The Xenophile Historian

A History of Europe

1914 to 1945

	It Started as the Third Balkan War
	The Lights Go Out
	The Schlieffen Plan
	The Decisive Campaign
	Other Events of 1914
	1915
	1916
	1917
	The Last German Offensive
	The Central Powers Give Up
	Disillusionment at Versailles
	The Irish Free State
	From Idealism to Upheaval
	The Rise of Mussolini
	The Scourge of the Depression
	War Games in Ethiopia and Spain
	Suddenly, It Became Hitler's Austria
	The Munich Agreement and the Maginot Line
	The Blitzkrieg Unleashed
	The Fall of the West
	The Battle of Britain and the Campaigns of 1941
	Under the Swastika
	The "Final Solution"
	Underground Resistance
	The Battle of the Atlantic
	The Air War
	The Underbelly of the Axis
	The Liberation of France
	The Final 150 Days
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The immediate cause of World War I was the chronic Balkan problem, in this case Austria-Hungary's ongoing efforts to make the Bosnians see their future with the Hapsburgs rather than as part of a greater Serbia. When everything else failed, the governor of Bosnia invited Archduke Franz Ferdinand to make an official tour of the province. He could stay at Ilidze, a pleasant little resort just outside of Sarajevo (the provincial capital), watch the army's summer maneuvers and chat with the local dignitaries. The archduke graciously agreed and the governor's staff drew up an itinerary. Not long afterwards, a copy of this document was intercepted and delivered to the desk of Colonel Dragutin Dimitrijevic, Chief of Serbian Intelligence. This was not the colonel's only job; under the code name of Apis, he also led Crna Ruka ("The Black Hand"), a terrorist organization dedicated to the creation of Yugoslavia. A radical hates a reformer more than he hates his enemy, and Dimitrijevic decided that eliminating the archduke was the best way to serve his cause.

Franz Ferdinand and his wife arrived in Sarajevo on June 28. Coincidentally, this day was the 525th anniversary of the battle of Kosovo (see Chapters 9 and 15), an event of Biblical importance to the Serbs, but the archduke didn't seem to realize that the Bosnians would be extraordinarily sensitive for that reason. The crowd that came to see him included both spectators and terrorists; one of the latter lobbed a bomb at the archduke's car as it passed. The bomb hit the car but bounced off before exploding; the only person injured was an aide in the next car. The archduke sped safely to the town hall, where he acted remarkably cheerful as he listened to a loyalist's speech. Then he called for his car, so he could visit his aide in the hospital. Unfortunately, nobody had told the chauffeur about this and he started out for the museum, the next stop on the official itinerary; Franz Ferdinand had to call a halt while the misunderstanding was straightened out. That caused the car to stop alongside another member of the Black Hand, a nineteen-year-old Bosnian Serb named Gavrilo Princip. He put one bullet into Franz Ferdinand and another into Sophie; then he, like the bomb-thrower before him, took a cyanide pill. The cyanide came from a long-expired batch, like the poison Napoleon had used a hundred years earlier (see Chapter 12, footnote #11), so it wasn't a fatal dosage for either of them. However, the bullets did their job; both the archduke and duchess were dead on arrival at the hospital.

The Lights Go Out

The Austrians got little out of Princip before he died of tuberculosis in prison; all they learned was that he and his fellow conspirators had gotten their training and equipment from Belgrade. Still, it was enough for the Austrians to realize they had a war on their hands, so first they made sure that the Germans would back them up, and then they sent the Serbs an ultimatum: "Let our investigating teams follow up the leads we have in Belgrade--or else." To make sure that the Serbs wouldn't agree, they gave Serbia only forty-eight hours to reply. No sovereign state could accept a demand like this; the Serbs rejected it and on July 28, Austria-Hungary declared war. Next Russia mobilized, determined not to let the Austrians destroy their best friend in the Balkans. They had planned at first to only mass troops along the Austro-Russian frontier, so as not to threaten Germany. But the details of a partial mobilization were too much for the primitive Russian military machine. Faced with calling out all of his troops or none at all, the tsar chose to put them all on the active duty list. So did the Germans; they didn't really want to get involved, but they had promised to do so if a major power joined Austria's enemies. Then the Germans made sure that France would fight by asking for guarantees of neutrality that the French couldn't possibly give. In the first two weeks of August, while diplomats were hurrying about delivering declarations of war, the Central Powers⁽¹⁾ prepared to overthrow the Franco-Russian-Serbian entente.

Just about everyone expected the upcoming war to be a short one, a rerun of the "genteel wars" that marked most of the previous century. Both sides expected to win swiftly, the result being that a few soldiers would get killed and the rest would go home full of stories to tell their grandchildren. In August the kaiser boasted to his troops: "You will be home before the leaves have fallen from the trees." In Britain hundreds of thousands of young men enlisted, far more than could be easily trained or equipped; all of them were eager to get involved in what looked like the adventure of a lifetime. When the first British soldiers went across the Channel, the rest protested, expecting the war to end before they got their chance to go for glory, and with a mind-set almost incomprehensible to us, some British officers refused to let their men wear steel helmets because they thought it was unsporting!

Only later did everyone realize how much things had changed. There were too many countries involved to allow a short war, and technology had changed the weapons, strategy and tactics completely. The submarine, machine gun and barbed wire were used on a larger scale than ever before; as the conflict went on warplanes, poison gas and tanks were invented, though the generals were too old-fashioned to use them in ways that could win battles. For most of the war, they would pay for the lessons they learned with their soldiers' lives. Yes, this would not be an easy war at all. The only observer who seemed to know this in August 1914 was the British Foreign Minister, Sir Edward Grey. As he watched the lamplighters making their rounds in St. James' Park, he remarked sadly: "The lamps are going out all over Europe. We will not see them lit again in our lifetime."

The Schlieffen Plan

Trying to strike the key blow in the east was not the answer; Russia was simply too big to knock out with one punch. Since it would take the Russians weeks, maybe months, to prepare and move their forces, the Germans would have time to beat France first. However, the west wasn't an easy option either; the French had used conscription to get enough troops to man the entire Franco-German frontier. An offensive here would require frontal assaults against fortified positions, not an appealing prospect for any army, especially one in a hurry.

Schlieffen's solution was a Prussian-style flanking maneuver, on a scale larger than anyone had attempted before. Instead of fighting through the French, he would go around them. His plan called for the deployment of the entire German army on the western frontier, with two thirds of it stationed alongside the Low Countries. These divisions, known henceforth as the right wing of the army, were to march through Belgium, Luxembourg, and southern Holland as fast as they could go, the idea being to mobilize in two weeks and reach the Franco-Belgian frontier one week after the start of hostilities. From there they would sweep into northern France, wheel to the left, and catch both Paris and the whole French army in one enormous pocket. If all worked as planned, the whole campaign would be over in six weeks. The critical part in the maneuver would be played by the German 1st Army, the one farthest to the right; because it would form the outer rim of the German "wheel," it would have to march the fastest, about twenty miles a day, to keep in step with the other units. And it would have to stay as close to the English Channel as possible, to make sure that no French divisions escaped. As Schlieffen put it: "Let the last man on the right brush the Channel with his sleeve."

Click here to see the Schlieffen Plan (opens in a separate window).
Source: Atlas of the First World War, by Martin Gilbert.

It has been said that no military strategy survives its first encounter with the enemy, but the Schlieffen Plan was so rigid that any changes made to it invited disaster. The first problem was that it called for 100 divisions, but Germany only had 80 divisions when World War I began, so the all-important right wing would be understrength from the start. Then after Schlieffen retired, his successor, Helmuth von Moltke (a nephew of the other Moltke), made some more compromises. First, he revised the marching orders so that the right wing would not pass through Holland. Then he decided that ten divisions must be kept back to defend East Prussia. Schlieffen, hearing of these changes, wondered if Moltke really understood the thinking behind the plan. After all, did the burning of a few East Prussian farms matter so long as the campaign in the west succeeded? He sent memos explaining the need to hit the French as hard and as fast as possible; the evasive answers he got weren't reassuring. He was still worrying when he died in 1913. His last words were meant for Moltke: "If nothing else, keep the right wing strong."

The Decisive Campaign

The Germans sent the Belgian government a demand to let their army march through Belgium on August 2, 1914. Would the Belgians fight to keep them out, and if they did, would the British join them? Within a couple of days the Germans knew that the answer to both questions was yes. The German chancellor dismissed the 75-year-old treaty guaranteeing Belgium's neutrality as a "scrap of paper," and the German army invaded Belgium. They weren't overly concerned about the British because they were sure the war would be over before Britain could make much of a difference. But the Belgian decision was disappointing because it meant that the fortress complex at Liege, which lay right in the path of the German armies, would have to be taken out. And there were only ten days in which to do it if the Schlieffen Plan were to stay on schedule.

The main citadel of Liege was so obsolete that it surrendered when General Erich Ludendorff drove up to it and banged on the door! Ringing the town, however, were twelve forts that were more modern, and because the Germans were pressed for time, these presented a real problem. Fortunately Krupps of Essen, the famous arms manufacturer, had a special series of 420mm cannon for the job. The guns took several days to set up, but once in action, they reduced each fort to rubble in just a few hours. General Alexander von Kluck's 1st Army was able to start moving on August 17, almost exactly as scheduled.

A week later von Kluck crossed the Franco-Belgian frontier. He had a two to one superiority over the troops the Allies (the name now given to the Triple Entente and their associates) had scraped together to stop him, and it only took him a day to drive them from their positions. So confident were the Germans of a quick victory at this point that Moltke pulled four divisions from the right wing and sent them east to shore up defenses on the Russian front. The first phase of the great offensive had proceeded perfectly.

The French responded with an offensive of their own, a direct thrust against the German center in Lorraine. Germany couldn't have had a more cooperative opponent. The French put on a magnificent show at first; the bright blue coats and red trousers of the infantry and the gleaming breastplates of the cavalry stood out against the drab grey uniforms of the Germans. The plan behind the attack, a document known simply as Plan 17, showed a remarkable lack of thought. As an official manual declared, "Only two things are necessary: to know where the enemy is and to decide what to do. What the enemy intends is of no consequence." In other words, wars are won by the side with the most guts. This doctrine would have been questioned by anyone familiar with military history, but since most French soldiers were too young to remember the last war, it had become an article of faith among them. It soon withered away when the French charged with blind courage into the crossfire of rifles and machine guns. Within two weeks the French had lost 300,000 men and were falling back everywhere, sadder, wiser and fewer.

Meanwhile, the dead hand of Schlieffen continued to guide the Germans. Von Kluck kept to his schedule, though he had to fight soldiers from three armies (the British, Belgians and French); by September 1 he was right where he was supposed to be, at Amiens, fifty miles north of Paris. But the generals to his left were suffering heavy casualties and they narrowed the front of each division to keep up the momentum of their attacks. This meant that von Kluck would have to turn more sharply left than planned to keep gaps from forming in the advancing line. The German line as a whole was shortening; von Kluck would have to pass east, not west, of Paris.

Von Kluck changed his direction without slowing his pace; on September 3 he crossed the Marne River, just forty miles east of Paris. It was here that his right flank was hit by a French force, delivered by taxicabs from the capital. Von Kluck turned around and beat off this attack without difficulty, only to learn with dismay that while he had been shortening his front the French had been lengthening theirs. By using the railroads to transfer whole divisions, the French had built up the numbers opposite von Kluck's force until they had both outnumbered and overlapped it. It was immediately clear at this point that the Schlieffen Plan had failed. On Moltke's orders an attempt was made to break through in the center, but instead on September 9 the Germans on the right wing began to pull back to the Aisne River. The Allies surged forward, claiming that the battle of the Marne was a decisive victory. They were right, but the victory came from the strategies used, rather than the personal bravery of those soldiers involved.

Click here to see how the Schlieffen Plan actually worked out. (opens in a separate window).
Source: Atlas of the First World War, by Martin Gilbert.

The Schlieffen Plan failed for the same reason as Plan 17: nobody took into account the new technology of war--in this case the firepower of the machine gun--which now gave the defender an awesome advantage. For an attack to succeed it required more attackers per defender than anyone had foreseen, which is why the Germans had to shorten their line as they advanced and the French had been able to lengthen theirs as they retreated. But at the time it was thought that the generalship of the two sides had been the main reason for the outcome. Moltke's "failure of nerve" was compared to the complete calm of Joseph "Papa" Joffre, the French commander. Joffre did keep his wits throughout the whole campaign, though whether he did so because he knew what he was doing (as his admirers believed) or because he never realized how bad things really were (as his detractors claimed) is irrelevant. Moltke's nerve, or lack of it, didn't influence the result at all. It was the commanders on the German right wing, including von Kluck, who ordered the retreat and they did so when they realized that the Germans, and not the French, were about to be outflanked; General Headquarters wasn't directly involved.

Blameworthy or not, Moltke had a nervous breakdown and had to be dismissed on September 14; the war minister, General Erich von Falkenhayn, took his place. Falkenhayn did his best to recover the initiative. As fast as new divisions could be raised, he sent them into northern France with orders to get a new flanking movement going. But the Allies won the race to the Channel. What this meant was that there was no longer any flank to find; from Switzerland to the Belgian town of Ypres, troops stood in an unbroken 500-mile-long line. The fighting became bloodier, but as hard as both sides fought, little movement was possible. Nobody had any idea how to storm a position defended by rifles or machine guns without losing more soldiers than the enemy would lose. By mid-November movement stopped completely; both sides dug in for the winter and the incredibly filthy war of the trenches had begun.⁽²⁾

Other Events of 1914

Ludendorff arrived in the east to find that a plan for a counterattack had already been prepared. The basic idea was to concentrate every available unit against the southern Russian army, defeat it or drive it back, and then go after the eastern one. The Russians had no maps, so they moved at a ponderously slow rate; that and their use of uncoded radio signals gave Ludendorff the chance to make an attack that would go down in military textbooks. The battle of Tannenberg was a classic envelopment that almost completely wiped out the southern Russian force. Then he marched east to encounter the other Russian army at the Masurian Lakes and drove it out of Prussia with crippling losses. It was a breathtaking feat of arms, something to offset the failure in the west. Ludendorff didn't even need the four divisions Moltke had sent him from the western front; they were still traveling across Germany when the East Prussian battles took place.

Austria-Hungary also had two war fronts, but performed miserably on both. The Hapsburg empire was so far behind western Europe, in supplies and technology, that you could say it never really entered the twentieth century. When the main Austrian force moved north into Russian Poland, a Russian countermove from the east hit it in the side. The Austrians failed to recover their balance and by the end of the year all Galicia was in Russian hands. Even worse, their invasion of Serbia, which they had predicted would be a cakewalk, ended in a humiliating rout; the outnumbered Serbs pursued the Austrians all the way to Slovenia. The Austrian generals just couldn't seem to do anything right.

The Germans were understandably bitter about this. The Austrian army had promised much, but was a complete liability. One German general complained, "We have shackled ourselves to a corpse." And speaking of corpses, the Ottoman Empire, the traditional "Sick Man of Europe," joined Germany and Austria-Hungary in October. The attacks launched by the Turks--against the Russians in the Caucasus and the British in Egypt--had as much fantasy in them as the Austrian war plans.

1915

There seemed to be no way to break the stalemate in the west. Any would-be attackers on either side faced formidable defenses: machine guns, barbed wire, trenches and artillery. An army could always break through a spot in the enemy line by throwing enough artillery shells and men at it; the hard part was that cavalry could not survive under such conditions, and artillery could not follow the soldiers through the shell-torn wilderness created by these attacks. This meant that the defenders could usually regroup and stage a counterattack before they were forced to retreat more than a mile or two. Before long British officers were calculating that they would need to sacrifice three British lives for every two Germans they killed, and that they would need a 13:8 superiority in numbers if they were going to have any men left to hold the battlefield after the fighting was over. It's hard to imagine warfare getting any nastier than this!

Most of the time the western front seemed like a contest to see which side could die faster, but both Germany and the Allies worked to find a quicker way to victory. When the Germans attacked Ypres in 1915, they introduced a ghastly new weapon--poison gas. Thousands were killed or maimed by the gases used: first chlorine, later phosgene and mustard gas. However, it was not used everywhere, and the Allies soon had primitive gas masks.⁽³⁾ As in future wars, poison gas failed to win any battles, but all soldiers since have had to prepare for an encounter with this horror.

We often think of the Germans as expert mechanics, but the tank was a British invention. The idea of "land battleships"--gun-carrying armored cars--had appeared in science fiction stories shortly after the automobile was invented (the name "tank" was a code word to confuse spies). A few prototypes became available in 1915, and they first saw action in late 1916. These slow-moving monsters frightened the Germans, but the Allies didn't have enough tanks to win battles until 1918.

In addition to land and sea, the air now became a place for fighting. At the beginning of the war the airplane was a fragile flying machine, only suitable for reconnaissance. However, aircraft-building technology progressed rapidly; soon fighter planes were sturdy enough to carry bombs, and had machine guns synchronized to fire at targets in front of them without damaging the propeller. Few pilots lived long enough to become "aces"; those who did, like America's Captain Eddie Rickenbacker and Germany's Manfred von Richtofen (the "Red Baron"), were the war's most celebrated heroes. At the same time, the tactic of bombing enemy cities made civilians a target worth attacking. Despite the attention given to the pilots and the panic caused by the bombings, warplanes had a marginal effect on World War I. Not until the next war would the airplane become an important tool for winning every battle.

General Falkenhayn found enough things to do, even if they weren't war-winning strokes, to keep himself busy in 1915. First there was the Austrian sector of the eastern front, which badly needed shoring up. Falkenhayn sent a German army to western Galicia and in May it smashed through the Russian line. This became the southern arm of a huge pincer movement into Poland; the northern pincer was provided when Hindenburg and Ludendorff struck south from East Prussia. Warsaw fell in early August; by early September the Germans had all of Russian Poland. Once the Russians were pushed a safe distance away, Falkenhayn closed down the war's first really successful offensive; like Schlieffen, he believed that even the most dramatic eastern advance would run out of steam before Russia collapsed. Then he sent the troops south to help Austria with its other problem, Serbia.

Falkenhayn had a new card to play here, for Bulgaria, still bitter at her defeat in the Second Balkan War, decided to join the Central Powers. This made the second invasion of Serbia an easy success. As Germany and Austria-Hungary launched the main attack from the north, Bulgaria opened up a second front in the east; the whole country was overrun during the month of October. 150,000 Serbian solders managed a magnificent fighting retreat across the Albanian mountains, taking 25,000 Austrian prisoners with them. An Allied naval force rescued the Serbs when they reached the Adriatic, but it didn't change the results. Those Serbs who survived starvation, freezing temperatures and raids from the Albanians spent the rest of the war in a camp the Allies set up for them at the Greek port of Salonika, while the Central Powers went to work brutalizing their country.⁽⁴⁾

The Allies tried to help the Serbs by opening up a new front from Salonika, but this expedition was too little and too late. The Bulgarians had no trouble chasing it back to Greece, where it sat uneasily on the territory of an officially neutral country and served no useful purpose. This failure was all the more embarrassing because there had been enough troops in the Aegean during the summer to bring about a victory, but they had been squandered in an attempt to take Constantinople and knock the Turks out of the war. This expedition was so badly planned that it never got beyond the beaches of the Gallipoli peninsula and by the time it was called off (January 1916, nine months after it started) the Turkish soldiers had proved they were not lacking in courage, though their equipment was in short supply.

For those keeping score, the Central Powers were ahead on most fronts by the end of 1915. Britain had built up its army on the western front until the Allies had a 3:2 superiority over the Germans, but the Allied offensive was beaten back with terrible losses (400,000 Allied dead against a German loss of less than half this number). Add to this another 250,000 Allied soldiers wasted on Gallipoli. In the east, Russia was crippled, Serbia was eliminated, and Turkey had survived its toughest test. The only good news for the Allies was that Italy joined them in May. Italy had offered to sell herself to the highest bidder, and since Austria held the territory she wanted, the Allies could offer a better deal. But Italy proved just as disappointing for the Allies as Austria-Hungary was for Germany. The Italians never got more than a few miles across the border in the eastern Alps, and the Austrians finally had an enemy they could take care of on their own.

1916

Falkenhayn began the bloodiest battle in history on February 21, 1916. At first it looked as though the plan might work, but then, as the French learned how to counter the German tactics, the battle deteriorated into a struggle that was just as punishing for the Germans as the French. The final score after the attack was called off in July: 300,000 estimated German dead, 350,000 estimated French dead. Meanwhile, the British finally had as many troops on the front as the French, so they launched a massive assault in the Somme valley. This took the pressure off the French but turned another sector into an equally bloody mess. Four months of fighting gained the British 120 square miles, an area about one tenth the size of Rhode Island, but at an awesome cost: 419,654 lives, nearly one percent of Great Britain's population at the time. By the end of the year the total number of casualties on the western front had exceeded one million, but nobody could claim victory. For all this sacrifice, the front line had only shifted seven miles to the east.

In the east, where there were fewer troops per mile and the armies weren't so evenly matched, a war of movement was still possible. The Russians launched their last successful attack, the Brusilov offensive, in June and reconquered the eastern half of Galicia from the Austrians before the attack petered out in September. The main result of this was that Romania ended two years of fence-sitting and jumped in with the Allies. Romania, like Italy, wanted part of Austria-Hungary's territory; unfortunately, the Romanians, like the Italians, were so militarily inept that they failed to help the Allied cause.

In Austria-Hungary, Franz Joseph's 68-year reign ended with his death in 1916. A grandnephew succeeded him as Karl I. His two years on the throne were ineffectual ones, and today we only remember him because he was the last emperor of the venerable Hapsburg dynasty.

Other events worthy of note in 1916 included a Russian advance across the Caucasus into Turkey, and Germany's creation of a vassal Polish kingdom out of the conquered Russian territory. This version of Poland was only a core territory around Warsaw; Germany and Austria-Hungary didn't give it any of the Polish lands they held before the war started. In fact, the Germans arrested its leader, Marshal Joseph Pilsudski, when he started acting too independent. Portugal joined the Allies in spring, and Greece declared itself in the Allied camp that summer.

The failure of Verdun discredited Falkenhayn; after the Brusilov offensive he had to resign. The Hindenburg-Ludendorff team now took command of both the east and the west. Ludendorff quickly turned about the situation in the east, by putting German officers and NCOs in the Austro-Hungarian units. Then he sent enough troops to Hungary and Bulgaria to spearhead an offensive against Romania. Because of Romania's geographical shape (like a backwards letter "L"), and Germany's talent for moving troops quickly by railroad, it was easy to arrange for attacks from four directions to cut off the southern half of the country (Wallachia). The end of 1916 saw the shattered remnants of the Romanian army hiding behind a Russian relief force in Moldavia, while the Central Powers drained Wallachia of its cattle, wheat and oil.

These new supplies were welcome, but they weren't enough. Britain had put a total naval blockade on the Central Powers at the beginning of the war, and by 1916 it was hurting them badly. Food was running short in Germany and the behavior of the people lining up for it was disorderly; several cities saw serious riots in the spring. In Austria-Hungary, Bulgaria and Turkey, the situation was even worse. They needed a war-winning idea more than ever.

The best suggestion came from an unexpected source--the German navy. The naval commander, Admiral Alfred von Tirpitz, was one of the kaiser's favorites, but his surface fleet had gotten nowhere against the British. The only surface naval engagement where Germany had any success was the battle of Jutland, off the coast of Denmark, in May 1916. The Germans were able to claim a victory, but because getting home safely was their top priority, Britain still ruled the waves.

Though Germany's battleships had failed to live up to expectations, the submarines, also called U-boats (from the German Unterseeboot), had done well. The catch was that U-boat attacks only did real harm when they were "unrestricted," meaning that they had to be free to attack any ship that belonged to the Allies, both military and civilian. In 1915 a U-boat sank a British ocean liner, the Lusitania, killing 1,198 civilians (128 of them American). The United States wouldn't stand for this, and warned that it would declare war on Germany if the attacks continued, so the German admiralty agreed to stop them. One reason why they did was because of a shortage of U-boats; with only twenty-five available for action at a time, they couldn't wage an effective campaign. Now there were more than a hundred, and the German admirals claimed that, free of restrictions, they could sink 600,000 tons of shipping a month. Six months of this ought to be enough to bring famine to Britain and halt her economic engine. America would enter the war, but it would take a year and a half for the Americans to build up an army and ship it across the Atlantic; by then it would all be over.

1917

The German people didn't pay much attention to the Americans at this point because they believed that--in Europe anyway--everything was finally going their way. The Russian tsar had abdicated in March, his army was withering away, and it was only a matter of time before the Germans could dictate peace on their own terms for the eastern front. France was almost as war-weary as Russia; morale was so low that when they were ordered to march across No Man's Land into German machine gun fire for the umpteenth time, some French soldiers went bleating like sheep. The British didn't do much better; the battle of Passchendaele saw them sacrifice another quarter million lives to gain fifty square miles of muddy land in Flanders. There was every reason to believe that victory in the west would quickly follow victory in the east. Overseas, Germany had lost all of its colonies except German East Africa, but this caused little concern; victory in Europe would allow the Central Powers to recover all their losses at the conference table.

Just how bad it was for the French was shown by what happened when they tried a new commanding officer. General Robert Nivelle replaced Joffre as the French commander, and he promptly planned a grand offensive. The French government tired to dissuade him, since Verdun had nearly bled the French Army to death. The Germans heard what Nivelle was planning, prepared defenses in depth along the Aisne River, and pulled back from the Somme to a powerful line of fortifications, called the Hindenburg Line. Nivelle paid no attention, and launched his attack in April. It failed, like all other French offensives to date. By the standards of the war, it was a small failure, costing just 120,000 casualties. Even so, Nivelle had promised much and delivered nothing. He continued pouring men onto the battlefields, ignoring casualty reports and refusing to accept defeat. In May, thousands of men deserted, and whole divisions refused to go into battle. A Russian division, sent to the western front as a friendly gesture, rebelled openly. The French soldiers simply couldn't take any more. By June, fifty-four divisions--half the French army--were in a state of mutiny, and there were no reliable troops left between the front line and Paris.

Somehow the French were able to keep the mutiny secret from the Germans until they restored order. Nivelle was dismissed from his command, and Henri Philippe Petain, the hero of Verdun, took his place. Petain promised better rations, more leave time--and no more futile assaults. Unlike his predecessors, he would wait for tanks and the Americans to arrive before going on the offensive. Forty-six ringleaders in the mutiny were shot, while the Russians were surrounded and destroyed by artillery.

On the Italian front, eleven battles had failed to get the Italians across the Isonzo River. In October the Austrians inflicted a crushing defeat at the battle of Caporetto. 260,000 Italians were captured, another 200,000 deserted, and the Austrians occupied nearly all of Venetia. France and Britain had to rush troops to Italy to keep Venice in Allied hands.

The Last German Offensive

Once Russia was taken care of it was Romania's turn to sign the dotted line. When they did so (in May) a piece of Moldavia went to Austria-Hungary while the southern half of Romania's coastline (Dobruja) went to Bulgaria. The northern Dobruja was also detached, though it was never clarified in the last months of the war who would get it (presumably Germany). Neither was Bessarabia (modern Moldova), which was separated from Russia; because Germany was totally occupied elsewhere, the Romanians got away with adding Bessarabia to their kingdom, as partial compensation for their losses.

Now that Hindenburg and Ludendorff had won the war in the east, they had to do the same in the west. And they only had spring to do it in, because the Americans would be there in strength by summer. Once their troops were shifted from east to west, the Germans had a numerical superiority (200 German divisions vs. 170 British & French), but this would not last long. They would have to strike the critical blows in March and April.

Ludendorff began the attack in the Somme sector, by positioning 70 specially trained "assault divisions" against 35 British.⁽⁵⁾ When the guns crashed and the troops marched forward, the British line simply disintegrated; whole battalions vanished, never to be seen again. Within a week some German units had advanced forty miles, ten times farther than any Allied force had gone in the same amount of time. It was a magnificent replay of 1914, but it wasn't enough. The German offensive ground to a halt in the second week; German losses (especially among the new elite units) began to exceed Allied casualties, and the offensive had to be closed down. The same thing happened on the second and third blows; they were tactical successes but strategic failures.

Ludendorff's third offensive took the Germans to the Marne again. There, in the forest of Chateau-Thierry, in early June, they ran into American troops. There were only two divisions of them, but the psychological impact was enormous. By the reduced standards that ruled this late in the war, any American unit was at double strength. These men were fresh, but not foolhardy; soon the German Command reluctantly reported that: "The American soldier proves himself brave, strong and skillful." Just as important, there were more where they came from. By the end of June there were ten American divisions in the front line; by the end of July, twenty; by the end of October, thirty. Time had finally run out for Germany.

The Central Powers Give Up

The signs that Germany was going to lose were quickly read by the other Central Powers. Italy, with British and French help, liberated its occupied territory in the course of four months (June-October 1918). In mid-September the much ridiculed part-French, part-Serbian, part-British army in Greece launched a major attack on Bulgaria, and the Bulgarians almost immediately decided to throw in the towel. As Bulgaria withdrew from the war, British forces raced to the Turkish frontier, French columns reached the Danube and the Serbs made a good start on liberating their homeland. The Turks held out until the end of October before they surrendered, during which time Syria was conquered by the Allies.

It was a long road from Belgrade to Vienna, but the Allied armies never had to march on it; Austria-Hungary fell apart first. October saw Czech nationalists seize control of Prague and proclaim it the capital of an independent Chechoslovak state, while the Poles and Ukrainians of Galicia looked to become either a part of the new Polish state or the short-lived Ukrainian Republic. Meanwhile the Slovenes, Croats and Bosnians repudiated both Austrian and Hungarian rule and declared, with surprising unanimity, that they would join with Serbia and Montenegro to form a single Yugo-Slav state. All that was left was for coups in Vienna and Budapest to declare separate Austrian and Hungarian republics, and the Hapsburg empire ceased to exist.

Germany stood alone as November began. On the third day of the month the sailors of the German fleet mutinied rather than sail on a death-or-glory mission against the British. It looked like many army units were about to do the same. And a third of Belgium had been liberated. The kaiser reluctantly conceded that the war was lost, but the Allies would only talk peace to the German people--not the military or monarchy--so on November 9 he abdicated. Two days later an armistice was signed in a railroad car in France, and the guns fell silent for the last time. Any hope that this would be a truce between equals was quickly dashed; the terms of the agreement amounted to a complete surrender.

The Germans signed because they had one hope left. The American president, Woodrow Wilson, declared that the postwar frontiers of Europe would be decided by the people, not the politicians. Self-determination would be the most important principle, with plebiscites to determine the people's will. On this basis Germany wouldn't do too badly, which is why the Germans chose to negotiate with the idealistic Wilson and not his European allies. True, the president said that there would be exceptions to the rule (Alsace-Lorraine would go to France so that the French would lose their interest in revenge, and the new Polish state--whose existence all parties had agreed on--would be given a seacoast carved from German territory), but if Wilson had his way, Germany would end up clipped instead of crippled.

The cost of the war, in lives and resources, was staggering. Germany had lost 1,827,000 men, or 12% of its male population between the ages of 15 and 50. France had also lost most of a generation--1,400,000. Austria-Hungary lost 1,350,000 men, Russia lost nearly two million. Italy lost 700,000; Serbia lost 350,000; Britain and its dominions lost 950,000. Because it was a late participant, the United States lost a mere 115,000, about half of them victims of disease. The grand total for everybody came up to ten million dead, twenty million wounded. Add to this the civilian casualties caused by invasion and bombings; epidemics of cholera, typhus and influenza; malnutrition and famine; perhaps another ten million innocent lives. Belgium and northern France were utterly devastated. For France and Great Britain, the cost of the war in money was estimated at 10% of the national wealth. Never in history had a single war come so close to destroying civilization. It was called the Great War, the "war to end all wars," for a generation--until a second world war, an even more destructive conflict, set the world ablaze again.

Disillusionment at Versailles

In mapping terms the biggest challenge facing the diplomats was carving up the defunct Austro-Hungarian empire. This understandably led to bickering among the successor states--Czechoslovakia, Poland, Austria, Hungary, Romania, Yugoslavia⁽⁶⁾ and Italy. The Hungarians even tried fighting to regain Transylvania and Slovakia, which had been theirs before the war. Their resistance, however, was quickly broken by the Romanians, who occupied Budapest in August.⁽⁷⁾ By October, apart from four sectors where the final line was to be determined by plebiscites, agreement had been reached on nearly all the new boundaries.

An important exception was the frontier between Italy and Yugoslavia. The Italians wanted Dalmatia (the eastern coast of the Adriatic) because the Republic of Venice once had it, though hardly any Italians lived there now. And the British and French, when bidding for Italian support in 1915, said Italy could have it. Neither factor carried any weight with President Wilson; as far as he was concerned, the line between Italian and Slavic-speaking communities was where the political line was going to be, and token concessions were all that Italy could expect. Sure enough, when the final border was drawn, the Italians got all of Istria and the Yugoslavs got all of Dalmatia except for the port of Zara, which went to Italy, while Fiume became an independent "free city."

Where Wilson compromised his self-determination principle was in cases where physical geography mattered more than ethnic details. For example, he let the Italians have the watershed line in the Alps, because there were Italians living in the southern Tyrol; however, there were a quarter million Austrians in the area as well. And he agreed that the frontier between Czechoslovakia and Germany should follow the mountainous rim of Bohemia (the Sudetenland), though the two million Germans on the Czech side of the line were horrified at the idea.

The exceptions had one important feature in common: they allowed politicians in the defeated nations to argue that the Wilson doctrine operated in the Allies' favor. There were Germans in Czechoslovakia but no Czechs in Germany; there were Austrians in Italy but no Italians in Austria; the cession of Transylvania to Romania, with its mixed Hungarian-Romanian population, meant that there would be Hungarians in Romania but no Romanians in Hungary. However, the most glaring infringement of the self-determination principle came when impoverished Austria asked to join Germany, and the Allies refused to allow the union. One can see the Allies' point of view--a defeated Germany could not be allowed to come out of the war bigger than before--but it did make some of the other things they said sound hypocritical.

The Germans, of course, pointed out this inconsistency. When they signed the Versailles treaty, they said quite openly that they were doing so under duress. But really they didn't do too badly, particularly if you consider the kind of treaty they would have forced the Allies to sign had they won (remember Brest-Litovsk). They had to return Alsace-Lorraine to France, as expected, and hand over two largely Polish provinces to Poland (Posen & West Prussia); finally, two Baltic ports, Danzig and Memel, were made into free cities.⁽⁸⁾ But the other territories that France and Poland asked for, Wilson put to plebiscites, with the result being that all of them except northern Schleswig and the tip of Upper Silesia returned to Germany.⁽⁹⁾

Bulgaria's losses were proportionately about the same as Germany's: she had to return the southern Dobruja to Romania, give western Thrace to Greece, and make some small adjustments in Yugoslavia's favor. The Ottoman Empire got the same treatment as Austria-Hungary: it was completely dismembered. The Allies drew up for the Turks a treaty just as crushing as Versailles, the Treaty of Sevres (1920), but it never went into effect. It was rewritten with Greek and Turkish blood (the Greco-Turkish War of 1921-22), with the end result being that Turkey lost its troublesome Arab provinces but conceded nothing else to the Allies. The Turks recovered their strength with such astonishing speed that the Allies decided to leave them alone and let their first president, Mustafa Kemal, pursue his program to make Turkey a modern, Western republic.

The Irish Free State

By 1914 much of the Irish population was in a serious state of unrest, and they probably would have launched a full-scale rebellion at that time if the Great War had not erupted on the Continent. For a time many put aside their anti-British feelings; 200,000 Irish enlisted in the British army, and 25,000 of them died in the war. The extremists, however, saw Germany as a lesser evil, and to them the war was an opportunity to change the balance of power on the Emerald Isle in favor of the Irish. They began their revolt on Easter Monday of 1916; many of them felt they had no chance of defeating the British, but they participated because they thought their blood sacrifice would bring the rest of the Irish over to their side. Sure enough, by Saturday the uprising was put down, at a cost of 64 rebel lives, 130 British soldiers, and about 300 civilians. Then the British played into nationalist hands by immediately shooting fifteen rebel leaders, thereby killing whatever sympathy they had among the folks in Dublin.

Bad news from the war front prompted Britain to order the conscription of all able-bodied Irishmen in 1917; previously all Irish soldiers had been volunteers. This caused widespread protest and the signing of anti-conscription pledges, forcing London to back down. When general elections were held in December 1918, they showed how much things had changed: Sinn Fein won 73 of the 106 Irish seats in Parliament. Even more amazing was the fact that 34 Sinn Fein candidates were in jail, having been imprisoned for their part in the 1917 protests. Among those who won was a remarkable figure named Eamon de Valera (1882-1975). He had been the last commander to surrender during the 1916 Easter uprising, but unlike his comrades, his death sentence was commuted to life imprisonment, due to his American birth (he was born in New York City, to a Spanish father and an Irish mother). Two months after the election, he made his escape, using a key baked in a cake by his friends, and began a fundraising tour in the United States.

Back in Ireland, 1919 began with Sinn Fein setting up its own parliament, the Dáil Éireann, in Dublin, with de Valera as the first president. Britain saw this as an illegal act, and open fighting broke out between the IRA (Irish Republican Army, Sinn Fein's military wing) and auxiliary British soldiers, called the "Black and Tans" because they wore uniforms with a color combination that did not match. This time, war-weariness and Woodrow Wilson's idealism put Britain in a mood to recognize Ireland's right to self-rule. Near the end of 1920, de Valera returned to represent the Dáil in negotiations. The following year saw three quarters of Ireland granted Dominion status within the British Commonwealth, with the IRA leader, Michael Collins, as chairman of the provisional government; meanwhile, the Protestants set up another parliament in Belfast to counterbalance the Dáil.

London felt compelled to hold onto six counties in the northeast corner of Ireland, centered around Belfast. Whereas the rest of Ireland was almost totally Catholic, three centuries of Scottish immigration and missionary activity had converted most of Ulster's inhabitants to Protestantism, and they preferred British rule to becoming a minority in a Catholic country. Until now Catholic nationalists had ignored the wishes of the Protestants, causing much resentment in the north. At first the six counties were given the option of staying with the new Irish Free State or rejoining the United Kingdom; all of them voted to go with the UK.

Predictably, nobody really wanted to divide Ireland into two states, one of them a British province. The result was a new Irish conflict, this time pitting the moderate nationalists, who had grudgingly accepted the deal, against radicals who wanted nothing less than the whole island. The Irish Civil War lasted from April 1922 to April 1923; among its 700 casualties was Michael Collins. De Valera supported the radicals, but in June 1922 new elections put a pro-treaty majority in control of the Dáil, taking away political support for the radical cause. Eventually the moderates got the upper hand, and de Valera called on the anti-treaty militants to surrender. IRA bombings and ambushes continued throughout the 1920s, but because popular support declined, the remaining radicals turned to the north, rather than Dublin, for support and leadership. The inability of all sides to find a solution to Ireland's partition is the direct cause of the violent incidents that we read about in today's headlines, as the British army, police and their "Orangemen" sympathizers battle Catholic extremists in Northern Ireland.

From Idealism to Upheaval

Among the fallen eagles, Kaiser Wilhelm II did the best; he lived fairly comfortably at Doorn, Holland, where he grew a beard and spent his spare time chopping wood. In 1940 a new German army crushed the Low Countries and France, and he wrote Adolf Hitler a letter thanking him for succeeding where he had failed. He probably felt vindicated when he died a year later, at the age of 82.

Tsar Nicholas II of Russia lived under house arrest for sixteen months, and was transferred from city to city by the Bolsheviks. When it looked like his final home, Yekaterinburg in the Ural mts., would be captured by anti-Bolshevik forces, local Bolsheviks had the ex-tsar and his family shot (July 1918).

Mohammed VI of the Ottomans got insult as well as injury. The last Turkish sultan had been on the throne for only three months when the Allies took Constantinople. In 1922 he was ousted by Mustafa Kemal; then he tried--and failed--to make himself king of western Arabia after its ruler (the Hashemite sharif of Mecca) was expelled by the Saudis. He died in 1926 at the Italian resort of San Remo.

The Hapsburgs suffered a very similar fate. Karl I was forced to abdicate when the war ended; he first retired to his private Austrian estates, but then, at Allied insistence, he moved to Switzerland. In 1921 he made two unsuccessful attempts to seize power in Hungary, after which the Swiss refused to have him back. He died in humiliation on Madeira in the following year. The last Hapsburg, Karl's widow Zita, lived in seclusion until her death in 1989.

The Europe created by the Versailles treaty had a lot of medium-sized countries where the prewar empires had once stood: Finland, Poland, Romania, Czechoslovakia, Yugoslavia and Turkey. Wilson called them the real winners of the war, since most of them chose democratic governments for themselves, but others wondered if this was really a good thing for the stability of Europe. Czechoslovakia, Romania and Yugoslavia formed an alliance in 1921, called the "Little Entente," to prevent any restoration of Hapsburg power in central Europe. However, none of the new nations could contribute much to defend even its own frontiers, so the responsibility for maintaining peace fell--you guessed it--on the major powers.

Whether they would keep the peace was a good question. Wilson thought the US should lead the way in peace, but the US Senate was tired of Europe; the American soldiers were promptly called home, and the Senate refused to have anything to do with what came out of Versailles. And what was going on in Russia, now called the Soviet Union, made that country so unpredictable that the less the West had to do with it, the better. So the task of keeping Germany in line--a Germany that had been irritated but not crippled by its territorial losses--fell entirely on France and Britain. Could they do it?

The French thought not. After losing a whole generation on the battlefields of Flanders and northern France, they thought that the only way they could cope was to use the advantage of the moment to disable Germany permanently. At Clemenceau's insistence, special clauses were inserted into the Versailles treaty limiting the German army to 100,000 men (seven divisions); other sections of the treaty limited the navy to a few surface ships no larger than cruisers and abolished the air force altogether. And to make sure they would be only used defensively, the army was not allowed to station any troops in the Rhine valley or west of it (the Rhineland). Finally, the German economy was loaded with such a burden of reparations that it was hoped that it would be twenty years before any German could afford to think of guns or glory again.⁽¹⁰⁾

The British, unlike the French, were vaguely aware that punishing the new, peaceful and democratic Weimar Republic for the sins of the last kaiser could backfire on them. And the more the Germans had to be mad about, the more likely they were to turn to extremist politicians. There were plenty of these running around, ranging from communists to ultra-rightist bullies in uniforms. Among the latter was a group called the Nazis, whose rise to power in the early 1930s would produce a tyrant without a match in the whole sorry history of inhumanity--Adolf Hitler.⁽¹¹⁾

Born in Austria to a customs officer in 1889, Hitler was a never-do-well who drifted from one job to another until 1914, when he crossed the border and became a corporal in the German army. Serving on the western front, he suffered a leg wound in 1916, was gassed in 1918, and was awarded the Iron Cross. The war ended with Hitler guarding Russian prisoners in a P.O.W. camp on the Austrian border. After Germany's defeat, there followed for Hitler "terrible days and even worse nights . . . my hatred rose against the originators of this deed." In 1919 he joined the Nazis, a group so small that he was the party's seventh member. In 1921 he became Der Führer--the leader.

The Nazis had a brief moment of glory in 1923, when Ludendorff joined them and they attempted to seize power in Bavaria (the so-called Beer Hall Putsch). However, the coup failed badly and Hitler got a six-month jail sentence, which he used to write down his personal philosophy in a book (Mein Kampf, meaning "My Struggle") that soon became the Nazi Bible. After he got out, Germany started to recover from both the war and the reparations, and the Nazis did so poorly during the next few years that few people took them seriously. Even in 1928, their best year before the Great Depression, they couldn't claim a membership of more than 100,000 or win more than a bare dozen of the 491 seats in the German parliament, the Reichstag.

The Rise of Mussolini

Mussolini got his start as a left-wing political activist. Although he became the editor of the influential socialist newspaper Avanti! ("Forward") in 1912, he was inconsistent in his views and soon displayed his opportunism and pragmatism.⁽¹²⁾ When the Italian Socialist party called for neutrality in World War I, Mussolini supported intervention. Party officials removed Avanti! from his control and expelled him from the party. He then put out his own paper, Il Popolo d'Italia ("The People of Italy"), and organized like-minded former leftists into bands called Fascisti, a name derived from the Latin fasces, the bundle of rods bound around an axe that was carried by bodyguards in ancient Rome. During the war, Mussolini volunteered for the army, saw active service at the front, and suffered a wound. When he returned to civilian life, he gave the Fascisti black-shirted uniforms and reorganized them into the fasci di combattimento ("fighting groups") to attract war veterans and try to gain control of Italy.

In the 1919 elections, the Socialists capitalized on widespread unemployment and hardship to become the strongest party. The extreme-right parties did not win a single seat in the Chamber of Deputies. Even so, the Socialists lacked effective leadership and failed to take advantage of their victory. Meanwhile Mussolini's goons beat up opponents, forced castor oil ("Fascist medicine") down their throats, broke strikes, and disrupted opposition meetings--while the government did nothing. When new elections were held in 1921, extreme right-wing politicians still failed to do well, although thirty-five Fascists, Mussolini among them, gained seats. Failing to succeed through the existing system, Mussolini established the National Fascist party in November.

The 1922 government was as ineffective as its predecessors, and frustration with its incompetence fueled the Fascist rise. The trade unions called a general strike to protest the rise of Fascism, but Mussolini's forces smashed their efforts. In October, after a huge rally in Naples, 50,000 Fascists swarmed into Rome; soon after that King Victor Emmanuel III invited Mussolini to form a new government, and granted him dictatorial powers to bring stability to the country. The Fascists remained a minority in Italy, but once they had the central government they packed it with party members and allies, and turned Italy into a one-party state. Thus the October "March on Rome" began Mussolini's reign.

Fascism, like Nazism, emphasized submission to the state, and built a cult of personality around Il Duce, "the leader." Mussolini asserted that "life for the Fascist is a continuous, ceaseless fight," and "struggle is at the origin of all things."⁽¹³⁾ Other than statements of this type and his economic theories, it is difficult to figure out exactly what Mussolini intended Fascism to be, beyond being nationalistic, anticommunist, antidemocratic, expansionist, and statist; for example, he preferred not to meddle in private industry, so long as it worked toward his goal of economic self-sufficiency. He encouraged a high birth rate, but noted that individuals were significant only because they were part of the state. Children were indoctrinated "to believe, to obey, and to fight."

Once Italy was firmly under his control, Mussolini started to make threatening gestures at small countries abroad. He also talked constantly about restoring the Roman Empire. "We have a right to empire," the twentieth-century Caesar said, "as a fertile nation which has the pride and will to propagate its race over the face of the earth, a virile people in the strict sense of the word." His first step in that direction was to rename the Mediterranean Mare Nostrum ("Our Sea"). This should have been more alarming than it was, but the world had gotten used to seeing Italians dress up in gaudy costumes and shout slogans.

Beneath the talk of struggles and the trappings of grandeur was the reality of Italy. Mussolini was no Stalin or Hitler, and his fascism was a far milder form of totalitarianism than what Russia and Germany produced. The Italian people were too laid back to carry out the worst features of fascist rule. There was no class destruction or anti-Semitic persecution in Italy.

As with the other dictatorships, Mussolini's programs had some worthwhile features such as slum clearance, rural modernization, and campaigns against illiteracy and malaria. The trains ran on time--something no other Italian leader could accomplish--and the omnipresent Mafia was temporarily dispersed, with many of its more notable figures fleeing to the United States. However, these positive achievements were more than outweighed by the invasion of Ethiopia, excessive military spending, and special benefits to large landowners and industrialists.

The Scourge of the Depression

Germany's problem was finances. The kaiser's government had spent money at a crazy rate because reparations from the Allies were expected to cover the deficit. Now the boot was on the other foot; the Allies presented the Germans with bills to pay, at a time when the treasury was empty. There was nothing left to do except print more paper money and to borrow from abroad to pay the reparations. This sounds straightforward enough, but the social cost was very high; hyperinflation devalued the German mark until it took four trillion marks to equal one dollar, and the entire middle class was driven into poverty. Nor did the Allies give the Germans any slack; a delay in just one payment brought a French occupation of the Ruhr that paralyzed German industry in 1923-24. In the late 1920s Germany finally recovered to its prewar level of production, but of course, the opposition hadn't stood still in the interim. In automobiles, for example, Germany had once led the world; now her industry was just turning out 90,000 per year while Britain and France each manufactured about 200,000 per year.

The figures listed in the previous sentence are significant; even more so is the difference between them and America's. Whereas Europeans listed the numbers of manufactured cars by the hundred thousand, the Americans measured theirs by the million; e.g., four million in 1928 and five million in 1929. Indeed, because of this and because the nations of Europe owed the United States money after World War I, the economy of Europe had effectively come under the US economy's control. Then in October 1929 the American system collapsed suddenly, without warning. A downturn in the business cycle caught the New York stock market at a time when most of its stocks were greatly overvalued, resulting in a crash in prices. As the fortunes of businesses and investors were wiped out overnight, the collapse of the stock market spread to the banking world and international commerce. The flow of raw materials and manufactured goods came to a halt, factories closed, and bread lines grew longer in every city. By the early 1930s there were twenty-five million unemployed in the United States and, because the advanced nations were all interdependent economically, three million unemployed in Britain and six million jobless in Germany.

This was one more blow than Germany's social structure could stand. In the 1932 elections the Nazis increased their number of seats in the Reichstag to 230, becoming the largest single party. Hindenburg, now president of the republic, had once remarked that Hitler was only fit to be postmaster general, where he could lick stamps with Hindenburg's picture on them. Now in this moment of social and economic crisis, the new generation of army leaders talked him around. In January 1933 Hitler became chancellor, and at once began the transformation of the Weimar Republic into the Third Reich.

One month later the Reichstag went up in flames. Hitler immediately blamed the communists for this arson, and bullied parliament members into granting dictatorial powers to deal with the emergency; the Nazis arrested 4,000 communists in the days that followed. In August 1934 Hindenburg died, leaving Hitler the undisputed master of Germany. He solved the unemployment problem by starting an immense rearmament program, one so successful that for Germany the depression was over by 1935. He also dropped clear hints as to what all this rearmament was for; he intended to obtain for the Germans an empire, with resources and Lebensraum (living space) on a continental scale.

In Nazi Germany, the closest thing to a worship service was one of the official rallies at Nuremberg.

War Games in Ethiopia and Spain

Ethiopian Emperor Haile Selassie made a dramatic appeal for help at the League of Nations. The League was unconvinced by Italy's shameless argument that Ethiopia was the aggressor, and voted to prohibit shipment of certain goods to Italy and to deny it credit. Mussolini couldn't understand why foreigners would side with "barbarian Negroes," rather than with the motherland of civilization. However, the effect of the sanctions was minor because those items a modern army needs the most--coal, steel and oil--were not included in the list of prohibited articles. France and Britain gave only lukewarm support to the sanctions because they did not want to alienate Italy, while nonmembers of the League like the United States largely ignored the prohibitions. The whole sorry story ended in July 1936, when Mussolini triumphed and sanctions were removed. Haile Selassie, now an emperor without a country, went to live in Britain, the first of several royal exiles who would be forced there in the upcoming war. The same year saw Mussolini and Hitler form an alliance, which they called the "Rome-Berlin Axis"; they chose that name because they expected to see the rest of Europe revolve around them. After that Italy's future was tied with Germany's.

Though Hitler held the gas pedal to the floor on his war machine, it wasn't up to battle strength yet, and it was an unexpected flare-up in Spain that gave Nazism its first test of arms. Spain had become a republic in 1931, when a popular rebellion forced King Alfonso XIII to flee. However, Spanish society was stuck in the eighteenth century, and the Republicans did such a bad job of pulling it into the twentieth century that they alienated the army, the Church and the upper classes. Francisco Franco, a right-wing Spanish general, launched a revolt in July 1936, and found plenty of popular support. His 55,000 Moorish troops seized Spanish Morocco, and he called on mainland army garrisons to join him; virtually all of them did. Germany and Italy quickly rushed in tanks, planes, and 85,000 men to help the Falange (Spanish Fascists); four months later Franco controlled half of the country.⁽¹⁵⁾

Joseph Stalin felt duty-bound to support the Loyalist government, which included the small Communist Party of Spain in its coalition, but from his point of view a Loyalist victory could be the worst outcome, because a communist-dominated Spain would provoke the Western nations into forming an anti-Soviet alliance. He ended up supporting the Loyalists with Soviet military equipment, but only halfheartedly, hoping to drag out the war for as long as possible instead of winning it. Of course the Loyalists, who were fighting for their lives, felt differently, so along with the aid came a number of Soviet secret police agents. Instead of going after the native pro-Franco elements, they hunted down and assassinated Stalin's enemies among the leftists, especially those from the Trotskyite Worker's Party of Marxist Unity (POUM in Spanish), whose members outnumbered the pro-Stalin communists. The loyalist government was not communist when the civil war began, but gradually it became so as time went on. Aid to the Loyalists slowed down Franco's advance, but it was always too little, too late. During 1937 Franco completed the conquest of the north⁽¹⁶⁾ and west; the last Loyalist attempts to turn back the Fascist tide ended in November 1938 when Stalin stopped sending aid (he chose to cut his losses because Germany and Japan now looked more threatening). Franco followed this up immediately, by driving down the Ebro valley to the Mediterranean, dividing Catalonia from the rest of Loyalist-held Spain. Four months later he captured Madrid, bringing him complete victory. By then half a million Spaniards had died; most of the dead were victims of the mass executions that both sides indulged in (the "Red Terror" of the Loyalists vs. the "White Terror" of the Nationalists), rather than casualties from front-line fighting.⁽¹⁷⁾

As with Spain, Portugal's first attempt to rule without a king failed, because that country had gone from a monarchy to a republic too quickly. Fifteen years of chaos followed the elections of 1911. During this time, Portugal had eight presidents and 44 cabinets, and suffered through twenty revolutions and coups. In May 1926, General António de Fragoso Carmona seized power, dissolved the parliament, suspended the constitution and began to rule without an ideological program. Carmona followed this up by running for president in 1928, in an election where he was the only candidate. After winning he appointed António de Oliveira Salazar (1889-1970), a professor of economics at the University of Coimbra, as minister of finance. Salazar was given extraordinary powers to put Portuguese finances on a sound basis.

Salazar did so well in his job that he became the most powerful man in Portugal. Profoundly religious, he restored much of the power of the church. In 1930 he founded the União Nacional (National Union) Party; he became prime minister and dictator in 1932 and helped to write a new constitution in 1933. Portugal was now an authoritarian state with a planned economy and no tolerance for opposition, calling itself the Estado Novo (New State).

Suddenly, It Became Hitler's Austria

From the start of his career Hitler had called for an Anschluss, or union, between Germany and Austria. In Englebert Dollfuss, however, the Austrians had a 4-foot-11 leader who passionately believed in independence. One afternoon in July 1934 armed Nazis stormed into his office and assassinated the brave little chancellor. They failed to seize the government, though, and Kurt von Schusnigg replaced Dollfuss.⁽¹⁹⁾

In February 1938 Hitler declared that he was no longer going to tolerate the separation of Austria from Germany, so Schusnigg announced a March 13 plebiscite to decide the matter. Hitler wanted no part in this, so by using a series of threats, he persuaded the Austrian government to let German troops into the country, just one day before the voting took place. The results of the plebiscite would have been more convincing if they had been less than the 99.75% Yes vote that the Nazi press later announced, but the British and French knew that many Austrians wanted Anschluss, so they had the excuse they needed for doing nothing. After all, they had already done nothing about Hitler's violations of the Versailles treaty.

The Munich Agreement

Or so everyone thought. At the last moment, Neville Chamberlain, the British prime minister, made a personal intervention. He possessed in full the loathing and fear of war which characterized the British and French in the inter-war period. He recognized that Germany had genuine grievances and persuaded himself that if these were met a repeat of the 1914-18 holocaust could be avoided. Quoting his personal motto, "Peace at any price," he flew to Munich and persuaded a reluctant Hitler into calling off his attack in return for the Sudetenland. The French were relieved to let Chamberlain defuse tensions; the Russians said nothing and the Czechs, knowing that they couldn't fight alone, bit their lips and signed the agreement.⁽²⁰⁾

It was a terrible decision. If Chamberlain was right and Hitler's ambitions were now satisfied, the crisis was over. But if Hitler wanted more than a pan-German state, the West would have to fight without a great military advantage. Czechoslovakia's defensive frontier--both mountains and fortifications--had been given away and without it the Czech army was worthless. Moreover, the Allied understanding, that the Soviet Union would cooperate with the West in containing the expansion of Nazi Germany, had been destroyed. As Winston Churchill, the opposition leader in Parliament, pointed out, "You had your choice between war and shame -- you chose shame but you will get war."

The Maginot Line

It was impressive indeed. Each ten-kilometer unit of the line was staffed by 1,100 men, sported up to seventeen pillboxes housing heavy artillery, and was powered by generators strong enough to provide electricity for a town of 10,000. In front of the pillboxes ran barriers of barbed wire, tank traps, and machine gun nests; the rear was protected by anti-aircraft guns and underground hangars. Beneath the guns ran an anthill of tunnels, going as much as twelve stories underground. Into these tunnels went everything the French thought might be useful, from generators and ammunition dumps to hospitals, dormitories, and movie theaters. The ventilation intakes which brought air into the tunnels forced the air through two hundred feet of pebbles and charcoal filters the size of a bass drum, to screen out any poison gas that might come in from outside, and the interior air pressure could be raised as an additional line of defense against chemical agents.

But it only took one look at a map of Europe to find the Maginot Line's fatal weakness. The part of the line guarding Sedan and the Ardennes Forest--the German invasion route in the Franco-Prussian War--was only lightly defended, since few thought Hitler would dare to send his tanks through that kind of terrain. Furthermore, the line stopped there, leaving 175 open miles between the Ardennes and the Channel; British and Belgian soldiers were expected to defend that part of the frontier. The Maginot Line could be bypassed with ease; unless Hitler and his generals obligingly used their troops in a direct frontal assault, the whole construction with its eastward-pointing guns would be useless. One French general, a tank commander named Charles de Gaulle, saw this clearly. He pleaded for more planes and tanks to match Germany's fast-moving mechanized power. But his superiors put all their faith in the Maginot Line. Paying no attention to what strategy the Germans might be planning, France confidently prepared to fight World War I all over again.⁽²¹⁾

The Blitzkrieg Unleashed

Nor was there much doubt as to who his next victim was going to be. Poland had gained more German territory at Versailles than any other country; the existence of Danzig and of the Polish Corridor that separated East Prussia from the rest of Germany were standing affronts to German nationalism. When Hitler opened his propaganda campaign against these "injustices," Chamberlain, in a joint declaration with the French, finally drew the line: if Germany invaded Poland, Britain and France would declare war. However, both he and the Poles shrank from asking the Soviet Union to join in this anti-Nazi alliance; the Poles because they knew exactly what the Soviets would ask for in return (the territory Poland had annexed in 1919-20)⁽²³⁾, Chamberlain because he couldn't bring himself to associate with Bolsheviks. Consequently the Anglo-French threat wasn't all that impressive. The Germans would think twice about starting a war if it meant fighting on two fronts, since many felt that was what killed them in the last conflict, but without the USSR there wouldn't be an eastern front for long.

By this time, Hitler had set a date for the invasion of Poland. However, the Nazi leader did sense that the upcoming war would be a lot easier to handle if the Soviets stayed out of it, so he made an offer to Stalin. If Chamberlain had been blind for too long about Hitler's intentions, it seems even stranger that Stalin was blind for a time as well. He appears to have regarded the Allied and German diplomatic missions to Moscow in the 1930s as nothing more than the bids of rival suitors seeking his favor. In the end, he found the German offer more to his liking, because it gave him both time and a chance to grab some more land. One week after German and Soviet ministers signed the papers dividing up Poland between them, the German army crossed the Polish frontier (September 1, 1939). Two days later Chamberlain reluctantly declared war, and the world was in flames again.

Hitler knew from experience that German soldiers did best when they moved fast, avoiding bloody slugging matches like the ones that characterized World War I. But how could they overcome the immense firepower of automatic weapons in the hands of a defending force? Most agreed that the tank was the solution, and most generals planned on using them to blaze a path for the infantry, just like they had done in 1918. However, one German general, Heinz Guderian, had a different idea. During the 1920s he worked out a plan for motorizing and armoring all the elements of a normal division (infantry, artillery and engineers) so that they could work alongside tanks without slowing them down. The end result, a special panzer (armored) division, turned the tank concept around; now infantry supported the tanks, rather than the other way around. Panzer divisions would be very expensive--to pay for them, the rest of the German army would have to use horse-drawn transport for years to come--but Guderian believed that with half a dozen of them he could make war a matter of movement again.

In 1933, Guderian showed Hitler the first experimental panzer unit. "That's what I want," exclaimed the excited Führer, and then he gave his full support to Guderian's panzer-building program. As a result, all six of the armored divisions Guderian had requested were ready in time for the invasion of Poland. They were grouped into three corps of two divisions each--Guderian commanded one in the north, while two other generals, Hoepner and Kleist, massed theirs along the southern part of the German-Polish border (Silesia). All were under orders to drive on Warsaw as fast as possible, before the Allies could counterattack in the west (see footnote #21).

The insistence on speed made the campaign against Poland a model operation. The Polish air force was wiped out on the first day, giving the Luftwaffe full command of the air. Within five days Guderian overran the Polish Corridor and Danzig; Hoepner's tanks were at the gates of the Polish capital within a week. Poland's armies, strung along the frontier in World War I style, found themselves first bypassed, then surrounded as infantry poured through the breaches the panzers had made. The world had its first taste of Blitzkrieg, "lightning war." It also had its first experience of Nazi terror as the Germans ruthlessly bombed and shelled Warsaw into submission. Five weeks after the Blitzkrieg started, the last Polish resistance ended.

A German Stuka (dive bomber) in action.

The reporters concentrated their attention on the siege of Warsaw. What they missed was that Guderian wasn't there. He never thought of Warsaw as a suitable objective and managed to get Brest-Litovsk, 120 miles farther east, put into his orders instead. While one of his panzer divisions took part in the pincer movement that surrounded Warsaw and most of western Poland, he led the other, reaching Brest-Litovsk on September 14. Three days later he made contact with the leading elements of Kleist's corps.⁽²⁴⁾ This was the sort of maneuver he was really interested in: envelopment on a truly massive scale.

The Fall of the West

Stalin's pact with Hitler and his ruthless behavior toward the states on the USSR's border aroused great fury in the west; during the Russo-Finnish War, anti-Russian feeling ran so high that Britain and France--as though they didn't already have enough to keep themselves busy--considered sending an expeditionary force to help the Finns. This force could only have been deployed with the consent of Norway and Sweden (which was refused), but the fact that the expedition had been suggested at all started people thinking. Three-quarters of Germany's iron ore came from northern Sweden, and since the Baltic is frozen for much of the year, it was shipped by railroad to the Norwegian port of Narvik for export. If the Allies could get control of Narvik--and they now had an expeditionary force that could do the job--Germany would lose a vital resource. Both sides saw this at the same time, but as usual Hitler acted while Chamberlain was still thinking about it. Combined air and sea landings on April 9 conquered Denmark and most of Norway in a single day. The British responded by landing their force at Narvik, confident that their command of the sea would give them the edge in this campaign, but as in Poland, command of the air was more important. The Germans already had the airfields; by early June they had the rest of Norway.

Meanwhile, all was quiet on the western front. To most people this activity didn't make sense. Western journalists, who had been expecting something like 1914, began writing about the "Phony War," and the Germans compared the Blitzkrieg in the east with the Sitzkrieg in the west. But whereas the French were waiting confidently behind the Maginot Line, thinking that it would defend them against anything, the Germans were moving as many troops as possible to the western frontier, where a replay of the Schlieffen Plan was supposed to take place in May 1940.

By the time they were ready, the initial plan had been replaced. A German plane carrying a complete copy of the orders crashed in Belgium, forcing the High Command to come up with a new strategy. Of the various ideas proposed, the best one put the main blow in the center, through Luxembourg and the Ardennes forest. The aim was to hit the weak spot between the French and their allies and split the whole front in two.

The German army had ten panzer divisions by now; Guderian was given three to make the crucial breakthrough. The operation began on May 10, and went like clockwork. The Allies went to the rescue of the Dutch, who were invaded first, and didn't pay much attention to anything else. A daring raid by paratroopers captured Eben-Emael, the strongest Belgian fort, opening the way for the invasion of Belgium. Again the Luftwaffe quickly won control of the air, and it mercilessly bombed the city of Rotterdam (May 14). One day later Holland surrendered--and Guderian struck. His panzers crashed through the supposedly impenetrable Ardennes, crossed the Meuse River at Sedan, and raced west. Five days later, on May 20, they reached the Channel. The Allied front was irretrievably broken. On May 28, Belgium capitulated, leaving the British Expeditionary force surrounded in the northernmost corner of France.

Hitler and General Gerd Von Rundstedt, Guderian's commanding officer, were surprised by how swiftly the panzers had destroyed the French army. During the last week of May they halted their advance, fearing that they were now overextended. For the British this was the miracle they needed, and they used the time gained to bring every boat available to the one French port remaining to them, Dunkirk, from which they evacuated their men to safety in England. At first they thought they would only have two days to undertake the rescue, but it lasted nine days, and they saved 338,226 men, which included some of their French and Belgian companions. By the time the Germans overran Dunkirk, only a holding force of 40,000 French remained.

On the same day that the siege of Dunkirk ended (June 5), the Germans began the second phase of the campaign to conquer France. General Hoth took one Panzer corps along the coast to capture Normandy and Brittany, while Kleist and Guderian led the others directly south. For the French it was a speedy doom. General Maxime Weygand had sixty-six divisions hastily dig in along the Somme and Aisne rivers, but this only held the Germans briefly. The French commander of the Maginot Line had refused to release any of his men to defend the heart of France, thinking that the main German attack was still to come at the Maginot Line itself; now he found that his guns were pointing the wrong way. Paris fell on June 14; on June 22 the French government, recognizing the military situation as hopeless, surrendered to the Germans, in the same railroad car where Germany had surrendered in 1918.⁽²⁵⁾

Hitler goes sightseeing in Paris, after the fall of France.

One final point worth noting is Mussolini's formal entry into the war. Finally convinced that Germany was going to win, he declared war on France and Britain on June 10. Unfortunately for him, Italy's military performance hadn't improved much since the last war, and his thirty-two divisions, opposed by six French ones, succeeded in getting yards (not miles) past the Franco-Italian frontier before the French surrendered to Hitler. Winston Churchill, who had succeeded Chamberlain as prime minister of the United Kingdom in May, knew that Italy was no asset; when he heard that the Italians had joined the enemy, he is said to have remarked, "Well it's only fair, they were on our side last time."

The Battle of Britain and the Campaigns of 1941

Meanwhile Mussolini made his own play for the limelight. In August he occupied British Somaliland and in September he invaded Egypt from Libya. Those activities were all that the Italians could handle, but when the campaign against Egypt began to go badly, Mussolini responded by opening up additional fronts. He proposed simultaneous invasions of Switzerland, Yugoslavia and Greece, until his commanders warned that he did not have enough troops for all three, so he decided to go after Greece only. Then came the news that Hitler had persuaded Romania to join the Axis. Mussolini blurted to Count Ciano, his son-in-law and foreign minister, "Hitler always faces me with a fait accompli. This time I am going to pay him back in his own coin. He will find out from the newspapers that I have occupied Greece. In this way the equilibrium will be reestablished. I shall send in my resignation as an Italian if anyone objects to our fighting the Greeks."

Unfortunately for him the Greeks objected. Since 1936 Greece had been under its own fascist dictator, Ioannis Metaxas, and he successfully mobilized his subjects to resist. One week after the Italians invaded from Albania, they were stopped and turned back. By early 1941 the Greeks had begun a counterattack that captured a third of Albania. In Africa the British also turned the tables on the invaders, conquering half of Libya and all of Ethiopia, Eritrea and Somaliland.

Hitler, who had wanted to keep things quiet elsewhere while he got the Russian campaign ready, was furious, but he felt he had to bail out his fellow dictator. Two divisions sent to North Africa restored the situation in Libya and became the core units for the soon-to-be-famous Afrika Korps. In March the Yugoslav government gave in to German pressure and agreed to join the Axis, thereby allowing the Germans to pass through their country on the way to Greece. This was too much for the Yugoslav people, though, and a few days later a coup d'etat brought in a new government dedicated to keeping Yugoslavia neutral.

Germany retaliated quickly and without mercy. Five panzer divisions and the cooperation of his Balkan partners (Italy, Hungary, Bulgaria and Romania) made it possible for Hitler to crush Yugoslavia in just ten days. The panzers moved on, and by the end of April they took care of mainland Greece, too. Then came a whirlwind paratroop assault on Crete, which forced a sudden withdrawal of the forces Britain had dispatched to the area.⁽²⁷⁾ But all this forced Hitler to postpone the invasion of Russia for five weeks. Later on he wished that the Italians had never gotten involved in the war--at least on his side. "My unshakable friendship for Italy and the Duce may well be held to be an error on my part," he wrote. "It is in fact quite obvious that our Italian alliance has been of more service to our enemies than to ourselves."

With the wisdom of hindsight, one could point out that the delay of Operation Barbarossa caused by the Balkan campaign was quite unnecessary. In June 1941 Hitler had more than 150 divisions massed along the Russian border, compared with just seven in Yugoslavia and Greece. But those five weeks may well have made all the difference. By the time the panzers reached the gates of Moscow in the fall of 1941, the troops were fought out, ill-prepared for the Russian winter (they didn't bring cold weather clothing because they had expected victory by the end of summer), and unable to go any farther. As Hitler began to deal with the consequences of having made the same mistake as Napoleon and Sweden's King Charles XII, Stalin found that his best generals were the ones that nature had provided in the past: first "General Mud," and later "Generals January and February."⁽²⁸⁾

Finally one other event of 1941 is important enough to mention here, though it took place on the other side of the world. On December 7, the Japanese launched a pre-emptive air strike on the American Pacific Fleet as it was anchored at Pearl Harbor in Hawaii. This caused the United States to declare war on Japan, and when Hitler heard the news, he was so delighted that he proclaimed the Japanese honorary Aryans and declared war on the USA himself. With both Britain and Russia still fighting, it was the height of folly. Maybe America was going to come against Germany sooner or later, but why hasten the day?⁽²⁹⁾ What conceivable advantage could be gained, even of the most temporary sort? There seems to be no answer except to say that Hitler was acting petulant and short-sighted. But then Hitler never did calculate the long-term odds of anything; maybe that is why he was so successful--in the short term.

Under the Swastika

Those in the last group were rewarded for their support. Mussolini got those bits of the Balkans he had always wanted: southern Slovenia, Dalmatia and the Ionian Islands, additions to his Albanian province (Kosovo and Epirus) and Montenegro as a new one. The Hungarians got Transylvania and half of Banat; the Bulgarians got back western Thrace, the southern Dobruja, and added the Yugoslavian part of Macedonia. Hungary and Bulgaria's gains were made partially at Romania's expense, and because Hitler had also let Stalin annex Bessarabia and northern Bukovina in 1940, the Romanians were the least happy members of the Axis. However, after the break with Russia, Hitler gave them back Bessarabia and northern Bukovina and threw in the slice of the Ukraine between the Dniester and the Southern Bug Rivers (Transnistria) as well. As for the Finns, they were once again in possession of the territory they had lost in 1940, though in the war against Russia they were unable to take anything beyond that.

40 percent of France and the overseas French colonies were ruled from the provincial town of Vichy, under a dictatorship managed by the ancient Marshal Petain, and a despicable prime minister named Pierre Laval. Petain pleaded that he was not a traitor, and that only political necessity made him support the Axis. If at times it seemed that he pleaded too often and too easily, most Frenchmen, at this stage in the war, gave him their support. When the Allies captured French North Africa in November 1942, Hitler dispensed with the Vichy charade and brought the rest of France under German occupation.

Another French general, Charles de Gaulle, escaped to England in 1940 and tried to persuade French citizens to continue the struggle against Germany. But while Churchill and Roosevelt recognized him as the leader of the "Free French" without hesitation, he got little response from the French themselves. The British hoped that he could at least bring Syria over to their side, but instead they had to conquer it for him and install a Free French governor. Not until late 1942 did de Gaulle have enough popular support to help the Allies constructively (in the liberation of French North Africa).

If de Gaulle's initial performance was disappointing to the Allies, Spain's Francisco Franco was a greater disappointment to the Axis. He was in debt to the Germans for their help in the Spanish Civil War, but he kept Spain neutral for all of World War II. He wouldn't declare war on the Allies because he said that Spain was too poor to afford another war, and wouldn't even let the Germans pass though Spanish territory to take the British base at Gibraltar.

Besides Spain, the other neutral nations were Ireland, Portugal, Sweden, Switzerland and Turkey. Ireland refused to join any alliance that included Britain, despite its Commonwealth status, because Northern Ireland was still in British hands. However, Eamon de Valera, who served as prime minister from 1932 to 1948, faced a threat from a local fascist movement, the "Blue Shirts," in addition to the Irish Republican Army, so he gave the Allies better treatment. American and British pilots who crashlanded in Eire were given food and safe transport to Northern Ireland, along with their planes if they could be repaired, while German pilots were interned (the accidental German bombing of Dublin in 1941 didn't help German-Irish relations, either). Portugal signed a friendship pact with Spain right after the Spanish Civil War, and allowed the Allies to use Portuguese air bases from 1943 onward, but otherwise refused to commit itself to either side. Turkey stayed out until early 1945, and only declared war on Germany so that she would qualify for charter membership in the new United Nations. Sweden sold its iron ore to Germany, as we noted earlier, while Switzerland's banks and factories did business with the Third Reich; after the war the Swedes and Swiss claimed this was necessary to prevent an outright German invasion. In the 1990s it was discovered that Swiss bank accounts still held money the Nazis had looted from their Jewish victims, leading some to wonder how "neutral" Switzerland really was during the war. The same could be said about the Vatican; Pope Pius XII did so little to denounce Axis behavior, both during and after the war, that a biography of him carried the title "Hitler's Pope."

Surprisingly, the Nazi regime did little to regulate Germany's economy, when one considers how much it controlled the rest of German society. Perhaps Hitler and his associates felt that economic prosperity was the real reason why the German people supported them, rather than their propaganda machine and the Nuremberg rallies. While the Allied nations accepted rationing, martial law, etc., almost immediately after they entered the war, ordinary Germans enjoyed peacetime standards of living until 1941; luxury goods that were no longer available in Britain or the USSR, and scarce in the United States, were still common in Germany. When shortages did appear, the Germans got by with imports from their conquests (e.g., French perfumes, Dutch cheeses, Norwegian furs, etc.), and with ersatz (substitute) products invented by their scientists. Equally astonishing, German factories worked only one shift a day until 1943, and they did not hire women to fill the vacancies when their workers went off to war. There was no Axis equivalent of "Rosie the Riveter," because that went against Nazi ideology; propaganda chief Joseph Goebbels declared that a woman's most important tasks were "being beautiful and bringing children into the world."

The "Final Solution"

Hitler had announced his anti-Jewish feelings to the world when he wrote Mein Kampf, and he started putting them into action once he could rule without opposition. 1934 saw the creation of the first concentration camp, Dachau, and it served as the model for those built afterwards. At first the camps held an assortment of inmates--communists, socialists, Gypsies, homosexuals, political opponents like liberals and Social Democrats, clergymen who denounced Nazi barbarism--but as time went on Jews became the largest group incarcerated. In 1935 the infamous Nuremberg Laws liquidated Jewish businesses, barred Jews from working as doctors or lawyers, and made it illegal for them to marry Gentiles. In schools the teachers taught courage in battle, obedience, and the superiority of the "Aryan race," while books considered offensive were burned in bonfires. Individual Jews like Albert Einstein began leaving Germany for western Europe and America; for those who decided to wait it out, this was only the beginning.

The rapid Axis advances in the first years of the war brought millions of Jews under Nazi domination. Administration of the conquered areas became the job of the SS and the Gestapo, or secret police; Jews living here suffered harsher treatment than the Jews in Germany. In Poland the world's largest Jewish community went into confinement, either quartered in ghettoes or hauled off to the concentration camps. Relocating the Jews took too long on the Russian front, where the standing order was to kill them on sight. In the occupied part of the USSR, the preferred solution was to dig mass graves and machine-gun the victims as they stood before the trenches.

In July 1941, Hitler's second-in-command, Hermann Göring, sent a directive to the chief of the Reich Security Main Office, Reinhard Heydrich, charging him with the task of organizing a "final solution to the Jewish question" in all of German-dominated Europe. By September 1941, the Jews of Germany were forced to wear badges or armbands marked with a yellow star. In the following months, tens of thousands were deported to ghettos in Poland and to cities wrested from the USSR. Over there, a new type of concentration camp was created, where the main goal was to kill the inmates, not to put them to work.

Prisoners were usually transported to the new death camps in railroad cattle cars, and told beforehand that they were going somewhere else. Upon arrival, those incapable of working (women, children, the ill and the aged), were usually marched to the gas chambers right away. Those who could work were subjected to forced labor, until that or the starvation rations ended their usefulness. Besides the gassings, victims could be killed in any diabolical manner dreamed up by the guards, from shootings and hangings to "experimental surgery." Auschwitz (modern Oswiecim, near Cracow) was the worst camp of all; more than a million perished there.

The administration of the camps was an example of German efficiency gone mad; it shows how the prisoners were regarded as nothing more than animals, an exploitable commodity. Such record-keeping among the SS doctors produced the following statistics: the typical inmate's work was worth six marks a day, and he could be expected to work 270 days before he dropped dead; after death, his gold fillings, money, clothing, and objects like eyeglasses would be worth an average of 200 marks. After taking from this two marks for the cost of cremation and a tenth of a mark for amortization of clothing, a final profit of 1,631 marks would be realized, plus some further revenue from industrial use of the bones and ashes.

Hitler ordered the trains to keep hauling Jews to the death camps for as long as possible, even when his officers protested that they needed the trains to move men and materiel to the war fronts.⁽³²⁾ Outside Germany, rumors about the Holocaust leaked out as early as 1942, but many among the Allies refused to believe them, thinking that the stories were just wartime propaganda. The truth became clear to everyone in early 1945, when Allied troops advanced far enough into the Third Reich to reach the camps. Most of the soldiers were battle-hardened veterans by this time, but they were sickened by what they saw: prisoners reduced to living skeletons, many of them too weak to be helped by doctors; dead and dying victims everywhere; bodies stacked like cordwood outside gas chambers and crematoria; SS guards still shooting inmates right until the end. The camps may have only been in use for a few years, but what happened there may be the most horrifying episode in the story of man's inhumanity to man. Linguists had to coin a new word--genocide, the murder of a race--to define the mass slaughter of ten million people, six million of them Jews. The following table shows how many Jews fell victim to the Nazis in each country:

Nation	Approx. Jewish Population (1941)	Est. number of Jews killed by 1945	Concentration Camps
Austria	70,000	65,000	Mauthausen
Belgium	85,000	28,000	-
Bulgaria	48,000	40,000	-
Czechoslovakia	281,000	277,000	Theresienstadt
Denmark	6,000	100	-
France	300,000	83,000	-
Germany	250,000	180,000	Belsen, Buchenwald, Dachau, Flossenberg, Grossrosen, Mittelbaudora, Neuengamme, Oranienberg, Ravensbrück, Sachsenhausen, Stutthof
Greece	67,000	65,000	-
Hungary	710,000	402,000	-
Italy	120,000	9,000	-
Latvia	100,000	70,000	-
Lithuania	140,000	104,000	-
Netherlands	140,000	106,000	Vught
Poland	3,000,000	2,600,000	Aushwitz, Belzec, Birkenau, Chelmno, Majdanek, Sobibor, Treblinka
Romania	1,000,000	750,000	-
(occupied) USSR	2,500,000	750,000	-
Yugoslavia	70,000	65,000	-

Most of the other Axis dictators were less bloodthirsty than Hitler, and didn't share his enthusiasm for killing members of "inferior races." Italy, Romania and Hungary, in fact, refused to hand over their Jews to the Germans, until German troops occupied those countries late in the war; Finland never gave up its 2,000 Jews. This loophole allowed many Jews an opportunity to escape by going first to one of Germany's allies, then to a neutral nation like Switzerland. Most of Denmark's small Jewish community survived because the Danes cooperated in ferrying their Jews to Sweden.

After the war those Jews who survived did not want to stay in Europe, since they had lost their homes and families. In the east, the Soviet Union and its satellite states continued to practice its own form of anti-Semitism. Most Jews who could leave emigrated to America or Israel. Today only a remnant is left of the once vibrant European Jewish community: 30,000 Jews in the Netherlands, 8,000 in Poland, 70,000 in Hungary, 10,000 in Austria, 40,000 in Germany. Of all the countries unlucky enough to fall under Axis tyranny, only France has more Jews than it did before the war (600,000), and more than half of these are North African immigrants, forced to leave North Africa when French rule over that area ended. A large percentage of European Jews are more than 65 years old, and intermarriage with Gentiles is common among the younger ones, so the 21^st century will probably witness the total assimilation of the last Jews in Europe. If this happens, Hitler will have perversely succeeded in one of his goals, despite the total defeat of Nazism.

Underground Resistance

Anti-Nazi activity was strongest in the east, where the Germans had behaved with utter brutality. Red Army soldiers caught behind enemy lines formed the core of the resistance in the Soviet Union, which grew to number around 200,000 armed fighters. Yugoslavia fell to the Axis so quickly that tens of thousands of Yugoslav soldiers went into hiding, before the Germans could kill or capture them. By the end of 1941 they had organized themselves into two guerrilla movements. One, led by a Serb named Drago Mihailovich, was dedicated to restoring the Serbian monarchy; the other was led by Josip Broz Tito (1891-1980), a Croatian communist. Both attacked the Ustasha, the fascist regime set up in Croatia, and the Ustasha retaliated with a campaign of extermination against the Serbs.⁽³³⁾ In the long run, the communists did better; the brush wars of the late twentieth century showed that communism and guerrilla warfare work well together. From late 1943 onward the Americans and British only gave aid to Tito, because he was killing more Germans than anyone else in the Balkans. Poland also had a large Underground movement, though here it was nearly impossible for Britain and the United States to send help.

Similar but smaller groups of spies and saboteurs worked in Italy, France, Norway and the Netherlands. As in the east, many of these partisans were communists, which led to the rise of strong communist parties in postwar Europe. The German occupation force stationed in France had orders to act courteous and cultured, but this failed to end French hatred of the Boche. Eventually the Nazis resorted to their usual heavy-handedness, and resistance began to grow. The French fighters, a mixture of communists and de Gaulle's Free French, called themselves the Maquis, after the guerrillas that had long opposed the authorities on Corsica. The largest guerrilla force in western Europe was in northern Italy; it had more than 100,000 men by the end of the war.

Members of the Underground could expect only death and torture if captured; sometimes Nazi retaliation was even worse. In May 1942 the notorious Nazi administrator Reinhard Heydrich was assassinated in Czechoslovakia. A reward of ten million Czech crowns was offered for information leading to the capture of Heydrich's killers, but there were no takers, even after the reward increased to twenty million. Then the Nazis went to the map and randomly chose a victim to punish: Lidice, a village just west of Prague. All 192 men in the village were lined up and shot, while the women and children went to the Ravensbrück concentration camp. Women under the age of 25 were assigned to brothels, and nine of the ninety-one children passed a racial test and were adopted by German families; the rest of the women and children were gassed to death. Then the houses were leveled, the cattle driven off, and the village pond filled in, leaving only a bare plain. The last step involved removing the name of Lidice from maps and government documents.

Despite all this, Lidice did not stay dead. Towns in Mexico and Illinois changed their names to Lidice when the Allies found out, and Venezuela gave that name to a new suburb. Several countries built memorials, and after the war the Czech government built a new village named Lidice, next to the old one; the original site became a memorial garden for the victims. This wasn't the case with another community the Nazis destroyed, Oradour-sur-Glane in central France. On June 10, 1944, two years to the day after the Lidice massacre, they drove into Oradour, shot or burned 642 people (all but six of the residents), and set the buildings on fire, to avenge the murder of another German officer. After liberation the French left the charred ruins of Oradour standing, but never publicized what happened, so today few people outside of France know about this atrocity.

The Battle of the Atlantic

Even so, the Germans had some secret weapons with which they hoped to gain the advantage. All of their ships were brand-new, for a start, while most of Britain's capital ships were built before World War I. The U-boats operated in "wolf packs," which proved to be a bigger challenge than the solitary raiders of the last war, and this time the submarine captains didn't bother with the "restricted warfare" that had so hindered them before. Early in the war the Germans introduced the magnetic mine, which didn't wait for a ship to hit it, but exploded when a ship came close. It was a success until November 1940, when a magnetic mine was found intact on a British beach and taken apart, allowing scientists to invent a defense against it ("degaussing"). In the early 1930s Germany built three cruisers with as many guns packed into them as possible, to get around the tonnage limitations of the Versailles treaty; these "pocket battleships" were more powerful than anything the Allies had of similar size. Using the "pocket battleship" idea also permitted the construction of two super-battleships, the Bismarck and the Tirpitz.

There was no "phony war" at sea. Just hours before Britain declared war on Germany, a U-boat sank a British ocean liner, the Athenia; 112 lives were lost, including 28 Americans. On the night of October 13-14, another U-boat, commanded by Captain Gunther Prien, slipped into the naval base at Scapa Flow, and sank the battleship Royal Oak; this was one of the most daring submarine raids ever attempted. A pocket battleship, the Graf Spee, wreaked havoc against Allied shipping in the south Atlantic, sinking nine merchantmen in two months, from Brazil to Mozambique. Finally on December 13, 1939, three British cruisers caught up with the Graf Spee outside the bay of the Rio Plate. In the battle that followed, all ships were heavily damaged, before the Graf Spee broke off and headed for Montevideo. Once in port, however, Captain Hans Langsdorff got the idea that he would not be able to escape, so a few days later he scuttled the Graf Spee and shot himself, ending a hunt that captured the attention of the world.

In May 1941, the Bismarck made her first and only foray into the war. The super-battleship, accompanied by the cruiser Prinz Eugen, sailed from the Baltic into the north Atlantic, with the intention of joining two warships and six U-boats already there. British planes spotted the Bismarck while refueling at Bergen, Norway, and immediately sent four ships in pursuit. Three days later, the Hood and the Prince of Wales, two of Britain's largest battleships, engaged the Bismarck between Iceland and Greenland. Only eight minutes after the battle began, a shell from the Bismarck found the Hood's magazine and blew up the whole ship; the Prince of Wales, badly damaged, limped away. The Bismarck also took a serious hit, and she changed course for the French port of Sainte-Nazaire, leaving a steady oil trail in her wake. On May 26, more British planes, cruisers and destroyers caught up with the Bismarck, 700 miles from occupied France, and went for the kill. The torpedoes from the planes couldn't penetrate the Bismarck's armor, but one disabled her rudder, making it impossible to escape; then torpedoes and shells from the ships finished her off. The sinking of the Bismarck was hailed as a great Allied victory, but it diverted so many ships and planes to the Atlantic that it may have permitted Hitler's victory on Crete at the same time.

While the Bismarck went down fighting, the career of the Tirpitz was long and inactive. After what happened to the Bismarck, Admiral Raeder didn't want to risk the other super-battleship in the Atlantic, and hid the Tirpitz in the fjords of Norway instead. The plan was to have the Tirpitz attack Allied convoys as they sailed past, on their way to Russia, but she saw no significant action; by mid-1942 the German Command realized that U-boats and the Luftwaffe did a better job at raiding. Even so, the presence of the Tirpitz so close to England kept the British nervous, and several air raids attempted to sink her. They failed because conventional bombs could not penetrate the dreadnought's double layer of armor plate; a special 12,000-lb. bomb called the "Tallboy" was invented in 1944, just to do that job. In September 1944 a squadron armed with the new bomb attacked at Kaa fjord, in northern Norway; they didn't sink the Tirpitz, but did so much damage that the Germans moved her south to Tromso, where they decided to use her as a floating artillery battery. There on November 12, 1944, another raid of Tallboy-equipped bombers finally blew up and sank the battleship. That event marked the end of the naval war in northern waters.

For the German navy, the best part of the war was from July to October 1940, when the threat of invasion kept the British fleet close to home, leaving convoys with almost no escort. During this time, each U-boat sank an average of eight ships per month. After that, though, the British began to work out an effective antisubmarine defense, and soon the Americans were helping as well. The entry of the United States in the war greatly expanded the area of operations. For a few months in 1942, the U-boats in American waters got choosy; pickings were so good that they let high-riding empty ships go by and sank only those that looked full. Eventually the Americans also learned how to defend themselves against the U-boats (sonar, depth charges, destroyer-escorted convoys, air reconnaissance), so the easy hunting ended by summer. The losses in men, ships and cargo were still appalling, but enough got through to keep Britain fighting, and each year after 1942 saw the German sailor's mission grow more suicidal.

The Air War

Britain launched its first raids on Germany in July 1940, while the battle of Britain was taking place. The commander of the Luftwaffe, Reichsmarshal Hermann Göring, boasted that if any Allied bombs fell on Berlin, people could call him Meyer (a popular German Jewish name). A lot of Germans called him Meyer before long, when they had to spend their nights in bomb shelters! However, these early attacks did little besides restore British morale; daytime missions were suicidal, while bombers that attacked at night couldn't see their targets. It took America's entry into the war and the development of long-range bombers before the Allied planes could inflict real damage.

The Allies began to get the upper hand against the Luftwaffe in 1942. Part of the reason was numbers: in that year the overextended Germans built about 15,000 aircraft, compared to 23,672 for Britain, 25,436 for the Soviet Union, and 47,836 for the United States. The other reason was that the British and Americans worked out a strategy for their bombing campaign; the more heavily armored American planes would attack in the daytime, while the RAF made its raids during the night, using new target-finding techniques. The first of these combined missions went against Lübeck in March 1942; the old headquarters of the Hanseatic League was full of wooden buildings, so the attack flattened or burned half the city. At the end of May, a massive force of 1,000 bombers incinerated Cologne, bringing the horrors of war to the heart of Germany. No more raids on that scale were attempted for the rest of 1942, but now nights in an air-raid shelter became a regular part of life for the Germans, rather than the British. Each year saw the raids on Britain decrease, while the raids on Germany increased:

	Bombs dropped on Britain (tons)	Bombs dropped on Germany (tons)
1940	36,844	10,000
1941	21,858	30,000
1942	3,260	40,000
1943	2,298	120,000
1944	9,151	650,000
Early 1945	761	500,000

1943 saw the beginning of Allied bombing around the clock. By early 1944, advances on the Russian and Italian fronts made three-way bombing possible: bombers could take off from Britain, southern Italy or the Soviet Union, fly missions over any place the Axis controlled, and land in one of the other Allied areas. However, the raids didn't disrupt German production as much as the Allies expected, especially when they hit homes instead of factories, and Allied losses were also heavy; an American B-17 bomber, for instance, cost more than $250,000 in 1942, and its trained crew was even harder to replace. Furthermore, bombing civilian targets was a poor advertisement for the Allied cause; the worst example was the bombing of Dresden, where three raids in February 1945 killed 135,000 and turned that city into a smoking tomb. The bombing campaign's value was in the strain it put on the Luftwaffe, and how it increased the drain on Germany's resources. It also meant that German soldiers could no longer expect air support.

In 1944 the Germans invented some devastating secret weapons, which gave the Allies a few sleepless nights but failed to change the course of the air war. One of these was the first jet fighter, the ME 262. At a top speed of 540 MPH, it could outrun and outfight any other plane, but Hitler was not impressed. When Göring and other Luftwaffe generals argued that the ME 262 would be an excellent defensive weapon, he shouted, "I want bombers, bombers, bombers. Your fighters are no damned good!" For months he refused to even watch a test flight, then he changed his mind and ordered that the jet be converted into a bomber, though it had neither the range nor the load capacity.

More effective was a forerunner of the cruise missile, the V-1 (the V stood for "vengeance"). Basically an unmanned, unguided jet full of explosives, the V-1 was tested at Peenemünde on the Baltic, and launched at London from bases in the Netherlands and northern France. The British were forced to station planes along the Channel to catch these "buzz bombs" before they hit anything. Then the Germans introduced the V-2; the Allies found this rocket unstoppable, because it traveled at a speed of 3,000 miles an hour, and flew as high as 60 miles before it slammed into its target with a ton of TNT. Fortunately for the Allies, Germany could not afford to produce many V-2s, and the liberation of the Netherlands ended the missile threat to Britain. The last attack of the Luftwaffe occurred around the same time (January 1, 1945), and the Germans lost so many planes that Göring never tried large-scale bombing raids again.

The Underbelly of the Axis

In the European theater, the Allied counterattack began on the southern fringe: North Africa. German air power had badly shaken, but failed to destroy, Britain's prewar naval supremacy over the Mediterranean. The tiny but strategic island of Malta underwent a hideous two-year siege at the hands of the Luftwaffe, but like Gibraltar, it remained in British hands. Honors in the desert war between General Erwin Rommel's Afrika Korps and the British Eighth Army were even for two years and if the British had their supply problems (they had to sail around Africa, rather than use the Suez Canal), so did the Germans, because air and submarine attacks by both sides made travel in the Mediterranean a risky business for everybody.

Rommel's last success was his offensive of June 1942, which chased the British halfway to Suez. However, Rommel failed to break through the Alamein Line--the last defense before Alexandria--at that time, and again when he tried three months later. In October, the Eighth Army, led by General Bernard Law Montgomery, struck back. The Afrika Korps was hit very hard in this battle and barely managed to get out of Egypt; worse still, it couldn't stop to recuperate in Libya the way it had before because the Allies had opened up a second front in the rear--by landing British and American troops in Algeria and Morocco (Operation Torch, November 1942). Thus, Rommel had to withdraw to Tunisia. He managed to hold out for the entire winter because Hitler foolishly reinforced him, but in May 1943 the entire Afrika Korps (though not Rommel, who was recalled to Europe before the end) was forced to surrender.

The liberation of North Africa was a tremendous triumph for the Allies, but there was still the question of where and when the first attack on Hitler's "Fortress Europa" should begin. Stalin and Roosevelt both felt it should be in France, since it would crush the Germans in a two-front offensive from both east and west, but when a 1942 commando raid on the German defensives along the Channel (at Dieppe) ended in disaster, it was back to the drawing board. It would take the immense resources of the United States to force a breakthrough that way, and there wouldn't be enough Americans in England to try it until 1944, so Churchill proposed a smaller invasion for 1943. He suggested going after Italy, which he called "the soft underbelly of the Axis beast."

The attack began with a landing of eight divisions on Sicily (July 10, 1943). With the Americans racing around the west end of the island, and the British occupying the east, the Allies succeeded in driving out the Italian forces, along with their German help, by the end of August. That was all the Italians could take; now they wanted out of the war. Fear of their Nazi partner had stopped them from quitting in the past, but with the Allies on their doorstep, many Italians reasoned they could chuck Mussolini out and get the Allies in before Hitler could stop them. But as soon as they thought it, Hitler suspected it; when it came to a double-cross he had always been a hard man to beat.

Hitler's action to keep Italy in the Axis was both swift and successful. The Italians, playing it very warily, didn't announce their change of sides until September, when Allied forces landed on Sardinia, the Italian toe, and at Salerno. This delay gave Hitler enough time to transfer an army from Russia to Italy and form a defensive line across the peninsula, between Rome and Naples (the Gustav Line). He also managed to find out where the new Italian government had locked up Mussolini, rescued him and put him back in charge.⁽³⁴⁾

Churchill's portrayal of Italy as a vulnerable spot may have been correct politically, but it wasn't from a geographical standpoint. The Italian peninsula has many streams and lines of mountains, providing numerous opportunities to set up defensive barriers. Once the Germans were in charge their commander, Field Marshal Alfred Kesselring, used a brilliantly flexible series of tactics that slowed the Allied advance to a miserable crawl. The Allies expected to be in Rome by Christmas, but the Gustav Line held until the last days of 1943.

In January 1944 an attempt was made to go around the Germans, by making a new amphibious landing at Anzio, less than 40 miles south of Rome. The landing achieved complete surprise, but once the troops were on the beach, their commander kept them there, waiting for the artillery and tanks that would back him up. This gave the Germans time to mount a counter-assault that bottled up the invaders on their beachhead--"the largest self-supporting prison camp in the world" is what German propaganda called it. Meanwhile, activity on the main front centered on a siege of the Monte Cassino monastery. Not until May 1944 was there a successful breakout, and in the end it was the main force that came to the rescue of the troops at Anzio, when the original plan had been for the opposite to happen. Allied troops finally entered Rome on June 4.

The capture of Rome was a moral triumph for the Allies--it was the first capital of an Axis state to fall into Allied hands--but it was overshadowed by the D-day landings which took place in France just two days later. D-day took away men and supplies from the Italian front, and those officers remaining showed a remarkable lack of imagination, seeming to think that all they needed was superiority in numbers and they would win in the end. This was true, but it also prolonged the Italian campaign much longer than necessary. The Allies had Kesselring on the run in the summer of 1944, for example, but they didn't follow him very closely; by August they had only gotten as far as the Arno River and the Etruscan Apennines. There the Germans dug in along a new barrier, the Gothic Line, and the Allies made no headway at all for months. By the time they broke through and liberated northern Italy it was April 1945, and Allied troops were so close to victory in Germany that what happened in the south no longer mattered much.⁽³⁵⁾

The Liberation of France

American soldiers at D-Day.

The original date for "D-Day," June 5, 1944, had to be cancelled due to extremely bad weather, but on the following day there was a lull in the storm, so the commanding Allied general, Dwight D. Eisenhower, reluctantly gave the go-ahead. The largest amphibious assault in history, involving five divisions (two American, two British, and one Canadian), took place on the beaches of Normandy. Though they had to spend their first month on the coast building up their force to full strength, they did manage to liberate the nearest French town to the west, Cherbourg. At the end of July the Americans succeeded in breaking out of that zone. Swinging first through Brittany, the US armies turned to the east in a maneuver that tried to pin the Germans back against the British; they weren't quick enough to catch the panzer divisions they were after, but they did trap and destroy a German army at Falaise. In late August, the Allies approached Paris, and they stood aside so that de Gaulle and the Free French could have the honor of liberating the city.

The war might have ended around this time, had a plot to assassinate Hitler succeeded. The rapid Allied advances in France and Belarus convinced a group of German officers that they must get rid of the Führer now, while Germany was still strong enough to negotiate anything besides its surrender. On July 20, Lt. Colonel Count Klauss von Stauffenberg, a one-armed veteran, went to a meeting in Hitler's East Prussian headquarters ("The Wolf's Lair"), carrying a bomb in a briefcase; he placed the briefcase under the conference table and left. It exploded on schedule, killing four and wounding twenty, but Hitler was partially protected by the table, so his injuries were not permanent. The Führer's reaction was quick; a huge Gestapo roundup arrested fifteen thousand suspects, and eventually executed five thousand of them. The ringleaders, including Stauffenberg, were shot immediately, while a group of distinguished prisoners were tried in a "Peoples' Court" and hanged with piano wire; Hitler ordered their slow deaths filmed, and had the film shown to selected audiences as a warning. General Rommel, "the Desert Fox," was not directly involved in the plot, but he was a suspect, so he took poison; the press announced that he had died in an automobile accident.

On August 15, an additional front was opened as a force of Americans and Free French landed on the Riviera. On a map of Europe this maneuver looked like the southern claw of a grand pincer movement, but it really was Eisenhower's way of transferring troops from the Mediterranean to the main front. Italy was becoming the sort of dead end that the Americans had warned it would be, and they wanted to reduce their commitment there as quickly as possible. At any rate, it succeeded in linking up with the force in northern France at Dijon on September 3, thus completing the liberation of France.⁽³⁶⁾ It was the worst disaster Hitler had suffered since Stalingrad, doubly magnified because it was twice as close to Germany.

September saw the Allies liberate Belgium and capture Germany's westernmost town, Aachen. As the Germans withdrew to the Fatherland it began to look like the war would end in 1944. But the farther the Allied troops advanced the harder it was to keep them supplied, and German supply lines shortened proportionately. Finally the Germans discovered that the troops pursuing them were too weak to press their attacks and front lines formed again. In the east Hungary, Czechoslovakia, and parts of Poland and Yugoslavia remained in Axis hands. In the west the first attempt to liberate Holland (by paratroops) was defeated, and the Allies were halted before they could cross the Rhine.

The Final 150 Days

In January 1945 Hitler moved his headquarters from East Prussia to a bombproof bunker, beneath his ruined presidential palace in Berlin, the Chancellery. After that his orders were always the same: stand firm, shoot any waverers and sell your own lives as dearly as possible. But the military situation was beyond his control; the Allies finally crossed the Rhine in March when they captured the last undamaged bridge over that river, and leaving the German army on the western front locked up in the Ruhr, the Allies swept across the heart of Germany to the Elbe. The Russians didn't move until April 16, when they crossed the Oder. Nine days later, the easternmost American unit met the Russians on the banks of the Elbe, and General Eisenhower decided to concentrate his attention on Bavaria and Austria, leaving Berlin to the Red Army. The Third Reich had been cut to pieces.

Hitler decided to stay where he was. When the Russians entered Berlin, he held his midday conferences as usual, charting the progress of the enemy across the city block by block. He drafted another group of teenagers to take part in the final defense, as if he expected the German nation to die with him. He also composed his political testament. He denounced Hermann Göring and Heinrich Himmler, two of his closest friends, because they dared to negotiate with the Allies; he declared the German people unworthy of the great future he had promised them; he claimed that a Jewish conspiracy had brought him to ruin. Admiral Karl Doenitz, the commander of the U-boat fleet, was picked to succeed him. On April 29 he married his longtime girlfriend Eva Braun, and the next day he gave her poison, bit a cyanide capsule, and shot himself. Their bodies were burned with gasoline in a ditch outside the bunker.

On May 1 the Führer's most devoted follower, Joseph Goebbels, killed his wife, six children, and finally himself in the same bunker. Heinrich Himmler, the chief of all German police forces, took cyanide when captured by the British. Another senior Nazi who stayed loyal to the end, Martin Bormann, simply disappeared, leading to speculation on his fate long after the war.

The Third Reich outlasted Hitler by only a week. Doenitz was only interested in getting as many Germans as possible--both soldiers and civilians--to surrender to the western Allies, since they, unlike the Russians, were likely to be merciful to a defeated foe. Those left in Berlin surrendered on May 2; the remaining German-held areas in the north (Norway, Denmark, Schleswig and Frisia) began to lay down their arms on May 4. That left Army Group South in Bohemia as the last major German military unit, and now the Allies surrounded it; the Americans took Innsbruck and Linz in Austria and Pilsen in Czechoslovakia, while a partisan uprising began the liberation of Prague just before the Russians arrived. General Alfred Jodl met with Eisenhower in Rheims on May 7 to sign the terms of unconditional surrender; the next day he did the same thing with the Russians in Berlin and "V-E Day" could be officially declared. The war that had claimed some 30 million lives and caused unprecedented devastation was finally over.

1. Just Germany and Austria-Hungary at this point. Italy and Romania were allies of theirs, but both of them chose to sit out the war at this date, arguing that the alliance was purely a defensive one, and that they had no obligation to support Germany or Austria-Hungary if they were the aggressors. Later on they entered the war on the other side.

2. The 1914 German invasion of Belgium caused a wave of anti-German hysteria in the Allied countries. The Russian capital was renamed Petrograd because St. Petersburg sounded too German, and Britain's King George V changed his family name from Saxe-Coburg-Gotha to Windsor. In 1947 the future Queen Elizabeth II married Prince Philip Mountbatten, Duke of Edinburgh, so today the official name of the British royal family is Mountbatten-Windsor.
While we're on the subject of British royalty, note that George V was the first British monarch in several generations who was more English than anything else. For most of the previous 1,400 years, England's dynasties were foreign in origin. The Anglo-Saxons were German, the Normans were Vikings turned Frenchmen, the Plantagenets were all French, the Tudors were Welsh, the Stuarts were Scots, William III was Dutch, and the Hanoverians and Saxe-Coburg-Gothas were German again. I'll venture that if there are any more dynastic changes in London, it will be Ireland's turn to have someone on the throne next time.

3. The Germans tried poison gas on the Russian front first, only to find out that the frigid cold of an eastern European winter turned the gas to liquid and made it useless.

4. Austria-Hungary also occupied Montenegro and Albania as it chased the Serbs to the sea.
Today's Serbs will talk at length about how World War I started and how it ended--history is an important subject to anyone from eastern Europe--but they say very little about how bad things were during the four years in-between. The Austrians left Nikola Pasic, the pre-war prime minister, in charge of Serbia, because he had opposed starting a war over the archduke's assassination. In 1917 he had Princip's patron, Colonel Dimitrijevic, executed on a charge of treason. Thousands of more Serbs would suffer a similar fate before the country was liberated in October 1918.

5. These German units were called "storm troopers" and maintained the offensive by carrying light machine guns. Avoiding frontal assaults, they always followed the path of least resistance, leaving enemy strongpoints to be dealt with by the general infantry behind them.

6. Serbia had emerged from the war more than doubled in size, having acquired Montenegro, Banat (see footnote #30), Bosnia-Herzegovina, Croatia and Slovenia, so it required a new name. At first it was called the "Kingdom of the Serbs, Croats, and Slovenes" but in 1929 this was simplified to Yugoslavia, which means the land of the southern Slavs. The Slovenes and Croats weren't really thrilled about becoming part of a Serb-dominated state, but the country was too war-ravaged for them to do anything about it at this time. Later on the Great Depression would keep them quiet; the Croats succeeded in expressing their independence briefly during World War II, but because they chose the wrong side, communism clamped down on them for another two generations afterwards (1944-91).

7. This petty war incidentally disposed of Europe's second communist government, the five-month-old dictatorship of Bela Kun.

8. The "free city" idea was really a way of dodging border disputes that couldn't be settled at the negotiating table, and it wasn't very successful. Of the three set up after World War I, Memel was annexed by Lithuania and Fiume by Italy, both in 1923. The third, Danzig (modern Gdansk), survived until the beginning of World War II, but its status was constantly in dispute and its independence hurt German-Polish relations.

9. The voting along the German-Polish frontier was completed by 1922. The French insisted on a fifteen-year delay in the area they tried to claim, the Saarland, but when the vote finally came in 1935 the Saar chose to stay German.
Another area the Allies put to the vote was the Danish-populated part of Schleswig; this was something Bismarck had promised in 1865, but never got around to doing. The voting took place in 1920 and resulted in northern Schleswig returning to Denmark.

10. The French got full revenge at this point for the indemnity they had paid at the end of the Franco-Prussian war; they presented Germany with a bill for £6.85 billion. According to the leading economist of the time, John Maynard Keynes, the most Germany could pay was £2 billion.

11. "Nazi" is an acronym; the full name of the group was the National Socialist German Workers Party. The brown-shirted paramilitary force that gave muscle to the movement was known as the S.A. (from Sturm Abteilungen, meaning Storm Troopers). After Hitler took command, the toughest and most trustworthy of these were given black uniforms and enrolled in his elite bodyguard, the S.S. (Schutzstaffel).
By 1934 the S.A. was two million strong, many times larger than the army and a threat to everybody. Hitler made sure that it would not seize power by using the S.S. to kill its leader, Ernst Roehm, and the more independent-minded S.A. officers in a coup he later called the "Night of the Long Knives."

12. He was consistent on one thing--he believed that action mattered more than ideology, and that using force was always justified.

13. Mussolini, Fascism, pgs. 35-38.

14. Besides Mussolini, Stalin, Hitler and Franco, there was Chiang Kai-shek in China, while the United States elected Franklin Roosevelt, the first (and so far only) president-for-life America has ever produced. After World War II began Winston Churchill (of Britain) and Hideki Tojo (of Japan) joined the list.

15. Capt. Gonzalo de Aguilera, Franco's press liaison, blamed the whole war on "the introduction of modern drainage. Prior to this, the riffraff had been killed by various useful diseases; now they survived and, of course, were above themselves . . . Had we no sewers in Madrid, Barcelona and Bilbao, all these Red leaders would have died in their infancy instead of exciting the rabble and causing good Spanish blood to flow. When the war is over, we should destroy the sewers."

16. The brutal bombing of a Basque town by German airplanes prompted an angry Pablo Picasso to paint one of his most celebrated murals, Guernica. Later on, when the Germans occupied France, the Gestapo came to search Picasso's Paris apartment, and they found a photograph of Guernica. One officer asked, "Did you do that?" and Picasso answered, "No, you did."

17. In addition to the USSR, the Republican Loyalists got some help from international communists who sent in units of volunteers from abroad, like the Lincoln Brigade from the United States.

18. England's King Edward VIII, for example. The prime minister and the Church of England refused to let him marry an American woman, Wallis Warfield Simpson. Forced to choose between duty and love, he abdicated in December 1936, and the couple lived out their lives as private citizens. His brother took his place, ruling as George VI until 1952, when he was in turn succeeded by his eldest daughter, Elizabeth II.

19. Hitler and Mussolini did not get along very well when they first met in 1934. Mussolini thought Hitler dressed shabby and talked too much, while Hitler wasn't impressed to see the laundry of Italian sailors hanging from the lines of their ships. The murder of Dollfuss prompted Mussolini to send 50,000 troops into Austria, promising to safeguard Austrian independence against the "Prussians." He changed his mind after the formation of the Axis. When Hitler brought up the Anschluss issue again in 1938, Mussolini did not get in the way. Delighted, the Führer said, "I shall stick with him whatever may happen." It was one of the few promises Hitler actually kept.

20. To make it appear that the Czechs weren't simply knuckling under to Hitler, Mussolini and the French premier, Edouard Daladier, also attended the meeting, though about all they did was pose for photos with Hitler and Chamberlain. The Czechs were also made to give up some other areas that contained ethnic minorities. The Poles got the town of Teschen, while the Hungarians took Ruthenia, the easternmost province, and a thin strip of Slovakian territory that was largely Magyar.

21. The Germans had their own set of fortifications on the western frontier, which they called the Siegfried Line, but it was more propaganda than concrete. At the time of the war in Poland, Germany had 23 second-rate divisions on the line, facing 110 Allied (mostly French) divisions. Bad memories of failed offenses from World War I caused the Allies to hold back until the Germans were ready to strike.

22. Hitler forced the Lithuanians to return Memel to Germany in March. In April Mussolini annexed Albania, turning the Adriatic into an Italian lake. Zog I, the king of Albania, fled into exile with his family, and never returned. His son Leka was only three days old when forced to leave; since that time Leka has said that he would like to go back to Albania, and maybe even become king, if the people will have him.

23. In 1919 the Allies drew Poland's eastern frontier along the Bug River, calling it the Curzon Line. The Polish state thus created contained just about everyone who spoke Polish, but it was much smaller than the Poland of the 15th-18th centuries. Consequently, the Poles grabbed as much eastern territory as they could while the USSR was engulfed in civil war, and after the war ended they got to keep most of it. The territory in question included the capital of Lithuania (Vilnius), half of Byelorussia (modern Belarus), and a good-sized chunk of the Ukraine.

24. On the same day that Kleist and Guderian met, the Russians moved in to grab what was left of Poland.

25. In April 1945, when everyone knew that Germany would soon lose the war, the SS destroyed the railroad car that had been the scene for the 1918 and 1940 surrenders, so that the Allies could not use it a third time.

26. One of the strangest events of the war was the flight of Rudolf Hess. On May 10, 1941, the number three Nazi flew west and bailed out over Scotland. Hess claimed that he was trying to land at the estate of the Duke of Hamilton, whom he wrongly believed was the leader of a "peace party," so they could negotiate a treaty. Instead, he went to jail for the rest of his life. Hess never changed his story, Churchill denied that Hess had been lured to Scotland by British agents, and Hitler denied that his deputy left with his blessing. Thus, we may never know the real reason why Hess defected.

27. However, it was a costly victory for the Germans. The loss of 4,000 paratroops made sure that Hitler would not try any more airborne attacks.

28. The Russian campaign will not be covered in the detail it deserves here, because I have already done so in my Russian history.

29. President Roosevelt had been giving Churchill military and financial aid (the famous "Lend-Lease" program) since late 1940; it started with fifty surplus destroyers. The first American ship sunk in the war, the Reuben James, was torpedoed while escorting a British convoy, on October 31, 1941. Germany's declaration of war against the US made Churchill's job easier; for a few days it looked like the United States was going to concentrate all its attention on defeating the Japanese.

30. Banat is the small part of Serbia north of Belgrade that is populated by Serbs and Hungarians, where the Danube, Sava, and several smaller rivers meet. Today it is called Voyvodina.

31. Hungary and Romania declared themselves in the Axis camp in November 1940; Bulgaria joined in March 1941 and Finland did so in June, just in time to take part in the war against the Russians.

32. From 1942 to 1944, the busiest railway station in Europe was at Birkenau, an extension of Auschwitz. And this was a station where all the traffic came from arriving passengers; departing trains were always empty until the Germans abandoned the camp in January 1945.

33. At first the Croats were glad to be free of the Serbs, but it now appears that most of the Croatian people eventually supported the Allies; independence wasn't worth the price of Fascist terror. By the end of the war, Croatia's Ustasha regime had slaughtered more than a million Serbs, Jews and Gypsies. At Croatian concentration camps like Jasenovac, Ustasha guards got rid of prisoners in ways that horrified even the Germans, who preferred to use the more humane killing method of poison gas on theirs.

34. After this Hitler and Mussolini no longer even pretended to be equal partners. Hitler punished the Italians for their defection by moving the northern Italian frontier to where it had been in 1914, adding the rest of Slovenia (including Istria) and the southern Tyrol to Germany's possessions. This gave Germany direct access to the Adriatic. He also took away Dalmatia and gave it to Croatia, which, unlike Italy, was still an enthusiastic member of the Axis. Finally, the Germans confiscated Italy's gold reserves and sent 640,000 Italian soldiers to P.O.W. camps. Two Italian divisions got away because they were stationed in Yugoslavia, and they joined Tito as the "Garibaldi Partisan Division."

35. Mussolini tried to escape to Germany when the end came, but was captured and shot by Italian communist partisans (April 28, 1945). His body was hung upside down in a public square of Milan.

36. The Free French liberated Corsica in October. Three German-held ports on the Bay of Biscay (L'Orient, St. Nazaire and La Rochelle) were not taken, but surrounded and isolated from the rest of the Axis world until the war ended. Allied troops did not have to liberate any part of France west of the Rhone River or south of Paris--the Underground took care of that.

© Copyright 2001 Charles Kimball