A Companion to World War II

Thomas W. Zeiler, Daniel M. DuBois, Thomas W. Zeiler, Daniel M. DuBois

• Publisher: Wiley-Blackwell
• Year: 2012
• Print ISBN: 9781405196819
• eBook ISBN: 9781118325056
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: 20th Century History
• Index: History

A Companion to World War II brings together a series of fresh academic perspectives on World War II, exploring the many cultural, social, and political contexts of the war. Essay topics range from American anti-Semitism to the experiences of French-African soldiers, providing nearly 60 new contributions to the genre arranged across two comprehensive volumes. 

• A collection of original historiographic essays that include cutting-edge research
• Analyzes the roles of neutral nations during the war
• Examines the war from the bottom up through the experiences of different social classes
• Covers the causes, key battles, and consequences of the war

PART I

Roots of War

CHAPTER ONE

How a Second World War Happened

GERHARD L. WEINBERG

As a prisoner of war in December 1945, German Field Marshal Ritter von Leeb mused in his diary about the lessons of World War II on the way Germany should prepare for and conduct World War III that he evidently assumed Germany would fight against essentially the same enemies as in the conflict that had just ended (Meyer 1976, p. 80). The record of Germany since 1945, whether in two states or as one, suggests that this anticipation was not widely shared. There was concern about the cold war possibly turning into open conflict, but the idea of Germany once again taking on France, England, Poland, the Soviet Union, and the United States proved limited to a minority so tiny that it would have been hard to find. After World War I, however, the idea of another war was by no means so inconceivable to a considerable number of Germans as one might have expected after the enormous casualties and costs of that war. How did that come to be?

In order to try to understand the origins of World War II, it would be best first to define the war that carries that name. The conflict between Japan and China that Japan initiated in 1931 by occupying the Chinese territory of Manchuria and that broke into open conflict in July 1937 needs to be seen as a local conflict in a series initiated by Japan in 1894 against China and in 1904 against Russia. It is true that in 1941 Japan joined the war Germany had begun in 1939 on the assumption that Germany would win. This was Japan’s chance to profit from Germany’s victory at the expense of the countries with which it had been allied in World War I; but this action by Japan would not have occurred had not Germany started the new conflict. Similarly, the war of Italy against Abyssinia/Ethiopia in 1935–1936 has to be seen as a ­resumption of Italian colonial warfare conducted earlier against the same ­country and subsequently against the Ottoman Empire. When Italy joined World War II in the summer of 1940, it was also in anticipation of profiting from a German victory that appeared to be imminent. The critical point is that without the initiative of Germany there would have been no World War II, and it is therefore the origins of that initiative that need to be examined.

Before one examines the 1919 peace settlement’s implications for future German choices, there is a critical feature of the war itself that must be mentioned. The wars of the German states against Denmark in 1864, the war of Prussia against Austria and other German states in 1866, and the war against France in 1871–1872 had all been fought on the territory of the other country. Similarly, with minimal exceptions, World War I had seen fighting and destruction everywhere but in Germany. There was thus, and would be until well into World War II, the tacit assumption by most Germans that war was something that took place elsewhere. There had been, and might well be once again, privations at home, but the physical destruction of modern war was something that occurred in the cities and countryside of Germany’s enemies. It would be in World War II that the Germans received substantial reeducation, as the terminology went at the time, on this point.

Several features of the peace settlement of 1919 at the end of World War I require careful attention. The defeat of the Russian Empire by Germany and Austria-Hungary with the subsequent defeat of the latter powers by the Allies opened the way for the independence of a series of countries from Finland to Poland, while a Bolshevik regime triumphed after assistance from Germany in what was left of the prewar Russian Empire. The defeat of Austria-Hungary and the Ottoman Empire led, not as after prior wars to these empires losing pieces of territory, but in their dissolution. This in turn led to the independence of additional states in eastern Europe and to British and French control of portions of the Middle East. Whatever the merits and demerits, justice and injustice, of the boundaries of the newly independent – and in the case of Serbia greatly enlarged – states, for the first time in over a century, Russia was separated from Germany and the successor states of Austria-Hungary by a revived Poland and a tier of newly independent countries.

A second aspect of the peace settlement was that although the German Empire had been defeated it was not broken up. The newest of the European great powers, less than half a century old in 1918, was seen by the peacemakers as a basic unit in the context of a settlement based on the principle of nationality. It was obliged to return territory to several of its neighbors taken from them in the past; but with the most minimal exceptions, these had not been under German control for long. In places where there were doubts about the national affiliation of the local ­population, ­plebiscites were scheduled to be followed by the allocation of territory based on the vote.

A third aspect of enormous long-term significance that was integrally related to the national principle was the refusal of the American and British representatives at the peace conference to agree to detaching the Rhineland from Germany to secure France from future invasion by Germany. Since this decision would leave France and Belgium open to attack, the French were reassured by defensive alliance treaties with the United States and Britain in case of such an attack – the assumption or at least hope being that the existence of these treaties would discourage Germany from trying.

The fourth especially significant aspect of the peace settlement was that the United States refused to ratify it, refused to join the League of Nations created by that ­settlement, and refused to ratify the treaty with France that had been that country’s security compensation for leaving the Rhineland with Germany. The American refusal led to a British refusal, so that the major ally most weakened by the war was deprived of either form of security against German attack.

The fifth aspect of the peace settlement was the fiercely strong negative reaction to it by Germany. This reaction was the product, primarily, of two strongly held beliefs and a failure to recognize any of the advantages of the peace treaties for Germany. One belief deliberately sponsored by the military leaders who had brought about Germany’s defeat by their poor strategy, excessive territorial ambitions, and insistence on a total victory, was that Germany had actually not been defeated at all. It had lost its chance of victory by what came to be called the stab-in-the-back by traitorous ­elements at home. Those elements, variously identified as socialist, communists, and Jews, had deprived Germany of the fruits of its massive exertions in the war. The other belief was the widely shared view that Poles were some east European variety of ­cockroach who had no ability to have and maintain a state. The very idea of returning territory to such a state, of having the nerve to ask people whether they considered themselves Poles or Germans – as if there could be any theoretical equivalence between them – looked preposterous and insulting to most Germans. The ­substitution for the east–west corridor through Polish territory arranged by Frederick the Great in 1772 to connect his Prussian and Brandenburg lands of a north–south corridor as had existed in prior centuries looked to most Germans as a deliberate affront to their ­dignity.

The advantages of the peace settlement for Germany, which most did not ­recognize until they were lost in World War II, were several. The possibility that being separated from the Soviet Union by a Poland that had its own serious disputes with that country might be a good thing occurred to few Germans until Russian forces came to Berlin in 1945. The willingness of the Allies to allow Germany to remain united similarly did not look like a good thing until 1945, any more than the limitation of occupation to a portion rather than all of the country. A German general captured in Tunisia in 1943 was overheard commenting to other captured generals in February 1945 that they would jump for joy if Germany could obtain another Treaty of Versailles (Neitzel 2007, p. 137). The recognition of reality came too late (Weinberg 1995, ch. 1).

Ironically, the man who wanted to lead Germany and obtained the opportunity to do so held and advocated a view of the peace settlement different from that of most Germans. In his speeches and his writings, Adolf Hitler always denounced those who wanted to reclaim what Germany had lost by the peace treaty as stupid “Grenzpolitiker,” border politicians, as compared to his brilliant self, the “Raumpolitiker,” the politician of space (Jäckel 1980). What Germany needed was certainly not the snippets of land lost by the 1919 treaty; securing their recovery would mean wars costing large ­numbers of lives for land that would still leave Germany without the agricultural space on which to raise the food it needed. What Germany really needed was hundreds of thousands of square kilometers of land on which to settle farm families who would grow the food Germany needed and raise the children who would provide soldiers for added conquests of land until the whole earth was occupied by the racially superior Germans. There would be a demographic revolution on the globe, and the killing of all Jews would be a central portion of that event (Heuss 1932).

Designated chancellor of Germany by President Hindenburg at the end of January 1933, Hitler quickly consolidated his powers. He explained to the country’s military leaders a few days after becoming chancellor that all democratic and pacifist trends would quickly end and that rearmament would enable the country to conquer vast lands in the east and their ruthless Germanization (Müller 2001; Weinberg 2010, pp. 23–35). Many of the military convinced themselves that he meant Polish territory, but Hitler never considered Poland as important as they did. To him, that country’s lands were always subordinate to the expected destruction of the Soviet Union, a state easier to conquer in his eyes because of the fortunate replacement of the old Germanic elite by the Bolshevik revolution that left incompetents ruling a racially inferior Slavic population. That was where the first major installment of living space for Germany would be found.

The rearmament program initiated in 1933 built on the prior secret violations of the peace treaty’s restrictions on Germany’s military but looked beyond them to the wars Hitler expected to fight. Relatively minor expansion of Germany’s armed forces would suffice for a first war against Czechoslovakia, a campaign that before or after the annexation of Austria would solidify Germany’s position in central Europe as well as provide the population and industrial basis for further expansion of the military. The major armaments expansion would be needed for the defeat of France, and by late 1934, of England (Weinberg 1995, ch. 6). It would be safe to turn east against the Soviet Union once the Western powers had been crushed, but that war required no special weapons because of the weakness of a country that Germany had defeated even before the stroke of good fortune of the Bolshevik Revolution. It was the fourth war against the United States which called for new weapons. It, too, was a weak ­country – the converse of belief in the stab-in-the-back legend was that America’s military role in World War I had made no difference – but the country was distant and had a large navy. If, for the war with France, one needed tanks and single-engine ­dive-bombers and for the war with England a substantial navy and two-engine ­dive-bombers, war with the United States implied an intercontinental bomber and super-battleships. Since these would take years to design and build, it is easy to ­understand why in 1937, when the weapons for war against France and England were getting into production, Hitler gave the directives to begin work on the ones for war against the United States.

In 1937, the American government was continuing to develop what was called “neutrality legislation,” a subject that belongs into the framework of the reaction of other countries to the new regime in Germany and of the way the Germans tried to deal with those reactions. In a world that looked back with horror at the human losses and massive destruction of what was called “the Great War,” the shocked reaction abroad was dealt with by the pretense that the new regime wanted only peace. To make sure that no one moved against Germany before it was ready, Hitler took steps to reassure those most alarmed. There were a nonaggression pact with Poland, a renewal of the credit agreement with the Soviet Union, and a concordat with the Vatican (Weinberg 2010, chs. 2–4). All would be broken by Germany when Hitler thought the time ripe, but in only two respects did the new regime move drastically.

At what looked like the earliest opportunity, Germany left the Disarmament Conference then in session and withdrew from the League of Nations. The idea of being on an equal status with other countries in the League, including having like any other great power a permanent seat on the League’s Council, was too much to expect of a state destined to lead and control the world. As for Austria, Hitler believed that it should be annexed promptly and tried to accomplish this by economic pressure from the outside and political pressure from the Nazi Party inside the country. When this effort did not produce prompt results, he ordered a July 1934 coup in Vienna by which a Nazi stooge, Anton Rintelen, would replace Austrian Chancellor Engelbert Dollfuss, who was to be killed. Not only did the coup fail, though Dollfuss was ­murdered, but the attempt caused trouble with the one country that Hitler had long hoped to bring to Germany’s side: Italy.

Hitler admired Benito Mussolini, the dictator of Italy, and had hoped for an ­alignment with Italy even before the latter’s assumption of power (Pese 1955). The Italian government, however, preferred a small and weak Austria on its northern ­border rather than a large and strong Germany. Far from being a reversal of the lengthy struggle of Italians against Austria to attain unification, this interest in Austrian independence was caused by fear that a revived Germany might demand the southern Tyrol with its substantial German minority that Italy had acquired by the peace treaty with Austria and perhaps the port of Trieste on the Adriatic that Italy had also obtained in 1919. The breach between Italy on the one hand and Britain and France on the other – when those two opposed Mussolini’s attack on Abyssinia – very voluble ­reassurances from Berlin about the South Tyrol, and parallel intervention on the side of Francisco Franco in the Spanish Civil War from July 1936 to April 1939 opened the way for a rapprochement between Italy and Germany, a development also ­hastened by Mussolini’s visit to Germany in 1937 and Hitler’s visit to Italy in 1938. It was Mussolini who coined the term “Axis” for this relationship after his visit to Germany. From his point of view, an alliance with Germany looked like the best and perhaps the only way to gain the imperial expansion he hoped to attain at the expense of France and England (Mallett 2003).

If this was the way Italy reacted to the new regime in Germany, how about the other major European powers? The Soviet Union altered its prior line, set by Josef Stalin, that the worst enemies of communism were the social democratic parties of central and west European countries in favor of a new line that called for a common front against fascism. In practice, however, this made little difference. The Soviet Union was in the throes of collectivization of agriculture and the first five-year plan, and hence in no position for an active foreign policy. On the contrary, Stalin made periodic efforts to make an arrangement with Nazi Germany – which were ignored by Berlin – and did what he could to appease the Japanese in the Far East. Once famine and industrialization had simultaneously reduced the rural population and shifted many of the survivors into new industries, Stalin ordered a massive purge of the ­military, administrative, and economic leadership, thereby weakening the country internally and reducing its already limited attractiveness as any state’s prospective ally (Weinberg 2010, ch. 3).

France had been terribly weakened by World War I. Its major effort to insist on the terms of the peace treaty by occupation of the Ruhr in 1923 had led instead to a breach with its wartime allies as the British opposed this action and the United States evacuated its zone of occupation in the Rhineland (Schuker 1976). The French ­government subsequently tried to develop a system of alliances with potential victims of German aggression like Poland and Czechoslovakia, and even added one with the Soviet Union to this project, but there was always a realization behind these efforts that without the support of Britain and, hopefully, also the United States, there was realistically little that could be done to restrain Germany. France itself was too weak to cope with its power...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Series page
• Title page
• Copyright page
• Notes on Contributors
• Introduction
• PART I: Roots of War
• PART II: Fighting the War
• PART III: Multinational and Transnational Zones of Combat: Strategy
• PART IV: Multinational and Transnational Zones of Combat: Society
• PART V: Homelands
• PART VI: Aftermath and Consequences
• Index