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09/01/2009

Europe in the summer of 1939. According to Ernst von Weizsäcker, then a senior official in the German Foreign Ministry and the father of later West German President Richard von Weizsäcker, the dictator at the head of the strongest military power on the continent was "not a man of logic or reason."

What an understatement.

Nikolaus von Vormann, a young officer, became a member of the Führer's entourage. He was present when Hitler met with his most trusted advisers over lunch or in the evenings, and he noted, with some surprise, that the Reich chancellor's opinion at 11 a.m. was often "completely different from his views at noon or 1 p.m." Hitler, at the time, was vacillating between wanting to invade Poland -- even if it meant triggering a world war -- and postponing the campaign.

There was only one option that was apparently unacceptable to Hitler: permanent peace.

A veteran of World War I who had seen the tattered bodies of his fellow soldiers lying in the trenches, and who had been the victim of a poison gas attack himself, Hitler never recovered from the defeat. A proponent of social Darwinism, he defined politics as the "conduct and process of the historical struggle for the life of nations." Without war, there was stagnation, and stagnation, Hitler believed, was tantamount to ruin. "Long live war -- even if it lasts from two to eight years," he proclaimed. A man who was so regaled by death and doom was incapable of promoting peace.

The Invasion Begins

On Sept. 1, 1939, Hitler's indecisiveness ended. The Wehrmacht had invaded neighboring Poland at dawn. Before the invasion, members of the SS, wearing Polish uniforms, had staged border incidents, and the bodies of murdered concentration camp inmates were presented to the global public as the victims of Polish aggression.

Shortly before 10 a.m. Hitler, feigning outrage, hoarsely announced to the Reichstag: "As of 5:45 a.m., we are now returning their fire." But not even the time was correct. The German invasion had begun an hour earlier.

Two days later, the German invasion had turned into a world war. In addition to Great Britain and France, Commonwealth members Australia, India and New Zealand declared war on the Third Reich, followed by South Africa and Canada soon afterwards.

But that was only the beginning. The war was to rage for another 2,194 days. By the end, Germany was at war with 54 nations. A total of 110 million soldiers fought between Murmansk and Marseille, Tokyo and Tobruk, using weapons that ranged from flamethrowers to folding shovels, hand grenades to machine guns.

The inferno Hitler had unleashed led to an escalation of violence unprecedented in the history of mankind. About 60 million people were killed, more than half of them women, children and the elderly. Six million people died in the Holocaust alone.

The Roots of War

Like a massive earthquake, Hitler's war forever destroyed a world order with Europe at its center. After 1945, the United States became the world's principal driving force. The shift of Poland's borders to the West, the Soviet Union's dominance of Eastern Europe, which would last until 1989, and the partition of Germany -- none of this would have happened without World War II.

And at the root of it all was a man who -- if one is to believe his contemporaries -- was just 1.75 meters (5 foot 9 inches) tall and who weighed a mere 70 kilograms (154 pounds), a man whose guttural pronunciation betrayed his Austrian origins: Adolf Hitler, born in the town of Braunau am Inn.

But is it possible for one man, no matter how powerful a dictator, to set the entire world on fire? For some time, there have been growing doubts about the previously generally accepted view, and the consensus today is that the situation was far more complex than once believed. It remains indisputable that World War II would not have happened without Hitler. But it is also clear that a number of factors helped to turn the Nazi leader's war fantasies into reality.

One of those factors was the compliance of conservative elites in the military, the civil administration and the world of business. They did not share Hitler's crude concept of racial superiority, and many of them feared a war with the Western powers. Nevertheless, they dreamed of acquiring global power and had aspirations to create a Greater Germany that would, at the very least, dominate Eastern Europe. They included men like Franz Halder, the commander-in-chief of the army, who announced in the spring of 1939 that his men had to overrun Poland and would then, "filled with the spirit of having emerged victorious from enormous battles, be prepared to either oppose Bolshevism or be thrown to the West."

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• Part 1: Why Wasn't Hitler Stopped?
• Part 2: 'Long Live War'
• Part 3: Mouthpiece of the Nationalist Masses
• Part 4: 'There Never Was a War Easier to Prevent'
• Part 5: An Historic Mission