The Last Lion Box Set: Winston Spencer Churchill, 1874 - 1965 (214 page)

The other two developments were the reactions to the broadcast in Rome and London. Before perpetrating the outrage, the Führer had to be certain Austria would be isolated. His brag to Schuschnigg about Austria’s lack of allies had been equivocal; at that time he had no assurance that Italy, France, and Britain would remain aloof. In the case of France it hardly mattered. Churchill had warned his guests from Paris that their unstable governments gravely diminished their prestige in foreign chancelleries. Camille Chautemps’s regime fell that Thursday; the country would lack a premier for a month; meantime, action was impossible.

Schuschnigg had hoped for more from Italy—four years earlier Mussolini had helped abort the Nazi coup when Dollfuss was murdered—but when he consulted him about the plebiscite, the Duce replied: “
C’è un errore!
” Hitler didn’t know that, however, and on Thursday, as his troops deployed on the southern border of the Reich in attack formation, he sent Mussolini a preposterous letter, declaring that Austria was in “a state of anarchy,” that the Austrians and Czechs were plotting to invade Germany with “at least twenty million men,” and that Schuschnigg’s failure to meet his “more than moderate” demands “made a mockery” of “a so-called plebiscite.” Friday the Duce, still smarting from Anglo-French attempts to thwart his conquest of Ethiopia, sent word that Austria would be “immaterial” to him. The Führer danced with joy and told the messenger: “Tell Mussolini I will never forget him for this…. Never, never, never, no matter what happens!”
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The dictators, unanswerable to public opinion, could act like that. British statesmen couldn’t; they had to satisfy their colleagues, their consciences, and, ultimately, their constituents. So the Chamberlain government resorted to hypocrisy. HMG took the position that Britain’s armed forces were too weak to challenge the rearmed Reich (overlooking its responsibility for that weakness) and that Hitler’s feelings of insecurity must be stroked with reassurances. In Berlin, Henderson wrote, “The big question which all Germans asked themselves was, ‘What will England do?’ ” His own recommendation was: Nothing. “His Majesty’s Government,” he explained in his memoirs, was in no “position to have saved Austria by [its] actions.” Besides, he added—and here his rationalization is remarkable—“the case against Hitler was not yet a cast-iron one. Austria was German, and many Austrians were wholeheartedly in favor of union with the Reich.” Determining
how
many had been the purpose of the plebiscite, but Henderson dismissed the plebiscite as Schuschnigg’s “final mistake” and “the throw of a desperate gambler.” It apparently occurred to none of the appeasers that the chancellor of an independent country, in resolving to poll his countrymen on whether they wished to surrender their independence, might be acting, not only within his rights—the legality of his move could scarcely be challenged—but wisely. Henderson triumphantly concluded, “The love of peace of the British public was too great for it to approve of a war in which the moral issue was in any possible doubt.”
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Within an hour of Schuschnigg’s broadcast on Wednesday, Goebbels had been whipping up German rage against him, and Churchill gloomily told a Manchester audience the next evening: “The horizon has not lightened in the last few months—or in the last few hours.” By Thursday the question of what England would do had become urgent, and the ball was in the foreign secretary’s court. Halifax and Ribbentrop were closeted for several hours, after which Ribbentrop sent a telegram which surfaced after the war among other German foreign policy documents in Nuremberg. “England will do nothing with regard to Austria,” Ribbentrop reported, even if Germany resorted to naked force, provided there was “a very quick settlement.”
⁸⁴

That was straightforward, if ignoble. More humbug began Friday morning. Ribbentrop breakfasted at his London embassy with Thomas Jones, Astor, Inskip, and a German diplomatic aide. The guests had been carefully picked; all were eager to hear Ribbentrop’s justification of whatever Hitler was going to do, as were many others in England. As early as 1936, when Ribbentrop was the Reich’s new ambassador to the Court of St. James, he had been approached by Lord Lothian, who expressed the hope that German seizure of Austria, despite the attendant battles and bloodshed, would not lead to a “breach of faith” between His Majesty’s Government and the Wilhelmstrasse.
⁸⁵

Thomas Jones, typically, had written Lady Grigg: “I keep on and on and on, preaching against the policy of ostracizing Germany, however incalculable Hitler and his crew may be…. We have abundant evidence of the desire of all sorts of Germans to be in friendly terms with us.” Jones, it should be noted, had been elected to no office; in 1930 he had retired as deputy secretary to the cabinet, far below Vansittart in official protocol. Astor had been a delegate to the League of Nations seven years earlier and had retired to private life. Inskip, foundering in a job for which he was so singularly ill suited, was the only cabinet member at the breakfast. But Ribbentrop knew these men made vital decisions and would be fertile ground for his rationalizations.
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After the Friday breakfast Jones noted in his diary that Ribbentrop “was clearly in a state of active apprehension…. He did tell us that Schuschnigg had acted without consultation with his Nazi colleagues and this rankled.” No one had pointed out that Schuschnigg, remembering Dollfuss, may have assumed that any such consultation would have ended with himself a cadaver. But Ribbentrop’s breakfast guests were not completely gulled. “Walking away,” Jones wrote, “we said to each other that R. had not been frank about the Berchtesgaden [Berghof] interview”; they had heard “the account given by Schuschnigg to our Austrian ambassador—that the interview was the most terrible experience of his life.” Yet Jones remained convinced that England had to go “to absurd lengths” in offering Hitler the other cheek. This reasoning had lost the Rhineland; now Austria was sliding down the Nazi maw.
⁸⁷

Ribbentrop was, in fact, only in town to wind up his London affairs, as Hitler had appointed him foreign minister of the Third Reich. Breakfast at the Reich embassy was followed by a farewell lunch at No. 10, with Ribbentrop as the P.M.’s guest of honor and Churchill as an impotent if bemused spectator. Because Winston was the most unpopular Englishman in the great stone piles lining the Wilhelmstrasse, Chamberlain would have enjoyed omitting his name from the guest list, but that was impossible. The prime minister could hardly give the Nazis veto power over visitors to his home. And Churchill was a world celebrity who had been a member of six British cabinets; if he were cut, there would be an uproar in the House.

There were sixteen at the table, including Winston and Clementine. About halfway through the meal an FO messenger brought Cadogan an envelope. Van’s successor read it, walked round the table, and handed it to Chamberlain. By now Churchill was alert, sensing danger. Afterward he recalled: “I could not help noticing the Prime Minister’s evident preoccupation.” On a signal from her husband, Mrs. Chamberlain rose, saying, “Let us
all
have coffee in the drawing-room.” Winston felt that “a kind of restlessness pervaded the company, and everyone stood about ready to say good-bye to the guests of honour.” The Ribbentrops were merry and voluble, however; Churchill guessed that this was a “manoeuvre to keep the Prime Minister away from his work and the telephone.” Finally the P.M. said: “I am sorry. I have to go now to attend to urgent business.” In parting, Churchill bowed to Gertrud von Ribbentrop and “in a valedictory vein” murmured: “I hope England and Germany will preserve their friendship.” She gave him a rude stare and snapped: “Be careful you don’t spoil it.”
⁸⁸

Placed as far as possible from the guest of honor, Churchill had been beyond earshot of the exchanges between Chamberlain and Ribbentrop and left No. 10 under the impression that the diplomatic transaction, whatever it had been, was over. Within an hour, however, even without Van, he knew the contents of the FO luncheon message. Two telegrams from the British delegation in Vienna had reported that at 5:50
A.M.
the Germans had closed their Austrian border at Salzburg, that Wehrmacht divisions were massed all along the frontier between the two countries, and that at 10:00
A.M.
Seyss-Inquart, on instructions from Hitler, had appeared in Schuschnigg’s office to insist that plans for the plebiscite be canceled. Told that the alternative would be bloodshed, Schuschnigg, with his pitifully small army, capitulated. But yielding to one Nazi ultimatum quickly led to another. The Führer now followed with demands that Schuschnigg resign, that Seyss-Inquart succeed him as federal chancellor, and that his first official act be an appeal to the Reich Chancellery in Berlin, asking that the Wehrmacht enter Austria to “restore order.” One way or another, 100,000 German troops would cross the border at 10:00
P.M.
and move swiftly to envelop Vienna.

Churchill missed fireworks at No. 10—a row which sharply defined the cultural abyss between the appeasers and the appeased—and the rainbow that followed. Englishmen cherished civility and good manners as social lubricants. German aristocrats—often cousins, several times removed, of their counterparts in England—shared their conviction. Until Hitler moved into the Reich Chancellery, the men in striped
Hosen
from the Wilhelmstrasse were celebrated for their breeding, their mastery of exquisite diplomatic language, and their meticulous observance of international treaties. Elaborate, almost choreographed manners had always graced relations between powers, however bloody the deeds. “When you have to kill a man,” as Churchill later said, “it costs nothing to be polite.”
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But the division between the Old Boys lunching at No. 10 that Friday, March 11, 1938, and the Nazi foreign minister representing his omnipotent führer cut deep. For the first time in history, the power of a European state was rooted in its lower middle class. Ribbentrop had appropriated his “von” from a distant aunt and affected noble origins. His sole distinction, before he caught the Führer’s eye, had been his matinee profile, which had won him the hand of his boss’s daughter, thereby ending his drab, ill-paid, exhausting career as a commercial traveler roaming Europe and hawking wines. Had he been an Englishman, he could never have been admitted to a London club, not to mention to a Tory cabinet. To Chamberlain and his cabinet, trying to persuade one another that he was acceptable in their circle, he remained an enigma, entertained by them only because he had been designated the formal representative of what was, by the third month of 1938, the greatest military power in the world. England’s patricians had never dealt with such Europeans in affairs of state.

Before arriving for lunch, Ribbentrop knew of Hitler’s first ultimatum to Schuschnigg—call off the plebiscite or face a German invasion. And shortly afterward word reached him of the second ultimatum, demanding that Seyss-Inquart replace Schuschnigg as chancellor. Yet he had given no indication that anything was amiss when, moments before Cadogan handed Chamberlain news of these developments from the British legation in Vienna, the prime minister told him of his “sincere wish and firm determination to clear up German-British relations.” After studying the two telegrams the prime minister gave his honored guest a quizzical look and asked why German troops were massing on their Austrian border. With a straight face Ribbentrop replied that he believed they were there for “spring training.” Clearly Chamberlain was unsatisfied, but it was not the sort of conversation a prime minister pursues over lunch, particularly when the most eloquent English critic of his foreign and defense policies is at the other end of the table, gazing at him intensely.
⁹⁰

Only after the others had departed did Chamberlain invite Ribbentrop and Halifax into the drawing room. By then additional reports of the Führer’s ultimatum and its sequelae had arrived from Vienna. Chamberlain read them aloud. “The discussion,” as Ribbentrop reported to the Führer afterward, “took place in a tense atmosphere.” To his surprise, Halifax, who had been so unctuous at the Berghof, was “more excited than Chamberlain, who outwardly at least appeared calm and cool-headed.” The Nazi statesman responded by doing what Nazis did best; rather than defend the indefensible, he simply denied “the truth of the reports.” The Englishmen asked no questions, accepted the remarkable charge that British diplomats in Vienna had concocted everything, and cheerfully accompanied Ribbentrop to the door. His “leave-taking,” he reported to the Führer, “was entirely amiable, and even Halifax was calm again.”
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In an attempt to make Hitler’s strong-arm diplomacy seem less brutal, Ribbentrop had not only lied to his hosts; he had also underestimated them. Accepting Austria as a state within the Reich’s sphere of influence was one thing; naked bayonets were another. By the time the Nazi foreign minister had returned to his embassy, it had occurred to Chamberlain and Halifax that their guest had been less than candid with them. It was Ribbentrop, they recalled, who had denounced the Schuschnigg plebiscite as “a fraud and a swindle” and “a violation of the letter and spirit of the Berchtesgaden agreement.” Within an hour they learned that Seyss-Inquart had proclaimed himself chancellor of Austria, that Hitler was preparing a broadcast promising his new subjects “a real plebiscite” to be supervised by the SS (the Führer’s private army) and the Gestapo (state secret police), and declaring that Schuschnigg was a fugitive. Halifax persuaded a reluctant Geoffrey Dawson to condemn what was now clearly a coup, and in an emergency cabinet meeting Chamberlain expressed shock at the “manner” of the annexation, calling it “distressing” and “a typical illustration of power politics.” Henderson was instructed to deliver a formal note to the Wilhelmstrasse declaring that “His Majesty’s Government feel obliged to register a protest in the strongest possible terms.”
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