Neville Chamberlain

Neville Chamberlain
Term of office May 28, 1937 - May 10, 1940
Political party	Conservative Party
Preceded by	Stanley Baldwin
Succeeded by	Winston Churchill
Born	March 18, 1869
Died	November 9, 1940
Spouse	Ann Vere Cole
Religion	Unitarian

Neville Chamberlain (March 18, 1869 – November 9, 1940) was the Prime Minister of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland from May 27, 1937 to May 10, 1940. Chamberlain belonged to and was Leader of the Conservative Party. Chamberlain, together with France's Edouard Daladier, signed the Munich pact with Germany. This allowed Germany to annex the Sudetenland in exchange for a promise of peace. Chamberlain received a hero's welcome upon his return to Great Britain, declaring that the pact had provided "peace in our time." However, he also immediately took steps to bring the British armed forces into a state of readiness for war, implying that he himself knew that war was imminent. Hitler looked upon Chamberlain as an extremely wily character, and felt that he had been cheated out of war.

Not long after, Hitler took all of Czechoslovakia and then invaded Poland, starting World War II. In the spring of 1940, following British and French reverses in Norway, Chamberlain resigned and Winston Churchill became Prime Minister.

Appeasement

He adopted appeasement during his time in office, allowing Adolf Hitler to get what he wants but nothing more, but he couldn't be trusted.

White Paper

March 17, 1939:

A cable urging the British Government “not to betray the confidence of the Jewish people” with regard to Palestine was dispatched today by a conference of all Zionist parties together with the Agudath Israel, religious non-Zionist organization. The cable said: “In the darkest and most tragic hour of Jewish history, 3,500,000 Polish Jews appeal to the British Government not to betray the confidence of the Jewish people in Great Britain and not to destroy the sacred hopes of the Jewish people by adoption of a policy bound to drive them to despair.”

Polish Jews’ pre-Holocaust plea to Chamberlain: Let us into Palestine. In March 1939, weeks before the notorious White Paper

In 2019, the Telegram was uncovered, polish Jews’ pre-Holocaust plea to Chamberlain: Let us into Palestine. It was sent by both, non-Zionist/ultra-orthodox-Haredim and Zionists..

In March 1939, weeks before the notorious White Paper, Polish Jewry sent London a desperate telegram, published here apparently for the first time. At terrible cost, it was ignored...

..."In the darkest and most tragic hour of Jewish history, three and a half million Polish Jews appeal to the British Government not to betray the confidence of the Jewish people in Great Britain and not to destroy the sacred hopes of the Jewish people by adoption of a policy bound to drive them to despair.."

The London Conference opened on February 7, 1939, at St. James’s Palace. Chaim Weizmann and David Ben-Gurion, later the first president and first prime minister of the future State of Israel, respectively, led the Jewish delegation.

In his opening statement — made to the British Government and Jewish delegates only, as the Arab delegates refused to sit in the same room with the Jews — Weizmann stressed the extreme danger Hitler posed to European Jewry, prophetically noting “the fate of six million people was in the balance.”

But Weizmann’s warnings fell on deaf ears. By late February 1939, less than three weeks after the London Conference began, British officials began leaking to the press their intention to propose independence for Palestine in 10 years under majority Arab rule, along with immediate and severe limitations on Jewish immigration to Palestine.

‘The Arabs were jubilant about the proposals, the Jews cast down and bitter’

As the Times of London reported on February 28, 1939, “[t]he Arabs were jubilant about the proposals, the Jews cast down and bitter.” The same Chamberlain who foolishly believed appeasing Hitler represented the best way to keep the peace in Europe not surprisingly decided that appeasing the mufti was the best way to restore peace to Palestine.

By mid-March everyone realized Britain planned to close the doors of Palestine to all but a small trickle of Jewish immigrants. On March 15, 1939, the Times of London published additional leaked details of the British proposals for Palestine, including capping Jewish immigration at 15,000 per year for the next five years.

That same day, March 15, 1939, Germany invaded Czechoslovakia, and German forces triumphantly marched into Prague.

Criticism of his European statesmanship

Thomas Sowell wrote:

• No leader of a democratic nation was ever more popular than British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain—wildly cheered in the House of Commons by opposition parties as well as his own—when he returned from negotiations in Munich in 1938, waving an agreement and declaring that it meant "peace in our time." We know now how short that time was. Less than a year later, World War II began in Europe and spread across the planet, killing tens of millions of people and reducing many cities to rubble in Europe and Asia. Looking back after that war, Winston Churchill said, "There was never a war in all history easier to prevent by timely action." The earlier it was done, the less it would have cost. At one point, Hitler could have been stopped in his tracks "without the firing of a single shot," Churchill said.

Domestic achievements

Chamberlain's disastrous foreign policy and inept conduct of the first months of World War II overshadowed a lifetime of achievement before his comparatively short tenure as Premier, particularly in the field of domestic policy. As Minister of Health twice and in a long period of office as Chancellor of the Exchequer, his achievements included landmark reforms of local government finance, improvement of conditions in factories, establishment of the basis of a welfare state, repayment of much the National Debt from the Great War and technological modernisation of British industry. Consequently, he is generally rated as one of the most significant UK government ministers of the 20th century. Ironically, the economic strength achieved by Chamberlain's domestic reforms in peacetime placed Britain in a strong position to resist Germany when war broke out. He remained respected in Parliament and the country even after his fall from Prime Ministerial office, and was in charge of home policy in the Churchill government until shortly before his death in 1940.