France and Great Britain , the two largest powers of the 1930s, as well as other minor European states, followed a policy called "appeasement" toward the increasingly aggresive fascist states of Germany and Italy. That means they did not react with force or by opposing their moves militarily , but instead they preferred diplomacy and accomodation. Adolf Hitler dismantled all the breaks put on Germany by the Treaty of Versailles, annexed Austria, took the Sudetenland from Czechoslovakia and nobody stopped him; in both Britain and France, people didn´t want another war. British and French leaders even signed an accord that avoided war in 1938. Appeasement only encouraged aggression.
