I might as well try one more time

Mr ‘P’ makes the following odd offer : ‘The fact is that Nazism in Europe ended in the spring of 1945 after going to war in 1939, and its horrors brought to an end with it. I am perfectly prepared to agree to all Mr Hitchens says if he can present compelling evidence that his timescale for allied intervention would not have delayed the end of the war beyond the spring of 1945.’

 

This sort of thing tempts me to follow the advice of the contributor who advised me to give up on the topic, as so many people simply aren’t capable of grasping my simple proposition.

 

Of course the whole war cult is a semi-religious one, and some people simply won’t ever be able to let go of their beliefs about it, which guide them in much, if not all, of their view of the world. These are the sort of people who think that Vladimir Putin, Saddam Hussein Slobodan Milosevic and the others are all new Hitlers. For them there is nothing I can say. Many of us long to have things divided into simple good and simple evil, and dislike it when we’re told it’s not so.  I understand the urge. I'm opften wrongly accused of suffering from it. But it’s mistaken.

 

But perhaps there are others, mere witnesses to these clashes, who might pick up something.

 

Mr P seems to think that the duration of the war is some sort of fixed quantity, and that if it started in 1939, it was bound to end in 1945 . From this he seems to deduce that, if it started in, say, 1941, it was bound to have lasted until 1947.

 

I think this is absurd. For a start, as I have said here before, the huge French Army and the large French economy were eliminated from the anti-German side of the war almost totally in 1940, and only partially returned towards the end. The British army, having been driven from the European continent in 1940,  was not in contact with the main body of the enemy from 1940 to 1944.

 

Half my point here is that this was not the only possible outcome, though it was a reasonable outcome of the peculiar strategy adopted by Britain and France in April 1939, which allowed Germany to fight them on one front and so defeat them quite easily, without even needing a pretext to start a war, as they’d already declared it.

 

As it happened, Britain and France were very nearly eliminated from the First World War in the autumn of 1914 but, largely because Germany was fighting a war on two fronts, and spread its army too thin, they were not. It was a close-run thing, though, as such events always are. Anglo-French policy in 1914 was pretty foolish, but it was nothing like as daft as their policy in 1939.

 

Can I just get Mr ’P’ (or anyone else) to think a bit here?

The hinge of decision is not May 1940. It is April 1939.Without April 1939, and the empty, dishonest guarantee to Poland, which only Poland believed,  there would have been no September 1939 invasion of Poland, no May 1940 invasion of the Low Countries and France, as we know it.

 

Without the Polish guarantee, a whole series of events Mr ‘P’ takes for granted would almost certainly not have happened.

 

My guess is that Poland would have renewed its non-aggression pact with Germany, that Poland would have ceded Danzig to Germany, and permitted the construction of German roads and rail lines across the corridor.  No agreement on the partition of Poland would have been attempted or reached between Germany and the USSR, hence no Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact.  

Hitler was an opportunist. We don’t know what he would have done next. But without the promise of a neutral, even friendly USSR, and with a heavily-armed France sat on his Western frontier, he would have had much less freedom of action.

 

Mr ‘P’ also needs to understand that , while the government of Germany was a National Socialist (‘Nazi’) dictatorship, Hitler was following classical liberal German foreign policy dating back to 1915, namely Friedrich Naumann’s policy of ‘Mitteleuropa’ , or German domination of central and eastern Europe, not necessarily through direct political control. The allies were not fighting ‘The Nazis’. They were fighting Germany, which might well have followed equally aggressive policies under a different government. The allies were not fighting ‘Nazism’. They had tolerated it and dealt with it willingly for six years.

 

He must also grasp the fact, repeatedly pointed out by me,  that a) Hitler did not adopt the policy of mass extermination of Jews until well after the war had begun c) that it was only his eastern conquests, and his invasion of the Low Countries,  followed by his defeat of Britain and France in May 1940, which placed most of Europe’s Jews in his grasp, and c) that the allies never lifted a finger to prevent that extermination, long after they had reliable information that it was going on. Would he perhaps just say that he has taken this fact in? So few of my opponents on this matter ever do. It would save so much trouble, and it is a demonstrable and undisputed fact.

 

So, for the ninetieth time, to characterise World War Two as a war to stop the Holocaust is simply incorrect. Our side didn’t fight it for that purpose.

 

As for the victory of the allies ending the Holocaust, that is undoubtedly the case, and axiomatic. But it is also possible that the rate and speed of the mass murder may have been accelerated by Hitler’s knowledge of approaching defeat. I don’t think we can know, not least because there is so little surviving documentation and most of those involved who were caught lied about what they were up to. Either way, it can’t really be made an issue in this discussion.

 

By the way, the horrors of World War two did not, alas, end with the fall of the Third Reich in 1945. The ghastly ethnic cleansing of the Potsdam agreement, many times described here, brought misery and death to multitudes of innocent women and children. The Soviet takeover of Eastern Europe was bloody and cruel on a colossal scale.

 

I can guarantee nothing about a past which never happened. But I can say that it seems to me to be quite possible that, by remaining in a state of strong and increasingly armed neutrality, Britain and France might well have achieved a better result than the one they did achieve – namely, the end of both of them as major powers, the alliance between Hitler and Stalin, the utter destruction of Poland and its imprisonment under foreign rule for the next 50 years,  the invasion, rape and occupation of the Low Countries, Denmark, Norway and France, and the near-defeat of the USSR by surprise attack in 1941. The USA didn’t suffer by staying out, and is not reviled for it. Nor, except by a very few who know the details, is Russia reviled for her cynical behaviour between 1939 and 1941.

 

The simplest way of making the point remains A.J.P. Taylor’s bitter question. ‘In 1940, would you rather have been a ‘betrayed’ Czech, or a ‘saved’ Pole?’ The contrast between the rhetoric and the facts of life is the thing to bear in mind. Talk of honour as much as you like but if your ‘honour’ means someone else’s home being burned to the ground, while he and his family are marched off to slavery or death, it doesn’t seem to me to be worth all that much.

 

An honest self-interested policy of defending one’s own national interests seems to me to be preferable to this sort of exalted, pseudo-noble palaver, in which ‘doing the right thing’ and feeling good about yourself happens to involve death and misery for lots of other people, not to mention the diminution of your own national independence for all future time.