In March 1939, the last vestiges of appeasement died. Adolph Hitler, until he occupied Bohemia and Moravia, had a serious diplomatic argument for his territorial aggression in Europe. The Saar plebiscite in 1935 surprised much of the world. Germans living in a relatively safe, relatively prosperous, relatively free regime chose to surrender their independence and join Hitler’s Third Reich. One year later, German troops occupied, without French resistance, the Rhineland. In 1938, Austria was made a part of Germany. Soon thereafter, the German population in the Sudetenland (the northwest frontier of a polyglot Czechoslovakia) was brought into the Reich.
