GTCharlie:

> It seems you have a different view of Western intentions

I do, because the west had shown its hatred of the Soviet Union from early on.

The "Whites", the counterrevolutionary movement that tried to restore the Russian monarchy, were made up not only of Russians but also of soldiers from Japan, Britain, Canada, France, Italy, United States, Germany, the Austro-Hungarian Empire, Australia, Greece, Turkey, China, Romania, Rstonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Poland, Finland and Czechoslovakia. The Russian Civil War was fought from 1917 to 1923 and all those countries put aside their differences and sent troops to try to drive the communists out of Russia. There were 2,400,000 Russians, 155,000 Allies and hundreds of thousands from the Central Powers fighting on the side of the Whites. The war left about 15 million people dead, of those 13 million were civiliands. The desire to destroy communism was manifest from early on and the superpowers failed to destroy the Soviet Union because they compted among themselves for wealth and power.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russian_Civil_War

On Nov. 26, 1936 Germany and Japan signed the Anti-Comintern Pact, a pact designed to destroy international communism and the USSR. Italy joined the pact 1 year later. The "Axis" (a name adopted in 1941) was born out of anticommunist hatred.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anti-Comintern_Pact

On Sep. 30, 1938 Germany, the UK, France and Italy signed the Munich Agreement (notice that the US was no involved at this point). This agreement gave Germany control of the Sudentenland, an area in Czechoslovakia with a large proportion of Ethnic Germans. On Oct 10, 1938 Germany occupied the Sudetenland.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Munich_Agreement

At this point I will say that the Allies (UK and France) were hoping that Hitler would abandon his claims over Alsace-Lorraine in France and concentrate on moving east on a path towards the Soviet Union. This was the appeasement that pleased the allies. Since Hitler was a sworn enemy of communism, the logical thinking was that Hitler would much rather go to war with the USSR than with the Allies.

The Allies underestimated Hitler and Stalin, and the unthinkable occurred. Germany and the USSR signed the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact on Aug. 24, 1939. In this pact Germany and the USSR aggreed to divide Eastern and Central Europe and to remain neutral in case of a third party decalring war on either country. In Sep. 1939 Germany and the USSR invaded Poland and divided the land between the two.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Molotov-Ribbentrop_Pact

WW II started on Sep. 1, 1939 when Germany invaded Poland and the UK and France declared war against Germany. The hopes that Hitler and Stalin would declare war on each other were dashed. The Alies undestimated Hitler and overestimated his hatred of the USSR.

Why would Stalin and Hitler sign this treaty? Everyone knew that those two hated each other and Germany had openly signed the Anti-Commintern Pact. They needed to build up their armies and secure strategic territory before going to war. Hitler wanted Norway and its iron ore trade, and Romania and its oilfields. Stalin wanted Finland, Bessarabia and the Baltic States. They knew that war was unavoidable, but they played for time.

After Hitler defeated France and invaded Norway, he turned on the UK. Hitler was overconfident and thought that the Luftwaffe would effectively defeat the RAF, but the UK had a secret weapon called the RADAR. Radar made the Luftwaffe ineffective and Hitler decided to abandon the plan to invade the UK and decided to invade the USSR instead. It was then that Winston Churchill asked Stalin to become allies, and this did not happen until June of 1941. It took the defeat of France, Belgium and the Netherlands to make the Allies abandon its hatred of communism and decide to coordinate their efforts with the USSR.

After the war ended, the most of same powers that had once been members of the White Movement became NATO in 1949, with Germany joining in 1955. It took the defeat of Germany and the loss of Eastern and Central Europe to make former competing empires put aside their differences and work together in a unified anticommunist front. My view of western objectives during WWII might not be entirely correct, but at least it does explain why Hitler was appeased rather than crushed.