Short History of World War II - James L. Stokesbury [96]
They also began, hesitantly, to look toward the postwar world. It was agreed there should be some form of supra-national organization, but its outline was still dim. Roosevelt proposed that it should contain a subgroup of “Four Policemen”: Britain, the United States, Russia, and China. Stalin thought China would not make the grade and that the idea would not be too welcome to the rest of the world anyway. He was more definite about what Russia wanted—a major sphere of influence in central Europe, and some way to keep Germany down in the future. This boded ill for the future of the former central European states, but Churchill seemed at this time no more than mildly concerned over that, and Roosevelt was not concerned at all. Everything was too far in the future to worry yet, certainly too far off to upset the solidarity of the alliance.
Ironically, by the time the Big Three met again, at Yalta in February of 1945, and finally at Potsdam in the ruins of Germany in July of that year, it was too late to worry about the future. The Western Powers, represented at Yalta by Churchill and a dying Roosevelt and at Potsdam by their replacements, Clement Attlee and Harry Truman, saw Europe already rearranged in Stalinist terms. All the talk in the world was not going to move Russian troops out of Poland by then. Throughout the whole war, it was always either too early or too late for political deals and decisions. It was as if the ghost of Bismarck had risen from the past to echo, “The great decisions of our times will not be decided by speeches…they will be decided by Blood and Iron.” It was still the time of blood and iron.
16. Occupied Europe
WHILE THE AVENGING FATES gathered, the Germans continued to build the Thousand-Year Reich. At its greatest extent the German empire extended from the North Cape of Norway to the Peloponnesus, and from the Pyrénées to the Caucasus Mountains. This included Germany’s allies and satellites, but for practical purposes they might as well have been conquered territories, for their treatment was only marginally better than that accorded the victims of outright military aggression. German relationships with all the states and territories under their domination varied, both from one state to another, and from time to time as the war progressed. Yet through all the changes on the theme, there were perceptible patterns, and there was some attempt to impose a coherent scheme of empire on the German conquests.
In principle, Germany and Italy divided prostrate Europe between them. In practice, Italy got Albania, the Dalmatian coast of Yugoslavia, and a few unimpressive bits of Balkan real estate. The bottom line of Hitler’s philosophy was that might makes right, and that as conquerors the Axis Powers could do as they pleased with their victims. They even went further than thinking that they might do as they chose; they believed, or professed to believe, that what had enabled them to conquer Europe was the superiority of their ideology; democracy had bred weakness and therefore did not deserve to survive; totalitarianism bred strength and it therefore not only deserved to triumph, it also enjoined upon its practitioners the necessity of conversion, or of full implementation of its tenets. If the conquerors were free of the toils of representative government and the burden of criticism, they were no less imprisoned by the demands of their own beliefs—or what was even worse, they were all imprisoned by the demands of Hitler’s beliefs.
The normal assumption is that the loss of freedom in a dictatorship is compensated for by the gain in efficiency; that is in fact usually the justification for the restriction of freedom. An examination