Buchanan's Hitler Apologia

If you're Pat Buchanan, of course, you never let a little thing like history stop you from a good opportunity to try to paint Hitler as being on OK guy and to explain how Adolf Hitler didn't really want war and he was just a poor, misunderstood guy forced to fight by those nefarious Allies, who were unreasonable and wouldn't give him what he wanted. Sadly, Buchanan never misses an opportunity to try to convince people that Hitler was really not interested in war, and the 70th anniversary of the invasion of Poland provides him with yet another opportunity to do just that--again--with an article entitled Did Hitler Want War?After slapping down a particularly stupid Holocaust denier the other day, I hadn't planned on writing about Holocaust denial again for a while. Little did I know that I'd end up seeing the big macher of Hitler apologia launching into another of his nonsensical and ahistorical tracts:

On Sept. 1, 1939, 70 years ago, the German Army crossed the Polish frontier. On Sept. 3, Britain declared war.

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

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

What cause could justify such sacrifices?

Gee, I get the feeling that Buchanan is about to argue that World War II wasn't worth the sacrifices it took to destroy the Third Reich, don't you? Also, note the clever way he describes the people who perished. He doesn't say "50 million people had perished." Rather, he said "50 million Christians and Jews [emphasis mine] had perished." It's a non-so-subtle ploy among those who don't much like Jews to try to remind people that, you know, Hitler killed Christians, too. In fact, given that Hitler "only" killed six million Jews, that means Christians must have taken the brunt of Hitler's fury. In terms of sheer numbers, there's no doubt that most of the dead were Christian. However, as a percentage of prewar population, the number of Jewish dead far outstrips any other group, mainly because Hitler meant what he said when he proclaimed the Jew the mortal enemy of the Reich and promised a war of extermination. No doubt Pat would say I'm being unfair, but I don't think so. If he didn't mean to minimize Jewish suffering during World War II, why did he make such a point of saying "Christians and Jews" instead of just "people"?

Consider the context, as well. Buchanan goes on to describe how Danzig was a flashpoint of conflict between Germany and Poland leading up to the war. He apparently can't understand the difference between what Hitler said was the reason for his invasion of Poland and what was really behind the invasion. Here's Buchanan's highly one-sided version of the Danzig conflict:

The German-Polish war had come out of a quarrel over a town the size of Ocean City, Md., in summer. Danzig, 95 percent German, had been severed from Germany at Versailles in violation of Woodrow Wilson's principle of self-determination. Even British leaders thought Danzig should be returned.

Why did Warsaw not negotiate with Berlin, which was hinting at an offer of compensatory territory in Slovakia? Because the Poles had a war guarantee from Britain that, should Germany attack, Britain and her empire would come to Poland's rescue.

But why would Britain hand an unsolicited war guarantee to a junta of Polish colonels, giving them the power to drag Britain into a second war with the most powerful nation in Europe?

Was Danzig worth a war? Unlike the 7 million Hong Kongese whom the British surrendered to Beijing, who didn't want to go, the Danzigers were clamoring to return to Germany.

Apparently Pat never read Mein Kampf. Either that, or, more likely, he did read it but, as so many fundamentalists do with the Bible, decided to ignore the bits he didn't like. While it is true that Hitler fantasized about an alliance with Britain, which he admired, Mein Kampf laid out a stepwise progression for Germany's return to power. This was referred to by one of the translators of Mein Kampf as the Stufenplan (stage-by-stage plan). The first step was to form alliances with Britain and Italy; the second step was to wage war on France and its Eastern European allies, the most prominent of which was Poland; and the third step was to invade destroy the "Judeo-Bolshevist" regime in Russia and thereby obtain Lebensraum("living space") for the German volk.

It also just so happens that I'm in the midst of reading Richard J. Evans' magisterial three volume history of the Third Reich. Here is a telling passage from the second volume, The Third Reich in Power, describing the buildup to war in Poland:

On 23 May 1939 Hitler told military leaders, including Göring, Halder, and Raeder, that "further successes cannot be won without bloodshed."

"It is not Danzig that is at stake," he went on. "For us it is a matter of expanding our living-space to the east and making food supplies secure...If fate forces us into a showdown with the West it is a good idea to possess a largish area in the East. It was necessary, therefore, to attack Poland at the first suitable opportunity. Hitler conceded that Britain and France might come to Poland's aid. "England is therefore our enemy and the showdown with England is a matter of life and death." If possible, Poland would perish alone and unaided. But in the longer run, war with England and France was inevitable. "England is the motive force driving against Germany." It was to be hoped that such a war would be short. But it was well to prepare, he said, for a war lasting ten to fifteen years. "Time will decide against England." If Holland, Belgium, and France were occupied, English cities bombed, and overseas supplies cut off by a maritime and airborne blockade, England would bleed to death. However, Germany would probably not be ready of the conflict for another five years he added. German policy in 1939 therefore had to isolate Poland as far as possible and to ensure that the coming military action did not lead immediately to a general European war.

Indeed, by March 1939, Hitler had already mostly decided upon invading Poland. He had even set the date for August or September 1939. Then he cleverly set about trying to isolate Poland. The most cynical part of his strategy was the Nazi-Soviet Non-Aggression Pact, which was negotiated and signed in August 1939. Part of that pact was a secret protocol whereby, if Stalin didn't interfere with Hitler's conquest of Poland, he would get the Baltic States (Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania), and Poland was to be divided between the two nations along the Narew, Vistula, and San rivers. Thus, when Hitler invaded on September 1, 1939, the Soviet Union did nothing; nothing, that is, until September 17, when it invaded Poland from the East.

But in Pat's world, Lebensraum means nothing. Hitler's proclamations, dating back to the 1920s, that Germany needed Lebensraum in the East mean nothing. No, it was those nasty Poles' fault for not turning Danzig over to Hitler, and it was those horrible Brits' and Frogs' fault for being pissed off at having been played the fools at Munich a year earlier and therefore not wanting to give in to Hitler any more. How unreasonable! It couldn't possibly be that Hitler used Danzig as one (of several) pretexts for invading Poland, at least not to Pat! It couldn't possibly have been that the Nazi Party in Danzig had been staging incidents and violence for propaganda value, could it? Perish the thought! It couldn't possibly be that Goebbels had grotesquely exaggerated stories of oppression by the Poles, in which Poles were allegedly murdering ethnic Germans or even shooting at random passers-by, were fiction, could it? Not to Pat. Pat apparently can't believe that Hitler would never lie about such things. Or anything, for that matter, apparently.

After all, Hitler had been such a nice guy to Czechoslovakia. Pat tells us so:

After Munich in 1938, Czechoslovakia did indeed crumble and come apart. Yet consider what became of its parts.

The Sudeten Germans were returned to German rule, as they wished. Poland had annexed the tiny disputed region of Teschen, where thousands of Poles lived. Hungary's ancestral lands in the south of Slovakia had been returned to her. The Slovaks had their full independence guaranteed by Germany. As for the Czechs, they came to Berlin for the same deal as the Slovaks, but Hitler insisted they accept a protectorate.

Now one may despise what was done, but how did this partition of Czechoslovakia manifest a Hitlerian drive for world conquest?