"It belongs to the very nature of a totalitarian system of the Fascist type that it is restless, dynamic, wanting action for its own sake and constantly devising imperatives."
Goebbels & National Socialist Propaganda
2. jexster - 3/2/2000 12:53:35 PM
Well the new computer is almost here. Should be set up either today or tommorrow so I decided to get started and see how this thread goes.
WWII, often characterized as a continuation of WWI after a 20 year cease fire, is a vast subject encompassing most of what forms the basis of modern war fighting strategy and incredible death and destruction born of the greatest ideological clashes in human history.
So it is that the scope of the Thread will be vast - from Hegelian dialectic to the Holocaust, from guerilla war to the massive battles of the Eastern Front; from Hitler to Tojo to Mussolini to Stalin, Churchill and FDR.
I will be setting up several links in the "butter bar".
Here is a bibliography, annotated courtesy Amazon.com. The ratings (***, **, etc) are mine.
1. Rise and Fall of the Third Reich : A History of Nazi Germany ***
by William L. Shirer
Before the Nazis could destroy the files, famed foreign correspondent and historian William L. Shirer sifted through the massive self-documentation of the Third Reich, to create a monumental study that has been widely acclaimed as the definitive record of one of the most frightening chapters in the history of mankind--now in a special 30th anniversary edition.
"One of the most important works of history of our time."
THE NEW YORK TIMES
3. jexster - 3/2/2000 12:53:52 PM
2. Inside the Third Reich : Memoirs **
by Albert Speer, Eugene Davidson (Introduction), Richard Winston (Translator)
From 1946 to 1966, while serving the prison sentence handed down from the Nuremburg War Crimes tribunal, Albert Speer penned 1,200 manuscript pages of personal memoirs. Titled Erinnerungen ("Recollections") upon their 1969 publication in German, Speer's critically acclaimed personal history was translated into English and published one year later as Inside the Third Reich. Long after their initial publication, Speer's memoir continues to provide one of the most detailed and fascinating portrayals of life within Hitler's inner circles, the rise and fall of the third German empire, and of Hitler himself.
Speer chronicles his entire life, but the majority of Inside the Third Reich focuses on the years between 1933 and 1945, when Speer figured prominently in Hitler's government and the German war effort as Inspector General of Buildings for the Renovation of the Federal Capital and later as Minister of Arms and Munitions. Speer's recollections of both duties foreground the impossibility of reconciling Hitler's idealistic, imperialistic ambitions with both architectural and military reality. Throughout, Inside the Third Reich remains true to its author's intentions. With compelling insight, Speer reveals many of the "premises which almost inevitably led to the disasters" of the Third Reich as well as "what comes from one man's holding unrestricted power in his hands." -- Bertina Loeffler
3. Hitler: A Study in Tyranny **
by Alan Bullock
Bullock describes with chilling specificity how through adroit manipulation of popular discontent, the control of information, and the politics of terror, a madman and a monster inspired Germany to perpetrate the defining horror of this century.
4. jexster - 3/2/2000 12:58:26 PM
4. Hitler's Vienna : A Dictator's Apprenticeship **
by Brigitte Hamann, Thomas Thornton (Translator)
Michael White, The New Yorker, August 2, 1999
Hitler's Vienna tries to penetrate the myths of the dictator's formative years as a frustrated painter in Vienna. Hitler, she says, detested the city's cosmopolitanism and restless avant-garde and took great pleasure in relocating its art reasures to other cities when he took power.
Meir Ronnen, Jerusalem Post, August 13, 1999
Hamann claims that the Hitler of Linz and pre-war Vienna was not yet an antisemite. She believes that antisemitism became a central issue for him when he decided to become a politician and first began addressing audiences in Munich in 1919 in aggresively antisemetic terms. It was then that Hitler, the once weak eccentric who, in his own eyes at least, had become a somebody during the war...began reinventing himself.
Stanley, Hoffmann, Foreign Affairs, September/October 1999
Hamann combines a careful, well-documented account of Hitler's life as a young man in Vienna before World War I with a sociopolitical history of the Hapsburg capital during those years....Hamann must be congratulated on her critical and discriminating approach to her sources and the fascinating double story she tells.
5. 1933 **
by Philip Metcalfe
If you can find it, do so! Fascinating account, almost an historical novel of 1933, the year Hitler came to power, from the standpoint of the US ambassador and other German liberals who witnessed events in Berlin.
6. Churchill, Roosevelt, Stalin : The War They Waged and the
Peace They Sought
by Herbert Feis (out of print)**
5. jexster - 3/2/2000 1:02:23 PM
7. Second World War
by Winston Churchill, John Keegan (Editor) ***
"After the end of the World War of 1914 there was a deep
conviction and almost universal hope that peace would reign in
the world. This heart's desire of all the peoples could easily
have been gained by steadfastness in righteous convictions, and
by reasonable common sense and prudence."
But we all know that's not what happened. As Britain's prime minister for most of the Second World War, Winston Churchill--whose career had to that point already encompassed the roles of military historian and civil servant with a proficiency in both that few others could claim--had a unique perspective on the conflict, and as soon as he left office in 1945, he began to set that perspective down on paper. To measure the importance of The Second World War, it is worth remembering that there are no parallel accounts from either of the other Allied leaders, Roosevelt and Stalin. We have in this multivolume work an account that contains both comprehensive sweep and intimate detail. Almost anybody who compiles a list of such works ranks it highly among the nonfiction books of the 20th century.
6. jexster - 3/2/2000 1:03:32 PM
8. The Second World War
by John Keegan **
The best one-volume treatment available, The Second World War by John
Keegan is an outstanding synthesis of an enormous amount of material on "the largest single event in human history." The book proceeds chronologically through the war, but chapters appearing at appropriate moments focus on particular themes, such as war production, occupation, bombing, resistance, and espionage. Keegan's ability to translate the war's grand strategies is impressive, and the battle descriptions are superb. Generals obviously play a key role in this narrative, but ordinary soldiers also receive proper credit, as do the often-overlooked merchant marines whose heroic efforts to supply Great Britain made the Allied victory possible. Keegan, author of the landmark book The Face of Battle, is without doubt one of our greatest military historians, and here his analytical powers and skilled writing are on full display.
9. The Road to Pearl Harbor; The Coming of the War Between the
United States and Japan.
by Herbert Feis (out of print)***
10. The Hollow Years : France in the 1930's
by Eugen Weber *
7. jexster - 3/2/2000 1:08:35 PM
From Kirkus Reviews , September 15, 1994
Weber (European History/UCLA; France, Fin de SiŠcle, 1986; etc.) skillfully paints a somber portrait of France in decline. War and the threat of war shaped France in the 1930s. Though the nominal victor of WW I, France never recovered from losing over a million dead and over three million wounded. About the inert Depression-era French economy, Weber reflects that ``the spirit of Thomas Malthus ruled over the land.'' With a less dynamic economy and a significantly lower rate of postwar population growth than Germany, Italy, or Britain, France produced a succession of leaders, such as Edouard Daladier and L‚on Blum, who reflected the country itself: conservative, backward-looking, irresolute, and determined to avoid another war with Germany at all costs. Weber notes the familiar diplomatic, economic, and political indicators of France's decline in the 1930s--its fractured politics, its failure to oppose a resurgent Germany, the repudiation of its American debt from WW I, its fatal pacifism in the face of German aggression. But he focuses primarily on social and cultural history. A significant drop in the servant population, greater urbanization of what had been a predominantly agrarian economy, the falling value of the franc, and labor legislation all had transformative effects. Nonetheless, some things changed very slowly. The emancipation of women, Weber notes, was ``slow, patchy, and indirect,'' with women receiving the ability to take legal action without their husbands' consent only in 1938, and the vote in 1945. With France's decline as a great power, people became preoccupied with sports, films, and religion (Weber describes the religious revival of the period as the ``Indian Summer'' of French Catholicism); xenophobia and anti-Semitism became more pronounced as economic conditions worsened.
8. jexster - 3/2/2000 1:11:50 PM
11. Hitler's Willing Executioners : Ordinary Germans and the
Holocaust ***
by Daniel Jonah Goldhagen
In a work that is as authoritative as it is explosive, Goldhagen forces us to revisit and reconsider our understanding of the Holocaust and its perpetrators, demanding a fundamental revision in our thinking of the years between 1933-1945. Drawing principally on materials either unexplored or neglected by previous scholars, Goldhagen marshals new, disquieting primary evidence that explains why, when Hitler conceived of the "final solution" he was able to enlist vast numbers of willing Germans to carry it out. A book sure to provoke new discussion and intense debate.
12. Goebbels & National Socialist Propaganda
by Ernest K. Bramstead (out of print) *
13. Goebbels
By Helmut Heider (out of print) *
9. jexster - 3/2/2000 1:12:43 PM
14. The 900 Days : The Siege of Leningrad (A Da Capo Paperback)
by Harrison Evans Salisbury ***
Reading this epic account of the Leningrad siege (written by an American journalist who lived in Russia for many years), I was stunned again and again by the horrors that the city endured. It is mind-boggling to realize that some of the siege's survivors are still around, almost sixty years after their ordeal. How long, I wonder, could an American city's populace hold out against such an onslaught? Salisbury makes his narrative compelling by tracking the lives of several citizens, utilizing their diary entries and letters. Their micro-histories allow the reader to imagine, briefly, the hell that Hitler and his minions created. Which is not to say that the Soviet leadership comes off much better-- Salisbury is absolutely blistering in his report on Stalin's incompetence and paranoid lunacy. Stalin was quite willing to sacrifice Leningrad to the German Army if it meant protecting his own position in Moscow. And many of the leaders and heroes of the Leningrad community were executed after the war on bogus charges of treason.
If you're curious about the Eastern Front, get this book.
10. jexster - 3/2/2000 1:15:49 PM
15. Kharkov 1942 : Anatomy of a Military Disaster
by David M. Glantz *
Examines the huge Russian offensive in May 1942 whereby Stalin hoped to split and destroy the German Army. The Germans, however, had planned to launch an offensive of their own and attacked at the root of the Soviet penetration, cutting it off and inflicting over 270,000 casualties on the Red Army. This is the most detailed work on the subject yet published.
About the Author
Colonel David M. Glantz is widely considered to be America's foremost effort on Soviet military studies.
16. When Titans Clashed: How the Red Army Stopped Hitler (Modern War Studies)
by David M. Glantz, Jonathan M. House ***
A full account of the Soviet army's triumph over the German army, from the Soviet perspective. Draws on formerly classified Soviet sources to place the war within its wider political, economic, and social contexts, and recounts the offensives and counteroffensives sweeping across a half-million square miles.
11. jexster - 3/2/2000 1:20:19 PM
17 Thunder on the Dnepr : Zhukov-Stalin and the Defeat of Hitler's
Blitzkrieg
by Bryan I. Fugate, Lev Dvoretsky (Contributor), L. S. Dvoretskii
The authors claim that the failure of the Wehrmacht to conquer Russia during the campaign of 1941 was due to the brilliant planning of Marshals Zhukov and Timoshenko.
Synopsis
The failure of the Wehrmacht to conquer Russia during the campaign of 1941 is commonly thought to be due to interference in the plans and operations of the German armed forces by Adolf Hitler. The truth, according to military historians Bryan Fugate and Lev Dvoretsky, is that the Soviets outfoxed both Hitler and the vaunted German General Staff.
18. Panzer Leader
by Heinz, General Guderian, Heinz Guuderian, Kenneth Macksey (Introduction) **
This is a great book by a brilliant strategist and soldier of WWII. Guderian tells his military life with straight forward bluntness that is typical of Generals who have seen the face of war and combat first hand. His tactics of "Achtung Panzer!" and of defeating and defending against the Soviet Army during WWII is rivoting. A loyal soldier to Germany Guderian makes no apology for fighting for the "Fatherland" yet you can tell that he was no "loyal Nazi" either. He was just a soldier doing his duty as he saw best. But overall this is the type of General and Panzer leader that the allies feared, especially the Soviets. As a final comment, it would of been very interesting to see how the allies would of done at Normandy, if Guderian was there and if he would of had full authority to let the tanks and Panzergrenadiers loose at the allies after DDay. The allies are indeed fortunate they never had to go against Guderian or the soldiers under his command.
12. jexster - 3/2/2000 1:22:28 PM
19. Barbarossa : The Russian-German Conflict, 1941-45
by Alan Clark ***
Many histories of the Second World War written by American and English
authors downplay Russia's critical role in the Allied triumph over Germany. Some of this has to do with the Cold War rivalry that emerged after 1945, and perhaps more of it comes from a lack of Russian source material and unfamiliarity with the Russian language. In any event, Alan Clark's classic study of the Eastern Front remains the best book on the subject, "the greatest and longest land battle which mankind has ever fought." These pages concentrate on four major events: Moscow in the winter of 1941, Stalingrad, the Kursk offensive in 1943, and the battles on the Oder at the start of 1945. The author, first a historian and later Margaret Thatcher's secretary of state, suggests that the Russians might very well have won the war on their own, or at least fought the Germans to a standstill, without American intervention. He also makes the provocative point that Hitler's military instincts were often quite good, and usually better than his generals'--contrary to received wisdom. Barbarossa is a reliable and readable account.
13. jexster - 3/2/2000 1:27:06 PM
20. The Longest Day : June 6, 1944
by Cornelius Ryan ***
A true classic of World War II history, The Longest Day tells the story of the massive Allied invasion of Normandy on June 6, 1944. Not only is The Longest Day a pleasure to read, but subsequent historians, dutifully noting its accuracy, have relied heavily on Ryan's research for their own accounts. In short, the book is a "must read" for anyone interested in the D-day invasion. --Robert McNamara
21. Citizen Soldiers : The U.S. Army from the Normandy Beaches to
the Bulge to the Surrender of Germany, June 7, 1944 to May 7, 1945
by Stephen E. Ambrose **
Stephen E. Ambrose combines history and journalism to describe how
American GIs battled their way to the Rhineland. He focuses on the combat experiences of ordinary soldiers, as opposed to the generals who led them, and offers a series of compelling vignettes that read like an enterprising reporter's dispatches from the front lines. The book presents just enough contextual material to help readers understand the big picture, and includes memorable accounts of the Battle of the Bulge and other events as seen through the weary eyes of the men who fought in the foxholes. Highly recommended for fans of Ambrose, as well as all readers interested in understanding the life of a 1940s army grunt. A sort of sequel to Ambrose's bestselling 1994 book D-Day, Citizen Soldiers is more than capable of standing on its own.
14. jexster - 3/2/2000 1:29:52 PM
22. The Two-Ocean War : A Short History of the United States Navy
in the Second World War
by Samuel Eliot Morison ***
A paper edition of Morison's rewrite (not a condensation) of his classic 15-volume History of the United States operations in World War II . A fine scholar, Morison possesses a good deal of poet: of the glorious 4th of June, 1942 at the Battle of Midway he writes that the carrier Kaga "sank hissing into a 2600-fathom deep".
Morison's concise history of U.S. naval operations in World war II is an outstanding contribution to military history. The author served on eleven different ships during the war, emerging as a captain with seven battle stars on his service ribbons. Illustrated with photos, maps and charts.
23. The Battle of the Atlantic, 1939-1943 : History of the United
States Naval Operations in World War Two
by Samuel Eliot Morison *
24. American Caesar
by William Manchester ***
15. jexster - 3/2/2000 1:30:57 PM
25. Marshal of the Soviet Union G. Zhukov : Reminiscences and
Reflections
by Georgi Zhukov **
26. The Waffen Ss : Hitler's Elite Guard at War, 1939-45
by George H. Stein *
27. Beyond 'Monsters and 'Clowns' : The Combat Ss. : De-Mythologizing Five Decades of German Elite Formations by Karl H. Theile
16. jexster - 3/2/2000 1:34:20 PM
Though not exclusively related I love:
The Arms of Krupp, 1587-1968
by William Raymond Manchester *** (out of print)
and for jollies:
The Neibelungenlied
17. CalGal - 3/2/2000 2:08:47 PM
Stephen Ambrose also wrote Band of Brothers, which follows the E Company in the 101st Airborne. If you have kids interested in WWII, the Ambrose books are all entirely suitable.
I watched A Bridge Too Far last weekend, and ordered Ryan's book as a result. Operation Market Garden strikes me as one of those classic cases of lousy decision making.
18. jexster - 3/2/2000 2:13:08 PM
Maybe someone will stand up for FM Montgomery. Maybe someone other than me!
19. jexster - 3/2/2000 2:19:16 PM
Recently read a book on WWII intel - Magic & Ultra - the title of which now totally escapes me.
One of the interesting things I learned, however, was that Market Garden was of a piece with a long history of heated dispute between the US and Brits on zones of occupation ending in the race for Berlin.
Monty's ego came into the picture rather late as a consideration. There were larger political disputes that gave rise to the ill-fated & misbegotten operation.
20. Wombat - 3/2/2000 2:26:23 PM
There are some newer histories of World War II that contribute a great deal that is new..if I could remember their authors/titles.
Other "popular" histories:
Shirer's Rise and Fall of the Thrid Republic. Does for France what he did for Germany.
Ambrose also wrote a book on D-Day. Drove home the role of close-in naval bombardment in a way no other studies have.
Ryan's Last Battle, the fall of Berlin.
Gordon Prange on Pearl Harbor.
21. Cellar Door - 3/2/2000 2:30:39 PM
Man -- what a reading list!
I can't say I'm a "war buff" on any level. I have, however, recently become aware from research I've been doing in other areas, of the enormous social and cultural impact the war had on American citizens on almost every level. So much so as to lead to a general unloosening of what Bill Bennett and similar pinheads would call "moral restraints." In fact I'm starting to believe that the immediate post-war period is shaping up as an "age" not at all that dissimilar from the "Roaring 20's." This is an undertone of several books I've been reading, including "Original Story By," the Arthur Laurents memoir I'm reviewing for the L.A. Times, Fred Kaplan's "Gore Vidal" bio, James Merrill's memoir "A Different Person," Paul Bowles' collected letters "In Touch," and several other things.
Ordinarily we see the McCarthy era, as bringing about its end. But the spirit of the late 40's gave birth to the Beats, and also by extreme contrast, the "Man in the Gray Flannel Suit" -- a "mainstream" culutral manifestation which was criticized the very moment it was first identified.
I hope this thread gets around to dealing with this area at some point.
22. jexster - 3/2/2000 2:44:08 PM
In fact I'm starting to believe that the immediate post-war period is shaping up as an "age" not at all that dissimilar from the "Roaring 20's."
I think so too.
23. Wombat - 3/2/2000 2:47:36 PM
The roaring twenties saw a loosening of some social mores through mass lawbreaking (because of prohibition). World War II's impact on US society was much more profound and far-reaching.
24. cigarlaw - 3/2/2000 3:03:30 PM
market garden was brilliant in concepton. alas, we left it to monty to impliment it.
25. Wombat - 3/2/2000 3:21:12 PM
Any plan that calls for a ground advance along one road to relieve advanced forces is not brilliant (unless there is no resistance). Monty didn't just implement it, he conceived it as well.
26. PincherMartin - 3/2/2000 3:26:49 PM
Jexter --
I appreciate the extended and detailed bibliography.
27. CalGal - 3/2/2000 4:18:22 PM
The third Shirer book I'd recommend is Berlin Diary.
28. cazart - 3/2/2000 4:30:25 PM
Goddamn it.
How can you Moteheads fuck up a WWII thread? Well, one way is to post a listing of an Amazon.com search of 'WWII.'
Jexster, get one the stick. Do an outline.
I. Genesis of War
II. War in Europe
III. War in the Pacific.....etc, etc.
You gotta get these cats to march, Jexster, or they'll be all over the landscape with favorite movies, books, and TV series.
29. cazart - 3/2/2000 4:37:46 PM
In the interest of moving this discussion in a coherent way, this might assist in developing a framework or outline for the discussion.
30. Angel-Five - 3/2/2000 4:46:19 PM
Well, Monty does get shorter shrift than he deserves -- and that's a hard thing to accomplish.
A lof of people don't realize that Churchill had charged Monty with keeping his army intact at all costs. It was Britain's last real field army and the Brits needed to have one of those when it came time to determine the balance of post-war power. The Brits also couldn't afford to be marginalized out of the effective balance of power DURING the war -- so you have Monty trying to walk a tightrope between demanding equal billing and not having the men and materiel available to press the attack.
Of course, this doesn't excuse Monty for Market-Garden. The attack required more than he was willing to give for it, and he wasn't willing to relinquish the full British end of the planning and execution. The result was the debacle that most people know about because they've seen A Bridge Too Far.
To be honest, I don't know how Monty ever got to be regarded as a master tactician. The man who beat Rommel? Hardly. The man who beat Rommel was a jumped-up quartermaster in the German high command -- I for the life of me cannot remember his name -- who for reasons that were strongly related to internal politics refused to support the Afrika Korps with men and materiel. And, I suppose, Rommel himself, who pressed the attack without sufficient supplies and backing from his superiors against a larger and better-supplied foe.
But Monty, wrongly, was a hero for 'outfoxing the Desert Fox'. And Britain had borne the lion's share of stopping Hitler early in the war, so Monty remained somewhat untouchable despite his sub-par generalship and the Brit inability to match the American pace.
31. Wombat - 3/2/2000 5:06:49 PM
Montgomery was exactly what the 8th Army needed after the disastrous Gazala campaign. He had been a highly competent division and corps commander in Britain, and was a master at raising troop morale, and implementing rigorous physical conditioning and training programs. He also did not subscribe to the languid "there's a good chap, why don't you go biff Jerry before tea" mind set that the British Army suffered from. He terrorized his subordinates, and demanded a great deal from them (often more than they were capable of giving). He was also able to stand up to Churchill, which was more than most British commanders could do.
Montgomery was the master of planning and organizing massive set-piece battles. El Alamein was superbly planned and supplied. Montgomery's subordinates, all holdovers from the previous 8th Army commanders, let him down badly.
32. cigarlaw - 3/2/2000 5:14:35 PM
i like rommel's discription of monty. 'he makes war like this...' stamps rt foot 6 inches in front of left and grinds it as if putting out a cigarette. 'i make war like this...' takes several long strides.
33. cigarlaw - 3/2/2000 5:18:30 PM
market garden needed a rommel it had montgomery.
btw, anyone read monty's history off wwii? hell, according to him he won the war and would have done it quicker if we had followed his advice.
34. Wombat - 3/2/2000 5:19:31 PM
Would Rommel's strides be forward or backward?
35. Wombat - 3/2/2000 5:22:20 PM
No one could have salvaged Market Garden. It was Monty trying outflash Patton.
36. spudboy - 3/2/2000 5:34:05 PM
Jex:
Nice start. I'll be mostly lurking, but hoping to chip in once in awhile. I'm not much of a goosestepper, so I'd urge you to ignore Cazart.
I note that your bibliography includes several books on Hitler. I'd also recommend the best survey of the various Hitler tomes, Ron Rosenbaum's Explaining Hitler.
Also, it'd be worth your while to check out what seems to be the best analysis of fascism, Roger Griffin's The Nature of Fascism.
37. jexster - 3/2/2000 5:56:53 PM
Cazart's an a--hole I know but that's OK. She'll never = Ace whom I've been missing BTW.
Buttholes notwithstanding, its probably a good idea to break the War into more manageable portions. Unfortunately, that's not really feasible with this set up as one huge subject thread. Readers would never know which part we were in.
And BTW asswipe, Cazart...the bibliography is no Amazon search. I've read each listed and welcome others to post their favorites so I can read more!
38. jexster - 3/2/2000 5:59:17 PM
Cigar -
I've seen Montgomery's book. From the sound of it I've made an excellent decision in passing it up. What a turd!
39. RustlerPike - 3/2/2000 6:24:50 PM
I remember a course in Tel Aviv U. by Shaul Friedlander, in which he said the Shirer book was unprofessional popular-reading and looked down upon in the academe.
40. jexster - 3/2/2000 6:48:07 PM
I know it has a poor reputation but its accuracy is unquestioned; its scope all you need, and its highly readable.
41. CalGal - 3/2/2000 6:54:10 PM
Shirer caught shit from historians for most of his career. I think that was due in large part to his popularity.
42. cigarlaw - 3/2/2000 7:18:35 PM
jex, yep. we all know it was john wayne won wwii. not some effette brit. my father-in-law was under monty's command for the battle of the bulge. he had some choice epithets for the brits.
i could have made margwt gard4en work. speed was of the essence. i'd have ordered anyone seen drinking tea would be summarily executed. of course, i am more concerned with killing the enemy than my own casualties. just so long as more of them die and i take real estate.
43. Angel-Five - 3/2/2000 9:24:36 PM
Market garden required more mobilization, more speed, more men, a more realistic timetable, and less Monty.
I disagree about El Alamein being a superbly planned battle. He had more force in better repair and better supplies. All he did was use them.
The effect Monty had on the Brits is much more akin to the effect a new coach will often have on a team with a streak of bad luck -- the change itself is much more efficacious than any abilities of the leader. And Britain at that time desperately needed a morale boost. 'Monty the war hero' is much more of a Hearst-like invention of the Brit press than anything remotely grounded in reality.
44. SnowOwl - 3/2/2000 9:34:38 PM
I disagree about El Alamein being a superbly planned battle. He had more force in better repair and better supplies. All he did was use them.
Isn't this what good planning's all about?
45. Angel-Five - 3/2/2000 9:35:48 PM
As to whether Rommel's strides were forward or backward:
There can be little doubt that Erwin Rommel had initiative, genius, and elan when it came to warfare. Those are generally the qualities that make or break a war leader and Rommel had all three in spades. I believe that he, MacArthur, Yamamoto, Patton, Guderian and possibly von Manstein were the only military leaders of true genius who achieved any stature during WWII, and I believe that order best reflects their abilities. (A caveat: I know comparatively little of the Soviet generals and even less of the Italians).
46. SnowOwl - 3/2/2000 9:37:33 PM
If you want to see what happens when you send ill-planned, badly supplied attacks against the German African forces, look westward to where Patton had his butt kicked at Kasserine Pass.
47. Angel-Five - 3/2/2000 9:38:44 PM
Isn't this what good planning's all about?
That would be a part of it but certainly not the majority. Examine any one of Lee's campaigns in the American Civil War, or examine the blitzkrieg into France against superior numbers with more and better armor.
48. SnowOwl - 3/2/2000 9:42:22 PM
Wavell and Slim are both notable by their absence on your list, Angel.
Zhukov's incredible skill as an organisational general is undeniable, and of the Americans I think Bradley ranks higher than Patton or MacArthur. And surely the most effective military leader in the entire war must be Eisenhower. I admit his skills were mainly in being a political general but war is an extension of politics as Clauswitz so rightly points out.
49. ScottLoar - 3/2/2000 9:45:41 PM
Or, look to Jackson's feints, rapid marches, and use of rail to gain a march on the enemy in the US Civil War, all to place the maximum force to bear upon his opposition's weakest or most critical point as badly outnumbered Jackson may have been. Or look to the Japanese race down the Malaysian peninsula - some of it through jungle and all of it fast and on short rations.
50. ScottLoar - 3/2/2000 9:47:03 PM
My comment was intended to support Message # 47.
51. ScottLoar - 3/2/2000 9:49:11 PM
Zhukov clobbered the Japanese in Asia, giving them such heavy losses that they never again took on the Russians, which allowed Stalin to later shift Zhukov and the Asian forces to the eastern front, much to the German's surprise when the massive counterattack by the Soviets was launched.
52. ScottLoar - 3/2/2000 9:49:34 PM
Rather, Germans'.
53. Angel-Five - 3/2/2000 9:51:41 PM
Bradley was beloved by his troops, undoubtedly. That was his charm. But he wasn't as much of a battle leader or a tactician as he was a leader of men, and that's not quite what I'm after.
Wavell is a good choice, but as for stature? Slim?
Eisenhower wasn't that effective of a leader. Sure, he juggled efficiently but his insistence on not doing anything to show up Monty prevented the AEF from achieving some major early victories in the ground war in Europe. Whole divisions escaped carefully planned pincer movements because Eisenhower insisted that US troops not move into areas that Brit troops were slated to occupy (and ended up occupying days late). We aren't talking about things that would have fractured the British/American alliance by any means.
Moreover, confusion as to where Monty stood and whether Monty took orders from SHAEF caused a lot of trouble for the Allies; given that the overall chain of command was Ike's purview, that too reflects badly on him.
54. SnowOwl - 3/2/2000 9:59:50 PM
w.r.t. the points made by ScottLoar and AngelFive on Monty's efforts in the Alamein, one has to remember that the African campaign was his to lose. As long as he could deny Rommel decisive victories, then Rommel's supply problems were going to defeat him. Thus by denying Rommel the opportunity to have the mighty breakthroughs and local superiority of forces that the outnumbered force needs to display, he demonstrated his analytical skills.
Conversely, Patton consistently risked his force for tactical benefit, but little or no strategic gain. With the situation on the Western Front in '44-'45 as it was, the preferable approach was the methodical genius of a Grant or a Bradley.
55. Angel-Five - 3/2/2000 10:02:19 PM
As far as Bradley versus Patton;
I think that the two of them needed each other -- the one to rein in the other, the other to spur on the one. Bradley was certainly cognizant of more political concerns than Patton was. But I think that if Patton had got his way more than Bradley the war would have been over more quickly and with fewer casualties. I think Patton was the only general on the Allied side who was truly feared by his enemies, much as Rommel was feared by the Allies.
AS for MacArthur -- well, it's much harder to draw a comparison between him and Bradley because the two fought in separate theaters in entirely different kinds of campaign. But Mac was clearly a master of where and when to strike and as such the Pacific theater was his chance to shine.
56. SnowOwl - 3/2/2000 10:08:34 PM
I always find it hard to judge MacArthur purely as a WWII tactical leader, he is overshadowed so heavily by Nimitz, and by his own later career.
57. Angel-Five - 3/2/2000 10:11:16 PM
Re: Monty -- I think that time was more of a pressing requirement to both sides than you credit it to be. The longer Rommel went on, the likelier he could convince his superiors to reinforce his victories. The longer the British went in Africa without a decisive victory, the more likely they would have found a replacement to give them one.
Re: Patton/Bradley:
Let's also keep in mind how important the postwar balance of power between East and West turned out to be, and that a quicker advance in Europe by Allied ground forces might have pushed back the Iron Curtain considerably... not to mention served to deny the Soviets the access to German research which propelled their space and armament research programs so far forward.
58. Angel-Five - 3/2/2000 10:12:40 PM
Re: Message # 56 Definitely.
59. Angel-Five - 3/2/2000 10:16:44 PM
I also wanted to add to Snowowl's Message # 54:
This may be true, but then again, such a realization on the part of Monty hardly proves him anything more than an officer of average military aptitude. And some hindsight is involved in this statement as well. Monty and the Brits couldn't know that Rommel wasn't going to be reinforced. In fact, as I recall, they were sort of incredulous that he hadn't been, and were expecting it.
60. Angel-Five - 3/2/2000 10:38:03 PM
There are a whole host of terrible WWII military blunders to be discussed in this thread. The US assault on Peleiu. The lack of decisive action at Anzio. Dieppe. Kursk. The reliance upon the Maginot Line. Market Garden. Kasserine Pass.
But I believe that the strong majority of blunders were committed by the Axis powers, an even greater number than one might deduce existed simply because the Axis lost. Most of these can be directly attributed to idiots like Hitler and Goering, but some of them -- such as the German failure to project enough power in the Mediterranean to enable the resupply of Rommel -- reduce to incompetence and petty politics, pure and simple.
Rommel's offensive wasn't in the overall plan -- Africa was sort of an exile for him arranged by his superiors who feared that while Rommel was around they no longer had Hitler's ear. He gained a clear tactical advantage right off the bat in Africa, despite the protests of his superiors, and with support he could have taken the Suez and beyond. He never got that resupply; while the Med wasn't exactly an Axis body of water at that time, the Germans still could have forced supplies to Rommel instead of sending trickles, much of which was sunk in transit.
While the German failure to resupply Rommel certainly ranks lower than their more colossal blunders (such as the timing of their attack in Russia, their lack of winter preparedness, Hitler's disastrous unwillingness to disengage at Stalingrad, the shifting of Luftwaffe targetings away from radar and fighter bases to centers of population and their subsequent failure to follow through on Sealion) one can't help but notice that it helped change the course of the war to the detriment of the Nazis.
61. Angel-Five - 3/2/2000 10:38:28 PM
Peleliu.
62. jexster - 3/3/2000 1:47:58 AM
WRT links, I highly recommend the Virtual Library one for those at all interested in the Eastern Front.
For the truly hardcore, checkout the section on books by David Glantz which includes declassified Soviet documents galore.
His When Titans Clashed is truly outstanding.
63. cazart - 3/3/2000 8:36:48 AM
The circle jerk continues.
It's a pity, this thread had some promise but has devolved into the usual look at me and the book I once read navel gazing exercise.
Also, let's get into the stereotypes--Monty was a bad, prissy Brit and Patton saved his ass--and the like.
Congratulations. This thread is to WWII history what People magazine is to journalism.
Wabbit, rename this thread to WWII Lite.
64. Indiana Jones - 3/3/2000 8:53:24 AM
Any of you WWII buffs into simulations of the war? Any favorites?
I used to enjoy Avalon Hill's "Rise and Decline of the Third Reich" and "Squad Leader."
65. Dusty - 3/3/2000 9:20:38 AM
cazart
Some have the capacity to lead by example, others are only able to whine.
66. cazart - 3/3/2000 9:25:17 AM
dusty:
There's no leadership here in 'WWII Lite.' I think you realize this.
To just throw out a book title really doesn't constitute a meaningful discussion. Additionally, with a topic as broad and rich as WWII, it is really meaningless if one pursues it without some kind of framework. Look at the posts to date--very, very little substance.
67. Dusty - 3/3/2000 9:31:06 AM
I've read all the posts. Many are fascinating. I'm learning a lot. True, some have very little substance, but they often have your name attached. If you can do better, show us.
68. cazart - 3/3/2000 9:34:24 AM
Not my thread, dusty. It is the responsibility of the moderator to set the framework and keep it moving in the same direction.
As to your learning 'a lot,' it's probably true given your general lack of knowledge on any subject.
69. Wombat - 3/3/2000 10:33:41 AM
Add Yamashita to your list of great WWII generals. Also take Slim over Wavell.
Any criticisms of Monty as 8th army commander must be taken in comparison to his peers in the British Army at the time. What an uninspired bunch! The British at Gazala outnumbered the Axis forces, were better equipped and supplied, and were routed by Rommel. There was a leadership deficit that Monty filled.
Most memoirs are self serving, particularly Churchill's, Zhukov's, and Speer's.
For those of you who like reading dense, academic books, there is a superb and highly detailed study of Khalkin Gol campaign (Nomohan to the Japanese) from the Japanese perspective.
70. jexster - 3/3/2000 12:27:00 PM
Cazart is as free as anyone to whine or to contribute something of substance or, indeed to fuck off and die if she would like.
Perhaps Cazart would favor us with her opinion of the dynamic of fascism as it found expression in pre-war Italy, Japan & Germany.
Was it in the nature of these fascist systems to bring on the conflagration it eventually did? Could these systems have survived with more limited aims? What impact did the imperialist legacies of the Western democracies have on the "have-not" fascist states' behavior? Was the subsequent overreaching of Germany, Italy and Japan a natural consequence of their systems? What of the coup d'etat in Japan circa 1936? Was rapprochement with China possible? Did the US contribute to the Asian War by its confrontational policies with Japan both before WWI and its immigration policies?
There's your assignment for the weekend Cazart!
71. jexster - 3/3/2000 12:33:20 PM
Wombat:
Not only are most memoirs self-serving but I can think of none that isn't. Zhukov's is worse because it had the additional constraint of the Soviet censors. Best to get the last edition - less censorship.
Still memoirs are useful for that very reason. The bias may be irritating but its revealing as well on some very important issues. Churchill in particular for if you read between the lines you learn a good deal about the politics going on in the UK.
Because of bias, however, I make it a practice to read memoirs only after reading 3d party historians so I can place the writer's comments in perspective.
Even then watch out. Most of the early histories of the Eastern Front are slanted because they are based in some measure on the recollections, testimony or memoirs of Germans.
That's why I recommend anything written by David Glantz. He relies heavily on his knowledge of Soviet strategic and tactical doctrine as well as recently declassified stuff to balance the earlier renditions.
72. jexster - 3/3/2000 12:34:13 PM
Cazart -
The fee for your Seminar on WWII is $50 per post. Please remit to Wabbit.
73. cazart - 3/3/2000 12:53:55 PM
Jexster:
Your answers in keeping with the best traditions of 'WWII Lite:'
1) It contributed but was part of a number of other factors.
2) A qualified 'yes.'
3) Again, a minor factor (with differing views)among many other factors.
4) Not necessarily a function of their systems. Depends.
5)Gave rise to dominance of 'total mobilization' faction.
6)Probably not, given the inconsistencies and irrationality of the Japanese Govt.
7)Prior to WWI? Or WWII? Both?
7)
74. Wombat - 3/3/2000 3:42:43 PM
A British professor named Erickson wrote a very good two-volume history of the war on the Eastern Front.
I tried rereading Morison's history of the US Navy in World War II and found it unbearable. So much cheerleading. Stephen Roskill did a much better job on the Royal Navy in WWII. Arthur Marder is another excellent naval historian. His book on the Mers-el-Kebir incident is an unbiased look at an apalling action.
75. jexster - 3/3/2000 4:42:43 PM
Cazart gets a "lite" grade = D-
Wemember to wemit to Wabbit. You should put more effort in if you wish to get the most of your $50
76. Angel-Five - 3/4/2000 7:43:12 PM
World War II has always been a fascinating subject for me, for reasons both personal and general. Preparations for it, and attempts to avoid it, and the fighting and denoument of it took over two decades; the outcome of WWII has exerted an unmatched influence on world history this century. The sheer human drama of the war and the clash of ideologies is fascinating and horrifying, but I suppose one of the things that I find so fascinating about WWII is not only its importance but the fact that we understand so many different ways it might have come out had there been a small change here or there.
IT is such a well-documented war that these 'what-if' guesses can have a great deal of legitimacy to them, because we can see what would have happened if one thing had gone differently here or there.
77. Angel-Five - 3/4/2000 8:13:06 PM
From today's Independent:
'Queen Mum wanted peace with Hitler'
78. jexster - 3/4/2000 10:29:54 PM
Thanks for the post A5. And how quickly she turned around! She and George were quite inspiring during the Battle of Britain.
Have to agree also that WWII what-if's are not only fun but fun because there were so many which are so realistic to play with.
If Japan had attacked Russia?
If Hitler had not gone to Mussolini's rescue?
If Hitler had supported Rommel and cut down his eastern ambitions?
If Goring were such a fat disgusting pig with power?
If GB had been able to re-arm circa 35-36?
79. ilyavinarsky - 3/4/2000 11:26:53 PM
Re the Siege of Leningrad. A novel translation that is gathering dust on my hard drive has this fragment:
Some ripples…. Yeah. Depends on how lucky. This depends on us not. We only have to think of what depends on us…. In Leningrad, we didn’t have any ripples, there was the cold, ghastly, savage, and the freezing ones would scream on icy stairwells – quieter and quieter, for many hours…. He would go to sleep hearing someone scream, and wake up to the same hopeless screams, and when in the morning he descended the stairs, slippery from frozen excrement, for water, wrapped up to the eyes, holding mother, who was pulling the sled with the bucket, by her hand, the screaming one would be lying downstairs by the elevator shaft, probably right where he fell yesterday, certainly right there – could not get up by himself, nor crawl, and no one must’ve come to his aid…. And no ripples were necessary. We only survived because mother was used to buying firewood not in the summer, but in the early spring. The firewood saved us. And the cats. Twelve grown cats, and a small kitten, so hungry that when I wanted to stroke it, it jumped at my hand and greedily gnawed and bit my fingers…. Wish you’d been there, bastards, Andrei thought about the soldiers, suddenly bitter. This ain’t the Experiment…. And that city was scarier than this one. I would’ve gone insane there, no doubt. What saved me was that I was little. The little ones simply died.
80. ilyavinarsky - 3/4/2000 11:27:00 PM
And the city, by the way, wasn’t surrendered, he thought. Those who remained were dying off. They were being piled up in wood warehouses, the living ones they tried to get out – the administration was functioning nevertheless, and life went on – horrible, delirium life. Some simply died, some made heroic feats and died anyway, some worked their asses off until the very end, and when the time came, died too…. Some would get fat on all this, would trade bits of bread for jewelry, gold, pearls, earrings, and then died too – were led down towards Neva and shot, and then the soldiers walked up, looking at no one, throwing rifles behind the flat backs…. Some would hunt with an axe in narrow alleys, ate human meat, even tried to sell it, but died anyway too…. That city had nothing more common than death. And the authority remained, and as long as the authority remained, the city stood fast.
I wonder whether they had any pity for us? Or did they simply not think about us? Simply obeyed the order, and the order spoke about the city, and nothing about us. That is, there was something about us too, of course, but in paragraph G…. On Finland Station, under the clear, white from the cold, sky, echelons of boxcars stood. Our boxcar was full of little ‘uns like me, aged twelve or so – some orphanage. Remember almost nothing. Remember the sun in the windows, and the steam of breath, and a child’s voice that kept repeating the same utterance over and over again, in the same helpless?vicious squealing pitch, “Get the fuck off ‘ere!” And again, “Get the fuck off ‘ere!” And again….
81. ilyavinarsky - 3/4/2000 11:29:27 PM
Has anyone read Total War by Wint, Pritchard and Calvocoressi?
82. jexster - 3/4/2000 11:52:54 PM
Thanks Ilya. I want to visit St. Petersberg more than just about any place on the planet.
And no I've not read Total War but will check it out.
83. jexster - 3/5/2000 12:19:31 AM
Total War 1989 edition is 1300 pages long.
84. Angel-Five - 3/5/2000 12:25:41 AM
I have read some about the siege of Leningrad; that is very moving, Ilya. Though I don't imagine any words can capture the enormity of what the citizens of Leningrad endured, those are very evocative.
It is amazing and heartbreaking to contemplate that a city of nearly three million, with food reserves of less than two months at the onset, survived a German siege that lasted 900 days; most of that time was endured without heat, running water, and any real amount of electricity or food. The citizens were held under the stifling heel of one tyrant -- their own leader -- while another tried to grind them away to nothing. In one winter (1942, where the temperatures dropped below -40 F) over two hundred thousand people died from the cold and the hunger alone. Perhaps eight hundred thousand died during the course of the siege.
85. jexster - 3/5/2000 12:31:00 AM
PISKARIOVSKOYE MEMORIAL CEMETERY
At this sobering place one can truly understand the scale of tragedy that this city (then called Leningrad) lived through during the Second World War (the 900-day Siege of Leningrad). For over 2 and a half years the Nazis kept Leningrad under siege, but its heroic defenders, both soldiers and civilians, did not surrender.
In St. Petersburg we take pride in the fact that during almost 300 years of the city's history enemy forces have never taken the city.
Hundreds of thousands of people died in the city (mostly of cold and starvation) during the siege. About half a million of them, including 420 thousand civilians, are buried in the cemetery's 186 mass graves. The slightly raised mounds are marked by year and a long alley leads the visitor to a monument with a statue of the Motherland, portrayed as a grieving woman. Many of St Petersburg families come to the cemetery once or twice a year to bring flowers and pay tribute to the city's defenders, perhaps to members of their own family, who died during the Siege, which the Russians call Blokada
Near the entrance there is an eternal flame, where everyone stops insilent mourning and two pavilions, with an exhibit of photographs that need no captions. During summer time Russians drop coins into the little ponds and the money goes for maintenance.
86. Angel-Five - 3/5/2000 12:40:55 AM
Five hundred thousand.
Imagine that. That's something like a solid stack of bodies five hundred feet wide, five hundred feet long, and fifty feet high. IIRC the Russians just left them stacked up until the ground would thaw enough to bury them in the spring, and then draft people to dig mass graves and throw the bodies in.
87. Angel-Five - 3/5/2000 12:45:30 AM
I don't think that either the Nazis or Stalin even gave the citizens and soldiers a chance to surrender, Jexter. I may be wrong, but I thought that Hitler ordered that no surrender from Leningrad be accepted, and I'm pretty sure Stalin ordered that anyone attempting to surrender would be shot.
88. jexster - 3/5/2000 1:16:00 AM
A5 -
You are correct as far as I have read. Hitler planned to massacre everyone and the Leningrad authorities had detailed plans - concrete works, tank barriers, trenches, lines of fire all in place for an expected assault.
Any talk of surrender would have been considered treason
89. Angel-Five - 3/5/2000 1:43:15 AM
Jexster:
Have you read Eisenhower's Lieutenants by Russell Weigley? Thick as rock but lots of good day-to-day info about the ground campaign in Europe.
Did you have a plan for where to first tackle WWII in this discussion?
90. jexster - 3/5/2000 2:23:33 AM
Did you have a plan for where to first tackle WWII in this discussion?
Short answer is "no". If there is enough interest Wabbit might break this up into something like, off the top of my head:
- Origins
-Military Campaigns - Europe
- Military Campaigns - Asia
- Big Three Relations
- Holocaust
- Immediate Post-War (Nurmberg, UN, NATO, Marshall Plan etc)
Otherwise its a free for all.
91. Angel-Five - 3/5/2000 3:44:35 AM
We ought to be able to hit those pretty well; there's lots of knowledgeable people for each topic here. But you don't need Wabbit to do that for you -- you should be able to change the heading yourself as suits your need.
92. jexster - 3/5/2000 11:53:11 PM
Damned if I can't!. Damned if I didn't.
We now speak of events leading up to WWII - personalities, politics, ideologies, sociological changes, economics, military whatever. Just don't go beyond 1939 please.
We'll see how this goes.
93. AytchMan - 3/6/2000 3:05:41 AM
jexster--
OK, here goes -- how's this for a radical notion?
The Maginot Line was a screaming success. With one forgotten exception (which gave me the idea), I've never read a defense of the Maginot Line anywhere. Indeed, everyone today uses the phrase as a synonym for costly failure. Well, I beg to differ. Here's the argument:
While it nearly bankrupted the moribund French economy, the Line brilliantly achieved exactly what it was built for: to deter and deflect a German attack. That the French failed miserably in the Ardennes and elsewhere is a separate issue. Except for a couple of feints to distract the French at the outset of the attack into the Ardennes, the Germans completely ignored the Line until the Battle of France was nearly over. Only then, with the French desperately drawing troops to shore up a ragged line south of Paris, did the Germans break into the Maginot forts.
During construction, I think the French actually considered extending the ML into the Ardennes. If they had been able to scrape up a few more francs for that, the course of the war would almost certainly have been very different.
Let loose the electrons of discussion. I'll chip in as I can but this week looks busy.
94. AytchMan - 3/6/2000 4:59:23 AM
A clarification:
Since the Maginot Line was built before the war, I posted the previous message. But since the results were not determined until 1940, you may want to postpone discussion until later. Please advise.
95. PelleNilsson - 3/6/2000 6:54:15 AM
Something I would like to discuss is Hitler's original plan. On the surface it looks simple: to restore Gemany to pre-WWI status and fulfill the unification by adding Austria. Hitler did not want a war with France and England, at least not in the near future. But how could he gain Alsace-Lorraine without a war?
If the above is a mimimum plan was there a maximum one too? Incorporate all of the former Austrian Empire? Take over all of Poland, and perhaps Ukraine?
Or wasn't there any plan at all? Was it all a question of opportunism?
96. cazart - 3/6/2000 8:49:35 AM
Message # 90
Hmmmm.....sounds familiar. Could it be an echo from Message # 28 or Message # 29?
Otherwise 'WWII Lite' continues in this vein:
Gee, I like Prange better than Toland
Toland's really good.
A lot of people died in WWII
I'll say. Did you see Saving Private Ryan?
I cried when Tom Hanks got shot.
97. Angel-Five - 3/6/2000 9:30:53 AM
I actually want to amend something I said earlier -- about Wavell and Slim being candidates for the group of best war leaders to come out of the combat of WWII. The more I think about Slim, even though he committed some embarrassing blunders early on, he probably deserves a nod. And the more I think about Wavell, the more I actually wonder what ever he could have done to deserve such an accolade. He lost to Rommel twice and he didn't accomplish much of anything in SE Asia that I can remember.
98. Angel-Five - 3/6/2000 10:01:38 AM
It's commonly accepted that WWII was an inevitable consequence of the incomplete resolution of WWI -- that the economic and social condition Germany found itself in following its incomplete defeat in WWI set the stage, sooner or later, for a second future war against the Germans. To me this seems obviously true.
What isn't true for me is that the campaign necessarily had to be against a fascist Germany, let alone a virulently anti-Semitic state which in the common imagination has come to personify unmatched cruelty and malice. And we have to ask -- if we had done things differently in the years between the world wars, would we have faced a tougher fight or an easier?
Germany in the years leading up to the second war was ripe for a demagogue to lead them. The point has been made in the past that most other leaders would not have taken the crazy gambles that Hitler did in the early years (occupying 'traditionally German' territory) and there's probably some truth to this. But one also has to realize that a) the core of German power and industry would have not been terribly weakened if they had never occupied the Rhineland or the Sudetenland,
b)there would have been much less of a push on the part of the Allies to rearm without such aggressive seizures, and c) even if Hitler gave the Nazi state a strong early advantage, his insistence on calling all the military shots was the Nazi death knell.
So it would seem that a Hitlerian Germany might have been our best bet for a beatable opponent in WWII. Hitler commanded fanatic loyalty, but other demagogues might well have done the same.
99. Angel-Five - 3/6/2000 10:06:36 AM
Let's not forget that if it weren't for the fascists in Germany there would have been little to stop the Communists from assuming control. People don't speak much of that now but it was a real possibility in those days that communist insurgency in Germany would triumph. It's one of the reasons that the fascists were tolerated.
As horrible as WWII was, I can only think that a second world war of Allies vs the communist Soviets and Germans would have been much, much worse -- and much, much longer. The only redemptive factor would be that maybe there would have been no Holocaust.
100. PelleNilsson - 3/6/2000 10:13:06 AM
I cannot accept your premise in the first para that WWII was an inevitable consequence of WWI. I don't believe in historical determinism, and I don't think any respectable historian does either.
101. Angel-Five - 3/6/2000 10:17:29 AM
Bully for you, then, Pelle. What do you perceive that could have been done to forestall a second world war where Germany fought against the bulk of the Allies?
102. Angel-Five - 3/6/2000 10:18:52 AM
A proviso: Assume that the resolution at Versailles, including reparations and strictures, does not change.
103. ScottLoar - 3/6/2000 10:24:05 AM
Would the learned historians find The World War, Phases I & II more palatable? Or do you believe the two events totally unrelated, independent in origin, just coincidentally again ranging the interests of Germany against those of Britain, France and Russia? And that the US would never have been involved in the European land war save the bombing of Pearl Harbor?
104. PelleNilsson - 3/6/2000 10:30:53 AM
Well, Angel, we cannot wade through all of German domestic policies 1919-1933, but there were a great deal of occasions when developments could have taken another turn, the last one when the foolish von Papen persuaded Hindenburg to appoint Hitler as Chancellor, in spite of the fact that the Nazis had lost voters (I think -- I don't have any reference available now).
We cannot, in my view, exclude that democracy could have taken hold in Germany and that it could have come to terms with its defeat in WWI, just as it did for WWII.
105. Angel-Five - 3/6/2000 10:48:01 AM
Von Papen convinced Hindenburg to make Hitler the Chancellor because everyone was deathly afraid of Communism. One way or the other it would have happened.
Germany after WWII had a bombed-out country, a thoroughly destroyed power structure that was busily being hunted throughout the world by international tribunals, and huge floods of Marshall money. It was also occupied by foreign troops, had had the Holocaust forcibly shoved into its face -- and even then it took the Germans a LONG time to deal with their guilt, as evidenced by the fact that many ex-Nazis were 'sanitized' and incorporated into the West German power-structure.
Compare that to post-WWI Germany with massive inflation, a toothless central leadership, war reparations and humiliating strictures upon its abilities to function on a sovereign state, a strong Communist insurgency AND the notion that Germany hadn't truly been defeated by its foes.
No. I'll accept that there's some very small probability that WWII would have been thorooughly avoided or even largely avoided through chance, but only a probability small enough that it makes little sense to even address it.
106. PelleNilsson - 3/6/2000 10:56:35 AM
Yes, the central leadership was "toothless". My point is that it didn't need to be. But you are right, as a discussion subject this is not very profitable. Any thoughts on Message # 95?
I have to go offline for a while now.
107. Jenerator - 3/6/2000 11:24:08 AM
Res,
"Let's not forget that if it weren't for the fascists in Germany there would have been little to stop the Communists from assuming control. People don't speak much of that now but it was a real possibility in those days that communist insurgency in Germany would triumph. It's one of the reasons that the fascists were tolerated."
I've never heard of this before. How much of a threat was the Communist presence in Germany? If anything, the social conditions seemed ripe for a totalitarian/fascist government more than anything else.
108. Jenerator - 3/6/2000 12:03:13 PM
>> An American soldier, serving in World War II, had just returned from several weeks of intense action on the German front lines. He had finally been granted R&R and was on a train bound for London.
>> The train was very crowded, so the soldier walked the length of
the train, looking for an empty seat. The only unoccupied seat was directly adjacent to a well dressed middle aged lady and was being used by her little dog.
>>The war weary soldier asked, "Please, ma'am, may I sit in that seat?"
>>The English woman looked down her nose at the soldier, sniffed
and said, "You Americans. You are such a rude class of people. Can't you see my little Fifi is using that seat?"
>>The soldier walked away, determined to find a place to rest, but
after another trip down to the end of the train, found himself again
facing the woman with the dog. Again he asked, "Please, lady. May I sit there? I'm very tired."
>>The English woman wrinkled her nose and snorted, "You Americans! Not only are you rude, you are also arrogant. Imagine!"
>>The soldier didn't say anything else. He leaned over, picked up the little dog, tossed it out the window of the train and sat down in the empty seat.
>>The woman shrieked and demanded that someone defend her and
chastise the soldier.
>>An English gentleman sitting across the aisle spoke up, "You know,
sir, you Americans do seem to have a penchant for doing the wrong thing. You eat holding the fork in the wrong hand. You drive your autos on the wrong side of the road. And now, sir, you've thrown the wrong bitch out of the window."
109. Angel-Five - 3/6/2000 12:10:51 PM
Zara
The Communist threat was about equal, a little less than equal actually, in most cases than the fascist threat. The two ideologies are natural enemies and fascism had an ideological edge in Germany but the Communists had the Comintern and the Sovs. People in favor of neither side generally abhorred both but trusted nationalist fascism a little more than the R
110. Angel-Five - 3/6/2000 12:11:17 PM
a little more than bolshevism.
111. Angel-Five - 3/6/2000 12:24:35 PM
As far as Hitler's plan, I think it was opportunism, plain and simple, informed by 'Ein Volk, Ein Reich ... Ein Welt, Ein Sonnensystem, Ein Galaxie ... Ein Fuhrer'. I think he genuinely wanted to rule everything he could reach and have it populated by ethnic Germans. I have seen people suggest that his attacks on some other countries were the fruit of his paranoia, but I think he at first set out to build a Greater Germany and then decided he wanted the whole enchilada.
112. Jenerator - 3/6/2000 12:32:18 PM
Res,
I know Zara personally, and yes we're two distinct people. She knows a whole lot more about WW2 than I do, but it is something I'm interested in, whether or not you persist in claiming we're the same person. I have questions. How are fascism and communism natural enemies in your opinion? And wouldn't you say that those Germans in favor of neither fascism nor Communism preferring "national fascism" actually preferred what they thought was German nationalism?
113. Jenerator - 3/6/2000 12:34:11 PM
"I have seen people suggest that his attacks on some other countries were the fruit of his paranoia, but I think he at first set out to build a Greater Germany and then decided he wanted the whole enchilada."
I agree, and didn't Hitler's nationalism include a concept of 'living space'?
114. Angel-Five - 3/6/2000 12:48:13 PM
Re: Zara
Whatever.
Re: 'national fascism'
Well, obviously, they preferred neither, but the fears of a fascist government were there all along. Maybe some thought they could just get away with a strongly nationalist government, but don't forget that Mein Kampf was already out then and it was pretty frickin' plain as to what Hitler wanted.
As to why fascism and communism are natural enemies -- economics.
115. Angel-Five - 3/6/2000 1:01:31 PM
Also keep in mind that fascism wasn't a German invention. The powers that be had Italy to examine. The Weimar rulership was toothless, the German economy was in tatters, and Hitler wanted to centralize power while jackbooted Sturmtruppen marched at his beck and call and fought with the Communists in the streets, both sides aching for a revolution.
No, I think that even the optimists knew that they were looking at a change a lot more profound than simply having a nationalist government when they considered Hitler as a compromise candidate for chancellor.
116. jexster - 3/6/2000 1:25:03 PM
Well it appears the more focused format's better.
Have fun.
117. jexster - 3/6/2000 1:28:06 PM
The Maginot Line was a screaming success.
It certainly was. The problem was with the false sense of security it gave the French and the ammunition it gave the Socialists and other opponents of re-armament in the 1930's.
The Line was enveloped from the rear, the main thrust of course coming through the Ardennes and through Belgium where for various reasons, primarily finanicial the Line did not exist.
118. jexster - 3/6/2000 1:29:21 PM
AM -
Its OK to talk off topic as it were. As I said, your Maginot Line Post can easily relate to what happened or didn't happen in France in the 20's & 30's
119. cazart - 3/6/2000 1:33:50 PM
Well it appears the more focused format's better.
Only took you about a week and 90 posts to figure that one out, Clausewitz.
120. Angel-Five - 3/6/2000 1:42:33 PM
That'd make him a much quicker study than you, Cazart. Anyone who's bitched about the content of a thread for that length of time and not though of one interesting or intelligent thing to say is definitely second place to someone who can change their mind as need be. Is it just that you're out of your depth in a WWII thread or are you only disposed to complain in this thread because you're generally despised here?
121. cmboyce - 3/6/2000 2:01:53 PM
I have the impression that the German Communists had pretty effectively shot their wad with the spate of "People's Republics" (and attempts at them) right after the first war. The left was then committed to Weimar, and fascism and its allies on the "old" right, fought to weaken this establishment through the 20s.
Incidentally, wrt the proposition that a Communist, and thus Hitlerless Germany—which I quite agree would have been harder to defeat, at least if allied with Russia—would have necessarily involved the (compensating) absence of the Holocaust, I don't think this follows with anything like inevitability. Communism, especially in Russia, has shown no marked indisposition toward pogrom-as-policy.,
122. cazart - 3/6/2000 2:18:05 PM
Really, A-5? You call a rote recitation of a syllabus an interesting or intelligent discussion? Or a disjointed and ill-advised precis of Montgomery's campaigns, which was likely based on a movie portrayal?
The new format--one which I suggested eons ago--has promise. And I will participate when the more simplistic views of WWII's origins are exhausted. Until then, you can put your head up your ass where it belongs.
123. Angel-Five - 3/6/2000 2:26:44 PM
You call a rote recitation of a syllabus an
interesting or intelligent discussion?
(laughing) Hardly what's happened here, but even so, that's much more interesting than a would-be village idiot mouthing such pithy aphorisms as 'WWII Lite' and 'Say, seen Private Ryan?' in a frantic attempt to be noticed. Such rapier-like wit and poker-faced subtlety is only matched in these parts by Rosettastone, who would be hard put to outsmart my dog, and that speaks poorly of you both indeed.
If you think Montgomery has been maligned in this thread, well, then, Herr Docktor, 'splain away. But don't think this 'I'm saving all my intelligent speech for marriage' tripe is fooling anyone, except maybe you.
124. cigarlaw - 3/6/2000 2:29:56 PM
how about the origins of wwii lay in germany's national infiority complex/give a derman a uniform and beat a drum and they wou;d do it again--hence the troops we still keep there. hell, against the russians in the 50s, 60s, 70s amd 80s a girlscout troop would have sufficed.
125. cigarlaw - 3/6/2000 2:29:59 PM
how about the origins of wwii lay in germany's national infiority complex/give a derman a uniform and beat a drum and they wou;d do it again--hence the troops we still keep there. hell, against the russians in the 50s, 60s, 70s amd 80s a girlscout troop would have sufficed.
126. cigarlaw - 3/6/2000 2:30:02 PM
how about the origins of wwii lay in germany's national infiority complex/give a derman a uniform and beat a drum and they wou;d do it again--hence the troops we still keep there. hell, against the russians in the 50s, 60s, 70s amd 80s a girlscout troop would have sufficed.
127. PelleNilsson - 3/6/2000 2:31:30 PM
The thread holds its collective breath waiting for cazart to explain wie es eigentlich gewesen war (what really happened -- program of Ranke and his school of historians).
128. cazart - 3/6/2000 2:34:00 PM
Take a look at the posts to date, A-5. I guarantee that over half are just book recommendations with no supporting explanation. It's navel-gazing; it's to say Look, I read a book on WWII. Look everyone.
This thread, until recently, has been 'WWII Lite.' Starting with the origins is a promising, if not a logical, step in the right direction.
So kiss my ass, A-5. You've not exactly lit up this thread with your brilliance.
129. cazart - 3/6/2000 2:34:49 PM
Ahhh....Farmor Pelle weighs in.
130. PelleNilsson - 3/6/2000 2:38:26 PM
I would say that Angel's description of the situation in the 20's and early 30's is correct (I'm not patronizing). The failure of the Weimar republic can be summarised as the centre didn't hold.
131. PelleNilsson - 3/6/2000 2:40:32 PM
Or, perhaps, Pelle, the Conqueror. Watch it mate.
132. cazart - 3/6/2000 2:44:08 PM
Message # 130 Well, no shit. This is pretty obvious whenever either extreme prevails. But it tells us nothing.
Message # 131 Watch what, Farmor?
133. PelleNilsson - 3/6/2000 4:16:30 PM
Hindenburg, Paul von, twice the agent of Germany's destruction.
134. Angel-Five - 3/6/2000 6:50:09 PM
Boyce:
Sorry, mised your post until just now.
I didn't suggest that a Communist Germany would have necessarily avoided a Holocaust. That and 'inevitability' are not in what I said -- I believe I mentioned that the Holocaust would possibly have been avoided.
But you have to look at it like this -- there were many more Jewish intellectuals for Communism in Germany than there were for fascism, and the Communist propaganda already had a wonderful set of scapegoats set up --'wreckers' and imperialists. They had very little impetus to do what Hitler did to the Jews. The Communist track record with Jews is admittedly not that great but I think one can say with reasonable assurance that 6 million plus Jews would not have died in a Communist Germany the way they did under the Nazis, let alone in the horrible callous way they did die.
Of course, you have to balance this against the number of other people who would have died in a world war between a communist Germany, Soviet Union, and in all likelihood a subjugated Eastern Europe on one side and the Allies on the other.
One wonders what would have happened to Italy -- would it have gone the way of Spain? And one wonders whether the Japanese would have attacked Pearl Harbor under those conditions.
135. Angel-Five - 3/6/2000 6:52:53 PM
In fact, I think it's really rather doubtful that the Allies could have won that war.
136. Angel-Five - 3/6/2000 11:47:31 PM
Pelle:
I think it's a little unfair to blame Hindenburg for Hitler's rise to the Chancellorship in Germany. Hindenburg loathed Hitler and indeed did just about everything he could to keep him from that post.
Out of all the people who vied for Chancellor -- Schleicher, von Papen, and Hitler -- only the last one appeared to have any real backing from the people. Schleicher was pretty much done politically because he'd tried to break Hitler's hold on power and failed, and von Papen was (though he really didn't know it yet) firmly in Hitler's grasp. There wasn't really anyone else primed at the moment to take power, and the stasis of government had the entire country at the boiling point.
In addition, the Nazis had the backing of German industry because they believed he'd make them all a lot of marks. And he had the backing of the military, because Hitler promised to tear up the treaty of Versailles and rearm. And he enjoyed popular support due to his skilled use of propaganda and public speaking techniques that bordered on brainwashing.
Hitler promised something for everyone -- he'd make Germany great again, rich again, mighty again, above all he'd keep the Communists down and he'd punish the Jews, who were of course his convenient scapegoat for most of what was internally wrong with Germany -- and in the terrible depression when governments kept dissolving and new votes kept being called and government (thanks largely to the machinations of the Nazis under Goring) had ground to a standstill, those promises resonated in a lot of German ears. There was little food, little work, less hope, and the everpresent fear of Bolshevism (which was, along with the accompanying unionization, something that the industrialists feared a great deal).
137. Angel-Five - 3/6/2000 11:48:17 PM
The Nazis had indeed lost ground in the last election for several reasons relating to Hitler's state of mind and internal strife within the party, but they hadn't lost enough -- and Gobbels was quite adept at making Hitler's support seem much stronger than it was.
Faced with no real alternative and the popularity of Hitler, Hindenburg (who was an old, old man who didn't have the strength or political will to fight Hitler anymore against the apparent odds and Hitler's constant machinations) really didn't have much of a choice but to agree to von Papen's proposal of a dual chancellorship. The final straw was that von Papen had convinced Hindenburg that they could outwit Hitler and consign him to failure, ruining his appeal.
I really don't think that post-WWI Germany had any real chance of true democracy. Hindenburg was too old a leader to offer any permanence in the perceptions of the Germans. Bruning (I think that's his name) -- the last chancellor Germany had with any intent at democratization -- tried to do the right thing but his reforms were too slow and to ineffectual to win the support of the German people -- and I really don't know what else, under Versailles, he could have done to speed things up. There isn't really anything anyone could have done to stave off a popular demagogue who was intent on telling the people any lie he had to in order to discredit the Republic and gain their support.
138. Angel-Five - 3/7/2000 12:13:05 AM
The question then becomes -- what could somebody else outside of Germany had done?
And that's a tough call. Certainly the terms of the Treaty of Versailles could have been much less punitive -- they were later lessened out of both sheer necessity and a growing consciousness that something was rotten in Denmark, but by then Hitler's party had too much power and could manipulate the collapse of the Weimar republic.
I personally like to think that the only thing which might have prevented the Second World War is the successful formation of the League of Nations with the US playing its expected role and a Wilson who had gotten his way in Europe over the likes of Lloyd George and Clemenceau.
You can look at the two world wars, in a sense, as the struggle for a world body politic with the power to control and influence aggression between nations. The League was probably never going to get full support in America -- but I think it might have, if Wilson had played some of his political cards back home better and hadn't turned the Republicans in Congress further against him, losing both the House and the Senate to them.
Wilson or a similar type, as opposed to Warren Harding, and a real League of Nations instead of one that was broken from the start, might have made a large difference. Maybe. Yet I don't think that was in the cards. Moreover, once the fascist ball started rolling in Germany I don't think much could have been done to stop it. No one was up for a military intervention (god, what a mess that would have been) and the Soviets weren't much help. No one wanted Bolshevism to spread further into Europe; moneyed people were willing to forgive a lot to keep that from happening. And Germany was in economic ruins as demagogues vied to wrest power away from the former democratic-minded leaders in Weimar. The combination was disastrous.
139. cmboyce - 3/7/2000 2:31:23 AM
A5: You're right, I overstated your case about the communist non-holocaust. Actually, I did not so much mean to address that point as to inquire (for I'm not well versed in this history) as to my feeling, based on decades old and not intensive reading, that the German "revolutions" of 1918-19 were Pyrrhic insofar as they were victorious at all, which was, of course, only here and there and very very briefly. The Freikorps found their being in suppressing them, and I recall them as predecessors and recruiting grounds for Hitler's SA. And virtually all the Communist leadership was either dead or in exile in consequence of them. That the Bavarian People's Socialist Republic (or whatever it may have been called) was doomed in any case is surely so; but my question is: having made the attempt in the wake of the war, had not the Communists simply insured that they would not be around to potentially take power in the event of Weimar's fall (let alone do so electorally).
140. cmboyce - 3/7/2000 2:35:25 AM
But had they succeeded (the German Communists) then, yea verily, an ensuing war would have been, not just very difficult for the west to win, but very probably lost. Consider how difficult it was with Russia on our side. (Of course, Russia outside of Russia might well have been less imposing.)
141. cmboyce - 3/7/2000 2:39:05 AM
Back in the F place, I recall, there was a discussion of a battle fought between Japanese and Russian troops in Manchuria, in the late 30s. Can someone more knowledgeable than I reprise that subject and suggest how it may have influenced the balance of power in Asia at the time?
(Perhaps in the event of the hypothesized Bolshevik Axis between Communist Berlin and Stalinist Moscow, we'd have allied with Japan.)
142. Angel-Five - 3/7/2000 3:05:08 AM
cmb:
No, the Communists were a force in Germany for some time -- in fact, until the Nazis banned them.
Right now I don't have access to numbers, so I could be wrong -- but I do know that the SA and the Communists had equal power on the street and used to get into frightfully huge streetfights.
And in the level of government, they held enough of a bloc that once the Nazis started moving on their agenda (once Hitler was firmly the Chancellor) the first thing they did was take the Communist politicians into 'protective custody' to isolate them from the voting processes so the Communists couldn't block the voting. They then sent them off to the camps and confiscated all their holdings. This was in, I think, '33.
There was a great deal of bother over it all -- way too much bother for a unimportant political minority, even counting that the Nazis would want to make as much out of stamping out the Marxists as they could.
It's important to remember that the Communists didn't exist in a leftist vacuum in Germany, either. The Social Democrats were there as well and a coalition between the two was a strong possibility in the face of Nazi domination of the parliament. It didn't take the Nazis long to lose the Social Democrats, either.
143. Angel-Five - 3/7/2000 3:29:03 AM
In fact, the communist insurgency never left Nazi Germany. Well-hidden Marxists, who had blended into the nationalist movement, operated one of the best and most thorough espionage operations ever conducted. It was known as the Red Orchestra and even included high-ranking Nazi officials, and it spent the entire war radioing secret messages into the Soviet Union. The Red Orchestra was so efficient that Soviet spymasters reportedly got a lot of their data from the Germans before the German OKW got it.
Of course, Stalin didn't always make use of it (he didn't trust it). So while the Red Orchestra was busy burning up the airwaves trying to warn Stalin of Barbarossa, Stalin looked at the other indicators of attack, and saw none. The Germans weren't taking the preparations any sensible army would have taken, like issuing winterized clothing which required wool and sheepskin which would mean a sudden drop in the price of mutton as more sheep were slaughtered.
So Stalin figured that he was getting disinformation, and got a very bad shock when the Germans launched Barbarossa.
At least that's one version. Some German officers claimed that Stalin had cold-bloodedly planned it all out, had indeed known of the coming invasion, had calculated his army was too poor and untrained to stop the offensive, and had hurriedly begun conscripting troops to go train in icy cold Siberia so they'd be fresh and winter-hardened when the Nazi attack bogged down -- which is where a lot of those fresh troops used in the big counterattack came from. And Stalin, to preserve the surprise, didn't tell any of his forward commanders, many of whom were becoming politically inexpedient anyway... I personally doubt it, but if anyone was cold enough to make that sort of call it was Ole Joe.
All of this is really fascinating to me but I'm getting a little ahead of the ballgame so I'll stop.
144. PelleNilsson - 3/7/2000 3:39:35 AM
The last possibility for the Allies to do something decisive was probably when Germany reoccupied the Rhinelands in 1936. But I would be surprised to learn that any action was seriously considered, What the hell they gave away the Czechoslovakia's Sudetenland two years later.
In my opinion, we must conclude that the stage was set in the 1920's when a strong democratic leadership, alternatively a more benign strongman-rule (like in Poland, failed to emerge.
145. Angel-Five - 3/7/2000 3:53:46 AM
This link, for CMB, breaks down the constituency by party of the Weimar house. The Communists are usually in third place behind the Social Democrats and the nationalists (first the NDVP and then the NSDAP).
Pelle: The last chance for a 'benevolent strongman' was probably in '32 in response to the threat of Hitler gaining control of the government. An autocratic system suited many peoples' needs and was seriously considered alternately by Schleicher and von Papen with Hindenburg's interest as well. Of course, that was a risky proposition... but I don't know how much riskier it could have been than going with Hitler and watching the government get destroyed in a few months.
146. Angel-Five - 3/7/2000 3:57:10 AM
And, again, noting that a strong democratic government failed to emerge in 1920s Germany is sort of like noting that a strong Communist government failed to emerge in 1960s America. I really don't think it ever had any chance -- not with the economy as bad as it was, not with so few fruits of democracy available to offer the people.
147. Angel-Five - 3/7/2000 4:00:18 AM
sorry, DNVP. DeutschNationale VolksPartei.
148. PelleNilsson - 3/7/2000 4:25:12 AM
Thanks for the link. In an earlier post I said that NSDAP lost votes in the 1933 election. That was wrong. It was in the second election in 1932 they went down from 37.8% to 33.6%. The 1933 election was forced by Hitler because the Centre Party refused to join the NSDAP-DNVP coalition and was preceded by a violent intimidation campaign conducted by Röhm's SA.
It is an interesting question why the number of Reichtag seats increased from 584 in November 1932 to 647 in March 1933. A quick check indicates that NSDAP took 52 out these 63 additional seats. Gerrymandering perhaps.
149. PelleNilsson - 3/7/2000 4:38:16 AM
I looked around that site a bit more. Quite nice. My #148 reads as if lifted from there, but in fact it has its origin in Britannica.
150. PelleNilsson - 3/7/2000 5:24:45 AM
The crumbling centre 
The graph shows the outcome of the German elections from January 1919 to November 1933 (the intervals were irregular). The left staple in each series represents the Communists, the middle one the centre parties and the Social Democrats, and the right one the Nazis and DNVP.
151. stostosto - 3/7/2000 8:54:00 AM
A-5
I think your contention that German dictatorship was unavoidable is way too influenced from how events turned out. No doubt there was a large alienated middle class in Germany. No doubt the various Weimar parliaments were unstable and bred a lot of popular frustration. No doubt Hitler also due to mass unemployment was able to appeal to a lot of working class voters who should normally identify with the Social Democrats.
But consider Hitler's falling support in the 1932 election, down to only just third of the vote. Consider the bottoming out of the Great Depression around 1932-3. Consider the fact that German unions were dominated by Social Democrats, a party which was by no means a newcomer to German politics but one which had established its influence as early as during Bismarck, and was most decidedly a force of moderation. (In fact, maybe so much so that some of its core consistency considered it worn out).
My perceptioin is that Hitler's power seizure came in the last moment, just as the political tide was going to turn against him as the political situation de-radicalised. Nor was there any other player at the German political scene at that time (or ever) with such unadulterated reckless cynicism as to pull a coup d'etat. Hitler was, singlehandedly, a radicalising force. He consistently wrong-footed all his opponents by actually believing in his own bull-shit and acting on it. This goes for his German political opponents as well as for the various Chambarlains in the western countries.
152. stostosto - 3/7/2000 8:56:51 AM
The communist thread you talk about is surely exaggerated. In fact, I would write it off as mere fantasizing, again as seen through the mirror of subsequent events. At least, I have never heard that speculation before. In light of the communist's electoral backing such as can be gauged from the link you provided, it doesn't appear much more likely. Do you have some good sources to back up your claim of an imminent communist power seizure?
The communists did play a destabilising role, of course. Like everyone else they mis- and underestimated Hitler. Therefore their prime political focus was their rivalry with the Social Democrats, forcing these to defend its left flank rather than aiming for an appeal to middle-of-the road Germans, thus sapping the power of the left.
The communist calculus was that Hitler was bound to fail, making Germany ripe for the proletarian revolution. (Such is my understanding, but don't ask for sources. I once had a "Hitler's road to power" obsession, but I was only 12 or 13 at the time...)
153. Raskolnikov - 3/7/2000 12:10:59 PM
I don't think the Great Depression has been emphasized enough here. Surely, a major factor in Hitler's election was the economic situation. In the absence of a depression, there would have been a lot more time for Germany to become a stable democracy. And I think it is hard to argue that the Great Depression itself, and its international scope, were inevitable, considering the extent to which they were the result of a series of bad decisions.
154. Dantheman - 3/7/2000 12:47:54 PM
Rask,
I agree, and more particularly, I suspect the hyperinflation of the Weimar era did a lot to weaken the existing political parties, allowing a fringe group like the Nazis to be heard.
155. cigarlaw - 3/7/2000 12:58:16 PM
Regarding the Holocaust . I think in his time after 50 years to look at this was some other standpoint. I do not wish to diminish in any way what happened to the European Jews. It was horrendous. Alas, although people always think of the Jews in the Holocaust, they represented probably only about half those were killed or died in concentration camps. About 12 million people including Jews, Gypsies, Socialists, Communists, mentally retarded, disabled for other reasons, homosexuals, and others were killed. The Jews were the most notable example of those and had the biggest play in the history books. But they did not die alone. The Nazis killed 12 million people in death camps, not counting the uncounted millions killed in war itself. If Hitler had his way Europe would have been devoid of anyone but blue-eyed Aryans.
Do you think the killing wouldn't have stopped if Hitler had succeeded killing every Jew in Europe? Ultimately his philosophy would require the elimination of the slavs, the Greeks, the Italians, Spanish, and every other dark skined person on the planet. Of course at a certain point Hitler would have been eliminated himself. Hitler was an interesting person, but he was certainly not Stalin.
156. cmboyce - 3/7/2000 1:09:30 PM
A5, thanks. All that clears up my misapprehension quite thoroughly. I had never heard of the Red Orchestra, a fascinating development. I suppose its major players (first oboe and all) ended up in East Germany.
Looking at the figures, I tried to dope out just where the votes went that Hitler lost between July and Nov 1932, and while it's evident the Communists got a lot of them, I couldn't make the numbers come close to adding up, just eyeballing them, and then I noticed that the number of delegates changed. In fact, in no two elections throughout the period was the number of delegates elected the same. Sometimes the difference is slight, once ('28-'30) almost 20%. Why is this?
I have to go off-line now, probably until late tonight, but I'll look in when I can. This lead-up to the war is fascinating in detail, especially since it is for me, as no doubt for other Moties, the least familiar aspect of it.
157. jexster - 3/7/2000 1:15:36 PM
Message # 150
Thanks Pelle!
This thread is taking off. Now if we can just figure out how to keep Cazart out of here......
158. Raskolnikov - 3/7/2000 1:18:03 PM
well, if A5 keeps baiting him, he may either go away, or post something more substantive than a link to some lecture notes he found from an Internet search.
159. Jenerator - 3/7/2000 1:20:15 PM
Res,
Message#114,115
"No, I think that even the optimists knew that they were looking at a change a lot more profound than simply having a nationalist government when they considered Hitler as a compromise candidate for chancellor."
"but don't forget that Mein Kampf was already out then and it was pretty frickin' plain as to what Hitler wanted."
I tend to think that the majority of Germans believed more in the nationalistic slant and focus of the Nazi party. Just as Hitler said in Mein Kampf about the stupidity of the masses, I doubt that the majority knew what they were really voting for. If anything, the social classes were ready for a strong leader, opposite of the former Chancellor, and Hitler with his strong persuasive speaking abilities and his call on German unity and German spirit was able to 'fool' the people into believing one thing about his party when it really stood for other ideals. He clearly infused new meanings all of the time into his words. He kept the masses in the dark about much of what his party stood for, and much of what it did.
160. jexster - 3/7/2000 1:20:25 PM
The book 1933, which I cited in one of the intro messages, is a good read, if you can find it.
The author tells the story of Germany's "crumbling centre", as Pelle would have it, from the perspective of various liberal/moderate Germans, cosmopolitcan Berliners mostly, and the US Ambassador. The book is interesting because its also, in effect, an extended annotated bibliography of various memoirs of people living the times in Germany.
Long and short - there were still substantial numbers of people who in 1933 thought Hitler a clown who'd soon collapse and portrays others who were beginning to see the light - too late.
161. cazart - 3/7/2000 1:22:52 PM
Is that any way to treat the guy who saved this thread from extinction?
Hell, I could probably save Rosie's fucked up thread.
BTW, Raskolnikov's Message # 153 succinctly summed up -- correctly--what others have only guessed at or nibbled around for the previous 150 posts.
162. Jenerator - 3/7/2000 1:27:10 PM
Also, I expected more than one word out of you regarding the natural enemy status of communism/fascism. They have some weird similarities... racism, anti-intelligentsia, elitism, and so on.
163. PelleNilsson - 3/7/2000 1:43:58 PM
cigarlaw
Hitler was an interesting person, but he was certainly not Stalin.
Please expatiate. You find Stalin more "interesting"?
Jenerator
If you find that some aspect has not been adequatly covered I suggest you fill in the gap rather than complaining about others.
164. PelleNilsson - 3/7/2000 1:47:42 PM
cigarlaw
Also, I question the figure of 12 million exterminated. There is a touch of revisionism here -- exaggarate the total to reduce the Jewish share.
But we should save this for the Holocaust discussion that Jexster has scheduled for later.
165. PsychProf - 3/7/2000 1:48:08 PM
Stalin was directly responsible for the murder of some of my wife's family members. How interesting.
166. Dantheman - 3/7/2000 1:50:54 PM
Pelle,
The 12 million number is on the high end of the range that I've seen, but not outside the realm of possibility. I don't recall seeing any number lower than 9-10 million.
167. Jenerator - 3/7/2000 1:56:32 PM
Pelle,
"If you find that some aspect has not been adequatly covered I suggest you fill in the gap rather than complaining about others."
First of all, I wasn't complaining. Secondly, I asked Res a question about his opinion and he responded with a vague one word answer. Res never answers with one word, so that is why I was surprised. I asked for his opinion, and that is what I was waiting for.
168. cazart - 3/7/2000 2:17:57 PM
Jexster:
Time to get the cats marching in the same direction. They are straying in light of cigarlaw's idiotic post.
169. Jenerator - 3/7/2000 2:23:32 PM
I don't think Cigarlaw's post was dumb. I disagree that it was only half of the Jews that were killed in his 12 million figure, and I'm not sure what he meant with mentioning Stalin, but his post is interesting and gets you thinking in different directions.
170. cazart - 3/7/2000 2:28:29 PM
Jenerator:
Sure. It gets you thinking in different directions; so would a post on the statues of Easter Island--but it is hardly germane, certainly at this point in the discussion. Moreover, cigarlaw's conclusion (that Hitler would have to kill himself because he wasn't an Aryan posterboy) is superfluous and shallow.
171. Jenerator - 3/7/2000 2:33:54 PM
Well, what I think he meant was that after awhile, the critera for murder wasn't just in being Jewish. There were plenty of people killed for having brown hair and looking Jewish. If aryanism were taken to the extreme, it could have been possible for everyone who wasn't blonde and blue eyed to be killed. Nietzsche's monster, ya know?
172. jexster - 3/7/2000 2:42:09 PM
Caz -
Not really off topic. Stalin was doin some major purging in the '30's . No doubt one reason for Hitler's overconfidence in '41
173. Angel-Five - 3/7/2000 3:00:31 PM
Sto:
For me, this list pretty much sums it up:
Government was, due to the Communists and the Nazis sabotage, at a standstill
The economy was in ruins, unemployment and hunger were great
The Nazi party had the largest percentage of votes of anyone
The army and industrialists both favored a strongman
the people had lost faith in government.
To me, those circumstances leave little doubt as to the consequence of their union. You say that Hitler grabbed power while he had the chance -- of course he did. If Hitler hadn't grabbed power, von Papen or Schleicher would have -- if they hadn't, if nobody stepped up to the plate, then maybe Germany would have avoided a dictatorship. The point is that there's absolutely nothing chancy at all about the prospects of a Hitler seizing control in a 1933 Germany. Those are the sort of situations that it happens in. Might it have taken a little longer than the lightning speed with which Hitler dismantled the old Republic? Of course. The point is, though, that it wasn't chance that it did happen.
Re: Communism
Please bear in mind that I originally said that were it not for Fascism the Communists would have taken over. And I meant that. The primary block against Communists in Germany, the people that constantly went around discrediting them, outfoxing them, fighting them in the streets and above all giving people a hard-edged alternative to them and their Revolution, were the fascists. Their success is reflected in Pelle's graph. Without the Fascists, or with the Fascists discredited, their power would only have waxed.
174. Angel-Five - 3/7/2000 3:00:43 PM
It's also important to realize that the Communists might have been losing overall share of the votes, but they were swimming upstream very hard to maintain their position. And -- like the Nazis -- people constantly assumed that they were bigger than they were. Look at McCarthyism in America -- how many communists do you think were actually in America then? How many did Joe McCarthy have them believing were in America then? The scare was real. It's why the Nazis made such a campaign point out of stopping Marxism; it's why the Social Democrats took care to make sure that their Communist neighbors on the Left weren't used against them.
175. PelleNilsson - 3/7/2000 3:30:22 PM
Jenerator
There were plenty of people killed for having brown hair and looking Jewish.
Please substantiate.
If aryanism were taken to the extreme, it could have been possible for everyone who wasn't blonde and blue eyed to be killed.
This is just plain silly. You don't know what you are talking about. A majority of Germans are not blond and blue-eyed. A significant minority of Slavs (e.g Poles and Russians) are blond and blue-eyed.
176. PelleNilsson - 3/7/2000 3:39:05 PM
Angel
Please bear in mind that I originally said that were it not for Fascism the Communists would have taken over.
I disagree on two accounts:
177. PelleNilsson - 3/7/2000 3:44:02 PM
cazart
The thread is waiting for your masterful analysis promised in Message # 122.
178. stostosto - 3/7/2000 4:41:09 PM
A5
Sure, the circumstances were there for Hitler's takeover - I mean, duh. They presented Hitler with a "window of opportunity", which he jumped at. My point is, the window may have been about to close at the time he jumped, making it a last minute call.
There is a risk that we rationalise about historic events and make them seem inevitable, given the particular circumstances. But if you think about it, what, besides Hitler's energetic political manoeuvering, was so much worse about the situation in 1933 than, say, 1918-19 when the war had just been lost and returned soldiers were running loose, some of them staking communist uprisings, or in the wake of the killings of Karl and Rosa Liebknecht, or 1922-3 when France occupied the Ruhr, and the terrible German hyperinflation took place? (In fact, why is this last episode so often pointed to when explaining Hitler's rise to power a full decade later?)
Circumstances were ripe, yes. That was a necessary condition for the Nazi takeover. But they were not sufficient. To get at that, Hitler's vast evil energies were needed. And I actually think that had he not been there, personally, everything else being unchanged, the Weimar republic might well have stabilised and survived.
You are right in that the commie scare was more real than the actual commie threat. But that was not what you said in your earlier post.
179. stostosto - 3/7/2000 5:06:31 PM
Jenny
You need to read up on communism and fascism. Many people tend to lump them together as 'totalitarian' because they displayed a number of similarities in the way they exerted power. But their social and political origins are very different, indeed anathema, as A5 said. Briefly put, communism wanted a radical break with basic economic and social values and institutions like private property, religion, traditional authorities, even family. Fascism was very much a reaction against this - hence the term 'reactionary'. Its objective was to not only protect what it saw as True, Traditional, National, Social norms, but also forbibly, by use of the state, impose them on people and spheres where they didn't otherwise prevail. Hence the paranoid and sickly fascist obsession with 'normalcy' as opposed to 'decadence' promoted on the back of existing national myths (plus some newly fabricated ones, like in the German case the Dolkschuss legend). Communism, on the other hand, was internationalist in outlook. Stalin actually had to articulate the doctrine about 'socialism in one country' to expressly free himself from the tiresome obligations of having to help the rest of the world extricate itself from capitalism.
Thus, Stalin gained 'fascist' elements in that he bred a kind of Soviet nationalism (complete with the infamous 'cosmopolitan' (= anti-Soviet)labelling of Jews). He also completed the non-aggression pact with Hitler, as you may know. But this was to the huge dismay and embarassment of communists in western countries who had a tough job explaining away this move. (The faithful's line was to blame it on the western powers).
180. Angel-Five - 3/7/2000 5:09:01 PM
Please bear in mind that I originally said that were it not for
Fascism the Communists would have taken over.
I disagree on two accounts:
1.The revolutionary moment was over. The
Communists would have been contained by the
Social Democrats.
Pelle:
Why, exactly, do you think that the Communists were containable in the first place? Who do you believe expended the most energy to contain them?
Imagine Germany at this time period; a breaking republic, massive inflation and unemployment, reparations and a bar to rearmament. 'Democracy' was new and was offering little immediate return to the populace.
There was a strong feeling against the Weimar leadership. This is evident in the fact that so many people voted for parties which were openly against the continuation of the Republic and spent their time in Parliament openly sabotaging the function of government. This is a pool of massive discontent -- primarily populated by Germany's younger unemployed and marginalized citizens. Right?
These people wanted a change. And the two groups who fought tooth and nail to win this large disaffected group over were the fascists and the Communists. It's why they were natural enemies -- they were competing for the same resources for divergent purposes.
Now, compare this conflict to the larger political picture in Germany --there are plenty of moderates, but the radical base is growing as people become more and more disaffected with the status quo of Weimar. The radical base can't be ignored. It's getting bigger and bigger and demanding more and more attention -- so swiftly the issue becomes which side to court and which to scorn.
181. Angel-Five - 3/7/2000 5:09:40 PM
That wasn't much of a choice to the conservative industrialists, who feared Marxism and labor unions and wanted a leader who would kick-start the industrial base back into motion. This is why the Nazi political and economic power base grew along with their popular power base. No one wanted the Communists to have the chance to take power via coalition.
So, you see, the Fascists were instrumental to the entire attack and partial supression of Communism in the years leading up to 1933. That suppression would not have occurred without a fascist group to sap the power base of the Communists in Germany. Don't forget, moreover, that German Communism was an internationally supported political faction. The Soviets had as much interest in making Germany a Communist state as did the German Communists.
You are assigning Fascsism a heroic role in history:
Fascism saved Germany from Communism. I
dispute that
This is addled crack-pipe talk. No one is making 'heroes' out of the Fascists -- I'm merely explaining how the mechanism functioned. Germany saved itself from Communism -- it's just that the means they had at hand were the Fascists, to the eventual massive detriment of the world.
182. Angel-Five - 3/7/2000 5:27:20 PM
Sto:
My perceptioin is that Hitler's power seizure came in the
last moment, just as the political tide was going to turn
against him as the political situation de-radicalised. Nor
was there any other player at the German political scene
at that time (or ever) with such unadulterated reckless
cynicism as to pull a coup d'etat.
No. Schleicher wanted a coup; so did the Communists. Von Papen even argued at the last minute for establishing an autocratic government -- to keep the Nazis out of power. The Weimar Republic was being dragged towards Golgotha and everyone knew it.
Circumstances were ripe, yes. That was a necessary
condition for the Nazi takeover. But they were not
sufficient. To get at that, Hitler's vast evil energies were
needed. And I actually think that had he not been there,
personally, everything else being unchanged, the Weimar
republic might well have stabilised and survived.
I'm not so sure of that either. Schleicher was discredited largely because Hitler and Goering did it. Let's not forget Strasser.
Let's also not forget that part of the reason Hitler had to work so hard to get the Chancellor's chair is that -- well, he was Hitler. Everyone knew what he was about, he was a horrid demagogue who lied his ass off and had openly stated that he wanted to change the government. Hindenburg didn't trust him. Von Papen didn't trust him. No one among the elite trusted him at all -- they just thought they could co-opt him or force him out if they had to.
183. Angel-Five - 3/7/2000 5:27:45 PM
So perhaps Hitler at that time was the only person with enough twisted political skill and amorality to pull off the feat of getting Hitler into office, but then again, no one else needed that much skill to get themselves into office from that position except perhaps the Communists.
You say 'all else being equal' but for me that's where it gets a little slippery and vague, because although I disagree with your 'all else being equal' outcome and have demonstrated why -- well, all else couldn't in all probability have been equal without Hitler being there. Certainly some other demagogue would have filled in, yet it's less certain that they would have had enough of a charismatic effect upon their target audience to pull off what Hitler was unfortunately able to achieve.
184. Angel-Five - 3/7/2000 5:32:05 PM
BTW: Pelle's graph is misleading in that it lumps the Social Democrats in with the centrist parties. I don't think it's fair to call the Social Democrats 'centrist'.
185. PelleNilsson - 3/7/2000 5:39:26 PM
Angel
Your line of argument is not credible. As I said -- and sto --supported -- the revolutionary moment had passed. The Communists did not attract many votes. You talk about coalition. With whom? The Social Democrats. No way. You suffer from the usual American ignorance about the history of the marxist/socialist movement. The two were mortal enemies. And the numbers in the table you linked shows that such a coalition would not have gained power anyhow.
And before you bring out the big sledgehammer called "Popular Front": I know. Ineffectual window-dressing.
I have to log out now.
186. stostosto - 3/7/2000 5:45:12 PM
A5:
You do make some sense. Especially in pointing out the distrust facing Hitler. And while I agree with Pelle that painting the Nazi takeover as a defence against a communist takeover can have apologistic connotations, that doesn't necessarily make it untrue.
I happen to think it is untrue, though. The communists simply weren't in a position to make a revolution at that time, nor were they likely to be later anymore than, say, French communists were in France. But the fear of the communists and the sheer out-of-touchness of the leading politicians in Germany probably made the possibility a factor.
Fall of the Weimar Republic
A handy summary from the link A5 provided earlier.
Ecerpt (speaking of out-of-touchness):
June 1932: Hindenburg fed up with issuing unpopular decrees on Bruning's behalf replaces him by von Papen. Papen, reactionary, stupid and arrogant, was however an officer and fine horseman and so the ideal Chancellor in the eyes of the ageing President.
187. stostosto - 3/7/2000 5:54:49 PM
Going to sleep. Night.
188. Angel-Five - 3/7/2000 6:52:33 PM
Schto:
And while I agree with Pelle that
painting the Nazi takeover as a defence against a
communist takeover can have apologistic connotations,
that doesn't necessarily make it untrue.
Well, if more than one person thinks so, then I retract my suggestion that Pelle was sucking on a crack-pipe before he posted so. I might have been unlear, although I think that the 'apologistic connotations' have unfairly been read into this in the way that 'Democratic sympathies' are often unfairly read into an attack on a Republican.
Let me be clearer. The Nazi takeover is not a heroic example of German patriots taking over a disintegrating government in order to save their country from Communism. The Communists and Nazis were natural political adversaries and the Nazis certainly intended to stomp out communism in Germany, but that's hardly their intended reason, or a justification, for their seizure of power in Germany. And it is, as I've said, not the entire reason that people who otherwise should have known better supported Hitler's ascension to power. Nationalist pride and the promise of a strong economy did a lot to shape the circumstances which enabled Hitler to first subvert and then replace the German government.
However -- whether or not you and Pelle agree that the Communists were a legitimately perceived threat in Germany, and whether or not you acknowledge my argument about how the emergence of Communism in Germany was hampered and stalled primarily by the political aggression of the Nazis -- one must agree that the question of breaking the Communists was one which diverted a lot of political support in Germany into the Nationalist, fascist right. It's not a justification of why it happened, just a mechanism by which it occurred.
189. Angel-Five - 3/7/2000 6:55:04 PM
Campaign statements and propaganda of the time are laden with reference to the Communist menace. There was a strong Communist insurgency in Germany at that time, which was, demonstrably, fertile ground for the seeds of revolution. Moreover, the voting patterns alone do not paint a remotely complete picture of the political strength of Communism in Germany any more than they did in the decades before the October Revolution in Russia.
Voting patterns do not record the existence of crypto-Marxists or Marxist sympathizers within the German power structure, just as they didn't in Russia. The term 'bolshevik' means 'majority man' -- but that was a brilliant political ploy at the time, because Bolsheviks didn't represent anything like a majority at the time the phrase was coined.
I think that the non-Communist members of the German government and power structure were very much aware of what had happened in the years leading up to 1917 and Lenin's eventual ascent to power in the new Soviet Union. I think that awareness did much to inform their decision-making WRT the Nazis.
Ultimately that was for the worse, because it wasn't necessary to give the Nazis control in order to stop Communism in Germany. The existence of the Nazis as a well-organized minority was probably in hindsight enough to keep the Communists down. Yet that's the sort of hindsight which allows us to pronounce comfortable decisions in the modern era. It wasn't present then when the question came up.
190. Seguine - 3/7/2000 8:59:08 PM
Martin Girder's review of Dark Continent in The Sun's Eye may contribute to this discussion.
191. cigarlaw - 3/8/2000 1:27:51 AM
first, I didn't say that Hitler and would eliminate himself. I said he would be elevated. Next, evil is always interesting, don't you think? Otherwise we would not be discussing this topic . As to Hitler had not being Stalin, I don't see a problem with making the comparison. Stalin was far more competent, and not quite as insane is Hitler. Plus Stalin had a long history of European philosophers to support his position. Lastly, the figure of 12 million dead was not put forth to any way revise or diminish what happened to the European Jews. If there any revisionism it, he should be laid at the doorstep of those who emphasized that Holocaust killed 6 million use and forget the non-Jewish 6 million who died. who claim that the Holocaust only killed Jews. The figure of 12 million murders was used in the Nuremberg trials..
192. PelleNilsson - 3/8/2000 2:03:13 AM
Angel
Just to pick a nit. The term "bolsheviks" comes from the party split-up at its London congress in 1903. The other side became known as "mensheviks".
193. Stumbo - 3/8/2000 2:33:56 AM
Pelle:
And the nit you're picking is... ?
194. Angel-Five - 3/8/2000 2:42:19 AM
Pelle:
I know.
Yet it was Bolshevism that came to rule the Soviet Union, not the 'minority men'. Correct?
BTW in regards to Cigarlaw:
I think the 12 million toll also takes into account POWs who died in German custody, but yes, I've heard that too. The Nizhkor site mentions nearly twelve million deaths. But if the justification for the number is that it was cited in the Nuremburg trials, it has to be looked at a little more closely: some of the mass murders the Soviets charged to the Germans, such as the murders at Katyn, were actually committed by the Sovs.
195. PelleNilsson - 3/8/2000 2:42:25 AM
Hello Stumbo! Long time.
It seems to me that Angel's "at the time" refers to the late 20' - early 30's and that he implies that the term "bolshevik" was some kind of propaganda ploy used during that period.
196. Angel-Five - 3/8/2000 2:42:47 AM
Hey, Stumbo.
197. Angel-Five - 3/8/2000 2:49:51 AM
Pelle:
It seems to me that Angel's "at the time" refers to the
late 20' -early 30's and that he implies that the term
"bolshevik" was some kind of propaganda ploy used
during that period.
Every once in a while you make it painfully clear that English isn't your first language.
'Bolshevik' was indeed a propaganda ploy -- carried out by the Bolsheviks. When they coined the term. I'll reprint the text for you:
Voting patterns do not record the existence of
crypto-Marxists or Marxist sympathizers within the
German power structure, just as they didn't in Russia.
The term 'bolshevik' means 'majority man' -- but that
was a brilliant political ploy at the time, because
Bolsheviks didn't represent anything like a majority at
the time the phrase was coined.
The bold is used for emphasis of time placement. Read it again; I trust this clears up the alleged basis for your attempt to nit-pick.
198. Angel-Five - 3/8/2000 2:57:12 AM
Stumbissimo:
The nit he's picking is nonexistent. Pelle has a rather uninformed penchant to imagine that Americans are ignorant on any given topic upon which he disagrees with them, and a decided fetish for 'correcting' their ignorance as a means of discrediting their arguments. I think he comes by this by way of studying and emulating PE, but PE usually manages to correctly divine ignorance when he comes across it, whereas poor Pelle is forced all too often to pounce only upon his own misconceptions.
199. Stumbo - 3/8/2000 3:24:59 AM
.. And I was only away for about 2 weeks, heh. Thanks, all, for the nice reception; perhaps I should go get sunburned more often.
200. Stumbo - 3/8/2000 3:43:18 AM
* but check the Sports thread for even better news!
201. PelleNilsson - 3/8/2000 4:25:13 AM
Angel
We seem to be locked in some kind of semantic misunderstanding here. As you correctly point out English is not my first language although I feel that I have a reasonable command of it.
Let me also say that I didn't pick the nit as an attack on you but in order to clarify a point that seemed a bit obscure to me. In a thread like this there are usually many more lurkers than posters.
Now to the semantics and I hope that your reply will finally clarify this issue. You say:
"Bolsheviks didn't represent anything like a majority at the time the phrase was coined."
The time the phrase was coined was 1903 and the context was the congress of what was then Russia's Social Democratic party. "Majority" refers to "majority within the party" not to "majority among the population" or anything like that. Your reference to "crypto-Marxists and Marxist sympathizers" led me to believe that you used it in the latter sense. Please correct me if I'm wrong.
In order to preempt more nitpicking I hasten to add that Lenin's line lost the vote among the delegates but he later won the majority on the central committee.
202. PelleNilsson - 3/8/2000 5:11:55 AM
I would like to put in another 2 cents before our genial host decides to move forward. We have not mentioned the "knife-in-the-back" legend which played an important role.
It emerged at the end of the war and was based on the fact that the German army was never properly defeated in the field (or the perception that it wasn't). At the time of the surrender it still stood on foreign soil. So if the war hadn't been lost at the battle front, then where? The legend points to the home front and a communist/Jewish conspiracy that undermined the army's ability to fight and was out to destroy Germany.
For its proponents, this conspiracy was still around and that was one of the reasons why the fear of communism was much higher than its performance in the elections would warrant.
Another point that is perhaps not generally known is that there were several proposals by the Allies to reduce the burden of the war reparations. The last of these plans was the Young Plan of 1929, named after the American Owen D. Young.