The End of Old Illusions

Some have assumed that most Western leaders were slow to recognise what Hitler’s accession to power meant. One hears about relief that Germany’s political turbulence had ended and that finally Germany had a government which could command a majority in the Reichstag, along with hope that power would tame Hitler and that he really did not mean what he said. Such notions were common and perhaps understandable, but they were rarely found in the ministries of European governments. Nobody fully envisaged the horrors ahead and most Western diplomatists misjudged Hitler’s intentions towards Poland, thinking that like his predecessors he sought frontier revision, when in fact he cast Poland as an obedient satellite and then, after Poland rejected this role, saw it as an entity to be destroyed en route to Russia.1 But on the main issue there was, especially at first, little illusion. Most of Europe’s leaders realised that Nazism was a threat to Europe’s peace and that in the long run Hitler intended war. In April 1933 Herriot informed an American visitor, ‘we shall have to fight them again’,2 whereas MacDonald told his son, ‘I shall not see peace again in my lifetime; I hope you will see it in yours.’3