Meanwhile, the British government has asked Benea to ask for a mediator. As he did not want to sever his government`s relations with Western Europe, the heirs reluctantly agreed. The British appointed Lord Runciman, the former Liberal cabinet minister, who arrived in Prague on 3 August to convince Benes to accept an acceptable plan for the Sudeten Germans. [23] On 20 July, Bonnet informed the Czechoslovakian ambassador in Paris that France, while publicly declaring its support for the Czechoslovakian negotiations, was not prepared to go to war on the Sudetenland. [23] In August, the German press was full of stories of Czechoslovakian atrocities against the Sudeten Germans, with the intention of forcing the West to put pressure on the Czechoslovakians to make concessions. [24] Hitler hoped that the Czechoslovaks would refuse and that the West would feel morally justified in abandoning the Czechoslovaks to their fate. [25] In August, Germany sent 750,000 troops along the border with Czechoslovakia, officially as part of military maneuvers. [9] [25] On September 4 or 5,[23] Erbe presented the fourth plan, which met almost all of the requirements of the agreement. The Sudeten Germans were invited by Hitler to the prairies to avoid compromise,[25] and the SdP organized demonstrations which, on 7 September, provoked a police operation in Ostrava, during which two of its deputies were arrested. [23] The Sudeten Germans used the incident and the false allegations of other atrocities as a pretext to interrupt further negotiations.
[23] [26] The positive appeasement was partly marked by media manipulation. The German correspondent for the Times of London, Norman Ebbutt, criticized him for his insistent reports of Nazi militarism being suppressed by his publisher Geoffrey Dawson. Historians such as Richard Cockett, William Shirer and Frank McDonough confirmed this assertion[57] and noted the links between The Observer and the Pro-Appeasement Cliveden Set. [59] The results of an October 1938 Gallup poll, which found that 86% of people believed Hitler was lying about his future territorial ambitions, was censored at the last minute by the publisher, loyal to Chamberlain, of the News Chronicle. [60] For the few journalists who asked difficult questions about appeasement – especially members of the foreign press – Chamberlain often rubbed or intimidated them. Asked at press conferences about the abuse of Jews and other minority groups of Hitler, he went so far as to denounce these reports as “Judeo-communist propaganda”. [61] The Czechoslovakians were appalled by the colony of Munich. They were not invited to the conference and felt betrayed by the British and French governments. Many Czechs and Slovaks describe the Munich agreement as a Munich diktat (Czech: Mnichovska diktéta); in Slovak: Mnechovska diktét).
The phrase “Munich betrayal” (Czech: Mnichovska zrada; In Slovak: Mnechovska zrada) is also used because Czechoslovakia`s military alliance with France proved useless. This is also reflected in the fact that the French government, in particular, had considered that Czechoslovakia would be held responsible for any European war that would result if the Czechoslovak Republic defended itself by force against German abuses. In 1938, the Soviet Union was allied with France and Czechoslovakia.