THE APPEASEMENT POLICY

The Treaty of Versailles, which ended World War I, contained several clauses designed by the Allied powers to limit Germany’s ability to cause another European war. The German Army was limited to 100,000 officers and men, the German Air Force and Navy was severely restricted, and the Rhineland, the area of Germany bordering France, was to be demilitarized. The major nation advocating these and other harsh measures, such as the payment of $33 billion in war reparations, against Germany was France. As Germany strove to establish a democracy and repay the war reparations the economy plummeted, setting the stage for the rise of Adolph Hitler in the 1930s.

In Germany, Hitler began to violate the Treaty of Versailles in 1935 by rebuilding the German armed forces. In 1936, Hitler’s army entered and remilitarized the Rhineland. In October of that same year Hitler signed a military alliance with Italy’s dictator, Benito Mussolini. Next, Hitler sent German “advisors” and military hardware to help Franco and the Falangists. Spain became a major testing ground for new German tanks, artillery, airplanes, and tactics from1936 to 1939. France and Britain did nothing.

Hitler then began to move on the smaller nations in Europe. In 1938, Hitler annexed Austria to Germany, a merger that was forbidden by the Treaty of Versailles. 1938 also witnessed the most blatant act of appeasement during the era, the Munich Agreement. At Munich Hitler was given the Sudetenland, a fortified area of Czechoslovakia that bordered Germany. While British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain and French Prime Minister Edouard Daladier promised the world “peace in our time,” Hitler was already planning his next move.

In 1939 Hitler annexed the rest of Czechoslovakia and demanded part of Poland. Here the British and French stopped the policy of appeasement, but it was too late. Hitler was already well armed, and he had isolated Poland. The result was the invasion of Poland in September 1939, and a six-year war that killed more human beings than any other war.

While the French and British appeased Hitler, Mussolini moved on Ethiopia in 1934 and Albania in the spring of 1939. In the Far East, Japan openly invaded Manchuria in 1931 and China in 1937. When Ethiopia, Albania, and China asked for help from the League of Nations, an international organization established after World War I to help solve disputes, the League proved to be little more than a debate society. There was no help for the nations being attacked and dismembered and no punishment for the aggressors.

Appeasement failed to work. German troops entering the Rhineland in 1936 were under orders to withdraw if challenged by French forces. One show of backbone by Britain, France or the nations of the world in the 1930s may have averted World War II and all the horrors associated with it.

History’s currents, or current history! You decide.