Word: sudetenlanders
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...consult with his associates, which amounted to seeing whether either the British or the French were ready to fight for Czechoslovakia. They were not. Chamberlain then had to persuade Bene to give Germany every area inhabited more than 50% by Germans. That would mean the surrender of the entire Sudetenland, which represented not only one-fifth of Czechoslovakia's territory but also its industrial heartland and its defensible natural frontier. Bene at first refused, but when the British and French told him that he would have to fight alone, he gave...
...next day Chamberlain returned to Germany to tell Hitler he could have everything he asked. "Do I understand," asked the Fuhrer, "that the British, French and Czech governments have agreed to the transfer of the Sudetenland from Czechoslovakia to Germany...
...terribly sorry," said Hitler, "but that no longer suits me." The German leader seemed determined to humiliate the Czechs and expose the weakness of the British and French. He no longer wanted a plebiscite. The Czechs would simply have to hand over the Sudetenland by Oct. 1, or the Germans would invade. Now Chamberlain was angry. Returning to London, he found that the French were reluctantly ready to meet a German invasion with force, a decision in which he unhappily concurred. In London people began digging trenches to provide shelter from the expected air raids. "How horrible, fantastic, incredible...
Having won everything, Hitler still could not be satisfied. The following spring, deciding that he now wanted more than just the Sudetenland, he held a conference with Czech President Emil Hacha in Berlin (Bene had resigned and gone into exile after Munich). Hacha was 66 and suffering from heart trouble, so it did not help to have the meeting begin at 1:15 a.m. on March 15, 1939. Hitler told his guest that the Czechs were still guilty of "Bene tendencies," and therefore the Wehrmacht would invade Czechoslovakia at 6 that morning. The only question was whether the Czechs would...
...Britain and France, this was an agonizing time. Again and again they had gone through brink-of-war crises over Hitler's insatiable and megalomaniacal demands, over his rearming of the Rhineland in 1936, his annexation of Austria in the spring of 1938, his claims on the Czech Sudetenland in the fall of 1938, his seizure of Bohemia and Moravia in the spring of 1939. In each crisis, the threat of war had reawakened the nightmarish memories of World War I, when tens of thousands of men had been slaughtered in meaningless offensives over a few miles of trenches...