But by all odds the dominating figure at Munich was the German host, Adolf Hitler. He had torn the Treaty of Versailles to shreds. He had stolen Austria before the eyes of a horrified and apparently impotent world. See pictures of Hitler Exhibit in Germany. All these events were shocking to nations which had defeated Germany on the battlefield only 20 years before, but nothing so terrified the world as the ruthless, methodical, Nazi-directed events which during late summer and early autumn threatened a world war over Czechoslovakia.
Most other world figures of faded in importance as the year drew to a close. Among many Frenchmen there rose a feeling that Premier Daladier, by a few strokes of the pen at Munich, had turned France into a second-rate power. His noisy agitation to get Corsica and Tunis from France was rated as a weak bluff whose immediate objectives were no more than cheaper tolls for Italian ships in the Suez Canal and control of the Djibouti-Addis Ababa railroad.
But victory still eluded the Generalissimo and war weariness and disaffection on the Rightist side made his future precarious. Secretary Hull will remember Good Neighborly as the year he crowned his trade treaty efforts with the British agreement, but history will not specially identify Mr. Hull with But the figure of Adolf Hitler strode over a cringing Europe with all the swagger of a conqueror.
Japan during the same time added tens of millions of Chinese to her empire. More significant was the fact Hitler became in the greatest threatening force that the democratic, freedom-loving world faces today.
In France Nazi pressure was in part responsible for some of the post-Munich anti-democratic decrees. Fascism had intervened openly in Spain, had fostered a revolt in Brazil, was covertly aiding revolutionary movements in Rumania, Hungary, Poland, Lithuania. In Finland a foreign minister had to resign under Nazi pressure.
