Chamberlain secures ‘peace for our time’
1938
This year the prime minister Neville Chamberlain met German chancellor Adolf Hitler in Munich.
The Nazi leader wanted to annex the Sudetenland, a mineralrich and industrial part of Czechoslovakia with a large Germanspeaking population. At the conference four powers – Germany, Britain, France and Italy – agreed that Czechoslovakia would lose a third of its population in the transfer to Germany, but the remaining territory would be protected. Chamberlain returned to Britain declaring that he had obtained “peace for our time”.