Abstract
Some have assumed that most Western leaders were slow to recognise what Hitler’s accession to power meant. One hears about relief that Germany’s political turbulence had ended and that finally Germany had a government which could command a majority in the Reichstag, along with hope that power would tame Hitler and that he really did not mean what he said. Such notions were common and perhaps understandable, but they were rarely found in the ministries of European governments. Nobody fully envisaged the horrors ahead and most Western diplomatists misjudged Hitler’s intentions towards Poland, thinking that like his predecessors he sought frontier revision, when in fact he cast Poland as an obedient satellite and then, after Poland rejected this role, saw it as an entity to be destroyed en route to Russia.1 But on the main issue there was, especially at first, little illusion. Most of Europe’s leaders realised that Nazism was a threat to Europe’s peace and that in the long run Hitler intended war. In April 1933 Herriot informed an American visitor, ‘we shall have to fight them again’,2 whereas MacDonald told his son, ‘I shall not see peace again in my lifetime; I hope you will see it in yours.’3
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Notes and References
Gerhard Weinberg, The Foreign Policy of Hitler’s Germany: Diplomatic Revolution in Europe, 1933–36 (Chicago, 1970) p. 14. This work and its sequel, The Foreign Policy of Hitler’s Germany: Starting World War II, 1937–1939 (Chicago, 1980), are definitive on this subject. For a brief introduction to Nazi foreign policy, see either
William Carr, Arms, Autarky, and Aggression (New York, 1972)
Klaus Hildebrand, The Foreign Policy of the Third Reich, tr. Anthony Fothergill (Berkeley, CA, 1973).
Edgar B. Nixon (ed.), Franklin D. Roosevelt and Foreign Affairs, 3 vols (Cambridge, MA, 1969), p. 122.
David Marquand, Ramsay MacDonald (London, 1977) p. 749.
David Welch, Hitler, Profile of a Dictator (London, 1994) p. 59. This short work serves as a useful introduction before one tackles the many massive biographies.
On Soviet policy, see Geoffrey Roberts, The Soviet Union and the Origins of the Second World War (New York, 1995).
On Nazi penetration in Czechoslovakia, see Elizabeth Wiskemann, Czechs and Germans (London, 1967).
Rothstein, pp. 149, 152–5. See also
Robert Machray, The Struggle for the Danube and the Little Entente, 1929–38 (London, 1938). Text of the Statute of the Little Entente may be found in DIA, 1933.
On Italian policy, see Burgwyn, Italian Foreign Policy; R. J. B. Bosworth, Italy and the Wider World, 1860–1960 (London, 1996);
Philip Morgan, Italian Fascism, 1919–1945 (New York, 1995). The best survey of the crises of the 1930s is
P. M. H. Bell, The Origins of the Second World War in Europe (London, 1986).
See also Gordon Martel (ed.), ‘The Origins of the Second World War’ Reconsidered, 2nd edn (London, 1999).
Brief clear studies of the confusing Spanish war are George Esenwein and Adrian Shubert, Spain at War (New York, 1995)
Gabriel Jackson, A Concise History of the Spanish Civil War (London, 1974).
On Polish and other east European reactions to Hitler, see
Anita J. Praz·mowska, Eastern Europe and the Origins of the Second World War (London, 2000).
Clerk to Simon, 27 Jan. 1934, no. 57 (Belgium, Annual Report, 1933); FO 371/17616; Simon to Bland (10 July 1933), FO 371/17282; Sargent to Ovey (31 July 1934) FO 371/17630; FO Memo (30 May 1934) FO 371/17630. On Belgian policy, see D. O. Kieft, Belgium’s Return to Neutrality (Oxford, 1972)
Martin S. Alexander, The Republic in Danger: General Maurice Gamelin and the Politics of French Defence, 1922–1940 (Cambridge, 1992).
Minutes of meeting at French Ministry of War (10 March 1933) FO 371/16668. On France’s dilemmas, see Robert J. Young, France and the Origins of the Second World War (New York, 1996).
The best study is R. A. C. Parker, Chamberlain and Appeasement (New York, 1993).
See, for example, Maarten L. Pereboom, Democracies at the Turning Point (New York, 1995), p. 176
Richard Davis, Anglo-French Relations Before the Second World War (London, 2001) p. 14.
Davis provides a new examination of the Anglo-French relationship in the Ethiopian and Rhineland crises. On this relationship thereafter, see Martin Thomas, Britain, France, and Appeasement (Oxford, 1996).
See Stephen A. Schuker, ‘France and the Remilitarization of the Rhineland, 1936’, French Historical Studies (spring 1986), and
Donald Cameron Watt, Too Serious a Business: European Armed Forces and the Approach to the Second World War (Berkeley, CA, 1975) pp. 21, 74, 100–2.
For the Soviet reaction, including dismissal of collective security, see Michael Jabara Carley, 1939: The Alliance that Never Was and the Coming of World War II (Chicago, 1999). This work effectively represents the Soviet viewpoint.
On events after Munich, see Donald Cameron Watt, How War Came (New York, 1989).
For French opinion, see William D. Irvine, ‘Domestic Politics and the Fall of France in 1940’, in Joel Blatt (ed.), The French Defeat of 1940: Reassessments (Providence, RI, 1998) pp. 85–99.
Antony Lentin, ‘“Appeasement” at the Paris Peace Conference’, in Michael Dockrill and John Fisher (eds), The Paris Peace Conference, 1919 (New York, 2001) p. 51.
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© 2003 Sally Marks
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Marks, S. (2003). The End of Old Illusions. In: The Illusion of Peace. The Making of the 20th Century. Palgrave, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-0-230-62949-3_6
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