Hitler the Peacemaker
David L. Hoggan’s The Forced War
Part 1

2,781 words

Part 1 of 5 (Part 2 here)

David L. Hoggan
The Forced War: When Peaceful Revision Failed, 2nd ed.
Newport Beach, Calif.: Institute for Historical Review, 2023

David Hoggan (1923-1988) was an American historian who received his doctorate from Harvard University in 1948 with a dissertation on The Breakdown of German-Polish Relations in 1939. The influential and well-respected historian Harry Elmer Barnes was so impressed with it that he encouraged Hoggan to expand it into the book currently under review.It first appeared in 1961 in a German translation (Der Erzwungene Krieg). With its thesis that Hitler and Germany did not bear primary responsibility for the outbreak of the Second World War in 1939, the work triggered predictable outrage among the West German political and cultural establishment, but met with a grateful reception from thousands of ordinary Germans. Mainstream German historians produced critiques, and were able to point out instances of questionable documentation, some of which the author later corrected. However, as German historian Kurt Glaser wrote of the controversy: “It is hardly necessary to repeat here that Hoggan was not attacked because he had erred here and there — albeit some of his errors are material — but because he had committed heresy against the creed of historical orthodoxy.”

It took another 28 years for Hoggan’s book to appear in English, as Mark Weber explains in his Introduction to this new edition:

As he was finishing work on the manuscript, the author became embroiled in a dispute with Barnes, who pleaded with Hoggan to revise or remove a few troublesome passages that, in his view, were not adequately supported by the evidence. Hoggan, proud and somewhat temperamental, refused to budge. He also quarreled with Devin-Adair, the publisher that was preparing the book for release. Because these disputes were not resolved, Devin-Adair withdrew from the project. Eventually the Institute for Historical Review obtained the rights to the book. But a devastating arson attack on the IHR’s offices in July 1984, which destroyed the book’s layout and proof sheets, art work and other key files, delayed publication several more years.

The first English edition of The Forced War finally appeared in 1989. Despite his disagreements with a few of the author’s formulations, Harry Elmer Barnes said of the book: “it not only constitutes the first thorough study of the responsibility for the causes of the Second World War, but is likely to remain the definitive revisionist work on this subject for many years.” The 1989 edition has long been out of print. This new edition has been completely reset, with a new index, photographs, map, and Introduction, as well as corrections and expansions to the appendix, bibliography, and notes.

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An important consequence of the First World War was the reappearance of a sovereign Poland on the map of Europe. The new state was unenviably located between Germany and Russia — two much larger powers with a combined population eight times its own. Under such circumstances, prudence dictated the cultivating of friendly relations with at least one of these two states as insurance against possible threats from the other. Long before independence was recovered in 1918, Polish nationalists had been debating whether a pro-German or pro-Russian policy would be in the country’s best interest. As Hoggan writes, a hostile Polish policy toward both neighbors “would have been like a canary seeking to devour two cats.”

Success in foreign relations requires adaptation to constantly changing circumstances, and the author credits Marshal Józef Piłsudski, the dominant figure in interwar Poland, with the necessary flexibility. In 1933, for example, the Marshal had considered a possible preventive war against a still-weak Germany, yet by the end of that year he had given his approval for a German-Polish non-aggression pact. In March 1935 he came out in opposition to efforts to challenge Hitler’s defiance of the Versailles Treaty, believing the time when Germany might have been dealt with through intimidation had passed.

Piłsudski died in May 1935, and Hoggan characterizes his successors as epigoni: lesser figures who sought to perpetuate the Marshal’s legacy but lacked his breadth of views. Polish foreign policy became the responsibility of Piłsudski’s longtime collaborator, Col. Józef Beck, who failed to display the Marshal’s flexibility in relations with Poland’s two powerful neighbors. Unalterably opposed to any collaboration with the Soviet Union, Beck would consistently reject all overtures from Hitler. This proved to be a luxury Poland could not afford.

Ten months after Piłsudski’s death, Hitler ordered German troops into the Rhineland, which had been demilitarized under the Versailles Treaty. Polish Foreign Minister Beck responded by summoning the French ambassador and offering to attack Germany from the east if France would agree to invade from the west. It was symptomatic of what was to come. As Hoggan explains, Beck

believed that the unpopular Polish regime would acquire tremendous prestige and advantages from a military victory over Germany. His attitude illustrates the deceptiveness of the friendship between Germany and Poland during these years, which on the Polish side was pure treachery, beneath the façade.

Though revealing, the incident proved inconsequential: The French were not interested. Beck covered his tracks by having the Polish news agency issue a pro-German statement the following day.

The Versailles Treaty of 1919 was a disaster for German-speaking Central Europe. It broke up the Austro-Hungarian Empire, leaving seven million Germans in a newly-constituted Austrian rump state none of them desired, and three million more within “Czechoslovakia,” a new multi-ethnic state dominated by the Czechs. Nearly all these people would have preferred to see their lands become part of Germany, but this was forbidden by the victorious powers.

The German state itself also suffered large punitive reductions in territory under Versailles and other post-war treaties, including the annexation of Alsace-Lorraine by France, the Eupen district by Belgium, and northern Schleswig by Denmark. By far the greatest amount of territory, however, was lost to the new Polish state, including most of the provinces of Posen and West Prussia, along with the industrial region of East Upper Silesia. These regions amounted to more than 25,000 square miles — about the size of today’s Lithuania — and were home to over five million people, many of them German. The awarding of this land to Poland contravened the November 1918 armistice agreement under which Germany declared it would accept the results of self-determination in the German-Polish borderlands.

The agreement had also stipulated that Poland was to obtain access to the sea, a result which could have been achieved by granting her free harbor facilities in German ports. The Germans living there would have been glad to get the business. Instead, the Versailles Treaty assigned Poland political sovereignty over a corridor to the Baltic that cut the province of East Prussia off from the rest of Germany — without bothering to ask the local inhabitants what they thought.

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Danzig, a medium-sized provincial German port city, was subjected to what Hoggan calls “the least defensible territorial provision of the Versailles Treaty.” Against the will of its citizens, it was detached from Germany and placed under the administration of the League of Nations. Geographically, it lay sandwiched between East Prussia and the Polish Corridor, which had the effect of exciting Polish covetousness while also preventing its satisfaction. In short, no one was happy with the arrangement.

In November 1937, Germany and Poland concluded a pact regarding their ethnic minorities in one another’s countries. It prohibited forced assimilation and restrictions on use of the mother tongue, protected peaceful ethnic associations and schools, and forbade policies of economic discrimination. The pact was especially welcome to ethnic Germans in Poland, who had been treated harshly after 1918. Hundreds of thousands had already migrated to the Reich.

It is difficult to get an accurate count of the total number of Germans living in interwar Poland at any given time. The author notes, “A critical study of the 1931 Polish census, which contained startling inaccuracies in several directions, showed that the given figure of 727,000 Germans was short of the real figure by more than 400,000.” It is even more difficult to get an idea of how many Poles lived in Germany; the German census allowed native speakers of Polish to declare themselves ethnically German if they wished, resulting in a count of fewer than 15,000 Poles in the entire country. The German government estimated there ought to have been 260,000 by objective criteria, while the Polish government alleged there were one and a half million! This last claim is certainly fanciful: Hoggan describes the German minority in Poland as “much larger.”

Unfortunately, the 1937 agreement on minorities was ignored by the Polish authorities, and subsequent months saw conditions for the German minority in Poland deteriorate rather than improve. German schools were closed and Poland’s land reform program was carried out in a manner heavily biased against German interests. In 1938, for example, Germans had to supply two-thirds of the land for confiscation and redistribution. The German government forbade newspapers to report on anti-German incidents for fear of damaging diplomatic relations with Poland.

In spite of all this, a leading member of the Polish Parliament publicly declared in April 1938 that conditions were far worse for Poles in Germany. The speech “had a disastrous effect on the attitude of the Polish masses toward the Germans in Poland, and the theme of the speech was constantly reiterated in the Polish popular press.” The German Ministry of the Interior investigated the claim and found no more than a few instances of “discrimination against Polish students and restrictions on the distribution of books by Polish cooperatives.” But this had no effect on ordinary Poles, and anti-German hostility grew.

The year 1938 witnessed two stunning diplomatic victories for Adolf Hitler which temporarily relegated German-Polish relations to the background: the annexation of Austria in March and that of the Sudetenland, or German-speaking periphery of the Czech lands, in October. Without a shot being fired, two of the Versailles Treaty’s punitive anti-German provisions were undone and ten million Germans brought into the German state.

As demonstrated by British historian A. J. P. Taylor in The Origins of the Second World War (1961), and contrary to the picture painted at the Nuremburg Trials, these were not preplanned stages in a program of conquest, but opportunistic responses to events over which Hitler had little control. For example, as late as four days before the Anschluss, or the annexation of Austria on March 12, 1938, Hitler had no plans for such an action and no idea it was going to occur. The previous month he had met with Austrian Chancellor Kurt Schuschnigg who, in Hoggan’s words,

agreed to cease persecuting Austrian National Socialists, to admit the National Socialist Austrian leader, [Arthur] Seyss-Inquart, to the Cabinet as Minister of the Interior, and to permit Hitler to broadcast a speech to Austria in return for a Schuschnigg speech to Germany.

The Austrian leader later regretted these concessions and began to consider how to repudiate them. On March 9, 1938, he announced a plebiscite on the future of Austria in just four days’ time. Voting would not to be anonymous, and “a vote-of-confidence question in Schuschnigg was to be phrased in terms as confusing and misleading as possible.” The breathtaking speed of the events which followed resulted from Schuschnigg’s insistence on holding his plebiscite within such a short time.

Schuschnigg was informed by Seyss-Inquart on March 11, 1938, at 10:00 a.m., that he must agree within one hour to revoke the fraudulent plebiscite, and agree to a fair and secret-ballot plebiscite within three to four weeks, on the question of whether Austria should remain independent or be reunited with the rest of Germany. Otherwise the German Army would occupy Austria. The failure of a reply within the specified time produced a new ultimatum demanding that Seyss-Inquart succeed Schuschnigg as Chancellor of Austria.

The German army entered Austrian territory to install Seyss-Inquart, and the Austrian public’s ecstatic reaction convinced Hitler to simply annex the country the following day.

The Czech crisis later that year presented important analogies to what had happened in Austria. At Versailles, the Czech leaders had assured the victorious powers that they intended to give their new state of Czechoslovakia a Swiss-style decentralized constitution involving a loose confederation between the various nationalities. What they went on to create was a kind of Czech empire in which their own group wielded power over all the others, Slovaks included. Accordingly, the annexation of Austria produced wild excitement among three million disaffected Sudeten Germans. By the end of March, their leader, Konrad Heinlein, was “pleading for the curtailment of all propaganda efforts to arouse the Sudeten people who were already too much aroused.” Heinlein collaborated with the German leadership to formulate a list of demands which he announced on April 24.

The Czech leadership was placed in an awkward position, and on May 21 they made a tactical blunder not unlike Schuschnigg’s announcement of a fraudulent plebiscite: They ordered partial mobilization based on a false accusation that German troops were concentrating on the Czech border. They hoped that “the resulting emotional confusion would commit the British and the French to the Czech position before a policy favoring concessions to the Sudeten Germans could be implemented.” This did not happen, and British military experts soon determined there were no hostile German troop concentrations. The fiasco led to Hitler’s decision to force the Sudeten issue that same year.

A British fact-finding mission to Czechoslovakia

completed its labors early in September 1938, and reported that the main difficulty in the Sudeten area had been the disinclination of the Czechs to grant reforms. This development was accompanied by the final rupture of negotiations between the Sudeten German and Czech leaders. It was evident that the crisis was close at hand.

The Czech and German leaders traded defiant messages, and British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain made two abortive efforts to intercede with Hitler on September 15 and 23-24. Hitler was determined to resolve the matter militarily on October 1. However, on September 28 Italy launched a last-minute mediation effort to which Hitler agreed.

The British Ambassador was able to telephone London at 3:15 p.m. that Hitler wished to invite Chamberlain, [French Prime Minister] Daladier, and Mussolini to Munich the next day to discuss a peaceful solution of the Czech problem. The British Prime Minister received this news while delivering a tense speech to the House of Commons on the imminent danger of war. When he announced the news of Hitler’s invitation and his intention to accept, he received the greatest ovation in the history of the British Parliament.

The events which followed have been among the most misrepresented and mythologized of the twentieth century. At the Munich Conference, Britain and France declined to go to war over the Sudetenland, and all peripheral districts of the Czech lands with a German population of over 50% were assigned to Germany. Hoggan writes:

Never was an agreement more clearly in the interest of all Powers concerned. Great Britain had won time to continue to gain on the German lead in aerial armament. France extricated herself from the danger of a desperate war after having abandoned her military hegemony in Europe in 1936 [when she permitted Germany’s occupation of the Rhineland]. Italy was spared the danger of involvement in a war when she was woefully unprepared. Germany won a great bloodless victory in her program of peaceful territorial revision. By resisting the temptation to fight merely because she had the momentary military advantage, she increased her stature and prestige.

Contrary to legend, there was never any split within the British leadership, either at the time of the Munich Conference or later, between the advocates of craven “appeasement” and manly resistance to “Nazi aggression.” Britain faced no “Nazi aggression.” As an American embassy official in Berlin noted that same year, “an English-German understanding is Hitler’s first principle of diplomacy in 1938, just as it was in 1934, or in 1924 when he wrote Mein Kampf.”

An anti-German stance predominated within the British Conservative Party at this time, including among those later referred to contemptuously as “appeasers.” The only serious disagreement focused on whether to go to war with Germany immediately or to play for time. Chamberlain once remarked that “one should select a favorable hour to stop Hitler rather than to permit the German leader to pick both the time and the place for the conflict” — hardly the view of a man willing to sacrifice all other considerations to the maintenance of peace.

As Hoggan notes, one reason Britain acquiesced in the Munich settlement was her perceived need to beef up aerial munitions before the final showdown that was already being planned. She did so, in fact, over the next 11 months. Whereas Germany possessed mainly light and medium bombers for tactical operations in support of ground troops, the British armaments program emphasized heavy bombers that were capable of attacking civilian objectives far behind the front. British targeting of Germany’s women and children was planned at least as early as 1936.