The Popular Front responded by calling for volunteers to defend the republic.

Battle lines had been drawn.

[Music] At first, Franco faced problems.

He and his army were in North Africa and he had to get across the streets of Gibraltar back to Spain.

So he turned to the one person he thought might help, Adolf Hitler.

Within a month, transport aircraft from Hitler’s new Luftvafer had begun an airlift, taking Franco’s battleh hardened veterans over to southern Spain.

[Music] At this stage, the republic still seemed to have the advantage.

The pro- Franco military uprisings in Madrid and Barcelona were quickly crushed, leaving it in control of most of the east of the country.

Franco’s nationalists were confined largely to the northwest and part of the south.

But the nationalist situation was transformed when Hitler and Mussolini started to pour in troops and weapons.

The German dictator seized the opportunity to test his new equipment and expanding armed forces.

The first Panza tanks were sent along with some 12,000 troops.

And the Luftwuffer deployed its Condor Legion with its ultramodern new bombers and fighters.

[Music] Mussolini sent a so-called volunteer corps of 50,000 men and more than 700 aircraft.

In vain did the Republicans appeal to Britain, France, and the Soviet Union for help.

But London and Paris were scared of setting off a European war.

They declared a policy of non-intervention.

[Music] Cynically, both Germany and Italy signed up to this.

But when it became obvious that they were still sending arms to the nationalists, Ysef Stalin, the Soviet leader, announced that he would help the Republic.

Stalin’s worry was the rise of fascism in Germany.

Hitler had made it abundantly clear that he believed communism to be Nazism’s ultimate enemy.

Stalin saw the Spanish conflict as a way of keeping Germany and Italy occupied while building up the Soviet Union’s military strength.

About 700 military advisers were sent along with tanks and fighter aircraft.

It was something, but no match for the support Franco had received.

In fact, the largest source of outside help for the republic didn’t come from a country at all, but from volunteers, the international brigades.

About 30,000 left-wing Americans, British, French, and Germans signed up to fight in Spain.

With their new fascist support, the nationalists were able to open two fronts.

One advancing towards Barcelona from the north, the other led by Franco pushing up towards Madrid from the south.

By the end of 1936, Madrid was enveloped on three sides and virtually under siege.

The fighting was intense and often accompanied by appalling atrocities against civilians.

The Republicans hunted down and murdered Roman Catholic priests.

The nationalists slaughtered anyone accused of being communist.

[Music] German and Italian air power was used indiscriminately against civilian targets.

Madrid was heavily bombed.

But the worst incident came in April 1937 when the Basque town of Ganeka was virtually obliterated with 6,000 civilian deaths.

The area controlled by the Republic was steadily grounded down.

Its forces fought with great gallantry, but undertrained and underequipped amateurs were no match for the professional soldiers led by Franco or for the combined modern weaponry of Italy and Germany.

As the war dragged on, the fighting around Madrid became a symbol of the left’s determination not to be crushed by a fascist dictatorship.

But behind the scenes, the Republican alliance was falling apart.

The communists and socialists wanted to concentrate on winning a military victory.

[Music] But the more idealistic anarchists and syndicicalists saw the war as an opportunity for a mass revolution by the workers.

These disagreements burst out into the open in May 1937.

Fighting broke out in Barcelona between the anarchists and communists.

It was a fatal weakening of the Republican cause.

By the end of 1938, the nationalists had penned their enemy into a small enclave around Barcelona and another stretching eastward from Madrid to the coast.

Madrid continued to hold out, but the international brigades were withdrawn.

More and more nations began to recognize Franco’s government as his forces closed in for the final assault on Madrid.

[Music] At the end of March 1939, its defenders exhausted after nearly 3 years of fighting, the capital finally surrendered.

[Music] A month later, Franco formally declared hostilities at an end.

[Music] The scars of Spain’s civil war took years to heal, and in some ways they never have.

And internationally, Franco’s victory over the Republic proved a disaster.

Hitler and Mussolini were confirmed in their belief that the democracies of Britain and France were impotent to resist any real pressure.

While Stalin despared of their willingness to confront fascism, Hitler in particular saw his way open to begin the aggressive policies outlined in mine.

Even before the Spanish Civil War ended, his armies were on the march.

[Music] [Applause] From the moment he became Chancellor of Germany on January the 30th, 1933, Hitler had begun to put his long-term ambitions into action.

On February the 3rd, he told his top commanders that his ultimate aim was to conquer territory in the east and ruthlessly Germanize it.

They were instructed to prepare for a massive expansion.

Although Germany had been forbidden tanks, a secret treaty with the Soviet Union in 1923 had allowed the development of tank designs and experimentation with new mobile armored tactics.

Energetic young German officers like Heinserian read the theories of British thinkers like Basil Little Hart and Colonel John Fulham.

They even watched exercises being carried out by the British during the 1920s on Ssbury play.

It was from these that they came up with the idea of fastm moving units combining tanks, artillery, and infantry that could thrust fast and deep into enemy territory.

Hitler adopted their ideas with enthusiasm.

The new army was to have three Panza divisions.

Similarly, the new air force, the Luftvafer, under former World War I fighter ace Herman Guring had had a framework to build on [Music] throughout the years in which its air force was officially banned.

Germany had kept up its design skills by building civilian machines and gliding and flying clubs provided a reserve of potential aircraft.

Hitler revealed the existence of the Luftvafer in March 1935.

He then announced that the army was to be increased to 300,000 men and conscription was reintroduced.

Britain and France protested feebly at this flagrant breach of the Versail treaty.

But soon they reluctantly and slowly began to rearm.

Until this point, Hitler had been modest in his goals.

He had only taken back what was his, the Rhineland and Salah.

But now he had a grander target in mind, his homeland, Austria.

In 1934, Austrian Nazis had attempted to seize power and unify the country with Germany.

The Austrians, after all, spoke German, even if they had never been part of a German state.

In February 1938, another Nazi plot was discovered.

Austrian Chancellor Kurt von Shushnik protested to Hitler.

Hitler responded by demanding that Austria stop mistreating the Austrian Nazis and unite with Germany.

[Music] [Applause] a referendum so that the Austrians could vote on whether to remain independent.

But on March the 12th, 1938, the eve of the referendum, Hitler, fearing that it might produce the wrong result, sent in his troops.

Complete surprise and an enthusiastic welcome by Nazi sympathizers made it a bloodless invasion.

Within hours, Hitler announced Austria’s incorporation into the Third Reich.

A sovereign nation had for the first time been subsumed into a greater Germany.

Once again, the Western democracies failed to react.

In the summer of 1938, he turned on his next prey, Czechoslovakia.

A substantial German minority lived in the northwest of the country, an area known as the Sudatan land.

These Sudatan Germans had been part of the old Austrian Empire, but had been cut off when Czechoslovakia was created in 1919.

This was the time bomb that had started ticking at the signing of the Treaty of Versailles.

Hitler encouraged Sudatan German demands for autonomy and then threatened a Czech government with force if it refused to agree.

Undaunted, the Czech government ordered general mobilization and prepared to resist.

The Czechoslovak army was large and well equipped with formidable fortifications on its frontier with Germany.

Hitler backed off.

But then at the beginning of September, concerned that war might be imminent, the British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain decided to act as a peacemaker.

He flew to meet Hitler twice.

The Nazi dictator assured him that if he could have the Sudatan land, he would make no further territorial demands in Europe.

In Munich on September the 29th, 1938, with Mussolini acting as mediator, France and Britain signed an agreement giving the Sudatan land to Germany in return for a formal declaration by Hitler that he had no more territorial ambitions.

Chamberlain flew back to Britain waving the piece of paper which he claimed guarantees peace in our time.

And so on October the 1st, German troops occupied the Sudatan land and seized the Czech frontier fortifications.

Hitler now began sizing up his next target, Poland.

Again, the nominal cause was a German minority marooned as a result of the Versail treaty.

Hitler demanded the return of the port of Danik to German control so that East Prussia could be linked up with the rest of Germany.

The Poles refused and Hitler hesitated.

He was not quite ready for allout war and he had unfinished business with Czechoslovakia.

[Applause] In March 1939, the eastern part of the country, Slovakia, which was ethnically different to the Czech lands, appealed to Hitler for help in achieving greater independence.

Hitler summoned the Czechoslovak prime minister Emil Hatcha to Berlin and browbeat him into putting his country under German protection.

[Applause] German troops now marched into the rest of Czechoslovakia unopposed.

Most of the country was annexed into the Reich.

Slovakia was declared a protectorate for the first time.

Hitler had seized non-Germanspeaking territory, but again there was only a feeble protest from Britain and France.

At the end of March, he again repeated his demand of Poland give up dancing.

This time, France and Britain declared unequivocally that they would declare war if he attacked Poland.

But by now, Hitler cared little whether they did or not.

He was sure that they would be weak and indecisive opponents in Russia.

Stalin had also become increasingly concerned by Hitler’s aggression.

In April, Stalin proposed an alliance with Britain and France.

But negotiations made little progress and finally Stalin despared, deciding that there was another solution to the German threat.

On August the 23rd, the Soviet Union and the Third Reich, who everyone had believed were sworn enemies, announced a non-aggression pact.

[Music] The agreement secretly specified that Poland would be split between the two countries and Stalin would have a free hand to take over Estonia, Latafia, and Lithuania.

Now free from any Russian threat, Hitler ordered his armed forces to prepare for an immediate invasion.

On the evening of August the 31st, the German Fairmarked prepared for the assault.

Its furer had made the decision which would plunge the world into war.

Heat.

Heat.

 

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