The Totalitarians: Hitler, Mussolini, and Stalin

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The Totalitarians: Hitler, Mussolini, and Stalin

Polish Air Force engages the new Luftwaffe 1939, Poland.

 

Perhaps the clearest demonstration of where exactly the Western countries stood in 1939, with respect to Adolf Hitler and Germany, is that after the Germans finally invaded Poland in the dark hours of 1 September 1939, it took until 3 September for Britain and France to declare war on Germany. The British waited while the French delayed. A summation, then, of all that was both France and Great Britain with Poland suffering the first blows of what would become the most costly, horrific, and all-consuming World War the engulfed millions of lives.

The end of the Great War left the European continent unbalanced. Of the Allies, the French believed the Germans guilty and that war reparations were hardly enough to compensate for the devastation France had suffered. Of the many by products of the Great War, cranage and devastation was visited across Eastern France and the war had hardly touched Germany proper. The British has suffered from the loss of men; a whole generation and the financial cost had set the exchequer back for some time. Of the United States, the Great War left an impression that tremendous costs were associated with great power competition. The United States could hardly stay the course with respect to involving herself in international affairs and withdrew into isolation.

Germany experienced disillusionment, frustration, and anger. Despite whatever mistakes Germany made economically in the post-war years, the political and social conditions set the stage for the rise of Adolf Hitler and the Nationalist Socialist Workers Party (NSDP). Hitler came to power legitimately “because of support registered by German voters in 1932”[1] and the German middle class, in the main, supported the early concepts and ideology of Hitler and his political party.

For the rest of Europe, the British and French were 

hopeful to avoid any conflagration. The British Prime Minister in 1937 believed that conflict; another war much like the Great War should be avoided at all costs. But Chamberlains disposition and diplomacy experienced severe criticism. 

The “most effective answer Chamberlain could have made to these criticisms was that ‘standing up to Hitler’, with or without the League and the Soviet Union, involved a serious risk of war.”[2]

In 1938 Germany would invest itself in Austria. Germany would then threaten war; simply threaten conflict with Europe and the Europeans turned their eyes as Germany rolled up the Sudetenland. But Hitler was not complete. He would order German forces into Memel, Lithuania in 1939 and any claim to Danzig and the ‘Polish Corridor.’ War, unwished for by the unprepared, was coming to Europe in spades.

Benito Mussolini: "Il Duce"

Benito Mussolini (“Il Duce”) was ultimately welcomed by both the working class and the middle conservative class of Italy.  He was dynamic; a charmer who captured the unspoken desires of the masses. He was a gifted orator who “in less than five years, [Benito Mussolini has] created an overpowering legend.”[3]

Like Hitler, Mussolini was self-taught, an ardent Socialist, and served in World War I. He spent over 8 months in the trenches as an Infantryman with the Bersagliari.


As for Joseph Stalin, he rose through the ranks of the Bolshevik revolution on the coat tails of Vladimir Lenin. After Lenin’s death in 1924, Stalin consolidated power and ultimately became the supreme leader.


His support was forged through determined

propaganda and soon an associated “cult of

personality” dominated internal affairs of pre-

World War II Soviet Russia.

Prior to the start of hostilities, “Stalin hesitated for almost two weeks in May-June 1937 before giving the NKVD the go ahead for the purge of the top Red Army leadership.”[4]

When it was done, over 35,000 Officers had been dismissed with well over 4,000 murdered. Of course, after 1941, the previously dismissed were all ordered back to active duty. One such officer ordered back to duty from imprisonment: Konstantin Rokossovsky.






RESOURCES

[1] R.A.C. Parker, The Second World War: A Short History, (Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 1989), 2.

[2] Ibid, 13.

[3] Perspectives: Benito Mussolini, (New York, NY: A&E Television Networks, 1961), 22 mins. 

[4] Peter Whitewood, The Red Army and the Great Terror: Stalin's Purge of the Soviet Military, (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2015).

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