Appeasement: A cautionary tale

Bouverie, a former British television journalist, offers few fresh details or insights into Britain's disastrous appeasement policy

Three months after Hitler came to power in Germany, the British ambassador in Berlin dispatched a prescient 5,000-word report to London. Having just read Mein Kampf, Sir Horace Rumbold correctly saw the book as Hitler’s master plan for the conquest of Europe. To his superiors, Rumbold outlined how the German leader planned to pick off countries one by one, all the while promising that his latest victim would be his last.

In Appeasement, Tim Bouverie notes that Rumbold’s April 1933 dispatch caused a momentary stir in the Foreign Office. But the ambassador’s warning, like later admonitions from Winston Churchill and others,