A Dilemma

It's easy to look back and criticize Chamberlain, who proposed the Munich settlement. But at the time, Chamberlain was faced with a terrible dilemma. He couldn't have known what would happen in the future. He couldn't have known whether a "firm stand" would have stopped Hitler. We don't even know that today, though many people assume that it would have. What Chamberlain did know was that his country had been through the most bloody war in history in 1914-1918. The Munich settlement was his way of avoiding another disastrous war. It didn't, of course, work out that way.

When a leader like Hitler is in power, armed with a mass army, there isn't any good solution to the problems he creates. World War II killed over 50 million people and laid waste much of Europe and Asia. It's hard to think of this as good, even though many people do. So it wasn't a choice of a "good" war or a "bad" non-war. Both choices were bad because each might have led to great suffering.

It's possible that a different stand by the Allies at Munich would have prevented or postponed World War II. It's also possible that the war would have started sooner if the Allies had threatened Hitler with military force. No one will ever know. What we do know today is that Hitler might never have come to power if the Allies had followed different policies after World War I--for instance, if they'd followed through on their pledges about disarmament and the League of Nations and had helped the struggling Weimar Republic in the 1920s. And we can see how the policies that they did follow laid the groundwork for the crisis of 1938 and the war that followed.

Hitler didn't just happen. Allied policy, including that of the United States, must share a lot of the blame for Hitler's rise to power and the damage that he did.

Even when their policies had failed, the Allies didn't at first see the war as a crusade. Going to war didn't, for instance, stop the Holocaust; and before the war, the Allies had done little or nothing to save the Jews of Europe. Britain declared war when Germany invaded Poland, but "as late as 1940, when France fell, some British political leaders gave thought and utterance to coming to terms with Hitler and letting him be." The United States kept out of the war until the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor in 1941. Even then, Hitler declared war on the US before the US declared war on Germany.

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