Appeasement of Hitler
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The most well-known case of appeasement is one which ultimately failed — the appeasement of Adolf Hitler by British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain's government in the late 1930s. The Munich Agreement in particular stands as a major example of appeasement. There is, however, a large historiographical debate about appeasement.
Reasons why the British government appeased Hitler
- The main reason was that confrontation would probably lead to war, and Britain would probably lose. While ahead in seapower, the British were behind in airpower and land strength.
- Memories of the First World War. Britain and especially France were extremely reluctant to fight because of the psychological trauma resulting from having witnessed the mass deaths of vast numbers of young men in 1914-1918. King George V famously said that he would rather abdicate and stand in Trafalgar Square in central London singing The Red Flag (the socialist and communist anthem) than allow his country to go through another war like 1914–18.
- Fear of strategic bombing. In 1932 the British MP Stanley Baldwin declared that "I think it is well for the man on the street to realize that there is no power on earth that can protect him from being bombed . . . the bomber will always get through." Bombers were widely viewed as invincible superweapons capable of laying waste to whole countries — comparable to how nuclear ICBMs are viewed today. This fear was stoked by apocalyptic visions such as those in the H. G. Wells book The Shape of Things to Come and its movie adaptation Things to Come.
- Perceived flaws of the Treaty of Versailles. The Treaty of Versailles imposed many restrictions on internal German affairs, which were later on widely viewed by the Allied nations as being unfair to Germany. Many people, argued that German rearmament, the reoccupation of the Rhineland and the acquisition of the Saarland were merely examples of the Germans taking back what was rightfully theirs. They also believed that since Versailles had created the states of Poland and Czechoslovakia on the basis of self-determination, it was unjust to deny the opportunity of Austrians and Sudetenlanders to join Germany if they so wished. Because Hitler had not taken any obviously non-German territory as of 1938, a war launched by the Allies at this stage would have been a war launched merely on the basis of suspicion, in which Britain would be deeply divided. This could have been fatal if the war had gone badly for the Allies —as indeed happened in 1940. By 1939 Hitler had annexed the very non-German city of Prague — meaning that self-determination could no longer be used to justify his actions. This made a decision to go to war in 1939 far easier than in 1938.
- The Communist threat. Conservative politicians had to worry not only about the threat posed by Hitler's Germany, but also about the threat posed by the Stalinist Soviet Union — as the Holocaust had not yet occurred, they mostly regarded Stalin as the greater of the two totalitarian evils. The fact that the United States was at the time in an extremely isolationist phase made the situation even more difficult. They feared that as Britain and France were busy fighting Germany in the West, the Soviets would invade Poland and then eastern Germany. After the "War of German Suppression", Germans and Allies alike would be at the mercy of the Soviet Union, essentially "1945 without the United States or the atomic bomb".
- Failure to recognise the dangers of Nazism. Winston Churchill, was leader of the minority that recognised the military threat posed by a rearmed Germany. Even if a 1938 war against Germany was won, the most likely regime to replace the Nazis would be a military dictatorship. Alternatively, a post-Nazi Germany could have swung leftward, forcing the Western democracies to fight a German-Soviet alliance.
- Support for the League of Nations. The League of Nations was designed to prevent future wars. If there were no wars to be fought, then there would be no need to maintain armaments, and any disagreements could be settled by the League of Nations. The Peace Ballot of 1935 conducted by the League of Nations Union (a political pressure group of the time) showed support for the League; this was though a select group that voted and not a national referendum. When asked "should Britain remain a member of the League of Nations?" 97% voted in favour of staying in the League. When asked "Do you consider that, if a nation insists on attacking another, the other nations should combine to stop it by economic and non-military measures?" 94.1% voted in favour. However, there was greater division over whether force should be used to stop an aggressive nation; only 74.2% voted in favour, showing a greater division over the use of force. Similar problems exist with the United Nations today.
- The Economic Impact of World War I. The national debt of Britain increased tenfold during the war, and the increase of British government debt to foreign governments during WWI, mainly to America, led to a high interest rate being charged. The British government therefore had to try to cut back on spending, and the public would not stomach cutting back on domestic spending. The Geddes Committee of 1921–22 recommended that the armed forces and weapons be reduced, but this would eventually lead to a time delay when it came to rearmament during the 1930s. The price of rearming would have a crippling effect on the British government, and so the avoidance of war was a sound economic policy. Besides, one can argue that it was not until the post-war period, after the large scale centralisation of the government, that the British civil service was really capable of raising, allocating and taxing the funds required of the large scale spending that would be necessary to rearm effectively.
- Mistaken presumption that Hitler was a rational actor. Like many other dictators, diplomats of the time operated under the assumption that the Nazi Party, and Hitler, were rational actors who would stop when their defined goals were achieved. The failure of this assumption led to containment policies by anti-Communist nations during the Cold War, and such assumptions have remained in question against other dictatorships and expansionist totalitarian states including (but not limited to) China, North Korea, Iran, Iraq, and Libya.
Peace for our time
A voice condemning the Agreement came in the publication that very same day of the best-selling Penguin Special Europe and the Czechs by S. Grant Duff, a copy of which was delivered to each member of Parliament. As the publishers state, the volume was written at their request and was completed as late as the first week of September, and sold in the hundreds of thousands of copies.
The Munich Agreement marked the high tide of appeasement but was also the turning point in British public opinion. Many regarded the surrender of Czechoslovakia, the only remaining democracy in central Europe, with disgust — especially as it had a well-armed and trained army. The Labour Party, which until relatively recently had been condemning the Tories for their bellicosity, now attacked the appeasers as the "Men of Munich" and switched firmly into the pro-war camp.
Origins of the concept of the
The Czechoslovak leaders and the population believed that if Germany attacked, France would meet its treaty obligation to Czechoslovakia and attack Germany. They also believed that Britain — which unlike France had no treaty obligation to Czechoslovakia — would be drawn in, too. The Soviet Union also had a treaty obligation to come to the aid of Czechoslovakia — if France did. There was no question of America acting, as far as Jan Masaryk, the son of the first Czechoslovak President, professor Tomáš Garigue Masaryk, was concerned.
It is when viewed against this background that the rationale and impact of Chamberlain's agreement with Hitler takes on less than desirable and laudable characteristic:
On September 27, 1938, when negotiations between Hitler and Chamberlain were strained, the British Prime Minister addressed the British people [link]. At the heart of why his critics view his policy as well-meaning but ultimately wrong [link] is this sentence from that speech: "How horrible, fantastic, incredible it is that we should be digging trenches and trying on gas masks here because of a quarrel in a far-away country between people of whom we know nothing."
A mere 20 years before Chamberlain addressed the British people regarding his agreement with Hitler, WWI ended in The Versailles Treaty [link]. Czecho-Slovakia was one of the original members of the League of Nations signatories of the Versailles treaty of peace. Part I, Articles 27–30, addresses the Boundaries of Germany. Part III, Political Clauses for Europe, Section VII, of that treaty addresses the Czecho-Slovak State. Yet, Chamberlain characterised the Czechs and the Germans as "people of whom we know nothing".
The peoples whose fate was being decided in Munich were not invited to the negotiating table. O nás bez nás (about us without us) became a phrase bitterly remembered by all Czechs and Slovaks. Neither were the peoples whose fate was being decided again invited to the Yalta Conference in 1945.
Hopes were expressed by Milan Ekert, Czech PES Group Observer, Member of the European integration Committee in 2003: "'Without us, but about us' — this sentence describes the history of the Czech Republic, where a succession of larger powers have taken decisions about us, without us. After enlargement, however, all of this change [sic]. For the first time in our history, we can decide for ourselves. And only because of this, is it worth joining the EU."
Chamberlain and rearmament
However, many of those that had been in government during the First World War were haunted by its effect and were determined to avoid any war in the future. Deeming all war "futile", Chamberlain himself and his ministers were also aware of the lack of military capacity at their disposal. Part of that was the result of the belief subscribed to by many governing elites in the 1920s and early 1930s that war would no longer be an option and that military budgets could be tailored accordingly. The European cycle of wars, which in the previous seventy years had produced two massive conflicts, the Franco-Prussian War of 1870 and the First World War (or Great War as it was often called), was thought to mark the end of old-style European conflicts. This was partly because of:
- the horrors of 1914–18 that were thought to haunt all Europeans;
- the disappearance of old militarist monarchies like the Hohenzollern monarchy of Prussia and Germany and the old system of secretive military alliances (the Triple Entente and the Triple Alliance);
- the apparent democratisation of Europe which it was thought would mean that war could not be waged without the will of the people, and after 1918 that will would no longer be there;
- and as a result of the financial burdens fighting the Great War and rebuilding states afterwards had imposed on individual exchequers.
In addition, the appearance of the League of Nations raised hope that there would now be other ways of resolving interstate disputes than military might. Because of this the old cycle of rearming for the next revenge conflict was thought to be broken. The Great Depression after 1929 forced governments to cut expenditures. In such circumstances, a heavily funded military was thought neither politically possible nor financially viable.
Faced with the growing political and economic instability in Europe, the rise in Nazism and the increased irrelevance of the League of Nations as a means to deal with disputes, Britain engaged in one of the most massive military build-ups in modern history and instituted a peacetime draft. The rearmament budget of 1937 amounted to £1.5 billion.
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