Hitler and Appeasement, 1933-39

Key individuals

• Neville Chamberlain
• Lord Halifax
• Daladier
• Beneš
• Stalin

Key concepts and colligations

• The Hossbach Memorandum
• The Maginot Line; Maginot mentality
• Franco-Soviet Pact (1935)
• Plan Z
• ‘a quarrel in a far away country between people of whom we know nothing’
• ‘Peace in our time’
• The Munich Agreement
• ‘It is the last territorial claim which I have to make in Europe’
• ‘The Scrap of Paper’

 
1. Hitler’s Three Key Aims:

• Abolish Treaty of Versailles
• Expand German territory (i.e. establish a Grossdeutschland, a Volksgemeinschaft and Lebensraum)
• Defeat communism

 

Read:

• Walsh, pp. 255-256.
• See John D. Clare on Hitler’s aims.
• See also gcsehistory.org.uk

 

 
2. Hitler’s actions

• Leaves the Disarmament Conference and the League (October 1933)
• Secret re-armament 1933-34
• SCRAMCUP:
• SAAR Plebescite
• Conscription announced/Open rearmament (1935)
• Re-occupies the Rhineland (1936)
• Anschluss (March 1938)
• Munich – Hitler presses claims against Czechoslovakia (September 1938)
• Czechoslovakia annexed completely – Hitler flouts Munich Agreement (March, 1939)
• USSR-Germany 10 year non-aggression Pact
• Poland invaded

 

Read/see:

• Walsh: pp. 257-263.
• gcsehistory.org.uk
• John D. Clare’s 8 Steps to War (Scramcup)

 

Hitler’s actions were influenced by the actions of others during this period including:

• Japanese occupation of Manchuria
• the Italian occupation of Abyssinia (and the collapse of the Stresa Front);
• the Anglo-German Naval Agreement (bilateral treaty rather than working through the League);
• Italian participation in the the Rome-Berlin Axis from 1936;
• the Spanish Civil War;
• Italian and Japanese involvement in the The Anti-Comintern Pact.

3. Reasons for appeasement in the 1930s

Read:
• Walsh, pp. 264-265.
• See GCSE History on Chamberlain’s reasons

 

Churchill was the most prominent critic of appeasement, as a politician at the time and as a historian (in his book The Gathering Storm). In 1940, under the name Cato, Chamberlain and the appeasers were called The Guilty Men.

 



 

 
4. The Sudetenland Crisis and the Munich Conference

Read:
• Walsh, pp. 266-269.
• BBC Bitsize on Munich

 

 
5. Was Appeasement the Right Policy?

Read:
• Walsh, pp. 273.
• See John D. Clare on this question.
• BBC Bite Size on Appeasement is very clear and helpful.