This is actually something I’ve wondered for some time now.
Hitler was a racist in the extreme. He thought Germans were the master race. And he thought anyone who wasn’t German–or more generally anyone who wasn’t of NW European descent–was inferior. So why then was he allied with Italy and the Empire of Japan? This alliance was often referred to as the new "axis’ around which the earth will now spin–so apparently this alliance was supposed to last for some time.
So what was rationale in including these two otherwise “inferior” groups?
It was strategic as much as anything else. The Italians gave them a foothold in the Mediterranean and in North Africa. The Japanese gave the Russians another front and the British and the Americans something else to worry about. Strategically good moves. And the Japanese were in some ways like the Asian version of Germany.
IIRC, around the time of the alliance with Japan Nazi scientists quickly set about “proving” that the Japanese were descendants of an Aryan tribe that ventured to the Far East.
Hitler also made friends with many of the Arab nationalists during the time who were looking for powers to turn for their own state, not to mention their mutual dislike of Jews ala continued Zionist presence in Palestine.
You might want to look at it from the pre-war naval point of view, which from the time of Kaiser Wilhelm’s worship of the book The Influence of Sea Power upon History encouraged all naval nations to count their beads according to how mean their capital ships were, and how many they had. Post-WW-I naval treaties limited the number of battleships that Italy and Japan could have to a ratio of 5:3 against Britain and America. Both Germany and Japan explicitly violated those treaties in terms of tonnage with the Bismarck and Yamato class battleships. Germany was under other constraints by the Treaty of Versallies, but by letting the “3” guys ally themselves, one can view it in terms of a sort of battle-line parity.
As soon as that parity began to reach equanimity, the Axis powers began to buck up–first Japan in China, then Italy in Abyssinia, and then Germany in Austria. Perhaps unsurprisingly, Winston Churchill and Franklin Roosevelt, both high-level administrative Navy men in their times, found a common ground on keeping the upstarts down. I personally think that FDR was aiming for a war with Germany when he got surprised by the Japanese.
Whatever the result, war was in the winds, and the unusual American propensity for building the right ships for the right time was already well underway long before the Japanese wrecked Pearl Harbor. Battleships didn’t mean jack shit once most of the important ones were laying in the mud at Pearl. But I think that one can argue that Germany’s alliances were primarily naval in nature, and were highly important at the outset of the war. So it was definitely strategic first, political second, and paved over by the damned racists.
One key issue is that racism isn’t, you know, reasonable. Besides Jews, there were also the Gypsies, blacks, artists who painted in a modern style, etc. Anybody they didn’t like.
The underlying logic was also driven by which groups it was convenient to steal huge amounts of resources from (the Jews, the Poles, the Russians).
Besides the military convenience of not attacking the Japanese, Italians, Spanish, Swiss, and Swedish, the Nazis had already started to set up puppet states which needed working populations to support commerce (particularly farms and factories). So it was very convenient, for example in Poland, to distinguish between people of “good stock” (who would be allowed to live somewhat free lives), and people of “bad stock” (who could be used under duress).
Also: When it came to the Roma and Sinti (Gypsies), some were allowed to serve in the German army for the first few years of the war before being sent to the concentration camps.
Another point, for the italian side, at least, was that Hitker was actually a great admirer of Mussolini’s - a lot of Hitler’s political theories (as opposed to his racial theories) came from Mussolini’s early writings, before he had attained any official political clout.
By the time WWII got under way, however, Mussolini was less popular than he had been, and his hold on the Italian government was weakening. He wanted an alliance with Hitler, so that Hitler would secure his position as head of the Italian government; and in fact it was the presence of Nazi troops on Italian soil that kept him in power for so long.
There were also a number of Mischeling (“half-breeds”…people, under German law, partly of Jewish and partly of German descent), in the German army in WWII. They were sometimes able to get documents from the German government declaring their official “Arayaness”.
Hitler and the German government also didn’t explore too deeply the rumors that Franco, the dictator of Spain, was part Jewish.
Hitler also signed a peace treaty with Stalin that lasted 3 years, despite his hatred of both Slavs and Communism.
I guess the answer is that, while Hitler was a racist bigot, he also wasn’t stupid, and realized that countries like Japan and Spain could be useful German allies, and that there was plenty of time after the big war was over to settle things with any of the “impure” races.
Years ago, I read the war time diaries of Joseph Goebbels. As I recall, he made it quite explicit (to himself at least) that once the war with the West and USSR was over, Germany would deal with the Japanese. There was no mistaking that he defined “deal with” to mean an enforced position of subservience.
Another facet of the racist ideas of the Nazis was that they considered “Aryans” to be superior because they were “pure” races and had not mixed with other races, unlike the Jews and Gypsies who had been doing so for centuries through their migrations. The Japanese were a “pure” race because they had isolated themselves for so long, never mind that they were Asian.ê
Lots of people noticed this back in the 1930s, too.
Z.A.B. Zeman’s highly amusing book HECKLING HITLER: CARICATURES OF THE THIRD REICH featured a number of mocking cartoons, including “The Aryan Superman: Blond like Hitler; well-formed like Goering; Handsome like Goebbels.”
And one of Hitler posing with a Mussolini dressed in Gypsy garb and a monkey-like Hirohito, captioned “Yessir! We’re ALL ARYANS NOW!”
One small correction… The Axis alliance didn’t “give the Russians another front” at all. The Soviets may have worried about the possibility, but no action materialized until the Soviets themselves initiated it rather belatedly – just a few days before the A-bomb fell on Hiroshima, IIRC, and certainly not until the Japanese were tottering on the verge of collapse.
One of the most important of Hitler’s stated aims from the beginning was the acquiring of “Lebensraum” (literally, ‘living space’) for the German people; the idea was sort of a ‘back to the land’ movement. Italy and Japan shared certain ideologies with the Nazis, but it is significant to note too that they had no Lebensraum that der Fuhrer might covet.
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*Originally posted by TBone2 * One small correction… The Axis alliance didn’t “give the Russians another front” at all. The Soviets may have worried about the possibility, but no action materialized until the Soviets themselves initiated it rather belatedly – just a few days before the A-bomb fell on Hiroshima, IIRC, and certainly not until the Japanese were tottering on the verge of collapse.
The Soviet Union declared war on the Empire of Japan on August 8, 1945, two days after the first atomic bomb was dropped on Hiroshima and one daybefore the second was dropped on Nagasaki.
Likewise the Japanese were stunningly racist and considered themselves the most superior on Earth. No doubt they assumed that eventually they would face Germany and wipe them off the planet.
Unfortunately, unlike Germany, the Japanese never completely got rid of their racial ideology after the war.
