German expansion in Europe was undermining the balance of power, and they wanted to restore it. Britain and France declared war, he argued, for old-fashioned reasons of state.
Why did they do so, he asked? His answer has largely been accepted by subsequent historians. In this provocative work, which helped shape the views of a generation on this topic, Taylor reminded his readers that in 1939 Britain and France declared war on Germany, not the other way round. Taylor nearly half a century ago, in his bookThe Origins of the Second World War. But this simple explanation was torpedoed by A. It used to be thought, both during the war and, under the influence of Winston Churchill's massive, and widely-read five volumes on its history, that the war was caused simply by Nazi aggression, and that the British and French should have stood up to it earlier. In this opening lecture in the series I'll talk about the origins of the war.
In this series of four lectures I want to discuss the origins, course and consequences of the Second World War from a German perspective: my aim is not just to explain how the war came about, why Germany conquered most of Europe with such apparent east, when the tide of war turned against Germany, and what the reasons were for Germany's eventual defeat, but also to explore the unusual, even in many respects unique nature of the war that Germany waged, particularly in Eastern Europe, to show how the war was experienced by ordinary Germans, both members of the armed forces and civilians on the Home Front, and to assess the changing levels of support for the war effort amongst the German people as a whole.
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