Appeasement

            
             The 1930s was plagued by dictatorship after the economic crisis whereby democracy's fell in Italy, Germany and had already fallen in USSR. The moral dilemma that Britain faced at the beginning of the 1930s was, is it morally right for Britain as a nation to use force to stop Germany from uniting with other German speaking nations especially if they had belonged to Germany and wanted to. Many Brits and Americans felt that the Treaty of Versailles had been too harsh and therefore felt the need to compensate for this in many ways leading to Britain's own policy of appeasement towards Hitler in the 1930s. Therefore the question was, was the moral solution maintaining Versailles, or turning a blind eye, was there a moral justification to appeasement?.
             After the depression France and Britain were hard hit and therefore their priority was to build up their economy again, they had no intention of entering a war and also had no resources with which to do this. At the time many countries were more worried about the threat of communism and therefore believed that Hitler could defend them against it and act as a buffer. Lessons had been learnt from world war one and no-one wanted to enter into another war lightly. Neville chamberlain was elected in 1937 he gave appeasement a new drive believing that he must find out what Hitler wanted and negotiate, therefore believed that the best policy was to embark upon peaceful relations with Hitler in the hope that together they could maintain peaceful world relations in a way the league of nations had failed. At this point many of the Jewish purges were not done in the open and many of Hitler's demands seemed reasonable. In retrospect many Britain's felt they had placed the responsibility of the first world war too heavily on the Germans and therefore felt that Hitler was taking back what was naturally his and not in a forceful way but by plebiscite, posing no real threat to Britain in the West.