A CRIMINAL HISTORY OF MANKIND

government that General Franco had proclaimed in Spain. From the beginning of the Civil War
Hitler lent Franco armed support.
With Mussolini now a firm ally - a Berlin-Rome-Tokyo ‘axis’ was formed in 1937 - Hitler turned
all his energies to the problem of union with Austria. The Austrian chancellor Schuschnigg was
bullied into giving the Nazi party of Austria more freedom. In March 1938, political manoeuvring
forced Schuschnigg to resign, and the new Nazi chancellor, Seyss-Inquart, invited Hitler to send
troops into Austria.
At the end of the First World War, Austria had lost part of its territory - the Sudeten mountains - to
Czechoslovakia. Three million Germans lived there, and they wanted to rejoin the new Germany.
Hitler made threatening noises, but he had to proceed cautiously - France, Britain and the Soviet
Union had promised to aid Czechoslovakia in the event of an invasion. Then, to Hitler’s
astonishment, the British prime minister, Neville Chamberlain, proposed to come and see him to
find a ‘peaceful solution’. This meant that Britain was anxious to avoid war.
And after speaking to Hitler, Chamberlain joined with the French premier Daladier to notify the
Czechs that they would have to hand over the Sudeten territory. The Czechs were enraged at the
betrayal, but could do nothing. In Munich, Hitler, Mussolini, Chamberlain, Daladier and Roosevelt
met to discuss the problem, and the Sudetenland was returned to Germany. Chamberlain returned to
England and uttered the famous phrase about ‘peace for our time’.
In the British parliament, Winston Churchill warned that this policy of appeasement would lead to
disaster; he was proved right sooner than even he expected. The Slovakian premier, Tiso, was
deposed in a government crisis, and appealed to Hitler for aid for Slovak independence. Hitler
responded by taking over most of Czechoslovakia, as well as a slice of Poland that the Czechs had
always claimed. At the same time, Mussolini took over Albania. Now the only chance of stopping
Hitler was for Britain and France to combine with the Soviet Union. And at this point, in August
1939, the Nazis staggered the world by announcing that they had signed a non-aggression pact with
Stalin.
Now all that remained for Hitler was to take back the Polish corridor. Since the Poles would object
to losing their link with the sea, this obviously involved invading Poland. On 1 September 1939, his
troops marched across the border and his planes bombed Warsaw. Two days later, England and
France declared war against Germany.
How had it all come about? Marx would undoubtedly have blamed capitalism - as Marxist
historians continue to do; but this crisis had nothing to do with market forces or free enterprise.
Tolstoy would have insisted that the ‘natural laws’ of history are responsible, unknown forces
which are as unpredictable as the weather. But we have seen again and again that it is the will of
individuals that changes the course of history. A ‘great man’ - a Julius Caesar, Genghis Khan, Peter
the Great, Napoleon, Bismarck - sets out to achieve certain aims, and succeeds to a greater or lesser
degree. Lesser men have less of an impact. But the essential clue always lies in the personality of
the individual.
The crises of the post-1920s period were the direct result of the First World War. Without that there
would have been no Russian revolution, no Italian and Spanish fascism, no German Nazism. And
the First World War can be blamed almost entirely on the personality of one man: the Kaiser. And
after the Kaiser came Hitler, another hysterical egoist. But if the Kaiser reminds us of Nero, Hitler