8.7 Europe During the Interwar Period

After 1924 the international mood briefly improved. In the Locarno Treaties (1925), Germany accepted its new western borders with France and Belgium, and in 1926 it joined the League of Nations. In the Kellogg-Briand Pact (1928), dozens of countries renounced war as a tool of policy, though with no way to enforce it. This “spirit of Locarno” rested on prosperity and American loans, and the Great Depression destroyed it (8.5).

At Munich in September 1938, Neville Chamberlain of Britain and Édouard Daladier of France agreed with Hitler and Mussolini that Germany could take the Sudetenland, the border region of Czechoslovakia with about three million German speakers. Hitler promised it was his last territorial demand. Chamberlain returned home claiming he had secured peace. Six months later, Hitler seized the Czech lands, which had no German majority, proving that his aims went far beyond uniting Germans. Appeasement was now discredited.

Both the West and Hitler then courted the Soviet Union. Stalin distrusted Britain and France, who had left him out of Munich, and they distrusted him. On August 23, 1939, Germany and the Soviet Union signed a non-aggression pact. A secret protocol divided eastern Europe into spheres: Germany would take western Poland, and the Soviet Union eastern Poland, Finland, Estonia, Latvia and Bessarabia (Lithuania was moved into the Soviet sphere a month later). Hitler no longer feared a two-front war, and he invaded Poland nine days later.

• Memory of World War I: millions had died, and voters in Britain and France feared another such war above all.
• Guilt about Versailles: many in Britain thought Germany had been treated too harshly, so its early demands seemed reasonable.
• Military and economic weakness: the Depression had limited spending, Britain's rearmament was only beginning, and France relied on the defensive Maginot Line.
• Fear of communism: some conservatives saw Nazi Germany as a barrier against the Soviet Union, and the West would not trust Stalin.
• American isolationism: the U.S. passed Neutrality Acts in the mid-1930s and stayed out of European disputes.
• Imperial commitments: Britain worried about threats from Italy and Japan to its empire and about Commonwealth countries reluctant to fight in Europe.

In 1940 critics condemned the appeasers as “guilty men” who had fed Hitler's appetite and weakened Britain. Later historians, with access to government records, offered a more sympathetic view: Britain was not ready to fight in 1938, public opinion opposed war, and the year gained at Munich let Britain build radar defenses and fighter planes that helped win the Battle of Britain. Others reply that Germany also rearmed during that year, and that Czechoslovakia's army and fortifications were lost. Presenting both sides is a strong way to show complexity.