English Translation

246 The joke tells of statistics that it reproduces the exact sum of inaccurate data. Something tragic about exact sums of inaccurate values was the politics and strategy of the Western democracies after the World War and especially after 1933, as far as the assessment of the strength of Germany and Italy was concerned. It was forgotten that it was not enough simply to count regiments and guns together and to evaluate the economic situation from the old point of view. Above all, it would have been necessary to estimate the moral forces of both revolutions, the German and the Italian, accordingly, but this did not succeed. In assessing the political and strategic situation, however, much depends on the ability to assess one's own forces impartially, and here the second fundamental mistake was made by the Western powers. With the underestimation of the moral forces of the German and Italian revolutions and with the overestimation by England and France, the fate of the Czech people also hangs in 5