The Shame and Tragedy of the 1938 Munich Agreement

Yesterday marked the 80th anniversary of the Munich Agreement, one of the most shameful and tragic chapters in the history of the foreign policies of Britain and France and one that constituted a pivotal factor in the outbreak of the second world war, the most destructive conflict in the history of mankind, in which the Holocaust occurred.

This is not to castigate the governments of Neville Chamberlain and Edouard Daladier for wanting to avoid another world war.

The traumas of the Great War were ingrained in the minds of British and French statesmen and this should not be overlooked or downplayed.

Nor should the benefit of hindsight cloud our judgement when assessing British and French insistence that any changes to the existing world order were to be initiated through negotiations rather than by force.

Rather, this article will highlight the ramifications for Europe of Britain and France agreeing to Czechoslovakia being ceded to nazi Germany, without even Prague’s consent; how London and Paris rejected appeals by the Soviet Union for a collective security pact to deter Adolf Hitler from territorial aggression; how Poland, having signed a non-aggression treaty with Hitler, annexed Czech territory following the agreement at Munich; and how the nazi-Soviet pact did not cause the war in Europe.

Following Hitler’s demands for the Sudetenland to be handed to Germany on the spurious claims of discrimination against ethnic Germans residing in this region by the Czech authorities, Britain and France decided to enter into negotiations with Hitler, in a policy known as appeasement.

The British and French prime ministers travelled to Munich in September 1938 to attend the Munich Conference.

In attendance were Hitler, Chamberlain, Daladier and Italian leader Benito Mussolini. At no time during the conference was Czech president Edvard Benes invited to attend — an astonishing absence in light of how the conference centred on part of Czechoslovakia being ceded to another country.

Indeed, the British and French governments did not even make a representation for Czech participation at Munich. That Hitler resented the Czechoslovakian state was no defence. London and Paris should have acted in accordance with the founding principles of the League of Nations regarding state sovereignty.

But for Hitler, the message was clear. If Britain and France were prepared to disregard Czech sovereignty, then they would probably do the same over Polish sovereignty too.

Another conspicuous absence at Munich was that of the USSR.

Despite Moscow being a major power on the European continent and having concluded in 1935 a treaty with Prague on mutual assistance in the event of either country being attacked, the Soviets were left out of the conference, which made the Kremlin feel increasingly suspicious of British and French intentions.

Furthermore, the failure of Chamberlain and Daladier to insist on Soviet representation at Munich made Hitler feel even more confident that Britain, France and the Soviet Union would not form an anti-nazi alliance between themselves. Hence it bolstered his determination to achieve a German-dominated Europe.

Shortly after midnight on September 30 1938, the Munich Agreement was signed by Hitler, Chamberlain, Daladier and Mussolini, in which the Sudetenland was handed to Germany.

The British and French gave a piece of a country’s territory away that was neither theirs in the first place nor theirs to give.
Following the signing, Chamberlain told president Benes of Czechoslovakia that he should not resist the German annexation of the Sudetenland and that, if he did, Czechoslovakia would be on its own to face Germany.

The Munich Agreement played a pivotal role in the outbreak of the second world war, which British and French politicians and journalists today are either ignorant of, downplay or refuse to accept.

Following the acquisition of the Sudetenland, Hitler felt emboldened and certain that his territorial designs on Poland would not provoke a military response from Britain and France.

Furthermore, the German leader’s confidence, after Munich, received a further boost when Germany’s absorption of the rest of Czechoslovakia in March 1939 did not provoke even the slightest of reactions against Berlin by London and Paris.

Professor Michael Jabara Carley of the University of Montreal told me:

“September 30 1938, is a day that the West likes to forget. If Europe really wants to remember how World War II began, I would propose the day that Chamberlain and Daladier met with Hitler and Mussolini to carve up Czechoslovakia.”

Following the coming to power of the nazis in January 1933, the leadership of the Soviet Union became increasingly alarmed over the language emanating from Berlin, especially concerning nazi pronouncements of securing Lebensraum in Russia.

By the end of 1933, the USSR had begun taking the first steps in seeking collective security with Britain and France and also with smaller states such as Czechoslovakia and Poland.

Moscow’s quest for collective security would last until August 1939, when the Russians realised that, despite their endless efforts, the British and French would not agree to a collective security treaty with the Soviet Union.

Now, it is one of history’s “what ifs” concerning whether Hitler would have been deterred from territorial expansion, for instance, over the Sudetenland, had there been in place a collective security alliance between Britain, France and the USSR.

Perhaps it is the case that nothing was ever going to deter the nazi leader from war. However, it is conceivable that, with the combined might of the British, French and Soviet militaries, Hitler might have, at the very least, scaled down his plans for Europe. After all, in Mein Kampf, Hitler had argued against fighting on two fronts.

I would like to dispel two myths that have been propagated by politicians and journalists in Britain.

The first concerns the portrayal of Poland in the 1930s as an almost angelic country. There is little, if any, talk in British quarters over how Poland signed a non-aggression pact with the nazis in 1934 and how Poland, as a result of the Munich Agreement, annexed the Zaolzie region from Czechoslovakia.

Alas, it was not only the nazis who dismembered Czechoslovakia but Poland, too.

The second myth concerns the Nazi-Soviet Pact, signed in August 1939 between Berlin and Moscow.

Today, British politicians and journalists, whose knowledge of the inter-war period is more or less confined to Wikipedia, claim that the treaty between nazi Germany and the Soviet Union caused the outbreak of the second world war. Nothing could be further from the truth.

The reality is that Moscow signed the non-aggression pact with the Germans because its leadership believed that the only way to preserve the security of the USSR, after its quest for collective security with London and Paris had failed, and to buy time for an inevitable conflict with Germany — though Stalin was not convinced of this inevitability — was to sign an agreement with Berlin.

Hitler agreed to the pact with the Soviet Union so that this would give him a free hand to fight France and Britain, without the fear of the Soviets attacking him from the rear. In short, the Nazi-Soviet Pact was not a pact of friendship but a pact of convenience.

On the 80th anniversary of the Munich Agreement, Britain and France have a moral responsibility to apologise to the people of the former Czechoslovakia for disregarding their country’s sovereignty and territorial integrity and to recognise the enormous ramifications for Europe and its people of the shame and tragedy that was Munich.

And it is high time that British and French politicians and journalists alike learn about the Soviet Union’s search for collective security with London and Paris to deter Hitler from aggression because, had the Russians been successful, it is just possible that the most devastating war in history could have been averted.

Originally published on 2018-10-01

Author: Dr. Marcus Papadopoulos

Source: Morning Star

Origins of images: Facebook, Twitter, Wikimedia, Wikipedia, Flickr, Google, Imageinjection & Pinterest.

Read our Disclaimer/Legal Statement!

Donate to Support Us

We would like to ask you to consider a small donation to help our team keep working. We accept no advertising and rely only on you, our readers, to keep us digging the truth on history, global politics and international relations.

READ MORE!

America’s Renegade Warfare

Seventy-seven million people in North and South Korea find themselves directly in the line of fire from the threat of a Second Korean War. The rest of the world is recoiling in horror from the scale of civilian casualties such a war would cause and the unthinkable prospect that either side might actually use nuclear weapons. Since the first Korean War killed at least 20 percent of North Korea’s population and left the country in ruins, the U.S. has repeatedly failed to follow through on diplomacy to establish a lasting peace in Korea and has instead kept reverting to illegal and terrifying threats ...

Western Silence as 20,000 Neo-Nazis March in Ukraine

In one of the largest, if not the largest, Neo-Nazi demonstration in Europe since WW2, 20,000 facists marched through the streets of Ukraine’s capital Kiev last weekend under the silent gaze of the western media. Other than Russian state media RT and Sputnik News facists throwing Nazi salutes and parading in their tens of thousands in a European capital didn’t concern any of the major western news outlet. Nothing on BBC, France24, CNN, New York Times, The Guardian…the silence of the media lambs when it comes to a growing facists movement in Ukraine is deafening. The Ukrainian Nazis were honoring their ...

Russian Military Interventions Throughout the World since 1945

Origins of images: Facebook, Twitter, Wikimedia, Wikipedia, Flickr, Google, Imageinjection & Pinterest.Read our Disclaimer/Legal Statement!Donate to Support UsWe would like to ask you to consider a small donation to help our team keep working. We accept no advertising and rely only on you, our readers, to keep us digging the truth on history, global politics and international relations.

Ukraine’s State-Sponsored “Azov Battalion” Expands Use of Nazi-Inspired Symbols

On September 22, Ukraine’s Azov Battalion had a ceremony honoring its fighters who were killed in combat in eastern Ukraine’s Donbass regions. It is natural for any military unit to honor its dead. But it is evident from the images on Azov’s own website that this ceremony used iconography that is disturbingly reminiscent of the 1930s Nuremberg rallies, including the use of searchlights, the banners with Waffen-SS stylized logos and the flames. The background of Azov, its leadership, its recruitment and emblems are all deeply disturbing. It grew out of the Social-National Assembly of Ukraine (S.N.A.), a group of far right and neo-Nazi organizations ...

When Canada Invaded Russia

The corporate media presents Russia as militaristic but ignores Canada’s invasion of that country. 100 years ago today a popular revolt ousted the Russian monarchy. Enraged at Nicholas II’s brutality and the horror of World War I, protests and strikes swept the capital of Petrograd (Saint Petersburg). Within a week the czar abdicated. Later in the year the Bolsheviks rose to power in large part by committing to withdraw from the war. The English, French and US responded to the Bolshevik’s rise by supporting the Russian monarchists (the whites) in their fight to maintain power. Six thousand Canadian troops also invaded. According ...

Donald Trump: We Created Chaos, We Should not have Attacked Serbia!

Donald Trump, influential billionaire and a candidate for the president of United States, back in the 1999, as a guest of the famous host Larry King on CNN, spoke about that time ongoing topic of the bombing of Serbia. Asked by Larry King, what does he think and what would he do if he was in Clinton’s place, Trump criticized the decision to bomb Serbia. “So, I would do something different and I know it will sound ghastly to everybody. But, look at the chaos which we created in Kosovo. I think, we can say that we lost only few people. Of ...

Europe’s “Little Guantanamo”: Why the U.S. Wants Serbia to Give Up Kosovo

The U.S. military base in Kosovo was constructed in 1999 without consulting with the government of Serbia and is the largest U.S. military base built outside of the U.S. since the Vietnam War. The site was apparently used for extraordinary renditions and has been referred to as a “little Guantanamo”. This is a very little known fact as NATO, the U.S., the European Union and the West are in the process of forcing Serbia to effectively give up Kosovo, and indicates the real motive for the West’s support of the Kosovo Liberation Army which it had deemed a terrorist organization ...

The UN Security Council Resolution on Kosovo

June 10 is a sad date in the history of the UN, the institution originally meant to play the key role in ensuring peace, security, and the primacy of law in the world. The decade since the passing of the June 10, 1999 UN Security Council Resolution 1244 addressing the Kosovo problem – the document totally ignored throughout the period – has shown that the UN is no longer playing the role prescribed to it by the post-World War II system of the international law. The Resolution the tenth anniversary of which nobody seems willing to celebrate in the UN ...

Israel’s Money Machine: Jewish Oligarchs Fund Crimes Against Humanity

The stars came out in Hollywood on November 2nd, or at least some of them did. The gala event celebrated the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) and raised funds to support its mission in Israel itself and on the occupied West Bank. The organization being fêted was the Friends of the Israel Defense Forces (FIDF), which has fourteen regional offices in the United States and operates under the slogan “Their job is to look after Israel. Our job is to look after them.” In attendance were Arnold Schwarzenegger and actor Gerald Butler. Entertainment was provided by the singer Seal. Hollywood Jewish royalty ...

The Middle East on the Waves of Chaos

For some time the criminal activities of the terrorist organization “Islamic State” (ISIS) seemed to have faded into the shadows. It seemed that this organization in the near future will be broken tie with due to the “heroic” American bombing. However, the ISIS like a fabulous hydra, who immediately has a new head grown in place of a severed one, revived and made further impressive gains. The capture of ancient Palmyra in Syria and the important city Ramadi, the main city of the Sunni province Anbar, located by the way just 100 kilometres far from Baghdad, made the world’s media and ...

America’s Worst President Ever

If you wanted to identify, with confidence, the very worst president in American history, how would you go about it? One approach would be to consult the various academic polls on presidential rankings that have been conducted from time to time since Harvard’s Arthur M. Schlesinger Sr. pioneered this particular survey scholarship in 1948. Bad idea. Most of those surveys identify Warren G. Harding of Ohio as the worst ever. This is ridiculous. Harding presided over very robust economic times. Not only that, but he inherited a devastating economic recession when he was elected in 1920 and quickly turned bad times ...

White Lies and Black Disbelief in a Fading Empire

Having already violated every tenet of international law in its proxy jihadist war against Syria, including the seizure of one-third of the country, the United States invoked a Non-Law, a Law That Never Was, to justify its missile strikes against fictitious “chemical warfare” facilities. Syrian President Assad “kills his own people,” said Trump, leader of the nation whose police kill more of its “own people” than any country except (fellow white settler state) Brazil, and whose prisons entomb one-quarter of all the world’s inmates. (One out of every eight prisoners on the planet is an African American.) On the Saturday morning ...

Interview with Historian David Motadel: Islam and Nazi Germany’s War

In your book, "Islam and Nazi Germany's War", you write about the policies of the Nazis towards Islamic political entities. What form did they take? David Motadel: At the height of the war in 1941-1942, when German troops entered Muslim-populated territories in the Balkans, North Africa, Crimea and the Caucasus and were approaching the Middle East and Central Asia, Berlin began to see Islam as politically significant. Nazi Germany made significant attempts to promote an alliance with the "Muslim world" against their alleged common enemies – the British Empire, the Soviet Union, America and Jews. In the war zones, Germany engaged with ...

The Russian Minority Question in Estonia

A historical overview and Estonia's minorities Estonia (Eesti, Estland) is a Baltic state that was colonized by the German Teutonic Order of Knights from 1346 being, therefore, dominated politically and economically by a German-speaking landowning aristocracy, which succeeded to maintain its social and economic position even during the Swidish occupation of the territory of present-day Estonia from 1561 to 1721 and for most period of subsequent Russia's administration since 1721 to 1915. From 1855 the ethnic Estonians received the right to possess the land. Migration increased the Estonian population in the cities during the time of the Russian administration. It is ...

Living Under Libyan “Dictator” Muammar Gaddafi

Origins of images: Facebook, Twitter, Wikimedia, Wikipedia, Flickr, Google, Imageinjection & Pinterest. Read our Disclaimer/Legal Statement! Donate to Support Us We would like to ask you to consider a small donation to help our team keep working. We accept no advertising and rely only on you, our readers, to keep us digging the truth on history, global politics and international relations.

What Should We Expect from the Talks on Syria in Astana?

At the beginning of March 2017, it will be exactly six years since the beginning of the conflict in Syria. Some journalists even make unfavorable forecasts wondering about the very possibility of reconciliation. Complicated by the foreign intervention on the part of Israel war in Lebanon, for example, had been for about 15 years. But even a six-year term it is too long. That is why we may hope that the meeting in Astana scheduled on January 23 will eventually lead to a positive result. And then there will be an occasion to consolidate the success of the negotiations in Geneva ...

Recognize the Genocide that Happened—And the One Now Beginning

The United States, Europe, and their partners must officially recognize the Mountainous Karabagh Republic within its constitutional frontiers. Stepanakert, Mountainous Karabagh — I no longer know what to do on April 24—or where to go. This is the day Armenians across the globe commemorate the genocide in 1915 that destroyed the Armenian people and its homeland of thousands of years. Those killing fields, the homes of my grandparents, are located in historic western Armenia—now eastern Turkey. But a century later, this very region has erupted in all-out war. Turkish forces are on the offensive again, this time, Armenians having been eliminated, against ...

Mass Exodus from Muslim Kosovo into Europe: Did US Play a Role in Creating the Crisis?

Editor: Little did I know when I posted a short news story about the ‘invasion of Hungary’ last evening that the situation in Kosovo has become untenable and a mass exodus was so advanced. ‘Pungentpeppers’ has again pulled many threads together to give us the big picture of what is happening in Eastern Europe. Is the US responsible? An Austrian political leader says so! Mass exodus from Muslim Kosovo into Europe ~150,000 or more Kosovars on the move since summer ~Hungarian Police catch 1,000 Kosovars daily – a small fraction of the total ~Hungarian mayor calls for fence as Kosovars overwhelm village ~Austrian politician blames ...

Reviving the Greater Israel Scheme

Israel’s Maariv newspaper has revealed that the government of the Zionist state is planning to drop a political bombshell in the coming weeks by presenting a bill in the Knesset (parliament) calling for the annexation of land occupied since 1967. It is likely to have the support of the majority of Knesset members. The newspaper added that the right wing has chosen this time for the move ahead of the US presidential election; America, it is believed, will be too preoccupied to care about what is happening in the occupied Palestinian territories. Preliminary talks about a first stage have been held, ...

NATO: Lying All the Way to Barbarossa

Despite claims made during NATO Summit Warsaw 2016, that “NATO remains a fundamental source of security for our people, and stability for the wider world,” it is clear that the threats and challenges NATO poses as existing to confront are in fact threats of its own, intentional creation and continued perpetuation. From the ongoing refugee crisis triggered by NATO’s own global-spanning and ongoing military interventions, invasions, and occupations, to its continued expansion along Russia’s borders – violating every convention and “norm” that existed during the Cold War to keep it “cold,” NATO has proven that it is to the populations it poses as protector over, ...