R4.9 Europe and the Second World War (1918–1949)

Between 1918 and 1949 Europe moved from one world war to another and then into the division of the Cold War. The League of Nations was created to make another war impossible; twenty years later the war it failed to prevent killed tens of millions of people, among them about six million Jews murdered in the Holocaust.

The League of Nations: aims, organisation and structure

The League of Nations was the first permanent international organisation designed to keep the peace. The US president, Woodrow Wilson, made it the fourteenth of his Fourteen Points, and its founding document, the Covenant, was written into each of the Paris peace treaties of 1919–1920. The League came into being on 10 January 1920, when the Treaty of Versailles took effect, and had its headquarters in Geneva, in neutral Switzerland.

Aims

The League’s central idea was collective security: if every member promised to defend every other member against aggression, no state would dare to attack another. Several articles of the Covenant set out how this was meant to work.

• Disarmament (Article 8): members accepted that peace required "the reduction of national armaments to the lowest point consistent with national safety".

• Mutual guarantee (Article 10): members promised to respect and preserve one another’s territory and independence against external aggression.

• Peaceful settlement of disputes (Articles 12–15): members were to take disputes to arbitration, to a court or to the Council, and not to go to war until three months after a decision.

• Sanctions (Article 16): a state that went to war in breach of the Covenant would face economic and, possibly, military action from all members.

• Social and humanitarian work (Articles 22–25): supervising the former German and Ottoman colonies as mandates, and improving labour conditions, health and the treatment of refugees and minorities.

The words of Article 16 show both the ambition of the Covenant and its limits. The economic sanctions were automatic in theory; military action was only something the Council could "recommend".

Should any Member of the League resort to war in disregard of its covenants under Articles 12, 13 or 15, it shall ipso facto be deemed to have committed an act of war against all other Members of the League, which hereby undertake immediately to subject it to the severance of all trade or financial relations […]

It shall be the duty of the Council in such case to recommend to the several Governments concerned what effective military, naval or air force the Members of the League shall severally contribute to the armed forces to be used to protect the covenants of the League.

Covenant of the League of Nations, Article 16, signed 28 June 1919 as Part I of the Treaty of Versailles. The Covenant was drafted mainly by British and American lawyers and politicians, who wanted a League that could deter war without binding their own countries to fight automatically. The gap between the firm language on sanctions and the weak "recommend" on military force reflected the unwillingness of the members to commit themselves in advance, and it is the weakness that the crises of the 1930s exposed.

Organisation and structure

The diagram of the League’s organisation shows its three main bodies and its agencies.

• The Assembly included every member state, each with one vote. It met once a year in September, controlled the budget and admitted new members. There were 42 founding members, and membership peaked at about 58 in the mid-1930s.

• The Council met several times a year and dealt with crises. Its permanent members were Britain, France, Italy and Japan; Germany held a permanent seat from 1926 to 1933 and the USSR from 1934 to 1939. Elected non-permanent members (four at first, later more) sat beside them.

• The Secretariat was an international civil service of several hundred officials, led until 1933 by the British diplomat Sir Eric Drummond.

• The Permanent Court of International Justice at The Hague (1922) judged legal disputes between states that agreed to use it. The International Labour Organization (ILO) promoted better working conditions, and commissions dealt with mandates, refugees, health, minorities, drugs and slavery.

Decisions of the Assembly and the Council normally had to be unanimous, so a single member could block action. The League had no army of its own and depended on its members, above all Britain and France, to enforce its decisions.

Strengths and weaknesses from the start

The League had serious weaknesses from its first day. The US Senate refused to ratify the Treaty of Versailles in November 1919 and March 1920, so the USA, the world’s largest economy, never joined. Germany was excluded until 1926 and Soviet Russia until 1934, so for most of the 1920s the League looked like a club of the victors. Britain and France, the two most important members, also disagreed about its purpose: France wanted a League that would enforce the peace treaties against Germany, while Britain wanted a forum for conciliation and was unwilling to take on new military commitments.

The League’s humanitarian agencies achieved more than its security system. The Norwegian explorer Fridtjof Nansen, as High Commissioner for Refugees from 1921, organised the return home of hundreds of thousands of prisoners of war and created the Nansen passport (1922), an identity document for stateless refugees that more than fifty governments recognised. The Health Organisation fought typhus and cholera in eastern Europe, and the League arranged international loans that stabilised the finances of Austria (1922) and Hungary (1924).

The League and disputes in the 1920s

In the 1920s the League dealt with a series of disputes between smaller states, many of them caused by the new borders drawn after 1918. Its record depended less on the Covenant than on whether a great power was involved.

The Corfu incident, 1923

The Corfu incident was the first test of the League against a great power. On 27 August 1923 the Italian general Enrico Tellini and members of his staff were murdered on Greek territory while marking the Greek–Albanian border for the Conference of Ambassadors, the body of Allied diplomats that supervised the peace treaties. Mussolini, in power for less than a year, blamed Greece, demanded an apology and compensation, and on 31 August bombarded and occupied the Greek island of Corfu, killing at least sixteen civilians.

Greece appealed to the League Council, but Italy was a permanent member and refused to accept its authority. Britain and France preferred to settle the matter through the Conference of Ambassadors, which ordered Greece to apologise and to pay Italy 50 million lire, although the murderers were never identified. Italian troops left Corfu on 27 September. The lesson many drew was that a great power could use force against a weaker member and be rewarded, and that the League would step aside when one of its leading members was the aggressor.

The search for collective security and disarmament, 1923–1934

Because the Covenant left gaps, statesmen spent much of the 1920s trying to strengthen it or to build security outside it. Two approaches ran side by side: stronger guarantees against aggression, which France wanted, and general disarmament, which Britain and Germany favoured for different reasons.

Guarantees: from the Geneva Protocol to Locarno

The Draft Treaty of Mutual Assistance (1923) and the Geneva Protocol (1924) tried to close the gaps in the Covenant by making arbitration compulsory and defining any state that refused it as the aggressor. The British Labour government of Ramsay MacDonald supported the Protocol, but the Conservative government that replaced it rejected it in March 1925, because it would have committed Britain to act against aggression anywhere in the world.

Security in western Europe came instead from the Locarno treaties, agreed in October 1925. Germany, France and Belgium accepted their common borders as fixed, including the demilitarised Rhineland, and Britain and Italy guaranteed them. Germany also signed arbitration treaties with Poland and Czechoslovakia, but did not accept its eastern borders as final, and Britain gave no guarantee in the east. In September 1926 Germany joined the League with a permanent seat on the Council.

The Kellogg–Briand Pact of August 1928, proposed by Briand and the US secretary of state Frank Kellogg, went further in words. Its signatories, eventually more than sixty states, renounced war "as an instrument of national policy". It had no means of enforcement and did not define self-defence, so states that later went to war simply did not declare it.

Disarmament

Article 8 of the Covenant committed members to reduce their armaments, and Germany had been disarmed by the Treaty of Versailles on the understanding that others would follow. The naval powers limited their battleship fleets at the Washington Conference (1921–1922), held outside the League, but land armaments were much harder to compare and limit. The World Disarmament Conference finally opened in Geneva in February 1932, with sixty states attending.

The conference stalled on the question of German equality. Germany demanded either that the others disarm to its level or that it be allowed to rearm; France, which had been invaded twice in fifty years, refused to give up its military advantage without firm guarantees. In December 1932 the powers accepted German equality "in principle", but in October 1933 Hitler withdrew Germany from both the conference and the League, claiming that it was still treated as a second-class nation. The conference ended in failure in 1934.

The League and the crises of the 1930s

The Great Depression that began in 1929 changed the problems the League faced. Governments turned to tariffs and national recovery, democracies became reluctant to spend on armaments or risk trade through sanctions, and nationalist dictatorships in Japan, Italy and Germany looked to expansion as a solution to economic crisis.

Manchuria, 1931–1933: the precedent

In September 1931 the Japanese army in Manchuria, in north-east China, staged an explosion on a Japanese-owned railway near Mukden and used it as a pretext to occupy the whole region, where it set up the puppet state of Manchukuo in 1932. China appealed to the League, which sent a commission of inquiry under the British politician Lord Lytton. The Lytton Report (October 1932) condemned the invasion and recommended that Manchuria be returned to Chinese rule as an autonomous region. When the Assembly adopted the report in February 1933, Japan announced its withdrawal from the League. No sanctions were imposed, because the only powers able to act, Britain and the USA, were unwilling to risk war in the Far East. Manchuria lay outside Europe, but it showed European dictators that a great power could defy the League without paying a price.

The Abyssinian crisis, 1934–1936

Ethiopia (then usually called Abyssinia in Europe) was one of the few independent states in Africa and, since 1923, a member of the League. Italy had colonies on its borders, in Eritrea and Italian Somaliland, and Italian nationalists had not forgotten the defeat of an Italian army by Ethiopia at Adwa in 1896. Mussolini wanted a colonial empire for prestige, for settlement and to show that Fascist Italy was a great power. The timeline of the crisis shows how it developed.

In December 1934 Italian and Ethiopian troops clashed at the oasis of Walwal, where Italy had built a fort about 100 kilometres beyond the border agreed in 1908, and Mussolini demanded compensation. The emperor, Haile Selassie, appealed to the League, which delayed for most of 1935. Britain and France had a second concern: they wanted Italian support against Germany, and in April 1935 they met Mussolini at Stresa to protest against German rearmament, a meeting at which Abyssinia was not seriously raised. Two months later Britain signed the Anglo-German Naval Agreement, which allowed Germany a navy of 35 per cent of the size of Britain’s, without consulting France or Italy. Mussolini drew the conclusion that his partners put their own interests first.

Italy invaded Ethiopia on 3 October 1935. On 7 October the League Council declared Italy the aggressor, and from 18 November about fifty member states applied sanctions: an embargo on arms, a ban on loans and on imports from Italy, and a ban on the export of some raw materials. The sanctions did not include oil, coal or steel, which Italy needed most, and Britain did not close the Suez Canal, through which Italian troops and supplies passed. The USA and Germany, which were not members, continued to trade with Italy.

In December 1935 the British foreign secretary, Sir Samuel Hoare, and the French prime minister, Pierre Laval, agreed a plan to end the war by giving Italy large parts of Ethiopia, roughly two-thirds of the country, in return for a corridor to the sea for the emperor. When the Hoare–Laval Pact was leaked to the French press, public anger in Britain forced Hoare to resign. The plan was dropped, but the damage was done: the two leading members of the League had been caught trying to reward the aggressor.

The Italian army, using aircraft and poison gas against soldiers and civilians, entered the capital, Addis Ababa, on 5 May 1936, and Italy annexed the country. On 30 June Haile Selassie addressed the League Assembly in Geneva.

I assert that the problem submitted to the Assembly today is a much wider one. It is not merely a question of the settlement of Italian aggression. It is collective security: it is the very existence of the League of Nations. It is the confidence that each State is to place in international treaties. It is the value of promises made to small States that their integrity and their independence shall be respected and ensured.

Haile Selassie, Emperor of Ethiopia, speech to the Assembly of the League of Nations, Geneva, 30 June 1936 (official English translation; he spoke in Amharic). The emperor was appealing for help that he knew was unlikely, and he framed Ethiopia’s defeat as a test of the whole system so that smaller European states would see their own danger in it. Its value lies in showing how the crisis looked to the victim of aggression; it is not evidence of how the great powers weighed their choices.

The League lifted its sanctions in July 1936, and Italy left the League in December 1937. The crisis had three lasting results. It discredited collective security, so that smaller states such as Belgium returned to neutrality. It broke the Stresa Front and pushed Mussolini towards Hitler, who had supported Italy. And it distracted Britain and France at the moment when Hitler made his first open breach of the Locarno treaties.

The Rhineland and Spain

On 7 March 1936 German troops marched into the demilitarised Rhineland, breaking both the Treaty of Versailles and the Locarno treaties that Germany had signed freely. The force was small, and German commanders had orders to withdraw if France resisted. France, in the middle of an election campaign and unwilling to act without Britain, only protested; the British government and much of British opinion regarded the Rhineland as Germany’s own territory. The League Council condemned the breach but took no action.

In July 1936 civil war broke out in Spain between the elected Republican government and Nationalist rebels led by General Franco. Britain and France organised a Non-Intervention Committee in London to stop foreign help reaching either side; Germany and Italy joined it and ignored it, sending aircraft, tanks and tens of thousands of Italian troops to Franco, while the USSR aided the Republic. The bombing of Guernica by the German Condor Legion in April 1937 showed the power of air attack on civilians. The war in Spain itself is a separate regional study; for Europe it brought Germany and Italy together and showed again that Britain and France would avoid confrontation.

Why did the League fail to prevent aggression in the 1930s?

Italian foreign policy, 1922–1941

Benito Mussolini came to power in October 1922 promising to make Italy respected abroad. Many Italians believed that Italy had been cheated at the peace conference of 1919, where it did not receive all the territory promised in the Treaty of London (1915), and Fascism glorified war and empire. Mussolini spoke of making the Mediterranean mare nostrum ("our sea") and of winning spazio vitale (living space) in the Balkans and Africa.

Cautious revisionism, 1922–1934

In the 1920s Mussolini combined bursts of aggression with respectable diplomacy. After Corfu (1923), he gained the port of Fiume by agreement with Yugoslavia in the Treaty of Rome (January 1924). He made Albania an Italian protectorate in all but name through the Tirana pacts of 1926 and 1927, and he signed the Locarno treaties as a guarantor in 1925 and the Kellogg–Briand Pact in 1928. Italy at this stage was a satisfied partner of Britain and France more than a threat.

Mussolini also saw Nazi Germany as a rival in central Europe, where he wanted an independent Austria under Italian influence. When Austrian Nazis murdered the chancellor, Engelbert Dollfuss, in a failed coup in July 1934, Mussolini moved troops to the Brenner Pass on the Austrian border, and Hitler disowned the plotters. In April 1935 Italy joined Britain and France in the Stresa Front, which condemned German rearmament.

From Stresa to the Axis, 1935–1939

The Abyssinian war changed Italy’s alignment. Britain and France had imposed sanctions; Germany had not. Italy and Germany then fought on the same side in Spain from 1936. In October 1936 they signed a secret protocol, and on 1 November Mussolini announced in Milan that Europe now turned on a Rome–Berlin Axis. Italy joined the Anti-Comintern Pact with Germany and Japan in November 1937 and left the League a month later.

As Italy depended more on Germany, Mussolini gave up his defence of Austria and accepted the Anschluss in March 1938. At Munich in September 1938 he presented himself as the mediator, although he put forward a plan drafted in Berlin. In April 1939, after Hitler had taken Prague without warning him, Mussolini invaded Albania to show that Italy could expand too. On 22 May 1939 Italy and Germany signed the Pact of Steel, a full military alliance, although Mussolini told Hitler that Italy would not be ready for a major war until 1943.

Italy at war, 1939–1941

When Germany invaded Poland, Mussolini declared Italy a "non-belligerent", because its army and economy were not ready. He entered the war on 10 June 1940, when France was about to fall, hoping to share in the victory at little cost. Italian forces then suffered a series of defeats. The invasion of Greece from Albania on 28 October 1940 was driven back, British forces destroyed an Italian army in Libya in the winter of 1940–1941, and the Royal Navy crippled the Italian fleet at Taranto in November 1940. Germany had to rescue its ally by sending Rommel’s Afrika Korps to North Africa in February 1941 and by conquering Yugoslavia and Greece in April 1941. By then Italy was a junior partner of Germany.

These views can be weighed against the timing of Mussolini’s choices. His caution before 1935 fits the realist interpretation, but his willingness to fight in Ethiopia and Spain and to join Germany in 1940, against the advice of his generals and economists, fits Knox’s argument that ideology mattered more as the regime aged.

German foreign policy, 1919–1939

Weimar revisionism, 1919–1933

Almost every German government after 1919 wanted to revise the Treaty of Versailles: to reduce reparations, recover the lands lost to Poland, end the occupation of the Rhineland and regain equality in armaments. The aim was shared across most of German politics; what divided Weimar governments from Hitler was method and how far they wanted to go. The terms of the treaty and the crises of 1919–1923 are part of the study of the First World War; here they matter as the starting point of German policy.

The Weimar Republic pursued revision by diplomacy. In the Treaty of Rapallo (April 1922) Germany and Soviet Russia restored relations, and secret cooperation followed in which the German army trained with tanks and aircraft on Soviet soil. Gustav Stresemann, foreign minister from 1923 to 1929, followed a policy of fulfilment: by meeting Germany’s obligations he won concessions, from lower reparations to Locarno, League membership (1926) and the early end of the Rhineland occupation (1930).

Hitler’s aims

Adolf Hitler set out his ideas in Mein Kampf (1925–1926) and in an unpublished "Second Book" written in 1928. Three aims run through them. The first was to overturn Versailles and rearm. The second was to unite all ethnic Germans in one Reich, including Austria and the German minorities of Czechoslovakia and Poland. The third, and the most radical, was to conquer Lebensraum ("living space") in the east, above all in Poland and the Soviet Union, to be settled by Germans at the expense of the Slav peoples living there. These aims were bound up with Hitler’s racism: he saw politics as a struggle between races, regarded Slavs as inferior, and identified Jews with Bolshevism as Germany’s mortal enemy.

The first two aims were shared by many Germans and could be presented abroad as a reasonable revision of an unjust treaty. The third meant war with the USSR and the destruction of the European order, and Hitler did not speak of it in public after 1933. Hitler’s rise to power in 1933 and his domestic rule are studied elsewhere; the question here is how his aims shaped his foreign policy.

Breaking free from Versailles, 1933–1936

Hitler’s first years in power combined secret preparation with reassurance. The timeline of German foreign policy from 1933 to 1939 shows how each step tested the response of the other powers.

In October 1933 Germany left the World Disarmament Conference and the League. In January 1934 Hitler surprised Europe with a ten-year non-aggression pact with Poland, which weakened France’s alliance system in the east. His first setback came in July 1934, when Austrian Nazis murdered the Austrian chancellor, Engelbert Dollfuss, but failed to seize power, and Mussolini’s troops at the Brenner Pass forced Hitler to disown them.

From 1935 Hitler moved openly. In January 1935 about 91 per cent of voters in the Saar, which had been run by the League since 1920, chose to return to Germany in a plebiscite held under the peace treaty. In March 1935 Hitler announced conscription, an army of thirty-six divisions and an air force, the Luftwaffe, all forbidden by Versailles. The Stresa Front protested, but in June Britain signed the Anglo-German Naval Agreement, accepting German rearmament at sea. The remilitarisation of the Rhineland in March 1936 completed the first phase: Germany’s western border was now defended, and France could no longer easily march into Germany to help its eastern allies.

Preparing for expansion, 1936–1937

In August 1936 Hitler wrote a secret memorandum for the Four-Year Plan, which demanded that the German army be ready for action and the economy fit for war within four years. Germany intervened in the Spanish Civil War from July 1936, and in October–November 1936 it formed the Rome–Berlin Axis and signed the Anti-Comintern Pact with Japan, directed against the Communist International.

On 5 November 1937 Hitler met his war minister, the commanders of the three armed services and the foreign minister in the Reich Chancellery. The minutes, written five days later by his adjutant, Colonel Friedrich Hossbach, became known as the Hossbach Memorandum.

The aim of German policy was to make secure and to preserve the racial community [Volksmasse] and to enlarge it. It was therefore a question of space. […]

Germany’s problem could only be solved by means of force and this was never without attendant risk. […]

If the Fuehrer was still living, it was his unalterable resolve to solve Germany’s problem of space at the latest by 1943-45. […] our first objective, in the event of our being embroiled in war, must be to overthrow Czechoslovakia and Austria simultaneously in order to remove the threat to our flank in any possible operation against the West.

Friedrich Hossbach, minutes of a conference in the Reich Chancellery on 5 November 1937, dated 10 November 1937 (translation used at the Nuremberg trials, document 386-PS). The memorandum was an unofficial summary, written from notes after the meeting, and it was used at Nuremberg as evidence that the Nazi leaders had planned aggressive war. A. J. P. Taylor argued that Hitler was speaking to win support for rearmament in a dispute over raw materials, and that the scenarios he described did not match what happened. Its value lies in showing that Hitler talked to his commanders about war for space within a few years; it is weaker as evidence of a fixed timetable.

Within three months the two leading generals who had raised objections at the meeting, Werner von Blomberg and Werner von Fritsch, had been removed in personal scandals (February 1938). Hitler took personal command of the armed forces, and the conservative foreign minister, Konstantin von Neurath, was replaced by the Nazi Joachim von Ribbentrop.

The Anschluss, March 1938

Union with Austria had been forbidden by the Treaties of Versailles and Saint-Germain. In February 1938 Hitler bullied the Austrian chancellor, Kurt Schuschnigg, into appointing an Austrian Nazi, Arthur Seyss-Inquart, as interior minister. When Schuschnigg called a plebiscite on Austrian independence for 13 March, Hitler demanded that it be cancelled and that Schuschnigg resign. German troops crossed the border on 12 March unopposed, and the Anschluss (union) was proclaimed on 13 March. A plebiscite held under Nazi control in April recorded more than 99 per cent approval.

Britain and France protested but did nothing; Mussolini, now tied to Hitler, accepted it. The Anschluss added about 6.7 million people to the Reich, gave Germany Austria’s gold reserves and iron ore, and surrounded western Czechoslovakia on three sides. Austrian Jews were immediately subjected to public humiliation, plunder and forced emigration.

The Sudeten crisis, 1938

Czechoslovakia was the only democracy left in central Europe. It had a strong army, fortifications along its mountain borders and the Škoda arms works, and it was allied to France (1924) and the USSR (1935). About three million Germans lived in its border regions, the Sudetenland, and the largest of their parties, Konrad Henlein’s Sudeten German Party, was funded and directed from Berlin. Henlein was told to demand more than the Prague government could give.

In May 1938 Hitler told his generals that it was his "unalterable decision" to destroy Czechoslovakia by military action, and set 1 October as the date. On 12 September he denounced the Czechs in a speech at the Nuremberg rally, and riots followed in the Sudetenland. The British prime minister, Neville Chamberlain, then flew to meet Hitler three times.

• Berchtesgaden, 15 September: Hitler demanded the Sudetenland. Chamberlain agreed in principle, and Britain and France forced the Czechoslovak government to accept the transfer of areas with a German majority.

• Bad Godesberg, 22–23 September: Hitler raised his demands, insisting on immediate military occupation by 1 October and on the claims of Poland and Hungary. Chamberlain refused, Czechoslovakia mobilised, the Royal Navy was put on alert and trenches were dug in London parks.

• Munich, 29–30 September: at Mussolini’s suggestion, Hitler, Chamberlain, the French prime minister Édouard Daladier and Mussolini met in Munich. Neither Czechoslovakia nor the USSR was invited.

The Munich Agreement gave Germany the Sudetenland, to be occupied in stages between 1 and 10 October, with an international commission to settle the details. Britain and France promised to guarantee what remained of Czechoslovakia. Poland seized the Teschen district in October, and Hungary received southern Slovakia in the Vienna Award of November 1938. Czechoslovakia lost its frontier fortifications, much of its industry and about a third of its population.

The end of Czechoslovakia and the Polish crisis, 1939

On 15 March 1939 German troops occupied Prague. Bohemia and Moravia became a German "protectorate", and Slovakia became a nominally independent state under German protection. A week later Lithuania was forced to hand over the port of Memel. For the first time Hitler had seized territory where the people were not German, and the claim that he only wanted to unite Germans could no longer be believed.

Hitler now turned to Poland, demanding the return of the Free City of Danzig, which was under League supervision, and a road and rail link across the Polish Corridor, which separated East Prussia from the rest of Germany. On 31 March 1939 Chamberlain announced that Britain and France would support Poland if its independence were threatened; guarantees to Romania and Greece followed in April, and Britain introduced peacetime conscription. In April Hitler ordered plans for an attack on Poland, and on 22 May he signed the Pact of Steel with Italy.

Appeasement, Chamberlain and the Munich crisis

Appeasement was not invented by Chamberlain. British governments in the 1920s had already accepted that parts of the Versailles settlement should be revised, and Stanley Baldwin’s governments (1935–1937) accepted German rearmament and the Rhineland. What changed when Chamberlain became prime minister in May 1937 was that appeasement became an active policy, run personally by the prime minister. Chamberlain sent the Lord President of the Council, Lord Halifax, to meet Hitler in November 1937, opened talks with Mussolini, and pushed his foreign secretary, Anthony Eden, into resignation in February 1938.

Why did Britain appease Germany?

The diagram of the reasons for appeasement groups the pressures on the British government.

• Memory and opinion. About 750,000 British servicemen had died in 1914–1918. In February 1933 the Oxford Union debating society voted that it would "in no circumstances fight for its King and Country", and in the Peace Ballot of 1934–1935, organised by the League of Nations Union, 11.6 million people voted, with large majorities for the League, disarmament and economic sanctions.

• Fear of bombing. In 1932 Baldwin had told the House of Commons that "the bomber will always get through"; planners expected a German air attack to kill hundreds of thousands of Londoners in weeks.

• Military and economic weakness. The chiefs of staff warned that Britain could not fight Germany, Italy and Japan at once. The Treasury feared that rearming too fast would ruin the economy, and the new fighters and radar chain would not be ready until about 1939.

• The empire and allies. At the Imperial Conference of 1937 the Dominions made clear they would not fight over central Europe; the US Neutrality Acts (1935–1937) kept the USA out; France looked to Britain for a lead; and many Conservatives saw the USSR as a greater danger than Germany.

• A sense of German grievance. Many British politicians thought Versailles too harsh, and that Germans in the Rhineland, Austria and the Sudetenland had a fair claim to self-determination.

Chamberlain added his own convictions. He believed that Hitler’s aims were limited and could be satisfied, that personal meetings between leaders could achieve what diplomats could not, and that war would destroy Britain’s economy and empire whoever won. In a radio broadcast on 27 September 1938, between the Godesberg and Munich meetings, he explained his view to the British people.

How horrible, fantastic, incredible it is that we should be digging trenches and trying on gas-masks here because of a quarrel in a far away country between people of whom we know nothing. […] I am myself a man of peace to the depths of my soul. Armed conflict between nations is a nightmare to me; but if I were convinced that any nation had made up its mind to dominate the world by fear of its force, I should feel that it must be resisted.

Neville Chamberlain, prime minister, radio broadcast from 10 Downing Street, 27 September 1938. Chamberlain spoke to a frightened public on the day the fleet was mobilised, and his purpose was to justify a last attempt at a settlement while preparing opinion for war if it failed. The phrase "a far away country" was later quoted against him as proof of indifference to the Czechs; read in full, the broadcast also shows that he accepted that a power seeking to dominate by force would have to be resisted, and that he did not yet believe Hitler was such a leader.

Munich: peace with honour or a defeat?

On the morning of 30 September Chamberlain asked Hitler to sign a short declaration that the two countries regarded the Munich Agreement and the Anglo-German Naval Agreement "as symbolic of the desire of our two peoples never to go to war with one another again". He showed it to the crowd when he landed in England.

That evening, outside 10 Downing Street, Chamberlain told the crowd that he believed it was "peace for our time". The reception was overwhelmingly favourable. In the Commons debate on Munich, however, Winston Churchill told the House on 5 October that "we have sustained a total and unmitigated defeat", and the first lord of the Admiralty, Duff Cooper, resigned. After Kristallnacht in November 1938 and the occupation of Prague in March 1939, opinion turned decisively against any further concessions.

The table of arguments about Munich shows why it remains contested: the case that Munich "bought time" is strongest for air defence, which won the Battle of Britain in 1940; the case against it is strongest for the balance on land, where Germany gained more from the year than Britain did.

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French and Soviet foreign policies

France: security without the will to act

France had been invaded by Germany in 1870 and 1914, and its whole interwar policy aimed at security against a third invasion. In the 1920s it relied on a strict enforcement of Versailles (it occupied the Ruhr in 1923 to force reparations payments), on alliances with the new states of eastern Europe (Poland in 1921, Czechoslovakia in 1924, and links with the Little Entente of Czechoslovakia, Romania and Yugoslavia), and on the League.

From 1929 France also began building the Maginot Line, a chain of fortifications along its border with Germany. The line reflected a defensive military doctrine shaped by the losses of 1914–1918, and it created a contradiction: France had promised to help its eastern allies, but its army was built to wait behind fortifications, not to attack Germany. After the Rhineland was remilitarised in 1936, German fortifications in the west made French help to Poland or Czechoslovakia even harder.

In the 1930s France was weakened by political division and economic difficulty. Governments changed frequently, the right feared communism more than Germany, and the Popular Front government of the socialist Léon Blum (1936–1937) was distrusted by the army and the propertied classes. France signed a pact with the USSR in May 1935 but never turned it into a military alliance. Above all, French leaders believed that France could not fight Germany without Britain, so after 1936 they followed the British lead. Édouard Daladier, prime minister from April 1938, had few illusions about Hitler, but he went to Munich because Britain would not support France in a war over Czechoslovakia.

The USSR: from collective security to the pact with Hitler

Soviet foreign policy in the 1920s was hostile to the League, which it saw as a club of capitalist powers. Hitler’s rise changed this. The foreign commissar, Maxim Litvinov, argued that the USSR should work with the western democracies against fascism, and the USSR joined the League in September 1934. In May 1935 it signed mutual assistance pacts with France and with Czechoslovakia, although the Czech pact obliged the USSR to help only if France did so first. From 1935 the Communist International told communist parties to join "popular fronts" with socialists and liberals against fascism, and the USSR sent aid to the Spanish Republic.

Stalin had reasons to doubt the West. Britain and France did nothing over the Rhineland or Austria, they excluded the USSR from Munich, and Stalin suspected that they hoped to turn Hitler eastwards against communism. The western powers had their own doubts: Stalin’s purges had executed most of the Red Army’s senior commanders in 1937–1938, so the army looked weak, and Poland and Romania refused to let Soviet troops cross their territory, since they feared the Red Army would never leave.

In the spring of 1939 Britain and France opened talks with the USSR. On 3 May Stalin replaced Litvinov, who was Jewish and associated with collective security, with Vyacheslav Molotov, a signal that other options were open. The Anglo-French military mission was sent to Moscow by slow passenger ship, arrived only on 11 August, and was led by officers without authority to make decisions. When the Soviet side asked whether the Red Army could enter Poland to fight Germany, the mission could not answer, because Poland refused. Meanwhile, German diplomats were offering what the western powers could not: territory and a free hand in eastern Europe.

The Nazi–Soviet Pact and the invasion of Poland

On 23 August 1939 Ribbentrop flew to Moscow and signed the Nazi–Soviet Pact with Molotov. Publicly it was a ten-year non-aggression treaty: each side promised not to attack the other and to stay neutral if the other went to war. A trade agreement signed a few days earlier would supply Germany with Soviet raw materials and food. The pact had a secret additional protocol, whose existence the USSR denied until 1989.

1. In the event of a territorial and political rearrangement in the areas belonging to the Baltic States (Finland, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania), the northern boundary of Lithuania shall represent the boundary of the spheres of influence of Germany and the U.S.S.R. […]

2. In the event of a territorial and political rearrangement of the areas belonging to the Polish state the spheres of influence of Germany and the U.S.S.R. shall be bounded approximately by the line of the rivers Narew, Vistula, and San.

The question of whether the interests of both parties make desirable the maintenance of an independent Polish state and how such a state should be bounded can only be definitely determined in the course of further political developments.

Secret additional protocol to the Treaty of Non-Aggression between Germany and the USSR, Moscow, 23 August 1939 (translation published by the US State Department in Nazi–Soviet Relations 1939–1941, 1948, from captured German files). The protocol was meant to stay secret, and its cool language about "territorial and political rearrangement" shows that both governments were planning the partition of a neutral state. It was published by the US government in 1948, at the start of the Cold War, partly to embarrass the USSR; its authenticity, long denied in Moscow, was confirmed when the Soviet original was released in 1992.

Why did Hitler and Stalin make the pact?

For Hitler the pact meant that Poland could be destroyed without Soviet resistance, and he expected that Britain and France, deprived of any eastern ally, would not fight. Britain answered by turning its guarantee into a formal alliance with Poland on 25 August. Mussolini told Hitler that Italy could not join a war yet.

The outbreak of war, September 1939

On the night of 31 August SS men dressed in Polish uniforms staged an attack on the German radio station at Gleiwitz, on the Polish border, to give Hitler a pretext. At dawn on 1 September 1939 German forces invaded Poland. Britain and France sent ultimatums demanding German withdrawal, and when these expired declared war on 3 September. On 17 September the Red Army invaded eastern Poland. Warsaw surrendered on 27 September, and Poland was divided between Germany and the USSR along a line close to the one in the secret protocol.

From European war to world war, 1939–1941

Hitler’s foreign policy did not end in September 1939; the war widened in stages until, by December 1941, Germany was at war with the three largest powers in the world. Understanding this period explains how a German–Polish war became the Second World War in Europe.

Victories in the west, 1939–1940

After Poland fell, Britain and France did not attack Germany in the west. The months of inaction from October 1939 to April 1940 are known as the Phoney War. In the east, the USSR forced the Baltic states to accept Soviet bases and attacked Finland in the Winter War (November 1939–March 1940), for which it was expelled from the League; the Finns resisted fiercely but had to give up territory. In April 1940 Germany occupied Denmark and Norway to secure the route for Swedish iron ore. The failure of the British campaign in Norway brought down Chamberlain, and Winston Churchill became prime minister on 10 May 1940.

The same day Germany attacked the Netherlands, Belgium, Luxembourg and France. The main German armoured force advanced through the wooded Ardennes, which the French had thought impassable for tanks, crossed the River Meuse at Sedan and drove to the Channel coast, cutting off the best British and French armies in Belgium. About 338,000 British and French soldiers were evacuated from Dunkirk between 26 May and 4 June. France signed an armistice on 22 June 1940; Germany occupied the north and the Atlantic coast, and a collaborating French government under Marshal Philippe Pétain ruled the south from the spa town of Vichy.

Britain alone, 1940–1941

Hitler expected Britain to make peace. When Churchill refused, Germany prepared an invasion, which required control of the air over the Channel. In the Battle of Britain (July–October 1940) the Royal Air Force, using radar and a well-organised fighter control system, prevented the Luftwaffe from winning that control, and Hitler postponed the invasion in September. The Luftwaffe turned to night bombing of British cities, the Blitz, until May 1941. Britain survived with growing American help: the US Lend-Lease Act of March 1941 allowed the president to supply war materials to Britain without immediate payment. In September 1940 Germany, Italy and Japan signed the Tripartite Pact, promising to support one another against any new enemy, a warning aimed at the USA. Italy’s defeats in Greece and North Africa drew Germany into the Mediterranean, and in April 1941 German forces conquered Yugoslavia and Greece.

Operation Barbarossa and the widening of the war, 1941

On 22 June 1941 Germany and its allies invaded the USSR with more than three million German troops, in Operation Barbarossa. This was the war for Lebensraum that Hitler had written about since the 1920s, and it was planned from the start as a war of annihilation against "Jewish Bolshevism" and the Slav population. The Red Army lost millions of men killed or captured in the first months, but the Germans failed to take Moscow, and on 5 December the Soviet counter-offensive began. Two days later Japan attacked the US fleet at Pearl Harbor. On 11 December Hitler declared war on the USA, a decision that historians regard as one of his greatest mistakes, because it brought American power directly into the European war.

Why did war break out in Europe in 1939?

The causes of the war can be weighed using the diagram of causes grouped by timescale.

Most historians agree that Hitler’s aims were the central cause: no other European leader wanted a major war, and Hitler’s aims could not be achieved without one. The other factors explain why he was able to pursue them. The peace settlement gave Germany grievances and left it potentially the strongest state in Europe, surrounded by weak new states; the Depression brought Hitler to power and undermined international cooperation; the League and collective security failed when tested by Japan and Italy; and appeasement allowed Germany to rearm and expand while the western powers were weak.

The Nazi–Soviet Pact was the immediate cause of war in September 1939, because it freed Hitler from the danger of a war on two fronts. Whether the western powers could have prevented it by offering Stalin more in 1939, or whether Stalin always preferred the German offer, is one of the questions historians still debate.

Reasons for Axis defeat and Allied victory, 1941–1945

At the end of 1941 Germany and its allies controlled most of Europe from the Atlantic to the outskirts of Moscow. Three and a half years later Germany was occupied and divided. The timeline of the war in Europe shows the shape of the change: Axis victories until 1941, turning points between the autumn of 1942 and the summer of 1943, and Allied advances from 1943 to 1945.

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The turning points, 1942–1943

• Stalingrad (August 1942–February 1943). The German summer offensive of 1942 aimed at the oil of the Caucasus. Hitler insisted on taking the city of Stalingrad on the Volga, and in November 1942 a Soviet counter-offensive, Operation Uranus, encircled the German Sixth Army there. Hitler forbade a break-out, and its last units surrendered on 2 February 1943; about 91,000 Germans were taken prisoner. It was the first time a whole German army had been destroyed.

• North Africa (October–November 1942). The British Eighth Army under Bernard Montgomery defeated Rommel at El Alamein, in Egypt, and Anglo-American forces landed in Morocco and Algeria in Operation Torch. By May 1943 the Axis forces in North Africa had surrendered in Tunisia.

• The Battle of the Atlantic (to May 1943). German U-boats sank millions of tons of Allied shipping in 1942. Escort carriers, long-range aircraft, radar and the breaking of the German naval Enigma code turned the battle; after losing more than forty U-boats in May 1943, the German navy withdrew them from the North Atlantic.

• Kursk (July 1943). The last major German offensive in the east was stopped by deep Soviet defences, and the Red Army held the initiative for the rest of the war. The Allies landed in Sicily in July 1943; Mussolini was deposed on 25 July, and Italy surrendered in September, although German forces fought on in Italy until 1945.

Political leadership and the wartime alliance

The Grand Alliance of Britain, the USSR and the USA was an alliance of necessity between two capitalist democracies and a communist dictatorship that had been Hitler’s partner until June 1941. It held together because its leaders put the defeat of Germany above their disagreements.

• Winston Churchill (prime minister from May 1940) refused to negotiate in 1940, kept Britain in the war and worked to bring the USA in. He also pursued British imperial interests, preferring operations in the Mediterranean to an early landing in France.

• Franklin D. Roosevelt (US president 1933–1945) supplied Britain through Lend-Lease from March 1941 and agreed the Atlantic Charter with Churchill in August 1941. After Pearl Harbor he accepted a "Germany first" strategy: the defeat of Germany would come before that of Japan.

• Joseph Stalin directed the Soviet war effort through the Stavka (high command). His Order No. 227 of July 1942, "Not one step back", imposed savage discipline, but from late 1942 he also learned to rely on able commanders such as Georgy Zhukov.

The alliance had real strains. Stalin demanded a second front in France from 1942 and suspected that the delay until June 1944 was meant to let the USSR bleed. The western Allies were alarmed by Soviet aims in Poland, especially after the discovery in 1943 of the graves at Katyn, where the Soviet NKVD had shot about 22,000 Polish officers and other prisoners in 1940, and after the Red Army halted outside Warsaw during the rising of 1944. These disputes became the origins of the Cold War, but they did not break the alliance before Germany was defeated.

Axis leadership was weaker. Germany, Italy and Japan never planned a common strategy; Japan did not attack the USSR, and Germany did not know of Pearl Harbor in advance. Hitler took personal command of the German army in December 1941 and increasingly overruled his generals, forbidding retreats at Stalingrad and elsewhere. Mussolini led Italy into a war it could not fight. Nazi racial policy in the occupied east also turned people who had at first welcomed the Germans as liberators from Stalin, especially in Ukraine and the Baltic states, into enemies or partisans.

Economic factors

The Allies had far greater resources: in 1942 their combined national output was several times that of the Axis, and they had access to the oil of the USA, the Middle East and the Caucasus while Germany depended on Romania and synthetic fuel. Resources had to be turned into weapons, and the graph of aircraft production shows how this happened.

• The USA became, in Roosevelt’s phrase, the "arsenal of democracy". Its factories produced more aircraft, tanks and ships than any other power, and Lend-Lease supplied its allies. The USSR received about 11 billion dollars of aid, including about 400,000 trucks and jeeps, which gave the Red Army the mobility for its offensives of 1943–1945.

• The USSR moved about 1,500 industrial enterprises and millions of workers east of the Urals in the second half of 1941, out of reach of the Germans. Despite losing territory that had produced most of its coal and steel, it out-produced Germany in tanks and aircraft from 1942, by concentrating on a few simple designs built in huge numbers.

• Germany did not fully mobilise its economy until 1942–1944. Under Albert Speer, armaments minister from February 1942, production of weapons roughly tripled by mid-1944. It depended heavily on forced labour: by August 1944 about 7.6 million foreign civilians and prisoners of war were working in the Reich (Ulrich Herbert, Hitler’s Foreign Workers, German edition 1985, English 1997), and shortages of oil and rubber limited German operations from 1944.

Strategic and military factors

Economic superiority did not guarantee victory, and in 1940–1942 the Axis armies outfought their enemies. Military factors explain why the Allies were able to use their resources. Germany’s greatest strategic failures were its inability to defeat Britain in 1940, which left a base for American power in Europe, and its failure to defeat the USSR in 1941, which condemned it to a long war of attrition that it could not win.

The Red Army learned from its disasters. From Stalingrad onwards it combined surprise, deception and massed artillery and tanks in deep operations, culminating in Operation Bagration (June–August 1944), which destroyed German Army Group Centre in Belarus. The Eastern Front accounted for the large majority of German military deaths. The western Allies won command of the sea and, from 1944, of the air. The strategic bombing of German cities, such as Hamburg in July 1943 and Dresden in February 1945, killed hundreds of thousands of civilians; its effect on German production is debated, but by forcing Germany to defend its skies it drew aircraft, guns and manpower away from the fronts. The landings in Normandy on 6 June 1944 (D-Day), the largest seaborne invasion in history, opened the second front, and after the failure of the German Ardennes offensive (December 1944–January 1945) the Allies crossed the Rhine in March 1945. Soviet forces took Berlin; Hitler killed himself on 30 April, and Germany surrendered unconditionally on 7–8 May 1945.

Intelligence and technology also favoured the Allies. The British code-breakers at Bletchley Park read many German Enigma messages (the intelligence was code-named Ultra), radar served both air defence and the war at sea, and the Allies led in many areas of applied science. Germany developed advanced weapons, such as jet fighters and the V-2 rocket, but too late and in too small numbers to change the outcome.

The impact of the Second World War on one European country, to 1949

The Second World War affected every European country differently, depending on whether it was a victor or a defeated power, whether it was occupied, and where the fighting and the killing took place. Britain, France and Germany are described in full, and Poland more briefly. The displacement of millions of people after 1945, including the expulsion of Germans from eastern Europe and the fate of displaced persons, has a study of its own and enters here only as part of each country’s story.

Britain

Social and economic impact

About 384,000 British servicemen and women and about 70,000 civilians were killed, far fewer than in the First World War or in the occupied countries. The civilian deaths came mainly from bombing: about 43,000 people died in the Blitz of September 1940 to May 1941, and the V-1 and V-2 attacks of 1944–1945 killed thousands more. In the first days of September 1939 about 1.5 million people, mostly schoolchildren and mothers with young children, were evacuated from the cities under the official scheme, Operation Pied Piper. For many middle-class families in the countryside, evacuation was their first sight of urban poverty, and it strengthened demands for social reform.

The state took control of the economy to an extent never seen before. Food rationing began in January 1940 and lasted, in stages, until 1954; bread, never rationed during the war, was rationed from 1946 to 1948. Labour was directed by the Ministry of Labour under the trade unionist Ernest Bevin, unemployment disappeared, and taxation rose sharply. The cost was enormous. Britain sold much of its overseas investment, ran up large debts to the USA and to the empire, and in 1945 faced bankruptcy when Lend-Lease ended; it needed a US loan of 3.75 billion dollars in 1946 and Marshall Aid from 1948.

Political impact

In May 1940 Churchill formed a coalition government in which Labour leaders held key posts: Clement Attlee was deputy prime minister. The war produced a broad demand for a better society after victory. The Beveridge Report of December 1942, written by the civil servant and economist William Beveridge, identified "five giants on the road of reconstruction" (Want, Disease, Ignorance, Squalor and Idleness) and proposed a national insurance system covering people from birth to death, later summed up as "cradle to the grave". It sold hundreds of thousands of copies. The Education Act of 1944, steered by the Conservative R. A. Butler, introduced free secondary education for all to the age of fifteen.

In the general election of July 1945 Labour won 393 seats and a large majority, defeating Churchill. Attlee’s government built the welfare state: family allowances (1945), national insurance (1946) and the National Health Service, launched on 5 July 1948, which provided medical care free at the point of use. It also nationalised the Bank of England (1946), coal (1947), railways and electricity (1948) and gas (1949). Abroad, the war accelerated the end of empire: India and Pakistan became independent in August 1947. Historians such as Paul Addison (The Road to 1945, 1975) argue that the war created a political consensus around the welfare state and a managed economy that lasted until the 1970s; others stress that many reforms had roots in the 1930s and that the consensus was less complete than it looked.

Experiences of women

From December 1941 Britain conscripted women, one of the first countries to do so: unmarried women aged twenty to thirty had to join the auxiliary services (the ATS, the WAAF or the WRNS), civil defence or war industry, and the age range was later widened. By mid-1943 about 90 per cent of single women and 80 per cent of married women of working age were in the forces, industry or other war work. Women built aircraft and munitions, worked on the land in the Women’s Land Army, operated radar and anti-aircraft guns, and served as code-breakers at Bletchley Park.

The change was real but limited. Women were usually paid less than men for the same work; the Commons voted for equal pay for women teachers in 1944, but Churchill made the vote a matter of confidence and it was reversed. Most women left war jobs in 1945–1947, and post-war welfare policy assumed a male breadwinner and a wife at home. Historians who stress lasting change point to the confidence and independence many women gained; those who stress continuity, such as Penny Summerfield, point to how quickly traditional roles returned.

Experiences of marginalised groups

• "Enemy aliens". In May–July 1940, fearing a "fifth column", the government interned about 27,000 German, Austrian and Italian men and some women, many of them Jewish refugees from Nazism, mostly on the Isle of Man. About 800 internees died when the Arandora Star, deporting them to Canada, was sunk in July 1940; most were released by 1941.

• Conscientious objectors. About 60,000 people registered as objectors; most were given non-combatant work, and their treatment was more tolerant than in 1914–1918.

• Black and colonial British subjects. Hundreds of thousands from the colonies served, including about 2.5 million in the Indian Army and thousands of Caribbean volunteers in the RAF, but faced a colour bar in Britain, made worse by the segregated US Army stationed there from 1942. The arrival of the Empire Windrush in June 1948 with Caribbean migrants, and the British Nationality Act of 1948, began a new phase of migration from the Commonwealth.

France

Defeat, occupation and Vichy

France was defeated in six weeks in May–June 1940, and about 1.8 million French soldiers were taken prisoner, most of whom spent the war in Germany. The armistice divided the country: Germany occupied the north and west, Italy a small area in the south-east, and a French state with its capital at Vichy governed the rest. On 10 July 1940 the parliament voted full powers to Marshal Pétain, ending the Third Republic. In a radio broadcast on 30 October 1940, after meeting Hitler at Montoire, Pétain announced that France was entering on "the path of collaboration".

Vichy’s National Revolution replaced "Liberty, Equality, Fraternity" with "Work, Family, Fatherland". It promoted Catholic and rural values, made divorce harder, banned married women from many public-sector jobs (1940), and blamed the defeat on the Republic, the left, Freemasons and Jews. The economic cost of occupation was heavy: France paid huge occupation costs, much of its food and industry went to Germany, and from February 1943 the Service du travail obligatoire (STO) sent between 600,000 and 650,000 French workers to Germany. Rationing in the cities fell below subsistence levels, and the black market flourished.

Resistance and liberation

On 18 June 1940 General Charles de Gaulle, in London, broadcast an appeal on the BBC for the French to continue the fight, and founded the Free French. Resistance inside France grew slowly at first, then faster after the German invasion of the USSR brought in the communists (June 1941) and the STO drove young men into the countryside to join the maquis (rural guerrilla groups). Jean Moulin, sent by de Gaulle, united the main movements in the National Council of the Resistance (May 1943) before he was arrested and died after torture by the Gestapo. Paris was liberated on 25 August 1944.

Liberation brought a violent settling of accounts, the épuration (purge). Most historians estimate that about 9,000 to 10,000 people were killed without trial in 1944–1945. The courts later passed 6,763 death sentences (most in absentia) and carried out fewer than 800; Pétain’s death sentence was commuted to life imprisonment, and his prime minister Pierre Laval was executed. About 20,000 women accused of "horizontal collaboration" (sexual relations with Germans) were publicly shaved, the tondues, a punishment that historians see as a way of reasserting male and national honour after defeat.

Political, social and economic change to 1949

De Gaulle’s provisional government gave French women the vote by an ordinance of 21 April 1944, and they voted for the first time in municipal elections in April 1945. The Fourth Republic was established by a constitution approved in a referendum in October 1946; its preamble promised women equal rights with men. The resistance parties dominated politics: in November 1946 the Communist Party was the largest party, with about 28 per cent of the vote, until it was expelled from government in May 1947 as the Cold War began. The state nationalised Renault (as punishment for collaboration), coal, gas, electricity and the largest banks, created a social security system (1945), and launched the Monnet Plan (1946) for economic modernisation, supported by Marshall Aid from 1948.

Experiences of marginalised groups

Vichy passed its first Statut des Juifs on its own initiative in October 1940, excluding Jews from public office, teaching and the professions, and it interned foreign Jews in camps in the south. From 1942 French police took part in round-ups for deportation, most notoriously the Vel’ d’Hiv round-up in Paris on 16–17 July 1942, when 13,152 Jews, including more than 4,000 children, were arrested and held in a cycling stadium and then in camps before deportation to Auschwitz. About 76,000 Jews were deported from France, about a quarter of the Jews living there, and only about 2,500 of them survived (figures from Serge Klarsfeld). The fact that about three-quarters of Jews in France survived owed much to rescue by French civilians and Church groups, and to the fact that many hid in the Italian zone and the countryside. Roma and travellers were interned in French camps, some until 1946.

Germany

Social and economic impact

By May 1945 Germany was defeated, occupied and in ruins. About 5.3 million German soldiers had died (Rüdiger Overmans, 1999), and bombing had killed several hundred thousand civilians (estimates range from about 350,000 to 600,000) and destroyed much of the housing in the large cities. Germans called the moment of surrender Stunde Null ("zero hour"). Food rations in 1946–1947 often fell below 1,500 calories a day, the Reichsmark was nearly worthless, and cigarettes served as currency on the black market. Between 12 and 14 million Germans fled or were expelled from eastern Europe in 1944–1950, and the occupied zones had to absorb them.

Political impact: occupation and division

The Potsdam Conference (July–August 1945) divided Germany into four occupation zones, American, British, French and Soviet, and Berlin, inside the Soviet zone, into four sectors. The Allies agreed on the "four Ds": denazification, demilitarisation, democratisation and decentralisation, as well as reparations. The leading Nazis were tried at Nuremberg. In the western zones millions of Germans filled in questionnaires about their past, and local tribunals classified them; the process was overwhelmed by numbers and ended with most people placed in the lowest categories. In the Soviet zone, denazification was used to remove opponents as well as Nazis, large estates were broken up in a land reform of September 1945, and the Social Democrats were forced to merge with the Communists in the Socialist Unity Party (SED) in April 1946.

Allied cooperation broke down as the Cold War developed. The American and British zones merged economically in January 1947, and Marshall Aid reached western Germany from 1948. The western currency reform of 20 June 1948, which introduced the Deutsche Mark, led Stalin to blockade the western sectors of Berlin from 24 June 1948 to 12 May 1949; the western Allies supplied the city by air. The Basic Law (Grundgesetz), the constitution of the Federal Republic of Germany, was proclaimed on 23 May 1949, and Konrad Adenauer became chancellor in September. The German Democratic Republic was founded in the Soviet zone on 7 October 1949. Germany was divided for the next forty years.

Experiences of women

The war left German women in a majority, many of them widows or waiting for husbands held as prisoners of war. In the last months of the war and the first of the occupation, Soviet soldiers raped very large numbers of German women; estimates are uncertain and reach about two million (Norman Naimark, The Russians in Germany, 1995, and other studies). The Trümmerfrauen ("rubble women") who cleared bombed cities became a symbol of reconstruction, although recent research shows that much of the clearing was done by firms and by former Nazis made to work as punishment. The Basic Law stated that men and women had equal rights, but family law and expectations remained conservative into the 1950s.

Experiences of marginalised groups

Nearly 8 million foreign forced labourers and prisoners of war were in Germany at the end of the war, and with the survivors of the camps they became the Allies’ displaced persons; most were repatriated by 1946. Very few German Jews remained. Persecution of some victim groups did not end with the regime: Roma and Sinti were refused compensation for years, and gay men who had been imprisoned under Paragraph 175 of the criminal code could still be prosecuted under the same law in West Germany.

Poland

No country lost a larger share of its population. Poland lost about 5.6 to 5.8 million citizens, around 16 per cent of its pre-war population; about 3 million of them were Polish Jews, nearly all of Poland’s Jewish community, and most of the rest were non-Jewish Poles killed in executions, camps, forced labour and the fighting (estimates of the Polish Institute of National Remembrance, 2009). Both occupiers set out to destroy the Polish elite: the Germans in the Intelligenzaktion of 1939–1940, the Soviets in the Katyn massacres of 1940. The Polish Home Army’s Warsaw Uprising (1 August–2 October 1944) ended in defeat; between 150,000 and 200,000 civilians were killed, and the Germans then systematically destroyed most of the city.

Politically, Poland was liberated by the Red Army and fell under Soviet control. Its borders were moved about 200 kilometres west: it lost its eastern lands to the USSR and gained German territory up to the Oder–Neisse line, and millions of Poles, Germans and Ukrainians were moved. A communist-dominated government, created as the Lublin Committee in July 1944, won a rigged referendum in 1946 and rigged elections in January 1947; the leader of the Peasant Party, Stanisław Mikołajczyk, fled the country in October 1947, and the communist Polish United Workers’ Party was formed in December 1948. Thousands of former Home Army soldiers were imprisoned. Women had served in the Home Army as couriers, nurses and fighters, and in post-war Poland they entered industry in large numbers under the new regime.

Figures from national and international estimates; death tolls for France and Poland vary between sources because of how deaths in deportation, in forced labour and in border changes are counted.

Reasons for the persecution and mass murder of marginalised groups in Nazi-occupied Europe

During the Second World War, Nazi Germany and its allies and collaborators murdered about six million European Jews. They also killed millions of Soviet prisoners of war and civilians, Polish civilians, Roma and Sinti, disabled people and others whom Nazi ideology defined as enemies or as "unworthy of life". The persecution of Jews and other groups inside Germany from 1933 to 1939 belongs to the study of the Nazi state; the reasons why persecution became mass murder in occupied Europe after September 1939 are set out in stages.

The word genocide was coined by the Polish-Jewish lawyer Raphael Lemkin in Axis Rule in Occupied Europe (1944), from the Greek genos (race or people) and the Latin -cide (killing), to describe the deliberate destruction of a national, ethnic or religious group. The timeline of the Holocaust shows how persecution developed into genocide in stages.

Long-term factors and the role of ideology

Hostility to Jews had deep roots in Europe. For centuries Christian churches had taught that the Jews were guilty of the death of Christ, and Jews faced segregation, expulsions, the "blood libel" and pogroms. In the nineteenth century a new racial antisemitism claimed that Jews were a separate and harmful race, whose character could not be changed by conversion or assimilation; the German journalist Wilhelm Marr popularised the word "antisemitism" in 1879. Racial antisemitism drew on social Darwinism, which applied the idea of a struggle for survival to nations and races, and on eugenics, the pseudo-science of improving a population by controlling who could have children. Eugenic sterilisation laws were passed in many countries, including more than thirty US states, Sweden and Switzerland, so these ideas were not uniquely German.

In Germany after 1918, defeat and revolution gave these ideas new force. Völkisch nationalists blamed Jews for the defeat and for Bolshevism. In 1920 the lawyer Karl Binding and the psychiatrist Alfred Hoche published a book arguing for the "destruction of life unworthy of life", meaning the killing of the incurably sick and disabled. Hitler combined these strands into a worldview in which history was a struggle between races, Germans needed living space in the east, Slavs were fit only to serve, and Jews were a mortal enemy behind both capitalism and communism.

From 1933 the Nazi state excluded German Jews from public life, deprived them of citizenship under the Nuremberg Laws (1935), plundered their property and, in the Kristallnacht pogrom of November 1938, attacked them openly. The aim before 1939 was to force Jews to emigrate, and about half of Germany’s Jews had left by the outbreak of war. On 30 January 1939, in a speech to the Reichstag, Hitler made a threat that he and other leaders would refer back to repeatedly during the war.

I have very often in my lifetime been a prophet and have been mostly derided. […] I want today to be a prophet again: if international finance Jewry inside and outside Europe should succeed in plunging the nations once more into a world war, the result will be not the Bolshevization of the earth and thereby the victory of Jewry, but the annihilation of the Jewish race in Europe.

Adolf Hitler, speech to the Reichstag, 30 January 1939 (translation by Jeffrey Herf, The Jewish Enemy, 2006). Hitler spoke at a time when the regime was trying to force Jewish emigration and when he wanted to deter the western powers from opposing him, so some historians, such as Hans Mommsen, read "annihilation" as a threat to Jewish influence more than a plan for murder. Others, such as Ian Kershaw, stress that Hitler returned to this "prophecy" again and again from 1941, as the killing was carried out, which suggests that it expressed a real intention once war gave him the opportunity.

Nazi ideology also targeted other groups. Disabled people were the first victims of systematic murder: from the autumn of 1939, in the programme known as Aktion T4, doctors and officials selected patients in asylums for killing, at first in gas chambers disguised as showers. About 70,000 people were killed before the central programme was officially halted in August 1941, and killing then continued in a decentralised way; in all, up to 250,000 disabled people were murdered. The methods and some of the staff of T4 were later used in the killing centres of occupied Poland. Roma and Sinti were treated as racially "alien" and "asocial", and Slavs, above all Poles and Russians, were to be reduced to a labour force or removed under the long-term Generalplan Ost for German settlement of the east.

Military factors: war, conquest and the Einsatzgruppen

War transformed the scale and nature of persecution. The diagram of reasons for persecution and mass murder shows how the conquests of 1939–1941 combined with ideology, political decisions and collaboration.

The invasion of Poland, 1939

The conquest of Poland brought about 1.7–2 million Jews under German rule, several times as many as in Germany itself. Behind the army, SS units murdered thousands of Polish teachers, priests, landowners and officials in the Intelligenzaktion, intended to leave the Poles without leaders, and killed thousands of Jews. On 21 September 1939 Reinhard Heydrich, head of the SS security police, ordered that Jews be concentrated in larger towns near railways.

From late 1939 the Germans forced Jews into ghettos, closed districts of towns and cities. The Łódź ghetto was sealed in the spring of 1940 and the Warsaw ghetto in November 1940; Warsaw’s held more than 400,000 people in about 3.4 square kilometres. Each ghetto was run on German orders by a Judenrat (Jewish council). Food rations were set far below what was needed to live, and in Warsaw more than 83,000 people died of hunger and disease before the mass deportations began in July 1942. In 1940 Nazi planners considered deporting Europe’s Jews to the French island colony of Madagascar, but the plan was abandoned when Britain could not be defeated.

The invasion of the USSR, 1941

The invasion of the USSR in June 1941 was planned as a "war of annihilation". The Commissar Order of 6 June 1941 instructed the army to shoot Soviet political commissars on capture. Four Einsatzgruppen (mobile killing units), A to D, with about 3,000 men in all, followed the army, supported by Order Police battalions, Waffen-SS brigades, army units and local auxiliaries, as well as Romanian forces in the south. At first they shot mainly Jewish men of military age, accused of being communists or partisans; from August 1941 they killed women and children too and destroyed whole communities.

The scale of the shootings is shown by single events. At Babi Yar, a ravine outside Kyiv, 33,771 Jews were shot on 29–30 September 1941. At Ponary near Vilnius and at Rumbula near Riga, tens of thousands more were murdered in 1941. The report of Karl Jäger, commander of one unit in Lithuania, listed 137,346 people killed by 1 December 1941. According to the USHMM, at least 1.3 million Jews were murdered by shooting and in gas vans in the occupied Soviet Union. The war in the east was also a war of starvation: of about 5.7 million Soviet soldiers taken prisoner, around 3 million died in German captivity, most of hunger, exposure and disease, and German plans for the occupation assumed that millions of Soviet civilians would starve so that the army and Germany could be fed.

Political factors: Nazi leaders and the Wannsee Conference

No written order from Hitler for the murder of Europe’s Jews has been found, and historians have reconstructed the decision-making from other documents. On 31 July 1941 Hermann Göring authorised Heydrich to prepare a "total solution of the Jewish question" in the German sphere of influence in Europe. In October 1941 Jewish emigration from the Reich was banned and the deportation of German Jews to ghettos in the east began. Gassing with carbon monoxide in vans began at Chełmno, in the part of Poland annexed to Germany, on 8 December 1941. After Hitler spoke to Nazi party leaders on 12 December 1941, the day after he declared war on the USA, Himmler noted after a meeting with him on 18 December that the Jewish question was to be dealt with by killing Jews "as partisans".

Heinrich Himmler, as head of the SS and the police, and Heydrich were the chief organisers of the killing; Adolf Eichmann, head of the Gestapo’s Jewish affairs office, organised the deportations. On 20 January 1942 Heydrich chaired a meeting of fifteen senior officials from the SS, the party and the ministries at a villa on the Wannsee lake in Berlin. The purpose of the Wannsee Conference was to secure the cooperation of the government departments whose help was needed for the "Final Solution", and to establish the SS’s leadership of it. The minutes were written by Eichmann, and only one of the thirty copies survived the war.

Another possible solution of the problem has now taken the place of emigration, i.e. the evacuation of the Jews to the East, provided that the Führer gives the appropriate approval in advance. […]

Approximately 11 million Jews will be involved in the final solution of the European Jewish question […]

Under proper guidance, in the course of the final solution the Jews are to be allocated for appropriate labor in the East. Able-bodied Jews, separated according to sex, will be taken in large work columns to these areas for work on roads, in the course of which action doubtless a large portion will be eliminated by natural causes. The possible final remnant will, since it will undoubtedly consist of the most resistant portion, have to be treated accordingly […]

Minutes of the Wannsee Conference, 20 January 1942, written by Adolf Eichmann for Reinhard Heydrich (English translation as published by the History Place from the surviving copy, number 16 of 30). The minutes use euphemisms ("evacuation", "treated accordingly") because they were an official record circulated among ministries; at his trial in Jerusalem in 1961 Eichmann testified that the discussion itself had been about killing in plain words. The figure of 11 million included the Jews of Britain, Ireland, Sweden, Switzerland and Spain, which shows the continental, even unlimited, scope of the plan. The conference did not take the decision to kill; it coordinated the bureaucracy for a programme that was already under way.

Three killing centres were built in occupied Poland for Operation Reinhard, the murder of the Jews of the Government General (the German-occupied zone of central Poland): Bełżec (from March 1942), Sobibór (from May 1942) and Treblinka (from July 1942). In the summer of 1942 about 265,000 Jews were deported from the Warsaw ghetto to Treblinka. By the end of 1943, when the camps were dismantled and planted over, between about 1.5 million (USHMM) and 1.7 million (Yad Vashem) Jews had been murdered in them. Auschwitz-Birkenau, the largest of the camps, combined a concentration and labour camp with gas chambers using the pesticide Zyklon B, and Jews were deported there from all over Europe; about 1.1 million people were murdered there, about 1 million of them Jews. The last great deportation came from Hungary, after Germany occupied its ally in March 1944: between May and July 1944 Hungarian gendarmes and German officials deported more than 420,000 Jews, most of whom were gassed on arrival. As the Red Army advanced in 1944–1945, the SS forced prisoners on death marches to camps in Germany, on which tens of thousands died.

The bar chart of where Jewish victims died shows that the Holocaust was not only a story of gas chambers: about a quarter of the victims were shot, and hundreds of thousands died of starvation and disease in the ghettos. The USHMM’s estimates of other victims of Nazi persecution include about 3 million Soviet prisoners of war, about 1.8 million non-Jewish Polish civilians, about 312,000 Serb civilians killed in the Independent State of Croatia, up to 250,000 disabled people and up to 250,000 Roma; other historians’ estimates for the Roma and Sinti reach 500,000. In the "Gypsy family camp" at Auschwitz-Birkenau, the last few thousand Roma prisoners still held there were murdered in the gas chambers on the night of 2–3 August 1944.

Collaboration within Germany and the occupied territories

The murder of millions of people across a continent needed the work of very large numbers of people beyond the SS. Within Germany, civil servants drew up the definitions and confiscated property, the state railway (Reichsbahn) ran the deportation trains and charged the SS for them, and private firms profited: the chemical company IG Farben built a factory using Auschwitz prisoners, and the firm Topf and Sons designed and built the crematoria. In Ordinary Men (1992), Christopher Browning studied Reserve Police Battalion 101, a unit of middle-aged men from Hamburg. At Józefów in July 1942, when their commander offered them the chance to stand aside before a mass shooting, only about a dozen of nearly 500 men did so; the unit went on to take part in the shooting or deportation of tens of thousands of Jews.

In the occupied and allied countries, the extent of the killing depended heavily on the attitude of local governments and police.

Data: USHMM and Yad Vashem estimates; figures for Croatia and Romania are especially uncertain. In some places neighbours took part directly. In Neighbors (2001), the historian Jan Gross showed that in July 1941, in the town of Jedwabne in north-east Poland, Polish inhabitants murdered hundreds of their Jewish neighbours, most of them burned in a barn, with German encouragement. The book caused a national debate in Poland, and an official investigation by the Institute of National Remembrance confirmed the Polish perpetrators’ role, while giving a lower death toll than Gross.

Responses to persecution and mass murder, to 1949

People responded to Nazi persecution in many ways: by hiding or rescuing those in danger, by protest, by armed resistance, by recording what was happening, or by looking away. Governments outside occupied Europe responded with words of condemnation and, after the war, with trials and new international law. The responses of the victims themselves are part of this history, and the historian Yehuda Bauer used the Hebrew word amidah ("standing up") for the many forms of Jewish resistance, from smuggling food into ghettos to armed revolt.

Resistance and rescue by individuals

Thousands of individuals risked their lives to save others. Yad Vashem, Israel’s Holocaust remembrance centre, has recognised more than 28,000 non-Jews (as of 2024) as Righteous Among the Nations for rescuing Jews at the risk of their own lives.

Some individuals protested publicly. In August 1941 the Catholic bishop of Münster, Clemens August von Galen, condemned the murder of the disabled in a sermon that was copied and circulated across Germany, and the central T4 programme was officially halted later that month, although killing continued in secret. The White Rose group of students in Munich, led by Hans and Sophie Scholl, distributed leaflets condemning the murder of Jews and Poles, and its leaders were executed in February 1943. Such opposition inside Germany is covered in more detail with the challenges to authoritarian rule.

Collective protest, resistance movements and solidarity

• The February strike, Amsterdam (25–26 February 1941). After the first round-up of Jewish men in Amsterdam, workers led by the communist underground went on strike in protest, the only mass strike against the persecution of Jews in occupied Europe. The Germans crushed it within two days.

• Denmark (October 1943). When the Germans planned to deport Denmark’s Jews, a German diplomat leaked the plan, and Danish citizens and the resistance hid them and ferried about 7,200 Jews and several hundred non-Jewish relatives across the sea to neutral Sweden. About 470 were caught and sent to Theresienstadt, most of whom survived.

• Bulgaria (1943). Protests by members of parliament, led by the deputy speaker Dimitar Peshev, and by the Orthodox Church stopped the deportation of the Jews of Bulgaria proper, about 48,000 people. The same government deported more than 11,000 Jews from the Greek and Yugoslav territories it occupied, nearly all of whom were murdered at Treblinka.

• Le Chambon-sur-Lignon (1940–1944). The Protestant villagers of this area of south-central France, led by Pastor André Trocmé, sheltered thousands of Jews, many of them children.

• Rosenstrasse, Berlin (February–March 1943). Non-Jewish wives protested for days outside the building where their Jewish husbands were held, and most of the men were released.

Jewish armed resistance took place in conditions of extreme weakness, with few weapons, no outside support and families as hostages. Underground organisations formed in many ghettos. In Warsaw, after the deportations of 1942, the Jewish Combat Organisation (ŻOB), led by the 23-year-old Mordechai Anielewicz, and the Jewish Military Union (ŻZW) prepared to fight. When German forces entered the ghetto to complete its destruction on 19 April 1943, the eve of Passover, they met armed resistance that lasted almost a month. On 23 April Anielewicz wrote to his deputy, Yitzhak Zuckerman, who was on the "Aryan" side of the city.

The dream of my life has risen to become fact. Self-defense in the Ghetto will have been a reality. Jewish armed resistance and revenge are facts.

Mordechai Anielewicz, commander of the Jewish Combat Organisation, letter to Yitzhak Zuckerman from the Warsaw ghetto, 23 April 1943 (English translation as widely published; the wording varies slightly between translations). Anielewicz wrote in the middle of the uprising, to a comrade outside the ghetto from whom he needed weapons, and he knew the fighters could not survive. The letter shows that the uprising was understood by its leaders as an act of dignity and historical witness more than a military operation. Anielewicz was killed on 8 May at the ŻOB bunker at 18 Miła Street; the SS commander, Jürgen Stroop, reported on 16 May that the ghetto no longer existed.

There was a rising in the Białystok ghetto in August 1943, and there were revolts at the killing centres themselves: at Treblinka (August 1943) and Sobibór (October 1943) prisoners broke out, and some hundreds escaped, and in October 1944 members of the Sonderkommando at Auschwitz-Birkenau, the prisoners forced to work at the crematoria, blew up a crematorium. Roma prisoners in the Auschwitz "Gypsy family camp" resisted an attempt to liquidate it in May 1944. Thousands of Jews fought as partisans in the forests of eastern Europe; the Bielski brothers’ group in Belarus protected about 1,200 Jews.

Resistance also meant preserving the record. In the Warsaw ghetto the historian Emanuel Ringelblum organised a secret archive, Oyneg Shabes, which collected diaries, reports, posters and testimonies, and buried them in metal boxes and milk cans; parts were recovered in 1946 and 1950. The Judenräte faced impossible choices. Some leaders believed that making the ghetto useful to the Germans as a source of labour would save lives, as Chaim Rumkowski did in Łódź; Adam Czerniaków, head of the Warsaw Judenrat, killed himself on 23 July 1942 rather than sign orders for the deportation of children.

The level of international response

Before the war, the democracies did little to help Jews leave Germany. At the Évian Conference of July 1938, called by Roosevelt, delegates from thirty-two countries expressed sympathy, but almost none agreed to take more refugees. After Kristallnacht, Britain allowed about 10,000 mainly Jewish children to enter without their parents through the Kindertransport (1938–1939), and in May–June 1939 the liner St Louis, carrying more than 900 Jewish refugees, was refused entry by Cuba and the USA and had to return to Europe, where many of its passengers were later murdered.

From 1942 the Allies had detailed information about the killing. In August 1942 Gerhart Riegner, of the World Jewish Congress in Geneva, sent a telegram reporting a plan to exterminate Europe’s Jews; reports from the Polish underground and Jan Karski confirmed it. On 17 December 1942 the Allied governments made a public statement.

From all the occupied countries Jews are being transported, in conditions of appalling horror and brutality, to Eastern Europe. In Poland, which has been made the principal Nazi slaughter-house, the ghettos established by the German invaders are being systematically emptied of all Jews except a few highly skilled workers required for war industries. None of those taken away are ever heard of again. […] The above-mentioned Governments and the French National Committee condemn in the strongest possible terms this bestial policy of cold-blooded extermination.

Joint Declaration by Members of the United Nations, issued on 17 December 1942 by the governments of Belgium, Czechoslovakia, Greece, Yugoslavia, Luxembourg, the Netherlands, Norway, Poland, the USSR, the UK and the USA and the French National Committee, and read by the foreign secretary, Anthony Eden, in the House of Commons, whose members stood in silence. The declaration shows that the Allies knew of the extermination by the end of 1942 and said so publicly. Its promise was retribution after victory, not rescue: it proposed no measures to save Jews, and the British and American governments feared that rescue efforts would divert resources from the war or lead to demands for more immigration.

Action remained limited. The Anglo-American Bermuda Conference (April 1943) produced almost nothing. In January 1944, after pressure from officials in his own Treasury, Roosevelt set up the War Refugee Board, which helped to fund rescue in Hungary, including Wallenberg’s work, and is credited with helping to save tens of thousands of lives. In April 1944 two prisoners, Rudolf Vrba and Alfred Wetzler, escaped from Auschwitz and wrote a detailed report on the gas chambers; its publication in the summer of 1944 contributed to the international pressure that led the Hungarian regent, Miklós Horthy, to stop the deportations in July. Jewish organisations asked the Allies to bomb Auschwitz or the railways leading to it, and the US War Department refused in August 1944, arguing that it would divert aircraft from military targets, although US bombers attacked the IG Farben factory a few kilometres away that month. Whether bombing would have saved lives is still debated.

Other institutions also said little. Pope Pius XII, in his Christmas broadcast of 1942, spoke of "hundreds of thousands" of people condemned to death because of their "nationality or race", without naming Jews or the Germans; whether his caution was prudent diplomacy that allowed the Church to shelter Jews, or a moral failure, is one of the most disputed questions of the period. The International Committee of the Red Cross visited the Theresienstadt ghetto in June 1944 and accepted a staged show of normal life, and it did not speak out publicly about the deportations.

Legal responses, including Nuremberg

In the Moscow Declaration of October 1943, the Allies announced that German war criminals would be tried. In the London Charter of 8 August 1945, the USA, Britain, the USSR and France created the International Military Tribunal (IMT) at Nuremberg, and defined the crimes it would try: crimes against peace (planning aggressive war), war crimes, and a new category.

CRIMES AGAINST HUMANITY: namely, murder, extermination, enslavement, deportation, and other inhumane acts committed against any civilian population, before or during the war; or persecutions on political, racial or religious grounds in execution of or in connection with any crime within the jurisdiction of the Tribunal, whether or not in violation of the domestic law of the country where perpetrated.

Charter of the International Military Tribunal, Article 6(c), annexed to the London Agreement of 8 August 1945. The four victorious powers wrote the charter to judge the leaders of a defeated enemy, and they designed it so that German law, which had permitted persecution, could be no defence; Article 8 also ruled that obeying orders did not free a defendant from responsibility. The link to "any crime within the jurisdiction of the Tribunal" meant that persecution before 1939 could be punished only if connected to the war, a limit that later international law removed.

The trial of the major war criminals at Nuremberg ran from 20 November 1945 to 1 October 1946. Twenty-four leading Nazis were indicted; one killed himself before the trial and another was judged unfit, so twenty-two were tried, Martin Bormann in his absence. Twelve were sentenced to death, three to life imprisonment and four to prison terms of ten to twenty years, and three were acquitted. Ten were hanged on 16 October 1946; Göring poisoned himself the night before. The Tribunal also declared the SS, the Gestapo and SD and the Nazi party leadership to be criminal organisations. Its judgment and the documents gathered for it, such as the Hossbach Memorandum and the Einsatzgruppen reports, became the foundation of later knowledge of the Holocaust.

Two further documents of December 1948 extended these principles. The Genocide Convention, adopted by the UN General Assembly on 9 December 1948 after a campaign by Raphael Lemkin, defined genocide as acts "committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group, as such" and obliged states to prevent and punish it. The next day the General Assembly adopted the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. The doctors’ trial led to the Nuremberg Code (1947), which set rules for medical experiments on human beings.

The legal response had serious limits. Critics, then and since, called Nuremberg "victors’ justice": Allied acts such as the bombing of cities were not judged, and the Soviet prosecutors charged the Germans with the Katyn massacre, committed by the NKVD, a charge the Tribunal quietly dropped. Only a small fraction of perpetrators were ever tried; with the start of the Cold War the western Allies lost interest in denazification, and many officials, judges and police officers returned to their careers in West Germany in the 1950s. Survivors themselves faced displacement, renewed antisemitic violence in Poland and difficulty in rebuilding their lives, and many emigrated to Palestine, which became the State of Israel in May 1948, and to the Americas.

Perspectives and debates

Almost every question in this study has produced a long debate among historians, partly because new sources appeared (captured German documents after 1945, Soviet archives after 1991) and partly because each generation has asked new questions. Historians’ interpretations differ on each of the main questions, and each interpretation rests on particular evidence.

Was the League of Nations a failure?

The first verdicts were harsh. Writing in 1939, the British historian E. H. Carr, in The Twenty Years’ Crisis, argued that the League rested on a "utopian" belief that states shared an interest in peace and would obey international law, and that it ignored the realities of power. This realist view dominated for decades and fitted the experience of 1935–1939. More recent historians have been kinder. Zara Steiner, in The Lights that Failed (2005), argues that the League was never meant to replace the great powers and could only work when they supported it; its failures were their failures. Susan Pedersen, in The Guardians (2015), and other historians of the League’s agencies show that its work on mandates, refugees, health and economic cooperation created practices and institutions that the United Nations inherited.

Hitler’s intentions and the origins of the war

Taylor’s book caused a storm because it seemed to excuse Hitler, and his critics showed that he ignored much of the documentary evidence. Most historians today accept that Hitler had long-term aims and was the main cause of the war, while agreeing with Taylor that he was often an opportunist in his methods and timing. Mason’s economic argument has been widely questioned, since the regime could have slowed rearmament, but it shows that structural pressures as well as Hitler’s will shaped the timing of 1939.

Appeasement: guilty men, realists and missed alternatives

In July 1940, after the fall of France, three journalists writing as "Cato" published Guilty Men, which blamed Chamberlain and his colleagues for leaving Britain unprepared. Churchill’s The Gathering Storm (1948), the first volume of his war memoirs, presented appeasement as a foolish policy that he had opposed from the start. This orthodox view saw the appeasers as weak and deluded. From the 1960s, when the government papers were opened, revisionist historians such as Donald Cameron Watt and later John Charmley (Chamberlain and the Lost Peace, 1989) argued that appeasement was a rational response to Britain’s military, economic and imperial weakness, and that Churchill’s alternative was unrealistic. The post-revisionist R. A. C. Parker, in Chamberlain and Appeasement (1993), accepted the constraints but argued that Chamberlain had a real alternative, a firm alliance with France and the USSR, and rejected it because of his own convictions and his confidence in personal diplomacy.

These views can be weighed against what Chamberlain knew. The chiefs of staff’s warnings and the state of rearmament support the revisionists for 1938; Chamberlain’s continued hope of a settlement after Prague, and his reluctance to negotiate seriously with the USSR in 1939, support Parker.

Soviet policy: collective security or expansion?

Historians divide over whether Soviet policy in the 1930s was a sincere search for collective security. Jonathan Haslam, in The Soviet Union and the Struggle for Collective Security (1984), argues that Litvinov’s policy was genuine until Munich convinced Stalin that the western powers would not fight. Geoffrey Roberts, in The Soviet Union and the Origins of the Second World War (1995), presents the Nazi–Soviet Pact as a defensive choice made when the alternatives had failed. Other historians stress the secret protocol and the Soviet annexation of eastern Poland, the Baltic states and Bessarabia in 1939–1940, which suggest that Stalin also wanted to recover the lands of the Russian Empire. Gabriel Gorodetsky, in Grand Delusion (1999), shows how Stalin then misjudged Hitler’s intentions until the invasion of June 1941.

Why did the Allies win?

In Why the Allies Won (1995), Richard Overy argues that the result was not inevitable: the Allies won because they turned their resources into effective fighting power through better production, technology, leadership and morale, and because the Axis made strategic mistakes. Adam Tooze, in The Wages of Destruction (2006), argues that Germany’s economy was always too small to defeat the combined power of the British Empire, the USSR and the USA, which explains Hitler’s gamble on rapid victories. David Glantz and Jonathan House, in When Titans Clashed (1995), stress that the Red Army, which fought most of the German army, learned to fight better than its enemy. Phillips Payson O’Brien, in How the War Was Won (2015), challenges the focus on the Eastern Front: he argues that most German production went into aircraft and air defence, so the Anglo-American air and sea war did most to limit German power.

How did the Holocaust happen? Intentions, structures and perpetrators

A second debate concerns the perpetrators. Raul Hilberg, in The Destruction of the European Jews (1961), showed the Holocaust as the work of an entire bureaucracy. Browning’s Ordinary Men (1992) explained the actions of a police battalion through conformity, careerism and the pressure of the group, as well as antisemitism. Daniel Goldhagen, in Hitler’s Willing Executioners (1996), argued that ordinary Germans killed because a uniquely German "eliminationist antisemitism" made them want to; most historians criticised his evidence and his neglect of non-German perpetrators. Saul Friedländer, in Nazi Germany and the Jews (1997, 2007), put the voices of the victims at the centre of the history and stressed the "redemptive antisemitism" of the Nazi leadership. Timothy Snyder, in Bloodlands (2010), placed the Holocaust within a wider zone of mass killing by both the Nazi and Soviet regimes in Poland, Ukraine, Belarus and the Baltic states, an approach that critics fear blurs the distinctiveness of the genocide of the Jews.

Could more have been done?

David Wyman, in The Abandonment of the Jews (1984), argued that the US government, through indifference, antisemitism in the State Department and fear of immigration, failed to take rescue measures that could have saved many lives. Martin Gilbert, in Auschwitz and the Allies (1981), showed how much the Allies knew. William Rubinstein, in The Myth of Rescue (1997), replied that once the killing began, little could have been done to save the Jews of German-controlled Europe except by winning the war as quickly as possible. On the victims’ side, Hannah Arendt’s Eichmann in Jerusalem (1963) criticised the cooperation of the Jewish councils, and caused bitter controversy; Isaiah Trunk’s study Judenrat (1972) showed the great variety of their conduct under impossible conditions.

Applying the ideas in exam questions

Paper 3: the League of Nations

Paper 3: the reasons for the war

Paper 3: impact on one country

Paper 3: the Holocaust

Paper 3: responses to persecution

Self-check

• To do:

  I can describe the aims, organisation and structure of the League of Nations and explain its weaknesses.

• To do:

  I can explain the League’s responses to the Åland Islands, Vilna, Upper Silesia, Corfu and Petrich disputes.

• To do:

  I can explain the search for collective security and disarmament from the Geneva Protocol to the World Disarmament Conference.

• To do:

  I can explain why the League failed over Abyssinia and how the crisis affected Europe.

• To do:

  I can outline and explain Italian foreign policy from 1922 to 1941.

• To do:

  I can outline German foreign policy from Weimar revisionism to 1941 and explain Hitler’s aims.

• To do:

  I can explain the motives for appeasement and evaluate the Munich Agreement.

• To do:

  I can explain the roles of French and Soviet foreign policy, and why the Nazi–Soviet Pact was signed.

• To do:

  I can weigh the causes of the outbreak of war in 1939 and use historians’ views on Hitler’s intentions.

• To do:

  I can explain how political leadership, the wartime alliance, economic strength and military factors led to Allied victory.

• To do:

  I can explain the social, economic and political impact of the war on one country, and the experiences of women and marginalised groups there.

• To do:

  I can explain the long-term, military and political reasons for the Holocaust and other Nazi mass murder, including the role of the Einsatzgruppen and the Wannsee Conference.