Video: 'Munich Agreement Signed. Hitler, Mussolini, Chamberlain, Daladier (1938)'

(Friday, September 30, 1938, at about 1:30 a.m. CET) — German Chancellor Adolf Hitler, British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain, Italian Premier Benito Mussolini and French Prime Minister Édouard Daladier signed the Munich Agreement  early this morning at the Rheinhotel Dreesen in Bad Godesberg, Germany.

The agreement, dated Sept. 29, 1938, permitted Nazi Germany to annex portions of Czechoslovakia, along the country’s borders mainly inhabited by German speakers, for which a new territorial designation, the “Sudetenland,” was coined.

The Czechoslovak government was largely excluded from the negotiations and was not a signatory to the agreement.

The agreement would become widely regarded as a failed act of appeasement, and the term has become “a byword for the futility of appeasing expansionist totalitarian states.”

Video: 'The World At War 1973(World War II Documentary) 01.A New Germany (1933–1939)' (Munich Agreement at 37:35)

Video: 'World War II - Blitzkrieg to the Bomb Documentary' (Munich Agreement at 4:08)