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President Paul von Hindenburg names Adolf Hitler, leader or fÜhrer of the National Socialist German Workers Party (or Nazi Party), as chancellor of Germany.
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He gave as his excuse the fact that Germany was already disarmed, while other countries were refusing to disarm.
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Military conscription is reintroduced in the German Reich – a further violation of the rearmament conditions of the 1919 Treaty of Versailles which Adolf Hitler, as he publicly announces, intends to ignore completely from now on.
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Under the terms of Versailles, the Rhineland had been made into a demilitarised zone. Germany had political control of this area, but she was not allowed to put any troops into it. Therefore, many Germans concluded that they did not actually fully control the area despite it being in Germany itself.
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German troops marched into Austria unopposed. Hitler now had control of Austria. A month later, Hitler held a rigged referendum. The results showed that the Austrian people approved of German control of their country.
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The "Sudeten" Germans were formerly part of the Austrian Emire, not Germany. This was the first attempt to take action on behalf of the wider German-speaking minorities created in the general peace settlement of 1919
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Chamberlain goes to see Hitler at Berchtesgaden.
Without consulting Czechoslovakia, he promises to give Hitler all the areas where more than 50 per cent of the population is German. Then he persuades France to agree. -
Chamberlain goes to Bad Godesberg to tell Hitler about the decision, but Hitler now demands ALL the Sudetenland. Chamberlain refuses; it looks like war.
Chamberlain calls the crisis 'a quarrel in a faraway country, between people of whom we know nothing'. -
Once German forces were committed in Poland there was no real possibility of a Munich-type settlement. The USSR non-aggression pact offered the chance to amass foced against Poland. The plannon og the invasion included death squads and the racial war in the east began. There was no significant action by either side on the Western Front.
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Hitler had established a foreign-policy aim not linked to the treaty of Versailles by taking over a non-German state. German rearmament was not planned to be completed before 1942 but was now accelerated.
