Churchill, Hitler, and "The Unnecessary War": How Britain Lost Its Empire and the West Lost the World

by Patrick J. Buchanan

WHY DID CHAMBERLAIN NOT reject Hitler’s demands? Why did Britain not elect to fight, rather than abandon the Czechs? First, as he had written his sister, Chamberlain “didn’t care two hoots whether the Sudetens were in the Reich, or out of it.”60 He did not believe that maintaining Czech rule over three million unhappy Germans was worth a war. As the British saw the German demands as reasonable, they came to see the Czechs as obdurate. Nevile Henderson, the British envoy in Berlin, thought it necessary, in the interests of peace, to be “disagreeable to the Czechs,” for they were a pig-headed race and President Beneš “not the least pig-headed among them.”61 Many British believed justice was on the German side. The Sudeten Germans, a privileged minority in the Austro-Hungarian Empire, hated the Prague regime and had no loyalty to a nation where they were second-class citizens. Under Wilson’s principle of self-determination, they should have been left under Vienna.