The Origins of the Second World War

[jbor]

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>From: "Otto Sell" <o.sell at telda.net>
>

> Thanks for the interesting quotes. Yes, opportunism surely played (and does
> so still) a big role in Germany, as elsewhere too I assume.
>
> "It turned out that the Italians, far from wanting war, wished to insist
> that they could not be ready for war until 1942 at the earliest; and the
> German representatives agreed with them. Thus, this marvellous directive
> merely proves (if it proves anything) that Hitler was not interested at this
> time in a war against Great Britain; and that Italy was not interested in
> War at all. Or maybe it shows that historians should be careful not to seize
> on an isolated cause in a document without further reading."
>
> Are there any known reasons or are there reasons given why this "agreement"
> of the axis didn't work? Or was it the typical Hitler-lie: written down in
> march and war in September already!

Yes, the way the diplomacy broke down in the dispute over Danzig is
recounted in excruciating detail. After the bombing of Warsaw on 1 Sept
Chamberlain still held off from a declaration of war for about 52 hours in
the hope that the European conference Mussolini had proposed would actually
eventuate. But Chamberlain's hand was forced by members of his own Cabinet
with the threat that his own government would fall -- "Speak for England",
they demanded. And, ironically, "the French who had preached resistance to
Germany for over twenty years appeared to be dragged into war by the British
who had for twenty years preached conciliation." (277)

> Surely Germany and Italy wanted to reverse Versailles and get a bigger piece
> of the imperialistic pie. And it's one of the things "They" have told us
> after the war too: that sooner or later a war would have been inevitable.
> But if this argument is meant to re-evaluate the question of which countries
> are mainly responsible for the real WW-II that has happened I don't buy it.
> There are Germany and Japan, and to an minor degree Italy.

After the paragraph you quoted above, Taylor continues:

     Of course, in British eyes, their government only wanted to keep things
   quiet, while Hitler wanted to stir them up. To the Germans, the status
   quo was not peace, but a slave treaty. It all depends on the point of
   view. The victor Powers wanted to keep the fruits of victory with some
   modifications, though they did it ineffectively. The vanquished power
   wanted to undo its defeat. This latter ambition, whether "aggressive" or
   not, was not peculiar to Hitler. It was shared by all German
   politicians, by the Social Democrats who ended the war in 1918 as much as
   Streseman. No one defined precisely what undoing the defeat of the first
   World war meant; and this applies also to Hitler. It involved recovering
   the territory lost then; restoring the German predominance over central
   Europe which had previously been given by the alliance with
   Austria-Hungary; ending of course all restrictions on German armaments.
   The concrete terms did not matter. All Germans, including Hitler, assumed
   that Germany would become the dominant Power in Europe once she had
   undone her defeat, whether this happened by war or otherwise; and this
   opinion was generally shared in other countries. The two ideas of
   "liberation" and "domination" merged into one. There was no separating
   them. They were merely two different words for the same thing; and only
   use of the particular word decides whether Hitler was a champion of
   national justice or a potential conqueror of Europe. (xiii-xiv)

Taylor also considers the role of the appeasers ("few causes have been more
popular" than appeasement was in the Allied nations, says Taylor):

     ... I am concerned to understand what happened, not to vindicate or
   condemn. I was an anti-appeaser from the day Hitler came to power; and no
   doubt should be again under similar circumstances. But the point has no
   relevance in the writing of history. In retrospect, though many were
   guilty, none were innocent. The purpose of political activity is to
   provide peace and prosperity; and in this every staesman failed, for
   whatever reason. This is a story without heroes, and perhaps even without
   villains. (17)

     ... Historians do a bad day's work when they write the appeasers off as
   stupid or cowards. They were men confronted with real problems, doing
   their best in the circumstances of the time. They recognised that an
   independent and powerful Germany had somehow to be fitted in to Europe.
                                                                 (xxii)

> Stalin's role has
> to be put into consideration too, relieving Hitler from pressure, enabling
> and thus encouraging him and himself taking of Poland what the Germans did
> not take. War between his both enemies, capitalism and fascism, seemed to be
> in his interest, if, maybe, only to gain time because he might have read and
> listened to Hitler whose "Lebensraum"-concept was directed towards Russia.

Yes, Taylor talks about how Hitler "half-believed Bolshevism might break
down without a war, a belief shared by many Western statesmen", and how
"Lebensraum could easily be presented as an anti-Bolshevist crusade; and
thus helped to win the hearts of those in the Western countries who regarded
Hitler as the champion of Western civilisation". Taylor continues on
Lebensraum:

     But was Lebensraum Hitler's sole idea or indeed the one which dominated
   his mind? To judge from *Mein Kampf*, he was obsessed by anti-semitism,
   which occupies most of the book. Lebensraum gets only seven of the seven
   hundred pages. Then and thereafter, it was thrown in as a final
   rationalisation, a sort of "pie in the sky" to justify what Hitler was
   supposed to be up to.
>
Taylor examines the validity of the Hossbach memorandum, the speeches Hitler
gave which were transcribed and subsequently characterised as "blueprints"
of his intentions, the program for German rearmament ("largely a myth until
1936"), all the official documents from the warring nations and the letters
and personal memoirs of the main players therein. It is a very
well-documented and unbiased historical account.

best



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