Poland wasn’t the first stop in that line, though, only the one that started the thing. The annexation of the Sudetenland was the first “big thing” after a series of smaller appeasements. The powers of the time recognized that Germany was absolitely unreliable. If the Nazis had framed the Polish campaign as “liberation” following a short-lived Soviet occupation… that might have worked. And may have even resulted in a Nazi/British/French alliance. It’d then come down to how much the Allies’ intelligence agencies knew about Nazi/Soviet collaboration on Poland.
Poland wasn’t the first stop in that line, though, only the one that started the thing. The annexation of the Sudetenland was the first “big thing” after a series of smaller appeasements. The powers of the time recognized that Germany was absolitely unreliable. If the Nazis had framed the Polish campaign as “liberation” following a short-lived Soviet occupation… that might have worked. And may have even resulted in a Nazi/British/French alliance. It’d then come down to how much the Allies’ intelligence agencies knew about Nazi/Soviet collaboration on Poland.