Sources used in this document:

Here are quotes that present the principal supporting arguments from Ascher vis-a-vis Britain's appeasement policies: a) officials in London (in 1938) "…shied away from confronting him as a leader unscrupulous in the pursuit of his goal, the enhancement of Germany's Power" (p. 14); b) ambassador Nevile Henderson reported (1938) that Hitler "…may have crossed the border-line of insanity" (p. 16) and yet Henderson also said Hitler "hates war as much as anyone" (p. 17); c) Prime Minister (PM) Neville Chamberlain was "the chief architect of appeasement"; and after visiting with Hitler three times in September, 1938, the PM said Hitler could be "relied upon when he had given his word" (p. 17-18); d) "It had taken Chamberlain over six years" to fully understand what "Rumbold and Phipps" had been saying (p. 19); and e) had the advice of ambassadors in the early 1930s been "heeded" the British "could have stopped Hitler… history of the twentieth century might well have been different…" (p. 19).

Critique on the article: Ascher makes his points without using emotional language, and every new point is logically linked to the last point. The author's juxtapositions (pointing to Hitler's madman outbursts contrasted with Britain's apparent indifference to vividly presented dispatches from its ambassadors) are very effective. I really enjoyed reading this article and most of the points Ascher makes are credible. I most certainly bought into his narrative approach to identifying appeasement towards Hitler. The article achieves its goal and there were only a couple points in his conclusion that were less than totally believable.

In conclusion, as Ascher points out in his last pages, and as this paper points out, if the leaders of Western Europe had heeded the dispatches from Britain's ambassadors in the early 1930s, things might have been different. However, I do feel that Ascher's last paragraph was very speculative and uncharacteristic of the rest of the piece. That is, even if Europe had been totally up to speed early on what Hitler was planning, there is -- contrary to Ascher's assertion -- absolutely no assurance that using economic measures against the Nazis would have stopped Hitler's war machine. Yes, there was a failure of "political will" but hindsight is indeed 20-20 and there is absolutely no certainty that had those ambassadors' warnings been transitioned into Britain's foreign policies that Hitler could have been stopped. Hitler was not a riddle, but explaining how and why early assessments of his fanaticism were ignored is a kind of riddle itself.