The Munich crisis remains among the most dramatic and tragic military–diplomatic crises of the twentieth century. Hitler used the plausible claim of self-determination of peoples to demand and achieve annexation – without war – of the 3.5 million Sudeten Germans in Czechoslovakia, a state of approximately 12 million people, chiefly Slavs. He thereby took possession of the fortified mountain frontier along the border of Germany and Czechoslovakia and rendered indefensible the previously most immediate – and most formidable – barrier to his planned takeover of Eastern Europe. Czechoslovakia and its allies, France and the Soviet Union, could muster a combined military force six or seven times larger than that of Germany at the time, yet Hitler's public demands were met without a fight. If the fight had occurred in September 1938, given both the odds against a German victory and the prospect of an effective conspiracy against Hitler inside the German high command – some of his generals planned to attack him if war broke out at that time – World War II as we know it simply could not have happened. The Czech army begged to fight, but Czech President Edvard Beneš capitulated. Forsaken by his French allies, he was afraid that the Soviets would not assist him without French support, that the Czechoslovak Republic would be left to face the Wehrmacht alone against hopeless odds.

Books about Munich are by no means rare.