Churchill is often, slightly wrongly, credited with describing an appeaser as ‘one who feeds a crocodile — hoping it will eat him last’. With hindsight, the land grabs made by Hitler in the 1930s led inevitably to the Second World War and the unimaginable horror of the Holocaust. Therefore, the term appeasement has become closely associated with the negotiations between British politicians in the late 1930s and Nazi Germany.
Appeasement was derided bitterly in the 1940 publication Guilty Men which denounced 15 prominent figures in British public life. Under the pseudonym ‘Cato’, the authors of Guilty Men analysed the responsibility for appeasing Hitler and the failure to capitalise on the time gained by the policy to prepare for war, which they believed was responsible for the chaos of Dunkirk. Guilty Men, along with Churchill’s memoirs, shaped popular opinion and scholarly debate for more than two decades.
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