The Appeasement of Nazi Germany

The Weimar Republic has become a byword for a failed, tragic, political experiment. The official period of its existence, 1919-1933, marked the inter-war years in Germany and their related uncertainty, chaos and the state's ultimate collapse. Historians have found the roots of Nazism embedded in the Weimar years and that in the final analysis, Weimar politicians voluntarily handed over power to the man who wrought destruction on an epic scale, Adolf Hitler. Yet the Weimar era encapsulated a number of trends and fissures within German society, as well as the international community. The Weimar Republic was a prisoner of events and in the long run had little power to shape them. Historians are fond of interpreting the past as a tension between human agency, that is to say decision-making, and structural developments that evade individual choices. Both these interpretations are crucial when examining the tumultuous years of Germany's Weimar Republic.



The struggling Weimar Republic had become a breeding ground for extremist politics, including two opposed and powerful authoritarian entities: the right-wing National Socialists and the left-wing KPD Communist Party. As the 1930s dawned, these two totalitarian groups held one another in a temporary stalemate, enabling the fragile ghost of democracy to continue a largely illusory survival for a few more years.



That stalemate was broken in dramatic fashion on a bitterly cold night in late February 1933, and it was the Nazis who emerged decisively as the victors. 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." 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."



Munich is widely reviled today and is held up as the epitome of appeasement, but historians still debate its effects on the Second World War, as well as Neville Chamberlain's character and motivations. Some believe the attempted appeasement of Nazi Germany hastened, or even caused, the mayhem occupying the next seven years. Others believe that the pact merely failed to alter war's inevitable arrival in either direction. Historians and authors alternately interpret Chamberlain as a bumbling, arrogant fool, a strong-willed statesman who simply miscalculated the nature of Hitler and Nazi Germany.