Hell, France and the UK were so determined to not actually attack Germany that they were busy drawing up plans to attack the USSR instead.
Whole lotta wishful thinking was going on in 1938 & 1939. On all sides. They just weren’t all withing for the same things.
And no small measure of “When your enemy is making a mistake, don’t interrupt him.” The problem was various countries other than Germany all had somewhat different ideas of what constituted a German mistake.
Different thought …
There have already been a few good references to Versailles and ethno-nationalism and how that set some boundaries on what is reasonable and unreasonable border “realigning”, whether by diplomacy, or force of arms..
What hasn’t been mentioned is the treaty web that existed in 1914 and caused one minor incident to tripwire a wargasm of all Europe. The powers of the 1930s were determined not to fall into that trap again. Yes there were various interlocking alliances and mutual defense treaties in the 1930s. But in the capitals, everybody knew they were’nt going to be tripwire railroaded into a war that didn’t benefit them. “Not this time; we’re smarter than that!” they all thought.
And they were at least a little bit right;
You are correct, I misremembered. Mussolini never explicitly promised to enter the war on Germany’s side, but he gave Hitler good reason to do so.
Weinberg, 26-27:
Mussolini’s pride…left him reluctant to temper public and private expressions of sympathy for Germany by cautions appropriate to Italy’s unreadiness for war. The Italian unwillingness to reveal to Berlin that the verbal cheering from Rome would not be translated into (participation in war) would have the effect of surprising Hitler when he sounded the trumpet for battle – only to discover that Mussolini anticipated some years of peacetime concerts.
The first time this had happened had been in 1938 when, at the last-minute, Mussolini’s urging of a peaceful settlement on Hitler had been a major factor in the latter’s last-minute reversal of a choice for war.
Here is Weinberg’s review of the 1938 crisis (excerpted and condensed), pp 27-28
In 1938 Hitler thought he had with great care laid the groundwork for the first of his wars. Once tricked into negotiations by British PM Neville Chamberlain, Hitler tried desperately to extricate himself; but then at the last minute funked at war when confronted by the doubts of his own people and advisors. Reluctantly he settled for his ostensible aims (the Sudetenland) rather than his real ambition.
While others thought of the Munich agreement of 1938 as a sign of German triumph and as a symbol of weak-kneed acquiescence in aggression, Hitler looked upon it as a terrible disappointment then and as the greatest error of his career later.
Not so much determined not to attack Germany as a plan to weaken Germany by attacking its ally. Which the Soviet Union was in 1940.
Not strategically that much different than the British/American plan to weaken Germany in 1943 by attacking Italy.
I don’t understand. Even if we take it as true that Hitler was disappointed and saw the Munich agreement as a great error… how does that translate into brilliant statecraft on Chamberlain’s part? Isn’t it just possible that Hitler was too stupid (as warmongering fascists often are) to realize he’d actually won big?
In my head now, I have this image of Chamberlain and Hitler playing blackjack. Chamberlain pulls an Austin Powers and stays on 5. Hitler is dealt 20 and beats the dealer, but then walks away pissed he didn’t get 21. So much so that he goes to the bank, withdraws his life savings, takes out a loan, and convinces all his friends and neighbors to do the same. He insists he has a system to win at blackjack, and they just need to trust him. Some of them—a shockingly large number—do. Others who are not so sure (or maybe just not very well liked) are beaten, bullied, and robbed by the pro-Hitler neighbors, with the proceeds also going to Hitler. After a year of that, Hitler confidently marches back to the table and bets it all on the first hand. His system? Always ask for a hit. 13? Hit me. 17? Hit me. 20? Hit me. 21? Hit me.
Not surprisingly, he goes bust.
Does that make Chamberlain a brilliant card player? The fact that, in the first instance, he underperformed relative to an idiot who was too stupid to just take the win and quit while he was ahead?
It also gave Germany the time needed to develop their Stuka dive bomber technique in Spain. This was a key component in their rapid deployment strategy that sicked through Europe.
To get back to the OP, I can’t see any way you can spin events to make Chamberlain out to be a “hero”.
If Chamberlain thought he had made a deal that would avoid a war, he was wrong. And that’s the best case scenario for his reputation.
Because if Chamberlain thought that a war was going to happen, he should have pushed to have that war occur in 1938 when Germany was weaker than it would be in 1939 or 1940.
Some have made the valid point that Chamberlain couldn’t have pushed to have a war in 1938 because British public opinion wouldn’t have supported him. If that’s the case but Chamberlain knew that a war was inevitable, then Chamberlain should have gone home from Munich and started working hard on changing public opinion (or done so before going to Munich). He shouldn’t have gone home and publicly announced that he had achieved “peace for our time”.
Arguing that Chamberlain “won” because he made Hitler furious is not a good argument. Hitler had emotional issues. Random people he passed on the street made him furious. You can’t take that as evidence.
Again, you’re assuming that it is, and always was, clearly obvious to everyone that Germany was relatively weaker in 1938 than it would be in 1939. That is not a correct assumption, and it does not appear to be the assumption that either Hitler or Chamberlain was operating under. Moreover, you arrive at that conclusion merely by comparing the relative sizes of their militaries, without considering the potentially much more significant impact of possible diplomatic developments which decision makers needed to consider.
For instance, as I said, the British felt there was a chance of working out an alliance with the USSR, which would have guaranteed the war either not happening or being much shorter than it was IRL. If you think there’s a significant chance that a year’s delay might let you achieve that, it would be criminally foolish to rush into war. And as DrDeth has pointed out, the British surely knew the chances of Hitler being assassinated or removed by his own military in that year was not zero.
And I’m not sure what Chamberlain could have done to “change public opinion” that would have been more effective than just waiting for Hitler to grab the rest of Czechoslovakia. Once that happened, he announced that his government would never again engage in negotiations with the Nazi regime, and the public endorsed that decision with the same near-unanimity they had embraced the Munich deal.
The sad part is that Chamberlain didn’t think he was good at public speaking, and his staff had to coax him to go outside and give the speech that would soon earn him decades of ridicule and scorn. Should have trusted your instincts, Neville.
(The “peace in our time” line, BTW, was cribbed from Disraeli, who uttered it after the great powers got together to redraw the map of the Balkans in 1878. It took 36 years for that to go pear-shaped, so I guess he was right for some definitions of “our time”)
How does/did Weinberg know what Hitler was thinking?
Right, and Hitler had won big, very big.
Good points.
Through 40 years of meticulous examination of primary military and diplomatic documents.
The book I am quoting from won the American Historian’s Association book of the year award. It was Weinberg’s second such win, making him one of only four historians to have earned that honor twice. He has been a Guggenheim Fellow and a Fulbright Scholar. He has won multiple prestigious lifetime achievement awards in the field of history.
Weinberg is a guy you cite, not one you demand cites from. If you can find a historian with comparable credentials who seriously disputes his view, bring it on. (Obviously works from before 1994, when A World At Arms was published, don’t count).
Britain moved away from both of these goals, if they were goals, at Munich. The appeasement of Germany made Stalin think that Britain and France could not be dependable allies. So he decided he needed to make a deal with Hitler. And Hitler’s occupation of the Sudetenland, which was after all his stated goal regardless of his personal feelings, strengthened his position against opposition in Germany.
He could have at least said something. If Chamberlain had come back from Munich and warned Britain that Germany was a threat and that Britain needed to be ready to fight if it had to, public opinion might have disagreed with him. But then when Germany invaded Czechoslovakia, public opinion would have said “Oh, Chamberlain, was right. Germany is a threat. We should listen Chamberlain.”
This was essentially what Churchill did. He issued warnings about Germany when it was not a popular thing to say. But eventually events caught up to him and everybody saw he had been right all along.
In particular, in the book sections quoted, Weinberg cites his own The Foreign Policy of Hitler’s Germany: Starting World War II, 1937-1939 which has a more academic bent and thus backs up more of the conclusions with concrete cites and evidence than the more generalist and popular AWAA.
If DrDeth is unhappy with the cite given, he can certainly go back to Weinberg’s previous work on the topic and research back to the primary sources, if need be. I certainly haven’t heard that Weinberg either mis-cited himself or the sources he used to put together his works on Germany’s foreign policy of the '30s.
That is argument from authority. Yeah, since i am not sure Hitler knew what he was thinking, and he left no diary- then how does this guy know what Hitler was thinking? I call BS.
He cites his own book???
How can anyone know what someone as crazy as Hitler was thinking, without a diary or similar?
Oh and there is this-
In 1983, when the German illustrated weekly magazine Der Stern reported its purchase of the alleged diaries of Adolf Hitler, the U.S. weekly magazine Newsweek asked Weinberg to examine them hurriedly in a bank vault in Zürich, Switzerland. Together with Hugh Trevor-Roper and Eberhard Jäckel, Weinberg was one of the three experts on Hitler asked to examine the alleged diaries. Having examined the documents for two hours, Weinberg reported in Newsweek that “on balance I am inclined to consider the material authentic.”[22][23] However, he expressed reservations by adding that more work would be needed to “make the verdict [of authenticity] airtight”,[22] and said he “would feel more comfortable if a German expert on the Third Reich who has already made his reputation had been brought in to look at the material”.[22] Weinberg also noted that the purported journals would likely add less to our understanding of the Second World War than many might have thought. When further work was undertaken by the German Federal Archives, the “diaries” were deemed forgeries.
So, yeah, I am not buying 100% what he is selling.
In Chamberlain’s defense, the efficacy of strategic bombing was vastly overrated before it was put to the actual test by the war. Which was a large driving force in the worry about Britain’s air forces supposed weakness vis a vis the Luftwaffe during Munich. The Blitz - Pre-war preparations and fears
In 1937, the Committee on Imperial Defence estimated that an attack of 60 days would result in 600,000 dead and 1.2 million wounded. News reports of the Spanish Civil War, such as the bombing of Barcelona, supported the 50-casualties-per-tonne estimate. By 1938, experts generally expected that Germany would try to drop as much as 3,500 tonnes in the first 24 hours of war and average 700 tonnes a day for several weeks.[51]
In addition to high-explosive and incendiary bombs, the Germans could use poison gas and even bacteriological warfare, all with a high degree of accuracy.[51] In 1939, the military theoretician B. H. Liddell Hart predicted that 250,000 deaths and injuries in Britain could occur in the first week of war.[52] London hospitals prepared for 300,000 casualties in the first week of war.
That said, I agree it’s hard to paint Chamberlain as a ‘hero’ for Munich or that the one year he gave both sides to continue rearmament was a determining factor in who eventually won.
More like two years, counting the “Phony War”. And Germany made good use of those years.
Good point. And even if there had been a “Battle of Britain” that Germany “won”, there is still the Royal Navy and the German navy having no way to get massive numbers of troops over the channel.
Would you prefer him to cite a less comprehensive and definitive work? Because, you know, that’s what he would have done if he had literally cited anything else on the subject, other than going straight to primary sources (which, if he had done so with everything in AWAA, would have expanded a already-1000-page doorstop by a factor of 2 or 3).
You want to know how he supports his view? Borrow his book from your local library and follow his cites yourself.
How do you know it from a diary? Plenty of them have been written in a most self-serving manner as well.
The best guide to someone’s thoughts is their stated reasons for taking actions, along with examination to see if the action is aligned with their reasons. Hitler talked about his whys all the time with people around him - he was after all the governmental and political leader of an entire nation, which reported ultimately to him, so of course he had to relate his ideas and his whys to them continually. If he says one thing to one person and something different to another, you have to figure out a reason for the discrepancy and decide where he really stood at the time. These are the meat and potatoes of historical work.
If you reject that, you’ll have to take the rather nihilist view that no person’s thoughts are a subject for historical inquiry whatsoever - or perhaps that no one really has thoughts at all.
And what’s your beef with his part in the fake Hitler diaries controversy, anyway? Is it because he made a snap judgment while expressing reservations?
Yes.
Hitler had only a tenuous grasp on reality, and lied so often and about so many things that you cant know from actual quotes (which are missing here) what Hitler was actually thinking.
So, sure tell me what Hitler said (altho he could have been lying) and what he did- but dont try and feed me bullshit about what he was thinking.
No, Hitler never had to explain himself, and in fact rarely did so.
The German army would have been absolutely crushed if they had gone to war in March of 1938.
According to Oxford Companion to World War II and The German Army 1933–1945 (Müller & Ueberschär): In March of 1938 the Heer consisted of 36 infantry divisions totaling roughly 600,000 men."
That number moves to 109 division and 3.5 million men by the start of the war 1.5 years later. I can’t find tank totals for 1938 but I know there are going to be really low as I know that a little over half of Germany’s medium tanks came from Czechoslovakia at the start of the war. (Edit here I found a table.) I am not going to bother with the Panzer I and II as they were really more of an armored car than a tank considering how thin their armor was (large rifles could penetrate them) and they were only armed with machineguns.
| Tank Type | Number (Sept 1939) | Origin |
|---|---|---|
| Panzer III | 98 | Germany |
| Panzer IV | 211 | Germany |
| Panzer 35(t) | 244 | Czechoslovakia |
| Panzer 38(t) | ~78–91 | Czechoslovakia |
Also remember that if the war starts in 1938 those tanks are fighting against the Germans and not for them making the situation even worse. Also remember that the sudetenland was mostly mountains with lots of forts and other easily defendable terrain. (That is why it was selected as the border at the end of WWI.)
The German Luftwaffe didn’t have any fighters that were capable of reaching England from Germany so Luftwaffe isn’t going to matter in that context. Almost every bomber raid in the BoB that didn’t have fighter escort suffered massive losses.