It is sometimes said that the Second World War, which started in 1939, was a continuation of the First, which ended in 1918. Certainly the line-up in each was similar: Germany fought against Britain, France, Russia (renamed the Soviet Union from early 1920s) and the United States. It is also true that the second conflict arose partly from German grievances with the 1919 Treaty of Versailles. Yet in the first war Italy and Japan fought against Germany, while in the second they fought as her allies; and Germany's leader from 1933, Adolf Hitler, went to war to achieve far more than the revision of Versailles, much of which had already been scrapped. It is important to remember, therefore, that the Second World War had short-term as well as long-term origins.

The Legacy of Versailles
The terms of the 1919 peace treaty were hotly resented by Germans. In particular they disliked the fact that Germany had lost around 13 per cent of its European land and population. Alsace and Lorraine were taken by France, for instance, and a strip of land given to Poland ('the Polish corridor') even cut off East Prussia from the rest of the country. They had to pay large reparations, as compensation for damage the war had caused. There was to be an allied occupation of the Rhineland for 15 years, after which time the Germans were forbidden ever to station troops there. The German army was to be restricted to 100,000 men. Furthermore, Germany had to accept the blame for causing the war. All German governments from 1919 were determined to revise Versailles.

Peaceful revisionism
Before Hitler came to power many of the terms of Versailles had been revised. Reparations, for instance, were scaled down twice (in 1924 with the Dawes Plan and in 1929 with the Young Plan), before being scrapped altogether in 1932. Allied troops left the Rhineland not after 15 years but after 10, in 1930. Germany also signed the Locarno Treaty in 1925 by which it voluntarily accepted its western borders with France, whose right to Alsace and Lorraine was recognised, and agreed never to have troops in the Rhineland. It seemed that the hostilities of the war years were finally at an end.

Germany's leader for most of the 1920s was Gustav Stresemann. He was determined to revise the hated treaty of Versailles, but he was committed to doing so peacefully. He was helped by a new atmosphere of goodwill in international relations, which depended partly on economic prosperity and partly on a belief that the League of Nations, set up after the war, would be able to solve problems peacefully. Germany was invited to join the League in 1926. But at the end of 1929 the atmosphere changed abruptly. Not only did Stresemann die but the American stock market crash on Wall Street helped to cause worldwide economic depression. Several states hoped to solve their problems by gaining extra territory - to provide valuable raw materials or a market for exports, or at least to distract the attention of the public from problems at home. Japan attacked Manchuria, in mainland China, in 1931; and in 1935 the Fascist dictator of Italy, Benito Mussolini, invaded Abyssinia, in East Africa. Yet the League of Nations was unable to provide effective resistance to such aggression, and as a result was discredited.

The Impact of Hitler
Adolf Hitler became Chancellor of Germany on 30 January 1933. The following month he gained dictatorial powers. From the very beginning he was determined to remove what remained of the Treaty of Versailles, and then to achieve a 'Greater Germany' (so that all German-speaking peoples should be in a single state) and finally to expand and conquer the territories of other states, especially in the East. He had written this quite clearly in his autobiography, Mein Kampf ('My Struggle', 1925). But at first he had to proceed carefully, owing to German economic weakness and to a lack of allies. Only when Germany had recovered from depression could he be more aggressive and provocative.

One of his first moves was to leave the League of Nations, in October 1933. He followed this up by introducing conscription in March 1935 and by sending troops into the Rhineland in March 1936. None of these actions had involved violence, though Hitler introduced a Four-Year Plan in 1936 to put the German economy on a war footing. In March 1938 he sent his troops to Vienna and brought about the union (Anschluss) between Germany and Austria, though this had been expressly forbidden by Versailles. But again there was no aggression, and Austrians soon voted by a large majority to accept what had happened. Hitler then sought to bring the German-speakers in the Sudeten region of Czechoslovakia into Germany, threatening war against the Czechs. In September 1938, at the Munich conference, Britain and France agreed that Hitler should have the Sudetenland. Yet in March 193, his troops marched into what remained of Czechoslovakia, territory to which he had no moral claim.

Appeasement
The victors of the First World War took no actions to prevent Germany becoming strong again. Partly this was due to their reaction against the slaughter of 1914-18. Another war, they reasoned, would be even more destructive than the first, and therefore had at all costs to be avoided. Also, they believed that Hitler had just grievances, which ought to be removed. By the 1930s it was widely thought that the First World War had not been caused by German aggression: therefore Versailles had been built on false premises and ought to be revised. Why should Germans be forced to limit the size of their army? Why should they not have troops on their own territory, including the Rhineland? Why shouldn't all Germans be united in a single state, if that was what they wanted? On the other hand, the British and French governments, while hoping that Hitler would soon cease to make demands, did prepare for the worst by rearming in case they had to fight.

A Second World War
Hitler had no respect for the appeasers, judging that their willingness to make concessions was sheer cowardice. 'Out opponents are little worms,' he said, 'I saw them at Munich.' Hence the Sudetenland was not the last of his demands. After Hitler invaded the rump of Czechoslovakia in March 1939, Britain and France guaranteed Poland, pledging to declare war against Hitler if he invaded Polish territory. Yet this attempt to dissuade Hitler from further aggression did not succeed. On 23 August 1939 he signed a pact with the Soviet Union, to prevent Germans - as in 1914-18 - having to fight a war on two fronts; and on 1 September he invaded Poland. Two days later Britain and France declared war on Germany, and another conflict between the Great Powers had begun.

Soon the conflict escalated. Mussolini had formed an alliance with Hitler in May 1939, the Pact of Steel, but he joined the war only in June 1940, when it seemed that victory was assured. Germany's Soviet ally joined the war in June 1941 when, as he had intended all along, Hitler invaded the Soviet Union. Japan had been Germany's ally since signing the Anti-Comintern Pact in 1936 but joined the conflict in December 1941 with an attack on the American fleet at Pearl Harbor.

The Second World War may have had its origins in the First, but the causes of the new world war lay primarily in the complex diplomacy of the 1930s and, above all, in the aggressive policies of Adolf Hitler.

 

By Robert Pearce.

 

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