GEOGRAPHY
20th Century European History
*The early twentieth century saw Europe try to destroy itself in the
First World War. Nationalism (both its arrogant form and its
nation-state building form), militarism, and a desire for glory led
Europe into a terrible war that destroyed ancient empires.
*Towards the end of WWI, Russia was in such bad shape (some soldiers
were sent into battle without guns, being told to pick them up from
dead men once they had the chance) that the workers, led by a vanguard
of dedicated communist revolutionaries (with Lenin at their head)
overthrew the Tsar of Russia in 1917, and killed him and all his family
in 1918 after a period of imprisonment.
*Lenin died in 1924, and the Communist Party was taken over by Stalin,
who ruled until 1953.
*The Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (as Russia and its dependent
territories were now called) took over industry, collectivised the
farms, and instituted a totalitarian government with a command
economy. Dissenters could be imprisoned in gulags or killed, and
often were, as the KGB were everywhere. Among those killed were
many of the officers in the army, who Stalin feared were plotting
against him (which left the USSR unprepared for WWII). Overall,
Stalin ruled through a secret police state, and through terror.
While he ruled the USSR, perhaps as many as 20 million people died from
his purges, and from famines brought on by poor economic
planning. As Stalin himself said, ‘the death of one man is a
tragedy. The death of millions is a statistic.’
*In Europe, the map was changed by the Treaty of Versailles which ended
World War I. Austria-Hungary was broken up into Austria, Hungary,
Czechoslovakia, Yugoslavia, and parts of other new countries (also
created out of Germany and Russia): Poland, Finland, Estonia,
Latvia, and Lithuania.
*The treaty also laid a huge indemnity on Germany, requiring them to
pay for the War, limited the size of their military, took away their
few overseas colonies, and forced them to sign the ‘War Guilt Clause,’
in which Germany claimed that all of World War I was its fault.
The purpose of the treaty was to crush Germany, and to humiliate it.
*The German and Austro-Hungarian Kaisers also abdicated, and were
replaced by republics, notably the Weimar Republic in Germany.
*The late 1920s and 1930s saw a worldwide depression, which hit all the
US and Europe, but got Germany particularly hard. There, money
became so worthless that marks had to be printed in billion-mark
denominations, and people needed wheelbarrows to haul their daily wages.
*The Depression, combined with fears of Communist uprisings across
Europe (which were seen as very possible) led to the rise of Fascist
governments in Italy, Germany, Hungary, Spain (following the Spanish
Civil War (1936-1939), and Portugal.
*Extreme nationalism, racism, and militarism are the major
underpinnings of fascism; so fascist leaders told their peoples that
they were the greatest nations on Earth, and planned to build or
rebuild their glory (this worked particularly well in Italy, where
Mussolini offered to restore the glory that was Rome, and in Germany,
which felt cheated at the end of WWII).
*Hitler also used the Jews as a scapegoat, blaming them for the
problems of the Aryan race, and eventually offered a ‘final solution’
to the ‘Jewish question,’ by killing about 6 million of them, along
with about 5 million other ‘social deviants’ in the Holocaust.
*In the name of nationalism, Hitler rebuilt the military to illegal
levels, annexed Austria and demanded (and got) the return of the
Sudentenland. This was permitted by Britain and France as part of
the policy of appeasement, which was expected to provide ‘peace in our
time.’
*In 1939, Hitler invaded Poland on 1 September. He doubted anyone
would stop him, partly because he had already signed the secret
Nazi-Soviet Pact, in which Germany and the USSR would jointly invade
and then split Poland (and the Baltic Republics). However,
Britain and France declared war on Hitler this time (but did not send
Poland much real help).
*Hitler used blitzkrieg, or lightning war, in which dive-bombers
shattered enemy defences and morale, then rapid-moving tanks, motorised
infantry, and paratroops moved through the disrupted enemy lines.
It was an excellent tactic as long as it could achieve victory in less
than six weeks, after which it would bog down into a lengthy ground
war. Fortunately for Hitler, Poland fell in less than a month, as
Hitler and Stalin divided it up between themselves.
*From there, the rest of the world was next. After a period of
preparation, during which he claimed he wanted peace, Hitler began to
move again. On 9 April 1940 the Germans conquered Denmark and
invaded Norway, which was betrayed by one of its own, Vidkun
Quisling. On 10 May, the Nazis invaded the Low Countries.
Luxembourg fell in a day, the Netherlands in five days, and Belgium in
three weeks. On 14 June, the Germans captured Paris.
*The British and French also had a new and powerful ally. On 22
June 1941, Hitler invaded the Soviet Union. Initially it
worked. The Red Army was poorly trained, poorly led (partly
because Stalin had killed so many of his generals in his purges), and
for the moment easily defeated.
*On Sunday morning at 7 o’clock, the Japanese launched an attack on the
US Naval base at Pearl Harbor just outside Honolulu, Hawaii and the
United States Congress declared war on Japan on 8 December 1941.
On 11 December 1941, Germany and Italy, to help their ally Japan,
declared war on the United States.
*In fact, Russia shouldered most of the burden during the war, losing
50 men for every one that America lost. Suffering terribly,
Stalin begged the Allies to attack Hitler somewhere more important that
Africa in order to open up a two-front war and take some of the
pressure off the Red Army.
*Stalin wanted America and Britain to attack France, but Churchill
thought it would be too tough. Instead, he suggested the ‘soft
underbelly’ of Europe, taking Italy and from there, hopefully, moving
into the rest of Europe.
*The soft underbelly had proven not to be so soft, but the beaches of
France did not look too inviting either. The US Army Air Corps
and the Royal Air Force tried to open a front in the air. By
1943, the US and Britain were, at least in theory, following
Churchill’s promise to ‘bomb the devils ‘round the clock.’ This
was called strategic bombing, an attack on German factories, roads, and
other facilities. The Air Corps, with good sights, bombed
specific targets during the day. The RAF, who could not aim as
well, practised carpet-bombing at night.
*On 6 June 1944 the D-Day invasion began.
*Although casualties were heavy, half a million troops landed within a
week, and by late July there were 2 million Allied troops in Europe.
*Despite stiff resistance at the Battle of the Bulge, 16 December 1944
to 25 January 1945, Germany was defeated, and on 7 May 1945, Admiral
Karl Dönitz offered Germany’s unconditional surrender. This
is known as V-E Day.
*The period after WWII saw Europe’s power decline tremendously, partly
because most of Europe was devastated physically and financially by the
war, partly because so much of Europe ended up dependent on either the
USA or the USSR after the war, and partly because the stresses of the
war, or Europe’s poverty afterwards, forced Europe to give up its
colonies overseas, or at least most of them—mostly by 1960, although
some would be retained longer (and a few remain).
*The proof of Europe’s dependence on the USA—and of the USA’s power in
the world—was the Marshall Plan, named after US Secretary of State
George Marshall. To keep Europe from getting so poor that it felt
forced to turn to Communism, the US sent $13 billion to Europe (roughly
equal to $100 billion today) starting in 1947. It was offered to
the Soviets, too, but they rejected it. This rebuilt Europe, and
reformed its trade system somewhat, lowering tariffs and taxes, and may
have eventually helped lead to the formation of the European Union.
*After the War, the leaders of Britain, France, the USA, and the USSR
met at Potsdam in Germany to work out who would control what after the
war. This later formed the basis for East and West Germany.
*After World War II, Europe would be divided into the western nations
that more or less favoured the United States, and the Eastern Bloc that
was largely dominated by the Soviet Union. Most of the western
nations eventually joined the USA and Canada in NATO, a mutual defence
treaty, while most of the Eastern Bloc was forced to sign the Warsaw
Pact, which did the same for them.
*The theoretical dividing line between the two sides was called the
Iron Curtain.
*This face-off between the east and the west, in which neither side
directly attacked the other, but in which both competed fiercely, was
known as the Cold War, and it dominated world politics from 1945 until
1991, and made the world fear it might be destroyed by nuclear war, at
least after 1949, when the USSR tested its first atomic bomb.
*Life was hard in much of the Eastern Bloc. The command economy
did not get workers to do their best—everyone got enough to live no
matter what, so why work too hard? This often led to shortages,
low quality products, and a lack of freedom to enjoy personal
luxuries. This was also caused by the general depression of the
economy required by immense military spending.
*Many people in communist countries tried to flee to the west, which
usually resulted in death if they were caught. To try to stop
this, East Germany built the Berlin Wall around West Berlin in
1961—most of it went up overnight on 13 August. The rest of the
country’s border was fortified as well.
*Eventually public dissatisfaction and their inability to provide for
their people while keeping up with US military spending led to many of
the Eastern Bloc nations relaxing their border restrictions, and in
1989, East Germany removed the Berlin Wall. On 3 October 1990,
Germany re-united.
*The same forces led to a coup in the Soviet Union by the military (who
feared the same thing might happen there), which failed, and, in fact,
weakened the government so that in 1991 the USSR collapsed into 15
republics. The Cold War was over.
*The fall of communism in Eastern Europe was not without
problems. Both Czechoslovakia and Yugoslavia were created at the
end of WWI out of several ethnic nations. Czechoslovakia
dissolved itself peacefully into the Czech and Slovak Republics, but
Yugoslavia broke up into Slovenia, Croatia, Bosnia-Herzegovina,
Macedonia, Serbia (also called Yugoslavia), and (in 2006) Montenegro.
*The former Yugoslavia, especially the new nation of Bosnia, was
ethnically and religiously diverse, and during the Yugoslav wars, in
which Slovenia, Croatia, and Bosnia fought for their independence from
Serbia, warfare often had a religious and racist element as well.
Bosnia had it worst, because it was about equally Serbian (Slavic and
Orthodox), Croat (Slavic and Catholic), and Bosniak (Slavic and
Islamic), and they fought each other, and engaged in ‘ethnic
cleansing,’ a nice term for genocide. Most of this was undertaken
by the Serbian Army (which was trying to keep Bosnia as part of
Serbia), but some was done by Croats and even by Bosniaks as
well. Trials for crimes against humanity are still ongoing in
relation to this, and it is one of the worst instances of mass murder
in the past 20 years.