The War Did Not Begin on 1 September 1939

The details of Adolf Hitler’s rise to power and the Nazi seizure of Germany fill volumes far beyond the scope of an article written for this site.

This piece therefore begins with the years immediately preceding the Second World War and looks at them primarily from the German side of the ledger.

The detail remains stunning, if not terrifying: a party that began as a noisy minority, never won an outright majority in a free election, and still, through a mixture of popular support, street violence, political calculation and the misjudgement of better-placed men, took hold of what had been one of the most advanced states in Europe.

The rest of Europe watched, protested, bargained, conceded -  and failed to stop the process until it was almost too late.

Hitler, like many German soldiers, emerged from the First World War furious at the collapse of 1918. He absorbed the “stab-in-the-back” story then circulating on the nationalist Right: that the German army had not been defeated in the field but betrayed at home by socialists, democrats and, in the version he never abandoned, Jews.

That was his reading of the defeat. It was not a finding of fact.

When Hitler built his political movement, however, he fixed upon a handful of objectives and did not greatly waver from them.

They can be reduced, without doing too much violence to the sources, to four:

1. The creation of a racially defined German Volksgemeinschaft, ( people's community )  with Jews and other groups excluded from it.
2. The destruction of Marxism and Bolshevism, which Hitler treated as one enemy and, in his propaganda, as a Jewish enterprise.
3. The recovery of territory and Germans lost or separated by the post-war settlement -  immediately the Saar, the Rhineland, Austria, Danzig, the Corridor and the Sudetenland, and ultimately far more.
4. The destruction of the military and financial restrictions imposed by Versailles: no more dictated limits on the army, armaments or Germany’s freedom of action.

He advanced a long way on the third and fourth objectives.

On the second, he signed a pact with Moscow when it suited him, then broke it.

On the first, the regime moved from legal exclusion to expropriation and, once the war was underway in the East, to mass murder.

That final stage is a subject in itself. It is not a minor appendix to the war’s origins.

But neither is it the whole of this particular story.

Antisemitism was not a late addition to the Nazi programme. It was there from the beginning. The party programme of 1920 and Hitler’s speeches made that plain long before he held office.

What changed was the method and the opportunity.

Boycott and civil disabilities came in 1933. The Nuremberg Laws followed in 1935.

Open violence erupted in 1938. The machinery of extermination came later, under the conditions created by war.

Many German Jews understood the direction early and left for Britain, the United States, Palestine and elsewhere, often stripped of property and possessions. Others could not leave, would not leave, or discovered that the doors were closing.

The ground on which Hitler's movement grew was real enough.

Weimar Germany carried the humiliation of Versailles. The memory of the inflation that had destroyed the currency in 1923 remained raw. Then came the Depression of 1929 - 32, mass unemployment and violent political conflict between Communists and the Right.

None of that explains why Hitler won.

It does explain why a party promising national recovery, revenge and order found an audience.

On 30 January 1933, President Paul von Hindenburg appointed Hitler Chancellor of Germany.

The Nazis were the largest party in the Reichstag, but they had not won a majority. They had taken 37 per cent of the vote in July 1932, falling to 33 per cent in November. Conservatives around Hindenburg and Franz von Papen believed they could use Hitler.

They were spectacularly wrong.

Between the Chancellery, the Prussian police and the Nazi Party's own formations, Hitler's government possessed more power than the cabinet list suggested.

Then came the Reichstag fire.

On the night of 27 February 1933, the Reichstag building burned. A young Dutch Communist, Marinus van der Lubbe, was arrested at the scene and later executed.

Whether he acted alone remains debated. 

What is not debated is what Hitler did with the opportunity.

The emergency decree issued the following day suspended basic civil rights. Communist organisations were smashed. Political opponents were arrested. The machinery of repression began operating almost immediately.

The March election was held under those conditions and still did not give the Nazis 50 per cent of the vote. 

It did not matter.

On 23 March, the Enabling Act passed.

Communist deputies had already been arrested or driven underground. SA and SS men stood around the chamber. The parliament that emerged from that day was no longer an effective check upon the government.

The Republic had ceased to be a republic in any meaningful sense.

Hitler then set about eliminating the remaining independent centres of power.

Trade unions were destroyed. Political parties disappeared. The SA, once the party's great street army, became increasingly troublesome to the leadership. In June 1934 came the Night of the Long Knives, when Hitler ordered the purge of the SA leadership and other perceived enemies.

The SS emerged stronger.

So did Heinrich Himmler.

The Gestapo, created in Prussia under Hermann Göring, became part of a growing system of political policing built around surveillance, files and “protective custody”.

The dictatorship was no longer being improvised.

It was becoming a state.

And it was a state preparing for something.

Hitler also understood that popular support mattered.

Unemployment fell. Public works expanded. Rearmament accelerated. Conscription returned in 1935. The destruction of free unions and the mobilisation of the economy for military purposes were central to the transformation.

The Autobahn programme became a propaganda triumph as well as a real construction effort.

The promised “people's car” was another part of the vision. Ferdinand Porsche's office developed the design that became the Volkswagen Beetle, although ordinary Germans would not receive the promised cheap car before the war swallowed the factory.

The regime was presenting itself as the government that had restored German confidence.

The books, however, were not clean.

The economic recovery was being built alongside dictatorship, militarisation and preparation for war.

Then Hitler began testing the outside world.

Germany withdrew from the League of Nations.

Conscription was announced.

The Saar returned to Germany after its scheduled plebiscite in January 1935.

And on 7 March 1936 German troops entered the demilitarised Rhineland. This was a particularly revealing gamble. Hitler's forces were not in a position to fight a major war against France. The move succeeded because Britain and France protested but did not intervene.

Hitler learned something.

The lesson was not that Germany was invincible. It was that the other powers might protest without acting. 

That lesson would be repeated.

In January 1934 Hitler had signed a ten-year non-aggression pact with Poland, buying time on Germany's eastern frontier while rearmament continued.

But Danzig remained under the League of Nations, with a strong Nazi movement, and Hitler's larger ambitions were not hidden.

Austria came next.

German troops crossed the Austrian frontier in March 1938 and the Anschluss ( annexation of Austria )  followed.

The subsequent plebiscite recorded overwhelming support for union, but it was conducted after the German takeover and under the new regime. The international powers did nothing to prevent the annexation. The Anschluss mattered far more than territory. It demonstrated once again that Hitler could violate the post-war settlement and get away with it.

And it brought Nazi rule, almost overnight, to Austria's Jewish population, who were subjected to persecution with extraordinary speed.

Six months later Hitler turned to Czechoslovakia.

The Sudetenland contained a large ethnic German population and Hitler claimed the right to bring those Germans into the Reich.

But Czechoslovakia was not Austria.

It had an army. It had defensive arrangements with France. And a German attack threatened to turn a Central European dispute into a general European war.

Britain was not ready.

France was not eager.

And Neville Chamberlain believed that an agreement might preserve peace.

In September 1938 Chamberlain flew to Germany and met Hitler.

At Munich, Britain, France, Italy and Germany agreed that the Sudetenland would be transferred to Germany.

Czechoslovakia was not a party to the negotiations that decided its fate.

Chamberlain returned to Britain with a piece of paper and the promise that the settlement represented peace.

Hitler was not satisfied.

That is important.

The man who had just received the Sudetenland without firing the European war he had threatened to start had discovered that diplomacy had achieved less than force might have achieved.

Some German generals, who knew how unprepared the army still was for a major war, had contemplated resisting him.

They did not.

On 1 October German troops entered the Sudetenland.

Then the whole argument changed.

On 15 March 1939 Hitler occupied Prague and established a German protectorate over Bohemia and Moravia.

Czechoslovakia ceased to exist.

That was the end of the pretence that Hitler merely wanted to gather Germans into Germany.

The Anschluss could be presented as national reunification.

The Sudetenland could be presented as self-determination.

Prague could not.

Hitler had taken territory inhabited largely by Czechs who were not asking to become part of Germany.

The promise made at Munich had been broken.

The calculation in London and Paris changed with it.

On 31 March Britain guaranteed Polish independence.

In retrospect, the guarantee can look almost absurdly difficult to enforce.

Britain was still rearming. The British public remembered 1914 - 18. Poland lay on the far side of Germany, and there was no simple way for Britain to put an army there.

Interwar Poland was not a liberal democracy in the British mould. After 1926 it was an authoritarian state, and its own treatment of minorities was hardly exemplary. In 1938 Poland had also participated in the dismemberment of Czechoslovakia.

None of that made the British guarantee sentimental.

It was a line drawn after Hitler had broken the line drawn at Munich.

Whether it was wise is another question.

It was not mysterious.

Hitler treated it as a bluff.

He had watched the Rhineland, Austria and Munich and concluded that Britain would always prefer negotiation to war.

He had been encouraged by his successes and by the divisions among his opponents.

Now he turned to Poland.

The immediate demands concerned Danzig and access across the Polish Corridor to East Prussia.

Britain and France had concluded that Hitler could no longer be trusted to negotiate in good faith.

Hitler reached the same conclusion about them.

Only he reached it differently.

He concluded that they would not fight.

Then came the Soviet Union.

On 23 August 1939 Germany and the Soviet Union signed the Molotov - Ribbentrop Pact.

The two regimes that had spent years denouncing one another as ideological enemies had found a temporary reason to cooperate.

A secret protocol divided much of eastern Europe into spheres of influence and provided for the partition of Poland.

For Hitler, it removed the immediate danger of a war with Poland becoming a two-front war.

For Stalin, it bought time and territory.

For everyone else, it was the final piece of a very ugly puzzle.

The attack on Poland was delayed briefly when Mussolini made clear that Italy was not ready for a major war.

Then the machinery moved again.

On the night of 31 August, SS men dressed in Polish uniforms staged a supposed Polish attack on a German radio station at Gleiwitz.

It was intended to provide Hitler with a pretext.

He did not really need one.

At 4.45 a.m. on 1 September 1939, the old German battleship Schleswig-Holstein opened fire on the Polish garrison at Westerplatte.

German forces crossed the frontier.

The Second World War, in Europe, had begun.

 But it had not begun that morning.

The guns at Westerplatte were the sound of a process reaching its final stage.

For years there had been warnings.

Treaties had been broken.

The Rhineland had been remilitarised.

Austria had disappeared into the Reich.

The Sudetenland had been surrendered at Munich.

Prague had then fallen despite the promises made at Munich.

Each step had taught Hitler something about the willingness of his opponents to act.

And each concession had bought time for Germany to become stronger.

That does not mean that war was inevitable from the moment Hitler became Chancellor.

It means that the choices available to prevent it became narrower with every successful gamble.

The background is long, and the cast of secondary politicians is difficult to keep straight. The atrocities have deliberately remained off-centre here because the question is how the war began, not how it was later conducted.

They are nevertheless part of the answer.

A government that defined national recovery in terms of racial purification, conquest and Lebensraum in the East was never going to stop voluntarily at the Sudetenland.

That is the thread the diplomatic story keeps trying to drop.

And cannot.

The war did not begin on 1 September 1939.

That was simply the morning when Europe could no longer pretend that it had not already begun.