Re: You see, hitler wasn't a bad guy. Roosevelt was the problem.
Actually, Bolshevism and its successful takeover of Russia was the problem --that is, as far as Europe's bourgeoisie was concerned. There was a real fear, in the aftermath of WWI, among European ruling elites that Bolshevism/Communism would eventually break out and spread in Western Europe. Hence their ploy to pit Germany against the Soviet Union by granting the former a so-called "free hand" in Eastern Europe...
Moreover, we should keep in mind the deep-rooted, almost congenital, Germanophobia of British elites:
In September of 1940, Sir Robert Vansittart, Chief Diplomatic Adviser to the Foreign Office, wrote a letter to Lord Halifax, Secretary of State, on the subject of peace overtures made to Mr. [Victor] Mallet, the British ambassador in Sweden, by Dr. Weissauer, Hitler’s personal lawyer:
"I hope that you will instruct Mr. Mallet that he is on no account to meet Dr. Weissauer. The future of civilisation is at stake. It is a question of we or they now, and either the German Reich or this country has got to go under, and not only under, but right under. I believe it will be the German Reich. This is a very different thing from saying that Germany has got to go under; but the German Reich and the Reich idea have been the curse of the world for 75 years, and if we do not stop it this time, we never shall, and they will stop us. The enemy is the German Reich and not merely Nazism, and those who have not yet learned this lesson have learned nothing whatever, and would let us in for a sixth war even if we survive the fifth. […] All possibility of compromise has now gone by, and it has got to be a fight to a finish, and to a real finish. […]" (emphases in the original.)
This letter is a most instructive illustration of the state of mind of the small group of people who governed Britain in the 1940s. It shows that the fight against Hitler was incidental; it was only part of a larger battle aimed at eliminating Germany as a political power in order to preserve the British Empire. Vansittart’s references to the "fifth war" – which Halifax undoubtedly understood – beg the question of the other four. Obviously, WWI was one of them, but the three others that Britain had supposedly fought against the Reich since the 1860s are somewhat mysterious, as there never were, during that time, any declared hostilities between the two countries. One can only surmise that for Vansittart the wars Prussia fought against other countries in 1864, 1866, and 1870 or such conflicts as the Boer War, the Agadir crisis, or the Baghdad railway project were, in essence, wars, in which Britain herself confronted the German Reich. Such considerations shed interesting sidelights on British activities behind the scenes of European politics throughout the 19th century.
Thus, in a vain effort to stem the tide of history and save the Empire, Churchill and the men around him lost not only what they were trying to preserve but managed to ruin a good part of Europe at the same time.
[...]
vho.org
I learnt about Sir Vansittart's letter while reading Martin Allen's latest book, Himmler's Secret War(*). What's indeed hard for us, folks who were born well after 1945, to grasp is the narrowly nationalistic mindset of European elites of the 1920s and 1930s. We naively believe that Britain, France and the US were fighting the German regime. We wrongly assume that WWII was about a moral struggle between the "free world" and its fascistic nemesis... How wrong! As Vansittart's cynical letter exposed it, Britain felt at war with Germany WHATEVER the latter's political regime!!! Whether Germany in 1939 had been ruled by Mother Theresa or Lucifer himself was irrelevant, as far as Anglo-American policymakers were concerned. And that's precisely why ALL the tentative plots to thwart or topple the Nazis were systematically dismissed or even BETRAYED(**) by the British government from the mid-1930s up to the "Stauffenberg conspiracy" of July 1944 when Hitler survived the bombing of his HQ bunker:
historylearningsite.co.uk
As for Nazi Germany's anti-Semitism and racism, it was not just a German aberration/singularity. Anti-Semitism was a social fixture throughout Europe and both racism/segregation and eugenism were the guidelines of US politics until well after 1945(***).
Gus
(*) amazon.co.uk
(**) It was Nicky Kaldor, now Lord Kaldor, who first told me about the plot of the German generals in 1938. After the war he interrogated Halder, who was Chief of the German General Staff in 1938. The plan was to arrest the Nazi leaders in Berlin, and proclaim a military government. All the leading German generals were in, or connived at, the plot: Brauchitsch, the Commander-in-Chief; von Rundstedt; Beck; Stulpnagel; Witzleben, Commander of the Berlin Garrison; and also Graf Helldorf, who was chief of the Berlin police. Nicky Kaldor gave me full details of the plot, which I passed on to Churchill who printed them in full, without acknowledgement, in The Gathering Storm. Halder said that he called off the plot at the eleventh hour when Chamberlain's flight to Berchtesgaden was announced. He decided that if Hitler could get away with this he could get away with anything. Of Munich he said: "Never in history has there been such a betrayal. A country, at least equal to ours, forced to give up the strongest defence line in Europe. How could I have foreseen it?" In his view Germany would have been defeated in three weeks in the event of war [in 1938].
spartacus.schoolnet.co.uk
(***) THE NAZI CONNECTION:
EUGENICS, AMERICAN RACISM, AND GERMAN NATIONAL SOCIALISM
By Stefan Kuhl
Oxford University Press, New York,
1994, xviii + 166 pp.
Reviewed by
David Lethbridge
As fascism has continued to grow over the last dozen year, in both Europe and North America, so too has grown a substantial body of literature exposing its nature. Stefan Kuhl's new book is an examination of scientific racism - the racist "science" produced by racist scientists - that lent support to Nazi policies in Germany, and that continues to support racism and fascism today.
The central theme in Kuhl' s book is the intimate relations between American eugenicists and Nazi racial scientists during the period of classical fascism. Eugenics - a term invented by Francis Gaiton that refers to ensuring "the more suitable races or strains of blood a better chance of prevailing speedily over the less suitable" - had from its beginning in America, a political orientation. Wealthy individuals from within the highest levels of the American exploiting class funneled hundreds of thousands of dollars into the eugenics movement. Laws were implemented in state legislatures to prevent the procreation of "inferior families". At the federal level, legislation was passed to restrict immigration to largely "Nordic" populations. American scientists stated the racist position publicly. The eugenicist Charles Woodruff declared, "It is clear that the types of human beings from northwest Europe are our best citizens and have, therefore, to be conserved;" while the sociologist Edward Ross, in a phrase now used repeatedly by contemporary neo-Nazis, spoke of the "race suicide" that would result from "inferior" segments of the population gaining power. By the early 1930s, the American eugenics movement was the most influential and prestigious among those Western capitalist powers who were interested in genetic and racial manipulation. Nor was this fact lost on the rising Nazi movement; even Hitler, in "Mein Kampf", wrote admiringly of the US Immigration Restriction Act with its intended purpose of ranking "races" according to their genetic "suitability."
What Kuhl has succeeded in doing, in this masterful book, is to sketch in telling detail the cross-currents of influence between the American-dominated eugenics movement, and the rise and implementation of the Nazi racial program; In 1934, for example, some eighteen months after the Nazis came to power, Falk Ruttke, a member of both Hitler's elite SS and the Committee for Population and Race Policies, spoke at an international meeting of eugenicists in Zurich. Ruttke thoroughly outlined the steps the Nazis had already taken toward rebuilding Germany along racial lines. These included the infamous Law on Preventing Hereditarily Ill Progeny which allowed for the sterilization, and ultimately the gassing, of persons with mental or physical afflictions and the Decree for the Granting of Marriage Loans, which explicitly excluded Jews. The US Journal of Heredity appreciatively reported Ruttke' s speech as reflecting the eugenic foundation of the Nazi state. Even more to the point, Kuhl recounts how Clarence G. Campbell senior member of the American contingent at the 1935 eugenics conference in Berlin, praised Hitler's race policies in glowing terms, referring to them as "epochal in racial history", and as setting a pattern "which other nations and racial groups must follow." In Germany, his remarks were widely published as particularly valuable propaganda. Back in the US, Campbell busied himself drumming up support for the Nazi regime.
Throughout the pre-war period, there was considerable influence of American eugenics policy on Nazi racial policy. Kuhl notes that specific Nazi legislation on sterilization was based on similar American laws, or on model legislation proposed by Harry Laughlin of the Eugenics Record Office, and that US scientists were proud of their influence on the Hitler regime. German publishing houses eagerly reprinted American racial and eugenics books and articles, while American foundations such as the Pioneer Fund, underwrote the distribution of Nazi race propaganda films in the US. In an almost incestuous mutuality, the Nazis used the prestige of the American scientists and legislators to validate their own eugenics and racial policies, while American eugenicists used the ne6r Nazi eugenics laws as evidence that widespread human sterilization policies could be feasibly put into practice with a minimum of social resistance.
Even after World War II had begun, notable American eugenicists continued to visit Nazi Germany; such visits were virtual collaborations. Ellinger, a geneticist, met with Wolfgang Abel, a scientist and SS officer, who was active in sterilization programs involving both blacks and Jews.
[...]
bethuneinstitute.org |
