Saturday 18 June 2022 04:46 PM In 1938, to Hitler's glee. Now ALEXANDER TEMERKO accuses their successors of ... trends now
The heads of state of three great European powers – Germany, France and Italy – arrived in Kyiv this week, and unexpectedly re-enacted one of history’s most tragic farces.
In 1938, the British prime minister Neville Chamberlain and his French counterpart Edouard Daladier betrayed Czechoslovakia by handing Adolf Hitler a portion of that country in a bid to avert a second world war.
Today, standing in for these unenviable roles, are Olaf Scholz, Emmanuel Macron and Mario Draghi.
These Janus-faced men offer Ukraine’s president Volodymyr Zelensky and his people strong words of support. But I have also strong reason to believe they urge Mr Zelensky in the same breath to cede land to the neo-fascist Vladimir Putin, the Hitler of our time.
They offer token weapons to the president, but withhold the massed ammunition and weapons he badly needs, without which Ukraine cannot roll back the Russian invasion.
Why do they behave like this?
Well, just like Chamberlain and Daladier before them, they do so because they claim to believe in peace. Perhaps soon, in an unsettling historical inversion, it will be Herr Scholz who returns to some German airfield to declare ‘peace in our time’ for this century.
1938, Munich conference. From left to right: Chamberlain, Daladier, Hitler, Mussolini, and Ciano pictured before signing the Munich Agreement, which gave the Sudetenland to Germany
But he will be just as wrong as the appeasers who came before him. ‘Land for peace’ has never worked – and will not do so now. In 1938, Hitler assured the Western powers that the Sudetenland, a Czechoslovakian province that then bordered Germany, was his only goal. The first result of the betrayal in Munich was to condemn three million Czechoslovakians to a forced and unhappy union with Nazi Germany.
The rest of their country fell to Nazi bondage within six months; and soon after that Poland, and then much of the rest of continental Europe,
