The Munich Conference was held on September 29-30, 1938, at a hotel in the Bavarian capital. The participants were Adolf Hitler, French Prime Minister Eduard Daladier, British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain, and Benito Mussolini. The conference was called after a protracted crisis created by the ethnic German minority - sponsored and supported by Nazi Germany - in the Sudetenland, a province of the Republic of Czechoslovakia.
The Nazi regime exacerbated the crisis; the British government, in contrast, was fervently committed to keeping matters from escalating into hostilities - even if it meant repudiating its tripartite defence treaty with France and Czechoslovakia, and even as Hitler constantly changed and stepped up his demands.
Chamberlain and Hitler negotiated at length. Representatives of Czechoslovakia were not invited to take part in the talks. Daladier and Mussolini were secondary players. First, they attempted to conclude an autonomy arrangement for the German minority in Czechoslovakia; later on, they debated the annexation of the Sudetenland to Germany. When Germany increased its demands again, Great Britain, France, and Czechoslovakia verged on declaring war on Nazi Germany. However, in Chamberlain's famous speech, he stated: "How horrible, fantastic, incredible it is that we should be digging trenches and trying on gas masks here because of a quarrel in a faraway Country between people of whom we know nothing!"
To prevent war, Chamberlain offered Hitler and Mussolini a quadripartite conference. By accepting the invitation, Hitler forewent a military invasion at the last moment in favour of a settlement. The decisions at the conference amounted to the contents of the memorandum that the British had refused to accept shortly before. The decisions were reported to the government of Czechoslovakia as a final verdict, with which it was to comply without appeal.
Upon his return from Munich, Chamberlain waved the joint statement at the airport in London and proclaimed, "I bring you peace in our time."
Germany's annexation of the Sudetenland - with its military industries, gold reserves, communications system, coal mines and anti-German defence lines - sealed the fate of the Republic of Czechoslovakia. With the German occupation of Bohemia and Moravia on March 15, 1939, breaking the Munich Agreement, Western statesmen awakened to the realisation that war was inevitable.
