The Last Lion Box Set: Winston Spencer Churchill, 1874 - 1965 (220 page)

The situation of the German Jews was desperate. In every community, posters declared that they had been stripped of their civil rights and were forbidden to seek employment of any kind; Jewish shops and homes were plundered by Nazi storm troopers. Among the victims were the parents of Herschel Grynszpan, a seventeen-year-old refugee living in Paris. On November 7, 1938, after learning of this, Grynszpan murdered Ernst vom Rath, a third secretary at the German embassy in Paris. Senior Nazis, SS officers, and Gestapo agents instantly saw this as an outrageous opportunity. On November 9 Goebbels issued instructions that “a spontaneous demonstration of the German people” (“
eine spontane Reaktion des deutschen Volkes
”) was to be “organized and executed” that night. No one knows how many acts of murder, rape, and pillage were carried out during
die Kristallnacht
, as it came to be called—Crystal Night, or the Night of Broken Glass—but the pogrom was the greatest in history. Reinhard Heydrich, Heinrich Himmler’s second in command at the SS, reported that the number of Jewish shops smashed and looted was 7,500.
¹⁵⁶

O
n May 10, 1938, Ambassador Henderson’s first secretary, Ivone Kirkpatrick, lunched with Prince Bismarck. Kirkpatrick had a specific proposition, of which the French, he said, were unaware. In his report to Ribbentrop, Bismarck quoted Kirkpatrick as saying: “If the German Government would advise the British Government confidentially what solution of the Sudeten German question they were striving after, the British Government would bring such pressure to bear in Prague that the Czechoslovak Government would be compelled to accede to the German wishes.”
¹⁵⁷

If one assumes that men in public life are guided by patriotism, reason, or even political survival, the conduct of His Majesty’s foreign policy defies understanding. It makes sense, however, if one grasps the fact that HMG and the key diplomats who owed their rise to the men in Downing Street believed that England should sever her bonds with leftist France and form a new alliance with Hitler’s Germany, thereby forming a solid front against the Soviet Union. It is a historic irony that Churchill, Britain’s original anti-Bolshevik, should have fought them every inch of the way.

He could do little beyond sending Bill Deakin as his personal representative, to ask Prague whether the Czech government approved of his plan for a Grand Alliance—which it did—and to inquire about reports of disorders in the Sudetenland. In the spring of 1938 the Czechs were breaking up the Sudetendeutsche riots but treating the ringleaders with kid gloves, determined to give the Reich no excuse for intervention. On March 12—the day Hitler annexed Austria and Churchill unsuccessfully urged Halifax to protest his conquest in Geneva—the Czech foreign minister, Dr. Kamil Krofta, instructed his ambassadors “to avoid all unnecessary criticism, and to make every effort to avoid being involved.” His envoy in London was Jan Masaryk, the son of Tomáš. Jan was worried about London’s vocalizing its support of the Czech cause. On the evening of March 13, a crowd gathered in Trafalgar Square and cheered a proposal that they stage a sympathetic demonstration outside his home in Grosvenor Place. He protested that he was “a good deal disturbed,” and the demonstration was quietly canceled. It was a measure of Hitler’s power that the mere possibility of annoying him was enough to quash a peaceful show of friendship—for a country he had not yet threatened—in the capital of the world’s greatest empire.
¹⁵⁸

In newspaper accounts of the Czech disturbances, the German führer was reported to be upset by them. The British public did not suspect his complicity. For better or for worse, but mostly worse, Woodrow Wilson had sown the seed of self-determination at Versailles, and enlightened Europeans sympathized with the discontented Sudeten Germans. If German observers were to be believed—and German credibility was very high among those determined never to fight another war—the Czech government was subjecting the demonstrating Sudetendeutsche to outrageous brutality. As Harold Macmillan later pointed out: “It is a falsification of history to suggest that appeasement up to the time of Munich was not widely supported, either openly or by implication. It was only as the relentless march of events revealed the true character of the man who had seized control of Germany that opinion in Britain began to change.”
¹⁵⁹

It was going to take a lot of havoc to turn people around, and except for Churchill few were trying. The London press was disenchanted with the French. The
Observer
commented: “We cannot allow the British Empire to be dragged down to disaster by the separate French alliances with Moscow and Prague.” Kingsley Martin, then editor of the liberal
New Statesman
, later reflected on the pessimism in Whitehall and at No. 10. It began, he thought, toward the end of the 1920s, when Germany was still ruled from Weimar and almost every well-informed Englishman “regarded the French notion of keeping Germany as a second-class power as absurd, and agreed that the Versailles Treaty must be revised in Germany’s favor.” But France wouldn’t have it, and Weimar, unarmed but still suspect, was impotent. By 1938, however, Martin felt that “things had gone so far that to plan armed resistance to the dictators was now useless. If there was a war we should lose it. We should, therefore, seek the most peaceful way of letting them gradually get all they wanted.”
¹⁶⁰

One of the most outspoken of the appeasers was an Anglican bishop, the Reverend Morley Headlam, who defended Hitler’s suppression of religious freedom before a church assembly, arguing that it was “only fair to realize that a great majority” of the Nazis believed that their cause “represented a strong spiritual influence” and looked upon it as “a real representation of Christianity.” A visiting Nazi told the Anglo-German Fellowship: “Herr Hitler has given the Church a free hand… he is a very religious man himself.” There was “no persecution of religion in Germany,” said Bishop Headlam, merely “persecution of political action.” Geoffrey Dawson published the bishop’s sermons in full while consigning dispatches from his own Berlin correspondent, describing the imprisonment of German clergymen, to the wastebasket.
¹⁶¹

The curtain rose on what would be the first Czech crisis when Konrad Henlein addressed a Sudeten German party rally in Karlsbad on April 24. He read a list of eight demands for action in Prague. They bore Hitler’s stamp; two weeks after the Anschluss, on March 28, Henlein had been rushed to Berlin for a three-hour session in which he was coached by Hitler and his foreign minister. Hitler’s closing words to the SDP leader were found among the Wilhelmstrasse debris in 1945 and submitted as an exhibit in Nuremberg. The Führer had told his Sudeten puppet that “demands should be made by the Sudeten German party which are unacceptable to the Czech government.” Accordingly, sandwiched between innocuous demands at Karlsbad were two which any Prague government would reject. One was the recognition of the Sudeten Germans as autonomous within the state, and the other provided them “complete freedom to profess adherence to the German character and ideology.” Later Henlein added another demand: a revision of Czech foreign policy, which had “hitherto placed the [Prague regime] among the enemies of the German people” and had considered it “the particular task of the Czech people to form a Slav bulwark against the so-called
Drang nach Osten
,” the Reich’s “thrust to the east.”
¹⁶²

This was provocative and, at the time, puzzling. If Hitler had the best interests of the Sudeten Germans at heart, or even if he intended to annex the Sudetenland—in short, if he intended anything except the incitement of riot leading to bloodshed—he was going about it the wrong way. Two days earlier President Beneš had told the British minister, Basil Newton, that he planned to open “serious negotiations” with Henlein and his party during May and June and, once they had reached an agreement, to pass the necessary legislation through the Czech legislature in July. Now Prague canceled this program. The Czech press was outraged. Foreign Minister Krofta called Henlein’s program “far-reaching and dangerous”; among other things, it could be used to restrict equality and freedom for other minorities—specifically Jews. The demand that the Sudeten Germans be given a separate “legal personality,” he added, was totally unacceptable. Nevertheless, the coalition government led by Premier Milan Hodža, a Slovak with broad popular support, left the door to negotiations ajar, though he told Newton that he doubted anything “serious” would be possible until after the local elections.
¹⁶³

Another French government had fallen in mid-April, and on April 28, four days after Henlein’s Karlsbad speech, the new premier arrived in London for two days of conferences between the allies of the last war. He was Édouard Daladier. Accompanying him was Georges Bonnet, France’s tenth foreign minister in less than six years. Daladier—not yet defeatist—was determined to honor his country’s commitment to the embattled Czechs. Like Churchill, he believed Hitler’s objective was nothing less than the “destruction of the present Czechoslovakian State.” To block him Daladier wanted a joint declaration, putting the Führer on notice that a Nazi invasion of Czechoslovakia would trigger declarations of war in Paris and London. But when he arrived at No. 10 Downing Street he found that if he wanted to form a solid anti-Nazi front he had come to the wrong address. On March 20 Chamberlain had written his sister Ida: “I have therefore abandoned any idea of giving guarantees to Czechoslovakia, or the French in connection with her obligations to that country.” He repeated this to Daladier, who left disappointed.
¹⁶⁴

Bonnet, whom Churchill called “the quintessence of appeasement,” was secretly delighted, and, in fact, he represented the mood of French politicians and the Paris press. The Army of the Third Republic was ready to fight the Boche; so were the people, with their bitter memories of 1914–1918. But their leaders and their journalists were preparing to turn them round. Professor Joseph Barthélemy, who later served in Pétain’s Vichy government as minister of justice, argued in
Le Temps
that the frequent violations of Locarno freed France from her treaty commitments.
Paris-Soir
,
Le Matin
,
Le Figaro
,
Paris-Midi
,
Information
,
L’Action Française
,
Le Temps
,
Petit Parisien
, the Socialist
Le Populaire
—every daily in the capital except the chauvinist
Epoque
and the Communist
L’Humanité
—opposed defending democratic Czechoslovakia.
¹⁶⁵

C
hurchill’s financial straits kept him at Chartwell most of the time, working to keep faith with Sir Henry Strakosch. Chamberlain’s tenure faced no strong challenge, and his most visible rival was the “Eden Group,” as Fleet Street called them, between twenty and thirty MPs who met regularly at various homes with Eden presiding. Churchill’s followers were the “Old Guard,” never more than four or five at this time. His absences from London were too frequent and too long to attract and hold a large number of supporters, while “Eden’s resignation,” as Harold Macmillan recalled, “had at least produced a pivot round which dissenting members of the Conservative Party could more readily form.”
¹⁶⁶

Visitors to Chartwell, correspondence, and frequent telephone conversations brought Churchill abreast of developments in the capital, however, and since public men of that generation kept meticulous accounts of public activities and personal impressions, Churchill’s growing role in British affairs can be traced and documented with confidence. His intellect and will had been recognized since his first years in Parliament nearly forty years earlier, yet his contemporaries continued to charge that he lacked sound judgment. Isaiah Berlin later commented: “When biographers and historians come to describe and analyse his views… they will find that his opinions on all these topics are set in fixed patterns, set early in life and lately only reinforced.”
¹⁶⁷