America’s Second Crusade. William Henry Chamberlin
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to the case of the Sudeten Germans. The question of whether to fight or yield was threshed out at top-level conferences of French and British government representatives on September 18 and 19. These conferences, in Chamberlain’s words, were “guided by a desire to find a solution which would not bring about a European war and, therefore, a solution which would not automatically compel France to take action in accordance with her obligations.”
The result was a decision to transfer to the Reich areas in which the Sudeten Germans were more than 50 per cent of the population. This solution was rather brusquely imposed upon President Beneš in Prague. The French Foreign Minister, Georges Bonnet, was especially emphatic in pressing for Czechoslovak acceptance.
A snag was encountered when Chamberlain went to the Rhineland resort of Godesberg for a second meeting with Hitler and found the latter insistent upon an immediate German military occupation of regions where the Sudeten Germans were more than half of the population. Hitler also refused to participate in the proposed international guarantee of the new Czechoslovak frontier until the claims of the Polish and Hungarian minorities had been satisfied.
The Czechoslovak Government at first refused to accept Hitler’s Godesberg demands, which went beyond the Anglo-French plan that had been reluctantly accepted in Prague. Several days of extreme tension followed. The British Navy was mobilized. The German Army was poised to strike against Czechoslovakia at two o’clock on the afternoon of September 28. Almost at the last moment the French Government made an offer which went far to meet Hitler’s demands, and Mussolini requested a postponement of the German mobilization. Chamberlain had intimated his willingness to come to Berlin for further discussion.
Chamberlain announced on the afternoon of September 28 to the House of Commons, grave in face of the threat of imminent war, that Hitler had invited him, together with Daladier and Mussolini, to a conference in Munich on the following afternoon. There was an outburst of tremendous, almost hysterical, enthusiasm. There had been little desire to die for a questionable boundary decision in eastern Europe.
Agreement was quickly reached at Munich. Hitler got substantially what he wanted. There were a few face-saving concessions, such as the establishment of an international commission to supervise the evacuation of the Sudetenland. But in the main, Germany wrote its own terms. Chamberlain returned from Munich satisfied that he had done right in averting war. He had induced Hitler to sign with him a joint declaration that the Munich Agreement and the Anglo-German naval accord symbolized “the desire of our two peoples never to go to war with each other again.”
Upon his arrival in London, Chamberlain told the cheering crowd which welcomed him: “I believe it is peace in our time.” And so it might have been, if the British Government had been willing to disinterest itself in eastern Europe, leaving that area as a battleground to Hitler and Stalin.
But what for Chamberlain was an end was for Hitler a beginning. The Munich settlement was capable of being interpreted in two ways. It could have been understood as a final renunciation by Britain and France of interest and concern in eastern Europe. This was how Hitler chose to understand it. Or it could have been taken as a final settlement of German territorial claims in Europe.
There was an atmosphere of precarious peace in Europe for a few months after Munich. German Foreign Minister von Ribbentrop came to Paris and signed with French Foreign Minister Georges Bonnet a declaration of friendship and mutually pacific intentions on December 6. In the text of this declaration there was nothing very striking, but there is reason to believe that Bonnet, in private talks, gave Ribbentrop to understand that France was disinterested in eastern Europe. Ribbentrop asserts that Bonnet accepted his argument that the French military alliances with Poland and Czechoslovakia were remains of the Versailles Treaty which Germany could no longer endure. He also alleges that the French Foreign Minister did not contradict the statement that Czechoslovakia must now be regarded as being within the German sphere of influence.9
Of course this is an ex parte statement of Ribbentrop and was later contradicted by Bonnet. But a disinterested observer, the Polish Ambassador to France, Jules Lukasiewicz, offers some confirmatory evidence. Lukasiewicz, in a report to the Polish Ministry of Foreign Affairs, dated December 17, 1938, reports a conversation with Bonnet, who admitted telling a German intermediary that he regretted the French alliances with Poland and the Soviet Union. Characterizing Bonnet as a person of weak character who adapted himself to whomever he talked with last, Lukasiewicz continues:
France therefore remains paralyzed and resignedly confined to adopting a defeatist attitude towards everything that is happening in central and eastern Europe. . . . France does not consider anything of positive value except an alliance with England, while an alliance with ourselves and the USSR is considered more of a burden. . . .10
It is understandable that Hitler, in view of the atmosphere in France and Chamberlain’s acceptance of his demands at Munich, hoped that he would encounter little resistance in the West to further expansion in the East. But his next move produced the challenge from London which, after further diplomatic sparring and a final German resort to arms, led to the Second World War.
Taking advantage of a separatist movement in Slovakia, Hitler in March 1939 proceeded to swallow up the shrunken remains of Czechoslovakia. The new Czechoslovak President, Dr. Emil Hacha (Beneš had resigned and left the country), was summoned to Berlin, plied with drugs to sustain his failing heart, and put under strong pressure to accept a German protectorate over Bohemia and Moravia. Slovakia was permitted to set up an independent administration and became a German satellite state.
Chamberlain’s first reaction to this development was moderate. He spoke in Parliament of “disintegration” of Czechoslovakia from within and declared that no British guarantee of the country’s frontiers could apply in such a situation. He took a much more militant line, however, in a speech at Birmingham on March 17. Accusing Hitler of having taken the law into his own hands, Chamberlain declared that “any attempt to dominate the world by force was one the democracies must resist” and that “Britain would take part to the uttermost of its power in resisting such a challenge if it were made.”
Chamberlain’s shift of attitude was apparently attributable to a combination of causes. His Foreign Secretary, Lord Halifax, was prodding him to take a stronger line. There was a rising tide of protest against “appeasement” in Parliament and in the country.
The Birmingham speech heralded a striking shift in British foreign policy. Hitherto the British Government had been extremely cautious about making firm commitments to defend any part of Europe east of the Rhine. Now it began to toss guarantees about with reckless abandon, and with little regard for its ability to implement these guarantees if they were put to the test.
Very fateful was the decision to guarantee Poland against attack on March 31, 1939. This was the climax of ten days of feverish and complex negotiations. The last chance for Poland to align itself with Germany against the Soviet Union, perhaps receiving compensation in the East for concessions to Germany on the issues of Danzig and the Corridor, disappeared when two talks between Ribbentrop and the Polish Ambassador to Germany, Josef Lipski, ended in hostile deadlock. These talks took place on March 21 and March 26.
Colonel Beck on March 23 rejected a British proposal for a consultative pact, directed against German aggression, with Great Britain, France, the Soviet Union, and Poland as signatories. With very good reasons, as past and future events proved, Beck distrusted Soviet designs as much as German. His countersuggestion was a bilateral Anglo-Polish agreement. Chamberlain announced his willingness to accept this when he told the House of Commons on March 31:
As the House is aware, certain consultations are now proceeding with other governments. In order to make perfectly clear the position of His Majesty’s Government in the meantime, before these consultations are concluded, I now have to inform the House that during that period, in the event of any action which clearly threatened Polish independence, and which the Polish Government accordingly considered it vital to resist with their national forces, His Majesty’s Government would feel themselves bound at once to lend the Polish Government all support in their power. They have given the Polish Government an assurance to this effect.
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