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At its zenith in 1942, the Axis presided over large parts of Europe, North Africa, and East Asia, either through occupation, annexation, or puppet states. In contrast to the Allies,[4] there were no three-way summit meetings, and cooperation and coordination were minimal; on occasion, the interests of the major Axis powers were even at variance with each other.[5] The Axis ultimately came to an end with its defeat in 1945.
Particularly within Europe, the use of the term "the Axis" sometimes refers solely to the alliance between Italy and Germany, though outside Europe it is normally understood as including Japan.[6].mw-parser-output .toclimit-2 .toclevel-1 ul,.mw-parser-output .toclimit-3 .toclevel-2 ul,.mw-parser-output .toclimit-4 .toclevel-3 ul,.mw-parser-output .toclimit-5 .toclevel-4 ul,.mw-parser-output .toclimit-6 .toclevel-5 ul,.mw-parser-output .toclimit-7 .toclevel-6 uldisplay:none
The term "axis" was first applied to the Italo-German relationship by the Italian prime minister Benito Mussolini in September 1923, when he wrote in the preface to Roberto Suster's La Germania Repubblicana that "there is no doubt that in this moment the axis of European history passes through Berlin" (non v'ha dubbio che in questo momento l'asse della storia europea passa per Berlino).[7] At the time, he was seeking an alliance with the Weimar Republic against Yugoslavia and France in the dispute over the Free State of Fiume.[8]
Since the 1920s Italy had identified the year 1935 as a crucial date for preparing for a war against France, as 1935 was the year when Germany's obligations under the Treaty of Versailles were scheduled to expire.[11] Meetings took place in Berlin in 1924 between Italian General Luigi Capello and prominent figures in the German military, such as von Seeckt and Erich Ludendorff, over military collaboration between Germany and Italy. The discussions concluded that Germans still wanted a war of revenge against France but were short on weapons and hoped that Italy could assist Germany.[12]
However at this time Mussolini stressed one important condition that Italy must pursue in an alliance with Germany: that Italy "must ... tow them, not be towed by them".[10] Italian foreign minister Dino Grandi in the early 1930s stressed the importance of "decisive weight", involving Italy's relations between France and Germany, in which he recognized that Italy was not yet a major power, but perceived that Italy did have strong enough influence to alter the political situation in Europe by placing the weight of its support onto one side or another, and sought to balance relations between the three.[13][14]
Mussolini did not trust Hitler's intentions regarding Anschluss nor Hitler's promise of no territorial claims on South Tyrol.[19] Mussolini informed Hitler that he was satisfied with the presence of the anti-Marxist government of Engelbert Dollfuss in the First Austrian Republic, and warned Hitler that he was adamantly opposed to Anschluss.[19] Hitler responded in contempt to Mussolini that he intended "to throw Dollfuss into the sea".[19] With this disagreement over Austria, relations between Hitler and Mussolini steadily became more distant.[19]
Hitler attempted to break the impasse with Italy over Austria by sending Hermann Gring to negotiate with Mussolini in 1933 to convince Mussolini to press Austria to appoint Austrian Nazis to the government.[20] Gring claimed that Nazi domination of Austria was inevitable and that Italy should accept this, as well as repeating to Mussolini of Hitler's promise to "regard the question of the South Tyrol frontier as finally liquidated by the peace treaties".[20] In response to Gring's visit with Mussolini, Dollfuss immediately went to Italy to counter any German diplomatic headway.[20] Dollfuss claimed that his government was actively challenging Marxists in Austria and claimed that once the Marxists were defeated in Austria, that support for Austria's Nazis would decline.[20]
In June 1934, Hitler and Mussolini met for the first time, in Venice. The meeting did not proceed amicably. Hitler demanded that Mussolini compromise on Austria by pressuring Dollfuss to appoint Austrian Nazis to his cabinet, to which Mussolini flatly refused the demand. In response, Hitler promised that he would accept Austria's independence for the time being, saying that due to the internal tensions in Germany (referring to sections of the Nazi Sturmabteilung that Hitler would soon kill in the Night of the Long Knives) that Germany could not afford to provoke Italy.[21] Galeazzo Ciano told the press that the two leaders had made a "gentleman's agreement" to avoid interfering in Austria.[22]
Several weeks after the Venice meeting, on 25 July 1934, Austrian Nazis assassinated Dollfuss.[21] Mussolini was outraged as he held Hitler directly responsible for the assassination that violated Hitler's promise made only weeks ago to respect Austrian independence.[23][22] Mussolini rapidly deployed several army divisions and air squadrons to the Brenner Pass, and warned that a German move against Austria would result in war between Germany and Italy.[24] Hitler responded by both denying Nazi responsibility for the assassination and issuing orders to dissolve all ties between the German Nazi Party and its Austrian branch, which Germany claimed was responsible for the political crisis.[25]
The Axis powers' primary goal was territorial expansion at the expense of their neighbors.[33] In ideological terms, the Axis described their goals as breaking the hegemony of the plutocratic Western powers and defending civilization from communism.[citation needed] The Axis championed a number of variants on fascism, militarism, conservatism and autarky.[34] Creation of territorially contiguous autarkic empires was a common goal of all three major Axis powers.[6]
The Axis population in 1938 was 258.9 million, while the Allied population (excluding the Soviet Union and the United States, which later joined the Allies) was 689.7 million.[35] Thus the Allied powers outnumbered the Axis powers by 2.7 to 1.[36] The leading Axis states had the following domestic populations: Germany 75.5 million (including 6.8 million from recently annexed Austria), Japan 71.9 million (excluding its colonies), and Italy 43.4 million (excluding its colonies). The United Kingdom (excluding its colonies) had a population of 47.5 million and France (excluding its colonies) 42 million.[35]
The wartime gross domestic product (GDP) of the Axis was $911 billion at its highest in 1941 in international dollars by 1990 prices.[37] The GDP of the Allied powers was $1,798 billion. The United States stood at $1,094 billion, more than the Axis combined.[38]
The burden of the war upon participating countries has been measured through the percentage of gross national product (GNP) devoted to military expenditures.[39] Nearly one-quarter of Germany's GNP was committed to the war effort in 1939, and this rose to three-quarters of GNP in 1944, prior to the collapse of the economy.[39] In 1939, Japan committed 22 percent of its GNP to its war effort in China; this rose to three-quarters of GNP in 1944.[39] Italy did not mobilize its economy; its GNP committed to the war effort remained at prewar levels.[39]
Italy and Japan lacked industrial capacity; their economies were small, dependent on international trade, external sources of fuel and other industrial resources.[39] As a result, Italian and Japanese mobilization remained low, even by 1943.[39]
Romania's oil gave the country a disproportionate importance in the global conflict. In 1940 and 1941, Romania supplied 94% and 75% of Germany's oil imports respectively. Italy - which lacked both natural and synthetic output - was even more reliant on Romanian oil than Germany. The loss of Romania's oil - following the country's defection from the Axis in August 1944 - resulted in Hitler's first admission that the war was lost.[41]
Hitler in 1941 described the outbreak of World War II as the fault of the intervention of Western powers against Germany during its war with Poland, describing it as the result of "the European and American warmongers".[42] Hitler had designs for Germany to become the dominant and leading state in the world, such as his intention for Germany's capital of Berlin to become the Welthauptstadt ("World Capital"), renamed Germania.[43] The German government also justified its actions by claiming that Germany inevitably needed to territorially expand because it was facing an overpopulation crisis that Hitler described: "We are overpopulated and cannot feed ourselves from our own resources".[44] Thus expansion was justified as an inevitable necessity to provide lebensraum ("living space") for the German nation and end the country's overpopulation within existing confined territory, and provide resources necessary to its people's well-being.[44] Since the 1920s, the Nazi Party publicly promoted the expansion of Germany into territories held by the Soviet Union.[45]
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