The programme will air on Channel 5’s sister station 5 Select.
The new Odyssey Television documentary Could Hitler Have Been Stopped? The Politics of Appeasement explores the influence of public opinion and the press, and the failure of UK politicians and government to understand the real threat that Adolf Hitler posed.
This illuminating new documentary premieres on 5SELECT at 9pm on Tuesday 5th April with Part 2 airing at 9pm on Tuesday 12th April.
There is an argument made that appeasement in the 1930s by Chamberlain and his government was in retrospect mistaken. The truths that Churchill and others saw at the time are regarded as self-evident. However, there is perhaps another more accurate narrative – and one that was confirmed at the Nuremberg trials by the German generals that invaded Rhineland – that British politicians failed to understand the real facts, and that right up until Hitler’s occupation of the Rhineland in 1936 he could have been stopped.
This strikingly topical two-part documentary makes extensive and powerful use of archive footage, contemporary accounts and leading best-selling historians: Sir Richard Evans, Tim Bouverie, Frank McDonough, Jonathan Haslam, John Bew, Andrew Roberts and John Charmley. Could Hitler Have Been Stopped? The Politics of Appeasement goes beneath the surface and sees that the short-term interests of personal political ambition, democratic election realities and the sheer power of the legacy of World War I led so few to see the threat that Hitler posed and that he was stoppable.
Both British political and public opinion, similarly to the rest of Britain’s European allies, were hesitant to stand up to Hitler’s Germany – if only so many had not misread the alliances that might have been made to stop what became an inexorable tide towards war – one that perhaps need never have happened and could have been stopped.
Could Hitler Have Been Stopped? The Politics of Appeasement, 5 Select 9pm on Tuesday 5th April, with part two airing at 9pm on Tuesday 12th April.
