The Second World War (2 page)
The hyper-inflation of 1923–4 undermined both the certainties and the rectitude of the Germanic bourgeoisie. The bitterness of national and personal shame produced an incoherent anger. German nationalists dreamed of the day when the humiliation of the Versailles
Diktat
could be reversed. Life improved in Germany during the second half of the 1920s, mainly due to massive American loans. But the world depression, which began after the Wall Street Crash of 1929, hit Germany even harder once Britain and other countries left the gold standard in September 1931. Fear of another round of hyper-inflation persuaded Chancellor Brüning’s government
to maintain the Reichsmark’s link to the price of gold, making it over-valued. American loans had ceased, and protectionism cut off German export markets. This led to mass unemployment, which dramatically increased the opportunity for demagogues promising radical solutions.
The crisis of capitalism had accelerated the crisis of liberal democracy, which was rendered ineffective in many European countries by the fragmentary effect of voting by proportional representation. Most of the parliamentary systems which had sprung up following the collapse of three continental empires in 1918 were swept away, unable to cope with civil strife. And ethnic minorities, which had existed in comparative peace under the old imperial regimes, were now threatened by doctrines of national purity.
Recent memories of the Russian Revolution and the violent destruction of other civil wars in Hungary, Finland, the Baltic states and indeed Germany itself, greatly increased the process of political polarization. The cycle of fear and hatred risked turning inflammatory rhetoric into a self-fulfilling prophecy, as events in Spain soon showed. Manichaean alternatives are bound to break up a democratic centrism based on compromise. In this new collectivist age, violent solutions appeared supremely heroic to intellectuals of both left and right, as well as to embittered ex-soldiers from the First World War. In the face of financial disaster, the authoritarian state suddenly seemed to be the natural modern order throughout most of Europe, and an answer to the chaos of factional strife.
In September 1930, the National Socialist Party’s share of the vote jumped from 2.5 per cent to 18.3. The conservative right in Germany, which had little respect for democracy, effectively destroyed the Weimar Republic, and thus opened the door for Hitler. Gravely underestimating Hitler’s ruthlessness, they thought that they could use him as a populist puppet to defend their idea of Germany. But he knew exactly what he wanted, while they did not. On 30 January 1933, Hitler became chancellor and moved rapidly to eliminate all potential opposition.
The tragedy for Germany’s subsequent victims was that a critical mass of the population, desperate for order and respect, was eager to follow the most reckless criminal in history. Hitler managed to appeal to their worst instincts: resentment, intolerance, arrogance and, most dangerous of all, a sense of racial superiority. Any remaining belief in a
Rechtsstaat
, a nation based on respect for the rule of law, crumpled in the face of Hitler’s insistence that the judicial system must be the servant of the new order. Public institutions–the courts, the universities, the general staff and the press–kowtowed to the new regime. Opponents found themselves helplessly isolated and insulted as traitors to the new definition of the Fatherland, not only by the regime itself, but also by all those who supported it. The Gestapo, unlike Stalin’s own secret police, the NKVD, was surprisingly idle. Most of its arrests were purely in
response to denunciations of people by their fellow Germans.
The officer corps, which had prided itself on an apolitical tradition, also allowed itself to be wooed by the promise of increased forces and massive rearmament, even though it despised such a vulgar, ill-dressed suitor. Opportunism went hand in hand with cowardice in the face of authority. The nineteenth-century chancellor Otto von
Bismarck
himself once remarked that moral courage was a rare virtue in Germany, but it deserted a German completely the moment he put on a uniform. The Nazis, not surprisingly, wanted to get almost everyone into uniform, not least the children.
Hitler’s greatest talent lay in spotting and exploiting the weakness of his opponents. The left in Germany, bitterly divided between the German Communist Party and the Social Democrats, had presented no real threat. Hitler easily out-manoeuvred the conservatives who thought, with naive arrogance, that they could control him. As soon as he had consolidated his power at home with sweeping decrees and mass imprisonment, he turned his attention to breaking the Treaty of Versailles. Conscription was re-introduced in 1935, the British agreed to an increase in the German navy and the Luftwaffe was openly constituted. Britain and France made no serious protest at the accelerated programme of rearmament.
In March 1936, German troops reoccupied the Rhineland in the first overt breach of the Versailles and Locarno treaties. This slap in the face to the French, who had occupied the region over a decade earlier, ensured widespread adulation of the Führer in Germany, even among many who had not voted for him. Their support and the supine Anglo-French reaction gave Hitler the nerve to continue on his course. Single-handed, he had restored German pride, while rearmament, far more than his vaunted public works programme, halted the rise in unemployment. The brutality of the Nazis and the loss of freedom seemed to most Germans a small price to pay.
Hitler’s forceful seduction of the German people began to strip the country of human values, step by step. Nowhere was the effect more evident than in the persecution of the Jews, which progressed in fits and starts. Yet contrary to general belief, this was often driven more from within the Nazi Party than from above. Hitler’s apocalyptic rants against Jews did not necessarily mean that he had already decided on a ‘Final Solution’ of physical annihilation. He was content to allow SA (Sturmabteilung) stormtroopers to attack Jews and their businesses and steal their possessions to satisfy an incoherent mixture of greed, envy and imagined resentment. At that stage Nazi policy aimed at stripping Jews of civil rights and everything they owned, and then through humiliation and harassment to force them to leave Germany. ‘
The Jews must get out
of Germany, yes out of the whole of Europe,’ Hitler told his propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels on 30 November 1937. ‘That will take some time yet, but will and must happen.’
Hitler’s programme to make Germany the dominant power in Europe had been made quite clear in
Mein Kampf
, a combination of autobiography and political manifesto first published in 1925. First he would unite Germany and Austria, then he would bring Germans outside the borders of the Reich back under its control. ‘
People of the same blood
should be in the same Reich’, he declared. Only when this had been achieved would the German people have the ‘moral right’ to ‘acquire foreign territory. The plough is then the sword; and the tears of war will produce the daily bread for the generations to come.’
His policy of aggression was stated clearly on the very first page. Yet even though every German couple had to purchase a copy on marriage, few seem to have taken his bellicose predictions seriously. They preferred to believe his more recent and oft-repeated assertions that he did not desire war. And Hitler’s daring coups in the face of British and French weakness confirmed them in their hopes that he could achieve all he wanted without a major conflict. They did not see that the over-heated German economy and Hitler’s determination to make use of the country’s head-start in armaments made the invasion of neighbouring countries a virtual certainty.
Hitler was not interested merely in reoccupying the territory lost by Germany after the Versailles Treaty. He despised such a half-hearted step. He seethed with impatience, convinced that he would not live long enough to achieve his dream of Germanic supremacy. He wanted the whole of central Europe and all of Russia up to the Volga for German
Lebensraum
to secure Germany’s self-sufficiency and status as a great power. His dream of subjugated eastern territories had been greatly encouraged by the brief German occupation in 1918 of the Baltic states, part of Belorussia, Ukraine and southern Russia as far as Rostov on the Don. This followed the 1918 Treaty of Brest-Litovsk, Germany’s own
Diktat
to the nascent Soviet regime. The ‘bread-basket’ of Ukraine especially attracted German interest, after the near starvation caused largely by the British blockade during the First World War. Hitler was determined to avoid the demoralization suffered by Germans in 1918, which had led to revolution and collapse. This time others would be made to starve. But one of the main purposes of his
Lebensraum
plan was to seize oil production in the east. Some 85 per cent of the Reich’s oil supplies, even in peacetime, had to be imported, and that would be Germany’s Achilles heel in war.
Eastern colonies appeared the best means to establish self-sufficiency, yet Hitler’s ambition was far greater than that of other nationalists. In line with his social-Darwinist belief that the life of nations was a struggle for racial mastery, he wanted to reduce the Slav population dramatically in numbers through deliberate starvation and to enslave the survivors as a helot class.
His decision to intervene in the Spanish Civil War in the summer of 1936 was not as opportunistic as has often been portrayed. He was convinced that a Bolshevik Spain, combined with a left-wing government in France, presented a strategic threat to Germany from the west, at a time when he faced Stalin’s Soviet Union in the east. Once again he was able to exploit the democracies’ abhorrence of war. The British feared that the conflict in Spain might provoke another European conflict, while the new Popular Front government in France was afraid to act alone. This allowed Germany’s flagrant military support of Generalissimo Francisco Franco’s Nationalists to ensure their ultimate victory while Hermann Göring’s Luftwaffe experimented with new aircraft and tactics. The Spanish Civil War also brought Hitler and Benito Mussolini closer together, with the Italian Fascist government sending a corps of ‘volunteers’ to fight alongside the Nationalists.
Hitler had sought advice from Mussolini in 1922 and 1923. He had even wanted to copy Mussolini’s ‘March on Rome’, with one on Berlin. The Italian Fascist leader, or ‘Duce’, also helped finance the young Nazi party. He was condescending towards Hitler, whom was then described as the ‘German Mussolini’, and he described his book
Mein Kampf
as ‘a boring tome that I have never been able to read’ and its ideas as ‘little more than commonplace clichés.’ But by 1936 the relationship, with Germany’s growing power, began to change.
Mussolini, for all his bombast and ambitions in the Mediterranean, was nervous about Hitler’s determination to overturn the status quo. The Italian people were not ready, either militarily or psychologically, for a European war.
Eager to obtain another ally in the coming war with the Soviet Union, Hitler established the Anti-Comintern Pact with Japan in November 1936. Japan had begun its colonial expansion in the Far East during the last decade of the nineteenth century. Profiting from the decay of the Chinese imperial regime, Japan established a presence in Manchuria, seized Formosa (Taiwan) and occupied Korea. Its defeat of Tsarist Russia in the war of 1904–5 made it the major military power in the region. Anti-western feeling grew in Japan with the effects of the Wall Street Crash and the worldwide depression. And an increasingly nationalistic officer class viewed Manchuria and China in a similar way to the Nazis’ designs on the Soviet Union: as a landmass and a population to be subjugated to feed the home islands of Japan.
The Sino-Japanese conflict has long been like a missing section in the jigsaw of the Second World War. Having begun well before the outbreak of fighting in Europe, the conflict in China has often been treated as a
completely separate affair, even though it saw the largest deployment of Japanese ground forces in the Far East, as well as the involvement of both the Americans and the Soviet Union.
In September 1931, the Japanese military created the Mukden Incident, in which they blew up a railway to justify their seizure of the whole of Manchuria. They hoped to turn the region into a major food-producing region as their own domestic agriculture had declined disastrously. They called it Manchukuo and set up a puppet regime, with the deposed emperor Henry Pu Yi as figurehead. The civilian government in Tokyo, although despised by officers, felt obliged to support the army. And the League of Nations in Geneva refused Chinese calls for sanctions against Japan. Japanese colonists, mainly peasants, poured in to seize land for themselves with the government’s encouragement. It wanted ‘one million households’ established as colonial farmers over the next twenty years. Japan’s actions left it isolated diplomatically, but the country exulted in its triumph. This marked the start of a fateful progression, both in foreign expansion and in military influence over the government in Tokyo.
A more hawkish administration took over and the Kwantung Army in Manchuria extended its control almost to the gates of Peking. Chiang Kai-shek’s Kuomintang government in Nanking was forced to withdraw its forces. Chiang claimed to be the heir of Sun Yat-sen, who had wanted to introduce a western-style democracy, but he was really a generalissimo of warlords.
The Japanese military began to eye their Soviet neighbour to the north and cast glances south into the Pacific. Their targets were the Far Eastern colonies of Britain, France and the Netherlands, with the oilfields of the Dutch East Indies. The uneasy stand-off in China was then suddenly broken on 7 July 1937 by a Japanese provocation at the Marco Polo Bridge outside the former capital of Peking. The Imperial Army in Tokyo assured Emperor Hirohito that China could be defeated in a few months. Reinforcements were sent across to the mainland and a horrific campaign ensued, fired partly by a Chinese massacre of Japanese civilians. The Imperial Army was unleashed. But the Sino-Japanese War did not end in a rapid triumph as the generals in Tokyo had predicted. The appalling violence of the attacker stimulated a bitter resistance. Hitler failed to recognise the lesson for his own onslaught against the Soviet Union four years later.
