Chamberlain again took the lead to defuse the bellicosity. “However much we may sympathize with a small nation confronted by a big and powerful neighbor, we cannot in all circumstances undertake to involve the whole British Empire in war simply on her account,” the PM stated on the radio on September 27. “If we have to fight, it must be on larger issues than that.”69 That same day, the German general staff moved its troops to forward positions on the frontier with Czechoslovakia. The French and British governments reluctantly felt that they would be compelled to fight if the Wehrmacht forcibly seized Czechoslovakia. The Royal Navy was on full alert. Britain’s populace was digging trenches and air-raid shelters and filling sandbags; the authorities were distributing gas masks. The mood was grim.70 Hitler, in fact, was hours from ordering an invasion. But on September 28, Mussolini accepted a British entreaty to coordinate a disorganized four-power summit with Chamberlain (Britain), Édouard Daladier (France), and Hitler (Germany), with the duce (Italy) acting as dishonest broker.71
Hitler chose the site of the Führer Building in the Nazi movement’s capital, Munich. The British and French governments consented to consigning the Czechoslovaks to an adjacent room, apart from the negotiations. The Soviet Union, despite its treaties with France and Czechoslovakia, was not even invited. Chamberlain, along with Daladier, agreed not only that Czechoslovakia would cede the Sudetenland but also that all fortifications and weapons there would be left intact. Hitler acceded to this granting of his original demands rather than unleash the war he had been promising, and the infamous Munich Pact was signed in the small hours on September 30 (it was dated the day before).72 Wehrmacht troops marched into western Czechoslovakia with international authorization. Nazi Germany absorbed, gratis, industrial plants, coal and other natural resources, and 11,000 square miles of territory, on which lived 3 million Sudeten Germans and 800,000 Czechs. Non-German Sudeten inhabitants were given fewer than ten days to evacuate, and forced to relinquish everything—homes, household possessions, livestock. The German government was absolved from paying compensation.
Chamberlain allowed himself to imagine that he was “fixing” the Versailles Treaty by removing the supposed cause of German aggression: too many ethnic Germans living outside German borders. Hitler, recounting what he had told Chamberlain, had remarked in a public speech on September 26, 1938, at the Sports Palace in Berlin, that the Sudetenland was “the last territorial claim which I have to make in Europe, but it is a claim from which I will not swerve, and which I will satisfy, God willing. . . . And this I guarantee. We don’t want any Czechs at all.” That had been the straw that Chamberlain grasped. To win over Britain’s head of state, George VI, to the deal with the distasteful Hitler, the PM had played up “the prospect of Germany and England as the two pillars of European peace and buttresses against Communism.”73 In fact, Chamberlain prioritized the higher purpose of preserving the British empire. (The self-governing dominions would, in any case, not join a war over Czechoslovakia.)74 What Chamberlain and his ilk missed was that Germany was not militarily strong, but, if unopposed now, it would never be so weak again.
Daladier had heard from an adamant French general staff, which wanted more time to build up the military, that the Luftwaffe was too strong for France.75 But if he understood how the French brass tended to exaggerate German capabilities, Daladier, a veteran of the Great War, also recognized the antiwar sentiment in French society, which, along with Germany, had borne the heaviest devastation in that conflict. Still, the former history teacher from Provence also understood that France had failed to honor its commitments. “No, I am not proud,” Daladier told colleagues concerning Munich. “I do not know what you think, you others, but I, I will say it again, I am not proud.”76