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  footage alongside testimony from Nicholas Winton and many of the people he saved, the film gives credit to the man who took action at a time

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Featuring archive footage alongside testimony from Nicholas Winton and many of the people he saved, the film gives credit to the man who took action at a time when the rest of Britain seemed to be turning a blind eye to the plight of the Jews.

Hanns F. Skoutajan • Alternatives to appeasement

The ghost of a tall, gaunt Englishman wearing a bowler, clutching a tightly wrapped umbrella, has moved through seven decades of history confronting every peace lover with the question: peace or appeasement? The name Chamberlain has been invoked countless times, mostly in a negative sense, whenever an alternative to war has been contemplated.

BY THE OTTAWA CITIZEN SEPTEMBER 30, 2008

The ghost of a tall, gaunt Englishman wearing a bowler, clutching a tightly wrapped umbrella, has moved through seven decades of history confronting every peace lover with the question: peace or appeasement? The name Chamberlain has been invoked countless times, mostly in a negative sense, whenever an alternative to war has been contemplated.

Seventy years ago, on Sept. 30, 1938, Neville Chamberlain, prime minister of Great Britain, landed at an airport near London. In his hand he clutched a paper, the infamous Munich Agreement, which he waved as he stepped off the plane that had just brought him from Germany. He proclaimed, "peace with honour" and "peace for our time" to the cheering crowds that lined the roads all the way to 10 Downing Street.

Brits breathed a sigh of relief. Apart from a powerful navy, the British were unprepared for war. Over the past three years the German Reich had been building up a considerable military might, on the ground, in the air and on and under the sea, all in contravention of the Versailles Peace Treaty.

King George phoned him to urge Chamberlain to come to Buckingham Palace immediately to receive his personal congratulations. A tremendous ovation awaited him when the prime minister and Mrs. Chamberlain appeared on the palace balcony. At his residence a packed crowd sang "For he's a jolly good fellow." The press almost unanimously hailed him with thankfulness for having averted a blood bath.

In a broadcast speech on Sept. 27, Chamberlain proclaimed, "How horrible, fantastic, incredible it is that we should be digging trenches and trying on gas masks here because of a quarrel in a far away country between people of whom we know nothing."

This treaty severed the Sudetenland, a predominantly German area from the Republic of Czechoslovakia. The annexation deprived the Czechs of their well-fortified boundary which ran along the height of land in the mountains and the forests that divided Bohemia and Moravia from Germany. The Czechs now had no natural barriers to protect them, the 20-year-old republic, an offspring of Versailles, was now ready prey for Hitler's voracious appetite for "lebensraum" (living space) and his virulent hatred of the Czechs.

The Reichschancellor had announced that he had no claims on the rest of Czechoslovakia, that this was the last of his demands -- but the hollowness of this pledge was soon made manifest. To his confidants Hitler had flatly stated that "this guy," meaning Chamberlain, "has deprived me of my triumph (in Prague)" on the fifth anniversary of his accession to power.

The Munich Agreement was no smooth transfer, at least not for those who had been ardent opponents of fascism. German social democrats and communists had fought hard in the towns and cities of the Sudetenland against Konrad Henlein and his Nazi party who stridently called for "Heim ins Reich" for the Germans.

Many fled ahead of the Wehrmacht as they poured over the mountains and forests. My parents and I were among them, carrying a suitcase each and a backpack. Luckily, we had relatives on a farm not far from Prague where we found refuge for a few days. Thousands of others, however, had their flight rerouted by Czech authorities and were sent "home" into the waiting arms of the Gestapo. Concentration camps such as Dachau and Theresienstadt, not far from Prague, were soon occupied by these "traitors."

Among those who tried to help the most seriously endangered Sudetens was a British woman, Doreen Warriner, who had come to Prague in the summer of 1938 on behalf of Save the Children. She soon recognized the impending tragedy and with the help of others including a Canadian woman, Beatrice Wellington, a Quaker, worked day and night under extremely dangerous conditions to gather and expedite the flight of as many as possible. She and her cohorts in Britain sought to obtain British visas and transportation in a round-about way through Poland to the Baltic and thence by freighter to Britain. In an essay called Winter in Prague, Warriner tells the hair-raising story of the transfer of German anti-fascists to Britain and Sweden.

Few people know about the human calamity that the Munich Agreement brought about. At best, it bought time, not quite a year, before war broke out. Winston Churchill was one of the lone voices in Westminster who spoke out against Chamberlain's appeasement of the Fuhrer, calling the Munich Agreement a disgrace.

There were others in Britain who had tender consciences and set about to raise money for the Sudeten refugees. Under the leadership of the Lord Mayor of London and the Bishop of Chichester, action was undertaken that brought some 2,000 politically endangered to camps in Britain and Scotland as well as Sweden. After Czechoslovakia ceased to be and it became apparent that a return was not likely in the near future, most of those Sudetens came to Canada and were settled on abandoned homesteads in Saskatchewan, northwest of North Battleford and in the Peace River area, near Dawson Creek in British Columbia.

In March the following year German armies moved across the provisional border taking all the remaining country. While Hitler declared Czechoslovakia a "protectorate," the Poles helped themselves to a small industrial strip of land know as Teschen (German spelling) and the Slovaks declared themselves an independent puppet state of Germany. The Swastika now flew over Hradzany Castle which overlooks the ancient and historic city of Prague.

Peace or appeasement? The name Chamberlain has often been invoked whenever nations and their leaders have backed off from aggressors. But the Munich crisis was not a simple one. Fearing a costly war against the Czechs who had the best trained and equipped army in Europe (the Bren gun was developed by the Czechs) the General Staff of the German army were planning to revolt against Hitler. Indeed, the assassination plot came within minutes of being carried out when the announcement came that Hitler had gotten all and more than he had wanted at Munich. The possibility of the coup had been communicated to the British government who preferred to deal with diplomats rather than the would-be assassins of the Fuhrer.

There is no doubt that Chamberlain was a man of peace. Hugh R. Trevor-Roper, a distinguished Oxford professor of modern history and prolific writer on European affairs, writing 10 years after the war described Chamberlain: "His letters and papers reveal him as he was -- a man of limited intelligence, unlimited complacency and a narrow obstinacy, with a genius for banality in solemn moments and a genuine, emotional, almost mystical love of peace." He goes on to comment, "The problem now is not why he carried out this fatal policy but how such a second-rate man acquired the control of policy?"

Chamberlain had gathered around him people of questionable reliability, Sir Horace Wilson, his diplomatic adviser, Sir Neville Henderson, the ambassador to Berlin who had been charmed by Hitler, and Lord Runciman whom Chamberlain had sent to Czechoslovakia to investigate the German/Czech situation, who never made contact with the German anti-Nazi opposition. They were all rather positively inclined toward Hitler. Lord Maugham, lord chancellor of England, publicly declared that the opponents of appeasement ought to be hanged or shot.

Historians must also take into account the dubious role of France with whom Czechoslovakia had a defence pact. Its foreign minister would have preferred an alliance with the Reich against the Bolsheviks in Russia. He was not alone. The Soviet Union, slavic cousins of the Czechs, were rumoured to be ready to come to their defence but their readiness was little more than wishful thinking. In the United States, Joseph Kennedy, father of Jack Kennedy, was deeply involved in financing the German Reich. In Canada, prime minister Mackenzie King had declared Hitler "an honourable man."

In the fall of 1938 Czechoslovakia stood alone.

One asks the question with a view to our own times: is there no recourse to war other than appeasement? Hindsight is always with 20-20 vision, but undoubtedly the collapse of the League of Nations did not help in restraining Hitler's move to power. Critics of the United Nations need to bear this in mind. Hitler's aggression might have been called at the time of his march into the Rhineland, the taking of the Saarland, the building up of aggressive military power. All these had been prohibited by the Treaty of Versailles. The Anschluss of Austria in March of 1938 was probably already too late for intervention. Hitler's virulent anti-Semitism ought to have raised deep concern everywhere.

And where was the United States in all this? President Franklin D. Roosevelt had communicated several times with Herr Hitler prevailing on him not to resort to violence, but the U.S. remained faithful to the Monroe Doctrine in splendid isolation until the attack on Pearl Harbour in late 1941. Some conjecture that only for its need of oil would the U.S. retreat behind its seas once more.

Although there are frequent references to Chamberlain's folly and the Munich Agreement, there are of course no easy parallels to the Sudeten situation. Solutions to international crises are always complex, but the spectre of Chamberlain nevertheless appears again and again urging us to stay aloof or to grasp at facile answers which are always plentiful.

The question that "Munich 1938" poses is: Are there any alternatives to war and appeasement? There sure as hell better be.

War today is gruesome, total war unthinkable. There have been times in the last century when the world held its breath. The Cuban missile crisis when the Soviet Union and the United States stood at the brink of World War III was one such memorable time. But diplomacy prevailed. There was neither war nor appeasement but a bipartisan withdrawal from the chasm.

There have, of course, been numerous occasions when deadly force has been employed at various degrees of ferocity, all of them producing casualties and destruction, few of them resolving anything, (i.e. Korea).

At the same time humanity faces an ecological crisis as severe as any military confrontation. Armies do not care much about global warming or the preservation of the environment. It is obvious that war must be out of the question and that nations must address that other conflict waged against the environment.

Surely the human dilemma is not how our civilization is to perish but how this planet can be saved. The heritage we have received is too precious to be squandered by a Chamberlain or Hitler.

Hanns F. Skoutajan is author of Uprooted and Transplanted: A Sudeten Odyssey from Tragedy to Freedom. A recently produced documentary: Hitler's German Foes (Norflicks 2007) is based on his book. He is a retired United Church minister who lives in Ottawa.

© (c) CanWest MediaWorks Publications Inc.