Para 1 - Cengage



CHAPTER 29

Dictatorships and the Second World War, 1919–1945

Instructional Objectives

After reading and studying this chapter, students should be able to compare and contrast radical, totalitarian dictatorship and conservative authoritarianism. They should be able to explain how Stalin and the Communist party built a modern totalitarian state in the Soviet Union. They should be able to describe Mussolini’s rise to power in Italy. They should also be able to discuss Hitler’s rise to power, the policies of the Nazi state, and their connection to the outbreak of World War II. Finally, they should be able to chart the ascendancy and ultimate defeat of the German and Japanese empires over the course of World War II.

Chapter Outline

I. Authoritarian States

A. Conservative Authoritarianism

1. Traditional authoritarian governments aimed to preserve their power and the status quo using repressive measures. They did not seek to control the daily lives of their subjects.

2. After World War I, this kind of authoritarian government revived.

a) In the eastern part of Europe, all states except Czechoslovakia were more or less authoritarian by 1938.

b) Spain and Portugal were also authoritarian dictatorships.

c) Large landowners and the Church were still powerful in these areas. They were the bulwarks of authoritarian regimes.

B. Radical Totalitarian Dictatorships

1. In the Soviet Union, Germany, and to some extent in Italy, a new type of regime emerged by the 1930s.

2. By the 1930s, British, American, and German commentators were using the word totalitarian to describe these regimes’ subordination of all institutions and classes to the state’s aims.

3. Totalitarian states used modern technology to achieve complete political power. The state also attempted to control economic, social, intellectual, and cultural life.

4. Totalitarian states were a radical revolt against the liberal commitment to rationality, peaceful progress, and economic freedom. They sought to use violence and total mobilization to achieve state goals regardless of individual rights.

5. There were differences between Stalin and Hitler’s regimes. The Soviet regime seized all private property for the state and crushed the middle classes. Hitler did not.

6. Comparative studies of fascism across Europe have shown that fascist regimes shared extreme nationalism, antisocialism, alliances with powerful capitalists and landowners, a dynamic and violent leader, and glorification of war and the military.

7. Although recent scholars have emphasized the unique aspects of the Soviet and Nazi regimes, the term totalitarian does serve to emphasize their total claim on the belief and behavior of their subjects.

II. Stalin’s Soviet Union

A. From Lenin to Stalin

1. By spring 1921, Lenin and the Bolsheviks had one the civil war, but Russia was in ruins.

2. Following the destruction and chaos of the Russian civil war, Lenin’s New Economic Policy (NEP) aimed to restore the economy by ending forced requisitioning of grain and allowing small-scale private business and trade.

3. In the struggle for power following Lenin’s incapacitation and death (1924), Joseph Stalin defeated Leon Trotsky because he controlled the Central Committee apparatus, and hence, the party.

B. The Five-Year Plans

1. The “First Five Year Plan” (1928(1932) was in fact a second revolution.

2. Stalin and allies hoped to stamp out NEP’s incipient capitalism.

3. They wanted to raise industrial and agricultural production.

4. They wanted to industrialize and catch up to the West.

5. They aimed to make the peasants pay for this revolution by forcing them onto collective farms.

6. Collectivization became an economic and human disaster, as the regime deported and murdered millions of peasants and stood by as millions of others starved.

7. The industrialization drive was more successful. Soviet industry produced about four times as much in 1937 as in 1928.

8. Labor unions were crushed during the First Five Year Plan.

9. Foreign engineers played key roles in Soviet industrialization.

C. Life and Culture in Soviet Society

1. Living standards for ordinary Soviet subjects, including workers and peasants, declined, at least through 1940.

2. The regime did provide old-age pensions, free medical services, free education, free day care, and full employment.

3. Personal advancement through specialized skills and technical education was possible.

4. Women’s rights broadened as divorce and abortion became easier in the 1920s. Some determined women were able to enter the professions or become skilled technical specialists.

5. Women really had to work outside the home because incomes were so low.

6. In the 1930s, the party/state took complete control of culture.

D. Stalinist Terror and the Great Purges

1. Dissent within the party against collectivization and the 1934 assassination of party leader Sergei Kirov helped provoke Stalin’s massive purge of the party.

2. Ordinary citizens were also caught up in the purge.

3. Millions were deported to forced labor camps and/or executed (1936(1939).

III. Mussolini and Fascism in Italy

A. The Seizure of Power

1. World War I discredited the liberal parliamentary government, as great sacrifices led to little gain at Versailles.

2. The Russian Revolution inspired revolutionary socialists in Italy to begin seizing factories and land.

3. Benito Mussolini, a veteran of World War I and former socialist, organized other veterans into a fascist political movement that used violence to intimidate socialists.

4. The fascists created enough disorder to discredit the liberal regime, and then marched on Rome, where King Victor Emmanuel asked Mussolini to form a government.

B. The Regime in Action

1. Under the slogan, “everything in the state, nothing outside the state, nothing against the state,” Mussolini abolished freedom of the press, fixed elections, ruled by decree, arrested political opponents, disbanded independent labor unions, and put fascists in control of the schools.

2. Mussolini drew support from the Catholic Church, signing the Lateran Agreement in 1929.

3. Italy never really became totalitarian, however, because Mussolini never truly controlled big business, the Catholic Church, or the army.

4. Mussolini promoted conservative gender norms and his government did not pass racial laws until 1938.

IV. Hitler and Nazism in Germany

A. The Roots of Nazism

1. Hitler developed his political beliefs as a young man living in Vienna. He was strongly influenced by Viennese mayor Karl Luger (1844–1910).

2. Hitler hated Jews and Slavs, and explained everything by supposed machinations of Jewish conspirators. He also espoused the most extreme Social Darwinism.

3. Service in the German (not Austrian) Army in World War I gave Hitler’s life meaning. When Germany lost he blamed Jews and Marxists.

4. By 1921, Hitler controlled a small party known as the German Workers’ Party, which espoused “national socialism.”

B. Hitler’s Road to Power

1. Imprisoned for a coup attempt against the Weimar Republic, Hitler wrote Mein Kampf (“My Struggle”).

a) His basic themes in this work were anti-Semitism, Germany’s need to conquer “living space,” and the necessity of a leader-dictator (Führer) with unlimited power.

2. The Great Depression caused many small businessmen, office workers, artisans, and peasants to vote Nazi. Hitler promised to use government programs to end the economic crisis.

3. The Nazi party was dominated by youth and strongly appealed to them.

4. After May 1930, German President Hindenburg authorized Chancellor Heinrich Bruning to rule by decree. Bruning’s cuts in government spending and in wages and prices worsened the Depression in Germany.

5. In January 1933, conservative and nationalist Germans supported Hindenburg’s appointment of Hitler as chancellor.

C. The Nazi State and Society

1. When fire damaged the Reichstag building in spring 1933, Hitler blamed the communists and persuaded President Hindenburg to sign dictatorial emergency decrees.

2. Hitler then convinced the Reichstag to endorse emergency powers for himself and moved to establish a one-party state.

3. The Nazis took over the German bureaucracy, professional organizations, publishing houses, and universities.

4. The Nazis persecuted Jews, driving them from their jobs and from public life, and destroying their property.

D. Hitler’s Popularity

1. Military and public works spending improved profits for business and real wages for German workers in the mid-1930s, increasing Hitler’s popularity.

2. Hitler’s nationalism remained popular.

3. Although Nazi propaganda claimed that Germany was becoming a more egalitarian society, in reality there was little change.

4. Resistance to the Nazis first appeared among communists and socialists. Later, Protestant and Catholic churchmen sought to preserve independent religious life. Even later, there were plots against Hitler in the army.

E. Aggression and Appeasement, 1933(1939

1. The guiding goal of the Nazi regime was the territorial expansion of the superior German race.

2. Early in his rule, Hitler proclaimed his peaceful intentions but did withdraw from the League of Nations (October 1933).

3. After 1935, British appeasement prevented the formation of a united front against Hitler. When German troops entered the demilitarized Rhineland in March 1936, Britain refused to support French action against them.

4. British appeasement lasted far into 1939.

5. Many British conservatives saw Hitler as a bulwark against communism.

6. In 1935, Mussolini invaded Ethiopia. Hitler supported him and formed an alliance. From 1936, the Fascists and Nazis supported Francisco Franco’s fascist movement against the Spanish republic.

7. In 1938, Hitler occupied Austria and the Sudetenland, with British approval.

8. In 1939, he took all of Czechoslovakia and then demanded territory from Poland. Britain and France promised to fight should he invade Poland.

9. After concluding an alliance with the Soviet Union to divide Poland, Hitler invaded on September 1, 1939. Britain and France soon declared war.

V. The Second World War

A. Hitler’s Empire, 1939(1942

1. After overrunning Poland with new blitzkrieg (“lightning warfare”) that used tanks and aircraft to break enemy lines, the German army conquered Denmark, Norway, Holland, Belgium, and France in the spring and summer of 1940.

2. British victory in the epic air battle known as the “Battle of Britain” prevented German invasion of the home islands (fall 1940).

3. In April 1941, Hitler conquered Greece and Yugoslavia and subjugated the entire Balkans.

4. In June, the German Army attacked the U.S.S.R., in accordance with Hitler’s own dream of “living space” in the East.

5. In the winter of 1941(1942, the Soviets stopped the German advance just outside Moscow.

6. Hitler’s New Order was based on the principle of racial imperialism.

B. The Holocaust

1. After the fall of Warsaw, the Nazis began deporting all German Jews to occupied Poland.

2. In 1941, as part of the “war of annihilation” in the Soviet Union, the Nazis began exterminating Soviet Jews.

3. The Nazis decided to pursue the “final solution.”

4. By 1945, 6 million Jews had been murdered.

5. The issue of responsibility for the Holocaust is both complicated and controversial.

C. Japan’s Empire in Asia

1. By late 1938, 1.5 million Japanese troops were bogged down in China.

2. Japanese leaders were, therefore, eager to find new alliances and opportunities that might improve their position.

3. The outbreak of war in Europe provided such opportunities.

4. Japanese–U.S. relations steadily worsened, a trend that culminated in the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941.

5. The Japanese claimed that they were freeing Asians from imperialism and creating a Greater East Asian Co-prosperity Sphere.

6. Asian faith in co-prosperity and support for Japan declined as the war went on.

D. The Grand Alliance

1. After the Japanese attack on the U.S. in December 1941, Britain, the U.S., and the U.S.S.R. found themselves allied. Britain and the U.S. decided to focus on defeating Germany before Japan.

2. The economic strength of this Grand Alliance was tremendous.

a) The U.S. had immense industrial resources and could draw on Latin American raw materials.

b) Britain had a strong, fully mobilized economy.

c) The Soviets managed to move many of their factories east to the Ural Mountains to maintain war production.

3. The Alliance also had the help of resisters to the Nazis inside Europe.

E. The War in Europe, 1942–1945

1. In the winter of 1942–1943, the Germans suffered a terrible defeat at Stalingrad.

2. Allied victories in North Africa put increasing pressure on Germany and Italy.

3. The Allies launched an invasion of Italy in the spring of 1943.

4. The Germans fought on for almost two more years.

5. On June 6, 1944 (“D-Day”), the Allies invaded France.

6. In 1944 and early 1945, American, British, and Soviet forces closed in on Germany.

7. The Germans surrendered on May 7, 1945.

F. The War in the Pacific, 1942–1945

1. Naval battles decided the fate of the war in the Pacific.

2. As U.S. production ramped up, America gradually gained control of the sea and air in the Pacific war.

3. In July 1943, America and its allies opened an “island hopping campaign toward Japan.

4. The war in the Pacific was brutal and atrocities were committed on both sides.

5. In spite of numerous defeats, the Japanese continued to fight with enormous determination.

6. On August 6 and 9, 1945, the United States dropped atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in Japan.

7. On August 14, 1945, the Japanese announced their surrender.

Lecture Suggestions

1. “European Fascism—Its Many Faces.” What are the forms of fascism? What countries developed fascist movements in addition to Germany and Italy? Why were those fascist groups unsuccessful? Sources: Z. Sternhell, Neither Right Nor Left: Fascist Ideology in France (1986); A. De Grand, Italian Fascism (1989); E. Weber, Varieties of Fascism (1964); F. L. Carsten, The Rise of Fascism (1982).

2. “Soviet Communism and Fascism—Similarities and Differences.” How are communism and Nazism alike? How are they different? Sources: P. Booker, Twentieth-Century Dictatorships: The Ideological One-Party State (1995); H. Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism (1951); E. Halevy, The Era of Tyrannies (1965).

3. “The Tide Turning in World War II.” What led to the Allied victory over the Nazis? How were the Allies able to encircle Germany? Sources: J. Campbell, The Experience of World War II (1989); G. Weinberg, World at Arms (1994); G. Wright, The Ordeal of Total War, 1939–1945 (1990); B. H. Liddell Hart, The History of the Second World War (1971).

Using Primary Sources

Visual Arts as Propaganda

Have students view the short version of Triumph of the Will (80 min. B/W. Films, Ltd.). After viewing the film, they should write an interpretive essay on what the director was trying to express about Nazism. Have some students read their papers in class as the basis for a class discussion.

classroom Activities

I. Classroom Discussion Suggestions

A. How did Stalin defeat Trotsky?

B. Why did France and Britain choose a policy of appeasement?

C. Why did the Nazis implement policies that resulted in the Holocaust?

D. What was the status of women under Stalinist rule?

E. How did women fare in Mussolini’s fascist state?

II. Doing History

A. What motivated Hitler? How can psychohistory help us to understand his psychological makeup? Sources: A. Bullock, Hitler (1953); J. Fest, Hitler (1974); A. Hitler, Mein Kampf (1924).

B. What did the postwar world think of Neville Chamberlain? How has his image changed over the years? Sources: K. D. Bracher, The German Dictatorship (1970); A. L. Rowse, Appeasement (1961).

C. What about Hitler appealed to lower-middle-class Germans who accepted his leadership? Sources: M. Mayer, The Germans: They Thought They Were Free (1955).

III. Cooperative Learning Activities

A. Leaders of World War II

Have six teams do research and make reports on six significant leaders of World War II: Hitler, Mussolini, Stalin, Churchill, Roosevelt, and de Gaulle. After the presentations, have the class write short papers analyzing the leadership characteristics of the six leaders.

B. Have five student teams create propaganda pieces related to World War II. The teams decide whether they are pro-fascist or pro-Allies. Each team should use a different medium:

1) poster, 2) song, 3) film script, 4) radio address, 5) T-shirt (or any others students may think up).

Map Activity

1. Why Do We Call It a World War? On an outline map of the world, have students identify all the places where military action took place in World War II.

2. Have students shade in the Axis and Allied Powers on a blank outline map of Europe.

3. Using Map 29.3 (World War in the Pacific) as a reference, answer the following questions.

a. Why were the Japanese able to conquer so much territory so quickly? Why was it so difficult for them to hang on to their gains?

b. How did the Japanese gain support for their expansion throughout Asia? Why did support for Japan wane as the war went on?

c. What strategies and tactics did the Allies employ in their efforts to defeat Japan?

Audiovisual Bibliography

1. Triumph of the Will. (DVD, 2001.)

2. Olympia, Parts 1 and 2. (VHS, 1997.)

3. The Rise of Dictatorship, 1920–1939. (58 min. B/W. Films for the Humanities and Sciences.)

4. Il Duce. (20 min. BAK Films for the Humanities and Sciences.)

5. The Life of Anne Frank. (25 min. Color. Films for the Humanities and Sciences.)

6. Hiroshima: The Legacy. (30 min. Color. Films for the Humanities and Sciences.)

7. U.S.A. Wars: WW II. (CD-ROM. Learning Services.)

8. Hitler’s Assault on Europe. (Videodisc. 17 min. Color. Films for the Humanities and Sciences.)

9. Holocaust: Liberation of Auschwitz. (Videodisc. 18 min. Color. Films for the Humanities and Sciences.)

10. Conspiracy. (DVD, 2004.)

11. Nuremberg. (DVD, 2001.)

internet resources

1. United States Holocaust Memorial Museum ()

2. BBC History: World War Two ()

3. The Battle of Britain ()

4. Italian Life Under Fascism ()

5. The History Place: The Rise of Adolf Hitler ()

6. National Archive: Pictures of World War II ()

7. War in Asia: Primary Sources (fordham.edu/halsall/mod/modsbook45.html#War%20In%20Asia)

suggested reading

The historical literature on fascist and totalitarian dictatorships is rich and fascinating. Kershaw’s work, cited in the Notes, provides an excellent survey of this literature, includes extensive bibliographical references, and is highly recommended. P. Brooker, Twentieth-Century Dictatorships: The Ideological One-Party State (1995), compares leading examples throughout the world, and Gleason, cited in the Notes, is an important recent study. H. Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism (1951), a classic interpretation, has been recently reissued. F. L. Carsten, The Rise of Fascism (1982), and W. Laqueur, ed., Fascism (1976), are also recommended.

Malia’s work, cited in the Notes, is a provocative reassessment of Soviet history and an excellent introduction to scholarly debates. It may be compared with the fine synthesis of M. Lewin, The Making of the Soviet System (1985). R. Stites, The Women’s Liberation Movement in Russia: Feminism, Nihilism, and Bolshevism, 1860–1930 (1978), and the work by Deutscher, cited in the Notes is highly recommended. R. Service, Lenin: A Biography (2002), is a major work using new sources. D. Volkogonov, Autopsy for an Empire: The Seven Leaders Who Built the Soviet Union (1998), is an engrossing collective biography by a leading Russian historian. R. Conquest, The Great Terror: A Reassessment (1990), is an excellent accounting of Stalin’s purges of the 1930s, and A. Applebaum, Gulag: A History (2004), is an excellent study of Soviet police terror. Three important reconsiderations of Soviet purges, women, and urban life are Thurston’s revisionist work, cited in the Notes; S. Fitzpatrick and Y. Slezkine, eds., In the Shadow of the Revolution: Life Stories of Russian Women from 1917 to the Second World War (2000); and S. Kotkin, Magnetic Mountain: Stalinism as Civilization (1995). S. Marks, How Russia Shaped the Modern World: From Art to Anti-Semitism, Ballet to Bolshevism (2004), is an ambitious but clear history of Russian ideas and their impact in many fields. D. Ransel, Village Mothers: Three Generations of Change in Russia and Tartaria (2000), is a path-breaking study based on oral histories made in the 1990s. Arthur Koestler, Darkness at Noon (1956), is a famous fictional account of Stalin’s trials of the Old Bolsheviks. J. Scott, Behind the Urals (1973), is a remarkable eyewitness account of an American steelworker in the Soviet Union in the 1930s.

R. Bosworth, Mussolini’s Italy: Life in the Fascist Dictatorship, 1915–1945 (2006), and A. Lyttelton, The Seizure of Power: Fascism in Italy, 1919–1929, 2d ed. (1987), are excellent studies of Italy under Mussolini. D. Mack Smith, Mussolini (1982), is authoritative. Ignazio Silone, Bread and Wine (1937), is a moving novel by a famous opponent of dictatorship in Italy. E. Morante, History (1978), a fictional account of one family’s divergent reactions to Mussolini’s rule, is recommended. Two excellent books on Spain are H. Thomas, The Spanish Civil War (1977), and E. Malefakis, Agrarian Reform and Peasant Revolution in Spain (1970). R. Paxton, Vichy France (1973), tells a controversial story extremely well.

W. Smith, The Ideological Origins of Nazi Imperialism (1986) is a fine study on the origins of Nazism. M. Burleigh, The Third Reich: A New History (2000), is a splendid accomplishment that includes a refurbishing of the concept of totalitarianism. Two major studies by influential German historians are M. Brozat, The Nazi State (1981), and H. Mommsen, From Weimar to Auschwitz (1991). W. Shirer, The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich (1960), is a famous popular account of an American journalist who experienced Nazi Germany firsthand. A. Bullock, Hitler and Stalin (1993), is a fascinating comparison by a master biographer. R. Moorehouse, Killing Hitler (2007), investigates numerous attempts and near misses. R. Gellately, Backing Hitler: Consent and Coercion (2001), is a major re-examination by a leading historian, and R. Evens, The Third Reich in Power, 1933–1939 (2005), is a comprehensive study by a leading specialist. R. Allen, cited in the Notes, is outstanding scholarship, showing how Nazi ideology united the SS engineers who ran the slave labor camps. C. Koonz, Mothers in the Fatherland: Women, the Family, and Nazi Politics (1987), and D. Peukert, Inside Nazi Germany: Conformity, Opposition, and Racism in Everyday Life (1987), are pioneering forays into the social history of the Nazi era. Moving accounts of the Holocaust include Y. Baurer, A History of the Holocaust (1982); C. Browning, The Origins of the Final Solution: The Evolution of Nazi Jewish Policy, September 1939–March 1942 (2004), a definitive work drawing on the latest research; and R. Hilberg, The Destruction of the European Jews, 1933–1945, 3 vols., rev. ed. (1985), a monumental scholarly achievement. M. Marrus, The Holocaust in History (1987), is an excellent interpretive survey, and I. Clendinnen, Reading the Holocaust (1999), is an imaginative reconsideration of victims and perpetrators. Goldhagen’s widely debated study, cited in the Notes, may be compared with C. Browning, Ordinary Men: Reserve Police Battalion 101 and the Final Solution in Poland, 2d ed. (2001). E. Staub, The Roots of Evil: The Origins of Genocide and Other Group Violence (1989), is a profound study by a noted psychologist with a gift for history. Especially recommended are E. Weisel, Night (1961), a brief and compelling autobiographical account of a young Jew in a Nazi concentration camp, and A. Frank, The Diary of Anne Frank, a remarkable personal account of a Jewish girl hiding during the Nazi occupation of Holland. R. Gellately and N. Stolzfus, eds., Social Outsiders in Nazi Germany (2001), studies other groups that were oppressed in addition to the Jews, and A. Fraser, The Gypsies (1992), considers a misunderstood people decimated by Nazi terror.

J. Campbell, The Experience of World War II (1989), is attractively illustrated and captures the drama of global conflict, as does G. Keegan, The Second World War (1990). G. Wright, The Ordeal of Total War, 1939–1945 (1990), and C. Emsley, World War II and Its Consequences (1990), are also recommended. G. Weinberg, World at Arms: A Global History of World War II (1994), is a masterful interconnected overview. Two dramatic studies of special aspects of the war are A. Dallin, German Rule in Russia, 1941–1945 (1981), which analyzes the effects of Nazi occupation policies on the Soviet population, and C. Merridale, Ivan’s War: Life and Death in the Red Army, 1939–1945 (2007), is a moving account of ordinary Soviet soldiers. J. Friedrich, The Fire: The Bombing of Germany, 1940–1945 (2006), presents Allied fire bombing in harrowing detail.

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