Churchill, Hitler, and "The Unnecessary War": How Britain Lost Its Empire and the West Lost the World

by Patrick J. Buchanan

But with families starving, Bolshevik uprisings in Munich, Cologne, Berlin, and Budapest, Trotsky’s Red Army driving into Europe, Czechs and Poles ready to strike from the east, and Foch preparing to march on Berlin at the head of an American-British-French army, Germany capitulated.

Five years to the day after Gavrilo Princip shot the archduke and his wife in Sarajevo, German

delegates signed what Wilson had promised his countrymen would be “pe...

By forcing German democrats to sign the Treaty of Versailles, which disarmed, divided, and disassembled the nation Bismarck had built, the Allies had discredited German democracy at its birth.

“President Wilson is a hypocrite and the Versailles Treaty is the vilest crime in history,” said the social democrat Scheidemann, who had brought down his government rather than sign.

Men who believe in the rule of law believe in the sanctity of contract. But a contract in which one party is not allowed to be heard and is forced to sign at the point of a gun is invalid. Germany signed the Treaty of Versailles only when threatened that, should she refuse, the country would be invaded and her people further starved. Though Napoleon’s foreign minister Talleyrand had been invited to Vienna to negotiate the peace of Europe, no German had been invited to Paris. Francesco Nitti, the prime minister of Italy when Versailles was signed, in his book The Wreck of Europe, expressed his disgust at the injustice.

Versailles had created not only an unjust but an unsustainable peace. Wedged between a brooding Bolshevik Russia and a humiliated Germany were six new nations: Finland, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Poland, and Czechoslovakia. The last two held five million Germans captive. Against each of the six, Russia or Germany held a grievance. Yet none could defend its independence against a resurrected Germany or a revived Russia. Should Russia and Germany unite, no force on Earth could save the six.

Balfour had promised the Jews a homeland in Palestine. To defeat the Turks, T. E. Lawrence had stirred up the smoldering embers of Arab nationalism. Not a day passed that some popular leader did not arrive in the lobby of Wilson’s hotel to plead for independence for a province

or colony he had never heard of.

Also, Germany had accepted an armistice on the basis of Wilson’s Fourteen Points, enunciated in his address to Congress January 8, 1918. The fourteen were amended to twenty-four by addresses to Congress, February 11, at Mount Vernon on July 4, and in New York City on September 27. These Twenty-four Points were to serve as the basis of the peace. So Wilson had pledged to the Germans. Under Points Seven and Eight, Germany was to depart Belgium and restore French rights in Alsace-Lorraine lost in 1871.

At a London dinner party soon after Adolf Hitler had taken power in Berlin, one of the guests asked aloud, “By the way, where was Hitler born?” “At Versailles” was the instant reply of Lady Astor.

Rising from obscurity to build a mass movement in a demoralized Germany, Hitler first drew public notice, then attracted ever-larger crowds by delivering again and again a vitriolic speech he titled simply “The Treaty of Versailles.”

When Hitler came to power, Mussolini, realizing the Nazis might attempt the violent overthrow of Versailles, imperiling the peace of Europe, proposed a Four-Power Pact. It was among the bolder and more visionary ideas of the era. Britain, France, Italy, and Germany would meet as equals to rectify the injustices of Versailles to avert another war.

Believing that war might be necessary to overturn Versailles, Hitler wanted no repetition of 1914, when Italy, an ally, declared neutrality, then entered the war against Germany.

To the Nazis, murder was a legitimate weapon to deal with political enemies. Between 150 and 200 people died. Mussolini was shaken. Reading of how Hitler relished the role of executioner of former comrades, Mussolini

Six weeks after Hitler’s visit to Venice, 150 Austrian Nazis stormed the chancery in Vienna. Most of the Cabinet, warned in advance, had fled. But the gritty little Dollfuss refused to run. From six inches away, he was shot in the throat. As the celebrating Nazis went on national radio to announce his resignation, Dollfuss, ignored by his killers, bled to death, the only European leader to die a martyr’s death resisting Nazism.

Papen found Hitler in a “state of hysterical agitation, denouncing feverishly the rashness and stupidity of the Austrian Nazi Party for having involved him in such an appalling situation.”26 “We are faced with a new Sarajevo!” Hitler shouted.

Mussolini, who had been hosting Dollfuss’s family and had to break the news of his assassination to his wife, was enraged and ordered four divisions to the Brenner. Il Duce sent word to Vienna: If Germany invades, Italy will go to war. In a show of support, Mussolini departed for Austria, where he vented his disgust at Hitler and the Nazis to vice chancellor Prince Ernst Rüdiger von Starhemberg: “It would mean the end of European civilization if this country of murderers and pederasts were to overrun Europe.”

Britain and France now began to believe Mussolini might be right. With German rearmament under way, and the murder of Dollfuss and the failed Austrian coup in mind, Prime Minister Ramsay MacDonald and French

prime minister Pierre Flandin and Foreign Minister Pierre Laval agreed to meet with Mussolini in Stresa on Lake Maggiore from April 11 to 14. Passed over by many historians, this was a crucial meeting in the interwar period. For in 1935, as Oxford’s R. B. McCallum has written, “Italy, with her military force and strong and virile Government, held the balance of power in Europe.”39 At the end of the Stresa conference a communiqué was issued denouncing German rearmament as a violation of Versailles and affirming the three nations’ commitment to the principles of Locarno.

Locarno was crucial. For it represented the voluntary acceptance by Berlin of what had been imposed upon Germany at Versailles. On October 16, 1925, a democratic Germany accepted the loss of Alsace-Lorraine, the inviolability of its borders with Belgium and France, and the permanent demilitarization of the Rhineland, and undertook to apply for membership in the League of Nations. At Locarno, however, the borders of Eastern Europe had gone unmentioned. For no German statesman could accept, in perpetuity, the loss of Memel, Danzig, the Corridor, and the Sudetenland to Lithuania, Poland, and Czechoslovakia, and survive.

As the British Empire controlled almost every other piece of real estate in East Africa, Italy’s annexation of part or all of Ethiopia posed no threat to Great Britain. And with British flags flying over Hong Kong, Singapore, Malaya, Burma, India, Ceylon, Pakistan, southern Iran, Iraq, Palestine, Egypt, the Sudan, Uganda, Kenya, Tanganyika, Rhodesia, South Africa, Southwest Africa, Togo, the Gold Coast, and Nigeria—not all acquired by peaceful purchase—for Britain to oppose Italy’s annexation of Ethiopia might seem hypocritical. To aspiring imperial powers like Italy and Japan, it did.

When a Frenchwoman accosted Churchill to argue that Italy was only doing in Ethiopia what British imperialists had done for centuries, Churchill replied, “Ah, but you see, all that belongs to the un-regenerate past, is locked away in the limbo of the old, the wicked days. The world progresses.”

A week before the Italian army invaded Ethiopia, Churchill was hailing Mussolini as “so great a man and so wise a leader.”100 Two years after Mussolini had embraced Hitler, Churchill was still proclaiming the genius of Rome’s Fascist dictator: “It would be a dangerous folly for the British people to underrate the enduring position in world-history which Mussolini will hold; or the amazing qualities of courage, comprehension, self-control and perseverance which he exemplifies.”

Hitler knew that Western statesmen and peoples nurtured a sense of guilt over Versailles and he intuitively sensed how to play upon that guilt. He would first identify an injustice of Versailles, or a new threat to a disarmed Germany. Then, playing the aggrieved party, he would announce what seemed a proportionate response, protesting all the while that he was acting only in self-defense or to assert Germany’s right to equality of treatment. To soothe Allied fears, Hitler tied his response to an olive branch.

Rising in Kroll Opera House that fateful Saturday, March 7, 1936, Hitler declared that if France and Stalin’s Russia were ganging up on Germany, he had a sworn duty to act in defense of the Fatherland.

Why, when Hitler had sent in only three lightly armed battalions, with orders to withdraw immediately if they met resistance, did France, with the most powerful army in the world, not march in, send the Germans scurrying back over the Rhine bridges, and restation French troops on the river? Decisive action, warranted by Versailles and Locarno, to which Britain was signatory and which she would have had to back up, might have prevented World War II.

Churchill, in his war memoirs, adopts the same view that, had the French army entered the Rhineland and run the German battalions out, the German generals might have rebelled and overthrown Hitler: “[T]here is no doubt that Hitler would have been compelled by his own General Staff to withdraw, and a check would have been given to his pretensions which might well have proved fatal to his rule.”

While Hitler did indeed come to power with a “vision” of Versailles overturned and a German-dominated Europe, most of his actions were taken in spontaneous reaction to situations created by his adversaries. Hitler “owed all his successes to his tactical opportunism,” wrote Sir Nevile Henderson.

European statesmen by 1938 had concluded that severing the ethnic Germans in the Sudetenland from Vienna had been a blunder that must be corrected. Neither Chamberlain nor his Cabinet was willing to go to war to deny Sudeten Germans the right to self-determination or keep them under an alien Czech rule. But there were complications. The first was France.

WHAT CAUSED HITLER TO turn with sudden ferocity on the Czechs and President Eduard Beneš, and risk war with Britain and France so soon after his triumph in Austria? The triggering event occurred two months after Anschluss, while Hitler was still celebrating. Rumors began to fly of an imminent German invasion of Czechoslovakia. The rumors were false, and there is reason to believe the Czechs had planted them with the knowledge of Beneš, who ordered mobilization. As the rumors ricocheted around Europe, London warned Berlin that Britain would not sit still for an invasion. Paris and Moscow renewed their commitments to Prague. Hitler was suddenly in a major crisis not at all of his own making.

The Hitler of Mein Kampf had made it starkly clear that overturning Versailles and bringing Germans home to the Reich was not the end of his life’s mission.

Since Lenin’s death, Stalin had surpassed him in mass murders that included the forced starvation of the Ukrainians and the Great Terror that began with the torture, show trials, and executions of his revolutionary comrades and went on to consume hundreds of thousands of lives. Was Churchill willing to ally the Mother of Parliaments with this monster?

If Churchill’s assessment of Hitler’s character and Munich were spot-on, his strategic alternative—bring the Red Army into Europe to stop him—appalled Chamberlain, who despised and distrusted the Bolsheviks more than the Nazis and Fascists. Forced to choose between Nazi Germany and Stalin’s Soviet Union controlling Eastern and Central Europe, he would have preferred the former. “Better Hitler than Stalin” was a sentiment shared by leaders of all the nations bordering on Stalin’s empire: Finland, Estonia, Lithuania, Latvia, Poland, Rumania. They had all heard the screams from over the border. Living next door, they had none of the romantic illusions about a “brave new world” held by British Labourites and American liberals.

By Munich, when the number of Hitler’s victims still numbered in the hundreds, Stalin had murdered millions in his “prison house of nations” stretching from Ukraine to the Pacific. Chamberlain also believed any alliance with Russia meant certain war with Germany, a war from wh...

On that third and final trip to Munich, according to aides present, Hitler was surly, angry, rude, brusque. Lord Dunglass, the future prime minister Sir Alec Douglas-Home, described it as the worst experience of his career. Never had he expected to see a British prime minister treated in the manner that Adolf Hitler treated Neville Chamberlain.

“In the early days of 1939,” writes U.S. historian Charles Callan Tansill, “Hitler believed that [Polish Foreign Minister] Beck was so well versed in the principles of Realpolitik that he would be glad to go hand in hand with the Nazi leaders in a joint search for plunder that was weakly guarded by the broken-down states of Europe.”12 Hitler believed Beck was a man he could do business with.

Hitler did not want war with Poland, he wanted an alliance with Poland. But Halifax and Chamberlain believed Colvin and feared that Beck might cut a deal with Hitler, which was what Hitler had in mind—a deal, not a war. Immediately after the meeting with Colvin, as Chamberlain wrote to his sister, “we then and there decided” Poland must be guaranteed.

WHY DID CHAMBERLAIN, who never believed Britain had a vital interest in Eastern Europe, give the first war guarantee in British history to Eastern Europe? Deceived and betrayed by Hitler, his Munich pact made a mockery, Chamberlain appears to have acted out of shame and humiliation at having been played for a fool, out of fear of Tory backbenchers who had turned against Munich in disgust, and out of panic that Hitler was out to “dominate the world.”

HITLER WON THE COMPETITION for Stalin’s hand for a reason: They were brothers under the skin, amoral political animals with blood on their hands who would unhesitatingly betray nations or crush peoples to advance state or ideological interests.

WHEN GERMANY INVADED POLAND on September 1, six months after Warsaw received its war guarantee, not one British bomb or bullet had been sent to Poland. No British credit had been extended. Britain still lacked the power to come to Poland’s aid. And Britain had made no plans to come to Poland’s aid. The Poles, however, facing the first blitzkrieg, or lightning war, awaited the promised Allied offensive.

After dividing Poland with Stalin, Hitler turned west to deal with the nations that had declared war on him. On May 10, 1940, he launched his blitzkrieg through the Low Countries and into the Ardennes. In three weeks, the British army had been hurled off the continent. In six weeks, France had fallen. The Wehrmacht was at the Pyrenees.

Had Britain never given the war guarantee, the Soviet Union would almost surely have borne the brunt of the blow that fell on France. The Red Army, ravaged by Stalin’s purge of senior officers, might have collapsed. Bolshevism might have been crushed. Communism might have perished in 1940, instead of living on for fifty years and murdering tens of millions more in Russia, China, Korea, Vietnam, and Cuba. A Hitler-Stalin war might have been the only war in Europe in the 1940s. Tens of millions might never have died terrible deaths in the greatest war in all history.

Three months after Kristallnacht, on the sixth anniversary of his assumption of power, January 29, 1939, Hitler, in a speech to the Reichstag, publicly threatened the Jews of Europe. America, Britain, and France, he charged, “were continually being stirred up to hatred of Germany and the German people by Jewish and non-Jewish agitators.”16 Hitler then issued his threat: In the course of my life I have often been a prophet, and have usually been ridiculed for it.… I will once more be a prophet: If the international Jewish financiers in and outside Europe should succeed in plunging the nations once more into a world war, then the result will not be the Bolshevization of the earth, and thus the victory of Jewry, but the annihilation of the Jewish race in Europe.

The mass deportations and destruction of the Jews of Europe, however, did not begin in 1939 or 1940. They began after Hitler invaded Russia, June 22, 1941, when the Einsatzgruppen trailed the Wehrmacht into the Soviet Union exterminating Bolsheviks, commissars, and Jews. Writes Ian Kershaw, “[T]he German invasion of the Soviet Union triggered the rapid descent into full-scale genocide against the Jews.”

They began after Hitler invaded Russia, June 22, 1941, when the Einsatzgruppen trailed the Wehrmacht into the Soviet Union exterminating Bolsheviks, commissars, and Jews. Writes Ian Kershaw, “[T]he German invasion of the Soviet Union triggered the rapid descent into full-scale genocide against the Jews.”

Not until January 1942, after Hitler had been at war two and a half years, invaded Russia, declared war on the United States, and begun to sense disaster, was the infamous Wannsee Conference held.

In February 1942, after that conference, Goebbels wrote ominously in his Diaries, “World Jewry will suffer a great catastrophe.… The Fuehrer realizes the full implications of the great opportunity offered by this war.”19

On March 7, 1942, the ominous phrase “a final solution of the Jewish question” appears in The Goebbels Diaries.20 On March 27, 1942, after describing the deportations lately begun from Poland’s ghettos, Goebbels writes chillingly, “Fortunately, a whole series of possibilities presents itself for us in wartime that would be denied us in peacetime. We shall have to profit by this.”21 The same day, Goebbels refers back to Hitler’s threat of January 1939, adding, “[T]he fact that Jewry’s representatives in England and America are...

From this chronology, the destruction of the European Jews was not a cause of the war but an awful consequence of the war. Had there been no war, would there have been a Holocaust at all? In The World Crisis, Churchill, the Dardanelles disaster in mind, wrote: “[T]he terrible Ifs accumulate.” If Britain had not issued the war guarantee and then declared war on Germany, Hitler might never have invaded France. Had he not, Mussolini would never have invaded France or Greece, or declared war on England. With no war in the west, all the Jews of Norway, Denmark, Holland, Belgium, Luxembourg, France, Italy, Yugoslavia, and Greece might have survived a German-Polish or Nazi-Soviet war, as the Jews of Spain, Portugal, Sweden, and Switzerland survived.