by Norman Lowe
Map 6.6 The defeat of Germany, 1944–5
Source: D. Heater, Our World This Century (Oxford, 1992), p. 90
(e) The defeat of Japan
On 6 August 1945 the Americans dropped an atomic bomb on Hiroshima, killing perhaps as many as 84 000 people and leaving thousands more slowly dying of radiation poisoning. Three days later they dropped an atomic bomb on Nagasaki, which killed perhaps another 40 000; after this the Japanese government surrendered. The dropping of these bombs was one of the most controversial actions of the entire war. President Truman’s justification was that he was saving American lives, since the war might otherwise drag on for another year. Many historians believe that the bombings were not necessary, since the Japanese had already put out peace feelers in July via Russia. One suggestion is that the real reason for the bombings was to end the fighting swiftly before the Russians (who had promised to enter the war against Japan) gained too much Japanese territory, which would entitle them to share the occupation of Japan. The use of the bombs was also a deliberate demonstration to the USSR of the USA’s enormous power.
6.7 WHY DID THE AXIS POWERS LOSE THE WAR?
The reasons can be summarized briefly:
shortage of raw materials;
the Allies learning from their mistakes and failures;
the Axis powers taking on too much;
the overwhelming impact of the combined resources of the USA, the USSR and the British Empire;
tactical mistakes by the Axis powers.
(a) Shortage of raw materials
Both Italy and Japan had to import supplies, and even Germany was short of rubber, cotton, nickel and, after mid-1944, oil. These shortages need not have been fatal, but success depended on a swift end to the war, which certainly seemed likely at first, thanks to the speed and efficiency of the German Blitzkrieg. However, the survival of Britain in 1940 was important because it kept the western front alive until the USA entered the war.
(b) The Allies soon learned from their early failures
By 1942 they knew how to check Blitzkrieg attacks and appreciated the importance of air support and aircraft carriers. Consequently they built up an air and naval superiority which won the battles of the Atlantic and the Pacific and slowly starved their enemies of supplies.
(c) The Axis powers simply took on too much
Hitler did not seem to understand that war against Britain would involve her empire as well, and that his troops were bound to be spread too thinly – on the Russian front, on both sides of the Mediterranean, and on the western coastline of France. Japan made the same mistake: as military historian Liddell-Hart put it, ‘they became stretched out far beyond their basic capacity for holding their gains. For Japan was a small island state with limited industrial power.’ In Germany’s case, Mussolini was partly to blame: his incompetence was a constant drain on Hitler’s resources.
(d) The combined resources of the USA, the USSR and the British Empire
These resources were so great that the longer the war lasted, the less chance the Axis had of victory. The Russians rapidly moved their industry east of the Ural Mountains and so were able to continue production even though the Germans had occupied vast areas in the west. By 1945 they had four times as many tanks as the Germans and could put twice as many men in the field. When the American war machine reached peak production it could turn out over 70 000 tanks and 120 000 aircraft a year, which the Germans and Japanese could not match. Albert Speer, Hitler’s armaments minister from 1942, gave the impression that he had worked some sort of miracle, enabling Germany’s arms production to keep pace with that of the enemy. However, Adam Tooze has shown that Speer was more successful as a self-publicist than as an armaments minister. He claimed credit for successful policies that were actually started before he took over; he blamed everybody else when his policies failed, and continued right to the end to produce a stream of false statistics.
(e) Serious tactical mistakes
The Japanese failed to learn the lesson about the importance of aircraft carriers, and concentrated too much on producing battleships.
Hitler should have defeated Britain before invading the USSR, which committed Germany to a war on two fronts. German plans for the invasion of Britain were vague and improvised, and they underestimated the strength of the enemy. Britain was saved for the Allies and was able to be used later as the base from which to launch the D-Day landings.
Hitler failed to provide for a winter campaign in Russia and completely underestimated Russian resourcefulness and determination. The deeper the German army advanced into Soviet territory, the more its supply and communication lines became exposed to enemy counter-attacks. Hitler also became obsessed with the idea that the German armies must not retreat; this led to many disasters in Russia, especially Stalingrad, and left his troops badly exposed in Normandy (1944). This all helped to hasten defeat because it meant that scarce resources were being wasted.
Hitler made a fatal mistake by declaring war on the USA after Japan’s attack on Pearl Harbor.
Another serious mistake was Hitler’s decision to concentrate on producing V-rockets when he could have been developing jet aircraft; these might well have restored German air superiority and prevented the devastating bomb attacks of 1944 and 1945.
(f) Nazi racial policy
Nazi treatment of Jews, gypsies and homosexuals in occupied territories of the USSR alienated many of the conquered peoples who, with decent treatment, could have been brought on board to fight the Stalinist regime. Soviet rule was especially unpopular in the Ukraine.
6.8 THE HOLOCAUST
As the invading Allied armies moved into Germany and Poland, they began to make horrifying discoveries. At the end of July 1944 Soviet forces approaching Warsaw came upon the extermination camp at Majdanek near Lublin. They found hundreds of unburied corpses and seven gas chambers. Photographs taken at Majdanek were the first to reveal to the rest of the world the unspeakable horrors of these camps. It later emerged that over 1.5 million people had been murdered at Majdanek; the majority of them were Jews, but they also included Soviet prisoners of war, as well as Poles who had opposed the German occupation. This was only one of at least 20 camps set up by the Germans to carry out what they called the ‘Final Solution’ (Endlosung) of the ‘Jewish problem’. Between December 1941, when the first Jews were killed at Chelmno in Poland, and May 1945 when the Germans surrendered, some 5.7 million Jews were murdered, along with hundreds of thousands of non-Jews – gypsies, socialists, communists, homosexuals and the mentally handicapped.
How could such a terrible atrocity have been allowed to happen? Was it the natural culmination of a long history of anti-Semitism in Germany? Or should the blame be placed fairly and squarely on Hitler and the Nazis? Had Hitler been planning the extermination of the Jews ever since he came to power, or was it forced on him by the circumstances of the war? These are some of the questions that historians have wrestled with as they try to explain how such a monstrous crime against humanity could have taken place.
Earlier interpretations of the Holocaust can be divided into two main groups.
Intentionalists – historians who believed that responsibility for the Holocaust rests on Hitler, who had hoped and planned to exterminate the Jews ever since he came to power.
Functionalists – historians who believed that the ‘Final Solution’ was in a sense forced on Hitler by the circumstances of the war.
There is also a small group of misguided writers with anti-Semitic sympathies, who try to play down the significance of the Holocaust. They have variously argued that the numbers of dead have been greatly exaggerated; that Hitler himself was unaware of what was happening; and that other Nazis, such as Himmler, Heydrich and Goering, took the initiative; a few have even denied that the Holocaust ever took place at all. All these writers have now been largely discredited.
(a) The intentionalists
They argue that Hitler was personally responsible for the Holocaust. Right fr
om his early days in Vienna he had been venomously anti-Semitic; in his book Mein Kampf (My Struggle) he blamed the Jews for Germany’s defeat in the First World War and for all her problems since. In his speech to the Reichstag in January 1939 Hitler declared: ‘if international finance Jewry inside and outside Europe should succeed in plunging the nations once more into a world war, the result will be, not the bolshevization of the earth, and thereby the victory of Jewry, but the annihilation of the Jewish race in Europe’. The intentionalists stress the continuity between his ideas in the early 1920s and the actual policies that were carried out in the 1940s. As Karl Dietrich Bracher puts it, although Hitler may not have had a master plan, he certainly knew what he wanted, and it included the annihilation of the Jews; the Final Solution ‘was merely a matter of time and opportunity’. Critics of this theory question why it took until the end of 1941 – almost nine years after Hitler came to power – before the Nazis began to murder Jews. Why did Hitler content himself with anti-Jewish legislation if he was so determined to exterminate them? In fact, following Kristallnacht – an attack on Jewish property and synagogues throughout Germany in November 1938 – Hitler ordered restraint and a return to non-violence.
(b) The functionalists
They believe that it was the Second World War which aggravated the ‘Jewish problem’. About three million Jews lived in Poland; when the Germans took over the western part of Poland in the autumn of 1939, and occupied the rest of Poland in June 1941, these unfortunate people fell under Nazi control. The invasion of the USSR in June 1941 brought a further dimension to the ‘Jewish problem’, since there were several million Jews living in the occupied republics of the western USSR – Belorussia and Ukraine. The functionalists argue that it was sheer pressure of numbers that led the Nazi and SS leaders in Poland to press for the mass murder of Jews. Hitler’s views were well known throughout Nazi circles; he simply responded to the demands of the local Nazi leaders in Poland. Hans Mommsen, one of the leading functionalists, believes that Hitler was ‘a weak dictator’ – in other words, more often than not, he followed the promptings of others rather than taking initiatives himself (see Section 14.6(d)) for more about the ‘weak dictator’ theory). As late as 2001 Mommsen was still suggesting that there was no clear evidence of any genocidal bent before 1939.
According to Ian Kershaw in his biography of Hitler (published in 2000), ‘Hitler’s personalized form of rule invited radical initiatives from below and offered such initiatives backing, so long as they were in line with his broadly defined goals.’ The way to advancement in Hitler’s Third Reich was to anticipate what the Führer wanted, and then ‘without waiting for directives, take initiatives to promote what were presumed to be Hitler’s aims and wishes’. The phrase used to describe this process was ‘working towards the Führer’. The intentionalists are not impressed with this interpretation because they feel it absolves Hitler from personal responsibility for the atrocities committed during the war. However, this conclusion does not necessarily follow: many of these initiatives would not even have been proposed if his subordinates had not been well aware of the ‘Führer’s will’.
Some historians feel that the intentionalist v. functionalist debate is now somewhat dated and that both approaches can be misleading. For example, Allan Bullock in Hitler and Stalin (1991), pointed out that the most obvious interpretation of the genocide was a combination of both approaches. Richard Overy in The Dictators (2004) claims that
both approaches to the hunt for genocide divert attention from the central reality for all Jews after 1933: whether or not the later genocide was explicit or merely implicit in the anti-Jewish policies of the 1930s. … the vengeful and violent xenophobia promoted by the regime had the Jews as its primary object throughout the whole life of the dictatorship.
What were Hitler’s motives? Why was he so obsessively anti-Jewish? It is clear from a secret memorandum which Hitler wrote in 1936, however crazy it may appear today, that he genuinely perceived the Jews as a threat to the German nation. He believed that the world, led by Germany, was on the verge of a historic racial and political struggle against the forces of communism, which he saw as a Jewish phenomenon. If Germany failed, the German Volk (people) would be destroyed and the world would enter a new Dark Age. It was a question of German national survival in the face of a worldwide Jewish conspiracy. In the words of Richard Overy:
The treatment of the Jews was intelligible only in the distorted mirror of German national anxieties and national aspirations. The system deliberately set out to create the idea that Germany’s survival was contingent entirely on the exclusion or, if necessary, the annihilation of the Jew.
It was the convergence of Hitler’s uncompromising anti-Jewish prejudice and his self-justification, together with the opportunity for action, which culminated in the terrible ‘apocalyptic battle between “Aryan” and “Jew”’.
(c) The ‘Final Solution’ takes shape
Alan Bullock argued that the best way to explain how the Holocaust came about is to combine elements from both intentionalists and functionalists. From the early 1920s Hitler had committed himself and the Nazi party to destroying the power of the Jews and driving them out of Germany, but exactly how this was to be done was left vague. ‘It is very likely’, writes Bullock, ‘that among the fantasies in which he indulged privately … was the evil dream of a final settlement in which every man, woman and child of Jewish race would be butchered. … But how, when, even whether, the dream could ever be realized remained uncertain.’
It is important to remember that Hitler was a clever politician who paid a lot of attention to public opinion. During the early years of his Chancellorship, he was well aware that the so-called ‘Jewish question’ was not a main concern of most German people. Consequently he would go no further than the Nuremberg Laws (1935) (see Section 14.4(b), Point 11), and even they were introduced to satisfy the Nazi hardliners. Hitler allowed Kristallnacht to go ahead in November 1938 for the same reason, and to test popular feeling. When public opinion reacted unfavourably, he called an end to violence and concentrated on excluding Jews as far as possible from German life. They were encouraged to emigrate and their property and assets were seized. Before the outbreak of war, well over half a million Jews had left the country; plans were being discussed to forcibly remove as many Jews as possible to Madagascar.
It was the outbreak of war, and in particular the invasion of Russia (June 1941), that radically changed the situation. According to Richard Overy, this was seen not as an accidental or unplanned opportunity for a more vigorous anti-Jewish policy, but as ‘an extension of an anti-Semitic Cold War that Germany had been engaged in since at least her defeat in 1918’. The occupation of the whole of Poland and large areas of the USSR meant that many more Jews came under German control, but at the same time the conditions of war meant that it was almost impossible for them to emigrate. In Poland, around two and a half million Jews were forcibly moved from their homes and herded into overcrowded ghettos in cities such as Warsaw, Lublin and Łódź. In 1939, for example, 375 000 Jews lived in Warsaw; after they captured the city, the Germans built a wall round the Jewish districts. Later, Jews from other parts of Poland were moved into Warsaw, until by July 1941, there were about 445 000 Jews crammed into this small ghetto. Nazi officials complained about the problems of coping with such large numbers of Jews – conditions in the ghettos were dreadful, food was deliberately kept in short supply and there was the danger of epidemics. Eventually 78 000 died from disease and starvation.
In December 1941, soon after Germany had declared war on the USA, Hitler stated publicly that his prophecy of January 1939, about the annihilation of Europe’s Jews, would soon be fulfilled. The following day Goebbels wrote in his diary: ‘The World War is here, the extermination of the Jews must be the necessary consequence.’ There is no firm evidence as to exactly when the decision was taken to begin the implementation of the ‘Final Solution’ – to kill the Jews – but it was arguably
in the autumn of 1941.
The decision was the result of a combination of various developments and circumstances:
Hitler’s self-confidence was at a new high point after all the German victories, especially the early successes of Operation Barbarossa.