RSS
Our last article described some of the activities of the Focus and the early stages of their project to supplant British foreign policy with their own: regime change in Germany by threats or by war. Here we examine the collaborative efforts of the Focus and the Soviet Union toward that aim in 1938.
Collective security
Since the founding of the Focus in 1936, its members and their allies in the Foreign Office sought an alliance between Britain and the Soviet Union and were particularly attracted to Maxim Litvinov, the Soviet foreign minister. The Conservative MP Robert Boothby wrote in his memoirs that the prime minister, Neville Chamberlain, “could have chosen either Russia or Germany as an ally” and that Boothby “preferred the former ‘because socialism was still their proclaimed goal; because in socialism there was at least some hope, and because Litvinov had espoused the cause of collective security’.”[1]Chamberlain and the Lost Peace, John Charmley, 1989, chapter 6 Litvinov had espoused that cause since December 1933. He argued that the Soviet Union was interested “not only in its own peaceful relations with other states, but in the maintenance of peace generally.” Litvinov persuaded Stalin to let anti-fascism surpass anti-capitalism in urgency in foreign policy, entailing a more particular focus on Hitler’s Germany. The espionage and subversion operations of the NKVD and the Comintern in Britain and around the world continued as before.[2]The Comintern adopted the ‘popular front’ policy at its 7th congress in August 1935, a change of approach to the same ends as before. See Czechoslovakia between Stalin and Hitler, Igor Lukes, 1996, page 72
According to Geoffrey Roberts, “Litvinov’s doctrine of the ‘indivisibility of peace’ was underlined by Stalin at the seventeenth party congress in January 1934 when he defended Soviet détente with France on the grounds that ‘if the interests of the USSR demand rapprochement with one country or another which is not interested in disturbing the peace, we adopt this course without hesitation’.”[3]Geoffrey Roberts in The Origins of the Second World War, edited by Frank McDonough, 2011, page 411 The countries not interested in disturbing the peace were the beneficiaries of Versailles and Trianon; the status quo was a partitioning cage for Germany. In any case, peace was an expedient stance for countries building their war capacity. Such were the interests of the USSR, as Richard Overy describes: “Like Germany, Italy and Japan the Soviet Union saw an intimate relationship between domestic economic development and future security, though the Soviet Union was rich enough in resources to be able to develop autarkic policies without foreign expansion.”[4]Richard Overy in McDonough (ed.), p493
Time was on the side of the already-autarkic, as was France. As Roberts says, “It was partly at France’s behest that the USSR joined the League of Nations – an organization that the Soviets had previously scorned as a ‘capitalist club’ responsible for carving up the globe – in February 1934.”[5]Roberts in McDonough, p412 The USSR in fact joined the League in September of that year; it did so at the behest of Czechoslovakia and France, allied with one another since 1924. The League, all three perceived, was a potential vehicle for their shared anti-German purposes. The Focus, and Winston Churchill in particular, wore defence of the Covenant of the League as their cloak, though the cloak became ragged after the Soviets disclosed what they meant by collective security to eastern Poland in October 1939.
From the Versailles settlement onwards, as though they had not been victors, French leaders agitated against Germany, and against peace and cooperation in general, at every juncture. Poland, allied with France since 1923, made a declaration of non-aggression with Germany in January 1934. The following month, Poland renewed the non-aggression pact it had made with the Soviet Union in 1932. According to Piotr Wandycz, “The reaction in France was distinctly negative,” although the Declaration “was, in effect‚ logically included in [the] accords of Locarno.”[6]Piotr Wandycz in McDonough (ed.), p382-3 When France ratified its own pact with the Soviets in February 1936, Hitler declared it a violation of the Locarno treaties and reoccupied the Rhineland. Poland’s foreign minister Joszef Beck expressed some sympathy for Germany’s position, understanding the problem of hostile powers to the east and west; the French, encircled by nothing worse than the sea, then “engaged in intrigues to have Beck removed from his position.”[7]Wandycz in McDonough, p384. “Warsaw had no cause to regret the demise of Locarno. In fact it meant for Beck the possibility of restoring the Franco-Polish alliance to its original and firm mutual engagement. This may have been wishful thinking, for the Maginot Line and the law of 1935 (defence of homeland and empire) made it clear that France would fight only a defensive war – its military aid to Poland would be of highly dubious character.”
French politicians and civil servants saw Poland and Romania as pawns in a game against Germany. According to Dov Lungu,
“Romania was important to the French strategically: first, the denial of German access to its oil, in which they had substantial investments and the Germans had few, was considered an important condition for the victory of France and its allies in a protracted European war; second, in such a war, Romania was to be assigned an important role in the defence of Czechoslovakia. The Romanians were expected to free the Czechoslovaks from worrying about their rear by paralyzing the Hungarians and, perhaps, by allowing Soviet military units coming to the assistance of Czechoslovakia to reach that country through Romanian territory.”[8]The French and British Attitudes towards the Goga-Cuza Government in Romania, December 1937-February 1938, Dov Lungu, Canadian Slavonic Papers, Volume 30, Number 3, September 1988, p326
In the latter scenario, France permitted Romanians to hope, or even assume, that the Soviet forces would withdraw after generously rescuing the Czechs. Even then, Romanian governments never fully consented to the role magnanimous France had assigned them. In December 1937, a pro-German government led by Octavian Goga was formed in Romania. Goga’s government began to remove citizenship from much of the Jewish population. As Rebecca Haynes describes, the result was
“to bring the economy to a standstill as Jews boycotted work and withdrew their money from the banks. The Jewish World Congress and the Federation of Jewish Societies of France petitioned the League of Nations to investigate the situation in Romania. The British and French governments subsequently put pressure on Romania to comply with the 1919 Minorities’ Protection Treaty under which Romania was obliged to treat her citizens equally regardless of nationality.
The Goga-Cuza government fell from power largely as a result of western displeasure at its antisemitic measures… Without any formal commitment from Germany to guarantee Romania’s frontiers, Carol could not afford to alienate his western guarantors. At the same time, the extreme right-wing nature of the Goga-Cuza government had roused the wrath of the Soviet Union [and] the chaos created by the regime’s antisemitic legislation… impeded the flow of Romanian agricultural produce and petroleum to the Reich.”[9]Romanian Policy Towards Germany, 1936-40, Rebecca Haynes, 2016, p46. The “Jewish World Congress” presumably refers to the World Jewish Congress. Even if the Treaty was worded to condemn the removal of citizenship but permit collectivisation, arbitrary imprisonment, slavery, torture and summary execution, genuine humanitarians would not have stopped at lobbying Romania alone.
Czechoslovakia
Edvard Benes, the Czech foreign secretary until December 1935 and president thereafter, personified ‘Czechoslovakism’, and what could be called the Europe of Versailles, along with Tomas Masaryk, the state’s only president before Benes, and Jan Masaryk, Tomas’ son and the ambassador to Britain. Benes was socialist though not Marxist. Czechoslovakia had avoided diplomatic recognition of the Soviets until Franklin Roosevelt, US president from March 1933, began to show favour to them. As Igor Lukes describes:
“The shadow of Hitler, his racist doctrine, and his nationalistic claims gave pause to European democracies and autocracies alike. As a consequence, many countries started paying court to the Kremlin. In November 1933 the United States, that bastion of capitalism, recognized the Soviet Union de jure. From then on, few were willing to be left behind.”[10]Czechoslovakia between Stalin and Hitler, Igor Lukes, 1996, p35-6. Lukes’ approval is clear: “There seemed every reason to try to bring the Soviet Union into the equation of power in Central Europe; the Third Reich worried all clear-headed observers.” p39
The Kremlin’s proclaimed policies of collectivisation and dekulakisation had caused the deaths of more than a million of its own citizens in that year alone. Thanks to the preferences of the US president and the World Jewish Congress, the benefit of doing so in ways deemed neither “racist” nor “nationalistic” was immense. Lukes tells us that Benes and his advisers “knew—in rough terms—that Joseph Stalin was extraordinarily brutal”, but they “did not intend to live in the Soviet Union; they only wanted to develop a security arrangement with it.”[11]Lukes, p38. According to Lukes, Benes “was a lifelong socialist” for whom “égalité and fraternité were the two most important attributes of humanity. Liberté was secondary… Benes had little trouble accepting the social component of the Bolshevik ideology as he understood it.” p13-4 Then as now, leftist and Jewish cant about human rights was often wholly pretextual.
The basis of Benes’ foreign policy was imaginary, as Lukes describes:
“From Prague’s perspective, Adolf Hitler made the existence of the Soviet card welcome. … [A]n equilibrium of power in Europe had to be reestablished. It was necessary to compensate for the German threat by bringing Moscow westward and giving it a real presence on the scales of power in Europe. This policy, Benes believed, was… what the traditional concept of balance of power was all about.”[12]Lukes, p38-9
The notion of the balance of power was not traditional in Britain, let alone elsewhere, and was a pretext invented earlier in the century by Eyre Crowe and other anti-German activists in the British Foreign Office to justify alliances with France and Russia while affecting defensive intentions; retrojection onto previous centuries enabled the advocates of the doctrine to snidely portray their innovation as hallowed.[13]Arthur Nicolson, Charles Hardinge and others promoted by Edward VII supported and furthered Crowe’s thinking, helping to cause the First World War. Robert Vansittart was one of the younger generation who continued the theme. Geoffrey Roberts, a sympathiser of the Soviets’ strategy, says that the allegation that it was “a policy of encircling Germany, much as Russia had done before the First World War… was broadly accurate”.[14]Roberts in McDonough, p413 Crowe himself might not have imagined allying with a communist regime, but somehow the ‘Crowe school’ continued after the Great War; as their efforts conduced toward the Soviets’ interests, they are perhaps better termed the Litvinov school.
For the Czechs, as in Britain’s case, opposition to Germany meant alignment with France. “Benes was encouraged by signs of growing Franco-Soviet cooperation… For its own reasons, Paris was greatly concerned about the reemergence of the German threat…”[15]Lukes, p37 France already posed to Germany the kind of ‘threat’ Churchill ‘warned’ Germany might one day pose to Britain, and had already occupied the Ruhr valley from 1923-25, but its leaders contemplated with dread the prospect of having to parley respectfully with other states one future day. Benes, at any rate, probably chose the side he believed would prevail.
Once Czech relations with the Soviets had been established,
“Benes immediately started using his considerable influence in Geneva to bring about Moscow’s admission into the League of Nations. He succeeded on 18 September 1934. With Benes’s prompting, the Fifteenth Assembly of the League even went so far as to invite the Soviets to join. In his first speech at the League’s assembly, Litvinov recorded ‘with gratitude the initiative taken by the French Government… and the President of the Council, Dr. Benes, in the furtherance of this initiative.’ This was not mere persiflage. Benes wielded real influence in the League, and he used it to help the Soviet case.”[16]Lukes, p39. My emphasis.
Benes agreed a treaty with the Soviets in May 1935 (coming into effect after ratification the following March) in which the Czechs included a stipulation that the Soviets would only send forces to assist Czechoslovakia if France did first. Britain and France supported this limitation as it denied the Soviets the freedom to start a war. The Soviets saw it as avoiding an obligation to do so. As Lukes says, “the Kremlin would not want to march on behalf of the bourgeois Czechoslovak government unless France had already absorbed the blows of Hitler’s Wehrmacht.” The treaty “strengthened Prague’s resolve to resist the Third Reich” rather than “seek a rapprochement with Berlin” which “would have been the worst possible development from the Kremlin’s perspective”.[17]Lukes, p49. “It would become Benes’s policy to deal with Moscow via Paris.” p38-9 Happily for the Soviets, the alliance “pushed France to the position of a shield between Germany and the Soviet Union”. In 1938, “France would be able to weasel out of its obligations toward Czechoslovakia only by dishonorably breaking its legal commitment. The Kremlin, on the other hand, would use the stipulation to maintain complete freedom of action throughout the crisis.”[18]Lukes, p47-9
Absurd as the French position was, it was welcome to those for whom helping the Soviets had become the aim. Churchill and the Soviet ambassador in London, Ivan Maisky had been introduced by Robert Vansittart in 1934 and had been meeting privately ever since. By February 1936, as David Irving describes,
“[t]he peripatetic American diplomat William C. Bullitt, visiting London at this time, was baffled at the mounting hysteria he found: the German ‘menace’, he reported to Washington, was being played for all it was worth. At dinner tables he heard people say that unless Britain did not make war on Germany soon, Hitler would have his way in Central Europe and then attack Russia. ‘Strangely enough,’ wrote Bullitt to President Franklin D. Roosevelt, ‘all the old anti-Bolshevik fanatics like Winston Churchill are trumpeting this Bolshevik thesis and are advocating an entente with the Soviet Union!’”[19]Irving, p54-5
Benes declared after making the agreement that “Stalin’s Soviet Union was ‘a mighty shield of peace in Europe.’”[20]Lukes, p50 Still, in pursuit of “strengthening Prague’s resolve”, the Soviets saw fit to lie. In June 1935, after signing the pact, Kliment Voroshilov, the Soviet defence secretary, told Benes “We’re not afraid of Hitler. If he attacks you, we’ll attack him…” When Benes sought verification, “Litvinov assured him that Voroshilov had expressed the opinion of the Soviet government.”[21]Lukes, p54
Stalin was inclined to be less discriminating in regard to ‘capitalist’ powers than was Litvinov. “He restrained Litvinov’s anti-Nazi tendencies somewhat and was receptive to German overtures about an expansion of trade relations” as Roberts says, in order “not to burn all his bridges to Berlin.”[22]Roberts in McDonough, p413 The aim was not to simply goad Germany into war, at least while Britain and Japan were uncongenial to the USSR, but Stalin intended Czechoslovakia to either inhibit German (and Polish and Hungarian) territorial revisions by its heavily armed presence or to provoke Germany into a war on two or more fronts. Benes was considered useful toward these aims. The Czechoslovak Communist Party was required to drop its revolutionary stance toward the government in accordance with the new policy adopted at the seventh congress of the Comintern. In June 1936, the CPC’s leader Klement Gottwald returned from Moscow with new orders “to help strengthen Czechoslovakia’s ability to defend itself against Hitler, thereby erecting a protective shield in front of the Soviet Union.”[23]Lukes, p77
Spring 1938
Even with the ‘help’ of the CPC, the Czechoslovaks’ ability to resist Hitler’s territorial demands diminished sharply when Germany occupied and united with Austria in March 1938. Czech forces were thereafter distributed more sparsely along a greatly lengthened border with Germany. The less viable the Czechoslovak state became, the more the Soviets encouraged intransigence:
“Police informers inside the communist apparat reported that as a result of the Anschluß Moscow reaffirmed its order to abandon the dictatorship of the proletariat [communist revolution] as the CPC’s immediate objective. Instead, all of its strength was to be committed against Nazism… [A]fter the destruction of the Third Reich… the dictatorship of the proletariat would be resurrected as the party’s main objective. The main task of the CPC was to ensure that the Czechoslovak-German conflict would be fought as an all-out war, whatever the consequences.”[24]Lukes, p142. According to William West, Czech arms manufacturers, via the Comintern, supplied Austrian communists with weaponry to assist in an attempted revolution in 1934. “This traffic was also a factor in the Spanish Civil War” and “appears to have been organised by Max K. Adler.” Truth Betrayed, W J West, p77, footnote 24
The day after the German-Austrian union, in collaboration with Litvinov’s man in London, Ivan Maisky, Churchill went public with the suggestion that “the only sensible policy to deal with the obvious German threat to European peace was a ‘Grand Alliance’ of mutual defence based on the Covenant of the League of Nations.”[25]McDonough, p192 Churchill thereafter began to openly call for Britain to support the Soviet Union. His book Arms and the Covenant was released in June 1938; in October that year, he met with the BBC producer and Soviet spy Guy Burgess and gave him a signed copy.
Rather than aggravate the disputes between the European powers, Neville Chamberlain sought to alleviate them by helping Germany get most of what it demanded. Naturally, he did not see the USSR as a partner. According to John Charmley, Chamberlain “saw in Russia a dictatorship as evil as Hitler’s and a country which was ‘stealthily and cunningly pulling all the strings behind the scenes to get us involved in a war with Germany’”.[26]Chamberlain, Charmley, chapter 7 Chamberlain thought that a “positive response to Russian requests for talks would be the prelude to war, whilst a guarantee to Czechoslovakia would ‘simply be a pretext’ for that war.” The Foreign Secretary, Lord Halifax, who was yet to be converted by the warmongers, “reminded the Foreign Policy Committee that the more closely they associated themselves with France and Russia, ‘the more we produced in German minds the impression that we were plotting to encircle Germany and the more difficult it would be to make any real settlement with Germany’.”[27]Chamberlain, Charmley, chapter 7
Halifax and Chamberlain identified the raison d’etre of Churchill and the Focus, but as they never renounced British involvement in France’s disputes with Germany, Chamberlain was susceptible to ensnarement in those disputes by the means in which the war party specialised. The private intelligence networks run by Robert Vansittart, Lord Lloyd and others, and the alarming ‘reports’ and rumours they produced, were one such means. Another was direct incitement of hostility between Germany and Czechoslovakia. Lukes identifies Litvinov as the most likely culprit for the false but convincing intelligence reports of German mobilisation near the Czech border which provoked a partial Czechoslovak mobilisation of forces on 20th May 1938.[28]Lukes, p148-157, especially p154. Irving speculates that the war party provoked the May crisis or co-ordinated it with Litvinov: “What was the origin of the canard? Did Masaryk talk with Churchill in those crucial days? The ebullient Czech was certainly spotted the day before the crisis in conclave with Vansittart.” Irving, p123 All the Soviets’ behaviour is consistent with an intention to provoke a war and avoid committing forces to it for as long as possible. On 11th May, Litvinov had told the Czech diplomat Arnost Heidrich that
“[W]ar was inevitable. We know, he continued, that the ‘West wishes Stalin to destroy Hitler and Hitler to destroy Stalin.’ But Moscow would not oblige its enemies, warned Litvinov. ‘This time it will be the Soviets who will stand by until near the end when they will be able to step in and bring about a just and permanent peace.’”
According to Lukes,
“Litvinov’s summary… was authentic… Moscow apparently hoped that a collective of states would emerge that would commit itself to an anti-Hitler agenda. The Kremlin intended to strengthen the collective’s resolve by its own warlike élan, then drive it into a shooting war with Hitler—and stand aside… Before the crisis, the Kremlin had strengthened Czechoslovakia’s determination to defend itself against the Third Reich by posturing as a reliable ally. Once the crisis started, however, Soviet officials retreated and made themselves unavailable for official business..”[29]Lukes, p154. “Paradoxically, after the tensions declined, Moscow emerged to claim that the partial mobilization was a success, at least in part because of the firmness of Soviet foreign policy.”
Litvinov believed that time was on the side of the Soviets, “because the future war, originally fueled by nationalism, would have gradually become a revolutionary war against the European bourgeoisie”. Such a war would be “a guarantee against a Franco-British-German rapprochement, which would constitute the greatest threat to Soviet security.”[30]Lukes, p157
War failed to eventuate in May, but the war party exploited what they saw as an opportunity to humiliate Hitler. Reginald Leeper, who used his position as head of the Foreign Office news department to form a cartel of compliant diplomatic correspondents from major newspapers, had recruited Churchill into the Anti-Nazi Council, from which was formed the Focus. As David Irving describes, Leeper openly used Foreign Office press conferences to aggravate Anglo-German relations: “When no tanks rolled into Czechoslovakia, Leeper poured fuel on the flames, flaunting it as a triumph of ‘collective security’ over Hitler’s ambitions…”[31]Irving, p123 On June 2nd, at a League of Nations demonstration, “[r]eferring to the recent Czech crisis,” Churchill “crowed over Hitler’s apparent climbdown on May 21 – claiming it as a definite success for collective security – and scoffed at the critics of rearmament…”[32]Irving, p127 Supporters of the League and its Covenant appear to have drifted from their professed pacific origins. Irving continues: “Months later, Hitler would still betray a smouldering bitterness over the episode: despite every assurance… that not one German soldier had been set in motion, Fleet-street had crowed over Germany ‘bowing to British pressure.’”[33]Irving, p123
Summer 1938
That the reports of German mobilisation were false, and that his Soviet allies had avoided contact during the hour of need, somehow failed to cause Benes to doubt what Voroshilov and Litvinov had previously asserted, that the Soviets would send forces to fight any German invasion. That Romania or Poland sat between the Soviet Union and Czechoslovakia and had not agreed to allow Soviet forces to travel through their territories was also unperturbing. The Soviets thus expected their provocative deceptions to bear more fruit. Lukes asks
“What did Litvinov do in June 1938 to clear away the clouds gathering above Czechoslovakia? Did he raise the issue of the corridor with Bucharest? Did he even talk to Benes? He did neither. What Litvinov really wanted was to break through the emerging diplomatic blockade around the Soviet Union, and Czechoslovakia’s fate was of secondary importance.”[34]Lukes, p193. “To Benes, the Soviet Union wanted to appear ready—indeed, eager—to go to war. Toward the West the Soviet Union needed to present itself as a reliable, strong, but prudent partner. On this front, the main objective was to prevent the Soviet Union’s isolation by working against a rapprochement between Western democracies and Hitler.”
Andrei Zhdanov, a leading Central Committee member trusted by Stalin, told the Czechoslovak Communist Party the real plan in secret in August 1938, his address confirming what the CPC had been told after the 7th Congress of the Comintern in 1935: the Soviets pursued ‘collective security’ as the most likely recipe for war among capitalist states and class war across Europe.[35]Lukes, p191, 198-200. At the Zhdanov meeting with the CPC, Harry Pollitt, head of the CPGB and collaborator with the Board of Deputies and the Home Secretary in terrorism against the anti-war British Union of Fascists, was in attendance. Why the same was welcomed by anyone else ought to be a central question for historians.
September 1938
Though having never given any guarantee to Czechoslovakia, the consensus among politicians and civil servants for joint action with France caused British entanglement in the Czech dispute with Germany. Britain involved itself to help extricate France from the obligation the latter had undertaken in 1935, i.e. to preserve Britain’s alignment with France while avoiding war.[36]Considering the enormity of its consequences, historians are remarkably incurious about who ensured the continuation of the Anglo-French entente through the 1920s and 1930s and why. This was considered a better option by the vilified ‘appeasers’ than leaping to the assistance of a state which had chosen to side with the Soviets and which Voroshilov laughingly referred to as “a dagger in Germany’s back”.[37]Lukes, p192 The so-called ultimatum British and French diplomats issued to Benes after the Munich summit in September 1938 was a statement of non-intervention which helped preserve peace; that Benes and Litvinov were disappointed to receive it would be forgotten had they lacked the support of those who went on to write the victors’ history.
Churchill and other Focus members spent the September crisis making every possible attempt to force Britain and France into war. According to David Irving, with Chamberlain’s approval,
“…the home secretary Sam Hoare placed wiretaps on Eden, Macmillan, and Churchill – all future prime ministers. MI5 was already tapping embassy telephones. Vansittart, wise to the ways of ministers, eschewed the telephone and contacted Winston and Labour conspirators only in their private homes. …Neville Chamberlain betrayed no feelings when Messrs Churchill and Attlee were heard conniving with Maisky and Masaryk, undertaking to overthrow his government; nor when Masaryk telephoned President Roosevelt direct… MI5 has declined to make available the British transcripts… The German intercepts of London embassy communications indicate that Masaryk was furnishing documents and funds to overthrow the British government.”[38]Irving, p138
After harassing French ministers by phone, Churchill and other members of the Focus flew to Paris to collaborate with the Czech ambassador in Paris, Stefan Osusky, in a plot to simultaneously collapse the British and French governments. Eric Phipps, the British ambassador in Paris, telegraphed to Halifax that “His Majesty’s government should realise [the] extreme danger of even appearing to encourage [the] small, but noisy and corrupt, war group here.” The war group tried to close off any means of peaceful resolution. “General Spears and seven others of the Focus, including Harold Macmillan, sent an urgent letter to Lord Halifax threatening a Tory revolt if the screw was turned on Benes any tighter as Hitler was demanding.”[39]Irving, p147 They then resorted to an attempt to sabotage Chamberlain’s negotiations with Hitler, as Irving describes: “They decided that Winston should go to Lord Halifax and persuade him to put out a threatening communiqué before Hitler’s broadcast. This would force Chamberlain’s hand…” There would be “a forty-second announcement broadcast in German over Nazi wavelengths in the pause just before Hitler spoke. All Germany would then hear of England’s resolve to fight.” The text “was headed ‘official communiqué’ and typed on foreign office notepaper. Rex Leeper, one of Masaryk’s ‘clients’ at the FO who had steered Britain to the brink in May, sent it to Reuter’s agency. (Afterward the FO and the French foreign ministry immediately disowned it…)” However, according to Churchill’s comrade Frederick Lindemann, the BBC “fumbled or refused to break international wavelength agreements, so it went out only over the conventional channels, an hour after Hitler’s speech.”[40]Irving, p150
Even after Benes submitted to Hitler’s demands for control of the Sudetenland, as he was jointly advised to do by Britain, France and Italy, Churchill urged Masaryk to “implore Dr Benes to… refuse to pull Czech troops out of the vital fortifications” for as long as possible as, in Churchill’s words, “a tremendous reaction against the betrayal of Czechoslovakia [was] imminent”. Irving refers to this as Churchill’s “final incitement to war – for such there would have been if Benes were now to disregard the Four Power agreement.” Cadogan, Vansittart’s successor as head of the Foreign Office, “recorded in amusement that Winston, Lloyd and others were still ‘intriguing with Masaryk and Maisky.’”[41]Irving, p156
Amid the crisis, Masaryk was also lobbied by the Focus’ Zionist associates, who awaited such moments of British vulnerability. On 23rd September, as Irving says, “Recalling Churchill’s June 1937 advice to wait until Britain’s hour of distraction, Chaim Weizmann, Israel Moses Sieff, and the other Zionists bore down on Jan Masaryk… urging war.”[42]Irving, p145 On the 28th September,
“Over at the Carlton Grill… Chaim Weizmann… invited several gentile Zionists to discuss how to exploit the Czech crisis in the context of Palestine. Britain had only two divisions there, and only two more available for France… A year earlier a foreign office memorandum had pointed out that the Zionist policies of the colonial office were rousing anger throughout the Moslem Middle East, and that there was a powerful argument for revising them if the air situation was as perilous as Mr Churchill claimed.”
The colonial secretary, Malcolm Macdonald, warned Weizmann that, “should war now break out, Palestine would be subject to martial law and further immigration halted. Weizmann wrote to him that same day, warning that the British must choose between friendship of Jewry and of Arabs.”[43]Irving, p152
Weizmann’s audacity in issuing warnings to the British Empire invites more investigation than it has yet received, as does the choice he presented. The friendship of Jewry, an unfortunate people exiled from dozens of realms and oppressed throughout history for no reason, was surely a paltry reward for angering the vastly more numerous Arabs. It also proved an uneven kind of friendship, as Lord Moyne or the inhabitants of the King David Hotel might attest. Still, though the Zionist leaders were inciting war among European nations and blatantly plotting treason against their host country, the smaller, more troublesome group had its way over the succeeding decade. No doubt this owed much to the favour it won among a section of the British upper class, leaders of anglo-Jewry and the members of the Focus. As Martin Gilbert describes, “On 8 June 1937… at a private dinner given by Sir Archibald Sinclair at which Churchill was present, as well as James de Rothschild and several parliamentary supporters of Zionism: Leo Amery, Clement Attlee, Colonel Josiah Wedgwood and Captain Victor Cazalet”, Churchill told Weizmann “‘You know, you are our masters…’ and he added, pointing to those present, ‘If you ask us to fight, we shall fight like tigers.’”[44]Churchill and the Jews, Martin Gilbert, chapter 11
In September 1938, Zionists were attempting to organise the eviction of British forces from Palestine, if necessary by armed insurrection. On October 1st, “…as Masaryk walked into Weizmann’s home,” he encountered the same crew “discussing ways of destroying Chamberlain’s policies on Palestine”. Having been informed that war with Germany would entail conscription of Jews in Palestine, Blanche Dugdale, niece of Arthur Balfour and a leading gentile Zionist, wrote that “We can only work by every means, fair and foul… to buy land, bring in men, get arms.’”[45]Irving, p156-7 Zionists have always attacked any suggestion that their loyalty to their host countries were compromised, but, regardless of ancestry, those who seek opportunities in a nation’s vulnerabilities can fairly be counted among its enemies, as can those, like Churchill, who advise and encourage them to do so.
Though under Chamberlain they made slower progress, the Zionists had only to wait for him to be replaced, to which end their friends in the Focus worked ever more energetically. They leveraged personal connections and old friendships and employed pathos and emotive moralising. They redefined words expediently. According to Lord Lloyd, head of the British Council, writing to his friend Lord Halifax, the Foreign Secretary, in September 1938, “If Germany was allowed to annex the Sudetenland not only would Czechoslovakia be at her mercy, but all the smaller European states would draw the conclusion that there was no way of standing up to Hitler and ‘you will have opened a path for Germany to the Black Sea’.” As in the case of Romania’s oil supplies, the need to prevent Germany accessing what the Soviets already had was treated as self-explanatory. Lloyd invoked courage, “sacrifice”, “what is Right” and “to be the champions of weak peoples”, the last of which was “a task surely set us by Providence”. He informed Halifax that “There are worse issues even than war”, referring to peace.[46]Lord Lloyd and the decline of the British Empire, John Charmley, 1987, p218-9
We may never know how much, if at all, Halifax was swayed by the pretentious use of capital letters, but evidently Lloyd wielded piety as a bludgeon; all talk of concern for “weak peoples” was a veil or a lever to be worn or pulled as was found judicious. The Zionists with whom Lloyd frequently dined, who colluded in the same belligerent cause as he, were explicit about their intention to subjugate or displace the natives of Palestine. We find no objection from Lloyd to Churchill for his ardent support for that project or the forthrightly racial supremacist reasons Churchill gave. Nor did Lloyd write letters pleading the case of the minorities forced to live under the Czechoslovak state since 1919 or, indeed, of the Czechs themselves before that date. We might hope that Providence later reviewed how best to set its tasks, so considerate had it been in the 1930s to Zionists, communists, financiers and manufacturers, and so neglectful to Lloyd and Churchill’s proclaimed interest, the British Empire, and to the tranquility of ordinary European folk.
To suggest that Benes’ government was worthy of the help of Britain would obviously be absurd, but arguably it was not even worthy of that of France. The case for such help relied entirely on the fear campaign against Germany and the apologies, from the same parties, for the Soviet Union. The notion that a helpless ‘democracy’ was being ‘fed’ to a dictator in 1938 was false, as Lukes describes: “By the spring of 1938, the Czechoslovak parliament, the prime minister and the cabinet had been pushed aside by Benes. During the dramatic summer months he was – for better, or worse – the sole decisionmaker in the country.”[47]The Munich Crisis, 1938, edited by Igor Lukes and Erik Goldstein, 1999, p15 Real democracy militates against the gathering of such autocratic powers even in times of crisis. Czechoslovakia had the kind of democracy any multicultural, civically-defined state should expect.
After Germany successfully “championed” the Sudeten Germans and the Slovaks, Lloyd wrote to the Daily Telegraph that “it was ‘impossible to speak without shame and difficult to speak without indignation, of what we have done to the Czech people’. Disraeli had credited Britain with two great assets, her Fleet and her good name: ‘Today we must console ourselves that we still have our Fleet.’”[48]Lloyd, Charmley, p215, p220 Her Fleet was a great asset, but Disraeli had brandished it in 1877 to prolong the sanguinary Turkish occupation of Christian lands and Churchill used it to starve Germany in 1919; the malnourished state of the German delegation at Versailles detracted from Britain’s “good name”, and Churchill’s. The disgrace Disraeli and his admirers had incurred on Britain’s behalf was mitigated, not extended, when Chamberlain helped extricate France from an alliance it should never have made and on which Benes was a fool to rely.
When the Prime Minister reminded Lloyd in October 1938 that “the policy I am pursuing is a dual one” and that “conciliation is a part of it fully as essential as rearmament”, Charmley says that “Lloyd increasingly felt that what was needed was ‘an alternative National Government’”.[49]Lloyd, Charmley, p221 To form that alternative was the primary objective of the Focus, which Churchill referred to as the “Cave of Adullam” and from which had come one attempt already in April 1938.[50]Irving, p119. “[T]he New Statesman’s editor put out secret feelers to influential Liberal and Labour politicians: would they join a putative Churchill coalition with Eden as foreign secretary, if their minority parties were strongly represented in his cabinet? It was their first sniff of power for some time. Attlee agreed in principle, but retired into his shell soon after the editor sounded him. Greenwood and Morrison showed more interest, and Bevin was also rumoured to be willing, if offered the ministry of labour. These remarkable soundings, described by Kingsley Martin to Hugh Dalton a few days later, were an echo of things to come.” During the Sudeten hysteria, “[f]resh in funds, the Focus began printing millions of leaflets and booked a London hall for a protest meeting… to throw out the Chamberlain four and set up a national government.”[51]Irving, p148 A new government was needed specifically to collaborate with the USSR.
Exclusion of the Soviets
While Churchill was inciting war in Paris in September, Robert Boothby travelled to meet Litvinov in Geneva and returned saying that “the Russians will give us full support”.[52]Irving, p142-4 This was even less true to Britain than it was to Czechoslovakia. Until near the end of the crisis, Benes “was convinced that… the Soviet Union would ‘fight its way through Poland and Romania’ to help Czechoslovakia…”, though the Soviets lacked agreements with either country to do so.[53]Lukes, p231 When asked to confirm the Soviets’ intention to honour the treaty with Czechoslovakia, Litvinov “carefully waited for Benes to surrender before he said publicly that Moscow had given an affirmative answer.” At any rate, because France “had already made clear that it was not prepared to live up to its obligations, Moscow’s promises of support had purely cosmetic value.” As Lukes says, after ‘Munich’, ”the Kremlin was able to create the appearance of being supportive of the Prague government but without accepting any responsibility.”[54]Lukes, p229 In 1947, Benes said that “The truth is that the Soviets did not want to help us,” and that they “acted deceitfully.” During the crisis, referring to Sergei Aleksandrovsky, the Soviet ambassador in Prague, Benes said “I asked him three questions, whether the Soviets would help us, and I repeated them. He did not answer, he never answered. That was the main reason why I capitulated.”[55]Lukes, p257. Benes revealed his fury at Stalin’s perfidy on several occasions in 1945. See Munich, Lukes and Goldstein (eds), p20-1 The Soviets appear to have had a reserve plan but their agents failed to activate it. After the war, Klement Gottwald, the Czech Communist Party leader, told Benes “that Soviet leaders had severely criticized [Gottwald] for his failure to carry out a communist coup d’état in Prague during the September 1938 crisis.”[56]Lukes, p231. It appears to be standard practice among anti-fascist historians to simply ignore this evidence and treat the Soviets, especially Litvinov, as having sagely foreseen the ‘Nazi threat’ and as eager friends of democracy foolishly spurned by ‘the appeasers’.
According to Lukes, the Soviets’ desire, short of war, was “a seat at the international conference that would eventually deal with the crisis.” Litvinov told Lord De La Warr, the British ambassador to the League of Nations, “that Great Britain, France, and the Soviet Union should meet in Paris to discuss the crisis”; he wanted to avoid an international conference excluding the Soviet Union.[57]Lukes, p229 At Munich, Litvinov’s fear, a “modus vivendi between the Franco-British bloc and the Hitler-Mussolini tandem” which “increased the Kremlin’s isolation” was fulfilled.[58]Stalin and Benes at the End of September 1938: New Evidence from the Prague Archives, Igor Lukes, Slavic Review, Volume 52, Number 1, Spring 1993, p48 Thus “[t]wo days after the conference, Georgi Dimitrov, the Comintern chief, expressed the opinion that the Munich Agreement, was directed against the Soviet Union. He said nothing of Czechoslovakia.”[59]Lukes, p258. Likewise, “Litvinov’s suggestion… did not mention the participation of Czechoslovakia.” Lukes, p230
Size of forces
Denied war in September 1938, Lord Lloyd and others of the Focus fomented the myth of the ‘betrayal’ at Munich, their equivalent of the ‘stab in the back’ in Germany at the end of the Great War. They put only one of the Czechs’ faithless allies on trial and called the other as a witness. Whereas Benes admitted his mistake eventually, Stalin’s good faith is still argued seriously by some Western historians, lest either the benevolence or the acuity of his allies in Britain, and the regime begotten by them, be doubted.
Most criers of betrayal mean, but say more indirectly, what Frank McDonough brassily asserts: September 1938 was “a lost opportunity to start a two-front war”.[60]McDonough, p197 McDonough also demolishes the fear campaign, carried out since 1933, on which relies the notion of Churchill as a prescient seer of danger. Churchill’s claims had always contradicted the calculations of the disinterested Air Ministry, as intended by Robert Vansittart, who contributed numbers based on ‘intelligence’ from a network composed largely of communists and “Jewish emigrés”.[61]Churchill’s Man of Mystery – Desmond Morton and the World of Intelligence, Gill Bennett, 2007, chapter 9. Vansittart and Churchill tried to silence the Air Ministry rather than prove the accuracy of their estimates. According to McDonough,
“The forces available to Germany in 1938 were never as favourable as British ministers, supported by their bungling military and intelligence advisers, had predicted… Hitler’s ability to talk a good fight spread the alarm, but he had been bluffing all along… The French air force outnumbered the Luftwaffe by a ratio of four to three, and those figures excluded additional air force support of Britain and Czechoslovakia… The Luftwaffe’s capacity to bomb British cities was merely a figment of the British Chiefs of Staff’s imagination. No serious German study of the Luftwaffe fighting strength in 1938 has unearthed any plans to bomb Britain whatsoever… the British and French government leaders and their Chiefs of Staff totally misread how much the balance of power was loaded in their favour in 1938.”[62]McDonough, p197-8. Bluffs by Hitler, as when he privately boasted of outmatching the RAF in 1935, had been presented in Parliament and the press as ‘intelligence’ from ‘credible sources’, as had the claims, sometimes humorous, of communists like Jurgen Kuczynski.
McDonough is unusual among anti-fascist historians in alluding to Germans’ need to consider all the countries surrounding them and implicitly acknowledging that Germany would be insane to launch its whole air force at any of them at once. Even then, McDonough omits to mention the scale of the Soviet forces. According to Manfred Jonas, France, already ahead of Germany in aircraft in September 1938, “began to re-arm in earnest” the following spring and ordered a further 1,000 planes from the USA to be delivered in July 1939. Geoffrey Roberts informs us that “The 1938 Soviet war plan identified Germany as the chief enemy and allocated 140 divisions and 10,000 tanks to the defence of the USSR’s western borders.” Jonas dates the beginning of the Soviets’ rearmament to March 1939.[63]Manfred Jonas in McDonough, p409, 440 To be autarkic and have 140 divisions and 10,000 tanks on one front before even “beginning” to re-arm was a favourable situation indeed; the common idea of the Soviets as ‘defensive’ is more convenient than true. According to Joachim Hoffman, when Germany invaded the Soviet Union on June 22nd, 1941,
“the Red Army possessed no less than 24,000 tanks, including 1,861 type T-34 tanks (a medium tank, perhaps the most effective armored weapon of the entire war) and KV (Klim Voroshilov) tanks (a series of heavy tanks), which had no equal anywhere in the world.”
Germany had 3,550 German tanks and assault guns, of which half were light tanks. Hoffman adds that “Since 1938, the Air Forces of the Red Army had received a total of 23,245 military aircraft, including 3,719 aircraft of the latest design.” The lowest Soviet estimates grant that at least 10,000 were ready at the start of Barbarossa to engage the “2,500 combat-ready German aircraft”.[64]Stalin’s War of Extermination, Joachim Hoffman, 2001, p30-32 The aggressive positioning of these forces near the German borders in 1941 was a factor in the vastness of the Soviets’ losses in the early stages of the German invasion.[65]Stalin’s War, Sean McMeekin, 2021, chapter 17. “The Lvov/Lemberg salient… contained the best-armed and most mechanized divisions in the entire Red Army… its fate in the early days of Barbarossa exposed… the baleful consequences of Stalin’s grasping at territory in 1939 and the Red Army’s offensive deployment in 1941.”
Soviet expansion
Geoffrey Roberts describes ‘Munich’ as “a mortal blow to the policy of collective security” which “all but ended Soviet hopes for an alliance with Britain and France against Hitler.” It only ended those hopes temporarily while delivering the Soviets undeserved legitimation in Britain. Roberts says that “Moscow did not retreat into complete isolation. Instead, Stalin bided his time and awaited events.”[66]Roberts in McDonough, p414. Lukes says that “The Munich affair proved to be a godsend… for the Communist party of Czechoslovakia. Klement Gottwald noted in late December 1938… that, despite its defeat, the CPC had succeeded in drilling into the minds of Czechoslovak citizens the link between the security of their country and the security of the Soviet Union. During the crisis, Gottwald observed, anticommunism had for the first time become unfashionable and unpatriotic. Party propaganda had managed to form the public view that hostility toward the CPC meant endangering Czechoslovakia’s national security and that hostility toward the Soviet Union weakened Czechoslovakia.” This paid dividends between 1945-8, after which public opinion was given less regard.
Having never really believed in the Covenant or “the indivisibility of peace”, Stalin was free to sign a non-aggression pact with Hitler in August 1939 which freed Germany to invade France, though presumably Stalin would have preferred a costly, lengthy struggle there.[67]After the start of war between Germany and Britain and France, Czech communists visited Moscow. “The delegation was received by an official of the Commissariat for Foreign Affairs. The Molotov-Ribbentrop pact was justified, he said: ‘If the USSR had concluded a treaty with the Western powers, Germany would never have unleashed a war from which will develop world revolution which we have been preparing for a long time… A surrounded Germany would never have entered into war… We cannot afford Germany to lose… The present war must last as long as we want… Keep calm because never was the time more favorable for our interests than at present.’ The long-term Soviet strategy outlined… was in harmony not only with the 7th Congress but also with the ideas laid down by Zhdanov in his August 1938 speech before the Czechoslovak Communist party’s Central Committee.” Lukes, p258 Once France was defeated, the Soviets disposed of old, inhibitory pretences and began to issue demands to the “weak peoples” Lloyd assumed they would respect. Between November 1939 and June 1940, the Soviets invaded Finland and annexed Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania. They then occupied Bessarabia and northern Bukovina in June 1940; the ensuing mass deportations and killings proved less controversial, both with the likes of Lloyd, who had personally intervened to prevent Romania drawing closer to Germany, and with the World Jewish Congress. Perhaps the specific provisions of the Minorities Treaty were all-important and communist mass murder fell outside its jurisdiction merely by misfortune, or perhaps the leaders of the WJC, like Samuel Untermyer, were obsessively opposed to Hitler and supported the Soviets regardless of the human cost. Certainly Soviet occupation, a nightmare for ordinary Europeans, was welcomed in some circles; as Sean McMeekin describes, when the Soviets occupied eastern Poland in October 1939, “many Jews rejoiced in the news that the red army had arrived”.[68]McMeekin, chapter 6 The pact with ‘the Nazis’ and the devourment of neighbouring countries apparently only cost the Soviets the support of a few Western fellow-travellers; Churchill remained an eager suitor.[69]That is, Churchill continued throughout the period of the Hitler-Stalin pact to court Stalin, who had chosen to ally with Churchill’s sworn enemy, and historians attribute even that to necessity.
As we know that Churchill asked for the suppression of accurate force comparisons from the Air Ministry, it is unlikely that sincere dread of Germany was his primary motive in collaborating with foreign governments against his own after 1933. I find no evidence that he became sympathetic to Marxism or was any kind of Soviet agent. Though he was given money by various Jews throughout his life, there was never an evident quid pro quo. Most likely, Churchill and his benefactors understood him to be their advocate and servant in politics, as individuals and as Jews; he did what he could for them. Churchill acted upon what Disraeli presented as an observation: “The Lord deals with the nations as the nations deal with the Jews.” As the interests of communists and “Jewish emigrés” like Jurgen Kuczynski were the same in regard to Hitler’s Germany as those of rich Jewish industrialists like Henry Strakosch and of Robert Waley Cohen, the Board of Deputies and the other “leaders of anglo-Jewry” who secretly financed the Focus, along with Samuel Untermyer’s boycott movement (with which Churchill began his campaign against Hitler in tandem) and the World Jewish Congress, Churchill collaborated with and served all at once, continuing naturally from his earlier life, when Ernest Cassel had been his munificent benefactor (as he was of King Edward VII), and from that of his father, for whom Nathan Rothschild was the equivalent of Cassel, as Nathan’s father Lionel had been for Benjamin Disraeli. As all those interests also coincided with those of the Soviet Union, as expressed through its Jewish diplomats Maxim Litvinov and Ivan Maisky, Churchill naturally served as a voluntary advocate of the Soviet cause, affecting to be concerned with security rather than openly working to replace the existing British policy with one designed to enhance the power of the small foreign minority he regarded as a superior race.[70]“[T]hroughout the years up to Munich [LItvinov’s] was the sole hand in charge of Soviet foreign policy.” The key ambassadors were “Jakob Suritz in Paris, Ivan Maisky in London, Boris Shtein in Rome.” See How War Came, Donald Watt, 1989, p112. Litvinov was succeeded by Vyacheslav Molotov in May 1939 and became the Soviet ambassador in Washington a month before the attack on Pearl Harbour. The Soviets took the position that was natural for the Soviets; so did the Focus, and woe to the ‘cowards’, ‘appeasers’ and ‘fascists’ who tried to take the natural British position.
Weak peoples
Of all the “weak peoples” seeking “champions”, Jews in Britain were the most generously treated by “Providence”. The Czechs and Slovaks, like the Poles and Romanians, were less fortunate. When Czechoslovakia was occupied by the Red Army in 1945 and Benes’ government, then including Gottwald’s communists, subsequently expelled its entire German population, Western reactions were markedly different from those of Churchill and his cohorts in March 1939 when Germany had subjected the remainder of Czechia to protectorate status.[71]“It was with a degree of pride that Andrei Zhdanov, in the autumn of 1947, reviewed the changes World War II brought about in Europe. He noted that the war had significantly altered the international balance of power in favour of the Soviet Union. ‘The war dealt capitalism a heavy blow’, Zhdanov asserted. Some of the main bastions of imperialism were defeated (Germany, Japan and Italy) and others were weakened (Great Britain and France). By contrast, the Soviet Union was greatly strengthened.” Munich, Lukes and Goldstein, p41. Lukes adds that the Soviet position in Europe relied on terror and the goodwill of the USA. Gerhard Weinberg adds that
“In 1945, the Soviet Union annexed the easternmost portion of pre-Munich Czechoslovakia on the grounds that the people living there were akin to those in the adjacent Ukrainian SSR – the same basis on which Germany annexed what had come to be called the Sudetenland. In 1968, the army of the Soviet Union, together with units from the German Democratic Republic, Poland, Hungary and Bulgaria, occupied the remainder of Czechoslovakia. No public demand was voiced anywhere then, and to my knowledge no historian has suggested since, that the United States, Britain, France, or anyone else go to war to protect the independence of Czechoslovakia.”[72]Munich, Lukes and Goldstein, p1
Within weeks of taking power in 1948, the communist regime of Czechoslovakia, with the Soviets’ approval, supplied crucial arms to Israel, which immediately expanded its territory and drove masses of Palestinians into flight. They and their descendants remain stateless refugees. Churchill smiled to see the “higher grade race” triumph over the “lower manifestation”.
‘Munich’ is said by its detractors to have sanctioned the ‘dismemberment’ of Czechoslovakia. Within three years of independence from the Soviet Union, Czech and Slovak politicians dismembered their conjoined state and have since lived peacefully as two distinct peoples. The Masaryk-Benes era was little less artificial than that of communist rule; the fidelity of the likes of Churchill and Lloyd to Czechoslovakia was no realer than Stalin or Litvinov’s. ‘Munich’ is not a metonym for betrayal of the weak but an object lesson in the warmongers’ craft: they disparage peace and lie about the past to justify their crimes forever after.
Notes
[1] Chamberlain and the Lost Peace, John Charmley, 1989, chapter 6
[2] The Comintern adopted the ‘popular front’ policy at its 7th congress in August 1935, a change of approach to the same ends as before. See Czechoslovakia between Stalin and Hitler, Igor Lukes, 1996, page 72
[3] Geoffrey Roberts in The Origins of the Second World War, edited by Frank McDonough, 2011, page 411
[4] Richard Overy in McDonough (ed.), p493
[5] Roberts in McDonough, p412
[6] Piotr Wandycz in McDonough (ed.), p382-3
[7] Wandycz in McDonough, p384. “Warsaw had no cause to regret the demise of Locarno. In fact it meant for Beck the possibility of restoring the Franco-Polish alliance to its original and firm mutual engagement. This may have been wishful thinking, for the Maginot Line and the law of 1935 (defence of homeland and empire) made it clear that France would fight only a defensive war – its military aid to Poland would be of highly dubious character.”
[8] The French and British Attitudes towards the Goga-Cuza Government in Romania, December 1937-February 1938, Dov Lungu, Canadian Slavonic Papers, Volume 30, Number 3, September 1988, p326
[9] Romanian Policy Towards Germany, 1936-40, Rebecca Haynes, 2016, p46. The “Jewish World Congress” presumably refers to the World Jewish Congress. Even if the Treaty was worded to condemn the removal of citizenship but permit collectivisation, arbitrary imprisonment, slavery, torture and summary execution, genuine humanitarians would not have stopped at lobbying Romania alone.
[10] Czechoslovakia between Stalin and Hitler, Igor Lukes, 1996, p35-6. Lukes’ approval is clear: “There seemed every reason to try to bring the Soviet Union into the equation of power in Central Europe; the Third Reich worried all clear-headed observers.” p39
[11] Lukes, p38. According to Lukes, Benes “was a lifelong socialist” for whom “égalité and fraternité were the two most important attributes of humanity. Liberté was secondary… Benes had little trouble accepting the social component of the Bolshevik ideology as he understood it.” p13-4
[12] Lukes, p38-9
[13] Arthur Nicolson, Charles Hardinge and others promoted by Edward VII supported and furthered Crowe’s thinking, helping to cause the First World War. Robert Vansittart was one of the younger generation who continued the theme.
[14] Roberts in McDonough, p413
[15] Lukes, p37
[16] Lukes, p39. My emphasis.
[17] Lukes, p49. “It would become Benes’s policy to deal with Moscow via Paris.” p38-9
[18] Lukes, p47-9
[19] Irving, p54-5
[20] Lukes, p50
[21] Lukes, p54
[22] Roberts in McDonough, p413
[23] Lukes, p77
[24] Lukes, p142. According to William West, Czech arms manufacturers, via the Comintern, supplied Austrian communists with weaponry to assist in an attempted revolution in 1934. “This traffic was also a factor in the Spanish Civil War” and “appears to have been organised by Max K. Adler.” Truth Betrayed, W J West, p77, footnote 24
[25] McDonough, p192
[26] Chamberlain, Charmley, chapter 7
[27] Chamberlain, Charmley, chapter 7
[28] Lukes, p148-157, especially p154. Irving speculates that the war party provoked the May crisis or co-ordinated it with Litvinov: “What was the origin of the canard? Did Masaryk talk with Churchill in those crucial days? The ebullient Czech was certainly spotted the day before the crisis in conclave with Vansittart.” Irving, p123
[29] Lukes, p154. “Paradoxically, after the tensions declined, Moscow emerged to claim that the partial mobilization was a success, at least in part because of the firmness of Soviet foreign policy.”
[30] Lukes, p157
[31] Irving, p123
[32] Irving, p127
[33] Irving, p123
[34] Lukes, p193. “To Benes, the Soviet Union wanted to appear ready—indeed, eager—to go to war. Toward the West the Soviet Union needed to present itself as a reliable, strong, but prudent partner. On this front, the main objective was to prevent the Soviet Union’s isolation by working against a rapprochement between Western democracies and Hitler.”
[35] Lukes, p191, 198-200. At the Zhdanov meeting with the CPC, Harry Pollitt, head of the CPGB and collaborator with the Board of Deputies and the Home Secretary in terrorism against the anti-war British Union of Fascists, was in attendance.
[36] Considering the enormity of its consequences, historians are remarkably incurious about who ensured the continuation of the Anglo-French entente through the 1920s and 1930s and why.
[37] Lukes, p192
[38] Irving, p138
[39] Irving, p147
[40] Irving, p150
[41] Irving, p156
[42] Irving, p145
[43] Irving, p152
[44] Churchill and the Jews, Martin Gilbert, chapter 11
[45] Irving, p156-7
[46] Lord Lloyd and the decline of the British Empire, John Charmley, 1987, p218-9
[47] The Munich Crisis, 1938, edited by Igor Lukes and Erik Goldstein, 1999, p15
[48] Lloyd, Charmley, p215, p220
[49] Lloyd, Charmley, p221
[50] Irving, p119. “[T]he New Statesman’s editor put out secret feelers to influential Liberal and Labour politicians: would they join a putative Churchill coalition with Eden as foreign secretary, if their minority parties were strongly represented in his cabinet? It was their first sniff of power for some time. Attlee agreed in principle, but retired into his shell soon after the editor sounded him. Greenwood and Morrison showed more interest, and Bevin was also rumoured to be willing, if offered the ministry of labour. These remarkable soundings, described by Kingsley Martin to Hugh Dalton a few days later, were an echo of things to come.”
[51] Irving, p148
[52] Irving, p142-4
[53] Lukes, p231
[54] Lukes, p229
[55] Lukes, p257. Benes revealed his fury at Stalin’s perfidy on several occasions in 1945. See Munich, Lukes and Goldstein (eds), p20-1
[56] Lukes, p231. It appears to be standard practice among anti-fascist historians to simply ignore this evidence and treat the Soviets, especially Litvinov, as having sagely foreseen the ‘Nazi threat’ and as eager friends of democracy foolishly spurned by ‘the appeasers’.
[57] Lukes, p229
[58] Stalin and Benes at the End of September 1938: New Evidence from the Prague Archives, Igor Lukes, Slavic Review, Volume 52, Number 1, Spring 1993, p48
[59] Lukes, p258. Likewise, “Litvinov’s suggestion… did not mention the participation of Czechoslovakia.” Lukes, p230
[60] McDonough, p197
[61] Churchill’s Man of Mystery – Desmond Morton and the World of Intelligence, Gill Bennett, 2007, chapter 9. Vansittart and Churchill tried to silence the Air Ministry rather than prove the accuracy of their estimates.
[62] McDonough, p197-8. Bluffs by Hitler, as when he privately boasted of outmatching the RAF in 1935, had been presented in Parliament and the press as ‘intelligence’ from ‘credible sources’, as had the claims, sometimes humorous, of communists like Jurgen Kuczynski.
[63] Manfred Jonas in McDonough, p409, 440
[64] Stalin’s War of Extermination, Joachim Hoffman, 2001, p30-32
[65] Stalin’s War, Sean McMeekin, 2021, chapter 17. “The Lvov/Lemberg salient… contained the best-armed and most mechanized divisions in the entire Red Army… its fate in the early days of Barbarossa exposed… the baleful consequences of Stalin’s grasping at territory in 1939 and the Red Army’s offensive deployment in 1941.”
[66] Roberts in McDonough, p414. Lukes says that “The Munich affair proved to be a godsend… for the Communist party of Czechoslovakia. Klement Gottwald noted in late December 1938… that, despite its defeat, the CPC had succeeded in drilling into the minds of Czechoslovak citizens the link between the security of their country and the security of the Soviet Union. During the crisis, Gottwald observed, anticommunism had for the first time become unfashionable and unpatriotic. Party propaganda had managed to form the public view that hostility toward the CPC meant endangering Czechoslovakia’s national security and that hostility toward the Soviet Union weakened Czechoslovakia.” This paid dividends between 1945-8, after which public opinion was given less regard.
[67] After the start of war between Germany and Britain and France, Czech communists visited Moscow. “The delegation was received by an official of the Commissariat for Foreign Affairs. The Molotov-Ribbentrop pact was justified, he said: ‘If the USSR had concluded a treaty with the Western powers, Germany would never have unleashed a war from which will develop world revolution which we have been preparing for a long time… A surrounded Germany would never have entered into war… We cannot afford Germany to lose… The present war must last as long as we want… Keep calm because never was the time more favorable for our interests than at present.’ The long-term Soviet strategy outlined… was in harmony not only with the 7th Congress but also with the ideas laid down by Zhdanov in his August 1938 speech before the Czechoslovak Communist party’s Central Committee.” Lukes, p258
[68] McMeekin, chapter 6
[69] That is, Churchill continued throughout the period of the Hitler-Stalin pact to court Stalin, who had chosen to ally with Churchill’s sworn enemy, and historians attribute even that to necessity.
[70] “[T]hroughout the years up to Munich [LItvinov’s] was the sole hand in charge of Soviet foreign policy.” The key ambassadors were “Jakob Suritz in Paris, Ivan Maisky in London, Boris Shtein in Rome.” See How War Came, Donald Watt, 1989, p112. Litvinov was succeeded by Vyacheslav Molotov in May 1939 and became the Soviet ambassador in Washington a month before the attack on Pearl Harbour.
[71] “It was with a degree of pride that Andrei Zhdanov, in the autumn of 1947, reviewed the changes World War II brought about in Europe. He noted that the war had significantly altered the international balance of power in favour of the Soviet Union. ‘The war dealt capitalism a heavy blow’, Zhdanov asserted. Some of the main bastions of imperialism were defeated (Germany, Japan and Italy) and others were weakened (Great Britain and France). By contrast, the Soviet Union was greatly strengthened.” Munich, Lukes and Goldstein, p41. Lukes adds that the Soviet position in Europe relied on terror and the goodwill of the USA.
[72] Munich, Lukes and Goldstein, p1
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This is a great article about the farce of “collective security”. Lesser known is that in the Far East, the Soviet Union also attempted to embroil Japan and the West in conflict through the same ruse, but to no avail. It was FDR’s particular interest in China, along with various American and Chinese interest groups, that really sealed the deal.
Source: Garver, J. W. (1987). Chiang Kai-shek’s Quest for Soviet Entry into the Sino-Japanese War. Political Science Quarterly, 102(2), 295–316. https://doi.org/10.2307/2151354
It was good this article finally mentioned:
Yet somehow Germany was the threat to the West? It would be good to mention that the dictator who ruled Poland bullied Lithuania to cede 30% of its territory and threaten Czechoslovakia to gain its mostly Polish region granted to it by the British in 1920. The author might also mention the Hungarians were slowly pushing into Slovakia to regain land lost in 1920 that caused Slovakia and the Czechs to seek the protection of the Germans.
Then the Brits suckered Poland to play tough with Germany and promised military support. When war came they sent no aircraft to help Poland and landed no forces along the Baltic coast. The French army greatly outnumber the Germans along the western front but only made a small incursion and then withdrew.
Video Link
It would be interesting to listen to Russian historians, for example Sinitsyn, for the same list of issues and try to contrast one with the other.
Executive summary, por favor?
A 9,100-word essay is about 10 times longer than what most folks, including me, are willing to read online.
The article is probably fine. Maybe even great. Too bad few will read it.
Perhaps the author likes not being vetted. Like a film director who insists that movie-theatre personnel keep caps on projector lenses when showing his grand opus.
> to Joachim Hoffman, when Germany invaded the Soviet Union on June 22nd, 1941,
> “the Red Army possessed no less than 24,000 tanks, including 1,861 type T-34 tanks (a medium tank, perhaps the most effective armored weapon of the entire war) and KV (Klim Voroshilov) tanks (a series of heavy tanks), which had no equal anywhere in the world.”
> Germany had 3,550 German tanks and assault guns,
Here’s a customary fallacy. The number of German tanks (3.550) refers to tanks employed on the eastern front in preparation for Barbarossa. The USSR on June 1, 1941, had a total of 23.106 tanks in all conditions on all fronts. Of these, 12,782 were in the Western Defense Districts, and of those 10.540 were as combat-ready, while the remaining 2,242 were listed as broken down and in need of repairs. While 10,540 functioning tanks is a major force, this comparison of number 3,550/24,000 is false.
As far as the actual causes of the war in 1939, that followed from Hitler’s occupation of Czechia on March 15, 1939. He showed there that he had no intent of adhering to treaties like Munich and so no further settlement could be made over Danzig. If Hitler had simply observed the Munich Agreement faithfully, there would have been no war.
Maxim Maksimovich Litvinov is a Jew, Meer-Genoch Moiseevich Wallach. He lived in London for a long time and had a circle of acquaintances there, obviously among serious people of the MI-6 level. He was a member of the Jewish management clans in new Russia and had access to Jewish structures abroad.
No mention of Soviet arms orders with Skoda pre-war
It was the largest arms producer in Europe without which Hitler was under-resourced
To call all of Germany’s 3300 tanks committed to the Soviet Union, actual tanks is also false.
Often equivalent to machine gun carriers on a tracked vehicle. The machine gun armed PzKw I “tank” in Barbarossa accounted for 400 of the 3300 number. The 20mm cannon armed PzKw II accounted for approx 1000 of that number. The Germans had 1300 machines we would accurately call a gun tank like the PzKw 3 with a 5cm gun. The Soviets had a ludicrously large tank fleet by comparison and were already churning out the next generation of tank on an unsuspecting German technical/design office.
Sovs had more armoured cars with guns than Germany had PzKw1’s. The Soviet B20 armoured car numbered around 2500 in 1941. The Germans simply didn’t understand the bottomless pit of the Soviet tractor factory production. The funny thing is that captured Czech tanks with the peashooter 3.7cm gave the Germans a chance.
Every Soviet tank had at minimum a 4.5cm gun and machine guns in the turret. Non trivial numbers at the start had a 76cm gun like the KV1. The T34 with a 76mm started to appear as the Germans trundled into Belorussia.
The German-Polish War of 1939 is by the ruling class & hyena portrayed as a war of aggression by the German Reich to gain living space in the east.
Fact is that Poland had already tried several times a few years earlier to also win over France for a war against Germany and openly threatened to invade Germany; all negotiation proposals on the part of the German Reich were rejected; around one million Germans were brutally violated and expelled from their ancestral homeland by the Poles, around 60,000 were tortured and slaughtered like animals (under the encouragement of Catholic bishops), before Germans started responding in the Wehrmacht.
(Poland incl. its most ugly language is an artificial creation of Vatica, a pole in the flesh of the North).
There were plenty of nasties in the Polish military who wanted a war, as they assumed they could quickly advance to Berlin and annex the German center up to the Oder-Neisse line after a German defeat. They did get their earthly reward for their crimes after all.
I doubt that their priests & politicians will be of any help in the aftermath, which is far more certain than the fake Amen (Amon) in Poolish churches of cucks.
(By the way – because Nord Stream is in the news again – the day after the bombing of Nord Stream (on Rosh Hashanah) Poland had its very own Norway gas-pipeline ceremonously opened (literally with a big bang). Today the satanic Chech president mulls „Ukraine’s legitimate interest in blowing up Nord Stream“, for which Ukraine ofcourse did not have the capacity at all).
Lol. The Soviets produced 3500 B10 Armoured cars armed with a 45mm AT gun by the time Barbarossa started. The gun for those who do not know was an effective AT gun against the majority of German armour plate in 1941. That’s just Soviet heavy recon. Not even the tanks yet.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BA-10
You are correct about the Germans needing “captured” Czech 37mm armed tanks though. The Skoda works designs and production numbers made Barbarossa conceivable.
WWII, the great battle between nationalism and communism/globalism. Too bad the USA fought on the wrong side and was instrumental in saving the communists from Hitler. Too bad the communists/globalists won and here we are living under the results.
Claro señor: Jews won, again.
This. Precisely.
The collapse of France might have disappointed Stalin’s “Icebreaker” hopes but it terrified Roosevelt.
It all worked out well in the end as the ramped-up US war production enabled Roosevelt to “do a Ukraine” for the Red Army from June 1941 onwards.
One world is no world?
the big picture: everything hitler did was part of an effort to strengthen germany in preparation for the final conflict between german fascism and soviet communism. he knew it was just a matter of time, as did stalin. you can’t fault hitler for that, unless you’re a fan of stalin and his program. the germans were lucky to get as far as they did, it says a lot for the skill of their troops. there’s a recording of hitler speaking with mannerheim in june of 42 in which hitler claims that germany had (up to that point) destroyed around 35000 soviet armoured fighting vehicles of all types. he goes on to say if germany hadn’t struck when it did and stalin had struck first it would have been the end, germany would have been lost.
Video Link
America built its line of support first for the USSR and then for Hitler’s Germany, largely at the peak of Britain. It is the United States that is the main beneficiary of the Second World War. A little later, an atomic war with the USSR was planned. This did not work out largely due to the fact that competing power groups in the Western system decided to transfer atomic secrets to the USSR. My father worked on an atomic bomb assembler in the USSR and told me that they originally had drawings of an American bomb.
This is standard western propaganda that appeared years after the war ended. After the mindless British/French map drawing after World War I, the fake nation of Czechoslovakia was formed. The minority Czechs ruled other ethnic groups who wanted to join their native lands, so it collapsed. Hungary wanted to regain more of its territory and started pushing into Slovakia after it declared independence.
The Czechs also felt threatened by the Hungarians, Poles, and even Soviets, so sought the protection of Germany. It also faced food shortages and economic problems that were solved by becoming a German protectorate. German troops were cheered as they marched into Prague and most left a few months later after the threats ended. The Czech government and army remained intact and its economy boomed.
World War II occurred because the British had failed to destroy Germany after World War I and Germany recovered to begin producing superior goods for the world market, thus threatening the British empire. It sucked Poland into a proxy war that same way Ukraine is being used today. Propaganda remains powerful today so that most westerners believe the war in Ukraine was caused by Russian aggression, rather than the Anglo-American empire.
Video Link
It’s exhausting following the Jew and his intrigues, which in turn are funded by finance capital and usury.
Put spectacles on your nose (a reference to the protocols).
In one bucket, the red bucket is the Logos. In another, the blue bucket is anti-logos.
In all civilizations, about 20 percent of the people are deformed psychos, sociopaths, narcissists, or they are money-sick, another form of sociopathy. The 20% of malformed Jews who operate at the top of their tribe have all of these defects, and in addition they also have a religion (Talmud) which operates as a cover and shield for nefarious activities. So, yes – Jews have to be treated differently than the rest of humanity, where their worst people are usually not in charge. Jews have to be excluded, like they are in Iran today. Hitler was right. You cannot have a red bucket civilization with Jews around, they will operate to subvert the logos.
The anti-logos blue bucket is one of permanent creditor over debtor dynamics. It is a parasite /host relationship. The Jew has always deigned to own the money power, or to become a permanent creditor, extracting from goyim debtors forever. This is why they have been kicked out over 100 times, because of their predatory parasitism. It is always a King or authoritarian who does the ass kicking. Hitler thought Jews were a race problem, and meanwhile there were some 20 percent of Germans who were deformed and sympathetic to the Jew. Hitler should have kept the race angle to himself, but held privately to race realism. Don’t lie to yourself. The deformed 20% will never admit they are deformed.
The blue bucket is clown world, and epigenetics and environment will create a new race-people who are low trust and more animal like. We in the west are deep into clown-world, a deep blue bucket. The easiest way to see it, is to put on your spectacles, and look for privatized money, especially private corporate banks. Clown world, the blue bucket, is the Jews invention, invented while in Amsterdam after Spanish expulsion. Clown world includes parasitism, usury, low-trust people, woman power, negroes with the jewish revolutionary spirit (Negro radicals funded by Jewry), normalizing the gay, and pedophilia, and perverted Judeo Christianity. Judeo Christianity is detected when the jubilee is erased from the doctrine.
Harvesting debtors in a debt cycle is the Jew’s harvest which then funds dystopia of clown world blue bucket.
The red bucket has public credit and money. The first seigniorage of public credit aims at industry and the commons. The colonials in America invented this form of political economy, especially in Massachusets bay using Pine Tree Shillings. Treasury sovereign money channeled into both industry and the commons, and the Colonials were astonished at how labor and industry and the commons all improved simultaneously. They called this the commonwealth and it did not include gold and silver. Jews do not want a commonwealth. They are not in the logos. Read it again and repeat it to yourself. Jews want to take the economic surplus of civilization for themselves, and reduce humanity into their serfs/cattle/debtors. Debt slavery is part of the blue bucket scheme.
Public credit and money, the red bucket, includes some sort of mechanism, usually with a King – who sits in judgement on privateers and usurers within his kingdom (blue bucket people). Remember, about 20 percent of the population are defectives, driven by their sordid desires. Jews have always been expelled because of their behavior, which after thousands of years of evolution may now be racial, an evolutionary construct. Hitler was right, but the rest of the world wasn’t ready to hear it, especially with Jews owning the press organs of the west.
From ancient Sumer and Babylon, up until Judea, the God-King palace economies were red bucket. They didn’t allow an oligarchy to develop, or privateering wealthy sordid gain takers to get the upper hand. They erased debts, which is the core teaching of original Christianity (not what we have now – deformed Judeo Christianity).
Erasing debts is in the red bucket, the logos. It is also real Christianity, something the Jew fears above all. Torah Jews were put down around the time of Christ, and made into permanent debtors.. This was due to Hillel’s prozbul clause, which created a love of money Pharisee class, the worst of the Jews. Forgive them their debts as we forgive the debtors is in the red bucket, and the Pharisee were against the Lord’s prayer.
Debt is sin, the original concept of Christianity. A civilization that has 95% of its population indebted, is paying a usury tithe to the top 5%. The wealth of the top 5% is an extraction from indebted goys in the bottom 95%.
In the blue bucket, the goy/animals vote for their debtor status. It is what democracy does. In a two party democracy, the illusion of choice is satanic/anti-logos. Both choices are your dispossession, and worse, you sanction your dispossession.
George Washington did not want two party democracy. Hamilton had a sinking fund to return the stock of the first bank to Treasury. Jefferson’s dying wish was to fix the mistake made in the Constitution, which allowed government to borrow its own credit from privateers. Payne knew the french revolution was a blue bucket take-over. The revolutionary war was due to a blue bucket attack on the red bucket, as by that time in history the Bank of England (1694 yes- Jews) had already embedded itself and was indebting the population. The Colonials were attacked, when their sovereign script, such as pine tree shillings, were demonetized. This then caused a severe depression, which led to the revolutionary war.
Hitler had resurrected the red bucket American System of the founders, and was the bad guy. Really? China today is the closest political economy to that of the founders, and they are the bad guys. Really? Don’t listen to top creditor Jews and their narratives, they cannot help themselves -and they may actually be a racial epigenetic problem. Put on your spectacles. Turn up the gain on your jew-dar.
In a nutshell, England/France/Jewry meddled and made (fake!) promises of support to the nations surrounding Germany after lying on and instigating incessantly against Germany and the German attempts to alleviate the damage done by the Treaty of Versailles.
Bolshevik/Stalinist Russia played everyone, whilst secretly and openly killing-off much of their own population and/or using them for slave labor in order to eventually dominate militarily and culturally as much of Europe as possible after (hopefully) years of war/conflict. Hitler was on to their Bolshevik/Communist cat & mouse game and invaded first. [Germany/Hitler truly had the best interests of Europe in mind, in my opinion.]
Winston Churchill was a repugnant excuse for an Englishman; a whore for Jewry; a disgusting war pig, and a traitor to England and Anglo-Saxons, in general.
Organized Jewry does as they have always done, and Hitler was absolutely correct in every allegation and prediction he made against Jewry and their intentions/machinations and hostilities in Europe/Palestine and the unfortunate consequences thereof.
It’s the Cliff Notes/Spark Notes ilk, such as yourself, I guess, who create a problem for western people and provide ample hunting grounds for those who wish to deceive and bastardize accurate European history, as such ilk can’t be bothered to inform themselves through even a minimum of serious study. The true history and pitiful consequences of our actual losing of WW2 can’t be conveyed, in any meaningful way, with a pithy, nutshell essay or comment. In truth, we (America) fought against our own interests.
The subject essay, and the previous article, is/was excellent, rather elucidating, and of great importance, and you should read both; study both; commit much of it to memory; and forward to whomever might take an interest.
We CAN NOT defend ourselves, as White/European Gentiles, against a Force about whom we have not the slightest knowledge or even a cursory understanding.
The pledge to Poland was the stupidest thing the British ever did.
The BolshevikPretzel is a fan of Stalin. His mantra – “Lie back and think of Uncle Joe!” is well known.
Regarding the Mannerheim recording, he will (did once) say the rather calm tenor and thoughtful inflection of Hitler’s tea-time voice with a friend/ally is proof-positive that Hitler was an imposter and a war monger.
Nor is the BolshevikPretzel an Irishman.
Agreed. Without British meddling, Hitler would have settled minor border disputes with Poland. He wanted a few small areas occupied mostly by Germans returned that Germany was forced to cede by the Brits in 1919 to end a starvation blockade.
Then the Germans would ally with the Poles (who the Soviets had already attacked in 1920) and the rest of Eastern Europe (which eventually occurred) to deter or defeat the Soviets. The Brits, French and Americans needn’t fight a World War II.
What a fuckin’ lie.
you are correct sir. at the end in the bunker, hitler blamed the war on the british and the jews. as you so astutely pointed out, it’s the goddamn british and the jews up to their old tricks again, this time in the ukraine.
All true, and as I understand it, there were a 150K armed Jews in Poland agitating against Germany and maybe responsible for a lot of the Germans’ troubles there.
“the fake nation of Czechoslovakia was formed”
so what about the fake nation of The German Empire brought together brutally? what about the fake nation of Austria-Hungary to which the Czechs were forced for centuries? what about the fake nation of the USA?
the “fake nation” thing discounts anything else you’d say because it’s clear you have what would fairly be considered a demented bias. you can’t smell your own feces, you think it doesn’t stink.
the Czechs offered, in the mid-19th century, to the Germans to secede from Austria-Hungary without German-majority areas, the Germans refused. over the ensuing time, the Czechs reclaimed/repopulated ancient territory that was theirs, like Plzen (which lost its ethnic Czech majority after the exterminations of the Thirty Years’ War, the exterminations that actually made the Germans a majority in the area in the first place, a majority they held after those exterminations for only 270 years by 1918, the millennias before that it being a Czech plurality or majority). after they finally reclaimed their nation, the Czechs took it with all their historical territory even where they may have still been a minority. they received backing for this endeavor by ‘The West’ because while the Czechs sent a legion to fight Bolshevism in Russia, the Kaiser sent Lenin to start the Revolution.
the Czechs treated the Germans in Czechoslovakia fairly, far better than they treated us (if you research ethnic riots of the Austria-Hungary era, you’ll find the Czechs bundled the Jewish and German merchants as one and the same in their behavior towards Czechs, ironically the Germans had no problem with the Jews until they were finally betrayed by them). Germans were allowed political parties, schools in their own language, newspapers in their own language, they were privy to the social care system (and received help like all others during The Great Depression). conversely, when the Czechs demanded equal treatment in Austria-Hungary, German citizens rioted against the prospect. the Germans simply weren’t allowed to secede, but the Czechs were fair, because they respected the historical nature of the place, allowing both Czechs and Germans to live in peace. when the Germans took over after Munich, my mom’s great uncle was forced to quit school because the Germans shuttered Czech language schools, so much for the ‘minority Rights’ the Germans championed, what hypocrites.
Having read quite a few texts on the history of the Inter-War Period, I am finding this article very interesting and plan to complete its reading in its entirety.
However, I was surprised to find that the author did not use David Hoggan’s, “The Forced War”, as a source, considering that it is one of the definitive studies on this period. In fact, to my knowledge, it is the only complete diplomatic history on the period that I am ware of.
And this is where I found at least one error in the author’s writing.
Early on he mentions that Britain was not a purveyor of the “Balance of Power” doctrine until up to near the outbreak of WWII.
This is an error, most likely in interpretation of his sources. Britain had very much used and supported the “Balance of Power” doctrine for the past two centuries and she used it quite readily against Germany as WWII grew closer to breaking out.
In terms of French belligerence towards Germany, this was not as all encompassing as the author has led readers to believe. It is true that France had a psychotic hatred of Germany since the end of WWI as a result of the Clemenceau leadership during that conflict. However, the French Foreign Minister, George Bonet, in the latter 1930s, was staunchly opposed to spooling up troubles again with Germany and wanted peaceful relations with her. He was so successful in his opposition he nearly convinced the French President to avoid being drawn into any aggressive alliances with Britain.
As it regards the Locarno Treaty between France and Germany, by 1936 the French had already removed its troops from the Rhineland since after WWI this aspect of the three treaties signed at Versailles only provided for France to maintain troops in the Rhineland for 15 years. By 1936, for whatever reason, France had already left the Rhineland prior to the 15 year limit as she had decided to remove her troops from the region early.
The fact that Germany reoccupied the Rhineland does not mean that she threw the French out. Instead, it merely means that Germany returned her troops to a German territory that was no longer occupied.
I thought it was comic relief.
The Jews in Poland had organized into a large terrorist paramilitary called Beitar (League of Trumpeldore) which was a forerunner of the IDF. They had 40,000 gun men all told. The Poles were preparing to ship them to Palestine to fight the British. Then German knocked on the door.
So to make a short story long, the Germans were actually the massive underdog in WW2…having a tiny territory and few natural resources and only truth, their own ingenuity, pluckiness, and work ethic on their side.
While there were three gigantic world powers with almost unlimited resources and hundreds and hundreds of millions of brainwashed goys to fight for the jewish ruling class that controlled all three nations behind the scenes: uk, us, and the soviet union.
Not really an “even” match huh?
Weird how the judaized history books of the west don’t paint ww2 in this way….
Why do Reader’s Digests, executive summaries, and such “ilk” exist in the first place?
As for being “informed,” I suspect you’re wrong. In fact, I’ll wager I’ve read more about the Mideast than high-horse you.
For example, I’ve books by Vladimir Rezun (Viktor Suvorov) on Russia’s WWII military plans to hit Adolf first. And tons of other tomes by Mideast opiners from Irving to Bahour to Mondoweiss and others (Delisle, Hillburg, Jiryis, Browning, Duke, Hitler (both volumes of Mein Kampf ) to infinity and beyond.
The problem is that Joe Sixpack hasn’t. And that matters. Because even if Gazans convince every Congo village that Israel is “the bad guy,” it won’t mean shit to a tree. The key is to convince “enough” ordinary Americans. Because, at least at the moment, America remains king of the hill.
Alas Palestinians, like Morgan Jones does, think it’s better to have a warehouse full of drinks superior to Coke than actually sell them. They also don’t “get” that Coca Cola isn’t bought for being caramelized seltzer, but for providing “good times” vibes. No one wants to buy the world a Coke to sate thirst. They do so to offer friendship.
Marketing matters.
Palestinians don’t have a state because they refuse to master modern media. They use Israel’s terms…like “incursion… instead of “invasion.” And so lose every argument. They let themselves be called “terrorists” a billion times, rebutting the term 100 times tops. So the demonizing slur sticks.
FACT: if someone calls you a pedophile and you let it remain (because, well, you know you’re not one), don’t be surprised when few care if you get stomped.
The Problem: few people are going to read a 9,100-word screed if they’re not already “interested” in the topic.
Naifs need to first be persuaded to give a hoot. They need to be “sold” via preliminary “sound-bites” and primers and “comic-book”-like intros.
FACT: You don’t interest kids in playing baseball by having them first face Major League pitchers. You start them off playing tee-ball, building up their coordination, muscle-memory, and so on.
Similarly, you first put a child on a tricycle, then bike with training wheels, and only later…motorcycles.
What have Palestinians done? Fronted spokespersons like Hanan Ashrawi…who looks and sounds like a shtetl yiddishe momme. Worse, she yammers on and on about arcane UN resolutions know one cares about. Because no one cared to teach them.
Meanwhile, Israel sells its views via savvy talking-heads who look, talk, and dress like Americans.
FACT: Audiences respond favorably to “sellers” who look and sound like themselves.
Again, what have Palestinians done? They fronted Yasser Arafat to “sell” their ‘message.” Now Arafat may well have been a fine leader, beloved by Arabs who knew him. But Americans didn’t know him. So didn’t care about him or his cause. They saw him as a C-list Hollywood extra sporting a perma-5 o’clock shadow beard, lisping like a faggotso, and wearing a kitchen dishtowel on his head. His pearl-handled pistols made him look like a bargain-basement Patton.
The sad truth: Palestinians don’t have a state because they still haven’t mastered modern media.
Meanwhile, the IDF has dedicated cadres pushing hasbara online 24-7-365. And civilian Jews pay literally thousands of other diaspora Jews to “work the media” ’round the clock. College classrooms have “spies” reporting on how Israel is presented. And tons of ordinary online Jews champion the Jew State.
Palestinians, on the other hand, waste time teaching “skygeeks” how to program. And publish endless white papers on what they’ll do once they have a state…3 billions years from now.
It’s like watching adults build sand castles.
Where are the endless stories, videoclips, and soundbites teaching/reminding the world that Israel itself was founded by terrorists? Who is saying again and again again that the Irgun illegally smuggled state-of-the art Czech weapons into Mandate Levant? Who teaches that:
Jew mobsters aided the invasion of Palestine;
smuggled weapons were stored in synagogues; and
everything horror that Jews say Arabs do is actually done by Juden themselves?
Don’t expect people to read dust-encrusted books languishing in library stacks. Not when you don’t bother to intrigue them first by offering exciting intros.
Don’t expect the world to care about Gazans who, themselves, didn’t care enough over 76 years to get their side of things out.
Even today, you rarely if ever hear Palestinian advocates using American history, argot, and icons to make their case. If they did, millions of outraged Americans would protest effectively and daily. Then Palestinians would have their state.
Yet even now, few if any pro-Palestinian advocates compare Hamas to the Minutemen on Lexington Green. Or Gaza to the Alamo. Or Hamas to Spartacus’ slave army (or Jews escaping Sobibor). Or Bibi to Adolf.
No one reminds those who brag about the IDF being the “most moral army in the world” that Himmler said the same thing about the Wehrmacht in his Posen speeches..
Again: unless one is a pure academic, it’s useless for activists to know history if they can’t convey it meaningfully to others. Yet where are media-masters recruiting apprentices? How is the Palestinian Online Guild enticing youths to enter it media “trades”?
What effective “elevator pitch” is presented to Mideast “noobs?” What one-page, graphically-interesting, engaging, “pithy” FAQs sheet is handed to passersby per current genocidings in Gaza?
Tragically, after all this time, Palestinians still don’t “get” why US armed forces made movies like Why We Fight during WWII. Or why they paid Capra big bucks to make ’em.
Video Link
Yet some blindly persist in insisting that:
How dense! No one goes 0-to-60 per Levantine history unless first enjoying “pithy parties.”
FFS: the main reason Israel has gotten away with their 7 decades-of-terror is due to one pithy, nutshell word: Holocaust!
A Palestinian can eruct on and on about the “nakba” months on end…yet be nuked by one Jew saying just one word: “Holocaust.”
Why? Because Jews spent years and years producing short talks, essays, books…and then block-buster movies…on the so-called Holocaust.
What comparable…and effective!…efforts have Palestinians made?
Hell, Palestinians don’t even bother to spotlight famous Arab-Americans…from Danny Thomas to Tony Shalhoub to Salma Hayek and others. Such efforts/focuses would say: “We’re just like you!” So when they see Palestinian babies being blown to shitereens, they won’t say: “Who cares? They’re all just devils.”
Media-media-media-media-media-media-media-media…MATTERS!
Stories trump statistics.
Emotions, not “facts,” move audiences to act.
Personal stories have more impact that repeated numbers.
Unsympathetic (because not “reached”) US audiences will care more about Jews via Anne Frank than seeing piles of unknown (and thus not identified with) dead Arab teens.
Unless and until Palestinians master effective rebuttals, framing, and other arts-of-suasion…they will continue to be arse-reamed.
I mean, why the fark hasn’t every American been urged to watch this?
Video Link
While it’s not the end all and be all per PR, it is a “pithy, nutshell essay/comment” start. It shows a sports-loving American audience that “ay-rabs” are just like us. That kind of “identifying” engenders “empathy.” And that creates emotional responses. So when viewers later see folks like us in the Mideast being butchered by Kikestanis, they just might be outraged enought to do something about it.
Capisce?
British and American Anglos (sometimes known as WASP) and Scots love kikes.
Especially Jewish money.
They prefer Jews and cause division in Europe for hundreds of years.
In WW2 they left out the smaller countries in between the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany with false promises. Didnt lift a finger.
They sided with Communists.
Today they hate Russia and keep Germany a slave.
Anglo-American and Jewish policy is to hate Germany and the Slavic countries. By funding wars on that part of the sphere they allow many to die.
They still look down on the smaller states and keep them divided. They still see Russia as non-European.
“Debt is sin, the original concept of Christianity. A civilization that has 95% of its population indebted, is paying a usury tithe to the top 5%. The wealth of the top 5% is an extraction from indebted goys in the bottom 95%.”
Tibet 1959 –had 97% illiteracy and 95% poverty – it was a Theocracy under the Dalai Lama. Debt was inherited generationally so no matter How hard a peasant worked–he was born into poverty and died in poverty and if not careful –punished by the monks.
Any evidence towards the alleged persecution of German minority in pre-war Poland?
Or you’re just talking out of your rear?
You make your hate towards Slavs very obvious. Paradoxically, it is that hate that accelerated the demise of the 3rd Reich. Apparently Germans don’t learn. Or maybe they do and you’re an exception – a Teutonic simpleton spewing lies for the entertainment of naive and ignorant audience.
Well, I guess you told me; I guess I had it comin’.
Not really. The subject essay is not about the current state of Palestine/Israel, unlike your 1,300-word, pithy screed, but fair enough then…
I’ll skip the pissing contest and submit that I therefore find it odd that one as well-read and academic as yourself on such a complex and lengthy overall subject would leave such a derogatory post on an informative article that certainly would have taken a considerable effort and much time to investigate and compose. Basically, what you’re saying is Revisionists should master the art of clickbait? Maybe so. But, where does one go afterwards?
Hitler’s War was what, 900+ pages? Yet, you’ve got a bee in your bonnet over 9,000 words, and particularly over 9,000 words that offered significant insight into why Hitler/Germany was motivated/forced to do the things that were done, and why England’s Hero Churchill was no such thing. These are rather important tells.
On this we agree. Try this – attempt to explain to a Joe Sixpack you personally know that Adolf Hitler was no Adolf Hitler; that Winston Churchill and FDR were traitors and war criminals; that Jews are, in fact, mostly guilty of the things for which they have been historically accused; and do this in 5 minutes, which is the average length of time it takes to read 1,300 words. See what happens.
Palestinians don’t have a state because Jews have American and English battering rams, stooges, and Useful Idiots to do the funding, fighting, and dying for Israel.
I don’t deny our captured media is a major culprit in lying about/obfuscating history and current events, but what about academia and publishing? I will assume you are aware of the extraordinary demographic changes in America/Europe since 1945, and of who has been at the forefront of the liberalization of immigration/asylum policies? Just the other day, not in February, when I strolled through the children’s section at Barnes & Noble to the History shelf, I saw mostly black faces on the featured books – Carver, Douglass, Obama, Marley, Tubman…way down on the bottom shelf – Edgar Allan Poe. On the Mind, Body & Health shelf – “Glory, Magical Visions of Black (girl) Beauty” and “Something Happened In Our Town (A Child’s Story About Racial Injustice)” – on and on this Black/Brown-fest went, even in the Classics section. Of course, standards in American/English education have been exponentially lowered decade after decade to accommodate the masses of black and brown faces in western classrooms, so balking at having to spend 30-45 minutes to learn something of substance just smacks the wrong way, as I refuse to lower my standards or accommodate indigenous ways of knowing, which is mostly superficial and always anti-White. “Norse Mythology” was also at the bottom of the Classics shelf, although there was a book titled “Goddess” on the bottom, as well – except for Medusa, all the Goddesses on the cover were black/brown.
Now, because of essays like the one we’re arguing over, I know this rewriting of history and the intentional elevation of non-Whites at the expense of Whites/Europeans has absolutely nothing to do with a genuine concern for the welfare and dignity of the marginalized. No, the Marginalized are the battering rams of Jewry. It’s rather complex and difficult to understand unless one is aware of the lengths to which Organized Jewry will go to achieve their ends.
On that note, explain the actual origin and history of the African slave trade into the Americas through Amsterdam and Newport in 5 minutes, while you’re at it.
In pithy, nutshell soundbites? Nowhere. It can’t be done. Or, maybe it’s done on World Truth Videos. But, WTV is considered fringe mainly because the content is often aggressive and impolite, and baby steps must be taken gingerly because people can’t tolerate uncomfortable subject matter these days, as reality, substance, and accuracy are all relics of White Supremacy.
FFS: This portion of your diatribe is the most ridiculous of it all. Holocaust literature and media are nowhere within the realm of pithy. We are inundated with Holocaust nonsense, remembrance, museums, fundraising, movies, so on, and as I’m sure you know, it’s illegal in Europe to refute any aspect of the official narrative of WW2/Holocaust, and the Palestinians in their current plight have nothing whatsoever to do with this circumstance, and if Israel can pull the wool over the eyes and hearts of the Nordics, Anglos, Saxons, etc., in successive years, against historical wisdom and warnings; in defiance of all laws of western jurisprudence, reason, mathematics, chemistry, and thermodynamics, what in God’s name can the Palestinians do to stop them? Palestinian competence in media matters is the least of their problems.
The Jews control the western media, therefore they control the narrative; now they’re ensconced within academia, publishing, and the governments of all of Europa. Until one understands how and why they have accomplished this against quite arguably the most extraordinary group of people on earth, they will remain unopposed – capisce? We are exponentially diminishing in numbers and becoming stupider, lazier, and less educated every decade, so it gets easier and easier to maintain hegemony over us. We hardly know they have it. This understanding comes only after years of study, and frankly, Mr. Jones condensed quite a bit of sordid and shocking history into a paltry 9,000 words. Is that really too much to ask to inspire someone to help save Europa?
Regarding Palestine, are you suggesting American boys/men must fight and die, again, to “free” a nation of people other than their own? You’re correct, America is still a world Behemoth, but America is not, nor has it for many decades, acted in the interests of the legacy American people or America. Israel would not/could not survive without American money, ingenuity and power, but we are dwindling in Saxon genetics/power and have very few left to send elsewhere, and should another real war occur in a land far, far away, we will be diminished beyond repair. If we turned Israel loose from their position as our “greatest ally” and let them fight for themselves, the Palestinians/Arabs could take them, I’m sure.
You haven’t been reading the right history texts and sources. You have been reading mainstream western sources on interwar period and the events leading to WWII.
Majority of them are mostly Western propaganda writing total rubbish. Western history academy is a total and utter fraud when it comes to topic of origins of WWII. It is very annoying when the mainstream history academy connives to suppress and cover up the truth on important historical events and write total rubbish on origins of WWII.
David Hoggan’s “The Forced war” is a complete and total joke also. There is no need whatsoever to read that book.
Read these sources. They will tell you the truth. They can give you CLARITY on what really happened in 1930s:
As Prof Carroll Quigley put it:
…the British Conservative government had reached the fantastic idea that they could kill two birds with one stone by setting Germany and Russia against one another in Eastern Europe.
In this way they felt that the two enemies would stalemate one another, or that Germany would become satisfied with the oil of Rumania and the wheat of the Ukraine. It never occurred to anyone in a responsible position that Germany and Russia might make common cause, even temporarily, against the West. Even less did it occur to them that Russia might beat Germany and thus open all Central Europe to Bolshevism…
…In order to carry out this plan of allowing Germany to drive eastward against Russia, it was necessary to do three things:
(1) to liquidate all the countries standing between Germany and Russia;
(2) to prevent France from honoring her alliances with these countries; and
(3) to hoodwink the English people into accepting this as a necessary, indeed, the only solution to the international problem.
The Chamberlain group were so successful in all three of these things that they came within an ace of succeeding, and failed only because of the obstinacy of the Poles, the unseemly haste of Hitler, and the fact that at the eleventh hour…”
https://web.archive.org/web/20221029210347/http://www.yamaguchy.com/library/quigley/anglo_12b.html
http://www.carrollquigley.net/books.htm
More sources here:
See also pages 284, 559, 576, 608, of this book “Tragedy and Hope”; the entire story is told there.
http://www.carrollquigley.net/pdf/Tragedy_and_Hope.pdf
Stalin, appeasement, and the Second World War by Mark Jones
http://www.columbia.edu/%7Elnp3/mark_jones/appeasement.htm
In our time : the Chamberlain-Hitler collusion
https://archive.org/details/inourtimechamber0000leib
The Spanish Civil War: Revolution and Counterrevolution by Burnett Bolloten (chapters 8, 9, 16, 17, 61)
https://archive.org/details/spanishcivilwarr0000boll_z8t8
The Munich Conspiracy by Andrew Rothstein
https://archive.org/details/munichconspiracy0000andr/mode/2up
Europe on the Eve, the Crises of Diplomacy, 1933-1939 by Frederick L. Schuman
https://archive.org/details/europeoneve0000schu
Falsifiers of History: An Historial Document on the Origins of World War II
https://libgen.is/book/index.php?md5=4AD21DF829DA634FAFED44BE71ED6C62
https://web.archive.org/web/20050616080438/http://www.agitprop.org.au/lefthistory/1948_falsifiers_of_history.php
Selected Works of Mao Zedong
https://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/mao/selected-works/volume-2/mswv2_17.htm
https://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/mao/selected-works/volume-2/mswv2_19.htm
http://www.china.org.cn/china/military/2007-07/30/content_1219034.htm
Documents And Materials Relating To The Eve Of The Second World War II. Dirksen Papers Vol. I ( 1937 1938)
https://archive.org/details/documents-and-materials-relating-to-the-eve-of-the-second-world-war-ii.-vol.-i-
Documents And Materials Relating To The Eve Of The Second World War II. Dirksen Papers Vol. II ( 1938 1939)
https://archive.org/details/documents-and-materials-relating-to-the-eve-of-the-second-world-war-ii.-vol-ii-
THE COMING OF THE WAR AND EASTERN EUROPE IN WORLD WAR II.
https://acienciala.ku.edu/hist557/lect16.htm
The Road to War: A Selection of Primary Documents
https://web.archive.org/web/20140815094039/https://www2.bc.edu/~heineman/origins.html
Thank you, Morgan Jones, for another solid history piece.
Couple minor demurs, mainly GB was entirely about balance of power/divide and rule on Continental Europe as elsewhere, as another above points out.
Just to pay tribute to that great Leader, Adolf Hitler. He did his honest best, with others, but the Sanhedrin and shabbos-goy were too much.
And what disgusting creatures were those shabbos-goy. And how weak were those who knew that they were disgusting/corrupt etc but failed to effectively oppose them. That cowardice imho is one of the prime lessons in this period.
Another might be to reflect on Mr “Litvinov’s” obvious access to a cut-price Jew tailor.
But that’s another matter entirely.
Perhaps it was the image he wished to project as a “man of the people”.
And maybe said tailor died of starvation in the ghetto.
I was looking through my books and found two volumes of materials from the Soviet Foreign Ministry for the years 1937-39.
If you read the mass of information provided there, it turns out that the whole of Europe clearly wanted a war
, but wanted someone else to suffer.
Not only brainwashed but forced to fight — “conscripted” “compulsory induction of individuals into the Armed Services.”
Yesterday a podcaster explained that he refrains from directly naming “zionism” or “Israel” in order that he be able to continue his podcasting; that he stay out of jail; that he retains his wealth.
I understand the prudent decision of the podcaster to speak in circles for fear of the Jew.
BUT if you don’t name the adversary, isn’t there a danger of aiming your blunderbuss in the wrong direction, against the wrong enemy or no enemy at all?
My Dad was conscripted to fight in WWII.
He was forced to ‘aim a gun’ against an enemy not of his own devising. He did, indeed, lose his physical well-being; his vision and ability to acquire wealth was forever impacted.
Yesterday Larry Wilkerson drove home the point that Jews in Israel (and R0W) will “kill and kill and kill” to enforce the overriding concept that THEY possess “deterrence” that you are incapable of evading or resisting
Video Link
This is chilling.
It’s not just the Palestinians who are thus threatened or whose lives are ruined, it’s all of us.
The Va pensiero chorus in Verdi’s Nabucco is an unofficial ‘national anthem’ of the Italian people.
Audiences respond emotionally to the passage,
O, mia patria si bella e perduta
(Oh, my homeland; so beautiful and so lost)
The Chorus follows Old Testament Psalm 137, but Verdi dramatically changed its conclusion from the Hebrew wish to “dash their children upon the rocks” to a prayer repeated four times:
al patire virtù –that “the Lord” inspire a “consensus” of “manly courage” (virtù) for the “struggle” or “against the suffering.”
(I insist: “virtù” is not plain vanilla virtue; it is manly —vir — courage.)
(I insist: “virtù” is not plain vanilla virtue; it is manly —vir — courage.)
Correct.
In Brit Isles Medieval Kings were expected to have “Vertue” — same meaning. Added components of compassion (for poor etc), respect for women.
In my opinion the phrase “balance of power” is itself a problem. What is it exactly? It has no clear meaning, or at least it has an adaptable meaning based on time, place, person, and circumstance, but I think more importantly it has a vague ethical quality to it, much like “equality” or “freedom”. It is essentially something that can be sold to the inexperienced and less adroit, and I would say that is the entire point of the phrase.
Source: Schroeder, P. W. (1992). Did the Vienna Settlement Rest on a Balance of Power? The American Historical Review, 97(3), 683–706. https://doi.org/10.2307/2164774
————————————
My own cynical definition of “balance of power” reduces it to the realm of political sloganing. It’s a buzzword, used by monarchs, politicians and bureaucrats to favorably characterize their desired course of action—”we are restoring the balance of power!” much like “we are making the world safe for democracy!”
Why would empires desire such things in the first place? Well, attempts to totally destroy one another can become self-defeating. Typically, the myth of the “balance of power” really means that the empires with a dominant status—an outcome of the last great war, whatever war that may be—want to maintain their dominant status indefinitely. What better way to say a “balance” has been achieved than when standing on the ashes of a fallen opponent? And this is quite obvious because it is the dominant empires who claim that stability, or balance, has been achieved only when they have become dominant and bested their immediate rivals.
The Congress of Vienna is often cited as the paradigm of “balance of power” politics. That may be true in the sense it is characterized in a way to obscure the actual imbalance of power behind it.
Source: Schroeder, P. W. (1992). Did the Vienna Settlement Rest on a Balance of Power? The American Historical Review, 97(3), 683–706. https://doi.org/10.2307/2164774
This article while long was wonderfully written and very informative to this reader. Thank you!
But as another poster mentioned, what’s up with that suit?
“…Whole of Europe…” LOL! How many Europeans did you talk to then?
“…Soviet foreign ministry…” says it all. They invented their material even more than the so-called democracies.
> portrayed as a war of aggression by the German Reich to gain living space in the east.
That agrees with Hitler’s own description of his aims as declared on May 23, 1939:
“It is not Danzig that is at stake. For us it is a matter of expanding our living space in the East…”
— Max Domarus, Hitler: Speeches and Proclamations, Volume 3, p. 1619.
> Poland had already tried several times
The reports are that Pilsudski attempted to enlist France for a war against Germany in 1933, just after Hitler had gained the Chancellorship. Once it was clear that France rejected this as an imminent option, Pilsudski turned around and sought the declaration of non-aggression which was signed on January 26, 1934. No further signs of Poland seeking a conflict with Germany occurred until after the occupation of Czechia on March 15, 1939.
For other fake Churchill quotes:
https://richardlangworth.com/quotes-churchill-never-said-2
> everything hitler did was part of an effort to strengthen germany in preparation for the final conflict between german fascism and soviet communism.
That’s nowhere close to the truth. From the earliest days Hitler was arguing that the Russian Revolution represented the irreversible decay of Russian power and that this was clearing the way for Germany to expand its living space. He repeated this over and over in Mein Kampf, Hitler’s Second Book, and in multiple statements right up into the early days of Barbarossa. It was only in the fall of 1941 that he fully awakened to the fact that the USSR represented a serious military challenge.
—–
Germany decides [its future goal] to adopt a clear, farsighted policy of space … concentrates all of its strength on marking out a way of life for our people through the allocation of adequate Lebensraum for the next one hundred years. Because this space can only be found in the East … Germany again attempts to fight for its interests by forming a decisive power on land,
—–
— Hitler’s Second Book, Chapter XIII, p. 158 of the 2003 Enigma Books edition.
> Hungary wanted to regain more of its territory and started pushing into Slovakia after it declared independence.
Of all people, David Irving describes very concisely how the German officials were enraged in 1938 when they heard that Horthy was reaching agreement with the Czechs.
—–
Throughout August 1938, the “whetting the blade” continued… But when he tried to bribe the Hungarians into promising outright support of his invasion of Czechoslovakia, he was disappointed… That day, 22 August, passed without incident until evening when the Forschungsamt, routinely monitoring the Hungarians’ telephone conversations between Kiel and Budapest, reported that at a meeting of foreign ministers of the Little Entente in faraway Bled the Hungarian delegation had apparently formally renounced all use of force against Czechoslovakia; the wiretaps showed that Horthy, Kanya and his prime minister, Bela von Imrédy, had retrospectively sanctioned this. This cast a cloud over the entire state visit…
The secret meetings which began the next day, during a sea trip to Heligoland, were stormy. In the morning Hitler conferred privately with Horthy, while Ribbentrop and Weizsäcker took on Imrédy and Kánya… To Hitler it was inconceivable that Hungary was so reluctant to fight to regain her part of Slovakia.
—–
— David Irving, The War Path, pp. 125-6, 2013 Focal Point edition.
Hitler sought to keep the Hungarian-Slovak conflict by pressuring Horthy because he intended to use this as a tool for his preplanned expansion across Czechoslovakia.
Yep. Selfish jewish worms whine endlessly about the mythical six million jews turned into furniture….but I BLAME the jews for the 50+ million White gentiles killed fighting in a war that didn’t benefit them, it only benefitted the jews.
It was a brother war, and wicked, lying jews got White gentile Brits, Germans, and Slavs to all murder eachother in the tens of millions and that jewish inspired war destroyed the European people and the west way more than it damaged the jews.
My grandfather risked his life fighting against Germany while he was in the RAF….for what? So that the jews of today can gloat at how they are replacing White Europeans with infinity non White invaders.
Like Uncle Adolf said, these people are vicious backstabbers. I wish my grandfather was still around so I could explain how all his mates were killed for these jews that hate me, hate him, hate our ancestors, and hate our people.
Hitler’s speech of May 23, 1939 is nothing but the infamous Schmundt protocol:
A good three months after a speech to the army commanders, Hitler spoke again to the leaders of the three branches of the Wehrmacht at a secret conference.
The meaning and content of this speech on May 23, 1939 is highly controversial. It is the second of the “key speeches” with which the all Jewish Nuremberg Military Tribunal attempted to prove that the accused generals and admirals were “jointly planning a war and conspiring against peace.”
The speech, it should be noted immediately, is not available as a verbatim transcript in this case either. Lieutenant Colonel Schmundt, Hitler’s adjutant in the Wehrmacht at the time, wrote it down from memory at some point after the meeting…
(Tribunal witnesses were beaten black and blue – sometimes to death – till they signed statements and „documents“)
Schmundt’s notes on the first page of a transcript “reproduced analogously”, indicating that he did not adhere to Hitler’s wording.
Grand Admiral Raeder, confronted with the Schmundt transcript at the Nuremberg trial, said in court:
“In my opinion, it is the most unclear document about a speech by Hitler that exists anywhere, because a large part of what is said, in my opinion, makes no sense at all. …In this case in particular, it by no means accurately reflects the character of the speech.”
In reality on May 23, 1939, Hitler had summoned the commanders-in-chief of the armed forces and their chiefs of staff to the Reich Chancellery to inform them of two things: Firstly, that he wanted to set up an extra study staff at his disposal in the High Command of the Armed Forces (OKW). It was to investigate the conditions to which wars would be subject in the future.
Re. infamous “Max Domarus”:
The family background of the Nazi exploiter and a possible academic degree (“historian”) are in the dark (no entry in the German Biographical Encyclopaedia (DBE) or Munzinger). He published a four-volume work with texts of Hitler’s speeches – it is unreliable and extremely tendentious with regard to the texts reproduced and the events described; it also contains a large number of denigrations, slanders and insinuating smears of the leaders of the German Reich and the National Socialist organizations – it was a sales success in English-speaking countries after the war.
Poland fought with Czechoslovakia over Teschen, with Germany over Poznan (→ Greater Poland Uprising) and with Ukraine over Galicia (→ Polish-Ukrainian War).
In 1930/31, the Polish president commissioned plans for a march on Berlin and the press spoke of the “necessity” and “inevitability” of a future war against Germany. The justification for these efforts was the alleged historical “Slavic” settlement of the areas between the Elbe and Oder rivers before the German colonization in the early Middle Ages.
However, England and France refused to support any aggression against Germany at this time.
In December 1931, so-called “volunteer units” began the violent expulsion of the German minority in the area near the border on the Polish side (see Manchester Guardian of December 12, 1931). In the years 1933 and 1936, Polish units repeatedly attacked the territory of the Reich.
In the spring of 1933 and again in the winter of 1933/34, PILSUDSKI tried from Warsaw to persuade France to wage a war of aggression against Germany in order to gain further German territory up to the Oder, in particular the then Free City of Danzig, and East Prussia for Poland. As France did not feel strong enough and Great Britain advised against it, this war of aggression against the Reich did not take place. In preparation for this, PILSUDSKI had Polish troops land on Westerplatte, which belonged to the Free City of Danzig, on March 6, 1933 – a violation of international law (see article: Polish troops on Westerplatte in violation of international law) – and a few days later Polish units were assembled in the corridor.
After PILSUDSKY’s death (12.5.1935), on 7 March 1936, the day of the German invasion of the German Rhineland, which had been demilitarized since 1919, the new Polish head of state BECK again sought France’s assistance in a war of aggression against the Reich: he assured Poland that it would attack Germany in the east if France invaded West Germany. When Paris hesitated, BECK hastily traveled to London, where he received a rejection of his war plans from both the government and King Edward VIII. As early as 1936, Warsaw wanted a major European war against Germany in order to acquire further territories from us.
In August 1939, Poland carried out a series of military border violations and bombardments of German objects. In the seven days from August 25 to 31, 1939 alone, the German Foreign Office documented 43 Polish border violations, most of which involved gunfire and several German fatalities. On August 23, 1939, a German airliner flying to Gdansk was shot at by Polish anti-aircraft fire outside Polish territory near the Gdansk border. On August 25, 1939, another airliner was shot at from Polish warships in the open sea near Gdansk. The Ilustrowany Kurjer in Krakow, a widely circulated Polish newspaper, had already written on August 7, 1939 that Polish units were constantly making advances across the border into German territory in order to destroy military installations and take Wehrmacht weapons and equipment back to Poland.
After the partial mobilization of the Polish armed forces on 23.3.1939, the general mobilization was carried out by Warsaw in the night of 24.8.1939, initially delivered in person and publicly announced on 29.8. The Polish military plans stipulated that a general mobilization would only be ordered in the event that Poland had decided to go to war. Poland had thus decided to go to war at a time when a peaceful solution and the maintenance of peace in Europe were still being discussed in Berlin and elsewhere.
This must be a fake too, as fake as you are?
Emrys Hughes, Winston Churchill – His Career in War and Peace, page 145
Emrys Hughes & Nan Hardie are an extict species unlike the Hasbara McNallies.
Churchill: The Power of Words – His Remarkable Life Recounted Through His Writings and Speeches, Da Capo Press
“There is a way to break the resistance of the Boers. […] We must kill them to teach their children to love us.“
The Milwaukee Journal, 23. August 1915, p. 6
Marlborough Express, Volume XXXV, Issue 299, 27. December 1901, p. 2
The Church-ill-swine has been debunked a long time ago, but your species never gives up:
The Holocaust lie is one of the best proofs that Jews & British hyenas lie, lie, lie until the beams bend and the roof collapsed, they stick their heads out of the rubble, dust off and shout angrily: I told you so!
Churchill’s factory of lies:
„…especially in those of a certain Mr. Churchill, one could read at length, some years after the war, that during the war the London plutocracy had found nothing at all in lying to the world, indeed, that they still took great credit and pride in having led Germany by the nose …The most important English leadership secret is not so much to be found in a particularly outstanding intelligence as in a sometimes downright penetratingly stupid stubbornness. The English proceed according to the principle that if you lie, then lie thoroughly and, above all, stick to what you have lied about! So they stick to their fibs, even at the risk of making fools of themselves.“
(Churchills Lügenfabrik, Joseph Goebbels, 12. Januar 1941).
Well, Pretzel, Danzig, the Corridor, East Prussia, the Sudetenland, Bohemia, Moravia, and Austria are all to the east of Germany.
The Guardian
Mon, Dec 14, 1931 • Page 12
Disarmament, Hitler, and the Minorities
POLISH “PACIFICATION”
(From our Special Correspondent.)
WARSAW. SUNDAY.
The Polish papers are full of the visit of MI. Zaleski, the Polish Foreign Minister, to London, though without indicating its specific purpose…..
In any case, the offensive against the minorities is being pushed home–not so much against the German (although against them it has not relented) as against the Ukrainian and White Russian.
The terrible fact is that a ” second pacification” of Eastern Galicia is now going on – floggings are given not in the villages but in the prisons, while the co-operatives are not being raided and wrecked, but are being closed down, which, in effect, is at least as disastrous…..
The end.
I do wonder (not really) why England/France deemed only the people residing in western Poland worthy of a war to protect their Freedom & Democracy! yet everyone else in Eastern Europe was up for grabs?
Extract from Herr Hitler’s speech to the Reichstag on April 28, 1939.
[…] Here, too, the Peace Treaty of Versailles-of course intentionally-inflicted a most severe wound on Germany. The strange way in which the Corridor giving Poland access to the sea was marked out was meant, above all, to prevent for all time the establishment of an understanding between Poland and Germany…. Nevertheless, I have never ceased to uphold the view that the necessity of a free access to the sea for the Polish State cannot be ignored, and that as a general principle… nations which Providence has destined or, if you like, condemned to live side by side would be well advised not to make life still harder for each other artificially and unnecessarily….. Nevertheless, there remained one open question between Germany and Poland, which sooner or later quite naturally had to be solved-the question of the German city of Danzig. Danzig is a German city and wishes to belong to Germany. On the other hand, this city has contracts with Poland, which were admittedly forced upon it by the dictators of the Peace of Versailles….I regarded the peaceful settlement of this problem as a further contribution to a final loosening of the European tension. For this loosening of the tension is assuredly not to be achieved through the agitations of insane warmongers, but through the removal of the real elements of danger. After the problem of Danzig had already been discussed several times some months ago, I made a concrete offer to the Polish Government…. As I have already pointed out, I have always seen the necessity of an access to the sea for this country, and have consequently taken this necessity into consideration….
I considered it, however, necessary to make it clear to the Government in Warsaw that just as they desire access to the sea, so Germany needs access to her province in the east….
The end.
The Poles were no peaceniks and Hitler tried to help them; just like America, Poland fought the wrong enemy. I wonder (not really) why Untermyer failed to declare war on Poland when they started funneling Jews into camps long before Hitler ever did?
I am asking again: can you point to the sources of your claims about the alleged murders of the German minority in pre-war Poland?
Yes, that is correct. In September 1938, the Czech army was MORE powerful than the Germany army, insane as that seems to us now. If Germany had invaded Czechoslavkia in September 1938 as Hitler originally intended, the result would most likely be as Russian invasion of Ukraine in 2022. German army would move a few kilometers into Czech territory and get bogged down and the war would reach stalemate with the Czech army mounting a counter offensive later on.
The difference would be that Germany in 1938 would be surrounded by hostile countries and if they all intervened, Hitler would have been overthrown. No WWII. Hitler would only have been a footnote in world history.
But the British under Neville Chamberlain had a completely different agenda altogether. He had a far larger goal in mind. He was playing a bigger game with far higher stakes. His end goal and vision was more dramatic. So Chamberlain personally intervened to make sure that there would be no war in 1938 and that Czechsoslvakia would be destroyed as intended by Chamberlain.
“…While all this was going on, the remorseless wheels of appeasement were grinding out of existence one country after another. The fatal loss was Czechoslovakia. This disaster was engineered by Chamberlain with the full co-operation of the Milner Group. The details do not concern us here, but it should be mentioned that the dispute arose over the position of the Sudeten Germans within the Czechoslovak state, and as late as 15 September 1938 was still being expressed in those terms. Up to that day, Hitler had made no demand to annex the Sudeten area, although on 12 September he had for the first time asked for “self-determination” for the Sudetens. Konrad Henlein, Hitler’s agent in Czechoslovakia and leader of the Sudeten Germans, expressed no desire “to go back to the Reich” until after 12 September. Who, then, first demanded frontier rectification in favor of Germany ? Chamberlain did so privately on 10 May 1938…
…In order to persuade public opinion that it was necessary to yield to Germany, the Government pretended that its armaments were quite inadequate in comparison with Germany.” We now know, thanks to the captured papers of the German Ministry of War, that this was a gross exaggeration. These papers were studied by Major General C.F. Robinson of the United States Army, and analyzed in a report which he submitted to the Secretary of War in October 1947. This document, entitled Foreign Logistical Organizations and Methods, shows that all of the accepted estimates of German rearmament in the period 1933-1939 were gross exaggerations…
…The last piece of evidence which we might mention to support the theory—not of a plot, perhaps, but that the Munich surrender was unnecessary and took place because Chamberlain and his associates wanted to dismember Czechoslovakia—is even more incriminating. As a result of the inadequate rearmament of Germany, a group of conservatives within the regime formed a plot to liquidate Hitler and his close supporters if it appeared that his policy in Czechoslovakia would result in war…”
https://web.archive.org/web/20221029210347/http://www.yamaguchy.com/library/quigley/anglo_12b.html
Dr. Quigley explains how Nazi Germany seized a stronger Czechoslovakia
My dear Dr. Quigley:
My name is Jay Burke and I am a student at Georgetown University. I am writing in regard to a discussion I have had with a student of yours, James Dowling. It is his assertion that prior to the outbreak of hostilities in 1939, at the time Germany took over Czechoslovakia, Germany had only 36 incomplete divisions while Czechoslovakia had 35 complete and well trained divisions. In Dowling’s own words, “The Czech troops were ordered out of the trenches,” shortly before the treacherous invasion of the Germans.
Obviously the Czech army was more potent than the German army. If this is so, why was Germany able to conquer Czechoslovakia so easily, and why didn’t the Czechs resist?
It is my contention that Germany had more than 36 incomplete divisions to conquer a country of 35 complete divisions. Mr. Dowling contends that Germany had but 36 divisions plus their reserves.
Would you please give us the truth of the matter?
Respectfully yours,
Jay Burke
Prof Carroll Quigley:
My dear Mr. Burke,
Mr. Dowling’s statement, regarding the size of the German Army at the time of the Munich crisis of September 1938, is quite accurate. In the third week of September Czechoslovakia had a million men and thirty-four first-rate divisions under arms. The Germans, in the course of September, increased their mobilization to thirty-one and ultimately to thirty-six divisions; but this probably represented a smaller force than the Czechs…
http://www.carrollquigley.net/misc/Quigley_explains_how_Germany_conquered_Czechoslovakia.htm
That’s quite a mélange of unsourced quotes there. But just to focus on one of the few items where some claim of a reference was being made about Churchill and bacteria and biological warfare:
——
“I think I should emphasize that our interest in the whole [B.W.] project is purely defensive; by that I mean that we have no intention of indulging in this form of warfare except as a retaliation for its institution by the enemy. From this point of view the less effective it is proved to be in any respect, the better we are pleased.”
Far from the previously closed files proving the existence of a British plot to launch an anthrax attack, they show conclusively that the B.W. programme was designed for retaliation…
—–
– Julian Lewis, Changing Directions, 2nd edition, p. xxiv, quoting Churchill from the Chiefs of Staff Inter-Service Sub-Committee on Biological Warfare.
> Danzig, the Corridor, East Prussia, the Sudetenland, Bohemia, Moravia, and Austria are all to the east of Germany.
But the point he was making was that such patchwork territories do not suffice to achieve the demanded living space.
This had been addressed back in the Second Book, when he considered the recovery of old territory:
—–
I would like to state very briefly the possible foreign policy goals…
3) Germany establishes as its foreign policy goal the restoration of the 1914 borders.
This goal is inadequate from the national standpoint…
—–
— Hitler’s Second Book, p. 158, 2003 Enigma Books edition.
Instead, he sees a broad expansion to the east as the way forward, an expansion which is not focused on the small bits of territory which had previously belonged to Germany and Austria.
So, what’s the thesis of this article? That Stalin was a bad guy and wanted to instigate a German-UK/French war in 1938? Collective security was a fraud concocted by Soviets to instigate world war so as to turn Europe bolshevik? I don’t get CLARITY from the article. I didn’t get any mystery solved. I didn’t learn anything that cleared my doubts.
This is a long article and at the end of it, I get NOTHING.
If you want to invest yourself in a long article and get away with SOMETHING at the end of it, whether you agree with it or not, I have something for you:
https://web.archive.org/web/20221029210347/http://www.yamaguchy.com/library/quigley/anglo_12b.html
http://www.carrollquigley.net/books.htm
You don’t have to read a thousand books and articles on origins of WWII. Majority of them are all useless and completely worthless. Even if you read a thousand of them and all of them only tell lies and falsehood, it will all still be useless. We are in the year 2024. It is not the year when truth of origins of WWII is widely known. We are still getting propaganda films telling complete, total and utter rubbish about origins of WWII:
Munich: Edge of War gives Neville Chamberlain a makeover
https://www.bbc.com/news/entertainment-arts-59867318
The above film – complete garbage. Total fraud. 1000% fake. The truth is unable to get out. Even if it gets out, no one is going to buy into it. They prefer fake news.
A thousand fake articles and books and films will still be worthless at the end.
One article that speaks the truth is enough, you don’t need anything more.
“History Doesn’t Repeat Itself, but It Often Rhymes” – Mark Twain