Appeasement: Chamberlain, Hitler, Churchill, and the Road to War

by Tim Bouverie

On February 27, 1933, six days before polling day, the Reichstag was set on fire. A Dutch Communist was arrested at the scene and the Nazis declared the arson the start of an attempted Bolshevik revolution. This provided Hitler with the excuse to establish his dictatorship. Civil liberties were suspended, Communists and other political opponents were arrested en masse, and, on March 23, the newly elected Reichstag voted itself into oblivion with the passage of the Enabling Act, granting Hitler the power to rule by decree.

Lord Beaverbrook, owner of the mass-market Daily Express and Evening Standard, for one, visited Berlin in March 1933 and came back convinced that “the stories of Jewish persecution are exaggerated.”15

the British First World War General Sir Ian Hamilton

For all these reasons, he was not prepared to condemn the Nazi treatment of the Jews and, on the contrary, became a notable apologist for the regime.

The twenties were, consequently, spent searching for ways to correct the defects of Versailles.

the British Ambassador, Sir Horace Rumbold.

Shocked by the ruthlessness with which Hitler had established his dictatorship, the Ambassador saw, right from the start, how the ideology which underpinned Nazi domestic policy could be transferred to the international sphere.

Hitlerian foreign policy. In a masterly 5,000-word dispatch, written in April 1933—just

just three months after Hitler’s accession to power—Rumbold laid bare Hitler’s social Darwinism:

The Government was committed to the Disarmament Conference, while the idea of a “preventive war” to halt German rearmament was—thanks to the pacific nature of public opinion—beyond the realms even of discussion.

Hitler, who lost no opportunity to present himself as a man of peace. On

But the French Ambassador to Berlin was ambivalent. Although François-Poncet, who had read the book and spoke German fluently, recognized that “the pacifism of Hitler is relative, temporary and conditional,” he was torn between considering Mein Kampf a blueprint for Hitler’s rule and the moribund rantings of a young firebrand.39

first of his weekend coups—Hitler announced that Germany was withdrawing not merely from the Disarmament Conference but from the League of Nations as well. Foreign opinion was stunned and incensed. The French considered their distrust justified, while the British felt that their good faith had been hurled back in their face.

Even before Hitler came to power, he was warning of the danger of a rearmed Germany.

On November 23, 1932, in a speech to the House of Commons, he cautioned the Government against believing that all Germany desired was equality of status with the other European powers:

March 1933, therefore, he publicly thanked God for the existence of the French Army and demanded a strengthening of British arms in the air and upon the seas.3 The following month he attacked the entire Nazi edifice—composed of “grim dictatorship,” the persecution of the Jews, and “appeals to every form of fighting spirit”—while calling on the Government to abandon the chimera of disarmament in favor of urgent repairs to Britain’s defenses.4

The problem Churchill faced was that there was probably a stronger spirit of pacifism in Britain between 1933 and the end of 1934 than at any other time since the end of the war.

On February 9, 1933, students at the Oxford Union approved by 275 votes to 153 the motion “This House will in no circumstances fight for its King and Country.”

dewy-eyed undergraduates. The belief that the arms race had caused the last war was widespread, and the campaign against arms manufacturers—the so-called merchants of death—was continued by the left well into the decade. The Liberals were wholly committed to disarmament, while the Labour leader, the Christian socialist George Lansbury, wanted to disband the Army, dismiss the Air Force, and dare the world “Do your worst!”

Like Rome 1,500 years earlier, the British Empire was overextended and by the mid-1930s in existential danger.

The Government had been aware of the Nazi intention to build a military air force since the summer of 1933.

In pressing for an expanded Air Force, Churchill, although he did not know it, had an ally in the Chancellor of the Exchequer, Neville Chamberlain.

Chamberlain wanted a significantly larger Air Force and was only prepared to spend modestly on the Army. “Our best defence,” the Chancellor declared, “would be the existence of a deterrent force so powerful as to render success in attack too doubtful to be worthwhile. I submit that this is most likely to be attained by the establishment of an Air Force based in this country of a size and efficiency calculated to inspire respect in the mind of a possible enemy.”

In his “terror from the air” speech, Baldwin had declared that the only defense against bombing was offense, “which means that you have to kill more women and children more quickly than the enemy if you want to save yourselves.”

The future of war, de Gaulle believed, lay in mobility and

tanks. The Maginot Line was a folie de grandeur: an “army of concrete,” incapable of reacting to circumstances, devouring money which could have been spent mechanizing the Army, and a block to strategic thinking.

Churchill’s warnings—which were sounded, with increasing volume, throughout the summer and autumn of 1934—drew mixed responses from MPs. While many Tories, particularly on the right of the party, supported his campaign, there were those, like his old foe the Secretary of State for India, Sir Samuel Hoare, who considered his agitations a self-interested attempt to resurrect his flagging career.

The Labour Party branded him a warmonger, while the former Liberal leader Sir Herbert Samuel accused him of stirring up “blind and causeless panic.”

parades. We have to face the fact that, while other countries enjoy playing football or sipping coffee at little tables under trees, German youth is happiest playing at soldiers, and German manhood is happiest on the barrack square.

Churchill’s speech of November 28, 1934, marked the high point of his early campaign for rearmament.

The debate surrounding Churchill’s amendment to the Address added to those voices arguing in favor of legalizing German rearmament. Germany could not be stopped from developing her military, asserted Lord Londonderry, and, as such, the logical course was to offer to cancel the armaments clauses of the Treaty of Versailles in exchange for her return to the League of Nations.

find it very hard to believe that the man himself wants war,” he reported to Baldwin.5

Five months later, in December 1919, he published The Economic Consequences of the Peace, in which he castigated the “Peace Makers” and their “Carthaginian Peace.” “The policy of reducing Germany to servitude for a generation,”

wrote Keynes, was not merely “abhorrent and detestable” but sowed “the decay of the whole civilised life of Europe.”16 The book became an international best-seller and set the tone for the series of critiques, including Nicolson’s, which followed.*1

the Minister for Education, H. A. L. Fisher, had comforted himself with the idea that the Treaty would be followed by “an appeasement, and by degrees readjustments and modifications can be introduced which will give Europe a prospect of stability.”17

The sense that the Allies were to blame for the Nazis was critical to the mentality from which appeasement developed.

Like most Liberals, Lothian detested Nazism.

Lothian was impressed by Hitler’s sincerity. He considered the Führer “a prophet”

“I watched him with the utmost vigilance,” he wrote in the Daily Telegraph on his return, “and I am convinced he genuinely desires peace.”

There it melded with that other great spur to Anglo-German friendship: a profound fear of communism.

Against the malevolent force of communism stood fascism.

Yet when faced with the choice, in the “Age of Extremes,” fascism appeared the lesser evil and was, indeed, considered a barrier against the communist tide.37

this vein, Winston Churchill assured Mussolini in 1927 that, had he been an Italian, he would have supported him in his “triumphant struggle against the bestial appetites and passions of Leninism”;

The evils of the regime were plain to see, and yet many within the British elite chose to embrace Nazi Germany on account of its achievements and its opposition to communism.

Most people had not read the book, and of those who did there were a considerable number who, like General Sir Ian Hamilton, were inclined to dismiss it as mere juvenilia.

the Night of the Long Knives (it

Neville Chamberlain, correctly thought the purge would “increase dislike of dictatorships,” and it was from this point

that comparisons between the Nazis and American gangsters became common.

In February 1935, French and British Ministers met in London and decided that the defunct armaments clauses of the Treaty of Versailles should be abolished. They would be replaced by a new agreement on arms—in particular an air pact—as well as an “Eastern Locarno,” in which Germany would “accept” her eastern frontiers. In return, Hitler would be asked to join a multilateral pledge to uphold Austrian independence and to return Germany to the League of Nations.

Then, on March 16, one day after French deputies approved the reestablishment of two-year military service—the necessary offset for the “lean years”—Hitler detonated his own bombshell. Summoning first the French and then the British Ambassadors to the Reich Chancellery, he informed them that he was reintroducing conscription and creating a peacetime army of thirty-six divisions—some 500,000 men.