With a POD of 1934, how inevitable was appeasement?

Deleted member 114175

Several times during the 1930s Nazi Germany would have been challenged before September 1939 but wasn't.

How inevitable was the policy of appeasement, and the exact outcomes of the remilitarization of the Rhineland, the Anschluss, Munich Agreement, partition of Czechoslovakia, etc.?

For example what smaller changes in British politics or in timing of Germany's aggressive actions might lead to an earlier end of appeasement, either Nazi Germany standing down or the war starting earlier?
 
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It would have been possible to prevent the rise of Nazi Germany, but that's only with hindsight. The 1930s were ruled by fear and uncertainty, something Hitler was counting on - and not just the fear and uncertainty of the German people.

The British and French had gone out of WW1 victorious, but brutally scarred. France had a lot of territory damaged in the war, and took horrifying losses. 1.36 million dead, 4.27 million wounded (including 1.5 million permanently maimed) and 537,000 made prisoner or missing, out of a total mobilized of 8.41 million mobilized, or population of 40 millions - and that's not counting those who came back whole but broken by the experience. That's going to leave massive scars in a nation's psyche, as an entire generation was butchered and damned, to quote Eric Bogle. The country won its war against Germany, but its cost was so steep the French weren't willing to give it another go.

The British, while losing less, still had at least a million casualties, and the cost of the war drove their empire to the brink after it had been the richest in the world (another thing about The Great War people forget; since nobody expected it was going to take so damn long and be so damn bloody, nobody prepared their economies for it). Britain's thinking went along the lines of "Another such victory and we are undone", so best not to get into another world war at all.

Since the Americans weren't eager to police Europe and waste their time, neither France nor Britain had the will or the strength to police postwar Europe. It got especially worse with the rise of the USSR, so they needed the Germans to 'hold off the bear'. Add to that the economic mayhem of the Great Depression, where Britain and France were reeling from the economic turmoil, and you'd find the British and French public extremely reluctant to engage Germany, even if they were going to win easier this time around.

So, to recap, it would have taken a quicker recovery from the Great Depression, followed by a rise in willingness to fight in Britain and France, or a greater willingness by the USA to enforce peace (which given US isolationism would have been effectively impossible). Given a 1934 PoD, the French and British could have better prepared for a war, or even gotten ready for an intervention, but they needed rapidly recovering economies and a more willing populace, something extremely difficult to get by that time, especially since Italy hadn't even invaded Ethiopia the second time (and thus displayed the threat fascism posed).
 
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