World War Two, How the World Changed Forever

by Vern, Steven

  In 1904, war broke out between Japan and Russia in the Far East. The issue was influence in the north of Korea, parts of China, and various small islands in the Sea of Japan. First, the Japanese defeated the Russian Far East Fleet, and defeated the Russians in a number of land battles in Korea and Manchuria (northern China). A few months later, the Russians sent their European Fleet to teach the Japanese a lesson – it, too, was soundly defeated.

  At the peace table in Portsmouth, New Hampshire, American president Theodore Roosevelt negotiated a treaty between the two nations, winning himself a Nobel Peace Prize. Japan was now firmly a power to be reckoned with.

  When WWI broke out, Japan saw an opportunity. Realizing that the armies of both France and Britain would be engaged for the most part in Europe, but also realizing that both nations had far more powerful navies in the Pacific than Japan yet had, the Japanese offered to defend British and French interests in the Far East from Germany, which had colonies and a number of troops and ships in the Pacific area. In return for defending British and French interests, the Japanese would be given German colonies in the Far East (mostly island outposts in the Pacific) when the war ended.

  This is exactly what happened. The British and the French were able to transfer a number of their ships and troops to Europe and the Japanese quickly defeated the isolated German outposts in Asia. At the end of the war, Japan had won for itself a number of islands that it could use as naval and refueling stations for its navy, and allow its navy a much greater area of operations.

  This put Japan in competition with another rising Pacific power, the United States, which had colonies (the Philippines, Guam, and Samoa), and had considerable economic interests in China. In the naval conference rooms of both nations, strategists planned for what many saw as an inevitable conflict between the two countries.

  After the victories over China, Russia, and World War I, nationalism in Japan grew rapidly and rabidly. In the late 1920s and early 1930s, the armed forces gradually took power and enforced a uniquely Japanese fascism on the country, based on the worship of the emperor and a twisted interpretation on the samurai warrior code of Bushido.

  Though most people have heard of the Gestapo, the German secret police, many have not heard of the Kempeitai, its Japanese equivalent. One of the translations of the name is “thought police”, and the Kempeitai was tasked with making sure that all of Japan was of the same opinion, thought, and action (at least in theory). They were extraordinarily effective in a national culture that had valued obedience to one's superiors as a national virtue.

  Japan was (and is) roughly the size of California. Today, and in 1931, Japan had roughly four times the population of that American state. Unlike California, however, Japan is poor in natural resources, especially minerals. To make matters worse, only about 10-12% of the Japanese mainland is arable (able to be farmed). In the minds of the leading men of the Japanese military, Japan needed to expand or die.

  In 1931, the Japanese military launched an expedition to seize the resource rich nation (created after WWI) of Manchuria. When the League of Nations protested (but did nothing – after all, what nation was going to send their sons to fight in Manchuria, and for what?), the Japanese simply walked out of the organization. So much for collective security.

  5 years later, the Japanese military provoked an incident on the Manchurian/Chinese border and used this as an excuse to launch a full-scale invasion of China. By 1938, many of China's coastal cities were under Japanese control. By 1940, a large segment coastal part of the nation was under Japanese control, as were millions of Chinese civilians, who suffered absolutely appalling atrocities at the hands of the Japanese. By the end of WWII, only the Soviet Union had suffered more losses than China.

  Watching these Japanese actions, the United States attempted to stop them through diplomatic and economic means. In 1941, the diplomacy would stop.

  Hitler

  When WWI ended in 1918, a young Austrian corporal in the German Army lay in a German military hospital with his blind eyes bandaged after being exposed to poison gas on the battlefield.

  A few years later, this corporal, Adolf Hitler, wrote that when word of the armistice hit him, he underwent what could only be described as a spiritual experience. His vision returned to him and it dawned on him that his mission in life was to become a politician and lead Germany out of defeat into a new “Golden Age”.

  Throughout history, there are numerous accounts of people going through extreme emotional experiences in times of great distress – there is no reason to disbelieve Hitler's account. He almost immediately got involved in politics and for a time, it seemed (at least to many Germans) that he had led them into the very “Golden Age” he had dreamt about.

  Hitler remained in the pay of the army when the war ended, and returned to the Bavarian capital of Munich, where he had lived before the war. His army superiors asked him to investigate the rising numbers of fringe political parties then coming to life in Munich, as they feared a challenge to their authority and/or hoped to make allies of those they deemed effective.

  In 1919, Hitler sat in on a meeting of the German Worker's Party, which, despite its communist sounding name, was a far-right nationalist party that loathed communism and the communists who seemed to be growing in influence in post-war German cities.

  The pro-German, anti-communism, and anti-Versailles stance of the party appealed to Hitler, and while ostensibly reporting on the party for the army, he became more and more involved in its activities.

  By late 1919, the economic situation in Germany was horrible. Reparations demanded virtually all of its cash reserves and no money existed for infrastructure and governance. Low level, but extremely violent civil wars took place in various German states and cities between the political parties of the far-left and those of the far-right (backed by the military). For many everyday Germans, this chaos was the fault of those who had “stabbed Germany in the back”, which was the men who had signed the Versailles Treaty (mostly from the Social Democratic Party, the moderate party in power), the communists (who it was believed had worked behind the scenes to bring Germany down throughout the war), and finally, the Jews.

  Anti-Semitism in Germany had a long history, and exactly how anti-Semitism feeling in many (but surely not all) of the post-WWI population grew from simple prejudice to extermination could, and has, filled thousands, if not millions, of books. Let's see if we can make this brief. Why was there anti-Semitism in Germany and Europe?

  Firstly, they were a minority. Minorities are easy targets and often singled out for the problems within a society.

  Second, as a minority, and one that practiced a different set of religious beliefs from most of the population, Jews had, for the most part, either chose to or were forced to (by political or economic means) live separately from the rest of the population. Although Jews in Germany were more assimilated into the dominant culture than they were elsewhere, and even considered themselves Germans first and Jews second, many of them led separate lives from their German counterparts to one degree or another. This, too, contributed to the idea of the Jews as “outsiders”.

  Even though most of Germany's approximately 700,000 Jews (out of a total population of 70 million) lived a lower or lower middle class existence, a significant portion of Jews in the cities of Germany prospered. Many of these families were involved with banking (which, for reasons of history, had been relatively off-limits to Christian Germans, and other Europeans, for centuries), the entertainment business, the arts, and in large merchant concerns, like the new department stores.

  Thousands of Jewish Germans had fought and died in WWI, yet many Germans believed (from the seeming success of Jewish business in Germany) the Jews were not doing enough to help win the war.

  If that was not bad enough, in the years after the war, Germany saw a number of communist uprisings (some that included exclusively German naval units). The founder of communism, Karl Marx, was a German Jew. So were many of the lea
ding communists of the day, such as the very public Rosa Luxembourg. In the Soviet Union, many of the top communists, like Trotsky, were of Jewish heritage. (Of course, it is no wonder that a persecuted minority would get involved in an ideology that preached brotherhood among classes and people; though, in practice. it was far different.)

  For these and other reasons, mostly having to do with religious prejudice that “blamed” the Jews for the death of Christ, Jews became one of the reasons that Germany lost World War I. They had worked behind the scenes with both the international bankers capitalists (their brothers overseas), or the communists, or both, even though the two systems are the exact opposite of the other and hostile to each other. In the minds of German nationalists like Hitler, the German Army had not been defeated on the battlefield, it had been defeated at home.

  Add to all this a doctrine of German racial superiority that had begun in the mid/late 1800s, and trained and aggressive veterans, and you have a political party on the far-right (actually, there were many of them) just waiting for a leader.

  One of Hitler's gifts was the power of oratory. He was a born public speaker, though he did not know this until he gave his first speech to the German Worker’s Party and a small number of spectators in 1919. With much practice, he became a speaker of mesmerizing power, and the word spread of this former corporal who seemed to possess a hypnotic power and the desire to restore Germany to its proper place in the world.

  By 1921/22, Hitler had become the leader (“Führer”) of the party and its name was changed to the “National Socialist German Worker's Party” (the first syllable of the first word being pronounced “nazi-oh-nal”, which was shortened to “Nazi” in popular usage.

  "In the Beginning was the Word" Nazi poster (courtesy U.S. Holocaust Memorial and Museum)

  In 1922/23, Germany suffered a massive hyperinflation that wiped out the savings of millions of Germans. The Nazis gained more followers and Hitler felt strong enough, at least in Bavaria, to attempt to copy Italian dictator Mussolini's tactics, and stage an uprising and march on Berlin. Unlike Mussolini, however, Hitler's coup failed and he was put in jail for a little under a year.

  One would think this was a bad thing, but for Hitler and the Nazis, his trial and imprisonment turned out to be a boon. Sympathetic judges at the trial let Hitler speak much more than was warranted and he gained national attention. His imprisonment allowed him to write his “autobiography” and political testament, Mein Kampf (“My Struggle”), which elaborated on his and his party’s main beliefs. As such, he was reaching a wider audience, though most in Germany still believed Hitler and the Nazis to be nothing but a fringe party made up of thugs and morons.

  Even though most Germans believed the Nazis were nothing but a passing fancy, Hitler and those around him put together a national organization, which included a private army, the “Storm Detachments”; in German, the “Sturmabteilung”, or “SA”.

  By 1929, when the Great Depression struck Germany and Europe, conditions in the nation were dire. There had been French occupations of the border provinces when reparations could not be paid. U.S. loans to pay German debts to England and France (which were, in turn, paid back to the U.S. in an endless cycle of debt and repayment that took billions out of the world economy). Now, with the collapse of Wall Street and the shrinking of the international economy, Germany suffered yet again. Unemployment reached over 33% at one point. Hunger gripped the country. Mainstream politicians seemed powerless to do anything to solve the problem. More and more people turned to the parties of the extreme right and left in search of a solution. And, of course, the Nazis and other right wing parties found a ready scapegoat in the Jews, who (as the Nazis never got tired of screaming) controlled both “international finance capital” and “communism”.

  By 1932, the Nazis were the biggest party in Germany. In January 1933, President (former Field Marshal) Paul Von Hindenburg agreed to name Hitler chancellor of Germany. In February, the German parliament or “Reichstag” caught fire. The fire was blamed on German communists and Hitler was given dictatorial powers to deal with his enemies.

  By the late summer of 1933, the Nazis had succeeded in bringing virtually all of the main cultural, political, legal and economic features of German life under their control. In 1934, Hindenburg (a much respected figure and the only person who might have stopped Hitler's excesses) died. When he did, Hitler merged the office of president with that of chancellor. He was now the “Führer”.

  One of the first things he did was to make the army swear a loyalty oath to him, not Germany. This was done immediately after he put down a perceived threat from within his own party. The SA, which had helped him to power and terrorized the Nazis' enemies into submission, was seen by the army as a threat to their position, and many within the SA wanted to put themselves in the army's place. At this point in time, Hitler was not strong enough to oppose the army, and was concerned that the SA would cause the army to remove the Nazis by force. So on June 30th, 1934, Hitler had many of the SA leadership eliminated. Many other Nazi enemies were “dealt with” at the same time. In place of the SA, another even more fanatical and disciplined paramilitary moved in to protect the Nazi government and Hitler: the SS.

  Now secure in his position, Hitler immediately put the plan he had been working on for some time into action. He removed Germany from the League of Nations, repudiated the Versailles Treaty, and began a tremendous military build-up (some of it secretly, some of it openly). When the great powers of Britain, France, and the United States did nothing to prevent his moves, Hitler knew that if he was careful, Germany would soon rival the other powers of Europe.

  His first overt move was to organize a vote in the Saarland that re-attached that territory formally to Germany (1935). In 1936, Hitler gambled against the advice of his generals and ordered German troops to re-occupy the Rhineland. When France did nothing to stop them, Hitler knew that he would likely succeed in his next steps.

  For the powers and people of Europe, decimated by the war and looking back at the Versailles Treaty, Hitler's moves seemed aggressive, but at the same time, were aimed at historically German territory, and so they shrugged their shoulders and moved on.

  With each success, Hitler's power and popularity grew, despite the police state that had been erected throughout the country and the concentration camps that now housed tens of thousands of political enemies. The economy was improving (through massive public works and re-armament) and Germany was becoming a respected world power again. Some within Germany were disturbed by the anti-Semitic excesses organized by the Nazis, but many Germans felt that the Jews held a more prominent place in German society. Many Germans took part in anti-Semitic parades and rallies, but most did not and even the most dedicated Nazi could not envision what was to come, though a careful look at Hitler's book and speeches would have given a strong clue.

  So Hitler and the Nazis gained in popularity and power. There were few within France and Britain who recognized that Hitler and Germany were a growing threat, most notably British politician, Winston Churchill, who had played a large role in the defeat of Germany in WWI, but most people chose to look the other way and hope Hitler would be satisfied.

  He was not. Hitler's inner dream was a Europe populated and ruled by Germans and the Germanic peoples of Western Europe and Scandinavia. He believed Germans were the “Master Race” and that they were destined to rule the globe. The ultimate goal was to conquer the western portion of the Soviet Union for use as a German colonial empire, but to do this, he first needed to neutralize the powers of the West.

  His first step eastward took place in 1938. After years of working to subvert the Austrian government from within, and sustaining a rapidly growing Nazi Party in Austria, Hitler threatened the Austrian government with violent invasion and reprisal should they resist his intention to annex the country and unify it with Germany, which had been a dream of many Germans and Austrians for years. In March 1938, Hitler did just that. The powers of Eu
rope, knowing that many Austrians were pro-Hitler and not willing to go to war over what many saw as an inter-German matter, did nothing.

  His second step eastward took place shortly thereafter. The old Austro-Hungarian Empire had been divided into a number of nations. Hitler's homeland of Austria itself was populated almost exclusively by ethnic Germans. The neighboring (and new) country of Czechoslovakia, however, was not, but included a sizable German minority in the mountainous regions along the south German border (called the “Sudetenland”). In 1937 and '38, Hitler and the Nazis began making claims that the Germans in Czechoslovakia were being persecuted and demanded that the Sudetenland be turned over to Germany.

  The defense of Czechoslovakia depended on the mountain passes of the Sudetenland. The Czech Army was powerful and well-armed, but would be helpless without their mountain defenses. Despite the odds, the Czechs let it be known that they intended to fight the Germans for every inch, but they depended on the aid of their allies, Great Britain and France.

  Great Britain and France had experienced the tremendous losses of WWI and were just now beginning to slowly recover from the worst effects of the Depression. The thought of another European war was horrific, and so their leaders were determined to seek another solution.

  At Munich in late September 1938, the leaders of France (Edouard Daladier) and Great Britain (Neville Chamberlain) met with Hitler and his Italian ally, Mussolini. The long and short of the talks was that Hitler got exactly what he wanted (while promising to make no more demands in Europe), and the Czechs lost their allies and were forced to cede the Sudetenland to Germany. When the conference was over, Hitler told his closest allies and advisers that they had met the enemy and that “they were worms.”

  British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain returned to England a hero (for a moment) and proclaimed that he had reached an understanding with “Herr Hitler” and that there would be “Peace for our time”. War had been averted, but Winston Churchill, who had been issuing warnings about Hitler for 5 years now, proclaimed the Munich Conference a shameful defeat, and expected that Hitler would soon have more demands to present to the world.