rise-and-fall-of-the-third-reich-william-shirer-pdf

THE ROAD TO MUNICH 339But they needed assurances of another kind – whether, after all, they hadbeen right in their assumption that Britain and France would go to war againstGermany if Hitler carried out his resolve to attack Czechoslovakia. For thispurpose they had decided to send trustworthy agents to London not only tofind out what the British government intended to do but, if necessary, to tryto influence its decision by informing it that Hitler had decided to attack theCzechs on a certain date in the fall, and that the General Staff, which knew thedate, opposed it and was prepared to take the most decisive action to preventit if Britain stood firm against Hitler to the last.The first such emissary of the plotters, selected by Colonel Oster of theAbwehr, was Ewald von Kleist, who arrived in London on August 18. AmbassadorHenderson in Berlin, who was already anxious to give Hitler whateverhe wanted in Czechoslovakia, advised the British Foreign Office that ”it wouldbe unwise for him [Kleist] to be received in official quarters.” ∗ Nevertheless SirRobert Vansittart, chief diplomatic adviser to the Foreign Secretary and one ofthe leading opponents in London of the appeasement of Hitler, saw Kleist onthe afternoon of his arrival, and Winston Churchill, still in the political wildernessin Britain, received him the next day. To both men, who were impressedby their visitor’s sobriety and sincerity, Kleist repeated what he had been instructedto tell, stressing that Hitler had set a date for aggression against theCzechs and that the generals, most of whom opposed him, would act, but thatfurther British appeasement of Hitler would cut the ground from under theirfeet. If Britain and France would declare publicly that they would not standidly by while Hitler threw his armies into Czechoslovakia and if some prominentBritish statesmen would issue a solemn warning to Germany of the consequencesof Nazi aggression, then the German generals, for their part, would act to stopHitler. 360Churchill gave Kleist a ringing letter to take back to Germany to bolster hiscolleagues:I am sure that the crossing of the frontier of Czechoslovakia by Germanarmies or aviation in force will bring about renewal of the WorldWar. I am as certain as I was at the end of July, 1914, that Englandwill march with France . . . Do not, I pray you, be misled upon thispoint. . . †Vansittart took Kleist’s warning seriously enough to submit immediately a∗ According to a German Foreign Office memorandum of August 6, Henderson, at a privateparty, had remarked to the Germans present ”that Great Britain would not think of riskingeven one sailor or airman for Czechoslovakia, and that any reasonable solution would be agreedto so long as it were not attempted by force.” 359† Kleist returned to Berlin on August 23 and showed Churchill’s letter to Beck, Haider,Hammerstein, Canaris, Oster and others in the plot. In Nemesis of Power (p. 413), Wheeler-Bennett writes that, according to private information given him after the war by Fabian vonSchlabrendorff, Canaris made two copies of the letter, one for himself and one for Beck, andKleist hid the original in his country house at Schmenzin in Pomerania. It was discoveredthere by the Gestapo after the July 20, 1944, attempt on Hitler’s life and contributed toKleist’s death sentence before a People’s Court, which was passed and carried out on April16, 1945. Actually the contents of Churchill’s letter became known to the German authoritiesmuch sooner than the conspirators could have imagined. I found it in a German ForeignOffice memorandum which, though undated, is known to have been submitted on September6, 1938. It is marked: ”Extract from a letter of Winston Churchill to a German confidant –” 361