When Hitler addressed a crowd of 15,000 party faithful in Berlin's Sportpalast on September 26 1938 and demanded that Czechoslovakia cede the Sudetenland or face invasion, his words reached far beyond the borders of the Reich.
Before the Führer rose to speak, the German radio announcer named literally dozens of countries, from Lithuania to Uruguay, where the speech was being broadcast live. The Nazis provided simultaneous translations of the Führer's words, and international correspondents were also in the Sportpalast, capturing at the microphone the dramatic atmosphere of this Wagnerian event. Among them was CBS's Bill Shirer, who speculated that Neville Chamberlain and his French counterpart Edouard Daladier were probably among the many millions sitting at their radio sets, in all likelihood feeling distinctly uneasy as the Führer scolded them like unruly children. At this stage Hitler knew that he could say more or less what he liked: Chamberlain had already assured him that if he promised the Sudetenland would be Germany's "last territorial claim", Britain would give him the green light to take whichever chunks of Czechoslovakia he wanted.
By 1938 people in Germany were more than familiar with Hitler's spectacular public appearances - there were even distinct signs of Führer fatigue - but imagine how menacing this barking, staccato speech, punctuated with cheers and Heil Hitlers, must have sounded to radio listeners in the American Mid-West, their regular music programmes suddenly interrupted by an announcer declaring that they were going over live to Berlin. It must have seemed like a voice from another planet. We should hardly be surprised that when CBS broadcast Orson Welles' famous radio adaptation of The War of the Worlds just a few weeks after Munich, thousands really believed Martians had landed in New Jersey. After Hitler, nothing on the airwaves seemed unthinkable.
The Munich crisis was a milestone in radio history. Starting with the Austrian Anschluss in March of the same year, this was the first world diplomatic crisis to be played out at every step on the airwaves. Radio had reached maturity: in Europe and North America nearly every household owned or had access to a radio set, all the sides knew that radio could win hearts and minds and as the crisis moved on at a lightning pace - with the breakneck speed of events also defined by the new culture of instant communication - radio helped to make history.
It was during the crisis that the American radio networks more or less invented a format that we now take for granted in news broadcasting: the daily news round-up with live reports from around the world including breaking news as it happens, interviews and expert comment. Thanks to charismatic radio reporters like Bill Shirer or Ed Murrow who were rapidly becoming household names in the United States, American radio listeners were - paradoxically - far better informed about what was going on in Europe than their European counterparts. This extract from Ed Murrow's report the day after the Austrian Anschluss in March 1938, was typical of this new, more personal and direct style. It left the listener in no doubt about what was really going on in Europe:
"It was called a bloodless conquest and in some ways it was - but I'd like to be able to forget the haunted look on the faces of those long lines of people outside the banks and travel offices. People trying to get away ... I'd like to forget the sound of smashing glass as the Jewish shop streets were raided; the hoots and jeers at those forced to scrub the sidewalk..."
But for the British public Czechoslovakia remained - in Chamberlain's infamous words - "a faraway country", and it was in no small measure thanks to the British prime minister himself that the Czechs and Sudeten Germans remained people "of whom we know nothing". In his staunch conviction that appeasement was the only realistic way of ensuring "peace for our time", he went out of his way to make sure that the British public was not informed about the complexities of the situation in Central Europe.
The BBC was in the front line. Chamberlain had already won over a large section of the British press. A devastating editorial in the Times on September 7 1938 openly advocated carving up Czechoslovakia, and when the newspaper stated that this view had "found favour in some quarters", everyone knew that this meant Mr Chamberlain himself. In relations with the BBC, Chamberlain did not stop short of direct intervention, and while news bulletins remained balanced, other programmes were subject to tight scrutiny. Anything that might be controversial was sent directly to the Foreign Office press department for approval. If it was rejected, the BBC was under strict instructions not to let listeners know that the decision had come from the government. Among those who found themselves at the receiving end of this censorship was Harold Nicolson, who was forced to drop a talk about Czechoslovakia. Despite his anger, he rather apologetically explained during his replacement lecture on milk prices that the situation was so delicate "that anything I say could perhaps be twisted into something which might give offence to the German people with whom we all desire to live on terms of friendship."
At the same time Chamberlain was brilliant in the way he stage-managed his three trips to Germany to meet the Führer, making sure that reporters were there in abundance to hear his carefully prepared soundbites as he departed. On the third occasion, when he flew from Heston Aerodrome on September 29 to seal Czechoslovakia's fate in Munich, an ebullient BBC reporter described the atmosphere as being "almost like a first night", as the prime minister waved his hat "with a gesture of nonchalance and gaiety".
To the horror of the many dissidents among BBC staff - known collectively as the "warmongers" - the BBC had helped to turn Chamberlain into the supreme elder statesman. A few days after Munich, John Coatman, a former Home Service chief news editor, sent an in-house memorandum to the BBC Programme Board, in which he concluded that, had the service offered more balanced coverage, "it might, probably would, have made all the difference between the surrender to which democracy has submitted and the negotiation of a real peace which would have left Europe secure." Perhaps this was no exaggeration.
Chamberlain had learned a lot from Goebbels, who had been intensely aware of the potential of radio from the moment he became propaganda minister in 1933. Goebbels defined radio as the main instrument of his propaganda policy, and Germany began broadcasting across the border to Czechoslovakia's 3.5m German speakers almost as soon as the Nazis came to power. As is so often the case of a somewhat cumbersome democratic state in the face of dictatorship, Czechoslovakia was agonizingly slow to recognize the danger of Nazi radio propaganda. As late as 1938, less than eight percent of the broadcasts by Radiojournal - as Czechoslovak Radio was then known - were in German, although German speakers made up a quarter of the population.
Milena Jesenská, one of the most brilliant Czech journalists of her generation (most often remembered for her brief affair with Franz Kafka many years earlier) described the situation thus: "For five years all that people in the borderlands have had to do is to turn a switch and Nazi ideology from the German stations has flowed directly into their homes - it goes without saying that they all tuned into stations that they could understand! ... As a counter to this, all we offered was half an hour of German radio, most of it dull and indigestible. Only by now they are all perfectly schooled, sweet-talked and bullied, repeating parrot-fashion phrases about their national space."
As the tension increased at the beginning of September 1938, radio became more than just a tool of propaganda. For some days, pro-Hitler Sudeten German activists had been working with agents from the Reich to sow the seeds of a coup in the Sudetenland, which would effectively turn its annexation by Germany into a reality on the ground. The cue for the uprising was to be Hitler's speech on September 12, which was broadcast live from the Nuremberg party rally on all German radio stations. With each sentence, the Führer stirred the Sudeten Germans to rebellion. The British journalist, Sydney Morrell, witnessed the speech's impact in the spa town of Karlovy Vary (Karlsbad), where he listened in the company of an elderly Sudeten German widow and her teenage son. While the widow got rather bored, "her son, his head pillowed on his arms, huddled up to the loud-speaker, listened avidly, his bright eyes darting round the room, seeing visions ..." Such was the alchemy of radio.
As soon as the speech was over, Morrell went out into the streets of the town, where large crowds were gathering, singing the Nazi anthem, the Horst Wessel song, which, like the swastika, was banned in Czechoslovakia. Still more menacingly: "In a side street I heard the crash of glass and ran towards the sound. They were smashing the windows of Jewish shops."
Such scenes were repeated throughout the Sudetenland. As tensions heightened, the pro-Nazi Sudeten German Party's press spokesman, Oskar Ullrich - very much a spin-doctor in the modern mould - made sure he was always available to provide foreign correspondents with vivid accounts in fluent English of "Czech atrocities". Naively confident in their country's motto "Truth will Prevail", Czech and Slovak politicians rarely bothered to respond, and in the meantime the German version of the incident had shot around the world.
If we are in any doubt about how central radio had come to people's lives, we only need to recall an episode in Prague, a few days after the attempted Sudeten coup had, at least in part, been brought under control. Chamberlain had just held his infamous meeting with Hitler at Berchtesgaden and returned beaming and confident that the Führer was a man with whom he could do business. With the utmost reluctance, the Czechoslovak government succumbed to intense pressure from Britain and France, and agreed on September 21 that it would give up the Sudetenland without a fight.
The announcement was made on the radio and was also relayed through loudspeakers on Wenceslas Square, the busiest thoroughfare in the heart of Prague. Everything stopped - pedestrians, cars and even trams - and the crowds stood in stunned silence. But they did not disperse. More and more people gathered, soon amounting to tens of thousands, and then they turned not to the cabinet office or the president's office at Prague Castle but instead to the rather austere modern headquarters of the radio just above the square. A small group broke into the building. As a witness later remembered, "people felt that the tragic news had been declared from this building and that it could only be reversed from this building." An anonymous man from the crowd sat down uneasily in front of the microphone. His statement, in broken and scarcely comprehensible sentences, remains one of the most moving moments in the whole crisis. He appealed for a government of soldiers and for his country to be given a chance to fight.
Radio had come out of the shadow of history. After this extraordinary impromptu broadcast and another huge demonstration the next morning, the Czechoslovak government really did resign, with the First World War hero General Jan Syrovy taking over as prime minister. Twenty-four hours later a general mobilization was declared.
But this was not enough to persuade Czechoslovakia's Western allies to come to the country's aid. Czechoslovakia's determination to fight was pared down by Chamberlain's equal determination to avoid war at whatever cost. When the Munich agreement was finally signed, just after midnight on September 30 1938, in the absence of any Czechoslovak representative, the spirit of a nation was broken in an instant. While Chamberlain was waving his "piece of paper" in triumph at Heston Aerodrome, Czechoslovakia's leaders also took to the air, to break the news to their own people. The American journalist Vincent Sheean described in his diary how, as they listened on Wenceslas Square, people "moved aimlessly here and there, without direction, most often without speaking". And as the Justice Minister Ivan Dérer took to the air his voice broke down completely. Sydney Morrell happened to be in the radio building at that moment and described Dérer as "a man who was being torn to shreds inside himself", a vivid enough symbol of what was happening to the entire country.
Ivan Dérer's speech has a strong resonance with another radio address that was made almost exactly thirty years later. When Alexander Dubcek returned from Moscow in the days shortly after the reforms of the Prague Spring had been shattered by the Warsaw Pact invasion in August 1968, he also spoke on the radio. Under circumstances that were depressingly similar to 1938, his voice also broke down as he tried to explain to his country's citizens that they stood alone in the face of occupation and it was beyond their power to resist the tide of history.
While the BBC remained silent on Czechoslovakia's fate, British radio listeners did still have a chance to hear an uncensored version of events, thanks to radio's disregard for national borders. Immediately after Munich, correspondents from around the world disappeared from Prague as fast as they had come, but one broadcaster who stubbornly remained was Jonathan Griffin, a soft-spoken, round-spectacled intellectual, rather aristocratic in demeanour. He was later to become the wartime head of European intelligence at the BBC and after the war had an extraordinary second blossoming as a poet, now undeservedly almost forgotten. His series of broadcasts from Prague in the three weeks that followed Munich, capture the atmosphere of a country betrayed, and predict with absolute precision the future fate of Czechoslovakia. They were not broadcast by the BBC - they were far too critical - but by Czechoslovakia's shortwave service, broadcasting in English for Britain and America. Here is an extract from Griffin's broadcast on October 1, one day after Munich:
"Why did the same event, the four-power agreement in Munich, produce opposite effects in the two peoples - for you jubilation, for the people here profound misery? Because for the moment you have peace, but you have got it, for the moment, on the cheap, at others' expense. For the moment you have paid for it nothing noticeable except the frightful responsibility of which some of you may be aware. Later on you will find that you have mortgaged the security of Great Britain and her security as a great power, and that by allowing your government to violate solemn pledges and ride roughshod over international justice and morality, you have let loose over Europe an anarchy that may well make the peace that you have so dearly bought uneasy and short."
Less than a year later, the world was at war.