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Originally written by Strontium:

It is also true that Germany systematically went about defying the Allies, breaking the Treaty of Versailles and rearming, etc for several years and started a war without any real opposition.

There was opportunity to invade from France, in support of Poland, but the allies stood by and watched Poland fall. This too was a realistic opportunity to stop Hitler, in the early stages of a war yes, but surely would have prevented many millions of deaths.

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Originally written by The Worst Man Ever:

Germany was a freaking titan. Fighting the war differently would have been criminal, and disastrous.

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My good friends, for the second time in our history, a British Prime Minister has returned from Germany bringing peace with honour. I believe it is peace in our time.

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For one thing, there is Neville Chamberlain's fine record as a cabinet minister, and especially as Chancellor of the Exchequer (from 1931 to 1937), which cannot be extinguished solely by his failure to stop Hitler.

The recovery of the British economy in the mid-30s had a lot to do with Chamberlain's prudent management. For the critics to the right of him, Chamberlain cut income tax; for those to the left he restored unemployment benefit, and imposed a tax on the arms producers.

Better still, he found in the budget enough funds to promote the biggest house building programme in the country's history. If expenditure on rearmament was not as great as some would have liked, the money went to an equally deserving cause.

Secondly, the principle of appeasement, forever twisted around Neville Chamberlain's neck, had actually been the policy of the British government ever since the end of the First World War.

There were moral and political reasons for that, but practical ones too.

The consistent advice from the Chiefs of Staff to the Prime Minister throughout the 1930s was that Britain was as yet incapable of facing up to the military threat of either Germany, Italy or Japan, let alone all three at once.

It remained Chamberlain's considered objective that rearmament must not be at the expense of all other government expenditure.

Thirdly, as Ward shows, the British people were hardly consistent in their views of Hitler's Germany either.

As late as 1935 the Birmingham Labour Party, Communist Party and other groups were protesting loudly against rearmament.

Peace rallies in the Town Hall and Handsworth Park condemned the growth in arms manufacture as a wilful slide towards war, and a betrayal of the League of Nations and of collective security.

Only when Mussolini invaded Abyssinia and Hitler marched into Czechoslovakia did the radicals begin to change tack.

In the eyes of the Left, Neville Chamberlain had switched overnight from a warmonger to an appeaser.

The cry reached a crescendo with a 'Chamberlain Must Go' rally in the Town Hall, organised by Victor Gollancz's Left Wing Book Club.

The wider public changed its tune, too. In the wake of the Munich agreement, there was widespread rejoicing at a crisis averted. 50,000 fans at Villa Park sang 'For he's jolly good fellow', while the Lord Mayor launched a Thanksgiving Fund 'intended to be an expression of the city's pride in the unique achievement of one of its sons'.

When Neville visited the Austin factory in July 1938 he was mobbed by enthusiastic supporters. Ronald Cartland MP commented: 'He has a following in the country far bigger than those in Westminster think.'

As late as May 1939 Chamberlain's Unionists were winning a parliamentary by-election in Aston.

Only with Britain's disastrous expedition to defend Norway in the spring of 1940 did the House of Commons turn decisively against the Prime Minister.

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None of the powers in western Europe wanted war. They severely overestimated Adolf Hitler's military ability at the time, and while Britain and France had superior forces to the Germans they felt they had fallen behind, and both were undergoing massive military rearmament to catch up. Hitler, on the other hand, was in just the opposite position. He far exaggerated German power at the time and was desperately hoping for a war with the west which he thought he could easily win. He was pushed into holding the conference, however, by Benito Mussolini who was totally unprepared for a Europe-wide conflict, and was also concerned about the growth of German power. The German military leadership also knew the state of their armed forces and did all they could to avoid war.

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Hitler "would never have considered invading Poland" without synthetic fuel technology provided by General Motors. The relationship of Ford and GM to the Nazi regime goes back to the 1920s and 1930s, when the American car companies competed against each other for access to the lucrative German market. Hitler was an admirer of American mass production techniques and an avid reader of the antisemitic tracts penned by Henry Ford. "I regard Henry Ford as my inspiration," Hitler told a Detroit News reporter two years before becoming the German chancellor in 1933, explaining why he kept a life-size portrait of the American automaker next to his desk.

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Population and industrial capacity
Population in 1939 Steel output in tons
UK 47.961.000 13.192.000
France 41.600.000 6.221.000
USSR 190.000.000 18.800.000
USA 132.122.000 51.380.000
Germany (including Austria) 76.008.000 23.329.000

Italy 44.223.000 2.323.000
Japan 71.400.000 5.811.000
In population and in industrial capacity , the allies, even after losing France, were stronger than the axis powers.

Population and industrial capacity by the British Empire Forces
Population in 1939 Steel production in tons (1939)
Canada 11.682.000 1.407.000
South Africa (white) 2.161.000 250.000
Australia 6.807.000 1.189.000
New Zealand 1.585.000 --
India 374.200.000 1.035.000
The British Commonwealth and Empire possessed further resources for war. Canada and Australia had significant industries, and their populations, like those of New Zealand and white South Africa, were well-educated and physically and mentally capable of providing high-quality recruits. These 4 self-governing 'dominions' followed the British lead and declared war 1939.

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Relative Strenght at 10 May 1940
German France England Allies Belgium/Holland
Inf. div. 119 - - 119 -
Motor. div. 7 - - 7 -
Tank div. 10 - - 11 -
Airborne div. 1 - - - -
Total div. 136 - - 137 -
Tanks 2580 - - 3000 -
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Bombers 1562 143 »Total 1150
» Planes,
» of this 500
» in France
» station - »
»
» Total 160 Planes
»
»
»
Fighters 1016 764 -
Scouting Planes 501 396 -
Other Planes 555 396 -
Total Planes 3634 »2613«

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Originally written by too long, don't read, too many CRs:

The very idea of a permanent occupation by "Aryan Herrenmenschen" appears to me to belong in the stone age. Think of Alexander the Great and Napoleon.

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