Started 85 years ago, World War II was a conflict foretold

On September 1, 1939, the Wehrmacht invaded Poland, seemingly without warning. The war, however, was not a surprise, but something Hitler had been planning since he came to power in 1933. This war did not come as a surprise. Hitler never made a secret of his aggressive plans for expansion, even if he occasionally played the “pacifist record,” as he himself called it, according to historian Klaus Hesse of the Topography of Terror documentation center in Berlin.

“Since he came to power in January 1933, Hitler made every preparation for war. From then on, everything was geared towards revising the order imposed by the Treaty of Versailles, towards the recovery of hegemony in Europe by an enlarged Germany, everything was geared towards the creation of a European economic space that would make it possible for Germany to wage a major and prolonged war in Europe,” he states.

Internal war against the opposition and the Jews

The Versailles Peace Treaty of 1919 had placed all responsibility for the outbreak of the First World War on the German Empire and its allies and obliged it to make territorial concessions, disarm and pay compensation to the victorious powers. In Hitler’s view, this was a humiliation that should be remedied.

The so-called “stab legend,” according to which the Social Democrats and the Jews were ready to “stab the country in the back,” suited the dictator’s intentions perfectly. Thus, the path to a new war began within Germany.

Just a few days after taking power, Hitler organized the first nationwide boycott of Jewish businesses on April 1, 1933. This was followed by the “Law for the Reestablishment of the Civil Service Career,” which effectively banned all Jews from public service activities.

And this persecution was also aimed from the beginning at obtaining financial resources to finance the war. Even before the government comprehensively regulated the confiscation of Jewish property by law, Jewish businessmen were put under pressure and even had to pay for their escape from Germany.

Emigrants had to give up 25% of their taxable assets to the state, which managed to collect 153 million marks in the first two years of the Nazi regime alone. Transfers of foreign currency abroad were also taxed. Until September 1939, this tax continued to rise, reaching 96% of the amount transferred.

Berlin 1936 – Olympics and declaration of war

Most Germans, however, saw Hitler as their savior until 1939. For many, the dictatorship brought an improvement in economic conditions. Unemployment fell, individual consumption rose. “Hitler was populist enough to know that he had to offer butter as well as cannons,” says Klaus Hesse.

The cannons, however, were the real objective. While the world was watching the Berlin Olympics, Hitler was consolidating his war plans. Within four years, the armed forces were to be ready for the war in the east.

Hitler’s secret plan, written in his Memorandum on the Four-Year Plan: Germany was to become self-sufficient in as many areas as possible and thus isolate itself from the world market so that it could invest all its resources in the arms industry. It was not long before half of all state spending was devoted to this sector.

That same year, the Wehrmacht (Armed Forces) occupied the demilitarized Rhineland, in clear violation of the Treaty of Versailles, which Hitler had been opposing since the beginning of his rule. In November 1937, Hitler secretly revealed his plans to the highest-ranking Wehrmacht officers: Germany needed, he said, more space “for the preservation of the population and its proliferation.”

September 1938 – war is not prevented, but postponed

In 1938, Hitler annexed his home country of Austria in what became known as the Anschluss. Soon after, he threatened to invade Czechoslovakia, claiming that the German-speaking population living in the Sudetenland was being discriminated against.

British and French politicians feared a European war and tried to prevent an attack through a policy of appeasement. The hope was: “if you give Hitler what he sees as his national rights, he will calm down.” Under the Munich Agreement, the Sudetenland was incorporated into Germany. “Chamberlain allowed Hitler to obtain a whole series of territorial expansions without a war,” says historian Antony Beevor, referring to the then British Prime Minister.

The question of what would have happened if an opponent of the appeasement strategy, Winston Churchill, had been British prime minister is more complicated. “Was it possible that in September 1939 the British and French were in a stronger position against the Wehrmacht? To that we will never have an answer.”

There had been a noticeable fear of war in Germany since 1938, Hesse points out. “It was clear that this German development in Europe – from a defeated Germany to a new power factor – was no longer possible without the risk of war.” The Munich Agreement was sold by Nazi propaganda as a great success of Hitler’s peace policy, but in reality he was even annoyed because he would have preferred to have started the war already.

In September 1939 there was no room for a coup.

The truly tragic thing about September 1938 was that Hitler was at that point isolated in his war plans. His generals wanted to avoid a premature war at all costs. The head of the Army High Command, Franz Halder, important commanders in and around Berlin, as well as the Berlin police chief had already discussed a new government with critical government officials and former Social Democratic politicians.

A secret riot squad was on standby to storm the Reich Chancellery as soon as Hitler declared war. A year later, there was no longer any talk of a coup. Even though the population did not celebrate that September 1, 1939, the majority of Germans supported Hitler despite everything and were willing to go to war for him.

World War II would kill 60 million people. The Nazis murdered six million Jews. For Beevor, World War II was “the greatest man-made disaster in history.”