyond criticism.” As such he had been visited by the German air mission and briefed by Ambassador Joachim von Ribbentrop.
⁷¹

C
entral to the appeasers’ creed was the assumption that no one wanted war. They did not know, or refused to believe, that the German chancellor was an exception. Thus the victorious allies of 1918 “slept,” as Churchill put it, while Germany, not answerable to voters, trained armies, built ships, and sent swarms of bombers and fighter planes into the sky. On November 5, 1937, Hitler had summoned his generals and senior diplomats to announce an irrevocable decision. Germany must make war. He was not getting any younger, and he wanted to fight, wanted to see his armies take action while he was still vigorous and capable of exercising direct command. The Wehrmacht and Luftwaffe were ordered to prepare for battle, which could come “as early as 1938.”

In the Reich Chancellery that day he had rambled on for four hours and fifteen minutes, raising the possibility of war between Japan and France; denouncing France and England, the two “hate-filled” (“
hasserfüllte
”) countries; and sounding the ritualistic demand for lebensraum. He had chosen to prolong the war in Spain, he said, because among other things, the issue might bring Italy into armed conflict with Britain and France. This would open the way for Germany to resolve the Czech and Austrian questions. He added that “annexation of Czechoslovakia and Austria” would mean improved strategic frontiers, new sources of food, the assimilation of twelve million more “Germans,” and, best of all, enough young men to form twelve new divisions. Of course, if Germany were to make use of this war between Italy and the democracies, “the attack on the Czechs” (“
Überfall auf die Tschechei
”) would have to be carried out with “lightning speed” (“
blitzartig schnell
”). Then—for the last time, as it turned out—he had agreed to answer questions from his subordinates.
⁷²

Three men stood up to him: Generals Blomberg and Fritsch and Foreign Minister Neurath. They pointed out what everyone there knew: to predict war between Britain and Italy was absurd. Moreover, Czechoslovakia had been supported by a military alliance with France since 1925—and by the Franco-Soviet alliance since 1936. Less than two months earlier the French foreign minister had stressed that France would fulfill her obligations “whatever the form of the aggression if the aggression is certain”; unofficially, the Foreign Office had let it be known that a British declaration of war on Germany would follow.
⁷³

Hitler ignored all this. Within three months the dissenters had all been dismissed. Neurath was replaced as foreign minister by Ribbentrop, though (like Vansittart) he was given an impressive new title to save his prestige abroad. But Blomberg and Fritsch, the leaders of Germany’s military elite, were destroyed, and Hitler, being Hitler, did it in the coarsest possible way. Blomberg was cashiered on the ground that his wife had once been a prostitute; Werner von Fritsch, the Wehrmacht’s commander, was disgraced by a preposterous assertion that he was a homosexual who practiced sodomy in a dark alley near Berlin’s Potsdam Hauptbahnhof on a demimonde figure known as Bayernsepp (Bavarian Joe). Stunned, too proud even to dignify such an accusation with an answer, the aristocratic officer told the Führer that he would respond only to a court-martial. Hitler had no evidence—there was none to be had—and he had no intention of letting the officer corps caste pass judgment on one of its own. He simply ordered Fritsch to retire, and the general, having taken the oath to obey his führer under all circumstances, vanished into obscurity. On February 4, 1938, Hitler proclaimed himself
Kriegsherr
(warlord), assuming personal command over Germany’s armed forces. His dictatorial powers would remain unchecked until his death.
⁷⁴

It was time, the Führer decided, for Austrian independence to mount the scaffold. In the Berghof he had granted Schuschnigg’s homeland a reprieve, but it was short; he was not a patient man. Eight days after the distraught Austrian chancellor returned to Vienna, the Führer staged one of his frenzied performances before the Reichstag. He raved that “political separation from the Reich must not lead to the deprivation of rights—that is, the general rights of self-determination [
Selbstbestimmung
]…. To the interests of the German Reich belongs the protection of those German peoples who are not in a position to secure, by their own efforts, their political and spiritual freedom.” He ordered Jodl and Göring to mobilize their men and call up the reserves, confronting Schuschnigg with 4,126,200 superbly trained men—Versailles, had it been enforced, would have limited them to 100,000—against Austria’s 38,000 soldiers, many of German stock and therefore of doubtful loyalty.
⁷⁵

But how many Austrians wanted to join the Third Reich? In the
Evening Standard
on March 4 Churchill estimated that two-thirds of Schuschnigg’s countrymen were prepared to defend their independence. The following day he was challenged by Unity Mitford, his wife’s cousin. Unity had strong Nazi sympathies. She had been among Hitler’s traveling companions since he became Reich chancellor five years earlier. Now she wrote “Dear Cousin Winston” that he, like most Englishmen, was “very misinformed about Austrian affairs, which are consistently misrepresented by the British press.” She had been in Vienna when her führer had torn his strip off the Austrian chancellor, and she wrote:

She predicted that “a free plebiscite would result in
at least
80% for the Nazis.”
⁷⁶

Churchill passed this along to Georg Franckenstein, a veteran diplomat and Austria’s envoy in London, asking for advice and assuring him that his reply would be confidential. Franckenstein pointed out that the Austrian Nazis were purposefully noisy and highly visible because they wanted to create the impression that they formed a majority, and he agreed that “there was much jubilation among the National Socialists after Hitler’s speech.” But while the Nazis were “displaying the greatest possible activity,” the majority of people, at Schuschnigg’s expressed wish, were remaining quiet and orderly “to avoid conflict and bloodshed which might lead to German intervention.” Franckenstein had consulted several informed, objective observers about Nazi strength in Austria; “some suggested 25%, others 35%, but all were agreed that the majority in the country is in favor of an independent Austria.”
⁷⁷

Chamberlain had applauded the “negotiations,” at the Berghof. To what extent the P.M. was misled by his hopes and his advisers can never be determined, but the documents prove that in crises he was capable of lying to Parliament and the country. Once back in Vienna, Schuschnigg and Guido Schmidt, his under secretary of foreign affairs, had described their ordeal in detail, including the Führer’s ultimatum. They had briefed envoys of all the powers, particularly England’s, and William L. Shirer, who was there at the time, read the British legation’s unsparing account before it was cabled to London. Even Ambassador Henderson, whose admiration for the Third Reich approached Unity Mitford’s, wrote that Austria’s chancellor had been “threatened and browbeaten, and under menaces accepted an arrangement of which he thoroughly disapproved.” Furthermore, the Viennese correspondents of the
Daily Telegraph
and
The Times
had telephoned accurate reports of Hitler’s
Schrecklichkeit
in the Berghof. Dawson didn’t always print dispatches from his correspondents in Europe, but those he suppressed he sent to No. 10. Thus it is impossible to argue that the prime minister did not really know what had happened at the Führer’s alpine retreat. On the contrary, he was keenly aware that Austria’s independence was gravely imperiled. Nevertheless, he told the House on March 2 that

Actually, Schuschnigg’s address to the Austrian Bundestag, delivered after his return from the Berghof, had been an act of desperate courage. The federal chancellor declared that Austria would make no more concessions to the Nazis. “We must,” he declared, “call a halt and say ‘Thus far and no farther [
Bis hierher und nicht weiter
].’ ” He swore that the country would never surrender its independence, giving it a rallying cry: “
Rot-Weiss-Rot bis in den Tod!
” (“Red-White-Red till we’re dead!”).
⁷⁹

Obviously, defying Hitler was highly dangerous. He had already murdered one Austrian chancellor. His Austrian Nazis, who were if anything more brutal than the Reich’s, roamed the streets in mobs—twenty thousand in Graz alone—hauling down their nation’s flags and raising hakenkreuz banners. The police, acting on instructions from Seyss-Inquart, made no attempt to restrain them. In Vienna, the Karlsplatz was swarming with hysterical Nazis screaming “
Sieg Heil! Heil Hitler!
” and demanding that Schusschnigg be lynched. But the federal chancellor was made of sterner stuff than the men then ruling the British Empire, who were afraid to challenge Hitler. On March 9 Schuschnigg announced a national plebiscite to be held on Sunday, March 13. His countrymen would be asked whether or not they wanted a free, independent, Christian, united Austria:
Ja oder Nein?
⁸⁰

In a note to Churchill, Ambassador Franckenstein jubilantly wrote that the Austrian voters would settle the “ ‘duel’ between Miss Mitford and myself.” But the next day—Thursday, March 10—the ambassador was less sanguine. Leo Amery gave a lunch for him at 112 Eaton Square. Harold Nicolson noted that the Austrian seemed “anxious and depressed.” They congratulated him, Nicolson continued, upon “Schuschnigg having declared a plebiscite and having been so brave as to stand up to Hitler,” but “he does not seem to think that his courage will avail very much.”
⁸¹

Until the plebiscite issue arose, Hitler had not planned an immediate Anschluss, an outright annexation of Germany’s southern neighbor; he merely wanted Austria as a vassal state. Hitler’s goal had been to dominate Austria by undermining Schuschnigg, overthrowing him, and installing a government of Austrian Nazis. Schuschnigg’s radio broadcast Wednesday evening, the ninth, announcing the plebiscite, was one of three developments which led Hitler to decide that Austria must and
could
be annexed, abolished as a nation, and integrated as part of the Reich.