Counter-Currents
1,500 words
The following text is an excerpt from J. F. C. Fuller’s The Generalship of Alexander the Great (Rutgers, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1960), pp. 308–311. The quote from Hermann Rauschning’s fraudulent book Hitler Speaks does not invalidate Fuller’s argument. The title is editorial.
The profoundest political change the First World War gave rise to, or was followed by, was a series of catastrophic revolutions: the Austro-Hungarian empire vanished, the Russian was upheaved by Marxist Communism, the Italian by Fascism, the German by National Socialism, and in many other countries throughout the world Communist and Fascist movements of various shades took root and challenged nineteenth-century civilization. This meant that while in 1914, to all intents and purposes all belligerents had been firmly united nations, whose peoples staunchly supported their respective governments, in the next war, and more particularly in those countries in which revolutionary governments were established, there would exist reactionary inner fronts, and that these hostile factions would enable an enemy, who set out to cooperate with them, to attack these governments internally. Was this change recognized by the statesmen of 1939? Except in Soviet Russia, either not at all, or only superficially. How did this come about?
Hitler’s political aim was to establish a German hegemony over Europe, and its attainment depended on the solution of two problems. The first was, how to conquer and annex the greater part of Russia in Europe, so that the Third Reich might become economically so powerful that it would dominate the rest of Europe? The second was, how to defeat Great Britain and France should they come to Russia’s support?
In character these two problems were very different. Though the inner front in Great Britain was negligible, and in France composed mainly of people opposed to war and not necessarily disloyal to their country, in Russia the position was the reverse. Most of her western provinces, notably the Ukraine and Bielorussia (White Russia), inhabited by some forty million people, had been subjugated by the Russians, and because the vast majority of their inhabitants was antagonistic to the Soviet regime, the Russian inner front was immense. In 1939, Russia was still as Theodor Mommsen, nearly 100 years earlier, had described her, “a dustbin held together by the rusty hoop of Tsardom”; fracture the hoop and the bin would fall to pieces. Hitler’s western problem was essentially military, his eastern essentially political.
Hitler set out on sound Philippian lines to establish his hegemony; he created a new model army based on mobility, and immediately before he launched his war, he tricked Stalin into a faked alliance. Next, he overran Poland in twenty-seven days, and to show his good-will towards Russia, he shared his plunder with her. Then he turned against the West, overran Denmark in one day, conquered Norway in twenty-three days, Holland in five, Belgium in eighteen, France in thirty-nine, Yugoslavia in twelve, and Greece in twenty-one. Philip could not have improved on this strategy, and had Hitler died on the day his Swastika flag was broken over the Acropolis, in the pages of history he might well have taken his place alongside the founder of the Macedonian hegemony. He lived on, but the Philippian light died within him, and that at the very moment when it was needed to illumine his Alexandrian task.
Some years before the war, in a conversation with Hermann Rauschning, Hitler is alleged to have said:
The place of artillery preparation for frontal attack by infantry in trench warfare will in future be taken by revolutionary propaganda, to break down the enemy psychologically before the armies begin to function at all . . . How to achieve the moral break-down of the enemy before the war has started — that is the problem that interests me. Whoever has experienced war at the front will want to refrain from all bloodshed. . . . We shall not shrink from the plotting of revolutions. . . . The lessons of revolutions, these are the secrets of the new strategy. I have learnt from the Bolsheviks. I do not hesitate to say so. One always learns more from one’s enemies. Do you know the doctrine of the coup d’état? Study it. Then you will know our task. . . . I have made the doctrine of revolution the basis of my policy.[1]
This was sound Philippian strategy: Subvert your enemy from within, and when it is politically possible it is both easier and more profitable than to attempt to crack his skull.
If this doctrine were true in preparing for war, it was doubly true when it was waged, and trebly true vis-à-vis Russia, because of her enormous inner front. France was down and out, and Great Britain for the time being impotent; that problem had been solved, and all that was needed to solve the other problem — how to conquer and annex the greater part of Russia in Europe — was for Hitler to put his revolutionary policy into operation. In other words, to enter into alliance with the subjugated peoples in Russia and destroy the Soviet Imperium from within, as in his day Alexander had destroyed the Persian Imperium.
He was advised to adopt this course by Dr. Alfred Rosenberg, his expert on foreign affairs, a Baltic German well acquainted with internal conditions in Russia. He pointed out to Hitler that Russia “has never been a national state, but a state of nationalities”; that the German problem was not to reconstruct the Russian empire, but to dissolve it; not to impose a new political system upon its subjugated peoples, but to recognize each nationality and foster each nation’s independence. “We should declare,” he said, “that we are not fighting the Russian people but the Bolshevik system,” and that “our fight will take place in the name of national self-determination of nations.”[2] In other words, Hitler should proclaim that his war aim was to liberate the subjugated peoples of western Russia; this was sound Alexandrian policy. But Hitler had become so intoxicated by his military successes that he abandoned all idea of relying on the revolutionary strategy he had expounded to Rauschning. He expected that Russia would collapse as France had done, in spite of the fact that the Russians had unlimited space to fall back in, as every former invader had learnt to his cost. Contemptuously he set Rosenberg’s suggestions aside, and declared that: “Our policy is to cut the gigantic cake with skill, so that it can be first mastered, secondly administered, and thirdly exploited . . . Naturally,” he said, “the vast territories have to be pacified as soon as possible; this can best be achieved by shooting everybody who shows a wry face.”[3] Instead of offering the subjugated peoples their freedom, he set out to enslave them, and should they resist, to exterminate them.
In the initial stage of the invasion the Germans were everywhere welcome by the common people as liberators; the Ukrainians looked upon Hitler as the saviour of Europe; the Bielorussians were eager to fight on the German side; whole regiments of Cossacks deserted to their enemy; and Georgians, Armenians, Turkomans, Tartars, and Usbeks, as well as Ukrainians, Bielorussians, and Cossacks, surrendered in droves. At Rostov, writes Erich Kern, “all over the city there were people waiting on the streets ready to cheer and welcome us in. . . . Never before,” writes Kern, “had I seen such a sudden transformation. Of Bolshevism, there was no more. The enemy had gone . . . wherever we went now we met laughing and waving people. . . . The Soviet Empire was creaking at the joints.”[4]
Then came Himmler and his assassins, and “by rousing the Russian people to a Napoleonic fervour,” writes Kern, “we enabled the Bolsheviks to achieve a political consolidation beyond their wildest dreams and provided their cause with the halo of a ‘patriotic war.’”[5] And Walter Görlitz writes: “The fact that the destruction of Bolshevism began soon to mean simply an effort to decimate and enslave the Slav people was the most fatal of all the flaws in the whole campaign.”[6]
More than one historian has considered that Hitler’s failure to occupy Moscow in 1941 was the turning point of the war; but the turning point lay in his policy. Had he assumed the role of a liberator instead of a butcher, the high probability is that he would have dissolved the Soviet Imperium long before the United States entered the war, and thereby have avoided the one thing he dreaded most — a full-scale war on two fronts. In spite of his military ineptitude, his crucial error was far more political than strategical: had he relied on counter-revolution instead of conquest, for him there would have been no turning point at all. He was decisively defeated, not by the Russians, but by his own stupidity.
Notes
1. Hitler Speaks (1939), pp. 19–21.
2. Abstracted from Russian World Ambitions and World Peace, R. Ilnytzky (1953), pp. 4–12.
3. Ibid., pp. 12–15, citing Nuremberg Documents in evidence at the trial before the International Military Tribunal, Nuremberg, 1945–46.
4. Dance of Death (English trans., 1948), pp. 86, 94, and 102. Kern was an N.C.O. in the Leibstandarte Adolf Hitler.
5. Ibid., p. 108.
6. The German General Staff (English trans., 1953), p. 397.
28 comments
Hitler could have won the war if he had come as a liberator not only of the subject peoples of the Soviet Union but also of the Russians themselves. But that would have meant that he should have waged war entirely for altruistic purposes, and that of course was never the intention.
People who still consider Hitler a “genius” would do well to keep in mind how much Hitler was moved by irrational impulses. There was in the first place his megalomania based on racial prejudice. Then his underestimation of the Slavs and his contempt for America (“a judaeified and negrified nation”) and finally his belief in his own “chosenness” and special protection by “Providence”.
There is however one sphere in which Hitler was truely a genius and that is demagoguery. The immense power he attained over the German people at the height of his career could ultimately be ascribed only to his power to stir up the masses, in which he was a master. However it is not sufficient to only be a good salesman, one has also to deliver solid goods.
Making enemies out of potential (and necessary) allies is indeed a colossal mistake, which very likely has changed everything. This would be true in most conflicts of such a scale but for sure for this one. Everybody can agree on that. And if it was Hitler himself who was responsible for that, then that would have been a fatal error on his record. But he didn’t wage a war on the Sovjet Union for altruistic purposes anyhow, as he rightly shouldn’t have, but out of necessity to stop and destroy Bolshevism, which would have attacked Germany (and the rest of Europe) anyway. So it was a mighty noble purpose in my book.
You could state that the execution was flawed by this error.
But I don’t see anything irrational about his contempt for a “a judaeified and negrified nation”. Unless of course that is a perfectly acceptable situation for you. I actually live in such a country and I can report that I have nothing but contempt for what my own country’s society has become in less than half a century, as it currently is the horror of exactly that. And it is becoming worse by the minute.
And if you feel racial prejudice equals megalomania then you must be appalled by this website. It does endorse white nationalism.
How anyone can claim that Hitler didn’t deliver is beyond me. Take a quick look at how life for Germans improved enormously when he came to power, while the rest still had to suffer years of economic depression.
Hitler was the real deal. Yes, Germany was destroyed, but only because he built it up out of literally ruins, and in a very short time. And it was exactly thát achievement what wás the cause of that destruction by our eternal enemy. Adolf Hitler was a man of honour and integrity and he actually proved that our decline as a civilisation isn’t an enevitable phenomenon but an intentionally evil plan executed by jews. And for that alone he deserves to be considered a genius.
The America of Charles Lindbergh was not “a judaeified and negrified nation”.
It was still a Nordic, Protestant, Whig nation molded by the frontier experience. Man for man, Americans were every bit as tough as the Prussians, as they proved on both fronts in WW2.
Fuller asks the wrong question, “How to achieve hegemony?” Why should a White nation *want* to achieve hegemony?
Hegemony was a disaster for Macedonia and its royal family. Philip’s family became extinct, the Macedonian aristocracy relinquished their free European ethos for a slavish oriental ethos to appease the megalomania of Alexander, and within a few centuries of their brief moment of glory the Macedonian nation ceased to exist as a separate and distinct people.
The wisest White statesmen, from Themistocles to Pope Urban II to Pope Innocent XI, have sought to create an alliance of independent power centers prepared to resist the aggression of true outsiders. Lindbergh advocated for the same policy in a Reader’s Digest article shortly before WW2. Had Hitler been wise, he would have been content with the peaceful achievement of Germany unification by the end of 1938, and worked to create a Germano-Franco-Anglo-Russo-American alliance to maintain White interests.
“The America of Charles Lindbergh was not a judaeified and negrified nation” During WWII, America has done all that was necessary for the triumph of the Jews. Your president, central bank and media were under the complete control of Jews. The America of Charles Lindbergh was already fully judaeified.
“Had Hitler been wise, he would have been content with the peaceful achievement of Germany unification by the end of 1938, and worked to create a Germano-Franco-Anglo-Russo-American alliance to maintain White interests.”
Only Britain and America, and perhaps to a lesser degree, Soviet Russia and France, all controlled by international Jewry, would most certainly refuse to listen to him and remain unpersuaded no matter how hard he tried as he actually did to France and England repeatedly and sincerely, asked them to come to peace, only to have his words fall on predetermined deaf ears and hostile minds.
This is exactly right, and much the same analysis in Maggenheimer’s “Hitler’s War.”
And this is not hindsight, as Rosenberg’s entreaties were mocked and eschewed.
What is with all of this ridiculous post-game quarterbacking on this site, of late? More examples of whites blaming themselves and their own heroes rather than blaming the enemy.
I swear, if Bismarck and the Prussians had lost the 1871 war, you’d be blaming Bismarck for “his own stupidity.”
Of course A.H. was a genius. Tactical mistakes are easy to see in hindsight. But what we do know is what happens without having such a man come along: The United States (about which his negative opinion was absolutely correct, the one that Ryckaert quotes) never had such a hero, and as a result it has degenerated steadily over the past century to the point where it has become the worst toxin of the world, not only suffused by Cultural Marxism but also spreading it around the globe.
Without this one great figure, the degenerate Weimar Republic likely would have gone on indefinitely and would have become Cultural Marxism Central, decades in advance of the U.S. taking on that role.
Germany today, and Europe in general, pointedly lacks such a genius, and as a result traditionalists forever remain divided and unable to save their own nations. We, right now, are experiencing the depravity of what would have happened to Germany in the 1930s if there had never been such a great man.
That the world ganged up on him, or that he got to within 10 meters of the finish line but couldn’t complete the journey, in no way invalidates the heroic and exemplary 90 meters that he and he alone managed to coax Germany into achieving. We see this especially today, when no traditionalists can even get out of the starting blocks.
Amen. What have all of these critics of Hitler ever accomplished? Nothing that I’m aware of unless you want to count getting books or essays published.
What have you critics of the critics of Hitler ever accomplished? At least some of us have blogs, contribute to Counter-Currents, and have been involved in the “movement” for 20 years, writing and spreading ideas. What have you done?
By this logic, you can’t criticize Merkel for opening Germany to alien migration. After all, have you accomplished what she did? What political office have you been elected to?
The point, of course, is to learn from the mistakes and we can’t very well do that if we don’t recognize any mistakes.
absolutely right! Western culture has been systematically replaced by purely materialistic values and ugliness and this has been led by the USA, precisely what Hitler was criticizing.
Nobodys perfect, and things very rarely work out at the first attempt, Jews have been succesful not because they are perfect or have providence on their side, they have been trying this world domination for millenia, at the beginning with pathetic results but they never give up, the early church fathers despite of being living in times of decadence they portrayed history as linear progress leading to the unification of humanity by the faith (and trying to discredit Romes golden age, Marx anyone?), much the saem thing is being done today but Christianity has changed its face by Globalism (portraying these decadent times as progress and diminishing the great achievements of the past), its also interesting that the early conception of Christianity was that all evil in the world came from men alone, very reminiscent of todays idea of all bad things steming from white people, its interesting that both the old and the modern notions were ultimately inspired by jewish tought.
Jews feel so superior to everyone else that they dont hesitate in creating a caricature of all peoples in order to make us all fit into their hate fantasy where we simply play the role they have imagined in their simplistic racial-class struggle and our identity is determined by whatever they want it to be, if you are black, jews will make sure that you feel diminished by whites etc. ofcourse this is denigrating and dehumanizing for everyone.
I know the a case of a liberal activist Jew that when confronted by a mexican with the fact that Jews run hollywod and is pure propaganda he started to insult the mexican and belittling him because of his nationality jaja arent liberals supposed to believe that all are the same that we should love mexican culture and in universal tolerance? it just shows their sense of superiority that they want to suppress in everyone else.
“Existence is the enduring essence while Life is a temporary expression, I cannot Exist without love but cannot Live without hate, Life is a struggle in which we are compelled to hate and fight evilness in order to increase the beloved in our Existence”
J. F. C. Fuller’s discussion above is especially significant in view of its source: Fuller was a British fascist and an outstanding expert on military history.
I think the comments at “Hitler’s Failure” and the ones here will show at least two things.
First, there’s a need for more material dealing with the Third Reich’s ideology and policy as it related to eastern Europe, so that these issues can be addressed with greater knowledge and insight. Discussions of these things are often informed, so to speak, by a handful of factoids, references, and sources (e.g., Hitler’s Table Talk, Der Untermensch), by petty nationalism (which in some cases might be better called “cut-throat nationalism”), by Hitlerphilia or Hitlerphobia. There’s also plenty of point-scoring disputatiousness, incivility, and misology. This is deplorable.
Second, Hitler’s policies in eastern Europe and elsewhere should be soberly assessed against the criteria of grand strategy, such as summarized below, and with a sense of history that properly accounts for what Clausewitz called fog and friction. In politics as in war, fog makes it difficult to see far ahead, or to even see what one is doing, and friction makes even the simplest things difficult to do. Unfortunately, it seems that few people are prepared to think of these things.
Franklin Spinney writes of grand strategy:
“The late American strategist, Col. John R. Boyd . . . evolved five criteria for synthesizing and evaluating a nation’s grand strategy. . . . Boyd argued that any country should shape the domestic policies, foreign policies, and military strategies used to pursue its national goals . . . in a way that a nation’s decisions and actions work to:
“1. Strengthen that nation’s resolve and increase its political cohesion or solidarity;
“2. Drain away the resolve of its adversaries and weaken their internal cohesion;
“3. Reinforce the commitments of its allies to its cause and make them empathetic to its success;
“4. Attract the uncommitted to its cause or makes them empathetic to its success;
“5. And most importantly, end conflicts on favorable terms that do not sow the seeds of future conflicts.
“These common sense criteria should not be thought of as a checklist, but as being general guidelines for evaluating the wisdom of specific policies or actions . . .”
Spinney also observes:
“Obviously, it is difficult to construct policies that conform to or reinforce all these criteria at the same time. . . . Military operations and political coercion are usually destructive in the short term, and their destructive strategic effects can be in natural tension with the aims of grand strategy, which should be constructive over the long term. History is littered with failures to reconcile the natural tension between military strategy and grand strategy.
“Moreover, the more powerful a country becomes, the harder it is to combine these often conflicting criteria into a sensible grand strategy. The possession of overwhelming power breeds hubris and arrogance that tempts leaders to use their power coercively and excessively. But lording over or dictating one’s will to others breeds lasting resentment. Thus, paradoxically, the possession of overwhelming power increases the danger of going astray grand strategically over the long term.”
http://chuckspinney.blogspot.com.au/p/criteria-of-sensible-grand-strategy.html
For his part, Fuller remarked that “Alexander realized what many statesmen forget: that the good-will of the civil population is the moral basis of military power. It follows from this that there are always two fronts in a war; an outer or physical front, the province of the general, and an inner, or psychological front, the province of the statesman. That on the former battles are fought with weapons, while on the latter they are fought with ideas enshrined in the policy the statesman adopts towards the enemy’s peoples” (The Generalship of Alexander the Great, p. 267.)
By the standards of Boyd or Fuller, Hitler’s eastern policy was senseless in terms of grand strategy. It was reckless in its aim and disastrous in its results — obviously and predictably so. It was like driving down the wrong side of a highway at high speed without fearing a crash.
Thank you for that excellent comment and the informative link. What the “movement” needs is more strategic thinking. This is the value in critiquing Hitler (or any other leader, friend or foe): to learn from their mistakes.
Those of us critiquing Hitler here are not doing it from a knee-jerk anti-Hitler bias. It’s not from a liberal ideological bias: I am a national socialist. But it is very dangerous to have some sort of fossilized Hitler cult. Where he was right (basic ideology, on the Jews), let’s learn from that, and where he was wrong (attitude toward non-Germanic Europeans, war strategy, stupid racial theories- e.g., drooping Czech moustaches), let’s learn from that as well.
You’re right that more strategic thinking is needed. I’ve been thinking about how this might be promoted, but it’s giving me a headache, for I’m not sure where to start. Strategy is an esoteric and difficult discipline. Among racial nationalists, there is a strategic vacuum, a lack of any strategic vision and any strategic action. We need a strategy which is fundamentally adventurous, creative, and adaptive: we need to go into unfamiliar territory, to build institutions, and to exercise a high level of problem-solving ability at all levels. We need to amass what Friedrich Nietzsche called the “capital of human wit and will.” In this context, strategy is very much an emergent property of a movement, something that expresses its will to power and governs its work for power, something that grows organically and evolves with experience, and something which is modular, taking different forms in different spheres of action. Strategies require a certain coherence of ideas and action among the members of a movement if they are to take effect.
Where should one start reading in order to think about strategy in an informed manner? This is a vexing question. Those who are unfamiliar with a given subject aren’t the best judges of the literature on that subject. There are many publications dealing with many kinds of strategies. The word strategy is defined in various ways, is sometimes used indiscriminately, and seems to excite magical thinking in some people.
Some people want strategies to provide final, complete, and definitive solutions, but we have to content ourselves with working solutions — solutions which are incomplete and imperfect, but which enable us to move forward. As Everett Carl Dolman defines it, albeit in the context of international politics, “strategy, in its simplest form, is a plan for attaining continuing advantage. For the goal of strategy is not to culminate events, to establish finality in the discourse between states, but to influence states’ discourse in such a way that it will go forward on favorable terms.” (Pure Strategy: Power and Principle in the Space and Information Age [London: Frank Cass, 2005], p. 6.)
One difficulty with a strategy concerned with working solutions is that it may appear to have little to show for itself at first, regardless of how well-thought-out and ultimately constructive it may be, and it will demand much from its partisans in terms of work and discipline. This doesn’t appeal to people with a short-term outlook or an all-or-nothing outlook. Such people form the market for panacea peddlers and miracle mongers. They want quick fixes and total solutions. They’re obsessed with the trivial and indifferent to the essential. Although there’s plenty of work that can and should be done, starting now and continuing well into the future — the saying that “nothing can be done” sometimes means “everything remains to be done” — these people can’t recognize the necessity, utility, and value of such work.
By the way, Dolman also provides a good distinction between plans and strategies: “A plan is not strategy, though strategy without a plan is absurd. To have a plan is to have made a decision or decisions regarding the means available to achieve a specified result (a tactical plan) or condition (a strategic plan), and the manner in which those means shall be employed. To be a planner is to understand the process by which means are applied to achieve goals or conditions, and to understand that a plan must be able to anticipate the unforeseen through designed adaptability to changing conditions (a plan that does not anticipate change is simply not strategic). To have a strategy is to have a plan that sets into motion a series of actions or events that lead the state toward a desired condition or policy. To be a strategist is to understand how the parameters of action determine the means and ends chosen in conflict, and to manipulate the processes that transform them. To be a strategist is to know that the strategy needs a plan, but that the plan is not the strategy.” (Pure Strategy, p. 11.)
We need to properly define the context in which we should formulate strategy in order to effectively select and adapt ideas and works relating to strategy.
Perhaps I shouldn’t worry about where to start and simply start. I’m not in a position where I can choose the most advantageous starting point, but I’m probably in a better position than most people in this regard, and I should make the most of it.
I think that Adolf Hitler was the greatest white man who ever lived. If it wasn’t for Hitler the jews would have went a much longer time operating under the radar, as it was, he dragged them out into the sunlight, and made the whole world aware of their machinations. I would also like to thank the jews for always whining about the holo-hoax, and running their mouths about Hitler, they, more than anyone, have kept the white race aware of Hitler, and his greatness.
White people have to stop fighting each other.
They need to unite against the common foes.
It’s that simple.
The Raushning conversations are now recognized as fakes. Hitler didn’t plan on exterminating the Slavs. I even heard that ridiculous lie repeated on the Daily shoah last week. Certainly the Slavs wouldn’t have lived a life of luxury under German rule but in table talk he said that the Slavs quality of life would be better under German rule than any time in history. There are many other similar quotes in table talk. As far as his failure to take the east before the U.S. entered the war, the Germans would have conquered the east had the German high command not changed his plan to encircle Moscow. Marshall Zhukov himself agreed that Russia would have crumbled if Hitler’s strategy was implemented. I agree that he should have appealed more to the national aspirations of the people in the east, though many did serve in the Waffen SS, and he publicly praised them.
Yes, the Rauschning conversations are recognized as fakes, as I pointed out. I also pointed out that nothing in the argument depends on the quote. It is a pity that Hitler did not say and think what Rauschning attributed to him here. The war might have gone better.
Hitler did not plan to exterminate the Slavs. That is a stupid bit of post-war propaganda. He was allied with some Slavs, for instance Croats, Slovaks, and Bulgarians. But he did plan to basically reduce the conquered Slavs (Poles, Ukrainians, etc) to serfs, perhaps assimilating their best racial stock, and work to wipe out their national identity. Which is still genocide, by the way, as defined by the UN. And if WNs are going to apply that genocide definition to our present rulers, we have to apply it to the Third Reich too.
The New Right stands for ethnonationalism. Hitler was not consistent about that. He was a German chauvinist, a social Darwinist, and an imperialist with a host of scientifically false prejudices about Slavs. These attitudes turned out to be his undoing. Thus they have no place in New Right thinking. We can do better.
Hitler’s attitude about Slavs wasn’t his undoing in my opinion. The biggest factor that turned the war against him was the participation of the United States. Without this I believe the Gemans could have defeated the Soviet Union or at least fought them to a stalemate.
The points made by Venner and Fuller is that he failed to defeat the USSR because he opposed rather than supported the legitimate national ambitions of the Slavs. The US did not defeat the Germans with soldiers but with war material given to the Soviets.
Up until late 1943 the Germans were holding their own on the Eastern Front. At that point they had to start diverting more manpower to the approaching battles in the West. Without the participation of the United States would there ever been a re-opening of the Western Front in World War II? Without a re-opening of the Western Front is there still a German collapse in the East? Who knows. It doesn’t really matter now. I do think that it is stupid though to fight a war unless you’re defending your own country or plan on annexing the territory you’re invading. How do you justify the bloodshed otherwise? Unless your the United States who invades countries for all types of altruistic reasons only to create a bigger mess than what was there in the first place.
I believe the Germans committed about 10% of their efforts to the West. Of course that might have made all the difference.
Ridding the world of Bolshevism was a noble aim, and it could have been accomplished if Hitler had aligned himself with the nationalism of the Russian people. As it happened, Stalin was the one who appealed to Russian nationalism. It is obscene that some Russian nationalists still revere him today.
I agree with you on that, and I also believe that Rosenberg was an outstanding proponent of making allies out of the Slavs, rather than driving them back into Stalin’s hands as his allies and tools.
I went to a David Irving talk once where he brought this up. Glad you pointed this out.
Excellent articles about Hitler’s mistakes. Not saying so out of emotional grudges against Hitler/Germany. Even being a Slav myself, I’ve reached a point where I grudgingly admit: it probably would’ve been better for everybody, Russians included, if Hitler, and not the Soviets, won.
But it’s tiresome to read rather primitive apologism and myths again and again in the pro-White / Far Right circles. A lot of things, especially starting with the invasion of Poland (and how it was done), can IMHO be described by the famous saying: “It’s worse than a crime, it’s a mistake”. By the way, pre-WW2 Poland, Polish-German relations and the German invasion pretexts are another area where myths and obvious propagandistic distortions are piled high. Some of it is virtually identical to the the official diplomatic pretexts and modern apologism for… Stalin’s invasions into Finland, Poland and Baltic States. I kid you not, sometimes there are almost identical words.
I am surprised to read that Rosenberg actually opposed Hitler on this. In the Soviet / “Russian” world, AFAIK, people like Rosenberg are typically depicted as advocates of “Slav genocide”.
If anything from the Eastern Front stands out as an example of “what might have been”, it’s the Lokot Republic. It was an anti-communist Russian autonomy under the patronage of Germany. Too bad it was a rather small scale experiment, as opposed to the “general Party Line”. I cannot find in the Wikipedia articles, which NS party bigshots were the chief backers and patrons of this experiment, but it does briefly mention Alfred Rosenberg. Perhaps, then, he was the one, as this Counter-Currents text here also would suggest.
Sovietophiles hate the issue of Lokot republic brought up much more than that of Vlasov, a very inconvenient topic for the “Soviet narrative”. To end on a high note, a photo of modern Russian WNs honoring that collaboration on the biggest annul nationalist rally in Moscow (04 November 2014). The banner reads: “thanks granpa, for the attempt”.
So many reasons- or at least factors- go into this question of why Hitler lost the war.
It’s easy to focus on big political questions like the alienation of potential allies in the way Slavs, etc., were treated. The fact that we are a bit unsure ourselves, at this late date and with thousands of histories to peruse, exactly what the Third Reich’s policies were or were going to be on the Eastern Front suggests that this aspect of strategy either suffered some internal conflicts or was improperly thought through.
Many additional factors- everything from Winston Churchill’s indebtedness to Jews and his subsequent efforts to steer the UK and USA into war against the Reich-problems in the West that Germany did not need-to facts like the failure to capture and make use of the Russian oil fields, and the inadequacy of the cold-weather provisioning of German troops on the eastern Front- all these things and many more contributed to the prolonged two-front war and subsequent loss.
The fact is that Hitler was involved in an unprecedented kind of war with an international hydra- Jewish power- at the same time he was dealing with the old-fashioned problem of conventional wars with countries clearly delineated on a map. Remember that all this time we’re watching the re-run of the failure to defeat the Soviets, in the Judaized and Negrified USA there was a bomb being built that it’s Jewish developers fully intended to see used against the Reich.
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