Great powers paid price for `peace': history shows that the pacifist movement of the 1930s ultimately helped to usher in the horror of World War II by allowing rogue nations to rise to power unabated

0 Comments | Insight on the News, April 1, 2003 | by Stephen Goode

When British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain returned from his meeting with Hitler and other world leaders at Munich in the fall of 1938, he famously promised that the settlement he had secured with "Herr Hitler" offered "peace in our time." He was wrong. That promise made Chamberlain and the umbrella with which he seemed always to be photographed the very symbol of appeasement. Within a year, World War II had begun.

Could that war have been avoided? Many are certain it could have. No less a figure than Pope Pius XI told the French ambassador to the Vatican that if the French had acted at the time Germany reoccupied the Rhineland, Hitler would have been stopped. And the Germans themselves thought so, too.

It is interesting to see how much Hitler was betting on the unwillingness of Great Britain, France or the United States to offer him serious challenge. At a meeting with chief aides in February 1933, the month after he became chancellor of Germany, Hitler promised to overthrow the Treaty of Versailles. He also promised to make the Third Reich the strongest nation in the world. Hitler told aides that his plans would meet their biggest test when he began to rearm Germany. It was then, he said, that "we shall see if France has statesmen. If she does, she will not grant us time, but will jump on us."

France had no nerve. It had no statesmen.

The West's spectacular failure of nerve came up again among Nazi leaders in April 1940--just before Germany's invasion of Norway--when Joseph Goebbels met with a carefully selected group of German journalists. Hitler's minister for propaganda told the reporters that the Nazis could have been stopped at several points. The Weimar Republic (the German government that preceded Hitler) might have "suppressed us in 1925--but didn't." That's exactly how it was in foreign policy, too, Goebbels went on. "In 1933, a French premier ought to have said, and if I had been the French premier, I would have said it: `The new Reich chancellor is the man who wrote Mein Kampf, which says this and that. This man cannot be tolerated in our vicinity. Either he disappears or we march!'"

But, Goebbels noted, with what must have been a mixture of amazement and glee, "They didn't do it. They left us alone and they let us slip through the risky zone, and we were able to sail around all dangerous reefs." Then an incredulous Goebbels concluded: "And when we were done and better armed--better armed than they were--then they started the war!"

Surely one of the most poignant regrets ever expressed was written in the late-1930s by one prominent French man of letters to another: "We should have gone to war at the end of 1935 [just before Hitler's occupation of the Rhineland], and we would have had 50 years of peace."

Yes, perhaps. But more importantly, Hitler would have been checked.

STEPHEN GOODE IS A SENIOR WRITER FOR Insight.