Quote of the Day (Masaryk)

"If you have sacrificed my nation to preserve the peace of the world, I will be the first to applaud you. But if not, gentlemen, God help your souls!"-- Jan Masaryk, Czech ambassador to London, warning Great Britain and France about giving up a portion of his country, the Sudetenland, to appease Adolf Hitler

(At the Munich Conference, Europe took a decisive turn toward another convulsive conflict only two decades removed from its last one—and the word “appeasement” took on a far more pejorative connotation. Great Britain and France acquiesced in the dismemberment of the young republic of Czechoslovakia. It was not just the transfer of the this region of German ethnic groups to the Nazi regime, but, in a last minute upping of the ante, a full military occupation and expulsion of all non-Germans living there. But Neville Chamberlain was willing to let it go because the small republic was, as he put it shamefully and condescendingly, “a small, far-away place about which we know nothing.”

The British Prime Minister would learn much more about it soon, as Hitler, unsatisfied with what he had gotten through bullying, decided to seize the rest of the country in 1939. The move also unmanned, at a stroke, a quiet but noticeable revolt that had been brewing among the German upper military brass, who thought that their country was unprepared for a war with Britain, France and, possibly, Germany.

The deal to cede the Sudetenland to full Nazi occupation was made on this date in 1938, then signed the next day. Winston Churchill correctly called it “a total, unmitigated defeat.” Less than a year later, the war that the snobbish—but also naïve and sincerely idealistic—Chamberlain had sought to avert broke out anyway.)