The Treaty of Versailles imposed harsh reparations and territorial losses on Germany after World War I, creating severe economic instability including hyperinflation that destroyed savings and undermined public confidence in the Weimar Republic. This economic crisis, combined with political instability and the humiliation of the treaty, created fertile ground for extremist movements. Adolf Hitler exploited these conditions through the Nazi Party, using propaganda and charismatic leadership to gain support. The failed Beer Hall Putsch of 1923 initially failed but provided Hitler with national attention and propaganda victory. Hitler learned from this failure to pursue power through legal means rather than violent revolution. The Great Depression further destabilized Germany, leading to Hitler's appointment as Chancellor in 1933. Once in power, Hitler systematically dismantled democracy, purged his own party rivals, and consolidated absolute power, ultimately leading to World War II.
Why Germany Turned to Adolf Hitler | Full Documentary
Added:[music] [music] [music] >> Europe was in chaos after the First World War.
Some 20 million were dead.
Large parts of [music] France and Germany were completely destroyed, including France's major source of coal and much of their farmland.
The total war that consumed so many lives had also consumed the combatants thirst for war.
When the Kaiser's army began marching home, the civilian populace, who had not been told of the defeats or the stagnation on the Western Front, was stunned by the armistice.
As the guns fell silent and the Kaiser began his exile in Holland, communists formed soviets in the once proud German Imperial Fleet.
Discipline [music] vanished.
Red banners were raised over the fleet and officers were murdered.
Disaffected, demoralized veterans of the army went another [music] direction and began to form right-wing paramilitary groups called Freikorps or free army.
Germany plunged into social and economic instability [music] as socialists, communists, nationalists, and imperialists all fought each other in nightly bloody battles [music] in the streets of cities all across Germany.
In a Munich military hospital, a decorated hero, cited by his [music] Jewish platoon leader for the Iron Cross, lay recovering from a gas attack that launched just days before the armistice.
A failed artist in [music] civilian life, Adolf Hitler resolved at that moment to restore Germany to her rightful glory and avenge her honor.
At least, that's what he claimed years later.
In the winter of 1919, Hitler was released from the hospital and was assigned as a field operative for the army's secret police.
Posing as just another disgruntled veteran, Hitler wandered into a meeting of the National Socialist German Workers' Party.
Hitler was enthralled.
He saw an opportunity for himself with like-minded men.
He quit the military and joined the Nazi Party.
Later that year, the formal end of the war was signed in Versailles, France, almost a year after the fighting had ended.
The Treaty of Versailles was a punitive measure, assigning blame for the war to Germany and Austria-Hungary, and imposing severe, unlimited, and ill-defined reparations on the Central Powers.
Great Britain and France owed large debts to the United States, and they intended to make Germany pay.
After the abdication of Kaiser Wilhelm, the Germans formed a democratic government in the ancient city of Weimar, south of Berlin.
The vengeance of the Allied governments doomed [music] this experiment in German democracy to failure.
Meanwhile, Hitler discovered he was a gifted orator and moved to consolidate his power within the Nazi Party.
He defined the Nazi Party, gave it leadership and by 1921 [music] was the sole leader.
By 1923 the Nazis were the best organized political party and had 55,000 members.
The National Socialists were openly anti-Semitic and nationalist.
They blamed the Versailles Treaty for all of Germany's ills.
The system of reparations set up in Versailles had the consequence of runaway inflation in Germany.
From the end of the war the mark lost ground against the dollar.
In November 1918 the mark was worth 25 cents.
And by 1922 it was down to 400 marks to the dollar.
By November 1923 the purchasing power of money was being halved almost hourly.
Germans rushed to convert their savings if they had any to durable goods.
The endurable image of wheelbarrows of money to buy a loaf of bread is comically accurate.
It took 4 million marks to obtain a single US dollar.
On November 8th, 1923 Hitler believed it was time to move.
On the evening of November 8th the Nazi Party's Fuhrer Adolf Hitler, the popular World War I General Erich Ludendorff, and other leaders of the Kampfband or patriotic fighting societies made their move to gain power in Munich, Bavaria, and Germany by means of a putsch, the German equivalent of a coup d'état.
Hitler, along with a large detachment of Sturmabteilung private army or SA, marched on the Bürgerbräukeller, a Munich beer hall where Bavarian Commissar Gustav von Kahr was making a speech in front of 3,000 people.
In the darkness >> [music] >> 600 storm troopers surrounded the beer hall and a machine gun was set up pointing at the front door.
Hitler, surrounded by his associates, Hermann Göring, Alfred Rosenberg, Rudolf Hess, [music] and Ulrich Graf, burst through the front door at 8:30 p.m., fired a shot into the ceiling, and jumped on a chair yelling, "The national revolution has broken out.
The hall is filled with 600 men. Nobody is allowed to leave.
The Bavarian government and the government at Berlin are deposed.
A new government will be formed at once.
The barracks of the Reichswehr and those of the police are occupied.
Both have rallied to the swastika."
At gunpoint, Hitler forced von Kahr, >> [music] >> Bavarian state police head Colonel Hans von Seisser, and Reichswehr or army general Otto von Lossow >> [music] >> into a room and told them to support his march on Berlin, or they would be shot.
Hitler thought he would get an immediate response of affirmation from them.
When he did not, things began to unravel. [music] Hitler and Ernst Röhm began to entreat and badger the captives.
In a tactical mistake, Hitler decided to leave the Bürgerbräukeller to deal with the crisis elsewhere.
Around 11:30 p.m., Ludendorff released von Kahr and his associates.
By mid-morning on the 9th, Hitler was well aware that the putsch was going nowhere, and he was desperate.
Hitler and [music] his comrades didn't know what to do and were about to give up.
At that moment, Ludendorff [music] cried out, "Wir marschieren!
We will march."
With that, Röhm's force, together with Hitler's, which totaled about 2,000 men, marched out of the beer hall with no plan of attack.
On the spur of the moment, Ludendorff led them to the Bavarian Defense Ministry, or the War Ministry.
There they met a force of 100 soldiers blocking the way.
The two groups exchanged fire.
Four state police officers and 14 insurgents were killed.
Hitler and Hermann Göring were both injured.
Göring managed to escape, but Hitler was captured.
Three days after the putsch, Hitler was arrested and charged with treason.
His trial began on February 26th, 1924.
Hitler, along with Hess, was sentenced to five years.
Even with this rather preferential sentence, Hitler only served around nine months.
Because of his war service and connections, Ludendorff was acquitted.
Though Hitler failed to achieve his immediate stated goal, the event did give the Nazis their first exposure to national attention and a propaganda victory.
It was while serving his prison sentence at Landsberg that he and Rudolf Hess wrote Mein Kampf.
Also, the putsch changed Hitler's outlook on violent revolution to affect change.
From then on, he thought that in order to win the German heart, he must do everything by the book, strictly legal, since Germans obviously frowned on not following the rules.
He decided to maneuver the populace so that the German folk would choose him as dictator.
A few days before Christmas, 1924, Adolf Hitler emerged a free man after nine months in prison, having learned from his mistakes.
In addition to creating the book, Mein Kampf, Hitler had given considerable thought to the failed Nazi revolution of November 1923 and its implications [music] for the future.
He now realized it had been premature to attempt to overthrow the democratic government by force without the support of the German army and other [music] established institutions.
He was determined not to make that mistake again.
No matter how much his Nazi party members [music] wanted action taken against the young German Democratic Republic, it simply would not happen.
He would not give in to [music] them as he had done in November 1923 with disastrous, even laughable [music] results.
Hitler had a new idea on how to topple the government and [music] take over Germany for the Nazis and himself.
He would play by the democratic rules and get elected.
Hitler immediately began reorganizing the Nazi party with feverish effort.
For young people, the Hitler Youth or youth was formed.
It was for boys aged 15 to 18 and was modeled after the popular Boy Scout programs.
Younger boys [music] aged 10 to 15 could join the German Young Folk.
There was an organization for girls called League of German Girls and for women, the National Socialist Women's Also at this time, Hitler began to reorganize the SA, >> [music] >> his Nazi storm troopers, which he referred to in Mein Kampf as an instrument for the conduct and reinforcement of the movement's struggle for its philosophy of life.
The SA began as an organization of Nazi street brawlers, originally called the [music] Monitor Troop, that kept Nazi meetings from being broken up by Marxists and fought with them in the streets as well.
It had also been Hitler's main instrument in the Beer Hall Putsch.
Realizing the German man's fondness for uniforms, the SA adopted a brown-shirted outfit with boots, a swastika armband, badges, and cap.
Nazi uniforms, along with the swastika symbol, would become important tools in providing recognition and visibility, thus increasing public awareness of the party.
At this time, within the SA, Hitler formed a new highly disciplined guard [music] unit that would be solely responsible to him and would serve as his personal bodyguard.
It was called the Schutzstaffel, the staff guard, or SS for short.
The SS adopted a black uniform, modeled partly after the Italian fascists.
A former stationery salesman, Josef Berchtold, was its first leader.
A young man who had done a variety of odd jobs for the party became member number 168.
His name was Heinrich Himmler.
But despite all this effort, the Nazis now ran into an obstacle that limited the party's success.
Things were getting better in Germany.
The economy was improving and unemployment was dropping.
The big German industrialists were now debt-free.
Factory output was increasing as investment capital came pouring in from the United States.
Germany now had a new president, a sleepy-eyed old gentleman named Paul von Hindenburg, a famous World War I field marshal.
He was unanimously backed by the conservative and middle-of-the-road political parties to help bring stability to the Republic and to thwart any attempt by radical parties to capture the presidency.
The German army had made its peace with the young Republic.
Although forbidden by the Treaty of Versailles to exceed 100,000 soldiers and denied modern equipment and planes, thousands of men existed in thinly veiled paramilitary organizations funded by the army.
The German General Staff, disbanded by the treaty, simply disguised itself among its troops.
The army was also secretly engaged in developing new technologies in Russian factories and was involved in training exercises with the Russian army.
As things got better economically, there was a sense of relaxation among the German people.
Amid all this, Adolf Hitler knew it was going to be slow going for his party, which had counted so many unhappy, disgruntled men among its early members.
But Hitler also had a sense that [music] the good times would not last.
The German Republic was living on borrowed money and borrowed time.
The underlying political and racial tensions he was so keen to exploit were still there, only dormant.
And when the good times were over, they would once again come looking for him.
But for now, he just had to wait.
Adolf Hitler described the quiet years between 1926 and 1929 as one of the happiest times of his life.
In the scenic mountains above the village of Berchtesgaden in the German state of Bavaria, he found an ideal home.
He spent his [music] days gazing at inspiring, majestic mountain views and dreaming of future glory for himself and his German Reich.
Those dreams centered around asserting the supremacy of the Germanic race, acquiring more living space or Lebensraum for the German people, and dealing harshly with Jews and Marxists. [music] By May of 1926, Hitler had overcome any remaining rivals within the Nazi party and assumed the title of supreme leader or Führer.
He enjoyed a following among upper-class socialites who were strangely drawn to this charismatic but socially awkward man.
Hitler delighted in their attention and their money.
During these quiet years, Joseph Goebbels first came to Hitler's attention and experienced a quick rise in the Nazi hierarchy.
Goebbels, a brilliant but somewhat neurotic would-be writer, displayed great talent for speech making, organizing, and propaganda.
He was a rarity among the Nazis, a highly educated man with a PhD in literature from Heidelberg.
Goebbels was a little man, about 5 ft tall.
He walked with a limp as a result of infantile paralysis.
He became infatuated with Hitler.
On May 20th, national elections were held in Germany.
The Nazis had a poor showing, although Goebbels won a seat in the Reichstag.
For the average German, the Nazis at this time had little appeal.
Things seemed to be just fine without them.
The economy was strong, inflation was under control, and people were working again.
All that soon changed.
On October 29th, the Wall Street stock market crashed with disastrous worldwide effects.
First in America, and then the rest of the world, companies went bankrupt, >> [music] >> banks failed, and people instantly lost their life savings.
Unemployment soon soared, and poverty and starvation became real possibilities for everyone.
The people panicked. Governments seemed powerless against the worldwide economic collapse.
Fear ruled.
Governments stood on the brink.
The Great Depression had begun.
And Adolf Hitler knew his time had come.
By mid-1930, amid the economic pressures of the Great Depression, the German democratic government was beginning to unravel.
The elections were set for September 14th.
Hitler and the Nazis sprang into action.
Their time for campaigning had arrived.
Adolf Hitler and the Nazis waged a modern whirlwind campaign in 1930 unlike anything ever seen in Germany.
Hitler traveled the country delivering dozens of major speeches, attending meetings, shaking hands, signing autographs, posing for pictures, and even kissing babies.
Joseph Goebbels brilliantly organized thousands of meetings and torchlight parades.
He plastered posters everywhere and printed millions of copies of special editions of Nazi newspapers.
In his speeches, Hitler offered the Germans what they needed most, encouragement.
He gave them heaps of vague promises while avoiding the details.
He used simple catchphrases repeated over and over.
His campaign appearances were carefully staged events.
Audiences were always kept waiting, deliberately letting the tension increase, only to be broken by solemn processions of brownshirts with golden banners, blaring military music, and finally the appearance of Hitler amid shouts of Heil.
The effect in a closed-in hall with theatrical-style lighting and decorations of swastikas was overwhelming and very catching.
Hitler began each speech in low, hesitating tones, gradually raising the pitch and volume of his voice, then exploding in a climax of frenzied indignation.
He combined this with carefully rehearsed hand gestures for maximum effect.
He skillfully played on the emotions of the audience, bringing the level of excitement higher and higher until the people wound up a wide-eyed, screaming, frenzied mass that surrendered to his will and looked upon him with pseudo-religious adoration.
Hitler offered something to everyone.
Work to the unemployed, prosperity to failed business people, profits to industry, expansion to the army, social harmony, and an end of class distinctions to idealistic young students.
On election day, September 14th, 1930, the Nazis received 6,371,000 votes, over 18% of the total, and so were entitled to 107 seats in the German Reichstag.
It was a stunning victory for Hitler.
Overnight, the Nazi party went from the smallest to the second largest party in Germany.
Now, for the floundering German democracy, the clock was ticking, and time was on Hitler's side.
The years 1930 and 1931 were good for Hitler politically.
Hitler had become a best-selling author, with Mein Kampf [music] selling over 50,000 copies, bringing him a nice income.
Money was flowing in from German industrialists who saw the Nazis as the wave of the future.
They invested in Hitler in the hope of getting favors when he came to power.
Their money was used to help pay the growing numbers of salaried Nazis and fuel Goebbels' propaganda machine.
The German General Staff was also investing support in Hitler, hoping he meant what he said about tearing up the Treaty of Versailles, which limited their army to 100,000 men and also prevented modernization.
In October 1931, the former Austrian corporal was presented to the former field marshal.
Hitler was a bit unnerved by by old gentleman and rambled on at length trying to impress him.
Hindenburg was not impressed and later said Hitler might be suited for postmaster, but never for a high position such as the chancellorship of Germany.
That meeting marked the beginning of the political intrigue that would destroy the young republic and ultimately make Hitler the Fuhrer of Germany.
The German people were desperate for relief from the tremendous personal suffering brought on by the Great Depression, which was now 2 years old.
Civilization itself was unraveling in Berlin, where people were fighting in the streets and killing each other in the chaos.
On a dark, rainy Sunday, April 10th, 1932, the people once again went to the polls to vote in the presidential elections.
Hindenburg, who was 85 at the time, was elected by an absolute majority to another 7-year term.
But no one was at ease.
Hitler and the Nazis had shown massive popularity.
Berlin was now a swirling mass of fear, intrigue, rumors, and disorder.
A group of the country's most influential industrialists, bankers, and business leaders approached Hindenburg asking him to appoint Hitler as chancellor.
They believed Hitler would be good for business.
The military also placed its hope on Hitler believing his repeated promises to tear up the Treaty of Versailles, expand the army, and bring back its former glory.
They all had one thing in common.
They underestimated Hitler.
Hindenburg was in a terrible bind.
Around noon on January 30th, 1933, a new chapter in German history began as a teary-eyed Adolf Hitler emerged from the presidential palace as Chancellor of the German nation.
Surrounded by admirers, he got into his car and was driven down the street, which was lined with cheering citizens.
>> [cheering] >> "We've done it.
We've done it." a jubilant Adolf Hitler exclaimed.
On the evening of January 30th, just about every member of the SA and SS turned out in uniform to celebrate the new Führer Chancellor, Adolf Hitler.
Carrying torches and singing the Horst Wessel song, they were cheered by thousands as they marched through the Brandenburg Gate and along the Wilhelmstraße to the presidential palace.
Cops on the beat who used to give them trouble now wore swastika armbands and smiled at them.
The rhythmic pounding beats of jackboots, drums, and blaring military parade music was heard everywhere.
They saluted Hindenburg as he looked out from a window of the presidential palace.
Then they waited at the Chancellery for Hitler in a scene carefully staged by Joseph Goebbels.
When he appeared in the beam of a spotlight, Hitler was greeted with an outpouring of worshipful adulation unlike anything ever seen before in Germany.
Bismarck, Frederick the Great, and the Kaiser had not seen this.
"Heil! Sieg Heil!"
"Hail! Hail victory!" went the chorus of those who believed the hour of deliverance had come in the form of this man now gazing down at them.
Joseph Goebbels wrote in his diary on January 30th, 1933, "It is almost like a dream, a fairy tale.
The new Reich has been born.
14 years of work have been crowned with victory.
The German revolution has begun."
Dismissive of the Bohemian corporal, as he called Hitler, Hindenburg hoped making Hitler Chancellor in [music] January 1933 would appease and quiet him.
The Nazis had always used violence to intimidate their opponents.
And once Hitler took office, this did not change.
In 1933, the Buchenwald concentration camp was opened for political prisoners.
And after Hitler became the supreme power, thousands were sent there.
At first, Jews [music] were not sent.
The Nazis first focused on the intelligentsia and their political enemies.
In March 1933, the Reichstag was set a fire in circumstances that [music] remain mysterious.
The Nazis blamed the communists, and history [music] has blamed the Nazis.
This last institution of the Weimar Republic was shut down, and Hitler used this as an excuse to condemn communists and socialists [music] to prison.
Hitler and the Nazis moved against those least [music] likely to defend themselves.
Disabled and mentally [ __ ] Germans were sent away [music] to special hospitals, where they were forcibly sterilized and eventually killed.
On April 1st, 1933, the Nazis organized a boycott of Jewish business.
The SA stood in front of Jewish businesses and intimidated anyone attempting to enter.
The next week, Jews [music] were removed from civil service positions.
Within a year, non-Aryans, anyone with one Jewish parent or grandparent, were removed from practicing professions like law, banking, medicine, and journalism.
The greatest challenge to Hitler's survival during the early years of the Third Reich came from his own brown-shirted storm troopers, the SA, led by Chief of Staff Ernst Röhm.
The battle-scarred Röhm was a decorated World War I combat officer and a post-war street brawler who had been with Hitler from the start.
Röhm's jackbooted stormtroopers were largely responsible for putting Hitler in power.
On the front lines of the Nazi political revolution, they had risked their necks battling communists for control of the streets and squashed anyone who stood in Hitler's way.
The SA was powerful enough to displace Hitler if they so desired and thus became a threat.
Also, Hitler could never gain control of the army until he eliminated the SA as a threat to the thoroughly Prussian officer corps.
On June 30th, 1934, during the Night of Long Knives, Röhm and several other SA leaders were summoned [music] to a villa outside Berlin where they were arrested.
Hermann Göring and Heinrich Himmler, envious of Röhm's intimacy with Hitler, accused him of being a homosexual.
He was taken to [music] prison where he was beaten and told to confess.
When he would not, he was offered a pistol.
When he did not commit suicide, the door was thrown open and he died in a hail of gunfire.
Hitler gained the support of the army who signed a pledge [music] of allegiance to him.
Not only had Hitler eliminated the brownshirts threat, but also now he proclaimed himself to be the supreme judge of the German people, in effect placing himself above the law.
The German army generals, by condoning the purge, locked themselves in step with Hitler and began the long journey that would take them over the next 11 years to the brink of world conquest and finally to the hanging docks at Nuremberg.
A few weeks after the purge, Hitler rewarded Himmler by raising the SS to independent status.
No longer part of the SA, Himmler would now answer only to Hitler.
Absolutely loyal to Hitler, the SS would kill anyone on command >> [music] >> and would become the Führer's personal instrument of terror on a continental scale as well as a gigantic military force.
After the Night of the Long Knives, nothing stood between Hitler and absolute power in Germany except 87-year-old German President Paul von Hindenburg, who now lay close to death at his country estate in East Prussia.
For Hitler, Hindenburg's demise couldn't have come at a better time.
He had just broken the back of the rowdy Brownshirts and cemented the support of the army's general staff.
Now he just needed to resolve the issue of who would succeed Hindenburg as president.
Hitler, of course, decided that he should succeed Hindenburg, but not as president.
Instead, as Führer or supreme leader of the German people.
About 9:00 a.m. on August 2nd, 1934, the much-anticipated death of President Hindenburg finally occurred.
Within hours, the Nazi Reichstag announced that the office of Reich President would be combined with that of Reich Chancellor.
The existing authority of the Reich President would consequently be transferred to the Führer and Reich Chancellor, Adolf Hitler.
Immediately after the announcement of the new Führer law, the German officer corps and every individual soldier in the German army was made to swear a brand new oath of allegiance.
I swear by God this sacred oath.
I will render unconditional obedience to Adolf Hitler, the Führer of the German Reich and people, supreme commander [music] of the armed forces, and will be ready as a brave soldier to risk my life at [music] any time for this oath.
The unprecedented oath was to Hitler personally, not the German state or constitution >> [music] >> as were previous army oaths.
All men in uniform, in accordance with their military code of honor, would now regard [music] obedience to Hitler as a sacred duty.
This would make the German army the personal instrument of the Fuhrer.
High above the town of Berchtesgaden in southeastern Bavaria, Adolf Hitler spent many hours in solitude at his mountain retreat with its magnificent views of the Alps and the valleys below.
It was here that the Fuhrer came to contemplate the future of Germany and to make all of his big decisions.
On Friday, March 15th, 1935, Hitler departed his mountain retreat and returned to Berlin.
He immediately convened a cabinet meeting and also assembled members of the army's general staff.
He then announced a major decision he had just come to.
Germany would openly defy the military limitations set by the Treaty of Versailles and rearm.
Breaking the treaty was an affront to Germany's former World War I enemies, France and England.
Everyone waited for their response to the news.
Some of Hitler's more cautious army generals thought there might even be an immediate military attack by France.
But, absolutely nothing happened except for a few diplomatic protests.
Hitler's next big move in the game of international diplomacy didn't occur until a year later, and it would be one of the biggest risks of his entire career.
Beginning at dawn on Saturday, March 7th, 1936, three battalions of the German army crossed the bridges over the Rhine and entered into the industrial heartland of Germany, known as the Rhineland.
This was another gross violation of the Treaty of Versailles.
Once again, the whole world waited to see how the French and British would react.
German troops entering the Rhineland even had orders to scoot back across the Rhine bridges if the French army attacked.
But in France, the politicians were simply unable to convince their generals to act and were also unable to get any British support for a military response.
So, they did nothing.
It had been a tremendous gamble for Hitler, one that might have cost him everything if their old enemies had humiliated his troops.
Later, Hitler would privately admit, "The 48 hours after the march into the Rhineland were the most nerve-racking in my life.
If the French had marched into the Rhineland, we would have had to withdraw with our tail between our legs, for the military resources at our disposal would have been wholly inadequate for even a moderate resistance."
41 months would elapse from the day Hitler grabbed control of the German army until the actual start of World War II.
During those months, Hitler engaged in a kind of gangster diplomacy in which he bluffed, bullied, threatened, and lied to various European leaders in order to expand the borders of his Reich.
His very first victim was Dr. Kurt von Schuschnigg, Chancellor of Austria, a country being torn apart from within by Nazi agitators and also feeling threatened from the outside by Germany's new-found military strength.
Von Schuschnigg met Hitler at Berchtesgaden on February 12th, 1938.
Hitler demanded Anschluss or union.
Schuschnigg decided on a national vote to let Austrians decide if they wanted to reunify with Germany.
Hitler challenged the vote.
He demanded and got the resignation of the Austrian government.
Even before he got it, German troops entered Vienna.
Again, the Western powers did nothing fearing an open confrontation with Germany would lead to war.
Now Adolf Hitler began looking toward lands not traditionally part of greater Germany.
The Sudetenland, a narrow strip of mountainous land in Czechoslovakia, held a predominantly ethnic German population on the border with Germany.
The Sudetenland was important to the Czechs for two reasons.
The mountains were a natural defense against German aggression and most of their man-made fortifications were located there.
If the Sudetenland were to fall, the whole of Czechoslovakia would be open to German occupation.
After street battles like those of Hitler's rise to power and Austrian Anschluss, Hitler demanded the Sudetenland from Czechoslovakian President Edvard Beneš.
Beneš turned to Britain for help, especially to Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain.
Chamberlain was a man who did not comprehend the circumstances in which he lived.
The world was changing far more rapidly than he could handle.
He sought to appease Hitler and flew to Munich on September 29th, 1938 to discuss the Czechoslovakian crisis.
Also joining the discussion was Italian Duce Benito Mussolini and French Premier Édouard Daladier.
Beneš was not present nor any Czech representative.
>> With war apparently inevitable, the big four signed the peace of Munich.
Hitler and Chamberlain kindled a so-called British-German friendship that will turn to ashes in a fortnight.
Mussolini, with the ink scarcely dry upon his signature, prepares new claims on French Premier Daladier for Tunisia and mastery of the Mediterranean.
Round one goes to the dictators.
Czechoslovakia, a stronghold of democracy in Eastern Europe, is carved up as a menacing Berlin demands. The remnant comes under the economic and political domination of Germany.
A totalitarian holiday feast.
>> [music] [music] >> Chamberlain and Daladier accepted this proposal without hesitation in their overwhelming desire to avoid bloodshed.
Just after 1:00 a.m. on September 30th, the four leaders signed the Munich Agreement, allowing the [music] German army to occupy the Sudetenland beginning on October 1st.
The occupation would be completed [music] by October 10th.
Upon arriving back home in London, Chamberlain declared, "The settlement of the Czechoslovakian problem, which has now been achieved, is, in my view, only the prelude to a larger settlement in which all Europe may find peace."
>> This morning, I had another talk with the German Chancellor, Herr Hitler.
And here is the paper which bears his name upon it as well as mine.
We regard the agreement signed last night and the Anglo-German Naval Agreement as symbolic of the desire of our two peoples never to go to war with one ANOTHER AGAIN.
>> AGAIN!
>> ONCE AGAIN, HITLER HAD GOTTEN EVERYTHING HE wanted without firing a single shot.
Incredibly, this time [music] he would have welcomed a fight.
Somewhat exasperated, he said, "I did not think it possible that Czechoslovakia would be virtually served up to me on a plate by her friends."
Hitler had promised [music] British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain and the German people that the Sudetenland would be his last territorial demand in Europe.
In reality, it was only the beginning.
Hitler now wanted to grab the remainder of Czechoslovakia due to its strategic importance.
At 5:55 a.m. on Wednesday, March 15th, amid a late winter snowstorm, the German army rolled into the first non-Germanic territory to be taken by the Nazis.
"Czechoslovakia has ceased to exist," Hitler announced to the German people later that day, just before departing for Prague.
But now, in an [music] ominous development for Hitler, Britain and France found their backbone.
On March 31st, Prime Minister Chamberlain issued a solid declaration with the backing of France.
It guaranteed that Hitler's next likely victim, Poland, would have protection from Nazi aggression.
The era of Hitler's bloodless conquests had ended.
The next time German troops rolled into foreign territory, there would be an actual shooting war.
>> [music] [music] >> Mhm.
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