The First Crisis
The First World War, the punitive settlement at Versailles, the failure of the League of Nations, the Second World War. The Westphalian system tested by total war and found wanting. Eight million dead in the first round; sixty million in the second.
Part of Farewell To Westphalia
14 moments in this segment.
- — The Sarajevo Assassination. Police seize a bystander moments after the shooting of Archduke Franz Ferdinand and Sophie, Sarajevo, 28 June 1914. Place: Corner of Franz Josef Street and the Appel Quay, Sarajevo, Bosnia and Herzegovina Figures: Archduke Franz Ferdinand of Austria, heir presumptive · Sophie, Duchess of Hohenberg, his wife · Gavrilo Princip, 19, Bosnian Serb · the Young Bosnia cell · Leopold Lojka, the chauffeur who takes the wrong turn Wrong Turn at Franz Josef Street The Archduke's motorcade is already a survivor by mid-morning. At 10:10 a hand grenade thrown by Nedeljko Čabrinović bounces off the folded canvas roof of the Gräf & Stift and detonates under the car behind, wounding two officers. The cortege accelerates to the Town Hall, where Franz Ferdinand reads his planned speech with the bomber's congratulatory telegram visibly in his hand. He then insists on visiting the wounded officers at the Sarajevo Garrison Hospital. The route is changed; the chauffeur Lojka is not told. At the corner of Franz Josef Street, Lojka turns right, as planned for the original itinerary. Governor Potiorek shouts that it is the wrong way. Lojka stops to reverse. Gavrilo Princip, standing five feet from the running board outside Schiller's delicatessen, fires twice with a Browning 1910. Sophie is hit in the abdomen; Franz Ferdinand in the jugular. Both die within the hour. The Cascade Princip is a member of Young Bosnia, armed and trained by elements of the Serbian Black Hand under Colonel Apis. The Austro-Hungarian response is calibrated to be rejected: a 23 July ultimatum to Belgrade demanding, among other things, Austrian participation in the Serbian investigation. Serbia accepts nine of ten points. Vienna declares war on 28 July. What follows is the first full demonstration that the Westphalian alliance system, designed to keep equilibrium by automatic counter-mobilization, can no longer be stopped once it begins (see [[august-1914-mobilization]]). Five years to the day after the murders, the same dynasty's defeat will be sealed in the Hall of Mirrors (see [[treaty-of-versailles-1919]]). Video: A TimeGhost production with Indy Neidell walking through the 28 June 1914 motorcade route, the wrong turn at Franz Josef Street, and Gavrilo Princip's two shots.
- — The August 1914 Mobilization. An officer reads the German mobilisation order to a crowd on the Unter den Linden, Berlin, 1 August 1914. Place: Vienna, Belgrade, St Petersburg, Berlin, Paris, London, Brussels Figures: Helmuth von Moltke the Younger, German Chief of Staff · Nicholas II of Russia, ordering and rescinding · Theobald von Bethmann-Hollweg, German Chancellor · Sir Edward Grey, British Foreign Secretary · the railway timetables, sovereign in fact The Timetables Take Over Austria-Hungary declares war on Serbia on 28 July. Russia orders partial mobilization on 29 July, then full mobilization on 30 July when the General Staff convinces the Tsar that partial mobilization will fatally disrupt the timetable for full mobilization later. Germany issues an ultimatum demanding Russian demobilization within twelve hours; when it expires, Berlin declares war on Russia on 1 August. France mobilizes the same evening. The Schlieffen Plan, designed in the 1890s and refined through 1905, allows for no variant in which Germany mobilizes against Russia without also invading France through Belgium. Moltke informs the Kaiser, who has briefly hoped to fight east only, that the entire deployment schedule cannot be rewritten in an afternoon. Germany invades Luxembourg on 2 August and Belgium on 4 August. Britain, guarantor of Belgian neutrality since 1839, declares war on Germany the same night. A War No One Wanted, On Schedule Within a week of the Serbian ultimatum's expiry, all six European Great Powers are at war. Each general staff has built its credibility on the speed and rigidity of its mobilization plan; each plan has been designed to remove the political class's ability to hesitate. The system functions exactly as designed and produces a continental war that almost no leader actually wants. It is the first major Westphalian system failure to prevent a war. The Concert of Europe (see [[congress-of-vienna-1815]]) had assumed that Great Powers in periodic conference could damp local crises before they became general. By August 1914 the conference mechanism is gone; the alliances are automatic; the timetables are sovereign. Le système, as a French diplomat observes that week, marche tout seul. The system walks by itself. Video: Indy Neidell's opening episode of the centennial real-time series, tracking the cascade of ultimatums and general mobilisations through late July and early August 1914.
- — Wilson's Fourteen Points. President Woodrow Wilson addresses a joint session of Congress, the setting in which he delivered the Fourteen Points on 8 January 1918. Place: Joint session of the United States Congress, Capitol, Washington Figures: Woodrow Wilson, US President · Colonel Edward House, his adviser · The Inquiry, a 150-strong team of academics drafting policy at the New York Public Library An American Program for a European Peace Wilson addresses Congress with a fourteen-point program for the postwar world. Open covenants of peace, openly arrived at. Absolute freedom of the seas. Removal of economic barriers. Reduction of armaments. Adjustment of colonial claims with attention to the interests of the populations concerned. Evacuation of Russian, Belgian, French, Romanian, Serbian, and Montenegrin territory. Self-determination for the peoples of Austria-Hungary and the Ottoman Empire. An independent Poland with access to the sea. And, in the fourteenth point, a general association of nations. The Points are drafted largely by Colonel House and The Inquiry, a body of academics convened in September 1917 to design the American peace. They are issued, deliberately, before any Allied conference has agreed war aims. Wilson means to set the terms of the settlement from outside the European system, by making them the visible American precondition for American participation. What Versailles Keeps and Loses The Central Powers accept the Fourteen Points as the basis for armistice in October and November 1918. The German army lays down arms expecting the Points to govern the settlement. At Versailles (see [[treaty-of-versailles-1919]]), Wilson trades most of his program for Clemenceau's and Lloyd George's signatures on the fourteenth: the League of Nations. The remainder survives ideologically. Self-determination becomes the legitimating principle of the interwar successor states, of decolonization after 1945, and of every secessionist case from Bangladesh to Kosovo to South Sudan. The first sustained American attempt to redesign the European Westphalian system from outside it fails as a settlement and succeeds as a vocabulary. Video: Indy Neidell on Wilson's 8 January 1918 address to a joint session of Congress and the doctrine of self-determination it placed on the international agenda.
- — The Treaty of Brest-Litovsk. Arrival of the Soviet delegation at the peace conference in Brest-Litovsk, January 1918. Place: Brest-Litovsk, German-occupied Belarus Figures: Leon Trotsky, then Grigori Sokolnikov for Soviet Russia · Richard von Kühlmann, German Foreign Minister · Ottokar Czernin, Austro-Hungarian Foreign Minister · Lenin, in Petrograd, insisting on signature Peace at Any Price The Bolsheviks seize power in November 1917 on the explicit promise of immediate peace. Trotsky opens negotiations at Brest-Litovsk in December with the slogan no annexations, no indemnities, then walks out in February 1918 with the formula no peace, no war. Germany resumes its advance the next day, taking 240,000 square kilometres in eleven days against no resistance. Lenin overrules the party majority and orders signature on any terms available, on the argument that the Soviet republic must survive long enough for revolution to come to Germany. Sokolnikov signs on 3 March without reading the text, declaring it a dictated peace to be denounced at the first opportunity. A Sovereign State Made to Pay Russia loses Poland, the Baltic states, Ukraine, Finland, Belarus: 26 percent of population, 27 percent of cultivated land, 33 percent of railway track, 73 percent of iron, 89 percent of coal. The territories are detached as nominally independent buffer states under German military oversight. It is the first major Westphalian peace dictated to a sovereign state that has just had a revolution, and the first treaty to test whether the new system applies to a regime its signatories regard as illegitimate. The answer is given when Germany capitulates in the West eight months later. Article XV of the Versailles armistice annuls Brest-Litovsk in November 1918; the territorial settlement collapses; the successor states reappear in different shapes (see [[treaty-of-versailles-1919]] and [[league-of-nations-founded-1920]]). The Bolshevik regime survives, and remembers. Video: Indy Neidell on the 3 March 1918 treaty that ended Russia's war and transferred a third of the empire's population to German control.
- — The Treaty of Versailles. The signing of the Treaty of Versailles in the Hall of Mirrors, 28 June 1919. Place: Hall of Mirrors, Palace of Versailles Figures: David Lloyd George, Britain · Georges Clemenceau, France · Woodrow Wilson, United States · Vittorio Orlando, Italy (walked out) · the German delegation, made to sign at gunpoint Carthaginian Peace The treaty's Article 231, the war-guilt clause, assigns Germany sole responsibility for the war. Reparations are set at 132 billion gold marks. The Rhineland is demilitarized. Alsace-Lorraine returns to France. A Polish Corridor severs East Prussia from the rest of Germany. The German overseas empire is stripped and distributed as League of Nations mandates. The German army is capped at 100,000 men with no air force, no submarines, no heavy artillery. John Maynard Keynes resigns from the British delegation in protest and writes The Economic Consequences of the Peace within months. His thesis: the reparations are mathematically impossible to pay, and the attempt to enforce them will radicalize German politics until another war becomes inevitable. The book is widely read and largely ignored. The League That Couldn't The treaty also creates the League of Nations, the first attempt to overlay Westphalia with a planetary collective-security institution. Wilson proposes; Wilson cannot get the US Senate to ratify; Wilson collapses on a speaking tour in October 1919. The United States never joins the League it conceived. Without American participation, the League cannot enforce collective security where it matters. Japan invades Manchuria (1931); the League protests; nothing happens. Italy invades Abyssinia (1935); sanctions imposed and then quietly dropped. Munich (1938) is negotiated entirely outside the League framework. The Westphalian system's first attempt at collective enforcement has failed within twenty years, and a German war for which Versailles is widely blamed is, by 1939, twenty years and three months away. Video: The Great War channel on the 28 June 1919 signing in the Hall of Mirrors, with John Maynard Keynes's prophetic verdict on the reparations regime.
- — The League of Nations Founded. Members of the League of Nations Commission at the Paris Peace Conference, drafters of the Covenant that came into force on 10 January 1920. Place: Palais Wilson, Geneva, Switzerland Figures: Eric Drummond, first Secretary-General · Léon Bourgeois, French theorist of the League idea · Lord Robert Cecil, British architect · 42 founding member states · the United States, conspicuously absent A Standing Body for a Westphalian World The League comes into being on 10 January 1920 with the entry into force of the Treaty of Versailles (see [[treaty-of-versailles-1919]]). Forty-two founding members. Headquartered initially at the Palais Wilson, then from 1936 at the Palais des Nations on the lakeshore. Article 10 of the Covenant binds members to respect and preserve as against external aggression the territorial integrity and existing political independence of all members. Article 16 commits members to economic and military sanctions against any state that resorts to war in violation of its Covenant obligations. It is the first standing planetary body designed to constrain Westphalian sovereignty by collective security. The architecture is ambitious. The financing is thin: a budget around six million Swiss francs, a Secretariat of about 700 in its peak years. Born Without Its Architect The United States, having proposed the institution as Wilson's fourteenth point (see [[wilson-fourteen-points-1918]]), never joins. The Senate rejects ratification in November 1919 and again in March 1920, principally over Article 10's apparent commitment to collective force. Wilson collapses on a national speaking tour intended to break the deadlock and is incapacitated for the remainder of his term. Without American participation, the League cannot deliver either security or constraint. Germany joins in 1926 and withdraws in 1933. Japan withdraws in 1933. Italy withdraws in 1937. The Soviet Union joins in 1934 and is expelled in 1939 for invading Finland. By 1940 the Geneva offices are essentially shuttered. The institution survives juridically until 18 April 1946, when it dissolves and transfers its assets to the new United Nations (see [[un-charter-1945]]). Video: The Great War channel on the Covenant entering force 10 January 1920, the Senate's rejection of US membership, and the structural weaknesses built into Geneva from the start.
- — The Locarno Treaties. Foreign ministers Gustav Stresemann, Austen Chamberlain and Aristide Briand at the Locarno conference, October 1925. Place: Locarno, Ticino, Switzerland Figures: Gustav Stresemann, German Foreign Minister · Aristide Briand, French Foreign Minister · Austen Chamberlain, British Foreign Secretary · Émile Vandervelde, Belgian · Benito Mussolini, Italian (signing without enthusiasm) Borders Guaranteed Germany, France, Belgium, Britain, and Italy sign a treaty guaranteeing the post-Versailles Franco-German and Belgo-German borders, including the demilitarized status of the Rhineland. Britain and Italy commit to act against whichever of France, Belgium, or Germany violates the settlement. Germany signs arbitration treaties with France, Belgium, Poland, and Czechoslovakia. Crucially, the eastern German borders (with Poland and Czechoslovakia) are not guaranteed in the same terms. Stresemann refuses; nobody insists. The treaty is initialled on 16 October 1925 at the Palazzo del Pretorio in Locarno after two weeks in which the foreign ministers eat lunch together every day. It is signed formally at the Foreign Office in London on 1 December. Germany is admitted to the League of Nations the following September. Five Good Years Stresemann, Briand, and Chamberlain share the 1926 Nobel Peace Prize. For about five years it looks as if European reconciliation is real. The Briand-Kellogg Pact of 1928 (see [[kellogg-briand-pact-1928]]) follows directly from the esprit de Locarno. French troops evacuate the Rhineland in June 1930, five years ahead of the Versailles schedule. Stresemann dies on 3 October 1929. The Wall Street crash arrives three weeks later. The reparations system that the Dawes (1924) and Young (1929) plans had stabilized collapses with the German banking system in 1931. By March 1936 the Wehrmacht is back in the Rhineland; the Locarno guarantees are dead letter; nobody fires. The interval is remembered as the last moment in which the post-Versailles settlement could plausibly have stabilized into a durable Westphalian peace.
- — The Kellogg-Briand Pact. Frank B. Kellogg signs the instrument of ratification for the Pact of Paris, which had been concluded at the foreign ministry on 27 August 1928. Place: Quai d'Orsay, Paris Figures: Frank B. Kellogg, US Secretary of State · Aristide Briand, French Foreign Minister · Gustav Stresemann, German Foreign Minister · representatives of fifteen original signatories, eventually sixty-three War Renounced Briand proposes a bilateral Franco-American treaty in April 1927, on the tenth anniversary of US entry into the World War. Kellogg, wary of an entangling alliance, counter-proposes a multilateral treaty open to all states, renouncing war as an instrument of national policy. Briand accepts. The Pact is signed by fifteen states in the Salon de l'Horloge at the Quai d'Orsay on 27 August 1928. Sixty-three states eventually accede, including all major powers of the day. It enters into force on 24 July 1929. The text is two articles long. Article I: the signatories condemn recourse to war for the solution of international controversies, and renounce it as an instrument of national policy in their relations with one another. Article II: all disputes shall be settled by pacific means. There is no enforcement mechanism. A Treaty Without Teeth, A Charge With Them Within three years Japan invades Manchuria (see [[japan-invades-manchuria-1931]]); within seven, Italy invades Abyssinia (see [[italy-invades-abyssinia-1935]]); within eleven, Germany invades Poland (see [[germany-invades-poland-1939]]). The Pact prevents none of them. It is widely cited in the 1930s as a monument to interwar naïveté. But its language reappears as legal foundation in 1945. The Nuremberg Tribunal charges the surviving Nazi leadership with crimes against peace, defined as the planning and waging of aggressive war in violation of international treaties, with Kellogg-Briand cited specifically. The Tokyo Tribunal does the same. Oona Hathaway and Scott Shapiro argue in The Internationalists (2017) that the Pact's longer effect is the dismantling of conquest as a legal route to territory: states acquire by treaty after 1945, almost never by war.
- — Japan Invades Manchuria. Japanese troops of the Kwantung Army in the field near Mukden, October 1931, weeks after the staged railway incident of 18 September. Place: Liutiaohu, near Mukden (Shenyang), southern Manchuria Figures: Lieutenant Colonel Suemori Komoto and Colonel Seishirō Itagaki, conspirators · Kwantung Army staff · the Wakatsuki cabinet, informed after the fact · Victor Bulwer-Lytton, leading the League commission · Yōsuke Matsuoka, walking Japan out of Geneva The Mukden Incident Just after ten p.m. on 18 September 1931, Kwantung Army officers detonate a small charge on the South Manchuria Railway near Liutiaohu, north of Mukden. The damage is so minor that a Dalian-bound express passes the spot minutes later without incident. The conspirators blame Chinese saboteurs and order an immediate punitive advance. The Mukden garrison is taken by morning. Within five months the Kwantung Army has occupied all of Manchuria, an area larger than France and Germany combined, and installed the deposed Qing emperor Puyi as figurehead of a new puppet state, Manchukuo. The civilian government in Tokyo is informed after the operation is underway and cannot reverse it. The army acts; the cabinet ratifies; the constitutional question of who actually controls Japanese foreign policy is answered for the rest of the decade. Geneva Condemns, Tokyo Leaves China appeals to the League of Nations under Article 11 on 21 September. The League commissions a five-member inquiry under Lord Lytton, which travels to Manchuria in 1932 and reports in October that Japan's actions cannot be regarded as legitimate self-defence and that Manchukuo is not the product of genuine independence movement. The League Assembly adopts the report 42 to 1 (Japan dissenting) on 24 February 1933. Yōsuke Matsuoka, the Japanese delegate, walks out of the chamber and Japan formally withdraws from the League the following month. No sanctions follow. No state recognizes Manchukuo except Italy, Germany, and (later) the Vichy regime, and yet it persists for fourteen years. It is the first major demonstration that the League cannot constrain a Great Power (see [[league-of-nations-founded-1920]]). The Sino-Japanese war that begins formally in 1937 grows out of this opening; so does the road to Pearl Harbor. Video: Indy Neidell on the Mukden Incident of 18 September 1931, the Kwantung Army's runaway war, and the puppet state of Manchukuo.
- — Italy Invades Abyssinia. Emperor Haile Selassie of Ethiopia addresses the League of Nations in Geneva, 30 June 1936, appealing for collective action against the Italian invasion. Place: From Eritrea and Italian Somaliland into Ethiopia Figures: Benito Mussolini, ordering from Rome · Marshal Pietro Badoglio, commanding · Marshal Rodolfo Graziani, southern front · Haile Selassie, Emperor of Ethiopia · Samuel Hoare and Pierre Laval, drafting a secret partition · Anthony Eden, resigning over it Mustard Gas in the Highlands Italian forces cross from Eritrea into Tigray on 3 October 1935 without declaration of war. Badoglio commands roughly 400,000 men, the largest colonial expedition assembled to that date. Ethiopian resistance under Ras Mulugeta and Ras Imru is determined; Italian advance is slow until early 1936, when Mussolini authorizes the use of mustard gas, sprayed from aircraft over Ethiopian troops, civilians, and Red Cross stations in direct violation of the 1925 Geneva Protocol Italy has ratified. Addis Ababa falls on 5 May 1936. Haile Selassie escapes by train and ship to Britain. On 9 May Mussolini proclaims the empire from the Palazzo Venezia balcony. Italian East Africa, formed by the merger of Ethiopia, Eritrea, and Italian Somaliland, lasts five years. Sanctions Imposed and Quietly Dropped The League of Nations declares Italy the aggressor on 7 October and imposes Article 16 sanctions on 18 November: arms embargo, financial restrictions, ban on imports from Italy, ban on exports to Italy of certain raw materials. Oil, the one sanction that might have stopped the war, is excluded. In December the British and French foreign ministers privately draft the Hoare-Laval Pact, which would partition Ethiopia in Italy's favour; the plan leaks, public outcry forces Hoare's resignation, but the signal to Rome is unmistakable. On 30 June 1936, Haile Selassie addresses the League Assembly in Geneva in person: It is us today. It will be you tomorrow. Hecklers from the Italian press gallery shout him down. The League ends sanctions on 15 July. France and Britain are by now actively prioritizing Italian alignment against Germany. The League's second total failure (see [[japan-invades-manchuria-1931]]) is complete inside seven months. Within four years Italy is fighting on the German side anyway. Video: Indy Neidell on Mussolini's invasion of Ethiopia from 3 October 1935 and the League of Nations failure that followed.
- — The Munich Agreement. Chamberlain, Daladier, Hitler, Mussolini and Ciano before the signing of the Munich Agreement, 29 to 30 September 1938. Place: Führerbau, Königsplatz, Munich Figures: Adolf Hitler · Neville Chamberlain, British Prime Minister · Édouard Daladier, French Premier · Benito Mussolini, mediating · Edvard Beneš, Czechoslovak President, not invited Four Powers, One Absent The four heads of government meet at the Führerbau in Munich on the evening of 29 September 1938 and sign before two a.m. on the 30th. The agreement transfers the Sudetenland, the German-majority border districts of Czechoslovakia, to Germany in stages between 1 and 10 October. With the Sudetenland go the entire Czech border fortification system, most of the country's heavy industry, three-quarters of its electrical generating capacity, and the natural mountain frontier. The Czechoslovak delegation is held in a Munich hotel and presented with the terms after signature. Beneš accepts on 30 September because the alternative is to fight Germany alone. France abandons its 1924 alliance with Prague; Britain has never had one. The country that the Versailles settlement (see [[treaty-of-versailles-1919]]) had built as a Central European liberal democracy is partitioned by its supposed protectors in a thirteen-hour meeting to which it is not admitted. Peace for Our Time Chamberlain returns to Heston aerodrome on the afternoon of 30 September waving a separate Anglo-German declaration of non-aggression and tells the crowd at Downing Street that he has brought back peace for our time. Daladier, met by cheering crowds at Le Bourget, mutters to an aide that the French do not understand what has just happened (les imbéciles, in some accounts). On 15 March 1939, German troops occupy the rump Czech lands without resistance and declare the Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia. Slovakia is detached as a German client. Whatever Munich was supposed to settle, it has settled nothing for six months. The agreement enters the lexicon as the canonical case of appeasement, and the comparison to Munich becomes one of the most weaponized analogies in twentieth-century foreign-policy debate. Six months later, the door is open to [[ribbentrop-molotov-1939]] and [[germany-invades-poland-1939]]. Video: Indy Neidell on the 29 September 1938 Munich Agreement, Chamberlain's peace for our time, and the dismemberment of Czechoslovakia.
- — The Ribbentrop-Molotov Pact. Vyacheslav Molotov signs the Soviet-German Non-Aggression Pact in Moscow as Joachim von Ribbentrop and Joseph Stalin look on, 23 August 1939. Place: The Kremlin, Moscow Figures: Joachim von Ribbentrop, German Foreign Minister · Vyacheslav Molotov, Soviet Foreign Minister · Joseph Stalin, observing the signature · Friedrich-Werner Graf von der Schulenburg, German Ambassador The Deepest Enemies Sign Negotiations move from trade talks in May to a political treaty by mid-August. Ribbentrop flies to Moscow on 23 August. The public Treaty of Non-Aggression, ten articles, commits each party not to attack the other and not to support any third party that attacks it. It is signed late that night in Molotov's office, with Stalin standing behind the table. The Secret Additional Protocol, four short articles, divides Eastern Europe into spheres of influence. The Baltic states north of Lithuania, eastern Poland, Bessarabia: Soviet. Lithuania and western Poland: German. A line runs roughly along the Vistula, the San, and the Narew. The protocol's existence is denied by Moscow for fifty years and confirmed only in 1989 when the Lithuanian SSR's commission accesses the German microfilm copy. Westphalian Raison d'État, Pure The deepest ideological enemies of the decade ally to dismember Poland. The Comintern reverses anti-fascist policy overnight; Western communist parties spend twenty-two months explaining that the imperialist war is none of their concern. The Soviet Union supplies Germany with grain, oil, manganese, and chrome until literally hours before the German invasion of June 1941. It is Westphalian raison d'état in its purest form: state interest unmoored from any ideological pretext. The alliances that produce 1914 (see [[august-1914-mobilization]]) had at least been ideologically plausible; the alliances of 1939 demonstrate that under sufficient pressure the Westphalian system will pair any two states whose immediate interests align. The pact lasts twenty-two months. Its territorial provisions outlast it. The Baltic states, partitioned in 1940, regain independence only in 1991. Video: Indy Neidell on the 23 August 1939 non-aggression pact and the secret protocol that partitioned Eastern Europe between Berlin and Moscow.
- — Germany Invades Poland. German troops parade through Warsaw following the invasion of Poland, September 1939. Place: The German-Polish border; Wieluń, Danzig, Mokra, the Mazury Figures: Adolf Hitler, in the Reichstag at ten · Edward Rydz-Śmigły, Polish Commander-in-Chief · Major Henryk Sucharski, Westerplatte garrison · Reinhard Heydrich, planning Operation Himmler · Neville Chamberlain, declaring war on 3 September Operation Himmler and the Border On the night of 31 August, SS men in Polish uniforms stage seven false-flag attacks along the border, the largest at the Gleiwitz radio station. Concentration-camp prisoners are killed, dressed in Polish uniforms, left as evidence. At 04:45 on 1 September the battleship Schleswig-Holstein opens fire on the Polish garrison at Westerplatte, near Danzig. Wieluń is bombed in the same minutes; sixty-five percent of the town is destroyed and roughly twelve hundred civilians killed. German armoured columns cross from East Prussia, Pomerania, Silesia, and Slovakia in coordinated lines. Hitler addresses the Reichstag at ten a.m. in field-grey uniform: seit 5:45 Uhr wird jetzt zurückgeschossen, fire is being returned since 05:45. The time is wrong by an hour and the verb's voice (passive, defensive) is a lie. The substance, that war has begun, is true. The Guarantees Honoured Britain and France issue ultimatums on 1 September demanding withdrawal. When they expire on 3 September, both states honour their guarantees to Poland and declare war on Germany. France will fight no serious offensive for eight months. The Soviet Union invades eastern Poland on 17 September per the secret protocols of [[ribbentrop-molotov-1939]]. Polish resistance ends formally on 6 October. The Second World War in Europe begins. By the time it ends in 1945, roughly sixty million people are dead, the continent is occupied by two non-European powers, and the Westphalian system requires (see [[un-charter-1945]] and [[yalta-conference-1945]]) a wholesale redesign. The interwar attempt at collective security through the League is over (see [[league-of-nations-founded-1920]]); the second attempt will be drafted at San Francisco within six years. Video: Episode 001 of the TimeGhost real-time WW2 series. Indy Neidell on the Wehrmacht crossing the Polish frontier at dawn on 1 September 1939.
- — The Yalta Conference. Winston Churchill, Franklin D. Roosevelt and Joseph Stalin at the Yalta Conference, Livadia Palace, February 1945. Place: Livadia Palace, Yalta, Crimea Figures: Franklin D. Roosevelt, frail and twelve weeks from death · Winston Churchill · Joseph Stalin, the host · Edward Stettinius, Anthony Eden, Vyacheslav Molotov, the foreign ministers · Alger Hiss, US delegation note-taker Seven Days at Livadia The three heads of government meet at the former summer palace of Nicholas II. The Red Army is on the Oder, forty miles from Berlin; Anglo-American forces are still west of the Rhine. The military balance frames every conversation. The agenda runs to four principal questions: the structure of the United Nations, the postwar treatment of Germany, the political shape of liberated Eastern Europe, and the terms of Soviet entry into the Pacific war. On the UN, agreement is reached on the Security Council veto formula (see [[un-charter-1945]]) and the General Assembly. On Germany, agreement is reached on division into occupation zones, with a French zone carved from the Anglo-American sectors and a separately occupied Berlin. On Poland, the eastern border runs along the Curzon Line, the western along the Oder-Neisse; the Lublin Committee will be the basis of the provisional government, broadened by some London Poles. On the Pacific, Stalin commits to declare war on Japan within three months of Germany's defeat, in exchange for the Kurile Islands, southern Sakhalin, and a sphere of influence in Manchuria. The Constitutional Document of the Cold War The Declaration on Liberated Europe, signed on 11 February, commits the three powers to the earliest possible establishment through free elections of governments responsive to the will of the people. The phrase is interpreted differently in Washington and in Moscow within months. By the Potsdam Conference in July the disagreement is open. By March 1946, Churchill is in Fulton, Missouri, speaking of an iron curtain. Yalta becomes the constitutional document of the Cold War, in the negative sense: the conference where, in the dominant Anglo-American reading, Eastern Europe was conceded; in the Soviet reading, Western recognition of facts already on the ground was secured. Both readings agree on the substance: Yalta sets the framework that San Francisco (see [[un-charter-1945]]) builds inside, and that the next forty-five years of bipolar Westphalia (the system the [[fall-of-the-berlin-wall-1989]] eventually ends) live under. Video: TimeGhost special on the 4 to 11 February 1945 conference at Livadia Palace, where Roosevelt, Churchill, and Stalin drew the postwar map.
