Czech Books “The Chamberlain Effect”: When did World War Two really begin?
The 70th anniversary of the outbreak of World War Two this week will pass almost unnoticed in the Czech Republic. The reason is simple. For Czechs and Slovaks the tragedy did not begin with the invasion of Poland, but a full year earlier. With the Munich Agreement of September 1938, Britain, France and Italy gave Hitler the green light to annex huge tracts of Czechoslovakia and less than six months later, Nazi troops marched into what was left of the Czech lands unopposed. So how did Hitler get away with bringing a determined and well-defended democratic country under the sway of the swastika, while Czechoslovakia’s allies stood by? The British historian and politician, David Faber, has tried to answer this question in his book, Munich: The 1938 Appeasement Crisis, which focuses above all on the role of the British political establishment, in particular Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain. This is the most detailed account of the events leading up to Munich to be published for several decades, and an American edition is due out this month. I caught up with David Faber in London, and we discussed some of the many aspects of a book that deserves to become a classic.
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