On 29 September, Britain and France agreed on Hitler at a conference in Munich. Neville Chamberlain (Britain) and Edward Daladier (France) accepted most of Hitler`s demands and left Czechoslovakia to accept or fight Germany alone. Czechoslovakia yielded to Hitler`s demands. Six months later (March 1939), Hitler broke all his promises and took over the rest of Czechoslovakia. As the threats to Germany and the European war have become increasingly evident, opinions have changed. Chamberlain was awarded for his role as one of the “Men of Munich” in books such as the Guilty Men of 1940. A rare defence of the wartime accord came in 1944 from Viscount Maugham, who had been the Lord`s chancellor. Maugham regarded the decision to establish a Czechoslovakian state with large German and Hungarian minorities as a “dangerous experiment” in the face of previous disputes and described the agreement, which stemmed mainly from the need for France to free itself from its contractual obligations in the face of its vagueness to war. [63] After the war, Churchill`s memoirs of that time, The Gathering Storm (1948), claimed that Chamberlain`s appeasement of Hitler had been wrong in Munich, and noted Churchill`s pre-war warnings about Hitler`s plan of attack and Britain`s folly of disarmament after Germany reached air parity with Britain. While acknowledging that Chamberlain was acting for noble reasons, Churchill argued that Hitler should have resisted in Czechoslovakia and that efforts had to be made to involve the Soviet Union. The slogan “Above us, without us!” (Czech: O n`s bez n`s!) sums up the feelings of the Czechoslovakian population (Slovakia and the Czech Republic) towards the agreement. [Citation required] On its way to Germany, Czechoslovakia (as the state was renamed) lost its reasonable border with Germany and its fortifications. Without it, its independence became more nominal than more real.
The agreement also caused Czechoslovakia to lose 70% of its steel industry, 70% of its electricity and 3.5 million citizens to Germany. [61] The Sudeten Germans celebrated what they saw as their liberation. The impending war, it seemed, had been averted. The New York Times made the front page of the Munich agreement: “Hitler receives less than his claims from the Sudetenland,” and reports that a “joyful crowd” had applauded Daladier on his return to France and that Chamberlain had been “wildly applauded” upon his return to the UK. [54] After Poland learned that populated territories in Poland were to be transferred to Germany, Poland issued a note to the Czechoslovakian government regarding the immediate conclusion of an agreement providing for the unquestionable occupation of Polish territory by Polish troops; An agreement on referendums is expected to follow in districts with a large proportion of the Polish population. [75] London, FridayThe Munich Agreement gives Hitler everything he wants (first), except to the extent that it may not be entirely possible to obtain it as quickly as he would have done under Godesberg`s full ultimatum. He will begin tomorrow the invasion of Czechoslovakia, as he threatened in his speech of 12 September. It is free to occupy all the regions where the Sudeten Germans are the majority, and this by leaps and bounds. On 29 and 30 September 1938, an emergency meeting of the major European powers was held in Munich – without Czechoslovakia or the Soviet Union, allied with France and Czechoslovakia.