“Friends,” a character intones in the new film Munich: The Edge of War. “History is watching us.”
Now streaming on Netflix, the movie is a fictionalized portrayal of the 1938 Munich Agreement when the British and the French, hoping to avert another world war, acquiesced to the Nazi dismemberment of Czechoslovakia.
War, however, was only delayed for less than a year. As it turns out, Munich only whetted Adolf Hitler’s appetite for a wider European conquest. In the years since, “Munich” has “become a byword for feckless naivete,” as the British strategist Lawrence Freedman once put it. Ditto for British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain, who, after leaving the September 1938 Conference, famously declared he had returned bringing “peace with honor — peace for our time.”
Chamberlain, played by the Academy Award-winning actor Jeremy Irons, is given sympathetic treatment in director Christian Schwochow’s revisionist film. Recognizing that a military conflict might be inescapable, the British premier hopes to “avert war in the immediate term.” The movie closes with the claim that “the extra time bought by the Munich Agreement enabled Britain and her allies to prepare for war and ultimately led to Germany’s defeat.” Chamberlain, the movie posits, is a tragic hero who sacrificed his political future for the greater good.
As is often the case, the truth is more complicated.
Indeed, Hitler was emboldened by the British and French, allowing him to dissect Czechoslovakia. As he told his generals a week after Chamberlain left: “Our enemies are little worms, I saw them at Munich.” When the Nazis invaded Poland less than a year later, Hitler did not expect the British to intervene forcefully. Munich encouraged miscalculation, and in doing so, it invited war.
Yet, as Irons’s Chamberlain remarks to a young aide: “I can only play the game with the cards that I’ve been dealt.” Chamberlain did not become prime minister until May 1937, a little more than a year before his meeting with Hitler. The policy of appeasement or accommodating dictators such as Hitler or Italy’s Benito Mussolini to avoid conflict predated him.
Chamberlain’s predecessor, Stanley Baldwin, favored appeasement, as did wide swaths of the British public. This was particularly of many in the upper class, who often viewed fascism as a preferable alternative to communism. World War I and the Great Depression left Britain with budgetary limitations and decreased support for armed interventions abroad.
The British then faced severe constraints. For many, appeasement seemed to offer the best solution. Munich was merely its culmination.
Under Chamberlain, the British began to ramp up military production. Munich did buy precious time. But it is also true that Chamberlain’s support for appeasement predated both the conference and his premiership. And while he was prime minister, Chamberlain and a coterie of like-minded aides and Cabinet officials colluded with the British Broadcasting Corporation and actively worked to silence or punish critics of appeasement.
Munich’s real lessons lie elsewhere. Willpower counts for a great deal. The combined militaries of France and Britain could perhaps have forestalled Hitler’s Czechoslovakia gamble. The numbers certainly favored them. But the morale wasn’t there. By overlooking the tenets of Hitler’s ideology, and belatedly grasping the necessity of armed deterrence, the supporters of appeasement set the stage for tragedy.
When it comes to war, the enemy gets a vote. And as the old saying goes: An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure.
The writer is a Washington D.C.-based foreign affairs analyst. His views are his own.
