The thing is without what I call race insanity (which yes, I know is at the very heart of Nazism) Germany probably could have successfully appealed to many Jews in Poland and throughout eastern Europe. After all many of them spoke Yiddish which is basically a German dialect and its not like they were treated very well in much of eastern Europe.
The Germans had legitimate grievances after WWI (Austria voted democratically to join Germany and was not allowed to, the Sudetenlanders were never consulted before being placed as an oppressed minority in a newly created Czech-Slovak state, ethnic Germans in the “Polish Corridor” were similarly never consulted nor were those in Sud Tyrol before their land was given to Italy nor were those in Elsass Lothringen before their land was given to France nor those few whose land was given to Belgium. But of course all that was lost when instead of getting a sane nationalist who would press their legitimate claims, they got a raving lunatic.
Before Mussolini became Hitler’s little bitch, with regards to racial policies, many Jews supported the Fascists in Italy. Even Count Ciano was married to a Jewess.
A lot of ethnic groups in Eastern Europe were not allowed to choose what country they would become part of. Italy annexed a lot of land inhabited by Slovenes and Croats. The rest of the Slovenes, Croats and Bosnian were handed over to Serbia--Yugoslavia was essentially a Greater Serbia. Even though the Montenegrins are mostly Serbian Orthodox in religion, apparently many of them would have preferred to keep their separate kingdom.
Dear FLT-bird,
Your words are the most concise on this matter which I have read in a long, long time🙂
That was the heart of the matter. Hitler had, sadly, managed to camouflage himself as an idealistic man of the people. When he had gotten into power and consolidated it, his mask slipped off, bit by bit.
A sane nationalist - as you stated it so well - might have been able to get a compromise with the neighbors regarding the fate of the Germanophone minorities within their respective countries, e.g. a regional autonomy in linguistic/cultural terms - or maybe even, to some degree, in political matters; although that would, imho, with the defeat of Germany in 1918, almost have been too good to be true.
Had there been a compromise peace agreement in, say, 1916; well, that would have given a much better chance for the establishment of certain inalienable rights for (e.g. German- or Hungarian-speaking) minorities within countries, which have ethnically different majorities.