Quick Take: Everything You Think You Know about Munich 1938 Is Wrong
Neville Chamberlain was the hero & winner in the talks with Hitler that delayed WWII for a year
Have a look at the map above. It’s a political map of Europe and surrounding areas in the summer of 1938. It’s full of fascinating historical detail but, for now, please focus on the area I marked in red at the very center of the map.
Do you see that area, the region where the borders of Poland, the Soviet Union and Romania met? Make a mental note: Czechoslovakia at that time had no land border with the Soviet Union, so it had no way to allow Soviet troops into its territory, in any meaningful amount and with any kind of a sustainable supply route. Remember that.
Now, you are probably aware of the most famous analogy of all time. That analogy revolves around a specific event in European history in 1938, the conference in Munich (Germany) in which World War II was avoided (or rather delayed) when Germany reached a last-minute agreement over the status of Czechoslovakia.
This was the conference in which the word “appeasement” for ever took on a derogatory meaning. If you know any history, you have probably heard 500 times already the thunderous response that Winston Churchill, then a lowly member of parliament, allegedly gave the leader of his Tory Party, Neville Chamberlain, when the then British Primer Minister announced on his return from Munich that he had brought joyous news of peace:
“You were given the choice between war and dishonour. You chose dishonour, and you will have war.”
The actual quote wasn’t actually quite like that, and there’s some debate on whether it was an actual Churchill quote. Regardless, it’s been repeated a million times since and summarizes well Churchill’s own position as well as the bellicose spirit of our time, if not that of 1938. In fact, Chamberlain now arguably is the most maligned British PM of the 20th century.
If you think I may be exaggerating, you’re not paying attention. Here’s a comparison of Brexit to Munich 1938, and here a comparison of Boris Johnson’s early Covid-19 policy with Munich 1938 (“appeasement!”); also, one between Munich 1938 and a 2023 vote in the US Congress that didn’t provide the Ukraine with as much weaponry as Liz Cheney would have liked. Politicians who urge talks with Venezuela’s regime are Chamberlain; and Donald Trump is Chamberlain; and John Kerry (remember him?) is Chamberlain; and Emmanuel Macron is Chamberlain; and Indian President Modi is Chamberlain. Honestly, just Google “[INSERT NAME OF POLITICIAN HERE] Chamberlain” and find out who else is the despicable, spineless appeaser, because he rejected a plan to fund a public park or settled with a pharma company over a lawsuit or whatever. It’s a fun game.
This is not just wrong. On this matter, the educated consensus opinion may be more wrong than on any other important question of our time. It’s not that Chamberlain was an OK guy whom people like to dunk on because of a bad spell in 1938. No: Chamberlain was absolutely brilliant, dealt with Hitler superbly and his critics are worse than ignorant, because they don’t understand the facts and still they are 100% sure of their stance. Let me explain.
On Sep. 29, 1938, when the two-day Munich Conference opened, representatives from France, the UK, Germany and Italy met not to decide the future of Europe, but a very narrow and specific question — how to settle the claims on Czechoslovakian territories from various neighboring states, at a time when the Czechoslovakian state itself (never the strongest of the post-1918 concoctions as shown by the fact that it ceased to exist completely soon after the fall of the Berlin Wall) was already in an advanced stage of disintegration.
The German minority in Czechoslovakia, a clear majority along the border regions with Germany proper then called Sudetenland, had been agitating for incorporation into their home country. These were people who had lived as Germans in the Austrian empire for centuries, until the Austrian defeat in World War I left them adrift, as a minority in a Slav-majority state.
The claims of the Sudetenland Germans were mostly backed by a German army that was brazenly concentrating on the borders, but more importantly these people were broadly supported by public opinion in many countries — because the then-called Austro-Hungarian Empire had been disbanded in 1918 precisely on the grounds of self-determination.
If Czechs and Slovaks had the right to set up their own ethnic state, why did the Germans of the Sudetenland had to be attached to that state? That this makes no sense is evident in that Hungary and Poland, on behalf of their own minorities within Czechoslovakia, also wanted pieces of that country and were moving their troops to the borders.
Such was the situation when the leaders met in Munich. France had signed a defense pact with Czechoslovakia, yes, but had no intention whatsoever to mobilize its army against Germany to enforce it; and if it came to blows, as we know now, the French military plan called for all troops to stay on the defensive along the Maginot Line and hope for the best. That is precisely what happened in 1939-1940, when war did break out over Poland.
And the UK? What was Chamberlain supposed to do, exactly? He had been Prime Minister for all of a year by that point, and knew that the British public and elites had zero appetite for another World War, after the bloodbath that the first one proved to be. He had no allies to rely upon, given France ‘s unwillingness to act, no defense pact with Czechoslovakia, and no good reason to play the tough guy.
The Soviet Union (Stalin’s Soviet Union, then in the middle of horrific purges and mass exterminations, the one self-evidently genocidal state of 1938) did offer to protect Czechoslovakia with troops, but as we saw in the map I attached at the top of this post, it had no way to move troops into Czechoslovakia without crossing either Polish territory or Romanian territory.
The chance of securing permission from either of these two hard-right governments was one in a trillion, as Stalin knew perfectly well. And, even if that happened, was Chamberlain supposed to ally with the Bolsheviks, now? He had no political capital for such a move, even if he had wanted to do it.
Chamberlain gave way, cut a deal with Hitler, and mostly everyone sighed with relief. The Spanish Civil War went on, sputtering to its conclusion within seven months, since the Republican’s side last chance for survival had been a wider war in which, somehow, their Soviet patrons could end up as partners of France and the UK.
That didn’t happen; many fantasies have been written about how the Spanish Republic, by then fully under the Soviet thumb (its gold reserves were in Moscow, and the Soviets were in effect their sole weapons suppliers) would have joined the Allies in a World War II that would have started in 1938.
Let’s play this fantasy scenario out for a moment. I just explained why it was impossible, but let’s say that Chamberlain gets really upset at Mr. Hitler in Munich, and he returns to London to announce that he talked the reluctant French into supporting a joint front against Germany, with the Soviets somehow parachuting supplies into Prague or whatever.
Then what? Isolated, surrounded by enemies on all sides, bitterly divided (Slovakia, the country’s eastern half, in real life declared independence from Czechoslovakia as soon as it could in 1939, like it later did in 1993) Czechoslovakia had no hope in hell to survive the onslaught. It had pretty decent weaponry of its own, so let’s say it holds on until, say, early 1939. By then, Nazi Germany has occupied the country, while the UK and France watch from the sidelines like they did in 1939 and early 1940.
Now, we have the very anti-Semitic state of Poland having forged a friendship in arms with the Nazis. And, more importantly, we have a situation in which the Allies have lost the moral high ground, by denying Germans the right of ethnic self-determination they had given everyone else.
Elites in countries that later were key for the outcome of WW2, like Yugoslavia, Greece, even Sweden, would have left this fantasy scenario with less respect and support for a French-British tandem that by mid-1939 would have been left completely isolated by the defeat of Czechoslovakia and later of the Spanish Republic (already on its last legs by the time the Munich conference came along), with Stalin as their only friend in the world — a massive barrier to enhanced American cooperation with them at that crucial, early point just before the pivotal 1940 American general election.
Chamberlain probably played a version of this inside of his head, concluding that a war in 1938 would leave Germany as the military and even moral leader of Central Europe, which made no sense, and France and the UK as Stalin’s besties, which was downright insane (at the time)1.
So, instead of pushing for something he knew was impossible, he shrewdly extracted a promise from Mr. Hitler: in exchange for letting him have the Sudetenland (which Chamberlain couldn’t protect anyway), Mr. Hitler publicly vowed that this would be his last territorial demand.
This was Chamberlain’s masterstroke2. Thus, when Hitler in early 1939 took over the remainder of Czechia and supported Slovak independence, he was exposed as a liar and a cheat with whom nobody could be expected to deal fairly. When he went ahead and invaded Poland, it became clear to all that Hitler was a crook and a bully, and his state was addicted to gangster politics3.
To quote a very intelligent political observer: “To be great one's actions must be able to be understood by simple people,” as Clementine Churchill wrote to her husband on April 6, 1916, when Churchill was in the Western Front, earning future political capital. American voters by 1940 had understood these actions, and related facts, very well.
Let me now address the elephant in the room. Western pundits who invoked Munich 1938 to compare the deals proposed by the Russians before their 2022 invasion of the Ukraine with the West’s deal to allow Germany control the Sudetenland are particularly wrongheaded, as I explained right after the invasion itself.
In their armchair general fantasies, having spent decades deprecating Chamberlain, these pundits saw the Russian ultimatum in 2022 over the Ukraine’s accession to NATO and the status of the Sudetenland Germans Donbass Russians as the perfect chance to replay Munich 1938, only this time acting like tough, macho hombres, and not like that wimp Chamberlain.
Much like the Bourbons, these pundits knew nothing and wouldn’t forgive anything. They managed to combine ignorance with recklessness, thinking that Chamberlain’s only problem was a lack of balls, and their stance dangerously contaminated politicians who should have known better. Some of them, like the Churchill cosplayer Boris Johnson, maybe knew better but went ahead anyway.
In the 1938 analogy, NATO would have accepted a Finlandization of Ukraine as a buffer state, as Vladimir Putin requested. And then it would have been clear — not least to China, NATO’s one true peer competitor — whether Russia was prepared to be a respectable member of the international community, playing by the rules supposed to bind everyone equally.
The Biden administration made their Tough Chamberlain fantasies come true, and now we'll see how that works out for everyone involved. The West was given the chance between war and dishonor, it chose war, and its’s looking more and more likely that it will also have dishonor, as well as the strongest Russo-Chinese alliance in history. Also, I foresee a pretty clear reputation hit on all their super-expensive wunderwaffen that were supposed to have crushed the primitive Russian orcs.
Many critics of NATO actions have been stressing that the Tough Chamberlain scenario isn’t working, just like Chamberlain would have predicted. Russia hasn’t collapsed and chances are it will outlast the Ukraine and get his way on both the territorial and the NATO issue. In addition, all sorts of on-the-fence powers apart from China, like India, Saudi Arabia and Brazil have decisively supported the Russians one way or another, understanding that if Russia, a permanent member of the Security Council, is treated like a bunch of Taliban interlopers over a dispute involving their core interests, then any of them can end up an outlaw for any reason as far as the NATO bloc is concerned.
However, who knows, maybe NATO can still come out the winner out of this, and there’s that Nobel Prize in the cards for Boris Johnson — the future is certainly not written yet; and maybe it will be Boris Johnson who writes future books of history (for which Churchill received his well-deserved Nobel, of Literature) explaining his genius and berating those who were wiser than him, like Churchill did with Chamberlain, repeatedly4. My point isn’t really about the Ukraine specifically. My point is about history, and how bad history takes contaminate modern policymaking and may lead to terrible outcomes such as hundreds of thousands of people killed for no good reason.
In the end, Munich 1938 as is commonly depicted is just a terrible piece of misleading, dangerous post-war propaganda. Together with the myth that the Nazis started the Blitz — it was the British who bombed German residential areas first, looking to trigger Hitler into responding to get favorable press in the US, via pictures of London burning, as he did — and the related myth that the nukes forced Japan to surrender and saved millions of lives, it’s one of those tall stories about the WW2 era that seems to never die the permadeath it deserves.
(Correction: as noted by a reader, it’s incorrect to state that representatives from Czechoslovakia took part in the Munich meetings with the four powers, so I adjusted the ninth paragraph.)
There were British voices, besides Churchill’s, who opposed what they saw as “appeasement” from day one. Malcolm Muggeridge (in his memoir “The Infernal Grove”) tells the story of how years later he approached a top official named Vansittart with suspicions that a general was in contact with pro-German elements. His description of Vansittart, anti-Chamberlain leftover from the Edwardian era, is peerless: “Having quarreled with Chamberlain over his Munich policy, he had been made special adviser on foreign affairs, which meant, of course, that no one took his advice, and he exerted no influence at all, while still having a large office and all the appurtenances of dignity and authority… Vansittart made no comment and took no note; just stared across his desk at us, a monocle in one eye; in his blank gaze all the past comprehended – Victorian-Edwardian, limited editions, epigrams fashioned, restaurant table looking out on the Danube and an orchestra playing Chopin and Richard Strauss, boots with trees in them, velvet smoking-jacket. A whole décor – embossed notepaper, ’My dearest love’, leisure hours given over to literary pursuits: ‘Lady Eleanor’s boudoir. “The Count, my lady, left the flowers with a note.” Opens, reads…’ All this in a gaze directed at Bobby and me, not exactly vacant, but – how shall I put it? – stolid, wooden, impassive; like a heathen idol receiving the prayers and oblations of worshippers.”
Well, this and his decision NOT to invade Belgium in early 1940. After the Germans took Norway, it was Churchill — foolhardy as ever — who suggested they invade neutral Belgium immediately to forestall Hitler there. French PM Daladier opposed the idea, arguing that Belgians “could be very sensitive” to such a stab at the back. No shit, Dal. The whole charade explains why on April the Belgians moved forces against the French frontier, to the Germans’ astonishment. Reynaud would later came around to this idea, and propose it himself after the Narvik fiasco, only to be stopped, once again, by Chamberlain. If you don’t perceive a faint smell of Churchillian recklessness in the Ukraine’s attempt to capture some Russian farmland in Kursk, you’re not paying enough attention.
Chamberlain always held up hope that another world war could be avoided. It was only days before the German invasion of Poland that he finally conceded that there was no other way out for Nazism. On August 25, Joseph Kennedy (US ambassador in London, father of JFK & RFK) called upon the PM, shocked by his haggard looks, and asked how things stood. Chamberlain replied, downcast: “It appears as if all my work has been of no avail.”’ The guarantee he had given to Poland, to help contain Hitler in a box, had not worked. He still was as lucid and brilliant as always: “The thing that is frightful,’” he stated, ‘”is the futility of it all. After all, the Poles cannot be saved.’” Let’s remember that a war that started to ensure Polish independence against a neighbor (Germany) ended with Poland occupied by another neighbor (the Soviet Union), and Churchill, for one, couldn’t give a smaller fuck.
Churchill’s revenge on Chamberlain, entirely on print (the ex-PM died in 1940) was harsh and time consuming. This son of a Duke who didn’t record an honest day of work in his gilded, well-funded life, wrote that Chamberlain (a successful businessman who recovered his family’s lost fortune) “loves the working man; he loves to see him work” and in later years liked to explain that “history will deal severely with Chamberlain,” adding (after a well-timed, well-rehearsed pause), “I know because I shall write it.” Not the least of his revenge acts was post-mortem and perhaps unintended. In recent decades, a Churchillian speech has often been cited as a clear example of Churchill’s brilliance. It goes like this: “"We are a solid and united nation which would rather go down to ruin than admit the domination of the Nazis... If the enemy does try to invade this country we will fight him in the air and on the sea; we will fight him on the beaches with every weapon we have. He may manage here and there to make a breakthrough: if he does we will fight him on every road, in every village, and in every house, until he or we are utterly destroyed." (the quote is in Keith Feiling’s Neville Chamberlain (MacMillan & Co., 1946, p. 449). You know what? That was a speech written (and delivered) by Chamberlain, broadcast at the time to the British public, although many after the war misremembered that it was Churchill who spoke.
"The West was given the chance between war and dishonor, it chose war"
No, dude. Putin chose war. You can tell by the tanks crossing the border on his command.
The part that you're very carefully eliding, in both cases actually, is what came before. The Germans, shortly before the Munich Conference, had invaded their sovereign neighbor, Austria, after sponsoring all manner of thuggish actors within the country, and followed it with a sham referendum.
The extent to which Russia's playbook in annexing Crimea matched that of the Anschluss is somewhat shocking for those whose justification is denazification. Both of these incidents clearly should have demonstrated to any that were paying attention that, indeed, both of these states were addicted to gangsterism. Even before that, and again almost exactly parallel, paramilitary or even official forces associated with both powers had been committing atrocities in a supposedly neutral country in the midst of a civil war (Spain and Syria).
I'll concede that the logic of national self-determination was extremely salient post-Versailles, it being a relatively recent invention, and that this did indicate that the creation of Austria and Czechoslovakia in the forms they took was mostly to punish Germany without regard for the self-determination of the Germans living in those countries. But punishing the defeated power in a war was also fair by the logic of the time; it just happened that the victorious powers miscalculated as to which logic would remain salient, and underestimated the extent to which their own interests would immediately cease to coincide once the military threat of Germany at least temporarily receded.
But really, if Germany had actually wanted to employ the self-determination weapon, we'll call it, in at all a good-faith manner, they would have done (or tried to do) the referenda BEFORE they started moving the army around. Referenda had been used in numerous places post-war to determine borders, not least at the German-Polish border. By the logic of self-determination, Germany could have requested or sponsored referenda in Austria and Czechoslovakia. If, as is likely, those states had refused to hold them, or the victorious powers had tried to forbid them, then Germany would have had a much easier time assuming the moral high ground.
But the Germans had no interest in good faith; they wanted to achieve greater Germany, and all else was secondary at best. They would tolerate no such extrinsic or self-incurred risks to the end goal. So it is with Russia. They wanted to dismember and neutralize their rivals, and aggrandize themselves territorially. I don't know to what extent any free and fair referenda took place or were requested and then blocked in places like Donbass, but I doubt there were any.
Also, don't forget that it was the Soviet Union that dismantled itself, and not on the basis of national self-determination. Obviously, numerous of its constituents had territorial and other disputes with each other when the union broke apart along its internal SSR divisions, and this led to wars and referenda and ethnic cleansing of all kinds (Armenia v. Azerbaijan, Chechnya v. Russia, etc.).
The shape of the union's various SSRs had little, generally, to do with the national or ethnic character of the relevant places (the divisions that did attempt to conform to such generally were only ASSRs and below, entirely within the RFSR, as I recall, none of which have ever been offered or really sought independence) Indeed, as far as I know, these borders were constructed with the specific intent of erasing national and ethnic distinctions in favor of Soviet-ness.
All of which is to say that the time to deal with these problems, especially with the history of the interwar period to educate the interested parties, was when the union broke apart. It was the Soviets, dominated by the RFSR, but often led by non-Russians, who chose to include 'Novorossiya,' so called, and Crimea within Ukraine. It was they, or its successor, the RFSR and later the Federation, that should All of which is to emphasize that Russia's appeal to the supposedly neutral principle of self-determination was a sham, and the principle itself has lost a great deal of its salience due in large part to its victory (most places now conform to it, to a large extent), and as a result most people (especially outside the interested areas) don't have a lot of desire to upset the status quo in favor thereof.
Anyone who needed the final destruction of Czechoslovakia, or hypothetically Ukraine, to 'see' that Germany/Russia was addicted to gangsterism would, at best, be extremely morally myopic, not paying attention, or latently hostile. Of course, in the end, it was that gangsterism that ended up attracting some of their most important allies, such as with the Soviet-Nazi alliance. I think that Russia-China follows the same pattern; whatever the Chinese think in an absolute sense about Russian gangsterism is secondary to the fact that their gangsterism has caused them to be extremely diplomatically isolated, which makes them attractive as a target for diplomacy among countries similarly isolated (China, North Korea) or that feel themselves marginalized in some way (Brazil, India), which itself is usually due to their own internal dysfunction, which they choose to externalize. Similar logic applies to Germany and its allies, particularly the Japanese, and I guess the Romanians.
Also, as I recall, the Czechs were in fact not invited to the Munich Conference; not sure why you claim otherwise in this piece without supporting the assertion (the fact that the Czechs were not invited would seem to be one of those well-known myths you seek to debunk). The Ukrainians, again as I recall, were consulted as to whether they wanted to surrender their territorial integrity. Considering the aggression they'd already suffered (not so unlike the Czechs, as with German puppet Freikorps violence in the Sudentland prior to Munich) from the country doing the asking, they quite reasonably said no.
If one were to justify Munich purely in terms of buying time to enable better rearmament by the Allies, I'd say that's not crazy, but I don't believe any of the protagonists viewed it in that fashion, as you acknowledge in footnote 3. Chamberlain really believed his own bullshit. And of course it ended up not really being true. The Germans would never have been able to invade the UK. They never even really tried. The Germans hardly made a serious effort to defeat the UK in the air in the Battle of Britain. This was particularly true once the Germans lost their radio navigation and targeting advantage.
The French ultimately squandered time bought by building mostly okay weapons but using them totally ineffectively. It was they, with their massive, well-equipped, and under-employed land army, that refused to make any significant offensive moves in order to relieve Poland, due to what can only be termed civilizational despair.
I love the unsupported shot at Churchill at the end about Poland. As I recall, Churchill was prepared to risk a war with the Soviets over Poland, after they reneged on the promise of free and fair elections post-war (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Unthinkable).
That failed for numerous reasons, but primarily due to a lack of American support, which is kind of goofy in hindsight considering how much more badly infiltrated with communists the UK was. It's interesting that, essentially, the top level of government in the UK was much more hostile to the Soviets than the rank-and-file, and vice-versa in the US.
This quick take needs longer in the oven, I think.