<P> Though the British and French were pleased, as were the Nazi military and German diplomatic leadership, a British diplomat in Berlin claimed he had been informed by reliable sources that soon after the meeting with Chamberlain Hitler had furiously said: "Gentlemen, this has been my first international conference and I can assure you that it will be my last". The British diplomat claimed his sources relayed that Hitler viewed Chamberlain as "an impertinent busybody who spoke the ridiculous jargon of an outmoded democracy ." In his postwar memoirs, Winston Churchill, a staunch opponent of appeasement, compared Germany and Poland (who annexed a part of Czechoslovakia with Polish minority in October 1938) to vultures landing on the dying carcass of Czechoslovakia and lamented that "over a question so minor as Teschen, they (the Poles) sundered themselves from all those friends in France, Britain and the United States who had lifted them once again to a national, coherent life, and whom they were soon to need sorely...It is a mystery and tragedy of European history that a people capable of every heroic virtue, gifted, valiant, charming, as individuals, should repeatedly show such inveterate faults in almost every aspect of their governmental life ." </P> <P> Australian Prime Minister Joseph Lyons said "We owe heartfelt thanks to all responsible for the outcome, and appreciate very much the efforts of President Roosevelt and Signor Mussolini to bring about the Munich conference of the Powers at which a united desire for peace has been shown .") </P> <P> Joseph Stalin was also upset by the results of the Munich conference . The Soviets, who had a mutual military assistance treaty with Czechoslovakia, felt betrayed by France, who also had a mutual military assistance treaty with Czechoslovakia . The British and French, however, mostly used the Soviets as a threat to dangle over the Germans . Stalin concluded that the West had actively colluded with Hitler to hand over a Central European country to the Nazis, causing concern that they might do the same to the Soviet Union in the future, allowing the partition of the USSR between the western powers and the fascist Axis . This belief led the Soviet Union to reorient its foreign policy towards a rapprochement with Germany, which eventually led to the signing of the Molotov - Ribbentrop Pact in 1939 . </P> <P> Daladier, the French Prime Minister, told the US ambassador to France that "he hoped to live long enough to pay Poland for her cormorant attitude in the present crisis by proposing a new partition ." The Soviet Union was so hostile to Poland over Munich that there was a real prospect that war between the two states might break out quite separate from the wider conflict over Czechoslovakia . The Soviet Prime Minister, Molotov, denounced the Poles as "Hitler's jackals". </P>

What conference held in 1938 sought to prevent war between germany and the western democracies