REFLECTIONS ON VE DA Y----1

The War That Had To Be

By ALAN BULLOCK

TliE war in Europe came to an end twenty years ago. After nearly six years of fighting and intense effort, the Germans had been de- feated for the second time in a generation; Hitler and Mussolini were dead, the Third Reich overthrown, its capital occupied, its cities reduced to rubble. This time the Allies meant to make sure: total war was to be matched by total defeat, and travelling through Germany in that summer of 1945 I found it hard to believe that any nation could recover from such blows.

Any compassion I felt, however, was checked by the thought that if ever a people had brought disaster on their own heads it was the Germans. By then we had uncovered the evidence in Belsen and Buchenwald which confirmed all that had been said about the evil character of the Nazi regime. Surely no one could doubt that this was a war which had to be fought. I remember a walk near Diepholz with a German friend who had been a political refugee, first in Czechoslo- vakia, then in England: we talked about the war- guilt controversy which followed the First World War. This time, we agreed. there could be no such controversy, still less a stab-in-the-back myth: this time even the Germans must admit who had been responsible for starting the war and prolonging it to the point where their country was in ruins and occupied.

In the summer of 1945 it all appeared very clear. How does it look now, twenty years later?

Europe has never found an answer to the question, how to live with the Germans if they are united in a single state which by virtue of its geographical position, the size of its popu- lation, their organising ability and economic resourcefulness appears destined to dominate the rest of the continent. This was the political issue which lay at the root of both wars and which remains unresolved to this day, even if tem- porarily overlaid by the division of Germany and Europe into Communist and non-Communist halves. The Treaty of Versailles certainly pro- vided no answer: it imposed penalties and restrictions upon Germany which it was virtually certain the Germans would seek to remove and highly unlikely the former Allies would enforce.

Whether a compromise could have been dis- covered between German demands for the revision of Versailles. French fears, and Poland's determination to defend the frontiers she had acquired after the war, is a question I have never been able to answer to my own satisfaction. What 1 am sure of is that it is a question which needs to be asked. Why? Because, if one wants to understand the origins of the Second World War, it is at least as important to recognise the failure —and the reasons for the failure—to reach a settlement with Germany before Hitler as it is to continue harping on the folly of looking for one, the policy of appeasement, after he had come to power.

Some people, of course, would argue that the question is not worth asking, that the only settlement the Germans would ever have con- sidered was one which reversed the defeat of 1918 and restored them to a dominant position in Europe. They may be right, in which case the only choice open to the Allies, not only after 1933, but throughout the inter-war years, was either to let Germany get on top again or to hold her down. The difficulty in forming a judgment of the alternative view—that a settle- ment could have been found—is the impact of the Depression. What might have been possible, it can be argued, given a continuance of the economic recovery of 1925-28 (or the prosperity of the 1950s), was no longer practicable in the changed atmosphere of fear and distrust in 1929-32. Even if a settlement had been reached, would it have stood any chance of surviving in a Germany where mass unemployment produced a mood uniquely suited to exploitation by a man of Hitler's gifts?

All this assumes that, once Hitler had come to power, at least after the purge of June 30, 1934, when he finally eliminated any opposition, claimed the succession to Hindenburg and assumed the title of Ftihrer, all hope of a settle- ment with Germany except on Hitler's terms was ended. I have never come across any evi- dence that would lead to a different conclusion.

This is not to say that Hitler came to power with the express purpose of launching another European war, with a 'blueprint' or timetable of aggression already in his mind. He was far too much of an opportunist for that. I agree with Mr. A. J. P. Taylor that, not only in 1938, but up to the very last moment in August 1939, Hitler had not finally made up his mind to take the risk of starting a war. Where I disagree with Mr. Taylor is in believing that, given the charac- ter of Adolf Hitler and of the movement he had created, it was certain that sooner or later he was going to take that risk.

Hitler's career is remarkable for two things: his opportunism and his consistency. To achieve his aims he was prepared to consider any device, including the Nazi-Soviet pact: but the aims themselves. hardly vary at all, from his early speeches in Bavaria and Mein Kampf to the table talk of the 1940s. No one could complain that he had not made them clear: to get rid of the 'Jewish swindle' of democracy and establish the rule of a single party based on the Fiihrer- prin.:fp. with himself as Fiihrer; to eliminate the Jews from German life; to remove the restric- tions and regain the territories lost by the Treaty of Versailles; to establish Germany as the most powerful nation in Europe and to find 'Owns- :num for her growing population by expansion to the east. This was Hitler's programme—not from 1937 or 1938, as many Germans later affected to believe, nor from 1940-41, but from the beginning. If anyone doubts this, he has only to look at Mein Kampf. What expanded were not Hitler's ambitions, but the means at his dis- posal to carry them out and the margin of risk he could afford to take.

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Reports in the 1930s exaggerated the progress of German rearmament: in reaction some his- torians today have been inclined to underplay its importance. But German rearmament in the 1930s was no myth. Like all rearmament pro- grammes. it took longer to produce results than anyone expected, but the results were impres-

sive: no other army was so well equipped or prepared for war in 1939-40 as that which Hitler had at his disposal.

Hitler no more had a cut-and-dried plan for war than he had for diplomacy. The meeting which he held with his commanders-in-chief in November 1937 (the so-called Hossbach meet- ing), provided no guide at all to what actually happened, and the annexation of Austria which followed was a hasty improvisation: Hitler had planned to acquire control of Austria by quite different means. The point of both the Hossbach meeting and the Anschluss, however, is that by the winter of 1937-38 the risks Hitler felt able to take were greater than they had been in 1936 when he re-occupied the Rhineland, far greater than in 1934 when he hastily repudiated the murderers of Dollfuss.

Even in 1939 Hitler did not deliberately plan a European war. He was convinced the Nazi- Soviet Pact would lead Britain and France to back down on their promise of support to Poland (as they had in the case of Czechoslovakia), and even after the Polish campaign had been won, made an offer of peace to the Western Powers. Why not? If Europe could be conquered piece- meal in a series of isolated diplomatic or military coups, why start a general war? Even after France was defeated, he was prepared to offer Britain terms of peace.

But to allow this to confuse us about Hitler's responsibility for the war would be to make the same mistake as those who allowed Hitler's tactics of 'legality' to confuse them about his intention of overthrowing the Weimar Republic. On each occasion it was he who took the initiative in creating or exploiting a crisis, then confronting the Western Powers with the dilemma of deciding whether or not this particular issue was worth fighting for. But it was Hitler who made the running and by a process of `escalation' deliberately increased the risk of war as his leverage in each successive crisis.

Had Britain and France acted resolutely at an earlier date—in 1936, for instance, when Hitler re-occupied the Rhineland—they might have curbed him without a war. I have some reservations about this, because I cannot see that a firm line even then would have been effective unless it led to Hitler's overthrow and, quite apart from the reluctance of British and French opinion to contemplate such a step, their inter- vention might well have rallied German support for the regime. By 1938, certainly by the time of the Czech crisis, although there is evidence that German opinion was more divided (I find it hard to believe that the German generals would ever have done more than protest, if that), resistance to Hitler's demands had to be based on the presumption of war.

It is still possible that if Hitler had been con- fronted with the blunt and unconditional alterna- tive of war he might have retreated: no one can be sure of this. Since Chamberlain's inter- vention, however, started from exactly the opposite point of view—to avoid war—it is hardly surprising that it did not prevent Hitler from acquiring the greater part of what he demanded without having to fight, and the remainder in March of the following year.

In the spring of 1939 Chamberlain's govern- ment gave its guarantee to Poland, but failed to make any real effort to secure the agreement with Russia which alone would have made it effective. Whether such an agreement could have

been reached remains a question without an answer. The moves made by the British could hardly have been less convincing, yet the sus- picion remains that if the Prime Minister himself had flown to Moscow he would have been no more successful than Lord Strang once Hitler had promised Stalin so great an accession of territory from the Gulf of Bothnia to the Danube —in return for doing nothing at all. Hitler was convinced that the Nazi-Soviet pact would lead the Western Powers to drop their guarantee to Poland. He was genuinely surprised when they did not, but he was hardly disconcerted: the army was ready and this time at least there was no doubt that he was prepared to use force if the threat was not enough.

It was still not a general war: only, as Hitler, true to his technique of 'one-by-one,' insisted, a localised campaign. But once he had faced 'the risk of war and not oply survived but triumphed, Hitler no longer bothered to contrive a situation in which he faced his opponents with the dilemma of deciding whether to fight. This time lie made the decision himself, not risking, but deliberately starting, a major war with the invasion of France : it was the logical next step in the series which had begun with the repudia- tion of the military clauses of the Treaty of Versailles in 1935. At each step Hitler had en- larged but never miscalculated the risks: he had not miscalculated now, by mid-June the French had capitulated and the British been driven out of the continent.

The Second World War was not the result of miscalculation on Hitler's part. Put on one side any idea of a timetable or blueprint of aggres- sion: what counted under all the shifts of opportunism and the hesitations of temperament was the consistency of purpose, to extend his own and German power—how far, was a ques- tion he did not ask. Sooner or later, this meant war, unless the rest of Europe was prepared to accept German domination without a fight: and to provide for it Hitler created an army which, when put to the test, took nearly six years to defeat. Looking back, with more than twenty years' hindsight, the only question I can see to ask is not whether there would be a war, but when, and at what cost.

(To be continued next week.)