Fateful Choices: Ten Decisions That Changed the World, 1940-1941

by Ian Kershaw

  The decision to kill the Jews arose from an earlier aim, absolutely intrinsic to Nazism, to ‘remove’ them. Hitler had never lost sight of this aim since 1919. It did not initially mean physically annihilate. But such a meaning was potentially, and over the course of time actually, also embraced by it. The aim of ‘removal’ was in this way proto-genocidal. Only the ‘successful’ (from the Nazi perspective) expulsion of Germany’s Jews before war began could have prevented the logical progression into genocide itself for these Jews. But even then the intended expansion by conquest of the Nazi leadership would inevitably have resulted–as in practice it did–in vast numbers of further Jews falling within the clutches of the Third Reich. ‘Removal’ of these Jews was impossible without genocide, even if that had largely arisen from the deliberately imposed ravages of slave labour, malnutrition and disease. Only the prevention of war (ruled out by the politics of appeasement), the toppling of Hitler from within (for which the will was lacking among the German elites) or the rapid defeat of Hitler’s Germany in the early stages of the war (an utter impossibility in military terms) could have precluded such an outcome. Otherwise, the only other way in which the Jews might have been spared their appalling fate is if better prepared Soviet defences had repelled a German invasion, forcing a compromise peace settlement, perhaps even with Hitler no longer in power. Stalin’s obtuseness ruled out this possibility.

  Germany’s aggression was the main cause of Europe’s second descent into war within a generation. It was also the crucial trigger, in the summer of 1940, to the spiral of events that we have followed, transforming conflicts at opposite ends of the globe by December 1941 into world war. Behind that aggression lay an ideological ‘mission’ embodied by the figure of Adolf Hitler. And inherent in that ‘mission’ was the ‘removal’ of the Jews. In this way, the Nazi war on the Jews was a central component of, inextricable from, the Second World War itself–the greatest slaughter the world has ever known.

  Afterthoughts

  Things might have turned out differently. The British government could have chosen in May 1940 to seek out a negotiated settlement with Hitler. The German leadership could have concentrated its attack on the Mediterranean and north Africa, not the Soviet Union. Japan could have decided to extricate herself from the damaging China imbroglio and not embarked upon the risky expansion to the south. Mussolini might have awaited events before deciding whether it was worthwhile taking his country into the war and could in any case have avoided the disaster in Greece. Roosevelt might have sided with the isolationists and not run the political risks of helping Britain and pushing to the brink of direct involvement in the war. Stalin might have heeded the numerous warnings and better prepared his country to meet the German onslaught. The Japanese could have attacked the Soviet Union from the east while the Germans were still advancing from the west. Hitler might have refrained from declaring war on the United States, an enemy he did not know how to defeat.

  In theory these were alternative options. Any one of them could have altered the course of history. A rich variety of imaginary ‘what if’ scenarios might be constructed on such a basis–a harmless but pointless diversion from the real question of what happened and why. For the preceding chapters have shown in each case why these alternatives were ruled out.

  Among the more feasible propositions was the possibility of Britain putting out feelers towards a negotiated peace in the spring of 1940. The immediate context of military catastrophe in France, together with the known readiness of some figures in the British establishment–including, at the very heart of government, the Foreign Secretary, Lord Halifax–to consider such an outcome, and the relatively weak position at this point of the new Prime Minister, Winston Churchill, meant it could not be dismissed out of hand. But when three days of debate in the War Cabinet eventually concluded with a firm decision to fight on, it was on the basis of reasoned argument, led by Churchill but accepted by a collective decision of all those involved, including Halifax.

  At the other end of the spectrum, Hitler’s decision to attack the Soviet Union and the Japanese decision to expand into south-east Asia were choices where alternatives had minimal chance of acceptance–or even of finding a hearing.

  Hitler had for nearly twenty years seen war against the Soviet Union at some point as vital for Germany’s future. This was his war. He had wanted to undertake the crucial showdown with Britain’s assistance, or at least tolerance. Had Britain capitulated in 1940, the attack would surely have gone ahead on those terms. As it was, he had to reckon with Britain’s continued hostility. But far from reducing the commitment to war in the east, and in the foreseeable future, this intensified it. For in 1940–41 Hitler’s ideological fixation merged with military and strategic considerations into the decision for invasion. For years, he had justified the need to expand without delay with the argument that time was running against Germany. Now he could put that argument with force. He was aware that from 1942 onwards American arms and resources would increasingly weigh in the scales on the side of Great Britain. He still had no means of combating this. Meanwhile, in central and eastern Europe he could see a future Soviet threat to German dominance surely emerging (and confirmed in his mind by what he had heard when Molotov visited Berlin in November 1940).

  The preferences of those in the German military leadership for a priority to be given to north Africa and the Mediterranean cut no ice with Hitler. Given the nature of the German regime, there was no possibility of any alternative based upon those premisses countering the strategy favoured by Hitler himself. From Hitler’s point of view, the decision to attack and destroy the Soviet Union–an undertaking he wanted ideologically–was strategically forced upon him. He had to gain victory in the east before Stalin could build up his defences and before the Americans entered the war. Rapid triumph over the Soviet Union was the route to complete victory in the war–compelling capitulation from Britain, keeping the Americans out and destroying any basis for future Soviet challenge for dominance in central Europe and the Balkans.

  Japan’s choice of southern expansion was equally inflexible, and paired here with similar inflexibility over the war in China. No alternative was feasible from a Japanese perspective. The China quagmire allowed no retreat for Japan without national humiliation. The more the Americans dug their heels in over China, the greater the impasse became. At the same time the commitment to expansion to cement Japan’s standing as a great power, with extended dominion to provide the lasting basis for assured supremacy in east Asia, had permeated all sections of the elite, particularly the army and navy, and was backed by a manufactured shrill consensus of public opinion. No retreat from this commitment was possible either. It was a big risk. Expansion into south-east Asia would axiomatically lead to confrontation not only with Great Britain, but, even more importantly, with the United States in the Pacific. The extreme Japanese dependency on America for raw materials, especially oil, greatly increased the risk. But without the oil of the Dutch East Indies to supplant American oil, the economic self-sufficiency seen as essential for great-power status could never be achieved. Japan would always remain precariously dependent upon the United States. So when the upheaval in Europe following the German victory over France provided what was seen as a golden opportunity, no segment of the power-elite opposed it. Collectively, the Japanese government chose imperialist expansion to the south, despite the risks.

  When an alternative choice posed itself, for a brief moment, following the German attack on the Soviet Union, it was for expansion to the north, against the old Russian enemy. Even then the southern advance would merely have been postponed for a time. When the northern alternative was rejected, since a strike to the north was adjudged too premature to be certain of benefits, the southern advance–favoured by the dominant elements in both navy and army–was reconfirmed. A clash with the United States then became inevitable. Even though the Japanese leadership was aware that such a clash would most probably result in national disaster if vict
ory were not swiftly attained, prestige allowed no pulling back, either from the southern expansion or from the war in China. Not only Pearl Harbor, but the road to Hiroshima and Nagasaki beckoned.

  The colossal risks which both Germany and Japan were prepared to undertake were ultimately rooted in the understanding among the power-elites in both countries of the imperative of expansion to acquire empire and overcome their status as perceived ‘have-not’ nations. The imperialist dominance of Great Britain and the international power (even without formal empire) of the United States posed the great challenge. The need to counter with the utmost urgency the growing economic disparity, quite especially the increasing material strength of the United States, which could only work over time against the ‘have-not’ nations, meant that the quest for dominion as the foundation of national power could not be delayed. This was the basis of the rationale, accepted by the power-elites in Germany and Japan, for undertaking such high-level risks that even national survival was put at stake. Economic domination of the Eurasian land mass by Germany and of south-east Asia by Japan would, as American analysts recognized, have undermined the position of the United States as a world power. This was certainly the presumption in Berlin and Tokyo. From the perspective of the German and Japanese leadership, the gamble had to be taken.

  In parallel fashion, if less grandiose in vision, the imperial dream underpinned Mussolini’s ambitions. He, too, was determined to overcome the disadvantages widely regarded within Italy’s elite as stemming from her weakness as a ‘have-not’ nation. The fateful choices of 1940 were framed by this imperative. In the summer of 1940, as Germany’s final victory seemed imminent, Italy’s ruling elites (including the King), despite some cold feet, were persuaded by Mussolini’s belligerency. The advantages of joining a war apparently already won outweighed, it seemed, the risks of becoming involved in a war Italy was ill-equipped to fight.

  In the case of the calamitous decision to attack Greece, the elites were divided. The military leadership was cautious, aware of the risks involved. But opposition was at best muted. Mussolini could reckon with their compliance, if not their enthusiasm. Egged on by Ciano, his Foreign Minister, the Duce saw the Balkans, and Greece in particular, as the chance to create an Italian imperium–at the same time showing Hitler that he was not compelled to be tugged along in the German dictator’s slipstream. Here, too, prestige played its part in the courting of disaster. But the decision to invade Greece was waiting to happen. It was ultimately also preformed by long-standing Italian ambitions–embodied in Mussolini–to join the ‘have’ nations, and become an imperialist ‘great power’.

  Stalin’s options were drastically narrowed by his own staggering misjudgement of German intentions. And given Stalin’s unchallengeable supremacy within the Soviet regime, his miscalculations–as with those of Hitler and Mussolini–were the miscalculations of an entire system. His paranoid suspicions, long since an inherent component of his rule, meant that he distrusted and disbelieved good intelligence while perversely (since it supported his subjective assessment) believing deliberate German disinformation. In the climate of fear and suspicion that pervaded the regime, he was also fed distorted evaluations by those in charge of sifting the intelligence, themselves victims of the general ideological presupposition that the interests of the western democracies lay in fomenting war between Germany and the Soviet Union, a notion abetted by the successful German disinformation campaign. Stalin’s certainty that there would be no German attack before an ultimatum posing severe demands–perhaps a new ‘Brest-Litovsk’–and that he could gain the time necessary to complete the rebuilding of the Red Army (which had been severely and unnecessarily weakened by his own brutal purges some years earlier) led him, catastrophically, to ignore all warnings and to berate his increasingly worried military advisers. They in turn were certain, in their own postwar apologias, that Stalin, even at the risk of provoking the Germans and even with the frantic rearmament programme still incomplete, could have mobilized Soviet defences to be ready to meet any invasion. The strategic thinking of the Soviet military leadership, which Stalin relied upon, was, however, also deficient. Deployment of Soviet defences not on the border, but in much deeper-lying formations, would have avoided the rapid demolition of front-line forces in the immediate German attack, and provided the basis for organized counter-offensives. The initial huge breakthrough by the Wehrmacht would thereby have been prevented. But military strategy had long rested upon the principle of offensive action as the best form of defence. This, and Stalin’s disastrous certainty in his own judgement, exposed the Soviet Union to the calamity of 22 June 1941.

  Roosevelt’s choices, too, appear more open in theory than in practice. His early leanings towards isolationism in foreign policy were already fading fast in the later 1930s, as German and Japanese bellicosity increasingly threatened world peace–and American interests. The President had to reckon with isolationist feeling in the country, and even more so in Congress. The isolationist minority sustained a loud, discordant clamour. But it had no following within the administration. Among the President’s advisers–some more belligerent, some more cautious–there was unanimity behind the need urgently to rearm and build up American defences. There was soon extensive acknowledgement, too, of the necessity–again in America’s own interest–of underwriting the British war effort, and of resolute firmness against Japanese aggression in the Far East. From these premisses, the destroyer deal, lend-lease, the Atlantic Charter, the ‘undeclared war’ in the Atlantic and Cordell Hull’s unbending ‘Ten Points’–seen as an ultimatum in Japan–were logical developments, in the thrust of their policy more rather than less likely. By the autumn of 1941, the most obvious outcome, whether through formal declaration or not, was war in the near future against both Japan and Germany.

  Once Japan had pre-empted the need for any decision by Roosevelt to risk a vote in Congress on a declaration of war, outright confrontation with Germany–still seen in Washington as the greater danger–was never likely to be long delayed. Again, any difficult choice on political tactics was taken from Roosevelt by Hitler’s rapid decision to declare war on the United States. But, far from being the arbitrary irrationality that it has often puzzlingly seemed, this decision was inherently logical from Hitler’s point of view. America had long been an adversary which Hitler knew Germany would at some point have to confront. By the autumn of 1941 his options were reduced to the question of when to open hostilities. Pearl Harbor gave him what seemed a gilt-edged chance. The conclusion of new, more binding ties to a seemingly indomitable ally provided the opportunity to anticipate the inevitable and declare war in order to turn the tables on America in the Atlantic while her hands were full in the Pacific.

  Over the previous months, Hitler had commissioned the ‘final solution’, aimed at ending Jewish existence in Europe. As the war had widened, with no likelihood of imminent German victory, this ‘final solution’ had emerged as the inexorable outcome of an escalating Nazi persecution which was increasingly genocidal in character. At the root of the Jewish tragedy was the Nazi ideological obsession, held more fervently by Hitler than any other, of ‘removing’ the Jews to ‘cleanse’ the German nation and pave the way for a racially pure ‘new order’ in Europe which would overthrow the centuries-old dominance of Judaeo-Christian values and beliefs. Here, by 1941, the only choice had turned out to be the methods and location of killing. Alternatives had by this time been reduced to techniques and organization of mass murder.

  The fateful choices that were made were not predetermined or axiomatic. But they did reflect the sort of political system that produced them.

  The fascist-style authoritarian systems made the most dynamic, but also the most catastrophic, choices. In both Germany and Italy, highly personalized regimes had been established in which the making of decisions was vested in all-powerful leaders. These could rely upon the backing–or at very least obedient acceptance–of all sections of the power-elite. Their supremacy was also
upheld by plebiscitary acclamation from the masses, manufactured and manipulated by the toxicity of ceaseless propaganda and the ruthless repression of dissentient views. In these systems, the leaders might or might not choose to listen to advice. But they reserved the right–seen as the prerogative of leadership–to decide alone. In governmental terms, it was an extraordinary level of freedom–but one fraught with equally extraordinary risk, with the inbuilt potential for calamitous error.

  Hitler’s own freedom of action had been increasingly unshackled from institutional constraints after he took power in 1933. By the time war broke out it was as good as absolute. Not even the remnants of collective government were left. The Reich Cabinet had ceased to meet. The armed forces were directly under Hitler’s control. All vital agencies in the regime, most importantly the apparatus of repression, were held by Hitler loyalists. Even the sections of the German power-elites that did not share the complete Hitlerian world-view supported the parts of it that added up to expansion, conquest and establishment of Germany’s Continental dominance at the cost of brutally subjugated peoples, particularly those of eastern Europe. They had shared Hitler’s triumphs, most singularly the remarkable victory over France in 1940. Whatever private misgivings they might have harboured, they were in no position to oppose the logical extension of his great gamble: war against the Soviet Union, then against the United States.