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Who was to blame for the outbreak of world war 2
Who was to blame for the outbreak of the Second World War? Was it Adolf Hitler or was it the appeasers of Britain and France?
Was Hitler to blame for attacking Poland and others or was it people like Neville Chamberlain who should have taken a firmer stand against Germany.
Many feel the appeasers are to blame. Appeasement is the policy of avoiding war with aggressive powers by giving way to their demands if they are not too unreasonable.
Therefore during my essay I will be discussing whether appeasement was the wrong policy at the wrong time during the 1930’s.
The majority of the British public were against war in the 1930’s. This was shown in the peace ballot of 1935 where the majority favoured peace. The oxford debate also backed up this point. Another indication was the great reception Chamberlain received when he returned from Munich in 1938.
The treaty of Versailles favoured Britain. The prime minister at the time Lloyd George had hoped for a “stern” peace. His hope was granted. The League of Nations was “the cornerstone of British foreign policy”. The League of Nations was not strong and had failed to do its job.
Britain may have took this route due to the economic crisis in Britain at the time or the terrible state that the British forces were in at the time. Also the British feared the idea of war and they may have felt that Germany and Italy had been unfairly treated at Versailles.
It was also felt that the disarmament conference of 1932 in Geneva had been a success due to the ban on bombing and the limitation on tanks and armed forces. The use of chemicals had also been stopped. But this was not a success. Germany and Russia voted against and eventually in 1933 when Hitler came to power he withdrew Germany from the world disarmament conference and began to openly rearm. (His army had risen to 550,000)
So why did this happen. It may be due to the foreign policies of Hitler and Mussolini for that matter. It was well documented that Hitler had wanted to unite all Germans and German speakers into what he called “greater Germany” in his book Mein kampf and his ideology of lebensraum, which translates to living room.
He had many stages in how to achieve this. Firstly was the Rhineland where Adolf Hitler marched his 22,000 troops back into the demilitarised zone on March 7th 1936. This was a clear act of aggression which had broken the Versailles and Locarno treaties.
Britain chose to ignore this saying it was an outdated concept and were committed to appeasement. Some may say it was not feasible to use military force. A quote for Anthony [next page]