A Wider Perspective

It is like travelling through thick forest with millions of trees.  You are on the motorway which passes through quickly and easily.  You are aware of another, earlier road.  But as for the forest?  Presumably there are tracks, and you can see a little way in through the first line of trees, but – even though you have driven through it many times – most of the forest is an unknown, even forbidding mystery.

Going Deeper

The following links will help you widen your knowledge:

The Great Depression as a cause of war

PJ Larkin (1965) has a section on the underlying causes of the War, including a good section on the Great Depression

'Why World War II?' - explores issues beyond Hitler

- BBC debate-podcast on what caused the war

1.  THE MOTORWAY: HITLER’S WAR?

In 1998 Collins published a book for A-Level History entitled Hitler and the Road to War. 

To be fair to Ted Townley, the author, he does tell us on the first page that:

"The outbreak of war in September 1939 can no longer be explained simply in terms of Hitler’s actions and policies."

… but, nonetheless, the first two-thirds of his book are about Hitler’s actions and policies, and to this day these remain the focus of popular histories, TV documentaries, school textbooks ... and GCSE specifications. 

SO… the ‘motorway route’ to the Causes of WWII is:

• A.   Hitler was expansionist
  • •  Many historians still think that the Second World War was Hitler's personal war, and that he always intended to fight a war - as a re-run of a First World War he did not believe that German had lost fairly.
• B.   Appeasement failed to stop him so...
  • •  Appeasement encouraged war.   It made Hitler think no one dare stop him, which encouraged him to go further and further until in the end he went too far. 
  • •  The Sudetenland led Stalin to make the Nazi-Soviet Pact, because he believed he could not trust Britain.
    
• C.   ... he led the world to war in Eight Steps [SCRAMCUP]
  • •  In addition, events leading up to the war played a part in starting the fighting.  Each event created anger in the alliesThis anger grew until Chamberlain declared war on Hitler on 3rd September 1939.
  • •  EIGHT events have been identified by historians as being especially significant in causing war:
    • 1,  Saar Plebsicite, 1935
      • •  It broke the Treaty of Versailles. 
      • •  It started a rearmament race. 
      • •  It divided the nations opposing Germany.
    • 2,  Conscription and Re-armament, 1935
      • •  It broke the Treaty of Versailles. 
      • •  It started a rearmament race. 
      • •  It divided the nations opposing Germany.
    • 3.  Rhineland, 1936
      • •  It broke the Treaty of Versailles. 
      • •  It was the first military action by Hitler and it was successful. 
      • •  France lost the opportunity to stop Hitler once and for all.
    • 4.  Austria, 1938
      • •  It broke the Treaty of Versailles. 
      • •  It was the first time Hitler had annexed land outside Germany. 
      • •  It marked the beginning of Mussolini's support for Hitler. 
      • •  It marked the first time Chamberlain appeased Hitler because Austria was 'too far away to help'.
    • 5.  Munich, 1938
      • •  It was the first time Hitler took land that was not simply redressing the Treaty of Versailles. 
      • •  It convinced Hitler that Chamberlain and Daladier were 'worms' who could be bullied. 
      • •  It convinced Stalin that Chamberlain and Daladier would not stand up to Hitler and led him to make the Nazi-Soviet Pact. 
      • •  The German army, hoping Hitler would be humiliated by the allies, had planned to topple him when he was; his success meant the end of any hope of getting rid of Hitler. 
    • 6.  Czechoslovakia, 1939 
      • •  It discredited appeasement and demonstrated that Hitler's promises could not be trusted.
      • •  It was the first time Hitler had annexed a non-German people; thus it appear to prove that he wanted to dominate the whole world.
      • •  Czecholsovakia was a democracy, which worried the other western democracies. 
      • •  It convinced Chamberlain that Hitler would ot be stopped by negotiation, and led him to make the Polish Guarantee (which was the eventual trigger of the war).
      • •  It outraged the British people, and got them ready for war (where in September 1938 they had been overwhelmingly in favour of peace).
    • 7.  USSR/Nazi Pact, 1939 
      • •  It was the agreement which made Hitler brave enough to invade Poland. 
      • •  It was seen as a disgusting act of political cynicism which convinced British people of the need for a war to stop this evil man.
    • 8.  Poland, 1939 
      • •  The Polish Guarantee was the end of appeasement - a 'non-negotiable' which provoked war. 
      • •  The Polish Guarantee was the promise that prevented Chamberlain cutting another deal with Hitler in August 1939.
      • •  The Polish Guarantee was the decision which threw Stalin into the Nazi-Soviet Pact the invasion of Poland was the event which explicitly caused Britain to declare war on 3 September 1939.

    

This drawing by the British cartoonist Sidney 'George' Strube (2 September 1939) is titled 'Juggernaut'.  What did Strube think was the cause of the war?

Click here for the interpretation

2.  THE OTHER ROAD

You know from your studies that there ARE other issues involved in the outbreak of WWII:

• D.  The Treaty of Versailles solved nothing  
  • •  Reparations left many people in the victorious nations feeling guilty. 
  • •  The loss of all that land to other countries simply made Hitler's early aggression look justified. 
  • •  Self-determination surrounded Germany by a lot of small nation states that fell easy prey to Germany. 
  • •  Most of all, the Treaty made the Germans angry, just waiting their chance for revenge. 
• E.  The League of Nations failed to keep the peace   
  • •  It was weak from the beginning, and had spectacular failures in Manchuria and Abyssinia, and it failed to prevent Hitler breaking the Treaty of Versailles. 
  • •  It failed to achieve disarmament, which resulted in an arms race. 
  • •  Countries left the failing League, and realised that they would have to fight a war. 
  • •  Britain and France abandoned collective security, and turned instead to appeasement.

… but even in the most-recent AQA GCSE History syllabus they are treated as separate to ‘the origins and outbreak of the Second World War’, and it is easy to regard them therefore as a separate road. 

Yet people in the 1930s did not see these issues as separate, in silos.  For them, Italy invaded Abyssinia just after Hitler’s Re-armament Rally, and just before he marched into the Rhineland.  And as late as 1937 the League set up a Reform Committee to discuss how it might adapt to the changed political situation. 

SO… don’t forget to mention these two factors. 

3.  THE WHOLE FOREST

Finally, what about the rest of the forest – all the Other Issues troubling the peace in the 1930s.  What about the Civil War in Spain?  The weakness and collapse of the fledgling democracies in eastern Europe?  The role of the USSR? 

Meanwhile, have we forgotten that the Second World War was a world war, not a European war, and that Japan – creating havoc conquering an empire in the Pacific, and committing all kinds of war crimes in China – was a key factor in its outbreak AND in November 1936 formed the ‘Axis’ alliance with German and Mussolini … but hardly gets a mention in the classroom narrative, even though the Axis Alliance was explicitly intended for war.

And has it not struck you that – when you were studying the outbreak of World War One – you started by studying the ‘underlying issues’: Nationalism, Imperialism, Militarism and Alliances?  All these tensions were important in the 1930s – so why are we not asking whether there was a general ‘will to war’ as we did for WWI? 

What about the Great Depression of the 1930s – did that create a situation in which war was more likely? 

And what about beliefs & ideologies: the historian Mark Mazower thinks that a key factor in the outbreak of war was the ethical clash between the easy-going (for the times) liberalism of the British Empire and the repressive supremacism of the German one Hitler was building.  Mazower called his book: ‘Dark Continent’, and the people who lived through the 1930s saw them as a time when evil was triumphing all over the world and it was going to be a case of fighting for civilisation … or losing it. 

The specification demands that you show a knowledge of Hitler’s policies & actions, and of the failure of the Treaty of Versailles, the League of Nations & Appeasement. 

But when you have covered the basics, you might want to drop a few sentences to show that you are aware of THE WIDER PERSPECTIVE.