I recently read Hitler’s declaration of war against the US and some of his other speeches and writings, after realizing that we never read anything by the most infamous man in history in our history classes in school.
Commenter Wobbly though I might enjoy the BBC documentary, The Nazis, A Warning From History, and I did find it thought-provoking.
If you read what Hitler actually said and wrote, he does obsess about the Jews, and he does equate them with Bolsheviks — which is odd if they’re also a race of scheming bankers. The first episode explains where this “crazy” idea might have come from. For one thing, the leadership of the Munich Soviet Republic was almost entirely Jewish:
Hitler’s rise to power follows a familiar formula. Moderate conservatives need his far-right stormtroopers to keep far-left Communists in line, a crisis costs the moderates their credibility, and soon the most extreme wing of the (right-wing) revolution takes over — rather bloodlessly, in this case.
Once Hitler takes over as dictator though, he doesn’t do much dictating. For all the later complaints by the German generals that Hitler micromanaged the war and later excuses by war criminals that they were just following orders, Hitlers leads, for the most part, by simply providing the vision and letting his subordinates vie for his approval under their own initiative.
In fact, the warning from history appears to be that the Nazis did very little themselves. There were only a few dozen Gestapo for a region of millions of Germans, for instance, and there were always plenty of collaborators later in conquered territories. At the very least, people were happy to take Jewish homes, shops, winter coats, etc.
But I’m getting ahead of myself.
The Rise of the Third Reich is fascinating, because Hitler seemed to solve Germany’s problems and to solve them quickly. He put men to work, and he restored Germany’s prestige. No one wanted to start another war over, say, German troops moving back into Rhineland. When Hitler moved his troops into Austria, crowds cheered them in the streets — and again in the Sudetenland. I suspect he could have made a move for the ethnically German portions of Poland, too — if he hadn’t seized the rest of Czechoslovakia first and given up all credibility as a simple uniter of the German people.
I suppose the Polish invasion seemed like a great victory at the time, and it seemed such an odd thing to push the French and British over the edge. Oops.
Set aside some time and heed the warning:
Hitler won because the Allies kept giving him victories in every gamble over German military. Of course if someone gambles several times and keeps winning his reputation increases at every gamble. So the Allies helped Hitler win over the moderates and the prudent ones.
For some perspective, a one hour interview with Pat Buchanan about his book The Unnecessary War.
I enjoyed that interview — as well as this one with Victor Davis Hanson and Christopher Hitchens.
Hitler did not come up with this stuff himself, it was a popular worldview within his constituency.
It’s funny that War Plan Red, for the hypothetical war against Great Britain, was maintained well into the thirties, even after Adolf Hitler rose to power in Germany.
In 1935 the War Department arranged a Congressional appropriation of $57 million to build three border air bases for the purposes of pre-emptive surprise attacks on Canadian air fields. It wasn’t until 1939 and the outbreak of World War II that a decision was made that no further planning was required.
A lot of the Nazi party platform is less insane then one might think, though Hitler and his goons definitely were (they were psychotic meth addicts). Strip out the ethnic cleansing and the constant need for war and what you get isn’t so bad. Of course you can’t detach that stuff from Hitler. In fact the war part was part in parcel with keeping him in power. The second the wars ended people would eventually wonder why there hadn’t been any elections in a long time. If a grateful people could throw Churchill out, they could throw Hitler out. Both Hitler’s military actions and policy on the Holocaust show a strong desire to hide details from the German people.
I think one of the worst things that could happen to the Germans was the successful invasion of France. France was the first war that Germans shouldn’t have won according to the consensus of the generals. As a result when people cautioned Hitler about the Soviet Union he just figured it would be France all over again.
“..when people cautioned Hitler about the Soviet Union…”
Nobody cautioned him. The Wehrmacht thought it would be a walkover.
Just posted today on vice.com, an article about The London Cage, Britain’s enhanced interrogation center for German POWs between 1940 and 1948.
Remember, Stalin invaded Eastern Poland too, and took captive a half dozen other nations, and was expelled from the League of Nations for its illegal war to try and conquer Finland, but England and France did not declare war on the Soviet Union out of any “provocation” or “obligation to defend Poland.” People forget this all the time — it’s kind of the inexplicable (in terms of the conventional narrative) dark-matter behind the story of how WWII started.
Handle,
Yes, it should also be noted that Hitler offered Britain peace twice, including before the Battle of Britain, and he also let untold trapped soldiers escape from France as a gesture of peace. Even in his racial hierarchy he considered the Brits near equals and never expressed a desire to destroy them.
Also, while Hitler did not use chemical weapons to defend Germany — they were ready, marked in boxes “do not open unless under direct order from the Fuhrer”, and were 100 times more powerful then anything from WWI. Churchill, by contrast, had already decided to use them if the Germans got onto the island.
Of course Hitler had been the recipient of a gas attack, so maybe that was enough to persuade him.
But,
Plenty of people cautioned Hitler. You need to read up on the history.
Of course they also told him the same things about France.
I thought that the word Socialism appeared in the NSDAP.
Must have been wrong.
“he also let untold trapped soldiers escape from France as a gesture of peace”: fanciful stuff, that.
The problem is that there were no ethnically German portions in Poland. There were areas where Germans were a substantial minority, but even in 1919 (before German military, clerks, teachers, government workers and their families left) there were very few districts which had a German majority.
Of course, as most people in the west, you ignore that, because Poles seem to be subhuman and therefore it doesn’t matter if they are majority, as long as some Germans live there. Somehow, the Polish minority living in Germany at the time does not deserve the same sympathy from Buchanan and the likes. Buchanan’s arguments about British guarantees are exactly the same, which British ambassador Henderson heard from Nazis in 1939. Read Henderson’s autobiogaphical book “failure of a Mission”.
Highest percentage of Germans in Sepolno (more than 48%). 18,8% of population was German in total. And that was in 1921. In 1939, due to German emigration, Polish immigration the percentage was even more pro-Polish. Note, that I always found strange the claim that Polish immigration into the area was somehow unjustified, while German previous attempts to settle there Germans was completely understandable.
As expected this article reproduces many points in total contrast with facts but in harmony with propaganda — too many to list. After seizing the Sudetenland, Poland attacked Czechoslovakia, and Czechoslovakia called on Hitler to guarantee it’s border as per agreement on the terms fixed when Germany re-annexed the Sudentenland. It is false that Hitler used this pretext to seize all of Czechoslovakia, as Britain characterized it, although certainly it was a expectation, it was not a fact. Keep in mind Czechoslovakia had never existed in history until invented after WWI by the Versailles treaty in order to ring Germany with a number of hostile states — in order to prime events for WWII and further destroy Europe.
Szopen, it is an obvious an undeniable fact that the Polish Corridor (Prussia) and Danzig were 98% German and had been German since time immemorial, as with the majority of Silesia.