In the early hours of 1 September 1939, Germany attacked Poland on land and from the air. Two days later, on 3 September, Britain and France declared war on Germany. The Second Great War of the twentieth century - the greatest single slaughter in history - had begun.
The Second World War must be seen as a continuation of the war of 1914-18. It was the direct outcome of the spiritual malaise, the economic chaos and the political barbarism engendered by the First World War. The resulting catastrophe - and the false peace that had followed in 1919, in which Germany suffered ignominy and humiliation - had made a further clash between the nations of the West almost inevitable.1 If there is one reason more than any other why the Germans supported the radical agitator Adolf Hitler it was because he expressed better than anybody else the real or imagined grievances of the Germans of the Versailles Treaty, which had violated both German national pride and German national honour. The Great War and the treaty that followed it, instead of removing the German problem, only exacerbated it.
Even without Versailles, the worsening of conditions in postwar Europe made a confrontation between the liberal western democracies and the totalitarian states unavoidable.2 Lenin, Stalin, Mussolini and Hitler triumphed as they did because the First World War led to economic collapse,3 and the almost total destruction of the middle class in Russia, and its partial destruction in Germany and Italy. Out of the conditions in Russia emerged Lenin and the dictatorship of the proletariat. The Bolshevik Revolution saw the triumph of the merciless revolutionary masses.
While communism was entrenching itself in Russia, a rival ideology of fascism was making its appearance in Italy. In 1922, with
Italy facing the possibility of civil war, a former school teacher, Benito Mussolini (1883-1945),4 the leader of Italy's anti-communist, anti-democratic and anti-revolutionary Black Shirts, was charged by King Victor Emmanuel III to form a government. In the election of 1924, as conditions deteriorated, fraud, violence and intimidation gave the fascists two-thirds of the total poll. Fascism became the official ideology of Italy. The outcome was the establishment of an authoritarian, all-powerful corporate state, in which intellec-tualism became suspect and obedience paramount. The rationalism and liberalism of an earlier Europe was spurned. Faith in the traditional parties was lost. All those who failed to cooperate with the fascists were removed from office. Mussolini's desire to create an empire led to his annexation of Ethiopia in 1936 and Albania in 1939.
Germany, like Russia and Italy in the postwar period, was ripe for revolution. The country was in turmoil; financial collapse was widespread; armed insurrection and political slayings were common, nihilism flourished, morals deteriorated; liberty begot licence, licence begot anarchy. Since 1920, the parties most identified with the republic - the Social Democrats and the Roman Catholic parties
- had had severe setbacks at the polls. The nationalists and the People's Party on the right, and the Independent Socialists on the left, achieved considerable gains. Henceforth, the demands for the overthrow of the Weimar Republic and its leaders became unrestrained. In coalition after coalition, the republic fought to stay alive. The western democracies - far from going to its help
- hastened its fall. The French and Belgian occupation of the Ruhr in 1923 - following Germany's default in reparation payments
- added to the republic's financial troubles and precipitated its collapse. America's demands upon the Allies at this time for the repayment of loans, coupled with the volatility of US financial leadership, made matters worse.
By 1924 Germany was in the grip of hyperinflation. It cost between 800 and 900 million marks to buy a three pound loaf of bread. Million mark notes were sold on the streets of London for one penny each. In that year, as leader of the National Socialist German Workers Party, Hitler tried to seize power in Munich. Having failed, he went to jail where he wrote his biography Mein Kampf (My Struggle), in which he expressed his belief in the purity of the Aryan race (hence his anti-Semitism), his extreme nationalism, his determination to colonize Slav lands and his opposition to democracy in general and the Weimar Republic in particular. Never had any man provided a better guide to what he intended to do. His racism and his intention to colonize the Slav lands separate him from the German statesmen who preceded him. His subsequent rise might have been avoided if the Genoa Conference of 1922, at which more than 30 nations were represented (and during which Germany and the USSR made their own separate treaty at Rapallo) had not foundered, or if the Locarno treaties, concluded in 1925 between Britain, France, Germany, Italy and Belgium, which guaranteed the frontiers of Germany with Belgium and France, had been upheld.
Forced to choose between what many of them saw as communist-inspired chaos on the one hand, and the Nazi promise of law and order on the other, the Germans supported Hitler. Not even a demagogue, it was thought, could make matters worse. (History says otherwise. Since ancient Greece and Rome, the demagogue has always been the strangler of civilization.) Anarchy and fear had opened the door to despotism.5 In the election of 1930, as the nation became desperate and the vast army of unemployed grew, the National Socialists (Nazis), embracing the two dominant political ideologies of the age - nationalism and socialism - increased their seats in the Reichstag from 12 to 107.6 The communists also made considerable gains. Nazis and communists fought openly in the streets. In 1932, with the deepening of the world depression,7 the Nazis became the largest single party. On 30 January 1933, as majority leader, Adolf Hitler was appointed Chancellor of Germany by the Reichspresident, Paul von Hindenburg (1847-1934).
A system of government by terror and duress, especially against the Jews and the communists, followed. In March 1933, using the Reichstag fire as evidence of a communist plot to overthrow the state, Hitler was granted emergency powers for four years; the Reichstag was eliminated as a political force; the Communist Party was outlawed. With the death of Hindenburg in August 1934, the office of Reichspresident was abolished. Hitler became an absolute dictator, Fuhrer of the German Reich and people. He was to be Germany's undisputed leader for 12 years.
Hitler did not create the chaotic conditions or the enthusiasm which brought him to power. He was endowed with power because he offered a solution to the unbelievably desperate conditions of the times; he never ceased emphasizing Germany's postwar humiliation. Having lost faith in a democratic solution, with conditions worsening, the electorate placed their trust in Hitler.8 They thought that the crises which had shaken German society since 1918 would now end. Through Hitler national and social redemption would be achieved. All of which proved to be a disastrous illusion.
Once in power, Hitler substituted propaganda and terror for public support. The National Socialist German Workers Party was declared the only political party. The judicial and administrative systems of the country were concentrated in Nazi hands. The power of organized labour was likewise broken. The abuses of profiteers and speculators, as well as the decadence of some of Germany's elite, were used to advance the Nazi cause. Political, racial and religious persecution became the order of the day. Everything was sacrificed to the welfare of the party and the security of the state. Racist laws, the 'Nuremberg Laws' (1935), were introduced, excluding Jews from government, the professions and many walks of cultural life. At a time when the parliamentary democracies of Europe were under attack, Hitler magnified their weaknesses. He became the spokesman of all the anti-democratic, anti-liberal, anti-socialist, anti-Christian, anti-communist, antiSemitic and anti-Slav movements of Europe.
In the great purge of 29-30 June 1934, in one fell swoop, Hitler assassinated 77 political opponents for alleged conspiracy. In July, Austria's Chancellor Engelbert Dollfuss (1892-1934) was murdered by Austrian Nazis, who attempted an unsuccessful coup. Although forbidden by the Treaty of Versailles, efforts had already been made by both Austria and Germany to form a political union. In 1935 Hitler denounced the Versailles Treaty (Germany had joined the League of Nations in 1926 and left it in October 1933) and began rearming. The League's attempts to bring about general disarmament were abandoned in 1934. The foreign ministers of Britain, France and Italy met at Stresa to protest Hitler's actions, but nothing came of it. In two years, 1932-4, the number of Germany's unemployed were reduced from 6 to 2 million (in 1937 the figure would be half a million). In 1935 Germany recovered the Saar territory by plebiscite. In 1936 German troops reoccupied the Rhineland.
Italy's invasion of Abyssinia (Ethiopia)9 in 1935 and Hitler's repudiation of the military clauses of the Versailles Treaty (which had included the demilitarization of the Rhineland, where much of Germany's heavy industry was located), probably marked the point beyond which a European war could not be avoided. In 1936 Hitler repudiated the Locarno treaties. In October 1936 the Rome-Berlin Axis was formed; in November the Anti-Comintern Pact between Germany and Japan was concluded.10 The year 1936 also witnessed the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War, which ended in 1939 with the victory of the insurgents under General Francisco Franco (1892-1975). The war provided Germany and Italy, who supported Franco, with a dress rehearsal for the world conflict that was to follow. It also dramatized the ideological differences between the democracies and the dictatorships.
In 1938, with no one prepared to use force against him (and with the Romanov and Austro-Hungarian empires no longer in existence to restrain him), Hitler seized both Austria and the German-speaking areas of Czechoslovakia.11 The surrender of parts of Czechoslovakia to Germans, Poles and Hungarians which followed the Munich meetings in 1938 - to which the Czechs and the Russians were not invited - was described by Chamberlain as 'peace with honour'. It was, of course, appeasement.12 As a result, Germany, without a major war, had become the strongest power on the continent of Europe. In November 1938, following the assassination of an official in the German embassy in Paris, the Nazis used open violence against the German Jewish community (Kristallnacht). Jews were killed, synagogues and businesses were destroyed.
In March 1939, Hitler proceeded to annex the whole of Czechoslovakia and the Lithuanian port of Memel. Intent now on conquering Poland and regaining the territory given to Poland by the Treaty of Versailles (the Polish Corridor), which divided German West Prussia from East Prussia, he made the 'Pact of Steel' with Italy in May 1939. Although in 1934 Germany had signed a nonaggression pact with Poland, in August 1939 Hitler agreed with Stalin (who desperately needed time to prepare for the feared German onslaught, and who despaired of Britain's lukewarm overtures) to divide Poland. Stalin even pledged material support to the Germans. Russia's share of the spoils was to be eastern Poland, Bessarabia, the northern Baltic States and parts of Finland.13
On 1 September, having been warned by Britain and France that an invasion of Poland would bring them into war against him, Hitler attacked Poland. Two days later, on 3 September 1939, conscious now that they were in deadly peril, Britain (joined at once by its Dominions) and France declared war against the German Reich.14 On the same day, Roosevelt, although antiisolationist, declared that America would stay neutral.15 Roosevelt's actions in supplying Britain with arms, and naval protection in the western Atlantic, were anything but neutral. The day after Japan's attack on the United States fleet at Pearl Harbor, on 7 December 1941, America declared war on Japan. Hitler declared war on the United States on the 10th.16 By 1945 all the nations of Latin America had broken relations with the Axis powers; Brazil sent troops to Europe; Mexico gave air support in the Pacific.
While Hitler bears major responsibility for the Second World War, he could never have done what he did had he not been faced by weak, divided French and British leaders.17 Not even a fanatic like Hitler could have gained total power if the western leaders had stood fast. The failure of the western powers was not only one of judgment, but also of will. Hitler knew they would yield under threat, and he exploited their moral weakness. Not one of them stood up to him. Few like Winston Churchill were even prepared to think the worst of him. Only when it was too late did they see through his guise of talking peace while preparing for war.18
While Hitler and Mussolini sought victory at any price, the democracies sought compromise. The decent, middle-class shopkeeper mentality, epitomized by Chamberlain, who was already overwhelmed by the seemingly intractable political and economic problems facing his country, was pitted against the bullying, militaristic mentality of the dictators. Whereas Chamberlain and the rest wanted to reconcile conflicting interests as one would do in business, the dictators wanted, by one ruse or another, to triumph over their rivals. Knowing only national law and national interests, talk of the supremacy of international law was an anathema to them. Outside of war, the democracies could not hope to win.
The best thing that can be said for the British and French leaders is that having experienced the horrors of the Great War, they could not believe that anyone would plunge the world into war again. The mood of the time, both in the European democracies and the United States, was pacifist. War was unjustifiable. Until Britain found itself at bay, the masses preferred appeasement to war. The next best thing that can be said is that appeasement bought for Britain the vital time needed for rearmament (especially in the air), and the development of what became indispensable to Britain's defences: radar. In March 1938 the British Joint Chiefs of Staff urged Chamberlain, 'no matter what the cost, war must be averted until the rearmament programme begins to bear substantial fruit.'19
The democracies' belief that no one could be evil enough to begin a second world war proved false. War followed on a scale such as the world had never seen before. In a month (September 1939) Poland was conquered. With Poland occupied by Germany and Russia (the Soviets had invaded eastern Poland on 17 September, and Finland on 30 November 1939), Hitler turned west. Ignoring the Copenhagen Declaration of Neutrality of July 1938, by means of which the smaller European states20 (Belgium, Netherlands, Denmark, Norway, Switzerland, Finland and the Baltic states) had hoped to stay out of the forthcoming war, in April 1940 he struck at Denmark and Norway. In May he overran Belgium, the Netherlands and France. In a Blitzkrieg (lightning war) all these countries fell one after the other. In ten days the Germans were at Calais and Boulogne. On 15 May, Churchill, who had replaced Chamberlain five days earlier, wrote to Roosevelt: 'the weight may be more than we can bear.' Saved by a miracle, the overwhelmed British Army held out on the sands of Dunkirk (26 May-4 June) for another ten days before being evacuated.21 The Netherlands and Belgium had surrendered; France was tottering.
In five weeks Germany had overrun western Europe, Paris had fallen. With a reckless determination to win, Germany had defeated a larger Allied force. On 10 June 1940, turning a deaf ear to the appeals of President Roosevelt,22 Italy attacked France. For Britain, the French capitulation on 22 June was the greatest loss. The USSR was preoccupied with Poland and the Baltic states. On 15 July, Hitler offered peace terms to Britain which were rejected. Also in July, the US abandoned neutrality by providing the British with 50 destroyers. German U-boats in the Atlantic were causing havoc to British shipping. In one week in October 1940 32 British ships were sunk. Meanwhile, with the German Army occupying three-fifths of France, French resistance continued from London and Algiers under General Charles de Gaulle (1890-1970). The unoccupied part of France was governed from Vichy as a neutral state.
Determined to knock Britain out of the war, Hitler gave orders for its invasion in the summer of 1940. The battle for Britain began in the air. The German bombing of London and other parts of Britain lasted eight months and accounted for 30,000 dead.23 (Later Hamburg and Dresden would lose many more than that in a single air raid.)
Defeated by the British air force ('Never in the field of human conflict was so much owed by so many to so few,'24 said Churchill on 20 August 1940) and unable to penetrate Britain's naval defences, Hitler (like Napoleon had done in 1805) on 12 October 1940 abandoned the task and prepared to attack the Soviet Union.
With the invasion of the Soviet Union, the hoped-for colonization by Germans of Slav lands, about which Hitler had written in Mein Kampf, had begun. Hitler's action - however rash it might appear now - was prompted by the fact that Germany had defeated Russia in the First World War. Despite its much larger numbers (roughly 181 million against Germany's 69 million), Russia was expected to fall as France and Poland had done. 'Kick in the door and the whole rotten edifice will come crashing down,' Hitler kept saying. Echoing ancient racial myths about eastern Europe, the Slavs, he said, were Untermenschen, definitely inferior to the Germanic race. Germany's military might, its productive capacity and its general strategy were all superior to that of the Soviet Union. As Hitler saw it, with Russia out of the war, oil and territory would become available, Britain's fate would be sealed and final victory for the Germans in the west would be assured; America would have to come to terms. Russia's blundering in its conquest of tiny Finland in 1940 demonstrated that the time was ripe.
Germany's invasion of Russia on an almost 2,000-mile-long front on 22 June 1941 - code name 'Barbarossa'25 - had been planned since December 1940. Hitler had been talking about it since July of that year. The original plan had called for an invasion in May, not June. It was delayed a crucial six weeks because Hitler, in response to an anti-Axis coup in Belgrade in March 1941, had invaded Yugoslavia.26 He had also decided (against the advice of his generals) to go to the aid of Mussolini, who now faced almost certain defeat in Albania, Greece and North Africa. Another factor causing postponement were the unusually heavy Spring floods which hindered movement across the Polish-Russian river areas.27
The decision to go to Mussolini's aid opened a chapter of disasters, which played no small part in Germany's ultimate defeat in 1945. Mussolini may have boasted 'eight million bayonets', but over the long haul, as an ally, he proved to be a disaster. In an effort to reinforce the imperilled Italian Army in Albania and Greece,28 the Germans were compelled to fight a prolonged and difficult campaign in Yugoslavia.29
Having rescued the Italians in Albania and Greece, the Germans then fought the British in Crete (where the backbone of the German airborne command was broken). From Crete they then went to the aid of the Italians, who by now were being driven from Libya by the British, Australians and New Zealanders. Under General Erwin Rommel, the German Africa Corps was formed. Step by step, largely on Italy's account, Germany found itself committed to war in the Mediterranean and the Middle East. Without any overall, long-term strategy, the Germans seemed fated to overreach themselves. When, at last, the main German Army was unleashed against Russia in June 1941, it was already too late. Moscow was still in Russian hands when winter set in. Taking the view that it was better to have Russian control of part of Europe (the Soviets had invaded Poland whose independence Britain and France had guaranteed) than the whole of it under German control, the British joined ranks with the Soviet Union.
In June 1941, taking advantage of Germany's assault upon the Soviet Union, Japan began its expansion in southeast Asia. Having overrun French Indo-China, it attacked the Americans in Hawaii and in the Philippines, the British in Hong Kong, Malaya and Burma, the Dutch in Indonesia and the Australians in New Guinea. By May-June 1942, with lightning speed, the furthermost point of their expansion had been reached.
With Germany's invasion of Russia in June 1941 and Japan's attack on Pearl Harbor30 (about which the Germans were not consulted), the war became global. These two actions sealed the fate of the Axis powers. The Japanese attack ensured that the Americans would enter the war with their enormous industrial potential. Britain had been receiving equipment and supplies from America since the passing of the US Lend-Lease Act in March 1941. Germany's declaration of war against the US also assured that American priorities would be settled in favour of the Atlantic rather than the Pacific. The attack on Russia committed Germany to a prolonged, limitless war - the largest military campaign there had ever been - which, with all its other military adventures, it could hardly hope to win. The odds against it in manpower,
Armour and aircraft were formidable. Enormous supplies of weapons reached Russia from Britain and America. It was on the eastern front that Germany lost the war.31
Yet at the outset the Germans could not have done better. By November they had overrun the Baltic states and the Ukraine and were outside Leningrad and Moscow. Millions of Russian soldiers were captured. (In the course of the Russian campaign, more than five million officers and men surrendered to the Germans.) The reaction in Britain and the US to the Nazi invasion was one of relief; the threatened German attack on the British Isles had been postponed. The feeling of relief soon turned to one of fear as the German Army swept all before it. The West became concerned that the Russians would be defeated, leaving Germany free to deal with Britain alone. Only the harsh winter and a Soviet counterattack in December 1941 robbed the Germans of what appeared to be certain victory.
The failure to seize a quick victory on the eastern front was Germany's undoing. Yet, not even after the US had entered the war were the Axis Powers halted. In 1942 Germany's armies still stood outside Moscow and Leningrad in Russia, and in Alexandria in Egypt. At El Alamein Rommel's army was only a few miles from the Suez Canal, Britain's lifeline to the East. Control of the Mediterranean and Britain's vital oil supplies were both in peril. Oil was Germany's greatest need. Until 1942 the Axis Powers' chances of winning the war still looked good. Only at the end of that year and the beginning of 1943, with the Allied victories at Stalingrad (now Volgograd), El Alamein32 and in the Pacific against Japan (especially at Midway in June and at Guadalcanal in the Solomons in August 1942), was the Axis tide turned.
By May 1943 the Allies had defeated the German Army in Africa and had invaded Sicily and Italy. In July 1943 Mussolini, having suffered defeat in east and north Africa, fell from power. By June 1944 Rome had been taken and Italy had switched sides and had declared war on its ally, Germany.33 With the failure of the German offensive at Kursk-Orel in July 1943 (in which, in a matter of 50 days, Germany lost 75,000 men and 1,500 tanks), initiative on the eastern front was taken out of German hands. By 1944 the Soviets had repossessed the Ukraine, broken the German siege of Leningrad and moved into the Baltic states. German U-boats in the Atlantic were hunted down by long-range aircraft now equipped with radar.
In the summer of 1944, under the command of the American General Dwight D. Eisenhower (b. 1890, president 1953-1961, d. 1969), Allied armies landed in France.34 The French contingent was led by General de Gaulle. The long-awaited D-Day, agreed upon at the Allied conference at Teheran in 1943, had arrived. Overnight, the resistance movements of German-occupied Europe came out into the open.
Germany was now besieged from the east, the west and the south. Hundreds of thousands died from Allied air bombardment. In manpower, in productivity and in armaments, it was hopelessly outclassed. Paris was liberated by the end of August 1944. By March 1945 Allied armies had crossed the Rhine. Nor was Germany able to stem the invasion by the use of its newly developed guided missiles. Instead, the horror of war began to spread across Germany.
The German attempt to recover the initiative in the west - by striking through the Ardennes in the Autumn of 1944 (the Battle of the Bulge) - failed, as the Spring offensive had failed in 1918. In the east, in January 1945, Warsaw fell; in April, Soviet troops reached Berlin. Hungary, Romania and Bulgaria had already been overrun. On 25 April 1945, the Allied and Russian forces met on the Elbe. On 30 April, in a bunker in Berlin, Hitler committed suicide. Mussolini had already been shot by Italian partisans; with his mistress he was hung by the heels by a bloodthirsty mob in Milan. On 7 May the Germans surrendered unconditionally. The war in Europe was over.
It remained to defeat the Japanese, who in a series of brilliant campaigns35 had overrun the British, French and Dutch empires in southeast Asia and had reached India, New Guinea and Guadalcanal. By the Spring of 1942 the last US stronghold in the Philippines had fallen, much of southeast Asia and the western Pacific was in Japanese hands. The turning points were the decisive defeats of the Japanese at the naval battles of the Coral Sea (May 1942) and Midway (June 1942). Until Midway, Japan had never lost an important battle; after Midway it never won one. In August, Allied forces under General Douglas MacArthur (1880-1964) attacked Japanese positions in the Solomons. In September Japanese ground forces were defeated by the Australians on the Kokoda Trail in New Guinea, and in the Spring of 1944 by the British and the Indians at Imphal on the border of India.
By October 1944 the Americans had island-hopped across the Pacific and had retaken the Philippines. With the battle for Leyte Gulf, the greatest battle of its kind in history, the threat of the Japanese Navy was ended. The subsequent capture of Iwo Jima and Okinawa in March-April 1945 provided a base from which Japan could easily be bombed. Until August 1945 the skies above Japan were rarely free of land-based and carrier-based American aircraft. US submarines blockaded Japan. On 16 July the US detonated its first atomic bomb at Los Alamos in New Mexico. On 6 August an atomic bomb was dropped on Hiroshima, and on 9 August on Nagasaki. In Hiroshima 140,000 died instantly; 130,000 were injured.36 One of the most powerful considerations in dropping the bomb was to end the war before the Soviets could stake a claim for the joint occupation of Japan. Had not President Harry Truman (b. 1884, president 1945-53, d. 1972) and General MacArthur resisted Soviet proposals, Japan, like Germany, would have become a divided state. On 8 August, ignoring its nonaggression pact with Japan, the Soviets attacked Japanese positions in Manchuria.37 Japanese resistance collapsed. With Japan's acceptance of the Allied terms of capitulation on 14 August, the war in the East was over. In allowing their ambitions to run wild, the Japanese had become committed to undertakings far greater than their strength could support.
Thus ended a cataclysm without parallel. War-related deaths were about 55 million, most of them in eastern Europe.38 Unbelievable mass exterminations had also been practised against minority groups and political opponents. The number of European Jews, by flight and genocide, had been reduced by two-thirds. The Jews now speak of this as their holocaust, an event of such barbarity as to surpass understanding.39 It was an event that would change both Jewish and world history. It led to the establishment of the state of Israel in 1948, and to the present discord between Arab and Jew in the Middle East; which in turn has affected US relations with the rest of the world. The war uprooted and dispersed millions of other people (including 14 million Germans). The use of saturation bombing which - official rhetoric aside - was meant to terrorize the civilian population, greatly increased the number of casualties. The Second World War is the first war in history where the civilian losses outnumbered those of the military. It was a turning point in the history of warfare.
Germany and Japan emerged from the war at the mercy of the Allies. Japan was stripped of the Pacific islands it had acquired before 1941, and of all possessions seized since 1941. The Soviet Union annexed the Kurile Islands north of Hokkaido, the US took Okinawa (the Ryukyu Islands) and obtained a trusteeship of the Pacific islands formerly mandated to Japan - the Mariana, Caroline and Marshall Islands.
The trial of Japanese and German war criminals followed. The Axis Powers had been warned by Churchill and Roosevelt that they would be held responsible, and they were.40 In bringing the Axis leaders to justice, the trials assembled the damning evidence of a uniquely barbaric age. Other than shooting them out of hand, which was the traditional way of dealing with the vanquished, it is difficult to see what else could have been done. Yet it was a victors' justice - with no guarantee that the victors were necessarily the most just. Without neutral judges, it assumed that truth and justice were on the victors' side. US Chief Justice Stone called the Nuremberg trials 'Jackson's lynching expedition' (Jackson was US associate justice of the Supreme Court).41 The defendants (22 at Nuremberg, 28 in Tokyo) were not allowed to cite Allied crimes as justification for their own acts. The Soviets' Katyn Forest massacre in Poland in 1939,42 Britain's war in Norway in 1940 and the terror bombing by the Allies of Germany and Japan all went uncited. As the Japanese were tried with a complete disregard for Japanese values and traditions, in particular with a disregard for the samurai code, the Tokyo trials have come to be regarded by some Japanese as little more than a farce.43
The chief legal criticism levelled at the trials, particularly where judgment was rendered for crimes against humanity, was that the laws applied were created retroactively. Men were sentenced for deeds which were not considered crimes when the acts were committed. The General Treaty for the Renunciation of War (the Kellogg-Briand Pact of 1928, of which Germany and Japan were signatories) had not made war as such illegal. What it had censured was aggressive war, and that was a matter of legal interpretation.
Although Nuremberg gave new life to the concept of natural law, and raised questions about the legitimate authority of the state in war, the trials may have enlarged rather than limited war. Having established that guilt in war will be personal and that military necessity or the receipt of orders from a superior44 will not be admitted in defence, it means that those who are engaged in war will either emerge victorious (whatever the cost), or they will run the risk of being hanged.
Unfortunately for humanity, the Nuremberg trials45 have not banished barbarity. Crimes against humanity have gone on. Even genocide46 persists, as the Biafrans, Kurds, Bosnians, Albanians, Laotians, Hutus, Tutsi and countless others could testify. As long as there is no international tribunal empowered to uphold international law by force, as long as we are unable to reconcile universal laws with the wishes of national sovereignty, crimes against humanity will continue.
Power abhorring a vacuum, in 1945 the US and the USSR emerged as the two greatest world powers. Although three of the five great powers of the time - the US, the USSR, Britain, France and China47 - were European powers, the Eurocentric world system, which had prevailed since the sixteenth century, was at an end. A bipolar world replaced the multipolar world of nineteenth-century geopolitics. The concessions made to Stalin at Teheran (1943), Yalta and Potsdam (1945), which gave Russia parts of Germany and Poland, and gave Poland parts of Germany,48 and divided Germany itself, had greatly enlarged Russian tutelage in eastern and central Europe49 (Map XV). Despite what Hitler intended, for the first time in its history, central and eastern Europe were at the mercy of the Russians. By 1948, except for Greece,50 Turkey and Yugoslavia, eastern Europe had come under Soviet control. By then communist power had been established in Poland, East Germany, the Baltic states (except Finland), Romania, Yugoslavia, Hungary, Bulgaria and Albania. Except in Albania, Soviet power was never extended without military pressure. Also in 1948, in order to keep its outer defences intact, the Soviets seized power in Czechoslovakia.
One of the astonishing outcomes of the war was the way communist Russia was able to reach out and seize control of so much of Europe. In 1939, Britain and France had gone to war because Hitler had invaded Poland, whose independence they had guaranteed. Russia's invasions, which began with the conquest of eastern Poland and ended with the seizing of Czechoslovakia, raised no such furore in the West. Similarly, the atrocities committed by the Soviets in their rapid expansion in Europe have been glossed over. The West seems to have had a double standard: one by which to judge the diabolical actions of Hitler; the other by which to judge the conduct of 'Uncle Joe' (Stalin). Hitler's
Map XV EASTERN EUROPE AFTER THE SECOND WORLD WAR
Invasion of Poland meant war; Stalin's invasion of Poland meant that he became an ally of the West. Yet Stalin altered the European map more than Hitler did. All of which seems to confirm the age-old dictum: 'Inter arma silent leges' (In times of war the law is silent). Political expediency prevailed.
Russian attitudes towards the West at the end of the Second World War are partly to be explained by Russia's severe losses. The 'marriage of convenience' of the war years between capitalism and communism had ended. More importantly, from 1939 to 1948, nobody had the will or the power to halt Soviet transgressions. Regardless of America's superlative economic and military power, it had no desire to challenge Stalin's policy of imposing the communist system as far as the Red Army could reach. It was out of the question for war-shattered Britain and France to intervene. Britain not only lacked the physical resources to wage another war; after six years of war, it also lacked the necessary fighting spirit.
In 1945 there was no peace conference (such as Versailles) to settle the problems of the postwar world. Reparations took the form of Allied occupation of Germany and Japan, and the seizing of German industrial plant and equipment. France and the Soviet Union obtained the greatest share. Stalin continued to strip the East German zone after reparations had ended in 1952. Since 1951, West Germany has paid $62 billion as reparations to Israel and holocaust survivors for losses caused to Jews during the Nazi regime.51 In addition, Germany has granted low-interest loans and scientific and military aid to Israel. In 1947 the Allies made peace treaties with Italy, Hungary, Romania, Bulgaria and Finland; in 1951 with Japan; in 1955 with Austria; and not until 1990 with Germany.
In the summer of 1945 the line between the western democracies and the Soviet Union had still to be drawn. At that time most people's hopes were pinned on the United Nations Organization which, under American auspices, had just been established to guarantee world peace. Unlike in 1919, the US now embraced the idea of collective security. President Truman's words: 'Oh, what a great day this can be in history', echoed the hopes of mankind. But the dream of world peace soon gave way to the cold war. 'From Stettin on the Baltic,' warned Churchill at Fulton, Missouri, on 5 March 1946, 'to Trieste in the Adriatic, an Iron Curtain has descended across the continent' (Map XV). Henceforth it took a balance of terror to keep a third world war at bay.
World History
