The origins of World War II, 1929–39
The 1930s were a decade of unmitigated crisis culminating in the outbreak of a second total war. The treaties and settlements of the first postwar era collapsed with shocking suddenness under the impact of the Great Depression and the aggressive revisionism of Japan, Italy, and Germany. By 1933 hardly one stone stood on another of the economic structures raised in the 1920s. By 1935 Adolf Hitler’s Nazi regime had torn up the Treaty of Versailles and by 1936 the Locarno treaties as well. Armed conflict began in Manchuria in 1931 and spread to Abyssinia in 1935, Spain in 1936, China in 1937, Europe in 1939, and the United States and U.S.S.R. in 1941. See the .
The context in which this collapse occurred was an “economic blizzard” that enervated the democracies and energized the dictatorial regimes. Western intellectuals and many common citizens lost faith in democracy and free-market economics, while widespread pacifism, isolationism, and the earnest desire to avoid the mistakes of 1914 left Western leaders without the will or the means to defend the 1919 order. This combination of demoralized publics, stricken institutions, and uninspired leadership led historian Pierre Renouvin to describe the 1930s simply as “la décadence.”
The militant authoritarian states on the other hand—Italy, Japan, and (after 1933) Germany—seemed only to wax stronger and more dynamic. The Depression did not cause the rise of the Third Reich or the bellicose ideologies of the German, Italian, and Japanese governments (all of which pre-dated the 1930s), but it did create the conditions for the Nazi seizure of power and provide the opportunity and excuse for Fascist empire-building. Hitler and Mussolini aspired to total control of their domestic societies, in part for the purpose of girding their nations for wars of conquest which they saw, in turn, as necessary for revolutionary transformation at home. This ideological meshing of foreign and domestic policy rendered the Fascist leaders wholly enigmatic to the democratic statesmen of Britain and France, whose attempts to accommodate rather than resist the Fascist states only made inevitable the war they longed to avoid.
The economic blizzard
Political consequences of the Depression
The debate over the origins of the Great Depression and the reasons for its severity and length is highly political, given the implications for the validity of theories of free market, regulated, and planned economies, and of monetary and fiscal policy. It is usually dated from the New York stock-market crash of October 1929, which choked the domestic and international flow of credit and severely damaged global trade and production. Wall Street prices fell from an index of 216 to 145 in a month, stabilized in early 1930, then continued downward to a bottom of 34 in 1932. Industrial production fell nearly 20 percent in 1930. Unlike previous swings in the business cycle, this financial panic did not eventuate in the expected period of readjustment, but rather defied all governmental and private efforts to restore prosperity for years until it seemed to a great many that the system itself was breaking down.
Mutual recriminations flew across the Atlantic. Americans blamed the Europeans for the reparations tangle, for pegging their currencies too high upon the return to gold, and for misuse of the American loans of the 1920s. Europeans blamed the United States for its insistence on repayment of war debts, high tariffs, and the unfettered speculation leading to the stock-market crash. Certainly all of these factors contributed. More tangibly, however, a sudden contraction of international credit in June 1928 made an international emergency likely. Since the Dawes Plan of 1924, Europe had depended for capital and liquidity on the availability of American loans, but increasingly American investors were flocking to the stock market with their savings, and new capital issues for foreign account in the United States dropped 78 percent, from $530,000,000 to $119,000,000. Loans to Germany collapsed from $200,000,000 in the first half of 1928 to $77,000,000 in the second half and to $29,500,000 for the entire year of 1929. A world crisis was also brewing in basic commodities, a market in which prices had been depressed throughout the decade. Mechanization of agriculture stimulated overproduction, and Soviet dumping of wheat on the world market to earn foreign exchange for the First Five-Year Plan compounded the problem.
The Smoot–Hawley Tariff, the highest in U.S. history, became law on June 17, 1930. Conceived and passed by the House of Representatives in 1929, it may well have contributed to the loss of confidence on Wall Street and signaled American unwillingness to play the role of leader in the world economy. Other countries retaliated with similarly protective tariffs, with the result that the total volume of world trade spiraled downward from a monthly average of $2,900,000,000 in 1929 to less than $1,000,000,000 by 1933. The credit squeeze, bank failures, deflation, and loss of exports forced production down and unemployment up in all industrial nations. In January 1930 the United States had 3,000,000 idle workers, and by 1932 there were more than 13,000,000. In Britain 22 percent of the adult male work force lacked jobs, while in Germany unemployment peaked in 1932 at 6,000,000. All told, some 30,000,000 people were out of work in the industrial countries in 1932.
The Depression naturally magnified European bitterness over the continuing international obligations, but the weakest link in the financial chain was Austria, whose central bank, the Creditanstalt, was on the verge of bankruptcy. In March 1931, Stresemann’s successor as German foreign minister, Julius Curtius, signed an agreement with Vienna for a German–Austrian customs union, but French objections to what they saw as a first step toward the dreaded Anschluss provoked a run on the Creditanstalt and forced Berlin and Vienna to renounce the union on September 3.
The panic then spread to Germany, rendering the Reichsbank unable to meet its obligations under the Young Plan. President Hoover responded on June 20, 1931, with a proposal for a one-year moratorium on all intergovernmental debts. Short of a general recovery or global agreement on the restoration of trade, however, the moratorium could only be a stopgap. Instead, every country fled toward policies of protection, self-sufficiency, and the creation of regional economic blocs in hopes of isolating itself from the world collapse. On September 21, 1931, the Bank of England left the gold standard, and the pound sterling promptly lost 28 percent of its value, undermining the solvency of countries in eastern Europe and South America. In October a national coalition government formed to take emergency measures. The Ottawa Imperial Economic Conference of 1932 gave birth to the British Commonwealth of Nations and a system of imperial preferences, signaling the end of Britain’s 86-year-old policy of free trade.
The Lausanne Conference of June–July 1932 took up the question of what should be done after the Hoover Moratorium. Even the French granted the impossibility of further German payments and agreed to make an end of reparations in return for a final German transfer of 3,000,000,000 marks (which was never made). The United States, however, still insisted that the war debts be honoured, whereupon the French parliament willfully defaulted, damaging Franco-American relations.