true nature. It was also firmly founded on what had been, with the terrible exception of the Great War, British foreign policy for the past hundred years. It is important to remember that Chamberlain’s analysis was shared by the majority of British political and public opinion of the day – especially among the generals: ‘Of our top military and air people whom I questioned on the subject, I don’t think I found one who did not think that appeasement was right,’ wrote Sir Alexander Cadogan, who succeeded Sir Robert Vansittart as head of the Foreign Office in 1938.
It was Churchill and those closest to him, along with the Labour Party and the Liberals, who were regarded as being out of step with reality and with history, not Chamberlain.
Since the post-Napoleonic settlement, Britain’s strategy had been to stay out of military engagements on the European mainland. Successive British governments were, in the main, sniffily indifferent to what the Europeans did on their continent, so long as they did not threaten the wider peace or interfere in the process of building and maintaining the British Empire. The Europeans could have the Continent, was London’s unspoken motto, provided Britain could have the sea. Chamberlain’s ‘betrayal’ of Czechoslovakia was thus fully consistent with Britain’s traditional policy of managing the European peace not through armies, but through constantly-shifting diplomatic alliances designed to preserve the balance of power established at the Congress of Vienna in 1815. What matter if this policy earned Britain the French insult ‘Albion perfide’ – so long as it kept her powerful, prosperous, peaceful, and out of the wars that convulsed Europe in the nineteenth century. In the view of the appeasers in 1938, it was the abandonment of this policy in 1914 that had caused such ghastly consequences for the generation that had fought in the First World War, and who now governed Britain. It was to this traditional policy that the country should now return, they insisted, so that the terrible blood sacrifice which was the inevitable consequence of modern total war should never again be allowed to happen. When Hitler hinted, in a ‘peace speech’ to the Reichstag on 21 May 1935, that he favoured a broad settlement based on ‘leaving Europe to the Europeans and letting Britain have the sea’, he was skilfully playing both to Britain’s traditional foreign policy and to popular and official British sentiment.
It was for this reason that when Goerdeler and his plotters started appearing in Whitehall in 1937 and 1938 with their warnings of an approaching apocalypse, they were seen not as good men seeking to save the world from tyranny, but as meddlers and interferers in a policy which everyone believed in, and which had proved its worth over the previous hundred years. If it is the case, as seems likely, that Chamberlain’s hurried first flight to Bad Godesberg on 15 September 1938 was intended, at least in part to forestall the plot Goerdeler and his friends had been hatching, then in all probability what would have been on his mind was ‘Better the devil you know, than the conspirators you don’t.’
Herein also lay the last major ingredient of the tragically missed opportunity of September 1938. Goerdeler and his fellow plotters knew and understood the exceptional nature of the demonic power they were seeking to remove. Chamberlain and the British, on the other hand, saw Hitler as just the latest in the long line of Continental tyrants behaving badly, as Continental tyrants always had, from Napoleon to Bismarck to Kaiser Wilhelm II. Worse still, the 1938 plotters were, in the British government’s eyes, yet another bunch of conservative Prussian landowners, monarchists and militarists with no attachment to democracy. Their primary aim, like that of Hitler, was to recover the lands Germany had lost under the Versailles settlement. What Chamberlain, Halifax and Henderson did not see was that, whatever the democratic deficiencies of the September plotters, they were nevertheless motivated by conventional religious and European values of morality, which were totally absent from the character and actions of Adolf Hitler. The plotters understood the unique moral bankruptcy of the Hitler phenomenon. Chamberlain and his government, it seems, did not.
Behind the September plotters’ complaints about the moral failures of Britain and France during the Czech crisis lay a crucial failure of their own – one which was fatally to hobble them right through to 1944. They wanted to be rid of Hitler, but they were never prepared to take the initiative to do so. They shied away from triggering events themselves, and depended on others to do this for them (in the case of the Czech crisis, the trigger was Hitler’s order to mobilise). They were actors in the wings, always waiting for a cue to come onto the stage which never came. Eventually, as successive ‘ripe moments’ for their ‘lovely plans’ came and went, waiting became a kind of strategy in itself – until finally an impetuous, headstrong young man strode into their midst in 1944 and shook them from their torpor.
In the immediate aftermath of Munich, most of the plotters slunk away into the shadows to wait and watch for the next propitious moment to strike. Goerdeler spent the end of September and the first week of October writing a series of long, impatient and rather self-righteous memos to London and Washington – including his first proposition for a united Europe as a solution to the rising threat of European nationalism. In the middle of October he called Vansittart’s ‘agent’ A.P. Young to a meeting at a private address in Zürich. There he passed on some useful intelligence, including the information that Hitler had sent Canaris to persuade Franco into an alliance aimed at capturing Gibraltar and sealing off the Mediterranean from the British.
A further meeting between Young and Goerdeler took place on 4 December, this time in a hotel room in Zürich. On this occasion Goerdeler, using two fingers and a typewriter borrowed from the hotel, laboriously typed out ten paragraphs of a suggested ‘Heads of Agreement between Great Britain and Germany’. Despite the fact that nearly all his recommendations had already been incorporated in Foreign Office forward papers, his proposals were roundly rejected by the mandarins of King Charles’s Street, who, having been proved wrong about Goerdeler’s warnings about the Sudetenland, were now finding his preachy style irksome and patronising.
It was not just the British who were put off by Goerdeler’s didacticism. Hans Bernd Gisevius wrote at this time that Goerdeler’s ‘finest virtue was also his gravest weakness. The passion for justice burned so fiercely in him that he forgot all moderation. He preached and preached and preached, until … people … lost all patience with him.’
On 10 December 1938, Sir Alexander Cadogan reflected the same weariness with the German emissary in his diary: ‘had a message from G [Goerdeler] outlining a plan of [an army] revolution in Germany to take place before the end of the month. G wants a message from us … He had already sent us a “programme” which we couldn’t subscribe to – too much like Mein Kampf – and that rather put me off him. But he may want something merely to show his fellow conspirators that we shan’t fall upon a divided Germany and would want to work with any decent regime that may come out of this mess … I don’t believe much in this,’ he concluded, but added a wary codicil: ‘but if there is anything in it, it’s the biggest thing for centuries’.
Along with his recommendations for British policy, Goerdeler also included a report predicting, among other things, that Hitler would soon turn his attention to Holland, Belgium and Switzerland. Over the next year, Goerdeler’s use to the British changed from being an occasional (and by now mostly unwanted) diplomatic adviser on Germany, to a primary source of intelligence on Hitler’s plans and intentions.
Madeleine Bihet-Richou was not able to enjoy autumn in Paris for long after her narrow escape from Vienna. In the last days of September her French intelligence handler, Henri Navarre, asked her to return to Berlin, where a job had been arranged for her at the French Institute. She was now able to continue her affair with Lahousen, who was by this time installed as one of Canaris’s closest advisers in the Tirpitzufer. At the end of October the two lovers were taking advantage of a brilliant late-autumn day to pay a visit to the Berlin Zoo. Admiring the giraffes, Lahousen said in a quiet voice that Hitler had just ordered plans to be drawn up for the takeover of the remains of Czechoslovakia in the middle of March the following year.
‘This time,’ he added, ‘if France and Britain react, it will be war.’
Madeleine rushed, first to the French embassy to send a brief coded telegram to Navarre in Paris, and then to the Anhalter station in Potsdamer Platz, where she caught a train to the French capital to report personally on what she had learned. She met Navarre and Louis Rivet,