The trouble came when Hitler pushed well beyond the point up to which Appeasement made sense. 

October 1933: Germany quit the League of Nations and its disarmament conference. 

July 1934: Austrian Nazi “putsch” in Vienna failed; Italian Army mobilized on the Brenner Pass; Hitler denied all involvement.  So Mussolini wasn’t pro-German yet and he looked ready to fight.  That could be useful. 

March 1935: Germany announced rearmament in violation of the Versailles Treaty.  Conscription was restored and an air force (the Luftwaffe) created.  It turned out that Hitler didn’t share conventional economic beliefs about the sanctity of a balanced budget.  That makes all sorts of things possible. 

April 1935: At the Stresa Conference Britain, France, and Italy agreed to oppose forcible changes in European borders.  A “coalition of the willing” appeared to be in formation. 

June 1935: Anglo-German Naval Agreement.  Britain agreed to Germany violating the naval terms of the Versailles Treaty.  The French thought that it might have been nice if the British had told them about this before they read it in the newspapers. 

October 1935-May 1936: Italo-Ethiopian War.  A split between Italy, on the one hand, and France and Britain, on the other hand, opened.  The British didn’t want the Italians on the Suez route and the League of Nations enthusiasts wanted to oppose aggression (without resorting to war of course).  So they dragged the French along.[1] 

The key point here is that the French wanted Britain’s support in any war against Germany.  To keep that secure, one way was to follow the British lead in foreign policy.  People began to refer to Britain as the “English governess.”  Another, riskier, approach was to believe that Britain couldn’t afford to have France be defeated by Germany.  If you believed that, France could take a stronger line against Germany and assume that the British would get on board in a crisis.  Did French leaders want to take a stronger line or did they just want someone to blame? 

December 1935: Hoare-Laval Agreement became public.  French foreign minister Pierre Laval had talked British foreign secretary Sir Samuel Hoare into agreeing to cut a deal with the Italians so that Mussolini would not be permanently alienated from France and Britain.  When news leaked out, both men lost their jobs.  As King George V said to Hoare, “Ah well Sam, no more coals to Newcastle, no more Hoares to Paris.”  NB: You have to say it out loud. 

March 1936: Germany re-militarized the Rhineland in violation of the Versailles Treaty.  That is, they moved in troops and began to build fortifications.  Once completed, these measures would prevent France from making an easy and crippling attack on the Ruhr, Germany’s industrial heartland. 

September 1936-March 1939: Spanish Civil War.  The British and French tried to push through a policy of non-intervention.  Nobody paid any attention.  Germany, Italy, and Russia all intervened.  Germany and Italy sent troops, tanks, and planes to support the rebel Nationalists; Russia sent weapons and planes and secret policemen to support the government.  Idealistic people your age went to fight in Spain to defend the Republic against fascist aggression.  Franco, the German-Italian client, emerged victorious. 

November 1936: Rome-Berlin Axis proclaimed; Germany and Japan sign anti-Comintern[2] Pact.  Neither one was a real military alliance, but they did amount to an agreement to co-operate. 

July 1937: Japan invaded China.  The Japanese concentrated on conquering the heavily-populated coastal areas, where most of the British trade took place. 

March 1938: “Anschluss” with Austria.  Germany suddenly annexed Austria.  Again, a violation of the Versailles and other treaties.  Two things mattered.  First, the Italians didn’t block the German grab the way they had done in the 1934 “putsch.”  Germany and Ital were aligned.  Second, it put Germany on the southern (and largely unfortified, border of Czechoslovakia and on the frontiers of Yugoslavia. 

March-September 1938: Sudetenland crisis.  The German minority in western Czechoslovakia began agitating for self-government, then for independence.  The Germans had put them up to it.  This gave Hitler the opportunity to threaten to intervene to protect the “oppressed” German minority.  Czechoslovakia had an alliance with France.  France didn’t want to fight Germany unless the British were going to join in.  The British didn’t have an alliance with Czechoslovakia.  In theory, Britain could stay out.  However, if France fought Germany and lost, Britain would be up a gum tree.  So, if France fought, then Britain would have to fight.  For Britain the question became how to squeeze the French to urge the Czechs to give Hitler what he wanted.  That way France would not have to fight and the British would not have to back them up. 

The shock waves from an Anglo-French retreat would be severe.  Other countries in Eastern Europe, like France’s ally Poland and everyone’s enemy the Soviet Union would get the idea that the Western powers were abandoning the region to Germany.  Leaders there would have to adapt.  As one of the characters in an Alan Furst novel says, “We can’t just pick the country up and paste it on Sweden.” 

29-30 September 1938: Munich Conference.  Germany, Italy, France, Britain confer, excluding Czechoslovakia and the Soviet Union.  The conference stripped the Sudetenland from Czechoslovakia.  Neville Chamberlain, the British prime minister who had sought the deal, and Edouard Daladier, the French prime minister who had gone along with the deal, received heroes’ welcomes when they returned home. 

November 1938: “Kristallnacht.”  This was a domestic event inside Germany.  However, it had a deep international effect.  “We’re dealing with a bunch of barbarians.  Can they separate their behavior at home from their behavior in international affairs?  Probably not.” 

15 March 1939: Germany suddenly occupied “Rump Czechoslovakia.”  This Hitler had promised not to do just five months before.  Chamberlain began to think that Hitler was no gentleman.  Where would Hitler turn next? 

31 March 1939: Britain and France announced that they would defend Poland.  The Poles hadn’t asked for this guarantee.  The British and the French had just decided that they needed a trip-wire for war. 

7 April 1939: Italy annexed Albania (Albania!), which borders on Greece. 

April 1939: Britain and France extended their guarantee of borders to Rumania, and Greece; Britain re-established conscription (just as Germany had done four years previously).  The thing is, trained and equipped soldiers aren’t “dragon’s teeth”: they don’t just spring up out of the ground at the command of a magician. 

3 May 1939: Stalin replaced the pro-Western (and Jewish) Foreign Minister Maxim Litvinov with his own villainous henchman, Vyacheslav Molotov.  What could that mean?  Those inscrutable Russkies. 

Spring-Summer 1939: Hitler starts badgering Poland over the “mistreatment” of ethnic Germans in the “Polish Corridor” (once part of Germany and lost in the Versailles Treaty).  A new “Sudetenland”? 

12 August 1939: Anglo-French delegation arrived in Moscow to negotiate an anti-German alliance. 

20 August 1939: Hitler secretly asked Stalin to let the German foreign minister, Ribbentrop, come to Moscow. 

23 August 1939: Nazi-Soviet Pact.  The public part of the treaty was a Non-Aggression Pact: Germany and Russia would not fight each other, regardless of who else they fought.  So the British and French negotiators went home.  The secret part of the treaty divided up Eastern Europe: Germany got the western two-thirds of Poland; Russia got eastern Poland and the little Baltic countries (Estonia, Lithuania, Latvia), eastern Poland, and Bessarabia (from Rumania).  Stalin had regained the frontiers of tsarist Russia—more than Lenin ever did. 

23 August-1 September 1939: Hitler expected the British and the French to back down, abandoning Poland to its certain fate.  The British and French announced that they would not back down. 

1 September 1939: Germany invaded Poland. 

3 September 1939: Britain and France declared war.  Hitler turned to one of his confidants and asked “What now?” 

War raged in Poland, but it was “All quiet on the Western Front.”  At one place, the French and German lines were close together, without anyone shooting.  Overnight the Germans put up a big sign: “Ein Volk, Ein Reich, Ein Fuhrer.”  On the following morning daylight revealed the French sign: “Liberte, Egalite, Fraternite.”  Battle between these opposed ideal was now joined.[3]

---

[1] “Ethiopium”: waging war against a weaker country for poorly considered reasons, leaving you with a splitting head-ache and fuzzy memories.  See: Iraq.  

[2] The Third, or Communist, International—hence “Comintern” in SovSpeak–was an organization of all Communists parties in the world.  Utterly under Soviet control, it allowed the USSR to exert leverage on the domestic politics of foreign counties and to conduct espionage. 

[3] I stole that anecdote from Sir Denis Brogan, The Development of Modern France, 1870-1940 (1940), p. 729.