The Last Lion Box Set: Winston Spencer Churchill, 1874 - 1965 (235 page)

H
ITLER IN PRAGUE
!” screamed the newspaper posters on kiosks throughout England. What, outraged Englishmen asked one another, was he doing there? They had read his personal pledges to Chamberlain at Munich and his promise to be guided by the international commission, which would recognize Reich sovereignty only in “predominantly German” areas. Most Britons were unaware that Germany had ignored the commission with the connivance of London and Paris, unaware of Czechoslovakia’s slow disintegration, unaware that the Nazis had, in defiance of the Munich Agreement, “awarded” Hungary and then Poland large tracts of Czech territory, inhabited by over one and a quarter million citizens of Czechoslovakia, none of them German, now made citizens of other states. These ominous events, heavy with implications, had been reported in the British press, but only briefly and obscurely.

His Majesty’s Government had not prepared their countrymen for this blow. The fact is that they, too, were unprepared for the Prague invasion. In Hitler’s most recent speech he had reflected upon how fortunate the world would be if Britons and Germans could unite “in full confidence with one another.” On March 10, only five days before Hitler’s Prague coup, the P.M. had told the House of Commons that the Continent was now “settling down to a period of tranquillity.” Hoare, speaking next, had predicted that if Hitler, Mussolini, Franco, Chamberlain, and Daladier were to work in tandem they could banish nightmares of war and burdens of armament and thus “in an incredibly short space of time transform the whole history of the world.” As a consequence of this joint effort, Hoare had envisioned a new “Golden Age,” whose promise would be realized if the “jitterbugs”—singling out those who had appealed for a stronger British military presence: Churchill, Eden, Duff Cooper, Bracken, Amery, Boothby, Sandys, Nicolson, Macmillan, and Keyes—were denied their goals.
⁵²

A backbencher softly quoted Shakespeare:

Hoare was fatuous, and Churchill knew it, but he could not deliver a plausible rebuke without exposing informants already being tailed by the Gestapo. Two weeks after Munich, Hitler had summoned Frantisek Chvalkovsky, Prague’s new pro-German foreign minister, and told him that Czechoslovakia must abandon her cordial relationship with Britain and become reconciled to her “proper place” as a colony of the Reich. The Czechs must “not play any tricks with Germany.” If they did, “in twenty-four hours—no, in eight hours—I’ll finish her off [
mache ich Schluss
]!” The following month one of Winston’s sources sent him a secret memorandum in which the Führer had described the next phase of his foreign policy to Ribbentrop and Weizsäcker. Britain, he had said, “must be attacked with speeches and in the press… first the Opposition, and then Chamberlain himself.” Munich had taught him “how to deal with the English—one had to move aggressively [
vor den Bauch treten
].” His objective, he declared, was “to overthrow Chamberlain.” The Opposition, he assumed—an absurd assumption, revealing his ignorance of parliamentary rule—“would not then be capable of forming a new government, and the same would occur as in France. The political strength of Great Britain would be paralyzed” and “Fascism would gain the upper hand.”
⁵³

On March 12, three days before Hitler’s rape of the rump Czech state, Chartwell had received another report from an agent in Brno, Moravia. “Hitler,” Winston had learned, “is coming to Vienna”—fifty miles from Prague—“this week.” Swastika banners “lavishly decorated” a “great many public buildings,” and each evening Czech Nazis “gathered in or around the Deutsches Haus to sing and demonstrate.” One night a procession of anti-Nazis paraded by the German House; the men wearing the hakenkreuz brassards shouted “
Sieg Heil!
” and sang the “Horst Wessel Song.” These Nazis had been told that “Hitler will come on March 15 and the greeting ‘Heil Marz!’ instead of ‘Heil Hitler!’ has been quite common for some weeks.”
⁵⁴

On the morning of March 14 the Slovakian legislature, which had been quarreling with the national government in Prague, had declared its independence. This presented the Führer with his opportunity. Obviously, he declared, Prague could not control its people. The Czechs were informed of his displeasure by Ribbentrop, who stressed the need for an immediate solution. At 10:40
P.M.
—just as Churchill’s meeting at Waltham Abbey was breaking up—a train bearing Chvalkovsky and Dr. Emil Hácha, formerly a judge of Czechoslovakia’s supreme court and now the country’s president, drew into Berlin’s Anhalt Station. An SS guard of honor escorted them to the Hotel Adlon and then the Reich Chancellery, where the Führer kept them waiting until 1:15
A.M.
Hácha was no Masaryk, no Beneš; he had come prepared to grovel. He denounced his great predecessors and actually said that after Munich “I asked myself whether it was a good thing for Czechoslovakia to be an independent state at all.” He realized that the destiny of his country lay “in the Führer’s hands, and I believe it is in safekeeping in such hands.” He knew that the Czechs had a bad reputation in the Wilhelmstrasse. His explanation was that “there still exist many supporters of the Beneš regime.” But, he was “trying by every means to silence them.” He meekly added that he hoped the Führer “will understand my holding the view that Czechoslovakia has the right to live a national life.”
⁵⁵

Hitler didn’t understand it, however. Hácha’s “Rump State” (“
Rest-bestand
”), he said, owed its very existence to his indulgence. At Munich he had hoped that the Czechs, under new leadership, would mend their ways, but he had also resolved that “if the Beneš tendencies did not completely disappear he would completely destroy this state.” It was now obvious that they had not disappeared. Therefore, last Sunday, March 12, “
die Würfel waren gefallen
” (“the die was cast”). He had issued the orders for the invasion by German troops and for the incorporation of Czechoslovakia into the German Reich. Schmidt, his interpreter, noted that the Czechs “sat as though turned to stone. Only their eyes showed that they were alive.” Hitler told them that at 6:00
A.M.
, on his orders, his armies would cross their borders near points where the Luftwaffe had already seized Czech airfields. Any attempts at defense would be broken by “
rohe Gewalt
” (“brute force”). He paused. Of course, he said, they had a choice. If the defenders laid down their arms the Führer would treat them with generosity, assure their autonomy, and even grant them a certain measure of freedom. He suggested they step into the next room and talk it over.
⁵⁶

Awaiting them there were Göring and Ribbentrop, who literally chased them around a table strewn with documents, thrusting the papers at them, pushing pens into their hands, shouting that if they refused to sign, within two hours half of Prague would be bombed to ruins and their families slain. Suddenly Schmidt heard Göring shout: “
Hácha hat einen Schwächeanfall bekommen!
” Hácha, who had a heart condition, had indeed fainted, and a single thought crossed the minds of the Germans: the world would say that Czechoslovakia’s president had been murdered in the Reich Chancellery. Then Dr. Theodor Morell—Hitler’s personal physician, whose strange drugs later addicted the Führer—gave Hácha an injection. A special telephone line to Prague had been rigged up; over it, in a slurred voice, the revived president advised the cabinet to capitulate. Morell gave him another shot, and both Czechs signed the papers. It was 3:55
A.M.
Two hours later German troops swarmed over the shrunken Czech frontier. Hácha was appointed governor of the German Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia. But the world already knew who really ruled the country now. Hitler had told them. Before retiring for the night in Hradschin Palace he issued a triumphant statement: “
Die Tschechoslowakei existiert nicht mehr!
”—“Czechoslovakia has ceased to exist.”
⁵⁷

That evening, as Hitler slept in his hijacked palace, Churchill dined at the Grillions Club with Sir Horace Rumbold, formerly His Majesty’s ambassador to Berlin, who had been dismissed after the Nazis, opening his pouches, found he was reporting the facts about Hitler’s regime and demanded an envoy more sympathetic to the Führer’s policies. Rumbold was in low spirits. Learning that Hitler was in Prague, he concluded that “Even Chamberlain’s eyes must now be opened to the fact that Hitler’s statements and assurances are not worth the breath with which they have been uttered…. I confess that I have never in my life been so disheartened as I am now.” He was angry that the Foreign Office had ignored his warnings six years before and that Chamberlain had been so gulled by Hitler. Over the past few months, however, he had begun to note “increasing disgust with Germany” on all levels of British society and “a growing conviction that there is nothing to be done with the Nazis.”

This, he told Churchill, gave him a flicker of hope. And yet there were Englishmen who were still working toward an Anglo-German alliance. One, he said, was Lord Brocket, whom he regarded as “among the most gullible of asses.” Brocket had been shooting with Göring. Göring had entrusted him with news of great importance: “Neither he [Göring] nor Hitler had any knowledge of the recent Nazi action against the Jews.” On reflection Rumbold became convinced that further aggression by Nazis in 1939 was inevitable. The following day he wrote to his brother: “This year… is their last opportunity of doing so with any chance of success.” There was a general feeling of uneasiness, he wrote Churchill that same afternoon. “You asked me last night what I thought of the present situation. I replied that I was profoundly disheartened. This was an understatement…. I have never felt so depressed or so nauseated as I feel now and this because it seems to me that our Government have, for a year or more, failed to look ahead or to understand the character of the man with whom they are dealing…. I only hope that it will not enter into the PM’s head to pay Hitler another visit.” On March 20 Churchill replied, thanking Rumbold for his letter and adding: “Since you wrote it events have told their unanswerable tale.”
⁵⁸

“The blow has been struck,” Churchill told his readers on March 24. Hitler had “broken every tie of good faith with the British and French who tried so hard to believe in him. The Munich agreement which represented such great advantages for Germany has been brutally violated.” British confidence in the Nazi hierarchy

That, or something like it, had indeed happened. A profound shift in public opinion was noted all over Britain. Hitler’s Prague coup—which was followed, in a week, by his annexation of Memel, part of Lithuania—was the pivotal event in turning round British public opinion. The spirit of friendship between London and Berlin, which Chamberlain believed had been the fruit of Munich, had, in A. J. P. Taylor’s phrase, “lost its glitter.” And Robert Rhodes James, after reviewing the period, concludes:

Later in the year a scrap-iron drive was launched, but an exception had to be made for Lord Baldwin; the wrought-iron gates leading to his estate were needed to control angry men who, only two years before, had cheered his every appearance. Malcolm Muggeridge bitterly recalled Chamberlain’s return from Munich and his response to the airport crowd: “He showed them the very document, pointed to the signature upon it; then told them to go home and sleep quietly in their beds, confident that they were secure against molestation, not just for that night and tomorrow night, but for many nights, perhaps for ever. Peace in our time; peace in his time—not even that. The first ecstasy soon passed.”
⁶¹

Muggeridge was considered a crank and was disregarded by the House because of his contempt for everything trendy. But for once he was in the mainstream; MPs knew it because their constituents told them so in every mail delivery. Only the prime minister remained blind to the shift in the national mood. Addressing the House of Commons on March 15 he ignored the Nazis’ exploitation of ethnic feuds which had always riven eastern Europe. Slovakia, he solemnly noted, had proclaimed her “independence.” What had happened in Bratislava hardly resembled the American Declaration of Independence—in fact the proclamation had been issued by an extremist band of Slovakian Fascists—but you would never have known it from the prime minister’s remarks to the House. He said: “The effect of this [Slovakian] declaration put an end by internal disruption to the State whose frontier we had proposed to guarantee. His Majesty’s Government cannot accordingly hold themselves any longer bound by this obligation.”
⁶²

Back in Downing Street his ministers told him this made no sense. He turned away, refusing to concede that the issue which had made him a national hero had boomeranged. But his cabinet persisted, and he was under growing pressure from his whips, his closest colleagues, even from the King. Finally, on March 17, Chamberlain grasped the humiliating fact that the Führer had deceived him, exposing the paper they had signed for the placebo it was.

Another statesman might have abandoned his discredited policies, and at first it seemed that the P.M. had decided to do precisely that. Actually his commitment to appeasement lay too deep, and he could never entirely relinquish his conviction that the path to enduring peace lay through continuing compromise. So his public positions became schizoid, swinging from one extreme to another. That Friday he was decidedly hawkish. The Prague betrayal had angered him, and speaking before a large crowd in Birmingham, the arena most sympathetic to Joe Chamberlain’s son, he executed what was, for the moment at least, an about-face. He believed, he said, that most Englishmen had not only approved of the Munich Agreement but had “shared my honest desire that that policy be carried further.” Now he shared “their disappointment,” their “indignation.” Hitler claimed that his ingestion of what was left of Czechoslovakia was “justified by disturbances [there]. Is this the last attack upon a small state or is it to be followed by another? Is this in fact a step in the direction of an attempt to dominate the world by force?” If so, he said, Britain would take part “in resisting the challenge to the utmost of her power.”
⁶³

Halifax told Dirksen: “In Anglo-German relations the clocks [have] been put back considerably.” But Chamberlain did not let a formal protest leave the FO until March 18, three days after the occupation of Prague. Bonnet, having been put under similar pressure, did the same. Couriers from the French and British embassies sped along the Wilhelmstrasse bearing stiffly worded notes protesting the “denial of the spirit of Munich” to the Foreign Ministry. Ribbentrop discarded them unread.
⁶⁴

Ribbentrop’s contempt was deserved. There had been so many such notes, deploring Hitler’s seizure of the Rhineland and then its fortification, objecting to the Anschluss, remonstrating against the
Kristallnacht
and subsequent anti-Semitic pogroms. Ribbentrop knew the drill. Presently Henderson would appear and explain that friendship between the two countries must not be jeopardized, that mistakes would be resolved by negotiation. And, sure enough, the British envoy arrived within the hour.

Meantime a meeting in Düsseldorf between British and German industrialists had been scheduled to open on March 15. It went ahead as planned. Even as Hitler rode through Prague, the participants signed a preliminary agreement, one clause of which permitted Germany to spend the foreign exchange resources of the country he had just seized—in short, providing the Reichsbank with stolen funds to finance Hitler’s regime.
⁶⁵

The disposition of Czech gold deposited abroad soon became the focus of heated disagreement in England. Though the Bank of England quickly froze its Czech assets, some of the Czech gold it held—six million pounds’ worth—was controlled by the Bank for International Settlements, which wanted it transferred to the Reichsbank. By mid-May rumors were rife that a German representative was in London to conclude negotiations—and HMG was refusing to intervene. The House of Commons erupted on May 26. Where, indignant MPs asked, was the six million pounds in gold? Why was the government willing to permit its transfer to Germany? Chancellor of the Exchequer Simon replied that he was not sure he was even entitled to ask the bank about Czech deposits. But MPs were persistent. After the Anschluss, Vienna’s Threadneedle Street had been a gold mine for Hitler, transferring all Austrian assets to the Nazis, and Parliament wanted no encore. “Really,” said Bracken, “this is the most squalid form of appeasement… appeasing the Germans with the money of the unfortunate Czechs.”
⁶⁶

Chamberlain was evasive, Churchill apoplectic. British rearmament was picking up speed; the lag with the Germans continued, but an effort had begun at last. He told the House:

The prime minister flushed when Winston added that he could not understand how this matter could have escaped him. Churchill demanded that he put a halt to “the transference of this £6,000,000 of Czech money into the hands of those who have overthrown and destroyed the Czech republic.” This, in Chamberlain’s view, was another example of Churchill’s lack of judgment, of his misunderstanding of the business world. Sentiment had no place in the City. The government in Prague had changed legally, since the Czech government had signed Hitler’s documents, and Hácha had a perfect right to the gold Beneš had deposited here in the name of Czechoslovakia.
⁶⁸

Because of legerdemain—a hasty change in the Bank of England’s bookkeeping methods—and the fact that vital Reichsbank records were later lost in the bombing of Berlin, to this day no one knows the degree to which the Nazis succeeded in obtaining these Czech assets. Gilbert and Gott state that Germany “never claimed the gold.” But even if Nazi Germany lost a windfall, the Reich kept most of its powerful British friends.
⁶⁹

In London, Hitler was praised—praise which was entirely unmerited—for his generosity and restraint in suppressing violence in Prague. During the months following his entry into the city, 250,000 Czechs were killed, over half of them Jews. That was unknown at the time, for it was extremely difficult to get precise accounts of German behavior in Prague. The Nazi grip there had begun to tighten even before the coup. “Everywhere the Nazi salute and ‘Heil Hitler’ are to be found,” one of Churchill’s sources had written, “with pictures of the Führer in German restaurants.” Nazis insulted young Czechs and clubbed them, Jews were required to register, and—a glint of black humor—“At the Capitol Cinema here [he was reporting from Brno] the German film ‘Olympia’ is showing. All the Nazis are itching to go, but there is a Nazi picket outside… because the cinema is owned by a Jew!” The same source described the Nazis’ arrival: “I saw the first German troops entering the town…. The local Germans were very enthusiastic, but the rest of the population has been extremely and amazingly quiet. Everything is now draped in swastikas. Yesterday morning Hitler paid a surprise visit; the reception was very cool, and he drove straight back and did not make his intended speech here this evening. Few people saw him or even recognized him.”
⁷⁰

Although the full scope of Nazi atrocities in Czechoslovakia was concealed from foreign correspondents, they could not be prevented from witnessing clubbings, the persecution of Jews, and the disappearance of Czech intellectuals once concentration camps had been built, wired, and equipped with watchtowers for machine guns and searchlights. There was no blinking the fact that this time Hitler had acted not as the champion of Germans living in a neighboring country but as a Genghis Khan bent upon pillage, enslavement, slaughter, and destruction. The Czechs were the first Slavs he had subjugated. He frequently broke his promises; his threats he always made good. In a secret
Führerordnung
he decreed that the Czechs were to be “
assimiliert
,” chiefly as “
Sklavenarbeit
” (“slave labor”) in the Reich; the others, “
besonders die Intellektuellen
” (“particularly the intellectuals”), were to be “
entmanntet und ausgeschaltet
” (“castrated and eliminated”). All this had been set forth in
Mein Kampf
, the best-seller read by few and dismissed by most of them as ravings. Churchill, virtually the only public man who had taken Hitler at his word, published a collection of his own
Evening Standard
and
Daily Telegraph
columns under the title
Step by Step
. Clement Attlee wrote him, “It must be a melancholy satisfaction to see how right you were,” and Lord Wolmer wrote: “The book is a record of perspicacity and courage on your part.”
⁷¹

Powerful Nazis had become British celebrities, however. On March 18, R. H. S. Crossman, a future cabinet member, spoke in the House of Göring’s “courage and capability.” “Apart from Hitler,” he said, “he is the only statesman of any caliber in the Third Reich…. Moreover, it was his energy in reorganizing the Prussian police and establishing the Gestapo which enabled Hitler to consolidate his position in 1933, and since then the triumphs of the Nazi foreign policy would have been impossible without his work.”
⁷²

Parliament’s indifference to the lot of the Czech Jews infuriated Churchill. Dispossessed by the Nazis, they wandered the roads of eastern Europe. Photographs of their ordeal were profoundly moving, but Dawson refused to run any of them in
The Times
; he couldn’t help the victims, he explained to his staff, and if they were published Hitler would be offended. Then, nine weeks after Prague, the Chamberlain government announced that British policy in Palestine had been changed. Unlimited Jewish immigration was over; strict limits would be imposed on the number entering Palestine for the next five years, and after that all Jews would be turned away “unless the Arabs of Palestine are prepared to acquiesce in it.” This closed the chief refuge for European Jews fleeing the growing Nazi empire, and it gave the Arabs veto power over the eventual establishment of a Jewish state.
⁷³

This was popular in the Reich. But it was also a renunciation of the Balfour declaration, which in 1917 had promised British support in “the establishment [in Palestine] of a national home for the Jewish people.” To Churchill, who had been a Zionist for thirty years, it constituted a shocking act of treachery and a violation of his personal honor. In 1921, as colonial secretary, he had committed Britain to the founding of a homeland for the Jews; it would be called “Judea” or “Israel.” And in 1937, he had reaffirmed his support of such a nation publicly and, privately, to Chaim Weizmann, president of the World Zionist Organization, who had become a close friend. In May 1939, the new Middle Eastern policy was defended in the House by Malcolm MacDonald, who now presided over the Colonial Office. Amery denounced it in blistering terms, and Churchill, after reviewing his speech with Weizmann (who said he wouldn’t change a word; he thought it perfect), addressed the issue in Parliament on May 22.

As one “intimately and responsibly concerned in the earlier stages of our Palestine policy,” he could not “stand by and see solemn engagements into which Britain has entered before the world set aside.” Perhaps the government’s purpose was “administrative convenience.” It was unlikely. No one had suggested it. Or perhaps—and here Winston hinted at the darker, more obvious, and most reprehensible motive, an attempt by His Majesty’s Government to ingratiate itself with the Führer—it was being done “for the sake of a quiet life,” which, he predicted, would be “a vain hope.” Of the Arab veto he said, “There is the breach; there is the violation of the pledge; there is the abandonment of the Balfour Declaration; there is the end of the vision, of the hope, of the dream.” He asked: “What will our potential enemies think?… Will they not be tempted to say: ‘They’re on the run again. This is another Munich.’ ” At the end he stared straight at the prime minister’s eyes and recalled that twenty years earlier, in this chamber, Chamberlain had said—he was quoting him directly—“A great responsibility will rest upon the Zionists, who, before long, will be proceeding, with joy in their hearts, to the ancient seat of their people. Theirs will be the task to build up a new prosperity and a new civilisation in old Palestine, so long neglected and misruled.” Churchill closed with three shattering sentences: “Well, they have answered his call. They have fulfilled his hopes. How can he find it in his heart to strike them this mortal blow?”
⁷⁴