Yeah, right. Such a thing would have been unheard of.
Had it not been for Sir Winston, things would have been a lot more problematic.
Posted on 10/04/2010 11:26:57 AM PDT by nickcarraway
One of Hitler's most senior Nazis set his heart on a stylish retirement in Cornwall following Germany's invasion of Britain, new research reveals.
Joachim von Ribbentrop, the Fuhrer's foreign minister, planned to live in St Michael's Mount, one of the most beautiful locations in the country.
He had served as the Nazi ambassador to Britain in the late 30s and had his eye on the picturesque tidal island, which is 400 yards offshore, after spending a week in Cornwall in 1937. He also plotted to keep Tregenna Castle, near St Ives, as a holiday home once the Nazis had achieved world domination.
Von Ribbentrop's love affair with Cornwall tallies with stories that the Luftwaffe was ordered to avoid bombing particular sections of the Cornish coast.
He was one of Hitler's closest henchmen and was notorious for his arrogance when serving in London. He was eventually hanged as a war criminal following the Nuremburg Trials.
His designs on Cornwall emerged after local artist Andrew Lanyon spent three years researching the Nazi's links with the county.
Drawing on local testimony and contemporary reports, he said Von Ribbentrop had expressed a desire to move there after the war.
He said: 'In one visit, he was here for about five days in 1937. He brought his aides with him and went to St Ives.
'He said how much he enjoyed Cornwall. He said: "You are going to be invaded, you need an air raid shelter." 'He said Hitler had promised him the whole of Cornwall, and when he saw Tregenna Castle he wanted to live there. But when he saw St Michael's Mount he thought that was better - I suspect he wanted Tregenna Castle as his holiday home, he was that arrogant.
(Excerpt) Read more at dailymail.co.uk ...
Torquay is in Devon. Don’t ever let a Cornishman catch you mistaking the two!
It is a known fact that Hitler was an anglophile who admired the British Empire and viewed Britain’s Indian Raj as a model for his planned rule of Russia.
Hitler would have loved to have gotten the Brits on side. That the Brits refused and sacrificed their prosperity and Empire to stop him is of enormous credit to Britain, who might have come out better if they had just sat by and watched the two equally wicked ideologies of Nazism and Communism fight each other to a standstill over in the East...
Britain, who might have come out better if they had just sat by and watched the two equally wicked ideologies of Nazism and Communism fight each other to a standstill over in the East...But in 1939, when Britain declared war on Germany, Hitler and Stalin were on the same side and had just carved up Poland.
Anyone who had read ‘Mein Kampf’ could have worked out what Hitler had on the cards as far as the USSR were concerned...
Good point about Mein Kampf... but the British general public never read it and I think Churchill would have had a hard sell on the notion “let the 2 dictators fight it out while we sit back and wait”.
Particularly when France was invaded.
Would Britain have made a deal if Churchill had been out of the picture? Impossible to be certain of course, but I think we probably would have. There was certainly enough political support for such a move - even in 1940 25% of the British public would have accepted "peace at any price". Hitler certainly thought Britain would come to the negotiating table. It was, after all, the smart move.
Hitler's objective was "lebensraum" - living room in the East - and the dismantling of the Bolshevick Russian state. War with the old enemy France was a neccesary precursor for that, but he had no ambitions against Britain and her empire. In fact he rather admired us. Besides, Britain's military situation in 1940 wasn't good. Although ultimately we would have had to lock horns with the Nazi's, a peace now would have given us a breather to build up our strength.
All of which proves how important Churchill was to the successful prosecution of World War II.
Mussolini is supposed to have said of Ribbentrop “you only have to look at his head to realise what a small brain he has.”
I guess there must be a difference between intelligence and wisdom...
A lot of people bought “Mein Kampf”, but very few actually got round to reading it. It is not exactly the most satisfying of reads...
I thought I read somewhere that, Hitler was hoping Stalin would have stayed on as the ruler of his Russian puppet state; despite being mortal enemies, Hitler greatly admired Stalin.
France wouldn’t have been invaded anyway if we had omitted to declare war on Germany for invading Poland. That was a waste of time wasn’t it? Declaring war to defend Poland, only to see Poland ending up crushed underneath the boot of a totalitarian tyrant anyway... On the basis of achieving our original war aims, WWII wasn’t that much of a victory for Britain. As it was, all we managed to achieve was not getting our ass kicked too hard, and for that, we ended up worse off than we were before...
That's TWO totalitarian tyrants. They might have held out longer in the East against Hitler, had not the Soviets come in. At least long enough for British and French aid to get there. Although I still doubt if Britain and France really would have done much anyway.
Yeah, right. Such a thing would have been unheard of.
Had it not been for Sir Winston, things would have been a lot more problematic.
Yep, Churchill’s own party thought he was nuts when he railed against Hitler in the mid-30s, they did everything they could to try to kick him out of the party.
I certainly don’t think all Brits would have rolled over per Chamberlain, and no doubt many would have rallied around the royals, but had it not been for Churchill things would have been far worse for GB, and by extension, us.
Apparently Rudolf Hess flew to Scotland in 1941 to finalize a peace deal with certain British aristocrats so that the Germans could concentrate on the Russians. The Germans planned for the ex-king, the Duke of Windsor to take over the throne.
Unfortunately for Hess, MI-5 and Churchill knew about the whole affair and collared Hess when he crash-landed.
Certain British lords (such as the king’s cousin the Duke of Kent) died under mysterious circumstances not too long afterwards.
Hitler was the one who ordered the Luftwaffe to shift their priority from attacking the RAF infrastructure to bombing other targets, partly in retaliation for the British managing to bomb Berlin.
Goering was an interesting character. As a WW1 ace (and the successor to Richtofen in command of the Flying Circus), he was a kind of rock star in Weimar Germany And like a lot of rock stars, he was also vain, hedonistic and completely amoral. I tend to doubt that he was really a "true believer" Nazi, and instead was an utter opportunist.
On the other hand, he might have been one of the smartest of the Nazis. His performance at the Nuremburg Trials, once he'd been weaned off his morphine addiction, shows that he was not an imbecile. Even the prosecutors developed a grudging respect for him, at least in comparison to his co-defendants.
I was talking more about how the Soviets ended up occupying and oppressing Poland after the war, which France and Britain had originally gone in to defend and liberate...
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