Accounting for the outbreak of the Second World War

Accounting for the outbreak of the Second World War The Second World War was a significant conflict at the beginning of the 20th century that preceded the Great War; in this essay I intend to identify and outline its principal contributing factors from the European and East Asian contexts. After the First World War, many Germans felt that the outcome of The Treaty of Versailles had unfairly placed the culpability for the war on them, holding the Germans fully accountable for the financial reparations demanded by France. Germany was made to relinquish territory, in particular the region of Alsace-Lorraine, which held high levels of coal, steel and iron deposits; an area highly industrialized with resources and therefore of great strategic and economic value. The treaty was viewed in Germany as humiliation; the aftermath of Versailles destroyed any sort of possible rehabilitative capability and obstructed the nation’s opportunities to rebuild an already embattled and war-torn state. This scuppered the economic and technological progress the Germans badly needed. As time would prove, this humiliation at Versailles would soon morph into bitter resentment, which subsequent far-right parties would capitalize on in the 1920s to rally popular support. After the Great Depression of 1929, Germany was economically devastated, still rebuilding from the Great War, which only ended a decade previously. This depression caused an already weak Germany into further poverty. Unemployment and inflation grew massively and food prices rose sharply in the wake of the crash of New York’s Wall Street. The German people began to feel as if they had lost control over their own affairs; from the allocation of territories to other states that previously had been theirs to the fluctuating and uncertain economic situation that enveloped the country. The dire situation that led Germany onto the path of war grew out of the deep-seated indignation, social frustrations and economic desperation in a post-war world. The German public began to despair and sought change under the Weimar Republic. As the 1920s passed, far-right political parties began to become more commonplace within the German political arena. Adolf Hitler proved instrumental in the founding of the National Socialist German Worker’s Party. By 1921 this newly formed Nazi party flourished, boasting over 100,000 supporters. As the urge for change grew so did the scapegoating of ethnic minorities, this was offered as an explanation for challenging position that Germans found themselves in; focusing initially on Germany’s Jewish community and then expanding to discriminate against other sectors within society. At first establishments owned by Jews were vandalised, with discriminatory violence becoming widely accepted and frequently experienced. Jews were characterised as ‘Untermensch” or subhuman; a phrase first coined by the American author Lothrop Stoddard in his 1922 pamphlet “The Revolt Against Civilization: The Menace of the Under-man” later translated into German and released widely as far-right propaganda in 1925 (Stoddard, 1922). This tied into deep-seated historical tensions concerning Jews dating back to the Eastern European Pogroms of the 18th and 19th centuries. In turn this created a new national identity categorised by the propagation of extremist racist misinformation, suspicion and discrimination. With the support for Hitler came political representation in the German Legislative Reichstag. The Nazi party began to sow its seeds, spreading its inflammatory propaganda, capitalizing on the ‘Dolchstoßlegende’ myth. Loosely translated as the stab-in-the-back, which claimed that the German army had not lost the Great War but instead the defeat was due to the betrayal by those on the home front therefore the signing of the Versailles Treaty was tantamount to treachery (Deist, 1996). Alongside this account of history also lay the depiction of the Weimar Republic; the nation-state that preceded Nazi Germany in the years between 1920-1933. A Republic described as “a morass of corruption, degeneracy, national humiliation, ruthless persecution of the honest national opposition, fourteen years of rule by Jews, Marxists, and cultural Bolsheviks” (Eberhard, 2005, p.140). By 1933 Hitler had compelled the then German president, Paul von Hindenburg, to appoint him to the position of High-Chancellor of Germany, from where he was rapidly able to consolidate and extend his power. He began with the enforcement of fascist policies against minorities, the official adoption of the Dolchstoßlegende myth into the account of history and initiation of restoring the historic dignity of Germany through the eradication of Marxism and Judaism; thoughts he had foretold in his 1925 book Mein Kampf. In the same year Germany withdrew from the League of Nations, the provisional international governmental council of the time. This was seen as voluntary political isolation and a rejection of the principals of the League, including Woodrow’s fourteen point plan. A plan that outlined various free trade agreements and radical ideas concerning democratic self-determination within and outside the European sphere (Snell, 1954). With political isolation, Hitler sought new alliances with other nations in Western and Southern Europe, first with Benito Mussolini's fascist regime in the Kingdom of Italy in 1936; ideologically the two agreed on many ideas. The second union of sorts was with that of the Kingdom of Spain, headed by the dictatorship of Francisco Franco, engaged in brutal civil war at the time. Hitler sent significant military aid to Spain and was in turn permitted (along with Italian air forces) to test warfare strategy in the northern Spanish town of Guernica; countless Basque civilians were killed (Preston, 2009). Following a fire in the Reichstag in February 1933, an order entitled “Decree of the Reich President for the Protection of People and State” was instituted. The first article stipulated the indefinite suspension of the Weimar Constitution along with the annulling of most civil liberties associated with it. Modern historians see this decree as being the initial phase of consolidation of power into Hitler’s hands (Koonz, 2003). Hitler failed to recognize the legitimacy of the 1919 Treaty of Versailles and any restrictions that had accompanied it; announcing his intention to fully rebuild Germany’s military capability. His intention was seen as an aggressive opposition and rejection of the 1919 treaty, of which stipulated a demilitarized zone in Rhineland and Germany as a whole after 1918. After these unflinching actions, in September of 1935 the Nuremburg Laws were drafted, adopting anti-Semitism as part of the official state ideological doctrine of Nazism. These laws institutionalised and entrenched the discrimination of the already vulnerable Ashkenazi Jewry living under the Nazi Reich. As September 1938 approached, Germany began an act of revanchism, in which the German state began the forced annexation of territories previously allocated in treaties to other parties, namely those of Versailles and Locarno. A meeting in Munich was held in which the German grievances were upheld, permitting the annexation of the majority German speaking Czechoslovakian province of Sutherland. This permission was given in return for an assured limitation of German expansion in the region. Known historically as the Munich Pact of 1938, and could be viewed as a failed act of appeasement towards Germany. Although his demands had been met, Hitler then decided to appropriation of more territory than had been agreed, subsequently culminating in the occupation of all Czechoslovakia. His next act of aggressive expansion would be focused east to Poland in September 1939. Following these steps Britain and France aligned against Germany, moving from a position of staunch opposition of German policy and mere support of the Polish exiled leadership based in London, to an official declaration of war against Nazi Germany. Just as in Germany, Japan was severely affected by the Great Depression of 1929. Its economy had been weakened by high tariffs that it had been confronted with in the American and British imperial markets. This affected Japanese silk exports and further deepened its economic woes. Combined with this, Japan needed more land for its rapidly expanding population and imperialist ambitions. Under growing pressure to resolve the issue, Japanese military leaders saw territorial acquisition as the best solution. After an incident of fabricated Chinese aggression at Mukden in September of 1931, Japanese extremists used this as motive to begin occupying the north western Chinese territory of south Manchuria. Later encompassing the north as well, with the establishment in February 1932 of the Japanese-driven puppet state of Manchukuo (Rothwell, 2001). Similar to Germany, even in the same year, the Japanese leadership also withdrew from the League of Nations following disagreement over its occupied territories. Later rolling out the Amau Doctrine, which spelt out Japan’s imperial ambitions “warning other powers to regard China as Japan’s sphere of influence” (Overy, 1987, p.11). In the wake of these events in the Far East, Britain and the United States in times of such economic crises were reluctant to confront Japan, thus allowing Japan to expand its hand over the entire Pacific region (Louis, 1971). The Anti-Comintern Pact of 1936, a formal recognition of shared interests and collective security between Nazi Germany and Japan against the Soviet Union, signalled an important change of power dynamics in relation to the two conflicts that seemed previously unrelated, geographically and politically. This pact agreed that the two parties would not make any formal links with the Soviet Union, they would defend each other in case of an attack on either Japanese or German soil. Alongside these understandings Germany also formally recognized Manchukuo. In later years, other states would sign this alliance (Osmańczyk, 2002). Following continued Japanese ‘incidents’ of aggression on Chinese soil, tensions rose significantly. This culminated in the Marco Polo Bridge incident of July of 1937; resulting in the beginning of the formal conflict. This declaration of war was preceded by Japan’s further expansion into Chinese territory. In 1940, the Japanese government proclaimed its intention to establish a “new order in East Asia” (Overy, 1987, p.13), under which the Pacific region would be liberated from the Western influence of Washington and London along with any historical chains of the European colonisation of centuries prior. In the same year Japan signed an additional alliance with the fascist states of Germany and Italy. This brought Japan into direct confrontation with Western allies, which had been avoided in other earlier diplomatic spats. This globalised the reach of World War Two to East Asia; linking directly Germany’s expansionist Nazi regime to the Japanese Empire. Following the newly made alliance between Japan and the fascist states, the United States implement a heavy trade embargo on Japan, which further isolated the country. At this time, Japan was engaged militarily in conflict with the Chinese and was becoming increasingly weakened. Alongside this active bloody conflict were economic trade and oil embargos and diplomatic hostility exerted by those in Washington. At this point America was actively supporting China against the Japanese. Seeing it self as vulnerable and increasing internationally isolated; the commanders of the Japanese military decided to launch a pre-emptive attack. The chosen target was the military naval installation of Pearl Harbor, an attack perceived to be a fitting response to American hostility. The attack took place on December 7, 1941 and was the first direct attack on American soil since the country’s conception. This escalation would prove a deadly decision for the Japanese; the following day the United States and its allies declared war on Japan. This event was the ultimate provocation for an American and allied war against the Japanese that would last for almost 4 years. The situations that led to violent confrontation with Imperial Japan and the German Third Reich held many similarities. The vulnerable state of their economies was a primary factor for the pursuit of both their expansionist policies, both of which were still recovering from wars and conflicts at the beginning of the 20th century. The crash of Wall Street in the late 20s detrimentally affected both countries and the world economy as a whole. The pact between Japan and Germany solidified their aggressive anti-cooperative stance towards powers of the time, those mainly of Britain, France, the USSR and the United States. The withdrawal from the League of Nations in 1933 only further politically and economically isolated both, in turn putting them on a path leading to conflict with the Western allied states and eventually a second ‘world’ war within two decades. Bibliography CASANOVA, J. (2010) “The Spanish Republic and Civil War” Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. DIEST, W; FEUCTWARNGER, E, J. (trans.) (1996) "The Military Collapse of the German Empire: the Reality Behind the Stab-in-the-Back Myth" War in History April 1996 3: 186-207. Journal entry available: http://wih.sagepub.com/content/3/2/186.full.pdf Last ac cessed 03/01/2015 EBERHARD, K. (2005) “The Weimar Republic” New York: Routledge. p. 140. FORD, K. (2000) “The Rhineland 1945: The Last Killing Ground in the West” Washington: Osprey. KOONZ, C. (2003) “The Nazi Conscience” Cambridge: Harvard University Press. LOUIS, W, R. (1971) “British Strategy in the Far East 1919-1939” Oxford: Oxford University Press. OSMANCZYK, J, E; MANGO, A (ed.) (2002) “Encyclopedia of the United Nations and International Agreements” (3rd edn) London: Routledge p. 104. OVERY, J, R. (1987) “The Origins of the Second World War” Abingdon: Routledge. pp.11-12 PRESTON, P. (1995) “Franco, A Biography” London: Fontana Press. p.245 PRESTON, P. (2009) “We saw Spain die: foreign correspondents in the Spanish Civil War” London: Constable. pp.195–197 ROCKWELL, V. (2001) “The Origins of the Second World War” Manchester: Manchester University Press. p.134. SNELL, L, J. (1954). "Wilson on Germany and the Fourteen Points" extract in ‘The Journal of Modern History’ Vol. 26, No. 4 pp. 364 369 University of Chicago Press Journal Entry Available http://www.jstor.org/stable/1876113 Last Accessed on 19/12/2014 STODDARD, L. (1922) “The Revolt Against Civilization: The Menace of the Under Man” New York: Charles Scribner's Sons. Chaim Narang – 14042699 - International Relations GI4005 – Accounting for the outbreak of the Second World War 1