Chapter Summary

The other states of Europe and the United States failed to take action prior to 1939 to halt aggression. Both Germany in Europe and Japan in China took advantage of the opportunity to seize territories belonging to other nations.

Hitler openly rearmed Germany, withdrew from the League of Nations, and ignored the provisions of the Treaty of Versailles. In 1938 he annexed Austria to Germany and threatened Czechoslovakia on the pretext of protecting the German minority in the Sudetenland. Neither France nor Britain were willing to risk war to defend Czechoslovakia. Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain of Britain offered to yield the Sudetenland to Hitler in return for promises of peace. When Hitler increased his demands, Chamberlain and the Prime Ministers of France and Italy met with Hitler at Munich. At the Munich conference, Chamberlain’s policy of appeasement avoided war by granting Germany’s requirements for peace. Shortly thereafter, Hitler’s armies occupied all of Czechoslovakia. He then began pressuring Poland to surrender the Polish corridor.

Hitler prepared the way for war in western Europe by concluding alliances with Italy and the Soviet Union. Britain and France recognized that Hitler intended to continue military expansion and signed an alliance in 1939 to defend Poland. In the month of September 1939, Poland fell to advancing German armies. Just before the Polish collapse, the Soviet Union also invaded. Stalin’s armies also swallowed up the Baltic States and defeated Finland by 1940. The invasion of Poland at last brought both France and Britain into the war against fascism. During the winter of 1939, there were no offensives. In 1940 the German armies launched Blitzkrieg attacks against Denmark, Norway, the Netherlands, Belgium, and Luxembourg. The mobile German Panzer units then swept through northern France against a demoralized French army. In June 1940 the French surrendered. France was divided into two parts: the north directly governed by the Germans in Paris, and the south governed by a collaborationist government at Vichy under Marshal Petain. The collapse of France left Britain alone against the German attack. The German air force, the air force (Luftwaffe), began saturation bombing of English cities. Under the leadership of Winston Churchill, the prime minister, the British survived and denied the Germans air superiority in the Battle of Britain. The Germans decided against an amphibious invasion of the island. In the Balkans, Hitler’s forces took advantage of a military coup and ethnic divisions to seize Yugoslavia. From Yugoslavia they mounted a successful attack on Greece. Control of the Balkans provided the Germans with food supplies and invaluable petroleum resources. German control of southeastern Europe also threatened British supply routes to Egypt and the southern regions of the Soviet Union.

Governments of subject states were ruled by collaborators who cooperated with Germany because of fear of communism, potential opportunity to regain lands lost in the Treaty of Versailles, of promises of independence, or simply to mitigate the impact of the Nazi occupation. Resistance to Nazi occupation was widespread. After the German attack on Russia in 1941, many communists throughout Europe took active measures against the Germans. The most successful was Josip Broz of Yugoslavia, known as Tito, but in general the actions of resistance movements were ineffective against German military power.

Both the Germans and the Japanese made use of spurious scientific theories to justify slaughter of groups they determined to be inferior to the master races. They were not alone. The United States interned Japanese-American citizens on the basis of racial stereotypes.

The Nazis identified various groups as racially and genetically inferior. Gypsies were subjected to discriminatory legislation, removed to internment camps, and systematically slaughtered during the war. The Nazi state discriminated against children of racially mixed marriages and provided for the euthanasia of “defective” people—the mentally ill and those with physical defects. All types of conditions were considered hereditary and capable of polluting the German population. The state provided for the compulsory sterilization of the homeless, criminals, alcoholics, and prostitutes. Homosexuality was punishable by castration or internment in concentration camps.

German policies against the Jews evolved gradually. After Kristallnacht, Jewish property was confiscated and Jews were confined to ghettoes within the cities of Germany and Poland. Mass murder of Slavs and Jews began following the invasion of Poland. During the invasion of Russia, German troops competed to demonstrate efficiency in murdering the inferior Slavic peoples. Heinrich Himmler of the SS suggested that poison gas would be more efficient as a killing mechanism than the mass shooting of prisoners and noncombatants. In 1941 a network of death camps was constructed to carry out the “Final Solution.” The death camps targeted Jews, Slavs, homosexuals, and the political enemies of the Third Reich. As many as eleven million men, women, and children suffered under the most inhumane conditions prior to mass execution. The most horrible of the death camps was Auschwitz in Poland. The sick and aged were immediately dispatched to the gas chambers, while the young were sent to work until disease, starvation, or exhaustion made them unfit for the duties assigned them. The Jewish population could offer no effective resistance to extermination. They were locked in a country that universally accepted their fate and by immigration policies established in nearly all nations that made it impossible for them to leave. Even the United States and Palestine refused emigrants from Europe. Few Jews understood the final fate of those who were arrested. When the Warsaw ghetto attempted militant resistance, they were liquidated by the German army. Generally speaking, all governments were aware of the German policy of extermination. Collaborationist governments occasionally assisted with rounding up Jews and minorities. Britain and the United States simply ignored the plight of the victims of the slaughter. The Holocaust represented systematic extermination of eleven million people of which six million were Jews.

In the spring of 1941, Hitler controlled the continent of Europe and was allied with the Soviet Union, Italy, and Japan in what seemed an indomitable Axis. In the summer of 1941, the war changed, Germany invaded Russia, and in December Japan bombed the American fleet at Pearl Harbor. Germany now faced the alliance of the United States, Britain and the Soviet Union with their inexhaustible resources.

With the Western countries neutralized, Hitler felt free in 1941 to carry his war against communism to the Soviet Union. Stalin, unprepared for a German invasion, called for an alliance with Britain and the United States. Operation Barbarossa, as the German invasion was called, swept through western Russia to the outskirts of Moscow. There a determined defense and the Russian winter put an end to the blitzkrieg. In December 1941, the Russian armies under General Zhukov counterattacked. Losses on both sides were enormous, but the German forces on the eastern front were crushed. In the following year, Hitler ordered a second attack aimed at Stalingrad. As with the first campaign, German troops foundered in the Russian winter. The Soviet population endured tremendous sacrifices of property and lives to defeat the Germans. The victory, achieved at a cost of ten percent of the Russian population, was never forgotten.

The United States’ contribution to the war effort before 1941 was entirely economic. The United States considered Germany, not Japan, the primary enemy. U.S. relations with Japan suffered as a result of Japanese invasions in Thailand and Indochina. Nevertheless, when Japan successfully bombed the American Pacific fleet at Pearl Harbor on 7 December 1941, it came as a complete surprise. The U.S. declaration of war against Japan was followed by Hitler’s declaration of war against the United States. Although the U.S. was militarily weak at the time of Pearl Harbor, the nation possessed vast industrial capacity and natural resources.

Strategy in a two-front war required that the Americans initiate some action in the Pacific against the Japanese to relieve the besieged forces of the British Empire and also open a second front in Europe to take some pressure off the Soviet Union. Although the Americans and British opened an offensive from Africa into the Mediterranean and Italy, it did little to alleviate the Russian dilemma. In 1943 Stalin, Churchill, and President Franklin Roosevelt met in Teheran to discuss opening another front in Europe. In June 1944, Britain and the United States invaded France at Normandy. Allied forces raced across northern France to Paris and on to the German border. Only briefly delayed by the German offensive at the Battle of the Bulge, the Allies crossed the Rhine in 1945. The Russian army entered Berlin and brought the European phase of the war to an end in April 1945.

The Japanese promoted their efforts in World War II as an end to Western imperialism in Asia. The Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere, begun in 1940 to link all peoples and economies of the Pacific and Asia under Japanese domination, soon deteriorated into a new form of imperialism, with Japan as the colonial power. Japan viewed Southeast Asia as a market for Japanese manufactured goods and as a source of raw materials and food supplies. The Japanese regarded all other ethnic groups in Asia as their racial inferiors and required ritual obedience. The Chinese were regarded as culturally advanced, but their cultural sophistication did not prevent their wholesale destruction at the hands of Japanese troops. With respect to Westerners, the Japanese insisted on their own moral superiority. Purification consisted of requiring the Japanese population to endure wartime scarcity and material poverty. The moral inferiority of Westerners was reflected in their desire for grisly trophies of war. Because they viewed Europeans and Americans as morally deficient, the Japanese did not believe they could mobilize for long-term warfare. Their assessment proved inaccurate.

In the Pacific, American forces hopped from island to island, driving out the Japanese. American naval forces won the critical battle of the Pacific war at Midway, where the Japanese carrier forces were decimated. By 1945 the United States had obtained bases sufficiently close to Japan to initiate heavy bombing of the Japanese homeland. The air assault culminated in the atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The Japanese government surrendered in September 1945.

Fifty million people died during the Second World War, most of them civilians. War was intentionally extended to noncombatants as a questionable means of destroying the will of civilian populations to resist. Material devastation of cities and industry was almost total. Europe and Japan were crippled; only the United States survived unscathed. The leaders of the victorious nations plotted the postwar world even before the final battles. The governments of Germany and Japan were to be utterly destroyed. New governments were to be established under the direct authority of the Allies. Stalin decided that the eastern European nations, invaded in 1945, had to remain subject to Russian domination as a means of guaranteeing the security of the Soviet Union.