Chapter 12: The Road to Munich
What really happened in 1938.
You may have heard of “The Munich Agreement.” Perhaps you may have even heard of it more than once…
If you’ve been paying attention to political discourse for any stretch of time, then you have encountered some politician or pundit making reference to the Munich Agreement. It is perhaps the most referenced event in our discourse on international relations.
For some people, it is always 1938 in Munich.
The agreement itself has become a byword for pusillanimity. Faced with an evil foe, you have a choice. You can try to appease the evil foe or you can choose to see through their deceit and recognize their maximalist aims…and then you can fight. In our political discourse, the Munich Agreement is inevitably used to recommend the latter choice by denigrating the former. Naive appeasement means fooling yourself into thinking you have avoided a fight, which then, consequently, makes the fight that much worse in the end.
Of course, no serious analyst can dispute this conclusion about the Munich agreement itself. French Premier Eduard Daladier and British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain made a vast error in judgment in trying to appease Hitler. The French and British leaders did not, in point of fact, achieve “peace for [their] time.” Quite the contrary. A little over a year later, World War II broke out. They made a huge assumption, and that assumption turned out to be wrong.
The Munich Agreement certainly deserves its reputation. However, when it comes to how it is deployed today in debates about international relations, the real question should be whether every geopolitical conflict is similar enough to Nazi aims in central Europe in the 1930s, and, relatedly, whether every world leader thinks and acts like Adolf Hitler. Put another way, does appeasement always fail? Or does it only fail when politicians have aims and motivations similar to those of Hitler.
The truth is that some situations may resemble the Sudetenland crisis in 1938 and some leaders might have aims and motivations to say nothing of a personality somewhat similar to Hitler’s. But many do not.
Not every leader is Adolf Hitler. Hitler is a type.
When a historical analogy becomes rote and overused, it is a pretty good sign that we need to go back to the original details.
Today, we jump into what actually happened at Munich in 1938.
Early last week (my apologies for the long delay! I wanted to give this topic its due and it has been a very hectic two weeks), I tried to sketch out the problem of German nationalism and how it fed into Hitler’s foreign policy and the Anschluss in particular.
In the wake of World War I, the emergence of national self-determination as a guiding geopolitical principle provided an opening for German nationalism. The imperial breakup at the end of World War I (which ended four empires—the Russian, the Austro-Hungarian, the German, and the Ottoman) allowed national self-determination to take center stage as an organizing principle in international relations. Each nation—that is, a people group with a shared language, culture, and more often than not, a religion—should have their own government, their own state.
The problem, of course, is that not all nations were deemed worthy of a state for their people. (If you’re interested in this topic, please check out Erez Manela’s book The Wilsonian Moment, in which he looks at contemporaneous nationalist movements in Egypt, India, China, and Korea and how they engaged with Wilsonian self-determination.)
But it wasn’t just national movements in the colonized world that were disappointed by the colonial powers’ selective use of self-determination. The Germans also were disappointed!
Of course, that isn’t to say that Woodrow Wilson’s liberal internationalism was responsible for Nazism. There was plenty of agency on the part of the Germans. No one forced them to do what they did from 1938 on. But the imperial breakup at the end of World War I and the determinative role of national self-determination for some ethnic groups in Europe but not for Germans did, in point of fact, leave an opening.
And it was an opening that a fanatical megalomaniac like Adolf Hitler chose to exploit.
This map shows the Anschluss, which united 7 million Austrian Germans to the Nazi state in March 1938. As great a political success as this was for Hitler, there were still 3 million more Germans living in the Sudetenland, in an area bordered by Bavaria, Saxony, and Austria (at that point in 1938, all part of Germany).
Just by way of reminder, here is the map of all the Germans living outside of Germany in 1937.
You can see that after Austria, Czechoslovakia had the largest number of Germans living outside of Germany. Moreover, as I noted, it was largely surrounded by Germany (which now included Austria).
Naturally, after the peaceful success of the absorption of Austria, Hitler turned his attention to the Sudetenland. Anyone who had read Mein Kampf or listened to his speeches would have known that he wished to claim more land for the German people. Everything in Hitler’s political career pointed towards an attempt to unite the German-speaking Sudetenland to Germany.
Shirer begins chapter 12 by discussing Case Green, Hitler’s plan to attack Czechoslovakia. Obviously, this was not known at the time. We must remember, Hitler had made at least a couple of “peace speeches,” in which he tried to assuage foreign audiences that his aims were minimalist—he just wanted a fair shake for Germans after their unfair deal at Versailles. Those who had read Mein Kampf or followed him a little more closely—like Shirer, for instance—suspected that Hitler might not actually just trying to get a fair shake for the Germans. But there was no way for him to know about Case Green or any of Hitler’s dual track plans.
In these chapters and for the remainder of the book, Shirer relies much more on the archival record than any personal observation from covering the Nazi regime during those days. Occasionally, he will insert a personal observation, but they are not all that common. What is most interesting to the story is not what a journalist could have reported at the time but rather what was found in the secret archives afterwards.
In late March 1938, the leader of the Sudeten German Party (the Nazi equivalent in Czechoslovakia) met with Hitler for three days to plan their next moves. The Sudeten German Party would make demands that were unacceptable to the Czech government in order to create a crisis.
As noted above, the uneven application of the principle of self-determination, to say nothing of certain other parts of the Versailles treaty, were unfair. British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain felt very strongly that the public concerns that Hitler raised were legitimate, and so he chose to pressure the Czechoslovak government to give in to the Sudeten German Party and Hitler.
Of course, they didn’t see it the same way. And so in May 1938, the Czechoslovaks mobilized. This was the closest Europe had been to full-scale war since the Armistice twenty years earlier. The French made it clear that they would go the aid of the Czechoslvaks. The British, in keeping with tradition, were decidedly ambiguous. But it was enough to get Hitler to back down. He informed the Czechs on May 23 that Berlin had no aggressive intentions.
On May 28, though, after brooding for several days, Hitler convoked his military leaders and gave them instructions to prepare for a military invasion in October, four months later, to resolve once and for all the “Sudeten question.”
Some generals were deeply concerned by the moves that Hitler was making. Shirer devotes some space to discussing plots against Hitler over the summer of 1938. It is not worth getting into all the details here, but in the end, General Beck, who headed up these efforts, misinterpreted Britain and France. Unlike Hitler, Beck “had a sense of history but not of contemporary politics,” Shirer writes. They did not act and eventually it was too late.
Over the summer, the crisis escalated again. News of German mobilization reached foreign powers. Early at the Nuremberg rally in September 1938, Goering also made an extremely bellicose speech about how the “miserable pygmy race” of the Czechs were oppressing a “cultured people,” all supported by Moscow and “the eternal mask of the Jew devil.”
At the same time, the Czechs tried to defuse the crisis by playing it quiet and dignified. But the train station and airport in Prague, where Shirer was covering the story, were full of Jews trying to fle. Gas masks were distributed. Everyone thought war was coming.
When Hitler finally spoke at Nuremberg, he demanded that the Czech government give “justice” to the Sudeten Germans or face the consequences. Two days of localized fighting broke out in the Sudetenland, and the Czech government ended the violence by declaring martial law.
Chamberlain decided to go to see Hitler in person in order to extricate Europe from the crisis. Hitler was tickled that the British leader would come to plead with him.
And so on September 15, 1938, Chamberlain traveled by airplane for the very first time to Bavaria for a visit to Berchtesgaden, Hitler’s residence in the south of Bavaria near the (former) border with Austria.
Once inside, Hitler gave a long diatribe, as was his wont, in which he insisted on the “return” of the Sudeten to Germany. As usual with Hitler, this was ahistorical framing: it had belonged to Austria, but never to Germany.
Chamberlain interrupted Hitler—an unusual move in the presence of the Fuehrer. “If the Fuehrer is determined to settle this matter by force without waiting even for a discussion between ourselves, why did he let me come? I have wasted my time.” It got his attention. Hitler calmed down and asked if Britain would agree to a secession of the Sudeten reason. Chamberlain told Hitler he agreed with it in principle but would need approval by the rest of the British government.
Shirer notes:
From this surrender at Berchtesgaden, all else ensued.
Chamberlain returned to London, and the French leaders joined them there, where the democratic countries worked out a plan to avoid war. Any territory inhabited by more than 50 percent Germans must be turned over to Germany.
The Czechs, as you might guess, objected and asked to submit the question to arbitration under the German-Czech treaty of 1925. After some agonizing back and forth, though, eventually the Czechs agreed to the Franco-British plan on September 21. The next day, Chamberlain returned to Germany, meeting Hitler at Godesberg.
In the meantime, Shirer himself had returned from Czechoslovakia to Germany and was in Godesberg to cover the meeting. Over breakfast on September 22, Shirer and another journalist noticed Hitler walking past them in the garden of their hotel. In Berlin Diary, Shirer recounts his observations of Hitler:
On inspection, it was a very curious walk indeed. In the first place, it was very ladylike. Dainty little steps. In the second place, every few steps he cocked his right shoulder nervously, his left leg snapping up as he did so. I watched him closely as he came back past us. The same nervous tic. He had ugly black patches under his eyes. I think the man is on the edge of a nervous breakdown.
This seeming lack of control of himself, unpredictable emotion, and inscrutable shifts lies behind much of these geopolitical events. Even those who usually hew to more structural explanations of historical events have to concede that Hitler’s personality played an overwhelming role in the leadup to World War II. It also explains a bit the enduring fascination with the man.
Concretely, for the leaders of the remaining democratic nations in Europe, it meant that they felt that they had to do something to placate him. At Godesberg, Chamberlain presented a plan to the Germans in which the Sudetenland would be turned over to Germany without even a plebiscite. It was a coup for Hitler. But he played it coy. “I am terribly sorry, but after the events of the last few days, this plan is no longer of any use,” Hitler told Chamberlain.
The British Prime Minister was shocked.
The next day, September 23, Chamberlain asked for Hitler to draw up his new demands in writing and accompany them with a map, which Hitler promptly did. This time, he demanded that the Czech withdraw from the Sudeteland on the morning of September 26 (that is, a little over 48 hours later).
Just at that moment, news arrived that the Czechs had ordered a general mobilization. After a long night of talks, eventually Hitler offered a concession: he would delay the required withdrawal date to October 1. As they parted, Hitler insisted that this was the last territorial demand he would make in Europe, a statement which seemed to impress the Prime Minister.
On September 28, Hitler spoke at the Sportpalast in Berlin for three hours, “shouting and shrieking in the worst paroxysm” Shirer had ever seen. “For the first time in all the years I’ve observed him he seemed tonight to have completely lost control of himself,” Shirer wrote in his diary.
In the next few days, world leaders across the globe attempted to intervene. The King of Sweden pointed out that Hitler would lose and the whole world would blame him. President Roosevelt begged Hitler to restrain himself. And the Duce of Italy offered to mediate, asking Hitler to refrain from mobilization.
One can always see which powers actually matter by who is at the table when a big decision is made. The Concert of Vienna in 1815 redrew the borders of Europe after the Napoleonic Wars included Austria, France, Prussia, Russia, and the United Kingdom. At the Berlin Conference in 1878, where Africa was partioned by European powers, the United States was an observer but not a participant. By 1919 at Versailles, the United States was at the head of the table with the United Kingdom, France, and Italy being the others.
And at Munich in 1938, where world leaders convened to settle the question of the Sudeten Germans in Czechoslovakia, the countries represented included Italy, France, Britain, and Germany. The Czechs were not invited, nor were the Hungarians or Poles or Soviets or Americans or any number of other smaller countries.
It was just the leaders of Italy, France, Britain, and Germany and their assistants who convened in Munich at half past noon on September 29.
Chamberlain explained at length how the British and French had managed to get Czechoslovak approval for the plan, expecting immediate agreement from Hitler. That is not what happened. Hitler then upped the ante, asking for more. (Interestingly, Mussolini could understand French and English, but Hitler could not, which flustered him.)
The British wanted to know how the Czechs would be compensated and if a Czech representative could join the discussion. Eventually Chamberlain got Hitler to agree that Czech representatives could be present in the next room. So two Czech diplomats were convened. However, they were given no say in the final agreement. The French and English told them that if they did not accept, they would be on their own with the Germans.
And that was the end of it. Chamberlain and Daladier were so eager to avoid war with Germany that they didn’t use any remaining leverage they had, giving in entirely. “Appeasement” is the word that has become synonymous with the agreement determined in the Bavarian capital at the end of September 1938. Hitler secured even greater concessions from the French and the British, and all they got was flimsy promise that no more territorial demands would be coming. A second great war in the early 20th century would be forestalled.
For his part, Chamberlain managed to secure a concession from Hitler the next morning that the British and Germans would work together to never go to war together agian. Hitler read it quickly and signed it.
This was the document that Chamberlain displayed proudly at his return on September 30, 1938, waving it to the crowd before reading it. The British prime minister told the crowd, it would be “peace for our time.”
Of course, it wasn’t.
Chapter Recaps
Topical Posts
Podcast ep. 1: The Man, The Myth: Hitler in American Culture
The Problems with the German Character Explanation of the Nazis
Podcast ep. 2: Why are Dictators (and Techno-monarchs) Appealing?
Podcast ep. 3: Interview with a 20th Century War Correspondent: Jon Randal
If You’ve Fallen Behind on the Reading, This Post is For You
Who was William L. Shirer? — part 2 (The Nightmare Years 1934-1940)