f Adolf Hitler.
The first of the works to be considered in this discussion is The Origins of the Second World War, by P.M.H. Bell. Published in 1986, it is one of the more recent of the works evaluated here, and thus has some advantages (as well as disadvantages) of distance from its subject matter. What makes it particularly well-suited as an introduction to the problem of the origins of the Second World War, however, is that the author devotes substantial space in the first part of the book to an extended discussion of rival theories to account for the origins of the war.
Broadly speaking, Bell suggests, two general theories have been put forward to explain the outbreak of the Second World War. They may be referred to in a shorthand way as the Thirty Years' War theory and the Hitler's War theory. The name of the Thirty Years' War theory contains an echo of a disastrous European war of an earlier century, but refers also the the circumstance that just over thirty years elapsed from the outbreak of the First World War in 1914 to the end of the Second World War in 1945. As Bell observes,
In 1939 and the following years there was a
powerful and general sense that men were engaged, not in
a second war, but rather in the second phase of a Thirty Years War, another round in a struggle against the
Both wars involved, at least in Europe, the same core participants: Germany against France, Britain, Russia, and the United States--even if France, the key Western participant in the first round, was knocked out early in the second, and even if German's Axis allies had previously been members of the anti-German alliance. Both wars arguably were driven by German expansionism. The sense that the two world wars belong together is heightened by the retrospective impression that the interwar years of peace were really little more than an unstable truce.
On the other hand, argues Bell, the sense that the inte...