"I ran with Hitler!"
"I ran with Hitler!"
At the time there was not much support for war with Germany in both France and Great Britain. There are many reasons for this.
The horrors of the First World War were still very fresh in both populations’ minds.
But there were other less known factors.
Many people in Great Britain at the time including many leading statesmen thought the treaty of Versailles was unfair to Germany. So they did not take a stand when Germany decided to tear it up. Part of this was they could not see a real objection to why the Germanic people could not unite under one German nation. This included the Rhineland, Austria and finally the Sudetenland.
It was when Germany annexed the rest of Czechoslovakia, after encouraging the Slovaks under Tiso to breakaway that they really woke up to the dangers of Hitler and Nazism, for the first time he brought a non-Germanic population under his control. This was the reason why France and Great Britain created a treaty with Poland, and tried to create a treaty with the Soviet Union, too late. The problem was pre Czech occupation; many in very important positions still viewed Stalin’s Russia as the main threat to Europe, and that Hitler a committed anti Bolshevik as an important bulwark. In the British establishment it was viewed as the height of folly to go to war with Hitler. They saw a rerun of the First World War, which would; who ever won would lead to more Bolshevik revolutions in Europe. In fact what was feared did come to pass war with Hitler led to the Communist occupation of Eastern Europe for over 40 years
There was a real scare of the Red Menace at the time.
Just as the Right Wing German establishment thought they could use Hitler to contain and deal with the Red Menace , so did the Establishments in Great Britain and France.
Only a few dissenters such as Winston Churchill saw this as folly.
Also at this time Britain was experiencing unrest in her empire Palestine, nationalist movement in Egypt and India, a growing Japanese menace.
They reasoned a European war would lead to diversion of military resources needed to safe guard the Empire.