The Nazi Menace: Hitler, Churchill, Roosevelt, Stalin, and the Road to War
Benjamin Carter Hett
Henry Holt (August 2020)

How and why the Second World War emerged out of “a shocking new world”

According to Benjamin Carter Hett, Italy, Germany, and the Soviet Union developed totalitarian regimes in the 1930s that “devoted themselves to military operations with a thoroughness, brutality, and a set of technological tools that were without historical precedent. This book tells the story of how the Second World War emerged out of this shocking new world and its crisis of democracy, and of how, little by little, democratic leaders learned to respond to these challenges.”

He suggests that the problems the leaders of the 1930s [i.e. Churchill, Roosevelt, and Stalin] had to confront were new, but they will seem especially familiar to many of us — more familiar, perhaps, than would have been the case a few decades ago. Western democracy seemed not only secure but triumphant, and the threats to it were minimal.” And then a series of events — many of them preventable — that posed a greater challenge to democracy than had any ever before.

Having taken a position that was too isolationist, the British government refused to make clear to Hitler that it would join other allies in an international defense of Poland against unprovoked aggression. Hett: “This led to a tragic paradox.” Winston Churchill: “His Majesty’s government refused to give that guarantee when it would have saved the situation, yet in the end they gave it when it was too late, and now, for the future, they renew it when they have not the slightest power to make it good.” (Page 199)

Here is another passage that caught my eye. It also suggests the thrust and flavor as well as the range of focus of Hett’s brilliant analysis.

“Millions would have to suffer and die before, as Churchill put it, ‘every trace of Hitler’s footsteps, every stain of his infected, corroding fingers’ would be ‘sponged and purged and, if need be, blasted from the face of the earth.’ But there had been a decisive change since the dark years of 1937 and 1938. Churchill and Roosevelt knew what they were fighting for. They could spell out a vision of a future world, the world after victory, that their people found compelling. In time, it would happen. So, if not the end, 1941 was, to quote Churchill once again, at least ‘the end of the beginning.'” (Pages 321-322)”

In his review of this book for The New York Times, Fredrik Logevall observes, “In the end, we come back to Hitler. As The Nazi Menace shows anew, no domestic or international pressures forced him into war. He chose it, and some part of him understood right away that he was getting more than he bargained for. On the morning of Sept. 3, 1939, he and his obsequious foreign minister, Joachim von Ribbentrop, listened intently as the interpreter Paul Schmidt read to them the text of a British ultimatum demanding that German forces be withdrawn from Poland. ‘When I finished,’ Schmidt wrote in his memoirs, ‘there was complete silence. Hitler sat immobilized, gazing before him. Finally, he looked up, turned to Ribbentrop and said bitterly, ‘What now?'”

Moments such as these help to explain why I am grateful to Benjamin Carter Hett for helping me to gain a much better understanding of four major figures as they made their separate ways on the road to World War Two. There were no doubt countless occasions when Churchill, FDR, and Stalin must also have asked “What now?” Be that as it may, they and those who trusted in their leadership proceeded into an uncertain future, doing all they could to eliminate a menace unlike any other the world had seen before.