INTRODUCTION
HOW
WORLD WARS BEGIN
by
David Irving
N
AN AGE in which the writing of history has become
dangerously politicised, with the Marxist-Leninist
perspective gradually replacing the more traditional
views and values, any alternative angle on the events of
the first half of this century in Europe is to be
welcomed.
No one single book can give a true perspective of a
historical event: we need two or more, and from widely
spaced viewpoints, just as the sailor needs widely
separated stars and planets to navigate by. Nor do we
have to agree with all that a book says. Seldom is a
navigator actually required to steer toward one star, but
he needs to keep all the principal celestial axes and
pinpoints in view.
So it is with history. Each man, each reader, prefers
his own explanation of events -- but he needs
well-spaced, responsible literature to help him form his
opinion.
The author of this book, the late Paul
Rassinier is one such far-flung star. A
pacifist, a socialist, a member of the
anti-Hitler Résistance, a former
inmate of Hitler's concentration camps: we have
read works of history by people with these grim
qualifications before -- and yet, Rassinier
dared to think the unthinkable. The Second World War began in an unthinkable
way: essentially, it arose from a series of
local squabbles, in which none of the later
combatants had a direct interest at all. There had been, since 1933, a squabble
between the National Socialists and the Jews,
both inside and outside Germany. Each group had
enforced boycotts on the other. This irritating, ugly, irrelevant dispute was
swamped, from early 1939 onwards. by the far
larger squabble that emerged between Germany and
Poland. | | | As
the newspaper magnate Lord Beaverbrook
(later one of Churchill's Cabinet ministers
but also most vociferous critic too) wrote in
March 1938, "There are twenty thousand German
Jews in England -- in the professions,
pursuing research, in chemical operations,
etcetera. These all work against such an
accommodation [with Germany]."
|
This was a dispute over what, in retrospect, were the
merest geographical trifles -- former German territories
that Hitler, in the name of a now immensely strengthened
German people, demanded back. In each case, somehow, the
great international bystanders -- France, Britain, and
then the Soviet Union and the United States -- found
themselves dragged into these distant squabbles.
The outcome, in 1945, was satisfactory only to the
United States and the Soviet Union on the one hand, and
to what subsequently became the State of Israel on the
other. Wretched Poland was twice trampled underfoot, her
intelligentsia and officer corps being murdered within
the first months by Hitler's and Stalin's Schergen
[killers]. The French lost their empire. Britain
was bankrupt by December 1940, had to sell up all of her
overseas investments -- to the immense satisfaction and
benefit of her American cousins -- and shortly lost her
Empire too.
Where
did all this have its origin? In the hateful class war on
which the Marxists and, to an increasingly violent
degree, the Socialists had thrived? Or had race war
supplanted class war by 1933, as the world's Jewish
community -- with the French politicians like
Léon Blum and Georges Mandel at
their head -- girded themselves for a crusade of revenge
against Hitler and his men, a ruthless crusade that was
to be fought out with other people's armies and other
people's blood? One letter shocked me more than any other
which I discovered while writing the biography of
Winston Churchill -- a letter in the archives of
Churchill's éminence grise Chaim Weizmann
(later the first president of the State of Israel).
Pleading with the British prime minister to allow
increased Jewish immigration into Palestine, and to allow
a Jewish Army, Weizmann offered a political bribe: he
wrote reminding Churchill on September 10, 1941, that the
Jewish community in the United States was the largest
ethnic grouping that still backed Britain's war against
Hitler; he claimed that this Jewish community had
single-handedly brought the United States into World War
I on Britain's side in 1917; and he promised that what
they had done before, they could do again.
*Thus it is a calumny to see Hitler and his grand
strategy alone as the sole origin of Europe's calamity.
What can we say with certainty about Hitler -- if we are
to ignore the increasingly absurd positions adopted by
the semi-blind professors currently teaching history in
the German historical institutes?
First, that Adolf Hitler was a patriot -- from first
to last, he intended to restore Germany's former unity,
pride, and greatness. Having come to power in 1933 he
enforced the programme which he had always said he would,
from 1922 onward: he restored confidence in the central
Government, he rebuilt the German economy, he banished
unemployment, he rebuilt the impoverished Wehrmacht, and
then he used this new-found muscle to regain Germany's
lost sovereignty and embarked on his adventure of winning
Lebensraum in the East. He had no evil designs on Britain
and her Empire whatever, quite the contrary: this did not
prevent the lying German émigrés who had
fled to Britain from proclaiming to all who would listen
-- or could be bought -- that the British Empire was at
risk.
Hitler's foreign policy was guided by the desire for
secure frontiers, and the need to expand to the east: he
had little interest in the South Tyrol, none at all in
the Alsace and Lorraine.
He justified his rearmament of Germany in violation of
the Treaty of Versailles by pointing to the failure of
the other treaty signatories to adhere to their
disarmament obligations.
The war had its origins in Europe's ill adjusted
frontiers, in themselves relics of the Treaty of
Versailles. German had been separated from German, and it
was Hitler's will that they should be united again. The
Rhineland was easy: he could stage a fait accompli, and
get away with it. Austria was easy too: as Sir
Alexander Cadogan, Permanent Under-Secretary at the
Foreign Office, privately wrote, they had only kept
Germany and Austria apart out of spite -- the F.O. had
been totally misinformed about the depth of Austria's
pro-German feeling. (The Austrian ambassador in London,
Georg Franckenstein, decided to stay in Britain: he
joined the British Secret Service, M.I.6; and he became
"Sir George Franckenstein" before the war was over!)
The
forces pushing Europe into war were not just in Berlin.
Joseph Stalin hoped for a European conflict, out of which
the Soviet Union would emerge as tertius gaudens
(lachender Dritte), with the rest of Europe in
ruins. Franklin D. Roosevelt, asked in September
1938 whether a European war was beneficial for the United
States, grandly told his Cabinet (as the private diary of
his Secretary of the Interior Harold F. Ickes
reveals), "A war in Europe can only be good for us. They
have to buy their armaments and ammunition from us.
Already the gold of Europe is flowing to us so fast that
we have not enough warships to carry it across the
Atlantic!"
Later, in 1939, Hitler's troops would find in Warsaw
archives the telegrams from Polish ambassadors in London,
Paris, and Washington revealing how F.D.R. was urging
those governments to war with Germany, while posing as a
peacemaker. When the German foreign ministry published
the captured Polish telegrams in 1940, Graf Jerzy
Potocki, Polish ambassador in Washington, denied that
they were authentic; but they were -- I have seen the
original carbon copies in his papers in the Hoover
Library in California.
Similar forces in Britain militated against peace.
Winston Churchill, alone and without Cabinet employment
since 1930, had cried out for war against somebody --
anybody -- for years.
From July 1936, when London's Jewish community (with
the solid backing of the American Jewish authorities)
started financially assisting him on a substantial scale,
Churchill aimed his hate-filled warmongering speeches and
writings against Germany alone. In this crusade he found
ready, and often wealthy, backing from the refugees
flooding into Britain.
As the newspaper magnate Lord Beaverbrook
(later one of Churchill's Cabinet ministers but also most
vociferous critic too) wrote in March 1938, "There are
twenty thousand German Jews in England -- in the
professions, pursuing research, in chemical operations,
etcetera. These all work against such an accommodation
[with Germany]." "The Jews," the same press lord
rasped in another letter from London, "have got a big
position in the press here. . . At last I am shaken. The
Jews may drive us into war. I do not mean with any
conscious purpose of doing so. They do not mean to do it.
But unconsciously . . . their political influence is
moving us in that direction."* This was the belief of
Britain's prime minister Neville Chamberlain; it
was the belief of the U.S. Ambassador in Britain,
Joseph P. Kennedy, too.
Perhaps this was an exaggeration, an
oversimplification: perhaps it is fairer to say that
there were nations whose parched economies thirsted for
war. All that we can say for certainty, now that we have
complete access to the archives, is that until Munich, in
1938, Germany was able to regain her lost possessions
without resort to war.
Even after Prague, in March 1939, both Mr Chamberlain
and the French were at first inclined to shrug their
shoulders and allow Hitler this excess as well. But
almost instantly the latent forces of the anti-Hitler
coalition -- the British press, the Jewish
émigrés, the foreign governments, the
bankers and armament manufacturers, snapped the last
bonds of restraint.
Under pressure from some or all of these quarters,
Chamberlain uttered his fateful guarantee to the Poles at
the end of March 1939; on August 25, it was ratified by
the British Parliament. Their resolve thus stiffened at
the last instant, the Poles refused to listen to
Germany's demands, and war became inevitable.
It was as though Peace, always a fragile swimmer in
the oceans of national affairs, thus struck a sudden
current -- a hidden undertow -- and vanished from sight
for the next six years.
* Beaverbrook Papers, House of
Lords Records Office.Churchill
Index
© David Irving
1989
