Following the occupation of Czechoslovakia in March 1939, there was no longer any restraint. Roosevelt imposed a 25 per cent punitive tariff on German imports, a measure viewed in Berlin as tantamount to a declaration of economic war.77 Though the occupation of Prague was fêted in Berlin as a huge triumph, it had conjured up against the Third Reich the nightmare of German strategy, an encirclement from both East and West, to which Hitler really had no answer.
