What Hitler Said When the Western Allies Refused All Peace Negotiations…

Berlin, July 22nd, 1940. Adolf Hitler sat in the Reich Chancellery, waiting. Three days earlier, he had stood before the Reichtag and delivered what he called his last appeal to reason to Great Britain. He had just crushed France in 6 weeks. The British army had fled from Dunkirk, leaving behind nearly all its heavy equipment.

German forces controlled the European continent from Norway to the Pyrenees and Hitler had offered peace. Now he waited for the response. The answer came not through diplomatic channels but over the radio. Lord Halifax, the British foreign secretary, spoke from London. His voice was measured formal and utterly uncompromising.

Britain would not negotiate. Britain would not consider terms. Britain would fight on. Hitler’s face, according to those present, went through a remarkable transformation. The color drained from his cheeks. His eyes widened. Then his jaw clenched, and his hands began to tremble with what Albert Spear would later describe as a rage unlike any I’d seen before.

He stood abruptly, knocking papers from his desk, and began pacing the room with quick, jerky movements. They have refused, he said, his voice tight and high. After everything they have refused. What Hitler could not grasp, what he would never truly understand, was that the Western Allies had made a fundamental decision.

There would be no negotiation with Nazi Germany. Not after Poland, not after Norway, not after France, not ever. And Hitler’s reaction to this refusal, his statements both public and private, would reveal the vast gulf between his understanding of the war and the reality he faced. But this was not the first time Hitler had extended his hand across the English Channel only to have it slapped away.

To understand his fury in July 1940, you have to go back 9 months earlier to the moment when he first realized that Britain might not see reason. October 6th, 1939, just over a month after German forces had invaded Poland, triggering declarations of war from Britain and France. Poland had been defeated in less than four weeks.

The country was divided between Germany and the Soviet Union. The fighting in the east was over and Hitler stood before the Reichag to explain why the war should now end. He spoke for nearly two hours. His voice carried that peculiar mix of reasonableness and menace that characterized his diplomatic pronouncements. Germany, he explained, had been forced to act against Poland.

The Versailles treaty had been unjust. The Polish corridor had been intolerable. German minorities had been persecuted. But now with Poland defeated, Germany had no further territorial demands in the West. “I have no war aims against Britain and France,” he declared. His hands gripped the podium.

“Why should this war in the West be fought?” He proposed an international conference, a gathering of major powers to reorganize central Europe, to address the injustices of Versailles, to establish what he called a new order of peace. He claimed he wanted nothing from France, nothing from Britain. The colonial questions could be discussed calmly.

The German people did not want war with the West. And then in a phrase that would be repeated in German propaganda for months, he said he was extending his hand to Britain and France. He was offering them a way out, a chance to end the war before it truly began. In the Reich Chancellory afterward, Hitler was confident. He told his associates that Britain would see reason. France was demoralized.

He said the French had no stomach for another war. and Britain, practical Britain, would recognize that continuing the war served no purpose. Poland was gone. Nothing could bring it back. Why sacrifice British lives for a lost cause? They will negotiate, he told Gerbals. Churchill’s war party is loud, but they do not control policy.

Chamberlain understands reality. He was wrong. The British response came 6 days later. Neville Chamberlain, the prime minister who had tried so desperately to avoid war, who had flown to Munich and believed he had secured peace for our time, stood in the House of Commons and rejected Hitler’s offer completely.

There could be no peace, Chamberlain said, while Nazi Germany continued to use force and oppression. Hitler’s word could not be trusted. His promises meant nothing. The invasion of Poland had been the final proof that Nazi Germany represented a threat to all civilization. Britain would not negotiate.

Britain would fight until Nazi tyranny was destroyed. Winston Churchill, first Lord of the Admiral and the most vocal opponent of any compromise with Hitler, was even more blunt. He called Hitler’s speech a trap and a fraud. He said negotiating with Hitler would be like negotiating with a boa constrictor that had already swallowed several victims and was now promising not to swallow you if you would just come a little closer.

When Hitler received the news, his reaction was one of genuine surprise. He had expected rejection from Churchill, whom he despised as a wararmonger and a drunk. But Chamberlain Chamberlain had negotiated at Munich. Chamberlain had signed an agreement. Chamberlain was reasonable. “They are insane,” Hitler told his inner circle.

His voice carried a note of bafflement. “What do they think they can accomplish? They cannot restore Poland. They cannot defeat Germany. What is the point of continuing?” But beneath the surprise was something else, a growing anger. Hitler had offered peace from a position of strength, and it had been rejected. In his mind, this was not just a political decision. It was a personal insult.

Over the following weeks, his private statements grew darker. He began speaking more frequently about the Jewish wararm mongers who controlled Britain. Churchill, he said, was a puppet of Jewish financial interests. The British people wanted peace, but their leaders, corrupted by Jewish influence, were driving them toward destruction.

Gerbles recorded these rants in his diary. Hitler would pace his office, working himself into fury, describing how he had extended his hand in friendship and had it spat upon. He spoke of British arrogance, of their assumption that they could dictate terms to Germany, of their refusal to accept the new reality of German power.

They think they are still the empire on which the sun never sets. Hitler said, “They do not realize the sun is setting on them right now.” But Hitler did not immediately abandon hope for peace with Britain. Throughout the winter of 1939 and spring of 1940, as German forces prepared for the Western Offensive, he continued to speak privately about the possibility of an arrangement.

Britain, he believed, would come to its senses once France fell. The campaign in the west began on May 10th, 1940. German forces swept through the Netherlands and Belgium, then punched through the Arden forest into France, cutting off the British Expeditionary Force and the best French armies in Belgium.

Within 2 weeks, the British were evacuating from Dunkirk. Within 6 weeks, France had surrendered. Hitler was elated. He danced a little jig at the railway car in Compenya where the French signed the armistice. The same railway car where Germany had surrendered in 1918. The humiliation of Versailles had been avenged.

France, the ancient enemy, had been crushed. German forces stood on the English Channel. And now surely Britain would negotiate. Hitler genuinely believed this. Multiple sources including Shpare Gerbles and military officers record his conviction that Britain would see reason after France fell.

He had no desire to invade Britain. He said the British Empire could continue to exist. Germany would dominate the continent. Britain would dominate the seas. It was logical. It was sensible. It was in Hitler’s mind the obvious solution. He waited several weeks before making his offer, allowing time for the reality of France’s defeat to sink in.

He wanted the British to feel the weight of their isolation, to recognize their hopeless position. Then on July 19th, he summoned the Reichd for a special session. The Croll Opera House, where the Reichtag met after the fire of 1933, was packed. Hitler had staged the event carefully. He promoted 12 generals to the rank of field marshal, the largest mass promotion in German military history.

It was a reward for victory, but also a demonstration of strength. Look at these men, the message said. Look at what they have accomplished. Look at what they could do to Britain. Then Hitler spoke. His voice was calmer than usual, more measured. He reviewed the campaign in France praising the Vermach’s achievements. He spoke of Germany’s military power now greater than ever.

And then he turned to Britain. In this hour, he said, I feel compelled by conscience to make one more appeal to reason and common sense in Great Britain. I consider myself in a position to make this appeal since I am not a vanquished foe begging favors but a victor speaking in the name of reason. He claimed he could see no reason why the war should continue.

Germany had no aims against the British Empire. He had always admired Britain. He said he had no desire to see the empire destroyed. But if Britain insisted on continuing the war, the responsibility for what followed would rest with British leaders, not with Germany. Mr. Churchill, he said, his voice hardening, may believe that the war is only just beginning.

I can only regret this because I know what is coming. A great empire will be destroyed. An empire which it was never my intention to destroy or even to harm. He spoke for over an hour and then in his closing words he made what he called his last appeal. He was extending his hand one final time. Britain could have peace with honor or Britain could have destruction.

I can see no reason he concluded why this war must go on. In the Reich Chancellery afterward Hitler was in high spirits. The speech had gone well. The promotion of the field marshals had been wellreceived and surely surely this time Britain would respond positively. He had made the offer from a position of overwhelming strength.

He had been reasonable. He had shown respect for the British Empire. What more could they want? He told his staff to prepare for negotiations. He discussed possible terms. Britain would recognize German hegemony in Europe. Germany would guarantee the British Empire. Perhaps some colonial adjustments in Africa, but nothing major.

It was all very reasonable in Hitler’s mind. For 3 days, he waited. The British response came on the evening of July 22nd, not through diplomatic channels, but through a BBC broadcast. Lord Halifax spoke for less than half an hour. His message was simple and absolute. No, Britain would not negotiate with Nazi Germany.

Hitler’s speech had been carefully considered and unanimously rejected by the British government. There could be no peace while Nazi Germany continued its policy of aggression and oppression. Britain would fight on whatever the cost. Hitler’s reaction when he heard the news was volcanic. Those present in the Reich Chancellery that evening described a man who seemed genuinely unable to process what he was hearing.

He had offered peace from a position of total military dominance. He had been reasonable. He had shown respect and Britain had rejected him again. “They are mad,” he shouted, his face flushed. “They are absolutely mad.” He paced the room, his movements sharp and agitated. He waved his arms. He struck the table. He demanded to know what the British thought they could accomplish.

They had no army left after Dunkirk. France was gone. They stood alone. What did they think would happen? Spear, who was present, later wrote that Hitler seemed genuinely baffled. It was as if the Furer could not comprehend that someone would reject his offer. In Hitler’s mind, he had been magnanimous. He had offered Britain a way out, and they had thrown it back in his face.

“I extended my hand,” Hitler said, his voice rising. “I offered them peace with honor, and they spit on it. They spit on Germany.” The rage continued for hours. Hitler ranted about Churchill, calling him a drunkard, a wararmonger, a puppet of Jewish interests. He spoke about the Jewish bureaucrats who controlled Britain, who wanted war because they profited from it, who would sacrifice the British people to maintain their power.

The British people do not want this war, Hitler insisted. It is Churchill and his Jewish masters who drive them to destruction. But beneath the anger was something else, a kind of wounded pride. Hitler had genuinely believed that Britain would recognize reality and negotiate. He had thought that his offer was generous and the rejection felt to him some like a personal insult.

In the days that followed, Hitler’s statements grew darker. He told his military commanders to prepare for an invasion of Britain, Operation Sea Lion. He ordered the Luftwaffer to begin attacks on British shipping and ports. and he began speaking more openly about what would happen to Britain if it continued to resist.

If they want war, he told Gerbles, they will have war. And when Britain lies in ruins, when their cities are burning, when their people are starving, they will remember that I offered them peace. They will remember that they chose this. But even as he ordered preparations for invasion, Hitler continued to hope that Britain might change its mind.

Throughout August and September of 1940, as the Battle of Britain raged in the skies, he made several indirect approaches through neutral countries. Sweden, Spain, the Vatican, all were asked to sound out the British about possible negotiations. The answer was always the same. No. Churchill’s government would not negotiate.

The British people, far from pressuring their leaders to make peace, rallied behind Churchill’s defiance. When German bombs began falling on London in September, British resolve hardened further. Hitler could not understand it. He told his associates repeatedly that the British were being irrational. They could not win.

Even if they survived the air campaign, even if invasion proved impossible, they could not defeat Germany. And at best they could prolong the war. At worst they would see their cities destroyed and their empire collapse. What do they think they are fighting for? Hitler demanded. Poland is gone. France is gone.

They cannot restore what has been lost. Why do they persist? The answer which Hitler never grasped was that Britain was not fighting for Poland or France. Britain was fighting against Nazi Germany itself, against everything it represented. Churchill had said it plainly in his speeches. Britain would fight not for territory or advantage, but for civilization itself.

There would be no compromise with Nazi tyrann. But Hitler interpreted British resistance through his own framework. He believed nations acted out of rational self-interest as he understood it. territory, power, resources, these were what mattered. The idea that Britain would fight on principle, that it would risk everything rather than accommodate Nazi Germany, was incomprehensible to him. His rhetoric shifted.

If Britain would not accept his generous offers, if it insisted on continuing the war, then Britain would be destroyed. Not as something Hitler wanted, he insisted, but as something Britain had chosen. I did not want this, he told his associates repeatedly. I extended my hand. I offered peace. They refused. What happens now is their responsibility, not mine.

It was a theme he would return to again and again in his speeches throughout 1941 and 1942. Germany had wanted peace. Germany had offered reasonable terms, but Britain, controlled by Jewish wararm mongers, had chosen destruction. The final attempt at peace, or at least the final significant one, came in May 1941, and it was not authorized by Hitler.

Rudolph Hess, Hitler’s deputy and one of his oldest associates, flew solo to Scotland in a bizarre attempt to negotiate peace with Britain. Hess believed or claimed to believe that there was a peace party in Britain that would negotiate if approached correctly. He flew to Scotland hoping to contact the Duke of Hamilton whom he believed would help arrange talks.

Instead, he was immediately arrested. Hitler’s reaction when he learned of Hess’s flight was complex. Publicly, he declared that Hess was insane, that he had acted without authorization, that his mission represented nothing. But privately, according to multiple sources, Hitler was both furious and hopeful. Furious because Hess had acted without orders and made Germany look foolish, but hopeful because perhaps, perhaps, this might open a channel for negotiations.

Perhaps the British would respond to Hess’s approach. They did not. Churchill’s government treated Hess as a prisoner of war and a propaganda embarrassment for Germany. There would be no negotiations. Not through official channels, not through unofficial channels. Not at all. When it became clear that Hess’s mission had failed completely, Hitler’s anger was intense.

He raged about Hess’s stupidity, about British intrigence, about the impossibility of dealing with people who refuse to see reason. “I have tried everything,” he told his staff. “Everything, and they refuse. They choose destruction over peace.” By this point, Hitler had already made the decision to invade the Soviet Union, scheduled for June 1941.

Some historians have argued that Britain’s refusal to negotiate was a factor in this decision. If Britain would not make peace, if it insisted on continuing the R war, then Germany needed to secure its eastern flank and access to Soviet resources before dealing with Britain. Finally, Hitler himself made this argument in his conversations with associates.

He said that Britain was continuing the war only because it hoped the Soviet Union would eventually enter the conflict against Germany. Therefore, Germany must eliminate the Soviet Union, removing Britain’s last hope, and then Britain would have to negotiate. It was tortured logic, but it revealed how deeply Britain’s refusals had affected Hitler’s strategic thinking.

He had expected quick victory. He had expected negotiated peace. He had expected the war to end in 1940. Instead, Britain fought on and Hitler found himself facing a prolonged conflict he had never wanted. Throughout 1941 and 1942, as the war expanded and Germany’s position grew more complicated, Hitler continued to speak about his peace offers.

They became a staple of his speeches and private conversations. He had extended his hand. He said he had been reasonable. He had offered generous terms and Britain had refused. “I wanted peace with Britain,” he told his associates in 1942. “I admired the British Empire. I had no desire to destroy it, but they forced this war to continue.

They chose this path. It was a narrative that served multiple purposes for Hitler. It absolved him of responsibility for the war’s continuation. It portrayed Germany as the reasonable party seeking peace and it justified whatever measures Germany took against Britain because Britain had refused the alternative. But it also revealed something about Hitler’s psychology.

He genuinely seemed to believe that his offers had been generous, that Britain’s refusals were irrational, that he had been wronged. The idea that Britain might have legitimate reasons for refusing to negotiate with Nazi Germany, that Hitler’s word might be worthless, that Nazi ideology might be fundamentally incompatible with peace, these thoughts never seemed to penetrate his consciousness.

In his final years, as Germany faced defeat, Hitler returned to this theme obsessively. In his rants in the bunker in 1945, as Soviet forces closed in on Berlin, he spoke about how different things could have been if only Britain had accepted his offers in 1940. “I extended my hand,” he said, according to those who survived the bunker.

“I offered them peace. They could have had their empire. We could have ruled Europe together, but they refused. And now look what has happened.” It was a delusion, of course. Hitler’s peace offers had never been genuine in the sense of offering lasting peace based on mutual respect and international law.

They were offers for Germany to consolidate its conquests while Britain stood aside. They were demands for Britain to accept German hegemony in Europe and abandon its allies. But Hitler never saw it that way. to the end. He believed he had been reasonable that he had offered generous terms that Britain’s refusal had been the great tragedy that led to unnecessary destruction.

The Western Allies refusal to negotiate with Hitler was not a missed opportunity for peace. It was a recognition that Nazi Germany represented something that could not be accommodated or appeased. Churchill understood this. Roosevelt understood this. Even Chamberlain after Poland understood this.

There could be no peace with Nazi Germany because Nazi Germany’s goals were fundamentally incompatible with peace. Hitler wanted to dominate Europe, to eliminate entire peoples, to create a racial empire built on conquest and genocide. No amount of negotiation could reconcile these aims with any kind of just or lasting peace.

But Hitler never understood this. He saw Britain’s refusal to negotiate as irrational, as driven by Jewish influence, as a tragic mistake that prolonged the war unnecessarily. His statements about these refusals, both public and private, revealed a man who could not grasp that others might see the world fundamentally differently than he did.

When Hitler said he had extended his hand to Britain and had it slapped away, he was not lying exactly. He had made offers, but they were offers from a conqueror to a potential victim. Accept subjugation or face destruction. That Britain chose to fight rather than submit was not irrational. It was the only choice compatible with freedom and dignity.

Hitler’s fury at these refusals, his genuine bafflement that Britain would not see reason, his repeated returns to the theme of his rejected peace offers. All of this revealed the vast gulf between his understanding and reality. He could not comprehend that some things matter more than survival, that some tyrannies cannot be accommodated, that some fights must be fought regardless of the odds.

The Western Allies refusal to negotiate with Hitler was not the mistake he believed it to be. It was their finest hour, the moment when they chose principle over expedience, when they decided that some evils cannot be compromised with. When they committed to fighting until Nazi Germany was completely defeated.

Hitler never understood this. To his last days, he believed that Britain’s refusal to accept his peace offers had been the great tragedy of the war. the missed opportunity that led to unnecessary destruction. He could not see that the real tragedy was Nazi Germany itself and that the only response to that tragedy was the one the Western Allies chose.

Absolute refusal to negotiate, absolute commitment to victory, whatever the cost. When Hitler stood in the Reich Chancellery in July 1940, listening to Lord Halifax’s rejection of his last appeal to reason, he was hearing something he could not process. The sound of a free people choosing to fight rather than submit.

His rage, his bafflement, his repeated returns to the theme of his rejected offers all revealed a man confronting something outside his comprehension. The Western Allies had looked at Hitler’s extended hand and seen it for what it was. Not an offer of peace, but a demand for surrender. And they had made their choice.

They would fight and in the end they would