Britain and France reject Hitler’s offer

At 3.48 p.m. on 12 October 1939 the Prime Minister, Neville Chamberlain, rose in the House of Commons to set out the government’s position on the proposals that Adolf Hitler had announced in the Reichstag six days earlier. His reply was calm, matter-of-fact and unequivocal: a peace that began by sanctioning aggression was unacceptable, and the promises of the present German government could no longer be believed. If Germany wanted peace, it would have to prove it by “acts – not words alone”. Two days earlier, on Tuesday 10 October, the French Prime Minister, Édouard Daladier, had spoken in a similar vein on the radio.

Some chronologies give these two events in the reverse order, placing Chamberlain’s refusal under 10 October and Daladier’s under 12 October. The sources leave no room for doubt here. The record of the House of Commons (Hansard) dates Chamberlain’s statement to Thursday 12 October, and in it the Prime Minister himself referred to the speech Daladier had broadcast “last Tuesday”, that is, on 10 October. The dates have thus been swapped.

A week of deliberation

Hitler’s speech of 6 October did not take the Allies by surprise. Ever since the German–Soviet declaration of 28 September, appended to the Boundary and Friendship Treaty, London and Paris had been expecting a “peace offensive”. As early as 2 October the American ambassador, Joseph P. Kennedy, reported to Washington after lunching with the First Lord of the Admiralty, Winston Churchill, that any terms Hitler offered would probably be rejected. The British government nevertheless decided that the offer had to be considered carefully rather than dismissed in a single sentence. Public opinion was at stake – at home, in the Dominions and in the neutral countries, above all America: it was Hitler who had to be seen as the one who did not want peace.

The first assessment by Foreign Office officials, drawn up on 6 October itself after consultations with Chamberlain and the Foreign Secretary, Lord Halifax, ran as follows: the proposals were too vague to serve as the basis for a conference, and a conference on such terms would hand Hitler all the cards. The following days were taken up with consultations with the Dominion governments and with France. In Paris it was decided as early as 7 October that the speech required no formal reply and that it would be enough to refer to it in the ordinary speeches of members of the two governments. The new Foreign Minister of the Polish government-in-exile, August Zaleski, happened to be in London at the time. Chamberlain was later able to say that “complete identity of views” had been established with the Poles.

Daladier: “every six months”

Daladier spoke on the radio on the evening of 10 October. He began with the war: for a month French soldiers had been advancing on enemy soil, French airmen had been giving proof of their courage, and the navy was securing communications with the empire and intercepting hundreds of thousands of tons of raw materials bound for Germany. This was a description of a situation that no longer existed. French troops were at that very moment withdrawing from the Saar behind the Maginot Line, and a few days later the Germans recovered the whole strip of land they had lost in September. The Prime Minister also attacked the French Communists, who until recently had presented themselves as the most ardent of patriots but who, after the agreement between Moscow and Berlin and the partition of Poland, had begun to preach a “peace of treason”. The Communist Party had already been dissolved by decree on 26 September.

He then turned to the “German peace”. He recalled that Austria had been followed by Czechoslovakia, and Czechoslovakia by Poland, and that each time the world had been told that Germany wanted nothing more. He summed up the speech of 6 October ironically: I have destroyed Poland, I am satisfied, let us stop fighting and call a conference to consecrate my conquests. His most frequently quoted sentence was: “We have taken up arms against aggression. We shall not lay them down until we have sure guarantees of security – a security that cannot be called in question every six months.” To Hitler’s claim that the fate of Poland concerned only two powers, he replied that it also concerned – and above all – the Poles themselves. He mocked the German victories: after all its conquests, Germany was beginning the war with ration cards for bread, meat, milk and sugar. France, on whom the war had been forced, would fight for definitive guarantees of security, because no Frenchman would forgive a government if, after a demobilisation based on empty promises, the army had to reassemble under enemy fire a few months later.

Chamberlain: “acts – not words alone”

Chamberlain’s statement was longer and more carefully constructed. Halifax had handed its text to Ambassador Kennedy that morning so that he could cable it to Washington at once. In the House of Lords the same text was read out by the Lord President of the Council and Leader of the House, Earl Stanhope, because Halifax had a sore throat.

The Prime Minister began by recalling the events of August: the British efforts to bring about direct German–Polish negotiations, and the appeals of the President of the United States, the King of the Belgians, the Queen of the Netherlands, the Pope and Mussolini, all of which had come to nothing because Hitler was determined to attack Poland. He spoke of Polish towns and villages ruined by bombing and shellfire and of civilians killed in great numbers, as neutral observers had testified. He observed that Hitler’s speech contained not even an attempt to make amends for this “grave crime against humanity”. The Polish state and its leaders had been showered with abuse, and the future of the occupied lands was to be decided by Germany and Russia alone. Hitler’s proposals were thus founded on the recognition of his conquests and of his right to do with the conquered as he pleased. Britain could not accept such a basis without forfeiting its honour.

The Prime Minister did not comment on the assurances offered to the Reich’s neighbours, since their worth could be judged by comparing them with the assurances of 1935, 1936 and 1938 that Germany would not annex Austria, would not attack Czechoslovakia and, after the Sudetenland, would make no further claims. He also pointed to a contradiction within Hitler’s ideology itself: the incorporation of millions of Poles and Czechs into the Reich, and a pact with the USSR after years of violent denunciation of Bolshevism. “The plain truth is that, after our past experience, it is no longer possible to rely upon the unsupported word of the present German Government.” As these words were spoken, the Scottish member John McGovern called out from the benches: “Nor on Russia’s.”

Chamberlain gave an assurance that Britain was not waging war out of vindictiveness, sought no advantage and had no wish to deny Germany its rightful place in Europe. The aim was “a real and settled peace, not an uneasy truce interrupted by constant alarms and repeated threats”, and what stood in its way was the German government and the German government alone. He summed up his position in a few points. Hitler had rejected all peace proposals until he had crushed Poland, just as he had crushed Czechoslovakia before it. His proposals were “vague and uncertain” and contained no suggestion of righting the wrongs done to Czechoslovakia and Poland. But even if he made them more precise, it would still have to be asked by what practical means Germany would convince the world that aggression would cease and pledges would be kept. Therefore “acts – not words alone – must be forthcoming” before Britain and France would cease to wage war with all their strength. He concluded: either the German government must give convincing proof of the sincerity of its desire for peace by definite acts and effective guarantees, or “we must persevere in our duty to the end. It is for Germany to make her choice.”

The debate in the House of Commons

The leader of the Labour opposition, Clement Attlee, supported the Prime Minister without reservation. Hitler’s proposals, he said, were being made by a man whose word was “utterly worthless”, after an act of brutal and unprovoked aggression, and they rested on the recognition of that aggression’s results. “We are asked to condone the crime and trust the criminal.” The renunciation of aggression was not a condition of peace to be negotiated but a precondition. The Liberal leader, Archibald Sinclair, added that since the urge to conquer lay at the very heart of Hitlerism, Hitlerism had to be destroyed.

Dissenting voices were few. The veteran pacifist and former Labour leader George Lansbury said that people on trams and trains were asking where this struggle against aggression was to end: did Britain intend to stop Japan in China, to restore Albania, and what was its attitude to the Soviet invasion of Poland and to the handing over of Wilno (Vilnius) to Lithuania? Stafford Cripps, the left-wing politician expelled from the Labour Party in 1939, considered the offer impossible to accept but argued that the government ought to proclaim its own war aims in clear terms. The Conservative Leo Amery replied that a conference would achieve nothing as long as an undefeated Germany had no reason to let go of the countries it had conquered, and his party colleague Victor Raikes warned that there was too much talk of peace and too little of victory. The debate confirmed that almost the whole of Parliament stood behind the refusal, just as it had a week earlier, when David Lloyd George’s appeal for peace terms to be considered had drawn criticism from almost every quarter.

Roosevelt declines to mediate

From the outset Berlin had counted on one of the great neutral powers, above all the United States, taking up its offer. On the evening of 6 October the head of the German Foreign Ministry’s press department assured correspondents that Germany would certainly accept a proposal for an armistice from President Franklin Delano Roosevelt. On the evening of 12 October the Reich Press Chief, Otto Dietrich, called Chamberlain’s speech a “calculated insult” to the German nation and intimated that “bloodshed” could now be prevented only by the mediation of a neutral country, a role for which the United States would be admirably suited. When the foreign press read this as an appeal to Roosevelt, the DNB news agency declared the next day that there had been no appeal and that Dietrich’s words had been a private conversation that had been misunderstood.

The threatened neutrals also asked for an American initiative. On 2 October the Romanian Foreign Minister, Grigore Gafencu, enquired whether the President was considering a peace move. Secretary of State Cordell Hull replied that none of the belligerents had expressed any such wish and that no steps were planned. On 7 October the King of the Belgians, Leopold III, sent a request through the American ambassador in Brussels, Joseph Davies, that Roosevelt, “the only man in the world” who could avert catastrophe, should make a fresh attempt. The Foreign Minister of Finland, a country that Soviet demands had just begun to threaten, spoke in similar terms. Meanwhile an American oil businessman, William Rhodes Davis, was moving about Germany; according to information from the US legation in Bern, he presented himself to Göring as the President’s man and discussed American mediation with him.

Roosevelt had no intention of being drawn in. The refusal of London and Paris was unequivocal, and mediation on Hitler’s terms would have meant putting pressure on the Allies to accept the partition of Poland. The President was also busy with a struggle of his own: Congress was debating the repeal of the arms embargo which, under the Neutrality Acts, hampered purchases by Britain and France. On 19 October he wrote back to the King of the Belgians that he was looking every day for an opportunity to take a step that might lead to peace, but that since hostilities were already under way, the United States could act only when it became “abundantly clear” that the course it proposed really led to peace. When, a few days later, James Mooney, head of General Motors’ overseas company, brought back from Berlin a proposal from Göring for a secret meeting of representatives of Germany, Britain and France in a neutral country, Hull instructed the ambassador in Paris not to support it with the French.

Berlin’s response

Hitler did not sit idly waiting for the replies. On 9 October, before Daladier had even spoken, he signed Directive No. 6, ordering preparations for an offensive in the west through Belgium, the Netherlands and Luxembourg. On 10 October in Berlin he opened the wartime collection of the Winter Relief with a speech in which he repeated that Germany wanted peace but, if it did not get it, was ready to fight. On 13 October an official German statement, read to foreign journalists at the Foreign Ministry, declared that Chamberlain had spurned the outstretched hand and had deliberately chosen war. The American chargé d’affaires in Berlin later reported that Hitler, said to have been inclined to talk at the time of his Reichstag speech, had visibly hardened after the speeches of Daladier and Chamberlain.

Only the Soviet Union supported Hitler’s offer. On 9 October Izvestia, in an editorial entitled “Peace or War?”, called it a “real and practical basis” for negotiations and accused the “ruling classes” of England and France of defending their world hegemony under the slogan of destroying Hitlerism.

Significance

The replies of 10 and 12 October closed the only serious public attempt to end the war after the fall of Poland. The Allies did not announce detailed war aims, but they established a principle from which they never departed: peace could not begin with the recognition of conquest, and Hitler’s promises were not to be trusted. At the same time, neither Britain nor France intended to do anything to put that principle into effect on land. The transfer of the British Expeditionary Force to the Belgian border had just been completed, and the French army was falling back behind the Maginot Line. The Phoney War was beginning in earnest.

Behind-the-scenes contacts went on for several more weeks. Göring sounded out London through Dahlerus and other intermediaries, and on 7 November the King of the Belgians and the Queen of the Netherlands offered both sides their good offices. On 31 October the Chairman of the Council of People’s Commissars, Vyacheslav Molotov, declared before the Supreme Soviet of the USSR that waging war for the “destruction of Hitlerism” was not only senseless but criminal. British contacts with a supposed military opposition in Germany ended on 9 November with the Venlo incident, when the SD abducted two British intelligence officers on the Dutch border. Meanwhile Hitler fixed date after date for the attack in the west, and his generals and the weather postponed it time and again.

The offensive began on 10 May 1940. On the same day Chamberlain made way for Churchill; Daladier had ceased to be Prime Minister in March. After the defeat of France, on 19 July 1940, Hitler once again appealed in the Reichstag to British “reason”. This time the reply came within an hour, over the radio, and a few days later Halifax formally rejected it. The principle of October 1939 – that no peace is made with Hitler on his terms – endured to the end of the war and in 1943, at Casablanca, took the form of the demand for unconditional surrender.