'The Road to World War II: Why Wasn't Hitler Stopped?'

The image is from Wiki Commons. The text is German, but the photo is dated September 16, 1938, and titled, "Obersalzberg." This shot places Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain at Hitler's retreat - the Eagle's Nest - near Berchtesgaden during his initial diplomatic visit to Germany to stave off war over the Sudetenland.

I'm moved to post this after reading Der Spiegel's essay today, "The Road to World War II: Why Wasn't Hitler Stopped?" Here's the introduction:

World War II began 70 years ago when Germany invaded Poland on Sept. 1, 1939. It would last six years and claim millions of lives. But the Allies missed several opportunities to stop Hitler in the run-up to the war.

And here's this from the text:

Like a massive earthquake, Hitler's war forever destroyed a world order with Europe at its center. After 1945, the United States became the world's principal driving force. The shift of Poland's borders to the West, the Soviet Union's dominance of Eastern Europe, which would last until 1989, and the partition of Germany -- none of this would have happened without World War II.

And at the root of it all was a man who -- if one is to believe his contemporaries -- was just 1.75 meters (5 foot 9 inches) tall and who weighed a mere 70 kilograms (154 pounds), a man whose guttural pronunciation betrayed his Austrian origins: Adolf Hitler, born in the town of Braunau am Inn.

But is it possible for one man, no matter how powerful a dictator, to set the entire world on fire? For some time, there have been growing doubts about the previously generally accepted view, and the consensus today is that the situation was far more complex than once believed. It remains indisputable that World War II would not have happened without Hitler. But it is also clear that a number of factors helped to turn the Nazi leader's war fantasies into reality.

One of those factors was the compliance of conservative elites in the military, the civil administration and the world of business. They did not share Hitler's crude concept of racial superiority, and many of them feared a war with the Western powers. Nevertheless, they dreamed of acquiring global power and had aspirations to create a Greater Germany that would, at the very least, dominate Eastern Europe. They included men like Franz Halder, the commander-in-chief of the army, who announced in the spring of 1939 that his men had to overrun Poland and would then, "filled with the spirit of having emerged victorious from enormous battles, be prepared to either oppose Bolshevism or be thrown to the West."

The rest is here.

The piece notes as well that public opinion in Germany on the eve of war was nationalist and hardly pacifist. It turns out, not surprisingly, that there was a 'rally 'round the Reichsadler" effect after the initial conquest of Poland.

Cited here as an authority is Ian Kershaw, whose recent two-volume psycho-biography of Hitler has been re-released in an abridged, single-volume edition, Hitler: A Biography. Still, I'm not sure how much more "complex" is the academic consensus today on the origins of World War Two in Europe. Historians and political scientists have been researching these issues for decades; and my take on Kershaw's work was more an exhaustively-researched and innovative interpretation of Hitler rather than a raw, wholesale paradigm shift on the outbreak of the conflict.

The war in Europe has long been considered overdetermined: We had the unfinished conflict with Imperial Germany, which left the defeated German state intact and at restless following the punitive peace settlement at Versailles. Changes in the international system and choices of the leading states of the realm contributed to the permissive circumstances for a new continential conflagration. The United States stayed out of the League of Nations. American power was withdrawn from the European balance. British and French policies chose appeasement on the late-1930s when a softer line in the 1920s might have helped the Weimar regime survive. These counterfactuals are discussed by Joseph Nye in his book, Understanding International Conflicts.

My own work has focused on pacifist (antiwar) opinion in contributing to the phenomenon of "underbalancing" in the 1930s. Democratic regimes are often difficult to rouse to action, but by 1938 Britain and the U.S. (and to a lesser degree France) had moved well on the way toward a material counterbalance to German power. It's a frustrating exercise, figuring out what delayed the Western response to Hitler's drive for hegemonic conquest. Thank goodness that the Western democracies prevailed in the end.