From The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich (William L. Shirer, 1960, 2011) pp446-8
What was to be done? The broken old President did not have to with. draw to decide that. He told Hitler at once, “The position is quite clear, Resistance would be folly.” But how, he asked – since it was now a little after 2 A.M. – could he, in the space of four hours, arrange to restrain the whole Czech people from offering resistance? The Fuehrer replied that he had better consult with his companions. The German military machine was already in motion and could not be stopped. Hacha should get in touch at once with Prague. “It was a grave decision,” the German minutes report Hitler as saying, “but he saw dawning the possibility of a long period of peace between the two peoples. Should the decision be otherwise, he saw the annihilation of Czechoslovakia.”
With these words, he dismissed his guests for the time being. It was 2:15 A.M. In an adjoining room Goering and Ribbentrop stepped up the pressure on the two victims. According to the French ambassador, who in an official dispatch to Paris depicted the scene as he got it from what he believed to be an authentic source, Hacha and Chvalkovsky protested against the outrage to their nation. They declared they would not sign the document of surrender. Were they to do so they would be forever cursed by their people.
The German ministers [Goering and Ribbentrop] were pitiless [M. Coulondu wrote in his dispatch]. They literally hunted Dr. Hacha and M. Chvalkovsky round the table on which the documents were lying, thrusting them continually before them, pushing pens into their hands, incessantly repeating that if they continued in their refusal, half of Prague would lie in ruins from bombing within two hours, and that this would be only the beginning. Hundreds of bombers were waiting the order to take off, and they would receive that order at six in the morning if the signatures were not forthcoming.
At this point, Dr. Schmidt, who seems to have managed to be present whenever and wherever the drama of the Third Reich reached a climax, heard Goering shouting for Dr. Morell.
“Hacha has fainted!” Goering cried out.
For a moment the Nazi bullies feared that the prostrate Czech President might die on their hands and, as Schmidt says, “that the whole world will say tomorrow that he was murdered at the Chancellery.” Dr. Morell’s specialty was injections – much later he would almost kill Hitler with them – and he now applied the needle to Dr. Hacha and brought him back to consciousness. The President was revived sufficiently to be able to grasp the telephone which the Germans thrust into his hand and talk to his government in Prague over a special line which Ribbentrop had ordered rigged up. He apprised the Czech cabinet of what had happened and advised surrender. Then, somewhat further restored by a second injection from the needle of Dr. Morell, the President of the expiring Republic stumbled back into the presence of Adolf Hitler to sign his country’s death warrant. It was now five minutes to four in the morning of March 15, 1939.
The text had been prepared “beforehand by Hitler,” Schmidt recounts, and during Hacha’s fainting spells the German interpreter had been busy copying the official communique, which had also been written up “beforehand,” and which Hacha and Chvalkovsky were also forced to sign. It read as follows:
Berlin, March 15, 1939
At their request, the Fuehrer today received the Czechoslovak President, Dr. Hacha, and the Czechoslovak Foreign Minister, Dr. Chvalkovsky, in Berlin in the presence of Foreign Minister von Ribbentrop. At the meeting the serious situation created by the events of recent weeks in the present Czechoslovak territory was examined with complete frankness.
The conviction was unanimously expressed on both sides that the aim of all efforts must be the safeguarding of calm, order and peace in this part of Central Europe. The Czechoslovak President declared that, in order to serve this Object and to achieve ultimate pacification, he confidently placed the fate of the Czech people and country in the hands of the Fuehrer of the German Reich. The Fuehrer accepted this declaration and expressed his intention of taking the Czech people under the protection of the German Reich and of guaranteeing them an autonomous development of their ethnic life as suited to their character.
Hitler’s chicanery had reached, perhaps, its summit.
According to one of his woman secretaries, Hitler rushed from the signing into his office, embraced all the women present and exclaimed, “Children! This is the greatest day of my life! I shall go down in history as the greatest German!”
It did not occur to him – how could it? – that the end of Czechoslovakia might be the beginning of the end of Germany. From this dawn of March 15, 1939 -the Ides of March – the road to war, to defeat, to disaster, as we now know, stretched just ahead. It would be a short road and as straight as a line could be. And once on it, and hurtling down it, Hitler, like Alexander and Napoleon before him, could not stop.
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