This review was submitted to Amerikaner by Grant Norman. If you would like to submit your own articles to Amerikaner.org please email amerikanercontributions@proton.me
My first introduction to A.J.P. Taylor was when I bought a book of his at a library sale and brought it with me to school one day. My history teacher hastened to inform me that Taylor was a “holocaust denier”, which was my first introduction to the term. Well, rest assured, Taylor takes pains to drop obtuse references to gas chambers and extermination plans in this work, but looking past those pinches of incense, it becomes clear why “The Origins of the Second World War” caused Taylor’s reputation to be dragged through the mud.
The Origins of the Second World War does not attempt to relitigate the question of Adolf Hitler’s intentions towards the jews or really pay much of any attention to the domestic policy of Germany under the National Socialists. Instead, in this book, Taylor attempts to draw out the causes of the great conflagration of the twentieth century in the vein of other scholarly works which have focused on the diplomatic history leading up to the First World War.
In drawing from the diplomatic records and historical inference of both the great powers of Germany, Britain, France, Italy, and the Soviet Union and the minor powers of Austria, Czechoslovakia, and Poland, Taylor works tirelessly to present each of the interested parties as its own independent actor, with motivations, fears, and options which determined their different responses to the crises of the interwar period. Taylor uses his resources and talents as a historian to dispel several myths of the Second World War, namely that appeasement was an obviously foolhardy policy by cowards, that the German claims to Danzig were self-evidently egregious, and that the Axis powers sought out war.
By treating Adolf Hitler foreign policy on behalf of Germany as that of any other statesman, albeit a talented one, Taylor eliminates the narrative that Hitler and the National Socialists bore the sole responsibility for the Second World War and admittedly undermines the authority of the Nuremberg trials as mere victor’s justice. Slaughtering these sacred cows has earned Taylor the opprobrium of being a “holocaust denier” not by virtue of his claims on that historical topic, but as a way to undermine his work on other aspects of the war.
The book itself is a wonderful antidote to much of the commonly-held myths about the Second World War, and is written by a British historian whose anti-German credentials are enough to let the average reader open their mind to Taylor’s arguments. Dissidents can learn much from the book as well, for Taylor not only tackles the bogeymen of appeasement and war guilt, but he also paints a picture of Adolf Hitler radically different from that of even his staunchest defenders.
The common narrative, from both admirers and detractors of Adolf Hitler, is that he was a man with a grand plan in mind. This amateur architect also made plans, grandiose plans, for the vast settlement of German settlers in Eastern Europe, the rebuilding of Berlin after the war, and the division of the world between Germany and Britain. But Taylor argues that not much stock should be put into what he views as idle planning. Adolf Hitler, by Taylor’s telling, was not a dogmatist but an opportunist, and an improviser rather than a planner.
Opportunism and improvisation do not seem like positive qualities in the circular firing squad of dissident politics where ideological purity is heralded as the highest good, but Hitler was an expert at squeezing what he could out of the situations which arose, rather than being slavishly devoted to a timetable for successes and conquests. Taylor dismisses the so-called “seizure of power” as a fable as well as the associated legend that the “Reichstag Fire decrees” were a cynical ploy by the National Socialists to seize total power in Germany. Rather, in his sole foray into German domestic policy, Taylor argues that Hitler and his supporters observed painstakingly the legalistic processes which would grant them their desires, and honestly viewed the attempted arson of the German parliament as an attempt at revolution, not as a cover to gain power or even an inside job.
This opportunism and patience for the right opportunities to present themselves carried over into German foreign policy in the 1930’s. Before the war came, German rearmament never granted Germany the ability to match the Anglo-French alliance in material terms, but what Germany did have was complimented by Hitler’s guile and nerves of steel. The views Hitler propounded to his generals and to foreign audiences included the return of Germany’s overseas colonies, the conquest of vast tracts of living space in Eastern Europe, and the smashing of Bolshevism once and for all. But these goals were subordinated to a single great idea of foreign policy, namely that Germany should be the great power that she was by nature of her size, capabilities, and geography, and receive the rights and privileges which she was thus due.
German foreign policy under Hitler was always conducted with that goal in mind. It was for that goal that Hitler compromised other less-important objectives. The reunification of the German people that seems to be the crux of Hitler’s foreign policy if one looks solely at maps in sequence does not appear so readily important when considering that Hitler was willing to write off the territory and the people of Alsace-Lorraine in France and South Tyrol in Italy for the sake of maintaining peace. The Polish Corridor and the status of Danzig were not obstacles to the German-Polish Nonaggression Pact of 1934, and German opposition to the Czechs was driven at least as much by their much-touted status as a French ally and base for bombers as the oppression faced by the Sudeten Germans.
One of the most striking of Taylor’s revelations to an uninitiated student of history is the ambivalence with which Hitler viewed the annexation of Austria. The Anschluss joining Austria to Germany, fulfilling the dream of a union which was killed by the nineteenth-century diplomacy of Bismarck was, by Taylor’s telling, much more unexpected than is commonly told. The Austrian National Socialists were harder for Berlin to control than they are often given credit, and their assassination of the Austrian chancellor in 1934 and general campaign of resistance to the Austrian government were not in-line with the gradual incorporation of the two countries which Hitler initially preferred. Events came to sweep him away and the announcement of the joining of the two countries following the establishment of a National Socialist government in Austria was a spur of the moment decision rather than the culmination of a long-planned strategy.
Taylor’s work particularly shines when he describes the Munich Conference and the surrounding events. The Origins of the Second World War becomes a phenomenal political thriller as the wits and nerves of the main cast of characters, Hitler, British prime minister Neville Chamberlain, French prime minister Édouard Daladier, and Czech president Edvard Beneš are pitted against one another. Ultimately, Hitler succeeded because he was able to expertly combine what resources he did possess with the gambler’s ability to play his hunches and bluff his way to victory against less steady opponents.
Rather than utilize war to achieve his objectives, Hitler preferred to use the threat of war as a tool in his toolbox. He took the read of his opponents in the Western democracies and saw men who held the same foibles as the politicians he had defeated in Germany. A man who had never traveled abroad or studied languages and foreign cultures proved to be more than a match for the trained diplomat of the greatest empires in the world because of his understanding of their psychology. Their defense of the status quo was slavish and desperate, and Germany could use that against her foes by advancing against the system imposed after the First World War by breaking her revisionism into multiple steps.
By maintaining a steady drumbeat of pressure, and not getting distracted by swinging wildly to other objectives, the chains holding Germany down from her natural position in Europe were gradually broken or even withdrawn.
The ability to extract gradual concessions is a nerve-wracking process where the powers involved are always walking on a knife’s edge between surrender and war. Once war has been declared, it is difficult to return that genie to the bottle, and that was the great failure of the Polish crisis in 1939 by Taylor’s telling. In his view, every one of the major parties to the conflict, the Germans, the British, and the Poles (to say nothing of the French and the Italians) wanted peace, but the fear of blinking particularly set off the first stage of the devastating conflict the effects of which we are still struggling to master.
Hitler’s path to power, and his stewardship of Germany’s resurrection pose valuable lessons for today’s dissidents against the current system. It is key that we understood how successful revolutionaries actually accomplished their goals instead of the fantasies about how we wish that they had succeeded. It was not in timetables and schedules that Hitler gained power and redrew the map of Europe, very peacefully at first, but through the flexibility to respond to openings which presented themselves, the willingness to utilize his limited resources and even push beyond them, and the nerves to follow up on these opportunities with nerves of steel.