20 World War II and the Holocaust:

The origins of World War II have not been studied in the same way as the origins of World War I because Hitler's responsibility for World War II was more obvious.

The appeasement of Hitler by France and England has caused a lot of controversy about the origins of World War II.
The diplomatic history of the interwar years cast a long shadow over the rest of the twentieth century.

It is obvious that Hitler is responsible for the Holocaust.

They have cast a long shadow.

France built an alliance system with Czechoslovakia, Yugoslavia, and Romania, and separately with Poland, which was designed to surround Germany.

The Rapallo Treaty of 1922 was signed by Germany and the Soviet Russia, the other pariah state of the day.

It was published by John Wiley & Sons.

A secret, more extensive diplomatic and military cooperation between the two countries was being negotiated according to the investigators of World War II.

A remarkable economic recovery occurred in Germany and nearly all countries during the Locarno era, which lasted from 1924 to 1929.

The collapse of the stock market changed everything.
The opening stages of the collectivization of agriculture and the five-year plan were already happening in the Soviet Union.
The national boundaries established by the Paris Peace Conference remained in place.

Outraged nationalism is a staple of Hitler's oratory.

The public rhetoric of Hitler, the marginal, widely mocked demagogue, was one thing, but the concrete reality of Hitler's foreign policy upon taking office was another.
His first efforts as chancellor were focused on domestic issues.

Hitler presented himself to the world as a man of peace in 1933, but other countries refused to take his proposal seriously.

He withdrew from the League of Nations and the Disarmament Conference because of their refusal.
The Polish Corridor through eastern Germany remained for most Germans the most bitterly resented territorial change of 1919 after Hitler signed a non-aggression pact with Poland in January 1934.
In January 1935, after the overwhelming vote in favor of German rule in the Saar, Hitler announced that he had no further claims on France.

Throughout this period Hitler kept returning to the theme that he, a veteran of trench warfare, knew well the horrors of war and was committed to preventing their recurrence.

After the passing of the Nuremberg Laws, the tone of his foreign policy could be seen as moderate.
Many observers remained unconvinced, and retroactively describing Hitler as rational seems ludicrous, but at the time many allowed themselves to be persuaded that Hitler, once saddled with the responsibilities of power, was in fact moving away from the radical rhetoric of his past and showing many signs of being a responsible statesman.

The Austrian republic is Germany's neighbor to the south east.

There were many obstacles to Hitler's stated intentions.
The Austrian Nazis attempted to stage a putsch after the murder of the ChristianSocial chancellor, Engelbert Dollfuss, in late July 1934.
Hitler was embarrassed by the failure of that putsch.
Things got a bit more embarrassing.

The Christian Socials had good relations with Mussolini.

The establishment of a strong German state on Italy's northern border was a key foreign-policy goal for Italian leaders.
If necessary, Mussolini moved 100,000 Italian troops to the Brenner Pass to protect Christian Social rule.
The project of unifying Germany and Austria was abandoned by Hitler after he repudiated the actions of the Austrian Nazis.

The year 1934 had marked dazzling victories for Hitler in domestic affairs, but he was less successful in foreign policy.

It seems clear that his intentions were spurious and short-term.

In domestic matters, Hitler retreated in ways that were not often remembered in subsequent years.

He decided that the time for major action against the Jews had to be delayed because there was little popular support for the planned boycott.
The subject of an anti-Jewish boycott largely disappeared from Hitler's speeches after the boycott was changed to a symbolic day.

Hitler announced in March 1935 that Germany would rebuild its air force and enlarge its ground forces to 500,000, five times the limit imposed by the Versailles Treaty.

In the future, the three leaders promised that their countries would use military force to resist any further violations of the Versailles Treaty by Germany.

The Stresa Front was not a coalition of liberal-democratic powers but rather one based on national interest, like France's alliance with tsarist Russia before World War I.

The Stresa Front might have been described as realpolitik by French and British leaders, who wanted to oppose a rising Nazi Germany.

Hitler's dictatorship and Germany's rearmament suggested to some observers that an even more threatening evil was emerging in Nazism.

Foreign-policy implica tions had far-reaching internal developments in this period.

In the early Depression years, the French Third Republic was under siege, and frustration with it reached a climax.
Serge Stavisky bribed officials and parliamentarians to cover up his activities and sold worthless bonds to the tune of millions of Francs.
For the antirepublican, antisemitic right in France, Stavisky epitomized all that was wrong with "Marianne", the symbol of the Republic, which was embraced and disgraced by unscrupulous Jews.
In early January 1934, Stavisky was found dead of gunshot wounds, and it was thought that he was finally going to be brought to justice.

The demonstrators said that Stavisky was murdered by the police in order to prevent him from exposing the corruption of high government officials.

Seventeen people were killed and hundreds were wounded when the demonstration turned into a bloody confrontation with the forces of order.

The reactionary right in France did not find a leader comparable to Mussolini or Hitler in charisma or political savvy, but by 1934 Colonel Francois de la Rocque of the Croix du feu claimed a million recruits to his banners.

At this time in France, his group was called a fascist.
Many were close to the prewar right-wing antirepublican movements.
Many on the right expressed admiration for the German and Italian dictators, even though De la Rocque favored military action against Nazi Germany.

The February 1934 riot in France was thought to be evidence of a rising right-wing threat to the republic.

The long history of insurrections in Paris made it easy to believe that the antirepublican conspirators were going to seize power.
At the time, the Marxist left believed that a "fascist" coup d'etat had been narrowly averted.
Right-wing antirepublicans would have been in power in Italy, Germany, Austria, and France if the coup had succeeded.
In France, the failure of Germany's left to unite against Hitler made a strong impression.
France's left needed to pay attention.

The formation of the Popular Front, an anti-fascist coalition that came to power in both France and Spain in 1936, was the result of the riots of February 6, 1934.

The leaders of Comintern were forced to recognize the failure of the revolutionary doctrine they had forwarded since 1928.

The nightmare for Soviet leaders was that France could join Germany and Italy in an anti-Communist alliance.
They tried to keep Europe's major powers divided since they realized that the capitalist world could bring down the Soviet Union.

The leaders of the Soviet Union were open to change.

In the summer of 1934, the Congress of Victors announced a new period of class harmony inside the Soviet Union.
Communists throughout the world were told to encourage harmony, or at least to ally with other anti-fascist forces, not only with democratic socialists but also with non-socialist democrats, possibly even with conservatives so long as they were firmly anti-fascist.
Soviet Russia joined the League of Nations in 1934.
Leading spokesmen for the Comintern had previously denounced liberal democracy as a farce.

Comintern member parties were told to stress patriotism rather than proletarian internationalism.

The Communist Party, the Socialist Party, and the Radical Party were suspicious of the Popular Front in France.

The Stresa Front had implications for the formation of the Popular Front.
Mussolini was studying the possibility of an imperial expansion into Ethiopia, Africa's only major area not controlled by Europeans, bordered on the north by Italian Eritrea and on the south by Italian Somaliland.
The scene of a humiliating defeat for Italy in 1896 was one of the attractions of conquering Ethiopia.

Mussolini wanted to reverse a worrisome disaffection in Italy's population, especially its youth.

He succeeded in that goal.
Mussolini basked in the most ardent support he ever achieved during the Second Ethiopia War, which lasted from October 1935 to May 1936.
His warnings that "national pride has no need of the delirium of race" were forgotten.
He and other Fascist leaders used crude forms of European racism against Africans in justifying the attack on Ethiopia.
While the Fascist propaganda machine presented the war as heroic and glorious, the reality was that it was a slaughter of a divided, often bewildered population that was equipped with largely inferior weapons.

Mussolini thought the French and British would tolerate the Ethiopia escapade.

Many people in those two countries believed that keeping Italy in the Stresa Front was crucial to containing Nazi Germany.
Concrete measures to prevent Italy's conquest of Ethiopia were never included in the denunciations of Italy's aggression that came from France and Britain.
The half-hearted steps only inflamed the belief of Italians that they were being held to unjust or hypocritical standards by other imperialist nations.

The Stresa Front's disintegration suggests how complicated opposition to aggression can become.

Slavery was still practiced in Ethiopia, along with many other practices in violation of League of Nations standards, according to representatives from France and Britain.

The League's failure to prevent Italy's takeover of Ethiopia was one of many proof that it was not effective in fighting nationalist aggression.

The Second Ethiopia War contributed to a shift in opinion and diplomatic alliances.

The rapprochement of Italy and Germany began after Nazi Germany did not protest Italy's aggression.
Mussolini began to speak of a "Rome-Berlin axis" in late 1936.
He and other Italian spokesmen stopped referring to Hitler and Nazism.
Anti-Jewish legislation was introduced in Italy.

Europe as a whole seemed to be moving toward a diplomatic situation that was logical and anti-fascist.

The idea of a balance of power between nation-states continued to be resisted by many leaders.
There was an ideological tendency of the pre-World War I coalition of France, Britain, and Germany against a newly threatening autocratic Germany, but bringing autocratic Russia into the anti-German coalition underscored how national interest trumped ideological preference.
Conservatives in western Europe were not willing to accept the idea of establishing a diplomatic alliance with Communist Russia against Nazi Germany.
A pact of mutual defense was negotiated between France and Russia in May 1935, but it encountered strong resistance in the French Chamber ofDeputies and was finally approved by the narrowest of votes.
Between 1935 and 1938, a lot remained in limbo.

The way in which people and nations responded to the Stresa Front was characterized by dramatic shifts from 1933 to 1939.

"), but now it seemed to many that it was a matter of choosing not between democracy and Communism but rather between two dynamic, totalitarian systems, seemingly "new" in nature and evolving in unexpected and alarming directions."

Germany's previous position as a shining light of western civilization was hard to deny, and as the hatreds of World War I faded, hopes had arisen that a democratic Germany could securely join Europe's other advanced liberal democracies.

Soviet Russia was more barbaric and dangerous than tsarist Russia ever was.

The reputation of the Germans as a more civilized people made Europeans think that the danger of Germany was less than that of Soviet Russia.

A strong minority of Europeans still consider Soviet Russia to be a representation of the revolution, even though it has been contorted.

By early 1936, it became more difficult to determine what a "Communist" system would look like for most European left-wingers, since any decision to ally with Soviet Russia and the Communist parties in their own countries did not necessarily mean that they hoped for a system exactly like that Left-liberals and democratic socialists were attracted to the Popular Front coalition because they believed that a unified left was necessary to oppose the fascist threat from within their own countries.
Hitler and Nazism were seen as the lesser evil by most of the conservative right.

The Popular Front organized an anti-fascist rally on Bastille Day in 1935.

A million people squeezed into the Place de la Bastille to hear speeches against fascists.
In the parliamentary elections of the following spring, the Popular Front won more seats than any other party.
For the first time, the Socialists overtook the Radicals as the largest delegation to the Chamber, with 149 seats.
The Communists rose from 12 seats to 72, but the Radicals dropped from 157 to109, a worrying sign since the drop suggested a move to the right of former centrist voters for the Radicals.
Although the Popular Front won 58 percent of the total vote, the vote revealed a sharper divide between the right and left in France and not a significant groundswell of votes for the left.

The wave of strikes that rolled over France between the May 3 vote and the assumption of the office of prime minister on June 4 by the Socialist leader Leon Blum intensified the political polarization.

The leaders of the PCF were surprised by the strikes and did their best to calm the strikers.
Some 2 million workers were involved by the first week of June, occupying their factories and refusing to leave.

The French economy stopped working.

The strikes were hailed by some on the extreme left as the beginning of a long-awaited revolution in the West.
The strikes had more in common with the 1871 Paris Commune than with the Bolshevik Revolution, in the sense that they represented an inchoate exultation, a flexing of muscle, with especially intriguing similarities to the Commune's strange "festival of the oppressed" in the spring of 1871.

The Popular Front victory awakened lower-class expectations, but the strikers had no long-range or coordinated program.

The goal of the Popular Front in France would be to exercise power under capitalism but not "conquer" it, as would be the case in a future social revolution.

The future revolution would only be possible if a majority of the population favored it, which was not the case in 1936.
The exercise of power would involve dealing with the fascist menace, but he also expressed a hope to accomplish something like the New Deal in the United States, attending to various social and economic inequalities but retaining the market economy and private ownership.

The "Matignon Agreements" were hammered out after a meeting with representatives of the French industry.

A forty-hour week, salary increases of 12 percent, and two-week vacations with pay were included in the Agreements.
Legislation was passed that dissolved the fascist leagues, but in many cases the leagues reformed as political parties and were protected by the constitution.
Many leaders of industry did all they could to undermine the Agreements, and many workers complained that a rapid rise in the cost of living was blocking their salary increases.

Industrial leaders were upset about the drop in productivity.

Both had a point.

French investors fear for the future and moved their capital abroad.

The govern ment needed a higher return from taxes to support its welfare measures, but it faced stagnant labor productivity and a declining tax base.
The regime's economic reforms were paused early in 1937.
By the spring, barely a year after he took office, Blum was forced to resign and be replaced by a Radical-led parliamentary coalition.

The years 1936-7 were excellent for Nazi Germany.

The Berlin Olympics in the summer of 1936 followed Hitler's successful gamble in remilitarizing the Rhineland.
The German economy was booming.
Germany's workers increased their productivity because they worked longer hours.
Industry leaders and investors in Germany were more supportive of the Nazi government than they were of the Popular Front.

The challenges of foreign policy were more difficult than those of domes tic ones.

Hitler took a major foreign-policy gamble in March 1936, against the advice of his generals and in violation of the Locarno Agreements, when he remilitarized the Rhineland against the advice of his generals.
He thought it was too late to respond when Blum took power in June.
He would have faced strong opposition to any effort to drive Germany's armies out of the Rhineland.
The British made it clear that they would not participate in any military action against Germany over the issue of the Rhineland's remilitarization, despite the fact that the French were reticent to take any action.

In July 1936, after barely a month in office, Blum learned that General Franco had risen up against Spain's Popular Front, an uprising that quickly developed into a fullscale civil war.

Some on the left of France's Popular Front, especially the Communists, were against full-scale military aid to the Spanish Popular Front, but the Radicals, as well as many leading figures in the Socialist Party, were against it.
Being drawn into Spain's civil war seemed too similar to being drawn into the Balkans in 1914.

The lack of British support for any major foreign-policy initiative was due to the reticence of the French since 1923.

The Conservatives remained strong in Britain's parliament in the early 1930s, while the Labour and Liberal parties had little interest in the British Popular Front.
The British Union of Fascists and the British Communist Party both had 40,000 members.

Two months after the formation of the Stresa Front, Britain signed a naval agreement with Nazi Germany, which had weakened anti-fascist sentiment in the ruling class.

Germany was allowed to increase the size of its navy to 35 percent of the Royal Navy.
Hitler's rearmament gained legitimacy.
Britain's negative reaction to the idea of aiding the Popular Front in the Spanish Civil War underscored the reservations of the ruling Conservatives about becoming involved in any anti-fascist crusade.

It is dangerous for one country to get involved in another's civil war.

French and American support for anti-Bolshevik forces in 1919-20 was useless since it allowed the Bolsheviks to portray themselves as defending Mother Russia from foreign invaders.
The civil war in Spain was similar to the one in Russia in that there was a breakdown of central authority and a mixture of violently opposed parties.

Spain's political history was often on the edge of civil war during the 1920s.

King Alfonso left in early 1931, after Primo de Rivera took over as dictator in 1923.
If the people of Spain had the choice, they would have voted for independence from Madrid.
The sense of a modern political community in Spain has been weak for a long time.
In the spring of 1931, when the king left, a coalition of radical democrats and reformist socialists collaborated to write a new constitution similar to the one of the Weimar Republic.
In December 1931, the new constitution became official.

The passions that had torn the country's fabric for so long were not calmed.

In the four years between the adoption of the constitution and the electoral victory of the Popular Front, violent unrest spread, with formal electoral victories shifting from left to right and back to left.
The governing coalitions of both left and right were unable to control their more fanatical followers.
There was no willingness to recognize the legitimacy of the opposing side.
It was more widespread in Spain.

The coalition of the Spanish Popular Front was more diverse than the one in France.

The Socialists became the largest party in France with the May elections, but the anarchists remained the most popular party in Spain.

The Spanish Popular Front was headed by a man who had already been prime minister in 1931 and was hated by the right for his efforts to weaken the Church and reform the military.

The immediate agendas of both Azana and Blum involved radical-democratic reform, but in Spain it was still a distant goal, involving major changes and challenging many vested interests.

The most powerful strike wave in Spanish history rolled over the country after the electoral victory of the Spanish Popular Front in February 1936.

Millions of landless laborers in Spain were helped by a powerful strike wave in France three months later.
In Spain, the belief that a fundamental social revolution had begun was more justified than in France because of the lack of coherent revolutionary leadership and agreed-upon goals.

The Spanish Popular Front more often unleashed a violent revenge against right-wing political leaders and army officers, bombings of churches and cathedrals, rapes of nuns, and attacks on other people.

Rightwing groups against the left were provoked by the surge of popular violence.

The buildings had been seized by the workers and draped with red flags or black flags of the anarchists.

Everyone wore rough working-class clothes.

Even if Franco and many of the people around him remained traditional Catholic military men, the front uprising would lend more plausibility to the epithet "fascist".

After Franco accepted the aid offered by Mussolini and Hitler, the term was appropriate for those who believed in a Europe-wide anti-fascist struggle.

Mussolini eventually sent 100,000 troops and Hitler offered the Condor Legion, which bombed a small market town, killing many people.

The signing of a Non-Intervention Pact was the result of diplomatic efforts by Britain and France.
Nazi Germany, Fascist Italy, and Soviet Russia all ignored it.

There was a major split within the Spanish Popular Front's governing ranks over the issues of centralizing military command and enforcing discipline on the part of the Front's fractious supporters.

The Communists wanted victory to be achieved by centralizing state power and imposing military discipline on the ranks.
They stressed the importance of curtailing social revolution in order to avoid alienating middle-class citizens who might support the Popular Front.
If the goal were to return to statist rule and authoritarian class society, the people would see no reason to risk their lives.

Most of the other parties of the Spanish Popular Front had doubts about the Communists' methods and their actual goals in the war.

The military aid given to the Popular Front by Soviet Russia increased the strength and popular support of the Spanish Communist Party.
Stalin sent secret police agents to Spain to ferret out "Trotskyites", resulting in arrests in the night, confessions under torture, and summary executions at dawn.
The years of the Spanish Civil War and the Purge Trials in Russia were very similar.
Stalin put to death most of the Soviet generals who served in Spain after the Spanish Civil War.

The war in Spain ended in 1939 with a death toll of more than half a million.

Civil wars are always unpredictable, but the divisions of those formally supporting the Popular Front revealed themselves to be so fundamental as to make victory not only unlikely but practically impossible.
If the Popular Front had prevailed over Franco's forces, there would have been another civil war.

If Spain was not a significant military power, the balance on the international front would not have changed.

The divisions of the liberal democrats and moderates in the rest of Europe in regards to Nazi Germany were almost as bad as those of the anti-fascists in Spain against Franco.

Orwell, who was gravely wounded by a bullet in his neck, narrowly missed being arrested by Soviet agents while he was recovering.

He could not help but notice how gullible the Spanish people were, how quickly they could become callous.

The Spanish Civil War was a dress rehearsal for World War II.

On the one hand it appeared international, but on the other it was an eruption of Spanish troubles that were not understood by outsiders.
It resembled the Dreyfus Affair in the way that it catalyzed right and left while revealing ugly attributes on both sides.
Orwell was haunted by what he saw in Spain.
It became more difficult to believe that Stalin and the Comintern were upholders of humanity, democracy, and justice.
For many on the hard left, the choices were limited, and they tended to excuse the dark side of Stalinism, much as others on the right did.

There were contrasting reactions to the challenge of Nazism between the Popular Front and Appeasement.

Those who supported the Popular Front hoped that a united left could block Nazism, while appeasement attracted those who thought Communism was more dangerous than Nazism.
The widespread belief that another war on the scale of World War I was unacceptable caused both reactions to fail.
The slaughter of the Spanish Civil War reinforced these conclusions.
The Popular Front and appeasement evolved out of two false claims: first, that the Paris Peace Conference had established a just peace, and second, that the Bolshevik Revolution represented the fulfillment of the Marxist vision of socialism and Enlightened values more generally.

It is difficult to untangle the idea of appeasement from the more familiar practice of amoral foreign policy.

Although he would eventually become the anti-appeaser, there was a soft spot for fascists for a number of years.

Efforts by British statesmen to "appease" Mussolini were evident in the Stresa Front and continued after the Ethiopia war, primarily motivated by hopes to prevent or undermine his rapprochement with Hitler.

The softer side of Mussolini in the Stresa is still remembered, but the more extensive efforts to appease Hitler are still seen as the more negative side of appeasement.

The appeasement of the Nazi dictator can be seen in Britain's naval agreements with Germany in June 1935.
Allowing the remilitarization of the Rhineland is more important than preventing Germany and Italy from aiding Franco.

Hitler backed away from incorporating Austria in July of 1934.

The issue reappeared in a different context by early 1938.
In terms of his popularity, Hitler was the stronger of the two.
Being incorporated into Germany in 1938 became more attractive for many Austrians.

Hitler's tendency to respond to unforeseen situations rather than stick to a precise plan was again demonstrated as pressures built over the issue.

He subjected Kurt Schussnigg to a three-hour browbeating after inviting him to his mountain retreat.
Schussnigg agreed to appoint an Austrian Nazi to the post of interior minister.
Schussnigg unexpectedly announced that he was organizing a referendum to determine if Austria's citizens actually favored a union with Germany.
Hitler ordered his troops into Austria before the plans were put into effect.
Hitler received a rapturous welcome when he traveled to his hometown of Linz and then Vienna.

Around 80 million was the number of the Nazi Reich.

Discontented German minorities in other countries saw new hopes for remedying their own situation after observing how Hitler brought Austria's Germans home to the Reich.

The Sudeten Germans, numbering around 3.5 million, charged that the Czech majority had become more blatant since the start of the depression.

The awkward truth was that Czechoslovakia did not constitute a nation-state on Wilsonian principles.
It did not reconcile its minorities to Czech domination by the year 1938.

In the summer of 1938, Hitler was about to invade Czechoslovakia as he had Austria in March.

At this point, the British Conservative prime minister tried to apply the policy of appeasement for which his name has become so notorious.

He stood at the left of the Conservative Party and was not soft on Communism or fascists.
He was persuaded that he could bring Hitler around to a reasonable, non-violent resolution of the crisis in Czechoslovakia by recognizing Germany's legitimate grievances and negotiating skillfully.

In that belief, he showed himself to be more sympathetic to German Nazism than to Russian Communism.

It is difficult to imagine him going to Moscow in order to appeal to Stalin's side in the case of Soviet Russia being unfairly treated at the Paris Peace Conference.

He couldn't have imagined anything so unacceptable to his party's right wing.

Stanley Baldwin spoke for many in his party when he said that his heart would not be broken if Hitler attacked Russia.
Conservatives in Britain and France would be happy to see Hitler launch an attack on Russia.
Many on the right warned that a war against Germany by France and Britain would exhaust Germany, France, and Britain and cause the Red Army to pick up pieces of the broken capitalist world.

Europe's peoples were gloomily bracing for the coming of war in the early autumn of 1938 after the twists and turns of negotiations resulted in a deadlock.

Mussolini was able to arrange a meeting with Hitler in the last week of September after warning him that Italy was not ready for war.
The areas of western Czechoslovakia with a majority German population were to be transferred to the Nazi Reich.
The French prime minister, who played a supporting role in the negotiations, was also welcomed in France.

The Nazi leader revved up another long-standing issue, that of the Polish Corridor.

The war broke out a year later on less favorable terms for Britain and France.

There were parallels between Hitler's foreign policy in the late 1930s and Germany's at the time.

The extent to which this violent uprising was a genuine popular uprising has been debated.
The pogroms of eastern Europe were described by Hitler as the wrong way to deal with the Jewish Question.
Chaotic mob violence was contrary to German traditions and large parts of the German population did not participate.
Although Hitler did not want violent demonstrations to be organized by the party, he did allow expressions of indignation over the assassination to happen.

In most areas of the Reich, the violence and destruction was the work of small bands of Nazis who were "guided" and often aided by the police.

The riots were denounced by several Nazi leaders as a public-relations disaster.
The destruction undermined the country's economic recovery.
Few Nazi leaders would object to the riots on moral grounds.

The destruction of Jewish shop windows and synagogues in the Nazi Reich was rare in the past.

Around 100 Jews were killed, tens of thousands were arrested and sent to concentration camps, and most of them were released on the condition that they leave Germany immediately.

The start of the Holocaust was marked by a sharp increase in violence against Jews on November 9, but that date is misleading because the main focus of this "solution" was to force Jews out of Germany.

More than 115,000 Jews fled the Nazi Reich after the outbreak of war.
The overwhelming majority of Europe's Jews still lived outside Germany, so forcing them to leave was not a final solution to the Jewish Question.

Much more was at play than Hitler's deviousness and naivete when it came to taking in well-meaning, reasonable people.

Appeasement was very popular with the general population in Britain and France.
If he had been prime minister between 1936 and 1938, he wouldn't have been able to rally his countrymen in the way he did.
Had he tried to take military action against Hitler in defiance of popular opinion, he would almost certainly have been voted down in Parliament and removed from office.

After every effort at a compromise peace had been exhausted and Britain had had more time to prepare for war, the country was able to rally around its leader, who became prime minister on May 10, 1940.

Many accounts might lead one to believe, but the support he found was less wholehearted.
Before 1939, a man of obvious brilliance but also known as a reckless gambler, was associated with a number of disastrous military decisions.

What might have been accomplished by an earlier, more aggressive opposition to Hitler's actions against the Jews is similar to what was said.

The threat of an economic boycott against Nazi Germany did seem to impress Hitler, but his retreat on boycotting Jewish businesses was only tactical, reflecting his understanding that he needed to improve Germany's economy if his regime was to gain popularity.

The measures taken against the Jews by the Nazi regime were not considered outrageous enough to justify economic sanctions against Germany.

By the mid-1930s, Germany was basking in its "golden years" of economic recovery, popular support, and international prestige.

The issue of admitting large numbers of German refugees into other countries became intense only after March 1938, but even those who bore no ill will toward Jews were reticent to open their countries to hundreds of thousands of them.

The failure of the world to see the criminal nature of the Nazi regime has been linked to the idea of appeasement.

Stalinist Russia was a powerful regime with a criminal essence that was greater than that of Nazi Germany.

The world failed to recognize that essence or do anything to stop it.

Since Russia in the 1930s did not appear aggressively expansionist to the degree that Nazi Germany did by 1938, the comparisons with reactions to Nazi Germany are not entirely correct.

Millions of Soviet citizens, as well as millions of Jews in Germany and Poland, would have to emigrate if they had the option.

Soviet Russia during the Popular Front era was seen as the best hope to counter the plague of fascists.

The diplomatic origins of World War II are covered in the books and other volumes by the author.