Munich Agreement: Appeasement Emboldens Hitler

Neville Chamberlain stepped off the plane at Heston Aerodrome waving a piece of paper and declared "peace for our time." The date was September 30, 1938, and the paper was the Munich Agreement, which handed Adolf Hitler the Sudetenland region of Czechoslovakia without a shot being fired. Within a year, the peace Chamberlain promised was shattered, and the agreement had become the most infamous act of appeasement in modern history. The crisis began in the spring of 1938, when Hitler demanded the annexation of the Sudetenland, a mountainous border region of Czechoslovakia inhabited by roughly three million ethnic Germans. The Sudeten Germans, organized by the Nazi-funded Sudeten German Party under Konrad Henlein, staged protests and provocations designed to create a pretext for German intervention. Czechoslovakia was prepared to fight. Its army was well-trained and equipped, its border fortifications were formidable, and it had military alliances with both France and the Soviet Union. But Britain and France, haunted by memories of the Great War, were desperate to avoid another conflict. Chamberlain flew to meet Hitler three times in September 1938, each time conceding more territory. At Munich on September 29, Chamberlain, French Premier Édouard Daladier, Hitler, and Italian dictator Benito Mussolini signed the agreement in the early hours of September 30. Czechoslovakia was not invited to the conference that dismembered it. The Czechs were informed afterward and given a choice between acceptance and fighting Germany alone. They accepted, and Czech President Edvard Beneš called it a betrayal. Germany occupied the Sudetenland on October 1. In March 1939, Hitler violated the agreement and seized the rest of Czechoslovakia. Chamberlain, finally recognizing that appeasement had failed, extended security guarantees to Poland. When Germany invaded Poland on September 1, 1939, Britain and France declared war. Winston Churchill's judgment, delivered in the House of Commons after Munich, proved prophetic: "You were given the choice between war and dishonour. You chose dishonour and you will have war." The Munich Agreement permanently discredited appeasement as a foreign policy strategy and became the reference point for every subsequent debate about whether to confront or accommodate aggressive dictators.