‘Munich, 1938’ offers particularly timely lessons

Bullies, whether they’re teenage punks or middle-age tyrants, like to tell you what they’re going to do. ‘‘I’m going to beat you up after school.’’ ‘‘I’m going to wipe you off the face of the earth.’’

Case in point, Adolf Hitler, the garden-variety thug who managed to seize control of 1930s Germany and lead it into a war that killed upward of 50 million people. Hitler said he was going to take over Europe. He said he was going to war before England and France could stop him. He didn’t believe they would be able to do so, and he gambled that they would be loath to try.

He was right.

In "Munich, 1938: Appeasement and World War II," historian David Faber looks at those disastrous weeks in fall 1938 when Hitler perhaps could have been dissuaded from his monstrous plans. Instead, the leaders of France and, particularly Britain, put their faith in what they wished and hoped, rather than in the plain facts in front of them.

Certain photos have chilling power because now we know the rest of the story — President and Mrs. Kennedy, her in a pretty pink suit, arriving at Love Field in Dallas — a glimmering silver passenger jet moving inexorably across a perfect blue September sky toward the South Tower — Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain, fresh off a plane from Germany after his third trip over to bargain with Hitler, brandishing a piece of paper signed by the Fuhrer himself.

‘‘Peace with honor.’’ ‘‘Peace for our time,’’ Chamberlain announced that evening to a cheering crowd. England and France thought they had bought off Hitler by handing him the part of Czechoslovakia known as the Sudetenland, forcing the Czechs to agree to the carving up of their country.

‘‘Lebensraum,’’ Hitler ranted. ‘‘Space.’’ Some 80 million Germans needed space to expand, to rebuild from the earlier ‘‘Great War.’’ But all Europe was not big enough for Hitler’s predatory ambitions. He told his people, as Faber points out, that England was too weak and decadent to stop him, and France was tied up in internal politics. The time to move was now.

The Czechs knew it. So did Churchill. But Chamberlain refused to know.

Winston Churchill, voice from the wilderness of political exile, had raised the alarm throughout the ’30s about Germany’s rearmament. He warned that Britain was virtually defenseless.

But taking that warning to heed would mean confronting the little Austrian painter, calling his bluff on a gamble that might end up in war. It would mean a frantic rush to build planes, train pilots, equip an army, taking taxi drivers and bank clerks and coal miners and students off their jobs and putting them on the parade field and the shooting range, turning them into soldiers.

Britain, still clawing out of the Great Depression and shellshocked from the devastation of the last great conflict — more than 700,000 British dead, and at least twice that many wounded, by minimum estimates — desperately wanted not to fight.

In the end, as we know, it had to anyway. Hitler’s Nazi army marched into Austria, then the Czech-German border region known as the Sudetenland, and then overran tiny Czechoslovakia, so bitterly betrayed by its Western allies. Then he turned on Poland, and, almost too late, Britain had to stand and fight. Ready or not, Europe was plunged into war.

Faber takes us almost minute by minute through the crucial events of 1938 leading up to the agreement at Munich that Germany and Great Britain would never again wage war against each other — an agreement that, of course, turned out to be worthless. Faber looks at the goings-on inside Hitler’s inner circle, including a sex scandal that rocked the upper echelons of the German military even as Hitler’s generals were urging him not to go to war.

Why should we care what happened in Europe some 70 years ago?

It’s all just a little bit of history repeating, to quote Shirley Bassey, in her inimitable rendition of The Propellerheads song. Faber’s retelling of the events of September 1938 lays out a road map of appeasement and folly.

Human nature being what it is, each generation has its own tyrants. Ours include the murderous dynasty in nuclear North Korea, the cruel Islamic dictatorship in Iran (hell-bent on nuclear weapons and whose president threatens to wipe other countries off the map), and the tin pot dictator Hugo Chavez, who is busily erasing democracy in Venezuela and whose chums include — you guessed it — the North Koreans and Iran’s Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. The threats coming from these men seem so preposterous that we could think ourselves fools to take them seriously.

But they take themselves very seriously, indeed. That’s the trouble with tyrants, and those we face are drinking from the cup of nuclear courage. A nasty potion indeed.