Could Britain have stopped the Nazis prior to the outbreak of the war in 1939?

Answer 1

Conventional wisdom (as it crystallized in the summer of 1940) says yes. However, those who take this view seldom agree on what Britain could have done in practical terms. There is sometimes the suggestion that a thunderous roar of disapproval from Parliament when Germany announced massive rearmament in 1935 together with the reintroduction of conscription would have done the trick ... It would certainly have shown Hitler that his hopes for an alliance with Britain were unrealistic. Part of the problem is that the British and French governments had enormous difficulty understanding what they were dealing with. There were very few senior people in the British Foreign Office with much knowledge of Germany at that time. Britain was not alone in this failure to grasp the psychopathic nature of the Nazi regime - their philosophy of "we do what we can get away with". About 24 hours before the Netherlands was invaded on 10 May 1940 the Dutch government was warned by two of its agents in Germany of the invasion. The predominant reaction was disbelief. After all, they told themselves, they had been strictly neutral and done nothing to offend Germany.