By Ethel C. Fenig:
Eight decades ago, most of a battered Europe still suffering from the ravages of World War l that devastated the continent over 20 years earlier, was in no mood to fight again. But Germany, under Adolf Hitler, was. And so Hitler signed the Munich accord with England’s Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain. “Peace for our time,” Chamberlain triumphantly crowed to a delighted England as he agreed to Germany’s annexation of parts of western Czechoslovakia’s Sudetenland. Several months later, Hitler invaded Prague. The agreement was worthless.
Soon afterward, Hitler signed another agreement, the Molotov-Ribbentrop non-aggression pact with Germany’s purported rival, the Soviet Union, leaving both totalitarian states presumably free to pursue other conquests. But again, Germany broke this non-aggression pact just a few years later.
A week after signing the pact with the Soviet Union, on this date 80 years ago, September 1, 1939, Germany invaded Poland. A few days later, the U.K. and France declared war. World War ll began.
Unprepared for war, there was no peace for almost six years in the European countries that appeased these aggressors.
Read more: American Thinker
