Patrick Buchanan - Who Started World War II?

Who Started World War II?

Everything I undertake is directed at Russia. If the West is too stupid and too blind to comprehend that, I will be forced to come to an understanding with the Russians, to smash the West, and then, after its defeat, to turn against the Soviet Union.

• Hitler's words to the League of Nations commissioner for Danzig, Carl Burckhardt, in August 1939.

In September 1944, when I was commander of the guard unit at Hitlers headquarters, I spoke with Hitler during a walk together outside. I asked him: My Fuhrer, may I speak frankly with you for a moment? Of course," he replied. I then asked him: Why did you really attack Poland? Couldnt you have been more patient?

Hitler had only asked for an extra-territorial highway and rail line across Polish territory, and he wanted the return of Danzig to the Reich. These were really very modest demands. With a bit more patience, couldnt he have obtained these, in much the same way that Austria and the Sudetenland had been united with the Reich?

And Hitler replied: You are mistaken. I knew as early as March 1939 that Roosevelt had determined to bring about a world war, and I knew that the British were cooperating in this, and that Churchill was involved. God knows that I certainly did not want a world war. Thats why I sought to solve the Polish problem in my own way with a kind of punishment expedition, without a declaration of war. After all, there had been thousands of murders of ethnic Germans and 1.2 million ethnic German refugees. What should I have done? I had to act. And for that reason, four weeks after this campaign, I made the most generous offer of peace that any victorious leader could ever have made. Unfortunately, it wasnt successful. And then he said: If I had not acted as I did with regard to the Polish question, to prevent a second world war, by the end of 1942 at the latest we would have experienced what we are now experiencing in 1944. Thats what he said.

• General Otto Ernst Remer, 1990 interview

I really think that this trial, if it should get into an argument over the political and economic causes of this war, could do infinite harm, both in Europe, which I dont know well, and in America, which I know fairly well. If we should have a prolonged controversy over whether Germany invaded Norway a few jumps ahead of a British invasion of Norway, or whether France in declaring war was the real aggressor, this trial can do infinite harm for those countries with the people of the United States. And the same is true of our Russian relationships. The Germans will certainly accuse all three of our European allies of adopting policies which forced them to war. The reason I say that is that captured documents which we have always made that claim that Germany would be forced into war. They admit they were planning war, but the captured documents of the Foreign Office that I have examined all come down to the claim, We have no way out; we must fight; we are encircled; we are being strangled to death.

• Justice Jackson, Nuremberg trial record, http://avalon.law.yale.edu/imt/jack37.asp

If another war comes and the history of it is ever written, the dispassionate historian a hundred years hence, will not say that Germany alone was responsible for it, even if she strikes first, but that those who mismanaged the world between 1918 and 1937 had a large share of responsibility in it.

• Lord Lothian, British Ambassador to the U.S., March, 1938

There can be no doubt that he [ Hitler ] broadened the war in 1941 only on preventive grounds.

• A. J. P Taylor, British historian.

The nature of the concessions that the German Fuhrer was prepared to make in order to obtain peace with Britain must have astounded the men at the head of SO1.

This was not even a deal worked out through a process of hard negotiation. It was Hitler's opening gambit an offer so generous and pragmatic that it would be very tempting to anyone who genuinely wanted peace.

• Martin Allen describing Hitlers January 1940 peace offer (via the Vatican a mbassador) in Himmler's Secret War .

Take the summer of 1940, when Britain came to its other fateful crossroads, after France, Poland, the Low Countries, Norway and Denmark were all in German hands: at this point in Britain's tragic history, our "deadly foe" Adolf Hitler came to us with an offer so generous that you can only scratch your head now and ask, Well, what went wrong? I've seen it in the German, the Swedish, the Swiss and the American archives; but there are only vague traces of it in the British archives, because it has all been blanketed out pasted over, like certain paragraphs in the Cabinet minutes of May, June, and July 1940, which you are not allowed to read even now, fifty years later.

The peace offer was this: Hitler declared that he was prepared to pull his armies out of France, Holland, Belgium, Norway, Denmark, Poland and Czechoslovakia -- out of all these territories except of course for the regions which had been German before and which he had fought the war over. Now that he had the territories like Alsace and Lorraine back, he was not going to let them go. Hitler told us, through emissaries. In Sweden, he informed Victor Mallet, the British ambassador; Hitler sent a lawyer called Ludwig Weissauer to him in August 1940. In America, it was Hans Thomsen, the German ambassador, approached by the British ambassador, Lord Lothian, a very upright Christian gentleman. Every attempt that the Germans made to bring the details of their historic Peace Offer to the attention of the British people was killed by Winston Churchill.

• David Irving, speech to the Clarendon Club, 1990

Played golf today with Joe Kennedy. I asked him about his conversations with Roosevelt and Neville Chamberlain from 1938 on. He said Chamberlains position in 1938 was that England had nothing with which to fight and that she could not risk going to war with Hitler. Kennedys view: That Hitler would have fought Russia without any later conflict with England if it had not been for Bullitts urging on Roosevelt in the summer of 1939 that the Germans must be faced down about Poland; neither the French nor the British would have made Poland a cause of war if it had not been for the constant needling from Washington. Bullitt, he said, kept telling Roosevelt that the Germans wouldnt fight, Kennedy that they would, and that they would overrun Europe. Chamberlain, he says, stated that America and the world Jews had forced England into the war. In his telephone conversation with Roosevelt in the summer of 1939 the President kept telling him to put some iron up Chamberlains backside.