Seeing the end of the Republic as a fait accompli, Edvard Beneš resigned as president of the First Czechoslovak Republic one week after the Munich Agreement ceded the Sudetenland to Nazi Germany. He initially fled to London. On 15 February 1939, he arrived in Chicago; he became visiting professor at the University of Chicago,[3] where he took refuge in the same community that had once buoyed his predecessor and friend, Tomáš Masaryk.[4] While there, he was urged to quickly return to Europe to organize some kind of government-in-exile.