![]() ![]() ![]() But in March 1939 Hitler tore up the agreement and invaded the Czech lands, reducing them to a German “protectorate”. “Hitler has missed the bus,” he told his cabinet. ![]() ![]() The year before, a complacent Chamberlain had “saved the peace” at Munich, by forcing the Czechoslovak government to surrender the Sudeten territory to Germany. In August 1939, Nazi Germany and the USSR signed their infamous non-aggression pact which secretly agreed on the partition of Poland and the abolition of the Baltic states. And when Chamberlain changed his mind, it was too late. Even if Stalin had honoured an agreement, the Polish government would never have joined a military pact with the traditional Russian enemy. (And much of the Conservative party, while disliking both tyrannies, instinctively preferred the Nazis to the Bolsheviks.) It wouldn’t have worked, anyway. He didn’t want Hitler to feel “surrounded”. Until 1939, Chamberlain resisted the idea of an anti-German alliance which would include the Soviet Union. But how do you negotiate with somebody completely unreliable and capricious? Neville Chamberlain, who became British prime minister in 1937, did have a plan for dealing with Hitler, “deterrence with negotiation from strength”. France and Britain were never, until the very end, quite able to grasp that the dictators were not rational, that deterrents did not deter them and that a diplomacy which offered concessions seemed to them an admission of weakness.ĪJP Taylor, a historian who liked upsetting received ideas, wrote that Hitler never had a coherent plan of conquest but simply grabbed opportunities. Fascism was the trouble – fascism in a time when the liberal democracies were too weak to resist it or to defend the Versailles status quo. Photograph: Chronicle/Alamyīut the Versailles settlement might not have ended in catastrophe, even though it made some sort of resentful German revival inevitable. Will Dyson’s 1920 cartoon Peace and Future Cannon Fodder. ![]()
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