Critique of Buchanan’s false image of Hitler in to the “Unnecessary War.”
By Iwo Cyprian Pogonowski
Patrick Buchanan presents a false picture of Hitler’s rationality and intentions in his book „Hitler, Churchill and the Unnecessary War.” There are few people that would question the opinion that Hitler was a disgrace for Germany, and brought calamity known as “Gotterdammerung,” to German people, by his foolish notions of German superiority, and his lack of education and command experience. Buchanan seems to be unaware of Hitler’s Parkinson’s Disease, which was contracted after his gas-poisoning on the western front during WWI.
In a German military hospital, after difficult recovery and a bout of blindness, caused by the gas poisoning, Hitler contracted meningitis and suffered an other attack of blindness, and wound up with permanently trembling left hand, as well as, personality change, which made him more cunning than he was earlier. Hitler was from then on worried about his own longevity and during his political career he was a man in a hurry, which fact was well described by professor M. Kamil Dziewanowski in his book “War at Any Price.”
Hitler thought that he was “Germany’s man of destiny” and that only he could accomplish his conquest of “Lebensraum” for the next German millennium. In fact the essence of the policies of the Hitler’s government, at all times, was the implementation of the doctrine of Lebensraum, or “German living space.”
The aim of Hitler’s government was to size the lands inhabited by others, who were to be enslaved or exterminated and replaced by “racial Germans.” These aims were to be realized by a series of wars. Each time Germany was to launch a quick, victorious campaign against w weaker, unprepared, and isolated enemy, whose resources were to help prepare for the next war.
This sequence was to lead to the conquest of the great agricultural lands of the Slavic two-thirds of Europe, and eventually to Germany’s hegemony over the entire world. These lands, located mainly in the Soviet Union and Poland, were to become German Lebensraum during Hitler’s lifetime. Hitler did not want to hear such warnings as that the American steel making capacity was the largest in the world and that USA, located between two oceans, enjoyed a uniquely strong and advantageous strategic position.
Hitler hoped that the German “Aryan” population would double under his rule, thanks to earlier marriages and larger families, while Germans with hereditary defect were to be sterilized. In fact eventually, Hitler’s government kidnapped some one-half million blond Slavic children from occupied Poland to be brought up in Germany as “racial Germans.”
Hitler believed that the Jewish minority was the main enemy of internal German racial purity and an important focus for consolidation at home in preparation for expansion abroad. Hitler felt that the wars for German Lebensraum represented an inevitable life-and-death struggle between races for the “survival of the fittest.” Hitler was willing to let Germany perish in his attempt to implement the doctrine of lebensraum, rather than turn back and be “disgraced forever.”
The fact that Hitler lacked education and preparation for the task he set for Germany, under his rule, is evidenced during Hitler’s writing in prison in Bavaria of his “Mein Kampf” program. There Hitler was visited and given eight lengthy lectures by major general, professor of geopolitics, as well as editor of “Zeitschrift fuer Geopolitik,” Karl Haushofer (1869-sicide in 1946). The cellmate of Hitler, Rudolf Hess, was a student of Haushofer and he arranged for his visits with Hitler in prison, in order to help Hitler formulate a strategy, for which task Hitler was not prepared either by schooling or experience.
Haushoffer taught Hitler that the defeat of the Soviet Union was of fundamental importance and that the control of the Soviet and Arab oil would put Germany in position to gradually acquire British and French colonies by blackmail, without fighting a war. “Germanic Britain” was also to be junior partner of continental German-Nazi power. This notion caused Hitler to treat “gently” the British on the battlefield and during their disgraceful escape to England from France in 1940, in comparison to the atrocities ordered by Hitler in Poland beginning in 1939.
Hitler believed that his own intuition and eight lectures by Haushofer, qualified him to be the “Germany’s commander in chief.” Hitler learned from Haushofer that Germany lost WWI because of insufficient food and manpower and therefore should form a strategically and numerically superior anti-Soviet alliance of Germany, Japan, Poland and other countries in order to destroy the Soviet-Union in simultaneous attacks from east and west, without having to fight on a western front. For this purpose Hitler formed the “Anti-Comintern Pact” which according to Buchanan, Poland should have joined and thereby “saved the world” from an “Unnecessary War.”
In reality Hitler said to Jacob Burkhardt, Commissioner of the League of Nations already on August 11, 1939, that: "Everything I undertake is directed against Russia; if the West is too stupid and blind to grasp this, I shall be compelled to come to an agreement with the Russians, beat the West and then, after their defeat, turn against the Soviet Union with all my forces. I need the Ukraine so that they can not starve me out as happened in the last war." (Roy Dennan "Missed Chances," Indigo, London 1997, p. 65). Hitler called the coming conflict "the war of the engines" ("Motorenkrieg"). Ironically the German army used 600,000 horses in addition to the 200,000 trucks, which were less dependable than the horses according to Stephen Badsey, "World War II Battle Plans" 2000, p. 96.
Patrick Buchanan seams to be oblivious of all the facts mentioned above, and the real history of Hitler’s efforts to persuade Poland to join the Anti-Comintern Pact, which were described among others in the book “Diplomat in Berlin, 1933-1939” by Józef Lipski, Polish Ambassador to Germany during Hitler’s administration. Soviet fear of a two-front war, simultaneously against Germany and Japan, is well described by Pavel Sudoplatov, an NKVD general under Beria, in his book “Special Tasks.” The attack on the Soviet Union from east and west was “Hitler’s best case scenario” supported by the German military commanders.
“Hitler’s best case scenario” was ruined by the Poles when Poland rejected the “Anti-Comintern Pact” which could have had some six hundred divisions against have that many Soviet divisions, debilitated by Stalin’s purge and killing of some 44,000 of most experienced Red Army officers. Hitler counted on three and half million soldiers from Poland in about one hundred divisions, two hundred twenty German divisions, two hundred Japanese divisions and some eighty divisions of other members of the “Anti-Comintern Pact.” Loss of participation of Polish and Japanese forces against the Soviets caused Hitler to be short of one million line soldiers on eastern front. Thus, Poland ruined “Hitler’s best case scenario.”
Despite its strategic importance, Poland was in hopeless situation being located within Hitler’s Lebensraum and considered a spoiler of grandiose Lenin’s plans for “Communist World Revolution,” because of the Polish spectacular victory over the Red Army, in the Polish-Soviet war of 1920. At that time the commander of the Red Army, Mikhail Tukhachevsky’s order of July 4, 1920 was: “To the West, over the corpse of “White” Poland, on the road to the worldwide conflagration.”
Hitler’s fury against Poland was caused not only by Poland’s refusal to join in the German-Japanese attack on the Soviet Union; but also by being an obstacle to German access to the Soviet territory. Poland’s resolve to defend itself, actually derailed Hitler’s strategy and drove him to betray his Japanese allies who were fighting the Siberian Soviet army since 1937.
Thus, the Japanese considered Hiller a traitor, never to be trusted again, but to be used in the coming Japanese-American war. Japan not only lodged a formal protest in Berlin against the “Ribbentrop – Molotov Pact,” but also started cease-fire negotiations with the Soviets after extremely heavy losses in the battle on the Kalka River at Kalkhim-Gol. A Soviet-Japanese cease-fire was signed on September 15, 1939, it was put in force the next day, on Sept. 16th and on September 17th 1939, the Red Army, freed of the hostilities against Japan, joined the Germans in the invasion of Poland.
The record shows that the Polish nation did not want to surrender and was ready to put up armed resistance. As it happened the Poles destroyed one third of the armored vehicles and one fourth of the German air force use against them. Also the German record shows, that the Wehrmacht used twice as much of machinegun and artillery ammunition as well as aerial bombs during the assault on Poland in 1939, than was use by the Germans against the French and the British in 1940. Against this historical record it is impossible to claim that World War II was avoidable. Hitler was not alone to want the war at any cost.
World War II could have lasted a few weeks only, had the French, with their numerical superiority in the number of tanks, kept their word and attacked Germany, when 70% of German forces were fighting in Poland. As it was Poland had contributed more soldiers to the war effort than did France, not to mention the gift of deciphered Enigma, German code system, that Poland gave to Britain and France on July 25, 1939. “The breaking of the Enigma by Poland was one of the cornerstones of the Allied victory over Germany,” according to David A. Hatch of the Center of Cryptic History, NSA, 1999.
One must remember Hitler’s brutal occupational policies, which required the use of additional 30 divisions for pacification purposes, at the expense of such frontline operations, such as the battle of Stalingrad. The fury of Hitler’s vengeance against the Poles for derailing “his best case scenario” started from September 1, 1939 with his order to stamp on the ammunition boxes the words “nicht sparen,” or do not save. The fate of the Czechs, who meekly surrendered was different. They lost some 100,000 people during the war, while in Poland, German and Soviet genocide amounted to more than 20% of the population of over 35 million.
Stalin upon learning from war games in the Spring of 1941, that deep penetration into Russia by German armored divisions is unstoppable, ordered to deliberately brutalize the war by such actions, as the mass killing of Polish prisoners in eastern Poland, immediately when German forces attacked the Soviets. Thus in the first week of the German-Soviet war, some 30,000 imprisoned Polish civilians were executed by the NKVD.
Patrick Buchanan presents a false picture of Hitler’s rationality and intentions in his book „Hitler, Churchill and the Unnecessary War,” in which he suggests that the war was avoidable, when the record shows, that Hitler was committed to the destruction of Russia at any price. Poland formed a physical barrier between Germany and Russia.
German recovery of the lands of the Prussian part of the partitions of Poland was also at stake, besides Dantzig. Buchanan in fact questions whether Poland would surrender to German domination and accept the loss of national independence, without Polish armed resistance. One could speculate whether the common defense pact between Poland, Great Britain and France made Polish government more decisive in rejecting Hitler’s growing demands. Buchanan’s speculation about the “unnecessary war” implies falsely, that World War II was avoidable.
Note: Books by Iwo Cyprian Pogonowski
Jews in Poland - A Documentary History
Hippocrene Books, January 1998; 432 pages
ISBN: 0781806046
Poland - An Illustrated History
Hippocrene Books (2000 - First Printing; 2003 - Second Printing; 2008 – Third Printing);
282 pages
ISBN: 0-7818-0757-3
Poland - A Historical Atlas
Hippocrene Books, New York 1987 - First Printing; 1988 -Third Printing;
320 pages
ISBN: 0-87052-282-5