What Was Hitler’s Word Worth?

In a recent conversation with Jacob Rees-Mogg, Tucker Carlson asked a question that quickly became more radical than it first appeared. Why had Britain gone to war with Germany in 1939, and what had Britain actually gained from doing so?

Carlson did not merely question the wisdom of the decision. He rejected the idea that Hitler had simply invaded Poland arbitrarily, pointing out that parts of Poland had been German territory before the Treaty of Versailles. He used this to challenge what he regarded as the conventional account of an unprovoked invasion. Britain, he argued, had involved itself in a conflict that ultimately helped destroy both its empire and its position in the world.

Rees-Mogg pushed back much more strongly. He rejected Carlson’s portrayal of Britain as the aggressor, pointing to Britain’s commitments to countries that had been attacked and arguing that Germany would eventually have attacked Britain itself. He described the Second World War as a classic struggle between good and evil and, at one point, reached for the familiar line that otherwise the British would now be speaking German.

Carlson’s answer to that was essentially: who cares?

The exchange became heated enough for Rees-Mogg to tell Carlson that he was “verging on defending Hitler.” Carlson responded sarcastically that perhaps he was a secret Nazi.

Strip away the provocation, however, and there is a serious historical question underneath it. Hitler did repeatedly indicate that he preferred an accommodation with Britain to war with it. Britain did emerge from the war victorious but enormously weakened. And it is perfectly legitimate to ask whether refusing accommodation with Germany was therefore the right strategic decision.

But Rees-Mogg’s weakest answer was also his most memorable one. Britain did not need to fear that everyone would literally end up speaking German.

There was a much stronger answer available.

What was Hitler’s word worth?

So let us give Carlson the strongest version of his argument. Let us assume that Hitler genuinely wanted peace with Britain in 1940. There are good reasons to believe that he preferred some form of accommodation with Britain to a prolonged war against it. France had been defeated. Much of continental Europe was either under German control or had been forced to accommodate German power.

If Hitler meant his peace overtures, however, Churchill’s problem did not disappear.

He still had to decide what would happen if he was wrong about how long that peace would last.

For Britain in 1940, the calculation was brutal. If Churchill continued the war and was wrong, the cost could be catastrophic. Britain might be invaded. Its cities could be destroyed, its economy exhausted and its empire weakened. France had collapsed with astonishing speed. The United States was not in the war. Nobody sitting in London in the summer of 1940 knew how the story would end.

A peace settlement therefore had an obvious attraction. It might stop the war.

But there was another possible mistake. Britain could make peace and allow Germany time to consolidate its position on the continent. If Hitler later changed his mind, Britain might face essentially the same strategic problem from a much weaker position.

Churchill had reasons to take that possibility seriously. By 1940 he was not dealing with an abstract question about Hitler’s character. There was already a pattern.

In 1936 Hitler remilitarised the Rhineland. In 1938 came Austria. Then the Sudetenland. Hitler publicly presented the Sudeten question as his last territorial demand in Europe. Britain and France accepted the Munich settlement partly because they hoped that satisfying this demand could prevent a larger European war.

Six months later German troops entered Prague and occupied the Czech lands.

Then came Poland.

None of these events by itself told Churchill what Hitler would do next. Together, however, they provided something more useful than a psychological judgement about whether Hitler was an honest man. They provided a record. Boundaries that had appeared final had repeatedly ceased to be final.

By the summer of 1940, therefore, Churchill did not have to prove that Hitler would break a future peace agreement. He had to decide how much weight to give a pattern he had already observed.

That changed the price of being wrong.

If a peace agreement endured, Britain might save itself an enormous amount of blood and destruction. If it did not, Germany would have had time to consolidate its domination of continental Europe. Britain might then discover that it had exchanged a dangerous war in 1940 for an even more dangerous confrontation later.

This was not simply a question of trusting Hitler. Agreements between states do not depend on trust alone. They also depend on power.

And these were two separate problems. Hitler’s record raised doubts about how long any settlement would last. But even if Britain could somehow have known that the settlement would endure, it would still have had to decide whether it could live safely alongside a Europe dominated by Germany.

A German-dominated continent would alter the balance of power dramatically. Britain was a maritime and imperial power facing the possibility of a single state becoming overwhelmingly powerful across Europe. Even without a German invasion of Britain, that was a serious strategic problem. Rees-Mogg did not need the fantasy of everyone eventually speaking German. The balance of power was enough.

This is also where Carlson’s argument becomes more serious than the existence of Hitler’s peace overtures.

Carlson can point to what continuing the war actually cost. Millions died. Britain emerged victorious but financially exhausted, its position as a world power greatly diminished. The British Empire subsequently unravelled, while much of Eastern Europe ended the war under Soviet domination. It is legitimate to ask whether a negotiated settlement might have avoided some of those consequences.

But Churchill did not get to make his decision in 1940 with the balance sheet of 1945 sitting on his desk.

He did not know that the Soviet Union would survive the German invasion. He did not know that the United States would enter the war. He did not know that Germany would eventually be defeated. He also did not know what Britain would look like after five more years of war.

Carlson can ask whether the eventual outcome justified the cost. Churchill had to answer a different question: which possible mistake could Britain survive?

And Churchill had another disadvantage. He had to judge Hitler before one of the clearest examples of Hitler’s attitude towards agreements had even occurred.

We do not.

In August 1939, Germany and the Soviet Union signed a non-aggression pact. Churchill knew about the pact. What he could not know in 1940 was how Hitler would eventually treat it.

On 22 June 1941, Germany invaded the Soviet Union.

That event cannot be smuggled backwards into Churchill’s decision. Barbarossa had not happened yet. But Carlson is asking the question today, and today we know what happened.

Less than two years after entering a non-aggression agreement with another major power, Hitler abandoned it when war against that power suited his objectives.

Britain was not the Soviet Union. Hitler thought very differently about the British Empire and about the Soviet state, and Barbarossa does not prove that he would have broken a peace with Britain.

But it does matter when we look backwards and ask whether Churchill’s concern about the durability of a settlement was reasonable. The danger was not merely theoretical. Hitler subsequently demonstrated on an enormous scale that an agreement which served him at one moment need not restrain him when his strategic calculation changed.

That still leaves Carlson with a serious question. The war was ruinously expensive for Britain. A negotiated peace might have spared Britain and Europe some of what followed. We cannot rerun history and discover the answer.

But uncertainty does not make the alternatives equal.

By 1940 Churchill had already watched Hitler’s supposedly limited demands expand repeatedly. A peace would leave Germany dominant on the continent. If the settlement failed later, Britain might have to confront that Germany from a worse position than before.

Nothing Churchill knew could prove that this would happen. Enough had happened to make betting against it extraordinarily dangerous.

That is the part missing from the simple question, “Why not take the peace?”

The question was never merely whether Hitler wanted peace in 1940. It was whether Britain could survive being wrong about how long he would want it.

Hitler’s peace offer was therefore not only an opportunity. It was a bet. And Britain itself was the stake.