Was the appeasement of Nazi Germany by Britain and France ever anything more than an attempt to buy time?

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HST242 Assignment 1                Stephen Wilson

Was the appeasement of Nazi Germany by Britain and France ever anything more than an attempt to buy time?

        The policy of appeasement, which both Britain and France took toward Nazi Germany and it’s expansionist aims during the late 1930s, is one of the most controversial and criticised foreign policies in history.  Appeasement policy has been given short shrift by historians and the public alike since the 1930s, with the general consensus being that if Britain and France would have taken a harder line against the Nazi’s then Hitler’s aggressive policy could have been checked.  However, the view of appeasement has not been totally one sided.  Many revisionist historians have arrived at the view that appeasement was necessary for both Britain and France as a way of buying time for rearmament so that they would militarily be able to oppose Nazi Germany.  This essay will closely look at that viewpoint to correctly assess whether that was one of the chief aims of appeasement.

        Firstly it is apt to actually define what appeasement actually was.  Appeasement was the policy of satisfying Hitler’s demands by making certain concessions in order to avoid conflict.  But was this policy motivated by ideology, the actual view that it was the morally right and just policy to follow, or was it, as the question prompts, merely a front to buy more time?  To rightly answer that question one must look at the environment in which appeasement developed and actually took place.

        For both Britain and France the First World War had devastating effects upon them.  The idea of war up until the Great War was one that it was a noble gesture to die for one’s country.  The massive human cost of the war changed everybody’s perception about conflict, Britain (and it’s dominions) lost approximately 900,000 men during the war.  France suffered to an even greater extent, with approximately 5,000,000 military and civilian casualties as well as vast damage to French agricultural land and industry.  Therefore after the First World War public and political opinion was staunchly against the use of force to settle disputes, and a new form of international diplomacy, of solving problems through negotiation was thought to be the best strategy.  It is from this view that British and French appeasement sprung in the middle of the 1930s.  This is important when regarding the question.  When the British and French were first trying to appease Hitler, they actually believed that by giving Nazi Germany these concessions on paper, they were averting conflict.

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        The theme of appeasement being an ideological policy can be easily shown in two of the earliest uses of the policy: the Anglo-German Naval pact of 1935 and the remilitarization of the Rhineland.  Obviously the former was a use of appeasement solely by the British, but it is important in relation to the question.  This pact’s importance is due to the fact that it represented the open abandonment of the Treaty of Versailles.  The British knew that the Nazi’s wished to create a naval fleet, by stepping in and agreeing a pact with them, they then would at least ...

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