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interesting piece and he raises a lot of good points...
i also don't subscribe to the idea of Hitler wanting to take over the world - prior to WW2, his claims for land were almost all areas which were either already inhabited by German speakers (Upper Silesia, Sudetenland, Bohemia & Moravia). even in terms of after the outbreak of WW2, he only annexed Alsace Lorraine from France, and i'm pretty certain a large portion of Poland had been held by Prussia before 1918
Hitler's initial goals were relatively modest: unite all areas inhabited by German speakers (excepting Switzerland) and possibly recover areas which belonged to the old German Empire. While that does not in and of itself sound very sinister, it does create a problem that this expanded Germany (which included Austria and Czechoslovakia) would have become essentially a superpower in the heart of Europe. That would have seriously upset the balance of power within Europe, created a mortal threat to France as well as other neighbors. Germany would have been too powerful for Britain and France to contain. In light of everything that happened in the interwar years - the Treaty of Versailles, the reparations, the Greater Poland Uprising, the hatred between the Nazis and the Communists, the whole situation would have been a huge power keg which would have exploded sooner or later.
So do I think WWII could have been delayed a few years by giving in to Hitler's demands for Danzig? Sure.
Could it have been completely avoided? Very unlikely.
Hitler's initial goals were relatively modest: unite all areas inhabited by German speakers (excepting Switzerland) and possibly recover areas which belonged to the old German Empire. While that does not in and of itself sound very sinister, it does create a problem that this expanded Germany (which included Austria and Czechoslovakia) would have become essentially a superpower in the heart of Europe. That would have seriously upset the balance of power within Europe, created a mortal threat to France as well as other neighbors. Germany would have been too powerful for Britain and France to contain. In light of everything that happened in the interwar years - the Treaty of Versailles, the reparations, the Greater Poland Uprising, the hatred between the Nazis and the Communists, the whole situation would have been a huge power keg which would have exploded sooner or later.
So do I think WWII could have been delayed a few years by giving in to Hitler's demands for Danzig? Sure.
Could it have been completely avoided? Very unlikely.
i do agree that it was a powder keg waiting to go off: after all wasn't it Clemenceau who predicted another war in 20 years and ended up being only a few months off?
though it is important to note two things: first off, Britain (and France) were superpowers at the time. not on Continental Europe but worldwide, by means of their colonies: something Germany (or the German Empire) had never been able to pull off with much success. Britain had the world's best navy, and France's army was highly regarded as being one of the world's best and a lot of people thought the Maginot Line was basically impenetrable.
second off i think it's reasonable to say that Germany was running out of places it could easily annex/take over with justification (ie German speaking places). there would eventually have been some sort of natural or reactionary limit placed on her, just as has happened with most empires - Napoleonic France being one such example. it's one thing to argue against the Anschluss, but then to justify Germany taking over an area like present day Slovenia/Croatia would've been something else entirely.
i honestly suspect that after the failure to conduct Operation Sea Lion Hitler decided to go all-in and attack Russia and did so without proper preparation and with poor timing - had he been able to take on one opponent at a time, and not declare war on the US with Japan, things could easily have turned out very differently. i don't, however, believe he would have wanted to take over the entire world, though.
On Sept. 1, 1939, 70 years ago, the German Army crossed the Polish frontier. On Sept. 3, Britain declared war.
Well, he got that part right.
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Six years later, 50 million Christians and Jews had perished. Britain was broken and bankrupt, Germany a smoldering ruin. Europe had served as the site of the most murderous combat known to man, and civilians had suffered worse horrors than the soldiers.
I see he's just setting the tone here where only dead Christians and Jews matter...
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By May 1945, Red Army hordes occupied all the great capitals of Central Europe: Vienna, Prague, Budapest, Berlin. A hundred million Christians were under the heel of the most barbarous tyranny in history: the Bolshevik regime of the greatest terrorist of them all, Joseph Stalin.
Yet again with the Christian suffering. I think this is interesting to highlight though. I imagine in Pat's mind Hitler was perfectly fine as long as his guns were pointed east at the Soviets. Pat would have liked to have seen a war where the "united Christian nations of Europe expelled the unholy threat of Bolshevism from the continent". Instead, they tragically ended up killing each other. This is Pat's thesis and really has nothing to do with Hitler.
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The German-Polish war had come out of a quarrel over a town the size of Ocean City, Md., in summer. Danzig, 95 percent German, had been severed from Germany at Versailles in violation of Woodrow Wilson's principle of self-determination. Even British leaders thought Danzig should be returned.
He is flat out wrong here. Wilson was the most vociferous advocate for the reformation of a Polish state and the Danzig corridor and indeed Danzig itself was essential to the security of Poland. The Poles did not even control Danzig, it was a "free city" under a League of Nations mandate.
The "British leaders" he is referencing would not be British leaders in the days after WW1, but some British leaders in the lead up to WW2 who thought that giving Hitler what he wanted would indefinitely keep the peace. Basically, if it meant war or giving Hitler Danzig, some Brits thought it better to just give Hitler Danzig.
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Why did Warsaw not negotiate with Berlin, which was hinting at an offer of compensatory territory in Slovakia? Because the Poles had a war guarantee from Britain that, should Germany attack, Britain and her empire would come to Poland's rescue.
They didn't refuse to negotiate, not in the least. The events that led up to the outbreak of war can be traced back all the way to Hitlers ascension to power in 1933. What Hitler wanted was to maneuver Poland away from Frances influence and turn Poland into a German vassal state to oppose the Soviets. Hitlers demands for Danzig started in earnest in 1937 and the Poles while engaging Hitler were very wary of what he would do. They feared a Czech scenario and were not ready to begin acquiescing to Hitler's loaded demands that would reduce Poland to a vassal state.
The guarantees of Polish territorial integrity were not issued by Britain and France unitl March of 1939. By this point Hitler had already decided that he was not going to achieve his desires through peace took advantage of the Soviet refusal to ally with Britain and France against Germany over the issue of Poland and struck an agreement with the Soviets to divide Eastern Europe.
Still Britain held out hopes for peace over Danzig. The negotiations continued right up to the moment war broke out. On August 23rd the Germans received word from the Soviets that they would back Germany in an attack on Poland. On August 25th Britain signed an alliance with Poland and sent a message to Germany that they were ready to continue negotiations over Danzig. The German invasion that had been scheduled for the 26th was stopped in its tracks. Hitler would not invade while they wanted to negotiate, it wasn't how he wanted to frame the war. What followed was a flurry of activity...
Germany demanded not just Danzig, but the entire Polish corridor. Additionally they wanted a Polish representative with full authority to sign a treaty to be in Berlin within one day. The British were happy that negotiations were going to start, but were concerned over the representative ultimatum, that is how the Czechs lost their country. The next day Ribbentrop read a 16 point ultimatum to the British ambassador that basically would turn Poland into a German vassal state. The British rep responded by asking for a copy to forward to the Polish, Ribbentrop refused because the Polish rep wasn't there. The next day the Polish rep arrived, but said he did not have the authority to sign the treaty. Ribbentrop dismissed him and later that day, the 31st of August, the Germans announced the Poles had refused to negotiate. That night a set of German commandos blew up a German radio antenna in Silesia. Hitler called this an act of war and the Germans marched into Poland.
So, suffice to say, old Pat missed a LOT of history courses.
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But why would Britain hand an unsolicited war guarantee to a junta of Polish colonels, giving them the power to drag Britain into a second war with the most powerful nation in Europe?
Was Danzig worth a war? Unlike the 7 million Hong Kongese whom the British surrendered to Beijing, who didn't want to go, the Danzigers were clamoring to return to Germany.
Comes the response: The war guarantee was not about Danzig, or even about Poland. It was about the moral and strategic imperative "to stop Hitler" after he showed, by tearing up the Munich pact and Czechoslovakia with it, that he was out to conquer the world. And this Nazi beast could not be allowed to do that.
Again, it wasn't about Danzig and everyone knew that. It was about Hitler getting what he wanted and becoming a superpower in Europe. Britain and France were slow to realize it, but once they did they tried to draw a line in the sand. Once Hitler crossed it, literally into Poland, they knew they couldn't appease him.
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If true, a fair point. Americans, after all, were prepared to use atom bombs to keep the Red Army from the Channel. But where is the evidence that Adolf Hitler, whose victims as of March 1939 were a fraction of Gen. Pinochet's, or Fidel Castro's, was out to conquer the world?
Hitler didn't want to conquer the world. Hitler wanted to defeat the Soviets to gain "lebensraum" in Eastern Europe and establish a greater German Reich dedicated to the preservation and elevation of the Aryan race. If Britain and France had not declared war to try and stop him, he would not have gone after them, instead he would have simply waited until he was too powerful to stop and then would have begun dictating terms to them.
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After Munich in 1938, Czechoslovakia did indeed crumble and come apart. Yet consider what became of its parts.
The Sudeten Germans were returned to German rule, as they wished. Poland had annexed the tiny disputed region of Teschen, where thousands of Poles lived.
Hungary's ancestral lands in the south of Slovakia had been returned to her. The Slovaks had their full independence guaranteed by Germany. As for the Czechs, they came to Berlin for the same deal as the Slovaks, but Hitler insisted they accept a protectorate.
Czechoslovakia was a creation, it had never existed, hence why it doesn't exist today. However, trying to pretend Poland was the same situation is incredibly off base. Pat, wants to make it about Danzig, but as I outlined above, it was never about Danzig. Hitler wanted/needed Poland and was fine with taking it diplomatically like he did the other territories. When that appeared to fail he took it militarily.
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Now one may despise what was done, but how did this partition of Czechoslovakia manifest a Hitlerian drive for world conquest?
It doesn't. Czechoslovakia was just the latest in a series of territorial grabs that Hitler was engineering. The Allies realized after Munich and Czechoslovakia that Hitler wasn't done when he stepped up pressure on Poland. There was no satiating Hitler unless he got exactly what he wanted.
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Comes the reply: If Britain had not given the war guarantee and gone to war, after Czechoslovakia would have come Poland's turn, then Russia's, then France's, then Britain's, then the United States.
The war guarantee and military alliance was only signed by Britain when they realized that Poland was indeed next. After Poland it would have been Russia and if Hitler won there, he would be more than powerful enough to dictate the way things would work even without needing to fight the others.
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But if Hitler was out to conquer the world — Britain, Africa, the Middle East, the United States, Canada, South America, India, Asia, Australia — why did he spend three years building that hugely expensive Siegfried Line to protect Germany from France?
The Siegfried Line was a public works project. It was never a serious attempt to defend Germany. It also served as an outward appearance of a defensive posture to the west and served as a source of national pride in opposing the Maginot Line. No German military leaders ever thought it was actually useful for anything.
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Why did he start the war with no surface fleet, no troop transports and only 29 oceangoing submarines? How do you conquer the world with a navy that can't get out of the Baltic Sea?
He wanted a larger navy, but there was only so much he could do with the resources Germany had. They were on the brink of economic collapse when the war broke out, the navy simply wasn't ready yet.
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If Hitler wanted the world, why did he not build strategic bombers, instead of two-engine Dorniers and Heinkels that could not even reach Britain from Germany?
The smaller bombers were what was needed in the immediate war. Hitler didn't want war with Britain and France. There was again, only so much German industry could do. The Luftwaffe was also organized as a tactical force, not a strategic force, though they attempted to be one and failed, in the Battle of Britain. Basically, the Luftwaffe wasn't designed to be a strategic bombing force, so why built strategic bombers?
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Why did he let the British army go at Dunkirk?
Hubris which led to a tactical failure. No one, not even Hitler, expected the rapidity of the German success against France.
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Why did he offer the British peace, twice, after Poland fell, and again after France fell?
He didn't want war with Britain, he wanted war with the Soviets.
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Why, when Paris fell, did Hitler not demand the French fleet, as the Allies demanded and got the Kaiser's fleet?
The French fleet was stuck at port in Algiers with the British between them and home. Hitler had no idea what the French navy would do and tried to walk the line with the Vichy government.
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Why did he not demand bases in French-controlled Syria to attack Suez?
The British seized control of Syria immediately after the French fell. There was nothing to demand.
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Why did he beg Benito Mussolini not to attack Greece?
He was preparing with war against the Soviets and didn't want to deal with a sideshow. Hitler felt that Greece would simply join the Axis once Russia was defeated.
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Because Hitler wanted to end the war in 1940, almost two years before the trains began to roll to the camps.
He wanted to end the war in the west, so he could conduct his war in the east. The trains would have rolled regardless.
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Hitler had never wanted war with Poland, but an alliance with Poland such as he had with Francisco Franco's Spain, Mussolini's Italy, Miklos Horthy's Hungary and Father Jozef Tiso's Slovakia.
Hitler wanted Poland, period. Whether it was by tuning into a vassal state or by forece of arms, he was going to take it. Without Poland, war with Russia was impossible.
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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.
He was being driven by his own success and the weakness of the western allies in stopping him. He was convinced that the west would not go to war with him over Poland and this drove him to continue pushing his demands for territory.
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As of March 1939, Hitler did not even have a border with Russia. How then could he invade Russia?
Gee Pat, what do you think Poland was for?
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Winston Churchill was right when he called it "The Unnecessary War" — the war that may yet prove the mortal blow to our civilization.
So, we get to Pat's thesis statement. It isn't about Hitler, or WW2 or anything else. Obviously Pat spent about 5 minutes researching this piece. Pat's point is that the war was unnecessary because the greater threat was the "Godless Bolsheviks and their Slavic hordes". Pat would have happily let Hitler murder whomever he wanted and exploit whatever he wanted in exchange for the west being hands off in letting Hitler confront the communists head on. He sees the actions against Hitler, not as the western allies confronting a man bent on murder and conquest, but as a failure of western civilization to look past it's petty squabbles and address the real threat.
23434015[/color] (tel:23434015 - broken link)]Brilliant argument. Ya got me beat.
Argument? You want arguments?
The author is in few short paragraphs is revising history going against opinion of most scholars and you want arguments?
Arguments for what? That Hitler was a psychotic megalomaniac who would never stop short of increasing German lebensraum in expense of Germany's neighbors?
That Poland should just give up their claims to historically Polish Gdansk and get pushed away from Baltic Sea?
Or maybe just like Daladier and Chamberlain you believe that just by givin in to Hitler's demands peace could have been saved in Europe?
That Hitler in 1936 build the Axis with Italy and Japan to promote peaceful coexistence around the world and wasn't planning a global war?
Hitler was not another politician and the Nazis were not just another political party.
The Nazis should have been stopped when they started building up their army and march into the demilitarized zone. Europe chose inaction for which it paid dearly few years later. You cant negotiate with megalomaniacs like Hitler or Stalin.
Lol...stop frothing at the mouth already my god...people take things so personally...and as usual they are wrong.
No one is taking anything personal. You post crap, it's going to be called out. That "article" by Buchanan is rife with errors and baseless causal claims. Of course, you don't want to actually discuss it, you just want to post a random article spouting something you agree with and then occasionally come back to stir the pot. You never contribute any of your own thoughts or analysis. This forum isn't a repository for links spouting revisionist history and baseless claims you happen to find interesting.
No one is taking anything personal. You post crap, it's going to be called out. That "article" by Buchanan is rife with errors and baseless causal claims. Of course, you don't want to actually discuss it, you just want to post a random article spouting something you agree with and then occasionally come back to stir the pot. You never contribute any of your own thoughts or analysis. This forum isn't a repository for links spouting revisionist history and baseless claims you happen to find interesting.
Couldn't said it better myself.
Having somewhat conservative views I had some respect for Buchanan however after committing this piece of crap he lost it all in my eyes. Historical inaccuracies alone make Buchanan's piece a travesty. It almost seems like he bought into Nazi propaganda from 1930's which was presenting Germans as piece loving victims, simply asking for what is legally theirs, the great protectors of European civilization. And those damn Poles, they should have accepted German demands, give up their access to the sea and become German vassals, like the Czechs and Slovaks, all in the name of greater good. Thank God Poles had more brains and pride and did not allow Hitler to become more powerful before showing his true intentions to the West. Polish troops fought for five weeks, Poland never created a puppet government, never enhanced German military power by forming Polish Waffen-SS divisions (like many other European countries, including France, did) but instead created Polish Underground right after the fall of Poland, focusing on fighting Germans until the end. In a sense Poland saved Europe's honor.
I don't want to go too far here but the kind of thinking displayed by Buchanan is exactly what made the initial success of Nazis possible in the first place. It's a shame.
Hitler's initial goals were relatively modest: unite all areas inhabited by German speakers (excepting Switzerland) and possibly recover areas which belonged to the old German Empire. While that does not in and of itself sound very sinister, it does create a problem that this expanded Germany (which included Austria and Czechoslovakia) would have become essentially a superpower in the heart of Europe. That would have seriously upset the balance of power within Europe, created a mortal threat to France as well as other neighbors. Germany would have been too powerful for Britain and France to contain. In light of everything that happened in the interwar years - the Treaty of Versailles, the reparations, the Greater Poland Uprising, the hatred between the Nazis and the Communists, the whole situation would have been a huge power keg which would have exploded sooner or later.
So do I think WWII could have been delayed a few years by giving in to Hitler's demands for Danzig? Sure.
Could it have been completely avoided? Very unlikely.
Hitler didn't want war, he just wanted a bunch of things that nations typically do not get except by waging war.
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