WWII IN EUROPE:  REVIEW IV The Anschluss In the spring of 1938, Hitler tested appeasement again with his annexation of Austria.  The Austrian Nazi Party “invited” native son Adolf Hitler to “rescue” them from persecution.  On March 12, Nazi troops entered Austria to cheers and ovations.  England and France, predictably, did nothing.  Hitler now set his sights on Czechoslovakia. The Sudetenland and the Munich Conference As part of his plan to gather all German-speaking people into a “Greater Germany,” Hitler now demanded the return of part of Czechoslovakia known as the Sudetenland, which contained a large German minority.  In the face of these threats, the Czech government called upon its allies, England and France, to affirm their pledge to go to war with Germany if she attacked Czechoslovakia. Czech leaders, along with the leaders of England and France, met with Hitler at Munich in September 1938.  Hitler alternately bullied and flattered the English Prime Minister, Neville Chamberlain.  Hitler assured Chamberlain that Germany only wanted the Sudetenland—he would leave the rest of Czechoslovakia alone.  Continuing on the course of appeasement, Chamberlain agreed to the dismemberment of Czechoslovakia. On October 1, 1938, the Nazis marched into the Sudetenland.  In March 1939, the Nazis swallowed the rest of Czechoslovakia.  (Poland and Hungary, the Czech’s historic enemies, also took some 8,000 square miles of territory.) Hitler had gained another country without firing a shot. Meanwhile, England and France, Czechoslovakia’s allies,  did nothing. Kristallnacht With every concession made to Hitler, he grew bolder.  Following the Anchluss with Austria and the annexation of the Sudetenland, the Nazis stepped up their persecution of the Jews.  Following the assassination of a minor German official in Paris by a Polish Jew, Herschel Grynzpan—whose parents recently were forcibly deported from Germany by the Nazis—the Nazis unleashed a carefully coordinated pogram against Germany’s Jews.  The SA, SS, and German police led mobs in the streets.  They vandalized Jewish synagogues, businesses, and homes.  They rounded up Jewish men and deported them to concentration camps, like Dachau and Sachsenhausen.  Then, to add insult to injury, when German Jews applied to their insurance companies for compensation, their payments were confiscated by the government, and they were forced to pay 4 billion Reichsmarks in “fines” to the Nazi state.