OPINION — “Munich” is one of the most used historical analogies – and almost always, it is used inappropriately to justify force. For once, however, the Munich analogy is sadly relevant for present-day circumstances over the war in Ukraine. Munich is a story of appeasing a dictator in Europe set on territorial expansion. It is a tale of great powers “settling” the fate of a smaller nation in Europe without the latter’s involvement in the peace process. The question today is whether the territorial ambitions of Russia’s leader, Vladimir Putin, will be appeased by any areas of Ukraine he obtains in a peace settlement with the U.S. administration of Donald J. Trump. Or does Putin, like Adolf Hitler beforehand, view his current war as just one part of larger territorial expansion in Europe?
Although enormous amounts of ink have been devoted to Munich – the pre-World War II agreement, not the city itself –one aspect of it continues to be overlooked, even among some of the most recently published accounts: the intelligence that Britain’s Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain was receiving before and during the crisis. An examination of these intelligence reports provides lessons for governments and intelligence communities today: they concern how best to understand the mindset of a dictator.
What “Munich” meant in 1938
Although most readers of these pages will probably be familiar with the Munich Agreement, it is worth reminding ourselves of its basic facts. The crisis occurred in September 1938, when Hitler demanded control over a German-speaking region of Czechoslovakia, the Sudetenland, where there were about 3.9 million ethnic Germans. In an echo of Putin’s claims about Ukraine eight decades later, Hitler thundered that Czechoslovakia was a made-up country (a creation of the League of Nations, he said) and that ethnic Germans in the Sudetenland were being persecuted, raped, and killed, something that the Nazi dictator could not stand for and that had to be corrected. The British and French governments tried to avoid war with Hitler at all costs, in what was ultimately known as a policy of appeasement, with Britain’s Prime Minister Chamberlain flying twice to meet Hitler in Germany, on the 15th and 22nd of September. The crisis was resolved at the Munich Conference from September 29th to 30th, when the British, French, and Italian governments agreed that Hitler should be allowed to annex the Sudetenland in exchange for a promise of peace. Czechoslovakia was not included in the negotiations and was forced to accept the settlement as a fait accompli.
Upon returning to Britain, Chamberlain famously declared his agreement with Hitler would herald, “peace for our time.” Chamberlain told his cabinet that he trusted Hitler and was convinced that his ambitions could be contained. When news of the deal reached Prague on the morning of September 30, the Czech President, Edvard Beneš, growled that “Munich is a betrayal that will be its own punishment.” Beneš continued: “Britain and France think they will save themselves from war and revolution at our expense, but they are wrong.” He concluded that Czechoslovakia had been defeated not by the Germans, but by its allies, Britain and France. Beneš’ views were prescient. Hitler violated the terms of the agreement reached with Chamberlain and in March 1939, German forces occupied the rest of Czechoslovakia. It was a catastrophe for the Czech state, which lost about a fifth of its industrial production base.
In short, the Munich Agreement has rightly gone down in history as a shameful betrayal of a central European power to a dictator.
Chamberlain is often portrayed as a weak, vacillating leader, whose policies of appeasement slid Europe into WWII. This is unfair. Chamberlain was far from the dithering leader his detractors describe. He was intellectually formidable, albeit stubborn in his views. Mustachioed, with upright collar suits, often carrying his trademark umbrella, Chamberlain was very much the epitome of the Edwardian member of Britain’s ruling class in the pre-war years. Having fought in World War I, and seen the carnage that it brought to Europe, he was for good reason adamantly opposed to war ever taking place again on the Continent. Crucially, Chamberlain’s policy of appeasement allowed Britain time to rearm.
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The Intelligence Given to Chamberlain
Chamberlain was given two completely divergent streams of intelligence before and during the 1938 Munich crisis. This occurred because the British intelligence community was far from the streamlined process that it became during the war, under the leadership of Winston Churchill. Although Britain’s Joint Intelligence Committee (JIC) had been established in 1936, at the time of the Munich Crisis, it did not yet have full buy-in from all the different intelligence services. It was not acting as an overall assessment body that would provide unified assessments to decision makers in London, as it later would do during the war – and as it continues to do today. Instead, during the Munich Crisis, Britain’s foreign intelligence service, MI6 (formally known as SIS) and the Security Service (MI5), were able to offer their own, starkly divergent assessments of Hitler’s intentions to the senior most decision makers in Whitehall.
On September 18, 1938, at the height of the crisis, MI6 set out its views of what the Chamberlain government should do in terms of negotiating with Hitler over the Sudetenland. The MI6 memorandum, entitled, “What Should We Do,” was drafted by MI6’s head of political intelligence, a man named Malcolm Woolcombe. In the document, MI6 advised a policy of “calculated appeasement.” It suggested that the Czechs should be pressed to accept “the inevitable” and surrender the Sudetenland to Hitler.
The memorandum continued:
“It may be argued that this would be giving into Germany, strengthening Hitler’s position and encouraging him to go to extremes. Better, however, that reality be faced and the wrongs, if they do exist, be righted than leave it to Hitler to do the writing in his own way and time – particularly if, concurrently, we and the French, unremittingly build up our strength and lessen Germany’s potentialities for making trouble.”
In short, MI6 was suggesting that the British government should try to ensure that Germany’s style is “cramped,” but with the minimum of provocation. Documentary evidence shows that MI6’s memorandum was read by the upper echelons of the government. The head of the British civil service, Sir Warren Fisher, a chief architect of the policy of appeasement, stated that it was a “most excellent document.”
MI6’s memorandum almost certainly fueled Chamberlain’s belief that he was pursuing a correct course by appeasing Hitler.
MI5 came to a fundamentally different conclusion. For about three years before the Munich Crisis, MI5 had been forwarding to senior officials in the Foreign Office a steady stream of reports warning of Hitler’s territorial ambitions in Europe. The most forceful MI5 officer who expressed these pessimistic – but as it transpired realistic – views of Hitler’s strategy was a man named John “Jack” Curry. Unlike many in the British government, Curry had read Hitler’s autobiography, Mein Kampf, in which the Nazi dictator had set out his world view (Weltanschauung) of racial conquest in the East. Mein Kampf laid bare, in Curry’s view, the inevitably of Hitler’s war strategy in Europe.
MI5 had a significant German source in the pre-war years, who provided insights into Hitler’s secret strategic mindset. MI5’s source was a diplomat at the German embassy in London, Wolfgang zu Putlitz. He was an ardent anti-Nazi, who was recruited by MI5 using an intermediary (a cutout, to use the technical terminology) called Jona “Klop” Ustinov, a journalist in London – and, later, father of the actor Peter Ustinov.
On November 7, 1938, MI5 dispatched a report to the Foreign Secretary, Lord Halifax, summarizing the previous intelligence it had provided the Foreign Office before and during the Munich crisis. MI5’s memorandum was a searing indictment of British foreign policy regarding Hitler. The first page read as follows:
“There is nothing surprising and nothing which could not have been foreseen in the events of this summer in connection with Czechoslovakia. These events are a logical consequence of Hitler’s Nazi Weltanschauung, and his foreign policy and his views in regard to racial questions and the position of Germany and Europe.”
The memorandum continued:
“It is apparent that Hitler’s policy is essentially a dynamic one and the question is – which direction will it take next if the information in the [report], which has proved generally reliable and accurate in the past, is to be believed, Germany is at the beginning of a ‘Napoleonic Era’ and her rulers contemplate a great expansion of German power.”
To try to ensure that its report received Chamberlain’s attention, MI5 decided to include examples – from Putlitz inside the German Embassy in London – of Hitler’s insulting references about Chamberlain himself. The report noted that Hitler described Chamberlain as an “arsehole” (arschloch), which the Foreign Secretary, Halifax, underlined three times in a red pencil. The report also noted that Hitler mocked Chamberlain’s trademark umbrella as a symbol of his feebleness and the German dictator made jokes about Chamberlain’s “umbrella pacifism.”
Despite the extraordinary insults included in this MI5 report about the British Prime Minister, it did not change British policy towards Hitler. The contrasting reports from MI6 and MI5 are a striking example of the limits of intelligence – unwelcome assessments (from MI5) failed to change British policy, while MI6’s report seems to have validated London’s existing policy of appeasement.
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A warning – and a lesson – from the past
MI5 was able to arrive at accurate assessments of Nazi territorial ambitions because it studied, and took seriously, Hitler’s own words, found in Mein Kampf. Dictators have a tendency to telegraph to the world their plans and intentions. The same applies to Putin today. Western governments and intelligence communities need to take seriously what Putin says in his public speeches about his plans and intentions.
The Russian dictator has expressly declared his intention, well before February 2022, to take “back” the whole of Ukraine for Russia – and that Ukraine is a made-up country, formed by Western powers and the United Nations, after the Soviet Union’s collapse in 1991. Putin has also famously declared that the demise of the Soviet empire was a “geopolitical catastrophe” There is no reason to believe that giving Putin annexed territories in Ukraine in a peace deal now will deter Putin from his original war strategy – any more than an agreement after his 2014 occupation of agreement did: the overall conquest of Ukraine.
In Putin’s long rambling and historically misinformed speeches, Putin has harkened back to the glory days of Catherine the Great and Joseph Stalin, whose brutal dictatorship after 1945 expanded into Eastern Europe through the creation of Soviet satellite states. According to Putin’s Weltanschauung, it would be logical for him to incorporate areas like Georgia, Moldova, and even the Baltic states “back” into Russia’s sphere of influence. This bleak situation is made worse by the fact that NATO, hitherto a bulwark against territorial aggression in Europe, now seems fatally weakened given the Trump administration’s reversal of policy: to align with Russia, not Washington’s Western European allies. If NATO is no longer the force it previously was, because of Washington’s abdication of leadership, Putin will inevitably be emboldened for his designs in areas in Europe he considers within Russia’s sphere of influence.
British Prime Minister Keir Starmer is surely taking the correct action by creating a “coalition of the willing” to support Ukraine. The Western European contingent of NATO must rearm and do everything it can to support Ukraine even without the US government. Western Europe must force Russia to the negotiation table from a position of weakness, not strength as it currently enjoys with Trump’s Washington. Munich is a chilling warning from history of the dangers of appeasing a dictator in Europe who has expressly stated his maximalist territorial ambitions. There is a real danger that any peace settlement reached with Putin over Ukraine (without Ukraine’s integral involvement) will not be worth the piece of paper it is written on, any more than the Munich agreement with Hitler was, eight decades ago. Putin cannot be trusted any more than Hitler could.
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