Hitler: Ascent, 1889-1939 (137 page)

At this point Hitler revealed to his officer corps what he had told his top military leaders on 3 February 1933 and 5 November 1937. As the “strongest people not just in Europe but practically the entire word,” Hitler said, the 85 million Germans, all members of a highly civilised race, had a right to greater space in order to preserve their standard of living. “I have taken it upon myself to solve the German question,” Hitler declared, “that is, the German problem of [not having enough] space. You should be aware that as long as I live this thought will dominate my entire existence.” He would never “shrink back even from the most extreme measures,” Hitler added, and he expected his officer corps to stand behind with “trusting faith.” Without explicitly naming the Soviet Union, he told his army commanders: “The next struggle will be a war purely of world views, a war between peoples and races.”
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The response to these revelations was apparently mixed. Hitler’s attaché Gerhard Engel described the reaction as “partly enthusiastic and partly very sceptical.”
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To start with, however, Hitler set about capturing what had escaped his clutches in the autumn of 1938. His preparations for the annexation of the remaining Czech territory were twofold. On the one hand, he came up with a variety of excuses for delaying the acknowledgement of Czech sovereignty guaranteed under the Munich Agreement; on the other, he encouraged separatist Slovaks to break away from what was left of Czechoslovakia. When negotiations between Prague and Bratislava over Slovak autonomy broke down, the new Czechoslovakian president, Emil Hácha, dismissed the local Slovakian government under Father Jozef Tiso, a German ally, and sent troops into Slovakia. “This is a launching pad,” noted Goebbels with glee. “Now we can get a complete solution to the problem we were only half able to solve in October.” At noon on 10 March, Hitler summoned Goebbels, Ribbentrop and Keitel to the Chancellery. “Decision: on Wednesday, 15 March, we’ll invade and destroy the entire monstrous construct that is Czechoslovakia,” Goebbels wrote. “The Führer is crowing with delight. The outcome is dead certain.”
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The Wehrmacht was issued its orders on 12 March. “The people are completely calm,” Goebbels noted. “No one knows or suspects anything.”
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On the afternoon of 13 March, Jozef Tiso arrived in Berlin at the Nazi government’s request. Hitler informed him that Germany was about to occupy Czech territory and told him to proclaim Slovakian independence immediately. Otherwise, Hitler threatened, he would abandon Slovakia to its fate—that is, give Hungarian troops massing on the border carte blanche to invade.
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On 14 March, the parliament in Bratislava declared Slovakia an independent state. At noon that day, as Hitler and Goebbels were discussing the details for what would become the “Reich Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia,” news arrived that Hácha had requested an audience with Hitler. Hitler agreed to meet the Czechoslovakian president but also informed the Wehrmacht leadership that the scheduled invasion would proceed no matter the circumstances.
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That evening, accompanied by Czech Foreign Minister František Chvalkovský, Hácha arrived at Anhalter station in Berlin. The guard of honour on hand to welcome him was nothing but a façade. Hitler had no intention of negotiating in good faith. His goal was complete Czech capitulation, and he employed the same tactics of wearing down his opponent that he had used against Kurt von Schuschnigg. He kept his visitors waiting for hours in the Adlon Hotel, while he watched a movie at the Chancellery.
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It was past midnight when Hácha and Chvalkovský were led through the long hallways and reception rooms of the Reich Chancellery to Hitler’s gigantic office, which was only dimly lit by several standing lamps.
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To put additional pressure on his visitors, Hitler had a large group of underlings in attendance. Alongside Göring, Keitel and Ribbentrop, there were Ernst von Weizsäcker, Otto Meissner, Press Spokesman Otto Dietrich and the interpreter Paul Schmidt; also present was the SS officer and Foreign Ministry State Secretary Walter Hewel, who took the minutes of the meeting.
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What ensued was the political equivalent of a scene from a gangster film without parallel in recent diplomatic history. Hácha had hoped to preserve at least partial Czech independence, but Hitler made it brutally clear right from the outset that there was no room for compromise. He rattled off a litany of supposed Czech affronts, claimed that the new Czech government was still animated by the “spirit of Beneš” and announced his intention to turn the remaining Czech territory into a German protectorate: at 6 a.m., the Wehrmacht would be invading. Hácha could do his people “one final service” by phoning his minister of war with the order not to resist German troops. “Hácha and Chvalkovský sat frozen in their seats,” Schmidt recalled.
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While an underling tried to establish a telephone connection with Prague, Göring threatened an aerial bombardment of that city if German demands were not met. That was apparently too much for the Czech president, who collapsed. Hitler’s personal doctor Theodor Morell was called to give the only-semi-conscious Hácha an injection.
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Hácha recovered sufficiently to confer with his foreign minister in a separate room and issue the orders demanded to Prague via telephone. Around 4 a.m., he and Chvalkovský signed a declaration, presented to them by Hitler, in which the Czech president “entrusted the fate of the Czech people and country to the hands of the Führer of the German Reich.” At this point, the minutes read, “The Führer accepted this declaration and expressed his commitment to take the Czech people under the protection of the German Reich and to guarantee an autonomous development of its ethnic-popular life in keeping with its particular characteristics.”
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None of the Germans present, including Weizsäcker, raised a word of objection to the treatment of the Czech delegation, which violated the basic conventions of diplomacy and common decency. On the contrary, in his 1950 memoirs, Weizsäcker still had the audacity to accuse Hácha of being complicit in the “seemingly legal beginning of Hitler’s march on Prague.”
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This top diplomat also shared the Führer’s racist prejudices against the Czechs. “They were never pleasant: outside the Reich border they were lice in the fur and inside, scabies under the skin,” Weizsäcker remarked one day after the unscrupulous coercion of Hácha, which he euphemistically called a “memorable late-night act of negotiation led by the Führer using the whole range of tactics.”
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Hitler himself was “overjoyed” and self-satisfied by the “greatest stroke of political genius of all time.”
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He demanded that his two secretaries Christa Schroeder and Gerda Daranowski, who had spent the night in a room next to Hitler’s office, each give him a kiss on the cheek, saying: “This is the best day of my life…I will go down in history as the greatest German ever.”
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In the small hours German troops crossed the Czech border, and by 9 a.m. the first units had reached Prague, where they were greeted not with cheers, but with silence and choked-back anger. Around noon, Hitler boarded a train for the Bohemian town of Ceská Lípá, from where he travelled the remaining 100 kilometres to Prague in his three-axle Mercedes limousine. It was snowing heavily, so the city’s inhabitants barely noticed him arriving at the Hradschin Castle, the office of the Czech president. Nothing had been prepared for his arrival, so his adjutants were sent out to procure some ham, sausage and beer.
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That night, assisted by Frick and Stuckart, Hitler issued a decree establishing the Reich Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia. It granted Czechs a measure of autonomy.
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Hitler named former Foreign Minister von Neurath as “Reich Protector.” As a member of the old conservative elites, he was considered a moderate, and thus his appointment served to camouflage the fact that the Czechs were being subjected to German occupation.
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At the same time, at Jozef Tiso’s request, Slovakia was also placed under German protection, and German troops advanced to Bratislava. On the afternoon of 16 March, Hitler left Prague, returning to Berlin on 19 March via Brünn, Linz and Vienna. Goebbels had once again succeeded in mobilising thousands of people in the capital to turn out and cheer the Führer as he drove from the Görlitzer station to the Chancellery. “We have a week behind us that out of all the astonishing events we have experienced thus far has probably brought the most astonishing thing of all,” former Reich negotiator and museum director Rudolf Buttmann noted in his diary. Hitler’s “great statesmanship” had once again led to a “massive increase in power” without bloodshed. “He is always lucky,” an acquaintance told Buttmann in the street.
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But such sentiments did not reflect the mood of the entire population. The annexation of the remnants of the Czech state was anything but universally welcomed. Many people remembered Hitler promising in his Sportpalast speech on 26 September that the Sudetenland would be his last territorial demand, asking “Was this really necessary?”
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The executive committee of the SPD in exile, which had been forced to relocate from Prague to Paris, spoke on the basis of reports from within Germany of widespread “concern that with its latest ‘victory’ Germany had taken another step towards a major war and another defeat.”
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The significance of the destruction of Czechoslovakia for Hitler’s war plans was considerable. The German Reich gained not only the largest Czechoslovakian armaments facilities, the Skoda factories in Pilsen and Prague; it also acquired enough weapons and supplies to outfit twenty further divisions. In addition to industrial resources, the German war effort gained access to Czechoslovakian copper, nickel, lead, aluminium, zinc and tin. The door was also wide open for Germany to penetrate the Danube and Balkan region economically. And in terms of military strategy, the Reich was now better positioned to launch campaigns to conquer further “living space in the east.”
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On the evening of 15 March, Hitler was convinced that “in a fortnight, no one will be talking about this any more,”
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but he was fundamentally mistaken. Hitler’s seizure of Prague was a wake-up call to leaders in London, where the British government realised that it had been duped and that Hitler’s promises were not worth the paper they were written on. The policy of appeasement and the idea that Hitler could be restrained by treaties and conciliation were revealed as utterly misguided. Ambassador Henderson was withdrawn from Berlin until further notice,
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and in a speech in Birmingham on 17 March, Chamberlain announced an about-turn in British policy. The prime minister accused Hitler of crassly violating the principle of national self-determination that he himself had always invoked, concluding his address by asking: “Is this in fact a step towards trying to dominate the world by force?”
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The Nazi leadership did not take seriously the protests from London, which the French government seconded. “This is just hysterical, after-the-fact wailing that leaves us entirely cold,” Goebbels scoffed.
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Indeed, Hitler thought that he could exploit the situation to stage his next foreign-policy coup. On 20 March, Ribbentrop summoned Lithuanian Foreign Minister Joseph Urbsys, who was visiting Berlin, and demanded the immediate return of the Klaipeda Region, known in Germany as the Memel Territory, a part of East Prussia that had been put under French control after the First World War and was subsequently annexed by Lithuania in 1923. Two days later, the Lithuanian council of ministers approved the handover, and that afternoon Hitler boarded the battleship MS
Deutschland
in the port of Swinemünde. Around midnight, Ribbentrop announced the signing of a treaty reuniting the Memel Territory with the Reich. Hitler declared a corresponding law the following morning while still on board the ship. “You live in a great age,” he declared to his manservant Heinz Linge. “We now take care of little matters like this on the side.”
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At 2 p.m., Hitler disembarked at the port of Memel and gave a short speech from the balcony of the city’s main theatre, in which he welcomed “our old German racial comrades as the newest citizens of our Greater German Empire.”
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That same evening he departed the city, and by noon on 24 March he was back in Berlin.

The amalgamation of the Memel Territory was the last foreign triumph Hitler would achieve without bloodshed. In the night of 21–22 March, while awaiting the decision of the Lithuanian government, he held a long conversation with Goebbels in the Chancellery about his future foreign policy. “He wants to calm things down a bit so that we regain trust,” Goebbels reported in his diary.
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Should Hitler have said anything of the kind, he was doubly deceiving himself. On the one hand, as we have seen, neither the Nazi system of rule nor Hitler’s own personality allowed for any periods of extended peace and quiet. Less than three days after their conversation, Goebbels once again found him pondering how he could “solve the question of Danzig,” or Gdansk, which had been declared a free city after the First World War. “He intends to apply some pressure on Poland and hopes that Poland responds,” Goebbels noted.
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With that, there was no more doubt about the next target of Hitler’s free-flowing aggression. And Hitler also deceived himself about the possibility of regaining the trust of the Western powers, which he had forfeited once and for all by breaking the Munich Agreement. He had removed the mask of the peace-loving politician who only wanted to revise the status quo, and everyone could now see the brutal nature of his regime, which demanded unlimited expansion. The real problem, as British Foreign Secretary Lord Halifax put it at a cabinet meeting on 18 March, was Germany’s drive for world domination, which it was in the interests of all states to resist.
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On 31 March, Britain and France issued a statement guaranteeing the independence of Poland. The two sides of what in a few months would become the Second World War had been formed.