Neville Chamberlain, the Prime Minister of the United Kingdom from 1937 to 1940, pursued a policy of appeasement toward Nazi Germany in an attempt to avoid war. This culminated in the Munich Agreement of 1938, in which Britain and France agreed to cede the Sudetenland region of Czechoslovakia to Germany in exchange for a promise of peace from Adolf Hitler. Chamberlain famously proclaimed upon his return to Britain that he had secured "peace for our time," but the agreement ultimately failed to prevent the outbreak of World War II the following year. Appeasement has since become a controversial policy, with some arguing that it emboldened Hitler and others maintaining that it was a necessary attempt to avoid a wider conflict.
