Europe in an Age of Total War: World War II,1939–45 577negotiated treaties of friendship with two countries with
which he envisioned future wars—Ethiopia and Greece.
Ethiopia was especially important to Italian nationalists
because it had been the site of the humiliating colonial
defeat of 1896 (the battle of Adowa) and had been an
important Italian claim denied at Paris in 1919. In 1934
Mussolini used the excuse of border clashes between
Ethiopia and the Italian colony of Somaliland to resume
the attempted conquest. An Italian invasion of Ethiopia
in 1935 led the League of Nations to declare Italy an ag-
gressor state and to apply economic sanctions such as an
embargo on selling military goods or giving financial as-
sistance to Italy. The League, however, could not agree
upon severe sanctions (such as shutting off Mussolini’s
oil supplies) and thus gave little effective support to
Ethiopia, which was formally annexed by Italy in 1936.
The western weakness in dealing with the Ethiopian
question was a sign that the western powers lacked the
resolution to stop aggression in Europe.
Nazi Germany exploited the western irresolution.
Hitler was a product of World War I, and his efforts to
abrogate the Versailles Treaty led to World War II. For
most of the 1930s, the victors did nothing to stop him.
Hitler had made his intentions clear in Mein Kampf and
in German political debate; within weeks of coming to
power in 1933, he showed his determination to change
the 1919 settlement by walking out of disarmament ne-
gotiations and the League of Nations. The most fateful
western inaction came in early 1935 when Hitler
bluntly renounced the disarmament provisions of the
treaty and reintroduced military conscription. The dis-
armament clauses had permitted Germany only a small
army (seven divisions in 1933) and no air force or sub-
marines. France, and perhaps Poland, could have with-
stood that Germany. Nazi conscription and
construction, however, built a German army of fifty-
two divisions by 1939, backed by a Luftwaffe(air force)
of more than four thousand planes and a navy with
fifty-four submarines. Hitler found battlefield training
for this army by sending units to fight in the Spanish
Civil War. The Luftwaffe, for example, polished the dive-
bombing tactics that it would use in World War II by
bombing the Basque town of Guernica. Fascist coopera-
tion in Spain led to an Italo-German alliance of 1936,
which Mussolini dubbed the Axis. The Anti-Comintern
Pact (1936) expanded this alliance to include Japan,
and the Pact of Steel (1939) tightened the Axis.
Hitler’s second great challenge to the Versailles
Treaty came eleven months later, in early 1936, when
he renounced the Locarno Treaty and ordered the re-
militarization of the Rhineland. The French army could
have stopped this, but the French and the British gov-
ernments were indecisive and bickering over the
Ethiopian question. France had a caretaker government
on the eve of the most important election of the inter-
war era—the depression election of Léon Blum’s Popu-
lar Front government; Britain had a newly elected
Conservative government unwilling to send British sol-
diers to the continent again or to support sanctions in
the League of Nations. Consequently the World War I
allies did nothing to stop the remilitarization of the
Rhineland, and Hitler (whose rearmament had only just
begun) won a risky gamble.
His victories in 1935–36 encouraged Hitler to
overthrow the rest of the Versailles restrictions and to
plan the expansion of Germany. Hitler outlined his war
plans to German military leaders in 1937. The record of
that meeting, known as the Hossbach Memorandum,
reveals Hitler’s thinking: “The German racial commu-
nity,” he said, must have Lebensraum(“living space”), and
he projected a new European war before 1943 (see doc-
ument 29.1).
Hitler achieved most of his territorial goals without
war (see map 29.1). A plebiscite in the Saar in 1935 re-
stored that region to Germany by an overwhelming
vote, lending some international credence to Hitler’s
demands for revision of the Versailles Treaty. He did
not seek further territory, however, until March 1938,
when he annexed Austria, an act that he preferred to
call the Anschluss(union), which had been forbidden by
the treaty. After promising to respect Austrian indepen-
dence and then browbeating the chancellor of Austria,
Kurt von Schuschnigg, into disbanding Austrian mili-
tias and granting an amnesty to Austrian Nazis, Hitler
used the excuse of Austrian unrest (largely provoked by
Austrian Nazis) to invade that country. The Austrians
did not offer military resistance, and the western pow-
ers again did nothing. (France was again in the midst of
a ministerial crisis, and the British were disposed to ac-
cept the Anschluss.) In a sham plebiscite, 99.75 percent
of Austrians were reported to support the annexation,
not counting the votes of, among others, concentration
camp internees.
Shortly after the annexation of Austria, Hitler re-
turned to his oratorical theme of “protecting the 10 mil-
lion Germans living outside the Reich” and reopened
the question of Czechoslovakia. He demanded that the
Czechs cede to Germany the Sudetenland, a border re-
gion of western Bohemia that contained a German pop-
ulation (2.8 million Germans compared with 700,000
Czechs) plus Czechoslovakia’s natural defenses (the
Sudeten mountains and frontier fortresses) and much of