The occupation of the Rhineland in defiance of the Versailles and Locarno treaties was a major step forward in Hitler's plan to re-establish Germany as a respected and feared Great Power. The failure of Britain and France to threaten, much less employ, military force to prevent or reverse the occupation revealed their unwillingness to confront a revisionist, totalitarian regime that didn't hide its contempt for Western values—individualism, tolerance, and democracy. By allowing his gambit to succeed, the two most powerful European liberal democracies encouraged Hitler's megalomania and fueled his transformation into Germany's messiah. The end result was a clash of civilizations that resulted in the most destructive war in the history of the world.
(See The American Future)
2 comments:
Peter, the problem is that if Hitler had been stopped in the Rheinlands and the Sudetenland --- which could have been done by six gendarmes and a large head of garlic --- we might well not have had to rush the Spits into production.
And that sonuvabitch with the little mustache might have shot himself 10 years earlier.
Peter:
I think WW1 might have been the war to end all wars back then, but today it has become the war the world forgot.
But in 1936, it was not forgotten. In fact a scant 20 years had passed since that horrible conflict. And Russia was still in a revolution of sorts with millions locked up.
It is easy today for people to say what could have should have been done back then, but people today by and large can not even comprehend a world war.
We get the vapors over Iraq. In those days, 2,500 casualties in three years would scarce have qualified as war.
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