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00:00Oh, what fun!
00:31This is the story of the greatest war of world history.
00:36It's the story of a terrible time, an age when the most wicked evils were perpetrated.
00:4574 million were to die, 5.5 million Germans, 21 million Chinese, 21 million Russians, 6 million Jews, and 3.5 million Japanese.
01:01The images of the past send a message through time, a warning from the past, lest we forget.
01:10March, 1933.
01:13A new Chancellor of Germany is elected.
01:16He does not seize power with conspiracy.
01:19He uses no violence.
01:21He is made Chancellor according to the laws of German democracy.
01:26A new Chancellor of Germany is elected.
01:28He does not seize power with conspiracy.
01:31He uses no violence.
01:33He is made Chancellor according to the laws of German democracy.
01:38A democracy he has openly and truthfully promised to destroy.
01:43He promises, openly and truthfully, to end the unfinished business of World War I, with blood if need be.
01:52He is Adolf Hitler.
01:57World War II was unfinished business.
02:01Without knowledge of the great European war of 1914 to 1918, we cannot comprehend the war that convulsed the world from 39 to 45.
02:12Even the fighting that tore across the remotest Pacific islands and the densest Asian jungle cannot be understood.
02:20The leaders of the world in 1939 were men shaped by the First World War.
02:26Hitler had seen the war at first hand as an infantryman in the trenches of the Western Front.
02:32And there were older men who had seen a generation of the young lost, consumed by an industrial war machine.
02:41When these men took part in the post-war cult of the war dead, laying wreaths at monuments across the continent,
02:48they felt the presence of millions of souls standing behind them.
02:56To understand how and why war returned to Europe in 1939 is to understand how and why war came to Europe in 1914,
03:06and how and why that conflict ended.
03:09The cause of war in 1914 was the simple problem of Germany,
03:14of how the then new country of Germany could be accepted as a great power by other much older powers,
03:21France, Russia, and Britain.
03:24In a tangle of alliances, a climate of aggressive rivalry between these countries burst into war.
03:31World War I ended in a strange anti-climax.
03:38It's hard for us to remember that after a massive victory in the East,
03:43ending in abject Russian surrender and the conquest of vast lands,
03:48Germany itself collapsed to defeat without being invaded.
03:52Many Germans believed that their armies had been stabbed in the back, betrayed, not defeated at all.
04:00The fighting stopped suddenly in 1918 with the armistice.
04:07Armistice is a word that means truce, a temporary halt to fighting.
04:12The First World War was supposedly ended by the Versailles Conference and Treaty.
04:17A summit of France, Britain, Italy, and America met to decide on a system of security that would guarantee peace in Europe.
04:25Lenin's new revolutionary government in the Soviet Union was not invited.
04:30Germany was summoned only to sign the resulting treaty.
04:35The French demanded that the treaty formally blame Germany for starting the war.
04:40Britain saw the war more as a terrible mistake.
04:44Every line of the treaty followed from the supposed German guilt.
04:48The guarantee of peace was to be the punishment and weakening of Germany.
04:53In fact, each line was a recipe for a future renewed war.
04:59Germany lost territory in the east where huge areas had been won from Soviet Russia.
05:05These gains of what in later years would be called Lebensraum, living space, were taken away and used to create a new nation, Poland.
05:17A high-minded and noble idea was that states should be decided by nationality.
05:23Therefore, the Polish had a country of their own rather than living as minorities in Germany or Russia.
05:29But in drawing the new map of Europe, the principle of nationality was forgotten at Germany's expense.
05:37The new Poland was given access to the sea and in the process millions of Germans became a minority in Poland.
05:45The new Czechoslovakia was to be given defendable borders and included millions of Germans, the Sudeten Germans, and a minority of disaffected Slovaks.
05:56Contrary to the basic principle of nationality, German-speaking Austria was forbidden to unite with Germany lest the two countries combine their strength.
06:07Versailles created a Europe where Germany, still a big powerful country, was bordered in the east by weak, smaller countries.
06:16Countries with whom Germany now had scores to settle.
06:22The fighting had devastated huge areas of northern France and nearly bankrupted the economies of both Britain and France.
06:31The Versailles settlement insisted that Germany pay.
06:36Huge sums were to be paid to pay off the debts of France and Britain, repaying money loaned by America.
06:43The sums were unimaginably large, crippling the German economy.
06:48Versailles imposed military humiliation upon Germany, insisting the Rhineland, that area of Germany adjacent to France, be demilitarized.
06:59The German army, the largest in Europe, was to be cut to 100,000, not enough to defend Germany, let alone start a war.
07:09The army was to have no modern weapons, tanks or aircraft, that had revolutionized World War I.
07:16The German navy was to have no U-boats.
07:21Versailles established the League of Nations, which would provide a forum in which international security could be policed and aggression contained.
07:31As the people of Europe mourned a lost generation, they lived in a continent where the tensions that had torn the nations apart remained,
07:40and upon which had been layered new resentments and new grievances.
07:50Now, the most powerful country in Europe remained, with its strength, size, industry, economy and population intact, and with a whole catalog of further grievances.
08:03And the success of Versailles, as a system for peace and security, depended on German cooperation.
08:11If Germany refused to pay, if she rearmed, if she moved troops into the Rhineland, the only option open to France and Britain was to restart the ghastly horror of the Western Front.
08:24To renew the war, fought to end all wars. Versailles was weakened from the start.
08:33The British thought the settlement unfair and unrealistic. The French, that the punishment of Germany had not gone far enough.
08:44That the only punishment of German breach was war, total war, made international relations a high-risk game, made for a bold individual gambler.
08:57What of the United States, the power whose entry into the war in 1917 had weighed the scales against Germany?
09:06The USA turned in upon itself, concerning itself with the 1920s and all that decade means for American history.
09:15Having entered into world affairs, the United States turned its back on Europe, the Congress refusing to ratify the treaty, refusing to join the League.
09:27The oceanic distances separating the old from the new world seemed to provide insurance from the problems of Europe.
09:36The map of Europe was now a map to war, the history determined and awaiting the minds and the wills to act out the script.
09:48Already, as Hitler took power in 1933, the system of reparations had collapsed amidst the world economic crisis.
09:57For 13 years, reparations had been a major issue keeping the war alive.
10:03Germany had lurched from financial disaster to disaster.
10:07Any individual German's money troubles, the great inflation and the huge unemployment of the 1920s were laid at the feet of Britain and France.
10:17The Germans felt robbed, the French swindled, but the Germans were trying not to pay.
10:24The British saw reparations as part of the problem, feeling their abandonment would bring about a European economic recovery.
10:32A run on banks in the early 1930s had caused the payments to be written off and had discredited the German government, helping bring Hitler to power.
10:42The 13 years of fighting over money helped destroy the Versailles settlement.
10:48Britain came to regard everything the French said about Germany as bad sense, the French to feel disillusioned.
10:57The story of the interwar years is complicated and it's just too easy to see a plot by Hitler, some system at work.
11:06Hitler was a dreamer of great schemes, but whether events followed his plan is debatable.
11:13Plans and systems are imposed by history on events which are random, on the actions of individuals that are spontaneous and improvised.
11:24Plans may exist, dreams may be dropped, but the gap between idea and reality is large.
11:33Hitler presented the German people with one big idea, the destruction of what he called the Slave Treaty of Versailles, and to once more make Germany a power.
11:48Hitler's policy from taking power in 1933 was a succession of acts, each a line by line deletion of Versailles.
11:57One of the great paradoxes of Hitler, one of the many ways in which other political leaders and the ordinary voter in all countries misread Hitler and Nazism,
12:09was in believing that Hitler was like every other politician, capable of saying anything out of office, but doing something very different when in real power.
12:19Hitler was a politician of action and did just what he said he would do.
12:25He promised to abandon democracy, he claimed it the enemy of strong leadership, and at the first opportunity proceeded to set about that very destruction.
12:39One month after Hitler took office, the German parliament, the Reichstag, burnt to the ground.
12:46It was arson.
12:48The attack upon the center of German democracy is shrouded in conspiracy theory.
12:54The controversy is central to the history of Nazi Germany.
12:58The Nazis blamed communists and claimed the arson was the prelude to a communist coup, a plot to establish a Soviet Germany.
13:08Indeed, in the polarized and extreme politics of Germany at that time, that was the goal of the Nazis' Bolshevik enemies.
13:19The alleged arsonist was Marinus van der Loon, a young Dutch communist arrested in the building that night.
13:27His voice is silent as he was tried, condemned, and executed.
13:33History will forever turn over and question the events of that night in Berlin.
13:38Was van der Loon the patsy of the Nazis, who started the fire themselves to create a crisis they would then exploit?
13:46Was van der Loon the tool of a real communist plot?
13:51Was there no plot, but an imagined plot that a paranoid Hitler thought real?
13:57Was van der Loon the lone gunman responsible for the whole attack himself?
14:04History can only show with certainty the result of the fire, the physical and the political destruction of German democracy.
14:16The Nazis used the emergency to suspend parliamentary democracy and arrest and imprison all communist and socialist opponents.
14:25The office of chancellor was combined with that of president.
14:29Head of government became head of state.
14:32The army swore personal loyalty to Adolf Hitler, and a parliamentary democracy became a dictatorship.
14:42Vague and fanciful ideas of Jewish responsibility for the war, which seemed eccentric when the Nazis were an opposition party, were turned into real action.
14:54According to Hitler, the Jews sought the destruction of the Aryan Nordic German peoples, and it caused war between Britain and Germany.
15:05Hitler believed the Jews were using Slav people via Soviet communism to threaten the German race.
15:12The result was persecution of Jewish people and businesses, both formal and informal, that spread to all parts of German society.
15:24Hitler did as he promised.
15:27He said he would end unemployment, and did so, implementing policy that was a German New Deal,
15:34a recovery program that would save the lives of thousands of Jewish people.
15:39It was the only way to save the lives of thousands of Jewish people.
15:44He said he would end unemployment, and did so, implementing policy that was a German New Deal,
15:51a recovery program that was every bit as successful as that of Roosevelt in the USA.
15:57Money was pumped into the economy through vast public works, directly and indirectly creating jobs,
16:04raising the level of demand and productivity throughout Germany.
16:08A lasting image of the 1930s is of Hitler and other Nazis proudly opening autobahns, futurist highways of a new age.
16:18It was a more ruthless New Deal than Roosevelt's, the destruction of trades unions making the manipulation of the economy easier than in America.
16:29The great parades of Nazism, stupefying to the eye, were the genuine expression of a nation willingly, gladly, and gratefully
16:39marching symbolically and actually in step with the will of one man.
16:45Already in 1933, the system of reparations had collapsed.
16:51Hitler first made an attack upon the principle of disarmament.
16:55Hitler's predecessors in government had been partying to a lengthy conference of disarmament, demanding revision of the treaty.
17:03Hitler, sensing France too weak to do anything and Britain thinking the treaty unfair,
17:09simply walked out of discussions and ordered rearmament.
17:13It was a gamble.
17:15The French raged, but as Germany began to once more launch U-boats,
17:21began openly to develop tanks, as the skies began to fill with the embryonic Luftwaffe, nothing happened.
17:30Hitler had challenged the British and French to fight.
17:34The gamble paid off.
17:36Nothing happened.
17:38Hitler simply left the League of Nations, and nothing happened.
17:43In March 1935, Germany reclaimed the Saarland, yet another chapter of Versailles, and the post-war settlement unraveled.
17:59The Saar was a small but economically important area of Germany adjacent to the French border, and was seized by France at the end of World War I.
18:11Versailles Treaty
18:15The Versailles Treaty promised that after 15 years of French occupation,
18:20the population of the Saar could vote to choose French rule, German rule, or independence.
18:27It was now two years into Hitler's regime.
18:30Any Saarlander knew that union with Germany meant joining an aggressive militaristic dictatorship,
18:37that it would be a democratic vote to end democracy.
18:41The people of the Saar were as educated, as intelligent as any European people.
18:46The issues at stake were fully and openly debated.
18:50The French made a strong and attractive case for retention of their rule.
18:54The voting was free and fair, internationally monitored.
18:5998% chose Germany, chose Nazism, chose Hitler.
19:08Each and every European of those times played a greater or lesser part in the coming of war.
19:17If the leading player on the stage of Europe was Hitler, the supporting character was Italian dictator Benito Mussolini.
19:26Mussolini and Italy's story may be just as well explained as a desire for greatness.
19:34The Italian fascists came to power many years before the German Nazis for reasons much the same.
19:41Although on the victorious side in World War I, Italy had felt cheated of the due and just spoils in the peace.
19:49Mussolini created fascism as a dynamic politics of the future and had abolished democracy.
19:57Nazism had borrowed many basic political and visual ideas from fascism.
20:02The central difference between the two leaders was the relationship each had between actions and words.
20:10Mussolini boasted and bragged, talked of power.
20:14But in reality, Italy was a weak country without the inherent strength, the wealth, resources, and the industry to back up proud words.
20:24Mussolini felt himself the creator of fascism and senior to Hitler.
20:31In later years, Mussolini, confronted with Hitler's successes, was impelled to somehow put his boasts into action.
20:40These policies of vanity and envy would desperately weaken the strategy of the Italian-German alliance.
20:48In 1935, Italy invaded the African country of Abyssinia, modern-day Ethiopia, and the only African state until then independent.
20:59It was a feudal monarchy ruled by a god-king, Haile Selassie.
21:04The two countries had fought in the 19th century, when Italy had been defeated by an African army.
21:12Mussolini wanted revenge.
21:18Abyssinia had plans of imperial expansion of its own, conflicting with Italian interests spreading from Somalia.
21:25Why did Mussolini send his forces into battle when he did?
21:29It was not as if the dictator needed a war to distract the Italian population from internal Italian affairs.
21:36Mussolini was secure in power and enjoyed the approval of the Italian people.
21:41It was not a war that Italy could particularly afford.
21:45And Abyssinia was not a colony worth having for its wealth.
21:50It was not that Abyssinia was the target of a rival imperial power.
21:55The world recognized that the remote African kingdom was in Italy's sphere of interest.
22:01There is probably no simpler answer than the vanity of Benito Mussolini.
22:08Thus did one man's ego determine the fate of a nation.
22:13How is the invasion of Abyssinia, a faraway country of which Europeans knew little, a step on the path to war?
22:21The answer is in the damage the Abyssinian affair wrought upon the League of Nations.
22:28Abyssinia was a member of the League. Selassie made a dignified appeal for help.
22:37The League debated action and imposed limited economic sanctions,
22:42but stopped short of the one sanction which, even in the 1930s, was the most damaging, the cutting of oil supplies to Italy.
22:50Before any further action could be taken, the League was presented with the fait accompli of an Italian victory.
22:57Mussolini proclaimed the Italian king, the new emperor, of Abyssinia.
23:06Hitler watched these events at a distance.
23:10Germany, although not a member of the League, scrupulously observed the sanctions against the Italians.
23:17Hitler watched the inability to act, to agree action against aggression, and decided on his next move, the reoccupation of the Rhineland.
23:29The Treaty of Versailles forbade Germany from placing troops opposite the French border.
23:36On March 7, 1936, Hitler ordered his army to cross the Rhine.
23:42It was a gamble.
23:44Had France decided to go to war, Germany had not yet built up its strength to have any chance of resisting invasion.
23:52It was a gamble Hitler won.
23:56France would not start a war alone.
23:59The British public would not countenance military action.
24:03The British did not think in terms of giving in to Hitler.
24:07Rather, that the Germans were simply justified, retaking full control of their own territory.
24:14The reoccupation of the Rhineland has been described as the real end of World War I and its aftermath.
24:21After this time, Germany ceased to right the wrongs of Versailles and moved to aggressive expansion.
24:30From the perspective of generations later, it's hard to realize the novelty of Hitler's tactics in the international politics of the 1930s.
24:40The whole ethos after World War I was disarmament and arms control.
24:46A world where politicians hid their strength, said they had less guns, tanks, and aircraft.
24:54Where nations hid the fact that they were building larger ships.
24:59In 1934, in the British Parliament, there had been angry exchanges between Prime Minister Baldwin and maverick backbencher Winston Churchill over the true size of the German Air Force.
25:12Churchill wildly and wrongly claimed that the Germans had a secret air force already many times stronger than the RAF.
25:22Hitler turned this world upside down and claimed a greater strength than he had.
25:29In a paranoid climate of alleged secret forces, nobody ever suspected a country would overstate its strength.
25:42In 1936, civil war broke out in Spain.
25:48In 1931, Spain, an old-fashioned, traditional country, had become a republic and a process of change and reform begun.
25:59Conservative Spain was alarmed by the changes and in 1936 the election of a government of communists and socialists caused elements of the army to break out in open rebellion.
26:12Whether this revolt was part of a grand fascist conspiracy is doubtful.
26:19The Spanish generals were too aware of their country's long history as a great power to be anybody's puppets.
26:27Rebel leader Francisco Franco was not a fascist, rather an old-fashioned conservative who valued patriotism and religion.
26:36A man who looked to the values of the past rather than some revolutionary future.
26:42Yet the Italians and the Germans supported Franco, sending planes, soldiers and arms.
26:49Both desired to discredit democracy and used Spain as a testing ground for new weapons.
26:56Neither was prepared to risk war over Spain.
27:01Both were prepared to back down had Britain and France opposed the fascist intervention.
27:08Neither of the democracies wanted to become involved.
27:12Both feared the war would grow into a general European war.
27:16Once again, Hitler bluffed and the democracies backed away.
27:22Soviet Russia supported the republican government out of solidarity with the communists who increasingly came to dominate the direction of the republican war.
27:34And also out of a hard-nosed decision to create mayhem on the far side of Europe, distracting and dividing would-be enemies.
27:44The war might have ended quickly with defeat of Franco's rebels had the democracies supported the legitimate government.
27:51It might have ended quickly had the strict neutrality Britain and France imposed been likewise observed by the fascists and communists.
28:00As it was, the fighting dragged on for three more years.
28:05Three years of increasing brutality on both sides.
28:09Franco's troops killing anyone of even the most liberal opinion.
28:13A third of Spain's clergy, monks, nuns, and priests were killed for their faith by the republicans.
28:22The Spanish Civil War has gained a special place in history.
28:27To this day, no account seems capable of telling the story of Spain without partisanly refighting the battles.
28:35The mythology of the International Brigade, the few thousands of young left-wing idealists from the democracies who joined to fight fascism, paints the war in a romantic light.
28:47But Spain represented a conflict as isolated from Europe as the country itself.
28:54Subsequent history shows Spain remaining resolutely neutral in the European war.
29:01If there was a Nazi plot, Hitler gained little benefit.
29:11Some of those young men who fought for the republican cause were from the United States.
29:17America as a nation was as resolutely neutral over the issue of Spain as any other.
29:23Without the United States, the history of World War II would not be complete.
29:29But America is the empty space upon the world stage of the interwar period.
29:35Throughout the 1920s and 30s, America gazed inward to its own complex society.
29:42While American ideas had been responsible for much of the idealism that permeated Versailles, the Congress of the U.S. refused to ratify the treaty.
29:52America was to have nothing to do with the League, nothing to do with policing the system of security that the treaty created.
30:00America had vast problems of its own, dealing with the economic chaos of the Great Depression and the Wall Street crash.
30:08It was chaos that affected industry and agriculture alike, causing mass unemployment and huge internal movements of population.
30:19It was a time of civil unrest, with mass protests before the White House.
30:25General Douglas MacArthur earned himself a different niche in history as he commanded U.S. troops to prepare to fire on U.S. citizens.
30:38A bizarre side street of history is that in 1930, many serious strategic thinkers and military experts thought that if any major war were to break out in the world in the next ten years, it would most likely be contested between the United States and Great Britain.
30:58The isolationism of the U.S. was traditional in a society two oceans away from the rest of the world.
31:07In 1932, a new type of politics came to power in America, with the election of Democrat Franklin Roosevelt.
31:20In the New Deal, American interests were ever more closely focused on affairs at home, and not across the seas.
31:29America was, in fact, to become the most deadly enemy of Hitler in the coming war.
31:39The underestimation of America was the Nazi dictator's greatest mistake.
31:44America was held by Hitler to be a country of no threat, racially weak, dominated by Jews, contaminated by its African-American population.
31:56The isolationism of the United States was reflected in its military strength.
32:01The U.S.A. could threaten a new nation in the 1930s.
32:06While Germany thought the restricted 100,000-man army an insult, the United States Army was freely kept by Congress at around 135,000.
32:17Weak forces meant the views of the U.S.A., even had she chosen to speak, would have been of little import.
32:27In 1935, Congress reinforced the wall against the world by passing the Neutrality Acts.
32:36These laws were the products of a conspiracy theory that U.S. arms manufacturers had engineered America's entry to the First World War.
32:46The new laws prevented U.S. arms sales to any nation at war.
32:56If Hitler paid little interest in the U.S.A., across another ocean, the Empire of Japan viewed America with envy and aggression.
33:08The place of Japan and China in the buildup to the outbreak of war is often neglected.
33:15On the other side of the world, great movements of people and ideas were unfolding.
33:20Acts perpetrated involving astounding cruelty and inhumanity.
33:25Huge conspiracies and war plans were forming in Japan.
33:31In 1926, a new emperor ascended the Chrysanthemum Throne, Hirohito.
33:38As was and remains the custom, a name was chosen for the era of the new monarch's reign.
33:45This was to be the Showa, the era of illustrious peace.
33:50The coming years were to bring anything but peace to the peoples of Japan and Asia.
33:56In the interwar years, Japan's miraculous transformation into a modern society seemed to be failing.
34:06There was economic depression, high unemployment, and rural poverty.
34:11Japan had sided with the victorious powers in World War I, yet gained little from the peace.
34:19The abandonment of democracy by European states, such as Italy and Germany,
34:24seemed to hint to some Japanese that they too should abandon the foreign ideas and return to a traditional society.
34:34Expansion from the crowded Japanese islands, islands that lacked the resources needed to power a modern industrial society,
34:42seemed a way out of the problems of recession and unemployment.
34:46Japan eyed China covetously, resenting European powers exploiting the wealth of the region.
34:55Japan came to be allied with the fascist powers, but was not a fascist country.
35:02Economic need and greed were integrated with a traditional mythology to create a unique worldview.
35:10Japanese society at all levels between the wars became permeated with an ideology of Japanese racial superiority,
35:18the God Emperor giving the Japanese race a distinction over other peoples who had lost their link with the divine.
35:27This ideology saw a future war in which enlightened Japanese liberated the less fortunate of Asia,
35:36and a war of world domination that would be fought against the United States.
35:43As a developed industrial country, Japan shared in the industrialized nation's exploitation of China.
35:50Various treaties had allowed these countries concessions of territory inside China, with the right to station troops.
35:58The British territory of Hong Kong was the model.
36:02From this presence, Japan planned to expand.
36:07In 1931, Japan had faked an attack by Chinese troops upon Japanese forces in Manchuria.
36:15In retaliation, the army of Japan invaded and conquered the Chinese province,
36:21renaming it Manchukuo and installing a puppet government headed by the last emperor of China, Puyi.
36:33With this vindication of their aggressive expansionist policy, the military gained more power, becoming the dominant force of Japanese policy.
36:44The invasion of Manchuria is a major landmark on the timeline to war.
36:49It was the first blow in the death of a thousand cuts that was inflicted upon the League of Nations.
36:56A whole year after the Japanese completed their conquest, the League issued a report,
37:02carefully and worthily written, that condemned Japan's action.
37:07Nothing happened. Japan left the League.
37:13This was a whole year before Hitler's rise to power.
37:18In November 1936, fearful of Russian communist ambition in the Far East, Japan formed a pact with Germany and Italy,
37:27the Anti-Common-Turn Pact, directed against communist expansion.
37:32This was not a relationship of great trust or shared ideology, more of expedience and fear of a common enemy.
37:40Japan knew that Nazism's white supremacism could never be reconciled with their own racial supremacy.
37:47In 1937, full war broke out between China and Japan.
37:53The reason, again, a faked attack by China upon Japanese troops.
37:58The Chinese, led by the aggressive Chiang Kai-shek, fought back.
38:03The war was to be long and vicious from the very start.
38:09In December 1937, the Chinese capital of Nanking fell.
38:13As many as perhaps as one third of a million Chinese were killed in an orgy of murder, rape, torture and looting.
38:21In 1937, one half of the World War had already begun.
38:27Chinese historians believe this was the start of World War II.
38:39Stalin's Russia seemed the exception in a Europe full of states that had some grievance at the end of World War I.
38:48Russia's interest in international affairs was cautious and pragmatic,
38:53designed mainly to ensure no great coalition of capitalism was formed against Bolshevism.
38:59This was the time of the mass industrialization of the Soviet Union, of the Five Year Plans.
39:05These years were the years of the purges.
39:08Every Russian, including Stalin, living in paranoid terror, fearing the enemy at home,
39:15and dreading betrayal, denunciation, imprisonment in a labor camp, or summary execution.
39:22Millions were to die and disappear.
39:25Of course, in the despotic terror of Stalinism lay a fearful dilemma for the democracies
39:32which explains much of what has come to be called appeasement.
39:36In the 1930s, who was worse, Hitler or Stalin?
39:40To Western Europe, Bolshevism seemed far the greater evil, and Hitler at least a stern anti-communist.
39:52The actions of the politicians who wore suits, the Democrats who faced Hitler,
39:57are the counterparts to Nazi aggression.
40:00The mythic history of the war condemns them as appeasers, weakly giving in to Hitler's lies.
40:07The truth, though, is more complex.
40:10As soon as the Versailles Treaty was agreed,
40:13because the victorious powers had no sanction other than renewed war,
40:18negotiation, concession, compromise, appeasement,
40:23became the way of dealing with problems.
40:27At the start of the 1930s, British policy was in the hands of James Ramsey Macdonald,
40:33Britain's first socialist prime minister,
40:36and a man who had been an active pacifist in the First World War.
40:40Macdonald believed Germany had fair grievances that deserved redress.
40:46His successor from 1932 was Stanley Baldwin,
40:50a placid, uncharismatic man who refused to be panicked by Hitler's aggression
40:55and thought the French hysterical and paranoid.
40:59If British policy was determined by men who thought Germany deserved better treatment
41:05and who refused to get upset by Hitler,
41:08French policy was determined by more complex emotions.
41:12The French felt aggrieved and threatened by Germany,
41:16The French felt aggrieved and threatened by Germany,
41:19yet were paralyzed by a cynical defeatism that prevented a positive action against Nazism.
41:25They refused to act without British help,
41:29convinced war was coming but that nothing positive could be done.
41:35Their view of the world came to be expressed in spectacular physical form.
41:41The French were to devote incredible sums of money in the second half of the 1930s
41:46to the construction of the Maginot Line.
41:50Named after the French war minister who conceived the plan,
41:54the line was a complex of futuristic fortifications.
41:58The line ran from Switzerland to the Luxembourg and Belgian border
42:03and was designed to deter German attack.
42:07The great weakness of the line was that it did not extend across all France's western border.
42:13It was thought impolitic to extend the forts against the Belgians,
42:17a friendly and neutral country.
42:21Nearly half a million French troops inhabited underground cities of war,
42:26manning huge ammunition stores, deep armored bunkers with underground roads and railways.
42:33The rigidity of the Maginot Line reflected the French strategic mind.
42:39People who gaze into the future too often only see their past,
42:44and France could not imagine a future war
42:47which did not begin with a German attack in the west upon France.
42:54While building its wall in the west, France made defensive alliances in the east.
43:00But with what states did France make these defensive alliances?
43:05Czechoslovakia and Poland.
43:08Small countries, weak countries, countries that had scores with whom Hitler had grievance,
43:14countries that had German minorities, had German territory.
43:19Poland was notoriously unstable and aggressive,
43:23with delusions of great power and status.
43:27These alliances would be more likely to drag France into a war as deter Germany.
43:36Not all politicians in the democracies were appeasers.
43:39In Great Britain, Winston Churchill constantly warned that Nazism would in the end bring a huge war.
43:47In Churchill's story once again, the history and mythology of the war grind past each other.
43:54In the 1930s, Churchill was thought a dangerous eccentric,
43:59who by his constant calls for more arms was likely to bring about war.
44:05Churchill already had a long history in British politics and not a history covered in glory.
44:11As a cabinet minister in World War I, he was forced to resign
44:15over disastrously conceived campaigns which had cost thousands of lives.
44:20As peacetime chancellor, finance minister,
44:23he had been forced to resign over catastrophic mishandling of the economy, causing economic chaos.
44:30Churchill was, in many ways, hopelessly out of step in the 1930s,
44:35a diehard conservative with a mind closed to new ideas.
44:41Churchill was trusted by almost no one, thought an unprincipled man,
44:46a politician who had changed parties cynically for personal gain.
44:52That history has vindicated Churchill makes it hard for us to realize that 1930s Britain feared him
44:59and saw the pragmatic common sense of the British government prepared to deal with Hitler as the right way forward.
45:10In May 1937, Neville Chamberlain became British Prime Minister.
45:15Chamberlain has a sad place in the history of the war.
45:19The wisdom of hindsight and the mythology of the war makes him arch appeaser,
45:25the betrayer of small countries, the mirror of weakness against Churchill's strength.
45:32If we are to judge this man, let us ask ourselves would we, in our turn,
45:37as people of reason and fairness, not attempt everything possible to avoid the recurrence of war?
45:44Would we really follow the insane ravings of Churchill?
45:49Chamberlain was a sharp contrast to his predecessor, Baldwin, who placidly drifted through international affairs.
45:57Chamberlain, despite the appearance of a 19th century gentleman, had a keen mind,
46:03was a competent administrator who really could achieve in government.
46:08He came to office determined to get things done, to resolve rather than ignore problems.
46:15Today, appeasement is a dirty word synonymous with insipid surrender.
46:21In the 1930s, it was the problem, not the enemy, that was appeased.
46:27Appeasement meant negotiation and compromise.
46:31Chamberlain was a determined and principled man who simply pursued what everybody,
46:36politician and citizen alike, saw as the sensible way to do things.
46:50Some historians see the German annexation of Austria in 1938 as the start of the countdown to World War II,
46:59all previous events being the undoing of the punishments laid upon Germany at Versailles.
47:05The union of Austria and Germany, the Anschluss, went beyond any restitution and was aggressively expensive.
47:17Nazism believed all German people should be members of the same state, and Hitler himself had been born Austrian.
47:26The Anschluss would increase Germany's base of population and industrial strength, making further expansion possible.
47:34It would be the first move in pushing Germany's frontier to the east, which Hitler believed Germany's destiny.
47:46The Austrian Nazis were in constant ferment and agitation against the Austrian government.
47:53There was a history of violence and assassination, of threatened and attempted coups.
48:00In 1936, Austrian Chancellor Schusnigg had made what was ironically called a gentleman's agreement with Hitler.
48:07Concessions were made to the Nazis, yet the agitation continued.
48:12Two years later, in February 1938, Hitler and Schusnigg met again,
48:17and it was agreed that a Nazi sympathizer be made minister in charge of Austrian security.
48:25The Austrian government saw this as part of a gradual taking over of Austria and proposed a vote on Anschluss.
48:33With the reoccupation of the Rhineland, Hitler had bluffed his strength.
48:37Now German troops began to really mess on the Austrian border, to intervene, to prevent chaos and anarchy in Austria.
48:46For perhaps the first time in history, an international crisis was conducted over the telephone.
48:52Schusnigg and the Austrians, who wished to retain independence, tried to rally support among the leaders of Europe.
48:59In a series of phone calls, they found no one would support Austria.
49:04Britain and France thought war not a price worth paying,
49:09accurately sensing that most Austrian people were not opposed to Anschluss.
49:15As German troops entered Austria, they were received with wild enthusiasm.
49:20Hitler as a hero.
49:22Austria was incorporated as part of the Third Reich.
49:29Hitler's plan had been to take control of Austria slowly, by the same methods as in Germany,
49:35by first using and then dissolving democracy, creating a puppet state.
49:41As he received the adulation of the Austrian people, as a whirlwind of history gathered around Europe,
49:47perhaps even Hitler thought that the pace of time was accelerating towards a destiny that might not be in any man's total control.
49:59Next time, on World War II, the Complete History,
50:03it's the turn of the state of Czechoslovakia to face the might of Hitler's ambition and wrath.
50:10In the defining moment of the 1930s, Neville Chamberlain flies to Munich to resolve the crisis.
50:17The great powers of Europe meet to decide the fate of the small Central European country.
50:23The Czechs wait outside to be told their fate.
50:28Events that history judge as betrayal, as the definitive appeasement, are lauded by the peoples of the world.
50:36Chamberlain returns to London a hero. He promises peace in our time.
50:42Too soon, the climate of ecstatic relief and joy dissolves, as it's realized that Hitler will not keep his word.
50:51A grim realism seizes Europe, as Britain and France begin to rearm.
50:56The eastern ambition and hunger of Hitler grows, as his gaze falls upon the remainder of Czech lands.
51:04The nation of Czechoslovakia dissolves.
51:08All over Europe, there is a fatalistic certainty that war is coming.
51:12Poland is the subject of Hitler's mystical belief and territorial avarice,
51:17In a move which shocks the world, Nazism and Soviet Communism form an unholy alliance that seals Poland's fate.
51:26Enmeshed by alliances disguised as protections, France and Britain are committed to aid Poland, and war breaks out.