Question

A chief reason for Britain’s prolonged appeasement of Hitler was that

Answer 1

Best answer among those choices:  a. He was seen by some leaders as an anticommunist bulwark.

Details/context:

The other answers are not correct, so the "anticommunist bulwark" answer is the best available.  There was some of that feeling in Europe's western democracies at that time.  However, the bigger factor was simply that Britain wasn't ready to confront Germany and go to war.

An article by Dr. G. Bruce Strang of Brandon University, in the journal, Diplomacy and Statecraft (September 2008), explains:

• The British government's appeasement of fascism in the 1930s derived not only from economic, political, and strategic constraints, but also from the personal ideologies of the policy makers. Widespread guilt about the terms of the Versailles Treaty and tensions with France created sympathy for German revisionism, but the Cabinet properly recognized that Nazi Germany represented the gravest threat to peace in the 1930s. Fear of war and the recognition that Britain would have to tolerate peaceful change underlay attempts to appease the dictators, culminating in the Munich agreement in September 1938. ... While most of the British elite detested communism, anti-communist views did not govern British policy; security considerations required Soviet support in Eastern Europe, and Britain and France made a determined effort to secure Soviet support for the Peace Front.