Hitler

incorporation of the Sudetenland in the German Reich, but at destroying the state of Czechoslovakia itself. By the end of May this aim, and the timing envisaged to accomplish it, had been outlined to the army leadership. It meant war – certainly against Czechoslovakia, and probably (so it seemed to others), despite Hitler’s presumption of the contrary, against the western powers. Hitler, it became unmistakably plain, actually wanted war.
    The sheer recklessness of courting disaster by the wholly unnecessary (in their view) risk of war at this time against the western powers – which they thought Germany in its current state of preparation could not win – appalled and horrified a number of those who knew what Hitler had in mind.
    It was not the prospect of destroying Czechoslovakia that alienated them. To German nationalist eyes, Czechoslovakia could only be seen as a major irritant occupying a strategically crucial area. Coloured in addition by anti-Slav prejudice, there was little love lost for a democracy, hostile to the Reich, whose destruction would bring major advantages for Germany’s military and economic dominance of central Europe. The army had already planned in 1937 for the possibility of a pre-emptivestrike against Czechoslovakia – ‘Case Green’ – to counter the possibility of the Czechs joining in from the east if their allies, the French, attacked the Reich from the west. As the prospect of a war with the French, something taken extremely seriously in the mid-1930s, had receded, ‘Case Green’ had been amended a month after the ‘Hoßbach meeting’ of 5 November 1937 to take account of likely circumstances in which the Wehrmacht could invade Czechoslovakia to solve the problem of ‘living space’.
    In economic terms, too, the fall of Czechoslovakia offered an enticing prospect. Göring, his staff directing the Four-Year Plan, and the leaders of the arms industry, were for their part casting greedy eyes on the raw materials and armaments plants of Czechoslovakia. The economic pressures for expansion accorded fully with the power-political aims of the regime’s leadership. Those who had argued for an alternative economic strategy, most of all of course Schacht, had by now lost their influence. Göring was the dominant figure. And in Göring’s dreams of German dominion in south-eastern Europe, the acquisition of Czechoslovakia was plainly pivotal.
    But neither military strategy nor economic necessity compelled a Czech crisis in 1938. And even Göring, keen as he was to see the end of the Czech state, was anxious, as were others in the upper echelons of the regime, to avoid what seemed that almost certain consequence of any move against Czechoslovakia: war against the western powers.
    It was the vision of national disaster that led for the first time to the tentative emergence of significant strands of opposition to what was regarded as Hitler’s madness. In the army leadership (still smarting from the Fritsch scandal), in the Foreign Office, and in other high places, the germs of resistance were planted among those certain that Germany was being driven headlong into catastrophe. In the military, the leading opponents of Hitler’s high-risk policy emerged as General Beck, who resigned as Chief of Staff in the summer, and Admiral Wilhelm Canaris, head of the Abwehr (military intelligence). In the Foreign Office, the State Secretary Ernst von Weizsäcker was at the forefront of those in opposition to the policy supported avidly by his immediate superior, Foreign Minister von Ribbentrop. Among civilians with inside knowledge of what was going on, Carl Goerdeler, the former Reich Price Commissar, used his extensive foreign contacts to warn about Hitler’s aims.
    Nor was there any popular pressure for a foreign adventure, let aloneone which was thought likely to bring war with the western powers. Among ordinary people, excluded from the deliberations in high places which kept Europe on the thinnest of tightropes between war and peace in September, the long-drawn-out crisis over Czechoslovakia, lasting throughout the late spring and summer, unlike earlier crises allowed time for the anxieties about war to gather momentum. The acute tension produced what was described as a ‘real war psychosis’. No love was lost on the Czechs. And the relentless propaganda about their alleged persecution of the German minority was not without impact. There were indeed some feelings of real gung-ho