World War 2
The Road to War
The manner of Germany’s defeat in 1918, with its Army still in the field, and the reparations and territorial losses imposed by the Treaty of Versailles, left a permanent legacy of bitterness. Agitators like ex-solider Adolf Hitler, leader of the nascent Nazi Party, fed on those feelings of betrayal. Hitlers’ opinion of the Versailles settlement was simple: ‘Only fools, liars and criminals could hope for mercy from the enemy... hatred grew in me, hatred for those responsible for the dead.’ His political career was to be devoted to the overturning of the Treaty of Versailles and the restoration of Germany as a world power.
After the failure of his Munich putsch in November 1923 (The Munich Putsch was an armed rebellion which aimed to establish a dictatorship in the Bavarian city of Munich. The overall aim of the putsch was to overthrow the Weimar Republic) and subsequent imprisonment, Hitler pursued a constitutional path to power, becoming German Chancellor in January 1933. A year later he announced that he would become German Head of State and Commander-in-Chief of the armed forces, binding them to him with an oath of allegiance.
The impressive German economic recovery of the 1930s, achieved by a bold policy of deficit financing, underwrote Hitlers’ policy of rearmament, at first all undertaken secretly, and then revealed to the world on 16th of March 1935. Skilful propaganda concealed the underlying weakness of Germany’s rapidly expanding armed forces, and their strength was constantly overestimated abroad.
All-the-while the British were being prepared. During the crisis over Czechoslovakia in 1938, 38 million gas masks were issued to men , women and children in Britain. In the late 1930's fears about the use of gas were justified. In 1935 The Italian dictator Benito Mussolini had used chemical weapons in his conquest of Ethiopia.
War, or rather the threat of it, was the driving force behind Hitlers foreign policy in the 1930s. He played brilliantly on the popular desire for peace in France and Britain, their governments fear of a bloodletting even more terrible than that of 1914-18, and their inability to ally with the Soviet Union.