Eighty Years Ago This Week

  The Czechoslovak government began the expulsion of German speakers in line with a policy established by the government-in-exile in London during the war and supported by the then British government. The Sudetens were concentrated around the country's borders with Germany and Austria. Hitler's takeover of the Sudetenland under the Munich agreement of 1938 was a major step on the road to war and the move aimed to remove the risk of some future recurrence. The plan had been approved at the Potsdam Conference. Ultimately over 2m people would be forcibly resettled in US and Soviet zones of occupied Germany.   The first resolution passed by the UN general assembly established the United Nations Atomic Energy Commission to "to deal with the problems raised by the discovery of atomic energy."  In particular it was to find ways of ensuring that atomic energy was to be used solely for peaceful purposes and to eliminate nuclear weapons from "national arsenals". Th...

  General de Gaulle resigned as the head of government. There was no single, overwhelming issue; rather he felt he was unsuited to the contingencies and compromises of party politics if he was not able to dominate the whole political scene. He had debated his intentions in the course of a week's holiday at Antibes and seemed to have accepted that he ought to have withdrawn immediately after the liberation in a vividly imagined vision of his role model caught by a far more banal fate than the one which actually befell her, "...one can't imagine Joan of Arc married, a mother, and who knows, deceived by her husband." (Je n'imagine pas Jeanne d'Arc mariée, mère de famille et, qui sait, trompée par son mari). It was more appropriate for the saviour of the nation to be martyred than to be swallowed by life in all its ordinariness. The Soviets used the newly established UN Security council as a springboard for two attempts to assert their power. Off their own bat the...

  As the United Nations General Assembly met for the first time in London, other key features of the new organization began to emerge clearly. Paul-Henri Spaak, a leading Belgian socialist politician, was elected as chairman of the assembly by 28 votes to 23. He defeated Norwegian Trygve Lie, also a socialist politician. The debate over who should become the first UN Secretary-General was a far more delicate affair. The Soviet Union was opposed to the de facto US candidate, Lester Pearson, because he was a North American; whilst the Soviet Union was running two candidates openly, a Pole and a Yugoslav, it was clear from the outset that a compromise candidate was the likely winner and Lie's name was in the frame from the outset. Both Spaak and Lie were to go on to high profile and successful careers, perhaps a reflection of the UN's far better standing than the League of Nations. The  Secretary-General was, and still is, the most important single individual in the organisation ...

  The General Assembly of the newly established United Nations Organization held its first meeting in the Methodist Central Hall in Westminster after intense efforts to create from scratch a key body that was to avoid the failures of the League of Nations. The hall had just enough space to accomodate the delegations of the 51 original member countries and had been redecorated by the Ministry of Works in lieu of rental; the light blue colour emblematic of UNO still today predominated. The massive organ was masked by the UNO's globe emblem. In the rehearsals for the opening session a British diplomat had adopted the identity of the delegate from Antarctica and delivered a moving speech on the aspirations and disappointments of the penguins. The four occupying powers met to discuss the shape of the German economy in peacetime. Their paramount consideration was to prevent a resurgence of German military might. Their first firm conclusion was that steel output - then the prime measure o...