In the course of the battle of the Ebro, Franco was deeply worried about the possible consequences of the Sudeten crisis of September 1938. After the Anschluss, ‘Greater Germany’ surrounded Czechoslovakia on three sides and Hitler ordered the Sudeten German minority to press for an autonomy which would strip Czechoslovakia of its western defences and its major industries. In the course of 1938, he turned to building up military pressure and by mid-September, to the alarm of the British and French, the Czechs were preparing to fight. Neither the German public nor the army were ready for war and Czech fortifications would have been difficult to pass. Hitler was saved from an embarrassing climb-down by Chamberlain’s determination to appease him at all costs. At the Munich conference on 29-30 September 1938, Chamberlain and Daladier, encouraged from afar by Roosevelt, abandoned Czechoslovakia to Hitler. The West lost its only industrialized ally in the East and Germany boosted its industrial stock and gold reserves for future aggressions. Hitler celebrated by unleashing a violent wave of anti-Jewish pogroms. However, it was only in March 1939, when he breached the Munich agreement and annexed the rest of Czechoslovakia, that the West finally woke up to the threat.
Fascism was the extreme political weapon which emerged to fight the threat of communism. In international terms, the fascist powers were the most uninhibited enemies of the Soviet Union. To an extent the conservative democracies were marginalized, although they tried to derive benefit from that hostility. Just as the conservative establishments of Germany and Italy had been convinced that they could tame fascism and use it for their own purposes, so too Britain and France hoped to use Hitler against the Soviet Union. In its turn, the Soviet Union had tried to make allies in the democratic West against the Nazi threat. To that extent, the 1930s saw a parallel between national and international issues in the Popular Front strategy of broad class alliances within individual countries and the Soviet foreign policy aspiration of broad alliances with Britain and France against Nazi Germany. Until Hitler’s entry into the Czech capital in
March 1939, Britain and France pursued an ambiguous policy of support for the fascist dictators within Germany and Italy, motivated by their desire to protect their own investments, their approval of the regimes’ anti-communism, and their hope of turning them eastwards.
Austria and then Spain had been examples of localized civil wars becoming part of an international pattern. When it was finally realized in London and Paris that the inevitable logic of fascist expansion would turn the fascist powers against the bourgeois powers, it was too late to make the logical leap — that the bourgeois democratic capitalist powers should ally with the Soviet Union against the fascist capitalist powers. Indeed, when Britain and France woke up sufficiently to Hitler’s plans, they made the inappropriate step of making unsustainable guarantees to Poland, which was threatened by Germany, and to Romania and Greece, which were threatened by Italy. The position of the Soviet Union was now decisive. An alliance with Stalin was immensely distasteful to Chamberlain and he did little to hasten an agreement. Essentially, the West was hoping that Stalin would stiffen the guarantees to Poland and Romania and risk war with Hitler. Hitler by contrast offered a non-aggression pact and the chance to carve up eastern Europe without war. It did not take much persuasion for Stalin to agree to throw in his lot with Hitler. Once their pact was signed on 23 August 1939, there was no further obstacle to Hitler’s move against Poland. In the early hours of the morning of i September, Germany attacked Poland. Two days later, a reluctant Chamberlain was forced, in support of the March guarantee to Poland, to issue an ultimatum and to go to war with Germany. Only Hitler’s attack on the Soviet Union in June 1941 and Japan’s attack on the United States in December 1941, however, brought about a circumstantial coalition capable of defeating the Third Reich.
Until that time, Hitler was able to draw on vast reserves of raw material and fuel, ranging from Scandinavian and Turkish strategic minerals to Romanian and Soviet oil. In consequence, he experienced virtually uninterrupted success. While Stalin eliminated his enemies to the east, the Germans massacred large numbers of Jews and other Poles to create Lebensraum for
German settlers. The SS, under Heinrich Himmler, began to regiment even larger numbers into slave armies. Within Germany, Jews, gypsies, and the mentally ill began to be eliminated. During what came to be known as the phoney war, the Allies did nothing as Poland was gobbled up. Then, in April 1940, Hitler seized Norway and Denmark. On 10 May, Winston Churchill became British war leader and Hitler invaded Holland, Belgium, and France. By 24 June, France was defeated and Hitler controlled Europe from the English Channel to central Poland and from northern Norway to the Pyrenees. His plans to invade England in the autumn of 1940 were thwarted by the RAF in the Battle of Britain and his hopes of taking control of the Mediterranean were hampered by the poor showing of Mussolini’s forces. As Churchill began to woo the United States, and Lend-Lease arrangements provided a lifeline to the exhausted British economy, Hitler decided to hasten his assault on the Soviet Union.
He launched an attack on Russia, Operation Barbarossa, on 22 June 1941, convinced that victory would free the Japanese to attack the United States, and also create a German empire capable of defeating the British and Americans together. The advancing forces were enjoined not just to defeat the Soviet Union militarily but also to undertake sweeping ‘racial measures’ against the civilian population. It was assumed that the population of eastern Europe would be either exterminated or starved out of existence to make room for more German colonists. By the autumn of 1941, German forces were nearing Moscow, having massacred untold numbers of ‘Jewish-Bolshevik subhumans’ on the way. However, the Germans were to be bogged down as the winter took its toll. On 6 December, the tide began to turn with a Soviet counter-attack; on 7 December, Japan attacked the US fleet at Pearl Harbor and on ii December Hitler declared war on the United States. As the war in Russia dragged on, Himmler proceeded with what was called the Final Solution, the creation of death camps in Poland whose purpose was the annihilation of European Jewry.
Spectacular Japanese advances in the first half of 1942 were finally halted at the battle of Midway in June and the Germans became enmeshed in the battle for Stalingrad. Anglo-American landings in North Africa in November 1942, Operation Torch, were the prelude to Axis defeat in that area and the invasion of Italy in July 1943. In the summer of that year, as the Soviets battered the remnants of the German army, Mussolini was overthrown and Allied navies won the Battle of the Atlantic. Nevertheless, it still required a monumental deployment of military and economic power by the Grand Alliance to push back the conquests of the Third Reich. By the spring of 1944, the Russians were driving the Germans back through Poland and towards their own frontiers. On 6 June 1944, British, American, and Canadian forces landed in Normandy. By the end of the year, it was clear that the German forces had been defeated on both the western and eastern fronts. However, Stalin delayed his drive into Germany in order to establish control over eastern Europe.
The essential underlying contradictions between the capitalist democracies and their revolutionary enemy made it inevitable that the circumstantial alliance between the Anglo-Saxon powers and the Soviet Union would begin to break up after 1943. Even before the American entry into the war, Churchill and Roosevelt had met in mid-August 1941 on a ship near Newfoundland and launched the Atlantic Charter. In it, both Britain and the United States renounced territorial aggrandizement, declared that any territorial changes coming out of the war should ‘accord with the freely expressed wishes of the people concerned’, and announced their commitment to free markets, freedom of the seas, and freedom from fear and want for humanity. That implied collision with Stalin’s territorial ambitions and the gulag system over which he ruled. Stalin’s ruthlessness, and his recognition of the contradictions of alliance with the bourgeois democracies, was revealed both by the Nazi-Soviet pact of August 1939 and by his wartime approaches to Hitler for a separate peace. The implicit collision would take the form of more than fifty years of Cold War in which, exhausted by its internecine struggles of the previous four decades, Europe was divided and world hegemony passed to the United States and the Soviet Union.
Between 1890 and 1914, German expansionist ambitions set off a train of events which led to war. Although capitalism survived the ordeal, the colossal social and economic dislocation of that war polarized every European country along class lines. In one country, Russia, the forces of the left were triumphant and, in consequence, the international scene was also divided in a right-left confrontation. The post-war settlement at Versailles facilitated the later resurgence of a resentful Germany. Under the leadership of Adolf Hitler, and with the covert approval of the western democracies, the Nazi regime waged class and racial war against perceived enemies both internally and externally. The internal war against communists, socialists, and Jews was replicated by external aggression against the small Slav states of eastern Europe and against Jewish-Bolshevik Russia. The enormity of the German threat finally drove the capitalist democracies and the communist Soviet Union into alliance. The costs of victory against Germany left Europe exhausted and her fate in the hands of the two new superpowers. Ironically, during the Cold War, a competition between two economic and social systems, western Europe was to know unprecedented prosperity. Kick-started by economic aid from the United States, a period of economic growth was to ensue in which many European workers were to enjoy rights and living standards, to prevent which German rulers had embarked, sixty years earlier, on the policies of ‘negative integration’ which had led to the 1914-45 cycle of war.
World History
