A war worth fighting

[capt_starlight]

Book in question is Churchill, Hitler, and "The Unnecessary War": How Britain Lost Its Empire and the West Lost the World by Patrick J. Buchanan .

 

Article is:

 

A War Worth Fighting

 

Revisionists say that World War II was unnecessary. They're wrong.

Christopher Hitchens

NEWSWEEK

 

 

Is there any one shared principle or assumption on which our political consensus rests, any value judgment on which we are all essentially agreed? Apart from abstractions such as a general belief in democracy, one would probably get the widest measure of agreement for the proposition that the second world war was a "good war" and one well worth fighting. And if we possess one indelible image of political immorality and cowardice, it is surely the dismal tap-tap-tap of Neville Chamberlain's umbrella as he turned from signing the Czechs away to Adolf Hitler at Munich. He hoped by this humiliation to avert war, but he was fated to bring his countrymen war on top of humiliation. To the conventional wisdom add the titanic figure of Winston Churchill as the emblem of oratorical defiance and the Horatius who, until American power could be mobilized and deployed, alone barred the bridge to the forces of unalloyed evil. When those forces lay finally defeated, their ghastly handiwork was uncovered to a world that mistakenly thought it had already "supped full of horrors." The stark evidence of the Final Solution has ever since been enough to dispel most doubts about, say, the wisdom or morality of carpet-bombing German cities.

 

Historical scholarship has nevertheless offered various sorts of revisionist interpretation of all this. Niall Ferguson, for one, has proposed looking at the two world wars as a single conflict, punctuated only by a long and ominous armistice. British conservative historians like Alan Clark and John Charmley have criticized Churchill for building his career on war, for ignoring openings to peace and for eventually allowing the British Empire to be squandered and broken up. But Pat Buchanan, twice a candidate for the Republican nomination and in 2000 the standard-bearer for the Reform Party who ignited a memorable "chad" row in Florida, has now condensed all the antiwar arguments into one. His case, made in his recently released "Churchill, Hitler and the Unnecessary War," is as follows:

 

* That Germany was faced with encirclement and injustice in both 1914 and 1939.

* Britain in both years ought to have stayed out of quarrels on the European mainland.

* That Winston Churchill was the principal British warmonger on both occasions.

* The United States was needlessly dragged into war on both occasions.

* That the principal beneficiaries of this were Joseph Stalin and Mao Zedong.

* That the Holocaust of European Jewry was as much the consequence of an avoidable war as it was of Nazi racism.

 

Buchanan does not need to close his book with an invocation of a dying West, as if to summarize this long recital of Spenglerian doomsaying. He's already opened with the statement, "All about us we can see clearly now that the West is passing away." The tropes are familiar—a loss of will and confidence, a collapse of the desire to reproduce with sufficient vigor, a preference for hedonism over the stern tasks of rulership and dominion and pre-eminence. It all sounds oddly … Churchillian. The old lion himself never tired of striking notes like these, and was quite unembarrassed by invocations of race and nation and blood. Yet he is the object of Buchanan's especial dislike and contempt, because he had a fondness for "wars of choice."

 

This term has enjoyed a recent vogue because of the opposition to the war in Iraq, an opposition in which Buchanan has played a vigorous role. Descending as he does from the tradition of Charles Lindbergh's America First movement, which looked for (and claimed to have found) a certain cosmopolitan lobby behind FDR's willingness to involve the United States in global war, Buchanan is the most trenchant critic of what he considers our fondest national illusion, and his book has the feel and stamp of a work that he has been readying all his life.

 

But he faces an insuperable difficulty, or rather difficulties. If you want to demonstrate that Germany was more the victim than the aggressor in 1914, then you must confine your account (as Buchanan does) to the very minor legal question of Belgian neutrality and of whether Britain absolutely had to go to war on the Belgian side. (For what it may be worth, I think that Britain wasn't obliged to do so and should not have done.) But the rest of the kaiser's policy, most of it completely omitted by Buchanan, shows that Germany was looking for a chance for war all over the globe, and was increasingly the prisoner of a militaristic ruling caste at home. The kaiser picked a fight with Britain by backing the white Dutch Afrikaner rebels in South Africa and by butchering the Ovambo people of what is now Namibia. He looked for trouble with the French by abruptly sending warships to Agadir in French Morocco, which nearly started the first world war in 1905, and with Russia by backing Austria-Hungary's insane ultimatum to the Serbs after the June 1914 assassinations in Sarajevo. Moreover, and never mentioned by Buchanan at all, the kaiser visited Damascus and paid for the rebuilding of the tomb of Saladin, announced himself a sympathizer of Islam and a friend of jihad, commissioned a Berlin-to-Baghdad railroad for the projection of German arms into the Middle East and Asia and generally ranged himself on the side of an aggressive Ottoman imperialism, which later declared a "holy war" against Britain. To suggest that he felt unjustly hemmed in by the Royal Navy's domination of the North Sea while he was conducting such statecraft is absurd.

 

And maybe a little worse than absurd, as when Buchanan writes: "From 1871 to 1914, the Germans under Bismarck and the Kaiser did not fight a single war. While Britain, Russia, Italy, Turkey, Japan, Spain, and the United States were all involved in wars, Germany and Austria had clean records." I am bound to say that I find this creepy. The start of the "clean record" has to be in 1871, because that's the year that Prussia humbled France in the hideous Franco-Prussian War that actually annexed two French provinces to Germany. In the intervening time until 1914, Germany was seizing colonies in Africa and the Pacific, cementing secret alliances with Austria and trying to build up a naval fleet that could take on the British one. No wonder the kaiser wanted a breathing space.

 

Now, this is not to say that Buchanan doesn't make some sound points about the secret diplomacy of Old Europe that was so much to offend Woodrow Wilson. And he is excellent on the calamitous Treaty of Versailles that succeeded only—as was noted by John Maynard Keynes at the time—in creating the conditions for another world war, or for part two of the first one. He wears his isolationism proudly: "The Senate never did a better day's work than when it rejected the Treaty of Versailles and refused to enter a League of Nations where American soldiers would be required to give their lives enforcing the terms of so dishonorable and disastrous a peace."

 

Actually, no soldier of any nation ever lost so much as a fingernail in the service of the League, which was in any case doomed by American abstention, and it's exactly that consideration which invalidates the second half of Buchanan's argument, which is that a conflict with Hitler's Germany both could and should have been averted. (There is a third Buchanan sub-argument, mostly made by implication, which is that the democratic West should have allied itself with Hitler, at least passively, until he had destroyed the Soviet Union.) Again, in order to believe his thesis one has to be prepared to argue that Hitler was a rational actor with intelligible and negotiable demands, whose declared, demented ambitions in "Mein Kampf" were presumably to be disregarded as mere propaganda. In case after case Buchanan shows the abysmal bungling of British and French diplomacy—making promises to Czechoslovakia that could never have been kept and then, adding injury to insult, breaking those promises at the first opportunity. Or offering a guarantee to Poland (a country that had gleefully taken part in the dismemberment of Czechoslovakia) that Hitler well knew was not backed by any credible military force.

 

Buchanan is at his best here, often causing one to whistle at the sheer cynicism and stupidity of the British Tories. In the Anglo-German Naval Agreement of June 1935, for example, they astounded the French and Italians and Russians by unilaterally agreeing to permit Hitler to build a fleet one third the size of the Royal Navy and a submarine fleet of the same size as the British! Not only was this handing the Third Reich the weapon it would soon press to Britain's throat, it was convincing all Britain's potential allies that they would be much better off making their own bilateral deals with Berlin. Which is essentially what happened.

 

But Buchanan keeps forgetting that this criminal foolishness is exactly the sort of policy that he elsewhere recommends. In his view, after all, Germany had been terribly wronged by Versailles and it would have been correct to redraw the frontiers in Germany's favor and soothe its hurt feelings (which is what the word "appeasement" originally meant). Meanwhile we should have encouraged Hitler's hostility to Bolshevism and discreetly rearmed in case he should also need to be contained. This might perhaps have worked if Germany had been governed by a right-wing nationalist party that had won a democratic vote. However, in point of fact Germany was governed by an ultra-rightist, homicidal, paranoid maniac who had begun by demolishing democracy in Germany itself, who believed that his fellow countrymen were a superior race and who attributed all the evils in the world to a Jewish conspiracy. It is possible to read whole chapters of Buchanan's book without having to bear these salient points in mind. (I should say that I intend this observation as a criticism.) As with his discussion of pre-1914 Germany, he commits important sins of omission that can only be the outcome of an ideological bias. Barely mentioned except in passing is the Spanish Civil War, for example, where for three whole years between 1936 and 1939 Germany and Italy lent troops and weapons in a Fascist invasion of a sovereign European nation that had never threatened or "encircled" them in any way. Buchanan's own political past includes overt sympathy with General Franco, which makes this skating-over even less forgivable than it might otherwise be.

 

On the one occasion where Spain does get a serious mention, it illustrates the opposite point to the one Buchanan thinks he's making. The British ambassador in Berlin, Sir Neville Henderson, is explaining why Hitler didn't believe that Britain and France would fight over Prague: "[Hitler]argued as follows: Would the German nation willingly go to war for General Franco in Spain, if France intervened on the side of the Republican government? The answer that he gave himself is that it would not, and he was consequently convinced that no democratic French government would be strong enough to lead the French nation to war for the Czechs."

 

In this instance, it must be admitted, Hitler was being a rational actor. And his admission—which Buchanan in his haste to indict Anglo-French policy completely fails to notice—is that if he himself had been resisted earlier and more determinedly, he would have been compelled to give ground. Thus the whole and complete lesson is not that the second world war was an avoidable "war of choice." It is that the Nazis could and should have been confronted before they had fully rearmed and had begun to steal the factories and oilfields and coal mines and workers of neighboring countries. As Gen. Douglas MacArthur once put it, all military defeats can be summarized in the two words: "Too late." The same goes for political disasters.

 

As the book develops, Buchanan begins to unmask his true colors more and more. It is one thing to make the case that Germany was ill-used, and German minorities harshly maltreated, as a consequence of the 1914 war of which Germany's grim emperor was one of the prime instigators. It's quite another thing to say that the Nazi decision to embark on a Holocaust of European Jewry was "not a cause of the war but an awful consequence of the war." Not only is Buchanan claiming that Hitler's fanatical racism did not hugely increase the likelihood of war, but he is also making the insinuation that those who wanted to resist him are the ones who are equally if not indeed mainly responsible for the murder of the Jews! This absolutely will not do. He adduces several quotations from Hitler and Goebbels, starting only in 1939 and ending in 1942, screaming that any outbreak of war to counter Nazi ambitions would lead to a terrible vengeance on the Jews. He forgets—at least I hope it's only forgetfulness—that such murderous incitement began long, long before Hitler had even been a lunatic-fringe candidate in the 1920s. This "timeline" is as spurious, and as sinister, as the earlier dates, so carefully selected by Buchanan, that tried to make Prussian imperialism look like a victim rather than a bully.

 

One closing example will demonstrate the corruption and prejudice of Buchanan's historical "method." He repeatedly argues that Churchill did not appreciate Hitler's deep-seated and respectful Anglophilia, and he continually blames the war on several missed opportunities to take the Führer's genially outstretched hand. Indeed, he approvingly quotes several academic sources who agree with him that Hitler invaded the Soviet Union only in order to change Britain's mind. Suppose that Buchanan is in fact correct about this. Could we have a better definition of derangement and megalomania than the case of a dictator who overrules his own generals and invades Russia in wintertime, mainly to impress the British House of Commons? (Incidentally, or rather not incidentally, it was precisely that hysterical aggression that curtain-raised the organized deportation and slaughter of the Jews. But it's fatuous to suppose that, without that occasion, the Nazis would not have found another one.)

 

It is of course true that millions of other people lost their lives in this conflict, often in unprecedentedly horrible ways, and that new tyrannies were imposed on the countries—Poland, Czechoslovakia and China most notably—that had been the pretexts for a war against fascism. But is this not to think in the short term? Unless or until Nazism had been vanquished, millions of people were most certainly going to be either massacred or enslaved in any case. Whereas today, all the way from Portugal to the Urals, the principle of human rights and popular sovereignty is at least the norm, and the ideas of racism and totalitarianism have been fairly conclusively and historically discredited. Would a frightened compromise with racist totalitarianism have produced a better result?

 

Winston Churchill may well have been on the wrong side about India, about the gold standard, about the rights of labor and many other things, and he may have had a lust for war, but we may also be grateful that there was one politician in the 1930s who found it intolerable even to breathe the same air, or share the same continent or planet, as the Nazis. (Buchanan of course makes plain that he rather sympathizes with Churchill about the colonies, and quarrels only with his "finest hour." This is grotesque.) As he closes his argument, Buchanan again refuses to disguise his allegiance. "Though derided as isolationists," he writes, "the America First patriots kept the United States out of the war until six months after Hitler had invaded Russia." If you know anything at all about what happened to the population of those territories in those six months, it is rather hard to be proud that America was neutral. But this is a price that Buchanan is quite willing to pay.

 

I myself have written several criticisms of the cult of Churchill, and of the uncritical way that it has been used to stifle or cudgel those with misgivings. ("Adlai," said John F. Kennedy of his outstanding U.N. ambassador during the Bay of Pigs crisis, "wanted a Munich.") Yet the more the record is scrutinized and re-examined, the more creditable it seems that at least two Western statesmen, for widely different reasons, regarded coexistence with Nazism as undesirable as well as impossible. History may judge whether the undesirability or the impossibility was the more salient objection, but any attempt to separate the two considerations is likely to result in a book that stinks, as this one unmistakably does.

 

Article is at => http://www.newsweek.com/id/141501/output/print

 

What say you ? World War II (at least) was unnecessary ? Should Hitler have been directed elsewhere (east only) to defeat the forces of communism (and then get his comeuppance) ?

 

Finally, is "...the West is passing away..."?

[Guest aevans]

Well, one can make a marginal geostrategic case that the British should have held themselves mostly aloof of the Continent in the 20th Century. Whether they could have in practical terms is another question.

[m4a1]

Germans killed ONLY in death and concentration camps c.a. 5.2 million of civilian Poles. Enough? Damn the revisionists.

[Guest aevans]

Germans killed ONLY in death and concentration camps c.a. 5.2 million of civilian Poles. Enough? Damn the revisionists.

 

The Chinese communists did better than that, and possibly the Russian Soviets. Pol Pot certainly wins first prize on a proportional basis. As much as has been made of it, and as objectively bad as it is, pure slaughter has never been an adequate reason to commit to war.

[lastdingo]

For reasons that I'm not aware of, the Poles were not exactly saints to the Germans in 1939 as well. There were some atrocities against the German minority in Poland in the early days of the war and before that tell me they wouldn't have been nice occupiers if they had occupied Germany.

Btw, much of Poland 1938 was not polish, but rather a foreign rule of an authoritarian Polish government over Byelorussians, Ukrainians and Lithuanians. The Polish post-war Eastern border was almost fair considering the majority/minority situation.

 

The world was no nice in place in the inter-war years, even the oh-so nice Allies were nothing but extremely offensive nations by today's standards (just remember colonialism). The British & French were ready and intent to invade Norway, they just came too late. They were also about to bomb Baku (Soviet Union) in 1940 in an act of aggression to reduce the Soviet oil production and thereby its oil exports to Germany). The bombers were already being assembled in Syria and Persia.

 

The Soviet Union was about as offensive to Poles as was Germany, Stalin had jut a few years ago tolerated the death of millions of his peasants and had brutally oppressed Caucasian peoples. He had invaded and occupied three Baltic nations, taken away territory from Romania and Finland. The Western allies tolerated that due to a lack of military options against Stalin.

The antipathy for his regime was extreme in many parts of the German-occupied territories; it needed pretty bad and ideologically driven civilian administrations in these regions to motivate a partisan movement against Germany. The Red Army had some trouble with partisans after "liberating" many regions.

 

The world has universally agreed that the axis powers were bad. Few allied powers were 'good' (Australia, New Zealand & Canada plus the victim nations Luxembourg, Denmark & Norway - that's it).

Two axis powers - Romania and Finland - were probably more "good" than the average allied power, as they merely defended themselves or tried to regain their territory.

[Gregory]

The Chinese communists did better than that, and possibly the Russian Soviets. Pol Pot certainly wins first prize on a proportional basis. As much as has been made of it, and as objectively bad as it is, pure slaughter has never been an adequate reason to commit to war.

 

Took the Chinese and Soviets quite a bit longer on a number dead/1,000,000 population/year though (Pol Pot might win that one). I have no doubt that had the Nazi regime lasted as long as the communist regimes, it's death toll would've been much greater.

[Guest aevans]

Took the Chinese and Soviets quite a bit longer on a number dead/1,000,000 population/year though (Pol Pot might win that one). I have no doubt that had the Nazi regime lasted as long as the communist regimes, it's death toll would've been much greater.

 

Should it make a difference whether it's a few millions or a few tens of millions? The point is that murder of helpless subjects/minorities beyond the point of any excuse has never been a justification for war that I can tell.

[nitflegal]

I think it's an amusing idea to think that the UK had no stake in a Europe that was over-run by Germany. If Germany had taken France and Russia in 19-teens it seems a bit of a stretch to think that Britain wouldn't have suffered accordingly. Similarly, Germany taking all of continental Europe and maybe a big chunk of the Soviet Union would have required the UK to be an ally at the least.

 

I'm probably the wrong person to ask as I think Buchanan is an isolationist idiot who thinks that if he closes his eyes and yells loudly enough can have the world do what he wants.

 

Matt

[BillB]

For reasons that I'm not aware of, the Poles were not exactly saints to the Germans in 1939 as well. There were some atrocities against the German minority in Poland in the early days of the war and before that tell me they wouldn't have been nice occupiers if they had occupied Germany.

Btw, much of Poland 1938 was not polish, but rather a foreign rule of an authoritarian Polish government over Byelorussians, Ukrainians and Lithuanians. The Polish post-war Eastern border was almost fair considering the majority/minority situation.

 

The world was no nice in place in the inter-war years, even the oh-so nice Allies were nothing but extremely offensive nations by today's standards (just remember colonialism). The British & French were ready and intent to invade Norway, they just came too late. They were also about to bomb Baku (Soviet Union) in 1940 in an act of aggression to reduce the Soviet oil production and thereby its oil exports to Germany). The bombers were already being assembled in Syria and Persia.

 

The Soviet Union was about as offensive to Poles as was Germany, Stalin had jut a few years ago tolerated the death of millions of his peasants and had brutally oppressed Caucasian peoples. He had invaded and occupied three Baltic nations, taken away territory from Romania and Finland. The Western allies tolerated that due to a lack of military options against Stalin.

The antipathy for his regime was extreme in many parts of the German-occupied territories; it needed pretty bad and ideologically driven civilian administrations in these regions to motivate a partisan movement against Germany. The Red Army had some trouble with partisans after "liberating" many regions.

 

The world has universally agreed that the axis powers were bad. Few allied powers were 'good' (Australia, New Zealand & Canada plus the victim nations Luxembourg, Denmark & Norway - that's it).

Two axis powers - Romania and Finland - were probably more "good" than the average allied power, as they merely defended themselves or tried to regain their territory.

Did you lift that verbatim from Buchanan's book? I ask as it uses the same kind of partial and half-arsed "reasoning".

 

BillB

[Kenneth P. Katz]

I started to look though the book, and I got a headache very quickly. It's so idiotic that it is useless to refute it point by point.

[lastdingo]

Did you lift that verbatim from Buchanan's book? I ask as it uses the same kind of partial and half-arsed "reasoning".

 

BillB

 

There was no reasoning involved, it was a list of historical facts.

[Ken Estes]

How can P. Buchanan even be viewed as a 'revisionist?" Has he conducted any research or is he just another polemicist writing off the top/point of his head? Some people will do anything for attention.

 

There is nothing wrong with revision in history, provided it is done with care and logic. Many of the old saws are desperately in need of a relook. Redoing the origins of WWII has several danger areas, however spectacular the effects might be. Here the non-historian Herman Wouk comes out just fine: The Nazis and Japanese set out to loot the world, and it took many years of struggle before the united allies could beat them back (War and Remembrance).

[Gabe]

Book in question is Churchill, Hitler, and "The Unnecessary War": How Britain Lost Its Empire and the West Lost the World by Patrick J. Buchanan .

 

* That the principal beneficiaries of this were Joseph Stalin and Mao Zedong.

 

Surely America was the biggest beneficiary, in the way strategic fortunes are tallied.

[Brian Kennedy]

The "Britain should have made nice with Hitler after Dunkirk" argument is actually somewhat defensible (and has been invoked frequently by everyone from hard-core Realists to rabid Russia-haters like JFC Fuller). Churchill's stance was heroic but wasn't very rational at the time; Britain was probably safe from invasion but would have been doomed to economic starvation if Hitler hadn't gone to war with the Soviets and then with the US, and most evidence indicates that Hitler was open to making peace with Britain.

 

Would the world be a better place now, though? Hell no. What-Ifs on this scale are kind of silly and impossible, but my money would be on the Nazis defeating Russia, killing several tens of millions and reducing the rest of the population to serfdom, the Holocaust probably still happening (it's going to take a hell of a lot to convince me that it only happened because Hitler felt that his back was against the wall), a completely cowed Britain, and life in Western Europe being barely tolerable but a hell of a lot worse than it was prior to WWII. I'd still bet on the US defeating Japan all by its lonesome, but I have a hard time buying the standard alt-history scenario of some long cold war between The New World and Nazi Europe.

 

Overall upshot -- a lot more dead people worldwide if Churchill hadn't kept fighting after Dunkirk.

[ickysdad]

For reasons that I'm not aware of, the Poles were not exactly saints to the Germans in 1939 as well. There were some atrocities against the German minority in Poland in the early days of the war and before that tell me they wouldn't have been nice occupiers if they had occupied Germany.

Btw, much of Poland 1938 was not polish, but rather a foreign rule of an authoritarian Polish government over Byelorussians, Ukrainians and Lithuanians. The Polish post-war Eastern border was almost fair considering the majority/minority situation.

 

The world was no nice in place in the inter-war years, even the oh-so nice Allies were nothing but extremely offensive nations by today's standards (just remember colonialism). The British & French were ready and intent to invade Norway, they just came too late. They were also about to bomb Baku (Soviet Union) in 1940 in an act of aggression to reduce the Soviet oil production and thereby its oil exports to Germany). The bombers were already being assembled in Syria and Persia.

 

The Soviet Union was about as offensive to Poles as was Germany, Stalin had jut a few years ago tolerated the death of millions of his peasants and had brutally oppressed Caucasian peoples. He had invaded and occupied three Baltic nations, taken away territory from Romania and Finland. The Western allies tolerated that due to a lack of military options against Stalin.

The antipathy for his regime was extreme in many parts of the German-occupied territories; it needed pretty bad and ideologically driven civilian administrations in these regions to motivate a partisan movement against Germany. The Red Army had some trouble with partisans after "liberating" many regions.

 

The world has universally agreed that the axis powers were bad. Few allied powers were 'good' (Australia, New Zealand & Canada plus the victim nations Luxembourg, Denmark & Norway - that's it).

Two axis powers - Romania and Finland - were probably more "good" than the average allied power, as they merely defended themselves or tried to regain their territory.

 

 

Don't know if it was quoted verbatum from the aforementioned book but it seems like your statement definately has a "Made in Germany" tinge to it. Now as far as Norway goes IMHO The Western Allies had every right to go into Norway remember the Altmark? As far as inter-war colonialism compared to today just how much better off are some of those colonies?

[seahawk]

I agree on the notion that WWI and WWII are to be seen as a linked conflict. But imho the driving force in both conflicts was the old conflict between France and Germany. Germany won 1871 and since then France was eager to get back at them. So WW1 was the chance they have been waiting and planing for. (both sides)

After WWI it went back to old game of hurting your oponent more then he had hurt you before, so after France felt humiliated and unfairly treated by Germany after 1871, Germany felt the same after 1918 and Germany wanted revenge.

 

WW2 ended this. Imho mostly due to the Soviets appearing in central europe as a comon enemy.

 

Even if some will cal me revisionist, I think that a different treaty of Versailles after WWI could really have avoided WW2. The Soviet Union or Communism was the merging threat to all european powers and they could have and should have consolidated their interests against it, but they choose to use the Soviets in their conflicts with eachother and so gave them a position of much influence and power.

 

Once Hitler came to Power in Germany only the historical result will be possible though, even it means that the Soviet gain so much influence over central europe as a result.

Edited June 25, 2008 by seahawk

[swerve]

...

Would the world be a better place now, though? Hell no. What-Ifs on this scale are kind of silly and impossible, but my money would be on the Nazis defeating Russia, killing several tens of millions and reducing the rest of the population to serfdom, the Holocaust probably still happening (it's going to take a hell of a lot to convince me that it only happened because Hitler felt that his back was against the wall), ...

 

The Holocaust began long before Germany felt it had its back against the wall. The Wannsee Conference was in January 1942. It was called to rationalise & improve the extermination campaign, not begin it. The Einsatzgruppen had been operating for months. The first (mostly temporary) extermination camps had already been set up. When the Wehrmacht was sweeping eastwards, apparently unstoppable, Jews (& Gypsies, & Communists, & the mentally ill & handicapped) were being slaughtered in its wake. Nothing at all to do with "backs against the wall". Hitlers image of the Thousand Year Reich didn't include certain groups of people, so they had to go. Germany had tried expelling Jews before the war, in much smaller numbers, & it hadn't worked. The rest of the world wouldn't take them. Obviously, expelling vastly greater numbers, during a war, was impossible. Therefore, they had to be killed, or the Fuhrers envisioned pure Reich would be sullied.

[redcoat]

The Holocaust began long before Germany felt it had its back against the wall. The Wannsee Conference was in January 1942. It was called to rationalise & improve the extermination campaign, not begin it. The Einsatzgruppen had been operating for months. The first (mostly temporary) extermination camps had already been set up. When the Wehrmacht was sweeping eastwards, apparently unstoppable, Jews (& Gypsies, & Communists, & the mentally ill & handicapped) were being slaughtered in its wake.

 

In its official report to Berlin, Einsatzgruppe A, reported that there were 70,000 Jews in Latvia when Germany occupied the country.

By December 1941, over 65,000 Jews had been executed by the Einsatzgruppen. Only approximately 4,000 remained alive, and this was only due to the fact that they were specialized workers necessary for maintaining the country's economy.

Edited June 25, 2008 by redcoat

[m4a1]

lastdingo,

Numbers, numbers

About 1.000 criminal murders occur in Poland a year, and there's a peace, are all Poles murderers? The same refers to other nations

During the first days of war there might have been few artrocities, caused by the mess that war always brings to the every country. Tell me, what is death toll However, noone can measure that the occupation would have been similar to what Germans did to Poles and Russians. It is true that Soviet Union invaded Poland alongside with Nazi Germany on September, 17. The death toll is dozens, if not hundred times smaller than the German. Without Red Army I wouldn't be writing to you now, probably.

As far as the attitude towards administration is concerned, it wasn't that much positive, but Red Army soldiers were (and should be) seen as liberators, without them Stalin would have managed . Tell me, how many people were murdered during stalinism in Poland? I heard of estimates ranging about 100.000-300.000 (obviously including the 1939-1941 period), so Nazi Germany has got 60 times (I count also the military deaths) "numerical superiority", while some historians always "accuse" Allies of having numerical superiority in everything. Every axis country is much more evil than any Allied, and while it is true that some stalinist driven goverments did a number of artrocities (often not on Germans but on political rivals, i.e. Home Army in Poland). Stalinism in Poland lasted twice times longer than nazi occupation btw.

Few relevant questions

How do you measure Allies to "not be good"? Understand artrocities commited by the communist goverment countries above, all Allied powers including Soviet Union are "good" compared to Nazi Germany, the numbers say something about it.

How way can you measure France, GB "not be good", that it didn't help us in 1939 despite the agreements? Not to mention other Western Allied powers, included Poland.

And Norway, with quisling collaborator movement to be "good"?

One point I agree with you is Finland, it had to co-work with Nazi Germany, having faced Soviet attack, but fortunately it withdrew when it was possible.

[lastdingo]

lastdingo,

Numbers, numbers

About 1.000 criminal murders occur in Poland a year, and there's a peace, are all Poles murderers? The same refers to other nations

During the first days of war there might have been few artrocities, caused by the mess that war always brings to the every country. Tell me, what is death toll However, noone can measure that the occupation would have been similar to what Germans did to Poles and Russians. It is true that Soviet Union invaded Poland alongside with Nazi Germany on September, 17. The death toll is dozens, if not hundred times smaller than the German. Without Red Army I wouldn't be writing to you now, probably.

 

Both had much less time to kill than Germans. And I did actually not talk about numbers. Atrocities happened by many countries, and some have not made it into general knowledge. Especially the Poles like to play the big victim nation, but were in fact pretty bad guys for two decades prior to their surrender.

 

As far as the attitude towards administration is concerned, it wasn't that much positive, but Red Army soldiers were (and should be) seen as liberators, without them Stalin would have managed . Tell me, how many people were murdered during stalinism in Poland? I heard of estimates ranging about 100.000-300.000 (obviously including the 1939-1941 period), so Nazi Germany has got 60 times (I count also the military deaths) "numerical superiority", while some historians always "accuse" Allies of having numerical superiority in everything.

Again, I didn't write about numbers. I didn't even imply any numbers. I mentioned that many countries were guilty of atrocities.Every axis country is much more evil than any Allied,

 

And this is exactly the BS that I refute. Slovakia, Romania & Finland were with certainty much less "evil" than the Soviet Union and also less "evil" than the UK and France.

The British and French oppressed numerous countries at the time as colonialists, disrespected several countries' sovereignties in their war planning and cannot claim to have been a better nation than for example Romania or Finland.

 

How do you measure Allies to "not be good"? Understand artrocities commited by the communist goverment countries above, all Allied powers including Soviet Union are "good" compared to Nazi Germany, the numbers say something about it.

How way can you measure France, GB "not be good", that it didn't help us in 1939 despite the agreements? Not to mention other Western Allied powers, included Poland.

 

The UK would find itself as extreme outlaw state that would be justifiedly attacked and overthrown asap if it was today the same state as in 1939.

 

Simple reason; colonialism. There's no way how a nation can be "good" as colonial power. In fact, the planning of Hitler to gain territories in the East was pretty much on the same level as UK's imperialism/colonialism. The outrage was only so large because he did it against whites.

We're used to ignore that, as those were sins of the victors and "the West". Other nations outside of "the West" have no such selective memories.

You remember Iraq 1990, invading Kuwait? What an evil dictator.

It was a minor joke in comparison to European colonialism before the 60's, though.

 

The same applies to France and even the U.S., which was also an imperial power (Philippines) with extreme disrespect for other nation's sovereignty (about a dozen "Banana wars" in the inter-war period, all U.S. aggressions).

 

World War 2 was a contest between a lot of large nations of varying degree of evilness and some small nations in the middle, struggling for survival on either side.

 

Stalin was absolutely not better than Hitler. Even by numbers, as many Russian victims of Hitler were as much victims of Stalin. Stalin's victims are easily in the eight digit range, and he began with mass murder in the seven digit range long before the war.

 

Check your logic; other states were not good just because they were not as bad as Hitler Germany.

("How do you measure Allies to "not be good"? Understand artrocities commited by the communist goverment countries above, all Allied powers including Soviet Union are "good" compared to Nazi Germany, the numbers say something about it.")

 

There would have been a big mess in the 40's with or without Hitler...the time was simply terrible, with two expansionist nations, two expansionist empires, two empires that preferred status quo and a wannabe empire that thought it had to get involved.

 

World War 2 began in 1937 with the Japanese invasion of China anyway; the idea that it began on 1.9.1939 is typical of Western-centric viewpoints.

[ickysdad]

Lastdingo...

There's a big difference between UK & French "Colonialism" and Nazi Germany's outright genocide of not just the Jews but Gypsy's and others. It is one thing to conquer a people it's quite another to conquer then eliminate or attempt to eliminate a people . Now as far as Stalin well I agree he wasn't much better then Hitler. Now again just where did the UK & France disrespect other nations in thier war planning? Also you really can't compare the UK & France then with what standards we have now you have to go by contemporary values of the time . Now on the US imperialism as far as the Phillipines go they had been guaranteed thier independence by 1946 . Let's also compare Allied occupation of Germany,Italy and Japan postwar with the Axis occupations during the war.

Edited July 5, 2008 by ickysdad

[Yama]

I started to look though the book, and I got a headache very quickly. It's so idiotic that it is useless to refute it point by point.

 

Ha! Feel my pain whenever I try to read a Suvorov book...

[Marek Tucan]

Lastdingo...

There's a big difference between UK & French "Colonialism" and Nazi Germany's outright genocide of not just the Jews but Gypsy's and others. It is one thing to conquer a people it's not quite another to conquer then eliminate or attempt to eliminate a people . Now as far as Stalin well I agree he wasn't much better then Hitler. Now again just where did the UK & France disrespect other nations in thier war planning? Also you really can't compare the UK & France then with what standards we have now you have to go by contemporary values of the time . Now on the US imperialism as far as the Phillipines go they had been guaranteed thier independence by 1946 . Let's also compare Allied occupation of Germany,Italy and Japan postwar with the Axis occupations during the war.

 

Re Stalin, casaulty-wise he was about two orders of magnitude better atleast for our country. some 350 000 vs. 5000.

[nitflegal]

Ha! Feel my pain whenever I try to read a Suvorov book...

 

God in Heaven, why would you do that to yourself!? That's just masochism on a grand scale.

 

Matt

[Detonable]

Re Stalin, casaulty-wise he was about two orders of magnitude better atleast for our country. some 350 000 vs. 5000.

 

You were probably fortunate not to have the Ukranian experience.

 

Its not realistic to compare Polish combat deaths against Germany, to combat deaths versus the Russians. Most of the combat was against the Germans, since the Soviets invaded later. Had the Soviets invaded first, with Germany entering the war near the end, results would be different.

 

In terms of civilian deaths, the Poles were a victimized nation, due to expulsions and massacres. Yes, they did bite off parts of other countries before the war, but they didn't slaughter 20% of the inhabitants of those parts.