Antifascist
Friday, 16 May 2008, 3:09 pm
Appeasement isn't really the correct word for what France and Britain were doing. They were urging the Czech to surrender to the Nazis and even threatening the Czech knowing what had happened in Austria earlier. Britain and French assisted the Nazis thinking it would save there own necks. It was a sacrifice that Britain and France was willing to make. The story is so ugly that blaming Chamberlian greatly understates the crime.
QUOTE
Hitler's instructions, as revealed in a Foreign Office memorandum, were that "demands should be made by the Sudeten German Party which are unacceptable to the Czech govermuent." As Henlein himself summarized the Fuehrer's views, "We must always demand so much that we can never be satisfied."3 Thus, the plight of the German minority in Czechoslovakia was for Hitler merely a pretext, as Danzig was to be a year later in regard to Poland, for cooking up a stew in a land he coveted, undermining it, confusing and misleading its friends and concealing his real purpose. What that purpose was he had made clear in his November 5 harangue to the military leaders and in the initial directives of Case Green: to destroy the Czechoslovak state and to grab its territories and inhabitants for the Third Reich. Despite what had happened in Austria, the leaders of France and Great Britain did not grasp this. All through the spring and summer, indeed almost to the end, Prime Minister Chamberlain and Premier Daladier apparently sincerely believed, along with most of the rest of the world, that all Hitler wanted was justice for his kinsfolk in. Czechoslovakia. In fact, as the spring days grew warmer the British and French governments went out of their way to pressure the Czech government to grant far-reaching concessions to the Sudeten Germans.
Rise and Fall of the Third Reich by Shirer, William L. (William Lawrence)pp.
359-360...and add Russia to the mix. The three super powers of the region all agreed to sacrifice the Czechs. Don't blame Chamberlain--he was just the public face.
QUOTE
Hitler had For some time now he had felt himself reinforced in his judgment that Prime Minister Chamberlain would sacrifice the Czechs rather than go to war and that, in such a case, France would not fulfill her treaty obligations to Prague...The Wilhelmstrasse had not failed to notice dispatches published in the New York newspapers as far back as May 14 in which their London correspondents had reported an "off-the-record" luncheon talk with Chamberlain at Lady Astor's. The British Prime Minister, the journalists reported, had said that neither Britain nor France nor probably Russia would come to the aid of Czechoslovakia in the case of a German attack, that the Czech state could not exist in its present form and that Britain favored, in the interest of peace, turning over the Sudetenland to Germany. Despite angry questions in the House of Commons, the Germans noted, Chamberlain had not denied the veracity of the American dispatches. On June 1, the Prime Minister had spoken, partly off the record, to British correspondents, and two days later the Times had published the first of its leaders which were to help undermine the Czech position; it had urged the Czech government to grant "self-determination" to the country's minorities "even if it should mean their secession from Czechoslovakia" and for the first time it had suggested plebiscites as a means of determining what the Sudetens and the others desired. A few days later the German Embassy in London informed Berlin that the Times editorial was based on Chamberlain's off-the-record remarks and that it reflected his views. On June 8 Ambassador von Dirksen told the Wilhelmstrasse that the Chamberlain government would be willing to see the Sudeten areas separated from Czechoslovakia providing it was done after a plebiscite and "not interrupted by forcible measures on the part of Germany."24 All this must have been pleasing for Hitler to hear. The news from Moscow also was not bad. By the end of June Friedrich Werner Count von der Schulenburg, the German ambassador to Russia, was advising Berlin that the Soviet Union was "hardly likely to march in defense of a bourgeois state," i.e., Czechoslovakia.
Rise and Fall of the Third Reich by Shirer, William L. (William Lawrence)pp. 375
High level German military conspirators even warned London at their own peril of Hitler's plans but they were IGNORED by London even while they actually bombed Hilter himself!
QUOTE
The Road to Munich 381 Secretary, and though Chamberlain, writing to Lord Halifax, said he was inclined "to discount a good deal of what he [Kleist] says," he added: "1 don't feel sure that we ought not to do something."30 What he did was to summon Ambassador Henderson, in the wake of some publicity, to London on August 28 "for consultations." He instructed his ambassador in Berlin to do two things: convey a sober warning to Hitler and, secondly, prepare secretly a "personal contact" between himself and the Fuehrer. According to his own story, Henderson persuaded the Prime Minister to drop the first request.37 As for the second, Henderson was only too glad to try to carry it out.* This was the first step toward Munich and Hitler's greatest bloodless victory. Ignorant of this turning in Chamberlain's course, the conspirators in Berlin made further attempts to warn the British government. On August 21, Colonel Oster sent an agent to inform the British military attache in Berlin of Hitler's intention to invade Czechoslovakia at the end of September. "If by firm action abroad Hitler can be forced at the eleventh hour to renounce his present intentions, he will be unable to survive the blow," he told the British. "Similarly, if it comes to war the immediate intervention by France and England will bring about the downfall of the regime." Sir Nevile Henderson dutifully forwarded this warning to London, but described it "as clearly biased and largely propaganda." The blinkers on the eyes of the debonair British ambassador seemed to grow larger and thicker as the crisis mounted. General Halder had a feeling that the conspirators were not getting their message through effectively enough to the British, and on September 2 he sent his own emissary, a retired Army officer, Lieutenant Colonel Hans Boehm-Tettelbach, to London to make contact with the British War Office and Military Intelligence. Though, according to his own story, the colonel saw several important personages in London, he does not seem to have made much of an impression on them. Finally, the plotters resorted to using the German Foreign Office and the embassy in London in a last desperate effort to induce the British to remain firm.
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