Description
The Munich Agreement, by which in September 1938 Britain and France allowed the German armies to occupy parts of the sovereign state of Czechoslovakia against the will of the Czechs and in the end without consulting them, has aroused more passionate arguments than any other peacetime event in modern European history.
France was under a treaty obligation to defend Czechoslovakia against aggression at the time. Both Daladier, the French Prime Minister, and Neville Chamberlain, who had signed for Britain, were welcomed home as heroes. Chamberlain’s judgement that Munich meant ‘peace for our time’ was one which many were anxious to believe.
Though in fact it led to the outbreak of the Second World War within a year, it is possible to argue that had he taken a diametrically opposite course at Munich and risked war the world might have been spared at least the worst of the subsequent horrors and possibly would have been saved from war altogether. Equally it has been argued that by gaining time for Britain Chamberlain enabled her to re-arm sufficiently to be able to survive when war came.
Robert Kee describes Munich as a ‘grotesque’ event for which in fact the need to find a historical explanation transcends in interest all argument and special pleading. Threading his way, detective-like, through the preceding history of Germany, Czechoslovakia and above all the strained relations between Britain and France in the 1930s, he finds a disturbing inevitability in the final tragedy which he narrates with consummate clarity and drama.
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