Prime Minister Chamberlain Quotes

The campaign’s most important consequence was that it precipitated the fall of Chamberlain. Had there been no Norway, it is overwhelmingly likely that he would have retained office as prime minister through the campaign in France that followed.

Britain, however, under Prime Minister Chamberlain, built up Hitler, granting to him in haste everything that had for a decade been refused to the German Republic - the remilitarization of the Rhineland, the Nazi-terrorized plebiscite in the Saar, German re-armament, naval expansion, the Hitler-Mussolini intervention in Spain. British finance, which had strangled German democracy by demanding impossible reparations, helped Hitler with investments and loans. Every intelligent world citizen knew that these favors were given to Hitler because British Tories saw in him their 'strong-arm gangster' against the Soviets.

Neville Chamberlain's politics of appeasement were, as far as we can judge, inspired by good motives; he was probably less motivated by considerations of personal power than were many other British prime ministers, and he sought to preserve peace and to assure the happiness of all concerned. Yet his policies helped to make the Second World War inevitable, and to bring untold miseries to millions of men. Sir Winston Churchill's motives, on the other hand, were much less universal in scope and much more narrowly directed toward personal and national power, yet the foreign policies that sprang from these inferior motives were certainly superior in moral and political quality to those pursued by his predecessor. Judged by his motives, Robespierre was one of the most virtuous men who ever lived. Yet it was the utopian radicalism of that very virtue that made him kill those less virtuous than himself, brought him to the scaffold, and destroyed the revolution of which he was a leader.

Most people today are not aware that British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain helped restore Great Britain’s financial stability during the Great Depression and also passed legislation to extend unemployment benefits, pay pensions to retired workers, and otherwise help those hit hard by the slumping economy. But history does remember his failure to confront Hitler. That is Chamberlain’s enduring legacy. So too will Iran’s construction of nuclear weapons, if it manages to do so in the next few years, become President Barack Obama’s enduring legacy. Regardless of his passage of health care reform and regardless of whether he restores jobs and helps the economy recover, Mr. Obama will be remembered for allowing Iran to obtain nuclear weapons.

Nazi aggression, one might think, should have lent support to Winston’s candidacy. At this, of all times, it seems inconceivable that Baldwin would pick a weak man to supervise the defense of England. Nevertheless, that was what he did. Baldwin said outright: “If I pick Winston, Hitler will be cross.” In his biography of Chamberlain, Keith Feiling writes that the Rhineland was “decisive against Winston’s appointment”; it was “obvious that Hitler would not like it.” As the prime minister’s heir apparent, Chamberlain encouraged Baldwin to think along these lines. He suggested that Baldwin choose a man “who would excite no enthusiasm” and “create no jealousies.” The prime minister agreed. On Saturday, March 14—exactly a week since German troops had crossed the Rhine—he announced that he was establishing, not a ministry of defense, but a ministry for coordination of defense. Its leader, the new cabinet member, would be Sir Thomas Inskip.

Germany’s rearmament was first met with a “supine”134 response from its future adversaries, who showed “little immediate recognition of danger.”135 Despite Winston Churchill’s dire and repeated warnings that Germany “fears no one” and was “arming in a manner which has never been seen in German history,” Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain saw Hitler as merely trying to right the wrongs of Versailles, and acquiesced to the German annexation of the Sudetenland at Munich in September 1938.136 Yet Chamberlain’s anxiety grew as Hitler’s decision to occupy the remainder of Czechoslovakia in March 1939 indicated his broader aims. Chamberlain asked rhetorically: “Is this the end of an old adventure, or is it the beginning of a new? Is this the last attack upon a small State, or is it to be followed by others? Is this, in fact, a step in the direction of an attempt to dominate the world by force?”137 France, meanwhile, as Henry Kissinger explains, “had become so dispirited that it could not bring itself to act.”138 Stalin decided his interests were best served by a non-aggression pact signed with Germany, which included a secret protocol for the division of Eastern Europe.139 One week after agreeing to the pact with Stalin, Hitler invaded Poland, triggering the British and French to declare war on September 3, 1939. The Second World War had begun. Within a year, Hitler occupied France, along with much of Western Europe and Scandinavia. Britain was defeated on the Continent, although it fought off German air assaults. In June 1941, Hitler betrayed Stalin and invaded the Soviet Union. By the time Germany was defeated four years later, much of the European continent had been destroyed, and its eastern half would be under Soviet domination for the next forty years. Western Europe could not have been liberated without the United States, on whose military power it would continue to rely. The war Hitler unleashed was the bloodiest the world had ever seen.

I remember when America was strong. The situation that has arisen due to "The Interview" and North Korea’s Kim Jong Un is bizarre! More bizarre is that the pressure worked — and the movie will not be released. This is a comedy — a satirical look at a serious situation. Rob Lowe was right when he said, "Hollywood has done Neville Chamberlain proud today," referring to the British prime minister who appeased Hitler.

Chronicling future appeasing Prime Minister Joseph Chamberlain's rise to Parliament from first-generation commercial interests rather than the aristocracy, the author diagnoses even then that he had no center outside himself.

growing greater by the day, David Ben-Gurion, Chaim Weizmann, and delegates from Egypt, Iraq, and Saudi Arabia arrived in London to meet with the British leadership. They had been summoned by British prime minister Neville Chamberlain, in order to explain the empire’s new policy toward Palestine. Jewish immigration would end. The Jews would live under Arab rule in an independent state. Ben-Gurion erupted: “Jews cannot be prevented from immigrating into the country except by force of British bayonets, British police, and the British navy. And, of course, Palestine cannot be converted into an Arab state over Jewish opposition without the constant help of British bayonets!

They are ready to sell us out as they have the Chechs [sic],” an allusion to Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain’s appeasement of Hitler in the Munich Agreement, forcing Czechoslovakia to cede its industrially rich Sudetenland to Germany.

France was about to fall to the Germans, and Neville Chamberlain was about to resign as Prime Minister of Great Britain. He called Winston Churchill and Lord Halifax into his office. He said, “Well, one of you two will have to replace me. Who’s it going to be?” Churchill wrote, “I knew no Englishman could ever say ‘Give it to me’. So whoever spoke first would be the loser. It was the longest 30 seconds of my life, but nothing would induce me to speak.” Eventually Halifax couldn’t bear it any longer. He cracked. He said, “Well, I suppose you’d better give it to Winston.” Churchill accepted, and became Prime Minister. Imagine the course of history if Churchill had spoken first.

Butler’s raging hatred of war led him into the same errors of judgment that ensnared the isolationists of America. Like them, he approved of Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain’s efforts to buy “peace in our time” at Munich.

Sir Winston Churchill was born into the respected family of the Dukes of Marlborough. His mother Jeanette, was an attractive American-born British socialite and a member of the well known Spencer family. Winston had a military background, having graduated from Sandhurst, the British Royal Military Academy. Upon graduating he served in the Army between 1805 and 1900 and again between 1915 and 1916. As a British military officer, he saw action in India, the Anglo–Sudan War, and the Second South African Boer War. Leaving the army as a major in 1899, he became a war correspondent covering the Boer War in the Natal Colony, during which time he wrote books about his experiences. Churchill was captured and treated as a prisoner of war. Churchill had only been a prisoner for four weeks before he escaped, prying open some of the flooring he crawled out under the building and ran through some of the neighborhoods back alleys and streets. On the evening of December 12, 1899, he jumped over a wall to a neighboring property, made his way to railroad tracks and caught a freight train heading north to Lourenco Marques, the capital of Portuguese Mozambique, which is located on the Indian Ocean and freedom. For the following years, he held many political and cabinet positions including the First Lord of the Admiralty. During the First World War Churchill resumed his active army service, for a short period of time, as the commander of the 6th Battalion of the Royal Scots Fusiliers. After the war he returned to his political career as a Conservative Member of Parliament, serving as the Chancellor of the Exchequer where in 1925, he returned the pound sterling to the gold standard. This move was considered a factor to the deflationary pressure on the British Pound Sterling, during the depression. During the 1930’s Churchill was one of the first to warn about the increasing, ruthless strength of Nazi Germany and campaigned for a speedy military rearmament. At the outbreak of the Second World War, he was appointed First Lord of the Admiralty for a second time, and in May of 1940, Churchill became the Prime Minister after Neville Chamberlain’s resignation. An inspirational leader during the difficult days of 1940–1941, he led Britain until victory had been secured. In 1955 Churchill suffered a serious of strokes. Stepping down as Prime Minister he however remained a Member of Parliament until 1964. In 1965, upon his death at ninety years of age, Queen Elizabeth II granted him a state funeral, which was one of the largest gatherings of representatives and statesmen in history.

Neville Chamberlain, the Prime Minister of the United Kingdom, honestly believed that he could reason with Adolf Hitler in good faith. Now, most history books find little else to say about Chamberlain and he is solely remembered for believing that he could pacify Herr Führer by signing the Munich Agreement of 1938. In doing this, he ceded to Germany the Sudetenland, a German-speaking part of Czechoslovakia, without having any real authority to do so. Three days later, French Prime Minister Édouard Daladier followed suit, thereby giving the “German Reich” a piece of Czechoslovakia, consisting of the border districts of Bohemia, Moravia, and parts of Silesia. In March of 1939, German troops rolled in and occupied the territory. Three other parts broke off from Czechoslovakia, with one becoming the Slovak Republic, another part being annexed by Hungary, and the third part, which was borderland, becoming a part of Poland. These all came together to become satellite states and allies of Nazi Germany. On May 10, 1940, in a radio address to the 8th Pan American Scientific Congress, President Franklin Delano Roosevelt declared, “I am a pacifist. You, my fellow citizens of twenty-one American Republics, are pacifists too.” Roosevelt was referring to Canada and Latin America. The United States attempted to remain neutral and did not enter into the war until four days after Pearl Harbor was attacked by Japan. Roosevelt opposed the concept of war and made every attempt to find a peaceful solution to the hostilities in Europe. On December 11, 1941, after Japan’s attack on Pearl Harbor, both Germany and Italy declared war on the United States.

Appeasement was a policy put in place by Neville Chamberlain, the British Prime Minister to try to avert war. His theory was that trying to prevent Germany from getting what it wanted would cause more harm than good in the long run. Therefore Britain’s official foreign policy would be that they would fulfill Germany’s wishes, “provided they appeared legitimate and were not enforced with violence,” described in German newspaper Der Spiegel. Chamberlain was aware that the British Empire’s resources were limited and that they really didn’t have the power to stop Hitler. So cooperating with them seemed like a better option.

Neville Chamberlain, the only British prime minister until Margaret Thatcher to have had a university education in science and the only university-educated twentieth-century prime minister to have studied entirely outside Oxbridge.

Chamberlain could also be philosophical about the führer’s coarse rhetoric and bullying, which he ascribed to poor breeding. However, the prime minister could not imagine anyone intentionally causing a second world war.

You know what Stanley Baldwin said about Churchill?” Baldwin, a Conservative, had been prime minister before Chamberlain. “When Winston was born, lots of fairies swooped down on his cradle with gifts—imagination, eloquence, industry, ability—and then came a fairy who said: ‘No person has a right to so many gifts,’ picked him up, and gave him such a shake and a twist that he was denied judgment and wisdom.

Chamberlain went on to record: “In courteous but perfectly definite terms, Herr Hitler made it plain that he had made up his mind the Sudeten Germans must have the right of self-determination and of returning, if they wished, to the Reich.” In these last words the Prime Minister was repeating one of Herr Hitler’s favorite lies, and it was hard to believe that he was doing it naïvely; for certainly Gerald or Ceddy or some other of his permanent Foreign Office men must have informed him that the Sudeten Germans had never belonged to the Reich, not since they had left Germany nine hundred years previously. And as for “self-determination,” those Germans had never been consulted; the Nazi agents and agitators had done the “determining,” and among their determinations was that a fair plebiscite should never be held in that region.

Commercial men weren’t looked down upon as they had been in old England; for, after all, this was an industrial age, and business and politics were pretty thoroughly mixed. The recent Prime Minister, Mr. Stanley Baldwin, had been an ironmaster, and the present Prime Minister, Mr. Neville Chamberlain, was an arms manufacturer from Birmingham.

In the 19th century, many European countries sought colonies. Leopold II long cherished the ambition to give a colony to Belgium. He came into contact with British explorer Stanley, who found no interest in Central Africa in London. Later, the British would regret it. They discredited the Congo Free State to get their hands on Katanga and its mining resources. In 1908 London tried to sabotage Belgium’s takeover of the Congo Free State by formulating conditions. But other countries did not follow that line. In 1911, the British signed a secret agreement with Germany on a reallocation of Africa; the Germans would not follow through. In 1937 British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain offered Hitler ‘half of the Belgian Congo’ in exchange for peace in Europe; but the Fuhrer refused.

Neville Chamberlain, Former Prime Minister of the United Kingdom, in a letter.

and Winston Churchill, who succeeded Chamberlain as prime minister, was perhaps the most ardent Zionist in British public life.

As the prime minister’s heir apparent, Chamberlain encouraged Baldwin to think along these lines. He suggested that Baldwin choose a man “who would excite no enthusiasm” and “create no jealousies.” The prime minister agreed.

There isn’t, incidentally, any such thing as an ancient Chinese curse saying, “May you live in interesting times.” The phrase seems to be a piece of invented Orientalist folklore coined in the 1930s by First Lord of the Admiralty Sir Austen Chamberlain, half-brother of Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain who went off to Munich to appease Hitler. And let’s not be silly and forget that the Chamberlain brothers lived in much more accursedly interesting times than our own. What I thought was going on in the 2016 election cycle was a mere fight to the death between two fundamental American political ideologies.

Then, in April 1940, Hitler invaded Norway and everything changed. Most of Ramsay’s ships were withdrawn from his command, leaving only five working corvettes and seven motor torpedo boats (MTBs). The allied failures in Norway also led to a political crisis which toppled Chamberlain from power on the day that Hitler launched his offensive in the West. When Winston Churchill became prime minister, at this crucial moment in the nation’s history, he feared the worst. “I hope it’s not too late,” he said to his bodyguard after seeing the King. “I very much fear that it is.” Ramsay had been at the heart of operational planning since that day, 10 May, because he was responsible for keeping Lord Gort, the BEF’s commander-in-chief, and his men supplied in Belgium