Buchanan’s Apologia for Hitler
As if some neocon were setting out to parody dovish thinking on contemporary issues, paleocon Pat Buchanan has gone and written a “blame Britian first” account of the origins of World War II. Apparently, according to Buchanan, Hitler was just seeking to unify the German-speaking people in one country by annexing Danzig and had no intention of fighting a wider war:
Indeed, why would he want war when, by 1939, he was surrounded by allied, friendly or neutral neighbors, save France. And he had written off Alsace, because reconquering Alsace meant war with France, and that meant war with Britain, whose empire he admired and whom he had always sought as an ally.
As of March 1939, Hitler did not even have a border with Russia. How then could he invade Russia?
This last line is the giveaway. After all, it’s perfectly clear that Hitler did want to invade Russia. The need for a German-Soviet war to obtain lebensraum was long at the center of his thinking. That’s why Generalplan Ost was prepared in the early years of the war and called for German occupation of vast swathes of Soviet territory. The answer to Buchanan’s riddle of how Hitler intended to invade Russia when Russia and Germany were separated by Poland is, of course, that Hitler intended to conquer Poland, the very thing that Buchanan is perversely trying to deny he intended to do.
The real question for Buchanan is why, if Hitler had no intention of marching through Poland into Russia, did he follow up his conquest of Poland by breaking the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact and invading Russia? The answer, of course, is that Hitler wanted to conquer Eastern Europe and the western USSR from the beginning.
I think that if you want to try to run the case against World War II, your best route is not to deny that Hitler wanted war with Poland and Russia. You should deny that Hitler wanted war with Britain and France for any reason other than to secure his western flank against the USSR. Then you can say the western powers should have just let Hitler and Stalin fight it out and prepare for a Cold War-style campaign of containment against the eventual winner. I think for that to be even remotely persuasive requires you to import a lot of 20/20 hindsight about the Cold War into 1939, but it’s not nearly as ludicrous as this “Hitler was just misunderstood” theory.
177 Responses to “Buchanan’s Apologia for Hitler”
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September 2nd, 2009 at 4:49 pm
But Hitler wanted a public option-right?
September 2nd, 2009 at 4:50 pm
How can Buchanan write this, after Mein Kampf?
September 2nd, 2009 at 4:53 pm
Hilter and the National Bocialists just wanted to win the North Minehead by-election and set up some Boncentration Bamps. No biggie.
September 2nd, 2009 at 4:54 pm
From here on out, “Hitler apologist” ought to be the mandatory prefix to Patrick Buchanan’s name. And if any talk show host (starting with Rachel Maddow) wants to have him on, (s)he should have to answer why (s)he is giving a platform to a Hitler apologist.
September 2nd, 2009 at 4:54 pm
Anglo-Jewish-Bolshevik propaganda, Joe. Just like when he was arrested for defending Germany from the Reds in 1923.
September 2nd, 2009 at 4:55 pm
How can Buchanan write this, after Mein Kampf?
Well, silly, he had to write it after Mein Kampf. After all, writing Mein Kampf kept Pat awfully busy. He wouldn’t have had time to write this screed, too.
September 2nd, 2009 at 4:57 pm
It’s true that Hitler went through a lot of phases on Britain–it wasn’t always “yeah let’s conquer them whatever the costs!” The Brits were having none of it from the start though.
September 2nd, 2009 at 4:57 pm
What a strange essay for a public figure to write. Pat Buchanan is not a stupid guy — just evil — and sometimes I wonder if his basic animating force is contrarianism…
… nah, never mind, the dude’s clearly a white/straight/non-Jew supremacist.
September 2nd, 2009 at 4:59 pm
And here I thought the lesson of Munich was that Hitler *would not* settle for just the land where Germans were in the majority…
September 2nd, 2009 at 5:00 pm
Buchanan is just restating A. J. P. Taylor’s argument from “The Origins of World War Two.” He thought (or at least argued) that of all Hitler’s territorial demands, the one for the return of Danzig was by far the most reasonable, and that the Western Powers and Britain in particular had been stupid to draw the line there after giving in on so many less reasonable demands. As I recall, Taylor also smacked the allies around for being so unwilling to join with the USSR in any effort to contain Germany.
A very interesting contrarian book.
September 2nd, 2009 at 5:01 pm
Paging David Irving. Paging David Irving.
September 2nd, 2009 at 5:03 pm
I wonder if a close look at Pat’s genealogy might not find some Krauts among the Irish.
September 2nd, 2009 at 5:03 pm
DaveL beat me to it. This is AJP Taylor redux.
Taylor’s book made a big splash in 1961 but has not held up well. Odd if he were Buchanan’s inspiration — he was a raging leftist.
September 2nd, 2009 at 5:06 pm
DaveL,
It’s a fair point that wanting the return of Danzig was a pretty reasonable position.
But Buchanan goes farther than that, arguing that Hitler’s desire for the return of Danzig was why he began the war, rather than the desire to conquer large portions of Eastern Europe, including Russia, which he laid out perfectly clearly in Mein Kampf.
September 2nd, 2009 at 5:06 pm
And here I thought the lesson of Munich was that Hitler *would not* settle for just the land where Germans were in the majority…
The problem wasn’t so much Munich itself as the follow-up. Let’s remember that Sudetenland was indeed German through and through, and it was unjust of Versailles to have taken it from Germany in the first place and given it to the Czechs. The problem was essentially that Britain gave assurances and guarantees that it had no way of enforcing (hello, guarantee for POLAND???) and the lack of credibility was laughable.
If Britain was smart, it would have forced the Poles to give up the Corridor and Danzig early in the game and then shut the Poles up, so it had some breathing space to figure out what to do with Hitler. The way the whole thing went down was insane. There were people in Britain who saw that the game was up by 1933 and concessions had to be made; being wishy-washy like Chamberlain really didn’t help.
Oh, and had Lord Halifax become PM, the whole thing would have turned out a lot better. Churchill couldn’t do grand strategy to save his life (cf. Gallipoli, Campaign of) and of course he ended up bankrupting the country.
September 2nd, 2009 at 5:08 pm
Tell that to the Czechs.
September 2nd, 2009 at 5:09 pm
Gerhard Weinberg, in his work, takes a lot of pokes at people who think Hitler wanted to live in peace with the Brits. Apparently one of the items on the German “to do” list if they occupied Britain was a plan for every adult male between the ages of 18 and 45 be transported to the continent as slave labor. This was marginally more drastic than the original plans for disposing of the Poles and the Ukranians, which involved slow but deliberate mass starvation, and slightly less blatant than the German “ship ‘em out or kill ‘em all” programs for the Jews and Gypsies.
September 2nd, 2009 at 5:10 pm
Re hedley at 12: “I wonder if a close look at Pat’s genealogy might not find some Krauts among the Irish. ”
Who do you think supplied the Irish Republican Army?
Although Victorian England’s treatment of the Irish in the Potato Famine was a pretty decent prototype for the Holocaust. Including blockading Irish ports and preventing Turkish ships from delivering relief supplies while the Irish were starving to death. The Turks evidently took notes and consulted them for the Armenian Genocide.
And Churchill was nothing if not a Victorian Imperialist.
Still, some of this historical revisionism is bullshit. Hitler and the Nazis were criminal gangsters long before they went into politics. A guy who exterminated some of his closest associates would not hesitate to lie while reaching for the knife.
The mistake lies in thinking Churchill was much better. Churchill practically INVENTED modern terrorism with SOE.
September 2nd, 2009 at 5:11 pm
It’s a fair point that wanting the return of Danzig was a pretty reasonable position.
No shit. That’s why it’s amusing to see people foaming at the mouth whenever I attack the Churchillian policy of what’s essentially know-nothingism; Hitler’s negotiating terms (note: not WAR terms, but negotiating terms) were not unreasonable.
That Britain felt punked by the whole Munich business did not change the fact that the concessions demanded by Hitler during the Polish negotiations were realistic terms. That Britain ended up backstopping (and it turns out, not having the actual power to do the actual backstopping) Polish intransigence to negotiate even in good faith was, to put it simply, really, fucking, stupid.
We were backstopping a bunch of Poles who thought they could fight German tanks with bicycle troops and then fall back on the West to take the real brunt. It was insane business. It’s like backstopping Georgia’s insane president against Russia in the recent fracas.
September 2nd, 2009 at 5:11 pm
Pat just really, really likes the idea of ethnically homogeneous countries and admires Hitler for having the balls to try to achieve it. But he’s also an isolationist so he refuses to accept that his hero was a war-monger.
September 2nd, 2009 at 5:11 pm
It’s very simple. Hitler, of course, wanted and planned to march East.
The British and French knew that Hitler wanted and planned to march East. The British and French wanted him to march East, hence the Munich agreement and all the other incidents of appeasement.
But Stalin fooled them, and bought himself a couple of years worth of time, by signing the non-aggression pact.
That’s all.
September 2nd, 2009 at 5:12 pm
Wait, so Hitler didn’t want war, so when he signed a treaty to divide Poland with the Soviet Union, and then invaded Poland, that was an offer of peace to Britain?
Of course, Hitler didn’t want to fight Britain, nor did he want to fight the United States. But he clearly wanted to fight a war with the Soviet Union, France and more or less every non-Fascist country in mainland Europe and Africa. So even if Danzig was a reasonable demand, his next demand would not have been so reasonable. Thus, war was inevitable. Besides, Hitler’s worst crimes were committed in spite of, and not because of, the War.
September 2nd, 2009 at 5:13 pm
Now, it’s possible for one to argue in good faith that post-Munich, Germany didn’t think Britain would follow through on its defense of Poland and so could have made a move on Danzig. But, even that is hard to square with the notion that Britain had been re-arming itself after Hitler annexed the rest of Czechoslovakia and that the Poland pact was signed *after* Hitler violated the terms of Munich.
The sensible conclusion is that Britain and France were more than willing to permit Hitler to occupy German-speaking areas, but not Slavic ones. Danzig was Poland’s only outlet to the sea, though, so insisting on protecting the Polish corridor was necessary to preserve a free Poland. Especially after the Molotov-von Ribbentrop pact. (This being in Britain’s interest as Poland served as a buffer to both resurgent Soviet Union and Germany, neither of which were much interested in trading with Britain.)
September 2nd, 2009 at 5:14 pm
Let’s remember that Sudetenland was indeed German through and through, and it was unjust of Versailles to have taken it from Germany in the first place and given it to the Czechs.
Try to at least glance at a historical atlas before you make comments like this. The Sudetenland had never been part of “Germany” in Germany’s limited history–the country was only created in 1871. it had been part of Bohemia for more than a thousand years, and did quite well for most of that time, as Bohemia passed from Czech-speaking to German-speaking to Czech-speaking governments.
September 2nd, 2009 at 5:15 pm
I’ve known some people from Gdansk who would strenuously object to this position’s supposed “reasonableness.”
September 2nd, 2009 at 5:20 pm
Of course, Hitler didn’t want to fight Britain, nor did he want to fight the United States. But he clearly wanted to fight a war with the Soviet Union, France and more or less every non-Fascist country in mainland Europe and Africa. So even if Danzig was a reasonable demand, his next demand would not have been so reasonable. Thus, war was inevitable.
Well, Hitler did want to fight all those people, but not at the same time. He wanted Poland, first, then France and the Low countries, then Britain, then the Soviet Union, and he expected to settle with the United States in the mid-to-late 40s.
One of the reasons Franco refused to join Germany in a war with Britain was that Germany insisted on getting naval bases in Morocco and the Azores as part of the deal. These would have been no use to Germany in the British war, too far away and underdeveloped. They were someething the German navy felt they needed for the next war in the Atlantic–against the Americans.
September 2nd, 2009 at 5:20 pm
That Britain felt punked by the whole Munich business did not change the fact that the concessions demanded by Hitler during the Polish negotiations were realistic terms.
Except that after “the whole Munich business” there was no sane reason to believe his negotiating terms re. Poland were offered in good faith.
Which is not to say the Polish guarantee was a wise idea; just that there was no longer any point in trying to cut deals with Hitler.
September 2nd, 2009 at 5:23 pm
Poland, strangely enough, has the same bleak geography as Israel — poor and lying between greater powers that inevitably fuck it over periodically. Behold the high Ashkenazi IQ.
Only a moron would ally themselves with Poland –at least Israel has nukes. But Britain fell for it and we are evidently equally stupid.
September 2nd, 2009 at 5:25 pm
The Sudetenland had never been part of “Germany” in Germany’s limited history–the country was only created in 1871. it had been part of Bohemia for more than a thousand years, and did quite well for most of that time, as Bohemia passed from Czech-speaking to German-speaking to Czech-speaking governments.
I really love it when people play cheap tricks with technicalities. I really love it. It was a part of a Bohemia that was a part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. Who was the king of Bohemia? The Emperor and Archdukes of Austria. It is a historical technicality that Sudetenland was in Bohemian borders.
Actually, it works on the same principle as Silesia, which was originally Austro-Hungarian but had a plebiscite and sort of went to Germany after the war, when the Austrian empire was getting dismantled.
Your claim is a joke in the same way it is a joke when Hungarians go on a tear-jerker about how they lost all their land post-WWI; folks, it was never your land! It was just vested in the Crown of St. Stephen, a technicality to make things a bit more convenient for the Habsburgs. They were as Hungarian as me. It was the Austrians who conquered and fought for the land, and it belongs to the Habsburgs.
The stupid never stops.
September 2nd, 2009 at 5:26 pm
All of this makes for animated conversation, but it is silly. Hitler did invade Poland and he used Stukas and lots and lots of tanks. If he had not wanted to invade Poland, he wouldn’t have. I distrust anyone who tries to read Hitler’s mind in retrospect on these things. Reading his mind would require a bigoted crazy man who was able to think like Hitler and imagine his intentions..someone like..hmm..Pat Buchanan.
September 2nd, 2009 at 5:27 pm
I’ve known some people from Gdansk who would strenuously object to this position’s supposed “reasonableness.”
Well, I wonder if they benefited at all from Stalin’s population transfers program post-war that kicked out all the Germans?
That’s what I thought. A bunch of peasants who got a hold of a the lord’s manor and now feel super-NIMBY about it and screams and kicks whenever it is asked a touchy question.
September 2nd, 2009 at 5:27 pm
I’ve wondered why Hitler didn’t form an alliance with Poland against the Soviet Union. Poland was no friend of the Soviets, having battled with them in the 20s, and had an almost fascist, anti-semitic government at the time. It was the policy that Goering apparently advocated.
September 2nd, 2009 at 5:29 pm
To see how those sorts historical-accident technicalities are pretty meaningless when it comes to actual stuff happening, see the Pragmatic Sanction.
September 2nd, 2009 at 5:29 pm
Now, it’s possible for one to argue in good faith that post-Munich, Germany didn’t think Britain would follow through on its defense of Poland
Not only it’s possible, it is indeed what happened. After the occupation of Poland, Britain and France were still hoping and expecting that Germany would move East, hence the so-called “phony war” (”la drole de guerre”) when they formally declared war but did nothing, waited.
September 2nd, 2009 at 5:30 pm
Buchanan’s explanation of Hitler’s motives and intentions sounded better in the original German.
September 2nd, 2009 at 5:31 pm
One of the weird aspects of this column is I saw it posted on World Net Freaking Daily. I wonder if they actually read it, or when they saw the word “Hitler” they thought it was an Obama hit piece.
September 2nd, 2009 at 5:31 pm
Only a moron would ally themselves with Poland –at least Israel has nukes. But Britain fell for it and we are evidently equally stupid.
Snort. As I have said before and will say again, Churchill was really, fucking, stupid.
Not being able to pass Latin at Harrow is really quite something; it means you sincerely cannot do basic rational analytical processes, as Latin is basically memorization + analysis. It’s great that we had a man who couldn’t do analytical thinking as the most important prime minister of the century.
September 2nd, 2009 at 5:37 pm
Poland, strangely enough, has the same bleak geography as Israel — poor and lying between greater powers that inevitably fuck it over periodically
Poland, for most its history, was quite wealthy and militarily the equal of any of the powers on its borders. Unfortunately, in the 17th and 18th Centuries it fell under the rule of a corrupt conservative elite who used their power to seize most of the countries wealth for themselves, ruining the middle class and crippling its economy. Then, they contrived to give themselves veto power in the legislature even when they didn’t actually have the votes to rule, thus paralyzing the government, refusing to allow taxation and laws for the common good, collaborating with foreign interests against the executive.
The disappearance of Poland from the map in 1797 was as much assisted suicide as murder.
September 2nd, 2009 at 5:37 pm
Buchanan just gets crazier all of the time…or more truthful, I can’t decide which. But I think he’s felt this way for a long time considering some of the outright racist things he has said in the past.
September 2nd, 2009 at 5:38 pm
The complacency re Hitler as a threat to America is also misguided.
Nazi Germany might well have acquired the Atomic Bomb If not for the pressure on the USA of war, the help of Jewish refugee scientists, and an adoit transfer of high grade uranium ore to the USA by Belgium. A nuclear-armed Third Reich could have kicked an isolationist American in the ass in the 1950s.
September 2nd, 2009 at 5:41 pm
Pat Buchanan is a less entertaining Franz Liebkind.
September 2nd, 2009 at 5:41 pm
If Britain was smart, it would have forced the Poles to give up the Corridor and Danzig early in the game and then shut the Poles up, so it had some breathing space to figure out what to do with Hitler.
This would have done little good. Hitler knew time was not on his side, and that Nazi Germany’s head start with respect to armaments was eroding. Had war not been declared in September of 1939, Hitler almost certainly would have launched a surprise attack westwards, because he knew he had to secure his western flank prior to attacking his real target, the Soviet Union. Under such a scenario I think it’s very likely the strategic situation would have been similar in say, the summer of 1940 either way, except Moscow would be a couple of hundred miles farther from German panzers (though not if Stalin and Hitler decided to carve up the remainder of Poland after Hitler was finished in the west). Indeed I can think of one possibility under such a scenario that might have worked against Britain to a disastrous degree: I suspect the RAF would not have undergone the same degree of strengthening it did during the first ten months or so of the war; defense budgets don’t increase (nor do pilot hours of air combat experience accrue) to the same degree during periods of “breathing space” when you’re trying to “figure out” your adversary as they do during, you know, war. If, in response to a surprise attack on France in, say, the spring of 1940, Britain had declared war on Germany, the former might have found itself forced to defend the skies above Britain against the predations of the Luftwaffe with a substantially weaker force than was actually the case 69 summers ago. And a German victory in the Battle of Britain would probably have resulted in a very different world from the one we live in.
September 2nd, 2009 at 5:41 pm
[...] Porter, Matt Yglesias, and Steve Benen have more on this delightful [...]
September 2nd, 2009 at 5:42 pm
Actually, it works on the same principle as Silesia, which was originally Austro-Hungarian but had a plebiscite and sort of went to Germany after the war, when the Austrian empire was getting dismantled.
The Austro-Hungarian Empire dates only to 1867. I assume that you mean something like the Hapsburg Monarchy which held Silesia in the 1500s. You might have a stronger claim there.
With that said, Silesia was held by Poles during the Middle Ages through the Piast dynasty. Which is precisely why the claim over Silesia is disputed.
September 2nd, 2009 at 5:43 pm
Fixed.
September 2nd, 2009 at 5:45 pm
Warner von Braun built the US ICBM program — and Robert Oppenheimer’s technical skills were acquired in graduate studies in Germany and England.
The old Ivy League was contemptuous of engineering and it showed at the start of WWII. Even today, it largely benefits from the fact that the endowments of its European competitors were bombed out of existence in WWII.
September 2nd, 2009 at 5:50 pm
It was the Austrians who conquered and fought for the land, and it belongs [sic] to the Habsburgs.
Your argument is missing something… the part where you explain how this means it should have gone by natural right to *Germany*.
By your “German through and through” remark you seem to be accepting Buchanan’s (and, dare I say, Hitler’s) premise — that shared race/language = all your Sudetens are belong to the Reich.
September 2nd, 2009 at 5:50 pm
Poor Hitler.
September 2nd, 2009 at 5:53 pm
The problem wasn’t so much Munich itself as the follow-up. Let’s remember that Sudetenland was indeed German through and through, and it was unjust of Versailles to have taken it from Germany in the first place and given it to the Czechs. .
Myles, the German Government didn’t want the Sudetenland* (or Austria for that matter) during Versailles, it only groups of hardcore nationalists were advocating this at the time. The Germans realized that taking on more territory in Austria or the Sudetenland with Germany in a state of virtual revolution wasn’t a great idea. The option wasn’t even on the table, so it wasn’t “took” from Germany, they didn’t want it. This is all laid out by by Margaret MacMillan in Paris 1919.
*And it’s not like I’m unsympathetic, my family is Sudetendeutsche.
September 2nd, 2009 at 5:54 pm
# Jim T Says:
September 2nd, 2009 at 5:12 pm
Hitler’s worst crimes were committed in spite of, and not because of, the War.
Is it a crime to love your Fatherland? Because otherwise Pat Buchanan has no idea what you’re referring to.
September 2nd, 2009 at 5:56 pm
This really misrepresents the way that Austria-Hungary was set up, especially in the late 19th/early 20th centuries. Bohemia rose and fell in importance in the empire, with several emperors coming from Bohemia and actually using Prague as a capital. To my knowledge, no one in Austria proposed changing the historical borders of Bohemia to excise the Germans. They really did respect it as a historical entity in and of itself.
More importantly, though, you seem to have completely bought into the German propaganda about the Sudentenland. Yes, the “region” overall had a German majority, but there was still a very large Czech minority. The Nazis ethnically cleansed these Czechs (whose families had been living the region for as long as the Germans) to make room for more Germans.
Now, maybe, all things being equal it makes sense to divide up border territories according to who is in the majority in a particular place. But it doesn’t always work out perfectly well – you will often end up with enclaves and such. Plus, I can absolutely guarantee you that Czechoslovakia treated its German minority better than the Third Reich treated its Czech and Moravian minorities.
September 2nd, 2009 at 5:59 pm
Pat is just scratching the proto cognitive itch. That being in a perfect world Hitler’s Germany would have left Britain alone and destroyed the USSR along with every communist on the continent. He can’t give up the dream even if the dream was shattered by the time he was born.
Pat has the clarity of vision, in his fervid dreams, to accept the elimination of the Jews. The sticking point that thankfully has kept most conservatives away from their natural home. Which is where he parts with so many contemporary conservatives. It goes without saying that Hitler’s plan to eliminate all Slavs too is OK with him. Hard choices are what conservatism is all about after all.
September 2nd, 2009 at 5:59 pm
I love these WWII threads. Everybody’s got a hobby-horse.
Just to screw with things further: Canada declared war in 1939, the US not til 1941. Canada: Awesome. America: pussies.
Discuss.
I’m outta here.
September 2nd, 2009 at 6:00 pm
Before RTFA, my thought was that Pat has been reading too much alternative history fiction.
After reading it, it seems like a private joke, replaying history like the email joke from a few years ago: once you subtract all the days the employee has off, he’s only working a week per year, so, no, you can’t have it off.
The original joke worked because the deletion of some 200 work days was hidden in the midst of the text. Pat pulls this same game, ignoring the whole of lebensraum.
What I can’t quite get a grip on is why he’s bothering to go though this bogus exercise.
September 2nd, 2009 at 6:00 pm
Re “you seem to be accepting Buchanan’s (and, dare I say, Hitler’s) premise — that shared race/language = all your Sudetens are belong to the Reich.”
——–
I do not think Hitler should have been appeased in the late 1930s –but the Versailles Conference did much to convince Germans that Americans and the British were lying shitheads. Which helped the Nazis gain enormous political support.
Woodrow Wilson made much of his 14 Points and the Germans thought they were the basis on which the Armistice was agreed. But once the Allies got the upper hand , Woodrow’s 14 Points were cast aside. All these new countries were formed by people sharing a common language and ethnic group. EXCEPT German Austria was not allowed to unite with Germany.
September 2nd, 2009 at 6:01 pm
True, but Germany never really put resources into its nuclear program because it kept assuming the war would be over quickly. Basically, once the war got started, the Germans did not invest in anything unless they believed it would be ready within about six or nine months to help them achieve final victory. The United States, on the other hand, believed the war would take years to win and invested in things like the atomic program and radar and jet engines.
September 2nd, 2009 at 6:02 pm
No shit. That’s why it’s amusing to see people foaming at the mouth whenever I attack the Churchillian policy of what’s essentially know-nothingism; Hitler’s negotiating terms (note: not WAR terms, but negotiating terms) were not unreasonable.
I agree that Britain’s actions before the war were just insane, but the negotiation points that Hitler offered were stop-gap measures to war. This is confirmed in the Hossbach Memorandum, Mien Kompf and Hitler’s Table Talk. I’m not a fan of Churchhill, but he was right in 1938. If Hitler had gotten everything he wanted, there still would have been war two years down the road at the very most.
September 2nd, 2009 at 6:03 pm
That was actually one of my complaints about the Wolverine movie – why would the dude fight for the Americans when (a) he was Canadian and (b) the Canadians always got involved in wars first.
September 2nd, 2009 at 6:03 pm
So, what I want to know is, does it count as a Godwin when he’s actually, literally apologizing for the Nazis?
September 2nd, 2009 at 6:06 pm
and had Lord Halifax become PM, the whole thing would have turned out a lot better.
You really are a twat, Miley.
September 2nd, 2009 at 6:06 pm
By your “German through and through” remark you seem to be accepting Buchanan’s (and, dare I say, Hitler’s) premise — that shared race/language = all your Sudetens are belong to the Reich.
Absolutely not. The doctrine in this case is essentially Grossdeutschland (Germany including Austria), in opposition to the Bismarckian Kleindeutschland (ex-Austria) framework.
I think it is fair to say that the Kleindeutschland framework, with its heavy concentration around the very austhoritarian Prussian tendency, in which rational civilian politics had no legitimacy, was fatally flawed from the very beginning, doomed to self-destruct in some manner sooner or later.
The original ideal of German unification was that of Fichte and the Frankfurt parliament, which was Grossdeutschland, with the crown being placed upon a moderate central-German prince, for example Hesse. That it did not come through in whole, but rather wilted in favour of Kleindeutschland, was a train wreck waiting to happen.
Let’s not fool ourselves; by the late 19th century it was pretty much clear that the Austrian empire was not going to survive. That Bismarck stubbornly refused to deal with this impending reality and instead tended to his petty Prussia-first mentality was thoroughly unfortunate.
September 2nd, 2009 at 6:08 pm
My grandparents were born in Danzig and they didn’t speak a word of German. There were plenty of Poles in Gdansk. (In fact, my grandparents were Kashubs, but in all the historical arguments between Russia, Germany and Poland over Danzig the Kashubs have always gotten the short end of the stick).
September 2nd, 2009 at 6:08 pm
When you’re talking about actual Nazis, no, it doesn’t count.
September 2nd, 2009 at 6:10 pm
That was actually one of my complaints about the Wolverine movie – why would the dude fight for the Americans when (a) he was Canadian and (b) the Canadians always got involved in wars first.
Because we’re dirty socialist peaceniks, everyone knows canadians never fought in wars.
September 2nd, 2009 at 6:10 pm
abb1:
But Stalin fooled them, and bought himself a couple of years worth of time, by signing the non-aggression pact.
Nonesense, Stalin had total faith in Hilter honesty in the non-aggression pact, he used the time he had for a military buildup before June of ‘41 very very poorly even if you want to argue that he somehow didn’t trust Hitler. It was Stalin’s biggest mistake, fortunately for us, Hilter made a bigger mistake by waiting to invade Russia until after rescuing Italy in Greece by invading Yugoslavia.
September 2nd, 2009 at 6:12 pm
Godwin assumes you mean Nazi like it’s a bad thing, so no.
September 2nd, 2009 at 6:15 pm
It wasn’t *just* Bismarck – the Austrians did not really accept that their empire was crumbling until it was too late. Part of the problem with the Grossdeutschland was that Austria wasn’t willing to give up its non-German parts, which was basically a requirement for the whole thing to work. Instead, they doubled down on a multi-ethnic empire at precisely the time multi-ethnic empires were coming out of vogue.
The Czechs, though, did see the writing on the wall – a major Czech nationalism movement arose at precisely the same time.
September 2nd, 2009 at 6:16 pm
This really misrepresents the way that Austria-Hungary was set up, especially in the late 19th/early 20th centuries. Bohemia rose and fell in importance in the empire, with several emperors coming from Bohemia and actually using Prague as a capital. To my knowledge, no one in Austria proposed changing the historical borders of Bohemia to excise the Germans. They really did respect it as a historical entity in and of itself.
Sure. But by the time after the Congress of Vienna, it had nothing to do with the Czechs and everything to do with the intransigence of the Hungarian magnates, who were trying their darnedest, all the fucking time, to be worst possible fucking assholes.
Basically, the Habsburgs couldn’t do anything without the Hungarians raising a shit-storm about it, and spending extra time dealing with relatively harmless Czechs was, frankly, so down the to-do list as to be negligible.
In any case, there was never a point in shifting borders; medieval (by extension, Habsburg) borders were not meant to reflect actual nations as much as holdings of land or feudal rights. But yes, would Austria would have turned out not so much a mess, and the whole borders issue such a mess, had they been free from Hungarian shit-raising every single time they actually try to do something good? Yes. But of course, to expect the Hungarian nobility to not be constant son-of-a-bitches is like expecting the Russians to not invade other people.
September 2nd, 2009 at 6:17 pm
Interesting, two people that know what exactly Hitler planned before he did it.
September 2nd, 2009 at 6:21 pm
I would buy this more if Bohemia and Moravia had been part of Hungary, but they were actually part of the Austrian half of the empire (and always had been). While its glory days were in the past, Bohemia was still pretty well run and it did experience a substantial economic revival in the second half of the 19th century. In fact, by the early 20th century, Bohemia actually had a higher standard of living than Austria proper.
September 2nd, 2009 at 6:24 pm
Part of the problem with the Grossdeutschland was that Austria wasn’t willing to give up its non-German parts, which was basically a requirement for the whole thing to work.
I recall one of solutions tendered was to render the non-German parts of Austria into personal holdings of the Habsburgs, sort of like the former Austrian archduchies in Italy but more autonomous, that would lie outside the remit of Germany’s borders. So the Habsburg holdings would be divided in two, with the German parts falling under the imperial umbrella, the non-German parts forming a personal collection of fiefdoms (potentially empire) for the Habsburgs, and simultaneously for the family to be excluded from the German throne and the crown to be a given to a compromise candidate, a moderate Catholic.
September 2nd, 2009 at 6:27 pm
Actually they should just have let them slug it out and THEN invaded the winner.
5 million more fresh troops hurled at a Soviet Union who had to face the full might of Nazi Germany, or a Nazy Germany that had carved their way to the Urals would have been too much for either of them to face. Bonus: If the Nazi’s do push them back that far, Japan is going to get it’s courage up and start taking pieces off them in the East too.
September 2nd, 2009 at 6:28 pm
Re Myles at 68: “it had nothing to do with the Czechs and everything to do with the intransigence of the Hungarian magnates, who were trying their darnedest, all the fucking time, to be worst possible fucking assholes.”
————-
Were any of them named Lieberman?
September 2nd, 2009 at 6:28 pm
I would buy this more if Bohemia and Moravia had been part of Hungary, but they were actually part of the Austrian half of the empire (and always had been).
Which was, again, a giant miscalculation on the Habsburgs’ part. Once they accepted that the various non-Hungarian nations were unequal with Hungary, and Hungary to be equal with Austria, the whole edifice was bound to collapse sooner or later. There was simply no way to make it work when the Hungarians, who were supposedly running half the empire, spent all their time sabotaging the empire.
Did it matter that Bohemia was by then within Austrian borders ? Not really. What I was saying that you could’t move a pencil in Vienna without the Hungarians raising hell. Didn’t matter where the borders were, the Hungarians just raised hell all the time, whether it was about Austria or Hungary.
September 2nd, 2009 at 6:36 pm
The sad part was that Grossdeutchland would actually have provided a way out for the Habsburgs, instead of consigning them to inevitable doom. What would likely happen is that they would probably have excluded themselves from the German crown and moved out from the Vienna to Prague or Budapest, and taken up an independent imperial title (King-Emperor of Hungary-Bohemia) while keeping the very bare minimums of their German territories within the German empire, which they would administer remotely, from Budapest/Prague. A way would have been found for the Austrians to slip as much of their territory out of the German domain (read: Silesia, Sudetenland, etc.) while maintaining the advantages of a first-tier German princely house as the senior house among the various German non-Kaiser monarchies.
September 2nd, 2009 at 6:38 pm
In fact, the Habsburgs, with their vast Eastern holdings and their sizable German holdings, could easily have become more powerful than the proper “imperial” house in Berlin or Munich or Hesse-Frankfurt or whatever.
September 2nd, 2009 at 6:39 pm
Wow, this thread went off into the weeds quickly. I seriously doubt PB has much interest in pre 1930 European history. He as a good American pretty much hates all Europeans, except Germans. Well the British too, which is another peculiarity PB has. An Irishman who loves the Brits.
It is pretty difficult to unpack PB’s odd prejudices on historical terms. It all has to do with American Conservatism during his own life, which has nothing to do with history but is rather a million layered apologia for American exceptionalism. Something he took up as a profession, has paid pretty well, sure beats work and has given him some fame.
September 2nd, 2009 at 6:40 pm
Myles SG @37,
You have missed the point of Winston Churchill completely. Maybe he wasn’t a strategic genius; maybe Lord Halifax would have run the war much better than Churchill did. But Churchill was not a “Lord”, in fact he was half American, so he knew the amazing grit of ordinary British citizens. He realized that it was more important to extract what could be saved from the continent and “live to fight another day”.
Lord Halifax would probably have ordered the BEF to “hold Dunquerque at all costs” while they were being cut up by the Stukas or some other such World War I “honor” idiocy.
Churchill had the same essential insight as Mao when faced with a technologically superior adversary and preferred to fight like a guerrilla: “when the enemy advances, withdraw, when he stops harass, when he tires, strike, when he retreats, pursue”
When Churchill took over as PM England was not ready to take the weight of the German mechanized military. It had a twenty mile wide moat, radar, a dozen Spitfire squadrons, and a lightly-armored navy vulnerable to U-boats. And it had Churchill’s growl; it made the difference.
September 2nd, 2009 at 6:42 pm
Just to screw with things further: Canada declared war in 1939, the US not til 1941. Canada: Awesome. America: pussies.
Any reasonable person accepts the rightness of the allied cause in the Second World War, and so by extension America’s entry into said war. But I’ve always found the line of thought above a bit puzzling. War is a really terrible thing, and generally speaking it is a desirable state of affairs when a country and a people enter a war only very reluctantly when there’s clearly no other acceptable choice. It’s when a country and people embark upon war eagerly and in a hurried fashion that disaster usually can be counted upon to ensue.
September 2nd, 2009 at 6:45 pm
You could also make the argument (well, take the posture) that Canada entered the war as a lapdog for the same master that had used Commonwealth soldiers as cannon fodder in WWI.
September 2nd, 2009 at 6:55 pm
You have missed the point of Winston Churchill completely. Maybe he wasn’t a strategic genius; maybe Lord Halifax would have run the war much better than Churchill did. But Churchill was not a “Lord”, in fact he was half American, so he knew the amazing grit of ordinary British citizens.
Indeed, the grandson of the Duke of Marlborough and the son of the Chancellor of the Exchequer is the very impersonation of Andrew Jackson.
The stupid never stops.
September 2nd, 2009 at 6:56 pm
Come on, guys. William Shirer was there at the time, and afterwards got a look at the Nazi records before they were sealed up by the Allies. He also interviewed almost every surviving high-ranking person in Germany and France after the war (and compared what they said to what they had told him _before_ the war). He said in multiple (well-documented, footnoted) books that there was no concession in the world, not Danzig or anything else, that would have stopped Hitler from invading Russia [1].
Cranky
September 2nd, 2009 at 6:59 pm
Pat Buchanan must have discovered some previously unknown Germans in Bucharest, Sofia, and Athens.
September 2nd, 2009 at 7:00 pm
Lord Halifax would probably have ordered the BEF to “hold Dunquerque at all costs” while they were being cut up by the Stukas or some other such World War I “honor” idiocy.
The precise opposite. Halifax saw what the Great War did to Britain (and to his family) and pretty much vowed to do whatever it takes to keep Britain out of the damn war. It was Churchill who was all gung-ho about “honour” and so on; there were by then literally almost no-one on the aristocratic or even suburban wing of the Tories who thought all that “honour” of war was worth the effort.
The whole business was an exercise in absurdity. The loudest cheerleaders of the war were Labourites, not Tories, because they where helping Stalin fighter Hitler. It was idiocy in its most staggering form.
A great number of Tories were pretty much close to personal bankruptcy by the time the war got underway. To suggest that they could possibly be gung-ho about further bankrupting themselves to fight an unending war was disingenuous in the extreme.
September 2nd, 2009 at 7:01 pm
The point of WW2 (in Europe) was that Germany wanted to crush Russia, before the Slavic menace became too strong.
The point of WW1 was that Germany wanted to crush Russia, before the Bolshevik/Slavic menace became too strong.
The rest is details, which are extremely important but shouldn’t be used to obscure.
September 2nd, 2009 at 7:01 pm
He said in multiple (well-documented, footnoted) books that there was no concession in the world, not Danzig or anything else, that would have stopped Hitler from invading Russia [1].
Nobody said anything about it being about Russia. Who cares about Russia? It was about saving the West from Hitler. And there was no firm indication that Hitler contemplated no other alternative than to engage in a bloody fight with the West.
September 2nd, 2009 at 7:02 pm
The point of WW2 (in Europe) was that Germany wanted to crush Russia, before the Slavic menace became too strong.
The point of WW1 was that Germany wanted to crush Russia, before the Bolshevik/Slavic menace became too strong.
And they were proven right, fifty years of Cold War and all.
Quelle surprise!
September 2nd, 2009 at 7:05 pm
Not being able to pass Latin at Harrow is really quite something; it means you sincerely cannot do basic rational analytical processes, as Latin is basically memorization + analysis. It’s great that we had a man who couldn’t do analytical thinking as the most important prime minister of the century.
Hey man, don’t be mean to those of us who had trouble with Latin, it’s a LOT of grammar.
September 2nd, 2009 at 7:06 pm
# Myles SG Says:
September 2nd, 2009 at 7:02 pm
And they were proven right, fifty years of Cold War and all.
Quelle surprise!
If only there were some sort of aphorism about poking bears.
September 2nd, 2009 at 7:09 pm
Well, It had been Great Britain’s policy for several hundred years to allow NO power to unify the Eurasian Continent. Because that would have cooked Britain’s goose.
And,as someone once noted, America found it easier to understand British propaganda than German propaganda.
September 2nd, 2009 at 7:19 pm
Way I look at it, if the west had stayed out of it, the Russians would have beat the Nazis anyway, and then their tanks would have merrily rolled into central Europe. Instead of East Germany and West Germany, the Cold War would have happened with United Communist Germany under Soviet occupation.
This would not have gone well for Mr. Buchanan’s beloved and much missed Cold War.
WWII might not have been necessary to save the world from Hitler, but it was necessary to save the world from Stalin.
September 2nd, 2009 at 7:24 pm
Considering how little the US and UK had done by 1944, that’s probably more or less right. Especially when you consider that Germany would still have kept some troops in France and Italy just in case.
September 2nd, 2009 at 7:33 pm
Had Halifax become PM in 1940 he would almost certainly have capitulated to the Nazis, creating a Vichy Britain. Pro-fascist sympathies ran thick through the British aristocracy early in the the war and Halifax was socially connected with such people.
It is ignorant and stupid to describe Labourites as cheerleaders for the war against Hitler only in order to aid Stalin. The Molotov-Ribbentrop pact was in force until June 1941. Until that time Hitler and Stalin were allies not enemies, and Britain and the Commonwealth were fighting the Nazis alone.
The British Labour Party supported the war against the Nazis for the obvious reason that the Nazis were evil bastards.
September 2nd, 2009 at 8:09 pm
> Considering how little the US and
> UK had done by 1944,
You are taking Yglesiasism a little too far there. There is no question that history as taught in the US gives far too little mention and credit to the Soviet side of the war. But by 1944 the western Allies had cleared the Mediterranean, killed or captured 300,000 Axis troops in North Africa (not all German, and many not of the highest capability, but would have been useful in defense of Germany nonetheless), destroyed enormous quantities of German war material also in Africa (google ME-323 – those might have been useful on the Eastern front), substantially engaged the Germans on the Italian peninsula (not the most successful campaign, but kept quite a few good troops and officers) busy, ended the Japanese threat to India, delivered hundreds of thousands of trucks to Russia, and quite a few other things. It is easy but facile to claim that the western allies were doing “nothing” while the Russians were (without question) fighting on the eastern front.
Cranky
Oh yeah – the British also fought the Germans alone from 1940 – mid-1941 while the Soviets sat on the sidelines. Not without reason, but not helping either.
September 2nd, 2009 at 8:20 pm
Well, Hitler was always desperate for Oil. And one of the things Churchill did was keep those bombers warmed up in Iran — ready to bomb the living piss out of the oil fields around Baku, Azerbaijan if the Nazis broke through Russian lines.
Of course, that would have meant no fuel for Russian tractors and massive famine in Russia.
Which kinda helped stiffen the resolve of our gallant Russian allies at Stalingrad. GAVE them motivation. As did all the footdragging on the Normandy invasion.
hee hee hee And people wonder why the Cold War broke out.
September 2nd, 2009 at 8:39 pm
Obviously a lot of people here are better read than I am: How precarious was the Russian victory and the rollback to Berlin? It’s always portrayed as a damn near thing.
September 2nd, 2009 at 8:59 pm
Though far from an expert, I will venture an opinion to get the ball rolling on Aleks’s question : I think there is general agreement that after Stalingrad, the Germans on the Eastern Front were doomed.
As to what would have happened if they had gotten across the Volga, I don’t know if there is a consensus. (Presumably if Hitler had allowed Paulus to break out, it would have helped the German situation, but not enough for them to go back on the offensive with any hope of success.)
September 2nd, 2009 at 9:07 pm
aleks at 96: “Obviously a lot of people here are better read than I am”
Nah, we just make shit up.
Looks to me like Hitler’s goose was cooked when the US entered the war, given our enormous resources. However, we might have gotten diverted by the war in the Pacific — British Intelligence in New York City worked like crazy to ensure that didn’t happen.
Head of British intelligence , William Stephenson, boasted in book “A Man Called Intrepid” that he manipulated Hitler into declaring war on the US just after Pearl Harbor by leaking info to a Member of Congress he knew to be working for the Nazis.
But everyone in British Intel is a lying shithead.
Proud of it, actually. Consider it an art form.
September 2nd, 2009 at 9:37 pm
> Obviously a lot of people here are better read
> than I am: How precarious was the Russian victory
> and the rollback to Berlin? It’s always portrayed as
> a damn near thing.
The unanswered and probably unanswerable question is why the Japanese did not attack Siberia while the Soviets were occupied with the 1943 campaign. That would have put the USSR and the Allies in a very difficult position. Luckily the Japanese never coordinated in any significant way with the Germans (although the license to produce the ME-163 would have caused the US a lot of trouble in 1945 had we not read the codes and sunk the U-boat carrying the plans and samples).
Cranky
September 2nd, 2009 at 9:39 pm
Here is an interesting story of how Hitler’s war plans were whipsawed by the leak of the “Rainbow Five” Plan (to wage war on Germany ) in US newspapers a few days before Pearl Harbor. Author notes Stephenson’s admission but judges that Franklin Roosevelt was the real leaker.
http://www.americanheritage.com/articles/magazine/ah/1987/8/1987_8_64.shtml
September 2nd, 2009 at 9:49 pm
Here is a Wiki article on US War Plans of that era (called OPLANs today, I believe.)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rainbow_Five#Rainbow_Plans
Plan Red ( Waging War on Great Britain and Canada) might have raised Churchill’s eyebrows, if he had seen it.
Another interesting plan was War Plan White (Fighting a Domestic Insurrection in the US — part of which was actually executed in dispersing the Bonus Army of WWI vets )
I Wonder what is sitting in Pentagon vaults today. Heh heh
September 2nd, 2009 at 9:50 pm
although the license to produce the ME-163 would have caused the US a lot of trouble in 1945 had we not read the codes and sunk the U-boat carrying the plans and samples.
I beg leave to doubt that the Japanese could ever have produced enough jets to make any difference, given the shambles to which their economy had been reduced by submarine blockade and bombing.
September 2nd, 2009 at 9:50 pm
The Japanese did not attack the Soviets in 1943 because they had the living sh*t whomped out of them in Manchuria by the Soviets in 1939. Interestingly Zhukov commanded the Soviet forces that did the whomping.
Cranky is more likely referring to the Me-262. It’s doubtful that the Japanese had the industrial capacity to build it anyway.
The US was already waging war–in all but name–on Germany by the time of Pearl Harbor. It is thought that Germany’s unilateral declaration of war against the US after Pearl Harbor came from this recognition. Did Roosevelt a big favor, though.
September 2nd, 2009 at 9:57 pm
Heh heh yourself. Every country with a military larger than a Boy Scout troop has and had a safe full of plans to fight every other such nation, and knows that each of the others has a plan for waging war on it. If for no other reason than to give all those colonels something to do between polo tournaments.
The Pentagon undoubtedly has a plan to attack Albania, Zimbabwe, and everybody in between. As a foundation for paranoia this amounts to nothing at all.
September 2nd, 2009 at 10:11 pm
Re roac at 104: “As a foundation for paranoia this amounts to nothing at all.”
———-
From http://www.commondreams.org/headlines02/0302-01.htm
“Congress Not Advised Of Shadow Government
by Amy Goldstein and Juliet Eilperin
Key congressional leaders said yesterday the White House did not tell them that President Bush has moved a cadre of senior civilian managers to secret underground sites outside Washington to ensure that the federal government could survive a devastating terrorist attack on the nation’s capital.
Senate Majority Leader Thomas A. Daschle (D-S.D.) said he had not been informed about the role, location or even the existence of the shadow government that the administration began to deploy the morning of the Sept. 11 hijackings. An aide to House Minority Leader Richard A. Gephardt (D-Mo.) said he similarly was unaware of the administration’s move.
Among Congress’s GOP leadership, aides to House Speaker J. Dennis Hastert (Ill.), second in line to succeed the president if he became incapacitated, and to Senate Minority Leader Trent Lott (Miss.) said they were not sure whether they knew.
Aides to Sen. Robert C. Byrd (D-W. Va.) said he had not been told. As Senate president pro tempore, he is in line to become president after the House speaker. ”
heh heh
September 2nd, 2009 at 10:18 pm
More from the above Washington Post article on Bush’s shadow government:
“There are two other branches of government that are central to the functioning of our democracy,” said Rep. William Delahunt (D-Mass.), a member of the House Judiciary Committee. “I would hope the speaker and the minority leader would at least pose the question, ‘What about us?’ ”
Other lawmakers said they believe the federal government lacks adequate plans to be certain that all three of its branches could function if terrorists disabled Washington.
———-
Heh heh
Note that several emergency statutes give the President Dictatorial powers in a National Emergency. Subject only to review by Congress every six months. So the failure of Congress to survive is not necessarily a bug.
September 2nd, 2009 at 10:22 pm
Looks to me like Hitler’s goose was cooked when the US entered the war, given our enormous resources. However, we might have gotten diverted by the war in the Pacific — British Intelligence in New York City worked like crazy to ensure that didn’t happen.
Waste of energy. Roosevelt was operating on the premise that Germany was more dangerous than Japan years before Pearl Harbor. The math was first worked out, as I recall, by Albert Wedemeyer, a first-rate staff planner who eventually took over the China-Burma command from Joe Stillwell in 1945. When George Marshall needed a full work-up on how to allocate resources for a world war, he turned to the best staff analyst in his inner circle: Lt. Colonel Dwight David Eisenhower.
Naturally, when Marshall later needed someone with the organizational savvy, broadness of intellect, and depth of character to plan and run the United States’ first trans-oceanic land, air, and sea campaign, it made more sense to promote Eisenhower to general than to risk some old war horse like Patton screwing up the planning and picking fights with our allies.
September 2nd, 2009 at 10:27 pm
Bob Oso
But Hitler wanted a public option-right?
A big proponent of death panels too!!!! Hell, most of the time he cut-out the middle-man.
September 2nd, 2009 at 10:32 pm
Not to be too anal-retentive, but the “Silesia” referred to in terms of the post-WWI plebiscite, voting to stay in Germany, had been Prussian and then German from around 1742. No part of the Austro-Hungarian Giant Mess joined up with Germany after WWI – Upper Silesia was split between Poland and (primarily) Germany, but it, like I said, had been snagged by Frederick the Great back during the War of the Pragmatic Sanction.
As to Grossdeutschland vs Kleindeutschland and the Sudetenland and all – not only was there a hefty Czech minority in the Sudetenland, it was an absolutely essential geographic/economic part of Bohemia. It was economically tied to the rest of Bohemia, and formed the natural, physical border for Bohemia. Separating the Sudetenland from the Czech lands in 1919 would have resulted in something not unlike what resulted from separating it in 1938 did, leaving behind a rump Bohemia. Not to mention that Czechoslovakia was, unlike pretty much everything else east of the Low Countries and France, an actual, functioning democracy, with guarantees of the rights of its ethnic German population, etc… There never would have been a crisis over the Sudetenland if it weren’t for the fact that the Nazis were total assholes.
September 2nd, 2009 at 10:41 pm
> The Japanese did not attack the Soviets in 1943
> because they had the living sh*t whomped out of
> them in Manchuria by the Soviets in 1939. Interestingly
> Zhukov commanded the Soviet forces that did the whomping.
And did so again in 1945 in what must be one of the most complete and least known military victories in human history. But between 1941 and 1943 the Soviets, their troops, and Marshall Zhukov were a little busy elsewhere in their empire…
> Cranky is more likely referring to the Me-262. It’s
> doubtful that the Japanese had the industrial capacity
> to build it anyway.
I am referring specifically to the Me-163:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Me-163
If you go to Planes of Fame in Chino, California you will see one of two remaining Mitsubishi Mu-163s hanging next to an Me-163. As I noted, the sub carrying the plans and samples was sunk by the Allies. Mitsubishi had the pilots handbook (POH) and some sketches and was able to reverse engineer the design from that, but much later than it could have if it had had the plans. 1000s of those with pilots intent on suicide would have caused massive problems for any US invasion fleet and possibly the B-29s as well.
> roac
> I beg leave to doubt that the Japanese could ever have
> produced enough jets to make any difference, given the
> shambles to which their economy had been reduced by
> submarine blockade and bombing.
The Me-163 was built of plywood and fueled with hydrogen peroxide and nitric acid – its low cost and simple construction was part of the genius of its design. In German hands it didn’t do so well because it tended to kill its pilots, but that was less of a concern for the Japanese.
Cranky
September 2nd, 2009 at 10:48 pm
As to what would have happened if they had gotten across the Volga, I don’t know if there is a consensus. (Presumably if Hitler had allowed Paulus to break out, it would have helped the German situation, but not enough for them to go back on the offensive with any hope of success.)
I think Germany’s chance came in the fall of 1941 when Army Group Centre could view the spires of Red Square on the horizon and Stalin was evacuating Moscow of most of it’s industrial equipment and bureaucrats.
The argument for the Soviets being done in by offensive of the summer of ‘42 (Stalingrad) hinge on Hitler capturing the Caspian oil fields and making a giant hook to the north and surrounding Moscow to the east after taking Stalingrad.
I think the former was possible but the later was impossible, the Heer’s (German army) lines were too over extended to carry out such a task. If they had taken Stalingrad it would have been between Sept and Nov. of ‘42 and too late for an immediate push on Moscow. By the spring the Soviets would have regrouped and put up a stiff fight, I doubt the Germans could have resupplied very well by the spring since the winter of ‘42 was a rough one even by Russian standards. They would have been too weak to take Moscow in the spring of ‘43.
So fall of ‘41 was the one and only chance for the Germans to succeed in my view.
September 2nd, 2009 at 10:52 pm
There was without question a lot of treachery, backstabbing, double-dealing, and conspiracy going on in the 1920-1941 period (as during 1941-1946, as always in human history), but all these hyper-devious conspiracy theories involving British Intelligence, secret Rainbow plans, Danzig compromises, etc are far beyond a stretch. Hitler had stated quite clearly and openly his entire political life what he thought Germany should do to regain its lost honor, glory, and land, and when he came to power he started doing it quite directly. While there is much to argue about in the details and the minor twists and turns, the general outline of events looks like a cigar because it is in fact just a cigar. And Patrick Buchanan is a stone idiot.
Cranky
In fact that is what fascinates me about true radicals: how often they state openly what they plan to do if they take power, how directly they proceed to do it once they do take power, and how clever people are about ignoring what is going on while they do it.
September 2nd, 2009 at 10:52 pm
Head of British intelligence , William Stephenson, boasted in book “A Man Called Intrepid” that he manipulated Hitler into declaring war on the US just after Pearl Harbor by leaking info to a Member of Congress he knew to be working for the Nazis.
Weinberg, among others, mentions that leak, but claim it was done by a Republican isolationist senator. He pissed off Roosevelt and could have been tried for espionage if Roosevelt hadn’t been distracted by World War II suddenly starting in Hawaii.
In either case, this was also a waste of energy. Hitler had always expected that Germany would have to fight the United States, and had only put off doing so because he couldn’t balance the advantage of attacking convoys in the western Atlantic against whatever naval forces the United States might transfer to the Atlantic from their Pacific fleet.
The Japanese, like the Germans, had been expecting to fight the United States for years, and had made up their minds to do so in 1940. They decided on a late autumn attack in 1941 with German support. Hitler needed a diversion to keep the American navy in the Pacific, expected that Japan would be able to inflicted serious damage on British supply lines to its Asian empire, and hoped they would pin down or defeat Soviet forces in Siberia. Japan intended to seize control of eastern Asia while Germany kept British and American forces occupied in Europe.
Since neither country’s leadership oligarchy felt anything but contempt for American military skill or potential, it was a win-win situation for both governments.
The point, ultimately, is that nothing Roosevelt or Churchill did or might have done would have avoided war. All their political maneuvers affected only the timing and the balance of starting forces.
Germany attacked the Soviet Union in 1941 because Hitler wanted to do so. He saw it as the best way to achieve his goal of a German-ruled Europe. Japan attacked the United States later that year because Japan wanted to do so. Her leaders thought this was the best way to create a Japanese empire in eastern Asia.
Germany never considered NOT declaring war on the United States after Pearl Harbor. Hitler had only put off declaring war on the United States before because he lacked a navy to deal with the American navy. When the Japanese navy became available, he did what he thought he needed to do to win the war in Europe.
September 2nd, 2009 at 10:53 pm
Cranky,
Yes, the Japanese wouldn’t have worried much about technology that killed their pilots…
The japanese were a little busy between 1941-43, largely as a result of their decision to attack south instead of north.
The Japanese had done very little to make up for their utter technological and logistical disadvantages in regard to Soviet forces in Siberia. Japanese motor transport, armor, and artillery were inferior in 1939, and had not improved since then. A string of explosions that destroyed a massive supply and ammo dump in Manchuria in 1941 didn’t help either.
September 2nd, 2009 at 11:10 pm
“And they were proven right, fifty years of Cold War and all.”
When the alternative is possibly Hitler ruling Paris, Berlin, Rome and Vienna fifty years when the Soviets’ prize jewel was Prague is probably a deal I’d make too. Not that Prague isn’t a prize jewel (it is).
September 2nd, 2009 at 11:25 pm
@ 38 Midland
Hey, you could transpose this with *very* few edits, and lo and behold, its us! I mean “corrupt conservative elite” with “veto power… even when they didn’t actually have the votes…” Hmmm. Those who forget history…
And Childe Myles: Chill, kid. So you took a couple of A-H Empire courses. You’ll get over it. You’ll also get over your obvious sympathy for Germany after 1919. Anyway, i thought you were a philosophy major.
September 2nd, 2009 at 11:25 pm
Miley’s nostalgic ennui towards the end of the Jolly Old Empire, and a time when the wogs and coolies knew what was what and did their bit to keep the aspidistra flying, really is something to behold. He’s the embodiment of a throwaway Wodehouse character.
September 2nd, 2009 at 11:35 pm
” think Germany’s chance came in the fall of 1941 when Army Group Centre could view the spires of Red Square … So fall of ‘41 was the one and only chance for the Germans to succeed in my view.”
Good points but…
Too many armchair historians (yeah, thats all I am, so who am I to talk) seem to assume Fall of Moscow = USSR defeated
Didnt work out that way in 1812 and I dobt it would work that way in 1941
September 2nd, 2009 at 11:35 pm
Well, I think Myles has a point. When the Hapsburgs collapsed, it destroyed the last opportunity a man had to dance the Waltz dressed in a Hussar uniform.
A great setback for gays everywhere.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hussar
September 2nd, 2009 at 11:41 pm
Also:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Cornet_Wilkin_11th_Hussars.jpg
September 2nd, 2009 at 11:42 pm
“Poland, for most its history, was quite wealthy and militarily the equal of any of the powers on its borders”
Largly because it was spared the Black Death
September 2nd, 2009 at 11:46 pm
No part of the Austro-Hungarian Giant Mess joined up with Germany after WWI – Upper Silesia was split between Poland and (primarily) Germany, but it, like I said, had been snagged by Frederick the Great back during the War of the Pragmatic Sanction.
And if it weren’t for the League of Nations caving to the Poles who were being assholes, pretty much the entirety of Silesia would have gone to Germany.
September 2nd, 2009 at 11:47 pm
Sure, sure, but the population of modern-day Gdansk is quite different from what it was seventy years ago.
September 2nd, 2009 at 11:47 pm
Or it is Pomerania? Can’t seem to remember. But Germany was definitely screwed out of serious territorial plebiscites in favour of the bloody Poles, who were pretty underhanded in making the League of Nations deny plebiscites.
September 3rd, 2009 at 12:08 am
Yes, and not to mention that it would have been the right and moral thing to do if Britain had decided to step down and not threaten war over Poland–and then declare war over that little invasion — that’s not appeasement, that’s understanding Hitler. They should have let Hitler squash that nasty little country Polish country and slaughter it’s Jews.
Buchanan is a born Fascist.
September 3rd, 2009 at 12:11 am
The earlier poster who compared today’s Congress to the dysfunctional Polish Parliament of the 18th century had a point.
I hope the Blue Dogs don’t hear of the “Liberum Veto”
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liberum_veto
James Madison would have shuddered.
September 3rd, 2009 at 12:52 am
Hasn’t Pat reliably waved the bloody shirt of Chamberlain’s appeasement of Hitler low these many years? I doubt he could resist. A more reliable rhetorical conservative trope can’t be found.
Pat is old. Pat was an early adopter of the career model, professional conservative. His specialty is American exceptualism, with a few twists owing to his age. To wit, he doesn’t like Jews. Which was fine if not mandatory in 1938, the year of his birth but is an anachronism now. He’s set in his ways and essentially he is simply an act. His act is to play Pat Buchanan on TV. His scratchings and mutterings don’t mean a thing. They take up space on the page or on a TV set. Corporations will continue to pay him out of habt. He’s just an old trooper who will keep hoofing till he goes horizontal.
September 3rd, 2009 at 2:23 am
[...] Matthew Yglesias also begs to differ with Buchanan: [...]
September 3rd, 2009 at 2:47 am
Buchanan seems to be channeling AJP Taylor, the maverick British historian, who portrayed Hitler as a misunderstood German statesman trying to undo Versailles. More recent evidence shows otherwise: Hitler had apocalyptic plans for a German colonial empire in the east from the start. He planned and expected war. The war that broke out in 1939 was not the one he planned – Buchanan is right in that. However, it would not have broken out but for Hitler’s plan to start a major European war eventually.
September 3rd, 2009 at 2:54 am
[...] is, needless to say, insane. Matt Yglesias does a nice job of summarizing: it’s perfectly clear that Hitler did want to invade Russia. The need for a German-Soviet war to [...]
September 3rd, 2009 at 2:57 am
History Lesson?
Just to remind, Hitler broke the Oct 1938 Munich agreements less than six months later in March 1939, well before before Danzig became a (manufactured) crisis in summer 1939.
In March 1939, he occupied the rump Czech state of Bohemia and Moravia. Those areas were ethnically Czech – the heart of the Czech state and culture. They were part of the loyal core of the Austro-Hungarian empire for centuries, and had never been part of Germany. THAT was what finally convinced Chamberlain that Hitler could not be trusted.
At the same time, the rest of Czechoslovakia’s neighbors participated in this second partition, with the Poles getting small chunks along their border and the Hungarians annexing Ruthenia (having already taken a large strip of southern Slovakia as a protectorate in November 1938, just after Munich). Hitler also secured a strip of Lithuania around Memel, adjacent to East Prussia in March 1939.
September 3rd, 2009 at 2:59 am
[...] is, needless to say, completely and utterly blinkered. Matt Yglesias does a nice job of summarizing: it’s perfectly clear that Hitler did want to invade Russia. The need for a German-Soviet war to [...]
September 3rd, 2009 at 4:25 am
A.J.P. Taylor wrote a lot of the same stuff in his book The Origins of World War II. I can’t understand how Liberal Fascists like Yglesias and his peanut gallery have their noses so completely out of joint. I don’t agree with Taylor or Buchanan, but hypocritical fascists like Obama and the JournalList-service Nazis basically are arguing for the kind of Corporatist oligarchy that Mussolini and Hitler set up. The big corporations fall in line under Big Government while small businessmen and the taxpayer get slaughter economically.
In the first few chapters of his excellentl book, Liberal Fascism, Jonah Goldberg goes into much detail as to the Italian Blackshirt Brigades in the ’20s marching on Rome and pledging their personal loyalty to Benito Mussolini. FDR wanted to base the New Deal on a lot of Mussolini’s statist/corporativist brand of neo-capitalism run by unaccountable elites. Just like Obama does today.
Like Marx said, what goes around, comes around, ["the first time as tragedy, the second time as farce"], only the Liberal Fascists nowadays forget they’re fascists and stress the “liberal” part.
Just a marketing ploy, but the same old totalitarian personalism that banana republic caciques employ throughout the Southern Half of the Western Hemisphere.
Now Chiquita Obama is trying to move the caudillo politics of Latinos into the Anglosphere part of North America!!
September 3rd, 2009 at 4:45 am
Jesus, they’re coming out of the woodwork. Did O’Reily start frothing at the mouth over ThinkProgress again?
September 3rd, 2009 at 5:01 am
I only know two thing about WWII. I know the sacrifices of family members I met that lived. And I’ve read far too many histories. I know Vietnam much better. To the point where I met a guy who my uncle saved. Turns out, ‘Uncle Charlie’ delivered him as a baby. His mother was VC, but a doctor has to deliver a baby if it’s happening. I can go to Europe and never meet people who actually met my family during the war, and we fought in it. But in Vietnam, my uncle is a hero to them. And they really do remember ‘Uncle Charlie’ in the Da Nang area. But when you’re a doctor, you’re always the hero. Well, at least to the people, the generals want to kill you. The only reason they don’t is that they might need that medical treatment.
September 3rd, 2009 at 5:15 am
Shorter me: In a war zone, nobody kills a doctor.
September 3rd, 2009 at 7:24 am
Jesus, they’re coming out of the woodwork. Did O’Reily start frothing at the mouth over ThinkProgress again?
Yeah, but it was all totally worth it just for the Hussar jokes. Biggest laugh I’ve had all week.
The Peruvian palace guard and drum majors everywhere agree with me . . .
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Peru_Guard_Change_21.jpg
September 3rd, 2009 at 8:20 am
Say goodnight, Gracie.
September 3rd, 2009 at 8:21 am
I love the way this particular whack-job defended Hitler and Buchanan, and then accused other people of being fascists, though. You don’t see that very much.
September 3rd, 2009 at 9:06 am
Didn’t we to some extent let Stalin and Hitler fight it out? Sure we did plenty of fighting with the Germans, but it was the Russians who bore most of the costs of that war not us. Plus I do think that it was probably better for us that Russia won the exchange if for no other reason that Russia has a hard time having much of a navy.
September 3rd, 2009 at 9:15 am
Jasper way up @79:
I agree with you. I was just messing with the thread.
Thoroughly enjoyable. It’s not often you see someone these days pining wistfully for the Habsburgs and Lord Halifax.
September 3rd, 2009 at 9:17 am
As many have mentioned, the history was complex. In 1939 Russia wanted to confront Hitler by forming a pact with England and France. Poland and the Baltic states were too alarmed at the thought of Russia marching through their countries to confront Hitler, so they lobbied England not to support the pact. In the end, the Russian foreign minister, Litvinov, lost sway and was replaced by Molotov who immediately set about making a non-aggression pact with Hitler
September 3rd, 2009 at 9:30 am
“Poland, for most its history, was quite wealthy and militarily the equal of any of the powers on its borders” . . . Largly because it was spared the Black Death.
Yeah, right. On the other hand, Germany didn’t have half its population slaughtered by Mongols . . .
What Poland had, for centuries, was thousands of square miles acres of prime farmland and forest, an abundance of other natural resources, a thriving, productive, multi-ethnic mixture of rural and urban culture, a central position on European trade routes, and a government that functioned as well or better than any other in Europe. All that went down the crapper in the 17th Century with the pervasive cultural decadence of its ts Polish-Lithuanian aristocracy, and the rest is abysmal history.
The strategic position of Poland in 1939 was utterly hopeless, but its army did as well or better in combat with the Germans as any other army did up until the Battles of Kursk and Salerno in 1943. The story about Polish cavalry using lances in 1939 is a fabrication.
Reading Norman Davies is a good tonic for those of us raised on a steady diet of Anglo-centric history. His history of Europe is great fun to read, along with being informative and balanced.
Davies, among others, notes that Poland was the only nation that fought the Germans every hour of every day of the second World War from the first barrage to the final German surrender, even after their country was betrayed and partitioned by the monsters running Germany and Russia. There are many graves on mountains in Italy and hills in France that testify to the ferocity of that struggle.
Poland’s reward was the extermination of a fifth of its population and four decades in a Soviet gulag. My sympathies for the people who invaded her are somewhat limited by that circumstance.
September 3rd, 2009 at 9:31 am
Didn’t we to some extent let Stalin and Hitler fight it out?
Not on purpose.
There may have been those in the British government who were happy to see Reds getting killed, but the Americans, from the day they entered the war on, were pushing to get troops ashore in France and pushing toward Berlin at the earliest possible moment. (In fact, it is overwhelmingly probable that any invasion mounted before 1944 would have been a debacle, but the Brits had to work very hard to convince Marshall of that.)
Nor is there any need to read deep scheming into the British foot-dragging (though Don Williams will no doubt give it a shot). They had lost a whole generation in the first war, and they couldn’t afford any more mass casualties. The whole British war effort post-D-Day was severely constrained by the fact that they had no reserve of manpower left.
September 3rd, 2009 at 9:35 am
Footnote to 143: And of course it was three Polish grad students who made the crucial breakthrough into the Enigma machine.
September 3rd, 2009 at 9:45 am
They didn’t drag their feet in defending their colonial possessions in Africa, though, did they?
September 3rd, 2009 at 9:49 am
Re Midland at 143: “On the other hand, Germany didn’t have half its population slaughtered by Mongols . . .”
Don’t forget the Tatars, the Swedes and the Cossacks…
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poland#Jagiellon_dynasty
September 3rd, 2009 at 9:53 am
Didn’t we to some extent let Stalin and Hitler fight it out? Sure we did plenty of fighting with the Germans, but it was the Russians who bore most of the costs of that war not us.
True, to some extent, but there were few options available at the time. The Soviets weren’t just another country in 1939, they were a dangerous totalitarian dictatorship looking for ways to subjugate and/or conquer countries on their borders, just like the Germans, Japanese, and Italians. As it was, an enormous amount of Western aid went to Stalin at a terrible cost in ships, men and resources and we got little in return beyond questionable promises not to make peace with the Germans short of final victory and an agreement to not fight us when our armies met somewhere in Europe as Germany was being defeated.
After the Battle of France and Dunkerque, there wasn’t enough of an army left west of Berlin to fight the Germans anywhere on the continent. It wasn’t until 1944 that the Allies dared attempt a full-scale invasion of continental Europe, and they didn’t really have enough manpower to finish the job until 1945. Eisenhower, Montgomery, et. al, beat the Germans in the west with an army a quarter of the size of the army Foch used to beat Germany in 1918.
While the Soviets do not get enough credit over here for their sacrifices in defeating Germany in that war, the notion that the Western Allies held back in some fashion is more propaganda than anything else.
September 3rd, 2009 at 9:59 am
This speculation is a) silly and b) demonstrably untrue. Ribbentrop’s personal secretary, who was at Munich and with both Ribbentrop and Hitler during their conversations immediately following did several interviews describing what was said by Hitler. Basically, Hitler was angry over Munich because, as he said, he had been “cheated” out of his war by the Munich pact. He also told Ribbentrop that the paper they signed was meaningless and he had no intention of honoring it when they were walking out the front door. He wanted a war, always wanted a war, said he wanted a war, and then started a war after the allies caved (to his surprise) to his earlier demands. If Hitler had his way, according to what Hitler said, the war would have started by invading Czecheslovakia rather than marching in without firing a shot.
So, Pat’s a dishonest idiot and Nazi apologist. Also, water wet, sky blue, blah blah blah.
September 3rd, 2009 at 10:01 am
They didn’t drag their feet in defending their colonial possessions in Africa, though, did they?
The forces involved in the fighting in North Africa on both sides) were tiny in comparison to those committed to the continent in 1944. And a lot of those on the British side were ANZACS and South Africans (which put the high command in a bind in 1942, when the Australian government brought its divisions home to defend against the Japanese push southward).
September 3rd, 2009 at 10:07 am
The actual historical inaccuracies of this isn’t what’s interesting here. The fact that a prominent right wing figure would attempt to begin to ‘re-tell’ the Hitler story is mind boggling. Here we see a seed being planted that Hitler was misunderstood, and so, maybe not that bad afterall. Perhaps, this isn’t so surprising when you realize the right wing’s hatred of non-whites which is manifested over and over again on a variety of issues from welfare reform to immigration. Would an idealized Right Wing America be much different from a post WWII Germany had Hitler succeeded? More than likely, but still one has to wonder given their recent hate mongering.
September 3rd, 2009 at 10:14 am
Just to prove that I have a Tolkien quote for every occasion:
“It is a pity that our friends lie in between,” said Gimli. “If no land divided Isengard and Mordor, then they could fight while we watched and waited.”
“The victor would emerge stronger than either, and free from doubt,” said Gandalf.
September 3rd, 2009 at 10:19 am
Buchanan is Virginia Scots-Irish on his dad’s side, and German Catholic (Bavarian?) on his mom’s. Hence the rigid, authoritarian Catholicism spiced up with angry redneckery.
September 3rd, 2009 at 10:20 am
They had lost a whole generation in the first war, and they couldn’t afford any more mass casualties.
They didn’t drag their feet in defending their colonial possessions in Africa, though, did they?
Given that their survival as a nation depended on resources shipped across the world from South Africa, the Middle East, India, and Malaya, what other choice did they have?
The British defended those impossibly long supply lines with a tithe of the strength Germany, Italy, Japan, and Vichy France sent against them. They were also handicapped by dullard generals, inferior equipment, and obsolete ships, and they won anyway.
September 3rd, 2009 at 10:23 am
Midland, I too am a Norman Davies fan and am also reading Simon Sebag Montefiori’s book on Potemkin & Catherine the Great at the moment. Catherine, Maria Theresa, Fred the Great all helped do in a Poland which, while decadent as you note, was the only DEMOCRATIC version of an aristocracy in 18th c. Europe. And the Poles were a close second to the Jews in the extermination camps, with gypsies and homosexuals far behind. Living in Chicago, I heard many Polish immigrants [in medical circles] tell tales of brutal Teutonic nastiness to them as little kids. Seems a lot of those UeberMenschen really were the sadistic monsters we always thought they were—if even some of the horrific anecdotes were accurate.
You left out the greatest Polish achievement in its long history, the Polish King’s Army defeating the Ottoman Sultan in 1687 at the gates of Vienna to relieve a year-long siege. Coffee houses and croissants ensued when the Sultan’s gigantic culinary/bakery wagons were plundered by the Poles and the grateful Viennese instituted the cafe society which Starbucks continues to this day. The Turks were turned back and Hungary and the Balkans eventually liberated. Everybody won except the Poles!
Read Clive James and Cultural Amnesia for some follow-on anecdotes.
September 3rd, 2009 at 10:59 am
[...] a glance at Mein Kampf gives some clues in regards to Hitler’s goals to the east (as does Matthew Yglesias). Michael C. Moynihan addresses Buchanan’s arguments about German’s Siegfied [...]
September 3rd, 2009 at 12:09 pm
[...] a big fan of The American Conservative. But Buchanan’s tendency to write crazy shit is hurting their chances of getting subscriptions from the all-important “League of Ordinary [...]
September 3rd, 2009 at 12:20 pm
[...] Matthew Yglesias [...]
September 3rd, 2009 at 12:39 pm
What?
The Eastern front was about 80% of the fighting in the European Theater of Operations! The Soviets were fighting German armies numbering the millions when there were less than 100,000 men fighting on the western front.
Got little in return? Are you kidding?
September 3rd, 2009 at 1:25 pm
joe from Lowell has it right. The Soviets did the bulk of the fighting because that’s where most of the troops were. Had Hitler listened to the German general staff, there wouldn’t have been a siege at Stalingrad but the name of the city dictated the Hitlerian strategy.
That worked as well as promoting von Paulus to Field Marshall did. I always enjoyed the simultaneopus surrender story, too.
Oh, and is it possible that this Buchanan ridiculousness will finally be sufficient to keep him off MSNBC?
Nah!
September 3rd, 2009 at 1:42 pm
quote from Matt Y:
“I think that if you want to try to run the case against World War II, your best route is not to deny that Hitler wanted war with Poland and Russia. You should deny that Hitler wanted war with Britain and France for any reason other than to secure his western flank against the USSR. Then you can say the western powers should have just let Hitler and Stalin fight it out and prepare for a Cold War-style campaign of containment against the eventual winner. I think for that to be even remotely persuasive requires you to import a lot of 20/20 hindsight about the Cold War into 1939, but it’s not nearly as ludicrous as this “Hitler was just misunderstood” theory.”
Actually, that’s close to the argument that Buchanan really makes. Out of curiosity I read his book. He may certainly be wrong in his strategic/historical analysis, but he does not “apologize” for Hitler. He is quite critical of Hitler, and he never remotely suggests that Hitler was “misunderstood” in the sense of being unfairly blamed. One of his main points is that Britain and France blew their chance to stop Hitler in the mid thirties, when the balance of power favored them, then later issued a guarantee to Poland that they were unable to enforce. As to Hitler wanting war in 1939, the eminent British historian A.J.P. Taylor made a similar argument: Hitler was on a path of expansion, but many of his ambitions were the same as every other German government after WW I—to restore German territory lost at Versailles. He was an opportunist who would take what he could get, and he didn’t want general war with Britain and France in 1939. That may be a quibble: Hitler’s megalomania was sufficient to have produced future wars regardless of the events of 1939. But making an erroneous estimate of Hitler’s intentions, is not the same as “apologizing” for him.
Buchanan’s arguments stem from a traditional strain of conservative isolationism. The same philosophy led him to oppose the invasion of Iraq from the very start, though liberal bloggers never mention that. He has also opposed NATO expansion on the borders of Russia on the grounds that it is a needless provocation.
September 3rd, 2009 at 2:04 pm
I think the one thing left out of this discussion was, no matter what Hitler wanted, could he been prevented from waging war on the Western Front? I think the answer is a firm yes.
There were ways, in 1939, to assure that Hitler attacked Russia first and not Britain/France. Lord Halifax certainly gave that scenario a great deal of thought. If one could get a delay of say, at least a year or two, on the invasion of France, we could have bogged down Hitler so badly in Russia that it would have materially prevented him from waging a serious campaign on the Western Front.
However, it turned out that we didn’t take that route, and ended up with a situation where Russia was attacked after France, which made things pretty much impossible.
We could have gotten two birds with one stone; we could have used Hitler to wreck the Communist menace and at the same time tire the Nazi machine into oblivion in the Russian steppes. However, we rather had the worst of both worlds; preservation and strengthening of Communism, and serious fighting against Hitler.
I regret and mourn the bad choices made by the British, against the interests of Western civilization, and in favour of Russian Communism and the subsequent domination of Eastern Europe by it.
By the way, those who are claiming that Russia would have prevailed anyway and taken over Germany are quite wrong. There is no way, absent Western material aid (which should never have been given), that Russian armies could have pushed back effectively. They would have been quite effective, no doubt, at resisting Nazi advances and defending the Russian homeland, but it would have been near impossible, if it were an one-on-one fight between Russia and Germany, for the Russians to have as overwhelming an advantage as necessary for a successful push right up to the Rhine. Let’s not forget the billions of aid they got out of the West.
September 3rd, 2009 at 2:06 pm
In fact, the most likely scenario of an one-on-one, no-outside-assistance Russian-on-Germany fight would have been a permanent stall on the Eastern Front, sort of like the Great War mess (or like the later stall on the Korean front), where neither Russia nor Germany could maintain sufficient momentum to decisively overcome the other.
That, in fact, would have been the ideal outcome; letting the Communists and the Nazis, equally evil (although Stalin did kill more people), bleed each others out.
September 3rd, 2009 at 2:35 pm
“Churchill, Hitler, and the Unnecessary War” is a terrific read. And, the late,great British historian Arnold Toynbee completely agreed with Hitler on the issue of the Polish corridor. Re my friend PJB – he does like to stick it to his favorite bugaboo: Liberals/The Left. Maybe, it’s because he gets no credit for his scathingly eloquent indictments of the Iraq War, the hysteria over Iran, the neocons coup d’etat, The Israel Lobby’s death-grip on American foreign policy, etc., etc. David Frum, Tom Friedman, Bill Kristol, Richard Cohen – why, they’re just all nice, Jewish boys, while Pat is Martin Bormann. Not so ironically the same position the Little Green Footballs crowd takes.
September 3rd, 2009 at 5:10 pm
As it was, an enormous amount of Western aid went to Stalin at a terrible cost in ships, men and resources and we got little in return
The Eastern front was about 80% of the fighting in the European Theater of Operations! The Soviets were fighting German armies numbering the millions when there were less than 100,000 men fighting on the western front.
I’m speaking only in diplomatic terms. Essentially, the Soviet Union and the Western allies fought separate wars. The Soviets were not our “friends” at any point during that government’s existance. That did not change just because we eventually allied against Hitler. As I noted, the Western Allies sent the Soviets hundreds of thousands of tons of invaluable supplies and machinery. The Soviets, nominally, agreed to not make a separate peace with Germany, but the fear of their doing so affected Anglo-American strategic planning. Eventually, the basic outline of occupation zones and policy came out of the various discussions we had with the Soviets, but there was no guarantee that the Soviets would go along with those joint plans unless we had an army in place in Germany occupying the ground and ready to enforce them. They certainly had done nothing over the previous decade to indicate they could be trusted to keep an agreement. We did not not share intelligence, did not coordinate our war efforts, and did not exchange liason officers, even in the last days of the war when there was a danger of our aircraft and artillery firing on each other.
As alliances go, it was a pretty crappy arrangement. It was worth it to the Western allies because, as you note, the Soviets did most of the killing necessary to defeat Germany. If they’d lost, or stalemated, or signed a cease fire somewhere along the way, it would have taken an atomic bomb on Berlin to end the war. Maybe.
In any case, the Soviets had been perfectly content to stay out of the war when it was Poland and western Europe being crushed by the German army. When the Germans turned on the Soviets, the armies that might have helped them share the burden of fighting Germany had been destroyed while the Soviets shipped oil and metals westward to supply the German war machine that destroyed them. The industries that might have supplied the armies that could have shared the Soviet burden of fighting Germany were, aside from those in Britain, under German control, supplying the German war effort.
Karmic payback’s a bitch, ain’t it?
September 3rd, 2009 at 9:24 pm
I gotcha now. I thought you were saying we didn’t get any help with the war effort for our investment.
September 3rd, 2009 at 10:58 pm
Myles SG rightly blames Churchill for his pathetic sense of strategy and cites Gallipoli as a prime example of Churchill’s blundering. Consider, Myles SG, the Pacific arena of the war, in which the Japanese army won all of Malaya and the so-called “impregnable fortress” of Singapore in a mere 70 days. Although no academic nor a professional historian, Peter Elphick has documented the issue admirably, as have other writers, many of whom participated in one capacity or another in the war. It becomes clear, upon reviewing the documents regarding British foreign policy and military strategy in particular that most of the blame for the surprisingly swift collapse of that erstwhile outpost of Empire can be fairly laid at the feet of Churchill. Churchill it was who kept trimming the military budget to ensure that Singapore’s defenses would be severely lacking; Churchill it was who kept reassuring all and sundry, especially the Americans, whom he was hoping to draw into the war, that Singapore was an “impregnable fortress,” when it had hardly anything worth terming fortifications; and Churchill it was, finally, who hushed up everything, for fear that a well-deserved enquiry into the facts would have revealed his gross negligence and incompetence. And finally, Churchill it was who pointed the finger of blame at those unfortunate military commanders who had to suffer for his decisions.
September 4th, 2009 at 12:51 am
# Midland Says:
September 3rd, 2009 at 9:30 am
“Poland’s reward was the extermination of a fifth of its population and four decades in a Soviet gulag.”
I don’t know if the Poles considered the German help in massacring their Jewish neighbors a “reward,” or just a happy side effect of a generally bad situation.
September 4th, 2009 at 1:24 am
MylesSG:
But Germany was definitely screwed out of serious territorial plebiscites in favour of the bloody Poles, who were pretty underhanded in making the League of Nations deny plebiscites.
That’s very true, but it wasn’t in Pomerania, the Plebiscites were in East Prussia, south and south west of Koeningsburg (Kaliningrad) and of course the Danzig plebiscites. There were also plebiscites in the western part of Galicia.
You really dislike the Slavs, don’t you?
September 4th, 2009 at 1:51 am
You really dislike the Slavs, don’t you?
I just have no particular preference for Slavs over say, Germans, especially when it comes to territory that is rightfully German.
Really though, I know of very few non-Slav people who would like the Slavs over the Germans. Throw in the fact that Russia, a Slavic nation, was responsible for just about most of the people killed in Europe in much of the 20th century, and that it housed the greatest threat to Western civilization for nigh well a century (Communism) that led to the deterioration of everything good and beautiful in Western civilization.
Oh, and throw in the fact that pan-Slavism was probably a good deal responsible for the downfall of the European empires. There is no love lost between and things Slavic.
I also seriously dislike the Hungarians, who are non-Slavic, but nonetheless managed to break-up the Austro-Hungarian formation that in the process led to a hundred years of hopeless instability in eastern and southern Europe. Good work, Magyars!
September 4th, 2009 at 7:15 am
Thread kudos to Don for coming up with the next big Reality Show hit . . .
Dancing With the Hussars!
As stiff as Tom Delay looked in that screenshot I saw the other day, he might have been envisioning himself in a uniform with epaulets.
September 4th, 2009 at 8:07 am
Re: Really though, I know of very few non-Slav people who would like the Slavs over the Germans.
Me, for one.
And there is no such thing as ‘territory that is rightfully German’. After the bad behavior that Germans engaged in for a thousand years, they are lucky they weren’t all deported to Kazakhstan.
September 4th, 2009 at 10:55 am
And there is no such thing as ‘territory that is rightfully German’.
That, of course, notes the fake premise at the heart of Myles argument about the Sudetenland and most other arguments about
The concept of the “national state” is a 19th Century invention. Europe and every other civilized region of the globe got along without national states before the 19th Century. The ethnic Germans scattered across Europe spoke a myriad of dialects sometimes as unintelligible as French and Italian, and usually as unintelligible as Russian and Ukrainian, northern and southern French, Spanish and Portuguese. Ethnic hierarchies, relgious hierarchies, and class hierarchies were all part of the same structure of social inequality. Germans lorded it over Slavs in some parts of Europe, groveled to Slavs and Magyars in others, and Germans and Slavs managed, a good part of the time, to get along with Jews, Tatars, and Turks without everyone murdering each other in the street over relgion.
Creating a national state for a given ethnic group is one useful way of dealing with ethnic oppression, but it isn’t the only way, and depriving some other ethnic group of their rights, lives, and property to achieve a Nationalist ideal is an easily corrupted process, one that led to mass murder on a scale that would have startled the likes of Vlad Dracul.
September 4th, 2009 at 3:42 pm
HISTROY IS WROTE BY THE WINNERS
September 4th, 2009 at 6:06 pm
And there is no such thing as ‘territory that is rightfully German’. After the bad behavior that Germans engaged in for a thousand years, they are lucky they weren’t all deported to Kazakhstan.
From my perspective this German vs. Slav is not really all that based in reality guys. Even if you go back to the Roman times you’re not going to find any “good guys” in European history. Because European history it is a bloody, craven tale of petty rulers doing petty things for no great gain. Before the rise of Germany France and the Hapsburgs were the perennial “bad actors” of Europe. When the Russians and Germans came to prominence, the actors changed but the stage set and the plot of the play stayed the same.
I’m sympathetic to German claims over the Sudetenland, (especially) Prussia and Silisia in the sense that a lot more fair deal should have been worked out, but the Germans aren’t the total victims they made themselves out to be post-WWI.
What’s really sad that if it weren’t the great power politics of time; Poles, Czechs and Germans living in East Central Europe could have flourished if it weren’t for the mechanations of the decrepit Hapsburgs, Hohenzollern’s and Romanovs. They weren’t all bad. But in the end, all of these dynasties caused collective disasters for their subjects when they refused to change with the times.
September 5th, 2009 at 7:13 pm
Czechoslovakia treated its German minority better than the Third Reich treated its Czech and Moravian minorities.
The Czechs did a better job of covering up their atrocities. See this week’s edition of Der Spiegel re the mass graves of Germans being uncovered in the Czech Republic that date to 1945. And the Czechs expelled almost every last German, meaning millions, and seized their property in one of the world’s most thorough examples of ethnic cleansing. All signed off on by Churchill and FDR.
re the Hossbach Memorandum, it is not just AJP Taylor that sees this document as doubtful. Hans-Günther Seraphim, no revisionist, rejects its historiographical legitimacy.
Any reasonable person accepts the rightness of the allied cause in the Second World War
We inserted ourselves into a hellacious war between Hitler and Stalin, picking the side of the latter. Britain originally entered the war for the sake of Polish self-determination, a difficult thread given the history of Danzig and the Corridor and the fact that wiping Poland from the map involved TWO conspirators, both Hitler and Stalin, and the brutal Soviet occupation of Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania, but then FDR sold the compromised remains of this principle out completely in 1945, giving Poland over to Stalin, covering up the Katyn massacre, seeing no evil in the Red Army’s rape of millions of German women, and signing off on the expulsion of 12 million German civilians.
Buchanan is not picking Hitler’s side, he’s rather saying it was unnecessary for us to tip the scales to Stalin. Note that the people most familiar with the details of central European history are the most inclined to give Buchanan’s views a fair hearing. MSNBC has nonetheless censored him, pulling his column from MSNBC.com.
September 6th, 2009 at 10:36 pm
Pat Buchanan is a peace-loving man and is only making the argument that there were better ways to deal with Hitler than launching a war that ended up killing 60 million people. Similarly, there were better ways to deal with Saddam Hussein than starting a war which ended up killing tens of thousands and creating millions of refugees. If the Brits were so pleased with WWII, why did they boot Churchill out of office short months after? One might say Adolf Hitler is the anti-Christ of the western establishment, if they believed in Christ in the first place.