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At dawn on 15 March 1939, the German army (Wehrmacht) marched into Czechoslovakia’s western provinces of Bohemia and Moravia. Its uncontested occupation of Prague took place the day after the leadership of the eastern province of Slovakia petitioned Berlin to establish a German protectorate over that newly autonomous region. A treaty that accorded Berlin responsibility for directing Slovakia’s diplomatic and military affairs was signed on 23 March; the document included a secret annex that set up a customs union between Germany and Slovakia as well. At the same time, German troops seized the Baltic Sea port of Klaipeda (Memel), which Lithuania had wrested from a French wartime administration in January 1923. Taken together, these two offensives “spread alarm and confusion throughout Europe.” Some nearby countries, most notably the United Kingdom and France, stiffened their opposition to further German expansion. But others, particularly in the Baltic and the Balkans, reacted quite differently to the almost simultaneous disappearance of Czechoslovakia and Klaipeda.

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Germany’s 1939 Threat to East-Central Europe

  • 章节

  • 发表日期：

    2025年

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  • Fred H. Lawson

摘要

At dawn on 15 March 1939, the German army (Wehrmacht) marched into Czechoslovakia’s western provinces of Bohemia and Moravia. Its uncontested occupation of Prague took place the day after the leadership of the eastern province of Slovakia petitioned Berlin to establish a German protectorate over that newly autonomous region. A treaty that accorded Berlin responsibility for directing Slovakia’s diplomatic and military affairs was signed on 23 March; the document included a secret annex that set up a customs union between Germany and Slovakia as well. At the same time, German troops seized the Baltic Sea port of Klaipeda (Memel), which Lithuania had wrested from a French wartime administration in January 1923. Taken together, these two offensives “spread alarm and confusion throughout Europe.” Some nearby countries, most notably the United Kingdom and France, stiffened their opposition to further German expansion. But others, particularly in the Baltic and the Balkans, reacted quite differently to the almost simultaneous disappearance of Czechoslovakia and Klaipeda.