Dan Snow's History Hit - The Start of WWII

Episode Date: September 3, 2021

On September 1 1939 Nazi Germany invaded Poland followed two days later by France and the United Kingdom declaring war on Germany and beginning the Second World War. This was the opening act in what would be the most devastating clash in human history. By its end Europe and much of Asia lay in ruins, tens of millions of people had been killed, wounded or displaced and the world order had been irrevocably altered. But, how did it start? In this episode, Dan delivers one of his monologues on how and why the Second World War came about. He examines both the immediate triggers and the big substructural forces that impelled humanity into another devastating conflict that continues to shape our world today.

Hi everyone, welcome to Dan Snow's History It. At 11.30pm on the 2nd of September 1939, with a thunderstorm raging outside, Neville Chamberlain presided over his last peacetime cabinet meeting as Prime Minister. It was decided that an ultimatum would be presented to Hitler in Berlin at 9 o'clock the following morning to expire two hours later. The day before, on September the 1st 1939, Germany had invaded Poland. The old battleship Schleswig-Holstein had fired what was probably the first shots of the Second World War in Europe at a Polish military port, a kind of military depot on the mouth of the river Vistula. German Luftwaffe aircraft had struck at several Polish targets in the early hours of the first, and troops flooded

across the border in the hours that followed. After a series of compromises reached with the Western powers over things like rearmament, the Rhinelands, Austria, Czechoslovakia. Hitler gambled that the British and French would not declare war, would not plunge the world into a second global conflict over his dispute with Poland. Hitler was wrong. At 11am on the 3rd of September, the ultimatum to Poland expired. At 11.15am, Chamberlain addressed the nation by radio, stating that the United Kingdom was at war with Germany. We have, he said, a clear conscience. We have done all that any country could do to establish peace but a situation in which no word given by Germany's ruler could be trusted and no people or country could feel itself safe had become intolerable. He finished off by saying, for it is the evil things

that we should be fighting against, brute force, bad faith, injustice, oppression and persecution, and against them I am certain that the right will prevail. Later that afternoon Chamberlain addressed the first Sunday session of the House of Commons in over 120 years. And he said simply, everything that I've worked for, everything that I've hoped for, everything that I've believed in during my public life has crashed into ruins. Britain and her empire was back at war with Germany. The Second World War would prove an even greater war than the first. It was caused by many of the same underlying impulses that caused the First World War, and born out of the messy, unsatisfactory ending of that First War, particularly according to Germany, Japan, and Italy. In this episode of Dan Snow's

History Hit, I, Dan Snow, will talk you through how and why the Second World War came about. It's one of my monologues, folks. Following the kind words that many of you share with me about the First World War and the huge number of listens it got, I decided to do another one of these monologues on the anniversary of the outbreak of the Second World War, talking about how that war came to be, focusing both on the immediate triggers and the big substructural forces that impelled humanity to another devastating conflict. We've got so much content available on this slide, Into War. We've got many, many podcasts that I've leant heavily upon, gone back and researched and stole the best answers from people like Frank McDonagh, Dan Tobman, Richard Overy. We've also got lots of TV shows available on History Hit TV. If you go to

historyhit.tv, for a small subscription, you sign up today, you get 30 days free. And then after that, you have a lifetime of pleasure for a very small subscription every month watching historyhit.tv. You're going to love it. Plenty of Second World War material there we'll be featuring on our front page on this big anniversary. In the meantime, though, get settled in. This is my attempt to explain why the Second World War happened. The Second World War was a catastrophe of such enormity that it's actually quite an

intimidating job to try and explain how it started. The scale of it feels like it requires far more than just me talking to this microphone for half an hour or 40 minutes. 100 million men and women bought from 30 or so countries, the majority of which threw their entire effort, economic, scientific, human, economic, scientific, human, industrial, political and cultural effort into it. Perhaps 80 million people were killed. Millions more were brutalised, raped, wounded, traumatised, dehoused. There was genocide. There was biological, chemical warfare. Unimaginable destructive technology was unleashed. The first man-made object was launched into space. Centuries of giant strides forward in state power, in industry, in science, led to the bloodiest war in our history.

So why did it start? Despite what I said before, it's probably easier with the Second World War to give one or two sentences description of why it started than it is for many other wars. The Thirty Years' War, the War of Jenkins' Ear, the Seven Years' War. On one level, I feel the Second World War is elemental. It was just a twisted desire of a very small minority, a tiny sliver of the world's population, to exercise dominion over their fellow man, to exploit people, both in their home countries but particularly abroad, to usurp land and wealth, to enslave and to dominate. I think on one level it's as simple as that. And because these handful of people found themselves in charge of modern states with vast armed forces, complex industries, hugely effective

bureaucracies, the intensity and the scale of the wars they were able to unleash were unprecedented. Now, a month ago, I did one of these in which I tried to explain how the First World War started. And of course, many of those same impulses are present in the Second World War. In the First World War, perhaps they get obscured by the extraordinary nature of the outbreak of war, the accidental contingent nature of the assassination leading to various mobilizations and triggering various alliances. But as I tried to say in that episode, there were deeper, much deeper, more powerful currents at the time. And one of them was just the legitimacy of war, of empire, of dominion itself. It was a truth universally acknowledged, to misquote anachronistically Jane Austen, it was a truth

universally acknowledged that a proud nation in the 19th century, and even up until the mid-20th century, a proud nation buzzing with industry, developed, advanced, was in want of an empire. It was, as it had been before the First World War, a world of empires. In fact, the destruction of some of the great empires at the end of the First World War blinds us to the fact that the British and French empires had expanded. They were at their greatest territorial extent following the First World War. They'd gained possessions from defeated empires. The Soviet Union was, I mean, still fairly imperial, shorn of some of its czarist provinces like Finland, but still exercising dominion over

a vast portion of Europe and Asia. China was undergoing a deeply painful transition from an imperial state to a kind of nation state at the time. But essentially, empires ruled the world. They were the building blocks of the global system in a way that today we think of as the nation state. They were also thought to be engines of development. They were thought to reign in the anarchy, the savagery of non-European peoples. They ensured that the world was run in an orderly way. Land could be properly exploited. Minerals could be mined, shipped elsewhere in the world. They could be turned into useful things. The world could be controlled by white Europeans and North Americans who thought they were biologically superior, who thought it was

their manifest destiny to govern over other races. And it was believed that it was also best for those other races. It was best for the peoples of Africa, peoples of South Asia, of the Pacific. They would thrive under this imperial system. As Cecil Rhodes once said, it was all about philanthropy plus 5%. Imperial subjects would benefit from all the blessings of imperial rule. And if the rulers made 5% on their investments, then everybody was happy. Now, clearly, because the world was divided into empires, and empires were thought to be good, and those empires had been amassed largely on the battlefield, violence was inherent within them. War was legitimate. And therefore, there was huge

potential for conflict within that system, particularly because these empires, they meant identity. They were a source of extraordinary national pride, but they were also a source of materials, of food, of markets for your finished goods. And as we'll hear, that became essential after a global economic calamity in the late 1920s and early 1930s. So they were a symbol of national prestige, but they were also thought to deliver wealth and security to the mother country. This is something that stretches way back into deepest history, but there's a few quotes that I've stolen from Rich Lowry's recent brilliant book on the subject. We've got the German Chancellor in December 1894 saying the maintenance of our

colonial possessions is a demand of national honour and an indication of our national reputation. Empire was essential to be a truly developed first-rank nation. You had to have an empire as well. Italy, another young nation like Germany, emerging in the mid to late 19th century. The foreign minister of Italy claimed in 1885 that there was a steeplechase for colonial acquisition all over the world and, quote, its destiny as a great power depended on acquiring colonies of Italy's own. Later on, even after the First World War had shorn Germany of its colonies, the foreign minister Stresemann made a speech in which he highlighted the contrast between other European empires,

like Spain, Portugal, and the Germans, who pretty much uniquely in Europe, he called a people without space, Raum. And there's that phrase, Lebensraum, living space, which you're going to hear a lot in this podcast. Adolf Hitler, who became leader of Germany in the early 1930s, was raised in this culture, in this milieu. He wrote his book Mein Kampf, in which he talked about the need for living space in Eastern Europe, territory inhabited by people like the Poles, Ukrainians and Russians. But he wrote a second book that he never published, and he wrote it in 1928, and he reflects on the British Empire. And he concluded that despite the way the Brits like to talk about their civilising

mission, in fact, he says, England needed markets and sources of raw materials for its goods, and it secured these markets through power political means. He was certain, he said, that national prosperity depended on conquering an empire his quote is the bread of freedom from the hardship of war homan goring hitler's charismatic and ridiculous deputy commander of the german air force la farfa said to an english friend in 1937 we want an empire well around the same time the third reich's economics minister said in a speech, for an industrial state, the possession of colonial areas for raw material to expand the home economy is indispensable. That's what empire was. It was essential for the national project to boost national identity and pride in a world full of competition. But it was also a place which

would support your industry. It would buy goods made by your workers at home. It would provide raw materials for those workers to fashion into finished goods. It would provide land for your country folk, your peasants, to go out and flourish, sending back great cargoes of grain and beef to keep your home populations fed, happy and fat. Now that rhetoric around empire seeking might have remained just rhetoric were it not for a couple of important changes that the world was going through in the 1920s and 30s. The first I think very important change is that Britain and France were the two greatest global empires, and they were both declining. Clearly, they no longer had the money to sustain their vast global possessions, which were becoming increasingly resistant to their rule. And unfortunately, because they were both going through a process of democratization,

they were incorporating more and more of their own citizens in the democratic decision-making process. It was apparent that people, voters, normal people in France and Britain, when given the choice to spend vast amounts of money on battleships to protect the Asian empire, or have decent schools, pensions, hospitals, unemployment benefits, clearly there was an impulse to choose the latter. Britain and France were facing a crisis not just from imperial competition, from places like Germany, Japan, Italy, the United States, the Soviet Union. Very different conditions to those in which Britain had amassed a vast empire in the 18th and 19th centuries. Times were very different. There were imperial competitors now, and Britain was facing a situation where the costs of clinging on to that gigantic empire were no longer thought by many in Britain

to be worth paying. What dividends was the empire actually bringing to Britain? That did mean that other nations saw opportunities. Mussolini described the UK and France as aged weakened forces and I don't think he was wrong about that. And in Britain, I think it's quite easy to feel that sense of decline, that sense of terror. There was an understanding, I think, in Britain that the global system in the early 1930s benefited them enormously. They had this vast empire. It was going to be a fine balancing act to keep the domestic population happy, providing the kind of welfare state, the proto-welfare state that they wanted, whilst also maintaining this vast overseas empire. And the British realised

they would almost certainly not be able to do that if they had to face several competing imperial powers at the same time. It was enough difficulty just dealing with resistance from within the empire. So for example, policing India, let alone before it's a factor in great power conflict with nations such as Germany Italy and Japan and it's interesting I'm reading the chips Shannon diaries at the moment he's a very gossipy politician close friend of Neville Chamberlain's in the 1930s he wrote when Britain went to war in 1939 he went to a debate in the House of Commons and he wrote the house was crowded, half hoping for peace but determined really on war, which equals empire suicide. A few weeks before in the

outbreak of war he'd written, everyone is smiling, the weather is glorious, but I feel that our world or all that remains of it is committing suicide while Stalin laughs and the Kremlin triumphs. suicide while Stalin laughs and the Kremlin triumphs. I think people like Chan felt the essential fragility of the status quo and they thought that the world that they liked, they recognised a world in which Britain was hegemonic, in which Britain's ruling elite was coping with the challenges posed by domestic socialism. He thought that world would be obliterated by the Second World War. And actually, he was right. The world in 1945 was almost unrecognisable. So while Britain and France are going to cling on, trying to fend a global system in which their empires enjoyed huge territorial extent,

other nations wanted a piece of it. Those nations we know, of course, Germany, Japan, and Italy foremost among them. Now, another cause of the Second World War has always seemed to be the dissatisfaction that resulted from the end of the First World War. All three of these countries felt aggrieved by the outcomes of the First World War, particularly the treaty, which loosely we describe as the Versailles Settlement, the Treaty of Versailles, but in fact included several other treaties around that time. If we start with Germany, that probably had most to complain about, they had been blamed for the outbreak of the First World War, specifically blamed for the outbreak of the First World War, which they felt wronged Germany. The German Empire was stripped

of all its overseas territories. Germany itself lost provinces. It lost Alsace-Lorraine in the west to France. It lost Silesia, a fantastically wealthy province that Frederick the Great had seized from Maria Therese in 1740. But I digress. It had lost that to Poland. It lost bits of land to Belgium, even Denmark. And it had been made to disarm almost completely. It couldn't have tanks and aircraft and great battleships and aircraft carriers, all the kind of things you need to make modern war. And it was had to pay a gigantic reparations bill as well, billions of gold marks. And remember the Germans, as far as they were concerned, Germans had never been defeated in the field. Whilst the soldiers on

the front line in the West in late October and November 1918 might have known just how imminent their complete collapse was on the Western Front, enemy armies didn't actually march through Berlin. German troops after the armistice were allowed to go home, their colours flying, they marched in good order back to their hometowns and cities. The fact that Germany had then collapsed was deeply confusing for many people who didn't understand the desperate situation that Germany was in and therefore the right was given a ready-made cause, the stab in the back. They were able to say that

everything was fine on the battlefield but they were undone by socialists, communists and Jews at home. They surrendered whilst the brave men of Germany had everything in hand on the front line. And thanks to their cowardice, thanks to their treachery, Germany had been shorn of its territory, of its empire, and relegated to a second-rank nation. In Italy too, people were upset by the outcome of the First World War. The Italian front of World War I is something which, if you haven't looked into too closely, you need to check out. It rivals, if not supersedes, the Western front in terms of the horrors experienced by the men who fought there. At the time, Italians and their Austrian enemies fought on the highest battlefields that humans had ever fought on,

sustained themselves on, to that point in history. Thousands of men died in avalanches at the top of mountain ranges in what we now call northern Italy. They were exposed to shocking conditions. Gigantic offensive led to deaths and injuries of nearly two million Italians during the war. And yet at the end of the war, Italy, which had fought on the side of Britain and France, was not given what it felt had been promised. It wanted to sort of start recreating, well, if not the Roman Empire, certainly the Venetian Empire.

It wanted territory down the Dalmatian coast, what's now Croatia. It wanted Greek islands. It would have taken territory in Turkey. But in fact, the victorious allies gave Italy very little of what it felt it deserved. And again, that became a clarion call for those on the right who believed that Italy's blood sacrifice in the First War earned it a place among the first-rank nations and empires in the world.

Japan as well had allied itself with Britain and France. Russia, during the war, had driven Germany out of certain Chinese bases. But in return, it was not given great chunks of China as it wanted. It was not treated as a first-ranked power in Paris in 1919. And Japan, the leaders of which believed that Japan was a first-ranked power, ought to be considered amongst the great world powers. Japanese leaders, Japanese politicians, held this grudge through the 20s and 30s they believed that Japanese had been denied the fruits of empire which after all Britain and France had helped themselves to following the first world war when they'd carved up for example the Ottoman empire between them and Germany's African empire Japan felt aggrieved and the politicians within Japan

who thought the answer lay not in waiting for the European empires to deal them in, but to take what they wanted themselves. Now, it may be that all these extremists, for that's what they were initially in Japan, in Germany, in Italy, it may be that they would be a footnote in history had it not been for the Great Depression. In the autumn, fall of 1929, there the great crash the wall street crash it came at the end of the exciting effervescent 1920s the roaring 20s that everyone's been talking so much about at the moment so buckle up everybody on october the 24th 1929 that's the largest sell-off of

shares in u.s history five days later Wall Street collapsed following the London Stock Exchange crash of September that year. And together, these signaled the beginning of what's been known as the Great Depression. It was an awesome, an awful economic depression. The global economy came very close to collapse. The global financial system came close to collapse. And within a couple of years, sort of moderate, if you like, people who believed in maintaining the international system, roughly speaking, liberal, free trading ideas of international collaboration based on the new League of Nations, those politicians had largely been swept from power. And as the British ambassador to Berlin wrote to the British Foreign Secretary in 1933,

many of us have a feeling that we're living in a country where fanatics, hooligans and eccentrics have got the upper hand. This catastrophe of the early 1930s propelled those with their ready-made alternative, an alternative based around self-reliance, imperial competition, war, securing resources. It propelled those people into positions of influence, power, and it gave birth to a new era of territorial acquisition. By 1932, in the world's leading industrial economies, there were 40 million unemployed people, registered unemployed. Tens of millions more were in part-time work couldn't make ends meet in this recession world trade if you can believe it fell by two-thirds more than half mind-blowing there was the mother of all credit crunches there were widespread bankruptcies

nation states came close to bankruptcy communists rubbed their hands together with glee saying this is the end of the western capitalist system but equally happy with nationalists at the other end of the scale who saw that western capitalist trading system as the enemy to the world that they wanted to forge and the sad thing is the conventional politicians seem to play into their hands the british american policy makers did quite a lot to dismantle that global economy. They pulled up the drawbridge. They tried to protect their domestic markets, their domestic voters. In June 1930, the Americans effectively cut off themselves from foreign imports, desperately hoping that would stimulate their domestic economy. In November 1931, even Britain, even the original, the OG free trading empire, abandoned great

elements of liberal free trade. They imposed a range of tariffs and they brought in so-called imperial preference. It's quite important. This is the idea that they would give preferential treatment to goods sourced from across the British empire. Now for those people around the world, it pointed to empires as essential to sustaining the national economy, national prosperity. This looked like the British doing exactly that. France did the same by reducing tariffs on goods from outside their empire as well. America, France, Britain who had so much to lose from the destruction of the international system didn't do enough to protect it themselves and retreated into the mirage-like safety of economic self-sufficiency. In Japan, the moderate government collapsed. The great Japanese export, raw silk, which was bought up by industrial countries all around the world, collapsed.

It fell by more than 50%. Millions of peasants were left in crippling poverty. The idea that Japan could incorporate itself, grow rich in an international trading system dominated by these Western nations was shown up as chimerical. Nationalists came to power, promising the Japanese people their prosperity, their safety, their food security would no longer depend on the whims of central bankers and policymakers in Washington, London and Paris. In Germany, there was about 40% unemployment and around a 40% reduction in industrial production. Meanwhile, Germany was still expected to pay, on paper at least, its reparations from the First World War, which had

been bitterly resented, even in good times. And all that created very fertile ground, which has been dealt with in many other podcasts on History Hit, but it created very fertile ground for the rise of Adolf Hitler. In the late 1920s, he was an absurd peripheral figure, polling in the low single digits. Now with his message, which had remained unchanged, now with his nationalist message, which had remained unchangedained now with his nationalist message which had remained unchanged it seemed perfectly suited for the times that germany was in he'd always been hostile to a kind of globalized trading economy he'd always been hostile to a world in which the british and french and american empires were dominant by 1932 hitler was the largest party in the german

parliament and by January 1933 Hitler was offered the chancellorship and very soon after dismantled German democracy altogether turning it into an authoritarian state. Just like Italy, just like Japan, in Germany those nationalists who'd been screaming into the void all through the 1920, talking about the importance of empire, the importance of taking back control. They found themselves, they thought, at that point, on the right side of history. The world looked like it was going in the direction. You're listening to Dan Snow's History. I'm talking about why the Second World War broke out. More coming up after this.

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And straight away, straight from the off as professor richard evans has told me another podcast hitler believed that european war was desirable that seizing territory to provide that security for the german people to provide space for German people to move as British settlers had moved into North America and grown rich on huge farms. That was what the German people needed, according to Hitler. And so from the outset, in private in 1932 and 1933, as Richard Evans says, when he's coming to power, he's determined that there will be a general war in Europe. Then there were equivalents to Hitler in Japan as well, who seized the opportunities presented by this global economic dislocation. Perhaps the first great spasm of this new imperialism was on the 18th of September 1931, which I think has got a

fairly good claim to be the beginning of the Second World War in some ways. Japanese engineers from the so-called Kwantung Army, so various nations including Japan and European nations, had concessions on the Chinese coast, of which Hong Kong is probably one of the most famous. That was signed over in perpetuity to the British, but there were other ports that had been signed over to be bases for other imperial powers. Now the Kwantung Army supported the Japanese economic interests in Manchuria, a security force, if you like, for their foothold in that part of China. The Kwantung Army, operating without civilian control, without the civilians back in Tokyo even knowing, decided to engineer a conflict in Manchuria. They sent Japanese

engineers to blow up a stretch of railway. They then blamed out on the Chinese on the 18th of September 1931. In response to this act of Chinese aggression, they burst out of their concessions on the coast and they captured the city of Mukden. And by early 1932, they'd occupied near the whole of Manchuria. It was the start of a war in China that would last until 1945. By the beginning of 1933, the Japanese decided to invade south of Manchuria, and by 1935 they were at Beijing. This was the first new great territorial acquisition undertaken by any power since the First World War, and the rest of the world was watching. And Manchuria was full of industry. It was one of the most advanced areas

of Chinese industrially and so sure enough Japanese steel output rose from 2 million tons in 1930 to almost doubled in 1938 to almost 6 million tons coal extraction went from 30 million tons to 50 million tons but the point is and this is the fly in the ointment this is the catastrophe for the rest of the world and for these nationalists is that the resources required to seize and hold that territory, to extract those raw materials, then sucked in ever more resources. More resources, in fact, than could be procured. So all of that rise in steel production was swallowed by the military, who insisted that in order to hold on to this giant empire, to expand this giant empire, to get ever more resources, they needed more and more resources. By 1939, there were one million

Japanese troops in China, and it was costing on half the national budget of the Japanese government to sustain this war effort. Nervous politicians who pointed out this insanity were jostled aside. The solution, according to nationalists, according to the upper echelons of the military, was to wage war on an ever larger scale to secure ever more resources, which could then, at some later point in the future, be enjoyed by the Japanese population. You see the problem with this theory, folks. The League of Nations, which is a kind of forerunner to the United Nations set up after the First World War, famously did very, very little in response to this Japanese aggression in Manchuria. And this was watched by Japan and

by Germany, and it gave them great heart that the British, the French empires in particular, had no appetite for war, had no appetite to enforce the international order. And therefore, there were opportunities to be had. Fortune favoured the bold. Germany decided it would default on its debts in 1933, it would repudiate reparations, it would refuse to pay any more money to the victorious allies of the First World War. Hitler then announced that he would not abide by the Treaty of Versailles and he would rearm in 1935. He would build a modern gigantic German military. Expenditure went from 1.2 billion Reich marks in 1933 to 10 billion in 1936-37. This is where we point out

that although everyone's very rude about the Treaty of Versailles, in fact by repeating the Treaty of Versailles the German treasury ends up spending another 9 billion marks on the military money that could otherwise have been spent on projects to improve the lives of the German treasury ends up spending another 9 billion marks on the military money that could otherwise have been spent on projects to improve the lives of the German populations themselves by denying the German government the right to build a modern military it actually ensured the German government spent more domestically on other projects but there we go I digress so 1935 Germany's rearming and also 1935, closely following what's going on in Manchuria, decides it will make its own push for imperial greatness.

Mussolini, the absurd, strutting nationalist dictator of Italy, had made it clear for years that British possessions in the Mediterranean, Malta, Suez, effective ownership of Egypt, Gibraltar, they had allowed Britain to, as he said, encircle, to imprison Italy. And he, Mussolini, was looking for spazia vitale, which is Lebensraum, it's living space. It's as common a phrase in Italy as it was in Germany. He wanted to turn Italy into a new Rome and he had his eyes on Libya, particularly the fertile strip along the Mediterranean, which

Mussolini believed would support up to six million Italian peasants who could go there and move and start farms and export the bounty of those farmers back to Italy. First of all, on Mussolini's agenda was probably Libya, which had been nominally controlled by the Italians since 1911-ish, but he fought a series of brutal, costly counterinsurgencies to try and bring Libya properly under Italian control. Next up, in October 1935 was Mussolini's first big move in terms of seizing brand new territory, and that is the invasion of Ethiopia, which remarkably had remained independent during the so-called Scramble for Africa in the late 19th century, where European nations had partitioned Africa, taken every piece of territory into incorporating their empires. Ethiopia had

remained independent, but in October 35, Italian troops marched in. It was a harder campaign than Mussolini was expecting. It was a savage campaign as well. Mussolini's forces used poison gas to help defeat the Ethiopians. But on the 9th of May 1936, he was able to announce to a crowd in Rome, Italy finally has its empire. Italy and Japan were very much on the march. Germany was not far behind. In fact, as Italy was invading Ethiopia on the 7th of March 1936, Hitler had re-militarized the Rhineland.

He'd marched troops into the Rhineland. The Rhineland is a stretch of German territory on the east bank of the Rhine. The French had wished to occupy it to insist on German good behaviour in the aftermath of the First World War. The British and Americans had said that would be a step too far, but they had commanded the German government would leave it demilitarised, meaning no defences, no military units placed there, that if Germany ever did misbehave or breach the terms of the Treaty of Versailles, France in particular would be able to march straight into the heart of Germany.

Well, Hitler made the gamble as part of his repudiation of the Treaty of Versailles to re-militarise the Rhineland. His tiny force marched in. Albert Speer, who was his architect, said later he believed it was Hitler's most daring undertaking. And Hitler later said it was the most nerve-wracking 48 hours of his life. The German troops have been ordered to retreat if confronted by a much larger French force crossing the Rhine, but no French force had materialized. And this was Hitler's first huge success. And critically, it put Hitler in a greatly strengthened position when it came to confronting his more cautious generals, his generals who were unwilling to seek war against the Western

Allies, who many of them remembered defeating them on the battlefields of 1918. Hitler was now able to point to the success, his daring, his elan in reoccupying the Rhineland in 1936. In that spirit, he intended to continue. history, we uncover the epic stories that inspire Assassin's Creed. We're stepping into feudal Japan in our special series Chasing Shadows, where samurai warlords and shinobi spies teach us the tactics and skills needed not only to survive, but to conquer. Whether you're preparing for Assassin's Creed Shadows or fascinated by history and great stories, listen to Echoes of History, a Ubisoft podcast brought to you by History Hits. There are new episodes every week.

Later that summer, he wrote a strategic memorandum on the military and economic future of his Third Reich. He pointed out the Soviet Union loomed very large. He always believed that there would be a time when there would have to be a showdown between fascism and communism. And in order to take on the Soviet Union, which Hitler believed would be about 1942-1943 when Germany was ready to fight a massive total war, Hitler wanted huge rearmament. He also wanted this thing, economic self-sufficiency. He didn't want Germany to be cut off by blockades as it had been during the First World War, when it couldn't access important rare metals from around the world. It couldn't access Chilean nitrates to

boost harvest yields. He wanted Germany to be self-sufficient. So he started to put in place a command economy. Everything would be bent towards the national goals of self-sufficiency and empire seeking and the only way for germany to thrive would be to expand this hitler writing to expand the living space in particular the raw material and food basis of the german people and that meant moving east moving into poland ukraine russia which was seen as barbarous, uncivilised, undeveloped. It was viewed in the same way that Hitler thought that Britain viewed the Australian outback, the African interior, the western plains of North America. That's how Hitler and his ilk viewed the East. In October 1936, a few months later, Germany and Italy came to an informal agreement

known as the Axis because Mussolini later claimed that it was an Axis between Rome and Berlin that all of Europe would now revolve around. In November 1936 a month later Japan and Germany signed the anti-comintern pact basically an anti-communist pact and Italy would join that a year later. Boosted by its new empire-seeking allies, in July 1937, there was a so-called Marco Polo Bridge incident just outside Beijing, in which, it's a very bizarre story, a member of a Japanese unit went to the toilet. His commanding officer couldn't find him and thought the Chinese would abduct him and basically initiated a firefight with the Chinese. And this was used as an inciting moment to start another campaign,

another war in northern China. And within a month Beijing had been captured and Japan was now sucked into a full-on gigantic land war in central China. It would prove incredibly costly. As I mentioned earlier, just a year or two later a million Japanese soldiers would be involved and a giant slice of the Japanese budget would go into waging this never-ending war in China. Hitler for his part was now interested in expanding Germany to incorporate all the places in which Germans as he defined them lived. That meant first of all Austria. Austria is a German-speaking country it was the remains of the giant Austro-Hungarian empire never been incorporated into the Second Reich, the Kaiserreich, but it had been passed the Holy Roman Empire, the First Reich. So Hitler said, why not the third? November 1937, Lord Halifax, a very, very senior British

politician, leader of the House of Lords, and shortly after to be made Foreign Secretary, went to visit Hitler and told him that Britain would not stand in the way of Hitler incorporating Austrian Germans and Sudeten Germans, these are Germans living in Czechoslovakia, into his Third Reich as long as that process was peaceful. That was at odds with Britain's official stance. But it gave Hitler the impression, quite rightly, that there was a sizable chunk of politicians within Britain, people in Britain, who would go to great lengths to avoid fighting a great second war against Hitler. Britain was profoundly unwilling to fight again on the continent after the great bloodletting of the First World War. Hitler didn't wait long before acting.

In early 1938, just a month or two later, he purged his cautious army leadership. He felt powerful enough to do that. He made himself supreme commander of the armed forces. He created a new high command for the German army, effectively, called Oberkommander der Wehrmacht, which facilitated his control of the armed forces. And he made Ribbentrop a key Anglophobe, a key member of the kind of war party, the aggressive end of the Nazi party, foreign minister. And after those preparations, on the 12th of March 1938, the so-called Anschluss took place. Hitler, well, he effectively invaded Austria.

There was strong support from people in both Austria and Germany for unification of the two countries. It felt like unfinished business in the First World War. Now that the Austro-Hungarian Empire no longer existed, why not incorporate all German speakers into a German country, the country of Germany? Shortly after the German invasion, there was a referendum, a plebiscite, which of course officially ratified Austria's annexation by the Third Reich. Over the summer of 1938, just months later, Hitler turned his attention to the so-called sudeten germans living in czechoslovakia these were also a holdover from the austro-hungarian empire they were germans living in what had been austro-hungarian provinces but were given to

the new country of czechoslovakia in the great redrawing of the map that occurred in 1919 in europe these germans were pointing, enjoyed civil and political rights that Germans in Germany did not enjoy because they were living under Hitler's dictatorship. But much was made of their plight as minority peoples living in a Czech-dominated state. Hitler and some Sudeten leaders made them out to be a cruelly exploited and dominated minority who'd be much happier living in Germany, about three and a quarter million of them. Hitler's determination to forcibly include these Germans within the Reich precipitated the so-called Munich crisis of September 1938, when Hitler and Chamberlain, in particular the UK Prime Minister, came probably hours away from war. After much tooting and froing and much shuttle diplomacy,

there was a sort of compromise outcome whereby Germany agreed that it would not go to war against the Czechs as long as the Sudeten Germans were incorporated within the Reich. Britain and France accepted this deal. On October 1st, Sudetenland was incorporated into Germany. It came as a surprise to many Sudeten Germans. They thought they would be getting a measure of freedom within the Czech Republic. In fact, of course, they were annexed to Germany and became subjects of the Third Reich. Interestingly, the Munich Agreement between the European powers looked like it had averted war, and it provoked very different responses in Britain in particular. There's something called mass observation, which is a series of interviews

done with British people to try and give the government a sense of what the national mood was. And it's very interesting. A young woman wrote, if there's one thing we want, it's no more war. But I can't see what we're going to do when he keeps on wanting things that he says, like that Czechoslovakia. I know what I'd do if I had him. My husband says, and I agree, that we'll have a bigger war now, sooner or later for this. There was a hardening up that took place

in the British public among British politicians. There was a sense that Hitler's appetite for conquest was insatiable and it would have to be met sooner or later with violence. In the debate that took place in parliament on Munich Winston Churchill was on fine form and he said it was impossible to live with Germany which vaunts the spirit of aggression and conquest, which derives strength and perverted pleasure from persecution and uses with pitiless brutality the threat of murderous force. But Rab Butler, the up-and-coming Conservative MP speaking for the government, said, we have two choices. Either we settle our differences with Germany by consultation or face up to the inevitability of a clash between the two systems of democracy and dictatorship. I must

emphatically give my opinion as one of the younger generation. War settles nothing. And I see no alternative to the policy on which the Prime Minister has so courageously set himself, the construction of peace. There is no other country that can achieve this, the construction of peace. In the end, Winston Churchill did not vote against the government, but he did abstain. He was one of 25 MPs that abstained. Rather than going to vote, he just sat in a grump on the government benches of the House of Commons. So the autumn of 1938 was thought that war might have been averted, but in March 1939, I think was the moment where everyone realised it was inevitable.

might have been averted. But in March 1939, I think was the moment where everyone realised it was inevitable. On the 15th of March, Czech President Emil Hacza was summoned to Berlin. He had a meeting with Hitler. And at that meeting, according to one witness, he actually appears to have suffered a heart attack, which was induced by Göring's threat to bomb Prague into the ground and was forced. I mean, he was actually physically bullied into signing a capitulation for the rest of Czechoslovakia. The French ambassador reported that Hatcher collapsed, he had this possible heart attack, and he was kept going, I quote, kept going only by means of injections. He was then forced, I mean, almost physically bullied into signing the papers that were laid in front of him by Goering and Ribbentrop in particular. They kept shouting at him that hundreds of bombers were ready to take off. His city, his country would be pulverized unless he

signed it over the German Reich. Czechoslovakia ceased to exist. Germany annexed Bohemia and Moravia while Slovakia was established as a kind of puppet regime. Now this was the first time that Germany had seized land that had either not been taken away from them at Versailles or did not include a majority of German people. This was the first time they had just conquered foreign territory. It was very clear to nearly everybody, including Chamberlain and Halifax back in the UK, that Hitler was a not to be trusted and that he was bent on a program of conquest and expansion that would inevitably thrust Europe into war. On the 31st of March, so about two weeks later in 1939, it was announced in the British House of Commons that the British

government, His Majesty's government, had given Poland a guarantee of its independence. This was meant to be a clear signal to the Germans, to Hitler, that by invading Poland, which was the obvious next target, that would precipitate war with Britain. It's also worth pointing out what happened that spring, because days later, in April 1939, Italian forces invaded Albania. A famously named King Zog was deposed, and Albania was effectively incorporated into Italy. The British government was speeding up their rearmament by this stage. For the first time at the end of April, so weeks after Mussolini's invasion of Albania, the British government introduced the first peacetime conscription in British history.

The first time young men were conscripted into the armed forces, even though Britain was not actually at war. It was certainly not too soon. If anything, that announcement came too late. On the 23rd of August 1939, in a stunning diplomatic revolution, Nazi Germany and the Communist Soviet Union signed a pact, a guarantee of peace made by each party towards the other. But in addition to this publicly announced affirmations of non-aggression, the treaty included the secret protocols, which broke up Eastern Europe into spheres of influence. So a line that stretched down through Poland, Lithuania, Latvia, Estonia, Finland, they were all divided up between the Soviet and the German orbit. This meant that Hitler was now free to act against

Poland, knowing that it would not intimidate or risk war against the Soviet Union, which he didn't want, not yet. Hitler's sense of certainty, his sense that he was touched by fate, only increased with every success that his foreign policy enjoyed. He told Ribbentrop, his foreign minister, in August 1939, I have at last decided to do without the opinions of people who have misinformed me on a dozen occasions, and I shall write my own judgment, which has in all these cases given me better counsel than the competent experts. I think we've heard enough from experts, said Adolf Hitler in 1939. He ordered the invasion of Poland, assuming that Britain and France would yet again back down. Poland, Hitler said, was, and I quote, to be depopulated and

settled by Germans. At 4pm on the 31st of August, Hitler ordered the invasion to begin the following day. He assured one senior military commander that France and England will not march. Joseph Goebbels, Hitler's propaganda minister, wrote down in his diary that night, the Fuhrer does not believe England will intervene. Just as the engineers of the Kwantung Army created the false flag operation in Manchuria back in 1931. So under the code name Himmler, an operation was mounted now to fake a Polish attack on German positions, German frontier posts. Six concentration camp prisoners were gathered up by the SS, dressed in Polish uniforms and left dead on the German Polish border. And a Polish person was found, killed and left in a German radio transmitting station, allowing Germans to claim that the Poles had violated German territory, a pretext for war.

At dawn on the 1st of September, German aircraft attacked Polish targets, while an old pre-First World War battleship, the Schleswig-Holstein, which was a friendship visit to the port of Danzig, sailed out of the port and opened fire on a Polish military depot at the mouth of the Vistula. And that's traditionally been considered the first shots fired of the Second World War in Europe. There was consternation in Britain and France. There was high drama in the corridors of Whitehall, Westminster and Paris. But on the 3rd of September 1939, two days after the German invasion of Poland, Neville Chamberlain went on the BBC and made a radio broadcast. He informed the British people that he had not received an undertaking from Germany to withdraw from Poland and consequently this country was at war with Germany.

When news of that British declaration arrived in Berlin Hitler looked at his foreign secretary apparently white with rage and said simply what now? Like so many wars the Second World War had been precipitated by gamblers strutting proud confident after easy wins on previous hands and this confidence had caused Hitler to radically misjudge the response of the British and French governments to his action in Poland. Rather than a limited quick war to incorporate bits of Polish territory into Germany Hitler now faced another great war against two, yes, aging empires, but two empires that could still marshal gigantic global resources against him. And behind them, America, which Hitler assumed rightly would end up coming in on their side. And Hitler knew enough

to be sure that against that gigantic military, industrial, economic, trading, demographic coalition, Germany would face much the same odds as she had faced in the First World War. Victory against those Western powers was almost inconceivable. Now, 1940 showed that Hitler came closer than anyone had believed before the war to achieving that victory. But in the end, even devastating, stunning advance on the battlefields of Western Europe were not enough. And British obstinacy, backed by the Americans, represented an existential threat to the German imperial project. So Hitler turned east against his erstwhile ally, Stalin, and decided to precipitate a gigantic war with the Soviet Union as well.

But that, friends, is a story for a different podcast. As probably is the eventual arrival of Italy and Japan as formal allies of Germany, Italy sat on the sidelines weighing its chances until the summer of 1940 and Japan would launch its own extraordinary lightning attacks on the USA, Britain and other European empires at the end of 1941. Finally bringing these conflicts in different theatres on different continents into one unified global war. The war that followed has shaped everything that's come since. From the space race, to national boundaries, the end of empires, nuclear weapons, down to the far more prosaic. I'm only the person I am today. I'm only alive today because my grandparents met among the chaos and tumult of war, the chaos that threw them together when otherwise there was absolutely no

chance. A Welsh woman born in India would ever meet a Canadian medical student who grew up on a farm north of Toronto. Whether we like it or not, the Second World War made our world and made most of us within it. Thank you very much for listening to this monologue. Thank you for all the kind comments I've had about these and I won't do too many, I promise, but sometimes it feels like it might be a nice occasion for them. Remember you can listen to podcasts on many of the elements that have been mentioned in this one on History Hit TV. But in the meantime, thanks for listening and see you next time.

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