At Dunkirk, Goering told Hitler that he could use the Luftwaffe to cut off the British evacuation, and compel the surrender of 350,000+ British, French and allied troops without risking Germany's panzer divisions. Hitler gave Goering his blessing, over the objections of his Army generals.
Two other things--besides Goering's hubris--saved the British Army at Dunkirk: a week of superb late spring weather in the English Channel, and the courage of hundreds of common British citizens who braved the seas and the Luftwaffe attacks to help rescue 338,000 British, French, and allied troops. It marked the first of many major failures by Goering (Heinz Guderian, Panzer Leader, Messenger op. cit.).
"Why did he offer the British peace, twice, after Poland fell, and again after France fell?"
Because, Hitler had no great personal animosity towards Great Britain, whom he thought of as fellow Aryans (Bullock, op. cit., p.337). He was hoping that Great Britain would see the error of its ways, and join him in his crusade against the Bolshevik Jew in the East, the ultimate source for the lebensraum (land for expansion) Hitler had written about in Mein Kampf. A change of government, with someone like his friend J.F.C. Fuller at its head, would have turned the Axis triumvirate into a foursome that included the resources of the largest empire in the world.
"Why, when Paris fell, did Hitler not demand the French fleet, as the Allies demanded and got the Kaiser's fleet?"
As I said before, Hitler never understood naval warfare. Additionally, most of the French fleet was not in European France where he could get his hands on it. When France surrendered, many of the French ships at sea preferred internment by the British, or in the United States, rather than surrender to the Nazis. Most of the rest of the French fleet ended up in either Dakar in French West Africa, or Oran in French Algeria. The Royal Navy, in a tragic preemptive strike, sank or disabled much of the French fleet at Oran. (Messenger, op. cit.)
"Why did he not demand bases in French-controlled Syria to attack Suez?"
And just how would Hitler have transported troops there? Could he have transported them through a neutral and unwilling Turkey? Or across an Eastern Mediterranean controlled by the Royal Navy?
Additionally, the British had units next door in Palestine, and at the first indication of France ceding Syria to Hitler, the British would have brought in reinforcements from Egypt and India and taken it away, just as they did a year later when the Vichy French tried to use Syria--at Hitler's instigation--to support the revolt in Iraq. It is self evident (to me at least) that demanding and controlling Syria were far beyond Hitler's capabilities, and he knew it.
"Why did he beg Benito Mussolini not to attack Greece?"
Because Hitler knew from watching Italy's difficulties in Albania, that Italy could not conquer Greece, and that an Italian loss would encourage British intervention in the Balkans and destabilize the region. This in turn would force Hitler to intervene, delaying his real goal, Operation Barbarossa, the invasion of the Soviet Union, whose planning had begun almost the instant France capitulated. (Bullock, op. Cit., p.p. 612-639, Alan Clark, Barbarossa)
I believe that also invalidates Mr. Buchanan's assertion that ""Hitler wanted to end the war in 1940, almost two years before the trains began to roll to the camps." By the way, what would have prevented those trains from rolling if the war had ended?
What are my sources for my contentions? Nearly two thousand books and five times that number of magazine articles read over the last forty years. The books include William Shirer's Rise and Fall of the Third Reich, Albert Speer's Inside the Third Reich, Alan Bullock's Hitler: A Study in Tyranny, Heinz Guderian's Panzer Leader, David M. Glantz and Jonathan House's When Titans Clashed, Eric Von Manstein's Lost Victories, and Milton Meyer's They Thought They Were Free. Except for checking the spelling on a couple of names, and a location on a map, then looking up the references, this article was done from my own knowledge of the greatest conflagration in human history. I do not have a vast army of assistants and editors to fact check my work, as I am sure Mr. Buchanan does. But I will promise you this: it does not contain the factual errors and resultant whole cloth suppositions of his article.
I do not know if Mr. Buchanan is a Nazi apologist or just a dupe. It doesn't matter. Anyone who so consistently misrepresents Adolf Hitler's intentions and motivations to a reading public, deserves our contempt and our censure. Because in the final analysis, the only real difference between Hitler and Mr. Buchanan's bogeyman Stalin are these:
Hitler was taller and a better public speaker. Stalin was personally more ruthless, and had a better mustache.
The Wikipedia article on World War II casualties is at:
