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The Munich Conference to determine the future of Czechoslovakia began on September 29, 1938 with the Czechoslovakian government absent from the talks. They were “not expected to participate or even attend” and it was only after the conference had begun that British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain “relented and invited the Czechoslovaks as part of his own delegation.” Even then the Czechoslovaks were considered only observers, refused admission to the conference room, and “left to cool their heels” as German, Britain, France, and Italy negotiated their dismemberment. Most English-language studies of Munich likewise exclude the Czechoslovaks from the central narrative and largely relegate the country and its politicians to the periphery of the story. The Bell of Treason: The 1938 Munich Agreement in Czechoslovakia by P.E. Caquet is a valuable study of the crisis told from the vantage point of Prague and the perspective of the Czechoslovaks. With fluency in English, Czech, Slovak, French, and German, Caquet effectively mines Czech and Slovak language primary and secondary sources, while the Notes and Bibliography reflect research in archives in London, Paris, and Prague.
Having absorbed Austria, Hitler and Germany immediately turned their full attention to Czechoslovakia with the pretext of self-determination for the Sudeten Germans. As Caquet demonstrates the Czechoslovakian government was resilient in the face of the threat. It was “able and prepared to resist aggression” from within in the form of Henlein and the SdP and ready to attempt to weather, with the support of its allies in Paris and London, a German invasion. By September 1938, as Caquet notes, the Czechoslovakians had broken the SdP and forced Henlein to flee, while advancing a plan that would meet the aspirations of the Sudeten Germans. “A resolution of the conflict was in sight. The Sudetenland was on the verge of ceasing to be a ticking time bomb in the heart of Europe. Then something extraordinary happened. Chamberlain announced that he would go to Berchtesgaden.” Czechoslovakia was sold-out in the space of just a few days. While Chamberlain returned to London from Munich at the end of the month to an enthusiastic welcome, Caquet details in his chapter, “After Munich,” the chaos and violence heralded by the German occupation. Caquest effectively refutes the apologists for appeasement, including the claim by A.J.P. Taylor that Munich was “a triumph for all that was best and most enlightened in British life.”