By Pat Buchanan
On Sept. 1, 1939, 70 years ago, the German Army
crossed the Polish frontier. On Sept. 3, Britain declared war.
Six years later, 50 million Christians and Jews had
perished. Britain was broken and bankrupt, Germany a smoldering ruin. Europe
had served as the site of the most murderous combat known to man, and civilians
had suffered worse horrors than the soldiers.
By May 1945, Red Army hordes occupied all the great
capitals of Central Europe: Vienna, Prague, Budapest, Berlin. A hundred million
Christians were under the heel of the most barbarous tyranny in history: the
Bolshevik regime of the greatest terrorist of them all, Joseph Stalin.
What cause could justify such sacrifices?
The German-Polish war had come out of a quarrel over
a town the size of Ocean City, Md., in summer. Danzig, 95 percent German, had
been severed from Germany at Versailles in violation of Woodrow Wilson’s
principle of self-determination. Even British leaders thought Danzig should be
returned.
Why did Warsaw not negotiate with Berlin, which was
hinting at an offer of compensatory territory in Slovakia? Because the Poles
had a war guarantee from Britain that, should Germany attack, Britain and her
empire would come to Poland’s rescue.
But why would Britain hand an unsolicited war
guarantee to a junta of Polish colonels, giving them the power to drag Britain
into a second war with the most powerful nation in Europe?
Was Danzig worth a war? Unlike the 7 million Hong
Kongese whom the British surrendered to Beijing, who didn’t want to go, the
Danzigers were clamoring to return to Germany.
Comes the response: The war guarantee was not about
Danzig, or even about Poland. It was about the moral and strategic imperative
“to stop Hitler” after he showed, by tearing up the Munich pact and
Czechoslovakia with it, that he was out to conquer the world. And this Nazi
beast could not be allowed to do that.
If true, a fair point. Americans, after all, were
prepared to use atom bombs to keep the Red Army from the Channel. But where is
the evidence that Adolf Hitler, whose victims as of March 1939 were a fraction
of Gen. Pinochet’s, or Fidel Castro’s, was out to conquer the world?
After Munich in 1938, Czechoslovakia did indeed
crumble and come apart. Yet consider what became of its parts.
The Sudeten Germans were returned to German rule, as
they wished. Poland had annexed the tiny disputed region of Teschen, where
thousands of Poles lived. Hungary’s ancestral lands in the south of Slovakia
had been returned to her. The Slovaks had their full independence guaranteed by
Germany. As for the Czechs, they came to Berlin for the same deal as the
Slovaks, but Hitler insisted they accept a protectorate.
Now one may despise what was done, but how did this
partition of Czechoslovakia manifest a Hitlerian drive for world conquest?
Comes the reply: If Britain had not given the war
guarantee and gone to war, after Czechoslovakia would have come Poland’s turn,
then Russia’s, then France’s, then Britain’s, then the United States.
We would all be speaking German now.
But if Hitler was out to conquer the world —
Britain, Africa, the Middle East, the United States, Canada, South America,
India, Asia, Australia — why did he spend three years building that hugely
expensive Siegfried Line to protect Germany from France? Why did he start the
war with no surface fleet, no troop transports and only 29 oceangoing
submarines? How do you conquer the world with a navy that can’t get out of the
Baltic Sea?
If Hitler wanted the world, why did he not build
strategic bombers, instead of two-engine Dorniers and Heinkels that could not
even reach Britain from Germany?
Why did he let the British army go at Dunkirk?
Why did he offer the British peace, twice, after
Poland fell, and again after France fell?
Why, when Paris fell, did Hitler not demand the
French fleet, as the Allies demanded and got the Kaiser’s fleet? Why did he not
demand bases in French-controlled Syria to attack Suez? Why did he beg Benito
Mussolini not to attack Greece?
Because Hitler wanted to end the war in 1940, almost
two years before the trains began to roll to the camps.
Hitler had never wanted war with Poland, but an
alliance with Poland such as he had with Francisco Franco’s Spain, Mussolini’s
Italy, Miklos Horthy’s Hungary and Father Jozef Tiso’s Slovakia.
Indeed, why would he want war when, by 1939, he was
surrounded by allied, friendly or neutral neighbors, save France. And he had
written off Alsace, because reconquering Alsace meant war with France, and that
meant war with Britain, whose empire he admired and whom he had always sought
as an ally.
As of March 1939, Hitler did not even have a border
with Russia. How then could he invade Russia?
Winston Churchill was right when he called it “The
Unnecessary War” — the war that may yet prove the mortal blow to our
civilization.