Munich in the Second World War

In the history of the Second World War, Munich is a name that carries powerful connotations. It was in Munich that Adolf Hitler launched the abortive Beer-Hall Putscht, his abortive first attempt at power. A decade and a half later, in September of 1938, Hitler had been in power for six years, and Munich became the site of even a more powerfully symbolic event. Here, the Western allied powers faced their last potential decision point short of the one which would confront them with the invasion of Poland a year later.

Hitler demanded the right to occupy the Sudetenland, a region of western Czechoslovakia that had a largely German-speaking population. The Czechs were prepared to resist, but despite a fairly powerful army they lacked the means to do so entirely alone. The question was whether the Western Allies, Britain and France, would come to the aid of Czechoslovakia if attacked, or if they would hold back--in which case there would be no attack as such, but a Czech cession of the Sudetenland.

At Munich, the Allies chose to withhold any promise or threat of support, but instead give their implicit assent to the cession, either in the hope that it would be the last of Hitler's territorial demands, or that they would by the abandonment of Czechoslavakia buy sufficient times to strengthen their own defenses. Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain asserted the former, saying that he had achieved "peace for our times"--a phrase that would ring with bitter irony less tha

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rgued for incorporation of the Sudetenland in order to provide Czechoslovakia with defensible frontiers. What was achieved proved to the the worst of all worlds. Ethnic tensions in the Sudetenland provided the background and pretext for Hitler's demands at Munich, while Czechoslovakia did not have frontiers defensible enough for the Czechs to have any real hope of defending themselves against the Wehrmacht. The Sudeten Germans found themselves something of an oppressed population in the new Czechoslovakia. Official advancement was available chiefly to Czechs; while the Czechoslovak army had a good many Sudeten German officers, few rose above the rank of captain unless they took Czech names. The best schools were Czech. Economic conditions added to the Sudeten Germans' sense of grievance. The redrawing of borders had cut the industrial Sudetenland off from its markets, and during the Depression, of some 600,000 unemployed in Czechoslovakia, over half were in the Sudetenland. Sudeten Germans looking for jobs found them across the frontier in Germany, and began to contrast the stagnant villages of the Sudetenland with the economic miracle apparently being achieved in Germany under Hitler. Such, in outline, wa

Category: History - M