Short History of World War II - James L. Stokesbury [25]
After a month of unrestrained violence against Jews and anyone else who dared speak against the Nazis or union with Germany, there was a plebiscite; 99.75 percent of the voters announced themselves in favor of union.
Britain and France lodged the obligatory formal protests, but they did no more. They were busy with the neutrality patrols around Spain and the complications arising therefrom, and the problems of what Japan was doing in Asia, and they were again unwilling to act. It was almost, if not quite, the height of the movement to “appease” the dictators, the theory being that if they were given everything they asked for, eventually they would run out of things for which to ask.
The big loser was Italy. Mussolini had several times taken Austria under his protection; it was no part of his plan to have a major power at the northern end of the Alpine passes. But he too was busy in Spain, and there was little he could do about affairs except put the best face he could muster on them. Il Duce sent his warmest congratulations to der Fuehrer.
The slightest look at the map would show that the next target had to be Czechoslovakia. With Austria now an integral part of Germany, the western part of Czechoslovakia was surrounded by German territory. The question was, would there be another target, or was Hitler satisfied? and if there was to be another one, could he take on the Czechs anyway? because Czechoslovakia was a different prospect from Austria.
The Czechs were one of the successor states of the Hapsburg Empire. The state had been formed out of the most valuable parts of the old empire and included basically, from west to east, the Sudetenland, which was the mountainous rim around the western end of the Bohemian basin; then there was Bohemia itself; then Moravia; and then Slovakia. Essentially, when the empire broke up, the South Slavs had taken the southern Slavic areas and formed Yugoslavia, and the Czechs had taken the rest of the Slavic areas to form Czechoslovakia. The population was about 15,000,000 including substantial numbers of non-Czech minorities, especially Germans in the Sudetenland, and some Poles and Magyars as well here and there.
In spite of its ethnic complexity, Czechoslovakia, led by its founder T. G. Masaryk until his death in 1937, was viewed as the most viable democratic state in central Europe. It was certainly the most prosperous and the most industrialized. There was substantial heavy industry, the most famous being the Skoda works which were the major military suppliers to the old empire, and in the interwar years produced some of the best weaponry in Europe.
The Czechs had fortified the Sudetenland, the mountainous western boundary. They had a good army, bigger than the German; they were well supplied with tanks and artillery, and they had a useful little air force. They were allied with Rumania, Yugoslavia, and most important, France, and through France with Poland as well. They had an arbitration agreement with Germany, and in 1935 they signed a mutual-assistance pact with Russia, which obligated Russia to come to Czechoslovakia’s aid if France did so. This agreement resulted from a pact France signed with Russia earlier in 1935, when she began to be even more worried than usual about Germany; the flaw in the treaty lay in the fact that Russia and Czechoslovakia had no contiguous territory, and to come to her aid, the Russians would need transit rights from her neighbors.
The Czechs nonetheless were buttressed by their own resources, as well as their allies. They were committed to western-style democracy and to their own independence.
Most of them.
The minorities presented a problem, and the biggest minority, and therefore the biggest problem, was the Sudeten Germans. For centuries German had dominated Slav, and the Sudetenlanders did