Read the passage from "The Spanish Civil War.”Four months later the morale of the increasingly hard-pressed republicans received another major blow when Britain, France, and Italy acknowledged Hitler's preeminence in Europe by accepting his diktat at Munich that deprived Czechoslovakia of its borderland defenses. The Nazi triumph was followed by Franco's massive invasion of the province of Catalonia and the capture of Barcelona, its major city. In March of the following year, a nationalist offensive seized in two days Madrid, and the last loyalist forces surrendered on April 1.