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    Hitler, Chamberlain and Munich: The End Of The Twenty Year Truce
    Hitler, Chamberlain and Munich: The End Of The Twenty Year Truce
    Hitler, Chamberlain and Munich: The End Of The Twenty Year Truce
    Ebook88 pages1 hour

    Hitler, Chamberlain and Munich: The End Of The Twenty Year Truce

    By Nick Shepley

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    About this ebook

    In the mid 1930s, Hitler's determination to wage a European war and destroy the Treaty of Versailles seemed to be an unstoppable force in international affairs. The weak and divided British and French, crippled by multiple crises over the Rhineland, Spain Abyssinia and Austria were poorly prepared for the ordeal to come. This ebook explains how Hitler schemed and manipulated them in order to guarantee the destruction of Czechoslovakia and Poland.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherAUK Academic
    Release dateDec 7, 2015
    ISBN9781783331079
    Hitler, Chamberlain and Munich: The End Of The Twenty Year Truce

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      An amazing amount of information presented with an unusual conciseness. Well written (although poorly edited), a worthwhile read.

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    Hitler, Chamberlain and Munich - Nick Shepley

    damages.

    Prologue: Locarno and Stresa

    By 1925 Gustav Stresemann, Weimar Germany’s Foreign Minister was presented with a complicated balancing act. The new German republic that he had briefly been Chancellor of in 1923 had been born in the midst of a revolution that deposed the Kaiser, and its first task in 1919 was unenviable; signing the Treaty of Versailles.

    The Weimar politicians were not invited to the Paris Peace Conference, they were simply directed to sign the treaty that it produced. The loss of territory, armed forces, colonies, imposition of war guilt and reparations have all been covered in a previous ebook, Britain, France, Germany and the Treaty of Versailles, and these conditions deeply shocked and angered a broad cross section of the German people. Germany’s generals knew full well that her people would never fully accept the Versailles ‘Diktat’, and purposefully guided the new republicans to power specifically to let them take ownership of this toxic legacy that they had been responsible for creating. Stresemann was therefore anxious once the treaty was signed not to be seen by the German people to be working too hard to honour its provisions. Any Chancellor or foreign minister who pandered to Britain and France more than was strictly necessary would face electoral defeat at home and the possibility of more radical voices being heard. It was just two years since the Munich Putsch, where Hitler had attempted to first seize power, and two years since the French and Belgians had occupied the Ruhr Valley, Germany’s economic and industrial heartland, on order to force Germany to stop dragging her feet on the issue of reparation payments. The Weimar Government were mindful of these events, knowing that even though the economy had begun to give the appearance of recovery, deeply reactionary voices were still powerful and persuasive in Germany, and were not to be underestimated in their appeal.

    Stresemann also had to be mindful of the Western Allies. as mentioned above, when Germany appeared to be subverting the punishments meted out by the Treaty of Versailles, she was vulnerable to French invasion. She was also vulnerable still to naval blockade by Britain, who’s navy had laid siege to her ports, costing nearly a million German lives by 1919, in terms of hunger and resultant illness. Germany was also deeply reliant on the new finance that was flooding in from the USA under the provisions of 1924’s Dawes Plan, and it was perhaps this that made her most likely to comply, albeit reluctantly, with the provisions of Versailles.

    It was in this climate that Stresemann and the foreign ministers of Britain and France concluded the Locarno Treaties. He had made overtures to the British and French in February of 1925, in a bid to reintegrate Germany back into the international community. He offered a gesture that from Franco British perspectives was an act of genuine good will and cooperation, he agreed to recognise once and for all the much resented western borders of Germany, borders which forever ceded Alsace Lorraine to France. He also agreed to accept the demilitarisation of the Rhineland, another key provision of the Treaty of Versailles that German nationalists resented and rejected.

    The British had a longer game to play at Locarno, one that would prove ultimately disastrous for eastern Europe just over a decade later. It would be the actions of two half brothers, Austen and Neville Chamberlain, at Locarno and Munich separately, that would create the conditions for Hitler’s destruction of first Czechoslovakia and later Poland.

    Austen Chamberlain, son of the radical liberal politician Joseph Chamberlain, was a lifelong Francophile and had developed a deep mistrust of German nationalism during his time in Germany before World War One. He had served as the Minister for India during the war and resigned over the disasters that befell Britain’s Indian Army in Mesopotamia. A man of seemingly impeccable political morals, who was keen to remember old friends and allies when his party leader Stanley Baldwin of the Conservatives was choosing a cabinet, Chamberlain was a natural choice for Foreign Secretary in 1924.

    The previous year had seen Anglo French relations plummet to their lowest point since 1918. France’s invasion of the Ruhr Valley, Germany’s industrial heartland, and it’s subsequent occupation to force Germany to meet her schedule of reparations, had created a crisis at the heart of the Entente Cordiale. One of Chamberlain’s first jobs as Foreign Secretary was to announce the British Government’s rejection of the League of Nation’s The Geneva Protocol for the Pacific Settlement of International Disputes; the protocol laid out rules for future disarmament, sanctions and conflict resolution, but the Committee for Imperial Defence’s recommendation to the cabinet was to reject outright, whilst making modest proposals for alternate treaties. The committee felt that Britain’s freedom to act, and therefore naturally to resist tyrannical forces in both Europe and Asia, would be fatally undermined by disarmament. British strategists were also vey dubious about the idea that the League of Nations might be able to impose economic sanctions through the protocol. It was this more than anything else that caused the British to reject the proposals; The British might either lose a powerful tool to exert its influence over other states, or be forced to use it when it was not in British interests. This rejection was deeply unpopular with France, who’s leadership were anxious that Britain show a united front with her in the League of Nations. France’s overwhelming priority was to see a politically divided and economically and militarily weakened Germany for a generation, and for this she needed international partners such as Britain who she could rely on.

    It is testament to Chamberlain’s skill as a statesman that by the end of 1924 Britain and France were still on speaking terms at all.

    Chamberlain could see, along with many in Britain’s political classes, that Versailles had presented Europe with a time bomb that needed to be defused. French hopes of a permanently weakened Germany were fanciful in Chamberlain’s eyes, Germany would regain much of her strength in a decade or less, and when she did, it was important that her business was conducted not in the west, but in the east.

    This was a tacit acceptance by Chamberlain, and by much of the Foreign Office, that

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