Neville Chamberlain

After World War I, Great Britain was marked by the death of a million of her young men, more than she was to lose in World War II. Her leaders, many old men overdue for retirement whose replacements were dead in Flanders field, were gripped by the memory of their war dead. The true horror of trench warfare had been kept from the British public, but not to the same extent that the German public was.

Adolf Hitler had completed Anschluss with Austria and now was looking towards lands not traditionally part of “Greater Germany.” The Sudetenland, a narrow strip of mountainous land in Czechoslovakia, held a predominantly ethnic German population on the border with Germany.