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The Czechs then withdrew to another room to decide their course. The documents had already been laid out for them to sign, and Goring and Ribbentrop pursued them around the table, pushing documents and pens at them. Hacha fainted dead away. Hitler's personal doctor came and gave him an injection, and just before 4 a.m. he recovered sufficiently to sign away his country. The western provinces of Bohemia and Moravia became a German "protectorate"; Slovakia was granted a shadowy "independence."
There were the usual protests, with the usual results, but Hitler's seizure of Bohemia and Moravia had two important consequences. First, Chamberlain finally realized that appeasement would not suffice to restrain Hitler. So when Hitler began talking to the Poles in that same month about the Germans' need to regain the port of Danzig, plus free passage through the Polish Corridor, Chamberlain offered the Poles an unsolicited guarantee of British military support. It was that guarantee that Hitler flouted the following September.
The second important consequence was convincing Stalin that the Western powers would never resist Hitler's increasingly aggressive expansion eastward. Stalin had several times proposed a treaty with the Western powers to check Hitler's ambitions, but he had been ignored. With the treachery characteristic of him -- he had purged dozens of his top army officers on false charges of conspiring with the Germans to overthrow him -- he began exploring the possibility of signing an alliance with those same Germans. To Hitler, who had been ranting about "the struggle against Bolshevism" for nearly 20 years, it seemed like an offer he couldn't refuse.
If the German conflicts with France ran back for centuries, so did those with the Poles, conflicts tinged with contempt. Long before Hitler, General Hans von Seeckt, the haughty army commander during the Weimar Republic, had said of the frontiers established by Versailles, "Poland's existence is intolerable, incompatible with the essential conditions of Germany's life. Poland must go and will go." That was the mission that Hitler now vowed to carry out.