As soon as Hacha had left, Hitler lost all his customary control. Exuberantly he rushed into the room where his secretaries were sitting and invited them to kiss him. “Girls,” he cried, “Hacha has signed. This is the greatest day of my life. I shall be known as the greatest German in history.”107 Two hours later his troops crossed the border. The first formations arrived in Prague, in a snowstorm, by nine o’clock. Once more cheering people were waiting on the sidewalks, but they were only a minority; the majority turned away or stood mute, tears of helplessness and rage in their eyes. That same evening Hitler himself entered the city and spent the night in Hradschin Palace. “Czechoslovakia,” he announced, drunk with victory, “has herewith ceased to exist.” It had all been the work of two days. When on March 18 the British and French ambassadors submitted protest notes in Berlin, Hitler had already set up the Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia. As a placatory gesture he placed at its head Konstantin von Neurath, then Minister of Foreign Affairs, now “protector” of Bohemia and Moravia, who was regarded as a moderate. He had arranged a protective treaty with Slovakia and was already on his way back to Berlin. It seemed as if Mussolini’s remark shortly before Munich was once again proving true: “The democracies exist to swallow toads.”
Nevertheless, the seizure of Prague ushered in the turning point. The Western powers were too deeply disillusioned; they felt hoodwinked, their good will and patience abused. As late as March 10, Chamberlain had told some journalists that the danger of war was abating and a new era of détente dawning. Now, on March 17, he spoke in Birmingham of a shock more severe than any before, referred to the many breaches of pledges inherent in the action against Prague, and finally asked: “Is this the end of an old adventure or is it the beginning of a new?” On the same day he recalled Ambassador Henderson from Berlin for an indefinite time. Lord Halifax, for his part, declared that he could well understand Hitler’s preference for bloodless triumphs, but the next time blood would have to be spilled.108
But the occupation of Prague was a turning point only for Western policy. In the apologias of the appeasers, and in the attempts at selfexoneration by German accomplices of the regime, the argument constantly recurs that it was Hitler who changed with his entry into Prague; that only then had he set out on the road of injustice and radically expanded his valid revisionist aims; that after Prague it was no longer the right of self-determination but the glory of a conqueror that became his goal. We have since learned, however, how such considerations miss Hitler’s motives and intentions, and in fact the very core of his nature. He had long ago decided on his course. Prague was only a tactical problem for him, and the Moldau was certainly not his Rubicon.
And yet, the undertaking was an act of self-revelation. Colonel Jodi had once smugly noted, in the days of continuous triumphs in foreign policy: “This kind of politics is new for Europe.” In fact, the dynamic conjunction of threats, flatteries, pledges of peacefulness and acts of violence applied by Hitler was an unfamiliar, numbing experience; and the Western statesmen might well have been deceived for a while about Hitler’s true intentions. Lord Halifax confessed his own confusion when he compared trying to make out what Hitler was up to, to the groping of a blind man seeking a way across a swamp while everyone on the shores was shouting different warnings about the next danger zone. Hitler’s operation against Prague, however, had finally dispelled the fog. For the first time Chamberlain and his French counterparts seemed to begin to perceive what Hugenberg had had to realize: this man could not be controlled and tamed—except, perhaps, by force.
Prague signified another kind of turning point in Hitler’s career: it was, after almost fifteen years, his first grave mistake. Tactically, he had achieved his victories by his ability to give all situations an ambiguous character, so that his opponents’ front and their will to resist was splintered. Now for the first time he was acting in an unequivocal manner. Whereas until then he had always assumed dual roles and had played, as an antagonist, the part of a secret ally, or provoked conditions while alleging that he was opposing them, he now revealed his innermost nature without ambiguity. In Munich he had once more, although reluctantly, set up the “Fascist constellation,” that is to say, achieved a victory over one enemy with the help of the other. The assault on the Jews in November, 1938, seemed to be his first break with this formula. Prague wiped out any doubt that he was the universal enemy.
It was inherent in his tactics that the very first mistake was irreparable. Hitler himself later recognized the fateful significance of his seizing Prague. But his impatience, his arrogance, and his far-flung plans left him no choice. On the day after the occupation of Prague he ordered Goebbels to give the following instructions to the press: “The employment of the term ‘Greater German Empire’ is undesirable…(and) reserved for later occasions.” And, in April, when he was preparing to celebrate his fiftieth birthday, he ordered Ribbentrop “to invite a number of foreign guests, among them as many cowardly civilians and democrats as possible, and I will show them a parade of the most modern of all armed forces.”109
Unleashing the War
The thought of striking was always in me.
From the spring of 1939 Hitler exhibited a noteworthy inability to break his own momentum. The infallible sense of tempo he had shown only a few years before, in the course of taking power, now began to desert him and to give way to a neurasthenic craving for sheer movement. Faced with the weakness and disunity of his antagonists on the European scene, he undoubtedly could have won all his revisionist demands and probably some of his more far-reaching Lebensraum plans by means of his tactic of enlisting the co-operation of the conservative powers. Now he abandoned the tactic. The regime’s propaganda announced that the Führer’s genius consisted in his ability to wait. But now, whether out of arrogance, whether corrupted by the effectiveness of “non-negotiable demands,” or whether out of frantic restiveness—Hitler no longer waited.
Only a week after the occupation of Prague he boarded the cruiser Deutschland in Swinemünde and sailed toward Memel. This small seaport on the northern frontier of East Prussia had been annexed by Lithuania in 1919, in the confusion of the immediate postwar period. A demand for its return was only a matter of time. But in order to lend dramatic verve and proof of his imperiousness to the process of recovering the city, Hitler informed the Lithuanian government in Vilna on March 21 that its envoys were to arrive in Berlin “tomorrow by special plane” to sign the protocol of cession. Meanwhile, he himself, with the reply still in doubt, set out for Memel. And while Ribbentrop “Háchaed” the Lithuanian delegation, Hitler—seasick and in ill humor—held two impatient radio conversations from on board the Deutschland. He demanded to know whether he would be able to enter the city peaceably or would have to force his way in with the ship’s guns. On March 23, toward half past one in the morning, Lithuania consented to the cession, and at noon Hitler once again held one of his loudly cheered entries into Memel.
Two days earlier Ribbentrop had summoned Josef Lipski, the Polish ambassador in Berlin, to meet with him, and had proposed negotiations on a comprehensive German-Polish settlement. Ribbentrop returned with some emphasis to demands he had made several times before, including the return of the Free City of Danzig and the building of an extraterritorial road and rail link across the Polish Corridor. In return he offered to extend the 1934 Nonaggression Pact for twenty-five years and to guarantee formally Poland’s borders. How seriously the offer was meant is evident from the simultaneous attempt to enlist Poland in the Anti-Comintern Pact. In general Ribbentrop’s overtures were aimed at striking a bargain with a “distinctly anti-Soviet tendency.” One draft of a Foreign Office note, for example, rather brazenly offered Warsaw, as its reward for increased cooperation, the prospect of receiving possession of the Ukraine. Following this line, Hitler, in a conversation with Brauchitsch on March 25 rejected a violent solution of the Danzig question but thought a military action against Poland under “specially favorable political preconditions” worth considering.