Conventional wisdom holds that the Allied powers fought the Second World War to prevent Germany under Adolf Hitler from carrying out a plan to conquer the world. It is also commonly believed that the United States and Britain fought in order to save the Jews of Europe from genocide. Nicholson Baker, in Human Smoke, and Patrick J. Buchanan, in Churchill, Hitler, and the Unnecessary War, set out a mountain of evidence which refutes these ideas. This article discusses facts that undercut popular misconceptions about the “Good War.”
1. The Western powers initiated hostilities with Germany despite Germany’s efforts to avoid war in Western Europe. In 1939, Germany tried unsuccessfully to negotiate a peaceful return of the port city of Danzig, which had been severed from Germany and transferred to Poland under the Treaty of Versailles. Most of Danzig, which was 95% German, wanted to return to Germany. In March, Britain and France gave Poland war guarantees, committing themselves to fight Germany if it attacked Poland. Britain and France gave the guarantees although they lacked the military means to expel Germany's Wehrmacht from Poland, and they had no strategic interest in Poland's independence. In the summer, Hitler issued an ultimatum to Poland: cede Danzig to the Germany, while retaining the surrounding territory, or face invasion. The war guarantees from Britain and France, however, emboldened Poland to refuse Germany's demands. Hitler's ultimatum expired, and on September 1, 1939 Germany invaded Poland.
In response, British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain and French Premier Édouard Daladier told Hitler that Germany would face war if its forces did not withdraw from Poland by September 3. They demanded Germany’s withdrawal because they placed their national honor on the line when they issued the guarantees.
Hitler had hoped to avoid war with Britain and France. In his writings, he expressed admiration for the British Empire and the hope that a continental empire established by Germany could forge an alliance with Britain’s sea empire. On August 31, when Hitler issued an order for the invasion of Poland, he instructed German forces not to cross any western frontier, not to attack Allied ships, and not to fire on Allied planes, except in defense of Germany (Buchanan 295, 361).
That Hitler had no designs on the territory of Germany's western neighbors is also shown by Germany’s failure to build up its navy. If Germany planned to invade Britain, it would need landing barges and troop ships to get its forces across the English Channel. Hitler did not construct any. Germany had not built its navy up to the level permitted by the Anglo-German Naval Treaty of 1935, which granted Germany the right to a fleet equal to 35% of the British Royal Navy. (Buchanan 144-45). In 1936, Hitler had said, “The Navy--what need have we of that?” (Buchanan 329).
After the ultimatum to withdraw expired on September 3, France and Britain declared war against Germany. But Chamberlain and Daladier betrayed Poland by providing none of the military aid they had promised. Britain and France did attack Germany in the west. On September 4, Britain began aerially bombing Germany. In the first raid, 29 planes flew to Wilhelmshaven to blow up German war ships. Due to bad weather, they blew up an apartment building in a nearby Danish town, causing 16 civilian casualties (Baker 140-41). On September 7, the French initiated the Saar Offensive. Eleven divisions of the French army entered the Rhine River valley, on Germany's western frontier. They seized 20 German villages and proceeded to a depth of five miles within Germany. The French troops withdrew after seizing the Warndt Forest, which was heavily mined.
The British navy imposed a blockade in order to starve the German population, civilians and armed forces alike (Baker 143). Between September 1939 and May 1940, Neville Chamberlain's government sent 358,000 soldiers--the British Expeditionary Force--to France. The BEF was stationed at the Franco-Belgian border and the Maginot Line, a series of fortifications the French had constructed along their frontier with Germany.
Despite French and British aggression against Germany, Hitler offered peace throughout 1939 and 1940. On September 19, 1939, Hitler, speaking in Danzig, said, “I have neither toward England nor France any war claims, nor has the German nation since I assumed power.” Hitler said he desired only the “sincere friendship of the British people” (Baker 145). After Warsaw fell, Hitler again proposed peace (Baker 147). Britain and France rejected his overtures.
In May 1940, Germany invaded The Netherlands, Belgium, and France. The Wehrmacht routed the French army and the British Expeditionary Force, which fled north and west to Dunkirk, a Belgian town on the English Channel. The British government used the Royal Navy and civilians ships to evacuate hundreds of thousands of troops across the channel back to Britain. During that time, Dunkirk was unguarded. Hitler issued a stop order to his units, directing them not to attack the BEF while it was awaiting evacuation because he did not want to “create an irreparable breach” between Germany and Britain (Buchanan p. 326).
On July 19, 1940, after Germany had occupied Norway, Holland, and France, Hitler addressed the Reichstag and made what he called an appeal to reason and common sense in Britain. He said that he did not want war with the British Empire (Buchanan 361; Baker 213). Churchill refused to respond. A German language reporter at the BBC broadcast Britain's unofficial response: the British hurled Hitler's appeal to reason “right back at you, right in your evil smelling teeth” (Baker 214). In a radio address in September, Churchill called Hitler a “monstrous product of former wrongs and shame” (Baker 230).
2. With encouragement from the United States, the British initiated the practice of bombing civilians and non-combatant areas. The British were the first to breach the fundamental rule of war which states that hostilities must be waged against combatants, not civilians. On May 11, 1940, the second day of Churchill's tenure as prime minister, 18 British bombers conducted a nighttime bombing raid on German towns far from the fighting. Four civilians died (Baker 178; Buchanan 393; F.J.P. Veale, Advance to Barbarism, 122). In August 1941, Roosevelt told the Secretary of the Treasury, Henry Morgenthau, that the way to beat Hitler was to bomb small German towns (Baker 374).
In March 1942 Churchill's War Cabinet accepted a plan providing that top priority for air attacks was to be given to “working-class houses in densely populated residential areas” (Veale, quoted here; Buchanan 394). Because working class neighborhoods had smaller houses, the population density was higher, and the British would get more deaths per bomb. In 1942, Churchill told Stalin that the purpose of British bombing was to “de-house” the civilian population of Germany. Churchill saw the morale of Germany's civilian population as a military target. He hoped to “shatter” 20 Germany cities (Buchanan 394).
In February 1945, before the Yalta Conference, Churchill gave orders for the large scale bombing of Dresden, a city in eastern Germany which was not involved in the war effort. The Allies wanted to “de-house” the residents of Dresden so that they would clog the roads and prevent the German army from reinforcing Germany's eastern frontier and blocking an invasion by the Red Army (Buchanan 397). 1,300 heavy bombers dropped 3,900 tons of high explosive bombs on the city, which resulted in a firestorm that destroyed 15 square miles of central Dresden and killed between 22,000 and 25,000 civilians.
The Allied bombing campaign claimed the lives of half a million German civilians and reduced Germany’s beautiful cities to heaps of debris. The delusional nihilists who led the Third Reich saw a silver lining in this destruction. Goebbels, the Nazi propaganda minister, said that “the so-called achievements of the bourgeois nineteenth century had finally been buried.” (Cambridge Illustrated History of Germany, Martin Kitchen, 278).
3. Britain and the United States did not go to war to save European Jews from the Nazis. By 1935, many Jews wanted to leave Germany because of the discriminatory Nuremberg Laws, the Nazis' brutal treatment of their political enemies, and Hitler's anti-Semitic rhetoric. In July 1935, President Roosevelt turned down a request from the governor of New York to increase the number of Jews permitted to immigrate to the United States (Baker 59). Roosevelt’s advisers believed that the public would be angry if immigration quotas were raised during a time of high unemployment.
In 1938, Germany began mass deporting Jews who were not German citizens. In July, the Evian Conference was convened in France to find a home for Jewish refugees created by the deportations (Baker 89). Britain and the United States refused to accept them.
In November 1938, Sendel Grynszpan, the son of a Jewish tailor who had been deported from Germany, shot a German diplomat working in the embassy in Paris. After the official died of the wound, the Nazis used the murder to gin up anti-Semitic feeling among the German population. The Gestapo circulated rules for the rioting that would take place in response to the murder. Synagogues could be torched as long as the fires were unlikely to spread to surrounding buildings. Shops could be destroyed but not looted. In the small hours of November 10, Nazi thugs burned and smashed up Jewish shops, cafes, offices and synagogues. Goebbels called the destruction Kristallnacht, the Crystal Night. At a press conference, Roosevelt expressed shock that a civilized nation in the 20th century would act so brutally. He also stated that he would not recommend a relaxation of the quota on Jewish immigration (Baker 101, 103). Chamberlain, the prime minister of Britain, stated that the British empire could not absorb large numbers of refugees.
In May 1940, Churchill's Cabinet gave orders for German and Austrian aliens in Britain to be interned in camps enclosed with barbed wire. Most of the internees were Jewish (Baker 179, 181). The newspaper published by the aliens in one camp ran an editorial which stated, “Let the Mooragh Times be a witness of how a great nation thought it right ... to begin a war for the liberation of Western civilisation by imprisoning the most embittered enemies of its own enemies” (Baker 189).
By November 1940, three and a half million refugees were living in the free zone of France. The French ambassador asked the Secretary of State for assistance in feeding the refugees and permitting some of them, especially German Jews, to resettle in the United States (Baker 258). The State Department answered that the United States could not accept more Jewish refugees.
Some Zionist Jews journeyed across the Mediterranean to seek refuge in Palestine, which was a British colony (Baker 257). When they arrived, British forces deported them to an island in the Indian Ocean. Militant Zionists used a mine to blow a hole in one of the refugee ships to prevent it from leaving. The boat sank and more than 250 died (Baker 257).
The British and Americans could have saved the Jews from the Third Reich by permitting refugees to resettle in the United States and the British Empire. Their refusal to admit Jewish refugees shows that the Allies did not fight Nazi Germany to protect the Jews. American and British military involvement in the war probably made things far worse for the Jews by precipitating the Third Reich’s efforts to carry out the Final Solution.
4. The Nazis tried to exterminate the Jews only after it became apparent that America would enter the war. Hitler was a rabid anti-Semite from the beginning. Hitler and the Nazis alone bear moral responsibility for the mass slaughter of European Jewry in World War II. However, it still should be asked whether the Nazis would have attempted to exterminate the Jews if the Western powers had not intervened against the Third Reich.
Initially, Hitler’s goal was not the all-out destruction of European Jews. With the discriminatory Nuremburg Laws and the Nazis’ anti-Semitic rhetoric, Hitler wanted to make the Jews so miserable that they would voluntarily leave. In October 1938, the front page of a Blackshirt newspaper declared that the “Jews living in Germany and Italy are hostages given into our hands by fate so that we may defend ourselves in the most effective manner against world Jewry” (Baker 95). According to Buchanan, half of Germany's Jews had left the country before Kristallnacht occurred in November 1938. Half of those who remained fled the country in response to the rioting (Buchanan 310-11).
In a speech to the Reichstag on January 29, 1939, Hitler accused the Jews of America, Britain, and France of stirring up hatred of Germany. He warned that, “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 the Jewry, but the annihilation of the Jewish race in Europe” (Buchanan 310-11; Baker 114). Hitler was threatening European Jews with genocide should Germany again find itself at war with the Western powers.
According to Baker, as of July 1, 1940, the Nazis, having occupied Poland, France, Holland, and Norway, were confident of victory. Rather than exterminating the Jews, they wanted to send them to a “superghetto” on an island administered by a Nazi governor, with a Jewish mayor and police force (Baker 204). Adolf Eichmann, a Jewish emigration expert, calculated that a fleet of 120 boats, each carrying 1,500 Jews, could transport 4,000,000 million Jews to Madagascar over a period of four years. Eichmann thought that, as soon as Britain made peace and stopped blocking ocean traffic, Germany could send the Jews away (Id.).
On July 19, 1940, President Roosevelt announced that the United States would not allow Germany to defeat Britain. Hitler concluded that Germany could bring the war to an end only by crushing Russia before America had time to rearm and come to Britain’s aid (Kitchen 278). In the summer of 1940, Hitler decided to nullify Germany’s non-aggression pact with Russia. He called for the invasion of Russia to be completed by the summer of 1941. It was only after Germany invaded Russia in June 1941 that the Nazis began to systematically slaughter the Jews of Occupied Europe (Baker 379, 383; Kitchen 283-84).
As to whether the Nazis would have begun the wholesale slaughter of the Jews if Britain and the United States had not entered the war, Buchanan quotes Churchill: “the terrible Ifs accumulate” (Buchanan 312). If Britain and France had not declared war against Germany, Germany would not have invaded West. If Germany had not invaded the West, the Jews of Norway, Denmark, Holland, France, Belgium and Italy would have survived. If a shipping route to Madagascar had been open, Germany might have resettled the German Jews in the Indian Ocean rather than gassing and starving them to death in concentration camps. But because of the war guarantees given to Poland, war in the West ensued, and by 1942 Hitler had captured most of Europe's Jewish population.
5. By guaranteeing Poland’s borders, Britain placed itself on a collision course with Germany over Danzig, although Britain believed that Germany had a legitimate claim to the city. In 1937 and 1938, the British government let it be known that Britain believed that Germany had a legitimate claim to revising its eastern frontiers, which had been established by the Treaty of Versailles. That would mean the return of Danzig, the port city on the Baltic Sea, and the return of the Sudetenland, a majority German province that had been assigned to Czechoslovakia. American and British leaders recognized that Versailles (which ended the First World War) was unjust and vengeful. Keynes, the British economist, called it a Carthaginian peace. The United States Senate had voted the treaty down.
In September 1938, at Munich, Chamberlain and Hitler agreed that the Sudetenland would be returned to Germany in a plebiscite. In exchange for the Sudetenland, Hitler agreed to cede any other claims on the territory of Czechoslovakia. Hitler reneged on the Munich agreement in March 1939, when Germany, Hungary, and Poland annexed Czechoslovakia's outlying provinces and the German army invaded the Czech rump state. By dismembering Czechoslovakia, Hitler had humiliated and enraged France and Britain. Although Poland had not sought war guarantees from Britain and France, on March 31, Britain guaranteed Poland’s independence, committing itself to fight if Poland was attacked by Germany (Buchanan 278). France followed suit.
The guarantees were reckless because they gave Poland's military regime the power to force France and Britain into war with Germany. Former Prime Minister Lloyd George said that the British general staff should be confined to a lunatic asylum if they approved the war guarantee. Another British statesmen said that Britain had never before allowed a smaller power to decide whether Britain went to war (Buchanan 255-56). The guarantees were also foolhardy because Britain and France lacked the troops necessary to guarantee Poland's frontier with Germany (Buchanan 265).
Hitler had hoped that Poland would ally with Germany in a war against Soviet Russia (Kitchen 276). Hitler offered to guarantee Poland’s borders for a quarter century if Poland would enter into an alliance, return Danzig, and allow the construction of an extra-territorial highway across the Polish Corridor to the Baltic Sea. Polish leaders, feeling a false sense of security due to the guarantees from France and Britain, refused to negotiate with Hitler.
In late August 1939, the Third Reich made a last minute attempt to avoid war by inviting British and Polish leaders to Berlin to discuss the status of Danzig and the Polish Corridor. To the shock and dismay of both Britain and Germany, Poland refused to send an envoy. The Polish refusal to negotiate was profoundly unwise. On August 24, 1939, Germany and Soviet Russia had announced that they had concluded a non-aggression pact. Poland was surrounded by totalitarian states with only distant France and Britain as allies.
Having failed to negotiate the peaceful return of Danzig to the Reich, Hitler ordered the German army to invade Poland on September 1. In response, Britain and France declared war, setting in motion the global conflict that would cause the combat deaths of more than 10 million Russians, 5.5 million Germans, 2.5 million Poles, and 1 million Allied soldiers. Preventing Germany from annexing Danzig was not worth this unthinkable loss of life. Britain itself had recognized the legitimacy of Germany’s claim to the city.
6. The Allies failed to achieve the aims that led them into the war. The war was a failure for the Western European powers when it is judged against the aims that led them into the war. Britain and France attacked Germany in order to guarantee Poland’s independence. At the war’s end, Poland was not independent. The Soviet Union, which had killed more people than the Third Reich, occupied Poland and the rest of Eastern Europe. Had the Allies not attacked Germany, the millions who died on the war’s Western Front would have survived. Germany would have focused its military resources on conquering Russia. The Allies could have watched on the sidelines while the two totalitarian states weakened each other in a drawn out war. Whichever totalitarian state won the conflict, Nazi or Bolshevik, it would have been weaker than the Soviets were at the end of the Second World War. The West would have been freer and more prosperous if the Allies had stayed out of the war.
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