Posted on 07/20/2018 8:04:20 AM PDT by harpygoddess
Today is the anniversary of the denouement of the nearly-forgotten "20th of July" plot in 1944, when a courageous, but incredibly quixotic, group of old-fashioned German patriots under the leadership of Army officer Count Claus von Stauffenberg sought to achieve a compromise end to World War II in Europe by assassinating Adolf Hitler in his headquarters at Rastenburg, East Prussia, preparatory to opening peace negotiations with the western allies (i.e., excluding Russia). The conspiracy involved a number of high-ranking officers, including Generals Ludwig Beck and Friedrich Obert, but collapsed when a bomb placed by Stauffenberg himself failed to kill Hitler, and plans to seize Berlin fell through.
Within a day Stauffenberg and the other ringleaders had been executed, but thousands of known opponents of the regime were killed also, and Field Marshals Erwin Rommel, Erwin von Witzleben, and Günther von Kluge were implicated and forced to commit suicide.
Ironically, within a year, the Third Reich had collapsed and Hitler was dead.
(Excerpt) Read more at vaviper.blogspot.com ...
The plotters were very brave, to be sure.
And they wanted to make peace with the West...but at the same time hold on to all the conquered territories in the East (Poland, etc.).
So in some ways the plotters were as expansionistic as Hitler was.
A tragic example of how a matter of a few inches (in the placement of the bomb) left Hitler alive and in power, kept the war going and consequently, led to the deaths of easily over a million more soldiers, POWS, civilians and concentration camp inmates.
But for a nail...
It comes down to the fact that they were not willing to give their own lives in the attempt.
They were dead anyway. They had to know the Gestapo and the SS would come after them.
And there was no way the Allies would have agreed. It was “Unconditional Surrender” or bust.
Do you not think that had Hitler been killed that Valkyrie would have worked?
It was only when Major Remer went to arrest Goebbels and Goebbels put him on the phone with Hitler that Valkyrie fell apart.
Ever wonder if the war had been going like it was in 1940 in 1944 for Germany would they have tried to kill Hitler?
No way...They ALL loved Hitler after France fell.
The real tragedy was that the Allies accepted the armistice that put WWI on hold until Hitler (in conjunction with the USSR) broke it by invading Poland. WWII was just Round 2 of WWI (with some differences in the side players). If the allies had refused the armistice (asking a lot, after the carnage they had already suffered prior to 11/11/1918) they coulda, woulda, shoulda permanently prevented WWII.But once the WWI armistice was entered and broken, the only politic approach (in America) was FDR’s demand for unconditional surrender (a promise that “We’re not going down that road again"). People wonder why the Germans fought WWII to the bitter end; “Unconditional Surrender” was why. As well as the fact that the Nazis had seen to it that an enormous fraction of the German military had guilt over - at a minimum, had good reason to know about - mass murder and war crimes.
Those considerations aside, it would have made sense for the Anglo part of the Allies to agree to a separate peace with Germany which would have kept the USSR out of the Balkans and Poland. But those considerations prevailed. And besides, FDR himself was enough of a socialist to want the USSR to work out.
Stalin would have liked the Normandy invasion to turn into a meat grinder that left him free to go all the way to Paris. In that sense Hitler’s Battle of the Bulge - consisting as it did of a major diversion of troops from “der Ostfront” to a westward offensive against American, British, and Canadian forces - must have suited Stalin. And would have suited him perfectly if it had succeeded.
Well I still contend the world would have been much better off had Britain (and subsequently the US) sat out WWI.
That’s a pretty big counterfactual, and all I know for sure about it is that neither one of us would have been around to debate it at this point. Such a big change that long ago would have caused our parents not to marry - or something.If Germany conquered France, would it have subsequently played nice with Russia and everyone else? How would the Kaiser’s influence have affected the states that he didn’t conquer? As it turned out in reality, the British King was influenced by the Nazis; if he had not married outside the bounds of his social place, and had remained King, what then???
Your scenario might have ended with Fascism in command in Britain and the Royal Navy. Or not. Just hard to know what the consequences would look like today. And then there is the fact that the A-bomb would have been developed by someone by now - and perhaps it woulda been even worse it that hadn’t been us????
And I still say, if the US really was “neutral” before entering WWI, we should have told the Brits straight up that unless they ended their Naval Blockade of Germany, we weren’t going to risk our ships to supply Britain.
Of course Britain knew that choking off Germany would lead to the U-Boats going after US shipping and inevitably provide the Casus Belli for us getting into the war.
Reminds me of Lt. Spiers wasting the Kraut POWs in “Band of Brothers”, even offering them cigarettes before blasting them away.
I’m sure those kinds of things happened all the time, but it was kept hush hush. That’s war.
That is a strong position to argue from, I agree.I wonder if the Associated Press has any fingerprints on that issue . . .
IOW, Germans did more to try to rid the world of that damned Austrian a-hole than anyone else in the world. Thanks harpygoddess.
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