+ -

Permanent Mission of the Russian Federation to the European Union

Submitted on 2017-10-03 06:41:45

Comment by the Information and Press Department regarding the signing of the Munich Pact

---

September 30 is one of the darkest days in world history. On September 30, 1938, British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain and his French counterpart, Edouard Daladier, met with Hitler and Mussolini in Munich to sign an agreement that later became known as the Munich Betrayal, on the annexation of Czechoslovak regions designated as Sudetenland. Czechoslovak delegates were invited to the meeting only because they were to put their signatures on that document. Poland and Hungary also took part in the shameless division of Czechoslovakia.

Historians consider the Munich Betrayal Western European capitulation before the rising Nazism. The heads of the leading Western European countries refused to join forces with the Soviet Union against Nazism and opted instead to appease the aggressor in the hope that this would divert the threat from them and send the German war machine to the East. Later on the same day, September 30, 1938, Neville Chamberlain signed a non-aggression pact with Adolf Hitler. France did the same three months later, on December 6, 1938.

Actually, the Munich Betrayal allowed Hitler to start the Second World War, a global disaster that resulted in untold losses to all humankind, but primarily in the Soviet Union, where the war against the so-called brown plague claimed nearly 30 million lives.

It took progressive international forces considerable time and incredible effort to create the anti-Hitler coalition in order to defeat Germany and liberate Europe. The Nuremberg Trials outlawed the misanthropic Nazi ideology and practices.

We believe that the events of September 30, 1938 must be remembered as a reminder of the consequences of politically manipulating public opinion, flirting with Nazism, and the infantile pandering to neo-Nazism, which is reappearing in new forms in Europe.