Hitler

several hours, left his audience – which was fully acquainted with the content of Beck’s July memorandum – still unconvinced. The crisis of confidence between Hitler and the army general staff had reached serious levels. At the same time, the assembled officers were divided among themselves, with some of them increasingly critical of Beck.
    The Chief of the General Staff made a last attempt to persuade Brauchitsch to take a firm stance against Hitler. It was whistling in the wind. On 18 August, Beck finally tendered the resignation he had alreadyprepared a month earlier. Even then, he missed a last trick. He accepted Hitler’s request – ‘for foreign-policy reasons’ – not to publicize his resignation. A final opportunity to turn the unease running through the army, and through the German people, into an open challenge to the political leadership of the Reich – and when Beck knew that only Ribbentrop, and perhaps Himmler, fully backed Hitler – was lost. Beck’s path into fundamental resistance was a courageous one. But in summer 1938 he gradually became, at least as regards political strategy, an isolated figure in the military leadership. As he himself saw it several months later: ‘I warned – and in the end I was alone.’ Ironically, he had been more responsible than any other individual for supplying Hitler with the military might which the Dictator could not wait to use.
    Hitler was by this time, therefore, assured of the compliance of the military, even if they were reluctant rather than enthusiastic in their backing for war against the Czechs, and even if relations were tense and distrustful. And as long as the generals fell into line, his own position was secure, his policy unchallengeable.
    As it transpired, his reading of international politics turned out to be closer to the mark than that of Beck and the generals. In the guessing-and second-guessing political poker-game that ran through the summer, the western powers were anxious to avoid war at all costs, while the east European neighbours of Czechoslovakia were keen to profit from any war but unwilling to take risks. By midsummer, Ribbentrop regarded the die as cast. He told Weizsäcker ‘that the Führer was firmly resolved to settle the Czech affair by force of arms’. Mid-October was the latest possible date because of flying conditions. ‘The other powers would definitely not do anything about it and if they did we would take them on as well and win.’
    Hitler himself spent much of the summer at the Berghof. Despite the Sudeten crisis, his daily routine differed little from previous years: he got up late, went for walks, watched films, and relaxed in the company of his regular entourage and favoured visitors like Albert Speer. Whether on the basis of newspaper reports, or through information fed to him by those able to gain access, he intervened – sometimes quirkily – in an array of minutiae: punishment for traffic offences, altering the base of a statue, considerations of whether all cigarettes should be made nicotine-free, or the type of holes to be put into flagpoles. He also interfered directly in the course of justice, ordering the death penalty for theperpetrator of a series of highway robberies, and the speediest possible conviction for the alleged serial killer of a number of women.
    But the Czechoslovakian crisis was never far away. Hitler was preoccupied with the operational planning for ‘Green’. His confidence in his generals dwindled as his anger at their scepticism towards his plans mounted. He also involved himself in the smallest detail of the building of the Westwall – a key component in his plans to overrun the Czechs without French intervention and the bluff to discourage Germany’s western neighbours from even attempting to cross the Rhine. He was still expecting the fortifications to be complete by the autumn – by the onset of frost, as he told Goebbels – at which point he reckoned Germany would be unassailable from the west. But the sluggish progress made by the army made him furious. When General Adam claimed that the extra 12,000 bunkers he had ordered were an impossibility, Hitler flew into a rage, declaring that for Todt the word ‘impossible’ did not exist. He felt driven to dictate a lengthy memorandum, drawing on his own wartime experiences, laying down his notions of the nature of the fortifications to be erected, down to sleeping, eating, drinking, and lavatory arrangements in