"The British and German accounts of the conversation agree that he walked warily, and knew that he was dealing with an abnormal fanatic. It may be that his self-confidence misled him into thinking that the Führer could be moved by arguments and explanations that seemed to us unanswerable. British Ministers, whether Grey, Asquith or Baldwin, have always been inclined to think and act as if foreigners thought and acted like themselves. Chamberlain evidently believed that there was at least a small corner of Hitler's mind that was sufficiently like his own to respond to British arguments. The belief was something more than wishful thinking. The plan of the blitzkrieg against Czechoslovakia, for instance, was dropped as the result of Chamberlain's insistence. The truth seems to be that each of them was influenced by the other, but that neither really understood the other's point of view. Chamberlain failed to realise that Hitler wanted the whole continent and not a few million more Germans. Hitler, when he talked of perpetual peace between Germany and Great Britain, always assumed that it would be based upon the division of the old world between them."
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Prime Ministers of the United KingdomPoliticians from EnglandUnitariansPeople from BirminghamConservative Party (UK) politicians
Original Language: English
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Viscount Templewood, Nine Troubled Years (1954), p. 381
https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Neville_Chamberlain
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