Active History

Neville Chamberlain (Jeremy Irons) brandishes a document promising peace between Britain and Nazi Germany. Still from Munich: The Edge of War.

Alvin Finkel

When people desire a more bellicose response to an international conflict, they often accuse their opponents of failing to recognize the lessons of “Munich.” We are hearing that from some Canadian conservatives with regards to Canada’s response to the threat of a Russian invasion of Ukraine. The assumption in their use of “Munich” is that the leaders of Britain and France “appeased” Hitler in September 1938 by approving his plan to seize the Sudetenland region of Czechoslovakia and ignoring his earlier seizure of Austria. But that assumes that the men negotiating with Hitler in Munich despised his goals but caved to preserve an impossible peace. In fact, there is evidence that British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain and his government supported Hitler’s goal of conquering central and Eastern Europe and then invading the Soviet Union, provided that he left western European nations and their colonies alone. The new Netflix movie Munich: The Edge of War, like much of the historical work on the event and on Chamberlain, ignores that possibility.

The movie, based on a popular novel by Robert Harris, gets some things right. It introduces a network of influential Germans conspiring to overthrow Hitler and their failed efforts to win British government support. It shows Chamberlain telling Britons that Czechoslovakia was not worth fighting over before he’d even gone to Munich, though it somewhat muffles the defeatist words of his radio address. It suggests that Chamberlain believed that Hitler would not stop his territorial conquests with Austria and Czechoslovakia’s Sudetenland, both conceded at Munich.

The rest is apologetics. Chamberlain is presented as a near-pacifist who finds the prospect of war appalling and who is convinced that the British people, exhausted from World War I, need to see more betrayal by Germany and more rearmament by Britain before agreeing to another war. Beyond negotiating the Munich Pact, he demands a personal meeting with Hitler to obtain the famous piece of paper in which the two countries agree not just to “peace in our time” but to eternal peace. He argues naively that Hitler’s signature will reveal him to the British people as treacherous if he seizes more territory.

Plentiful evidence demonstrates that Chamberlain, who had expressed enthusiasm for the Nazis’ destruction of communism, socialism, and unions in Germany, was not opposed to substantial Nazi expansionism. Continue reading →