@SuperbattleshipYamato hard to argue against any of this really. The IJN was so far gone by this point in the war that there’s not really much they could have done to salvage their situation one way or another. The bit about the allies not having many LSTs in general is something I never knew before though.
Maybe Chamberlain was not enough of a coward?
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Thanks KG7. Again you display considerable knowledge of events.
I understand that Hitler had rational thought processes as well as irrational, a balance which gradually altered through the course of the war. Â Plus that it is important to understand both side’s viewpoints, which makes me open to some of your arguments.
However, I don’t see in your posts a willingness to engage with the Allies’ side of the confrontation, which troubles me.
Yes Stalin was a monster, but that doesn’t make Hitler a saint. R was certainly a threat, but so was G. Hitler had clear designs on R, but that does not mean he did not have designs on others too. The democracies mislead Poland and made mistakes, but that does not make them primarily responsible. And so on ….
A more evident balance in your posts would increase the chance of engagement with the tremendous knowledge you display.
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KurtGodel7…
I do not think it is disputed that Communism was a serious threat to the Western world, and that it was ignored by the Western democracies.
But the topic and the issue at hand is whether it would have been wiser for the Allies to have conceded to Hitler or to have fought Hitler.
On the last page, I brought up several points that I do not believe you acknowledged. Namely, the very real threat to democracy, the strong possibility of Axis victory against the USSR if things had gone according to plan and Britain had made peace after the fall of France, and the development of the Atomic Bomb, directly due to US involvement in the war in Europe, and which was the primary deterrent for Soviet aggression in the Post War period.
You have made a strong case for why the Soviets were a threat, but you have not made a strong case for why the Allies ignoring Hitler would have been a better idea than what they did.
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@Private:
Thanks KG7. Again you display considerable knowledge of events.
I understand that Hitler had rational thought processes as well as irrational, a balance which gradually altered through the course of the war. � Plus that it is important to understand both side’s viewpoints, which makes me open to some of your arguments.
However, I don’t see in your posts a willingness to engage with the Allies’ side of the confrontation, which troubles me.
Yes Stalin was a monster, but that doesn’t make Hitler a saint. R was certainly a threat, but so was G. Hitler had clear designs on R, but that does not mean he did not have designs on others too. The democracies mislead Poland and made mistakes, but that does not make them primarily responsible. And so on ….
A more evident balance in your posts would increase the chance of engagement with the tremendous knowledge you display.
However, I don’t see in your posts a willingness to engage with the Allies’ side of the confrontation, which troubles me.
A fair point.
One reason for that is because I see little alignment between Allied leaders’ values and mine. Below are several examples.
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Mass murder. I strongly oppose mass murder. The Allies did nothing at all which would suggest they felt the same way–at least not when that mass murder was being committed by the Soviet Union. Stalin could kill all the people he wanted, and the Western democracies rewarded him with defensive alliances, openness to Soviet influence, government-sponsored pro-Soviet propaganda films, and more. No major Western democracy adopted an anti-Soviet foreign policy prior to 1948.
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Mass murder part 2. Not content with merely turning a blind eye to Soviet mass murder, the Western democracies chose to indulge in mass murder of their own. That mass murder began in 1939, with their food blockade of Germany. In 1940, former U.S. president Herbert Hoover wrote the following:
The food situation in the present war is already more desperate than at the same stage in the [First] World War. … If this war is long continued, there is but one implacable end… the greatest famine in history.
Germany responded to famine conditions by feeding Germans first, Slavs second, Jews not at all. Exactly how you’d expect a Nazi government to respond to famine. As a result of this (predictable) response, millions of Poles starved to death. Granted, tens of millions of non-Poles were also starved or otherwise killed, including 6 million Jews. The reason I’m mentioning the Poles in particular is because Britain and France went to war in the first place claiming they wanted to help Poland! :o That is the second-most cynical and deceitful political claim I have ever encountered. Far from “helping” Poland, the very first thing those two nations did was to unleash a food blockade which killed millions of innocent Poles! As someone who’s part Polish myself, I find it hard to remain fully neutral about something like this. I’m sure that multiple members of my extended family died as a direct result of the Allies’ food blockade.
Hitler was Poland’s enemy too. But at least in that case, Hitler told Polish leaders what they needed to do to not be enemies with Germany; and they chose not to listen. It’s not like he led them on with false promises of help and friendship, only to push them into a ditch after they’d made the mistake of trusting him. (Which is how the Western democracies treated Poland.) Not only that, the Western democracies were completely open to the idea of a Soviet conquest of Poland. (As they demonstrated in 1920, and again in 1939, and a third time at Yalta.)
- Honesty. The more honest a government is, the more I will respect it. There were times when the Nazi government deviated from honesty. To give an example: after Dresden was bombed, the official police report stated there had been 60,000 victims. Goebbels claimed there had been over 500,000 victims. Maybe he felt that some of the bodies had been buried under rubble or incinerated in the firestorm; and so not included in the police report. But even so, his statement was a case of taking what was (at best) a wild guess, and presenting it as a cold and hard fact.
However deceptive Goebbels may have been, the Allies were worse. They chose to “act as if” Germany could feed everyone within its own borders. The deaths caused by their own food blockade were presented as having been caused solely by the Nazis’ irrational genocidal urges.
During the 1930s, large numbers of German Jews had immigrated to Palestine. This immigration made Palestinians and other Muslims unhappy. In 1939, Britain responded to that unhappiness by stopping almost all additional Jewish immigration into Palestine. I don’t blame Britain for not wanting to deal with a rebellion among their Islamic colonies on the eve of a world war. I do blame Britain and France for refusing to open any of their non-Muslim colonies to Jewish immigration.
The Allies used a food blockade to create famine conditions within Germany. They used immigration policy to prevent Hitler from exporting his Jewish population. Then they made the Holocaust the centerpiece of their wartime and postwar anti-Nazi propaganda effort. The combination of these three decisions strikes me as even more dishonest and cynical than the lies the Allies told about wanting to help Poland.
During the latter stages of WWII, large numbers of Latvians, Estonians, Lithuanians, and Soviet citizens fled westward into Germany to escape the horror of the Red Army. After WWII ended, the Western democracies found themselves with about 5 million such refugees on their hands. They agreed to turn these refugees over to Stalin!
Tolstoy described the scene of Americans returning to the internment camp after having delivered a shipment of people to the Soviets. “The Americans returned to Plattling visibly shamefaced. Before their departure from the rendezvous in the forest, many had seen rows of bodies already hanging from the branches of nearby trees.”[11]
It’s widely accepted that many or most American and other Western democratic politicians are sleazy and self-serving. But the things I’ve described go well, well beyond mere sleaziness.
Yes Stalin was a monster, but that doesn’t make Hitler a saint.
Agreed. Hitler was (by far!) the lesser of the two evils. But he was still brutal, and became more brutal as the war progressed and his hopes diminished. Some of his late war killings cannot be explained in terms of coping with the famine conditions caused by the Allied food blockade.
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Thanks KG7. For the first time I see a recognition of Nazi shortcomings in your post, which is a great encouragement. It will help me to continue to engage with and benefit from your knowledge.
I had begun to think that you were representing G’s actions as rational and reasonable, which I am sure is a perception you would wish to avoid. If future posts were to balance your many criticisms of the allies, some of them certainly justified, with a recognition of G’s terrible failings that would really help. The mass murder point being an obvious one.
I am sure you don’t see any correlation between the Nazi’s values and yours either, so you won’t find it hard!
I now understand that your key thrust is one of R being even worse than an awful G. In some ways you are right. I still think, however, that it was Germany’s location that made it the far greater threat to France and Britain. As a previous reply from you showed, Hitler himself understood this. He then took a range of actions that made that threat ever more real without investing the same energy in effectively re-assuring the democracies of his intentions being solely focussed on defence against R.
I also think amanntai’s point is a good one: You have made a strong case for why the Soviets were a threat, but you have not made a strong case for why the Allies ignoring Hitler would have been a better idea than what they did. Looking forward to your reply to that.
P.S. Poland was certainly badly let down by the Allies. Churchill felt it keenly.
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@Private:
Thanks KG7. For the first time I see a recognition of Nazi shortcomings in your post, which is a great encouragement. It will help me to continue to engage with and benefit from your knowledge.
I had begun to think that you were representing G’s actions as rational and reasonable, which I am sure is a perception you would wish to avoid. If future posts were to balance your many criticisms of the allies, some of them certainly justified, with a recognition of G’s terrible failings that would really help. The mass murder point being an obvious one.
I am sure you don’t see any correlation between the Nazi’s values and yours either, so you won’t find it hard!
I now understand that your key thrust is one of R being even worse than an awful G. In some ways you are right. I still think, however, that it was Germany’s location that made it the far greater threat to France and Britain. As a previous reply from you showed, Hitler himself understood this. He then took a range of actions that made that threat ever more real without investing the same energy in effectively re-assuring the democracies of his intentions being solely focussed on defence against R.
I also think amanntai’s point is a good one: You have made a strong case for why the Soviets were a threat, but you have not made a strong case for why the Allies ignoring Hitler would have been a better idea than what they did. Looking forward to your reply to that.
P.S. Poland was certainly badly let down by the Allies. Churchill felt it keenly.
I had begun to think that you were representing G’s actions as rational and reasonable . . .
My tendency is to examine Germany’s (or any other nation’s) actions on a case by case basis. In doing so, I ask two questions: 1) to what extend did the action in question advance the nation towards its goals? 2) To what extent were the goals reasonable objectives for that nation to have?
The mass murder point being an obvious one.
I divide mass murder into two categories:
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Mass murder with extenuating circumstances. Imagine that ten people are on a lifeboat, but there is only enough food and water for seven of them to make it back to safety. A decision to kill three people on the lifeboat would represent a miniature example of something in this category.
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Pure mass murder. Imagine a lifeboat with ten people on board, and enough food and water to bring twenty people back to safety. A decision to kill anyone on that lifeboat would be a miniature example of this category.
The Ukrainian famine was pure mass murder. It occurred during a time of peace, when no one was blockading the Soviet Union’s ports; and at a time when it was exporting millions of tons of grain for sale on the London Exchange. There were no extenuating circumstances which would excuse that government-induced famine.
There were over 1,000 victims of Soviet prewar mass murder for every one victim of Nazi prewar mass murder. The Soviets were much, much more willing to engage in pure mass murder than the Nazis.
Once the war began, German government planners determined that the Allied food blockade–and the resulting food shortages–would result in the starvation of 20 - 30 million people. The Nazis recognized that even though they could do nothing to avoid those 20 - 30 million deaths, they at least had the option of choosing the victims. Every person they shot or gassed was one less mouth to feed. However, more people died under Nazi rule due to starvation than to gas chambers or firing squads. Millions of the victims of starvation were people Hitler had ordered to be fed. The most notable example of this is the starvation of the Soviet POWs forced to work in German weapons factories. Their work was vital to the German war effort, which is why Hitler gave the order to feed them. But the food necessary to carry out that order simply did not exist.
One reason that food didn’t exist is because the Nazis had mostly failed in their efforts to prevent captured Soviet farms from delivering food to captured Soviet cities. The Nazis had wanted that food to go to Germany instead, so that they could feed their captured Soviet POWs. However, Germany lacked the manpower with which to cordon off captured Soviet cities. Also, a number of German government officials put in charge of administering captured Soviet territory were less than thrilled with this plan; and pointed out the lack of wisdom of starving captured enemy territory during a time of war.
I still think, however, that it was Germany’s location that made it the far greater threat to France and Britain.
Over the short run you are right. Germany had a common border with France, and the Soviet Union did not. But had the Versailles Treaty remained in place throughout the '30s and early '40s, the Soviet Union would have annexed all of Germany. Once that happened, Stalin would have inherited Germany’s centralized location. But unlike Germany, he wouldn’t have had to worry about his eastern front.
By the end of the war the Soviet Union controlled half of Germany’s prewar land area. At the end of the war, the Soviets chopped off the eastern half of Poland and added it to the Soviet Union. Then they chopped off the eastern 25% of Germany and added it to Poland. The remaining portion of Soviet-occupied Germany–the part which didn’t get chopped off–became East Germany.
By 1945, the Soviet Union had acquired most of the advantages of Germany’s centralized location, without any of the disadvantages. It did its best to fuse the military age men of Eastern Europe together under a giant army under the control of the Warsaw Pact.
In early 1940, Britain and France had rough military parity with Germany. The combined Anglo-French forces (in combination with their Belgian and Dutch allies) were more numerous than the Germans. They had about the same number of tanks as Germany. They had fewer military aircraft, but more military production capacity. A war against Germany was a credible proposition for Britain and France; and it was only superior generalship which allowed Germany to conquer France.
After WWII ended, the governments of Britain and France were in no position to credibly wage war against the Warsaw Pact. Not even if West Germany joined in. The democracies of Western Europe were in a much weaker position after the war ended than they were just before it started. That weakness was the inevitable result of the policy–which they had pursued for the previous two decades–of ignoring or embracing Soviet expansionism.
[Hitler] then took a range of actions that made that threat ever more real without investing
the same energy in effectively re-assuring the democracies of his intentions being solely focussed on defence against R.Hitler could (and did) reassure the British by limiting the size of his navy. But his goal of conquering the Soviet Union was incompatible with the goal of providing similar reassurance to France by limiting the size of Germany’s land forces. Nor did Daladier or other French leaders give Hitler any reason to hope that they’d pursue anything other than a highly anti-German foreign policy no matter what he did. Even during the mid '30s, French leaders were already trying to negotiate a deal with Stalin in which Germany would be conquered and divided between France and the Soviet Union. (Stalin wasn’t interested.) Eventually, Hitler became persuaded that war with France was inevitable; and that he would need to conquer France in order to secure his western front before going to war in the east. Given that France’s anti-German, pro-Soviet foreign policy was in place long before Hitler even came to power, it’s hard to blame that foreign policy on Hitler’s own diplomatic failings. I grant that Hitler’s grasp of diplomatic policy was flawed. But even if he’d been Otto von Bismarck, it’s not necessarily clear that he could have avoided war against France.
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I am alarmed that you apparently justify Hitler’s mass murders by saying it was due to food shortages! Hitler made it pretty clear that his actions were racially based. Even if Germany was suffering from food shortages, Hitler still chose to use those shortages to justify genocide. Famine should never be a justification for genocide.
Remember that Hitler also starved thousands of Russians (especially in Leningrad) as part of his policy of wiping out the Russians. And this article (http://www.ushmm.org/wlc/mobile/en/article.php?ModuleId=10007183 ) seems to indicate the starving of Soviet POWs was intentional!
Furthermore, I would like you to provide a source for your claim that 30 million Germans could have died to hunger. This seems rather inflated, as my research indicates Germany only had about 80 million people in 1940. I do not believe that 37.5% of the German population was at risk of starvation! The highest figure I have found is that 3 million Poles were at risk of starvation, and 3 million Soviet POWs starved.
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A little bit off topic here, but:
In early 1940, Britain and France had rough military parity with Germany. The combined Anglo-French forces (in combination with their Belgian and Dutch allies) were more numerous than the Germans. They had about the same number of tanks as Germany. They had fewer military aircraft, but more military production capacity. A war against Germany was a credible proposition for Britain and France; and it was only superior generalship which allowed Germany to conquer France.
This is something I’ve always felt is not well modeled in A&A 1940. The Fall of France is inevitable (unless you get really awful dice rolls), but only because Germany has so many units to throw at France. France doesn’t stand a chance against Germany’s superior numbers on the 1940 board! Germany’s brilliant sweep through Belgium around the Maginot line unfortunately cannot be modeled on the Europe 1940 board.
But it can be modeled on the A&A 1914 board! Germany can sweep through Belgium and into Picardy, ignoring a superior French force in Lorraine as it captures Paris! I should very much like to see a future A%A game featuring a global WW2, and a European map as detailed as the 1914 map.
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I am alarmed that you apparently justify Hitler’s mass murders by saying it was due to food shortages! Hitler made it pretty clear that his actions were racially based. Even if Germany was suffering from food shortages, Hitler still chose to use those shortages to justify genocide. Famine should never be a justification for genocide.
Remember that Hitler also starved thousands of Russians (especially in Leningrad) as part of his policy of wiping out the Russians. And this article (http://www.ushmm.org/wlc/mobile/en/article.php?ModuleId=10007183 ) seems to indicate the starving of Soviet POWs was intentional!
Furthermore, I would like you to provide a source for your claim that 30 million Germans could have died to hunger. This seems rather inflated, as my research indicates Germany only had about 80 million people in 1940. I do not believe that 37.5% of the German population was at risk of starvation! The highest figure I have found is that 3 million Poles were at risk of starvation, and 3 million Soviet POWs starved.
Thanks for the post and the link. While I am not familiar with some of the link’s secondary assertions, its primary assertion (that large numbers of Soviet POWs starved to death while in German captivity) is consistent with my own research.
Furthermore, I would like you to provide a source for your claim that 30 million Germans could have died to hunger.
Adam Tooze’s book Wages of Destruction was praised by The Times, the Wall Street Journal, The Guardian, the Boston Globe, and a number of other major media outlets. The book was awarded the Wolfson History Prize. Below are some quotes from it:
After 1939 the supply of food in Western Europe was no less constrained than the supply of coal. . . . Grain imports in the late 1930s had run at the rate of more than 7 million tons per annum mostly from Argentina and Canada. These sources of supply were closed off by the British blockade. . . . By the summer of 1940, Germany was facing a Europe-wide agricultural crisis. . . . By 1941 there were already signs of mounting discontent due to the inadequate food supply. In Belgium and France, the official ration allocated to ‘normal consumers’ of as little as 1,300 calories per day, was an open invitation to resort to the black market.
Pp. 418 - 419
According to General Thomas’s secretariat the meeting concluded as follows:
1.) The war can only be continued, if the entire Wehrmacht is fed from Russia in the third year of the war.
2.) If we take what we need out of the country, there can be no doubt that many millions of people will die of starvation.
3.) The most important issues are the recovery and removal of oil seeds, oil cake, and only then the removal of grain.The minute did not specify the number of millions that the Germans intended to starve. . . . Backe himself put the figure for the ‘surplus population’ of the Soviet Union at between 20 and 30 million, and over the following months these numbers established themselves as a common reference point. . . .
[A memorandum stated:] Efforts to save the population from death by starvation by drawing on the surplus of the black earth regions can only be at the expense of the food supply to Europe. They diminish the staying power of Germany in the war and the resistance of Germany and Europe to the blockade. There must be absolute clarity about this.
Pp. 479 - 480. However, the plan to starve 20 - 30 million people to death largely failed. As a result of that failure–and the consequent lack of food freed up for shipment to Germany–the following occurred.
When the order to ship large numbers of Eastern European workers to Germany was first given, Backe protested vigorously. The 400,000 Soviet prisoners of war already in Germany were more than he could provide for. Goering had spoken casually of feeding the Eastern workers on cats and horse-meat. Backe had consulted the statistics and reported glumly that there were not enough cats to provide a ration for the Eastern workers and horse-meat was already being used to supplement the rations of the German population. If the Russians were to be given meat, they would have to be supplied at the expense of the German population.
P. 539
Backe was in an impossible position. The Fuehrer had demanded more workers. Gauleiter Sauckel was dedicated to delivering them. Hitler and Sauckel now demanded that the workers [Soviet POWs] be fed, which was clearly a necessity if they were to be productive. And yet, given the level of grain stocks, Backe was unable to meet this demand. What was called for was a reduction in consumption, not additional provisions for millions of new workers. The seriousness of the situation became apparent in the spring of 1942 when the Food Ministry announced cuts to the food rations of the German population. Given the regime’s mortal fear of damaging morale, the ration cuts of April 1942 are incontrovertible evidence that the food crisis was real. Lowering the rations was a political step of the first order, which Backe would never had suggested if the food situation had not absolutely required it. . . . When the reduction in the civilian ration was announced it produced a response which justified every anxiety on the part of the Nazi leadership.
P. 541. In response to all this, the following measures were taken.
Entire groups were to be excluded from the food supply, most notably the Jews. As Goebbels noted in his diary, the new regime would be based on the principle that before Germany starved ‘it would be the turn of a number of other peoples.’
P. 542.
[German-occupied Poland was] an agricultural deficit territory. In the first year of the German occupation, Backe and Governor General Frank had agreed on food imports from the Reich that were sufficient to give food to those Poles working for the Germans. The majority of the Polish population was left to fend for themselves. The result was an epidemic of malnutrition and outright starvation, particularly among the Jewish population confined to the ghettos. Faced with Germany’s food shortage in 1942, Backe went much further. He now demanded that the Governor General should reverse the flow. Rather than receive food supplements from Germany, the General Government [of Poland] was to make sizable food deliveries. . . . Backe predicated his demands on the elimination of Polish Jews from the food chain. . . . Eliminating the Jews would . . . reduce the number of people that needed feeding.
Pp. 544 - 545
By the end of August 1942, this extraordinary series of measures spread a palpable mood of relief throughout Berlin. Backe, Himmler, and Goering had staved off a disastrous downward spiral in the food supply. . . . Total European deliveries of grain [into Germany] doubled from 2 million tons per annum to more than 5 million tons in the harvest year of 1942-3. Of those deliveries that did enter the Reich [as opposed to being consumed in the field by the Wehrmacht], the General Government [of German-occupied Poland] supplied an astonishing 51 percent of German rye imports, 66 percent of oats and 52 percent of German potato imports. This was directly at the expense of the local population. . . . In the summer of 1942 it was the concerted extermination of Polish Jewry that provided the most immediate and fail-safe means of freeing up food for delivery to Germany.
P. 549.
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Suppose that France had pursued that same policy of neutrality. Might Hitler have left France alone too? Might he have focused his attention on his one foreign policy goal–war against the Soviet Union–while leaving things well enough alone in the west?
Seems unlikely. There was a large chunk of territory (the Alcase) at stake. Hitler makes it clear in Mein Kampf that France and Germany are rivals and France should be subordinate.
I had been under the impression that the French and Soviets were willing to fight for the integrity of Czechoslovakia but the British put their weight behind the peace deal. Of course it wouldn’t surprise me if the French government was also determined to avoid war at all costs, as they were leaving the Spanish republican government in the lurch at the same time.
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Suppose that France had pursued that same policy of neutrality. Might Hitler have left France alone too? Might he have focused his attention on his one foreign policy goal–war against the Soviet Union–while leaving things well enough alone in the west?
Seems unlikely. There was a large chunk of territory (the Alcase) at stake. Hitler makes it clear in Mein Kampf that France and Germany are rivals and France should be subordinate.
I had been under the impression that the French and Soviets were willing to fight for the integrity of Czechoslovakia but the British put their weight behind the peace deal. Of course it wouldn’t surprise me if the French government was also determined to avoid war at all costs, as they were leaving the Spanish republican government in the lurch at the same time.
There was a large chunk of territory (the Alcase) at stake.
In Hitler’s second book, he wrote about the inadvisability of basing broad national policy on border disputes. The incident which prompted those comments was the fact that Italy had annexed South Tyrol, an area with hundreds of thousands of Germans. Many in Germany felt that Hitler should do something to prevent those Germans from being annexed. Hitler, on the other hand, was prepared to let South Tyrol go so that he could have an alliance with Italy.
If Hitler was willing to write off South Tyrol in order to gain a completely useless ally, he might also have been willing to write off Alsace in order to avoid a pointless and unwanted war with Britain and France.
Hitler makes it clear in Mein Kampf that France and Germany are rivals and France should be subordinate.
It is true that Hitler expressed bitterness about the fact that France had pursued an anti-German foreign policy for literally centuries. He felt it was inevitable that France would continue pursuing an anti-German foreign policy, regardless of the nature of the French or German governments. France could have tried to change Hitler’s mind about all this by pursuing a policy of neutrality or even benevolence towards Germany. But that option was never considered.
[The French] were leaving the Spanish republican government in the lurch at the same time
It’s true that France could have done more to support Spain’s communist government in its war against Franco. Whether France should have done more to help the communists is, of course, another question.
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