Despite the large number of German victims, even many former members of the Nazi Party claimed that they had no responsibility for German crimes and that Adolf Hitler himself knew nothing about the Holocaust. This created serious obstacles to the Allies` attempt to de-Nazify Germany. The Western Allies oversaw the establishment of denazification courts from March 1946, but it soon became clear that there would not be enough qualified doctors, lawyers, judges, teachers, and civil servants if former NSDAP members were excluded from these professions. U.S. military officials even used lie detectors at one point to determine whether individuals had joined the Nazi Party to protect their jobs or because they agreed with the party`s policies. Students could add up the criticisms that could be levelled at Chamberlain, from naivety in his vision of Hitler to national self-centeredness in his inability to consult his allies and his willingness to sacrifice the Czechs. The time and opening of documents that were secret at the time add different perspectives on this subject. Chamberlain was part of the generation that survived, but was deeply outraged by the First World War. Is it unfair of us to criticize him for misjudging Hitler? This was partly because American politics at the time was deeply divided. President Wilson led the Democratic Party.

However, his rivals in the Republican Party dominated the US Congress. They took advantage of the treaty to criticize Wilson. Wilson must take some of the responsibility for this, as he has made little effort to consult Republicans about the treaty. The Americans were also concerned about Wilson`s plan for a League of Nations. They feared that membership in the League would drag the United States into international disputes that did not concern them. In the end, Congress rejected the Treaty of Versailles and the League of Nations. As Hitler continued to deliver inflammatory speeches demanding that the Germans of Czechoslovakia be reunited with their homeland, war seemed imminent. However, neither France nor Britain felt ready to defend Czechoslovakia, and both were anxious to avoid a military confrontation with Germany at almost any cost. In France, the Popular Front government had ended, and on 8 August the Popular Front government had ended. In April 1938, Édouard Daladier formed a new cabinet without socialist participation or communist support. Four days later, Le Temps, whose foreign policy was steered by the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, published an article by Joseph Barthelemy, a professor at the Faculty of Law in Paris, in which he examined the Franco-Czechoslovak Treaty of Alliance of 1924 and concluded that France was not obliged to go to war to save Czechoslovakia.

Earlier, on March 22, the Times of London said in an editorial by its editor-in-chief G.G. Dawson that Britain could not wage war to preserve Czech sovereignty over the Sudeten Germans without first clearly identifying the wishes of the Sudeten Germans; otherwise, “Britain may well fight against the principle of self-determination.” Six months later, in March 1939, German troops captured the rest of Czechoslovakia. Poland seemed to be the next most likely victim of Nazi aggression, and Chamberlain struck a deal with the Poles to defend them in Germany. Hitler did not believe that Britain would go to war for Poland after failing to do so for Czechoslovakia. In September 1939, he sent his soldiers to Poland. On the same day, Britain declared war on Germany. Although the trial could not convince all Germans of their responsibility for the outbreak of World War II and the Holocaust in Europe, it forged a preliminary consensus on the criminality of the Hitler regime. In October 1946, the month the IMT verdicts were announced, more than 79 percent of Germans surveyed by U.S. occupation authorities said they had heard of the court`s verdicts and considered the trial fair. Seventy-one percent of respondents confirmed that they had learned something new from the study.

This formation consolidated the importance of the Tribunal for the reconstruction of Germany […].