Geography Reference
In-Depth Information
'Peace for our time'
CZECHOSLOVAKIA, 1938
Czechoslovakia was one of the new countries created in 1918 when the Austro-Hungarian
Empire was dismantled after the First World War. As the old empire had been notably cosmo-
politan, encompassing many ethnically and linguistically mixed regions, all of the successor
states included substantial minorities within their borders. For instance, many towns and vil-
lages in Czechoslovakia, especially in the western part of the country near to its borders with
Germany and Austria, were inhabited by ethnic Germans.
In the late 1930s the German government demanded a change to the boundaries of
Czechoslovakia that would transfer its majority-German-speaking areas, known as the Sude-
tenland, to Germany. In late September 1938, Adolf Hitler, the German Chancellor, met the
leaders of the United Kingdom, France and Italy in the German city of Munich to discuss this
territorial claim. During the discussion, Hitler gave this map of Czechoslovakia, illustrating
his demands, to the British Prime Minister, Neville Chamberlain. The map is colour-prin-
ted to show the distribution of Czechs (beige), Slovaks (pink), Hungarians (yellow), Poles
(mauve), Germans (blue) and Ukrainians (orange) throughout the country. The four areas that
Hitler intended to annex are marked with hand-drawn dark blue lines and numbered in red
in Roman numerals. The other handwritten figures, also in red, indicate the specific dates in
early October when the annexations of each part of the Sudetenland were planned to take
place.
