Everyone is entitled to their own opinion—not their own facts. Pat Buchanan showed such an utter disdain for the facts in his article "Did Hitler Want Peace?" that I believe he should receive a retroactive "F" for every history course he took from elementary school on. As that is impossible, I believe he should go on every broadcast and cable news show and apologize to all of the veterans of World War II, living and dead.

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Hysterical Fantasy

By Richard Girard

“Only the history of free peoples is worth our attention; the history of men under a despotism is merely a collection of anecdotes.”

Sébastien-Roch Nicolas de Chamfort (1741–94), French writer, wit. Maxims and Considerations, volume 2, number 487 (1796; translated 1926).

I finally got to read Patrick J. Buchanan's article “Did Hitler Want War?” (1 September, 2009) on Thursday the tenth, and as a student of the Second World War my first reaction was to demand that all of Mr. Buchanan's history instructors, from elementary school to college, retroactively give him an “F.” I then considered Mr. Buchanan's age, and realized that most of them have probably passed away, rendering my plan an impossibility.

So I have decided to correct Mr. Buchanan's article, on a point by point basis. I do this for my father, my two great uncles, and my mother's cousin who served in that war, as well as the sixteen million other Americans, living and dead, who selflessly undertook the great crusade against the consummate evil that was Hitler and Nazi Germany.

Mr. Buchanan's article implies—in my opinion—that their sacrifice was in vain, and that Hitler did not need to be stopped; he would have stopped himself. Anyone who is familiar with Hitler's unpublished sequel to Mein Kampf (published in 1961 as Hitlers Zweite Buch, English version Hitler's Secret Book) knows better.

Where possible, I have given you book, author, and page where you can confirm my information. The exception is four books that I currently have in storage, William L. Shirer's The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich, Alan Clark's Barbarossa, Samuel Eliot Morrison's Two Ocean War, and Heinz Guderian's Panzer Leader; but my memory of their information is as clear as if I read it today. They were not on the shelves of the local library, so I used Charles Messenger's Chronological Atlas of World War II (copyright 1989) to confirm my recollection of the facts and kept, what was for me, the original source.

“On Sept. 1, 1939"the German Army crossed the Polish Frontier.”

Oversimplified, but basically correct. German special ops troops actually crossed the night before to take out communication centers and fake a Polish attack. (William L. Shirer, The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich.)

“On Sept. 3, Britain declared war.”

Half right. On September 3, the British Empire and most of the Commonwealth (South Africa and Canada waited for Parliamentary confirmation on the sixth and tenth respectively) declared war, together with the French Republic.

Mr. Buchanan's apparent disdain for the French, by not mentioning that they declared war with Great Britain, should be obvious to everyone. In September 1939, the French had a larger army (69 active and 45 reserve divisions versus 55 and 51; Shirer, op cit., Messenger, op. cit.) than Germany, and a larger navy than still neutral Italy. France's problem was doctrine, not materiel.

“Six years later, 50 million Christians and Jews had perished. Britain was broken and bankrupt, Germany a smoldering ruin. Europe had served as the site of the most murderous combat known to man, and civilians had suffered worse horrors than the soldiers.”

Sorry. Fifty million plus is the current low end estimate for the total deaths for the Second World War worldwide. Twenty million plus for the Soviet Union, fifteen—twenty million for China between 1937 and 1945, five-and-a-half million Germans, plus the casualties of the other nations (which included at least some of the eleven million-plus victims counted in the Holocaust: Resistance leaders, intellectuals, etc.), and the victims of the genocide of not quite six million Jews, and murders of roughly the same number of “undesirables,” e.g., gypsies, homosexuals, disabled individuals, socialists, Communists, etc.. It wasn't just “50 million Christians and Jews” who had perished. Communists, atheists, Buddhists, Confucians, Taoists, Hindus and Muslims probably made up more than half. The exact number is one we can only guess at, never know. I have seen numbers from 50-78 million written of by respectable scholars (Wikipedia actually has very good, fully sourced material on this subject). The rest is correct—as far as it goes.

“By May 1945, Red Army hordes occupied all the great capitals of Central Europe: Vienna, Prague, Budapest, Berlin. A hundred million Christians were under the heel of the most barbarous tyranny in history: the Bolshevik regime of the greatest terrorist of them all, Joseph Stalin.”

Of the capitals that Mr. Buchanan has named, all of them were a part of Germany or its allies except for Prague, which was part of a “Reich Protectorate.”

The use of the phrase “hundred million Christians” is questionable, especially when you consider the Muslim populations in what was then Yugoslavia and Albania. The total population of the newly conquered Soviet territories probably barely equaled that number (around 112 million if I've done the math correctly, using the Wikipedia article on war casualties), and that is including all of the nearly seven million people in Austria, which was split up into zones of control by the Allies, and using an estimate of ten million people for Soviet occupied Germany.

In rhetoric this constitutes an “argumentum ad populum,” or playing to the audience, as does his use of Joseph Stalin as a bête noire. Mao Zedong was every bit as bad, if not worse than Stalin (37 million in Cultural Revolution and Great Leap Forward, Wikipedia, “History of the People's Republic of China;” versus 20 million, Robert Conquest, The Great Terror: A Reassessment). Hitler had only twelve years to indulge his madness, not the nearly thirty Stalin had. Do not get me wrong: Stalin was a monster. This is Buchanan's anti-Bolshevik bias showing: if it's Bolshevik, it's got to be the worst. Stalin being the “greatest terrorist of all” is highly debatable.

“Was Danzig worth a war?”

When it was Poland's primary deep water port, and—the Polish government believed—this was an obvious first step to make Poland a satellite of Germany in the same way it had Slovakia—as the Polish Foreign Minister pointed out in the Ministry's White Book (its day to day diary of diplomatic initiatives and maneuvers)--you bet. (See Alan Bullock, Hitler: A Study in Tyranny; p.p. 493-4)

“But if Hitler was out to conquer the world" why did he spend three years building that hugely expensive Siegfried Line to protect Germany from France? Why did he start the war with no surface fleet, no troop transports and only 29 oceangoing submarines? How do you conquer the world with a navy that can't get out of the Baltic Sea?”

Why build the Siegfried Line? How about to help defend his strategic rear in case of a war with Poland, the Soviet Union, or both. This is basic military planning 101. (Shirer, op cit.)

Why did Hitler start a war with almost no surface fleet or other naval assets? First of all, building up a fleet in peacetime has a huge lead time: 5-6 years for aircraft carriers and battleships, e.g., the Bismarck was started in 1935 and was not ready for combat until 1941; 3-4 years for cruisers; 2 years for destroyers and auxiliaries; including the training of crews. Submarines, or U-boats (my turn to use the “argumentum ad populum,” by using the traditional term for German submarines) requires a year or less in the era before nuclear propulsion. Within a year of the war's start, U-boats had Britain reeling, averaging over 300,000 tons sunk every month (Samuel Eliot Morrison, Two Ocean War; Messenger, op. cit.).

Secondly, Hitler never understood naval warfare, as exhibited by his failure to have a plan ready for invading England, or his failure to take Malta and secure Rommel's supply line. As such he—in my opinion—preferred the bully's and coward's methods of attacking the weak (using raiders) or from ambush (using U-boats); tactics which (as a bully and coward) he could understand.

Finally, Hitler was impatient. He had promised Grössadmiral Raeder, commander of the German Navy, that Raeder would have until 1944 to build up the navy so that it could challenge Britain's Royal Navy for supremacy in the Eastern Atlantic. The Plan Z naval buildup to four aircraft carriers, thirteen battleships and battle cruisers, and thirty-three heavy and light cruisers: all of them less than fifteen years old, against an aging Royal Navy, might well have accomplished that mission (Christopher Chant, Warfare and the Third Reich, p. 73). Not understanding naval warfare, or its essential place in a nation's modern war plans, cost Hitler more than we will ever know. (Shirer, op cit.)

“If Hitler wanted the world, why did he not build strategic bombers, instead of two-engine Dorniers and Heinkels that could not even reach Britain from Germany?”

“Why did he let the British army go at Dunkirk?”

In both cases the answer is the same: Hermann Goering.

In 1939 only two nations had operational four-engine bombers: the Soviet Union and the United States. Great Britain was still more than a year away from deploying the Halifax and Stirling four engine bombers, and two years from its Lancaster bomber. General Wener had been the primary voice for the four-engine strategic or “Ural” bomber in a Luftwaffe dominated by fighter aces Goering and Ernst Udet. When General Wener died in an airplane accident in 1936, the ideas for the development of the strategic bomber were placed on a back burner, and the emphasis was concentrated on the Luftwaffe's tactical support role by Luftwaffe chief of development Udet, with Goering's blessing (Chant, op. cit., p.317).

Hitler did not feel he had to put the emphasis on strategic bombing to attack Great Britain's war making potential, especially with what he expected would be a short war (Chant, ibid,). The Germans knew that as an island nation—with limited natural resources—a blockade using their U-boats, would stop the British from acquiring the materiel needed to continue a war (as it almost had in World War I), better than the uncertain theoretical effect of bombing Great Britain's industrial capacity.

Against Germany—since it was a continental power—Great Britain had only one sure way to successfully inhibit Germany's war making potential: by air attack against its production and transportation facilities. So Great Britain put its emphasis into the as yet unproven idea of strategic bombing.

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:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_War_II_casualties

Authors Bio:

Richard Girard is a polymath and autodidact whose greatest desire in life is to be his generations' Thomas Paine. He is an FDR Democrat, which probably puts him with U.S. Senator Bernie Sanders in the current political spectrum. His answer to all of those who decry Democratic Socialism is that it is a system invented by one of our Founding Fathers--Thomas Paine--and was the inspiration for two of our greatest presidents, Abraham Lincoln and Franklin Roosevelt, who the Democrats of today would do well if they would follow in their footsteps. Or to quote Harry Truman, "Out of the great progress of this country, out of our great advances in achieving a better life for all, out of our rise to world leadership, the Republican leaders have learned nothing. Confronted by the great record of this country, and the tremendous promise of its future, all they do is croak, 'socialism.'