Munich - The Edge of War is a film adaptation of the thriller by Robert Harris showing Neville Chamberlain, the British prime minister at the notorious 1938 Munich conference attended by the UK, Italy, France and Germany before the outbreak of the Second World War. The conference was convened by Hitler to persuade the western powers to allow Nazi Germany to decide the future for Czech Sudetenland, a key early step in Hitler’s plan for world domination.

The film shows Hugh Legat and Paul von Hartman, who are fictional junior members of the British and German government teams who happened to be best friends at Oxford in the early 30s and their friend Lena, a German Jewish student. In 1938 Paul is secretly anti-Nazi, with a dangerous mission to show the British government a highly controversial  document with evidence of Hitler’s plans for conquest of Europe. Hitler had promised that if Germany was allowed to take the Sudetenland, that would be their final territorial gain but the document showed that this was a lie.

Von Hartman goes to extreme lengths to get the document to Chamberlain via Legat and then to try to convince Chamberlain in person that Hitler is not to be trusted. The British were increasingly committed to the policy of appeasement and to averting war so they were reluctant to believe Von Hartman and pull out of the agreement, knowing that refusal to sign might give rise to war. But the film shows that despite Chamberlain’s initial reluctance to believe the document, he did in fact change his mind and ask Hitler to sign an additional document to ensure ‘peace in our time’.

History traditionally shows Chamberlain in a bad light as an appeaser of Hitler. However the film shows Chamberlain and appeasement in a different light implying that the delay created by the Munich agreement gave Britain valuable time to build up its army and prepare for war. It also shows that the British government and the British population at the time actually celebrated Chamberlain’s policy of appeasement because they too underestimated the threat of Hitler and the Nazi party.

The film displays the antisemitism seen in Germany in 1938 accurately although in little detail. The fate of the German Jewish student Lena who is taken to a camp for protesting is shown in one scene where we see that she was beaten and abused and mysteriously ‘fell out of a window’ and is now dying alone in hospital.

The film is now available on Netflix and is valuable watching for any students studying the run up to the Second World War.