The collapse of the Grand Alliance

In Mein Kampf, Hitler wrote, ‘Germany will either be a World Power or there will be no Germany.' He tried to keep his word. As Anglo-American forces closed on the Reich from France and the Red Army marched from Eastern Europe, Hitler's soldiers fought on and on 16 December 1944, in a forlorn bid to relive the glories of June 1940, launched a surprise attack into the Ardennes to break through the American lines.

While the weather grounded Allied aircraft, the German tanks made headway towards recapturing the vital port city of Antwerp. Once the skies cleared and the Americans recovered, the Germans, short of fuel and ammunition, were beaten back.

Only three things could have altered Germany's fate in 1944—45. One was a coup. On 20 July 1944 Hitler narrowly escaped a bomb planted in his headquarters under the map table. The conservative German army officers and other high officials who had planted the bomb out of fear for Germany's future paid with their lives for this attempt on Hitler's life. The second, one Hitler had great faith in, was some secret ‘wonder' weapon. New weapons, namely rockets, flying bombs, jet aircraft and advanced submarines, were already in use or nearly so with little effect. Fortunately, the Germans failed to build the one device that might have made a difference, the atomic bomb. Third, the Führer might have prolonged the war or perhaps stopped it by negotiating a separate peace with one of his foes. The Allies, however, held firm. So, the final act of Europe's long tragedy was staged in the bunker of the Reich Chancellery. As the Red Army advanced

Mein Kampf (German:

My Struggle)

A semi-autobiographical book dictated by Adolf Hitler to his chauffeur and his personal secretary, Rudolf Hess, while he was serving a prison sentence for his part in the failed Munich beer hall putsch of 9 November 1923.

It was published in 1925—26 in two volumes. Sales did not reach the hundreds of thousands until Hitler took power in 1933. It is a myth that the book was unread or ignored by foreign statesmen. It contained no detailed timetable for aggression; instead, Mein Kampf is a rambling exploration of Hitler's basic political and racial views.

collective security

The principle of maintaining peace between states by mobilizing international opinion to condemn aggression. Commonly seen as one of the chief purposes of international organizations such as the League of Nations and the United Nations.

League of Nations

An international organization established in 1919 by the peace treaties that ended the First World War. Its purpose was to promote international peace through collective security and to organize conferences on economic and disarmament issues. It was formally dissolved in 1946.

Bretton Woods

The site of an inter-Allied conference held in 1944 to discuss the post-war international economic order. The conference led to the establishment of the IMF and the World Bank. In the postwar era the links between these two institutions, the establishment of GATT and the convertibility of the dollar into gold were known as the Bretton Woods system. After the dollar's devaluation in 1971 the world moved to a system of floating exchange rates.

towards the bombed-out suburbs of Berlin, Hitler ordered the demolition of what was left of German industry and infrastructure. On 30 April 1945 Hitler committed suicide.

It is tempting to try to pinpoint the moment when the Grand Alliance began to fall apart between Hitler's suicide and Germany's final surrender on 5 May 1945. As the purpose that had united the Allies in the first place was achieved, so runs the logic, the Alliance began to pull apart. However, the defeat of Nazi Germany is only one part of a much wider explanation of why wartime cooperation between the Big Three did not continue into peacetime. In 1944—45 a progressive breakdown in East-West relations was not a foregone conclusion.

London, Washington and Moscow shared an interest in checking the reemergence of German revanchism. Europeans of all ideological hues longed for an extended period of quiet reconstruction and resettlement. Why then did East-West relations go sour? The main part of the answer lies in the clash of values and visions of world order between the victorious Powers.

From 4 to 11 February 1945 Roosevelt, Churchill and Stalin met at Yalta in Crimea. The conference marked the high point of inter-Allied co-operation. The Big Three reiterated their demand for Nazi Germany's unconditional surrender. Stalin pledged to enter the war against Japan (the Red Army in fact attacked Japan on 8 August). With victory in sight, post-war issues took on urgency. Officials drew up plans for a Four-Power occupation of Germany (the French would occupy one zone) and the prosecution of German war criminals. Consensus was also reached on the need for a new international organization to promote collective security to replace the now defunct League of Nations. In line with the principles first set out in the Atlantic Charter, the Big Three issued a ‘Declaration on Liberated Europe'. The declaration promised Europeans the right to determine their own futures through democratic institutions. Finally, they settled the long- disputed question of Poland's borders. The frontiers of the new Polish state would be drawn much further westward, at the territorial expense of Germany, and to the benefit of Soviet Russia.

Yalta could have formed the basis for a working relationship, but each of the Big Three was seeking peace and security in its own way, and officials in each capital worked to identify and remedy the likely circumstances under which new threats might emerge according to deeply entrenched doctrines. Washington, for example, was determined not to repeat the mistakes of the 1920s and 1930s. Peace would be secured through the active participation of the United States in a number of new multilateral institutions.

In July 1944 the Americans thus hosted delegates from forty-four nations at Bretton Woods in New Hampshire in order to fashion a post-war economic order. The conference buzzed with Anglo- American ideals of liberal economics and free trade. Two institutions were established: the International Monetary Fund and the International Bank for Reconstruction and Development (or the World Bank). The mission of the first was to set up a new financial system based on fixed exchange rates to facilitate world capital flows; the second was intended to supply the capital for major reconstruction projects. Similarly, from August to October 1944, Washington played host to diplomats from thirty-nine countries for the Dumbarton Oaks

Conference on the formation of the United Nations Organization. Just like Woodrow Wilson decades before, Roosevelt believed that the world needed a single forum for the peaceful resolution of conflicts. Yet he also recognized that the replacement for the old League had to reflect the unequal distribution of power and responsibility in international relations. Roosevelt’s vision of the new UN thus included a General Assembly of all states and a select executive (the Security Council) of Great Powers, principally the United States, the USSR, China and Britain, which would act together as the world’s ‘four policemen’.

United Nations (UN)

An international organization established after the Second World War to replace the League of Nations. Since its establishment in 1945, its membership has grown to 192 countries.

Roosevelt’s idea of the ‘four policemen’ indicated his willingness to work with Moscow. As Cordell Hull, the secretary of state, said in November 1943, with the foundation of a concert of Great Powers there would no longer be the need for ‘spheres of influence, for alliances, for balance of power, or for any other special arrangements through which, in the unhappy past, the nations strove to safeguard their security or to promote their interests’.

These words do not, as one might think, betray a lack of political savvy and sophistication. The president and his advisers knew that Stalin was a suspicious tyrant. What they hoped was that the war had taught the Soviet leader and his officials that mutually beneficial relations with the capitalist world were possible. They were equally alert to Moscow’s deep sense of insecurity. Eastern Europe, they agreed, could no longer be a hotbed for anti-communism and a launch pad for anti-communist crusades. Russia would be preponderant in the region. But how would Moscow exercise that power? The Americans did not object to Stalin shaping the foreign and defence policies of the Eastern European states. What the Americans rejected was the formation of an exclusive sphere of control. In other words, so long as the Soviets permitted the Eastern Europeans to exercise self-determination and democracy at home, and to participate in multilateral institutions and commerce abroad, then there would be little scope for future conflicts. However, if Moscow tried to impose one-party politics and closed economies within their sphere of control, then Eastern Europe would become a source of national discontent, chronic poverty and eventually general war.

The British understood too that Stalin would dominate Eastern Europe. Like the Americans, Churchill and his advisers did not object to a Soviet sphere of influence, so long as the principles in the Atlantic Charter and the Declaration on Liberated Europe were adhered to. In talks between Churchill, Stalin and their foreign ministers in October 1944, south-eastern Europe was divided between them in what came to be called the ‘percentages agreement’. To protect their imperial interests in the eastern Mediterranean and Egypt, the British attained predominance in Greece, while the Soviet Union attained the dominant position in Romania and Bulgaria. Churchill also implied to Stalin that he would not oppose Soviet claims in Eastern Europe if Stalin would help him safeguard Britain’s Asian empire against American pressure for rapid decolonization.

Britain’s readiness to draw spheres of influence and to shore up its declining empire with diplomacy was consistent with the view prevalent in London that Soviet Russia would behave after the war much like its tsarist predecessor. The British Empire could peacefully co-exist yet still compete with the Soviet one provided their rivalry remained circumscribed by well-defined rules. Churchill’s diplomacy likewise indicated growing anxiety about Britain's place among the World Powers. The war had severely weakened Britain in relation to both the United States and the Soviet Union. No one could be sure of the continued flow of American material aid and goodwill across the Atlantic. Indeed, despite Churchill's stormy relations with General de Gaulle, who had been recognized as head of the provisional government in Paris, the British turned to France as a potential ally to help counteract Soviet influence in Western Europe. It was thus the British who persuaded Washington and Moscow that France should be responsible for a zone of occupation in Germany and that it should be given a permanent seat on the UN Security Council.

decolonization

The process whereby an imperial power gives up its formal authority over its colonies.

see Chapter 9

Evidence from the Soviet archives confirms that Stalin and his top advisers had no ‘master plan' for Eastern Europe leading to the full communist take-over in 1947—48. Nonetheless, Soviet security policy, just like that of the United States and Britain, was the product of weighty historical and ideological factors. As American diplomats understood, the Soviets would not allow Eastern Europe once again to become the springboard for war against Russia. In November 1943, Stalin had insisted that the Soviet Union retain the territorial gains it had made under the Nazi-Soviet pact and from Finland and Romania, the absorption of the Baltic States, and the movement of Poland's frontier with Russia further westward. For Stalin and his security planners, territory equalled security. This did not necessarily mean the imposition of communist dictatorships across Eastern Europe, but where the Red Army had become the army of occupation, territory was best safeguarded through deep political and economic transformations. ‘This war is not as in the past,' Stalin explained in 1945. ‘Whoever occupies a territory imposes his own social systems. Everyone imposes his own system as far as his army has the power to do so. It cannot be otherwise.' To be sure, the Soviets were primarily concerned with reconstruction, recovery and freedom from aggression in this period, but their willingness to deal with the United States and Britain only reflected what they expected to be a long truce with the leading proponents of global capitalism and imperialism.

After Yalta, there were signs that the truce would not hold for long. A change of American presidents accelerated the downturn in relations. On 12 April 1945, Roosevelt died and his vice-president, Harry S. Truman, assumed the presidency. The new man in the White House had not been a member of Roosevelt's inner circle during the war and was less inclined to give Stalin the benefit of the doubt. Truman's fears that the Soviets might emerge as the next totalitarian threat to the American way of life, as well as the liberty, prosperity and security of Western Europe and Japan, also arose from a steady hardening of attitudes. The atomic bomb played an important, though alone not decisive, role in the magnification of hostilities. Before becoming president, Truman had been kept in the dark about the Manhattan Project — the codename for the American atomic programme - but Soviet intelligence had had some knowledge of the project as early as 1941. After the successful detonation of the first bomb on 16 July 1945, Truman hoped that the weapon would provide him with the lever he needed to keep the Soviets loyal to the Yalta Accords. As David Holloway has shown, Stalin and Molotov were equally determined not to be intimidated by the atomic bomb and deliberately toughened their responses to Truman's abrasive diplomacy.

Poland was the initial source of grave tension. Over Poland, Truman and Churchill saw Stalin as a contract breaker (which was a serious charge in the light of Hitler's failure to respect treaties), while Stalin and Molotov saw the West's pressure for elections in Poland as a violation of their designated sphere of control. Poland was a sensitive issue for all three states: Britain had gone to war over Poland; Polish Americans formed a powerful lobby in Washington; and twice in thirty years German troops had attacked Russia through Poland. At Yalta, Stalin agreed to form an inclusive government through free elections that would have a place for the representatives of the Polish government in exile in London. During the war, Stalin and the London Poles tried to strike an equitable bargain, but failed. Historic antagonisms ran too deep, and revelations in 1942 that the Red Army had murdered 15,000 Polish officers at Katyn Forest did not improve matters. For Moscow, the danger was that free elections would elect an anti-Soviet government in Warsaw. Since the Polish Workers Party had no base of popular support, this fear was not unfounded. Poland, as the Red Army's access route to defeated Germany, was too valuable to risk and therefore, despite concessions from Washington and London, Stalin reneged on his Yalta pledges and imposed his own subservient provisional government known as the Lublin Poles. Washington and London complained. Perhaps Stalin wanted an exclusive sphere of control after all? Yet, on 5 July, the two governments recognized a slightly modified cabinet of Lublin Poles as the legitimate government in Warsaw. Regardless of how much outrage British and Americans officials felt over the Polish elections, the German question still had to be settled in collaboration with the Soviet Union.

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Source: Best Antony. International History of the Twentieth Century and Beyond. Routledge,2008. — 638 p.. 2008

The collapse of the Grand Alliance

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