World War II began 70 years ago when Germany invaded Poland on Sept. 1, 1939. It would last six years and claim millions of lives. But the Allies missed several opportunities to stop Hitler in the run-up to the war.And here's this from the text:
The rest is here.Like a massive earthquake, Hitler's war forever destroyed a world order with Europe at its center. After 1945, the United States became the world's principal driving force. The shift of Poland's borders to the West, the Soviet Union's dominance of Eastern Europe, which would last until 1989, and the partition of Germany -- none of this would have happened without World War II.
And at the root of it all was a man who -- if one is to believe his contemporaries -- was just 1.75 meters (5 foot 9 inches) tall and who weighed a mere 70 kilograms (154 pounds), a man whose guttural pronunciation betrayed his Austrian origins: Adolf Hitler, born in the town of Braunau am Inn.
But is it possible for one man, no matter how powerful a dictator, to set the entire world on fire? For some time, there have been growing doubts about the previously generally accepted view, and the consensus today is that the situation was far more complex than once believed. It remains indisputable that World War II would not have happened without Hitler. But it is also clear that a number of factors helped to turn the Nazi leader's war fantasies into reality.One of those factors was the compliance of conservative elites in the military, the civil administration and the world of business. They did not share Hitler's crude concept of racial superiority, and many of them feared a war with the Western powers. Nevertheless, they dreamed of acquiring global power and had aspirations to create a Greater Germany that would, at the very least, dominate Eastern Europe. They included men like Franz Halder, the commander-in-chief of the army, who announced in the spring of 1939 that his men had to overrun Poland and would then, "filled with the spirit of having emerged victorious from enormous battles, be prepared to either oppose Bolshevism or be thrown to the West."
The piece notes as well that public opinion in Germany on the eve of war was nationalist and hardly pacifist. It turns out, not surprisingly, that there was a 'rally 'round the Reichsadler" effect after the initial conquest of Poland.
Cited here as an authority is Ian Kershaw, whose recent two-volume psycho-biography of Hitler has been re-released in an abridged, single-volume edition, Hitler: A Biography. Still, I'm not sure how much more "complex" is the academic consensus today on the origins of World War Two in Europe. Historians and political scientists have been researching these issues for decades; and my take on Kershaw's work was more an exhaustively-researched and innovative interpretation of Hitler rather than a raw, wholesale paradigm shift on the outbreak of the conflict.
The war in Europe has long been considered overdetermined: We had the unfinished conflict with Imperial Germany, which left the defeated German state intact and at restless following the punitive peace settlement at Versailles. Changes in the international system and choices of the leading states of the realm contributed to the permissive circumstances for a new continential conflagration. The United States stayed out of the League of Nations. American power was withdrawn from the European balance. British and French policies chose appeasement on the late-1930s when a softer line in the 1920s might have helped the Weimar regime survive. These counterfactuals are discussed by Joseph Nye in his book, Understanding International Conflicts.
My own work has focused on pacifist (antiwar) opinion in contributing to the phenomenon of "underbalancing" in the 1930s. Democratic regimes are often difficult to rouse to action, but by 1938 Britain and the U.S. (and to a lesser degree France) had moved well on the way toward a material counterbalance to German power. It's a frustrating exercise, figuring out what delayed the Western response to Hitler's drive for hegemonic conquest. Thank goodness that the Western democracies prevailed in the end.
2 comments:
The German people were promised the world, and wanted it. They have disdain for Hitler today only because he failed to live up to his promise. Das is alles, verstehen sie?
WWII was really nothing more than a continuation of WWI, which didn't really settle anything. I don't recall just now who said it, but around the time of Versailles, it was noted that all the victors had really achieved was a twenty-year armistice. That was exactly what they got.
What has always astounded me is the myopia that afflicted the Western powers in the interwar years.
"It remains indisputable that World War II would not have happened without Hitler."
I am not buying this, as I believe WWII would have happened had Hitler never been born, as I see its origins coming together even before the ink was dry on the Treaty of Versailles.
As for the Bohemian Corporal, had he chosen not to invade the U.S.S.R. and had instead consolidated his holdings in the Mediterranean, there is a better than even chance the Third Reich would be in existence to this very day.
As for America, even though we were mired in a crippling economic depression, we were fortunate in that we had the luxury of time on our side. We were able to gear up our manufacturing apparatus, which eventually gave us a very well equipped, effective and expanding military force, as we were able to easily out-produce both Germany and Japan.
Of course, that was in a pre-nuclear age. Things were a little simpler back then, and a little slower to develop.
What concerns me is, given the current decline of this nation economically, and looking at the rise of Iran, China and Russia, how much longer will we be able to field an effective military force? At some point, declining government revenues are going to have an impact in this area, if they aren't already.
What is more, we aren't going to have the luxury of time, as we did in the late 1930's, to "gear up" should things really hit the fan in the near future.
-Dave
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