Around 15 years after the end of the First World War, the fragile
peace holding a damaged Europe together was under threat. The Nazi party came to
power in 1933 and Hitler had soon crushed all political opposition and made himself dictator.
Europe's leaders were desperate to avoid war. But were attempts to placate Hitler the right
thing to do? The Versailles Treaty of 1919 had left Germany in a state of economic Collapse. By
early 1933 more than a third of Germany's working population were unemployed. This dire situation
was instrumental in Hitler's rise to power. He had gained support by denouncing the Versailles
Treaty of 1919 and the harsh terms it inflicted on Germany after the First World War. One of the
treaty's terms had been to prohibit Germany from rearming, but Hitler had other ideas. He removed
Germany from the League of Nations and withdrew from discussions about European disarmament and
in early 1935 he announced a German rearmament program which broke the Versailles terms. Hitler
gradually built up Germany's military capabilities and in March 1936 he sent
German troops to re-militarize the Rhineland in Western Germany. He also embarked on a process of
annexing territory that he saw as rightfully part of the German State. This included the
annexation of neighbouring Austria known as the 'Anschluss' in March 1938. Despite Hitler's
aggressive rearmament, Western Powers remained largely inactive. Instead they pursued a strategy
known as appeasement - the policy of acceding to the demands of a potentially hostile nation in
the hope of maintaining peace. People struggled to understand the new threats of extreme nationalism
in Germany, Japan and Italy. Their governments also had domestic priorities to address which
provided a distraction from foreign affairs. In Britain MPS paid attention to public opinion.
They were convinced that the British public would not support any moves towards war. It should also
be remembered that a significant number of the British aristocracy were enthusiastic supporters
of Hitler. Anti-Semitism existed in Britain at the time. Many of the major newspapers wrote favourably
about Hitler in the 1930s. Finally, many people didn't see Hitler as a real threat to peace until
it was too late. Yet his War aims were all laid out clearly in his 1925 book 'Mein Kampf'. Very few
senior politicians in Britain or France bothered to read it, but if they had they would have seen
his extremist political ideology, his violent anti-Semitism, his belief in a German master race
in need of living space and his future plans for Germany, which included unification and expansion.
Chamberlain, who became prime minister in May 1937, favoured what he called a 'grand strategy'.
This was based on pursuing diplomatic means. He and many others thought that offering concessions to
Germany was the best way to keep the peace in Europe. Chamberlain had read Hitler's book but
dismissed it. In contrast, Churchill began voicing his concerns about the dictator. Churchill had
visited Germany in 1932 and seen the growing Nazi threat. He began making a series of impassioned
speeches in Parliament condemning the regime. As part of this, he made frequent and ever louder
calls for British rearmament throughout the 1930s. Two of his contacts in government were passing him
secret intelligence about German rearmament levels. This helped him to lobby both Stanley Baldwin
and then Neville Chamberlain's governments to significantly step up British military
preparations. There were those who saw Churchill's warning calls about Nazism as simply a means to
raise his profile. Others thought he was just being a 'warmonger'. There isn't evidence to support either
of those points of view. Churchill saw the threat that Hitler posed and was alert to Britain's
unpreparedness to meet it. Despite Churchill's efforts, Chamberlain persevered with appeasement.
Chamberlain had a somewhat stubborn nature and a firm belief in his own ability to befriend
the dictators. He doggedly stuck to appeasement even after it was clear it couldn't work against
Hitler. In October 1935, Mussolini, the fascist dictator of Italy, decided to invade Ethiopia
which was then known as Abyssinia. Britain didn't take any steps to stop him. The League of Nations
also failed to take any real action other than imposing some minor sanctions on Italy. In October
1935 Britain and France both allowed Italy to conquer Ethiopia. Watching all of this pay out
was Hitler and what he saw greatly encouraged him. By 1938 the situation had reached a crisis point.
It looked increasingly likely that Germany would march into the territory the Sudetenland and
take it by force. France was committed to protect Czechoslovakia from aggression but neither France
nor Britain felt ready to fight a war with Germany. British policy was to place pressure
on Czechoslovakia to concede to Hitler's demands and give up the Sudetenland in order to avoid war.
After protracted diplomatic activity during 1938, Chamberlain flew to meet
Hitler in Germany, on three occasions in September, to try and reach agreement over the Czech crisis.
His last visit was to attend the Munich conference. This was held between the leaders of Britain,
France, Germany and Italy who collectively reached and signed an agreement. The Czech leaders were
not invited to attend the Munich conference at Hitler's insistence. He refused to tolerate their
attendance. This led to riots in Czechoslovakia. In this, Britain and France forced Czechoslovakia to
hand Germany the border areas which were home to its German-speaking minority. This averted
war but gained what many suspected was only a temporary peace without honour. After signing
the Munich agreement, Chamberlain visited Hitler at his private apartment and persuaded him to sign an
anglo-german declaration. When Chamberlain returned to Britain and held aloft this piece of paper, he
was met with cheers and celebration. Chamberlain: "This morning I had another talk with the German Chancellor, Herr Hitler
and here is the paper which bears his name upon it, as well as mine.
We regard the agreement signed last night and the anglo-german naval agreement as
symbolic of the desire of our two peoples never to go to war with one another again".
Behind closed doors, however, Hitler dismissed the document as insignificant. We have on display here, at the
Churchill Museum, that declaration next to a photograph of Chamberlain after he arrived back
in Britain. In the lead up to the agreement, war fears had swept the country, children had been evacuated,
there were queues for gas masks and preparations were made for air raid shelters and home defences.
Now that it seemed Chamberlain's visit to Munich had avoided war, there was widespread
joy and Chamberlain was hailed as a hero. People sent in gifts and fan mail, he was even offered
a home in France in gratitude. Not everyone was pleased, however. Churchill denounced Munich as a
total and unmitigated defeat. Czechoslovakia had lost 11,000 square miles of territory and more
than 3 million of its population. Its leaders were utterly dejected and felt they had been betrayed
by their friends. The British held out hope that Hitler could be dissuaded from war in Europe by
returning to Germany its former colonies in Africa, but Hitler's main ambitions were in Europe and he
rejected these proposals. It became increasingly difficult for British and French politicians to
deal with him or to trust his word. Europe was heading for war. Appeasing Hitler had
failed. Had Britain and France's reluctance to plan for war put them on the back foot?
Just a few months later, Hitler broke the Munich agreement and sent troops to take
all of Czechoslovakia. The Munich agreement was a failure. Hitler had turned his back on the
agreement almost instantly. Munich came to be seen as a British and French failure and also betrayal.
But it can also be said that because of Munich, Hitler was forced to abandon his planned war
of conquest, as he saw that he couldn't risk fighting against Britain and France at that point.
Appeasement also bought both Britain and France time to rearm, as neither country was ready for war
in the 1930s. Chamberlain and his fellow appeasers seemed to follow the philosophy 'hope for the best,
but prepare for the worst' and he continued to hold out hope for the success of appeasement well after
it was clear that it couldn't deliver what he wanted. The appeasers also didn't effectively
'prepare for the worst'. Although British and French re-armament was stepped up in the late 1930s, it
can be argued that they weren't as militarily prepared for the conflict that broke out in
1939 as they could have been. One thing the British did do that turned out to be very beneficial was
to put large resource into the development of radar. Perhaps unfairly, Chamberlain has become
the face of appeasement. But he was in fact not alone. Chamberlain is the main name attached to
appeasement but in fact he was continuing the line taken by his predecessors. Ramsay
McDonald was prime minister when Hitler came to power and he adopted a position of appeasement
towards the Nazi regime and this was continued by his successor Stanley Baldwin. Appeasement's
famous opponent, Churchill, in fact favoured the use of diplomacy and talks instead of launching
straight into war. For example, after his experience of working with Stalin in the second world war, he
advocated international summits as a means to solve the growing tensions of the Cold War. He wasn't the
'warmonger' he was accused of being. He just saw that Hitler was not someone who could be persuaded or bought off
with concessions. He could also react furiously to various proposals, ranting and raving
and crushing any hopes of reaching agreement. British and French attempts to find common
ground or make concessions made little headway for that reason. Another element in the failure of
appeasement is the fact that it isn't possible to reason with someone who is unreasonable.
It's also worth noting that we never got to hear Chamberlain's side of the story, or his defence for
pursuing appeasement, as he sadly died of cancer in November 1940, six months after resigning as
Prime Minister. Whereas Churchill wrote his hugely popular history of the Second World War, in which he
defended his actions and criticized appeasement, we don't have Chamberlain's defence of his decisions.
Appeasement has come to be a byword for weakness and its failure to avoid war in the 1930s has been
invoked as a reason to avoid resorting to it since then. Each concession to German demands gradually
built up in Hitler's mind a belief that Britain and France were not a serious threat to his
ambitions and encouraged him to take further steps to war. So instead of avoiding conflict, appeasement
made it ever more possible. Chamberlain's aim to appease the dictators was a noble one and one
worth trying. He didn't want to push Britain and its empire into a risky war that might cost it
its security and would entail huge loss of life. He had an extremely difficult task as British Prime
Minister in the 1930s and adopted a course which he believed was worth pursuing to preserve peace.