[Civilization] will be swept aside by the consuming fire of Bolshevism. Out of this terrible devastation new governments will arise . . . and the first people to come to their senses . . . will be the Germans . . . With their power of efficient organization backed by the almost endless resources of Russia, Germany will dominate Russia, and, if she unites with Japan, Asia will be subject to her will.
Robert Lansing, US Secretary of State, 19191
[I]f we would take the long view, must we not still reckon with the possibility that a large part of the Great [Eurasian] Continent might some day be united under a single sway, and that an invincible sea-power might be based upon it? . . . Ought we not to recognise that that is the great ultimate threat to the world’s liberty so far as strategy is concerned, and to provide against it in our new political system?
Sir Halford Mackinder, 19192
Whoever controls Europe will thereby seize the leadership of the world. It must therefore remain the objective of our struggle to create a unified Europe, but Europe can only be given a coherent structure through Germany.
Adolf Hitler, 19433
The year 1917 marked a watershed in European and global geopolitics, beginning with the Russian Revolution, followed by the American entry into the world war, and finishing with the Balfour Declaration promising the establishment of a Jewish national home in Palestine. Over the next thirty years or so, the geopolitical and domestic consequences of these developments worked themselves out in a period of unprecedented turbulence in Europe and around the world. It was marked by the clash between two unifications, American and German, and three Utopias: democratic, communist and National Socialist. The fulcrum of the struggle was Germany, which Wilson’s new international order was designed to contain and convert; which was the main focus of Soviet revolutionary geopolitics; against which the Balfour Declaration was directed; and from where the Nazi challenge later emerged. German power was also the focal point of European internal politics: in the preoccupation of the Weimar Republic with the constraints of Versailles; the central question of containment in France and other European countries; and in the Soviet hopes for revolution in central Europe, which were followed by the urgent need to contain Hitler. For Germany’s neighbours, far and near, the key objective remained preventing Germany from falling into hostile hands, while ensuring that she herself did not develop hegemonic ambitions of her own. For the Germans themselves, the question was how to structure their grand strategy and domestic politics to prevent themselves from being crushed by the global great powers, without in turn inviting an overwhelming coalition against them. Both projects failed, with catastrophic consequences.
As the third year of war dawned, Germany strained every nerve – militarily, diplomatically and domestically – to force the issue. In order to starve Britain out, she resumed unrestricted submarine warfare in February 1917. Given the feeble American response to Pancho Villa’s raid on New Mexico, Berlin did not fear adverse reaction from Washington. To be on the safe side, though, the German foreign minister, Arthur Zimmermann, sent a telegram promising Mexico the return of Texas, Arizona and New Mexico, if it sided with Berlin in the event of the outbreak of war between the Reich and the United States. The navy was instructed to think about ways of supplying arms to the Mexicans. Meanwhile, Germany sought to mobilize all remaining economic resources to prevail against the enemy coalition, no easy task given that she was surrounded on all sides and cut off from her traditional sources of raw materials. Rathenau partially solved this problem by rationalizing the production process to maximize output and minimize the effects of the blockade. There was a limit, however, to what could be achieved by straightforward extraction. It was becoming clear that the Reich would only be able to survive against a ‘world of enemies’ if it could generate increased popular political participation. It was for this reason that the Kaiser’s Easter Message of 1917 signalled his intention to repeal the discriminatory Three-Class Electoral Law after the end of the war.
In the British Empire, the need to mobilize ever more manpower to contain Germany forced London to look again at its relationship with the empire. Conscription, which had long been ruled out to avoid inflaming nationalist sentiment, was put back on the agenda in Ireland, and this prospect reopened the wounds left by the suppression of the Easter Rising. As a result, the moderate Home Rule party was increasingly eclipsed by the radical separatist Sinn Féin movement. In most of the empire, by contrast, the price of continued military support was the demand for increased political consultation in the direction of the conflict, and greater political equality more generally. Colonial leaders, outraged at what they believed to be British military incompetence on the western front, called for a voice in grand strategy. The British government bowed to these demands by creating an Imperial War Cabinet in the spring of 1917, promising ‘continuous consultation’ and an ‘adequate voice in foreign policy . . . and foreign relations’ for ‘autonomous nations of an Imperial Commonwealth’ after the end of the conflict. A few months later, the India Secretary, Edwin Montagu, held out to the subcontinent ‘the gradual development of self-governing institutions [and] the progressive realization of responsible government’ within the British Empire on a vague timetable at some point after the war.4 The demands of war against Germany, in short, hastened the emergence of political consciousness in Canada, Australia, New Zealand and India; and they profoundly shaped debates in Ireland, where this consciousness was long-established.
In Russia, the autocracy’s failure to achieve the promised decisive victory over the Germans strengthened the supporters of greater political participation. Only true parliamentary government, the Kadets and Octobrists argued, could mobilize the whole of Russian society against the enemy. This critique merged with a broader popular paranoia about Jewish- and German-sponsored ‘treachery’ behind the lines and in high places, especially the royal family with its ‘German’ consort and her sinister favourite, Rasputin. By the beginning of 1917, therefore, the Romanov dynasty had undergone a loss of legitimacy similar to that of the Bourbon monarchy before 1789. Just as the ‘Austrian’ Marie Antoinette became the scapegoat for the strategic failures of her cuckolded husband, so was Nicholas’s inability to defend the true Russian national interest attributed to the machinations of a courtly clique of ‘Germans’. A series of strikes and military mutinies finally brought down the autocracy in late February 1917, bringing to power a ministry under Prince Lvov, with Paul Miliukov as foreign minister, determined to resume the offensive against the Germans at the next available opportunity. The ‘first’ Russian Revolution, in other words, was a protest not against the war as such, but against the failure of the tsar to prosecute the conflict against Germany more vigorously.
Shortly after this earthquake, the European scene was transformed by developments on the other side of the world. Relations between Germany and the United States were already strained thanks to the resumption of unrestricted submarine warfare. At the end of February, Washington first saw the decoded secret ‘Zimmermann Telegram’, which had been intercepted by the British intelligence service. American opinion was outraged by the news that Berlin had offered the recovery of Texas, New Mexico and Arizona in exchange for an alliance. Not long after, news of the first sinking of US ships hit the headlines. There was also widespread alarm about the Germans’ plans for the integration of Mitteleuropa under their leadership, which Wilson claimed was a scheme to ‘throw a broad belt of German military power and political control across the very centre of Europe and beyond the Mediterranean into the heart of Asia’.5 Taken together, these developments convinced many Americans that developments in Europe, particularly the threat of German hegemony, had profound implications for their security in the western hemisphere. They had the potential to threaten not only the commerce of the United States, but its very territorial integrity. The danger could only be contained through direct intervention in the European state system. To stand aside, President Wilson warned, would be to risk a map in which the ‘[German] black stretched all the way from Hamburg to Baghdad – the bulk of German power inserted into the heart of the world’. In April 1917, the United States declared war on Germany.
In the view of President Wilson, Imperial Germany also represented a profound ideological challenge to American political values. ‘The world must be made safe for democracy,’ he told Congress in his speech in support of war with Germany. ‘Its peace must be planted on the tested foundations of political liberty.’6 German aggression, he explained, was the product of Wilhelmine despotism: ‘German rulers have been able to upset the peace of the world only because the German people . . . were allowed to have no opinion of their own.’ It was the belief of the American government that the defence of US democracy at home required its defence abroad. Wilson’s aim was not so much to make the ‘world safe for democracy’, as to make America safer in the world through the promotion of democracy.7
By the summer of 1917, therefore, the strategic situation was becoming critical for Germany. The French and British maintained a steady pressure in the west with attacks around Arras, Ypres and Soissons from late May. At around the same time, the Italians started a fresh offensive on the Isonzo against the Austrians. In late June, the new Russian government authorized Brusilov to launch a large-scale attack on the eastern front. Caught between the Russo-Italian pincers, Austria-Hungary began to buckle under the strain. To the south, the British resumed their advance through Palestine and Mesopotamia. The long-term perspective for Berlin was even grimmer, thanks to the expected arrival of American forces in large numbers. A ‘peace resolution’ of the Centre Party leader, Matthias Erzberger, which forswore annexations, and passed the Reichstag with a substantial majority in July 1917, reflected these sober new realities. That same month, Bethmann-Hollweg was forced out and replaced as chancellor by Georg Michaelis. When he in turn lost the confidence of the Reichstag in October, Count von Hertling was drafted in as a replacement. The ‘creeping constitutionalization’ of the Reich, visible even before 1914, was rapidly speeding up under the pressure of war.
The German high command quickly regained the initiative. In late October 1917, a joint German–Austrian offensive pulverized the Italian defences at Caporetto and nearly forced Rome to sue for peace. The real coup, however, was landed in the east. ‘Russia appeared to be the weakest link in the enemy chain,’ the German State Secretary in the foreign office, Richard von Kühlmann, observed. ‘The task therefore was gradually to loosen it, and, when possible, to remove it. This was the purpose of the subversive activity we caused to be carried out in Russia behind the front – in the first place promotion of separatist tendencies and support of the Bolsheviks’; regular payments were made to the Bolsheviks in support of this strategy.8 Lenin, the Bolshevik leader, was conveyed in a sealed train across German territory from Switzerland, via Sweden and Finland, to Russia. His faction eventually gained the upper hand in the debates following the collapse of the costly second Brusilov offensive in July 1917. They predominated in the soldiers’ and workers’ councils that seized power in October–November promising ‘peace and bread’. A fierce debate now broke out in St Petersburg on the future direction of Russian foreign policy. Some still strongly supported the war, or at least opposed a precipitate and disadvantageous peace. In November 1917, the Bolsheviks seized power. The All-Russian Congress of Soviets of Workers’, Soldiers’, and Peasants’ Deputies now passed a ‘Decree on peace’. It proposed ‘to all belligerent peoples and their governments’ immediate negotiations for a ‘just and democratic peace . . . without annexations . . . and without indemnities’. The decree also announced the abolition of ‘secret diplomacy’.9 A Russo-German armistice was signed in December 1917. In short, not only did Lenin espouse an ideology originating in Germany, but he brought it to Russia as part of a scheme devised by the German high command to knock her out of the war.
By the end of 1917, therefore, the western allies suddenly found themselves at a disadvantage, not only in Russia but on other fronts as well. After some promising developments in 1917, Allied forces were once more bogged down in the Middle East and on the western front. The Italians needed substantial support just to hold the line. Russian forces were falling back before the Ottomans in the Caucasus.10 As for the eastern front, once Berlin cut a deal with the Bolsheviks, large numbers of German troops would be transferred for a final showdown in the west. If they arrived before the Americans put in an appearance, the war would be lost. To make matters worse, Germany now controlled the entire resources of eastern and central Europe. The Reich was also moving towards still closer integration with Austria-Hungary. Germany, Wilson warned an audience in Baltimore in early April 1918, was trying to dominate the whole of Eurasia.11 Similarly, the British imperial statesman Lord Milner feared that ‘the Central bloc under the hegemony of Germany will control not only Europe and most of Asia but the whole world’.12
It was now imperative for the Entente to wrest the initiative back from the central powers. In early November 1917 the British Foreign Secretary, Arthur Balfour, issued a Declaration promising the creation of a ‘Jewish National Home’ in Palestine. Regionally, this was conceived of as a pre-emptive strike to prevent the Turks – and their German backers, who were in Palestine in increasing numbers – from cutting the British Empire in half by attacking the Suez Canal. A strategically placed colony of Jewish settlers would guard the approaches to Egypt. More broadly, the Balfour Declaration was a political and ideological bid for the support of Jews world-wide; ‘I do not think it is easy to exaggerate the international power of the Jews,’ the Foreign Office minister, Robert Cecil, remarked.13 While Jewish communities had for the most part demonstrated enthusiastic support for their respective national causes, Jews generally tended towards the central powers, partly because of Russian anti-semitism and partly because many Jews, especially those in central and eastern Europe, looked to Germany for the defence of civilized values. Jewish leaders such as Chaim Weizmann routinely suggested that if the Entente failed to provide them with a national home in Palestine, the Kaiser would.14 One way or the other, it was the British who sought out the Zionists, rather than vice versa. The Balfour Declaration was driven not by concern for what the Entente powers could do for the Jews, but for what world Jewry could do for the struggle against Germany.
Not long after, President Wilson announced his famous ‘Fourteen Points’ in January 1918. These were designed to prevent the emergence of a German-dominated bloc in Europe, and to establish a new order based on democracy and self-determination, qualified by geopolitics. Point six demanded the ‘evacuation of all Russian territory’; point eight called for the evacuation of all French territory by Germany, and the return of Alsace-Lorraine; and point nine requested that the Italian borders be ‘readjusted on national lines’. Point ten spoke for the ‘autonomous development’ of the peoples of Austria-Hungary; it left open, however, whether the empire should not remain united for external purposes to act as a counterweight to Germany. According to point eleven, Romania, Montenegro and Serbia – then under Austro-German occupation – were all to be restored; the last was to receive access to the sea, guaranteed by the great powers. The Arab lands, with the exception of Palestine, were to be granted self-government – but their foreign policy was to be under British control. Point thirteen called for the establishment of an ‘independent Polish state’, with access to the sea guaranteed by the great powers, containing ‘indisputably Polish populations’. Finally, the fourteenth point called for a ‘general association of nations’ to safeguard world peace and the territorial integrity of states. The driving force behind these demands was not any abstract principle, but a concern to reduce German power in Europe to manageable proportions.
Bold action was also required over Russia. While the Entente powers were strongly opposed to the threat the revolution posed to the liberal capitalist and democratic order, the real issue was how the eastern front could be restored. Far from being determined to stamp out Bolshevism above all else, Balfour announced in April 1918 that ‘if the Bolshevik government will cooperate in resisting Germany, it seems necessary to act with them as the de facto Russian government’. Two months later, the Chief of the Imperial General Staff, Sir Henry Wilson, warned that if Germany dominated the continent, ‘with no preoccupation in Europe, she could concentrate great armies against Egypt or India by her overland routes’.15 In early July 1918, therefore, the Allied Supreme War Council resolved to intervene militarily against the revolutionaries, primarily in order to pursue the war against Germany more vigorously.
All this sparked a debate among the Russian revolutionaries which went to the heart of the whole revolutionary project.16 ‘If the rising of the peoples of Europe does not crush imperialism,’ Leon Trotsky warned, ‘we will be crushed . . . that is unquestionable.’ According to Marxist theory, the forces of counter-revolution would either cancel each other out – the waves would be, as Lenin put it, ‘destined in the end to break on each other’ – or else the mature post-capitalist working class would repel them, assisted by revolutions across the world. Reality now intervened. The working classes in western and central Europe did not rise in solidarity, or at least not yet; the revolutionaries were on their own. Moreover, whereas Marx had expected the triumph of communism in an advanced society such as Britain or Germany, the Bolsheviks had seized power in a backward state with a tiny working class, populated largely by peasants.17 It was a case of revolution in the wrong country. Lenin now conceded that there was no choice for the moment but to ‘remain at our post until the arrival of our ally, the international proletariat, for this ally is sure to arrive . . . even though moving much slower than we expected and wished’.
In March 1918, the Bolsheviks concluded a punitive peace treaty at Brest-Litovsk, ‘clenching our teeth’, as Trotsky later remarked, ‘conscious of our weakness’.18 Huge swathes of Russian territory were surrendered, in return for peace and thus a ‘breathing spell’, as Lenin put it, to consolidate the revolution at home. Not only, however, did the Germans continue to advance despite Brest-Litovsk, but Allied intervention got underway and various separatist movements proliferated in the Ukraine, in the Baltic provinces and across the former Russian Empire.19 In this context, the domestic policy of the revolutionaries was largely shaped by the foreign-political situation. The Mensheviks, a minority faction of the party opposed to the more exclusive approach of the Bolshevik majority, argued that the only way to protect Russia from external attack was to re-establish the Constituent Assembly, replace communist dictatorship with democracy, and mobilize the entire country for the struggle.20 Lenin, on the other hand, argued that ‘the defence of the socialist fatherland . . . requires the waging of a merciless war . . . against the bourgeoisie in our own country’.21 Mass shootings, arrests and deportations – many of them personally initiated or approved by Lenin himself – now became the order of the day in Soviet Russia.
The deteriorating strategic situation also shaped domestic affairs in the Entente and associated powers, albeit less drastically. French politics throughout 1917–18 were dominated by arguments about the conduct of the war. Aristide Briand’s government fell in March 1917 over the issue of whether parliament had the right to discuss strategy in secret session. That summer, after a renewed offensive had collapsed amid heavy casualties, French soldiers mutinied en masse. The military failures and the mutinies provoked an outbreak of mass paranoia about German agents and treachery at home. Right-wingers accused the interior minister, Louis-Jean Malvy, of being a spy on account of his failure to arrest potential subversives at the beginning of the war. In July 1917, the Radical leader Georges Clemenceau openly taxed him in parliament with ‘treason’. A month later, the government of Alexandre Ribot resigned after a merciless battering of its military record. Its successor, headed by Paul Painlevé, did not last long: it was forced out in November 1917 after the collapse of the Italian and eastern fronts. His replacement, Clemenceau, was made of altogether sterner stuff. He not only arrested the former Radical Party leader and supporter of a negotiated peace, Joseph Caillaux, on suspicion of treason in January 1918, but assured parliament in March 1918 of his absolute determination to see the conflict through to the end. ‘Internal policy, I wage war,’ he said, ‘foreign policy, I still wage war.’22
On the other side of the Channel, and on the far side of the Atlantic, the final stages of the war likewise shaped domestic politics. The huge casualties of the British army’s Passchendaele campaigns from July 1917 finally drove the Labour leader, Arthur Henderson, to demand an international peace conference, and tender his resignation from the government when it was refused by Lloyd George. Early in the following year the prime minister saw off, with some difficulty, a public attack on his manpower policy by two powerful generals, worried that Britain lacked the troops to stop the final German offensive; it was the Chief of the Imperial General Staff, Sir William Robertson, who had to resign instead and was replaced by Sir Henry Wilson. The United States also threw herself into the business of domestic mobilization. In 1916, she possessed the seventeenth-largest army in the world; within a very short time the imposition of conscription had produced 4 million men, half of whom were sent to France. War expenditure, which exceeded all federal spending since the establishment of the constitution, was funded by aggressively marketed ‘Liberty Bonds’. The Committee of Public Information, headed by Wilson’s nominee and former journalist George Creel, dispatched more than 70,000 ‘minute men’ to convince the public in town hall meetings across the nation – totalling 7.5 million events in all – that the ‘very future of democracy’ was in the balance.23 Americans of German descent were ostracized; sauerkraut was rechristened ‘victory cabbage’. Domestic criticism was muzzled through the Espionage Act (1917) and Sedition Act (1918). Police and vigilantes targeted socialists and anti-war protestors, many of whom were only released by Republican governments after the conflict had ended. On the other hand, mobilization for war allowed certain minority groups, such as African-Americans, to prove their patriotism and to articulate claims for full citizenship on the strength of their military service.24
The final act in the struggle for mastery in Europe opened with a great German offensive on the western front in March 1918. At around the same time, German aircraft and Zeppelins stepped up their attacks on British cities, hoping to wreak maximum damage with new Elektron incendiary bombs. In the east, German forces continued to advance deep into the Ukraine. On the high seas, the U-boats wrought havoc on Allied shipping. For several months, the outcome of the war hung in the balance. The Germans were never able to prevent the Americans from crossing the Atlantic in large numbers, however, and the aerial offensive soon petered out. The British and French reacted to the crisis on the western front by appointing a joint Supreme Allied Commander, Marshal Foch, the first example of successful Anglo-French military integration. By the summer of 1918, the Germans had been halted at the second battle of the Marne. American troops intervened decisively at Belleau Wood in June 1918. By the beginning of August, the British and French scored a decisive victory near Amiens in an engagement described by General Ludendorff as ‘the black day of the German army’.25
In early October 1918, the liberal Prince Max von Baden was made German chancellor as a concession to President Wilson’s democratic agenda. Shortly afterwards, the Allies breached the formidable ‘Hinden-burg Line’. At around the same time, Allied forces finally broke through on the Salonica front, forcing Bulgaria to surrender in late September. British forces punched through the Ottoman defences in Palestine. At the end of the following month, the Italians routed the Austrians at the battle of Vittorio Veneto. By then, the Austro-Hungarian Empire was in a state of disintegration as its constituent parts began to rebel against Habsburg rule. The new German government, hopeful that it would be able to negotiate a settlement based on Wilson’s Fourteen Points, put out peace feelers to the Allies. At the end of October, German sailors at Kiel mutinied against the order to attack the Royal Navy in a desperate attempt to turn the tide, and the unrest spread rapidly across the country. Germany erupted in revolution, the Kaiser abdicated and on 11 November the Germans signed an Armistice which amounted in effect to a surrender.
The Allied victory had many causes. In part, Germany was simply crushed by the weight of the Entente’s superiority in manpower and economic resources. The controversial strategy of attrition certainly wore the central powers down until Foch and the Americans delivered the coup de grâce in 1918.26 It is also true that the German home front was subjected to extreme privations due to the blockade. Metrics alone, however, do not explain the outcome. Big battalions, for example, did not save tsarist Russia. Indeed, of the original belligerents of 1914, only British and French society proved able to take the strain until the bitter end. To be sure, the French army mutinied in 1917, but the nation rallied and deserters were shamed back to the front. Russia, by contrast, was forced out of the war through revolution that same year, and in 1918 both Germany and Austria-Hungary disintegrated from within, in the first case because the social inequalities aggravated by the Allied blockade had worn down the civilian population and in the second case because the monarchy was no longer capable of keeping the lid on national antagonisms. The western democracies were slow to start the war, but only they survived it intact.27 All the same, it had been close-run thing.
The war against Germany was over; the struggle over Germany now began. The debate on its future divided not only the victorious coalition, but the political leadership within France, Britain and the United States. Nowhere was the discussion more bitter than in Paris, where the cost of the war was being counted. 1,300,000 men had been killed in the trenches, and another 3 million wounded, many of them left crippled for life. Well over a million French women and children had been widowed or orphaned, and were totally dependent on the state. The birth rate, never high, had plunged during the war and looked unlikely to recover. The ideal solution would have been the division of Germany into several smaller states. ‘In order to secure a lasting peace,’ one French foreign ministry memorandum argued in October 1918 as the end was in grasp, ‘the legacy of Bismarck must be destroyed.’28 At the very least, many demanded a larger buffer on France’s eastern border. Her supreme military commander, Marshal Foch, mounted a massive press campaign arguing that this could only be guaranteed through control of the Rhine frontier.29 The political leadership under Clemenceau argued that to insist on this would destroy the crucial alliance with Britain and the United States. He eventually prevailed, but only with difficulty and on the understanding that the terms imposed on Germany would be so severe as to prevent her from embarking on fresh conquests for the time to come.
The British and the Americans, on the other hand, were not only suspicious of traditional French ambitions in central Europe, but convinced that the best way of dealing with Germany was by changing her behaviour rather than her capabilities. There was agreement in London and Washington that the aggressiveness of the Wilhelmine Empire abroad had been a product of her illiberalism at home. The obvious solution, therefore, was the destruction of ‘Kaiserism’ and the introduction of liberal democracy. Austen Chamberlain, the Chancellor of the Exchequer, argued shortly after the war that ‘if Germany remains or becomes democratic, [it] cannot repeat the folly of Frederick the Great and Bismarck and his later followers’.30 This should be achieved by local actors if possible, and by outside pressure if necessary. ‘The tragic fact remains,’ the British historian and political adviser William Harbutt Dawson argued, ‘that the German nation cannot by its own will shake off one of its political fetters.’ He spoke for many in Britain and the United States when he added that it would require external intervention to remove ‘that system, which for fifty years has proved a plague centre in the life of Europe’.31
Moreover, the German Question was aggravated by the problem of Bolshevism. The outbreak of revolution in Germany suggested to the Russian revolutionaries that the general rising of the proletariat which they had expected in 1917 was now at hand. ‘The crisis in Germany has only begun,’ Lenin exulted. ‘It will inevitably end in the transfer of political power to the German proletariat . . . Now even the blindest workers in the various countries will see that the Bolsheviks were right in basing their whole tactics on the support of the world workers’ revolution.’ He warned that ‘The Russian workers will understand that very soon they will have to make the greatest sacrifices in the cause of internationalism’, and that ‘The time is approaching when circumstances may require us to come to the aid of the German people.’ This was because, as Lenin explained in his ‘Letter to the workers of Europe and America’, ‘The revolution in Germany – [was] particularly important and characteristic as one of the most advanced capitalist countries.’32 Once the Reich fell to the revolution, the rest of Europe would follow, but if reaction regained the upper hand, the Russian Revolution could not hope to survive for long. So when the Comintern was established in March 1919 to take on the ‘international bourgeoisie’, the official language of the new organization was not Russian or even English but German.
The western allies, for their part, were locked in combat with the Bolsheviks in Russia itself, and desperate to stop them from moving into the emerging vacuum in central Europe. Britain and America soon came to believe that the best way of effecting this was by recruiting Germany to the struggle against revolution, or at least denying her to the Bolsheviks. Bolshevism, the US Secretary of State, Robert Lansing, warned in October 1918 even before the war had ended, ‘must not be allowed to master the people of Central Europe, where it would become a greater menace to the world than Prussianism’.33 For this reason Churchill called for ‘the building up of a strong yet peaceful Germany which will not attack our French allies, but will at the same time act as a moral bulwark against Bolshevism’, and thus ‘build a dyke of peaceful, lawful, patient strength and virtue against the flood of Red barbarism flowing from the east’.34
The Treaty of Versailles, which settled the future of western and central Europe in late June 1919, five years to the day after the assassination of Franz Ferdinand, was a compromise between the various Allied demands and strategic concerns.35 It was designed to guard against a revival of German expansionism while maintaining the Reich as a bulwark against the spread of Bolshevism. Germany gave up all of her colonies. Alsace-Lorraine was returned to France and north Schleswig to Denmark; Eupen-Malmedy was ceded to Belgium. The future of the Saar was to be decided by plebiscite. In the east, Germany surrendered West Prussia and the Wartheland to a reconstituted Poland, and Memel initially to French administration, before it was seized by the new state of Lithuania. Danzig was made a ‘free city’. The future of the important industrial area of Upper Silesia and the southern half of East Prussia, both hotly contested between Polish and German armed bands, was to be decided by a plebiscite. In all, the Reich lost about 13 per cent of its territory and about 10 per cent of its population. Germany was also subjected to a regime of disarmament, occupation and reparation payments. The Rhineland and the Palatinate were to be occupied by British, French, American and Belgian forces for up to ten years, partly to contain the Reich and partly to keep an eye on each other.36 Germany was forbidden to erect fortifications close to the borders. The new German army, the Reichswehr, was not to exceed 100,000 men and was to be made up entirely of professionals; conscription and all other forms of short-term service were outlawed. No aircraft or tanks were permitted, and most of the navy was to be surrendered. Germany was thus completely defenceless militarily. Her most important rivers – the Rhine, Danube, Oder and Elbe – were placed under international control. Finally, Germany was deemed by article 231 of the treaty to be responsible for the costs of the war and therefore presented with a massive reparations bill in cash and kind totalling 226 billion Marks. The centre of Europe, in effect, was to be neutralized, and monitored by the victorious coalition.
Underpinning this new territorial dispensation in Europe was the League of Nations, whose Covenant was written into the first twenty-six articles of the Versailles Treaty. The League was based in Geneva and consisted of an Assembly, to which all recognized states belonged, and a Council, which was made up of the five victor powers, Britain, France, Italy, Japan and the United States. Neither Germany nor the Soviet Union was admitted to the League. On the contrary, its primary purpose was the containment of Germany, and to a much lesser degree of the Soviet Union, through the guarantee of the territorial settlement at Versailles and its disarmament clauses. According to article 10 of the Covenant, members undertook ‘to respect and preserve . . . against external aggression the territorial integrity and existing political independence of all members of the League. In case of any such aggression or in case of any threat or danger of such aggression the Council shall advise upon the means by which this obligation is to be fulfilled.’ In short, the League of Nations stood or fell with the Versailles Treaty and the containment of the Reich.37
President Wilson did not want the League, as he put it, to become merely a ‘Holy Alliance’ directed against Germany.38 He always intended that Berlin should be admitted to full membership once it had demonstrated democratic credentials, not least in order to contain the Russians. Wilson therefore sought to embed the central European settlement in a broader transformation of international behaviour. At the heart of this was universal disarmament: the Versailles Treaty explicitly stated that the restrictions on Germany were ‘[i]n order to allow for preparation for general arms limitation by all the nations’.39 Moreover, the League sought to change not only relations between states, but also behaviour within states through the establishment of a Commission for Refugees, a health organization, a slavery commission, a Committee for the Study of the Legal Status of Women, and various other transnational bodies. Most importantly of all, the League guaranteed a series of bilateral ‘Minority Treaties’ to protect the basic religious, civil and cultural rights of all inhabitants. Thanks to the efforts of Lucien Wolf, the Anglo-Jewish human rights advocate, European Jews now appeared to enjoy a comprehensive, internationally sanctioned and enforceable system of civil rights, embedded in a programme of similar rights for all.40 In part, these provisions reflected a free-standing progressive agenda pursued for its own sake, but the principal motivation was to reduce domestic tensions which might lead to international tension and even war.
If the League of Nations was designed primarily to secure the European balance of power, it also had profound implications for the wider world. Germany and Turkey were divested of their empires, but the victor powers did not just want to cut these territories adrift as independent states, partly because some of them would instantly collapse into anarchy, partly because the precedent would create a subversive dynamic within the other empires, but mainly because the resulting vacuum would quickly become the subject of great-power rivalry. Nor could these lands simply be partitioned among the victors, because President Wilson would not allow this for ideological reasons. The result was the ‘mandate’ system, by which the League authorized one of the Allied or associated powers to administer the forfeit colonies and provinces until they were ready for full independence. Despite strong resistance from France, which wished to use its new territories as a source of manpower to contain Germany, mandatory powers were explicitly forbidden from fortifying their territories or raising armies there, thereby seeking unilateral advantage which might affect the balance of power. On this basis Mesopotamia (present-day Iraq) and the Transjordan fell to Britain; so did Palestine, where London was tasked by the League with implementing the Balfour Declaration there. Syria (present-day Lebanon and Syria) was awarded to France. Wilson and many Arabs were disappointed in their hopes for a united Arab state, or confederation of states as envisaged in the Sykes–Picot agreement. Once it became clear that she was not going to be assigned any territories herself, Germany became a firm opponent of the whole mandate system and a passionate supporter of early independence for the states concerned.
The Treaty of Versailles and League of Nations Covenant dominated domestic politics across Europe and the far side of the Atlantic after 1918 among winners and losers alike.41 In Germany, defeat, territorial losses and the prospect of a huge reparations bill put unbearable pressure on the Weimar Republic. It was henceforth indelibly associated in the public mind with national humiliation comparable to that experienced during the Thirty Years War or at the hands of Napoleon. The Social Democrat president, Friedrich Ebert, lamented that ‘Versailles conditions with their economic and political impossibilities are the greatest enemy of German democracy and the strongest impetus for communism and nationalism.’42 Quartermaster-General William Groener warned that the League was designed for ‘the maintenance of the political encirclement of Germany’.43 Max Weber counselled repudiation of the treaty, even at the price of an Allied occupation of the whole country, on the grounds that the young republic would be crippled at birth by the stigma of Versailles. The German military leadership, however, ruled out a resumption of the war which would have risked total defeat, followed by an Allied invasion and possibly partition. Their first priority, and that of the Social Democrat-led government, was to keep the Reich intact. This meant dealing with regional movements which threatened its integrity, and revolutionary eruptions which might give the Allies an excuse to intervene. A left-wing Spartacist uprising under Rosa Luxemburg and the younger Karl Liebknecht was put down with severity; the Bavarian Republic of Kurt Eisner met a similar fate. Gritting her teeth, Germany signed the Treaty of Versailles.
Yet if defeat and revolution were mortal threats to the Reich, they also represented an opportunity to break with the federal traditions which had prevented Germany from realizing her true fiscal and military potential for so long. At the top of the agenda was the permanent unification of the Prussian, Bavarian, Württembergian and Saxon armies, which had hitherto been under unitary command only in time of war. In October 1919 the new Reichswehrministerium not only amalgamated the war ministries in Stuttgart, Munich and Dresden with that in Berlin, but took on the functions of the Prussian general staff.44 Likewise, in the debates preceding the Weimar constitution, the constitutional lawyer Hugo Preuss, who drafted most of it, argued that ‘The outward strengthening of the Empire so that the outside world is faced only by a single Empire rather than individual tribes is necessary for the [continued] existence of Germany.’ The resulting constitution created a much more centralized Germany, in which the regions lost many of the federal powers, especially in the fiscal sphere, they had retained in 1871. Taken together with the creation of a single German army, the centralization of fiscal powers would inevitably transform the European balance. The German Republic of 1919 was therefore potentially much more powerful than the Empire of 1871 had ever been.
Versailles brought little joy to the victors, moreover. France was unable to insist on the Rhine border, accepting instead the demilitarization of the Rhineland, and an additional weak bilateral promise of support from Lloyd George against ‘unprovoked aggression by Germany’. Marshal Foch therefore loudly condemned the treaty as a ‘capitulation’ and even ‘treason’. It received a bumpy ride in the National Assembly. All the same, the November 1919 elections were widely regarded as a verdict on the war and the settlement: Clemenceau and his Bloc National won handsomely. From then on, French politics were driven by the quest to consolidate the victory and to effect the domestic reconstruction and transformation necessary to repair the war damage. Particular emphasis was placed on reparations, both to keep taxes down and to persuade the electorate that the German threat was being contained. Another priority was to make up the demographic shortfall, which would leave France militarily exposed in the future. The labour force was buttressed by encouraging Spanish, Italian and Polish immigration. Work-place nurseries, social housing and other state or state-mandated benefits were introduced not in deference to some socialist or feminist agenda, but with the specific purpose of increasing the birth rate.45 In the economic sphere, the minister of commerce, Étienne Clémentel, proposed integrated national planning with Britain and the United States for the distribution of raw materials, energy resources and foodstuffs. This was designed to raise French productivity and protect it from the ravages of the free market. The minister for the colonies, Albert Sarraut, drafted an ambitious plan for the development of France’s overseas colonies, to compensate her for the weight she now lacked in Europe.
In Italy, critics spoke of a ‘mutilated victory’, which had denied them rightful gains in the Adriatic. ‘Let us put it bluntly,’ the republican newspaper L’Italia del Popolo argued, ‘we have been defeated. Defeated as Wilsonians, defeated as Italians. We have won the war and lost the peace.’ The government of the prime minister, Vittorio Orlando, was hounded out of office. His successor, Francesco Nitti, was almost immediately confronted by a challenge from the radical nationalist poet and adventurer Gabriele d’Annunzio, who seized the Istrian port of Fiume – now Rijeka in Croatia – from Yugoslavia in September 1919. At the same time, Italian democracy struggled to deal not only with the fallout from Versailles, but also the huge social and economic divisions which bubbled up after the end of the war. In the Italian general elections at the end of the year, the liberal governing coalition did badly while annexationist parties of various stripes were rampant. The great beneficiary of all this was the former socialist, strong interventionist and war veteran Benito Mussolini, whose fascist ‘Blackshirt’ movement (founded in March 1919) now began to gain more and more adherents. He effectively substituted the promise of an assertive Italy abroad for radical change at home.
The British victory celebrations did not last long, either. Lloyd George’s coalition swept back to power in the general election immediately following the end of the war on a platform of, as one candidate put it, ‘squee[zing] Germany until the pips squeaked’. In Ireland, however, the radical nationalist Sinn Féin party completely routed the more moderate Home Rulers, and eventually embarked on an armed struggle leading to independence. Across Britain, millions of demobilized men flooded back into the workforce and an uncertain future. As passions subsided, sickened by the cost of the war, and repelled by what they saw as French vindictiveness, many Britons began to feel that the conflict had been a tragic mistake and that Germany needed to be rehabilitated. So when John Maynard Keynes published The economic consequences of the peace in 1919, he was pushing at an open door. Keynes, who had been a member of the British delegation at the Versailles Conference, argued that the punitive reparation clauses were economically completely self-defeating. He pointed out that the general European recovery, on which the world and particularly the British economy depended, could only begin on the Rhine. Forcing the Germans to export their way to paying reparations would undercut British products. Moreover, ‘The treaty includes no provisions for the economic rehabilitation of Europe,’ he warned, ‘nothing to make the defeated Central empires into good neighbours, nothing to stabilise the new states of Europe, nothing to reclaim Russia.’46
In the United States, President Wilson made the Versailles Treaty and the League the cornerstone of his campaign for re-election in 1920. ‘Dare we reject it,’ he asked, ‘and break the heart of the world?’47 Praising article 10 of the Covenant, which committed signatories to the defence of the territorial integrity of all members, as ‘the very backbone of the whole covenant’, Wilson called upon the United States to assume ‘the leadership of the world’.48 This repelled ‘isolationists’, but the most serious resistance to ratification came from the Republican Party, the traditional standard-bearer for American internationalism. Critics such as the former Secretary of War, Elihu Root, were concerned that the rhetorical flourish masked a weak and ineffective treaty. Likewise, the former Republican president, William Howard Taft, vigorously supported article 10, but only if it entailed an absolute obligation to go to war in its defence, rather than the vague ‘moral obligations . . . binding in conscience only, not in law’ that Wilson had in mind. In particular, the Republicans demanded concrete security guarantees for France against Germany, which Wilson refused to give.49 The Republican criticism, in other words, was not that the League of Nations embroiled Americans too much in the outside world, but that it failed to do so comprehensively and effectively enough.50
In the end, the League treaty was defeated in the Senate, where it failed to secure a two-thirds majority, and Wilson himself was worsted in the 1920 presidential election. The United States would become neither a member of the League of Nations, nor a signatory and thus a guarantor of the Versailles settlement. The American people may not have broken the heart of the world, but they certainly wrecked the complex geopolitical architecture designed in 1919 to contain the revival of German power.
So when the dust settled in the early 1920s, a fundamental geopolitical revolution had taken place in Europe and more globally. The British Empire was now the undisputed hegemon in the Middle East and central Asia, as well as in Africa and Australasia. She was now at the pinnacle of her power, with a formidable military apparatus and a vast military-industrial economic base to fall back on in time of war. In the Far East, Japan had emerged as the new hegemon, confronting not so much Russia as the European empires, the perennially weak China, and ultimately the United States. In Europe, the Ottoman, Habsburg and Tsarist Empires had all disappeared. A series of successor states had taken their places in central, eastern and south-eastern Europe: Poland, Czechoslovakia, Hungary and Yugoslavia. Above all, while Germany had shed substantial territorial feathers and was hedged about by the restrictions of the Versailles Treaty, she remained not only the largest state in Europe outside the Soviet Union, but in relative terms she was even more formidable than before 1914.51 She was no longer balanced by powerful empires to her east and south-east. Moreover, in 1921 Germany produced three times as much steel as France, and the demographic gap between the two was increasing. Worse still, as Sir Halford Mackinder warned in his 1919 book Democratic ideals and reality, the ‘heartland’, which included the former German Reich, Austria-Hungary and the Tsarist Empire, was a ‘vast triple base of man-power’ that remained beyond the control of ‘sea-power’ and was thus a potentially mortal threat to the western democracies.52
The challenges to the Versailles system mounted in the course of the new decade. In February 1920, close to victory in the Russian Civil War and with the withdrawal of the interventionist powers in the offing, Lenin approved plans for a Red Army attack on her western neighbour, Poland. The Polish head of state and army commander, Joseph Pilsudski, therefore decided on pre-emptive action.53 In late April, Polish armies crossed the border and quickly advanced deep into the Ukraine, capturing Kiev a month later, while ‘White’ forces under Marshal Wrangel thrust northwards from the Crimea. In the summer of 1920, however, the Red Army under Marshal Mikhail Tukachevski went on the offensive and pushed the Poles all the way back to Warsaw. If they could punch through their final defences, hastening a revolution by the Polish proletariat, the Bolsheviks would have Germany firmly in their sights. The forward ramparts of the revolution against the Entente would then lie along the Rhine and Ruhr, rather than in the Ukraine.54 In late July, the Red Army crossed the Bug. German workers refused to handle war material for the Poles, and even conservatives rejoiced that Pilsudski was getting his comeuppance. On orders from Moscow, German communists became ever more nationalistic in their rhetoric.
Seriously alarmed, the Entente powers sent a military mission to Poland. The French, in particular, feared that a Polish defeat would allow the Germans to restore their pre-1914 borders in the east without firing a shot, and to leverage their new position as sole bulwark against Bolshevism in order to revise the disarmament clauses of Versailles.55 Their primary objective was not to prevent a Polish revolution, but to keep the revolutionary tide out of Germany. In the end, the Polish workers did not rise but backed Pilsudski against the Russian invaders, and in late August 1920 Entente-backed Polish forces decisively defeated the Red Army in the ‘Miracle on the Vistula’. The subsequent Treaty of Riga in March 1921 settled the borders in eastern Europe, at least for the time being. The Soviet Union had to accept the independence of Finland and the Baltic states, but it reasserted control over White Russia, the Ukraine and most of the former Tsarist Empire in the Caucasus and the Far East. Poland remained in possession of Vilnius, which it had seized from the Lithuanians. The War of the Tsarist Succession was over.
By far and away the most serious challenge, however, was German revisionism. The Reich had gone from being an imperial power to being a victim – as she saw it – of colonization herself. Germany had not merely been stripped of her own overseas possessions, but had sacrificed large swathes of German-populated territory, as well as being subjected to debt servitude by an Anglo-American ‘cartel’.56 Over the next ten years or so, Berlin sought to reduce reparations payments or even evade them altogether, demanded territorial revision, the right to rearm for self-defence, and membership of the League with overseas mandates as a symbol of equality. In the short term, given the absence of any substantial military muscle of her own, Germany tried to leverage her weakness, arguing (on the whole speciously) an inability to pay reparations, her centrality to the world economy, and the danger that a complete collapse of German power would turn central Europe into a battleground. Over time, Berlin hoped to use her huge economic potential to force a revision of Versailles. The only other trump Berlin held was Russia: cooperation with the Soviet Union encircled Poland, might persuade Moscow to reduce interference in German domestic politics, and would force the western allies to treat the Reich with more respect. Playing these two cards simultaneously, as Germany tried to do, was fraught with difficulties. The tension between opting for the west on economic and ideological grounds, and for the east on strategic grounds, made for a highly ambivalent German geopolitics in the years ahead.
The Soviet Union, for its part, remained convinced that an encircling capitalist world was in league for her destruction. She responded with a twin-track strategy. To keep the enemy off-balance, Moscow instigated a number of insurrections in central Europe, especially Germany, between 1920 and 1923.57 At the same time, the Soviet government pursued a policy of rapprochement with Berlin to keep it out of the Allied camp, and to put pressure on Poland. Secret Russo-German military collaboration to evade the disarmament clauses of Versailles began in 1920 and really took off in the middle of the decade. Two years later, in 1922, Germany and the Soviet Union concluded a friendship treaty at Rapallo, sending a collective shiver down spines in London, Washington and especially Paris.58
By then, the Versailles system was buckling along its southern periphery. In October 1922, Mussolini marched on Rome and took power. He promised not only to resolve the country’s deep economic, social and political problems, but more importantly to make Italy great among the powers. His ambition was to make the Mediterranean a ‘mare italiano’ by ‘expelling those who are parasites’ and smashing ‘the chains of hostility that surround Italy in the Mediterranean’. Mussolini argued that the nation needed to carve out its own ‘spazio vitale’, not just through the acquisition of a critical land mass, but by gaining access to the Atlantic and Indian Oceans. This strategy threatened the French in North Africa, required ‘the demolition of the British Empire’, which strangled Italy by holding the exits to the Mediterranean in Gibraltar, Malta and Egypt, and challenged the territorial integrity of Yugoslavia and Greece. It could only, as the Italian dictator admitted, be executed ‘at Germany’s side’.59
There was broad agreement between the Entente powers on how to respond to Russia. Bolshevism must be contained. The French encouraged Romania, Czechoslovakia and Yugoslavia to create the ‘Little Entente’ in 1921; this was primarily designed to counter Hungarian revisionism, but Paris hoped that it would also serve to deter the Soviet Union. Hopes that some of Russia’s former borderlands could be organized into a ‘United States of Eastern Europe’ had to be abandoned, however.60 There was also a consensus that Mussolini’s Italy was a menace to both powers in the Mediterranean particularly, but also in Africa and to the stability of the Balkans. This soon led to the ‘Corfu Incident’, when the Royal Navy was mobilized to stop Italy from taking over the island in 1923. Mussolini was forced to back down, but it all left planners in London and Paris with yet another military headache to cope with.
Germany was quite another matter. France interpreted events in the Soviet Union, the Mediterranean and the Middle East within a Germano-centric framework which saw Berlin behind the tide of global unrest against the colonial powers.61 The main threat, however, came from directly across the Rhine. The most senior French military commander, Marshal Foch, cautioned that so long as Germany retained a nucleus of trained officers, she could rearm in a very short period of time. In 1920, France concluded a military agreement with Belgium, and in 1921 with Poland, thus threatening the Reich on its eastern flank. At around the same time, French troops responded to German default on reparations payments by temporarily occupying three towns in the Ruhr. Britain and the United States, on the other hand, pursued a more conciliatory policy towards Germany. In March 1922, the Americans signalled their intention to withdraw their army of occupation from the Rhineland within a year.62
In the Soviet Union, the continuing tension with the capitalist world led to a radical domestic change of course. In the absence of world revolution, the Soviet Union would have to reconcile the peasantry, grow her economy and generally achieve the inner cohesion necessary to fend off outside attack. The result was the New Economic Policy after 1921, which allowed the peasants to produce for a limited free market, and paved the way for outward investment in and technological transfer to the Soviet Union. ‘Considering . . . that further interventionist attempts’ were to be expected, the All-Russian Soviet Congress resolved in January 1922 that ‘the restoration and rehabilitation of the national economy . . . the quickest and widest possible development of trade with other countries, the attraction of foreign capital and technical personnel to exploit the natural wealth of Russia, and the receipt from other states of cooperation in the form of loans’, were so essential to Soviet security that it was prepared to honour the tsarist debts to the western bourgeoisie.63 As Lenin put it in a probably apocryphal remark, ‘the capitalists themselves will be happy to sell us the rope which we will use to hang them’.
France and Britain sought to increase their leverage in Europe by defending and developing their overseas empires.64 ‘France does not stop at the Mediterranean, or at the Sahara,’ General Mangin remarked in January 1919, ‘she extends to the Congo . . . she constitutes an empire vaster than Europe, and which in half a century will number one hundred million inhabitants.’ The real value of these colonial troops lay in their use against Germany. Tens of thousands of West and North Africans served in the army of occupation in the Rhineland, a move which sparked widespread condemnation across the former Entente powers, where it became a matter of racist, pacifist and feminist concern. Mrs H. M. Swanwick of the British section of the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom spoke for many when she moved that ‘In the interest of good feeling between all the races of the world and the security of all women, this meeting calls upon the League of Nations to prohibit the importation into Europe for warlike purposes, of troops belonging to primitive peoples, and their use anywhere, except for purposes of police and defence in their country of origin.’65 The experience also left a lasting trauma among the German population. ‘French militarism,’ the Social Democrat chancellor, Hermann Müller, told the Reichstag in April 1920, ‘has marched across the Main as into enemy country. Senegal negroes are camping in Frankfurt University, guarding the Goethe House.’ In the minds of German nationalists, there could be no better illustration of the mortal threat which the French colonies represented not just to the sovereignty of the Reich but to its cultural and ‘racial’ integrity.66
By the beginning of 1923, the French had given up on waiting for an Anglo-American security guarantee, or the improvement in German behaviour which London and Washington forecast from a policy of restraint. Paris could not accept the status quo, because this had an inbuilt economic and demographic dynamic that was inexorably shifting to France’s disadvantage. So in January 1923 the French once again used a (probably deliberate) shortfall in reparations payments to send in the troops. This time, however, they and their Belgian allies occupied the entire Ruhr area. That same month, the Lithuanians occupied Memel in the east. A large proportion of Germany’s industrial potential, and millions of its inhabitants, fell under foreign rule. France resumed her policy of sponsoring separatist movements in the Rhineland and the Palatinate. Chancellor Wilhelm Cuno’s government responded by proclaiming a policy of ‘passive resistance’. This was designed to wear the French down through a thousand cuts of civil disobedience, especially strikes, while denying them the opportunity to deploy their crushing military superiority. France was pilloried internationally for her behaviour, but the cost of paying the salaries of the striking employees and the general economic disruption quickly led to hyperinflation and widespread misery, especially among members of the middle class who had lost their life’s savings. In August 1923, the discredited Cuno was replaced as chancellor by Gustav Stresemann. By the end of September, the Reich government was forced to call off passive resistance and admit defeat. The German Communist Party, trying to take advantage of the widespread sense of national humiliation and severe economic distress, launched another abortive rising. An attempt by an obscure right-wing agitator, Adolf Hitler, to exploit the government’s capitulation to France by launching a Putsch in Munich also failed in November 1923, leading to his arrest, trial and imprisonment.
The Ruhr Crisis prompted a strategic rethink across Europe and on the far side of the Atlantic. Yet another failed uprising in Germany finally tipped the balance in Moscow away from world revolution, and towards building socialism in one country. This gave the advantage to Stalin in the struggle to succeed Lenin after his death in January 1924. Unlike his rivals Trotsky, Grigory Zinoviev and Nikolai Bukharin, he had been a long-term sceptic of world revolution. In the short term, the Soviet Union turned towards a policy of accommodation with the west, which secured diplomatic recognition by Britain in 1924, followed by Japan and various other states in 1925. In Germany, Gustav Stresemann, now foreign minister in the cabinet of his successor, Wilhelm Marx, came to recognize the political and economic bankruptcy of the established Revisionspolitik. Though a strong nationalist, and a former annexationist, Stresemann knew that Germany was too weak to overturn the Versailles Treaty through military means or diplomatic confrontation.67 For this reason, Stresemann sought to overcome Versailles not through rearmament, or financial chicanery, but through embedding German security and economic prosperity in a wider European settlement. He planned to use financial interdependence to promote European cooperation and effect German strategic equality through peaceful means. ‘One must simply have . . . so many debts that the creditor sees his own existence jeopardized if the debtor collapses,’ Stresemann argued a few months later.68 The victorious allies, in other words, had to be persuaded that they needed a stable, prosperous Germany as much as she did herself.
Meanwhile, Paris was forced to accept that the kind of direct military intervention pursued in 1920–23 was no longer viable. The diplomatic and economic costs of using reparations to contain Germany were simply too high. Hawks such as Poincaré, who relentlessly argued the need for permanent strategic preponderance over Berlin, emerged from the Ruhr Crisis with their standing reduced; conciliators such as Aristide Briand were correspondingly strengthened. The result was a new French grand strategy. To be on the safe side, plans were drawn up for the construction of a line of fortifications within France to replace the concept of forward defence in the Rhineland. There was a much greater emphasis now, however, on a more multilateral approach designed to tie Germany into a web of legal, economic and political constraints which would inhibit or dilute her residual revisionism.69
The emergence of a more collaborative spirit in Europe, especially among German and French elites, found expression in the birth of the Pan-European Union in late 1923.70 In the following year, its founder, Count Richard Coudenhove-Kalergi, set up the journal Paneuropa to agitate for ‘a non-party mass movement for the unification of Europe’. Together with many other similar organizations and publications, it called upon Europeans to sink their differences, forswear nationalism, to celebrate their common heritage and values, and band together to protect them against Godless communism and, in some cases, American materialism. Coudenhove-Kalergi’s own vision was pro-European rather than anti-American: he sought to imitate the US model politically and economically, while preserving as much of Europe’s cultural traditions as possible. Within a couple of years the movement had gained many adherents in Germany, including the president of the Reichstag, the chairman of the Democratic Party and a former economics minister, and in France, where the socialist leader, Léon Blum, was an enthusiastic supporter and the foreign minister, Aristide Briand, served as honorary president of the Paneuropa Union.71
In Britain and the United States, the Ruhr Crisis of 1923 served as evidence of the need to re-engage on the German Question. The prime minister, Ramsay Macdonald, saw the French occupation of the Ruhr in 1923 as evidence of a ‘historical craving’ to dominate central Europe. Likewise, Curzon accused France in early October 1923 of seeking ‘the domination of the European continent’. For this reason, London refused to recognize the ‘so-called autonomous governments of the Palatinate’,72 which it regarded as mere French puppets. On the other hand, the British Foreign Secretary, Austen Chamberlain, wrote in January 1925, ‘We cannot afford to see France crushed, to have Germany, or an eventual Russo-German combination, supreme on the continent, or to allow any great military power to dominate the Low Countries.’73 A much broader settlement was therefore required, which addressed French security concerns, recognized Germany as an equal, and locked her into a web of mutual cooperation and constraints. These developments coincided with a profound shift in US policy towards Europe. There was a growing consensus among agricultural and industrial lobbies in the United States that, as one spokesman put it in February 1922, ‘our interests are indissolubly united with the interest of Europe, and until we have a reorganized, a sound condition of affairs in Europe . . . we shall not have normal healthy times at home’.74 Moreover, the Ruhr Crisis threatened to create a vacuum in central Europe which the Soviet Union might fill.
The Republican internationalists in charge of American foreign policy now sought to stabilize the situation through a strategy of economic intervention. In early April 1924, the administration proposed a plan drawn up by the banker Charles Dawes which was designed to lighten the German reparations burden by revising the schedule of payments, to give the Reich access to American credits and thus ignite a European boom in which all boats would float with the rising tide. This would put an end to the sterile strategic zero-sum games of the immediate postwar period. The policy was not intended to dominate Europe: in June 1924, Charles Evans Hughes, the US Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs, spoke for many when he abjured any desire to act as ‘the world’s policeman’ there. Nor was US policy simply designed to create an economically dependent German client state. When the major Ruhr industrialist Hugo Stinnes asked the American ambassador to Berlin to support a Mussolini-style right-wing putsch against the Republic in late September 1923, Washington recoiled in horror. Nothing, the US administration feared, would be more likely to promote a communist revolution than backing a unrepresentative conservative coup d’état. Instead, Republican internationalists aimed to create a viable democratic state in Germany which would be strong enough to maintain stability in central Europe, and keep the Bolsheviks at bay. They sought not to control Europe, but to prevent the continent, and especially German militarism, from endangering world peace once again.
A year later, Chamberlain, Briand and Stresemann concluded the Locarno agreement of October 1925, a non-aggression treaty between Paris, Berlin and Brussels, guaranteed by London and Rome. Germany accepted the territorial settlement in the west, including the loss of Alsace-Lorraine. In return, Germany was to be admitted to the League of Nations on an equal basis, albeit without a commitment to participate in any collective military action against the Soviet Union. To be on the safe side, Stresemann concluded a reinsurance treaty with Russia in late April 1926. Taken together with the Dawes Plan, these arrangements were a comprehensive attempt to settle the problem of German power and put the stability of the continent on a sound footing. A new spirit of cooperation was hailed, and found expression in the award of the Nobel Peace Prize to two of its architects, Briand and Stresemann. In Locarno, Briand announced, ‘on a parlé européen’.75 The settlement only held in the west, however; Britain had refused to extend her commitment to France and Belgium to cover eastern and central Europe. ‘No British government,’ Chamberlain announced in a tone redolent of Bismarck, ‘would even risk the bones of a single British grenadier’ to defend Poland. Indeed, Germany pointedly declined to guarantee its borders with Poland and Czechoslovakia, signalling its intention to seek revision at some stage in the near future. Only time would tell whether the peace of Europe was divisible as the contractants at Locarno believed. The US ambassador to London, for one, was unhappy with the creation of different classes of boundaries, which he predicted would merely ‘fix the point where the next great war will begin’, that is, on the Polish–German border.76
The Dawes Plan and the Locarno agreement dominated European foreign and domestic politics for the rest of the decade. In Germany, Stresemann got both measures through the Reichstag, but he was accused by the right-wing opposition of having sold out the national interest to the Entente powers, especially American and Jewish financiers; the communists charged him with making the country a slave to international capital. In this context, Adolf Hitler’s manifesto Mein Kampf – ‘my struggle’ – portrayed international politics as a struggle for space, which was ‘the chief support of . . . political power’. On his reading, the German Reich was in danger of being dwarfed by the huge landmasses of the Soviet Union, China, the United States and the French and British Empires. ‘All,’ he pointed out, ‘are spatial formations having in part an area more than ten times greater than the present German Reich.’ Indeed, Hitler argued that ‘From the purely territorial point of view, the area of the German Reich vanishes completely as compared with that of the so-called world powers.’ For this reason Hitler dismissed calls for ‘the restoration of the frontiers of 1914’, as ‘a political absurdity [because] the Reich’s frontiers in 1914 were anything but logical. For in reality they were neither complete in the sense of embracing the people of German nationality, nor sensible with regard to geo-military expediency.’ To restore them would simply put Germany back in the impossible position she had been in before the war, globally encircled by territorially vast world powers.
The solution, Hitler argued, was to ‘creat[e] a healthy viable natural relation between the nation’s population and growth on the one hand and the quantity and quality of its soil on the other hand’. Germany, led by the National Socialist party, ‘must strive to eliminate the disproportion between our population and our area’. This meant that ‘land and soil’ in the east, on the territory of ‘Russia and her vassal states’ – the Soviet Union – should be ‘the goal of [German] foreign policy’. It was there that the Germans could acquire the necessary Lebensraum to match the vast spaces open to their global rivals. Hitler also laid out the domestic preconditions for this cosmic struggle for living space: the need to unite the Volk behind the project of national reassertion, in particular by isolating the ‘harmful’ elements which corrupted and confused the people. Here Hitler especially had the Jews in mind, whom he regarded both as a domestic threat to the purity of the race and as the directing mind behind an international plutocratic and communist conspiracy against Germany. For Hitler, even more so than for most Germans, therefore, foreign and domestic politics were inseparably intertwined.77
The Soviet Union and Poland were also deeply unsettled by the Dawes Plan and Locarno. Viewed from Moscow, the rapprochement between the principal European powers amounted to a conspiracy against them. Meanwhile the situation in central Europe went from bad to worse. In particular, the Soviet Union feared, as Izvestia put it in May 1925, that ‘Germany’s choice of a definitively western orientation and entry into the League of Nations can objectively lead only to the deterioration of relations between Germany and the Soviet republic.’78 All this served to strengthen Stalin’s position within the Soviet elite. His doctrine of ‘socialism in one country’ allowed him to consolidate the power of the party at home and his own personal position in Moscow. Locarno also provoked a crisis in Poland, which the western powers seemed to have abandoned to the tender mercies of German revisionism. Warsaw was only too aware that Germany would use membership of the League to deploy the robust minority-rights provisions of the charter against her. ‘Every honest Pole,’ the retired Polish army commander and former head of state Marshal Pilsudski, remarked, ‘spits when he hears this word [Locarno].’ The final straw came in April 1926, when Stresemann’s reinsurance treaty with Russia confirmed the encirclement of Poland. A month later, Marshal Pilsudski launched a coup designed primarily to provide the strong leadership which Poland would need to survive in an ever more dangerous international environment. The nation was wracked by paranoia against minority groups suspected of disloyalty such as Germans, Ukrainians and Jews. One of those fleeing the 1926 pogroms was a young man called Menachem Begin, who made his way to Palestine.
The new European settlement profoundly shaped the British Empire. When the question of a European security pact was discussed at the Committee of Imperial Defence in 1925, it soon became clear that it could not be concluded without consulting the dominions. There was therefore a strong risk that British defence policy would be ‘paralysed’. In January 1926, the secretary to the committee, Maurice Hankey, penned an influential memorandum arguing that a new form of ‘Pan-Britannic’ imperial organization was required to cope with the revival of German power, the ‘Balkanization of Europe’ and the rise of Japan in the Far East. The resulting Imperial Conference at Westminster in October–November 1926, attended by the prime ministers of Britain, Canada, Newfoundland, Australia, New Zealand, South Africa and the Irish Free State recognized the equality of the dominions, and indeed their implicit right of secession from the empire. In return, all of the prime ministers present, except W. T. Cosgrave of the Irish Free State, promised to help Britain in time of war. Not long afterwards, the consultation of the dominions in foreign affairs was put on a formal footing, and in due course the Statute of Westminster proclaimed the official equality of the dominions with the mother country. The new, ‘third’ British Empire would speak with one voice in world affairs.
The new cooperative framework of international politics promised by Locarno reduced tensions in western Europe. In 1926, Germany was admitted to the League of Nations and, after some wrangling, given a permanent seat on the Council. A year later, the International Military Commission in the Rhineland was finally withdrawn. It soon became clear, however, that French security concerns and German demands for equality were impossible to reconcile. The Versailles Treaty explicitly linked the immediate disarmament of Germany to a general reduction of military establishments worldwide. France, in particular, had made few moves in that direction, and showed every sign of wanting to ensure Germany’s strategic inferiority for time immemorial. There was no other way, Paris argued, of preventing her neighbour from realizing her huge demographic and military-industrial potential. The logical conclusion of this argument was that French security and European stability required that German economic power as such be reduced. This was anathema not only to Berlin but to London and Washington as well. As one State Department official remarked, one ‘could hardly ask the Krupp factories to go out of the business of making ploughs because in war, they might make guns’.79 Moreover, the world at large was not disarming – on the contrary. In the summer of 1927, the major naval powers – especially Britain and the United States – failed to reach agreement at the Geneva Conference. It was no surprise, therefore, that Germany now began to demand the return of her occupied territories and the recognition of her military equality with ever greater insistence.80
Alarmed by the breakdown of his relations with Stresemann, and concerned at the disengagement of the United States from Europe, Briand approached Washington in April 1927 with a suggestion of a Franco-American non-aggression pact. The Frenchman was really after a US guarantee of the European status quo, but Washington insisted on a much broader treaty to which all powers could subscribe. This initiative resulted in the Kellogg–Briand Pact of August 1928, which outlawed war ‘as an instrument of national policy’, except in self-defence. This agreement, which almost all European states joined, was very much in line with the classic American notions of non-coercive international cooperation. At the behest of the Secretary of State, Frank B. Kellogg, the pact contained no enforcement mechanism, and everybody who signed it was well aware that the right to self-defence could be so broadly interpreted as to render its provisions nugatory. What, for example, if France occupied parts of Germany to prevent her from rearming, as she had done in 1920 and 1923, and what if Berlin used force to reassert her national sovereignty? Once again, Washington had flunked the German Question. That same year, the French minister of war, André Maginot, authorized the construction of a ring of fortifications on France’s eastern border. It was that same year, too, that the French returned to the Gold Standard, pressing ahead with the establishment of a substantial gold reserve – the second-largest in the world by the beginning of the next decade – in order to provide them with greater economic leverage against Germany.81
The Kremlin, too, was highly sceptical that the Kellogg–Briand Pact would lead to an outbreak of international peace and goodwill. Instead, it believed that if the revolution was to survive over the long term, then the Soviet Union would have to mobilize the necessary domestic resources to repel all comers. At the July 1928 Party Congress, Bukharin proclaimed war to be ‘the central problem of our time’, for which the Soviet Union had ‘little time’ to prepare.82 Youth militarization was stepped up. The directive for the First Five Year Plan, in 1928, specifically cited the prospect of another war of intervention as justification for a crash programme of industrialization. The New Economic Policy, with its free market in agricultural produce, was abandoned. Dependence on foreign experts and suppliers was to be eliminated. The collectivization of farms would generate the surplus food to feed the workers building the factories to produce the armaments which would keep the Soviet Union safe. Collective farmers were effectively ‘bound to the land’; many were shot for failing to cooperate. What the peasants called the ‘second enserfment’ began: a new ‘service class’ was created to meet the external needs of the state. To that extent, 1927–8, and not 1917, marked the start of the social transformation of Russia under the primacy of foreign policy.83 ‘Stalinism’ was born.
The Dawes Plan and the Kellogg–Briand Pact were the context in which Hitler penned his Second Book in 1928. This volume, which was not published until after the Second World War, was exclusively devoted to foreign policy and it showed how Hitler’s strategic conceptions had developed since writing Mein Kampf in late 1923. Influenced by the recent extensive American economic intervention in Europe, and her growing industrial and cultural strength, he was now much more conscious of the power of the United States.84 He pointed out that whereas Germany had reached the limits of her internal demographic development, the sheer size of the United States meant that the ‘American Union’, as he called it, ‘can continue to grow for centuries.’85 ‘Americans’, he went on, were ‘a young, racially select Folk’ – effectively ‘a Nordic German state’ – who maintained their stock through ‘special standards for immigration’ which elevated them above the racially degenerate ‘Old Europe’. This was ‘slowly leading to a new determination of the world’s fate by the Folk of the North American continent’. In a direct rebuff to the ‘pan-Europeans’, Hitler attacked those ‘who want to propose a European Union to the American Union in order thereby to prevent a threatening world hegemony of the north American continent’. In the absence of the right racial ‘values’, he argued, this would be nothing more than a ‘Jewish Protectorate’ subject to ‘Jewish impulsions’. The creation of a ‘European great power’ on these lines would involve the ‘racial submersion of its founders’, and would thus never survive against the ‘American Union’. This was Hitler’s answer to Stresemann, Briand and Coudenhove-Kalergi. There was nothing for it: the German Volk’s ‘prospects’ of matching those of the ‘American Volk’ would be ‘hopeless’ unless the territory of the Reich were ‘considerably enlarged’ to the east.
German nationalists were reminded of US influence in Europe in August 1929, when Washington announced a new scheme for the settlement of German reparations drawn up by the bankers J. P. Morgan and Owen Young. Within a few months, however, the Wall Street Crash of late October 1929 struck at the heart of the American economy. Its geopolitical consequences were profound. US interest in Europe was radically reduced; many of the American loans which underpinned the boom in the Weimar Republic and the reparations programme on which the territorial settlement rested were now recalled. The International Bank of Settlements set up by the Young Plan was crippled by the resulting credit crunch. America moved towards protectionism. European economies, dependent on American markets and capital, suffered a sharp downturn. Damaging though the Crash and the following slump were, however, they were not enough to plunge Europe and indeed the United States into a deep depression. Instead, it was the contest for supremacy in central Europe which administered the fatal blow to the world economy.
Towards the end of 1929, German domestic politics lurched to the right not because of the fallout from Wall Street, but in response to the announcement of the Young Plan.86 Critics such as Hitler and the press baron and conservative nationalist politician Alfred Hugenberg condemned the projected repayment schedule – which stretched until 1988 – as a ‘new Paris diktat’ which would ‘enslave’ the German people for the rest of the century. They lost the resulting referendum by a large margin, but the debate had served to focus nationalist energies and galvanize the substantial constituency for whom the return to great-power status was the principal issue. The plan was eventually approved by the Reichstag in March 1930, but the intervening controversy put Hitler firmly on the German electoral map. In the Reichstag elections of six months later, which were dominated by reparations and rearmament rather than the economic situation, the Nazis became the second-largest party with nearly 20 per cent of the vote. Germany was now virtually ungovernable, driving Chancellor Heinrich Brüning to rule by presidential decree.
France watched all this with alarm. Aristide Briand now made one last attempt to lock Germany into a stable balance which would guarantee French security. He proposed to trade French sovereignty in return for permanent restraints on German power in a united Europe. In May 1930, Briand unveiled a detailed plan for a ‘European Federal Union’, which would be assembled in a ‘European Conference’ boasting its own permanent executive. Economic cooperation was central to the whole endeavour, but Briand stressed that ‘any progress in the sphere of economic unity was strictly determined by the security question’.87 London refused to participate. These schemes garnered some support among Social Democrats, but the German response was generally cool. Berlin saw the plan as an attempt to impose ‘new coils’ upon them, as State Secretary von Bülow put it.88 Instead, Berlin preferred to press ahead with its plan for the consolidation of German power in central Europe, especially through cooperation with Vienna.89 In early July 1930, the German government rejected the Briand plan.
Matters came to a head between Paris and Berlin soon after. In late August 1930, the German foreign minister, Julius Curtius, launched a plan for a customs union with Austria, designed to draw ever wider swathes of eastern and south-eastern Europe into the orbit of Berlin: first Austria, then Hungary, Czechoslovakia, Romania, Yugoslavia and possibly even Poland. This would thus not only lead to European partial economic integration under German leadership – something which Briand had been frantic to prevent – but also to the de facto unification of Germany and Austria, which the Versailles Treaty expressly forbade. In mid-March 1931, Curtius signed the agreement in Vienna. A month later, one senior German diplomat looked forward to the ‘forced’ entrance of Czechoslovakia to the union; the resulting ‘encirclement’ of Poland, he added, would enable Germany to challenge the disputed eastern borders from a position of strength.90 In retaliation, France deployed her considerable economic muscle – which had increased in relative terms compared to the US and Britain after 1929 – to bring down the largest Austrian bank, the Wiener Kreditanstalt, in May 1931. This led to a German banking crisis, which tipped the country into economic collapse and ultimately deepened the Depression in the United States. In the year before the French destroyed the Kreditanstalt, German unemployment stood at 3 million; a year after it had jumped to more than 5 million and was to rise still further. Likewise, the US unemployment rate was a high 9 per cent in 1930, but it had risen to a crippling 16 per cent by late 1931 and 24 per cent in 1932. In other words, it was the European geopolitical crisis of the early 1930s which caused the Great Depression, not the other way around.
All now depended on whether the next round of the disarmament conference at Geneva, which opened in early February 1932, could reach a settlement that would satisfy both Berlin and Paris. The French refused to agree to German equality without satisfactory guarantees; if the talks failed, the Reich government stood by to implement a large-scale programme of rearmament. The race to see whether the Weimar Republic could deliver on military equality now entered its final stretch. Chancellor Brüning made no secret of his hope that he could bridge irreconcilable domestic divides through foreign policy success. France’s sabotage of the Austrian Customs Union, and then her obstructionism at Geneva left him defenceless against the onslaught of the nationalist right. Brüning’s government fell in May 1932, largely because the Reichswehr and President Hindenburg had given up on him, only a few months before the French, British and Americans conceded German military equality in principle at Geneva in July. When the chancellor had begged not to be brought down ‘one hundred metres from the finishing line’, it was rearmament he was referring to, not economic recovery.91
The resulting elections in July 1932 made Hitler’s National Socialists – capitalizing on growing unemployment and discontent with Versailles – the largest party. Because there was no parliamentary majority for any candidate, Hindenburg appointed Franz von Papen chancellor. Rearmament was his highest priority. Papen made overtures to France and Poland, offering the regional guarantee of the eastern border withheld at Locarno, cooperation against the Soviet Union, and a customs union, in return for a complete end to reparations and total ‘equality’ of armaments. In June–July 1932, the Lausanne Conference announced the end of reparations with a final payment, but the French refused to budge either on armaments or on allowing the Germans to remilitarize the Rhineland. The nationalist right – led by Hitler – and the communists lambasted Papen’s alleged ‘surrender’; his defence minister, General Kurt von Schleicher, spoke contemptuously of a German ‘defeat’. In early December 1932, Hindenburg sacked Papen, but fresh elections only produced further parliamentary deadlock. Hitler’s National Socialists lost several million votes but remained the largest party; the communists made substantial gains. Hindenburg appointed Schleicher chancellor, with a view to continuing government by presidential decree.92 To the fury of nationalist opinion and the Reichswehr ministry, however, Schleicher refused to embark on full-scale rearmament even after the Geneva Conference allowed Germany to do so in principle. In January 1933, Hindenburg sacked the general and replaced him as chancellor with Adolf Hitler. He was supposed to rally domestic opinion behind the new government, while tried and trusted conservatives in key positions oversaw the revival of the Reich as a great power. The Nazi takeover in Germany, therefore, was a product not so much of the economic depression as of the failure of disarmament and the persistence of revisionism.
Adolf Hitler took power with a popular and elite mandate to overturn the Versailles Treaty. He shared the prevailing view that Germany’s central position in Europe, surrounded as she was on every side by potential enemies, required more defensible borders than the 1919 settlement provided. To that extent, the new chancellor was part of a Prusso-German strategic tradition going back hundreds of years. Ultimately, however, Hitler was proposing a radical break with traditional German geopolitics. The relatively minor territorial revisions demanded by the nationalist right would not make Germany more secure. Only the capture of ‘living space’ in the east would provide the critical landmass to enable the Reich to survive in a world dominated by the French and British Empires, the Soviet Union and especially the ‘American Union’, all of them manipulated by the Jews. This was a grandiose vision, certainly, but it was hardly limitless. Hitler was not aiming for global hegemony, but the eastwards territorial expansion which alone would enable Germany to maintain her independence among the world powers. His contention that Germany would be a world power or nothing was therefore not mere nihilistic hubris, but reflected his belief that the Reich would have to achieve a critical global mass or risk being swallowed up. He expected the final showdown with the United States and ‘world Jewry’ to take place at some point in the remote future, probably after his own death.93
Hitler now moved to reshape German government and society for war. After a lone communist burnt down the Reichstag building, Hitler used the ensuing outrage to push through a range of repressive measures aimed at political opponents, many of whom disappeared into concentration camps. The Communist Party was banned. Fresh elections held in an atmosphere of fear and intimidation in early March 1933 resulted in a greatly increased Nazi vote, but still no majority. Hitler was already sure of the support of substantial sections of the nationalist right, however, and soon the Catholic Centre Party yielded to his embrace, albeit reluctantly. In late March 1933, the Reichstag voted him far-reaching powers under the Enabling Act. This effectively made Hitler the supreme lawmaker, and authorized him to conclude treaties with foreign powers without reference to parliament. Over the next few months, the regions and all administrative and social institutions were brought into line in a process known as Gleichschaltung. The party’s paramilitary formations, the SA and SS, fanned out across the Reich suppressing opposition. By the middle of 1933, Hitler’s power was by no means absolute in Germany, but his regime was so firmly entrenched that it could not be dislodged by any means other than an outright invasion.
The rearmament of Germany, which had already begun in the late Weimar period, was now speeded up. Hitler expanded the Reichswehr and pressed ahead with the development of weapons forbidden by the Versailles Treaty, such as tanks and aircraft. In 1934, Hitler ordered the killing of the SA leader, Ernst Röhm, thus signalling his intent to increase and modernize the traditional armed services, rather than replace them by a mass militia. Underpinning all this was a much broader process of social mobilization and transformation. Hitler believed passionately that Germany would only survive the forthcoming struggle if she could achieve inner unity and racial purity. A compulsory Labour Service was established for purposes of ideological indoctrination and military mobilization.94 Class distinctions were to be transcended by national solidarity. German society was to be a ‘Volksgemeinschaft’, a ‘racial community’, and instead of aristocrats, bourgeois and workers, there should be only ‘Volksgenossen’, or ‘people’s comrades’.95 Women were encouraged to marry, stay at home and raise the next generation of German warriors. ‘Every child that a woman brings into the world,’ Hitler announced, ‘is [equivalent to] a battle, a battle waged for the existence of her people’; a celibacy tax was introduced for unmarried men and women.96 Hitler also sought to heal the rift between Catholic Germany and the Protestant mainstream by concluding a Concordat with the pope. Above all, Hitler moved decisively against the Jews, whom he regarded as the principal threat to the cohesion which Germany society needed to cope with the challenges ahead. Jews were rigorously excluded from the civil service, and subject to an economic boycott. It was only a concern for public opinion in Britain and the United States, and fear of reprisals orchestrated by ‘world Jewry’, that restrained the chancellor from taking more extreme measures right away.
At first, Hitler trod carefully in the international sphere. He was anxious not to provoke an attack before his rearmament programme had taken effect. In a speech to the generals of early February 1933, Hitler expressed concern that the French and their ‘eastern satellites’ would attack before the domestic transformation was complete. ‘If it were to be learned that Germany was planning a war,’ he stressed later that year, ‘this could have highly damaging consequences.’ Intelligence reports suggested that a Polish invasion was on the cards.97 Hitler therefore relied on a mixture of bluff, conciliation and manoeuvre. The military dimensions of the Labour Service were played down in order to confuse the watching Allies. France and Britain were duped into believing that German air power was much further advanced than it actually was.98 In January 1934, Hitler broke out of the Franco-Polish encirclement by concluding a non-aggression pact with Warsaw. All the same, the aggressive thrust of German policy was clear. Hitler ended the secret military cooperation with Moscow. He announced his intention to withdraw from the League of Nations, and shortly after he crashed out of the Geneva disarmament talks. Hitler also used the large Nazi party in Austria to agitate for Anschluss with Germany. By July 1934, they felt strong enough to launch a Putsch attempt that failed but during which the Austrian chancellor, Engelbert Dollfuss, was murdered. Hitler’s determination to resurrect German power, to dominate central Europe and to destroy the Versailles settlement generally was now plain for all to see.
German policies caused consternation among the other European powers. In 1934, responding to Hitler’s lunge towards Vienna, Mussolini sent troops to the Brenner Pass on the Austro-Italian border. Hitler immediately backed off. The Soviet leadership was equally if not more alarmed by the victory of National Socialism. They had read Mein Kampf, especially the bits about ‘Russia and her vassal states’, took Nazi ideology seriously, and were in no doubt about what it meant for them. Hitler, the veteran communist Karl Radek warned in 1933, was ‘overturning Versailles’. Stalin and his Commissar for Foreign Affairs, Maxim Litvinov, therefore sought to tie Hitler into a system of mutual guarantees if possible, and to contain him through collective international action if necessary.99 The Soviet Union therefore joined the League of Nations in 1934. That same year, the Comintern abandoned its traditional hatred for Social Democrats and called upon ‘anti-fascist’ parties across Europe to unite against Hitler. Diplomatic feelers were put out to Britain and France. At the same time, however, the Soviet Union fretted that the western powers would come to terms with Hitler over her head. Moscow would have to tread carefully between the imperial rivals and prevent them from getting too close to each other.
There was also no doubt in Paris, Warsaw and London that the new Germany posed a threat. The Poles put down a strong marker by occupying the Westerplatte near Danzig in March 1933, and serious thought was given to the idea of a joint pre-emptive strike with France against Germany before her rearmament was complete. There was no appetite for such a course of action in Paris, however. Joseph Paul-Boncour, the French foreign minister from December 1932 to January 1934, unsuccessfully sought a pact between France, Britain, Italy and Germany to guarantee the peace. He was followed by Louis Barthou, who saw a Soviet alliance directed against Germany as the solution. In mid-September 1934 he even helped Stalin to secure a seat on the Council of the League of Nations. In London, the Defence Requirements Sub-Committee pronounced unmistakably in February 1934 that while both Japan and, to a lesser extent, Italy were serious threats, the ‘ultimate potential enemy’ was Germany.100 The defence of the wider empire was a much lower priority. Britain decided in July 1934 to establish a substantial ‘Field Force’ for deployment to the continent in time of war. Yet there were very few in Whitehall and Westminster who were advocating out-and-out military resistance to Hitler at that point. One of them was Winston Churchill, now in the political wilderness, who argued from the start that the Germans – ‘this mighty people, the most powerful and most dangerous in the western world’ – had voluntarily subjected themselves to Hitler, and should be resisted without delay.101 The perceived strength of the Luftwaffe greatly increased anxiety about Hitler. For this reason, the prime minister, Stanley Baldwin, warned parliament in July 1934, during a debate on the expansion of the RAF, that ‘since the day of the air, the old frontiers are gone’. ‘When you think of the defence of England,’ he continued, ‘you no longer think of the chalk cliffs of Dover; you think of the Rhine. That is where our frontier lies.’102
On the far side of the Atlantic, Hitler caused relatively little alarm for the moment.103 President Franklin Delano Roosevelt, who was inaugurated in January 1933, did not want to jeopardize his programme of internal recovery through external distractions. Moreover, his Secretary of State, Sumner Welles, was strongly sceptical that any fundamental US interests were at stake in Europe. The only initiative that Roosevelt launched to balance Germany, and to a lesser extent Japan, was the recognition of the Soviet Union in November 1933.104 One way or the other, the great powers failed not only to take preventive action against Hitler in 1933–4, when it would have been militarily straightforward, but even to form a common front against him. Regime change or the forcible restoration of German democracy was never considered.
All the same, the Nazi threat had an immediate effect on domestic politics across Europe. Stalin was conscious that failure to deal with it would undermine his authority at home. ‘No people,’ he remarked in 1933, ‘can respect its government if it sees the danger of attack and does not prepare for self-defense.’105 He therefore tightened his grip on party and population even further. Even though the origins of the policy pre-date Hitler’s takeover of power, collectivization was stepped up, resulting in a huge famine in the Ukraine in 1933. That same year, Stalin unleashed a series of ‘Treason Trials’, which led to the execution of Lev Kamenev, former deputy chairman of the Council of People’s Commissars, and Zinoviev on charges of conspiring against the Soviet Union with fascists and Trotskyites abroad. At the same time, a concerted campaign was launched against national groups suspected of collaborating with the external enemy, especially in the Ukraine and White Russia.106 In Moscow, high politics polarized around the question of how to respond to Hitler. Figures such as Vyacheslav Molotov, chairman of the Council of People’s Commissars, and the collectivization supremo, Lazar Kaganovich, challenged Litvinov’s policy of trying to create a European alliance against Hitler through the League of Nations. For the moment, Stalin went along with Litvinov, but nobody knew better than he that the power he had won promising to defend the Soviet Union against external attack could just as easily be lost on the same grounds.
British and French domestic politics after 1933 were also substantially shaped by the rise of Hitler. The bitterly contested East Fulham by-election in October 1933 was dominated by the question of rearmament and won by the candidate opposed to greater military expenditure.107 In the 1935 general election both major parties were opposed – Labour bitterly so – to large-scale rearmament, and the victorious Conservative prime minister, Stanley Baldwin, later notoriously admitted that any other position would have led to his defeat. At the heart of this hesitation was widespread fear of aerial bombing, which it was widely believed would cause hundreds of thousands if not millions of civilian casualties. The subject dominated Commons debates on foreign policy and rearmament with the result that press, parliamentary and public interest in national security largely exhausted itself in demanding increased provision for air defence; it was expected that Hitler would be contained and in the end defeated by naval blockade. There was hardly any popular concern at all for the state of the European balance, and the huge continental commitment which would be required to uphold it. In public opinion, the ‘blue water’ policy of an earlier generation of navalists had become a ‘blue skies’ strategy designed to minimize British involvement in Europe as much as possible.
In France, there were huge right-wing riots outside the Chamber of Deputies in Paris in February 1934. The left saw this as a Nazi- or Mussolini-style attempted takeover, and therefore responded positively to Moscow’s suggestion of a Popular Front against ‘fascism’. In June 1934, the communists and socialists formed a unity pact; the Radicals joined a month later. In France, unlike in Britain, leftist parties thus quickly came around to the view that the Nazis would have to be resisted by force. The problem was that French society was in a state of abject moral and physical decline. Pacifism, or at least a ‘war anxiety’ induced by the traumatic memory of the trenches, was the dominant discourse. Large sections of the press were in German and Italian pay, teachers and trade unionists were strongly opposed to confronting Hitler militarily, and nearly a third of males eligible for the army were deemed unfit for service, nearly twice as many as in more vigorous Germany.108 In both countries, therefore, there was widespread pessimism about whether democracy would be strong enough to prevail against the dictators, or indeed whether it deserved to do so. There were many on the European right, especially in France, who sympathized with fascism and felt that it was better able to give expression to the national will. They felt that if they could not beat Hitler they should join him.
The challenge of the dictators also affected the relationship between London, Paris and their overseas empires. The imperial priority, as the British Permanent Under-Secretary to the Treasury, Warren Fisher, remarked in the mid-1930s, was to contain the ‘Teutonic tribes, who century after century have been inspired by the philosophy of brute force’. On the other hand, the support of the empire, especially self-governing British dominions, could not be taken for granted. There was still considerable doubt among the Canadians, Australians, New Zealanders and South Africans that confronting Germany militarily was necessary or wise, not least because anxiety about Italian and especially Japanese power often loomed larger overseas.109 Some constituencies, such as the Afrikaners and the French Canadians, could not be relied on at all: the Québecois leader, Henri Bourassa, warned that ‘British imperialism must not be allowed to drag Canada into any more wars.’110 In 1935, the India Act sought to deliver on earlier promises of self-government and meet the demands of the Congress Party halfway. The subcontinent was to remain an imperial strategic reserve, paid for in part by London, poised to deploy troops or labour forces to operate east and west.
American politics in the first years after 1933, by contrast, were largely unaffected by the changing geopolitical situation. To be sure, the economic trauma of the Great Depression meant that US anxiety about the future of democracy was widespread, but only a tiny minority saw Nazism or Italian fascism as a viable alternative. Nor were the dictators popularly regarded as a threat, at least for the time being.111 There were as yet relatively few calls to show solidarity with the European democracies or to protect the Jews from discrimination. President Roosevelt’s ‘New Deal’, a huge experiment in state intervention into the economy, was not driven by a concern to prepare American society for the next conflict. He spoke of a ‘war’ on depression, not on neighbouring powers. The radical measures taken in the early 1930s, the creation of the Tennessee Valley Authority, the Works Progress Administration and other programmes designed to take the United States out of depression, or at least to ameliorate its effects, were perhaps the first undertaken by any government of a major power without an explicit strategic agenda.
In March 1935, Hitler announced the introduction of conscription, and the replacement of the old 100,000-man Reichswehr by a Wehrmacht of more than half a million men. The existence of a growing air force, the Luftwaffe, was made public. This was the most serious Nazi breach of the Versailles settlement so far. The complete rearmament of Germany, and thus the transformation of the whole European balance of power, was now on the cards. This time, the powers reacted quickly. In mid-April, the British, French and Italians formed the ‘Stresa Front’ to uphold the Locarno Treaty, defend what was left of Versailles, and resist any further German encroachments. In early May, France and the Soviet Union concluded a treaty of mutual assistance albeit without any meaningful military protocols. Germany was now much more effectively surrounded than at any point since 1917. Hitler would have to act quickly before the ring drew tighter around the Reich and strangled in its infancy the domestic transformation he had inaugurated. He would have to prise open the encircling coalition and throw this first sustained attempt to contain a resurgent Germany off-balance.
In late June 1935, Hitler made a significant breach in the hostile front. He persuaded the British to conclude a Naval Agreement in which he renounced the return of German colonies, explicitly acknowledged British maritime superiority by agreeing to limit German construction to one third of that of the Royal Navy, and undertook not to engage in unrestricted submarine warfare. In Britain, locking Hitler into an arms control agreement while she still held the advantage was reckoned a great success. It was also seen as a way of escaping a continental commitment and concentrating on imperial defence. In return, Hitler had subverted British commitment to the Stresa Front. All the same, Germany’s position remained extraordinarily precarious until October 1935. That month, Mussolini – misunderstanding the spirit of Stresa – sought to draw on his credit in Paris and London by invading Ethiopia, thus underlining Italy’s claim to great-power status. Much to his surprise, the British and French governments – under pressure from outraged public opinion – strongly opposed the move. They did not, however, press the League of Nations to impose effective sanctions – especially a crucial oil embargo – on Mussolini. Hitler, on the other hand, expressed not only public sympathy for Italian ambitions in Africa, but also signalled his willingness to resolve the thorny question of the South Tyrol by accepting Italian sovereignty there. The Stresa Front, and with it the prospect of a pan-European coalition to contain a resurgent Germany, disintegrated.
Hitler now moved quickly to exploit the opening by occupying the demilitarized zone in the Rhineland in late March 1936. This was another hammer blow to the Versailles system, and a direct challenge to the Stresa powers. Hitler later pronounced the subsequent forty-eight hours as ‘the most nerve-wracking my life. If the French had then marched into the Rhineland we would have had to withdraw with our tails between our legs, for the military resources at our disposal would have been wholly inadequate for even a moderate resistance’.112 Paris, however, did not move and nor did London. The ‘Führer’ also speeded up the mobilization of German society and the economy. In August 1936, he conceived a ‘Four Year Plan’ – the choice of words suggested a quicker pace than Stalin’s ‘Five Year Plan’ – to prepare for war by 1940/41. Hermann Göring was put in charge of this effort. ‘Autarchy’ – self-sufficiency in foodstuffs and raw materials – became the watchword. The costs of rearmament were to be borne in full knowledge of their distorting effect on the economy. ‘The confrontation we are heading towards,’ Göring remarked at the end of the year, ‘requires huge capabilities. There is no end to rearmament in sight. The only decisive thing here is victory or defeat. If we win, business will be compensated sufficiently. One cannot be guided here by actuarial considerations of profit, but only by the demands of politics.’113
The geopolitical and domestic consequences of the re-militarization of the Rhineland were enormous. Other powers now scrambled too. In October of that year, Belgium abandoned the Franco-Belgian military accords of 1920 to pursue an ‘exclusively and completely Belgian’ policy, in effect to become neutral.114 Hitler’s coup also provoked a passionate debate within Britain and France. Some British observers argued that Hitler was merely moving into his ‘back yard’. Most were concerned that the staff talks with the French would provoke Hitler, and drag them all into another continental European war. In France, by contrast, the German move contributed substantially to the election of a Popular Front government under Léon Blum in April 1936, which was pledged to unite the country against fascism at home and abroad. His administration embarked on an ambitious programme of social transformation, designed to make France not only more equal, but also more resilient in the face of Hitler and Mussolini.115 The school-leaving age was raised, the Bank of France was placed under partial state control, fixed prices for wheat were introduced, and in August 1936 the arms industry was nationalized. Édouard Daladier’s defence ministry was permitted to increase expenditure radically to nearly one third of the entire budget. France was preparing for the worst.
Battle between the Popular Fronts and the emerging German–Italian alliance was soon joined. In July 1936, Spanish nationalist forces under General Francisco Franco revolted against the left-wing Popular Front government elected earlier that year, plunging the country into civil war.116 Many perceived this proxy conflict between European fascism and the international Popular Front as an ideological war between dictatorship and democracy. It was the geopolitical issues at stake, however, which made the Spanish Civil War such a crucial front in the battle for mastery in Europe. Hitler sent an expeditionary force to help Franco, in order to put pressure on France’s southern flank and re-create the pattern of encirclement which had threatened Paris in the time of Charles V. More importantly, Hitler was determined to pre-empt a communist victory which would spill over into France, allowing both powers to collaborate with the Soviet Union in the encirclement of Germany. Mussolini sent an even larger force to support the nationalists. Stalin dithered for some time, but eventually backed the Republicans. The French Popular Front government of Léon Blum, by contrast, declared a policy of non-intervention in August 1936. Britain followed suit. Both powers imposed an arms embargo on the whole country, which tended to favour the better-equipped nationalist forces. Thousands of volunteers from France, Britain, Germany, the United States and many other parts of the world flocked to Spain in the ‘International Brigades’ to fight ‘fascism’.
As Europe was sucked into the Spanish vortex, another crisis was brewing on the other side of the Mediterranean. In 1936, encouraged by the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem, the Palestinian Arabs launched a three-year revolt against the British mandate designed to drive out the Jewish population. Zionist settlers retaliated and set up clandestine organizations such as the Irgun and Betar; for the first time, Jews would now take the fight to the enemy militarily. Bitter guerrilla warfare resulted. London eventually deployed about 10 per cent of the British army in the late 1930s to secure this crucial piece of the geopolitical jigsaw in the Middle East. In 1937, at the height of the disturbances, the Peel Commission recommended a partition of the area between Arabs and Jews with an exchange of population between the two states. Arab leaders feared that they were too weak to prevail against British imperialism and world Zionism on their own; for this reason, they looked to Nazi Germany for ideological inspiration and practical help.117 For the time being, however, the Arabs were much more interested in Hitler than he was in them. The Führer was still experimenting with the idea of deporting German Jews beyond the boundaries of Europe, perhaps to Africa; in 1938, he approved the idea of sending them to Madagascar. A Jewish state in Palestine was therefore not a threat, but an opportunity to dump more refugees.
By the end of 1936, Hitler was back in control of events. He had not only broken out of Franco-Polish encirclement, but he had stymied a serious attempt by France, Britain and Italy to contain him at Stresa. The United States – his ultimate enemy – had hardly stirred. He had restored full German sovereignty over the Reich itself, the Saar and the Rhineland; rearmament was proceeding apace. Mussolini – who had been such a bone in the throat over Austria – increasingly came round after the Abyssinian crisis. From July 1936, his new Italian foreign minister, Count Ciano, sought to ‘faschistize’ Italian diplomacy and to steer his country in a more ‘revolutionary’ and pro-German direction. A formal alliance – the ‘Axis’ – followed in October. A month later, Hitler concluded the Anti-Comintern Pact with Japan, and – in due course – Italy. This was directed principally against the Soviet Union, which was now menaced west and east by the Axis, but it was also intended as a global ‘encirclement’ of the British Empire in order to deter it from intervention in continental European affairs. A new global geopolitics, pitting the Axis dictatorships against the western democracies, and both against Soviet communism, had emerged.
Stalin reacted violently. He became increasingly paranoid about foreign subversion and embarked on a prolonged round of ‘purges’ to consolidate his control over party and state.118 The most capable army commander, Marshal Tukachevski, was executed on suspicion of treasonable contacts with the German secret service; tens of thousands of Red Army officers perished with him. Hundreds of thousands of ordinary citizens were also shot. Countless more were sent to the Gulag, an archipelago of more than one hundred labour camps mainly in Siberia. Kulaks, an independent larger farmer class, were accused of being in league with the Japanese through an imagined ‘Russian General Military Union’. There was also a strong ethnic component to the persecution, in which ‘enemy nations’ were systematically targeted. Koreans were deported from the Far Eastern provinces in case they might collaborate with the Japanese. About 100,000 Poles in the Ukraine and White Russia considered to be a potential security risk were shot in 1937–8. It was, at one level, the politics of the permanent pogrom and at the other the logical conclusion to the long Russian tradition of coercive modernization in the face of an external threat. About 4 million men and women were affected in all, of whom about 800,000 were killed.
On the other side of the world, President Roosevelt also reacted sharply to the new Axis geopolitics. Looking west and east, he saw forces gathering which would threaten the security of the United States in the long term. In Europe, the dictators were on the march; in Asia, emboldened by the Anti-Comintern Pact, the Japanese launched a full-scale invasion of China in early July 1937. That year the journalist Livingston Hartley published Is America afraid?, arguing that the domination of Europe by a single power such as Germany, and Asia by Japan, threatened to encircle the United States. This would be, moreover, the envelopment of democracy by dictatorships. In early October 1937, Roosevelt gave voice to these sentiments in a much-publicized speech at Chicago. ‘Let no one imagine that America will escape,’ he cautioned, ‘that America may expect mercy, that this Western Hemisphere will not be attacked.’ ‘When an epidemic of physical disease starts to spread,’ Roosevelt continued, ‘the community approves and joins in a quarantine of the patients in order to protect the health of the community against the spread of the disease.’119 At the same time, Roosevelt had not completely given up hope that Germany might be contained through a new ‘general settlement’ in Europe at which her reasonable demands were met. To this end, he authorized his Secretary of State, Sumner Welles, to tour the continent and mediate between the great powers. Whether it was to be the carrot of the ‘Welles Plan’, or the stick of ‘quarantine’, one thing was clear. The United States had re-engaged with European geopolitics.
In Berlin, the shift in American policy towards Europe struck home like a thunderbolt. Hitler’s strategy had been to establish German dominance in central Europe, preparatory to destroying the Soviet Union and securing the Lebensraum in the east without which the Reich could not hope to contain the overwhelming power of the United States. Roosevelt’s shot across his bows in early October 1937 rendered the original timetable obsolete. Henceforth, Hitler had to reckon with American hostility. This meant that the domestic transformation of Germany and the consolidation of central Europe under his leadership would have to be speeded up. For this reason, Hitler summoned a meeting of his political and military leaders in the Imperial Chancellery in early November 1937. A sudden urgency now entered the Führer’s discourse. ‘It [is my] unalterable determination,’ Hitler announced, ‘to solve Germany’s problem of space by 1943–1945.’120 Only the acquisition of ‘greater living space’ and raw materials in Europe, adjacent to the Reich, would suffice. The first step in this direction, he ordained, was the annexation of Austria and Czechoslovakia.
At the same time, Hitler stepped up the pace of domestic change. In February 1938, he pushed out the war minister, Werner von Blomberg, and the Chief of the Army, Freiherr von Fritsch. Hitler replaced them with the Supreme Command of the Wehrmacht under the utterly subservient Wilhelm Keitel, and the equally pliable Walther von Brauchitsch as Chief of the Army. He also used the opportunity to remove the conservative nationalist Konstantin von Neurath and replace him with the radical Nazi Joachim von Ribbentrop as foreign minister. The German national security apparatus was now completely in Hitler’s hands. His next target was Austria, control of which would not only give the Reich a substantial demographic and economic boost, but also expose Czechoslovakia to attack on its southern flank. Here Hitler exploited another opportunity; indeed, events forced his hand. In early March 1938, the Austrian chancellor, Kurt Schuschnigg, announced the holding of a referendum on unification with Germany. He intended to skew the wording of the question, and the composition of the electorate, in such a way as to ensure a rejection of Anschluss. Hitler immediately moved to preempt this and occupied Austria amid scenes of wild enthusiasm from the local population. This time, Mussolini stood aside. At the beginning of the following month, Hitler ordered the traditional imperial insignia to be moved from Vienna to the party city of Nuremberg. This highly symbolic move was intended to suggest a synthesis between the old Holy Roman Empire and National Socialism.
All that now stood between Hitler and total control of central Europe was Czechoslovakia, with its large and restive German minority in the Sudetenland, who made up more than one third of the population. There was no appetite in either London or Paris to defend its integrity. This reflected a widespread belief that Berlin had a legitimate grievance against the Czechs over the treatment of the Sudeten Germans, and residual hopes that Hitler’s aims were essentially limited. The principal reason, however, why the two western powers refused to intervene was fear of a rearmed Germany. Nobody who remembered the Reich’s extraordinary military performance in the world war wanted to risk another conflict if it could possibly be helped. In particular, general staffs in both Britain and France strongly opposed a land war against Germany in 1938. They ruled out simultaneously fighting Hitler in central Europe and Mussolini in the Mediterranean; London also had the Japanese to worry about. Cooperation with Stalin’s Soviet Union was ruled out on ideological and practical grounds. The dominions were resolutely against fighting over Czechoslovakia. Doing so would shatter the very unity of the British Empire upon which London depended as a force multiplier in Europe. Even ardent resisters such as Sir Robert Vansittart baulked at taking on Hitler openly and this weakened their hand against the dominant ‘appeasers’. ‘It is easy to be brave in speech,’ the Permanent Under-Secretary in the Foreign Office, Sir Alexander Cadogan, asked him at the time of Hitler’s ultimatum over Austria, ‘[but] will you fight?’ Vansittart replied: ‘No.’ ‘Then what is it all about?’ Cadogan rejoined. ‘To me it seems a most cowardly thing to do to urge a small man to fight a big [man] if you won’t help the former.’121
For this reason, western leaders were anxious to refute not only the idea that Hitler represented a fundamental threat to European peace, but the notion that there was an irreconcilable gulf between Nazism and the west. ‘We shall never get far’ in the work of mediation, the British prime minister, Neville Chamberlain, told parliament in early November 1938, ‘unless we can accustom ourselves to the idea that the democracies and the totalitarian states are not to be ranged against one another in two opposing blocs’. Much better, he argued, for Britain to ‘work together’ with its rivals and thereby ‘facilitate the international exchange of goods and the regulation of international relations in various ways for the good of all’.122 While Hitler was consciously waging an ideological war, the western democracies continued to pursue a strategy of engagement in the spirit of Locarno. They rejected Stalin’s frantic attempts to create a common diplomatic front against Germany. The effect of this approach was the opposite of what was intended. Instead of entering into constructive cooperation, or allowing themselves to be enmeshed in a web of mutual obligations, the dictators simply pocketed all concessions and made further demands.
So when Hitler confronted Czechoslovakia in the autumn of 1938, brandishing the minority-rights legislation of the League on behalf of the Sudeten Germans, Prague faced the onslaught alone. It was unable to take up Stalin’s offer of military aid because neither the Poles nor the Romanians – fearful that the Red Army would refuse to leave – would grant transit through their territory. Mussolini strongly backed Hitler. Britain and France instructed Prague to capitulate to Hitler’s demands; despite having a strong army the Czechs decided not to fight. Chamberlain flew to Germany in late September to arrange the Czech surrender. In the Munich agreement, he allowed Hitler to annex the entire Sudetenland, an industrially and strategically vital semi-circle around the Bohemian periphery. Czechoslovakia was not only territorially mutilated but rendered militarily defenceless. The rest of Bohemia was there for the taking. Returning to Britain, Chamberlain proclaimed ‘peace in our time’.
The Munich agreement had a profound effect on European domestic politics and geopolitical alignments. In late 1938, French opinion polls showed that 70 per cent of Frenchmen wanted to resist any further German encroachments. In Britain, the longstanding debate between ‘appeasers’ and ‘resisters’ on how to deal with Germany became the central political issue. More and more members of the Labour Party moved away from pacifism and towards the view that Hitler had to be stopped; the left-wing press, led by the Daily Mirror, now relentlessly battered appeasement.123 The Conservatives remained a ‘class divided’ between those such as Churchill, Harold Macmillan and Anthony Eden, who believed that concessions simply encouraged further demands, and the Chamberlainite majority, which held that another war against Germany would destroy civilization as they knew it and open the door to a communist takeover of the whole of Europe. Some such as the Foreign Secretary, Lord Halifax, even saw Hitler as a ‘bulwark of the west against Bolshevism’. Matters came to a head during the bitter by-elections held in late October and early November 1938 when Liberals, Labour and Conservative dissidents rallied to support anti-appeasement candidates. In Oxford, their campaign literature announced that a vote for the official Conservative candidate was ‘a vote for Hitler’; he squeaked in with a greatly reduced majority. Three weeks later, however, a Conservative majority at Bridgwater was overturned in a result that was widely regarded as a popular rejection of appeasement. The message was clear: Chamberlain’s policy of appeasement had now lost its popular backing.124
In Germany, on the other hand, Hitler’s triumph at Munich effectively silenced critical voices within the elite. Carefully laid plans by General Ludwig Beck and other military critics to topple Hitler before he plunged Germany into a ruinous war were called off. The conspirators received little encouragement from abroad: Chamberlain dismissed the German resistance as ‘Jacobites’ who lacked legitimacy at home. Hitler now stepped up his campaign against the enemy within. On 9 November 1938, the SA and the mob were let loose on synagogues and Jewish property across Germany in the Kristallnacht pogrom. A month later, Ribbentrop insisted that all representatives of Jewish descent be excluded from his diplomatic receptions. In late January 1939, Hitler escalated his rhetoric still further. He prophesied to the Reichstag that ‘If International Finance Jewry within Europe and abroad should succeed once more in plunging the peoples into a world war, then the consequence will not be the Bolshevization of the world and therefore a victory of Jewry, but on the contrary, the destruction of the Jewish race in Europe.’125 In other words, Hitler regarded his struggle against the Jews as part not of domestic politics but of grand strategy.
In March 1939, Hitler took advantage of a crisis in Czech–Slovak relations to occupy Prague. Once again, the British and the French gave way; the League of Nations took no action and neither did the United States. Bohemia and Moravia became a German protectorate; Slovakia declared its independence as a German satellite. Czechoslovakia ceased to exist. Hitler’s military and economic preparations for war received a powerful boost from the absorption of the Czech army, which included many advanced armoured fighting vehicles, and the industrial potential of Bohemia. Rather than rallying to contain Germany over Czechoslovakia in 1938–9, the smaller and middling powers now rushed to make their peace with Hitler. Romania, Yugoslavia and Bulgaria sought German protection. Some states even joined in the feeding frenzy themselves, partly in order to indulge longstanding ambitions, but also because they believed that restraint would only be rewarded by unilateral gains on the part of their rivals. Poland seized the disputed territory of Teschen from Czechoslovakia in late 1938, and Hungary annexed a substantial strip of southern Slovakia populated largely by Magyars. Mussolini, too, was anxious to ‘compensate’ for Hitler’s gains with acquisitions of his own. He responded to Hitler’s annexation of Bohemia and Moravia by occupying Albania in April 1939. One way or the other, the European map was being changed as much by reactions to Hitler as by the man himself.
Within British and French domestic politics, however, opinion shifted sharply against appeasement. Hitler’s occupation of Prague effectively destroyed popular and press confidence in government strategy towards Germany; the parliamentary rumblings grew greater. Chamberlain was relentlessly attacked from the opposition benches and, more worryingly for him, was confronted with calls from Conservative resisters for an all-party government. In effect this would have lined Britain up in a ‘popular front’ against Hitler. Similar developments were taking place in France. The appeasers led by the foreign minister, Georges Bonnet, were losing ground to the resisters around the prime minister, Daladier. British and French society was preparing to resist Germany.
London and Paris were now forced to recognize that Hitler not only totally dominated central Europe – something they tolerated with severe misgivings – but intended to overturn the whole European balance on the strength of it. In late February, the cabinet agreed to go to war in the event of a German attack on Holland, Belgium or Switzerland, and issued a public guarantee of French security. The continental ‘Field Force’ was mobilized in the first months of 1939, and the first really intensive Anglo-French staff talks followed soon after. The Entente Cordiale had been revived. It was not enough, however, just to draw the line in the west. Further German gains in eastern Europe – and rumours of a descent on Poland or Romania were already circulating – would have to be prevented. Moreover, Hitler could only be defeated – or better still deterred – if he was forced to fight on two fronts; keeping the Poles in play was therefore vital. For this reason, the western powers issued a formal guarantee of Polish and Romanian independence in March 1939, though not necessarily of their territorial integrity. This was designed to allow some room for a Polish–German territorial settlement, but to deter Hitler from outright annexation, thus denying him the resources to wage a successful war against them.
Hitler’s actions had also made a deep impression on the United States. Roosevelt told his civilian and defence chiefs that for the first time since the Holy Alliance in 1818 the United States now faced the possibility of an attack ‘on the Atlantic side in both the Northern and the Southern hemispheres’. If the Germans could defeat or seize the Royal Navy that would result in a substantial shift in the maritime balance of power to America’s disadvantage. Furthermore, as Roosevelt pointed out in a press conference at around the same time, technological advances – especially air power – had brought a potential attack ‘infinitely closer’ than in previous decades.126 Moreover, the dictators posed not merely a strategic but also an ideological threat; indeed, the two considerations fused in the president’s mind. For much of the late 1930s, he feared that Hitler or Mussolini might ‘do in Mexico what they did in Spain’, which was to ‘organize a revolution, a fascist revolution’.127 Roosevelt therefore saw the struggle against the European dictators as a cosmic battle between two world views, in which the security of the United States was inextricably linked to that of the world beyond the western hemisphere.128
Stalin, however, was now convinced that the western European powers were not interested in a common front. On the contrary, there was every sign that they hoped that Hitler could be used to contain him. In March 1939, therefore, the Soviet dictator warned publicly that the USSR would ‘maintain vigilance and not allow those who would provoke war to draw our country into a conflict’, nor would he ‘pull others’ chestnuts out of the fire’.129 His suggested Franco-British-Russian alliance to guarantee the territorial settlement in eastern Europe – in effect simply an extension of the promise London and Paris had already made – led to desultory negotiations which dragged on through the summer. The delay was partly due to Polish refusal to countenance Soviet military help – which would have fatally undermined Warsaw’s hold on its White Russian and Ukrainian provinces – and a mistaken Anglo-French belief in the strength of the Polish army. Radical action was needed to break out of the vicelike grip in which Tokyo and Berlin now held the Soviet Union. That same month, the Russians decisively defeated Japanese forces in Mongolia at the battle of Nomonhan. His eastern flank secure, at least for the time being, Stalin could now concentrate on Hitler.
For his part, Hitler was feeling more and more boxed in. Deeply worried by Roosevelt’s increasingly belligerent rhetoric,130 and convinced that the showdown with the United States was much closer than he had expected, Hitler ordered the implementation of the ‘Z-Plan’, the construction of a large ocean-going surface fleet – the Weltmachtsflotte,131 capable of projecting German air power across the Atlantic, not just against the British Empire but also the United States. In March, Hitler resurrected his colonial demands in Africa and brought Spain into the Anti-Comintern Pact, a move directed much more across the Atlantic than at Moscow. In April 1939, he abrogated the Anglo-German naval treaty, partly as a reaction to the Polish guarantee, but also in recognition of the fact that the maritime confrontation with the Anglo-Saxon powers was moving closer.
It was in eastern Europe, however, that Hitler’s new timetable really made itself felt. The only way of balancing the world powers, especially the United States, lay through the conquest of living space in the east. To this end, Hitler approached Poland in late October 1938 – shortly after the Sudeten crisis – with an offer of a joint campaign against the Soviet Union.132 In return for Danzig and military cooperation – including transit across Polish territory to attack Russia – Warsaw would receive lands in the Ukraine. Poland, in other words, was to be co-opted as a junior partner in the Lebensraum project, not eliminated; it would rank somewhere between an ally, such as Mussolini, and a complete satellite, such as Slovakia. To Hitler’s surprise and immense irritation, however, the Poles refused his overtures. Worse still, the Anglo-French guarantee both ‘re-encircled’ Germany – the phrase was on everybody’s lips in Berlin from March 1939 – and created an immovable obstacle to the Führer’s grand strategy. The Poles stood between him and the ultimate security he craved: spatial depth in the Russian interior. If the Soviet Union were to be attacked, Poland would have to be crushed. With breathtaking audacity, Hitler now turned to Stalin to eliminate the last barrier to attacking him.
The resulting Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact of August 1939 was thus very much a sudden German initiative, but it offered Stalin at least a chance of a managed territorial reorganization in the east. Without agreement, Hitler would simply take the lot, and he might even ally with the French and British against Russia. Stalin was also playing a long game, hoping – as he told the Politburo in mid-August – for a ‘Sovietized Germany’, the ultimate prize, after a Franco-British victory over Germany. For all these reasons, he explained, it was ‘in the interests of the USSR . . . that war breaks out between the Reich and the capitalist Anglo-French bloc’.133 Stalin’s main concern was not Poland, but the Baltic states: he feared that Hitler would move into Lithuania, Latvia and Estonia. The first clause of the pact dealt with Lithuania, only the second with Poland, and the intention seems to have been to mark the eastern limit of German expansion into Poland, rather than necessarily a zone for direct Soviet occupation. So when Hitler attacked Poland on 1 September 1939, he fired the opening shots of a Soviet–German war of coalition against the established European territorial order. Neither dictator got the war, or the partner, he had originally wanted, however. Hitler had intended to invade the Soviet Union in alliance with Poland; Stalin would have much preferred to have joined an Anglo-French front against Nazi Germany.
Britain and France eventually declared war on Germany on 3 September 1939, with great reluctance, and made no effort to attack Hitler’s exposed western border. They still hoped for a compromise peace which would leave Germany intact as a bulwark against Bolshevism.134 Stalin now, for his part, feared that a German defeat would upset the European balance and expose him to a concerted attack by the capitalist powers.135 In the event, Warsaw’s resistance crumbled quickly, and so on 17 September – the day after he finally vanquished the Japanese forces at Khalkhin Gol in Mongolia – Stalin sent Soviet troops into her eastern provinces. The fourth partition of Poland was complete. An intense period of Russo-German cooperation now followed, during which Stalin sent Hitler vital raw materials to wage war against the western powers; the NKVD returned escaped German communists to Hitler; and the SS handed Ukrainian nationalists over to the Soviet Union. Both intelligence services ruthlessly suppressed the Polish intelligentsia and officer corps. In November 1939, Stalin attacked Finland with a view to securing a buffer to defend Leningrad. A full-scale Russo-German territorial reorganization of eastern and northern Europe was underway.
The war had profound, but very different, effects on domestic politics. Unlike 1914, France did not experience a new Union Sacrée bringing together all parties and classes of society, however briefly and superficially. On the contrary, the divides between left and right, and between right-wing and left-wing appeasers and right-wing and left-wing resisters deepened. The position was further complicated by the Hitler–Stalin pact. The Communist Party was instructed by Moscow to refuse all cooperation with the government; its leader, Maurice Thorez, deserted from the army and fled to the Soviet Union. Armament production was sluggish, primarily because the economically liberal government left it in the hands of private enterprise. The war was prosecuted timidly, both in military and in propagandistic terms. French forces lulled themselves into a false sense of security behind the Maginot Line, while Hitler and Stalin reordered eastern Europe.
In Britain, the outbreak of war and the failure to contain Hitler nearly destroyed Chamberlain’s government. In the end, the prime minister was pushed into taking action by a popular, press and parliamentary determination to confront Germany. As a result, Britain entered the war unenthusiastically but united, the only major state of the subsequent victorious Grand Alliance which took on Hitler directly rather than being attacked by him. Moreover, Australia, Canada, New Zealand and South Africa all rallied to the cause, in the last case only after a very bitter parliamentary debate; Ireland remained neutral. The war economy worked efficiently from the start of hostilities, thanks not least to government-sponsored cooperation between industry and trade unions in order to boost arms production.136
The totalitarian powers, on the other hand, pursued much more radical internal policies. Stalin revolutionized the occupied Polish territories, uprooting the bourgeoisie; fearful that they might form a pro-Allied fifth column, he ordered the murder of thousands of captured Polish officers in Katyn Wood in April–May 1940.137 Likewise, Hitler tightened his grip on the German home front and the occupied territories. In late September 1939, all the security and surveillance organizations were united under Heinrich Himmler in the formidable Reichsicherheitshauptamt. A month later, Hitler authorized the start of a ‘euthanasia’ programme designed to eliminate ‘unworthy life’ and strengthen the biological fibre of the nation for the struggle ahead. Baltic and Russian Germans were brought ‘home’ into the Reich. He repeated his warnings that the Jews would be punished for plunging Europe back into war. The Jews in Poland were herded into ghettos; tens of thousands were summarily shot. For the moment, however, the German Jews were left alive, primarily to deter the United States. In July 1940, Hitler referred to them explicitly as ‘hostages’ in German hands. For all the rhetoric, however, Hitler did not yet order the total mobilization of German society for war. He was much slower than the British to draft women into the workplace, and more concerned to maintain the supply of consumer goods. Germany was still arming in breadth rather than depth: it would have difficulty sustaining a long war against Britain and France. Hitler was determined that there should be no repeat of the experience of the First World War, when the home front had collapsed as a result of the blockade.
With Poland crushed, Hitler was anxious to wind down the war in the west, and to secure Lebensraum in the east, before the United States intervened. In late September 1939, he opened a ‘peace offensive’ designed to achieve a compromise peace with Britain and France. He would then almost certainly have launched his attack on the Soviet Union as originally intended. London and Paris were not prepared to leave him in control of Poland, however, and so the overtures were rejected. Worse still, from the Germans’ point of view, the British and French were preparing to cut off their supply of iron ore through Norway. So in April–May 1940, Hitler was forced to improvise again. He pre-empted the Allied occupation of Norway with his own invasion; Denmark was also occupied to secure the line of communication. Shortly afterwards, Hitler launched a lightning invasion of Holland, Belgium and France. This operation – which he feared might take several years – succeeded beyond his wildest expectations. Within a few weeks, the Low Countries had been completely over-run, the French army crushed, and the British Expeditionary Force so comprehensively beaten that it was lucky to escape in such large numbers from the beaches of Dunkirk.
The German victory in the west transformed European politics.138 From June 1940, Hitler controlled not only the whole of central Europe, but also most of Poland, the entire northern half of France, the Low Countries, Denmark and Norway. What was left of France was dominated by Germany. The new, nominally independent ‘Vichy’ regime under Marshal Pétain and his chief minister, Pierre Laval, in the south sought to carve out a role for itself in Europe through ‘collaboration’ with Berlin.139 The traditional European balance of power was no more. It had been replaced by German hegemony. This unleashed a territorial scramble which did as much – if not more – to change the European map than Hitler’s direct actions. For the remaining powers, Hitler’s geopolitical threat was both a threat and an opportunity. The Soviet leader was determined to ‘compensate’ for Hitler’s gains, and pre-empt further German advances close to his borders, through annexations. Shortly after the fall of France, therefore, Stalin occupied the Baltic states, and a month later he forced Romania to hand over Bessarabia and the North Bukovina. He began to penetrate the Balkans, not only to preempt the Germans but also to keep out the British, whom he regarded as the principal capitalist world power and a standing threat to Soviet security. The net result of all this was that by the end of the year Stalin had invaded, occupied or territorially despoiled about as many independent states as Hitler.
Mussolini reacted to the collapse of France by pushing ahead with his plans for a fascist empire in south-eastern Europe and the Mediterranean.140 In June 1940, he launched a belated and completely unsuccessful offensive in the south of France; he was rewarded with a zone of occupation nonetheless. Shortly afterwards he attacked the British in North Africa, and was ignominiously repulsed. Finally, in late October, Mussolini invaded Greece hoping at least to establish a Balkan hegemony to balance Hitler’s dominance of central and western Europe. Once again, Italian forces became hopelessly bogged down as the Greeks put up a much stiffer resistance than expected. As if all this were not bad enough, the British sank much of the Italian fleet at anchor at Taranto in November 1940. Mussolini’s humiliation was now complete. The string of defeats undermined the regime at home, where the first cracks were beginning to appear; foreign policy, long a tool of fascist governance in Italy, was now threatening to undermine it.141 The Spanish dictator also hoped to take advantage of the collapse of French power. He occupied the International Zone in Tangier in mid-June 1940, not least in order to pre-empt the Italians. In October 1940, Hitler met Franco at Hendaye, but failed to persuade him to abandon his neutrality. At issue was not the Spaniard’s refusal to attack Britain; he was eager to do so. The problem was that Franco presented a long list of territorial demands including not just Gibraltar but Oran and Morocco. This not only cut across Hitler’s policy of trying to win over Pétain for the anti-British coalition, but would also have offended Mussolini.142 In short, it was not Franco’s restraint which kept Spain out of the war, but Hitler’s.
The German invasion of the Low Countries precipitated a parliamentary revolt against Chamberlain in May 1940 (sometimes misleadingly described as the ‘Norway debate’). The new government under Winston Churchill was determined to fight on and to make whatever military, economic, social and constitutional sacrifices necessary to achieve victory. In mid-June 1940, Churchill made an unsuccessful offer of union with France – involving joint citizenship and a common government – designed to lock the French into the war effort against Germany, or failing that to secure their fleet.143 The Nazi threat was so existential, in other words, that it justified the surrender, or at least the pooling, of British sovereignty. Not long after, once the French had capitulated, Britain rejected Hitler’s peace overtures. That summer, the Royal Air Force repulsed the Luftwaffe’s attempt to gain control of the skies over England, and even with air superiority Germany’s ability to get past the Royal Navy would have been highly doubtful.144 In any case, Hitler had never intended to fight Britain, if it could be avoided, and he was sucked into hostilities only by London’s refusal to let him dominate central and eastern Europe. He called off ‘Operation Sealion’, the projected invasion of the south coast.
The fall of France had a major impact on the British Empire. It was now the last line of defence against Hitler – Churchill planned to carry on the struggle from Canada if Britain itself was conquered – and a reservoir of strength on which London could draw. Britain, therefore, never ‘stood alone’.145 Hundreds of invaluable ‘imperial’ pilots flew in the Battle of Britain.146 New Zealand battle casualties were the highest among all belligerents as a proportion of the population, with the single exception of the Soviet Union.147 Factories in Canada, Australia and India actually produced more rifles than Britain itself, as well as tens of thousands of aircraft; the Canadian economy alone was equal that of Italy. Over the next five years or so millions of Canadians, Australians, New Zealanders and South Africans served in one capacity or another, mainly against the Germans in the first instance. So did many Indians, who were in the war whether they liked it or not. After May 1940, the Indian army was doubled to 2 million men, and the resources of India were deployed systematically in support of the war effort. The combined industrial output of the British Empire soon exceeded that of German-occupied Europe in every category with the exception of rifles.
Hitler was no longer focused on fighting the British Empire, however. Shortly after the fall of France he signalled to his military leadership that he planned to attack the Soviet Union at the next opportunity. The failure to subdue Britain that summer and autumn, and Churchill’s refusal to countenance an amicable division of the world between them, added to his determination to deal with both enemies before the Americans could intervene. In late September 1940, he brought together the Italians and Japanese to form the Tripartite Pact. At the end of the year, he issued a detailed instruction on how the attack on the Soviet Union – ‘Operation Barbarossa’ – was to be executed. First, however, Hitler had to secure his southern flank in the Balkans. Here Mussolini’s failed Greek adventure brought British troops to help the Greeks. Worse still, the Italian offensive in North Africa not only failed but provoked a devastating British counter-attack in early 1941. To cap it all, Yugoslavia was convulsed by a Serbian nationalist coup widely interpreted as a rejection of alignment with Germany. So, in February 1941, he sent the Afrikakorps under Rommel to stem the tide in North Africa and to secure the area as a staging post from which to threaten America;148 within a very short time, the British army there was in severe difficulties. Two months later, he overran Yugoslavia and Greece, both of which fell under joint Italo-German occupation; a Croatian puppet state under Ante Pavelić was established in the north, and a Serbian one in the south under Milan Nedić. Hitler had not originally intended to occupy so much of Europe, so quickly, and these snap strategic decisions were to have unexpected consequences.
Italian failure and Rommel’s success in North Africa forced Hitler to think systematically about the Middle East. He now envisaged a massive pincer strategy, in which the Afrikakorps advanced east through Egypt and Palestine towards Mesopotamia, while another army wheeled south from the Ukraine, through the Caucasus, to join up with Rommel. Arab nationalists now saw Hitler as their best hope of expelling Zionists from Palestine and the British from the whole region. In January 1941, the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem, Amin al-Husseini, offered Hitler a strategic partnership against the ‘Anglo-Jewish coalition’. This would also end ‘the exploitation and the export of petrol for England’s profit’. He subscribed wholeheartedly to the Nazi policies against the Jews, including physical extermination. The Nazi foreign minister, Ribbentrop, was enthused by the possibilities of the Middle East, especially after the pro-German Rashid Ali took power in a coup in Baghdad and launched pogroms against the Jews. Rashid Ali was soon crushed by the British, however, and the two Luftwaffe squadrons deployed to Mosul with the help of the Vichyite authorities in Syria were shot down in a few days. For Hitler, however, the Middle East remained essentially a sideshow: local leaders were much more interested in him than he in them.
What really preoccupied the Führer was the United States. President Roosevelt had reacted to the fall of France with horror. He regarded the German victory as a fundamental shift in the European and thus the global balance of power, not least because Hitler might now inherit French possessions in South America and the Caribbean. Roosevelt feared that Hitler’s real objective was to gain access to the Atlantic, probably by gaining a foothold in the Iberian peninsula, or even the Azores and Cape Verde.149 US domestic opinion – where interventionists were still heavily outnumbered by sceptics and outright isolationists – meant that Roosevelt had to hold back. The president therefore framed his support for Britain as a strategy to pre-empt German penetration of Latin America. In early September 1940, he negotiated a deal by which the Royal Navy received elderly American destroyers in return for the lease of British bases. This move was directed against Hitler, to be sure, but it could also be defended in traditional terms as a diminution of the power of the British Empire in the western hemisphere. That same month, Congress agreed to the introduction of conscription, the first peacetime draft in US history.
In November 1940, Roosevelt secured a third term of office as president, and with it the room for manoeuvre he had lacked. He could now begin the containment of Hitler in earnest. At the very end of December 1940, he told the nation in one of his famous ‘fireside chats’ that the United States would act as the ‘arsenal of democracy’ against the dictators. In March 1941, Roosevelt introduced ‘Lend-Lease’, by which the United States ‘leased’ – in practice gave – huge quantities of war materials to the cash-strapped British and Chinese. This was, as the Secretary of War, Henry Stimson, pointed out, effectively ‘a declaration of economic war’ on Hitler and Japan; in a radio speech the day the Lend-Lease Bill passed the Senate, Roosevelt spoke openly of ‘The Second World War’, which ‘began a year and a half ago.’150 Later that same month, the president and his chiefs of staff agreed that, in the event of conflict with the Axis powers, the United States would concentrate on dealing with ‘Germany first’. All the war plans focused on the Atlantic, Germany and the Reich. With this in mind, the Americans conducted the ‘Washington conversations’ with Japan in April 1941 designed to hold Tokyo in check while Germany was sorted out. Hitler was not privy, of course, to US military planning but the general direction of US policy – which he attributed to the power of ‘world Jewry’ in Washington – was unmistakable. That same month, desperate to avoid a Japanese defeat, which would leave him facing the full might of the Americans alone, and convinced that open conflict with Roosevelt was only months away, he made a fateful promise to Tokyo that he would support them in a future war against the United States.
So, on 22 June, the Führer invaded the Soviet Union. Next to the Wehrmacht itself, the invading army included, or came to include, national contingents from allied Italy, Finland, Romania, Hungary, Slovakia and neutral Spain (whence Franco supplied the Blue Division) as well as volunteers from almost every part of Europe, France, the Low Countries and Scandinavia. Hitler had mobilized almost the whole of Europe in support of his strategy. His aim was not just to eliminate Bolshevism, or at least to push it beyond the Urals, but to secure the Lebensraum which Germany needed to survive the looming showdown with the encircling Jewish Anglo-American coalition. To this end, the lands conquered were to be ruthlessly colonized and purged of all Jewish and communist influences. Right from the beginning, the army executed Soviet commissars as suspected agents of world Jewry, while SS Einsatzgruppen advancing behind the front line slaughtered hundreds of thousands of male Jews; the women and children were generally spared, for the moment.
Stalin now oversaw the total mobilization of Soviet society. He announced that the struggle ‘cannot be considered a normal war . . . between two armies’, but a ‘fatherland war’ of ‘freedom against slavery’.151 Critical industries in danger of being overrun by the Germans were dismantled and reassembled in safe locations beyond the Urals. Very soon, these were turning out tens of thousands of tanks, aircraft and artillery pieces. Millions of soldiers were drafted; many officers languishing in the Gulag were released to serve on the front line. Russian national sentiment was encouraged. Stalin was slow, by contrast, to appeal to popular religious sentiment. This seems to have developed spontaneously as a reaction to invasion, and the regime revived the Moscow patriarchate not so much to promote it as to manage a wave of enthusiasm which might otherwise be directed against the regime.152 Dissent, potential and actual, was still brutally suppressed: about 2.5 million people were sent to the Gulag during the war, and hundreds of thousands of Germans and Chechens were deported pre-emptively for fear they might collaborate with Hitler. Towards the end of 1941, based on vital intelligence that the Japanese did not plan to attack in the east, and were in fact about to attack the United States, Stalin authorized the transfer of powerful Siberian divisions westwards. By the end of the year, the Red Army had stopped the Wehrmacht from reaching Moscow. The outcome of the war was still entirely open, but it was clear that the chance of a quick German victory had passed.
Roosevelt now stepped up the pressure on Hitler still further. He did not accept Stalin’s astonishing offer to deploy American troops under US command anywhere on the Russian front. Public opinion was still strongly opposed to formal belligerence. The president did, however, send Stalin substantial military aid, unfroze Soviet assets and freed Soviet shipping from the restrictions of the Neutrality Act. He met with Churchill at Placentia Bay off Newfoundland in mid-August 1941 and agreed what came to be known as the ‘Atlantic Charter’. This announced a ‘better future for the world’ on the basis of the rejection of ‘territorial changes that do not accord with the freely expressed wishes of the people concerned’ and the establishment of a peace ‘[a]fter the final destruction of Nazi tyranny’; and the disarmament of nations ‘which threaten, or may threaten, aggression outside of their frontiers’.
The crucial phrase was the reference to ‘the final destruction of Nazi tyranny’. The Charter was a strategy for the defeat of Hitler, a super-Versailles which would once again disarm Germany. It was a remarkable document from a non-belligerent power, issued without Congressional authority. In the following month, the president instructed US destroyers to shoot at German raiders or submarines on sight. ‘When you see a rattlesnake poised to strike,’ Roosevelt warned the nation in another of his ‘fireside chats’ on 11 September 1941, ‘you do not wait until he has struck before you crush him.’ Nobody listening to this address – including the Nazi leadership in Berlin – could have been in any doubt that the president was putting the German dictator on notice. In effect, Germany was already at war with the United States.
Against this background, both leaders made fateful decisions. As German armies thrust deep into Russian territory, Japan made ready in August 1941 to abandon her neutrality and move against Stalin in the east. Roosevelt feared that this would administer the coup de grâce to Russia and hand her huge resources to Hitler. He therefore imposed an oil and steel embargo on Tokyo, partly to help the Chinese, but mainly to deter an attack on the Soviet Union. This set the clock ticking: the Japanese needed to secure alternative sources of energy in the Dutch East Indies or they would have to cave in to American pressure and abandon all their ambitions for Asian predominance. At around the same time – we do not know exactly when – Hitler decided on the complete annihilation of European Jewry: men, women and children, north, south, east and west. The planning heads of the relevant economic, administrative, diplomatic and police authorities were summoned to Berlin to work out the practical implementation of that policy. Not long after that, at the very beginning of December 1941, Hitler reaffirmed to the Japanese that he would join them in a war against the United States. The time had come to engage ‘world Jewry’ on all fronts.
On 7 December, the Japanese launched a surprise attack on the US Pacific Fleet in Pearl Harbor. Roosevelt now had the wrong war. He was rescued by Hitler, who was determined to deliver on his commitment to Tokyo. The German dictator was convinced that the United States needed to be engaged in a ‘two-ocean war’ to forestall a rapid Japanese collapse which would allow Roosevelt to concentrate all his energies on Europe. On 11 December, Hitler declared war on America, to the relief and jubilation of the German high command, especially the navy, which welcomed the chance to wage what had become a debilitating shadow conflict openly. In effect, Hitler had provoked the very global encirclement of the Reich which he had always feared. His pre-emptive strike against world Jewry created the Judaeo-Bolshevik-plutocrat alliance which the German dictator had sought for so long to put off, before he had secured the Lebensraum in the east which would enable Germany to weather the challenge. It remains one of the great unanswerable counter-factuals of history: what would have happened if Hitler had not risen to Roosevelt’s bait, and the United States had taken no active part in the European war.
From late 1941, two great coalitions, the ‘Grand Alliance’ – a phrase which Churchill borrowed from his ancestor Marlborough – of Britain, the Soviet Union and the United States, and the Axis of Germany, Italy and Japan, together with their various satellites and allies, locked horns across the globe. In January 1942, the Allied powers issued their ‘Declaration by the United Nations’, pledging to employ their ‘full resources’ to ‘the struggle for victory over Hitlerism’.153 Like its predecessor, the League, the United Nations was conceived as an answer to the German problem. For nearly six months it seemed possible that the Axis would prevail. The Japanese ran riot against the Americans and the European colonial empires. Hong Kong, Singapore, Malaya and the Dutch East Indies fell in quick succession. Meanwhile, the German U-boats massacred unprotected US shipping off the American coasts; the Wehrmacht resumed its advance in Russia, reaching Stalingrad on the Volga and pushing south towards the crucial oil fields of the Caucasus; and, in North Africa, Rommel’s Afrikakorps seemed close to capturing Egypt and pushing on into Palestine. In the summer of 1942, as German troops converged on the Middle East from the north and west, and as the Japanese navy raided Ceylon and the Indian Ocean, a ‘link-up’ between the two Axis powers seemed possible.
The contending coalitions engaged in a massive domestic mobilization to generate the necessary resources and manpower.154 The entire US economy was now devoted to the war effort and soon began to outproduce the Axis. Here the driving force was the president himself, and his New Dealers who defied the advice of business leaders so as to set ambitious targets which were not only met but far exceeded in reality. These weapons not only equipped the growing US army, navy and air force, but were sent to help the British and Russians. In 1942, Hitler put Albert Speer in charge of the war economy. Through innovation, organization and the ruthless use of slave labour he achieved a massive increase in armament production. Early in the following year, the propaganda minister, Joseph Goebbels, increased the sense of psychological mobilization by declaring ‘total war’. The Soviet war economy, too, depended heavily on the forced labour in the Gulag. Very soon, Russia was also outproducing the Third Reich in most key categories of armaments. Perhaps the most remarkable mobilization, however, was that of Britain. Despite being cut off from vital European trade and raw materials by Hitler’s domination of the continent, she managed to produce armaments in greater quantity – if not always of better quality – than Germany. Britain was able to sustain not only her own effort against Germany, but also had enough to spare considerable supplies for the Soviet Union after June 1941. Millions of men were recruited and sent to serve over seas. All the while, parliament continued to sit and most basic civil liberties continued to be respected. Once again, the British ‘warfare state’ showed that democracy and mass military mobilization were not only entirely compatible but a more efficient combination than dictatorship.
Germany, by contrast, relied on the exploitation and settlement of conquered territories. The native population was to be subjugated, deported and often simply murdered. ‘Generalplan Ost’, which was drafted in January 1941 and went through several versions over the next two years, involved the colonization of large tracts of Poland, the Baltic, White Russia and the Ukraine. About 30 million of its inhabitants were to be expelled into western Siberia and replaced by about half that number of German settlers who would double as a garrison and strategic military reserve for the Reich. The idea was to turn the Ukraine into the ‘breadbasket’ of the Reich, ‘so that’, as Hitler put it, ‘no one is able to starve us again’.155 Inside Germany, the Nazis promoted the concept of the Volksgemeinschaft, an exclusionary national community purged of Jews, Gypsies and other ‘undesirable’ elements, which would be strong enough to hold out against the encircling Judaeo-Bolshevik-plutocratic coalition. They conceived this as a more egalitarian society, breaking with the corporate rigidities and setting free the energies of the people. In reality, social inequalities largely persisted, but old caste barriers were broken down in the armed forces, where high casualties among the traditional officer corps provided candidates from the lower middle classes and working classes with openings. Some gender distinctions were also relaxed in the interests of greater mobilization of women for the war effort.156 There was also a distinct political bias – particularly in the later years of the war – in favour of commanders, often from quite humble backgrounds, who openly supported National Socialist ideology. After the war, Hitler hoped to reward the Volk with a welfare state of autobahns, guaranteed employment, social housing and package holidays; in that sense, his vision blended racial utopia with ‘modernity’.
In the democratic powers, by contrast, the war hastened the emergence of an inclusive welfare state. In 1941, the British coalition government – at the instigation of the Labour Party – commissioned a report designed to map out a full-scale transformation of British society. The resulting document – the ‘Beveridge report’ – was published in late 1942. It contained proposals for a National Health Service, improved public housing and a comprehensive system of social welfare. The main aim was to promote the social cohesion and demographic strength necessary to support Britain’s great-power position, not only during the war but also in times to come. This came across very clearly in the report’s attitude to the family and women’s health, where the emphasis was on increasing the birth rate through maternity benefits. ‘In the next thirty years,’ Beveridge wrote, ‘housewives as mothers have vital work to do in ensuring the adequate continuance of the British race and of the British ideal in the world.’157 More generally, the report was designed to hold out to the soldiers and the home front a tangible reward for their exertions against Hitler. A similar process took place in the United States, where the ‘warfare state’ grew to an unprecedented size.158 Across the Atlantic, welfare and warfare were inextricably intertwined. The logic was inescapable: if Britons and Americans were to be mobilized in defence of hearth and home, it made sense to give those who had neither, hearths and homes to defend.
The war effort also had a profoundly integrative and emancipatory effect in the United States. In the American army, men from diverse backgrounds across the Union served together and found themselves welded into a more cohesive nation.159 African-Americans were still kept in segregated units for fear of reducing the effectiveness of Caucasian formations, but they served in combat units in large numbers for the first time, demonstrating their patriotism and making a substantial contribution to the war effort. Millions of American women were drafted into the factories and on to the farms. Because many of them had families, the state was forced for the first time to provide, as General Louis McSherry of the War Production Board put it, ‘adequate facilities for the children of working mothers’. All this was expensive because unpaid home labour had to be replaced; in the numerous shipyards where work nurseries existed, for example, the cost was integrated into the price of the vessel. The struggle against Hitler, in other words, transformed the lives of women on both sides of the Atlantic. Norman Rockwell’s famous depiction of Rosie the Riveter, in the Saturday Evening Post of May 1943, which shows a formidable female war worker with her foot firmly on a copy of Mein Kampf, summed up this process.
On the other hand, the war also gave a powerful impetus to exclusionary forces within belligerent societies. In Britain, governmental paranoia and popular xenophobia led to the internment of thousands of central European refugees – many of them Jewish – as potential fifth columnists. Likewise, after Pearl Harbor, Roosevelt ordered the internment of Americans of Japanese descent. In part, this policy reflected the anti-Asian prejudice prevalent on the western seaboard, but the main motivation was a strategic desire to forestall attempts at espionage or sabotage. Stalin resorted to much more extreme measures, deporting whole populations either in anticipation of disloyalty or as a punishment for collaboration. Germans, Chechens, Kalmyks and various other suspect ethnic groups were transplanted in conditions of great hardship.
Hitler’s campaign against the Jews was also strategically motivated but otherwise of a completely different order. He regarded them as the directing mind behind a vast international coalition directed against Germany. Their containment and eventual physical destruction were thus an integral part of the Nazi war effort. Until late 1941, Hitler held off exterminating western European Jews in order to keep them as hostages for the behaviour of the United States. Now the gloves were off. Only a few days after the declaration of war on America, Hitler made his intentions plain to the Nazi leadership. ‘With regard to the Jewish Question,’ Goebbels noted in his diary, ‘the Führer is determined to make a clean sweep. He prophesied that if they brought about a new world war, they would experience their annihilation. This was no empty talk. The world war is here. The annihilation of the Jews must be the necessary consequence.’160 In January 1942, the administrative details were worked out at a much-postponed conference in the Berlin suburb of Wannsee. Over the next three years, another 5 million Jews – about a million had already been murdered by the Einsatzgruppen in Russia – were either shot locally or deported from central, southern and western Europe to death camps such as Auschwitz and Lublin-Majdanek in Poland and killed.161 In a speech to SS leaders in Posen in October 1943, Heinrich Himmler explained that the programme of annihilation was necessary to maintain German racial superiority. This, he argued, was ‘the foundation, the precondition of our historical existence. A people which lies in the centre of Europe, which is surrounded by enemies on all sides . . . such a people only survives thanks to its quality, its racial value.’162 The ‘final solution’ was thus an extreme interpretation of the classic German doctrines of ‘encirclement’ and the Mittellage.
There were serious disagreements between the Russians, Americans and British over war aims and the conduct of the war. These differences reflected a wider discordance about how Europe should be ordered and international relations conducted after the war was over. Right from the start, Roosevelt spoke in favour of a global condominium of the ‘Four Horsemen’ – the United States, the Soviet Union, Great Britain and China – who would dominate the new international organization to replace the League of Nations. Churchill sought to guard against domination by the two ‘superpowers’ by adding France to the list. Stalin liked the idea of a post-1815 style ‘Concert of Europe’, but insisted that the security of the Soviet Union required the annexation of substantial adjacent territories and the establishment of Moscow-dominated buffer states between her and Germany. Roosevelt, by contrast, was adamant that there should be no division of Europe into ‘spheres of influence’, a policy which he believed had substantially contributed to the outbreak of war in the past, and American public opinion strongly supported this view. A European Advisory Commission of the three foreign ministers was therefore established to work out a compromise.
The real sticking point, however, was Germany. Stalin demanded its partition into an independent Rhineland, Bavaria and a rump state encompassing the rest (including Pomerania and Silesia); East Prussia was to be ceded to Poland. ‘Germany’, as Molotov put it, ‘must be rendered harmless for the future.’163 Roosevelt proposed an even more drastic split into six states of Hesse, Hanover–North West Germany, Saxony, Baden–Württemberg–Bavaria, Prussia (Brandenburg, Silesia and Pomerania) and East Prussia; the vital war-making potential of the Saar and the Ruhr were to be placed under international administration. Only partition, the Secretary of State, Sumner Welles, suggested ‘would possibly have an effect on the German psychology’ and cure them of aggressive tendencies.164 Churchill instinctively inclined towards more extreme measures: he periodically spoke of the need to ‘castrate’ German men to prevent future aggression, or hoped that Germans would become ‘fat and impotent’. On the other hand, the prime minister worried that Stalin might fill the resulting vacuum. He warned the cabinet not to ‘weaken Germany too much – we may need her against Russia’.165 Most British planners, however, supported partition schemes of one sort or another, even at the cost of Soviet hegemony in central Europe.166
Central to the containment of a post-war Germany, and the exclusion of the Soviet Union, were the revival and unification of Europe, or at least its western half. In October 1942, Churchill ‘look[ed] forward to a United States of Europe . . . which would possess an international police and be charged with keeping Prussia disarmed’.167 The Americans, in particular, were highly sympathetic to European unity. State Department planners favoured economic integration of the continent accompanied by a free trade regime with the rest of the world, especially the United States. In theory, this would both serve American economic interests and secure the global balance by converting the war-making potential into peaceful production. The danger, though, was that a future Hitler would gain control of this customs union and use it against the United States.168
For the moment, the only thing the Allies could agree on was that no separate peace with Hitler was possible. At the Casablanca Conference in January 1943, Britain and the United States announced a policy of ‘unconditional surrender’, to which Stalin subscribed a few months later.169 First, however, Hitler had to be defeated. In the United States there was general agreement – despite grumbling from some US ‘Asia-Firsters’ – that the priority was to crush Hitler;170 only then would the coalition devote all its attention to Japan. The British needed no persuading. ‘Germany’, a joint Anglo-American communiqué announced in January 1942, was ‘the prime enemy and her defeat is the key to victory. Once Germany is defeated, the collapse of Italy and the defeat of Japan must follow.’171 Washington and London were bitterly divided, however, about the timing of the cross-Channel assault which would be necessary to defeat Hitler. The British preferred to ‘wear down’ Hitler through operations in the Mediterranean and other marginal fronts first, while US commanders favoured delivering an early ‘knock out’ blow in northern France.172
These disagreements climaxed at the Casablanca Conference of 1943 when the British succeeded in beating back US demands for an early invasion of France, agreeing a Mediterranean strategy instead. For the moment, therefore, the Allies would depend on the massive use of air power. Once again, however, London and Washington were divided on the best strategy. The Royal Air Force, which flew by night to reduce losses, tried to compensate for its inaccuracy by bombing residential areas in order to break German morale. By contrast, the Americans favoured pin-point bombing of key industries such as ball-bearing factories and synthetic fuel plants. Taken together, these operations opened a whole new front over Germany itself. Hundreds of thousands of German civilians were killed, war production was seriously disrupted, morale at home and at the front plummeted, and, perhaps most importantly of all, 800,000 German servicemen were diverted to air defence, as were thousands both of the Reich’s most modern aircraft and of her best pilots; the Luftwaffe’s capacity to deploy in the east was greatly curtailed.173
The resources which Hitler could bring to bear in Europe were unprecedented and formidable, but they were far exceeded by the combined might of the British Empire, the Soviet Union and the United States.174 In the course of 1942, the imbalance began to tell. Rommel’s advance on the Nile Delta was checked; a few months later, Montgomery’s Eighth Army launched an offensive at El Alamein which was ultimately to drive the Axis out of North Africa altogether. In the Pacific, the Japanese were first checked at the battle of the Coral Sea and then suffered the catastrophic loss of most of their aircraft carriers at Midway in May 1942. The United States now began the slow reconquest of the Pacific, ‘island-hopping’ ever closer to Japan itself. Hitler’s attempt to capture the oil fields of the Caucasus failed when his summer offensive of 1942 ran out of steam. By the end of the year, the German Sixth Army had been surrounded at Stalingrad, where it surrendered in February 1943. A few months later, Hitler suffered a disaster of similar proportions at ‘Tunisgrad’ when almost his entire North African army surrendered to the Allies. He now made overtures to Stalin for a separate peace, but without success. The attempt to starve out Britain through submarine warfare nearly succeeded, but by the spring of 1943 the Battle of the Atlantic had been lost with terrible losses among the U-boat crews. A massive armoured attack at Kursk also failed that same summer. Not long after, the Allies occupied Sicily and then landed in southern Italy. This final indignity provoked a revolt against Mussolini’s foreign policy in the Fascist Grand Council, which soon led the country to switch sides. All Hitler could do now was to turn Europe into a fortress within which the Reich could weather the storm.
German strategy hinged on mobilizing the continent against the United Nations. ‘Whoever controls Europe,’ Hitler explained to his regional party bosses, the Gauleiter, in early May 1943, ‘will thereby seize the leadership of the world.’ ‘It must therefore remain the objective of our struggle,’ he continued, ‘to create a unified Europe, but Europe can only be given a coherent structure through Germany.’175 Nazi propaganda tirelessly proclaimed the idea of a ‘European crusade against Bolshevism’. Like Napoleon, Hitler could rely not only on occupied Europe, but also on a slew of satellite states whose attitude to the New Order ranged from enthusiastic cooperation to conditional support: Ante Pavelic’s New Croatian State, Milan Nedic’s Serbia, Monsignor Jozef Tiso’s Slovakia, Admiral Miklós Horthy’s Hungary, General lon Antonescu’s Romania, Marshal Carl Mannerheim’s Finland, and Bulgaria. In purely extractive terms, the results were impressive. The economy of occupied Europe, especially the two powerhouses of France–Belgium and Bohemia–Moravia, kept the Wehrmacht equipped; their output far exceeded that of the lands pillaged in the east, and gave the lie to the concept of Lebensraum. Millions of slave-workers were deported to the Reich. Nor was it all coercion. A heterogeneous array of volunteer formations from across the continent was deployed to defend the ‘Atlantic Wall’ against the Anglo-Americans, and to repel the ‘Asiatic hordes’ of the Red Army. What Hitler was unable even to imagine, however, was a strategy to bring the peoples of Europe into a collaborative political project, albeit under German hegemony. When the foreign office produced plans for a European Confederation in September 1943, Hitler rejected them. He conceived of Europe as a subordinate, not a partner.176
In early June 1944 – on ‘D-Day’ – the British, Americans and Canadians hurled themselves into northern France. Two weeks later, the Red Army launched a shattering offensive against the German Army Group Centre in what was to be the largest land battle of the war. Within a short period of time, the Soviet forces were well inside the pre-war Polish border. In order to forestall a Stalinist occupation, the non-communist Polish Home Army launched a rising in Warsaw in August 1944. The Russians stood aside, and the rising was crushed; shortly afterwards they resumed their advance. After six weeks of fierce fighting the western allies broke through the German lines in Normandy and raced towards Paris. The catastrophic military situation added new vigour to the activities of the German resistance against Hitler, but its most spectacular operation – the July bomb plot of 1944 – narrowly failed to kill the Führer. By the end of the year, a last desperate gamble in the Ardennes had failed. The vision of Lebensraum and German hegemony was dead. Instead, a vacuum was opening up in central Europe. The second war against Germany was almost over, another battle for Germany was about to begin.
The clash of the three Utopias, democratic, communist and National Socialist, left no continent untouched. Its principal focus, however, was always Europe, especially Germany. The Reich was the prize in the struggle between communists and democrats after 1917. German leaders reacted to this predicament by seeking to offset the power of the global empires, through the quest for Mitteleuropa in the First World War, economic dominance during the Weimar Republic and Hitler’s genocidal Lebensraum project. This strategy almost succeeded. The consolidated power of the European centre twice came close to achieving continental and thus global hegemony in 1917–18 and 1939–42. In the end, however, the combined might of the ‘American Union’, the British Empire and the other powers of the United Nations proved too much for the Reich. The Nazi Utopia was utterly defeated. A new European geopolitics would now pit the democratic and communist blocs against each other, in a conflict which was primarily fought over the ruins of their erstwhile foe.