A French Premier should have said in 1933, as I would have said in 1933, as I certainly would have, had I been French Premier should have said in 1933, as I certainly would have had I been French Premier,

the author of Mein Kampf, which contains this and that, has become German Chancellor.

This man cannot be tolerated as a neighbor.

Either he will have to disappear, or we will start marching.

That would have been completely logical, but it was not done.

They let us be, and we were able to proceed unhindered through the zone of risk.

Yosef Goebbels at a press conference in 1940.

Welcome to the history of the 20th century. Episode 286 Unwinding Versailles.

In 1933, the new Rewinding Versailles In 1933, the new British ambassador to Germany, Sir Eric Phipps, told the British Foreign Office that if you thought about the new German Chancellor solely as the author of

M. Kempf, that left you no option except war. Yosef Goebbels later admitted the same thing

in the quote I just read to you. With the benefit of historical hindsight, we can say today it would

have been for the best, for everyone, if Britain and France had immediately gone to war with

Germany, or at least threatened war, with the goal of removing Hitler from the chancellorship.

Of course, world leaders of the time didn't have our historical hindsight.

Hitler's accession to the chancellorship of Germany was a cause for concern to be sure,

but war? The lesson of 1914 was that even small squabbles between nations can blow up horrifically.

No one wanted to go through that a second time. Also, the Western democracies were in 1933 mired in the depths

of the Great Depression. Tax revenues were shrunken, along with the economy, and in Britain,

as in most countries, the government was looking for ways to cut expenditures. Any sort of mobilization or military buildup would only make

balancing the budget that much more challenging. Also keep in mind that in 1933, when Hitler became

Chancellor, Mein Kampf was nine years old. Even Hitler seemed embarrassed by it. Publicly, he dismissed it as the

ruminations of a man in prison with nothing better to do. Privately, he said that if he had known in

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