Page 221 - Was Hitler a Riddle?

208 Conclusion

1933 about the difficulty of understanding Hitler and his aims. the real
riddle is one that historians must try to solve: why did the leaders of the
three major democracies fail to take action against a dictator that their own
diplomats warned was a menace to world order? the answer may be less
complicated than one might think: in each of the three democracies, the
public mood was uncongenial to a firm response to Germany’s threatening
moves against europe. the Great depression of 1929 diverted attention
from international affairs and sharply reduced the funding available to gov-
ernments for rebuilding their military capacities. and the heavy casualties
incurred by France and Great Britain in the years from 1914 to 1918 had
invigorated the peace—or pacifist—movements in both countries, making
it difficult for statesmen to pursue a robust foreign policy that would have
led to estrangement from Germany and, as many people feared, to war.
in fact, until late 1936, Germany was militarily too weak to resist foreign
pressure to halt its rearmament, and the failure of the political leadership
of these two democracies to impress this weakness upon their countrymen
may be regarded as their most grievous error in judgment. ironically, the
peace movement unwittingly helped make war inevitable.
in the United states, it was not so much pacifism as isolationism that in-
hibited the government from playing a significant role in european affairs.
President Franklin d. roosevelt gradually came to recognize that Hitler
posed a threat, but within his administration some senior officials saw the
world differently. in November 1937, Jay Pierrepont Moffat, who a few
months earlier had been appointed chief of the newly created division of
european affairs in the state department, declared, “My personal preoc-
cupation is to prevent at any cost the involvement of the United states in
hostilities anywhere, and to that end to discourage any formation of a com-
mon front of the democratic powers.” 10
Ultimately, one is bound to agree with Winston Churchill, who in 1948
referred to World War ii as the “unnecessary war.” He did not mean that
Hitler should not have been resisted by force in 1939. rather, he meant,
“never was a war more easy to stop than that which has just wrecked what
was left of the world from the previous struggle.” 11