Peace in Our Time

The Causes and Consequences of World War II HIST 1301 | History Peace in Our Time Benito Mussolini, sometimes referred to as Il Duce or "the leader," aimed to extend the Italian protectorate over Somalia in East Africa as part of his pledge to restore Italian pride. Italy has long attempted to colonise Ethiopia; in November 1934, a boundary dispute emerged, and on January 5, 1935, the Ethiopians brought the issue to the League of Nations. October 3, that year, saw the start of a full-scale Italian invasion of Ethiopia. The League Council promptly recognised Italy to be the aggressor, and 51 member countries authorised penalties against Italy. However, the British and French undercut the League in a covert deal that allowed Italy to incorporate Ethiopia into a special economic zone because they were unwilling to stand up to Mussolini. After Italian soldiers captured Addis Ababa, the capital of Ethiopia, in May 1936, Italy legally annexed the nation. Mussolini became more and more popular in Italy, particularly among young Italians. France and Britain were even less eager to take Germany on. Adolf Hitler had frequently promised to renounce the Versailles Treaty. Just nine months after taking office, Hitler held referendums to provide the German people the option of continuing to be members of the League of Nations or not. Germany's withdrawal from the League in October 1933 was an inevitable outcome. Hitler was seen by some in Britain and other countries by the 1930s as a truly loyal German who just wanted to further the interests of his beleaguered country. Some see him and his policies as possibly hazardous and disconcerting for the stability of Europe. Nonetheless, the British government engaged in negotiations with Germany to restrict the extent of the German fleet, while France pursued a Treaty of Mutual Assistance with the USSR. Hitler openly said in March 1935 that Germany had already started to surreptitiously rearm in violation of the Treaty of Versailles, using the cooperation between France and the Soviet Union as justification. The Rhineland, an area of Germany that the Treaty had demilitarised, was once again under German control on March 2, 1936, with around 3,000 troops. Because it did not want to fight another war and was not prepared to do so, France was afraid to oppose this too vehemently. The action was not perceived as blatantly antagonistic by the British populace. Hitler attempted to achieve this even though the Versailles Treaty expressly forbade the union of Austria with Germany. In an effort to prevent union, Austria's prime minister called for a referendum in March. However, Hitler moved soldiers into Austria the following day in preparation for this possibility. The voters who cast ballots in the plebiscite chose unification with Germany. After winning his battle with Austria, Hitler focused on "gathering the German people" and looked to the Sudetenland, a region of Czechoslovakia that was home to three million ethnic Germans, many of whom had been incorporated into that country as a result of the Treaty of Versailles. In the one genuine democracy established by the Treaty of Versailles, the Czechoslovaks relied on the western countries and the mutual defence agreements they had signed with France in the 1920s and early 1930s to defend themselves against Germany. But the Sudeten Germans had set up their own Nazi Party and were pushing for German annexation. The Sudeten Germans were granted self-rule by the Czechoslovak government in 1938 as a means of defusing the situation, because it appeared that Britain and France were primarily focused on averting another big conflict. The tension increased. British prime minister Neville Chamberlain travelled to Germany to meet with Hitler as the latter appeared to be preparing for war and advocated for the complete integration of the Sudetenland into Germany. Hitler appeared ready for combat. Hitler accepted Chamberlain's suggestion to call a general meeting to discuss the Sudetenland issue instead. Hitler, Chamberlain, Édouard Daladier, the prime minister of France, and Mussolini—who was supposedly neutral but had already given Hitler his word—all attended the Munich Conference. They created the Munich Pact on September 30, under which, in an act now referred to as appeasement, Czechoslovakia conceded territory to Germany, Poland, and Hungary. France and Britain hoped that Hitler would be appeased and stop being hostile. Fighting Germany was the option, which neither government desired. The West was still debating whether the Soviet Union's communism or Germany's fascism posed a bigger danger to international peace. Hitler, like some other conservative political figures in England and France, had hoped for a German alliance against the Soviet Union. The United States' isolationist stance made it less likely that Washington would provide any assistance, and the British military lacked confidence in their ability to fight. Liberals in Britain were generally in favour of negotiated solutions as concerns over Japan's aggressions and Britain's possessions in Asia grew, and striking a deal with Hitler appeared like a sensible course of action. German forces moved into the districts that had been ceded in the following weeks, and by spring 1939, Germany had taken over the entirety of Czechoslovakia. The Nazis were persecuting Jews with ever-more-severe severity during these years. First, they were prohibited from holding jobs in the public service by a law passed on April 7, 1933. In the same year, Dachau, the first and still-existing Nazi concentration camp, was established close to Munich with the intention of housing political prisoners. The Nuremberg regulations, a collection of regulations that institutionalised Nazi racial ideas and discrimination against Jews, were passed in 1935. Regardless of how strongly one identified as German or how involved one was in the Jewish religious world, anyone with three Jewish grandparents was considered Jewish. In the new German empire known as the Third Reich, headed by the Nazis, Jews were refused citizenship and prohibited from marrying or having sex with ethnic Germans, referred to as "Aryans." They also lost most other political rights, including the ability to vote. Germany's legal system was beginning to cast the country as one of "us" against "them," and the way the state treated its Jews was evidence of its terrifying might. Kristallnacht, or the "Night of Broken Glass," was the name given to two days of violent attacks on them in November 1938. The attacks were sparked by the assassination of a German diplomat in Paris by a Polish Jewish man, and nearly all of Germany's synagogues and ninety percent of Jewish-owned businesses were set on fire. Approximately thirty thousand Jewish men were arrested and detained before being deported to Dachau, which had already been expanded to include camps at Sachsenhausen and Buchenwald. In 1939, all but two thousand were set free. The worldwide reputation of Germany suffered greatly after Kristallnacht. A furious British public forced Parliament to grant unaccompanied Jewish youngsters under the age of seventeen permission to seek safety in England. Up to ten thousand children may have been saved by this Kindertransport in the nine months before to the war. Many Jews fled the repressive policies of the Nazis and became refugees throughout Europe. In an attempt to address the Jewish refugee situation, a thirty-two-nation international conference was organised in France in the summer of 1938; however, no government offered to take in any of these refugees. In the United States, a measure was proposed in February 1939. Congress decided to approve the entry of 10,000 Jewish children into the nation in 1939 and an additional 10,000 in 1940. The measure was popular, but it failed because of the lacklustre political backing. Shanghai was one of the Asian cities available to Jewish immigrants seeking a fresh life. The city welcomed Jewish immigration without reservation, as did Franco's Spain. The Nationalist administration in the southwest of China, nominally still an ally of Germany in 1939, devised a scheme to offer asylum to Jewish immigrants from Europe. It did so for a number of reasons, including garnering support from Jews around the world and winning favour with the United States and Britain against Japan. Many plans were developed, some of which received backing from Albert Einstein, a physicist, and others from members of the GMD administration. Shanghai relocation visas were granted by GMD diplomats in Europe, such as Feng Shan Ho, the consul general in Vienna, to Jewish refugees. By the end of the war, more than twenty thousand Jewish displaced individuals had made their way to the city. A German ocean ship named MS St. Louis carried almost a thousand Jewish refugees fleeing Nazi persecution in May 1939 with the goal of reaching safety in Cuba. However, Cuba declined to accept them. The ship's captain then made an unsuccessful attempt to persuade either Canada or the US to take the migrants. Conditions on board worsened to the point that the ship was dubbed the "voyage of the damned" as it sailed about in vain; eventually, after a month, the ship was forced to return to Antwerp, Belgium, where the majority of the people left. In the end, roughly three hundred were taken by England, some were taken by France, and a smaller number went to Belgium and the Netherlands. Seventy percent of the original passengers made it through the war, while over two hundred were slain by the Nazis. Germany had long been driven by the desire to expand eastward. Hitler's vision of German families settling and procreating in large numbers in the lands seized from countries in eastern Europe, eventually displacing the local Slavic populations, was the driving force behind his search for overseas colonies in the late 1800s and was a stated objective of World War I. Thus, "superior" Germans—both physically and culturally—would retake Europe from "inferior" Slavic and Jewish peoples. Similar theories, such as Japan's expansionist policies in Korea and Manchuria and the United States' Manifest Destiny, have been used historically to justify the eviction of a territory's inhabitants in favour of a population that is deemed superior. The Treaty of Versailles had given Poland independence and given Poland portions of Germany to the east of Germany. The purpose of the "Polish Corridor," which runs through a region populated primarily by Poles, was to provide Poland with access to a port. Danzig, or Gdańsk, a German city that borders Poland, was granted semi-independence and a parliament of its own. As the Nazis searched for Lebensraum, Poland was one of their main targets. Britain and France decided to take action to defend Poland as a result of the lessons gained from Hitler's breach of the Munich Pact. Since then, international leaders have also used them in situations where a country's aggression endangers the sovereignty or territorial integrity of another. Invoking the Munich Analogy is the process of cautioning against the dangers of permitting one country to invade another without resistance, such as Hitler's Germany or Putin's Russia. The views of Stalin and the Soviet Union were crucial in determining whether or not Germany could be contained. Stalin was considering striking a deal with Germany as early as the summer of 1938. The next summer saw an improvement in Germany's ties with the Soviet Union. Stalin saw the long-term threat presented by Germany and attempted to gain time to prepare for a potential conflict, having read Hitler's reflections in Mein Kampf. Hitler, for his part, wished to steer clear of Germany's error during World War I—fighting on two fronts at once. The German-Soviet Nonaggression Pact on August 23, 1939, was the outcome. Germany and the USSR committed not to fight one another or help other countries attack one another under this treaty. Secret procedures that effectively split eastern Europe between Germany and the Soviet Union were part of the deal. As payment for helping Germany divide up Poland, the USSR received Lithuania, Latvia, Estonia, and a portion of eastern Poland. Two days later, Britain and Poland signed a mutual defence agreement, with Britain viewing the accord as a warning signifying that Germany was about to advance eastward. Everything looked set for the September 1, 1939, start of the German invasion. In order to honour their pledge to Poland, Britain and France declared war on Germany and joined forces to form the Allies—a coalition that excluded the Soviet Union. Two weeks later, Polish soil was overrun by Soviet soldiers. Crushed from two directions, Poland was practically erased. The Second World War had caught fire in Europe. The Germans used Poland to test their winning tactic, known as blitzkrieg or "lightning war," which involved swift, heavy airstrikes to establish air superiority, destroy the enemy's ammunition supplies and communications and transportation networks, and generally confuse and demoralise the enemy. Then defences would be overwhelmed by a vast ground invasion of soldiers, swiftly moving armour, and powerful artillery. The one million-man Polish army was beset by antiquated strategic ideas that advocated taking the Germans on head-on and lacked modern weaponry. Germany's war plan was well-suited to the comparatively level terrain of western Poland, which provided few natural obstacles to transportation and allowed the Germans to effectively execute a number of manoeuvres to penetrate and encircle. The British soon found that they could not really help the Poles in any meaningful sense. Rather, they trusted the French to confront the Germans. However, the French believed they could not continue to attack Germany's western front. Instead, they wanted to get ready for a potential German onslaught on France. In order to protect the French-Belgian border, Britain allied with the French and sent the British Expeditionary Force (BEF). Poland had already been lost and included into Hitler's aspirations to rule all of Europe by that point. The French-German frontier saw minimal activity in the winter of 1939–1940, with the exception of a few skirmishes between patrols and reconnaissance troops. The term "Phoney War" or the mocking "sitzkrieg" have been used to allude to the waiting period. On April 9, 1940, the Germans launched their westward march with a few raids into Denmark and Norway to the north. In order to avoid inciting German invasions, Belgium and the Netherlands both proclaimed their neutrality. The British and French were thus at a disadvantage since they were unable to coordinate defences with the armies of the Netherlands and Belgium or to place soldiers on their soil. On May 10, 1940, the Germans then began their full-scale westward advance. The Maginot Line, a system of fortifications and weaponry erected on the French border in the 1930s to protect France from another German invasion, was avoided by German troops as they quickly overran western Europe, sweeping through the Netherlands, Luxembourg, Belgium, and France. Seeing the dangers of his position, the British commander in France ordered an early morning departure towards the French coast, to Dunkirk. This was on May 23, 1940. This ultimately resulted in the remarkable evacuation of thousands of French and other Allied soldiers, along with a large portion of the BEF, across the English Channel between June 15 and June 25, employing every British boat that was able to traverse the channel. A withdrawal of 200,000 men was saved. In June 1940, the French prime minister, Paul Reynaud, resigned instead of signing the armistice with Germany. Rather, World War I hero Marshall Philippe Pétain took over as prime minister of a shortened French government that was headquartered in Vichy, France, and that, although being ostensibly independent, collaborated with Germany. During the summer of 1940, the German blitzkrieg in Europe proved to be incredibly successful, and this gave the Japanese force some very important strategic advantages. For example, European colonies in Asia may be prime for acquisition due to their remoteness. Consequently, Japan joined Germany and Italy in the defensive military alliance known as the Tripartite Pact in September 1940 to ensure mutual defence and maybe scare the United States away from providing more significant help against them. (Japan had split from Germany in 1939 when the German-Soviet Nonaggression Pact was signed, and a new agreement was thus in order.) The U.S. ambassador to Japan, Joseph Grew, felt discouraged in the attempt to maintain peace. Japan and Germany had earlier signed the Anti-Comintern Pact against the Soviet Union, which Japan saw as a rival for dominance in Asia, in 1936, and Italy had joined in a year later. "I saw the work of eight years swept away as if by a typhoon, earthquake, and tidal wave combined," he said to a colleague in February 1941.