The Roots of War
The seeds of World War II were sown in the aftermath of World War I, during the drafting of the Treaty of Versailles, signed on June 28, 1919. Though the spark that started World War I had been ignited in Yugoslavia, the war escalated because of decades-old treaties that required other European nations to enter the fray. At war’s end, the victors expected Germany — the primary combatant — to repay them for their losses.
The terms of payment were stiff. Not only did the victors demand that Germany admit its guilt for the war, return the disputed Alsace-Lorraine region to France, and turn over its African and Middle Eastern colonies to the Allies, they also wanted Germany to pay war reparations to the Allies amounting to tens of billions of dollars. The Versailles treaty also severely limited German rearmament, and it allowed the Allies to take temporary control of the German economy. The United States did not approve of this approach to international relations and refused to either ratify the treaty or join the League of Nations that had pushed for it.
The Versailles treaty was a heavy burden for the Germans to bear, both economically and emotionally. But what made Versailles most unbearable was the way it changed Germany’s boundaries. Two huge empires, the former Austro-Hungarian Empire and the German Empire, were carved up into parcels now named Germany, Yugoslavia, Czechoslovakia, Poland, Hungary, and Austria. The great German Empire ceased to exist, and what’s more, Germans were being made to pay for the privilege. German resentment ran deep.
In such a climate, a nationalistic fanatic like Adolf Hitler found fertile ground for his goal: to restore Germany to greatness at any cost.
Hitler Takes Power
Starting in 1934, Hitler declared Germany’s obligations under the Versailles treaty to be null. He bit off little pieces of Europe — the Sudetenland in Czechoslovakia, the Rhineland, and Austria — while the rest of Europe looked the other way, hoping he would be satisfied with these seemingly insignificant territories. They reasoned that since they themselves did not yet have the military resources to wage another war, Germany could not possibly be strong enough either. And they were almost right.
Germany was indeed too weak to fight, and Hitler knew this. He further sensed the German people’s antiwar mood. But he also knew that most Germans passionately hated the Weimar Republic — established by the Allies in 1919 after World War I, and Germany’s only attempt at democracy up to that time — and blamed it for Germany’s embarrassing defeat as well as for the current economic disaster. Most Germans craved a return to strong military leadership, which, though it meant giving up most of their personal freedom, also gave them relative prosperity and security. After all, rearming Germany would put lots of people back to work, and it held out the hope of restoring Germany to its position of military power — two prospects that convinced most Germans to give Hitler their support.
This was the atmosphere in which Hitler formed the Nazi party and gained a majority in the Reichstag, Germany’s parliament. Once in the majority, Hitler and his party worked quickly to issue decrees, all under the terms of the Weimar constitution, with the intention of securing absolute power. In 1933, in one of history’s great ironies, the German people legally gave absolute power to Hitler, and they did so under the laws of the Weimar Republic they so detested.
