<<< Finally and critically, most historians now disagree that Chamberlain’s
weakness and irresolution over Czechoslovakia led Hitler to discount the
possibility of military reprisal if Germany invaded Poland. According to
recent scholarship, Hitler himself viewed the result of Munich as a
“crushing defeat”, one in which he abandoned his true goal – which was to
seize Prague by force – in the face of British pressure. As Andrei
Francois Poncet, the French Ambassador in Berlin, noted, “Hitler did not
at all believe that he had, at Munich, achieved a success. He felt, on the
contrary, that he renounced his original objective, that he had
compromised and capitulated.” Having once retreated, Hitler was
determined not to repeat the performance. He told his aides that his
greatest fear with respect to Poland was not that Britain and France
would intervene, but that they would again broker some kind of
agreement that he would be unable to reject. If this account is
accurate, then Chamberlain’s act of appeasement in Munich was not
directly linked to Hitler’s decision to invade Poland. >>>
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