I

Germany’s seizure of Czechoslovakia in March 1939 inaugurated the final crisis in the disintegration of the Versailles peace structure and the march toward war. Again, Britain, France, and the United States – the makers of the Versailles Treaty – had failed to relieve Europe’s burgeoning tensions by modifying their treaty or defending it through an effective display of force. Even after the Munich settlement of the previous September, British leaders assumed that some form of accommodation would produce a general European settlement and forestall a German continental hegemony. But in the fall of Prague they detected a new and inescapable threat to Europe’s future. What troubled European observers was not merely the ruthlessness of the German occupation but, even more alarming, the revelation of a German expansionism without visible limit. On no grounds, and certainly not self-determination, could anyone justify such aggression. “The utter cynicism and immorality of the whole performance,” wrote British Ambassador Sir Nevile Henderson from Berlin, “defies description. Nazism has definitely crossed the rubicon of purity of race and German unity….”