Monday, March 16, 2020

Policy of Appeasement essays

Policy of Appeasement essays Was the Policy of Appeasement the right one to follow? Twenty-one years after the end of the Great War the Second World War broke out. The peace was not kept due to the impact of the Great Depression and due to the arrival on the World stage of aggressive foreign dictators who were determined to adopt aggressive foreign policies. Perhaps the turning point was in 1933 when Adolf Hitler became a chancellor of Germany, he intended to challenge the Treaty of Versailles. In order to placate Hitler, Britain and France adopted a policy of appeasement. There were many arguments for appeasement; one of these was that at first, many people felt there was some justice in Hitlers claims. The British accepted that the T of V was too harsh and felt that Germany should be treated with more fairness and be allowed to go back to a country accepted as a great power as it used to be. The T of V was basically abandoned in some aspects, from 1935 onwards they made the Anglo-German Naval Agreement, remilitarised the Rhineland-which was just seen by most people as Germany marching onto its own backyard and then allowed the Anschluss to occur in Austria uniting Austria and Germany which was simply the Germans achieving self-determination that was denied to them at the T of V. Everything Germany did was justified in one way or another and it was always believed that with just one more request or concession he would be satisfied and its demanding would stop. Britain and France wanted to keep the peace and avoid the chance of another war so they wanted to find peaceful solutions to Germanys problems, most Europeans placed their trust in the League of Nations and its idea of collective security. To keep the peace the idea of appeasement seemed like a good one to go ahead with but to make matters worse Italy and Japan were still coping with the impact of the Great Depression and would make it necessary to pr ...