JF Ptak Science Books   Post 1918   Part of the History of Anticipation series

This ad appeared in the Illustrated London News for 1 May 1937, Thomas Cook & Son Ltd revving up the summer vacationing wares for traveling Brits. No doubt the claims of beauty and history and interest and charm were/are true–its just that by October of the following year Adolf Hitler would be surveying his newest conquest from the Castle in Prague. 

Hitler wanted what he wanted, and in 1937 he revealed to his high command that he wanted Czechoslovakia.  The method would be to claim that ethnic Germans were being maltreated in the Czech border lands (Seudetenland) and that these German minorities must be saved. A crisis developed over this time, through 1937 and into October 1938, and arrangements between the ruling powers in the West were made with Hitler to give him a chunk of Czechoslovakia, (Neville Chamberlain infamously showing his Hitler-signed document pledging no further military expansion following this Czech-absent concession), though this proved to be not enough. The West didn’t want to fight Hitler over Czechoslovakia–and indeed they probably really weren’t ready for it, though in a way France was in a very 1918-kinda-way–so they gave in, and allowed the Nazis to annex a part of the country, and then stood by when Hitler invaded and established protectorate states with the rest of it. (And of course right before this, in March 1938, Hitler annexed Austria under threat of great force and constant pressure from Germany and within Austria, the Anschluss marking the first major step towards the construction of the expanded German Reich and the destruction of tens of millions of people.) Less than a year after that, Hitler would invade Poland, and allied forces could take no more. 

In any event, the advertisement struck me as wilting, and hollow, a great feeling of anticipated grief.

[Czech citizens having to greet soft-invading German troops, October, 1938.]