Mr. Tea
Let's Talk About Ceps
Britain had a choice. Many in Chamberlain's cabinet were eager go cut a deal with Hitler, and even in Churchill's.
I was going to make this point but you've made it for me. Throughout the '30s many people in Britain, from the man on the Clapham omnibus up to (and especially) the government and the royal family, had a generally favourable view of Hitler. And even well into the war, there was still as a sense that Germany was basically a rival upstart that needed to be taught a lesson (again). A rival isn't someone ideologically opposed to you: he's someone who wants the same thing you want for yourself, for himself. I think it was only later that the Nazis became the peerless exemplar of human evil that they still are in the popular imagination.
And I don't think "We can't be all that bad, we fought the Nazis after all" is really much of an argument. The UK and, later, the USA deserve credit for preventing Hitler's domination of the Atlantic and freeing Western Europe after the Wehrmacht had already spent itself on the Eastern Front, sure, but if any one country should be regarded as Nazi Germany's nemesis, it's obviously the USSR. Does that diminish any of Stalin's unimaginable catalogue of crimes? Of course not.
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