World War Two · Season 9 · Episode 23

How WW2 Really Started: Appeasement! - Q3 1938

Saturday, July 11 · 20 min

On September 30, 1938, Neville Chamberlain returned from Munich promising “peace for our time.” Adolf Hitler returned to Berlin with the Sudetenland. In this episode of Death of Democracy, Spartacus Olsson reports from Berlin as Nazi Germany escalates on two fronts: terror against Jewish citizens at home, and diplomatic blackmail against Czechoslovakia abroad. While the Evian Conference fails to open the world’s doors to Jewish refugees, the Nazi regime tightens the trap with identity cards, forced names, professional bans, the opening of Mauthausen, and Eichmann’s machinery of forced emigration in Vienna. At the same time, Hitler manufactures the Sudeten Crisis, threatens war, breaks Czechoslovakia’s defenses through the Munich Agreement, and convinces much of Europe that surrendering another country’s territory is the price of peace.