528. The Nazis' Road to War: Hitler Prepares to Strike (Part 1)

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Today, we are insulted. Our blood brothers are at the mercy of their cruel abusers without any means of defending themselves.
I am speaking of Czechoslovakia. Among the suppressed minorities in this state are three and a half million Germans.

These Germans are God's creatures.

The Almighty did not create them so that the Versailles Treaty could place them at the mercy of an alien power.

And he did not create seven million checks to reign over these three and a half million, keep them in tutelage.

And far less did he create them for ravage and torture. The misery of the Sudeten Germans defies description.
They are being oppressed and humiliated in an unprecedented fashion. There must be an end to the injustice inflicted upon these people.
The Reich will no longer stand for any further oppression and persecutions of these three and a half million Germans. It is the duty of all of us to never again bow our heads to any alien will.
To this, let us pledge ourselves. So help us God.
So that Dominic was very much not a friend of the show, Adolf Hitler. And he was speaking to the Nazi Party Congress in Nuremberg on the 12th of September, 1938, about Czechoslovakia, as he frames it.
And it's the beginning of the year. We're into 2025 now.
And on the rest is history. If it's the new year, it must be Nazis.
You're not wrong there, Tom. That was a very spirited performance.
You didn't do an accent, which is probably best. I wanted evoke the sense of hitler through the power of my acting and my oratory so i hope people got that sense if you do get cancelled for that reading it's good to bow out in a very spirited yeah in a very spirited performance i also hope that people who may be watching this on youtube will enjoy the the hand gestures which i thought were very hitlerian they were very hitian, yeah.
And actually, the funny thing is those are your usual hand gestures, aren't they?

It is.

It is.

That's actually how you speak off camera.

So actually, I find it quite easy.

Exactly. So let's give people a bit of context.
What Hitler is doing there, obviously, is he's,

on the face of it, defending the interests of the German-speaking minority in Western

Czechoslovakia, people who, he says, have been ravaged and tortured by their

Thank you. defending the interests of the German-speaking minority in Western Czechoslovakia, people who, he says, have been ravaged and tortured by their Czech or Czechoslovakian overlords.
Of course, what he's really doing is preparing the ground for the invasion and dismemberment of Czechoslovakia, which he sees as a crucial step towards the creation of a new German dominion in Central and Eastern Europe. And Tom, as you said, we always like to welcome the New Year with a series about the Nazis.
With the Third Reich. With the Third Reich.
So we've done two series in the last couple of years. The first one was about their rise, the Nazis' rise to power in the 1920s up to 1933.
And the second one was about the Nazis in power in the course of the 30s. And this one really will lead us up to the outbreak of the Second World War and the fall of Poland.
And this week, we're going to be focusing on one of the most discussed, most controversial, most, I guess, genuinely infamous diplomatic episodes in history, which is the Munich Agreement of October 1938. I mean, I would say, yeah, it's possibly the incident from history that has had the greatest influence on the way people certainly people in the west have approached international affairs since the war i mean basically it kind of lies behind everything from the suiz crisis to the invasion of iraq it absolutely does we don't want to be neville chamberlain we want to face down dictators yeah the munich analogy is probably the most well-worn analogy as you say in in all international relations and actually I think it's a crisis that's generally a bit misunderstood and that the nuances of it are more surprising and more interesting than people think.
And maybe the lessons that people draw are not necessarily always the right ones. So I think generally when people use the Munich analogy, they're using it merely as a political tool.
As a justification to go to war. Justification for something they wanted to do anyway.
Of course, that's what politicians always do, isn't it? So let's dig into this in proper detail. And we'll start by, I think, by reminding ourselves how absolutely central the idea of war is to the whole Nazi project.
So obviously the first point, the foundational point, is that Nazism is driven above all by the shattering experience of the Great War and by the desire to put that right.

So as Ian Kershaw says, Richard Evans, all the great historians of Nazism and of Hitler, the single thing that drives it more than anything else is a sense of humiliation and a thirst for revenge after 1918. And actually, you don't need to be a Nazi to have that.
So loads of people in Germany have that. Any conceivable nationalistic German leader in the 1930s or 1940s would probably have wanted to fight a war.
So the Nazis come to power kind of in alliance with the conservative militaristic elites who had been the elites since the time of the Kaiser and before. And in 1938, they still they're still on the scene right I mean they've kind of been slightly sidelined but they're still part of the makeup of the state yeah absolutely they are and obviously in the army there are lots of people in the army who've been there for years and Hitler's ambitions are absolutely as they see it in tune with their own long-standing ambitions that they've had since the day they were defeated in 1918, which is let's make Germany great again.
Let's get our territory back. Let's expand our borders.
All of that. Right.
But make Germany great again and get our borders back, but not necessarily should go into other countries that don't contain Germans and conquer them as well. And if Czechoslovakia contains a minority of Germans, then the majority are Czech or Slovaks.
And so that makes it slightly different, doesn't it? Yeah, who've never been part of Germany. Exactly right.
So I think the point worth making is that Hitler, of course, is not an ordinary nationalistic politician. He's not like a lot of these other people.
So he has a very, very distinctive worldview, which we discussed at great length in the very first series we did. And at the centre of it is this idea of racial struggle.
That comes from the social Darwinist ideas of the 1880s and 1890s. You open the pages of Mein Kampf, it's all full of this stuff about a coming race war, the struggle for the future of the planet.
I mean, here's a random quotation, He who would live must fight. He who does not wish to fight in this world, where permanent struggle is the law of life, does not have the right to exist.
Other European politicians do not talk like this in the 1920s and 1930s. This is distinctive.
You have to fight or you will be destroyed yourself. Exactly.
So I think it's fair to say that from the moment Hitler is propelled into office by those conservative elites in January 1933, absolutely everything is about preparing Germany for war. War is not an accident.
War is the end goal. Richard Evans is brilliant on this in his book about the Nazis in power, about how everything that Hitler does is designed to make Germany racially fit for conflict.
So that's everything from popular culture, from films and whatnot, all the way down to children's textbooks. It's like hammering this point home.
Life is about struggle. The fittest will survive.
You have to be hard. You have to be ruthless.
There's a lot of PE, isn't there? There's an awful lot of PE. But there's a moral re-education.
You did a brilliant episode in our last series about the Nazis, about this kind of attempt to morally re-educate people, to brainwash people, I guess, so that they become harder than hard. You know, the most ruthless people on the face of the planet.
Spartans. Spartans, exactly, exactly.
So in pursuit of his goal, Hitler has been helped by three things. First of all, you've already mentioned it, he's had the support of the army and the conservative establishment because they're delighted about this.
This is what they always wanted. Secondly, he benefits from the fact that internationally, the Germans do actually have genuine sympathy.
There are loads of people in Britain and France who, for completely understandable reasons, you may not agree with them now, but lots of people, you can understand why they thought it. People feel guilty about the Great War and the way that it ended.
They think it was a terrible struggle, slaughter. Germany did lose a lot of territory.
It did lose a lot of German speakers. Who wouldn't be a bit upset about that? Punic peace.
Yeah. Why shouldn't Germany have a proper army? Why shouldn't the Germans be treated with dignity and respect? So there are lots of people who think that.
And then the third thing is, because of the Great Depression, Britain and France in particular are fixated on their own internal problems. And they don't want to spend a lot of money on guns.
They want to spend a lot of money on soup kitchens. So quite familiar.
Yeah, exactly. Very familiar.
So all of this meant that Hitler's foreign policy up to 1938 had actually been, if you're a conservative or nationalistic German, it's a succession of foreign policy, stunning achievements. Takes them out of the League of Nations, massive rearmament, goes back into the Rhineland, which we did an episode about that.
Alliances with Italy and Japan, intervenes in the Spanish Civil War, and then most spectacularly annexes Austria in March 1938. So it takes a big German-speaking country and brings his homeland and brings it into the Reich.
And at this point, nobody says at this point, well, these are very outlandish goals, and clearly he's a man who wants to take over the world. I mean, well, a few people do, Churchill or whoever.
But in Germany, people say this is actually completely reasonable. this is like he's a man who wants to take over the world i mean well a few people do churchill or whoever but in germany people say this is actually completely reasonable this is like he's going down the wish list of things that any patriotic german would want to see we would want to have our troops in the rhine land we would want to bring austria what's wrong with that yeah what's wrong with national self-determination because that's that's the the hitler's genius isn? Is that the League of Nations, which has been set up after the First World War, is all about national self-determination.
Absolutely. It's the progressive thing to be in favour of.
So why shouldn't Germans have self-determination like everyone else? That's exactly what he's playing on. And, you know, if you have a city or a country with loads of German speakers who want to be part of germany the woodrow wilson versailles treaty league of nations principle is you let them choose you give them the freedom to choose absolutely and he has judged the whole thing perfectly

as ian kershaw says in his brilliant biography he had been bold but not reckless his timing had

been excellent the combination of bluff and blackmail effective his manipulation of propaganda

to back his coups masterly that sounds like kershaw is an admirer of it which he absolutely isn't

Thank you. He had been excellent.
The combination of bluff and blackmail effective. His manipulation of propaganda to back his coups masterly.
That sounds like Kershaw is an admirer of Hitler, which he absolutely isn't. But he's played his cards really, really cleverly.
And the result every time has been a massive propaganda boost. So you have these wonderful sources on public opinion in Germany, which are the reports of Social Democratic Party, SPD agents to their leaders in exile and they say look he's he's really popular whenever he does this his popularity will often flag and then i'll have a foreign policy achievement and even people who don't really like him will say oh hitler you know he's brilliant he that getting the austrians back that was fantastic all of this kind of thing yes it may not be running making the trains run on time necessarily, but he does get chunks of the Austro-Hungarian Empire that had never belonged to Germany before.
We've now got them. Hooray.
Exactly. Hitler himself, by the way, by this point, 1938, he has completely drunk the Kool-Aid.
So he, as Kershaw says, he began thinking that he was merely going to be John the Baptist to some other nationalistic leader. He was the drummer in his own terminology.
But by this point, he really believes, I mean, he refers to it again and again in speeches. He says, you know, I've been chosen by providence.
Fate has appointed me to bring the Germans to greatness. So he, nobody believes in the Fuhrer cult more than Hitler himself.
And by this point, he's going to be turning 50 next year in 1939. He feels a tremendous sense of urgency.
He feels that weight of history on his shoulders as it were. But I mean, it's kind of more supernatural than that, isn't it? He feels appointed by some inchoate spirit to guide his nation to glory.
He totally does. And he believes that literally.
Yes, he does. I mean, it's not just a kind of abstract spirit.
He feels ordained by some supernatural power. Yeah.
It's like he's a kind of Hegelian character who incarnates the spirit of history and science and he's been appointed. Yeah, exactly that.
However, what's nagging at him is that both his parents died young, and he himself is a horrendous hypochondriac. Well, he's drinking gun cleaning oil, isn't he? He is.
We talked about that in the previous episode, and I think we both agreed that although we don't have medical backgrounds, we didn't feel this was the wisest thing for him to be drinking. No, he's drinking this trench medicine, which is got to clean the oil.
And basically this gives him horrendous stomach problems. And to deal with this, his doctor, who's called Dr.
Morel, has given him this cocktail of kind of vitamins and amphetamines and stuff that he's taking. So basically it's fair to say Hitler is a bit of a crank i bet i think we can go on the record here yeah well i hope that people sense the the presence of amphetamines in that performance i gave at the start of the show i almost certainly they did so he's got a kind of personal sense of urgency he thinks he might drop dead at any moment secondly the kind of wheels are beginning to come off the german economy.
The German economy has been built on massive arms spending.

And because of that, they're always running out of,

remember we talked about this a bit in the last series,

they're always running out of fats of various kinds,

butter, lard, I don't know, oil.

They're always running out of these things.

There's always massive kind of consumer shortages.

And basically by 1938, the economy is very short of raw materials and cheap labor. And Goering, who's in charge of all this, keeps saying the wheels are going to fall off at any minute.
And foreign currency as well has gone, hasn't it? Yeah. And aren't there international boycotts, which the Nazi high command can then blame on international jury? Exactly.
Exactly right. Yeah, they've gone for an autarky.
So they've slightly tried to sort of go for sealing themselves off in the world economy and this huge drive for arm spending. But basically, this is unsustainable.
This is going to collapse in the next couple of years. Finally, they are conscious by 1938 that the Western allies, Britain and France, are at last beginning to rearm.
And so the window of opportunity, as they see it, is beginning to close. And at the end of 1937, Hitler told his bigwigs, look, we've probably got about seven years to do this.
So I think we should be looking to fight a European war about 1943 to 1945. And a European war would include taking on Britain and France and attacking the Soviet Union.
So I mean, basically taking on everyone. I mean, what are his plans at that point? At this point, I think it's possible that in Hitler's dream scenario, he doesn't fight Britain.
I think he probably thinks he'll always have to fight France, but he thinks the French can easily be beaten. Of course, he's not entirely wrong.
So he'll leave Britain to its empire? Yes, because he's making offers, as we would discover in this series, he's making offers to Britain to stay out of the war up until the very last possible minute he's spending much more effort on britain than he is on france so some of his generals were always anxious about this they'd liked the idea of fighting small central european countries they'd never liked the idea of fighting britain and france but by 1938 hitler is being encouraged in this aim by a terrible man another terrible terrible man. This guy is the ultimate kind of war hawk, and he is the new foreign minister.
And this is Joachim von Ribbentrop, who will be featuring a lot in this series. So if you see photographs of Ribbentrop, Ribbentrop looks kind of quite suave, doesn't he? And quite dapper, which was not his reputation in Britain, where people said he was always wearing inappropriate trousers or something.

Yes.

And he's very rude to tailors in Britain.

So he'll summon them to come and, you know, measure him.

And then he won't turn up.

So his name is mud.

His name is mud on Savile Row.

Well, I mean, we take Savile Row very seriously, Tom.

We do.

So that's very poor.

And also the other thing, his name is mud in the Church of England

because he gives a Nazi salute in Durham Cathedral. Really? And has to be almost forcibly restrained.
Yeah, absolutely disgraces himself. So Riventrop had been ambassador to Britain.
He'd actually worked in Britain beforehand and he'd also worked in Canada before the war. So he speaks English, doesn't he? He speaks English.
He'd won the Iron Cross in the Great War, so he was physically quite courageous. But then he'd worked in the drinks trade, hasn't he? And he'd married the heiress to a German sparkling wine firm.
And this basically made him an absolute figure of fun in Britain when he became ambassador. And everybody said, look at this champagne salesman.
That's what people said. He's a champagne salesman.
I put it in my order. Yeah, not even real champagne, right? German sparkling wine.
Who wants that? No one. Oh, dear.
Imagine if he had, imagine if the Nazis had one, the vengeance he'd have had. I've always said two things about Ribbentrop that are surprising that I learned from Richard Evans' recent book on the Nazis.
First of all, he was a brilliant violinist. And secondly, he competed in the Canadian National Figure Skating Championships.
Really? So that's a nice image. Yeah.
Goodness. The Torval and Dean of the Nazi party.
Exactly. Which one was he? Torval or Dean? Anyway, he's Tonya Harding.
Surely he's the Tonya Harding of figure skating. Yeah, he is.
That's harsh on Tonya Harding, who's subject to a very good film that made me more sympathetic to her. Okay, well, fine.
Margot Robbie. I apologise.
I apologise. You can't equate Margot Robbie to Ribbentrop.
No, that's strange casting. That's not casting anyone.
No, we want it put on the record. I think you should just say you're not comparing Ribbentrop to Margot Robbie.
I'm not comparing Margot Robbie and Joachim von Ribbentrop. I want to be quite clear about that.
Good. Okay, so Ribbentrop takes the hardest possible line at the foreign ministry.
He always eggs Hitler on. He always says, you know, that's the way to Hitler's favor, basically, to be even more of a Nazi than Hitler is.
And secondly, I think this is a really important point. Ribbentrop is completely blinded by his hatred of Britain.
So he always says to Hitler, the British are absolutely spineless. They are the most pathetic, pitiful curs.
They will never fight because they're too busy making jokes about champagne salesmen and Savile Row. And if we do ever fight them, we will crush them like insects underfoot.
So he really gives Hitler very, very bad advice. And you know who else is, of course, revealing to Hitler that Britain's air defences aren't any good is Unity Mitford.
Yes, I wondered if she would make an appearance, an unwanted appearance in this podcast, and she has. All right, so let's pick up the narrative in March 1938.
Hitler comes back from Vienna on the 15th of March to a tumultuous reception.

He's had an amazing time in Austria.

He's been to his boyhood house.

He's addressed this enormous crowd.

And barely has he returned

than he gets out a map.

Goebbels' diary describes it

and they go over the map together.

And Hitler says,

you know, I can't wait

because basically I'm going to see, I realise now that I will see in my lifetime the great German Reich, the German Empire over all Europe and all the world. And the next step is going to be Czechoslovakia.
Because I'm right that with the Anschluss, so Austria is now part of a greater Reich, that Czechoslovakia is basically kind of sticking into the gut of this Reich. So purely on a map, it looks like it should be swallowed up.
It's encircled. It's virtually encircled, exactly right.
And it's a kind of island of Slavs surrounded by, or partially surrounded by, a lot of Germans, exactly. However, Czechoslovakia is also a pretty serious target, a much more serious target than Austria.
It's bigger than Austria. It's got 15 million people.
It was created from the Austro-Hungarian Empire, so Bohemia and Moravia from the Austrian bit and Slovakia from the Hungarian bit. It is by far the most resilient liberal democracy in Central Europe.
It's got a very well-educated population. It has weather far the most sort of resilient liberal democracy in Central Europe.

It's got a very well-educated population.

It has weathered the Depression reasonably well.

It's got a really, really serious industrial base.

I mean, I know Skoda became a joke in Britain in the 1980s.

Not in Northumberland.

Not in Northumberland.

Where everyone drives a Skoda Yeti.

Do they? Yeah, Sadie bought one. It's a pride and joy so we're very pro Skoda are you touting for sponsorship is that what you're doing if Skoda want to give us a free Yeti we are you know we're here right but the other thing which I hadn't realized is that Skoda made the Bren gum which I I always thought was British.
The Skoda Works, which is in Pilsen in Western Czechoslovakia, is one of the largest industrial complexes in Europe. It is a really, really serious business.
So a massive prize for a German economy on its uppers. It's a gigantic prize.
If you're playing a board game, you know, you're desperate to get this thing. They make tanks.
They make the best guns. Some of the best guns in Europe.
Yeah, so the British Army are using it. I mean, I'm amazed by that.
Yeah. They make tanks, tools, ships, locomotives.
They've got lignite. They make loads and loads of stuff.
And Czechoslovakia therefore has this colossal military arsenal and a very, very well-trained and well-motivated army. And Dominic, don't they also, on the borders where the mountains abut Germany, they've built a fairly impregnable series of defences.
I mean, kind of Maginot line, but in a mountain chain. They have indeed.
Their frontier defences are pretty serious. They have a lot of raw materials.
They have tungsten. They have uranium ore, I think it is.
And Dominic, as I mentioned, lignite. I don't really know what that is, but whenever I see it in this kind of book, I want the lignite.
And on top of that, the Czechs have two very serious allies. France, on the one hand, and the Soviet Union, on the other.
And the fact that France is an ally,

if France goes to war, then Britain is obliged to go to war.

Yeah, probably.

And so we're back to a kind of pre-First World War.

Exactly.

You know, mountaineers all tethered up by a single rope kind of thing.

Yeah, exactly.

So it's a tough nut to crack, right?

On the other hand, if you could crack it, great,

because these are the attractions.

First of all, as you said,

it's a rich Slav country that obtrudes into the Reich. So loads of Hitler's generals think, you know, I'd love to crush that.
It's allied to France. So if there is ever a war, Czechoslovakia would fight.
And that would automatically mean Germany would face a war on two fronts. So let's knock that out first.
That makes sense. And am I right also that Hitler has potential allies himself because both the Hungarians and the Poles have kind of irredentist ambitions? They want to carve out a chunk.
This is true of every country in Central Europe and it will become a really important theme. So the dream of the French in particular was always to put together a kind of Central Europeanan alliance against hitler but the problem with that is exactly the point that you've identified that the their neighbors think i quite fancy a bit of that yeah exactly yeah so that's going to be a real problem the germans obviously want as you've already mentioned they want cheques back as raw materials they want the industry they want the the currency and stuff for hitler i think it's also quite personal he hates the checks and he hates them because he was austrian and if you were a german-speaking austrian before the first world war the checks were basically your arch enemy within the empire so they are the slavs with whom hitler had been had grown up kind of having a personal experience of exactly so not the poles or not the poles he has no here this will surprise people hitler has no kind of prior with the poles he doesn't care about the poles he's never had any dealings with them for him it's the checks but also he has a kind of artist's yearning to ride in triumph through prague doesn't he this great beautiful city with its incredible churches and yes synagogues uh yeah the great castle um so a bit Paris, I guess.
It kind of haunts his imagination as a foreign city that he would love to have as a prize. He has that sort of slightly adolescent Wagner-loving fantasy.
I will ride through Prague as a conqueror. You know, that kind of thing.
He absolutely has it. Like Tamelein.
Yes, exactly. So as Lug would have it, going back to the speech that you began the episode he has a perfect pretext for german action because the great flaw of woodroir wilson's project after the first world war of self-determination all these new nation states was there are so many minorities and in czechoslovakia there are three million german speakers who live along the western border, this area known as the Sudetenland.
Now, they have never been Germans. They were Austrian subjects.
But obviously, in this world of nationalism, of new nation states, their German-ness, the fact they speak German, becomes a massive issue for them. now they are pretty well treated.
They're probably better treated than any other minority in Europe. They have full legal equality with their Czech neighbours.
The Czechs don't massively discriminate against them. But they've been quite hard hit by the Depression, so a lot of them have been put out of work.
And secondly, of course, over the border, they've got this bloke ranting and raving about germandom and saying he's going to build a greater german reich so obviously a lot of them think i quite fancy being part of that and the main sudan german party is led by this bloke who was an austrian war veteran called conrad henline who also i have to say was gymnastics instructor and as I think he's a PE teacher, basically. But I mean, more than that, he's a racist PE teacher.
He's a racist PE teacher. They're the worst kind of PE teacher.
Yeah, and actually the worst kind of racists. He's a bad man.
Yeah, he's a bad man, Conrad Henline. So he's the leader of the Sudeten German he says oh let's let you know let's basically get into bed with hitler so hitler as soon as he gets back from the antelus he sets the wheels in motion he gets henline to berlin for a secret meeting and he says right i want to sort this out like i'm going to start agitating for you let's get you let's get you all riled up so a month later april April 1938, Henlein gets his party together and he says, oh, we're being totally bullied by the Czechs.
We want total self-government. We want autonomy and all this.
Now, the important thing here is they don't, this is not the aim. The aim is actually to dismember the whole of Czechoslovakia.
This is just a pretext. So Czechoslovakia said, oh, brilliant.
Well, you can have autonomy. That's not good enough.
Hitler would be furious. That's not what they want.
They want to give the Czechs a load of demands they can't possibly answer. So make them so humiliating that there's no way that the Czech government can possibly accept them.
A little bit like that Austrian ultimatum to Serbia before the First World War, remember? So meanwhile, Hitler gets his commanders together and he says, I want you to draw up plans for the invasion of Czechoslovakia. Again, worth emphasizing, this is not just about the Sudetenland.
He wants the whole country, he says to the head of the Wehrmacht, a guy called Wilhelm Keitel, he says, I want the whole country as a launch pad for the showdown in the East with Bolshevism. So he's still thinking beyond this, right? There you go, fighting the USSR.
And he also says, when we do invade, I want the whole thing done and dusted in four days because I don't want to give the British and the French, I don't want a European war with Britain and France. I don't want to give them a chance.
I want to present them with a fait accompli so that they don't get stuck in as well. But at this point, he says, this is a long-term thing.
We're not going to rush this. This could be like a year, a couple of years, who knows? But then something happens that massively advances his timetable.
It's a slightly complicated and weird story, but basically there are local elections in the Sudetenland. There are some scuffles the same time the germans army are having maneuvers just ordinary kind of military maneuvers nothing sinister in it and the czechs get in a massive kind of funk and mobilize their reserves they think the germans are about to attack them and actually weirdly this is the one time that hitler's not going to attack them and And as a result of this, there's all sorts of diplomatic excitement, rows between ambassadors and stuff.
There's a huge row between Ribbentrop and the British ambassador. The British ambassador's like, are you going to attack Czechoslovakia? What are you doing? So the British ambassador, he's Sir Neville Henderson.
And he's, I think, the first of two British performers in this story who don't turn up absolutely brilliantly called Neville. Yeah.
If you're called Neville, it's not good for you. And he is basically a guy who is calculated to rub Ribbentrop up the wrong way because he has impeccable tailoring.
Yeah, he's always seen wearing a carnation. In fact, did you know his uncle married Alice in Wonderland? So Alice Little.
Really? Yeah. So he's the embodiment of an English gentleman.
Yeah, Ribbentrop would hate that. You know, he likes going shooting, so would get on very well with Goering.
In fact, does get on very well with Goering, I think. They all go off and kind of shoot elk together.
But in all kinds of ways, he's a terrible man to have sent to Berlin because there's no way that Ribbentrop would get on with him. And in fact, I think, am I right that he has been sent because he's basically the person in the foreign office who people think he is most sympathetic to autocracies? Yeah, he's an archer-pieser, actually, is what he is.
Neville Henderson, which is then ironic that Ribbentrop and him don't really get along. Yeah.
Because they have a massive row at this point. Henderson says, if you're really going to attack, I mean, you're mad to attack Czechoslovakia because France will fight and they will have to fight you.
And Ribbentrop goes absolutely mental and says, well, that would be the greatest defeat in French history. And if Britain were to join France, once again, we'll fight you to the death.
That's not a harmonious relationship. Well, this is what comes when people who have different views on tailoring get to meet up in the chancery of europe exactly yeah never have a

champagne salesman i mean that's basically the don't get involved with champagne salesman or

indeed pe teachers right ribbentrop tells all this to hitler and hitler is absolutely furious he's

outraged at the loss of prestige you know this he sees this as a complete humiliation the czechs

immobilized their army the british have all kicked off whatever and he says to his aides

i can't live like this we have to solve problem now. And he spends the next week at his eerie, the Eagle's Nest in Berchtesgaden on top of this mountain.
And then he comes back on the 28th of May, 1938 to Berlin and he summons his generals and he says, okay, I've come to a decision. We need to get this started.
I want my living space, my Lebensraum. We're going to have to strike east eventually.
And because of this, he says, one day we're going to have to fight France and Britain. But in that case, we can't have the Czechs hanging around on the other side.
So we have to knock them out first. And he says, quote, I am utterly determined that Czechoslovakia should disappear from the map.
And two days later, Keitel presents him with the finalised plan. It's called Falgrun, Case Green.
And the preface to the plan lays out the explicit aim, quote, to smash Czechoslovakia by military action. So the stage is set for war.
I think we should take a break at this point. And when we come back, we will see what the upshot is.
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Pet injuries and additional coverage and subject to policy terms. Hello, welcome back to The Rest is History.
We are looking at the development of the Munich crisis. Hitler wants to dismember Czechoslovakia.
And Dominic, we heard just before the break how he has summoned his generals, told them, draw up a's let's get on with this uh what happens next well Tom what I will say is your first take of that you confused me with Adolf Hitler I did which I think people who enjoy my journalism will appreciate that that's Freudian slip you know that the uh the German gym teacher he wrote for the Daily Mail Conrad Henlein yeahin? Yeah. They featured a splash from him.

And he came out of it very badly.

Really?

Joseph Conrad wrote for the Daily Mail.

And he wasn't a Nazi.

You, Conrad, and this PE teacher.

Right.

So you ask about Hitler's generals, what they make of all this.

Quite a lot of people from the very beginning are very, very worried about Hitler's ambitions.

There's no sense that the German people want a war.

So as we will discover in this whole of the series in the next couple of weeks, all that Nazi indoctrination has not been as successful as Hitler hoped.

Well, can I also ask you about whether there is, so quite aside from the fact, do they want to go and conquer a country that does not contain German speakers?

Do they feel any sense of kind of identity with the Sudeten Germans? I mean, do they feel this is their kith and kin? I think it's the classic thing that some people who care about such things work themselves up into a lather about it. Oh, it's terrible that fellow German speakers are being poorly treated.
I mean, that is a big theme in German newspapers in the 1920s and 1930s. But also, probably most people are never particularly bothered about other people, are they? I mean...
A dog that doesn't bark in the night is the Germans in the Tyrol, which is part of Italy. Yes.
And they're much worse treated, aren't they? But nobody seems to raise a pipe about them. But it's a question about what the newspapers, what Goebbels' propaganda machine alights on, isn't it? So Goebbels' propaganda machine will run new stories day after day about the plight of the sedation Germans and hammer it home into people's minds.
The fact that the Germans go on and on about the sedation Germans, but not the ones in the Tyrol, they don't really care about them. I mean, is this all just a...
I mean, do they passionately believe in, or is it just an excuse? Yeah, it's an excuse. I think if it never come up in the newspapers, people wouldn't be walking around the streets of Hamburg saying, you know, I often think about the Sudetenland and the Sudeten Germans.
But I was wondering about the Nazi high command. The fact that they don't raise a peep over the Tyrol Germans, but the Sudeten Germans, they do.
Are they just using them or do they genuinely think that this is disgraceful? I think a lot of them ideally would love to have the Sudeten Germans in a greater German. They'd like to have every German speaker in a greater German Reich.
Because I suppose it gives them more manpower as well, doesn't it? Yeah, and they believe in it ideologically. As regards the Germans in the Tyrol and northern Italy, they probably just think, well...
More important to keep Mussolini on side. More important to keep Mussolini on side.
But to go back to the thing about what do people think about Hitler's war plans, a lot of the traditional conservatives, and including actually people like Hermann Göring, I mean, he's not a traditional conservative. He really is a Nazi.
But they're quite anxious about it. They're like, really? Risk war with France? Göring's kind of torn, isn't he? Because he does want all the arms factors and the lignite and stuff.

I mean, that would be brilliant

because that would help out his various four-year plans

or whatever they are, five-year plans.

But obviously he doesn't want Germany

to be crushed by Britain and France.

No, he's very...

Goering, as we shall see in this series,

is extremely anxious about fighting Britain and France.

But above all, it's actually some of the generals

who are really, really disturbed about it. So the chief among them is the army chief of staff, who's a guy called General Ludwig Beck.
So he was a very experienced general. He was very pro-Nazi.
He's not a Nazi member, but he really believes in the sort of making Germany great again project. If you've seen the film Valkyrie with Tom Cruise playing Stauffenberg he's Terence Stamp in this film

and Beck he kind of likes the idea of fighting Czechoslovakia but he thinks whoa we are going way too fast here this will mean war with France and therefore with Britain and we will definitely lose you know he's the chief of staff of the army he's a serious person so all summer he is firing off memos saying this is a dreadful idea we shouldn't do this the thing is he is seen as a doomster and the younger officers in particular say oh this old man he's too pessimistic all of this kind of thing and even people who agree with him are nervous about going along with him because of course ever since the night of the long knives they've sworn a personal oath of loyalty to Fuhrer. So they can't disobey the Fuhrer or go against him.
Anyway, what's very bad for Beck is in June, they hold war games. And the war games suggest that actually Hitler's plan might work.
They could beat Czechoslovakia in 10, 11 days. And even if they were then fighting France, they could then transfer troops to the Western Front and hold back the French.
When the result of these war games comes in, Beck sees this and he says, oh God, this is terrible. This is going to happen.
He says to his fellow generals, we should all resign collectively. That will force Hitler's hand, get him to back down.
He says desperate times require desperate measures or something like that, some famous line. And we have to save the fatherland from destruction.
Exactly that. And the other generals say, no, if you want to resign, you resign.
I'm not resigning. So he resigns in August.
And this is actually a massive, massive lost opportunity in the story of stopping Hitler. Because Beck is persuaded by Hitler to basically resign privately, not make a huge political fuss about it because Hitler says to him, look, this would play into the hands of Germany's enemies.
And actually, if Beck had played his cards differently, who knows, there were loads of senior Nazis who felt very anxious about the rush to war. And maybe, you know, who knows, if he'd gone public, things might have been different.
Goering is the new Fuhrer. Exactly.
Anyway, he keeps his resignation secret. And actually, here's a really interesting thing.
The late summer, the autumn of 1938, Beck and other senior people in the regime get together and they construct a plot to topple Hitler, to have a coup in Berlin. They say, look, we've achieved so much.
He's actually now going too far and he's going to risk it all. They make sort of informal links, particularly with the British.
If we did topple Hitler, would you be on side? So the head of military intelligence, Admiral Canaris, is in on this. The former finance finance minister the guy who's the most respected financian

industrialist in in germany who's a guy called hjalmar schacht he's what's he called dominic he's called hjalmar schacht tom good yeah you didn't think i could pronounce that twice in a row but you were mistaken you were mistaken you thought it was the schleswig holstein all over again Yeah.

But no.

So they get this plot together.

A guy called Lieutenant Colonel Hans Oster, who's a counterintelligence chief. He draws up the blueprint for storming the Reich Chancellery, killing Hitler, possibly bringing back the monarchy.
So it's the Kaiser who's in exile in Holland. Is he on this or not? I'm not sure he's as in on it as, yeah, he's not like pulling the strings because hitler hates the monarchy by this point doesn't he's just been to rome where he's been he feels he's been humiliated by the king of italy that's right yes exactly the king of italy did not treat him as an eagle but treated him as a commoner yes and hitler did not like this exactly so the big question i guess is could this plot have worked because this is a real what.
And my answer probably is that it couldn't, because they did try something similar to the Valkyrie plot in 1944, and that didn't work at all. I think the big issue for them, though, is that if Hitler could somehow get Czechoslovakia without having a world war, they would look like total mugs.
Exactly. So let's see if he can do that.
That summer, 1938, Hitler spends it at the Eagle's Nest. So this is his eerie in Berchtesgaden in the south of Germany.
He does his usual routine, loafing around, watching film, terrible films, talking to Albert Speer about architecture until basically he stays up very late doing nothing. So in other he has theo's life he conducts himself like well except um theo of course is not hanging out with a mitford sister no hitler is yeah and i think this is i think this is when they he's seeing her most of all they go to bairoet together to wagner yeah and then they have to leave early because hitler wants to go to a gymnastics contest.
Oh, my God.

He takes unity to that as well.

I don't know whether the Sudetenland guy, whether the PE teacher is there.

There's far too much gymnastics in this.

It's a warning from history, Dominic.

Yeah.

And actually, Hitler spends his time when he's doing any work.

He does it on absolutely inconsequential things.

Ian Kershaw lists the stuff that Hitler was doing that summer in 1938.

Punishment for traffic offences. Considerations of whether all cigarettes should be made nicotine free.
Thea would not like that. Or the type of holes to be put into flagpoles.
Yeah, that's not very Third Reich, is it? No, no. Not what comes into mind when you think of the might of the Nazi state.
That's Jimmy Carter's approach to the administration. That's what that is.
Anyway, this is actually a affront. Hitler is fooling the world because all the time he is waiting for the attack on Czechoslovakia.
He has set a date of the 1st of October and he says, that's when we'll go in. He's absolutely convinced that the Western allies will do nothing about it.
And do you know what? He's right. They won't.
First of all, the Czech's two main allies, the Soviet Union, ally number number one Stalin has just started purging the Red Army so he started killing all the officers in the Red Army the last thing that Stalin wants is a war so Stalin's not going to fight and secondly the French France is going through massive internal political ructions because the Popular Front has just come to power and that has which is the kind of left-wing organization and that has provoked a huge sort of backlash on the right so there's a sense which french politics is pulling towards the extremes there's a lot of overheated stuff you know oh is there going to be a french civil war like spanish civil war of course there isn't and all of this means is the french basically are in no kind of psychological condition to get stuck into a rerun of the Great War. Which means that Britain isn't either.
Which means that if the French go in, the British definitely won't go in. Because as we shall see, the British basically, when it comes to it, don't give a damn about Czechoslovakia.
So all that summer, Goebbels fires up his propaganda machine. And this goes back to the question you were asking, Tom.
Do people care?

They care when you shove it in their face day after day.

When in the front page of the newspapers,

it's Sudeten Germans are being attacked.

They're being beaten.

The Czechs will run them over in the street.

The Czechs have got plans to gas German villages. I mean, just mad, lurid stories.

Loads of stuff about how Czechoslovakia is actually full of Bolsheviks. It's a Trojan horse for the common turn.
The whole stuff is actually very reminiscent of Vladimir Putin about Ukraine. Ukraine full of Nazis, all that kind of stuff.
Are there people in Britain and France who worry about this, who think we'd rather Hitler had it than Stalin, Czechoslovakia? No, I don't think so. Maybe think quite in those terms.
I don't think they think, because I don't think they think that Stalin is seriously going to have Czechoslovakia. They know the Czechoslovakia? No, I don't think so.
Maybe they think quite in those terms. I don't think they think, because I don't think they think

that Stalin is seriously going to have Czechoslovakia.

They know that Czechoslovakia is a democracy

and, you know, very robust democracy.

So the Nazis are pumping out all these stories.

But here's the interesting, well, actually,

here's the answer to your question.

People are shocked at the stories.

They feel sorry for the state and Germans,

but they don't really care that much.

One of the best sources for Germany in this period

It is going to was a radio correspondent. Oh, the American journalist.
American journalist who wrote a diary. And he said, I don't think Hitler will get his war because people are against it.
People don't want it. They say, oh, they feel sorry for the Sudetens, but they don't want to fight a war about it the the spd agents who are reporting to their exiled leadership they say actually people feel a bit sorry for the sudesan germans but they're much more worried that a war will come about and then there won't be so much food and then it'll be really miserable and they won't you know the economic miracle will come to an end and all of this and goebbels is actually really annoyed about all all this.
He's aware of it. He talks about the German people having a war psychosis.
He's a bit like George C. Wallace's running mate, Curtis LeMay, saying that people had a phobia of nuclear weapons.
They need to man up. Yeah.
Get a backbone. People have this mad phobia about a world war.
Why? What's not to like? Right, exactly. So we get to late Augustust the propaganda machine has been running and running and running and because of that the stories have now filtered through to newspapers in london and in paris as well and so by the middle of august 1938 london is full of rumors what is hitler going to attack czechoslovakia what's going on here so now we come to Britain and obviously our focus in this story is on the Nazis themselves so we're not going to you know we could do thousands of episodes about Britain and appeasement but we should just do five minutes here so the prime minister is Neville Chamberlain he's been prime minister for a year or so again prime minister in 1937 I think the thing that people need to get into their heads, this sort of counterintuitive, Neville Chamberlain is not a weedy, dithery, indecisive, cowardly man.
That is absolutely not what he is. He is intellectually very formidable.
He is very arrogant. He is very inflexible.
And he sort of intimidates his cabinet and other politicians because he is the man who knows. And he's kind of vulpine, isn't he? He is.
A bit chilly. He is.
There's a brilliant portrait of him, actually, in Robert Harris's book on Munich, Robert Harris's novel, where he really captures that sort of sense of Chamberlain's, his pride, his vanity, that he will never change his mind, all of this kind of thing. He always thinks he knows best.
He's not this sort of foppish wimp, which is the way he's commonly portrayed. But you get that sense, don't you? Partly because he seems, compared seems compared to say the nazis an old-fashioned figure so his wing collar his umbrella which kind of becomes his emblem yeah the fact he's only once in his life been up in an airplane whereas hitler spent the whole time winging his way around germany in airplanes and there is a feeling so i was kind of i was just looking up on this.
I read a great book about Chamberlain years ago. So I just looked it up and there was this comment from Ernst von Weisacher, who's a diplomat, who's part of that plot, isn't he? Part of the general's plot.
And actually father of the Weisacher, who then became president of Germany, I think in the nineties. And he wrote, if Chamberlain comes, these louts, by which he means the Nazis,

will triumph and proclaim that some Englishman has taken his cue and come to heel. They,

the English, should send an energetic military man who, if necessary, can shout and hit the table with a riding crop, a marshal with many decorations and scars, a man without too much

consideration. And the guy he wanted was a general literally called General Ironside.

He thought this was the guy who should go. So I think there is a sense that Chamberlain's image is a problem, that he does seem fusty and Edwardian compared to the go-ahead kind of fascist.
Well, here's the weird thing with Chamberlain. Chamberlain, in his own mind, is a very modern politician.
So although he dresses in an old-fashioned way, he thinks, I am modernity. Because here's the thing.
He thinks they are old-fashioned. He thinks all that stuff about wearing a military uniform, wars, he thinks that's like Winston Churchill.
That's like 1890s. Because he's all about municipal drains.
Yes, that's the future. Health service.
He was a brilliant minister for health in the 1920s. Because he's a product of the civic government of Birmingham, isn't he? Absolutely.
So Neville Chamberlain, in his own mind, is the future, and Hitler and Co are the past. They're mad relics of the Great War.
But, of course, you're absolutely right. To them, he looks like this effeminate, foppish, effete, absolute wimp and weed who is backwards.
backward dead right about that but I think Chamberlain does embody British public opinion in the late 1930s all the commentary in Britain about war at this point is that war would be unbelievably apocalyptic that our cities would be leveled by bombers yes Yes, the bomber always gets through. The bomber always gets through.
The Stanley Baldwin quote. The whole business is about gas masks.
You know, all the famous pictures of little children clutching their gas masks and they're being evacuated. We will be attacked with gas.
Of course, we know now that didn't happen. But people think at the time, everybody will be gassed if a war happens.
There will be millions and millions of casualties. And so this is the heyday of peace petitions, peace ballots.
The Labour Party is the party of disarmament. The Oxford Union saying that they wouldn't fight for king and country.
Wouldn't fight for king and country. All of this.
And of course, Chamberlain knows all this. He also knows most people in Britain could not give a hoot about Central Europe.

So Richard Evans, in his book on the Nazis at war, makes this point.

And he's absolutely right.

Most people in Britain, they do care about India, Australia, South Africa, because those are the stories that are in their newspapers every day.

Even then, they don't really care about that much.

Of course. I mean, they might care about Australia if they're playing cricket.
but otherwise, I mean, they don't really care about the empire very much. The lesson of history, nobody ever cares about anybody else, let's be honest.
But they definitely don't care about Czechoslovakia where they've never been. They don't know where it is.
They don't understand what it is, as we will see from Neville Chamberlain's quote. A faraway country of which we know little.
Yeah. So Chamberlain, the other big problem I think Chamberlain has, Chamberlain is a smart guy.
He's a very rational person. He's very controlled.
And I think as a result of all that, he is imaginatively limited. So he cannot conceive of the kind of person Hitler is.
He's never met anyone like Hitler. The idea that this person could be seething with racial animosity and could be driven by this apocalyptic worldview, there's nobody like that in the House of Commons.
Chamberlain, there's no one like that in Birmingham, Tom. He's never met anyone like that.
So when he looks at this, he says, well, it seems to me perfectly rational that we could solve this Sudeten problem and everybody, you know, we could all be friends, which is obviously, that's the great flaw in Chamberlain's vision, as we shall see. So anyway, let's move towards the end of the episode.
On the 30th of August, as a result of all this, Chamberlain's cabinet agree they will not issue a warning to deter Hitler from attacking Czechoslovakia. Why not? Because they think it would inflame him and it would provoke things.
They want to have a peaceful settlement. So what they'll do is they will talk to the Czechoslovak president, who's a guy called Edvard Beneš, and they will get him to give concessions to the Sudeten Germans.
Now benesh he is a former lecturer in sociology and people who enjoy uh scouting be pleased to hear that like harold wilson he was a massive enthusiast for the boy scout movement benesh which i think reflects well on him do you know what he was also a freemason like uh like shaquille o'neal so if you have an image in your mind of a sociology lecturer who's a fusion of Shaquille O'Neal and Harold Wilson. Goodness, there's something.
Yeah. I mean, you wouldn't have thought that a sociology lecturer was the kind of person who would basically be suited to standing up to Hitler.
No, I would be right. But actually, Benesh, I mean, he's pretty tough.
Yeah, well. Hitler kind of ends up saying, well, he's a lot tougher than the Austrians were.
Yes, well, he is. There's no doubt about that.
The Czechoslovaks are much tougher than the Austrians. So Benesch says, okay, fine.
You know, we'll give the sedating Germans what they want. We'll give them some more autonomy.
We'll move to a more federal system in Czechoslovakia. Czechoslovakia already has other tensions between the Czechs and the Slovaks, for example.
He says, we'll have a more federal system, fine. Of course, that's not what Hitler wants.
Hitler doesn't want concessions. He wants a pretext for a full invasion.
So basically, he says to the Sudeten Germans, just reject that offer. Say that you can't trust Banesh, which they do.
They say, oh, well, we don't, we can't, nothing you offer us would be good enough because we don't believe a word you say. So another week goes by and it's full of claims from the Sudeten Germans.

Oh, we're being attacked.

We're being abused, all of this kind of thing.

And then on the 11th of September, 1938, there is a dramatic new development.

Across Western Czechoslovakia, the Sudeten Germans, Henline supporters, stage big demonstrations and they incite clashes with the Czech police. Of course, this was done on orders from Berlin.
And this was the context for the speech that you began with, Hitler's great rant at the party congress in Nuremberg, where he says they're being ravaged, they're being tortured, all of this kind of thing. And he has planned this out metic meticulously this is the starting gun this is going to be the great launch for the campaign so in three weeks time we'll go in and he in that speech that you did he lays out his case very carefully he says czechoslovakia is a made-up country created by the united nations he says and i quote the sudeten germans are being ravaged and.
I have begged and begged the democracies for redress, but they have ignored me. And finally, Germany is going to we're going to have to stand up for our kith and kin.
So this is very Vladimir Putin speech. Yeah.
2022 before going into Ukraine. Same day he gives that speech.
There is a new outbreak of violence across Czechoslovakia's western borderlands. There are bomb scares.
There are attacks on post offices and railway stations and so on. And then the next day, the 13th of September, a lot of fighting breaks out in a place called Habersbjerk, this village.
The Czech police are sent in and four of them are killed by Henlein's goons, by his thugs. And the Czechs then declare martial law and they send troops into the streets.
So this is brilliant. This is just what Hitler wants.
All going to plan. Exactly.
What could possibly go wrong? Well, then, Tom, there is a twist. There are going to be so many twists in these episodes.
This is the first of a series of massive twists. Because Neville Chamberlain has been off grouse shooting

while all this is going on.

Of course he has.

But I guess while he's been out there in the heather,

he's been working out what could we do.

His mighty mind.

His vulpine, cool, chill, calculating brain has been at work.

It has.

Now, Chamberlain has already decided the Sudetenland

should be given to Germany.

He just thinks it's mad to fight for the Sudetenland. It's full of Germans.
Like, the Czechs should just let it go. He knows the British people don't want war.
His military chiefs have already told him, they told him on the 13th of September, if there is a war, Czechoslovakia would fall in weeks, and we anticipate the Luftwaffe would bomb our cities every day for two months. know incredibly kind of bleak miserable prognosis Chamberlain is horrified by this because he hates war but he also thinks you know I'm a I'm I'm the man I can fix this and he comes up with something that he calls plan z and he thinks I can carry out a diplomatic coup that will change the entire picture and he's always writing these letters to his sisters and he thinks, I can carry out a diplomatic coup that will change the entire picture.

And he's always writing these letters to his sisters

and he writes letters to his sister and he says,

I will wait, I will bide my time.

I will wait until things look blackest

and then I will astonish the world.

He's a very vain man, Chamberlain.

So on the night of the 13th of September,

he decides the time has come and he sends this message to Berlin. In view of the increasingly critical situation, he says, I am prepared to rip up diplomatic protocol.
I will fly personally to Germany to meet Hitler and to find a peaceful solution. I could come tomorrow if you like.
I'm ready. This is an amazing thing.
Because no summit like this has ever happened before. Exactly.
Think about the series we did about the build-up to the Great War, where it's all telegrams and no one would ever expect their holiday to do anything. And it's kind of, again's looking forward to the summits that will be held between the Americans and the Soviets.

Yeah, exactly.

I mean, this is a sign, again, of Chamberlain's modernity, right?

That he's happy to do this.

So half a day goes by and the world is waiting.

And then on the early afternoon of the 14th of September, the reply comes from Berlin.

And Hitler says,

I would be delighted to see you at the Eagle's Nest tomorrow.

And so at eight o'clock in the morning of the 15th of September, 1938, Neville Chamberlain boards his plane at Heston Aerodrome for one of the most controversial flights in history. Well, Dominic, you said that this is a story full of twists and cliffhangers, and this is definitely a cliffhanger.
So if you want to find out what happens next, how will Chamberlain get on with Hitler? Will there be peace in our time? You can hear the episode, the next episode, right away. And if you are not a member of the Rest is History Club, you can join and get it at therestishistory.com.
But if you'd rather wait, we will be back on Thursday with the story of Chamberlain's three flights to Germany,

the Munich conference,

and, well, I'm giving it away here.

The fall of Czechoslovakia.

Goodbye.

Goodbye.