The Great Depression and World War II

The Great Depression and World War II

1929–1945

CHAPTER PREVIEW

1. The Great Depression, 1929–1939

• What caused the Great Depression, and what were its consequences?

2. Authoritarian States

• What was the nature of the new totalitarian dictatorships, and how did they differ from conservative authoritarian states and from each other?

3. Stalin’s Soviet Union

• How did Stalin and the Communist Party build a totalitarian order in the Soviet Union?

4. Mussolini and Fascism in Italy

• How did Italian fascism develop?

5. Hitler and Nazism in Germany

• Why were Hitler and his Nazi regime initially so popular, and how did their actions lead to World War II?

6. The Second World War, 1939–1945

• How did Germany and Japan build empires in Europe and Asia, and how did the Allies defeat them?

THE YEARS OF ANXIETY AND POLITICAL MANEUVERING IN EUROPE after World War I were made much worse when a massive economic depression spread around the world following the American stock market crash of October 1929. An increasingly interconnected global economy now collapsed. Free-market capitalism appeared to have run its course. People everywhere looked for relief to new leaders, some democratically elected, many not. In Europe, on the eve of the Second World War, few liberal democratic governments survived. Worldwide, in countries such as Brazil, Japan, the Soviet Union, and others, as well as in Europe, dictatorships seemed the wave of the future.

The mid-twentieth-century era of dictatorship is a deeply disturbing chapter in the history of civilization. The key development was not only the resurgence of authoritarian rule, but also the rise of a particularly ruthless brand of totalitarianism that reached its fullest realization in the Soviet Union, Nazi Germany, and Japan in the 1930s. Stalin, Hitler, and Japan’s military leaders intervened radically in society and ruled with unprecedented severity. Hitler’s sudden attack on Poland in 1939 started World War II in Europe. His successes encouraged the Japanese to expand their stalemated Chinese campaign into a vast Pacific war. By war’s end, millions had died on the battlefields and in the bombed-out cities. Millions more died in the Holocaust, in Stalin’s Soviet Union from purges and forced imposition of communism, and during Japan’s quest to create an “Asia for Asians.”

The Great Depression, 1929–1939

What caused the Great Depression, and what were its consequences?

Like the Great War, the Great Depression must be spelled with capital letters. Beginning in 1929 an exceptionally long and severe economic depression struck the entire world with ever-greater intensity, and recovery was uneven and slow. Only the Second World War brought it to an end.

The Economic Crisis

Though economic activity was already declining moderately in many countries by early 1929, the U.S. stock market crash in October of that year really started the Great Depression. The American stock market boom was built on borrowed money. Two factors explain why. First, the wealth gap (or income inequality) between America’s rich and poor reached its greatest extent in the twentieth century in 1928–1929. One percent of Americans then held 70 percent of all America’s wealth. Eventually, with not enough money to go around, the remaining 99 percent of Americans had to borrow to make even basic purchases — as a result, the cost of farm credit, installment loans, and home mortgages skyrocketed. Then a point was reached where the 99 percent could borrow no more, so they stopped buying.

Second, wealthy investors and speculators took increasingly greater investment risks. One such popular risk was to buy stocks by paying only a small fraction of the total purchase price and borrowing the remainder from their stockbrokers or from banks. Such buying “on margin” was extremely dangerous. When prices started falling, the hard-pressed margin buyers started selling to pay their debts. The result was a financial panic. Countless investors and speculators were wiped out in a matter of days or weeks, and the New York stock market’s crash started a domino effect that hit most of the world’s major stock exchanges.

The financial panic in the United States triggered a worldwide financial crisis. Throughout the 1920s American bankers and investors had lent large sums to many countries, and as panic spread, New York bankers began recalling their short-term loans. Frightened citizens around the world began to withdraw their bank savings, leading to general financial chaos. The recall of American loans also accelerated the collapse in world prices, as business people dumped goods in a frantic attempt to get cash to pay what they owed.

The financial chaos led to a drastic decline in production in country after country. Between 1929 and 1933 world output of goods fell by an estimated 38 percent. Countries now turned inward and tried to go it alone. Many followed the American example, in which protective tariffs were raised to their highest levels ever in 1930 to seal off shrinking national markets for American producers only.

Although historians’ opinions differ, two factors probably best explain the relentless slide to the bottom from 1929 to early 1933. First, the international economy lacked leadership able to maintain stability when the crisis came. Neither the seriously weakened Britain nor the United States — the world’s economic leaders — stabilized the international economic system in 1929. Instead Britain and the United States cut back international lending and erected high tariffs.

Second, in almost every country, governments cut their budgets and reduced spending instead of running large deficits to try to stimulate their economies. That is, governments needed to put large sums of money into the economy to stimulate job growth and spending. After World War II such a “counter-cyclical policy,” advocated by the British economist John Maynard Keynes (1883–1946), became a well-established weapon against depression. But in the 1930s orthodox economists generally regarded Keynes’s prescription with horror.

Mass Unemployment

The need for large-scale government spending was tied to mass unemployment. The 99 percent’s halt in buying contributed to the financial crisis, which led to production cuts, which in turn caused workers to lose their jobs and have even less money to buy goods. This led to still more production cuts, and unemployment soared. In Britain unemployment had averaged 12 percent in the 1920s; between 1930 and 1935 it averaged more than 18 percent. Germany and Austria had some of the highest unemployment rates, 30–32 percent in 1932. The worst unemployment was in the United States. In the 1920s unemployment there had averaged only 5 percent; in 1933 it soared to about 33 percent of the entire labor force: 14 million people were out of work. This was the only time in American history when more people left America than immigrated in — including thousands of Mexican Americans who suffered increasing hostility, accused of stealing jobs from those who considered themselves to be “real Americans,” and perhaps a hundred thousand Americans who migrated to the Soviet Union, attracted by communism’s promises of jobs and a new life.

Mass unemployment created great social problems. Poverty increased dramatically, although in most industrialized countries unemployed workers generally received some meager unemployment benefits or public aid that prevented starvation. Millions of unemployed people lost their spirit, and homes and ways of life were disrupted in countless personal tragedies. In 1932 workers in Manchester, England, appealed to their city officials — a typical appeal echoed throughout the Western world:

We tell you that thousands of people … are in desperate straits. We tell you that men, women, and children are going hungry…. We tell you that great numbers are being rendered distraught through the stress and worry of trying to exist without work….

If you do not provide useful work for the unemployed — what, we ask, is your alternative? Do not imagine that this colossal tragedy of unemployment is going on endlessly without some fateful catastrophe. Hungry men are angry men.¹

The New Deal in the United States

The Great Depression and the response to it marked a major turning point in American history. Herbert Hoover (U.S. pres. 1929–1933) and his administration initially reacted with limited action. When the financial crisis struck Europe with full force in summer 1931 and boomeranged back to the United States, banks failed and unemployment soared. In 1932 industrial production fell to about 50 percent of its 1929 level.

In these desperate circumstances Franklin Delano Roosevelt (U.S. pres. 1933–1945) won a landslide presidential victory in 1932 with promises of a “New Deal for the forgotten man.” Roosevelt’s basic goal was to preserve capitalism by reforming it. Rejecting socialism and government ownership of industry, Roosevelt advocated forceful federal government intervention in the economy. His commitment to national relief programs marked a profound shift from the traditional stress on family support and local community responsibility.

Roosevelt attacked mass unemployment by creating new federal agencies that launched a vast range of public works projects so the federal government could directly employ as many people as financially possible. The Works Progress Administration (WPA), set up in 1935, employed one-fifth of the entire U.S. labor force at some point in the 1930s, and these workers constructed public buildings, bridges, and highways.

In 1935 the U.S. government established a national social security system with old-age pensions and unemployment benefits. The 1935 National Labor Relations Act declared collective bargaining to be U.S. policy, and union membership more than doubled. In general, between 1935 and 1938 government rulings and social reforms chipped away at the privileges of the wealthy and tried to help ordinary people.

Despite undeniable accomplishments in social reform, the New Deal was only partly successful as a response to the Great Depression. Unemployment was still a staggering 10 million when war broke out in Europe in 1939. The New Deal brought fundamental reform, but it never did pull the United States out of the depression; only the Second World War did that.

The European Response to the Depression

The American stock market’s collapse in October 1929 set off a chain of economic downturns that hit Europe, particularly Germany and Great Britain, the hardest. Postwar Europe had emerged from the Great War deeply in debt and in desperate need of investment capital to rebuild. The United States became the primary creditor and financier. Germany borrowed, for example, to pay Britain war reparations, and then Britain took that money and repaid its war debts and investment loans to America. When the American economy crashed, the whole circular system crashed with it.

Of all the Western democracies, the Scandinavian countries under socialist leadership responded most successfully to the challenge of the Great Depression. When the economic crisis struck in 1929, Sweden’s socialist government pioneered the use of large-scale deficits to finance public works projects and thereby maintain production and employment. Scandinavian governments also increased social welfare benefits. All this spending required a large bureaucracy and high taxes. Yet both private and cooperative enterprise thrived, as did democracy. Some observers considered Scandinavia’s welfare socialism an appealing middle way between what they considered to be sick capitalism and cruel communism or fascism.

In Britain, Ramsay MacDonald’s Labour government (1929–1931) and, after 1931, the Conservative-dominated coalition government followed orthodox economic theory. The budget was balanced, but unemployed workers received barely enough welfare support to live. Nevertheless, the economy recovered considerably after 1932, reflecting the gradual reorientation of the British economy. Britain concentrated increasingly on the national, rather than the international, market. Old export industries, such as textiles and coal, continued to decline, but new industries, such as automobiles and electrical appliances, grew. These developments encouraged British isolationism and often had devastating economic consequences for Britain’s far-flung colonies and dominions, which depended heavily upon reciprocal trade with Great Britain and the United States.

The Great Depression came late to France as it was relatively less industrialized and more isolated from the world economy. But once the depression hit, it stayed. Economic stagnation both reflected and heightened an ongoing political crisis, as liberals, democratic socialists, and Communists fought for control of the French government with conservatives and the far right. The latter groups agitated against parliamentary democracy and turned to Mussolini’s Italy and Hitler’s Germany for inspiration. At the same time, the Communist Party and many workers looked to Stalin’s Russia for guidance.

Frightened by the growing popularity of Hitler- and Mussolini-style right-wing dictatorships at home and abroad, the Communist, Socialist, and Radical Parties in France formed an alliance — the Popular Front — for the May 1936 national elections. Following its clear victory, the Popular Front government launched a far-reaching New Deal–inspired program of social and economic reform. Popular with workers (because it supported unions) and the lower middle class, these measures were quickly sabotaged by rapid inflation, rising wages, a decline in overseas exports, and cries of socialist revolution from frightened conservatives. Politically, the Popular Front lost many left-wing supporters when it failed to back the republican cause in the Spanish Civil War while Hitler and Mussolini openly armed and supported Franco’s nationalists. In June 1937, with the country hopelessly divided, the Popular Front collapsed.

Worldwide Effects

The Great Depression’s magnitude was unprecedented, and its effect rippled well beyond Europe and the United States. Because many countries and colonies in Africa, Asia, and Latin America were nearly totally dependent on one or two commodities — such as coffee beans or cocoa — for income, the implementation of protectionist trade policies by the leading industrial nations had devastating effects.

The Great Depression hit the vulnerable commodity economies of Latin America especially hard. With foreign sales plummeting, Latin American countries could not buy the industrial goods they needed from abroad. The global depression provoked a profound shift toward economic nationalism after 1930, as popularly based governments worked to reduce foreign influence and gain control of their own economies and natural resources. These efforts were fairly successful. By the late 1940s factories in Argentina, Brazil, and Chile could generally satisfy domestic consumer demand for the products of light industry. But as in Hitler’s Germany, the deteriorating economic conditions in Latin America also gave rise to dictatorships, some of them modeled along European Fascist lines.

The Great Depression marked a decisive turning point in the development of African nationalism. For the first time, educated Africans faced widespread unemployment. African peasants and small business people who had been drawn into world trade, and who sometimes profited from booms, also felt the economic pain, as did urban workers. In some areas the result was unprecedented mass protest.

While Asians were somewhat affected by the Great Depression, the consequences varied greatly by country or colony and were not as serious generally as they were elsewhere. That being said, where the depression did hit, it was often severe. The price of rice fell by two-thirds between 1929 and 1932. Also crippling to the region’s economies was Asia’s heavy dependence on raw material exports. With debts to local moneylenders fixed in value and taxes to colonial governments hardly ever reduced, many Asian peasants in the 1930s struggled under crushing debt and suffered terribly.

When the Great Depression reached China in the early 1930s, it hit the rural economy the hardest. China’s economy depended heavily on cash-crop exports and these declined dramatically, while cheap foreign agricultural goods — such as rice and wheat — were dumped in China. While Chinese industrial production dropped off after 1931, it quickly recovered. Much of this growth was in the military sector, as China tried to catch up with the West and also prepare for war with Japan.

In Japan the terrible suffering caused by the Great Depression caused ultranationalists and militarists to call for less dependence on global markets and the expansion of a self-sufficient empire. Such expansion began in 1931 when Japan invaded Chinese Manchuria, which became a major source of the raw materials needed to feed Japanese industrial growth (see “Japan Against China” in Chapter 29). Japan recovered more quickly from the Great Depression than did any other major industrial power because of prompt action by the civilian democratic government, but the government and large corporations continued to be blamed for the economic downturn. By the mid-1930s this lack of confidence, combined with the collapsing international economic order, Europe’s and America’s increasingly isolationist and protectionist policies, and a growing admiration for Nazi Germany and its authoritarian, militaristic model of government, had led the Japanese military to topple the civilian authorities and dictate Japan’s future.

Authoritarian States

What was the nature of the new totalitarian dictatorships, and how did they differ from conservative authoritarian states and from each other?

Both conservative and radical totalitarian dictatorships arose in Europe in the 1920s and the 1930s. Although they sometimes overlapped in character and practice, they were profoundly different in essence.

Conservative Authoritarianism

The traditional form of antidemocratic government in world history was conservative authoritarianism. Like Russia’s tsars and China’s emperors, the leaders of such governments relied on obedient bureaucracies, vigilant police departments, and trustworthy armies to control society. They forbade or limited popular participation in government and often jailed or exiled political opponents. Yet they had neither the ability nor the desire to control many aspects of their subjects’ lives. As long as the people did not try to change the system, they often enjoyed considerable personal independence.

After the First World War, conservative authoritarianism revived, especially in Latin America. Conservative dictators also seized power in Spain and Portugal, and in the less-developed eastern part of Europe. There were several reasons for this development. These lands lacked strong traditions of self-government, and many new states, such as Yugoslavia, were torn by ethnic conflicts. Dictatorship appealed to nationalists and military leaders as a way to repress such tensions and preserve national unity. Large landowners and the church were still powerful forces in these predominantly agrarian areas and often looked to dictators to protect them from progressive land reform or Communist agrarian upheaval. Conservative dictatorships were concerned more with maintaining the status quo than with mobilizing the masses or forcing society into rapid change or war.

Radical Totalitarian Dictatorships

By the mid-1930s a new kind of radical dictatorship — termed totalitarian — had emerged in the Soviet Union, Germany, and, to a lesser extent, Italy. Scholars disagree over the definition of totalitarianism, its origins, and to what countries and leaders the term should apply. Moreover, when the Cold War began in the late 1940s (see “The World Remade” in Chapter 31), conservatives, particularly in the United States, commandeered the term as shorthand for the “evil” Communist regimes in the Soviet Union and its satellites. Liberals, especially in the 1960s, used the term more loosely to refer to every system they felt inhibited freedom — from local police to the U.S. Pentagon. Thus by the 1980s many scholars questioned the term’s usefulness. More recently, with these caveats, scholars have returned to the term to explain and understand fascism, Nazism, and communism in the 1920s, 1930s, and 1940s.

It can be argued that totalitarianism began with the total war effort of 1914–1918 (see “Mobilizing for Total War” in Chapter 28), as governments acquired total control over all areas of society in order to achieve one supreme objective: victory. This provided a model for future totalitarian states. As the French thinker ÉlieHalévy (AY-lee ah-LAY-vee) observed in 1936, the varieties of modern totalitarian tyranny — fascism, Nazism, and communism — could be thought of as “feuding brothers” with a common father: the nature of modern war.²

The consequences of the Versailles treaty (1919) and the severe economic and political problems that Germany and Italy faced in the 1920s left both those countries ripe for new leadership, but not necessarily totalitarian dictators. It was the Great Depression that must be viewed as the immediate cause of the modern totalitarian state.

In 1956 American historians Carl Friedrich and Zbigniew Brzezinski (z-BIG-nyefbzheh-ZIN-skee) identified at least six key features of modern totalitarian states: (1) an official ideology; (2) a single ruling party; (3) complete control of “all weapons of armed combat”; (4) complete monopoly of all means of mass communication; (5) a system of terror, physical and psychic, enforced by the party and the secret police; and (6) central control and direction of the entire economy.³

While all these features were present in Stalin’s Communist Soviet Union and Hitler’s Nazi Germany, there were some major differences. Most notably, Soviet communism seized private property for the state and sought to level society by crushing the middle classes. Nazi Germany also criticized big landowners and industrialists but, unlike the Communists, did not try to nationalize private property, so the middle classes survived. This difference in property and class relations led some scholars to speak of “totalitarianism of the left” — Stalinist Russia — and “totalitarianism of the right” — Nazi Germany.

Moreover, Soviet Communists ultimately had international aims: they sought to unite the workers of the world. Mussolini and Hitler claimed they were interested in changing state and society on a national level only, although Hitler envisioned a greatly expanded “living space,” or lebensraum (LAY-buhns-rowm), for Germans in eastern Europe and Russia. Both Mussolini and Hitler used the term fascism (FASH-iz-uhm) to describe their movements’ supposedly “total” and revolutionary character. Orthodox Marxist Communists argued that the Fascists were powerful capitalists seeking to destroy the revolutionary working class and thus protect their enormous profits. So while Communists and Fascists both sought the overthrow of existing society, their ideologies clashed, and they were enemies.

The Spread of Fascism in Spain, 1937 In the 1920s and 1930s most European countries had Fascist sympathizers. Between 1936 and 1939 Fascist nationalist forces led by General Francisco Franco, pictured here, fought a brutal war against the government of Spain’s left-leaning, democratic Second Spanish Republic. Socialist and liberal volunteers from around the world came to Spain to fight against Franco’s army, as recounted in Ernest Hemingway’s novel For Whom the Bell Tolls. Pablo Picasso portrayed the destruction to one town caused by German Nazi and Italian Fascist warplanes, supporting Franco, in his famous painting Guernica. Following the nationalist victory, Franco ruled Spain as a dictator for thirty-six years.

This black-and-white photo shows General Francisco Franco walking along a line of troops, saluting.

European Fascist movements shared many characteristics, including extreme, often expanionist, nationalism; anti-socialism aimed at destroying working-class movements; a dynamic and violent leader; a crushing of human individualism; alliances with powerful capitalists and landowners; and glorification of war and the military. Fascists, especially in Germany, also embraced racial homogeneity. Indeed, while class was the driving force in communist ideology, race and racial purity were profoundly important to Nazi ideology.

Although 1930s Japan has sometimes been called a Fascist society, most recent scholars disagree with this label. Japanese political philosophers were attracted by some European Fascist ideas, such as Hitler’s desire for eastward expansion, which would be duplicated by Japan’s expansion to the Asian mainland. Other appealing concepts included nationalism, militarism, the corporatist economic model, and a single, all-powerful political party. The idea of a Japanese dictator, however, clashed with the emperor’s divine status. There were also various ideologically unique forces at work in Japan, including ultranationalism, militarism (building on the historic role of samurai warriors in Japanese society), reverence for traditional ways, emperor worship, and the profound changes to Japanese society beginning with the Meiji Restoration in 1867 (see “The Meiji Restoration” in Chapter 26). These also contributed to the rise of a totalitarian, but not Fascist, state before the Second World War.

In summary, the concept of totalitarianism remains a valuable tool for historical understanding. It correctly highlights that in the 1930s Germany, the Soviet Union, and Japan made an unprecedented “total claim” on the beliefs and behaviors of their respective citizens.⁴ However, none of these nations were successful in completely dominating their citizens. Thus totalitarianism is an idea never fully achieved.

Stalin’s Soviet Union

How did Stalin and the Communist Party build a totalitarian order in the Soviet Union?

Joseph Stalin (1879–1953) consolidated his power following Lenin’s death in 1924 and by 1927 was the de facto leader of the Soviet Union. In 1928 he launched the first five-year plan — a “revolution from above,”⁵ as he so aptly termed it, to transform Soviet society along socialist lines, and to generate a Communist society with new attitudes, new loyalties, and a new socialist humanity. Stalin and the Communist Party used constant propaganda, enormous sacrifice, and unlimited violence and state control to establish a dynamic, modern totalitarian state in the 1930s.

From Lenin to Stalin

By spring 1921 Lenin and the Bolsheviks had won the civil war, but they ruled a shattered and devastated land. Facing economic disintegration, the worst famine in generations, riots by peasants and workers, and an open rebellion by previously pro-Bolshevik sailors at Kronstadt (kruhn-SHTAHT), Lenin changed course. In March 1921 he announced the New Economic Policy (NEP), which re-established limited economic freedom in an attempt to rebuild agriculture and industry. Peasant producers could sell their surpluses in free markets, as could private traders and small handicraft manufacturers. Heavy industry, railroads, and banks, however, remained wholly nationalized.

The NEP was successful both politically and economically. Politically, it was a necessary but temporary compromise with the Soviet Union’s overwhelming peasant majority. Economically, the NEP brought rapid recovery. In 1926 industrial output surpassed prewar levels, and peasants were producing almost as much grain as before the war.

As the economy recovered, an intense power struggle began in the Communist Party’s inner circles, for Lenin left no chosen successor when he died in 1924. The principal contenders were Stalin and Leon Trotsky. While Trotsky appeared to be the stronger of the two, in the end Stalin won because he gained the support of the party, the only genuine source of power in the one-party state.

Stalin gradually achieved absolute power between 1922 and 1927. He used the moderates to crush Trotsky and then turned against the moderates and destroyed them as well. Stalin’s final triumph came at the party congress of December 1927, which condemned all deviation from the general party line as formulated by Stalin.

The Five-Year Plans

The 1927 party congress marked the end of the NEP and the beginning of socialist five-year plans. The first five-year plan had staggering economic objectives. In just five years, total industrial output was to increase by 250 percent and agricultural production by 150 percent. By 1930 economic and social change was sweeping the country in a frenzied effort to modernize and industrialize, much like in Britain in the nineteenth century (see “The Industrial Revolution in Britain” in Chapter 23), and dramatically changing the lives of ordinary people, sometimes at great personal cost. One worker complained, “The workers … made every effort to fulfill the industrial and financial plan and fulfilled it by more than 100 percent, but how are they supplied? The ration is received only by the worker, except for rye flour, his wife and small children receive nothing. Workers and their families wear worn-out clothes, the kids are in rags, their naked bellies sticking out.”⁶

Stalin unleashed his “second revolution” because, like Lenin, he was deeply committed to socialism. Stalin was also driven to catch up with the advanced and presumably hostile Western capitalist nations. In February 1931 Stalin famously declared:

It is sometimes asked whether it is not possible to slow down the tempo a bit…. No, comrades, it is not possible! The tempo must not be reduced! … To slacken the tempo would mean falling behind. And those who fall behind get beaten. No, we refuse to be beaten! … We are fifty or a hundred years behind the advanced countries. We must make good this distance in ten years. Either we do it, or we shall be crushed.⁷

Domestically, there was the peasant problem. For centuries peasants had wanted to own the land, and finally they had it. Sooner or later, the Communists reasoned, the peasants would become conservative capitalists and threaten the regime. Stalin therefore launched a preventive war against the peasantry to bring it under the state’s absolute control.

That war was collectivization — the forcible consolidation of individual peasant farms into large, state-controlled enterprises. Beginning in 1929 peasants were ordered to give up their land and animals and become members of collective farms. As for the kulaks, the better-off peasants, Stalin instructed party workers to “break their resistance, to eliminate them as a class.”⁸ Stripped of land and livestock, many starved or were deported to forced-labor camps for “re-education.”

Because almost all peasants were poor, the term kulak soon meant any peasant who opposed the new system. Whole villages were often attacked. One conscience-stricken colonel in the secret police confessed to a foreign journalist:

I am an old Bolshevik. I worked in the underground against the Tsar and then I fought in the Civil War. Did I do all that in order that I should now surround villages with machine guns and order my men to fire indiscriminately into crowds of peasants? Oh, no, no!⁹

Forced collectivization led to disaster. Many peasants slaughtered their animals and burned their crops in protest. Nor were the state-controlled collective farms more productive. Grain output barely increased, and collectivized agriculture made no substantial financial contribution to Soviet industrial development during the first five-year plan.

In Ukraine Stalin instituted a policy of all-out collectivization with two goals: to destroy all expressions of Ukrainian nationalism, and to break the Ukrainian peasants’ will so they would accept collectivization and Soviet rule. Stalin began by purging Ukraine of its intellectuals and political elite. He then set impossibly high grain quotas for the collectivized farms. This grain quota had to be turned over to the government before any peasant could receive a share. Many scholars and dozens of governments and international organizations have declared Stalin’s and the Soviet government’s policies a deliberate act of genocide. As one historian observed:

Grain supplies were sufficient to sustain everyone if properly distributed. People died mostly of terror-starvation (excess grain exports, seizure of edibles from the starving, state refusal to provide emergency relief, bans on outmigration, and forced deportation to food-deficit locales), not poor harvests and routine administrative bungling.¹⁰

The result was a terrible man-made famine, called in Ukrainian the Holodomor(HAU-lau-dau-mohr) (Hunger extermination), in Ukraine in 1932 and 1933, which probably claimed 3 to 5 million lives.

Collectivization was a cruel but real victory for Communist ideologues who were looking to institute their brand of communism and to crush opposition as much as improve production. By 1938, 93 percent of peasant families had been herded onto collective farms at a horrendous cost in both human lives and resources. Regimented as state employees and dependent on the state-owned tractor stations, the collectivized peasants were no longer a political threat.

The industrial side of the five-year plans was more successful. Soviet industry produced about four times as much in 1937 as in 1928. No other major country had ever achieved such rapid industrial growth. Heavy industry led the way, and urban development accelerated: more than 25 million people migrated to cities to become industrial workers during the 1930s.

The sudden creation of dozens of new factories demanded tremendous resources. Funds for industrial expansion were collected from the people through heavy hidden sales taxes. Firm labor discipline also contributed to rapid industrialization. Trade unions lost most of their power, and individuals could not move without police permission. When factory managers needed more hands, they were sent “unneeded” peasants from collective farms.

Foreign engineers were hired to plan and construct many of the new factories. Highly skilled American engineers, hungry for work in the depression years, were particularly important until newly trained Soviet experts began to replace them after 1932. Thus Stalin’s planners harnessed the skill and technology of capitalist countries to promote the surge of socialist industry.

Life and Culture in Soviet Society

Daily life was hard in Stalin’s Soviet Union. Despite these hardships, many Communists saw themselves as heroically building the world’s first socialist society while capitalism crumbled and fascism rose in the West.

Offsetting the hardships were the important social benefits Soviet workers received, such as old-age pensions, free medical services and education, and day-care centers for children. Unemployment was almost unknown. Moreover, there was the possibility of personal advancement. Rapid industrialization required massive numbers of trained experts. Thus the Stalinist state broke with the egalitarian policies of the 1920s and provided tremendous incentives to those who acquired specialized skills. A growing technical and managerial elite joined the political and artistic elites in a new upper class, whose members were rich and powerful.

 

Soviet society’s radical transformation profoundly affected women’s lives. The Russian Bolshevik Revolution immediately proclaimed complete equality of rights for women. In the 1920s divorce and abortion were made easily available, and women were urged to work outside the home. After Stalin came to power, however, he encouraged a return to traditional family values.

The most lasting changes for women involved work and education. Peasant women continued to work on farms, and millions of women now toiled in factories and heavy construction. The more determined women entered the ranks of the better-paid specialists in industry and science. By 1950, 75 percent of all doctors in the Soviet Union were women.

Culture was thoroughly politicized through constant propaganda and indoctrination. Party activists lectured workers in factories and peasants on collective farms, while newspapers, films, and radio broadcasts recounted socialist achievements and warned of capitalist plots.

Stalinist Terror and the Great Purges

In the mid-1930s the push to build socialism and a new society culminated in ruthless police terror and a massive purging of the Communist Party. In August 1936 sixteen prominent “Old Bolsheviks” — party members before the 1917 revolution — confessed to all manner of plots against Stalin in spectacular public show trials in Moscow. Then in 1937 the secret police arrested a mass of lesser party officials and newer members, torturing them and extracting confessions for more show trials. In addition to the party faithful, union officials, managers, intellectuals, army officers, and countless ordinary citizens were struck down. One Stalin functionary admitted, “Innocent people were arrested: naturally — otherwise no one would be frightened. If people were arrested only for specific misdemeanors, all the others would feel safe and so become ripe for treason.”¹¹ In all, at least 8 million people were arrested, and millions of these were executed. Those not immediately executed were sent to gulags (GOO-lagz) — labor camps from which few escaped. Many were simply worked to death as they provided convict labor for Stalin’s industrialization drive in areas of low population.

The Soviet Forced-Labor Camp at Arkhangelsk From 1929 to 1953 millions of Soviet citizens were sent to forced-labor prison camps such as this one, and over 1.5 million died. Ten to 20 percent of these prisoners were women, many of them found guilty of nothing more than being married to men considered enemies of the state. Here male and female prisoners work in a lumberyard in a cold and snowy climate near the Arctic Circle.

This black-and-white photo shows male and female prisoners at work in a lumberyard in a cold and snowy climate.

Stalin recruited 1.5 million new members to replace those purged. Thus more than half of all Communist Party members in 1941 had joined since the purges. This new generation of Stalin-formed Communists served the leader effectively until his death in 1953 and then governed the Soviet Union until the early 1980s. Stalin’s mass purges remain baffling, for most historians believe those purged posed no threat and confessed to crimes they had not committed. Some historians have challenged the long-standing interpretation that blames the great purges on Stalin’s cruelty or madness. They argue that Stalin’s fears were exaggerated but genuine and were shared by many in the party and in the general population. Investigations and trials snowballed into a mass hysteria, a new witch-hunt.¹² Historians who have accessed recently opened Soviet archives, however, continue to hold that Stalin was intimately involved with the purges and personally directed them, abetted by amenable informers, judges, and executioners. Oleg Khlevniuk, a Ukrainian historian familiar with these archives, writes, “Theories about the elemental, spontaneous nature of the terror, about a loss of central control over the course of mass repression, and about the role of regional leaders in initiating the terror are simply not supported by the historical record.”¹³ In short, a ruthless and paranoid Stalin found large numbers of willing collaborators for crime as well as for achievement.

Mussolini and Fascism in Italy

How did Italian fascism develop?

Benito Mussolini’s Fascist movement and his seizure of power in 1922 were important steps in the rise of dictatorships between the two world wars. Mussolini and his supporters were the first to call themselves “Fascists.” His dictatorship was brutal and theatrical, and it contained elements of both conservative authoritarianism and modern totalitarianism.

The Seizure of Power

In the early twentieth century Italy was a liberal state with civil rights and a constitutional monarchy. On the eve of the First World War, the parliamentary regime granted universal male suffrage. But there were serious problems. Poverty was widespread, and many peasants were more attached to their villages and local interests than to the national state. Church-state relations were often tense. Class differences were also extreme, and by 1912 the Socialist Party’s radical wing led the powerful revolutionary socialist movement.¹⁴

World War I worsened the political situation. Having fought on the Allied side almost exclusively for purposes of territorial expansion, Italian nationalists were disappointed with Italy’s modest gains at the Paris Peace Conference. Workers and peasants also felt cheated: to win their support during the war, the government had promised social and land reform, which it failed to deliver after the war.

The Russian Revolution inspired and energized Italy’s revolutionary socialist movement, and radical workers and peasants began occupying factories and seizing land in 1920. These actions scared and mobilized the property-owning classes. Thus by 1921 revolutionary socialists, antiliberal conservatives, and frightened property owners were all opposed — though for different reasons — to the liberal parliamentary government.

Into these crosscurrents of unrest and fear stepped Benito Mussolini (1883–1945). Mussolini began his political career as a Socialist Party leader and radical newspaper editor before World War I. Expelled from the Italian Socialist Party for supporting the war, and wounded on the Italian front in 1917, Mussolini returned home and began organizing bitter war veterans into a band of Fascists — Italian for “a union of forces.”

At first Mussolini’s program was a radical combination of nationalist and socialist demands. As such, it competed directly with the well-organized Socialist Party and failed to attract followers. When Mussolini realized his violent verbal assaults on rival Socialists won him growing support from conservatives and the frightened middle classes, he began to shift gears and to exalt nation over class. By 1921 he was ridiculing and dismissing the Marxist interpretation of history:

We deny the existence of two classes, because there are many more than two classes. We deny that human history can be explained in terms of economics. We deny your internationalism. That is a luxury article, which only the elevated can practice, because peoples are passionately bound to their native soil.¹⁵

Mussolini and his private army of Black Shirts also turned to physical violence. Few people were killed, but Socialist newspapers, union halls, and local Socialist Party headquarters were destroyed, eventually pushing Socialists out of the city governments of northern Italy. A skillful politician, Mussolini convinced his followers they were opposing the “Reds,” while also promoting a real revolution of the little people against the established interests.

With the government breaking down in 1922, Mussolini stepped forward as the savior of order and property. In October 1922 thirty thousand Fascists marched on Rome, threatening the king and demanding he appoint Mussolini prime minister. Victor Emmanuel III (r. 1900–1946), forced to choose between Fascists or Socialists, asked Mussolini to form a new cabinet. Thus, after widespread violence and a threat of armed uprising, Mussolini seized power “legally.”

The Regime in Action

In 1924 Mussolini declared his desire to “make the nation Fascist”¹⁶ and imposed a series of repressive measures. Press freedom was abolished, elections were fixed, and the government ruled by decree. Mussolini arrested his political opponents, disbanded all independent labor unions, and put dedicated Fascists in control of Italy’s schools. He created a Fascist youth movement, Fascist labor unions, and many other Fascist organizations. He trumpeted his goal in a famous slogan of 1926: “Everything in the state, nothing outside the state, nothing against the state.”¹⁷ By year’s end Italy was a one-party dictatorship under Mussolini’s unquestioned leadership.

Mussolini was only primarily interested, however, in personal power. Rather than destroy the old power structure, he remained content to compromise with the conservative classes that controlled the army, the economy, and the state. He controlled labor but left big business to regulate itself, profitably and securely. There was no land reform.

Mussolini also drew increasing support from the Catholic Church. In the Lateran Agreement of 1929, he recognized the Vatican as a tiny independent state and agreed to give the church heavy financial support. The pope in return urged Italians to support Mussolini’s government.

Like Stalin and Hitler, Mussolini favored a return of traditional roles for women. He abolished divorce and told women to stay at home and produce children. In 1938 women were limited by law to a maximum of 10 percent of the better-paying jobs in industry and government.

Mussolini’s government passed no racial laws until 1938 and did not persecute Jews savagely until late in the Second World War, when Italy was under Nazi control. Nor did Mussolini establish a truly ruthless police state. Only twenty-three political prisoners were condemned to death between 1926 and 1944. Mussolini’s Fascist Italy, though repressive and undemocratic, was never really totalitarian.

Hitler and Nazism in Germany

Why were Hitler and his Nazi regime initially so popular, and how did their actions lead to World War II?

The most frightening dictatorship developed in Nazi Germany. Here Nazism asserted an unlimited claim over German society and proclaimed the ultimate power of its leader, Adolf Hitler. Nazism’s aspirations were truly totalitarian.

The Roots of Nazism

Nazism grew out of many complex concepts, of which the most influential were extreme nationalism and racism. These ideas captured the mind of the young Adolf Hitler (1889–1945) and evolved into Nazism.

The son of an Austrian customs official, Hitler did poorly in high school and dropped out at age sixteen. He then headed to Vienna, where he was exposed to extreme Austro-German nationalists who believed Germans to be a superior people and central Europe’s natural rulers. They advocated union with Germany and violent expulsion of “inferior” peoples from the Austro-Hungarian Empire.

From these extremists Hitler eagerly absorbed virulent anti-Semitism, racism, and hatred of Slavs. He developed an unshakable belief in the crudest distortions of Social Darwinism (see “Science for the Masses” in Chapter 24), the superiority of Germanic races, and the inevitability of racial conflict. The Jews, he claimed, directed an international conspiracy of finance capitalism and Marxist socialism against German culture, German unity, and the German race. Anti-Semitism and racism became Hitler’s most passionate convictions.

Hitler greeted the Great War’s outbreak as a salvation. The struggle and discipline of serving as a soldier in the war gave his life meaning, and when Germany suddenly surrendered in 1918, Hitler’s world was shattered. Convinced that Jews and Marxists had “stabbed Germany in the back,” he vowed to fight on.

In late 1919 Hitler joined a tiny extremist group in Munich called the German Workers’ Party. By 1921 Hitler had gained absolute control of this small but growing party, now renamed the National Socialist German Worker’s Party, or Nazi Party. A master of mass propaganda and political showmanship, Hitler worked his audiences into a frenzy with wild attacks on the Versailles treaty, the Jews, war profiteers, and Germany’s Weimar Republic.

In late 1923 Germany under the Weimar Republic was experiencing unparalleled hyperinflation and seemed on the verge of collapse (see “Germany and the Western Powers” in Chapter 28). Hitler, inspired by Mussolini’s recent victory, attempted an armed uprising in Munich. Despite the failure of the poorly organized plot and Hitler’s arrest, Nazism had been born.

Hitler’s Road to Power

At his trial Hitler violently denounced the Weimar Republic and attracted enormous publicity. During his brief prison term in 1924 he dictated Mein Kampf (My Struggle), in which he expounded on his basic ideas on race and anti-Semitism, the notion of territorial expansion based on “living space” for Germans, and the role of the leader-dictator, called the Führer (FYOOR-uhr).

The Nazis remained a small splinter group until the 1929 Great Depression shattered the economic prosperity and stability of the late 1920s. By the end of 1932, 32 percent or more of Germany’s labor force was unemployed. Industrial production fell by one-half between 1929 and 1932. No factor contributed more to Hitler’s success than this economic crisis.

Hitler rejected free-market capitalism and advocated government programs to promote recovery. He pitched his speeches to middle- and lower-middle-class groups and to skilled workers. As the economy collapsed, great numbers of these people “voted their pocketbooks”¹⁸ and deserted the conservative and moderate parties for the Nazis. In the July 1932 election the Nazis won 14.5 million votes — 38 percent of the total — and became the largest party in the Reichstag.

Hitler and the Nazis appealed strongly to German youth; Hitler himself was only forty in 1929. In 1931 almost 40 percent of Nazi Party members were under thirty, compared with 20 percent of Social Democrats. “National Socialism is the organized will of the youth,”¹⁹ proclaimed the official Nazi slogan. National recovery, exciting and rapid change, and personal advancement made Nazism appealing to millions of German youths.

Hitler also came to power because of the breakdown of democratic government. Germany’s economic collapse in the Great Depression convinced many voters that the country’s republican leaders were incompetent and corrupt. Disunity on the left was another nail in the republic’s coffin. The Communists refused to cooperate with the Social Democrats, even though the two parties together outnumbered the Nazis in the Reichstag.

Finally, Hitler excelled in backroom politics. In 1932 he succeeded in gaining support from key people in the army, big business, and politics, who thought they could manipulate and use him to their own advantage. Thus in January 1933 President Paul von Hindenburg (1847–1934) legally appointed Hitler, leader of Germany’s largest party, as German chancellor.

The Nazi State and Society

Hitler quickly established an unshakable dictatorship. When the Reichstag building was partly destroyed by fire in February 1933, Hitler blamed the Communist Party. He convinced President von Hindenburg to sign dictatorial emergency acts that abolished freedom of speech and assembly and most personal liberties. He also called for new elections in an effort to solidify his political power.

When the Nazis won only 44 percent of the votes, Hitler outlawed the Communist Party and arrested its parliamentary representatives. Then on March 23, 1933, the Nazis forced through the Reichstag the so-called Enabling Act, which gave Hitler absolute dictatorial power for four years.

Hitler and the Nazis took over the government bureaucracy, installing many Nazis in top positions. Hitler next outlawed strikes and abolished independent labor unions, which were replaced by the Nazi Labor Front. Professional people — doctors and lawyers, teachers and engineers — also saw their independent organizations swallowed up in Nazi associations. Publishing houses and universities were put under Nazi control, and students and professors publicly burned forbidden books. Modern art and architecture were ruthlessly prohibited. Life became violently anti-intellectual. As the cynical Joseph Goebbels, later Nazi minister of propaganda, put it, “When I hear the word ‘culture’ I reach for my gun.”²⁰ By 1934 a brutal dictatorship characterized by frightening dynamism and total obedience to Hitler was already largely in place.

In 1934 Hitler also ordered that all civil servants and members of the German armed forces swear a binding oath of “unquestioning obedience” to Adolf Hitler. The SS — Hitler’s elite personal guard — grew rapidly. Under Heinrich Himmler (1900–1945), the SS took over the political police (the Gestapo) and expanded its network of concentration camps.

From the beginning, German Jews were a special object of Nazi persecution. By late 1934 most Jewish lawyers, doctors, professors, civil servants, and musicians had been banned from their professions. In 1935 the infamous Nuremberg Laws classified as Jewish anyone having three or more Jewish grandparents and deprived Jews of all rights of citizenship. By 1938 roughly one-quarter of Germany’s half million Jews had emigrated, sacrificing almost all their property in order to leave Germany.

In late 1938 the attack on the Jews accelerated and grew more violent. On November 9 and 10, 1938, the Nazis initiated a series of well-organized attacks against Jews throughout Nazi Germany and some parts of Austria. This infamous event is known as Kristallnacht (krees-TAHL-nahkht), or Night of Broken Glass, after the broken glass that littered the streets following the frenzied destruction of Jewish homes, shops, synagogues, and neighborhoods by German civilians and uniformed storm troopers. U.S. consul David Buffum reported of the Nazis in Leipzig:

The most hideous phase of the so-called “spontaneous” action, has been the wholesale arrest and transportation to concentration camps of male German Jews between the ages of sixteen and sixty…. Having demolished dwellings and hurled most of the effects to the streets, the insatiably sadistic perpetrators threw many of the trembling inmates into a small stream that flows through the Zoological Park, commanding horrified spectators to spit at them, defile them with mud and jeer at their plight.²¹

Many historians consider this night the beginning of Hitler’s Final Solution against the Jews, and after this event it became very difficult for Jews to leave Germany.

Some Germans privately opposed these outrages, but most went along or looked the other way. Although this lack of response reflected the individual’s helplessness in a totalitarian state, it also reflected the strong popular support Hitler’s government enjoyed.

Hitler’s Popularity

Hitler had promised the masses economic recovery — “work and bread” — and he delivered. The Nazi Party launched a large public works program to pull Germany out of the depression. In 1935 Germany turned decisively toward rearmament. Unemployment dropped steadily, and by 1938 the Nazis boasted of nearly full employment. For millions of Germans economic recovery was tangible evidence that Nazi promises were more than show and propaganda.

For ordinary German citizens, in contrast to those deemed “undesirable” (Jews, Slavs, Gypsies, Jehovah’s Witnesses, Communists, and homosexuals), Hitler’s government offered greater equality and more opportunities. In 1933 class barriers in Germany were generally high. Hitler’s rule introduced changes that lowered these barriers. The new Nazi elite included many young and poorly educated dropouts, rootless lower-middle-class people like Hitler who rose to the top with breathtaking speed. More generally, however, the Nazis tolerated privilege and wealth only as long as they served party needs.

Yet Hitler and the Nazis failed to bring about a real social revolution. The well-educated classes held on to most of their advantages, and only a modest social leveling occurred in the Nazi years. Significantly, the Nazis shared with the Italian Fascists the stereotypical view of women as housewives and mothers. Only when facing labor shortages during the war did they reluctantly mobilize large numbers of German women for office and factory work.²²

Not all Germans supported Hitler, and a number of German groups actively resisted him after 1933. Tens of thousands of political enemies were imprisoned, and thousands were executed. In the first years of Hitler’s rule, the principal resisters were trade-union Communists and Socialists. Catholic and Protestant churches produced a second group of opponents. Their efforts were directed primarily at preserving genuine religious life, however, not at overthrowing Hitler. Finally, in 1938 and again during the war, some high-ranking army officers, who feared the consequences of Hitler’s reckless aggression, plotted, unsuccessfully, against him.

Aggression and Appeasement, 1933–1939

After Germany’s economic recovery and Hitler’s success in establishing Nazi control of society, Hitler turned to the next item on his agenda: aggressive territorial expansion. Germany’s withdrawal from the League of Nations in October 1933 indicated its determination to rearm. When in March 1935 Hitler established a general military draft and declared the “unequal” Versailles treaty disarmament clauses null and void, leaders in Britain, France, and Italy issued a rather tepid joint protest and warned him against future aggressive actions.

But the emerging united front against Hitler quickly collapsed. Britain adopted a policy of appeasement, granting Hitler everything he could reasonably want (and more) in order to avoid war. British appeasement, which practically dictated French policy, had the support of many powerful British conservatives who, as in Germany, underestimated Hitler. The British people, still horrified by the memory, the costs, and the losses of the First World War, generally supported pacifism rather than war.

Some British leaders at the time, however, such as Winston Churchill, bitterly condemned appeasement as peace at any price. After the war, British appeasement came to be viewed as “the granting from fear or cowardice of unwarranted concessions in order to buy temporary peace at someone else’s expense.”²³ Beginning in the 1990s some historians have argued that British leaders had no real choice but to appease Hitler in the 1930s, because neither Great Britain nor France was prepared psychologically or militarily to fight another war.²⁴

In March 1936 Hitler marched his armies without notice into the demilitarized Rhineland, violating the Treaties of Versailles and Locarno. France would not move without British support, and Britain refused to act. As Britain and France opted for appeasement, Hitler found powerful allies, particularly Mussolini, who in October 1935 had attacked the independent African kingdom of Ethiopia. Western powers had condemned the Italian aggression, but Hitler supported Italy energetically. In October 1936 Italy and Germany established the so-called Rome-Berlin Axis. Japan, which wanted support for its occupation of Manchuria, joined the Axis alliance in 1940 (see “Japan Against China” in Chapter 29).

At the same time, Germany and Italy intervened in the Spanish Civil War (1936–1939), where their support helped General Francisco Franco’s Fascist movement defeat republican Spain. Republican Spain’s only official aid in the fight against Franco came from the Soviet Union.

In late 1937 Hitler moved forward with his plans to crush Austria and Czechoslovakia as the first step in his long-contemplated drive to the east for living space. On March 12, 1938, German armies moved into Austria unopposed, and Austria became two provinces of Greater Germany (Map 30.1).

MAP 30.1 The Growth of Nazi Germany, 1933–1939 Until March 1939 Hitler brought ethnic Germans into the Nazi state; then he turned on the Slavic peoples, whom he had always hated. He stripped Czechoslovakia of its independence and prepared for an attack on Poland in September 1939.

Map shows Germany as it existed in 1933, including East Prussia. Austria was annexed in 1938. Czechoslovakia became a satellite state of Germany in March 1939. Poland was conquered by Germany in September 1939. The land to the east of Poland from Lithuania to Romania was annexed by the Soviet Union in September 1939. The area along the Rhine River in western Germany was remilitarized in 1936.

Simultaneously, Hitler demanded that the pro-Nazi, German-speaking territory of western Czechoslovakia — the Sudetenland — be turned over to Germany. Democratic Czechoslovakia was prepared to defend itself, but appeasement triumphed again. In September 1938 British prime minister Arthur Neville Chamberlain (1869–1940) and French negotiators met with Hitler in Munich and agreed with him that the Sudetenland should be ceded to Germany immediately. Returning to London from the Munich Conference, Chamberlain told cheering crowds that he had secured “peace with honour … peace for our time.”²⁵ Sold out by the Western powers, Czechoslovakia gave in.

Hitler Playing with All the Statesmen This satirical cartoon from 1938 shows Hitler playing with all the statesmen attending the Four Power (Italy, Germany, England, France) Peace Conference that year in Munich. The Munich Agreement that came out of this meeting permitted Germany to annex the Sudetenland in Czechoslovakia, although representatives of that country were not invited to the conference. British prime minister Neville Chamberlain is portrayed in the lower right corner, under Hitler’s boot.

Cartoon shows an incredibly large Hitler lying back on a field with mountains behind him. Different statesmen are shown as small figures. Some are shading him with an umbrella; Hitler is holding another in his hand looking directly at him. Others are shown playing around him, and some others are shown fighting with each other.

Hitler’s armies occupied the remainder of Czechoslovakia, however, in March 1939. This time, there was no possible rationale of self-determination for Nazi aggression. When Hitler used the question of German minorities in Danzig as a pretext to confront Poland, Chamberlain declared that Britain and France would fight if Hitler attacked his eastern neighbor. Hitler did not take these warnings seriously and pressed on.

Through the 1930s Hitler had constantly referred to ethnic Slavs in the Soviet Union and other countries as Untermenschen (OON-ter-men-schen) (inferior people), and relations between the two countries had grown increasingly tense. War between Germany and the Soviet Union seemed inevitable, and, indeed, Stalin believed that Great Britain and France secretly hoped the Nazis and Bolsheviks would destroy each other. Then, in an about-face that stunned the world, sworn enemies Hitler and Stalin signed a nonaggression pact in August 1939. Each dictator promised to remain neutral if the other became involved in war. An attached secret protocol divided eastern Europe into German and Soviet zones “in the event of a political and territorial reorganization.”²⁶ Stalin agreed to the pact for three reasons: he distrusted Western intentions, he needed more time to build up Soviet industry and military reserves, and Hitler offered territorial gain.

For Hitler, everything was now set. He told his generals on the day of the nonaggression pact, “My only fear is that at the last moment some dirty dog will come up with a mediation plan.”²⁷ On September 1, 1939, the Germans attacked Poland from three sides. Two days later, Britain and France, finally true to their word, declared war on Germany. The Second World War in Europe had begun.

The Second World War, 1939–1945

How did Germany and Japan build empires in Europe and Asia, and how did the Allies defeat them?

World war broke out because Hitler’s and Japan’s ambitions were essentially unlimited. Nazi soldiers scored enormous successes in Europe until late 1942, establishing a vast empire of death and destruction. Japan attacked the United States in December 1941 and then moved to expand its empire throughout Asia and the Pacific Ocean. Eventually, the mighty Grand Alliance of Britain, the United States, and the Soviet Union overwhelmed the aggressors in manpower and military strength. Thus the Nazi and Japanese empires proved short-lived.

Hitler’s Empire in Europe, 1939–1942

Using planes, tanks, and trucks in the first example of a blitzkrieg (BLITZ-kreeg), or “lightning war,” Hitler’s armies crushed Poland in four weeks. The Soviet Union quickly took its share agreed to in the secret protocol — the eastern half of Poland and the Baltic states of Lithuania, Estonia, and Latvia. In spring 1940 the Nazi lightning war struck again. After occupying Denmark, Norway, and Holland, German motorized columns broke through southern Belgium and into France.

As Hitler’s armies poured into France, aging marshal Henri-Philippe Pétain, a national hero of the Great War, formed a new French government — the so-called Vichy (VIH-shee) government — and accepted defeat. By July 1940 Hitler ruled practically all of western continental Europe; Italy was an ally, the Soviet Union a friendly neutral (Map 30.2). Only Britain, led by Winston Churchill (1874–1965), remained unconquered.

MAP 30.2 World War II in Europe and Africa, 1939–1945 The map shows the extent of Hitler’s empire at its height, before the Battle of Stalingrad in late 1942 and the subsequent advances of the Allies until Germany surrendered on May 7, 1945.

Map shows the following countries to be Axis powers or allies: Finland, Germany, Poland, Italy, Croatia, Slovakia, Hungary, Romania, Bulgaria, Albania, Croatia and Libya. Countries that were occupied by Germany and its allies are: Norway, Denmark, Latvia, Lithuania, Belarus, the Ukraine, Tunisia, Algeria, and Morocco.

Allied Powers and their allies were Great Britain, Egypt, Syria, Iraq, and the Soviet Union. Neutral nations are Spain, Sweden, Turkey, and Saudi Arabia.

Major battles were: the Siege at Warsaw in September 1939, the Battle of Britain in Fall 1940, the Battle For Crete from May 20 to June 1, 1941, the Siege of Leningrad from September 1941 to January 1944, Germans repulsed in December 1941 in Moscow, the Siege of Stalingrad from August 21, 1942 to January 31, 1943, the Axis troops’ occupation of Vichy, France from November 10th to 11th in 1942, Algeria and Morocco join the Allies in November 1942, Axis troops evacuated from Tunisia in May 1943, Allies invade Sicily and Italy from July to September of 1943, the Uprising at Warsaw from August to September of 1944, and Germany surrenders on May 8, 1945 in Berlin.

To prepare for an invasion of Britain, Germany first needed to gain control of the air. In the Battle of Britain, which began in July 1940, German planes attacked British airfields and key factories, dueling with British defenders high in the skies. In September Hitler began indiscriminately bombing British cities to break British morale. British aircraft factories increased production, and Londoners defiantly dug in. By September Britain was winning the air war, and Hitler abandoned his plans for an immediate German invasion of Britain.

Hitler now allowed his lifetime obsession of creating a vast eastern European empire for the “master race” to dictate policy. In June 1941 Germany broke the Nazi-Soviet nonaggression pact and attacked the Soviet Union. By October Leningrad was practically surrounded, Moscow was besieged, and most of Ukraine had been conquered. But the Soviets did not collapse, and when a severe winter struck German armies outfitted in summer uniforms, the invaders were stopped.

Although stalled in Russia, Hitler ruled an enormous European empire. He now began building a New Order based on the guiding principle of Nazi totalitarianism: racial imperialism. Within the New Order, the Dutch, Norwegians, Swedes, and Danes received preferential treatment, for the Germans believed they were racially related to the German “Aryan” master race. The French, an “inferior” Latin people, occupied the middle position. At the bottom of the New Order were the harshly treated “subhumans,” Jews and Slavs.

Hitler envisioned a vast eastern colonial empire where enslaved Poles, Ukrainians, and Russians would die or be killed off while Germanic peasants would resettle the abandoned lands. Himmler and the elite SS corps implemented a program of destruction in the occupied territories to create a “mass settlement space” for Germans.

The Holocaust

Finally, the Nazi state condemned all European Jews to extermination in the Holocaust. After Warsaw fell in 1939, the Nazis forced Jews in the occupied territories to move to urban ghettos, while German Jews were sent to occupied Poland. After Germany attacked Russia in June 1941, forced expulsion spiraled into extermination. In late 1941 Hitler and the Nazi leadership ordered the SS to speed up planning for “the final solution of the Jewish question.”²⁸ Throughout the Nazi empire Jews were systematically arrested, packed like cattle onto freight trains, and dispatched to extermination camps.

Prelude to Murder This photo captures the terrible inhumanity of Nazi racism. Frightened and bewildered families from the soon-to-be-destroyed Warsaw Ghetto are being forced out of their homes by German soldiers for deportation to concentration camps. There they faced murder in the gas chambers.

Black and white photo showing families being forced from their houses by German soldiers. There are men, women, and children, all with their hands in the air. Many are carrying bags with belongings.

Arriving at their destination, small numbers of Jews were sent to nearby slave labor camps, where they were starved and systematically worked to death. Most victims were taken to “shower rooms,” which were actually gas chambers. By 1945 about 6 million Jews had been murdered.

Who was responsible for this terrible crime? After the war, historians laid the guilt on Hitler and the Nazi leadership, arguing that ordinary Germans had little knowledge of the extermination camps, or that those who cooperated had no alternative given the brutality of Nazi terror and totalitarian control. Beginning in the 1990s studies appeared revealing a much broader participation of German people in the Holocaust and popular indifference (or worse) to the Jews’ fate.²⁹In most occupied countries local non-German officials also cooperated in the arrest and deportation of Jews.

Japan’s Asian Empire

By late 1938, 1.5 million Japanese troops were bogged down in China, holding a great swath of territory but unable to defeat the Nationalists and the Communists (see “Japan Against China” in Chapter 29). In 1939, as war broke out in Europe, the Japanese redoubled their ruthless efforts in China. Implementing a savage policy of “kill all, burn all, destroy all,” Japanese troops committed shocking atrocities, including the so-called Rape of Nanjing. During Japan’s war in China — the second Sino-Japanese War (1937–1945) — the Japanese are estimated to have killed 4 million Chinese people.

In August 1940 the Japanese announced the formation of a self-sufficient Asian economic zone. Although they spoke of liberating Asia from Western imperialism and of “Asia for the Asians,” their true intentions were to eventually rule over a vast Japanese empire. Ultranationalists moved to convince Japan’s youth that Japan had a sacred liberating mission in Asia.

For the moment, however, Japan needed allies. In September 1940 Japan signed a formal alliance (the Axis alliance) with Germany and Italy, and Vichy France granted the Japanese dominion over northern French Indochina. The United States, upset with Japan’s occupation of Indochina and fearing embattled Britain would collapse if it lost its Asian colonies, froze scrap iron sales to Japan and applied further economic sanctions in October.

As 1941 opened, Japan’s leaders faced a critical decision. At the time, the United States was the world’s largest oil producer and supplied over 90 percent of Japan’s oil needs. Japan had only a year and a half’s worth of military and economic oil reserves, which the war in China and the Japanese military and merchant navies were quickly drawing down. The Netherlands’ colonial possessions in Indonesia (Netherlands East Indies) could supply all of Japan’s oil, rubber, and tin needs, but the Japanese feared an attack there would bring American reprisal. On July 26, 1941, President Roosevelt embargoed all oil exports to Japan and froze its assets in the United States. Japan now had to either recall its forces from China or go to war before running out of oil. It chose war.

On December 7, 1941, Japan launched a surprise attack on the U.S. fleet in Pearl Harbor in the Hawaiian Islands. Japan hoped to cripple its Pacific rival, gain time to build a defensible Asian empire, and eventually win an ill-defined compromise peace.

The Japanese attack was a limited success. The Japanese sank or crippled every American battleship, but by chance all the American aircraft carriers were at sea and escaped unharmed. Hours later the Japanese destroyed half of the American Far East Air Force stationed at Clark Air Base in the Philippines. Americans were humiliated by these unexpected defeats, which soon overwhelmed American isolationism and brought the United States into the war.

Hitler immediately declared war on the United States. Simultaneously, Japanese armies successfully attacked European and American colonies in Southeast Asia. Small but well-trained Japanese armies defeated larger Dutch and British armies to seize the Netherlands East Indies and the British colonies of Hong Kong, Malaya, and Singapore. After American forces surrendered the Philippines in May 1942, Japan held a vast empire in Southeast Asia and the western Pacific (Map 30.3).

MAP 30.3 World War II in the Pacific In 1942 Japanese forces overran an enormous amount of territory, which the Allies slowly recaptured in a long, bitter struggle.

Map shows China, India, Australia, Southern New Guinea, Alaska, and a small piece of land at the southeast coast of China to be Allied controlled territories. The northern part of New Guinea, Burma, the Philippines, and another small piece of land at the southeast coast of China to be territory gained by Allies before the Japanese surrender. Thailand, French Indochina, Malaya, the Dutch East Indies, Japan, Korea, and most of Eastern China are Japanese controlled territories at the surrender on August 14, 1945. The farthest advance of the Japanese conquest as of 1942 was just east of the Marshall Islands to the east; south to most of New Guinea and Singapore; west to Burma and the eastern part of China; and north to Manchuria and the Kurile Islands.

Allied advances are shown going north in the Pacific to the Solomon Islands in 1942 and 1943. Allied advances are shown going west from the Hawaiian Islands to the Marshall Islands in 1943. Allied advances went further west in 1944 from the Marshall Islands to Guam and from Guam to the Philippines. In 1944 Allied advances also moved north from the Solomon Islands to the Philippines. From the Philippines, Allied forces moved south to Borneo, as well as north to Okinawa in 1945. Also in 1945 Allied forces moved north from Guam to Okinawa and Iwo Jima. 1945 also saw Allied forces moving south from India to Burma; from China into the area controlled by the Japanese, and from the north into Manchuria.

Major battles are:

Burma

Leyte in the Philippines – October 1944

Coral Sea – May 1942

Guadalcanal – August 1942-February 1943

Guam – July-August 1944

Midway – June 1942

Pearl Harbor – December 1941

Iwo Jima – February-March 1945

Okinawa – April-June 1945

The Japanese claimed they were freeing Asians from Western imperialism, and they called their empire the Greater East Asian Co-Prosperity Sphere. Most local populations were glad to see the Western powers go, but Asian faith in “co-prosperity” and support for Japan steadily declined as the war progressed. Although the Japanese set up anticolonial governments and promised genuine independence, real power always rested with Japanese military commanders and their superiors in Tokyo. Moreover, the Japanese never treated local populations as equals, and the occupiers exploited local peoples for Japan’s wartime needs.

The Japanese often exhibited great cruelty toward prisoners of war and civilians. Dutch, Indonesian, and perhaps as many as two hundred thousand Korean women were forced to provide sex for Japanese soldiers as “comfort women.” Recurring cruel behavior aroused local populations against the invaders.

The Grand Alliance

While the Nazis and the Japanese built their empires, Great Britain (the greatest colonial power), the United States (the greatest capitalist power), and the Soviet Union (the greatest Communist power) joined together in an unlikely military pact called the Grand Alliance. The vagaries of war, rather than choice, brought them together. Stalin had been cooperating with Hitler before Germany attacked Russia in June 1941, and the United States entered the war only after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor in December.

Grand Alliance leaders agreed to a Europe first policy set forth by Churchill and adopted by Roosevelt. Only after defeating Hitler would the Allies mount an all-out attack on Japan. To encourage mutual trust, the Allies adopted the principle of the unconditional surrender of Germany and Japan, and no unilateral treaties (as Russia had signed with Germany in World War I). This policy cemented the Grand Alliance because it denied Germany and Japan any hope of dividing their foes.

The Grand Alliance’s military resources were awesome. The United States possessed a unique capacity to wage global war with its large population and mighty industry, which it harnessed in 1943 to outproduce not only the Axis powers but also the rest of the world combined.³⁰ The British economy was totally and effectively mobilized, and the country became an important staging area for the war in Europe. As for the Soviet Union, so great was its economic strength that it might well have defeated Germany without Western help. Stalin drew on the massive support of the people for what the Soviets called the “Great Patriotic War of the Fatherland.”

The War in Europe, 1942–1945

Halted at the gates of Moscow and Leningrad in 1941, the Germans renewed their offensive against the Soviet Union in 1942 and attacked Stalingrad in July. The Soviet armies counterattacked, quickly surrounding the entire German Sixth Army of 300,000 men. By late January 1943 only 123,000 soldiers were left to surrender. In summer 1943 the larger, better-equipped Soviet armies took the offensive and began to push the Germans back (see Map 30.2).

Not yet prepared to attack Germany directly through France, the Western Allies engaged in heavy fighting in North Africa (see Map 30.2). In autumn 1942 British forces defeated German and Italian armies at the Battle of El Alamein (el a-luh-MAYN) in Egypt. Shortly thereafter an Anglo-American force took control of the Vichy French colonies of Morocco and Algeria.

Having driven the Axis powers from North Africa by spring 1943, Allied forces invaded Italy. War-weary Italians deposed Mussolini, and the new Italian government accepted unconditional surrender in September 1943. Italy, it seemed, was liberated. But German commandos rescued Mussolini and made him head of a puppet government. German armies seized Rome and all of northern Italy. They finally surrendered only on April 29, 1945. Two days earlier Mussolini had been captured by partisan forces, and he was executed the next day.

On June 6, 1944, American and British forces under General Dwight Eisenhower landed on the beaches of Normandy, France, in history’s greatest naval invasion. More than 2 million men and almost 0.5 million vehicles pushed inland and broke through the German lines.

In early February 1945 a sick and feeble Franklin Roosevelt met with Stalin and Churchill at Yalta in the Russian Crimea to negotiate plans for the remainder of the war in Europe, Russia’s participation in the war in Asia, and the postwar world. Roosevelt was later severely criticized by some for supposedly “handing over” eastern Europe and northeast Asia (North Korea in particular) to the Soviet Union. Other scholars have noted, however, that Stalin made substantial concessions as well.

In March 1945 American troops crossed the Rhine and entered Germany. The Soviets had been advancing steadily since July 1943, and on April 26, 1945, the Red Army met American forces on the Elbe River in Germany. As Soviet forces fought their way into Berlin, Hitler committed suicide in his bunker on April 30. On May 7 the remaining German commanders capitulated.

The War in the Pacific, 1942–1945

While gigantic armies clashed on land in Europe, the greatest naval battles in history decided the fate of the war in Asia. In April 1942 the Japanese devised a plan to take Port Moresby in New Guinea and also destroy U.S. aircraft carriers in an attack on Midway Island (see Map 30.3). Having broken the secret Japanese code, the Americans skillfully won a series of decisive naval victories. First, in the Battle of the Coral Sea in May 1942, an American carrier force halted the Japanese advance on Port Moresby. Then, in the Battle of Midway in June 1942, American pilots sank all four of the attacking Japanese aircraft carriers and established overall naval equality with Japan in the Pacific.

The United States gradually won control of the sea and air as it geared up its war industry. By 1943 the United States was producing one hundred thousand aircraft a year, almost twice as many as Japan produced in the entire war. In July 1943 the Americans and their Australian allies opened an “island-hopping” campaign toward Japan. By 1944 hundreds of American submarines were hunting in “wolf packs,” decimating shipping and destroying economic links in Japan’s far-flung, overextended empire.

The Pacific war was brutal — a “war without mercy” — and atrocities were committed on both sides.³¹ Aware of Japanese atrocities in China and the Philippines, the U.S. forces seldom took Japanese prisoners after the Battle of Guadalcanal in August 1942, killing even those rare Japanese soldiers who offered to surrender. American forces moving across the central and western Pacific in 1943 and 1944 faced unyielding resistance, and this resistance hardened soldiers as American casualties kept rising. A product of spiraling violence, mutual hatred, and dehumanizing racial stereotypes, the war without mercy intensified as it moved toward Japan.

In June 1944 U.S. bombers began a relentless bombing campaign of the Japanese home islands. In October 1944 American forces under General Douglas MacArthur landed on Leyte Island in the Philippines. In the ensuing Battle of Leyte Gulf, the Japanese lost 13 large warships, including 4 aircraft carriers, while the Americans lost only 3 small ships. The Japanese navy was practically finished.

In spite of massive defeats, Japanese troops continued to fight on. Indeed, the bloodiest battles of the Pacific war took place on Iwo Jima in February 1945 and on Okinawa in June 1945. American commanders believed that an invasion of Japan might cost 1 million American casualties and possibly 10 to 20 million Japanese lives. In fact, Japan was almost helpless, its industry and cities largely destroyed by intense American bombing. As the war in Europe ended in April 1945, Japanese leaders were divided. Hardliners argued that surrender was unthinkable; Japan had never been invaded or lost a war. A peace faction sought a negotiated end to the war.

On July 26 Truman, Churchill, and Stalin issued the Potsdam Declaration, which demanded unconditional surrender. The declaration left unclear whether the Japanese emperor would be treated as a war criminal. The Japanese, who considered Emperor Hirohito a god, sought clarification and amnesty for him. The Allies remained adamant that the surrender be unconditional. The Japanese felt compelled to fight on.

On August 6 and 9, 1945, the United States dropped atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in Japan. Also on August 9, Soviet troops launched an invasion of the Japanese puppet state of Manchukuo (Manchuria, China). To avoid a Soviet invasion and further atomic bombing, the Japanese announced their surrender on August 14, 1945. The Second World War, which had claimed the lives of more than 50 million soldiers and civilians, was over.

Chapter Summary

The 1929 American stock market crash triggered a global Great Depression. Western democracies expanded their powers and responded with relief programs. Authoritarian and Fascist regimes arose to replace some capitalist democracies. Only World War II ended the depression.

The radical totalitarian dictatorships of the 1920s and 1930s were repressive, profoundly antiliberal, and exceedingly violent. Mussolini set up the first Fascist government, a one-party dictatorship, but it was never truly a totalitarian state on the order of Hitler’s Germany or Stalin’s Soviet Union. In the Soviet Union Stalin launched a socialist “revolution from above” to modernize and industrialize the U.S.S.R. Mass purges of the Communist Party in the 1930s led to the imprisonment and deaths of millions.

Hitler and the Nazi elite rallied support by recalling the humiliation of World War I and the terms of the Versailles treaty, condemning Germany’s leaders, building on racist prejudices against “inferior” peoples, and warning of a vast Jewish conspiracy to harm Germany and the German race. The Great Depression caused German voters to turn to Hitler for relief. After he declared the Versailles treaty disarmament clause null and void, British and French leaders tried appeasement. On September 1, 1939, his unprovoked attack on Poland forced the Allies to declare war, starting World War II.

Nazi armies first seized Poland and Germany’s western neighbors and then turned east. Here Hitler planned to build a New Order based on racial imperialism. In the Holocaust that followed, millions of Jews and other “undesirables” were systematically exterminated. In Asia the Japanese created the Greater East Asian Co-Prosperity Sphere. This was a sham, as “Asia for the Asians” meant nothing but Japanese domination and control. After Japan attacked Pearl Harbor, the United States entered the war. In 1945 the Grand Alliance of the United States, Britain, and the Soviet Union defeated, outproduced, and outmanned Germany and Japan.

 CONNECTIONS

If anyone still doubted the interconnectedness of all the world’s inhabitants following the Great War, those doubts faded as events on a truly global scale touched everyone as never before. First a Great Depression shook the financial foundations of the wealthiest capitalist economies and the poorest producers of raw materials and minerals. Another world war followed, bringing global death and destruction. At war’s end, as we shall see in Chapter 31, the world’s leaders revived Woodrow Wilson’s idea of a League of Nations and formed the United Nations in 1946 to prevent such tragedies from ever reoccurring.

Although the U

The Great Depression and World War II

1929–1945

CHAPTER PREVIEW

1. The Great Depression, 1929–1939

• What caused the Great Depression, and what were its consequences?

2. Authoritarian States

• What was the nature of the new totalitarian dictatorships, and how did they differ from conservative authoritarian states and from each other?

3. Stalin’s Soviet Union

• How did Stalin and the Communist Party build a totalitarian order in the Soviet Union?

4. Mussolini and Fascism in Italy

• How did Italian fascism develop?

5. Hitler and Nazism in Germany

• Why were Hitler and his Nazi regime initially so popular, and how did their actions lead to World War II?

6. The Second World War, 1939–1945

• How did Germany and Japan build empires in Europe and Asia, and how did the Allies defeat them?

THE YEARS OF ANXIETY AND POLITICAL MANEUVERING IN EUROPE after World War I were made much worse when a massive economic depression spread around the world following the American stock market crash of October 1929. An increasingly interconnected global economy now collapsed. Free-market capitalism appeared to have run its course. People everywhere looked for relief to new leaders, some democratically elected, many not. In Europe, on the eve of the Second World War, few liberal democratic governments survived. Worldwide, in countries such as Brazil, Japan, the Soviet Union, and others, as well as in Europe, dictatorships seemed the wave of the future.

The mid-twentieth-century era of dictatorship is a deeply disturbing chapter in the history of civilization. The key development was not only the resurgence of authoritarian rule, but also the rise of a particularly ruthless brand of totalitarianism that reached its fullest realization in the Soviet Union, Nazi Germany, and Japan in the 1930s. Stalin, Hitler, and Japan’s military leaders intervened radically in society and ruled with unprecedented severity. Hitler’s sudden attack on Poland in 1939 started World War II in Europe. His successes encouraged the Japanese to expand their stalemated Chinese campaign into a vast Pacific war. By war’s end, millions had died on the battlefields and in the bombed-out cities. Millions more died in the Holocaust, in Stalin’s Soviet Union from purges and forced imposition of communism, and during Japan’s quest to create an “Asia for Asians.”

The Great Depression, 1929–1939

What caused the Great Depression, and what were its consequences?

Like the Great War, the Great Depression must be spelled with capital letters. Beginning in 1929 an exceptionally long and severe economic depression struck the entire world with ever-greater intensity, and recovery was uneven and slow. Only the Second World War brought it to an end.

The Economic Crisis

Though economic activity was already declining moderately in many countries by early 1929, the U.S. stock market crash in October of that year really started the Great Depression. The American stock market boom was built on borrowed money. Two factors explain why. First, the wealth gap (or income inequality) between America’s rich and poor reached its greatest extent in the twentieth century in 1928–1929. One percent of Americans then held 70 percent of all America’s wealth. Eventually, with not enough money to go around, the remaining 99 percent of Americans had to borrow to make even basic purchases — as a result, the cost of farm credit, installment loans, and home mortgages skyrocketed. Then a point was reached where the 99 percent could borrow no more, so they stopped buying.

Second, wealthy investors and speculators took increasingly greater investment risks. One such popular risk was to buy stocks by paying only a small fraction of the total purchase price and borrowing the remainder from their stockbrokers or from banks. Such buying “on margin” was extremely dangerous. When prices started falling, the hard-pressed margin buyers started selling to pay their debts. The result was a financial panic. Countless investors and speculators were wiped out in a matter of days or weeks, and the New York stock market’s crash started a domino effect that hit most of the world’s major stock exchanges.

The financial panic in the United States triggered a worldwide financial crisis. Throughout the 1920s American bankers and investors had lent large sums to many countries, and as panic spread, New York bankers began recalling their short-term loans. Frightened citizens around the world began to withdraw their bank savings, leading to general financial chaos. The recall of American loans also accelerated the collapse in world prices, as business people dumped goods in a frantic attempt to get cash to pay what they owed.

The financial chaos led to a drastic decline in production in country after country. Between 1929 and 1933 world output of goods fell by an estimated 38 percent. Countries now turned inward and tried to go it alone. Many followed the American example, in which protective tariffs were raised to their highest levels ever in 1930 to seal off shrinking national markets for American producers only.

Although historians’ opinions differ, two factors probably best explain the relentless slide to the bottom from 1929 to early 1933. First, the international economy lacked leadership able to maintain stability when the crisis came. Neither the seriously weakened Britain nor the United States — the world’s economic leaders — stabilized the international economic system in 1929. Instead Britain and the United States cut back international lending and erected high tariffs.

Second, in almost every country, governments cut their budgets and reduced spending instead of running large deficits to try to stimulate their economies. That is, governments needed to put large sums of money into the economy to stimulate job growth and spending. After World War II such a “counter-cyclical policy,” advocated by the British economist John Maynard Keynes (1883–1946), became a well-established weapon against depression. But in the 1930s orthodox economists generally regarded Keynes’s prescription with horror.

Mass Unemployment

The need for large-scale government spending was tied to mass unemployment. The 99 percent’s halt in buying contributed to the financial crisis, which led to production cuts, which in turn caused workers to lose their jobs and have even less money to buy goods. This led to still more production cuts, and unemployment soared. In Britain unemployment had averaged 12 percent in the 1920s; between 1930 and 1935 it averaged more than 18 percent. Germany and Austria had some of the highest unemployment rates, 30–32 percent in 1932. The worst unemployment was in the United States. In the 1920s unemployment there had averaged only 5 percent; in 1933 it soared to about 33 percent of the entire labor force: 14 million people were out of work. This was the only time in American history when more people left America than immigrated in — including thousands of Mexican Americans who suffered increasing hostility, accused of stealing jobs from those who considered themselves to be “real Americans,” and perhaps a hundred thousand Americans who migrated to the Soviet Union, attracted by communism’s promises of jobs and a new life.

Mass unemployment created great social problems. Poverty increased dramatically, although in most industrialized countries unemployed workers generally received some meager unemployment benefits or public aid that prevented starvation. Millions of unemployed people lost their spirit, and homes and ways of life were disrupted in countless personal tragedies. In 1932 workers in Manchester, England, appealed to their city officials — a typical appeal echoed throughout the Western world:

We tell you that thousands of people … are in desperate straits. We tell you that men, women, and children are going hungry…. We tell you that great numbers are being rendered distraught through the stress and worry of trying to exist without work….

If you do not provide useful work for the unemployed — what, we ask, is your alternative? Do not imagine that this colossal tragedy of unemployment is going on endlessly without some fateful catastrophe. Hungry men are angry men.¹

The New Deal in the United States

The Great Depression and the response to it marked a major turning point in American history. Herbert Hoover (U.S. pres. 1929–1933) and his administration initially reacted with limited action. When the financial crisis struck Europe with full force in summer 1931 and boomeranged back to the United States, banks failed and unemployment soared. In 1932 industrial production fell to about 50 percent of its 1929 level.

In these desperate circumstances Franklin Delano Roosevelt (U.S. pres. 1933–1945) won a landslide presidential victory in 1932 with promises of a “New Deal for the forgotten man.” Roosevelt’s basic goal was to preserve capitalism by reforming it. Rejecting socialism and government ownership of industry, Roosevelt advocated forceful federal government intervention in the economy. His commitment to national relief programs marked a profound shift from the traditional stress on family support and local community responsibility.

Roosevelt attacked mass unemployment by creating new federal agencies that launched a vast range of public works projects so the federal government could directly employ as many people as financially possible. The Works Progress Administration (WPA), set up in 1935, employed one-fifth of the entire U.S. labor force at some point in the 1930s, and these workers constructed public buildings, bridges, and highways.

In 1935 the U.S. government established a national social security system with old-age pensions and unemployment benefits. The 1935 National Labor Relations Act declared collective bargaining to be U.S. policy, and union membership more than doubled. In general, between 1935 and 1938 government rulings and social reforms chipped away at the privileges of the wealthy and tried to help ordinary people.

Despite undeniable accomplishments in social reform, the New Deal was only partly successful as a response to the Great Depression. Unemployment was still a staggering 10 million when war broke out in Europe in 1939. The New Deal brought fundamental reform, but it never did pull the United States out of the depression; only the Second World War did that.

The European Response to the Depression

The American stock market’s collapse in October 1929 set off a chain of economic downturns that hit Europe, particularly Germany and Great Britain, the hardest. Postwar Europe had emerged from the Great War deeply in debt and in desperate need of investment capital to rebuild. The United States became the primary creditor and financier. Germany borrowed, for example, to pay Britain war reparations, and then Britain took that money and repaid its war debts and investment loans to America. When the American economy crashed, the whole circular system crashed with it.

Of all the Western democracies, the Scandinavian countries under socialist leadership responded most successfully to the challenge of the Great Depression. When the economic crisis struck in 1929, Sweden’s socialist government pioneered the use of large-scale deficits to finance public works projects and thereby maintain production and employment. Scandinavian governments also increased social welfare benefits. All this spending required a large bureaucracy and high taxes. Yet both private and cooperative enterprise thrived, as did democracy. Some observers considered Scandinavia’s welfare socialism an appealing middle way between what they considered to be sick capitalism and cruel communism or fascism.

In Britain, Ramsay MacDonald’s Labour government (1929–1931) and, after 1931, the Conservative-dominated coalition government followed orthodox economic theory. The budget was balanced, but unemployed workers received barely enough welfare support to live. Nevertheless, the economy recovered considerably after 1932, reflecting the gradual reorientation of the British economy. Britain concentrated increasingly on the national, rather than the international, market. Old export industries, such as textiles and coal, continued to decline, but new industries, such as automobiles and electrical appliances, grew. These developments encouraged British isolationism and often had devastating economic consequences for Britain’s far-flung colonies and dominions, which depended heavily upon reciprocal trade with Great Britain and the United States.

The Great Depression came late to France as it was relatively less industrialized and more isolated from the world economy. But once the depression hit, it stayed. Economic stagnation both reflected and heightened an ongoing political crisis, as liberals, democratic socialists, and Communists fought for control of the French government with conservatives and the far right. The latter groups agitated against parliamentary democracy and turned to Mussolini’s Italy and Hitler’s Germany for inspiration. At the same time, the Communist Party and many workers looked to Stalin’s Russia for guidance.

Frightened by the growing popularity of Hitler- and Mussolini-style right-wing dictatorships at home and abroad, the Communist, Socialist, and Radical Parties in France formed an alliance — the Popular Front — for the May 1936 national elections. Following its clear victory, the Popular Front government launched a far-reaching New Deal–inspired program of social and economic reform. Popular with workers (because it supported unions) and the lower middle class, these measures were quickly sabotaged by rapid inflation, rising wages, a decline in overseas exports, and cries of socialist revolution from frightened conservatives. Politically, the Popular Front lost many left-wing supporters when it failed to back the republican cause in the Spanish Civil War while Hitler and Mussolini openly armed and supported Franco’s nationalists. In June 1937, with the country hopelessly divided, the Popular Front collapsed.

Worldwide Effects

The Great Depression’s magnitude was unprecedented, and its effect rippled well beyond Europe and the United States. Because many countries and colonies in Africa, Asia, and Latin America were nearly totally dependent on one or two commodities — such as coffee beans or cocoa — for income, the implementation of protectionist trade policies by the leading industrial nations had devastating effects.

The Great Depression hit the vulnerable commodity economies of Latin America especially hard. With foreign sales plummeting, Latin American countries could not buy the industrial goods they needed from abroad. The global depression provoked a profound shift toward economic nationalism after 1930, as popularly based governments worked to reduce foreign influence and gain control of their own economies and natural resources. These efforts were fairly successful. By the late 1940s factories in Argentina, Brazil, and Chile could generally satisfy domestic consumer demand for the products of light industry. But as in Hitler’s Germany, the deteriorating economic conditions in Latin America also gave rise to dictatorships, some of them modeled along European Fascist lines.

The Great Depression marked a decisive turning point in the development of African nationalism. For the first time, educated Africans faced widespread unemployment. African peasants and small business people who had been drawn into world trade, and who sometimes profited from booms, also felt the economic pain, as did urban workers. In some areas the result was unprecedented mass protest.

While Asians were somewhat affected by the Great Depression, the consequences varied greatly by country or colony and were not as serious generally as they were elsewhere. That being said, where the depression did hit, it was often severe. The price of rice fell by two-thirds between 1929 and 1932. Also crippling to the region’s economies was Asia’s heavy dependence on raw material exports. With debts to local moneylenders fixed in value and taxes to colonial governments hardly ever reduced, many Asian peasants in the 1930s struggled under crushing debt and suffered terribly.

When the Great Depression reached China in the early 1930s, it hit the rural economy the hardest. China’s economy depended heavily on cash-crop exports and these declined dramatically, while cheap foreign agricultural goods — such as rice and wheat — were dumped in China. While Chinese industrial production dropped off after 1931, it quickly recovered. Much of this growth was in the military sector, as China tried to catch up with the West and also prepare for war with Japan.

In Japan the terrible suffering caused by the Great Depression caused ultranationalists and militarists to call for less dependence on global markets and the expansion of a self-sufficient empire. Such expansion began in 1931 when Japan invaded Chinese Manchuria, which became a major source of the raw materials needed to feed Japanese industrial growth (see “Japan Against China” in Chapter 29). Japan recovered more quickly from the Great Depression than did any other major industrial power because of prompt action by the civilian democratic government, but the government and large corporations continued to be blamed for the economic downturn. By the mid-1930s this lack of confidence, combined with the collapsing international economic order, Europe’s and America’s increasingly isolationist and protectionist policies, and a growing admiration for Nazi Germany and its authoritarian, militaristic model of government, had led the Japanese military to topple the civilian authorities and dictate Japan’s future.

Authoritarian States

What was the nature of the new totalitarian dictatorships, and how did they differ from conservative authoritarian states and from each other?

Both conservative and radical totalitarian dictatorships arose in Europe in the 1920s and the 1930s. Although they sometimes overlapped in character and practice, they were profoundly different in essence.

Conservative Authoritarianism

The traditional form of antidemocratic government in world history was conservative authoritarianism. Like Russia’s tsars and China’s emperors, the leaders of such governments relied on obedient bureaucracies, vigilant police departments, and trustworthy armies to control society. They forbade or limited popular participation in government and often jailed or exiled political opponents. Yet they had neither the ability nor the desire to control many aspects of their subjects’ lives. As long as the people did not try to change the system, they often enjoyed considerable personal independence.

After the First World War, conservative authoritarianism revived, especially in Latin America. Conservative dictators also seized power in Spain and Portugal, and in the less-developed eastern part of Europe. There were several reasons for this development. These lands lacked strong traditions of self-government, and many new states, such as Yugoslavia, were torn by ethnic conflicts. Dictatorship appealed to nationalists and military leaders as a way to repress such tensions and preserve national unity. Large landowners and the church were still powerful forces in these predominantly agrarian areas and often looked to dictators to protect them from progressive land reform or Communist agrarian upheaval. Conservative dictatorships were concerned more with maintaining the status quo than with mobilizing the masses or forcing society into rapid change or war.

Radical Totalitarian Dictatorships

By the mid-1930s a new kind of radical dictatorship — termed totalitarian — had emerged in the Soviet Union, Germany, and, to a lesser extent, Italy. Scholars disagree over the definition of totalitarianism, its origins, and to what countries and leaders the term should apply. Moreover, when the Cold War began in the late 1940s (see “The World Remade” in Chapter 31), conservatives, particularly in the United States, commandeered the term as shorthand for the “evil” Communist regimes in the Soviet Union and its satellites. Liberals, especially in the 1960s, used the term more loosely to refer to every system they felt inhibited freedom — from local police to the U.S. Pentagon. Thus by the 1980s many scholars questioned the term’s usefulness. More recently, with these caveats, scholars have returned to the term to explain and understand fascism, Nazism, and communism in the 1920s, 1930s, and 1940s.

It can be argued that totalitarianism began with the total war effort of 1914–1918 (see “Mobilizing for Total War” in Chapter 28), as governments acquired total control over all areas of society in order to achieve one supreme objective: victory. This provided a model for future totalitarian states. As the French thinker ÉlieHalévy (AY-lee ah-LAY-vee) observed in 1936, the varieties of modern totalitarian tyranny — fascism, Nazism, and communism — could be thought of as “feuding brothers” with a common father: the nature of modern war.²

The consequences of the Versailles treaty (1919) and the severe economic and political problems that Germany and Italy faced in the 1920s left both those countries ripe for new leadership, but not necessarily totalitarian dictators. It was the Great Depression that must be viewed as the immediate cause of the modern totalitarian state.

In 1956 American historians Carl Friedrich and Zbigniew Brzezinski (z-BIG-nyefbzheh-ZIN-skee) identified at least six key features of modern totalitarian states: (1) an official ideology; (2) a single ruling party; (3) complete control of “all weapons of armed combat”; (4) complete monopoly of all means of mass communication; (5) a system of terror, physical and psychic, enforced by the party and the secret police; and (6) central control and direction of the entire economy.³

While all these features were present in Stalin’s Communist Soviet Union and Hitler’s Nazi Germany, there were some major differences. Most notably, Soviet communism seized private property for the state and sought to level society by crushing the middle classes. Nazi Germany also criticized big landowners and industrialists but, unlike the Communists, did not try to nationalize private property, so the middle classes survived. This difference in property and class relations led some scholars to speak of “totalitarianism of the left” — Stalinist Russia — and “totalitarianism of the right” — Nazi Germany.

Moreover, Soviet Communists ultimately had international aims: they sought to unite the workers of the world. Mussolini and Hitler claimed they were interested in changing state and society on a national level only, although Hitler envisioned a greatly expanded “living space,” or lebensraum (LAY-buhns-rowm), for Germans in eastern Europe and Russia. Both Mussolini and Hitler used the term fascism (FASH-iz-uhm) to describe their movements’ supposedly “total” and revolutionary character. Orthodox Marxist Communists argued that the Fascists were powerful capitalists seeking to destroy the revolutionary working class and thus protect their enormous profits. So while Communists and Fascists both sought the overthrow of existing society, their ideologies clashed, and they were enemies.

The Spread of Fascism in Spain, 1937 In the 1920s and 1930s most European countries had Fascist sympathizers. Between 1936 and 1939 Fascist nationalist forces led by General Francisco Franco, pictured here, fought a brutal war against the government of Spain’s left-leaning, democratic Second Spanish Republic. Socialist and liberal volunteers from around the world came to Spain to fight against Franco’s army, as recounted in Ernest Hemingway’s novel For Whom the Bell Tolls. Pablo Picasso portrayed the destruction to one town caused by German Nazi and Italian Fascist warplanes, supporting Franco, in his famous painting Guernica. Following the nationalist victory, Franco ruled Spain as a dictator for thirty-six years.

This black-and-white photo shows General Francisco Franco walking along a line of troops, saluting.

European Fascist movements shared many characteristics, including extreme, often expanionist, nationalism; anti-socialism aimed at destroying working-class movements; a dynamic and violent leader; a crushing of human individualism; alliances with powerful capitalists and landowners; and glorification of war and the military. Fascists, especially in Germany, also embraced racial homogeneity. Indeed, while class was the driving force in communist ideology, race and racial purity were profoundly important to Nazi ideology.

Although 1930s Japan has sometimes been called a Fascist society, most recent scholars disagree with this label. Japanese political philosophers were attracted by some European Fascist ideas, such as Hitler’s desire for eastward expansion, which would be duplicated by Japan’s expansion to the Asian mainland. Other appealing concepts included nationalism, militarism, the corporatist economic model, and a single, all-powerful political party. The idea of a Japanese dictator, however, clashed with the emperor’s divine status. There were also various ideologically unique forces at work in Japan, including ultranationalism, militarism (building on the historic role of samurai warriors in Japanese society), reverence for traditional ways, emperor worship, and the profound changes to Japanese society beginning with the Meiji Restoration in 1867 (see “The Meiji Restoration” in Chapter 26). These also contributed to the rise of a totalitarian, but not Fascist, state before the Second World War.

In summary, the concept of totalitarianism remains a valuable tool for historical understanding. It correctly highlights that in the 1930s Germany, the Soviet Union, and Japan made an unprecedented “total claim” on the beliefs and behaviors of their respective citizens.⁴ However, none of these nations were successful in completely dominating their citizens. Thus totalitarianism is an idea never fully achieved.

Stalin’s Soviet Union

How did Stalin and the Communist Party build a totalitarian order in the Soviet Union?

Joseph Stalin (1879–1953) consolidated his power following Lenin’s death in 1924 and by 1927 was the de facto leader of the Soviet Union. In 1928 he launched the first five-year plan — a “revolution from above,”⁵ as he so aptly termed it, to transform Soviet society along socialist lines, and to generate a Communist society with new attitudes, new loyalties, and a new socialist humanity. Stalin and the Communist Party used constant propaganda, enormous sacrifice, and unlimited violence and state control to establish a dynamic, modern totalitarian state in the 1930s.

From Lenin to Stalin

By spring 1921 Lenin and the Bolsheviks had won the civil war, but they ruled a shattered and devastated land. Facing economic disintegration, the worst famine in generations, riots by peasants and workers, and an open rebellion by previously pro-Bolshevik sailors at Kronstadt (kruhn-SHTAHT), Lenin changed course. In March 1921 he announced the New Economic Policy (NEP), which re-established limited economic freedom in an attempt to rebuild agriculture and industry. Peasant producers could sell their surpluses in free markets, as could private traders and small handicraft manufacturers. Heavy industry, railroads, and banks, however, remained wholly nationalized.

The NEP was successful both politically and economically. Politically, it was a necessary but temporary compromise with the Soviet Union’s overwhelming peasant majority. Economically, the NEP brought rapid recovery. In 1926 industrial output surpassed prewar levels, and peasants were producing almost as much grain as before the war.

As the economy recovered, an intense power struggle began in the Communist Party’s inner circles, for Lenin left no chosen successor when he died in 1924. The principal contenders were Stalin and Leon Trotsky. While Trotsky appeared to be the stronger of the two, in the end Stalin won because he gained the support of the party, the only genuine source of power in the one-party state.

Stalin gradually achieved absolute power between 1922 and 1927. He used the moderates to crush Trotsky and then turned against the moderates and destroyed them as well. Stalin’s final triumph came at the party congress of December 1927, which condemned all deviation from the general party line as formulated by Stalin.

The Five-Year Plans

The 1927 party congress marked the end of the NEP and the beginning of socialist five-year plans. The first five-year plan had staggering economic objectives. In just five years, total industrial output was to increase by 250 percent and agricultural production by 150 percent. By 1930 economic and social change was sweeping the country in a frenzied effort to modernize and industrialize, much like in Britain in the nineteenth century (see “The Industrial Revolution in Britain” in Chapter 23), and dramatically changing the lives of ordinary people, sometimes at great personal cost. One worker complained, “The workers … made every effort to fulfill the industrial and financial plan and fulfilled it by more than 100 percent, but how are they supplied? The ration is received only by the worker, except for rye flour, his wife and small children receive nothing. Workers and their families wear worn-out clothes, the kids are in rags, their naked bellies sticking out.”⁶

Stalin unleashed his “second revolution” because, like Lenin, he was deeply committed to socialism. Stalin was also driven to catch up with the advanced and presumably hostile Western capitalist nations. In February 1931 Stalin famously declared:

It is sometimes asked whether it is not possible to slow down the tempo a bit…. No, comrades, it is not possible! The tempo must not be reduced! … To slacken the tempo would mean falling behind. And those who fall behind get beaten. No, we refuse to be beaten! … We are fifty or a hundred years behind the advanced countries. We must make good this distance in ten years. Either we do it, or we shall be crushed.⁷

Domestically, there was the peasant problem. For centuries peasants had wanted to own the land, and finally they had it. Sooner or later, the Communists reasoned, the peasants would become conservative capitalists and threaten the regime. Stalin therefore launched a preventive war against the peasantry to bring it under the state’s absolute control.

That war was collectivization — the forcible consolidation of individual peasant farms into large, state-controlled enterprises. Beginning in 1929 peasants were ordered to give up their land and animals and become members of collective farms. As for the kulaks, the better-off peasants, Stalin instructed party workers to “break their resistance, to eliminate them as a class.”⁸ Stripped of land and livestock, many starved or were deported to forced-labor camps for “re-education.”

Because almost all peasants were poor, the term kulak soon meant any peasant who opposed the new system. Whole villages were often attacked. One conscience-stricken colonel in the secret police confessed to a foreign journalist:

I am an old Bolshevik. I worked in the underground against the Tsar and then I fought in the Civil War. Did I do all that in order that I should now surround villages with machine guns and order my men to fire indiscriminately into crowds of peasants? Oh, no, no!⁹

Forced collectivization led to disaster. Many peasants slaughtered their animals and burned their crops in protest. Nor were the state-controlled collective farms more productive. Grain output barely increased, and collectivized agriculture made no substantial financial contribution to Soviet industrial development during the first five-year plan.

In Ukraine Stalin instituted a policy of all-out collectivization with two goals: to destroy all expressions of Ukrainian nationalism, and to break the Ukrainian peasants’ will so they would accept collectivization and Soviet rule. Stalin began by purging Ukraine of its intellectuals and political elite. He then set impossibly high grain quotas for the collectivized farms. This grain quota had to be turned over to the government before any peasant could receive a share. Many scholars and dozens of governments and international organizations have declared Stalin’s and the Soviet government’s policies a deliberate act of genocide. As one historian observed:

Grain supplies were sufficient to sustain everyone if properly distributed. People died mostly of terror-starvation (excess grain exports, seizure of edibles from the starving, state refusal to provide emergency relief, bans on outmigration, and forced deportation to food-deficit locales), not poor harvests and routine administrative bungling.¹⁰

The result was a terrible man-made famine, called in Ukrainian the Holodomor(HAU-lau-dau-mohr) (Hunger extermination), in Ukraine in 1932 and 1933, which probably claimed 3 to 5 million lives.

Collectivization was a cruel but real victory for Communist ideologues who were looking to institute their brand of communism and to crush opposition as much as improve production. By 1938, 93 percent of peasant families had been herded onto collective farms at a horrendous cost in both human lives and resources. Regimented as state employees and dependent on the state-owned tractor stations, the collectivized peasants were no longer a political threat.

The industrial side of the five-year plans was more successful. Soviet industry produced about four times as much in 1937 as in 1928. No other major country had ever achieved such rapid industrial growth. Heavy industry led the way, and urban development accelerated: more than 25 million people migrated to cities to become industrial workers during the 1930s.

The sudden creation of dozens of new factories demanded tremendous resources. Funds for industrial expansion were collected from the people through heavy hidden sales taxes. Firm labor discipline also contributed to rapid industrialization. Trade unions lost most of their power, and individuals could not move without police permission. When factory managers needed more hands, they were sent “unneeded” peasants from collective farms.

Foreign engineers were hired to plan and construct many of the new factories. Highly skilled American engineers, hungry for work in the depression years, were particularly important until newly trained Soviet experts began to replace them after 1932. Thus Stalin’s planners harnessed the skill and technology of capitalist countries to promote the surge of socialist industry.

Life and Culture in Soviet Society

Daily life was hard in Stalin’s Soviet Union. Despite these hardships, many Communists saw themselves as heroically building the world’s first socialist society while capitalism crumbled and fascism rose in the West.

Offsetting the hardships were the important social benefits Soviet workers received, such as old-age pensions, free medical services and education, and day-care centers for children. Unemployment was almost unknown. Moreover, there was the possibility of personal advancement. Rapid industrialization required massive numbers of trained experts. Thus the Stalinist state broke with the egalitarian policies of the 1920s and provided tremendous incentives to those who acquired specialized skills. A growing technical and managerial elite joined the political and artistic elites in a new upper class, whose members were rich and powerful.

 

Soviet society’s radical transformation profoundly affected women’s lives. The Russian Bolshevik Revolution immediately proclaimed complete equality of rights for women. In the 1920s divorce and abortion were made easily available, and women were urged to work outside the home. After Stalin came to power, however, he encouraged a return to traditional family values.

The most lasting changes for women involved work and education. Peasant women continued to work on farms, and millions of women now toiled in factories and heavy construction. The more determined women entered the ranks of the better-paid specialists in industry and science. By 1950, 75 percent of all doctors in the Soviet Union were women.

Culture was thoroughly politicized through constant propaganda and indoctrination. Party activists lectured workers in factories and peasants on collective farms, while newspapers, films, and radio broadcasts recounted socialist achievements and warned of capitalist plots.

Stalinist Terror and the Great Purges

In the mid-1930s the push to build socialism and a new society culminated in ruthless police terror and a massive purging of the Communist Party. In August 1936 sixteen prominent “Old Bolsheviks” — party members before the 1917 revolution — confessed to all manner of plots against Stalin in spectacular public show trials in Moscow. Then in 1937 the secret police arrested a mass of lesser party officials and newer members, torturing them and extracting confessions for more show trials. In addition to the party faithful, union officials, managers, intellectuals, army officers, and countless ordinary citizens were struck down. One Stalin functionary admitted, “Innocent people were arrested: naturally — otherwise no one would be frightened. If people were arrested only for specific misdemeanors, all the others would feel safe and so become ripe for treason.”¹¹ In all, at least 8 million people were arrested, and millions of these were executed. Those not immediately executed were sent to gulags (GOO-lagz) — labor camps from which few escaped. Many were simply worked to death as they provided convict labor for Stalin’s industrialization drive in areas of low population.

The Soviet Forced-Labor Camp at Arkhangelsk From 1929 to 1953 millions of Soviet citizens were sent to forced-labor prison camps such as this one, and over 1.5 million died. Ten to 20 percent of these prisoners were women, many of them found guilty of nothing more than being married to men considered enemies of the state. Here male and female prisoners work in a lumberyard in a cold and snowy climate near the Arctic Circle.

This black-and-white photo shows male and female prisoners at work in a lumberyard in a cold and snowy climate.

Stalin recruited 1.5 million new members to replace those purged. Thus more than half of all Communist Party members in 1941 had joined since the purges. This new generation of Stalin-formed Communists served the leader effectively until his death in 1953 and then governed the Soviet Union until the early 1980s. Stalin’s mass purges remain baffling, for most historians believe those purged posed no threat and confessed to crimes they had not committed. Some historians have challenged the long-standing interpretation that blames the great purges on Stalin’s cruelty or madness. They argue that Stalin’s fears were exaggerated but genuine and were shared by many in the party and in the general population. Investigations and trials snowballed into a mass hysteria, a new witch-hunt.¹² Historians who have accessed recently opened Soviet archives, however, continue to hold that Stalin was intimately involved with the purges and personally directed them, abetted by amenable informers, judges, and executioners. Oleg Khlevniuk, a Ukrainian historian familiar with these archives, writes, “Theories about the elemental, spontaneous nature of the terror, about a loss of central control over the course of mass repression, and about the role of regional leaders in initiating the terror are simply not supported by the historical record.”¹³ In short, a ruthless and paranoid Stalin found large numbers of willing collaborators for crime as well as for achievement.

Mussolini and Fascism in Italy

How did Italian fascism develop?

Benito Mussolini’s Fascist movement and his seizure of power in 1922 were important steps in the rise of dictatorships between the two world wars. Mussolini and his supporters were the first to call themselves “Fascists.” His dictatorship was brutal and theatrical, and it contained elements of both conservative authoritarianism and modern totalitarianism.

The Seizure of Power

In the early twentieth century Italy was a liberal state with civil rights and a constitutional monarchy. On the eve of the First World War, the parliamentary regime granted universal male suffrage. But there were serious problems. Poverty was widespread, and many peasants were more attached to their villages and local interests than to the national state. Church-state relations were often tense. Class differences were also extreme, and by 1912 the Socialist Party’s radical wing led the powerful revolutionary socialist movement.¹⁴

World War I worsened the political situation. Having fought on the Allied side almost exclusively for purposes of territorial expansion, Italian nationalists were disappointed with Italy’s modest gains at the Paris Peace Conference. Workers and peasants also felt cheated: to win their support during the war, the government had promised social and land reform, which it failed to deliver after the war.

The Russian Revolution inspired and energized Italy’s revolutionary socialist movement, and radical workers and peasants began occupying factories and seizing land in 1920. These actions scared and mobilized the property-owning classes. Thus by 1921 revolutionary socialists, antiliberal conservatives, and frightened property owners were all opposed — though for different reasons — to the liberal parliamentary government.

Into these crosscurrents of unrest and fear stepped Benito Mussolini (1883–1945). Mussolini began his political career as a Socialist Party leader and radical newspaper editor before World War I. Expelled from the Italian Socialist Party for supporting the war, and wounded on the Italian front in 1917, Mussolini returned home and began organizing bitter war veterans into a band of Fascists — Italian for “a union of forces.”

At first Mussolini’s program was a radical combination of nationalist and socialist demands. As such, it competed directly with the well-organized Socialist Party and failed to attract followers. When Mussolini realized his violent verbal assaults on rival Socialists won him growing support from conservatives and the frightened middle classes, he began to shift gears and to exalt nation over class. By 1921 he was ridiculing and dismissing the Marxist interpretation of history:

We deny the existence of two classes, because there are many more than two classes. We deny that human history can be explained in terms of economics. We deny your internationalism. That is a luxury article, which only the elevated can practice, because peoples are passionately bound to their native soil.¹⁵

Mussolini and his private army of Black Shirts also turned to physical violence. Few people were killed, but Socialist newspapers, union halls, and local Socialist Party headquarters were destroyed, eventually pushing Socialists out of the city governments of northern Italy. A skillful politician, Mussolini convinced his followers they were opposing the “Reds,” while also promoting a real revolution of the little people against the established interests.

With the government breaking down in 1922, Mussolini stepped forward as the savior of order and property. In October 1922 thirty thousand Fascists marched on Rome, threatening the king and demanding he appoint Mussolini prime minister. Victor Emmanuel III (r. 1900–1946), forced to choose between Fascists or Socialists, asked Mussolini to form a new cabinet. Thus, after widespread violence and a threat of armed uprising, Mussolini seized power “legally.”

The Regime in Action

In 1924 Mussolini declared his desire to “make the nation Fascist”¹⁶ and imposed a series of repressive measures. Press freedom was abolished, elections were fixed, and the government ruled by decree. Mussolini arrested his political opponents, disbanded all independent labor unions, and put dedicated Fascists in control of Italy’s schools. He created a Fascist youth movement, Fascist labor unions, and many other Fascist organizations. He trumpeted his goal in a famous slogan of 1926: “Everything in the state, nothing outside the state, nothing against the state.”¹⁷ By year’s end Italy was a one-party dictatorship under Mussolini’s unquestioned leadership.

Mussolini was only primarily interested, however, in personal power. Rather than destroy the old power structure, he remained content to compromise with the conservative classes that controlled the army, the economy, and the state. He controlled labor but left big business to regulate itself, profitably and securely. There was no land reform.

Mussolini also drew increasing support from the Catholic Church. In the Lateran Agreement of 1929, he recognized the Vatican as a tiny independent state and agreed to give the church heavy financial support. The pope in return urged Italians to support Mussolini’s government.

Like Stalin and Hitler, Mussolini favored a return of traditional roles for women. He abolished divorce and told women to stay at home and produce children. In 1938 women were limited by law to a maximum of 10 percent of the better-paying jobs in industry and government.

Mussolini’s government passed no racial laws until 1938 and did not persecute Jews savagely until late in the Second World War, when Italy was under Nazi control. Nor did Mussolini establish a truly ruthless police state. Only twenty-three political prisoners were condemned to death between 1926 and 1944. Mussolini’s Fascist Italy, though repressive and undemocratic, was never really totalitarian.

Hitler and Nazism in Germany

Why were Hitler and his Nazi regime initially so popular, and how did their actions lead to World War II?

The most frightening dictatorship developed in Nazi Germany. Here Nazism asserted an unlimited claim over German society and proclaimed the ultimate power of its leader, Adolf Hitler. Nazism’s aspirations were truly totalitarian.

The Roots of Nazism

Nazism grew out of many complex concepts, of which the most influential were extreme nationalism and racism. These ideas captured the mind of the young Adolf Hitler (1889–1945) and evolved into Nazism.

The son of an Austrian customs official, Hitler did poorly in high school and dropped out at age sixteen. He then headed to Vienna, where he was exposed to extreme Austro-German nationalists who believed Germans to be a superior people and central Europe’s natural rulers. They advocated union with Germany and violent expulsion of “inferior” peoples from the Austro-Hungarian Empire.

From these extremists Hitler eagerly absorbed virulent anti-Semitism, racism, and hatred of Slavs. He developed an unshakable belief in the crudest distortions of Social Darwinism (see “Science for the Masses” in Chapter 24), the superiority of Germanic races, and the inevitability of racial conflict. The Jews, he claimed, directed an international conspiracy of finance capitalism and Marxist socialism against German culture, German unity, and the German race. Anti-Semitism and racism became Hitler’s most passionate convictions.

Hitler greeted the Great War’s outbreak as a salvation. The struggle and discipline of serving as a soldier in the war gave his life meaning, and when Germany suddenly surrendered in 1918, Hitler’s world was shattered. Convinced that Jews and Marxists had “stabbed Germany in the back,” he vowed to fight on.

In late 1919 Hitler joined a tiny extremist group in Munich called the German Workers’ Party. By 1921 Hitler had gained absolute control of this small but growing party, now renamed the National Socialist German Worker’s Party, or Nazi Party. A master of mass propaganda and political showmanship, Hitler worked his audiences into a frenzy with wild attacks on the Versailles treaty, the Jews, war profiteers, and Germany’s Weimar Republic.

In late 1923 Germany under the Weimar Republic was experiencing unparalleled hyperinflation and seemed on the verge of collapse (see “Germany and the Western Powers” in Chapter 28). Hitler, inspired by Mussolini’s recent victory, attempted an armed uprising in Munich. Despite the failure of the poorly organized plot and Hitler’s arrest, Nazism had been born.

Hitler’s Road to Power

At his trial Hitler violently denounced the Weimar Republic and attracted enormous publicity. During his brief prison term in 1924 he dictated Mein Kampf (My Struggle), in which he expounded on his basic ideas on race and anti-Semitism, the notion of territorial expansion based on “living space” for Germans, and the role of the leader-dictator, called the Führer (FYOOR-uhr).

The Nazis remained a small splinter group until the 1929 Great Depression shattered the economic prosperity and stability of the late 1920s. By the end of 1932, 32 percent or more of Germany’s labor force was unemployed. Industrial production fell by one-half between 1929 and 1932. No factor contributed more to Hitler’s success than this economic crisis.

Hitler rejected free-market capitalism and advocated government programs to promote recovery. He pitched his speeches to middle- and lower-middle-class groups and to skilled workers. As the economy collapsed, great numbers of these people “voted their pocketbooks”¹⁸ and deserted the conservative and moderate parties for the Nazis. In the July 1932 election the Nazis won 14.5 million votes — 38 percent of the total — and became the largest party in the Reichstag.

Hitler and the Nazis appealed strongly to German youth; Hitler himself was only forty in 1929. In 1931 almost 40 percent of Nazi Party members were under thirty, compared with 20 percent of Social Democrats. “National Socialism is the organized will of the youth,”¹⁹ proclaimed the official Nazi slogan. National recovery, exciting and rapid change, and personal advancement made Nazism appealing to millions of German youths.

Hitler also came to power because of the breakdown of democratic government. Germany’s economic collapse in the Great Depression convinced many voters that the country’s republican leaders were incompetent and corrupt. Disunity on the left was another nail in the republic’s coffin. The Communists refused to cooperate with the Social Democrats, even though the two parties together outnumbered the Nazis in the Reichstag.

Finally, Hitler excelled in backroom politics. In 1932 he succeeded in gaining support from key people in the army, big business, and politics, who thought they could manipulate and use him to their own advantage. Thus in January 1933 President Paul von Hindenburg (1847–1934) legally appointed Hitler, leader of Germany’s largest party, as German chancellor.

The Nazi State and Society

Hitler quickly established an unshakable dictatorship. When the Reichstag building was partly destroyed by fire in February 1933, Hitler blamed the Communist Party. He convinced President von Hindenburg to sign dictatorial emergency acts that abolished freedom of speech and assembly and most personal liberties. He also called for new elections in an effort to solidify his political power.

When the Nazis won only 44 percent of the votes, Hitler outlawed the Communist Party and arrested its parliamentary representatives. Then on March 23, 1933, the Nazis forced through the Reichstag the so-called Enabling Act, which gave Hitler absolute dictatorial power for four years.

Hitler and the Nazis took over the government bureaucracy, installing many Nazis in top positions. Hitler next outlawed strikes and abolished independent labor unions, which were replaced by the Nazi Labor Front. Professional people — doctors and lawyers, teachers and engineers — also saw their independent organizations swallowed up in Nazi associations. Publishing houses and universities were put under Nazi control, and students and professors publicly burned forbidden books. Modern art and architecture were ruthlessly prohibited. Life became violently anti-intellectual. As the cynical Joseph Goebbels, later Nazi minister of propaganda, put it, “When I hear the word ‘culture’ I reach for my gun.”²⁰ By 1934 a brutal dictatorship characterized by frightening dynamism and total obedience to Hitler was already largely in place.

In 1934 Hitler also ordered that all civil servants and members of the German armed forces swear a binding oath of “unquestioning obedience” to Adolf Hitler. The SS — Hitler’s elite personal guard — grew rapidly. Under Heinrich Himmler (1900–1945), the SS took over the political police (the Gestapo) and expanded its network of concentration camps.

From the beginning, German Jews were a special object of Nazi persecution. By late 1934 most Jewish lawyers, doctors, professors, civil servants, and musicians had been banned from their professions. In 1935 the infamous Nuremberg Laws classified as Jewish anyone having three or more Jewish grandparents and deprived Jews of all rights of citizenship. By 1938 roughly one-quarter of Germany’s half million Jews had emigrated, sacrificing almost all their property in order to leave Germany.

In late 1938 the attack on the Jews accelerated and grew more violent. On November 9 and 10, 1938, the Nazis initiated a series of well-organized attacks against Jews throughout Nazi Germany and some parts of Austria. This infamous event is known as Kristallnacht (krees-TAHL-nahkht), or Night of Broken Glass, after the broken glass that littered the streets following the frenzied destruction of Jewish homes, shops, synagogues, and neighborhoods by German civilians and uniformed storm troopers. U.S. consul David Buffum reported of the Nazis in Leipzig:

The most hideous phase of the so-called “spontaneous” action, has been the wholesale arrest and transportation to concentration camps of male German Jews between the ages of sixteen and sixty…. Having demolished dwellings and hurled most of the effects to the streets, the insatiably sadistic perpetrators threw many of the trembling inmates into a small stream that flows through the Zoological Park, commanding horrified spectators to spit at them, defile them with mud and jeer at their plight.²¹

Many historians consider this night the beginning of Hitler’s Final Solution against the Jews, and after this event it became very difficult for Jews to leave Germany.

Some Germans privately opposed these outrages, but most went along or looked the other way. Although this lack of response reflected the individual’s helplessness in a totalitarian state, it also reflected the strong popular support Hitler’s government enjoyed.

Hitler’s Popularity

Hitler had promised the masses economic recovery — “work and bread” — and he delivered. The Nazi Party launched a large public works program to pull Germany out of the depression. In 1935 Germany turned decisively toward rearmament. Unemployment dropped steadily, and by 1938 the Nazis boasted of nearly full employment. For millions of Germans economic recovery was tangible evidence that Nazi promises were more than show and propaganda.

For ordinary German citizens, in contrast to those deemed “undesirable” (Jews, Slavs, Gypsies, Jehovah’s Witnesses, Communists, and homosexuals), Hitler’s government offered greater equality and more opportunities. In 1933 class barriers in Germany were generally high. Hitler’s rule introduced changes that lowered these barriers. The new Nazi elite included many young and poorly educated dropouts, rootless lower-middle-class people like Hitler who rose to the top with breathtaking speed. More generally, however, the Nazis tolerated privilege and wealth only as long as they served party needs.

Yet Hitler and the Nazis failed to bring about a real social revolution. The well-educated classes held on to most of their advantages, and only a modest social leveling occurred in the Nazi years. Significantly, the Nazis shared with the Italian Fascists the stereotypical view of women as housewives and mothers. Only when facing labor shortages during the war did they reluctantly mobilize large numbers of German women for office and factory work.²²

Not all Germans supported Hitler, and a number of German groups actively resisted him after 1933. Tens of thousands of political enemies were imprisoned, and thousands were executed. In the first years of Hitler’s rule, the principal resisters were trade-union Communists and Socialists. Catholic and Protestant churches produced a second group of opponents. Their efforts were directed primarily at preserving genuine religious life, however, not at overthrowing Hitler. Finally, in 1938 and again during the war, some high-ranking army officers, who feared the consequences of Hitler’s reckless aggression, plotted, unsuccessfully, against him.

Aggression and Appeasement, 1933–1939

After Germany’s economic recovery and Hitler’s success in establishing Nazi control of society, Hitler turned to the next item on his agenda: aggressive territorial expansion. Germany’s withdrawal from the League of Nations in October 1933 indicated its determination to rearm. When in March 1935 Hitler established a general military draft and declared the “unequal” Versailles treaty disarmament clauses null and void, leaders in Britain, France, and Italy issued a rather tepid joint protest and warned him against future aggressive actions.

But the emerging united front against Hitler quickly collapsed. Britain adopted a policy of appeasement, granting Hitler everything he could reasonably want (and more) in order to avoid war. British appeasement, which practically dictated French policy, had the support of many powerful British conservatives who, as in Germany, underestimated Hitler. The British people, still horrified by the memory, the costs, and the losses of the First World War, generally supported pacifism rather than war.

Some British leaders at the time, however, such as Winston Churchill, bitterly condemned appeasement as peace at any price. After the war, British appeasement came to be viewed as “the granting from fear or cowardice of unwarranted concessions in order to buy temporary peace at someone else’s expense.”²³ Beginning in the 1990s some historians have argued that British leaders had no real choice but to appease Hitler in the 1930s, because neither Great Britain nor France was prepared psychologically or militarily to fight another war.²⁴

In March 1936 Hitler marched his armies without notice into the demilitarized Rhineland, violating the Treaties of Versailles and Locarno. France would not move without British support, and Britain refused to act. As Britain and France opted for appeasement, Hitler found powerful allies, particularly Mussolini, who in October 1935 had attacked the independent African kingdom of Ethiopia. Western powers had condemned the Italian aggression, but Hitler supported Italy energetically. In October 1936 Italy and Germany established the so-called Rome-Berlin Axis. Japan, which wanted support for its occupation of Manchuria, joined the Axis alliance in 1940 (see “Japan Against China” in Chapter 29).

At the same time, Germany and Italy intervened in the Spanish Civil War (1936–1939), where their support helped General Francisco Franco’s Fascist movement defeat republican Spain. Republican Spain’s only official aid in the fight against Franco came from the Soviet Union.

In late 1937 Hitler moved forward with his plans to crush Austria and Czechoslovakia as the first step in his long-contemplated drive to the east for living space. On March 12, 1938, German armies moved into Austria unopposed, and Austria became two provinces of Greater Germany (Map 30.1).

MAP 30.1 The Growth of Nazi Germany, 1933–1939 Until March 1939 Hitler brought ethnic Germans into the Nazi state; then he turned on the Slavic peoples, whom he had always hated. He stripped Czechoslovakia of its independence and prepared for an attack on Poland in September 1939.

Map shows Germany as it existed in 1933, including East Prussia. Austria was annexed in 1938. Czechoslovakia became a satellite state of Germany in March 1939. Poland was conquered by Germany in September 1939. The land to the east of Poland from Lithuania to Romania was annexed by the Soviet Union in September 1939. The area along the Rhine River in western Germany was remilitarized in 1936.

Simultaneously, Hitler demanded that the pro-Nazi, German-speaking territory of western Czechoslovakia — the Sudetenland — be turned over to Germany. Democratic Czechoslovakia was prepared to defend itself, but appeasement triumphed again. In September 1938 British prime minister Arthur Neville Chamberlain (1869–1940) and French negotiators met with Hitler in Munich and agreed with him that the Sudetenland should be ceded to Germany immediately. Returning to London from the Munich Conference, Chamberlain told cheering crowds that he had secured “peace with honour … peace for our time.”²⁵ Sold out by the Western powers, Czechoslovakia gave in.

Hitler Playing with All the Statesmen This satirical cartoon from 1938 shows Hitler playing with all the statesmen attending the Four Power (Italy, Germany, England, France) Peace Conference that year in Munich. The Munich Agreement that came out of this meeting permitted Germany to annex the Sudetenland in Czechoslovakia, although representatives of that country were not invited to the conference. British prime minister Neville Chamberlain is portrayed in the lower right corner, under Hitler’s boot.

Cartoon shows an incredibly large Hitler lying back on a field with mountains behind him. Different statesmen are shown as small figures. Some are shading him with an umbrella; Hitler is holding another in his hand looking directly at him. Others are shown playing around him, and some others are shown fighting with each other.

Hitler’s armies occupied the remainder of Czechoslovakia, however, in March 1939. This time, there was no possible rationale of self-determination for Nazi aggression. When Hitler used the question of German minorities in Danzig as a pretext to confront Poland, Chamberlain declared that Britain and France would fight if Hitler attacked his eastern neighbor. Hitler did not take these warnings seriously and pressed on.

Through the 1930s Hitler had constantly referred to ethnic Slavs in the Soviet Union and other countries as Untermenschen (OON-ter-men-schen) (inferior people), and relations between the two countries had grown increasingly tense. War between Germany and the Soviet Union seemed inevitable, and, indeed, Stalin believed that Great Britain and France secretly hoped the Nazis and Bolsheviks would destroy each other. Then, in an about-face that stunned the world, sworn enemies Hitler and Stalin signed a nonaggression pact in August 1939. Each dictator promised to remain neutral if the other became involved in war. An attached secret protocol divided eastern Europe into German and Soviet zones “in the event of a political and territorial reorganization.”²⁶ Stalin agreed to the pact for three reasons: he distrusted Western intentions, he needed more time to build up Soviet industry and military reserves, and Hitler offered territorial gain.

For Hitler, everything was now set. He told his generals on the day of the nonaggression pact, “My only fear is that at the last moment some dirty dog will come up with a mediation plan.”²⁷ On September 1, 1939, the Germans attacked Poland from three sides. Two days later, Britain and France, finally true to their word, declared war on Germany. The Second World War in Europe had begun.

The Second World War, 1939–1945

How did Germany and Japan build empires in Europe and Asia, and how did the Allies defeat them?

World war broke out because Hitler’s and Japan’s ambitions were essentially unlimited. Nazi soldiers scored enormous successes in Europe until late 1942, establishing a vast empire of death and destruction. Japan attacked the United States in December 1941 and then moved to expand its empire throughout Asia and the Pacific Ocean. Eventually, the mighty Grand Alliance of Britain, the United States, and the Soviet Union overwhelmed the aggressors in manpower and military strength. Thus the Nazi and Japanese empires proved short-lived.

Hitler’s Empire in Europe, 1939–1942

Using planes, tanks, and trucks in the first example of a blitzkrieg (BLITZ-kreeg), or “lightning war,” Hitler’s armies crushed Poland in four weeks. The Soviet Union quickly took its share agreed to in the secret protocol — the eastern half of Poland and the Baltic states of Lithuania, Estonia, and Latvia. In spring 1940 the Nazi lightning war struck again. After occupying Denmark, Norway, and Holland, German motorized columns broke through southern Belgium and into France.

As Hitler’s armies poured into France, aging marshal Henri-Philippe Pétain, a national hero of the Great War, formed a new French government — the so-called Vichy (VIH-shee) government — and accepted defeat. By July 1940 Hitler ruled practically all of western continental Europe; Italy was an ally, the Soviet Union a friendly neutral (Map 30.2). Only Britain, led by Winston Churchill (1874–1965), remained unconquered.

MAP 30.2 World War II in Europe and Africa, 1939–1945 The map shows the extent of Hitler’s empire at its height, before the Battle of Stalingrad in late 1942 and the subsequent advances of the Allies until Germany surrendered on May 7, 1945.

Map shows the following countries to be Axis powers or allies: Finland, Germany, Poland, Italy, Croatia, Slovakia, Hungary, Romania, Bulgaria, Albania, Croatia and Libya. Countries that were occupied by Germany and its allies are: Norway, Denmark, Latvia, Lithuania, Belarus, the Ukraine, Tunisia, Algeria, and Morocco.

Allied Powers and their allies were Great Britain, Egypt, Syria, Iraq, and the Soviet Union. Neutral nations are Spain, Sweden, Turkey, and Saudi Arabia.

Major battles were: the Siege at Warsaw in September 1939, the Battle of Britain in Fall 1940, the Battle For Crete from May 20 to June 1, 1941, the Siege of Leningrad from September 1941 to January 1944, Germans repulsed in December 1941 in Moscow, the Siege of Stalingrad from August 21, 1942 to January 31, 1943, the Axis troops’ occupation of Vichy, France from November 10th to 11th in 1942, Algeria and Morocco join the Allies in November 1942, Axis troops evacuated from Tunisia in May 1943, Allies invade Sicily and Italy from July to September of 1943, the Uprising at Warsaw from August to September of 1944, and Germany surrenders on May 8, 1945 in Berlin.

To prepare for an invasion of Britain, Germany first needed to gain control of the air. In the Battle of Britain, which began in July 1940, German planes attacked British airfields and key factories, dueling with British defenders high in the skies. In September Hitler began indiscriminately bombing British cities to break British morale. British aircraft factories increased production, and Londoners defiantly dug in. By September Britain was winning the air war, and Hitler abandoned his plans for an immediate German invasion of Britain.

Hitler now allowed his lifetime obsession of creating a vast eastern European empire for the “master race” to dictate policy. In June 1941 Germany broke the Nazi-Soviet nonaggression pact and attacked the Soviet Union. By October Leningrad was practically surrounded, Moscow was besieged, and most of Ukraine had been conquered. But the Soviets did not collapse, and when a severe winter struck German armies outfitted in summer uniforms, the invaders were stopped.

Although stalled in Russia, Hitler ruled an enormous European empire. He now began building a New Order based on the guiding principle of Nazi totalitarianism: racial imperialism. Within the New Order, the Dutch, Norwegians, Swedes, and Danes received preferential treatment, for the Germans believed they were racially related to the German “Aryan” master race. The French, an “inferior” Latin people, occupied the middle position. At the bottom of the New Order were the harshly treated “subhumans,” Jews and Slavs.

Hitler envisioned a vast eastern colonial empire where enslaved Poles, Ukrainians, and Russians would die or be killed off while Germanic peasants would resettle the abandoned lands. Himmler and the elite SS corps implemented a program of destruction in the occupied territories to create a “mass settlement space” for Germans.

The Holocaust

Finally, the Nazi state condemned all European Jews to extermination in the Holocaust. After Warsaw fell in 1939, the Nazis forced Jews in the occupied territories to move to urban ghettos, while German Jews were sent to occupied Poland. After Germany attacked Russia in June 1941, forced expulsion spiraled into extermination. In late 1941 Hitler and the Nazi leadership ordered the SS to speed up planning for “the final solution of the Jewish question.”²⁸ Throughout the Nazi empire Jews were systematically arrested, packed like cattle onto freight trains, and dispatched to extermination camps.

Prelude to Murder This photo captures the terrible inhumanity of Nazi racism. Frightened and bewildered families from the soon-to-be-destroyed Warsaw Ghetto are being forced out of their homes by German soldiers for deportation to concentration camps. There they faced murder in the gas chambers.

Black and white photo showing families being forced from their houses by German soldiers. There are men, women, and children, all with their hands in the air. Many are carrying bags with belongings.

Arriving at their destination, small numbers of Jews were sent to nearby slave labor camps, where they were starved and systematically worked to death. Most victims were taken to “shower rooms,” which were actually gas chambers. By 1945 about 6 million Jews had been murdered.

Who was responsible for this terrible crime? After the war, historians laid the guilt on Hitler and the Nazi leadership, arguing that ordinary Germans had little knowledge of the extermination camps, or that those who cooperated had no alternative given the brutality of Nazi terror and totalitarian control. Beginning in the 1990s studies appeared revealing a much broader participation of German people in the Holocaust and popular indifference (or worse) to the Jews’ fate.²⁹In most occupied countries local non-German officials also cooperated in the arrest and deportation of Jews.

Japan’s Asian Empire

By late 1938, 1.5 million Japanese troops were bogged down in China, holding a great swath of territory but unable to defeat the Nationalists and the Communists (see “Japan Against China” in Chapter 29). In 1939, as war broke out in Europe, the Japanese redoubled their ruthless efforts in China. Implementing a savage policy of “kill all, burn all, destroy all,” Japanese troops committed shocking atrocities, including the so-called Rape of Nanjing. During Japan’s war in China — the second Sino-Japanese War (1937–1945) — the Japanese are estimated to have killed 4 million Chinese people.

In August 1940 the Japanese announced the formation of a self-sufficient Asian economic zone. Although they spoke of liberating Asia from Western imperialism and of “Asia for the Asians,” their true intentions were to eventually rule over a vast Japanese empire. Ultranationalists moved to convince Japan’s youth that Japan had a sacred liberating mission in Asia.

For the moment, however, Japan needed allies. In September 1940 Japan signed a formal alliance (the Axis alliance) with Germany and Italy, and Vichy France granted the Japanese dominion over northern French Indochina. The United States, upset with Japan’s occupation of Indochina and fearing embattled Britain would collapse if it lost its Asian colonies, froze scrap iron sales to Japan and applied further economic sanctions in October.

As 1941 opened, Japan’s leaders faced a critical decision. At the time, the United States was the world’s largest oil producer and supplied over 90 percent of Japan’s oil needs. Japan had only a year and a half’s worth of military and economic oil reserves, which the war in China and the Japanese military and merchant navies were quickly drawing down. The Netherlands’ colonial possessions in Indonesia (Netherlands East Indies) could supply all of Japan’s oil, rubber, and tin needs, but the Japanese feared an attack there would bring American reprisal. On July 26, 1941, President Roosevelt embargoed all oil exports to Japan and froze its assets in the United States. Japan now had to either recall its forces from China or go to war before running out of oil. It chose war.

On December 7, 1941, Japan launched a surprise attack on the U.S. fleet in Pearl Harbor in the Hawaiian Islands. Japan hoped to cripple its Pacific rival, gain time to build a defensible Asian empire, and eventually win an ill-defined compromise peace.

The Japanese attack was a limited success. The Japanese sank or crippled every American battleship, but by chance all the American aircraft carriers were at sea and escaped unharmed. Hours later the Japanese destroyed half of the American Far East Air Force stationed at Clark Air Base in the Philippines. Americans were humiliated by these unexpected defeats, which soon overwhelmed American isolationism and brought the United States into the war.

Hitler immediately declared war on the United States. Simultaneously, Japanese armies successfully attacked European and American colonies in Southeast Asia. Small but well-trained Japanese armies defeated larger Dutch and British armies to seize the Netherlands East Indies and the British colonies of Hong Kong, Malaya, and Singapore. After American forces surrendered the Philippines in May 1942, Japan held a vast empire in Southeast Asia and the western Pacific (Map 30.3).

MAP 30.3 World War II in the Pacific In 1942 Japanese forces overran an enormous amount of territory, which the Allies slowly recaptured in a long, bitter struggle.

Map shows China, India, Australia, Southern New Guinea, Alaska, and a small piece of land at the southeast coast of China to be Allied controlled territories. The northern part of New Guinea, Burma, the Philippines, and another small piece of land at the southeast coast of China to be territory gained by Allies before the Japanese surrender. Thailand, French Indochina, Malaya, the Dutch East Indies, Japan, Korea, and most of Eastern China are Japanese controlled territories at the surrender on August 14, 1945. The farthest advance of the Japanese conquest as of 1942 was just east of the Marshall Islands to the east; south to most of New Guinea and Singapore; west to Burma and the eastern part of China; and north to Manchuria and the Kurile Islands.

Allied advances are shown going north in the Pacific to the Solomon Islands in 1942 and 1943. Allied advances are shown going west from the Hawaiian Islands to the Marshall Islands in 1943. Allied advances went further west in 1944 from the Marshall Islands to Guam and from Guam to the Philippines. In 1944 Allied advances also moved north from the Solomon Islands to the Philippines. From the Philippines, Allied forces moved south to Borneo, as well as north to Okinawa in 1945. Also in 1945 Allied forces moved north from Guam to Okinawa and Iwo Jima. 1945 also saw Allied forces moving south from India to Burma; from China into the area controlled by the Japanese, and from the north into Manchuria.

Major battles are:

Burma

Leyte in the Philippines – October 1944

Coral Sea – May 1942

Guadalcanal – August 1942-February 1943

Guam – July-August 1944

Midway – June 1942

Pearl Harbor – December 1941

Iwo Jima – February-March 1945

Okinawa – April-June 1945

The Japanese claimed they were freeing Asians from Western imperialism, and they called their empire the Greater East Asian Co-Prosperity Sphere. Most local populations were glad to see the Western powers go, but Asian faith in “co-prosperity” and support for Japan steadily declined as the war progressed. Although the Japanese set up anticolonial governments and promised genuine independence, real power always rested with Japanese military commanders and their superiors in Tokyo. Moreover, the Japanese never treated local populations as equals, and the occupiers exploited local peoples for Japan’s wartime needs.

The Japanese often exhibited great cruelty toward prisoners of war and civilians. Dutch, Indonesian, and perhaps as many as two hundred thousand Korean women were forced to provide sex for Japanese soldiers as “comfort women.” Recurring cruel behavior aroused local populations against the invaders.

The Grand Alliance

While the Nazis and the Japanese built their empires, Great Britain (the greatest colonial power), the United States (the greatest capitalist power), and the Soviet Union (the greatest Communist power) joined together in an unlikely military pact called the Grand Alliance. The vagaries of war, rather than choice, brought them together. Stalin had been cooperating with Hitler before Germany attacked Russia in June 1941, and the United States entered the war only after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor in December.

Grand Alliance leaders agreed to a Europe first policy set forth by Churchill and adopted by Roosevelt. Only after defeating Hitler would the Allies mount an all-out attack on Japan. To encourage mutual trust, the Allies adopted the principle of the unconditional surrender of Germany and Japan, and no unilateral treaties (as Russia had signed with Germany in World War I). This policy cemented the Grand Alliance because it denied Germany and Japan any hope of dividing their foes.

The Grand Alliance’s military resources were awesome. The United States possessed a unique capacity to wage global war with its large population and mighty industry, which it harnessed in 1943 to outproduce not only the Axis powers but also the rest of the world combined.³⁰ The British economy was totally and effectively mobilized, and the country became an important staging area for the war in Europe. As for the Soviet Union, so great was its economic strength that it might well have defeated Germany without Western help. Stalin drew on the massive support of the people for what the Soviets called the “Great Patriotic War of the Fatherland.”

The War in Europe, 1942–1945

Halted at the gates of Moscow and Leningrad in 1941, the Germans renewed their offensive against the Soviet Union in 1942 and attacked Stalingrad in July. The Soviet armies counterattacked, quickly surrounding the entire German Sixth Army of 300,000 men. By late January 1943 only 123,000 soldiers were left to surrender. In summer 1943 the larger, better-equipped Soviet armies took the offensive and began to push the Germans back (see Map 30.2).

Not yet prepared to attack Germany directly through France, the Western Allies engaged in heavy fighting in North Africa (see Map 30.2). In autumn 1942 British forces defeated German and Italian armies at the Battle of El Alamein (el a-luh-MAYN) in Egypt. Shortly thereafter an Anglo-American force took control of the Vichy French colonies of Morocco and Algeria.

Having driven the Axis powers from North Africa by spring 1943, Allied forces invaded Italy. War-weary Italians deposed Mussolini, and the new Italian government accepted unconditional surrender in September 1943. Italy, it seemed, was liberated. But German commandos rescued Mussolini and made him head of a puppet government. German armies seized Rome and all of northern Italy. They finally surrendered only on April 29, 1945. Two days earlier Mussolini had been captured by partisan forces, and he was executed the next day.

On June 6, 1944, American and British forces under General Dwight Eisenhower landed on the beaches of Normandy, France, in history’s greatest naval invasion. More than 2 million men and almost 0.5 million vehicles pushed inland and broke through the German lines.

In early February 1945 a sick and feeble Franklin Roosevelt met with Stalin and Churchill at Yalta in the Russian Crimea to negotiate plans for the remainder of the war in Europe, Russia’s participation in the war in Asia, and the postwar world. Roosevelt was later severely criticized by some for supposedly “handing over” eastern Europe and northeast Asia (North Korea in particular) to the Soviet Union. Other scholars have noted, however, that Stalin made substantial concessions as well.

In March 1945 American troops crossed the Rhine and entered Germany. The Soviets had been advancing steadily since July 1943, and on April 26, 1945, the Red Army met American forces on the Elbe River in Germany. As Soviet forces fought their way into Berlin, Hitler committed suicide in his bunker on April 30. On May 7 the remaining German commanders capitulated.

The War in the Pacific, 1942–1945

While gigantic armies clashed on land in Europe, the greatest naval battles in history decided the fate of the war in Asia. In April 1942 the Japanese devised a plan to take Port Moresby in New Guinea and also destroy U.S. aircraft carriers in an attack on Midway Island (see Map 30.3). Having broken the secret Japanese code, the Americans skillfully won a series of decisive naval victories. First, in the Battle of the Coral Sea in May 1942, an American carrier force halted the Japanese advance on Port Moresby. Then, in the Battle of Midway in June 1942, American pilots sank all four of the attacking Japanese aircraft carriers and established overall naval equality with Japan in the Pacific.

The United States gradually won control of the sea and air as it geared up its war industry. By 1943 the United States was producing one hundred thousand aircraft a year, almost twice as many as Japan produced in the entire war. In July 1943 the Americans and their Australian allies opened an “island-hopping” campaign toward Japan. By 1944 hundreds of American submarines were hunting in “wolf packs,” decimating shipping and destroying economic links in Japan’s far-flung, overextended empire.

The Pacific war was brutal — a “war without mercy” — and atrocities were committed on both sides.³¹ Aware of Japanese atrocities in China and the Philippines, the U.S. forces seldom took Japanese prisoners after the Battle of Guadalcanal in August 1942, killing even those rare Japanese soldiers who offered to surrender. American forces moving across the central and western Pacific in 1943 and 1944 faced unyielding resistance, and this resistance hardened soldiers as American casualties kept rising. A product of spiraling violence, mutual hatred, and dehumanizing racial stereotypes, the war without mercy intensified as it moved toward Japan.

In June 1944 U.S. bombers began a relentless bombing campaign of the Japanese home islands. In October 1944 American forces under General Douglas MacArthur landed on Leyte Island in the Philippines. In the ensuing Battle of Leyte Gulf, the Japanese lost 13 large warships, including 4 aircraft carriers, while the Americans lost only 3 small ships. The Japanese navy was practically finished.

In spite of massive defeats, Japanese troops continued to fight on. Indeed, the bloodiest battles of the Pacific war took place on Iwo Jima in February 1945 and on Okinawa in June 1945. American commanders believed that an invasion of Japan might cost 1 million American casualties and possibly 10 to 20 million Japanese lives. In fact, Japan was almost helpless, its industry and cities largely destroyed by intense American bombing. As the war in Europe ended in April 1945, Japanese leaders were divided. Hardliners argued that surrender was unthinkable; Japan had never been invaded or lost a war. A peace faction sought a negotiated end to the war.

On July 26 Truman, Churchill, and Stalin issued the Potsdam Declaration, which demanded unconditional surrender. The declaration left unclear whether the Japanese emperor would be treated as a war criminal. The Japanese, who considered Emperor Hirohito a god, sought clarification and amnesty for him. The Allies remained adamant that the surrender be unconditional. The Japanese felt compelled to fight on.

On August 6 and 9, 1945, the United States dropped atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in Japan. Also on August 9, Soviet troops launched an invasion of the Japanese puppet state of Manchukuo (Manchuria, China). To avoid a Soviet invasion and further atomic bombing, the Japanese announced their surrender on August 14, 1945. The Second World War, which had claimed the lives of more than 50 million soldiers and civilians, was over.

Chapter Summary

The 1929 American stock market crash triggered a global Great Depression. Western democracies expanded their powers and responded with relief programs. Authoritarian and Fascist regimes arose to replace some capitalist democracies. Only World War II ended the depression.

The radical totalitarian dictatorships of the 1920s and 1930s were repressive, profoundly antiliberal, and exceedingly violent. Mussolini set up the first Fascist government, a one-party dictatorship, but it was never truly a totalitarian state on the order of Hitler’s Germany or Stalin’s Soviet Union. In the Soviet Union Stalin launched a socialist “revolution from above” to modernize and industrialize the U.S.S.R. Mass purges of the Communist Party in the 1930s led to the imprisonment and deaths of millions.

Hitler and the Nazi elite rallied support by recalling the humiliation of World War I and the terms of the Versailles treaty, condemning Germany’s leaders, building on racist prejudices against “inferior” peoples, and warning of a vast Jewish conspiracy to harm Germany and the German race. The Great Depression caused German voters to turn to Hitler for relief. After he declared the Versailles treaty disarmament clause null and void, British and French leaders tried appeasement. On September 1, 1939, his unprovoked attack on Poland forced the Allies to declare war, starting World War II.

Nazi armies first seized Poland and Germany’s western neighbors and then turned east. Here Hitler planned to build a New Order based on racial imperialism. In the Holocaust that followed, millions of Jews and other “undesirables” were systematically exterminated. In Asia the Japanese created the Greater East Asian Co-Prosperity Sphere. This was a sham, as “Asia for the Asians” meant nothing but Japanese domination and control. After Japan attacked Pearl Harbor, the United States entered the war. In 1945 the Grand Alliance of the United States, Britain, and the Soviet Union defeated, outproduced, and outmanned Germany and Japan.

 CONNECTIONS

If anyone still doubted the interconnectedness of all the world’s inhabitants following the Great War, those doubts faded as events on a truly global scale touched everyone as never before. First a Great Depression shook the financial foundations of the wealthiest capitalist economies and the poorest producers of raw materials and minerals. Another world war followed, bringing global death and destruction. At war’s end, as we shall see in Chapter 31, the world’s leaders revived Woodrow Wilson’s idea of a League of Nations and formed the United Nations in 1946 to prevent such tragedies from ever reoccurring.

Although the United Nations was an attempt to bring nations together, the postwar world became more divided than ever. Chapter 31 will describe how two new superpowers — the United States and the Soviet Union — emerged from World War II to engage one another in the Cold War for nearly the rest of the century. Then in Chapters 32 and 33 we will see how less developed nations in Asia, Africa, and Latin America emerged after the war. Many of them did so by turning the nineteenth-century European ideology of nationalism against its creators, breaking the bonds of colonialism.

 

 

 

 

 

nited Nations was an attempt to bring nations together, the postwar world became more divided than ever. Chapter 31 will describe how two new superpowers — the United States and the Soviet Union — emerged from World War II to engage one another in the Cold War for nearly the rest of the century. Then in Chapters 32 and 33 we will see how less developed nations in Asia, Africa, and Latin America emerged after the war. Many of them did so by turning the nineteenth-century European ideology of nationalism against its creators, breaking the bonds of colonialism.