bboc/10_World_war_two.tex

\chapter{World war two}

\chapterauthor{François Delpla}

The massacre of the First World War indicted capitalism, in the eyes of many men. Both by the role of financial interests in the genesis of the conflict, and by the eagerness of industry to provide murder with exponentially increasing means.
The radical contestation of capitalism known as communism is one of the main fruits of this confrontation; initially, it was largely nourished by the horror it created.

As for the Second, the picture is, on the surface, more complicated. Instead of an economic-political regime bringing two blocs of power face to face, we find at the origin of the cataclysm an aggressor country, Germany.
Its Nazi regime is certainly capitalist, but of a very particular type. It is related to other regimes, with which he was linked in the war, at least at times, those of Italy, Japan, Hungary, Spain: the whole is readily grouped under the concept of fascism.
But these countries have in common a visceral hostility to communism, from which they have eradicated sometimes important seeds in themselves, and whose armed forces they confront in war, whether in the USSR or China.
Not to mention the national resistance, often led by communist parties, in the occupied countries.
But fascism is hardly less opposed, in theory, to liberal democracy, that is, to non-fascist capitalism. However, the latter appears to be its main winner, by the extent and wealth of the fascist territories occupied in 1944-1945.
Capitalism therefore seems, in a democratic leap, to have redeemed itself from the sins of the First War, and this one is seen as an accident of course. The second would be the fact only of excited extremists, who would have been left too long free of their movements.
Communism would have a share of responsibility, having pre-existed fascism and aroused it, as a self-defense of countries that felt threatened by the USSR or by its ideas.
We also embroider on the \enquote{kinship} of the two systems and on the collusion that partially associated them within the framework of the German-Soviet pact, between August 23, 1939 and June 22, 1941.
Didn't they both dream, deep down, of conquering the planet through war, and didn't they consider, for a long time and seriously, to unite their destinies in this effort?

The study that we will read synthesizes classical considerations on the imperfection of the treaties of 1919 and recent research concerning Nazism and the beginnings of the Second World War.
It shows that Hitler, from 1933 to 1940, cleverly charted his path, making each power believe that Germany would strengthen itself without harming their interests.
We are therefore far from the account by accusing liberal democracies of candor or cowardice, and very unfair if we attribute to the USSR alone a tendency to use Germanic aggressiveness against its own opponents.
And if we admit that in 1914 capitalism showed, by throwing peoples against each other, the limits of its civilizing capacity, it becomes difficult to believe that in the interwar period this form of economic organization contributed all united to peace between nations.

\section{1919-1929: the refusal of a collective security}

According to the habits and customs of the nineteenth century, two powers should have benefited from the victory of 1918, France and England.
They had gambled their fortune on the elimination of the German competitor from the world stage and, quite logically, shared his colonial remains. But the twentieth century brought a novelty: the divorce between political power and economic power.
English and French woollen stockings would not have been enough to defeat Germany, and the young America, hitherto marginal on the world stage, had weighed all its weight in the financing of the war effort, becoming a creditor of the two Euro-Western powers.
It was therefore very annoyed to their rapacious behavior at the peace conference, knowing full well that the expansion of their already vast colonial empires at the expense of Germany and its Turkish ally would put new obstacles in the way of U.S. trade.
Moreover, Germany understood this well, which, on November 11, 1918, had signed the armistice on the basis of President Wilson's \enquote{Fourteen Points}: 
these, invoking freedom of trade and the right of peoples, resembled a manifesto of the weak in the face of the demands of the Franco-British ogres.
Germany could only rally to it, in desperation, and so, already, a collusion was emerging between it and the United States.
These limited the territorial amputations of the vanquished and allowed it in particular to keep the Rhineland, whose France demanded the removal for security reasons.

German-American collusion became even better when Wilson, proud of having circumscribed the Franco-English triumph, was badly received by his compatriots and the United States rejected the treaties.
By disavowing their president and his Democratic Party, they denied the very legitimacy of their entry into the 1917 war, which their opinion was invited, by exception to the cult of capitalism, to blame on the \enquote{cannon merchants}.
Since it was the American intervention that tipped the scales, what better encouragement could the German spirit of revenge have hoped for?

When it comes to France, however, if its fear of a Germanic backlash was all too well founded, research has confirmed the greed of its bosses, 
who have indeed sought to take advantage of the circumstances to dominate their German rivals on the European market, particularly in the steel sector\footnote{cf. Jacques Bariéty, \emph{Les relations franco-allemandes après la Première Guerre mondiale} (Franco-German relations after the World War One), Paris, Pedone, 1977.}.

The League of Nations, of which Wilson had been the principal apostle and which, if it had brought together all those nations, could have weighed effectively in favour of peace, 
was found by the American rejection of the Treaty of Versailles, as well as by the revolution which had ostracized Russia, reduced to a Franco-English club.
Paris and London, which were far from agreeing, fought hard, which ended the paralysis. Major issues continued to be settled, as in past centuries, by ad hoc congresses, taking decisions in a matter of days whose implementation was not monitored by any permanent body.

\section{1929-1933: \enquote{every man for himself} in the face of the crisis}

It is not certain that the current crisis helps to understand the so-called \enquote{1929 crisis} that raged in the early thirties. The main common point is unemployment. But today, international trade continues to grow, whereas in 1933 it had fallen by two-thirds compared to 1929.
Countries with colonial empires appeared outrageously favored, because they could more easily than others retain their outlets. Germany and the United States had the highest unemployment rates among the great powers.
This may not have been due primarily to their lack of colonies, but in any case their opinion believed it. Hence a growing resentment, across the Atlantic, against France and England. Franklin Roosevelt, elected to try to end the crisis, was not left out.
A former undersecretary of the Navy during Wilson's presidency, he never did anything to combat the idea, hammered by his Republican predecessors, that the country's participation in the Great War had been a mistake.
The United States, asked by London and Paris to engage in a common economic and financial policy in the face of the crisis, opposed a straight refusal to the London Conference in July 1933.

\section{1933-1939: the mirage of Hitler's weakness}

On January 30, 1933, Hitler took over a country with a weakened economy and non-existent external support.
His program, expressed in Mein Kampf eight years earlier, should hardly help him find allies, as it designates powerful and diverse enemies:
Marxism but also Christian charity, communism as well as capitalism, the French and the Russians, freedoms of all kinds and, brooching on the whole, the Jews, guilty of all evils at once.
But he will use a strangely effective recipe, which is based on two principles: playing with his weaknesses, opposing his rivals. For starters, he is not taking power alone, but within a government numerically dominated by the conservative right.
Its most prominent leader, Franz von Papen, seemed, for a year and a half, able to eliminate him at any time, until that \enquote{night of the long knives} (June 30, 1934) when the Führer had Papen's closest collaborators killed with impunity.
But then, under the pretext that he also sent some leaders of the Sturmabteilungen (SA) who, it is said, threatened the army, it passes for the real winner of the episode.
Thus, until the middle of the war, Hitler will cultivate the appearance of a dictator on probation, weakened by powerful internal oppositions, and also by the division of his entourage – which must have triggered some laughter with his lieutenants, to whom he distributed the roles.

This game is far from having been properly perceived. Even today, the historian Hans Mommsen, when he speaks of a \enquote{weak dictator}, is certainly not unanimous, but he manages to be taken seriously.
Nevertheless, the truth progresses and leads to a question: why, at the time, almost no one made the assumption that Hitler was perhaps a very fine strategist?

The answer brings us back to the subject of this book: because no one had an interest in it, at least from the angle from which Hitler showed them their interest.
Many thought they were manipulating him (while they themselves were manipulated by him): therefore they needed to believe that man was fragile and that once he had helped them achieve a goal they could, if he became cumbersome, eliminate him.

If in the eyes of world opinion, and until today, one country is cheaply getting away with its role during the thirties, it is England. Yet its role was most detrimental to peace and democracy.
The one who was since 1933 one of the main inspirations, and became from 1937 the first responsible for its policy of appeasement against Hitler, Neville Chamberlain, passes for a brave man overwhelmed by the cruelty of the political universe,
while he knew what he wanted and that it was not angelic.
Above all, he wanted to prevent France from taking initiatives inspired by his anti-German atavism, and he did so admirably.
He had only decent relations with Hitler, but on the other hand, he cultivated, through the Foreign Office, a certain intimacy with the German conservatives.
What he was aiming for, therefore, was not the division drawn in Mein Kampf — to England the seas, to Germany Eastern Europe, Ukraine included — but some fair deal with German capital, satisfying the most reasonable of its aspirations to the east.
Hence his sense of triumph at the time of Munich — by sacrificing the Sudetenland, he believes he has channeled Germany's Eastern ambitions, with the help of his generals who had made no secret of their fear of war against England.
Hence, also, his cry from the heart in the aftermath of the German invasion of Czechoslovakia, on March 15, 1939, in violation of the Munich Agreements:
\enquote{Mr. Hitler is not a gentleman} does not mean that he had taken it for such, but that he believed he had corseted it in the Bavarian Treaty\footnote{cf. F. Delpla, \emph{Churchill et les Français (1939-40)} (Churchill and the Frenchs (1939-1940)), Paris, Plon, 1993, ch. 1.}.

Chamberlain may never have hurt a fly. His crime is above all intellectual: he believes he has trapped Hitler and narrowed down Germany's ambitions, and he acts as if this were a certainty, while this goal continues to slip away.
Meanwhile, opportunities to stop Nazism are lost and potential allies find themselves absorbed into the Reich, or move away.

\section{Who is responsible for the German-Soviet Pact?}

It is strange to read sometimes, that before 1939 Stalin hoped to get along with Hitler. Admittedly, as the following suggests, ideological scruples did not stifle him any more on this chapter than on the others. 
But to get married you have to be two, and Hitler's attitude did not allow much hope. Not that he was aggressive: 
until the end of 1938 he cultivated his image as a man of peace, seeking only the greatness of Germany in its borders of the moment, even if it meant incorporating from time to time some contiguous lands of Germanic settlement.
But if he left Russia alone, on the one hand he did not miss an opportunity to wither communism, on the other hand he traced in small touches a path to the east that would have worried any heir of the tsars.

It all began in January 1939, when, receiving the wishes of the diplomatic corps, Hitler shook hands with the Soviet ambassador with conspicuous warmth.
Discreet trade negotiations ensued. However, Stalin, who in the absence of any other choice has conscientiously cultivated the friendship of the Westerners, does not let go of the prey for the shadow.
It was certainly scalded by the Munich agreements. But as soon as the invasion of Czechoslovakia put them away, he resumed the posture and proposed a defensive \enquote{grand alliance} against Germany to the countries around it.
Once again, England will react coldly, and prevent France from advancing more than her. 

A geographical factor complicates the negotiations. Germany has no common border with the USSR and the USSR, in order to participate in a war against it, would have to go through Lithuania, Poland or Romania, and preferably through all three together.
Litvinov, the People's Commissar for Foreign Affairs, and then Molotov, who succeeded him on 3 May, intended that the Treaty should contain specific provisions in this regard.
It is a game for British diplomacy to prolong the discussions, as it will be, for Franco-English propaganda, to say later that after each point of agreement the Soviets presented \enquote{new demands} — which means that they had long since chosen to agree with Hitler.
This brings us to the month of August. Molotov, in order to force everyone to play their game, demanded and finally obtained that a military convention be discussed, saying who would do what, where and with which troops.
Western soldiers come to Moscow… and clashed, without instructions from their governments in this area, with the preliminary ruling of the Soviet military leader, Voroshilov, since Poland was threatened with a German attack, the Russians asked to take a preventive position on part of its border with Germany.

Stalin still gave French and British military delegations time to contact their governments, and for them to come to an agreement with the Warsaw government. But France alone seemed like to takes advantage of this delay.
Neither its president of the council Daladier, nor his ambassador to Warsaw Léon Noël, did anything to force the Poles, who would like to call the Red Army only after being invaded, to take better account of strategic needs.
Only the French negotiator in Moscow, General Doumenc, took initiatives to unblock the situation: he went so far as to delegate a member of his mission to Warsaw.
Daladier, for his part, went so far as to correct his own archives in 1946 to make it appear that, receiving the Polish ambassador on 21 August, he threatened him with a \enquote{revision of the alliance} if his country did not accept the Soviet request:
in fact it was the 23rd, and even then no threat had been issued\footnote{ibid., pp. 141-153 (with references from Daladier's corrected archives), and, similarly, \emph{Les papiers secrets du général Doumenc} (The secret papers of general Doumenc), Paris, Orban, 1992.}.

It is that on the evening of the 21st a dispatch fell, saying that a trade treaty had just been signed between Germany and the USSR and, above all, that the German Minister Ribbentrop was going to go to Moscow to sign a non-aggression pact.

The documents now known seem to indicate that Germany was very worried about these military negotiations by Moscow, and urged the Soviet side to sign an agreement, multiplying concessions. 
Stalin's choice was not made, or at least became apparent, until a few days before the signing.
In the absence of an agreement with Germany, the USSR would have suffered the shock of its armored divisions in the wake of their conquest of Poland, and the immobility of the \enquote{Phoney War} augurs how little the Westerners would have done to fix German forces on their side.
Who would argue in good faith that Stalin had nothing to fear from the anti-Soviet governments in Paris and London, unchanged since Munich, and that it was pure paranoia on his part to fear a peace negotiated on his back after a sham war?

In this start of a conflict that will kill fifty million people, and in the initial advantage that Germany will enjoy, in particular thanks to this German-Soviet pact, Chamberlain's responsibility is total, that of Daladier not much less. However, Stalin's is not zero.

The problem can be posed in Trotsky's way: by making Russia a frequentable power, by curbing struggles everywhere and especially in France of the Popular Front, Stalin would have weakened the revolutionary edge that alone could make fascism retreat.
Perhaps! In any case, this could be achieved through a classic understanding between States, encircling and discouraging the potential aggressor. That is what Churchill was aiming for, and he cannot be denied any relevance in this regard.
It is obvious that the French Communists tirelessly made a velvet paw, until the end of August 1939, and reacted as softly as possible, defying their own voters when Daladier attacked the social gains of the Popular Front, so as not to hinder the national mobilization,
nor the diplomatic efforts of the Soviet big brother.

Stalin's responsibility, I would rather situate it... in Stalinism. The great purges, and in particular that of 1937 against the cadres of the army, made doubt in the West that the USSR remained an important military factor.
In the French army, the debate had been lively since 1933 about the Soviet alliance and a large number of cadres, reacting more professionally than politically, were inclined to seek it.
However, when in 1935 Gamelin had succeeded Weygand, political considerations had taken over, Gamelin being, on this question, very close to the anti-Soviet Daladier 
(of whom it should be recalled that before being president of the council in 1938 he had been Minister of War and remained so continuously from June 1936 to May 1940).
The murder of Tukhachevsky and several hundred generals in 1937 gave pride of place to the Daladierizing or fascistic french officers who refused in principle a joint action with the USSR and were probably still a minority before.
Public opinion, in France as in England, was also less inclined, after the purge of 1937, to wish, in the face of Hitler's challenge, for Soviet reinforcements.
Nevertheless, General Doumenc's account shows that Daladier, in explaining his mission to him, justified it by the expectation of the public, which would not have understood that the ways of an agreement with the USSR were not being explored to the end.
He also recounts demonstrations that, when embarking the mission, confirmed such an expectation. What strength would they have taken, if the image of the USSR had not been tarnished by the purges!

All in all, to know whether the first deaths of the Second World War, on September 1, 1939, and all those whose death will induce, because of the power that Germany was allowed to acquire, are or not \enquote{dead of capitalism} we must take into account, 
above all, anti-communism and the way in which Nazism was able to play with it.
By implying that all his ambitions were directed towards Eastern Europe and that their satisfaction would free the planet from an undesirable regime, he attracted much sympathy in the ruling circles of the great Western powers.
However, they would not have so easily opened a boulevard to the expansion of the German competitor if the latter had not managed to persuade them that it was weak, divided and unable to profit much from a victory against the evil empire.
The career that these countries left to Germany and the unprecedented growth of its power between 1939 and 1941 are therefore not pure products of the hatred of the bosses against the workers' movement. 
They are also effects of naivety, in front of a particularly talented staging. The leaders of the great capitalist powers other than Germany have allowed themselves to believe what their class interests would lead them to believe, even against the evidence:
that Hitler was, not a high-flying politician, but a messy adventurer, disposable after use.

\section{The Phoney War, so aptly named}

If the literature on Munich is relatively abundant and of quality, the Phoney War remains the poor relation of the history of the twentieth century, and yet there is no more decisive period.
But above all: anyone interested in Munich should be passionate about the Phoney War, which sees the great liberal democracies tearing up their principles even better than when they sold the Sudetenland to Germany for a mess of pottage.
But here it is: war, now, is declared, and we prefer to say that we did it badly (by feeding illusions about the effectiveness of the blockade of Germany and the possibility of defeating it with attrition), rather than admit that we did the opposite of war, that is to say peace, or at least that we assiduously sought it.

This is where the United States comes in. Because, of this peace, they are the main brokers, even if they hid well from it afterwards.
Certainly, Roosevelt, when at the beginning of September he proclaimed the neutrality of his country, specified with an air of understanding that \enquote{thoughts are not neutral}, which amounts to a condemnation, really minimal, of the German aggressor.
This is clarified in November, by the \enquote{cash and carry} amendment to the neutrality law voted a few years earlier by Congress with the blessing of the president:
by way of derogation from this law, which prohibits the sale of war material to belligerents, it will be possible to sell it to those who will pay for it and transport it, which favours Germany's adversaries, masters of the seas.
Anti-Nazism? Maybe. Capitalism, for sure. American industry, once again affected by unemployment, cannot deprive itself of selling to people who want to buy. Nor does US imperialism miss another opportunity to financially weaken its rivals.

But at the same time, strange emissaries crisscross Europe. Kennedy, Joseph, the father of John Fitzgerald who accompanied him, was ambassador to London, and gladly visited the continent; he is an avowed admirer of Nazi effectiveness.
Sumner Welles, undersecretary of state and close to the president, spent several weeks commuting between Paris, Rome, London and Berlin. We also cite contacts made by bosses, general motors in particular\footnote{The Welles mission remains poorly known and the memoirs of the traveler, published in New York in 1944 under the title \emph{The Time for Decision}, allow themselves from the state of war to tell the interviews selectively.
However, as early as 1959, the U.S. State Department published, in a manner that presents itself as exhaustive, Welles' accounts to his government:
Diplomatic Papers, 1940, vol. 1. Very partial use of these documents in \emph{Churchill et les français} (Churchill and the Frenchs), op. cit. cit., pp. 337 sq. and 394 sq.
On the other conversations of American emissaries, cf. John Costello, \emph{les Dix Jours qui ont sauvé l'Occident} (The Ten Days That Saved the West), Paris, Oliver Orban, 1991, ch. 3 \emph{Les éclaireurs de la paix} (Scouts of peace).}.

Welles' mission began as the war raged, since November 30, 1939, between the Soviet aggressor and his Finnish victim.
Stalinist brutality, which was still exercised only within the framework of the former borders of the Tsarist empire and initially aimed only at taking a border pledge, easily passed for an unlimited appetite for conquest, a relative of that attributed to Hitler.
It feeds around the world, in countless newspapers, the idea that helping Finland militarily is tantamount to waging war on Germany.
If Welles brought back peace and harmony, or if the results of his mission allowed a spectacular initiative by the president, it would be a very bad sign for the USSR, the only power not visited by the undersecretary.
It is true that, in the face of the Soviet-Finnish war, the president is not neutral, even in words.

This brings us to the massacre, perpetrated by the Soviets, of the Polish elites who fell into their power, most often referred to by the name of the mass grave where some of the victims were found in 1943, that of Katyn.
Stalin's order to kill 20,000 Poles, mainly officers, revealed by Boris Yeltsin in 1992, is dated March 5, 1940 — whereas these people had been interned the previous September.
Since no one has recorded the date and tried to explain it, I thought I had to do so in passing, in a book from 1993, and to my knowledge nothing else has been proposed\footnote{Churchill and the French, op. cit. Cit. pp. 371-373. In \emph{The Black Book of communism} (Paris, Laffont, 1997, p. 234), Nicolas Werth cites, dated the same 5 March, another text, more detailed, signed by Béria, 
in the middle of a very general passage on the abuses committed  in the territories occupied by the USSR in 1939-40. Still no reflection on the date, and no discussion of my attempt at an explanation of 1993. 
This tends to confirm the reproach frequently made to this book, to be richer in balance sheets than in reflections.}.
On March 5, Finland has just asked for peace, and Stalin is preparing to receive his negotiators.
It is therefore necessary to ask whether he does not fear from this peace effects such that his Polish prisoners, and in particular the officers, would become dangerous.
This could be the case if the Soviet-Finnish peace led to a reconciliation of the capitalist powers, that is, a peace between Germany and its neighbors.
To save face, Hitler would have to tolerate the resurrection of a piece of the Polish state, divided in September 1939 between himself and Stalin. One of the first gestures of this rump state would probably be to claim its prisoners of war.
It would then be difficult to kill them, and dangerous to liberate them, because the new Poland, having recovered lands occupied by Germany, would be tempted to do the same on the Soviet side, and by war if necessary.
Let us add that Sumner Welles is in Berlin from 1 to 6 March: he is therefore there at the time when Stalin signs the fatal order, and he is dwelling on it, in a way that is probably very distressing for the Soviet government.

Today, after new research focusing in particular on the premises of the German-Soviet clash in 1941 (see below), I ask a new question:
Was this massacre, assuming that it had been revealed to Hitler or that it was proposed to do so, not intended to convince him that the Soviets were definitely on his side and had broken all ties with the Westerners, so as to dissuade him from reconciling with them?
In this case, the murderous gesture was aimed less at strengthening the defense of the country with a view to a possible Soviet-Polish war, induced by a Polish-German peace, than at all costs at this perilous situation, by definitively linking its fate to that of Nazism\footnote{In the part of Poland it occupied, Germany had banned all education other than primary education and had troubled the elites, particularly religious ones, in every possible way:
cf. for example No. 40 (October 1960) of the \emph{Revue d'Histoire de la Deuxième Guerre mondiale}.}.
There remains, even if these considerations proved to be inaccurate, a double observation: on the one hand, Stalin panicked (he could have moved the prisoners to the east, to wait for the turn of events; he mistakenly believed that he did not have the time);
on the other hand, it is indeed a crime against humanity. Women and children, and even the poor, have certainly been spared. But this massacre of a nation through its elites has the character of genocide.

Officially, the contacts made in Europe by American emissaries during the Funny War are exploratory. The United States does not broker, it only inquires about each other's intentions.
But isn't that what they say when brokerage failed? In this case, it is in Berlin that Welles' welcome is the freshest. 
It is that Hitler has chosen: peace, he no longer wants it, he wants to launch his offensive in the West, to strike a decisive blow to the morale of his opponents, as well as to the French army and its prestige.

Thus, in this pseudo-war, especially funny because it is full of pacifist gestures of all kinds, the underestimation of Hitler's abilities becomes particularly criminal. It blinds to lightning that he accumulates slowly, calculating its effects to the millimeter, and triggers suddenly, on May 10\footnote{On German military preparations during the Phoney War, cf. F.Delpla, \emph{La ruse nazie/Dunkerque, 24 Mai 1940} (The Nazi cunning/Dunkerque, 24 May 1940), Paris, France-Empire, 1997.}.

\section{The french fall and general defeatism}

At a time when the German armies are shaking westward, at this spring dawn, the British Prime Minister is called Chamberlain.
Four days earlier, Goering told Dahlerus, an unofficial Swedish diplomat with his entrances in London, that Germany would soon make a \enquote{generous} peace offer when its troops had \enquote{reached Calais.}
Dahlerus was then acting in close liaison with Raoul Nordling, Swedish Consul General in Paris and well introduced to French government circles.
Halifax and Reynaud, The British and French Foreign Ministers — Reynaud was also head of government — had to take it first of all for a boast, even for one of those innumerable signs of weakness that Nazi Germany had seemed to show since its beginnings:
the Germans in front of Calais, it was an unfortunate but by no means catastrophic eventuality.
This would only mean that the Allied armies, which had entered Belgium to meet them, would not have succeeded in stopping them and would have retreated in good order to the French border: not enough to rush to sign the peace on German terms.

However, after three days, the main axis of the offensive turned out not to be in the Belgian plains but in France, in the Sedan sector, where the defense was pulverized by the bulk of the armored divisions.
Very quickly it was realized that the French territory was open to invasion, then it was realized that Paris was temporarily spared and that the attack remained confined to the north of the Somme.
It finally appeared that Calais was indeed targeted but from the south and not from the north, and encircling in the process the entire Professional French and British army.

Soon Lord Gort, who commanded Her Majesty's expeditionary force, opted for a retreat to ports followed by embarkation, and found complacent ears in London, particularly those at Halifax.
But the Prime Minister, since the 10th, had changed, and his name was Churchill. He soon had only one thought: to maintain the state of war, by any expedient.
To begin with, he made Gort refuse the withdrawal, which would have looked too much like the prelude to an armistice and which the French disapproved.
They wanted to fight… or sign the armistice, but in no case embark. We therefore lived on the illusion and ambiguities of a "Weygand plan" – the latter had taken over the head of the army from Gamelin, sacked – 
consisting in trying to break through the German armored column from the north and south… consisting above all in not deciding anything.

And then Hitler stopped from May 24 to 27, at the gates of Dunkirk, the last port available for boarding. A false enigma. To solve it, just take Goering's prediction seriously:
Hitler stops because he wants his "generous" peace, leaving France and England their territories and colonies, taking away only their modern weapons seized in Belgium, their combativeness and their reputation.
It is understandable that the decision takes a little time, so we stop, to allow Paris and London to bring together their responsible bodies.
In Paris, the war committee of 25 May envisaged no other outcome than an armistice followed by a peace treaty. But Reynaud did not spread out, in front of this rather numerous and diverse assembly, the offer transmitted by Nordling.
The most important decision of this committee, inspired by Weygand, was to send Reynaud to London the next day, to, as the minutes modestly put it, \enquote{expose our difficulties}.
Churchill translated, at the opening of the session of the war cabinet on the morning of the 26th, as \enquote{He comes to announce to us that France will capitulate}.

But let us not anticipate. In England too defeatism was in full swing, from the 25th. In the morning, Halifax reported to the cabinet conversations, initiated by second-rate British and Italian diplomats, on concessions that might deter Italy from entering the war.
He obtains permission to continue these contacts. In the afternoon, infinitely exceeding this mandate, he himself received Ambassador Bastianini, a close friend of Mussolini, 
and asked him that the Duce enter each other to promote a \enquote{general European settlement leading to a lasting peace}. All in the name of the government, that is, Churchill, without ever mentioning him. This is less a lie than an anticipation:
Convinced that Winston was just a buffoon whose adventurism had gone bankrupt, Halifax considered him negligible and was already acting as prime minister.

The most astonishing thing is that the next day he reports to the cabinet on the conversation sincerely or almost (he blames Bastianini for the opening concerning a \enquote{general settlement}), and that Churchill does not protest.
The latter, when he then sees Reynaud face to face, first speaks of Italy, then suddenly asks him if he has received any peace proposals. Reynaud replies that no, but that the French \enquote{know that they can receive an offer if they wish}.
But then, Churchill manages to divert the conversation, and Reynaud's visit, by directing the discussions on the preparation of a boarding at Dunkirk.
He had indeed rallied to this solution the day before and, although the French still do not agree, it makes an excellent opportunity to talk about action and battle, rather than ceasefires and negotiations.

Peace did not occur in Dunkirk, so Hitler resumed the fight without much sadness.
He would have liked this immediate and bloodless peace, which would have allowed him to soon claim Ukraine from Stalin, but he had envisaged a failure and reluctantly reversed the order of the program:
since France, madly espousing Churchillian obstinacy, offers itself defenseless to his blows, he takes the opportunity to crush it. He certainly does not plan to make it sign a simple armistice and occupy it for four years.
He no doubt makes the calculation that such a crush will complete the maturation of discouragement across the Channel, and precipitate the fall of Churchill.
In late June and early July, in any case, he will revive tempting peace offers through all sorts of channels, and Halifax will again be very close to taking power\footnote{Period studied by John Costello, op. cit. cit., ch. 12. A surprising blackout persists eight years after the ephemeral revelation, by Le Figaro of July 13, 1990,
of the work of a small team of Sarthian scholars, reinforced by Philippe Cusin and Jean-Christophe Averty, on the variations of the text of the call pronounced on 18 June by General de Gaulle.
They most likely refer to the struggle between Churchill and Halifax over the continuation of the war: cf. \emph{Churchill et les Français} (Churchill and the Frenchs), op. cit., pp. 717-727. 
Similarly, on the role of Jean Monnet, press conference of 16 June 1994, at the author's home.}.

\section{The Nazi turn against the USSR}

The criminal foolishness of underestimating Hitler does not cease, alas, with his brilliant victories of the spring of 1940. 
From this point of view, the henchmen of French capitalism and their new hero, Pétain, are not only responsible for having facilitated, long in advance, the collection of the Jews, by the statute promulgated on October 18\footnote{And not the 3rd, as it is printed almost everywhere: cf. F. Delpla, \emph{Montoire}, Paris, Albin Michel, 1996, p. 220-225.}. 
By endeavouring as soon as they took office, with a dexterity worthy of a better cause, to attribute the defeat to the strikers of 1936 who thought more of "enjoying" than of having children and had pushed betrayal to the point of granting themselves two weeks of annual rest,  these people are once again missing the opportunity to analyze Nazism as a poison administered in small doses by a genius madman.
On the contrary, they obey him with on hand and feet, long before writing in large letters, in the autumn, the word \enquote{collaboration} on the pediment of their policy.
Defeat is accepted, in a jiffy, as that of democracy and human rights, assimilated to a messy laissez-faire\footnote{cf. Marc-Olivier Baruch, \emph{Servir l’État français} (Serve the French State), Paris, Fayard, 1997, ch. 1.}.
So-called men of order not only deny the one that the Republic had made reign after the upheavals of the nineteenth century and which had allowed a Pétain, son of small peasants, to become a marshal, 
but they are blind to the disorder that a foreign and moreover Nazi presence cannot fail to generate.
They see Hitler as nothing but a dictatorship maniac, who will soften if his regime is copied. They have no question about its objectives. Their policy is based not on an analysis, but on a bet, lost in advance.
As soon as the English aggression of Mers el-Kébir (July 3), they proposed a military collaboration and if it did not materialize, the cause was in Berlin, not in Vichy.

But alas, few people disputed the terrain for them, except de Gaulle and his handful of initial supporters. 
Falling back into the mistakes of their German comrades of 1933 who saw above all in Nazism the timely destruction of the old dominations, the French communists practice a wait-and-see attitude that can go, especially at the beginning, to the search for peaceful coexistence with the occupier -one could even speak of desires for collaboration, if the word were not so loaded, if it did not irresistibly evoke the hunt for Jews and resistance fighters practiced later by Vichy.
The PCF does not go beyond a demand for the legal reappearance of L'Humanité and a very reckless reappearance of elected officials in the town halls of the occupied zone, which will lead, in autumn, to stupid arrests.

The Communists were certainly opposed to Pétain from the outset, which would allow them, by sorting through the archives, to exhume early combative quotations.
But, by stigmatizing the French slave in preference to the German master, they seem to offer the latter their services.
Apart from lowering themselves to the same moral level, they show no intellectual superiority. They give just as much in the game of Hitler, who does not want any of the proposed or suggested collaborations:
it seeks only to divide the French into rival fractions and to keep each in suspense with promises

It should be pointed out, in the light of the latest research\footnote{well summarized in the book \emph{Eugen Fried} d’Annie Kriegel et Stéphane Courtois (Paris, Seuil, 1997), pp. 356 à 362.}, that, on the side of the French Communists, although the wait-and-see attitude persisted for several months,
the desire for agreement lasted only a few weeks and that they resulted, as far as can be judged, from initiatives by Jacques Duclos. Its leader Maurice Thorez had made known from Moscow, as soon as he could, his disapproval and that of the Komintern.
On the other hand, the communists present in France were far from unanimous and no one disputes the immediate acts of resistance carried out, on behalf of the party, by a Charles Tillon.
But it was Indeed Duclos who commanded and, if he ceased in August all negotiations with the occupier, it is necessary to see in the previous contacts the effect of a Stalinist opportunism far from any anti-fascist or national rigor, generated in a leading leader, whose biography is full of traits of patriotism, by the directives coming from Moscow in September 1939:   consider the war, like the previous one, as an \enquote{imperialist war} in which the communists do not have to take sides.

Hitler's great year is, if you think about it, the one that goes from June 22, 1940, armistice with France, to June 22, 1941, invasion of the USSR.
While disturbing his plans, the obstinacy of Churchill, who succeeds at the same time in the challenge of keeping his country alone at war, among the great powers, against a Germany that has neutralized all the others gives the German champion the opportunity to deploy all his talent. He had little lured France, making it seem that he wanted to invade Belgium alone. Now he is sumptuously deceiving the planet, pretending to attack England, then looking for a fight in the Mediterranean and the Balkans, when this is only a turning movement, allowing him to present himself, armed from head to toe, on the three thousand kilometers of the Soviet border.

Here, we must examine Stalin's responsibility, because the defense of his country will be completely taken by surprise, hence the deaths in combat that a little vigilance would have avoided and, above all, the millions of prisoners doomed to death by undernourishment: as Hitler was a racist, among others, anti-Slavic, the infinitely higher mortality of his Russian, Serbian or Polish prisoners, compared to the French or the English, was not unpredictable.
We have recently seen a curious thesis flourish: Stalin would have stripped his defense like a foosball player, to better attack. His plans were only offensive, and Hitler would have preceded him\footnote{Victor Suvorov, \emph{Le brise-glace} (The Ice Breaker), Paris, Orban, 1989. This prose, one of the last saplings of the Cold War (the author, who moved to the West in the early 1980s, had been taken in charge by the Intelligence Service),
is not, however, devoid of interest. Calling for a precise study, hitherto non-existent, of the Soviet order of battle, it makes it possible to sense in Stalin,
not a suicidal desire to attack Hitler at the height of his power, but certain projects for the future: cf. Paul Gaujac, \emph{Barbarossa: L'Armée Rouge, agresseur ou agressée?} (Barbarossa: the Red Army aggressor or attacked?), conference at the Institute for the History of Contemporary Conflicts, 26/2/1998.}.
Let us leave this rehash of the Nazi justifications of the time, and see the facts.

In October 1940, Hitler led his largest diplomatic offensive, probably aimed primarily at American voters called to the polls on November 5:
it is a question of showing them that the Führer has the situation well in hand and that it is better to vote for Willkie than for Roosevelt, who by supporting Churchill seeks quarrel in pure loss to the indisputable winner of the European war.
He met Pétain, Franco and Mussolini. It turns out that Molotov was invited to Berlin in the same period, and that, dragging his feet, he arrived only on November 12, spoiling in part the effects of the German leader:
who knows what would have happened, not only in the American joust, but in the persistent match between Churchill and the British pacifists, if Hitler had been able, after his meetings at Montoire, Hendaye and Florence, also to display Stalin behind his triumphal chariot?

He proposed to the USSR an alliance against England, and a zone of expansion in India. Molotov refused. The minutes of the conversations are cruel to capitalist dictators: the people's commissar is infinitely more dignified than Pétain and Franco. 
However, dignity is not an insurance against homicides caused by stupidity. Did Molotov understand better than the others? No! 
This is evidenced by the confidences made in his old age to Felix Chuev. He believed that Hitler really wanted to invade England and therefore, by refusing his alliance, the USSR gained time, even as it gave assets to its own conqueror: 
to justify the assault, he could always say that he had proposed an agreement and that he had been denied it. But anyway the trap was perfect: 
if he had accepted a treaty, Stalin would have reactivated the discredit brought to his country by the German-Soviet pact and embarrassed anyone who wanted to help him during the inevitable attack\footnote{On all these meetings of the autumn of 1940, cf. F. Delpla, \emph{Montoire, op. cit.}}.

In the first half of 1941, the cat continued to amuse the mouse. Stalin understood that there were plans to attack him.  When he neglects Churchill's warnings on this point, like those of Richard Sorge, it is not, for once, out of foolishness. 
It is that he sets himself a very modest goal: that the attack does not take place this year.  He will therefore play who loses wins and surpasses himself in unpreparedness on his borders, to show Hitler that he risks nothing to push his pawns against England. 
He will accentuate this attitude day by day\footnote{with one exception: on May 5th, probably to show Hitler that he can also react if he is attacked, and perhaps not to let the combativeness of his troops go to waste, he publicly says that \enquote{it is necessary to move from defense to attack}: cf. Gaël Moullec, \enquote{1941: how Hitler manipulated Stalin},  \emph{L'Histoire}, March 1998.},
and until after the beginning of the attack. Goebbels, to better deceive everyone, had made run at the beginning of June, both the rumor of an upcoming German landing in England, and that of an upcoming trip of Stalin to Berlin, which Tass had denied. And now, on the evening of the 21st, Stalin brutally let Berlin know that he agrees to come!  The next day again, when the invasion began, he gave the order not to oppose it, probably hoping that these were initiatives of some of the German generals, to force the hand of their government: now it was he who, in desperation, rallied to the theory of \enquote{Hitler, weak dictator}\footnote{cf. \emph{La ruse nazie} (the Nazi cunning), \emph{op. cit.}, ch. 12.}.

In all this, communists can only find one consolation: the fact that the USSR is reeling from the shock and remaining standing owes everything to the reflexes of the masses, and nothing to their leaders.

\section{The American game}

The United States, surprised by the fall of France, has given itself in record time the means to face new responsibilities, both global and capitalist. 
It is time to put an end to the ridiculous bickering where some say that the Soviets did most of the work against Hitler and others that they held only thanks to American supplies. 
In fact, the two Great Powers have well deserved their appellation, by complementary qualities.  Human and economic mobilization of a people struggling for its survival under iron rule, on the one hand, conquering dynamism of a nation in formation, at the forefront of technology, on the other, crushed Hitler who, without being completely surprised, had underestimated both phenomena and hoped, above all, to be able to liquidate one before fully facing the other.

Having stressed the weight of anti-communism in the decisions that led to Hitler leaving the field open for so long, I would now like to show that the Western victors turned the tide by ignoring, not without merit, their revulsion towards the USSR.

This is obvious and fairly well known in the case of Churchill. The man whom Lenin had decorated with the title of \enquote{greatest opponent of the Russian Revolution} put water in his wine as early as 1935, beginning to say that Hitler's danger was more threatening than the communist peril, and has, since 1938, pushed his country to seek the Moscow alliance — a hope that no German-Soviet collusion has ever made him renounce. It is therefore without forcing his naturalness that on the day of June 22 he writes, and in the evening pronounces, an extraordinary speech where, without denying his past prejudices, he welcomes with open arms in the fight the ally that Hitler handed him on a plate.

The phenomenon, in Roosevelt, is more discreet. He was silent, on the contrary, on 22 June and the following days. This pragmatist probably thinks that encouragement will not change anything in the immediate future 
and if the USSR collapses like a house of cards, it would be a shame to have compromised himself in words.

However, it is acting, and, since few Americans and few Soviets have welcomed this action, perhaps because of reciprocal ideological prejudices, it is time to highlight it.

Apart from the United States, there remains only one great power outside the war: Japan. Very clever who could say if it will enter it… for it does not know it itself.
And above all, it does not know against whom. More than fascism, the Japanese regime is an imperialism with a large place for the army.
Having taken off in the 1890s, a little after that of the United States, it arrived everywhere with a long delay on it, as well as in the Philippines or the Hawaiian Islands.
With rage he had to give in to it, time and time again. However, its leaders are too well informed to think that the time for a frontal impact has come.
They prefer to target smaller adversaries and in particular the European powers, already defeated by Germany such as France, vulnerable in Indochina, or Holland, struggling to defend the Dutch East Indies.
He also planned to attack Britain, which was stripping its defenses of Hong Kong or Singapore in order to concentrate its forces against the Reich.
Another option is possible: to expand into Siberia, at the expense of the USSR. This option  was very much in favor in the thirties, making it possible to give coherence to Japanese companies against the eastern provinces of China, officially to stop the progression of communism. The cold shower had come from the German-Soviet Pact, concluded at the precise moment when the Japanese and Soviet armies were experiencing border battles. Disappointed by Berlin, Tokyo came to sign a non-aggression pact with Moscow in April 1941. Hitler, who was preparing his aggression against the USSR this time, had done everything to dissuade the Japanese from making this gesture:
Japan, in addition to taking revenge for the Nazis' contempt for its interests in 1939, hoped to return them to the west and encourage Berlin to liquidate its war against England before starting a new one.
It is likely that Matsuoka, the Japanese foreign minister who visited Moscow, Berlin and Rome in March-April 1941 at the same time, thought himself clever enough to push Hitler to invade Britain, which would have allowed Japan to occupy its Asian colonies without too much trouble.

It remained to convince the United States to let it happen, playing on its lack of taste for European colonial empires. Success was random, and Matsuoka knew it. Also, as soon as june 22, 1941 he saw the ruin of his efforts and the irreversible choice, by Hitler,
of an expansion at the expense of the USSR\footnote{cf. \emph{Paix et guerre / La politique étrangère des États-Unis 1931-1941} (Peace and war / The foreign policy of the United States 1931-1941), Washington, Departement of State, 1943, p. 135-136.},
he changed his tune and pleaded, within his cabinet, for an attack on Siberia. It was here that Roosevelt intervened. He informed the Japanese government on July 4 that the United States would be extremely angry if Japan attacked the USSR. However, they had ample means of exerting pressure. They had embarked for two years, against the Asian encroachments of Japan, in a policy of graduated economic sanctions, which did not yet affect oil. 
Did Prime Minister Konoye fear an embargo on this strategic commodity? Still, he sacrificed Matsuoka and any idea of anti-Soviet aggression on July 16. 
The calm on the Siberian border, which Sorge's messages allowed to be expected to last, allowed Stalin to recall Zhukov, the general revealed by the border battles of 1939, with his best regiments. 
They were hard at work in the Moscow region at the same time as the Germans, to compete victoriously for the field the following December.  Roosevelt had been instrumental in saving Stalin and, in doing so, drew lightning upon himself. 
For, to please the hardliners of his cabinet, Konoye had to take an initiative and it was the invasion, at the end of July, of southern Indochina, which led to the oil embargo and consequently the obligation, for Japan, to act quickly, if it wanted to act. 
And that was Pearl Harbor.

\section{Pearl Harbor: why and how?}

A deluge of bombs and torpedoes fell on December 7, 1941 on a sleeping base. At the time, it killed more than two thousand people, then lit a fire in the Pacific that caused millions, and ended with a double nuclear fire.

If we stick to a traditional view, these deaths would be due less to capitalism than to feudalism, or even to primitive savagery.
It was samurai Japan, using modern industry only as a means to serve a centuries-old appetite for domination, that would have treacherously attacked Pearl Harbor\footnote{cf. F. Delpla, \emph{Les nouveaux mystères de Pearl Harbor} (The new mysteries of Pearl Harbor), unpublished. Extracts on the Internet: \url{http://www.amgot.org/fr.hist.htm}\rfootnotemark.}\rfootnotetext{Dead link. For an archived copy of what might be the text see appendix \vref{delpla2004}.}.

A closer analysis of the phenomenon obliges, as noted above, to return to the birth, in the nineteenth century, of Japanese imperialism, and its late insertion into the game of powers.
The gifted student not only assimilated the technical lessons of capitalism but also, and also quickly, its geopolitical lessons.
He tried to build a colonial domain, first at the expense of China, taking advantage of the remoteness of the European powers and playing on their rivalries.

Its ruling circles were, from the beginning, divided on the balance to be observed between modernity and tradition. But the divide also passes in the heads.
Like all non-European leaders who are not pure creatures of the West, the Japanese elites are constantly and anxiously wondering where to draw the line between the import of Western values, necessary for development as well as for mere existence, and the preservation of national particularities. Hence a cleavage, with unclear contours, between modernist bourgeois, anxious to preserve peace with the great powers and especially with the United States, and other bourgeois, developing a xenophobic nationalism.

In 1941, Prime Minister Konoye, rather aggressive around 1937, settled down, and tried to keep the country out of the world war. As Japan is already engaged in a local war, in China, it must liquidate it as soon as possible, by a compromise that would be endorsed by Washington. Konoye is confronted within his own cabinet with a warmongering tendency toward a military solution that deprives China of its external support, which comes from both Soviet Siberia and British Burma — hence, these warmongers believe, the need for a war against at least one of the two powers. Hoping, this is the general wish, that the United States will not get involved. The political divide intersects with a division of military leaders: the army is reluctant to evacuate Chinese territories, while the navy, more aware of the state of mind as well as the resources of North America, remains skeptical about the possibility of a war against England or Russia, without intervention of the United States.

But an unusual poker game began at the beginning of this year 1941. The most prestigious of the admirals, Yamamoto, argued that it was impossible to keep the United States out of a war and that, if Japan's interests demanded one, it should begin with a surprise attack on the Pearl Harbor fleet, the destruction of which alone could give free rein to a Japanese offensive. To his probable astonishment, he was ordered to study the plans for such an attack. This has been known for a long time. But Yamamoto is presented as a man torn between his pacifist convictions and his passion for fighting. However, recently published Japanese documents suggest that he only agreed to pilot the operation to sabotage it. Witness the last orders transmitted to the attack fleet: this squadron, the strongest in naval history, had to turn back, without even consulting the general staff, if it was spotted, during its eleven-day journey between the Kurils and Hawaii, more than 24 hours before the attack, and fight if not. But it was difficult to imagine that no aerial reconnaissance would signal such an armada in ten days, not to mention the chance encounters of ships or planes. The warmongers accepted a fool's bargain, and the pacifists a seemingly risk-free game.

In the surprising lack of aerial reconnaissance from Hawaii, does the United States have a share of responsibility, or should we blame bad luck alone? The answer is less simple than some of Roosevelt's opponents believe, who believe that the president was tracking the progress of the aggressor boats and let them act, to subject his still pacifist public opinion to an electroshock. The truth is pretty much the opposite. He would have given dearly to know what was going on.
The identification of an attack force, traveling clandestinely while the mission of Nomura and Kurusu, ambassadors extraordinary, continued in Washington, would have allowed him to raise his voice vis-à-vis Japan and to obtain the formation, in Tokyo, of a resolutely pacifist government: his objective was basically the same as that of Yamamoto.

The Pearl Harbor base, like all those of the United States in the Pacific, was indeed put on alert by the supreme chief of the armies, General Marshall, but at the wrong time: in October, the day after Konoye's resignation and his replacement by General Tojo, presumed to be a warmonger; then on November 27, the day after a breakup, which seemed definitive, of the talks with Nomura. However, on these two occasions, nothing happened. The first time, the Japanese returned to the negotiating table with new proposals. Roosevelt therefore, after fearing an attack at the end of November, regained hope at the beginning of December, and re-established some contacts himself.
What he did not know was precisely that the second time Japan, determined to attack or rather to play, on the sea route of Hawaii, the game of chance that was said, needed a delay of eleven days to bring its forces.
Moreover, in a period of such high international tension, no one imagined a surprise attack on an objective as far from Japan as Hawaii, at least with significant resources. Rather, it was expected in the Philippines.
And precisely, the American army was in the process of transferring equipment from one to the other archipelago… this explains the concentration, between the two, of aerial reconnaissance means based in Hawaii.

The American responsibility for the Pearl Harbor coup can therefore be summed up in one word: racism. Certainly the American leaders do not feel it, vis-à-vis their Japanese counterparts, in the manner of Hitler vis-à-vis the Jews.
It is a simple feeling of superiority, whether moral, intellectual or technical. The White House did not imagine that this belatedly developed country was capable of so much audacity and know-how.
Roosevelt and Marshall believed they held and subdued it, both militarily and diplomatically. The deciphering, by the \enquote{Purple} machine, of the most secret exchanges between Tojo and Nomura added to the feeling of superiority… and security\footnote{Let us add, for the exclusive use of the less sectarian minds, that American passivity, in the days before the attack and even after its beginning, both in the Philippines and in Hawaii, 
resembles that of Stalin the previous June and may well have the same motive: in order to encourage pacifist tendencies in the aggressor, one shows oneself to be peaceful.}.

\section{Conclusion}

The genesis of the Second World War, and the formation of the camps during its first two years, show both that capitalism had not miraculously lost, in 1919, its polemical potentialities, and that it retained enough resources to correct itself and erase, with the help of its Soviet negation, its hideous Nazi variant. Great power rivalries, fraught with economic ulterior motives, first ruined the ideal of collective security, before Hitler wielded communism like a bullfighter's cloak, at the very moment when the USSR, diplomatically assailed and indulged in terrible internal repression, no longer seemed so threatening.
The German aggressiveness is therefore beyond doubt, and could not take the pretext, in the thirties, of the slightest expansionism of the Soviet Union in Europe.

However, Hitler was able, by playing on the hatred of the bourgeoisies towards this country, and then temporarily approaching it, to prevent the conjunction of his potential enemies, to attack them separately.
At the critical moment of May-June 1940, everything rested in the hands of one individual, Churchill. Having recently come to power by taking advantage of rivalries over the leadership of the Conservative Party, he was able, by a mixture of will and cunning, to thwart the logic of British capitalism, which led to resigning itself to Hitler's triumph and to reconverting the activities of the City according to him.
Churchill was also able to gradually give Roosevelt confidence and bring him to put at the service of the anti-Nazi fight the resources of a continent convalescent from the crisis of 1929, and boosted by the profits generated by the confrontation.

This is a clear picture of how risky it is to attribute the victims of conflict to one of the systems involved, and that some deaths are preferable to lives of submission.
Without Churchill, there would have been far fewer deaths between 1940 and 1945 because Hitler would have consolidated his power for a long time and, no doubt, destroyed communism, in its Stalinist version, well before 1991 (and perhaps even without war, because Stalin could have resigned himself to ceding Ukraine by virtue of the balance of forces, as Lenin had done in Brest-Litovsk). He would not even have killed, at that time, so many Jews since, as recent studies have shown\footnote{cf. Philippe Burrin, \emph{Hitler et les Juifs} (Hitler and the Jews), Paris, Seuil, 1989.},
he decided his \enquote{final solution} only because of the slow progress of his advance in the USSR in 1941, which made him glimpse the possibility of his defeat. A triumphant Germany, obtaining the resignation of the other powers before a comfortable extension of its borders to the east, would have let its slaves live reduced to servitude and finished expelling the Jews from its \enquote{space} – with a brutality undoubtedly fatal to many, but without systematic genocide.

The leaders of the great capitalist powers, blinded by anti-communist motives, have given a career to a racist, most criminal enterprise. As for Stalinist communism, it knew only a clumsy attempt to preserve the interests of the workers' movement identified with those of the Soviet state, itself very naïve at times about Hitler's intentions towards it. The endemic permanence of the war since 1945, on the periphery of the developed world, after and before the erasure of the USSR, shows that the lesson has only partially served. While the recurrence of conflicts between great powers could be avoided, only the vanquished of the Second World War refrained from using force in their relations with the underdeveloped countries. From Indochina to Chechnya via Suez, Afghanistan, the Falklands and Iraq, the \enquote{big four} victors of the Axis have happily made the powder speak... while willingly Naziving in their propaganda the opposing leaders, even when they belonged to ethnic groups that the author of Mein Kampf moderately appreciated.
Yesterday Nasser, today Saddam are new Hitlers with whom any agreement would be Munich... President Clinton easily blows this trumpet, and if his partners in the Security Council have recently brought him to his senses, it was by virtue of the motive of the war he wanted to make, and not by the principle that every State, however powerful it may be, must submit to a common rule. At the end of this century, capitalism is still struggling to establish, in terms of relations between nations, the peaceful order that it makes reign in its rule of law states.

\rauthor{François Delpla}

François Delpla is an historian, specialist of world war two, author amongst other works of \emph{Aubrac, les faits et la calomnie} (Aubrac, facts and slander), Le Temps des Cerises éditeurs, 1997.