Source A

How important was the general mobilisation of the Russian army on 31 July?

At first glance it would seem to have been crucial since Russia’s move was answered immediately by Germany’s mobilisation and within two days by the outbreak of war. Even without the Russian mobilisation there is, however, every reason to doubt whether by 30 July a European conflict could have been avoided since, as Russian diplomats stressed, by then Austria and Germany had gone too far to retreat without serious damage to their prestige and to the stability of their alliance … Study of the July Crisis from the Russian standpoint indeed confirms the now generally accepted view that the major immediate responsibility for the outbreak of the war rested unequivocally on the German government.

Source: D.C.B. Lieven, Russia and the Origins of the First World War (1983)

Source B

At the center of the dispute stands the German Chancellor, Theobald von Bethmann-Hollweg, the civilian head of the German federal government. Some historians, with Fritz Fischer in the lead, have argued that Bethmann seized upon the assassination as the pretext to launch a long-planned war of aggression, whose goal was German hegemony on the European continent. The preponderance of evidence, however, now suggests that the chancellor pursued a somewhat more cautious policy, which grew out of his anxiety over the future of the Austrian monarchy, whose survival, he believed, did justify the risk of a European war. Bethmann was strengthened in this belief by the country’s leading soldier, the chief of the army’s General Staff, Helmuth von Moltke …

The thinking of both Bethmann and Moltke betrayed as well the malaise that was rife among Germany’s political and social elites over the country’s domestic future – particularly over the dramatic growth of the world’s most formidable Socialist party.

Source: Roger Chickering, Imperial Germany and the Great War, 1914-1918 (1998)

Source C

Two things are clear. First, while the Fischer controversy is now itself a part of history … it still provides the framework within which the origins of the war are discussed by both German and non-German historians… Some rejecting the so-called ‘primacy of domestic policy’ have tried to reinstate the decisive importance of international politics for the outbreak of war … More persuasively, historians have underlined the interdependence of foreign and domestic policy … Even among those who emphasize the role played by domestic considerations, there has been debate over whether Germany really faced internal crisis in 1914 – and whether this was true of Germany alone. … There is still a good case for arguing that Germany bore a major share of the responsibility for the war. But any such argument must be grounded in the volatile international situation of the time and set against a realistic analysis of how other powers behaved.

Source: David Blackbourn, History of Germany 1780 -1918: The Long Nineteenth Century (2003)

Source D

The consensus has for many years been that it was the German government that wilfully turned the Balkan crisis of 1914 into a world war. Yet that is surely to understate the shared responsibility of all the European empires. For one thing, the Austrian government could hardly be blamed for demanding redress from Serbia in the wake of the Archduke’s murder … It is true that when the Kaiser first informed the Austrian ambassador that Germany would back Austria, he explicitly stated that that support would be forthcoming ‘even if it should come to a war between Austria and Russia’. But an offer of support conditional on Russian non-intervention would have been quite worthless…

Without doubt, the German generals eagerly seized the opportunity for war and delayed their mobilization only in order that Russia would appear the aggressor. Yet German anxieties about the pace of Russia’s post-1905 rearmament were not wholly unjustified …

The French generals, whose belief in the morale-building benefits of the offensive was second to none, were scarcely less eager for war. They had no intention of standing by while Germany defeated their Russian ally, but planned instead to invade southern Germany through Alsace-Lorraine as soon as hostilities began.

Where the Kaiser erred most egregiously was in believing that the encirclement of Germany had been carefully planned by the Entente powers, above all by Great Britain. In reality, neither Edward VII nor his successor George V had remotely considered this possibility; nor had politicians in either the Liberal or the Conservative Party.

Source: Niall Ferguson, The War of the World: History’s Age of Hatred (2006)

Source A

The first day of the Battle of the Somme, 1916 – a German account.

The men in the dugouts waited ready, belts full of hand-grenades around them, gripping their rifles . . . it was of vital importance to lose not a second in taking up position in the open to meet the British infantry which would advance immediately behind the artillery barrage.

At 7.30 a.m. the hurricane of shells ceased. . . . Our men at once clambered up the steep shafts leading from the dugouts to daylight and ran . . . to the nearest craters. The machineguns were pulled out of the dugouts and hurriedly placed in position. . . . As soon as the men were in position, a series of lines were seen moving forward from the British trenches. The first line appeared without end to right and left. It was quickly followed by a second, then a third and fourth . . .

‘Get ready’ was passed along our front from crater to crater. . . . A few minutes later, when the leading British line was within a hundred yards, the rattle of machinegun and rifle broke out along the whole line of shell holes.

Whole sections seemed to fall . . . the advance rapidly crumbled under the hail of shells and bullets. All along the line men could be seen throwing up their arms and collapsing, never to move again. Badly wounded rolled about in their agony.

Source: Quoted in A. H. Farrar-Hockley, The Somme (Pan/Severn House, 1976).

Source A

Speech by Maxim Litvinov, Soviet Foreign Affairs Minister, to the League at Geneva, 1934.

They [the aggressor states] are now still weaker than a possible bloc of peace-loving states, but the policy of non-resistance to evil and bartering with aggressors, which the opponents of sanctions propose to us, can have no other result than further strengthening and increasing the forces of aggression, a further expansion of their field of action. And the moment might really arrive when their power has grown to such an extent that the League of Nations, or what remains of it, will be in no condition to cope with them, even if it wants to. . . . With the slightest attempt at actual perpetration of aggression, collective action as envisaged in Article 16 must be brought into effect progressively in accordance with the possibilities of each League member. In other words, the programme envisioned in the Covenant of the League must be carried out against the aggressor, but decisively, resolutely and without any wavering.

Source: Quoted in G. Martel (ed.), The Origins of the Second World War Reconsidered (Routledge, 1999 edition).

Source B

Whether the League of Nations could really help establish peace and settle disputes in the way that Wilson envisaged was debatable from the very outset. The member states of this system of collective security remained absolutely sovereign. And in the light of their divergent interests, especially those of the larger states, it was hard to see how any consensus could be reached on the question of sanctions. Among the privileged permanent members of the Council of the League of Nations, the larger European colonial powers had the upper hand. (In the spring of 1919 no one suspected that the United States would not become a member of the League of Nations.)

H. G. Winkler, The Age of Catastrophe: A History of the West, 1914 – 1945. (Yale University Press 2015) p 124

Source C

The peace that followed the First World War was the continuation of war by other means. The Bolsheviks proclaimed an end to hostilities, only to plunge the Russian Empire into a barbaric civil war. The Western statesmen drafted peace treaties – one for each of the defeated Central Powers ( Germany, Austria, Hungary, Bulgaria and Turkey) – each of which was a casus belli in its own right.

N. Ferguson, The War of the World: History’s Age of Hatred. (Allen Lane 2006) p141

Source D

Was there, I began to ask myself, really such a thing as the Second World War? Might it not be more correct to speak of multiple regional conflicts? After all, what began in 1939 was only a European war between Poland and, on the other side, Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union, with Britain and France siding with the under-dog more in word than deed. Poland’s Western allies did not really enter the fray until 1940, whereupon Germany won a short continental war in Western Europe. In 1914, even as the war between Germany and Britain was in its infancy, Hitler began a quite different war against his former ally Stalin. Meanwhile, Mussolini pursued his vain dreams of an Italian empire in East and North Africa and the Balkans. All of this was more or less entirely unrelated to the wars that were launched by Japan in Asia: the one against China, which had begun in 1937, if not in 193; the one against the British, Dutch and French empires, which had been won by the middle of 1942; and the one against the United States, which was unwinnable.

N. Ferguson, The War of the World: History’s Age of Hatred. (Allen Lane 2006) p xx

Source A

The conventional chronology of the war is no longer useful. Fighting began in the early 1930s in China and ended in China, South East Asia, Eastern Europe and the Middle East only in the decade after 1945. The warfare between 1939 and 1945 may provide the heart of the narrative, but history of the conflict goes back at least to the Japanese occupation of Manchuria in 1931 and forward to the final insurgencies and civil wars prompted by the war, but unresolved in 1945. Moreover, the First World War, and the violence that preceded and followed it, profoundly influenced the world in the 1920s and 1930s, supporting the contention that little is to be gained by separating the two giant conflicts. Both can be seen as stages of a second Thirty Years War about the reordering of the world system in a final stage of crisis.

R. Overy, Blood and Ruins” The Great Imperial War, 1931- 1945 (Allen Lane 2021) p x

Source B

From the moment he became Chancellor, Hitler acted and other statesmen reacted.

His intentions were fixed long before he came to power. They were breath-taking in their ambition. Hitler was not a conventional European statesman. Governed by a Social Darwinist belief in international affairs as a perpetual struggle between races for survival and supremacy. Hitler repeatedly told his leading military and naval officers that Germany would conquer Eastern Europe, aggrandising its vast agricultural resources for itself and pushing aside those who lived there to make way for the expansion of the German race’s ‘living space’. France, Germany’s traditional enemy in the west, would be subjugated to allow Germany to become Europe’s dominant nation. This was not a normal German foreign policy in any sense; nor was it determined by structural factors inherent in the international system of Europe since the nineteenth century, as some have argued.

R. J. Evans, The Third Reich in History and Memory, ( Little, Brown 2015) p 251

Source C

At the start of 1933, the international system was in disarray. The League of Nations had been badly damaged by its mishandling of the Manchurian crisis and the prolonged disarmament discussions being held in Geneva. Much had been expected from the World Disarmament Conference of 1932; the failure of statesmen to make any progress was a severe blow to popular expectations. The on-going depression had shattered the fragile, international financial and trading structure and led to a general retreat from co-operation between the states. …

It is with Hitler and Hitler’s intentions that any student of European international history must start.

Z. Steiner, The Triumph of the Dark, (Oxford University Press 2011 ) p60,62

Source D. Adolf Hitler in Mein Kampf

Thus, we National Socialists have intentionally drawn a line under the foreign policy of pre-war Germany. We are taking up where we left off six hundred years ago. We are putting an end to the perpetual German march towards the South and West of Europe and turning our eyes towards the land in the East. We are finally putting a stop to the colonial and trade policy of the pre-war period and passing over to the territorial policy of the future.

However, when we speak of new land in Europe today we must principally bear in mind Russia and the border states subject to her. Destiny itself seems to wish to point the way for us here.

Edited J. Noakes and G. Pridham, Nazism 1919-1945: 3. Foreign Policy, War and Racial Extermination. (Exeter University Publications 1988) p 615.

Source A

Extract from Hitler’s speech to the SS leaders, November 1938.

We must be clear that in the next ten years we will certainly encounter unheard-of critical conflicts. It is not only the struggle of the nations, which in this case are put forward by the opposing side merely as a front, but it is the ideological struggle of the entire Jewry, freemasonry, Marxism, and churches of the world. These forces – of which I presume the Jews to be the driving spirit, the origin of all the negatives – are clear that if Germany and Italy are not annihilated, they will be annihilated. That is a simple conclusion. In Germany the Jew cannot hold out. This is a question of years. We will drive them out more and more with an unprecedented ruthlessness.

Source B

Extracts from Hitler’s speech to the Reichstag, 30 January 1939.

I have very often in my lifetime been a prophet, and was mostly derided. In the time of my struggle for power it was in the first instance the Jewish people who received only with laughter my prophecies that I would sometime take over the leadership of the state, and then bring the Jewish problem to its solution. I believe that this once hollow laughter has meanwhile already stuck in the throat. I want today to be a prophet again: if international finance Jewry inside and outside Europe should succeed in plunging the nations once more into a world war, the result will be not the bolshevization of the earth and thereby the victory of Jewry, but the annihilation of the Jewish race in Europe.

Source: Both sources are quoted in Ian Kershaw, Hitler 1936–45: Nemesis (Allen Lane/Penguin, 2000).

Source C

The evidence for the precise nature of a decision to implement the ‘Final Solution’, for its timing, and even for the very existence of such a decision is circumstantial…. And for all the brutality of his own statements, there is no record of Hitler speaking categorically even in his close circle of a decision he had taken to kill the Jews.

His own direct role was largely confined to the propaganda arena – to public tirades of hatred and dire but vague prognostications about the fate of the Jews. The most notorious of these is his Reichstag speech of 30 January 1939, when he ‘prophesied’ that the war would bring about the ‘annihilation (Vernichtung) of the Jewish race in Europe’ – a prophecy to which he made frequent reference in the years to come, and which he significantly post-dated to 1 September 1939, the day of the outbreak of war. This itself reflected Hitler’s mental merger of the war and his ‘mission’ to destroy the Jews, which reached its fateful point of convergence in the conception of the ‘war of annihilation’ against the Soviet Union.

I. Kershaw, Hitler, The Germans, And The Final Solution. ( Yale University Press 2008) p 256-7

Source A

Stalin’s reply to Churchill’s ‘Iron Curtain’ speech, in an interview for Pravda,13 March 1946.

I regard it [Churchill’s speech] as a dangerous move, calculated to sow the seeds of dissension among the Allied states and impede their collaboration. Mr Churchill now takes the stand of the warmongers, and he is not alone. Mr Churchill has friends not only in Britain but in the United States as well. . . .

The following circumstances should not be forgotten. The Germans made their invasion of the USSR through Finland, Poland, Romania, Bulgaria and Hungary. The Germans were able to make their invasion through these countries because, at the time, governments hostile to the Soviet Union existed in these countries. As a result of the German invasion the Soviet Union has lost a total of about seven million people. In other words the Soviet Union’s loss of life has been several times greater than that of Britain and the USA put together. And so what can there be surprising about the fact that the Soviet Union, anxious for its future safety, is trying to see to it that governments loyal in their attitude to the Soviet Union should exist in these countries. How can anyone, who has not taken leave of his senses, describe these peaceful aspirations of the Soviet Union as expansionist tendencies on the part of our state?

Source: Quoted in Martin McCauley, The Origins of the Cold War, 1941–1949 (Longman, 1995).

Source A

A memo from John McNaughten, US Assistant Secretary of Defense, setting out his worries about the way the war was going, March 1966.

[I am] very deeply concerned about the breadth and intensity of public unrest and dissatisfaction with the war . . . especially among young people, the underprivileged, the intelligentsia and the women. Will the move to call up 20,000 Reserves polarize opinion to the extent that the ‘doves’ in the United States will get out of hand – massive refusals to serve, or to fight, or to cooperate, or worse? There may be a limit beyond which many Americans and much of the world will not permit the US to go. The picture of the world’s greatest superpower killing or seriously injuring 1000 non-combatants a week, while trying to pound a tiny backward nation into submission, on an issue whose merits are hotly disputed, is not a pretty one. It could conceivably produce a costly distortion in the American national consciousness.

Source B

Report on the situation in Vietnam, prepared for President Johnson by a group of officers in 1968.

200,000 more troops will not strengthen the Saigon government, because the Saigon leadership show no sign of a willingness – let alone an ability – to attract the necessary loyalty or support of the people. It would mean mobilizing reserves and increasing the military budget. There will be more US casualties, more taxes. This growing disaffection, accompanied as it certainly will be, by increased defiance of the draft [call-up orders] and growing unrest in the cities because of the belief that we are neglecting domestic problems, runs great risks of provoking a domestic crisis of unprecedented proportions.

Source: Both sources are quoted in Howard Zinn, A People’s History of the United States (Longman, 1996).

Source A

A UN General Assembly Resolution, 6 November 1956.

The General Assembly notes with deep concern the violent repression by the Soviet troops of the efforts of the Hungarian people to achieve freedom and independence. It calls upon the USSR to withdraw its forces from Hungary without any further delay. It requests that an investigation be made of the situation caused in Hungary by foreign intervention and a report given to the Security Council in the shortest possible time.

Source B

Statement by the new Hungarian government to the Security Council, 12 November 1956.

Soviet troops are here for the purpose of restoring law and order, and at the request of the Hungarian government. We cannot permit UN observers to enter Hungary, since the situation is purely an internal affair of the Hungarian state.

Source A

An account of events in Leipzig on 8 October 1989.

Mikhail Gorbachev allowed it to be known he had warned Erich Honecker that Soviet troops would not be available for use against demonstrators in the GDR, telling him: ‘Life punishes those who hold back’. That evening there were demonstrations in Berlin and Dresden; the Stasi (secret police) broke up most of them with great brutality. . . .

But it was the following day in Leipzig that the great test came. Leipzig, where the Lutheran church had given great support to the demonstrators, was pre-eminent in the campaign for reform and democracy. Early in the morning of 8 October the Stasi went from factory to factory and office to office, warning people that they shouldn’t take part in the big demonstration which was planned for that afternoon. . . . Several thousand troops were deployed; they took up position on every street corner, and tanks and armoured personnel carriers were drawn up at all the main intersections. On the rooftops near the station, marksmen were positioned . . . the military and the Stasi had orders to fire on the demonstrators if there was no alternative way of stopping them. If the troops had opened fire, as in China, it might have worked. . . . The indications are that the army, and perhaps even the Stasi, lacked the will to carry out their orders. There is evidence that Soviet officials got wind of the possibility that a massacre was being planned and warned against it. The demonstrators marched through the streets and the soldiers watched them go. . . . The government was on the run. Nine days later, Erich Honecker resigned as party leader.

Source: John Simpson, Despatches from the Barricades (Hutchinson, 1990).

Source A

Article in Fortune magazine, 11 February 1991.

The president and his men worked overtime to quash freelance peacemakers in the Arab world, France and the Soviet Union who threatened to give Saddam a face-saving way out of the box that Bush was building. Over and over, Bush repeated the mantra: no negotiations, no deals, and specifically, no linkage to a Palestinian peace conference. ‘Our jobs, our way of life, our own freedom, and the freedom of friendly countries around the world will suffer’, he said, ‘if control of the world’s great oil reserves fell into the hands of that one man, Saddam Hussein.’

Source: Quoted in William Blum, Killing Hope (Zed Books, 2003).

Source A

The view of Robert Kagan, an American writer on politics, in 1998.

The truth is that the benevolent hegemony exercised by the United States is good for a vast portion of the world’s population. It is certainly a better international arrangement than all realistic alternatives. . . .

The USA must refuse to abide by certain international conventions, like the international criminal court and the Kyoto accord on global warming. The US must support arms control, but not always for itself. It must live by a double standard.

Source: Quoted in William Blum, Killing Hope (Zed Books, 2003).

Source B

The view of Ken Booth and Tim Dunne, two British experts on international politics.

We do not believe that the ‘United States’ is hated . . . it is the policies of successive US governments that are so hated: the manner in which the world’s sole superpower tends always to get its way; its sometimes brutal foreign policy and profitable project of globalization; its support for tyrants while mouthing the language of democracy and human rights. . . . In any human situation, such power tends to provoke the hostility of those who are not listened to, or who do not get their way, ever.

Set against this, as a society, the US is an idea to which countless victims flock, seeking refuge from tyranny and hunger. The USA is one of the few countries to treat immigration as an economic resource rather than a burden.

Source: Ken Booth and Tim Dunne (eds), Worlds in Collision: Terror and the Future of Global Order (Palgrave Macmillan, 2002).