The peace movement phenomenon has stalked the
twentieth century like a macabre specter, typically emerging to call for
concessions to aggressors, tyrants, terrorists and mass murderers. The
phenomenon was particularly catastrophic before and during the Second
World War. Today's peace movement manifestations in Israel had their
counterpart predecessors in that era. Then too mothers' anti-war groups
were active, as was a group specifically called "The Peace Now Movement"
(in the USA). The groups active in Britain, France, and the United States
believed that it was possible and desirable to make peace with Hitler.
Government officials, journalists, intellectuals ("right" and "left"),
politicians ("right" and "left"), and peace movement leaders claimed that
complying with Hitler's territorial demands would bring peace, at least
for their own countries (although the slogan "territory for peace" was not
yet in vogue). Thinking along these lines and corresponding policies
helped lead to the Munich Pact (1938) which called for giving Hitler
strategically vital parts of Czechoslovakia inhabited mainly by ethnic
Germans. Thus the self-determination slogan came into play too.
At the time and since, the Munich concession has been
widely recognized as an essential step in Hitler's preparations for making
WWII a year later. Hence, the pre-war "peace movements" defeated their own
ostensible goal. In France, many pre-war advocates of peace through
concessions to Nazi Germany became officials of the pro-Nazi Vichy
government and its supporting parties and militias. In America, groups
favoring peace with Nazi Germany (including Communists from 1939 to 1941)
were active before and after US entry into the war, when information about
Nazi mass murders had already received some publicity in the US.
