appeasement

appeasement is generally used to describe the policy towards Nazi Germany pursued by Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain between 1937 and 1939, and has purely negative connotations. In fact, appeasement had a more respectable history and passed through several phases. British unhappiness with the vindictive reparations required to be paid by Germany after the First World War led to a policy of economic appeasement. Originally fixed, in 1921, at £6,600 million, the reparations total was reduced by almost three-quarters under the Young Plan of 1929. During the early years of Nazi rule in Germany (1933–6) a policy of economic appeasement also operated in relation to trade; in April 1933 an Anglo-German Trade Pact was concluded by Ramsay MacDonald's National Government, in the belief that although the Nazis were not likeable, one ought to do business with them.

Anglo-French acquiescence in Hitler's remilitarization of the Rhineland (March 1936), in violation of the treaties of Versailles and Locarno, marked a new phase of appeasement. In political circles in Britain, the Versailles settlement was widely blamed for the rise of the Nazis, and of Nazi sympathies amongst many ethnic Germans who, after 1918, found themselves excluded from Germany proper. In March 1938 Hitler ordered the anschluss, the union with Austria forbidden at Versailles, and almost at once indicated his determination also to meet the demands (real or imaginary) of Germans living in the Sudetenland, in Czechoslovakia, for union with Germany. Chamberlain could count on British public opinion for support of a policy aimed at giving the Nazis what they wanted. At Munich, on 29 September 1938, the Sudetenland was transferred to Germany, whilst more Czech territory was ceded to Poland and Hungary. Chamberlain, who visited Hitler twice during this crisis, was a national hero. Only after the German occupation of Prague (March 1939) was appeasement abandoned.

In its final phase, appeasement was an emergency measure. But it gave Britain a valuable year in which to rearm.

Geoffrey Alderman