George F. Kennan: An American Life (23 page)

Despite his sympathy for the Czechs, Kennan’s first reaction to Munich had been one of relief. Their country’s fortunes, he was sure, lay in the long run “with—and not against—the dominant forces of this area.” The Allies had erred in breaking up the Austro-Hungarian Empire after World War I, and certainly in leaving three million Germans within Czechoslovakia’s boundaries. No state could have survived as a democracy under those circumstances. At least Munich had preserved “a magnificent younger generation—disciplined, industrious, and physically fit—which would undoubtedly have been sacrificed if the solution had been the romantic one of hopeless resistance rather than the humiliating but truly heroic one of realism.”
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That view assumed, though, that the Munich settlement would stick. Kennan’s travels around the country quickly convinced him that it would not. The Germans were demanding what amounted to extraterritoriality, with jurisdiction over everyone of their nationality in Czechoslovakia. They were building no customs houses or passport control facilities along the new borders. Their businessmen were avoiding long-term deals with Czech counterparts. The army was under pressure to yield to German control. And the authorities in Slovakia and Ruthe-nia, which made up the eastern half of the country, had been completely won over by the Germans. “They are making awful fools of themselves; dressing up in magnificent fascist uniforms, flying to and fro in airplanes, ... and dreaming dreams of the future grandeur of the Slovak or Ukrainian nations.”
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Germany’s racial policies also threatened the status quo. If left alone, Kennan reported in February 1939, Czechoslovakia would treat its Jews relatively humanely: there was not, in itself, “the basis for a really serious and widespread anti-Semitic movement.” Yet German demands were already forcing Jews out of government, university, and other professional positions, and there were calls for more radical measures to eliminate Jewish influence. Because the Czechs on their own would be reluctant to go that far, meeting those requirements “might very well necessitate readjustment in the Prague government.”
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The final blow to the truncated Czechoslovak state came early in March when the Slovaks, with German approval, demanded complete independence. Hitler then executed long-standing plans to occupy all remaining Czech territory. Kennan got the word at four-thirty on the morning of the fifteenth. “Determined that the German army should not have the satisfaction of giving the American Legation a harried appearance, I shaved meticulously before going to the office.” He and the staff spent the morning burning their records on the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee, which was helping Jews escape from Central Europe, lest the Nazis seize them. Meanwhile, ashen-faced applicants for asylum were lining up outside, but there was no authority to grant it, and there would have been few facilities for providing it. “Their faces were twitching and their lips trembling when I sent them away.”

“People were caught like mice in a trap,” Annelise wrote to Jeanette a few days later. “The Jews are panic-stricken. Our Consulate is swarmed with them. We have heard about many suicides already. I feel sor[r]y for them, but not half as sorry as for the Czechs.” One Jewish acquaintance, who George knew had worked with the Americans for many years, showed up at the apartment. “We couldn’t possibly keep him.” The legation was about to be withdrawn, in which case American diplomatic privileges would probably be revoked, and “[h]e’d only have been in worse shape for having been found in our place.” Besides, there were ten thousand others: “I told him that I could not give him asylum, but that as long as he was not demanded by the authorities he was welcome to stay there and to make himself at home.”

“I was very worried,” Annelise acknowledged, “that he was going to commit suicide with my two children there.” But George advised him and other Jewish friends to go straight to the German army and apply to emigrate: “It’s going to be easier than when they have the SS in.” This worked, and they made their way safely out of the country.

By noon the Germans had taken the city: there were hundreds of vehicles plastered with snow, the occupants’ faces red with what some thought was shame but what George feared was mostly the cold. Annelise noted that many of the Czechs “hissed, showed their fists, and shouted pfui.” On the next day Hitler arrived, and the Kennans watched him pass by. “One thing which rather pleased me,” Annelise commented, “was the quiet in the streets. They marched the Germans up to cheer for Hitler, but it was might[y] few and seemed like a drop in the bucket to what he was accustomed to.” George too found the silence striking. “Hitler rode quietly past our front door, without even a crowd on the side-walk to impede the view.”

With the extinction of Czechoslovak independence, most foreign embassies and legations left Prague. But the State Department kept the American consulate general open, making Kennan responsible for political reporting from what was now the German “protectorate” of Bohemia and Moravia. “The job,” he explained to Jeanette, “is, all in all, an enviable one. I have my own office and staff, . . . and am more or less independent.” He and Annelise would keep their apartment but would be ready to send the children to Norway at any moment if that seemed necessary. And George had to recommend, reluctantly, that Jeanette defer her trip, because “the whole situation is now too shaky for anyone to make any plans for more than a few days.”
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With Czechoslovakia the first non-German state the Nazis had taken over, their policies might well set a precedent for what to expect elsewhere in Europe, now that Hitler’s intentions were clear. Kennan’s job would be to convey this preview to Washington. Berlin, he thought, should want “peace, quiet, and a minimum of bad feeling,” because Czechoslovakia was incidental to more distant objectives. Even Hitler had to worry about public opinion. Here Kennan was echoing one of the few shrewd insights in his 1938 “Prerequisites” essay: that dictators, “having deprived themselves of all legal means of retreat, have the bear by the tail.” He now could watch how this dictator handled that problem.
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The Czechs, at first, did not seem bearlike. “Toward their rulers they show—like the ‘brave soldier Švejk’ of Czech literary fame—a baffling willingness to comply with any and all demands.” They coupled this, though, with “an equally baffling ability to execute them in such a way that the effect is quite different from that contemplated by those who did the commanding.” Beneath the surface, they were bitter indeed—so much so that they were the only Europeans who wanted a great war, because only that could liberate them. Clandestine political groups were already forming, ready to become resistance movements as soon as hostilities commenced. Nor would the Czechs, if victory came, treat their tormentors gently: “Retaliation will be fearful to contemplate.”
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If the Germans were to have a trouble-free occupation, therefore, they would have to show tact and restraint, for which they were not noted. Their failure to do so appeared quickly. The military authorities allowed the Czechoslovak president, Emil Hácha, to retain his position and his residence in Hradčany Palace but rendered him honors in ways that suggested ridicule rather than respect. It was small recompense to have Hitler as an unannounced houseguest whenever it suited his convenience. Berlin appointed Konrad Henlein, the leader of the Sudeten German separatists, to administer all of Bohemia, but then removed him. Since nothing could have done more to harden Czech hostility, it was difficult to see why he had been selected in the first place. By the end of May, arrests were increasing, prisons were filling up, and old ones were reopening. Reports of brutality were all too well authenticated. Terror had now begun, and the Czechs “are quite powerless to oppose it.”
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Meanwhile, the Slovaks’ “independence” was turning out to be that “of a dog on a leash.” Their leaders were mismanaging their economy, the Hungarians were openly coveting their territory, and the Slovaks themselves, who were hardly pro-Czech, were beginning to realize that they were not apt to fare as well as they had before dismantling their former shared state. If war broke out, the Bratislava regime would prove too undependable to be of use to the Germans, and they would take it over as well.
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Jews had even less to hope for. There had been no Jew-baiting in the streets of Prague, as had followed the
Anschluss
in Vienna, Kennan reported at the end of March; still, Jews could hardly expect a fate much different from those in Nazi Germany. In Ostrava, near the Polish border, he found Jews being excluded from all public places. “One doctor, I am told, has attended thirty-three Jewish suicides since the occupation.” And in Slovakia, legislation had relegated Jews to the status of “thieves, criminals, swindlers, insane people, and alcoholics.” None of this made any sense in countries still dependent on Jewish capital.
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The Czechs, being realists, might have reconciled themselves to German rule had it been “firm in its purposes, conscious of its responsibilities, integrated in its activities, and incorruptible in the performance of its duties.” But it had been none of these things; instead the Germans had given the impression “of a regime in an advanced state of moral disintegration.” All of this had implications for the future of Europe, because until the Nazis developed greater maturity, they would stand little chance of successfully managing responsibilities borne for centuries—“and at times not uncreditably”—by the Roman Catholic Church and the Hapsburg Empire.
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Although Messersmith praised Kennan’s reports, there is no evidence that they went beyond the State Department, or that they had any impact on American foreign policy in the final months of peace in Europe. They did reflect, though, a conviction that would grow stronger in Kennan’s mind, the more he saw of the Germans over the next few years: “that even in the event of a complete military victory the Nazis would still face an essentially insoluble problem in the political organization and control of the other peoples of the continent.” The reason was that Nazi ideology had nothing to offer apart from “glorification of the supposed virtues of the German people,” an argument that had “no conceivable appeal” to anyone else.
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That conclusion, in time, would also shape Kennan’s view of the country that eventually defeated Nazi Germany and sought its own domination of Europe. For the moment, though, the Soviet Union was moving toward an uneasy alliance with Hitler, the surprise announcement of which, on August 24, 1939, made possible Germany’s attack on Poland a week later, and the beginning of the Second World War.

For all of his skill in analyzing Russia and Germany, Kennan failed to anticipate the Nazi-Soviet Pact. He had noted, in 1935, the Soviet Union’s propensity to seek “non-aggression” treaties with capitalist states while building up its military strength for an eventual confrontation with them. He had wondered, after Hitler extinguished Czechoslovakia’s independence in 1939, why the Germans were discouraging the Ruthenians’ ambitions to make themselves the nucleus of a Nazi Ukraine. But Kennan did not put these two things together, assuming instead that if the Soviet Union aligned itself with anyone, it would be Britain and France. He did not know that an old Moscow acquaintance, Hans-Heinrich (Johnnie) Herwarth von Bittenfeld, a part-Jewish German diplomat, was using tennis matches and horseback rides at the American dacha to pass along top-secret information to Bohlen on the negotiations leading up to the Hitler-Stalin accord. But Bohlen hedged his reports to Washington, and when the State Department did at last alert the British and French ambassadors, their governments did nothing.
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Kennan, still in German-occupied Prague, had no espionage service to draw upon. The only people “who could tell us things,” he explained to Messersmith in April, were no longer people worth trusting—presumably Germans. The best alternative was to attempt to guess, from an understanding of the past and an analysis of the present, what they might be planning. But his reports could go only by courier, and by May he was not even sure that he could continue sending those out. “[A]t the moment,” he acknowledged, “it is a rather lonely job.”
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Grace and Joan stayed in Prague through the first months of German occupation; in June, though, George and Annelise sent them to Kristiansand while treating themselves to a brief vacation in England. The sailing from Hamburg, he wrote, was “the saddest I have ever seen,” with only a few forlorn passengers present as the ship’s band tried to cheer things up with “Deutschland über Alles” and the “Horst Wessel Lied.” London was disconcertingly normal, as equestrians rode badly in Hyde Park, while a fascist heckled a communist at Speaker’s Corner. George got to meet Anna Freud, “a very fine psychologist in her own right,” and then went off on his own for a few morose days on the Isle of Wight, where the food was “unimaginative beyond belief.”
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There was time, after returning to Prague, for an automobile trip through Slovakia to Budapest, and then in early August for a family visit in Norway. George got back in midmonth and on the nineteenth sent his last long prewar dispatch, describing the summer as a strange and unhappy one: “Everything is in suspense. No one takes the initiative; no one plans for the future.” Annelise arrived on the day the Nazi-Soviet Pact was announced, only to be sent back, “in high indignation,” on what turned out to be the last train from Berlin into Sweden. “I didn’t want to leave as I didn’t think there would be immediate danger in Prague, but G. thought I ought to.” After a few days in Oslo, she arrived in Kristiansand on September 3, the day of Great Britain’s declaration of war against Germany. “I hope all the time that this war is just a nightmare and that I’ll wake up soon and find that it isn’t true.”