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0:04
Dear Mum, of all people I know, you are the one that will feel it most. So my very last thoughts go to you. Don't blame anyone else for my death because I myself chose my fate. I don't know what to write to you because even though I myself have a clear head, I can't find the right words.
0:28
I took my place in the army of liberation, and I die as the light of victory is already beginning to shine... I shall be shot very shortly with 23 other comrades. After the war, you must claim your rights to a pension. They will let you have my things at the jail. Only I am keeping dad's undervest because I don't want the cold to make me shiver. Once again, I say goodbye. Courage! Your son, Spartaco Quoted by Eric Hobsbawm in The Age of Extremes.
1:00
Hobsbawm also had this to say: 'In the simplest terms the question who or what caused the Second World War can be answered in two words: Adolf Hitler.' On top of that, many of the basic contours of the origins of the Second World War are not in dispute. Germany, Japan, and Italy were the aggressors, while the democratic powers were drawn into war, didn't want to fight and even tried quite hard to avoid it. But such vagaries give us little to learn from. Adolf Hitler did not happen in a vacuum.
1:36
Japanese militarism didn't happen in a vacuum, and neither did Italian Fascism. To understand how World War Two began, you need to understand the circumstances that produced it. This video will lay out exactly that. We're going to go on a journey through an era of high ideals and broken promises, an era of disillusionment, polarization, bitterness and extremism, an era of failing institutions, and of actors who sought to exploit them, an era of a status quo stretched
2:11
to a breaking point, and eventually of collapse.
2:20
We're going to start by covering what could have happened, or more specifically, what the democratic powers wanted to happen.
2:29
On screen at the moment, I'm playing a time-lapse. The subject is a map of the world approximating the territories of civilizations over time, right now passing from the 9th into the 10th century. The borders of this world are fluid. This is a world where strong societies are free to march into weak ones and take what they want, maybe resources or land or wealth. This is now called the state of international anarchy.
2:58
Now this is a time-lapse of the recent world. Beyond the decolonization of Africa and the breakup of the Soviet Union, the borders are almost entirely stable. This stable world is the status quo that the Allied powers at the end of World War One tried to create. We're ultimately talking here about a plan that failed, but that failure is at the very heart of our subject, so we need to spend some time on it. The chief architect of the plan was Woodrow Wilson.
3:29
The devastation of the First World War was immense, and Wilson believed it was time for world history to turn a corner. Wars of aggression, he believed, needed to finally stop. He wanted to create a world where all powers, great or small, would be protected from foreign aggression. But it wasn't a project that any one country could do alone. He thought that security for all could only be achieved through international collaboration. The logic went that any one given power couldn't wage a war
4:01
of aggression against another if the rest of the world stood against it. Wilson believed that for such a world order to be made, the First World War had to end in a particular way. For him, it wasn't a matter of the right side winning. He wanted no side to win. He wanted a 'peace without victory,' which would then create a 'peace between equals.' If there were victors in the Great War, then the victors would punish the vanquished. The vanquished would be angered and humiliated,
4:30
and the cycle of violence would continue. To Wilson, that was a 'crime against civilization.' He tried to act as a mediator in the war, but his attempts failed. Germany's unrestricted submarine warfare drew the United States into war.
4:47
The Allies won and peace was made, but it was a peace of victors. The peace marked an inflection point for the world. Four old empires had just fallen, and tremendous power and opportunity laid at the hands of the peacemakers who met in Paris. It was the outcome of that peace conference that would turn the future Axis powers so heavily against the Allied ones, which is to say, would lay the groundwork for the Second World War, so it's worth going into it in some detail.
5:18
Wilson's ideals at the time were reverberating around the world. When Wilson arrived in Europe, he was treated as a sort of deity. In France, thousands knelt and prayed as his train passed. In Italy, wounded soldiers tried to kiss the hem of his garments. Civilians showered the streets with handbills proclaiming him 'God of Peace,' 'Savior of Humanity', and 'Moses from Across the Atlantic.' Europeans said they'd never seen before such adulation.
5:49
The French prime minister, George Clemenceau, commented that talking to Wilson was 'something like talking to Jesus Christ.' His best known statement of principles were in his Fourteen Points, which tried to name reasonable settlements for combatants on both sides of the war, but also called for nothing short of a new world order, one where all nations great and small, are granted the right to autonomy. This new world order would be held together by an international organization. As he put it:
6:20
'A general association of nations must be formed under specific covenants for the purpose of affording mutual guarantees of political independence and territorial integrity to great and small states alike.' He also called for a new style of diplomacy based on transparency, which was in contrast to the network of secret deals and ambiguous alliances that were so instrumental in the escalation of the First World War. Wilson's ideals inspired and gave purpose to the Paris Peace Conference itself.
6:52
As a member of the British delegation put it: 'We were preparing not peace only, but eternal peace. There was about us the halo of some divine mission.' But again, this was a peace of victors, not a peace of equals. The defeated Central Powers weren't invited to the conference, and the major decisions made there were made by a council of ten, which featured two delegates from the US, Britain, France, Italy and Japan. Within that, most decision-making power rested with the three countries
7:24
which were thought to have contributed the most of the war effort: Britain, represented by Prime Minister David Lloyd George, France, represented by Prime Minister George Clemenceau and the United States, represented by President Woodrow Wilson. Wilson's ideas were popular, but they were far from the only views at the conference. States that have long been at war have a hard time suddenly respecting one another's autonomy. Furthermore, many states went to war looking to gain territory,
7:55
and now, as victors, wanted to capitalize on that. That resulted in a conference that was somewhat hyperbolically, but tellingly described by Herbert Hoover in the following manner: 'Destructive forces sat at the peace table. The future of 26 jealous European races was there. The genes of a thousand years of inbred hate and fear of every generation were in their blood. Revenge for past wrongs rose every hour of the day.' With the possible exception of the United States,
8:26
all the powers went to the peace table with demands that took from or aggravated other powers. By the time it was over, the conference had produced five separate treaties, which were quickly denounced by much of the world. By far the most controversial was the Treaty of Versailles, which, as you're probably aware, established peace terms between Germany and the Allied powers. Much of the world went straight to condemning it, but for our purposes I think it's better to spend a moment
8:55
trying to understand the logic and the circumstances behind it, and we're going to start that by reflecting on the nature of Germany as a power. Compared to other major European powers, Germany came together as a nation fairly late, and also industrialized fairly late, mostly industrializing in the mid-to-late 19th century, and coming together as a unity of German states In 1871. The German Empire around the time of the war also had a massive population, something like 65 million people,
9:28
bigger than Britain's and significantly bigger than France's. As Germany was growing and modernizing, many Germans began to believe that their potential as a nation wasn't reflected by their power and status, especially compared to other major European states. Germans sought to fix that by asserting themselves on the world stage, by expanding their territorial holdings and by establishing colonies overseas. An attitude captured in the German policy called the Weltpolitik, which called
9:58
for building up a large military and especially a large navy. They then proved themselves highly capable with that military. In the First World War, Germany played the main role in defeating Russia, and almost defeated Britain and France, straining their resources to a near breaking point. They even gave the Allies a scare after the United States entered the war, launching an offensive that made it within 60 miles of Paris. They had come so close that Clemenceau, who was in Paris
10:28
and who resolved to defend it until the last moment, was speechless when he heard that Germany had surrendered. Upon hearing the news, he simply put his head in his hands and wept, which is all a long way of saying that Germany was a rising and very intimidating power. The war had also been fought outside of Germany's borders, leaving its industries untouched, and the peacemakers knew that Germany's great power ambitions hadn't disappeared simply because they lost the war,
10:57
which meant the prospect of a German military revival had to be assumed. Taken together, there was ample reason to believe that Germany might become aggressive again in the future and ample reason to fear what might be capable of if that happened. Of the major powers, the country that felt most insecure about that was France, which, of course had a long history of conflict with Germany and also shared a long border with Germany. French public opinion was overwhelmingly suspicious of Germany,
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and Clemenceau himself in that way was typically French. Legend had it that he said when he died, he wanted to be buried upright and facing Germany. What he did definitively say at the end of his life was this: 'My life hatred has been for Germany because of what she has done to France.' Still, even Clemenceau believed, as did the British and American peacemakers, that the gravest mistake they could make would be to make 'excessive demands' on Germany.
11:59
'Every effort must be made to be just towards the Germans,' he said, 'but when it comes to persuading them that we are just towards them, that is another matter.' However reasonable the peacemakers may have tried to be, they simply weren't reasonable enough in the eyes of many. Wilson had promised a world full of states with the right to self-government. For that kind of world to work states need a certain level of trust in one another. It was a level of trust that, in the final analysis,
12:27
simply wasn't extended to Germany. It was decided that Germany had been too belligerent, was too dangerous, and therefore needed to be disarmed. It wasn't a decision made by the French alone. As Wilson himself put it: 'The world had a moral right to disarm Germany and to subject her to a generation of thoughtfulness.' The treaty ended up reducing Germany's army to the level of a country like Greece, and reduced its navy to be about on par with Argentina's.
12:57
To establish or reestablish other powers around Europe, Germany also lost 13% of its territory, which, among other things, now placed large numbers of German nationals under a new Polish government. To further limit German power, Germany was banned from uniting with Austria. To create a buffer for France, the Rhineland between Germany and France became a demilitarized zone. But perhaps the biggest issue came down to reparations.
13:27
After the war, Britain and France were both deeply in debt, and someone had to pay that debt. As Lloyd George put it: 'Somebody had to pay. If Germany could not pay, it meant the British taxpayer had to pay. Those who ought to pay where those who caused the loss.' The war with Germany had mostly been fought on French soil, which ruined 6000 square miles of French land and seriously hurt its industries and its economy. Germany had initially attacked France, and the French believed
14:00
that they shouldn't have to suffer for a war that they hadn't started. It was decided that reparations had to be paid, and at first there were only reparations for direct damage taken during the war. But the British had taken on more war debt than France, and were worried that that kind of settlement would allocate too much to France and too little to Britain. They pointed out that when the armistice had been signed, the Allies agreed that Germany was responsible
14:27
for all damage done to civilians by its aggression, which, among other things, included pensions for widows and orphans from the war. Wilson agreed that it should be included. His advisers told him that it didn't make logical sense. Wilson responded: 'Logic! Logic! I don't give a damn for logic. I am going to include pensions!' The result was a reparations bill that was doubled. The figure was set at about 6.6 billion pounds. It was a high figure designed to please the Allied powers
14:58
populations back at home. But the peacemakers had also studied, in great detail, Germany's realistic ability to pay, and through a subtle system of clauses, made it so Germany only had to effectively pay about half that amount. A subtle detail that has typically since gone unnoticed. To justify the bill, Article 231 was put in the treaty. German efforts successfully convinced the world that the clause tried to establish 'unilateral war guilt,'
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which made it become popularly known as the 'War Guilt Clause,' But the reality was that it was just legal language trying to establish a basis for reparations payments based on aggression.
15:38
The treaty, on the whole, wasn't harsh by historical standards, and the Germans themselves had just imposed far harsher treaties on Bolshevik Russia and on Romania. But the Germans had asked for an armistice based on the 14 Points, which Wilson had agreed to in a series of public notes. It was something he had done without European approval, but it nonetheless set German expectations. Wilson had promised a new world, and the treaty seemed like more of the old.
16:08
The disparity seemed too great, and a backlash developed against the treaty almost immediately. To Germans, Wilson overnight went from being a savior to being a hypocrite. When he died in 1924, the German embassy showed their feelings on the matter by opting not to lower their flag. The disillusionment with the conference was widespread. A member of the British delegation put it this way: 'We came to Paris confident that the new order was about to be established;
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we left it convinced that the new order had merely fouled the old. We arrived as fervent apprentices in the school of President Wilson; we left as renegades.' But Wilson had also come to Paris adamant about making a League of Nations, and in the Treaty of Versailles he created it. In its final session before officially ceasing to exist, the League would be summarized in this way by Lord Robert Cecil: 'For the first time an organization was constructed, in essence universal, not
17:11
to protect the national interest of this or that country... but to abolish war.' The idea, according to Wilson, was that a council of member states would watch the world and propose a course of action if war seemed imminent. At the top of the League of Nations was the Executive Council with nine seats. Five would be permanently occupied by great powers, and four would be delegated to other members which would be chosen by the League.
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That meant that the great powers would have a controlling stake in the League, which they believed they needed since they would be the ones making the biggest military commitment in the event that it was necessary. Article 10 of the League's covenant was Wilson's most cherished, which pledged that every League member would protect other members from external aggression. In the event of aggression, or the threat of aggression, the Executive Council would act as an adviser to the League,
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and beyond that, no definitive action was necessarily required. The legal jargon binding the League was minimal, which was thought to give the League flexibility to adapt to situations as they arose: to do as much or as little was seen as necessary. Despite the problems it may have had, Wilson believed that it would work. He said: 'It is a definite guarantee of peace. It is a definite guarantee by word against aggression. It is a definite guarantee against the things which have just come
18:33
near bringing the whole structure of civilization into ruin.' Its first seats on the Permanent Council were filled by the United Kingdom, France, Italy and Japan, which left the United States.
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The League was overwhelmingly popular with Americans, but treaties have to be approved by a two thirds majority in the Senate. Wilson was a Democrat and the Senate was majority Republican. The United States was also in an intensely partisan period. Many still believed in George Washington's advice about avoiding 'entangling alliances' abroad, which had been the bedrock of U.S. foreign policy for the last 150 years. Some of Wilson's top opponents publicly denounced the 14 Points.
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Wilson, for his part, was contemptuous of his opponents, even in his own party. For example, he compared senators to babies, saying they have their mouths open and their eyes shut. The Senate was particularly wary of Clause 10, which could have potentially committed the American military to war abroad. Many senators wanted to make modest revisions to the treaty, but Wilson, for his part, was inflexible. He was unwilling to court the Senate and seemed
19:47
to want all the credit for the League to himself. As the vote approached, Wilson went over the heads of Congress and tried to appeal to the public in a rapid series of speeches. In his last ever public appearance, Wilson concisely made his stance on the matter clear. He called his opponents disloyal and said there would be no compromising with them. He said: 'We have got to adopt it or reject it.'
20:12
When the crucial vote came, the two thirds majority wasn't there. The Senate rejected the Treaty of Versailles, and as a result the United States never joined the League of Nations. Wilson's health was failing. By the end of his life he appeared broken and discredited. The United States, for their part, would go into a period of relative isolation, disappearing as a power that could potentially check new forces of rising aggression. A peace had been made in Paris, but
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it was a peace widely condemned by public opinion. A League of Nations had been formed, but without the United States, the country that had conceived it and pressed for it, the League was crippled from the start. Europeans and the rest of the world would now enter a new moment in history, insecure and unsteady, but still for many with a cautious hope.
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Doing this tends to cause fighting, but for the sake of clarity for this next section I'm going to sketch out how we typically label the major political opinions. In the middle you have the center, center left and center right. All of them are considered moderate. And then you have the further left and the further right, which are not moderate. Socialism is typically associated with the left, and nationalism is typically associated with the right. There is such thing as left-wing nationalism,
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when nationalists aspire to an equality of nations, but it's not usually discussed and for our purposes we can ignore it. Liberalism is typically associated with the middle, center-left, and center-right. Conservatism is associated with the right. There's also progressivism, but that's typically just used as a synonym for leftism, and for our purposes we can ignore that too. So now we have a workable sketch. The era following the peace conference
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would be an era of a weakening middle, even a hollowing middle, and the expansion of the further left and the further right. In that time, two extremes became popular: an extreme left known as communism, and an extreme right known as fascism. The country that was the initial locus of that change was Russia. Russia had been a formidable power during World War One, but as the war dragged on and losses mounted public opinion turned sharply against it.
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That created political turmoil in Russia, which in eight months went from being a conservative autocracy, to a liberal democracy, to a revolutionary dictatorship under a tiny, extreme faction of Russian socialists, the Bolsheviks, whom most people, including the Russians themselves, had never heard of. Karl Marx had predicted a communist revolution that would sweep the world, and Vladimir Lenin from the beginning, saw the Soviet Union as being at the forefront of that movement.
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He put it this way to his supporters upon arriving in Russia during the Russian Revolution: 'Dear Comrades, soldiers, sailors and workers! I am happy to greet in your persons the victorious Russian Revolution, and greet you as the vanguard of the worldwide proletarian army.' It's important to understand that this was happening at a time when it was hard to know what exactly was happening in Soviet Russia. Information coming out of it was limited and unreliable.
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The outside world often projected their hopes, their fears, and their personal ideologies on the place. For example, in a rare case when a journalist was allowed into Russia, he famously reported: 'I have seen the future and it works,' a line he crafted before ever arriving there. Many did believe that the Soviet Union represented the future, and with that public opinion began to shift to the left. Liberals were rapidly becoming socialists, and socialists
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were rapidly abandoning their moderate socialism for Marxism, which at the time was being appropriated by Vladimir Lenin. Large communist movements formed in France, Germany and Italy, as well as smaller movements in Britain, the United States and Japan. Something like a worldwide breakout of communism started to seem possible. Communists in Berlin attempted to take power but failed. Communists in Munich and Hungary successfully seized power and proclaimed Soviet republics.
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But both governments lacked support and quickly fell. The Bolsheviks went to war with Poland, trying to make it a bridge that would bring communism to Europe, but were routed outside of Warsaw and retreated back to Russia. By 1920, the global wave had obviously subsided, which meant that the Bolsheviks, for the time, as a communist power were alone. Russia's domestic situation was in turmoil. They were also surrounded by unfriendly powers who could have conceivably invaded and overthrown them.
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Prospects for the Bolshevik's survival seemed precarious. They believed that in order to survive, they needed to actively spread communism around the world. Lenin started investing heavily in the cause, using an organization called 'Comintern,' or the 'Communist International,' to do it. They notably set up an office in Berlin as a base to spread their values across the length and breadth of Europe. Of the major countries in Europe, Italy was perhaps the most likely to convert.
25:47
That was because Italians were stressed and were dissatisfied with their self-described liberal government, which at the time featured both a parliament and a king. By the end of the Paris Peace Conference, parliamentary governments were the norm in Europe, which at the time included Germany's Weimar Republic. But none of the major European powers came off very well from the First World War. All had dissatisfactions and most were deeply in debt.
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But Italians were especially disillusioned with their government. Italy was the poorest of the great powers, and in the First World War went into debt beyond its capacity. By 1919, it owed its allies about 700 million pounds. By 1920, the lira lost more than half its value. Inflation raised the cost of living, hurt the middle classes, and led to serious civil disorder.
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Italy also performed badly during World War One. Their soldiers were badly led, badly equipped, and suffered heavy losses. Over half a million men had died by 1918, and the question had to be answered: what had it all been for? Italy had entered World War One after being promised land by Britain in the secret Treaty of London, and its delegates entered the Paris Peace Conference mostly just looking to capitalize on that promise.
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Their prime minister, Vittorio Orlando, was under intense public pressure. He even claimed that a secret society had pledged to kill him if he didn't come back with certain territory that had been pledged to them. One of those territories in particular had since become a burning national interest: gaining the port of Fiume. Nationalists had argued that Fiume was majority Italian and therefore should be part of Italy. In reality, its city center was only majority Italian.
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It was also embedded in a new nation being made: Yugoslavia. The Allies denied Fiume to Italy at the conference and Orlando left the conference in tears. Outrage over the denial of Fiume swept across Italy. Their government having failed them, a group of Italian citizens took the Fiume issue into their own hands. In a dramatic move, a group of Italian nationalists, anarchists, and general seekers of adventure illegally marched into Fiume and declared it their own.
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In a show of weakness that marked the beginning of its end, it took the Italian government about 15 months to dislodge them. There's an understandable trend in politics, regardless of the time period that we're talking about. The worse the outlook seems domestically, the more people look to alternatives. If the people in power are doing a bad job, then perhaps those people need replacing. If the system in place is doing a bad job, and if circumstances are bad enough,
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then perhaps that system needs replacing as well. When the Bolsheviks came to power, Italians immediately saw appeal in Soviet Communism. It was said that there was a Lenin in every village and every town. In the next election, the Italian Socialist Party won more than 100 seats in Parliament, making it the largest party in Italy. The party had, since 1917, developed a large bloc of communists who took direction from Comintern, and would go on in 1921 to form the Italian Communist Party.
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A typical slogan from them was 'Fare come in Russia.' 'Let us do as in Russia.' To convert Italy into a communist state, violence was typically accepted and even glorified. For example, a party leader declared: 'I reject violence as a method because it destroys the soul and crushes the personality, but I exalt the violence which is exercised as a form of liberation in order to create, generate, produce.' By then, the news of the Red Terror
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that was happening in Russia had spread around the world, which caused many Italians to see the burgeoning communism there as a threat to Italian society. Furthermore, it was noted that the Italian government wasn't stopping it and was even allowing communists into Parliament. But there was a bloc of Italians that adapted to the situation and resolved to do something about it. Which meant that in tandem with the rise of communism, a new kind of politics emerged.
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Politics that took inspiration from the left and synthesized that inspiration into a rough equivalent for the right. In Italy these were known as the Fascisti, or the Fascists. Their leader, Benito Mussolini, had earlier in life been a socialist and an anti-nationalist. For example, calling the Italian flag in 1910 'a rag to be planted on a dunghill.' But influenced by the Great War and by the threat of communism at home, Mussolini's views began to shift to the right.
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He began to see the world in terms of nationalism, national glory, violence, and war. Mussolini saw the government allowing socialism and communism to flourish around Italy. Their inaction to him presented an opportunity. In 1920, he mobilized his black-shirted squads and, to the shock of many, took action.
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They raided the political headquarters of their opponents, destroyed the offices of trade unions, burned down co-operative institutions, smashed left-wing presses, attacked socialists, and forced communists to drink castor oil. In the widespread violence, hundreds were killed and thousands injured. The authorities, like the police and the military, had little love for the far-left and mostly stood back and let the violence happen.
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Fascism didn't have a long history with a big figure behind it like Karl Marx. It also didn't have a large organization like Comintern. It was comparatively new and people were still figuring out what to make of it. The Fascisti didn't seem to have a sophisticated ideological framework. A popular slogan among them was 'Me ne frego.' 'I don't give a damn.' Their politics instead seemed to be based on action, and that action was violence.
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They did have one common interest that could motivate their action, and Mussolini in 1924 wrote an article spelling that out. He said: 'We Fascists have had the courage to discard all traditional political theories... we are aristocrats and democrats, revolutionaries and reactionaries, proletarians and anti-proletarians, pacifists and anti-pacifists. It is sufficient to have a single fixed point: the nation. The rest is obvious.' So this is an extreme take on nationalism.
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Whatever fascists believe the nation needs they do, and no traditional morality or ideology can get in the way of it. By crushing the left in Italy, the Fascisti argued that they were the ones who were acting in the true interests of the nation. They, they said, were the ones who were bringing order to Italy. In the ensuing violence, then between the left and right a pattern took shape. Violence was blamed on the left, and martyrs and victims were appropriated by the fascists.
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The state stood by and watched or actively enabled fascist attacks and reprisals. Fascists were able to make themselves out as the saviors of Italy, the defenders of the soldiers who had fought in the Great War, and the only force that could prevent the Bolsheviks from taking power. Moderate and middle-class opinion started to move towards fascism. Meanwhile, the socialist left was in retreat and disarray.
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The rise of the Fascists appeared unstoppable. By 1921, Mussolini could proclaim that Bolshevism had been vanquished. Italian opinion had moved both to the left and to the right, and the moderate government at that point looked weak, ineffectual and unpopular. But the Fascisti didn't settle with just suppressing the left. They didn't want to just save Italy, so they thought. They wanted to bring it back to a position of greatness in the world, to bring it national honor.
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The greatness of the Italian nation became their unquestionable myth, the attainment of that greatness, their unquestionable goal to which everything else should be subordinated. They saw it as a mission that they and they alone were qualified for. The Fascisti, they thought, had saved Italy, and it was the Fascisti and the Fascisti alone who could be trusted to bring about national rejuvenation. For that mission they needed power. 'Fascism,' Mussolini said, 'must become the state.'
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In 1922 they began what's called the March on Rome. The Fascisti took over public institutions across Italy and marched thousands of their Blackshirts outside the capital, where negotiations for power could take place. The king could have declared martial law and probably crushed the uprising. But he appeared to want to avoid bloodshed and instead appeased the Fascists. He appointed Mussolini as prime minister, the youngest in Italian history. Not satisfied with sharing power,
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The Fascists continued the campaign of threats and violence against their opposition, even killing an outspoken socialist senator: Giacomo Matteotti. Mussolini made a speech claiming full responsibility for the violence, and after that there were no further serious challenges to his rule. He was able to consolidate power and establish himself as a dictator. As dictator, he openly aimed to convert Italy into a totalitarian fascist state. In some ways he was successful,
35:40
but he never established total control over Italian political life. While Mussolini was very popular at times, Italy continued to struggle under him. Many Italians never respected his rule and treated him as something of a joke. For example, it was said that the Fascist salute was a way of showing 'how high the grass would soon grow in the streets of Rome.' Italy had been a democracy and had been on the Allied side of World War One. Mussolini though, was openly hostile to Wilsonian values.
36:13
He was openly against democracy and openly glorified war. These developments were problematic for the League of Nations, but for the time it was thought that not much could be done. Italy hadn't yet posed a direct threat to anyone. Meanwhile for Italians, there seemed little in the way of alternative to Mussolini. The middle had hollowed out and the left had been crushed. There seemed little left besides the Fascisti for Italy. What Mussolini seemed to prove, perhaps more than anything,
36:43
was that extreme nationalists could take power and democracy by crushing the left and positioning themselves as the preferable alternative to communism. Not long after the March on Rome in November 1923, news came in from Bavaria. A coup had been attempted in Munich. A fairly obscure movement had taken over a beer hall full of officials. Using the officials as captives, and with the support of a famous military figure, they intended it to be the beginning of a March on Berlin,
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something they had done in Mussolini's example. The military intervened and the coup failed, but its leader started to gain widespread attention once he was put on trial and given a platform to speak. Adolf Hitler had volunteered to fight in the German army during World War One. He was a somewhat normal soldier who performed his duties well, if not a little overenthusiastically. Towards the end of the war, he was blinded by a gas attack and was more or less incapacitated
37:47
as news of the end of the war came in. Once Germany surrendered and peace terms needed to be signed, it was thought it would be best to appease Woodrow Wilson by sending in a group of democratically elected politicians to do it, and not the military, who had been running Germany as essentially a dictatorship in the years leading up to it, which, based on popular support at the time, mostly meant sending members from moderate parties, like the Center Party and the Social Democratic Party.
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But the terms that they received horrified the German public. They had no control over the terms. They were told there was no room to negotiate, and that if they didn't accept, Germany would be invaded and occupied, a prospect the German High Command said they had no power to stop. But despite that, many Germans focused their outrage on the signers of the treaty, and within that a conspiratorial view formed. It was claimed by many that Germany hadn't actually been defeated in battle.
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Its defeat and the terms it received were the fault of people behind the front lines. It was the fault of domestic traitors, some of whom were these democratic politicians who worked with foreign powers to stab Germany in the back. The politicians who signed the armistice became known as the 'November criminals.' The politicians who signed the Treaty of Versailles became known as the 'criminals of 1919,' and the stab in the back myth would go on to exist powerfully in the minds of many Germans.
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One of those Germans was Adolf Hitler. He later claimed in a way that implausibly blurred timelines, but nonetheless shed light on his philosophy that as he lay in the hospital and heard news of the end of the war come in, he made a vow to himself: a vow 'to know neither rest nor peace, until the November criminals had been overthrown, until on the ruins of the wretched Germany of today there should have arisen once more a Germany of power and greatness, of freedom and splendor.'
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After the war he went into politics with that as his basic goal in mind. As one of his top subordinates would phrase it, 'he wanted to build up a party that would make Germany strong and smash the Treaty of Versailles.' Hitler needed somewhere to concentrate his political activity and found it in a tiny political discussion group. He liked that it was small and therefore malleable, and decided to join it and use it for his purposes.
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Who exactly they were, ideologically speaking, at the time wasn't clear. Their political program was a strange mix of socialism, nationalism and anti-Semitism. Jews were a tiny minority in Germany, making up about 1% of the population. They, historically speaking, were disproportionately successful, especially in urban centers, which led to a history of their being targeted by disgruntled Germans. For example, the German man who coined the word anti-Semitism also made
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an organization dedicated for that purpose, and complained that all German social, commercial and industrial developments were 'built on a Jewish worldview.' Hitler himself became increasingly anti-Semitic once he arrived back in Munich after World War One. He became convinced that Jews didn't really serve at the front, and therefore shirked war duties and demoralized Germans. According to a German census, the opposite was actually true. Jews disproportionately served in the German army,
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but a fact like that would probably be uninteresting to Hitler. This was happening at a time when Germany was being swept by romantic nationalism, a style of nationalism that hinges on feelings, on emotions. Certain beliefs felt right to nationalists, and that's what mattered. Hitler, over time became convinced that Jews had a parasitic effect on German life. He believed that to bring about German greatness, the German race, as he called
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the German people, needed to purge itself of its parasitic minority. The Nazi Party's relationship to nationalism and socialism is more controversial. In their earlier years, they were typically understood to be a sort of hybrid party that used aspects of socialism for the purposes of German nationalism, captured, for example, by Hitler when he said he wanted as a basic game to overthrow Marxism whether in socialist or communist garb, and rewin labor
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to the nationalist ideals of state and society. There were some in the party that were further left and others that were further right. The divisions in the party naturally led to debate, and it was Hitler himself who put a stop to that debate. He warned to not overly intellectualize the issue. The party could come up with programs, but as he explained: 'The program isn't the question... We need power!' Whatever gained them power, that was the correct path.
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Germany emerged from World War One in a deeply unstable condition. The Weimar Republic was steeped in a climate of defeat, national humiliation and political and social disorder. Discontentment was widespread in Germany, and Hitler distinguished himself as a passionate public speaker who could tap into that discontentment and channel it into culprits. It was the fault of the November criminals, he said, and the Treaty of Versailles. It was the fault of the Jews.
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It was the fault of his political opposition, especially the Social Democrats and the communists. But there was hope, and that hope was through him. Help him into power and he'll sweep away these problems and bring on a new era of glory and prosperity. The path forward, he said, will not be easy. But great things are never easy, and for Germans, this path was the only path for a better future. Hitler started to gain a fervent following.
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They were drawn from all walks of life and all manners of thinking, but they as a group shared two things in common: nationalism and a fear of Marxism. The tone that Hitler's new members brought with them was that of indisputable violence. Violence is and would need to be necessary to solve Germany's problems and to bring the Nazis into power. They began violently acting out against their opponents, who at the time were mostly communists.
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They, like the Italian Fascisti, received support from the police when they did it. The police in Munich gave their reason for doing so as testimony during Hitler's trial over his failed coup. They said they 'saw in the party the seeds of Germany's renewal.' They said: 'We were convinced from the start that this movement was the one most likely to take root among the workers infected with the Marxist plague and win them back into the nationalist camp.
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That is why we held our protecting hands over the National Socialist Party and Herr Hitler.' Hitler over time, consolidated full control over his party, for example, by threatening to resign when he was faced by ideological challenges from within. He said he would not return to the party unless he was given dictatorial powers over it. Over time, he also developed other aspects of his thinking. An important one for our purposes is his policy of Lebensraum, which translates to 'living space.'
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He believed that the German people were entitled to more land on Earth, and it fell on him as a matter of foreign policy to secure that land. He described the problem as a simple mathematic one that seemed instinctively correct to him: '62 million Germans were crowded into an area only 450,000 kilometers square. This is a ridiculous figure when one considers the size of other nations in the world today.' There were two solutions according to him: either decrease the population
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by 'chasing our best human material out of Germany,' or to 'bring the soil into consonance with the population, even if it must be done by war.'
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Advocating for Lebensraum was standard among German nationalists at the time, and politicians from all walks of German life didn't accept the frontiers that were laid down at Versailles, but only the most extreme nationalists were vocally making these claims, and Hitler would prove himself to be unique with the aggressiveness through which he would pursue Lebensraum, especially in a time when the world was trying to move beyond such thinking. Conditions worsened in Germany in the early '20s,
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and with that, the Nazis gained ever more support. The German High Command had run Germany deeply into debt during World War One, and had done it by annexing large territories and building a large war economy based on their resources. As a vanquished power, Germany now had to deal with that debt, and had to do it without those territories and without those resources. On top of that, the Allies were demanding reparations payments, and the German government was in a bind
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trying to figure out how to make those payments. Agreeing to make payments using existing German funds had infuriated nationalists like Hitler and led to violence across Germany. When the German government tried not paying anything at all, the French responded by marching into the Ruhr in Germany and occupying its coal mines, which led to further economic spiraling in Germany, and again stoked German nationalism and brought Hitler more adherents.
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The reparations were so unpopular and considered so unjust that raising taxes to make the payments was considered out of the question. The Weimar government, then, decided to print money. Lots of it. Hyperinflation was already beginning in Germany, but this brought it to new levels. The hyperinflation that ensued led to further polarization in German political life. Germans who invested in or loaned to the state lost their money, but Germans who had large debts saw their debts disappear
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and gained large assets like houses for virtually nothing. This especially affected the middle class. As Germans then confronted one another over a situation that many felt was unfair, the middle class fractured. The period led to a sense of despair for many. The German professor Victor Klemperer put it this way in his diary: 'Germany is collapsing in an eerie, step-by-step manner... The dollar stands at over 800 million. It stands every day at 300 million more than the previous day.
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All that's not just what you read in the paper, but has an immediate impact on one's own life. How long will we still have something to eat? Where will we next have to tighten our belts?' As discontentment simmered in Germany and as Hitler's followers grew, he felt that the time for a grab for power had come. Mussolini had recently come into power and it was observed by the Nazis how similar the movements were. Hitler was inspired by Mussolini's methods, and after the March on Rome,
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even allowed himself to be called Germany's Mussolini. He then attempted his own march on Rome, but the Nazis were still obscure. They didn't have near the support that Mussolini did. Unlike in Italy, the German government put a stop to the coup.
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Hitler was thrown in jail and there he gathered his thoughts. He decided that he would come into power not through an armed coup, but through the ballot box. He would use the democratic process to gain power and destroy the Weimar government from within. It was a path that would lean into his greatest strength: public speaking. Hitler had public speaking down to a science. He would start quietly to gain the rapt attention of the crowd. And then he would work up to a screaming finale:
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sweating and even crushing his glasses in his fist. He had a theory. In his mind the public was like a woman and needed to be spoken to as he believed women needed to be spoken to: with conviction and appealing to emotion.
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'You cannot imagine how silent it becomes as soon as this man speaks,' recalled one of his supporters, 'sometimes it almost seems to me as if Hitler used a magic charm in order to win the unconditional confidence of old and young alike.' A witness to the Beer Hall Putsch likened him to a master playing a Stradivarius violin. Within moments, he had won over most of the crowd, turning them inside out as one turned the glove inside out, with a few sentences.
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As Hitler worked on the crowd in the beer hall, tears streamed down many a cheek. Someone next to a police official turned and said: 'The only thing missing is the psychiatrist.' One thing Hitler had to convince Germans of was of the inadequacy of the current German state. When he stood trial for the coup, he stood trial not as a defendant, but as an accuser. What had failed Germany and betrayed Germany, he said, was not him, but the state.
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He took full responsibility for the putsch but denied that it was a criminal. How could he be one, he said, when his mission in life was to lead Germany back to honor, to its proper position in the world. Hitler and his associates were given light sentences and were out in a matter of months. From there, the campaigning began.
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Hitler would go from being the leader of a marginal party to being chancellor in eight years. he would practice body movements and rehearse speeches in front of a mirror. On the campaign trail, he was a chameleon, ideologically adapting to each audience he spoke to. 'What record must I use,' he said, 'the national, the social or the sentimental? Of course, I have them all in my suitcase.' Meanwhile, Nazi brownshirts and communists fought one another continuously at rallies and in the streets.
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Hitler had a theory: 'He who can conquer the streets can also conquer the masses; and he who has conquered the masses has thereby conquered the state.' Through those methods, the Nazi Party grew but remained marginal. Towards the end of the 1920s, Germany was doing well. The economy was running strong, held up by short term loans from the United States. The leaders of France and Germany reconciled and received Nobel Peace Prizes, and Germany joined the League of Nations.
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There was a sense of progress and renewal. Social fissures began to heal. The Nazis had made electoral gains, but only held around 2% of the popular vote. Because they campaigned on discontentment, things would have to turn dramatically for the worse for Germans in order for the Nazis to come into prominence. A surge in optimism towards the end of the '20s led to a flood of investment into American stocks. That led to a dramatic bull market, and in October 1929, to a dramatic crash.
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Panic selling led to even more panic selling, which led to even more panic selling. Stocks crashing led to companies going out of business, which led to rising unemployment, which led to more companies going out of business, which led to even more unemployment. It was a crash so severe that it triggered a worldwide depression - The Great Depression. Europe was hit hard by the depression, and of the European countries, Germany was perhaps the hardest hit.
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Its economy had relied on American loans, and when Americans called in those loans, the German economy collapsed. Counting hyperinflation, economic collapse had now happened twice in Germany in a decade. If there had been some amount of goodwill that had been shored up by the Weimar government, this marked the end of it. Hitler saw opportunity in the Depression, and responded by campaigning harder than ever. The Nazis adopted an ever more vague program,
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shifting their messaging based on each demographic they spoke to. They campaigned with film shows, rallies, songs, brass bands, demonstrations, and parades. Hitler himself made speech after speech to ever larger crowds, railing against the Weimar Republic, against its failures and the humiliation it was caused in Germany. Under him, he said, Germans would be one united people and would sweep away these problems and rise into a glorious future. The Nazis electorally exploded.
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They went from only 800,000 popular votes in 1928 to 6.4 million in 1930.
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As the Weimar government continued to fail to stop the Depression, the choices for Germans seemed to be narrowing. As Victor Klemperer put it in his diary: 'Is the government going to fall? Is Hitler going to follow? Or communism?' But communists never really had a shot at power. They were popular enough to be a loud presence in Germany, but not popular enough to be a serious challenge for the Nazis. Many Germans were scared by communism, and the German public, by and large, rejected it.
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In that rejection, a dramatic shift in German politics occurred: a dramatic shift to the right. By the 1932 presidential election, politics in Germany had shifted so far to the right that Hindenburg, an old fashioned conservative, was understood as a candidate for the left, getting support from the Center Party, liberals and even Social Democrats. He had been outflanked by his opponent, Hitler, who at that time was unarguably the candidate for the right.
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Hitler won, after a runoff, 37% of the vote. The Nazis hadn't won but their growth was explosive. There were many parties in German politics at the time, which meant that no parties were able to get majorities and had to govern through coalitions, And the coalitions being made at the time couldn't agree on how to solve the crisis. The heightened presence of communists and Nazis in their parliament, the Reichstag, didn't make matters easier.
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They chanted and shouted and interrupted through Reichstag meetings, creating turmoil and making the meetings seem pointless. Chancellors were effectively ruling Germany through emergency decrees, and it was on that powerful position that Hitler fixed his eyes. He would bring order to Germany, he said, but he needed to be made chancellor first. It fell on the president, Hindenburg, to appoint chancellors. Needing a functioning government, and having been failed by his other right-wing options,
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Hindenburg, on January 30th 1933, finally appointed Hitler. To celebrate the appointment, the Nazis put on massive demonstrations across the country. It signaled the beginning of an accumulation of ever more power. Processions of torchbearers sung: 'We want to die for the flag.' A young German girl was a witness and recalled: 'I was overcome with a burning desire to belong to these people for whom it was a matter of life and death... I wanted to escape from my childish, narrow life
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and I wanted to attach myself to something that was great and fundamental.' Once in power, Hitler framed the needs of the German nation as a holy cause that all must fall in line with. He said his movement would be 'intolerant against anyone who sins against the nation.' Hitler dictated what the needs of the German nation were, so it meant in theory that all must obey what Hitler decreed. But his powers were still somewhat limited.
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He was somewhat bound by law and had opposition parties to deal with. When a disillusioned leftist set fire to the Parliament building, the Reichstag, it gave Hitler an opportunity to solve that problem. He arrived at the scene and watched the Reichstag burn. He was apparently convinced it was a communist plot. 'Now we'll show them,' he said. 'Anyone who stands in our way will be mown down! The German people have been soft to long. Every Communist official must be shot.
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All Communist deputies must be hanged This very night. All friends of the Communists must be locked up. And that goes for the Social Democrats and the Reichsbanner as well!' The Reichsbanner was a paramilitary group designed to protect the Weimar democracy from extremism. Using the fire as a pretense, they then swept from left to right across the political spectrum. Through violence, intimidation, mass imprisonment and legal declarations,
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they stamped out all political opposition in Germany, starting with the Communists, the Social Democrats and then the Center Party. Once they were eliminated, there was little left in Germany that didn't already support the Nazis... and suppressing the rest was easy. The only power bloc that remained was opposition from within his own party, and after credibly fearing a coup from them, he gave an order for a mass killing known as the Night of the Long
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Knives, a move that marked the end of any serious party opposition in Germany. 'The Party is Hitler. But Hitler is also Germany as Germany is Hitler!' Like the Fascisti, the Nazis also aimed to establish a totalitarian state, which they also called a 'total state:' a state under total control of a single party, which in turn was under total control of a single man. 'Adolf Hitler. Adolf Hitler.' The phenomenon that occurred in Italy
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and Germany also happened in the major democracies around the world. Communist movements inspired by the Soviet Union formed, and also fascist movements formed, even in the United States. Everywhere in the '20s and '30s people suffered economic hardship, if not from the First World War, then certainly from the Great Depression. People, seemingly everywhere, became polarized, fraught and disillusioned. The sunny optimism of 1919 had vanished. But it was only in Italy and Germany
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that a fascist movement took control of a major power. Those powers would go on to test the postwar order to see if borders were indeed fixed, or if, as they suspected, the map of the world was subject to revision along the lines of their national interests. But neither would be the first country to try that order. That role would fall to Japan.
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In the 1930s, it became clear that people were living in a time of international anarchy, not international order. It was a development laid bare by the rise of aggressor powers, powers that wanted to build new empires. To reveal the hollowness of the international system, these powers needed to take action. The first to do it was a member of the League of Nations and stemmed from a power struggle within it, and that, of course, was Japan.
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Since Japan had been forced to open itself to dealings with the outside world in the mid-19th century, two broad voices prevailed. One was a voice of compliance, diplomacy and moderation. It was a voice that wanted to modernize Japan by learning from the outside world, to some extent, to strengthen Japan by making dealings with it and, practically speaking, to bring security to Japan by complying with the wishes of it. That way of thinking brought Japan into the League of Nations.
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It led it to be financially connected to the outside world, and it brought it democratic institutions and eventually a moderate political base. The other way of thinking was based on an aggressive nationalism. It emphasized Japan's racial purity and saw that purity as a source of national strength, something that made them superior to other nations. The politics of the world, as they saw it, were the politics of armed struggle. A hierarchical struggle between nations.
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It was a struggle that produced dominant hegemons and forced all others into a position of submission and dependance. It was a struggle that would continue until, as the popular author put it, 'a very powerful nation appears which will reign over the small and the big nations of the world, and establish a feudal peace.' It was believed by these nationalists, as a matter of faith, that it was a role that would fall to Japan. As a major general put it: 'The ultimate conclusion of politics
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is the conquest of the world by one imperial power... The Japanese nation, in view of her glorious history and position, should brace herself to fill her destined role.' It was a way of thinking that looked at the events around World War One and was, on one hand, inspired. Germany, led dictatorially by Erich Ludendorff, had waged an epic struggle against all odds and nearly won. To do it, Ludendorff had mobilized the resources of Germany to an unprecedented degree.
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It was an awe-inspiring demonstration of warfare, something you could call total war. On the other hand, these nationalists were humiliated. Japan had been treated as a lesser nation at the Paris Peace Conference. Their delegates had largely been ignored or treated as a joke. 'To think,' said Clemenceau, 'that there are blonde women in the world, and we stay closed up in here with these Japanese, who are so ugly.' Wanting at least equal treatment in this new international system,
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they tried to pass a racial equality clause in the League of Nations covenant, but were vetoed by dominions of the British Empire, most vocally by the Australians, who saw it as an unwanted intrusion in their own governing affairs. Japan also didn't get the territorial gains it looked for, namely ownership of the Shandong province in China. Perhaps worse, the Paris Peace Conference had established a mandate system,
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which promised to gradually separate the empires of the world from their colonies, a prospect that had grim ramifications in the eyes of many Japanese. The island of Japan is highly dense and resource poor. That made it highly dependent on the outside world for the raw materials that needed for war, namely oil and steel. In the event of war, outside powers could withhold those materials from Japan and the Japanese military would be paralyzed. To gain security then and to become a dominant power,
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it was thought that Japan needed to become self-sufficient, and it would do that by expanding. To fulfill its potential as a nation, Japan needed more territory, not less. It needed an empire. The nationalist and internationalist ideals in Japan until the 1920s existed in balance of another, a balance that existed as a conscious policy choice. But in the age of Wilson and the League of Nations, these principles became especially incompatible with one another.
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As a result, Japanese politics began to take swings in both directions, first towards internationalism in the '20s, and then towards nationalism in the '30s. In the '20s, Japan took part in the international community. It reduced its military and expanded its democratic institutions. But Japan had democratized quickly, perhaps too quickly. There wasn't a widespread social appreciation for democracy, and there weren't effective institutional safeguards against corruption.
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Corruption, therefore, was rampant, and a series of exposés informed the public about that corruption. Many nationalists believed that Japan was going in the wrong direction, and some of them responded dramatically, for example, by offering a delegate returning from a disarmament conference a ceremonial dagger for committing hara-kiri. Assassination became a popular form of activism, which included the killing of their prime minister in 1921.
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The Great Depression probably moved the needle more than anything. Because Japan had so few raw materials and became so dependent on foreign trade, it was hit especially hard by the depression. Landowning families and shopkeeping families were among the hardest hit in Japan, and the sons of those families disproportionately found work in the military. Many of their families were on the verge of starvation, and these young men, you could say understandably,
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blamed their internationalist status quo. Many joined secret societies in the military that had an ultranationalist bent, which radicalized these young men and drove them into a war against their own government. Political assassinations by members of these societies became rampant, and multiple coup d'états were attempted. But the most extreme action came from a branch of the military called the Kwantung Army, a division based in Manchuria.
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Manchuria had long been seen as a logical base for expansion for Japan. It was large, mostly wild and resource-dense. It also provided a strategic base for further action against China or Russia. Japan's army at the time only had limited rights to operate in Manchuria, but two officers in that army hatched a plan to seize the rest of it. It was a plan that would defy the wishes of their government, which meant to do it,
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they would act in the time-honored tradition of 'gekokujo.' 'Insubordination.' On September 18th, 1931, soldiers of the Kwantung Army blew up a stretch of railway line near the city of Mukden. It was a false flag operation blamed on Chinese bandits, which gave them an excuse to begin seizing territory around the South Manchurian Railway. By morning, the Kwantung Army had seized Mukden, to the dismay of their government in Tokyo. They ordered the army to limit their aggression, but
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the army simply ignored it and continued to sweep across the rest of Manchuria.
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The conquest of Manchuria inspired a wave of patriotic enthusiasm around Japan, and became popular across all classes of Japanese society, which forced their government to retroactively condone the occupation. China technically owned Manchuria as Japan took it, but China was weak and had its own problems and was in no position to stop it, which left the international community. China pled its case to the League of Nations, asking it to 'take immediate steps to prevent the further development
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of a situation endangering the peace of nations.' The League responded by launching an investigation, which concluded that China had no plan of attacking Japanese troops or property, and that the Japanese army wasn't acting in self-defense. The League recommended to Japan that it withdraw its troops and restore Manchuria to Chinese rule, a measure that 42 nations voted for. Japan was the lone vote against. They argued that due to past conquests, they had a historical right to Manchuria.
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'Japan will oppose any international attempt at control of Manchuria,' their delegate said. 'It does not mean we defy you because Manchuria belongs to us by right.' The Japanese delegation walked out of the League of Nations, never to return. The crisis in Manchuria was ultimately a cause that none of the major League powers wanted to take risks over. Many empathized with Japan, or could see benefits in avoiding conflict with them and letting them keep Manchuria.
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For example, the British Foreign Secretary was told the following in a letter from his friend: 'This, I know sounds all wrong, perhaps immoral, when [Japan] is flouting the League of Nations, but she has great provocation, she must ere long expand somewhere - for goodness sake let her do so there instead of Australia's way and her presence fully established in Manchuria means a real block against Bolshevik aggression.' In the end, the League voiced their disapproval,
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but nothing was done to change the outcome in Manchuria. In doing nothing, a principle was broken. This new international system was made to prevent wars of aggression from ever happening again. How did the taking of Manchuria square with that? If Japan could take Manchuria and more or less get away with it... what else could happen? Many around the world took notice. Mussolini would be the next to act.
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Up until the 1930s, Mussolini focused his political efforts domestically. He lacked experience in foreign affairs and was, for the time, content to leave it to the experts. But he was busy trying to convince Italians that through Fascism they were on their way to greatness, something akin to the greatness of ancient Rome. As he declared to a crowd in Milan on the 10th anniversary of the March on Rome: 'the 20th century will be the century of Fascism. It will be the century of Italian power;
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it will be the century in which Italy will return for the third time to be the leader of human civilization.' That would require some serious change in Italy's standing in the world, as it was still regarded as a somewhat lesser power, even just in Europe. Mussolini had long claimed that Italy would become a great power again by founding an empire, which meant creating 'il grande spazio,' 'a great imperial area.' But to the north and west of Italy
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all the land was taken and beyond the means of Italians to acquire. 'There was nothing to do,' as Mussolini put it, which meant looking at land in Africa and Asia. Within that, the obvious first choice was Ethiopia. Italians had pressed into Ethiopia in the 19th century, and in a manner unique for a European power paid dearly for it. The highland people of Ethiopia fought against the incursion and in 1887 killed about 500 Italians. Italians responded by pressing further into Ethiopia
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and war ensued, a war that Italy lost. To Italians, Ethiopia was a barbarous country, and a loss to them was a national humiliation. It seemed time to Mussolini to rectify that humiliation, and in the same move, establish Italy's next great empire. 'With Ethiopia we have been patient for 40 years,' he told the crowd the month of the invasion, 'Now enough.' The League had effectively done nothing about the Manchurian invasion, but this was an even more blatant challenge.
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Italy and Ethiopia were both members of the League, and Article 16 of the League's covenant said that if any member resorted to war against another, it would be deemed 'an act of war against all other members.' Mussolini had one major source of relief. France was overwhelmingly preoccupied with Germany, and their foreign minister, Pierre Laval, had met with Mussolini and exchanged pledges of support. Italy said they would support France if Germany tried to take Austria,
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and Laval, in turn, said France was disinterested in Mussolini's ambitions in Africa. The old Allied powers also had a telling moment of weakness. Hitler had declared to the world that Germany was rearming in March 1935, an act that broke the restrictions in the Treaty of Versailles. It was an act the Allies condemned, but did nothing to stop. Perhaps here, too, they would do nothing. Mussolini tried to get assurances from Britain that they wouldn't intervene,
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but they instead warned him against invading. Italy was also competing for power with Germany, and when Hitler learned of Mussolini's intentions he sent weapons and technical assistance to Ethiopia. Taking Ethiopia would be a risk, but there was a nationalist base at home that needed to be satisfied. Italian glory, it was thought, needed to be won. On the eve of the invasion, Mussolini blamed his actions on the powers who sat at the peace table in 1919
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and 'withheld from Italy all but a few crumbs of the rich colonial loot. We have waited 13 years,' he said, 'during which time the egoism of these Allies has only increased and suffocated our vitality.' On October 3rd, 1935, the invasion went forward. The Ethiopians were both outnumbered and technologically outmatched. As Italy captured a town that symbolized its defeat in the prior invasion, Mussolini telegraphed: 'ANNOUNCEMENT RECONQUEST ADOWA FILLS THE SOUL OF THE ITALIANS WITH PRIDE.'
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But Ethiopians resisted Italy more successfully than Mussolini had hoped, and Italy became involved in a drawn out conflict. Many understood, as a general principle, that if Italy succeeded it likely marked the beginning of a global trend. As a member of the British Parliament put it: 'If one dictator cannot be stopped from attacking Abyssinia,' which was a name for Ethiopia at the time, 'nothing can stop another dictator from attacking Lithuania, and Memel, and Austria.' But what could be done?
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The United States was still missing, and the British and French public both didn't want to fight. Those who hadn't experienced the scars of the First World War firsthand, learned about it through stories and fictionalizations like All Quiet on the Western Front.
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Both cultures had strong antiwar movements, and saw war as not something that should be glorified, but something that should be avoided if at all possible. It was also unclear how Italy's relationship to Germany was going to develop, and the Western powers were afraid that taking too hard a line against Mussolini would push him into an alliance with Hitler. The League of Nations responded by imposing economic sanctions on Italy, but the sanctions were somewhat weak.
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As Lloyd George put it, they were 'elaborate arrangements to deprive Italy of those things she could do without.' Trying to avoid war, British and French politicians drafted an agreement called the Hoare-Laval Pact, which would have partitioned Ethiopia if Mussolini ended the hostilities. It was an agreement that Mussolini seriously considered, but this was seen as more of the old way: old imperial powers dividing up the world in secret deals without any regard to a higher principle.
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The pact was discovered by the British public, and the outrage was so intense that their Parliament felt forced to abandon it. With nothing to stop them, Italy's invasion continued. The League imposed further oil sanctions on Italy, a country that imported almost all its oil from abroad. But the United States wasn't a League member, and their government was still afraid of the threat of communism in Italy. As a State Department official put it,
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they were afraid that if sanctions made Mussolini fall, it would thrust 'communism or near-communism' into 'the heart of Europe.' The US provided oil to Italy and disaster for Mussolini was averted. The war cost far exceeded Italy's estimates, but Italians were able to subdue Ethiopia through aerial bombardments and the use of poison gas. A Red Cross worker there recorded what he saw. I'll read it, but be warned, it's not for the faint of heart. 'The patients were a shocking sight.
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The first I examined, an old man, sat moaning on the ground, rocking himself to and fro, completely wrapped in a cloth. When I approached he slowly rose and drew aside his cloak. He looked as if someone had tried to skin him, clumsily; he had been horribly burned by 'mustard gas' all over the face, the back and the arms. There were many others like him: some more, some less severely affected; some newly burned, others older, their sores already caked with thick brown scabs;
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men and women alike all horribly disfigured, and little children too. And many blinded by the stuff, with blurred crimson apologies for eyes.' One of Mussolini's sons was a pilot in the war and recalled his experiences bombing Ethiopian cavalry: 'I still have in mind the spectacle of a little group of them... blooming like a rose when some of my fragmentation bombs fell in their midst. It was great fun and you could hit them easily.' In May of 1936, all of Ethiopia was annexed by Italy.
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Mussolini commemorated the occasion with a speech: 'Finally, Italy has its empire... a Fascist empire, an empire of civilization and of humanity for all of the peoples of Ethiopia.' Speaking before the League of Nations, the exiled emperor of Ethiopia had a different message: 'The appeals of my delegates addressed to the League of Nations had remained without answer. My delegates had not been witnesses. That is why I decided myself to come and bear
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witness against the crime perpetuated against my people, and to give Europe warning of the doom that awaits it if it should bow before the accomplished fact... I assert that the problem submitted to the Assembly today is much wider than merely a question of settlement of Italian aggression. It is collective security. It is the very existence of the League. It is the confidence that each state is to place in international treaties. It is the value of promises to small states
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that their integrity and independence shall be respected and ensured. It is the principle of equality of states, on the one hand, or otherwise the obligation made upon small powers to accept the bonds of vassalship. In a word, it is international morality that is at stake.' Mussolini more concisely summed up the message of the day: 'the League is a farce.'
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Such was the tapestry that Hitler was dealing with in the mid 1930s. Hitler withdrew Germany from the League of Nations after coming into power. Beyond that, he spent his first year focusing his efforts domestically, removing opposition and creating a single-party state. He also worked to end the crisis of the Depression. Through a combination of heavy state investment, and by proxy of the general economic upturn that was happening globally, he achieved it.
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The worst effects of the Depression began to disappear in Germany. Employment returned and Hitler's popularity soared. The only serious opposition that remained came from generals and military officials, who were forced to resort to private grievances and secret conspiracies. Publicly, Germans found themselves with two options: silence or a rapturous support for Hitler. As a leader, Hitler would typically give a general direction, often vague, and let those beneath him work out the details.
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But there were two areas where he directly and consistently concerned himself: foreign policy and the preparation for war. He had told Germans before coming into power that his intentions were 'to lead our people into bloody action, not for an adjustment of its boundaries, but to save it into the most distant future by securing so much land and ground that the future receives back many times the bloodshed.' Once in office, he publicly made himself out to be a man of peace,
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an act that swayed many in Western democracies at the time, including high profile figures like Lloyd George. But privately, Hitler revealed that his intentions never changed. He gathered his party leaders in 1934 and told them that unemployment in Germany had been solved, but within eight years an economic recession would ensue. The only remedy, he said, was the creation of living space for surplus Germans. To gain the land, war had to be an option.
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Hitler foresaw the possible need for short, decisive military action in the West and then in the East. To prepare for that, Germany needed to rearm. Hitler ordered a rearmament program that was to become Germany's priority. 'Every other task,' he said, 'must take second place.' By 1935, he announced the success of that program to the world. Germany's army, it was claimed, was four times the size allowed by the Treaty of Versailles. By then, Germany had widespread sympathy
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over the Treaty of Versailles, especially in Britain. A bestselling book by John Maynard Keynes had done much to convince the public, rightly or wrongly, that it was unfair. An opinion that seemed vindicated by how heavily Germany had been suffering since the treaty was imposed. Even the French believed that some rearmament was permissible. 'Better a limited and controlled armament than unlimited, uncontrolled and unrepressed armament of the Reich,' declared their ambassador.
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Britain and France had been controlling the coal rich Saarland on a 15 year lease from the Treaty of Versailles. Its population was mostly ethnically German. When its lease expired in 1935. A plebiscite was held and over 90% voted to rejoin Germany. Germany regained the resource rich land. It seemed that things were going in the right direction. Hitler wanted to make his first move with his military, but to do it, he first wanted assurances of the Nazi Party's loyalty.
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He gathered his party leaders, laid out his plans, and said he needed a 'single community loyal to him.' If he wasn't given the devotion he demanded, he said, he would kill himself. His party, stunned, said they'd follow him wherever he went with unquestioning loyalty. The move came in March 1936. The Treaty of Versailles had dictated that the Rhineland between Germany and France remain indefinitely demilitarized. A German reoccupation would mean the end of a buffer zone for France
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and a clear, aggressive breach of the treaty. Taking it was a risk that would likely raise French security concerns. The League of Nations had mostly been discredited as an arbiter against aggression. With collective security gone, each state had to more or less fend for itself, which meant that politics, going forward, would largely be shaped by classical balance of power concerns. In Hitler's eyes, there were two powers that might potentially act against him: Britain and France.
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But he had seen their feeble response to Mussolini's conquest of Ethiopia. Instincts told him that here, too, they would effectively do nothing. He flew his Luftwaffe from airfield to airfield, changing the markings on the planes to make it appear his air strength was higher than it actually was. News came in from London: Britain would not respond with force. That was enough for Hitler. He had a low opinion of the French and believed that they wouldn't act alone.
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France was basically in the opposite position of Germany. Its government was disorganized and divided to the point of being weak. They had the most formidable army in the world - on paper - but it was an army with strategy and technology that was becoming antiquated, and had faced large budget cuts in the year before. The French, like the British, overestimated Germany's strength in that moment, and the French General Staff believed that they were in no position to risk war with Germany.
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France gathered its allies formed by the Locarno Treaty, and tried to organize unified action against Germany, but nothing came of it. German soldiers marched into the Rhineland and nothing stopped them. France emerged from the affair appearing the aggressor. A British politician captured the mood: 'The general view seems to be that France has been the stumbling block in the path of peace for the last 15 years.' Meanwhile, Hitler had been bluffing.
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The force he had sent was meager, and his success earned him unheard of popularity back at home. When he put the issue of the Rhineland occupation to vote, almost 99% of Germans approved. The League of Nations, for their part, took no action and became irrelevant to the subsequent course of events. Four months later, civil war broke out in Spain. It was a long-simmering conflict based on a gulf between rich and poor. About 1% of the population owned more than half the land in Spain.
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The left, generally speaking, wanted reform, while the right was generally a conservative mix of priests, squires and officers. Both sides gained strength by forming coalitions. Spain was separated from the rest of Europe by geography, and had political life that was only tangentially connected to it. Rather than grasping politics as they fully existed in Spain, outsiders tended to focus their gaze on particular groups within Spanish coalitions,
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and use those groups to simplify their understanding of the conflict, and to project their own, typically European politics onto it. That caused many, especially in Europe, to enlist in the fight themselves. As one Briton described it: 'Everybody saw Spain as the epitome of the particular conflict with which they were concerned... For myself, and a great number of people like me, it became the great symbol of the struggle between democracy and fascism everywhere.'
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There was a communist faction loyal to the Soviet Union, and a fascistic faction known as the Falangists, but both factions were marginal. In Spain's last election before the war, communists won only 14 seats in Parliament and the Falangists won zero. Violence broke out between the left and right in Spain, and once again, the government wasn't able to stop it. It became discredited. A right-wing coup formed with a base in the military, led by the general Francisco Franco.
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In the fighting, each side adopted the European terminology of the day. The right became broadly known as 'nationalists' and used the rhetoric of fascism, which helped them secure aid from Mussolini and Hitler. The left was highly diverse, with a strong base and anarchism, but became known as 'republicans' and used the language of democracy. But the two biggest European democracies opted not to get involved. The British political elite were worried about communism in Spain, and were even worried
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that if Spain turned communist, it might spill over to France as well. France, as usual, was blocked by division and antiwar sentiment, which left only the Soviet Union supporting the Republicans.
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The nationalists had superior technology and organization and eventually won. The bombing of a last bastion of Republicans in the mountain town of Guernica held the world's attention, and was captured in what's generally considered a masterpiece by Pablo Picasso. Spain turned into a military dictatorship under Franco. Intense propaganda on both sides made it difficult to understand what exactly was happening in Spain, perhaps most notoriously
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when Franco denied that his forces had bombed Guernica at all. But there was a general takeaway from the war that, rightly or wrongly, seemed clear from the beginning: fascism was in the ascendant and democracy was in decline.
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Meanwhile in Japan, the military gained ever more power over Japanese politics. What became known as 'Japanese militarism' had no one single leader or even one single movement, or one single way of thinking, but as a general way of thinking it was aggressively nationalist and, generally speaking, pushed Japan to expand. By 1936, their prime minister summed up the situation by saying: 'The military are like an untamed horse left to run wild.
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If you try head-on to stop it, you'll get kicked to death. The only hope is to jump on from the side and try to get it under control while still allowing it to have its head to a certain extent.' In Japan's Imperial culture, power didn't necessarily rest in the hands of the person whose title would indicate it. It often existed in a more decentralized form and was wielded by figures with lesser titles. Officials of the highest rank in the military, for example,
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were supposed to avoid criticizing the work of their juniors to avoid humiliating them. That was perhaps most true of the Emperor, who nominally held unlimited power in Japan, but in reality held so little that any exercise of power was dangerous. If the Emperor gave an order and was disobeyed, the fragility of his power would be exposed, which meant that, generally speaking, subordinates were driving Japanese Imperial policy. Their ambitions for Japan's empire hadn't dimmed, and to meet those
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ambitions, Japan began spending almost half its national budget on armaments. Meanwhile abroad, the conquests continued. The Japanese military continued to push west into Mongolia and down south along the Great Wall of China. In July 1937, a Japanese soldier in China went missing near the Marco Polo Bridge. The Japanese army demanded the right to search for him in a nearby town. In the tense situation, Chinese soldiers fired on Japanese troops.
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It was a small conflict that could have de-escalated, but both sides saw war with each other as beneficial. China's leader, Chiang Kai-shek, believed that war with Japan would finally draw the Western democracies to China's side, while Japan believed that war in China would bring great material gains and be a quick affair: over within 'three months.' It would turn into one of the most bitter conflicts of the Second World War.
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Despite his hopes, serious help would not be forthcoming for Chiang Kai-shek. As multiple aggressors rose around the world, the prospect of a multi-front war had to be taken ever more seriously, which in terms of policy, led Britain and France to behave ever more defensively. As Britain's new prime minister, Neville Chamberlain, put it: he 'could not imagine anything more suicidal than to pick a quarrel with Japan at the present moment when the European situation had become so serious.'
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The overwhelming concern was Germany. France penned mutual defense guarantees with states around Eastern Europe, then seemed to undermine its commitment to those guarantees by investing heavily in a line of static defense running up and down its eastern border. Many in the British political elite felt a certain closeness to Germany, and believed that Anglo-German relations could somehow be worked out peacefully. Franklin Delano Roosevelt believed that a war was brewing,
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and believed that the United States would be better served if they confronted it sooner rather than later. But he was still up against a strongly isolationist public opinion at home. As he privately put it: 'I believe that as time goes on we can slowly but surely make people realize that war will be a greater danger to us if we close all the doors and windows than if we go out in the street and use our influence to curb the riot.' Wanting to do something,
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he had drafted a peace proposal for the world as Wilson had done two decades prior. He would get the dictators of the world to sign disarmament agreements in exchange for a new international system where the world equally distributed its raw materials. He privately asked the British government for their support, but the British asked him to hold off. They already had a policy in mind. They would listen to the dictators and grant them concessions,
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so long as the dictators promised they had no ambitions beyond the ones already stated. That would hopefully lead to a de-escalation of conflict and hopefully let them avoid war. The name of the policy was 'appeasement.' Unbeknownst to them, Hitler in his successes, became ever more convinced of his genius. He became increasingly intellectually isolated and developed a political vision that was increasingly apocalyptic. Shortly after militarizing the Rhineland, he, in a rare gesture,
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wrote up a note personally detailing that vision, which came to be known as the 'Four Year Plan Memorandum.' An epic conflict was brewing, he said, that no nation would be able to avoid or abstain from. He claimed that the French Revolution had produced a threat that was about to challenge the world, and that threat was Soviet communism. Germany, Italy and Japan, he said, would lead the struggle to save the world. If they failed, it would cause 'the most gruesome catastrophe'
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since the downfall of the states of antiquity. It was an occasion that would require a massive armament drive. All the resources of Germany had to be mobilized to create the 'premier army in the world.' He believed that Germany, like Japan, couldn't rely on trade for raw materials, at the time of such a war, which meant that Germany, like Japan had to expand to become more self-sufficient. On November 5th, 1937, he gathered his military chiefs and laid out his plans.
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'There have never been spaces without a master,' he said, 'and there were none today. The attacker always comes up against the possessor. The question for Germany ran: where could she achieve the greatest gain at the lowest cost?' To get what they needed, he told his staff, Germany would need to flex its muscles. The problem before them was one that could only be solved through force. Luckily for Germany, they had a head start. They were rearming faster than their opponents,
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which meant that Germany had an advantage, but it was a temporary one that had to be seized. Germany had to solve its territorial issues, he said, 'by 1943 to 1945,' at the latest. There were two strategic objectives that sat first on the table: seizing Czechoslovakia and Austria. He began with Austria. Hitler himself was Austrian, and his logic for uniting Austria with Germany was nationalistic: both were Germanic peoples and therefore should be united.
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Hitler met with Austria's chancellor and set the tone for what was to follow: The separate existence of Austria, he said, was 'treason' to Germany, a treason which, through force if necessary, would be resolved through unification. 'If you don't seriously believe you can stop me or even delay me for half an hour, do you?' he said, 'Perhaps you'll wake up one morning in Vienna to find us there - just like a spring storm. And then you'll see something!
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I would very much like to save Austria from such a fate, because such an action would mean blood.' Austria, then, had to choose how to respond. The public debate that followed was so intense that it pushed Austria into a state of near civil war. A vote was then scheduled to decide the issue. The cause seemed to unite Austria, but not in the way that Hitler intended. There was such an outpouring of support for Austrian independence that it seemed to threaten Hitler's plans.
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Not willing to risk rebuke, Hitler mobilized his army. 'If other measures prove unsuccessful,' he said, 'I intend to invade Austria with armed forces in order to establish constitutional conditions and to prevent further outrages against the pro-German population.' Germany demanded that the vote be delayed or else they would 'act accordingly.' The Austrian Chancellor asked Britain for advice, but it was a role that Britain was unwilling to play.
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They responded: 'His Majesty's Government cannot take responsibility of advising the Chancellor to take any course of action which might expose his country to dangers against which His Majesty's Government are unable to guarantee protection.' Alone, the Austrian Chancellor saw nothing good coming from a fight against Germany. He delivered an address to Austrians, telling them the people of Austria have yielded to force, 'because under no circumstances,
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not even in this supreme hour, do we intend that German blood shall be spilt. We have instructed our army to retreat without offering any resistance in the event of an invasion, and to await further decisions.' The only resistance at that point might have come from Italy, which, out of its own interests, didn't want Germany taking Austria. Hitler ordered the invasion, and Italy, to Hitler's relief in a phone call, sent its blessing. He was free to take Austria.
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There's a quirk of totalitarian governments in that they faced resistance while coming into power, then, when in power, they seem to have something like universal public support. When they lose power, they become widely condemned. Austria followed that pattern. Once it was taken by Germany. Public approval for the measure went to almost 100%. Resistance to Nazi rule suddenly vanished as they invaded. They were met by enthusiastic cheers by Austrians.
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Seeing the outpouring of support firsthand, Hitler's ambitions grew. He had originally envisioned a looser Austrian-German union, similar to the one Austria had with Hungary before the end of World War One. But now he resolved to fully combine them. 'I am destined,' he said, 'to be the Führer who will bring all Germans into the Greater German Reich.' Germany annexed Austria, then turned its attention to Czechoslovakia. Czechoslovakia was a country with a powerful army.
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It had been fashioned together during the Paris Peace Conference and contained a significant German-speaking minority population. Many of them were inspired by what happened with Austria, and were now demanding to be unified with Germany as well. They claimed the Czech government was cruelly treating them and the groundwork for the next crisis formed. Publicly, Hitler demanded to annex the Sudetenland - a region filled with ethnic Germans. Privately, he revealed he wanted the whole country.
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'It is my unshakable will,' he told his generals, 'to wipe Czechoslovakia off the map.' He believed he was living in a world where order had broken down. 'There is no international morality left,' he told his foreign minister, 'everybody snatches whatever booty he can.' Believing war was necessary, he mobilized his army on the Czech border. Czechoslovakia, in turn, mobilized its own. France and Britain became involved, this time taking a slightly harder line.
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They would commit to going to war to defend Czechoslovakia if Germany invaded without making an agreement with them first. As the German army made its way to the Czech border, the German public appeared to be silently nervous. No one applauded and the atmosphere was like a funeral procession. It was obvious enough to make Hitler turn to his propaganda minister and say: 'I can't lead a war with such a people!' A series of negotiations followed and Hitler
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agreed to a settlement called the 'Munich Agreement.' He could annex the Sudetenland if he left the rest of Czechoslovakia untouched. It was an agreement reached without Czechoslovakian involvement. It meant that Britain and France could stay out of war, but it also meant that Czechoslovakia's natural defenses would be penetrated. It would now be surrounded on three sides by Germany. Hitler had assured the British and French that the Sudetenland
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was 'the last territorial demand' that he would make in Europe. The security of the Czech state would now rely on him keeping his word. While negotiating, Chamberlain asked Hitler to sign a document saying the agreement was symbolic of the desire of both countries to 'never go to war with one another again.' Hitler signed it and Chamberlain took it to England. He received a hero's welcome and claimed he had established 'peace for our time.' He hoped that if Hitler breached that agreement,
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it would draw allies to Britain's side, namely the still-dormant United States. Germany was rapidly growing, and Britain and France were increasingly insecure about their ability to confront it. Hitler, back in Germany, assured his foreign minister that the document he had just signed was a piece of paper with 'no significance whatsoever.' Up until that point, Hitler's actions could have been seen as merely reversing the unjust settlement that was made at Versailles.
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That interpretation, to many, made him somewhat sympathetic and forgivable. But shortly after the Munich Agreement, that image of Hitler began to crack. When a Jewish refugee in Paris assassinated a German diplomat, Hitler decided it was time for German Jews to 'feel the anger of the people.' The Nazis first major anti-Jewish pogrom ensued, known as Kristallnacht, The Night of Broken Glass. It was an eye-opening event for many around the world, who, until that point,
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didn't take the anti-Semitic angle of Nazism seriously. Meanwhile, Hitler pushed German spending on rearmament to a new high. The demand it created for materials informed his next steps. In March 1939, he sketched out those steps to be completed by 1940. 'German dominion over Poland is necessary in order to guarantee the supply of agricultural products and coal for Germany... Hungary and Romania belong without question to the area essential for Germany's survival...
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The same could be said of Yugoslavia.' He also called for taking what was left of Czechoslovakia 'to increase German war potential,' as he put it. Believing time was precious, he immediately took action. He summoned the Czech president to Berlin and told him his country would be invaded on all sides in a matter of hours. He had two options: surrender or face 'the annihilation of Czechoslovakia.' Under pressure and seeing no viable alternative, Czechoslovakia surrendered.
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'It is the greatest triumph of my life,' he said. 'I shall go down in history as the great German!' The bloodless acquisition of Czechoslovakia again made Hitler's popularity soar in Germany. Germans began to believe their national ambitions could be fulfilled entirely without war. 'In Berlin,' their propaganda minister wrote, 'no one thinks of war.' But by taking Czechoslovakia, Hitler had broken an international agreement, one that had been willingly signed by his own government.
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He had also taken a country for the first time that wasn't predominantly German. All of a sudden, a veil seemed to be lifted. It seemed clear, for the first time, that he wasn't bent on merely reversing the Treaty. He was going to be an aggressor that aimed for ever more power, an aggressor that could not be dealt with diplomatically. In response to the public outcry, both the British and French governments gave military guarantees to Poland, Romania, Greece and Turkey,
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and at the same time began talks with the Soviet Union. Chamberlain made a speech indicating that the era of appeasement was over.
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As the summer of 1939 approached, the issue of Poland came to the fore. Alleged poor treatment of ethnic Germans there again gave Hitler a pretense to begin making demands. He publicly showed limited territorial interest in Poland, namely the free city of Danzig, but it was clear enough by then that he wanted the whole country. He gathered his military officials in his study and told them as much. 'The Pole is not a fresh enemy,' he said, 'Poland will always be on the side of our adversaries...
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It is not Danzig that is at stake. For us it is a matter of expanding our living-space in the east and making food supply secure.' France and Britain indicated they would go to war to defend Poland, but Hitler believed they were bluffing. As he put it to Italy's foreign minister in August: 'the conflict will be localized... France and England will certainly make extremely theatrical anti-German gestures but will not go to war.' He knew British rearmament was still in its early stages.
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'There is no actual rearmament in England,' he said, 'just propaganda.' The appeasement he received in Munich made him believe his opponents were 'tiny little worms.' People without the character to risk their empires for Poland. Mussolini had also just taken Albania. He had done it without informing Hitler, and it seemed like a smaller detail in the grand scheme of things, but it nonetheless led him to hastily sign an agreement with Germany guaranteeing
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mutual assistance even in the event that Germany acted as the aggressor. Japan had not yet allied with Germany, but its actions in the East were seen as further weakening for the Western democracies, and another sign that the tide was going in the right direction. There was one major uncertainty - what would the Soviet Union do? Taking Poland would bring Germany to its borders and Hitler wanted to avoid the prospect of a two-front war. That summer, negotiations were made.
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It was an alliance that Hitler intended to soon break. To bring it about as quickly as possible, he agreed to everything Stalin asked for. Britain and France had been making overtures to the Soviet Union, but Hitler, in his speed, outmaneuvered them. The pact was signed in the end of August. He believed that the conditions to take Poland were set. Again, the German people did not seem keen on war. On August 31st, a member of the German Resistance noted driving through Berlin
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that there were no cheering masses, just small groups of Germans standing silently 'with faraway expressions.' That night, the German army was in position on the Polish border. An incident was staged and then thinly blamed on the Poles. On September 1st, Germany invaded.
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Germany had also made an offer to Britain. If it could have Poland, then it pledged to help Britain strengthen its empire. But Britain and France had come around to an understanding. Appeasement and delay only made Germany more powerful and more ambitious. Conflict, then, was inevitable, and it was time, it was thought, to cut their losses and to confront it. Britain gave Germany an ultimatum. Chamberlain, on the 3rd of September, announced the results of that ultimatum to the world:
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'I am speaking to you from the Cabinet Room at Ten Downing Street.
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This morning the British ambassador in Berlin handed the German government a final note stating that unless we heard from them by 11:00, that they were prepared at once to withdraw their troops from Poland, a state of war would exist between us.
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I have to tell you now that no such undertaking has been received, and that consequently, this country is at war with Germany. The human cost of the Second World War will probably never be precisely known. Estimates are rounded in the millions, perhaps something like 50 million. It was a war that would end with Mussolini's death by his own countrymen, Germany's destruction, occupation and partition, and the use of two atomic bombs on Japan. I would encourage you to come to your own conclusions
1:49:21
about what was presented here, but that being said, I think it might be helpful to hear a short summary of what was said after the long journey that we've been on, and that might go something like this; up until the 1920s, states, societies and peoples had always taken land from others that they wanted to take and were able to take. In the 1920s, a new order was formed to try to move the world beyond that. People then had to choose what kind of world they wanted to live in.
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The attempt at creating an international order proved feeble. It offended some and asked too much from others. It never had the legitimacy, the self-confidence, or the level of cooperation that would have been needed to fulfill Wilson's vision. Due to hardship, popular extremist movements, and the isolation of the United States, support for the international order weakened further. The world, then led by extremist movements, reverted to land grabbing. Feeling threatened themselves,
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Britain and France finally said enough was enough, and the result was the Second World War.
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