The British Grope for a Policy: July–November 1934

Abstract

Hitler’s investiture as Chancellor of Germany on 30 January 1933 transformed the European political climate without producing a policy response from Britain. Though Hitler changed German complaints against the Versailles Diktat into a scarcely veiled threat to abolish by force the European settlement of 1919, British policy remained set in the patterns fixed by the Locarno Treaties of 1925 and informed by the conventional wisdom that another war among the Great Powers would destroy civilisation and therefore could not take place. Until external and internal events combined in the autumn of 1934 to convince the British government that they had to do something about National Socialist Germany, London watched and waited.