British Politics in a Nazi Victory TL
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Eurofed
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Perhaps not in 1940. But after the Ethiopian crisis, the idea of a war with the Entente in the medium-long term was not so zany.
It worked just as well as "preparatory" for deportation, which was seen as the default option in 1939-40.
As they scurried to implement what they saw as the best way to implement the oracular utterings, err, "general policy directives" of the Fuehrer, as every group understood them.
The switch from "deportation" to "industrial genocide" at the Wannssee Conference came because victory against Britain did not appear in sight and hence deportation was not feasible. Einsatzgruppen were nowhere the same degree of committment and organzied effort that came later.
Yep, if there was something the Nazis were never dearth of, it was rival plans and different options to deal with anything (of course, a lot of them were not necessarily good idesa, even from their PoV). Which, I suppose, is one of the things that makes them such AH darlings. By the way, there were less appalling ideas to deal with conquered Slavs, too. See, e.g. Plan Rosenberg.
Because the committment to extreme, substitution-colonization Lebensraum at any cost is going to wane with time. Also, by the way, with a victorious Germany, there is no special reason why the Lebensraum policy is not going to be implemented by deportation instead of extermination. It's less costly, less politically damning, and less burdensome on the moral of the troops.
I failed to get my point explained, it seems. I meant: If the Soviet regime had fallen with Stalin still in charge, many people would find natural to assume that Stalinist policies would have continued even under his successors, and would find it much harder to belive that the relative softening under Krushev and Breznev would happen (and the same point could be made about late Mao and Deng). I stand that the same kind of biased hindsight exists about the most probable course of the Nazi regime after Hitler had died.
Actually, Operation T-4 was stopped in 1941 because of public opposition. And they never meant to include crippled war veterans. Rather, fear that the "euthanasia" program could be extended to crippled war veterans was one of the reasons the German public successfully opposed the program.
I'm really curious to hear how the Einsatzgruppen in Kharkov or Smolensk are going to create famines in Paris or Barcelona or the destruction of industry or education in Vienna or Milan.
Actually, they offered a Brest-Litovsk peace in 1941, but the mustachoed idiot made nothing of it.
Well, Britain was responsible for one thing only: bringing the war to Western Europe.
Quite true, although betraying Munich was much, much more damning to his 1939 Polish policy than breaking the Polish-German Non-Aggression Pact, which by the way was denounced months before the war. Although I remain convinced that early Nazi Germany could have afforded not to sign that pact, and it was a mistake, since in the end it gained no serious concessions from Poland.
Oh, I subscribe this 100%. I would only add that the same strategy could have been used just as effectively for Danzig.
Well, you know my opinion that Bismarck's most serious mistake was not to finish the job of German unification in the early '70s. Quite understandable, for his mindset, but a mistake all the way. Without being shackled into supporting the Habsburg "second sick man of Europe", Germany would have fared much better on the diplomatic scene. Apart from this, I subscribe the point.
True as well.
Or a good containtment policy. As much as I do deem the Lebensraum to be a sick fantasy from top to bottom, I'm not so sure about Stalin's lasting committment to peace with a saner German regime once Soviet basic industrialization and military modernization was done past the early 1940s. But this is besides the point.
It means to me, as it concerns picking the best way to save those guys, re. the future of Europe. Versailles was a mess and it ought not to be repeated, and it is much better if Nazism is brought down without further enimity between Germany and the West, or further humiliation for the German people, which would have been wholly gratuitous, as it concerns what the Nazis were and did up to 1938, i.e. not worse yet than Mussolini, Petain, Franco, Salazar, etc.
Anyway, this is beside the point, since it would have not gone all the way to war. Within hours of giving orders to attack, the dear Fuhrer would have found a Heer gun to his neck, and the Nazi regime would gone in the history books like the worst part of the weirdness between the first and the second Kaiserreich, but nothing more than a paragraph in European history.
Well, if Hitler had been less of a hamhanded bully about Czechoslovakia and Poland (i.e. using "Bismarckian" means), that's more or less what appeasement was prepared to accept.
Well, that's indeed a vast issue, and in all likelihood worth its own discussion, but it also depends on the preparedness of the Wehrmacht, which was an incremental thing, too. For that matter, if Britain is agnostic about Poland, or Hitler manages things better, the M-R Pact could well not exist and the Red Army would remain on the Stalin line.
Well, my reasoning here is that, since Germany and Russia both were pretty much scraping the bottom of their manpower reserves back in 1945, at worst no more soldiers could die in such a German-Russian war than OTL because there weren't any. Yet Western Europe would be spared a lot of damage.
Eurofed
Banned
What I can say, 20th century history is one of the periods I know best, and I honestly try to steer myself away from political discussions on WWII which rarely bring anything constructive, but then I read some statement from guys that think "Hitler" and "Nazis" are licence to justify whatever outrageous statements and I find myself pulled in again.
As I see it, it is necessary to remind that the goose-stepping guys still belong to normal human history, even if they are of its darkest pages.
I Blame Communism
Banned
The Italians were still urging moderation on the Germans considerably later than that. Re-aligning towards Germany as a power who's ambitions were more likely to create favourably conditions for Italy in the Balkans hardly meant expecting Germany to rush into an aggressive war against nearly everyone.
(Note that while I don't think Bald Bad Benito was the best of leaders, he differed from his German and Japanese counterparts in being sane, and if not for the Germans he would almost certainly have died peacefully, a kind of Italian Franco: my references to "Germany and Japan" are meant that way.)
Deportation to where? Where could you get people from Polish railway stations other than to death-camps? Why should we bank on German "deportation schemes" that were either outright humbug ("Your neighbour has been relocated eastwards") or an awkward attempt to get around the "question" under peacetime questions that never considered boring real-world questions like whether the French would hand over Madagascar in a million years? Why should we forget that while the measures of 1935 were intended to contain violence and encourage emmigration, the Germans had already discarded this logic by organising the mother of all pogroms and hence set themselves on the intellectual drift towards the final solution?
In my opinion, "deportation" was a lot of tosh. In conditions where the most poisonous anti-semitism was being cultivated all through society, it was an attempt by those in charge to be doing something about the "problem" that never for a moment considered the logistical realities. As soon as the war began, the obvious advantages of working Jews to death in camps prevailed; and from there, it's one step to just plain killing them.
Today, it serves as a conveniant excuse to ignore the logical consequences of German victory. In reality, of course, packing millions of Lithuanians off to Madagascar with a suitcase each is pretty much mass-murder anyway.
It was a very complicated and shambolical system, and obviously what people did to appease the Fuehrer depended on what wishes the Fuehrer expressed, but there's no doubt that measures like the extermination of the disabled originated lower in the hierarchy.
This seems to me to be making the "aesthetic" distinction that Susano so often and so rightly criticises: murder is murder, whether or not it's done to a business plan and timetable. The brief of the Einsatzgruppen was to kill all the Jews and in Estonia and Latvia, they pretty well succeeded. How exactly is that not genocide? In any case they were extensively organised and briefed; and trained men who aren't fighting the Soviets is certainly "commitment" under total war conditions.
The Germans also immediately shot every Jewish Red Army man they captured, reserving the privelege of slow and miserable death by starvation, malnutrition, and exposure for the Gentiles. What would be the logic behind this policy, if not to kill all the Jews?
And they consistently adopted the most murderous and insane, detrimentally to their own interests at almost every point frm 1938 onwards at the latest.
If they defeat the USSR in the 1940s, partisan acitivity will continue (for many people, not least Jews, living in the forest and stealing their food will be preferable to the other options: there are plenty of firsthand accounts of people who had a reasonable chance, like a Volhynian Ukrainian nationalist employed by the military authorities, who still went into the forests out of sheer anger and helplessness at the attitudes of the Nazi occupiers). The Nazi respone to partisans was always the same, in the USSR and elsewhere: village burning. A burned village leaves a few shattered, homeless young people with nothing left to do but go into the forests, and so the cycle repeats.
(Other methods of partisan control - practised regularly by ordinary Wehrmacht officers - included knocking the population of a village out of bed at gunpoint and marching them down mined roads: those who fell were beaten, usually to death; if a German stood on a mine, everyone was immediately shot, and of course that didn't clear the minefield...)
All those burned villages bring agricultural productivity way down, obviously, and the Partisans made no more bones of stealing to eat than the Germans did. The young and strong are in the forest, and that leaves the very old and very young (I've read an account of some Red Army men who burst into a house which they thought contained Germans: all they found was an old woman unable to move from her bed and two famished children), and no food for anyone.
It certainly leaves no food for the city boys. Expect lots more Kharkovs.
In short, if the Soviets were defeated in 1942, and Hitler died in say 1948, and he was then replaced by the most liberal Nazi you can imagine, you would still see an unprecedented level of death which can't be immediately halted. Even when Hitler dies and, like clockwork, is succeeded by your soft-hearted liberal candidate, said man still has a situation in the USSR on his hands which is sort of like the lovechild of Vietnam and the China War on crack from hell in the USSR on his hands.
Quarters, thirds, and halfs of a population being killed in a war was once fairly routine. Given that the Nazis combined their organised genocides with an explicit return to the policy that Schiller once called "Der Krieg ernährt den Krieg", well...
Deportation to where, exactly, and what differentiates it from mass-starvation?
I think your mistake is to think that "genocide" implies extermination camps and the like. The Nazis invented that particular, very modern stain on the human race, but they got the same results by employing the methods of the 17th century. I've explained the situation facing the Nazis and why there's no way to avoid an astronomic death-toll. It's not a matter of "substitution colonisation", it's a matter of the logical consequences of methods used by Wehrmacht officers to control Partisan activity - consequences (the collapse of the food infrastructure behind urban areas, mass starvation, and a bloodbath in the villages) which we already witnessed in the occupied territories and which already killed a large proportion of the people there. It's a very simple matter of applying these methods to much larger areas for at least twice as long, probably longer.
As I said, my "bias" is simply based on a factual analysis of what the Nazis actually did in the occupied territories being repeated longer and on a larger scale. Sweet fanny adams a "relative softening" can do do change it.
My point was this: if the USSR falls in 1952, it may well be assumed that artificial famine, ethnic cleansing, and mass slave labour were all inherent. Howevere, those policies were defined, controlled, limited, and in some cases already complete. What the Nazis did was simply to revert a massive chunk of Europe to a situation that learned men have called solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short. You can't switch that off. You can't change the logical consequences of applying it on a much larger scale for a longer period (it's going to last at least several years after 1945, rather than being ended in 1944).
Although obviously the targetted genocides against Jews, gypsies and others are going to be completed, "deport" my foot.
Every account I've read (Read, Rees, Weinberger) has it continued in secret under the cover of war measures. I know that public pressure terminated the public programme, but every historian to cover the topic affirms that it re-started secretly and made the first use of the gas-vans. Weinberger says that euthanasia of war veterans had started. For now, I'm going with the trio of award-winning historians.
Europe is europe. Most of the "third world" is not in fact the Congo.
In any case, the destruction of the monumental German tradition of education was one of the more remarkable achievements of Nazism, so that last one is pretty much covered.
In short, we end up with an ever more pronounced lack of properly educated thinkers, an economy based on the largest window-breaking enterprise ever seen that has just run out of windows to break, and a very considerable portion of the world's economy formerly known as the Soviet Union exporting nothing except bodies.
American-level prosperity it ain't likely to be.
I'd be interested in sources for that, because Beevor has Stalin contemplate it in his panic without any offer actually landing on Hitler's desk. I seem to recall that the Soviets tried to ask the Bulgarians to arrange talks, and the Bulgarian ambassador said no, because "Even if you get pushed back to thhe Urals, you'll still win in the end."
I think it sounds absurdly cinematic and Russian-nationalist-fairy-tale too, but it was in an extensively cited, award-winning book. By Beevor, who isn't exactly the darling of your rabid Slavophiles.
I also have to wonder whether the mustachoed idiot was really making the stupidest decision of his career in rejecting a peace offer that would give the other party breathing space whilst and no incentive whatsoever to keep it as he was
In 1939. Responsible for bringing the war to western Europe then and not later.
What do you think Hitler planned to do after subduing the USSR, what with war being the sole remaining commodity that the German economy could produce in useful quantities? The destruction of French power was hardly unpopular with German nationalists, and Hitler didn't, IIRC, shy away from it in his books.
True. "Denouncing" a treatu with an unbuilt time limit unilaterally and for no reason is just as unworthy of old OvB.
It neutralised Poland and removed it from military calculations throught the period up to 1938, at a time when Germany was actually militarily feeble. If it had been understoof that any French commitment to war meant a Polish commitment, you'd have had a very differant Munich crisis. There;s a reason the Poles were considered a Nazi client up to 1939.
Very likely, is you assume a more sensible Nazi policy in general (ie consistency and a more measured re-armament).
Austria would be the absolute first ambition of any sensible regime in Germany in the 1930s (it of course already was before 1933); the point is that Bismarck knew when to stop, and that you can't have everything. The men who came after Bismarck didn't annex Austria either, but they still attempted to do too much with (just a bit) too little and came down with a crash.
Personally, I deem an alliance with Russia a riskier and less sound option for 1930s Germany offering only marginally greater immediate territorial gains (no surprise that the Nazis briefly embraced it, then), whereas consistant hostility is a nice bit of grease for the achievement of Germany's diplomatic aims in central Europe with Entente ascent.
But who could resist the quip?
Germany without any kind of *deNazification, run by a clique of colonels and with its military power undiminished, is really quite likely to try again. Nukes, yeah, but a power restrained solely by nuclear tensions is hardly a boon to the world.
So I consider an opportunity to purge German society of various nasty bits a good thing in itself. It's peanuts, however, compared to saving lives, Allied or German. Like I say, I really don't mind that much. I understand full why the Allies adopted Unconditional Surrender as their policy (and they had a variety of other reasons), but I merely prefer comprehensive defeat if all else is equal.
Anyway, this is beside the point, since it would have not gone all the way to war. Within hours of giving orders to attack, the dear Fuhrer would have found a Heer gun to his neck, and the Nazi regime would gone in the history books like the worst part of the weirdness between the first and the second Kaiserreich, but nothing more than a paragraph in European history.
Of course, assuming that to be true (and a loyalty oath is no peanuts for a German officer: personally I'd expect a putsch after it's abundantly clear that Germany is loosing), that raises the question of whether everybody else thinks the war is over yet...
Not really, because Bismarck would have been quite happy to go no further than Anschluss, a revision with Poland, and probably the Sudetenland and then establish German political-economic preponderance in south-east Europe, leaving Germany pretty much exactly where she left off in 1914: dominating middle-Europe, but not "everything east of the Rhine".
The Nazis preferred to break so many treaties and commitments and brazenly devour two countries so that there could be no doubt that their ambitions were unlimited. Afterall, "east of the Rhine" is not "east of the Rhine and west of the Stalin line".
Indeed, that's another discussion.
Western Europe would be spared comparative peanuts, and I say this as someone who can go right down and point to where the Germans bombed my city.
You're missing the obvious implications: if the Soviets were at the bottom of the barrel (and they were) with American trucks to carry them forward (and thus free up more manpower) they obviously can't hope to push back the Germans nearly as fast, and that leads to ever greater civilian casualties.
Every British civilian death from the German bombing would not approach the Soviet civilian casualties at Leningrad.
Eurofed
Banned
No, but neither the Nazis. Vichy was the homegrown French fascists exploiting the political opportunity created by military defeat to pull a coup. They did in 1940 what they had narrowly failed to do in 1934.
Anyway, I said "bringing the war" to Western Europe, not bringing fascism. Most of Europe was perfectly able to set up (clerico-)fascist or reactionary-authoritarian regimes with limited or no help from Nazi Germany: the only democracies that the Nazis directly toppled in their military expansion were Denmark, Norway, Benelux, and Czechia.
I Blame Communism
Banned
Hrm? The Hacha regime was pseudo-fascist, being clerical, anti-semitic, and with authoritarian tendencies, and that arose by Czech domestic politics.
Sorry I'm late responding.
1)I just noticed that I made a lot of spelling errors in my post. Sorry 'bout that.
2)Yeah, that's what I'm saying-the really really really dystopic "Be Aryan or Die" scenario is implausible for the same reason that a Nazi invasion of Britain or America is implausible-the Nazi's just couldn't do it-they had an insane amount of luck against the variety of enemies they were facing in OTL. But, as you say, there probably won't be a lot of Poles, Latvians, Lithuanians, Estonians, Ukranians, etc around when and if the Nazi Gorbachov wins, while Russia will probably be "c'mon, lets be fr-wait, you're rebelling? KILL SLAVS KILL SLAVS KILL SLAVS KILL SLAVS. German rule in the East would be (IMHO) worse then Soviet rule, if only because of their willingness to do anything to keep the Slavs down.
I Blame Communism
Banned
See, this is what I mean when I say that our historical views reflect Cold War distortion. Nobody in the world would have questioned for a second which rule was better in the 1940s as the Nazis shot, plundered, starved, raped, and murdered their way across the USSR. The world was divided into "people who'd support anybody against Bolsheviks no matter what" and "the rest of humanity", including the (sane and intelligent) Western critic of Stalin and his regime, George Orwell.
I heartily recommend "The Nazis", by Lawrence Rees, which has some detailed first-hand testimony for the Eastern Front. In that detailed first hand testimony, Soviet officers don't hesitate to shoot arbitrary civilians during the defence of Moscow, Soviet Partisans have few scruples about taking the food from the villages and letting everyone else fend for themselves, Stalin is a monster, Soviet officers chuck their men to their deaths during premature offensives...
And at the end of it all, it is impossible for a sane person not to conclude that the Soviets were far, far better.
I mean, do we really think that in the Stalinist USSR at its worst, soldiers routinely burst into villages, machine-gunned the houses, raped the women, and locked people in barns and burned them alive?
I don't think so. Like I said, most of us in the West are accutely aware of the Holocaust, but we vaguely assume that the fighting in Russia and China was like what we had but more, and simply have no idea about the astonishingly casual brutality of those fronts.
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Exactly my point-maybe it was Hitler's "eccentricities", maybe it was nationalism, maybe it was the racial thing-but, well, I wouldn't live in the stalinist USSR by choice, but the Nazis just had something-something that let them do things that Stalin never dreamed of-they may have been succesful in getting as close to absolute evil as is humanly possible. Stalin was bad, but the Nazis were worse. Much worse.
I Blame Communism
Banned
Indeed. It's the difference between a regime that was, like most regimes in history, willing to do brutal and evil things in pursuit of its objectives and a regime that's sole objective was destruction on a massive scale.
Eurofed
Banned
And in the Mediterranean. While Benny certainly didn't expect Hitler to declare war on America (but he did nothing to stop Hitler's DoW to America), he did expect and plan for an European war where Italy could use the combined strength of the Italo-German Axis to defeat the Entente and rob their territories and their supremacy in the Mediterranean blind. But he mistakenly expected and planned such war to occur in 1942-43, and made half-assed preparations accordingly. He may have wished to rein in the aggressive rashness of German diplomacy in 1938-39 (mostly because he at times realized that Italy was nowhere ready for such a war, while at other times he went into megalomanical denial). And he was very eager to take part in Barbarossa.
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Bah. He had the same kind of insanity as '44-'45 Hitler, when he wanted to fight wars with military resources he didn't have and had neglected to foster (or spare, in late Hitler's case).
It was an handy "reservation", which was already filled with native Jews and Poles, and hence in their racist logic a better interim place to pen Jews from "Aryan" lands, while they could deport them overseas. That was the logic in 1939-41. When they realized that deportation overseas were not feasible in the short term, they shifted to the death camps.
Well, in 1939-41, they were already at war, and if Britain had been forced to the peace table in 1940-41, France would have handed over Madagascar in a jiffy.
Hmm, I think you read too much in the Kristallnacht. Innumerable pogroms of various sizes, and not only against Jews, punctuate human history, and blossomed to large-scale genocide in few cases that I'm mindful of. The connection is too feeble. As far as I can see, the Kristallnacht may have marked a shift from "encouraged" emigration by legal discrimination to forced deportation.
True, but not considering the logistical realities was something that plagued the Nazis very often, typically to bite them in the butt.
But many, many more would have survived than in the death camps. I won't deny that the logistical deprivation would have reaped a big death toll, but I expect that millions more would have survived than OTL.
True. Now, I won't deny that the T4 program provided a lot of ideas for the Final Solution, but I would prefer to keep forced euthanasia of the severely disabled in a wholly different area than racist genocide and possibly off the table, since it impinges on much less clear-cut issues.
The "industrial" death-camps Final Solution carries a dimension of effectiveness, organization, effort, and commitment all its own. Unleashing troops or militias to kill, abuse, and rape disliked ethnic, political, and social groups is terribly common in history. What the Einsatzgruppen did qualifies as mass murder and genocide, but it blurs in the background noise of historical atrocities a lot more than the Holocaust.
That in the twisted racist wordwiew of the Nazis, the Soviet Jews were more dangerous, since they held the reins of the Soviet regime. Remember, they had this idea of the Soviet Union as a large clique or caste of "inhuman but smart" Bolshevik Jews ruling a mass of "subhuman and dumb" Slavs. More or less, it was the same logic behind the killing of the political commissars.
Uhm, yes, that's why they utterly failed IOTL.
Yup, this is a fairly accurate picture (apart from substituting "soft-hearted liberal" with "pragmatic"). And pretty much inevitable unless the Nazis adopt less brutal policies towards the Soviet peoples from the start. Notice that myself often speak of a mega-Vietnam or China War situation as a pretty much inevitable outcome of a Nazi victory. However, as harsh as that humanitarian situation would be, it would be nowhere like the Nazis setting up the successful mega-Holocaust of all the European Slavs. My objection is to that, which I regard as a comic-book dystopian fantasy. If we want to discuss the mega-Vietnam/China scenario and its implication, it's fine. That's quite realistic.
Hmm, as you mentioned it, in all likelihood the most reliable comparison to evalutate the casualties of the Russian mega-Vietnam/China War scenario, is to use China War itself as a comparison, since the Japanese used very similar means as the Nazis, as counterinsurgency goes.
Siberia and Central Asia, I suppose.
About this, see my point about China War above. You know my opinion about the reliability of the Soviet statistics about WWII population losses, that the Soviets used WWII as an handy excuse to tuck a substantial deal of the total population losses from 1917 to 1953 into the war losses. I won't ever deny the general extent of humanitarian losses caused by the war, but I always remain more than a little suspicious of the statistics you like to quote.
I don't deny this, otherwise I would not often speak of "mega-Vietnam" as one of the albatrosses around the neck of the victorious Nazis. My whole objection is against the argument that the Nazi Empire would be death camps for an ever-increasing amount of minorities, for ever and ever.
As I see it, it all depends on how and when the Nazi victory occurs. If it happens sufficiently early, then they go with the Madagascar program, or something similar. A lot die by deprivation, but a lot more live. If it happens too late, very sadly, you are right. No more Jews in western Eurasia, sigh. Of course, homosexuals can never be completely wiped out, but I expect that sooner or later the regime would revert back to discrimination, for various reasons. Eugenetic elimination of disabled persons would go on as long as the regime lasts, however.
True to a degree, they shut down the systematic T4 program (I would hesitate to call it "public", since killings were carried out under various pretenses, relatives typically were notified that their disabled relative had died of "pneumonia" and such, although sometimes the ruse was transparent, which motivated public opposition) and reverted to the more patchwork and covert efforts that had preceded it. That it ever included war veterans is an absolute novelty for me, I maintain tentative skepticism until I can check the evidence; such an inclusion would have been a very dangerous political minefield even for the Nazis, both with the civilian population and with the army.
Oh, quite true. Which is one of the reasons why I expect the Nazi Empire to fare no better than the USSR in competition with America. Unless they eventually get a Deng figure.
Of course not. But at worst it's going to be Breznevian-like stagnation west of the Bug and a China War-like zone east of it, with economic & social, problems, military attrition, and population alienation piling up till the inevitable fall of the regime. Still not Third World as commonly meant. Now, that's the likely bad-outcome scenario for the regime as I see it. The best-case would be eventually picking up the PRC-like path, reverting to sane education and economic policies that ensure sufficient technological efficiency and consumerist affluency, easing down the totalitarian burden on loyal citizens. As for the Russia situation, it's a huge mess given the immense load of hatred created by previous policies, but theoretically there are different counterinsurgency strategies that might be eventually devised and work somewhat better than burning random villages.
For what I know, there were about 3-4 Soviet peace offers: a couple in late 1941 and spring 1942 that were basically B-L, one in spring '43 that was pre-war borders (this one the Germans were interested in, but wanted the Dnieper border, and negotations broke down), and possibly one in early '44 for the 1914 borders.
I heard the Bulgarian ambassador quip before, but I remain terribly skeptical about it, since I cannot ever see the Soviet regime getting stalemated at such a decisive foreign policy choice by a low-ranking official of a third-rate power. It's like America or Russia failing to pursue a compromise offer during the Cuban Missile Crisis because some Yugoslav ambassador refuses to forward it.
As an aside, that hypothetical Bulgarian guy would have been a total Slavophile megalomanical idiot, b/c if Russia would have been pushed to the Urals, it would have never, ever been able to win the war with its own Nationalist China residual resources. It would have been left to pray for Americans to get it right with that Manhattan stuff.
Exactly my opinion on the matter.
This is another issue entirely, and another one that would be worth its own separate thread and discussion (if I didn't fear that the "Allies are invincible" fanboys would derail it by spending 12 pages nitpicking about the PoD
). Let's say that IMO if a second B-L peace is done, and the Germans build decent defensive positions, the chances of the Red Army to break them through in the near future are not so sure. That's what I argue.
I won't deny that faced with mounting economic problems, the Nazi Empire could easily resort to invade Western Europe in order to to delay them by yet more another row of pillaging and stuff. But as far as I know, all available evidence on Hitler's intentions on Western Europe, including his books, indicates that they were "Get Britain as an ally if possible, otherwise leave it alone if it leaves us alone to do our Lebensraum number", "Leave France alone and forget Alsace-Lorraine if it does not pick another fight with us", and "Get Italy as an ally and forget about South Tyrol".
Nonetheless, breaking a non-aggression treaty with immediate and unprovoked military aggression (Czechia 1939 and Russia 1941) is much, much, much more damning diplomatically than denouncing it in the reheating of a long-standing and well-known irredentist dispute, with actual war occuring several months later in the escalation of the dispute. The latter is more or less diplomacy as usual in the build-up to a war.
As far as the manifold diplomatic blunders of the Nazis go, their real ones in the Czech-Polish crisis that brought the West in were that a) they managed their claims over the Sudetenland and Danzig in a totally brutish naked-force way, instead of making a plausible appeal to national self-determination (and provoking Poland into doing something rash about Danzig to paint it as the guity party would have been far from difficult) b) they broke their word about the Munich agreement, showing that their sensible irredentist claims were a pretext, and their recent word could not be trusted. In comparison, denouncing the non-aggression pact with Poland was trivial, and harmed Germany's diplomatic standing very little. Without the above stuff, the reaction of the rest of the world, would have been "Oh well, it seems that the German-Polish attempt at detente is not going to work, as long as the border issues aren't solved. What could be expected. It seems Munich II is really necessary".
Old Otto would have managed the whole issue much better, framing the Poles in looking the brutal oppressors of Danzig Germans and declaring war, but frankly the whole German-Polish non-aggression treaty issue is more or less vanilla diplomatic friction. By the way, it had a time limit of 10 years.
I'm skeptical about this. Britain and France were just as unwilling to fight regardless of Czech or Polish contribution. It might be that Poland would have made Hitler a little less overconfident that he had a real chance of defeating the Entente, but I'm not sure, since the man had a wholly skewed concept of his military resources at the time. Also Poland was eager to get its own share of the CZS pie, so it's quite possible that it would not acted very different.
Oh, no question about this in comparison to Willy or the Austrian Caporal. My point about this is that Bismarck made a serious mistake by not striving to complete German national unification. Actually, he was absolutely right to stop in OTL 1866. Prussia could have gotten more without risking a dangerous two-front war only if Italy had pulled its own weight (that was an occasion were we sorely missed a unique golden chance; we could have easily crushed Austria on our side with some less terrible commanders). My criticism of OvB was that he did not need to stop in the early-mid '70s, and if he had chosen to pursue such a policy, finishing German unification would have been wholly doable without risking a general war or radically upsetting Germany's standing in Europe, and it would have improved Germany's long-term standing in various ways. He chose not to do it for petty and narrow-minded political reasons that were not in the country's long-term best interest.
Full agreement about this.
Bah. Entente bias and singling out Germany as a special case running rampant. The maximum foreign policy program of everyone in 1938-39 Germany short of the radical Nazis (even someone like Goring basically agreed) was the Sudetenland, Danzig and as closer to the 1807 border as they could get without a general war, then squatting down and building up peaceful political-economic hegemony of Central-Eastern Europe. No war with the West or Soviet Union in sight, only military parity. As for the political legacy of a Nazi regime overthrown in 1938-39, their entrenchment in society was still so recent and tentative that it would have faded away leaving little more than a tiny nostalgic fringe party. Vanilla right-wing conservative-nationalist, christian democratic, and liberal center-of-right political parties would have reabsorbed almost all of their following in a post-Nazi Germany.
I eagerly share the idea that the Nazi genocidal loons needed to be cast from power by whatever means necessary, but please everybody spare me the crap that apart from Nazism, Germany needed to be defeated in order to purge it from "Prussian militarism" or similar Entente propaganda bogeyman idiocy.
Unconditional Surrender was, notwithstanding the comprehensible political reasons that motivated it (but Italy and de facto Japan as well got something different, so doing different was quite possible), a total piece of crap that prolonged the war and the Nazi atrocities considerably since it forced the German people to cling to Hitler for much longer than it would otherwise done out of desperation at a threatened peace of enslavement, ethnic cleansing, and collective punishment. I understand why it was done, too, but but I brook no apology for it.
I remain convinced that if all else equal, a honorable peace and compromise settlement is much preferable to the comprehensive humiliation of either side, for various reasons, and I trust that German society would have been able to redress its political balance, with a homegrown fall of the Nazi regime and an honorable peace, optimally and hopefully before anybody but some German political opponents and medical basket cases are killed, just as well as OTL in the long term. Even more so than I trust the ability of the Entente to restrain themselves if handed a comprehensive victory and implement a balanced peace, instead of doing Versailles mk.II.
Actually, the preparations for an anti-Nazi coup were rather advanced and carried a fairly good amount of support in the German officer corps in the eve of and during the Munich crisis, since the officers understood much better than Hitler how bad such a war would have been for Germany. And the conspirators had gotten to accept that Hitler needed to be killed in order to free the Heer at large from its loyalty oath. If Chamberlain had been less accommodating, and Hitler had given the order to attack, Chief of Staff Halder was ready to give the order to overthrow him. There would have been no war, only a regime change in Germany during an international crisis. Check Fest for more details. Chamberlain certainly would not even think of starting a war in such a situation, and would be much delighted that loose-cannon Hitler was removed for a much more reliable and restrained German government. We can totally expect that in the medium term, after the German regime had stabilized, the Sudetenland and Danzig questions would be tackled again by the West and Germany in a much less tense atmosphere and settled to German satisfaction by plebiscite means in a comprehensive Munich-like settlement.
Oh, I totally agree. But I like to point out that this was the foreign policy program of more or less everyone in Germany but Hitler and the radical Nazis. Remove the mustachoed guy in 1938-39, and that's what you will get. I also remark that the West would have found quite a confortable settlement with such a Germany.
True as well. In all likelihood, when Chamberlain envisaged his appeasement strategy and expected Hitler to be a more brash but rational Bismarck-like figure with fascist trappings, it expected Germany to do the list above, then settle down to be the political-economic leader and anti-Soviet bulwark of Central-Eastern Europe. And if a German-Soviet war occurred, the best-case scenario for Germany to be a remake of WWI Eastern front and Brest-Litovsk peace.
Probably, but I have my reservations that they would be substantially greater.
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Eurofed
Banned
My long-standing point. I can't suffer Borg-like superhumanly-efficient Nazis that manage to rewrite the world in their most radical twisted racial fantasies if they manage to get the upper hand in WWII just like I can't suffer Three-Stooges-like outrageously-inefficient Nazis that manage to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory in WWII no matter how much ATL lucky breaks we give them. All too human evil as its worst, but not demons or buffoons.
All true, apart from the bit that even Ukraine is a big place and I would rank it with Russia and not Poland, Czechia, or the Baltics and eventually large-scale indiscriminate counterinsurgency policies wear down even a totalitarian-authoritarian regime. Yup, it shall be not a quite nasty picture.
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Eurofed
Banned
Actually, this statement needs to be nuanced. Nazi atrocities in the East certainly were fueled by laughable racist theories and radical disregard of "logistical" issues involved, but they had objectives that were as comprehensible in a might makes right logic as the ones of Stalinism. It was not comic-book nihilistic killing for its own sake. They meant to make of Eastern Europe for Germany what Europe had done of the New World. It was comic-bookish in the amount of resources required, which they didn't have at all, and mind-boggling in the human suffering involved, but it was a means to the end of a continental ethnically-homogeneous superpower stretching from the Rhine to the Urals.
Keenir
Banned
think about this. how are they going to get anyone to Madagascar?
except that if there's an honorable peace before Hitler dies, guess who gets the PR boost.
hint: its not any German moderates.
Wyragen-TXRG4P
Banned
What? Conquer the Soviet-Union, from Vilnus to Vladivostok? That would be pretty hard without radical reconsiderations of war policies or 1950s technological level (though I would guess the conquest of british possessions in the middle-east and north africa would still be impossible, right?).
Mega-vietnam scenario would imply they have have kept a sufficiently large territory with sufficiently large population for that.
It also implies that the populations in these territories would want to stay, rather than flee to the Soviet-Union, something you probably would agree to be unlikely.
That or that the Germans and other axis allies would actively prevent them from escaping, which in turn imply that the "sending the asians back to the east" plans have not only been cancelled but actually reversed, kinda hard if successors of Hitler are his clones.
There where these things called trains and ships. Latter, the populations of the UK depends uppon for food, industry and trade even more so. Transporting a millions jews or two every year isn´t going to be that difficult. If it is, it will be half a million a year instead.
It also isn´t going to look good for the UK and France to just let them starve either. Well, unless they can hidde or downplay it.
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Keenir
Banned
great....so are the Germans going to sail their trains and ships through British-dominated Mediteranean, then across the Arabian desert, through the monsoons of the Indian Ocean to the spiny forests of Madagascar?
...or are they going to sail their trains and ships through the British-dominated Atlantic, through all the stormy seas around Africa (they aren't at the Cape of Good Hope, ya know), and then to the spiny forests?
wouldn't it be cheaper and easier to just put everyone on a boat that sinks when it gets a certain distance from land?
I Blame Communism
Banned
I seem to recall (I'd want to check Read) that Mussolini was still saying there should be no war until 1942 in 1939 - I shalln't hazard a guess whether or not he intended to actually have a war by then if it could possibly be avoided, but while it would increase Italian strength in absolute terms, that delay would dramatically reduce the relative strength of Germany.
Basically, I think Mussolini, whatever his aspirations, was wise enought to recognise when he was standing on the cliff-edge and shuffle back, as he did when he helped defuse the Munich crisis. I also think that an opprotunity to get his way in the Balkans without Entente interference would have been welcome.
Was he? I wasn't aware of that, which would have to be factored into my opinion. I presume, though, that like many people (including many in Britain and, in a way, Stalin) he was wowed by Blitzkrieg and thought the USSR had no chance.
I remain dubious as to whether war with the Entente was a goal he'd ever have arrived at if he hadn't been pushed, however.
I take it your comments refer to the General Government? Heydrich specified that the ghettoes within the GG should be located as near as possible to railways stations "preparatory to future measures". If the Nazi plan was to send the Jews to the "reservation", why would they care how easy it was to shift those who were already there?
Notably, the Germans made no reference to Madagascar in their negotiations with the Vichy government. Sure, it would have been meaningless and the time was not ripe, but I'm unaware of any reference to "deportation schemes" after Hitler had given his "annihilation of European Jewry" speech, which is pretty telling.
IIRC (I'll check Rees), the Nazis were already getting valuable slave-labour from the Jews in 1940 which they have no reason to give up.
The most notable being Kristallnacht. The level of government organisation and provocation was noteworthy (especially when you consider how long it had been since people in Germany's modern society had had a pogrom of their own accord), but the important thing is the drift in Nazi thought it represented. The Nuremburg Laws were, if you took Nazi racist nonsense as read, a rational policy (minimise the destruction of property and bad PR caused by pogroms and encourage Jews to leave so we can have their stuff). In 1938, the entire idea behind them was ditched. The Nazi state itself organised a pogrom, one which led to massive property damage and terrible PR, and what for? Purely because they hated Germany's Jews.
Once the Nazis had accepted "no more Jews" as an end in itself, their were two ways to achieve this: ethnic cleansing and genocide. Ethnic cleansing was never particularly viable, and Hitler announced his intention to commit genocide as soon as he could cover it with war measures in 1939. As soon as they moved into Poland, the Nazi organisers made preparations for genocide. After September 1939, I see no way to turn back.
Forced deportation what? The Nazis didn't force-deport anyone on Kristallnacht (they did do it on a few isolated occasions, if memory serves, to a large extent at the behest of Goerring), they merely committed mass-arson and a few over-enthusiastic murders. Quite unnecessary to a policy of mass forced deportation, which they never embraced.
No denying that, but again: when after Hitler spelled out the possibility of genocide in 1939 did the Nazis ever hint at any attention to turn to deportation?
And? The point is that the Nazis were 100% willing to commit mass-murder against the Jews after 1938. Given that, I see no reason why they won't make use of Jewish slave-labour rather than investing their own resources into getting warm bodies out of their domain.
As far as I'm concerned it impinges on state-organised mass-murder, but I'll agree that that's a diversion we don't need which would bog down the debate.
And this is exactly what I'm objecting to. I don't mean to denigrate the singular suffering of the Holocaust victims, or endorse the disgusting communist revision of history, but the fact of the matter is that we in the west remember the people who were murdered by the Nazis using gas but not the even more peope who were murdered using bullets, fire, and famine, and all of them were people just as much.
The essential point (no escape from genocide after June 1941, when it officially began) remains.
This is an accurate view, but I don't see how, take with the rest of the evidence, it leads to any conclusion except that the Nzis were resolved on total genocide against the Jews in 1941.
Yup, no dissent there.
And that's a lot more deaths than the Holocaust. I don't even consider the OTL Holocaust death-rate of 60% to be impossible, although of course the TTL Holocaust death-rate will go considerably higher.
Similar, but there are differences. China, foe example, was a much less urbanised society, meaning that a breakdown of agricultural production implies less starvation in cities. The three principle causes of civilian death were urban mass-starvartion (Kharkov, Leningrad), the Holocaust, and the Partisan war; and as I understand it the Chinese partisans, while they could face equal brutality when the Japanese did retaliate, weren't so organised and pervasive at the Soviet ones in places like Belarus.
That would result in starvation on a large scale, no doubts about it. I also have to wonder whether transporting millions of people to vast forests and deserts and dumping them is nore logistically plausible (or any differant) from the total genocide you dismiss as impossible.
Do yo have any evidence for this belief whatever besides a desire to make the Nazis look better and the Soviets worse?
The Soviet census of 1926 is probably somewhat distorted by the scramble of the nationalities for priveledge, but that wouldn't just the numbers much or in any particular direction. So, in the first all-Union census we have a population of 147 millions.
The 1916 estimate for the Russian Empire is 181 millions, which, given the boom that was going on and the widely marvelled-at and feared demographic explosion (Nicholas II, always happy to have delusions about his empire's capability and power, confidently predicted that his heir would rule an empire of 300 millions) jams pretty well with the 1897 result of 125.5 excluding Finland.
Knocking off fifteen millions in the lost territories (rather generous estimate, albiet very rough), we're still left with a pretty severe population decline between 1916 and 1926. WW1, War Communism, and the Civil War would appear to be on the books. And why shouldn't they be? Lenin needed to know how many subjects he had and where if he was to Aggravate the Class Struggle and all the rest of it. This seems to me a more immediate concern that pretending that the wars that figured so prominently in his propaganda hadn't in fact happened.
Then the 1937 census. Stalin decrees that there simply aren't enough Soviets and sends the people responsible for these obviously falsified interventionist saboteur White Guard figures to GULAG. He wants something in the neighbourhood of 180 millions of Soviets and gets about 162, and tries to cover this up.
In other words the Soviets had already launched an attack on history to cover up the effects of crash industrialisation, by the characteristically Stalinist method of simply declaring that the 1937 census never happened.
The 1939 census then gives us a result of 168 Soviets in the 1939 borders. We'll ignore the areas taken from Poland: they suffered about the same percentage casualty rate as the 1939 USSR. That tells a rather differant story since they were occupied in their entirety, but it means that in terms of figures we can work without it and arive at the same average.
162 to 168 in two years is a fairly substantial jump, however one shouldn't forget that there were problems with the 1937 results, and changes in Soviet attitude in the intervening time in matters such as religion. I don't consider it fanciful. There's no particular evidence that I can see for the existence of "phantom Soviets". Large slices of the Soviet figures are pretty rock-solid. The generals couldn't deal in phantom casualties, still less in phantom troops.
Given this, the death-rate of 14% - which is based on the 1939 figures and includes the estimated population growth 1939-1941 which, by the way, is a pretty good match with that of 1937-1939 attested by the census figures - must be sufficiently accurate as to make little difference.
To cut the matter short: the estimates of Soviet population as of 1941 which give us these figures are pretty substantially below the population estimate of the Tsar's empire in 1916. If the Soviets "folded" the losses since that time into their WW2 losses, they actually double-counted.
To cut it even shorter: I see suspicion of anything besmirching the reputation of Nazi murderers and rapists, but I don't see maths.
One does not need death-camps to cause multiple megadeaths. The Nazis managed plenty without their aid.
Like I say, I consider Madagascar a big red herring. To get it, the Nazis must beat France. To beat France, the Nazis must beat Poland. Beating Poland brings millions of helpless Jews under their total control, right when they could do with slave-labour. Given that Hitler had already announced that he would destroy the Jews if there was a war, I don't see how the Nazis can suddenly reverse their policy and move to a more expensive and complicated one.
Like I said, I'm working from Weinberger (Visions of Victory, to be precise: I disagree with several of his conclusions, but a conclusion is differant from a fact).
Of course, a "Deng-like figure" would be one who restored capitalism to an economy of state mass-mobilisation, which the Nazis didn't have; but I get the general gist.
"As commonly meant" is a relic of Cold War geopolitics in any case. If we define it as the absence of a predominantly urban civilisation, that will certainly be the case in the ex-USSR.
Of course, China is China, and Mao hadn't presided over a massive decline in educational standards up to his fall. Obviously Red Guards beating up their professors wasn't any kind of a way to progress, but the Chinese started with a society where literacy was very limited and spread it majorly. The Nazis started in a very educated society and trashed its education system. They'd be obliged to pull themselves up by their bootstraps.
Oh, certainly. I imagine Nazi policy will change eventually, and they'll have to change their policy to cope with the new realities once a large portion of the population are dead.
Several of those are plausible at the very least in terms of keeping options open and threats in being, but again: the accounts I've read give Hitler no stark choice about a peace offer in 1941.
What were the Soviets going to do, invade Bulgaria? Not destroying the world was in the interests of both USA and USSR, but it's not like the Nazis had any particular desire to negotiate with the Soviets. The Soviets may have wanted to investigate the possibilities of a negotiated peace, but how could they do it? It wasn't in their power to make any third party mediate for them.
Alternatively, he could have been doing what all diplomats do and using grand rhetoric tailored to the recipient to advance a cynical policy rather differant than what his words suggested. I mean, how is a Nazi-Soviet compromise useful to Bulgaria? If the Nazis win, you don't want to be the Slavic power that was scampering around doing Russia's diplomatic dirty work and promoting defeatism. If the Soviets win, well, you were right. If a compromise is brought about succesfully, it's reasonable to assume that the parties will fight again and you're back at square one.
The Bulgarian might also have banked on Soviet victory (diplomats have always had their own prejudices and always will) and been exaggerrating to stiffen the listening Russians so that they would hold firm and get the victory that was coming to them.
There are plenty of explanations if one admits a little diplomatic subtlety to the equation.
On the other hand, the idea of the super-efficient German army smashing its way from Leningrad to the outskirts of Moscow to the Volga to the foot of the Caucasus, dwarfing Russia's previous greatest-ever defeat, because the foolish Russians had done sweet nothing to prepare for their arrival sounds like a nationalist fantasy and there it is.
This is another issue entirely, and another one that would be worth its own separate thread and discussion (if I didn't fear that the "Allies are invincible" fanboys would derail it by spending 12 pages nitpicking about the PoD
Possibly (I was thinking in terms of a very brief pause, Amiens-style), but the point is that I really doubt the Soviets were in earnest about accepting any losses.
I believe that Hitler's long-term plans involved increasingly heady ambitions. He may well have meant to fight the USSR first, but I certainly think he wanted to smash Versailles if the opportunity presented itself - and in the scenario, it does.
His attitudes did of course change. Admiration for Britain turned to a mixture of contempt and exasperation from 1938 onwards, for instance.
When did Bismarck break a treaty? Sure, he was operating at a level somewhere above "diplomacy as usual", but the only example that springs to mind of completely unilateral ditching of obligations if the Russian fleet in 1870 and that didn't lead to a war.
Quite, but the point is that it's all sides of the same coin: a policy based on the belief that obligations are just a means to pull the wool over the other party's eyes. As the Nazis showed us (as did the unscupulous right-hand-does-not-know-what-the-left-hand-is-doing diplomacy of the Second French Empire), such a policy can bring you simple, flashy successes, but eventually you'll end up friendless and backed into a hopeless situation.
Exactly, and the Nazis did not observe said time-limit. Personally, though, I think old Otto could have avoided signing a non-aggression pact with anyone he intended to go to war with until after he was done - but the comparison becomes increasingly strained. Bismarck was not a Nazi. There were many ways in which their manouvres weren't comparable: Bismarck, for example, could safely ignore public opinion when he didn't like it, whereas the Nazis to a considerable extent justified their regime by success abroad.
If it's tied by an alliance to France, it's obligated to stand by the Czechs. Now, trusting religiously in a French alliance wasn't a likely or a sensible thing for Pilsudski to do. Obviously his attempt to walk a tightrope between Germany and Russia with military power as his balancing pole and France as his safety harness was doomed, but that was because he misunderstood Hitler, as did everybody, not least Stalin and Chamberlain.
Personally, I think the man who transformed himself from least popular man in Germany to national meme, navigated through three back-to-back wars without scraping a rudder, and kept the peace in Europe for two decades knew his job a bit better than us, but that's just me.
Yes, but obviously having been beaten in a war they've been knocked back from that standing (it's not really "beaten" if you come out with more than you started with), and like I said: while Germans as a people are no more aggressive or evil or whatever than anybody else, a Germany ruled by military officers and cultivating the Dolchstosslegende is not something I'd like to see if it can possibly be avoided.
Why must I always be accused of having something against Germany? I'm the one who quotes Schiller.
And the runaway military class that had developed in the interwar period - a time of complete constitutional democracy and great social and npolitical freedom - would still be there.
Prussian militarism was clearly a real phenomenon (witness Wilhelm Voigt and the Zabern affair) but I'd like to think my analysis is a bit more nuanced. The old German army had a senior leadership representing reactionary Junker interests and all too willing to push aside the civilians, but it was, like all mass armies, a rather beaurgoise citizen force. Imperial Germany couldn't help having an army full of Social Democrat soldiers and Jewish lieutenants from Frankfurt, and no less a foaming-at-the-mouth critic of all things German than AJP Taylor said that the idea that the Germans were particularly more brutal or wicked in WW1 contains little useful truth.
But in the post-Versailles climate, the Germans had a small, artificially limited army officer corps made up of a very specific kind of officer drawn from the old elites, and this created an "echo-chamber". The Reichswehr was not "Prussian militarism", it was a daughter. It did become involved in politics in very unpleasant ways, but it couldn't have pulled an August 1914.
The significant thing was that it was wrapped up in itself and developed a tradition whereby the citizens values of the old German army vanished. It was ambitious, calculating, and completely amoral, and Hitler gave it a collar of his own while removing it from the leash of human decency with documented results.
That a tiny military class coming from a tradition of nationalism, supremacy, and entitlement in the Junkertum would develop such an attitude is a no-brained and says nothing whatever about the character of the German people who passed through the mechanism it had created after 1935.
But the army leadership existed, and was not nice.
Japan surrendered unconditionally. Leniancy is not incompatible with total victory.
My attitude is this: from a policy point of view, it was the logical choice for all the Allied governments to destroy Axis power altogether, and a realistic person can't expect governments to do anything whatever except follow their own self-interest at any point in history.
From a humanitarian point of view, a doctrine which ensured that the people who were responsible for unthinkable attrocities (the German military leadership on the eastern front were complicit in numberous megadeaths) and that the carnage was never repeated, as opposed to balancing millions of lives on the very thin reed of an enemy officer caste, wasn't even in the league of the Japanese-American internment, let alone the Kalmyk deportations; and I don't kid myself that the Allies weren't up to their knees in civilian blood.
The destruction of Germany military power has avoided a repeat event, so the only way an "honourable" peace could be superior on its own merits would be if it was better than a certainty.
Without a comprehensive cleansing of the Nazi past? The lesson of history is that societies don't naturally come to terms with their misdeeds to a helpful level. Just look at the ex-USSR.
"Versailles Mark II" has resulted in a liberal democratic Germany which has been flabberghastingly succesful in coming to terms with its own past and is now among the nicest places I can think of in the world, and almost complete peace in Europe for decades.
Interesting: I'll do some more reading
One can't expect anyone who isn't Bismarck to pull of a foreign policy of Bismarckian standard; but I agree that one can't expect anybody except Hitler to emulate his, ah, achievements either.
True. Of course, Chamberlain, like everybody, was a human being and had his own motivations and foibles - a genuine desire to avoid war and the instinct of a Birmingham businessman that led him to put a lot of faith in what you might call contractual obligation and simple transactions, for example.
Why not? The figures are there.