Tim Bouverie, Appeasing Hitler: Chamberlain, Churchill and the Road to War

Abstract

added some further complexity to the work. Minor criticisms aside, the depth and range of the sources is striking, which works almost exclusively in Beattie’s favour. Although the prose is generally sound there is an overwhelming tendency to get bogged down in the statistics throughout much of Chapters 2 and 3. The statistics are indeed important, as Beattie is often providing intersectional understandings of age and gender alongside the perceived level of Nazi involvement and length of incarceration. Yet, at times they become overbearing, and a series of tables might have served better to break up the flow of age ranges and percentages. One particularly adept point Beattie makes is that the Allies had ‘no agreement on what constitutes a senior, mid-ranking, or subordinate Nazi leader or official’ (126). When trying to ‘denazify’ Germany, and indeed those that were once part of the system, this became a crucial aspect of ‘re-education’ within the British and US zones. As Beattie asserts, however, it was hardly ever the intention of these Allied occupation zones to re-educate. Most of those interned were viewed as incapable of undergoing denazification to an agreeable point, but rather incarceration was there as a preventative measure for the wider population. As Beattie rightly concludes, ‘as only one aspect of a multifaceted Allied approach to the personnel of Nazi Germany, internment cannot be understood in isolation’ (190). One of the key points, further highlighted in the conclusion, is that internment camps were used to isolate individuals who may otherwise have caused issues for the occupying powers. It was a logical and pragmatic approach that, although varying from zone to zone, had similar implications – a significant lack of Nazis to influence or continue influencing the German public. This then allowed for one of the two ideologies to take hold, and although the methods of democratization in the western zones were perhaps more peaceful than Stalinization in the East, both were carried out through extrajudicial measures. Indeed, an additional celebration of Beattie’s work is that it allows us to trace the historiographical debate between historians of post-war internment in the western and Soviet zones since the opening of archives. Considering the sheer complexity and volume of the subject matter, Beattie has written a comprehensive and instructive history that would be useful to anyone studying post-war Germany, occupation, transitional justice or the legacies of Nazism.