HIS 102 – Western
Civilization II
Lecture 9 -- Inter-War
Turmoils
I. . The Russian
Revolution
-
Origins of the Revolution
-
Lack of Russian Reforms
-
since the freeing of the serfs,
the Russian government had swung back toward conservatism
-
throughout the late 19th century,
Russian tsars had supressed any liberalist ideas and movements--often brutally
(such as the crushing of the revolution in 1905)
-
The tsar during WWI was Nicholas
II
-
he was totally dedicated to
the idea of supreme royal power
-
even went so far as to try and
lead the army himself (with disastrous results on the battlefield and at
home)
-
World War I
-
The revolution was to a large
degree the result of World War I
-
During World War I, Russia suffered
the loss of roughly 10% of its population
-
In 1915 alone, the Russians
suffered two million casualties (1916 saw nearly as many)
-
The Russian soldiers were poorly
equipped--in 1915, for example, many soldiers were sent to the front without
any weapons at all and told to take then from the dead they would find
-
Transportation broke down, and
by 1917, the front was receiving only one half of its food needs (home
front did not fare much better)
-
Revolutions of 1917
-
By 1917, the Russian people
were ready for a change
-
The Tsarist government was at
its weakest stage ever
-
Nicholas at the front
-
Tsarina Alexandra was losing
her mind
-
Grigori Rasputin, "the mad monk,"
had become the main advisor at court
-
he was a self-proclaimed holy
man, debauche, and cunning advisor
-
worked his way into court by
promising to heal the hemophilia of one of the young princes
-
murdered by royalists in late
1916
-
The resulting turmoil led to
two separate, but related revolutions in 1917
-
the revolt of the bourgeoisie
(March, 1917)
-
the first was a moderate revolution
of March, when the tzar abdicated
-
Prince Lvov led a new provisional
government but this government was leaderless and could agree on
very little other than liberal reforms
-
This moderate revolution was
headed by the middle class who wanted more reforms like self government,
but who enjoyed a privileged economic position they intended to maintain
-
the reforms were pure liberalism--equal
laws, universal suffrage (even for women), freedom of religion and the
press
-
but this system did not appeal
to anyone outside the bourgeoisie
-
The Socialist Revolutionaries,
May 1917
-
In May, the socialist Alexander
Kerensky became the leader of the provisional government
-
He was more progressive, but
also led a faction-ridden band which could agree on almost nothing
-
Kerensky made two major mistakes
-
he refused to confiscate the
large estates and give the peasants the land, fearing that it would destroy
army discipline as peasants deserted to go home and claim their acreage
-
Moreover, Kerensky tried to
continue the war and honor Russia's commitment to her allies, in spite
of the catastrophes the country was suffering
-
Kerensky correctly guessed that
the entry of the United States into the war in April, 1917 would mean the
ultimate defeat of Germany
-
he argued that Russia, having
suffered so much, should wait out the arrival of the Americans
-
But he did not understand the
depth of the anger of the Russian people who wanted to get on with fixing
their own country rather than fighting for reasons of state
-
The Bolsheviks
-
Kerensky did not have sufficient
power to lead the government with his own people, so he turned to the Bolsheviks
for help
-
The Bolsheviks had the discipline
that Kerensky's followers lacked, but they did not have their own leader,
Vladimir I. Lenin
-
Lenin
-
Lenin had become a revolutionary
communist in 1887, following the execution of his brother as an anarchist
-
He spent many years in exile
in Switzerland
-
While there he adopted Marxism
as his ideals
-
he founded the Bolshevik party
in 1903, and according to his followers, he was "the one indisputable leader"
-
1917
-
The Germans, hearing that Lenin
would pull Russia out of the war, put him in a sealed coach in April, and
returned him to Russia to start a revolution
-
Lenin's clumsy attempts to do
so, however, were futile, and he had to flee to Finland, from which he
returned in October, a wiser man, to conduct what we still call the Russian
Revolution
-
The November Revolution
-
On November 9, Lenin and the
Bolsheviks overthrew the provisional government in Petrograd
-
The revolution was quick and
almost bloodless
-
news quickly spread and many
people across the nation were ecstatic
-
Once the revolution occurred,
the Bolsheviks had to fight to survive
-
They had seized power illegally
through revolution and for several years confronted an effective opposition
-
This made Russian leaders insecure
about their hold on the country, up to the time of Gorbachev
-
The communist party was never
a mass party--its early membership represented no more than one percent
of the Russian population
-
Lenin did honor his promise
to end the war when he signed the treaty of Brest-Litovsk in 1918
-
However, even after this extremely
popular move, in the free elections Lenin held, the communists won only
25% of the vote
-
It was so embarrassing, that
Lenin dispersed the assembly by force
-
Lenin's main difficulties came
from the Social Revolutionaries who had backed the communists before, but
who were actually more popular than the communists and disliked taking
a back seat to them
-
One of the Social Revolutionaries
attempted to assassinate Lenin in August, 1918
-
Civil War
-
the attempt on Lenin's life
started a Civil War, with Red Russians (the Bolsheviks) against White Russians
-
The civil war would last for
over two years
-
Lenin would not be firmly in
control until 1921
-
The imperial family was slaughtered
in July, 1918
-
within 18 months, the Cheka
(Bolshevik secret police) alone had killed two and a half times more opponents
than the old Russian empire had done in 80 years
-
In the middle of this civil
war, the United States, Britain, France and Japan invaded from two sides,
in the west at Archangel and Murmansk and in the east in Siberia
-
The British and French hoped
to overthrow Lenin and get Russia back into the war, thus forcing the Germans
to split their army again and take the pressure off the western front
-
The United States by contrast,
said that we only wanted to get Russia back into the war, and that Lenin
could stay
-
However, since Lenin's claim
to fame was that he had brought Russia out of the war, it seemed obvious
to the Russians that the U.S. meant to overthrow the communists just the
way our allies did, even though President Wilson publicly said he did not
-
This left a heritage of suspicion
between the communists and the Americans which lasted through the
Cold War
-
By 1919, the invaders withdrew,
having suffered through one Russian winter, and by 1920, Lenin's Red Army
had defeated the White Russians--most of whom had fled the country
-
Creating the Marxist State
-
Lenin now set about creating
a Russian state with the rather vague blueprint Marx had left him
-
In 1922, Lenin formed the Union
of Soviet Socialist Republics, the USSR--with Russia, the Ukraine,
Belorussia and Transcaucasia
-
The fact was that much of what
would later become the Soviet Union was held nominally if at all
-
Lenin believed in a two stage
revolution; the first would be a bourgeois revolution like Kerensky's and
the second a proletariat revolution like his
-
He accepted that the overthrow
of the system would be violent, rather than a peaceful evolution
-
He further rejected the idea
of a mass party made up of workers
-
Lenin once remarked that if
200,000 nobles could rule Russia, 200,000 communists should be able to
rule the Soviet Union
-
He therefore moved to eliminate
all opposition parties and made the communist party into a tool for controlling
the state
-
Lenin had no patience with the
peasants whom he saw as hopelessly backward
-
In his eyes, the sickle was
definitely the junior partner to the hammer
-
In this way, he was very unlike
Mao in China, who based his revolution on the peasants and disdained the
factory workers
-
unlike Mao, Lenin was missing
the cadres of trained personnel, toughened in civil war, who could easily
form a government when the fighting was over
-
Indeed, Lenin had not really
thought through what would happen after the revolution, nor about how a
government would be formed
-
Marx had been silent on these
matters, assuming such a process would happen naturally
-
Lenin did, however, firmly believe
that nationalism was on its way out
-
He found it incomprehensible
that after hundreds of years of Russian rule, anyone in the Soviet Union
would still care about their ethnic identity
-
Lenin immediately introduced
orthodox communist views, like maximum income, collectivization, elimination
of private property, etc., and was appalled to discover that all it produced
was widespread famine and industrial dislocation
-
By 1921, Russia was producing
only one-sixth of the manufactured goods she had in 1913, and steel production
was down to 4% of 1914 levels
-
Five million people starved
to death
-
Moreover, other groups took
advantage to pull away from the USSR, such as Estonia, Finland and Poland
-
The New Economic Program (NEP)
-
Lenin opted for what he called
the New Economic Program or NEP in 1921, to halt this slide into chaos
-
The NEP instituted a measure
of capitalism into agricultural production peasants paid the state in kind,
but what they produced over the state's requirements they could keep
-
The effects were dramatic--The
cereal harvest went from 57 million tons in1922 to 73 million in 1928
-
While the output increased,
however, the farms were not innovative
-
They still used strip planting
and wooden plows, and one half of the harvest of 1928 was brought in using
hand scythes
-
To deal with this backwardness,
Stalin would later introduce collectivization of agriculture
-
under the NEP, the most important
parts of the economy still remained under state control, like banking,
heavy industry and public utilities
-
But the first to give up on
orthodox communism as a loser was none other than Lenin himself
-
Struggle for leadership control
-
Lenin suffered a stroke in 1922
which incapacitated him, and he finally died in January, 1924
-
He had not provided for a successor
-
The two main contenders were
Joseph Stalin and Leon Trotsky
-
Trotsky appeared to be the heir
apparent--he had masterminded the 1917 revolution
-
Trotsky emphasized world revolution
and belonged to the intelligentsia
-
Stalin emphasized "socialism
in one nation," building up the Soviet Union, and was a shrewd manipulator
of men and a master administrator who knew how to use the Communist party
machinery to gain power
-
By 1927, Trotsky was out of
the party now controlled by Stalin and sent to Siberia
-
he escaped, only to be assassinated
by Stalin's agents in Mexico City in 1940
-
What happened to Trotsky encouraged
caution on the part of Soviet leaders: if you guess wrong, you can
die
-
Many backed Stalin against Trotsky,
however, and even colluded in the latter's death, because they were entranced
by Stalin's vision of making Russia a first class industrial power
-
Stalinism
-
Stalin differed from Lenin in
many respects
-
He had spent almost no time
abroad, unlike Lenin, and perhaps because of that he abandoned the emphasis
on world revolution that had concerned Lenin in favor of building up the
power of the Soviet Union
-
Purges
-
He ruthlessly consolidated his
personal power in a series of purges, between 1935-38, when he killed around
6 million people
-
Of the Central Committee of
1934, 70% were shot, and of those attending the party Congress in 1934,
only 3% were left alive in 1939
-
Most of Stalin's victims were
Old Bolsheviks who knew how far he had strayed from Lenin's vision of an
egalitarian communist society
-
The new people who replaced
them had little knowledge of old Russia or the ideals of the original Bolsheviks,
leading one historian to note that the history of Russia was written by
its killers
-
The purges also resulted in
a series of spectacular show trials, where denounced communists became
the scapegoats when Stalin's economic policies went sour
-
In these purges, Stalin also
decimated the officer corps on the eve of World War II; three-fifths of
the marshals and three-fourths of the full generals were killed (35,000
officers total)
-
On the other hand, these purges
and killings made way for many others to advance
-
They benefited from the programs
and supported Stalin as a result
-
Five Year Plans
-
Stalin's economic program was
made up of a series of Five Year Plans starting in 1928, which sought to
industrialize Russia quickly
-
Stalin would create the industrial
base Marx had said had to be there for the communist revolution to succeed,
but Marx had argued it had to be there before the revolution and Stalin
was creating it after
-
Many of the workers dragged
into industry were unskilled or poorly trained, so while the industrial
output increased, sometimes the products were of only mediocre quality
-
When Stalin failed to reach
his targets, he executed the ones he claimed were responsible or covered
up the failures
-
This could be done because of
his iron grip on the news media
-
As a result, many in the west
had no idea what was going on inside the USSR
-
Many foreigners thus hailed
Russian advances, unaware of the mass starvation that dogged the country
-
For indeed, the Russian people
suffered enormously as Russian food and raw materials were sent overseas
to purchase the heavy equipment for industrialization
-
In 1932, for example, wages
could buy only one-half of what they could in 1928
-
Most countries had financed
their industrialization by borrowing money from abroad, butthis avenue
was closed to Stalin because the Soviet Union had reneged on her World
War I debts and no bank would lend her any more until the previous loans
were paid up
-
Collective Agriculture
-
The most deadly of Stalin's
programs was the collectivization of Soviet agriculture
-
It was done so that the state
and not individual people would control the food supply and hence the loyalty
of the people
-
It was also done to introduce
new methods into backward Russian agriculture
-
Most historians argue that Russia
could have raised production by relatively simple means, such as the use
of the steel plow or better use of seed, but these avenues were never even
tried
-
Collectivization caused great
famine and many died
-
Stalin himself told Churchill
during World War II that 10 million died when he collectivized agriculture,
but the figure may be closer to 14 to 15 million, and this on top of the
deaths from the purges
-
In 1932-1933, 3-4 million died
in the Ukraine alone while the grain silos were full and the country was
exporting grain
-
Collectivization was introduced
in 1928 as the NEP was repealed, and by 1930, food production in Russia
was similar to what it had been in the 14th century
-
Stalin had hoped to use agricultural
products to pay for industrialization, but in fact Soviet agriculture became
a black hole that sucked up money and failed to feed the population adequately
ever again
-
Stalin succeeded in bringing
the Soviet economy into the 20th century
-
the industrial base by 1938
was hailed as a miracle of production
-
but what was the cost in human
suffering?
II. Post World War I Economic
Collapse
-
Unlike the same period in the
United States, for Europe the 1920s did not roar
-
It was instead a time of insecurity,
a short-lived upswing and finally a collapse
-
The twenties did not provide
for the steady growth of the prewar decade, and much of what prosperity
there was was the result of an unproductive transfer of paper money from
the United States to Germany and then to our former allies
-
Europe never regained her lost
world trade
-
In the twenties, increasing
numbers of people worked in the service industries, like sales and distribution,
which were particularly prone to cutbacks
-
And Italy and Britain never
shared the even the short-lived boom in any case
-
Most of these difficulties were
caused to some degree by the war
-
It had cost $350 million that
would have to be paid somehow
-
Europeans had decided to make
Germany pay for the war through her reparations, but this proved impossible
when the German currency collapsed
-
European trade had been in decline
during the war because of the blockades and submarine attacks
-
This overseas market was lost
to the Americans and Japanese
-
European internal trade had
been disrupted too, and after the war, the break up of the Austrian-Hungarian
empire produced a host of little countries, all of which imposed different
taxes, tariffs and tolls, thus strangling internal European trade
-
The circulation of unbacked
currency created inflation that wiped out middle class savings
-
The huge number of deaths the
war caused robbed Europe both of producers and consumers
-
Moreover, workers did not want
to give up the economic gains made during the war when labor was scarce
-
Reparations and inflation in
Germany
-
France had all along intended
to use German reparations to finance their own recovery
-
However, in 1921, when Germany
tried to make a good faith payment on the $33 billion reparations she owed,
she shattered her currency
-
The German mark which had traded
at 4 to the dollar in 1914, now traded at 64 to the dollar
-
By November, 1923, it took 800
million marks to make one dollar
-
The middle class saw the value
of their savings wiped out through inflation, and this, plus the defeat
and trauma of the war, helped produce Nazism
-
Since the Weimar republic refused
to pay any more, France invaded Germany's industrial Ruhr valley to get
the money out by force in January, 1923
-
The United States and Britain
did nothing to stop her, although they did protest weakly
-
France felt betrayed by her
erstwhile allies, because the Americans had failed to ratify the Treaty
of Versailles and Britain had refused a defensive treaty with France
-
France had thus determined to
take care of herself, come what may
-
This invasion was clearly not
provided for in the Treaty of Versailles, and German workers struck in
passive resistance
-
To support the workers on strike,
the German government began printing paper money, but this led to runaway
inflation
-
Sometimes workers were paid
twice a day so they could run to the stores to buy things before the prices
went up
-
This raging inflation is what
would convince other countries, especially the United States, not to unbalance
their budgets when the Great Depression hit in the thirties
-
France got little economic benefit
from her invasion, but the public was shocked at her strong-arm tactics
in violation of the treaty
-
The Germans came to believe
they were an outlaw nation for whom the laws of a civilized world did not
apply
-
Ironically, the British had
all along disagreed with the disastrous German reparations payments mandated
by the treaty, but the government had been unable to do much because of
public pressure for revenge
-
The United States finally led
the way in reducing the reparations payments in the 1924 Dawes Plan, but
the amount remained outlandish and the Germans began nursing a grudge
-
The world economy after World
War I was decidedly unhealthy
-
European nations especially
attempted to achieve economic self-sufficiency, whereby they would grow
or manufacture everything they needed at home, even if it was more expensive,
so as never to be dependent on foreign trade which submarines and blockades
could disrupt
-
International trade was further
hurt by high tariffs, especially those of the United States, which prevented
European nations from trading with us and so earning the money to pay back
the loans they had received during the war
-
American banks began lending
Germany money privately to pay the reparations, money that Germany then
paid to France and Britain, which they then used to buy goods in the United
States
-
Everything went along very well
until the stock market crash of 1929, after which American banks refused
to lend any more and the house of sand was swept away
-
Throughout the 1920s farmers
were in a period of depression
-
They were producing too much
grain because of better farming methods, thus creating a glut on the world
market that drove prices down
-
The situation was especially
bad in Germany where small farmers were later among the most consistent
supporters of the Nazis
-
The 1929 stock market crash
in the United States caused a massive credit contraction worldwide, as
investors lost 40% of their portfolios in one month
-
This was especially dangerous
for American banks, many of which had invested in the market and so lost
their collective shirts when the market collapsed
-
The resulting panic eventually
became a depression throughout the world, creating massive strains on the
European and American social and political fabric
-
Franklin Roosevelt solved America's
problems within a democratic framework through the New Deal, but the rest
of the world, and especially Europe, would not be so lucky
III. Totalitarian Governments
(part 2) --The Rise of Mussolini and Hitler
-
Mussolinin and Italian Fascism
-
The second dictator was Mussolini
-
Fascism, unlike Lenin's communism,
worked within the existing structure like the state bureaucracy, businesses
and the army, and it almost always came to power legally
-
One reason for this was the
host of problems plaguing post-World War I Italy
-
Italy felt cheated because she
had not gotten what she had been promised in secret treaties written during
the war but which Wilson ignored at Versailles
-
Thus, land Italy was to get
from Austria never materialized
-
She came to feel that her war
sacrifices had been in vain
-
The war also caused economic
chaos, plunging the lira to one-third of its pre-war value
-
In the teeth of these problems,
Italian governments came and went, seemingly unable to stop the downward
slide
-
Moreover, Mussolini's fascists
perpetrated violence in the civil sector; the black shirts beat up people
they accused of being socialists, terrorizing the population
-
The Socialists were in fact
the largest party in 1919 Italy, but Mussolini was supported by the industrialists
and large landowners who feared the socialists would confiscate their property,
especially after the Russian revolution of 1917
-
The raging factionalism among
the socialists was shrewdly exploited by Mussolini
-
Mussolini gains power
-
Il Duce came to power after
the October, 1922, March on Rome, when the king, Victor Emanuel III, invited
Mussolini to form a government
-
Interestingly, the mere threat
of violence was enough to persuade the king to capitulate
-
In the 1924 elections,
the fascists won a massive victory, partly due to violence and fraud, but
also because many were willing to give it a chance
-
Mussolini was underestimated
because there were so many contradictions in his philosophy; most Italians
were convinced he wouldn't last very long
-
Like Hitler, Mussolini was an
ultra opportunist, but he came to power legally, as did Hitler, to be sure
after months of terrorism
-
Mussolini was also successful
because his opponents were weak, he was effective in his use of office,
and he held great power over the masses
-
Mussolini immediately made peace
with the Catholic church in the 1929 Lateran treaty
-
Catholicism became the state
religion of Italy and the Vatican City was made independent
-
This treaty ended decades of
squabbling between the Italian state and the papacy, and allowed devout
Italians to support Il Duce without any religious qualms
-
It's hard to explain exactly
what fascism meant, even today
-
Clearly it wanted to stop Bolshevism
and make the world safe for the middle class and small businessmen
-
Mussolini however glorified
war and was seduced by recreating the grandeur of the Roman empire
-
The state became the symbol
of greatness, as Roman ruins were refitted and new imposing architecture
built
-
There was nothing above the
state, outside the state, or against the state, according to Il Duce
-
Like Hitler, Mussolini believed
the natural place of women was as mothers, so he made abortion criminal,
closed most jobs
to women and encouraged large families for his imperialist
dreams
-
There were some positive achievements
during Mussolini's stay in power; slums were cleared, clinics established,
and the Mafia was suppressed, but all this came at the price of plunging
the wages of Italian workers to the lowest in Europe
-
Hitler and Nazi Germany
-
The last dictator to rise during
the 1930s was Hitler
-
He benefited from the problems
of the Weimar republic, established at the end of World War I
-
The Weimar Republic
-
The republic embraced most of
the liberal ideas of the 19th century, like a bill of rights and universal
suffrage, but it was associated with defeat and did not enjoy the confidence
of many
-
Most Germans favored some sort
of constitutional monarchy, especially school teachers, civil servants
and judiciary figures
-
Officers in the smaller army
were also suspicious of the Republic
-
Worse, a proportional system
of representation encouraged factionalism
-
Governments could only rule
through coalitions which were inherently unstable
-
Moreover, Article 48 of the
Weimar Constitution allowed the president to enact decrees without the
consent of parliament if disorders arose; Hitler would later use this provision
to carry out his personal dictatorship of Germany without ever abolishing
the Weimar Republic
-
At first, Germany suffered a
series of economic difficulties, but between 1925 and 1929, she enjoyed
a great deal of prosperity, becoming the second largest industrial power
in the world
-
But this prosperity was based
on the flimsy foundation of money lent from American banks, money which
dried up following the stock market crash
-
Germany had had no real experience
in democratic government, for while the kaiser had a parliament, he never
listened to it.
-
Moreover, the army claimed German
defeat in the war was due to pacifists and decadent democrats, many of
whom they argued were Jews
-
The French invasion of the Ruhr
had upset German nationalism and made her feel like an outlaw nation
-
Rise of Hitler and the Nazis
-
Hitler had tried rebellion in
1923, but his attempt was poorly led and he failed
-
He went to prison where he wrote
Mein Kampf
-
When he emerged, Hitler formed
the Nationalist Socialist German Workers Party, or Nazis for sort
-
The party called for the repudiation
of the Versailles treaty, unification with Austria, exclusion of Jews from
German citizenship, and state administration of giant cartels
-
Hitler always showed special
concern for small enterprise, which was squeezed between big business and
the proletariat
-
He also had enormous appeal
to the young
-
In 1931, 40% of the Nazi party
was under 30 years of age
-
Hitler's major support came
from the lower middle class, the farmers and the young; big business did
not finance the Nazis to any great degree
-
Economic difficulties after
1929 created fear in Germany which Hitler exploited
-
Unemployment stood at 6 million,
more than the rest of Europe combined
-
43% of the German labor force
was unemployed
-
The Nazis increased in size
in the Reichstag until by 1932, there were 230 of them, the largest single
party
-
Hitler in Power
-
After a series of complex maneuverings,
Hitler became Chancellor in January, 1933
-
Note he came to power legally
when he was asked to form a government
-
This is important, because it
meant that those who wanted to support him anyway, the civil servants,
courts , armed services and government agencies, could do so in good conscience
because he was the state they had sworn to uphold
-
Hitler used the Reichstag fire
in February to get an Enabling Act in March, 1933, which would allow him
to rule by decree for four years
-
He had blamed the fire in the
government building on the communists, convincing people the threat of
revolution was quite real, but in fact we now know the Nazis had set it
themselves so as to be able to blame the communists
-
Hitler never formally abolished
the Weimar constitution
-
He never had to; he simply ruled
through it
-
Hitler now moved quickly to
consolidate his power
-
In the Night of the Long Knives,
in June, 1934, he murdered his opponents in the Nazi party, including Karl
Roehm, the head of the SA, who wanted his men put into the army with officer
rank
-
Himmler was made the head of
the SS
-
Hitler and the German economy
-
Hitler also moved to solve Germany's
economic problems
-
He put people to work in armament
factories and the army, and launched a public works program similar to
the PWA of Roosevelt's New Deal
-
Unemployment went from 6 million
in 1933 to only one million in 1936
-
Indeed, by the end of that year,
there was actually a shortage of German workers
-
Hitler's success in ending the
depression, a feat no other European leader could rival, made him extremely
popular, and many who might otherwise have shied way from his racist rhetoric
nonetheless supported him out of loyalty
-
Hitler's economic success, however,
was not without a price
-
The 1938 budget was seven times
higher than it had been before the Nazis came to power
-
74% of this budget was going
to the military
-
Hitler and ethnic cleansing
-
Hitler's antisemitism was a
product of 19th century racial theories, rather than a result of Christian
antagonism to the Jews
-
In 1935, the Nuremburg laws
robbed Jews of German citizenship and closed the professions to them
-
Kristallnacht (Crystal
Night) in November, 1938, saw the windows of Jewish stores smashed and
the forced labelling of Jews
-
The deportation of Jews began
only in 1941, when the six killing camps were started, all of them in Poland
-
Before that, many Jews had emigrated
-
some 37,000 in 1933 alone
-
By 1938, 1.3 million German
Jews had emigrated, most to neighboring countries, meaning that by the
start of the war, there were only 200,000 Jews left in Germany
-
Jews were not the only targets
of Hitler and the Nazis--they also targeted
-
Gypsies (Romneys)
-
Jehovah's Witnesses
-
People of color and mixed race
-
Slavs
-
Gays and Lesbians
IV. Toward World War II
-
Aggressive moves
-
In March, 1935, Hitler renounced
the disarmament provisions of the Treaty of Versailles, reinstated conscription
and began building up the German air force
-
In October, Italy attacked Ethiopia
-
The League proved ineffectual
in this conflict
-
The British Mediterranean fleet
could have stopped the operation by preventing Italian soldiers from using
the Suez canal, but both Britain and France were afraid to alienate Mussolini
-
both countries still believed
their primary duty was to end the depression at home
-
In March, 1936, while the Ethiopian
campaign was still underway, Germany took advantage of the confusion to
march into the Rhineland by force, eliminating the demilitarized zone provided
for in the Treaty of Versailles
-
This removed one of the most
important elements of French security and also gave Hitler a defensible
frontier on the West, giving him a free hand to concentrate on Eastern
Europe
-
The Axis Powers
-
Italy and Germany, now both
outcasts, moved to support one another in the Rome/Berlin Axis
-
Japan associated herself with
this Axis in 1937
-
Spanish Civil War
-
The Axis showed its strength
in the Spanish Civil War that began in July, 1936, following elections
in February which had brought a left wing Popular Front government to power
in Spain
-
When this communist dominated
government went forward with land reform, it alienated the Catholic Church
and large landowners who found Franco to lead a move to overthrow it
-
The Spanish Civil War was a
precursor to World War II, in that it caused widespread destruction of
civilian life
-
The Battle of Guernica in 1937,
was an example
-
The town was firebombed and
then machine-gunned, killing or wounding 2700
-
The only country to consistently
support the Republic was the Soviet Union, but not nearly as much as Hitler
and Mussolini
-
together they supported Franco
with troops, war matériel, and funds
-
In 1938, Stalin cut his losses
and withdrew his support, giving Franco the victory in 1939
-
Meanwhile, Hitler began carrying
out his plans to create the greater Germany he envisaged
-
He had long maintained that
his virile Aryan nation needed growing room or lebensraum, which would
be taken from the slavs fit only for servitude
-
This new Germany would be purified
of Jews and other "undesirables"
-
In March, 1938, Hitler annexed
Austria by force
-
Called the Anschluss, this operation
carried out one of the planks of the Nazi platform
-
Hitler next turned on Czechoslovakia,
which contained three and a quarter million Germans in its Sudetenland
area to the north and west
-
These Germans resented their
minority status and had voted to return to Germany
-
When the Czech government refused
to dismember itself, Hitler moved his army to the border
-
At the Munich conference in
September, 1938, Hitler demanded the annexation of the Sudetenland, and
Britain and France agreed
-
Once again, a key to Czech security
was gone, but Hitler pledged this was all he wanted, and the other powers
accepted his assurances
-
Some people believe Hitler could
have been stopped at this juncture; many German officers disagreed with
Hitler and might, it is argued, have overthrown him if the democracies
had had the stomach for a fight
-
Certainly a war begun now would
not have been fought with the neutrality of the Soviet Union or with the
resources of Eastern Europe which came to Germany through appeasement
-
In any case, in March, 1939,
Hitler violated the promises made at Munich six months before, and
absorbed the rest of Czechoslovakia by force
-
Realizing the danger, Britain
and France responded with a peacetime draft