I just viewed Andreaj Wajda’s film about the Katyn Forest Massacre. This event characterized Stalin’s paranoid politics as no other event could. We have the basic human honesty of the Poles to thank for that. They seemed beaten down by Hitler, Stalin and their own Communist politicians, but they survived and now they are telling their stories.
I can recall too many reminders that India is the oldest and largest democracy in the world that works! And there is little doubt that if you need to find evidence of how messy democracy can be, there is no better democracy than India’s.
In the dirty thirties and bloody forties of the 20th century it was all about Hitler and Stalin. Now there is a leaky virulent strain of political violence that nests very effectively in SE Asia.
Wajda’s movie gave me the creeps with it’s forthright truth telling. The story revealed by Ms. Roy gives me the shivers, especially because so many new Canadians are from SE Asia. Will the virulent strain of political violence leak from Kashmir to India to Canada?
Poland is central to Overy’s analysis, which suggests he may not be offering anything very new. His preface outlines the role of Danzig after the Treaty of Versailles, the vital supply channel for Polish trade that ultimately provoked Hitler’s disquieting request for lebensraum. Danzig remains the fault-line for the declaration of war, although clearly there are other causes: pride and obstinacy, failed brinkmanship and both sides’ belief that they were the last true upholders of western values. Overy suggests that the sheer exhaustion of the antagonists, particularly Neville Chamberlain, also played a part. A week after the war began, the prime minister wrote to his sister that his days “of stress and strain” had made him lose all sense of time: “Life is just one long nightmare.”
My own personal connection with this very sad part of WW2 history is that I was living in Paris with my birth family since my father had, since April 1939, taken up his posting with RBofC as manager of their 10, rue Scribe branch in Paris. By then I had lived in three countries, born in Barcelona in Oct 1935, in Montmagny QC with my mother and siblings in Aug 1936 till Oct 1937 and then Vernets-l-bains in the French Pyrenees. We had been unwillingly chased from Barcelona in mid-July 1936 by the outbreak of
the Spanish Civil War, which happened with violent clashes in and around Barcelona, which was the industrial heartland of Spain then.
My mother and I were forced to leave Paris after the German Wehrmacht invaded Western Europe so successfully on May 10, 1940. After lots of scrambling we made our way with my father and all siblings, Helen, Jean-Paul and Annette the latest arrival (May 16, 1940) back to Canada via the south of France, Portsmouth UK, and convoy out of Greenock, Scotland to Halifax, where we finally landed on July 13, 1940.
It seems that Medvedev is ready to deny that Stalin, the practical dictator of and head of state of the USSR during the dirty ’30s and ’40s, directed foreign policy that focused on direct intervention in the affairs of many countries such as Spain during it’s Civil War, China during the ascent of Mao Zedong to the leadership of the Chinese Communist Party and the brutal partition of Poland after signing an agreement of mutual support with Hitler in 1939 days before the Nazi horde invaded Poland.
According to Medvedev all those terrible historical verities are a string of cynical lies, which is on the face of it a much bigger CYNICAL LIE today.
There is little doubt that the USSR suffered enormously during the German Nazi invasion and spoliation of the Russian, Ukrainian and Belorussian homelands from 1941 until counterattacks from the USSR armies in 1943-44 and 1945. There is also little doubt that that conflict had more to do with the demise of the Hitlerian 1000 year Reich than any number of pinpricks by Western Allied armies. Those are big facts, but it’s not a fact that the USSR had nothing to do with the invasion and partition of Poland in 1939-40. That was deliberate foreign and military policy/action of the USSR. During that time the USSR armies invaded Finland also!
Given my own childhood “escape” from Nazi occupied France in 1940, I feel something when media people like Limbaugh start painting Obama, the US President with the Hitler and fascism brush.
I read this blog post with great interest because of it’s title “So you wanna talk about Hitler”. I highly recommend it for the views expressed and the images from Nazi Germany!
By repeatedly beating Prussian generals in battle, Napoleon provoked a radical reaction from the Prussians who eventually outdid his brilliance in battle, beginning in the battles of the 1811 to 1815 at Waterloo, especially.
In fact, the Prussian military realized that innovating and rebuilding their military machine required basic political reforms, or freeing its serfs so that they could become citizen soldiers like the French soldiers were. The serfs and mercenaries that made up Prussian armies lacked the ability and willingness to adopt the tactical and operational innovations introduced by Napoleon’s industrialized armies.
Maj. Gen. Scharnhorst, a political liberal and a reformer leading the effort to transform Prussia’s military capability to meet and then beat Napoleon in the field, recognized that it was necessary to free serfs politically to then train them in the new tactics used by Napoleon’s armies.
It is to easy to project this basic idea of revolutionary change into the predominance that Prussian and then German armies exercised over the next 125 years up until June 1940, which saw the lightning defeat of the larger better equipped French Armies by the Wehrmacht in Western Europe.
This predominance was finally stretched and broken by the radical over-reach of Hitler in Eastern Europe from 1941 till the crushing defeat of his armies in 1945 by the Soviet military juggernaut, marshalled by Stalin.
It’s clear then that the predominance of one army over the others comes mostly from the ability to train its soldiery in use of tactics and technology. That certainly was amply demonstrated in May and June 1940 in Western Europe and again in 1943 till 1945 by the Soviet military.
Timothy Ryback’s “Hitler’s Private Library” was published recently. A review in the New York Sun written by Sir Ian Kershaw a well known author of of books about Hitler, had this interesting comment:
As Mr. Ryback aptly adjudges, what Hitler’s attention to such works shows is
Not a profound, unfathomable distillation of the philosophies of Schopenhauer or Nietzsche, but instead a dime-story theory cobbled together from cheap, tendentious paperbacks and esoteric hardcovers, which gave rise to a thin, calculating, bully mendacity rather than some profoundly grounded source of evil, less the triumph of the will than of the shrill.
Unfortunately the NY Sun is no longer published!
This review was written by Sir Ian Kershaw, who is a professor at the University of Sheffield and the author of “Hitler, 1899-1936: Hubris,” “Hitler, 1936-1945: Nemesis,” and “Hitler, the Germans, and the Final Solution,” among other works.
In an article for The Atlantic about this very subject, Ryback noted the following not very conventional view gleaned from a close examination of this collection of Hitler’s books:
Given Hitler’s legendary disdain for organized religion in general and Christianity in particular, I didn’t expect him to have devoted much time to the teachings of Christ, let alone to have marked this quintessential Christian virtue. Had this in fact been made by the pencil of Hitler’s younger sister, Paula, who occasionally visited her brother at the Berghof and remained a devout Catholic until her dying day? Might some other Berghof guest have responded to this holy Scripture?
Possibly—but though most of the spiritually oriented books in the Hitler Library were gifts sent to the Führer by distant admirers, several, like Worte Christi, were obviously well read, and some contained marginalia in Hitler’s hand that suggested a serious exploration of spiritual matters. If Hitler was as deeply engaged with spiritual issues as his books and their marginalia suggest, then what was the purpose of this pursuit?
At the end of this longish article Ryback wraps his thoughts about Hitler’s reading habits this way:
Hitler told some guests in December of 1941. “If there is a God, then he gives us not only life but also consciousness and awareness. If I live my life according to my God-given insights, then I cannot go wrong, and even if I do, I know I have acted in good faith.”
As I sat in the rarefied seclusion of the Jefferson Building’s second-floor reading room one day, listening to the muffled roar of traffic and the distant wail of police sirens in late-summer Washington, I attempted to comprehend the full significance of this sentence to which Hitler seems to have responded so emphatically. Back in 1943 Walter Langer had concluded—correctly, to my mind—that in order to understand Hitler one had to understand his profound belief in divine powers. But Hitler believed that the mortal and the divine were one and the same: that the God he was seeking was in fact himself.
Do you wonder about Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain’s actions 70 years ago concerning Hitler’s threats to invade Czchecoslovakia? The London Times offers wide ranging access to its news archives to give a wide ranging picture of what was happening in Europe in the months leading to WW II.
In 12 short months the world went from “peace in our times”, declared by PM Chamberlain on his return by plane to England after meeting with Hitler & Co in Munich, to a declaration of war by Chamberlain on Sep 3, 1939.
It was around this time that a panel on CBC shared the following views about the impact of the end of the Spanish Civil War:
Could the end of the Spanish Civil War fuel a European crisis?
Broadcast Date: Feb. 26, 1939
In February 1939, the Spanish Civil War seems to be ending. But the conclusion of this war could mean renewed crisis in Europe. “And by crisis, I presume we mean the choice between further concessions to the dictators or war,” says historian R.G. Riddell in this half-hour-long CBC Radio panel discussion. Fellow historian Frank Underhill thinks crisis is indeed coming. But panellist J.L. Stewart thinks everyone is overreacting: “Now Underhill, I must say that I think that you’re inclined to view this situation with too much alarm.”
My septuagenarian memories: I was 3 years old in Oct 1938 and I was living in Vernet-les-bains in the French Pyrenees with my mother. In April 1939 we moved to Paris when my father became Branch Manager of the Royal Bank of Canada in Paris.
By July 13 1940 we ended up in Halifax NS after crossing U-Boat infested waters in the North Atlantic. Phew!
my father finally ended his attempt to reopen the Paris branch of the RBC in Cognac. This brief episode began when he got there on or about June 16 after getting out of Paris just ahead of the German Wehrmacht by car on June 12/13.
This attempt ended on or about June 18. By that time, tank units of the German Wehrmact couldn’t have been hours or at most a day or so away. In fact, the ministries of the French Government had moved to Bordeaux from Tours on June 14. By the 18th they felt the angry presence of German troops and with Petain as Prime Minister they proposed and accepted armistice under terms dictated by the Germans under direct instructions from Adolf Hitler. The Armistice was signed on June 22.
It is a fact that by June 22 German control extended on a line from Angoulème to Bordeaux, putting Cognac under German control for the duration of the French Vichy government. If we hadn’t gotten out of Cognac on time or no later than June 20, it is likely that we could have ended up either in a German concentration camp or in some kind of French safe house on the French side of the Armistice line.
From Cognac, he must then have made his way by car to the southwest coast of France with my mother, two sisters, one a babe in arms, my brother and myself in tow. Sometime between the 18th and the 30th of June we managed to get aboard a ship, probably a Royal Navy ship off the beach in Biarritz, to end up in England, likely Portsmouth.
By the 7 of July we were all on board the M/S Batory in Greenoch, Scotland to leave with a convoy to return to Canada, arriving in Halifax on July 11.
In 1986 I visited Cognac on a short road trip from Bordeaux. It was quite easy to detect the aroma of cognac distillation on arrival in Cognac.
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