The War that Never Ends

Introduction

Many young Germans refuse to deal with contemporary history. “What do we have to do with Hitler,” they say. “We want to look to the future.” But history will always catch up with them. You can’t put it away like an old shirt. There is no end to history. Those in power don’t let young Germans look ahead. They have imposed a collective responsibility on them, that is, a collective guilt, even if the rulers always deny a collective guilt. This is why the cult of guilt is kept alive in Germany. That is why Germany’s history of the last hundred and thirty years is falsified (selected), and that is why we have to come to terms with it as objectively as possible.

The President of the Central Council of Jews in Germany [in 2005], Ignatz Bubis, criticized statements made by German Chancellor Schröder and Minister for Special Affairs Bodo Hombach, because they said that “reparations” must be wrapped up by the year 2000. While they wanted to give government authority to the reparations fund of the German economy by participating in negotiations, under no circumstances did they want to provide subsidies from the German federal budget. (In reality, the German federal government paid around three quarters of the total amount into this fund, which was funded with the proceeds of sales of property confiscated by former communist Central Germany).[1]

In an interview with Germany’s biggest news magazine Der Spiegel, Ignatz Bubis put a quick stop to the attempt of Germany’s socialist government to end reparation payments to Jewish organizations:[2]

“Compensation payments will by no means end on January 1, 2000, certainly not by order of the chancellor. The end will come in 2030 at best, when the youngest survivors will also have died. Schröder misjudged the situation. He could not abolish reparations with mere words from the chancellor.”

It is not the Chancellor’s words that determine policy in the Federal Republic of Germany, but the words of the Chairman of the Central Council of Jews in Germany.

Rabbi Israel Singer demanded at the Jewish Claim Conference in 2002:[3]

“There can and must never be a line drawn. Germany will forever have to bear the responsibility for the crimes of the Nazis.”

“Under the direction of a senior official of the [Israeli] Ministry of Finance, a commission of the Israeli government has been working for the past seven years on a report on the total material damage suffered by the Jewish people as a whole as a result of persecution during the Nazi era. Not only the damage caused by the removal of property was taken into account, but also ‘lost income’ and ‘unpaid wages of forced laborers.’

In this way, the report arrives at a total ‘damage sum’ of between 240 and 330 billion US dollars, and ends with the final sentence: ‘There is still a lot to be done in this area…’ Surprisingly, the Commission’s report does not mention the reparations paid by the FRG since 1952, which total around 55 billion euros (more than 70 billion dollars at today’s exchange rate). Berlin observers expect that Federal Foreign Minister Fischer (Green Party) will receive a copy of the report and pass it on to Federal Finance Minister Hans Eichel (SPD). Further developments would then remain to be seen…”

Georg Simnacher, Chairman of the Bavarian District Presidents, wrote to the Bavarian Minister President Edmund Stoiber:[4]

“More and more quota refugees are putting a strain on the social welfare system of the Bavarian districts. The unlimited number of Jewish emigrants with unlimited residence permits from the former Soviet Union put the districts under financial pressure. Social welfare in the amount of 20 million had to be raised for them.”

In total, Germany had to pay billions for these Jews from the successor states of the former Soviet Union. In addition, there are the billions that have gone to Israel and, as just mentioned, are still going. These payments must be made by the younger generations, who have nothing whatsoever to do with the Second World War.

So, we are forever obliged (Joschka Fischer reaffirmed this obligation during his state visit to Israel on March 14, 2005) to support the state of Israel, this racist state, with billions and billions of euros to secure its existence, because our predecessors have discriminated against and persecuted the Jews in Germany so many decades ago.

Horst Köhler, the Federal President of the Germans [in 2005], bowed in “shame and humility” before the members of the Israeli parliament during his state visit to Israel in March, and solemnly proclaimed “Germany’s responsibility for the Holocaust as part of German identity. […] We Germans are eternally guilty. This guilt should be passed on from generation to generation.” So, there is a collective guilt after all?

The TV show “Humans at Maischbergers” (“Menschen bei Maischber­ger”) aired by the German government TV channel ARD on February 22, 2005, a woman named Isis Puttkammer reported on her terrible experiences during the occupation of her parents’ estate by Russian soldiers at war’s end. A Jewish woman sitting next to her grabbed her by the forearm and said: “Don’t forget that the Germans started the war.” In this way, the terrible crimes committed against the Germans are legitimized and amnestied.

Anyone who has followed the debates on television and in the press about the Allied terror bombings of the German cities of Dresden and Würzburg at war’s end – these were the real holocaust committed against Germans – will have to realize that it is claimed that Dresden and Würzburg would have been spared, if the Germans had not started the bombing war (which they didn’t). And Würzburg’s second mayor said that we must not forget that Germany started the war. We Germans are to blame ourselves, so to speak, for these barbaric criminal bombings.

Jewish-German author Ralph Giordano is convinced that there is a “causal nexus” to historical events, just not to Auschwitz:[5]

“Those who planned and triggered the Second World War are primarily responsible for every civilian and military death: Hitler and his supporters! This includes the half a million German air deaths. This responsibility, its causality and its chronology, must remain the basis of any discussion.”

The authorities forbid us to grasp the correct causality. These censorship laws came about primarily under the “leadership” of the “Christian” chancellor Helmut Kohl, who is also a B’nai Brith brother, the chancellor of the German unification, and a historian. On the occasion of the fiftieth anniversary of the outbreak of war between Poland and Germany, he insisted:[6]

“Hitler wanted, planned and unleashed the war. There was and is nothing to dispute about that. We must resolutely oppose all attempts to weaken this judgment.”

Even before that, the former SS officer and later Federal German minister Professor Dr. Theodor Eschenburg said (and he must know it):[7]

“The guilt question for the Second World War, which is quickly answered scientifically, is not merely a matter of technical history. Rather, the realization of Hitler’s undisputed sole guilt is one of the essential foundations and starting positions of the policies of the Federal Republic [of Germany].”

The lie was thus elevated to the raison d’état of postwar Germany!

Father Emmanuel Reichenberger, papal secret chamberlain and “father of the expellees” wrote in in a 1955 memorandum titled “Against Arbitrariness and Intoxication of Power. Insights and Confessions from two Continents”:[8]

“It is gradually becoming clear even to the blind that the war had absolutely nothing to do with Nazism, but was simply aimed at eliminating the German competitor. The Germans must simply all be guilty so that there is a ‘moral’ justification for the policy of enslavement and extermination of the Germans – which we are experiencing everywhere.”

The renowned US professor Stefan T. Possony, director of the Hoover Institution on War, Revolution and Peace, Stanford, did not share the view of the German politicians and court historians quoted here. In his book On Coping with the Question of War Guilt:[9]

“Whether the political guilt of London or Petersburg or the guilt of Paris was greater in this [WWI] than that of Berlin may remain undecided. It seems indisputable that Paris and London were considerably to blame for the First World War.” (p. 143)

“So if we want to establish the honest and definitive truth about the origins of both world wars, an international commission of historians would have to be set up, and the documents, whatever they may be, would have to be released in all the countries involved.” (p. 336; emph. added)

But the Allies are refusing to publish the most important documents on the outbreak of the Second World War. The file on Rudolf Hess will not be accessible until 2019 [and they were not released then either; ed.], and the embargo on the Tyler Kent file has been extended until 2038. Germany’s Foreign Office files have been falsified. And our court historians even refuse to cite the existing ones if it does not suit them, such as the reports of Carl Burckhardt, the League of Nations Commissioner for Danzig.

What was it again that Professor Westrich of the Hebrew University in Jerusalem wrote? If the Pope does not open his archives, the impression could arise that he has something to hide.[10] The Western Allies are still hiding a lot!

The Russian embassy in Warsaw informed the Polish public prosecutor’s office “that only 67 of the 183 files on Katyn can be handed over for security reasons. The Polish Foreign Minister Adam Rotfeld explained that it seemed as if Moscow had something to hide.”[11]

Of course, a lot is being hidden. All victors do this. It is well known that the renowned German historian Winfried Martini called his latest book The Victor Writes History.[12]

John Gaffrey, US Consul General in Vienna, did not share the view of our court historians Kohl and Eschenburg either:[13]

“If I had a drop of German blood in my veins, I would not rest a single night until the reproach had been taken from my fatherland that declares it guilty of the most terrible crimes in world history, although it was by no means alone responsible for the outbreak of the Second World War.”

Since I have more than a drop of German blood in my veins and still feel German, and “despite everything, everything that has happened” (Matthäi) I am still proud of Germany and the achievements of the German people, I am also writing these lines.

Prelude to War

Wars do not start by themselves. They do not arise like a thunderstorm. Nor do you slip into wars accidentally, as Sir Edward Grey, the British Foreign Secretary in 1914, later claimed. The later British Prime Minister Anthony Eden also wrote in his memoirs Full Circle (Houghton Mifflin, Boston, 1960) that we slid into the First World War. And Lloyd George, British Prime Minister during the First World War, said after the First World War that the leading politicians before 1914 “slid into the war, or rather: they staggered, they stumbled into it, out of folly.”[14]

But Germany was never rehabilitated because of this post-war knowledge, because of this folly. On the contrary: the Young Plan (1929) was again preceded by the declaration of Germany’s sole responsibility for the war, in order to “justify” forcing the Germans to pay the imposed debt. Foster Dulles, who later became US Secretary of State, recognized this gross psychological mistake. Unfortunately, it was too late. He wrote in 1938:[15]

“In the light of later developments, it may be that this (war guilt) article was the most important single article in the treaty. Through it, Germany was branded in German eyes with the moral guilt of the world war, and the German people were forced, under threat of mass starvation and military devastation, to recognize this verdict as true. It was the German people’s rebellion against this article of the treaty that, above all others, laid the foundation for the Germany we have before us today.”

Wars are willfully designed and have always been thoroughly prepared for a long time. The British diplomat Harold Nicolson wrote in his book The Diplomats’ Conspiracy[16] that the search for the causes of wars should not be limited to external causes, but that all historical backgrounds of the decades before the war should be taken into consideration.

Which backgrounds should be taken into consideration? What preceded the Second World War? The formation of the Second Reich in 1871. As U.S. historian Palmer pointed out, the founding of the Second Reich brought about a major shift in the balance of power in Europe. Just a few weeks after the proclamation of the new German Empire in the Palace of Versailles, Benjamin Disraeli, then leader of the British Tories, who considered himself the chosen man of a chosen race (Hannah Arndt), declared that the creation of the German Empire had severely unsettled the balance of power in Europe to the detriment of England, because England was the country suffering most from the effects of the great upheaval on the continent. This empire must therefore disappear again.

Pope Pius IX, who is now to be canonized, said at an international pilgrims’ meeting on 18 January 1874 about this new Germany, dominated by Protestant Prussia that, starting with Martin Luther, had denied papal dominance over its lands for centuries:

“Bismarck is the serpent in the paradise of humanity. Through this serpent, the German people are seduced into wanting to be more than God himself. This self-exaltation will be followed by a humiliation that no nation has ever had to taste. […] This empire, which, like the Tower of Babel, was built in defiance of God, will perish for the glory of God.”

In a pastoral letter, Bishop Ketteler of Mainz forbade the priests of his diocese to take part in the Sedan Festival, a celebration of German victory over the French in the war of 1870/71. Together with the British and French imperialists, the Catholic Church also worked towards the downfall of the Second Reich.

It is in this spirit that one has to see Sir Chalmers Mitchell’s 1896 declaration of war on Germany in one of the leading opinion-forming and most widely read weekly newspapers in Britain:

“[…] the Germans, by their resemblances to the English, are marked out as our natural rivals. […] Were every German to be wiped out to-morrow, there is no English trade, no English pursuit that would not immediately expand. […] Here is the first great racial struggle of the future: here are two growing nations pressing against each other, man to man all over the world. One or the other has to go; one or the other will go. […] Second, be ready to fight Germany […]”

He concluded his article with a battle cry by alluding to the Roman senator Cato the Elder’s exclamation, merely swapping Carthaginem for Germaniam:[17]

“Germania est delenda!” – “Germany is to be destroyed!”

And on November 11, 1897 (18 months later), the same author wrote in the same magazine:

“[Competing with each other,] the German and the Englishman are struggling to be first. A million petty disputes build up the greatest cause of war the world has ever seen. If Germany were extinguished to-morrow, the day after to-morrow there is not an Englishman in the world who would not be the richer.” (emph. added)

He then concluded again with the historical phrase mentioned above: “Germania est delenda!”

For me, these sentences are the first indication of an intended holocaust of the German people.

For the British imperialist Cecil Rhodes, “expansion was everything.” He was the first to think in terms of continents and globally and, “I would annex the planets if I could.”[18]

“And as expansion is everything, and as the surface of the world is limited, it must be our duty to take as much of it as we can possibly have.”[19]

British Colonial Secretary Joseph Chamberlain agreed with this in a speech in Glasgow on October 6, 1903:[20]

“Our aims are twofold: first, we all wish to maintain and increase the national strength and prosperity of the United Kingdom. Britain has played a great part in world history, and for that reason I wish Britain to continue to do so.

Our second aim is, or should be, the realization of the greatest ideal ever envisaged by statesmen in any country or of any time: the creation of an empire such as the world has never seen [a world domination such as was imputed to the German Kaiser and Hitler]. We must build on the unity of states around the oceans; we must consolidate the British race, we must counter the whole rat-race of competitions which are now trade competitions, which used to be something else and could be again in the future. But whatever may be, whatever dangers may threaten us, we must no longer face them as an isolated country; we must confront them, strengthened, fortified, and braced by the buttressing power of all those cousins of ours, all the powerful and steadily growing states that speak the same language with us, that are proud of the same flag with us. […] To this my second sentence: It [Great Britain] will inevitably fall if we do not prevent it when the time comes.”

And so the First World War was triggered. U.S. historian Robert Palmer confirmed in his book A History of Modern World that this war was an economic war:[21]

“It is not true that the Germans started the war, as its enemies simply believed in 1914. By far the most important cause was in fact the inability of Europeans to adapt to the strengthened German industry, which began to play a greater role after 1870. […] After Germany was united, the industrial revolution began for it. Industry, capital, the merchant fleet and the population grew extraordinarily. In 1865, for example, Germany produced less steel than France, but by 1900, it was already producing more than France and England combined.”

And the USA was then also dragged into the war. We owe this above all to the powerful British and Jewish lobbies in America. Among the most powerful warmongers was Bernard Baruch, the coordinator of the war economy, and Pierepoint Morgan, the big financier and media lord.

Benjamin Freedman, a wealthy Jewish businessman, an “insider,” told us in his 1961 speech in Washington, D.C., about the influence of Zionists on the U.S. involvement in the war:[22]

“The newspapers in the USA were controlled by Zionists. The bankers were Jews, all the mass media in this country were controlled by Jews. Do you know that in 1916 the Zionists made a deal with the British government that dragged us into the war? Nobody in the United States knew this! They weren’t supposed to know this either. Who knew this? President Wilson knew this. Colonel House knew this. And other ‘insiders’ knew this. I knew this too. I was friends with Henry Morgenthau Sr. We supported Wilson for his election in 1912. Wilson was elected. I was a confidant of Henry Morgenthau; he was chairman of the Finance Committee. I was friends with Rollo Wells; he was Secretary of the Treasury. I sat at a table with President Wilson and the others. I heard them indoctrinate Wilson […] with Zionism.

The chief justice of the United States, the Zionist Justice Brandeis, was as close to Wilson as those two fingers on my hand. They determined that we should go to war. They sent our boys to Europe to be slaughtered. And for what? To give the Jews their home in Palestine.”

The renowned US historian Dr. David Hoggan added to Freedman’s statement and agreed with him:[23]

“The only cause to which President Wilson once sincerely devoted himself was the Zionist program of world Jewry in 1897. It was not British propaganda that drove America into World War I, but a whistle blown by Zionist leaders Brandeis and Weizmann as part of the price Jewry had to pay for the ‘Balfour Jewish Homeland Declaration on Palestine’ in 1917.”

The fact that this war was not about “making Europe ready for democracy” (which US President Wilson stated as a war aim after the USA had declared war on Germany) was obvious already because both Germany and the UK were constitutional parliamentarian monarchies of the same type. But it could also be seen in the terms of the Treaty of Versailles. Germany’s Jewish Foreign Minister Walther Rathenau (I mention the word Jew to show that some Jews were loyal to their homeland and were appalled by this treaty) railed against these conditions:[24]

“It is annihilation! We are being destroyed. Germany’s living body and spirit are being killed. Millions of German people are being driven into misery and death, into homelessness, slavery and despair. One of the spiritual peoples in the circle of the earth is extinguished. Its mothers, its children, its unborn are being struck to death.

We are being destroyed, knowing and seeing, by those who know and those who see. Not like the dull peoples of antiquity, who were led clueless and dull into exile and slavery, not by fanatical idolaters who believe they are glorifying a Moloch.

We are being destroyed by brother nations of European blood who profess God and Christ, whose life and constitution are based on morality, who invoke humanity, chivalry and civilization, who mourn for the shed blood of men.

Woe to him and his soul who dares to call this judgment of blood justice. Have the courage, speak it out, call it by its name: it is called revenge.

But I ask you, spiritual men of all peoples, clergymen of all denominations and scholars, statesmen and artists; I ask you, workers, proletarians, citizens of all nations, I ask you, venerable father and supreme lord of the Catholic Church, I ask you in the name of God: May a people of the earth be destroyed by its brother peoples for the sake of revenge (this was indeed Clemenceau’s intention) and would it be the last and most miserable of all peoples?”

What did the Holy Father, the head of the Catholic Church, Benedict XV, the role model of the current [2005] Pope Benedict XVI, say? He wrote to the French Cardinal Amette on October 7, 1919:

“From France may God’s grace pour out upon the whole world; what human prudence began at the Versailles Conference, may God’s love ennoble and complete.”

The Pope, the Holy Father, was not bothered by the fact that thousands of Christian children in Germany were literally starving to death. To this day, no pope has apologized to the German people, as they have now done to the Jews.

The fact that the Germans were blackmailed and starved until they signed the Treaty of Versailles was confirmed by Senator Ernest Lundeen in the U.S. Senate on July 11, 1940:

“One overlooks the fact that by far the greatest atrocity was the British blockade of Germany for months after November 1918, as a result of which over 800,000 German women, children and old people died of starvation, and millions emaciated and wasted away.”

The U.S. delegate and later “Ambassador at large”, William Bullitt, commented on the wisdom of the French government in a letter to President Woodrow Wilson as follows:[25]

“Today I tendered my resignation as attaché to the Versailles Peace Commission. I was one of the millions who relied confidently and unreservedly on your leadership, believing that you would work for nothing less than a permanent peace based on selfless and impartial justice. But our government has now agreed to subject the suffering peoples of the world to new oppressions, subjugations and dismemberments. Nothing but a new century of war is beginning. So I have lost my conviction that as a servant of this government I could also do effective work for a new world order. Russia, this bitter test of good will, for you as well as for me, has not been understood at all. Unjust decisions of the Versailles Conference on Shantung, South Tyrol, Thrace, Hungary, East Prussia, Danzig, the Saar region and the abandonment of the principle of freedom of the seas, make new international conflicts certain. It is my conviction that the new League of Nations will be powerless to prevent these wars, and that the United States may become involved in them through the obligations assumed by the League of Nations together with France. I therefore consider it my duty to the United States Government, to its own people, to advise mankind not to sign or ratify this unjust treaty. Nor should we join the League of Nations and thereby endorse the provisions of the Treaty of Versailles.”

He later reported to the Senate on the letter he sent to President Woodrow Wilson, saying:[26]

“It was most unpopular. I wrote that the creation of the Polish Corridor would not bring peace, but war.”

And Lenin, who certainly cannot be described as a supporter of the German nationalists, wrote:[27]

“When Germany was defeated, the League of Nations, the confederation of nations that had fought against Germany, cried out that this had been a war of liberation, a democratic war. A peace was forced upon Germany, but it was a peace of usurers and stranglers, a peace of butchers, because Germany and Austria were plundered and dismembered. They were deprived of all means of subsistence and their children were left to starve and die of hunger. This is a monstrous peace of robbery that turns tens of millions of people into slaves. This is not peace, these are much more conditions dictated to a defenseless victim by robbers with a knife in their hand.”

U.S. historian Steffen Possony, mentioned earlier, wrote in relation to the Treaty of Versailles:[28]

“The postwar period witnessed, in effect, the continuation of war by other means, and the Treaty of Versailles initially signified a kind of attack in perpetuity. This assertion can be substantiated without difficulty by referring to the denial of equal rights in security matters, the reparations problem and the ban on the customs union with Austria.”

The first federal president of postwar West Germany, Theodor Heuss, wrote in his book Hitler’s Way (Hitlers Weg), published in 1932:

“The birthplace of the National-Socialist movement was not Munich, but Versailles.”

The treaty was signed with the hope that it could be “torn up” over time. One person who tried very hard to do this was Germany’s long-serving Foreign Minister Gustav Stresemann. He argued that Germany ought to join the League of Nations in order to obtain a revision of the Treaty of Versailles.

But all of Foreign Minister Stresemann’s requests to the League of Nations for border revisions in the East, as well as all requests for the lifting of import restrictions and payment facilitation to the Western countries, were repeatedly shot down by the Western powers in the League of Nations. He had to realize that nothing could be achieved with good words. On April 13, 1929, six months before his death, he granted the British journalist and diplomat Bruce Lockhart an interview in which he expressed his bitter feelings as follows:[29]

“It is now five years since we signed [the treaty of] Locarno. If you had made a single concession, I would have convinced my people. I gave, gave, always gave, until my compatriots turned their backs on me. The future lies in the hands of the young generation, the youth of Germany, whom we were able to win over for peace and the new Europe, but we have lost both – that is my tragedy and your fault.”

In spite of this, Stresemann was branded a lackey of the victorious powers in Germany (the German derogatory term “Erfüllungspolitiker” was used for that, meaning a politician doing the victor’s bidding). This intransigence of the Allies must always be remembered if one wants to understand Hitler’s forceful measures.

Ferdinand Miksche, a Czech-French military historian, regretted that “the governments of the West had neither the strength nor the will to remedy through a policy of revision the grievances they had caused by peace treaties.”[30] These Western governments were interested in Germany bleeding to death, and were prepared to accept war again to achieve this.

At the conference in Luxembourg on May 2, 1932, Hans Luther, who had been President of the Reichsbank Board of Directors since 1930, asked for permission to increase the amount of money in circulation in order to promote consumption, as deflation prevailed in Germany. This was rejected. He then painted a gloomy picture:[31]

“The conditions in Europe are not a path to a new life. This way, Europe can only collapse wearily.”

And collapse Europe did, as Luther said, wearily. That is why Adolf Hitler came to power.

Prof. K. D. Bracher, in the 1970s “Germany’s best-known contemporary historian” (so Janßen in the left-wing weekly Die Zeit), confirmed that Hitler, like all the leading politicians of the Weimar Republic, tried to break the chains of Versailles by peaceful means:[32]

“Hitler’s tactic of simultaneous shielding and preparation by means of continuity and legality relied on a linkage to the arguments and objectives of the Weimar revisionist policy.”

The Munich-based contemporary historian Nipperday agreed:

“Seen from its beginnings, the Third Reich by no means took itself as a ‘foreign body’ within the history of the German nation state. Only in retrospect [meaning after the re-education of the Germans] does it take on the expression of something alien.”

German historian Hans Adolf Jacobsen, who was certainly not well-disposed towards Adolf Hitler, also stated:[33]

“In view of the precarious situation of the Reich, Hitler initially pursued the method of so-called ‘peaceful change’ until 1937, i.e. the peaceful change of the status quo and thus of the Treaty of Versailles. With unparalleled skill and admirable perseverance, he proclaimed his desire for peace; he continued to speak of the German people’s longing for peace, tranquility and work, as well as of the experiences he had gained as a front-line soldier during the First World War. He could therefore best measure the sacrifices of the past.”

Even the former French foreign minister Georges Bonnet agreed with the German historians just quoted:[34]

“Hitler did indeed continue with ever-increasing energy and speed the work of Hindenburg and Stresemann to free Germany from the chains of the Treaty of Versailles.”

Shortly after coming to power, Hitler sent Goebbels to Geneva, where he once again reminded the Western Allies of their promises of 1919 and made the following disarmament proposals:[35]

• The Reich is embedded in a system of collective security. It did not escape the Reich government’s notice that the Poles were preparing to occupy Silesia in a coup d’état.
• The victorious states of the World War reduce their armed forces, which guarantee the security of the Reich. If this cannot be done, the Reich increases its troop strength to 300,000 men.

In response to this speech by Goebbels in Geneva, the French Prime Minister Daladier said that he opposed a disarmament conference, and at the same time demanded that Germany should not be allowed to rearm for five years. Since the major powers in the League of Nations did not comply with the requests of the German Reich governments for disarmament, Germany left the League of Nations on October 25, 1933, which was interpreted in the Western press as Hitler’s hostility to peace and lust for war.

French President Édouard Herriot immediately traveled to the Soviet Union and prepared the Franco-Soviet military pact, which was signed on May 2, 1935, and was clearly directed against the then still-unarmed Germany. This fact did not go unnoticed by the German government. Herriot had no human rights concerns about Stalin, although he learned during his trip to the Ukraine that Stalin had starved up to 10 million people there and murdered millions of opponents. At the same time, the German imperial government under Kaiser Wilhelm II was accused of having tolerated the expulsion and murder of Armenians (by their allies of WWI, the Turks).

This Franco-Soviet treaty explicitly stated that France and the Soviet Union reserved the right to do as they saw fit in the event of an inconvenient decision by the League of Nations, just as US President George W. Bush acted against UN decisions in the early 2000s.

This 1935 treaty clearly went against Germany’s Locarno Agreement with France and England, which then prompted Hitler to introduce universal conscription.

Hitler concluded a non-aggression pact with Poland as early as 1934 and a naval agreement with England in 1935. He certainly believed, as did Prince Lichnowsky, Germany’s ambassador in London before the outbreak of the First World War (My London Mission 1912 – 1914), that German naval construction before World War One, meaning Tirpitz’s armament at sea, was the most important cause that led to the estrangement between Germany and England, and ultimately caused the First World War.

Hitler already wrote in Mein Kampf on page 127 and following:

“No sacrifice should have been considered too great if it was a necessary means of winning England’s friendship. Colonial and maritime ambitions should have been abandoned and no attempts to compete with British industry should have been made.”

Hitler was reprehensibly anglophile:[36]

“He admired the British Empire and repeatedly described it as the greatest marvel ever created. On other occasions, he saw in the British Commonwealth the highest expression of Germanic state wisdom and Germanic will to lead. He was convinced that the English were filled through and through with Germanic concepts of honor, and that they would one day become his allies.”

On March 31, 1935, Hitler once again made a major peace offer. He called for general disarmament and the signing of a 25-year European peace pact, which would be based on the current air forces, new demilitarized zones and other significant, practical measures. This offer was firmly rejected.

Francis Neilson, the British-American publicist, described this sweeping peace and disarmament program with its 19 points as “the most comprehensive non-aggression pact ever drafted.”[37]

British pastor and historian Peter Nicoll, who lost two sons in the war, agreed with Francis Neilson:[38]

“England could at least have listened to this offer and then examined and discussed it in a free conference. One may wonder whether behind England’s refusal there was perhaps secretly a decision not to concede to Germany an inch of her former territories, an ounce of her former wealth and a door to her former trade.”

Sven Hedin, the famous Swedish explorer, wrote about this during the war:[39]

“If the victors of the [First]​ World War had accepted Hitler’s proposal at that time (1935) and taken his suggestions seriously, or if they had at least deigned to debate it with him, the present total war could have been prevented. […] But no, they were happy to sacrifice everything for the single goal: Germania delenda est (Germany must be destroyed).”

So Hitler, like Napoleon, Stresemann and later Mao Zedong, had to realize that nothing could be achieved with negotiations, good will and good words, and that right rested on gun barrels. Here it is appropriate to quote Lenin:[40]

“One must not shrink from sacrifice. To the realization ‘that the great historical questions will ultimately be decided only by force’ belongs the insight ‘that freedom cannot be won without the greatest sacrifice’.”

Many problems were then “solved” through the use of force. For example, the introduction of the Wehrmacht and the rearmament of Germany, the occupation of the Rhineland, the reunification with Austria, the Sudetenland and the Memel region. The problems of Gdansk, West Prussia and Upper Silesia still had to be solved. Hitler had already renounced earlier any claims to Alsace-Lorraine (France), Eupen-Malmedy (Belgium), North Schleswig (Denmark), Ödenburg (Hungary) and Southern Tyrol (Italy).

After the Sudeten crisis in the fall of 1938, Polish troops illegally occupied Olsa and Teschen in Moravia on October 2, 1938 and demanded a common border with Hungary. The Poles justified the invasion with the “brutal treatment of the Polish minority by the Czechs.” The newspaper Express Porannie, which was close to the Polish government, deplored the Czechoslovak authorities’ actions against the Polish minority in Cieszyn. They “live under the thumb of the Czech gendarmes, who want to rob them of their mother tongue by force. Czechoslovak Silesia has turned into one big prison.”[41]

The British and French were furious about this invasion of Czechoslovakia, but they came to terms with it. The French government quietly called on the Poles to abide by the Munich agreement, but to no avail.[42]

Foreign Minister Jozef Beck now asked the German government for a benevolent attitude, which he received. Hitler had no objections to this occupation and hoped to come to some other arrangement with the Poles regarding border disputes. He even promised the Poles Carpatho-Ukraine, the former eastern tip of Slovakia. But the Poles wanted more. They were even of the opinion that Czechoslovakia had to disappear. Poland itself was preparing to seize part of its heritage (Slovakia and Ruthenia).[43]

On October 22, 1938, Polish Ambassador Lipski, on behalf of his government, suggested to Mr. Woermann, a high official in the German Foreign Office, that he should support Hungary’s annexation of Carpatho-Ukraine (Bonnet informs us that in reality Poland wanted this territory and asked for France’s support; later, Lipski admitted to von Ribbentrop that it was the Poles’ wish to have a common border with Hungary). However, Woermann passed this request on to Germany’s Foreign Minister von Ribbentrop, who asked whether this opportunity should not be taken to start a more detailed discussion with the Poles about border problems.

In the then still-favorable atmosphere – this was before Germany’s occupation of Czechia, Foreign Minister von Ribbentrop invited the Polish Ambassador Lipski to Berchtesgaden on October 24, 1938.

There is repeated talk of brutal blackmail of the Czechs by Hitler, which Czech Prime Minister Hácha even denied to Molotov.[44] Hácha’s daughter, Milada Radlová, also testified to the correct treatment of Hácha in Germany.

I would also like to add that the British ambassador in Berlin, Sir Neville Henderson, was also concerned about the events in Czechoslovakia, and advised the Czech envoy Mastny to send Czech Foreign Minister Chvalkowski to Berlin.[45] The British envoy in Prague, Sir Basil Newton, did the same.[46]

Chvalkowski asserted that “there was no evidence that the Slovak propaganda for separation from Czechia had been instigated by the Reich or the German minority in Czechoslovakia.”[47]

Yet the history book for German university-prep students states:[48]

“In the fall of 1938, he (Hitler) encouraged the Slovaks to break away from Prague.”

Peter Rassow expressed it similarly in his book German History at a Glance: A Handbook (Deutsche Geschichte im Überblick. Ein Handbuch) on page 706.

The Polish government was the first to openly demand the dissolution of Czechoslovakia.[49] Ambassador Lipski reported on the visit to Berchtesgaden to Foreign Minister Joseph Beck:

“The Reich’s Foreign Minister then stated that he believed the time had come for a general settlement of all existing frictions between Germany and Poland. This would be the culmination of the work initiated by Marshal Pilsudski and the Führer. […] The first thing to be discussed with Poland would be Gdansk as a partial solution to a major settlement between the two nations. Danzig was German, had always been German and would always remain German. He, the Reich Foreign Minister, envisioned a large-scale solution as follows:

1. The Free City of Danzig returns to the German Reich.
2. An extraterritorial Reich highway belonging to Germany and an equally extraterritorial multi-track railroad would be laid through the corridor.
3. Poland also receives an extraterritorial road or highway, a railroad and a free port in the Danzig area.
4. Poland receives a sales guarantee for its goods in the Danzig area.
5. The two nations recognize their common borders and guarantee their mutual territories.
6. The German-Polish treaty is extended by 10 to 25 years.
7. The two countries add a consultation clause to their treaty.”

Lipski’s transcript then contains the following text verbatim in the Polish documents:[50]

“The Polish Ambassador takes note of the suggestion. Although he would of course have to speak to Mr. Beck first, he would like to say now that it is wrong to regard Danzig as a product of Versailles, like the Saar region. One had to follow the historical and geographical history of Danzig in order to get the right attitude to the problem. […] The Reich’s Foreign Minister declared that he did not want to hear an answer now. The ambassador should think all this through and talk to Mr. Beck about it as soon as possible. After all, a certain reciprocity should not be excluded from these considerations. For the Führer, an internal recognition of the corridor would certainly not be easy in terms of domestic politics. You have to think secularly – and Danzig after all, is German and must remain so.”

German history books do not mention this offer at all, and if they do, they only talk about alleged blackmail.

At a guest lecture in Stockholm, Walter Hofer, author of the book The Unleashing of the Second World War (Die Entfesselung des Zweiten Weltkrieges), which has been sold in millions of copies, answered my question as to why he did not mention the Marienwerder proposals in his book as follows:

“The Allies were well advised not to respond to these proposals. It was just a sham offer. To accept it would only have led to a delay [delay of what? GW]. Hitler wanted war, there is nothing to be said about that.”

British historian M. Follick wrote about the Polish corridor through West Prussia, severing East Prussia from the Rest of Germany:[51]

“The crime of the Polish corridor was a thousand times worse than if Germany, had she won the war, had drawn a corridor across the Caledonian Canal (in Scotland) and given Holland a strip about ten miles wide just to weaken Britain. It was more or less at France’s instigation that Poland was given this corridor, which tore apart one of the most fertile areas of Germany. By consenting to this criminal course of action, France’s allies gave their hand to one of the most disgraceful insults to civilization known to history. […] In order to give Poland a seaport, a second crime was committed against Germany. Danzig was taken away from it and declared a free city. Of all that is German in Germany, nothing is more German than Danzig. […] Sooner or later the Polish Corridor must be the cause of a future war.”

Doris Neujahr, a pen name of Thorsten Hinz, complained in the conservative German weekly newspaper Junge Freiheit of January 2, 2005:

“A serious historiography would have to take Beck’s objective into account. In the standard works by Thamer, Winkler, Benz etc. [she could have added Hofer and Fest; GW], Burckhardt’s report does not appear at all. […] The majority of German historiography on this period is a blueprint of the Nuremberg judgment of 1946, although this court decision does not meet any objective scientific criteria.”

Carl Jacob Burckhardt, Swiss commissioner of the League of Nations in Danzig, reported:[52]

“On December 2, 1938, the American ambassador in Warsaw, Tony Biddle [colonel and later general; GW], visited me. He told me with strange satisfaction that the Poles were ready to go to war over Danzig. They would meet the motorized strength of the German army with agility. ‘In April,’ he declared, ‘the new crisis will break out [did he already know that the British will issue a declaration of guarantee for Poland in April and partially mobilize Poland?], never since the torpedoing of the Lusitania has there been such religious hatred against Germany in America as today! Chamberlain and Daladier will be blown away by public opinion. This is a holy war. I wrote at the time about the communication of these sayings: ‘Beautiful perspectives, Calvin against the descendants of Luther, Lenin as Calvin’s ally’.”

And on August 20, 1939, Carl Burckhardt reported to Geneva:[53]

“The Poles are waiting in apparent silence. Beck, during our night-time trip [on a Polish warship in the Bay of Danzig; GW] let me in on his plans. He keeps playing a double game. It is not a German game, as some Frenchmen and the Polish opposition believe. It is a game in which Poland is hoping for the highest profit, a profit that is to result from an eventual and inevitable German catastrophe. For this reason, the Germans are being driven into their misdeeds, and in Danzig, the extremists are being allowed to triumph with pleasure, while at the same time the adherence to the external forms of the treaties is repeatedly emphasized. One day, the bill will be presented, and interest and compound interest will be demanded. By collaborating with the National Socialists in this way, it has already succeeded in creating a solidarity of aversion throughout the West – in France, England and America – to any revision of the treaties. […]

That was very different in 1932. Back then, the majority of Western opinion in the major democracies was in favor of the German minorities. People were upset about poorly drawn borders and isolated provinces. Thanks to the excessive methods of Nazism, all that has come to an end, and now people in Warsaw are quietly hoping not only for the unconditional integration of Danzig into the Polish state, but for much more, for the whole of East Prussia, Silesia and even Pomerania. In 1933, people in Warsaw were still talking about Polish Pomerelia, but now they say ‘our Pomerania’. Beck is pursuing a purely Polish policy, an ultimately anti-German policy, a policy of détente that only appears to be Polish-German since the occupation of the Rhineland, and the French passivity on the occasion of this event. But efforts are being made to methodically reinforce the Germans in their mistakes. I am completely alone here, without influence and very depressed about everything I see, feeling that I can do nothing to prevent it.” (emph. added)

However, it was not just Poles (apart from the British and Americans) who worked towards the war, but also Jews in England and the USA. Carl Burckhardt also reported on this. These documents also usually remain unmentioned. Burckhardt quoted the report of the Polish ambassador in Washington, Jerzy Potocki, from January 12, 1939:[54]

“The mood prevailing at the moment in the United States is characterized by an ever-increasing hatred of Fascism, especially of the person of Chancellor Hitler. […] The propaganda is mainly in Jewish hands, they own almost 100% of the radio, the movies, the press and the magazines. Although this propaganda is handled very crudely and portrays Germany as badly as possible, […] it works so thoroughly because the local public is completely ignorant and has no idea of the situation in Europe. […]

The situation in this country provides an excellent forum for all kinds of speakers and for the emigrants from Germany and Czechoslovakia, who do not spare words in order to incite the local public with the most diverse slanders. […] It is very interesting that in this very well-thought-out campaign, which is mainly waged against National Socialism, Soviet Russia is almost completely excluded. If it is mentioned at all, it is done in a friendly way, and things are presented as if Soviet Russia were part of the bloc of democratic states. […]

In addition to this propaganda, a war psychosis is also being artificially created: The American people are being persuaded that peace in Europe is hanging by only one thread, that war is inevitable. […]

On the first point, it must be said that the internal situation on the [U.S.] labor market is constantly deteriorating; the number of unemployed today is already 12 million. […]

On the second point, I can only say that President Roosevelt, as a skillful political player and a connoisseur of American psychology, soon diverted the attention of the American public from the domestic political situation in order to interest it in foreign policy. […]

Furthermore, the brutal action against the Jews in Germany [during the November 1938 pogrom; GW] and the emigrant problem, which constantly stirred up the prevailing hatred against everything that had anything to do with German National Socialism. Individual Jewish intellectuals, such as Bernard Baruch; New York State Governor Lehmann; newly appointed Supreme Court Justice Felix Frankfurter; Secretary of the Treasury Morgenthau and others who are personal friends of President Roosevelt, have participated in this campaign. They want the President to become the champion of human rights, of religious freedom and freedom of speech, and they want him to punish the troublemakers in the future. This group of people, who occupy the highest positions in the American government and who want to present themselves as representatives of ‘true Americanism’ and as ‘defenders of democracy’, are basically bound by unbreakable ties to international Jewry. For this Jewish International, which above all has the interests of its race in mind, placing the President of the United States in this ‘most ideal’ post of defender of human rights was a brilliant move. In this way, they have created a very dangerous hotbed of hatred and hostility in this hemisphere, and have divided the world into two hostile camps. The whole problem is being dealt with in a mysterious way: Roosevelt has been given the foundations to revitalize America’s foreign policy, and in this way at the same time to create the colossal military supplies for the future war, towards which the Jews are striving with full consciousness.”

Carl Jakob Burckhardt certainly believed Count Potocki, otherwise he would not have included this text in his book.

Most history books completely fail to mention that, shortly after Hitler came to power, Jews in England and the USA declared war on Germany. In the Daily Express (ed. Ralph David Blumenfeld) on March 24, 1933, there was a bold front-page headline:

“JUDEA DECLARES WAR ON GERMANY. […] Fourteen million Jews dispersed throughout the world have handed together as one man to declare war on the German persecutors of their Co-religionists. […] The Jewish merchant prince is leaving his counting-house, the banker his board-room, the shopkeeper his store, and the pedlar his humble barrow a holy war to combat the Hitlerist enemies of the Jew.”

Samuel Untermeyer, President of the “International Jewish Boycott Conference”, a close associate and friend of Roosevelt, even declared holy war on the Germans in August 1933:[55]

“My Friends: What a joy and relief and sense of security to be once more on American soil! The nightmares of horrors through which I have passed in those two weeks in Europe [he participated in the International Jewish Boycott Conference in The Hague; GW], listening to the heartbreaking tales of refugee victims, beggar description.

I deeply appreciate your enthusiastic greeting on my arrival today, which I quite understand is addressed not to me personally but to the holy war in the cause of humanity in which we are embarked.

It is a war that must be waged unremittingly until the black clouds of bigotry, race hatred and fanaticism that have descended upon what was once Germany, but is now medieval Hitlerland, have been dispersed. […]

As our ship sailed up the bay today past our proud Statue of Liberty, I breathed a prayer of gratitude and thanksgiving that this fair land of freedom has escaped the curse that has descended upon benighted Germany, which has thereby been converted from a nation of culture into a veritable hell of cruel and savage beasts. […]

I have seen and talked with many of these terror-stricken refugees […] and I want to say to you that nothing that has seeped through to you over the rigid censorship and lying propaganda that are at work to conceal and misrepresent the situation of the Jews in Germany begins to tell a fraction of the frightful story of fiendish torture, cruelty and persecution that are being inflicted day by day upon these men, women and children, of the terrors of worse than death in which they are living. […]

But why dwell longer upon this revolting picture of the ravages wrought by these ingrates and beasts of prey, animated by the loathsome motives of race hatred, bigotry and envy. For the Jews are the aristocrats of the world. […]

They have flaunted and persisted in flaunting and defying world opinion. We propose to and are organizing world opinion to express itself in the only way Germany can be made to understand. Hitler and his mob will not permit their people to know how they are regarded by the outside world. We shall force them to learn in the only way open to us. […]

There is nothing new in the use of the economic boycott as an instrument of justice. The covenant of the League of Nations expressly provides in these identical words for its use to bring recalcitrant nations to terms. President Roosevelt, whose wise statesmanship and vision are the wonder of the civilized world, is invoking it [the boycott] in furtherance of his noble conception for the readjustment of the relations between capital and labor […]. What more exalted precedent do our timid friends want? […]

Each of you, Jew and Gentile alike, who has not already enlisted in this sacred war should do so now and here. It is not sufficient that you buy no goods made in Germany. You must refuse to deal with any merchant or shopkeeper who sells any German-made goods or who patronizes German ships or shipping.”

None other than Chaim Weizmann, President of the Jewish Agency, wrote to British Prime Minister Chamberlain a few days before the start of the war (August 29, 1939):[56]

“I wish to confirm in the most explicit manner the declarations which I and my colleagues have made during the last month and especially in the last week: that the Jews stand by Great Britain and will fight on the side of the democracies.

Our urgent desire is to give effect to these declarations. We wish to do so in a way entirely consonant with the general scheme of British action and, therefore, would place ourselves, in matters big and small, under the coordinating direction of His Majesty’s Government. The Jewish Agency is ready to enter into immediate arrangements for utilizing Jewish manpower, technical ability and resources, etc.”

In his speech in New York on May 9, 1942 to the “Extraordinary Zionist Conference” in the Biltmore Hotel, he fueled the persecution of Jews in Germany even more. He called on the Jews to engage in sabotage in Europe:[57]

“We do not deny and are not afraid to confess the truth that this war is our war and leads to the liberation of Jewry. […] Stronger than all the fronts put together is our front, the front of Jewry. We not only give this war all our financial support, on which the entire war production is based, we not only place our propagandistic power at the disposal of this war, which is the moral driving force for maintaining this war. Securing victory is mainly achieved by weakening the enemy forces through our resistance, by crushing them in their own country, inside their fortress. Thousands of Jews living in Europe are the main factor in the destruction of our enemy. There our front is a fact, and it is the most valuable help for victory.” (emph. added.)

In 1943, Hitler therefore demanded that Admiral Horty imprison the Jews in Hungary because they were defeatists and saboteurs.

This war policy of certain Jews in England and the USA led to a catastrophe not only for Germany and the Germans, but also for the Jews in Europe. This was later confirmed by Jews loyal to the Torah in the United States. They denounced the criminal, brutal war policy of the World Jewish Congress:[58]

“Where did the Zionist leaders of the ‘World Jewish Congress’ get the right to demand advantages for themselves? The worldwide trade blockade against Germany in 1933 and all subsequent declarations of war against Germany, initiated by the Zionist leaders and the World Jewish Congress, enraged Hitler so much that he threatened to exterminate the Jews. At the Wannsee conference in January 1942, the fate of the Jews was decided, and their suffering began.” (emph. added)

Back to the Poles. Despite several reminders from the German Foreign Minister von Ribbentrop, the Poles did not respond to the offer. The former German counterintelligence officer, Lieutenant Colonel Oscar Reile, in active opposition to Hitler, pointed out in his book Geheime Ostfront (Secret Eastern Front)[59] that, immediately after the death of Pilsudski, in the summer of 1935, a clique around General Ryds-Smigly and Polish Foreign Minister Beck sought a war with Germany in order to establish a Greater Poland. It is therefore one of the most infamous lies to claim that Hitler was planning a war against Poland and the annihilation of the Polish people.

According to the French military historian Ferdinand O. Miksche, the Polish Foreign Minister Jozef Beck told a meeting of leading Polish politicians and generals on March 23, 1939,[60]

“that a Danzig that was politically dependent on Poland was an indispensable symbol of political power, and said that ‘it was more sensible to approach [read: attack] the enemy than to wait until he marched towards us.’ This was certainly a rather bold statement, which could in no way be based on the fact that Hitler really intended to attack Poland. The commanders present agreed without hesitation to issue the partial mobilization order on the same day. […] The veteran reservists born between 1911 and 1914 were to be called up, as well as additional reserves born in 1906. The Polish army thus reached a strength of 334,000 men. On the same day, the top commanders of the respective branches of the armed forces received the [evidently already existing] deployment plans for a war against Germany.”

At the meeting on March 26, 1939 with German Foreign Minister von Ribbentrop, Polish Ambassador to Germany Lipski stated:[61]

“He had the unpleasant duty to point out that any further pursuit of these German plans [the Marienwerder proposals], especially as far as they concerned a return of Danzig to the Reich, would mean war with Poland.”

The Polish newspaper Prostoz Mustet agreed. It wrote shortly before the outbreak of war, on August 9, 1939:[62]

“Either the Germans recognize our claims in their entirety and take full cognizance of the fact that Danzig lies within Polish territory, or they do not. The non-recognition of our rights dictates only one way out: war.”

On March 30, Halifax wired Kennard, the British ambassador in Warsaw, that the House of Commons would announce a guarantee to Poland the following day. This guarantee would be binding even without a firm commitment from Poland. Halifax therefore knew in advance how Parliament would vote.

This commitment on March 31, 1939 was made at Churchill’s insistence. It was a unilateral declaration of guarantee that did not commit the Poles to anything. Chamberlain declared before the House of Commons:[63]

“I have now to inform the House that in the event of an action which clearly threatens Polish independence and against which the Polish Government would accordingly regard resistance by its national armed forces as indispensable, His Majesty’s Government would feel obliged during this period to give the Polish Government all the assistance in its power at once. It has given the Polish Government an assurance to this effect.”

This statement reinforced the aggressive attitude of the Poles. The British ambassador to Poland, Sir Howard Kennard, reported on April 25, 1939, that many foreign diplomats believed that Poland was now about to go to war as a result of the partial mobilization:[64]

“The drafting of reservists has, I believe, gone considerably beyond the order of magnitude indicated in my telegram No. 79. A competent person named 750,000 as the number [of Poles] under arms.”

The German State Secretary in the Foreign Ministry Ernst Freiherr von Weizsäcker, the father of West-Germany’s later Federal President, wrote in his Memoirs with regard to the British guarantee declaration:[65]

“The only thing that was certain was that the German-Polish talks had been pretty much deadlocked since January [1939…] On May 24, 1939, stones were even thrown at the German embassy in Warsaw. […]

Neville Chamberlain, however, tied England firmly to Poland’s decisions. […] Warsaw had it in its hands to drag the British Empire into the war. […] The British minister and later ambassador Duff Cooper put it this way: never in history had Britain allowed a second-rate power to decide whether Britain should enter a war or not.”

Cooper’s statement shows that the British wanted to let the Poles drag them into the war. They only had to encourage the chauvinist Poles to do so. It then looks good to fight for the freedom of small nations, which they then “burned up” and abandoned.

After the First World War, the German imperial government was always reproached for having given the Austrians blanket authority and thus contributing to the outbreak of the First World War. Now the British were making the same mistake.

Sir Alexander Cadogan, head of the British Foreign Office, wrote in his diary on March 31, 1939:

“This guarantee to Poland is a dreadful gamble.”

It was not a gamble. The war was desired by influential circles in Great Britain.

In the meantime, Hitler had come to the conclusion, as he told his Foreign Minister von Ribbentrop, that the British and French wanted to declare war on him:[66]

“Hitler was convinced that the great war against him was now being prepared after all and that he therefore had to take further security measures. […]

Once they (the British and French) have finished arming themselves, they will come at me and smash Germany to bits without mercy. There is no international morality, everyone takes what spoils they can get, and I will take that as a lesson.”

This was confirmed after the war!

After the memoirs of the former Polish ambassador in Berlin, Jozef Lipski, were published, the well-known British historian A. J. P. Taylor wrote in the New York Review of Books that Lipski’s memoirs confirmed to him that Hitler did not want war:

“Hitler wanted to get Danzig out of the way so that he could strengthen the friendship between Poland and Germany.”

I would like to remind you the reader once more that the politicians of the Weimar Republic who tried to solve the problems at hand for the good were always rebuffed by the Allies.

The Second World War

The war was to begin on August 26 at 4 o’clock. On the afternoon of August 25, Hitler learned that the British and Poland had concluded a mutual military pact. He also learned that Italy would not join the war. Hitler was now convinced that Britain and France would intervene militarily, which he wanted to prevent. He asked Colonel General Keitel (it was already late in the afternoon) whether it would still be possible to halt the deployment of troops, to which Keitel replied in the affirmative. He immediately picked up the telephone and passed on the corresponding counter-order to the higher Wehrmacht authorities (so Halder’s war diary). The advance was halted, and the war postponed. This showed that Hitler wanted to avoid a war with England and France at all costs. He had already said this to Italy’s foreign minister, Count Ciano, when Ciano was in Berlin in August 1939:[67]

“Only if he was ‘absolutely convinced’ that France and England would not intervene, would he solve this problem [with Poland] by force [if they did not want to negotiate].”

The British certainly knew through German traitors that the attack was planned for the dawn on August 26, 1939. See the communications from the Resistance to the British about the start of the offensive on the Western Front![68] But the British did not expect that it would still be possible for Hitler to halt the advance. They set a trap for Hitler, which he was still able to escape.

On the same day, as already mentioned, Mussolini let Hitler know that he could not take part in the war because he lacked the economic resources to do so. Ambassador Attolico later presented him with an extensive list as a precondition for participation in the war. These wishes were deliberately kept so extensive so that Hitler would not get the idea of fulfilling them after all, Attolico said:

“6 million tons of coal, 2 million tons of steel, 7 million tons of oil, 1 million tons of wood, many tons of copper, potassium nitrate, potash, rosin, rubber, turpentine, lead, tin, nickel, molybdenum, tungsten, zirconium and titanium, 400 tons of the latter. They also demanded 150 anti-aircraft batteries with ammunition and German machinery.”

Nevertheless, Hitler showed understanding for Mussolini and asked him to pretend to take part in the war in order to possibly intimidate the British and French. Mussolini promised to do so. He thus had 17 divisions and 9 mountain infantry regiments deployed on the French border to emphasize his pretence.[69] This is also proof that Hitler did not want the war, but was only trying to “play poker” – but he had the worse cards. Count Ciano had already informed the British at a meeting in San Remo (August 18, 1939) that Italy would not be taking part. So this trump card was worthless.

However, after his “visit to the Führer” in August 1939, Ciano publicly declared:[70]

“Italy stands in solidarity with Germany at all times and under all circumstances.”

The falsehood of the Italian government was confirmed by the French Foreign Minister Bonnet in his memoirs:[71]

“The fact that Italy was a non-belligerent power was a remarkable success for us. It was accompanied by a complete turnaround towards us, because Italy even supplied us with powder, explosives, anti-tank mines and even airplanes.”

In a note dated August 28, the British government declared its willingness (in my opinion only as a pretense) to make itself available as a mediator for direct negotiations between Germany and Poland. The German government accepted this offer, and again submitted the Marienwerder proposals as a basis for negotiations, this time in 16 points, and asked for a reply within 48 hours, meaning by August 30. As the British ambassador Henderson objected to the short deadline, it was then extended until midnight on August 31. This was actually also a pretext, as both the Poles and the British had been aware of these proposals for almost a year.

During the Suez crisis, the British gave Egypt an ultimatum of just 12 hours. On September 30, 1938, Polish Foreign Minister Beck issued an ultimatum to Czechoslovakia to vacate the Cieszyn region and the Tristadt district within 24 hours and cede them to the Poles.

Hitler demanded the return of Danzig to the Reich on the basis of the peoples’ right to self-determination and the holding of a referendum in the corridor north of a line running west from Marienwerder to Schönlanke in Pomerania. The referendum in this area was to take place 12 months after the agreement with Poland. All Germans, Poles and Kashubians residing in the area on January 1, 1918 or born there before that date were to be eligible to vote.

During the interim period of 12 months, the referendum area was to be occupied by Russian, British, French and Italian troops. Should the Germans lose the plebiscite, which was to be decided by a simple majority, they were to be granted an extraterritorial connecting road to East Prussia in accordance with the proposal of October 1938. Should the Poles lose the referendum, they were to be granted a similar connection to Gdingen at German expense. The extent of the Gdingen hinterland would be determined by an international commission and then excluded from the referendum area as inviolable territory. In addition, the Poles were to be granted a free port in Danzig, but the Reich government demanded the demilitarization of Danzig, Gdingen and the Hela peninsula, and a mutual agreement on the protection of minorities.

Governor Rodhe of the Swedish Malmöhus Län region, who at the time was appointed Commissioner-General by the League of Nations to supervise the vote in the Saarland, said in an interview with Stockholms newspaper Tidningen (September 1, 1939) that Hitler’s proposal for a plebiscite in the corridor was a viable and just proposal.

Even Lady Diana, the wife of the former First Lord of the Admiralty, Duff Cooper, “considered Hitler’s proposals ‘so reasonable’ that her husband was horrified at the thought that the British public might come to the same conclusion as his wife.”[72]

The British ambassador in Berlin, Sir Neville Henderson, reported to London:[73]

“If an impartial Martian had to act as arbitrator, I cannot believe that he would pass any other judgment than one that is more or less in accordance with Hitler’s offer. […]

According to my Belgian colleague, almost all the diplomatic representatives here regard the German offer as a surprisingly favorable one. The Dutch envoy, the American chargé d’affaires and my South African colleague have all spoken to me to that effect. I therefore ask myself whether we are well advised to go into battle against Germany over an issue on which the world does not agree on the immorality of Germany’s demands? Will even our Empire be united on this issue? Of course, the underlying motive for the war will be something much deeper and more important than Danzig itself, and even if an understanding were reached on Danzig, it is still possible and even probable that the radical elements will demand further concessions which Poland will then no longer be in a position to refuse. But even under these circumstances I dread to think that Danzig could be just a pretext, and I dread even more to think that our fate is in the hands of the Poles. They are undoubtedly heroic, but they are also fools, and ask anyone who knows them whether they can be trusted. Beck did not even play a fair game in London with regard to the German offer. Ribbentrop asked me yesterday whether Beck had informed His Majesty’s Government in London of the German offer. I was forced to reply that, frankly, I did not know, to which Ribbentrop explained that his information from London was that Beck had not done so. We must realize that, despite our extreme aversion to a general war, the nation will stand behind Hitler much more than it did last September, before we made our offers to Russia and before the cry of encirclement was raised. On the Polish question, the German people will be much more enthusiastic than they were about the Sudeten Germans or even about the Czechs. […]

We have jumped into the Polish breach and given our guarantee unconditionally, and I am racking my brain to see how we can find a satisfactory way out of our present eastern commitments. I suspect that it is too optimistic to hope that any decision of the League of Nations or any form of arbitration could be found to solve the Danzig and Corridor question.

The German people are tired of adventures, but Poland and the Corridor with the spectre of ‘encirclement’ and ‘Soviet Russia’ in the background is a rallying cry that has more chance than anything else of uniting the whole nation. It may well be that Hitler would prefer his offer to be rejected. I have indeed heard this from several sources. If this is true, it only reinforces my personal belief that the Poles, like Schuschnigg and Benesch, are determined to play Hitler’s game.

Personally, I am inclined to believe that Hitler, as the Italian Ambassador [Attolico] tells me, thinks that time is on his side and that he would rather pass. If that is the case and we let things drift as we did in 1938, then I fear that we will soon be facing a new autumn crisis. If, on the one hand, the Poles believe that this is Hitler’s intention, then it will be they who will try to precipitate things by an incident. Both are unpleasant prospects.”

Hitler was also aware of the telegraphic instruction from the Polish Foreign Minister Beck to his ambassador Lipski dated August 31 at 12:40 p.m. Warsaw time, the decisive passages of which – to reject Germany’s offer – are quoted neither in the Polish White Paper nor by German historian Hofer. Beck added the following passage to the instruction to Lipski:

“Do not under any circumstances engage in factual discussions; if the Reich Government makes verbal or written proposals, you must declare that you have no authority to receive or discuss such proposals, and that you are to transmit only the above communication to your government and seek further instructions first.”

The British government did not want any negotiations. On the contrary, it incited the Poles. This was even confirmed, but very modestly, by the British ambassador Henderson in his report to London:[74]

“I honestly don’t think it’s politically wise or even fair to unduly incite the Poles either.”

The Poles refused to negotiate, and so began the greatest catastrophe in world history. German troops invaded Poland on September 1. Hitler justified this by saying that Polish units had already crossed the border and that Germans were being imprisoned, tortured and murdered in Poland. It must also be mentioned, which is always kept quiet, that the Poles carried out a general mobilization on 31 August. There can be no question of an unprovoked German ambush (Überfall) of Poland, as is always claimed.

May I remind the reader once more of Asher ben Nathan, the former Israeli ambassador to West Germany, who was accused of having fired first in the Six-Day War. He replied to this accusation:[75]

“It is irrelevant who fired the first shot. What is decisive is what preceded the first shot.”

On September 3, England and France declared war on Germany. Hitler learned of this beforehand and asked von Ribbentrop to call the press secretary of the German embassy, Fritz Hesse, who was still in England, which he did at around 7 a.m. on September 2, 1939. Von Ribbentrop told Hesse:

“You know who is speaking, please don’t call me by name. Please go to your confidant immediately. You know who I’m talking about and explain the following to him: The Führer is prepared to leave Poland again and to offer compensation for the damage already done on condition that we get Danzig and the road through the corridor if England takes over the mediation in the German-Polish conflict. You are authorized by the Führer to submit this proposal to the English Cabinet and to begin negotiations immediately. Emphasize once again that you are acting on Hitler’s express instructions and that this is not a private action on my part, so that there is no misunderstanding in the matter.”

Sir Horace Wilson, Secretary of State at the British Foreign Office and Chamberlain’s adviser, was the confidant. Hesse arrived at Wilson’s house at around 10 pm. He later informed Hesse that Hitler could not make any conditions, that the Germans would first have to leave Poland and restore the status quo before negotiations could take place.[76]

Sir Horace Wilson made the following record of his conversation with the press spokesman Fritz Hesse:[77]

“10 Downing Street, Whitehall, Hesse was instructed by Ribbentrop to contact me shortly after 8 p.m. to enquire whether the British Government would be prepared to authorize me to travel secretly to Berlin and meet him and Hitler. I saw him – Hesse – at about 10 p.m. and asked him the purpose of the meeting. The answer I got was – to discuss the whole situation, man to man, including the Polish question.

I told Hesse that the British view had been expressed in the Prime Minister’s statement in the House of Commons, and that I would ask him to tell Ribbentrop that under no circumstances would the HM Government be prepared to enter into any talks with the German Government until the German troops had been withdrawn and the status quo restored. After that, the position would be as expressed in the German-English exchange of notes just published. Signed H.J.W. 2 Sep. 39.”

Hitler was now in the trap they had set for him, and he couldn’t get out of it. What did millions of dead people matter to these capitalists?

British historian Richard Lamb, who studied the last minutes before the outbreak of war in great detail, wrote that Chamberlain and Halifax sought a “modus vivendi” with Hitler. Angry Conservative MPs pressed the other members of the government, and the “Palace Revolution” led by Hore-Belisha ensued. Chamberlain was probably not informed of Hesse’s telephone call at all, because:[78]

“Chamberlain had still wanted a final conference with Hitler on September 2 and would have agreed if Hitler had only promised a withdrawal from Poland. But at 11 o’clock at night, the Cabinet forced him to make the historic decision through a kind of sit-down strike. Chamberlain made it with the words: ‘Right, gentlemen, this means war’.”

Hitler’s many attempts to achieve peace were shot down by the Western Allies. More about this can be read in my book The Truth Will Set You Free (Die Wahrheit wird euch frei machen).

According to Colonel General Halder’s war diary, Hitler was, “shortly before the outbreak of war, sleepless, broken, despondent and powerless. He was stuttering.”[79]

The pious Halifax took the start of the war much easier:[80]

“He seemed relieved that we had made our decision [to declare war]. He ordered beer, which was brought down by a sleepy clerk in his pyjamas who lived in the house. We laughed and made jokes.”

– while thousands were already dying in the war thusly triggered. And the less pious Lord Ismay, who later became NATO Secretary General, was delighted by the outbreak of war:[81]

“Lord Ismay, Secretary of the Imperial Defense Council, the supreme military policy body of England, recalls on the occasion of a dinner for US President Eisenhower at Winfield House in London, September 1, 1959: ‘We were completely in the dark as to what Neville Chamberlain was going to do. I remember getting down on my knees the night before we finally declared war and praying, ‘Oh God, please let us go to war tomorrow’ […]!”[82]

Epilogue

The fact that this war, like the First World War, was about the struggle of big business with the nations was confirmed by the later Pope John XXIII. He knew, just as did the Archbishop of New York, Cardinal Faley, before him about the First World War, that the coming war would be a war between international capital and the dynasties. He wrote to his family from Athens on December 11, 1942:

“I do not repeat to you what I have already told you on other occasions: speak little of war and of the guilt of one or the other, for all have sinned, and they will all be called, one by one, to repentance. Each of us must atone for himself. But one thing is certain: the present war is the war of the rich against the poor, of the well-fed against those who struggle to live, of the capitalist against the worker.”

The fact that war is always a war of the rich against the poor was also confirmed by theology professor Dr. Dr. Johannes Ude:[83]

“We all want peace. Even those who wage wars want peace.

We all know that: Human happiness can only flourish in peace. Only in peace can culture develop. Only peace guarantees a humane existence for all people, but never war. […], if we honestly and sincerely want peace, we must eliminate capitalism. Because capitalism is the main cause of wars. As long as capitalism dominates our economy, there will and must be wars.

It is not difficult to prove this. Because capitalism is nothing other than an interest economy. But interest is the great criminal of society and the economy, of domestic and foreign policy, which constantly disrupts national and international relations and does not shy away from abusing even religion for its own selfish ends. But in the pursuit of ever more unemployed profit, the big capitalists on the world market clash with each other, violence stands against violence. They are arming. Armies are mustered. All technology is put at the service of violent defense. The press is bribed and bought. The governments themselves become ever more dependent on the financial kings. People are set against people. The war is here. But the peoples are told the lie that wars are a natural necessity, that they have to be waged for ‘God’, for ‘religion’, for the ‘emperor’, for the ‘fatherland’, for the ‘nation’, for ‘freedom’, and so on. And the peoples believe it and march, and the mass murder of people on command begins. Oh you stupid, you deceived peoples! Do you not see that wars only create new opportunities for the exploitation of capitalism? That is why the bloody international of armament capitalism always ensures that wars are waged. For in the final analysis, all wars are nothing other than planned business ventures of internationally organized finance capital to achieve enormous profits for the beneficiaries of war. Wars are the most beautiful and profitable ventures for the exploitation of interest on the grandest scale.”

About the Author

Georg Wiesholler, born on July 13, 1919 as the son of the married farmers Georg and Maria Wiesholler from Chieming on Chiemsee (house name “Denglhamer“), worked on his parents’ farm after attending elementary school, then volunteered for labor service and the navy. Soon in opposition to National Socialism, he fled to Sweden, worked for a farmer in Hagbyhamn (Harald Andersson) and attended the agricultural school in Hammenhög (Skåne). After the war, he attended a Swedish university-access school and, after passing the final exam, attempted to return to (West) Germany. Since his Swedish university-access diploma was not recognized in Germany, he subsequently studies in Sweden. He passed the state examination for “higher teaching profession” in German, history and political science. Employed as a teacher at the Ising country school (Bavaria), he was dismissed after three years. He thus then Germany again with his wife and six children, but returned later, and was then employed as a teacher in Leer (East Frisia) until retirement.

Wiesholler wrote several German-language books and pamphlets, most of which he published himself. One of his pamphlets was published by a German mainstream publisher: Die verhinderte Demokratie: Eine Abrech­nung (Democracy Thwarted: A Reckoning), Haag + Herchen, Frankfurt on Main, 1994 (https://search.worldcat.org/title/32386184).

Editor’s remark: I used to be in regular contact with Georg Wiesholler before my long-term incarceration in Germany in late 2005. While I was in prison for my historical writings, Georg donated £300 in August 2008 to me, at age 89. I learned this only after I had served my time and had managed to return to the United States in the summer of 2011, while entering into my new database the written records kept by my wife and by several friends in the UK and Germany, of all the donations generously made by the many friends who had supported me and my family during that ordeal. This donation is the last trace I have of Georg. I suppose that, by the time I learned of his generosity, Georg had passed on.

Although Georg was opposed to National-Socialism and avoided persecution by the Third Reich’s authorities only be fleeing into exile, he always distinguished between opposition to an ideology and regime from love and loyalty to his fatherland. Many Germans could not and still cannot keep these two things apart. Georg could. He was a great man and a dear friend.

Germar Rudolf.

Endnotes