Video: 'Peace Four Power Conference (1938)'

(Friday, September 30, 1938, 5:38 p.m. BST) — British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain declared the Munich Agreement would bring “peace for our time” as he arrived home from Germany to a cheering crowd this afternoon at the Heston Aerodrome .

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

Chamberlain, German Chancellor Adolf Hitler, Italian Premier Benito Mussolini and French Prime Minister Édouard Daladier signed the Munich Agreement, officially dated  Sept. 29, 1938, early this morning at the Rheinhotel Dreesen in Bad Godesberg, Germany.

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 would become “a byword for the futility of appeasing expansionist totalitarian states.”

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