The Grand Alliance

The Grand Alliance
Winston Churchill


This is the third in Churchill’s series of which I purchased the original publication of the whole set for fourteen dollars at a used book store in New York City. In this book the reader becomes intimately acquainted with the British experience of WWII during the period between the collapse of France and the alliance with the United States. As Churchill would say, this is the time when we would go it alone. What first catches the readers eye as impressive is how Churchill communicated and held consensus with his people, cabinet, the ministers, the War Council, the Prime Ministers of the British Empire, the Viceroys of India, Israel, Singapore, and Egypt., The Generals of the Home Army, the field Generals of The Mediterranean, North Africa,, India, the Heads of State in the conquered countries, The Heads of State of the free World, and saved time for private dialogue with Franklin Roosevelt, his King majesty, and then saved more time for his wife. I have read books that take a critical attack or a lesser passing swipe at Churchill and can only conclude that they were selfish authors for an audience and mad ( to sound British)at the same time.

I think the real plot of this tale of 1941 – 42 was found with the falling dominoes of Europe. Churchill, though try as he may, could not muster enough to stop Hitler’s advance. It give birth to the Domino Theory of the 1950’s. The book details the strategy of Churchill, and glosses over Hitler’s. You are left with the impression that the German Warmacht (war machine) was the prime strategy. It was indeed a Clawsitezian strategy that worked until the machine of his foe out produced him. So one is puzzled as to why Hitler turned to Russia without first consolidating his gains.

Churchill endeavors to make a case, modest though it may be, that it was his strategy of continuous annoyance in the Mediterranean and in North Africa that simply mesmerized Hitler with British valor and chivalry in the face of certain defeat. Meanwhile was it Hitler’s thinking leave him at bay while he looked East to defeat a people he had nothing but hatred toward? Hitler hated Stalin and was impressed with Churchill. He literally felt that by defeating Russia, Churchill would come to his senses and sue for armistice.

The question becomes was it strategy or failed strategy that prevailed? In the end we now see that it was Churchill that prevailed, but not because of Churchill’s strategy of maneuver but his strategy to hold on long enough for the United States to join in the fight. The strategy that failed was Hitler’s sense of an invincible warmacht that in reality failed him. And likely it was the strategy of the Gods as in winter that really prevailed. The reader eventually becomes aware that Hitler’s failure to formulate a sound alliance with Japan was as much a tribute to failed strategy as was the strategy to keep pressing his warmacht against Russia’s winter. So failure in Stalingrad and Moscow combined with Pearl Harbor brought a formidable opponent for Hitler to deal with. Hitler did not conceive the notion that even though the United States were attacked by Japan the Grand Alliance would hatch the strategy of Germany first. This strategy was first in the mind of Churchill and then through a deep private exchange of letters that found fertile soil in the mind of Roosevelt.

When looking at where a Head of State should have best spent his time, the reader learns that it first belongs to his own people and then international politics. Here is where Churchill excelled. He first built a Home Army and at every step incorporated Captains of industry to run the supply chain to a war machine. Production and supply chain management was that of civilian energy leaving war strategy to the benefiting Generals. In the international front, Churchill first looked to the appropriate Heads of State in each of his dominions. Second, during this time frame he looked to Roosevelt, and finally he spent time with the rest of the world. There became a time where the world was accusing Britain of roping them in to their fight. Then contrast this to Hitler who dictated to first his army through official orders, then his people through the lecture and press, and then the world through his warmacht. It was a battle for the world where Hitler lost it all and Churchill’s world empire saw the dawn of a new world order.

Britain is now an island country as opposed to a country who’s “fertile crescent” ran up the east coast of Africa, spanned the Middle East and then ran back down the Asian contenant to include India, ending up in Australasia. Against the world order pre WWII, contrast the belligerents and bring Japan and Italy in to the fold. Imagine Germany spanning from the English Channel, through the Middle East to Korea. Imagine Japan spanning the South Asia. Would India have been spared? Imagine Italy owning all of Africa. Should the United States have joined that axis, the western hemisphere would be her natural land grab. This was Rudolph Hess’s dream described in its own chapter.

Churchill brings in a chapter of the Rudolph Hess intrigue that leaves the reader with food for thought. How would Hitler’s Germany have handled today’s Muslim problem? Imagine the post two WWII juggernauts of industry owning three quarters of the worlds resources. How would they have dictated world culture? Certainly English would not be the world’s international business language. Certainly capitalistic democracies would not exist. There would be no USSR, China, France, or Britain. (all major votes in the United Nations) Would strict conformity to two basic leaders have brought on a world peace that is today still a dream? Would the United States have been rendered in Splendid Isolation in her western hemisphere? Free from the obligation of the world’s policeman. Free to continue is pursuit of capitalistic democracy, un-encumbered with the pressures of European socialism. Would an isolated Western Hemisphere leaped ahead of a war torn world that would not receive the recovery assistance they received? I only pose these scenarios as a prelude to the question especially to those who make sport of criticizing Churchill: Is Churchill the man or the goat of humanity’s twentieth century? I welcome your answer.

Churchill catch phrases:
• Nemesis personifies “the Goddess of Retribution"' who brings down all immoderate good fortune, checks the presumption that attends it... And is the punisher of extraordinary crimes.
• In somber wars of modern democracy chivalry finds no place. Dull butcheries on a gigantic scale and mass effects overwhelm all detached sentiment.

Below is a bibliography. Notes that influenced my reaction to the book. Integrated with the notes are specific reactions of mine that may be worth reading.

Page 5... We felt free to send over seas all troops... To wage
offensive war in the Middle East and the Mediterranean. Here was the
hinge on which our ultimate victory turned.

Page 17.... General Smuts to Prime Minister; The question is whether
Germany can afford to set the Balkans ablaze with Russia in
incalculable factor and Turkey hostile. The Italian defeat in Africa
and Greece, together with the failure of the Gamma Air Force against
Britain, have profoundly changed the position, and German
concentrations may only be intended to pacify the Italians, and to
lure British forces away from Britain, where the main attack has to be
made.

Page 19 Prime Minister to General Wavel. Nothing must hamper
capture of Tobruk, bit there after all operations in Libya are
subordinated to aiding Greece up to he limits prescribed.

Page 21 Prime Minister to General Smuts. Weather, maintains, Danube
crossing, fortified Greek-Bulgarian frontier, all helpful factors.
Turkey, Yugoslavia, Russia, all perhaps favorably influenced by
Evidences of British support of Greece.

Whatever happens in the Balkans, Italian army in Abyssinia probably
destroyable. If this should come off, everything useful from Kenya
should go forward to Mediterranean.

Page 30...if Hitler had been able, with hardly a fight, to bring
Greece to her knees and the whole of the Balkans into his system and
the force Turkey to allow the passage of his armies to the south and
east, might he not have made terms with the Soviets upon the conquest
and partition if these vast regions and postpone his ultimate
inevitable quarrel with them to a late part of his program? Or as
is more likely, would he not have been able to attack Russia in great
strength at am earlier date? The main question which the ensuing
chapters will probe and expose is whether His Majesty's Government by
their action influenced in a decisive or even in an appreciable manner,
Hitler’s movements in Southeast Europe and moreover whether that action
did not produce consequences first upon the behavior of Russia and
next upon her fortunes.

Page 32... The Reich Government believed that this action (troop
movement in the Balkans) was serving Soviet interest as well, which
would be opposed to England's gaining a foothold in these regions.

Page 42. His [Hitler's] optimistic time-table assumed that the Soviets
like the French, would be overthrown in a six-week campaign and that
all German forces would then be free for the final overthrow of
Britain in the autumn of 1941. Meanwhile the obstinate nation was to
be worn down first by the combination of the U-boat blockade sustained
by long range air, and secondly, by air attacks upon her cities and
especially the ports. For the German army "Sea Lion" was replaced by
"Barbarossa". The German Navy was instructed to concentrate on our
Atlantic traffic and the German Air Force on our harbors and their
approaches. This was far a more deadly plan than indiscriminate
bombing of London and the civil population, and it was fortunate
forbid that it was not pursued with all available forces and greater
persistence.

The conquest of Italy in Africa exposed the strategic consequence of
Britain's effort. The reader of 2010 is made aware of the mapping of
world power in the final days of the colonial period that in my
opinion only ended with Vietnam. The chapter was described as a
perquisite though not main thrust at either Italy or Germany. The
prime strategic advantage was the control of the Eastern
Mediterranean. Learning of the collapse of Italy's aspirations of a
larger Roman Empire was added largely as Churchillean historic drama.

My comment: In the chapter on Greece the reader realizes the immediate benefit of the conquest of Italy in Africa and also realizes that this victory was a mere pittance of strategic advantage against a larger and more mature German war machine. The strategy of England and Germany is revealed from a Churchill view. While Churchill clearly knew what England could bring to the table was too little too late, he very much realized the diplomacy required to sway Turkey and Yugoslavia to stand with the allies. Reading this chapter on the heels of the Rudolph Hess chapter this reader at least romanticized the consequence of Hess's view. That being a main land Germany/Europe, an Italian/Rome in north Africa and the English Empire from South Africa up the east coast of that continents, across the Middle East, through India and ending in Austral-Asia with Canada as a kicker. One has to wonder first why Churchill wouldn't have given that serious consideration and more-so why Hitler pursued Soviet Russia as opposed to the Balkans. Clearly the Balkans and Hess's dreams were obtainable. Imagine Germany owning all the oil. It becomes clear that the personalities of both Hitler and Churchill weighed in on the fate of the whole world and millions of lives.

While the above is an impression left on the reader, Churchill makes it very clear the importance of international diplomacy to engage a vacillating Greece, Greece did nit want British help as it was too little too late. Yet Greece needed her help for fear of certainty against a German war machine building in Bulgaria. In the end the English engagement struck the right diplomatic chord but the reader is led to believe that Eastern Europe fate was forestalled only through Hitler's turn northeast to Russia where history tells the rest.

Page 121: again this reader finds evidence of a questionable German
character:

Meanwhile the Hipper [German] had fallen upon a homeward-bound Sierra
Leone convoy near the Azores which had not yet been joined by an
escort. In a savage attack lasting an hour she destroyed seven out of
nineteen ships, making no attempt to rescue survivors, and regained
Brest two days later.

My Comment: One could argue that Hipper left the rescue to the remaining convoy and here may lay German stay of conviction. In my view against the plethora of German atrocity this question is worth probing. One could begin with examining German orders, German SOP, and looking at German code of conduct with the rest of the tonnage they sent to the bottom of the sea.

Page 184: in a minutes document from Ribbentrop to Japan’s Matsuoka
on 27 March 1941 disposition the status of Germany's war, he
concludes:

If, then, we summed up the military situation in Europe we should come
to the conclusion that in the military sphere the Axis was completely
master of Continental Europe. A huge army, practically idle, was at
Germany's command, and could be employed at any time and at any place
the Fuhrer considered necessary.

My comment: Why Russia? Here is the probing with evidence presented by Churchill. There was only a modest resistance in Greece. The victory in Africa was minor and a turn for Germany would throw England back out. Spain could be had by Germany even over reluctance from Franco.

Why did Hitler not work with Japan to first consolidate his position and then second have a formidable alley in Japan to take on his despised Russians from the east while he would consolidated power from the west? This would have knocked out England for sure, without drawing in the United States. I have read elsewhere of Hitler’s deep regard for the English. Was it Hitler's regard that caused refrain
from the finishing blows to England? Or did Hitler despise Bolshevism and Russian Jews so much as to make such a critical strategic mistake? Did the personal views of one man bring the Third Reich to it's knees fir never to be a Forth Reich.

Page 188: [said Matsuoka]. The ideological struggle in Japan was
extremely bitter, but those who were fighting for the restoration of
old ideals were convinced they would finally win. The Anglo-Saxons
represented the greatest hindrance to the establishment of the New
Order. He had to Stalin that after the collapse of the British
Empire the differences between Japan and Russia would be eliminated.
The Anglo-Saxons were the common foe of Japan, Germany, and Soviet
Russia. After some reflection Stalin had stated that Soviet Russia
had never got along with Great Britain and never would.

My comment: if the natural allies were as such, imagine the world
powers today if Hitler had not turned on Russia and Japan had not
attacked Pearl Harbor. Neither of those two strategic made military
sense let alone international sense of power.

Page 200: [Churchill of General Rommel]. In somber wars of modern
democracy chivalry finds no place. Dull butcheries on a gigantic scale
and mass effects overwhelm all detached sentiment. Still, I do not
regret or retract the tribute I paid to Rommel, un fashionable though
it was judged.

My comment: when the reader comes to appreciate the time frame of
decisions being the first six months of 1941, the questions of
Hitler's decision on Russia became influenced by his megalomaniac
illusions of world power. Hitler already had in mind enough power to
easily sweep in through Churchill's back door in North Africa, of
which he did anyway [Tobruk]. This made Greece and the Balkans look easy and afforded the march on Moscow. None the less this was a lot of fast moving
world strategic decisions for any one man. Churchill makes mention of
this and pays tribute to the machine that fed him the information.
Tribute aside the amount of information and decisions made are/were
daunting, while being bombed nightly.

Page 229: of the decision to fight on in Greece Churchill’s position;
I am most reluctant to quit, and if the troops were British only and
the matter decided on military grounds alone, I would urge Wilson to
fight if he thought possible. Anyhow before we commit ourselves to
evacuation the case must be put squarely to the Dinions after
tomorrow's Cabinet. Of course, I do not know the conditions in which
our retreating forces will reach the new key position

My comment: contrast page 229 with the leadership methods of Hitler.
One of deference to Generals in conjunction with consensus of the
Cabinet as opposed to a pure dictator.

Page 233: from April 21 until the end of the evacuation twenty-six
ships were lost by air attack. Twenty-one of these were Greek and
included five hospital ships.

My comment: did German dive bomber pilots know they were bombing
defenseless hospital ships? Of everything I have read to date, I
suspect they knew and indiscriminately bombed away.

Page 265: on a successful Iraq campaign; The Germans, of course, at
a their disposal an airborne force which could have given them at
thus time. Syria, Iraq, and Persia, with their precious oil fields.
Hitler's hand might have reached out very far towards India, and
beyond to Japan. He had chosen, however, as we shall soon see, to
employ and expand his prime air organism in another direction
[Russia]. We often hear military experts inculcate the doctrine of
giving priority to the decisive theater [Clawswitz]. There is a lot
to this. But in war this principal, like all others, is governed by
facts and circumstance, otherwise strategy would be too easy. It
would become a drill book and not an art; it would depend upon rules
and not on an instructed and fortunate judgment of an ever changing
scene. Hitler certainly cast away the opportunity of taking a great
prize for little cost in the Middle East. We in Britain, although
pressed to the extreme, managed with scanty forces to save ourselves
from far reaching or lasting injury.

My comment: this agrees with and at the same time challenges the
American policy of Clawswitz that prevailed in the decision for
Normandy as opposed the Lubjana Gap strategy in Yugoslavia. I
could argue that either location would have been the main thrust of
the war. But who I really see is the prime strategic player was
always Hitler of which all others countered.

Page 301: they [British refugee soldiers] and the Greek soldiers were
succored by the villagers and country folk, who were mercilessly
punished whenever detected. Barbarous reprisals were made upon
innocent or valiant peasants, who were shot by the twenties and
thirties. It was for this reason that I proposed to the Supreme War
Council three years later, in 1944, that local crimes should be
locally judged, and accused persons sent back for trial on the spot.
The principal was accepted, and some outstanding debts were paid.

My comment: Would Germany, winners or losers as they were, have initiated
the same justice? I have come across no evidence that would support
an affirmative answer.

Page 311: [Bismarck's fatal decision ]. She had the choice of
returning home victorious [after sinking the Hood, to repair her
severe oil leak as well], with all the options of further enterprises
open, or going to almost certain destruction. Only the extreme
exaltation of her Admiral or imperious orders by which he was bound
can explain the desperate action which he took.

Page 319: It was the cruiser Dorestshier that delivered the final
blow [to the Bismark] with torpedoes, and at 10:40 the great ship
turned over and foundered. With her perished nearly two thousand
Germans and their Fleet Commander, Admiral Lutjens. One hundred and
ten survivors, exhausted but sullen, were rescued by us. The work of
Mercy was interrupted by the appearance of a U-boat and the British
ships were compelled to withdraw.

My comment: The British had enough ships to sink the U-boat and rescue
the survivors. But they deferred to the humanity of the survivors as a
priority. The difference between Germans and the English.

Page 352: Nemesis personifies “the Goddess of Retribution"' who
brings down all immoderate good fortune, checks the presumption that
attends it... And is the punisher of extraordinary crimes

My comment: of the finest yet obscure Churchillian phrases to mark down and make reference to in moments of vengeance and revenge.

Page 369: [in choosing the lesser of two evils on the eve of
Germany's invasion of the USSR] ... 'I have only one purpose, the
destruction of Hitler, and my life is much simplified thereby. If
Hitler invaded Hell I make at least favorable reference to the Devil
in the House of Commons.'

My comment: a classic Churchill quote though not so well known

My comment: as I read on into Book 3 of this Volume, I'll be looking for the first vestiges of the Domino Theory of Kennen circa 1950s. Was it apparent in Churchill's mind long before Keenen and US international policy.

Page 431 on Sunday morning August 10, Mr Roosevelt came aboard the HMS
Prince of Wales and, with his Staff officers and several hundred
representatives of all ranks of the United States Navy and Marines,
attended Divine Service on the quarterdeck. This service was felt by
us to be a deeply moving expression of the unity in faith if our two
peoples, and none who tool part in it will forget the spectacle
presented that sunlit morning on the crowded quarterdeck - the
symbolism of the Union Jack and the Stars and Stripes side by side.,,,

My comment: You often hear the cliché claim that religion starts wars. This passage exemplifies my rebottle to such comment. Here you find that religion did not start any war but rather it was a common unity found in religion that helped two peoples endure a war. If this were today’s Britain’ Brown and our Obama, would such a ceremony occur?

Page 440:[on positioning with Japan, in the first meeting of Churchill
and Roosevelt of the coast of Newfoundland]. At the end if the Note
which the President will hand to the Japanese Ambassador when he
returns from his cruise in about a week's time he will add the
following passage, which was taken from my draft: "Any further
encroachment by Japan in Southwest Pacific would produce a situation
in which the United States Government would be compelled to take
counter measures, even those might lead to war between the United
Statea and Japan."

My comment: Here you find Churchill manipulating Roosevelt? Was that
Note passed on? Was that Note an invitation to Pearl Harbor? Were we,
Imperialist of the Philippines, accomplices with Great Britain,
Imperialists of Singapore, [claimed in the previous chapter to be more
vital to England that Egypt] in a threat to impede Japan's Imperial
aspirations?

Imagine a world map where Imperial Germany extended across the Middle
East to include all of India and half way across Russia., to meet up
with Imperial Japan, who 40 years earlier was at war with Russia and
now the conquerors of China. Then Italy would own all of Africa. The
Western Hemisphere would today be working as partners with Japan,
Italy, and Germany. The Middle East would be their problem.
Communism and the Cold War with all is ancilary wars including Korea
and Vietnam would have never happened. Russia, China, and England
would NOT be in existance let alone sitting at the top five security
table. How different would our problems be today? Would the be the
same only with different names?

Page 459: [Prime Minister to Monsieur Stalin 4 Sept 41]
We are ready to make joint plans with you now. Whether British
armies will be strong enough to invade the mainland of Europe during
1942 must depend on un foreseeable events. It may be possible however
to assist you in the extreme North when there is more darkness. We
are willing to raise our armies in the Middle East to a strength of
three- quarters of a million before the end of the present year, and
there after to a million by the summer if 1942. Once the German-
Italian forces in Libya have been destroyed, all these forces will be
available to come into line on your southern flank....,

My comment: history shows Stalin requesting a second front to
distract and dilute the German effort on Russia. A year later the
Americans pushed a second for Clawzwitizian reasons. Why a flanking
maneuver from the south after the Allied win back Africa and defeated
Italy was not pursued is yet to be sorted out in this readers mind.
Churchill's vision of 1941 was over run by his Allied partners. We
merely armed The USSR to first survive and then to consolidate her
victory in the counter attack to rule Eastern Europe for 50 years.
Churchill who fought alone for two years found his vision and strategy
stymied by two powers that would build nuclear muddled that would fly
over Churchill’s empire that is reduced to an island country. This was
the humble reward for the man that saved the world firm Hitler.

Page 480: it was clear from their message of August 6 1941 that the
Persians would not meet our wishes regarding the expulsion of German
agents and residents from their country, and that we would have to
resort to force. The next stage was to coordinate our plans,
diplomatic and military with those of the Russians

My comment: this represents why I say that our troubles with Iran
first start with the British. Iranians do not trust the British
because if their oil agenda openly discussed in this chapter of the
book. They equally don’t trust the Russian because of their conquest
aspirations. The prefer the United States yet our association with
Britain over the years has tainted their appreciation for our culture.

Page 583: in 1936 Japan had concluded with Germany the Anti-
Comintern Pact, which was originally negotiated by The Japanese War
Ministry, with Rippentrop representing the Nazi Party behind the backs
of both the then Foreign Ministers. This was not yet an alliance, buy
it provided the basis for one. In the spring of 1939 the Army
Ministers in the Cabinet, headed by Baron Hiranuma, tried to conclude
a full military alliance with Germany. He failed owing to the
opposition of the Navy Minister, Admiral Yonai. In August, 1939,
Japan not only engaged in the war with China which had begun in July,
1937, but was also involved in localized hostilities with Russia about
the boundary between the newly created State if Manchukuo and Outer
Magnolia. Alondra and behind this smoldering front large armies
lay. When, on the eve of European War, Germany made her Non-
Aggression Pact with Russia without consulting or informing Japan, her
Anti-Comintern partner, the Japanese felt with reason that they had
been ill-used. Their dispute with Russia fell into the background,
and Japanese resentment against Germany was strong. British support
and sympathy for China had estranged us from our former ally [Japan]
and during the first few months of the European war our relations with
Japan were already by no means friendly. There us however in Japan
little or no enthusiasm for Germany.

My comment: and there you have a explanation why Japan remained
fundamentally isolated from all World Powers in her quest to become
The World Power

Page 586: the drastic application of economic sanctions in July 1941,
brought to a head the internal crisis I. Japanese

Embargo imposed by Britain, United States, and Holland

Page 628: 5 Jan 42 [Eden to Churchill from Moscow]
...At my first conversation with M. Stalin and M. Molotov on December
16 M. Stalin set out in some detail what he considered should be post
war territorial frontiers in Europe and in particular his ideas of the
treatment of Germany. He proposed the restoration of Austria as an
independent state and the detachment of the Rhineland from Prussia as
an independent state or a protectorate, and possibly the constitution
of an independent State of Bravaria. He also proposed that East
Prussia should be transferred to Poland and the Sudetenland Land
returned to Czechoslovakia. He suggested that Yugoslavia should be
restored, and even receive certain additional territories from Italy;
and that Turkey should receive the Dodeanese, with possible
adjustments in favor of Greece as regards islands in the Aegean
important to Greece. Turkey might also receive certain districts in
Bulgaria, and possibly also in Northern Syria. In general the
occupied including Czechoslovakia and Greece, should be stored to
their pre-war frontiers, and M. Stalin was prepared to support any
special arrangements for securing bases for the United Kingdom in
Western European countries....As regards to the Soviet Union, M Stalin
desired the restoration of the position in 1941, prior to the German
attack in respect to the Baltic States, Finland, and Bessarabia. The
Curzon Line should firm the basis for furrier Soviet-Polish frontier.

My comment: Here you find clear argument in the political
perspective that A dominant powerful USSR would take any land she
could get. And while she was weak willing to make enormous
concessions. Thus our American insistence on a Normandy invasion over
Churchill's Lubjana Gap invasion in Yugoslavia allowed Russia to be
come powerful in Eastern Europe during WWII setting the stage for a
fifty-year Cold War

Rise and Fall of the Third Reich

Rise and Fall of the Third Reich
By William Shirer

There are few threads of thought to consider in this book. First there is a prevailing theme throughout the book represented by the German word lebensraum, meaning “more land.” For the people of neighboring lands an onslaught of terror was felt. Hitler’s original goal was always to conquer Russia and the Slavs as he despised Communism and the Jews that were driving the Russian state of mind as he believed it to be. This belief took root in him as a vagabond in Austria where he felt oppressed by Jewish merchants and businessmen. Secondly and ironically he always looked to the East and waged war with the West, presumably out of some poorly thought out strategy. While he held a vengeance towards France, he was willing to leave England and the West alone. Albeit his actions of bombing London for months on end contradicted even that of his many shallow convictions. Third was a theme that became a consistent irony was one where on the eve of every onslaught upon a neighboring country, leaders held out hope that “it would not happen”. One could make an argument in defense of Poland and perhaps even France individually, but collectively the world leaders could not gain consensus on eminent threats or preventive action. They had to wait until the fox was in the hen house. Fourth, I am left aghast at Neville Chamberlain as he sold out the Austrians and the Czechs, but more so, the world leaders who through silence allowed this to happen. After closing the last page in this book I stand even more firmly in my view that this world of ‘East’ or ‘West’ ideologies owes a world of tribute and gratitude to Sir Winston Churchill. Finally, though the book incriminates Hitler, it is also about German people with Hitler as their representative and scapegoat of the servant German mind. They had eleven hundred years of practice through the first and second Reich’s, and shallow convictions seemed to loom just below the surface of the German people of this time as well.

I read this book with the purpose to better understand the “collective conscience” or, better said, “collective unconsciousness” of the German mind. I was rewarded with a history that provided a multi faceted accounting that indicts not just Hitler’s regime but also the German people. Fundamentally there are a couple characteristics in German philosophy that enabled the madness of Hitler’s mind to prosper. In the book the reader begins to understand the mind of Hitler and to also appreciate that his madness was not single-minded. Before him came a long line of German history & philosophers that not only influenced Hitler, but the German people as well. Hitler had in his favor great oratory skills to convey and congeal a German collective conscious, harvested from already fertile soil. At Hitler’s determent he lacked the skills to see the world in a way that he could achieve his goals. Along with Hitler’s alchemy of words the crucible event that enabled a willing audience was the legendary stab-in-the-back the German people felt, and emphatically felt by Hitler, with the Armistice that concluded the First World War. Germans felt betrayed by their leaders in 1919. Hitler brought German honor [a deceitful and conflicted mind, compelling me to read further back beyond this book] back from the hibernation.

Hitler’s conquest strategy included propaganda and sleuth diplomacy that were undermined by amateur war strategy and a complete misunderstanding of the world. With regard to war miscalculations, Hitler missed the mark on his understanding of the English and the Russian willingness to remain beaten. His delusional mind conspired against him to leave newly conquered territory undefended or a job not quite finished. This led him to over reach the capabilities of the Wehrmacht, (war machine)] and he eventually found his generals requesting a retreat and regroup.

So to exacerbate the situation Hitler held a fundamental flaw that he carried to his own death, which was to never surrender or retreat. When you look at the wisdom of Churchill’s Dunkirk –v- Hitler’s Stalingrad you find the fundamental error in Hitler’s war strategy. At a human drama level, it is interesting to note that Hitler’s experience in the Netherlands in WWI caused him to pause long enough for Churchill to get most of his army out of harm’s way. At the same time, and to Hitler’s credit as a man of his word, at his core belief he expected his soldiers to die for his country, not surrender, which led to German demise at Stalingrad. With an overwhelming mountain of evidence of his propensity for a contradicting word, there was one word or code he held himself to. This one word came as a detriment to many German lives through the war years, and it was exactly that same word, code of honor, that took his own life securing an end to the nightmare. His suicide right or wrong, was not an act of cowardice, but the final result of his most deeply held convictions.

The toughest aspect to read about was the chapter called “The New Order.” When reading about the Rise of the Third Reich you become impressed with facts that Hitler had a lot of help in all circles of German society. The Wehrmacht was not his first internal conquest, but subsequent to his assent to even the head of the Wehrmacht, he groomed even more help to conquer more lands. It is when you get to the New Order chapter; of the prosecution of Jewish Poles and conquered non Aryan people you become overwhelmed with the overall mentality the German people as represented by their collusion. First you read about the German soldiers actually executing people in horrid ways. As the nightmare continues you read about German businessmen like Krupp bidding on devices like gas chambers. You do not get to wake up from the nightmare until you read about German doctors performing medical experiments and then writing reports and giving lectures to the German medical society and no one raises a note of objection. Like a bad dream it continues with reading about the collection of jewelry and dental work form the death camp victims and then fenced through the Reich Bank and then filtered through German pawnshops to be purchased by Aryan German people. And the German people bought it! Hence the author closes this bad dream with the following quote:

Such, has been sketched in this chapter, were the beginnings of Hitler’s New Order; such was the debut of the Nazi Gangster Empire in Europe. Fortunately for mankind it was destroyed in its infancy – not by any revolt of the German people against such a reversion to barbarism but by the defeat of German arms and the consequent fall of the Third Reich.

I think it is very important for history students to clearly understand that the prime subject is the people of the Third Reich who held a philosophy that allowed Hitler to be their prime mover towards a blight that should hang over their heads for years to come. To simply blame it on Hitler would be a grave mistake. Austria appreciates this and makes it a crime for anyone to suggest publicly that those heinous crimes were not committed. As a valuable lesson of how they got there should be a lesson on how they and the world healed. I am not sure where that is written.

To help substantiate my question mark on the healing of a wounded society, I raise the intriguing passages of the conspirators, those who conspired to rid the world of Hitler, and specifically by 1944 when it was apparent that Germany would lose the war, the conspirators hatched yet another plot to overthrow Nazi Germany. This plot would derive another armistice that would preserve a pre Nazi Germany. After reading 1036 pages of atrocity, this reader had no sympathy for a group who a.) Was guilty of war crimes and b.) Displayed a sense of treason only when they felt doomed. It was on their minds though that a defeat of arms to the West would help them pass the blame on to the Nazi’s and absolve them of their crimes on the basis of they were following orders. Unfortunately the West took the bait as there developed a common interest in the prevention of Bolshevisms throughout Europe. The conclusion left, even in the face of Nuremberg Trials, too much history to be swept under the carpet. It is doing no one any good if these lessons are not taught to our youth. As poetic justice a 50 year sentence in Berlin and East Germany may have been the medicine required to cure the ailments of the German mind.

To keep my own perspective in check this book helped me see that the West can be considered anything of the British Empire while the East is all the rest. Looking briefly at British world history leaves me with more reading to do before putting just the Germans in check. It is now clearer to me that all the popular arguments for or against the Iraq war are flawed. I continue to find disappointment in those who vehemently only echo the shallow words of talking heads, without taking a deep look our grave moment in history. It is through reading this history that I find the ironically enlightened conclusion.

I read this book to gain perspective on the German mind that allowed such terror to exist in their land. From this perspective perhaps one could better apply a remedy to the terror imposed upon people in today’s world. Coincidently I saw the movie The Last King of Scotland where Forest Whitaker did a remarkable job transforming the terrorist myth of Edie Amien into a person full of fear. This book does an equivalent job with Hitler. The author sums up the many failed plots to overthrow Hitler with the following assessment of the German mind:

This paralysis of the mind and the will of grown-up men, raised as Christians, supposedly disciplined in old world virtues, boasting of their code of honor, courageous in the face of death on the battlefield, is astonishing, though perhaps it can be grasped if one remembers the course of German history, outlined in an earlier chapter, which made blind obedience to temporal rulers the highest virtue of Germanic man and put a premium on servility.

Who did they serve? Why did they serve? I have a saying that goes like this “desperate people do desperate things.” In their material world the Germans felt desperate in consideration of their new lot in post First World War circumstance. Today’s instruments of world terror, despite of their ideology [Islam] are desperate. Not because of any direct imposition of the West, but because of the oppression of their rulers. Their Imams shine a light on ‘salvation’ of sorts. Much like Hitler did in 1930. Much like what became the remedy for Germany was an undeniable defeat of arms, looms the world destiny today.

Alternatively, let’s look at their leaders. Could a conspiracy of sorts be hatched from this? Well, let’s look at Hitler one last time. According to the authors documentation there is a personal dynamic in Hitler that is exposed in his relationship with Eva Braun. She was his kept mistress through out his whole reign of power. Their love was also kept a closely guarded secret. It was a love only to be exposed in the end when they wedded and then purposely moved on to another existence. Why and what would the reader learn from this?

Hitler knew what he wanted so much so that he wrote a book, Mein Kampf. He was 100% dedicated to the purpose of his book that was solely born from a mind devoid of love. This book was a roadmap to his destiny. When he wrote the book Eva was not in his life and he was not about to make any adjustments to accommodate his heart. He would not allow distractions from the thoughts of his delusional mind. While he put is love on hold the rest of Germany did not, giving Hitler the focus and mental edge where in conjunction with his great oratory skills we was able to win the mind of a pre-occupied people. Pre-occupied with their own plight in life. Germany then fell under the spell of a loveless being, a creature with a mind that played tricks on itself. He was left with the power to remake the perfect world into his world as he held it in his mad mind.

Had Hitler recognized that a perfect world had already been created, had he been raised in a life that allowed this recognition, in a society devoid of corrupt philosophy, perhaps a person of Hitler’s oratory skill would have found his or her way to the pulpit bestowing heart felt peace and love. When you live only in your mind and without the benefit of love, beginning with yourself you eventually find fear. Fear that the world could be other than what is reality. Fear that you could be wrong and therefore you could be totally invalid as a human being. Is it possible to elevate the consciousness of the world leaders beyond fear?

All world leaders use diplomacy that for some reason does not carry the tune below. These words resonated with the hippies of my day. Then like many hippies, me included we became caught up in the real world of making a living. At the ripe age of fifty-one these words sound prophetic and the way to peace, in reflection. But at the same time I am not about to sit back and allow Ahmadinejad, Kim Jong Il, and a cartel other “axis” lunatics repeat history in the same way unlikely partners in crime did in the 1930’s and 40’s. Ironically, singing songs to these folks does not work; developing a collective consciousness hasn’t proved a timely solution. I hate to say it, but the only thing that brought a Reich of Germany around to peace to be a defeat of arms. There is no Fourth Reich..

Perhaps these words could be the sneak attack if enough of the world joined hands with the world leaders in the loop and sang it. But, perhaps I’m just a dreamer.

Imagine there's no heaven
It's easy if you try
No hell below us
Above us only sky
Imagine all the people
Living for today...
Imagine there's no countries
It isn't hard to do
Nothing to kill or die for
And no religion too
Imagine all the people
Living life in peace...
You may say I'm a dreamer
But I'm not the only one
I hope someday you'll join us
And the world will be as one
Imagine no possessions
I wonder if you can
No need for greed or hunger
A brotherhood of man
Imagine all the people
Sharing all the world...
You may say I'm a dreamer
But I'm not the only one
I hope someday you'll join us
And the world will live as one

I got these words off the Internet…oddly the one missing word is you.
Personally, I’d prefer to sing my way out of my next fight. And at the same time I am not willing to ignore history and lose my personal freedom in a chorus of bliss

I am including these end notes as I suspect most will not chose to endure this book. These notes are the seeds to my review. I am sure my review will not move you as the book would. You need to endure it, the nightmare, as so many did and actually still do. I may say though the book may not change the way you look at war…but will change your views on its cause. When you look at a human race that killed more people as a “civilized society” in the 20th century than ever before, something needs to change. That change is not necessarily in our heads.






End Notes
The back drop of Hitler’s eventual stage to power

1. p 23. Though Hitler was to forget it when he cam to power in Germany, one of the lessons o f his Vienna years which he stress, at great length in Mein Kampf is the futility of a political party’s trying to oppose the churches. “ Regardless of how much room for criticism there was in any religious denomination: he says, in explaining why Schoenerer’s Los-von Rom (Away from Rome) movement was a tactical error, “a political party must never for a moment lose sight of the fact that is all previous historical experience a purely political party has never succeeded in producing a religious reformation.
a. My reaction is first that all the “self help” and keys to “success books” tell the reader to have a plan. AND Hitler did… Mein Kampf. We should learn from this
2. p23 But it was the failure of the Pan-Germans to arouse the masses, their in ability to even understand the psychology of the common people, that to Hitler constituted their biggest mistake. (my comment) An assessment Hitler made at age 21.
3. p25 Though refraining from participation in Austrian party politics, young Hitler salready was beginning to practice his oratory on the audiences.
4. p31 Thus emerged for Hitler, as for so many Germans, a fanatical belief in the legend of “the stab in the back” which, more than anything else, was to undermine the Weimar Republic and pave the way for Hitler’s ultimate triumph.
a. This is reference to the way the leaders of Germany capitulated in WWI when the German people thought that war was winnable.
5. p53 Thus the German Republic born, as if by fluke. If the Socialist themselves were not staunch republicans it could hardly be expected that the conservatives would be. But the latter had abdicated their responsibilities. They and the Army leaders, Ludendorff and Hindenburg, had pushed political power into the hands of the Social Democrats. In doing so they managed to also place on the shoulders of these democratic working class leaders apparent responsibility for signing the surrender and ultimately the peace treaty, thus laying the blame for Germany’s defeat and for whatever suffering a lost war and a dictated peace might bring upon the German people. This was a shabby trick, but in Germany it worked.
6. p60 The masses of the people, however, did not realize how much the industrial tycoons, The Army and the State were benefiting from the ruin of the currency. All they knew was a large bank account could not but a straggly bag of carrots.

The Mind of Hitler
7. p 81 relative to Mein Kampf : But it might be argued that had more non Nazi Germans read it before 1933 and had the foreign statesmen of the world pursued it carefully while there was still time, both Germany and the world might have been saved from catastrophe.
8. p 90 A crude Darwinism? A sadistic fantasy? An irresponsible egoism? Megalomania? It was all these in part. But something more. For the mind and passion of Hitler- all aberrations that possessed his feverish brain – had roots that lay deep in German experience and thought. Nazism and the Third Reich, in fact, were but a logical continuation of German History.
9. p97 There had been among the Germans, to be sure, some of the most elevated minds and spirits of the Western World. Leibnitz, Kant, Herder, Humbildt, Lessing, Goethe, Schiller, Bach, Beethoven – and they made unique contributions to civilization in the West But he German culture that became dominant in the 19th century and which coincided with the rise of Prussian Germany, continuing from Bismark through Hitler, rests primarily on Fichte and Hagel …..and then on Treitschke, Nietzsche, Richard Wagner…the succeeded in establishing a spiritual break with the West: the breach has not been healed to this day.
10. p. 104 with regard to Houston Stewart Chamberlain: This son of an English admiral, nephew of a British field marshal, sir Neville Chamberlain, and of two British generals, and eventually son-in-law of Richard Wagner…was drawn irresistibly towards Germany of which he ultimately became a German citizen and became one of the foremost thinkers and in whose language he wrote all of his many books, several of which and an almost blinding influence on Wilhelm II, Adolf Hitler and countless lesser Germans. ….under Prussian influence was receptive to the glories of militant, conquering Prussia.
a. My reaction to this as you read about Neville Chamberlain giving away countries to Hitler…just what were they talking about in those meeting?
b. You read over and over Hitler never had aspirations for England or America. So much of Hitler’s life was deeply conflicted and fraudulent.

The Road to Power

11. p 117 Between 1924 and 1930 German borrowing amounted to some seven billion dollars and most of it came from American investors, who gave little thought to how the Germans might make eventual repayment. The Germans gave even less thought about it.
12. p 118 a Hitler quote: if out voting them takes longer than out shooting them (the opposition in political party) at least the result will be guaranteed by their own constitution.
a. My reaction, while you can claim the political landscape was manipulated by Hitler; the other parties played the same games and the German people did vote Hitler in to power.
13. p135 another quote of Hitler: there was to be no revolution to gain control of the State. That goal was to be reached by mandate of the voters or by consent of the rulers. To get that vote Hitler only had to take advantage of the times.
14. p144 Fritz Thyssen head of a German steel trust and many other industrial magnates invested into Hitler
15. p145 Dr Schact resigned from The Reichbank in 1930…and devoted the next two years of all his considerable abilities to bringing the Fuehrer closer his banker and industrialist friends

The Nazification of Germany

16. p198 The Reich enacted the Enabling Act – the law Removing Distress of the People an Reich as it was officially called. Its five brief paragraphs took the power of legislation, including control of the Reich budget, approval of treaties with foreign states and the initiating of constitutional amendments, away from Parliament and handed to over to the cabinet for a period of four years. More over the laws drafted by the Cabinet were to be drafted by the Chancellor (Hitler) and might deviate from the Constitution.
17. p205 a quote from Hitler “The revolution is not a permanent state of affair, and it must not be allowed into such a state. The stream of revolution released must be guided to develop into a safe channel of evolution.
18. p211 on foreign policy after Hitler left the Disarmament Conference in 1936: That the Allies at this time could have easily have overwhelmed Germany is a certain as it is that such an action would have brought an end to the Third Reich.


Life in the Third Reich

19. p 239 It would be misleading to give the impression that the persecution of Protestants and Catholics by the Nazi State tore the German people asunder or even greatly aroused the vast majority of them. It did not.
20. p 248 Often in a German home or office or sometimes in a casual conversation with a stranger in a restraint, a beer hall, a café, I would meet with the most outlandish assertions from seemingly intelligent persons. It was obvious that they were parroting some piece of nonsense they hade heard on the radio or read in a newspaper.
21. p 256 In such a manner were the youth trained for life and work and death in the Third Reich. Though their minds were deliberately poisoned, their schooling interrupted, their homes largely replaced so far as their rearing went, the boys and girls, the young men and women, seemed immensely happy, filled with zest for the life of a Hitler youth.
22. p259 General Ludendorf, in his book Total War ….published in Germany in 1935, had stressed the necessity of mobilizing the economy of the nation on the same totalitarian basis as everything else in order to properly prepare for total war.
23. p266 One particular swindle perpetrated by Hitler on the German workers deserves passing mention. ( interpreted by this author) This has to do with Volkswagon (the peoples car) …Hitler instigated a plan for the worker to commit from his wages 990 marks - $396 towards his own car…just like the Americans. Hitler took the money but the German people never saw their car.
24. p 267 what enabled the German mind to bend towards Hitler the author writes: In the past, for so many, for as many as six million men and their families, such rights of free men in Germany had been overshadowed, as he said, by the freedom to starve. In taking away the last freedom, Hitler assured himself of support of the working class

The Road to War

25. This great journal, one of the chief glories of English journalism, would plat, like the Chamberlain government, a dubious role in the disastrous British appeasement of Hitler. But to this writer, at least it has even less excuse than the government, for in its Berlin correspondent, Norman Ebbutt, it had, until he was expelled on August 16, 1937 a source of information about Hitler’s doings and purposes that was much more revealing than provided by other foreign correspondents …he much complained of both the “government and press” ( interpretation for efficiency) knowing what was really going on in Nazi Germany and how grandiose Hitler’s promises really were.
26. p 293 about the German defense capabilities in 1936: As General Jodl testified at Nuremberg, “considering the situation we were in, the French covering army could have blown us to pieces”
27. p 299 about Hitler in 1937: Most important of all, perhaps, he had released the dynamic energy of the German people, reawakening their confidence in a nation and their sense of mission as a great and expanding world power…..
28. p300 neither Great Britain and France, their governments and their peoples nor the majority of the German people seemed to realize as 1937 began that almost all that Hitler had done in his first four years was a preparation for war.
29. p 344 Chamberlain was quoted as saying that “what happened (at Berchtesgaden) was merely that two statesmen had agreed upon certain measures for the improvement of relations between two countries…It appeared hardly possible the to insist that just because two statesmen agree in the interest of relations between them – the one country had renounced its independence in favor of the other. …In view of the British Legation in Vienna, as I myself learned at the time, had provided Chamberlain with the details of Hitler’s Berchtesgaden ultimatum to Schuschnigg ( the Austrian Premier), this speech, which was made to the Commons on March 2, is astounding. But ir was pleasing to Hitler, He knew he could march into Austria without any complications with Britain.
30. p346 President Miklas of Autria testified that the Austrian government, which immediately had informed Paris and London of the German ultimatum, was continuing “conversations” with the French and the British governments through out the afternoon in order to ascertain their “frame of mind” When it became clear the their “frame of mind” was to do nothing more than utter empty protests, President Miklas a little before midnight, gave in. (to Hitler)
31. p 364 with regard to the Czechoslovakia: The furthest the British would go was to warn, as Dirksen says Halifax did, that : in the event of a European conflict it was impossible to foresee whether Britain would not be drawn into it”. As a matter of fact, this was as far as Chamberlains government would ever go – until it was too late to stop Hitler.
32. p 368 with regard to the German generals reluctance to war: [General Beck] “In full consciousness of the magnitude of such a step but also of my responsibilities I feel it is my duty to urgently of the armed forces ask the Supreme Commander [Hitler} call off his preparation for war.”… Beck took his memorandum to Brauchistich and augmented it orally with further proposals for unified action on the part of the Army generals….at the Nuremberg trials to the question : Did an officer have a higher allegiance than the one to the Fuehrer? Dozens of generals excused their war crimes by answering…they had to obey orders.
33. p 375 Alas for Beck, and for the future of most the world, it was Hitler and not the recently resigned Chief of the General Staff who proved to have the shrewder view of the possibilities of a big war.
34. p 376 Despite the angry questions in the House of Commons, the Germans noted, Chamberlain had not denied the veracity of the American dispatches….On June 1, the Prime Minister had spoken, partly off the record, to British correspondents, and two days later the Times had published the first of its leaders which were to help undermine Czech position…
35. p 376 It was on that day August 3, that Chamberlain had packed off Lord Ruciman to Czechoslovakia on a curious mission to act as “mediator” in the Sudeten crisis. I happened to be in Prague that day of his arrival and after attending the press conference and talking with members of his party remarked in my diary that “Runciman’s whole mission smells.
36. p 377 my diary notes for the first evening and subsequent days make it clear the Czechs knew perfectly well the Runciman had been sent by Chamberlain to pave the way for the handing over of the Sudetenland to Hitler. It was a shabby trick.
37. p 379 the German hesitation to move on Sudetenland: But they needed assurances of another kind – whether, after all, they had been right in their assumption that Britain and France would go to war against Germany if Hitler carry out his resolve to attach Czechoslovakia….the sent agents to London to not only find out what the British government intended to do but if necessary influence its decision bi informing it that Hitler had decided to attack in a certain date in the fall, and that the German Staff, which knew the date, opposed it and was prepared to take the most decisive action to prevent it if Britain stood firm against Hitler to the last.
38. p 386 with regard to a German [Hitler] proposal: “Would Britain agree to a secession of the Sudeten region, or would she not?… a secession on the right of self determination. The proposal did not shock Chamberlain. Indeed, he expressed satisfaction that they “ had now got down to the crux of the matter.” According to Chamberlains own account, from memory, re replied the he could commit himself until he had consulted his cabinet and the French. He also stated “ he could state personally the he recognized the principle of detachment of Sudeten areas…He wished to return to England to report to the Government and secure their approval of his personal attitude”
39. p 388 Lord Ruciman was summoned from Prague to make recommendations…He advocated transferring the predominantly Sudeten territories to Germany without bothering a plebiscite. [General election]
40. p 406 Theodor Kordt, counselor of the German Embassy in London, that day, confiding that the Prime Minister [Chamberlain] was prepared to go a long way to meet Hitler’s demands in the Sudetenland.
41. p 411 of the German generals prior to Czechoslovakia: Neville Chamberlain, they claimed, was the villain! By agreeing to come to Munich he forced them at the very last minute to call off their plans to overthrow Hitler and the Nazi regime!
42. p 426 Germany was in no position to go to war on October 1, 1938, against Czechoslovakia and France and Britain, not to mention Russia….Chamberlain’s stubborn, fanatical insistence on giving Hitler what he wanted, his trips to Berchtesgaden and Godsberg and finally the fateful journey to Munich rescued Hitler from his limb [being overthrown by his generals] and strengthened his position in Europe.

The Diplomacy Prior to Hitler’s Attack on Poland

43. p 465 on Chamberlain just before Hitler attacked Poland: Great Britain, France, backed by Russia, could have taken action to stop Hitler at very little cost to themselves. But peace-hungry Chamberlain had shied away from such moves.. Not only that he had gone out of his way, he had risked, as he said, his political career to help Adolph Hitler get what he wanted in neighboring lands. He had done nothing to save the independence of Austria. He consorted with the German dictator to destroy the independence of Czechoslovakia, the only truly democratic nation on Germany’s eastern borders and the only which was a friend to the West and which supported the League of Nations and the idea of collective security. He had not even considered the military value to the West of Czechoslovakia’s thirty-five well trained, well armed divisions entrenched behind strong mountain fortifications at a time when Britain could only put two divisions in France and when the German Army was incapable of fighting on two fronts and according to the German generals incapable of penetrating Czech defenses.

Now overnight, in his understandable bitter reaction to Hitler’s occupation of the rest of Czechoslovakia, Chamberlain, after having undertaken to unilaterally guarantee and Eastern country run by a junta of politically inept Colonels, who up to this moment had joined with the Germans in carving up Czechoslovakia and whose country had been rendered militarily indefensible by the very German conquest which Britain and Poland had helped the Reich to achieve. And he at the eleventh hour risk without bothering to enlist the aid of Russia, whos proposals for joint action against further Nazi aggression he had twice turned down within the year.

Finally, he had done exactly what for more than a year he had stoutly asserted that Britain would never do: he left it to another nation the decision whether his country would go to war.

44. p 477 with regard to Stalin’s position on Poland:
1. To continue to pursue a policy of peace and consolidation of economic relations with all countries
2. …Not to let our country be drawn into conflict by warmongers, whose custom is to let other pull their chestnuts out of the fire
This was a plain warning from the man who made all the ultimate decisions in Russia that the Soviet Union did not intend to be maneuvered into a war with Nazi Germany in order to spare Britain and France and it was ignored in London, it was at least noticed in Berlin.
44. p 480 The significance or Litvinov’s abrupt dismissal was obvious to all. It meant a sharp and violent turning in the Soviet foreign policy. Litvinov had been an archapostle of collective security, of strengthening of the power of the League of Nations, of seeking Russian security against Nazi Germany by military alliance with Britain and France. Chamberlains hesitations about such alliance were fatal to the Russian Foreign Commissar.
45. p 494 Stalin’s distrust of Britain and France and his suspicion that the Western Allies might in the end make a deal with Hitler, as that had the year before in Munich, was thus publicized for the world to ponder.
46. p 502 It was a well-founded impression. As the confidential British Foreign Office papers would make clear, the political talks in Moscow had reached an impasse by the last week in July largely over the impossibility of reaching a definition of “indirect aggression” To the British and French the Russian interpretation of that term was so broad that it might be used to justify Soviet intervention in Finland and the Baltic States even if there ware no Soviet threat, and this to London at least – the French were prepared to be more accommodating. – would not agree
47. p 508 If the Fuehrer considered war “inevitable” then Italy would stand by her side. But the Duce reminded him that war with Poland could not be localized; it would become a European conflict. Mussolini did not think this was a time for the Axis to start such a war. He proposed a constructive peaceful policy over several years.
48. p 515 “The great drama” Hitler told his listeners, “ is now approaching its climax” While political and military successes could not be had without taking risks, he was certain that Great Britain and France would not fight. For one thing, Britain “has no leaders of real caliber. “The men I got to know in Munich are not the kind that start a new world war.” As in previous meetings with his military chiefs the Fuehrer could not keep his mind of England’s and he spoke in considerable detail of her strengths and weaknesses, especially the latter
49. p 526 the mindset of USSR in signing the Nazi Soviet Pact: We formed the impression [said Stalin] that the British and the French Governments were not resolved to go to war if Poland were attacked, but that the hoped the diplomatic line-up of Britain, France and Russia would deter Hitler.
50. p 544 Stalin’s cynical and secret deal with Hitler to divide Poland and to obtain free hand to gobble up Latvia, Estonia, Finland, and Bessarabia was not known outside Berlin and Moscow, but it would soon become evident from Soviet acts and it would shock the rest of the world even at this late date. [1959]
51. p 561 Nobel in form and intent as all these neutral appeals were, this is something unreal and pathetic about them when reread today. It was as if the President of the United States, the Pope and the rulers of the small Northern European democracies lived on a different planet from that of the Third Reich and had no more understanding of what was going on in Berlin than what might be transpiring on Mars. This ignorance of the mind and character and purposes of Adolph Hitler, and indeed the Germans, who, with few exceptions were prepared to follow him blindly, no matter where or how, regardless of morals, ethics, honor, or the Christian concept of humanity, was to cost peoples led by Roosevelt, and the monarchs of Belgium, Holland, Luxembourg, Norway and Denmark dearly in months to come.
52. p 593 Sir Nevile Henderson’s [British ambassador to Germany] disillusionment seemed complete. Despite all his strenuous efforts to appease the insatiable Nazi dictator, his mission to Germany, as he called it, had failed….And though would suffer one more typical, incredible lapse the next day, the first day of the war, an ancient truth was dawning on him: that there were times and circumstance when, as he at last said, force must be met by force.
53. p 595 Hitler has been in a fine fettle all day. At 6P.M on August 31 General Halder noted in his diary, “Fuehrer; has slept well...Decision against evacuation [in the West shows that he expects France and England will not take action.

Admiral Canaris {German}...one of he key anti-war Nazi conspirators, was in a different mood. Though Hitler was carrying Germany into war, an action which the Canaris circle had supposedly sw orn to prevent, by getting rid of the dictator, there was no conspiracy in being now that the moment for it ad arrive.

The War
54. p 642 The Wilhelmstrausse, it is now known from secret German documents, was encouraged to believe by reports it was getting from Paris through Spanish and Italian ambassadors there that the French had no stomach for continuing the war.
55. p 643 On Oct 2, Attoloco [Italy) handed Weisaeker [German] the text of the latest message from the Italian ambassador in Paris, stating that the majority of the French cabinet were in favor of a peace conference and it was now mainly a question of “enabling France and England to save face”
56. p 710 in Norway: The Wehrmacht commanders – Goering, Brauchitsch, Halder, Keitel, Jodl, Raeder and the rest – had for the first time had a foretaste during the Norwegian campaign of how ther demonic Leader cracked under the strain of even minor setbacks in battle. It was a weakness which would grow on him when, after a series of further astonishing military success, the tide of the war changed, and it would contribute mightily to the eventual debacle of the Third Reich
57. p 710 For the remaining neutral states Hitler’s latest conquest was also a terrifying lesson. Obviously neutrality no longer offered protection to the little democratic nations trying to survive in a totalitarian – dominated world. Finland had just found that out- and now Norway and Denmark. They had themselves to blame for being so blind, for declining to accept in good time – before the actual aggression – the help of friendly world powers.
58. p 734 after sweeping through Belgium and in northern France: Hitler was in very good humor…and gave us his opinion that the war would be finished in six weeks. After the he wished to conclude a reasonable peace wit France and then the way would be free for an agreement with Britain…
59. p 748 on the speculation of America being drawn in: On June 12, for example he [Hans Tomsen German ambassador to the USA] cabled Berlin in code “ most urget, top secret” that a well-known Republican Congressman” who was working “closely” with German Embassy had offered $3,000, to invite fifty isolationist Republican Congressman to the Republican convention so that they may work on the delegates in favor of an isolationist foreign policy…the same Tomeson want $30,000 to place ads in newspapers headed “Kepp America Out of The War.
60. p 760 with regard to German views prior to Operation Sea Lion: Jodl recognized that the fight against the British Air Force must have top priority. But on the whole he thought this as well as other aspects of the assault could be carried out with little trouble. He said: “ Together with propaganda and periodic terror attacks, announced as reprisals, this increasing weakening of the basis of food supply will paralyze and finally break the will of the people to resist, and thereby force its government to capitulate.
61. p 760 prior to a land invasion of England’ There seem to have been at least two reasons for the delay. One was the belief at OKW that the bombing of London was causing too much destruction, both to property and to British morale and that invasion might not be necessary.
62. p 776 Now Goering made the first of his two tactical errors. The skill of the British Fighter Command in committing it planes to battle against vastly superior attacking forces was based on its shrewd use of radar.
63. p 780 in a Hitler talk to an applauding German women’s group: “when they declare” Hitler continues, “that the will increase their attacks on our cities, then we will raze their cities to the ground”. At this I noted the young ladies were quite beside themselves and applauded phrenetically.
64. p 803 Prior to Hitler’s turn to Russia: Ribbentrop gave a sly hint of the Four Powers – The Soviet Union, Italy, Japan, and Germany – to adopt a long range policy … by the delineation of their interest on a world wide scale.
65. p 816 on return from a trip to visit the Duce as the tide was changing: Hitler went north with a bitterness in his heart. He had been frustrated three times – at Hendaye, at Montoire, and now in Italy. In the lengthy winter evenings of the next few years these long exacting journeys were a constantly therme of bitter reproaches against ungrateful and unreliable friends, Axis partners and deceiving Frenchmen.
66. p 819 in an effort to gain Spanish support at the Rock of Gibraltar:… About one thing, Caudillo, there must be clarity: we are fighting a battle of life and death and cannot at this time make any gifts…The battle which Germany and Italy are fighting will determine the destiny of Spain as well. Only in the case of our victory will your regime continue to exist.
67. p 820 The Fuehrer is of the opinion [Raeder wrote] that it is vital for the outcome of the war that Italy does not collapse…He determined to …prevent Italy from losing North Africa.
68. p 821 It was at a war conference that Hitler described Stalin as “a cold blooded blackmailer” and informed his commanders that Russia would have to be brought to her knees “as soon as possible” “ If the USA and Russia should enter the war against Germany the situation would become very complicated. Hence any possibility for such a threat to develop must be eliminated at the very beginning. If the Russian threat were removed, we could wage war with Britain indefinitely. If Russia collapsed, Japan would be greatly relieved: this in turn would mean increased danger to the USA.
69. p 830 Hitler on the war with Russia: The war against Russia will be such that it cannot be conducted in a knightly fashion. This struggle is one of ideologies and racial differences and will have to be conducted with unprecedented, unmerciful and unrelenting harshness. The officers will have to rid themselves of obsolete ideologies.
70. p 833 Did any German, even one single German, protest against this planned ruthlessness, this well-thought-out scheme to put millions of human beings to death by starvation? In all the directives concerning the spoliation of Russia, there is no mention of anyone’s objecting – as at least some of the generals did in regard to the Commissar Order. These were not merely wild and evil fantasies of distorted souls such as Hitler, Goering, Himmler, and Rosengerg. For weeks and months, it is evident from the records, hundreds of Germans officials toiled away at their desks in the cheerful delight of the warm spring days, adding up the figures and composing memoranda which coldly calculated the massacre of millions.
71. p 839 the Soviets went out of their way to appease Berlin as the date of the German attack approached. Stalin personally took the lead on this.
72. p 846 Keitel testifies in Nuremberg the following quote on Hitler: The main theme was that this was the decisive battle between two ideologies and that practices which we knew as soldiers – the only correct ones under international law – had to be measured by a completely different standard.
73. p 850 Of Hitler’s strategy on invading Russia: We have no chance of eliminating America. But it does lie in our power to exclude Russia. The elimination of Russia means at the same time a tremendous relief for Japan in East Asia, and thereby the possibility of a much stronger threat to American activities through Japanese intervention.
74. p 867 when facing disaster on the road to Moscow: Hitler’s triumph over the Prussian officer corps was thus completed. The former Vienna vagabond and ex-corporal was now head of State, Minister of War, and Supreme Commander of the Armed Forces
75. p 868 Hitler’s fanatical order that the troops must hold fast regardless in every position and in the most impossible circumstances was undoubtedly correct. Hitler realized instinctively that any retreat across the snow and ice must, within a few days, lead to dissolution of the front and if that happened the Wehrmacht would suffer the same fate that had befallen the Grande Armee.
76. p 875 the Fuehrer coaxing Japanese aggression on the USA As to the United Staets America was confronted by three possibilities: she could arm herself, she could assist England, or she could wage war on another front. If she helped England she could not arm herself. If she abandoned England the latter would be destroyed and America would then find herself fighting powers of the Three-Power Pact alone. In no case, however, could America wage a war on another front. Therefore the Fuehrer concluded, never in human imagination could there be a better opportunity for the Japanese to strike in the Pacific than now.
77. p 883 Strangely enough, it never seems to have occurred to him [Hitler] or to anyone else in Germany until very late that Japan had her own fish to fry and that the Japanese might be fearful of embarking on a grand offensive in the Southeast Asia against British and Dutch, not to mention attacking Russia in the rear, until they secured their own rear by destroying the United States Pacific Fleet.
78. p 893 on Dec 8 1942: The Nazi Foreign Minister also informed the ambassador, according to the latter’s message to Tokyo, that on the morning of the eighth “ Hitler issues orders to the German Navy to attack American ships when-ever and where ever they meet them.
79. p 912 It was the darkest moments of the war for the Allies and correspondingly one of the brightest for the Axis. But Hitler, as we have seen, had never really understood global warfare.
80. p 916 The shifting of this powerful armored unit back to the drive on Stalingrad was one of the fateful decisions which Hitler made on July 23. His fanatical determination to take both Stalingrad and the Caucasus at the same time, against the advice of Halder and the field commanders, who did not believe it could be done, was embodied in Directive 45, which became famous in the annals of the German Army. It was one of the most fateful of Hitler’s moves in the war, for in the end, and in a very short time it resulted in failing to achieve either objective and led to the most humiliating defeat in the history of German arm, making it certain that he would never win the war and the days of the Thousand-year Third Reich were numbered.
81. p 917 The continual under estimation of enemy possibilities [Halder noted sadly in his diary that evening] takes on grotesque forms and is becoming dangerous. Serious work has become impossible here. Pathological reaction to momentary impressions and a complete lack of capacity to assess the situation and its possibilities give this so-called “leadership a most peculiar character.
82. p 923 For about twenty-four hours Hitler toyed with the idea of trying to make an alliance with France [occupied France] in order to bring her into the war against Britain and America and, at the moment to strengthen the resolve of the Petain government to oppose the Allied landings in North Africa. He probably was encouraged in this by the action of Petain in breaking off diplomatic relations with the United States …and by the aged French Marshal’s statement to the US charge d’affairs that his forces would resist an Anglo-American invasion.
83. p 932 on Hitler’s attitude towards his generals who surrendered rather that fight to the death on General Paulus: Hitler’s venom toward Paulus for deciding to live became more poisonous as he ranted on “ You have to imagine he’ll be brought to Moscow – and imagine that rattrap there. There he will sign anything. He’ll make confessions, make proclamations – you’ll see. The will now walk down the slop of spiritual bankruptcy to its lowest depths…
84. p 934 as the tide turned and Russia was on the march into Germany: For the first time the civilian German people, like the German soldiers at Stalingrad and El Alamein, were to experience the horrors which their armed forces, and inflicted on others up to now.
85. p 943 getting even : France was forced to pay 31.5 billions of total, its contributions of more than 7 billions coming four times the yearly sums which Germany had paid in reparations under the Dawes and Young plans after the first war – a tribute which seemed such a heinous crime to Hitler.

On the New Order
The Atrocities on Man Kind committed by the German People
A collective conscious...not of just Adolph Hitler
86. p 949 about the conditions of the slave labor camps: Dr. Jeager reported the situations of Krupp and even to the personal physician of Gustav Krupp von Bohlen und Halbach, the owner but in vain. Nor did his reports on other Krupp slave labor camps bring any alleviation.
87. p 951 Even the Slav women seized and shipped to Germany for domestic service were treated as slaves. As early as 1942 Hitler had commanded Saukel to procure a half million of them “ in order to relieve the German housewife” The slave labor commissar laid down the condition of work in the German house hold. “There is no claim to free time. Female domestic workers from the East may leave the household only to take care of domestic tasks…”
88. p 971 There had been the records show, some lively competition among German businessmen to procure orders for building these death and disposal contraptions and for furnishing the lethal blue crystals. The firm of A Topf and Sons of Erfut, manufacturers of heating equipment, won out in its bid for the crematoria at Auschwitz. The story of its business enterprise was revealed in a voluminous correspondence found in the records of the camp.
89. p 973 Of the deposits of the jewelry, and gold dental work removed from the dead victims of the death camps: The Reich bank, in fact was overwhelmed by “Max Heilger” deposits. With its vaults filled to overflowing as early as 1942, the bank’s profit minded directors sought to turn the holdings into cold cash by disposing of them through municipal pawnshops. [my words and the German public bought these items]
90. p 979 of the medical experiments: Although the “experiments” were conducted by fewer than two hundred murderous quacks – albeit some of them held eminent posts in the medical world – their criminal work was known to thousands of leading physician of the Reich, not a single one of whom, so far as the record shows, ever uttered the slightest public protest.
91. p 986 of the “freezing experiments” in Dachau: Apparently a few German Luftwaffe medics were beginning to have their doubts. When Himmler heard of this he wrote Field Marshall Milch protesting about the difficulties caused by the “Christian medical circles” in the Air Force….he suggested that he find a “non-Christian physician, who should be honorable as a scientist” to pass on Dr. Raschers valuable works.
92. p 987 of the “freezing experiments” in Dachau: According to the testimony at the ‘Doctors Trial’, ninety-five German scientists, including some of the most eminent men in the field, participated, and though three doctors left no doubt that a good many human beings had gone to death in the experiment there was no questions put as to this and no protests therefore made.
93. p 994 Such, has been sketched in this chapter, were the beginnings of Hitler’s New Order; such was the debut of the Nazi Gangster Empire in Europe. Fortunately for mankind it was destroyed in its infancy – not by any revolt of the German people against such a reversion to barbarism but by the defeat of German arms and the consequent fall of the Third Reich, the story of which now remains to be told.

The Fall
94. p 1036 Just as ominous for the conspirators was the military situation. The Russians, it was believed, were about to launch an all-out offensive in the East. Rome was been abandoned to the Allied forces. In the West the Anglo-American invasion was immanent. Indeed, there was a growing number of conspirators, perhaps influenced by the thinking of the Kreisau Circle, who began to feel that it might be better to call off their plans and let Hitler and the Nazis take responsibility for the catastrophe. To over throw them might merely perpetuate another stab-in-the-back legend, such as that which had fooled so many Germans after the First World War.
95. p 1081 This paralysis of the mind and the will of grown-up men, raised as Christians, supposedly disciplined in old world virtues, boasting of their code of honor, courageous in the face of death on the battlefield, is astonishing, though perhaps it can be grasped if one remembers the course of German history, outlined in an earlier chapter, which made blind obedience to temporal rulers the highest virtue of Germanic man and put a premium on servility.

The Last Days
96. p 1108 One fine evening early in April Goebbels has sat up reading to Hitler from one of the Fuehrer’s favorite books, Carlyle’s of Fredrick the Great. The chapter he was reading told of the darkest days of the Seven Years War, when the great King felt himself at the end of his rope and told the ministers that if by February 15 no change for the better in his fortunes occurred he would give up and take poison.
97. p 1120 Hitler to one of his secretaries: “No Hanna” she says the Fuehrer replied. “if I die it is for honor of our country, it is because as a soldier I must obey my own command that I would defend Berlin to the last”
98. p 1131 The last sentence [of is will and testament] was straight out of Mein Kampf. Hitler had begun his political life with the obsession that “territory in the Easr” must be won for the favored German people, and he was willing to end his life with it. All of the millions of German dead, all of the millions of German homes crushed under the bombs, even the destruction of the German nation had not convinced him the robbing of the lands of the Slavic peoples to the East was – morals aside – a futile Teutonic dream.

The Discovery of Heaven

The Discovery of Heaven
By Harry Mulisch

The book begins with a story the average life of a collection of a few people in Amsterdam. It takes on the liberal persona of Dutch living in the 1960s. It begins with a story of human drama that is marked by tragic events of life and death that may occur without notice or reason. Yet it defines a new direction in life and perspective; thought. Max and Onno share the fatherhood of Quinten, a boy blessed with a remarkable beauty that is only explained through implication at the end of the book. As 1960 drama would have it, the reason why they are sharing fatherhood is because Quinten’s mother Ada has sex with her old boyfriend Max in the ocean and then out of guilt she feels for her action she seduces her current boyfriend Onno, who had betrayed her while she was betraying him, all in that same evening. During Ada’s pregnancy there is a tragic accident and Ada becomes comatose and her father dies of a heart attack on the same evening. Out of guilt and mystery Max offers to raise the child along with Sophia, Ada’s mother who has a cold day time persona, but a passionate quirk to privately have wild sex with Max at night, of which is forever a secret. You begin to wonder; why am I reading this and what does this have to do with the discovery of heaven?

All this story is lightly interlaced with moral questions along the way and provides the framework for classic character introduction. In this case the introduction is required as it adds to the intrigue as the back half of the book uses mystery drama of a grand heist of the Ten Commandments. The intrigue is brought about not just through the logistics of the heist and how to fence the treasure, but the tension of contrast in philosophy of the meaning of life through the eyes of each character’s moral differences. Max is a scientist and all life and its meaning is explained in a rational way were numbers and equations are at the core. Reality is physical. Onno is a linguist and a politician where words take on an art form and are representations of the physical. Is reality the words or the action? In the tension the question is examined through story and conversation of fathers and son.

The scene building is equally masterful as the author draws on art history, architecture, religion, and the history of many philosophers. Ironically I have spent considerable time in Amsterdam, Venice, Rome and Israel. Now I need to return and look upon those cities with a whole new perspective. You are introduced to the notion that to be an architect you must blend the skills of an engineer, a poet, a musician, and an artist, in to the fabric of your work. Ironically the next book on my reading list is Godel Hescher Bach, by Hoffstadter, which studies that in more depth. My previous was the Secret of Fremasonry by Naubon studies architecture in depth. The reading order is pure coincidence? Surely the philosophy of this books answers that question. So with a rich blending of moral question the author examines the religions of Jerusalem with primary focus on Judaism and then Christianity as they both pertain to the Law, the Ten Commandments.

The reader if paying attention may find in the message that of Judaism, the law is a pragmatic interpretation of the material world with a prescription of rules to get to heaven. Where as in Christianity laws are less tangible and of the spirit of balance and harmony with all that is. Inner peace expressed outwardly. In the former a person’s moral compass is a mandate. In the latter the moral compass is an intangible desire to simply do the right thing, make the right choice. Through Quinten’s actions towards the end it is clear that heaven is obtainable through transcendence. He makes the right choice. The mystery is can you transcend the material world through other means than death. This is left for Onno to explain. Does he? I choose the same path as the author for likely the same reasons and invite you to read the book. Together we can all solve that mystery.

Myself I will provide the review now and begin examining more closely Mulisch’s work and an addendum with bibliography notes over the next month.

Berlin Dairies

Berlin Dairies
By William Shirer

Synopsis

Why this book? William Shirer also wrote The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich. That book really moved me to search for what causes a people to go to war. Hence I have done a bit more reading on the subject with Germany as a central subject. Albeit it there are others that could have provided my center piece, Germany has too much available to a casual historian such as I have become. Germany has a history from the First Reich during the early days of the Crusades, through the Thirty Years War, the Reformation, the Unification, and finally WWI &II to be at the forefront of Wars shaping modern Western European Civilization. In related a book Causes of WWI by James Joll, he suggests numerous causes of WWI where Germany again becomes a prime protagonist. As you read this review I want to ask you to focus your thought on the word mood, that mysterious word that instills foggy intangible phenomena that I believe breeds a nation’s penchant towards territorial war. James Joll touched on it but did not bring it to the fore as I will attempt to do here in this review/essay. In part One of this report essay, I’ll summarize the book. Then I’ll circle back in Part Two and take excerpts of the book that demonstrates fertile ground found in their traits that allow for a mood in the German people for war. And finally I’ll attempt to demonstrate how Hitler’s only genius was to tap into the soul of the German mood, his mood, of the 1930’s.

This book takes the form of the diary of William Shirier the young reporter turned CBS News correspondent in the time of Hitler’s rise to power and through Germany’s conquest of France. To draw a parallel from a 21 century American perspective, I reflect on present day conversations on Vietnam, Iraq, or Afghanistan. The conversations about our leaders, the war, the adversaries, and the personal demands that war puts on our populace in general as well as direct personal experiences of individuals of either era. The history of Germany strikes both parallel and perpendicular lines with present day America. Shirer unfurls the events as they happened. Parallel lines are beginning to present themselves today. He captures the mood of the people, how the Germans reported them, the direct reactions of Germans he came in contact with, and his personal views on paper where turning each page is like turning any corner in Berlin of the 1930’s.

The picture you come up with is a tragic picture of a psychopathic leader and a group of subservient military leaders with too much of the same traits. Lack of Tantrums being the saving grace for 95% of them it was still a prominent trait in too many of them. In a rolling timeline from left to right, Shirer tells of his days event and then take a moment to drill down from top to bottom to capture either a focal point of Hitler’s strategy to manipulate millions across the world and punctuate that strategy with a human trait of either the German people .
 
TIMELINE

With regard to Hitler’ s strategy, he leveraged the mistakes made by world leaders of 1919 against a pragmatic thinking German society to tap into the mind and spirit of Germans. I’ll talk more about the constitution of the German people but first focusing on the strategy Hitler used which at high level is to talk to his ability to bring forward the emotion he felt through 12 years of a punishment banding that with a finality of hubris superiority by world leaders of 1919, including our own Woodrow Wilson, Britain’s Lloyd George, and France’s Clemenceau. Hitler promised the fulfillment of the German soul with more land, land that was destined to the German people, and exacted the acquisition with a sense of revenge to upon the world’s injustices toward the Fatherland. Just to use the world Fatherland with reference to one’s country then begs the unique German mind and heart of which Hitler played his tune on.

Hitler’s rants began earlier but began to resonate with a fervor in where for example Shirer describes an event in Nuremberg, September 4, 1934: About ten o'clock tonight I got caught in a mob who jammed the moat in front of Hitler's hotel, shouting: We want our Fuhrer.” I was shocked at the faces, especially those of the women, when Hitler finally appeared on the balcony for a moment. They reminded me of the crazed expressions I saw back in Louisiana of some Holy Rollers who were about to hit the trail. They looked up at him as if he were a Messiah, there faces transformed into something positively inhuman. If he had remained in sight for more than a few minutes many of the women would have swooned from excitement. This was the mood of frenzy that Hitler drew out in his appeal for the Austrian Anschluss.

That mood was punctuated with an event described two days later in Nuremberg, September 6, 1934: Standing there in the early morning light which sparkled on their shiny spades, fifty thousand of them, with the first thousand bared above the waist, suddenly made the German spectators go mad with joy when, without warning, they broke into a perfect goose-step. Now the goose-step has always seemed to be an outlandish exhibition of the human being in the most undignified and stupid state, but I felt for the first time what an inner chord it strikes in the strange soul if the German people. The ease for which German people could be led in to war is described shortly after: Nuremberg , September 10, 1934, Today the army had it's day, fighting a very realistic sham battle in the Zeppelin Meadow. It is difficult to exaggerate the frenzy of three hundred thousand German spectators when they saw their soldiers go in to action, heard the thunder of the guns, and smell the powder.

I feel that all those Americans and English who thought that German militarism was merely a product of Hohenzollerns made a mistake. It is rather seething deeply ingrained in all Germans. Hitler was not just a man of rhetoric. His swift follow-through with action made his rhetoric appear as a fate-acompli because he applied the momentum of his words against a lack of any momentum from the opposing country and its world allies. He could do this because he prepared his country for such a play. In Berlin, March 16, 1935 Shirer writes :

• Today's creation of a conscript army in open defiance of Versailles will greatly enhance Hitler's domestic position, for there are few Germans, regardless of how much they hate Nazis, who would not support it open heartedly. In the end in Vienna, March 25, 1938, Shirer describes the Austrian Anschluss like America’s Black Friday. Some suicide among Jews. He further describes the plebiscite as a farce that took on the air of holiday. Where one must be brave to vote No. It was a Nazi con.

The acquisition of Austria demonstrated to Germans that the world is prepared to give back all that she “wrongfully” took. As in all of leadership upon world events, their brilliance is dependent on the cooperation to go along. More on that later. As Germany made his play on the Czechoslovakia he did it to for the world to see. It was not only to make overtures’ to Germany’s eastern frontier but to cover his western front to put France in check. Shirer describes the following March events.

• March 7, 1936, Hitler’s speech in Berlin He can go no further. It is news to this hysterical "parliamentary" mob that German soldiers are already on the move into the Rhineland. All militarism in their German blood surges to their heads. They sprang to their feet, the audience does the same...their hands are raised in slavish salute, their faces in hysteria, their mouths wide open, shouting, shouting, their eyes burning with fanaticism glued on their new god. Not even a week later in Karlsruhe,

• March 13, 1936: Certainly these Rhinelander’s don’t want another war with France, but this reoccupation by German troops has inculcated them with the Nazi bug They are hysterical as the rest of the Germans... 95% approved the reoccupation. A taxi driver who had driven me around during the day and had a few Schnaps. He turned out to be a Communist, waxed bitter about the Nazis, and predicted their early collapse. It was a relief to find one German here against the regime. He said there were a lot of others but I some times wonder.

It is no secret that one of the corner stones of Hitler’s strategy, but certainly not his key stone, is his control of the press. In this case his control was the closing of newspapers with an opposing view. However the real phenomena are found in what was voluntarily printed and read of the papers that were left open. The reason press control does not hold the “keystone” award is because there was a significant amount of press that was not Goebel’s promulgated. There was voluntary expression of the German trait of which I’ll expound on later. There was an inherent part of a German that once submitting to the higher authority, there existed an enthusiasm to read how it is they are superior to the outside world. In speaking to the press the following are just a few of the many examples Shirer provides where the press becomes wrapped up in the madness of Hitler’s mind.

Another cornerstone in Hitler’s strategy was to take advantage a world that was not in any way enthused to go back to a state of war against a foe that they did not necessarily defeat. So one may ask why there was a mood in one country for war, where another had none. Could it be that the German populace is not satisfied unless its hold of dominion over, its destiny, is without question? And later you get this impression that it is in the German mind that a German does not sit at the right hand of God but possibly is God. First let us look at other countries where there was a conceding sense of diplomacy and much the same lack in physical preparedness and follow on resistance. This reluctance was held among the leaders, the people and it resonated in the press.

Early on you read from Shirer: Berlin, June 18, 1935, Norman Ebbutt complains that the London Times does not print all he sends, that he does not want to hear too much of the bad side of Nazi Germany. In this case the reader is impressed with a free press turning the heads of her nation away from pending doom. You come to appreciate the press’s role in a countries mood as it presents facts less than the whole truth and then follows up to tell their readers how they should respond. That response then is resonated back to Berlin signaling a green light for war.
Having read Rise and Fall of the Third Reich, a must read sister book by the same author, I am not convinced that Shirer, at the time and place at least, fully appreciated that the magnitude of how lack of the full truth in free countries took an uplifting turn in the den of their foe. For back in Berlin you read the following.

• Berlin, March 16, 1936 The French Senate is sure to vote the Soviet pact in a day or two. Berlin full of Nazi leaders...Saw a lot of them at the Kaiserhof and they seemed in a very cocky mood. The very own allies while still with relations with German leadership did nothing to dilute a penchant of German dominion by force. Shirer describes an occasion in
• Berlin, April 20, 1937, Hitler's birthday...the Reichwehr revealed a little of what it has: heavy artillery, tanks, and significantly trained men. Hitler stood on reviewing stand in front of Technische Hochschule, as happy as a child with tin soldiers, standing for more than two hours saluting every tank and gun. The military attaches of France, Britain, and Russia, I hear, were impressed. So were ours.

The Austrian Anschluss was clearly a diplomatic coup on Austria directly, but on the world as a bystander. If the world hadn’t woken up to Chamberlain’s agenda as a pacifist, the German public saw the British posturing as an entitlement to all they saw fit to be theirs. This enabled a momentum to carry Germans and Germany into Czechoslovakia with at least a threat of war but to a world still ready to double cross her allies. Shirer on this note writes the following.

• Prague, Sept. 12, 1938, On the eve of war waiting for Hitler's speech....Everyone in Czechoslovakia seems to have heard the speech the streets being deserted from 8 to 10. Some six thousand Henlein enthusiasts, wearing Swastika a bands, paraded the streets of Karlsbad afterward shouting: "Down with the Czechs and Jews. There was no clash. It was cold and rainy...The Czechs were going about their business a usual, not gloomy, not depressed, not frightened either.
• Prague, September 14, 1938, Unless Hitler again interferes, the crisis has passed it's peak. The Sudetener I talked to were puzzled. They expected the German army to march in Monday night after Hitler’s speech, but the Czech army did and their spirits dropped. General description of Czech people in the rise to the Czech Anschluss was an air of confident calm. They did not think their government would lay down and surrender a land held for over a thousand years that was a natural barrier to Germany. The world including German Generals that war would mean a European war of which they were yet prepared to win. Chamberlain's appeasement cost this world the lives of millions!!!!!
• Berlin September 26, 1938: No war fever, not even any anti Czech feeling, discernable on this quiet Sabbath day. In fact the old days on the eve of wars, I believe, crowds used to demonstrate angrily before embassies of the enemy countries. Today I walk outside the Czech legation. Not a soul outside, not even a policeman.
• Berlin September 26, 1938: I broadcast the seen from the seat in the balcony just above Hitler. He’s still got that nervous tic. All during his speech he kept cocking his shoulders, and the opposite leg from the knee down it would bounce up….when Hitler sat down Goebbles got up and said “one thing is for sure: 1918 will never be repeated! Hitler leaped to his feet with a fanatical fire in his eyes that I shall never forget brought his right hand, after a grand sweep, pounding down on the table and yelled with all power in his mighty lungs “ja!”. Then he slumped in his chair exhausted. This is the first time I saw him completely lose control.
And finally if the door of appeasement was left open in Austria, it was blown wide open fin Czechoslovakia as Shirer writes in Berlin September 24, 1938;
• The very fact the he, with all the authority of a man who is the political leader of the British Empire, has taken upon himself this task is accepted here, and I believe elsewhere, as meaning Chamberlain backs Hitler up. That’s why German people I talked within the street of Cologne this morning, and in Berlin this evening, believe there’ll be peace.

In Poland it was much the same way only with alliance treaties put to their final test. Britain and France at least made a diplomatic stand to the public and were pressed in to a declaration of war. But here is how it was perceived first hand.
• Berlin September 10, 1939; One week after the Anglo – French declaration of a state of war the average German is beginning to wonder if it’s a world war after all. He sees it this way. England and France, it is true are fulfilling their obligation to Poland. For a week they have been formally at war with Germany. But has it been a war? They ask. The British it is true sent over twenty-five planes to bomb the Wilhelmhaven. But if this is war why only twenty-five. And if this is war, why only a few leaflets over the Rhineland? …. Not a bomb has fallen on a Rhineland factory? Life here is still quite normal. The operas, the theaters, the movies all opened jammed.
• Berlin, April 23, 1939 The nerves of the German people were becoming frayed and they were against going to war. (this at the prospect of now taking his war to the Polish)
• Berlin August 27, 1939“The Fuher is still demanding patience from your because he wants to exhaust even the last possibilities for a peaceful solution of the crisis. The means of bloodless fulfillment of the irreducible German demands” This is a nice build up to convince the people that if war does come, the Fuhrer did everything possible to avoid it.

After Norway fell in much the same way as Poland the lid was ready to come off as Hitler and his German population knew it was only a matter of time and a bit of rhetorical posturing by Hitler to take the lowlands. To the profit of the press, the campaign was designed to sell newspapers which in the end Hitler was purchasing minds of a very obedient people domestically and an international community content with their destiny of doom. Shirer writes the following about the Dutch who were next in line.

• Amsterdam January 18, 1940 The Dutch, like everyone else, want it both ways. They want peace and comfortable life, but they are unwilling to make the sacrifices or even hard decisions which might ensure their way of life in the long run.

By the time Amsterdam fell it was apparent that Hitler was going to run the table in the West as he had yet broken treaties with the USSR. History has it well documented that the Germans, were relentless in their military conquest with the highest degree of amoral conscience waged against not just on soldier but civilian alike. But for now I want to capture a little of what Shirer saw of the benyn diplomatic resistance and the mind of the soon to be conquered. I do this to demonstrate that it was not merely Hitler’s perceived genius of the time, but a world that would not stand up to his madness that by now was an epidemic in Germany. I see this piece of first hand history as a lesson to be taught and not to be forgotten. I blend Belgium and France together because the both people fell to the same demise as they blindly allowed their governments to sell them out on their choice for freedom. In the rise to the actual clash of arms Shirer writes:

• Berlin October 6, 1939: Hitler offered Great Britain and France peace,….I doubt very much if England or France will listen to these proposals for five minuets, though some of my colleagues think so on the ground that, now that Russia has come up against Germany on the long front and this past week has been busy establishing herself in the Baltic States, it would be smart of London and Paris to conclude peace and sit back until Germany and Russia clash in eastern Europe.
o In my opinion this option of diplomatic intrigue while too little too late, had it been spawned a year earlier, it would have slowed the mad mind of Hitler. Being that it didn’t occur in either case makes a case that it was not Hitler’s genius alone as he had an accomplice in the apathy in the minds of his national neighbors.
• Paris October 8 1940 Paris a frightful place, completely surrendered to defeatism with no inkling of what happened to France. At Fouquet’s, at Maxim’s fat bankers and businessmen toasting Peace with rivers of champagne.
• Berlin March 28, 1940;The DNB today: “ At some place along the Upper Rhine front Easter Sunday, there were on the French side demonstrations against the English war, which clearly showed how foolish the French troops consider it to be that Germany and France have become enemies as a result of British connivance.”
• Berlin June 1, 1940 General Wygand has now had ten days to organize his armies along this line along the rivers Somme and Aisne, but the fact that he has not felt himself strong enough to attempt an offensive northward from the Somme against a fairly thin German line – a move which if pushed at home would have saved the Franco-British armies in Flanders – has convinced the German generals, if they needed convincing, that they can crack his forces fairly easily and quickly break through to Paris and to Norman and Breton ports.
• Maubegue June 16, 1940; Of an abandoned French house: What a break in his comfortable bourgeois life this must have been, this lazy flight before the town was blown up! Here in this house – until last month – solidity, a certain comfort, respectability.
• Paris June 17 1940; The inhabitants are bitter at their government, which in the last days, from all I hear, completely collapsed. It even forgot to tell the people until too late that Paris would not be defended.
Hitler’s demonstration of brutal power left his German people impressed with the idea that the German people were invincible. I’ll speak further to the propensity of a German to have already had that latent sense of invincible power. In the calm before the storm to befall on them, they became somewhat grateful for the forced sacrifice over the previous eight years but they were reluctantly accepting the prospect of a war with England as it finally meant a Europe completely dominated by German influence. Hitler with a sense of hesitation for two strategic reasons paused. First he felt that with dominion of the mainland Britain would be forced to play a junior role in Europe and two he did not have a war strategy that he was prepared to execute. So Hitler provided a little political maneuvering in the press to first intimidate the English and prepare the German for one last push. Shirer writes the following:

• Berlin November 19, 1939: For almost two months now there has been no military action on land, sea, or in the air. From talks with German military people, however, I’m convinced it would be as mistake to think that Germany will accept the Allied challenge to fight this war largely on economic front. That is just the kind of war which the Reich would be at a disadvantage. And that’s one of the reasons why most people here expect military action very soon.
• Berlin July 19, 1940: As a maneuver calculated to rally them for the fight against Britain, it was a masterpiece. For German people will now say: “Hitler offers peace, and no strings attached. He says he sees no reason why this war should go on. If it does, it’s England’s fault.
• Aachen May 20, 1940: 7.45 Tongres -Thursday night (May 9), Belgium had been at peace with the world, including Germany. At dawn on Friday the German bombers were leveling the station and the town – the houses in which they had gone to bed so peacefully – to a charred mass of ruins. The town itself was absolutely deserted. Two or three hungry dogs nosed sadly about the ruins, apparently searching for water, food, and their masters.

8.30 Tirlemont – I deduce that while the German Stukas put the Belgium railroad out of action, they were careful not to blow up the roads and bridges. Apparently the German high command decided in advance not to try to use Belgian railways; only roads. Their army was built to go on gasoline-motored vehicles.
o my note: this bares out the evidence that the thirst for war was inbred in the German people as demonstrated by the Stuka pilots ability to aim bombs at homes , women and children and not at prized implements for their war.

9.15 Louvain Before we left Berlin a certain officer in the German army had come down to the Wilhelmplatz to tell us: “ Gemtlemen, we have just word. From Louvain. The British have plundered that fine old town. Plundered it in the most shameful manner.”

We spend the morning in Louvain, looking over the ruins, snooping into some of the buildings that still stand, talking with the first returning inhabitants and with priests and nuns, some of whom have lived out the three-day battle huddling in the cellar of a nearby convent and monastery. We do not see or hear one shred of evidence that the British plundered the town. Nor-it is only fair to say-do any of the regular army officers suggest it.

Forty-one thousand people lived in Louvain until the morning Hitler moved west. A week later, when Nazi army poured into the town, not one of them was there. How many civilians were killed we could not find out. Probably very few. Perhaps none. What happened was that the population, gripped by fear of the Nazi hordes and remembering no doubt how the last time the Germans came, in 1914, two hundred of their leading citizens, held as hostages, had been shot in reprisal for alleged snipping, fled the city before the Germans arrived.
• Berlin July 20, 1940: No official reaction to Hitler’s peace offer, but Goebbels had local press tonight break the news gently to the German people that apparently the Britons aren’t having any. The Germans I talk to simply cannot understand it. They want peace. They don’t want another winter like last one. They have nothing against Britain, despite all the provocative propaganda. (Like a drug too often given, it is losing what force it once had) The think they’re on top. They think they can lick Britain too, if it comes to a showdown. But they would prefer peace.
• Berlin July 23, 1940: The press campaign to whip up the people for the war on Britain started with a bang this morning. Every paper in Berlin carried practically the same headline: CHURCHILLS ANSWER – COWARDLY MURDERING OF A DEFENCELESS POPULATION!...Afraid the German people swallow this They are depressed that Britain will not have peace. But they down pin their hopes on a quick peace.

After Shirer’s tour of the front, escorted by German’s with a complete German perspective of the events, hi s entries became darker and more opinionated. He was tired of living the austere life in Germany, tired of the hypocrisy he witnessed from not just the Nazi regime but of the people’s reaction to the war, he was ready to come home. He had heard stories of German soldiers taking relentless hostilities on civilians and then on his tour of the Western Front Blitzkrieg, found evidence for first hand corroboration . I think what added unbearable salt to the wound of relentless killing, was in the aftermath German soldiers spent time in the destroyed towns purchasing all the luxuries of the defeated to take home to their families who have been systematically deprived of such for eight years. The booty of war that prevailed in centuries before, still prevailed on the German mind in 1940. I can attest to that feeling of German superiority as once I was on a train from Zurich to Basel, Switzerland. I was reading an English newspaper and keeping to myself. In a mostly empty car came a mail voice from a middle aged man. He said “you are American aren’t you.” To this I looked over my paper and said “yes I am.” He went on to say “Just because you won the war, does not make you better than the German people.” I kept my silence but etched in my mind was the reason I believe that to conquer evil men you must annihilate them, and those left, must be forever left the message that a test of arms is futile. The question is, did Shirer’s book resurrect and then galvanize my nascent thought I had 15 years prior on a train.

 
German Traits a Foundation to Mood

In my answer to that question it is good to take stock in my own reading and formed opinions. I invite all readers of my reviews to do so and tell be if and where I have gone adrift. It is also good idea to take stock in an assessment of Shirer before you take stock in what he writes about German people. And finally it is a good idea to take your own analysis of Germans of present day, what they have been of the past, and how their history affects your thinking on why people go to war.
I will say reading this book leaves no doubt that Shirer has little regard for Germans of the 1930’s. I am going in this direction in the essay review at the risk of redundancy with the purpose in mind to illustrate that it takes a certain train of thought in a society to find them at least passengers and likely coal shovelers on that train to initiate a war. Then it takes a leader to extort that latent trait and catapult them blindly into a war. The rationale for this is to look to the future for potential hot spots. Traits in German people are 1.) Subservient, 2.) Arrogant, 3.) Insensitive to brutalities imposed by Germans on others Shirer’s assessment of German people are captured in the following.

• Subservient

• Berlin January 27, 1940:At six PM Fraulein X called for some provisions I had brought her from relatives abroad. She turned out to be the most intelligent German female I have met in ages. We talked about the German theatre and films, about which she knew a great deal. She had some interesting ideas about German character, history, direction. The trouble with Germans she said was that they were very geborene Untertanen – born subjects, through Untertan conveys also the connotation of submissive subjects. Authority and direction from a master above was about all a German wanted in life.
A German she said will think he has died a Good German if he waits at a curb at a red light, and crosses on a green on though he knows perfectly well that a truck, against the law though it may be, is bearing down upon him to crush him to death.
She though the present regime cared not a whit about Western civilization and represented the barbarian element which had always lurked below the surface in German history and for whom life only had meaning when it meant glorified war, force, conquest, brutality, and grinding down the weaker foe, especially if he were a Slav. She blasted about the German utter lack of political sense, his slavishness toward authority, his cowardly refusal to think or act for himself.


• Accepting of leadership

• Berlin December 25/25, 1939: Christmas Eve. Raining out, but it will turn to snow. The first war Christmas somehow has brought the war home to the people more than anything else. It was always the high point of the year for Germans but this year is a bleak Christmas, with few presents, Spartan food, the men folk away, the streets blacked out, the shutters and curtains drawn tight in accordance with police regulations…The Germans feel the difference tonight.
• Berlin January 1, 1940What will this year bring? The decision, as Hitler boasted yesterday? I haven’t met a German yet who isn’t absolutely certain. Certain it is that this phony war cannot continue long. Hitler has got to go forward to new victories or his kind of system cracks…More drunkenness on the Kurfurstendamm last night than I has ever seen..
• Berlin February 24, 1940: The newspapers seem inane after the Swiss. But the Germans swallow the fare, the lies. After this terrible winter their morale is lower, but they seem to be in the same cow-like mood. It’s hard to see the limit of what they will take. Much talk here of a spring offensive. But where?
• Berlin March 10, 1940: Today the Nazis ask the people not to think too much of the World War dead, but to concentrate their thoughts on those who have been done to death or will die in this war. How perverse humans can be! A front page editorial in the Lokal Anzinger says: “this is no time for being sentimental. Men are dying for Germany day and night. Ones personal fat now is unimportant . There is no asking why if one falls or is broken.
• Berlin March 24, 1940I tried to read the faces of the thousands what was in their minds on this Easter day. But their faces looked blank. Obviously they do not like the war, but will do what they are told. Die for instance.
• Page 264 Berlin May 4, 1940: Goethe harps on the theory that a writer can only get things done by retiring from the world when he has work to do. He complains that the world takes but does not give. Some of his letters on local administrative problems in Weimar are amusing. He had his small, bickering side. And –surprising he is subservient to his Prince Ruler!

• Arrogant, a one over society

• Paris July 14, 1934: Yesterday Hitler screamed ; The supreme court of the German people during these past 24 hours consists of myself! The deputies rose and cheered. One had almost forgotten. How strong sadism and masochism are in German people.
• Berlin September 2, 1934 We've had some walks and twice had to duck into stores to keep from having to salute the standard of some passing SA or SS battalion of facing the probability of getting beat up.
• Munich September 30 On the train Munich to Berlin – Most of the leading German editors on the train and tossing down champagne and not trying to disguise any more elation over Hitler’s terrific victory over Britain and France. On the dinner Halfeld of Hamberguer Frembenblatt, Otto Kriegk of Nachttausgaber, Dr, Boehmer, the foreign press chief of the Propaganda Ministry, gloating over it, buying out all champagne in the dinner. Gloating, boasting, bragging….When a German feels big he feels big.
• Berlin September 11, 1939: Later (midnight) – In subway, going out to broadcast tonight I heard a considerable grumbling about the war. The women, especially seemed depressed. And yet when I came back from my broadcast, a big crowd, mostly women, got on at the station under the Deutches Oprehaus. They had been to the Opera and seemed oblivious of the fact that a war was on.
But one thing is for sure is it possible that if the British and French decide upon a war of attrition, the mass of the German people will forget their feelings toward the regime and regard it as their duty to defend the Fatherland? Some of the things I’ve heard today from Germans make me think so.
• Berlin September 14, 1939: Y. holds Hitler is justified in bombing and bombarding towns where the civilian population offers resistance. Guess I’m losing my balance, but I disagree.
The maid came in tonight to say how terrible the war was.
“Why do the French make war on us?’ She asked.
“why do you make war on the Poles?’I said.
“Hum” she said, a blank face over her face. “but the French, they’re human beings.” She said finally.
“But the Poles, maybe they are human beings,” I said
“Hum” she said, blank again.
• Boulogne August 16 1940 On tour of the front with German press officials: We have lunch here in Boulogne, the food fair, a bottle of Chateau Margaux, 1929, excellent. After lunch our party goes out to loot a little more with the marks. In a perfume shop I picked up a conversation with an engaging little French sales-girl after I’ve convinced her by my accent that I’m an American. She says the Germans have cleaned out the town of all stockings underwear, soap, perfume, coffee, tea, chocolate, tobacco, and conac. But she is mainly interested in food. “How will we find enough to eat this winter? She asks.
• Berlin September 26, 1940: The German, I am profoundly convinced after mingling with him now for many years, is incapable of organizing Europe. His lack of balance, his bullying sadism when he is on top, his constitutional in ability to grasp even faintly what is in the minds and hearts of other peoples, his instinctive feeling that relations between two peoples can only be on the basis of master and slave and never on the basis of let-live equality.


• Insensitive to the brutalities imposed by Germans on others

• Berlin October 2, 1939: “A” blew in Saturday accompanied by an American girl has had met in Warsaw. They had been wandering in the wilds of Eastern Poland for three weeks – between German and Russian armies. He said they had lived on stale bread wandering from village to village. Stale bread was all the peasants would sell them, though they had butter and eggs and meat. Most villages had already set up local Soviets. A., who never loved Poles and rather liked the Nazis, says whole villages in eastern Poland far off the beaten track, far off the railroads and main roads, villages with no military importance whatsoever, have been destroyed by the German Luttwaffe for no reason he could think of. He says the German planes would often dive on lone peasant women in lonely fields and toss a bomb on them or machine gun them . He saw the bodies

• Berlin May 6, 1940: Bernhard Rust, Nazi Minister of Education, in a broadcast to school children today, sums it up pretty well the German mentality in this year of 1940. He says: “God created the world as a place for work and battle. Whoever doesn’t understand the laws of life’s battles will be counted out, as in a boxing ring. All the good things on this earth are trophy cups. The strong win them. The weal lose them. ..The German people under Hitler did not take up arms to break into foreign lands and make other people serve them. They were forced to take up arms by states which blocked their way to bread and union.
• Berlin May 8, 1940: I went out to a suburb last night to see the film of havoc wrought by the German air force in Poland. It is called Feuertaufe – or Baptism of Fire. The wanton destruction of Polish towns and villages, but especially Warsaw, is shown nakedly. The German audience took the film in dead silence.
• Berlin May 10, 1940: Later- The people in Berlin, I must say, have taken the news of the battle which Hitler says is going to decide the future of their nation for the next thousand years with their usual calm. None of them gathered before the Chancellery as usually happens when big events occur. Few bothered to buy the noon papers which carried the news. For some reason Goebbels forbade extras.
• Berlin May 16, 1940: I just saw two uncensored new-reels at our press conference in the Propaganda Ministry. Pictures of the German army smashing through Belgium and Holland. Some of the more destructive work of German bombs and shells was shown. Towns laid waste, dead soldiers and horses lying around, and the earth and mortar flying when a shell or bomb hit it. Yelled the German announce;” And thus do we deal death and destruction on our enemies! The film, in a way summed up the German people to me.

Towards sundown Joe Harsch and I took a walk in the Tiergarten and agreed: The savage destruction by high explosives and steel of the other fellow is a beautiful thing and the fulfillment of a high aim in Germanic life; blow up his home and his wife and his children. But let him do it to you and he is a barbarian.

• Berlin May 30, 1940: The papers are full of revenge for this and that…the Germans are incapable of comprehending that the hate against them in France and Belgium is due to the fact that Germany invaded these countries. Belgium- without the slightest excuse or justification and laid waste their towns and cities, and killed thousands of civilians with their bombings and bombardments
• Berlin June 2, 1940: Despite the lack of popular enthusiasm for this colossal German victory in Flanders, I gather quite a few Germans are beginning to feel that depravations which Hitler has forced on them for five years have not been without reason. Said my room waiter this morning: “Perhaps the English and French now wish they had less butter and more cannon.”

And yet the picture this capital presents at this great moment in German history still confounds me. Last evening, just before dark, I strolled down Kurfurstendamm. It was jammed with people meandering along pleasantly. The great sidewalk cafes on this broad tree-lined avenue were filled with thousands, chatting quietly over their ersatz coffee or their ice-cream. I even noticed several smartly dressed women. Today, being the Sabbath and a warm day, tens of thousands of people, mostly in family groups, betook themselves to the woods or the lakes on the outskirts of the city. The Tiergarten, I noticed, also was thronged. Every-one had that lazy, idle, happy-go-lucky Sunday holiday air.
• Berlin June 10, 1940 At the six PM press conference we were given another dose of the weekly German news-reel. Again the ruined towns, and dead humans, the putrefying horses’ carcasses. One shot showed the charred remains of a British pilot amid the wreckage of his burned plane. Most Germans there seemed to get a sadistic pleasure from these pictures of death and destruction. A few I know didn’t. A few react still like human beings.

 
MOOD

After this reading book and much reading elsewhere on the subject, the nebulous word “mood” comes back in to focus for me. Mood is a word symbol that captures the collective conscience of a people. With Germans, they were subject to a 100 years of philosophers’ messages that compelled them to be the survivor of the fittest, where leaders beginning with Bismarck, To Wilhelm, to Hitler lathered their people at the barber pole of nationalism. This nationalism spawned by Woodrow Wilson, left the rest of Europe with Churchill the only exception, so enchanted by a peace surrendered by default to a capable dominator. The mold cast was a void for a mood of German dominion over a inferior people of Europe. If Germans could have visualized a dominion through sound leadership like what is experienced in our current European Union, a world war could have been averted. Of the German character that rendered a vision of peaceful dominions impossible, I captured a few of following excerpts under the heading: They wanted peace, but they wanted their Germany back

• Berlin June 14, 1940; At the capture of Paris: I was having lunch in the courtyard of my hotel. Most of the guests crowded around the loud speaker in the bar to hear the news. They returned to their tables with wide smiles on their faces, but there was no undue excitement and everyone resumed eating.

• It would be wrong, though, to conclude that the taking of Paris has not stirred something very deep in the hearts of most Germans. It was always a wish dream of millions here. And it helps wipe out the bitters memories of 1918 which have lain so long – twenty-two years – in the German soul.

Germans seemed very capable of uniting around the cause of one people, provided that one people was limited to that of the Aryan race. Within that one people was a brush stroke of selfishness towards other people. I find it a trait of sadistic thinking people were the cause may be a noble cause, however where it brings hardship, the desire for war quickly evaporates. On this note I provide a few excerpts for Shirer’s Diary. They despised war only when it is not waged upon them.

• Berlin October 3 1938: The bravery of the Czechs in Prague the night war and bombs seamed certain; the look of fear in the faces of the German burghers in the Wilhelmstrasse the night the motorized division swept by and war seemed certain to them and then the delirious joy if citizens in Munich – and Berlin when they learned on Friday that it was not only peace they won but victory
• Berlin January 24, 1940:We discussed the Germen conception of ethics, honour, conduct. Said he: “For Germans a thing is right ethical, honourable, if it squares with the tradition of what a German a German should do; or if it advances the interests of Germinism or Germany. But the Germans have no abstract idea of ethics, or right or right conduct.” He gave a pretty illustration. A German friend said to him: “isn’t it terrible what the Finns are doing, taking on Russia? It’s utterly wrong.” When Mr. W. remonstrated that, after all, the Finns were only doing what you would expect all decent Germans to do if they got in the same fix – namely defending their liberty and independence against wanton aggression – his friend retorted: But Russia isn’t Germany. In other words, for a German to defend his country’s liberty and independence is right. For a Finn to do the same is wrong, because it disturbs Germany’s relations with Russia.
• Berlin August 31, 1940: Laid up with the flu for a bit. When the maid came in last night just before the bombing started, I asked: “Will the British come over tonight?”
• “For certain,” she sighed resignedly. All the confidence, all confidence that five million Berliners had that the capital was safe from air attack, is gone.

Shirer implied in many of his entries that Germans disdained war only because of its inconvenience. This seems to blend a sense of selfishness with a sense of superiority, and is not to be confused with laziness. As a superior people they did much in industry to prepare for war and made a huge sacrifice to take war to their adversaries, so when it turned out tat war did land in their front yard, they were put out. The following excerpts on demonstrates yet another dynamic to the mood Hitler created in an easily led people.

• Berlin August 28, 1939; The average German today looks dejected. He can’t get over the blow of the ration cards, which to him spell war.

• Berlin August 31, 1939; (morning)Everybody is against the war. People talking openly. How can a country go into war with a population so dead against it. People also kicking about being kept in the dark. A German said to me last night: “We know nothing. Why don’t they tell us what’s up?

• Page 162 Berlin September 2, 1939; I was standing in the Wilhemplatz about noon when the loud speakers suddenly announced that England had declared herself at war with Germany. Some 250 people were standing there in the sun. They listened attentively to the announcement. When it was finished, there was not a murmur. They just stood there as before, stunned.

I walked the streets. On the faces of the people astonishment, depression. Until today they have been going about their business pretty much as usual. There were food cards and soap cards, and you couldn’t get any gasoline and at night is was difficult stumbling around in the blackout

Few believed that Britain and France would move…The British and French had been accommodating before

In 1914, I believe the excitement in Berlin on the first day of the World War was tremendous. Today, no excitement, no hurrahs, no cheering, not throwing flowers, no war fever, no war hysteria. There was not even a hate for the British and the French

• Berlin September 20, 1939:If the war goes on, it is still a question in my mind whether the mass of the people won’t swing behind the regime. The people, who are very patriotic, and are being fed a terrific barrage of propaganda about England alone being responsible for the war, may get the general idea that they have to “defend the Fatherland.” I have still to find a German, even among those who don’t like the regime, who sees anything wrong with the destruction of Poland. All moral attitudes of the outside world regarding the aggression against Poland find little echo among people here. People of all classes, women as well as men, have gathered in front of the windows in Berlins for a fortnight and approvingly gazed at the maps in which little red pins showed the victorious advance of the German troops in Poland. As long as the Germans are successful and do not have to pull in their belts too much, this will not be an unpopular war.

• Berlin August 4, 1940: Of the English air raids on Berlin: The chief complaint of the people of Hamburg with whom I talked was not the damage caused, but the fact that the British raids robbed them of their sleep.

Strolled in the Tiergarten this afternoon, it being warm and the sun out brightly: At six different spots a crowed gathered to watch someone feed squirrels Even soldiers on leave stopped to watch. And these squirrel-feeders are the ones who have stormed through Norway to Narvik and through Holland, Belgium, and France to the sea.

• Berlin October 8 1940: The German press harps so much on the Luftwaffe attack on Britain being reprisals for the sort of thing we received last night that the public is already nauseated by the term – and Germans take a lot of nauseating. The story around town is that the average Berliner when he buys his ten-pfenning evening paper now says to the newsboy: :Give me ten-pfennings’ worth of reprisals.

• Munich October 25, 1940: All restaurants, cafes and beer halls here packed tonight with lusty Bavarians. Notice they’ve completely stopped saying “Heil Hitler.”

How does mood translate to war? Again I find that the mood was latent in the German soul and found its release through Adolf Hitler. Hitler’s strategy is not genius. It was a people of the same mind, to lesser proportions in most cases , that allowed a mood to catch fire. With regard to mood, so far I provided where it was a mood of a country that allowed German people to act the way they did. In my last example I touch on the atrocities taken not just by the German army, but the people themselves. Written elsewhere by Shirer I was appalled to have read in Rise and Fall of the Third Reich of German companies rigorously competing for government contracts to build gas chambers for the Jews. I was sickened to read about the multitudes of German medical society approvingly sitting and listening with inquisitive minds to the results of human experiments performed in concentration camps. And to appreciate how thorough this callous behavior towards man kind, the general German public were purchasing gold and jewelry of the executed Jews in local pawn shops. If you were to subscribe to the notion that what is inside a person is what is expressed through his actions, then the work of the German soul has much to be concerned about. The following excerpts from the book shed some light on the hypocrisy found in the German trait where they claimed to distain Hitler’s brutality, but were overtly guilty of the same themselves.


• Berlin September 1, 1939: One curious thing about Berlin on this first night of war: the cafes, restaurants, and beer halls were packed. The people just a bit apprehensive after the air raid, I felt.

• Berlin September 11, 1939: Later (midnight) – In subway, going out to broadcast tonight I heard a considerable grumbling about the war. The women especially seemed depressed. And yet when I came back from my broadcast, a big crowd, mostly women, got on at the station under the Deutches Oprehaus. They had been to the Opera and seemed oblivious of the fact that a war was on.

But one thing is for sure is it possible that if the British and French decide upon a war of attrition, the mass of the German people will forget their feelings toward the regime and regard it as their duty to defend the Fatherland? Some of the things I’ve heard today from Germans make me think so.

• 8.30 Tirlemont – I deduce that while the German Stukas put the Belgium railroad out of action, they were careful not to blow up the roads and bridges. Apparently the German high command decided in advance not to try to use Belgian railways; only roads. Their army was built to go on gasoline-motored vehicles.
• my note: this bares out the evidence that the thirst for war was inbred in the German people as demonstrated by the Stuka pilots ability to aim bombs at homes , women and children and not at prized implements for their war.


• Berlin September 4-5, 1944 They were easily excited by the dominance of a German over any other Hitler said with lovely hypocrisy: “I waited three months without answering the British night bombings in the hope they would stop this mischief. But Her Churchill saw in this a sign of weakness. You will understand that we are now answering, night for night. And when the British Air Force drops two or three or four thousand kilograms of bombs, then we will in one night drop 150 -230- 300 or 400,000 kilograms.
At this point he had to stop because of the hysterical applause of the audience, which consisted mostly of German nurses and social workers.

What I find interesting is that whether at soldier level where a command could be to take a theater of battle, but did not necessarily mean rape and pillage, but they did and justified it in their own mind. When you read that the same solider that rapes and pillages, and then goes home to feed squirrels in the Tiergarten you pause. When you read that the press does not just write what Goebbells dictates, they get excited about it, you ponder. When you read that the general public sees hope in their prospect of dominion, you protest up to an engagement of all out war. It was that voice in Churchill that elicited for some reason on the German mind that that is what was being done to them by the British and it justified their national madness. Hence the power of the press is essential. As you read the following you may pause and ponder on our world future and lessons to be learned by expanding our present moment backwards as though it is now and then projecting it forward as it would be out new now.

 
Conclusions:

Author’s Conclusion Berlin December 1, 1940: As an author anxious to get to sanity found in America, William Shirer writes his conclusion of which I copy verbatim. I do this because I intend to draw an Ominous parallel in 2010 in my conclusion. The following is directly from the book.

• After a year and a half of total war German morale is still good. Let us admit the fact. There is no popular enthusiasm for the war. There never was. And after eight years of deprivation caused by Nazi preparation for war, the people are weary and fatigued. The crave peace. They are disappointed, depressed, disillusioned that peace did not come this fall, as promised. Yet as the war goes into its second long, dark winter, public morale is fairly high. How explain the contradictions? Keep in mind three things:

First the millennium-old longing of Germans for political unification has been fulfilled. Hitler achieved it. Few people outside this country realize how this unification has knitted the German nation together, given the people self confidence and a sense of historical mission and made them forget their dislike of the Nazi regime, its leaders and the barbaric things It has done. Also – coupled with the rebirth of the army and air force and the totalitarian reorganization of industry, trade, and agriculture on a scale never before realized in this world –it makes the German feel strong. In its emergence of the primitive, tribal instinct of the early German pagans of the vast forest of the North to whom brute strength was not only the means but the ends of life. It is in this primitive racial instinct of “blood and soli” which Nazis have reawakened in the German soul more successfully than any other of their modern predecessors and which has shown that the influence of Christianity and western civilization on German life and culture was only a thin veneer. The Germans as a people lack the balance achieved, say, by the Greeks, the Romans, the French, the British, and the Americans. They are continually torn by inner contradictions which make them uncertain, unsatisfied, frustrated, and which force them from one extreme to the other. The Weimar Republic was so extreme in its liberal democracy that the Germans couldn’t work it. And now they have turned to the extremes of tyranny.

In drawing my own conclusion I think that the average modern person from East or Western cultures is vaguely aware of the traits of German people. Looking first at the western world there does exist the same sense of “we are better than you” mentality which is displayed first in business success. There is a success that has provided a comfortable life style that insulates them from the hardships felt by the people of other less fortunate countries. In western countries there is a freedom of the press, and relative freedom of economy and most importantly a democracy backed up and facilitated by a strong expression of capitalism that allows good fortune and good voice to elect leadership that represents that good choice. If any of those ingredients breaks down there is a reason to pause. I will pick China, North Korea, and Iran where those aforementioned does not exist and therefore are potential countries that could follow the German model.
With regard to China I will reference the book The New Chinese Empire, by Ross Terrill . From that book you learn that there is an Inner China, which includes the Han China and Manchurian China. Then there is also the outer China that includes providences that are quite a different mix of people from Muslim, to Buddhist, Shamanism , to Confucianism. For much the same reason religion is not apt to bring these people together. The reason is freedom to speak your mind. By virtue of inner and outer China one may be comforted with the fact a disparate society will never coalesce around nationalism and go to war as did Germany. In fact the Chinese people (inner China) not only don’t see them selves as superior, but rather they see there way as simply more preferable. Its why the annexing of outer China seems to escape under the radar. Will China be a world power? Yes. But before China could ever adopt a German ideal of dominion over a western society, she would have to figure out the “Inner/ Outer” dynamic first.

With regard to North Korea, while I too have little knowledge on the country, I reflect merely on the google map that illustrates lights turned on in North Korea. Those people are certainly oppressed and then depressed as well. From my prospective however that while the leadership has taken on the role of Hitler, Korea’s people do not have the same traits as do Germans or Japanese. So like China if North Korea were to take her people to war, the country would end up in revolt much like what happened to Russia in 1917.

Iran is a much different country. It has the all the same dynamics as did Germany in 1930. The leadership is fanatical, and delusional. Mahmud Ahmdenejad displays much the same personal history as did Hitler. The Iranian people are a proud people. It is heard within their cries that all they want is to have the same respect in the world as does any other first world country. This comes from a great Persian history, which is a striking parallel to Germany’s history post unification. Lets not forget that Persia, once included much of the Orient. Ahmdenejad appeals to a large base of Iranians who feel oppressed by the West. The sanctions applied to them is not weakening the governments resolve for nuclear war power as so much of their people are unemployed, which is a striking parallel to Germany’s 1920 -30’s. In recent history the exploiting of Muslim people in Iran by the British in the 1920 – 40’s combined with the apparent exploiting of government by the America in the 19650 – 70’s, to the Russian constant threat to march her armies across boarders, gives Ahmdenejad plenty of reason to coalesce his people around the Iranian Nationality. Today we have an oppressed Iranian people looking to break out. The people themselves do not want war, they don’t even want domain over foreign lands as was the case in Germany. They have simply a desire for their heritage to bask in the same sun as the West. But Ahmdenejad, in a thirst for power as demonstrated by Hitler and almost any other Muslim nation will exact a war cry from his people to give them what has been missing. When you look at the offer the Western Powers put on the table here in 2010 that we will give them their place in the sun, the only reason Ahmdenejad would refuse is he believes he can take his people down the same path as did Hitler. Because of the Muslim factor where one sixth of the world is Muslim, he will have no shortages of allies.