Germany in WW2

9 Key excerpts on "Germany in WW2"

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  War, Peace and International Relations

  An introduction to strategic history

  • Colin S. Gray(Author)
  • 2013(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  11  World War II in Europe, II

  Understanding the war

  Reader's guide: Hitler's purpose and role in the war. How the war was waged. Reasons for Germany's defeat. The war and themes in strategic history.

  Introduction: what was the war about?

  When delving into the rich contextuality and contingency of events, there is a risk that somewhere amid the detail and the complexities the essential historical plot is obscured or even lost. The origins, causes, enabling conditions and triggering occurrences that generated World War II attract a host of expert scholars, and rightly so. But, ultimately, the necessary and sufficient explanation for the outbreak and general course of the war could hardly be more straightforward. After 30 January 1933, Germany was led – one can hardly say governed, since Adolf Hitler did very little personal governing – by a man who needed to wage war in order to realize his vision of a racially pure Greater Germany occupying territory that was suitably expansive for a burgeoning populace of Aryan settlers. That land was in the East, held by Slavs, so it would have to be seized by force. In order to take this land and construct a strategically secure (blockade-proof) Germanic continental fortress, Hitler needed to abolish the European balance of power and replace it with German imperial hegemony. Exactly how and when this visionary purpose could be achieved were as uncertain in detail as its pursuit was to be unswervingly steady. Hitler intended to achieve world domination via the successful conduct of a series of wars, and he expected that process to be completed by 1950. Alone among the great powers of the 1930s, Germany had a leader who knew what he wanted and what he would, and would not, accept. He could be flexible, rationally prudent at times, and even temporarily deterred when opportunities faded. However, he could not be deflected from pursuit of his vision of a Europe dominated – or, more accurately, owned – by a new Nazi German Reich.

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  Remaking the Modern World 1900 - 2015

  Global Connections and Comparisons

  • C. A. Bayly(Author)
  • 2018(Publication Date)
  • Wiley-Blackwell

    (Publisher)

  In a way, this debate replayed some of the issues raised much earlier in the 1960s, when the Oxford historian A. J. P. Taylor had engaged in the more hazardous enterprise of partially exonerating Hitler and Nazi Germany from starting the Second World War. 2 Here the polycentric version has had less purchase. While Germany undoubtedly continued to feel surrounded and hemmed in on both fronts, Hitler's ambition of creating a new empire in Eastern Europe cannot be ignored. 3 In general then, the more recent debate about the Second World War has focussed on other issues than its origin, particularly the degree to which Roosevelt really wanted the United States to enter the war, Richard Overy's contention that the British began the bombing of civilian targets as early as 1940, 4 the military conduct of the war 5 or a discussion of how far the later mass destruction of German cities was a credible military tactic rather than a simple act of revenge. This chapter accepts the contention that the German and Japanese governments were largely responsible for the coming of war, whatever the underlying fears and ambitions which provoked them. It seeks, however, once again to reconceptualise the war temporally, geographically and in terms of its effects on social and ideological forms across the world. In the case of time and geography, one cannot dissent from the view that the climax of the struggle was the epochal conflict between 1942 and 1945 on the Eastern Front between Germany, the USSR and their proxies. This was certainly one of the three most destructive and bloody encounters in history, killing perhaps 25 million soldiers and civilians. It dwarfed even the mortality of the Taiping Rebellion in nineteenth-century China, while exceeding fatalities in the First World War itself

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  First Strike

  Preemptive War in Modern History

  • Matthew J. Flynn(Author)
  • 2008(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  With the attack on Poland, Nazi Germany started World War II in September 1939. When it ended six years later, 57 million people had died. The conflict had reached every continent save Antarctica and laid waste tonumerous nations. This reach came gradually. In the first few years of the war, German armed forces appeared unbeatable. Poland collapsed in four weeks. France fell in six. While Britain held firm in late 1940, Russia bore the brunt of the German juggernaut in 1941. By the end of that year, Japan made the conflict global with its attack on the US fleet at Pearl Harbor, Hawaii. Siding with Germany, these two Axis powers, in conjunction with Italy, challenged the world order at a minimum. At a maximum, they appeared on their way to global conquest. The Allied powers of Russia, Britain, and the United States dealt the first serious setbacks to Axis ambitions in 1942. Soviet forces destroyed an entire German army in southern Russia at Stalingrad, while the British defeated a combined German and Italian army in Egypt at El Alamein. In the Pacific in the same year, the Americans turned back Japan, first at the naval battle for Midway Island, then at the vicious, sixth-month land and sea battle for Guadalcanal in the Solomon Islands in the South Pacific. 1943 was a year of Allied resolve. Blunting Axis advances would not be satisfactory; only the complete defeat of the Axis powers, or vanquishment at their hands, would end this conflict. After 1943, it was clear that an Allied triumph would mark the end of this war. American and British armies forced Italy out of the war in 1943. Russian forces withstood another German attack that year at Kursk, before going on the offensive themselves. In 1944, Russian advances in the east accelerated, supported by an Allied invasion of France at Normandy. A final push by Allied armies from both east and west ended all German resistance in April 1945. Four months later, Japan surrendered as well under constant American attacks, the last featuring the use of the atomic bomb. The carnage, loss, and suffering reminded all combatants that the war had been total not just in its scope, but in its purpose. Opposing sides engaged one another with the only goal being the complete defeat of the enemy. When it ended, one side had met this goal, the Allied powers. The world order indeed had been defended, even if irrevocably lost in the process.

  Most observers usually blame Nazi Germany for the destruction arising from this catastrophe and this is where it belongs. World War II may have started at different times in different parts of the world, but the catalyst for this violence was Germany, the pivotal year, 1939. The account of the origins of the war offered here is no different in this respect. Certainly Hitler’s depraved sense of mission propelled Germany into a war that soon engulfed the world. Yet this view of Hitler at the head of an aggressor state in pursuit of some greater Germany takes on a decidedly different view when examined through the lens of preemption. Hitler convinced the German people that they faced an imminent threat to their security and, given this threat, Germany needed to defend itself. This defense would bea defense of civilization. In short, preemption reverses Germany’s role as aggressor to that of assuming a defensive posture, carrying with it the moral weight of that stand. However, the war Germany unleashed was immoral, of course, in the purpose of that war, no matter the label of preemption.

  The Case for Preemption

  There is no question that Germany’s post-World War I situation helped Hitler galvanize Germany into military action in the years after his elevation to power in 1933. The Treaty of Versailles that ended World War I attacked German identity in every way possible. Politically, the new German government, the Weimar Republic, offended German sensibilities of order and authority. Economically, capitalism contributed to this political disorder by failing to provide sustenance for the nation. This loss of German self-sufficiency teamed with restrictions on the size of the military meant a weakened Germany. As Germans reckoned with the diminished status of the fatherland, their society faced psychological trauma in that their leaders had accepted the sole blame for starting World War I. Hitler certainly found a society in crisis when he came to dominate affairs in Germany. He then elevated this crisis to hitherto unimagined levels.

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  Cornell Studies in Security Affairs

  Explanations for Limited and Unlimited Conflicts

  • Alex Weisiger(Author)
  • 2013(Publication Date)
  • Cornell University Press

    (Publisher)

  [4] World War II G ERMAN E XPANSION AND A LLIED R ESPONSE In contrast to the Paraguayan War and to many other bloody wars from history, which historians have often described as unnecessary and tragic, World War II seems less puzzling: Adolf Hitler did it. While ancillary questions remain, such as why the German people were willing to rally to Hitler’s standard, the man himself has been seen as history’s ultimate outlier, and World War II as simply the extension of his unique personality. It is likely for this reason, for example, that international relations scholars have spent far more time examining World War I, which is frequently seen as unnecessary and hence puzzling, than World War II. A serious attempt at explaining variation in the duration and severity of wars cannot afford, however, to simply paper over an extreme case as an unexplainable outlier, however attractive that approach may seem. It is thus worth asking to what extent the theory advanced here can account for German foreign policy prior to and during World War II. Indeed, I argue that the preventive war mechanism provides an excellent account of Hitler’s decisions. In this case, there are two separate components to Hitler’s fear of decline. First, and more important, Hitler operated according to a clear and consistent ideology that informed him that absent significant territorial expansion Germany was headed for long-term decline. This belief thus was the basis for the Lebensraum policy and the conclusion that an expansionist war was in Germany’s interest. Second, given that prior conclusion, Hitler then calculated that the late 1930s would be the optimal time to undertake that expansion, as rapid German rearmament and internal disorder in the Soviet Union had given Germany a temporary advantage that would not be sustainable in the long run

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  A History of the 20th Century

  Conflict, Technology and Revolution

  • Jeremy Black(Author)
  • 2022(Publication Date)
  • Arcturus

    (Publisher)

  Nevertheless, as discussed in the previous chapter, large-scale warfare really began with the Japanese invasion of China in 1937. This launched the chain of events that was to lead eventually, with Pearl Harbor, to a determination to prevent the United States from blocking Japan’s dominance of East Asia. Japan’s inability to knock China out, despite not having to fight other opponents, also prefigured Germany’s failure to do the same with Britain and the Soviet Union. Both Germany and Japan were aggressive as well as expansionist powers, and their aggression drove the pace of the early stages of the war.

  As with World War I, the view that the war was a general systems failure of the international system is wrong. Instead, it also arose due to aggression by particular powers – Germany and Japan – that gained valuable, additional benefit from the neutrality of the United States in the crucial early stages. However, the revisionism seen in discussions of the origins of World War I suggests what may follow with World War II. In particular, German revisionism is gathering pace in a fashion that would have been considered surprising 30 years ago.

  German Successes 1939–41

  The rapid conquest of Poland was followed by other triumphs won at modest cost to German forces. In 1940, Denmark, Norway, Luxembourg, the Netherlands and France were conquered. The first two were attacked on 9 April, the others on 10 May. Yugoslavia and Greece followed in early 1941. These German successes owed much to the combined arms tactics and operational seizure of the initiative and mobility all summarized as blitzkrieg (lightning war). Tank advances played a dramatic role. In practice, poor Allied strategy also played a major role, notably defending overlong perimeters (Poland; Yugoslavia; France moved forces too far forward into Belgium), placing reserves in the wrong place (France), and responding too slowly to the pace of developments (France). Nevertheless, the net result was a Germany that dominated the European landmass west of the Soviet Union. France surrendered on 22 June, and much of it was occupied by Germany, with a rump and partly demilitarized France ruled by a pro-German regime established in Vichy.

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  Narratives of War

  Remembering and Chronicling Battle in Twentieth-Century Europe

  • Nanci Adler, Remco Ensel, Michael Wintle, Nanci Adler, Remco Ensel, Michael Wintle(Authors)
  • 2019(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  narratives they composed to explore the origins, history and consequences of World War II, depended to a significant degree on the biographical and political context from which they emerged. Often, the individual perspective corresponded quite literally with their personal circumstances and whereabouts during the last weeks of the war. The reasons why historians choose a certain field of study and political alignment are rather complex, but the specific front experiences across Nazi-occupied Europe, imprisonment by Allied or Soviet forces and survival of the air war in the shelters of Berlin in a certain sense foreshadowed a later orientation towards the liberal reconstruction in the West or the socialist experiment in the East.

  The history of historiography should concern itself with the many contexts that shape historical writing. In doing so, it has to offer much more than a Nabelschau of an overly self-conscious profession or a mere documentation of historiographical ‘progress’. As the case of World War II historiography in post-war Germany illustrates, the two dominant narratives of triumph and defeat, and their social resonance and relevance, depended heavily on the way individual historians mastered their lives within broader, often extremely violent collective ‘realms of experience’, as Reinhardt Koselleck termed it. As mutually influential echoes of a shared past, these narratives offer a distinct vantage point from which to write an ‘integrated’55 history of post-war Germany – a war-torn, fractured yet entwined cultural landscape of which historians were not the least intriguing inhabitants.

  Notes

  1 See his programmatic text, A. Hillgruber, ‘Politische Geschichte in moderner Sicht’, Historische Zeitschrift , 1973, vol. 216, 529–52.

  2 E. Jäckel, ‘Vom Kampf des Urteils gegen das Vorurteil: Andreas Hillgruber zu Ehren’, in J. Dülffer, B. Martin and G. Wollstein (eds.), Deutschland in Europa: Kontinuität und Bruch: Gedenkschrift für Andreas Hillgruber zu seinem 65. Geburtstag

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  The Second World War

  • A. W. Purdue(Author)
  • 2011(Publication Date)
  • Bloomsbury Academic

    (Publisher)

  4 A wider context, and an even longer scenario, is possible if one considers the emergence of the German Empire in 1871 to have destroyed the balance of power in Europe at a time when the global influence of Europe, most concretely manifest in overseas empires, was increasing. From 1871 the basic European problem was to be how to accommodate or contain Germany, while European influence in Asia, Africa and the Middle East, enhanced during the high ‘age of imperialism’ of the late nineteenth century, ensured that the success or failure of such accommodation or containment would have a global impact.

  From such a point of view, 1871 affected all participants in the Second World War. It saw the birth of a German Empire, populous and with a developing economy and a strong army, which inherited from Prussia a tradition of respect for the power of government and an inclination towards protectionism rather than free trade in economic policy. It diminished Russia’s preponderant power in Eastern Europe. It propelled France into both a feverish search for colonial aggrandisement as a compensation for diminution of status and power in Europe, most piquantly illustrated by the loss of Alsace and Lorraine, and a search for European allies against Germany. This in turn changed Britain’s reluctant imperialism into an expansionism which overstretched her resources and led to the Anglo-Japanese Alliance of 1902, bringing an Asian power for the first time into an equal relationship with a Western power, and able to benefit or lose from changes to the European balance. The penetration of European power, together with European conflicts into the wider world, dis turbed the USA and its South American and Pacific interests leading to her determination to build a large navy. Thus the coming of the German Empire posed the problem and determined many of the parameters of international relations for the next century or more.

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  Warfare and Society in Europe

  1898 to the Present

  • Michael S. Neiberg(Author)
  • 2003(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  5 WORLD WAR II, 1939–1942 Germany’s war: Conquest and collaboration in the west In order to understand Germany’s war, one must understand two concepts that were central to German social assumptions and, therefore, to German military policy as well. The first, the “stab in the back,” or Dolchstoß, we have already examined. Originally designed to deflect the blame of German military defeat in World War I onto Jews, communists, and other perceived domestic enemies of the Second Reich, it developed a life of its own and became a seminal construct of Third Reich thinking. When combined with German notions of their own racial and military superiority, the Dolchstoß had important military ramifications. It implied that German defeat could not come on the battlefield. If Germany were to be defeated again, it would be at the hands of domestic enemies, as the believers in the Dolchstoß understood the defeat of 1918. German military officers and special police therefore became obsessed with rooting out enemies and suspected enemies. This manic fixation led the Nazi regime to criminalize and demonize many sections of German society and to commit all manner of crimes. It also significantly detracted from Germany’s ability to prosecute the war effectively. The second major concept, Lebensraum, argued that “living space” must be created for Germans in the east, specifically in Poland and Russia. The Nazis generally disliked cities, viewing them as centers of industrial unrest and Bolshevik agitation. The German people would therefore need space. Poland and Russia would provide the majority of that space for the growing German population that Nazi family policy would create. Since Nazi racial ideology denigrated the Poles and Slavs as sub-human and Nazi political ideology reviled Bolshevism, eastern Europe became an obvious and popular target

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  Cornell Studies in Security Affairs

  • John Mueller(Author)
  • 2013(Publication Date)
  • Cornell University Press

    (Publisher)

  CHAPTER 4

  WORLD WAR II AS A REINFORCING EVENT

  Europeans brought war under a degree of control in the middle of the last millennium with the development of disciplined military and policing forces and with the consequent rise of coherent states. But they still considered it to be a natural, inevitable and, often, desirable fact of life. After the trauma of World War I, they moved to use their control of war to eliminate the institution entirely from their affairs with each other.

  Since that war, countries in the developed world have participated in four wars or kinds of war: first, the cluster of wars known as World War II; second, wars relating to the Cold War; third, various wars in their colonies; and fourth, still to be defined and delimited, policing wars: assorted applications of military force after the Cold War to pacify civil conflicts and to topple regimes deemed harmful. The second and third of these are taken up in the next chapter, and the fourth is the central subject of chapters 7 and 8.

  This chapter deals with the first. It surveys the aggressor states that launched World War II, and it concludes that, but for the machinations of one man—Adolf Hitler—the Second World War in Europe would likely never have come about. It also explores the implications of this conclusion, and it assesses the impact of World War II on the developed world’s developing sense of war aversion.

  THE QUEST FOR PEACE AFTER THE GREAT WAR

  The Great War (as it was to be called for more than two decades) chiefly inspired bitterness, disillusionment, recrimination, and revulsion in Europe. For the most part, war was no longer embraced as supreme theater, redemptive turmoil, a cleansing thunderstorm, or an uplifting affirmation of manhood. It was what the first modern general, William Tecumseh Sherman, had called it a half century earlier: hell. People who often had praised war and eagerly anticipated its terrible, determining convulsions now found themselves appalled by it. Within half a decade, war opponents, once a derided minority, had become a decided majority: everyone now seemed to be a peace advocate.1

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