Arthur Neville Chamberlain, was a British politician who served as Prime Minister of the United Kingdom from May 1937 to May 1940 and Leader of the Conservative Party from May 1937 to October 1940. He is best known for his foreign policy of appeasement, and in particular for his signing of the Munich Agreement on 30 September 1938, ceding the German-speaking Sudetenland region of Czechoslovakia to Nazi Germany led by Adolf Hitler. Following the German invasion of Poland on 1 September 1939, which marked the beginning of the Second World War, Chamberlain announced the declaration of war on Germany two days later and led the United Kingdom through the first eight months of the war until his resignation as prime minister on 10 May 1940.
The Munich Agreement was an agreement concluded at Munich on 30 September 1938, by Nazi Germany, the United Kingdom, France, and Italy. The agreement provided for the German annexation of land on the border between Czechoslovakia and Germany called the Sudetenland, where more than three million people, mainly ethnic Germans, lived. The pact is also known in some areas as the Munich Betrayal, because of a previous 1924 alliance agreement and a 1925 military pact between France and the Czechoslovak Republic.
Jan Garrigue Masaryk was a Czech diplomat and politician who served as the Foreign Minister of Czechoslovakia from 1940 to 1948. American journalist John Gunther described Masaryk as "a brave, honest, turbulent, and impulsive man".
Appeasement, in an international context, is a diplomatic policy of making political, material, or territorial concessions to an aggressive power to avoid conflict. The term is most often applied to the foreign policy of the British governments of Prime Ministers Ramsay MacDonald, Stanley Baldwin and Neville Chamberlain towards Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy between 1935 and 1939. Under British pressure, appeasement of Nazism and Fascism also played a role in French foreign policy of the period but was always much less popular there than in the United Kingdom.
Édouard Daladier was a French Radical-Socialist (centre-left) politician, and the Prime Minister of France who signed the Munich Agreement before the outbreak of World War II.
The National Labour Organisation, also known as the National Labour Committee or simply as National Labour, was a British political group formed after the 1931 creation of the National Government to co-ordinate the efforts of the supporters of the government who had come from the Labour Party. The party leaders were Ramsay MacDonald (1931–1937) and his son Malcolm MacDonald (1937–1945).
Edward Hugh John Neale Dalton, Baron Dalton, was a British Labour Party economist and politician who served as Chancellor of the Exchequer from 1945 to 1947. He shaped Labour Party foreign policy in the 1930s, opposing pacifism; promoting rearmament against the German threat; and strongly opposed the appeasement policy of Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain in 1938. Dalton served in Winston Churchill's wartime coalition cabinet; after the Dunkirk evacuation he was Minister of Economic Warfare, and established the Special Operations Executive. As Chancellor, he pushed his policy of cheap money too hard, and mishandled the sterling crisis of 1947. His political position was already in jeopardy in 1947 when he, seemingly inadvertently, revealed a sentence of the budget to a reporter minutes before delivering his budget speech. Prime Minister Clement Attlee accepted his resignation; Dalton later returned to the cabinet in relatively minor positions.
Walter Runciman, 1st Viscount Runciman of Doxford, was a prominent Liberal and later National Liberal politician in the United Kingdom. His 1938 diplomatic mission to Czechoslovakia was key to the enactment of the British policy of appeasement of Nazi Germany preceding the Second World War.
The 1938 New Zealand general election was a nationwide vote to determine the shape of the New Zealand Parliament's 26th term. It resulted in the governing Labour Party being re-elected, although the newly founded National Party gained a certain amount of ground.
Janet Laurel Adamson was a British Labour Party politician who served as a Member of Parliament (MP) from 1938 to 1946, and as a junior minister in Clement Attlee's post-war Labour government.
The 1938 Bridgwater by-election was a parliamentary by-election for the British House of Commons constituency of Bridgwater, Somerset held on 17 November 1938.
The 1938 Lewisham West by-election was a parliamentary by-election held for the British House of Commons constituency of Lewisham West on 24 November 1938.
The 1938 Oxford by-election was a parliamentary by-election for the British House of Commons constituency of Oxford, held on 27 October 1938. The by-election was triggered when Robert Croft Bourne, the sitting Conservative Member of Parliament died on 7 August 1938. He had served as MP for the constituency since a 1924 by-election.
Polish Socialist Workers Party was a political party in Czechoslovakia founded in February 1921, based amongst Polish workers. The party was active in trade union struggles, mainly mobilizing miners and workers in heavy industries. The chairman of the party was Emanuel Chobot. Other prominent members of the party were Antoni Steffek and Wiktor Sembol. The party closely cooperated with the Czechoslovak Social Democratic Party. The party published the newspaper Robotnik Śląski from Fryštát.
The 1941 Hampstead by-election was a by-election held for the British House of Commons constituency of Hampstead in London on 27 November 1941.
The 1938 Walsall by-election was a parliamentary by-election held for the British House of Commons constituency of Walsall on 16 November 1938. The by-election was caused by the death of the sitting Liberal National Member of Parliament, Joseph Leckie. The election was won by George Schuster, a fellow Liberal National.
A Total and Unmitigated Defeat was a speech by Winston Churchill in the House of Commons at Westminster on Wednesday, 5 October 1938, the third day of the Munich Agreement debate. Signed five days earlier by Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain, the agreement met the demands of Nazi Germany in respect of the Czechoslovak region of Sudetenland.
The Runciman Mission to Czechoslovakia was a British Government initiative aimed at resolving an international crisis threatening to lead to war in Europe in the summer of 1938. The Mission, headed by a former British cabinet minister Lord Runciman, was sent to mediate in a dispute between the Government of Czechoslovakia and the Sudeten German Party (SdP), representing the radicalised ethnic German minority within the country. The British mediators were active on the ground in Czechoslovakia during the late summer, issuing their report shortly before the Munich Conference in September.
The following events occurred in September 1938:
The following events occurred in October 1938:
