Chamberlain: the heroic appeaser

Neville Chamberlain has gone down in history as the hopelessly naive “appeaser” of Hitler. But in reality, says Robert Harris, the British prime minister was a wily tactician who caught Hitler in a trap of his own making

In what used to be called the Führerbau, the monumental white stone building in the centre of Munich, twin red marble staircases rise to a galleried first floor. A heavy door leads to the Führer’s study. At the far end of the large, gloomy, woodpanelled room is the original brick fireplace in front of which Hitler and Mussolini sat with Neville Chamberlain and the French premier, Édouard Daladier, on 29 September 1938, to settle the fate of Czechoslovakia.

Two miles across the city, Hitler’s second-floor apartment in the smart residential square of Prinzregentenplatz has the same parquet floor, doors, fixtures and bookshelves as it had in the 1930s. One can sit in the corner where Chamberlain produced his notorious piece of paper for Hitler to sign, step out onto the balcony where Hitler greeted his supporters, and contemplate the spot where his 23-year-old niece, Geli Raubal, shot herself in 1931. Her bedroom and her uncle’s, both surprisingly small, are linked by a shared bathroom.

The Führerbau is now a music college, Hitler’s apartment a police headquarters. Yet when I visited them last November, it took little effort to see beyond the clutter of instrument cases and music stands, the computers and the whiteboards, and imagine the places as they were in 1938. Seldom have I felt the presence of so many ghosts. It was as if the players in the drama of the Munich Conference had only just stepped outside.

The historian John Lukacs entitled his excellent account of Churchill and Hitler in the summer of 1940 The Duel. But the two never met; their fight was not essentially personal; there was no psychological edge between them. The duel, if there was one, was between Hitler and Chamberlain, who did meet, at three separate summits, and who cordially detested each other. Chamberlain regarded Hitler as “a gangster” – “the commonest little dog you ever saw” was how he described him to the cabinet (a phrase cleaned up in the minutes to read “there was nothing out of the common about Herr Hitler’s features”). Hitler’s antipathy was equally strong. In private, he called Chamberlain der alte arschloch – “the old arsehole”.

The German historian Joachim Fest, ghostwriter of Albert Speer’s memoirs, noted in his diary: “Speer told us that, after the Munich Conference in 1938, Hitler was in a bad mood for many days and, contrary to habit, vented his anger in petty matters. Of course, no one dared ask him for the reasons, and he himself said nothing…

It gradually leaked out that because of the softness of the other powers, Hitler felt he had been swindled out of a real victory. A fortnight later, he said at a small gathering that he had been cheated, and not only by the cowardice of the British and French. The vacillating Germans had allowed themselves to be unceremoniously duped. ‘Our dear Germans!’ he added bitterly. ‘By that Chamberlain of all people!’”

This is so counter to the popular myth that it is hard, even today, to persuade people that Hitler regarded the Munich Agreement as a swindle, even a defeat. But the facts are plain. In the summer of 1938, he informed his generals that it was his “unshakeable will that Czechoslovakia shall be wiped off the map”. He commissioned plans for a blitzkrieg attack he believed would have brought victory in a week. He intended to transfer 30 divisions to the Western Front and dare the French and British to attack. He was confident neither would have the stomach to invade Germany a mere 20 years after the last war simply to restore three million Sudeten Germans to a country to which they did not wish to belong. For him, Czechoslovakia was the perfect casus belli [cause for war] – much stronger than his trumped-up case against Poland the following year – and as the years passed, he came to believe that Munich had helped doom Germany to defeat. “We ought to have gone to war in 1938,” he said privately two months before his death. “September 1938 would have been the most favourable date.”

Given this, it is surprising that Chamberlain still receives no credit for his part in Britain’s victory. Far from being the weak, umbrella-toting figure of popular caricature, he was in his way as vain, stubborn, autocratic, secretive and messianic as Hitler. Advised by the service chiefs in 1938 that a second world war would mean the end of the British Empire, and aware that if Germany invaded Czechoslovakia there would be little chance of avoiding fighting, he settled on the risky course of confronting Hitler face-to-face. Indeed, his original plan (code-named Z) entailed flying to Germany and not even telling Hitler he was coming until his plane was in mid-air, so that the dictator could not refuse to let him land. “I knew very well,” he told the Commons later, “that in taking such an unprecedented course, I was laying myself open to criticism on the ground that I was detracting from the dignity of a British prime minister… But I felt that in such a crisis, when the issues at stake were so vital for millions of human beings, such considerations could not be allowed to count.”

“That Chamberlain!” grumbled Hitler. “He keeps talking about fishing at weekends. I never have weekends – and I hate fishing!”

Chamberlain flew to meet Hitler for the first time on 17 September – an extraordinary undertaking for a man in his 70th year (“I’m tough and wiry,” he told the British ambassador, when he landed for the first time in Munich). At Berchtesgaden, he asked Hitler to outline his grievances against the Czechs, and Hitler – flattered by the presence of the British prime minister – proceeded to do so at length, whereupon Chamberlain promised to see what he could do.

Over the next two weeks, Hitler – whose objective remained war, not negotiation – wriggled to free himself from this self-created hook. He upped his demands. He imposed an unrealistic deadline. At a rally of 15,000 supporters in Berlin on 26 September, he ranted and raved against the perfidy of the Prague government. But the gap between what he had publicly demanded from the Czechs, and what the Czechs, under pressure from Chamberlain, announced themselves willing to concede became so narrow, that even such hardliners as Joseph Goebbels recognised that invasion could not be justified: “You cannot wage war over points of detail.” Reluctantly, the Führer postponed mobilisation and agreed to talks. In the words of the leading scholar of the period, Gerhard L. Weinberg: “Hitler had been trapped into settling for what he had publicly claimed, rather than what he really wanted.” (The notion, incidentally, that, but for Munich, Hitler might have been deposed in an army coup is far-fetched. The commander-in-chief of the Wehrmacht, Walther von Brauchitsch, dismissed the idea, somewhat irritably, in 1947: “Why should I have initiated action against Hitler? Tell me that.”)

Chamberlain arrived in Munich, on 29 September, the hero of the world. It was Oktoberfest, the annual beer-and-folk festival, a local holiday. The weather was unseasonably warm. Outside Chamberlain’s hotel the crowds were ten deep, held back by Brownshirts. An oompah band played The Lambeth Walk. The New York Times reported “real cheers, like the kind one hears in an American football stadium, whenever the slim, black-coated Chamberlain, with a smile and a careful walk, came out”. The fact that Chamberlain received louder applause than Hitler – and in Munich, of all places – only worsened the Führer’s mood. “That Chamberlain!” he complained to Mussolini. “He has haggled over every village and petty interest like a market-place stall keeper, far worse than the Czechs would have been! What has he got to lose in Bohemia? What’s it to do with him? He keeps talking about fishing at weekends. I never have weekends – and I hate fishing!”

In a sign of his distaste for the proceedings, Hitler permitted only one official photograph to be taken, by his personal photographer, Heinrich Hoffmann. His sullen unease radiates out of the picture. The following morning, before leaving for London, Chamberlain invited himself to Hitler’s apartment and unexpectedly produced a joint declaration, which he had drawn up that morning. Before making this dramatic move, Chamberlain had consulted nobody: neither the cabinet in London nor the Foreign Office officials travelling with him (he left them in the hotel). According to the German historian Max Domarus, the wording was largely based on the speech Hitler had delivered at the rally in Berlin earlier in the week, in which he had called on “both nations [to] promise one another solemnly never to wage war against one another again”. Hitler signed Chamberlain’s paper with barely a glance.

Did Chamberlain really trust Hitler’s word? Again, the record is more complex than is generally known. Over breakfast that morning, he told his parliamentary aide, the future prime minister Alec Douglas-home, that his motive was primarily to trap Hitler. “If he signs it and sticks to it, that will be fine, but if he breaks it, that will convince the Americans of the kind of man he is. I will give the maximum publicity to it when I return to London.”

Chamberlain’s first act on landing at Heston Aerodrome that afternoon, therefore, was famously to read out “the paper which bears his name upon it as well as mine”. And if he had left it at that, his subsequent reputation might have suffered less. But two hours later, back in No. 10, he was prevailed upon – by his wife, according to Douglas-home – to stick his head out of a first-floor window and repeat to the cheering crowds beneath him Disraeli’s words after the Congress of Berlin: “My good friends, this is the second time in our history that there has come back from Germany to Downing Street peace with honour. I believe it is peace for our time.” It was a grave mistake. According to Douglas-home, Chamberlain realised it as soon as he said it. The following week in the Commons, he apologised for words that had been used “in a moment of some emotion, after a long and exhausting day, after I had driven through miles of excited, enthusiastic, cheering people”. But it was too late. The phrase “peace for our time” has damned his reputation ever since.

Chamberlain died of cancer two years later, deeply depressed by the attacks on his integrity but confident that when the official records were opened and history came to be written, he would be vindicated. It hasn’t happened. The Churchillian narrative – of a war that could have been avoided, and a nation saved virtually by willpower alone in the summer of 1940 – appears, if anything, to have become more entrenched, fuelled by books and movies, of which there seems to be no end.

Is it not time to give Chamberlain a little more sympathy? Barely 20 years after the end of the Great War, which claimed some 750,000 British lives, he believed “the people of this country would have lost their spiritual faith altogether” if they had not seen their leaders striving as hard as they could to avoid another conflict. It would have undercut any chance of peace if he had stood at Heston Aerodrome and announced that he still did not trust Hitler and that the Munich Agreement was a regrettable necessity entered into only to buy time because Britain was ill-equipped to fight. Yet this was the truth. As Chamberlain observed, you cannot play poker with a gangster with no cards in your hand. To take the most obvious example: to defend Britain in September 1938, the RAF had a mere 26 fighter squadrons, of which only six possessed modern monoplanes. But in the year after Munich, half of all government revenue was spent on armaments, so that by the summer of 1940, the RAF had ten times as many aircraft as it had possessed in 1938.

And there was something else. The country was united in seeing the War through in a way it would not have been two years earlier. In the crucial cabinet battle of May 1940, when the foreign secretary, Lord Halifax, favoured hearing Germany’s peace terms, it was Chamberlain’s support for Churchill’s policy of fighting on that was the decisive factor. He had learnt the hard way that Hitler was not to be trusted; so had Britain. Neville Chamberlain deserves more credit than he has been given for his contribution to our finest hour.

This article first appeared in The Sunday Times. Munich by Robert Harris is published by Penguin at £20.

“Britain was not yet equipped to fight. As Chamberlain observed, you cannot play poker with a gangster with no cards in your hand”