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By the spring of 1942, a number of camps had been constructed in Poland. Concentration camps for political dissidents have existed in Germany since 1933, and similar camps have been used by other nations before that. Many thousands died in the initial variety of Nazi camps, but many more died in the British and Spanish camps, mostly from disease and exposure to the elements. There were fewer precedents for camps designed with the explicit goal of murdering an entire people, race, or category of humanity as quickly and efficiently as possible. The camps of the Soviet Union are close to the camps of Nazi Germany. Being sent to a Soviet prison was seen as a death sentence, though the death came from neglect, disease, or an executioner's bullet, not factory-style mass murder. The actions taken by the Soviet authorities against the "kulaks as a class" and other "seditious" ethnic minorities were very close to those taken against the "Jews as a race".

It has been speculated that by December 1941 the likelihood of defeat had begun to gnaw into Hitler's consciousness, and that his decision to order that all Jews under Nazi control be put to death had much to do with it. The United States was fully in the war because he failed to bring down the British. It is thought that Hitler had the power to win his war against the Jews since millions of them were under his control.

It is difficult to determine the priority of that war in Hitler's mind. There is evidence that he and other Nazi leaders diverted vital resources away from the battlefields on the eastern front and towards the extermination camps, but the matter is mired in baffling complexities and seeming contradictions - typical of the Nazi Reich as a whole. In 1942 and 1943, the death camps went into high gear, and it is difficult to imagine that such a massive undertaking would have proceeded without support from Hitler.

A further complicating factor is that, by the spring of 1942, the Fuhrer had turned his attention to another all-out attack against the Red Army, this time concentrating on southern Russia. In the summer of 1942, Nazi armies went from victory to victory in their drive toward the oil fields of the Caucasus Mountains.

The Red Army's counteroffensive at Stalingrad was more decisive than it had been in the battles outside Moscow in the previous year. The general of the Red Army, Friedrich von Paulus, surrendered to Hitler in November. By the end of January 1943, only ninety thousand soldiers, including twenty-four generals, were still alive. They wouldn't live to see Germany again.

Communism seemed to be defeating Nazism in the five-month battle, which resulted in the deaths of over a million Soviet soldiers and civilians. The news that the tank warfare in North Africa against the "desert fox," Erwin Rommel, had begun to turn in favor of the British and rapidly arriving Americans in the fall of 1942 gave the sense of a turning tide. Until the first months of 1943, German submarines were taking a heavy toll on ships from America to Britain, but after technological advances in detecting submarines and an effective convoy system, a growing number of American ships began arriving in British harbors.

The story of World War II in Europe from early 1943 to June 1945 was one of Nazi retreat. The battle in July and August 1943 around the Kursk salient, occupied by the Red Army, was the most famous battle of the eastern front. The greatest clash of tanks in history took place. It was the most expensive day of aerial warfare in history. It was the first major battle in which the celebrated German panzer units failed to break through enemy defenses. By land, by sea, by air, and in arenas where the German military had been most feared, the Nazi Reich had begun to suffer defeat.

Four and a half decades after the end of the war, there was a remarkable economic recovery, with no general war. The two and a half decades after the end of the Cold War saw dramatic changes in the lands where Communists had ruled but also in western Europe, which took major steps toward economic union. Germany was allowed to reunify.

The new German Reich was smaller than the old one, but it still became Europe's most productive country.

The victory at Stalingrad in January 1943 made it clear that the days of the Third Reich were numbered. The triumph of the Allied powers in the summer of 1945 was exhilarating for many Europeans, but also marked a time of widespread despair and hopelessness as another war was building, possibly involving atomic bombs or other weapons of massive destruction. The simmering tensions between the former Allied victors did not lead to a general war in Europe. After the end of the Cold War, the fear of large armies clashing and the bombing of cities with mass civilian deaths did not develop in Europe.

The initial passions of the Cold War waned over the course of four and a half decades, as the attachment of Europeans to competing ideologies gradually diversified and weakened. The end of the Soviet empire was more of a whimper than a bang.

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The healing process in Communist-dominated eastern Europe was slower and less complete than in western, free-market Europe, which was a factor in the collapse of the Soviet empire. Eastern Europe evolved into a region of material comfort and physical security compared to other parts of the world. In western Europe, there were disagreements about how far the welfare state should expand in trying to mitigate the destructive aspects of the free market and how much that market needed to be preserved to encourage economic dynamism. There were major differences about how best to manage the economy in Communist-ruled states. The economies of nearly all European nations were rebuilt. Bombed-out cities were gradually restored. Millions of acres were replanted.

It was the most improved period in European history.

The Europeans' power and sense of self changed over time. Europe's world position before 1914 was taken over by the United States and the Soviet Union, but those two non- European or semi- European powers could themselves be considered remnants of European civilization. Growing numbers of Europeans, especially those born after 1945, came to view their past in fundamentally different ways, as the shadow of the previous period of European history was dark and chilling. The appearance of the phrase "mastering the past," as distinguished from the more familiar "learning the lessons of history," suggested the difference.

There was a tendency among some historians to see European history as uniquely tainting, building toward genocide and self-destruction.

The result of this painful self-examination was that Europe became one of the most tolerant areas of the world, as well as one of the most prosperous. The openness of the intellectual climate in Europe's liberal-democratic states was impressive in comparison to previous periods, even though the tolerance and self-criticism of Europeans had definite limits. Europe's nations became places of refuge for millions of nonEuropeans, fleeing dictatorships, ethnic or religious persecution, and, perhaps most of all, poverty.

The movement toward European unity touched on a range of issues, from rela tively concrete economic ones to more elusive ones of nationalist attachment, ethical values, and legal norms. Europeans cultivated a loose sense of common identity in "Christendom" and then as part of the European concert of nations, with various kinds of economic and cultural ties. The move toward greater unity, as well as the ensuing Cold War, was a result of the revulsion over the tragedies of 1914 to 1945 and the threat of Communism. The expansion of the Soviet empire put a lid on eastern- European hypernationalism.

The effort to achieve economic integration was mostly a success, if hard-earned and tenuous at times. A single dominant European identity, one that subordinated existing national identities to a larger European one, remained an ever-receding prospect, despite the fact that Nationalist antipathies in Europe did decline significantly.

The closest parallels have to do with unrealistic hopes dashed. The oil embargo instituted by Arab nations following the war with Israel in 1973 caused the worst economic slump since the war, but also reflected other economic trends.

The nature of the Cold War changed in these years, as the soviets were allowed to step away from strict supervision by their leaders, and western- European democracies distanced themselves from the kind of leadership exercised by the United States. The late 1970s and early 1980s saw renewed tension between the United States and the Soviet Union, as both presidents Carter and Reagan pushed a more aggressive foreign policy, with a stress on the issue of human rights in the Soviet Union and on competing military budgets.

It is clear that the cracks in the structure of Communist rule in eastern Europe were getting worse. The Communist rule of the Soviet Union was on the verge of collapse when Gorbachev took over. Gorbachev's toleration was extended to the point of no longer insisting on the role of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union as long as the leading role was recognized. The collapse of European Communism and the beginning of a new era of history happened in the late 1980s.

The European New Order was barely established before it started to unraveling, and the Thousand Year Reich only lasted twelve years. The American giant began to flex its muscles, supplying Britain and Russia with vital materials, while the Red Army continued its relentless drive. The first landing of American troops was in north Africa in November 1942, followed by Sicily in July 1943, and then the major landing at Normandy in June 1944. The final victory in Europe took place in May 1945.

At this point in time, anyone's guess was the future shape of Europe. How to deal with the Nazis and those allied with them was uncertain. The full extent of the atrocities committed during the war was still unknown, and the deeper meaning of those atrocities as yet not searchingly explored, and the efforts of the postwar tribunals at Nuremberg to achieve some sort of justice left.

After the end of the war, the shape of the postwar European world remained up in the air.

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The issue of the postwar settlement was problematic because the historical records of the Americans and British were inconsistent with the principles of the Atlantic Charter. The Soviet Union's long standing and explicit rejection of those principles was a bigger problem. There is less reliable evidence in regard to the affection and mutual admiration of the Big Three (as they were called) for one another, but more surprising was the fact that they were both anti-Communists.

Many in the Allied camp still believed in the guilt of the Germans. That belief implied that collective punishment was justified. Not all of the ardent Nazis in the German population were guilty of criminal actions.

Millions of others claimed to have silently rejected Nazi actions, but they had done little or nothing to oppose them.

The paradoxes of Wilsonian ideals of national self-determination were already familiar, as was the notion that the Germans were not to be given the same rights as other peoples. The situation of various eastern-European peoples was more complicated. If allowed to choose their form of government after the war, they would almost certainly have voted for extreme nationalist, anti-Soviet, and antisemitic ones. The Soviets were not likely to approve of having right-wing neighbors. The citizens of the United States of African origin, or the Arab majority in Palestine, would continue to be denied the right to vote for the form of government under which they lived after the war ended.

Jews are being arrested in the Warsaw Ghetto. Jewish families surrender to the Nazis in 1943. The residents of the ghetto rose against the Nazis and held their ground for several months, but were defeated after fierce fighting in April and May.

The devil is in the details.

The view of Germans as inherently criminal was reinforced by war-time propaganda and even if precise definitions were not available, few disputed the criminal nature of the Third Reich. After the end of the war, the dimensions of that criminality became apparent, but not the full dimensions for a long time. There were many reports of Nazi atrocities during the war and threats to punish war criminals. There was a certain reticence to believe all of those reports because of the fabrications and exaggerations that took place during and after World War I. Many of the war-time reports evoked a revulsion so profound as to numb the ability to comprehend.

The Congress of Vienna in 1814-15 and the Paris Peace Conference in 1919 were the only peace conferences of their kind after World War II. A series of extraordinary war-time conferences of the Allies were held to coordinate the war effort and work out the principles to be applied to the postwar settlement. Within a few years the war-time tensions between the great powers emerged to take on threatening forms, despite the fact that these conferences served as a de facto peace settlement. At the Paris Peace Conference and the Congress of Vienna, there was a clash of strong personalities and seemingly irreconcilable national interests. Personal diplomacy played a key role at the four most famous conferences. The photos taken of the seated leaders at those conferences have achieved icon status due to the fact that they exercised powers far exceeding those of the leaders at Vienna in 1815 and Paris in 1919.

The face-to-face encounters between Stalin and Churchill were able to say that Stalin was one of the most intransigent anti- Communists in the world. By the time of the Battle of Britain, Hitler was described as a form of rule that exceeded all forms of human wickedness, including Communism. He began to believe that an alliance with the Soviet Union was the best way to counter the threat of Nazi Germany. After the Soviet Union was attacked by Nazi Germany, the Allies formed an alliance with the Communists. He dropped his anti-Communism and began to praise Stalin's leadership and the accomplishments of the Soviet system. In private, he expressed a personal affection for Stalin.

Stalin missed the first conference of the Allied leaders, at Casablanca in January 1943, but the Big Three met twice, first at Tehran in November 1943 and then at Yalta in February 1945.

After Germany's defeat, Roosevelt died a month after Yalta, before the July conference at Potsdam. His vice-president was Harry S. Truman. The Labour leader, Clement Attlee, was voted out of office in the July British elections, as the Potsdam conference was in progress.

The United States, Great Britain, and Soviet Russia formed the Grand Alliance in 1942. Before long, Roosevelt and war-time propagandists in the United States were also praising the leader of the Soviets, "Uncle Joe" Stalin. The public language of anti-Axis, liberal-democratic values that came to be associated with the Grand Alliance had a resemblance to the language of the Popular Front from 1936 to 1939. The years of failure and disillusionment were followed by nearly two years of a Nazi-Communist coalition. For anyone with a memory of more than five years, recent precedents were tainting any renewed pro-Soviet rhetoric. Although a brave face prevailed from early 1942 to the end of the war, it was hard to ignore that the Grand Alliance was composed of those who had recently been bitter enemies. The Allies were together until the enemies were defeated.

The political and personal differences between Roosevelt and Churchill were hidden from the public and the two men developed a friendship. The Atlantic Charter of August 1942 was worked on by the British leader after he spent three weeks with the American president in the White House discussing war strategies.

The Casablanca conference was called to approve a number of decisions about the strategy of the war in Europe. The decision to make it likely that the Germans would fight to the bitter end was criticized by some advisers because it implied that a separate, negotiated peace with Germany would not happen. The Allies believed that they could not sully the purity of their cause by compromising with evil.

Stalin didn't make it to the conference because his country was still fighting for survival at Stalingrad.

Americans would make peace with Nazi Germany. The alarm was linked to his suspicion that the reason the British and Americans repeatedly postponed the date of establishing a second front in western Europe was to allow the German and Soviet armies to battle on as long as possible. Stalin believed that the real motive behind the policy of appeasement was to encourage Hitler to go to the east.

There was a lot of reason to delay establishing the western front.

The most costly battles continued to be waged on the eastern front even after the landings in North Africa, Italy, and finally Normandy. After the Normandy landing, Hitler continued to station most of his armed forces there. By the end of the war, the Red Army and the Soviet civilian population had suffered terrible losses, which the Soviet leaders stressed in general terms but masked in detail, since they felt vulnerable to the Anglo-Americans.

The fundamental truths of this disproportion of suffering cast long shadows. The war-time conferences were in the shadows. The armies of the Western Allies generally made slow progress and suffered a few shocking reverses. Although the battles in north Africa had turned in favor of the British and Americans by early 1943, progress there had been much slower than anticipated.

Roosevelt was convinced that he could allay Stalin's suspicions by personally meeting him. He believed that with his personal charm, he could convince Stalin that the capitalist world would not act in a way that the Communists would act in. Roosevelt understood that he needed to show great sensitivity to Stalin's concerns by avoiding confrontations or dwelling on the unhappy recent past, but that was a tall order. Roosevelt was hopeful that he could convince Stalin to accept a vision of the postwar world in which the major powers, capitalist and Communist, would cooperate in keeping the peace, a vision that would not make much sense to a man of Stalin's personal beliefs.

Stalin's suspicion that Roosevelt and Churchill would cooperate against him was unwarranted. They both tried to get Stalin's support against the other.

Roosevelt told Stalin that he agreed with the Communists that Europe's imperial holdings should be dismantled after the war. The naivete of the Americans in foreign affairs was referred to slightly by Churchill in his private conversations with Stalin at Tehran.

The meeting was held in Tehran from November 28 to December 1. Stalin had not left Soviet territory since he took power. The informal exchanges between the Big Three were strange, perhaps more so than the formal decisions reached. There was a certain symbolism in how far Roosevelt and Churchill were willing to go to accommodate their Communist ally, since he remained unwilling to do more than step over the Soviet border, while they had to travel thousands of miles. Stalin wanted his own people to be in charge of security, so most of the meetings were held in the Soviet Union. There was a personal gift from King George VI to the citizens of Stalingrad and the people of the Soviet Union, as well as a specially prepared sword of honor, at an elaborate banquet that was hosted by the Prime Minister. Stalin kissed the sword after accepting it.

He did not give a comparable gift to the American or British people.

Stalin avoided direct confrontations. It might be argued that Stalin was the most effective in personal diplomacy because he seemed to persuade his capitalist interlocutors that he was, after all, a modest, reasonable sort. The Tehran conference had an aura of unreality because Roosevelt believed he could convince Stalin that Marxist theory was flawed and that capitalist leaders could be trusted.

I have a hunch that Stalin is not that kind of man. He won't try to annex anything and will work with me for a world of democracy and peace if I give him everything I can.

After several meetings with Stalin, Churchill commented that "Poor Neville Chamberlain believed he could trust Hitler."

Much of the playful repartee by the Big Three at Tehran is very real.

Stalin approved the murder of thousands of Polish officers in the spring of 1940, after overseeing the arrests and execution of thousands of his own military leaders.

The idea of putting thousands of German officers to death was hardly a large step for him, but the Big Three at Tehran finally postponed decisions about the exact punishments to be meted out to Nazi military officers.

In 1814-15 and 1919, the problem of Poland proved to be particularly troublesome, threatening to divide the Big Three irreparably. They put off binding decisions again.

Poland was to remain friendly to the Soviet Union even though there would be free elections.

The mass of Poland's population was deeply anti-Russian and anti-Communist. The Red Army and the Soviet secret police would have to guarantee friendship between Poland and the Soviet Union in order for a regime there to be elected.

Stalin's main concern was to get a firm commitment for the Anglo-American landing in western Europe, and that concern was more or less satisfied at Tehran, after so many postponements. Roosevelt got one concession, a further, if still tentative, statement from Stalin in support of the United Nations Organization.

Stalin agreed to go along with the creation of the United Nations because of the state of Soviet Russia at the end of the war. The rights of military conquest were included in the foreign policy "realism" that he was a firm believer in. He told the Yugoslav Communist that everyone imposes his own system as far as his army can go. By dividing Europe into spheres, the Soviet Union would have 90 percent influence, Britain 10 percent.

The figures were not binding, but they showed his belief that military power was more important than the people's right to choose their own governments. Stalin agreed. Roosevelt was persuaded that the peace could only be preserved after the United States and Britain had operated as a kind of police force for several years. Roosevelt continued to insist that the world's great powers should be in control of the United Nations, not the nations of the world.

Few European nations believe in free elections. After the war, the Americans imposed their own system of government "as far as their army could reach" in order to make sure friendly regimes were established in areas with large Communist followings. The establishment of American-style democracy was less blatant than the Soviet-style democracy because the rich Americans and liberal democracy were more popular in western Europe.

American power, economic and military, contributed to the victory of the Entente in World War I, and that power would again provide an important tilt to the balance in World War II if Americans were less inclined to believe. The landing in western Europe was widely expected to be a decisive display of American power, and Hitler's last hope to survive seemed to be based on Germany's ability to repel the landing. If the landing failed, he believed the Anglo-American leaders would file for peace. The success of the landing appeared to be in doubt for a while. The weather cooperated on June 6 after a last-minute postponement on June 5. The Germans were not at their highest alert because of the bad weather, and the Anglo-American forces were able to surprise them. The Germans were tricked into believing that the main landing would happen in the south of Normandy, which is the shortest route across the English Channel.

Omaha Beach was one of the battles that took place along the Normandy coast. The total number of casualties for the Anglo-American forces in the landing was over 10,000. The losses on the German side were the same as they were on the eastern front, but were not large. The main goal of the landing was to bring 2.2 million men and half a million military vehicles across the Channel. On June 22, the Red Army launched a major offensive on the northern edge of the eastern front, with over a hundred divisions and 4,000 tanks. By late July, the Red Army had pushed Nazi lines back to Warsaw and inflicted over half a million casualties.

There were significant differences between the eastern and western fronts. The Anglo-American forces moved slowly after establishing a beachhead. The American army consisted of a significant amount of raw recruits, and they faced battle-hardened opponents.

In the area of the Ardennes Forest, where Germany's armies had so famously broken through in the spring of 1940, Americans were surprised. The counteroffensive was halted and contained after the Americans suffered some 90,000 casualties.

The contribution of the French to the Normandy landing was small because Anglo-American forces were gradually being superseded by French recruits. After France's humiliation, General Charles De Gaulle established himself as the leader of the anti-Vichy Free French, but both Roosevelt and Churchill disliked him, and he joked about it in the midst of the war. The date of the Normandy landing and the date of the landing in north Africa were not known to De Gaulle. By the end of the war, De Gaulle's forces had grown to 1.25 million, with ten divisions fighting in Germany, and he had become recognized as France's leader, but reestablishing France as a major power was a hard sell.

The Franco-German border was not crossed by the Western Allies until 1945. Soviet forces were pushing into the valley as they worked their way into Germany. They renewed their offensive in January 1945. The Yalta meeting of the Big Three took place in February 1945, which was when Germany's defeat was certain.

Yalta became the most famous of the war-time conferences because Roosevelt had given away eastern Europe at Yalta because of his naive beliefs about Stalin and frail health. Compared to Soviet Russia's military victories, these factors seem unimportant. If Roosevelt had arrived at Tehran as a supplicant, he would have been aware of Russia's entry into the war against Japan.

It had been the case for a long time. If Roosevelt had been in better health, or if he had been more willing to challenge Stalin, things would have worked out better for the settlement in eastern Europe. Roosevelt might not have gotten Stalin's promise to declare war on Japan or his support for the United Nations.

After Roosevelt's death in April and the surrender of Germany in early May, the new American president assumed a distinctly more confrontational stance, and was harshly criticized by some historians for unnecessarily antagonizing Stalin, allegedly resulting in levels of hostility in the ensuing Cold War. There were many reasons for Truman's stance. He was a different personality with a different past and different options, and he had little of Roosevelt's confidence in his own personal charm and political adroitness, as the heavy burden of war-time leadership was so suddenly thrust.

The fact that the United States was days away from dropping atomic bombs on Japan was important to him. The importance of Russia entering the war against Japan seemed less important.

There was a shift in the feelings of anti-Nazi cooperation when the conference began. The reports of mass rapes by the Red Army in eastern Europe, which provoked indignation in the United States, particularly among Americans of eastern European origin, constituted an important element of the vote for the Democratic Party. Historians have debated how much Truman's decision to drop the atomic bombs was decisive. Stalin was impressed with the power of the United States and was forced to surrender.

The award of 10 billion dollars to the Soviet Union was one of the things that was left undecided at Tehran and Yalta. The Allied conferences can't be said to have achieved genuine consensus on a range of topics, as the following year saw much wrangling over exact details and alleged broken promises. The Oder-Neisse line was not formally accepted as Germany's permanent eastern frontier by the Americans or British, but it became permanent after a peace conference was not held. Plans for trials of the major Nazi leaders, as well as military occupation zones, were agreed upon at Potsdam.

The first camps were constructed in 1942. By the summer of 1944, deportations to eastern- European ghettoes and death camps had reached a peak, after two years of mass murder and genocide by the Nazis. Some 400,000 Hungarian Jews, most of whom had been sheltered by Hungarian authorities, were transported to their deaths at Auschwitz and elsewhere during the last full year of war. In the final months of the war, thousands of others perished in various work details and elsewhere outside the camps, including prisoners of war and members of the anti-Nazi resistance.

The total number of Jews put to death, or who died as a result of Nazi oppression, has been the subject of sometimes passionate debate, but the estimate of 4 to 6 million is most widely accepted by scholars. Estimates of the number of Jews who died as a direct result of Nazi oppression must be kept in mind, as must the number of other deaths, most notably of non-Jews in Poland and the Soviet Union.

In 1944, with the help of the Red Army, the Nazi authorities closed and destroyed the camps at Auschwitz, and the surviving inmates were moved to western camps. Many thousands of people died in the western camps from overwork, neglect, and disease before the Allied armies arrived. They were in a weakened state after liberation.

In most of the areas liberated from Nazi rule, there was some kind of reprisal against captured Germans. Over 100,000 people were brought before special courts in France, and 1500 of them were sentenced to death. Over 700 traitors, collaborators, and Fascist elements received the death penalty from special courts in Czechoslovakia, with equal numbers sentenced to life in prison, and 20,000 others to lesser prison sentences. The majority of Germans who were active in the Nazis were driven out of the Czechoslovak state in accord with agreements reached at Potsdam. The areas of former eastern Germany that are now allocated to Poland had larger numbers. Some 12 million ethnic Germans were obliged to move from eastern and central Europe to what is now West Germany. It was one of the most extensive examples of ethnic cleansing.

The extent to which the special trials in other countries were fair was not a major concern at the time. Mob rule prevailed, and even where there were formal hearings, they hardly correspond to rigorous standards of due process. Executions were carried out after a verdict was reached. The death penalty was temporarily restored in countries that had abolished it. In Germany, local trials were held in different occupied zones, but they were not always concerned with legal niceties and rarely maintained consistency of punishment.

The Allies wanted to spread the word about the crimes of the Nazi leaders. After lengthy negotiations, it was agreed that a series of trials would be held at Nuremberg and that they would respect American notions of due process. The Soviet leaders had their own show trials of the late 1930s that they had in mind when they were in favor of formal trials. Two judges from Britain, France, the Soviet Union, and the United States will be part of the International Military Tribunal.

The Trial of the Major War Criminals was the most famous of the trials. Understanding the inner workings of the Nazi state was limited at this point, so the prosecution had its work cut out for it.

There was a lot of information gained in the interrogations of the accused, but the significance of that information could not have been adequately understood within the allotted time. The decisions about the exact procedures and underlying legal principles of the trials were flawed because of the compromises necessary. There were moral issues and legal issues.

The lack of justice at Nuremberg became a contentious issue. The trials' violation of a number of widely recognized legal principles caused some observers and legal experts to be upset.

There was a double standard in punishing Germans for crimes that the Allies had committed, such as bombing civilian centers, torturing spies, executing prisoners of war or using them as slave labor. Nazi defendants were not allowed to claim in their defense that they had done what the Allies had done.

The Soviet Union was accused of applying a double standard since it was an ally of Nazi Germany in 1939 and the attack on Poland was denounced by the Nuremberg prosecutors. The lack of judicial independence in the Soviet Union made appointing Soviet judges a travesty. The "crimes against humanity" committed by the Nazis had been equaled by the Soviets, according to many.

Even if the trials at Nuremberg failed to live up to high ideals of jurisprudence, they were preferable to lining up against a wall and shooting the Nazis. Many more Nazi leaders would have been freed, including some of the worst, if the trials had been more rigorous in observing due process.

There were other dilemmas linked to more fundamental issues. When defending the interests of the state, the leaders of modern nations like the kings of old could do no wrong. The idea of applying Christian standards to the actions of states in regard to one another was considered laughable by most statesmen at the Congress of Vienna. Europe's states did not readily recognize external limits to their sovereignty, especially when national defense or the survival of the nation was in question, even though there had been many refinements in the way that the monopoly of violence was exercised.

The chief prosecutor of the first trial, Robert H. Jackson, did not think that the murder of the Jews was the most important crime of the Nazi regime. He believed that the most fundamental crime was the war. National aggrandizement through warfare by states recognizing no limit to their sovereignty was the most serious crime of modern times, he believed; other crimes, such as the murder of minorities, emerged from it. The Jews were killed because they got in the way of a war of expansion that the Nazis saw as a war of survival.

Jackson believed that future world peace could only be assured if aggressive war was recognized as criminal. It was argued that military conquests should no longer confer rights on a victorious state since most of Europe's states had waged aggressive war for national aggrandizement. Both "crimes against peace" and "crimes against humanity" were common in the British and French empires, which were based on the rights of conquest. Territorial changes at the end of the war were based on the right of conquest of the Big Three. In the war-time conferences, decisions about borders and population transfers were made by them, and they often paid little or no attention to what the affected populations wanted.

There was resistance to Jackson's reasoning. It raised a lot of questions about what military action was acceptable.

Germany's rationale for war in August 1914 was that it was their right as a nation to defend itself, and that a pre-emptive attack was necessary before Russia could complete their military deployment. In a hostile capitalist world, the Soviets justified their alliance with Nazi Germany.

A number of respected scholars have questioned if hatred of Jews was the main reason that Germans joined the Nazi Party or voted for Hitler. Fear of Communism may have been the main force driving Germany in the 1930s. Hitler was similar to previous German statesmen, businessmen, and military leaders in his desire to expand to the east. Both world wars are to be explained by Germany's inexorable rise and Europe's other major powers' refusal to accept it or be able to adjust to it peacefully - a central theme of this volume.

The first Nuremberg trial did not draw the attention of most observers because of the debatable issues.

The leaders of Nazi Germany were being brought to justice after years of war and the publicity surrounding the concentration camps in the summer of 1945. A lot of people claimed that they didn't know anything about the atrocities committed in the camps. Foreign Minister Joachim von Ribbentrop denied knowledge of what Hitler was planning in regards to the war with other nations and the genocide against the Jews.

Historians debate about what the Germans knew about what was happening in the camps. At the time of the Nuremberg trials, little credence was given to the claims of the defendants that they knew little about what Hitler was thinking or doing. Evidence was presented that exposed them as liars. What has impressed subsequent observers is how little these men fit into the stereotypes of Nazi leaders. Streicher came out with the lowest score on the IQ tests.

The head of the Luftwaffe, who was second in command to Hitler, was also an unnerving defendant. He had been ridiculed for putting on a lot of weight and living in luxury. He proved more than an intellectual match for Jackson on the stand. In his testimony, Goering seemed not to be intimidated or guilt-ridden, as he had scored 138 on the IQ test.

He claimed to have had a number of Jewish friends.

There was no way that Goering would be acquitted or given a light sentence because of the overwhelming evidence against him. He was sentenced to death. Streicher was also condemned to death, even if little proof was offered about his criminal actions. He was found to be criminally responsible for his antisemitic ideas. If the punishment was death, it was contrary to American notions of freedom of speech.

The majority of those charged with being major Nazi war criminals at the first trial were not seen as fanatics. Most of the images did not look like hardened criminals.

They could not possibly be described as agents of capitalism in crisis or resentful "little men," members of a bigoted bourgeoisie. Many of them had promising careers before the Nazi period, and most were better educated and more intelligent than anyone at the time. At the first Nuremberg trial, it is difficult to identify a distinct Nazi type among the accused. Twelve were sentenced to death and seven were sentenced to prison. Three were acquitted, which made it appear that the accused had been given a fair chance to defend themselves.

In the trials of major war criminals, twenty-four prominent Nazis would receive the death sentence, and over a hundred would be sentenced to prison for life. Many prominent Nazis received light sentences or escaped punishment altogether, despite the fact that the number of death sentences was less than they had proposed. The Nuremberg verdicts were dismissed as "victors' justice" by a fair number of non-Germans, including legal experts in many liberal-democratic countries.

There was no way to arrive at judgments sufficient to deal with the tragedies and injustice of these years. There was a similar dilemma in regards to how the Nazi past could ever be "mastered" by future generations of Germans. "Coming to grips" is a familiar metaphor, but in the case of the Nazi past it seemed that a quantum leap would be necessary, related to the assertion that the Holocaust was unprecedented and incomparable.

The kind of guilt associated with a crime defined in such a way went far beyond the guilt for starting World War I; it had something more in common with the concept of the Crucifixion, that is, standing mystically outside history. The claim that Hitler had exercised some sort of demonic power caused decent people to lose their moral bearings and follow his orders, even for acts they somehow knew to be immoral. The excuse that Hitler's will had become the law in the Third Reich was not without plausibility, and some Nazi leaders claimed that they were only working toward the Fuhrer.

It was convenient that many of the people who were close to Hitler were dead. Hitler and his long-term mistress, Eva Braun, committed suicide at the end of April. Joseph Goebbels had taken his own life. His wife killed their six children and then committed suicide. After he was captured, Himmler used a hidden glass capsule of cyanide to kill himself.

The logic of the position that Hitler's will was the law pointed to the conclusion that no one was responsible or guilty. The nation was under some sort of spell. Using a different metaphor, Nazi leaders had been mere pawns in a giant totalitarian machine that had crushed all notions of personal responsibility and operated according to its own inhuman logic.

Baldur von Schirach, leader of the Hitler Youth, did not deny his antisemitic beliefs, but he did deny his activities in expelling Jews from Germany. He was sentenced to twenty years in prison. In other societies, the moral defects of other leaders - credulity, greed, duplicity, ambition, miscalculation, lack of civil courage - were common.

This was a question that would haunt subsequent generations and was related to the long-debated issue of the nature and goals of modern antisemitism. On the one hand, the mass murder of Jews seems to be a product of antisemitism, but on the other hand, what came to be called the Holocaust was more than a product of antisemitism. It was initiated by Germany, a country that was widely considered to be Europe's least antisemitic before 1914. The move to mass murder was not in response to popular pressure from the German people, but in order to enhance his popularity, Hitler tried to give the impression that he was a moderate. Germany's advanced state of industrialization and the related efficiency and discipline of its people, especially their respect for state authority, may also be considered an obvious factor in making the Holocaust possible, but as such seems an overly general culprit.

Many other factors might be mentioned in trying to explain how the Holocaust occurred, but relying on any single one as an independent force is clearly inadequate. Under Mussolini, fascistism began as explicitly opposed to antisemitism and racism, and in fact attracted a number of Jewish admirers, inside Italy and on the right of the Zionism movement. The mass murder of Jews during the war in which tens of millions of non-Jews perished made the Holocaust possible. The mass murder of Jews came at the end of a period in which mass death and appalling crimes against humanity, on the battlefront and inside the Soviet Union, occurred on an unprecedented scale and intensity.

The end of the war and the immediate postwar period are covered in many studies of Nazism and the Holocaust.

Europe was reduced to bombed-out landscapes and smoking ruins at the end of the war. In comparison to World War I, civilian deaths and urban destruction far exceeded that of homeless refugees, gangs of lawless, brutalized youth, and crowded into various camps begging for food and shelter. In the areas overrun by the Red Army, an estimated 2 million women were raped, often repeatedly and in front of their husbands or families, with little or no effort by the Army's officers to exercise control.

The war-time meetings of the Big Three tended to paper over fundamental differences or delay addressing them, but with the defeat of Nazi Germany those differences reasserted themselves inexorably. The question became more complex after Stalin's death, but the lessons learned in the 1930s colored international relations for the next half-century.

The military deaths in World War II were a bit less than in World War I, in part because the stalemate of the trenches between 1914 and 1918 was replaced by motorized and armored units and more rapidly moving battlefronts between 1939 and 1945. The totals in both wars were huge.

Deaths varied greatly from country to country.

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After Soviet archives were opened to Western scholars in the 1990s, the widely accepted estimate was that around 26 million Soviet citizens perished during World War II, well over half of them civilians. The total number of war-time deaths in Europe was around 45 million, and the Soviet Union suffered more deaths than all the other countries combined.

Estimates of German losses are difficult because the German Reich's borders changed so much. The Poles had the greatest war-time losses. For Italy, the number of dead, military and civilians was less than 1 percent of its total population, compared to 16 percent for Poland, 14 percent for the Soviet Union, and 9 percent for Germany. France suffered fewer military deaths in World War II than it did in World War I, mostly because it dropped out of the war for about four years, but French civilians suffered both at the hands of their Nazi occupiers. The Battle of Britain was mostly an air war with bombing of civilian centers, but the final proportion of Britain's war-time dead to its total population was close to 1 percent. Military deaths for the United States were around 420,000 since there were no battles on the American mainland. The lowest rate of all the major combatants was 0.22 percent of the total population. The Soviet rate was five times greater.

The millions of dead and crippled and extensive material destruction of the war meant that postwar production plummeted in many areas.

Thousands of people died of exposure to the elements during the winter when Europe's population lived in hunger. In the major areas of combat, political chaos was a threat. Germany and Austria remained under Allied military occupation longer than other countries, to some degree reducing the potential for chaos, but the destruction of Germany's urban areas by May 1945 seemed overwhelming, due to Allied strategic bombing. European civilization, especially its German element, had reached its nadir according to some. The mood at the end of the war was bleak, but that was an overreaction.

Forced transfers of population replaced the effort in 1919 to draw national borders to fit existing populations according to language and ethnicity, as the nature of the European states that would be reestablished in the two to three years after the war remained uncertain. This could be called a final solution to the problem of non-Jewish minorities in Europe's nation-states, one that was started by the Nazis and was sanctioned by the Allies at the end of the war.

Most of Europe's states were more diverse before 1939. Stalin's dictum that each nation should impose its system "as far as its army could reach" meant that nearly all of eastern Europe came under Communist rule by 1948.

Tensions between the Western Allies and the Soviets increased after the war ended, but both sides agreed that Germany should not be allowed to reemerging. The Reich could be divided into a predominantly Catholic state and a predominantly Protestant one. Prussiaceded much of its territory to Poland at the end of World War I, which resulted in a reduction of the Reich before Hitler took power. Even if Germany were allowed to reunify, there was a question as to which borders it would return to.

The expansion of the Nazi Reich in 1938 to include Austria and Czechoslovakia had no legitimacy in the eyes of the Allies, and those two countries were reestablished after the war. Austria was reestablished but not responsible for the crimes of the Nazis. It became the first victim of Nazi Germany's territorial expansion due to the Austrians' embrace of unity with Nazi Germany in 1938.

Henry Morgenthau, Roosevelt's Secretary of the Treasury, put forth one of the most drastic plans to solve the German Question. He was one of the people who wanted Nazi leaders to be put to death. He wanted Germany to be broken up into smaller units so they wouldn't be able to wage modern warfare. The practical implications of his plan were duly considered and it was abandoned because preindustrial states would not be able to feed and provide Germany's large population.

The proposal that millions of Germans be shipped to a non- European area was rejected as even more ill conceived.

Making decisions about Germany's political future merged with the question of how ordinary citizens are treated. The major war criminals were to be dealt with by the Nuremberg tribunals, but the design of punishment for the many millions of Germans who had been active party members seemed uncomfortably close to collective punishment. It was difficult to get enough information about the major war criminals to convict them in courts of law, and the prospect of imprisoning millions of Germans was impractical and distasteful. The issue of appropriate treatment was further complicated by Jackson's opening remarks at the first Nuremberg trial, in which he made a distinction between the guilty German leaders and the German people, who he described as victims of Nazi tyranny.

Many non-Jewish Germans, Austrians included, were victims of Nazism, especially those on the liberal, socialist, and Communist left. 3 to 4 million non-Jewish Germans had suffered Nazi persecution, which included being put under police watch, losing their jobs, and facing imprisonment or terms in concentration camps, where many perished or emerged broken in body and spirit. Finding qualified Germans who might take up postwar positions of authority but who were untainted by Nazi associations was often frustrating.

In other countries, the leaders of the new governments were usually from the anti-Nazi or anti-Fascist resistance movements, but by 1945 the organized opposition inside Germany had been reduced to insignificance.

The failed attempt to assassinate Hitler on July 20, 1944, led by Colonel Claus von Stauffenberg, resulted in the arrest and execution of prominent military figures and members of other non-Nazi traditional elites.

Even if no proof was found that they were part of the plot to assassinate Hitler, the Gestapo used the occasion to arrest and execute those suspected of anti-Nazi sympathies. The White Rose Movement, composed of intellectuals and university students, did not find a significant response to their pamphlet campaign against Nazism.

After lengthy interrogation, the main leaders of the White Rose were guillotined.

With the assumption that a large part of the German population had been nazified, the Americans started programs in each zone. On the one hand, denazification was mocked as naive and unjust by the German population, but on the other, it was considered a failure. Millions of Germans were told to fill out questionnaires about their pasts in order to get rid of unmanageable paperwork. Some of the more practical measures, such as outlawing the Nazi Party, removing former Nazi Party members from positions of authority, and destroying statues of Hitler, were accepted as appropriate. The idea that the German population could be reeducated in a few years to embrace different values was not realistic. Postwar polls showed how attitudes towards Nazism were retained by a significant portion of the German population. Von Stauffenberg and the leaders of the White Rose became positive symbols for a new Germany after decades.

The trials of the Nazi leaders who weren't tried at Nuremberg were put in the hands of German authorities. Even with the best of wills, the task was bound to offend one or more people. It was easier to bring the less serious cases to trial first, which meant that relatively minor offenders were quickly and at times harshly punished, whereas many of the more serious and more complicated cases were repeatedly postponed. The pileup of cases led to a series of amnesties. By 1949 all but a few hundred of the millions of Germans who had been identified as probably culpable had been released. The punishments for those who collaborated with Nazi rulers in France, Holland, and Norway were more severe than the punishments meted out to the Nazi rulers themselves inside West Germany.

The trials of the most notorious Nazis, who had initially evaded capture, continued into the 1980s. It would take decades before it was concluded that most Germans didn't like Nazism very much. The shift was gradual and probably had less to do with the formal efforts to reeducate Germans than with the fact that older Nazis were dying off. The attitudes of Europe's younger generations changed a lot by the late 1960s, but the distance between generations in Germany was particularly stark.

The plans of Soviet officials for dealing with the Nazis remaining in the Soviet zone had parallels with the Morgenthau Plan in terms of their initial severity and their determination to reorganize the German economy in fundamental ways. Rather than deindustrialization, the Soviets wanted to replace Nazi economic structures with those modeled on Soviet Communism. The Marxist doctrine made a distinction between agents of capitalism and victims. The Communist Party would give proper leadership to the people. When one regime was replaced by another, the task of reeducating the people appeared easier, but communist leaders in the Soviet zone were prone to compromises, hoping to gain popularity.

The memories of World War II were being pushed aside by the Cold War. The concern of leaders in the United States to have a German ally against the perceived threat of Soviet expansion weakened the determination to deal with the Nazis. The critics who criticized the Nuremberg trials as representing "victors' justice" did not offer superior alternatives to those who denounced the whole denazification experience as a whitewash. The rising passions of the Cold War made up for the fact that the Nazis had gotten away with murder.

The administration of the four zones of military occupation, American, British, French, and Soviet, became mired in mutual recrimination over their respective roles and rights after the Potsdam conference.

Sudeten d U.S.S.R.

Germany is changing its borders.

There is an issue of responsibility for the Cold War. The Soviets claimed that they had suffered more from the war than the Western Allies did. It was difficult to contest but also impossibly open-ended. Hundreds of thousands of forced laborers from Germany were used by the Soviet authorities in the immediate postwar years. In the first year after the war, a lot of Germany's industrial infrastructure was taken over by the Soviets. The Soviets moved 10 billion dollars' worth of agricultural and industrial goods from Germany to the Soviet Union in five years. It reduced the German population to even greater destitution in many areas, but it only caused a fraction of Nazi damage to the Soviet Union.

By the autumn of 1949, the four zones of occupied Germany had been divided into western and eastern states. The Federal Republic of West Germany or the Bonn Republic is informally known as the American, British, and French zones. The German Democratic Republic was informally East Germany and had its capital in Berlin. The Federal Republic lacked the large, previously dominating Prussian element of the Weimar Republic, but some of them were similar to it. An extensive bill of rights was included to address the perceived weaknesses of the constitution.

The term "people's republic" was used for most of the eastern European countries that fell under Soviet domination. The means of production were taken over by the state and the state itself was guided by the Communist Party in these republics. Walter Ulbricht, a particularly wooden Stalinist who became the most familiar face of East German Communism, was the leader of the former KPD.

The first general elections in West Germany saw the emergence of two major parties.

The pre-Nazi Catholic Center Party had roots in the Christian Democratic Union. The Social Democratic Party was a revival of the pre-Nazi party. The Center Party and the SPD were the two largest parties of the initially ruling Weimar Coalition, but they did not form a reliable majority in the following years. Both the Christian Democrats and the Social Democrats could aspire to win an absolute majority, though a secure majority remained an ever-elusive goal for both, as the situation had changed significantly by 1949. The right-wing parties were mostly gone during the Weimar years. People who voted Nationalist or Nazi in the past are now voting for the Christian Democratic Party. The Communists in West Germany did not have a lot of popular appeal. The Free Democratic Party has roots in the Democratic and People's parties of the Weimar years. The Free Democrats allied with the Christian Democrats and the Social Democrats in order to provide them with more secure parliamentary majorities.

The leaders of the two major parties were different from those of the Weimar parent parties. Kurt was in the concentration camps of the Third Reich for twelve years. He emerged from the camps shattered in health but still harbored a belief that he could lead Germany from ruin to the promised land of democratic socialism. During World War I, when he had lost his right arm, he was treated with relative leniency by the Nazis, but his stubbornness cost him his life.

Konrad Adenauer was a less remarkable figure. He was able to survive the Nazi years by walking a fine line, not compromising his Catholic beliefs, but also avoiding the kind of overt opposition to Nazi rule that would have resulted in his being sent to.

His vision was for Germany to have a free-market economy and a Western-style society. Adenauer was a man of cunning political instincts and strong opinions, but he also had few illusions about his fellow Germans. He was a stern, no-nonsense leader, but he was able to compromise when necessary.

Observers concluded that only an authoritarian but politically flexible fig ure had a chance of ruling West Germany. His resemblances were countered by more profound differences. He was neither a Protestant nor a Junker, he was a Catholic. In 1949, West Germany was fifty-fifty Catholic and Protestant, whereas the Reich had a large Protestant majority. Prussia had been destroyed by the Junker ruling class.

It was politically foolish to overdo denazification. He wasn't particularly curious about the Nazi pasts of many who came to hold important positions in the Federal Republic. As part of his effort to rehabilitate Germany's moral standing in the world, he established good relations with the new state of Israel. He believed that an anti-Communist stance was crucial to maintaining a close alliance with the United States.

The American leaders preferred Adenauer, who expressed socialist convictions that drew him into confrontations with American military authorities. He had a dream of Germany being neutral in the Cold War. He wanted to nationalize the industry because he thought Germany's elite supported Hitler. The Christian Democratic Union gained the support of the Free Democrats and the Bavarian Christian Social Union in the 1949 national elections in order to win more seats in the Bundestag.

He assumed an opposition to almost everything undertaken by the Christian Democrats after he was incensed by Adenauer's victory. Many of his party's leaders were unenthusiastic about his intransigent anticapitalism, hoping instead to continue the transformation of their party toward democratic reformism and the "vital" political center.

Their dilemma was solved by Schumacher's frail health. He lost his arm in World War I and had a leg amputation in December 1951, and died at age fifty-six.

The SPD adopted a new program in 1959 that made an even cleaner break with Marxist theories of class conflict and economic determinism than it had in the past. Classical philosophy and Christian ethics were emphasized in the program. Private ownership of the means of production and open market incentives were both pronounced by the SPD.

The Social Democrats won many provincial and urban victories, most notably in Berlin, but national office remained elusive from 1949 to 1969.

The Christian Democrats were not hard line defenders of capitalism. Germany's economic recovery was linked to the tradition of state intervention to regulate capitalism's excesses and to aid the lower orders. Both social-democratic and Christian-democratic versions of a fine-tuned capitalism are capable of controlling the free market's tendencies to undermine social solidarity. After World War II, all major political tendencies in Europe accepted the role of the state in regulating capitalism.

At the end of the war, an Austrian identity came back to life.

Vienna was surrounded by the Soviet zone and was divided into four occupation zones. The Social Democratic and Christian Social parties of the first republic had roots in the Socialist Party and People's Party, but with new names, the Socialist Party and People's Party, the latter moving away from its earlier close identification with the Catholic Church.

The two main parties were able to put aside the violence that had characterized their parent parties during the 1930s in order to form a two-party system. Suppressing memories of the recent past, or creating a mythical, more bearable past, was a tendency in most European countries, but that tendency took on particularly striking aspects, as part of Austria's being Nazism's first victim. It was plausible that both parties had been anti-Nazi when the Nazis took over Austria in 1938, as the pretense was attractive and one does not blame a victim. The common experience of persecution, which meant that in some cases, being in the same prison cells or concentration camps, contributed to the surprising tolerance that each party extended to the other after the war.

The new political arrangements worked well. Austria experienced its own kind of economic miracle, based on what was termed a "social partnership" of capital and labor, after some very hard times in the postwar years. Austria regained its prewar unity within a decade of the end of the war. Austria was a neutral country during the Cold War.

Europe did not have a "hot" or "shooting war", but rather threats, military build-ups, and some hair-raising confrontations. Most of Europe became involved in the dispute over the status of Berlin, which was one of the initial arenas of Cold War confrontation. In Korea, full-out shooting wars occurred in June 1950 to July 1953 due to the conflict in the form of "Communism vs. Democracy". The spread of Communism to China in 1949 was seen as a great victory for Communism and thus the Soviet Union, which further fueled the fires of anti-Communism in the United States and Europe.

The exact point at which the Cold War began is difficult to say since there were no formal declarations of war. Truman assumed a more confrontational stance than Roosevelt, but hopes for continued Allied cooperation remained alive for most of the rest of 1945.

By early March 1946, the tone of the east-west relations was becoming more serious.

At the time, the "iron-curtain" speech was seen as an undiplomatic provocation by the public. Those who still harbored hopes for postwar cooperation reacted in such a way. Moderates and left-wingers in Britain criticized Churchill as an irresponsible war-monger, just like they criticized him in the 1930s.

Many years ago, it was thought that the Cold War had arisen from the West's resistance to Soviet aggression. As he had warned against the appeasement of Nazi Germany, he was thought to have been prescient in his iron-curtain speech. Appeasing dictators only whetted their appetites; they must be met with force. The Soviet Union became the new Nazi Germany and Stalin the new Hitler for many people in the West. The counternarrative grew in appeal as the century progressed, one that emphasized American capitalism as the real trouble-maker, whereas the Soviet Union was seen as gravely weakened by the war and acting defensively against the aggressive stance of the United States.

There are parallels between the changing views of the origins of the Cold War and the changing views of the origins of World War I. Historians of the Cold War have tended to emphasize the clash of expansionist states, each with a universalist ideology that demonized its opposition, while seeing itself as courageously defending high principles. The Cold War appears to be predictable rather than the result of bad leadership.

The early accounts of World War I and the Cold War were both characterized by moral outrage that focused on the central role of evil people. At Tehran and Yalta, "personal diplomacy" played a key role, and with Roosevelt's death, things changed at Potsdam in part because different people were involved. If Roosevelt had lived, history might have taken different directions.

Revisionist interpretations of the origins of the Cold War have come to be termed as Assumptions related to such speculations. It seems that the most to be expected was a somewhat less dangerous or intense confrontation, not genuine or lasting harmony.

The fact that there were only two major powers in the postwar years had ominous implications. Psychic instability and dangerous mood swings are referred to as "bipolar" in recent times. "bipolarity," in the sense of two poles of power, could be termed inherently dangerous in diplomacy.

Communism and liberal democracy were demonizing each other after World War II, which led to the dangers of bipolarity. There was something profoundly "structural" at work in those years, something deeper than personality in the worsening relations between the Soviet Union and the United States.

In the 19th century, Russia and America viewed each other as polar opposites. The United States and France would emerge as major world powers in the future according to the French observer of early democracy in the United States. In the Russian Civil War, the United States sent troops into Russia. The New Deal and Popular Front had a common enemy in Nazi Germany and the decline in overt hostility was a result of that. When the Nazi-Soviet Pact was signed in August 1939, the relationship relapsed into a familiar if also more intense hostility.

The argument that moral ideals also matter in international relations overlaps with the issue of personality. The United States and the Soviet Union are not morally equal states, according to some people. The most hostile to the Soviet Union in the immediate postwar period pointed to Stalin's appalling personal record and the Communist regime since 1917. Stalin imposed Communism in eastern Europe after the Third Reich was destroyed.

Stalin made a number of conciliatory gestures in the immediate postwar period, whereas the Americans made a number of provocative ones, according to the revisionists. Stalin understood how foolish it would be to provoke the Americans during the war, according to the revisionist argument. Stalin's initial conciliatory actions did not add up to his sincerely working for peace and lasting international harmony. He was going to return to the brutal methods he had used in the 1930s. For Stalin's detractors, the attempt to present him as a rational, reliable leader, simply pursuing the national interest of his country, has something in common with the description of Hitler as a traditional statesman. Stalin's past revealed his true moral essence, despite the fact that he could appear reasonable.

The relationship between the Soviet Union and the United States was in a state of limbo from 1945 to 1947, with both sides making conciliatory gestures, but by the beginning of 1948 the hopes for harmonious relations had largely disappeared. A battle over the status of Berlin averted a shooting war for the rest of the year. The coalition governments of Communists and non-Communists that had been patched together at the end of the war fell apart in both eastern and western Europe. The Truman Doctrine was proclaimed by the United States in March 1947, promising military aid to any country that was threatened by Communism. The Marshall Plan, which promised billions of dollars to restore the economies of Europe, was more decisive in permanently separating the two sides. The Truman Doctrine was seen by Stalin as less threatening than the Plan because a number of eastern European states were tempted to apply for aid under its provisions.

The Plan's promise to open Europe's economy to American trade and investment was one of the main attractions for members of the United States congress. The Plan was perceived by Stalin as American capitalist expansion into areas that were friendly to the Soviet Union. Communism's appeal was to impoverished populations, but most Americans saw the Plan in a more altruistic light. It was believed that restoring Europe's economy was crucial to defeating Communism.

The Czechoslovak Communist Party won 38 percent of the vote in 1946, making it the strongest party. The Communist Party leader, Klement Gottwald, was appointed to head a multiparty cabinet by President Edvard Benes, who was on friendly terms with Stalin and who had also been president at the time of the Munich Agreements.

The Czechoslovak model seemed poised to demonstrate how Communist rule could be introduced non-violently through the ballot box, with far-reaching implications for other countries. The Czech population was more friendly to the Soviet Union than most other eastern European populations. After the Red Army liberated the Czechs from Nazi tyranny, the country looked eastward for protection from future German revanchist designs.

By the summer of 1947, the Communist-led cabinet had alienated large parts of the population, and many anticipated that in the May 1948 elections support for the Czech Communist Party would decline. The role of Communists in coalition governments was "enhanced" by the Soviet authorities in other areas of eastern Europe. By the autumn of 1947, Stalin was resorting to more tried and true methods, despite the fact that a majority of the population supported Communism in free elections. The Czech Communists staged a bloodless coup in February 1948, removing other parties from their positions of power.

Stalin began to reveal suspicions of "nationalist devia tions" by Communist Party leaders elsewhere. The most prominent example was in Yugoslavia, where Josip Broz, better known by his revolutionary name, Tito, enjoyed strong popular support. "Titoism" came to be considered a particularly dangerous heresy because of its popularity and because it aroused suspicions on Stalin's part.

The Czech Coup did not involve direct confrontations between the military forces of the Soviet Union and the Western Allies, but they did develop in the months immediately following it, in the form of the Soviets blocking road and rail access to Berlin from the west. The division of Berlin seemed to promise future difficulties, and it is understandable only in the calm of the end of the war, when various tentative administrative agreements were being made in anticipation of a general peace conference. Stalin held the strong cards in the confrontation over access to the city, but he encountered resistance from the Americans and British. Europe seemed to be on the verge of a general war as other countries watched in fascination.

The Anglo-Americans decided to provide the western sectors of Berlin by air after the generals on both sides urged a major show of armed force. That seemed impractical, if not sheer folly, to many at the time, but it finally succeeded and became one of the most famous and defining episodes of the Cold War, known as the Berlin Airlift.

If American planes were shot down, Truman was ready for a shooting war, but he wouldn't allow his military leaders to move atomic bombs to Germany. In this war of nerves lasting over a year, Soviet pilots harassed Anglo-American transport aircraft and even fired warning shots, but no serious air battles developed. The 2.5 million West Berliners who were cut off from normal transports were able to be moved by air.

The blockade was called off by Stalin in May 1949. During the last months of the Berlin Airlift, the United States, Britain, and France formed the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, which promised to defend any one of its members against military aggression by the Soviet Union.