1942: The Year That Tried Men's Souls, Page 2

  The Nazis were a disturbing grab bag of thugs, criminals, zealots, and dupes aided by not a few misguided aristocrats and otherwise intelligent people such as General Erich Ludendorff, who had masterminded the German army in World War I and nearly engineered a German victory in 1918. In 1923 Hitler felt strong enough to challenge the new Weimar government but only got himself thrown in jail, where he penned his grimly prophetic Mein Kampf (my struggle). This seven-hundred-page screed, published in 1925, was the blueprint for Nazi dictatorship (with Hitler himself, of course, as dictator), advocating ethnic cleansing and aggressive territorial expansion, and has been described as “a satanic Bible.”4 It remains a great curse that so few people in positions of power have ever read it, or understood its sordid implications.

  Thereafter, Hitler and his cronies organized themselves into a kind of paramilitary party, goose-stepping up and down the streets in brown shirts and displaying the swastika* as their national emblem. Yearly their power grew, feeding off hatred, intimidation, resentment over the Versailles Treaty, staggering unemployment, leftist labor strikes, and the seeming inability of the new democratic Weimar government to solve the nation’s problems.

  By 1933 the Nazi party had gained not only enough votes to make itself a formidable force in the German Reichstag (parliament) but also enough power to force the eighty-six-year-old president, Paul von Hindenburg, to appoint Hitler chancellor, from which position he quickly consolidated his strength and seized total control of the German government, setting it up as a brutal police state. Calling himself “Der Führer” (the leader), Hitler then set about pacifying the seething German nation, building the vast autobahns, housing projects, and industrial plants, and, of course, repudiating payment of any more war reparations.

  Also, from that point on, Hitler and his Nazis began a stealthy but deliberate program to rearm Germany with the most modern weapons, converting otherwise peaceful businesses into war-making enterprises. Even though the Treaty of Versailles forbade the Germans from having a naval fleet, tanks, heavy artillery, and an air force, the Nazis brazenly defied the Allied nations and the new League of Nations—forerunner to the United Nations, set up in 1919 to maintain world peace—and continued creating what would become one of the most powerful military forces in history.*

  Still horrified by the slaughter of the 1914—1918 war, as well as financially devastated by it, and caught up like everyone else in the worldwide depression, France and England did nothing to head off Hitler’s warlike machinations. The great pity is that they easily could have, at least at the beginning; France’s army alone outnumbered Hitler’s infantry divisions by more than ten to one. But the mood in the so-called Great Democracies was quiescent, perhaps, more accurately, ostrichlike, while Hitler fulminated from the speaking platforms of huge outdoor stadiums and the German people became true believers, eagerly and delectably cheering every violation of the Treaty of Versailles.

  Not only that but the Nazis began to fulfill their grisly prophecy of ridding the nation of all but their own concept of a pure Aryan (Nordic) race. Millions of Jews, Gypsies, Slavs, and anyone else unlucky and un-Aryan enough to be caught in Germany from the mid-1930s onward were subjected to almost unendurable hardships and indignities and, in many cases, death. First, Nazi victims were stripped of their citizenship, then their property, then the right to practice their trades and professions. Finally, they were herded into concentration camps, which, beginning in 1942, became death camps. Those who had been unable to emigrate or escape were worked or starved to death, and many were murdered by firing squad and, later, more efficiently, in gas chambers.

  In Italy, meanwhile, a similar though somewhat lesser evil had been at work. Benito Mussolini, like Hitler, had fought in World War I and, also like Hitler, appeared to be promising material for psychiatric study. The child of socialist parents, Mussolini was editing a socialist newspaper in 1914 when the war broke out and quickly became a draft dodger until the authorities caught up with him in 1916 and marched him into the army. At war’s end, great labor strikes paralyzed Italy, many organized by Italian communists. Mussolini, who has been described variously as a crude bully, an atheist (in Catholic Italy!), and a womanizer, soon abandoned his socialism and in 1922 he became the leader of what was called the Fascist party, a group consisting primarily of former soldiers who had by a decade presaged Hitler’s Nazi “brownshirts” by adopting their own “blackshirts” and strutting around town beating up anyone who disagreed with them.

  Many of the early Italian fascists simply wanted jobs or for the government to halt the chaos and run the country effectively, but Mussolini had a far greater plan: he envisioned an Italy returned to the glory days of the Roman empire (with himself, naturally, as a Caesar). Like Hitler, Mussolini could legitimately be described as a comical character, right down to his dress and the hands-on-hips posturing—like something out of Laurel and Hardy pictures—were it not for the fact that he was a brutal dictator who murdered people at the drop of a hat.

  He called himself “II Duce” (the leader), “a superman, in the words of Nietzsche, with whom of course he agreed,” and became a much-celebrated windbag among disaffected Italians.5 It was said that “he made the trains run on time,” and this was true enough, but at dear cost to any tardy trainman. In 1922, four years after the armistice to end World War I, Mussolini and his fascists—now comprised of a huge throng of gangsters as well as the ex-soldiers and other well-wishers—marched on Rome, and for their efforts the hapless king of Italy anointed Mussolini prime minister. As Hitler was to do later, Mussolini quickly consolidated his power, abolished parliament, and became a totalitarian ruler. In a move that Hitler would also emulate, Mussolini forthwith outlawed all political parties except his own fascists and set about turning Italy into his personal vision of a great empire. First, though, he made certain improvements on the domestic scene, as Hitler was to do later, building much-needed housing and roads and getting industries operating again, mainly the armaments industry. For this he was publicly admired by such diverse personalities as Thomas A. Edison, the playwright George Bernard Shaw, and Mohandas Gandhi.

  Then, perceiving correctly that one cannot have an empire without colonies, Mussolini decided to acquire more of these for himself. In 1935 he mandated that every male between the ages of eighteen and thirty-five be subjected to military service. As a victim of colonial conquest Mussolini selected the peaceful and undeveloped African nation of Abyssinia (Ethiopia), just down the Red Sea from the Mediterranean. It was one of the few African countries not yet colonized by other powers and, besides, the Italians had lost an important and humiliating battle there at the end of the previous century, and this still rankled. Ruled for years by its hereditary emperor Haile Selassie, who sat on a throne draped in leopard skins, this poor tribal land was hardly a match for Mussolini’s new army of tanks, artillery, and air force bombs. Testing every weapon in the Italian arsenal, including poison gas, which had been outlawed by worldwide treaty, Mussolini’s army slaughtered an estimated 500,000 Ethiopian natives and subjugated the rest. The League of Nations condemned Italy but took no action, thus paving the way for mid-twentieth-century dictators to flout the international democracies’ efforts to contain them.

  In 1937 Mussolini met Hitler for the first time and was suspicious of him (the feeling was mutual) but, dictators being dictators, Mussolini agreed as a sop to Der Fuhrer to strip Italian Jews of all their civil rights and, for some odd reason as well, to adopt the German “goose step” as the official Italian army marching cadence. Two years later, on the eve of World War II, he and Hitler signed their names to what was called the Pact of Steel, a fateful decision for everyone concerned, which created the first two of what would soon become known as the Axis powers.

  With the Nazi rise the Germans, particularly the warlike Prussians, were becoming more belligerent by the moment. The whole nation seemed to be on some kind of war footing, including teenage German “youth groups,” who paraded around i
n khaki short-pant uniforms shouting Heil Hitler! at everyone they passed on the streets. The “stabbed-in-the-back” theory assumed renewed national importance, spurred on by state-sponsored propagandists who had begun shortly after the end of the 1914—1918 war to distribute all sorts of material aiming to prove that Germany was not responsible for starting World War I.

  This disinformation soon reached foreign shores, including Great Britain and America, where revisionist scholars began publishing books and articles denouncing German “war guilt” and laying blame for the great conflict on France, England, Russia, and even the United States.* Hitler’s ranting diatribes merely fueled the flames of this fiery new nationalism, born of the humiliation of defeat and the urge to avenge its perceived dishonor.

  One of the main grievances the Germans had was the dismemberment of part of what it considered its own territory by the Allied victors who in 1919 had created the independent states of Poland, Austria, and Czechoslovakia and returned to France the Alsace-Lorraine provinces, which had been seized by Germany in 1871. These separate entities contained some seven million German-speaking citizens, and the Fatherland, as defined by Hitler and his associates, wanted them back. Here lay the immediate bones of contention that would eventually rattle and herald World War II.

  There was something else in Hitler’s mind, too, more momentous than merely occupying or reoccupying such small-potato territories as Poland, Austria, and Czechoslovakia. This was his doctrine of lebensraum (living space), in which he hoped to relocate into huge areas of Europe Germany’s overpopulation of millions of peasants. And where was he to find this immense lebensraum? In Hitler’s own words, taken from his Secret Book, a sort of sequel to Mein Kampf: “The only area in Europe that could be considered for such a territorial policy therefore was Russia.”6

  One of the first statesmen to read true danger in the Hitler regime was the British parliamentarian Winston Churchill, and he remained a lone voice in the wilderness until it was far too late to halt the German juggernaut. The policy of both his country and France, the only two European states then powerful enough when combined to have stopped Hitler, was one of “appeasement.” But the victors of World War I had lost their stomach for war, or even the prospect of it. The year that Hitler came into power the prestigious Oxford Union, a student debating society, overwhelmingly approved a motion stating that “this House will in no circumstances fight for its King and Country,” and within a short period similar resolutions were adopted by most of England’s other colleges and universities. When in 1934 it became apparent that the Germans were swiftly rearming, the leader of the British Labour Party vowed “to close every recruiting station, disband the Army and disarm the Air Force,” and he got his candidate elected by saying so.7 The Peace Ballot, a national survey of public opinion, was distributed throughout Great Britain in 1935 and a majority of those polled stated that while they supported collective national security, they did so only “by all means short of war.”

  At a time when Hitler was openly flouting the Versailles Treaty by building up his army strength to exceed that of England and France combined, those two nations were cutting their military budgets to the bone, and Britain’s new Labour Party leader, Clement Attlee, was declaring: “We on our side are for total disarmament because we are realists.” Antiwar literature inspired by the World War I generation, such as Robert Graves’s Goodbye to All That, the poetic works of Siegfried Sassoon and Edmund Blunden, Erich Maria Remarque’s All Quiet on the Western Front, as well as stage plays such as R. C. Sherriff’s passionately convincing Journey’s End, had become extremely popular and added to the growing notion that all war was a stupid, wasteful, unacceptable enterprise. This was not a bad notion at all, except that Adolf Hitler had no such innocent visions and kept a careful eye on what he perceived as the pacific mood of the “decadent democracies,” which he gleefully realized were playing right into his hands.

  The only other European power remotely capable of dealing with Hitler at the time was the communist behemoth of the Soviet Union, which, since its inception in 1917, had been cloaked in a dark veil of secrecy. Its leader, Joseph Stalin, had succeeded Lenin and was as tyrannical a brute as Hitler and Mussolini ever hoped to be. During the 1930s Stalin purged his vast army of almost all its useful officers—as if the word purge, with its ironically sanitary connotation, could do justice to the wholesale murder this tyrant inflicted on his victims. Despite Hitler’s and Mussolini’s constant and fanatical ravings against the evils of communism, Stalin seemed blithely unaware of Hitler’s designs on his country. He therefore kept quiet and inscrutable in Moscow and adopted a wait-and-see attitude, concentrating his considerable energies on converting Soviet Russia from an agrarian peasantry into an industrial giant. Thus the Nazis, and their cohorts the Italian fascists, were left with practically a free hand to work their aggressive machinations against their weaker neighbors.

  Only one other force existed that might have stopped Hitler and the Axis powers during the dark days when the war clouds began to loom over Europe. This was the United States of America, comfortably safe (or so it was generally thought) on the other side of the Atlantic with even less inclination than France and England to get itself embroiled in another European conflict. Since the days of George Washington’s presidency, Americans had taken heed of the warning to “avoid all foreign entanglements.” Their mood by and large had become one of disillusionment and disappointment that the Europeans after World War I seemed to have learned nothing from that hideous slaughter and appeared headed for another senseless and savage contest. And who could blame them?

  A large part of the American constituency felt that they had seen all this before. After promising in 1916—in order to get reelected—that “American boys will not be sent to war overseas,” President Woodrow Wilson soon realized the dangers posed by the great conflagration in Europe and by 1917 had asked Congress for a declaration of war against Germany and its allies. When he got it, American soldiers began pouring into France, and the weight of their numbers is generally credited with Germany’s ultimate suit for peace. Wilson, however, had a greater plan in mind. After trying for two years to mediate between the warring nations, he produced his Fourteen Points, which included the slogan “Peace Without Victory,” the notion of self-determination for all nations, and a plan for a League of Nations that would somehow provide collective security throughout the world and prevent any reoccurrence of the “War to End All Wars.” Most of Wilson’s scheme was quickly blown apart at the Versailles Peace Conference, and though the League of Nations was indeed established it was so, to Wilson’s great chagrin, without the support of America, whose Congress wanted no part of any “world government.”

  Throughout the 1920s and 1930s America’s post–World War I military might was virtually dismantled in favor of domestic programs—especially after the Great Depression deepened. Its army and navy were not only neglected but almost forgotten. The American attitude became again one of “Europe’s problems are Europe’s problems,” and a wave of isolationism began to take hold in the country, especially in the Midwest, where the mostly right-wing newspapers (with their many Germanic subscribers) inveighed heavily and often against American involvement in European and Far Eastern troubles. This was due in part to the aforementioned wave of so-called revisionist scholars and historians during the 1930s who had removed the blame for the First World War from Germany and placed it upon France and England. In addition, there was an all-out effort by American leftists, pacifists, isolationists, and socialists to publicly denounce munitions makers and war financiers such as J. P. Morgan as being largely responsible for all the misery caused by that war, or any war. And there was the fact of the Kellogg-Briand peace pact of 1928, signed into international law by the U.S. Congress, Britain, France, and other nations, including Germany, which actually outlawed war, but which, in fact, had no more validity than the passing of laws against invention of perpetual motion machines.

  The America
n left still clung to the notion of the League of Nations, even though the U.S. Senate had refused to ratify the agreement.* After all, the League was perhaps the penultimate experiment in idealism, as typified by Harold Nicolson in a passage from his book Peacemaking 1919 where he describes his emotions upon attending the first conference of the Treaty of Versailles in 1919 as a young British diplomat: “We were journeying to Paris, not merely to liquidate the war, but to found a new order in Europe. We were preparing not Peace only, but Eternal Peace. There was about us the halo of some divine mission. We must be alert, stern, righteous and ascetic. For we were bent on doing great, permanent and noble things.” Much irony attaches to these stirring words, since Nicolson did not write them until years later, in 1933, when the world had again begun marching down the tragic path of war.

  In any event, Hitler loved it: cowardly decadent idealistic democracies, forever arguing among themselves and letting their people vote on everything!

  And so the kettle heated with no one, so to speak, minding the stove, except perhaps for Winston Churchill, whose increasingly shrill but prophetic warnings fell on mostly deaf ears. Churchill, who turned sixty years old in 1934, was by then a humpty-dumpty-looking man, in stark contrast with his dashing appearance as a young British officer who had captured his nation’s fancy with a series of on-the-spot newspaper and magazine pieces on British army exploits before World War I. As a member of government during that war he ran the Admiralty until his insistence on the disastrous Gallipoli campaign forced him to resign and he joined his old regiment in the terrible trenches in Flanders. Always controversial, Churchill floundered between the wars, and except for a brief stint as chancellor of the Exchequer and colonial secretary in the 1920s, he held on on to his parliamentary office but did not receive another major appointment to government. As Hitler came to power, Churchill reached the height of his oratorical powers, and his alarms against both the Nazi menace and England’s un-preparedness to meet it if heeded might well have saved the nation some of the wretched ordeal it was soon to undergo.