MCHFC

LECTURE 8

Part 1. European countries before and after the WW-2. The Second World War in Europe.

Europe before World War Two (1939)

The map of Europe changed significantly after the First World War. The war brought the monarchies in Germany, Austria-Hungary, Russia and the Ottoman Empire to their knees. The older nations and the new republics were unable to establish a stable political order. Smouldering territorial conflicts were compounded by boundary disputes, as the borders of such countries as Poland, Czechoslovakia and the Kingdom of Serbs, Croats and Slovenes had been drawn arbitrarily and with little regard for national or ethnic integrity.

Territorial changes

Under the terms of the Treaty of Versailles, Germany was compelled to make territorial concessions. Aside from substantial territory, the former German Empire lost some six million inhabitants. The creation of the "Polish Corridor" resulted in the isolation of East Prussia from the bulk of Germany. Alsace-Lorraine was ceded to France, the Hlu?ín Region to Czechoslovakia. Danzig was made a protectorate of the League of Nations. In a number of regions (North Schleswig, Upper Silesia, West and East Prussia, Eupen-Malmedy and the Saarland) national affiliation was determined by plebiscite. The Austro-Hungarian Empire was broken apart. The successor nations of Austria, Hungary and Czechoslovakia were established within the territory of the former Habsburg monarchy, while other regions went to Italy, Poland, Romania and the Kingdom of Serbs, Croats and Slovenes proclaimed in 1918.

The Russian Revolution of 1917 was followed by the creation of the Russian Socialist Federative Republic in 1918. The new republic emerged victorious from a series of civil wars but lost terrotiry in the bargain. Belarus and the Ukraine, which had declared their independence after the Russo-Polish War of 1920, were divided between the USSR and Poland. In 1918, the Republic was proclaimed in Poland, which had been united with Russia in a single kingdom since the Congress of Vienna. The former Russian Baltic provinces of Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania also declared their independence in 1918. Finland had become a sovereign state in 1917 and was proclaimed a republic in 1919.

While the borders of Portugal and Spain remained as they had been, Italy made small territorial gains in the North and East. Turkey under Kemal Atatürk secured the territory occupied for the most part by the present republic under the terms of the Peace of Lausanne in 1923. The independent Irish Republic was proclaimed in 1916 and became a free state after ceding the province of Ulster (Northern Ireland) to Great Britain in 1921. Iceland was recognized as a sovereign state under the Danish king in 1918.

The German Reich occupied the demilitarized Rhineland in 1936, thereby violating the Locarno Treaties, with which the European nations, prompted among other things by proposal by German Foreign Minister Gustav Stresemann, had sought to guarantee their territorial integrity in 1925. The invasion of Austria in 1938 and the annexation of Czechoslovakia in 1939 following the Munich Conference, at which the French and British had agreed to the German occupation of the Sudetenland, were the first campaigns in Germany's war of conquest.

Dates and Belligerents of World War Two

For a start, there’s disagreement on when the war started and two common dates for when it finished. In terms of Europe, Russia generally holds that the 'Great Patriotic War' began on June 22nd 1941 with Operation Barbarossa (the German invasion of Russia) while Western Europe uses September 1st 1939, the German invasion of Poland. Both use the date of Germany's unconditional surrender as the end in Europe, but the Western Allies accepted the surrender on May 8th and the Russian May 9th 1945.

The bulk of the European war was fought by the fascist 'Axis' of Germany and Italy against the uneasy alliance of France, the British Empire, the United States and Communist Russia with numerous small contributors on both sides. However, Russia began the war by seizing and suppressing Poland in allegiance with Germany in 1939 - albeit having first tried to find support against Germany from the western nations – until Germany invaded Russia in 1941, while an Italy freed from fascist rulers joined the Allies in 1943. All across Europe over fifty million combatants fought, with over ten million causalities and equal that number of civilian deaths.

The Causes of World War Two

The immediate trigger for war was the Nazi invasion of Poland, a conquest too far for the allied nations who had seen Austrian and Czech lands subsumed into the Reich already. The driving force was unquestionably Hitler, who wanted war and racial domination. But argument rages about the wider background, the political, cultural and economic climate which allowed Hitler into power to begin with.

Many start in 1918 with the end of World War One and the Treaty of Versailles, whose 'war guilt' and rampant anti-German clauses has led some to say another war was inevitable, or even that world wars one and two are part of the same conflict, albeit with a large ceasefire in the middle. Hitler certainly played on German beliefs that they had been betrayed and treated unfairly at the war's end. The Allied Occupation of Germany which ended World War Two prevented a repeat.

World War Two Itself

World War Two in Europe was fought on three main fronts: East, West and Italian. The most decisive and bloody was the East, where Axis troops reached Stalingrad in the south and almost Moscow in the north before being pushed all the way back to Berlin by a Soviet army of over twenty million combatants. The Western Front was temporarily dominated by Germany after their swift conquest of France in 1940, but on June 6th 1944 it was reopened by successful allied landings in Normandy. The Italian front, often called the 'forgotten front' saw Allied troops fight their way up the peninsular, allowing a non-fascist Italy to join the Allies. European troops also fought in North Africa, Asia and Australasia.

Unlike many previous conflicts, World War Two was also a battle of racial and individual survival. Nazi Germany was actively trying to enslave the Slavic groups and exterminate Jews, Gypsies and the physically or mentally handicapped, leading to the deployment of mass execution and the development of death camps which murdered twelve million people, the most infamous being Auschwiz-Birkenau. At the same time the Soviet Gulag system imprisoned millions, while the ideology/cruelty of Communist high command, which considered people as just another national resource to be spent, led to millions of civilian deaths. The Soviets, just like the Nazis, also purged (чистка) the Polish population of 'enemies'.

The Aftermath of World War Two

You cannot overstate the consequences of World War Two; every facet of human life was change, often permanently. The borders of Europe were redrawn again and the Cold War developed from a Europe divided between democratic western Allies and a newly dominant Soviet Union. Science advanced as code-breakers invented computers, synthetic materials and vaccines were developed and the atomic age began. Culture was radically altered as class and race systems broke down and humanity began to face the horror of what had occurred.

Key Themes of World War Two

- Battles

A number of battles/events have earnt considerable attention. In the west the aerial battle of Britain, the D-Day landings and Operation Market Garden, in the East the siege of Stalingrad, the Battle for Moscow, Kursk (the largest tank battle ever fought) and the Warsaw Uprising.

- Tanks and Blitzkrieg