Against

• The appeasers forced Czechoslovakia to back down to Hitler because they didn't want to fight, yet Czechoslovakia was a strong and modern country. With a little support Hitler could have been stopped
• Appeasement alienated the USSR; Stalin was worried that Hitler might invade the USSR but didn't feel he could rely on Britain and France for support if he did. Britain and France would need the USSR if war broke out but their relationship was strained by the policy of appeasement
• People misjudged Hitler. They thought he was a reasonable politician, but he had been saying throughout the 1920s that the only way to make Germany strong again was to use violence; they should have known better than to trust him
• Appeasement was morally wrong. It left countries such as Austria and Czechoslovakia occupied by the Nazis who treated people brutally and with no mercy. Political games shouldn't have been played at the expense of the lives of people in these countries
• People missed opportunities to stop Hitler. For example, his own generals said that the army wasn't strong enough to fight France if it had wanted to stop him from remilitarising the Rhineland. If France had acted then Hitler would have had to have backed down and war may have been avoided
• The more Hitler was given the more confident he grew and the more he took. For example, when he was 'given' the Sudetenland he knew he could then go on and take the rest of Czechoslovakia
• Lord Halifax, reflecting in his memoirs on the remilitarisation of the Rhineland in 1936: I have little doubt that if we had then told Hitler bluntly to go back, his power for future and large mischief would have been broken... but that moment which offered the last effective chance of securing peace after war, went by