WW2 · SEP 1938
Why didn’t Britain and France stop Hitler in 1936–38?
The seminar question: “Britain and France could probably have stopped Hitler cheaply in 1936–38. Why didn’t they?”
From 1936 to 1938 Hitler remilitarized the Rhineland, backed Franco in the Spanish Civil War, annexed Austria and demanded the Sudetenland. Britain and France answered with appeasement, and at Munich in September 1938 they granted the Sudetenland rather than risk war, a price paid by Czechoslovakia.
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In 1936, France had the military strength nearby to intervene when German troops entered the demilitarized Rhineland. Britain and France protested, and the German move stood. Here was a breach of the postwar settlement that France had the means to resist. Why did it hold back?
The short answer
- Versailles and Nazi revisionism. Germany lost territory and military strength under the 1919 settlement. The Nazis used resentment of those terms to build support for expansion, falsely describing each breach as a limited correction.
- Depression and political weakness. Economic crisis damaged moderate parties and helped the Nazis come to power. It also put pressure on British and French military spending, while making support for another major war harder to secure.
- Memory of 1914–18. Voters and leaders remembered the mass slaughter of 1914–18. Postponing another war seemed worth taking risks, especially when more time could help their countries rearm.
- Failed collective security. The League of Nations failed to enforce its responses to Japan in Manchuria and Italy in Abyssinia. Those failures showed how an aggressor could act while other states struggled to agree on enforcement.
THE TURNING POINT
Munich, 30 September 1938. The agreement at Munich gave Hitler reason to expect that pressure would win concessions. Stalin, whose government had been excluded, had reason to doubt a reliable Western front against Germany. Both conclusions helped make the Nazi–Soviet Pact possible.
What it changed
Czechoslovakia becomes vulnerable. Czechoslovakia’s border defenses lay in the Sudetenland. Losing them left the country exposed; Germany seized the rest in March 1939, gaining the Škoda arms works as well.
Stalin considers a German agreement. The Soviet Union’s exclusion from Munich added to its distrust of Britain and France. An agreement with Berlin came to look like a way to gain time and a security buffer.
Britain guarantees Poland. Britain’s guarantee to Poland after Prague made resistance to further expansion a clearer commitment. Hitler read it as another bluff, raising the danger in the next crisis.
The full answer, argued
Stopping Hitler meant accepting the possibility of another mass war. Leaders faced economic pressure, divided opinion, and forces that needed more preparation; delay did give them useful time to rearm. They also treated his demands as disputes over particular borders. Hitler saw concessions as steps toward a larger racial empire, so the bargain they hoped would settle the dispute encouraged further demands.
An interesting fact
French intelligence believed that nearly 300,000 German troops were in and behind the Rhineland zone in March 1936—about ten times the actual number. Only about 3,000 soldiers crossed the Rhine bridges. Hitler later called the forty-eight hours after the march the most nerve-racking of his life. A familiar story holds that the troops had orders to retreat at the first French shot, but historians now doubt it.
This is the study layer of Appeasement and the road to WW2, chapter 1 of The War Room — WW2, 1936–1945; the full index of the atlas is here.
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