IB History German Expansion Notes

The Destruction of Czechoslovakia (March 1939)

1. Only six months after the Munich Agreement, Hitler broke his promise. In March 1939, German troops marched into the remaining Czech lands, turning Bohemia and Moravia into a German protectorate. Slovakia became a puppet state under German control.
2. This was fundamentally different from previous demands. The Sudetenland could be justified by self-determination (3 million ethnic Germans); Bohemia and Moravia were populated by Czechs, not Germans. This was naked imperial conquest, not treaty revision.
3. Germany gained Czechoslovakia's Skoda armaments factories (among the world's largest), its gold reserves, and vast industrial capacity. The Czech army's equipment, including 1,500 aircraft and 469 tanks, was absorbed into the Wehrmacht.
4. In the same month, Hitler forced Lithuania to cede Memel (Klaipeda), a port city with a German-speaking population that had been separated from Germany by the Treaty of Versailles. Lithuania could not resist without allies.
5. The occupation of Czechoslovakia was the decisive turning point that ended appeasement. It proved Hitler's aims went beyond uniting German speakers; he sought Lebensraum and imperial domination over non-German peoples.

The Crisis Over Poland

1. Between October 1938 and January 1939, Germany had already been pressuring Poland over territory. Hitler demanded the return of Danzig and a road/rail corridor through the Polish Corridor to connect Germany with East Prussia.
2. Danzig was 95% German-speaking but had been designated a League-administered free city at Versailles. The Polish Corridor gave Poland its only access to the Baltic Sea but cut East Prussia off from the German mainland.

1. Poland refused to make concessions. Unlike Austria or Czechoslovakia, Poland had a strong national identity, a military of over 1 million men, a mutual defence treaty with France dating to 1921, and had seen that concessions had not saved Czechoslovakia.