Day of Empire_ How Hyperpowers Rise to Global Dominance--And Why They Fall - Amy Chua [141]
No society based on racial purity, ethnic cleansing, or religious zealotry has ever become world dominant. In the middle of the twentieth century, however, two brutally intolerant regimes—Nazi Germany and imperial Japan—achieved enormous power and, together, threatened to take over the world. The meteoric rise and stunning defeat of the Axis Powers illustrate both the frightening potency of extreme intolerance and the ultimate inability of societies based on such intolerance to attain world dominance.
NAZI GERMANY: THE DREAM OF
ARYAN WORLD DOMINANCE
At 3:15 p.m. on June 21, 1940, Adolf Hitler and his top commanders descended on the forest of Compiègne, fifty miles north of Paris, to preside over the surrender of the French. Hitler had personally chosen this hallowed forest—hunting grounds for the French monarchy for a millennium and the site of Joan of Arc's capture—for its more recent historical pedigree. It was here in November 1918 that Germany surrendered to France, ending World War I. As a pleasant June sun beat down, Hitler emerged from his Mercedes. His face, according to one eyewitness's account, was “grave, solemn, yet brimming with revenge. There was also in it, as in his springy step, a note of the triumphant conqueror, the de-fier of the world.” The fiihrer insisted on dictating the terms of the armistice in the same railway car where Germany had surrendered twenty-two years earlier. After a day of fruitless attempts to soften the treaty's harsh terms, Marshal Henri Philippe Pétain, the French hero of the battle of Verdun, succumbed categorically to the Nazi demands.1
The reversal of fortune at Compiègne marked the zenith for Hitler and Nazi Germany. Rising from the rubble and disgrace of World War I, Germany had not only miraculously rearmed and reindustrialized in less than a decade but had gone on to conquer most of continental Europe in only nine months. By the time France capitulated, the Nazis already controlled Austria, Belgium, Czechoslovakia, Denmark, Norway, and the Netherlands and were poised to invade Britain. A year earlier, the seemingly invincible Wehrmacht had unleashed on Poland its blitzkrieg, “a monstrous mechanized juggernaut such as the earth had never seen.” Just seven years after Hitler's rise to power in 1933, the Nazi promise of a “Thousand-Year Reich” no longer seemed so implausible.
Five years later, it was all over. Hitler was dead, and Germany lay in ruins. In its climb to power, Hitler's regime brought state-sponsored intolerance to a new level, instituting “a reign of terror over the conquered peoples which, in its calculated butchery of human life and the human spirit, outdid all the savage oppressions of the previous ages.”2 More than just a by-product of Nazi domination, brutal intolerance had been critical to the Nazis’ ability to amass power in the aftermath of World War I. Nazi ideology— with its potent mixture of militant nationalism, ethnic chauvinism, and religious hatred—was fantastically successful in generating loyalty and sacrifice from Germany's humiliated population. But Hitler and his party's unflagging devotion to bloody race purification ultimately proved a grotesque cancer within the regime and helped seal its eventual obliteration.
THE POWER OF HATE
World War I left Germany a bloodied and beaten nation. Nearly two million of its young men perished in the war, and almost as many were crippled for life. Among the general population, millions of working- and middle-class Germans suddenly found themselves unemployed and destitute. Adding to the trauma of defeat was the Treaty of Versailles. Imposed in 1919, the treaty forced Germany to admit that it was solely responsible for having caused the war. As punishment, Germany was saddled with staggering war reparations, stripped of its colonial holdings, and forced to forfeit cherished national territory to France and to the hated Poles. Germany's proud