1939

When year 1939 started nobody knew what is about to happen. This year has caused much more than anyone ever expected. It has been a gate to the biggest and widest world conflict in human history, World War II. The most important peple that affected the events of 1939 in Europe were Adolf Hitler, Benito Mussolini, Neville Chamberlain,Jozef Stalin and Jozef Tiso. Firstly the Munich Agreement forced Czechoslovakia to split up , then The Soviet Union signed a non-aggresion pact with Germany and then finally, the Nazi troops attacked the Poland.

After Adolf Hitler successfuly annexed Austria, now in 1939 he was in a good position to take on Czechoslovakia. The country had been created in 1918 from territory that had previously been part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. As well as the seven million Czechs, two million Slovaks, 700,000 Hungarians and 450,000 Ruthenians there were three and a half million German speaking people living in Czechoslovakia. Although Czechoslovakia had never been part of Germany, these people liked to call themselves Germans because of their language. Most of these people lived in the Sudetenland, an area on the Czechoslovakian border with Germany. The German speaking people complained that the Czech-dominated government discriminated against them. German's who had lost their jobs in the depression began to argue that they might be better off under Hitler. Hitler wanted to march into Czechoslovakia but his generals warned him that with its strong army and good mountain defences Czechoslovakia would be a difficult country to overcome. They also added that if Britain, France or the Soviet Union joined on the side of Czechoslovakia, Germany would probably be badly defeated. One group of senior generals even made plans to overthrow Hitler if he ignored their advice and declared war on Czechoslovakia. Unfortunatelly, things went well for Adolf Hitler and he got the chance to annex the Sudetenland and occupy the Czech.

The day before Hitler's troops invaded Czech lands in March 1939, a clero-fascist puppet state headed by Jozef Tiso (executed in 1947 as a war criminal) was set up, and Slovakia became a German ally.The centralising tendencies of the sophisticated Czechs alienated many Slovaks and, after the 1938 Munich agreement that forced Czechoslovakia to cede territory to Germany, Slovakia declared its autonomy within a federal state. Slovakia entered the year 1939 as an autonomy part of Czechoslovakia :Slovakia found itself between two totalitarian states – Nazi Germany and the Stalinist Soviet Union. As a consequence of internal division in Czechoslovakia, when the maintenance of centralist pressure and the stifling of democratic principles of autonomy by Prague proved no longer tolerable, demands for the independence of Slovakia became the more clamorous. This coincided with Hitler’s efforts to incorporate the Czech lands and Moravia into the German Reich. In 1939 the Slovak Republic was formed, Jozef Tiso becoming its president. It was a republic fettered by the powerful influence of Germany, which assumed the new state into its protective zone, with all the familiar negative consequences this entailed. The public knew little of the confidential negotiations being conducted in Vienna and Berlin by Tiso's aides, who went along with Hitler's preparation for the final takeover. In early 1939 Tiso's group prepared for the secession of Slovakia, and, on March 14, 1939, the Slovak National Assembly voted for independence, the autonomous parliament proclaimed the independence of the Slovak State. However, although recognised by more than 25 states, its independence was greatly limited by its strong economic, military and political dependence upon Germany. On the following day, Bohemia and Moravia were occupied and proclaimed a protectorate of the Third Reich.

While central Europe was being invaded by germany, Hitler In 1938 Jozef Stalin signed the Non-Aggression Pact with Hitler which bought the Soviet Union two years respite from involvement in World War II.