Wwii

the treaty obligations of Versailles, in addition to taking away German territory and placing limitations on the German military also give a massive reparations bill to Germany now it is easy to discount the effect these reparations on Germany it is true that in the mid-nineteen twenties the German economy had recovered and was improving but this is only because the annual reparations bill was small--1.5 billion Reichsmarks and the US was lending Germany sixty percent of all money that Germany was paying England and France for reparations. For much of the nineteen twenties Germany was shielded from the harshest financial effects of that treaty when germany was no longer shielded its economy collapsed in 1929 a new arrangement was made not only did that bill jump from 1.5 billion Reichsmarks to 2.5 billion a year but the US stop lending Germany all that money in the early 1930s all the world economy collapsing as if that weren't enough Britain which was the biggest purchaser of German manufactured goods not only dramatically increased its tariffs but then devalued the British pound which had the effect that making imports an additional 20 percent more expensive consequently Germany's unemployment tripled from the low two million mark in the mid-nineteen twenties to 3 million in 1929 to five million in 1932, to 6 million in the summer of 1933. You can see the dramatic increase in the vote that the Nazi Party got as Germany's economy imploded. Some have said that the Nazis simply expressed how Germans have always treated others and how the German Nation had always thought the bottom line is that as late as 1928 only two and a half percent of Germans felt that the Nazis represent them but as the German economy plummeted Hitler's radical program of action appealed to more and more voters in 1930 the nazis got eighteen percent of the vote in a national election in 1932, they got 37 and a half percent the largest amount have any single party in that election by January 1933 Adolf Hitler was chancellor of Germany. Hitler was rather clear in what his foreign policy objectives were throughout the 1920s and 1930s. Additionally his words were consistent with his actions. The line of thinking was the same in his notorious book Mein Kampf written in the mid 1920s in a speech he gave in early 1933 to german generals after coming to power there in Germany and in 1937 in the Hossbach memorandum which he said should be considered his last will and testament his position was that Germany had a natural resources problem its population was very urbanized and couldn't feed itself. It exported manufactured goods and imported food. During wartime this left Germany at the mercy of any country with a strong navy such as Britain that could blockade Germany. this is of course what happened in world war I Hitler said the only way out of this was to expand its territory to encompass more farmland--the famous Lebensraum concept The regions to Germany's west were very urbanized and highly populated--in other words controlling those places wouldn't solve Germany's food problem the region's to Germany's east were flat farmlands much more thinly populated and so the only object for Germany as Hitler saw it, was expansion eastward it was likely that France would object so France would have to be taken care of before any great expansion eastwards. This explains why he did what he did why he invaded france first why he went to war against the USSR when he had control pretty much all of Europe between Britain and the USSR in fact the SS in the early months after the German invasion of the USSR was transferring German families eastward and continued to do this until the German government realize that it had a labor shortage inside Germany itself It was importing Polish captives to work in German factories at this time and so it stopped this emigration of Germans to the east as far as his treatment of Slavic and Jewish people of Europe, as soon as the Germans moved into Russia they started gathering Jews and communists and simply shooting them Later, in 1943, Himmler spoke to his SS and told them that the now had to change the strategy because they needed these people for labor in camps that this massacre was "Not to be regretted but is now deplorable by reason of the loss of labor." Before war broke out in January 1939 Hitler said in a speech to the German congress the Reichstag that if Jewish bankers were to start a world war the result would be "the annihilation of the Jewish race throughout Europe." Specific intentions to exterminate European Jews respond out as early as January 1942 when to stop a leader white-haired Heidrick told a group SAS that 11 million Jews in Europe would be sent East to Poland and Russia and there, worked to death those that didn't die, would be executed Heydrich himself use the term "final solution" as early as September 39 immediately after the invasion of Poland the Nazis might not have been planning this all along but once they had the ability to do this they got to work rather quickly in their diabolical task One of the major steps that Hitler took to strengthen Germany and a step at which he probably could have been stopped at little cost was when he re-militarized the Rhineland if you recall from the treaty of Versailles ending World War one the Rhineland was the region around the Rhine River in Germany where much of Germany's industry and coal was. Versailles mandated that this region be a demilitarized zone-- a DMZ--so that if Germany ever started behaving badly all that the French had to do was send in troops and and there would go Germany's ability to wage a war in the modern era. when Hitler in 1936 sent in four thousand German troops in this region he and the German General Staff were very worried about French response. Eye witnesses in the German war room said that Hitler was so nervous he was shaking uncontrollably and had to be seated down in the corner of the room German generals were worried that their small force would get fired on by the French Hitler told the generals that if the French fired on them he would give the order to retreat. what were the Germans worried about? Seventy thousand French soldiers on the other side of the border that in the words of one German General "could have blown us to pieces." There was little question that the French force was stronger but the French military commander Gamelin, expecting an all-out war with Germany and not a mere border dispute, said that he would only order an action against Germany, if the French civilian government would mobilize their entire army. Not wanting to order this extreme measure, the French government sent a delegation to England to get their support the British told them they would not support the French if war broke out over what many in England saw as Hitler "taking a walk in his own backyard." and so the French blinked and let the Germans in another major event in the build-up to world war two that doesn't receive nearly as much airtime as it should, is the Molotov- Ribbentrop pact of 1939 in the summer of 1939, Ribbentrop, the German Foreign Minister, went to Russia and negotiated a military and economic treaty between the two countries not only would they agree to partition Poland (Germany got the western half and the USSR got the east) but they also signed a commercial agreement and out of these arrangements in the first half of the war Germany was supplied with huge amounts of grain and oil from the Soviet regions and so with Stalin's approval to move into Poland, Hitler did just that on September 1st 1939 the British and French insisted that Germany entirely withdraw from Poland Hitler refused, and World War II was on. let's look at the German strategy in France when they finally invaded in the spring of 1940. Arrow 1 indicates the path that the German military took in World War One. Arrow 2 represents the Allied --mainly French and English--forced waiting for the Germans in the spring of 1940 they were prepared to push forward into Belgium to meet the German advance yet again there were reasons for expecting a German pushed through that region apart from the fact that this was where the Germans invaded in World War I the land in this area was flat prime area for quickly moving vehicles and marching soldiers the area farther south the Ardennes forest was a hilly region that would be a much slower route for an invading army to take and when Germany wanted to invade in the spring of 1940, they sent a small force to mimic the path of their invasion in World War 1 and the Allies took the bait. Off they went. This allowed the main German army seen in arrow 3, to move in without much resistance As arrow 3 indicates they made it to the coast and then started rolling up the coastal towns the Allied forces were almost entirely trapped and it looked like this German force was gonna surround the last remnants of the Allied Force there was one last port along the coast, Dunkirk. It was there that 370,000 Allied (mainly English) forces were evacuated as Churchill was quick to point out, wars are not won by evacuations But a few hundred thousand Allied soldiers lived to fight another day. Still the outlook was not good within only six weeks after the fighting in the West started the Germans had captured a million and a half French soldiers and the French had been forced to sign an armistice Hitler for reasons explained earlier in the summer of 1941 invaded the USSR what is known as Operation Barbarossa. there was not any real military necessity to do so he had lost the battle of Britain, an air war in which the British Air Force kept the Germans from being able to launch an invasion of Briton. But the rest of Europe between the USSR and Britain was either conquered or allied to him. the reason for invading Russia that he given to Mussolini was that Germany, if it could conquer the USSR, would have to station fewer forces in the east as an occupation force in Russia then they were currently stationing along their border with the USSR, to prevent a Russian assault on German territory. the initial weeks of the invasion of Russia saw one German victory after another. The wide plains of eastern Europe allowed for much movement of the German Panzer tank divisions and you can see the encircling movements that allowed them to kill or capture three million Russian soldiers the reason why the Germans were able to push into France and later the Soviet Union so quickly was the strategy of blitzkrieg: their use of tanks combined with intense aircraft support. You could think of blitzkrieg as an early form of shock and awe combined with pincer movements the German tanks,, Panzers, were at this point in the war very light tanks. The Panzer II, seen here, the model used in the invasions in Poland and France had armed plating that was anywhere from two to three times less thick then the heavy French tank, the Char B1; its guns fired smaller shells three times smaller than the shells fired by that Char B1. in fact 1/4 the Panzers sent into action in Poland were destroyed but the Panzer was very fast. The Germans would mass these light fast tanks together to form the Blitzkrieg attack lightning fast penetration behind enemy lines motorized infantry would follow with marching footsoldiers behind them key points would be quickly overrun by the tanks followed by support from German infantry and the armored units would be supported by air force strikes for instance in the first week of Operation Barbarossa the German invasion the USSR the German air force destroyed nearly four thousand Soviet aircraft after these lightning fast strikes deep inside enemy territory, if possible the German forces would form a pincer movement and surround the enemy trapped inside these techniques in the early months of the invasion of Russia let them kill or capture three million Russians soldiers this was the strength of the German military the reason why it fought so effectively in the first years of the war. The Germans were outnumbered and knew it but their army was a lean mean fighting machine that was highly mobile its small numbers were designed not for a prolonged campaign against larger forces which would wear down the Germans in a long war of attrition that was a type of war that the Germans were not too confident of winning. So what happened to the German record of success, solid through late 1941? the major problem was that the Germans greatly underestimated the ability of the Soviets to withstand the German assault as one of Hitler's generals reported less than two full months after the invasion of Russia "at the beginning we reckon with some 200 enemy divisions and we have already identified 360." Hitler expressed surprise that the Russians have been able to produce so many tanks, tens of thousands more then he thought the Russians had another major obstacle to continue German success was that the US entered the picture after Pearl Harbor, we declared war on Japan Germany responded by declaring war on us which gave us explicit permission to fire on German forces the US battle in the pacific was a series of strategic retreats until the Battle of Midway when the US sunk four Japanese aircraft carriers attaining parity with Japan in that crucial area the US was able to put a lot more ships and planes into action than Japan could and slowly pushed them back. We also sent forces to fight the Germans in North Africa and Italy eventually on D-Day (June 6, 1944) we landed a hundred sixty thousand soldiers almost half american on the Normandy Peninsula and by September almost all of France was clear the Germans By early nineteen forty-five with US and Soviet forces pushing into Germany from each side Germany surrendered unconditionally Japan took a few more months and of course two atom bomb explosions. Secretary of Defense Henry Stimson published an article explaining America's decision if you are interested in a summary you can see it here