The Slide to War: A European Civil War?

Outside of politics, did European society engage in civil wars?

With the exceptions of Ireland and Finland, I would have to say that, for the period between the end ofthe Russian Civil War and the beginning of the Spanish Civil War, European society did not engage in civilwars. Given the presence of Ireland and Finland at peripheries of Europe, it's unsurprising that these wars are less often considered as impactful for the continent as those of Russian and Spain, although at least in the case of Finland, the issue of an emergent left lay at the root of the conflict. Thus, if we consider the period between the wars as one of reaction to Bolshevism specifically and the left generally, we should probably consider the period to be one primarily of coups rather than civil wars.

The other key question would seem to be whether Europe at large engaged in a civil war of left vs. Right over the entire interwar period. I'm sure many of us have "go-to" authors on particular topics; mine on civil war is Stathis Kalyvas, whose definition is "armed combat within the boundaries of a recognized sovereign entity between parties subject to a common authority at the outset of the hostilities."[1] Given this definition, it's hard to say that the idea of a Europe-wide 30 Years War truly obtains, at least in so far as such a war would be considered a civil war. Europe was not a recognized sovereign entity with a common authority in 1918. Nor do I think it's fair even to consider the lull in outright civil war between those in Russia and Spain to be a sort of left-right "cold war." The presence in the political center of some of the governments in Europe, particularly Germany, until the financial crisis of the late 1920s and early 1930s attests to the opposite being true. And in those places where it was not, there was not, as noted, civil wars so much as coups.

Therefore, Dan Diner strikes me as being mistaken when he writes, "The front lines in an emerging universal civil war would thus have far-reaching consequences for the territorial makeup of the new nation-states in Central and East Central Europe."[2] However, this disagreement is one of definition, since the examples of violence that he marshals are legitimate examples of coups, ethnic cleansing, and/or revolution. As far as Donald Watt's observations are concerned, he seems closer to the mark in writing that the "'European civil war' came to embrace a very much larger section of what might loosely be stigmatised as 'European opinion'; and that the existence of this set of perceptions has been almost entirely neglected in the development of European historiography of the origins and course of the Second World War."[3] Definitions, after all, matter.

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[1] Stathis Kalyvas, The Logic of Violence in Civil War (Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge UP, 2006), 17.
[2] Dan Diner, Cataclysms: A History of the Twentieth Century from Europe's Edge (Madison, Wisc.: University of Wisconsin Press, 2008), 65.
[3] Donald C. Watt, "The European Civil War," in The Fascist Challenge and the Policy of Appeasement, edited by Wolfgang J. Mommsen and Lothar Kettenacke (Crow's Nest, Australia: Allen & Unwin, 1983), 5.

The Slide to War: Versailles and the Outbreak of War

Did the Treaty of Versailles lead directly to the outbreak of war in 1939?
I think it's safe to say that a direct line cannot be drawn from the Treaty of Versailles to the outbreak of war in 1939. Of course, the events are related, and it's unlikely that Hitler, largely embodying the proximate cause of war's outbreak in 1939, would have acceded to power if the Treaty of Versailles had not had its particularly punitive effects on Germany. However, it is also true that, had the international economies not crashed in the late 1920s and early 1930s, it is less likely that democracy would have failed in Germany.

The readings for this week demonstrate, more than perhaps any other point, the intricacies of diplomacy in the final years before the war. Donald Watt's essay begins with his observation that, "[i]n western Europe, the German Foreign Minister Stresemann's successors were being driven by unemployment and the rocketing growth of the Nazi party to abandon his policy of gradual revision of Versailles for a policy of adventurism from weakness."[1] Given the extent to which gradual vision had worked between 1924 and 1929, there is little reason to believe that this strategy would not have continued to work. That said, it is also true that the depth of the depression experienced by Germany was greater because of its inability to implement monetary policies that would alleviate recessionary pressures because of the shortage of foreign reserve currency. It's true that the desired customs union with Austria might have alleviated, if not reversed, the negative economic trends in Germany post-1929, but it is also true that the Versailles treaty cannot be directly blamed for the refusal of the League of Nations to authorize the customs union.

The other point to consider is whether any force at all could have prevented war from breaking out in 1939. Were we to concede that Versailles led to the rise of Hitler and that Hitler was bent on having a war, then the only question really is whether war could occurred before or after 1939, rather than prevented. Zara Steiner's treatment of the previous preventive action makes clear that members of Hitler's own cabinet were deeply unsure about Germany's ability to go to war over the Sudetenland: "All those Germans who opposed war in 1938, and they were a very disparate group, agreed that given the state of Germany’s armaments and its economic position, the country could not risk a major war with Britain and France, particularly if those countries were backed by the United States"[2]; this group included Lutz Graf Schwerin von Krosigk, the finance minister -- who would also be Nazi Germany's last chancellor after Hitler's (and Goebbels's) suicide.

More aggressive action from Chamberlain and Daladier at Munich might therefore have resulted in Germany being defeated far earlier and at far smaller cost. This matter is speculative, of course, but interesting nonetheless.
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[1] D.C. Watt, "Diplomatic History, 1930-1939," in The New Cambridge Modern History. Vol. 12: The Shifting Balance of World Forces, 1898-1945, edited by C.L. Mowat (Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge UP, 1968), 684.
[2] Zara Steiner, "British Decisions for Peace and War 1938-1939: the Rise and Fall of Realism" in History and Neorealism, edited by Ernest R. May, Richard Rosencrance, and Zara Steiner (Cambridge, U.K., Cambridge UP, 2010), 134.

Jewish Refugees in the Kresy: Soviet Loyalty Testing

When Nazi Germany invaded Poland on September 1, 1939, a large number of Jews fled east. When the Red Army invaded Poland from the east sixteen days later, these Jewish refugees found themselves under Soviet rule. By the time the border was formalized between the Soviet and German zones of occupation, thousands of Jewish refugees were in the Soviet zone. Over the course of the coming months, these refugees were offered Soviet passports, which many rejected; in addition, when Nazi-Soviet cooperation over population transfers culminated in German committees appearing in eastern Poland to vet returnees to the Generalgouvernement, a large number of Jews applied to return to the German zone of occupation. An examination of these events makes it clear that the Jewish refugees were subjected to a series of loyalty tests by the Soviet occupation forces, culminating in the forced deportation of a large number to the Soviet interior.

            According to the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, 300,000 Jewish refugees from the Generalgouvernement and the regions of Poland annexed to the Reich were in the Kresy – the Polish term for the eastern third of the Second Polish Republic, consisting of territory annexed from Lithuania and the Soviet Union – when the Soviets annexed the territory on November 15, 1939.[1] These refugees, like the Jewish population remaining under the Nazi occupation, came from a variety of walks of life. Beyond the professions of the refugees, which included white collar professionals, small business owners, tradespeople, and industrial laborers, the political persuasions of the refugees ran the gamut from members of mainstream Polish political parties to Jewish-specific parties, including those for the religious community (Agudas Yisroel), for Zionists (themselves running the gamut from left to right), and for socialists (the General Jewish Workers' Association, called the Bund in Yiddish).

            All of these factors contributed to the Soviets' suspicions of these refugees. As a state that was officially and militantly atheist, the Soviet Union viewed Judaism as an equivalent threat to any other faith, and as a nationalist movement, Zionism was seen by the Soviets as bourgeois and reactionary; as a result, the use of Hebrew for either religious or political reasons had been severely circumscribed by Soviet authorities in the early 1920s.[2] Regarding the Bund, its relationship with Soviet authorities was more complicated. Founded in 1897 in Vilnius, the party had split in 1920 into a left faction that was absorbed by the Bolsheviks the following year and a right faction that persisted underground for a few years before disappearing. Outside the USSR, however, the Bund had gained political power in Latvia, Lithuania, Romania, and especially Poland. Members of the Bund in these countries had been labeled "social fascists" by Stalin with the rest of the non-Bolshevik left during the 1930s. Now Polish Bundists were arriving in the Soviet zone of occupation. Although a large percentage of Bundists from western Poland and the Generalgouvernement went to Vilnius, which would not be occupied by the Soviets until June 1940, significant numbers nevertheless gathered in Lviv, Bialystok, and other large cities and towns in the Soviet occupation zone.

            While the period of the Great Purges had ended by the time the Soviets occupied the Kresy, it is important to note that, as with former members of other non-Bolshevik political parties, such as Trotskyists or Mensheviks, former Bundists were purged in the 1930s. Noting the tendency of the accused during the purges to be former members of other socialist or left-wing parties, rather than actual "reactionaries," Robert Conquest notes that the Bund "was a particularly fatal association."[3] Therefore, it is unsurprising that the Bundist leadership in the Kresy was arrested in massive sweeps a few weeks after the Soviet invasion. Most famously, Henryk Erlich and Wiktor Alter, two prominent Bundist leaders from Warsaw, were arrested in Brest and Kovel, respectively.

            However, while Erlich and Alter's prominence in the Polish Bund had marked them for early detention, the majority of Jewish refugees in the Kresy when the border between the Soviet and Nazis zones was established were of unknown political affiliation. Therefore, to determine the loyalties of these new residents, it was necessary for the Soviet authorities to institute a series of tests. Calls for volunteers for labor battalions for details in the Soviet interior afforded the earliest opportunity. According to Grzegorz Hryciuk's highly detailed analysis of the period, nearly 60,000 refugees from the other parts of Poland – including not only Jews but also Ukrainians and Poles – relocated to eastern districts of Ukraine, including the Donbas mines, between October 1939 and August 1940.[4]

            However, even if every refugee sent on a work detail during this period were Jewish, it would still leave four-fifths of the refugees in the Kresy, with the loyalties of these refugees unknown to Soviet authorities. Another approach would be necessary. According to N.S. Lebedeva, based on her examination of Russian archival documents, NKVD head L.P. Beria, N.A. Bulganin, N.M. Shvernik, and L.P. Korniets, a high-ranking official in the government of the Ukrainian SSR, formed a commission on refugees in November.[5] In addition to addressing the continued allocation of volunteers to labor, the commission sought to investigate the possibility of repatriating the refugees to their former homes.

            Beyond the commission, however, was a decree of the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet of the USSR of November 29, 1939, granting citizenship to inhabitants of the Kresy. The decree was in three sections, the first of which defined two categories of people immediately receiving Soviet citizenship:

a) former Polish citizens who were on the territory of the western regions of the Ukraine and Belorussia when these became part of the USSR;

b) persons who arrived in the USSR on the basis of the agreement of November 16, 1939, between the Government of the USSR and the German Government, as well as those who arrived in consequence of the cession by the USSR to Lithuania of the city of Vilnius and Vilnius Region in accordance with the agreement of October 10, 1939.[6]

 

            Thus, any Polish citizen residing in the Kresy as of November 1-2 was a Soviet citizen, as was any person emigrating to the Soviet Union from Nazi Germany. The former category undoubtedly included many Jews, while the latter category specifically did not. Regarding the Vilnius region, many Jews fled to, rather than from, that area, believing Lithuanian independence might be permanent. Regarding the cited agreement between the Reich and Soviet Union of November 16, the agreement specifically stipulated the transfer of only ethnic Russians, Belarusians, and Ukrainians. The agreement of November formalized one of the secret annexes to the Molotov-von Ribbentrop pact in which the agreement of the Soviets to allow Volksdeutsche in the USSR to emigrate to the Reich is reciprocated: "A corresponding obligation is assumed by the Government of the German Reich in respect to the persons of Ukrainian or Belorussian descent residing in the territories under its jurisdiction."[7]

            The next step in the process of bestowing citizenship on previous Polish nationals was to issue them Soviet passports to replace their Polish passports. The so-called passportization operation appears in virtually all of the literature on the period. For instance, Sara Bender, in her book on the city of Bialystok during the war, notes that, while Polish citizens were forced to surrender their passports for Soviet ones, the refugees were allowed to choose, and if they elected not to accept Soviet citizenship, they could request return to the Generalgouvernement.[8] In contrast, Lebedeva and Yosef Litvak specifically interpret the choice as illusory and designed to prepare for these refugees' ultimate deportation; Litvak further states that the SS authorized the Soviet authorities to post public announcements that refugees could apply for return to the German zone of occupation, but he does not cite specific sources for this claim.[9]

            We do not know what percentages of Jewish refugees opted for a Soviet passport versus return to the Generalgouvernement. However, we can assume that many Jews who already had left-wing or communist sympathies and many who rightly feared returning to Nazi occupation accepted the Soviet passport. However, many also registered to go west. Christoph Mick, for instance, alleges that 75% of registrants in Lviv requesting to go west were Jewish.[10] Bender attributes some of these choices to a desire for family unity and reports that, at least at the end of 1939, conditions in Warsaw, e.g., were tolerable.[11] She also notes that Bundists broadly refused the passport, both fearing Stalinist political repression and having heard of Bundist underground activity getting under way in the German occupation zone. Bogdan Musial, citing NKVD documents on the topic, notes that the Soviet secret police viewed Bundist calls from Poland to support the Soviet regime "as a tactical manoeuvre to ensure the survival of the Bund’s own leadership corps."[12] Zionists generally refused the passport, fearing that they were be forbidden by Soviet authorities from eventually emigrating to Palestine; like many Bundists, they concentrated in Vilnius and continued to organize from there.

            It was with the arrival in the Kresy of committees of staff members of the German Volksdeutsche Mittelstelle (VoMi) to process applications for transfer to the Generalgouvernement, including of Volksdeutsche, that the magnitude of the number of Jews who had refused passportization was determined. In what in hindsight can only be considered a fatal miscalculation, thousands of Jews appeared before committees in Lviv, Bialystok, and other cities to request return to the German occupation zone. The incidents are attested in numerous primary sources from former Nazi and Soviet authorities and from Jewish émigrés. For instance, the Yiddish writer Moishe Grossman reported being told by another émigré about Jews crossing from the Generalgouvernement into the Kresy seeing Jews coming in the other direction and urging them to go back.[13]

            More reliably, one of the defendants in the Nuremberg Military Tribunal trial against the SS Race and Settlement Office, Otto Heinz Brückner, who worked for VoMi, testified about the resettlement actions. Asked whether he was able to process non-Volksdeutsche applications for resettlement, he said, "In a fairly large number of individual cases, we were. I did this whenever it was definite that these people were facing extinction in the Soviet Union, and if I could find a way to carry through this resettlement. I remember that at the time I re­settled Swiss, Swedes, Lithuanians, Russians and people of Jewish descent too. This meant a definite danger for me at that time."[14] Although Brückner's testimony must be approached with caution given its exculpatory nature, his account is corroborated in part by an entry in the diary of Hans Frank, the German Governor General of Poland in Krakow. In this entry, dated May 3, 1940, Frank recounts a meeting with Otto Wächter, who chaired the VoMi committee in Lviv and was later the district governor there, at which Wächter told Frank, “Of approximately 18,000 refugees, 16,500 were Jews, who in any case awaited admission to the Generalgouvernement.”[15]

            Finally, no less a figure than N.S. Khrushchev reported the spectacle in his memoirs. In Lviv at the time as head of the CPSU in Ukraine to oversee the city's incorporation into the USSR, Khrushchev reports being told by I.A. Serov, NKVD head in Ukraine, that the lines registering to go west were quite long. Serov reportedly said, "When I approached the place I found it very painful, because most of the waiting line consisted of people from the Jewish population. What’s going to happen to them? And yet, this is how devoted people are to all kinds of petty everyday things—an apartment, material objects. They give the Gestapo agents bribes to help them leave here sooner and return to their hearths and homes."[16]

            As noted by these sources, there were a number of Jews who returned to the Generalgouvernement under the auspices of VoMi. We can assume that most of these Jews perished over the course of the coming years. Conversely, we know that many Jews without Soviet passports remained in the Kresy following the appearance there of the resettlement committees. Because one of the four subsequent deportations specifically targeted the Jewish refugees who had not accepted the Soviet passport, some scholars have assumed that there was a coordinated effort between VoMi and the NKVD to identify Jewish applicants. In his book on the period, for instance, Dov Levin writes that VoMi's lists were "presumably forwarded" to the NKVD but he does not cite any sources.[17] As noted above, Litvak saw the whole process as a ruse, calling it a "malicious act of deceit"; however, his proof is the mere existence of the VoMi committees, which we know now were charged with much larger processes of population transfer.[18]

            There is one piece of information that perhaps supports the assertions of Levin and Litvak on this point, however. Specifically, in a message to V.M. Molotov asking for direction, Ye.I. Chekmenev, who headed the resettlement program for the Council of People's Soviet of the USSR (Sovnarkom), wrote the following:

The [Sovnarkom] Resettlement Administration has received two letters from the Berlin and Vienna resettlement bureaus concerning the resettlement of Jews from Germany to the USSR - specifically to Birobidzhan and the Western Ukraine.

Under the evacuation agreement between the USSR Government and Germany, only ethnic Ukrainians, Belarusians, Rusins [sic], and Russians are subject to evacuation to Soviet territory.

We believe that the proposals by the aforementioned resettlement bureaus cannot be accepted.

Awaiting further instructions.[19]

 

The message is notable not only because of its inclusion of Rusyns along with Ukrainians and Belarusians but also because it is clear that Chekmenev's recommendation was adopted by Molotov. It is uncertain whether Chekmenev was motivated by adhering to the letter of the agreements signed by Germany and the USSR, personal anti-Semitism, a desire to avoid further complication of what was already becoming a logistical nightmare, or some other factor.

            The aforementioned mass deportations from the Kresy began in February 1940, but the first two actions did not target the refugees. Rather, these deportations targeted, respectively, veterans of the Polish-Soviet war that ended in 1921 and their families. While these deportations were being carried out, however, decisions to target the now undocumented Jewish refugees were being made. Hryciuk identifies two high-level decisions: first, a decision of the Politburo of Central Committee of the CPSU on March 2, 1940; and second, a resolution of Sovnarkom on April 10.[20] The deportation targeting refugees in the Kresy was subsequently carried out on June 28-29, with more than 64,000 Jewish refugees deported and another 13,600 arrested and detained.[21]

            One irony of the fate of the Jewish refugees in the Kresy is that this mass deportation of refugees in June 1940 is that, while it undoubtedly netted many rank and file Jewish political party members, it largely missed the parties' leaders, most of whom, as noted above, had relocated to Vilnius. When Lithuania was subjected to direct Soviet rule in the same month, plans were made to target these leaders. For instance, Arcadius Kahan, who after the war would become an economic historian associated with the University of Chicago, was arrested almost immediately upon Soviet occupation of Vilnius, on the basis of his Bundist and Menshevik associations. In perhaps the most famous case, future Prime Minister of Israel Menachem Begin, who led the Revisionist Zionist Betar youth group in Vilnius, was arrested on September 20, 1940. In the fourth and final deportations, carried out across all of the territory the USSR occupied since September 1939 – including the Kresy, the Baltic states, Bessarabia, and Bukovina – the remaining known politically oriented Jewish refugees were seized and deported.

            One week later, Nazi Germany invaded the Soviet Union. The final irony of the Jewish refugees in the Kresy is that deportation to the Soviet interior likely saved their lives, as the vast majority of Jews in those areas, the Baltic states, and Bessarabia and Bukovina were killed in the coming weeks and months by Einsatzgruppen deployed the Nazi for that purpose. Some of the Jews who had been deported earlier were freed to fight the Nazis. Erlich and Alter, for instance, who months earlier had been tried for anti-Soviet activities and sentenced to death, were freed to help form the Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee. However, they were arrested again later in 1941 and executed. Begin, who had been held near Saint Petersburg, was allowed to leave and join the Anders Army, with which he deployed in 1942 to Palestine. Bundist and Zionist activists under the Nazi occupation organized resistance movements. Most died, but some, including Marek Edelman, a Bundist from Warsaw, returned to Poland after the war and continued their resistance to Soviet domination.

            In conclusion, the influx of thousands of Jewish refugees into the Kresy upon the Nazi invasion of Poland posed a significant challenge for Soviet authorities upon their own occupation of these territories a couple of weeks later, particularly because many of these refugees had political affiliations identified as problematic by the Soviets. Although citizenship was granted to these refugees, a series of loyalty tests were nevertheless imposed on them, with opportunities to volunteer for labor followed by passportization. Finally, Jews rejecting Soviet passports were given the opportunity to apply with the German authorities to return to their homes. Since few were admitted, they were largely arrested in the waves of deportation that followed. While these refugees were subsequently subjected to great hardship, their chance of survival was far greater if deported. In the end, the refugees’ own hostility to Soviet rule might have saved their own lives.

 

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[1] Holocaust Encyclopedia, s.v. "German Invasion of Poland: Jewish Refugees, 1939," accessed November 30, 2017, https://www.ushmm.org/wlc/en/article.php?ModuleId=10005593

[2] Zvi Gitelman, A Century of Ambivalence: The Jews of Russia and the Soviet Union, 1881 to the Present, 2nd ed. (Bloomington: Indiana UP, 2001), 77.

[3] Robert Conquest, The Great Terror: A Reassessment (New York: Oxford UP, 2008), 272.

[4] Grzegorz Hryciuk, “Victims 1939-1941: The Soviet Repressions in Eastern Poland,” in Shared History – Divided Memory: Jews and Others in Soviet-Occupied Poland, 1939-1941, edited by Elazar Barkan, Elizabeth A. Cole, and Kai Struve, Leipziger Beiträge zur Jüdischen Geschichte und Kultur 5 (Leipzig, Germany: Leipziger Universitätsverlag, 2007), 198.

[5] N.S. Lebedeva, “The Deportation of the Polish Population to the USSR, 1939–41,” Journal of Communist Studies and Transition Politics, 16, nos. 1-2 (2000): 31

[6] "On the Acquisition of Citizenship of the USSR by Inhabitants of the Western Districts of the Ukrainian and Belorussian SSRs," Soviet Statutes and Decisions, 7, no. 3 (1971): 260

[7] German-Soviet Boundary and Friendship Treaty, Germany-Soviet Union, September 28, 1939, in “The Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact: The Documents,” Litanus, 35, no. 1 (1989): 1-5, accessed November 30, 2017, http://www.lituanus.org/1989/89_1_03.htm

[8] Sara Bender, The Jews of Bialystok During World War II and the Holocaust, translated by Yaffa Murciano (Waltham, Mass.: Brandeis UP, 2008), 86.

[9] Lebedeva, ibid, 31; Yosef Litvak, “The Plight of Refugees From the German-occupied Territories,” in The Soviet Takeover of the Polish Eastern Provinces, 1939-41, edited by Keith Sword (New York: Macmillan, 1991), 67

[10] Christoph Mick, “Incompatible Experiences: Poles, Ukrainians and Jews in Lviv under Soviet and German Occupation, 1939–44,” Journal of Contemporary History, 46, no. 2 (2011): 352.

[11] Bender, ibid, 55.

[12] Bogdan Musial, “Jewish Resistance in Poland's Eastern Borderlands During the Second World War, 1939–41,” Patterns of Prejudice, 38, no. 4 (2004): 379.

[13] Quoted in Ben-Cion Pinchuk, “Jewish Refugees in Soviet Poland,” Jewish Social Studies, 40, no. 2 (1978): 158, note 82.

[14] Testimony of Otto Heinz Brückner, United States v. Ulrich Greifelt et al., December 19, 1947, in Trials of the Major War Criminals Before the Nuremberg Military Tribunals, vol. IV (Washington, D.C.: US GPO, 1949): 843.

[15] Hans Frank, entry of May 3, 1940, Diensttagebuch Hans Frank, 2233-PS, International Military Tribunal XXIX, Nuremberg, Germany, 358.

[16] Nikita Khrushchev, Memoirs of Nikita Khrushchev, vol. 1, edited by Sergei Khrushchev (College Park, Pa.: Penn State UP, 2005), 242.

[17] Dov Levin, The Lesser of Two Evils: Eastern European Jewry Under Soviet Rule, 1939-1941 (Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society, 1995), 194.

[18] Litvak, ibid, 67.

[19] Ye.I. Chekmenev to V.M. Molotov, February 9, 1940, in Pavel Polyan, “Two Million Unsaved Jews,” Moscow News, April 27, 2005, accessed November 30, 2017, http://archive.is/43HZX

[20] Hryciuk, ibid, 189.

[21] Ibid, 190.

The War in 1943: Allied Victories and Outproduction

While I am cautious to state that I do not believe that the whole of the Allied victory in World War II can be attributed to a handful of causes, I do nevertheless believe that two of the factors Richard Overy lists in his book were more decisive than the others: the Soviet victories at Stalingrad and Kursk; and mass production on the Allied side. Whereas the Soviet victories early in 1943 provided much needed momentum for the Allied military cause, mass production allows the Allies -- particularly the Soviets -- to produce far more materiel than Germany, even if it was arguably inferior materiel.

While Germany's gains on Soviet territory in the first six months following the invasion in June 1941 were enormous, the Germans were stalled by winter, and the Soviets were able to mount a counteroffensive. However, the Wehrmacht still had sufficient strength to launch a second offensive in the spring of 1941, ultimately driving to Stalingrad. In contrast, the loss at Stalingrad, including the surrender of Friedrich Paulus's Sixth Army, was a crushing blow to German morale.[1] Perhaps more importantly, it forced the Nazis to fully mobilize their economy for the first time since the war began. The subsequent need to supplement domestic workers with slave laborers from Slavic countries belied the notion of Aryan racial supremacy.

If morale was badly damaged by the loss at Stalingrad, the loss at Kursk was a coup de grace. In addition to this effect, Kursk provided an object lesson in Overy's second important point -- i.e., that mass production by the Allies would ultimately result in victory for their side. In the battle, which involved more tanks than any battle before or since, sheer superiority of numbers was essential to the Soviet victory. Soviet mass production would continue apace, augmented by ongoing British and American war production, while the strategic bombing took a toll on Germany's only recently maximized production. In fact, the highest-quality German tanks had not yet rolled out from the factories.[2]

Kursk also drove home a point that all the counter-production of full mobilization in Germany could never counter -- superiority in numbers of people. Although the Wehrmacht had superior numbers of soldiers to the British, the American and Soviet militaries had far more. While the U.S. would need time to train its soldiers and the Red Army was somewhat crippled by the initial Barbarossa offensive, by early 1943, both these issues were no longer factors. Plus, Germany had lost hundreds of thousands of soldiers, and while the Soviets had lost even more, they had virtually endless population stocks from which to draw.[3]

In conclusion, the Allied victories at Kursk and Stalingrad and the ability of the Allied economies, particularly that of the USSR, were decisive factors in the Axis losing the war. Of course, other factors contributed significantly, but I feel that these issues at the very least knocked Germany out of the war, although defeating Japan required additional contributions.

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     [1] Jay W. Baird. "The Myth of Stalingrad," Journal of Contemporary History, 4 (1969): 201
     [2] Valeriy Zamulin, "Could Germany Have Won the Battle of Kursk if It Had Started in Late May or the Beginning of June 1943?" Journal of Slavic Military Studies, 27 (2014): 607
     [3] Mark Harrison, "The Economics of World War II: An Overview," in The Economics of World War II: Six Great Powers in International Comparison, edited by Mark Harrison (New York: Cambridge UP, 1998), 14-15.

WWII: Race and the Pacific War

To determine the extent to which racial identity played in a role in combat in the Pacific theater in World War II, it is necessary to examine the question from both sides of the conflict, i.e., from the standpoint of both the Japanese and the Allies. On the latter point, it is necessary to consider not only the racial attitudes of the U.S. military but also those of the British, French, and Dutch colonial authorities, Australian and New Zealand forces, and the Asian and Pacific Islander populations who found themselves under Japanese occupation. The conclusion can be drawn that, while not the primary factor driving the conflict, racial identity was an immensely complicating factor in an already complicated conflict.

From the Japanese side, the rise of ethnic nationalism in Japan has been well attested. Ronald Spector details this ascendance in his book on the Pacific war, referring for example to the concept of kokutai and how it permeated the Japanese military.[1] Assassinations politically motivated by nationalists occurred against the foreign minister in May 1932[2] and the prime minister by likeminded assailants two years earlier.[3] Once the war began, and Japanese ultranationalism was given free rein, its expression took two forms. On the one hand, violence in the form of atrocities committed against non-Japanese enemies, whether Chinese in the Rape of Nanjing or Americans in the Bataan Death March, was a clear enunciation of the superiority the Japanese felt over other peoples. On the other hand, as pointed out by Millett and Murray in the case of the Japanese conquest of Malaya, a British colony, the Japanese could act as "liberators" of fellow Asian peoples by ousting militarily the colonial rulers.[4]

From the Allied side, there was the obvious factor that certain Asian and Pacific populations were eager to collaborate with the Japanese because they were not the traditional colonial oppressor. More importantly, however, was the pre-existing conceptions that American, British, French, Dutch, Australia, and New Zealand forces had of Asian and Pacific peoples. In the case of the United States, these prejudices had been reinforced by the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882, with its subsequent renewal every 10 years until 1942, not to mention the sporadic violence committed against Asian and Asian-American communities along the West Coast of the United States and the internment of Japanese Americans during the war itself. As a result, as noted by Craig M. Cameron, atrocities committed by American soldiers against Japanese surrendering soldiers or POWs was very widespread. In dissecting John A. Lynn's quasi-defense of this behavior, Cameron notes that "the apologist notion that Allied soldiers acted only in response, in retribution, is one of the great fallacies to attaches to racist brutality: the displacement of brutality onto the victim."[5]

Perhaps no point of comparison regarding how race was a factor in the war is that with the European theater, particularly as fought between the Allies and Germany. Whereas Germany fought a war of extermination on the Eastern front, on the Western front, Germany abided by international treaties (with a few notable exceptions) in fighting the British and Americans, and the Allies conducted themselves correspondingly. In the same way that German soldiers felt free to commit atrocities in the east because of racist doctrine, American soldiers felt the same comparative freedom when fighting the Japanese. At least in the case of the Pacific war, race was not the cause of the war, but it was undoubtedly a factor.

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     [1] Ronald Spector, Eagle Against the Sun: The American War With Japan (New York: Free Press, 1983), Epub edition, 101-02.
    [2] Ibid, 109
    [3] Ibid, 123.
    [4] Williamson Murray and Allan R. Millett, A War to Be Won: Fighting the Second World War, 1937-1945 (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard UP, 2001), 198.
    [5] Craig M. Cameron, "Race and Identity: The Culture of Combat in the Pacific War," International History Review, 27, no. 3 (2005): 558.

Strategic Bombing: A Moral Hazard?

To say that the Allied campaign of "strategic bombing" during World War II was controversial is ans understatement. With the exception of the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, it might be the single most debated purely military aspect of the war. While the initial reactions to the strategic bombings of Germany might have been quite positive from the standpoint of military assessments, time has tempered this uniform positivity; moreover, the moral aspect of the bombings has continued to be a concern for analysts.

Before the war was even over, proponents of strategic bombing such as J.M. Spaight, a one-time assistant secretary in the Air Ministry of the U.K., were justifying the tactic. In his widely distributed pamphlet Bombing Vindicated, Spaight relies heavily on tu quoque arguments along the lines of "Germany did x, so we are justified in doing y." Strictly from a logical standpoint, his argument therefore is flawed. Nevertheless, the distinctions he attempts to draw between combatants and civilians are important ones, particularly as it regards civilians working in military industries. Spaight writes, "To spare them might mean, however, that the lives of one's own fighting men were sacrificed. It is to save these men's lives to put a war-plant out of operation or to stop a trainload of munitions from reaching the front."[1]

However, this statement fails to recognize a key distinction in international law between combatants and civilians, i.e., that it is an accepted convention of warfare that combatants' lives are more expendable than those of civilians, if only because the first rule of warfare is that combatants will die, whereas only extraordinarily recently has warfare endangered the lives of large numbers of civilians. A moral calculus that states that one's combatants will suffer fewer deaths than one's enemy's combatants is wholly defensible; one that states that one's combatants will suffer fewer deaths by taking the lives of one's enemy's civilian population is less so.

In an assessment of strategic bombing written 40 years after the war was over, Kenneth P. Werrell of the U.S. Naval Institute offered some specifics of the strategic bombing campaign while specifically avoiding a moral justification. He noted that nearly one-quarter of bombs were dropped on non-strategic targets,[2] that the losses suffered by the RAF, particularly of officers, was hard to justify,[3] and that German production actually peaked during the strategic bombing,[4] although the latter point was perhaps a consequence of late full mobilization of the Nazis, which was not until after Stalingrad. The chief benefits, Werrell notes, besides negative effects on morale,[5] were the defeat of the Luftwaffe, the need of Germany to divert forces in response to the bombing, and the economic effects.[6] From his standpoint, the strategic bombing was clearly worth the lives that were lost -- military and civilian included.

That said, I can't help but wonder how assessments of strategic bombing such as Spaight's and Werrell's would have been affected had the Allies not won the war. If the U.K. had lost the Battle of Britain, would Spaight and Werrell justify the Blitz as one of the factors in that defeat? If the Axis powers had won, would Tojo and Momma have put Stimson and Macarthur on trial and hanged them? Certainly, to the victors go the spoils, but the mere fact that some of the people sentenced at Nuremberg committed crimes no more serious than those committed by the Allies (e.g., Doenitz serving 10 years for unlimited submarine warfare) is troublesome. In the end, it seems that, from a strictly military point of view, the strategic bombing campaign was justified, but I don't think it can ever be morally justified.

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     [1] J.M. Spaight, Bombing Vindicated (London: Geoffrey Bles, 1944), 116.
     [2] Kenneth P. Werrell, "The Strategic Bombing of Germany in World War II: Costs and Accomplishments," Journal of American History, 73, no. 3 (1986): 707.
     [3] Ibid, 708.
     [4] Ibid, 711.
     [5] Ibid, 712.
     [6] Ibid, 709.

Japanese Victories from China to Midway

Understanding why the Japanese were so successful in the early years of World War II requires a thorough exploration of the several campaigns in which Japan was involved during that period. Although period began with occupation of and campaigns against China, later actions undertaken against the European anti-Axis countries and finally the United States had their own explanations for the early successes. Japan owed its success in China to the lack of government unity in that country, while Japan's success in Hong Kong, Indochina, Indonesia, and elsewhere in the Far East resulted from the colonial powers of these countries being either occupied by or at with war with Germany. Finally, Japan's success against the United States resulted from lack of preparedness and the element of surprise.

Japan had already established a colony in Korea and an occupation government in Manchuria by 1937. Thus, with the invasion of the Chinese heartland, war against China began in earnest. Although China had become a republic in 1911 under the leadership of Sun Yat-sen, following Sun's death in 1925, power over the country had fallen into the hands of multiple warlords. In addition, civil war began in 1927 between nationalist forces led by Sun's Kuomintang political party and General Chiang Kai-shek and the Communist Party ultimate led by Mao Tse-tung. It was with the country being torn apart that the Japanese invaded China. As Millett and Murray point out, although Chiang and Mao entered a truce to resist the Japanese, the Japanese were able to exploit non-communist opposition to Chiang to strip him of power.[1] In addition, almost four years into the Japanese occupation, Chiang actually turned on the communist military units rather than concentrate on fighting the Japanese.[2]

Oddly, the key power supporting Chiang in 1937 was the Soviet Union, which supported him rather than the Chinese Communist Party, but the Soviets were unable to come to China's aid in 1941. This is a factor that was of enormous importance, since the Soviets had routed the Japanese in 1939 at Khalkin-Gol. According to historian Amnon Sella, the Japanese lost mainly because they had underestimated the Soviets in believing that the Purges of the 1930s had left the Red Army weak: "But as it turned out, the Red Army was better equipped than ever before, and quite prepared to improvise ingenious solutions to unaccustomed difficulties."[3] If the absence of the Soviets as a force to intervene in China was important, so was the inability of the British to adequately defend Hong Kong, Singapore, or Malaya. The former, for instance, had to be defended in part because of civilian volunteers.[4] Finally, given the ongoing military occupations of French and the Netherlands by the Nazis, the ability of these countries to defend their colonies were severely compromised.

In the case of the United States, the reason for Japanese success really seems to have been the element of surprise. Since the goal of the Japanese in attacking Pearl Harbor was prevention of the U.S. ability to intervene in the defense of the Philippines and other Pacific possessions, as well as to assist the British and Australians in defending their territories, the attack can be considered a major success. Ultimately, only Wake Island among the initial attacked areas was successfully defended, mainly because, unlike other U.S. territories, it been recently fortified in anticipation of such an attack.[5] The Philippines were comparative less defended and relied heavily on the Philippine Army; Guam was not defended at all.[6]

Thus, the reasons for Japanese success varied on the basis of time, place, and enemy. The Chinese, although perhaps providing the largest possible resistance, was politically the weakest and thus was easily exploited. The war in Europe left European colonial possessions in the Pacific comparatively weakly defended, and even the U.S., which had not yet entered the war, had uneven defenses in place, which were fully exploited by the Japanese using the element of surprise at Pearl Harbor. Tellingly, once the U.S. entered the war with full resource commitment and awareness, the tide turned quickly against the Japanese.

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     [1] Williamson Murray and Allan R. Millett, A War to Be Won: Fighting the Second World War, 1937-1945(Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard UP, 2001), 159.
     [2] Ibid, 164.
     [3] Amnon Sella, "Khalkhin-Gol: The Forgotten War," Journal of Contemporary History, 18, no. 4 (1983): 680.
     [4] Ronald Spector, Eagle Against the Sun: The American War With Japan (New York: Free Press, 1983), Epub edition, 331.
     [5] Ibid, 265-66.
 b  [6] Ibid, 266.

Radar vs. Signals Intelligence in British Successes

I feel that the intelligence work at Bletchley Park was more important to the U.K. success during 1940 than radar was. Essentially, I feel this way because radar, while certainly helpful, could only provide so much of an advantage. For instance, although Murray and Millett indicate an advantage for the U.K., at least in submarine warfare, owing to radar, writing that German U-boats did not yet have radar in 1942.[1] Therefore, radar-equipped British naval vessels were in a better position to communicate with each other. However, the down side to that advantage is that U-boats were also more difficult to detect in 1940 because they did not have radar in 1940, thus the comparative superiority of the Ultra program.

Given the need of the British navy to avoid U-boat packs lurking along convoy routes, Murray and Millett indicate clearly that signals intelligence would make a key difference.[2] In explaining how the Enigma code was first broken by Poland, which then presented its own findings to British intelligence,[3] the authors introduce the idea of the evolving nature of Enigma and its ability to work against itself. For instance, they write, "the British learned that the Germans were operating a weather ship off the coast of Iceland. In early May the Royal Navy mounted a well-planned cutting-out operation that captured the ship along with the Enigma keys for June. Two days later the Royal Navy […] captured U-110 […] and stripped the boat of all Enigma materials, including the keys for the highly secret 'officers only' traffic.[4] The Ultra program was no successful that even two investigations by Germany over lost campaigns failed because the Germans still believed that Enigma was unbreakable.[5]

Radar is not accorded that type of attention by Murray and Millett. Further, the Germans were ultimately able to get around British radar,[6] although this was long after 1940 and thus not a factor during the "standing alone" period. The authors do point out that the Germans' failure to comprehend the U.K.'s use of radar in 1940 was a key reason that Operation Sea Lion was abandoned.[7] However, this was clearly a matter of a failure on Germany's part, rather than an innovation on Britain's. Thus, the combination of Ultra's self-perpetuating nature (more intelligence yielding more intelligence) and its decisive role in the naval war demonstrate the superiority of codebreaking over radar as military innovations.

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     [1] Williamson Murray and Allan R. Millett, A War to Be Won: Fighting the Second World War, 1937-1945 (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard UP, 2001), 255.
     [2] Ibid, 243.
     [3] Ibid, 244.
     [4] Ibid, 245.
     [5] Ibid, 246.
     [6] Ibid, 256.
     [7] Ibid, 87.

Early War Victories of Nazi Germany

Understanding why the first nine months of the war went so well for Germany has to be broken down into constituent parts. The victories of the period are essentially three: over Poland, over Scandinavia, and over France and the Low Countries. The evidence suggests that the reasons for each of these three victories were quite different. Whereas the relative ease of the defeat of Poland could be attributed in large part to a combination of diplomacy and superior technology, the comparatively more difficult campaigns against Norway and France were respectively attributable to tactics and leadership.

In the case of Poland, with this campaign, Hitler likely knew that the invasion would lead to war, given the guarantees by the U.K. and France of Poland's sovereignty. For this reason, it was necessary for Germany to resort to diplomacy with the Soviet Union to prevent the possibility of a two-front war, which had been so disastrous for Germany in the previous war. On this point, Williamson Murray and Alan R. Millett write that Hitler took advantage of an opportunity follow the Nazi occupation of Prague to conclude a deal with Stalin before the U.K. or France could "In the meantime, the British, urged on by the French, dithered in dealing with the Soviets, and by July Hitler himself had reached out to Stalin. His overtures were warmly received."[1] Having neutralized the threat of intervention from the Soviets, the Germans could easily overwhelm Poland with its inferior technology.

Regarding Scandinavia, tactics were decisive, specifically Germany's use of paratroopers. Pressed for time to occupy Norway successfully before the U.K. could occupy the country's ports, from which Germany gained steel from Sweden important to building tanks, as well as other materiel. The edge that Germany required was Norway's airfields, from which attacks on British ships could be launched by the Luftwaffe. Murray and Millett point out the importance of paratroopers to establishing control over the airfields at Oslo and Stavanger: "Control of ports and air fields allowed the Wehrmacht to dominate the Norwegian countryside, as it quickly built up its forces […] Only at Narvik, far removed from Luftwaffe bases, did the Western powers mount an effective counteroffensive."[2]

Finally in France, Murray and Millett emphasize the importance of leadership. In describing the maneuvers of General Heinz Guderian at the Meuse on May 12, 1940, the authors assign primacy to Guderian's daringness to attack without full knowledge of French defensive positions, as well as pressure from his superiors to halt. They write:

The real explanation for the catastrophe along the Meuse lies in the quality of German leadership, from generals to NCOs. It has become fashionable these days to believe that battles do not matter, or that isolated historical facts (such as the victories along the Meuse) are of little significance, a matter of mere facticity, compared to the greater “unseen” social forces molding our world. The Meuse battlefield between 13 and 15 May would, however, suggest a different view of the world. A relatively few individuals wearing field-gray uniforms, in a blood-stained, smashed-up, obscure provincial town, diverted the flow of history into darker channels. The tired, weary German infantry who seized the heights behind the Meuse and who opened the way for the armored thrust to the coast made inevitable the fall of France, the subsequent invasion of Russia, the Final Solution, and the collapse of Europe’s position in the world.[3]

Although I might not agree with the extent to which the authors tie virtually everything that followed during World War II hinging on Germany's victory in France, it is clear that the abilities of a general such as Guderian to seize an opportunity, even in the face of resistance, and make a significant difference.

In conclusion, diplomacy, tactics, and leadership all played important roles in the stunning victories of Germany between September 1939 and June 1940. The non-aggression pact with the Soviets facilitated the invasion of Poland, paratroopers proved decisive in conquering Norway, and Guderian's leadership was instrumental in victory over France. Although the victories would soon end for Germany, this combination of advantages went a long way toward Hitler's domination of the continent.

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     [1] Williamson Murray and Allan R. Millett, A War to Be Won: Fighting the Second World War, 1937-1945(Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard UP, 2001), 14.
     [2] Ibid, 65-66.
     [3] Ibid, 75.

Austria and Appeasement

First discussion post for HIS-241: World War II -- several to follow.

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I've been lucky to have come into this course having just finished HIS-240: World War I and HIS-220: Modern Europe before that. Therefore, I've considered the matters of WWI and appeasement fairly intensively and quite recently. Much of the discussion of appeasement begins with the Rhineland remilitarization or even focuses solely on the Munich conference on the Sudetenland, but arguably, appeasement began with the failed 1934 coup in Austria. Here, the failure of the United Kingdom and France to sanction Hitler and Nazi Germany after a clear act of aggression against a neighboring country was an indication that further aggression would not be countered in any significant way. The situation itself -- Austria falling prey to an attempt by Germany to overthrow its government in a coup led by Austria's Nazi party -- was a legacy of WWI.

Almost immediately upon taking power in 1933, Hitler sought to annex Austria. Despite widespread desire of Austrians for union with Germany, maintaining the existence of a weak rump Austrian state was a policy devised at the Paris Peace Conference to which the victorious allies adhered. As a result, despite a concerted terror campaign by the Austrian Nazis against the government of Chancellor Engelbert Dollfuss that was clearly being orchestrated from Berlin, the U.K. and France failed to address the attack decisively. They did, however, along with Italy, complain through their ambassadors in Berlin. Hitler responded to this complaint by referring to dispute between Germany and Austria as "an internal German affair and of no concern to others."[1] One diplomat in the British foreign office presciently stated that he believed that Hitler's attack on Austria would be the first of many.[2] Nazi terrorist violence continued into the following year, at which point the three powers issued a more stern warning to Germany.

However, the U.K. and France ultimately expected Mussolini, by now leader of Italy, to protect Austria's territorial integrity.[3] This action had the ultimately undesirable effect of pushing Austria into alliance with authoritarian states in central and eastern Europe, including Italy, Hungary, and Yugoslavia. Already operating under an authoritarian system for the previous year, Dollfuss began to implement a corporate state on the model of fascist Italy. Had the U.K. and particularly France taken a stronger stand against Hitler at that time, the Nazi coup of July 1934 and the assassination of Dollfuss during the coup attempt might not have occurred; Hitler's military was still weak at that time and not a match for France. Although Italy ultimately threatened military force in July, which helped to cause the coup to fail and guaranteed Austrian independence for almost four more years, Austria remained under authoritarian rule and became increasingly conducive to being annexed by Germany.

The failure of the U.K. and France to issue stronger warnings to Germany over the issue of Austria in 1933 and 1934, particularly with the threat of the use of force, resulted in the subsequent aggressive actions undertaken by Germany. Although Hitler was chastened to some extent by his failure in July 1934, he nevertheless knew that the U.K. and France would not take military action. When Italy invaded Ethiopia two years later and was expelled from the League of Nations, it found a friend in Germany, and Austria was ultimately abandoned. Despite having won WWI, the reluctance of the U.K. and France to engage Germany militarily -- a likely result of the heavy casualties suffered in the war. Whether this strategy was logical is certainly open to debate. One of the key points of history to bear in mind is that historians look at it with the benefit of knowing how things ended. I don't think anyone can blame the U.K. and France for being wary of military action given the relatively recent experience of WWI. However, I do think that, once it was clear that Hitler had no intention of abiding by international agreement with the Rhineland remilitarization, it was time for the U.K. and France to take concrete action.

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     [1]  Gottfried-Karl Kindermann, Hitler’s Defeat in Austria, 1933-1934: Europe’s First Containment of Nazi Expansion, translated by Sonia Brough (Boulder, Colo.: Westview Press, 1988), 38.
     [2] Ibid, 38-39.
     [3] Ibid, 41.