"The mistake that the Führer made was to think that Chamberlain had accepted the Munich terms from weakness. Whatever may be said to the contrary, Chamberlain did not agree because of our military unpreparedness. On the contrary, he sincerely believed that it was necessary in the general interests of world peace to let the Sudeten Germans unite with the Germans of the Reich. The fact that we were military weak took a secondary place in his mind. Extremely obstinate by nature, he would never have submitted to a threat or surrendered through fear. He was prepared to make an agreement only because he felt that it was definitely wrong to plunge Europe into war to maintain what, even in the negotiations of the Versailles Treaty, was regarded as a precarious and vulnerable compromise. When he was told that the loss of the Sudetenland would destroy the balance of power in Europe, his answer was that a balance that depended on Czechoslovakia was no longer reliable when the defences had been turned by Hitler's occupation of Austria. Perhaps he underrated the strength of Czech nationalism. Whilst his mind was insular to the extent that he thought that foreigners thought like us, it was cosmopolitan in its indifference to nationalist movements. It was only after the occupation of Prague that he saw that his detached reasonableness was insufficient to stop Hitler. The result was our guarantee to Poland, Greece, and Roumania, the introduction of conscription, and the intensification of rearmament."
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Prime Ministers of the United KingdomPoliticians from EnglandUnitariansPeople from BirminghamConservative Party (UK) politicians
Original Language: English
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Viscount Templewood, Nine Troubled Years (1954), pp. 381-382
https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Neville_Chamberlain
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