17.1: Leading up to War
- Page ID
- 132593
Over the course of the 1930s, the Nazi government steadily broke with the provisions of the Treaty of Versailles. The pre-Nazi German state had already suspended reparation payments. When the Nazis came to power, they simply refused to negotiate resuming payments. By 1934, Germany secretly began the process of re-arming. A year later, it more openly moved to build a military larger than the one from World War I. By 1939, Hitler felt confident that the German war machine was ready for a full-scale invasion of the surrounding lands.
In a sense, the 1930s consisted of Hitler "playing chicken" with the rest of Europe. He would launch a dangerous and provocative initiative. Then, he would wait and see if the rest of Europe (meaning primarily France and Britain) would respond with the threat of force or instead back down. Those nations did back down, repeatedly, until the invasion of Poland in September of 1939 finally proved that Hitler could not be stopped without war.
Political historians often refer to this policy as “appeasement.” The French and British governments would give Hitler what he wanted in hopes that he would not do it again. Pieces of foreign territory, political unions with closely related German territories, and the growth of German military power were seen by British and French politicians as things that Germans might have legitimate grievances about. Thus, they played along with the idea that Hitler might be appeased once those issues were addressed.
Arguably, one should not be too quick to write off appeasement. World War I had been so awful that most Europeans believed that Hitler would not want to plunge Europe back into another world war. French and British wanted to avoid full-scale war at any cost. Indeed, their civilian populations were totally opposed to war and, especially in France, their governments were unstable and unpopular. Thus, British and French political leaders did not think they were 'caving in' to Hitler, rather they were preserving peace.
In March of 1938, Germany annexed Austria, an event known as the Anschluss. Most Austrians welcomed the German tanks that rolled into Austrian cities, and there was practically no resistance. This action was a blatant violation of the Treaty of Versailles. But, there was no foreign response, and Hitler's Nazi regime received a boost in public relations. In one swoop, Nazi laws and policies were imported to Austria, and there was a looting spree as Catholic Austrians attacked their Jewish countrymen.
In September of 1938, the threat of German intervention in the Sudetenland, a region of northwestern Czechoslovakia with a significant German minority, prompted an international crisis. The British and French governments hastily convened a conference in Munich. Instead of defending Czech sovereignty, the French and British agreed that Germany should annex the Sudetenland to “protect” its German population. Then, in early 1939, German troops simply occupied the rest of Czechoslovakia. The Czech lands were divided between Germany and a newly-created protectorate, while Slovakia became a puppet state under an anti-Semitic Catholic priest, Jozef Tiso.
While Germany was expanding its territories, it also formed political alliances. In May of 1939, Italy and Germany pledged an alliance with one another. More importantly, in August of 1939 Germany and the USSR signed the Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact - a mutual non-aggression pact that neutralized the USSR. Hitler had absolutely no intention of honoring the pact in the long term. However, the Soviet Premier Josef Stalin did. First, he thought that Germany was not strong enough to threaten Soviet territory. Further, he believed that any conflict would be between capitalist nations, not his communist state. To sweeten the deal for the Soviets, the pact secretly included provisions to divide Poland between Germany and the USSR in the immediate future.