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In the early hours of Wednesday, 28 September 1938 an armed raiding party, nicknamed ‘Commando Heinz’ after its leader, gathered in the Hohenzollerndamm headquarters of the Wehrmacht’s Third Army Corps, responsible for the defence of Berlin. The unit consisted of fifty or sixty assorted desperadoes, ranging from Abwehr and Wehrmacht officers, to armed civilians and civil servants, to student leaders. Under the command of an ex-Nazi thug and serial revolutionary called Friedrich Wilhelm Heinz, they were ready for action and equipped with weapons supplied on the instructions of Admiral Canaris. ‘The silence of pre-dawn Berlin,’ a commentator wrote later, ‘was broken by the click-click-click of ammunition being loaded into [the magazines of] carbines and automatic weapons.’

Commando Heinz’s orders were to arrest Adolf Hitler at the moment he gave the order to invade Czechoslovakia at two o’clock that afternoon, and take him to a nearby hospital. There the dictator would be seen by the psychiatrist Dr Karl Bonhoeffer, the father of the great theologian, who would declare the Führer insane and commit him to a lunatic asylum. But some in the group did not intend to let Hitler get that far. They had secretly sworn to kill him in the confusion of the arrest.

The conspirators’ task was, on the face of it, not a difficult one. Only fifteen SS soldiers guarded Hitler in his Chancellery at any one time. The great double doors of the building would be secretly unlocked from the inside by one of the Foreign Office conspirators so as to give the raiding party easy access. There were plenty of reinforcements ready to come to the raiders’ assistance if required. In the Foreign Office and the Interior Ministry, anti-Nazi diplomats and officials had been issued with arms, and were ready to play their part. Other reserve forces made up of small groups of officers were waiting in private houses and apartments across the German capital, like the group holed up in the ornate white-stuccoed art-nouveau block of flats at Eisenacher Strasse 118, close to the government quarter. One of the plotters told his brother over dinner that evening, ‘Tonight Hitler will be arrested.’

There were good reasons for this confidence. Among those backing the putsch were the chief of the German staff and his predecessor, the commander-in-chief of the Wehrmacht, the political and operational leaders of the criminal police, the commander of the Berlin military district and one of his subordinates, the state secretary of the Foreign Office and his chief of ministerial office, the president of the Reichsbank, a senior official in the German embassy in London, another in the Department of Justice, and Hitler’s personal interpreter.*

The plot had been meticulously prepared.

Two weeks earlier, on 14 September, after several days spent carrying out a detailed reconnaissance of all the key sites, there was a full paper rehearsal of the coup plans, which incorporated the seizure of key Berlin police stations, an armed takeover of the state wireless transmitters, telephone installations and repeater stations, and the occupation of Hitler’s Chancellery and key ministries. When the exercise ended, General Erwin von Witzleben, the commander of the Berlin garrison and the coup’s de facto leader, declared that all preparations had been completed. They were ready. The moment Hitler gave the order to invade the Sudetenland, they would make their move.

But in all his careful preparations, Erwin von Witzleben had missed one crucial factor – the British prime minister.

On the evening of 14 September, as the coup rehearsal concluded in Berlin, Neville Chamberlain, in London, suddenly stunned everyone, including his own cabinet and Hitler (who was ‘flabbergasted’), by announcing that he would fly to the Führer’s mountain retreat at Berchtesgaden in the Bavarian Alps for talks the following day.

It is important at this point to record the precise sequence of events.

As a result of the messages from Goerdeler in early August and mid-September, and of the visit of Kleist-Schmenzin to London in mid-August, we can presume that the British government must have known of the existence of the plot against Hitler, although we cannot be certain that this knowledge extended to No. 10 and the prime minister. However, after Theo Kordt’s backdoor visit to No. 10 and his discussion with Halifax on the evening of 7 September, no such uncertainty is possible. From this moment onwards No. 10 knew of the plot, and it is overwhelmingly likely that the prime minister knew of it too. It is a matter of record that, at least from the end of August, Neville Chamberlain and his closest advisers had been secretly considering a personal last-minute appeal to Hitler. But the fact that this took place – stunning everyone, including the cabinet – just eight days after the Kordt visit raises the strong suspicion that the British prime minister’s sudden visit to Berchtesgaden was, if only in part, designed to pre-empt the coming coup so as to give Chamberlain the peacemaker his time upon the stage.

Erwin von Witzleben

Whatever the truth of this, Chamberlain’s unexpected flight in a specially chartered aircraft (it was his first time on a plane) to join Hitler at Berchtesgaden left the plotters crestfallen and discomfited. They had no option but to put their plans on ice and wait for developments.

In the talks that followed, Chamberlain privately conceded the Sudetenland to Hitler, subject to a plebiscite in the disputed territory and a number of other weak safeguards. Afterwards the British prime minister gave his impressions of the meeting and of Hitler in a letter to his sister, which concluded: ‘I thought I saw in his face … that here was a man who could be relied upon when he had given his word.’ Returning to London, Chamberlain met with the French and persuaded them to help pressure the Czechs into accepting the deal, despite the fact that it would effectively dismember their country. Eventually, the Czech president Edvard Beneš had no option but to cave in.

If Chamberlain expected a welcome from his cabinet on his return from Berchtesgaden, he did not get one. Their meeting of 17 September was fractious, and treated the prime minister’s ‘peace deal’ with deep scepticism. Even Halifax, Chamberlain’s right-hand man in the business of appeasement, expressed his opposition: ‘Hitler has given us nothing and is dictating terms as if he had won a war,’ he said. Duff Cooper, the First Lord of the Admiralty, was even blunter, warning the cabinet of the ‘danger of being accused of truckling to dictators and offending our best friends’. Britain should, he said, ‘make it plain that we would rather fight than agree to an abject surrender’.

But Chamberlain would not be diverted. Still determined to push through his peace plan, on 22 September he flew back to see Hitler at Bad Godesberg, near Bonn, expecting to sign the final agreement that would settle the Czech crisis.

He had another shock waiting for him. Instead of signing the deal, Hitler upped his demands with a new set of conditions for ‘peace’, accompanied by an ultimatum requiring the full and unconditional withdrawal of Czech forces from the Sudetenland by 1 October. Chamberlain was forced to fly home that evening crestfallen and empty-handed.

On 26 September the prime minister’s adviser Horace Wilson was despatched back to Berlin as Chamberlain’s ‘personal envoy’. His instructions were to deliver two messages. The first was the carrot: there should be a meeting between the Germans and the Czechs ‘with a view to settling by agreement the way in which the territory [of the Sudetenland] could be handed over’. The second, and more important, part of Wilson’s message was the stick: if Hitler rejected this course of action and invaded, then he should be clear that France’s treaty obligations to Czechoslovakia meant she would have to defend her ally with force, and Britain would join her.

Wilson met Hitler at 5 p.m. that day. The Führer, preparing for a big speech in the evening, was in a foul temper. As soon as he heard Chamberlain’s proposal for more talks he flew into a towering rage, shrieking that there would be no talks unless the Czechs first accepted his terms as outlined at Bad Godesberg. He followed this outburst by issuing another ultimatum – now he must have the Czechs’ answer by 2 p.m. on 28 September – just two days away.

The Führer abruptly terminated the meeting before Chamberlain’s envoy had the opportunity to deliver the crucial second part of the prime minister’s message, containing the threat of a British and French response in kind if Hitler chose the path of military action instead of talks.

The Berlin conspirators were delighted with this outcome. Now, at last, there was a precise date and time for the coup, and it was a mere two days away. ‘Finally we have clear proof that Hitler wants war, no matter what. Now [if he invades] there can be no going back,’ Hans Oster commented to a friend. The carefully laid plans to remove Adolf Hitler were reinstated, and the key coup plotters began moving into position.

On the morning of the next day, 27 September, there were the first signs of a stronger British line: the Royal Navy was ordered to move to battle stations. Hitler, taken aback, said to Göring, ‘The English fleet might shoot after all.’

At midday Wilson, at Chamberlain’s insistence, returned to see the Führer, this time finally giving the strong warning that the prime minister had asked him to deliver the previous day: if Hitler attacked, France would act and Britain would follow.

According to insiders in Berlin, Hitler had already started to wobble. At 9 a.m. Carl Goerdeler sent an urgent telegram to Vansittart: ‘Don’t give away another foot. Hitler is in a most uncomfortable position …’

But then the rollercoaster lurched again.

Whatever ‘tough’ message was meant by the mobilisation of the British fleet and the warning Wilson delivered to Hitler, what the British prime minister said in his now infamous BBC broadcast to the nation at 6.15 that evening could not have been read by the German leader as anything other than a signal that Britain would not act if Czechoslovakia was invaded:

How horrible, fantastic, incredible it is that we should be digging trenches and trying on gas-masks here because of a quarrel in a far-away country between people of whom we know nothing. It seems still more impossible that a quarrel that has already been settled in principle should be the subject of war … However much we may sympathise with a small nation confronted by a big and powerful neighbour, we cannot in all circumstances undertake to involve the whole British Empire in war simply on her account. If we have to fight it must be on larger issues than that.

All eyes now focused on Hitler’s deadline – 2 p.m. the following day. The coup plotters and their forces were on hairtrigger alert, and the world held its breath.

The morning hours of 28 September ticked past in much scurrying to and fro between the various groups of plotters in their secret locations across Berlin. Von Witzleben calmed one of his colleagues who tried to persuade him to launch early: ‘It won’t be long now.’ At 11 a.m. Erich Kordt got a call from his brother Theo at the German embassy in London informing him, on apparently good information, that Britain would indeed declare war if Hitler launched his armies at 2 p.m.

What Theo Kordt did not know, however, was that an hour earlier, at 10 a.m., Chamberlain had rung the British ambassador in Rome and instructed him to get a message to Mussolini asking the Italian dictator to intervene ‘in the last useful hours to save peace and civilization’. The ambassador swiftly passed the message on to Il Duce. At 11 a.m., as Erich Kordt was being assured that Britain was ready to go to war at two o’clock that afternoon, Mussolini, who had been something of a bystander up to now, was ringing the Italian ambassador in Berlin, Bernardo Attolico: ‘Go to the Führer and tell him, considering that I will be by his side, whatever may happen, that I advise him to delay the start of hostilities for twenty-four hours. In the meantime I intend to study what can be done to resolve the problem.’

Shortly afterwards a second message from No. 10 arrived at the British embassy in Rome instructing the ambassador to get a message to the Italians ‘suggesting Mussolini supports Chamberlain’s proposal for a conference in Germany involving Italy, Germany, France and Britain to solve the Sudetenland problem’. A little later a telegram arrived in Downing Street from the ambassador in Rome saying that Mussolini had agreed to Chamberlain’s proposal, and would recommend it to Hitler.

As all this was going on, a constant stream of visitors flowed in and out of Hitler’s Chancellery. At 11.15 the French ambassador, the luxuriantly moustachioed André François-Poncet, speaking on behalf of both Paris and London and unaware of what had been happening between London and Rome, urged Hitler to accept Chamberlain’s proposal for more talks. Twenty-five minutes later a portly, stooped figure emerged from a taxi. Bald, bespectacled, sweating, breathless and without his hat, ambassador Attolico scurried in through the Chancellery doors, bearing the message from Mussolini. Hitler broke off from seeing François-Poncet to meet the new arrival. ‘Il Duce informs you,’ Attolico said, his high-pitched voice rising several notes from the tension, ‘that whatever you decide, Führer, Fascist Italy stands behind you. Il Duce is, however of the opinion that it would be wise to accept the British proposal and begs you to refrain from mobilisation.’ Finally, with just two hours to go to the 2 p.m. deadline, Hitler, the man whose reputation had been built on ‘the triumph of the will’, backed down, announcing that, instead of invading Czechoslovakia, he would accept talks at Munich.

Chamberlain heard the news in the House of Commons at a little before 4.20 that afternoon, and immediately announced he would go to Munich the following day. There was a moment of stunned silence, and then the Commons chamber erupted with shouts of elation and joy.

And so there was no order to invade, no launching of armies, and no trigger for a coup. It was over.

A senior army general involved in the aborted coup said later, ‘I had already passed the order to Witzleben to start the coup when the information reached us that Chamberlain and Daladier were coming to Munich and therefore I had to withdraw the order … the coup d’état was to have been justified before the people by saying that Hitler was provoking a war and that, without a violent coup d’état war could not be prevented. Now that was no longer possible.’ Another asked sharply, ‘What can troops possibly do against a leader this victorious?’

Though they would try again many times in the coming years to replicate the coup of 1938, this was the best chance the conspirators would get to remove Hitler – and, thanks to the British prime minister, they had lost it.

French ambassador François-Poncet, as famous for his merciless eye as he was for his magnificent moustaches, described Chamberlain arriving at Munich on 30 September: ‘Grey, stooped, with bushy eyebrows, blotched skin and chapped hands – he seemed typical of a grand Englishman from a bygone age.’

As all the world knows, what followed was the Munich agreement which gifted the Sudetenland to Hitler without a shot being fired.

Chamberlain returned in triumph to Croydon Aerodrome, with a flutter of paper in his hand, announcing ‘peace for our time’. In the House of Commons and across Britain that day there was cheering and jubilation. But not from Winston Churchill, who denounced Chamberlain’s deal as ‘the first foretaste of a bitter cup’ to shouts of abuse from all sides of the Commons chamber. For a Britain dangerously underprepared for war, there was a substantial upside to Munich – the country now had more time to get ready. But the cost to national prestige, standing and influence was huge. And the consequence of now having to deal with a Hitler magnified in size to his own people, and in his own sense of destiny, would be very great.

The French prime minister Édouard Daladier understood perhaps better than Chamberlain what had happened. Waving to cheering crowds on his return to Paris, he was heard to mutter under his breath. ‘Ah, les cons. S’ils savaient!’†

Hitler celebrated a triumph too, though it was not the one he had wanted. He was initially furious at the outcome of Munich, flying into a rage and shouting that Chamberlain had tricked him out of the military victory over the whole of Czechoslovakia that he wanted so badly. But he soon realised that the British prime minister had delivered him victory enough for the moment. The rest of Czechoslovakia could come later.

As the Commons debated in London, German troops marched through jubilant crowds into the Czech Sudetenland. They were followed four days later by the Führer standing in the front of an open-topped Mercedes, his right arm stretched out ramrod-straight in the Nazi salute, which the crowd returned with cheers, children bearing flowers and a forest of extended arms. Czechoslovakia, brought into existence by the Versailles Treaty, would over the next years lose 70 per cent of its iron, steel and electricity production, a third of its people, and enough weapons and ammunition from its arsenals and armaments factories to equip half the Wehrmacht.

Two days later, on 5 October, Churchill pronounced a final accusatory obsequy in the House of Commons over the dismembered remains of Hitler’s prey: ‘Silent, mournful, abandoned, broken, Czechoslovakia recedes into the darkness … terrible words have for the time being been pronounced against the Western democracies: “Thou art weighed in the balance and found wanting.”’

On 4 November, five weeks after Munich, members of Churchill’s Epping Constituency Conservative Association moved a motion of no confidence in their MP. Churchill survived by the skin of his teeth, thanks to what he later described as ‘the speech of my life’. Thus was Hitler denied a double victory: one at Munich which gave him the Sudetenland; and one at Epping, where fate came within a hair’s breadth of removing his most capable adversary in the coming conflict.

The Abwehr’s ‘eternal plotter’ Hans Bernd Gisevius, who had been amongst the most active of the conspirators right from the start, commented bitterly after the war: ‘Peace for our time? Let us put it a bit more realistically. Chamberlain saved Hitler.’

In a letter to an American friend, Carl Goerdeler wrote: ‘The Munich agreement was just sheer capitulation by France and England … By refusing to take a small risk, Chamberlain has made a war inevitable. Both the British and French nations will now have to defend their freedom with arms in hand …’

In his memoirs written after the war, Erich Kordt recorded: ‘Never since 1933 was there such a good chance to free Germany and the world.’

On the evening the Munich agreement was signed, the key Berlin plotters gathered in the grand house of the commander of the Berlin garrison, Erwin von Witzleben. In the words of one of those present, ‘all our lovely plans’ were unceremoniously burnt in Witzleben’s baronial fireplace.

One general wept, and the world, unchecked, marched on to war.

* Respectively: Generals Franz Halder and Ludwig Beck; General Walther von Brauchitsch; Graf Wolf von Heldorf, Graf Fritz-Dietlof von der Schulenberg and Arthur Nebe; General Erwin von Witzleben and Walter Brockdorff-Ahlefeldt; Ernst von Weizsäcker and Erich Kordt; Hjalmar Schacht; Theo Kordt; Hans von Dohnányi; and Paul Schmidt.

† The polite English translation would be, ‘Ah, the bloody idiots. If they only knew!’