Munich: The Edge of War

[silverscreenselect]

This is a fascinating new movie on Netflix about the events leading up to the 1938 Munich conference that resulted in a treaty allowing German to take over the Sudetenland in Czechoslovakia and led Neville Chamberlain to infamously note that he had returned from Germany with "peace for our time" (a quote that won me $32,000 on WWTBAM). The film is based on a novel by Robert Harris and focuses on two fictional junior diplomats, one English and one German, who were former classmates at Oxford. The German gets hold of a smoking gun, notes of a secret meeting between Hitler and his generals at which he outlined his plans to conquer Europe. The two hope to get the document to Chamberlain before he signs any treaty. You can probably guess how that eventually turns out.

The only familiar face in the cast is Jeremy Irons as Chamberlain. The movie portrays him somewhat more favorably than history has. But what really struck me were the similarities between the current situation with Putin and the Ukraine and Hitler's designs on Czechoslovakia in 1938. Just change the names and countries around and you could be talking about the current world situation. It was a very creepy feeling listening to that (of course the movie and the Robert Harris novel it's based on were written well before the current Ukraine crisis).