38, the Place of World War II in History., Gerhard L. Weinberg, 1995

'The views expressed are those of the author and do not reflect the official policy or position of the US Air Force, Department of Defense or the US Government.'" USAFA Harmon Memorial Lecture #38 The Place of World War II in History Gerhard L. Weinberg, 1995 When we look back today on the world of fifty years ago, two facets immediately come into view. In the first place, there are the almost unbelievable human losses and physical destruction. Exactly how many lost their lives in the war will never be known, but the most reliable estimates suggest a figure of over sixty million. And please note, this figure does not include the wounded. Added to this staggering loss of life is the vast destruction. Among the capitals of the world, Warsaw and Manila were hit worst, but they are mentioned here merely to represent the hundreds of cities and towns on all continents from Dutch Harbor in Alaska to Darwin in Australia which were more or less damaged by bombing, shelling, or the deliberate burning down of communities. The second facet we see is the division of the world into victors and defeated: the Allies on one side, and the powers of the Tripartite Pact on the other. At the end of almost six years of fighting in Europe, the Middle East, and Africa, and after fourteen years of upheaval and fighting in Asia and the Pacific, one side had forced the other to capitulate. And in the final months of fighting as well as immediately afterwards, population movements, either caused or contributed to by the war, continued on a vast scale. The end of the shooting by no means brought an end to the suffering. What did all this mean for the participants, at that time practically all nations on earth? For the defeated, this meant complete occupation for all except Finland. But occupation was only the obvious sign of a lost war. For the Germans, defeat meant the end of an effort to become the dominant power on earth. The intended demographic revolution, initiated inside Germany in 1933 with the compulsory sterilization of those with allegedly hereditary defects, and accelerated inside and outside the country with the invasion of Poland which started World War II in 1939, was halted- it could not be extended to the rest of the globe. For millions of Germans, this meant that they would neither be settled somewhere in the Ukraine or North Caucasus nor be assigned to guard or garrison duty somewhere in Africa, Asia, or the Western Hemisphere. I rather doubt that many Germans were greatly disappointed. If the Nazi government had called for individuals in Germany's cities to register for settlement in the new defense villages in the East, they would probably not have gotten millions to sign up; but people would, of course, not have been asked. There would have been prepared lists published in the newspapers, and people could have looked for their names and begun life anew. Only the high-ranking leaders of the armed forces and the black-shirted SS, who had already been given or promised stolen estates, may at times in the postwar years have thought longingly of the vast acres they had lost. On the other hand, defeat saved the lives of many Germans. Liberation from National Socialism meant that the vast numbers of severely wounded German veterans would not be murdered by their own government as "lives unworthy of life." Their lives would hardly be easy, but they could live them out with their surviving relatives. The same thing would be true of others scheduled for so- called euthanasia if Germany won. And the program under which 400,000 Germans had been forcibly sterilized by 1945 could not gather additional victims. In the religious, as in the cultural life, defeat freed the Germans from great dangers. All religions were supposed to disappear from the country; it is no coincidence that all plans for future German cities and residential areas were drafted without space for churches.1 And in art and music, literature and architecture, there would be only what might be described as National Socialist realism. Even those who might at times prefer to close their eyes or ears to what they can see or hear now will need to recall that their freedom to enjoy the music and art that they like requires the freedom of others to create theirs. For millions of Germans defeat meant the loss of their homes. We can see here one of the tragic results of the attacks on and destruction of the peace settlement at the end of the First World War. At Versailles an attempt had been made to adjust the borders of Europe to the population. Though not invariably implemented carefully and justly, this was a significant progressive concept which was never appreciated, especially in Germany. The Third Reich put forward the opposite principle: the boundaries should be drawn up first, and then the population shoved in whatever direction the new borders called for. This procedure was applied to the Germans themselves at the end of World War II by the victors. The alleged defects of Versailles on Germany's eastern border were corrected, but at a very high price. One should note in this context that the majority of the Germans who fled or were expelled from the former eastern territories and other portions of Europe settled in the Western zones of occupation in Germany. In the difficult and slow but steady development of a democratic parliamentary republic with its very substantial economic growth they would be able to see, perhaps later than many, but see all the same the truth of the assertion of that great theologian and opponent of Hitler's, Dietrich Bonhoffer, that for the Germans like all others defeat would be better than victory.2 Italy had paid for Mussolini's thoughtless entrance into the war with the loss of its colonial empire and endless destruction. Participation had effectively ended the independence Italy had attained in the nineteenth century, as it had to be rescued by its German ally in 1941. Only the victory of the Allies could restore the independence of the country, a process that was already under way in 1945. Here, too, defeat rather than victory at the side of an overbearing Germany was a blessing for the people. The colonies had always been a financial burden for a basically poor country, and it was only in the postwar era that Italy made dramatic economic progress, especially in the industrial field, becoming one of the leading national economies in the world. In the years of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries when Italy had attempted to play the role of a great power, the economic basis for that role had always been lacking; it was only after defeat that Italy's economy rose to high rank. It may serve as an indication of this rank that the basis for the European Common Market was laid in the Treaty of Rome. Japan, like, Italy lost its pre-war conquests. Here too destruction marked the land, but on nothing like the scale which would have been produced by a climactic final campaign in the home islands. Under the impact of the atomic bombs and the Soviet declaration of war, the Japanese government had abandoned the idea of fighting on to the bitter end and instead capitulated. In many ways, Japan's situation in the Pacific War in 1945 resembled that of Germany in 1918 rather than that in 1945. A large part of Japan's military apparatus, some seven million men in the army and over a million in the navy, was still in service, stationed not only in the home islands but in very substantial areas Japan had conquered in prior years and which were still under Japanese control. But because Japan was obliged to surrender and accept occupation, there has been since 1945 nothing like a stab-in- the-back legend in Japan, and nobody, or practically nobody in the country has followed the example of so many Germans who after World War I argued that Germany should have continued fighting in 1918. It was precisely such notions which the Allies in World War II wanted to keep from coming up again, and in this they were entirely successful with both the Germans and the Japanese. A few Germans did think about a third world war, Field Marshal Ritter von Leeb for one;3 and there might have been some equally hopelessly blind individuals in Japan; but for the overwhelming majority of Japanese once- as for most Germans twice- was enough. The Japanese dream of a huge empire was gone. In this case also one can raise the question whether there were really that many Japanese who wanted to leave their homes and settle in such conquered places as Guadalcanal or the jungles of New Guinea- to say nothing of the Aleutian islands now being used as places of exile for misbehaving teenagers. There is also the question whether an enlarged Japanese empire, with a colonial system, which to judge by the Korean model would have been far worse than any other, could have lasted for any length of time without involving Japan in endless guerrilla warfare against nationalist uprisings of all sorts. Before the advocates of a militarily aggressive foreign policy had shot their way into power in Japan, there had been elements in the country which had pushed for a democratic system at home and a conciliatory policy abroad. The foreign policy of Shidehara Kijuro, like that of Gustav Stresemann in Germany, was continually under attack at home, but it pointed in sound directions and would have served the country far better than the policies adopted by the critics of both.

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