Patrick J. Buchanan’s mendacious recent book, “Churchill, Hitler, and the Unnecessary War” (Crown Publishers, 2008, ISBN 978-0-307-40515-9) was recently exposed again. This time by professor Richard J. Evans’s conclusion that “Hitler’s plan was to exterminate the indigenous inhabitants of Eastern Europe, set up farms and factories and make Germany a great power.” He makes this statement in his new book “The Third Reich at War,” which describes events 1939 through 1945 as the third volume of his critically acclaimed history of Nazi Germany.
Profesor Evans holds the Regius Professorship of Modern History at the University of Cambridge. He decided that there was no book on Nazi era, that he could recommend. The first two books of his trilogy were: “The Coming of the Third Reich” (2003) and “The Third Reich in Power” (2005). “The Third Reich at War” is a comprehensive work based on a wide range of primary sources, personal papers of German generals as well as testimony of the survivors of German atrocities in diaries, letters, etc.
In his first volume professor Evans points out that the Weimar Republic did, in fact, bring Nazism, because of its Jewish dominated politics and the Depression when in the middle of 1932 one third of the work force was unemployed midst terrible inflation.
The historic perspective of professor Evans’s books are in complete disagreement with Buchanan’s erroneous ideas, that there were two main causes of the decline of the West, namely the declaration of war on Germany in 1914 and British guarantees to Poland in March 1939, which according to Buchanan, gave an opportunity to the “reckless” Poles to start the Second World War.
According to professor Evans the Nazis aimed to conquer Europe. Hitler, an uneducated man, saw Eastern Europe as the final stage of the thousand year old German “Drang nach dem Slawischer Osten” – his plan was to exterminate the indigenous inhabitants, set up farms and factories and make Germany a great world power.
Buchanan, on the other hand, claims that the Poles should have forgotten their thousand years history and accept “Hitler’s hand of friendship,” sign the Anti-Komintern Pact and help Hitler to defeat the Soviet Union. In the perspective of history described by Evans and other historians, it would have been a suicidal folly for the Poles to do what Buchanan writes that they should have done, in his mendacious book on the “Unnecessay War,”.
From the beginning, contrary to Buchana’s version of history, the truth is that, facing German mobilization, which started on July 31, 1914, Russia also mobilized. Then on August 1, 1914, the already mobilized Germany, declared war on Russia by means of an ultimatum, which stated that if Russia does not demobilize within 12 hours, Germany will (and actually did) attack Russia. Thus, Germany started the actual fighting of the First World War, and were at first successful on the eastern front as long as the battles were fought within the west European network of railroads with narrower spacing between rails. Farther east, German operation became more difficult.
Next day after the virtual declaration of war on Russia, on August 2, 1914, German ultimatum to Belgium demanded free passage in order to attack France, whom the Germans hoped to defeat as quickly as they did in 1871. The defeat of Russia by Germany and German colonization of Russia, similar to the British colonization of India, was to take a longer time, according to Aleksander Guczkow, defense minister in Kerensky’s government.
According to Guchkov, Germans wanted to treat Russia like the British treated India, so that they could build “the German Empire from the Rhine River to Vladivostok” in competition for world domination against the British Empire. The Germans wanted to end British control of the seas. German victory was to promote Germany from number three to the number one colonial power on the globe.
Loosing on the western front, Germans had to give up temporarily the building of “the German Empire from the Rhine River to Vladivostok” and moved their troops from the Russian front to the western front in France. In order to do so, the German government recruited Lenin, a refugee in Switzerland, in order to get him start a revolution in Russia, so that the German army could have more soldiers for combat in France.
Six million dollars in gold was brought to Russia from Germany by Lenin, and twenty million dollars in gold from New York was brought by Leon Trotsky (Lev Davidovich Bronstein), on board of the ship “Christiana Fiord,” for the financing of the Bolshevik takeover of the government in St Petersburg. It was done mainly by hiring, for that purpose, the local organized criminal gangs. The Bolshevik government, whom no one wanted, had to use terror, in order to take over the rains of power and to stay in power.
True to Lenin’s mission for which he was recruited, the Bolshevik government surrendered to Germany at Brest Litovsk on February 9, 1918 and formally agreed to make Russia a vassal of Germany, as the first step towards building of the “German Empire from the Rhine River to Vladivostok.”
German capitulation on the Western Front on November 11, 1918, postponed the grandiose German plans to colonize Eastern Europe till 1939. Hitler’s “best case scenario” was to start with the annexation of the Ukraine. Before shooting started Hitler told the representative of the League of Nations, Jacob Burkhardt, in August 1939, that if the West is too stupid to understand that Hitler’s purpose is to destroy Soviet Russia, then Hitler would join Russia in order to defeat the West, and after his victory over the West, he would destroy the Soviet Union.
My wartime recollection illustrates the degree of brainwashing of the German soldiers. I remember that while being incarcerated for five years as a political prisoner in Sachsenhausen concentration camp near Berlin, I have heard a conversation between of two officers of the Waffen SS who, by the end of 1942, still believed that after winning the Second World War, Germany would have to attack Japan in order to establish a mighty German marine base in Vladivostock, to dominate the Pacific Ocean.
According to Goebbel’s Diary, Hitler believed the British Empire “must be preserved if at all possible. For if it collapses, then we [the Germans] shall not inherit it.” According to Buchanan, Hitler believed that “the British were a superior race and a fit partner for Germany,” while the ardent Zionist Winston Churchill was “his worst enemy, the tool of English Jews who had scorched an Anglo-German alliance.” During the 1940 invasion of France, when British forces were fleeing towards Dunkirk in panic to evacuate, Hitler personally ordered a halt to two SS divisions, which were about to annihilate the retreating British who were on the mercy of the German air force, while defenselessly crossing from France to England.
One should point out that earlier, on August 22, 1939, furious because the Poles derailed his “best case scenario against Russia,” Hitler ordered his generals to use utmost ferocity against all ethnic Poles and made sure that German ammunition boxes were stamped with words “Do not save” or “Nicht Schparen.” German records indicate that their war machine used in the assault on Poland in the fall of 1939 over 400 million rounds of rifle and machine gun ammunition, over two million artillery shells, and about 70,000 aerial bombs. The next year in the 1940 conquest of France, the Germans used less than half as much ammunition, artillery shells, and bombs. Germany and the Soviet Union, immediately started to commit mass murders in Poland. Their purpose was the “beheading the Polish nation” by murdering its intellectual elite.
The Poles realized that German victory in 1939 over the USSR would result in the annexation of the Ukraine by Germany and liquidation of the Polish state in its historic lands, which to Buchanan, if anything represents no more than “collateral damage.” German treatment of their former Italian allies by the end of war represents a small-scale illustration what would have happened to the Poles, after their “useful role in collapse of Russia” would end and Hitler would start “to exterminate the indigenous inhabitants of Eastern Europe, to set up farms and factories and make Germany a great power.”
On the other hand, in case of its victory, the Soviet “evil empire” would convert Poland into a satellite state on the historic Polish lands, thus at least leaving open a possibility for Poles to fight for their freedom later on. For this reason the Poles chose the lesser evil and did not to help Hitler to destroy the USSR in 1939. It was either total annihilation of a nation of 36 million (in 1939), or temporary enslavement of some 24 million (what was left of Poland after the Second World War).
Patrick J. Buchanan presented a falsified story in his book. He falsely claimed that there were two causes of the decline of the West, namely the declaration of war on Germany in 1914 and British guarantees to Poland in March 1939, which according to Buchanan gave an opportunity to the Poles to start the Second World War. This is nonsense. One can only surmise that these falsifications stem from Buchanan‘s zeal to criticize the current irresponsibility of issuing security guarantees by the USA to over 50 countries. While it is legitimate to criticize the extent of the international commitments by the United States, it is illegitimate to do so at the expense of Poland whose sons and daughters were silenced first by the Nazis, and then by the fifty years of Soviet occupation of that country.