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My Very Short Take on
World War II
J. Bradford DeLong
U.C. Berkeley, WCEG, NBER, and BCDE
2011-01-05
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H
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8092 words
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From “September 1, 1939,” by W.H. Auden
I sit in one of the dives/On Fifty-second Street
Uncertain and afraid/As the clever hopes expire
Of a low dishonest decade:/Waves of anger and of fear
Circulate over the bright/And darkened lands of the earth,
Obsessing our private lives;/The unmentionable odor of death
Offends the September night.
Accurate scholarship can/Unearth the whole offence
From Luther until now/That has driven a culture mad,
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Find what occurred at Linz,/What huge imago made
A psychopathic god:/and the public know
What all schoolchildren learn,/Those to whom evil is done
Do evil in return...
I.
To Munich
A. A Popular Hitler: Recovery and
Rearmament
While most other countries continued to stagnate in the
Great Depression, the German economy recovered rapidly.
But peaceful spending-fueled recovery was not what Hitler
thought his regime was about. His regime was about
German rearmament: the breaking of the shackles of the
Treaty of Versailles that restricted the German military to a
total strength of 100,000; and eventually aggressive war
with the Soviet Union and the other powers to Germany's
east with the aim of increasing the “living space” of the
German people.
Hitler announced that Germany was rearming, and met
with no complaints. The victorious allies of World War I
faced a knotty foreign policy problem. The isolationist
United States was uninterested in sending soldiers and
garrisons to Europe. The British and French electorates
defi nitely did not want to do World War I again. And
Hitler’s program of rearmament and national self-assertion
demanded that Britain and France make a choice.
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The treaties of Muenster and Osnabrueck in 1648—the
Peace of Westphalia—and the earlier peace of Augsburg in
1555 established the principle in European international
law that internal affairs were nobody else’s business. Not
all rulers agreed. Pope Leo X condemned the Peace of
Westphalia. The French revolutionaries sought the
overthrow of kings and oppressors and the creation of sister
republics all across Europe—until Napoleon taught them
the joys of conquest and empire. (The American republic,
by contrast, positioned itself as, in the words of John
Quincy Adams: “the friend of liberty everywhere but the
guarantor only of our own.”) Nevertheless, the idea that it
was no concern on one duly recognized government what
another did within its borders became one of the strongest
taboos of European international law: freedom from nosy
oversight was something all governments could agree on.
When you combine this Westphalian sovereignty principle
with the particular features of the post-World War I
settlement, you brewed an explosive cocktail. World War I
ended with a settlement notionally based on the Fourteen
Points of Woodrow Wilson. Most important, there was
supposed to be:
•
Universal disarmament.
•
The abolition of offensive war—international disputes to
be settled by arbitration in the League of Nations.
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•
Adjustment of national borders to correspond to linguistic
groupings: people should be ruled from a capital where
people spoke the same language that they did.
B. Hitler’s Diplomacy: War by Other Means
When Hitler began his diplomatic campaign he thus had a
powerful array of arguments on his side. The Versailles
Treaty that had ended World War I had restricted the size of
the German army to 100,000. But the other nations of the
world had never cut back their own armies. Was Germany
to be the only great power to fear invasion from Denmark
or Yugoslavia? That was not fair. And the response that
Nazi Germany was a pariah nation—ruled by a cruel,
oppressive dictatorship—was not a statement that made
sense in the language of European diplomacy. Besides, a
strong German army could serve as a buffer against
communist Russia. (That was, indeed, the argument with
which post-World War II West Germany convinced the
allies to let it rearm.)
The Versailles Treaty and the other aspects of the post-
World War I settlement had tried, imperfectly but as much
as was possible, to redraw national borders along linguistic
lines. Except for Germany. Linguistic Germans were ruled
not just from Berlin but from Rome, from Vienna, from
Budapest, from Prague, from Warsaw, from Vilnius, from
Paris, by various League of Nations High Commissioners,
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and even from Bucharest. As long as Hitler restricted his
foreign policy goals to (a) removing the restrictions on
German armaments that made Germany a less than equal
nation, and (b) trying to “settle” national minority problems
by redrawing borders to more closely match linguistic
lines, it was hard for Britain and France and others to say
no.
After all, what did they want to do? Did Britain and France
want to invade Germany, depose Hitler, and set up an
unstable government bound to be viewed as their puppet in
his place, further inflaming German nationalism? Well yes
—they did, had they but known what was coming.
But their political leaders did not know the future at the
time. In the middle of the Great Depression, French and
British political leaders believed that they had bigger
problems than enforcing every jot and tittle provision of the
Treaty of Versailles, and that they wished to see Germany
rejoin the community of western European nations. Since
armaments were one of the standards prerogatives of the
nation-state, it would be silly in addition to pointless to
complain about Germany building its armed forces above
the Versailles limits.
Besides, with Germany effectively disarmed there was a
power vacuum between the border of the Soviet Union and
the Rhine River. Poland and the Soviet Union had fought
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one war in the early 1920s that had seen the Red Army
approach Warsaw before being turned back. Did French
and British geopoliticians want to see a possible future
Soviet war with Poland end with Communist armies on the
Rhine River? Probably not.
In 1936 Hitler broke yet another provision of the Treaty of
Versailles: he moved token military forces into the
Rhineland, the province of Germany west of the Rhine that
had been demilitarized after 1918. Once again it seemed
pointless to protest, or to take action. No other European
country had demilitarized zones within its borders. To
require that Germany maintain a demilitarized zone seemed
likely to pointlessly inflame German nationalism. And,
once again, to enforce the provision would presumably
require an invasion of Germany, the deposition of Hitler,
and the installation of a puppet government—for Hitler
seemed genuinely popular: there was a substantial risk if
not a strong likelihood that new elections would simply
return Hitler to power.
C. Anschluss
In the spring of 1938 Hitler annexed Austria. Austria was
inhabited overwhelmingly by ethnic Germans. One
principle of the 1919 peace settlement had been, as much as
possible and with a few exceptions, to draw national
borders along ethno-linguistic lines so that every language
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had a nation, and everyone speaking a given language lived
in the same nation. In annexing Austria, Hitler declared, he
was simply gathering the German people into their one
nation: reversing a political error committed in the late
nineteenth century when the Austrian Germans were
excluded from the political boundaries of Germany, an
error that would have been corrected in 1919 save for
Allied unwillingness to apply the same national self-
determination principles to the Germans that they had
applied to themselves and to the rest of Europe.
D. Munich
After the annexation of Austria, Hitler turned his attention
to a second of the anomalous boundaries of post-World War
I Europe: the “Sudetenland.” The northern and western
boundaries of Czechoslovakia followed the boundaries of
the medieval Kingdom of Bohemia, and included a
mountainous region that was the location of all the Czech
frontier defenses and was also heavily populated by
German-speakers. It took little for Hitler to fund a
movement in the Sudetenland that decried oppression and
discrimination by Czechs, and that demanded the
annexation of the Sudetenland by Germany: the return of
German-speakers to the German nation, according to the
national self- determination principles of the Treaty of
Versailles.
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The British government had commitments to defend
France; the French governments had commitments to go to
war to defend the territorial integrity of Czechoslovakia;
Czechoslovakia had no desire to surrender its mountain
territories—and its frontier defenses. The British and
French governments had no desire to get into a war to
prevent the people of the Sudetenland from becoming part
of Germany. Moreover, they feared the costs of a war. In
the worlds of the novelist Alan Furst, they thought that:
The German bomber force as constituted in a
theoretical month—May 1939, for instance—would
be able to fly 720 sorties in a single day... 50,000
casualties in a twenty-four hour period. A million
casualties every three weeks. And the USSR, Britain,
and France were in absolute harmony on one basic
assumption: the bomber would always get through.
Yes, anti-aircraft fi re and fi ghter planes would take
their toll, but simply could not c
a
use suffi cient
damage to bring the numbers down...
The western democracies
’
military advisors feared that
World War II would bring the horrors of the World War I
trench line to civilians located far from the front.
They were right.
In order to avoid war, on September 29 and 30, 1938, at
Munich in Germany, British Prime Minister Neville
Chamberlain and French Prime Minister Edouard Daladier
reached an agreement with Hitler: Hitler would annex the
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