Today, September 1, 2019 , it is 80 years since World War II began by Germany invading Poland. Few events and debt conditions in our present history are as easy to pronounce.

It was Adolf Hitler who started, it was he and his regime who took full responsibility. Any interpretation that lays blame on other shoulders is to be regarded as falsification of history.

But there is also another angle to an understanding of the outbreak of war. That the Germans attacked Poland was completely consistent, given their aggression policy in Eastern Europe, but that Britain and France would help the Poles through a declaration of war against Germany was not at all in line with how these states had acted in recent years.

Why did it take so long for British and French to take up arms against Nazism? Should they have acted earlier?

The latter question can be answered today, in light of our historical fact, with a clear yes.

Britain's and France's foreign policy actions until 1939 are among the most fateful fiasco of modern history.

On several occasions London and Paris had been able to pull the brake and stop Hitler - when he remilitarized the Rhineland, when he joined Austria to Germany, when he annexed the Sudet country and later the Bohemian morass, and so on. But that didn't happen, and in the meantime, the Wehrmacht and the Luftwaffe could be equipped for world war potential.

How is this related?

That the Western powers for the longest time stuck to their non-action against the Third Reich was mainly due to the memories of the First World War hell.

Western Europe in common was a pacifist. She didn't want to go back to the trenches .

The prevailing policy, which is usually called appeasement, "rapturous" or "reassuring", was aimed at avoiding a new major war at almost any price, even if it meant far-reaching concessions to evil.

This attitude has long enjoyed strong support in all political camps. Liberal Lloyd George, who was British Prime Minister during the First World War, expressed sympathy and understanding for Germany; In 1936 he even went there and agreed with Hitler.

In Labor, there was a compact resistance to disarmament - advocating an internationalist policy that focused on collective security within the framework of the United Nations Confederation, the UN's precursor.

The Conservatives agreed. They wanted reforms that eased the need and counteracted the effects of the depression.

To build combat aircraft and tanks in that situation and to equip the fleet was extremely inopportune. One of the few angry critics of peace policy was Winston Churchill, but his career had derailed and his influence over government policy was nonexistent.

As late as 1938, the Western powers' foreign policy was guided by the idea of ​​appeasement.

The best-known symbolic expression is the speech of British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain on September 30, following his return from the Munich talks.

To assembled journalists, Chamberlain explained that the decision that gave Hitler the right to annex the Sudet country was merely a prelude to a much larger agreement that would bring peace to all of Europe - "peace of our time."

A few months later, everything collapsed . After the German occupation of Bohemia, the Moravia and the Memel area, it was obvious that pacifism had reached the end of the road.

When it became clear that Hitler also had plans to annex the Danzig Free State and unite Ostpreussen with the rest of Germany, the Western powers abandoned their strategy and prepared for war.

The United Kingdom and France pledged to protect Poland should Germany attack the country.

With that, Hitler, if he attacked Poland, risked being forced to fight a two-war war, much like Germany did during the First World War. Thus, Hitler made an unexpected diplomatic maneuver. On August 23, 1939, he signed a non-assault pact with the Soviet Union.

Hitler got free hands in western Poland and Stalin was able to do as he wanted in Finland, the Baltics, eastern Poland and Romania.

When the division of Eastern Europe was completed, Hitler took action. On September 1, 1939, Poland was invaded.

Two days later, Britain and France declared war, but then it was too late. The tragedy could not be stopped. A war that could have been over in a couple of weeks or months - if one had acted in 1936 or 1938 - dragged on over time for several years, causing unlikely disasters for an entire world.

Moral? Don't wait too long. Letting free-spirited dictators have free space at the expense of the environment is one of the dumbest world communities can do.