The War of the World: History's Age of Hatred (57 page)

In All Souls, too, a number of the younger Fellows begged to differ from the Dawson line. At around the time of the Abyssinian crisis, the historian A. L. Rowse –who was just thirty-four at the time of Munich –recalled a walk with him along the towpath to Iffley, in the course of which he warned the older man: ‘It is the Germans who are so powerful as to threaten all the rest of us together.’ Dawson’s reply was revealing: ‘To take your argumentonits own valuation– mind you, I’s m not saying that I agree with it – but if the Germans are so powerful as you say,
oughtn’t we to go in with them?
’ Another youthful critic of appeasement at All Souls was the brilliant explicator of political thought Isaiah Berlin, who strongly disapproved of the attitudes of Dawson and his circle. As Berlin told his biographer many years later:

They didn’t talk about appeasement in front of all of us so very much, but they did in the privacy of their own rooms. They brought sympathizers,
well-wishers, with them; then they would disappear into one of those big rooms upstairs with one of them, and there they would have practically committee meetings… On appeasement, together with everybody else of my age… I was strictly against. There were no appeasers except [Quintin] Hogg in our group. In my generation, nobody was, nor people younger than me. No no, certainly not.

Partly because of the appeasement issue, Berlin was drawn to the left-leaning Thursday Lunch Club, among whose members were Richard Crossman, the future Labour minister, and Roy Harrod, Keynes’s biographer. Berlin was no socialist. But he had one advantage over other Oxford dons when it came to understanding what was happening on the continent. As a Jew whose family had emigrated from Latvia to escape the chaos of the Russian Revolution, he had every reason to understand what was at stake on the continent. He could see that the older Fellows continued to think of Europe in the old imperialist terms of the 1900s, which was why they were inclined to accept Hitler’s overtly racist arguments:

The British Empire Group… were fundamentally racist; they weren’t anti-Semitic in any overt sense, but they believed in the Aryan ascendancy. They didn’t want Italy or France to be part of them, really. They believed in Germany, Scandinavia, the White Empire, you see? And that, fundamentally, had a kind of Cecil Rhodes aspect to it.

There was much truth in this. ‘The Teuton and the Slav are irreconcilable – just as are the Briton and the Slav,’ observed Henderson in a letter to Halifax. ‘[The Canadian premier] Mackenzie King told me last year after the Imperial Conference that the Slavs in Canada never assimilated with the people and never became good citizens.’

However, as Berlin had to acknowledge, the appeasers had another and rather stronger argument on their side, and that was their aversion to Stalin’s Soviet Union:

The Russians were quite outside [their notion of an extended Commonwealth], quite apart from being communists and terrible that way… That was the basis of it, the defence of what might be called white Western values against the horrors of the East. The Germans were a dubious case because they misbehaved. Hitler was rather a misfortune, but still, it was better to be
friends with Hitler – I mean protection against Communism, fundamentally, is what stirred them.

Among the many arguments for appeasement perhaps the best was this: that even as late as 1939 Hitler had done nothing to compare with the mass murder that Stalin had unleashed against the people of the Soviet Union. Many a Tory grandee may have knowingly shut one eye to the realities of Nazi rule, but an even larger number of people on the British Left had shut both eyes to the horrors of Stalinism – and they took much longer to open their eyes. Berlin understood that these were two evils between which it was far from easy to choose. As he wrote to his father in November 1938:

All the old conservatives are very nervous… They all want to fight for the colonies. But they won’t. I feel absolutely certain that one day a Russian-Slavic bloc will form in Europe &sweep away the German penetration. The mood is depressed. Everyone is conscious of defeat.

Such was the Establishment consensus. Fortunately, as we have seen, it was not shared by the British people at large. That was just as well. If it had been, the Second World War might well have been lost.

Of course they want to dominate Eastern Europe; they want as close a union with Austria as they could get without incorporating her in the Reich, and they want much the same things for the Sudetendeutsche as we did for the Uitlanders in the Transvaal.

Neville Chamberlain to his sister Hilda, November 1937

If a number of States were assembled around Great Britain and France in a solemn treaty for mutual defence against aggression; if they had their forces marshalled in what you may call a grand alliance; if they had their staff arrangements concerted; if all this rested, as it can honourably rest, upon the Covenant of the League of Nations, agreeable with all the purposes and ideals of the League of Nations; if that were sustained, as it would be, by the moral sense of the world; and if it were done in the year 1938 – and believe me, it may be the last chance there will be for doing it – then I say that you might even now arrest this approaching war.

Winston Churchill, March 1938

Who were the Sudeten Germans? In Neville Chamberlain’s notorious phrase they were ‘people… in a far-away country… of whom we know nothing’. Yet Czechoslovakia is not so very far from Britain: London to Prague is just 643 miles, slightly less than the distance
between New York and Chicago (711 miles). And the implications of the Sudetenland’s annexation by Nazi Germany had a profound bearing on Britain’s security. It was therefore unfortunate that Chamberlain took so little trouble to inform himself about the people whose fate he helped to decide in 1938. Had he known more, he might have acted differently.

The term Sudetenland was not much used before the 1930s. At the end of the First World War an attempt had been made to associate the predominantly Germanophone periphery of Bohemia and Moravia with the new post-imperial Austria by constituting Sudeten-land as a new Austrian province, but this had come to nothing. The Germans who found themselves under Czechoslovakian rule after the First World War – they accounted for over a fifth of the population, not counting the mainly German-speaking Jews – had at no time been citizens of the Reich of which Hitler was Chancellor. They were first and foremost Bohemians. The role of Bohemia in the evolution of National Socialism had nevertheless been seminal. It had been there that, before the First World War, German workers for the first time defined themselves as both nationalists and socialists in response to mounting competition from Czech migrants from the countryside (see
Chapter 1
). It had been in Bohemia that some of the most bitter political battles in the history of inter-war Czechoslovakia had been fought, over issues like language and education (see
Chapter 5
). The industrial regions where German settlement was concentrated were hard hit by the Depression; Germans were over-represented among the unemployed, just as they were under-represented in government employment. On the other hand, Czechoslovakia was unusual in Central and Eastern Europe. It was the only one of the ‘successor states’ that had arisen from the ruins of the Habsburg Empire that was still a democracy in 1938. It also occupied a strategically vital position as a kind of wedge jutting into Germany, dividing Saxony and Silesia from Austria. Its politics and its location made Czechoslovakia the pivot around which inter-war Europe turned.

The first and greatest weakness of Chamberlain’s foreign policy was that by accepting the legitimacy of ‘self-determination’ for the Sudeten Germans, it implicitly accepted the legitimacy of Hitler’s goal of a Greater Germany. Chamberlain’s aim was not to prevent the transfer
of the Sudeten Germans and their lands to Germany, but merely to prevent Hitler’s achieving it by force.
*
‘I don’t see why we shouldn’t say to Germany,’ so Chamberlain reasoned, ‘give us satisfactory assurances that you won’t use force to deal with the Austrians and Czecho-Slovakians and we will give you similar assurances that we won’t use force to prevent the changes you want if you can get them by peaceful means.’ His comparison with the English settlers in the Transvaal on the eve of the Boer War said it all; Chamberlain did not mean to imply that a war was likely, but that the German demands for the Sudetenlanders were as legitimate as his father’s had been for the Uitlanders.
†
To use a different analogy, it had taken generations for British Conservatives to reconcile themselves to the idea of Home Rule for the Irish; they conceded the Sudeten Germans’ right to it in a trice. Since Versailles, Germany had been aggrieved. The transfer of the Sudetenland was intended to redress her grievances in what Chamberlain hoped would be a full and final settlement. Nothing better captures the inability of the appeasers to grasp the Nazi mentality than the analysis offered by Edward Hale, a Treasury official, in August 1937. Hale maintained that

the Nazi struggle is primarily one of self-respect, a natural reaction against the ostracism that followed the war; that its military manifestations are no more than an expression of the German military temperament (just as our temperament expresses itself in terms of sport); that Hitler’s desire for friendship with England is perfectly genuine and still widely shared; and that the German is appealing to the least unfriendly boy in the school to release him from the Coventry to which he was sent after the war.

But the problems of Central and Eastern Europe could not so easily be translated into the terms of the Victorian Empire, much less into
the language of the public school playing fields. Hitler was not some kind of Teutonic Cecil Rhodes. Nor was Germany remotely like a character from
Tom Brown’s Schooldays
. What Chamberlain and his advisers failed to grasp was the simple fact that Hitler was most unlikely to rest satisfied with the Sudetenland. As others pointed out, there were many more minorities in East Central Europe, each with its own grievances, each with its own desire to redraw Europe’s borders. In particular, as we have seen, there were numerous German minority communities, scattered all the way from Danzig, at the end of the Polish Corridor, and Memel, an enclave in Lithuania, down to the picturesque Saxon villages of the Siebenbürgen, now in Romania, and as far east as the banks of the River Volga, in the very heart of Soviet Russia. In all, according to the Nazis’ inflated estimates, there were no fewer than thirty million
Volksdeutsche
living outside the Reich – nearly ten times the number of Sudeten Germans. Conceding Hitler’s right to the Sudetenland therefore set a very dangerous precedent. The more Hitler was able to cite the trials and tribulations of the
Volksdeutsche
as the basis for border ‘rectifications’ in one place, the more resources – both economic and demographic – he could stake a claim to in the other states of Central and Eastern Europe. Chamberlain and his advisers were apparently blind to the implications of the rapid spread of National Socialism among not just the Sudeten Germans but nearly all ethnic German minorities after 1933. This ideological conquest was well advanced by 1938. ‘From our viewpoint,’ recalled Gregor von Rezzori, a young ethnic German in Romania,

the developments in Germany [after 1933] were welcome: a profusion of optimistic images of youth bursting with health and energy, promising to build a sunny new future – this corresponded to our own political mood. We were irked by the disdain with which we as the German-speaking minority were treated, as if the former Austrian dominion in Romania had been one of Teutonic barbarism over the ancient and highly cultured Czechs, Serbs, Slovaks and Wallachians, as if these had freed themselves from their oppressive bondage in the name of civilizing morality.

As early as 1935 the Romanian Germans had found in Fritz Fabritius a confirmed Nazi to act as their leader. To be a National Socialist in
Austria, Neville Laski found in 1934, was to be ‘a contingent holder of the job. To be a Nazi was to be an optimist’. By 1938 the Hungarian Germans, too, had formed their own Nazi organization, the
Volksbund
. Before even bidding for living space, Hitler was already winning the ‘thinking space’ of the
Volksdeutsche
. They became, in effect, his advance guard in the East.

The failure to appreciate the significance of Hitler’s appeal to the ethnic Germans was only the first of five flaws in the policy of appeasement. The second fatal weakness of Chamberlain’s policy was that it assumed the existence of ‘moderate’ elements within the Nazi regime that could be strengthened through conciliation. In reality, the apparently ‘polycratic’ nature of the regime – the fact that, as the French ambassador to Berlin complained, ‘There is not… only one foreign office. There are a half-dozen’ – was something of an illusion. Hitler was in charge, his broad objectives were no secret and his subordinates ‘worked towards the Führer’ when he did not specify the means of achieving what he wanted. Talking to Schacht about colonial concessions therefore turned out to be a waste of time, as was talking to Göring about deals on raw materials. Chamberlain’s early ‘grand design’ – which involved such bizarre proposals as the creation of a Central African raw materials consortium and an arms limitation agreement to abolish strategic bombing – was a flop because Hitler had no interest in either. Even more fantastic was the hope, to which the British clung until the war was nearly over, that the German working class would eventually tire of the economic sacrifices demanded by the Nazis and revolt against them.

The third flaw was the assumption, first enunciated by the Permanent Under-Secretary at the Foreign Office, Sir Robert Vansittart, that Britain gained by waiting. As he observed in December 1936, ‘Time is the very material commodity which the Foreign Office is expected to provide in the same way as other departments provide
other
war material… To the Foreign Office falls therefore the task of holding
the situation until at least 1939.’ In reality, the ‘policy of cunction’ (from the Latin
cunctor
, ‘I delay’) gave Hitler just as much time to build up his military forces and, as we shall see, was positively disadvantageous to Britain from an economic point of view. Fourthly, Chamberlain persisted with the idea – which should have been discredited as early as 1935 – that good relations with Mussolini might be a way of checking Hitler or at least limiting British liability on the continent. Finally, Chamberlain was too arrogant to attach a significant probability to the worst-case scenario that appeasement would fail, so that Britain’s position was unnecessarily exposed when, in due course, it did. Although he undeniably presided over substantial if belated increases in defence expenditure, Chamberlain also did a number of things that positively weakened Britain’s military position, notably his surrender of the ports still controlled by Britain in Southern Ireland when he recognized the independence of Eire in 1938. He also forced Viscount Swinton to resign as Secretary of State for Air for having quite legitimately accelerated the construction of modern fighters for the purpose of defending Britain from the Luftwaffe. Having earlier committed Britain to build an air force designed to attack Germany, Chamberlain offered to give even that ineffectual deterrent away if Hitler would only agree to a ban on strategic bombing.