> [Churchill] may think the outcome will be the annihilation of Germany, but it will [be] the destruction of a great world empire
In the end both occurred: Britain proper having received neither peace nor destruction; Germany was annihilated, partitioned into the BRD and DDR; and the great world empire was destroyed, the UK reduced to playing Airstrip One to one of the former colonies.
rewarded by Marshall plan making it one of the wealthiest countries on the continent. Not many people know there was an alternative https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Morgenthau_Plan hopefully this one will be implemented after ru falls.
Yes I think the national debt of Nazi Germany and dwindling resources required peace with the uk to avoid a two front war like ww1. Hitler and maybe Japan truly believed in a shrinking market hypothesis. I think the hossbach memorandum really outlines Hitler's warmongering goals.
Grain from Ukraine and the oil fields of Baku, were needed. Once baku was not seized in 41 instead of Moscow the Nazis pretty much lost the war.Zhukov outlined that's what he would have done. Although it's a long way from Poland to past the caucuses.
I don't know if you are joking or being serious, but TIL iron is of Germanic origin and irony's origin is the romanization of a Greek word. This also explains why the words for iron and irony are so different in Romance languages, and why iron and irony are pronounced so differently. On the other hand felon was copied verbatim from Old French.
> Germany has a greater supply of munitions; iron, gasoline, food and other essentials are more than adequate, he declared
I believe he was either bluffing or fooling himself on the gasoline point. Or had they captured sufficient reserves to make this a true statement?
> "I asked from Poland something no other German statesman could have dared. I asked for the return of the old German provinces, then only with a plebiscite. If Churchill and the warmongers felt half the responsibility toward Europe that I did they never would have started the war.
...
After alleging that the Germans had obtained possession of documents proving the "machinations of the warmongers" aimed at the spread of war...
It seems strange that Putin should be claiming he is running an Anti-fascist[0] Special Military Operation when he is channeling (if yet more hypocritically) Hitler himself.
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[0] I skimmed the stadium rally; this was a serious talking point! If they could've, Pavlichenko and Tsoi would've been spinning in their graves. In retrospect, PropAnal could've flagged https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fuPX8mjeb-E as psychological preparation for Operation Z.
According to Adam Tooze (wages of destruction, great book), Germany was bluffing. They were always on the brink of shortages. That was a constant from 1937 to 1945, and a major theme in the book.
unfortunately the last link has rotted; it was supposed to link to a quote from Hitler's diary where he views failure to capture middle-eastern oil fields as implying his eventual loss.
This was one of many similar gambles. That book stressed how most key events of the war were done right before Germany ran out of one thing or another: foreign currency, steel, oil, alloys. I was surprised to learn the extent of their brinksmanship. The economists saw the writing on the wall far before the military.
> A curious point developed. German morale in the higher grades was worse than in the lower. ...
This unusual situation arose from the fact that the National Socialist propaganda machinery was still working on the masses of the troops. The political officers still made speeches. The troops were given pep talks, ...
In contrast with common troops, the officers had the professional skill to understand the advantages possessed by the Allied armies. The officers knew enough about global and continental strategy, about the immediate strategy of the Western front, about economic factors and so on, to see that the situation was genuinely bad. Furthermore, the officer class had been less indoctrinated in the first place...
A common Landser, tough and ready in a whole division full of well fed, well armed men, could not be expected to undergo despair because freight-car loadings hundreds of miles away had dropped to zero. He might see that the Luftwaffe was less in evidence; he might grumble about mail, or about having to use horse transport, but as long as he could see that his own unit was getting on all right, it was hard to persuade him that defeat was around the corner. In World War I, the German troops at the time of surrender were much better off than most of them thought they were; in World War II, they thought they were better off than they actually were. The Germans may not have been in perfect shape, but they were incomparably better off than the starving scarecrows with whom Generalissimo Chiang was trying to hold back the Japanese in West Hunan or the Americans who had fought despair, fever and Japanese—all three at once—on Bataan.
I have read that strategic bombing was ineffective, done mainly for propaganda purposes. Having seen the OR tools that came out of that war, or were published a decade later, I would not be surprised to learn that they had in fact been doing (at least rudimentary) min-cut analyses for target selection, and that alleged ineffectiveness (of the mathematics or of the kilotons) is itself propaganda.
> It seems strange that Putin should be claiming he is running an Anti-fascist[0] Special Military Operation when he is channeling (if yet more hypocritically) Hitler himself.
That's only strange if you expect honesty from him. Despite everything, fascism still sounds like a massive negative to everybody today, so he appeals to that as justification, regardless of whether there's any basis for it. On top of that, he hopes the memory of the Russian WW2 fight against the Nazis will invigorate the Russian people to support his war. The fact that his war has more in common with Hitler's aggression than with the defense against it is of course an inconvenient fact he wants to ignore, deny, and bury under his war rhetoric.
Hitler was at least partially bluffing. He knew that he needed to secure access to the Romanian oil fields and refineries but at the time of that statement had not yet done so. It took a few more months. But even with the Romanian alliance, Germany was chronically short of petroleum products.
indeed: WMD+Gitmo was my personal "love it or leave it" trigger to emigrate from the Old Country.
I will note there is a qualitative (boolean!) difference between telling everyone you're going to conduct an injust invasion, then invading; and telling everyone you're defo not conducting an unjust invasion, then...
What I currently would like to understand is why, when Hitler offered the german electorate a choice to the effect of "those milquetoasts only offer you nice things, but the unity I offer you will involve risk and blood and salty tears" they voted for him.
Actually people desire to belong to a mission, join a quest, and to engage with comrades to reclaim glory that seems lost. This factors into their political views and actions.
As just one counterexample: space exploration is a mission, a quest, and an engagement with comrades (and in a certain country even a reclamation of glory that seems lost), but although it offers plenty of mental struggle, it deliberately seeks to minimise danger and death. (in fact, "fast cheap and out of control" pretty much drive the latter two to zero)
counterexample 2: Now the trumpet summons us again--not as a call to bear arms, though arms we need--not as a call to battle, though embattled we are-- but a call to bear the burden of a long twilight struggle, year in and year out, "rejoicing in hope, patient in tribulation"--a struggle against the common enemies of man: tyranny, poverty, disease and war itself.
About a third voted for him, but he only got power because the old right wing thought they could use his voting base to get to 50% and control him as part of a coalition. Things went downhill from there.
He had biggest share of votes in that election. That is actually a lot, expecting any party to have over 50% vote is unreasonable benchmark. He did broke the constitution when taking the final power. And the vote was under threat of violence. And the elections themselves were done in violent environment. It is not like him winning or taking power was clean, it was not at all.
Depends upon your country. In mine the centrists (we have enough parties that "the centre" even has a reasonably objective definition) are in favour of moderate progress.
> "National Socialism wanted to free Germany from Versailles as well as from the chains of the Demo-Plutocratic system.
Googling doesn't seem to return much for "demo-plutocratic", is there a more precise german word for what he was attacking here?
Wikipedia suggests plutocracy was a common insult against both the UK and Jews (as 'The World Plutocracy')
> Capitalism was also attacked as morally inferior to German values[3] and as failing to provide for the German people.[3] Great Britain was attacked as a plutocracy. A few months after the invasion of Poland, Goebbels released his "England’s Guilt" speech that blamed the war on Imperial Britain's "capitalist democracy" and warmongers, denouncing England for having the richest men on earth while their people get little of this wealth.[107] In that speech, Goebbels claimed that "English capitalists want to destroy Hitlerism" in order to retain its imperial status and harmful economic policies.
> This was portrayed as Jewish, so as to attack both Communism and plutocracy, describing Jews as being behind both.[49] Anti-capitalist propaganda, attacking "interest slavery", used the association of Jews with money-lenders.[11]
> Nazi propaganda and officials such as Robert Ley describe Germany as a "proletarian nation"[108] as opposed to the plutocratic England, a political divide that Goebbels described as "England is a capitalist democracy" and "Germany is a socialist people's state."[109]
> Initially the Nazis wanted to have alliance with United Kingdom, however after the war started they were denounced as "the Jew among the Aryan peoples" and as plutocrats, fighting for money.[110] Another major theme was the difference between British "plutocracy" and Nazi Germany. German newspapers and newsreels often pictured photos and footage of British unemployed and slums together with unfavorable commentary about the differences in living standards of the working class of Nazi Germany vs that of the working class living under British "plutocracy". Simultaneously, propaganda presented them as tools of the Communists. A German parody stamp, of one depicting King George and Queen Elizabeth, replaced the queen with Stalin and added a hammer and sickle, and stars of David. The Parole der Woche's weekly wall newspaper declared that the United States and Britain had agreed to let Stalin take Europe.[111] Using propaganda to present the Jews as being behind both helped juggle the issues of opposing "plutocracy" and Communism at once.[112]
After the invasion of the Soviet Union, propaganda resumed, quickly linking the attack with British forces, which simplified the task of attacking both Communism and "plutocracy" at once.[49]
> [Churchill] may think the outcome will be the annihilation of Germany, but it will [be] the destruction of a great world empire
In the end both occurred: Britain proper having received neither peace nor destruction; Germany was annihilated, partitioned into the BRD and DDR; and the great world empire was destroyed, the UK reduced to playing Airstrip One to one of the former colonies.