REAL HISTORY #1 Who Started World War II? - 2 - Table of Contents Did Hitler Want War?.........................................................................................14 The Views of Four Diplomats Close to Events...................................................17 Hundred Years of War against Germany...........................................................26 Who Broke the Disarmament Treaty of Versailles?..........................................55 What the World Rejected ..................................................................................62 Hitler’s Peace Offers, 1933 - 1939......................................................................66 Czechoslovakia in Context.................................................................................84 Winston Churchill Discreetly Veiled, Part 1.....................................................101 President Roosevelt's Campaign To Incite War in Europe..............................121 German-Polish Relations, 1918 - 1939.............................................................161 Peace Overtures Following the German-Polish Conflict.................................180 How Britain Pioneered City Bombing..............................................................195 Examining Stalin’s 1941 Plan to Attack Germany...........................................205 Russian and German Historians Debate Barbarossa and Its Aftermath........217 The Jewish Hand in the World Wars, Part 1...................................................235 The Jewish Hand in the World Wars, Part 2...................................................263 Recommended Reading...................................................................................302 Notes.................................................................................................................303 - 3 - Everything I undertake is directed at Russia. If the West is too stupid and too blind to comprehend that, I will be forced to come to an understanding with the Russians, to smash the West, and then, after its defeat, to turn against the Soviet Union. - Hitler's words to the League of Nations commissioner for Danzig, Carl Burckhardt, in August 1939. In September 1944, when I was commander of the guard unit at Hitler’s headquarters, I spoke with Hitler during a walk together outside. I asked him: “My Fuhrer, may I speak frankly with you for a moment?” “Of course," he replied. I then asked him: “Why did you really attack Poland? Couldn’t you have been more patient?” Hitler had only asked for an extra-territorial highway and rail line across Polish territory, and he wanted the return of Danzig to the Reich. These were really very modest demands. With a bit more patience, couldn’t he have obtained these, in much the same way that Austria and the Sudetenland had been united with the Reich? And Hitler replied: “You are mistaken. I knew as early as March 1939 that Roosevelt had determined to bring about a world war, and I knew that the British were cooperating in this, and that Churchill was involved. God knows that I certainly did not want a world war. That’s why I sought to solve the Polish problem in my own way with a kind of punishment expedition, without a declaration of war. After all, there had been thousands of murders of ethnic Germans and 1.2 million ethnic German refugees. What should I have done? I had to act. And for that reason, four weeks after this campaign, I made the most generous offer of peace that any victorious leader could ever have made. Unfortunately, it wasn’t successful.” And then he said: “If I had not acted as I did with regard to the Polish question, to prevent a second world war, by the end of 1942 at the latest we would have experienced what we are now experiencing in 1944.” That’s what he said. - General Otto Ernst Remer, 1990 interview - 4 - I really think that this trial, if it should get into an argument over the political and economic causes of this war, could do infinite harm, both in Europe, which I don’t know well, and in America, which I know fairly well. If we should have a prolonged controversy over whether Germany invaded Norway a few jumps ahead of a British invasion of Norway, or whether France in declaring war was the real aggressor, this trial can do infinite harm for those countries with the people of the United States. And the same is true of our Russian relationships. The Germans will certainly accuse all three of our European allies of adopting policies which forced them to war. The reason I say that is that captured documents which we have always made that claim – that Germany would be forced into war. They admit they were planning war, but the captured documents of the Foreign Office that I have examined all come down to the claim, “We have no way out; we must fight; we are encircled; we are being strangled to death.” - Justice Jackson, Nuremberg trial record, http://avalon.law.yale.edu/imt/jack37.asp If another war comes and the history of it is ever written, the dispassionate historian a hundred years hence, will not say that Germany alone was responsible for it, even if she strikes first, but that those who mismanaged the world between 1918 and 1937 had a large share of responsibility in it. - Lord Lothian, British Ambassador to the U.S., March, 1938 There can be no doubt that he [Hitler] broadened the war in 1941 only on preventive grounds. - A. J. P Taylor, British historian. - 5 - The nature of the concessions that the German Fuhrer was prepared to make in order to obtain peace with Britain must have astounded the men at the head of SO1. This was not even a deal worked out through a process of hard negotiation. It was Hitler's opening gambit … an offer so generous and pragmatic that it would be very tempting to anyone who genuinely wanted peace. - Martin Allen describing Hitler’s January 1940 peace offer (via the Vatican ambassador) in Himmler's Secret War. …Take the summer of 1940, when Britain came to its other fateful crossroads, after France, Poland, the Low Countries, Norway and Denmark were all in German hands: at this point in Britain's tragic history, our "deadly foe" Adolf Hitler came to us with an offer so generous that you can only scratch your head now and ask, Well, what went wrong? I've seen it in the German, the Swedish, the Swiss and the American archives; but there are only vague traces of it in the British archives, because it has all been blanketed out – pasted over, like certain paragraphs in the Cabinet minutes of May, June, and July 1940, which you are not allowed to read even now, fifty years later. The peace offer was this: Hitler declared that he was prepared to pull his armies out of France, Holland, Belgium, Norway, Denmark, Poland and Czechoslovakia -- out of all these territories except of course for the regions which had been German before and which he had fought the war over. Now that he had the territories like Alsace and Lorraine back, he was not going to let them go. Hitler told us, through emissaries. In Sweden, he informed Victor Mallet, the British ambassador; Hitler sent a lawyer called Ludwig Weissauer to him in August 1940. In America, it was Hans Thomsen, the German ambassador, approached by the British ambassador, Lord Lothian, a very upright Christian gentleman. Every attempt that the Germans made to bring the details of their historic Peace Offer to the attention of the British people was killed by Winston Churchill. - David Irving, speech to the Clarendon Club, 1990 - 6 - Played golf today with Joe Kennedy. I asked him about his conversations with Roosevelt and Neville Chamberlain from 1938 on. He said Chamberlain’s position in 1938 was that England had nothing with which to fight and that she could not risk going to war with Hitler. Kennedy’s view: That Hitler would have fought Russia without any later conflict with England if it had not been for Bullitt’s urging on Roosevelt in the summer of 1939 that the Germans must be faced down about Poland; neither the French nor the British would have made Poland a cause of war if it had not been for the constant needling from Washington. Bullitt, he said, kept telling Roosevelt that the Germans wouldn’t fight, Kennedy that they would, and that they would overrun Europe. Chamberlain, he says, stated that America and the world Jews had forced England into the war. In his telephone conversation with Roosevelt in the summer of 1939 the President kept telling him to put some iron up Chamberlain’s backside. - James Forrestal’s diary, entry dated 27 December 1945 [Polish foreign minister] Beck assured [American] Ambassador Biddle shortly before midnight on August 25, 1939 that war between Germany and Poland was inevitable. He claimed that Poland had an adequate legal basis for a declaration of war against Germany, in case the Germans failed to take the initiative against Poland within the next few days. Beck denied that there was any truth in the Bielitz massacre, which had been confirmed by neutral sources. - David Hoggan, The Forced War, p.515 Few historians now accept that Hitler had any plan or blueprint for world conquest, in which Poland was a stepping stone to some distant German world empire. Indeed, recent research has suggested that there were almost no plans for what to do with a conquered Poland and that the vision of a new German empire in central and eastern Europe had to be improvised almost from scratch. - Richard Overy, 1939: Countdown to War, p.124 - 7 - ‘French Invade Reich’ - New York Times front page, September 7, 1939 ‘Goering Makes Bid to Paris’ - New York Times front page, September 10, 1939 The French invasion occurs some 8 months before the German invasion of France. On October 16 and 17, a German counter- offensive re-takes areas of the Saar occupied by the French, sustaining casualties of 196 dead, 114 missing, and 356 wounded. Hitler… would have preferred to keep Norway neutral and did not plan to invade her until he was provoked to do so by palpable signs that the Allies were planning a hostile move in that quarter. - Captain B.H. Liddell Hart, History of the Second World War In this hour I feel it to be my duty before my own conscience to appeal once more to reason and common sense in Great Britain as much as elsewhere. I consider myself in a position to make this appeal, since I am not the vanquished, begging favors, but the victor speaking in the name of reason. I can see no reason why this war must go on. I am grieved to think of the sacrifices it will claim. - Hitler’s speech before the Reichstag, 19 July, 1940. Dropped as a leaflet over England. - 8 - Hitler only undertook the bombing of British civilian targets reluctantly three months after the RAF had commenced bombing German civilian targets. Hitler would have been willing at any time to stop the slaughter. Hitler was genuinely anxious to reach with Britain an agreement confining the action of aircraft to battle zones. - J.M. Spaight, CB, CBE, Principal Secretary to the Air Ministry, Bombing Vindicated, 1944. The primary purpose of these raids was to goad the Germans into undertaking reprisal raids of a similar character on Britain. Such raids would arouse intense indignation in Britain against Germany and so create a war psychosis without which it would be impossible to carry on a modern war. - Dennis Richards, Royal Air Force 1939-45, The Fight at Odds, 1953 … The Netherlands coastal territory constituted an equally open and unsecured gate for British aircraft. The Reich government in repeated communications had drawn the Royal Netherlands Government's attention to a violation of Netherlands' neutrality by English planes. Since the outbreak of the war British fliers practically daily have been coming from the Netherlands and have appeared over German territory. There were 127 cases of such flying over Holland by England which have been confirmed definitively and in all details, and the Royal Netherlands Government has been notified of them. In reality, however, their number is much greater, amounting to many times, than cases in which the Netherlands has been notified. … [the] massing of Belgian and Netherlands troops on the German frontier occurred at a time when Germany had concentrated no troops at all on its frontiers facing Belgium and the Netherlands and while England and France on the contrary had gathered strong motorized offensive armies on the Belgian- French frontier. - German Foreign Minister von Ribbentrop's statement on the Invasion of the Low Countries, May 10, 1940 - 9 - ...as long as Germany and Italy are under their present governments, they will not touch foreign loans, and Germany by her method of internal economy and trading has eliminated the international financier, and those who make profits by playing with foreign exchanges. That is doubtless why the government is being forced by the “City” to start a trade war with Germany. If the economic methods devised by Germany are successful, and spread to other nations, and if Hitler succeeds in his policy of establishing permanent peace in Europe, the high financier will cease to be able to exist. It is therefore their main interest today to plunge the four powers into war, in order to destroy Germany and Italy. - Arthur Laurie, British chemist, The Case for Germany, 1939, p.9 “There are 20,000 German Jews in England – in the professions, pursuing research. They all work against an accommodation with Germany.” “The Jews have got a big position in the press here… At last I am shaken. The Jews may drive us into war.” - Lord Beaverbrook (owner of UK’s biggest paper), quoted in Beaverbrook: A Shattered Legacy. Appearing before a Senate Committee investigating propaganda in films, he [Senator Bennett Champ Clark] said the industry was turning out dozens of pictures to infect the minds of their audiences with hatred and to arouse their emotions. America's 17,000 cinemas virtually constitute daily and nightly mass meetings for war. - Daily Express, September 11th, 1941 - 10 -