Appeasement of Hitler

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The appeasement of Adolf Hitler by British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain's government in the late 1930s is the best-known case of appeasement, and one of the major causes of the negative connotations now attached to the word.

The Munich Agreement in particular stands as a major example of appeasement. There is, however, a large historiographical debate about appeasement.

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Reasons why the British Government pursued appeasement

Setting Germany against Soviet Union

Conservative politicians worried not only about the threat posed by Hitler's Germany, but also about the threat posed by the communist Soviet Union. As the Red Army had the largest armed forces in the world; Stalin was regarded as the greater of the two totalitarian evils[citation needed]. The isolationist phase into which the United States had entered after World War I made Britain more vulnerable in foreign affairs without her backing.

Under such conditions, the British government decided instead to set Germany against the Soviet Union, so as to kill two birds with one stone. The policy of appeasement towards Germany was thus designed to push Germany eastwards into a war with the Soviet Union

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Redressing the Treaty of Versailles

The Treaty of Versailles imposed many restrictions on internal German affairs, which the Allied nations later on came to view as 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. The Conservative Party gradually began to take this view, in line with popular opinion and Conservative thinking of the time. Many people 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 might have proven catastrophic 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.

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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 World War I, mainly to the United States, 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.

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Chamberlain's Munich Agreement deal (peace for our time) (i.e., the surrender of the Sudetenland to Germany) with Hitler was internationally acclaimed and praised at home and abroad, by among others Pope Pius XI, Ireland's Eamon de Valera, the United States administration of Franklin D. Roosevelt and Canada's William Lyon Mackenzie King. Chamberlain was acclaimed by many British people for avoiding another war. He was greeted by cheering crowds on the balcony of Buckingham Palace, alongside King George VI and Queen Elizabeth, who themselves supported his policy, both having lost friends and relatives in the last war.

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. The Labour Party attacked the appeasers as the "Men of Munich" and moved firmly into the pro-war camp, in line with their belief in Collective Security.

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Origins of the concept of the Western Betrayal

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 Garrigue 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 [8]. At the heart of why his critics view his policy as well-meaning but ultimately wrong [9] 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."

Just 20 years before Chamberlain addressed the British people regarding his agreement with Hitler, WWI ended in The Treaty of Versailles [10]. Czechoslovakia 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 fates were being decided 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."

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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 then 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.