Page 77 - Was Hitler a Riddle?

64 The British Diplomats

sent their dispatches warning of the dangers that Nazi Germany posed to
europe—from 1933 to 1936—Germany had not yet established itself as a
strong military power. a central point of rumbold’s and Phipps’s missives
was that Britain and other european powers should stop Germany before
the country could fully implement its program of rearmament, before Hit-
ler’s regime acquired the military and economic wherewithal to resist pres-
sure from abroad. Put differently, during the first three years of Hitler’s
rule, the ambassadors based their recommendations on the conviction that
Germany was too weak to withstand economic and military pressure from
Britain, which almost certainly could have relied on the support of France.
But the leaders in Great Britain made no effort to educate the public on the
dangers of Hitlerism and the feasibility of restraining the Führer without
military conflict. in fact, they vigorously opposed Churchill’s many warn-
ings. it is difficult to avoid the conclusion that had the men who governed
Britain drawn the right lessons from all the reports about Hitler’s charac-
ter, program, fanaticism, and ruthlessness, they probably would have taken
steps that could have prevented the catastrophe of 1939.

the appeasers in control

With the appointment of Chamberlain as prime minister in late May
1937, British policy toward Germany came under the influence of outspo-
ken appeasers. disregarding rumbold’s and Phipps’s assessments of Hitler
as a serious threat to international peace, Chamberlain and his supporters
argued that the Führer’s appetite for aggrandizement could be stilled and
war avoided by making concessions to him on such issues as the annexa-
tion of territories in europe inhabited mainly by German speakers and by
returning to Germany at least some of the colonies it had lost after World
War i. all that Hitler was expected to offer in return was a promise to
honor the principle of “mutual understanding” and to avoid the use of
force in pursuit of his goals.
this definition of appeasement, although not inaccurate, is incomplete,
for the movement consisted of three different strains. Chamberlain was the
leading spokesman of the largest, which might be called “realist appease-
ment.” subscribers to this strain did not necessarily oppose recourse to
war as a matter of principle. rather, they believed that Britain and France
were too weak to stop Hitler and should therefore be prepared to make far-
reaching concessions to avoid military conflict, a goal that was uppermost