Posted on 09/01/2009 6:11:37 AM PDT by Kaslin
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? Because the Poles had a war guarantee from Britain that, should Germany attack, Britain and her empire would come to Poland's rescue.
But why would Britain hand an unsolicited war guarantee to a junta of Polish colonels, giving them the power to drag Britain into a second war with the most powerful nation in Europe?
Was Danzig worth a war? Unlike the 7 million Hong Kongese whom the British surrendered to Beijing, who didn't want to go, the Danzigers were clamoring to return to Germany.
Comes the response: The war guarantee was not about Danzig, or even about Poland. It was about the moral and strategic imperative "to stop Hitler" after he showed, by tearing up the Munich pact and Czechoslovakia with it, that he was out to conquer the world. And this Nazi beast could not be allowed to do that.
If true, a fair point. Americans, after all, were prepared to use atom bombs to keep the Red Army from the Channel. But where is the evidence that Adolf Hitler, whose victims as of March 1939 were a fraction of Gen. Pinochet's, or Fidel Castro's, was out to conquer the world?
After Munich in 1938, Czechoslovakia did indeed crumble and come apart. Yet consider what became of its parts.
The Sudeten Germans were returned to German rule, as they wished. Poland had annexed the tiny disputed region of Teschen, where thousands of Poles lived. Hungary's ancestral lands in the south of Slovakia had been returned to her. The Slovaks had their full independence guaranteed by Germany. As for the Czechs, they came to Berlin for the same deal as the Slovaks, but Hitler insisted they accept a protectorate.
Now one may despise what was done, but how did this partition of Czechoslovakia manifest a Hitlerian drive for world conquest?
Comes the reply: If Britain had not given the war guarantee and gone to war, after Czechoslovakia would have come Poland's turn, then Russia's, then France's, then Britain's, then the United States.
We would all be speaking German now.
But if 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.
Hitler had never wanted war with Poland, but an alliance with Poland such as he had with Francisco Franco's Spain, Mussolini's Italy, Miklos Horthy's Hungary and Father Jozef Tiso's Slovakia.
Indeed, why would he want war when, by 1939, he was surrounded by allied, friendly or neutral neighbors, save France. And he had written off Alsace, because reconquering Alsace meant war with France, and that meant war with Britain, whose empire he admired and whom he had always sought as an ally.
As of March 1939, Hitler did not even have a border with Russia. How then could he invade Russia?
Winston Churchill was right when he called it "The Unnecessary War" -- the war that may yet prove the mortal blow to our civilization.
Yes ... and so does FUBO ... never waste a crisis
Pat always embarrasses himself when he talks about WWII.
Yes, in fact Hitler’s biggest fear was that Britain would appease him again, denying him the war he so badly wanted in Czechoslovakia.
Had he gotten Danzig and the Corridor, he then would have demanded Warsaw. Nothing was going to stop him from getting the war he wanted.
Being a really lousy strategist is not a sine qua non for not wanting war.
Sure, Buchanan, it would have stopped with Danzig. Yea, right .
There are many facts that would show how goofy this author’s premise is.
But consider this, if Hitler didn’t want war with Poland, why did he launch a premeditated, highly planned blitzkrieg? Why not simply occupy Danzig?
Instead military law was imposed and the thinking voices silenced. Not only did Hitler want war, he HAD to have it to succeed.
And Obama is much the same in where he is going.Watch the Obama administration try to create a situation where martial law will be declared in all of the USA or part of it, as Obamas true national socialist political agenda dedicated to historic justice , as in all of fascist history, becomes apparent, and resistance to him is manifest.
Another hitler defense by Pat Buchanon. What a fool. No wonder he is the token “conservative” on MSNBC.
Before the war, there were many in the west that saw Stalin as the greater enemy, not without some justification.
They believed that an alliance with Hitler against Bolshevism made sense. Many in Britain felt that if Britain could have her empire, why not let Germany have her empire in the East.
That was why during those years, Churchill was such an outcast.
I’m sure to Buchanan, such a deal with the Nazis made a lot of sense.
And the news media should no longer be describing Buchanan as "a conservative." No competent conservative should share Pat's views on international affairs.
Congressman Billybob
I guess Pat missed that chapter in “Mein Kampf” where Hitler talked about colonizing the East.
I can justify going to war over Thrasher's French Fires and Dayton's Chicken.
Hint: One word replies are often obscure to the recipient.
Mmmm. Thrasher’s french fries. Mouth watering.
People who are not conservative:
Pat Buchanan, Ron Paul, Neo-Confederates, Anti-semites
I’m beginning to suspect that Pat Buchanan has a Velvet Hitler hanging on his bedroom wall.
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