Posted on 09/02/2009 1:48:50 PM PDT by nickcarraway
In the years leading up to World War II, Britain and France underestimated just how determined Adolf Hitler was in his lust for conquest. The failure of Neville Chamberlain's policy of appeasement meant war was inevitable.
A few days after returning from Vienna, Hitler, beaming with joy, told Goebbels "Czechoslovakia is next." Goebbels noted in his diary: "The Führer is wonderful. A true genius."
To Goebbels and Hitler, European dominance seemed within their grasp. Eighteen months later, they would take the final step into World War II.
Hitler met with Konrad Henlein, leader of the Sudeten German Party. In 1919, the Allied victors had incorporated Sudetenland, which had formerly been part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, into Czechoslovakia. However most Sudeten Germans rejected the newly formed nation, which discriminated against them. Particularly hard-hit by the Great Depression, many Sudeten Germans became increasingly enthusiastic about the chancellor in neighboring Germany.
In March 1938 Henlein, referring to the government in Prague, told Hitler: "We must always demand so much that we can never be satisfied."
Hitler's ambitions, of course, extended beyond the Sudetenland. He used the escalating crisis in Czechoslovakia, instigated with Henlein's help, as an excuse to invade, and said that it was his "staunch desire to wipe Czechoslovakia off the map." The Wehrmacht received orders to be prepared for an invasion by no later than Oct. 1. Henlein's Sudeten German Party took on the task of provoking a growing number of incidents, and soon his supporters were engaging in gun battles with government soldiers in the region bordering the German Reich.
(Excerpt) Read more at spiegel.de ...
Peculiar how the Spiegel fails to draw the lessons from this for today.
Ping
Luckily Obama doesn't have that going for him (collapsing poll numbers).
People refuse to learn from history
Yeah...but Achmadinijad isn't worried about collapsing poll numbers (neither is Obama) and will chomp Israel as an appetizer and then either do an emp attack on the U.S. or, more likely, give the nuclear weapons to some terrorist group so he can have plausiblity deniability.
Reminds me of an article about a Holocaust Museum opening in the US and the spokesman for the museum said that the museum was a reminder to never let it happen again. On the same page, there was an article about the Rwandan genocide.
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