For all you fans of appeasement out there, March 7 is the anniversary of Hitler's 1936 militarization of the Rhineland, a violation of the Treaty of Versailles and the Locarno Pact. The reaction of the League of Nations to this breach of international law was swift -- it censured the Nazis and decisively took no further action that would have provoked the testy Germans to violence. Nine years later Allied armies suffered thousands of casualties in breaching the defences that Hitler had erected there.
It is interesting to reflect that in 1936 the country that most wanted to use an armed solution to solve this crisis was France. It was Stanley Baldwin's Conservative government in Britain who were the arch-weasels, pleading that they were unwilling to live up to their commitments because of anti-war sentiment at home, military unpreparedness, and general dislike of the French, particularly by veterans of World War I. Economic sanctions were considered but thought to be unworkable. Foreign Secretary Anthony Eden suggested that he complain to the Germans that they had put the British government in an uncomfortable position and it was up to Mr Hitler to now show his good intentions -- not by obeying the treaties his country had signed but by not putting too many Wehrmacht units into the Rhineland and frightening the French. Cabinet minutes of these meetings make for sad reading by anyone who knows that the German troops were under orders to immediately pull back if they encountered resistance. We also know only too well that this policy of treating international scoff-laws gently led to Hitler gobbling up Austria, the Sudentenland and the rest of Czechoslovakia over the next three years before finally provoking the little tiff known as World War II.
What was Canada's position at the time? "Collective bluffing cannot bring about collective security," said Prime Minister Mackenzie King but he took no steps to strengthen the hand of the western democracies or Canada's own defence capabilities. In fact his 1937 visit to Berlin convinced him that we and the rest of the British Empire had little to fear from Hitler.
Posted by at March 7, 2003 12:48 AM