Embodied principally by the person of Neville Chamberlain, appeasement aims to fulfill German resentment towards the treaty of Versailles though the exercise of conciliation (McDonough, 2002). The threat, incarnated in the person of Adolf Hitler, had consequently been planned and organised a priori. Hitler's aggressive views, illustrated by his aim of gaining Lebensraum, proves that Appeasement is by definition, unable to restrain belligerence as war is inevitable. This appraisal consequently asserts that the Munich agreement allowed Hitler the time he needed and that, owing to Chamberlain's cowardliness, Hitler became more powerful and succeed to achieve some of his previously defined aims - such as attacking Poland. The 'Hitlocentric interpretation' of the Munich agreement consequently suggests that resistance against Hiter was the solution. .
'Revisionist historians' however, consider that Hitler was a genius of op- portunism and expediency. This view is mostly incarnated by Taylor's (1963) book The Origins of the Second World War which has been widely criticised for its vindication of Hitler (cited in McDonough, 2002). Highly controversial, this perspective asserts that the Munich agreement succeed in delaying a general European war in 1938 (Taylor, 1963). Since Hitler was only "an ordinary German statesman" (Taylor, 1963) and did not have any previously determined "Master Plan" (McDonough, 2002), war could consequently have been avoided as Hitler could not have been able to take part into the war if other foreign policies - such as English and French - did not provided him the opportunities he needed. Yet war patently occurred in 1939 since Chamberlain mistakenly and prematurely abandoned appeasement for an idealistic alternative: attacking Germany (Taylor, 1963). Taylor (1963) argues that a securement of an Anglo-Soviet agreement as well as a coercion of Poland to meet Hitler's requirements could have been beneficial.
