Reappraising the Munich Pact

The Munich Pact, signed by Britain, France, Germany, and Italy on September 30, 1938, agreed to the Nazi army's occupation of the Sudetenland in Czechoslovakia without so much as a diplomatic word to that country's government. Six months later, the German army crossed the recently truncated frontier, and Czechoslovakia ceased to exist as an independent state. British and French guarantees of Polish independence quickly followed but came too late to prevent the Nazi attack on Poland on September 1, 1939. Great Britain was obliged to declare war, and the Second World War had begun. Up to now, scholars' treatment of the Munich Pact focused on British policy--either moralistically criticizing the ill-advised diplomacy of Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain or reassessing the British role in view of the limitations imposed by a fragile economy. Reappraising the Munich Pact brings the other players back onto the stage by examining German, French, and Soviet policies before, during, and after the pact. The authors also trace the evolution of the pact's postwar historiography in Czechoslovakia and Poland. The Munich Pact has become an international metaphor, both used and abused, for failed Western agreements with dictatorial regimes. Reappraising the Munich Pact offers a close look at the complexity of this fateful moment in history after a half-century of historical analysis. The contributors are Gerhard Weinberg, John Dreifort, and Michael Kraus on the German, French, and Soviet perspectives, and Joseph Zacek and Anna Cienciala on the Czechoslovak and Polish points of view.