the last book I ever read (Spain in Our Hearts: Americans in the Spanish Civil War, 1936–1939, excerpt twelve)

from Spain in Our Hearts: Americans in the Spanish Civil War, 1936–1939 by Adam Hochschild:

The Czech crisis escalated throughout the month. On September 12, Hitler gave a fiery speech demanding self-determination for Czechoslovakia’s ethnic Germans. Three days later, Chamberlain rushed to confer with the Führer at his Alpine retreat of Berchtesgaden. A week later, the British prime minister paid a second visit to Hitler, whose demands only escalated. Finally, on September 29 came the Munich conference, in which the leaders of Europe’s major nations, sitting in a semicircle of armchairs around a large fireplace in the city’s palatial new Nazi Party headquarters, essentially dismembered Czechoslovakia. The others gave Hitler all he wanted—10,000 square miles of Czech territory containing some 3.5 million people, some of whom were not even ethnic Germans.

Although Chamberlain returned to London in his striped trousers and starched wing collar to claim that he had achieved “peace in our time,” it was an enormous, cost-free victory for Hitler. Czechoslovakia’s fate was all the more poignant because, almost alone among the states of Eastern Europe, it had been a thriving democracy. Franco promptly sent Chamberlain his “warmest congratulations” for his “magnificent efforts for the preservation of peace in Europe.”