11 World War II in Europe, II
Understanding the war
Introduction: what was the war about?
When delving into the rich contextuality and contingency of events, there is a risk that
somewhere amid the detail and the complexities, the essential historical plot is obscured
or even lost. The origins, causes, enabling conditions and triggering occurrences that
generated World War II attract a host of expert scholars, and rightly so. But at the end of
the day, as the cliché has it, the necessary and sufficient explanation for the outbreak and
general course of the war could hardly be more straightforward. After 30 January 1933,
Germany was led – one can hardly say governed, since Hitler did very little governing
- by a man who needed to wage war in order to realize his vision of a racially pure
Greater Germany occupying territory suitably expansive for a burgeoning populace of
Aryan settlers. That land was in the East; currently it was held by Slavs, and it would
have to be seized by force. In order to take this land and construct a strategically secure
Germanic continental fortress, Hitler needed to abolish the European balance of power
and replace it with German hegemony. Exactly how and when this visionary purpose
could be achieved were as uncertain in detail as its pursuit was to be unswervingly steady.
Hitler intended to achieve world domination via the successful conduct of a series of
wars, and he expected that process to be completed by 1950. Alone among the great
powers of the 1930s, Germany had a leader who knew what he wanted and what he
would, and would not, accept. He could be flexible, rationally prudent at times, and even
deterred when opportunities faded temporarily. However, he could not be deflected from
pursuit of his vision of a Europe dominated, actually owned, by a new, imperial Nazi
German Reich.
As so often is the case at the highest level of international politics, culture, the source
of political vision, drove policy. That is the core explanation of World War II. Historical
contingency would decide how effectively Germany would be opposed.