In the tense autumn of 1938, as Nazi Germany massed troops on the borders of Czechoslovakia and the specter of another European war loomed, British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain boarded a plane for Munich, clutching the hope that one more concession might satisfy Adolf Hitler's appetite for territory. There, in a hastily arranged conference with France, Italy, and the Führer himself, the Western democracies agreed to carve away the Sudetenland—handing over a sovereign nation's defenses in exchange for a scrap of paper promising "peace for our time." This episode unpacks the high-stakes diplomacy, the desperate calculations, and the fatal misjudgment that turned appeasement into a byword for weakness, setting the stage for the catastrophe that followed.
