Charles River Editors - Nazi Germanys Conquest of Western Europe: The Negotiations and Campaigns that Let Hitler Conquer the Continent Before and During World War II

Hitler and Chamberlain meeting in September 1938

"We have suffered a total and unmitigated defeat ... you will find that in a period of time which may be measured by years, but may be measured by months, Czechoslovakia will be engulfed in the Nazi rgime. We are in the presence of a disaster of the first magnitude ... we have sustained a defeat without a war, the consequences of which will travel far with us along our road ... we have passed an awful milestone in our history, when the whole equilibrium of Europe has been deranged. Winston Churchill

"My good friends," the mustached, bony man with thick eyebrows and large, strong teeth somewhat reminiscent of those of a horse, shouted to the crowds from the second-floor window of his house at 10 Downing Street, "this is the second time in our history, that there has come back to Downing Street from Germany peace with honor. I believe it is peace for our time." (McDonough, 1998, 70).

The man addressing the crowd, British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain, had just returned from the heart of Nazi Germany following negotiations with Adolf Hitler, and the crowd gathered outside the English leader's house on September 30, 1938 greeted these ringing words with grateful cheers. The piece of paper Chamberlain flourished exultantly seemed to offer permanent amity and goodwill between democratic Britain and totalitarian Germany. In it, Britain agreed to allow Hitler's Third Reich to absorb the Sudeten regions of Czechoslovakia without interference from either England or France, and since high percentages of ethnic Germans often more than 50% locally inhabited these regions, Hitler's demand for this territory seemed somewhat reasonable to Chamberlain and his supporters. With Germany resurgent and rearmed after the disasters inflicted on it by the Treaty of Versailles following World War I, the pact known as the Munich Agreement held out hope of a quick end to German ambitions and the return of stable, normal international relations across Europe.

Of course, the Munich agreement is now notorious because its promise proved barren within a very short period of time. Chamberlain's actions either failed to avert or actually hastened the very cataclysm he wished to avoid at all costs. The "Munich Agreement" of 1938 effectively signed away Czechoslovakia's independence to Hitler's hungry new Third Reich, and within two years, most of the world found itself plunged into a conflict which made a charnelhouse of Europe and left somewhere between 60-80 million people dead globally.

Many people hailed Chamberlain's "success" at defusing Nazi aggression by handing over Czechoslovakia tamely to Hitler's control, but others remained dubious. douard Daladier, the French prime minister, "later told Amery that he turned up his coat collar to protect his face from rotten eggs when he arrived in Paris." (Gilbert, 1963, 179-180). A Foreign Office man, Orme Sargent, was disgusted, and he later said bitterly, "For all the fun and cheers, you might think they were celebrating a major victory over an enemy instead of merely the betrayal of a minor ally." (Gilbert, 1963, 180). Winston Churchill, the deals most famous critic, bitterly remarked, England has been offered a choice between war and shame. She has chosen shame, and will get war.

Munich is widely reviled today and is held up as the epitome of appeasement, but historians still debate its effects on the Second World War, as well as Neville Chamberlain's character and motivations. Some believe the attempted appeasement of Nazi Germany hastened, or even caused, the mayhem occupying the next seven years. Others believe that the pact merely failed to alter war's inevitable arrival in either direction. Historians and authors alternately interpret Chamberlain as a bumbling, arrogant fool, a strong-willed statesman who simply miscalculated the nature of Hitler and Nazi Germany, or even a man with dictatorial ambitions surreptitiously inserting himself into the Fuhrer's orbit and prevented from further damaging democracy only by his fall and death from bowel cancer. Another possible interpretation, with considerable documentary support, asserts Chamberlain wished to enlist Germany's aid against the state most Europeans perceived as the true threat of the era, the Soviet Union.

Europes attempts to appease him, most notably at Munich in 1938, failed, as Nazi Germany swallowed up Austria and Czechoslovakia by 1939. Italy was on the march as well, invading Albania in April of 1939. The straw that broke the camel's back, however, was Germany's invasion of Poland on September 1 of that year. Two days later, France and Great Britain declared war on Germany, and World War II had begun in earnest.

Of course, as most people now know, the invasion of Poland was merely the preface to the Nazi blitzkrieg of most of Western Europe, which would include Denmark, Belgium, and France by the summer of 1940. The resistance put up by these countries is often portrayed as weak, and the narrative is that the British stood alone in 1940 against the Nazi onslaught, defending the British Isles during the Battle of Britain and preventing a potential German invasion.

In particular, the campaign in Poland is remembered as one in which an antiquated Polish army was quickly pummeled by the worlds most modern army. Polish lancers charging in a valiant yet idiotic attack against German tanks is the only image from the 1939 Nazi-Soviet invasion of Poland remaining in the popular imagination today. Originating as a piece of Nazi propaganda, paradoxically adopted by the Poles as a patriotic myth, the fictional charge obscures the actual events of September 1939. Outnumbered, outgunned, and under-equipped, the Polish army nevertheless inflicted heavy losses on the invading Wehrmacht. In fact, only the unexpected advance of Soviet forces from the east put a quick end to the struggle and saw the Polish republic partitioned again after just 20 years of independence. Nonetheless, the campaign that started World War II was a bloody sign of things to come as the conflict engulfed the globe.

That said, its widely overlooked today given how history played out that as the power of Nazi Germany grew alarmingly during the 1930s, the French sought means to defend their territory against the rising menace of the Thousand-Year Reich. As architects of the most punitive measures in the Treaty of Versailles following World War I, France was a natural target for Teutonic retribution, so the Maginot Line, a series of interconnected strongpoints and fortifications running along much of France's eastern border, helped allay French fears of invasion.