Greatest single news event of 1938 took place on September 29, when four
statesmen met at the Führerhaus, in Munich, to redraw the map of
Europe. The three visiting statesmen at that historic conference were
Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain of Great Britain, Premier Edouard
Daladier of France, and Dictator Benito Mussolini of Italy. But by all
odds the dominating figure at Munich was the German host, Adolf
Hitler. Führer of the German people, Commander-in-Chief of the German Army,
Navy & Air Force, Chancellor of the Third Reich, Herr Hitler reaped on
that day at Munich the harvest of an audacious, defiant, ruthless
foreign policy he had pursued for five and a half years. He had torn
the Treaty of Versailles to shreds. He had rearmed Germany to the
teeth— or as close to the teeth as he was able. He had stolen Austria
before the eyes of a horrified and apparently impotent world.
All these events were shocking to nations which had defeated Germany
on the battlefield only 20 years before, but nothing so terrified the
world as the ruthless, methodical, Nazi-directed events which during
late summer and early autumn threatened a world war over Czechoslovakia.
When without loss of blood he reduced Czechoslovakia to a German
puppet state, forced a drastic revision of Europe’s defensive
alliances, and won a free hand for himself in Eastern Europe by getting
a “hands-off” promise from powerful Britain , Adolf
Hitler without doubt became 1938’s Man of the Year. Most other world figures of 1938 faded in importance as the year drew to
a close. Prime Minister Chamberlain’s “peace with honor” seemed more
than ever to have achieved neither. An increasing number of Britons
ridiculed his appease-the-dictators policy, believed that nothing
save abject surrender could satisfy the dictators’ ambitions. Among many Frenchmen there rose a feeling that Premier Daladier, by a
few strokes of the pen at Munich, had turned France into a second-rate
power. Aping Mussolini in his gestures and copying triumphant Hitler’s
shouting complex, the once liberal Daladier at year’s end was reduced
to using parliamentary tricks to keep his job.
