Was World War II inevitable?

This year marks 80 years since the beginning of the largest and bloody epic of mutual mass extermination in the history of mankind, known to all of us as the Second World War. All these years, many professional historians, as well as just people who are not indifferent to the most tragic and fateful moments of the past, have been wondering: was this orgy of death, covering almost the entire globe, that claimed tens of millions of lives and left whole countries in ruins, inevitable. Or, nevertheless, under certain conditions, could this cup pass the long-suffering human race? Well, let us and we will try to look for an answer to it.

The world that gave rise to ... war

In addition to the eightieth anniversary of World War II, this year is another, no less significant date. On June 28, 1919, a peace treaty was signed in French Versailles, marking the end of the Great War, which no one had thought to assign any numbering to then. Many sacredly believed that after experiencing a five-year-old bloody horror, humanity would think a thousand times before again clutching at a weapon. And at the same time, the Treaty of Versailles, in fact, became only the prologue of a new world battle, many times more severe than the previous one. Be that as it may, the origins of the tragedy that erupted in 1939 must be sought not even two decades earlier, but in those motives that gave rise to the year 1914.

As a matter of fact, the causes of any global armed conflict can, in fact, be reduced to two words: "redivision of the world." And it doesn’t matter what exactly the “great” (or considering themselves as such) countries want to redraw on its map: borders, spheres of political influence, raw material bases or markets for goods. Any of these aspirations, and, even more so, their combination, can become a reason for “continuing policy by other means. ” Those forces who in reality stood behind the outbreak of the First World War pursued very specific goals. The Anglo-Saxon world and France, which joined it, wanted to stop the rapid economic development and concomitant growth of influence in the world of Germany and Russia. The "democratic" countries were eager to destroy the true monarchies, which hindered them by the very fact of their existence, the last European empires - Russian, Austro-Hungarian, German. The United States was eager to turn from a provincial overseas country into one of the states deciding the fate of the world.

Regarding the United States, by the way, there is another version - very believable. She says that to the greatest extent possible, unleashing a great war, American bankers, already then striving for global hegemony, planned in this way to crush the world financial system based on the "gold standard." Was it so - now it’s not possible to find out, but in the end it was precisely this that all came to ... We can say that it fulfilled the main tasks that that war had to solve. Not even the three listed above were destroyed, but as many as four empires - the Ottoman collapsed, so to speak, "to the heap." The Germans and Russians did not have time to expand their sales markets and increase exports - they were faced with the question of survival. And yet, allies who have gone too far and too reveled in their own victory over the “treacherous Teutons” made a huge mistake - in their own cruelty and greed for the defeated, they went too far.

Germany was not just defeated - the Germans were robbed and humiliated as soon as it is possible to humiliate a people that for centuries considered itself a nation of born warriors. Germany chopped off 70 thousand square kilometers of its ancestral territories, and at the same time they took away everything to a single colony. She was forbidden not only to have an army and navy, but even to produce weapons with a barrel length greater than the mocking winners would measure. The war, which followed its loss, countless reparations and indemnities, not only ruined the German economy - they actually destroyed it. Hyperinflation, total unemployment, poverty and balancing on the brink of hunger ... What do you think could grow out of all this? Namely, what turned out as a result is the Third Reich. All of which was said above, gave rise to despair, spilling into anger all over the world and provoking Hitler to life. Germany, after all, did not "fall" into Nazism all of a sudden. She came to him. The National Socialist Party did not seize power as a result of the coup — it advanced towards it in a long and thorny way, in order to ultimately receive as a result of the most democratic elections in 1933. Germany longed for the Fuhrer - and she received it.

War, as a cure for depression. Great ...

Those who won the First World War, directly pushing the Germans to revenge. Hitler and the Nazis simply became his embodiment, having previously resolved all sore economic and social problems. And, by the way, it's not in that Germany! If anyone forgot, Italy was ruled by the Nazis since 1922. Spain, Portugal, Greece, Yugoslavia, Hungary, Bulgaria, Poland - in all these countries in the 20-30s of the last century there were putsches, as a result of which various dictators and juntas came to power. Military and paramilitary regimes of all kinds of marshals, caudillos, duce and Fuhrer entangled the Old World like cancerous metastases. And in other, apparently prosperous countries, everything was not so decorum and safe. The “big” winners of the First World War, quickly “digesting” what they grabbed, began to think about where and what else to grab, starting with a carnivorous interest to take a closer look at yesterday's “allies” with a smaller caliber. The “small fry” that had fairly expanded in Europe after the collapse of the empires cherished and accumulated “centuries-old” resentments and claims against neighbors, trying on how to grab a couple of regions from them or some other piece fatter. All these spiders in a close European "bank" simply could not help but catch on a new one.

However, perhaps everything would have worked out. At least, it would not end in a world war, but in relatively local battles in the same Balkan madhouse, albeit with a limited participation of larger "players". But Her Majesty the Economy intervened ... What to do - this year we have solid anniversaries! True, one is darker than the other, but it just so happened. Talking about both world wars, without mentioning the global economic crisis that flared up “halfway” between them, in 1929, which we all remember under the name of the Great Depression, would be fundamentally wrong. A nightmare that drove world industrial production to the level of the beginning of the century, giving rise to tens of millions of unemployed in those countries that were considered the richest and most well-fed yesterday, gave rise to stock market and financial collapse in the United States, Canada, Great Britain, France and finally “finished off” the already the German economy, which was breathing its last ... Big war could be the best way out of this situation - it became them. No wonder the end of the Great Depression is considered to be 1939 ...

The Americans revived German industry completely not out of altruism or a conscience that suddenly awoke from them. And they also contributed to the industrialization of the Soviet Union for purely pragmatic reasons - their enterprises desperately needed orders, citizens needed work. In order not to go broke, industrialists on both sides of the ocean were ready to cooperate even with the bald one. Even more desperate, they were looking for ways to return to the blissful times of making super profits on military orders. They needed the world carnage like air, which is why enormous funds were invested in the Third Reich, ready to unleash it. Nothing personal just business! Let Europe, Asia and Africa again burn in the fire - for us all this will only be at hand. I must say, the worst thing is that in the end all these calculations were fully justified - in the Second World War, the United States enriched itself fantastically, just fabulously. Yes, and not just robbed the Germans once again, but also turned them, along with half of Europe into their own humble vassals.

But what about Russia?

Surely many readers are already full of indignation and are ready to cover up the under-author with the last words. After all, he did not mention one word at a time that to a great extent the Western leaders' support for the Nazis was due to their desire to certainly set the Third Reich on the hated Soviet Union. It was for the sake of the “Drang nah Osten” proclaimed by Hitler that they looked through their fingers at Germany’s revival of its military power and at its first aggressive steps, like the Anschluss of Austria and the capture of Czechoslovakia. I agree with this statement 100% or more! However, I admit honestly - a heated discussion among the readers of my article about the hypothetical prospects of Russia in the event of victory in the Civil War of the White movement led me to look at the current topic from a slightly different angle. Faced with numerous allegations that “without the Soviet Union there would have been neither Hitler nor World War II”, to complicate the task, I tried to consider some kind of virtuality in which the USSR did not really exist in the 30s and 40s of the last century. How would events unfold in such a case?

The fall of imperial power in the existing historical realities was most likely inevitable. But let's imagine that in Russia everything ended with the February Revolution, or, as an option, the defeat of the Bolsheviks in the Civil. In the end, not the weakest speeches under communist and socialist slogans in the same Germany and Austria-Hungary were defeated. We assume that in the 30s there was a kind of “free democratic Russia” ... Represented? Now I want to ask - do you, gentlemen, really think that this would be a "panacea" for the Second World War, would prevent it ?! Do you think that the noble western "friends" of our country would strangle Corporal Schicklgruber in the first attempt to become the Fuhrer of the German nation? Well, you can't be so naive! If this was the case, then what, excuse me, why the hell did the same West so desperately drive Russia into the First World War, in which it simply had absolutely no interests? Why did it demand its continuation already from the Provisional Government? Yes, with the simplest and most understandable goal - that our country should be destroyed! It does not matter, in essence, by whom exactly.

And why did you suddenly get the idea that Hitler would not have fallen on Russia if it weren’t for the Bolsheviks to rule? “Drang nah osten” was not invented by him at all, but by amateurs “to expand the living space” at our expense many centuries earlier. Russian soldiers had to knock this nonsense out of the Teutonic iron Boschs back in those days when, not at all, the Soviet Union and the Russian Empire did not exist. Our colossal natural resources, our lands, which can be inhabited by fertile "Aryans", turning their inhabitants into slaves for these same "new owners" - all this has attracted the conquerors for a long time, and today it attracts. Moreover, in the “virtuality” we are considering, Russia would probably be among the winners of Germany and the signatories to the Versailles Treaty. So, the Germans would have had even more accounts for her. And, in the end, if the Third Reich didn’t arise, there would be someone to incite to our Homeland. The same Poles, for example - they were somehow eager to expand the conquests made in the 20s. However, most likely, a whole coalition of different countries would act against us, to calculate all the members of which is a long and thankless task.

It can be stated with the highest degree of certainty - the Second World War would have erupted, with almost any not-so-significant deviations from the history we know. There were too many reasons for her, too many factors played to make her start. And blaming it on Nazi Germany alone would be fundamentally wrong. Today, at propaganda events, such as the anniversary of the Normandy landing, arranged to obscure the historical truth as much as possible, in fact, there are representatives of countries that are more or less collectively responsible for this tragedy. In the same way, it is incorrect, in my opinion, to say that the attack on our country was caused solely by the desire to destroy the Soviet system in it. Everything was simpler and simpler - the "collective West" was going to kill Russia. For the umpteenth time in its history ... And the fact that the invaders were met by a country that managed, albeit at the cost of tremendous stress and huge sacrifices, to repel the enemy invasion and win the Victory, is precisely the merit of those who controlled it at that time. Historical logic suggests that in any other case, everything could have turned out much worse. What would be the result of World War II in this case, I do not even want to imagine.