Czechoslovakia’s political class became its own state in the aftermath of World War I – thanks in large part to President Woodrow Wilson’s support – and the Czechs in Prague finally created a liberal constitution. By the 1930s, Czechoslovakia was a prosperous democracy with a fortified military and strong relations with Great Britain and France – and had become home to a wide range of ethnic groups, including over three million Germans who lived mainly in an area along the German border called the Sudetenland.

​

After the Anschluss – when German troops marched into Austria in March 1938, with practically zero opposition, incorporating Austria into Nazi Germany – Adolf Hitler set his sights on Germany’s neighbor to the east, demanding that the Czech government hand over the Sudetenland. The Czechs forcefully rejected Hitler’s aggressive overture, but war weary members of Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain’s cabinet moved toward appeasing the Führer saying, “It would be a mistake to plunge into a certain catastrophe in order to avoid a future danger that might never materialize.”

​

As a result, in 1938 Germany, Italy, France and Britain signed the Munich Agreement, allowing Nazi Germany to annex the Sudetenland in exchange for a promise of peace from Hitler. After he landed in London, back from the negotiations in Munich, Chamberlain stood on the tarmac at Heston Aerodrome waving a piece of paper as if in victory, boasting that he and Adolf Hitler had just ensured “peace for our time.”

 

Just 336 days later, all hell broke loose.

 

It’s shocking to think of today, but many people around the world fell for Hitler’s subterfuge, including President Franklin Roosevelt who sent a telegram to Hitler encouraging him to continue negotiations: “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.”

​

However, one man who saw right into Hitler’s heart from the start was Winston Churchill, who eventually ended up with World War II firmly in his lap. In a speech in the House of Commons, Churchill called the Munich Agreement “a total and unmitigated defeat” and warned 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.”

​

Two years after his telegram, with the Nazis now occupying much of Western Europe, President Roosevelt finally understood what Hitler was: “No man can tame a tiger into a kitten by stroking it.”

 

… but it was too late.