HW 5

6. I believe that Neville Chamberlain's assessment of the causes of World War II is accurate, to an extent. "The German Chancellor," as Chamberlain refers to Hitler, was in fact largely to blame for the war. However, appeasement by people such as Chamberlain himself was an almost equally responsible cause. It would be very ignorant for the British Prime Minister to deny that his nation and its allies had any role in starting the war.

As Chamberlain claims, Hitler seems to have done much more than any other single person towards beginning World War II. If Hitler had not been in power, the conflict would likely have never reached such a large scale. Hitler took advantage of the rise of dictators like himself, uniting various powerful leaders of the time, and in doing so, helped to start the war and later to expand it. He did this by working with leaders such as Italy's Mussolini, who allowed Hitler to for an Anschluss, or union, with Austria in 1938, and the emperor of Japan, which had invaded China and would eventually involve the United States in World War II. Hitler was also very aggressive in the years leading up to the war, annexing territories such as Czechoslovakia and remilitarizing the Rhineland, which had been occupied by France. While this aggression was ignored for the most part by the rest of the world, it served to increase international tensions and prove the limitations of the League of Nations, encouraging other dictators to take actions of their own.

Hitler's use of deceit was also to blame. Hitler had promised that, after he took Czechoslovakia, he would be done invading other countries. Soon afterward, however, he invaded Poland, revealing to Britain and France that Germany could not be trusted and had to be stopped. Similarly, Germany had signed a non-aggression pact with Russia, with the two nations agreeing that neither would attack the other when they both invaded different parts of Poland. Hitler betrayed this agreement and launched a massive assault on Russia, further expanding the conflict he had helped to begin.

For these reasons, Hitler held much of the responsibility for the war. Nevertheless, he was not the only person responsible. Western Europe's policy of appeasement allowed Hitler to do what he did, and as such it could be seen as having been as just as much of a cause of World War II as Hitler's actions were. France and Britain had multiple opportunities to stop Hitler; for example, they could have reacted to Germany's remilitarization of the Rhineland, or to Hitler's efforts to increase the size of the German military beyond the limitations set by the Versailles Treaty. It could be argued that there are always threats like Hitler in the world, and that they only reach their full potential as threats when others allow them to do so through their mistakes.