The Long Road to World War II. Part One

Today I’m going to talk about the long background to the Second World War. The victors of the First World War, especially President Woodrow Wilson, had proclaimed the principle of self-determination for all peoples. That was a fine slogan for breaking up the Habsburg Empire, but it would tend only to strengthen Germany, because the German-speaking people of the former Habsburg Empire would wish to amalgamate with the German Reich after the Habsburg Empire fell apart.

Adolf Hitler’s Mein Kampf begins with this yearning of the Austrian Germans to escape from the diverse Habsburg state and to unite with a truly German state with people like themselves. This was not a fixation peculiar to Adolf Hitler. The impulse toward German ethnic unity had been stirred as part of the reaction to Napoleon and had become conspicuous by 1848.

Pan-Germanism went hand-in-hand with hostility toward the Habsburg Dynasty, because this government was a barrier to pan-German unity. It was a barrier toward unification of all the German people in one state. Consequently, the downfall of the Habsburg Dynasty and the disintegration of the Habsburg Empire did not appear to Austrian Germans as an unmitigated evil.

It opened the possibility of unification with the German Reich. Because of Woodrow Wilson’s rhetoric about self-determination of peoples, there was some justification to hope for this positive outcome – if only the principle of self-determination would be applied to Germans in the same way as to other peoples.

The residual German populations of Austria mainly inhabited what we today call Austria, and the Sudeten Mountains slightly to the north. In 1919, these Austrian Germans and Sudeten Germans briefly existed in a single state that called itself German Austria. This German Austria, the German-speaking rump of the Habsburg Empire, was ruled not by right-wingers but by German-speaking Social-Democrats, who wanted immediate unification with the German state that was ruled from Berlin.

The Social-Democratic rulers in Berlin in 1918 and 1919 also generally welcomed unification of Germany and Austria. This was true even of Jewish Social-Democrats like Hugo Preuss, who drafted the constitution for the Weimar Republic. I get that information from a book called The Anschluss Movement 1918-1919 by Alfred D. Low, who was a professor of history at Marquette University, and it was published by the American Philosophical Society in 1974.

Professor Low says:

“Only a handful of socialists and pacifists warned the nation against insisting on the immediate Anschluss. The majority of Social-Democrats and their leading newspaper, the Vorwärts, championed the cause of the Anschluss.”

It was even contemplated, in Berlin, to invite Austria to send representatives to the German constituent assembly in Berlin:

“In the cabinet session of December 31st, 1918, Hugo Preuss suggested in a debate on Alsace-Lorraine that Germany tell the Austrians that they are welcome too.”

So, unification of Germany and Austria was mainstream, in the Social-Democratic party that ruled Germany immediately after the First World War.

In 1918 and 1919, however, despite the complete willingness of the government in Vienna and the government in Berlin to fulfill this long cherished dream of German unification with Austria, in spite of that, it did not happen because the principle of self-determination for Germans came into conflict with the French agenda of eliminating Germany as a challenge to French power on the European continent. Germany was to be weakened by carving chunks of German territory and population away from the German Reich and denying to former subjects of the Habsburg Empire their long-cherished wish for pan-German unity.

John Maynard Keynes, the most influential economist of the 20th Century, who had participated in the British delegation at the Paris Peace Conference, explained in his book The Economic Consequences of the Peace, the forces that shaped the post-war treaties that were so harsh to the Germans.

First, several months before the war ended, there was the idealistic talk of President Woodrow Wilson. President Wilson talked about “peace without victory” and “self-determination of peoples.” When President Wilson arrived in Europe, he was regarded as a kind of living saint or prophet for having espoused essentially forgiveness and just treatment for all, as the basis for ending a horrendous four-year war.

President Wilson’s rhetoric was highly consequential in ending the war. Keynes writes:

“The enemy had laid down his arms in reliance on a solemn compact as to the general character of the peace, the terms of which seemed to assure a settlement of justice and magnanimity, and a fair hope for a restoration of the broken current of life. To make assurance certain, the President was coming himself to set the seal on his work.

When President Wilson left Washington, he enjoyed a prestige and a moral influence throughout the world unequaled in history. His bold and measured words carried to the peoples of Europe above and beyond the voices of their own politicians. The enemy peoples trusted him to carry out the compact he had made with them, and the allied peoples acknowledged him not as a victor only but almost as a prophet.

How the crowds of the European capitals pressed about the carriage of the President! With what curiosity, anxiety, and hope we sought a glimpse of the features and bearing of the man of destiny who, coming from the West, was to bring the healing to the wounds of the ancient parent of his civilization and lay for us the foundations of the future!”

There was thus a boundless optimism for the future surrounding President Woodrow Wilson’s idealistic statement of principles upon which an enduring peace should be built.

This mood and this expectation, however, did not last. Keynes continues:

“The disillusion was so complete that some of those who had trusted most hardly dare speak of it. Could it be true, they asked of those who returned from Paris, was the treaty really as bad as it seemed? What had happened to the President? What weakness or what misfortune had led to so extraordinary, so unlooked-for a betrayal?

Yet the causes were very ordinary and very human. The President was not a hero or a prophet. He was not even a philosopher, but a generously intentioned man with many of the weaknesses of other human beings.

The President was like a nonconformist minister, perhaps a Presbyterian. His thought and his temperament were essentially theological, not intellectual – with all the strength and weakness of that manner of thought.”

Keynes says that Wilson lacked “that dominating intellectual equipment which would have been necessary” to cope with the kinds of people that he would encounter at the Peace Conference.

Keynes characterizes Wilson as “slow-minded” and “ill-informed.” Furthermore, he had come unprepared:

“It was commonly believed at the commencement of the Paris Conference that the President had thought out, with the aid of a large body of advisers, a comprehensive scheme not only for the League of Nations, but for the embodiment of the Fourteen Points in an actual Treaty of Peace.

But in fact the President had thought out nothing. When it came to practice, his ideas were nebulous and incomplete. He had no plan, no scheme, no constructive ideas whatsoever for clothing with the flesh of life the commandments which he had thundered from the White House.”

France and Britain, however, had brought their own very precise agendas to the Conference. The French agenda, under the leadership of Premier Georges Clemenceau, was most influential in determining the actual conditions that the victors imposed on the vanquished. Unlike President Wilson, and to some extent also unlike the British, Clemenceau had not the slightest impulse of generosity toward the defeated Germans.

Keynes explains the French motivation, starting with a short history lesson:

“Before the Franco-German War …” – this is the war in 1870 and 1871 when Germany, under Chancellor Otto von Bismarck, defeated the French Empire and annexed Elsass-Lothringen – also known as Alsace-Lorraine in French – which was a region inhabited mainly by Germans, who had been under French rule for two centuries. But anyway, back to Keynes:

“Before the Franco-German War, the populations of France and Germany were approximately equal. But the coal and iron and shipping of Germany were in their infancy, and the wealth of France was greatly superior. Even after the loss of Alsace-Lorraine, there was no great discrepancy between the real resources of the two countries.

But in the intervening period, the relative position had changed completely. By 1914, the population of Germany was nearly 70% in excess of that of France. She had become one of the first manufacturing and trading nations of the world.

Her technical skill and her means for the production of future wealth were unequaled. France, on the other hand, had a stationary or declining population and, relative to the others, had fallen seriously behind in wealth and the power to produce it.”

So what happened was that in 1871, when France was still clearly the dominant power on the European continent, at least Western Europe, she was humiliated in war by what seemed at the time to be a much weaker power. But then, in the decades that followed, that weaker power, Germany, became clearly the stronger power.

When the First World War came, Georges Clemenceau and other French jingoists not only wanted revenge for the humiliation of 1871; they wanted to restore the early French dominance in Europe. They wanted to make Germany weak in any way possible and to enrich France at Germany’s expense.

This French ambition was entirely incompatible with the ideals espoused by Woodrow Wilson, the ideals that had persuaded the Germans to lay down their arms. The spirit that prevailed after the German surrender was not peace without victory, but rather woe to the conquered.

To win Woodrow Wilson’s assent, however, the essentially anti-German Treaty of Versailles was in some ways misleadingly worded. Says Keynes:

“Then began the weaving of that web of sophistry and Jesuitical exegesis that was finally to clothe with insincerity, the language and substance of the whole Treaty. Thus, instead of saying that German-Austria is prohibited from uniting with Germany, the Treaty, with delicate draftsmanship, states that ‘Germany acknowledges and will respect strictly the independence of Austria’.”

The Treaty of Versailles pretended to protect German-Austria from annexation to the German Reich, but this was a so-called protection that the post-war government in Vienna did not want. The Social-Democrats governing what was left of Austria had been clamoring for unity with Germany almost from the moment that the war had ended.

In fact, the movement for unity existed already in 1848. The guarantee of Austria’s “independence” was not a measure to protect Austria. This was a measure to keep Germany weak by denying Austrians the right of self-determination – insofar as unity with Germany was precisely what they wanted.

The Treaty of Versailles portrayed the denial of German-Austrian self-determination as a guarantee of German-Austrian self-determination. That dishonest rhetoric, that perverse guarantee of so-called independence that France had thrust upon an unwilling Austria, was the beginning of dishonest rhetoric about Austria that continued in the ensuing years.

Adolf Hitler, who had been born in Austria and began Mein Kampf with a discussion of the yearning for unity with Germany that he and others in Austria had felt, in March 1938 cut the Gordian Knot and made the dream of Austrian unity with Germany into reality.

Of course the annexation of Austria was a violation of the Treaty of Versailles, but that treaty was by all rights a dead duck. Violations of the Treaty of Versailles were already rampant even among the signatories other than Germany. An egregious example was the failure of all signatories other than Germany to disarm.

Not many people know that the Treaty of Versailles required powers other than Germany – France, Britain, Italy, Japan – to disarm. The victors as well as the vanquished had been supposed to reduce their armaments, but France especially did no such thing.

I learned about this from an old book written by a captain in the Royal Navy named Russell Grenfell. (Remember, a captain in the Navy is like a colonel in the army.) I remember bringing this up in a history class when I was an undergraduate. It was one of these survey of modern history classes, and the professor had never heard that the powers other than Germany were supposed to disarm.

Now, when I told that history professor years ago that the Allies were supposed to disarm and didn’t do it, and the professor said that I was wrong, I brought the book with me to prove it to him, and he looked at it, and he just sort of shook his head and shrugged. He just sort of couldn’t assimilate that information. But if you go back and look, it’s actually a well-known fact that France and Britain were supposed to disarm and didn’t do it.

I’ve confirmed this by looking at contemporary journalism. A report from the Associated Press of the 21st of March 1935 quotes former U.S. Secretary of State Frank B. Kellogg, who was famous for the Kellogg-Briand Pact that was supposed to outlaw aggressive war. Because Adolf Hitler had announced that Germany was about to rearm, former Secretary of State Frank B. Kellogg said:

“I don’t believe the nations of Europe are entirely free from blame in this situation. In the Versailles Treaty, they pledged themselves to disarm. If any of them have done so, I do not recall which and when. Of course, that is no excuse for Germany to violate her treaty agreements.

But there is some truth in Hitler’s statements, if I read them correctly, that the other nations have agreed to reduce armaments, and none of them has done so.”

And again, that’s from the Associated Press, printed in the Lewiston Evening Journal on the 21st of March 1935.

Britain’s former wartime Prime Minister David Lloyd George, from the First World War, also had something to say about the matter. He said:

“The signatories to Germany’s Treaty of Versailles are in no position morally to enforce those parts of the treaty which they themselves have so flagrantly and defiantly broken. The British government, after the issue of its recent White Paper, has no right to complain at Germany’s gesture, coming before the proposed Berlin conversations.

We are now face to face with reality. We should regard recent developments, including the White Paper and France’s decision to increase her army, and finally Hitler’s declaration, as finally giving us a providential opportunity to clear up the whole mess.”

And that’s again David Lloyd George. That was reported by United Press reporter Frederick Kuh, and it appeared in The Pittsburgh Press of the 18th of March 1935.

Hitler’s decision to rearm should not have surprised anyone, and nobody should have found it incomprehensible, because, on March 23rd, 1933, Hitler said to the German Parliament:

“Germany has been waiting years for other nations to fulfill their promises to reduce armaments. We would gladly refrain from increasing our own if the others would agree to radical reduction of theirs.”

And that was reported by the Associated Press on the 24th of March 1933.

Already, Germany had waited 14 years for the victorious powers to comply with their own treaty, and it had not happened. After this statement in 1933, he waited two more years before finally going ahead and announcing that Germany would rearm.

There was from the very beginning some criticism of the Treaty of Versailles, even in France. The Socialist (but not Communist) grandson of Karl Marx, Jean Longuet, led the charge against the Treaty of Versailles in the French Chamber of Deputies, criticizing the treaty for its vengefulness in September 1919. Three years later, Longuet said:

“Although I was hooted then, I have noticed that a considerable number think the same now.”

That was in the Berkeley Daily Gazette of 27 October 1922. So, according to Jean Longuet, already in 1922 there was an observable, gradual change in attitudes toward the Treaty of Versailles even outside of Germany.

In Germany, discussion of the general injustice of the Treaty of Versailles, and especially Anglo-French hypocrisy in the implementation of it, seems to have erupted after Field Marshal Paul von Hindenburg was elected President of Germany on the 27th of April 1925.

The election of President Hindenburg had an effect on political discourse in Germany similar to the effect that Donald Trump had in the USA in 2016. Suddenly there was open discussion of situations that had been quietly tolerated.

In May of 1925, Foreign Minister Gustav Stresemann spoke to the Reichstag about the fact that, by that time, under the Treaty of Versailles, French occupation troops were supposed to have withdrawn from part of the Rhineland – the area around Cologne – but had not done so.

The New York Times reported on this speech delivered by Foreign Minister Gustav Stresemann:

“Stresemann repeated the German contention, already advanced by him and other German statesmen, that not only Germany, but also the other nations, must disarm if the disarmament clauses of the Versailles Treaty are really to be carried out. German disarmament, according to the unequivocal wording of the Versailles Treaty, is not an end in itself , but merely a preliminary toward general disarmament, declared Stresemann amid loud applause.”

And that was reported in the New York Times of 19 May 1925 by reporter T.R. Ybarra.

Stresemann complained that the victorious powers had exploited Germany’s helplessness to commit further injustices against Germany, such as refusing to withdraw occupation troops from Cologne.

In the Foreign Affairs magazine published on the 17th of June 1925, appeared an article by Chancellor of Germany, Hans Luther, making the same points that Stresemann had made. The impulse toward undoing the Treaty of Versailles was already growing in 1925, while Hitler was still in prison. And the grievances were not only that the Treaty of Versailles itself was harsh and unjust, but also that the victors themselves were not abiding by it.

How could the Treaty of Versailles possibly be defended under those circumstances?

Perhaps the coup de grâce to the Treaty of Versailles came later in 1935, when Britain concluded a naval treaty allowing Germany to have a fleet limited to 35% of the strength of the British Royal Navy. This directly contradicted the Treaty of Versailles, which prohibited Germany from having any navy whatsoever. It is clear that the British government by 1935 had decided that the Treaty of Versailles should simply be ignored.

The unification of Austria with Germany was overwhelmingly popular with the people of Austria. If popularity confers legitimacy, then the subsumption of Austria into Germany was entirely legitimate. There were reports and there was film footage of crowds celebrating in the streets of Austria over the achievement of unity with Germany after many decades of longing.

In spite of this, some hostile media and some politicians called this joyful union “the rape of Austria.” This allegation that there had been a “rape of Austria” relied for its success on general ignorance of the true nature of the Austrian situation. In the English-speaking world, this presumption of ignorance seems to have been well-founded. Otherwise, Winston Churchill would not have dared to use the words the rape of Austria in his famous Finest Hour Speech two years later. Churchill himself, however, certainly knew that his words were dishonest.

Of course, there were some elements of Austria’s population that were unhappy with the radical change of their political circumstances. Apart from Jews, who immediately gushed out of the country and caused a global Jewish refugee crisis when Austria came under Hitler’s rule, it seems that the main constituency in Austria opposing Anschluss consisted of fanatical Catholics, who valued living in a clerical fascist state where Catholicism was the one and only official religion more highly than they valued German ethnic unity.

The Treaty of Saint-Germain prohibited the German-speaking rump of Austria from calling itself German-Austria. The abolition of the name German-Austria, replacing it with simply Austria, separated the country’s identity from the people’s German ethnicity.

Suppressing reminders of German ethnicity facilitated keeping German populations separate. The Sudeten Germans were separated not only from Germany but from German-Austria. Even worse, they were placed under Czech rule in the new, artificial country called Czechoslovakia. This was the most egregious possible violation of the principle of self-determination that Woodrow Wilson had espoused, because no way would these 3.7 million Germans have chosen to subject themselves to Czech rule instead of living in a state governed by and for ethnic Germans.

Czechoslovakia was a strange creation to come from the advocates of popular self-determination. It was essentially a Czech Empire where Czechs were not more than about half of the population, and Germans greatly outnumbered Slovaks. Within this Czech Empire, the most satisfied group was, of course, the Czechs, who dominated the other groups. Even the Slovaks, who were at least honored with being included in the country’s name, were subordinated to the Czechs. In Slovakia, nearly everything was run by Czechs.

Figures quoted by R.H. Bruce Lockhart in the Glasgow Herald on the 11th of June 1924 indicated that Czechs were only about 43% of the population, Germans 26%, and Slovaks 14%. And there were several other ethnic minorities in Czechoslovakia, including Ruthenians, Magyars, and Poles.

According to Lockhart, the relationship of the government of Czechoslovakia to the German minority in that country was always difficult:

“The most serious problem which Czechoslovakia has to solve, if she wishes to become something more than a geographical expression, is her relations with her large German minority population. They are a hard-working and highly intelligent race, and there is no doubt that both in the industrial development of Bohemia and in the sphere of technical knowledge, the Czechs owe much to their former masters.

Even today, a large proportion of Bohemian industry is controlled and organized by German Bohemians. Unfortunately, the mentality of the German Bohemians is still under the influence of German Kultur and German imperialism. They prefer to regard the Czechoslovak state as a purely artificial creation of the Allies, which will endure only so long as French bayonets are able to support it.

They are never tired of proclaiming their grievances or of announcing to the outside world fantastic tales of Czech oppression. These complaints have no real basis and are due to the psychological inability of the Germans to treat as equals a people whom they have always been accustomed to regard as inferiors.”

And that was in the Glasgow Herald, 11th of June, 1924: Bruce Lockhart.

Lockhart says that Czechoslovak chauvinists – those are actually the words that he used, Czechoslovak chauvinists – proposed to eliminate the possibility of ethnic separatism by colonizing Czechs in the purely German-speaking areas. In other words, eliminating purely German-speaking areas. This was a plan to make the Sudeten Germans as powerless as possible.

Lockhart stated already in 1924 that ethnic Germans in Czechoslovakia were conspicuous for their “grievances” and “fantastic tales of Czech oppression.” Now, it has been customary to blame Adolf Hitler for sowing dissatisfaction among the ethnic Germans in other countries and essentially causing the inter-ethnic troubles in Czechoslovakia. But this is 1924. Contrary to what Anglo-American war propaganda has always alleged, Adolf Hitler and his movement did not cause these grievances and these reports of oppression by the German population of Czechoslovakia.

Lockhart tells us, “These complaints have no real basis,” but that assertion seems to be gratuitous. How could he have known that the complaints had no real basis? He does not say.

And even if the Czechs were entirely innocent of any wrong against those ethnic Germans, the Sudeten Germans could nonetheless affirm, beyond dispute, that a great wrong had indeed been done to them when their promised right of self-determination had been trampled by those who placed them under Czech rule.

Those complaints of oppression were well known long before Adolf Hitler became Chancellor of Germany. As the leader of the German people, Adolf Hitler took those complaints very seriously. In a speech of the 12th of September 1938, he mentioned the grievances and the oppression of the Sudeten Germans. “We have the right and the duty to protect our kinsmen in Czechoslovkia,” he shouted, and was interrupted by a roar of applause.

Some of the foreign reporting on this speech by Adolf Hitler criticized him for using overly dramatic language. He used one description that was rendered in English as “these tortured creatures,” which implies that physical attacks, perhaps, might have been the main concern that the Sudeten Germans had to endure. Now, it is certainly true that the Sudeten Germans were oppressed within Czechoslovakia, and the oppression increased as their manifestations of desire to join Germany increased, but most of their grievances were in the form of plain, old ethnic discrimination, not as dramatic as being physically beaten up all the time.

One of the discriminations against the Germans that was especially stupid on the part of the Czechs was the failure to supply their 3.7 million Germans with a German-language radio station that would broadcast news for them in Czechoslovakia. The result of this is that the Germans in Czechoslovakia would listen to the stations from Germany, and the government of Czechoslovakia made no effort to maintain the loyalty of its German population with radio broadcasts in their language. Very stupid discrimination there on the part of the Czechs, clearly not trying to keep their German population happy.

That’s mentioned in a book called Czechs and Germans by Elizabeth Wiskeman, which was very influential in 1938 when it was published, by Oxford University Press, and she gives many examples of discrimination against the Germans, even though her overall bias is actually pro-Czech. And the oppressiveness of the government in Prague increased as time went by.

This was not, however, merely a problem of Sudeten Germans. The Slovaks and the Ruthenes also were becoming restless. The foundation of this state called Czechoslovakia had been the idea that Czechs and Slovaks were really one people, but this idea had already fallen apart, and because of that, the country itself was having difficulty holding itself together.

Mary Heimann, author of Czechoslovakia: The State that Failed, published by Yale University Press in 2009, explains:

“You then got a new idea of Czech dominance, which by joining with the Slovaks could make a sort of Slav dominance over Germans and Hungarians, who are not Slav speakers. […]

The problem, if you like, that Czechoslovakia was supposed to solve from a Czech point of view was that there were historic grounds for having the territory of Bohemia, what’s today the territory of the Czech Republic, as a polity, but it was one-third German and two-thirds Czech speaking. So, in order to overcome the problem of such a large minority, they had to then join with the Slovaks, who had traditionally been in Hungary. They’d never been in Austria. So they were brought over, if you like, to make up numbers so that Czechs and Slovaks together could outnumber Germans and Hungarians. That was the idea. […]

The idea was to try and forge out of two peoples this new idea, this idea of a Czechoslovak person, which didn’t really work. So there were a few boom years at the start where people were keen to give it a go, but it rather fell back.”

The Slovaks were much more conservative and much more Catholic than the Czechs, and they also resented being dominated by the Czechs.

So the result was that these Slovaks, who had been brought into the creation of this new country, Czechoslovakia, in order to help the Czechs to dominate the Germans, ended up having the opposite effect. They, along with the Germans, began to pull the country apart.

Hitler made some important statements and observations in that speech that were not widely reported. One of his observations was that Czechoslovakia was already falling apart, and clearly it was. So, the victors of the First World War created this new mini-empire called Czechoslovakia, after having espoused a principle of self-determination that was utterly corrosive to empires. Then they blamed Hitler and his propaganda when this creation of theirs began to fall apart. If only Hitler didn’t keep bringing up the promise of self-determination of peoples, maybe the glaring contradiction between that Wilsonian ideal, and the French anti-German agenda that the post-war treaties embodied, would be forgotten.

A much greater factor than any such supposed propaganda coming from Hitler’s Germany, I suspect, was the phenomenal recovery and success of Germany under Hitler’s rule. It was called, at that time, the German Miracle. Of course, for ethnic Germans trapped in neighboring states that were not faring nearly so well, the famous success of the new Germany up until 1938 would only add to the preexisting desire for unification with their fellow Germans.

It was only the commitment of France to Czechoslovakia and Poland, and the helplessness of Germany from the end of the First World War until Adolf Hitler’s chancellorship, that had allowed the upstart Czech and Polish empires to possess what were properly German territory.

More and more, however, this established French agenda of keeping Germany weak was looking like a bad idea, especially from the British perspective. Remember that the Anglo-German naval pact of 1935 was already a partial negation of the Treaty of Versailles.

It has often been said that the re-militarization of the Rhineland was the moment when Hitler should have been stopped. The lack of any military response to this action is supposed to have emboldened Hitler so that he would proceed with further treaty violations. In fact, the Anglo-German naval pact of 1935 had preceded the re-militarization of the Rhineland, and because of the Anglo-German naval pact, Hitler already knew that Britain was no longer very interested in keeping Germany down. France, in turn, was unlikely to act without British support.

Why did this change in attitude toward Germany happen? Well, there was a new and much more frightening enemy in Europe. Consider that Britain’s ruling party was the Conservative Party. Neville Chamberlain, and Stanley Baldwin before him, were Conservatives. Their new great focus of fear was the Soviet Union. Because of this, the old commitment to championing every claim of Czechoslovakia and Poland against Germany, and keeping Austria separate from Germany, had become obsolete. Keeping Germany weak no longer seemed to serve French national security and certainly not British national security, because a strong Germany was now needed as a bulwark against the Soviet Union.

By 1936, it was well understood that the two dominant powers in Europe were Germany and the Soviet Union, and that all other powers in Europe would have to align with one of those two major powers. H. R. Knickerbocker, a Pulitzer Prize journalist, wrote this in a column of the 13th of May 1936. He said that Hitler clearly wanted no war with Britain or France. In fact, Hitler wanted to make sure that there would be no war with France, to the point that he had sought an alliance between Germany and France. After France rejected Hitler’s proposal for an alliance, then he built the Siegfried Line of fortifications along the Rhine River as an alternative means of protecting Germany from any possible war with France.

Knickerbocker observed that the preexisting system of alliances that France had created after the First World War to contain Germany seemed to give the advantage to the Soviet Union, but Knickerbocker predicted that fear of Communism would cause these anti-German alliances to crumble. Whenever the anticipated war between Germany and the Soviet Union would come, it was important that Soviet victory be prevented, because this would likely cause the establishment of Communism all over Europe. This consideration would induce France to abandon her anti-German alliances, and Knickerbocker also suggests that it would induce Poland to side with Germany against the Soviet Union – which is what should have happened.

In the light of Knickerbocker’s observations in 1936, it becomes evident what one of the motives for hyping and trying to maintain those old French guarantees to Czechoslovakia and Poland might have been. It looks pretty clearly like an attempt to protect the Soviet Union. It was in the Soviet interest to keep this main competitor on the European continent, Germany, from becoming any stronger.

But the people who happened to be governing in Britain and in France in 1938 were not interested in favoring the Soviet Union over Germany. See, this is the real reason for what people call Neville Chamberlain’s weakness. It was not exactly as portrayed.

The tragedy of Neville Chamberlain is that he, as a conservative anti-communist, was trying to do what would be best for Britain against the pressures of mass propaganda and even some people within his own party, foremost among them, of course, Winston Churchill, who had a very big mouth.

Now, Winston Churchill was an anti-Communist. He wrote a famous essay about the Jewish involvement in Bolshevism that’s well known. It was published in 1920. But in the 1930s, Churchill and some other conservatives were part of a rebel faction in the Conservative Party that perversely magnified the supposed threat of Hitler’s Germany beyond that of the Soviet Union.

Now, the case of Czechoslovakia – the Czechoslovak crisis and the resolution of it, the Munich Conference, followed by what happened after that – was really the turning point in Neville Chamberlain’s ability to withstand the criticism from mass-propaganda, and from the rebel faction led by Winston Churchill.

And what really happened there is not what most people believe. There were really two documents signed at Munich. There was the Munich Pact, which simply described how the Sudetenland would be separated from the rest of Czechoslovakia. That was supposed to be accomplished in October 1938. And there was no violation of that. But there was also this Anglo-German Declaration, which was a little agreement that Neville Chamberlain had put in front of Adolf Hitler, that said that, if Germany and Britain in the future would have any disputes, they would negotiate.

And – there was no dispute. Essentially, the complaint against Hitler is that he took unilateral action – annexing Czechoslovakia! – instead of conferring with Britain, and that he simply invaded and annexed Czechoslovakia. That’s not what happened.

That’s not what happened. What happened was that, after the Sudetenland was separated from Czechoslovakia, Slovakia and Czechia separated. The Slovaks decided to go their own way, and then Czechia was left by itself.

And the president of Czechia flew to Berlin with his foreign minister. So, Adolf Hitler and Emil Hacha and their foreign ministers signed this document that made Czechia, or the Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia, a protectorate of Germany.

And then the German troops rolled into Czechia. And this was widely misrepresented as simply a German act of aggression. It’s not an act of aggression if they were invited in, which they essentially were.

But what happened was that the demagogues like Churchill and the hostile media in Britain portrayed this as a betrayal of “the Munich Agreement” and it embarrassed – it was used to embarrass – Neville Chamberlain. And at that point, Neville Chamberlain felt that he had to take a harder line against Germany. And that was what set Britain and Germany on the road to war.