The Appeasement of Hitler

In 991 in order to fend off the Danes, Aethelred 2, King of England paid them 10,000 pounds (weight) in silver. Three years later they demanded another payment to maintain the peace. This time it was 16,000 pounds of silver. In 1002 they demanded 24,000 pounds of silver. This was equivalent to two years of gross national product. In 1006 the Danes returned and demanded 36,000 pounds of silver. This last payment of danegeld finally convinced King Aethelred to fight back and he built large ships in Sandwich to combat the Viking longboats however his ships were defeated. The lesson here is that if you appease, in the end you have to fight anyway. If he had spent the money from the beginning on arms he would have had more money for ships and the Danes would have less money for ships and the outcome might have been different.

In 1938 the English proved they learned nothing from the consequences of appeaseing the Danes. Conservative Prime Minister Chamberlain of England gave Czechoslovakia an ultimatum. Either they turn over the Sudetenland to the Germans or England would not come to their aid against a German invasion. This was a violation of the alliance England had made with Czechoslovakia. The Czechs gave up the valuable defenses of the Sudetenland to Hitler. Chamberlain came back to England calling his accomplishments "Peace in our Time".

The peaceniks rejoiced. The following is a paragraph from an editorial written at the time:

Be glad in your hearts. Give thanks to your God. People of Britain, your children are safe. Your husbands and your sons will not march to war. Peace is a victory for all mankind. And now let us go back to our own affairs. We have had enough of those menaces, conjured up from the Continent to confuse us.

Shortly afterwards Hitler invaded Czechoslovakia which succumbed shortly thereafter. Not long after Germany attacked Britain and bombed London. The Germans caused a lot more devastation as a result of the appeasement policies of Neville Chamberlain.

The Czech Prime Minister Milos Zeman in a visit to Israel (Jerusalem Post 2/18/02) said that:

You cannot negotiate with terrorists because the single response of terrorists for fulfilling their demands is blackmail - new demands, nothing more...This was our experience with the regime of Adolph Hitler. In 1936 he could have been defeated by two French divisions during the occupation of the Rhineland, and there was no courage by democratic countries because of the appeasement policy.

That Hitler could have been so easily defeated was confirmed by Hitler himself. Calling the 48 hours after his three battalions entered the Rhineland, "the most nerve-wracking" of his life, Hitler said:

If the French had marched into the Rhineland, we would have had to withdraw with our tails between our legs.

Yet the international community pressure's Israel to give land for peace. Peter Hutchins in an essay published on March 10th in the British newspaper, The Mail wrote:

The phrase 'land for peace' is interesting in itself. It is actually another way of describing the appeasement forced on Czechoslovakia by her supposed friends in 1938. This was also supposed to promise peace, but made the country impossible to defend and opened the gates for invasion a few months later. Those responsible for this cowardly stupidity are still reviled 60 years on. Those who urge it on Israel in the present day are praised.

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