If Chamberlain hadn't declared war, would Hitler have stopped with Poland?

[Nyvis]

If Chamberlain had allowed Hitler to carve up Poland in half with Stalin, would Hitler have been content with finally retaking the land that was once Prussia and connecting the main German reich with East Prussia? Would WW2 have been ultimately averted?

The question is... What does France do? If lack of Britain causes France to pull support, Germany will push Poland as far as it can, getting both the corridor and basically a puppet, with an ultimate fate similar to the Czech republic. Then probably prepare for war with the USSR because that was always part of the deal.

But if France still supports Poland, Germany still goes through Belgium and that will pull in Britain for sure. Hitler can't delay too long or France will get its shit together.

In any way, war is inevitable. If Hitler declared war against the USSR while still at war with Britain, he's not going to pass up on that war with a quiet west.

 

[mianfei]

So my guess is the focus of German diplomacy is enlisting the British and French into an alliance to take down the Soviet Union. Remember there is no Nazi-Soviet Pact but German diplomatic relations with Britain and France are not actually that bad. They might try to build on the Japanese alliance more but I never have understood what they were trying to do with this.

The British and French upper and middle classes had desired an alliance with Hitler to take down the Soviet Union ever since Hitler came to power.

The simple problem was that in Britain and France the upper classes were unable to overthrow democracy like Hitler, Mussolini, Franco, Salazar, Dollfuß, Piłsudski, Smetona etc. had. More crucially their working classes had the most extreme fear of the Nazis, desired an alliance with the USSR, and a numerical advantage over the pro-Nazi upper and middle classes.

This meant that British and French politicians and businessmen, even though most sympathised with the Nazis, could not be too explicit about it. They knew massive, uncontrollable protests would result if they were as pro-Nazi as they themselves desired.

If there had been an earlier collapse of France’s left-wing Popular Front, an alliance to destroy Russia is not implausible, but there is still the question of the British, who had a newly powerful Labor party whose constituency feared anything remotely resembling a Nazi-type regime. If the British upper classes could have contained this group, an alliance with Hitler and even Japan to defeat and carve up the Soviet Union would have become easy, but I do not see it in reality.

This gives Stalin no end of stuff to worry about, mind you, since the Third Reich is now butting up against his own empire’s borders, and those Poles who showed that they didn't like Russia much in the Polish-Soviet war are now part of the armies of Adolf Hitler who has said all sorts of interesting thing about Jewish-Bolshevist conspiracies and “living space” in books and delivered speeches.

Piłsudski in the year or so before he died had desired an alliance with Hitler for the same reasons Britain and France had, although his unwillingness to sacrifice Poland’s independence made him cautious, as did his support for the ‘Soviet—Polish Non-Aggression Pact’ of 1932. His de facto successor Edward Rydz-Śmigły failed to challenge this significantly, let along to discard it in favour of an alliance with Hitler, which was viewed as an unacceptable sacrifice of Poland’s independence. Smetona’s Lithuania – in some ways a similar regime to Poland or Dollfuß-Schuschnigg Austria – was even less able or willing to ally with Hitler, and in fact the Smetona regime put Nazis on trial when Britain and France were seeking to pacify them.

 

[lionhead]

This assumes that Stalin doesn't move to recover the Baltic States.

That hardly counts as a "common border"

 

[Garrison]

The British and French upper and middle classes had desired an alliance with Hitler to take down the Soviet Union ever since Hitler came to power.

If you could just provide some evidence to support that claim? Because everything I've read points to the primary concern of the French and the British leaders being to avoid another European war because they believed, correctly, that the only real winners would be the peripheral powers, the USA and USSR. Also despite all his talk of seeking an alliance with Britain Hitler had pursued economic policies that earned him the emnity of the City of London and most senior politicians, who again pursued appeasement in the belief it would prevent war, not because they wanted one with the USSR. Frankly for every member of the 'chattering classes' who was enthralled by the mythos of the Nazi's there was another taken in by Stalin's propaganda of a workers paradise. Overall though most of the middle classes inthe 1930's were far more concerned with the state of the economy than the antics of the fascists and bolsheviks on the continent of Europe.