On 1 September 1939, German forces invaded Poland. Two days later, Britain and France declared war on Germany, beginning World War II. Some historians date the war from 1937, with the Japanese invasion of China; Japanese official histories, however, start with 1931, when Japan’s forces over- ran Manchuria. But perhaps the most accurate place to begin is with the end of World War I. That conflict exacted horrible human and economic costs, destroyed the existing power structure of Europe, and toppled all the continental empires. It also sowed the seeds for a new conflict.
In January 1919, representatives of the victorious Allied, or Entente, powers met in Paris to impose peace terms on the defeated Central Powers. The centrepiece of the settlement, the Versailles Treaty, was the worst of all possible outcomes— it was too harsh to conciliate but too weak to destroy. It was also never enforced, making a renewal of the struggle almost inevitable.
The Paris peace settlement was drafted chiefly by Britain, France, and the United States. The Germans claimed they had assumed the November 1918 armistice would lead to a true negotiated peace treaty, yet in March and May 1918, when they were winning the war, their leaders had imposed a truly harsh settlement on Russia. In the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk, Russia lost most of its European territory, up to a third of its population, and three-quarters of its iron and coal production. It was also required to pay a heavy indemnity.
Far from being dictated by French Premier Georges Clemenceau, as many Americans still believe, the Paris peace settlement of 1919 was largely the work of British Prime Minister David Lloyd George and U.S. President Woodrow Wilson, who repeatedly blocked proposals advanced by Clemenceau. The irony is that the British and American leaders prevented a settlement that, although punitive, might indeed have brought actual French and Belgian security and prevented war in 1939.
The most novel creation of the conference was undoubtedly the League of Nations. Clemenceau did not place much stock in a league, but if there had to be one, he wanted mandatory membership and an independent military force. The Anglo-American league relied primarily on moral suasion; its strongest weapon was the threat of sanctions.
The most contentious issue at the peace conference—and arguably its most important matter—was that of French and Belgian security. Alsace and Lorraine were returned to France, and for security purposes, Belgium received the two small border enclaves of Eupen and Malmédy. France was granted the coal production of the Saar region for 15 years in compensation for Germany’s deliberate destruction of French mines at the end of the war. The Saar itself fell under League of Nations control, with its inhabitants to decide their future at the end of the period.
A storm of controversy broke out, however, over the Rhineland, the German territory west of the Rhine River. France wanted this area to be reconstituted into one or more independent states that would maintain a permanent Allied military presence to guarantee Germany would not again strike west, but Lloyd George and Wilson saw taking the Rhineland from Germany as “an Alsace-Lorraine in reverse.” They also wished to end the Allied military presence on Ger- man soil as soon as a peace treaty was signed.
These vast differences were resolved when Clemenceau agreed to yield on the Rhineland in return for the Anglo- American Treaty of Guarantee, whereby Britain and the United States promised to come to the aid of France should Germany ever invade. The Rhineland would remain part of the new German Republic but would be permanently demilitarised, along with a 30-mile-deep belt of German territory east of the Rhine. Allied garrisons would remain for only a limited period: the British would occupy a northern zone for 5 years, the Americans a central zone for 10, and the French a southern zone for 15 years. Unfortunately for France, the pact for which it traded away national security never came into force. The U.S. Senate refused to ratify it, and the British government claimed its acceptance was contingent on Amer- ican approval.
Germany lost some other territory: northern Schleswig to Denmark and a portion of Silesia and the Polish Corridor to the new state of Poland—accessions the Allies justified along ethnic lines. The Polish Corridor allowed Poland access to the sea, but it also separated East Prussia from the remainder of Germany and became a major rallying point for German nationalists. Despite these losses, German power remained largely intact; Germany was still the most powerful state in central and western Europe. Nonetheless, Germans keenly resented the territorial losses.
The Treaty of Versailles also limited Germany in terms of both the size and the nature of its military establishment. The new German army, the Reichswehr, was restricted to 100,000 men serving 12-year enlistments. It was denied heavy artillery, tanks, and military aviation, and the German General Staff was to be abolished. The navy was limited to 6 predreadnought battleships, 6 light cruisers, 12 destroyers, and no submarines. From the beginning, the Germans vio- lated these provisions. The General Staff remained, although clandestinely; moreover, Germany maintained military equipment that was to have been destroyed, and it worked out arrangements with other states to develop new weapons and train military personnel.
Other major provisions of the settlement included Article 231, the “war guilt clause.” This provision blamed the war on Germany and its allies and was the justification for repara- tions, which were fixed at $33 billion in 1920, well after Ger- many had signed the treaty on 28 June 1919. British economist John Maynard Keynes claimed that reparations were a per- petual mortgage on Germany’s future and that there was no way the Germans could pay them, yet Adolf Hitler’s Germany subsequently spent more in rearming than the reparations demanded. In any case, Germany, unlike France following the Franco-Prussian War in 1871, was never really forced to pay.
The breakup of the Austro-Hungarian Empire and the peace treaties following the war led to the creation of a num- ber of new states in central Europe, most notably Poland but also Czechoslovakia and Yugoslavia. Resolving the bound- aries of Poland proved difficult, especially in the east; it was not until December 1919 that a commission headed by Lord Curzon drew that line. Neither the new Polish government nor Russia recognized it, however. Romania was greatly enlarged with the addition of Transylvania, which was taken from Hungary. Hungary was, in fact, the principal loser at the peace conference, having been left with only 35 percent of its prewar area. The much reduced rump states of Austria
and Hungary were now confronted by Yugoslavia, Czecho- slovakia, and Romania. The latter three, the so-called Little Entente, allied to prevent a resurgence of their former masters. They were linked with France through a treaty of mutual assistance between that nation and Czechoslovakia.
The Allied solidarity of 1918, more illusion than reality, soon disappeared. When the peace treaties were signed, the United States was already withdrawing into isolation and Britain was disengaging from the Continent. This situation left France alone among the great powers to enforce the peace settlement. Yet France was weaker in terms of population and economic strength than Germany. In effect, it was left up to the Germans themselves to decide whether they would abide by the treaty provisions, which all Germans regarded as a vengeful diktat. Moreover, the shame of the Versailles settle- ment was borne not by the kaiser or the army—the parties responsible for the decisions that led to the defeat—but rather by the leaders of the new democratic Weimar Republic.
The new German government deliberately adopted ob- structionist policies, and by 1923, it had halted major repara- tions payments. French Premier Raymond Poincaré acted. He believed that if the Germans were allowed to break part of the settlement, the remainder would soon unravel. In January 1923, Poincaré sent French troops, supported by Belgian and Italian units, into the Ruhr, the industrial heart of Germany. German Chancellor Wilhelm Cuno’s government adopted a policy of passive resistance, urging the workers not to work and promising to pay their salaries. The German leaders thereby hoped to secure sufficient time for the United States and Britain to force France to depart. Although that pressure was forthcoming, Poincaré refused to back down, and the result was catastrophic inflation in Germany.
The mark had already gone from 4.2 to the dollar in July 1914 to 8.9 in January 1919. It then tumbled precipitously because of deliberate government policies. By January 1920, its value was 39.5 to the dollar and in January 1922, 191.8. Then came the French occupation of the Ruhr and Cuno’s ruinous policy. In January 1923, the value was 17,972, but by July, it was 353,412. In November, when the old mark was withdrawn in favour of a new currency, the mark’s value stood at 4.2 trillion to the dollar. The ensuing economic chaos wiped out the German middle class, and many middle-class citizens lost all faith in democracy and voted for Adolf Hitler a decade later.
Germany now agreed to pay reparations under a scaled- down schedule, and French troops withdrew from the Ruhr in 1924. Although the French generally approved of Poincaré’s action, they also noted its high financial cost and the opposition of Britain and the United States. These factors helped bring the Left to power in France in 1924, and the new government reversed Poincaré’s go-it-alone approach. The new German government of Chancellor Gustav Stresemann, moreover, announced a policy of living up to its treaty obligations. Notions of “fulfilment” and “conciliation” replaced “obstruction” and led to the Locarno Pacts of 1925, by which Germany voluntarily guaranteed its western borders as final and promised not to resort to war with its neighbours and to resolve any disputes through arbitration. For at least half a decade, international calm prevailed.
By the 1930s, national boundaries were still basically those agreed to in 1919. Italy, Germany, and Japan continued to be dissatisfied with this situation, however, and in the 1930s, the economic difficulties resulting from the Great Depression enhanced popular support in those nations for politicians and military leaders who supported drastic measures, even at the risk of war, to change the situation in the “revisionist” powers’ favour. The “status quo” powers of France, Great Britain, and the United States saw no advantage in making changes, but at the same time, they were unwilling to risk war to defend the 1919 settlement. They therefore acquiesced as, step by step, the dissatisfied powers dismantled the peace set- tlement. From the Japanese invasion of Manchuria in 1931 to the outbreak of war in Europe in 1939, those who wanted to overturn the status quo used force—but not those who sought to maintain it.
The Western democracies seemed paralyzed, in part because of the heavy human cost of World War I. France alone had 1,397,800 citizens killed or missing in the conflict. Includ- ing the wounded, 73 percent of all French combatants had been casualties. France could not sustain another such blood- letting, and the defensive military doctrine it adopted came to be summed up in the phrase “Stingy with blood; extravagant with steel.” In 1929, France began construction of a defensive belt along the frontier from Switzerland to Belgium. Named for Minister of War André Maginot and never intended as a puncture-proof barricade, the Maginot Line nonetheless helped fix a defensive mind-set in the French military.
By the 1930s, attitudes toward World War I had changed. German people believed their nation had not lost the war militarily but had been betrayed by communists, leftists, pacifists, and Jews. Especially in Britain and the United States, many came to believe that the Central Powers had not been responsible for the war, that nothing had been gained by the conflict, and that the postwar settlement had been too hard on Germany.
In Britain, there was some sympathy in influential, upper- class circles for fascist doctrines and dictators, who were seen as opponents of communism. British Member of Parliament Winston L. S. Churchill, for example, praised Italian dictator Benito Mussolini. The British government avoided continental commitments, and its leaders embraced appeasement—the notion that meeting the more legitimate demands of the dictators would remove all need for war. Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain (who served in that post from 1937 to 1940) was the principal architect of this policy.
There was also great concern in Britain, as elsewhere, over the possible air bombardment of cities in any future war.
The United States had been one of the few powers that actu- ally benefited from World War I. At a modest cost in terms of human casualties, it had emerged from the struggle as the world’s leading financial power. Yet Americans were dissatisfied with their involvement in European affairs; they believed they had been misled by wartime propaganda and that the arms manufacturers (the so-called merchants of death) had drawn the nation into the war to assure themselves payment for sales to the Entente side. In the 1930s, the United States adhered to rigid neutrality, and Congress passed legislation preventing the government from loaning money or selling arms to combatants in a war. Unfortunately, such legislation benefited the aggressor states, which were already well armed, and handicapped their victims. Franklin D. Roosevelt, the U.S. president from 1933 to 1945, understood the threat the aggressors posed to the world community, but most Americans eschewed international involvement.
The Soviet Union was also largely absorbed in its internal affairs. Following World War I, Russia experienced a pro- tracted and bloody civil war as the Communist Reds, who had seized control in November 1917, fought off the Whites, who were supported by the Western Allies. When this conflict ended in 1921, efforts by the government to introduce Com- munist economic practices only heightened the chaos and famine. In the 1930s, Soviet leader Josef Stalin pushed both the collectivization of agriculture, which led to the deaths of millions of Soviet citizens, and the industrialization essential for modern warfare.
In foreign policy, Stalin was a revisionist who did not accept the new frontiers in eastern Europe as final. Particu- larly vexing to him was the new Poland, part of which had been carved from former Russian territory. Russia had also lost additional lands to Poland following its defeat in the 1920 Russo-Polish War.
After 1933 and Adolf Hitler’s accession to power, Stalin became especially disturbed over Germany, for the German Führer (leader) had clearly stated his opposition to commu- nism and his intention of bringing large stretches of eastern Europe under German control, even by the sword. The Ger- man threat led Stalin to turn to collective security and pursue an internationalist course. In 1934, the Soviet Union joined the League of Nations.
Simultaneously, Stalin launched unprecedented purges against his own people, largely motivated by his own paranoia and desire to hold on to power. The number of victims may have been as high as 40 million, half of whom were killed. The so-called Great Terror consumed almost all the old- guard Bolshevik leadership and senior military officers. The consequences of decimating the latter group were felt in 1941 when the Germans invaded the Soviet Union.
By the late 1930s, many Western leaders distrusted the Soviet Union to the point that they hoped German strength could be directed eastward against it and that Nazism and communism would destroy one another. Thus, despite the fact that the Kremlin was willing to enter into arrangements with the West against Germany and Japan, no effective inter- national coalition was forged.
In 1931, Japan seized Manchuria. Japan had been one of the chief beneficiaries of World War I. At little cost, it had secured the German islands north of the equator and conces- sions in China. Riding the crest of an ultranationalist wave, Japanese leaders sought to take advantage of the chaos of the world economic depression and the continuing upheaval in China after the 1911 Chinese Revolution to secure the natu- ral resources their country lacked. The Japanese attempted to garner these not only in Manchuria but also in Mongolia, China proper, and South Asia.
Although Japan had many of the trappings of a democracy, it was not one. The army and navy departments were inde- pendent of the civilian authorities; from 1936 onward, the ministers of war and navy had to be serving officers, giving the military a veto over public policy because no government could be formed without its concurrence. Army leaders had little sympathy for parliamentary rule or civil government, and in the 1930s, they dominated the government and occa- sionally resorted to political assassinations, even of prime ministers.
On the night of 18 September 1931, Japanese staff officers of the elite Guandong (Kwantung) Army in southern Manchuria set off an explosion near the main line of the South Manchuria Railway near Mukden, an act they blamed on nearby Chinese soldiers. The Japanese military then took control of Mukden and began the conquest of all Manchuria. Tokyo had been presented with a fait accompli by its own mil- itary, but it supported the action.
The Japanese held that they had acted only in self-defense and demanded that the crisis be resolved through direct Sino- Japanese negotiation. China, however, took the matter to the League of Nations, the first major test for that organization. The League Council was reluctant to take tough action against Japan, and the Japanese ignored its calls to withdraw their troops and continued military operations. In February 1932, Japan proclaimed the “independence” of Manchuria in the guise of the new state of Manzhouguo (Manchukuo). A pro- tocol that September established a Japanese protectorate over Manzhouguo. In 1934, the Japanese installed China’s last Manchu emperor—Aixinjueluo Puyi (Aisingioro P’u-i, known to Westerners as Henry Puyi), who had been deposed in 1911)—as emperor of what was called Manzhoudiguo (the empire of the Manzhus [Manchus]).
A League of Nations investigating committee blamed Japan and concluded that only the presence of Japanese
troops kept the government of Manzhouguo in power. On 24 February 1933, the League Assembly approved the report of its committee and the Stimson Doctrine, named for U.S. Secretary of State Henry L. Stimson, of nonrecognition of Manzhouguo. Of 42 member states, only Japan voted against the move. Never before had such a universal vote of censure been passed against a sovereign state. Tokyo then gave notice of its intention to withdraw from the league.
Manzhouguo was larger than France and Germany combined, but in March, Japanese troops added to it the Province of Rehe (Jehol). Early in April, they moved against Chinese forces south of the Great Wall to within a few miles of Beijing (Peking) and Tianjin (Tienstin). In May, Chinese forces evacuated Beijing, then under the authority of pro-Japanese Chinese leaders. The latter concluded a truce with Japan that created a demilitarized zone administered by Chinese friendly to Japan.
Had the great powers been able to agree on military action, Japan would have been forced to withdraw from its conquered territory. Such a war would have been far less costly than fighting a world war later, but the world economic depression and general Western indifference to the plight of Asians precluded a sacrifice of that nature. A worldwide financial and commercial boycott in accordance with Article 16 of the League of Nations Covenant might also have forced a Japanese withdrawal, but this, too, was beyond Western resolve. Other states with similar aspirations took note.
Germany was the next to move. In January 1933, Adolf Hitler became Germany’s chancellor, by entirely legitimate means, and in October 1933, he withdrew Germany from both the League of Nations and the international disarmament con- ference meeting in Geneva. In July 1934, Austrian Nazis, acting with the tacit support of Berlin, attempted to seize power in Vienna in order to achieve Anschluss, or union with Germany. Ultimately, Austrian authorities put down the putschists with- out outside assistance, although Mussolini, who considered Austria under his influence, ordered Italian troops to the Bren- ner Pass.
Germany was then still largely unarmed, and Hitler expressed regret at the murder of Austrian Chancellor Engel- bert Dollfuss and assured the world that Germany had no role in the failed coup. The Nazis’ unsuccessful attempt at a takeover of Austria was clearly a setback for Hitler. Secure in French support, Mussolini met with the new Austrian chan- cellor, Kurt von Schuschnigg, in Rome that September and announced that Italy would defend Austrian independence. A French pact with Italy rested on agreement with Yugoslavia, but on 9 October 1934 when King Alexander of Yugoslavia arrived at Marseille for discussions with the French govern- ment, Croatian terrorists assassinated him and French Foreign Minister Louis Barthou. This event was a great embarrassment for France, although Barthou’s successor, Pierre Laval, did secure the pact with Italy. The January 1935 French-Italian accords called for joint consultation and close cooperation between the two powers in central Europe and reaffirmed the independence and territorial integrity of Austria. They also recommended a multilateral security pact for eastern Europe. In secret provisions, Italy promised to support France with its air force in the event of a German move in the Rhineland and France agreed to provide troops to aid Italy if the Germans should threaten Austria. France also transferred land to the Italian colonies of Libya and Eritrea, and Laval promised Mus- solini that France would not oppose Italy’s efforts to realize its colonial ambitions. Thereafter, Mussolini behaved as if he had France’s approval to wage aggressive war.
Only a week later, with Hitler declaring the Saar to be his last territorial demand in Europe (the first of many such state- ments), Saarlanders voted nine to one to rejoin Germany. On 1 March 1935, the League Council formally returned the Saar to German control. Two weeks later, on 16 March, Hitler pro- claimed the rearmament of Germany. Secret rearmament had been under way for some time, including development of an air training center at Lipetsk, a gas warfare school at Torski, and a tank school at Kazan (all in the Soviet Union), but Hitler now announced publicly that the Reich would reintroduce compulsory military service and increase its army to more than 500,000 men, moves he justified on the grounds that the Allies had not disarmed. France, Britain, and Italy all protested but did nothing further to compel Germany to observe its treaty obligations. In April 1935, Laval, Prime Min- ister J. Ramsay MacDonald of Britain, and Mussolini met at Stresa on Lake Maggiori and formed the so-called Stresa Front, agreeing “to oppose unilateral repudiation of treaties that may endanger the peace” (with the phrase “of Europe” being added at Mussolini’s request).
On 2 May, France and the Soviet Union signed a five-year pact of mutual assistance in the event of unprovoked aggres- sion against either power. The French rejected a military con- vention that would have coordinated their military response to any German aggression, however. On 16 May, the Soviet Union and Czechoslovakia signed a similar mutual-assistance pact, but the Soviet Union was not obligated to provide armed assistance unless France first fulfilled its commitments.
Britain took the first step in the appeasement of Germany, shattering the Stresa Front. On 18 June 1935, the British government signed a naval agreement with Germany that con- doned the latter’s violation of the Versailles Treaty. In spite of having promised Paris in February that it would take no unilateral action toward Germany, London permitted the Reich to build a surface navy of a size up to 35 percent that of Britain’s own navy—in effect, a force larger than the navies of either France or Italy. It also allowed the Reich to attain 45 percent of the Royal Navy’s strength in submarines, armaments that Germany was prohibited from acquiring by the
Treaty of Versailles. British leaders were unconcerned. The Royal Navy had only 50 submarines, which meant the Germans could build only 23. Moreover, the British were confident that the new technology of ASDIC, later known as sonar, would enable them to detect submarines at a range of several thousand yards. The Anglo-German Naval Agreement was, of course, another postdated German check. The conclusion of this accord was also the first occasion on which any power sanctioned Germany’s misdeeds, and it won Britain the dis- pleasure of its ally France.
On 3 October 1935, believing with some justification that he had Western support, Mussolini invaded Ethiopia (Abyssinia). Long-standing border disputes between Italian Somaliland and Ethiopia were the excuse. Mussolini’s goal was to create a great Italian empire in Africa and to avenge Italy’s defeat by the Ethiopians at Adowa in 1896. The out- come of the Italo-Ethiopian War was a foregone conclusion, and in May 1936, Italian forces took Addis Ababa and Mus- solini proclaimed the king of Italy as the emperor of Ethiopia.
On 7 October 1935, the League of Nations condemned Italy, marking the first time it had branded a European state an aggressor. But behind the scenes, British Foreign Secretary Sir Samuel Hoare and French Foreign Minister Pierre Laval devised their infamous proposals to broker away Ethiopia to Italy in return for Italian support against Germany. Public furore swept both men from office when the deal became known.
Ultimately, the league voted to impose some economic sanctions—but not on oil, which would have brought an Italian withdrawal. In the end, even those ineffectual sanctions that had been voted for were lifted. Italy, like Japan, had gam- bled and won, dealing another blow to collective security.
Probably the seminal event on the road to World War II occurred in early 1936, when Hitler remilitarized the Rhineland. On 7 March 1936, some 22,000 lightly armed Ger- man troops marched into the Rhineland, defying not just the Treaty of Versailles but also the Locarno Pacts, which Germany had voluntarily negotiated. Hitler deliberately sched- uled the operation to occur while France was absorbed by a bitterly contested election campaign that brought the leftist Popular Front to power.
Incredibly, France had no contingency plans for such an eventuality. French intelligence services also grossly overestimated the size of the German forces in the operation and believed Hitler’s false claims that the Luftwaffe had achieved parity with the French Armée de l’Air (air force). Vainly seeking to disguise its own inaction, Paris appealed to London for support, but Foreign Secretary Anthony Eden made it clear that Britain would not fight for the Rhineland, which was, after all, German territory.
Had the French acted, their forces in all likelihood would have rolled over the Germans, which would probably have
Origins of the War 7
8 Origins of the War
meant the end of the Nazi regime. But as it turned out, remil- itarization of the Rhineland provided Germany a buffer for the Ruhr and a springboard for invading France and Belgium. That October, it also led Belgian leaders to renounce their treaty of mutual assistance with France and seek security in neutrality.
Almost immediately after the German remilitarization of the Rhineland, another international crisis erupted, this time in Spain, where civil war began on 18 July 1936. The issue cen- tered on whether Spain would follow the modernizing reforms of the rest of western Europe or maintain its existing structure, favoured by Spanish traditionalists. When the Republicans won a narrow victory in the Spanish elections of 1936, the traditionalists, who were known as the Nationalists, took to arms.
It is probable, though by no means certain, that the Republicans would have won the civil war had Spain been left alone to decide its fate. Certainly, the conflict would have ended much sooner. But Germany and Italy intervened early, providing critical air support that allowed the airlifting of Nationalist troops and equipment across the Straits of Gibraltar from Morocco to Nationalist-held territory in Spain—in effect, the first large-scale military airlift in history.
Germany even formed an air detachment, the Kondor Legion, to fight in Spain, a key factor in the ultimate Nation- alist victory. The Germans also tested their latest military equipment under combat conditions, developed new fighter tactics, and learned about the necessity of close coordination between air and ground operations, along with the value of dive-bombing. Italy also provided important naval support and sent three divisions of troops, artillery, and aircraft.
Surprisingly, the Western democracies did not support the Spanish Republic. France initially sent some arms to the Republicans, but under heavy British pressure, it reversed its stance. British leaders devised a noninterventionist policy. Although all the great powers promised to observe that policy, only the Western democracies actually did so. This agreement, which made it impossible for the Republicans to obtain the arms they needed, was probably the chief factor in their defeat.
Only the Soviet Union and Mexico assisted the Spanish Republic. Stalin apparently hoped for a protracted struggle that would entangle the Western democracies and Germany on the other side of the European continent. During the civil war, the Soviet Union sent advisers, aircraft, tanks, and artillery to Spain. Eventually, this Soviet aid permitted the Spanish Communists, who were not a significant political fac- tor in 1936, to take over the Republican government. Finally, in March 1939, Nationalist forces, led by General Francisco Franco, entered Madrid. By April, hostilities ended.
The Western democracies emerged very poorly from the test of the Spanish Civil War. Although tens of thousands of foreign volunteers had fought in Spain, most of these for the Republic, the governments of the Western democracies had
remained aloof, and many doubted the West had any will left to defend democracy. Internationally, the major effect of the fighting in Spain was to bring Germany and Italy together. In October 1936, they agreed to cooperate in Spain, to collabo- rate in matters of “parallel interests,” and to work to defend “European civilization” against communism. Thus was born the Rome-Berlin Axis. Then, on 25 November, Germany and Japan signed the Anti-Comintern Pact to oppose activities of the Comintern (the Communist International), created to spread communism. On the same day, Germany and Japan also signed a secret agreement providing that if either state was the object of an unprovoked attack by the Soviet Union, the other would do nothing to assist the USSR. On 6 Novem- ber 1937, Italy joined the Anti-Comintern Pact. Shortly after- ward, Mussolini announced that Italy would not assist Austria against a German attempt to consummate Anschluss. Italy also withdrew from the League of Nations, and it recognised Manzhouguo as an independent state in November 1937 (as did Germany in May 1938).
Japan, meanwhile, continued to strengthen its position in the Far East, asserting its exclusive right to control China. Tokyo demanded an end to the provision of Western loans and military advisers to China and threatened the use of force if such aid continued. In 1935, Japan began encroaching on several of China’s northern provinces. The Chinese govern- ment at Nanjing (Nanking), headed by Generalissimo Jiang Jieshi (Chiang Kai-shek), initially pursued a policy of appeasement vis-à-vis the Japanese, but students and the Chinese military demanded action. The Chinese Commu- nists declared themselves willing to cooperate with the Nationalist government and place their armies under its command if Nanjing would adopt an anti-Japanese policy. The rapid growth of anti-Japanese sentiment in China and the increasing military strength of the Nationalists alarmed Japanese military leaders, who worked to establish a pro- Japanese regime in China’s five northern provinces.
On the night of 7 July 1937, a clash occurred west of Beijing between Japanese and Chinese troops. Later that month, after Nanjing rejected an ultimatum from Tokyo, the Japa- nese invaded the coveted northern provinces. In a few days, they had occupied both Tianjin and Beijing, and by the end of the year, Japan had extended its control into all five Chi- nese provinces north of the Yellow River. In mid-December, Japan also installed a new government in Beijing. Tokyo never declared war against China, however, enabling it to evade U.S. neutrality legislation and purchase American raw materials and oil. But by the same token, this situation per- mitted Washington to send aid to China.
The fighting was not confined to north China, for in August 1937, the Japanese attacked the great commercial city of Shanghai. Not until November, after three months of hard fighting involving the best Nationalist troops, did the city fall.
Japanese forces then advanced up the Changjiang (Yangtse) River, and in December, they took Nanjing, where they com- mitted widespread atrocities.
As scholars have since noted, Japan subsequently devel- oped a collective amnesia in regard to its actions at Nanjing and its atrocities in the war through South Asia in general. (According to the Chinese, Japan has a long history and a short memory.) This Japanese evasion of responsibility stands in sharp contrast to German attempts to come to terms with the Holocaust, and it has affected Japan’s relations with China and other nations in Asia right up to the present.
On 12 December 1937, while trying to clear the Changjiang River of all Western shipping, Japanese forces attacked a U.S. Navy gunboat, the Panay. Other American ships belonging to an oil company were also bombed and sunk, and British vessels were shelled. Strong protests from Washington and Lon- don brought profuse apologies from Tokyo. The Japanese, falsely claiming they had not realized the nationality of the ships, stated their readiness to pay compensation and give guarantees that such incidents would not be repeated. Wash- ington and London accepted these amends, and the episode only served to convince Tokyo that it had little to fear from Western intervention.
Again, China appealed to the League of Nations, which once more condemned Japan. Again, too, the West failed to withhold critical supplies and financial credits from Japan, so once more, collective security failed. By the end of 1938, Japa- nese troops had taken the great commercial cities of Tianjin, Beijing, Shanghai, Nanjing, Hankou, and Guangzhou (Can- ton), and the Nationalists were forced to relocate their capital to the interior city of Chongqing (Chungking), which Japan bombed heavily. In desperation, the Chinese demolished the dikes on the Huang He (Hwang Ho), known to Westerners as the Yellow River, costing hundreds of thousands of lives and flooding much of northern China until 1944.
Japan was also confronting the Soviet Union. Fighting began in 1938 between Japanese and Soviet troops in the poorly defined triborder area normally referred to as Changkufeng, where Siberia, Manzhouguo, and Korea met. Although no state of war was declared, significant battles were fought, especially at Changkufeng Hill in 1938 and Nomon- han/Khalkhin Gol in 1939. The fighting ended advantageously for the Soviets. A cease-fire in September 1939 preempted a planned Japanese counterattack, and the dispute was resolved by treaty in June 1940. The fighting undoubtedly influenced Stalin’s decision to sign a nonaggression pact with Germany in August 1939. It also gave Tokyo a new appreciation of Soviet fighting ability, and in 1941, it helped to influence Japanese leaders to strike not north into Siberia but against the easier targets of the European colonies in Southeast Asia.
In the West, the situation by 1938 encouraged Hitler to embark on his own territorial expansion. Mussolini was now
linked with Hitler, and France was experiencing another period of ministerial instability. In Britain, appeasement was in full force, so much so that in February 1938, Anthony Eden, a staunch proponent of collective security, resigned as for- eign secretary.
Austria was Hitler’s first step. In February 1938, Austrian Chancellor Schuschnigg traveled to Berchtesgaden at the Führer’s insistence to meet with the German leader. Under heavy pressure, Schuschnigg agreed to appoint Austrian Nazi Arthur Seyss-Inquart as minister of the interior and other Aus- trian Nazis as ministers of justice and foreign affairs. On 9 March, however, in an attempt to maintain his nation’s inde- pendence, Schuschnigg announced that a plebiscite on the issue of Anschluss would be held in only four days, hoping that the short interval would not allow the Nazis to mobilize effectively.
Hitler was determined that no plebiscite be held, and on 11 March, Seyss-Inquart presented Schuschnigg with an ulti- matum demanding his resignation and postponement of the vote under threat of invasion by German troops, already mobilized on the border. Schuschnigg yielded, canceling the plebiscite and resigning. Seyss-Inquart then took power and belatedly invited in the German troops “to preserve order” after they had already crossed the frontier. Yet Germany’s military was hardly ready for war; indeed, hundreds of Ger- man tanks and vehicles of the German Eighth Army broke down on the drive toward Vienna.
On 13 March, Berlin declared Austria to be part of the Reich, and the next day, perhaps a million Austrians gave Hitler an enthusiastic welcome to Vienna. France and Britain lodged formal protests with Berlin but did nothing more. After the war, Austrian leaders denied culpability for their association with the Third Reich by claiming that their coun- try was actually the first victim of Nazi aggression.
The Anschluss greatly strengthened the German position in central Europe. Germany was now in direct contact with Italy, Yugoslavia, and Hungary, and it controlled virtually all the communications of southeastern Europe. Czechoslova- kia was almost isolated, and its trade outlets operated at Ger- many’s mercy. Militarily, Germany outflanked the powerful western Czech defenses. It was thus not surprising that, despite his pledges to respect the territorial integrity of Czechoslovakia, Hitler should next seek to bring that state under his control.
In Austria, Hitler had added 6 million Germans to the Reich, but another 3.5 million lived in Czechoslovakia. Germans liv- ing there had long complained about discrimination in a state that had only minority Czech, German, Slovak, Hungarian, Ukrainian, and Pole populations. In 1938, however, Czecho- slovakia had the highest standard of living east of Germany and was the only remaining democracy in central Europe.
Strategically, Czechoslovakia was the keystone of Europe. It had a military alliance with France, an army of 400,000 well-trained men, and the important Skoda munitions com- plex at Pilsen, as well as strong fortifications in the west. Unfortunately for the Czechs, the latter were in the Erzege- berge (Ore Mountains) bordering the Bohemian bowl, where the population was almost entirely German. From the Ger- man point of view, it could now be said that Bohemia- Moravia, almost one-third German in population, protruded into the Reich. Hitler took up and enlarged the past demands of Konrad Henlein’s Sudetendeutsch (Sudeten German) Party to turn legitimate complaints into a call for outright separation of the German regions from Czechoslovakia and their union with Germany.
In May 1938, during key Czechoslovakian elections, Ger- man troops massed on the border and threatened invasion. Confident of French support, the Czechs mobilized their army. Both France and the Soviet Union had stated their will- ingness to go to war to defend Czechoslovakia, and in the end, nothing happened. Hitler then began to construct fortifica- tions along the German frontier in the west. Known to Ger- mans as the West Wall, these fortifications were clearly designed to prevent France from supporting its eastern allies.
Western leaders, who believed they had just averted war, now pondered whether Czechoslovakia, which had been formed only as a consequence of the Paris Peace Conference, was worth a general European war. British Prime Minister Chamberlain concluded that it was not. In early August, he sent an emissary, Lord Runciman, to Prague as a mediator, and on 7 September, based on Runciman’s suggestions, Prague offered Henlein practically everything that the Sude- ten Germans demanded, short of independence.
A number of knowledgeable Germans believed that Hitler was leading their state to destruction. During August and early September 1938, several opposition emissaries traveled to London with messages from the head of the Abwehr (German military intelligence), Admiral Wilhelm Canaris, and the chief of the German General Staff, General der Artillerie (U.S. equiv. lieutenant general) Ludwig Beck. They warned London of Hitler’s intentions and urged a strong British stand. Beck even pledged, prior to his resignation in mid-August, that if Britain would agree to fight for Czechoslovakia, he would stage a putsch against Hitler. Nothing came of this effort, however, as London was committed to appeasement.
By mid-September, Hitler was demanding “self- determination” for the Sudeten Germans and threatening war if it was not granted. Clearly, he was promoting a situation to justify German military intervention. France would then have to decide whether to honor its pledge to Czechoslovakia. If it chose to do so, this would bring on a general European war.
In this critical situation, Chamberlain asked Hitler for a personal meeting, and on 15 September, he flew to Germany and met with the Führer at Berchtesgaden. There, Hitler informed him that the Sudeten Germans had to be able to
unite with Germany and that he was willing to risk war to accomplish this end. London and Paris now decided to force the principle of self-determination on Prague, demanding on 19 September that the Czechs agree to an immediate transfer to Germany of those areas with populations that were more than 50 percent German. When Prague asked that the matter be referred to arbitration, as provided under the Locarno Pacts, London and Paris declared this unacceptable. The Czechs, they said, would have to accept the Anglo-French proposals or bear the consequences alone.
The British and French decision to desert Czechoslovakia resulted from many factors. The peoples of both countries dreaded a general war, especially one with air attacks, for which neither nation believed itself adequately prepared. The Germans also bluffed the British and French into believing that their Luftwaffe was much more powerful than it actually was, and both Chamberlain and French Premier Édouard Daladier feared the destruction of their capitals from the air. The Western leaders also thought they would be fighting alone. They did not believe they could count on the USSR, whose military was still reeling from Stalin’s purges. It also seemed unlikely that the United States would assist, even with supplies, given its neutrality policies. Nor were the British dominions of Canada, Australia, New Zealand, and South Africa likely to support Great Britain in a war for Czechoslovakia. In France and especially in Britain, there were also those who saw Nazism as a bulwark against communism and who hoped that Hitler could be diverted east- ward and enmeshed in a war with the Soviets in which communism and fascism might destroy one another.
Chamberlain, who had scant experience in foreign affairs, hoped to reconcile differences in order to prevent a general European war. He strongly believed in the sanctity of contracts and could not accept that the leader of the most powerful state in Europe was a blackmailer and a liar. But the West also suffered from a moral uncertainty. In 1919, it had touted the “self-determination of peoples,” and by this standard, Germany had a right to all it had hitherto demanded. The transfer of the Sudetenland to the Reich did not seem too high a price to pay for a satisfied Germany and a peaceful Europe. Finally, Hitler stated repeatedly that, once his demands on Czechoslovakia had been satisfied, he would have no further territorial ambitions in Europe.
Under heavy British and French pressure, Czechoslovakia accepted the Anglo-French proposals. On 22 September, Chamberlain again traveled to Germany and met with Hitler, who, to Chamberlain’s surprise, demanded that all Czech officials be withdrawn from the Sudeten area within 10 days and that no military, economic, or traffic establishments be damaged or removed. These demands led to the most serious international crisis in Europe since 1918. Prague informed London that Hitler’s demands were absolutely unacceptable.
London and Paris agreed and decided not to pressure Prague to secure its acceptance. It thus appeared that Hitler might have to carry out his threat to use force and that a general European war might result.
Following appeals by Roosevelt and Mussolini to Hitler, the German leaders agreed to a meeting. Chamberlain, Daladier, and Mussolini then repaired to Munich to meet with Hitler on 29 September. The Soviet Union was not invited, and Czechoslovakia itself was not officially represented. There were no real negotiations, the object being to give Hitler the Sudetenland in order to avoid war.
The Munich Agreement, dated 30 September, gave the Führer everything he demanded, and early on 1 October 1938, German troops marched across the frontier. Other neighbouring states joined in. Poland demanded—and received—an area around Teschen of some 400 square miles with a population of 240,000 people, only 100,000 of whom were Poles, and in November, Hungary secured some 4,800 square miles of Czechoslovakia with about 1 million people.
In retrospect, it would have been better for the West to have fought Germany in September 1938. The lineup against Germany might have included the Soviet Union and Poland, but even discounting them, the German army would have been forced to fight against France and Britain, as well as Czechoslovakia. Despite Hitler’s claims to the contrary, Ger- many was not ready for war in September 1938. The Luftwaffe had 1,230 first-line aircraft, including 600 bombers and 400 fighters, but nearly half of them were earmarked for use in the east, leaving the rest too thinly stretched over the Reich frontier to counter any serious offensive by the French air force and the Royal Air Force (RAF). The Luftwaffe was also short of bombs. Worse, only five fighting divisions and seven reserve divisions were available to hold eight times that number of French divisions.
Britain itself was far from ready, its rearmament program having begun only the year before. France had many more artillery pieces than Germany but was weak in the air. Accord- ing to one estimate, France had only 250 first-quality fighters and 350 bombers out of perhaps 1,375 front-line aircraft, but France also could have counted on 35 well-armed and well- equipped Czech divisions, backed by substantial numbers of artillery pieces and tanks and perhaps 1,600 aircraft.
Later, those responsible for the Munich debacle advanced the argument that the agreement bought a year for the West- ern democracies to rearm. Winston Churchill stated that British fighter squadrons equipped with modern aircraft rose from only 5 in September 1938 to 26 by July 1939 (and 47 by July 1940), but he also noted that the year “gained” by Munich left the democracies in a much worse position vis-à-vis Hitler’s Germany than they had been in during the Munich crisis.
The September 1938 crisis had far-reaching international effects. Chamberlain and Daladier were received with cheers
at home, the British prime minister reporting that he believed he had brought back “peace in our time.” But the agreement effectively ended the French security system, since France’s eastern allies now questioned French commitments to them. Stalin, always suspicious, was further alienated from the West. He expressed the view that Chamberlain and Daladier had surrendered to Hitler in order to facilitate Germany’s Drang nach Osten (drive to the east) and a war between Ger- many and the Soviet Union.
Hitler had given assurances that the Sudetenland was his last territorial demand, but events soon proved the contrary. The day after the Munich Agreement was signed, he told his aides that he would annex the remainder of Czechoslovakia at the first opportunity. Within a few months, Hitler took advan- tage of the Czech internal situation. In March 1939, he threw his support to the leader of the Slovak Popular Party, Jozef Tiso, who sought complete independence for Slovakia. On 14 March, Slovakia and Ruthenia declared their independence. That same day, Hitler summoned elderly Czech President Emile Hácha to Berlin, where the commander of the Luftwaffe, Hermann Göring, threatened the immediate destruction of Prague unless Moravia and Bohemia were made Reich pro- tectorates. German bombers, he alleged, were awaiting the order to take off. Hácha signed, and on that date, 15 March, Nazi troops occupied what remained of Czechoslovakia. The Czech lands became the Protectorate of Bohemia and Mor- avia, and Slovakia became a vassal state of the Reich, with lit- tle more independence than Bohemia-Moravia.
Thirty-five highly trained and well-equipped Czech divi- sions thus disappeared from the anti-Hitler order of battle. Hitler had also eliminated what he had referred to as “that damned airfield” (meaning all of Czechoslovakia), and the output of the Skoda arms complex would now supply the Reich’s legions. In Bohemia and Moravia, the Wehrmacht acquired 1,582 aircraft, 2,000 artillery pieces, and sufficient equipment to arm 20 divisions. Any increase in armaments that Britain and France achieved by March 1939 was more than counterbalanced by German gains in Czechoslovakia, which included nearly one-third of the tanks they deployed in the west in spring 1940. Between August 1938 and Sep- tember 1939, Skoda produced nearly as many arms as all British arms factories combined.
Hungarian troops crossed into Ruthenia and incorpo- rated it into Hungary. Later in March, Germany demanded from Lithuania the immediate return of Memel, with its mostly German population. Lithuania, which had received the Baltic city after World War I to gain access to the sea, had no recourse but to comply.
Hitler’s seizure of the rest of Czechoslovakia demonstrated that his demands were not limited to areas with Ger- man populations but were instead determined by the need for Lebensraum, or living space. His repudiation of the formal pledges given to Chamberlain at Munich did, however, serve to convince the British that they could no longer trust Hitler. Indeed, Britain and France responded with a series of guar- antees to the smaller states now threatened by Germany. Clearly, Poland would be the next pressure point, as the Ger- man press orchestrated charges of the Polish government’s brutality against its German minority. On 31 March, Britain and France extended a formal guarantee to support Poland in the event of a German attack. At the eleventh hour and under the worst possible circumstances—with Czechoslova- kia lost and the Soviet Union alienated—Britain had changed its eastern European policy and agreed to do what the French had sought in the 1920s.
Mussolini took advantage of the general European situa- tion to strengthen Italy’s position in the Balkans. In April 1939, he sent Italian troops into Albania. King Zog fled, whereon an Albanian constituent assembly voted to offer the crown to King Victor Emmanuel III of Italy. On 13 April, Britain and France extended a guarantee to defend Greece and Romania.
The Western powers began to make belated military preparations for an inevitable war, and they worked to secure a pact with the Soviet Union. Unfortunately, the guarantee to Poland gave the Soviet Union protection on its western frontier, virtually the most it could have secured in any negotiations.
On 23 May, Hitler met with his leading generals at the Reich Chancellery. He reviewed Germany’s territorial requirements and the need to resolve these by expansion eastward. War, he declared, was inevitable, and he announced that he intended to attack Poland at the first suitable opportunity.
The same month, Britain and France initiated negotiations with the Soviet Union for a mutual-assistance pact. Although negotiations continued until August, no agreement was reached. Poland, Latvia, Lithuania, and Estonia were all unwilling to allow Soviet armies within their borders, even to defend against a German attack. Many in these countries feared the Soviets more than the Germans, and Polish lead- ers refused to believe that Hitler would risk war with Britain and France. But due to the 1920 Russo-Polish War, Poland’s eastern border extended almost to Minsk, and the Soviets believed that the French and British wished them to take the brunt of the German attack. The Poles also had an exagger- ated sense of their own military power. In any case, the Anglo- French negotiators refused to sacrifice Poland and the Baltic states to Stalin as they had handed Czechoslovakia to Hitler.
While the Kremlin had been negotiating more or less openly with Britain and France, it concurrently sought an understanding with Germany, even to the point of Stalin dis- patching personal emissaries to Berlin. On 10 March 1939, addressing the Eighteenth Party Congress of the Soviet Union, Stalin had said that his country did not intend to “pull
anyone else’s chestnuts out of the fire.” He thus signalled to Hitler his readiness to abandon collective security and negotiate an agreement with Berlin. Within a week, Hitler had annexed Bohemia and Moravia, confident that the Soviet Union would not intervene. Another consideration for Stalin was that the Soviet Union potentially faced war on two fronts, owing to the threat from Japan in the Far East. Japanese pressure on Mongolia and the Maritime Provinces may well have played a significant role in predisposing Stalin to make his pact with Hitler.
In early May 1939, Stalin gave further encouragement to Hitler when he dismissed Commissar for Foreign Affairs Mak- sim Litvinov and appointed Vyacheslav Molotov in his place. Litvinov was both a champion of collective security and a Jew. Hitler later said that the dismissal of Litvinov made fully evi- dent Stalin’s wish to transform its relations with Germany. Contacts begun in May culminated in the German-Soviet Non-aggression Pact signed on 23 August in Moscow by Molo- tov and German Foreign Minister Joachim von Ribbentrop.
The German-Soviet agreement signed that night consisted of an open, 10-year, nonaggression pact, together with two secret protocols that did not become generally known until Rudolf Hess revealed them after the war during the proceed- ings of the International Military Tribunal at Nuremberg. These secret arrangements, never publicly acknowledged by the Soviet Union until 1990, partitioned eastern Europe between Germany and the Soviet Union in advance of the Ger- man invasion of Poland, for which Hitler had now, in effect, received Stalin’s permission. Any future territorial rearrange- ment of the area was to involve its division between the two powers. The Soviet sphere would include eastern Poland, the Romanian Province of Bessarabia, Estonia, Latvia, and Fin- land. Lithuania went to Germany. A month later, Hitler traded it to Stalin in exchange for further territorial concessions in Poland. In addition, a trade convention accompanying the pact provided that the Soviet Union would supply vast quan- tities of raw materials to Germany in exchange for military technology and finished goods. This economic arrangement was immensely valuable to Germany early in the war, a point that Churchill later made quite clear to Stalin. Certainly, Stalin expected that Hitler would face a protracted war in the west that would allow the Soviet Union time to rebuild its military. All indications are that Stalin welcomed the pact with Ger- many, whereas he regarded the subsequent wartime alliance with Britain and the United States with fear and suspicion. His position becomes understandable when one realizes that Stalin’s primary concern was with the internal stability of the Soviet Union.
The nonaggression pact had the impact of a thunderbolt on the world community. Communism and Nazism, sup- posed to be ideological opposites on the worst possible terms, had come together, dumbfounding a generation more versed in ideology than power politics.
On 22 August, Hitler summoned his generals and announced his intention to invade Poland. Neither Britain nor France, he said, had the leadership necessary for a life- and-death struggle: “Our enemies are little worms,” he remarked, “I saw them at Munich.” British and French arma- ment did not yet amount to much. Thus, Germany had much to gain and little to lose, for the Western powers probably would not fight. In any case, Germany had to accept the risks and act with reckless resolution.
The German invasion of Poland, set for 26 August, actually occurred on 1 September, the delay caused by Italy’s decision to remain neutral. Prompted by his foreign minister and son-in-law, Galeazzo Ciano, Mussolini lost faith in a German victory. Ciano proposed that Mussolini tell Hitler that Italy would enter the conflict only if Germany would agree to sup- ply certain armaments and raw materials. On 25 August, the Germans rescinded their plans and engaged in frenzied discussions. The next day, Mussolini asked for immediate delivery of 170 million tons of industrial products and raw materials, an impossible request. Hitler then asked that Mussolini maintain a benevolent neutrality toward Germany and continue military preparations so as to fool the English and French. Mussolini agreed.
On 1 September, following false charges that Polish forces had crossed onto German soil and killed German border guards—an illusion completed by the murder of concentration camp prisoners who were then dressed in Polish military uniforms—German forces invaded Poland. On 3 September, after the expiration of ultimatums to Germany, Britain and France declared war on Germany.
Spencer C. Tucker
See also
Aixinjueluo Puyi; Anti-Comintern Pact; Beck, Ludwig; Canaris, Wil- helm Franz; Chamberlain, Arthur Neville; Churchill, Sir Winston L. S.; Ciano, Galeazzo; Daladier, Édouard; Eden, Sir Robert Anthony; Franco, Francisco; Gamelin, Maurice Gustave; Guan- dong Army; Hess, Walter Richard Rudolf; Hitler, Adolf; Kondor Legion; Manzhouguo; Molotov, Vyacheslav Mikhailovich; Munich Conference and Preliminaries; Mussolini, Benito; Rhineland, Remilitarization of; Ribbentrop, Ulrich Friedrich Willy Joachim von; Roosevelt, Franklin D.; Schuschnigg, Kurt von; Sino-Japan- ese War; Spain, Civil War in; Stalin, Josef; Stimson, Henry Lewis; Tiso, Jozef; Victor Emanuel III, King of Italy
References
Bell, P. M. H. The Origins of the Second World War in Europe. New York: Longman, 1986.
Bendiner, Elmer. A Time for Angels: The Tragicomic History of the League of Nations. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1975.
Kee, Robert. 1939: In the Shadow of War. Boston: Little, Brown, 1984. Kennan, George F. From Prague after Munich: Diplomatic Papers,
1938–1940. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1968. Kier, Elizabeth. Imagining War: French and British Military Doctrine
between the Wars. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1997. Read, Anthony, and David Fisher. The Deadly Embrace: Hitler, Stalin,
and the Nazi-Soviet Pact, 1939–1941. New York: W. W. Norton,
1988. Renouvin, Pierre. World War II and Its Origins: International Rela-
tions, 1929–1945. New York: Harper and Row, 1969. Shirer, William L. 20th Century Journey: A Memoir of a Life and the
Times. Vol. 2, The Nightmare Years, 1930–1940. Boston: Little,
Brown, 1984. Smith, Gene. The Dark Summer: An Intimate History of the Events
That Led to World War II. New York: Macmillan, 1987. Watt, Donald C. Too Serious a Business: European Armed Forces and the Approach to the Second World War. New York: W. W. Norton,
1975. Whaley, Barton. Covert German Rearmament, 1919–1939: Deception
and Misrepresentation. Frederick, MD: University Publications of America, 1984.
9/11/01
The world on September 11, 1901, was not a bad place for a healthy white man with a decent education and some money in the bank. Writing eighteen years later, the economist John Maynard Keynes could look back, with a mixture of nostalgia and irony, to the days when the class to which he belonged had enjoyed 'at a low cost and with the least trouble, conveniences, comforts, and amenities beyond the compass of the richest and most powerful monarchs of other ages':
The inhabitant of London could order by telephone, sipping his morning tea in bed, the various products of the whole earth, in such quantity as he might see fit, and reasonably expect their early delivery upon his doorstep; he could at the same moment and by the same means adventure his wealth in the natural resources and new enterprises of any quarter of the world, and share, without exertion or even trouble, in their prospective fruits and advantages; or he could decide to couple the security of his fortunes with the good faith of the townspeople of any substantial municipality in any continent that fancy or information might recommend.
Not only could Keynes's inhabitant of London buy the world's wares and invest his capital in a wide range of global securities; he could also travel the earth's surface with unprecedented freedom and ease:
He could secure forthwith, if he wished it, cheap and comfortable means of transit to any country or climate without passport or other formality, could despatch his servant to the neighbouring office of a bank for such supply of the precious metals as might seem convenient, and could then proceed abroad to foreign quarters, without knowledge of their religion, language, or cus- toms, bearing coined wealth upon his person, and would consider himself greatly aggrieved and much surprised at the least interference.
But the crucial point, as Keynes saw it, was that the man of 1901 'regarded this state of affairs as normal, certain, and permanent, except in the direction of further improvement, and any deviation from it as aberrant, scandalous, and avoidable.' This first age of globalization was an idyll, indeed:
The projects and politics of militarism and imperialism, of racial and cultural rivalries, of monopolies, restrictions, and exclusion, which were to play the serpent to this paradise, were little more than the amusements of his daily newspaper, and appeared to exercise almost no influence at all on the ordinary course of social and economic life, the internationalisation of which was nearly complete in practice.
It is worth turning back to The Times of that golden age to verify Keynes's justly famous recollection. Exactly a century before two hijacked planes slammed into the twin towers of the World Trade Centre, 'globalization' was indeed a reality, even if that clumsy word was as yet unknown. On that day - which was a sunny Wednesday - Keynes's inhabitant of London could, as he sipped his breakfast tea, have ordered a sack of coal from Cardiff, a pair of kid gloves from Paris or a box of cigars from Havana. He might also, if anticipating a visit to the grouse moors of Scotland, have purchased a 'Breadalbane Waterproof and self-ventilating Shooting Costume (cape and kilt)'; or he might, if his interests lay in a different direction, have ordered a copy of Maurice C. Hime's book entitled Schoolboy's Special Immorality. He could have invested his money in any one of nearly fifty US companies quoted in London - most of them railroads like the Denver and Rio Grande (whose latest results were reported that day) - or, if he preferred, in one of the seven other stock markets also covered regularly by The Times. He might, if he felt the urge to travel, have booked himself passage on the P&O liner Peninsular, which was due to sail for Bombay and Karachi the next day, or on one of the twenty-three other P&O ships scheduled to sail for Eastern desti- nations over the next ten weeks - to say nothing of the thirty-six other shipping lines offering services from England to all the corners of the globe. Did New York seem to beckon? The Manitou sailed tomorrow, or he could wait for the Hamburg-America Line's more luxurious Fiirst Bismarck, which sailed from Southampton on the 13th. Did Buenos Aires appeal to him more? Did he perhaps wish to see for himself how the city's Grand National Tramway Company was using - or rather, losing - his money? Very well; the Danube, departing for Argentina on Friday, still had some cabins free.
The world, in short, was his oyster. And yet, as Keynes understood, this oyster was not without its toxic impurities. The lead story in The Times that September 11 was a 'hopeful' report - vainly hopeful, as it turned out - that the American President William McKinley was showing signs of recovering from the attempt on his life five days earlier by the anarchist Leon Czolgosz. ('The President is in great order,' his physician was quoted as saying. In fact, McKinley died on September 14.) This attack had awakened the American public to a hitherto neglected threat from within. The paper's New York correspondent reported that the police were engaged in rounding up all the known anarchists in the city, though the plot to kill the President was
believed to have been hatched in Chicago, where two anarchist leaders, Emma Goldman and Abraham Isaak, had already been arrested. 'I only done my duty,' Czolgosz explained, by which he meant the anarchist's duty to kill rulers and wage war on established governments. 'I thought', he added as he was led to the electric chair, 'it would help the working people.' The news that the President's condition was improving and that the perpetrator's associates were being rounded up might have reassured our breakfasting reader, as it had reassured the stock market the previous day. He would nevertheless have been aware that assassinations of heads of state were becoming disturbingly frequent; the King of Italy had been murdered the year before, the Empress of Austria- Hungary two years before that. In 1903 it would be the turn of the King of Serbia.
The ideology of anarchism and the practice of terrorism were just two of the 'serpents' in the garden of globalization that Keynes had forgotten about by 1919.
What of the 'projects and politics of militarism and imperialism, of racial and cultural rivalries'? There was ample evidence of these on September 11, 1901. In South Africa the bitterly contested war between the British and the Boers was approaching the end of its second year. The official communiqués from the British commander, Lord Kitchener, were sanguine. In the preceding week, according to his latest report, sixty-seven Boers had been killed, sixty-seven wounded and 384 taken prisoner. A further 163 had surrendered. By contrast, The Times listed the deaths of eighteen British soldiers, of whom just seven had been victims of enemy action. Here was a very British measure of military success, a profit and loss account from the battlefield. However, the methods the British had by this time adopted to defeat their foes were harsh in the extreme, though The Times made no mention of these. To deprive the Boers of supplies from their farms, their wives and children had been driven from their homes and herded into concentration camps, where conditions were atrocious; at this stage, roughly one in three inmates was dying because of poor sanitation and disease. In addition, Kitchener had ordered the construction of a network of barbed wire and blockhouses to disrupt the Boers' lines of communication. Even these measures did not strike The Times's editorial writers as sufficient to end the war:
To permit [the Boers] to protract the struggle and to exacerbate it by resort to deeds of barbarous cruelty . . . would not raise the character of the mother country in the eyes of her daughter nations, her partners in the Empire . . . The whole nation is agreed that we must carry through the task we have undertaken in South Africa. There should be no hesitation in adopting the policy and the means necessary to attain the end in view with the utmost rapidity and completeness.
Only the newspaper's man in Cape Town, who evidently felt some unease at the harshness of British policy, sounded a note of warning:
The rod of iron should remain the rod of iron, and there is no need - indeed, it would be a mistake - to clothe it in velvet. He who wields it, however, should remember that the exercise of power is never incompatible with the manner of an English gentleman . . . The political views of the Dutch . . . will never be changed by individual Englishmen giving them occasion to doubt our inherited ability to rule.
The Englishman's 'inherited ability to rule' was being put to the test in other parts of Africa too. That same day's Times reported punitive expeditions against the Wa-Nandi tribe in Uganda and against the 'spirit of lawlessness' in the Gambia, which nebulous entity was held responsible for the deaths of two British officials. That the editors shared the widely held conservative view of the Empire as militarily overstretched (or, rather, undermanned) seems clear; how else to explain their call for a revival of the eighteenth-century militia as 'the embodiment of the principle that it is the duty of every man to assist in the defence of his country'?
A further reason for disquiet was the apparently fraught state of relations between the continental great powers. The Times's Paris correspondent reported the imminent visit of the Russian Tsar, Nicholas II, to France, and offered two theories as to the purpose of his visit. The first was that he was coming to pave the way for the latest of many Russian bond issues on the Paris market; the second, that his intention was to reassure the French of his government's commitment to the Franco-Russian military alliance. Whichever explanation was correct, the newspaper's reporter saw dangers in this manifestation of harmony between Paris and St Petersburg. Since the German annexation of Alsace-Lorraine in 1871, he noted, France was 'to-day the only nation in Europe which has some claims to put forward, and the only one which neither can nor should admit that the era of European peace is definitive . . . W hat she might do if circumstances impelled her and patriotism as well, were it a question of filling the breach made in her territory . . . no one knows or can know.' Yet the most likely consequence of the Tsar's visit would be to strengthen Germany's rival alliance with Austria and Italy, recently under some strain because of disagreements over German import tariffs. Too strong an affirmation of the Franco-Russian 'Alliance of the Two' would tend to increase the risks of a war with this 'Alliance of the Three':
I make no allusion [the paper's correspondent concluded darkly] to the elements which at any moment may combine with those of the existing alliances, because the hour for action has not yet struck and is not near striking. Those who at present belong to neither of the alliances have time to wait and to continue their meditations before making a decision.
To be sure, our imaginary reader might have taken some comfort from the news that the Tsar was also paying a visit to his cousin the German Kaiser on his way to France, an event solemnly described by the semi-official Norddeutsche Zeitung as symbolizing the shared commitment of the Russian and German governments to the maintenance of peace in Europe. Less reassuring, however, was the news of a deterioration in relations between the French and Ottoman governments, which prompted The Times to speculate that the Sultan was considering 'the growing Pan-Islamic movement' as a possible weapon against both the French and the British empires. In the Balkans, too, there were grounds for concern. The paper reported signs of a slight improvement in Austro-Hungarian relations, but noted:
The respective influence of the two Powers in the Balkans are [sic] based upon different factors. Russian influence is founded upon community of race, common historic memories, religion, and proximity; while that of Austria- Hungary is chiefly manifest in the economic . . . sphere. Nothing has happened during recent years to diminish either Russian or Austrian influence. Both Powers have maintained their old positions . . .
In the eyes of pacifists, certainly, the world of 1901 was not quite the Eden of Keynes's recollection. At the 10th meeting of the Universal Peace Congress, then sitting in Glasgow, Dr R. Spence Watson prompted cries of 'Hear, hear' when he called 'the present... as dark a time as they had ever known'. Warming to his theme, Watson denounced not only 'that terrible war in South Africa, which they could not think of without humiliation' but also 'the swooping down of the Christian nations upon China, the most detestable bit of greed which history has recorded' - an allusion to the recent international expedition to suppress the Boxer Rebellion in China. An advertisement on the front page of that same edition of The Times lends some credibility to his impugning of the expedition's motive:
CHINESE WAR LOOT. - Before disposing of Loot, it is advisable to have it valued by an expert. Mr Larkin, 104, New Bond- street, VALUES and BUYS ORIENTAL ART-SPECIALITIES.
Socialists might also have questioned Keynes's complacent claim that 'the greater part of the population . . . were, to all appearances, reasonably contented with [their] lot' and that 'escape was possible, for any man of capacity or character at all exceeding the average, into the middle and upper classes'. In the week preceding September 11, The Times reported, there had been 1,471 deaths in London, corresponding to an annual rate of 16.9 per thousand, including '7 from smallpox, 13 from measles, 14 from scarlet fever, 20 from diphtheria, 27 from whooping cough, 17 from enteric fever, 271 from diarrhoea and dysentery [and] 4 from cholera . . .' In Wales, meanwhile, twenty miners were feared dead after an explosion at the Llanbradach colliery near Caerphilly. Across the sea in Ireland seven members of the Amalgamated Society of Carpenters and Joiners had been arrested and charged with 'conspiracy, assault and intimidation', having led a carpenters' strike for higher wages. The number of registered paupers in London, according to the paper, was just under 100,000. There was as yet no 'old age pension scheme . . . of giving State aid to those who had already in the past made some provision for the future'. The best escape from poverty in the United Kingdom was, in reality, geographical rather than social mobility. Between 1891 and 1900, The Times recorded, no fewer than 726,000 people had emigrated from the United Kingdom. Would so many have left if, in truth, they had been 'reasonably contented'?
The inhabitant of London could order by telephone, sipping his morning tea in bed, the various products of the whole earth, in such quantity as he might see fit, and reasonably expect their early delivery upon his doorstep; he could at the same moment and by the same means adventure his wealth in the natural resources and new enterprises of any quarter of the world, and share, without exertion or even trouble, in their prospective fruits and advantages; or he could decide to couple the security of his fortunes with the good faith of the townspeople of any substantial municipality in any continent that fancy or information might recommend.
Not only could Keynes's inhabitant of London buy the world's wares and invest his capital in a wide range of global securities; he could also travel the earth's surface with unprecedented freedom and ease:
He could secure forthwith, if he wished it, cheap and comfortable means of transit to any country or climate without passport or other formality, could despatch his servant to the neighbouring office of a bank for such supply of the precious metals as might seem convenient, and could then proceed abroad to foreign quarters, without knowledge of their religion, language, or cus- toms, bearing coined wealth upon his person, and would consider himself greatly aggrieved and much surprised at the least interference.
But the crucial point, as Keynes saw it, was that the man of 1901 'regarded this state of affairs as normal, certain, and permanent, except in the direction of further improvement, and any deviation from it as aberrant, scandalous, and avoidable.' This first age of globalization was an idyll, indeed:
The projects and politics of militarism and imperialism, of racial and cultural rivalries, of monopolies, restrictions, and exclusion, which were to play the serpent to this paradise, were little more than the amusements of his daily newspaper, and appeared to exercise almost no influence at all on the ordinary course of social and economic life, the internationalisation of which was nearly complete in practice.
It is worth turning back to The Times of that golden age to verify Keynes's justly famous recollection. Exactly a century before two hijacked planes slammed into the twin towers of the World Trade Centre, 'globalization' was indeed a reality, even if that clumsy word was as yet unknown. On that day - which was a sunny Wednesday - Keynes's inhabitant of London could, as he sipped his breakfast tea, have ordered a sack of coal from Cardiff, a pair of kid gloves from Paris or a box of cigars from Havana. He might also, if anticipating a visit to the grouse moors of Scotland, have purchased a 'Breadalbane Waterproof and self-ventilating Shooting Costume (cape and kilt)'; or he might, if his interests lay in a different direction, have ordered a copy of Maurice C. Hime's book entitled Schoolboy's Special Immorality. He could have invested his money in any one of nearly fifty US companies quoted in London - most of them railroads like the Denver and Rio Grande (whose latest results were reported that day) - or, if he preferred, in one of the seven other stock markets also covered regularly by The Times. He might, if he felt the urge to travel, have booked himself passage on the P&O liner Peninsular, which was due to sail for Bombay and Karachi the next day, or on one of the twenty-three other P&O ships scheduled to sail for Eastern desti- nations over the next ten weeks - to say nothing of the thirty-six other shipping lines offering services from England to all the corners of the globe. Did New York seem to beckon? The Manitou sailed tomorrow, or he could wait for the Hamburg-America Line's more luxurious Fiirst Bismarck, which sailed from Southampton on the 13th. Did Buenos Aires appeal to him more? Did he perhaps wish to see for himself how the city's Grand National Tramway Company was using - or rather, losing - his money? Very well; the Danube, departing for Argentina on Friday, still had some cabins free.
The world, in short, was his oyster. And yet, as Keynes understood, this oyster was not without its toxic impurities. The lead story in The Times that September 11 was a 'hopeful' report - vainly hopeful, as it turned out - that the American President William McKinley was showing signs of recovering from the attempt on his life five days earlier by the anarchist Leon Czolgosz. ('The President is in great order,' his physician was quoted as saying. In fact, McKinley died on September 14.) This attack had awakened the American public to a hitherto neglected threat from within. The paper's New York correspondent reported that the police were engaged in rounding up all the known anarchists in the city, though the plot to kill the President was
believed to have been hatched in Chicago, where two anarchist leaders, Emma Goldman and Abraham Isaak, had already been arrested. 'I only done my duty,' Czolgosz explained, by which he meant the anarchist's duty to kill rulers and wage war on established governments. 'I thought', he added as he was led to the electric chair, 'it would help the working people.' The news that the President's condition was improving and that the perpetrator's associates were being rounded up might have reassured our breakfasting reader, as it had reassured the stock market the previous day. He would nevertheless have been aware that assassinations of heads of state were becoming disturbingly frequent; the King of Italy had been murdered the year before, the Empress of Austria- Hungary two years before that. In 1903 it would be the turn of the King of Serbia.
The ideology of anarchism and the practice of terrorism were just two of the 'serpents' in the garden of globalization that Keynes had forgotten about by 1919.
What of the 'projects and politics of militarism and imperialism, of racial and cultural rivalries'? There was ample evidence of these on September 11, 1901. In South Africa the bitterly contested war between the British and the Boers was approaching the end of its second year. The official communiqués from the British commander, Lord Kitchener, were sanguine. In the preceding week, according to his latest report, sixty-seven Boers had been killed, sixty-seven wounded and 384 taken prisoner. A further 163 had surrendered. By contrast, The Times listed the deaths of eighteen British soldiers, of whom just seven had been victims of enemy action. Here was a very British measure of military success, a profit and loss account from the battlefield. However, the methods the British had by this time adopted to defeat their foes were harsh in the extreme, though The Times made no mention of these. To deprive the Boers of supplies from their farms, their wives and children had been driven from their homes and herded into concentration camps, where conditions were atrocious; at this stage, roughly one in three inmates was dying because of poor sanitation and disease. In addition, Kitchener had ordered the construction of a network of barbed wire and blockhouses to disrupt the Boers' lines of communication. Even these measures did not strike The Times's editorial writers as sufficient to end the war:
To permit [the Boers] to protract the struggle and to exacerbate it by resort to deeds of barbarous cruelty . . . would not raise the character of the mother country in the eyes of her daughter nations, her partners in the Empire . . . The whole nation is agreed that we must carry through the task we have undertaken in South Africa. There should be no hesitation in adopting the policy and the means necessary to attain the end in view with the utmost rapidity and completeness.
Only the newspaper's man in Cape Town, who evidently felt some unease at the harshness of British policy, sounded a note of warning:
The rod of iron should remain the rod of iron, and there is no need - indeed, it would be a mistake - to clothe it in velvet. He who wields it, however, should remember that the exercise of power is never incompatible with the manner of an English gentleman . . . The political views of the Dutch . . . will never be changed by individual Englishmen giving them occasion to doubt our inherited ability to rule.
The Englishman's 'inherited ability to rule' was being put to the test in other parts of Africa too. That same day's Times reported punitive expeditions against the Wa-Nandi tribe in Uganda and against the 'spirit of lawlessness' in the Gambia, which nebulous entity was held responsible for the deaths of two British officials. That the editors shared the widely held conservative view of the Empire as militarily overstretched (or, rather, undermanned) seems clear; how else to explain their call for a revival of the eighteenth-century militia as 'the embodiment of the principle that it is the duty of every man to assist in the defence of his country'?
A further reason for disquiet was the apparently fraught state of relations between the continental great powers. The Times's Paris correspondent reported the imminent visit of the Russian Tsar, Nicholas II, to France, and offered two theories as to the purpose of his visit. The first was that he was coming to pave the way for the latest of many Russian bond issues on the Paris market; the second, that his intention was to reassure the French of his government's commitment to the Franco-Russian military alliance. Whichever explanation was correct, the newspaper's reporter saw dangers in this manifestation of harmony between Paris and St Petersburg. Since the German annexation of Alsace-Lorraine in 1871, he noted, France was 'to-day the only nation in Europe which has some claims to put forward, and the only one which neither can nor should admit that the era of European peace is definitive . . . W hat she might do if circumstances impelled her and patriotism as well, were it a question of filling the breach made in her territory . . . no one knows or can know.' Yet the most likely consequence of the Tsar's visit would be to strengthen Germany's rival alliance with Austria and Italy, recently under some strain because of disagreements over German import tariffs. Too strong an affirmation of the Franco-Russian 'Alliance of the Two' would tend to increase the risks of a war with this 'Alliance of the Three':
I make no allusion [the paper's correspondent concluded darkly] to the elements which at any moment may combine with those of the existing alliances, because the hour for action has not yet struck and is not near striking. Those who at present belong to neither of the alliances have time to wait and to continue their meditations before making a decision.
To be sure, our imaginary reader might have taken some comfort from the news that the Tsar was also paying a visit to his cousin the German Kaiser on his way to France, an event solemnly described by the semi-official Norddeutsche Zeitung as symbolizing the shared commitment of the Russian and German governments to the maintenance of peace in Europe. Less reassuring, however, was the news of a deterioration in relations between the French and Ottoman governments, which prompted The Times to speculate that the Sultan was considering 'the growing Pan-Islamic movement' as a possible weapon against both the French and the British empires. In the Balkans, too, there were grounds for concern. The paper reported signs of a slight improvement in Austro-Hungarian relations, but noted:
The respective influence of the two Powers in the Balkans are [sic] based upon different factors. Russian influence is founded upon community of race, common historic memories, religion, and proximity; while that of Austria- Hungary is chiefly manifest in the economic . . . sphere. Nothing has happened during recent years to diminish either Russian or Austrian influence. Both Powers have maintained their old positions . . .
In the eyes of pacifists, certainly, the world of 1901 was not quite the Eden of Keynes's recollection. At the 10th meeting of the Universal Peace Congress, then sitting in Glasgow, Dr R. Spence Watson prompted cries of 'Hear, hear' when he called 'the present... as dark a time as they had ever known'. Warming to his theme, Watson denounced not only 'that terrible war in South Africa, which they could not think of without humiliation' but also 'the swooping down of the Christian nations upon China, the most detestable bit of greed which history has recorded' - an allusion to the recent international expedition to suppress the Boxer Rebellion in China. An advertisement on the front page of that same edition of The Times lends some credibility to his impugning of the expedition's motive:
CHINESE WAR LOOT. - Before disposing of Loot, it is advisable to have it valued by an expert. Mr Larkin, 104, New Bond- street, VALUES and BUYS ORIENTAL ART-SPECIALITIES.
Socialists might also have questioned Keynes's complacent claim that 'the greater part of the population . . . were, to all appearances, reasonably contented with [their] lot' and that 'escape was possible, for any man of capacity or character at all exceeding the average, into the middle and upper classes'. In the week preceding September 11, The Times reported, there had been 1,471 deaths in London, corresponding to an annual rate of 16.9 per thousand, including '7 from smallpox, 13 from measles, 14 from scarlet fever, 20 from diphtheria, 27 from whooping cough, 17 from enteric fever, 271 from diarrhoea and dysentery [and] 4 from cholera . . .' In Wales, meanwhile, twenty miners were feared dead after an explosion at the Llanbradach colliery near Caerphilly. Across the sea in Ireland seven members of the Amalgamated Society of Carpenters and Joiners had been arrested and charged with 'conspiracy, assault and intimidation', having led a carpenters' strike for higher wages. The number of registered paupers in London, according to the paper, was just under 100,000. There was as yet no 'old age pension scheme . . . of giving State aid to those who had already in the past made some provision for the future'. The best escape from poverty in the United Kingdom was, in reality, geographical rather than social mobility. Between 1891 and 1900, The Times recorded, no fewer than 726,000 people had emigrated from the United Kingdom. Would so many have left if, in truth, they had been 'reasonably contented'?
The Ideological Origins of Nazi Imperialism
There is ample evidence that Hitler and other leading Nazis, indeed, expected the acts of aggression that made up much of their foreign policy to serve multiple ends conceived in terms of different parts of their ideo- logical program. Thus an attack on the "Jewish-Bolshevik" Soviet Union was, in part, a consequence of the anti-semitic, anti-communist, and anti- Slavic aims of Naziism.2 These aims alone, however, did not define for Hitler the total significance of invading Russia. His announcement that Germany sought "living space" in Russia indicates the presence in his program of a distinctly imperialist element. The Lebensraum element was a product of an extensive tradition in German imperialist ideology—a tradition related to other constituents of the Nazis' radical-conservative worldview but not defined by them. The Nazi program also contained expansionary goals derived from quite different traditions of German imperialist ideology.
The question of whether or not there were continuities between the expansionary aims of the Third Reich and the foreign policies of previous German regimes has attracted the attention of numerous historians. The question has arisen directly in studies of Nazi policymaking and implicitly in many analyses of politics and imperialism in the Kaiserreich. Several East German and Soviet scholars have attempted to demonstrate such continuities, representing them, indeed, as extending into what they call the neoimperialism of the present German Federal Republic.3 These at- tempts have been on the whole unsatisfactory, mainly because of the deficiencies of the Marxist-Leninist framework of analysis on which they have perforce been based. The "orthodox" Marxist-Leninist view is simultaneously too broad and too narrow: too broad because imperialism is defined as the entire political, social, and economic order of late capitalism, which means that any continuity at all in modern German history (outside the German Democratic Republic) is automatically a continuity of imperial- ism; too narrow because of its dogmatic and often distortive concentration on the organized structures of finance and industry as the prime motivators of policy. It is probably not, however, an accident that Marxist-Leninist historians have often led the way in suggesting connections between Nazi- ism and earlier German imperialism. Their framework of analysis, what- ever its deficiencies, has the virtue of providing a ready-made concept of underlying historical continuity that can be used to relate developments in imperialist policy to sequential steps in the evolution of German and inter- national capitalism. Successive German governments from Bismarck to Hitler are held to have followed expansionary policies in response to the demands of organized big business for assistance in solving the crises and contradictions that arose within industrial capitalism. Imperialist policies changed to some extent over time because the nature of those crises and contradictions changed, becoming generally worse. Inconsistencies between imperialist programs were the results of fissures within the industrial and financial bourgeoisie, fissures that were themselves products in the last analysis of the inherent contradictions in capitalism.
Most Western historians, including Marxist ones, have rejected the Marxist-Leninist approach because of its limitations. Nevertheless, a great many of them, especially those who emphasize domestic policies as the main determinant of foreign policy, have focused on similar types of social phenomena and similar power relationships. Some have con- structed explicitly neo-Marxist analyses on broader and more flexible foundations than Marxism-Lenininsm.4 The best-known of these ap- proaches, however, have concentrated instead on the concept of socio- economic modernization. The modernization approach has proven to be particularly fruitful in the study of imperialism in the Kaiserreich and its relationship to the coming of the First World War. It has not, however, been used effectively as yet to link Nazi imperialism to its Bismarckian and Wilhelmian predecessors, except by suggestion.
The modernization concept became a prominent feature of the postwar study of German imperialism with the attempts of Fritz Fischer and his students to demonstrate continuities between expansionary ideas current in government, political, and business circles in the decade or so before 1914 and the aims of the German government during the First World War itself.5 In depicting such continuities, Fischer attracted widespread attention by arguing that Germany had, in fact, started the war to achieve the goals developed by its elite before 1914. He implied also that the expansionary aims of the Nazis were to some extent continuations of these goals.
Although Fischer did not extensively use the term modernization and concentrated on a rather limited range of economic changes as the under- lying forces behind Wilhelmian imperialism, the essence of the modernization approach was present in his analysis. According to Fischer, the course of Germany's rapid industrialization in the late nineteenth century created severe problems for the various German elite classes. For the leaders of finance and industry, modernization led to a need to invest outside the boundaries of the Reich in competition with foreign (especially British and French) business. Germany was, however, perpetually short of capital because of previous heavy demands of rapid industrialisation. In the years before the First World War, German financial institutions found that they could not protect their enterprises abroad when they were threatened with foreign takeover. German business therefore turned to the government, formulating different versions of a program of external expansion to secure and enhance investment. This program was trans- mitted to Bethmann Hollweg's government and to other sectors of the elite through a network of personal and institutional connections. During the war, the same network functioned to create a series of discrete war aims that became, in essence, the policy of the Reich government.
Fischer's students and the large number of historians influenced by his work have extended the approach that he pioneered, noting, for example, the importance of a growing community of interest between segments of the industrial and the Junker agrarian elites in the face of the perceived threat from socialism in the years just before World War I. This community of interest served to enhance the ability of the business elite to affect policy, but it also meant that the interests of the Junkers had to be incorporated into war-aims discussions. Historians of the Fischer school have also taken into account an increasingly wide range of political fac- tors that influenced Wilhelmian imperialist policy.6 Whatever the specific interests at work, however, the conscious motives leading to imperialism are represented as stemming directly from the process of economic mo- dernization. The resulting expansionary program is regarded as essen- tially uniform—a product of elite consensus in which disagreements ap- peared only on matters of detail. Germany was to create an organized system through which her economic domination of central Europe would be assured. She was to annex European territories with industrial and mining capacities or lands that were needed for strategic reasons. Germany was also to expand her overseas empire, especially through the establishment of a single German colony that included most of central Africa. These aims, frustrated by the result of the First World War, were, so it is argued, essentially those of the Hitler regime as well.
Critics of Fischer have found a great many problems with his analysis, especially with his extremely narrow conception of the policymaking process and of the reasons that elite interest groups turned to imperialism.7 His students, by extending the scope of the analysis, have avoided some of this criticism. But the assumption of the entire Fischer school that German expansionary aims, and thus German imperialism, were basically uniform is not borne out by a close examination of the very statements of those aims that they cite. We shall see presently that before and during the First World War there were at least two different aggregations of imperialist ideas current in German politics. These aggregations over- lapped to a considerable extent but were contradictory in many funda- mental ways—and they were perceived at the time as contradictory. We shall see further that German imperialism in the Wilhelmian era, far from being the product of elite consensus, was rather the result of attempts to create consensus—attempts that failed, at least up to the time of the Nazis.
The Fischer school shares with most other historians of the subject not only the assumption of the fundamental uniformity of German imperial- ism, but also a particular notion of the nature of the evidence for the continuity of imperialism: the recurring use of a certain vocabulary to denote expansionary ideas. For example, most segments of German imperialist opinion during World War I advocated the establishment of a German-dominated economic union in central Europe. All used Friedrich Naumann's catchword for the idea: Mitteleuropa. The Nazis also included Mitteleuropa in their catalogue of national policy aims as early as the mid 1920s, and Hitler sought central European integration (together with a great many other things) during World War II. Is this continuity? In a sense, yes (as we shall see), but not as the concept of continuity is used in most of the literature on German imperialism, including that of Fischer and his followers. On closer examination, it becomes clear that more than one version of the Mitteleuropa idea existed and that the imperialists using the term during the First World War meant quite different things by it. The Nazis, in fact, attempted in their version of Mitteleuropa to tie together the earlier highly contradictory views of economic integration. This is a complex concept of continuity that involves consideration of the interaction between political ideology and the structure of politics over time, which the Fischer style of analysis does not permit.
The idea that modernization was the ultimate source of continuity in the history of German imperialism has been employed most explicitly by historians who focus on the phenomenon of "social imperialism," espe- cially Hans-Ulrich Wehler. Wehler and the rest of the social imperialist school argue that Bismarckian and Wilhelmian imperialism were prima- rily political responses by threatened elites to the domestic class conflict generated by German industrialization. According to Wehler, Bismarck briefly adopted colonialism in the 1880s because he believed that it would permit him to consolidate bourgeois and worker support behind his re- gime, which Wehler interprets as standing ultimately for continued autoc- racy and semifeudal Junker rule.8 The reason that such an instrument of cooptation was available was that colonialism had previously emerged among certain segments of the upper bourgeoisie. German business leaders faced with the post-1873 depression used the demand for colonial expansion as the opening wedge of a campaign to acquire government support for market expansion abroad. Also, the concepts of colonialism and aggressive market expansion provided the business elite with a poten- tial weapon against social democracy: such policies could secure German industry against downturns in the business cycle and thus protect workers' jobs and incomes. Revolutionary socialism, even trade unionism, could not promise the workers so much. According to Wehler, Bismarck turned to colonialism not because of his belief in its inherent validity but because of his desire to use it in the politics of class conflict. The proponents of the social imperialist explanation argue that much the same thing was true of the later history of German imperialism, from the era of Weltpolitik to that of Hitler. According to some interpretations along these lines, Ger- many was led into the First World War by elite groups that sought to use wartime conditions to maintain the loyalty of subordinate social classes.9
The social imperialist approach has also been heavily criticized on a number of grounds, most notably because evidence to support it, al- though available, tends to be somewhat scarce. In Germany as elsewhere, people who advocated imperial expansion pointed to the potential utility of imperialism in deflecting class antagonisms. Nevertheless, it is quite difficult to demonstrate that such considerations weighed more heavily in the minds of imperialists than did many other factors. Wehler and his followers have also been accused of not taking into account other sources of imperialist motivation, especially those arising from the operation of the system of international relations, in order to exaggerate the importance of social imperialist motives.10 These are not fatal flaws in the social imperialist approach, however. They merely show that the phenomenon in question—imperialism in the industrial age—contained more complexi- ties than the rather broadly denned categories of Wehler's model can accommodate. A great deal of the social imperialist analysis can be readily employed in explanatory frameworks that take other factors into account.
From the standpoint of the present study, the deficiencies of the social imperialist approach lie in rather different directions. Indeed, most of the attempts to explain imperialism as a direct consequence of modernization suffer from the same difficulties. In the first place, there is a strong presumption that imperialism as a set of ideas and distinctive political actions was a result of the aims of a small number of segments of the social elite. These groups wished to achieve relatively clear and straightforward economic ends; at the same time, they wanted to maintain their elite status against potential rivals and against the industrial proletariat. Although much of the politics and ideology of any country revolve around such aims, elite classes are not, in fact, the only participants in the political process, nor is it at all clear that broad social-class categories are the most meaning- ful ones for defining political action. Geoff Eley's analysis of the politics of the German Navy League, one of the most important imperialist pressure groups in Wilhelmian Germany, has demonstrated the complexities of imperialist politics and the variety of the groups involved.11 Eley has also shown that the creation and use of ideologies in imperialist politics were not the exclusive prerogative of clearly identified elite classes; important elements of navalist politics reflected the resentment of various middle- class groups against the very elites that were supposed, in many of the social imperialist analyses of Wilhelmian imperialism, to have invented navalism as a means of rallying the support of the bourgeoisie.
Connected to this problem with social imperialism is the one that has already been noted in the discussion of Fischer's modernization argument: the Wehlerians, like Fischer, take an essentially unitary view of German imperialism. This has caused Wehler and some of his followers, for example, to downplay the importance in the German colonial movement of the argument that Germany needed settlement colonies to solve the problem of emigration. In fact, the settlement idea played an extremely important role in German imperialism, a role that is not easily explained by the Wehlerian model. The multiplicity of those who used the idea of imperialism in German politics is matched by the multiplicity of German imperialist ideologies. The social imperialist framework of analysis does not readily explain this phenomenon. We shall argue that social imperialism as Wehler describes it, rather than being the dominant form of imperialist ideology in Germany or even a particular imperialist ideology in itself, was actually a component of practically all varieties of imperialism in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, including ones that were overtly opposed to each other. Social imperialism was, in other words, one of a number of idea-sets that could be tied together in various ways to make up a composite imperialist ideology—a process about which we shall have more to say shortly.
As with most of the approaches to the history of German imperialism that concentrate on the immediate social effects of modernization, it has proven difficult to apply the Wehlerian analysis of social imperialism to Nazi expansion. The evidence of apparent similarities in expansionary vocabulary and ideas is there, but the logic of the social imperialist argument requires that these continuities be matched with some form of continuity in the response of threatened elite groups to modernization. This, in turn, requires that the Nazis be accorded essentially the same status as Bismarck and the other defenders of the nineteenth-century social order or, at least, that they be portrayed as the willing instruments of capital- ism. Although some have ascribed Hitler's acceptance of colonialism to pressure placed on him by the capitalist interests that supposedly stood behind the German colonial movement, the whole idea of the Nazis as the front men for a threatened capitalism is difficult to maintain in the face of the considerable evidence that exists about the revolutionary character of Nazi aims. Unless one can postulate a strong, uniform Nazi connection to elite social interests, it is extremely hard to demonstrate a continuity between the different eras of German imperialism on the basis of the standard social imperialist argument.
These difficulties illustrate what is probably, from the standpoint of the subject of this study, the greatest weakness of most of the explanations of German imperialism that portray it as a series of immediate responses to modernization. By assuming the primacy of direct connections between the socioeconomic processes of modernization on the one hand and political action on the other, such explanations oversimplify the workings of politics and the effects of the politics of one period on its successors. There are, indeed, ways of showing the kinds of continuity that the Wehlerians assume, but it requires a substantial broadening of their approach to politics to do so. It requires, in fact, the explicit recognition of a political sphere of human social existence that acts as, among other things, an intermediary between direct perceptions of socioeconomic change and specific instances of political action and that links those perceptions to one another. Moreover, an appropriate structure of explanation that connects modernization to political phenomena such as imperial- ism must also account for the fact that things other than responses to modernization also influence politics.
Before we turn to the problem of creating such a structure of explana- tion, we must also note that not all attempts to link Nazi expansionary and foreign policies to those of preceding governments have focused on modernization. Much of the discussion has taken place in the context of more-or-less traditional political and intellectual history. Historians of Nazi foreign policy such as Hildebrand, Weinberg, and Rich have concentrated on the evolution of Nazi policy ideas from the 1920s onward through the interaction of the Nazis' thinking and the pressures of exter- nal political reality.14 We shall consider these approaches in the final chapter. For the most part, however, they postulate a relationship with previous German imperialism based on an apparent continuity in stated expansionary aims or, in the case of Hildebrand's analysis, a continuity founded on the existence of a limited set of policy alternatives available to German governments from Bismarck's time onward. According to the latter view, Hitler, like his predecessors in World War I, chose an extravagant imperialist alternative as opposed to the more pacific (and effective) one chosen by Stresemann. In none of these approaches, however, is the nature of pre-Nazi imperialism closely examined nor is a comprehensive explanation of continuity or discontinuity given in terms of the structures of German politics and society.
Only a few historical works have focused on ideological aspects of imperialism in Germany. This is unfortunate because ideology is crucial to an understanding of the relationship between imperialism and the social and political systems, the motives of imperialists, and, especially, the question of continuity. If continuities exist between the politics of one era and those of the next, they must necessarily involve the adoption of similar patterns of thinking about politics. Obviously, each generation is to some degree socialized with the political attitudes and values of its forebears. People, whether policymakers or more casual political participants, cannot help but work within the intellectual frameworks they inherit, even though they may substantially modify those frameworks to suit their peculiar circumstances. At a certain basic level, any examina- tion of continuities in German imperialism must involve a consideration of political ideas organized into apparently coherent structures, or ideolo- gies. The evidence for continuity that is most often cited—the repetition in one period of imperialist formulas from a previous one—is essentially ideological evidence.
Neither the Marxists nor the Wehler and Fischer schools ignore ideol- ogy, but they take a rather limited view of it: ideology is one of the mean; by which a group of political participants, usually a social class or organized interest group, represents its own interests in politics both to itself and to other people. On the whole, ideology is held to derive from the particular socioeconomic and political environment in which the group finds itself at any time. This brings one back to the problem of explaining the intellectual aspect of continuity between periods in cases in which the environment of politics has changed.
Historians such as Fleinz Gollwitzer and Wolfgang Mommsen take a different approach, one in which some of the standard assumptions of intellectual history are directed toward politics and ideology. Ideas are considered to be the products of an intellectualizing sphere of human activity in which intellectuals, formalizing their own attitudes in systematic statements, develop social concepts that arc then adopted by political actors to define the objects that the latter seek.15 This approach, however, does not give an entirely satisfactory account of the relationship between politics and ideology, especially over time. Standard intellectual history, with its relatively narrow conception of the causal link between ideas and action, finds it difficult to deal with the complex interplay among formal ideas, individuals' perceptions of social reality, and the immediate problems faced by political practitioners. Thus, for example, Gollwitzer discusses "social Darwinism" and the concepts of "world- political thinking" as real intellectual phenomena that affect the behaviour of policymakers without sufficiently considering the specific circumstances that led politicians to adopt or (more importantly) to modify these pheno- mena over time to correspond to perceived political needs. Some sort of framework of explanation is required to relate the imperialist ideas Goll- witzer has described to the factors of politics and socioeconomic change that are the prime concerns of most historians of imperialism.
In reaction to the explanatory limitations of much of the contemporary historical literature on German imperialism, there have been a number of recent attempts to take a comprehensive view of the phenomenon with- out adhering to any particular theoretical line. The most impressive of these is Paul M. Kennedy's study of the development of the antagonism between Britain and Germany that existed before 1914.16 Kennedy at- tempts to examine all aspects of the Anglo-German relationship before 1914, weighing the claims of domestic politics, social change, economic rivalry, and diplomacy to being the prime sources of the impending con- flict. In the course of his study, Kennedy says much of importance about the relationship between German imperialism and politics. His work helps to break down the artificial (and by now largely deleterious) distinction made in German historiography between analyses of policy based on domestic politics and analyses that emphasize diplomacy. He demonstrates convincingly that, although a great many complex domestic political forces affected the actions of German (and British) policymakers, most policymakers also genuinely responded to their perceptions of the imperatives of foreign politics as significant considerations in themselves. Kennedy does not, however, tell us much about some of the major concerns of the present study—especially the relationship between the politics of the Wilhelmian period and those of the Nazi era.
The question of whether or not there were continuities between the expansionary aims of the Third Reich and the foreign policies of previous German regimes has attracted the attention of numerous historians. The question has arisen directly in studies of Nazi policymaking and implicitly in many analyses of politics and imperialism in the Kaiserreich. Several East German and Soviet scholars have attempted to demonstrate such continuities, representing them, indeed, as extending into what they call the neoimperialism of the present German Federal Republic.3 These at- tempts have been on the whole unsatisfactory, mainly because of the deficiencies of the Marxist-Leninist framework of analysis on which they have perforce been based. The "orthodox" Marxist-Leninist view is simultaneously too broad and too narrow: too broad because imperialism is defined as the entire political, social, and economic order of late capitalism, which means that any continuity at all in modern German history (outside the German Democratic Republic) is automatically a continuity of imperial- ism; too narrow because of its dogmatic and often distortive concentration on the organized structures of finance and industry as the prime motivators of policy. It is probably not, however, an accident that Marxist-Leninist historians have often led the way in suggesting connections between Nazi- ism and earlier German imperialism. Their framework of analysis, what- ever its deficiencies, has the virtue of providing a ready-made concept of underlying historical continuity that can be used to relate developments in imperialist policy to sequential steps in the evolution of German and inter- national capitalism. Successive German governments from Bismarck to Hitler are held to have followed expansionary policies in response to the demands of organized big business for assistance in solving the crises and contradictions that arose within industrial capitalism. Imperialist policies changed to some extent over time because the nature of those crises and contradictions changed, becoming generally worse. Inconsistencies between imperialist programs were the results of fissures within the industrial and financial bourgeoisie, fissures that were themselves products in the last analysis of the inherent contradictions in capitalism.
Most Western historians, including Marxist ones, have rejected the Marxist-Leninist approach because of its limitations. Nevertheless, a great many of them, especially those who emphasize domestic policies as the main determinant of foreign policy, have focused on similar types of social phenomena and similar power relationships. Some have con- structed explicitly neo-Marxist analyses on broader and more flexible foundations than Marxism-Lenininsm.4 The best-known of these ap- proaches, however, have concentrated instead on the concept of socio- economic modernization. The modernization approach has proven to be particularly fruitful in the study of imperialism in the Kaiserreich and its relationship to the coming of the First World War. It has not, however, been used effectively as yet to link Nazi imperialism to its Bismarckian and Wilhelmian predecessors, except by suggestion.
The modernization concept became a prominent feature of the postwar study of German imperialism with the attempts of Fritz Fischer and his students to demonstrate continuities between expansionary ideas current in government, political, and business circles in the decade or so before 1914 and the aims of the German government during the First World War itself.5 In depicting such continuities, Fischer attracted widespread attention by arguing that Germany had, in fact, started the war to achieve the goals developed by its elite before 1914. He implied also that the expansionary aims of the Nazis were to some extent continuations of these goals.
Although Fischer did not extensively use the term modernization and concentrated on a rather limited range of economic changes as the under- lying forces behind Wilhelmian imperialism, the essence of the modernization approach was present in his analysis. According to Fischer, the course of Germany's rapid industrialization in the late nineteenth century created severe problems for the various German elite classes. For the leaders of finance and industry, modernization led to a need to invest outside the boundaries of the Reich in competition with foreign (especially British and French) business. Germany was, however, perpetually short of capital because of previous heavy demands of rapid industrialisation. In the years before the First World War, German financial institutions found that they could not protect their enterprises abroad when they were threatened with foreign takeover. German business therefore turned to the government, formulating different versions of a program of external expansion to secure and enhance investment. This program was trans- mitted to Bethmann Hollweg's government and to other sectors of the elite through a network of personal and institutional connections. During the war, the same network functioned to create a series of discrete war aims that became, in essence, the policy of the Reich government.
Fischer's students and the large number of historians influenced by his work have extended the approach that he pioneered, noting, for example, the importance of a growing community of interest between segments of the industrial and the Junker agrarian elites in the face of the perceived threat from socialism in the years just before World War I. This community of interest served to enhance the ability of the business elite to affect policy, but it also meant that the interests of the Junkers had to be incorporated into war-aims discussions. Historians of the Fischer school have also taken into account an increasingly wide range of political fac- tors that influenced Wilhelmian imperialist policy.6 Whatever the specific interests at work, however, the conscious motives leading to imperialism are represented as stemming directly from the process of economic mo- dernization. The resulting expansionary program is regarded as essen- tially uniform—a product of elite consensus in which disagreements ap- peared only on matters of detail. Germany was to create an organized system through which her economic domination of central Europe would be assured. She was to annex European territories with industrial and mining capacities or lands that were needed for strategic reasons. Germany was also to expand her overseas empire, especially through the establishment of a single German colony that included most of central Africa. These aims, frustrated by the result of the First World War, were, so it is argued, essentially those of the Hitler regime as well.
Critics of Fischer have found a great many problems with his analysis, especially with his extremely narrow conception of the policymaking process and of the reasons that elite interest groups turned to imperialism.7 His students, by extending the scope of the analysis, have avoided some of this criticism. But the assumption of the entire Fischer school that German expansionary aims, and thus German imperialism, were basically uniform is not borne out by a close examination of the very statements of those aims that they cite. We shall see presently that before and during the First World War there were at least two different aggregations of imperialist ideas current in German politics. These aggregations over- lapped to a considerable extent but were contradictory in many funda- mental ways—and they were perceived at the time as contradictory. We shall see further that German imperialism in the Wilhelmian era, far from being the product of elite consensus, was rather the result of attempts to create consensus—attempts that failed, at least up to the time of the Nazis.
The Fischer school shares with most other historians of the subject not only the assumption of the fundamental uniformity of German imperial- ism, but also a particular notion of the nature of the evidence for the continuity of imperialism: the recurring use of a certain vocabulary to denote expansionary ideas. For example, most segments of German imperialist opinion during World War I advocated the establishment of a German-dominated economic union in central Europe. All used Friedrich Naumann's catchword for the idea: Mitteleuropa. The Nazis also included Mitteleuropa in their catalogue of national policy aims as early as the mid 1920s, and Hitler sought central European integration (together with a great many other things) during World War II. Is this continuity? In a sense, yes (as we shall see), but not as the concept of continuity is used in most of the literature on German imperialism, including that of Fischer and his followers. On closer examination, it becomes clear that more than one version of the Mitteleuropa idea existed and that the imperialists using the term during the First World War meant quite different things by it. The Nazis, in fact, attempted in their version of Mitteleuropa to tie together the earlier highly contradictory views of economic integration. This is a complex concept of continuity that involves consideration of the interaction between political ideology and the structure of politics over time, which the Fischer style of analysis does not permit.
The idea that modernization was the ultimate source of continuity in the history of German imperialism has been employed most explicitly by historians who focus on the phenomenon of "social imperialism," espe- cially Hans-Ulrich Wehler. Wehler and the rest of the social imperialist school argue that Bismarckian and Wilhelmian imperialism were prima- rily political responses by threatened elites to the domestic class conflict generated by German industrialization. According to Wehler, Bismarck briefly adopted colonialism in the 1880s because he believed that it would permit him to consolidate bourgeois and worker support behind his re- gime, which Wehler interprets as standing ultimately for continued autoc- racy and semifeudal Junker rule.8 The reason that such an instrument of cooptation was available was that colonialism had previously emerged among certain segments of the upper bourgeoisie. German business leaders faced with the post-1873 depression used the demand for colonial expansion as the opening wedge of a campaign to acquire government support for market expansion abroad. Also, the concepts of colonialism and aggressive market expansion provided the business elite with a poten- tial weapon against social democracy: such policies could secure German industry against downturns in the business cycle and thus protect workers' jobs and incomes. Revolutionary socialism, even trade unionism, could not promise the workers so much. According to Wehler, Bismarck turned to colonialism not because of his belief in its inherent validity but because of his desire to use it in the politics of class conflict. The proponents of the social imperialist explanation argue that much the same thing was true of the later history of German imperialism, from the era of Weltpolitik to that of Hitler. According to some interpretations along these lines, Ger- many was led into the First World War by elite groups that sought to use wartime conditions to maintain the loyalty of subordinate social classes.9
The social imperialist approach has also been heavily criticized on a number of grounds, most notably because evidence to support it, al- though available, tends to be somewhat scarce. In Germany as elsewhere, people who advocated imperial expansion pointed to the potential utility of imperialism in deflecting class antagonisms. Nevertheless, it is quite difficult to demonstrate that such considerations weighed more heavily in the minds of imperialists than did many other factors. Wehler and his followers have also been accused of not taking into account other sources of imperialist motivation, especially those arising from the operation of the system of international relations, in order to exaggerate the importance of social imperialist motives.10 These are not fatal flaws in the social imperialist approach, however. They merely show that the phenomenon in question—imperialism in the industrial age—contained more complexi- ties than the rather broadly denned categories of Wehler's model can accommodate. A great deal of the social imperialist analysis can be readily employed in explanatory frameworks that take other factors into account.
From the standpoint of the present study, the deficiencies of the social imperialist approach lie in rather different directions. Indeed, most of the attempts to explain imperialism as a direct consequence of modernization suffer from the same difficulties. In the first place, there is a strong presumption that imperialism as a set of ideas and distinctive political actions was a result of the aims of a small number of segments of the social elite. These groups wished to achieve relatively clear and straightforward economic ends; at the same time, they wanted to maintain their elite status against potential rivals and against the industrial proletariat. Although much of the politics and ideology of any country revolve around such aims, elite classes are not, in fact, the only participants in the political process, nor is it at all clear that broad social-class categories are the most meaning- ful ones for defining political action. Geoff Eley's analysis of the politics of the German Navy League, one of the most important imperialist pressure groups in Wilhelmian Germany, has demonstrated the complexities of imperialist politics and the variety of the groups involved.11 Eley has also shown that the creation and use of ideologies in imperialist politics were not the exclusive prerogative of clearly identified elite classes; important elements of navalist politics reflected the resentment of various middle- class groups against the very elites that were supposed, in many of the social imperialist analyses of Wilhelmian imperialism, to have invented navalism as a means of rallying the support of the bourgeoisie.
Connected to this problem with social imperialism is the one that has already been noted in the discussion of Fischer's modernization argument: the Wehlerians, like Fischer, take an essentially unitary view of German imperialism. This has caused Wehler and some of his followers, for example, to downplay the importance in the German colonial movement of the argument that Germany needed settlement colonies to solve the problem of emigration. In fact, the settlement idea played an extremely important role in German imperialism, a role that is not easily explained by the Wehlerian model. The multiplicity of those who used the idea of imperialism in German politics is matched by the multiplicity of German imperialist ideologies. The social imperialist framework of analysis does not readily explain this phenomenon. We shall argue that social imperialism as Wehler describes it, rather than being the dominant form of imperialist ideology in Germany or even a particular imperialist ideology in itself, was actually a component of practically all varieties of imperialism in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, including ones that were overtly opposed to each other. Social imperialism was, in other words, one of a number of idea-sets that could be tied together in various ways to make up a composite imperialist ideology—a process about which we shall have more to say shortly.
As with most of the approaches to the history of German imperialism that concentrate on the immediate social effects of modernization, it has proven difficult to apply the Wehlerian analysis of social imperialism to Nazi expansion. The evidence of apparent similarities in expansionary vocabulary and ideas is there, but the logic of the social imperialist argument requires that these continuities be matched with some form of continuity in the response of threatened elite groups to modernization. This, in turn, requires that the Nazis be accorded essentially the same status as Bismarck and the other defenders of the nineteenth-century social order or, at least, that they be portrayed as the willing instruments of capital- ism. Although some have ascribed Hitler's acceptance of colonialism to pressure placed on him by the capitalist interests that supposedly stood behind the German colonial movement, the whole idea of the Nazis as the front men for a threatened capitalism is difficult to maintain in the face of the considerable evidence that exists about the revolutionary character of Nazi aims. Unless one can postulate a strong, uniform Nazi connection to elite social interests, it is extremely hard to demonstrate a continuity between the different eras of German imperialism on the basis of the standard social imperialist argument.
These difficulties illustrate what is probably, from the standpoint of the subject of this study, the greatest weakness of most of the explanations of German imperialism that portray it as a series of immediate responses to modernization. By assuming the primacy of direct connections between the socioeconomic processes of modernization on the one hand and political action on the other, such explanations oversimplify the workings of politics and the effects of the politics of one period on its successors. There are, indeed, ways of showing the kinds of continuity that the Wehlerians assume, but it requires a substantial broadening of their approach to politics to do so. It requires, in fact, the explicit recognition of a political sphere of human social existence that acts as, among other things, an intermediary between direct perceptions of socioeconomic change and specific instances of political action and that links those perceptions to one another. Moreover, an appropriate structure of explanation that connects modernization to political phenomena such as imperial- ism must also account for the fact that things other than responses to modernization also influence politics.
Before we turn to the problem of creating such a structure of explana- tion, we must also note that not all attempts to link Nazi expansionary and foreign policies to those of preceding governments have focused on modernization. Much of the discussion has taken place in the context of more-or-less traditional political and intellectual history. Historians of Nazi foreign policy such as Hildebrand, Weinberg, and Rich have concentrated on the evolution of Nazi policy ideas from the 1920s onward through the interaction of the Nazis' thinking and the pressures of exter- nal political reality.14 We shall consider these approaches in the final chapter. For the most part, however, they postulate a relationship with previous German imperialism based on an apparent continuity in stated expansionary aims or, in the case of Hildebrand's analysis, a continuity founded on the existence of a limited set of policy alternatives available to German governments from Bismarck's time onward. According to the latter view, Hitler, like his predecessors in World War I, chose an extravagant imperialist alternative as opposed to the more pacific (and effective) one chosen by Stresemann. In none of these approaches, however, is the nature of pre-Nazi imperialism closely examined nor is a comprehensive explanation of continuity or discontinuity given in terms of the structures of German politics and society.
Only a few historical works have focused on ideological aspects of imperialism in Germany. This is unfortunate because ideology is crucial to an understanding of the relationship between imperialism and the social and political systems, the motives of imperialists, and, especially, the question of continuity. If continuities exist between the politics of one era and those of the next, they must necessarily involve the adoption of similar patterns of thinking about politics. Obviously, each generation is to some degree socialized with the political attitudes and values of its forebears. People, whether policymakers or more casual political participants, cannot help but work within the intellectual frameworks they inherit, even though they may substantially modify those frameworks to suit their peculiar circumstances. At a certain basic level, any examina- tion of continuities in German imperialism must involve a consideration of political ideas organized into apparently coherent structures, or ideolo- gies. The evidence for continuity that is most often cited—the repetition in one period of imperialist formulas from a previous one—is essentially ideological evidence.
Neither the Marxists nor the Wehler and Fischer schools ignore ideol- ogy, but they take a rather limited view of it: ideology is one of the mean; by which a group of political participants, usually a social class or organized interest group, represents its own interests in politics both to itself and to other people. On the whole, ideology is held to derive from the particular socioeconomic and political environment in which the group finds itself at any time. This brings one back to the problem of explaining the intellectual aspect of continuity between periods in cases in which the environment of politics has changed.
Historians such as Fleinz Gollwitzer and Wolfgang Mommsen take a different approach, one in which some of the standard assumptions of intellectual history are directed toward politics and ideology. Ideas are considered to be the products of an intellectualizing sphere of human activity in which intellectuals, formalizing their own attitudes in systematic statements, develop social concepts that arc then adopted by political actors to define the objects that the latter seek.15 This approach, however, does not give an entirely satisfactory account of the relationship between politics and ideology, especially over time. Standard intellectual history, with its relatively narrow conception of the causal link between ideas and action, finds it difficult to deal with the complex interplay among formal ideas, individuals' perceptions of social reality, and the immediate problems faced by political practitioners. Thus, for example, Gollwitzer discusses "social Darwinism" and the concepts of "world- political thinking" as real intellectual phenomena that affect the behaviour of policymakers without sufficiently considering the specific circumstances that led politicians to adopt or (more importantly) to modify these pheno- mena over time to correspond to perceived political needs. Some sort of framework of explanation is required to relate the imperialist ideas Goll- witzer has described to the factors of politics and socioeconomic change that are the prime concerns of most historians of imperialism.
In reaction to the explanatory limitations of much of the contemporary historical literature on German imperialism, there have been a number of recent attempts to take a comprehensive view of the phenomenon with- out adhering to any particular theoretical line. The most impressive of these is Paul M. Kennedy's study of the development of the antagonism between Britain and Germany that existed before 1914.16 Kennedy at- tempts to examine all aspects of the Anglo-German relationship before 1914, weighing the claims of domestic politics, social change, economic rivalry, and diplomacy to being the prime sources of the impending con- flict. In the course of his study, Kennedy says much of importance about the relationship between German imperialism and politics. His work helps to break down the artificial (and by now largely deleterious) distinction made in German historiography between analyses of policy based on domestic politics and analyses that emphasize diplomacy. He demonstrates convincingly that, although a great many complex domestic political forces affected the actions of German (and British) policymakers, most policymakers also genuinely responded to their perceptions of the imperatives of foreign politics as significant considerations in themselves. Kennedy does not, however, tell us much about some of the major concerns of the present study—especially the relationship between the politics of the Wilhelmian period and those of the Nazi era.
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