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

At 3:00 p.m. on Wednesday, September 28th, Chamberlain met Parliament for the first time during the crisis to inform it of what had been done. The whole city of London was in a panic. The Honorable Members sat hunched on their benches, waiting for Goriner’s bombs to come through the roof. As Chamberlain drew to the end of his long speech, a message was brought to him. He announced that it was an invitation to a four-Power conference at Munich on Thursday. There was a roar of joy and relief as Chamberlain hurried from the building without any formal ending to the session.

At Munich, Hitler, Chamberlain, Mussolini, and Daladier carved up Czechoslovakia without consulting anyone, least of all the Czechs. The conference lasted from 12:30 p.m. on September 29th to 2:30 a.m. when the agreement of the four Powers was handed to the Czech minister in Berlin, who had been waiting outside the door for over ten hours. The agreement reached Prague only eighteen hours before the German occupation was to begin.

The Munich agreement provided that certain designated areas of Czechoslovakia would be occupied by the German Army in four stages from October 1st to October 7th. A fifth area, to be designated by an international commission, would be occupied by October 10th. No property was to be withdrawn from these areas. The international commission would order plebiscites which must be held before the end of November, the areas designated being occupied by an international force during the interval. The same international commission was to supervise the occupation and draw the final frontier. For six months the populations concerned would have the right of option into and out of the areas transferred under the supervision of a German-Czechoslovak commission. The rump of Czechoslovakia was to be guaranteed by France and Britain. Germany and Italy would join this guarantee as soon as the Polish and Hungarian minority problems in that state had been settled. If they were not settled in three months, the four Powers would meet again to consider the problem.

The Munich agreement was violated on every point in favor of Germany, so that ultimately the German Army merely occupied the places it wanted. As a result, the Czech economic system was destroyed, and every important railroad or highway was cut or crippled. This was done by the International Commission, consisting of German Secretary of State Weizsacker and the French, British, Italian, and Czech diplomatic representatives in Berlin. Under dictation of the German General Staff, this group, by a 4 to 1 vote, accepted every German demand and canceled the plebiscites. In addition, the guarantee of the rump of Czechoslovakia was never given, although Poland seized areas in which the majority of the population was not Polish on October 2nd and Hungary was given southern Slovakia on November 2nd. The final frontier with Germany was dictated by Germany alone to the Czechs, the other three members of the commission having withdrawn.

Beneš resigned as president of Czechoslovakia under the threat of a German ultimatum on October 5th and was replaced by Emil Hácha. Slovakia and Ruthenia were given complete autonomy at once. The Soviet alliance was ended, and the Communist Party outlawed. The anti-Nazi refugees from the Sudetenland were rounded up by the Prague government and handed over to the Germans to be destroyed. All these events showed very clearly the chief result of Munich: Germany was supreme in central Europe, and any possibility of curtailing that power either by a joint policy of the Western Powers with the Soviet Union and Italy or by finding any openly anti-German resistance in central Europe itself was ended. Since this was exactly what Chamberlain and his friends had wanted, they should have been satisfied.

The Year of Dupes, 1939

Plans for appeasement by Chamberlain and plans for aggression by Hitler did not end with Munich. Within three weeks of this agreement (October 21, 1938), Hitler issued orders to his generals to prepare plans to destroy the rump of Czechoslovakia and to annex Memel from Lithuania. A month later he added Danzig to this list, although he signified his desire to achieve this through a revolutionary action without a war against Poland. This reluctance for war against Poland did not arise from any affection for peace but from the fact that he had not made up his mind whether to attack France or Poland. He was inclined at first to attack westward, and did not change his mind and decide to deal first with Poland until April 1, 1939. The plans to attack France and the Low Countries soon were reported to London and Paris and had a good deal to do with building up the war spirit in those areas.

In addition, Italian demands for territorial concessions from France in November 1938 aroused the fighting spirit of that country from the level to which it had sagged in September. Mussolini was seeking his share in the booty of appeasement but lacked the strength to do much more than make a nuisance of himself. His followers staged a great demonstration in the Italian Chamber of Corporations on November 30, 1938, in which there were loud demands for Nice, Corsica, and Tunis from France. In December the old Laval-Mussolini agreement of January, 1935, was denounced as inadequate, and a violent anti-French campaign was waged in the Italian press. These disturbances were encouraged by Chamberlain when he pointedly announced in the House of Commons on December 12th that Britain was not bound to come to the aid of France or its possessions if they were attacked by Italy.

Bonnet at once tried to repair this damage by asking Chamberlain to make a reference to the fact that Italy had bound itself to preserve the status quo in the Mediterranean in the Anglo-Italian (“Ciano-Perth”) Agreement of April 1938. Chamberlain refused. Bonnet at once pointed out to London that France had bound itself on December 4, 1936, to come to the assistance of Britain if it were attacked and that this promise was still completely valid. Nonetheless, it was only on February 6th, when Hitler’s plans to attack Holland and France “almost immediately” were reported in London, that Chamberlain could persuade himself to state in Commons that “any threat to the vital interests of France, from whatever quarter it came, must evoke the immediate cooperation of this country.”

The Italian demands on France had two important results. The fighting spirits of the French people were revived by being threatened by such a weak Power as Italy, and Bonnet was driven to a new appeasement of Germany. On December 6th Ribbentrop came to Paris, signed a treaty of friendship and neutrality, and opened a series of economic discussions. On this occasion the German foreign minister received from Bonnet the impression that France would give Germany a free hand in eastern Europe. French fears that Britain would seek to detach Mussolini from Hitler by making concessions to Italy at the expense of France did not end until February 1939, and reached their peak in January, when Chamberlain and Halifax made a formal visit to Rome to recognize the King of Italy as Emperor of Ethiopia. This had been agreed between the two Powers in the Ciano-Perth Agreement of April 1938, and was carried into effect in November, although the conditions originally set by Britain, the withdrawal of Italian troops from Spain, had not been fulfilled.

Before Hitler could carry on any further aggressions, he had to dispose of the carcass of Czechoslovakia. He and Ribbentrop were outraged that they had been cheated out of a war in September, and immediately made up their minds to wipe the rest of Czechoslovakia off the map as soon as possible and proceed to a war. The next time, said Hitler, he hoped no “dirty pig” would suggest a conference.

Orders to plan an invasion of the rump of Czechoslovakia were issued on October 21st, as we have said. Keitel’s plans, presented on December 17th, provided that the task would be done by the peacetime army without mobilization. Any possibility of opposition from Britain or France was effectively disposed of by Lord Halifax’s insistence that the guarantee to Czechoslovakia be worded so as to be binding on all four of the Munich Powers jointly (or at least on three of them) and would not be accepted by Britain if worded in such a way as to bind the signers individually. This made any guarantee meaningless, and this distasteful project was indefinitely postponed by a German note to Lord Halifax on March 3, 1939.