Carroll Quigley - Tragedy and Hope - A History of the World in Our Time

Among the Germans of the Sudetenland, only part were Nazis, but these were noisy, well organized, and financed from Berlin. Their numbers grew steadily, especially after the Austrian Anschluss. The Nazi Party in Czechoslovakia was banned in 1934 but, under Konrad Henlein, merely changed its name to the Sudeten German Party. With 600,000 members, it polled 1,200,000 votes in the election of May 1935 and obtained 44 seats in the Parliament, only one less than the largest party. As soon as Edward Beneš succeeded Tomáš Masaryk as president of Czechoslovakia in 1935, he took steps to conciliate the Sudetens, offering them, for example, places in the administration proportionate to their percentage of the total population. This was not acceptable to the Germans because it would have given them only one-fifth of the places in their own area, where they were over 90 percent of the population, as well as one-fifth in Slovakia, where they had no interest at all.

In 1937 the prime minister, Milan Hodža, offered to transfer all the Germans in the national administration to the Sudeten areas and to train others until the whole bureaucracy in these areas was German. None of these suggestions was acceptable to Konrad Henlein for the simple reason that he wanted no concessions within Czechoslovakia, however extensive; his real desire was to destroy the Czechoslovak state. Since he could not admit this publicly, although he did admit it in his letters to Hitler in 1937, he had to continue to negotiate, raising his demands as the government made larger concessions. These concessions were a danger to the state because the fortified zone against Germany ran along the mountains and thus right through the Sudetenland. Every concession to the Sudetens thus weakened the country’s ability to defend itself against attack. These two facts made all efforts to compromise with Henlein futile from the beginning, and made the constant British pressure on the Czech government to give additional concessions worse than futile. It is worthy to note that no public demand was made by either Henlein or Germany to detach the Sudetenland from Czechoslovakia until after September 12, 1938, although influential persons in the British government were advocating this, both in public and private, for months before this date.

The Czech strength rested on its army of approximately thirty-three divisions, which was the best in Europe in quality, the excellent fortification system, and its alliances with France, the Soviet Union, and the Little Entente. The annexation of Austria surrounded Bohemia with German territory on three sides, but its position, from a military point of view, was still strong. A line drawn from Berlin to Vienna would pass by Prague, but the German Army could not safely invade Bohemia across its weakly fortified southern frontier with Austria because of the danger of a Czech counterattack from its fortified base into Bavaria.

Within two weeks of Hitler’s annexation of Austria, Britain was moving. It was decided to put pressure on the Czechs to make concessions to the Germans; to encourage France and eventually Germany to do the same; to insist that Germany must not use force to reach a decision, but to have patience enough to allow negotiations to achieve the same result; and to exclude Russia, although it was allied to Czechoslovakia, from the negotiations completely. All this was justified by the arguments that Czechoslovakia, in a war with Germany, would be smashed immediately, that Russia was of no military value whatever and would not honor its alliance with the Czechs anyway, and that Germany would be satisfied if it obtained the Sudetenland and the Polish Corridor. All these assumptions were very dubious, but they were assiduously propagated both in public and in private and may, at times, even have convinced the speakers themselves.

The group which spread this version of the situation included Chamberlain, Lord Halifax, John Simon, Samuel Hoare, Horace Wilson, the Cliveden Set, the British ambassador in Berlin (Sir Nevile Henderson), and the British minister in Prague (Basil Newton). To make their aims more appealing they emphasized the virtues of “autonomy” and “self-determination” and the contribution to European peace which would arise if Germany were satisfied and if Czechoslovakia were “neutralized like Switzerland” and “guaranteed like Belgium.” By “neutralization” they meant that Czechoslovakia must renounce its alliances with the Soviet Union and with France. By “guaranteed” they meant that the rump of Czechoslovakia which was left after the Sudetenland went to Germany would be guaranteed by France and Germany but emphatically not by Britain.

How Czechoslovakia could be guaranteed against Germany by France alone after its defenses had been destroyed, when it could not, according to Britain, be defended in 1938 when its defenses were intact, and when it would be supported by France, the Soviet Union, and Britain, is only one of the numerous British illogicalities displayed in this crisis. Nevertheless, Britain was able to win support for these plans, especially in France where Foreign Minister Georges Bonnet and Prime Minister Edouard Daladier reluctantly accepted them.

In France, fear of war was rampant. Moreover, in France, even more obviously than in England, fear of Bolshevism was a powerful factor, especially in influential circles of the Right. The ending of the Soviet Alliance, the achievement of a four-Power pact, and the termination of Czechoslovakia as “a spearhead of Bolshevism in central Europe” had considerable appeal to those conservative circles which regarded the Popular Front government of Leon Blum as “a spearhead of Bolshevism” in France itself. To this group, as to a less vociferous group in Britain, even a victory over Hitler in war to save Czechoslovakia would have been a defeat for their aims, not so much because they disliked democracy and admired authoritarian reaction (which was true) as because they were convinced that the defeat of Hitler would expose all of central, and perhaps western, Europe to Bolshevism and chaos. The slogan of these people, “Better Hitler than Blum,” became increasingly prevalent in the course of 1938 and, although nothing quite like this was heard in Britain, the idea behind it was not absent from that country. In this dilemma the “three-bloc world” of the Cliveden Set or even the German-Soviet war of the anti-Bolsheviks seemed to be the only solution. Because both required the elimination of Czechoslovakia from the European power system, Czechoslovakia was eliminated with the help of German aggression, French indecision and war-weariness, and British public appeasement and merciless secret pressure.

There is no need to follow the interminable negotiations between Henlein and the Czech government, negotiations in which Britain took an active role from March 1938 to the end. Plan after plan for minority rights, economic concessions, cultural and administrative autonomy, and even political federalism were produced by the Czechs, submitted to Britain and Germany, and eventually brushed aside as inadequate by Henlein. The latter’s “Karlsbad Demands,” enunciated on April 24th after Henlein’s conference with Hitler, were extreme. They began with an introduction denouncing the Czechs and the Czechoslovak state, insisting that the country must abandon its foreign policy and cease to be an obstacle to the German “Drive to the East.” They then enumerated eight demands. Among these we find (1) complete equality between Czechs and Germans, (2) recognition of the German group as a corporation with legal personality, (3) demarcation of the German areas, (4) full self-government in those areas, (5) legal protection for citizens outside those areas, (6) reparation for damages inflicted by the Czechs on the Sudetens since 1918, (7) German officials in German areas, and (8) full freedom to profess German nationality and German political philosophy. There is here no hint of revision of the frontiers, yet when, after long weeks of negotiations, the Czech government substantially conceded these points under severe pressure from Britain, Henlein broke off the negotiations and fled to Germany (September 7-12, 1938).