The Munich Agreement

The question was how to keep the peace. And British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain wanted peace. He had seen what war does. Had lost family to it. He knew the grief that settled into people as a result. So did many in Britain. The streets included men who walked with canes, their lungs scarred by gas, their faces by shrapnel. Women still wore black for sons who never came home. The Great War of just two decades prior had left its mark. The people didn’t want another one. They wanted diplomacy.

On the other side stood Adolf Hitler. He wanted conquest. The Nazi leader had come to power in 1933, and in just a few years, he had already expanded Germany. First, it was the Rhineland, then Austria. No real fights. No real resistance. His publicly stated intentions ran much broader, though, and he had already set his next target: the Sudetenland region of Czechoslovakia.

Formed after World War I from the collapse of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, Czechoslovakia became home to over 3 million ethnic Germans in the Sudetenland. Hitler saw them as an ideal justification for Germany’s expansion. Under the pretense of protecting German-speaking people, he stirred unrest in the region, fueling Sudeten German nationalist demands for separation. He promised to bring them into the Reich. By force if necessary. As he would say to Chamberlain in a conversation between the two,

“All this seems to be academic; I want to get down to realities. Three hundred Sudetens have been killed and things of that kind cannot go on; the thing has got to be settled at once: I am determined to settle it: I do not care whether there is a world war or not: I am determined to settle it and to settle it soon and I am prepared to risk a world war rather than allow this to drag on.”

The 300 people that Hitler alluded to had not actually been killed. He fabricated the claim to justify increasing military pressure on Czechoslovakia and force Britain and France into negotiations.

This point is important. Hitler had been rearming Germany for years, openly violating the Treaty of Versailles. While he had not yet faced military resistance, the prevailing belief was that if his demands were denied, he would escalate to war.

By late September 1938, Hitler’s demands grew more intense. His insistence on taking the Sudetenland had escalated from rhetoric to near ultimatums. In an effort to avoid war, Chamberlain met with him twice that month, hoping for diplomacy to solve the issues. These conversations didn’t lead to an outcome, but did reveal Chamberlain’s perspective on the territory. He told Hitler, “I could give him my personal opinion which was that on principle I had nothing to say against the separation of the Sudeten Germans from the rest of Czechoslovakia, provided that the practical difficulties could be overcome.”

With the issue remaining unsettled, another meeting was scheduled between Chamberlain and Hitler to resolve the matter. This one would also include French Premier Édouard Daladier, and Italian leader Benito Mussolini. It was set for September 29, 1938. The leader of Czechoslovakia was not invited.

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Even as tensions rose, Chamberlain was careful about how Hitler was presented to the British public. In letters leading up to these conversations, he urged a diplomatic tone, believing that portraying Hitler as reasonable could foster better relations. In one such letter, he wrote,

“We make a great mistake when our Press persists in abusing him. Let it abuse his evil advisers but give him a chance of being a good boy. If our object is to achieve results that is the only line to take. If our only satisfaction is to slang him, then we must abandon hope of ever getting results.”

It is worth considering why Chamberlain took this approach. He clearly understood, and had so for years, the threat that Germany posed and the military desires of Hitler. In a letter written the year prior, Chamberlain says,

“No other country, not Italy, since she has had her hands full with the task of consolidating her Abyssinian conquest, not Russia with all her military preparations, certainly not France, England or any of the smaller powers, is for a moment credited with any aggressive designs. But the fierce propaganda against other nations continually carried on by the German Press and…the intensity and persistence of German military preparations, together with the many acts of the German Government in violation of treaties, cynically justified on the ground that unilateral action was the quickest way of getting what they wanted, have inspired all her neighbours with a profound uneasiness.”

Some argue that Chamberlain wasn’t just playing nice. He was buying time. He himself wrote, “I believe the double policy of re-armament and better relations with Germany and Italy will carry us safely through the danger period.”