Biggest Mistakes the Axis made iyo.

[Saras]

Kraftwerk, I always planned to buy some of their stuff. Which album would you reccomend?

[molly bloom]

Originally posted by Saras
Kraftwerk, I always planned to buy some of their stuff. Which album would you reccomend?

Oh dear- if you're like me, all of them.


'Autobahn' was my first, way back in 1974. I still have a tremendous fondness for it, and I think side one is one of the best pieces of 70s music.


'Trans Europe Express' I can also recommend and 'Computer World' too. There's also an excellent album called 'Ralf and Florian' which is well worth purchasing.

[Saras]

I don't think I'm like you, I'm more of a metal guy myself.

Autobahn and TransEuropeExpress are rated 5/5 in allmusic.com

[molly bloom]

Originally posted by Saras
I don't think I'm like you, I'm more of a metal guy myself.

Autobahn and TransEuropeExpress are rated 5/5 in allmusic.com

My brother was a metalhead/prog rock fan.

[Saras]

Funny you mentioned prog - I went to see the still alive Ian Anderson with Jethro Tull live in Vilnius. I thought it would be MUCH worse, it turned out ok'ish.

Good way to threadjack a thread about Axis mistakes

[molly bloom]

Originally posted by Saras
Funny you mentioned prog - I went to see the still alive Ian Anderson with Jethro Tull live in Vilnius. I thought it would be MUCH worse, it turned out ok'ish.

Good way to threadjack a thread about Axis mistakes

I used to own 'Songs From The Wood' many, many years ago. I still have a certain fondness for 'Aqualung' too, but I prefer the more folk influenced Tull.

[Ecthy]

What was worse for Vilna - the Wehrmacht or Jethro Tull?

[Saras]

Too close to call.

[molly bloom]

Originally posted by Ecthelion
What was worse for Vilna - the Wehrmacht or Jethro Tull?

Jazdíme a jazdíme a jazdíme po dial'nici
Pred nami leí hlboké údolie
Slnko svieti iarivými lúmi
Vozovka je sivá stuka
Biele iary, zelený kraj
Zapíname rádio
A z reproduktora znie:
Jazdíme po dial'nici .


Not Lithuanian, but I'm feeling all Jeux Sans Frontieres.

[Saras]

Slovak, funny enough, is sort of readable if you know Russian.

[Ecthy]

Stuka?

[Saras]

Stukach.

[Lancer]

Kraftwerk, Autobahn.

One of my favorites when I was a youngster.

The biggest mistake tha axis made was not following a common path toward national goals. They all just did what they wanted and called it an alliance. In fact it was just a bad boys club.

Japan and Germany should have worked together on Russia.

Italy should have followed Germany's lead instead of getting Germany embroiled in the Balkans and Africa.

Also, Germany was not prepared for victory in France. They should have had the Rhine barges ready to go across the channel as an extention of the battle of France and maybe even before the second phase of the French campaign. It would have been a costly mess but surprise would have been on their side and the BEF would still have been at Dunkirk.

[Ned]

Dr. Strangelove, you are right that Slovakia, as opposed to Czech, was not part of the HRE. But it was subject to Austria.

The effort in Poland was to restore Danzig and a corridor to it. The diplomatic exchanges until the Brit interference was quite cordial. After that, the Poles stopped talking, became beligerent and Germany girded for war.

Note also that after the war started, the Germans wanted a negotiated settlement; but the Brits refused to negotiate. The internal memo's noted that the Brits wartime goal was to remove the German government, not to restore Poland. I will conduct more research on whether the Polish goverment in exile supported this position or favored negotiations to restore at least some of their country from Nazi rule.

BTW, I was thinking that the true start of the "World War" was not the invasion of Poland or the British and French declarations of war. Nothing of significance happened for months after the declaration while at least the German side sought a way to end the war. The true start of the World War was when those attempts at negotiations failed and Germany began its offensives in 1940.

[Ned]

Here is a detailed account of the negotiations between Germany and Britain that occurred in late September and early October. According to the footnotes, critical British documents on these negotiations remain under seal until 2015. But what seems clear is that Hitler acceeded to British demands for a peace conference, but still Chamberalain decided for war. It is unclear why, but FDR may have had something to do with it.

"As he privately informed Reichsleiter Alfred Rosenberg on September 29, he intended to propose a grand peace conference to arrange an armistice, demobilization, and the general settlement of outstanding problems, but if need be he would launch an offensive in the west. He was not afraid of the Maginot line. If the British would not accept the peace he offered, then he would destroy them. And Baron Ernst von Weizs”cker recorded Hitler as saying in his presence that day that the new offensive might cost Germany a million men—but it would cost the enemy the same number, and the enemy could ill afford the loss. Hitler repeated his arguments to his army and army group commanders when he assembled them in the Chancellery the next day to receive his thanks for the Polish triumph."
...

"For the first two weeks of October 1939, Hitler unquestionably wavered between continuing the fight—which meant launching an almost immediate offensive in the west—and making peace with the remaining belligerents on the best terms he could get. The fact that he had ordered the Wehrmacht to get ready for “Operation Yellow” (Fall Gelb, the attack on France and the Low Countries) in no way detracts from the reality of his peace offensive. Whatever his final decision, there was no time to be lost.

Hitler saw powerful arguments against stopping the fighting while the Reich’s military advantage was at its height. Nevertheless, he would probably have settled for what he had already conquered—if only to be able to return to his grandiose architectural dreams. Besides, Germany would have needed at least fifty years to digest the new territories and carry out the enforced settlement programs planned by Heinrich Himmler to fortify the German blood in the east. Thus Hitler’s peace feelers toward London were sincere—not just a ploy to drive a wedge between Britain and France. Weizs”cker wrote early in October : “The attempt to wind up the war now is for real. I myself put the chances at 20 percent, [Hitler] at 50 percent ; his desire is 100 percent. If he obtained peace, the thesis that Britain would sacrifice Poland would be proven quasi right. And besides, it would eliminate the awkward decision as to how to reduce Britain by military means.” Early in September G–ring had hinted to the British through Birger Dahlerus, the Swedish businessman whom Hitler had already accepted as an unofficial intermediary to London during August, that Germany would be willing to restore sovereignty to a Poland shorn of the old German provinces excised from the Fatherland at the end of the Great War ; there would also be an end to the persecution of the Jews and a reduction in German armaments. The British response had been a cautious readiness to listen to the detailed German proposals.

But since these proposals had been made, the Russians, as per their agreement with the Nazis, had seized eastern Poland. Hitler told G–ring and Dahlerus in Berlin late on September 26 that if the British still wanted to salvage anything of Poland, they would have to make haste. They would have to send a negotiator who would take him seriously, and now he could do nothing without consulting his Russian friends. As for the Jewish question, the Germans proposed that it be solved by using the new Poland as a sink into which Europe’s Jews should be emptied. Hitler approved the proposal that a secret meeting take place between German and British emissaries—perhaps G–ring himself and General Sir Edmund Ironside—in Holland. Dahlerus left for London at once.(3)

"3 From the papers released to the Public Record Office in London it is clear that neither Chamberlain nor Halifax rejected Hitler’s terms out of hand when Dahlerus described them. Even Churchill talked approvingly of an armistice. However, the file that evidently contains notes of Chamberlain’s talk with Dahlerus on September 29, 1939, is closed until 1990, and forty-five pages of the foreign office file on Germany and future policy (F.O.371/22,985) covering the crucial period of October 3-4, 1939, are unavailable until the year 2015. A two-volume history of Anglo-German peace negotiations by Dr. Bernd Martin, of the University of Freiburg, is to appear shortly.

...

"The F¸hrer read this formidable document to his uncomfortable generals on the tenth. We shall return to it at greater length shortly. In it, he insisted that Britain’s long-range goal remained unchanged : the disintegration of the powerful German bloc, and the annihilation and dissolution of this new Reich with its eighty million people. The long-range German war aim must therefore be the absolute military defeat of the West (in which the destruction of the enemy’s forces was more important than the gaining of enemy territory). This was the struggle which the German people must now assume. Despite all this, he added, a rapidly achieved peace agreement would still serve German interests—provided that Germany was required to relinquish nothing of her gains.


Hitler ignored none of the various unofficial channels for negotiation with the West now that Poland had been laid low. Over the next few days, however, it became clear that while some circles in Britain—notably in the air ministry—wanted an armistice, there was in the British Cabinet a hard core of opposition to whom all talk of making a deal with Hitler was anathema. Hitler was probably right in identifying the main source of this stubborn anti-German line as Churchill, now First Lord of the Admiralty, and the clique around him. On September 29, Alfred Rosenberg secured Hitler’s permission to take up feelers put out through an intermediary in Switzerland by officials of the British air ministry ; but this glimmer of hope was shortly extinguished when the intermediary reported that the forces for peace in that ministry had been pushed to the wall by the more militant forces at Churchill’s beck and call. Little more was heard of these diffident approaches from London.

At this stage in Hitler’s thought processes there came an ostensible intervention by President Roosevelt that was as abrupt in its approach as it was enigmatic in denouement. At the beginning of October an influential American oil tycoon arrived in Berlin on a peace mission for which he had apparently received a ninety-minute personal briefing from Roosevelt. He was William Rhodes Davis, whose own personal interest lay in preventing any disruption of his oil business with Germany. He had been brought into contact with Roosevelt by John L. Lewis, leader of the CIO, the United States labor federation whose fourteen million members represented a political force no president could afford to ignore. Lewis was originally both anti-Fascist and anti-Communist, but he had, said Davis, been impressed by the significant rise in the living standards of the German worker under National Socialism. Anxious about the effects of a long war on American export markets, Lewis had obliged Roosevelt to entrust this unofficial peace mission to Davis.

In Berlin the oilman met G–ring, and a seven-page summary of the discussion of the alleged Roosevelt proposals survives.(4)

4 Signed by Ministerialdirektor Wohlthat, this remarkable document was not published in the postwar volumes of captured German documents ; nor were the German reports on the Dahlerus missions that followed.

"It was evidently given wide confidential circulation in Berlin, for sardonic references to Roosevelt’s sudden emergence as an “angel of peace” bent on securing a third term figure in several diaries of the day.
President Roosevelt is prepared to put pressure on the western powers to start peace talks if Germany will provide the stimulus. President Roosevelt asks to be advised of the various points Germany wants to settle, for example, Poland and the colonies. In this connection President Roosevelt also mentioned the question of the purely Czech areas, on which however a settlement need not come into effect until later. This point was touched on by President Roosevelt with regard to public opinion in the United States, as he must placate the Czech voters and the circles sympathizing with them if he is to exercise pressure on Britain to end the war.

Davis assured G–ring that Roosevelt’s main strategic concern was to exploit the present situation to destroy Britain’s monopoly of the world markets. “In his conversation with Davis, Roosevelt explained that he was flatly opposed to the British declaration of war. He was not consulted by Britain in advance.” Roosevelt suspected that Britain’s motives were far more dangerous and that they had nothing to do with Poland ; he himself recognized that the real reason for the war lay in the one-sided Diktat of Versailles which made it impossible for the German people to acquire a living standard comparable with that of their neighbors in Europe. Roosevelt’s proposal, according to the unpublished summary, was that Hitler be allowed to keep Danzig and all the now Polish provinces taken from Germany by the treaty of Versailles, that all Germany’s former African colonies be restored to her forthwith, and that the rest of the world give Germany financial assistance in establishing a high standard of living.

This was not all. If Daladier and Chamberlain refused to comply, then President Roosevelt would support Germany—Davis reported—in her search for a just, tolerable, and lasting peace : he would supply Germany with goods and war supplies “convoyed to Germany under the protection of the American armed forces” if need be. John L. Lewis had privately promised Davis that if some such agreement could be reached between Germany and the United States his unions would prevent the manufacture of war supplies for Britain and France.

G–ring outlined Davis’s message in detail to the F¸hrer immediately after the meeting, and on October 3 the field marshal announced to the American that in his important speech to the Reichstag on the sixth Hitler would make a number of peace proposals closely embodying the points Davis had brought from Washington. (Hitler’s more detailed proposals as described by G–ring indeed went so far that their sincerity is open to question.) G–ring told Davis : “If in his [Roosevelt’s] opinion the suggestions afford a reasonable basis for a peace conference, he will then have the opportunity to bring about this settlement.... You may assure Mr. Roosevelt that if he will undertake this mediation, Germany will agree to an adjustment whereby a new Polish state and an independent Czechoslovak government would come into being. However this information is for him [Roosevelt] alone and to be used only if necessary to bring about a peace conference.” G–ring was willing to attend such a conference in Washington.

When Davis went back to the United States with the five detailed points Hitler proposed, he was accompanied by a German official, a “special ambassador” appointed to settle any details. Hitler hoped for an interim reply from Roosevelt by the fifth. (As Rosenberg wrote : “It would be a cruel blow for London to be urgently “advised” by Washington to sue for peace!”) But something had gone wrong with the mission : when Davis reached Washington he was not readmitted to the President, and they did not meet again.

A different aspect of Roosevelt’s policy was revealed by the Polish documents ransacked by the Nazis from the archives of the ruined foreign ministry building in Warsaw. The dispatches of the Polish ambassadors in Washington and Paris laid bare Roosevelt’s efforts to goad France and Britain into war with Germany while he rearmed the United States and psychologically prepared the American public for war. In November 1938, William C. Bullitt, his personal friend and ambassador in Paris, had indicated to the Poles that the President’s desire was that “Germany and Russia should come to blows,” whereupon the democratic nations would attack Germany and force her into submission ; in the spring of 1939, Bullitt quoted Roosevelt as being determined “not to participate in the war from the start, but to be in at the finish”—the United States without doubt would fight, but “only if France and Britain kick off first.” Bullitt was said by the Poles to have carried with him to Paris a “suitcase full of instructions” outlining the pressure he was to put on the Quai d’Orsay not to compromise with the totalitarian powers ; at the same time Washington was applying “various exceptionally significant screws” to the British. Washington, Bullitt had told the Polish diplomats, was being guided not by ideological considerations but solely by the material interests of the United States. The Warsaw documents left little doubt as to what had stiffened Polish resistance to German demands during the August 1939 crisis.


On Friday October 6, Hitler spoke to the Reichstag. His “appeal for peace” was addressed to the British in more truculent and recriminatory language than many of his more moderate followers would have wished. He singled out Churchill—who was then First Lord of the Admiralty—as a representative of the Jewish capitalist and journalistic circles whose sole interest in life lay in the furtherance of arson on an international scale.

On the ninth, he issued to his commanders in chief a formal directive to prepare for “Yellow” with all haste, in the event that “Britain and, under her command, France as well” were not disposed to end the war. His soldiers were, however, full of optimism. General Rommel wrote from Berlin on the seventh : “The reaction of the neutrals [to the F¸hrer’s speech] seems very good. The others will be able to think it over during the weekend. There is not much going on here otherwise. If the war ends soon, I hope I will soon be able to go home. . . .”

Hitler had sent Dahlerus to London for talks with Chamberlain. Late on October 9 the Swede reported to him the conditions Britain was attaching to peace negotiations : in addition to insisting on a new Polish state, Britain wanted all weapons of aggression destroyed forthwith ; and there must be a plebiscite in Germany on certain aspects of her foreign policy. These were hard terms to swallow, for in public Hitler was still claiming that the future of Poland was a matter for Germany and Russia alone to decide, and Britain was blithely ignoring the growing armed strength of the Soviet Union and her expansionist policies. Nevertheless, on the tenth, Dahlerus was instructed to advise London that Hitler would accept these terms on principle. The Swedish negotiator saw Hitler twice that day before he departed for a promised rendezvous with a British emissary at The Hague. He took with him a formal letter from G–ring and a list of Hitler’s proposals—which included a new Polish state ; the right for Germany to fortify her new frontier with Russia ; guarantees backed by national plebiscite ; nonaggression pacts between Germany, France, Britain, Italy, and the Soviet Union ; disarmament ; and the return of Germany’s former colonies or suitable substitute territories.(5) Dahlerus noted to one German officer after meeting Hitler that “Germany for her part was able to swallow even tough conditions, provided they were put in a palatable form.” He said he was taking with him to Holland more than enough to dispel Britain’s smoldering mistrust of Hitler.

In Holland, however, Dahlerus waited in vain for the promised British emissary. The British foreign office asked him to describe Hitler’s proposals to their local envoy and to remain at The Hague until he heard from London. Berlin optimistically viewed this request as a positive token of British interest and agreed that he should wait there. But Chamberlain’s eagerly awaited speech to the House of Commons the next day, October 12, exploded Hitler’s confident expectation that peace was about to descend on Europe after five weeks of war. Chamberlain dismissed Hitler’s public offer (of the sixth) as “vague and uncertain”—he had made no suggestion for righting the wrongs done to Czechoslovakia and Poland. If Hitler wanted peace, said Chamberlain, “acts—not words alone—must be forthcoming.” That same evening Hitler sent for G–ring, Milch, and Udet of the Luftwaffe and instructed them to resume bomb production at the earliest possible moment. “The war will go on !” Dahlerus was asked to return from The Hague to Berlin forthwith. Edouard Daladier’s reply to Hitler was no less abrupt. “Before these answers came,” Weizs”cker wrote two days later, “the F¸hrer himself had indulged in great hopes of seeing his dream of working with Britain fulfilled. He had set his heart on peace. Herr von Ribbentrop seemed less predisposed toward it. He sent the F¸hrer his own word picture of a future Europe like the empire of Charlemagne.”

To the Swedish explorer Sven Hedin a few days later Hitler voiced his puzzlement at Britain’s intransigence. He felt he had repeatedly extended the hand of peace and friendship to the British, and each time they had blacked his eye in reply. “The survival of the British Empire is in Germany’s interests too,” Hitler noted, “because if Britain loses India, we gain nothing thereby.” Of course he was going to restore a Polish state—he did not want to gorge himself with Poles ; as for the rest of Chamberlain’s outbursts, he, Hitler, might as well demand that Britain “right the wrongs” done to India, Egypt, and Palestine. Britain could have peace any time she wanted, but they—and that included that “brilliantined moron” Eden and the equally incompetent Churchill—must learn to keep their noses out of Europe.

And in a fit of anger Hitler complained to Dahlerus about “the unbelievable behavior of Mr. Chamberlain”; from now on Germany would fight Britain tooth and nail—he did not propose to bargain with her any longer. Dahlerus left the Chancellery in a huff at the failure of his peace effort, but was later soothed by G–ring, who sent an important German decoration around to him that same evening."

...

"An indirect but readily traceable result of the British snub of his peace overture was a further hardening in Hitler’s attitude to the future of Poland. After his Reichstag speech of October 6, he did not renew his offer to set up a rump Polish state. The Poland of 1939 would be subdivided, dismembered, and repopulated in such a way that it would never again rise to embarrass Germany or the Soviet Union. The eastern half, of course, had gone to Stalin ; in the west, part would be absorbed by the Reich, while central Poland, i.e., the districts of Warsaw, Radom, Lublin, and Cracow, would become a Polish reservation under exclusively German rule—a reservoir of cheap labor for the Reich’s industries. By the end of September, Hitler had already drafted the first decrees for radical surgery of Poland’s population under the overall direction of Heinrich Himmler as “Reich Commissioner for the Consolidation of the German Population.” The Polish and Jewish populations in western Poland were to be displaced to a reservation in central Poland, and refugees of German descent from the Baltic states and eastern Poland would take their place."

http://www.fpp.co.uk/books/Hitler/1977/html_chapter/02.html