(1769-1852), British soldier, statesman, and Prime Minister (1828-30, 1834). Born into the impoverished irish nobility, Wellesley fought in the Low Countries during the french revolutionary WARS, but really learned his trade and first made his mark in india, winning spectacular victories over the Mahrattas in 1803. He entered parliament as a Tory in 1806, before achieving national prominence as leader ofthe British forces in the peninsular war after 1808. There he skillfully exploited the terrain, the tactical superiority of his troops, and the abilities of his Spanish allies as guerrilla fighters. in 1814 he was rewarded with a dukedom. At the battle of Waterloo, which ended the Napoleonic wars, he confirmed his stature as an outstanding commander. After 1815 the new Duke of Wellington returned to politics, serving in the cabinet as Master-General of Ordnance (1818-27) and becoming prime minister after canning’s death. He was more successful as a general than as his country’s political leader, in which latter role he opposed parliamentary reform and split his party through an eventual and reluctant acceptance of Catholic emancipation (see Catholicism). He was a three-week caretaker prime minister in 1834 after Melbourne’s death, and thereafter served under Robert Peel first as foreign secretary (1834-5) and then as minister without portfolio (1841-6). in this final office he helped to repeal the corn Laws before retiring from public life. The “iron Duke” died secure in the popular affection and public approbation that he had always tended to despise.
Weltpolitik Meaning “world politics” or “world policy,” this term became particularly important in Germany during the epoch of Kaiser william ii. The new german empire aspired not only to consolidate its influence over mitteleuropa but also to compete with other major powers, including Britain, in strengthening colonial imperialism. However, the manner and language of this pursuit by William’s regime in the years before world WAR I left many Germans and non-Germans alike in some uncertainty as to how far Weltpolitik might be turning into a bid for Welthegemonie (“world domination”).
Wends (see sorbs)
West Germany (see federal republic of Germany)
Western European Union (WEU) European defense and security organization formed in 1954. Its roots lie in the Brussels treaty of Economic, social and cultural collaboration and collective Self-Defense, signed on March 17, 1948 by Belgium, France, Luxemburg, the Netherlands, and the united Kingdom. Their linkage was initially conceived as a means of promoting military cooperation as the cold war intensified, but its functions were inevitably overtaken by nato. The WEU itself then came into being in the mid-1950s thanks to attempts to accommodate the future military potential of the new federal republic of GERMANY. Proposals to establish a European army through a European Defence Community (EDC) were approved by leaders of the six, yet voted down by the French National Assembly. so it was that in 1954 italy and West Germany signed up to the Brussels Treaty, as amended by the Paris Agreements of that year, and the WEu emerged. it achieved little, however, as members were wary of relinquishing sovereignty over military affairs. The WEU enjoyed another fresh start in the 1980s when France believed that this body might offer an alternative to a US-dominated NATO. Other member states of the European Union (EU), whose numbers had grown, were less convinced. Nonetheless, the Maastricht treaty envisaged the WEu as the chief military arm of the Eu, and in 1995 the Eurocorps was formed, comprising troops from the member countries of the WEU. In 2000, in the wake of the Amsterdam treaty, the various functions of the WEU started to be transferred to the EU as part of its developing Common Foreign and Security Policy, a process which did not prove at all straightforward due to continuing disagreements as to how Europe’s security could be best safeguarded. (See also
EUROPEAN integration)
White Terror Term used to describe a violent reactionary response to radical movements or policies. The first such episode took place in France following the fall of robespierre in the coup of THERMIDOR (July 1794), when the convention brought the Montagnard-inspired terror to a close. Outside of Paris, this event sparked an epidemic of popular violence in which royalist lynch mobs, sometimes called “Companies of Jesus,” hunted down and summarily executed suspected jacobins. Such bloodshed was especially intense in southeastern France where possibly two thousand people were killed in the course of 1795. The second White Terror (1815-18) again occurred in France, at the time of louis xviii’s restoration. While the Chamhre Introuvable prosecuted alleged regicides, in the countryside ultras searched out former Jacobins and Bonapartists and forcibly reclaimed lands lost during the FRENCH REVOLUTION OF 1789. The term White Terror is further used in the context of the Russian CIVIL war, when “White” tsarist armies engaged in the persecution of bolsheviks and in anti-Jewish POGROMS, especially in the Ukraine. A White Terror also followed the collapse of the german REVOLUTIONS OF 1918-19 when the freikorps brutally suppressed the spartacists. Similar events accompanied the end of the Finnish Civil War (1918) and the collapse of Bela kun’s Hungarian Soviet Republic (1920). The phrase is additionally applied to Nationalist atrocities during and after the SPANISH CIVIL war. These claimed the lives of anywhere between 200,000 and 800,000 people.
Wilhelmine empire (see german empire)
Wilhelmstrasse Synonym for the German foreign ministry, derived from the Berlin street named after Emperor william i where its principal offices were sited from 1871 to 1945. (See also ballhausplatz; quai d’orsay)
William I (1797-1888), King of Prussia (1861-88) and German Emperor (1871-88). In 1858 William became Prussian regent, acting on behalf of his ailing brother Frederick william iv until the latter’s death three years later. As monarch, his initial concessions to liberalism proved short-lived. His overriding aim was to strengthen the Prussian army with a view to challenging Austrian primacy within the german confederation. When parliament raised financial objections in 1862, the king was persuaded by his war minister, von roon, to drive through the necessary changes by appointing bismarck as minister-president. Thereafter the latter worked closely - though sometimes stormily-with his monarch to promote a version of german unification that would exclude the habsburg empire and remain firmly under Prussian leadership. Victory in the austro-prussian war of 1866 was a vital means towards that end, and a product of their collaboration. strained relations between William and Bismarck became more apparent in 1870, when the former hesitated over whether to defy France by persisting with support for a hohenzollern succession to the Spanish throne. The king’s cautiousness forced Bismarck to resort to editing the EMS telegram in a manner that would provoke a franco-prussian war - the conflict which soon enabled a new german empire to be proclaimed under William’s aegis in January 1871. Though the rights of other princes were formally preserved through its federal constitution (see federalism [1]), this Second Reich became increasingly characterized by the Prussian dominance that Bismarck’s statesmanship secured. While this was being consolidated, the “old emperor” helped to provide a symbolic focal point for the strengthening of German nationalism within the new imperial structures. in 1878 William was nonetheless the object of two unsuccessful assassination attempts by disaffected radicals, after the second of which his son (later Frederick iii) acted for a time as regent.
William II (1859-1941), King of Prussia and German Emperor (1888-1918). William succeeded to these titles after the three-month reign of his father, Frederick iii, a ruler of potentially more liberal persuasion. “conceited and hotheaded” according to his grandmother Queen victoria, he was to develop a complex love-hate relationship with everything British. From his youth he was obsessed with military paraphernalia, and his whole manner conveyed an impetuous bellicosity that may have provided some psychological compensation for the paralysis and deformity suffered in his left arm. Within two years of his accession, the new Kaiser had secured the ousting of BISMARCK from the imperial chancellorship - thus “dropping the pilot” who had skillfully navigated the hohenzollern dynasty’s version of a german empire through its first two decades. Thereafter William, an enthusiast for aggressive weltpolitik in the contexts both of European and overseas empire (see also imperialism), sought to exploit the extensive powers available to him under the Reich constitution. These included the requirement that ministers should be directly responsible not to the Reichstag but to the ruler personally. In practice, they proved generally capable of outwitting him, and thus the neurotically erratic Kaiser failed to achieve the degree of autocratic authority that he craved. Although his most cherished prerogative was that of “supreme warlord,” William’s role as military chief was increasingly marginalized, especially by HINDENBURG and LUDENDORFF, during the course of WORLD WAR I. On the day before armistice in November 1918, the Kaiser fled from Germany and subsequently abdicated. His self-exile allowed him to avoid a war-crimes trial by the victorious Allies for an alleged “supreme offence against international morality and the sanctity of treaties.” William spent the rest of his life in Holland, where after the Nazi invasion German troops guarded him at his country retreat of Doorn until his death.
Wilson, Thomas Woodrow (see under fourteen points; PARIS PEACE SETTLEMENT)
Windischgratz, Prince Alfred (1787-1862), Austrian general, who rose to high rank in the HABSBURG EMPIRE during the NAPOLEONIC WARS. In 1840 he was made commander of bohemia. Early in the revolutions of 1848-9 conservative elements hoped he would be given a free rein in crushing rebellion in vienna. Denied that opportunity, Windischgratz went back to his Bohemian command, where in June 1848 he swiftly extinguished insurrection in Prague by bombarding the city. In october he returned to put down revolution in vienna, before directing his attention to the Hungarian threat and marching on Budapest in December. In March 1849 Gorgey counter-attacked and drove Windischgratz from Hungary, leading to the latter’s resignation from public life.
Windthorst, Ludwig (1812-91), German politician. After the Prussian annexation of his native HANOVER and the creation of the german empire in 1871, Windthorst became the most eloquent and effective opponent of bismarck during the period of the KULTURKAMPF. While tirelessly championing the interests of German Catholics (see Catholicism), Windthorst was always a key defender of the constitutional rights of other minorities, including jews and Poles. Disliked but respected by Bismarck, Windthorst succeeded in turning the Catholic zentrum into the pivotal party in the Reichstag, and has been seen by some historians and many contemporaries as Germany’s most outstanding parliamentarian.
Winter War (see russo-finnish war)
Witte, Sergei (1849-1915), Russian administrator and politician, responsible for the rapid INDUSTRIALIZATION pursued by the tsarist regime in the 1890s. Witte was born into a wealthy and well-connected family, and his decision to enter state service was a natural one. In the 1870s and 1880s, he was especially involved in the development of railways (see communications), and became transport minister in 1892. From 1892 to 1903, he served as minister of finance. In this capacity, he did much to boost heavy industry and undertook several public-works programs, particularly the Trans-Siberian Railway. To pay for such ventures, Witte was instrumental in encouraging sizeable foreign investments, especially from France. The speed of economic change was still too modest for NICHOLAS ii’s more bellicose advisers, and Witte was effectively sidelined in 1903. He returned to power in 1905 to end the disastrous russo-japanese WAR that had contributed to precipitating the revolution of that year. In the course of this upheaval (see Russian revolution of 1905), he prepared the October manifesto, which envisaged a constitutional monarchy. In November he became the first Russian prime minister to serve within the new context of a parliamentary duma.
He was, however, disliked at court, and continuing left-wing agitation ensured his dismissal in 1906. Remaining a member of the State Council, he became a fierce critic of the bellicose drift of Russian foreign policy, but never recovered the influence he had previously enjoyed.
Wollstonecraft, Mary (1759-97), pioneer of feminism. During the epoch of the french revolution OF 1789 she belonged to the circle of so-called “English JACOBINS.” Her Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792) was partly an attack on Edmund Burke’s conservative responses to the events in France. it was most influential, however, as an impassioned depiction of the extent to which male prejudices had come to determine conventional perceptions of the nature, education, and social functions of the female sex (see also gender). The Vindication certainly stung Horace Walpole into calling its author “a hyena in petticoats.” During her final years she was the partner of the radical journalist William Godwin, author of Political Justice (1793). Despite their shared disapproval of marriage, they eventually wedded in 1797 - shortly before she died following the birth of their daughter Mary, who would later become the wife of the poet Shelley.
Women, emancipation of (see under feminism; gender)
Working class Within the overall spectrum of CLASS analysis, the undisputed core of this category is generally identified as being those whose subsistence depends on waged employment in manual industrial work (see industrialization). However, this term is also frequently used to cover any socio-economic grouping placed below the level of a notional “middle class.” Accordingly, the meaning may extend to encompass artisans and agrarian workers (see rural society), together with their families. The elasticity of definition is further encouraged by the persistence through the nineteenth century of complex patterns of MIGRATION, including those seasonally repeated by reference to harvesting, that often blunted sharp distinctions between town and country employment. Such mobility of labor remained quite commonplace in parts of southern and eastern Europe for even longer, thus continuing to bring into urban settings those traditions of rural protest that contributed, for instance, to Russian unrest in the early-twentieth century (see Russian REVOLUTION OF 1905; RUSSIAN REVOLUTIONS OF 1917).
Even so, by 1900 the number of Europeans who matched the core definition of “working class” and who lived more or less permanently in centers of industrial urbanization had already grown massively in both absolute and proportional terms. They tended to inhabit what were in effect segregated areas, where they were housed in cramped conditions that strained their family structures. They had little access to leisure facilities and hard drinking became common, though many communities made special efforts to educate themselves and thus to maintain a proud tradition of self-improvement. This brought some respite from a strict factory system, characterized by dangerous conditions on the work-floor, long hours, and severe penalties for absenteeism. State welfarism would only partly ameliorate this situation. Among the working classes themselves, there existed a strong corporate identity, but also an internal hierarchy. The biggest distinction was between those who were skilled and those who were not. For instance, within the textiles industry the elite comprised specially trained technicians; below them were semi-skilled machine operators; and, at the bottom, there existed a mass of unskilled laborers who earned poor wages. Everywhere employers tried to keep remuneration low - something made easier by the wide range of mundane jobs available, as well as by increasing mechanization and the employment of women (see gender).
So as to better its conditions, the working class flocked to TRADE UNIONISM and became vital to the development of socialism, constituting for example the electoral bedrock for the social democratic PARTY OF GERMANY. The workers themselves were defined by marx and lenin as those who had no control over the means of production and who were denied the fruits of their labor. Thus it was the duty of communism to promote a class consciousness that would pave the way for revolution and for a dictatorship of the proletariat which would eliminate rival social groups. This was something stalin partly attempted through the FIVE-YEAR PLANS and COLLECTIVIZATION when he targeted the kulaks (see also great purges). It was, however, always a conundrum for Marxism that members of the working class did not necessarily prove to be the most revolutionary of social groups. Although they would largely resist the blandishments of fascism, they did not lean automatically towards the political left. One case in point was Britain, where there was a long tradition of working-class conservatism, partly based on deference and a desire for social betterment, and particularly noticeable among women who had fewer dealings with trade unions and socialist parties (see also feminism). Through recent decades many western Europeans have continued to identify themselves as members of the working class, even though the accelerating pace of deindustrialization has been turning this into a shrinking and increasingly deskilled category in which women and immigrants tend to be proportionately over-represented.
World War I This conflict, conducted mainly in Europe but possessing certain wider dimensions as well, lasted from August 1914 until November 1918. Also known as the Great War, its principal belligerents were Germany, Austria, and Turkey on one side and Britain, France, Russia, and Japan (joined by Italy in 1915 and the USA in 1917) on the other.
The depth of controversy about its causes stems partly from the scale of the ensuing warfare, but also from the essentially political judgment registered by the victors in the 1919 Versailles treaty which emphasized “war guilt” and overwhelmingly condemned the former german empire. The subtler assessments provided by historians have tended either to rebut directly, or perhaps more often to qualify, that simplistic view. When offering more systemic long-term explanations based on broader European perspectives, they have cited a variety of factors that include the spread of nationalism and imperialism; the allegedly self-destructive capacities of capitalism; the competitive pursuit of militarism and of an arms race; the willingness of ruling elites to gamble on warfare as a means of resolving domestic divisions; and a culture increasingly pervaded by SOCIAL Darwinism’s supposed endorsement of relentless struggle. Yet even considerations such as these have remained entwined with the need closely to analyze those diplomatic developments of the pre-1914 period that still feature centrally in the relevant historiography. Did the balance between a triple alliance and a triple entente that had evolved since the era of bismarck and had seemingly helped to preserve peace among the major powers contain intrinsically fatal flaws, or did it simply fall victim to the quite conscious determination of one or more powers to abandon all concern for equilibrium? Though the conduct of an increasingly powerful Germany sometimes appeared to be particularly disruptive (e. g. in the MOROCCAN crises), even william ii’s regime could offer some plausible claim, focused in this case on the perils of “encirclement,” that its policies were essentially defensive. Other governments adopted similar justifications, even as the chronic instability of the Balkans and the territorial ambitions of SERBIA in particular became ever more threatening to general European peace (see also EASTERN question). While broader conflict was still avoided during the two regional Balkan wars of 1912-13, the major powers’ overall reaction to the assassination of the Austrian crown prince in sarajevo on June 28, 1914 produced a very different outcome.
Particularly between July 23 and August 6 there was a welter of diplomatic and military activity (for the course and significance of which see july crisis) that ended with Russia, France, and Britain being at war with the central powers of Germany and Austria. This line-up reflected (except for Italy’s absence) the pattern of the pre-war alliance system, yet it was shaped less by the strict letter of previous treaty promises than by perceptions of what constituted, at that moment, the vital national interests of those involved. in essence, large-scale conflict erupted once statesmen and military chiefs in key capitals had generally concluded that maintaining peace now carried more risk than quickly resorting to war. Germany’s decision was the most fateful of all, since it entailed prompt use of the schlieffen plan. This envisaged a rapid victory over France that would then allow fuller concentration on the defeat of Russia. Therefore the plan rendered it inevitable that a conflict whose immediate origins lay in the Balkans should spread, at the very outset, to western as well as eastern Europe. The related attack on Belgium was crucial in resolving doubts about the involvement of Britain, which would soon be bolstered by the participation of forces from her Dominions too. Once the schlieffen scheme foundered in september because of French resistance at the first battle of the marne,
Germany became burdened with precisely the kind of protracted warfare that she had aimed to avoid. Henceforth her reserves of manpower and material resources would be even more sorely stretched than those of her enemies.
By early 1915, a Western Front had developed along almost static lines stretching from Flanders to the Swiss border. Amid trenches and barbed wire, shell-craters and mud, the slaughter was now reaching the kind of horrific scale maintained thereafter. The successive battles around YPRES, the sustained German assault on verdun in 1916, and the somme counter-offensive of the same year became leading examples of vast carnage for minimal territorial gain. Warfare along the more mobile Eastern Front confirmed that the Russian commanders were also prepared to accept huge losses of manpower in their attempts to stem the enemy advances that progressed through 1915. In the Balkan region, Bulgaria’s entry into the conflict in September of that year had further increased the pressure on the tsarist regime. At sea, there was only one major direct engagement, on May 31 to June 1,1916, when the British and German fleets fought inconclusively at JUTLAND. The former did enough, however, to limit thereafter the movement of the Kaiser’s main warships. This allowed Anglo-French naval power to be increasingly deployed in blockade. Early in 1917 the Germans responded with extensive mining and with unrestricted use of submarine warfare as now urged by tirpitz, in a situation where the need to transfer their own burden of economic suffocation on to the British had become urgent. This gamble on swift victory failed only narrowly. Its main effect was to drive the USA into war upon Germany. Thus strengthened, the western Allies survived even the loss of Russia. After the brusilov offensive of mid-1916 had failed to strike a decisive blow against the Austro-German forces, the tsarist regime’s ability to sustain the war rapidly waned. Internal chaos, indicated by the Russian revolutions of 1917, hastened military dissolution. Towards the end of that year the new bolshevik regime sued for peace, and in March 1918 lenin and trotsky accepted the punitive Treaty of brest-litovsk. However, even this eastern victory for the Central Powers came too late to save them.
Their position had been complicated by Italy’s abandonment of neutrality and indeed by her reversal of earlier alliance loyalties, when she declared war on Austria in May 1915 and on Germany in August 1916. Though combined Austro-German forces routed the turncoats at CAPORETTO late in 1917, this northern Italian front (running principally along the Isonzo and then the Piave) continued into 1918 as a further drain on the resources of the Central Powers. Things were also going increasingly badly for their ally Turkey, which had joined the fray in November 1914 and had then enjoyed some success in frustrating its enemies’ gallipoli campaign of 1915-16 as well as in its domestic pursuit of the ARMENIAN GENOCIDE. Now the surviving Ottoman holdings in the Balkans, Asia Minor, and the Middle East were all being imperiled. Nor could Germany take comfort from the course of the far-flung colonial warfare that was bringing defeat to her imperial ambitions in parts of Africa, the Far East, and Oceania. Within Europe itself, by July 1918 LUDENDORFF’s last great German offensive on the Western Front stood exhausted. Here the tide of advance was now reversed, due principally to the increasing availability of American manpower, plus improved artillery techniques and greater use of tanks. Germany soon came to accept the need to seek an armistice. In November, even before enemy troops could reach her own soil, she obtained this. The ceasefire came amid rapid collapse of further resistance from her other war-partners, and indeed of william ii’s own imperial authority too (see german revolution of 1918-19). The defeat of the Central Powers was now an established fact, even though the conflict was not formally ended until the 1919 Paris peace SETTLEMENT had generated the requisite treaties (alongside that of Versailles, see those of neuilly; ST Germain; sevres; trianon) and thus re-mapped much of Europe and its colonial extensions.
What the ex-Kaiser’s son had initially welcomed as “a jolly little war” looked very different at the end of a conflict whose length and scale of slaughter none had anticipated. Overall, the battles themselves had probably accounted for nearly 10 million deaths and for varying degrees of disablement in some 25 million further cases. The related Russian civil war of 1917-21 also levied a heavy toll. Furthermore, taking Europe and other continents together, the early postwar period witnessed between 20 and 50 million deaths from the combined effects of epidemic (including “SPANISH” influenza) and malnutrition upon peoples directly or indirectly debilitated by four years of conflict. Such losses underlined the extent to which World War I had reflected the circumstances of MASS SOCIETY. Soldiers, increasingly recruited by general conscription, had been subjected to a carnage that was indiscriminate and impersonal. In London and Paris homage would be paid henceforth to the Unknown Warrior - a novel conception suggesting how apt it now was even for heroes to be nameless. The lines between combatant and civilian had also become more blurred. Both sustained blockade and long-range artillery bombardment, for instance, ignored distinctions of age, sex, or class. Moreover, there was leveling of service as well as suffering, illustrated particularly by the losses of merchant shipping and, in contexts of domestic war production, the growing reliance on female labor (see also gender). Once attrition became the order of the day, the “home front” had to be fully mobilized. Each nation’s human and material resources were then used according to the requirements of that scientific and mechanical technology which had already so profoundly conditioned everyday life before 1914. Among the results were innovative developments in tank, gas, submarine, and aerial warfare. More generally still, there was gigantic conversion of productive into destructive capacity. At certain moments it even seemed as if technical necessity had assumed autonomous significance, defiant of control by statesmen or generals. The machine, so long paradigmatic of the rationalization of European society, had become central to a scale of wastage that appeared irrational, or indeed insane. Other assumptions were similarly shaken by the kind of mass propaganda that had accompanied total mobilization and that would then become familiar for governments to employ as means of distortion, censorship, and control during the 1920s and 1930s. Enlarged state power was further exemplified by conscription, reorganization of civilian labor, imposition ofprice controls and rationing, higher government borrowing, increased taxation, stronger centralized direction of overall economic strategy, and various curtailments of civil liberty.
Other broad consequences of the Great War included its crucial contribution to the final collapse of Romanov, Habsburg, and Hohenzollern imperial authority in the course of 1917-18, as well as to that of the Ottomans in the early 1920s. Much of that process encouraged the western Allies to proclaim a triumph for liberalism and DEMOCRACY. Yet, equally, the conflict helped to make communism the ruling ideology in Europe’s largest state, and also created the preconditions for the widespread emergence of fascism elsewhere across the continent. Moreover, the Versailles Treaty was harsh enough to leave Germany deeply embittered, while also being sufficiently lenient (especially in not requiring a reversal of national unification) to permit Nazism to pursue revenge barely a generation later. As Marshal foch famously put it, “This is not a peace, but an armistice for twenty years.” Once the soviet union and the hitler regime had consolidated themselves, survival for many of the succession states created by the peacemakers of 1919 in the name of national self-determination became deeply questionable. Viewed over the long term and in truly global perspective, the European aspects of the conflict of 1914-18 might well appear to be a form of continental civil war. This was not merely an internecine struggle which hinted at the vulnerability of Europe’s far-flung imperialistic claims but also one which would soon be even more bloodily resumed within the overall ambit of WORLD WAR II. (See also battles of tannenberg and passchendaele; falkenhayn; fourteen points; hin-denburg; nivelle; pEtain; and Maps 7, 8, and 9)
World War II This conflict, conducted on a scale unparalleled in previous history, lasted in its European sphere from September 1939 to May 1945. The causes related principally to defeated Germany’s resentment at the terms imposed after WORLD WAR I by the Versailles treaty of 1919. Since efforts to relax those provisions were supported by most Germans during the weimar republic, the revisionist program developed in the 1920s by the Nazis (see Nazism) was in some ways unremarkable. However, particularly after hitler became chancellor in 1933, he expressed such demands in an increasingly radical and bellicose fashion, exploiting an ideology of Teutonic racism that focused on the “Aryan” destiny of Germany to reassert its primacy within (and even beyond) Europe.
Under Nazi rule Germany promptly withdrew from the league of nations, and ignored the bans on conscription and rearmament imposed at
Versailles. Early in 1936 Hitler managed through the RHINELAND CRISIS to undo another part of the treaty. By the end of that year he and mussolini had formed the Rome-Berlin axis, and had committed support to FRANCO’S Nationalists in the SPANISH CIVIL WAR. In March 1938 the Nazi regime violated the Versailles prohibition on union (see ANSCHLUSS) between Germany and Austria. Six months later, having provoked a crisis over the sudetenland, Hitler secured through the Munich AGREEMENT the first stage of Czechoslovakia’s dismemberment. The remaining stages occurred in March 1939, when it became fully evident that the Third Reich’s territorial ambitions extended into non-Germanic regions. At that point the British and French governments, which had previously tended towards appeasement of Germany, stiffened their stance by offering guarantees to the next likely target, Poland. Any chance of making these promises really effective was destroyed in late August by the surprise announcement of the NAZI-SOVIET PACT. While Hitler and stalin were both content to publicize what were for the time being their mutually convenient assurances about non-aggression against each other, they were equally anxious to conceal the “secret protocol” that confirmed their shared intent urgently to carve up all Polish territory. The German invasion of September 1 activated this scheme, under the pretext of resolving the danzig corridor issue, and by the end of the same month the goal of partition had been essentially achieved.
Though Britain and France swiftly responded by declaring war on Germany, no major combat on land ensued in the west during the subsequent winter of the so-called phoney war. This was, however, the period when Stalin waged a russo-FINNISH war, from which he managed to make only limited gains. Hitler’s major blitzkrieg in the western direction started in April 1940, with attacks on Norway, Denmark, the Netherlands, Belgium, and Luxemburg. By the end of June the German military machine had not only defeated all these countries and driven a British Expeditionary Force into the evacuation from Dunkirk but had also compelled the surrender of France. Its western and northern regions (including Paris) fell under military occupation, while the rest became administered by a vichy regime of essentially “puppet” status. However, the Luftwaffe’s failure to defeat the RAF over southern England (see BATTLE OF BRITAIN) and the continuing power of the Royal Navy meant that by October Hitler’s plans to round off the western strategy by bringing the UK directly to heel had to be postponed. Now led by churchill, the British would fight on - though not so entirely “alone” as legend often has it, but rather with valuable support from the Dominions.
Meanwhile Hitler was experiencing the mixed blessings that stemmed from Italy’s belated entry into the war in June 1940. Any fulfillment of Mussolini’s Mediterranean ambitions, focused especially on the Balkans and North Africa, became increasingly dependent on German support. The Axis attack on Yugoslavia and Greece in April 1941 caused a few weeks of crucial delay to Hitler’s implementation of a far more fundamental strategic objective. Coded as operation BARBAROSSA and eventually launched on June 22, this involved invading the Soviet union. The Nazi-Soviet collaboration (which had freed Stalin to absorb the Baltic States in June 1940) was thus suddenly repudiated by Germany. For Hitler - gripped by ideological obsessions about Jewish-Bolshevik conspiracy, Slavic racial menace, and the Aryans’ imperative need for lebens-RAUM - this was the moment at which the real war began.
Over the next few months the Germans made impressive initial advances in an eastward direction. But the onset of autumn and winter slowed their progress. By early December the Wehrmacht was threatening Moscow and Leningrad, yet also proving incapable of registering a decisive victory. At this juncture the scope of the war became truly global. Japan’s sudden strike upon Pearl Harbor provided the occasion for Germany in her turn to challenge the USA, whose formal neutrality had been operating (e. g. through Roosevelt’s Lend-Lease program) with increasing bias in favor of Britain. Henceforth the European and Asian spheres of conflict would be interlocked.
During 1942, despite German advances towards the Volga and the Caucasus, Hitler’s increasingly pressing need to defeat the Soviet union remained unsatisfied. By November American landings in North Africa had prompted him into bringing all of France under military occupation. Meanwhile, with the USA, the USSR, and Britain now allied against him, the higher levels of manpower and material resources available to Hitler’s enemies assumed ever greater importance. The anti-Nazi alliance was also superior in the secret war of intelligence and code-breaking, whose significance historians began properly to understand only in the 1970s (see also ultra). This whole turning of the tide - exemplified most crucially by the lifting of the siege of stalingrad in February 1943 - stimulated greater activity from valuably disruptive resistance movements inside the territories subjugated by the Nazis. By the summer of1943 soviet forces were gaining the upper hand on the Eastern Front (e. g. at kursk), as well as in southeastern Europe against Hitler’s Romanian and Bulgarian auxiliaries. similarly, the western Allies were following up their North African victories with an attack on and beyond Sicily, which helped towards the ousting of Mussolini in July and produced a general surrender of Italian forces in September. After the normandy LANDINGS had opened up a “second front” in June 1944, the Germans were forced into retreat across France. Their Ardennes counter-offensive (see BULGE, BATTLE OF the) at the end of the year was remarkably spirited, but incapable of being long sustained.
Unlike in 1918, on this occasion the Allies were clear that proper victory meant nothing less than total military occupation of Germany. By early 1945 American and British forces were leading the advance from one flank, while the red army was driving deep into the Nazi heartland from the other. At the end of April, when the Russians had already seized much of Berlin, Hitler killed himself in his Reich chancellery bunker. On May 7-8 the remnants of his regime made an unconditional surrender. However, it was not until midAugust, when Japan also capitulated after the atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, that the Asian part of this globalized conflict ended.
World War II, as compared to World War I, was vaster both in its geographical scope and in the scale of destruction wreaked upon the human and material resources that were so extensively mobilized for its conduct. One of the legacies for postwar Europe was a huge problem of refugees and “displaced persons.” In the German case, “total war” had involved the exploitation of millions of slave laborers drawn from the conquered countries. Though there were fewer deaths on the western front than in 1914-18, the conflict of 1939-45 produced overall a far higher toll of casualties. These losses were particularly severe in the Russo-German struggle and in the Asian-Pacific theatre of hostilities. On a global basis, mortality directly attributable to the war was of the order of at least 50 million. The USA lost some
300.000 service personnel. Estimates for combined military and civilian deaths suggest around
400.000 for France and nearly as many for Britain. The equivalent tallies for Poland and Germany come out to at least 6 and 4 million respectively. That for the Soviet Union is now generally recognized as being, on modest calculation, some 25 million (though the figure tends to grow as more detail emerges from the Soviet archives). It was thus understandable that Stalin should have claimed that, while Britain had won vital time for the Allies and while the USA had mobilized its huge economic might, the most crucial contribution to victory had been the blood sacrificed by the peoples of the USSR. However, it must also be remembered that far less of this would have been spilt if, especially during the first half of 1941, their leader had been himself less naive about Hitler’s ambitions.
Whereas the slaughter of 1914-18 had possessed elements of miscalculation, the death-toll of 1939-45 was far more deliberately methodical - above all, on the Nazi side. Each of the belligerents used every subtlety of science and technology to inflict a devastation that made little discrimination between soldier and civilian, adult and child. This was particularly evident in the intensification of various forms of aerial attack. The “Blitz” waged by Hitler on such cities as London and Rotterdam early in the war was eventually overshadowed in scale by the counter-attacks launched from American and British bombers. During the last two years of the war Germany was subjected to massive (and still controversial) raids that included the Hamburg fire-storm of July 1943 and the destruction of Dresden in February 1945. Meanwhile, during the final phase of conflict the Nazis themselves had resorted to pilotless aircraft-bombs (V1s) and supersonic rockets (V2s). Sea warfare also had an important role to play. In the European context its most notable features included the German U-boat attacks that threatened the UK’s Atlantic supply-lines; the Arctic convoys that set out from British and Icelandic ports so as to sustain the Soviet war-effort; and the naval participation in the kind of amphibious ventures and “combined operations” best exemplified by the Normandy landings.
The ideological content of the conflict also contributed to the pitiless conduct of such “total war.” This emerges most plainly from the way in which the Nazi and Soviet regimes became locked into a combat between two systematically intolerant and irreconcilable worldviews. For Hitler the struggle involved the opportunity to implement his vision of a pan-European new order, centered on a hierarchy of races. Not least, the fog of war supplied cover for the Fuhrer to pursue, in semi-secrecy, a so-called final solution to “the Jewish question” (see antisemitism). During the period 1941-5 the Nazis murdered some 5-6 million jews, mainly in the extermination centers (see CONCENTRATION CAMPs) that were constructed in Poland and became symbolized most notoriously by Auschwitz.
By the time of the German surrender most European countries had been gravely weakened in their economic resources and their political standing. Even those such as Britain, France, and the Netherlands which, by virtue of their imperial traditions, still aspired to play some role on the wider global stage had quickly to reckon with a lessening of their control over or influence in colonial contexts (see decolonization). Across central Europe itself the armed forces of the USA as the leading capitalist power and of the soviet Union as the pioneering communist one found themselves facing each other in much of the continental heartland. in 1944 stalin had commented: “This war is not as in the past. Whoever occupies a territory also imposes on it his own social system as far as his armies can reach. it cannot be otherwise.” Just as this had applied to the Nazis’ imperial project, so too it conditioned the stance adopted by the two “superpowers” of the postwar era. Their ideological and military rivalries were now, very directly, geopolitical ones as well. in this form they provided the principal setting for the cold war that was to dominate much of European, and indeed global, history over the four decades or so following the eventual defeat of Hitler. (See also Maps 9, 10, and 11)
WUrttemberg Occupying the Swabian region of southwest Germany, this duchy was promoted to the rank of kingdom in 1806 following the dissolution of the HOLY ROMAN EMPIRE. Its inaugural monarch, Frederick i, continued to benefit from the support that he gave to napoleon i, at least until the time of the latter’s defeat at Leipzig in 1813. WUrttemberg emerged from the Vienna CONGRESS of 1814-15 as a member of the new GERMAN CONFEDERATION. In the AUSTRO-PRUSSSIAN
WAR of 1866 it fought, like most of the other southern states, on the losing side as an ally of the HABSBURG EMPIRE. From 1871 until 1918 the kingdom formed one of the federal constituents (see federalism[1]) of the Prussian-led german EMPIRE. Under the weimar republic it existed simply as a provincial Land. Following the Nazi interregnum, Wuurttemberg eventually resumed that status when in 1952 it was combined with Baden to be one of the new Lander of the federal
REPUBLIC OF GERMANY.
World History
