Prehistory of the Second World War in Europe

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The heads of state of the European victorious powers Great Britain, France and Italy agreed with the German Reich at the Munich conference to separate the Sudetenland from Czechoslovakia.

The prehistory of the Second World War in Europe includes the power constellations and international politics after the end of the First World War up to the unleashing of the Second World War . The main developments in this period include the building of the Soviet Union , the rise of Spanish Falangism , Italian fascism and German National Socialism .

This includes in particular

overview

The prehistory of the Second World War was examined from different, often conflicting perspectives. The explanation of foreign and domestic political questions on National Socialist politics allows better than the description of individual events to describe the prehistory of the war in their contexts:

  • the role of Hitler's programmatic concepts before 1933 for German foreign policy since 1933
  • the importance of foreign policy in the Third Reich and its relationship to domestic, especially social policy and to other centers of power such as the armed forces and the foreign office .
  • the relationship between National Socialist foreign, economic and social policy to the previous specifically German and pan-European hegemonic policy since around 1880.
  • the economic preparation for war; Armaments and Industry
  • the interests of other states.

Reorganization of Europe after the First World War

Europe in the 1920s

Up until the First World War , Great Britain , France , the Russian Empire , Austria-Hungary and the German Empire were Europe's major powers. This system of power collapsed with the defeat of the Russian Empire, the Habsburg Empire and the German Empire. The victorious powers of the war, Great Britain, France and Italy , re-divided Europe in several peace treaties, the Paris Suburb Treaties .

A Bolshevik regime came to power in Russia during the course of the war as a result of the October Revolution , which was now to be shielded with a cordon sanitaire of newly founded nation states with a western orientation. These included Finland and the new Baltic republics of Estonia , Latvia and Lithuania . Poland regained its sovereignty , Romania was greatly enlarged territorially by formerly Hungarian territories (see Treaty of Trianon ) and the formerly Russian Bessarabia (details here ). Serbia , the former Austrian Slovenia and the former Hungarian Croatia were united in a newly established Kingdom of Yugoslavia . Bohemia and Moravia were united with Slovak and Carpathian-Ukrainian territories to form Czechoslovakia . Austria and Hungary were reduced to rump states .

the Versailles Treaty

The Versailles peace treaty concluded with the new republican Germany was not a work of mutual understanding and a compromise between victorious and defeated, but mainly an attempt to reduce Germany's political and economic strength to a "tolerable European level". Thus, despite the peoples' right to self-determination proclaimed by American President Wilson in his 14-point program , larger areas were separated from the German Reich without a referendum of the local population. Germany was assigned the sole war guilt for the outbreak of the First World War, and based on this argument it was to make extensive reparations payments for decades . The German army was limited to 100,000 men, banning aircraft, submarines, tanks and heavy weapons.

The Versailles Treaty was dictated to the defeated with practically no active participation and cooperation by the victors and under threat of resumption of hostilities if it was not signed within two days . He was partly to blame for the failure of a long-term and stable order in Europe. The entire post-war period was marked by the fear of a possible “re-strengthening” and Germany's intention to revenge. Lloyd George said in the British House of Commons on February 7, 1922: “If German youth are accustomed to the idea of ​​(...) punishing the winners for the defeat inflicted on Germany, this is one of the greatest dangers to which the future Europe will be exposed . "

Large parts of the population of Germany, which had largely initiated and lost the war, were dissatisfied with the new provisions of this treaty affecting Germany. Their own complicity at the beginning and course of this war was overlooked. Therefore, the foreign policy of the Weimar Republic endeavored to correct borders, especially in the east, as well as the annexation of Austria. The National Socialists went far beyond that. They were concerned with a redistribution of the political and economic spheres of influence in Europe, with living space and hegemony. Smaller states also made revisionist demands. The aftermath of the Great Depression shook the Western European powers. In the field of international politics they were no longer able to stabilize an international peace order; the European equilibrium under indirect British leadership crumbled. After the Weimar Republic had already managed to relax many of the provisions of the Versailles Treaty, Adolf Hitler passed the other restrictions, such as the limitation to a 100,000-man army. The rearmament of Germany worried the other states. They feared an economically and militarily strong Germany.

Revision efforts and the emergence of fascism and communism

Since Stresemann's time as Foreign Minister, Germany's goals had been mainly in the east and included the recovery of Danzig , the " Corridor ", the network district and Eastern Upper Silesia . Italy made claims to areas beyond the Adriatic. Hungary targeted areas that had been annexed to Czechoslovakia, Poland attempted to draw Lithuania directly or indirectly back into its sphere of influence. The Soviet Union feared that Poland's revisionism was also targeting the Soviet part of Ukraine and had the goal of a “world revolution” under Russian leadership.

The efforts of the Bolsheviks to expand the revolutionary movement in the course of the post-war chaos with the help of the Communist International to all of Europe ( Spartacus uprising , Hungarian Soviet Republic , Biennio rosso in Italy, Munich Soviet Republic , attempted uprising in Austria on June 12, 1919) also had reactionary and nationalist forces like the Freikorps in Germany and the Fasci di combattimento in Italy. National Socialism and Italian fascism recruited a considerable part of its militant supporters from them in the 1920s. Mussolini seized power on October 30, 1922 ; An attempted assassination on October 31, 1926, he used as an opportunity to restrict political freedoms and dissolve the remaining political parties (=> one-party state ).

Hitler took power on January 30, 1933; afterwards he radically operated - also with the help of his paramilitary associations SA and SS - bringing many social areas into line, smashing trade unions and much more (chronology here ). Because of the open question of South Tyrol, the two dictators Mussolini and Hitler did not work together until 1936, when Hitler sided with Italy in the course of the Abyssinian crisis and helped to minimize the effects of the League of Nations sanctions.

World economic crisis and self-sufficiency policy in Germany

Feeding of the poor by the Reichswehr, Berlin 1931
The collapse of German foreign trade , Germany had to exchange raw materials and food for industrial products on the world market.

According to the historian Hans-Erich Volkmann , Germany had a vital need for food and raw material imports at that time. These had to be financed through export. This export pressure was exacerbated by the assignment of territories under the Versailles Treaty , under which Germany, for example, lost 75 percent of iron ore production and around 15 percent of its food supply. The global economic crisis that began in 1929 led to a collapse in world trade and hit Germany hard - vital imports could no longer be financed through exports.

The idea of self-sufficiency as an alternative to the world economic free trade principle arose from this dilemma . For Volkmann, the National Socialists' living space theory offered the “conceptual roof” “under which the idea of ​​autarky could flourish”.

Like their predecessors, the Nazi government and Hjalmar Schacht , President of the Reichsbank , did not consider devaluing the Reichsmark to increase exports. In addition to reasons of prestige, the memory of the inflationary currency devaluation in 1923 played a role. In addition to the expansion of measures to regulate foreign exchange and the repayment of debts, bilateral trade agreements were sought from 1934. The German Reich received new sales markets and raw material reserves in Poland, Romania, Hungary, Yugoslavia and Bulgaria. From 1936 onwards, Hitler came closer to the goal of economic independence from the world market through a self-sufficient large-scale economy in south-eastern Europe.

A bad harvest in 1934, bureaucratisation and inefficiency of the Reich Food Ministry had led to food shortages in autumn 1935. As a result, food imports briefly took precedence over raw material imports for the armaments industry, which now contributed significantly to the economic upturn. A return of Germany to world trade and thus to increased export orientation was judged to be difficult. The Ministerialrat of the Reich Chancellery Franz Willuhn wrote in 1937:

“All efforts to increase the trade have been unsuccessful […]. An economic battle is raging in the world. "

According to the historian Ian Kershaw , however, a political decision by Hitler in 1936 was essential. He wanted to force armaments and - now irreversibly - relied entirely on autarky, which could only partially be achieved without territorial, expected military expansion.

With the onset of the global economic crisis in 1929, in addition to the self-sufficiency discussion, a flood of militaristic writings began. The number of war books rose from about 200 in 1926 to about 300 in 1929 and more than 400 in 1930, peaking in 1935 with 500 books.

In 1938 Germany had outstripped almost all European countries economically. Only in Great Britain was the average national income per capita 11 percent higher than in Germany. France's per capita income reached 77 percent of that of Germany, Poland was 48 percent.

The historian Detlef Junker sees one of the main reasons for Roosevelt's entry into the war in the economic threat to the USA from “a system of almost self-sufficient planned economies” which would arise from a victory for Germany, Japan and Italy. The USA was dependent on free world trade, the USA would lose its foreign investments if the world market collapsed, the volume of trade would decrease drastically, and if then foreign trade would only be possible on the terms of the others. This would exacerbate the unemployment problem, which was not resolved by the New Deal, and social tensions could no longer be resolved within the framework of the existing system.

National Socialism Program

Racial anti-Semitism: Exhibition "The Eternal Jew" , Munich 1937

Hitler's foreign policy thinking, which he published in the second volume of his book " Mein Kampf " in 1926 , was based on ideas that came from the Völkisch movement of the Empire and Austria-Hungary from around 1880:

  • Racial Anti-Semitism as a Global Conspiracy Theory . Hitler saw “ World Jewry ” as the mastermind of the First World War, the defeat in it, the November Revolution , the Versailles Treaty and all the needs of the post-war period. For him it stood behind both capitalism (“international financial Jewry”) and communism (“ Bolshevism ”). Hitler viewed the latter in the form of the Soviet Union as the main political enemy, while he only mentioned the USA in passing.
  • Social Darwinism : Hitler saw history as an eternal struggle for existence between higher and lower races, that is, as a constant war for " living space ", the acquisition of which for him depended solely on the "right of the strongest".
  • Geopolitics : Hitler wanted to conquer this area differently from the imperial era in Eastern Europe , and propagated this as an alternative to participating in world trade and colonialism .

Hitler took up the German settlement in the east up to the 14th century. Hitler did not mention a war against Poland , but declared Russia "ripe for collapse" because "the Jews" had "exterminated the Germanic ruling class" during the October Revolution . This was supposed to be revised by the "new German train" to the east. As a preliminary stage for his war of conquest, Hitler sought an alliance with the former main enemy Great Britain and Italy . He believed that the renunciation of colonies overseas and a German guarantee for the existence of the British empire would encourage its leadership to give Germany free rein on the continent. This alliance and geopolitics distinguished Hitler's concept from the previous aspirations for great power of the German national and Prussian elites.

Conquests in the East, the destruction of the Soviet Union and the elimination of Judaism formed an inseparable whole for him. “Foreign policy had to create the prerequisites for the land policy of the future and thus for the survival of the superior Aryan-Germanic race. In so doing, she also had to take into account the use of military force if there was resistance. In the long term, however, this commitment only brought a profit if, on the one hand, the national defense force was not endangered by `` alien blood '', and consequently the influence of Judaism was `` eradicated '' in peacetime, and if, on the other hand, the `` Jewish question '' in the interests of security during war The persecution of the Jews up to 1939, the war against the Soviet Union planned and carried out as a war of extermination and the “ final solution to the Jewish question ”, which escalated into the Holocaust from 1941 onwards, were already formulated in Hitler's ideology.

For Hitler, the expansion of the German Reich to the east was only a preliminary stage and starting point for a later German world power , to which he wanted to enable the Germanic race both domestically and internationally. With these plans, Hitler was able to build on the work and support of national conservative forces who dreamed of an Imperium Germanicum .

National Socialist Foreign Policy from 1933

Hitler's main long-term goals, published in 1924 and never withdrawn, did not determine the policy of the Nazi regime after the seizure of power, contrary to the fears of many opponents, especially those from the organized labor movement - "Hitler means war!" (1934) - by no means from the start. They were not tackled immediately and directly, but largely postponed in favor of a policy aimed at consolidating power in foreign and domestic politics, which initially hardly differed from the traditional revision policy of the Weimar period. This had led to a partial revision of the Versailles editions since 1931, but also to a partial international isolation.

Revision, Alliance and Armaments Policy

After taking office, Hitler pursued the immediate goals of regaining full "military sovereignty" and the territories ceded in 1919, arming Germany and strengthening it economically. If possible, this should be achieved by avoiding international conflicts. Hitler's first foreign policy steps served to pacify the rest of the world: he had the extension of the Berlin treaty with the Soviet Union ratified on May 5, 1933, held a highly acclaimed "peace speech" in the Reichstag on May 17, and on July 20, 1933 agreed the Reich Concordat with the Vatican .

The Foreign Office remained the traditional domain of conservative diplomats and was not yet significantly restricted by the establishment of competing party offices - the Foreign Policy Office of the NSDAP , the Foreign Organization of the NSDAP ( NSDAP / AO ) and the Ribbentrop Office . His sponsor Alfred Hugenberg , who in June 1933 had called for colonies and “living space” at the London World Economic Conference and thus caused a scandal, caused Hitler to resign from his post as Minister of Economics, Agriculture and Food.

The first significant change in foreign policy up to now was the withdrawal of the German delegation from the Geneva Disarmament Conference on October 14 and the termination of Germany's membership in the League of Nations on October 19, 1933. The initiative for this came from Foreign Minister Konstantin von Neurath and Reich Defense Minister Werner von Blomberg and Hitler out. Any form of international arms control would have stood in the way of Germany's rearmament, which Hitler wanted to pursue primarily. The measure was justified with the refusal of France and Great Britain to reduce their own armed forces to the strength of a maximum of 100,000 men established for Germany in the Versailles Treaty. In the following “ referendum on Germany's exit from the League of Nations ” on November 12, 1933, it was supposedly welcomed by 93 percent of those who voted.

With the German-Polish non-aggression pact of January 26, 1934, which was limited to ten years , Hitler seemed to turn away from the Weimar policy towards Poland and refrain from revising Germany's eastern border. The year before, the German Reichstag had voted in favor of extending the 1926 Berlin Treaty with the Soviet Union. At the same time, Hitler broke off the relations that had existed between the Reichswehr and the Red Army . With the extension of the Polish-Soviet non-aggression pact in May 1934, Poland also secured itself to the east.

The French Foreign Minister Jean-Louis Barthou had tried to forge a security alliance that would include Germany, France, the Soviet Union, Poland and the Danube and Balkan states. The understanding with Poland served Hitler to boycott Barthou's plan. Now not only Germany but also Poland rejected this plan. All that remained of Barthou's plan for a multilateral security alliance was a bilateral Franco-Soviet pact of May 2, 1935 , which unintentionally brought Poland even closer to Germany. With the non-aggression pact with Poland, Hitler eliminated the possibility that France could intervene preventively with its “satellites” Poland and Czechoslovakia against the development of the Wehrmacht. The Wehrmacht was still a long way from being able to wage a war on one front with any prospect of success, let alone a two-front war.

Development in Europe between 1935 and 1939: Germany and Italy in blue, the connections between areas and Germany in light blue

The German sphere of interest was to be expanded by connecting Austria to Southeast Europe. But the Italian Duce Benito Mussolini initially paved the way for Hitler by agreeing economic cooperation with Austria and Hungary in the Roman Protocols of March 17, 1934. After the assassination of the Austrian Chancellor Engelbert Dollfuss on July 25, 1934, Mussolini had Italian divisions deployed on the Brenner Pass against a possible German attack. The July coup by the Austrian National Socialists failed; Hitler had to distance himself from the putschists for a short time.

In the Saar referendum on January 13, 1935, 90.67 percent of the Saarlanders voting decided to reintegrate the Saarland into the German Reich. Supported by this approval, Hitler had general conscription reintroduced on March 16 . As early as March 8, 1935, Hitler announced that Germany had a new air force and a week later he announced that Germany would no longer adhere to the military provisions of the Versailles Treaty, which provided for a maximum strength of 100,000 men, but an army of 36 Build divisions with 550,000 soldiers. This troop strength agreed with the demands of the army command, which had advocated a military armament target of 30 to 36 divisions.

The League of Nations protested; Great Britain, France and Italy concluded an agreement in Stresa on April 14, 1935 to protect Austria and against further unilateral German breaches of treaty ( Stresa Front ). But they did not confront Hitler resolutely enough.

The Soviet Union had already joined the League of Nations on September 18, 1934 in order to strengthen collective security after Germany left. On May 2, 1935, France signed a five-year assistance pact with the Soviet Union. This made Soviet aid dependent on France intervening militarily in favor of Czechoslovakia. However, this resulted in the isolation of Czechoslovakia in the later Munich Agreement .

Hitler had not only freed Germany from the shackles of the European security system, but had also set the course for continuing his policy of conformity and rearmament. On June 18, 1935, the German-British naval agreement followed , which gave German rearmament its blessing. This appeasement policy was a consequence of the Great Depression : It had weakened Great Britain economically and politically, so that the country tried to relax on the continent in order to gather defenses against Japan in the Pacific. This left the Stresa front largely ineffective. In 1937 Great Britain increased its armaments expenditure from 1/6 to 1/7 of the state budget to 1/3. According to Bernd-Jürgen Wendt, England was "at the crossroads between peace and war economy".

Italy began the Abyssinian War on October 2, 1935 and received support from Berlin against the economic sanctions imposed by the League of Nations.

On March 7, 1936, Hitler occupied the demilitarized Rhineland and broke the Versailles Treaty again. France announced counter-measures failed to materialize, although this time militarily able was Hitler and a possibly necessary precaution German retreat planned had. With this, Hitler achieved, on the one hand, military security of the western border and, on the other hand, the gradual collapse of the Little Entente . The states allied with France in Eastern Europe (" Cordon sanitaire ") now increasingly oriented themselves towards bilateral cooperation with the Nazi regime. Mussolini also left the Stresa front by proclaiming the new " Berlin-Rome axis " on November 1, 1936 . This also meant surrendering Austria to German interests. With this, Hitler succeeded in a few months in breaking through the temporary isolation in foreign policy.

War preparations

Friedrich Hoßbach (center), 1934. His transcript of Hitler's 1937 speech is an important source on the Reich's war aims

Hitler had misunderstood the policy of appeasement as a weakness and had come to believe that the Western powers would not stand in the way of his plans in the future either. He also hoped to come to an agreement with Great Britain if necessary, from which he expected a free hand in the east. After the incorporation of most of the German-speaking areas of Europe into the new Greater German Reich, Hitler's general plan resulted in the occupation of Poland and the subsequent overthrow of the Soviet Union, which was to provide Germany with the living space in the East that Hitler believed it needed to carry out his racist policy of great power.

In the spring of 1936 Germany got into a new currency and raw material crisis. In his secret memorandum on the second four-year plan of 1936, Hitler formulated:

“We are overpopulated and cannot feed ourselves on our own. [...] The final solution lies in expanding the living space or the raw material and nutritional basis of our people. It is the task of the political leadership to resolve this question one day. [...] The fulfillment of these tasks in the form of a multi-year plan for the independence of our national economy from abroad will also make it possible for the first time to demand sacrifices from the German people in the economic field and in the field of nutrition. […] Almost four precious years have now passed. There is no doubt that we could already be completely independent from abroad in the field of fuel, rubber and, in some cases, iron ore supplies. […] I am setting the following task: I. The German army must be operational in four years. II. The German economy must be capable of war in four years. "

- Adolf Hitler : Secret Memorandum on the Four-Year Plan (August 1936)

This rejected Germany's return to world trade, which some had called for, and sealed the transition to a command economy and self-sufficiency policy . The economy had to subordinate itself to the needs of the arms industry. On October 1, 1936, the "August Program " was a new armaments program ; this envisaged the establishment of 102 divisions by October 1, 1939. In 1939 Germany started the war with exactly 102 divisions (57 of which attacked Poland ). On November 5, 1937, Hitler referred to habitat policy and specified his war goals in front of the Wehrmacht leaders ( Hoßbach transcript ):

"The only way to solve the German question could be through violence [...] then only answering the questions" when "and" how "[...]. If the Führer was still alive, his irrevocable decision was to resolve the German spatial issue by 1943/45 at the latest. [...] In order to improve our military-political situation, our first goal must be to overthrow the Czech Republic and Austria at the same time, in order to eliminate the flank threat of any action to the west [...] "

Friedrich Hoßbach stated in his (subsequent) transcript that Blomberg and Fritsch in particular had very vigorously objected to these objectives. The creation of “living space in the east” would not only lead to a confrontation with the Soviet Union, but also with Great Britain and France, a possibility that Hitler decidedly ruled out. The discussion ended without consensus; Hitler refused to hold further talks with Blomberg and Fritsch and ensured that both had to dishonorously retire from service a few months later ( Blomberg-Fritsch crisis ).

Participation in the Spanish Civil War
  • July 16: Beginning of the Spanish Civil War , also known as Spanish Civil War called; was fought between the democratically elected government of the Second Spanish Republic ("Republicans") and the right-wing putschists under General Francisco Franco ("Nationalists"). It ended in 1939 with the victory of the nationalists, especially with the help of the fascist allies from Italy and Germany. It was followed by the end of the Republic in Spain and the Francoist dictatorship (1939–1976), which lasted until Franco's death in 1975 .
  • July 21: on the fifth day of the uprising, the nationalists captured the Ferrol naval base in northwestern Spain with two brand new cruisers. In particular, Franco helped the first airlift in history to move troops from the Spanish colonies into the heartland with German help, thus circumventing the republican naval blockade in the Strait of Gibraltar and thus consolidating a bridgehead he controlled on the mainland.

German-Polish rapprochement between 1934 and 1938

Inauguration of the German-Polish Institute, Berlin in February 1935. From left: the Polish ambassador Józef Lipski , Carl Eduard Herzog von Sachsen-Coburg and Gotha and Joseph Goebbels

The German-Polish rapprochement followed the declaration of non-aggression on January 26, 1934. In the years 1934–1939 there was a lively cultural exchange in the fields of theater, film, music and exhibition projects at the behest of the political leadership. Institutions such as the Polish-German Society in Warsaw and the German-Polish Society in Berlin support the exchange. According to Karina Pryt in her 2010 cultural-political and diplomatic study, the Ribbentrop office assumed that, according to the social Darwinian theory of evolution and selection, an ostensibly equal cultural contact would lead to "the weaker" people automatically becoming stronger 'people will give way'.

Both sides expected concrete results from the cultural policy measures. For Poland, the incentive of cultural exchange was to be able to present itself as a nation belonging to the Western European cultural area and to underline its right to exist as a separate state. National Socialist Germany hoped to be able to integrate Poland as a partner in an alliance against the Soviet Union and to pave the way for German hegemony in the east. In his 2011 study , Rolf-Dieter Müller , a military historian at the Military History Research Office , shows that Hitler's “attempts to get closer” to Poland served the specific purpose of winning Poland over to a long-planned war against the Soviet Union.

Failure of the appeasement policy

Göring (left) and Mussolini (right), with Hitler in between, in Munich 1938

France and Great Britain pursued the policy of collective security until 1935 , which seemed to secure peaceful development in Europe with the Locarno Treaties (1925), but this has become increasingly unrealistic since Hitler came to power in 1933. The appeasement policy with regard to Germany was therefore given a different direction from 1935 onwards. The aim was to meet Hitler's territorial claims through a certain tolerance of revisions to the Treaty of Versailles and to integrate Germany into the European community in a peaceful manner. Under this aspect, the tolerance of the armament of the Wehrmacht (1935), the invasion of the demilitarized Rhineland (1936), the annexation of Austria and the cession of the predominantly German-speaking Sudetenland from Czechoslovakia in the Munich Agreement (1938) should be seen. In his quarantine speech on October 5, 1937, however, Roosevelt indirectly called for an end to the appeasement by demanding that the aggressive states of Germany, Italy and Japan be put under political "quarantine".

The end of the appeasement policy came with the breach of treaty by German troops marching into the remaining parts of Czecho-Slovakia and the separation of Slovakia (1939). The change of course was forced not least by public opinion in the two "appeasement states" and led to a declaration of guarantee for Poland in the event of German aggression and an offer to the Soviet Union to oppose further expansion of Germany together with armed violence as part of an alliance.

German-Polish crisis 1938 to 1939

The territory of the Free City of Gdansk

During 1938, Hitler initially downplayed the German-Polish conflict. At a meeting with the Polish Foreign Minister Józef Beck in January 1938, i.e. before Austria was annexed to the German Reich, he emphasized that he viewed the Danzig problem as secondary. On March 14, 1938, Hitler reaffirmed the Polish right to Danzig and free access to the Baltic Sea and had the anti-Polish activities of the National Socialists in Danzig interrupted. After the Munich Agreement he assured Chamberlain that he no longer had any territorial claims in Europe. However, this was in no way what his real intentions were. Rather, Hitler wanted to detach Poland from the French cordon sanitaire and incorporate it into the new European system he had conceived. In a later war against the Soviet Union, Poland was to play the role of a "junior partner" under German dominance. Before the Second World War, Poland pursued a great power policy in which it preferred cooperation with Germany. Poland supported Germany in the Sudeten crisis and annexed the region around Teschen on October 2, 1938, following the Munich Agreement .

The following development took place in several phases. In the first few months, Hitler tried to persuade the Polish government to make concessions on the Danzig and Corridor question in direct negotiations. When the Polish government opposed this request and the Western powers also gave up the appeasement policy, a phase followed in which negotiations between Poland and the German Reich were broken off and different alliance constellations emerged in Europe. Since Hitler had already decided to go to war against Poland at that time and had made an agreement with the USSR that provided for the common division of Eastern Europe, he tried in a third phase to isolate Poland through negotiations with Great Britain. As early as March 20, 1939, the British government proposed to Poland, like the Soviet Union and France, an alliance of four against Germany. Poland mobilized on March 23, 1939 and Warsaw rejected any further German negotiation proposal.

On September 1, 1939, the Wehrmacht attacked Poland. Since the Western powers, contrary to Hitler's assumption, stood by their alliance with Poland, a fourth phase of final diplomatic efforts took place before the war expanded into a European war with the declaration of war by the Western powers on the German Reich on September 3.

1st phase: The German-Polish conflict over Danzig

Józef Lipski, Polish Ambassador

On October 24, 1938, the Polish Ambassador Józef Lipski and the Reich Minister for Foreign Affairs Joachim von Ribbentrop met in the Grand Hotel in Berchtesgaden , originally to discuss the situation in Carpathian Ukraine . On this occasion, Ribbentrop submitted the German demands to the Polish ambassador in order to, as he put it, “come to a general settlement of all existing points of friction”. First of all, Ribbentrop stated that the Free State of Danzig had to be returned to Germany. To this end, not only should Poland's economic interests in Gdansk be taken into account, but the national borders should also be mutually guaranteed and the German-Polish non-aggression pact extended to 10 to 25 years and supplemented with a consultation clause. Poland would also join the Anti-Comintern Pact . At the same time, Ribbentrop invited the Polish Foreign Minister Józef Beck to visit . At this point in time, Ribbentrop had already been informed by Ambassador Hans-Adolf von Moltke that Poland would by no means lean on Germany. In fact, Lipski immediately pointed out that an annexation of Danzig to the German Reich was not acceptable for domestic political reasons.

The situation of the Jewish population in the respective countries played an important role in the negotiations between Poland and Germany . As early as after the Évian Conference in the summer of 1938, Poland had tried to direct the international efforts made on the question of the emigration of Jews from Germany and Austria to the question of Jewish emigration from Poland. The anti-Jewish German policy , so the Polish argument, should not be rewarded as well. In order to prevent anti-Semitic outbreaks in Poland, one must also talk about the problem of Polish Jews. Many states, however, were rather deterred by the Polish demands from accepting emigrants from Poland. Poland therefore sought cooperation with Germany, which in September and October 1938 showed its willingness to cooperate.

In September 1938, Hitler had already indicated that he would seek emigration of Jews to the colonies in agreement with Poland, Hungary and the Ukraine. At the meeting between Ribbentrops and Lipskis on October 24, 1938, the focus was not only on the Danzig question, but also on possible cooperation between Poland and Germany on the question of colonies and Jewish emigration. Historians, however, doubt whether there were any serious intentions behind this on the German side. Even if Hitler gave the impression in his interview with Beck on January 5, 1939, that Germany would sooner or later get colonies back and was ready to provide territory in Africa to “solve the Jewish question”, the historian Klaus Hildebrand points out pointed out that almost three months earlier Hitler had rejected exactly such a plan by the South African Defense Minister Oswald Pirow and had strictly forbidden the Wehrmacht High Command to plan this. These suggestions are therefore "typical of Hitler's unscrupulous negotiating tactics".

Expulsion of Polish Jews from Nuremberg, October 28, 1938

Indeed, the German side simultaneously used the Polish interest in Jewish emigration as a means of political blackmail to make Poland more willing to renounce territories. Only three days after Ribbentrop's Berchtesgaden meeting with Lipski, the German Reich began the so-called Poland Action , the short-term expulsion of around 17,000 Jewish Poles - a warning to the Polish side, according to historian Yfaat Weiss , that Germany could exacerbate the Jewish problem in Poland if Poland does not want to show willingness to compromise and diplomatic negotiations with Germany.

On November 19, 1938, Lipski, who had meanwhile reported in Warsaw, met Ribbentrop again to convey Beck's negative response: Danzig was of crucial economic and domestic importance for Poland. The annexation of Danzig, emphasized Lipski, “would lead to a very serious conflict with Germany”. Instead, the Polish government proposed to end the League of Nations statute, but to keep Danzig as a Free State in a customs union with Poland and to guarantee the status in a bilateral treaty. When asked about the connection through the Polish corridor , Lipski promised a positive answer. In the course of the conversation, Lipski got the impression that Ribbentrop had signaled a certain indulgence.

Meanwhile, on November 24, 1938, Hitler ordered the High Command of the Wehrmacht (OKW) to prepare a plan for a coup-like military occupation of the Danzig Free State by January 10, 1939. According to the historian Michael Freund , Hitler could have presented the Polish government with a fait accompli at a favorable moment with such a coup d'état, so that it would not have officially given in to the German demands.

German propaganda poster (summer 1939)

On January 5 and 6, 1939, Foreign Minister Beck personally came to Berchtesgaden and Munich, where he met Hitler and Ribbentrop. In principle, Hitler repeated Ribbentrop's demands, but formulated them in a more conciliatory manner. He did not fail to mention that as a realpolitician he would guarantee the Polish corridor, although he would certainly be heavily criticized for it in his own country. On the following day, Ribbentrop also promised that Germany would support Poland in dealing with the “Ukrainian question”, thus holding out the prospect of Polish expansion to the east for Danzig.

After his talks, Beck came to the conclusion that the German demands pose a serious threat. On January 8, 1939, there was a secret meeting between Marshal Rydz-Śmigły , President Mościcki and Beck in Warsaw Castle , in which the Polish leadership decided on its future position: In view of the German demands in “matters as subordinate as Danzig and the motorway “It is obvious that Poland is threatened by a“ serious conflict ”for which these demands could serve as a pretext. A “vacillating attitude” could cost the country its independence and make it a German “vassal state”. Therefore, a solid line is essential. In relation to the Polish public, the Polish government essentially remained silent about the extent of the German demands. It was not until March 1939 that the public became aware of the threat. The government also tried to create the impression that Poland was armed militarily. The situation was understood as a war of nerves, in which above all calm was to be kept.

Historians consider the German demands on Poland to be unacceptable from the start. Ludwig Denne emphasizes that the reintegration of Danzig into the Reich would have placed control of the Polish economy in German hands and that in the event of a war with the Reich, Poland could have been cut off immediately from its connection to the sea from the extraterritorial motorway through the corridor. “Any Polish government that would have made this renunciation would have overturned it, but without being able to stop the course of events.” For the Polish historian Marian Wojciechowski , the German proposals aimed “to bring Poland into dependence on Germany and out of Warsaw to make a satellite city of Berlin. ” Gerhard Weinberg emphasizes that the Polish government had seriously considered a compromise solution for Gdansk, but that Germany had demanded such massive concessions that a compromise was impossible. The request that Poland join the Anti-Comintern Pact is the most obvious sign that Berlin was about ritual submission. Hermann Graml argues that Beck pursued a policy of equilibrium between the great powers Germany and the USSR, which precluded a political declaration of hostility to the Soviet Union, such as joining the Anti-Comintern Pact would have meant. In addition, the German demands stood in the way of Beck's plans to build a “third Europe” that would include Hungary , Yugoslavia and Romania . Beck did not take the German demands seriously for a long time because he believed that Germany would need Poland as an anti-Bolshevik bulwark against the Soviet Union.

Meeting of the German Foreign Minister Ribbentrop (left) with the Polish Foreign Minister Józef Beck, January 1939

During a visit by Ribbentrop to Warsaw on January 26th, the Foreign Minister raised the Danzig question again, although, according to Hitler's instructions, he should not do so. He again offered Beck area compensation for Danzig in the Ukraine with access to the Black Sea , but, as the historian Helmut Krausnick notes with reference to Ribbentrop's formulation that the Black Sea is “also a sea”, “without any permanent guarantee for gentle treatment ”. However, the Polish Foreign Minister categorically refused due to the January 8 decision. At the end of February, the German-Polish talks about the treatment of minorities in the other country aggravated the situation. When there were mass brawls between German and Polish students in Gdansk on February 22nd and 23rd, Polish right-wing extremists raised demands for the annexation of Gdansk and other areas. During a demonstration in Warsaw on February 24, windows of the German embassy were broken. The incidents did not correspond to the majority of the Polish population and were condemned by the official Poles. However, they were later picked up by German propaganda and presented as representative of the entire Polish nation.

Hitler's will to go to war is beyond question. What is more in dispute is which priorities he set. After Wolfgang Michalka, Hitler wanted to win Poland as a “junior partner” for his habitat war in the east, while Rolf-Dieter Müller argues that Hitler had already considered a war against the Soviet Union in the spring of 1939. According to Stefan Kley, Hitler primarily wanted to restore peace in the east by means of a compromise with Poland, so that he could initially wage a campaign in the west. Michalka, on the other hand, considers the plan to win Poland over as an alliance partner for an anti-British alliance to be Ribbentrop's plan.

In March 1939 the foreign policy situation for Poland changed fundamentally. On March 14th, National Socialist Germany signed a so-called "Protection Treaty" with autonomous Slovakia. The following day the so-called " smashing of the rest of the Czech Republic " began. i. the occupation of the Czech part of the country by the German armed forces and the establishment of the Reich Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia . In doing so, he had disregarded the Munich Agreement and proved that contracts were not an obstacle to his intentions. “With this breach of contract, Hitler lost the ability to negotiate for all future.” On March 17th, the British Prime Minister Chamberlain announced the end of the appeasement policy in a speech in Birmingham.

The Polish government, snubbed by the disregard of Polish interests in the Czech question, saw Poland now embraced by Germany on three borders and decided to categorically reject the German demands. However, it was based on the false assumption that Hitler could only mobilize 9 divisions against Poland. At the same time, the Polish government, which feared a coup d'état against Danzig after the German occupation of the Memelland , initiated a partial mobilization of the armed forces, which was only lifted in June.

On March 26, 1939, Lipski finally delivered the Polish reply in the form of a memorandum. It did not go beyond a few easing of traffic between the Reich and East Prussia. Lipski said, however, that Poland will certainly continue to study the issues and will do everything possible to reach an agreement. In a file edition of the Foreign Office from 1939, the so-called White Book , the passage of the corresponding recording of the conversation with Ribbentrop was replaced by the addition of the fictitious sentence that he, Lipski “had the unpleasant duty to point out that any further persecution of this German Plans, especially as far as they concern the return of Gdańsk to the Reich, mean war with Poland ”, falsified. The Polish position was presented as particularly threatening by the National Socialists in order to justify breaking off the German-Polish negotiations. Hitler showed no interest in further talks without any visible results beforehand.

2nd phase: Formation of alliances

The German act of violence against Czechoslovakia triggered violent reactions in European countries. The representatives of Great Britain and France met on March 21st to agree on a common policy. The result was the British-French declaration of guarantee of March 31, 1939. In it, both states guaranteed the national integrity of Poland in the event of a German attack, but not its borders, nor in the event of a Soviet attack. Foreign Minister Beck then traveled to London, where he signed a formal assistance pact with Great Britain on April 6th. This was followed by a formal confirmation of the Franco-Polish assistance pact on April 13th. Due to the geographical location, however, it was impossible for the Western powers to come to Poland effectively. For this reason, negotiations began with the USSR in mid-April to win them over to the alliance. The negotiations dragged on for the whole summer, however, with no results because the Polish government refused to grant the Soviet troops marching rights. This was done out of the fear that the Red Army might not leave the country after a war. The President of the United States of America Franklin D. Roosevelt also intervened on April 15 and called on Hitler and Mussolini to conclude non-aggression pacts with more than 30 states.

Józef Beck's speech to the Polish Parliament on May 5, 1939

Hitler's strategy had failed. Instead of being able to involve Poland in the plans he was pursuing, a coalition had formed against him. On April 11, he ordered the Wehrmacht leadership to draw up a deployment plan for a war against Poland. On April 28, 1939, he underscored his position by rejecting the US President's request and terminating the German-British naval agreement of 1935 and the German-Polish non-aggression pact of 1934 . In a speech to the Sejm on May 5, 1939, the Polish Foreign Minister Beck rejected Hitler's territorial claims and demands on Poland. At the same time he underlined that Poland is still seeking an understanding with Germany even after the unilateral termination of the non-aggression pact.

Hitler originally wanted to start his habitat war in the east with Poland. But now he ordered the attack on Poland in order to have his back free after the expected victory for the then inevitable war with the Western powers and to use Poland as a deployment area for the war of conquest against the USSR. According to the Schmundt Protocol , Hitler explained to the military leadership on May 23, 1939:

“Gdansk is not the object in question. For us it is about the expansion of the living space in the east. […] The Poland problem cannot be separated from the conflict with the West. [...] So there is no question of protecting Poland, and the decision remains to attack Poland at the first suitable opportunity. "

Now all the states involved began to prepare for the event of an armed conflict. Italy and the German Reich signed a friendship and alliance treaty on May 22, 1939, the Steel Pact . This was followed by non-aggression pacts with Denmark (May 31), Estonia and Latvia (June 7). On the other hand, Great Britain and France intensified their efforts for the USSR and each signed a pact of assistance with Turkey in the event of a war in the Mediterranean (May 12 / June 23). In addition, the United Kingdom introduced compulsory military service by law on May 26, 1939.

Moscow on August 24, 1939: Stalin and Ribbentrop in the Kremlin on the occasion of the conclusion of the German-Soviet non-aggression pact

These negotiations culminated on August 24, 1939 with the signing of the German-Soviet non-aggression pact . The treaty (dated the day before) put an end to the efforts of the Western powers over the USSR and put Hitler in a position to begin military action without having to fight the Red Army . The contract also contained a secret additional protocol in which the contracting parties determined their respective spheres of influence in Eastern Europe. Among other things, it provided for a division of Poland. For Joseph Stalin , the conclusion of this pact offered more advantages than an alliance with the West. On the one hand, he was able to recapture eastern Poland in this way , which had only fallen to Poland in the peace treaty of Riga in 1921 . He also reckoned with a war between the “capitalist states” that it would be easier to enforce Soviet territorial claims in the Baltic States and in Bessarabia . On the other hand, he feared that he would also be attacked by its partner Japan in a war against the German Reich. For Hitler, the treaty paved the way to a war against Poland without having to take the Western powers into account, because the agreement made it impossible to block Germany as in the First World War. He therefore gave the first orders in preparation for a war. As early as August 22nd, in a speech to the Wehrmacht leadership, he stated: “The focus on the destruction of Poland. The goal is the destruction of the living forces, not the achievement of a certain line. Even if war breaks out in the West, the destruction of Poland remains in the foreground. ” In addition, in the following days he tried to prevent the Western powers from supporting Poland by making offers to Great Britain. Shortly after the agreement with Stalin, Hitler wrote a personal letter to Mussolini on August 24, 1939, asking him to support the war against Poland.

3rd phase: outbreak of war

In September 1939, Gdańsk state police officers and border officials recreated the demolition of the Polish barrier on the border with the Free City of Gdańsk for the “ Deutsche Wochenschau ” at Sopot

Now the person responsible for the four-year plan, Hermann Göring , who was skeptical of Hitler's war plans , intervened in the negotiations. As at the beginning of August, he unofficially sent a confidante, the Swedish businessman Birger Dahlerus , to London on August 25 to assure the British government of the German willingness to come to an understanding. However, at 3:02 p.m. on the same day, Hitler gave the order to begin the attack on Poland on the morning of August 26th. In order to get the British government on his side after all , Hitler had the British ambassador Sir Nevile Henderson come to him and told him that, once the problems with Poland had been resolved, he would be willing to sign a treaty with Great Britain that would cover all general interests should be clarified. This would affect German colonial demands, but also German military aid for Great Britain. Only hours later, at 4:30 p.m., the news arrived in Berlin that the British and Polish governments had just signed a formal mutual assistance pact, which strengthened the previously verbal guarantee. At 5:54 p.m. Mussolini informed Hitler that Italy would not take part in a war.

Against this background, Hitler canceled the start of the attack at 8 p.m. Some smaller troop divisions did not receive this order in time, so that on the morning of August 26th there were a number of smaller skirmishes along the German-Polish border . It can no longer be clearly determined which point was decisive for the withdrawal of the attack order. But the military had also approved of a postponement in order to gain time to mobilize their own armed forces.

Birger Dahlerus continued his efforts and went to the British Foreign Secretary Lord Halifax on August 26th . The latter handed him a letter to Goering in which he emphasized Great Britain's desire for a diplomatic solution. Goering informed Hitler of the contents of the letter, and Dahlerus sent Dahlerus again to London on August 27th. The British government welcomed the German-British treaty proposed by Hitler and recognized the need to resolve the corridor issue. To this end, she recommended the resumption of direct German-Polish negotiations, which the British government wanted to support in coming about, but at the same time pointed out that Poland's interests must also be safeguarded. This was recorded in a memorandum to the German government handed over by Henderson on the evening of August 28th. The diplomats involved saw this development as easing. Göring told Birger Dahlerus: "Peace is assured!"

In the plan to attack Poland that had been under consideration since the spring, Hitler was looking for a way to justify this war to his own people and above all to the Western democracies. According to the memoirs of Albert Speer , shortly before the outbreak of war, Hitler said:

“This time the mistake of 1914 will be avoided. Everything now depends on blaming the other side. "

To this end, Hitler put together another “mediation proposal” on the Danzig question, which he had to assume was unacceptable because of its far-reaching consequences for the Polish government. Lieutenant Colonel Helmuth Groscurth noted in his diary on August 29, 1939:

“The Führer has Ribbentrop, Himmler, Bodenschatz and others. a. said: 'This night I will think of something devilish for the Poles that will kill them.' "

On August 29, at 12:55 p.m., the main ships of the Polish fleet were ordered into British waters ( Operation Beijing ). First of all, Hitler wanted to present the new proposals to the British ambassador. On August 29, at 7:15 p.m., Henderson appeared at Hitler and Ribbentrop's premises in the Reich Chancellery to receive the German reply to the last British memorandum. Although Hitler accepted all the points of the British government, at the end of the conversation he ultimately demanded that a Polish negotiator with full powers be sent by the evening of the following day, August 30th. The reason given was that the political tensions required the quickest possible solution. Henderson took this request as an ultimatum and was indignant about it. After a loud battle of words, he left the Reich Chancellery. Again Goering sent Dahlerus to London to have a soothing effect. The British government replied in a note that night: “The type of contact and the preparations for an exchange of views must of course be quickly agreed between the German and Polish governments. However, His Majesty's government is of the opinion that it would be impractical to establish contact today. ” At the same time, it became known that the British ambassador in Warsaw had telegraphed to London that he did not believe the Polish government would bow to this ultimatum :

"They would certainly sooner fight and perish rather than submit to such humiliation, especially after the examples of Czechoslovakia, Lithuania and Austria."

In fact, no representative of the Polish government appeared, which, alarmed by the ultimatum, initiated the mobilization of the Polish armed forces.

When Henderson had handed over the British Note, Foreign Minister Ribbentrop read him the German proposals which should have served as the basis for negotiations with the Polish plenipotentiary: Danzig should be annexed to the German Reich, Gdynia should be recognized as Polish; In the corridor, a referendum on the basis of the census of 1919 was to decide on the affiliation of the area, whereby the respective losing side should be provided with an extra-territorial transport connection through the corridor. When Henderson asked for the text of these proposals to be forwarded to his government, Ribbentrop refused to hand them over on the grounds that they were out of date because the Polish negotiator had not appeared. Nevertheless, Henderson regarded these proposals as "not on the whole too unreasonable" and recommended that the Polish ambassador Lipski advise his government to restart negotiations. Without Hitler's knowledge, Goering sent Dahlerus to Lipski with a copy . According to Dahlerus, the American ambassador Forbes reported on Lipski's opinion later that evening:

“While I was dictating to the secretary, Lipski had informed Forbes that he had no reason to be interested in grades or offers from the German side. He knew the situation in Germany [...] he declared that he was convinced that in the event of war, unrest would break out in this country and the Polish troops would march successfully against Berlin. "

The British government urged the Polish government to meet up for talks anyway. In the late afternoon of August 31, Ambassador Lipski met Hitler. When it turned out that he had no negotiating powers and only promised that the Polish government would examine the German proposals, Hitler categorically refused to see the ambassador. In fact, Lipski had received instructions from Warsaw not to accept any further German memorandum in order to avoid any settlement with the Czech President Emil Hácha , although the British government repeatedly pointed out that such an approach would be dangerous.

On August 31st at 9 p.m. the radio then interrupted its program, reported that the German proposals had been “extremely sensible” and that a Polish negotiator had not even appeared. In his Reichstag speech of September 1, 1939, Hitler claimed that his proposals for a peaceful settlement of the Danzig question had been answered with mobilizations and increased terror. Hitler's interpreter Paul Schmidt heard Hitler say some time later:

“I needed an alibi, especially to the German people, to show them that I had done everything to keep the peace. That is why I made this generous proposal on the settlement of the Danzig and Corridor question. "

Hitler's proposal to mediate on the Danzig question of August 29 has therefore been evaluated in the research literature, just like the Gliwice incident, as a propaganda justification for the war of aggression against Poland.

Hitler now ordered the attack on Poland for the following morning. He did not assume that France and Great Britain would honor their alliance obligations towards Poland after the last negotiations. On September 1, 1939, at 4:15 a.m., German forces crossed the Polish border and started the war against Poland.

4th phase: The expansion to the European conflict

Destroyed buildings in Warsaw, November 1939
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After the German troops marched in, the British cabinet was divided. Chamberlain thought a peaceful solution was still possible. Halifax negotiated with the Germans, French and Italians without coming to a conclusion. The majority in the cabinet “did not believe in further postponements” and decided to issue a “final warning” to Hitler. As a result, the British ambassador Henderson informed the German government on the evening of September 1 that the conference in Florence proposed by Mussolini the previous day, to which Hitler had also agreed, "could only take place" if Germany ceased fighting in Poland and withdrew its troops . Germany did not react to this advance. On the evening of the next day, Saturday, September 2, the Prime Minister Chamberlain stood in front of the fully occupied House of Commons at 8 p.m. He had to confess to the house that Hitler had not responded to the “last warning”. When Chamberlain went on to say that one must understand Hitler's non-reaction and that one needs a little more time, a wave of anger swept the house. The mood in the political elite across Great Britain had turned since Hitler broke his word on the Munich Agreement . The vast majority in the House of Commons was of the opinion across all parties that Hitler's Germany wanted to bring all of Europe, if not the whole world, under his rule, and that it was time to fight back. The spokesman for the opposition Labor Party , Arthur Greenwood , said all MPs from the soul, when he said:

“I am deeply affected. A military attack began 38 hours ago. I wonder how much longer we will be willing to procrastinate at a time when England and everything that England stands for and human civilization are in danger. "

Chamberlain was startled by the hostile effect his words had produced. The majority of the cabinet met immediately after the House of Commons meeting without Chamberlain and decided to give the Germans an ultimatum. Chamberlain and Halifax carried out this.

The next morning, September 3, at 9:00 am, Ambassador Henderson presented the Foreign Office with a formal ultimatum stating that Britain would be at war with Germany if it did not cease fire and its armies within two hours Poland withdraw. Shortly before the deadline, the government replied with a ready-made declaration that all it wanted to do was eliminate the injustices of the Versailles Treaty, while Great Britain had encouraged the Poles to behave aggressively. At 12:00 noon the French issued a similar ultimatum, which the Reich government also rejected. She said that they did not intend to invade France. Around this time Chamberlain radioed the British people to announce that the country was at war with Germany and the reasons for this.

In the early afternoon Hitler responded with four proclamations to the German people, which he had read out. He tried everything to prevent the war, but British warmongering made it impossible. However, it is not the British people who are responsible, but the "Jewish plutocratic leaders". In his declaration to the NSDAP, he said: "Our Jewish-democratic world enemy has managed to put the English people in a state of war against Germany." With that, war broke out in Europe.

See also

literature

Overall representations

  • PMH Bell: The Origins of the Second World War in Europe. Longman, 1997. ISBN 0-582-30470-9 .
  • Andrew J. Crozier: The causes of the Second World War . Blackwell, Oxford 1997, ISBN 0-631-17128-2 .
  • Wilhelm Deist u. a .: Causes and conditions of the Second World War . Fischer, Frankfurt / M. 1991, ISBN 3-596-24432-3 (former title: Causes and Requirements of German War Policy ).
  • Ludwig Denne: The Danzig problem in German foreign policy 1934-1939 . Röhrscheid Verlag, Bonn 1959.
  • Richard J. Evans : The Third Reich. Volume 2 / I-II: Dictatorship . DVA, Munich 2006, ISBN 3-421-05653-6 .
  • Richard J. Evans: The Third Reich. Volume 3: War . DVA, Munich 2009, ISBN 978-3-421-05800-3 .
  • Hermann Graml : Europe's way to war. Hitler and the Powers 1939 . Oldenbourg Verlag, Munich 1990, ISBN 3-486-55151-5 .
  • Angela Hermann: The way to the war 1938/39. Source-critical studies on the diaries of Joseph Goebbels . Munich 2011, ISBN 978-3-486-70513-3 .
  • Klaus Hildebrand (Ed.): 1939. On the threshold of the world war . De Gruyter, Berlin 1990, ISBN 3-11-012596-X .
  • Klaus Hildebrand, Karl Ferdinand Werner (ed.): Germany and France 1936–1939. 15th Franco-German Historians' Colloquium of the German Historical Institute Paris (Supplement of the Francia, 10), Munich / Zurich (Artemis) 1981, ISBN 3-7608-4660-2 . Online at perspectivia.net
  • Walther Hofer (ed.): The unleashing of the Second World War. A study of international relations in the summer of 1939 . LIT-Verlag, Münster 2007, ISBN 978-3-8258-0383-4 . Reprint of the S. Fischer edition, Frankfurt a. M. 1964.
  • Hans-Adolf Jacobsen : National Socialist Foreign Policy 1933–1938 . Metzner publishing house, Frankfurt / M. 1968.
  • Richard Lamb: The failed peace. England's Foreign Policy 1935–1945 . Ullstein, Frankfurt / M. 1989, ISBN 3-550-07648-7 .
  • Wolfgang Michalka (Ed.): National Socialist Foreign Policy (= ways of research . Volume 297). Scientific Book Society, Darmstadt 1978, ISBN 3-534-07245-6 .
  • Wolfgang Michalka: Ribbentrop and German world politics, 1933-1940. Foreign policy concepts and decision-making processes in the Third Reich (= publications by the Historical Institute of the University of Mannheim . Volume 5). Fink, Munich 1980, ISBN 3-7705-1400-9 .
  • Marie-Luise Recker : The foreign policy of the Third Reich . Oldenbourg-Verlag, Munich 1990, ISBN 3-486-55501-4 .
  • Horst Rohde: Hitler's first "Blitzkrieg" and its effects on Northeast Europe . In: Klaus A. Maier u. a .: The establishment of hegemony on the European continent ("The German Reich and the Second World War; Vol. 2). DVA, Stuttgart 1979, ISBN 3-421-01935-5 .
  • Gerhard L. Weinberg : Hitler's foreign policy. The road to World War II, 1933-1939 . Enigma Books, New York 2005, ISBN 1-929631-27-8 (former title "The foreign policy of Hitler's Germany")
  • Bernd-Jürgen Wendt: Greater Germany. Foreign policy and war preparation of the Hitler regime . Dtv, Munich 1987, ISBN 3-423-04518-3 .

Source and memoir literature

  • Winston S. Churchill : The Second World War . Fischer, Frankfurt / M. 2003, ISBN 3-596-16113-4 .
  • Birger Dahlerus: The last attempt. London-Berlin, summer 1939 . Nymphenburger Verlagshandlung, Munich 1948.
  • Franz Halder : War Diary. Daily records of the Chief of the Army General Staff 1939–1942 . Kohlhammer, Stuttgart 1962 (Vol. 1, Hans-Adolf Jacobsen (Ed.)).
  • Léon Noël: The German attack on Poland . Arani Publishing House, Berlin 1948.
  • Blue Book of the British Government on German-Polish relations and the outbreak of hostilities between Great Britain and Germany on September 3, 1939 ("Documents and documents on the outbreak of war"). Verlag Birkhäuser, Basel 1939 (= official translation of the Documents, Miscellaneous No.9, 1939 ).
  • Files on German Foreign Policy 1918–1945. From the archive of the Federal Foreign Office. Series D (1937-1945) Volume VI; also: Series C (1933–1937), Volume I – VI, Series D (1937–1945), Volume I – V, Volume VII-XIII. Keppler-Verlag, Baden-Baden; Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, Göttingen 1950–1995. Online access via search mask

Web links

Commons : World War II  album with pictures, videos and audio files
Wiktionary: Second World War  - explanations of meanings, word origins, synonyms, translations
Portal: Imperialism and World Wars  - Overview of Wikipedia content on the topic of imperialism and world wars

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Joachim Fest: Hitler. The climb. Pp. 162-164.
  2. ↑ Sebastian Haffner: Von Bismarck zu Hitler, p. 172.
  3. ↑ a b hundredweight / needy: The great lexicon of the Third Reich . Augsburg 1993, p. 190.
  4. ↑ a b cf. Hans-Erich Volkmann: The Nazi economy in preparation for the war , in: Wilhelm Deist, Manfred Messerschmidt, Hans-Erich Volkmann, Wolfram Wette: Causes and conditions of the Second World War . Frankfurt am Main 1989, p. 211 ff.
  5. ↑ a b c Ian Kershaw : To hell and back. Europe 1914-1949 . Penguin Books 2015, pp. 225-227.
  6. ↑ George WF Hallgarten , Joachim Radkau : German industry and politics . Reinbek 1981, p. 306.
  7. ↑ Su in the section "Preparations for War" the Secret Memorandum on the Four-Year Plan (August 1936).
  8. ↑ a b Ian Kershaw : To hell and back. Europe 1914-1949 . Penguin Books 2015, 259f.
  9. ↑ Wolfram Wette : Ideologies, propaganda and domestic politics as prerequisites for the war policy of the Third Reich. In: Wilhelm Deist , Manfred Messerschmidt , Hans-Erich Volkmann, Wolfram Wette : Causes and conditions of the Second World War . Frankfurt am Main 1989, p. 110 ff.
  10. ↑ Bernhard Chiari [and a.]: exploitation, interpretation, exclusion. In The German Reich and the Second World War ; Part: Vol. 9., The German War Society 1939 to 1945 / Half Vol. 2. On behalf of the military history ed. by Jörg Echternkamp, ​​Deutsche Verlagsanstalt, Munich 2005, ISBN 978-3-421-06528-5 , p. 573.
  11. ↑ Detlef Junker summary of his book The indivisible world market. Economic Interest in US Foreign Policy 1933–1941 . In: Jürgen Rohwer , Eberhard Jäckel (Hrsg.): The turn of the war in December 1941. Lectures and contributions to the discussion at the international historical symposium in Stuttgart from September 17 to 19, 1981 . Koblenz 1984, p. 232.
  12. ↑ Berndt-Jürgen Wendt: Foreign Policy , in: Enzyklopädie des Nationalozialismus 1998, p. 69 f.
  13. ^ Helmut-Dieter Giro: France and the remilitarization of the Rhineland . ( P. 199 and p. 329 (USA) )
  14. ↑ full text (pdf)
  15. ↑ This came into force exactly two years later due to a two-year notice period. Document in the article League of Nations
  16. ^ Bernd-Jürgen Wendt : Economic Appeasement . Düsseldorf 1971, p. 426.
  17. ↑ Petra Bräutigam: Medium-sized entrepreneurs under National Socialism . Oldenbourg Wissenschaftsverlag, 1997, ISBN 978-3-486-56256-9 , p. 68
  18. ^ Karl-Volker Neugebauer: From the independent power factor to Hitler's instrument. Military history in the “Third Reich” 1933 to 1939. In: Ders. (Ed.): Basic course in German military history . Vol. 2. The Age of World Wars. Peoples in arms . Oldenbourg, Munich, p. 239.
  19. ^ NS archive - documents on National Socialism: The Hoßbach transcript (from November 5, 1937)
  20. ^ Friedrich Hoßbach: Between Wehrmacht and Hitler 1934–1938 . Wolfenbüttel 1949, p. 216 f.
  21. ↑ Karina Pryt: Commanded Friendship. German-Polish cultural relations 1934–1939 . Fiber, Osnabrück 2010, ISBN 978-3-938400-53-1 .
  22. ↑ Karina Pryt: Commanded Friendship. German-Polish cultural relations 1934–1939 . Fiber, Osnabrück 2010, p. 229, cf. also p. 468 f .; further review of Pryt's work , in: Sehepunkte , November 15, 2011.
  23. ^ Rolf-Dieter Müller: The enemy is in the east. Hitler's secret plans for a war against the Soviet Union in 1939. Ch. Links, Berlin 2011. ISBN 978-3-86153-617-8 , pp. 58 ff. And P. 105 ff .; see. also review , in: H-Soz-u-Kult , August 5, 2011.
  24. ^ Marian Wojciechowski: The Polish-German Relations 1933–1938. Brill, Leiden 1971, p. 387.
  25. ↑ Marian Zgórniak: Europe on the brink - 1938. Lit, Münster 2002, ISBN 978-3-8258-6062-2 f, p 107th
  26. ↑ Kurt Assmann : German years of fate . Wiesbaden 1950, p. 58.
  27. ↑ Horst Rohde: Hitler's first "Blitzkrieg" and its effects on Northeast Europe , in: Klaus A. Maier / Horst Rohde / Bernd Stegemann / Hans Umbreit: The German Empire and the Second World War , Vol. 2: The establishment of hegemony on the European Continent, ed. Military History Research Office, Stuttgart: DVA 1979, p. 79.
  28. ^ Paul N. Hehn: A low dishonest decade. The great powers, Eastern Europe, and the economic origins of World War II, 1930-1941. Continuum, New York 2002, ISBN 0-8264-1449-4 , pp. 94 f.
  29. ^ Document Brit. Foreign Policy, Third Series, Volume IV, Document 446
  30. ↑ a b Stefan Kley: Hitler, Ribbentrop and the unleashing of the Second World War. Zugl .: Stuttgart, Univ., Diss., 1994/95. Schöningh, Paderborn 1996, ISBN 3-506-77496-4 , pp. 204-206.
  31. ^ A b Yfaat Weiss: German and Polish Jews before the Holocaust. Jewish Identity Between Citizenship and Ethnicity 1933–1940. Oldenbourg, Munich 2000, pp. 163-165, cit. 165.
  32. ↑ Magnus Brechtken: "Madagascar for the Jews". Anti-Semitic Idea and Political Practice 1885–1945. 2nd Edition. Oldenbourg, Munich 2009, ISBN 3-486-56384-X , p. 150.
  33. ↑ Klaus Hildebrand: From empire to world empire. Hitler, NSDAP and the colonial question, 1919–1945. Fink, Munich 1969, ISBN 978-3-7705-0338-4 , pp. 598 f .; Magnus Brechtken: "Madagascar for the Jews". Anti-Semitic Idea and Political Practice 1885–1945. 2nd Edition. Oldenbourg, Munich 2009, ISBN 3-486-56384-X , pp. 199-202.
  34. ↑ Gerhard Weinberg points out that the German propaganda wanted to link the Polish attitude towards Danzig with the British guarantee for Poland of March 31, 1939 and therefore suppressed Lipski's warning and Ribbentrop's answer in the German White Paper of 1939. Gerhard L. Weinberg: Germany, Hitler and World War II. Essays in modern German and world history. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge 1995, ISBN 0-521-47407-8 , p. 122.
  35. ↑ Ludwig Denne: The Danzig problem in German foreign policy 1934-1939 , Bonn 1959, p. 147.
  36. ↑ Michael Freund (Ed.): History of the Second World War in Documents , Vol. 1, Wiesbaden 1953, p. 330.
  37. ^ Stefan Kley: Hitler, Ribbentrop and the unleashing of the Second World War. Zugl .: Stuttgart, Univ., Diss., 1994/95. Schöningh, Paderborn 1996, ISBN 3-506-77496-4 , pp. 207 f.
  38. ↑ Michael Freund (Ed.): History of the Second World War in Documents , Vol. 1, Wiesbaden 1953, No. 170.
  39. ^ Joseph Marcus: Social and Political History of the Jews in Poland, 1919-1939. Mouton Publishers, New York 1983, ISBN 978-90-279-3239-6 , pp. 413 f.
  40. ↑ Ludwig Denne: The Danzig Problem in German Foreign Policy 1934-1939 , Bonn 1959, p. 142.
  41. ↑ Marian Wojciechowski: The historical place of Polish politics in the genesis of the Second World War , In: Klaus Hildebrand, Jürgen Schmädeke and Klaus Zernack (eds.): 1939, on the threshold of the world war. The unleashing of the Second World War and the international system. W. de Gruyter, Berlin 1990, ISBN 978-3-11-012596-2 , p. 273.
  42. ^ Gerhard L. Weinberg: Germany, Hitler and World War II. Essays in modern German and world history. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge 1995, ISBN 0-521-47407-8 , p. 128.
  43. ^ Hermann Graml: Europe's way to war. Hitler and the Powers 1939. R. Oldenbourg, Munich 1990, ISBN 978-3-486-55151-8 , pp. 133-136.
  44. ↑ Helmut Krausnick: Legends about Hitler's foreign policy . In: VfZ 2 (1954): p. 228.
  45. ↑ Ludwig Denne: The Danzig Problem in German Foreign Policy 1934-1939 , Bonn 1959, p. 154.
  46. ↑ Kurt Assmann: Deutsche Schicksalsjahre , Wiesbaden 1950, p. 60 f.
  47. ^ Hermann Graml: Europe's way to war. Hitler and the Powers 1939 . Oldenbourg, Munich 1990, pp. 140-142.
  48. ↑ a b Wolfgang Michalka: Ribbentrop and German world politics, 1933–1940. Foreign policy concepts and decision-making processes in the Third Reich. W. Fink, Munich 1980, ISBN 978-3-7705-1400-7 , p. 276.
  49. ^ Rolf-Dieter Müller: The enemy is in the east. Hitler's secret plans for a war against the Soviet Union in 1939. Ch. Links, Berlin 2011, ISBN 3-86153-617-X , pp. 105-108.
  50. ^ Stefan Kley: Hitler, Ribbentrop and the unleashing of the Second World War. Zugl .: Stuttgart, Univ., Diss., 1994/95. Schöningh, Paderborn 1996, ISBN 3-506-77496-4 , pp. 209, 211.
  51. ↑ Kurt Assmann: Deutsche Schicksalsjahre , Wiesbaden 1950, p. 64.
  52. ↑ Ludwig Denne: The Danzig problem in German foreign policy 1934-1939 , Bonn 1959, p. 178.
  53. ↑ Sacha Zala : History under the scissors of political censorship. Official file collections in international comparison . Oldenbourg Verlag, Munich 2001, p. 39.
  54. ↑ a b c Horst Rohde: Hitler's first "Blitzkrieg" and its effects on Northeast Europe , in: Klaus A. Maier / Horst Rohde / Bernd Stegemann / Hans Umbreit: The German Reich and the Second World War , Vol. 2: The establishment of hegemony on the European continent, ed. Military History Research Office, Stuttgart: DVA 1979, p. 82.
  55. ↑ a b Kurt Assmann: Deutsche Schicksalsjahre , Wiesbaden 1950, p. 67.
  56. ↑ a b Hans-Joachim Lorbeer: Western powers against the Soviet Union 1939–1941 . Freiburg / Breisgau 1975, p. 40 f.
  57. ↑ Wolfgang Michalka: Ribbentrop and German world politics, 1933-1940. Foreign policy concepts and decision-making processes in the Third Reich. W. Fink, Munich 1980, ISBN 978-3-7705-1400-7 , p. 275.
  58. ^ Kurt Assmann: German fateful years . Wiesbaden 1950, p. 67 f.
  59. ↑ Horst Rohde: Hitler's first "Blitzkrieg" and its effects on Northeast Europe , in: Klaus A. Maier / Horst Rohde / Bernd Stegemann / Hans Umbreit: The German Empire and the Second World War , Vol. 2: The establishment of hegemony on the European Continent, ed. Military History Research Office, Stuttgart: DVA 1979, p. 85.
  60. ↑ Ludwig Denne: The Danzig Problem in German Foreign Policy 1934-1939 , Bonn 1959, p. 142.
  61. ^ Richard J. Evans: The Third Reich. Volume 2 / I-II: Dictatorship . DVA, Munich 2006, ISBN 3-421-05653-6 , p. 846.
  62. ↑ Kurt Assmann: Deutsche Schicksalsjahre , Wiesbaden 1950, p. 73 f.
  63. ^ Kurt Assmann: German fateful years . Wiesbaden 1950, p. 74 f.
  64. ↑ For more information on the logistical problems of the canceled attack order, see: Herbert Schindler: Mosty and Dirschau 1939 - Two coups of the Wehrmacht before the start of the Polish campaign , Freiburg 1971, pp. 25-29.
  65. ↑ Horst Rohde: Hitler's first "Blitzkrieg" and its effects on Northeast Europe , in: Klaus A. Maier / Horst Rohde / Bernd Stegemann / Hans Umbreit: The German Empire and the Second World War , Vol. 2: The establishment of hegemony on the European Continent, ed. Military History Research Office, Stuttgart: DVA 1979, pp. 86–88.
  66. ↑ Kurt Assmann: Deutsche Schicksalsjahre , Wiesbaden 1950, pp. 76–78.
  67. ↑ Birger Dahlerus: The last attempt , Nymphenburger Verlagshandlung, 1948, p. 88.
  68. ↑ Albert Speer : Memories . Frankfurt am Main - Berlin 1969, p. 179.
  69. ↑ Helmuth Groscurth : Diaries of an Abwehr Officer 1938–1940, With further documents on the military opposition to Hitler . Edited by Helmut Krausnick and Harold Deutsch, Stuttgart 1970, p. 192.
  70. ^ Kurt Assmann: German fateful years. Wiesbaden 1950, p. 78.
  71. ^ British Blue Book , No. 89 (p. 179)
  72. ^ British Blue Book , No. 84 (p. 175).
  73. ^ Paul Schmidt : Extra on the diplomatic stage . Bonn 1953, p. 468.
  74. ↑ Hendersons report, in: Britisches Blaubuch , No. 92 (p. 182); Kurt Assmann: Deutsche Schicksalsjahre , Wiesbaden 1950, p. 81 f.
  75. ↑ Göring's statement in the Nuremberg trial; see The Nuremberg Trial of the Major War Criminals . Paperback edition, Komet Verlag 2000, Volume 9, p. 446.
  76. ↑ Birger Dahlerus: The last attempt , Nymphenburger Verlagshandlung, 1948, p. 110.
  77. ^ British Blue Book , No. 96 (p. 185).
  78. ↑ Erhard Klöss (Ed.): Speeches of the Führer . Munich 1967, p. 208 ff.
  79. ^ Paul Schmidt : Extra on the diplomatic stage . Bonn 1953, p. 469.
  80. ↑ See Walther Hofer: The Unleashing of the Second World War . Frankfurt am Main / Hamburg 1960, p. 273 ff.
  81. ↑ Hans-Adolf Jacobsen (Ed.): Franz Halder: War Diary - Daily Notes of the Chief of the General Staff of the Army 1939–1942 . Vol. 1, Stuttgart 1962, p. 48.
  82. ^ Richard J. Evans: The Third Reich. Volume 2 / I-II: Dictatorship . Munich 2006, p. 849.
  83. ^ Richard J. Evans: The Third Reich. Volume 2 / I-II: Dictatorship . Munich 2006, p. 850.
  84. ^ Richard J. Evans: The Third Reich. Volume 2 / I-II: Dictatorship . Munich 2006, p. 850 f.
  85. ^ Richard J. Evans: The Third Reich. Volume 2 / I-II: Dictatorship . Munich 2006, p. 851.