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Hitler the peacemaker?
Instead of giving way, Hitler tried to show the world that the action in the Rhineland was reasonable. The ambassadors of Britain, Italy and France were told that Hitler had important new plans for long-term peace in Europe. He proposed a 25-year agreement between Germany, France and Belgium: Germany promised not to attack its western neighbors.
On the day of the reoccupation Hitler spoke to the Reichstag again, his intention was to convince the world that the action in the Rhinelandwasnottofigh -
The reaction of the French and the British
French ministers and generals met in emergency session on the day of the occupation. They thought about sending the French army to fight. In the end the French decided to protest but not to fight.
In Britain hardly anyone wanted to go to war over the Rhineland. Many British people approved of what Hitler had done; this was German territory, and they thought the German army had a right to be there. They took no action. -
The risk of War
Hitler did this to test the British and French allies. One of the major terms of the Versailles Treaty was that the Rhineland area would remain demilitarized. Hitler took the that chance that the allies would not respond, to show the allies that they didn't take the treaty seriously. Hitler knew Germany was nt ready for war so he ordered his troops to retreat if French resisted. Eventually this happened and he refused to retreat, making the allies take a big mistake by letting himget away withit -
The Referendum
Hitler called a referendum in which the majority of German voters expressed their approval of the remilitarization.During his campaign stops to ask for a yes vote, Hitler was greeted with huge crowds roaring their approval of his defiance of Versailles.The Führer had reached new heights of popularity. -
The Anschluss - the German take-over of Austria
In early 1938 Austria was in a state of crisis. Local Nazis were making life difficult for the government of Chancellor Kurt Schuschnigg. Hitler did not have complete control over these Austrian Nazis, and they sometimes acted without waiting for orders from Berlin.
In January 1938 it was discovered by the Austrian authorities that there was a plot by Austrian Nazis to create chaos in Austria by killing the German ambassador. -
The Anschluss
The AnschlussThe Austrian leader, Schuschnigg, visited Hitler for crisis talks in Germany in February 1938. Schuschnigg was badly treated at this meeting. Hitler raved and shouted at him for two hours. He demanded that Nazis be allowed to join the Austrian government and be given control of law and order. Schuschnigg felt that he had no option and agreed to Hitler's terms.
When Schuschnigg got back to Austria he was in a difficult situation. There was no help from abroad. -
The plebiscite
Schuschnigg in an effort to preserve Austria's independence announced that there would be a plebiscite, or referendum, in Austria to decide whether Austrians wanted their country to remain independent. He fixed the lowest age of voting at twenty-four, so that young Nazis would not be able to vote.
Hitler was eanfry when he heard about the plebiscite plan. He feared that Schuschnigg would win the plebiscite and he ordered the army to invade before the plebiscite. -
The invasion of Austria
The German army invaded Austria. Arrests began immediately of enemies of the Nazis. In the city of Vienna alone 76.000 people were arrested in the aftermath of the invasion. -
After the invasion of Austria
Austria 1938On 12 March Hitler himself crossed into Austria. He went to his own home town of Linz where he was greeted by cheering crowds. -
The Sudeten Germans
There were about 3 million German speakers in Czech. and they were a large minority in a country dominated by Czechs and Slovaks, Nazis were among the Sudeten Germans. Heinlein, the local Nazi leader claimed that the Sudeten Germanswere not treated fairly.
On the 28 March 1938 Hitler met Heinlein to give him instructions. He told the leader to keep making demands that the Czechoslovak government could not possibly accept. Hitler hoped to create a crisis over Czechoslovakia. -
Support from Britain and France?
Czechoslovakia looked to Britain and France for help. British leaders had no treaty with Czechoslovakia. By March 1938, Chamberlain was saying (in private) that Czechoslovakia couldn't be saved. However, Franced had once signed a treaty that said that she would give Czechoslovakia military help if it was attacked by Germany. But on Aril 1938, there was a change of government in France and the Prime Minister was not keen on the idea of going into war with Germany over Czechoslovakia. -
Hitler prepares to act
Hitler was sure that neither Britain nor France would intervene if he attacked Czechoslovakia. In April he visited Rome and was told by Mussolini that Italy would support Germany. On 30 May, Hitler let his generals know that he decided to smash Czechoslovakia by military action in the near future. The British and French governments reacted to the crisis by putting pressure on the Czechoslovaks to make concessions. The British Government was reccomended to separate the Sudetenland from Czech. -
The Munich crisis
Hitler was ready to go to war against Czechoslovakia in the summer of 1938. Many of his leading generals disagreed. They were afraid that Britain and France would fight and Germany would loose beacuse she was not ready for a large scale war. Hitler refused to listen, he was sure they wouldn't do anything. Tension rose in early September when Heinlein ordered local Nazis to attack Czech and Jewish targets. Beacuse of his violence,he left Czechoslocvakia on 15 September. -
Chamberlain flies to Germany
The first of three meetings took place at Berchtesgaden, near Munich in southern Germany. At this meeting Hitler demanded that the Sudetenland should be handed over to Germany. Without consulting the Czechs, Chamberlain agreed that those areas containing more than 50% Germans within them should be handed back to Germany. Chamberlain managed to get the Czechs and the French to agree to this solution. -
Chamberlain flies to Germany
French leaders agreed to support the partition of Czechoslovakia in return for a British promise to defend what was left to Czechoslovakia. A day later, the Czech president Benes was told to hand over the Sudetendland, he was really unhappy about this and at first he refused to co-operate. But by 21 of September he realised that he was powerless to resist without Allied support, so he agreed to take over. -
Chamberlain fies to Germany
Chamberlain flew to Bad Godesberg to meet Hitler so that the final details of the plan could be worked out. At this meeting Hitler made new demands that took Chamberlain by surprise. Hitler wanted German troops to occupy the Sudetenland. He also demanded that land containing a majority of Poles and Magyars should also be returned to Poland and Hungary. Britain and France rejected these demands and both the French and British governments prepared for war. -
War?
At this point a war between Britain and Germany seemed a real possibility. The British government prepared 38 million gas masks and anti-aircraft guns. Chamberlain tried once again to get Hitler to find a peaceful solution. Hitlerwas not in the mood for negotiations and made it clear that he would 'smash the Czechs'. -
An invitation to Munich
Chamberlain was in the middle of a speech to parliament describing negotiations when he passed an important note. The note said that Hitler had agreed a conference at Munich with presentatives of Britain, France and Italy. The conference would try to explore a peaceful solution to the crisis over Czechoslovakia. -
The Munich Agreement
Desperate to avoid war, and anxious to avoid an alliance with Joseph Stalin and the Soviet Union, Neville Chamberlain and Edouard Daladier agreed that Germany could have the Sudetenland. In return, Hitler promised not to make any further territorial demands in Europe.
On this date, Adolf Hitler, Neville Chamberlain, Edouard Daladier and Benito Mussolini signed the Munich Agreement which transferred the Sudetenland to Germany. -
Anexation of the Sudetenland
The Munich conference began on 29 Seotember. A day later the British and French Prime Ministers agreed to Hitler on the terms of the annexation of the Sudetenland. The conference didn't envolve any real negotitations and Czechoslovakia wasn't even represented. Britain and France simply agreed to give Hitler what he wanted. -
Sudetenland owned by Germans
On October 1st 1938, the Czech frontier guards left their posts and German troops occupied the Sudetenland. Very shortly afterwards, Polish and Hungarian troops took areas of Czechoslovakia which contained a majority of Poles and Magyars.
Chamberlain had returned to Croydon Airport near London as a hero; the man who saved peace in Europe. His "Piece of Paper" , signed both by Chamberlain and Hitler, was later called a "scrap of paper" by Hitler. -
Hitler, an untrustful man
In March, 1939, the German Army seized the rest of Czechoslovakia. In taking this action Adolf Hitler had broken the Munich Agreement. The British prime minister, Neville Chamberlain, now realized that Hitler could not be trusted and his appeasement policy now came to an end. -
The Soviets
By early 1939 the Soviets faced the prospect of resisting German military expansion in eastern Europe virtually alone, and so they began searching about for a change of policy. On May 3, 1939, Soviet leader Joseph Stalin fired Foreign Minister Maksim Litvinov, who was Jewish and an advocate of collective security, and replaced him with Vyacheslav Mikhaylovich Molotov, who soon began negotiations with the Nazi foreign minister, Joachim von Ribbentrop. -
Nonaggresion Pact
The Germans dismembered the Czechoslovak state in March 1939 in violation of the Munich agreement. Britain and France responded by guaranteeing the integrity of the Polish state. Hitler responded by negotiating a nonaggression pact with the Soviet Union so that his armies could invade Poland virtually unopposed by a major power, after which Germany could deal with the forces of France and Britain in the west without having to simultaneously fight the Soviet Union on a second front in the east. -
The German Soviet Pact
The German-Soviet Pact of August 1939, which stated that Poland was to be partitioned between the two powers, enabled Germany to attack Poland without the fear of Soviet intervention, which divided the whole of eastern Europe into German and Soviet spheres of influence. -
Hitler takes over Poland
On September 1, 1939, Germany invaded Poland. The Polish army was defeated within weeks of the invasion. From East Prussia and Germany in the north and Silesia and Slovakia in the south, German units, with more than 2,000 tanks and over 1,000 planes, broke through Polish defenses along the border and advanced on Warsaw in a massive encirclement attack.
