As the world marks the 70th anniversary of the Nazi-initiated invasion of Poland, which began World War II, Pat Buchanan is back with his revisionist Hilter-defending drivel:
On Sept. 1, 1939, 70 years ago, the German Army crossed the Polish frontier. On Sept. 3, Britain declared war.
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.
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.
What cause could justify such sacrifices?
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.
Why did Warsaw not negotiate with Berlin, which was hinting at an offer of compensatory territory in Slovakia?o
Buchanan made a similar argument back in May 2008 when he essentially blamed the German invasion on the refusal of the Poles to negotiate the surrender of their country. In this column, though, he attempts to go on to try to refute the counter-argument — that failing to stand up to Hitler in Poland would have meant having to deal with him later:
[I]f 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? 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?
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?
Why did he let the British army go at Dunkirk?
Why did he offer the British peace, twice, after Poland fell, and again after France fell?
Why, when Paris fell, did Hitler not demand the French fleet, as the Allies demanded and got the Kaiser’s fleet? Why did he not demand bases in French-controlled Syria to attack Suez? Why did he beg Benito Mussolini not to attack Greece?
Because Hitler wanted to end the war in 1940, almost two years before the trains began to roll to the camps.
No, Pat, the reason is because Hitlers original war plan involved dealing with the “Jewish problem” by attacking Eastern Europe first:
“[The Jews'] ultimate goal is the denaturalization, the promiscuous bastardization of other peoples, the lowering of the racial level of the highest peoples as well as the domination of his racial mishmash through the extirpation of the folkish intelligentsia and its replacement by the members of his own people,” he wrote [in Mein Kampf
]. On the contrary, the German people were of the highest racial purity and those destined to be the master race according to Hitler. To maintain that purity, it was necessary to avoid intermarriage with subhuman races such as Jews and Slavs.Germany could stop the Jews from conquering the world only by eliminating them. By doing so, Germany could also find Lebensraum, living space, without which the superior German culture would decay. This living space, Hitler continued, would come from conquering Russia (which was under the control of Jewish Marxists, he believed) and the Slavic countries. This empire would be launched after democracy was eliminated and a “FÅhrer” called upon to rebuild the German Reich.
So, Hitler’s vision was a German Reich that stretched from Rhine to the Urals and, after he achieved it, what was left of Western Europe would’ve been in a position that even the German’s of 1946 Berlin would’ve found bad. Whether there was ever a war in the West or not, Nazi Germany would have been the dominant power in Europe and, by extension, the world, and, of course, the Jews of Eastern Europe would be dead.
The other answer to Buchanan’s question are really quite simple once you realize that, with Britain and France in the war, Hitler was fighting the two-front war that he never wanted to fight. He couldn’t afford to unleash all of Germany’s military might on the West, because he also had to fight in the East. That simple fact of a two-front war may have been the reason that Germany was never going to win the war after September 1939.
Of course, Buchanan doesn’t really care about any of that, and doesn’t really think that an Eastern Europe denuded of Jews, Slavs, and Russians is his concern, as his previous forays into this area have revealed.
September 1st, 2009 at 4:24 pm
WoW!!! It just totally amazes me that he would know so little about one of the greatest turning points in human history. I would have thought that after 70 years of study that it would have become painfully obvious after Austria and Czechoslovakia that Hitler would never have been satisfied with just Europe and Africa. Hitler didn’t want Mussolini to attack Greece when he did because He knew Mussolini would screw it up, which he did (The Greeks actually pushed the Italians back into Albania and took Albanian ground before Germany intervened), and that Germany would have to divert manpower southward when he was preparing for Barbarossa. German scientists were working to develop the V4 rocket with designs of using it to bomb the US East coast before the US even entered the war. The V2 rockets that were used on England were more like test rockets than anything else. When Japan joined the Axis there was meeting between the three powers were they essentially divided up the world including the US.
September 1st, 2009 at 4:42 pm
By the way, Hitler had been planing for what he believed was an eventual war with the US since 1928.
September 1st, 2009 at 10:13 pm
Pat Buchanan’s writings are baffling to you because they don’t conform to what has passed for conventional thought. The reason his writings are so thought provoking is that he always builds upon the premise that groups like the Nazis were not entirely the crazies that they have been depicted as in the movies or popular press. Like today, the German military of the Nazi era, was mostly well trained, well equipped, and run by a corps of career soldiers.
Vast, your assertion of Hitler planning a war with the US since 1928 is not supported by reality. The Germans may have had war plans that included the US, but anyone who works in war plans will tell you that there are war plans against just about everyone, but that does not mean there is an intention to go to war, only a commitment to be prepared for such a contingency. There has been a great deal of work published that concludes that the Reich expected America to be an ally, or at the worst, just neutral.
During the early years of the War, Hitler seemed to repeatedly be in denial as to why Britain and the US were bothering to get worked-up about what he felt was the legitimate reclaiming of lands for the German people.
On part of Pat’s assessment of that period that has been often overlooked was that much of the hatred by the Nazis of the Jews was exacerbated by the fact that most of the leadership of the Communist Party in Germany were Jews. Among the Nazi Party leadership, Jews and Communists were synonymous, and the Nazis viewed the elimination of the Communists to be a kill or be killed proposition. While this doesn’t excuse the death camps, it does shed some light of the rationale that was employed; and perhaps why so many rank and file Nazis did nothing to stop or even slow the killing of what they felt were enemies of the, Nazi regime and therefore also enemies of the, “Fatherland.”
I am not sure why Pat Buchanan so often writes from the perspective of Nazis. In doing so, he surely invites the usual taunts, but his work always reveals helpful lessons from history, including the fact that WWII, like all wars, could have been prevented with the right mix of negotiators, skill and a little luck.
WWII was the last war where Congress actually declared war. Since that time we have made war based purely on Presidential fiat. We need to get Congress to re-assert control and limit the war powers of the President to emergency responses to attacks on our home soil.
September 1st, 2009 at 10:59 pm
Tyler,
You’re wrong. Buchanan doesn’t baffle me. I understand him completely. He’s anti-semitic crank who manages to get himself on television.
And, as I noted in the post, he’s completely off base when it comes to the history leading up to September 1, 1939.
September 1st, 2009 at 11:04 pm
In 1928 Hitler wrote his second book, it didn’t get published until well after the war, but in it he talks about the fact that he viewed war with the US as inevitable. http://hnn.us/articles/32084.html
In June of 1938 Herman Göring lamented the fact that “I completely lack the bombers capable of round-trip flights to New York with a 4.5-tonne bomb load. I would be extremely happy to possess such a bomber which would at last stuff the mouth of arrogance across the sea.”
The Ju 290 and Me 264 long range bombers were designed with the specific intention of bombing targets in the US as far inland as Indiana from bases in the Azores and France. The program that created the designs for these planes began before the US entry into the war, while the first prototypes didn’t make out of factories until ‘43 and ‘44, which by that time the war was going so badly for the Germans that the programs were scrapped.
Don’t kid yourself, Hitler’s plan was to remake the world and have it serve Germany. His intents far exceeded the borders of Europe well before he was even made Chancellor.
September 1st, 2009 at 11:18 pm
You might also be interested in this book…
http://books.google.com/books?id=hrsi2rH28NQC&pg=PA114&lpg=PA114&dq=Hitler+Plans+for+USA&source=bl&ots=QvN-9trIF0&sig=DV_a_2FD-Y95-HpKq0w6Geqp6Gw&hl=en&ei=b-OdSqqQEoO0Nrb35I8C&sa=X&oi=book_result&ct=result&resnum=10#v=onepage&q=&f=false
September 3rd, 2009 at 11:44 am
Thank you for your article. Mr. Buchanan’s “scholarship” in defense of his arguments is so shoddy, it is laughable. Even the TITLE of his book misses the boat! Churchill’s reference to the war as “unnecessary” meant that he believed early military opposition to Hitler’s aggression from the British, French, and even the U.S. could have toppled the dictator before a major European war became the only way to stop him. It did NOT mean that sitting back and allowing Hitler to take over Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union (to gain the “Lebensraum” Hitler described in MEIN KAMPF) would have been a desirable outcome for the people of the world. As well, the notion that Hitler would have stopped there and left Western Europe alone is beyond naive. Those nations would have been cowed into submission, required to allow free passage of German military forces throughout their territories, and forced to turn over their Jewish citizens. Such a claim is not an exercise in speculation: any country that refused to “ally” with Hitler during that period, or cancelled an existing alliance, was promptly invaded and subjugated by Nazi armies. Examples include Yugoslavia in 1941, then Rumania, and Hungary (both in 1944).
Mr. Buchanan’s long-standing nonsense implying that Hitler was some sort of “misunderstood German patriot” does not bear any realistic scrutiny. Fortunately , most freedom-loving people in the world appreciate the efforts of those who stood up to the dicatator and his plans for humanity.
Those interested in the period might want to check out my new novel, THE FUHRER VIRUS. It is a fictional spy/conspiracy/thriller for adult readers, and can be found at http://www.eloquentbooks.com/TheFuhrerVirus.html, http://www.amazon.com, http://www.barnesandnoble.com, and on Google review.
Thanks!
Paul Schultz