Hitler’s Empire in Europe, 1939–1942

Using planes, tanks, and trucks in the first example of a blitzkrieg, or “lightning war,” Hitler’s armies crushed Poland in four weeks. The Soviet Union quickly took its share agreed to in the secret protocol — the eastern half of Poland and the Baltic states of Lithuania, Estonia, and Latvia. In the west French and British armies dug in; they expected another war of attrition and economic blockade. But in spring 1940 the Nazi lightning war struck again. After occupying Denmark, Norway, and Holland, German motorized columns broke through southern Belgium and into France.

As Hitler’s armies poured into France, aging marshal Henri-Philippe Pétain, a national hero of the Great War, formed a new French government — that became known as the Vichy (VIH-shee) government — and accepted defeat. Initially many French supported Pétain, who they believed would stand up for them against the Germans, but as the war progressed Pétain increasingly collaborated with the Nazis. By July 1940 Hitler ruled practically all of western continental Europe; Italy was an ally, the Soviet Union a friendly neutral (Map 30.2). Only Great Britain, led by Winston Churchill, remained unconquered.

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MAP 30.2World War II in Europe and Africa, 1939–1945The map shows the extent of Hitler’s empire at its height, before the Battle of Stalingrad in late 1942 and the subsequent advances of the Allies until Germany surrendered on May 7, 1945.
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Vichy France, 1940

To prepare for an invasion of Britain, Germany first needed to gain control of the air. In the Battle of Britain, which began in July 1940, German planes attacked British airfields and key factories, dueling with British defenders high in the skies. In September Hitler began indiscriminately bombing British cities to break British morale. British aircraft factories increased production, and Londoners defiantly dug in. By September Britain was winning the air war, and Hitler abandoned his plans for an immediate German invasion of Britain.

Hitler now allowed his lifetime obsession of creating a vast eastern European empire for the “master race” to dictate policy. In June 1941 Germany broke the Nazi-Soviet nonaggression pact and attacked the Soviet Union. By October Leningrad was practically surrounded, Moscow was besieged, and most of Ukraine had been conquered. But the Soviets did not collapse, and when a severe winter struck German armies outfitted in summer uniforms, the invaders were stopped.

Although stalled in Russia, Hitler ruled an enormous European empire stretching from the outskirts of Moscow to the English Channel. He now began building a New Order based on the guiding principle of Nazi totalitarianism: racial imperialism. Within the New Order, the Dutch, Norwegians, Swedes, and Danes received preferential treatment, for the Germans believed they were racially related to the German “Aryan” master race. The French, an “inferior” Latin people, occupied the middle position. At the bottom of the New Order were the harshly treated “subhumans,” Jews and Slavs.

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London Bomb Shelter, 1940 Hitler believed that his relentless terror bombing of London — the “blitz” — could break the will of the British people. He was wrong. The blitz caused enormous destruction, but Londoners went about their business with courage and calm determination, as this unforgettable image of people being entertained in a bomb shelter in the Tube (subway) suggests.(© Bettmann/Corbis)

Hitler envisioned a vast eastern colonial empire where enslaved Poles, Ukrainians, and Russians would die or be killed off while Germanic peasants would resettle the abandoned lands. Himmler and the elite SS corps, supported by military commanders and German policemen, implemented a program of destruction in the occupied territories to create room for Germans. Many Poles, captured Communists, Gypsies, and Jehovah’s Witnesses were murdered in cold blood.

EVENTS LEADING TO WORLD WAR II

1919 Treaty of Versailles is signed
1921 Hitler heads National Socialist German Worker’s Party (Nazis)
1922 Mussolini seizes power in Italy
1927 Stalin takes control of the Soviet Union
1929–1939 Great Depression
1931 Japan invades Manchuria
January 1933 Hitler is appointed chancellor of Germany
March 1933 Reichstag passes the Enabling Act, granting Hitler absolute dictatorial power
October 1933 Germany withdraws from the League of Nations
1935 Nuremberg Laws deprive Jews of all rights of citizenship
March 1935 Hitler announces German rearmament
October 1935 Mussolini invades Ethiopia and receives Hitler’s support
March 1936 German armies move unopposed into the demilitarized Rhineland
October 1936 Rome-Berlin Axis created
1936–1939 Spanish Civil War
1937 Japan invades China
March 1938 Germany annexes Austria
September 1938 Munich Conference: Britain and France agree to German seizure of the Sudetenland from Czechoslovakia
March 1939 Germany occupies the rest of Czechoslovakia; appeasement ends in Britain
August 1939 Nazi-Soviet nonaggression pact is signed
September 1, 1939 Germany invades Poland
September 3, 1939 Britain and France declare war on Germany
Table 30.1: EVENTS LEADING TO WORLD WAR II