Background to war

The gathering storm

There are many considerations that made the outbreak of the Second World War possible. What made the war inevitable was one man: Adolf Hitler. Once Hitler had achieved power in Germany, war was certain to come. The combination of circumstances that allowed a man like Hitler to seize power, maintain it, and then take the opportunities presented to him on the international stage, however, were less inevitable and far more complicated.

Hitler made skillful use of the political and economic turmoil of post-First World War Germany. He also capitalized on the underlying sentiment in the army and among more right-wing elements of German society, that Germany’s defeat in the First World War was attributable to a ‘stab in the back’ by socialists and communists at home, rather than to a conclusive military defeat, which of course is what had actually happened. Hitler was able to focus these feelings more strongly courtesy of the provisions of the Treaty of Versailles, which ended the war. This constant reminder of Germany’s national humiliation was a useful tool for Hitler’s broader aims.

Hitler’s vehicle to power was the Nazi Party, ‘Nazi’ being an abbreviation of Nationalsozialistische. Hitler brought his personal dynamism to this rather directionless party and with it his own ideas. In particular, he brought a ‘virulent strain of extreme ethnic nationalism’ and the belief that war was the means by which the most racially pure and dynamic people could affirm their position as the rulers of a global empire. Mere revisions of the map were inconsequential in Hitler’s larger scheme of things. His ultimate goals lay in the east, where a war of annihilation was to be waged against the Soviet Union.

The Soviet Union was the incarnation of many evils as far as Hitler was concerned. His eventual war in the east was designed to destroy the ‘Judeo-Bolshevik’ conspiracy that he saw emanating from Moscow, and to remove the Slavic population, considered by Nazi ideology as Untermenschen or subhumans. The territory obtained would be effectively colonized by people of Germanic stock, enlarging and ensuring the survival of the Third Reich. It was this element that distinguished ‘Hitler’s war’ from previous wars and Hitler’s Germany from the Germany of the Kaisers. Germany, however, was no stranger to conflict.

A united Germany

The nation state of Germany is a comparatively new phenomenon. Only in 1871 did a united Germany come into existence. In 1866 the German state of Prussia decisively defeated Austria in the Seven Weeks’ War and in doing so assured Prussian dominance of the collection of German-speaking states in central and eastern Europe. Following Prussia’s further success against France, in the Franco-Prussian War of 1870, a united Germany was proclaimed on 18 January 1871, in the Hall of Mirrors at the Palace of Versailles, just outside Paris. Prussia was the largest German state and also the most advanced economically and militarily. The Prussian capital, Berlin, became the capital of this new European power and the Prussian king, at this point Wilhelm I, became the first Emperor or Kaiser of a united Germany.

The ambitions of the new state grew considerably with the accession to the throne of Imperial Germany of Kaiser Wilhelm II in 1888. Wilhelm’s foreign policy was an aggressive one. He sacked his Chancellor, Bismarck, the man whose political maneuvering had largely created the united Germany, and determined on building Germany up into a world, rather than just a European power. Wilhelm’s reckless desire to acquire colonial possessions met with little success in the years prior to 1914, but his determination to build a navy to rival the British one inevitably brought him into conflict with Britain.

Wilhelm, himself a grandson of Queen Victoria, allowed and encouraged a belief that Germany must provide for herself in an increasingly competitive world. In 1914 the opportunity came for Germany to throw herself against France, her nearest continental rival. When Archduke Franz Ferdinand, the heir to the throne of Austria-Hungary, was assassinated, Germany grasped her chance enthusiastically. The rival power blocs, complicated alliance systems, and powder keg diplomatic atmosphere ensured that there was no repetition of the comparatively short wars of the mid- to late nineteenth century. The First World War, the Great War, had begun.

Military defeat and the Weimar Republic

After four years of appalling slaughter, Germany was defeated decisively in 1918. Kaiser Wilhelm abdicated just days before the Armistice was signed and a left-wing government took over the country. This new government was obliged to sign what the Germans, at least, perceived to be an unfair diktat masquerading as a peace settlement. The Treaty of Versailles that formally brought the war to an end was a controversial settlement. The treaty laid the blame for starting the war squarely upon German, saddled her with enormous reparations payments, and also took away large areas of Germany territory, in many cases creating new states.

All of these considerations would have a bearing on the outbreak of the Second World War, although in all probability the failure to implement the treaty adequately was as serious a factor as its provisions. Of particular significance also was the fact that the government that signed the humiliating treaty found itself being blamed for doing so, when in reality it had little choice. The Social Democrats were also blamed for the German capitulation – many right-wingers and particularly the army considered that the German people had not been defeated, but rather had been ‘stabbed in the back’ by the government. This myth gained widespread credence in Germany during the interwar years.

In the early years after the war, Germany suffered along with most of the continent and political extremism was rife. The new German republic was established in the small town of Weimar, later to become famous for its proximity to the Buchenwald concentration camp. Hence this period of German history, the first ever of genuine German democracy, is known as the Weimar Republic. Weimar was chosen in preference to Berlin as the site of the new government because of Berlin’s associations with Prussian militarism. Berlin was also a less than safe place.

The Weimar government was assailed from both sides of the political spectrum. Extremists fought in many large German cities and occasional attempts were made by left and right to overthrow the government; the insurrection led by Wolfgang Kapp (known as the ‘Kapp Putsch’) was one of the most serious. The constitutional system that underpinned the Weimar government also complicated matters. The system was so representative of political opinion that it produced only minority governments or fragile coalitions that had little opportunity to achieve anything. Meanwhile, international tensions rose when Germany suspended her reparations payments, as a result of which the French, eager to draw every pfennig from the Germans, occupied the Ruhr region in 1923. These international concerns were exacerbated by soaring inflation, with the German mark being traded at 10,000 million to the pound.

Hitler’s rise to power

Amidst all this social, economic, and political turbulence, one radical among many was making a name for himself. Adolf Hitler, an Austrian by birth, had served in the German army throughout the First World War. In 1923 Hitler, who had become leader of the fledgling Nazi Party (then the German Workers’ Party, Deutsche Arbeiter Partei) by virtue of his personal dynamism and skills of oratory, organized his first clumsy attempt to seize power. However, the Munich Putsch, on 9 November 1923, was a failure and earned him five years in Landsberg prison.

Despite the sentence, Hitler served only nine months in rather plush conditions. The authorities, many of whom had some sympathy for Hitler’s position, were persuaded to release him early, after Hitler temporarily resigned the leadership of the Nazi Party and agreed to refrain from addressing public meetings on political issues. However, Hitler neatly circumvented these restrictions by moving his meetings into the private homes of his wealthier supporters.

While Hitler was in jail, dictating his memoirs and thoughts, later to be published as Mein Kampf, the situation in Germany improved considerably. A new scheme, the Dawes Plan, was accepted to reschedule Germany’s repayments, which now reflected more closely Germany’s ability to pay. It also allowed Germany to borrow substantially, mainly from the USA, and fueled a brief flurry of credit-induced economic prosperity. Germany later ratified a more comprehensive restructuring of the payments in the Young Plan, which improved her economic situation.

Similarly, the efforts of a new Chancellor, Gustav Stresemann, led to Germany entering the League of Nations in 1926 and signing the Treaty of Locarno with Britain and France, which helped to thaw the international situation. This treaty confirmed the existing borders of the participating states of western Europe. The prevailing feeling of reconciliation appeared to usher in a more constructive period of international relations. Importantly, however, Locarno failed to guarantee the frontiers of Germany in the east, suggesting to many in Germany that the western powers would not be as concerned if Germany were to attempt to reclaim lost territory there.

However, the improvements in Germany’s position by 1929 were undone totally by an unforeseen event that would have tremendous ramifications for the world at large. On 29 October 1929 came the Wall Street crash. The immediate effect was that all the American loans that had been artificially buoying up the world economy were recalled. The effects on the global economy were dramatic enough, but Germany, whose tenuous economic recovery had been fueled by extensive borrowing from the USA, was among the hardest hit. This new round of economic hardship gave Hitler another opportunity to make political capital, and he seized it with both hands.

Political violence on the streets of German cities characterized the years between 1929 and 1933 as Nazi fought communist and Germany’s economy labored under the pressures of worldwide recession and reparations. It was Hitler and the Nazis who promised a brighter future for Germany, and on 29 January 1933, the President of the German Republic, Paul von Beneckendorff und Hindenburg, appointed Adolf Hitler as Chancellor of Germany. In the elections of the following March, the Nazi Party received 44 percent of all votes cast. Even in the overly representational system of the Weimar Republic, this was still sufficient to give the Nazis 288 out of the 647 seats in the Reichstag. Hitler made ample use of his position, passing various ‘Enabling Laws’ to make him effectively a legal dictator.

Once Hitler took power, he began immediately to destroy the old structures of society and rebuild them in the mode of National Socialism. All political parties other than the Nazi Party were banned. Progressively, Jews were excluded from society and publicly shunned, culminating in the anti-Jewish pogrom of Kristallnacht in 1938 when Jewish property was vandalized. Concentration camps were also opened for ‘undesirables’ where hard work was the order of the day – the extermination role of these camps was as yet in the future. Hitler attempted to get Germans back to work with an ambitious program of public works, the planning and construction of the Autobahnen being the most famous.

Hitler was not above removing anyone who stood in his way. On ‘the night of the long knives’ he ordered the deaths of his old comrade and supporter Ernest Röhm, head of the Sturmabteilung (SA), and several hundred senior SA men. The SA was a large group of paramilitaries who had provided some of Hitler’s earlier supporters. These men were a private army for the Nazi Party and kept order at political meetings as well as engaging in physical battles with communists and other opponents. Increasingly, however, Hitler doubted the loyalty of Röhm, and the activities of the SA alienated the army, whose support Hitler needed. In the wake of the SA emerged the Schutzstaffel (SS), under Heinrich Himmler. In removing the army’s potential rivals, the SA, Hitler hoped to get the army more firmly on his side. Hitler also made the army swear a personal oath of allegiance to him as the ‘Führer of the German Reich and people and Commander-in-Chief of the armed forces.’

At this time, Hitler began to revise the Treaty of Versailles. The treaty affected Germany in a number of ways. First, she lost in the region of one-eighth of her territory and one-tenth of her population: the provinces of Alsace and Lorraine, seized by Prussia as spoils of the 1870 war, were returned to France; Eupen-Malmedy was given to Belgium, and Schleswig-Holstein to Denmark. The most serious territorial losses were in the east, where Germany lost a large area of West Prussia to the recreated state of Poland. This left East Prussia cut off from Germany and accessible, by land, only across Polish territory – known as the ‘Polish Corridor.’ The city at the head of this corridor, Danzig, was to be a free city under the auspices of the League of Nations. Germany also lost territory to the new state of Czechoslovakia, created out of the ruins of the Austro-Hungarian Empire.

Importantly, these territorial losses in the east did not include a transfer of their German-speaking populations, who largely remained in situ and ripe for use as political pawns in the future. At the end of the Second World War, when Germany was once again dismembered, the Allies did not make the same mistake again and expelled millions of Germans to ensure that they would not become troublesome and vocal minorities in the future. Under the Treaty of Versailles, Germany was also forbidden to unite with Austria, the Rhineland was to be demilitarized in perpetuity, and all Germany’s colonies were handed over to the Allies. Germany’s military capabilities were drastically reduced; she was to have no major navy or air force and only 100,000 men in the army. Germany was also required to pay a huge indemnity, £6,600 million. Perhaps the most controversial provision of the treaty was Article 231, the so-called war guilt clause, in which Imperial Germany, and Germany alone, was blamed for starting the war.

Much has been written about how the Treaty of Versailles played a role in the outbreak of the Second World War. Despite what turned out to be Marshal Foch’s accurate prediction, that ‘this [the treaty] is not a peace but an armistice for 20 years,’ the treaty itself did not cause the Second World War. It certainly failed to prevent another war, but then the treaty was never enforced as it was originally meant to be. Nevertheless, the Treaty of Versailles provided Adolf Hitler with a useful vehicle for inciting German hatred. The inequities represented by the treaty, in particular the losses of land that in many cases had been German for hundreds of years, were a daily reminder that Germany had lost the war. Although the provisions of the treaty itself did not lead directly to war, the fact of the treaty was enormously useful for Hitler’s purposes.

Hitler did not take long before he began to repudiate various elements of the treaty. In March 1935 he reintroduced conscription into Germany, announced that the peacetime army would be raised to 500,000 men, and also brazenly announced the existence of an army air arm, the Luftwaffe. All were in direct contravention of the treaty, yet none drew firm responses from the Allies, Britain and France. Hitler also signed a naval agreement with Britain allowing the new German navy a proportion of the tonnage of the Royal Navy.

In 1936 Hitler chanced his arm still further by reoccupying the demilitarized Rhineland. France was concerned by this resurgence of German confidence, but was unwilling to act without firm support from Britain. Many historians have interpreted this failure to act against Hitler at this early stage as disastrous. Certainly Hitler gained strength from his inital successes, becoming convinced that the British and French were too weak to stop him. Indeed, during the reoccupation of the Rhineland, German troops were instructed to retreat if the French merely looked as though they would offer some resistance. On 14 October 1933, Germany withdrew from the League of Nations. In 1936 she sent men, aircraft, and naval vessels to fight in the Spanish Civil War, providing the new armed forces with a real proving ground for their tactics and equipment.

Responses to Hitler

There are several reasons why little was done to stop Hitler at this early juncture. First, although Hitler was considered something of an extremist, he was not yet the megalomaniac the world now knows him to be. Although much of what was to follow was mentioned in Mein Kampf, few outside Germany had bothered to read this long and dull work. Paradoxically, Hitler was also considered a positive development by many. His dynamic leadership appeared to bring badly needed order and stability to Germany. David Lloyd-George, the wartime British Prime Minister, spoke of Hitler’s achievements in getting the unemployed back to work and famously visited Hitler in Germany, being greeted by him as ‘the man who won the war.’ Lloyd-George was neither the first nor the last senior politician to be hoodwinked by Hitler.

The new Germany was also considered to be a valuable bulwark against the threat of communism from the east and Hitler’s authoritarian regime was seen as a small price to pay for such reassurance. This fear of communism was a significant force in interwar Europe and it prevented any meaningful development of an alliance between the western allies and the Soviet Union until Hitler had shown his hand completely.

Importantly, there were many on the Allied side who believed the Treaty of Versailles to be a mistake, neither harsh enough to punish nor lenient enough to conciliate. The treaty was greeted with less enthusiasm than might have been expected in some quarters. The eminent British economist John Maynard Keynes resigned from his position with the British team responsible for negotiating the treaty amid disagreements over what form it would eventually take. Keynes’s criticism found form in his book The Economic Consequences of the Peace, and this began the subtle changing of opinion, at the highest levels at least, in Britain. Such feelings help explain why there was widespread antipathy toward enforcing such a treaty.

There were other factors that militated against a more unitary front towards the growing threat of Nazi aggression in Europe. There was still memory of the horrendous legacy of the First World War. The generation of politicians in office in the 1930s had served in the trenches and knew firsthand the cost of such a war. These sentiments had a profound echo in the public at large with the League of Nations Peace Ballot and the famous Oxford Union debate (when undergraduates debated and passed the motion ‘this house will not fight again for King and Country’) all contributing to an air of pacifism. The belief that Hitler was at worst an ambiguous figure combined with an overwhelming reluctance to fight another war led to a profound inertia and perhaps an unwillingness to recognize the threat even when it became overt.

Underscoring the political vacillation and popular mood was a concrete economic reason for avoiding a costly conflict. The Wall Street crash and the consequent Great Depression had left most industrialized economies significantly weaker. The financial muscle required to prosecute another war was simply unavailable through the early to mid-1930s. Ironically, even though Nazi Germany and Roosevelt’s America introduced programs (such as the New Deal in the USA) to stimulate the economy, it was rearmament that finally got men back to work.