Most of the fighting and dying in the bloodiest of all wars, to bring down Hitler’s Reich, was done on the Eastern Front. As Davies writes, “The Third Reich was largely defeated not by the forces of liberal democracy, but by the Red Army of another mass-murdering tyranny. The liberators of Auschwitz were servants of a regime that ran an even larger network of concentration camps of its own.”14
Measured by the size of the armies, the scope of the battles, and the length of the casualty lists, World War II was less a war between Fascism and freedom than a war between Nazism and Bolshevism. Hitler lost, Stalin won.
Of the Little Entente of Czechoslovakia, Rumania, and Yugoslavia, which in February 1933 had declared itself the “Fifth Great Power” in Europe, Villari writes: “When it came to a showdown in 1939, the combination utterly failed to save its members from invasion, devastation and wholesale massacre, ending up in slavery for all three under a blood-thirsty Communist regime, of the Stalinist variety in two of them, of a Titoist variety in the third, but both equally oppressive and abominable.”15
There was another consequence of “The Good War.”
HITLER’S POGROM
FOR WHAT HAPPENED TO the Jews of Europe, Hitler and his collaborators in the unspeakable crimes bear full moral responsibility. The just punishment for people who participate in mass murder is death, be it in a bunker or on a gallows. The Nazi murderers got what they deserved. But was the Holocaust inevitable? Could it have been averted?
Clearly, hatred of Jews was a defining characteristic of the Nazi Party from birth. Mein Kampf, written while Hitler was imprisoned at Landsberg after the Beer Hall Putsch in 1923, is saturated in it.
Within weeks of Hitler’s taking power came the Reichstag fire, which led to Dachau and the other camps to hold enemies of the regime. In 1935, Hitler imposed the Nuremberg Laws, discriminating against Jews in every walk of life. Yet though viciously anti-Semitic, Hitler’s Reich had not gone genocidal. Nazi policy had been to make Jewish lives so miserable in Germany that the Jews would leave.
Six weeks after Munich, however, came Kristallnacht. Synagogues were torched, Jewish businesses smashed and ransacked, and Jews attacked, brutalized, and lynched. Before Kristallnacht, half of the Jewish population had fled Germany. Of those who remained, perhaps half fled after the night of terror of November 9–10, 1938. Fortunately, they were gone when the curtain fell on September 1, 1939.
Three months after Kristallnacht, on the sixth anniversary of his assumption of power, January 29, 1939, Hitler, in a speech to the Reichstag, publicly threatened the Jews of Europe. America, Britain, and France, he charged, “were continually being stirred up to hatred of Germany and the German people by Jewish and non-Jewish agitators.”16 Hitler then issued his threat:
In the course of my life I have often been a prophet, and have usually been ridiculed for it…. I will once more be aprophet: If the international Jewish financiers in and outside Europe should succeed in plunging the nations once more into a world war, then the result will not be the Bolshevization of the earth, and thus the victory of Jewry, but the annihilation of the Jewish race in Europe.17
The mass deportations and destruction of the Jews of Europe, however, did not begin in 1939 or 1940. They began after Hitler invaded Russia, June 22, 1941, when the Einsatzgruppen trailed the Wehrmacht into the Soviet Union exterminating Bolsheviks, commissars, and Jews. Writes Ian Kershaw, “[T]he German invasion of the Soviet Union triggered the rapid descent into full-scale genocide against the Jews.”18
Not until January 1942, after Hitler had been at war two and a half years, invaded Russia, declared war on the United States, and begun to sense disaster, was the infamous Wannsee Conference held.
In February 1942, after that conference, Goebbels wrote ominously in his Diaries, “World Jewry will suffer a great catastrophe…. The Fuehrer realizes the full implications of the great opportunity offered by this war.”19
On March 7, 1942, the ominous phrase “a final solution of the Jewish question” appears in The Goebbels Diaries.20
On March 27, 1942, after describing the deportations lately begun from Poland’s ghettos, Goebbels writes chillingly, “Fortunately, a whole series of possibilities presents itself for us in wartime that would be denied us in peacetime. We shall have to profit by this.”21
The same day, Goebbels refers back to Hitler’s threat of January 1939, adding, “[T]he fact that Jewry’s representatives in England and America are today organizing and sponsoring the war against Germany must be paid for dearly by its representatives in Europe—and that’s only right.”22
From this chronology, the destruction of the European Jews was not a cause of the war but an awful consequence of the war. Had there been no war, would there have been a Holocaust at all?
In The World Crisis, Churchill, the Dardanelles disaster in mind, wrote: “[T]he terrible Ifs accumulate.” If Britain had not issued the war guarantee and then declared war on Germany, Hitler might never have invaded France. Had he not, Mussolini would never have invaded France or Greece, or declared war on England.
With no war in the west, all the Jews of Norway, Denmark, Holland, Belgium, Luxembourg, France, Italy, Yugoslavia, and Greece might have survived a German-Polish or Nazi-Soviet war, as the Jews of Spain, Portugal, Sweden, and Switzerland survived.
But because Britain issued the guarantee to Poland and declared war on Germany, by June 1941 Hitler held hostage most of the Jews of Western Europe and the Balkans. By 1942, after invading Ukraine, Byelorussia, the Baltic states, and Russia, he held hostage virtually the entire Jewish population of Europe.
Yet neither the Allies nor the Soviets were focused on the potential fate of the hostages Hitler held. At Casablanca in 1943, Churchill and FDR declared their war aim was “unconditional surrender.” At Quebec in 1944, Churchill and FDR approved the Morgenthau Plan calling for the destruction of all German industry. Goebbels used the Morgenthau Plan to convince Germans that surrender meant no survival. Annihilation of their hostages was the price the Nazis exacted for their own annihilation.
WHAT MIGHT HAVE BEEN
LOOKING BACK, WOULD IT not have been better to tell the Poles the truth—that Britain and France could not save them? And hence Beck must decide if it was worth war with Germany to hold a town of 350,000 Germans clamoring to return to the Reich?
Was Danzig worth a war? Was Poland worth a war, if there was no way to save Poland? Comes the reply: The war was never about Danzig. It was never about Poland. The war was fought to stop Hitler, the most demonic ruler ever to walk this Earth, whose crimes are unequaled in the annals of man. To destroy such a monster and eradicate his satanic regime, to prevent his gaining “mastery of the world,” any price, including tens of millions dead and the devastation of World War II, was worth it. The Good War was the great crusade against Nazism and Fascism, and if the British Empire had to perish to end this evil before it consumed the world, the British Empire died in the noblest of causes. So argues Niall Ferguson:
By the time Churchill became Prime Minister in 1940, the most likely alternatives to British rule were Hirohito’s Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere, Hitler’s Thousand Year Reich and Mussolini’s New Rome…. It was the staggering cost of fighting these imperial rivals that ultimately brought down the British Empire…. [T]he Empire was dismantled…because it took up arms for just a few years against far more oppressive empires. It did the right thing, regardless of the cost.23
“In the end,” writes Ferguson, “the British sacrificed [their] Empire to stop the Germans, Japanese and Italians from keeping theirs,” and it was this inevitably Pyrrhic victory that makes the sacrifice of her empire “so fine, so authentically noble.”24
But is this really how it happened? Was the sacrifice of the empire done willingly as an act of martyrdom? Or was it rather the result of British blundering on a colossal scale?
As for “Mussolini’s New Rome,” the British had courted Il Duce for years and had formally recognized I
taly’s conquest of Ethiopia and her rights in Libya and Eritrea before the war began. Indeed, before his excoriation of Mussolini for joining Hitler’s attack on France, Churchill had been ever effusive in his praise of the greatness of Il Duce. And Britain did not declare war on Mussolini. Mussolini declared war on Britain on June 10, 1940.
As for Japan, it was as barbarous an empire as modernity had seen. But Japan had been Britain’s ally before London terminated the Anglo-Japanese treaty in 1922, not out of moral revulsion, but because the Americans demanded it. In the mid-1930s, after Japan’s invasion of Manchuria, Neville Chamberlain was urging a rapprochement with Tokyo so Britain would not have to fight both Japan and Germany. And Britain did not go to war to bring down Japan’s empire. Japan attacked first—and America crushed Japan. And Japan’s empire—Manchuria, China, North Korea, Indochina—ended up in the empire of Stalin and his heirs, under the rule of Mao, Kim Il Sung, Ho Chi Minh, and Pol Pot, whose victims would far exceed in number those of imperial Japan.
Britain surely played an indispensable role in bringing down Hitler and liberating Western Europe, but it was a supporting role. It was the Red Army that tore the guts out of the Werhrmacht. D-Day in France did not come until three years after Hitler’s invasion of Russia. As Norman Davies writes,
Proportions…are crucial. Since 75%–80% of all German losses were inflicted on the eastern front it follows that the efforts of the western allies accounted for only 20%–25%. Furthermore, since the British army deployed no more than 28 divisions as compared with the American army’s 99, the British contribution to victory must have been in the region of 5%–6%. Britons who imagine that “we won the war” need to think again.25
And before Britain’s declaration of war on Germany brought Hitler’s army west, Western Europe did not need liberating. As for Eastern and Central Europe, they were “liberated” by Stalin.
Had Britain not declared war on Germany, perhaps Hitler, after taking back Danzig, would have turned west and overrun France as he did in 1940, then stormed into Yugoslavia, Greece, and North Africa as he did in 1941. But why? And what would have been lost had Britain and France never given the war guarantee to Poland, but rearmed and waited to see if Hitler would ever attack Western Europe?
Even had Hitler come west after crushing Stalin’s Soviet Union, how could it have been worse than it was for the Jews? Or the Gypsies? Or the Slavs? Or the Christians, tens of millions of whom would die and one hundred million of whom would end up slaves in an empire that was the most brutal and barbaric enemy Christianity had ever known? Had Britain not given the war guarantee, and not declared war over Poland, Western Europe might have avoided war altogether. And was the war worth it? Let us give the last word to Churchill. Three years after the victory, he wrote in The Gathering Storm:
The human tragedy reaches its climax in the fact that after all the exertions and sacrifices of hundreds of millions of people and of the victories of the Righteous Cause, we have still not found Peace or Security, and we lie in the grip of even worse perils than those we have surmounted.26
What did Churchill mean by “even worse perils” than Nazism and Hitler? He meant Stalinism and Stalin, a mass murderer whose victims exceeded even those of Hitler. By 1948, all of Stalin’s promises about elections had been broken and he was crushing all opposition to communist tyranny in the eleven countries now in his grip, including Czechoslovakia, for which Churchill had wanted to go to war, and Poland, for which Churchill had demanded Britain go to war.
If the West faced “even worse perils” in 1948 than in 1939, what had it all been for? Yes, Hitler was dead and Nazism exterminated, but at a cost of 50 million lives. And Britain had lost four hundred thousand men, and was broken and bankrupt. The empire had lost scores of thousands more dead and was collapsing. India, the crown jewel, was already gone. Stalin’s Red Army loomed over Europe. Stalinist parties were grasping for power in Italy and France. Mao’s armies were moving from victory to victory in China. And the Americans had gone home.
On May 13, 1940, in his first address to the House as prime minister, Churchill declared: “You ask, What is our aim? I can answer in one word. It is victory, victory at all costs.”27 Churchill was true to his word. As we shall see, it was he alone who refused to consider any agreement to end the war at Dunkirk. It was he who rejected Hitler’s offer of peace in July 1940.
On May 21, 1937, according to Churchill, at the German embassy he had warned Ribbentrop, “Do not underrate England. She is very clever. If you plunge us all into another Great War, she will bring the whole world against you like last time.”28
Churchill made good on his threat, holding on until the Americans came in. But that meant the war would last five years after Dunkirk, and all Europe would lie in ashes. Wrote Tory historian Alan Clark in 1993:
The war went on far too long, and when Britain emerged the country was bust. Nothing remained of assets overseas. Without immense and punitive borrowings from the US we would have starved. The old social order had gone forever. The empire was terminally damaged. The Commonwealth countries had seen their trust betrayed and their soldiers wasted.29
“Victory at all costs” proved costly indeed. Yet, horrendous as the cost was, it had to be paid. So we are told. For Hitler, as Henderson wrote, was out to “rule the earth.”30 But if he was out to rule the earth, and war was the only way to stop him, we must ask:
Where did Hitler declare his determination to destroy the British Empire and “rule the earth”? How was a nation of Germany’s modest size and population to conquer the world? Was there no way to contain Hitler but declare a war in which, as Chamberlain told Joe Kennedy, millions must die? What were Hitler’s real ambitions?
CHAPTER 13
Hitler’s Ambitions
THE LAST THING that Hitler wanted to produce was another great war.1
—B. H. LIDDELL HART
The one thing [Hitler] did not plan was the great war, often attributed to him.2
—A.J.P. TAYLOR
WHEN HITLER TOOK POWER in 1933, not all Englishmen were ignorant of the character of the man who had attempted the Munich Beer Hall Putsch and written Mein Kampf. Sir Horace Rumbold, the British ambassador in Berlin, a man wiser than those who would succeed him, wrote in his valedictory dispatch to London of April 26, 1933, that Hitler
starts with the assumption that man is a fighting animal; therefore the nation is a fighting unit, being a community of fighters…. A country or race which ceases to fight is doomed…. Pacifism is the deadliest sin…. Intelligence is of secondary importance…. Will and determination are of the highest worth. Only brute force can ensure the survival of the race.3
Hitler believes, wrote Rumbold, “It is the duty of government to implant in the people feelings of manly courage and passionate hatred…. The new Reich must gather within its fold all the scattered German elements in Europe…. What Germany needs is an increase in territory.”4
With the mass arrest of Communists after the Reichstag fire, the concentration camp established at Dachau, the murders by the SS during the Night of the Long Knives, the kind of men the Allies were dealing with in the new Germany was known by 1934. Even Mussolini had been shaken. But the issue of this chapter is not that Hitler was crude, cruel, and ruthless, or that the barbarism his Nazi regime degenerated into was rivaled only by Stalin, Mao, and Pol Pot, but whether Hitler ever sought war with the West.
Looking back at each of the crises before 1939 and how he responded, the answer would seem to be “No.” In 1934, Hitler had been nearly hysterical that the Austrian Nazis, who had assassinated Dollfuss, would drag him into a confrontation with Mussolini. He disowned the coup and the Nazi plotters and pledged to make amends.
Hitler described the days of March 1936, when he sent three lightly armed battalions into the Rhineland with orders to pull out immediately if they met French resistance, as the “most nerve-racking moment” of his life.
In March 1938, it was not Hitler who precipitated th
e Austrian crisis, but Schuschnigg with his call for a plebiscite in four days so Austria could vote permanent independence of Germany. Hitler did not even have an invasion plan prepared. When Mussolini sent word he would not interfere if Hitler sent his army in, Hitler was almost hysterical with gratitude and relief.
In September 1938, after his second meeting with Chamberlain, at Bad Godesberg, where Hitler had threatened to invade and seize what he wanted of Czechoslovakia, and the British, French, and Czechs began to mobilize, Hitler rushed a conciliatory letter to Chamberlain, urging him not to give up his search for peace. He grasped Mussolini’s proposal for a third meeting at Munich. It was Hitler who backed down after Godesberg.
In August 1939, when, after the Ribbentrop-Molotov pact exploded on the world, Chamberlain reaffirmed his alliance with Poland, a stunned Hitler put off his invasion a week to find a way out of a war with Britain. When the British ultimatum came on September 3, Hitler turned an angry face at Ribbentrop: “What now!” If Hitler were out to conquer the world, would he not have worked out his plans for conquest with his only major ally, Mussolini, who weaseled out of his Pact of Steel commitment in the week before Hitler went to war?
Hitler never wanted war with Britain. As his naval treaty showed—accepting a Kriegsmarine one-third the size of the Royal Navy, then declining to build up to the limits allotted—he had always been willing to pay a high price to avoid it. His dream was of an alliance with the British Empire, not its ruin. In August 1939, his generals expected, his people hoped, and Hitler believed he could still do a deal.
But if Hitler did not seek war with the British Empire, how could he have been out to conquer the world? What was Hitler’s real agenda?
Churchill, Hitler, and The Unnecessary War Page 31
