Munich Agreement
The Munich Agreement was signed at about 1:30 in the morning on the 30th of September 1938, in a city that gave it its name and its permanent stain. Four men put their signatures to a document in the Führerbau: Adolf Hitler, Neville Chamberlain, Benito Mussolini, and Édouard Daladier. The country whose fate they decided was not in the room. Czechoslovakia had sent representatives to Munich, but they were not invited to the conference itself. They waited in a nearby hotel and learned what had happened to them afterward.
The agreement handed over the Sudetenland, a mountainous border region of three million people, to Nazi Germany. In exchange, Hitler promised to seek no more territory. Chamberlain flew home and stood outside 10 Downing Street to read from the paper bearing both his name and Hitler's: "I believe it is peace for our time." The crowds cheered.
Winston Churchill, speaking in the House of Commons just five days later, called it "a total and unmitigated defeat." He said Czechoslovakia would be engulfed in the Nazi regime within years, perhaps months. He was wrong only about the timeline. It took less than six months.
How did four powers come to carve up a democratic republic without consulting it? What did Czechoslovakia actually lose? And what did the word Munich become in the decades that followed?
Czechoslovakia was born in 1918 from the wreckage of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. The Treaty of Saint-Germain gave it international recognition, and its borders enclosed a population that was far from uniform. More than three million Germans lived within its territory, representing 22.95 percent of the country's total population. They occupied the Sudetenland, a ring of border highlands that had marked the frontier between Czech and Germanic lands since the early Middle Ages.
The Sudeten Germans were not consulted on whether they wished to become Czechoslovak citizens. The constitution guaranteed equality, but political power tilted toward Czech and Slovak nationalism. When the Great Depression struck in 1929, the blow fell hardest on the Sudetenland, whose economy was highly industrialized and export-dependent. By 1936-60 percent of the unemployed in Czechoslovakia were Germans.
In 1933, Konrad Henlein founded the Sudeten German Party, described by historians as "militant, populist, and openly hostile" to the Czechoslovak government. It captured two-thirds of the vote in heavily German districts almost immediately. By 1935 it was the second-largest political party in the country. Historians still debate whether it was a Nazi front organization from the start or evolved into one.
On the 28th of March 1938, shortly after Hitler absorbed Austria into the Reich, Henlein traveled to Berlin and received his instructions directly from Hitler: make demands the democratic government in Prague could not possibly accept. On the 24th of April, the Sudeten German Party published what became known as the Karlsbader Programm, demanding full autonomy for Germans within Czechoslovakia. The Prague government offered expanded minority rights but stopped short of autonomy. By May 1938, Henlein's party had captured 88 percent of the ethnic German vote.
On the 20th of May 1938, Hitler presented his generals with the draft of Operation Green, a plan to attack Czechoslovakia, insisting he would not move without provocation or "a particularly favourable opportunity." Ten days later he signed a secret directive setting the invasion for no later than the 1st of October. That date would loom over every negotiation that followed.
Britain and France, intent on avoiding another war, advised Czechoslovakia to give ground. The French government had no wish to face Germany alone and followed the lead of British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain, who believed Sudeten German grievances were legitimate and Hitler's ambitions were limited. President Edvard Beneš resisted, ordering a partial mobilization in May. But the room to maneuver was shrinking fast.
On the 22nd of May, the Polish ambassador to France told French Foreign Minister Georges Bonnet flatly that if France moved against Germany to defend Czechoslovakia, Poland would not join them. The Soviet Union offered to help Czechoslovakia, but only if the Red Army could cross Polish and Romanian territory. Both countries refused. Beneš was being squeezed from all sides.
In August, Germany sent 750,000 soldiers to the border in what it described as army maneuvers. The German press filled with stories alleging Czechoslovak atrocities against Sudeten Germans. Hitler hoped Prague would refuse all demands so that the West would feel morally justified in abandoning it. On the 4th or the 5th of September, Beneš submitted what was called the Fourth Plan, granting nearly all of the Sudeten demands. Hitler's response was to instruct the Sudeten German Party to reject any compromise. Their leaders provoked a police action in Ostrava on the 7th of September, then used it as a pretext to break off negotiations entirely.
On the 12th of September, Hitler delivered a speech at the Nuremberg rally denouncing Beneš's government as a fraudulent state and accusing it of trying to exterminate Sudeten Germans. He claimed that since Czechoslovakia's creation, over 600,000 Germans had been forced from their homes under threat of starvation. On the 17th of September, he ordered the creation of the Sudetendeutsches Freikorps, a paramilitary force built from the structure of a disbanded ethnic German organization, to conduct cross-border operations into Czechoslovakia. Czech forces suffered over 100 personnel killed, hundreds wounded, and over 2,000 abducted.
On the 13th of September, Chamberlain asked Hitler for a personal meeting. He had consulted his advisors Lord Halifax, Sir John Simon, and Sir Samuel Hoare, and the announcement of the meeting was made at a special briefing at 10 Downing Street. British public opinion surged with optimism.
Chamberlain arrived in Germany on the 15th of September, flying on a chartered British Airways Lockheed Electra. The flight itself was historically notable: it was among the first times a head of state or senior diplomat had flown to a diplomatic meeting by airplane. He traveled to Hitler's residence in Berchtesgaden. For three hours the two men talked, with Hitler insisting on the Sudeten Germans' right to national self-determination and repeatedly claiming, falsely, that the Czechoslovak government had killed 300 Sudeten Germans. At one point a frustrated Chamberlain asked: "Why did I come over here to waste my time?"
After returning to Britain, Chamberlain met with French Prime Minister Daladier on the 16th of September in London. They agreed: Czechoslovakia must cede to Germany all territories where the German population exceeded 50 percent of the total. In return, Britain and France would guarantee Czechoslovak independence. Prague rejected the proposal.
Chamberlain flew to Germany a second time, meeting Hitler at Bad Godesberg on the 22nd of September. He arrived in Cologne to a lavish welcome, with a German band playing "God Save the King" and crowds presenting him with flowers and gifts. He told Hitler the Allies had agreed to the Sudetenland transfer. Hitler shook his head and said it was not enough; he wanted Czechoslovakia dissolved entirely, its territories distributed among Germany, Poland, and Hungary. Chamberlain was visibly shaken. Later that evening Hitler telephoned the prime minister's hotel suite, pulling back to demand only the Sudetenland, provided Czechoslovakia begin evacuating ethnic Czechs from German-majority areas by the 26th of September at 8:00 am. After Chamberlain pressed him, Hitler extended the deadline to the 1st of October, calling it a "gift" to the prime minister.
Meanwhile in Prague, a new cabinet under General Jan Syrový was installed. On the 23rd of September a decree of general mobilization was issued; within 24 hours one million men joined the army. The Czechoslovak Army was modern, experienced, and anchored by an excellent system of frontier fortifications. Its commanders believed they could fight.
By the 26th of September Hitler was demanding that the claims of ethnic Germans in Poland and Hungary also be satisfied, adding new conditions. He delivered a speech at the Berlin Sportpalast that evening declaring the Sudetenland "the last territorial demand I have to make in Europe" and giving Czechoslovakia until the 28th of September at 2:00 pm to comply or face war. The British government began war preparations and recalled Parliament from recess.
On the 27th of September, Chamberlain addressed the British people by radio: "How horrible, fantastic, incredible it is that we should be digging trenches and trying on gas masks here because of a quarrel in a far-away country between people of whom we know nothing."
Four hours before the deadline, on the 28th of September at 10:00 am, Britain's ambassador to Italy, Lord Perth, telephoned Italy's Foreign Minister Galeazzo Ciano to request an urgent meeting. Chamberlain wanted Mussolini to urge Hitler to delay. By 11:00 am Mussolini had agreed; he telephoned Italy's ambassador to Germany with the message: "Go to the Fuhrer at once, and tell him that whatever happens, I will be at his side, but that I request a twenty-four-hour delay before hostilities begin." Hitler received the message and agreed, though the invasion was never actually set for that day. The date had always been the 1st of October.
The four-power conference convened at the Führerbau in Munich on the 29th of September. Discussions were held in English, French, and German, giving Chamberlain and Daladier little time to consult before they began. The agreement was presented as an Italian proposal, though it was nearly identical to Hitler's own Godesberg demands: German forces were to occupy the Sudetenland by the 10th of October, and an international commission would decide remaining disputed areas. At about 1:30 am on the 30th of September, the four leaders signed.
Bohemia, Moravia, and Silesia lost about 38 percent of their combined area to Germany through the Munich Agreement. With the Sudetenland went 70 percent of Czechoslovakia's iron and steel industry, 70 percent of its electrical power, and 3.5 million citizens. The mountainous borderland had also held Czechoslovakia's major fortifications; without them, the remainder of the country was militarily indefensible.
Soon after the agreement, 115,000 Czechs and 30,000 Germans fled into what remained of Czechoslovakia. By the 1st of March 1939, the Institute for Refugee Assistance counted almost 150,000 refugees.
Poland and Hungary moved quickly. On the 2nd of October, the Polish Army under General Władysław Bortnowski annexed an area of 801.5 square kilometers with a population of 227,399 people in the Cieszyn region. Poland had issued an ultimatum to Prague on the night of the 30th of September, just 11 hours after the Czechoslovak government accepted the Munich terms. Hungary's claims were settled at the First Vienna Award on the 2nd of November 1938, which transferred 11,882 square kilometers in southern Slovakia and southern Carpathian Ruthenia to Budapest.
On the 4th of December 1938, elections in the newly created Reichsgau Sudetenland saw 97.3 percent of the adult population vote for the Nazi Party. About half a million Sudeten Germans joined the party, a rate of 17.3 percent of the German population there, compared with an average of 7.9 percent in Nazi Germany as a whole.
On the 5th of October Beneš resigned as president. Nobel laureate Thomas Mann, writing in defense of his adopted homeland, attacked "a Europe ready for slavery" and declared that it was already too late for Britain to save the peace. Beneš was nominated for a Nobel Peace Prize in 1939.
Within Germany, a small circle of military officers had been watching the Sudeten crisis as an opportunity, not a triumph. General Hans Oster, deputy head of the Abwehr, and General Ludwig Beck, who had already resigned as Chief of the General Staff in protest, were at the center of what became known as the September Conspiracy. Their plan was to arrest Hitler the moment he gave the order to invade Czechoslovakia, storm the Reich Chancellery, and overthrow the regime.
The plan depended on one thing: Britain had to issue a clear warning that it would fight to defend Czechoslovakia. If such a warning reached the German people, the conspirators believed, it would demonstrate that Hitler was leading Germany toward certain defeat. Agents were sent to England to inform Chamberlain of the plot and of Hitler's invasion plans. The British Cabinet rejected the proposal. No such letter was issued, and the coup never went forward.
When Hitler toured the captured Czech fortifications, he told Joseph Goebbels privately that "we would have shed a lot of blood" and that it was fortunate no fighting had occurred. American historian William L. Shirer, writing in The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich in 1960, argued that Czechoslovakia could have offered significant resistance, that Britain and France had sufficient air defenses to protect London and Paris, and that a rapid victory over Germany was achievable. He quoted Churchill's assessment that after Munich, Britain and France stood "in a much worse position compared to Hitler's Germany."
Hitler himself did not hide his contempt for the outcome. A British diplomat in Berlin reported hearing from someone in Hitler's entourage that, shortly after the signing, Hitler had said: "Gentlemen, this has been my first international conference and I can assure you that it will be my last." In August 1939, on the eve of the invasion of Poland, Hitler told his generals: "Our enemies are men below average, not men of action, not masters. They are little worms. I saw them at Munich."
By March 1939 the promise was broken. Hitler occupied the remainder of Bohemia and Moravia. Czechoslovak President Emil Hácha was brought to Berlin, made to wait, and then threatened with the bombing of Prague if he refused to order Czech forces to stand down. The news induced a heart attack; Hitler's doctor revived him with an injection. Hácha signed. In a speech to the Reichstag, Hitler enumerated what Germany had taken: 2,175 field guns and cannons, 469 tanks, 500 anti-aircraft artillery pieces, 43,000 machine guns, 1,090,000 military rifles, 114,000 pistols, roughly a billion rounds of small-arms ammunition, and 3 million rounds of anti-aircraft ammunition. During the 1940 Battle of France, roughly 25 percent of all German weapons came from the former Czechoslovak protectorate.
On the 5th of August 1942, British Foreign Minister Anthony Eden sent a formal note to Czechoslovak Ambassador Jan Masaryk declaring that His Majesty's Government considered itself "free from any engagements" arising from Munich. Masaryk replied that the agreement could now be considered "dead" between their two countries. In September 1942 the French National Committee under Charles de Gaulle proclaimed the agreement null and void from its very beginning; Italy and France formally reaffirmed this on the 17th of August 1944. After the Allied victory in 1945, the Sudetenland was returned to Czechoslovakia and its German-speaking majority was expelled under the Potsdam Agreement.
The agreement's political afterlife proved as consequential as the agreement itself. In 1950, US President Harry Truman invoked Munich to justify military action in the Korean War: "The world learned from Munich that security cannot be bought by appeasement." In 1962, General Curtis LeMay told President John F. Kennedy that his refusal to bomb Cuba during the missile crisis was "almost as bad as the appeasement at Munich." The barb was pointed; Kennedy's own father, Joseph P. Kennedy Sr., had supported appeasement as Ambassador to Britain. In 1965, President Lyndon Johnson cited Munich while escalating US involvement in Vietnam.
The pattern continued into the 21st century. During negotiations over the Iran nuclear agreement, a Texas Republican representative tweeted "Worse than Munich." Secretary of State John Kerry, advocating military action in Syria, called it "our Munich moment." Scholars Fredrik Logevall and Kenneth Osgood observed that "Munich" and "appeasement" had become among the dirtiest words in American politics, synonymous with naivete and weakness. They noted that presidents who challenged this framing often achieved policy breakthroughs, while those who cited Munich as an inflexible principle had sometimes led the country into its most enduring failures.
The Czech and Slovak phrase for what happened in 1938 captures a blunter verdict. The slogan "O nás bez nás" sums it up: "About us, without us."
Common questions
What was the Munich Agreement and when was it signed?
The Munich Agreement was a pact signed at about 1:30 am on the 30th of September 1938 by Germany, the United Kingdom, France, and Italy. It transferred the Sudetenland, a border region of Czechoslovakia inhabited by roughly three million ethnic Germans, to Nazi Germany.
Why was Czechoslovakia not represented at the Munich conference?
Czechoslovakia was deliberately excluded from the Munich conference negotiations, though its representatives were present in the city. Britain and France, seeking to avoid war with Germany, struck the deal without Czechoslovak participation, then informed Prague it must accept the terms or fight Nazi Germany alone.
What did Czechoslovakia lose as a result of the Munich Agreement?
Czechoslovakia lost 70 percent of its iron and steel industry, 70 percent of its electrical power, and 3.5 million citizens to Germany. The ceded borderland also contained its main defensive fortifications, leaving the remainder of the country militarily exposed. Poland and Hungary subsequently annexed additional territories.
What did Neville Chamberlain say about the Munich Agreement?
Chamberlain delivered his famous "peace for our time" speech outside 10 Downing Street on the 30th of September 1938, reading from a joint declaration he and Hitler had signed. He described the settlement as the prelude to a larger peace for all of Europe.
How did Winston Churchill respond to the Munich Agreement?
Churchill denounced the agreement in the House of Commons on the 5th of October 1938, calling it "a total and unmitigated defeat" and warning that Czechoslovakia would be engulfed in the Nazi regime within years or months. He described it as "the first sip, the first foretaste of a bitter cup" that would be offered year by year.
How did the Munich Agreement affect Soviet foreign policy?
The Soviet Union, which had mutual assistance treaties with both France and Czechoslovakia, felt betrayed by the agreement. Stalin concluded that the Western powers had colluded with Hitler and might do the same to the Soviet Union. This belief led to a reorientation toward rapprochement with Germany and ultimately contributed to the signing of the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact in 1939.
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