The Main Challenge For World War II Historians

One of the greatest questions that historians face in any field of study is "what was this person thinking before X happened?" Often times historians are forced to make educated guesses based on the person's actions as to what their motivations are.

However, sometimes historians have documentation from a person to give us a glimpse into their mindset during an event. In the field of World War II research, we are fortunate to have some very interesting and enlightening perspectives into two of the war's combatants: Britain and Germany.

Of course, the person that people most want to get into the mind of is Adolf Hitler. Fortunately for historians, Hitler was an avid orator and there are numerous works of his that explain his motivations. People who at the time viewed Germany's aggressive actions as a shock obviously didn't read "Mein Kampf", in which Hitler states that:

"[the Nazi movement] must find the courage to gather our people and their strength for an advance along the road that will lead this people from its present restricted living space to new land and soil, and hence also free it from the anger of vanishing from the earth or of serving others as a slave nation."


Conversely, people in Europe, especially Czechoslovakia, may have wondered why Britain practically gave Germany the Sudetenland of Czechoslovakia in 1938 without a fight. Looking back, we have access to an internal memo written by the British Chiefs of Staff on the military readiness of Britain, France and Czechoslovakia and the chances of winning a direct conflict with Germany.

Their report does not have a positive outlook for Britain's military. While Britain's "naval superiority [would] be sufficiently pronounced to ensure control against Germany's naval forces except in the Baltic", their army that could be mobilized would have been far smaller than the German army, and the Royal Air Force was in a similar position. Both the army and air force suffered from the problem of "[serious deficit] of modern equipment".

Finally, when Germany invaded Poland in September of 1939, the world was shocked when it was announced that the Soviet Union had signed a nonaggression pact with Germany. They were shocked again when they learned that the Soviets had invaded Poland weeks later. This was no longer a mystery when it was discovered that a secret protocol to the Nazi-Soviet Pact was included. In that protocol, it stated that:

"In the event of a territorial and political transformation of the territories belonging to the Polish state, the spheres of interest of both Germany and the USSR shall be bounded approximately by the line of the rivers Narev, Vistula, and San"

This shows that both parties knew Germany was going to invade Poland, that the Soviet Union would get a piece of the action, and gave the rest of Europe a heart attack because it gave the indication that the Soviet Union might have stayed at peace with Germany had they not invaded.

What can we take away from all this? Well, this gives you a taste of what historians face all the time. While there are many questions that we face, only a fraction of them can be answered by the surviving documents. The rest is up for debate. This gives these sources all the more significance, and after 70 years we are still making discoveries about the war. This is why World War II history can be tedious, exciting, and meaningful all at the same time. Until next time take care, and thanks for reading.