Rxcept for one HUGE difference: Hitler wanted to annihilate everyone on the planey but "Aryans" his phony race of supposed blonde, blue-eyed Germans. Stalin was merely paranoid and killed people who he feared were in his way or might come after himhe did not have a belief they were inferior specimans of humanity and needed to be destroyed. Same with Pol Pot. He did not try to take over the Earth either. His murdering was his own people as well. Both these two identified his victims himself as time passed. Solo dictators. No one defeated Stalin but his killing stopped with him.
Hitler had an entire Nazi Party dedicated to the world-wide genocide of so-called inferior races, even if they personally did not agree with it, or particularly care about it. They would have continued implementation of the Final Solution. Himmler was as fervant a genocidal maniac as Hitler. Goering shared the beliefs as well, and Goebbels was even more dedicated. Eichmannand that is just the top level. Had they won the war, after Hitler retired, the genocide would have continued around the planet. They wantedc to take the resources of each country and use up its citizens as disposable slave labor that did not require food, health care, housing beyond a prison shelf

"A lesser of two evils, if you like, which in a sense was the correct choice if you consider that Communism under Stalin and Pol Pot managed to kill and torture far more people than Hitler ever did."
Usual Nazi/fascist apologist beep Communism doesn;'t need to ostracize and denigrate a whole ethnic group, Nazism - which isn't exactly the same as fascism - does. Hitler's ideology was one of race, Marx's wasn't.
So, no, the ideology of Germany was not the lesser of two evil. Atleast true communism supports the workers, Nazism doesn't, it is an ideology were the strong get everything.
"Namu-myoho-renge-kyo"

I have to agree that it is alright to judge people in retrospect. More important than just judging them is to understand that things we do today we will be judged for tomorrow ourselves.

Most people who read "Mine Kampf" disregarded the idea of genecide as Hitlerian hyperbole. It had NEVER happened as a government policy before. The very fact that he didn't keep it SECRET worked against people taking it seriously. I agree that folks should have seen Hitler's agressive acts as a threat, but no one in the 30's, including Churchill, warned that Hitler was planning the deaths of millions of Jews. Not even the Jews, who saw the violence close up and personal never expected the Holocaust.
I know this comment has been up for quite a while, but I have to disagree. You're quite incorrect. Even if you leave out the Turkish government's genocide against the Armenians during WWI, The British were no strangers to the concept of genocide as a government policy, having created concentration camps during the Boer War and been one of the early adopters of government-sanctioned genocide against the indigenous populations of the New World and Australia.
And everybody in Europebe they British, German, French, or Russianhad plenty of historical experience with hundreds of years of attacks on Jews, just for their being Jews, and total elimination of entire Jewish populations in cities and even regions. In fact, the British had ended five centuries of banning Jews from settling in the British Isles only the century before.
So, yes, the British upper class should have seen Hitler's ideas as a threat, once he came to power. The problem was that they were as bigoted as he was, as a group, and many of the nobility agreed with him on the subject of getting rid of the Jews. They just weren't willing to actually go out and kill Jews themselves, but were they going to do anything about it if Hitler did it on the QT? Nope. And since they didn't have a problem with it, they didn't spend enough time working out what that would mean for them or Hitler's ambitions.
No, they weren't taken by surprise by Hitler's genocidal antisemitism. They were just taken by surprise by his Napoleonic ambition.
Regarding the fears and impact of death toll of either WWI or WWII, while they were shocking and devastating for the time, in the end, they were still "only" wars. Europe had assuredly seen worse in the past, in both the Reformation and the Black Death. The scars of the World Wars, and the memory of them, are already fading, but the Reformation and the Black Death inflicted scars that will never fade, and the demographic damage was intense. The USSR complaining about losing 20 million in population (which, as someone else noted, probably included some cynical sleight of hand involving the Holodomor genocide) out of some 180 million seems rather paltry when you consider that the most conservative estimate for the death toll of the Black Death was one-third of Europe's population. The thing is that it had been hundreds of years since those disasters, and Europeans had got rich and cocky. They thought it would never happen again.
I suppose one can argue, if one wants, that the European upper classes didn't see Hitler coming, but considering how Napoleon blindsided them, you'd think they really should have. Napoleon was not a genocidal maniac, but he certainly put the idea out there of one man trying to conquer Europe a good century-plus before Hitler. And he even rose to power out of a successful revolution.
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The British were knocked over by the huge loss of life in WW1 and Hitler took advantage of it.
British sympathizers to Nazism,shows how dangerous Hitler was and became..

"But serious historians ultimately agree that the primary factor was tactics;"
True enough as far as it goes. But few wars are won or lost entirely on the battlefield. Witness Vietnam. The US won every major battle. The communists would just never quit.

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The typical European response is indifference, mingled with a patronizing dissmissal of any danger or imperative to act, when the US calls for multi-lateral action. The obverse is to blame the US for "doing nothing". Thus, we were criticized for both Ruwanda AND Somalia!

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Well my friend, in my case, I don't think of the French as fags et al. My problem with the French has been EARNED by them. Every step of the way. French insistance on assigning war guilt and huge reparations on Germany, gave Hitler ample fuel for exhorting the Germans to follow an aggressive foriegn policy in Europe. There is evidence that the French held back some of the aid they were given and effort against Germany in order to have the ability to reclaim their colonial empire after the war. Basically, France extorted the US to support and supply their colonial war in Indo-China. They refused to join NATO unless this aid was given. Since Germany was not yet a member, NATO would have been still-born at it's inception w/o the support of a powerful, large nation on the continent. In other words France was the only country that could support a credible NATO military presence at the time. The US had to give in.
After the French made a mess of the situation, the US inherited an agressive and now hostile (due to US) aid) situation in Vietnam. Further American misunderstanding of the problem led to escalation of this destructive, pointless war. In the mid 60's Charles the nose took France OUT of NATO as a full participant in order to peddle his idiotic "3rd force" farce. Americans who have visited France are treated with extreme rudeness and contempt. And the French reaction to Euro-Disney filled with ridiculous, (given the subject ;an AMUSEMENT PARK!) rancor and jingoism. The French even carped that we violated French airspace when Regan punished Ghadaffi in the 80's.
Every time the US tries to coax European help in fighting a mutal threat, there is France, arguing the other way. Almost always. So, my attitude is absolutely not founded on a ridiculous idea of French homosexuality. It is based on what I percieve as French ingratitude, rudeness, duplicity, obstinacy, arrogance and ineptitude.

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"But serious historians ultimately agree that the primary factor was tactics;"
True enuff. But wars are seldom won or lost entirely on the battlefield.
Witness Vietnam. The US won every major battle. Communists just wouldn't EVER give up.

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Danish? Anyway the French get it because they had the largest army in the world at the time, their political leadership was so irresolute,and their tactics were entirely faulty. The French had MORE tanks than the Wehrmacht and even BETTER tanks as well. They insisted on expending them in "penny packets" as infantry support vehicles. Look what the Finns did to Stalin. The French shoulda held out for more than 6 WEEKS! It was like they sent a Maiter'D to the border."Table for 1.5 million? Goosestep right this way please."
The Benelux nations and Denmark, had no chance of stopping Hitler. The French utterly failed.

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Yup. All I'm saying that is that every "appeaser" was not a fool, like Chamberlain (or Darlington). Some had what they felt were good reasons to give Hitler what he wanted. (At least for the time being). The Brits were in a woeful state of preparedness. I don't think 10 years of appeasement would have helped the French. It was their state of mind.

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Some people got it right, for the right reasons. Meanwhile, lots of people got it wrong, in large part because of a biased judgement. Hitlers intent was not a "no-brainer", it was a good-brainer. Just like the domino theory, just like Iraqs WMD, just like the financial collapse. Some people have a track record of getting stuff right a lot more than others, and it's not chance.
I kinda agree with this statement, but I don't think that the fact that "some people got it right" is a blanket indictment against everyone who didn't. Even a stopped clock is right twice a day. SOMEBODY had to figure appeasementb was bad. Check out Churchill's judgement about Galipolli and his idea to attack " the soft underbelly of Europe " instead of an invasion of the continent. Even he had to admit afterwards "it turned out to be a tought old gut." And MacArthur, who was so right about the Inchon invasion and so wrong about Chinese intervention in Korea.

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I'm talking about WWII. The whole mess. It's amazing how people can't put aside hindsight. Was EVERY politcal tract to be taken seriously? Was every threat ever made by anyone fulfilled? Did no one ever bluff? Given our hindsight would Hitler have attacked the USSR? Would Japan have bombed Pearl Harbor? Would Saddam have barred UN inspection teams? It's easy to be wise AFTER THE FACT.The truth is, that Hitler could have been merely restoring Germany's territory and prestige. That's what most GERMANS believed. So don't act like standing up to Hitler was a complete no-brainer. In fact Hitler was fully prepared to go to war over Czechoslovakia. We won the war that started in Poland. Would the Allies have prevailed in this earlier war? Would you risk it?
BTW this "lesson learned" about appeasement, was used to support the idea of the "Domino Theory". Did the escalation of the Vietnam War prevent India from going Communist? It sure didn't help Cambodia.

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Churchill and Orwell, to mention two,actually read Mein Kampf, and they predicted what would happen.
Animal Farm (1947) and 1984 (1949) were writen AFTER WWII.
Most people who read "Mine Kampf" disregarded the idea of genecide as Hitlerian hyperbole. It had NEVER happened as a government policy before. The very fact that he didn't keep it SECRET worked against people taking it seriously. I agree that folks should have seen Hitler's agressive acts as a threat, but no one in the 30's, including Churchill, warned that Hitler was planning the deaths of millions of Jews. Not even the Jews, who saw the violence close up and personal never expected the Holocaust.

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It really is unfair to judge appeasement people as they had no idea what was going to come out of it."
It really is unfair to judge Iraq Invasion people as they had no idea what was going to come out of it.
It really is unfair to judge pro-Stalin people as they had no idea what was going to come out of it.
It really is unfair to judge "don'trepair-the-New-Orleans-levees" people as they had no idea what was going to come out of it.
The OP has a point. Only the first statement is justified. The world was unaware of the kinds of horror that a totalitarian system may perpetrate. Totalitarianism, ideologically speaking, was a post WWI phenomenon. Mussolini was the FIRST totalitarian dictator. After the world learned of the Nazi excesses, the excuse of ignorance is no longer valid and I don't think that later appeasers can justifiably claim ignorance. And of course the New Orleans situation was and REMAINS inexcuseable because it was EMIMNANTLY predictable. Poor levees led to the mess; so what did the city do? Spent MILLIONS rebuilding the Super Dome! But the appeasers were not totally culpable. I mean at the time, signing off on Czechloslovakia did not automatically equal Buchenwald and Treblinka.