Historiography of the Causes of World War II

    The verdicts of historians

  After the War,   AJP Taylor,  The debate into Recent Times,  Alternative Theories of Cause, 

The debate on Appeasement

Hitler cast such a huge shadow over the 20th century, and particularly over the Second World War, that historians have found it all but impossible ever since to do anything but accept that Hitler, his policies and his actions, were hugely responsible in causing the War. 

The Nuremberg Military Trials after the war decided that Hitler and the Nazi leaders were guilty of causing the war, and most historians in the succeeding years have gone along with their judgement … so much so that almost all the historical debates seem like mere to-ing and fro-ing about the details: Was it all pre-meditated-&-planned or just opportunism-&-accident?  Inevitable or avoidable?  Ideological or a traditional war about power?  Did Appeasement delay or hasten the war?  When was the ‘point-of-no-return’? 

The continuing psychological impact of Nazism, together with the way we study the Causes of the Second World War - especially in schools - tempts historians to view all these debates through a lens of what is so often labelled 'Hitler's War'.

Going Deeper

The following links will help you widen your knowledge:

This set of notes includes a section on 'The Historical Debate'

Cartoonists and the idea of a Stufenplan - Did Hitler have a plan for war?

Churchill on appeasement - BBC investigation

A site studying the theories of AJP Taylor

Conspiracy - Leibovitz's theory    

The Changing Debate on Appeasement - Frank McDonough's book starts with an overview of the historiography

Dr Ruth Henig - A-level paper...

   ... or you can download the whole of Ruth Henig, Origins of the Second World War (2005) – Chapter 3 is a very detailed historiography

1.  AFTER THE WAR

One of the first historians to write about the coming of War was Winston Churchill, in his book: The Gathering Storm (1948).  Churchill believed that Hitler had had a plan to go to war all along, and he put the ‘date-of-no-return’ at 1935, when Hitler re-armed – after that, said Churchill, ONLY a war could stop him. 

For a long time no historian seriously disagreed with this analysis, though some did raise related points:

  •    In 1960 the American journalist Willian Shirer – in his hugely popular book: Rise & Fall of the Third Reich – agreed that Hitler had planned the war all along, but emphasised the lies and deceits that Hitler had used to get away with it. 

  •    In 1965, distinguished German historian Andreas Hillgruber claimed that Mein Kampf (written by Hitler in 1924) contained Hitler's Stufenplan (his 'step-by-step' plan) for world domination. 

2.  AJP TAYLOR

In 1961, however, the controversial British historian AJP Taylor published Origins of the Second World War.  For Taylor, his analysis of the events leading to war showed no evidence of a long-term plan, only of opportunism – seizing the opportunities as they came along. 

The outbreak of war, Taylor suggested, was an accident – Hitler misjudged British determination on Poland. 

Most of all, he suggested that there was nothing particularly original or extreme about Hitler’s expansionism which, Taylor argued (following the theories of the German historian Fritz Fischer) was simply a continuation of Germany’s attempt to dominate Europe since the 1870s. 

3.  THE DEBATE INTO RECENT TIMES

Taylor’s views caused considerable interest at the time, but – although no historian now would seriously argue that Hitler was working to a Stufenplan – more recent studies have tended to shift the view back away from random opportunism towards ‘intentionalism’. 

In 1994, the British historian RJ Overy argued that it is impossible to explain Hitler’s massive re-armament as anything BUT a preparation for war, and a clear desire to create a military superpower. 

And, as late as 2004, Christian Leitz, in Origins of World War Two – Responsibility of the Powers: Nazi Germany, argued that Hitler possessed ambitious plans for the domination of Western Europe … with a ‘diabolical’ racial twist. 

4.  ALTERNATIVE THEORIES OF CAUSE

You will have realised that I am one of those historians who does not approve of the obsession with Hitler (I instinctively reject the idea that one individual can thus shape the whole of human history – that there have to be greater forces at work) ... so I am pleased to report that there have been other theories put forward as to why the Second Word War broke out:

1.   During the Cold War, the American State Department published (1948) documents blaming the Nazi-Soviet Pact.  In the same year, the Soviet Information Bureau published The Falsifiers of History, blaming American bankers and industrialists for funding the Nazis and German re-armament.  (Both accusations, btw, are true.)

2.   In 1970, the German historian Gerhard Weinberg suggested that ideology played a significant role in Nazi foreign policy – particularly the concepts of 'race', 'space' and 'unceasing struggle', which would only be accomplished by “total occupation of the globe”. 

3.   From the 1980s, a number of ‘functionalist’ historians argued that Hitler was a ‘weak dictator’ in charge of a chaotic government, and that Hitler’s personal role – his foreign policy – was in fact decided for him, as he was forced – by the powerful forces his rhetoric had unleashed in Germany – to put his wild promises into action. 

4.   In the late 1980s, the British Marxist historian Timothy Mason, whilst accepting that Nazi Germany was “bent at some time upon a major war of expansion”, argued that Hitler’s re-armament programme had caused such instability and inflation in the German economy that he HAD to go to war to avoid an economic melt-down (the ‘Flight into War’ theory) – Mason stressed that this had not determined Hitler’s desire for war … but it DID determine its timing. 

5.   In 1997, Patrick Finney suggested that the war was caused by “the destructive challenge posed by the revisionist powers to the international order established after the first world war” – i.e.  by the Treaty of Versailles – and there are historians who argue that the inter-war period was not a peace at all, but only an interlude in a thirty years’ war, 1914-45. 

6.   In 1996, John Vasquez – a political scientist writing in the International Political Science Review – tried to apply theoretical models of ‘steps to interstate war’ to the causes of the Second World War. 

Vasquez identified:

  •    Territorial Disputes;

  •    Military Buildups;

  •    Alliance Making;

  •    Repeated Crises,

exacerbated by:

  •    Breakdown of political order;

  •    Economic factors;

  •    Polarisation into 2 hostile blocs, neither bloc preponderant,

        and showed how each of these theoretical stimuli were present in the outbreak of the Second World War.  (This reminds me very much of the way we started the study of the Causes of World War One, with an analysis of a background-to-war which made war inevitable.) 

7.   In 1997, PMH Bell, studying why historical disagreements about the war have been so violent , noted that a multitude of "contradictoy interpretations" co-exist about the causes of the War; although he did not wholly want to reject the ability of individuals to impact the process, he repeated a number of times that "we must examine the forces which were at work, shaping and constraining the calculatios of statesmen".

***

It has to be said, however, that NONE of these alternative theories have done much to disturb a popular narrative which remains overwhelmingly about Hitler. 

This topic is just crying out for someone to come along and move us on from 'Hitler-as-the-big-bad-wolf'; could you grow up to be that historian?

APPENDIX:  THE DEBATE ON APPEASEMENT

It is a bit of a cheat to include what people felt at the time in an historiography (= ‘what historians have written’), but I think it is relevant to point out what you have seen in your studies that – although Winston Churchill wanted a tougher line against Hitler, and although most British people accepted gloomily that war was inevitable – at the time, Chamberlain’s attempts to prevent war by ‘appeasement’ were welcomed. 

This positivism, of course, evaporated when war broke out.  Even during the war, a group of Labour politicians led by Michael Foot published The Guilty Men (1941), which blamed Chamberlain and the appeasers for allowing – even encouraging – Hitler to move towards war. 

By contrast, as part of his theories about the causes of the War in 1961, AJP Taylor suggested that – given the circumstances, especially Britain’s military weakness and vulnerable, far-flung empire – Chamberlain’s policy of appeasement was just common sense politics, and he hailed Munich as “a triumph for all that was best and enlightened in British life”. 

The opening of the public records to historians in the 1960s, and of Chamberlain's voluminous personal papers in 1975, unleashed a wave of revisionism in favour of Chamberlain's reputation and policies – Chamberlain, it was suggested, was not as naïve, and a lot more pragmatic, than historians had given him credit for.  The historian Donald Cameron Watt in 1963 announced “the rise of a revisionist school".

Opinion, swung back from this view in the 1990s, led by RAC Parker (1993) who suggested that Chamberlain did NOT have no other choice.  DC Watts (1996) changed his opinion of appeasement, calling it "immoral", and Frank McDonough (1998) is among those who have suggested that standing up to Hitler earlier may have prevented war.  Clement Leibovitz (1993) even suggested that Chamberlain and his Cabinet wanted the Nazis to win.  However, more recent publications have been more sympathetic to Chamberlain – Peter Neville (2006) notes that conciliation and trying to understand the other point of view are NORMAL in diplomacy.

It is worth noting that Sidney Aster's 2008 review of the literature found that an historiography which posits a simple "linear projection from orthodoxy, to revisionism, to counter- or post-revisionism’ is not accurate", but that arguments for and against appeasement and Chamberlain have existed side-by-side since before the war.

Changing interpretations of Appeasement is a key topic on the OCR syllabus:

You will find this YouTube treatment by WatHistory very useful.

It is based on this factsheet from Brookdale Groby Learning Campus - essential!

  Essay: How and why have the following resulted in differing interpretations of appeasement: World War II; the Cold War; new sources of evidence c.1990 onwards?

The historian Richard J Evans has published online his lecture notes on Chamberlain and Appeasement: Differing Views of Historians

I fear that Sidney Aster's online article will be too huge for you to address.