The Munich Agreement: Nazi
Aggression and Crisis of Democracy?
September 30, 1938
The Sudetenland
Czechoslovakia
Hitler Used Wilson’s “14 Points”
World War I
Nation-State
National SelfDetermination
Three Varieties of Ethnic Cleansing:
1.) taking away territory and giving it away
based on national or ethnic composition
(Munich Crisis);
2.) killing members of national or ethnic
group (Nazi Holocaust);
3.) expelling members of national or ethnic
group (post-war expulsions).
Hitler
Daladier
Germany
France
Chamberlain
Beneš
Britain
Czechoslakia
A Policy of Appeasement
To appease: “to pacify or
conciliate”
Or?
To appease: “to buy off an
aggressor through
concessions”
Appeasement Equals
Weakness?
Czechoslovakia: Created 1918 from
Austria-Hungary (Habsburg Monarchy)
President Tomáš
Garrigue Masaryk
Prague Castle
The Pětka
Czech Agrarian
Party
Czech National
Democratic Party
Czech Social
Democratic Party
Czech National
Socialist Party
Czech Populist
Party
Where is the Sudetenland?
Sudetenland
Industry
Sudetenland Fortifications
Konrad Henlein
Sudenten-German
National Front
(1934)
Sudeten-German
Party (1936)
Anschluss:
Nazi Takeover
of Austria
(March 1938)
Carlsbad Demands, April 24, 1938
1.) Restoration of complete equality of German national group with the Czech
people;
2.) Recognition of the Sudeten German national group as a legal entity for the
safeguarding of this position of equality within the State;
3.) Confirmation and recognition of the Sudeten German settlement area;
4.) Building up of Sudeten German self-government in the Sudeten German
settlement area in all branches of public life insofar as questions affecting the
interests and the affairs of the German national group are involved;
5.) Introduction of legal provisions for the protection of those Sudeten German
citizens living outside the defined settlement area of their national group;
6.) Removal of wrong done to Sudeten German element since the year 1918,
and compensation for damage suffered through this wrong;
7.) Recognition and enforcement of principle: German public servants in the
German area;
8.) Complete freedom to profess adherence to the German element and German
ideology.
Hitler-Henlein Meeting, March 1938
“always demand so much that
we will never be satisfied.”
Three Meetings of Munich Crisis
1.) Berchtesgaden:
September 15, 1938
2.) Bad Godesberg:
September 22, 1938
3.) Munich:
September 30, 1938
Klement Gottwald and the
Czechoslovak Communist Party
“Barefoot Ethiopians, without arms, defended themselves, and we yield.”
German Liberation?
Sudeten-German Reactions
Ethnic
Cleansing:
Moving the
Border and
Expelling the
Czechs
March 15,
1939
Nazi Takeover of
Czechoslovakia
Protectorate of Bohemia and
Moravia; Slovakia
Reinhard Heydrich
Old Jewish Cemetery and Old-New
Synagogue:
Hitler Planned to Make Them
Museum of an Extinct and Vanished Race
Lidice
Jaroslava Skleničková, b. 1926
Post-War Retribution: Expulsion of
3-Million Germans
“Peace in Our Time”: What
Went Wrong?