I wouldn’t go around saying ‘Salaam, Hitler’! 

• 1938 
• Sillince, William 
• Drawing 
• Historical item 

6509451

Drawings / paintings

I wouldn’t go around saying ‘Salaam, Hitler’!

38 x 28 cm

1938

Original political cartoon in pencil on textured wove paper for Punch magazine, 1938, shows a woman speaking to her husband who is reading a newspaper with the headline ‘Hitler springs big surprise’. In September the first of three meetings took place between the British prime minister Neville Chamberlain and German leader Hitler at Berchtesgaden, near Munich in southern Germany. At this meeting Hitler demanded that the ethnic German Sudetenland part of Czechoslovakia should be handed over to Germany. Without consulting the Czechs, Chamberlain agreed that those areas containing more than 50% Germans should be given to Germany. Chamberlain managed to get the Czechs and the French to agree to this solution. On September 22nd, Chamberlain flew to Bad Godesberg to meet Hitler so that the final details of the plan could be worked out. At this meeting Hitler made new demands that took Chamberlain by surprise. Hitler wanted German troops to occupy the Sudetenland. He also demanded that territory containing a majority of Poles and Magyars should also be returned to Poland and Hungary. Britain and France rejected these demands and both the French and British governments prepared for war. So at this moment there could be no more use of the salutation ‘salaam’ (peace be with you) to Hitler. War was averted on this occasion when Britain and France gave in to Hitler’s demands in the notorious Munich Agreement signed at the end of September. Date stamped 21 Sep 1938 on verso and published in Punch magazine on 28 September 1938; also reproduced in “We’re all in it”, a collection of cartoons by Sillince (1941, p.13). Card size 38 x 28 cm (15 x 11 inch), image size 27 x 18 cm, signed lower right, caption in red ink in lower border. The caption has faded almost to the point of ineligibility, otherwise in very good condition.