The End of All Illusion

Abstract

It has been commonplace to assume that most western leaders were slow to recognise what Hitler’s accession to power meant. One is often told that there was considerable 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 widespread hope that power would tame Hitler and that he really did not mean what he said. Such notions were common and perhaps entirely understandable but they were rarely to be found in the ministries of European governments. Needless to say, nobody envisaged the holocaust* ahead and it appears that most western diplomatists misjudged Hitler’s intentions towards Poland, thinking that like his predecessors he sought frontier revision, when in fact he viewed Poland only 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 told an American visitor, ‘we shall have to fight them again’.²