The Causation of the Second World War
Introduction There is much discussion on the exact causes of the Second World War. Many say it involves problems left unsolved from World War I and forceful leaders in some countries took advantage of those problems. Many dictators in Germany, Italy and Japan to concur additional territory brought them to conflict. Middle There were many important stages leading up to the Second World War. Firstly, there were many countries involved. This would of-course mean many individual views from dynamic leaders. Probably the most famous and powerful at some stages was Hitler. Adolf Hitler was a German Nazi dictator, however he was born in Austria. He was leader of the Nazi Party from 1921. His position was not seriously challenged until the July Plot of 1944, which failed to assassinate him. In foreign affairs, he reoccupied the Rhineland and formed an alliance with the Italian Fascist Benito Mussolini in 1936, annexed Austria in 1938, and occupied Sudeten under the Munich Agreement. The rest of Czechoslovakia was annexed in March 1939. The Ribbentrop- Molotov pact was followed in September by the invasion of Poland and the declaration of war by Britain and France (see World War II). He committed suicide as Berlin fell. Hitler was born in Braunau-am-Inn, and spent his early years in poverty in Vienna and Munich. After serving as a volunteer in the German army during World War I, he was employed as a spy by the military authorities in Munich and in 1919 joined, in this capacity, the German Workers' Party. By 1921 he had assumed its leadership, renamed it the National Socialist German Workers' Party (Nazi Party for short), and provided it with a programme that mixed nationalism with anti-Semitism. Having led an unsuccessful uprising in Munich 1923, he served nine months in prison, during which he wrote his political testament, Mein Kampf. The party did not achieve national importance until the elections of 1930 ; by 1932, although Field Marshal Hindenburg defeated Hitler in the presidential elections, it formed the largest group in the Reichstag (parliament). As the result of an intrigue directed by Chancellor Franz von Papen, Hitler became chancellor in a Nazi-Nationalist coalition on 30 January 1933. The opposition was rapidly suppressed, the Nationalists removed from the government, and the Nazis declared the only legal party. In 1934 Hitler succeeded Hindenburg as head of state. Meanwhile, the drive to war began; Germany left the League of Nations, conscription was reintroduced, and in 1936 the Rhineland was reoccupied. Hitler and Mussolini, who were already both involved in the Spanish Civil War, formed an alliance (the Axis) in 1936, joined by Japan in 1940. Hitler conducted the war in a ruthless but idiosyncratic way, took and ruled most of the neighbouring countries with repressive occupation forces, and had millions of Slavs, Jews, Romanies, homosexuals, and political enemies killed in concentration camps and massacres. He narrowly escaped death on 20 July 1944 from a bomb explosion at a staff meeting, prepared by high- ranking officers. On 29 April 1945, when Berlin was largely in Soviet hands, he married his mistress Eva Braun in his bunker under the chancellery building and on the following day committed suicide with her. Early years Hitler's father, originally called Schicklgruber until he changed his name late in life, was a minor customs officer in the Austrian service. Hitler was the only son of his third wife. Hitler's father died when he was 14, leaving no resources for his continued education. With his mother he went to Vienna hoping to become an architect, but had
to earn his living as assistant to a house-painter and by selling indifferent sketches. After spending a few years in Vienna he left to settle in Munich in 1912. These years of penury were formative both of his philosophy of life and of his character and it was probably then that he first absorbed the anti-Semitic and pan-Germanic views current among extreme nationalists at the time. World War I Hitler joined a Bavarian reserve regiment at the start of World War I, serving in the trenches as a dispatch rider. He reached the rank of Gefreiter (lance corporal), was wounded ...
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to earn his living as assistant to a house-painter and by selling indifferent sketches. After spending a few years in Vienna he left to settle in Munich in 1912. These years of penury were formative both of his philosophy of life and of his character and it was probably then that he first absorbed the anti-Semitic and pan-Germanic views current among extreme nationalists at the time. World War I Hitler joined a Bavarian reserve regiment at the start of World War I, serving in the trenches as a dispatch rider. He reached the rank of Gefreiter (lance corporal), was wounded in the Battle of the Somme in 1916 and gassed in 1918. He became convinced that Germany had been betrayed by Jewish and Marxist influences and returned from the war bitter at Germany's defeat. Back in Bavaria, he attended, and later conducted, courses designed to keep ex-soldiers away from Bolshevism, where he came under the influence of Gottfried Feder, the intellectual founder of the Nazi movement. Takes over the Nazis He then became the seventh member of an insignificant political group in Munich, the German Workers' Party, and soon distinguished himself with his almost hypnotic popular oratory. Through his friends Erich Röhm, a staff officer at Munich, and von Epp, he maintained close contacts with the German army, the Reichswehr. He ousted Anton Drexler, the founder of the party, as leader in 1921. The party was now called the National Socialist German Workers' Party and adopted Hitler's nationalist and anti- Marxist creed. After an argument with Röhm over the role of the newly created SA (Sturmabteilung) troops (the Brownshirts), Hitler organized a special detachment to be his own disciplined political soldiers rather than the brawling street-fighters of Rö hm's Brownshirts. This was formally established in 1926 as the SS ( Schutzstaffel) in imitation of Mussolini's fasces. Beerhall Putsch Thinking that the Weimar Republic was on the verge of collapse, Hitler launched an abortive coup in Munich in November 1923, in alliance with R öhm, the war hero Erich von Ludendorff, and Hermann Goering, in an attempt to make Ludendorff dictator. The coup failed and Hitler was arrested and tried for treason. He was sentenced to five years' imprisonment and during his incarceration in the fortress of Landsberg worked on the final draft of Mein Kampf with the aid of Rudolf Hess. Building the party During his time in prison, the Nazi party all but disintegrated and when he was released under an amnesty in 1924, he set to work immediately to rebuild the party organization. Although for some time the Strasser brothers, creators of the Nazi party in northern Germany, were more influential than Hitler in the party ranks, he gradually recovered the ground he had lost and ousted the Strassers. By 1930 he was the undisputed head of a considerable party. Funds were increasingly flowing in from the big industrialists, who saw National Socialism as a safeguard against communism. ` Nationalism´ gradually superseded ` Socialism´ in the party programme, although its language still played lip service to its more revolutionary roots. When the world economic crisis came in 1930, Hitler ably exploited the discontent of both the working class and the more solid middle-class elements, who saw their standard of living threatened by the crisis. His rhetoric won over many converts and in the next election in September 1930 the Nazis increased their representation in the Reichstag from 12 to 107 seats. He stood against Hindenburg in the presidential election of 1932 and although he was beaten in the second ballot, he had managed to poll some 13 million votes and was now a political power to be reckoned with. In a rapidly deteriorating political situation, Chancellor Heinrich Brüning felt compelled to govern by decree and, though liberal in outlook, his regime paved the way to dictatorship. He resigned as chancellor in June 1932 and was succeeded by von Papen. Hitler had regarded himself as heir to the chancellorship but was blocked by the covert resistance of the old right-wing regime, with its backing of industrialists and Junkers. Von Papen dissolved the Reichstag and held fresh elections but the Nazi party doubled its strength to 230 seats and Hitler was now head of the biggest single party. Eventually Hitler and von Papen reached an agreement: Hitler renounced the socialist section of his programme, and von Papen released the subsidies from the industrialists to Hitler's coffers, and induced Hindenburg to accept Hitler as chancellor in January 1933. The Third Reich During 1933, the Weimar Republic gave way to the Third Reich and by the end of the year the one-man party had become the one-party state. Political opponents `disappeared´, either assassinated or sent to concentration camps. Having crushed opposition in Germany at large, Hitler turned his attention to stifling the last vestiges of dissent in his own party. In the `Night of the Long Knives´ of 30 June 1934, over a hundred leading Nazis were murdered, including Gregor Strasser, Röhm, and Kurt von Schleicher and his wife. All power now passed to the National Socialist executive, which, for all practical purposes, meant Hitler himself. When Hindenburg died in August 1934, Hitler was declared his successor but abjured the title of Reichspräsident in favour of Führer and Kanzler (chancellor). The Holocaust From the moment Hitler came to power he instituted a reign of terror against Jews, homosexuals, Romanies, and political opponents. Anti-Semitic measures were introduced in stages, starting with boycotts of Jewish businesses in April 1933 and culminating in the full horror of the extermination camps and the `final solution´ in 1941. Official propaganda was directed against Jews, stoking up popular hatred as in the organized terror of the Kristallnacht when Jewish businesses and property were attacked by government-sponsored mobs on 9 November 1938. Jews were increasingly marginalized by a combination of vicious propaganda and anti-Jewish laws, such as forcing all Jews to wear yellow stars, making them visible targets for both official repression and private hostility. Once World War II started, these policies were carried into the countries Germany occupied and by 1941, there was a network of extermination camps, mainly in Poland. The Holocaust reached its height after the Wannsee Conference of 20 January 1942, a meeting of top Nazi officials who developed a systematic policy of efficient extermination. There are no definitively accurate figures for the number of people exterminated by the Nazis but it is reckoned that by the end of the war some 6 million Jews had been killed and over a million people belonging to other groups, such as Slavs and Romanies, designated as Untermenschen (` subhumans´). Rebuilding German power Having established his position in Germany, Hitler now began his long campaign to restore German power in Europe, heralding his advent to power by a series of increasingly grave breaches of treaty obligations and flouting European opinion. He began a massive programme of rearmament, secretly at first and then ever more flagrantly. For example, Germany was not supposed to have an air force but Goering built the Luftwaffe from scratch under the guise of a civilian airline, announcing its existence officially in April 1935. Hitler then turned to the territorial clauses of the various treaties binding Germany, starting with the plebiscite in the Saar region in January 1935. The result, partly influenced by terrorism, was an overwhelming majority for retrocession to Germany and Hitler used this as a bolster to denounce the military clauses of the Treaty of Versailles in March 1935 and introduce conscription for the Reichswehr. A year later he boldly risked marching his forces into the demilitarized Rhineland zone, in defiance of the Pact of Locarno of 1925, which, he claimed, had been abrogated by a Franco-Soviet alliance. The remilitarization of the Rhineland was followed by two years of the most active German military preparations combined with a complete overhaul of the economy to make Germany self-sufficient. When the Civil War broke out in Spain in July 1936, Hitler seized the opportunity to test his newly built army and air force on the side of the right-wing general Franco. Other events abroad during 1936-37, such as the League of Nations' failure to check Mussolini's Abyssinian adventure, increased the nervous tension in Europe, and went far to strengthen Hitler's position. Mussolini was a natural ally and the two countries allied in the Rome-Berlin Axis in October 1936. Expansionism abroad From the end of 1937, Hitler pursued an aggressively expansionist foreign policy which for two years won spectacular successes. He annexed Austria in March 1938 by manipulating an abrupt crisis in Austro-German relations, then sending the German army across the frontier and declaring Anschluss, the incorporation of Austria within the Reich. He then moved on to the campaign to `liberate´ Sudeten, an ethnic German area within Czechoslovakia - this was an attack on a sovereign state bound by treaty with the Western powers and by ethnic ties with Russia. However, Hitler well understood the underlying realities of the immediate political situation and realised that the West was not prepared to fight. The Munich Agreement in August 1938 handed him Sudeten in return for assurances that he had no more territorial claims to make, the same claim he had made after the annexation of Austria. He then took the rest of Czechoslovakia piece by piece during early 1939 and at the same time announced his annexation of Memel in violation of the Versailles Treaty. Hitler now seemed, in the eyes of the average German, not only to be the preserver of peace but a consummate statesman, surpassing all his predecessors in extending the Reich frontiers. Within less than a year he had added 10 million Germans to the Third Reich, broken the one formidable bastion to German expansion to the southeast, and made himself the most powerful dictator in Europe since Napoleon. The outbreak of war In March 1939, Hitler renounced the nonaggression treaty with Poland of 1934 and demanded the return of Danzig and the `Polish Corridor´. The UK and France guaranteed Polish independence and warned Hitler they would stand by Poland. Hitler was shaken by this development, particularly when the two Western powers began negotiations with Moscow. Rather than abandon his designs on Poland he forgot his hatred of communism and proposed a nonaggression pact with the USSR. Stalin agreed and the Ribbentrop-Molotov pact was signed on 23 August 1939. Without any danger of Soviet interference, Hitler launched his Blitzkrieg on Poland on 1 September 1939, and two days later the UK and France declared war. Blitzkrieg After the invasion of Poland, Germany swept through the Netherlands, Belgium and France in equally rapid succession and simultaneously launched invasions of Norway and Denmark. The spectacular events of spring and summer 1940, culminating in the armistice with France, only confirmed Hitler's genius in the eyes of the average German. In the spring of 1941 German forces invaded Yugoslavia and Greece, while the air force belaboured the UK with bomber raids and the navy struck at its seaborne supplies. Battle of Britain and Barbarossa Hitler decided to weaken the British by attacking the empire in the east. However, this plan depended on the neutrality of the USSR and, not being sure of this, Hitler and his advisers decided to combine the attack on Egypt with an invasion of the USSR itself, Operation Barbarossa, in June 1941. This was a fatal decision which brought a powerful enemy into play against him and opened up an enormous second front. It revealed the essential weakness underlying all Hitler's foreign policy and it is possible that he took the decision against the advice of other Nazi leaders and the German general staff. From then on he strove to divide the USSR from the Western Allies by stressing Germany's anti-Bolshevik crusade. The German campaigns in the Balkans and the Mediterranean were brilliant in conception and execution, but British intervention in Greece and British resistance in Crete and Libya delayed Hitler's timetable, and, as the summer of 1941 wore on it was becoming obvious that German optimism had outrun itself. The reverses in the Battle of Britain in July 1941 were a great blow to German morale and for some time Hitler was silent, but at a meeting of the Winter Help Campaign 4 October, he announced a `gigantic operation´ which would bring about the defeat of the USSR. Following the failure of the German army before Moscow, Hitler sacked the commander in chief, Walther von Brauchitsch, in December 1941, and assumed direct control of all military operations. When the USA entered the war after the attack on Pearl Harbor in December 1941, four-fifths of the world was now ranged against Germany. Decline 1942-43 Hitler's New Year message for 1942 showed a marked decline in buoyancy, although the German armies were still a powerful force, and in the early half of 1942, the German armies in the USSR reached the Volga at Stalingrad while Erwin Rommel was threatening Cairo and Alexandria in North Africa. Yet before the autumn was past Rommel had been routed at El Alamein and the Soviets had destroyed von Paulus's 6th Army before Stalingrad. Hitler began to speak less of German victory than of the inability of the Allies to defeat Germany, and he soon faced new crises. Mussolini was deposed in July 1943 and Italy capitulated to the Allies. 1944 After the German armies had been driven out of the USSR, and with the D-Day landings in Normandy in June 1944, it soon became clear that the Allies would not, as Hitler had promised, be `driven into the sea´. The German `opposition´, led by army generals and supported by industrialists, liberals, and even elements of the left, attempted a coup d'état, the July Bomb Plot. The signal was to be the assassination of Hitler, but the bomb which was placed in his headquarters by a staff officer named von Stauffenberg did not kill him and the coup failed. It succeeded only in bringing about Hitler's most savage purge: thousands of men and women were executed who were not even necessarily implicated in the plot, but who might conceivably have led another rising. Himmler took command of the army inside Germany so as to tighten the Nazi grip on it. However, as the year wore on, the Allies steadily closed in from all sides. 1945: defeat As the Allies pressed into Germany in April 1945, Hitler married his mistress, Eva Braun, on 29 April 1945 and both then committed suicide in the air-raid shelter under the ruined chancellery in Berlin the following day. It is generally considered that their bodies were subsequently burned in the courtyard.
