Biggest Mistakes the Axis made iyo.

[Ned]

Dr. Strangelove, true. Just because Hitler was trying to restore the East Frankish Kingdom, HRE or whatever, doesn't mean he had a right to do so. I think the Wilsonian principles of "self determination" should have allowed Czechoslovakia to remain independent. But, when it came to Danzig and the Corridor, I think Germany had the better argument.

Now, regardless of the merits of Hitler's claims, what god given right did Britain have to tell Germany what lands could be or could not be part of the Reich? Everyone continues to focus on Germany and whether it was right in its claims or not. No one seems to care whether Britain's interference in Germany's affairs was legitimate. Without that interference, there would have been no world war.

[Ned]

An analogy may be Japan's recent remarks about Taiwan and China. One assumes from those remarks that it is Japan's intention to declare war on China if it attempts to take Taiwan by force.

Now, in this debate about this issue, we could ask whether China's claims on Taiwan were legitimate or not. But the larger question is what right does Japan have to poke its nose into a the affair at all? If a world war results from a Japanese declaration of war on China, whose fault is it that a war over Taiwan turned into a world war?

[Ted Striker]

I'd hitler it.

[BlackCat]

Nope. No sane person spends so much as a millisecond on such fantasies.

The fate of german, austrian an polish jews would have been the same, and when hitler started his attack on soviet he would have done it from a much stronger starting point and would probably have beaten them.

The result of passive France and Britain would probably have ended up in even more dead people than the known losses.

[Ned]

Blackcat, maybe. But it is true that as the war went on, the brutality on both sides increased exponentially. At the end, with the US and Britain blowing away Dresden and the US destroying virtually every major Japanese City, the rape of Nanking and the Nazi death camps no longer seem to be that bad. We were supposed to be the "good" guys, and yet we ourselves entered into barbarism, making deliberate attacks on civilians.

Had the war never been started, I am sure the Jews would not have been summarily killed. Hitler would have forced them to leave, but they would have gone to Israel, or some place like that. But certainly, millions of Europeans also would not have been killed.

The theory that nothing would have been changed had there been no war depends upon the inevitability of war regardless. But that also depends upon Hitler's relationship to the German people. He was popular because of the economy and because of his undoing of Versailles. Had he, though, gone on a world conquest that was not the result of Britain declaring war, I sincerely doubt he would have retained the confidence of the German people. After all, the last thing a dictator wants is to be overthrown.

[BlackCat]

Originally posted by Ned
Blackcat, maybe. But it is true that as the war went on, the brutality on both sides increased exponentially. At the end, with the US and Britain blowing away Dresden and the US destroying virtually every major Japanese City, the rape of Nanking and the Nazi death camps no longer seem to be that bad. We were supposed to be the "good" guys, and yet we ourselves entered into barbarism, making deliberate attacks on civilians.

This is a sick comparison. I don't think that bombardment of civilians is anything to be proud of, but to compare that with prisoners in deathcamps is far out. The civilians had aat least the possibility to go into shelters or flee while they to some degree was protected by military forces. Compared to people in a deathcamp with a gas chamber as neighbour, I for sure know what I would prefer.

Had the war never been started, I am sure the Jews would not have been summarily killed. Hitler would have forced them to leave, but they would have gone to Israel, or some place like that. But certainly, millions of Europeans also would not have been killed.

If hitler was such a little cutie that just would have let the jews leave, then please explain why it was so difficult for them to leave long before the war started by the german attack on Poland.

The theory that nothing would have been changed had there been no war depends upon the inevitability of war regardless. But that also depends upon Hitler's relationship to the German people. He was popular because of the economy and because of his undoing of Versailles. Had he, though, gone on a world conquest that was not the result of Britain declaring war, I sincerely doubt he would have retained the confidence of the German people. After all, the last thing a dictator wants is to be overthrown.

What are you talking about ? He was in total control of the country, and he went into a world conquest before Britain entered the war - the conquest of Poland was only the first step.

Do you really think that people like hitler and saddam are scared of the peoples opinion ? The only people they are scared of are the people that they share power with. Why do you think that hitler hit the SA or saddam regularly shot a general or two ?

[Spiffor]

Originally posted by BlackCat
If hitler was such a little cutie that just would have let the jews leave, then please explain why it was so difficult for them to leave long before the war started by the german attack on Poland.

Actually, many German Jews managed to flee with their lives during the decade before the final solution. This is BTW why German Jews were less massacred by it than Central Europe Jews.

I don't think that the war had to do with the final solution, myself. If anything, I think hitler was damn serious with his delirious idea that a genocide would clean the world, and he'd have put it into effect after the war if he had won. But the Jews might have had more time to pack and go to the US in such a situation.

[BlackCat]

Spiff, you are right, but their problem was that they often were sent back to germany despite the obvious danger.

[Alexander's Horse]

Originally posted by Spiffor

I don't think that the war had to do with the final solution, myself. If anything, I think hitler was damn serious with his delirious idea that a genocide would clean the world, and he'd have put it into effect after the war if he had won. But the Jews might have had more time to pack and go to the US in such a situation.

The war had everything to do with the final solution. It closed off other options for dealing with "the Jewish question" like immigration and, as many holocaust historians have argued, the genocide could only really have taken place under wartime conditions particularly of occupation, censorship and martial law. The war created the conditions where the unthinkable became thinkable.

Added to this, Hitler seems to have genuinely blamed the Jews for the war and warned several times before the war that if the Jews managed to plunge Europe into another war then retribution would be taken against them by Germany. Most people did not grasp what he really meant by this.

When the war turned against Germany the holocaust was accelerated almost as an act of revenge and in 1944 it came to be seen as at least one nazi goal that could be achieved regardless of the outcome of the war. Vast resources were spent transporting and killing people at a time when Germany was fighting for survival. This took precedence of desperate military needs.

In his last will and testament Hitler pointed to the final solution as his lasting gift to Europe and something that would one day be seen as a sign of his greatness. Europe would thank him he claimed. He again repeated that Jews had caused the war and the downfall Germany and so it was only right that Germany had taken measures against them.

[molly bloom]

Originally posted by Ned
Molly, reference the Hitler speech I quoted earlier in this thread where he is talking to Roosevelt in 1939, IIRC, about an ancient Reich and that the lands now subject to the Third Reich were subject to this ancient Reich.

What was he talking about? I think it is natural to think he is talking about the empire of Charlemagne, its Frankish predecessors, and its HRE successors. But I may be wrong.

It's irrelevant- just because he says something he believes in (or is saying simply for propaganda) doesn't mean it's true- perhaps you believe everything that came out of Goebbels' mouth too.

You haven't shown how Hitler could legitimately declare himself inheritor of this 'ancient Reich'- which in any case went through many mutations in its existence, including areas with no Germans and non-German territories.

You haven't even addressed the ancient existence of the Czech nation, or the heritage of the Kingdom of Bohemia, nor the difference between the Second Reich (one composed of German states and areas acquired by Brandenburg-Prussia by force, which lay outside the boundaries of the previous Reich) and the later stages of the Holy Roman Empire, when a loose agglomeration of territories was ruled over by a royal family many of whose personal holdings lay outside the boundaries of the Empire whose titular heads they were from time to time.

You choose to ignore that Sudeten Germans were never subjects of a German state, and that Hitler's propaganda was simply camouflage and persiflage.



Let's just imagine that Hitler was the legal inheritor of the elective crown of the Holy Roman Empire- which stage of this Empire's existence are you saying he should rightfully inherit ?

From when its territory included the Benelux countries, the County of Burgundy, Franche-Comte, Switzerland, Savoy, Lombardy, and parts of Italy all the way to the Papal States, southern Denmark, parts of Slovenia and Poland and the northern Adriatic ?


And you keep harping on about what 'right' Great Britain had to tell Germany about what should be in the Third Reich- as if somehow, Germany had every right to break international treaties to which it had been a signatory, and blackmail independent nations into surrendering territory which had never belonged to Germany!


I notice you don't mention the pre-existing treaties between Czechoslovakia and France and Great Britain - and you blithely seem to have assumed that Germany had every right to interfere in the INTERNAL politics of Austria and Czechoslovakia .

But when Great Britain stands by a treaty with another sovereign nation, suddenly they're interfering in Germany's business!

Let me give you two quotes:


' Europe in 1648: Political Units

" For a year after Nordlingen it looked as though Ferdinand II was going to make the German Empire a real state and himself the first effective Emperor since mediaeval times . " '

from the Penguin Atlas of Modern History (to 1815) by Colin McEvedy

and:

' In 1306, Bohemia came under the control of the House of Luxembourg and the rule of the Holy Roman Emperor Charles IV. This opened up a Golden Age for Bohemia: Prague became the political capital of the Holy Roman Empire and the Charles University, a major centre of culture and learning, was founded there.'


and:

' There was a Czech state, Bohemia, from the tenth century and for four centuries it was a flourishing and active power in central Europe. The kings of Bohemia held power until the sixteenth century... [...]

The boundaries of the new country (Czechoslovakia) were decided at the Paris peace conference of 1918-20 and brought together more peoples than simply Czechs and Slovaks... in the Sudetenland more than two million Germans had long been settled.

It was decided to include this very substantial minority within the new state since THEY HAD NEVER BEEN THE SUBJECTS OF A GERMAN STATE and there was no indication that they wanted to be. '

From- Ancestors: The Origins of the People and Countries of Europe, Martin berg and Miles Litvinoff, publ. Peter Lowe

[Ned]

nm

[Ned]

Well, we seem to agree that Bohemia and Moravia had long been part of the East Frankish Kingdom, aka, Kingdom of Germany, aka, HRE, aka, the First Reich even though they themselves were not German. Even as you said in your first post on this topic, the HRE was not a German Empire. It was however, an Empire or Kingdom that was primarily German.

Below is a map circa 1390. Note, at this date the Corridor and Danzig are part of the Kingdom of Germany.

It was one of Napoleon's formost objectives to break this Empire/Kingdom. He was successful. Bismarck tried to put the German-speaking part of it back together. He was successful, but he excluded the Austrians, who ruled much of the rest of the former HRE, and, as you pointed out, additional lands that were never part of the HRE. Prussia also included lands that had never been part of the HRE.

At the close of WWI, Lloyd George took a page from Napoleon's book. His central objective was to reduce the power of "Germany" by giving away its lands to its neighbors, and breaking up the Austrian Empire (as well as the Turkish Empire). Did George have a right to do this? No. But he had the power to do it and he did it. His map munipulation in Europe lead directly to WWII, the greatest war in human history. It also lead to the endless problems in the Middle-East and to the breakout of war between the Chinese and Japanese.

But, why did this have to lead to war? The reason clearly is that Britain continued Lloyd George's policy of weakening Germany by blocking or attempting to block Germany's moves to undo Versailles.

Now, it is clear that many here simply want to ignore history and label Hitler an evil world conqueror even from the time of Munich. But clearly the reason for this is to divert attention away from the disasterous British policies that are the cause the war in the first place.

It is a good thing that the Brits are no longer leading the world.

[BlackCat]

Do you seriously mean that todays borders shall be adjusted according to a map from 1360 ?

If that is the case, then why not take it a step furter and let Italy take over the areas that the roman empire (the real one) controlled at it's peak ? After all Rome was the capital of that empire and is now the capital of Italy.

[Ned]

Originally posted by BlackCat
Do you seriously mean that todays borders shall be adjusted according to a map from 1360 ?

If that is the case, then why not take it a step furter and let Italy take over the areas that the roman empire (the real one) controlled at it's peak ? After all Rome was the capital of that empire and is now the capital of Italy.

No, not at all. The major lesson we learned from WWII is not to take revenge on the defeated, but to convert enemies into friends.

As to the Roman Empire, the new European state is, in large, an attempt at its restoration in Europe. It will be interesting to see whether Britain cooperates this time.

[Ned]

Also, the point about 1390 is an attempt to understand what Hitler was saying. He referred to an ancient Reich in his speech. He also referred to Nazi Germany not as Germany but as the Third Reich. This clearly is a reference to a First Reich, and that must have been the East Frankish Kingdom, its predecessor and successor states. If this is correct, then one only had to look at a map of that "state" to judge Hitler's plans on reunification. This sets aside the issue of right and wrong, because that depends upon your point of view.

I only wish I knew more about what was being said in the British press during that era as I have a hard time understanding why the British people would support another major European war over the Corridor and Danzig.