24. Who is the Perfect Soldier?
The Causes and Consequences of the Second World War
Walk into the Warsaw Uprising Museum in Poland’s capital, and it won’t be long before you’ll begin to feel the eeriness that comes with being surrounded by death.1 One exhibit allows visitors to cower inside a replica of the sewers where members of the Polish underground resistance used to hide while fighting the Nazis. Another exhibit shows original film footage of the destruction of Warsaw; by January 1945, after the Polish forces surrendered, 85 per cent of the city’s buildings had been flattened. A third is dedicated to the child soldiers and nurses who died fighting for freedom. Around 16,000 members of the resistance were killed fighting in the streets. But the actual death toll was much larger. During and after the uprising, an estimated 150,000 civilian men, women and children died, mostly in mass executions.
The Warsaw Uprising was the largest military effort by a European resistance movement during the Second World War. It lasted sixty-three days. The Soviet Red Army, stationed on the outskirts of Warsaw, failed to provide support. And despite some low-level supply drops by British and South African aeroplanes, most of which fell in Nazi-occupied territories, the Polish underground resistance and their supporters received no military support from the Allied forces making their way to Berlin on the western front. It was an insurgency against a military industrial machine. Defeat was inevitable. After their surrender, almost all Polish forces were interrogated and imprisoned, sent to Gulags or executed. The entire civilian population of Warsaw was expelled and moved to a transit camp. A quarter of them were sent to labour camps in the Third Reich. A fifth were sent to concentration camps such as Auschwitz.
Four months later, on 2 May, Berlin fell to the invading Allied forces. Six days later, war ended in Europe. It would take another four months, and two atomic bombs, to bring the deadliest conflict in human history to an end. Between 1 September 1939, when Nazi Germany invaded Poland, and 2 September 1945, an estimated 80 million people died as a direct consequence of war. Many millions more perished due to starvation and disease.
Perhaps the most surprising thing about the Second World War is that it began only two decades after the Great War of 1914–18. Then, too, millions had died of conflict and disease. New technologies, such as machine guns, tanks and aircraft, produced warfare on a scale and with an intensity that was not possible with the cavalry lance, a weapon the British had been using against the Boers only a decade earlier.2 Railways and the telegram made possible not only the assembly, organisation and supply of large armies, but also the rapid movement of people – and disease. In the final months of ‘the war to end all wars’, an influenza pandemic – the so-called Spanish flu of 1918 – spread globally as soldiers returned from the war front. To give one example of its scale: an estimated 20 million people in India, 6 per cent of its population, perished because of the flu.3
But why, one may ask, after so much death and destruction, would war erupt so soon? To answer this, it helps to understand the origins of Germany’s Nazi Party and its far-right politics.
The Treaty of Versailles brought the First World War to an end. The treaty required Germany to accept responsibility for all losses and damages during the war, to disarm, and to pay reparations. These reparations amounted to about $442 billion (in 2021 prices). The former Boer War general and international statesman Jan Smuts, who would play an instrumental role in the creation of the League of Nations (and was the author of its charter), initially refused to sign the treaty, as he considered it too harsh. John Maynard Keynes, his friend and a prominent British economist, thought the treaty was counterproductive and predicted that it might lead to renewed conflict.
He was not far off the mark. To repay its debt the new Weimar Republic could either raise taxes or cut spending. Austerity, in a post-war Germany that required rebuilding, was not an option. The only alternative was to print money. The consequences were disastrous. In 1923 the value of the German mark collapsed. A loaf of bread, which cost only 260 marks in 1922, increased to 200,000,000,000 marks one year later. By the end of 1923 a 50-trillion-mark banknote was printed to ease exchange.
Yet the reparation payments and the hyperinflation did not immediately boost Nazi membership. In 1924 the National Socialist German Workers’ (Nazi) Party was on the ballot for the federal elections. Its message was both anti-capitalist and anti-communist. It instead wanted a Volksgemeinschaft, a community of the people, the idea of a racially exclusive German nation that honoured its workers. But the party failed to receive widespread support; it won only 3 per cent of the vote. Four years later, now under the leadership of Adolf Hitler, it received 2.6 per cent. A commentator in 1928 would have found it difficult to predict its dramatic ascent to national politics. Yet that is exactly what happened. In the next federal elections, in 1932, Hitler’s Nazi Party won 37 per cent of the vote, becoming Germany’s largest party. What explains this remarkable growth?
One answer is fiscal austerity. The Great Depression finally forced the Weimar government to cut spending and raise taxes. As expected, the policy was hugely unpopular: one study finds that those German localities more affected by the austerity measures had a higher mortality rate between 1930 and 1933.4 This had consequences: the same study shows that those localities that endured more suffering also had a higher vote share for the Nazi Party.
But austerity is not enough to explain the dramatic rise of far-right politics. Technology played a role too. During the 1920s the Weimar government introduced a news programme on what was then a new form of technology: radio. These radio broadcasts contributed to a more informed – and less radical – populace. In fact, comparing localities inside reception areas with those just outside, one study shows that having access to this news broadcast weakened support for the Nazi Party.5 But when Hitler was appointed chancellor, the public radio station began to broadcast only Nazi propaganda. This had the opposite effect: Germans inside reception areas were now more likely to vote for the Nazis than those outside.
It is worth pointing out that Germans weren’t the only ones susceptible to the power of this new mode of communication. Economist Tianyi Wang studied the effects of Catholic priest Father Charles Coughlin’s popular but pro-fascist radio programme which attracted a weekly audience of 30 million American listeners during the 1930s.6 Wang shows that places more exposed to Father Coughlin’s broadcasts were more likely to form a local branch of the pro-Nazi German-American Bund and sold fewer war bonds during the war. Six decades later, in Rwanda, radio propaganda would again be used to spread intolerance, violence and genocide, this time against the Tutsi minority.7
Another consequence of Nazi propaganda was to fuel the antisemitism that would ultimately culminate in the Holocaust, the genocide of an estimated 6 million Jews in German-occupied Europe. Economic history can help us understand why such antisemitic views spread. One important feature of German antisemitism was that there was large variation across the country: some parts of Germany were deeply prejudiced while other regions were not. Remarkably, two economic historians, Nico Voigtländer and Hans-Joachim Voth, found the reason for the large differences between regions in events that happened almost six hundred years earlier, when the Black Death killed at least a third of Europe’s population.8 In the fourteenth century Jewish communities were often blamed for local calamities such as epidemics. The authors show that the inhabitants of those places where Jews were massacred during the Black Death of 1348–50 were also more likely to attack synagogues and to deport Jews to concentration camps in the 1930s. Prejudice and persecution, it seems, can persist over half a millennium.
Although Jews were frequently made the scapegoats for pandemics, the ultimate motive may have been economic. Economic historians Sascha Becker and Luigi Pascali explain that because of the Catholic ban on usury, Jews historically had an advantage in the money-lending sector.9 Following the Protestant Reformation, however, Jews living in Protestant regions were suddenly exposed to competition in the banking and finance sector with the Christian majority. The authors show that those cities that converted to Protestantism also saw an increase in antisemitic pogroms (or organised massacres) and expulsions as well as an increase in the publication of anti-Jewish books. They then show that these effects persist: those cities that converted to Protestantism during the Reformation and faced competition from Jewish moneylenders were more likely to vote for the Nazis 400 years later.
When the Second World War ended, another war began. The Cold War was a period of geopolitical tension between the capitalist United States and the communist Soviet Union and their respective allies. It was ‘cold’ because there was no large-scale conflict, although there were several ‘proxy wars’ – from the 1953 Korean War, to the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis, to civil conflict in countries as diverse as Angola, Cambodia, Afghanistan and Nicaragua. It ended with the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 and the dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991.
Vietnam was one such ‘proxy war’. Officially fought between North and South Vietnam, in reality it was a war between the Soviet Union, China and their communist allies backing the North and the United States, South Korea, Australia and various other anti-communist allies backing the South. It ended with the North Vietnam’s Viet Cong capturing South Vietnam’s capital, Saigon, on 30 April 1975.
The Viet Cong victory is all the more remarkable given the vast resources the United States invested to win the war. The Vietnam War included the most intense bombing campaign in military history, for example. The economists Edward Miguel and Gérard Roland wanted to know how the bombing affected economic development in Vietnam: did those regions under heavy bombardment, for example, decline in comparison to those regions not bombed? Surprisingly, they find no difference in consumption levels, infrastructure, literacy or population density three decades after the bombing.10 What happened was that, after the war, the Vietnamese government reallocated substantial resources to rebuild those parts that were heavily affected; the massive destruction of physical capital is not a death sentence for a country.11 The bombing did, however, have a different kind of long-lasting effect: one study finds that a 1 per cent increase in bombing intensity during 1965–75 increases the likelihood of severe mental illness in adults today.12 Kids are most likely to carry the scars of war.
Cold War ‘proxy wars’ were often fought in the poorest of countries. Mozambique is a tragic example. After a protracted war of independence against Portugal, Mozambique gained its independence in June 1975. Its first president, Samora Machel of the Mozambican Liberation Front (FRELIMO), had the unenviable task of turning around the fortunes of a country ravaged by war and conflict. He chose to establish a socialist, one-party state. An opposition insurgent force, RENAMO, supported by neighbouring and undemocratic South Africa and Rhodesia (later Zimbabwe), launched an insurgency. A fifteen-year civil war ensued, in which at least a million Mozambicans died and many more were displaced.
The weapon of choice during both the war of independence and the civil war that followed was the landmine, otherwise also known as the ‘poor man’s weapon’. It was for this reason that Pol Pot, leader of Cambodia’s Khmer Rouge, the regime responsible for the death of at least 1.7 million Cambodians between 1975 and 1979, reportedly remarked that the ‘landmine is a perfect soldier, it doesn’t need food or water, it doesn’t take any salary or rest, and it will lie in wait for its victim’.13
Landmines were strategically placed by both FRELIMO and RENAMO combatants to disrupt trade, protect vital infrastructure, and terrorise the civilian population. By the end of the Mozambican civil war in 1992 hundreds of thousands of landmines had been buried across the vast country. One study that investigated the effects of landmines in Angola, another former Portuguese colony that suffered a long Cold War-linked civil war, shows the devastating effects of landmines especially on children.14
But there is hope. Mozambique, despite being one of the poorest countries on earth, has done a remarkable job of clearing its landmines. With the help of international aid agencies and new landmine detection and removal technologies, Mozambique was officially declared ‘landmine free’ in September 2015. The economists Giorgio Chiovelli, Selios Michalopoulos and Elias Papaioannou calculate the economic value of this landmine clearance campaign.15 In short, it is large, particularly in the most populated areas along trade routes. In fact, the authors conclude that the landmine clearance campaign in Mozambique was similar in size to some of the largest infrastructure projects in history, such as the construction of railways in the nineteenth-century United States that we discussed in Chapter 20.
War is costly, both for the generations who experience it and for those who are left behind. New technologies, from the radio to the landmine to the internet, can intensify conflict. But technology can also help to heal, restore and build. Our economic freedom depends on cooperation. War and conflict destroy it. A prosperous future is one without war.
The direct translation from Polish is the Warsaw Rising Museum, which is also how it is used on the museum’s website.↩︎
J. Fourie, K. Inwood and M. Mariotti, Military technology and sample selection bias, Social Science History, 44 (3), 2020, 485–500.↩︎
C. Tumbe, The Age of Pandemics, 1817–1920: How they Shaped India and the World (New Delhi: HarperCollins India, 2020).↩︎
G. Galofré-Vilà, C. M. Meissner, M. McKee and D. Stuckler, Austerity and the rise of the Nazi Party, Journal of Economic History, 81 (1), 2021, 81–113.↩︎
M. Adena, R. Enikolopov, M. Petrova, V. Santarosa and E. Zhuravskaya, Radio and the rise of the Nazis in prewar Germany, Quarterly Journal of Economics, 130 (4), 2015, 1885–1939.↩︎
T. Wang, Media, pulpit, and populist persuasion: Evidence from Father Coughlin, American Economic Review, 111 (9), 2021, 3064–92.↩︎
D. Yanagizawa-Drott, Propaganda and conflict: Evidence from the Rwandan genocide, Quarterly Journal of Economics, 129 (4), 2014, 1947–94.↩︎
N. Voigtländer and H. J. Voth, Persecution perpetuated: The medieval origins of anti-Semitic violence in Nazi Germany, Quarterly Journal of Economics, 127 (3), 2012, 1339–92.↩︎
S. O. Becker and L. Pascali, Religion, division of labor, and conflict: Anti-Semitism in Germany over 600 years, American Economic Review, 109 (5), 2019, 1764–1804.↩︎
E. Miguel and G. Roland, The long-run impact of bombing Vietnam, Journal of Development Economics, 96 (1), 2011, 1–15.↩︎
As Chapter 29 explains, despite fighting on the side of the Axis powers and despite the atomic bombs that flattened two major cities, Japan also experienced a remarkable recovery.↩︎
S. Singhal, Early life shocks and mental health: The long-term effect of war in Vietnam, Journal of Development Economics, 141, 2019, 102244.↩︎
G. Chiovelli, S. Michalopoulos and E. Papaioannou, Landmines and spatial development (National Bureau of Economic Research working paper no. w24758, 2018). Page 3.↩︎
J. L. Arcand, A.S. Rodella-Boitreaud and M. Rieger, The impact of land mines on child health: Evidence from Angola, Economic Development and Cultural Change, 63 (2), 2015, 249–79.↩︎
G. Chiovelli, S. Michalopoulos and E. Papaioannou, Landmines and spatial development (National Bureau of Economic Research working paper no. w24758, 2018).↩︎