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Person1869 – 1940

Neville Chamberlain

British prime minister (1937–1940) who pursued appeasement of Hitler and signed the Munich Agreement, then declared war after the invasion of Poland

Son of the statesman Joseph Chamberlain and half-brother of Austen Chamberlain, the foreign secretary who signed Locarno, he served as Lord Mayor of Birmingham and then as health minister and Chancellor of the Exchequer, leading housing and welfare reforms and the introduction of protective tariffs during the Depression. As prime minister he tried to avert war by meeting some of Germany’s demands and returned from Munich claiming to have kept the peace. When Hitler broke his word he turned to rearmament and the guarantee to Poland, but after the failed Norway campaign of 1940 he made way for Churchill and died of illness that year.

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2 related events

  1. 1
    1932Economic Blocsparticipant

    Amid the Depression Britain, France and others bound home countries and colonies together and raised high tariffs against outsiders. The world economy split into separate blocs.

  2. 2
    1938Munich Agreementdiplomat

    The leaders of Britain, France, Italy and Germany met in Munich and, without Czechoslovakia, agreed to hand the Sudetenland to Germany — the high point of appeasement.

People who appear alongside

  • Adolf Hitler1889 – 1945

    Nazi leader and Führer of Germany (1934–1945) who started the Second World War and perpetrated the Holocaust; he killed himself as Berlin fell

  • Édouard Daladier1884 – 1970

    French Radical politician who signed the Munich Agreement as prime minister (1938–1940)

  • Benito Mussolini1883 – 1945

    Founder of Italian Fascism who became prime minister (1922–1943) after the March on Rome; dictator who invaded Ethiopia and allied with Hitler

Themes this person appears in

  • The Great Depression and Totalitarianism1919 – 1939

    From the Washington Conference to the invasion of Poland — two decades in which the age of international cooperation collapsed in the Depression, fascism, Nazism and Stalinism rose, and the world slid into war again