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Within a few years, Mussolini had consolidated dictatorial power and Italy became a police state. On 7 January 1935, he and French Foreign Minister Pierre Laval signed the Franco-Italian Agreement, giving him a free hand in the Abyssinia Crisis with the Ethiopian Empire, in return for an alliance against Hitler. There was little international ...
Following the Battle of France and that country's capitulation, Adolf Hitler, the German Führer and Supreme Commander of the Armed Forces, hoped the British government would accept his offer to end the state of war between the two. He considered invasion to be a last resort, to be used only if all other options had failed.
This event, and the declaration of war by France and Britain two days later, mark the beginning of World War II. After the declaration of war, Western Europe saw minimal land and air warfare, leading to this time period being termed the "Phoney War". At sea, this time period saw the opening stages of the Battle of the Atlantic.
In the early 1990s a new theory of appeasement, sometimes called "counter-revisionist", [81] emerged as historians argued that appeasement was probably the only choice for the British government in the 1930s but that it was poorly implemented, carried out too late and not enforced strongly enough to constrain Hitler. Appeasement was considered ...
In keeping with that theme, German propaganda stressed that Britain had to maintain its hegemony over the centuries by manipulating the other European states into war, and Germany, the "guardian of Europe", was now standing up for all nations of Europe in putting an end to British "causing trouble on the continent". [35]
British policy was to "appease" them in the hopes they would be satiated. By 1938 it was clear that war was looming, and that Germany had the world's most powerful military. The final act of appeasement came when Britain and France sacrificed Czechoslovakia to Hitler's demands at the Munich Agreement of 1938. [40]
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The plan foundered on 3 March 1938, when Nevile Henderson, the British Ambassador in Berlin, presented Chamberlain's proposal to Hitler, who rejected the idea on the grounds that Germany should not have to negotiate for any bit of Africa, and he announced that he was prepared to wait ten years or longer for a unilateral return of the former ...