Munich: A Summit in Surrender

A half-century ago, on Sept. 29, 1938, Munich inaugurated the modern summits. That meeting has long been considered a disaster for Western democracies; the name Munich has come to be a synonym for appeasement and abject surrender. But there has always been a minority opinion insisting that Munich, whatever its moral repugnance, bought valuable time for France and Great Britain. Adolf Hitler never considered it an unmitigated triumph--in fact, he felt his will had been thwarted.

The road to Munich began in August, 1937, when Hjalmar Schacht, Germany’s minister of economics, warned Hitler that the economy could not sustain the pace of rearmament. Coming to a conclusion opposite of what Schacht intended, Hitler on Nov. 5, 1937, called his military chiefs together and told them Germany would have to aim for self-sufficiency, and the only way to achieve it was by conquest.

The latest time to launch such conquest, Hitler said, was 1943-45, but the sooner war came the better, since Germany had a two-year head start on rearmament and its economic and relative military positions could only deteriorate. As an overture, Austria and Czechoslovakia would be overrun.

A month after the bloodless Anschluss annexing Austria to Germany on March 11, 1938, Hitler issued the directive for “Case Green,” the assault on Czechoslovakia. The drumstick-shaped nation of 14 million people, dominated by 7 million Czechs, incorporated 3.25 million reluctant Sudeten Germans within its natural, defensible boundaries. The Anschluss placed the head of the drumstick firmly in German jaws--the most direct route from Berlin to Vienna passed east of Prague. The formidable defenses of Czechoslovakia’s “Little Maginot Line” were effectively outflanked. The Czechs had security treaties with France and the Soviet Union, but the treaty with the Soviets was implementable only on condition that the French acted.

Within Czechoslovakia, Hitler orchestrated a campaign of armed rebellion and subversion by the Sudetens. Konrad Henleim, the Sudeten leader, was told to be implacable; whatever concessions the Czech government made, he must always demand more. Hitler set the attack for Oct. 1, and all through the summer Sudeten actions kept Czechoslovakia in turmoil. The annual Nazi Party Nuremberg rally in the second week of September made clear that action was imminent. All Europe--not excluding the majority of Germans--was plunged into despair.

The world looked to France, but France was a nation divided against itself, suffering through one government crisis after another. In contrast to the reconstructed Wehrmacht, designed for mobility, the French army was wedded to the Maginot Line. The head of the second-rate French air force estimated its survival at two weeks. Gen. Maurice Gamelin, chief of the French army, gave the British the impression that he would be unable to aid the Czechs.

The British had determined, after the slaughter of World War I, never again to fight a land war on the Continent; they had only a skeleton army with two combat-ready divisions in England. The policy of the Royal Air Force was to maintain parity with Germany but the Luftwaffe’s surge, beginning in 1935, had carried its air fleet far ahead in modernization. The RAF was not projecting a return to parity until 1942. In September, 1938, Britain had only the first 43 of the modern Hurricane and Spitfire fighters that were to win the Battle of Britain.

What modern aerial warfare portended had been demonstrated 18 months earlier in the Spanish Civil War, when the German Kondor Legion attacked the town of Guernica and killed 1,600 of its 10,000 inhabitants. Projected onto major cities, such death ratios would produce horrendous casualty totals.

This was the situation confronting British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain. It seemed a question of either plunging Europe into war over what appeared to be a question of self-determination for the Sudeten Germans--when France and Britain seemed incapable of coming to the Czechs’ assistance anyway--or bowing to the inevitable.

Chamberlain startled Hitler by proposing a meeting; the prime minister would come to Germany at once. When the dictator agreed, Chamberlain appeared at Hitler’s Berchtesgaden aerie on Sept. 15. Then Chamberlain, with the acquiescence of the French, came to another meeting the next week at Bad Godesberg, acceding to Hitler’s demand for cession of the Sudetenland. Suddenly Hitler rejected his own terms. “I am terribly sorry,” Hitler said, “but . . . this plan is no longer of any use.”

What Hitler intended was the complete destruction of Czechoslovakia. Most of all, he wanted the chance to test the Wehrmacht in a limited war. The ceding of the Sudetenland would give him neither.

During the next few days Europe seemed headed inexorably toward war. Then, at the 11th hour, Chamberlain, grasping at straws, went through Benito Mussolini, the Italian dictator who was also distraught about the prospect of war. Chamberlain proposed a four-power conference to maintain European peace.

Mussolini was glad to offer himself to Hitler as a mediator; Hitler, who depended upon Mussolini as his principal ally, could not refuse. A summit was scheduled for Sept. 29 in Munich, where Mussolini presented a “compromise”--its terms prepared for Mussolini by Hermann Goering and the anti-war faction in Hitler’s own entourage--granting Hitler everything he wanted except military action. The day before the scheduled invasion, war was averted at the cost of stripping Czechoslovakia of its defenses, leaving the nation at Hitler’s mercy.

The hindsight argument has always been that if the Western powers had resisted and forced Hitler’s hand, Hitler might have been stopped then and there. An additional element of intrigue came after the war, in a claim by the loosely grouped German resistance, headed by the old-line German generals; they said that if the West had not capitulated, they were prepared to arrest Hitler to forestall the Czech invasion. But this was the same intellectual, professorial group that fumbled and bumbled for years, and finally failed in their July 20, 1944, plot against Hitler. The Fuhrer had the allegiance of the younger German generals and the officer corps; they would have regarded any attempt to depose him as treason.

It is reasonable to predicate that the attack on Czechoslovakia would have proceeded much as the invasion of Poland a year later, with the Luftwaffe roaming at will and the Czechs, at best, holding out two to three weeks, while the French engaged in a Sitzkrieg. The Soviet army, which had just undergone the Stalin purges, was in parlous shape, and the Soviet Union would in all likelihood not have participated.

Had the Soviets tried to come to the aid of the Czechs, however, by forcing passage across Poland, the Poles would have resisted, probably quite successfully, and become an important Hitler ally. The Poles at the time had reasonably good relations with Germany and regarded the Russians as their traditional enemy. A Poland fighting on the side of Germany would have taken the eastern front halfway to Moscow.

The probability, then, is that except for being advanced a year, the war would have proceeded much as it did; and that the advantage would have accrued to Hitler.

The British would have entered the war with a skeleton army; had the French been knocked out in the spring of 1939 instead of the spring of 1940, the British would have had to face the onslaught of the Luftwaffe with only a fraction of the fighter force and the barest beginnings of the radar system that proved crucial in the Battle of Britain. Under those circumstances, the outcome could have been different.

Even had Germany been forced to fight what its military regarded as the ultimate horror, a two-front war, the Polish manpower and land area would have been of inestimable value. The debilitated Soviet army would also have been subjected to a two-front war--the Japanese, in a confrontation that passed almost unnoticed, attacked the Soviets in the Far East in 1939.

Conversely, Hitler would not have had the onus of two post-Munich events: The Crystal Night pogrom in November, which was a direct outgrowth of the Munich settlement, and the unprovoked liquidation of the remainder of Czechoslovakia in March, 1939. War in 1938 would always have left some doubt that the peace of Europe might have been preserved by a settlement of the Sudeten question. By forcing Hitler’s hand, Munich destroyed the last vestige of his credibility.

The first summit also left the world with a lesson--that it is self-defeating to appease aggressors. A “never again” mentality grew among the Western nations that was fatally ignored by the Argentine military in the case of the Falkland Islands War. The summit at Munich, therefore, might be regarded as having been an unfortunate but valuable evil. The alternative could well have been worse.