Hitler’s greatest gamble in 1938 was his determination to occupy the Czechoslovak Sudetenland, even at the risk of sparking a European war. Neither Neville Cham- berlain nor the French prime minister, Edouard Daladier, was prepared to play for such high stakes and they threw in their chips, giving the Führer what he wanted without bloodshed. It will therefore come as a surprise that in Giles MacDonogh’s 1938: Hitler’s Gamble, a mere seven paragraphs are devoted to the Munich conference that effectively sealed Czechoslovakia’s fate.

Instead it is the Austrian capital that takes centre stage in this compelling survey of a tumultuous year. Given the extensive literature on the Munich carve-up, most recently and successfully by David Faber, the focus on Vienna is certainly justifiable. There is, after all, a natural tendency to see Hitler’s unopposed invasion of Austria in March 1938 as a fait accompli, with the details of the anschluss skimmed over as a mere prelude to the main event at Munich six months later. In contrast, MacDonogh shows how the vicious crushing of Austrian opposition and the persecution of Vienna’s Jews demonstrated — or should have demonstrated — to the world the true nature of the Nazi regime and the scale of its terrible ambitions.

At the time, there was little international sympathy for Kurt von Schuschnigg, the Austrian Chancellor whose decision to hold a plebiscite on Austria’s independence succeeded only in bringing on Germany’s invasion. Aside from its resistance to annexation by the Third Reich, there was not much to admire about Schuschnigg’s Corporate State. Even the proposed plebiscite was scarcely fair — the ballot slips only had ja printed on them. Austrians wanting merger with Germany would have had to bring their own nein scrawled scraps of paper to the polling station. Schuschnigg’s enforced resignation hastily followed by the invasion just before the vote was due to be held, made the whole performance unnecessary. Hitler’s arrival in Vienna was saluted by enough ecstatic Austrian pro-Nazis and wind-following opportunists to convince the world to mind its own business. Only Mexico and the embattled Spanish Republican government issued formal protests to the extinction of a major European nation-state.

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