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One of the most impressive of the new public buildings was the Olympic stadium in Berlin, and there Hitler welcomed the powerful and famous of other lands -- for example, the celebrated American aviator Charles Lindbergh -- to his refurbished capital. And despite the fuss over a black American, Jesse Owens, winning four gold medals at the 1936 Berlin Olympics, the team that scored the most points overall was Nazi Germany's.
It was inevitable that an economically reviving Germany would increase its pressure for major revisions in the Versailles Treaty. When the new President Roosevelt proposed the abolition of all major offensive weapons, Hitler was quick to agree -- easy enough since Germany had been forbidden to possess such weapons. "Germany would also be perfectly ready to disband her entire military establishment . . . if the neighboring countries will do the same," Hitler declared. That "if" was the shield behind which he planned to rearm. When Britain and France declined, Hitler indignantly announced that Germany was leaving the Geneva disarmament talks and the League of Nations.
In secret, Hitler had already told his generals that he wanted to triple the German army from the Versailles ceiling of 100,000 men to 300,000 by October 1934. The navy, which was not supposed to have any ships of more than 10,000 tons, got orders to start building two 26,000-ton battle cruisers. In the spring of 1935, Hitler announced that he was reintroducing universal military service to create an army of 500,000 men. The Allies protested but did nothing.
At dawn on March 7, 1936, Hitler made the first bold use of his growing Wehrmacht. Though his generals had warned him that the French would resist and that Germany was still too weak to fight, Hitler sent three battalions across the Rhine to occupy the supposedly demilitarized Rhineland. "We have no ) territorial demands to make in Europe," he proclaimed. "Germany will never break the peace!" It was all bluff. "If the French had then marched into the Rhineland, we would have had to withdraw with our tails between our legs," Hitler later said. "A retreat on our part would have spelled collapse."
There were several reasons for this Western irresolution. The memories of the war ran deep, and nobody was eager for more bloodshed. Both Britain and France were concerned with their own serious economic troubles. But particularly in Britain, there was a widespread view that Versailles had indeed been unfair, that the Germans had a strong case. George Bernard Shaw, for example, spoke of Hitler's "triumphant rescue of his country from the yoke the Allies imposed."
With hindsight it is clear that the Allies should and easily could have stopped Hitler by force, and their failure has long been condemned as "appeasement." But to the leaders of Britain and France, appeasement was a proudly proclaimed policy, meaning simply negotiating rather than fighting. "Appeasement between the wars was always a self-confident creed," Churchill biographer Martin Gilbert wrote in The Roots of Appeasement. "It was both utopian and practical. Its aim was peace for all time, or at least for as long as wise men could devise it."