Black Earth(40)

Czechoslovakia, like Austria, was a creation of the peace treaties after the First World War. Whereas Austria, as a rump successor state of the Habsburg monarchy, was punished as an enemy, the new state of Czechoslovakia was meant as a reward to people seen as allies. Before the First World War, Czech politicians had always been rather comfortable within the Habsburg monarchy, whose multinational character and liberal constitution protected Czechs from domination by Germans. It was only when the monarchy’s existence was threatened that they began to speak about an independent state. By the middle of the First World War, it seemed probable that the old monarchy was doomed whether it won or lost. If it won, it would be nothing more than a satellite of Germany, which would oppress the Czechs. If it lost, it would be destroyed by triumphant democracies of the West. In this situation, a few Czechs began to lobby for recognition in the western capitals. Because theirs was a small people, they claimed that Slovaks also belonged to the same nation. Because they wished their state to be defensible, they asked for mountain ranges inhabited mainly by Germans. Czechoslovakia was established on the principle of self-determination, with a generous admixture of political realism.

Czechoslovakia was thus like the old Habsburg monarchy: It was multinational and liberal. Unlike its neighbors, it maintained a democratic system through 1938. As Hitler sought to dismantle Czechoslovakia, he called the mountainous territories inhabited by Germans the invented name “Sudetenland,” which falsely suggested that they had some historic unity. Although the region defined by Hitler had a German majority overall, it included zones that had Czech majorities. It also included Czechoslovakia’s natural defenses, as well as the impressive fortifications built up by the Czechoslovak army. The Czechoslovak armaments industry was the best in Europe at the time, and Hitler’s zone also included its major factories. The famous ?koda works, one of the most impressive industrial complexes in Europe, was three miles inside the border of the “Sudetenland.”

Czechoslovakia was a creation of the western democracies and saw itself as one of them. It was an ally of France and enjoyed some sympathy in Britain, though perhaps less than it deserved. Wiser heads in Paris understood that Hitler’s proclaimed defense of the Germans was a political preparation for an invasion of Czechoslovakia, which, if the French fulfilled their treaty obligation, would lead to a general European war. The Soviet Union now expressed an interest in the well-being of Czechoslovakia and made overtures to Paris. French leaders hoped for an arrangement with Moscow that might deter Hitler, or at least decrease the likelihood that France would have to face Germany alone.

Unfortunately for the French, at precisely this time the Soviet NKVD was in the midst of executing half of the higher officers of the Red Army in a tremendous wave of terror. Although the details were not known to the French general staff, French officers and diplomats did notice that their Soviet interlocutors kept disappearing without a trace. Even absent this demoralizing development, the French would have needed to convince either Poland or Romania to allow Soviet forces to cross their countries. The USSR shared no border with Czechoslovakia, and so any intervention by the Red Army would involve the passage of Soviet troops through a third country. In Warsaw and Bucharest, the Czechoslovak crisis began to look like the pretext for a Soviet intervention in central Europe. The Poles and Romanians feared a Soviet invasion of their own countries more than a German invasion of Czechoslovakia.

In September, the second European crisis of 1938 reached its height. Hitler had ordered preparations for war with Czechoslovakia in May, with an expected invasion in October. He had also instructed the leaders of the German national minority to escalate their demands. On September 12, Hitler gave a rousing although factually absurd speech about the need to rescue Germans from Czech policies of extermination and to do away with Czechoslovakia generally. There was nothing at all inevitable about the fulfillment of his wishes. The Czechoslovak state was quite impressive in most respects; indeed, in its combination of prosperity and freedom, it was unmatched in central Europe and perhaps on the entire continent. Open talk of the destruction of Czechoslovakia made the destruction possible, especially insofar as European leaders could persuade themselves that yielding to such rhetoric somehow meant yielding to reason.

Even as London and Paris urged Prague to compromise, the Soviets provided indications of their willingness to intervene in central Europe to protect Czechoslovakia. Four Soviet army groups were moved to the Polish border. Three days after Hitler’s speech, the Soviet regime accelerated the ethnic cleansing of its western borderlands. From September 15 onward Soviet authorities carried out swift mass executions in the Polish Operation without any sort of review. Local authorities formed “troikas”—groups of three—from the local party head, procurator, and ranking NKVD officer. The troikas could sentence people to death and carry out the sentence without awaiting any sort of confirmation. Oral instructions made clear that “Poles should be completely destroyed.”