Outbreak of War 1939 – Causes and Allied History Policy. Part 1
by Stefan Scheil
[Stefan Scheil is a German historian. His research is focusing on the history of the World Wars. In his books, he is questioning the thesis of Germany's exclusive responsibility for the outbreak and escalation of World War II. The following text was originally published as "Kriegsausbruch 1939 - Ursachen und alliierte Geschichtspolitik (Teil 1)" on his website vernichtungskrieg.de. Translation by MKH. Quotations in the text from English sources are re-translated into English from Scheil's translation. Part 2 will be issued soon.]
Robert H. Jackson was confronted with a problem. Former U.S. Attorney General had always competently served his President Franklin D. Roosevelt in the legal protection of American war policy. Now he had been sent to Europe when the war was ending. It was necessary to set there an official end to the conflict and to state, once and for all, that Germany alone was to be blamed for the Second World War. While the British government had advocated to execute the most important members of the German leadership without further ado, from an American perspective a formal court trial had to take place. Jackson told his allied fellow lawyers in several attempts the reason why. Finally, he knew well and emphasized that the German declaration of war on the United States was perfectly legal. Therefore, Jackson pointed out, before the court the war in Europe had to be shown to have been, from the beginning, a German aggression contrary to international law.
This turned out to be easily said, but difficult to prove. Thorough study of files had made Jackson increasingly doubt there was a chance that a fair trial would support in any way the assertion of Germany’s exclusive responsibility. On the contrary:
The Germans will certainly accuse our three European allies to have pursued a policy that has enforced the war. I say this because the seized documents from the German Foreign Office, which I have seen, all come to the same conclusion: “We have no escape, we must fight, we are surrounded, we are strangled.” How would a judge react if this is found in the trial? I think he would say: “Before I condemn anyone as the aggressor, he ought to describe his motives”
And that would be catastrophic, Jackson continued, because
if this trial leads to a discussion of the political and economic causes of the war, this may cause infinite damage, both in Europe I do not know well, and in America that I know fairly well
However, ultimately those prospects only spurred the eager U.S. lawyer. He planned his perfect trial as a legislator and carried it successfully through as a prosecutor by simply banning any discussion on the causes of the war before the Nuremberg tribunal. Nothing was found on the war policies of the West, Poland, or the USSR since almost all documents and testimonies that would have been relevant in this respect were rejected by the court as irrelevant. The shark pool of European politics during the interwar period mutated into a carp pond in Nuremberg, with just one single pike in it. One can say that seldom a Court verdict has been used in this way to work so long as the model for the research of historians.
The professorial German historiography, however, initially began quite frankly to think about the deeper causes of the German and European disaster. Ludwig Dehio presented in 1948 with “Gleichgewicht oder Hegemonie” (“Balance or Hegemony”) a complete theory of the modern European state system, in which the Second World War appeared as the last section of a long succession of traditional struggles for supremacy. Germany was seen as a trigger of the war, but stood in a row with Spain in its expansive era of the 16th Century, and the France of Louis XIV and Napoleon Bonaparte. National Socialism was already historized, several decades before in the Federal Republic the lively discussion broke out about whether this shouldn’t be prohibited for moral reasons.
Himself of Jewish origin, Dehio had retreated and survived the Nazi regime in Berlin. Now he saw no reason to marginalize the Nazi crimes, but also no reason to see them as anything but a modern means of total power expansion. He attributed the radicalization of the Nazi regime also to a growing “Russian admixture” which reflected the “increased influence of Asia” in Europe, thus anticipating in some way Ernst Nolte. Hitler’s attempts had failed to quasi infiltrate the world system through local actions. The club of world powers united to fight down the next competitor, as “it was an elementary principle of their politics to stand together against any power that seemed to outdo them.”
Such clear judgment requires a higher point of view. Dehio wrote European history and was carried by a consciousness that once had been European common sense, and which didn’t include the ubiquity of moral self-doubt about the exercise of state power. Therefore, from his perspective, the question remained basically secondary, how this constellation had manifested itself at the level of concrete diplomacy. The mere existence of a united Germany represented potentially a new factor in world politics. Its destruction (or at least decomposition) had, since 1914, been a constant element of wishful thinking of major parts of the political elites of the other great powers. To Dehio and many of his contemporaries thinking in historical terms, it would have appeared completely absurd to deny this goal and its importance to the renewed outbreak of World War II from 1939 and especially for the course. He didn’t denounce it, he just stated the fact.
Politically, the question remained controversial, who in 1939 had actually started the renewed hot conflict. The Cold War made it a matter of continuous current importance, when West and East suddenly accused each other of having used the German government in 1939 as a trigger. Depending on the perspective, the war of 1939 could thus suddenly appear as a capitalist-fascist, or a communist plot. The analysis of detailed questions, however, was increasingly the victim of a moralization of historical science, which was no longer self-confident enough for a historical essay in Dehio’s style. On the basis of sometimes rather thin sources, individual events were instead highlighted with accusing gesture. Whether consciously or unconsciously, as in Nuremberg, the role of other countries than Germany was increasingly neglected. A historical embedding of World War II into a comprehensive explanation pattern did no longer seem to be adequate.
The obvious observation faded into the background that Germany had not been the first major European nation that for some time represented the culturally most active, economically most successful and demographically most dynamic power, but ultimately was defeated by the stronger battalions of a coalition, at the same time consuming its power and its sense of superiority. There was much talk of a “German Sonderweg” without considering that every major European nation had gone a special path at its best time, and that in each case its relevance was quite precisely to be able to go it.
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