Simplistic History
Recently I heard Jamie Kelso putting all blame for World War II on Adolf Hitler (Click here to listen):
September 1, 1939 the German armies entered Poland, and that was a precipitous moment there, a turning point, a decision by Hitler to go right back to world-war, absolutely one of the most catastrophic — well, I think the worst decision ever made by a White man, to start another world-war. A choice that one man, one man had the power and the opportunity, to make that choice…. It was one man’s decision, and you and I are paying for it today, as are all White people.
Hitler decided to start a world-war in 1939 and we are all paying for it today! So simple! Well, it’s not so simple. I was flabbergasted that somebody supposedly a White Nationalist and even a leading figure for that cause was espousing a simplistic, anti-nationalist history that was written for us by our enemies, and had never taken the trouble to get better information.
Many a war-leader could be made to appear as a crazed aggressor if the circumstances and provocations that made his choices seem necessary were omitted from discussion. I would like to remedy that omission in this instance.
Just in broad outline, this is why, in my view, Adolf Hitler was not responsible for World War II:
1. The Treaty of Versailles gave Germany an indefensible eastern border.
2. Germany had to be concerned about the military threat posed by its eastern neighbors, especially the Soviet Union.
3. Germany’s efforts to reach an accommodation with Poland, so that the indefensible border would no longer be a problem, were thwarted, largely as a result of British meddling.
4. Worse than that, there were some positively jingoistic Poles. It seems to have fallen down the memory-hole that Poland occupied part of Czechoslovakia simultaneously as Germany occupied the western part. And indeed there were some atrocities against ethnic Germans in Poland.
5. While Germany’s effort to make a defensive arrangement with Poland had been foiled, Britain began sabre-rattling over the German occupation of western Czechoslovakia* (but not over the Polish occupation of another part of Czechoslovakia).
6. Under the circumstances, with the looming threat of a war in the west, it made very good geopolitical sense for Germany to cultivate good relations with the USSR and to partition Poland with the USSR so as to create a short and defensible eastern frontier far from Berlin, while eliminating Britain’s ally from Germany’s rear.
7. The cross-border Polish attacks of 31 August 1939, which constituted the immediate provocation for the German invasion of Poland, were probably not an elaborate hoax as alleged at Nuremberg. There were cross-border attacks at many locations, and the only evidence that any of them was fraudulently staged was the post-war Nuremberg testimony of one man, the mysterious Alfred Naujocks.
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| “Powers behind Roosevelt” |
8. It was crazy for Britain and France to declare war on Germany because of Poland. Neville Chamberlain complained to Joseph Kennedy that America and the world Jews had forced England into the war. (This was then related by Kennedy to Secretary of the Navy James Forrestal; it appears in Forrestal’s published diary on p. 122. Kennedy also revealed that Roosevelt had instructed him in the summer of 1939 to put pressure on Chamberlain.) Additional information about how the Roosevelt Administration pushed for another European war (primarily through financial pressure on Britain) can be read in FDR:The Other Side of the Coin, by Congressman Hamilton Fish.
The continuation of the war by Britain after the fall of France, which facilitated the European war’s development into another World War with American involvement, was even more crazy.
Historian Stephen Ambrose said: “The British had as many problems, if not more, in recovering from victory, as the Germans did in recovering from defeat. What did Britain get out of the war? Not very much. Not very much. She lost a very great deal. I suppose that if you want to look at it positively, she got a moral claim on the world as the nation that had stood against Hitler alone for a year.”
That “moral claim” for Britain’s policy in World War II of course only holds water if one accepts the demonization of Adolf Hitler and National-Socialist Germany, including the proposition that it was worthwhile for Britain to sacrifice her blood and treasure so that Poland and the rest of Eastern Europe could be under Soviet rather than German hegemony.
In summation, Hitler’s actions were all reasoned responses to dangers and provocations. It was Britain that behaved unreasonably, at Jewish and American instigation. Without that unreason in British foreign policy, there would have been no Second World War.
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* Chamberlain (and Daladier) had conceded at Munich in 1938 that Germany should be allowed to annex the Sudetenland, the mountainous western fringe of Czechoslovakia that was inhabited mainly by ethnic Germans. Hitler may have made in perfectly good faith the agreement which Chamberlain took back to Britain and waved around declaring, “Peace in our time!” But then, after Germany occupied the ethnic-German areas, the Czechoslovakian government collapsed. At that point Germany occupied Bohemia and Moravia (the Czech area), while Hungary and Poland occupied Slovakia. It would not have been prudent for Germany to refrain from occupying Bohemia and Moravia, because in that power-vacuum, some power, perhaps even the Soviet Union, was likely to move in. This response to an emergency, however, only a very short time after Hitler had told Chamberlain that Germany had no further territorial ambitions in Europe, was easily misrepresented as deliberate mockery of the agreement with Chamberlain, and it was used to humiliate Chamberlain and goad him into an aggressive posture. Incidentally, Bohemia and Moravia were never annexed into Germany: they remained a “protectorate.” Czechs also were treated very well by the Germans, at least until the British instigated the assassination of Reinhard Heydrich by some Czechs: that made the relationship more difficult.