this post was submitted on 02 Sep 2024
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The first WW was more Germany committing the unconscionable crime of trying to keep up with British / French Colonialism. The second was a direct result of the WW1 winners tolerating/facilitating German fascists as a counterweight to the boiling over of Eastern European communist movements.
Right up until Adolf invaded the Rhineland, the UK and the US and France were all on board with German fascists and their crusade to crush the Soviet influence in their local politics. Hell, even the antisemitism was largely in-vogue. 1930s Western Europeans were broadly in agreement that Jewish people were a pest to be ghettoized and resource to be exploited. That's why so many Jewish refugees were denied entry to the western hemisphere in the run up to the Holocaust, in stark contradiction to the number of Nazis who were afforded Rat Lines into the Americas following the war.
I'd argue the Far Right in Germany was much more a symptom of 19th century colonialism and 20th century orthodox capitalism than the explicit cause of the wars. They were the tip of the spear aimed at naive people in Africa, East Asia, and Latin America. They only became a problem when their fascist ideologies returned to the imperial core.
The war reparations that France demanded of Germany post WW1 contributed to creating an economic environment where the rise of a 'National Socialist' party seemed like a good idea to the average German. IIRC, America and Britain tried to get France to be more reasonable and France basically said "I'll keep whipping until they stop crying" The Dawes plan helped provide European stability at the end of the 20s, but the crushing debt was used by Hitler as a tool in his rise to power.
Reparations had a perverse impact on the respective economies, though. Turning Germany into a debtor nation caused the country to undergo a rapid industrialization, partly financed by those same reparations payments. Meanwhile, the WW1 winners got to glut themselves on German industrial produce while their own economies stagnated.
Hyperinflation in Germany while every other nation was suffering deflation caused German export markets to surge. Hitler rode the downturn into office, but what really paid off for him was the sudden surge in demand for German goods (and subsequent German manufacturing). The modern industrial German state is a byproduct of that rapid industrialization.
But the industrial explosion also created a great deal of ecological destruction and a ravenous hunger for cheap raw materials and slave labor. Hitler operated as the ideological mouthpiece of the German industrial state, helping to form the rationale for a land grab in Eastern Europe and a press-ganging of the proles. But it was this industry surge, combined with the American financial capital that profited from distribution of German workhouses, that really boosted Hitler from one bigot PM among a dozen to the head of a metasticizing cancer of imperial conquest.
Thank you for the additional information and effort in sharing this. This is really well written - informative, easy to read, and enjoyable.
thanks ! I've done a partial read of "fascisme & grand capital" years ago but your bird's eye view is clearer than any