What were the reasons for World War II? Of course, Hitler attacked Poland. On the other hand, when Stalin invaded Poland and then attacked Finland a few months later, nobody declared war on the Soviet Union. Meanwhile, Hitler tried to negotiate a settlement. So what were the reasons for World War II? The Versailles “Peace Treaty” had created so many injustices in Europe that it bore within itself the seeds of a new war. One ought not neglect the colonial arms race in the Pacific between the newcomer Japan and the old European colonial powers…
By Joseph Bishop ∙ October 1, 2009
The Chief Culprit: Stalin’s Grand Design to Start World War II, by Viktor Suvorov Naval Institute Press, Annapolis, 2008, 328pp., illustrated, with notes, bibliography, indexed. The post-1945 war crimes trials in Nuremberg are underway and the international press excitedly covers the proceedings. The tribunal itself consists of justices not from victor powers but from wartime…
By Chip Smith ∙ August 1, 2009
Human Smoke: The Beginnings of World War II, the End of Civilization, by Nicholson Baker. Simon & Schuster Inc., New York, 2008. 576 pp. bibliography, indexed. Nested near the end of Nicholson Baker’s first book, The Mezzanine, is an oddly memorable scene. Set apart from the novel’s famously annotated escalator ascent, the scene finds Howie…
By Joseph Bishop ∙ April 1, 2010
The further one seriously studies history, and particularly the World War Two period, the more striking is the disconnect between what is popularly believed and what actually happened. Perhaps the reading public continues to shrink, not only in the United States but around the world, while information and opinion are generally retrieved from television and…
By Daniel W. Michaels ∙ July 31, 2012
Constantine Pleshakov. Stalin’s Folly: The Tragic First Ten Days of World War II on the Eastern Front. Houghton Mifflin Company, Boston and New York, 2005, 312 pp. As the title of Constantine Pleshakov’s book implies, the author, a Russian historian,[1] holds Stalin personally responsible for the debacle that befell the Red Army at the outbreak…
By Daniel W. Michaels ∙ July 31, 2012
Yuri Rubtsov, Alter Ego Stalina (Based on declassified archival documents), Svonnitsa-MG, Moscow, 1999, 302 pp. Yuri Rubtsov, Iz-za spiny vozhdya: poli ticheskaya i voyennaya deyatel’nost L. Z. Mekhlisa (Behind the Leader’s Back; The Political and Military Activities of L. Z. Mekhlis), Kompaniya Ritm, Moscow, 2003, 253 pp. Until the appearance of two recent Russian political…
By Daniel W. Michaels ∙ July 31, 2012
Simon Sebag Montefiore, Stalin: The Court of the Red Tsar, Knopf, New York, 2004, 785 pp. The British Book Awards’ History Book of the Year has been awarded to the distinguished Anglo-Jewish journalist/novelist Simon Sebag Montefiore for his Stalin: the Court of the Red Star.[1] Montefiore’s special writing interest is in matters Russian, especially in…
By Daniel W. Michaels ∙ August 1, 2004
Viktor Suworow, Marschall Schukow – Lebensweg über Leichen, Pour-le-Mérite, Selent, Germany, 2002, 350 pp., €25.80 Prologue Every war produces genuine military strategists and heroes, many of whom die on the battlefield or whose exploits go unrecognized. Decorated “Hero of the Soviet Union” four times, Marshal Georgi Zhukov was indisputably the most honored military figure in…
By Steffen Werner ∙ November 1, 2003
In August 1895, a series of articles began in the British weekly The Saturday Review, which called for the annihilation of Germany and whose disastrous greed for German plunder still reverberates to the present day. With the Second Reich, a German state came into being which was rapidly creating a modern economy which imperiled the…
By Arthur R. Butz ∙ November 1, 2003
In vol. 5 of his biography Winston S. Churchill, published in 1976, historian Martin Gilbert relates the working relationship that existed during the 30s between Churchill and the South African economist and gold mining executive Sir Henry Strakosch. Most of the figures on German armaments that Churchill brought to the House of Commons and publicized…
By Emil Schlee ∙ February 1, 2003
The time between the beginning of the first and the end of the second world war is more and more called what it actually was: The third Thirty Year War (1914-1945) for the destruction of Germany, which since the end of the 19th century had been becoming a scientific and economic super power. This fact,…
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