Theos-Talk Archives (June 2002 Message tt00203)

Frank:

If I remember correctly, when William Shirer started researching his 
book, THE RISE AND FALL OF THE THIRD REICH, a lot of people in Europe 
objected that it was too soon after the fact for someone to write 
about the war. Their contention was that fifty years would have to 
pass before emotions would cool down enough that anyone could put 
together an objective look at the war as an historical incident. 
Since the war ended in 1945, that suggests that serious history would 
have started around 1995.

Yes, it is true that any German chancellor would have had to take 
action against Stalin's impending encroachments in Europe. That has 
been recognized for some time. That almost certainly would have 
included yet another partition of Poland to create a buffer zone. 
Most people do not know that attacks on eastern Prussia by the Poles 
during the Weimar Republic years started the long series of events 
which propelled Hitler into power. It was because of this that the 
Sturmabteilung came into existence, an independent organization which 
Hitler used to leverage his own position in the twenties and 
thirties. However, the fact is that Hitler was a homicidal maniac, a 
fact which actually cost Germany the war. When he struck at the 
Soviet Union, his generals wanted to strike into the oil fields in 
the Caucasus region. Stalin would have then been forced either to 
counter attack, in which case the installations could have been blown 
up, or else to try to seize the oil fields in Iran, thereby bringing 
him into direct conflict with the British. Without oil he would have 
been forced to surrender or resort to guerilla warfare. Since Hitler 
was a homicidal maniac, his war goal was to kill as many people as 
possible, and he therefore ordered his men to attack major cities. 
It was at the gates of Stalingrad, Leningrad, and Moscow that the 
German army was chewed up and spit out. Minor questions, such as who 
committed which specific murders, seem to me to merely distract from 
the main issue. It has recently come out, for example, that some of 
the murdres of Jews formerly blamed on the SS were actually committed 
by Polish Christians, who wished to seize the property of their 
Jewish neighbors. That does not exculpate Hitler, though. A 
different chancellor would presumably have implemented less extreme 
and more sensible policies, with a better result.

As for the US war in Europe, there is not much getting around the 
fact that Hirohito, Hitler, and Mussolini all declared war on the US 
and not the other way around. We can argue about much else, but that 
is simply fact. A remarkable number of Europeans seem to be unaware 
of that. In Hitler's case, all his policies, with the exception of 
his antiSemitism, were copied in toto and without modification from 
his predecessor, Wilhelm II. That included his declaraion of war on 
the US and his slave labor program. Most historians believe that if 
Hitler had reneged on his promise to the Japanese and not declared 
war on the US, the entire fury of the US war effort would have been 
directed toward the dismantling of the Japanese Empire. The postwar 
bipolar world would have been the US and Germany instead of the US 
and the USSR.