The Appeasement of Nazi Germany

A single act of arson against the famous Reichstag building proved to be the catalyst that propelled Adolf Hitler to victory in the elections of March 1933, which set the German nation irrevocably on the path towards World War II. That war would plunge much of the planet into an existential battle that ultimately cost an estimated 60 million lives.

Of course, the Western Europeans tried and failed in notorious fashion to prevent that war by appeasing Hitler, who only became more ambitious as France and Britain refused to push back on his growing aggression, especially in the wake of the Anschluss, which Hitler's future enemies all but justified due to Austria's large German population. The Munich Agreement is now notorious because its promise proved barren within a very short period of time. British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain's actions either failed to avert or actually hastened the very cataclysm he wished to avoid at all costs. The agreement effectively signed away Czechoslovakia's independence to Hitler's hungry new Third Reich, and within two years, most of the world found itself plunged into a conflict anyway.

Initially, many people hailed Chamberlain's "success" at defusing Nazi aggression by handing over Czechoslovakia tamely to Hitler's control, but others remained dubious. Édouard Daladier, the French prime minister, "later told Amery that he turned up his coat collar to protect his face from rotten eggs when he arrived in Paris." A Foreign Office man, Orme Sargent, was disgusted, and he later said bitterly, "For all the fun and cheers, you might think they were celebrating a major victory over an enemy instead of merely the betrayal of a minor ally." Winston Churchill, the deal's most famous critic, bitterly remarked, "England has been offered a choice between war and shame. She has chosen shame, and will get war."