Top Photo: The British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain commenting and showing the Anglo-German Declaration of the Munich Agreement to commit to peaceful methods signed by both Hitler and himself, on his return from Munich on September 30, 1938. Photo via Narodowe Archiwum Cyfrowe, the national archive of Poland.

On September 30, 1938, British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain received a warm welcome from a cheering crowd when he returned to London after negotiations in Munich with Adolf Hitler. Chamberlain had just left a summit where he and the prime minister of France, Edouard Daladier, agreed to Hitler’s demands for Czechoslovakia to cede a portion of its territory known as the Sudetenland to Germany; in return, Hitler assured the Western Allies that he had no further territorial ambitions. Standing on the airport tarmac, the prime minister read from a statement he and the German Führer signed that morning, pledging that their new agreement was “symbolic of the desire of our two peoples never to go to war with one another again.”[1] Speaking later that day outside the Prime Minister’s Office at 10 Downing Street, Chamberlain proclaimed, “I believe it is peace for our time.”[2]

Those hopeful words soon rang hollow, as Hitler’s forces seized all of Czechoslovakia on March 15, 1939. Then on September 1, less than a year after Chamberlain’s triumphant return from Munich, German troops invaded Poland and started World War II. At the time and in the years since, Chamberlain’s actions were denounced as “appeasement,” a “policy of reducing tensions with one’s adversary by removing the causes of conflict and disagreement.”[3] Despite its deeply negative connotation and close association with September 1938, appeasement had a long history in British diplomacy. Historian Paul Kennedy called it “in essence a positive policy, based on certain optimistic assumptions about man’s inherent reasonableness.”[4] In 1929, Britain’s foreign secretary, Sir Austen Chamberlain, told a Liverpool newspaper that “We are pursuing a policy of appeasement, reconciliation, and peace. We will do all we can to find a method of solving such difficulties as may exist between us and our neighbors.”[5] Concessions in diplomatic negotiations were nothing new, but after Munich, appeasement took on a new meaning.

Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain holds up a proclamation signed by himself and Adolf Hitler after returning from talks in Munich, September 30, 1938. Imperial War Museums D 2239

The dramatic events of September 1938 had their roots in the aftermath of World War I. Under the Treaty of Versailles, the victorious Allied powers sought to prevent Germany from ever again threatening European security by imposing strict limits on German military power. The situation changed dramatically at the start of 1933 when Hitler and the Nazis took power in Berlin. Within three years, Hitler instituted military conscription to rebuild the German armed forces and remilitarized the Rhineland. He also expanded Germany’s borders, most notably in March 1938, when Germany annexed neighboring Austria, a process known as the Anschluss. At each step, Great Britain and France grew more and more concerned about Hitler’s increasingly aggressive foreign policy but took no concrete steps to halt Nazi expansion.

After Austria, Hitler took aim at Germany’s neighbor to the east. Czechoslovakia was a young country created in the aftermath of World War I. It was home to a range of ethnic groups, including more than three million Germans who were heavily concentrated in an area along the German border known as the Sudetenland. It was also a democracy with a significant military and good relations with Great Britain and France. Under the circumstances, the Czech government under President Edvard Benes had reason to believe that Czechoslovakia could stand up to Hitler’s Nazi regime.

After the Anschluss, Hitler sought to bring more ethnic Germans under his control and shore up his eastern flank for future expansion. He demanded that the Czech government cede the Sudetenland to Germany. This call touched off grave fears throughout Europe that another devastating war was around the corner. In 1938, Europeans still remembered the devastation of the 1914-18 war, which killed and wounded millions and left no community unscathed. But British and French leaders also had another major concern: neither country’s military was ready to fight a full-scale war to defend Czechoslovakia in 1938. During a discussion of the ongoing diplomatic crisis in Czechoslovakia, members of Neville Chamberlain’s cabinet rejected a more aggressive stance against Germany in favor of negotiations, arguing “It would be a mistake to plunge into a certain catastrophe in order to avoid a future danger that might never materialize.”[6] Chamberlain and other British officials were particularly concerned about the German air force (the Luftwaffe), which they believed could devastate vulnerable British cities and military bases.

The Munich Agreement

Driven by a strong desire to preserve peace and stability, Chamberlain led intense diplomatic efforts to try to satisfy German demands and to prevent the Czech crisis from deteriorating into armed conflict. By the end of September, Chamberlain had already met with Hitler twice, but despite these talks, the outlook was grim. Facing growing unrest in the Sudetenland and German forces massing on the Czech border, Chamberlain appealed to Hitler’s close ally, Italian dictator Benito Mussolini, to act as an intermediary for yet another summit with Hitler. To Chamberlain’s relief, Hitler agreed, and invited Chamberlain, Mussolini, and the French prime minister, Daladier, to new talks in Munich on September 29.

Neville Chamberlain and Adolf Hitler during the talks in Munich, September 30, 1938. Bundesarchiv Bild 146-1972-001-03

Although these talks concerned the future of Czechoslovakia, no Czech representative was present. When Chamberlain went to Munich, he had already accepted Hitler’s demand for the Sudetenland. The discussion between Hitler and the leaders of Great Britain and France centered on how Germany would absorb the Sudetenland, and when it would happen, not if it would happen. Unwilling to stand up to Hitler and risk unleashing a German invasion of Czechoslovakia that could erupt into a larger war, Chamberlain and Daladier signed the infamous Munich Agreement early on the morning of September 30. Chamberlain, believing that he had accomplished his mission and prevented another war, convinced Hitler to sign a statement pledging to continue to work for peace and improve Anglo-German relations. Although this was the agreement Chamberlain held up to loud cheers at the airport in London, Hitler had no intention of abiding by its terms, saying, “That piece of paper is of no significance whatsoever.”[7]

Chamberlain’s actions received wide acclaim throughout Great Britain and around the world. Following news of the Munich Agreement, an editorial in The New York Times proclaimed, “Let no man say that too high a price has been paid for peace in Europe until he has searched his soul and found himself willing to risk in war the lives of those who are nearest and dearest to him.”[8]

But not everyone celebrated the Munich Agreement. One of its fiercest critics was future Prime Minister Winston Churchill, who loudly denounced Chamberlain’s deal with Hitler in a speech in the House of Commons. Less than a week after Chamberlain returned from Munich, Churchill called the agreement “a total and unmitigated defeat” and warned his audience that “there can never be friendship between the British democracy and the Nazi power, that Power which spurns Christian ethics, Which cheers its onward course by a barbarous paganism, which vaunts the spirit of aggression and conquest, which derives strength and perverted pleasure from persecution, and uses, as we have seen, with pitiless brutality the threat of murderous force. That Power cannot ever be the trusted friend of the British democracy.”[9] Despite Chamberlain’s noble intentions, it was Churchill who was proven right in the coming months.

'A False Golden Age'

In 1940, with British and Allied forces freshly evacuated from Dunkirk after the collapse of France, some of Chamberlain’s fiercest critics published Guilty Men, a pamphlet denouncing years of British efforts to appease Nazi Germany. Writing under the pseudonym Cato, they called the six months after the Munich Agreement a false golden age, a moment when “the great mass of British politicians spent their time telling us that all was well, that Hitler was tamed, that the tiger had been transmogrified into a tabby by that old wizard of Number 10 Downing Street.”[10]The authors were later revealed to be prominent journalists from across the British political spectrum, including Michael Foot, future leader of Britain’s Labour Party. 

While the United States was not directly involved in the Munich talks, President Franklin D. Roosevelt and others closely followed the negotiations and endorsed their objectives. On September 26, 1938, Roosevelt sent a telegram to Hitler in Berlin, urging him to continue negotiations. He wrote to the German chancellor: “On behalf of the 130 millions of people of the United States of America and for the sake of humanity everywhere I most earnestly appeal to you not to break off negotiations looking to a peaceful, fair, and constructive settlement of the questions at issue.”[11] But Roosevelt took a very different position on appeasement just over two years later. In December 1940, fresh off his second reelection campaign and with the Nazis occupying much of Western Europe, Roosevelt warned against any further attempts to appease the Nazis, stating that “No man can tame a tiger into a kitten by stroking it.” He then urged Americans to make their country “the great arsenal of democracy.”[12]

Neville Chamberlain did not live long after the collapse of his appeasement policy. He resigned as prime minister and was replaced by Churchill in May 1940, after Norway had fallen to the Nazis, and died six months later. Although his efforts failed to prevent war, even Chamberlain’s fiercest critics conceded that he was driven by the purest of motives, a deeply felt desire for peace. Historian Martin Gilbert, for instance, wrote in 1966 that appeasement “was not a silly or treacherous idea in the minds of stubborn, gullible men, but a noble idea, rooted in Christianity, courage and common sense.”[13] In the decades after World War II, as more government and private records became opened to researchers, a school of historians emerged to defend Chamberlain and appeasement. An early voice in this debate was the distinguished British historian A.J.P. Taylor, who called the settlement at Munich “a triumph for British policy, which had worked precisely to this end.”[14]

The term appeasement has had a long life since the end of World War II, especially in American foreign policy rhetoric. In 1976, for instance, then-Secretary of State Henry Kissinger wrote that “For a generation after World War II, statesmen and nations were traumatized by the experience of Munich; they believed that history had shown the folly of permitting an adversary to gain a preponderance of power. This was and remains a crucial lesson.”[15] More recently, historians Fredrik Logevall and Kenneth Osgood observed that “‘Munich’ and ‘appeasement’ have been among the dirtiest words in American politics, synonymous with naïveté and weakness, and signifying a craven willingness to barter away the nation's vital interests for empty promises.”[16] With the failure of the Munich Agreement and the outbreak of World War II, “appeasement” evolved permanently from a positive negotiating tactic into an unforgivable diplomatic sin.