Who started World War 2?

One event that I think is overlooked in the rising political tension that led to WW2 was caused by the Imperial German desire to bring about an end to a war on two fronts. As a single act, it probably had more effect than any other, leading to, the end of the Russian, Austro-Hungarian and Ottoman empires, the rise of one murderous totalitarian political system and of a second murderous reactionary totalitarian system.

Its short term effect was to bring down the Tsar and the Russian empire and allow a last desperate push on the Western Front, which nearly succeeded. I don't believe that the long term consequences of the action were given much thought at the time as the Germans lost the Great War and throughout the 1920s and the early thirties, both politcal systems were engaged in establishing their political regimes, ensuring their survival.and plotting the destruction of their political enemies.

The ripples from this one event have caused millions of deaths, countless wars and revolutions and have not yet played out as it still affects the world one hundred and five years later.

The one single event that came back to haunt Germany and the world, took the form of a political time bomb that eventually exploded in June 1941 with the launch of Operation Barbarossa. Having got rid of one one enemy in the form of the Russian empire, they inadvertently helped the creation of a much more ruthless and determined enemy in the form of the Soviet Union. An enemy that they had to destroy as, if left to gain strength and achieve its political aims, would destroy them. Ultimately, the European aspect of WW2 was a fight to the death between two totalitarian political systems, only one of which would survive.

Undoubtedly the one action taken by the Geman High Command that changed the world for ever, destroying the old order, was that of putting Vladimiy Ilyich Lenin in a sealed train and sending him and his fellow revolutionaries to the Finland Station in Petrograd in 1917. The world was never the same again.

 

As there have only (sic) been two World Wars, it's difficult to spot any trend when it comes to specifically how did World War 2 start (reference the title of this thread). My personal view is that there is no definite start or finish and therefore no 'point source' to blame: the World drifts towards World War with various 'high profile' triggers, and hence the usual commments about 'it was AH who started WW2'....but what about Japan in China in the 1930s? Wasn't that the start? Depends on your definition? Has that Russian chap already started WW3 even though 'we' don't currently see it that way?

 

History also repeats itself because politicians don't get that 'if you don't learn from history you are doomed to repeat it' stuff because, well, they are politicians....

Another observation:
WW1....so form a League of Nations so it doesn't happen again....it failed....
WW2....so form the United Nations so it doesn't happen again.....it's failing....anyone seen or heard from them lately?
WW3....

 

I have already written that there are no monocausal causes, but always chains of numerous factors.

AH, however, was a significant factor: he ousted Gregor Strasser as the second force in the NSDAP, duped von Papen, coldcocked Schleicher and had Röhm murdered.
And with that, the most important personalities of a possible alternative political development were eliminated by his initiative
He then transferred all powers de facto and de jure to his person - in order to then realise his perverted visions.

Although he had numerous willing helpers/accomplices and was thus not the only personality, from 1935 at the latest he was THE decisive figure for the following development up to the outbreak of war and the Holocaust.
In short: He was not everything, but without him everything was nothing

As for the individual responsibility for the countless crimes in this context, that is a completely different question.

 

An orchestra can perform a symphony without a conductor but a conductor cannot perform a symphony without an orchestra.

 

undisputed
but in this case the entire ensemble decided to follow this conductor almost unconditionally and not to act independently.
And it was solely the conductor who determined wich symphony was played
Who else and how much was to blame or responsible (and there were many) is of secondary importance in this context.
Hence my statement: AH was not everything, but without him everything was nothing.

 

Halie Selassie agrees.

 

Which was the pretty much the point that I was making. If A H hadn't struck a chord with a large number of the German people, he would have been just another angry man ranting in the street. If the communists had won the street battles of the 1920s, it might have been an entirely different symphony that the German people marched to.

 

Hitler ordered the invasion of Poland and then things went from there
in this context his actions started WW2

 

The Nazis and the Soviets had signed the Molotov - Ribbentrop pact and both agreed to carve up Poland and invaded simultaneously; so by your logic Hitler and Stalin started WW2.

 

Hitler invaded first so he started it

 

Every war has long antecdents and multiple causes, if you trace them back, but the further back you go the less specific meaning and the more possible alternative outcomes you find. I am no great fan of alternative history, but at its best it does teach you to be cautious. In the German case you can take it back to Arminius and the Teutoburger Wald if you want to, and some historians have indeed done just that. On the other side some Germans have reasonably pointed out that there was no inevitable historical path (sonderweg) leading to Nazism, Hitler, and WWII. If there was such a special path and Germany was hopelessly cursed, then how can one explain the relatively rapid and relatively complete acceptance of liberalism in Germany after 1945? Surely the good work of Allied Denazifaction teams is not a sufficient cause, which suggests that the racialist and nationalist tradition in Germany was not the only tradition in that country. This is an enormous historical debate and I think an unresolvable debate since it depends ultimately on the issue of inevitability, which is a philosophical question and not a historical one.

It should also be pointed out that Fascism was certainly not an exclusively German problem, and neither was militant aggressive nationalism. Fascism was a European-wide phenomenon and indeed an international one, and the Nazis found collaborators everywhere they went. France and even Britain and the US had their Fascist movements, it was popular in Latin America, and of course the Japanese caught the bug as well (though in Japan, as in Spain and Italy, Fascism blended with older monarchist and conservative traditions). So I don't blame the Germans as a people particularly, it was simply their bad historical luck to be more vulnerable to the bug than other nations. That does not of course diminish German responsibility but we in the English speaking nations have no right to feel too superior, especially in light of recent developments (say no more, say no more). And as far as that goes why do we not talk about special Russian moral and historical responsibility for Communism, which besides a long record of other damage made a major contribution to the world crisis which led to WWII?

Let's leave these meta-historical explanations and narrow it down. Hitler always wanted war, and a major European war was highly likely from the moment he assumed power. The Japanese rulership (general staff of army and navy, plus emperor and imperial court, plus fascistic young officers) was determined to at least swallow China from 1931 onwards. From about 1934, Mussolini was determined to grab whatever he could. Stalin was cynically determined to take advantage of whatever disputes occurred elsewhere in order to defend the USSR, expand the USSR, advance the cause of world revolution, take your pick. Hungary, Rumania, Bulgaria, and Poland were a pack of buzzards, ready to circle around any weak-looking vildebeeste in order to satisfy their irredentist appetites.

But when you come to the crisis in the summer of 1939, what do you see? The Italians, perhaps dimly realizing that they were a fourth division club in a premier league tournament, backed away from war. This was the last time sense and caution would rule in Italian policy. The filthy Japs, like the Italians, were signatories of the Anti-Comintern Pact. They had been mired in China since 1937 and were bitterly resentful at Western and Soviet support for Chiang, tepid though that was. The Japanese Army had been anxious to fight the Russkies for a long time but when it came to it the Japanese Army was burned twice by the Red Army, first at Changkufeng and then even more severely at Nomonhan. So in the summer of 1939 the Japs, too, were being cautious.

Both of Adolf's main allies, then, backed away from him. But Stalin (hitherto his arch-enemy) didn't and the non-aggression pact enabled Hitler to turn on Poland. The short-sighted insanity of Uncle Joe (the Big Mustache) helped bring ruin on Europe and near-destruction on his own nation, but if you have to single out one man then both the ultimate and proximate responsibility for the launching of the European war of 1939-41 rests with AH, the Little Mustache. He wanted war from the start and he got it, despite the hesitations of his allies and even of his own generals. He had been the motor of the European crisis from at least 1935, and nothing short of death was going to stop him from getting the war of his dreams. AH's success in the European war which began in 1939 was the green light to the Japanese. If you have to pick one man to blame there then I nominate Hirohito, another Little Mustache, who could have stopped it all but didn't and somehow managed to evade all responsibility for the cruelties Japan inflicted on its neighbors and all blame for the disasters endured by the Japanese people.

 

In Our Time - The Congress of Vienna - BBC Sounds



Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss the conference convened by the victorious powers of the Napoleonic Wars and the earlier French Revolutionary Wars, which had devastated so much of Europe over the last 25 years. The powers aimed to create a long lasting peace, partly by redrawing the map to restore old boundaries and partly by balancing the powers so that none would risk war again. It has since been seen as a very conservative outcome, reasserting the old monarchical and imperial orders over the growth of liberalism and national independence movements, and yet also largely successful in its goal of preventing war in Europe on such a scale for another 100 years. Delegates to Vienna were entertained at night with lavish balls, and the image above is from a French cartoon showing Russia, Prussia, and Austria dancing to the bidding of Castlereagh, the British delegate. With Kathleen Burk Professor Emerita of Modern and Contemporary History at University College London Tim Blanning Emeritus Professor of Modern European History at the University of Cambridge and John Bew Professor in History and Foreign Policy at the War Studies Department at King's College London

 

James any more thoughts on your question
Anything to add

 

Identification of Hitler as a sole cause stems from human psychology. Wars are complex things, but human brain hates complexity and uncertainty.

Anyway, for a bit of fun... World War 2 was caused by... Roman and Persian Empires, and maybe by Christianity. Basically:

1. Romans and Persians are doing okay. Sure, they have wars every few decades, but that is it. Then come the emperors Tiberius II with his stupid management, Maurice being forced to overcompensate for that and getting murdered. Khosrow then uses that as an excuse to declare the war on the Roman Empire. But Romans do not fold as expected, and in the end you have 26 years of constant warfare.
2. This opened way for Islam. I had also found it suggested that Christian ban on usage of incense led to poverty in Arabia and thus appearance of Islam. Whatever the case, Romans and Persians were now too weak to resist. Roman Empire lost 3/4 of its territory, being reduced to basically just Anatolia, and the Persian Empire collapsed.
3. Islam is now too strong to be destroyed, and extremely aggressive. Eventually, by 15th century it had conquered the Roman Empire and Constantinople, as well as expanded into Central Asia. This cut off the Europe's trade routes to China, forcing the Europe to turn westwards in search for sea route to China.
4. This search led to development of Western Europe's geographical knowledge but also of shipbuilding art. Discovery of Americas meanwhile meant that there was a new land that was not either nearly-useless (Russia) or claimed by military superpowers. What this meant is that first Spain and Portugal, and then England, France and Netherlands, began their colonial sheningians.
5. These colonial sheningians eventually led to the Seven Years War. It was the first colonial war, and one could even consider it the "first" world war. Regardless, this was a major conflict between the colonial powers. War itself is not important, but its consequences were. UK was forced to heavily tax the colonies, and this combined with impact of the war set the stage for the American revolution. Meanwhile, in France, you had a bad situation - France had basically won the war for the Americans (a fact Americans tend to ignore in retelling of the revolution), but had spent itself in doing so. The country is destabilizing.
6. Combination of absolutism, economic crisis and various other consequences of the Seven Years War and the American Revolutionary War has destabilized France. Meanwhile, ideas from United States are coming in, and giving people in France, well, ideas. Cue the French Revolution, mass guillotine usage, and general unrestrained violence. And this naturally leads to the Napoleonic Wars.
7. Now, the revolutionary ideas eventually got stuffed back into the bag. But keeping them there forever was impossible. During the time after Napoleonic wars, there are multiple progressive revolutions in Europe, such as the revolutions of 1848 and the Paris Commune of 1871. Former had major impact on Karl Marx, while latter made him and Communism famous.
8. Just as importantly, we now have to go back to the point 4. Colonial sheningians did not stop. Britain, France and US are all building the colonial empires, while Portugal and Spain are trying to hold onto whatever had remained to them. They are losing ground however. On the other side, Germany and Italy had both unified at roughly the same time (1871.). And these new powers are looking for their own colonies, but having very little luck. Only Africa is left open, but by the time they can go for it, even Africa had been mostly taken by the older established powers.
9. Attention now turns to Balkans, and it is a mess. Austria sees Balkans as its backyard, but Italy also wants to build an empire there and also take the Croatian coast. Yet Germany, Italy and Austria are also natural allies against the old colonial powers - Britain and France. Russia meanwhile feels threatened by Germany (and vice-versa), and also wants to enter the Balkans - which puts it on a collision course with Austria-Hungary. As a result, natural alliances form - Germany and A-H against UK, France and Russia, with Italy hedging its bets.
10. Need to secure the routes to colonies as well as prestige concerns meanwhile cause Germany to expand its navy. But this places it on a direct collision course with the United Kingdom, and France doesn't like it either. Meanwhile, Russia is relying on Serbia to expand its influence in the Balkans, and Serbia itself is also on an imperialist path, looking to expand onto Austrian South Slavic territories in keeping with the imperialist writings of Ilija Garašanin. It is then that we see the ideas that Croats are "Catholic Serbs"... which ultimately leads to formation of both Chetnik and Ustashi movements, but these are irrelevant in the big picture and so I will skip them.
11. One naval race and several crises later, we are at war. Serbia's pretensions on Bosnia led to radicalization of some of the Serbs living there, and one of them shot dead the Archduke Franz Ferdinand. Serbian imperialism but also the Austria-Hungary's own internal political instability thus caused Austria-Hungary to go to war against Serbia. Russia attacks Austria-Hungary, Germany attacks Russia and France (which was allied with Russia and thus could be reliably relied on to attack the Germany in the rear while it was fighting with Russia), but makes a massive mistake. Namely, to get to France, Germany invaded Belgium. Whether this was the real cause or just a pretext is irrelevant - this means UK enters the war. In 1915., Italy attacks Austria to conquer Dalmatia, but the geography of the front and Cadorna's stupidity mean that the entire front is essentially a nearly irrelevant sideshow - entire Italian army is held at bay by a picket Habsburg force commanded by Svetozar Boroević von Bojna.
12. War lasts for some time and then Germany, as usual, proceeds the screw things up even worse than they already were. Namely, Russia. Russia was not ready for war, and was already unstable due to Tsar's authoritharianism and the Russo-Japanese war. World War I made things even worse, and Russia is teetering on the edge. And then Germany sends Lenin and his revolutionaries by train to Russia to forment revolution. They do so and Russia is out of the war - but is now a deep red.
13. Eventually, World War I ends with Entente victory, thanks in part to US joining the war. But significantly, while Austria-Hungary had fallen apart (long before its army did, by the way), Germany just... surrendered. No Entente soldier had crossed the Rhine - no enemy since L'Empereur did. This led birth to the stab-in-the-back myth - that Germany had lost the war due to betrayal by the Jews, revolutionary socialists and democrats. Now, while socialists, democrats etc. certainly were assholes (and a little bit evil), which provided a lot of fuel for the myth, fact remains that the myth was just that - a myth. Yet because no fighting had taken place on German soil, and no enemy even approached Berlin, it was easy for it to achieve status of the fact.
14. And it gets worse. Remember Russia? Yeah, Reds are busy there beating the stuffing out of everybody - Tsarists, Republicans, foreign forces, name it. Russia is red, and getting redder every day. Eventually, the Whites and foreigners are thrown out, and Russia is now deep, bloody red. And quite keen on exporting the redness abroad. Luckily, Soviets got a reality check at Warsaw in 1920., and so only manage to ruin the lands of the former Russian Empire. But then it gets worse.
15. Soviets may have gotten a reality check, but it is still a fact that Communism is naturally an aggressive ideology always seeking to expand. So even if the Soviet leadership itself has not shown much interest in exporting the revolution abroad after Red Army got checked by Poland in 1920., that is not much of a consolation. Fact is that Finland, Germany, Hungary and Italy had all experienced - and beaten back - Communist revolutions. And the establishment of Communist International in 1919. spells out Communist plans for everyone to see - One World Communism, or zilch.
16. All of the above serves to make a lot of people very, very nervous. And unlike UK, which had had a republic for a long time, or France that had already experienced revolution, other countries have no such immune system, and are naturally paranoid. This means that other socialist groups - such as Nazis and Fascists - get support simply so that Communism can be kept out.
17. And then comes the Great Depression. Economic hardship, idea that the liberal democracy had failed, and the ever-present threat of Communism means that alternative socialist political movements such as Nazism and Fascism are gaining traction. Eventually, the political elites of Germany and Italy turned the political power over to Nazis and Fascists, respectively. Other countries are also turning to dictatorships to protect them from Communism - Franco in Spain, Pilsudski and Pilsudski's colonels in Poland, Horthy in Hungary, Salazar in Portugal.
18. But Nazism is still a socialist ideology, as is Fascism. Their socialist side means that they have no clue about the economy, and their nationalist side have major ideas of irredentism and imperialism. All of this essentially means that they have to expand or die. Peace is now an impossibility, and appeasment will not work, because expansion will not stop. Much like with Communists in 1920., you either stop them militarily, or they swallow you up. But unlike 1920., there is nobody that can stop them in time. Poland is weak, Czechoslovakia even more so, and UK and France are just out of the Great Depression and require time to rearm. Like it or not, the appeasment was the only choice available to Britain and France at the time.
19. But while Britain and France are rearming, so is Germany. And its continual expansion with no opposition breeds a perception of Western powers as weak and indecisive - weak they certainly were - which again means that Hitler will not stop. And then in 1939. he decides to cross one line that British were not willing to back down from - Poland. And so the World War 2 begins.

Now, this is not to say that the war was inevitable - there are several points here at which the chain might have been broken and the war prevented. But the causal link is there. And as you can see here, rather than asking who started World War 2, we should be asking what started the World War 2. Because the war would have started without Hitler anyway, if not at the same time and in the same circumstances.

 

UK public sector answer
Who started WW2
Well we need to get back to you because we are all currently working from home and even when we do reply we will not get directly to the point and will have to set up a new department to aid the long winded answer which we will add lessons learned without a conclusion

UK private sector
Who started WW2
It was Hitler he invaded Poland and Britain and France requested he withdraw his troops pronto.
Britain and France then declared war on Germany when the withdrawal of troops did not happen.
It then all went World War from there.