A World Broken: World War II Overview

World War I and Versailles

The history of the Second World War has been chronicled in countless pages of books, documents, journals, and letters, as well as films and pictures. The greatest conflagration known to man changed so profoundly the course of modern history that it will never be totally forgotten. Yet some treatment of the historical context in which George Neilson served his country will be of benefit to those generations hence who live in a time when these tumultuous events are relegated to the dusty attic of the past.

Some historians have suggested that World Wars I and II were effectively one war with a twenty-year truce between them. This is so not only because of the brevity of the interwar period but because it is almost universally accepted that World War II occurred because the issues exposed by the first war were not resolved by it. Furthermore, the seeds of a future conflict were sown in the Treaty of Versailles, the formal document ending World War I. The peace treaty concluding the so-called war to end all wars imposed such punitive measures on the vanquished German empire of Kaiser Wilhelm I that it gave birth to a virulent discontent that was to erupt within five years after the guns fell silent.

Versailles had the objective of rendering Germany a pariah state, an affront to the German pride that was a legacy as old as the Teutonic tribes that had been subsumed into the Holy Roman Empire dating back to the tenth century. The reparations costs alone imposed on Germany by the Allied powers ravaged its economy, sending the Deutschmark into a state of hyperbolic inflation. In the ruins of the fledgling Weimar state established following a brief revolution at the end of the war, the disgruntled Prussian masses sought a voice of hope for a resurgent German nationalism. In the dangerous political and economic vacuum created by Versailles' crushing oppression, that voice came forth from an obscure World War I army corporal, the son of a part-Jewish Austrian laborer. His name was Adolf Hitler.

Hitler and the Nazi Party

Hitler, a psychopathic genius, rose from humble beginnings to the threshold of conquering the world and destroying Western civilization. This brutal dictator's name is synonymous with despotism. Though in sheer numbers of victims he is not without peers in the wide scope of history, he was the architect of one of the most fearful regimes the world has known. Founded by a group of disenchanted thugs hell-bent on revenging the wrongs wrought upon the fatherland by Versailles, the National Socialist German Workers Party was first established in Bavaria. The name of the party was abbreviated in German as the NSDAP and commonly known as the Nazi Party from the German pronunciation of the word national: nah-tsi-oh-nahl. Hatched in the noisy beer cellars of Munich, the rise of this nefarious band incubated in the poverty, chaos, and humiliation of postwar Germany.

The field was fertile for the growth of the malignancy that manifested itself in the perverted nationalism and ethnic hatreds of this fascist gang. Its adherents were mostly uneducated, unprincipled, and unscrupulous. They pushed their way to notoriety by the knife, the fist, and the revolver on the streets of Munich in the 1920s. For over a decade, the embryonic worm of National Socialism incubated among the disenfranchised masses of Germany. The political ascendancy of the NSDAP was astoundingly fast. It happened that through a complex process of political scheming, the National Socialists gained enough votes to win the Reichstag (parliament) in the 1933 elections. Thus their leader, Adolf Hitler, became chancellor of Germany through a paradoxically legitimate constitutional process. In so doing, that constitution became a worthless scrap. It was the end of Germany's brief foray into democracy.

Hitler's gift of charisma enabled his rhetoric to catch the imagination of the German people. Within a short few months after the Nazis' ascent to power, the swastika was flying from almost every building in the German Reich from the Black Forest to East Prussia. The infamous swastika was a pagan symbol derived from a broken cross, having its roots in the Holy Roman Empire that once ruled the Germanic peoples in north-central Europe. Indeed the Nazi regime drew its spiritual power from the medieval domains of darkness. Their platform was based on Hitler's notion of the superiority of the hypothetical Aryan race, which was allegedly epitomized in the Germanic peoples. According to this racist theory, this "master race" was destined to rule the world and subjugate all other people to it. The party drew its perverse strength as well from its appealing message of revived German nationalism as from its overarching hatreds: Judaism, Bolshevism, and less overtly proclaimed, Slavic civilization. So, as America slipped into a new isolationism born of the tragedies of The Great War and the Great Depression, the next global conflict was fomenting among the people of the former Central Powers.

In addition to the rise of the empires of Germany and Japan in the decades after World War I, the Bolshevik Revolution held an ever-tighter grip on the vast Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, which stretched from Poland to the Pacific Ocean. Under the ruthless and tyrannical rule of Josef Stalin (a name taken on by the peasant's son, meaning man of steel), some twenty million Soviet citizens were shot or worked to death in the gulag labor camps in order to discipline the Eurasian super state as a true and monolithic embodiment of Marxism-Leninism. The result was a nation under the dark cloud of a godless slavery, mortally loyal to its leader who molded and shaped the Soviet Union with an iron fist to fit his designs to Sovietize the rest of the world by persuasion if possible, and by armed compulsion if not. From the perhaps well-intentioned nineteenth-century wealth-equalization theories of Marx and Engels arose the cancer of...