A Short History of Europe: From Charlemagne to the Treaty of Europe (15 page)

From the moment in January 1933 that
Adolf Hitler was invited to become Chancellor by German President, Paul von Hindenburg (1847–1934), it was obvious to many that his ambitions lay beyond Germany’s borders. In his 1925 book,
Mein Kamp
f, Hitler had coined the term
Lebensraum
to describe what he believed to be Germany’s need for more space. He had also laid forth his hierarchical views on race, placing the German – or Aryan – race
at the top of the hierarchy and the Jews at the bottom. His loathing of communism was also made very clear.

In power, the Nazis immediately began a reign of terror, ruthlessly crushing all resistance. The first of the infamous concentration camps, built to torture and imprison opponents of the regime, were constructed in 1933, shortly after an arson attack on the German Reichstag, or parliament.
The Nazis used this attack to persuade President von Hindenburg to agree to the introduction of emergency laws to combat the ‘ruthless confrontation of the Communist Party of Germany’. The new laws established Germany as a dictatorship. Press, cinema and radio freedoms were withdrawn and civil liberties were suspended. Thousands of communists and other opponents of the Nazis were incarcerated
in the new concentration camps.

The greatest victims were the people that Hitler and the Nazis blamed for all of Germany’s ills – the Jews. In 1935, the Nuremberg Laws were introduced, severely limiting the freedom of Jews in Germany. They were banned from holding public office, Jewish shops were boycotted and many thousands, fearing for their future in Germany, emigrated. In 1938, on the night
of 9–10 November, a pogrom took place across the country, known as
Kristallnacht
. In this one night, at least 92 Jews were murdered and 30,000 were arrested and sent to concentration camps. Meanwhile, synagogues and Jewish cemeteries were attacked. By the end of the forthcoming war, some six million Jews would die in the camps.

There was little resistance to the moves against their Jewish neighbours
by the people of Germany. Many turned a blind eye while others were just pleased to see the country regaining its pride and its position as a power in Europe and the world. The 1936 Berlin Olympics had confirmed that status, even if the black American runner, Jesse Owens (1913–80) had upset Hitler’s celebration of the Aryan race by winning four gold medals. Unemployment had been significantly
reduced, even if large numbers of the once unemployed were now working in the munitions factories that were churning out arms in preparation for the war that many people knew must come. Hitler made no secret of his rearming of Germany and elements of military life began to seep into the everyday life of the German people. The
Hitler-Jugend
(Hitler Youth) and the
Deutches Jungvolk
(German Youth)
prepared boys and young men to fight for their country, instilling in them the principles of Nazism. Nazi propaganda also prepared the German people for war.

At first, since Germany was still not strong enough to engage in military action, Hitler restricted himself, often very successfully, to the diplomatic front. However, a series of incidents began the path to war. In January 1935, the fifteen-year
League of Nations mandate on the Saarland, the only part of Germany still under foreign control, came to an end. In a plebiscite to determine its future more than 90 per cent of the population expressed a desire to be returned to Germany. Then, in March, Hitler broke one of the terms of the Versailles Treaty when he introduced conscription. He followed that with a denunciation of the Treaties
of Locarno and ordered his troops into the Rhineland which had been demilitarised in 1920 in order to create a buffer zone between Germany on one side and France, Belgium and Luxembourg on the other. On 12 March 1938, after several years of continuous pressure, he annexed Austria, in an action known as the
Anschluss
.

Britain, France and Italy had met in 1935 at Stresa in Italy to form a united
front against German rearmament and to confirm the Locarno Treaties, but it was all to no avail. Britain, desperate to avoid war, embarked on a policy of appeasement towards Hitler and the Italians formed the Rome-Berlin Axis, following the signing of a treaty of friendship with the Germans in October 1936, welcoming Japan into the Axis and then Franco’s Spain. France, meanwhile, was suffering internal
problems posed by scandals and extremists.

For many, of course, Hitler was a useful bolster against communism and they were happy to let him get on with his expansionist plans. For others, the fear of war was so great that they were terrified to raise their voices. In 1938, Hitler’s desire to annex the Sudetenland in Czechoslovakia and incorporate its largely ethnic German population into a Greater
Germany brought Europe close to war. As German troops gathered on the border, preparing to invade, the British and French Prime Ministers, Neville Chamberlain and Georges Daladier, met with Hitler and Mussolini at Munich. Hitler claimed that this was his last territorial demand and an agreement was reached forcing the Czechs to cede the Sudetenland to Germany. Europe had been pulled back from
the brink. On 15 March 1939, however, Hitler’s true intentions became clear when he invaded the rest of Czechoslovakia. War was inevitable and Poland would be the catalyst.

Hitler had been agitating for some time about the German minority who lived in Poland but, on this occasion, the governments of Britain and France were unequivocal in their support for the Poles. However,
it was unknown which way the Soviet Union would fall in the event of a German invasion of Poland. Following the death of Lenin in 1924 and a long period of infighting between bitter political rivals, the USSR had been ruled autocratically by Joseph Stalin (1878–1953) who had controlled his vast country using terror, a secret police force and show trials in which opponents of his regime confessed
their guilt to the most unlikely of crimes. He established labour camps to house opponents or simply had them killed. Incredibly, in August 1939, Stalin signed a non-aggression pact with Hitler, but with good reason. Hitler was prepared to allow him a free hand in Poland and Eastern Europe. The Germans, in return, would benefit from not having to wage the impending war on two fronts.

On 3 September
1939, two days after German troops had marched into Poland, Britain and France declared war on Germany. Initially, however, they did nothing. Poland was rapidly beaten and the Russians occupied the eastern part of the country as agreed between Hitler and Stalin. Finland was next, the Soviets launching their attack on 30 November but, in a period known as the ‘Phoney War’, nothing much more
happened until April 1940, when German troops occupied Denmark and Norway, breaching the neutrality of both countries. In the west, Belgium, Luxembourg and the Netherlands fell and, on 17 June 1940, after just six weeks of fighting, France capitulated. Britain stood alone. Meanwhile, Italy had invaded Albania in April and on 10 June declared war on Britain and France. Late October saw the Italians
invade Greece where they met stiff opposition.

Just as Hitler began to believe in the summer of 1940 that Europe was his, he was forced to confront the determination of a British people galvanised by their charismatic leader, Winston Churchill (1874–1965). During the Battle of Britain, every major industrial British city was bombed but the RAF never lost its air superiority and the plan to weaken
Britain from the air and then invade was abandoned.

Without warning, Hitler now launched an attack on the USSR on 22 June 1941 but, by the winter of 1941–42, his advance had been halted at Moscow and Leningrad. The war that Stalin named ‘The Great Patriotic War’ brought out the determination and courage of the Russian people as they staunchly resisted the German forces, especially at Stalingrad
where, after months of street-fighting, the Germans capitulated. Around a million and a half people had died in the battle.

By now, all of Europe, apart from the neutral countries of Ireland, Switzerland, Spain, Portugal and Sweden, was at war. The conflict had also become a global conflagration with Japan’s surprise attack on the US base at Pearl Harbor in December 1941. It was a war that involved
everyone. Civilians had to endure massively destructive bombing raids on a daily basis and many took part in resistance movements, fighting clandestinely against occupying armies. General Charles de Gaulle led the Free French movement from London while, in Eastern Europe, partisans waged guerrilla warfare against their enemies.

In July 1943, the Allied invasion of Europe began in Sicily. It led
to the capture of most of Italy. Mussolini was able to remain in power only precariously in the north, and with Hitler’s support, before being shot by partisans in April 1945. D-Day, 6 June 1944, saw the Allies land in northern France and begin their advance on Berlin. The Red Army, meanwhile was ruthlessly advancing on Germany from the east. The final defeat of the Third Reich could be postponed
but not avoided. On 30 April 1945, Hitler committed suicide in his bunker in Berlin and Germany surrendered eight days later. The war in Europe was over and, within months, the dropping of atomic bombs by the USA on Hiroshima and Nagasaki brought World War Two to an end.

The Casablanca, Teheran (both 1943) and Yalta (1945) Conferences had already given the Allied leaders the opportunity to make
plans for after the war. Germany was divided between France, Britain, the USSR and the USA who would occupy and police their respective areas. Poland’s frontier would be moved one hundred kilometres west and Russia would gain territory. The numbers who had died on one side or another in the years the war had lasted were even more staggering than those of the First World War. Some fifty to sixty
million were dead or missing and many millions of those were civilians, killed by air raids or rampaging, occupying armies.

Europe was a continent in complete disarray. Entire peoples were displaced, having been either forcibly removed or obliged to flee before advancing armies. Europe was also bankrupt. Economies had been devastated by the funding of the war effort. Moreover, exhausted and broken,
Europeans no longer found themselves at the centre of the universe. There was a new world order with two new superpowers – the United States of America and the USSR.

Post-War Europe

As Europe crawled blinking from the ruins of World War Two, it was into the realisation that European domination of the world was at an end, a fact confirmed by the loss of its various colonial empires within two decades of the end of the war. The continent was bankrupt and entire cities lay in ruins. Large, formerly fertile areas, such as the Ukraine,
had been devastated by fierce fighting. There were psychological scars, too. Nazi atrocities perpetrated against the Jews and others shocked an entire continent. The former superpowers of Europe were mere shadows of their former selves and the United States, its territory unblemished by warfare and its industry bolstered by the war effort, was now a leading player in the peace. So too was the Soviet
Union, the might of its army undiminished by the fierce war it had just won.

The Soviets renewed their efforts to bring other countries in Eastern Europe into the communist sphere with the founding of Cominform, an official forum of the international communist movement. Stalin had convened this forum in 1947 in order to discuss the Marshall Plan, a programme devised by US Secretary of State,
George Marshall (1880–1959), to rebuild Europe in the post-war period. Earlier that year, the British Prime Minister, Winston Churchill, had predicted the future when, during his
Sinews of Peace
speech, delivered at Westminster College, Fulton, Mississippi, he said:

From Stettin in the Baltic to Trieste in the Adriatic an ‘iron curtain’ has descended across the Continent. Behind that line lie
all the capitals of the ancient states of Central and Eastern Europe. Warsaw, Berlin, Prague, Vienna, Budapest, Belgrade, Bucharest and Sofia; all these famous cities and the populations around them lie in what I must call the Soviet sphere, and all are subject, in one form or another, not only to Soviet influence but to a very high and in some cases increasing measure of control from Moscow.

A few months later, the refusal of the Russians and their satellites to accept the aid that came with the plan confirmed his vision and at once split the world in two, setting the scene for the next 45 years. A new war had begun, a war with many casualties, but no out-and-out fighting. American financier and US presidential adviser Bernard Baruch (1870–1965), came up with a name for this new war.
He called it the ‘Cold War’.

There was some opposition, of course, to communism. Czechoslovakia, for instance, was inclined to accept the US aid, but a communist coup in February 1948 put an end to that. There was also a bloody civil war in Greece between 1946 and 1949 that eventually defeated the communists who had played a major role in the liberation of the country.

The victorious powers
had learned their lesson from the Treaty of Versailles at the end of the First World War and they tried desperately to solve the problems of what to do with Germany this time around without creating another major conflict within a few years. Berlin was a major flashpoint and the Soviets imposed a blockade on the city when the three Western occupying powers united their three zones and introduced a
common currency in June 1948 – the Deutschmark. The Allies began the Berlin airlift, supplying their zones with essentials by air. The blockade was only lifted after a year. Then, in May 1949, the Soviets became even more inflamed when the Washington Agreement established the Federal Republic of Germany (West Germany) with its capital in Bonn. On 7 October, the Russians announced the founding of
the German Democratic Republic (East Germany) in their zone.

Fear of war continued. NATO, the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation, had been created in 1949 to provide a system of collective defence and there was even a suggestion of allowing West Germany to rearm and become a member of a putative European army, proposed by the French, consisting of troops from France, Luxembourg, Belgium, Italy
and the Netherlands. The European Defence Community (EDC), one of the first real modern efforts at European unity, failed to come into being, however, when the French National Assembly refused to ratify it. The Western European Union took its place in 1954 and this time Britain was involved. West Germany became a member and in 1955 became a full member of NATO. Not to be outdone, the USSR responded
a few months later with its own military union – the Warsaw Pact.