When, in 1936, Hitler moved to reoccupy the … Rhineland, his generals were alarmed at his decision and the reactions it might provoke from the French. … [later] he disregarded their apprehensions about the march into Austria, in March 1938.

When, shortly afterwards, Hitler disclosed his intention of putting the screw on Czecho-Slovakia … the Chief of the General Staff, General Beck, drafted a memorandum in which he argued that Hitler’s aggressively expansionist programme was bound to produce … Germany’s ruin. This was read out at a conference of the leading generals, and, with their general approval, sent to Hitler. As Hitler showed no sigh of changing his policy, [Beck] resigned from office. Hitler assured the other generals that France and Britain would not fight for Czecho-Slovakia, but they were so far from being reassured that they plotted a military revolt, to avert the risk of war by arresting Hitler and the other Nazi leaders.

The bottom was knocked out of their counter plan, however, when Chamberlain acceded to Hitler’s crippling demands upon Czecho-Slovakia…

It’s really hard to believe that an army that lost as decisively as the French did was assured of victory such a short time earlier.

Not given the changes in the German army over that period. It’s like saying that the US beat Japan decisively in 1945, and so would have beaten them in the Philippines in 1942, or that the allied success at D-Day means the same thing could have happened in 1941. When countries are rapidly rearming, a couple of years can matter a great deal.

I should say one other thing about this– at most, what your historians could establish is that the French had the MILITARY CAPABILITY to beat the Germans at that point. That’s a lot different from saying they would have beaten them. Wars are determined not only by capabilities, but by strategy, troop morale, and a whole bunch of other factors.

Indeed. IIUC, the prevailing opinion is that it wouldn’t have been a protracted war, because Hitler would have been deposed. The German people like him because he had pulled them out of the economic funk, and the generals liked him for starting to restore the military, but a lot of people thought he was mad to risk confrontation before Germany was fully rearmed. In fact, when he rolled the dice against such long odds and succeeded, it empowered him against later critics (when, e.g., he decided to invade the USSR, and his generals objected, he could just point out that his gambles worked before). Sorry, no cites for the German mood of the time, this is from memory.

Chamberlain’s approach– even though he grossly underestimated the Nazi threat– was a heck of a lot less risky than rolling the dice and going to war at a time when the British military was really underbuilt and understaffed (and stretched thin maintaining an empire). Imagine what would have happened if Britain had rolled the dice and lost.

You are certainly playing for keeps at that level, and that’s why simplistic analyses must be avoided. People using Munich to justify the second Iraq war are off base, IMHO, as were people using Vietnam to object to the first one. I think we probably agree on one thing – the outcomes of wars are difficult to predict a priori (1), and they can be easier to get into than out of. I guess I disagree both with people who say that war is never the answer, and those who think it’s the only answer. It is sometimes the best of the bad choices available, but one should never plan on a cheap or easy war, or engage in one lightly.

(1)One of the most poignant video clips I have seen is a group of British soldiers marching to the embarkation port right after WWI broke out, when everyone was still expecting a six week war. It’s a big holiday – pretty girls blowing kisses, flowers being thrown, all the troops smiling. And watching it, you know that the overwhelming majority of those troops died in the war, and your mind’s eye flashes ahead to the scenes of trench warfare, and it makes you want to cry.

Abdul Abulbul Amir: But then the Soviets invaded Poland in concert with the Nazis. Supporting opposite sides in the Spanish civil war is not nearly the same as the cooperative invasion and dismemberment of Poland.

Several points: The French and British were fighting the Germans long before the Russians were, and France had surrendered over a year before Hitler invaded the USSR in 1941. The British went to war in 1939 because Germany violated Poland, just as they did in 1914 when Germany violated Belgium. The Yale project that unearthed and analyzed the Kremlin records relating to the Spanish Civil War confirmed that Stalin used that opportunity to kill Trotskyites and other enemies, along with naive Americans, there as he did everywhere else. As for Churchill’s alleged racism, the first lesson any historian learns – and the first one s/he seems to forget once draped with a JD – is that you NEVER report the past in terms of the present. Editorialize and opine as you will, but then you’ve become, to paraphrase Somerset Maugham, “not a historian but a politician [or journalist], and deserve to be treated as one.” And, your opinions generally suffer the effects of future shock as well.

I am not sure to what extent it actually is a historical consensus, but when the consensus doesn’t make logical sense, it doesn’t make logical sense.

And there are certainly quite a bit of incentives for everyone to want to say this, from former Nazis who needed to cover their butts to all the people who would like to believe that there was some magical solution that could have avoided WW2.

So you have something that people would like to believe but which makes no logical sense based on the actual results. That’s not saying it COULD NOT be true– only that it’s like believing that a team that went 70-92 in the baseball season would have won the world series if it weren’t for one injured pitcher. It’s really hard to believe that an army that lost as decisively as the French did was assured of victory such a short time earlier.

I should say one other thing about this– at most, what your historians could establish is that the French had the MILITARY CAPABILITY to beat the Germans at that point. That’s a lot different from saying they would have beaten them. Wars are determined not only by capabilities, but by strategy, troop morale, and a whole bunch of other factors.

Chamberlain’s approach– even though he grossly underestimated the Nazi threat– was a heck of a lot less risky than rolling the dice and going to war at a time when the British military was really underbuilt and understaffed (and stretched thin maintaining an empire). Imagine what would have happened if Britain had rolled the dice and lost.

Certain patriotic groups are outraged by the proposal to erect a monument to Joseph Stalin at the national D-Day Memorial. Actually, they should be overjoyed. Such a monument would demonstrate that Joseph Stalin was the real beneficiary of the D-Day invasion. Every German soldier killed by the Normandy invaders was a gift to the Soviet Union. It is true that Stalin and the Red Army did not land at Omaha and Utah beaches. But every German soldier present at Normandy was absent from Russia – and that is what Stalin wanted. It was “Uncle Joe” who wanted the second front in France – and that is what the Normandy invasion gave him. The slow advance of the Americans and British through France – and it was very slow indeed – made the westward advance of the Red Army that much more rapid.

The D-Day invasion was a gift to Stalin – and it is time that it was so recognized. Some shall object that portraying American soldiers as servants of the Soviet Union distorts history and insults their sacrifice. In fact, it merely confirms the isolationist objections to American involvement in the war. Putting up a monument to Joseph Stalin at the D-Day Memorial no more insults the soldiers of the American Army than putting up a monument of Joseph Stalin patting Franklin Roosevelt on the head would demean the WW2 Memorial in the nations capitol. But a Joseph Stalin Memorial would not be complete without a tribute to those he served. WW2 is known these days as the “liberation” of Europe. It is therefore only fitting that the D-Day and WW2 Memorials should commemorate the identity of the liberators. Thus, there should be busts of all the chief “liberators” in East Germany, Poland, Hungary, Czechoslovakia and Rumania. The names and busts of Marcus Wolf, Hilda Benjamin, Jacob Berman, Hillary Minc, Hersh Smolar, Helena Volinska, Walter Groz, Rudolf Slanski, Mattias Gottwald, Ana Pauker, Jacob Broitman, Ilke Wasserman, Matyas Rakosi, Ernest Singer, Benjamin Auschpitz, Moses Kahane and many others should loom large as exhibits.

The victory of American soldiers did not enshrine Americans as commissars over half of Europe. It made commissars of a group that had supposedly been exterminated. How appropriate then, that the leader of this elect group of “Chosen” commissars, should be glorified as a partner in absentia of the Normandy, D-Day invasion.

I forgot, it is not the proper station of a White man to possess a smidgen of verbal IQ, and certainly not an IQ 2 SD above the mean. Apologies.

After all, the “Wannsee Conference Protocol” is alleged to have been written by Eichmann in which it is suggested that Jews were to be sent to the East with all alacrity, yet, were to construct the then non-existent roads there as they went – leaving aside that they were ultimately sent thence by train. But, Eichmann, and his superiors, were never accused of being morons; so, a bit of a crack in the cosmic egg then?

A more likely scenario? The “Protocol” is in fact a forgery concocted by the German-Jewish lawyer Kempner whom went back to see to the leveling of his former (auxilary) nation, and that it was not in fact “discovered” by him.

“The best analogy to you argument would be to argue that Saddam Hussein could have defeated the Americans before the Reagan defense buildup.”

What else could decent (White) men do but take as an article of faith the existence of Saddam’s gas chambers, er, I mean his WMD. You know, because Judith Miller, wife of editor Jason Epstein, of the NYT told us it was true.

Leo Marvin:
Quasi?

I was being charitable. I’m not sure the “neo” prefix is needed either.

But the French didn’t do that. The best analogy to you argument would be to argue that Saddam Hussein could have defeated the Americans before the Reagan defense buildup. That’s essentially what you are arguing

The US Army would decisively overmatch Iraq in 1990, in 2000, and in fact at any time since WWII, as you would expect given that the US is a vastly larger, richer, and more populous country than Iraq, as any detailed examination of the order of battle would show.

But on the subject at hand, respectfully, I am arguing that the generally accepted view among military historians is that the Allies could have defeated Germany easily in 1936, and fairly easily in 1938.

These are fundamentally arguments in which the details matter – how many battalions, in what kind of terrain, with what kind of equipment. I have not tallied those in detail personally, walked the Czech border fortifications, etc, but the people who have made a point of such study after the war, and were active participants, are IMHE unanimous on the subject. Now, I may have missed a source – I have only read (at a guess) a dozen memoirs and histories covering that period (which is not covered as well as 1939 onwards), and maybe there is a new one out with recently declassified info or something. That’s why I am interested in your sources – I don’t think you were a participant, and so your information must come either from your own independent research, or, like mine, from a book. If you went through the archives yourself and it’s your own unpublished research, fine. If it’s from a book, I’d like to evaluate it myself. But just glossing over it and saying ‘it’s simple and obvious and I don’t need the details to say that’ is not convincing, any more than if you were a global warming denier saying the same thing.

David Nieporent:
Responding to quasi-neo-nazi trolls is probably a waste of time, but the above claims are, to use a technical term, false.

Quasi?

This is precious. Recall, Lindbergh was a god, and after having spoken his conscious, and the truth, as only a good and honorable man could do, he was henceforth rendered to the obscurity of an unperson. That’s right Dave, I am not a morally normal man who wishes to do his duty by his people, but an unperson. Do you even think as you type, or is the Pavlovian sufficient for you? Perhaps one should not hold it against you, it is for most. For that is usually all that is called for to gain one’s status and self-righteousness.

As for me, I can do no other than to stand by my people, loyal unto death; and leave none of the devil’s handiwork in place, not in our land, not in our blood. Our enemies have no natural right to follow and hound us to extinction, the right we have to continue to be presumes a life that must be, in the main, exclusively our own. It is nothing that they do not ask for themselves, but there should be no mistake, we certainly are not soliciting their permission.

Because it made sense for Germany to build up its military too. You can conquer territory, but that doesn’t necessarily mean you can hold it.

Jodl was putting entries in his diary in 1938 that he thought the victorious allies would want to read in 1945?

So nobody has ever covered his butt in case something goes wrong?

You’d have a better case on all this if the French put up a valiant fight, held the Germans at bay for a year or two, and then finally fell. In that instance, you could argue that the French Army could have defeated the Germans before the buildup.

But the French didn’t do that. The best analogy to you argument would be to argue that Saddam Hussein could have defeated the Americans before the Reagan defense buildup. That’s essentially what you are arguing– that an army that showed itself to be completely outmatched, not just valiant but eventually beaten, could have kicked ass and took names just a couple of years earlier.

But were it so, Dave.

Read:

“In 2001, then-labor and social affairs minister Shlomo Benizri said: “I just don’t understand why a restaurant needs a slant-eye to serve me my meal.”[6] Even Jews of Chinese descent suffer harassment and poor treatment by immigration police.[2]

Employers have also been known to impose humiliating restrictions on Chinese workers in their employment contracts. In 2003, a report by The Guardian stated that Chinese workers at an unspecified company had been required to agree not to have sex with or marry Israeli women, including prostitutes, as a condition of getting a job. An anonymous Israeli lawyer, however, claims that these contracts only appear legal but could be proven illegal if challenged in court.[7]”

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_people_in_Israel

“Slant-eye,” and this from a guy named Shlomo, why John Smith should sacrifice his peoplehood on the alter of the Holocaust is a mystery to me.

And if you liked the first one, you’ll like this even more:

“Couples not considered Jewish according to Jewish law will be able to tie the knot in a civil marriage, following a consensus on a bill reached Wednesday between Justice Minister Daniel Friedmann and Sephardi Chief Rabbi Shlomo Amar.

This is the first time that the religious establishment has given the go-ahead to a civil marriage and divorce procedure. However, the bill drafted by Friedmann and Amar, will be restricted to cases in which both spouses are not considered Jewish according to Jewish law (halakha).”

http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/spages/883612.html

My G-d, now people in Israel who are not even considered Jewish – according to Jewish law – can be married. How progressive.

Now Dave, there is something you must begin to know, if you wish to have any knowledge of what goes on in this life, and it is this: If a (White) man scratches just beneath the surface of Jewish superfice he will find a mass psychology that is profoundly antagonistic to his peoplehood. And if he loves his people, and wishes them to live and not die, he will become acquainted with a perhaps painful truth, that he cannot serve two nationalisms – his own and another’s – when the latter regards his own as a mortal threat.

Our nation – what was that ever but freedom in a virgin land which facilitated the flowering of Northwestern European Man’s progenerative abilities? – once a city on a hill, has become a nearly exhausted ember on a dung heap.

They were telling people what they wanted to hear.

Jodl was putting entries in his diary in 1938 that he thought the victorious allies would want to read in 1945?

To say that an army that couldn’t even last a couple of months with the Germans could have beaten the Germans just a couple of years earlier is the height of stupidity.

As a thought experiment: if Germany could have walked over the Allies in 1936, and the German generals and Hitler knew it – why didn’t they?
Hitler doesn’t impress me as the kind of chap to let his opponents build up so as to make a fair fight of it.

As I said, the French sucked. They sucked in 1936. They sucked in 1940. Counting on the French Army is about as effective as counting on divine intervention.

You can keep repeating it, and it won’t make any more sense. Even if your assessment of the French army were accurate, you don’t seem to grasp that in 1936, Germany’s army (and its tactical position) was even weaker.

You haven’t presented a single fact in support of your position, and when people point out that German officials themselves disagreed with you, you invent silly arguments for why they must be lying, instead of just accepting that your assessment is based on nothing at all. (I thought it was supposed to be the neoconsevative hawks whose entire argument is “France sucks.”) Why not look at what actually happened when France attacked an unprepared Germany?

They were telling people what they wanted to hear. WW2 produced a whole lot of Churchillian types who desperately wanted to believe that will and force could have stopped the Nazis. And given Hitler’s staff was in a whole lot of trouble, they were going to say whatever they figured people wanted to hear.

As for military spending, that’s a really stupid argument. As I said, the French army proved it was worthless. Not just defeated, but worthless. They couldn’t even put up a fight. To say that an army that couldn’t even last a couple of months with the Germans could have beaten the Germans just a couple of years earlier is the height of stupidity.

Bottom line, the best thing to do was what Chamberlain did– appease and buy time to build up the army and get allies. Churchill was horrible even though he was right about the threat– had he been in charge, Hitler would have conquered Britain.

As I said, the French sucked. They sucked in 1936. They sucked in 1940. Counting on the French Army is about as effective as counting on divine intervention.

Israel in which guest workers must sign a contract by which they forswear sexual relations with Israeli citizens, in which marriages between Jews and non-Jews are not legally recognized,

Responding to quasi-neo-nazi trolls is probably a waste of time, but the above claims are, to use a technical term, false.

(By calling these false I am not implying that any of his other claims are true.)

I take it you must be referring the Prime Minister Netanyahu, who now leads the apartheid state of Israel in which guest workers must sign a contract by which they forswear sexual relations with Israeli citizens, in which marriages between Jews and non-Jews are not legally recognized, in whose torture chambers anything goes, even unto genital mutilation. It should rightly fill us all with pride that the people who have been so very instrumental in pathologizing our own peoplehood, in the minds of our people, can comfortably pursue their sadistic racial fascism on our tax dollars.

On one hand, I have your opinion. On the other I have the opinion of the German general staff, both at the time (1936/38) and after the war, with the insights gained by defeating France in 1940. They categorically disagree with you. Despite losing the war, the German general staff are not, AFAICT, viewed as incompetent by the participants in or historians of WWII. If you are going to persuade, you’ll have to explain why you think their assessment was wrong.

Dilan Esper: If you have sources that think Germany was a match for France and Britain at the time of the Rhineland and Sudetenland, I would really like to know about them. That is a very contrarian position, and I’d really like to read itI have a pretty obvious source, which is that the French army couldn’t even put up a fight when the Germans attacked. Neither could the Czechs. And as for the British, they needed YEARS plus the Soviet and American armies to defeat the Germans.The idea that it was a piece of cake to take care of the Germans is a counterfactual that assumes that an army that kicked everyone’s asses was easily beaten by the same folks whose asses it kicked.

Dilan, you seem to have a hard time understanding that the German army which won big in 1940 is not what Germany had in 1936. You acknowledge that the British needed time to build up their army, but seem to think the German military was static throughout the whole time period. Germany needed time to build up its army, too. In 1936, it wasn’t prepared to fight the French.

I have a pretty obvious source, which is that the French army couldn’t even put up a fight when the Germans attacked. Neither could the Czechs. And as for the British, they needed YEARS plus the Soviet and American armies to defeat the Germans.

The idea that it was a piece of cake to take care of the Germans is a counterfactual that assumes that an army that kicked everyone’s asses was easily beaten by the same folks whose asses it kicked.

Well, if you are a world leader whose racism lead to genocidal and imperialist policies, then it’s a problem; especially if it’s a leader who is currently being glorified.

Consider the following quotation from a minute issued by Churchill on 14 October 1939:

“First Lord to Second Sea Lord and others concerned, and Secretary

There must be no discrimination on grounds of race or colour [in the Royal Navy]… I cannot see any objection to Indians serving on H.M. ships where they are qualified and needed, or, if their virtues so deserve, rising to be Admirals of the Fleet.””

So? He said Indians could serve the British military. That’s like saying I am not a racist because I believe that my black colonial subjects could work real hard in my cotton fields (for free!).

From wikiquote:
Winston Churchill: “I hate Indians. They are a beastly people with a beastly religion.”

(In conversation to Leo Amery, Secretary of State for India. This quotation is widely cited as written in “a letter to Leo Amery” (e.g., in “Jolly Good Fellows and Their Nasty Ways” by Vinay Lal in Times of India (15 January 2007)) but it is actually attributed to Churchill as a remark, in an entry for September 1942 in Leo Amery : Diaries (1988), edited John Barnes and David Nicholson, p. 832:

During my talk with Winston he burst out with: “I hate Indians. They are a beastly people with a beastly religion.”)

Churchill wasn’t racist? LOL. He hated Indians, considered them beasts and uncivilized. He was partly responsible for the famine that killed millions in Bengal in the 1940s, and he actively stoked the flames of hatred between Hindus and Muslims as part of the British “divide and rule” colonial strategy. Churchill was quoted as saying that the Hindu-Muslim antipathy was “all to the good,” even though it resulted in the murder of more than 1 million people, and the displacement of tens of millions more.

Pintler: While granting a qualitative difference between the French and German armies, since we’re talking about Stalin :-), isn’t he quoted as saying ‘quantity has a quality all its own’? 100 divisions is a lot more than 12. The military professionals of the German high command, speaking after the fact and with full knowledge of the deficiencies of the French army are unequivocal in their belief they would have lost. Hitler himself believed he would lose. If there is a serious history of the period that disagrees, I would love to read it. WWII historians argue endlessly about a lot of things — was invading Italy wise, was the bombing campaign wise, should MacArthur have bypassed the Philippines, was the broad front advance across France a good idea, and so on — but this is the first time I have heard it posited that Germany could have defeated the allies in 1936/38.

Yes, but young Mr. Yglesias, armed with a philosophy degree from Harvard, knows differently, never mind that his pithy little quote about a comic book character cuts precisely the opposite way from the one Dilan is trying to use it for. (Nobody claims that the U.S. could win in Vietnam (or Iraq) with “will,” but rather with “will plus the United States military.” Whereas the liberal counterargument is that the communists couldn’t lose because they had more will.)

In 1940 the Germans had 141 divisions, many of them veterans of the Polish campaign, to throw against 144 French divisions. Four years before there had been only 12 divisions, many of them still only partially trained and none with battle experience. The German Rhineland invasion force was about 20 battalions and some planes. German conscription had only begun the previous year. A French mobilization would have raised 100 trained divisions. All of this is presumably why Hitler promised his worried generals that he would abandon the Rhineland if the French crossed the border. Hitler guessed correctly that France would not want to spend the money to intervene, that the British didn’t care, and that the Italians — who were getting pissed at Britain over Ethiopia — would do nothing.

To say that France in 1936 could not have crushed the German forces in the Rhineland (when Germany still had to worry about sizeable Polish, Russian, and Czech armies on its borders) because four years later France was defeated by Germany is a stretch.

As I said, the idea that mlitary force always works as long as you have the will …

BTW, Hitler himself is a classic example of that idea failing. He overruled his generals early in the war (during the first Russian winter counter offensive???) when they wanted to make strategic withdrawals. When the overstretched Germans managed to hang on nonetheless, Hitler decided that was evidence that anything was possible if only he willed it strongly enough, and he viewed subsequent defeats as the result of weakness in his general’s wills, instead of being over matched by the Soviet army.

Since we already know that the French Army was completely pathetic when the Germans actually attacked, it’s fanciful to argue that they actually could have beaten the Germans. The French Army sucked.

This is probably a myth. Ernest R. May’s Strange Victory is a good place to see why. 1940 was at bottom an intel failure by the French — they failed to guess where the Germans would come, put their worst troops there, and suffered accordingly.

In 1936, Germany’s rearmament was much less well along, whereas the French, being scared of the Germans, had a decent army — certainly enough to chase the Germans back across the Rhine, probably enough to win the “war” outright, and very likely enough to deal Hitler a political blow he couldn’t have recovered from.

It was Hitler’s string of victories that made the Army believe it didn’t dare topple him, and the Rhineland was first in the string. Counterfactuals are just that, counterfactual, but it’s difficult to see Hitler staying in power after such a humiliation.

(P.S. – Thanks, Leo!)

“Use force and break the racial pride of these German women. Take them as your lawful booty.”

Kaganovitch, Yagoda, Ehrenburg. Collective guilt is a sword with two edges.

From Comrade Trotsky:

“The movement of the colored races against their imperialist oppressors is one of the most important and powerful movements against the existing order and therefore calls for the complete unconditional, and unlimited support on the part of the proletariat of the white race.”

The “colored races” galvanized by explicit calls to their racial pride, the White working class encouraged to betray all such loyalty and be submerged in a sea of mongrelization (the genocide of the bed chamber – total racial destruction) whilst the true instigators keep their blood pure.

Class war and culture war as a proxy for race war. Amalek must die. The blood Bolshevization of the earth.

The words of Revilo Oliver:

“…for the Germans of 1939-1945 gave proof of a heroism and courage unsurpassed in all history and unmatched in modern times. They were also the only nation that had a rational perception of the realities of the modern world and the exigencies they impose–the only nation that dared to perceive and confront the deadly danger that impended over all civilized mankind–the only nation on whom there does not now rest the inexpiable guilt of the Suicide of the West.”