World War II
is appropriately called “Hitler’s war.” Germany was so extraordinarily successful in the first two years that
Hitler
came close to realizing his aim of establishing
hegemony
in
Europe
. But his triumphs were not part of a strategic
conception
that secured victory in the long run. Nonetheless, the early successes were spectacular. After the defeat of
Poland
within a month, Hitler turned his attention westward. He believed that it was necessary to defeat
Britain
and France before he could again turn eastward to the territories that were to become the “living space” for his new empire. The attack on the
Western Front
began in the spring of 1940. Hitler took
Denmark
and
Norway
during the course of a few days in April, and on May 10 he attacked
France
, along with
Luxembourg
,
Belgium
, and
The Netherlands
. Once again his armies achieved lightning victories; Luxembourg, Belgium, and The Netherlands were overrun in a few days, and France
capitulated
on June 21. Only the British, now alone, obstructed Hitler’s path to total victory in the west.
Country Facts
Audio File:
Anthem of Germany (
see article
)
- Officially:
- Federal Republic of Germany
- German:
- Deutschland or Bundesrepublik Deutschland
- Head Of Government:
- Chancellor:
Olaf Scholz
- Population:
- (2024 est.) 86,303,000
- Currency Exchange Rate:
- 1 USD equals 0.932 euro
Hitler determined that he could take
Britain out of the war with air power. German bombers began their attack in August 1940, but the British proved intractable. The vaunted German air force (
Luftwaffe
) failed to bring Britain to its knees partly because of the strength of the British
air force
, partly because the German air force was ill-equipped for the task, and partly because the British were able to read German code (
see
Ultra
).
Yet
Hitler had been so confident of a quick victory that, even before the attack began, he had ordered his military planners to draw up plans for an invasion of the
Soviet Union
. The date he had set for that invasion was May 15, 1941.
Although the defeat of the Soviet Union was central to Hitler’s strategic objective, during the early months of 1941 he allowed himself to be sidetracked twice into conflicts that delayed his invasion. In both instances he felt obliged to rescue his ally Mussolini from military difficulties.
Mussolini
had invaded
Greece
in October 1940, despite the fact that he was already in difficulty in
North Africa
, where he was unable to cut off Britain’s Mediterranean lifeline in
Egypt
. In February 1941 Hitler decided to reinforce Mussolini in North Africa by sending an armoured division under the command of General
Erwin Rommel
. When Mussolini’s invasion of Greece also bogged down, Hitler again decided to send reinforcements. To reach Greece, German troops had to be sent through the
Balkan countries
, all of them officially neutral. Hitler managed to bully these countries into accepting the passage of German troops, but on March 27 a
coup
in
Yugoslavia
overthrew the government, and the new rulers
reneged
on the agreement. In retaliation Hitler launched what he called Operation Punishment against the Yugoslavs. Yugoslav resistance collapsed quickly, but the effect was to delay for another month the planned invasion of the Soviet Union.
When the invasion of the Soviet Union finally came, on June 22, 1941, it did so with both campaigns against the British, across the
English Channel
and in the Mediterranean, still incomplete. Hitler was prepared to take the risk that fighting on multiple fronts entailed, because he was convinced that the war against the Soviet Union would be over by the
onset
of the Russian winter. The spectacular German advances during the first weeks of the invasion seemed proof of Hitler’s calculation. On July 3 his army chief of staff wrote in his war diary that the war had been won. The German Army Group North was approaching
Leningrad
; Army Group Centre had broken through the Soviet defenses and was rushing toward
Moscow
; and Army Group South had already captured vast reaches of
Ukraine
. The prospect of capturing the
summer
harvest of
Ukraine
along with the oil fields of the
Caucasus
led Hitler to transfer troops driving toward Moscow to
reinforce
those operating in the south.
Hitler’s generals later considered this decision a turning point in the war. The effect was to delay until October the drive toward Moscow. By then an early winter had set in, greatly impeding the German advance and finally bringing it to a halt at the outskirts of
Moscow
in early December. Then, on December 6, the Soviets, having had time to regroup, launched a massive counteroffensive to relieve their capital city. On the following day the
Japanese
, nominally Germany’s ally, launched their attack on the U.S. naval base at
Pearl Harbor
in
Hawaii
. Although they had not bothered to inform Hitler of their intentions, he was jubilant when he heard the news. “Now it is impossible for us to lose the
war
,” he told his aides. On December 11 he declared war on the
United States
.
Though his plans for a quick defeat of the Soviet Union had not been realized, Hitler’s troops at the end of 1941 controlled much of the European territory of the
Soviet Union
. They stood at the outskirts of Leningrad and Moscow and were in control of all of Ukraine. To prepare for what would now have to be the campaign of 1942, Hitler dismissed a number of generals and assumed himself the strategic and operational command of the armies on the Eastern Front.
At the high point of Hitler’s military successes in the Soviet Union, members of the Nazi leadership were, with Hitler’s understanding, feverishly planning for the new order they intended to impose on the conquered territories. Its realization called both for the removal of obstacles to German settlements and for a solution to the “Jewish problem.” Nazi planners were drafting an elaborate scheme, General Plan East, for the future reorganization of eastern Europe and the western Soviet Union, which called for the elimination of 30 million or more
Slavs
and the settlement of their territories by German overlords who would control and eventually repopulate the area with Germans. During the fall of 1941
Himmler
’s
SS
expanded and refurbished with gas chambers and crematoriums an old Austrian army barracks near the Polish rail junction at
Auschwitz
. Here was to continue, with greater
efficiency
, the
Holocaust
?the
mass murder
of Jews that had begun with the June invasion, when SS
Einsatzgruppen
(“deployment groups”) began rounding up Jews and shooting them by the thousands. The
assurance
of victory in the east, the heartland of European Jewry, convinced the Nazis that they could
implement
a “final solution” to the “Jewish problem.” Experts estimate that ultimately some six million
Jews
were murdered in the death factories of eastern Europe. At least an equal number of non-Jews died of
murder
and
starvation
in places like Auschwitz, including two and a half million Soviet prisoners of war and countless others from eastern European nationalities.
The success of
Nazi
armies until the end of 1941 had made it possible to spare German civilians on the home front from the misery and sacrifices demanded of them during
World War I
. Hitler’s imagination, however, was haunted by the memory of the collapse of the home front in 1918, and, to
avoid
a repetition, the Nazis looted the occupied territories of food and raw materials as well as labour. Food shortages in Germany were not serious until late in the war. Women were allowed to stay at home, and the energies of the German workforce were not stretched to their limits, because eventually some seven million foreign
slave
labourers were used to keep the war effort going.
Through much of 1942 an ultimate German victory still seemed possible. The renewed offensive in the Soviet Union in the spring at first continued the successes of the previous year. Once again Hitler chose to concentrate on the capture of the
Caucasus
and its
oil
at the expense of the
Moscow
front. The decision entailed a major battle over the industrial centre at Stalingrad (now Volgograd). Elsewhere, by midsummer of 1942,
Rommel
’s Afrika Korps advanced to within 65 miles (105 km) of
Alexandria
in
Egypt
. In the naval battle for control of the Atlantic sea lanes, German submarines maintained their ability to intercept Allied
shipping
into mid-1943.
By early 1943, however, the tide had clearly begun to turn. The great winter battle at
Stalingrad
brought Hitler his first major defeat. His entire Sixth Army was killed or captured. In North Africa Rommel’s long success ended in late 1942 when the British broke through at
El Alamein
. At the same time, a joint British-American force landed in northwestern
Africa
, on the coast of
Morocco
and
Algeria
. By May 1943 the German and Italian forces in
North Africa
were ready to
surrender
. That same summer the
Allies
broke the back of the German
submarine
campaign in the Atlantic. On July 10 the Allies landed in
Sicily
. Two weeks later
Mussolini
was overthrown, and in early September the Italians withdrew from the war.
The addition of an Italian front made the rollback of German forces on all fronts that much more likely. In the Soviet Union, German forces were stretched across 2,500 miles (4,000 km). They had lost their air superiority when Allied bombing raids on German cities forced the withdrawal of large numbers of fighter planes. British and American bombings reached a high point in midsummer when a raid on
Hamburg
killed 40,000 of its inhabitants. Similar air raids killed hundreds of thousands of German civilians and leveled large areas of most German cities. Shortages of food, clothing, and housing began to afflict German cities as inevitably as did the Allied bombers.
The rollback of German forces continued inexorably during 1944. On June 6 the Allies in the west launched their invasion of France across the
English Channel
. In the east the Soviet army was advancing along the entire 2,500-mile front. By the end of the year, it stood poised on the eastern frontiers of prewar Germany. In the west, British and American troops stood ready to attack across the western borders.
On the German home front, 1944 became a year of
acute
suffering. On July 20, officers carried out a plot, part of a long-simmering opposition to Hitler from within German military and civilian circles, but Hitler managed to escape the dramatic attempt on his life practically unharmed. He attributed his survival of the
July Plot
to his selection by fate to succeed in his mission of restoring Germany to greatness.
Fate did not again intervene on
Hitler
’s behalf. In mid-January of 1945 he withdrew underground into his bunker in
Berlin
where he remained until his
suicide
on April 30. By that time Soviet soldiers were streaming into Berlin. All that remained of the Reich was a narrow
wedge
of territory running southward from Berlin into
Austria
.
With the Soviet army in control of Berlin and the Western Allies within striking distance to the west and the south, there was no prospect of dividing them. Nonetheless, when Hitler’s successor, Grand Admiral
Karl Donitz
, sought to open negotiations for a surrender a few days after Hitler’s death, he still hoped that a separate surrender to the British and Americans in the west might allow the
Reich
to rescue something from the Soviets in the east. The Western Allies, fearful of any move that might feed the suspicions of
Stalin
, refused to consider the German proposal, insisting that a German surrender be signed with all the Allies at the same time. Early in the morning of May 7, 1945, a German delegation came to U.S. General
Dwight D. Eisenhower
’s headquarters in Rheims,
France
, and at 2:41
am
signed the surrender documents. Despite the fact that a Soviet major general signed for the
Soviet Union
, Stalin insisted that a second surrender ceremony take place in Soviet-occupied Berlin. This second surrender was signed in a Berlin suburb the following afternoon.
Karl A. Schleunes