Munich Agreement

The Munich Agreement was reached in Munich on 30 September 1938 by Nazi Germany, the United Kingdom, France and Italy, providing for the German annexation of the Sudetenland region of the First Czechoslovak Republic, home to about three million people, mainly ethnic Germans. It followed weeks of German military pressure and Polish and Hungarian territorial demands against Czechoslovakia, and an emergency meeting of the major European powers in Munich on 29 to 30 September, which did not include Czechoslovakia or the Soviet Union, quickly reached agreement on Adolf Hitler's terms; Czechoslovak president Edvard Benes submitted to the combined military and diplomatic pressure and agreed to surrender the territory. Much of Europe initially celebrated the agreement as averting a major war, and Hitler declared it his last territorial claim, but the Munich Agreement is today regarded as a failed act of appeasement and a byword for the futility of appeasing expansionist totalitarian states.