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CHAPTER 7 · 1938 · 1938
Anschluss and Munich: Appeasement at Full Stretch
The map above is the world of OCT 1938 — Munich — the Sudetenland signed away.
BRIEF EXPLANATION — THE ESSENTIAL ARGUMENT
The year 1938 carried appeasement to its limit, and the reason it went so far is that its central assumption seemed reasonable at the time. Germany annexed Austria in March, and the union placed German territory on three sides of Czechoslovakia, the next state in Hitler’s path. He then seized on a genuine grievance, the discontent of the three million ethnic Germans in the Czech border region called the Sudetenland, and inflated it into a crisis engineered for conquest. At the Munich conference Britain and France agreed to hand the Sudetenland to Germany, and they did so without letting Czechoslovakia take any part in the decision about its own survival.
Appeasement was a deliberate strategy rather than simple cowardice, and it aimed at three things, which were to avoid another world war, to correct what many saw as unjust borders left by Versailles, and to buy time for British rearmament. The whole policy rested, however, on the belief that Hitler’s demands were finite and could eventually be satisfied. Munich exposed the danger in that belief, because the settlement stripped Czechoslovakia of its mountain defences and much of its arms industry, deepened Soviet distrust of collective security, and left Germany stronger than before. The choice was understandable given how little the decision-makers could know, yet it made peace depend entirely on the good faith of a man who had none.
GUIDED EXPLANATION
German troops entered Austria in March 1938, and the country was annexed to the Reich. Public celebration went hand in hand with immediate persecution, above all of Austria’s Jews. The annexation also reshaped the map, placing German territory on three sides of Czechoslovakia and leaving the democracy that France was pledged to defend nearly surrounded.
Hitler then used the grievances of the Sudeten Germans to manufacture a crisis over the Czech border region. At Munich on 29 and 30 September, Britain and France agreed to transfer the fortified Sudetenland to Germany, and both Czechoslovakia and the Soviet Union were excluded from the talks. The agreement prevented an immediate war, but it removed the Czech defences and handed Germany valuable industrial resources. Chamberlain believed the concession might satisfy a limited revisionist, while Hitler regarded it as unwelcome interference with the war he had actually wanted. Appeasement had bought time, yet it had also shifted the military balance in Germany’s favour.
Appeasement was a strategy of negotiated concession rather than mere fear, and its reasoning deserves to be taken seriously. Britain had a small army, alarming forecasts of civilian deaths from bombing, and uncertain support from its Dominions, while many officials genuinely believed that Versailles had created real minority grievances worth redressing. They hoped to separate justified revision from unlimited conquest and to gain time for radar and fighter production. The hidden flaw was that the whole test depended on Hitler eventually being satisfied, even as each concession improved his position. Czechoslovakia possessed some thirty-five divisions, mountain fortifications and the great Škoda arms works, and Germany acquired much of that value without firing a shot. France held the treaty obligation but would not act without Britain, and the exclusion of the Soviet Union deepened Stalin’s distrust. Munich therefore reduced the immediate danger while weakening the coalition and the assets that would be available once Hitler’s seizure of Prague proved his aims had never been limited.
DEEP EXPLANATION — EVIDENCE & INTERPRETATION
Appeasement as strategy
Appeasement was a deliberate policy rather than a synonym for fear, and reconstructing its reasoning is essential to judging it fairly. British leaders remembered the slaughter of 1914, commanded weak land forces, dreaded aerial bombing, and doubted that the Dominions would fight over the Sudetenland. They also believed that some revisions of the Versailles settlement were genuinely just. Negotiation could buy time for fighter production and radar while testing whether German aims were finite. The policy failed because its central diagnostic test was weak, since every concession increased Hitler’s resources and prestige while any evidence of unlimited aims was repeatedly explained away. A strategy that depends on an adversary becoming satisfied needs a clear threshold for recognising that satisfaction will never arrive. March 1939 finally supplied that threshold, when Germany occupied the non-German city of Prague, but by then Czechoslovakia’s defences and industrial arsenal were already lost.
The 1938 military counterfactual
Judging Munich means comparing uncertain alternatives rather than measuring 1938 against the victory eventually won in 1945. Czechoslovakia had substantial forces, border fortifications and a strong arms industry, France outnumbered the German troops in the west, and some German officers discussed a coup should Hitler provoke a war. Against all that, Britain could not send a large army quickly, British and French estimates of air losses were alarming, Poland and Hungary held claims against Czechoslovakia, and Soviet help depended on contested transit routes and on political trust that did not exist. The year after Munich improved British air defence, yet it also handed Germany Czech weapons and a far better strategic position. Scholarship generally treats Munich as a military loss for the anti-German coalition while acknowledging that the decision-makers lacked the archives and the certainty available to later historians. The moral betrayal of Czechoslovakia remains clear even where the operational outcome stays a matter of counterfactual argument.
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THE SITES
ON THIS DAY
WHY IT HAPPENED
The bomber, the trenches and 1914. Appeasement was not mere cowardice; it was a theory of the world held by serious men with terrible memories. The guiding nightmares: another 1914, in which alliance mechanics turned a border dispute into civilizational slaughter; and the new dread — Baldwin’s “the bomber will always get through” — inflated by air-staff casualty projections for London that proved tenfold too high, and made vivid by Guernica (Ch. 5). If war meant the immediate destruction of cities, then almost any negotiated revision was cheaper. The premise was wrong about 1938 but not absurd; it had merely mistaken which decade’s war it was preventing.
A grievance with real content, exploited in bad faith. Many British policymakers privately conceded that Versailles had wronged Germany — and the Sudeten Germans, drafted into a state they hadn’t chosen in 1919 and hit hardest by the Depression, had authentic complaints Czechoslovak policy had only partly addressed. Appeasement’s intellectual core was the belief that satisfying legitimate grievances would separate reasonable Germans from Hitler, or Hitler-the-nationalist from Hitler-the-conqueror. The Sudeten crisis was engineered precisely to weaponize that decency: self-determination as siege engine.
The military arithmetic was contested — then and now. Chamberlain’s advisers told him Britain could not save Czechoslovakia (true: no British army could reach Bohemia) and was two years from air-defense readiness — the “buying time for radar and Spitfires” defense of Munich. Against it: Czechoslovakia’s thirty-five divisions behind mountain fortifications, France’s hundred divisions facing five German ones in the west, German generals so alarmed that a group around Beck and Halder planned a coup if war came — and the year bought armed Germany faster than it armed Britain, while handing over the Czech army whole. The balance of scholarship now leans against Munich’s military logic, but honest accounting admits the decision-makers lacked what we have: the German archives.
France had subcontracted its policy. The treaty obliging action was French, not British — France had promised Prague since 1924. But French planning was defensive, French politics fractured, and Daladier (who, unlike Chamberlain, believed Hitler’s appetite was unlimited and said so) judged France could not fight without Britain. So the decision migrated to London, which had no treaty with Czechoslovakia at all. The crowds that cheered Daladier at Le Bourget expected to be jeered; “the fools,” he reportedly murmured. Appeasement was in part a failure of alliance mechanics: each democracy waiting for the other’s spine.
THE TURN
Munich, 29–30 September 1938. Munich is the word every later generation reaches for when it debates concession, which is precisely why it needs careful handling. The turn is real: it is the last moment Hitler could have been fought with Czechoslovakia’s army and fortifications on the board, and the moment the USSR — excluded from the conference table — began pricing a separate deal (Ch. 8). But the “Guilty Men” reading of 1940, in which cowards betrayed an easy victory, has been complicated by decades of archival work: Chamberlain’s rearmament programs, the Dominions’ refusal to fight for the Sudetenland, the French air force’s genuine nakedness. The mature judgment is harsher than either caricature: appeasement was a rational policy resting on one falsifiable premise — that Hitler’s aims were finite — and its authors kept the premise long after the evidence had killed it. March 1939 falsified it beyond argument; the pity is what falsification cost.
WHAT IT CHANGED
Czechoslovakia is disarmed for its conquerors. The Wehrmacht that rolled into Prague in March 1939 (Ch. 8) — and into France in 1940 — did so partly on Czech steel: a third of the German army’s tanks in the French campaign were Czech-built 35(t)s and 38(t)s from the works Munich delivered. The democracies’ “peace” rearmed their enemy.
Stalin draws the Munich lesson. Excluded from the settlement of a crisis on his doorstep, Stalin concluded the West would happily point Hitler east. Litvinov, the Jewish champion of collective security, was replaced by Molotov in May 1939; the signal was received in Berlin. The road from Munich to the Nazi–Soviet Pact is direct.
The guarantee reflex. When Prague fell, Chamberlain reversed course in a weekend: guarantees to Poland, then Romania and Greece — commitments Britain could not physically fulfill, issued to deter rather than to fight. Deterrence issued from a reputation Munich had already spent traded at a discount; Hitler discounted it to zero.
FIELD QUESTION — Was Munich a betrayal, a blunder, or the best of the bad options available to Chamberlain in September 1938?
Run the three verdicts against the evidence. Betrayal is the Czech verdict and morally unanswerable — a functioning democracy was dismembered by its friends, unconsulted; whatever else is argued, this stands. Blunder is the military-historical verdict: the year bought strengthened Germany relatively (Czech divisions and Škoda gone, German tank production up) even if it matured British radar and fighters — and the German coup plotters of September 1938, whatever their real chances, were never tested. Best-of-bad-options was Chamberlain’s own defense: no ally ready, Dominions opposed, publics desperate for peace, and a genuine chance — he believed — that Hitler’s aims were limited. The debate has never closed because it is really a debate about decision-making under uncertainty: Chamberlain’s error was not preferring peace, but structuring the choice so that only Hitler’s good faith could redeem it. When your policy requires your adversary’s honesty, the policy is the hostage.
AN INTERESTING FACT
The Munich Agreement was signed in the small hours in the Führerbau on Munich’s Königsplatz — and the document Chamberlain waved at Heston airport was not it, but a separate half-page Anglo-German friendship declaration he had asked Hitler to sign the next morning, drafted by Chamberlain himself over breakfast. Hitler signed it, by witnesses’ accounts, barely reading it. The building still stands; it is today a music conservatory, and the room where four powers dismembered a fifth is used for student recitals.
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