Adolf Hitler’s private and confidential meeting with the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem, on 28 November 1941, right at the start of his Holocaust to get rid of “the Jews,” was enormously significant historically, because he was here secretly informing the leader of Palestine, about what Hitler’s plan was for Jews after Hitler would eliminate them from Europe. This is one of the few key documents that make unequivocal Hitler’s determination to eliminate every Jew on the planet — not merely every Jew in Europe. (which he publicly threatened to do).

As will be documented here, online for the very first time, and with links to the only existing online sources in the English language: Hitler privately expressed his explicit intention to cleanse (exterminate) Jews from Palestine, and to make the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem the “liberator” of all Arabs, not only the Palestinian leader. Hitler said that, as soon as Hitler would finish wiping out all Jews in Europe, he would publicly authorize, arm, and assist, the Mufti, to oversee exterminating them in Palestine and throughout all Arab regions; and this is what the Mufti wanted, so that the Mufti would then become the “liberator” of all Arabs (by killing all Jews in Arabia), and the Mufti would therefore be ruling, under Emperor Hitler, a vast Arab kingdom. The only initial disagreement between Hitler and the Mufti, was that the Mufti wanted Hitler to announce this intention immediately to the world, but Hitler told him that publicly announcing it at this time would be premature — the public announcement of his intention would occur only (and as soon as) all Jews had already been cleansed from Europe. At the meeting’s very end, the Mufti said that he was thoroughly persuaded by Hitler’s reasoning; the Mufti no longer wanted Hitler to announce it immediately. By the meeting’s end, they agreed on the timing of the public announcement. They parted in 100% agreement about what should be done, and in what order.

In short: This document is one (there are others) that exposes the utter fraudulence of the ‘historians’ who allege either that Hitler was a ‘weak dictator’, or that he didn’t hold the intention of exterminating each and every Jew, everywhere, and that he didn’t hold this exterminationist intention firmly, with conviction, and (in the case of this document) well before the Holocaust was at an advanced stage in Europe, or anywhere. 

In this particular document, Hitler also makes clear (as he did also on other occasions; so, this is hardly the only proof of it) that he would not consider “The Thousand-Year Reich” really to have so much as even just started, until the extermination of all Jews had been completed everywhere. In other words: for Hitler, “victory” in World War II would consist of (and could be achieved only by means of) his successfully eliminating all Jews. (In my 2000 book WHY the Holocaust Happened, I presented a case that he had first come to this intention during September 1919 but knew that if he allowed the public to know that this was why he was entering politics, then he’d never be able to achieve the leadership of Germany and thus would never attain his goal, but that this indeed was the reason for his entering politics, at that time, as he did.) 

In other words: completion of the Holocaust was, in Hitler’s mind, what World War II was actually about. The Holocaust wasn’t incidental to Hitler’s war-aims; it was his war-aim. For him, the war existed primarily in order to make possible, and to complete, annihilation of “the Jews” (defined in the way that Hitler did, in the Nuremberg Laws: not by what a person believed, but by what a person’s ancestors believed — as a “racial” matter, not a religious one, but ‘racial’ being based on ancestors’ religion, not on genetics; Hitler rejected genetics; he even condemned Darwin; Hitler was a biblical creationist and defined “Aryan” as being a “pureblooded” descendant from Adam and Eve, whereas he thought Jews descended from the snake in Genesis 3; these matters are documented in WHY the Holocaust Happened). For Hitler, “victory” would consist of exterminating all “Jews” everywhere; or, as he wrote in The Führer’s words right before his suicide — his final, supreme, statement of his war-aims — he urged his people to continue the war, until victory, against what he held to be the sole real enemy: “the poisoner of all nations, international Jewry.” His final words were: “I charge the leaders of the nation and those under them to scrupulous observance of the laws of race and to merciless opposition to the universal poisoner of all peoples, international Jewry.” That phrase “international Jewry” was a code he often used for referring to all Jews, everywhere. However, as he made clear in this document — the document that will now be presented in full and online, and with clarificatory annotations — his clear and explicit intention was to hide from the public that this was indeed his goal, and not to reveal it until after all Jews had first already been exterminated in Europe.

Furthermore, in light of this single and crucial document: any ‘historian’ — or even Israel’s own current racist-fascist and Hitler-apologetic Prime Minister, Benjamin Netanyahu — who alleges that Hitler had actually (strategically, instead of merely tactically) advocated merely the expulsion of Jews (to Madagascar, Palestine, or anywhere else) is simply fraudulent. The record is clear and unequivocal on this central historical matter: Hitler never had any such actual intention of merely expelling Jews — as this document itself (like several others) makes clear. And Hitler here explained why the sequence of events was going to be crucial in achieving the goal of a Jew-free world. Hitler explained to the Mufti the necessary sequence; the Mufti accepted it.

There are many abbreviated presentations on the Web, of the official Nazi record (the only record that exists) of Hitler’s meeting with the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem, and some of these presentations call themselves by such titles as "Full official record: What the Mufti said to Hitler”, but none is even nearly complete — other than the sources which will be linked to here. Most others omit crucial parts from the document; and the version that’s being presented here will therefore be the first that actually is complete, and that is also presented so as to be understandable, fully in context, and therefore making complete sense, as the document did in its own time and circumstances.

The portions in the document that I consider to constitute the most important excerpts in it are boldfaced in my presentation below; and, the few passages that are simultaneously boldfaced and italicized are the ones that I consider the most important of the most important. Reading only those highlighted portions provides an accurate summary of this document, but the complete document is being presented here in order that the reader can decide, for him or her self, which passages in it best summarize the document. Different individuals might have different takes on what’s important and what isn’t; and, so, the entirety of the document is presented here.

Nothing here will be paraphrased: Paraphrases of any document never possess the epistemological authority (the scientific credibility) that direct quotations do; and when direct quotations are being presented entirely within the context of the complete document, such as will be done here (the whole document will be shown), the reader knows the context in which any given quotations existed, and is therefore in the best possible position to interpret, on one’s own, what the document’s intended meaning was, at least for Hitler (and presumably also for the Mufti).

This presentation is from the official US Government publication of the document, as being pages 881-885, Document “No. 515" in Documents on German Foreign Policy, 1918-1945, Series D (1937-1945), Volume XII, THE WAR YEARS, June 23-December 11, 1941. It includes there no annotations or clarifications added to facilitate a reader’s accurate understanding of the context and historical background of the document. That lack of explanation or essential context might be one possible reason why this document has unfortunately been widely ignored except by people such as Netanyahu, who freely and baldly lie about what the document said, and about what Hitler intended regarding all Jews. This complete unannotated document can be seen online in .pdf here, and in .txt (though with many typographical errors from the automated text-reader) here. (The latter one — the .txt version but not the .pdf version — I was able to archive, at http://archive.is/iKBm4, so that’s an alternative copy of just the .txt version, just in case a person might encounter trouble accessing the .pdf version and in case the .pdf version becomes eliminated entirely.) Another version of this document, which is likewise without annotations, has been posted online from the official British publication of the document, and that’s here. 

My presentation of this document has been copied complete from the .txt version of the US Government publication, because the .pdf version is unfortunately of a non-copyable kind, but I have corrected here the many typos, so as to restore the readability that was lost by the automated text-reader. In this presentation, from the US Government text, there is (as I shall note in the text) one correction that was noted by the publisher: where the German original had shown “1,700,000” but the actual number was 17,000,000. Other than that factual correction of what was probably a typo in the official Nazi transcription, there were no annotations in any version. And the stark contrast contradicting Netanyahu’s statement about this meeting between The Fuehrer and The Mufti, is clear and even blatantly clear — and Netanyahu is, thus, clearly exposed here as having intended to place the central blame for the Holocaust on the Mufti, instead of on Hitler. The (anti-Palestinian) nazi Netanyahu thus presented the (anti-Jew) Nazi Hitler, as having been the Mufti’s fool, instead of as having been the Mufti’s leader and guide — as was clearly the case (as is displayed multifold in this document). Furthermore, Netanyahu is famous as being a psychopathic liar (like nazis — racist fascists — routinely are) but here is yet another case of that type, and all of the evidence on it is now easily available on the Web, presented here, with full disclosure and access to all of the sources, via evidence that’s just a click away.

Here, then, is the annotated document, taken from the US Government’s publication, and this will expose the widely spread lies (such as Netanyahu spread — in his case, that the Mufti instructed a reluctant Hitler to “burn” “the Jews” and didn’t instead take instructions from Hitler, about what the Mufti must do regarding Jews) which lies are aimed at conveying the false impression that Hitler didn’t actually know what he was doing, or that Hitler didn’t know what the people under his command were doing to Jews, and which suggest that Hitler was being ‘manipulated’ by others (such as the Mufti), regarding Jews, and was not himself the originator and commander of his own regime’s policy regarding the Jews — this is “The Big Exposé,” regarding simultaneously important past history, and present important reality or “news”:

——

No. 515 

F1/0018-24 

Memorandum, by an Official of the Foreign Minister's Secretariat 

Füh. 57a. g Rs. Berlin, November 30, 1941. 

Record of the Conversation Between the Fuhrer and the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem on November 28, 1941, in the Presence of Reich Foreign Minister [Ribbentrop] and Minister Grobba in Berlin 

The Grand Mufti began by thanking the Fuehrer for the great honor he had bestowed by receiving him. He wished to seize the opportunity to convey to the Fuehrer of the Greater German Reich, admired by the entire Arab world, his thanks for the sympathy which he had always shown for the Arab and especially the Palestinian cause, and to which he had given clear expression in his public speeches. The Arab countries were firmly convinced that Germany would win the war and that the Arab cause would then prosper. The Arabs were Germany's natural friends because they had the same enemies as had Germany, namely the English, the Jews, and the Communists. They were therefore prepared to cooperate with Germany with all their hearts and stood ready to participate in the war, not only negatively by the commission of acts of sabotage and the instigation of revolutions, but also positively by the formation of an Arab Legion. The Arabs could be more useful to Germany as allies than might be apparent at first glance, both for geographical reasons and because of the suffering inflicted upon them by the English and the Jews. Furthermore, they had close relations with all Moslem nations, of which they could make use in behalf of the common cause. The Arab Legion would be quite easy to raise. An appeal by the Mufti to the Arab countries and the prisoners of Arab, Algerian, Tunisian, and Moroccan nationality in Germany would produce a great number of volunteers eager to fight. Of Germany's victory the Arab world was firmly convinced, not only because the Reich possessed a large army, brave soldiers, and military leaders of genius, but also because the Almighty could never award the victory to an unjust cause. 

In this struggle, the Arabs were striving for the independence and unity of Palestine, Syria, and Iraq. They had the fullest confidence in the Fuehrer and looked to his hand for the balm on their wounds which had been inflicted upon them by the enemies of Germany. 

The Mufti then mentioned the letter he had received from Germany, which stated that Germany was holding no Arab territories and understood and recognized the aspirations to independence and freedom of the Arabs, just as she [Arabia] supported the elimination of the Jewish national home.

A public declaration in this sense would be very useful for its propagandistic effect on the Arab peoples at this moment. It would rouse the Arabs from their momentary lethargy and give them new courage. It would also ease the Mufti's work of secretly organizing the Arabs against the moment when they could strike. At the same time, he could give the assurance that the Arabs would in strict discipline patiently wait for the right moment and only strike upon an order from Berlin.

With regard to the events in Iraq, the Mufti observed that the Arabs in that country certainly had by no means been incited by Germany to attack England, but solely had acted in reaction to a direct English assault upon their honor. 

The Turks, he believed, would welcome the establishment of an Arab government in the neighboring territories because they would prefer weaker Arab to strong European governments in the neighboring countries, and, being themselves a nation of 7 millions, they had moreover nothing to fear from the 1,700,000 [corrected in a footnote to being actually 17,000,000] Arabs inhabiting Syria, Trans Jordan, Iraq, and Palestine. 

France likewise would have no objections to the unification plan because she had conceded independence to Syria as early as 1936 and had given her approval to the unification of Iraq and Syria under King Faisal as early as 1933. 

In these circumstances he was renewing his request that the Fuehrer make a public declaration so that the Arabs would not lose hope, which is so powerful a force in the life of nations. With such hope in their hearts the Arabs, as he had said, were willing to wait. They were not pressing for immediate realization of their aspirations; they could easily wait half a year or a whole year. But if they were not inspired with such a hope by a declaration of this sort, it could be expected that the English would be the gainers from it. 

The Fuehrer replied that Germany's fundamental attitude on these questions, as the Mufti himself had already stated, was clear. Germany stood for uncompromising war against the Jews. That naturally included active opposition to the Jewish national home in Palestine, which was nothing other than a center, in the form of a state, for the exercise of destructive influence by Jewish interests. Germany was also aware that the assertion that the Jews were carrying out the function of economic pioneers in Palestine was a lie. The work there was done only by the Arabs, not by the Jews. Germany was resolved, step by step, to ask one European nation after the other to solve its Jewish problem, and at the proper time direct a similar appeal to non-European nations as well.

Germany was at the present time engaged in a life and death struggle with two citadels of Jewish power: Great Britain and Soviet Russia. Theoretically there was a difference between England's capitalism and Soviet Russia's communism; actually, however, the Jews in both countries were pursuing a common goal. This was the decisive struggle; on the political plane, it presented itself in the main as a conflict between Germany and England, but ideologically it was a battle between National Socialism and the Jews. It went without saying that Germany would furnish positive and practical aid to the Arabs involved in the same struggle, because platonic promises were useless in a war for survival or destruction in which the Jews were able to mobilize all of England's power for their ends. 

The aid to the Arabs would have to be material aid. Of how little help sympathies alone were in such a battle had been demonstrated plainly by the operation in Iraq, where circumstances had not permitted the rendering of really effective, practical aid. In spite of all the sympathies, German aid had not been sufficient and Iraq was overcome by the power of Britain, that is, the guardian of the Jews. 

The Mufti could not but be aware, however, that the outcome of the struggle going on at present would also decide the fate of the Arab world. The Fuehrer therefore had to think and speak coolly and deliberately, as a rational man and primarily as a soldier, as the leader of the German and allied armies. Everything of a nature to help in this titanic battle for the common cause, and thus also for the Arabs, would have to be done. Anything, however, that might contribute to weakening the military situation must be put aside, no matter how unpopular this move might be. 

Germany was now engaged in very severe battles to force the gateway to the northern Caucasus region. The difficulties were mainly with regard to maintaining the supply, which was most difficult as a result of the destruction of railroads and highways as well as of the oncoming winter. If at such a moment, the Fuehrer were to raise the problem of Syria in a declaration, those elements in France which were under de Gaulle's influence would receive new strength. They would interpret the Fuehrer's declaration as an intention to break up France's colonial empire and appeal to their fellow countrymen that they should rather make common cause with the English to try to save what still could be saved. A German declaration regarding Syria would in France be understood to refer to the French colonies in general, and that would at the present time create new troubles in western Europe, which means that a portion of the German armed forces would be immobilized in the west and no longer be available for the campaign in the east. 

The Fuehrer then made the following statement to the Mufti, enjoining him to lock it in the uttermost depths of his heart: 

1. He (the Fuehrer) would carry on the battle to the total destruction of the Judeo-Communist empire in Europe. 

2. At some moment which was impossible to set exactly today but which in any event was not distant, the German armies would in the course of this struggle reach the southern exit from Caucasia. 

3. As soon as this had happened, the Fuehrer would on his own give the Arab world the assurance that its hour of liberation had arrived. Germany's objective would then be solely the destruction of the Jewish element residing in the Arab sphere under the protection of British power. In that hour the Mufti would be the most authoritative spokesman for the Arab world. It would then be his task to set off the Arab operations which he had secretly prepared. When that time had come, Germany could also be indifferent to French reaction to such a declaration. 

Once Germany had forced open the road to Iran and Iraq through Rostov, it would be also the beginning of the end of the British world empire. He (the Fuehrer) hoped that the coming year would make it possible for Germany to thrust open the Caucasian gate to the Middle East. For the good of their common cause, it would be better if the Arab proclamation were put off for a few more months than if Germany were to create difficulties for herself without being able thereby to help the Arabs. 

He (the Fuehrer) fully appreciated the eagerness of the Arabs for a public declaration of the sort requested by the Grand Mufti. But he would beg him to consider that he (the Fuehrer) himself was the Chief of State of the German Reich for 5 long years during which he was unable to make to his own homeland the announcement of its liberation. He had to wait with that until the announcement could be made on the basis of a situation brought about by the force of arms that the Anschluss had been carried out. 

The moment that Germany's tank divisions and air squadrons had made their appearance south of the Caucasus, the public appeal requested by the Grand Mufti could go out to the Arab world. 

The Grand Mufti replied that it was his view that everything would come to pass just as the Fuehrer had indicated. He was fully re-assured and satisfied by the words which he had heard from the Chief of the German State. He asked, however, whether it would not be possible, secretly at least, to enter into an agreement with Germany of the kind he had just outlined for the Fuehrer. 

The Fuehrer replied that he had just now given the Grand Mufti precisely that confidential declaration. 

The Grand Mufti thanked him for it and stated in conclusion that he was taking his leave from the Fuehrer in full confidence and with reiterated thanks for the interest shown in the Arab cause. 

Schmidt [the authorized transcriber]

American and world media have provided helpful color commentary, condemning the caging of children as openly racist atrocities and state terrorism comparable to Nazi concentration camps and worse than FDR’s internment of Japanese and Japanese-Americans. Indeed, just having voted for Trump is now reason enough for Americans to be labeled as Nazis.

Finally, the presumptive Hitler himself, also known as President Donald Trump, citing the pleas of First Lady Melania and First Daughter Ivanka, signed an Executive Order to provide for adults and (their?) children to be detained together. However, the order is unlikely to hold up in court, with sanctuary-minded states aiming to obstruct border enforcement the way Trump’s earlier order on vetting arrivals from terrorism-prone countries has been crippled by the federal judiciary. His media and bipartisan political opposition will be happy only when all border violation detentions cease and America has gone full Merkel, starting with ending Trump’s declared zero tolerance for illegal crossings and restoration of Barack Obama’s catch-and-release policy.

Even then, Trump will be vilified for taking so long to do it. Whether or how Trump may yield further is not clear, but rather than slaking the hate campaign against him, his attempted effort at appeasement has put the smell of political blood in the water with the November 2018 Congressional midterm elections looming.

Some images of small children have become veritable icons of Trumpian brutality. One photo, reportedly of a two-year-old Honduran girl (who in fact had not been separated from her mother), graced the cover of Time magazine, confronting the black-hearted tyrant himself. Another, of a little boy in a cage, went viral before it was revealed that this kid had nothing to do with the border but rather was briefly inside a staged pen as part of a protest in Dallas.

The reality behind the pictures doesn’t matter, though. More important are the images themselves and their power, along with dishonest media spin, to produce an emotional response that short-circuits critical thinking. Never mind what the facts are! Children are suffering! Trump is guilty! We need to “do something”!

On point of comparison, let’s remember the  saturation media distribution given in 2016 to a picture of a little boy, Omran Daqneesh, said to have been pulled from the rubble of Aleppo after what was dubiously reported as a Russian airstrike. Promptly dubbed “Aleppo Boy,” his pathetic dusty image immediately went viral in every prestige outlet in the United States and Europe. The underlying message: we – the “international community,” “the Free World,” the United States, you and I – must “do something” to stop Syrian President Bashar al-Assad and his main backer and fellow Hitler clone Vladimir Putin.

(Not long before, another little boy, also in the area of Aleppo, was beheaded on video by the “moderate” US-supported jihad terror group Harakat Nour al-Din al-Zenki. The images of his grisly demise received far less media attention than those of official Aleppo Boy. This other youngster received no catchy moniker. No one called for anyone in power to “do something.” In fact, western support for the al-Zenki murderers – which the Obama administration refused to disavow even after the beheading and allegations of chlorine gas use by al-Zenki – can itself be seen as part of “doing something” about the evil, evil Assad. (Reportedly Trump’s viewing the beheading video led to a cutoff of CIA aid to some jihad groups.) Another small detail readily available in alternative media but almost invisible in the major outlets: Mahmoud Raslan, the photographer who took the picture of Aleppo Boy and disseminated it to world acclaim, also took a smiling selfie with the beaming al-Zenki beheaders of the other kid. But, hey, says Raslan, I barely know those guys. Now let’s move on . . . )

For those who have been paying attention for the past couple of decades, the Trump border crisis kids, like Aleppo Boy before them, are human props in what is known as “atrocity porn” designed to titillate the viewers through horror and incite them to hatred of the presumed perpetrators. Atrocity propaganda has long been a part of warfare – think World War I claims of Belgian babies impaled on German bayonets – but with modern digital technology and social media the impact is immediate and universal.

It’s irrelevant whether what is identified in images corresponds to reality. What matters is their ability to evoke mindless, maudlin emotionalism, like MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow choking up in tears over the border children or the similar weepy display in 2016 by CNN’s Kate Bolduan over Aleppo Boy.  

Now being deployed in an American domestic context over whether or not the US should be allowed to control its borders, for decades atrocity porn has been essential for selling military action in wars of choice unconnected to the actual defense of the US: incubator babies (Kuwait/Iraq); the Racak massacre (Kosovo); the Markale marketplace bombings, Omarska “living skeletons,” and the Srebrenica massacre (Bosnia); rape as calculated instrument of war (Bosnia, Libya); and false flag poison gas attacks in Ghouta  and Douma (Syria). Never mind that the facts, to the extent they eventually become known, may later turn out to be very different from the categorical black-and-white accusations on the lips of western officials and given banner exposure within hours if not minutes of the event in question.

Atrocity porn dovetails closely with another key meme, that of Hitler-of-the-month. In painting Trump as der Führer on the border, we see coming home to America a ploy that has been an essential element to justify foreign regime change operation, each of which has been spelled out in terms of black-and-white, good-versus-evil Manichaean imperatives, with the side targeted for destruction or replacement having absolutely no redeeming qualities. This entails first of all absolute demonization of the evil leader in what is called reductio ad Hitlerum, a concept attributed to philosopher Leo Strauss in 1951. Russia’s Vladimir Putin has been characterized by name as another Hitler by Hillary Clinton and others. Among the prominent “Hitlers” since 1991 have been Saddam Hussein (Iraq), Slobodan Milosevic (Yugoslavia/Serbia), Radovan Karadzic (Republika Srpska), Moammar Qaddafi (Libya), and Bashar al-Assad (Syria), with less imposing Führer figures to be found in Mohamed Farrah Aidid (Somalia), Manuel Noriega (Panama), Mahmoud Ahmadinejad (Iran), and Omar al-Bashir (Sudan).

With apologies to Voltaire, if Hitler had not existed it would be necessary for the US-UK Deep State to invent him . . .

Today the atrocity porn and Hitler memes that have been so useful in justifying regime change in other countries are being directed with increasing intensity against America’s own duly elected president. This is at a time when the original conspiracy to discredit and unseat him, the phony “Russian collusion” story, is in the process of unraveling and being turned back on its originators. Horror of horrors, Trump is now feeling free enough to move forward on a meeting with Putin.

Keep in mind that Putin is, according to Hillary Clinton, leader of the worldwide “authoritarian, white-supremacist, and xenophobic movement” who is “emboldening right-wing nationalists, separatists, racists, and even neo-Nazis.” So he and Hitler-Trump should get on famously! The prospect of any warming of ties between Washington and Moscow has elements of the US intelligence agencies, together with their British coconspirators in MI6 and GCHQ, in an absolute panic.

That’s why desperate measures are in order. As noted earlier, when confronted with a reincarnation of the most evil personage in history, even the most extreme actions cannot be ruled out. Demonizing the intended target neutralizes objections to his removal – by any means necessary.

After all, how can any decent person oppose getting rid of Hitler?

White House Press Secretary Sean Spicer falsely stated at a press conference Tuesday that Nazi leader Adolf Hitler did not use chemical weapons, triggering widespread popular anger and disgust in the US and internationally.

Spicer made the comment as part of a denunciation of Syrian President Bashar al Assad, which the US government accuses, without presenting any evidence, of having carried out a chemical weapons attack in northwestern Idlib province in Syria last week.

Spicer declared, “even someone as despicable as Hitler… didn't even sink to using chemical weapons.” When he was asked by a reporter to explain this patently absurd statement, Spicer clarified: “He [Hitler] brought them [his victims] into the holocaust center, I understand that,” but that the Nazi leader “was not using the gas on his own people in the same way that Assad is doing.”

That a leading figure in the White House could make such a statement, even in an offhand remark, speaks to the extreme ignorance, backwardness and toxic right-wing atmosphere that prevails at the highest levels of the US state.

Hitler widely used a chemical weapon, namely Zyklon B, to murder millions of Jews on a mass scale—not in “the Holocaust center” but in death camps like Auschwitz, Treblinka, Bełżec, Chełmno, Majdanek and Sobibór.

Before the industrialized use of Zyklon B in these death camps, which started at the turn of 1941-42, the SS would gas thousands of Jews in mobile vans in the occupied territories of the Soviet Union and in Nazi-occupied Poland. In total, between 2.5 and 3 million European Jews—about half of the total number of victims of the genocide of the European Jews—were killed in this way. Added to this must be the thousands of mentally ill people, Soviet prisoners-of-war and Sinti and Roma who were also gassed with Zyklon B.

Following a public outcry, the White House felt compelled to withdraw the statement and Sean Spicer made a public apology on CNN, saying that he had “mistakenly used an inappropriate and insensitive reference to the Holocaust.”

The whole incident was revealing on many levels. It underscores the obscene character of the entire campaign demanding regime-change operation against Assad, which has been based on a tissue of lies and the whipping up of hysteria. While the American media has glossed over in silence the US-backed siege of Mosul, which has taken the lives of thousands of civilians, it has seized upon last week’s chemical weapons attack in Syria to beat the drum for war.

No evidence whatsoever has been presented as to who perpetrated the attack, which in all likelihood was a deliberate, imperialist provocation aimed at providing a pretext for an escalation of the regime-change operation in Syria and stepped-up war preparations against both Russia and Iran.

It should also be noted that some of the same so-called liberal outlets who denounced Spicer’s comments on Tuesday have been fully implicated in this lying campaign, culminating in their endorsement of Trump’s illegal attack on a Syrian airfield on Thursday.

The fact that Spicer now went so far as to basically deny the most notorious aspect of the Holocaust is more than a slip of the tongue. It reflects moods prevailing in the White House that range from callous indifference to the horrendous crimes of the Nazi regime, to more or less open endorsement.

In January, the Trump White House published a statement on Holocaust remembrance day which ignored the six million Jews that were murdered by the Nazis. The White House likewise kept silent for weeks about a wave of anti-semitic attacks in January and February, before issuing a potted statement about “prejudice and evil.”

The Trump campaign has, from the beginning, critically relied on the support from and encouragement of the far-right. The most notorious embodiment of this alliance is White House Chief Strategist Stephen Bannon, the former editor of the far-right Breitbart News, which serves as an outlet for right-wing extremist groups tied to white supremacy and anti-Semitism.

wsws.org

Many authors are referring to the current state of international relations as «Cold War 2.0», noting that the ideological conflict between the West and the USSR during the last Cold War was based on different interpretations of events in the 20^th century, among which there is no subject more important than the Second World War. And within this, the question of «who’s to blame» is the most important. Who is responsible for the failure of the Treaty of Versailles, for Hitler coming to power, and for the outbreak of World War Two? This seems to be what the author of the article in The National Interest is writing about. Yet his focus on the Führer’s personality and his sidelining of the influence of powerful political forces that ensured Hitler’s rise to power become a smokescreen that hides the problem. Hence the outright lies regarding the 1939 German–Soviet Non-Aggression Pact (the Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact) and the 2009 PACE resolution, which placed an equals sign between the Soviet Union and Hitler’s Germany as «two totalitarian regimes». 

So when exactly did Hitler become Hitler?

A revealing detail noted by Historian Jacques Bergier is that by the summer of 1938, the residents of Berlin had stopped shouting «Heil!» and had gone back to the old form of greeting. In the summer of 1938, Hitler’s power was considered complete, yet the commander of the 3^rd Military District in Berlin, Field Marshal Erwin von Witzleben, who was executed by Hitler in 1944, openly rehearsed taking the Reich Chancellery. Many German generals believed that Germany was facing inevitable defeat in its attempt to seize Czechoslovakia in 1938. Giving evidence at the Nuremberg Trials, German field marshal Keitel, chief of the Oberkommando der Wehrmacht (Supreme Command of the Armed Forces), said: «We were extraordinarily happy that it had not come to a military operation, because […] we had always been of the opinion that our means of attack against the frontier fortifications of Czechoslovakia were insufficient. From a purely military point of view we lacked the means for an attack which involved the piercing of the frontier fortifications».

Moreover, Western ‘appeasers’ presented Hitler with Czechoslovakia’s first-rate armaments industry in Munich. Germany got its hands on the Škoda works, the second most important arsenal in Europe. And as well as the famous Škoda works, Germany also got its hands on the comparable engineering giant ČKD, the aircraft company Aero Vodochody, which produced Focke-Wulf Fw 189 aircraft for the entirety of the war, and many others. At that time, Czechoslovakian tanks and guns were sold all over the world, making Prague one of the world’s leading arms exporters.

Prior to the Munich Agreement, the armed forces of the two countries looked like this: the Czechoslovak Army had 1,582 aircraft, 469 tanks and two million people, while the German Army had 2,500 aircraft, 720 tanks and 2.2 million people. The size of the two armies was comparable. Moreover, the border between Czechoslovakia and Germany was the mountainous Sudetenland. Ever since Czechoslovakia was formed in 1919, it had been building fortifications in Sudetenland. The combination of modern fortifications and the mountainous terrain made Czechoslovakia impregnable in the face of German aggression. And all of this was handed over without a fight. 

As well as the uniquely fortified Sudetenland there was also the Soviet-Czechoslovak agreement, but the promise of military assistance it contained was blocked by Poland. And Moscow’s experience was that there was already a real war in progress between the Soviet Union and Hitler’s Germany in 1938, only it was going on far away, in Spain, and the issue of who would win was still undecided. 

In Munich, the English provided assurances to the Czechoslovak representatives. Chamberlain told the Czechs: «The rights of national minorities are sacred! Hand over Sudetenland and you will receive new guarantees on new borders». 

All talk of Western guarantees was just that, whereas the mountainous, heavily fortified region of Sudetenland guaranteed Czechoslovakia’s security one hundred percent. On 30 September 1938, however, the Czechoslovak Army began its withdrawal from Sudetenland, leaving behind the mountain fortresses and the major industrial facilities. But Hitler soon presented Czechoslovakia with a new set of demands and on 15 March 1939, Germany occupied the whole country. 

Hitler was saved by the Munich Agreement. The deal with the Western democracies gave Hitler enough power to see him through to April 1945. The question asked by The National Interest, «When did Hitler become Hitler?», has a simple answer: «In Munich in 1938». The Munich Agreement was an amicable deal between democracies and Nazi Germany, and this is something that cannot be erased from history. It was a deal between an aggressor and his ‘appeasers’. The reason we should all remember this today is clear: The West is once again trying to posture as the ‘appeaser’ in order to prevent the defeat of the terrorist forces that have engulfed Syria and are already threatening Europe.

It’s an annual event, anxiously awaited by western Russophobic propagandists, to remind us of the iniquitous Soviet role in starting World War II. Nowadays of course when the Mainstream Media say «Soviet», they want you to think about Russia and its president Vladimir Putin. Western «journalists» can’t make up their minds about Putin: sometimes he’s another Hitler, sometimes another Stalin.

When it comes to World War II, Poland is above criticism and gets a lot of sympathy in the West, as the first «victim» of both Nazi Germany and the USSR. The Wehrmacht invaded Poland on 1 September; and the Red Army moved in from the east 17 days later. It was a Soviet «stab in the back».

Or was it? Winston Churchill, then First Lord of the Admiralty, saw the matter differently. In a BBC broadcast on 1 October 1939, he observed that Soviet action «was clearly necessary for the safety of Russia against the Nazi menace.» Given that the Polish government had collapsed, better the USSR stood in those eastern borderlands than Nazi Germany.

During the 1930s Poland played a spoiler’s role. It was a far-right quasi-dictatorship, anti-Semitic and sympathetic to fascism. In 1934 as the USSR raised the alarm about Hitler, Poland signed a non-aggression pact in Berlin. Who stabbed who in the back? France had a formal alliance with Poland and felt betrayed. Until 1939 Poland did all it could to sabotage Soviet efforts to build an anti-Nazi alliance, based on the World War I anti-German coalition of France, Britain, Italy, and in 1917 the United States. It may surprise, but Maksim Litvinov, the Soviet Commissar for Foreign Affairs, saw fascist Italy as part of a defensive alliance against Hitlerite Germany. Litvinov also wanted to bring Poland into his anti-Nazi coalition, and in 1934 warned his Polish counterpart, Józef Beck, of the danger of Hitler. Beck laughed him off. 

Poland felt itself caught between two hostile great powers, but of the two, the USSR was by far its «worst enemy». These were old lines; Polish Russophobia dated back many centuries. In 1934-1935, when the USSR sought a mutual assistance pact with France, Poland attempted to obstruct it. In 1938, during the Czechoslovak crisis, Foreign Minister Beck said that if Hitler was to get the Sudeten territories, Poland should have the Teschen district. In other words, if Hitler gets his booty, we Poles want ours. Litvinov accused Beck of playing into the hands of Hitler, but Beck laughed him off again. Poland was Hitler’s accomplice in 1938 before becoming his victim in 1939.

What about France and Britain? The USSR saw France as «the pivot» of collective security in Europe. Supported by Stalin, Litvinov warned his western counterparts that Hitler was bent on war and that it was essential to organise a defensive alliance against him. It was Litvinov, not Churchill, who first conceived of the «Grand Alliance» against Hitler. Unfortunately, Soviet policy suffered setback after setback. Litvinov’s coalition became the Grand Alliance that Never Was.

How is that possible? Amongst other reasons, because the conservative elites of Britain and France and also generally in Europe, feared Bolshevism more than they feared Nazism. There were important exceptions of course to this general rule; Soviet diplomats called them «white crows». The Nazis were admired for their virility and masculinity. The odour of fascist leather and sweat was a powerful aphrodisiac for insecure, tired European elites who saw Nazi Germany as a bulwark against Bolshevism.

British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain feared victory allied with the USSR more than he feared defeat at the hands of Nazi Germany. A victorious Red Army, with Bolshevism in its baggage trains, could advance into the heart of Europe. «I have met Hitler», Chamberlain declared in September 1938 after one of three visits to Germany, «and I believe him». But the Munich accords, which sacrificed Czechoslovakia, only encouraged further Nazi aggression.

There was one last chance in 1939 to conclude an alliance against Nazi Germany. Again, the Soviet side took the initiative. And again the British, followed reluctantly by the French, dragged their feet. In fact, if you read the Soviet diplomatic papers from the mid to late 1930s, it’s hard to avoid the conclusion that Britain was chief saboteur of Soviet collective security. Stalin sacked the seemingly quixotic Commissar Litvinov in early May 1939 and replaced him with the tougher Vyacheslav Molotov. Maybe French and British negotiators would take Molotov more seriously. It didn’t happen. They still dragged their feet, with the result that last ditch negotiations in Moscow in August 1939 failed. They’re not serious, Stalin concluded, and so he made a deal with Hitler to avoid war with unreliable allies.

The final chapter of this abysmal history occurred during the autumn of 1939 and the winter of 1940, when the British decided to publish a collection of telegrams and dispatches, a so-called White Paper, on the 1939 negotiations. Their objective was to show that the failure of these negotiations lay with the Soviet side, not with the British and French. The White Paper got to proofs in January 1940, and the British Foreign Office was impatient to publish.

The whole exercise proved to be a fiasco because the Quai d’Orsay, the French foreign ministry, had «certain misgivings» about publication and vetoed it. French diplomats were masters of understatement. In Paris they thought that the White Paper might be interpreted to show that the Soviet side was serious about concluding an anti-Nazi alliance while they, the French and British, were not. The White Paper provoked additional irritation in Paris because it omitted to show that France was keener for agreement with Moscow than London. The Quai d’Orsay threatened to publish its own Livre jaune to save France’s credibility, though there was precious little of that.

The Polish government in exile was also none too eager for publication since Poland attempted to obstruct the 1939 talks. It was beginning to look like a falling out amongst thieves. To add to the embarrassment, one senior Foreign Office official worried that the White Paper was «tendentious». Another official was apprehensive about the US reaction. Would Americans believe the British account «since our reputation [in the United States] for telling the truth is none too bright»? Then there was the additional worry that the USSR might publish its own account. What if public opinion believed the Soviet side and not the British? In the end, the British government wisely decided not to publish the White Paper. It was quickly forgotten during the military catastrophes which engulfed Britain and France in the spring of 1940.

Here is the real context to the Nazi-Soviet non-aggression pact which you will never hear about in the western Mainstream Media. Western historians have tried mightily to explain appeasement and save Chamberlain’s reputation. But even British and French diplomats at the time felt the need to conceal their conduct for fear they would get the blame for the failed 1939 alliance. We cut «a rather sorry figure,» said one Foreign Office official. And they did too. It was sympathy for fascism which confused the west about Hitler.

What a comedy. And what scruples in London. These days western governments and their «inspired» journalists, if one can call them journalists, don’t worry about «tendentious» argument when it comes to blackening the Russian Federation. It’s anything goes. Should we let them equate the roles of the USSR and Nazi Germany for starting World War II? Certainly not. It was Hitler who intended war, and the French and British, especially the British, who repeatedly played into his hands, rejecting Soviet proposals for collective security and pressuring France to do the same. Then and only then did Stalin seek to appease Hitler through the non-aggression pact. As it turned out, Soviet appeasement did not work out any better for the USSR than it had for France and Britain. In fact, in June 1941 it proved to be a catastrophe.

If indisputable facts and real history mattered, the Mainstream Media would have one less weapon in its toolbox of scurrilous propaganda with which to attack President Putin and Russia. Unfortunately, western propagandists don’t pay much attention to what really happened in the past which so resembles what is going on in the present. There’s the danger and why these purveyors of deceit must be exposed and challenged.

________________________________________

Michael Jabara Carley, professor of history at the Université de Montréal (Canada)

The propaganda attack against Putin equating him with Hitler is so extreme that you have to think that the Russians cannot believe their ears and cannot trust the United States anymore under any circumstances.

I cannot believe how we could have gotten ourselves into this situation to protect the looters in the Ukraine that Putin would have rid the Ukraine of, and even had the gall to place in a leadership role one of the worst of the thieves. But that is history. What is certain is that MAD [mutually assured destruction] is not a deterrent today when both sides believe the other will use nuclear weapons once they have the advantage and that the side that gains a decisive advantage will use them. MAD is now over.

That may sound somewhat extreme – but it's a perfectly logical extension, further on down the road, of what the Russian president intimated in his already legendary interview with Germany's ARD in Vladivostok last week: the West is provoking Russia into a new Cold War. [1] 

Mikhail Gorbachev just stressed a few days ago the new Cold War is already on. Princeton's Stephen Cohen says the Cold War in fact never left. The Roving Eye reported about Cold War 2.0 months ago. Brits – still stranded in the 19th century new Great Game – prefer to spin the "strident toxic personality" of "diminutive Putin"; [2] he is the "ruthless, charming and ultimately reckless" man who "put the cold war back in vogue". The Council on Foreign Relations, predictably, mourns the end of the post-Cold War world, blasts the current "disorder", and dreams of the good ol' unchallenged exceptionalist days. [3] 

For arguably the best detailed background on how we came to this perilous state of affairs, it's hard to beat Vladimir Kozin of the Russian Institute for Strategic Studies. [4] Read him carefully. And yes, it's Cold War 2.0, the double trouble remix; between the US and Russia, and between NATO and Russia. 

Seeing red

In his ARD interview, Putin stuck to actual facts on the ground: "NATO and the United States have military bases scattered all over the globe, including in areas close to our borders, and their number is growing ? Moreover, just recently it was decided to deploy special operations forces, again in close proximity to our borders. You have mentioned various [Russian] exercises, flights, ship movements and so on. Is all of this going on? Yes, it is indeed." 

For the Russia-demonizing hordes, it's always convenient to forget that NATO expansion to Georgia and Ukraine was clinched at a NATO meeting in Bucharest in April 2008. The Georgia op spectacularly failed in the summer of 2008. Ukraine is a work in progress. 

Crucially, in the ARD interview, Putin also told the EU coalition of the clueless/vassals/puppets/ that Russia can bring down the Ukraine House of Cards in a flash; Moscow just needs to emphasize it's time to collect the humongous amounts of cash it is legally owed. 

Putin also made it very clear Moscow won't allow – and that was categorical: won't allow – Donbass to be overrun/smashed/ethnic-cleansed by Kiev: "Today there is fighting in eastern Ukraine. The Ukrainian central authorities have sent the armed forces there and they even use ballistic missiles. Does anybody speak about it? Not a single word. And what does it mean? What does it tell us? This points to the fact, that you want the Ukrainian central authorities to annihilate everyone there, all of their political foes and opponents. You want that? We certainly don't. And we won't let it happen." [5] 

According to Kiev's own figures, no less than 65% of residential buildings and 10% of schools and kindergartens in Donbass have been destroyed. Over 40,000 medium-sized companies are paralyzed. Unemployment – Ukraine-wide, is over 40%. External debt may reach US$80 billion – and don't expect the International Monetary Fund, which now owns Ukraine, to go philanthropic. Most of all, Kiev can't pay its billionaire gas bills to Gazprom because it spends a fortune terrorizing eastern Ukraine citizens. This Poroshenko rant sums it all up – with the US and EU fully complicit. 

So NATO has been warned about Russia's real red lines. Still, substantial sectors of the Washington/Wall Street elites can't get enough of war. And they like it hot. [6] No one should ever underestimate the unlimited stupidity of the Return of the Living Neo-con Dead using their favorite pulpit, the editorial page of the Wall Street Journal. 

The "logic" behind Cold War 2.0 – now in full swing – couldn't give a damn about European stability. The Obama administration launched it – with NATO as the spearhead – to in fact prevent Eurasian integration, building a New Berlin Wall in Kiev. The immediate target is to undermine Russia's economy; in the long run, regime change would be the ultimate bonus. 

So the logic of escalation is on. The economically devastated EU is a joke; the only thing that counts for the US is NATO – and the overwhelming majority of its members are in the bag, sharing the prevailing mood in Washington of treating Putin as if he were Milosevic, Saddam Hussein or Gaddafi. There are no signs whatsoever Team Obama is willing to de-escalate. And when the Hillarator President-in-Waiting ascends to the throne, all bets are off. 

Notes:
1. Putin's Sunday Interview on German TV (Dubbed + Transcript), Russian Insider, November 19, 2014.
2. The new cold war: are we going back to the bad old days?, The Guardian, November 19, 2014.
3. The Unraveling: How to Respond to a Disordered World, foreignaffairs.com, December 2014 issue.
4. See here.
5. The broken-down beauty of Eastern Ukraine, 25 years after the end of the USSR, Quartz, November 15, 2014.
6. The Wall Street Journal Wants the US to Go To War in Ukraine, Russia Insider, November 18, 2014. 

atimes.com

As the operation Overlord planning was over the allied leadership suddenly faced difficulties related to the operation Anvil (then renamed as Operation Dragoon) – the allied landing in southern Francein August 1944. Winston Churchill argued against it on the grounds that it diverted military resources that were better deployed in the on-going Allied operations in Italy. As US – historian Forrest Carlisle Pogue noted the British Prime Minister steadfastly opposed Anvil. He strongly wanted allies to reach South-Eastern Europe before Soviet troops.  It mismatched with the plans of the American ally. The United States considered West Europeas a priority for establishing its domination in the region after the war.  The only thing the allies agreed about was the advance to the west to get more territory under their control as the Soviet forces were in offensive from the other direction.

In case of Germany’s collapse the allies planned to use all the resources for massive invasion of the continent to be ahead of the Soviet troops. Eventually, as of late May, 1944, the allies assembled 2 million troops of numerous nationalities, nearly 5,000 ships of all types and sizes (537 major warships) and 11,000 aircraft.  They succeeded in convincing the Germans that the landing was to take place in the area of Pas de Calais, not Normandy. The alert for the German 7^th army responsible for shore defense was sounded at 2.15 a.m. as the allied aviation was already delivering preliminary strikes and air borne troops had landed to take positions.  

Germany lacked forces to repel the invasion. The shore fortifications were only 18% ready. The German propaganda told over and over again about the Atlantic Wall. Field Marshal von Rundstedt, Commander in Chief in the West, said it was an illusion.  In his memories he wrote that it exasperated him to read about the unassailable defense. It was ridiculous to call it a wall. 

Nearly 160,000 troops crossed the English Channelon June 6 including five infantry and three air-borne divisions. By the end of the day they got hold of a springboard of 2-9 kmin depth. Around 900 tanks and armor vehicles, 600 artillery pieces and many transport vehicles were transported to the beach. In his situation reports General Eisenhower wrote the enemy was caught unprepared and its counter strikes were ineffective.

By the end of June the beachhead expanded the front line length to 100 kmand was 40 kmin depth. Totally the 1^st US and 2d British armies strength exceeded 875 thousand. There were 23 air strips to host tactical aviation. The force was opposed by 18 German divisions that had suffered losses before. The situation was critical and the German command had no reinforcements to defend the flanks from assaults in the south and south-east of France.

The Soviet Unionmade a great contribution by acting in unison with allied efforts. According to the Tehran accords, reached about a half – year before, the command intensified the activities at the front to prevent Germans from sending any reinforcements to Normandy. 

One day before the operation Overlord began, Stalin informed Churchill that according to Tehran agreements, the Soviet offensive would start in mid-July at one of decisive sections of the front. The armies would gradually switch to offensive actions.  In the period late June – end of July the Soviet forces would start overall offensive. He meant operation Bagration launched on June 23, 1944 in Belorussiain concert with the actions of allies fighting at the second front. Hitler was encircled by the coalition forces and his collapse was inevitable.

History allows drawing lessons. No matter the differences between political systems, the USSR and Western allies could unite against the common enemy – German Nazism threatening human civilization. 

What about Neo-Nazism emerging in Ukraine?  Few in the West share the opinion it must be opposed. The events of the 1930s are repeated again… The US monopolies cooperated with Nazi while Western democracies tried to appease Hitler in an attempt to direct the expansion to the East.

Today many Western leaders easily forget the WWIII lessons. The US President will not meet Russian President Vladimir Putin in Normandy on June 6 where the world leaders will gather to commemorate the date. But European leaders have made independent decisions, for instance German Chancellor Angela Merkel, French president François Hollande and UK Prime Minister David Cameron  plan meetings with the Russian head of state. Europeans know better what it’s like when fierce battles are taking place on your soil and they better realize what threat is posed to humanity by Nazi revival after 70 years since May 1945. Incase of those willing to learn history lessons stand them in good stead. Those who refuse to make conclusions pay a heavy price.

No matter how hard one tries to delete or blur over this ignominious page in the history of Western diplomacy, the peoples’ memory is too strong to make it forgotten. Indeed, the Munich Pact cannot be consigned to oblivion – it started WWII… 

Going through the pages of 1938, one can see that Hitler wanted Czechoslovakia to van-ish from the world map as far back as in the spring of the same year. At the beginning of April he told Mussolini about his plans to stop the movement to the Mediterranean and tackle the issue of Sudetenland predominantly populated by ethnic Germans. In the directive on implementation of Fall Grün («Case Green»), the pre-World War II German plan for an aggressive war against Czechoslovakia, the Fuhrer told Wilhelm Keitel that he was adamant in his plans to make this country cease to exist by taking a military action against it in the near future. Field-Marshal Wil-helm Keitel, Chief of the German High Command, told the commanders-in-chief to start carrying out the order no later than October 1, 1938. 

Neville Chamberlain «stopped» Hitler. With touching care he did his best not to bother the Third Reich with any complications on international arena. Meeting Fuhrer in Berchtesgaden (Germany) on September 15, 1938, the British Prime Minister tried to convince him of his desire to facilitate in each and every way the rapprochement between the two countries and was ready to recognize Sudetenland as part of Germany to foster the process. No doubt this stance let Hitler have a free hand; he could not bother anymore about the Western reaction to his policy pursuing the goal of extending the «living space» at the expense of Czech territory. Now he had a reason to be self-assured enough meeting Chamberlain again in Godesburg to demand the ful-fillment of all conditions to make possible the occupation of Sudetenland no later than October 1. The British Prime Minister agreed. The UK chose Italian Duce, a well-known peacemaker, for the role of intermediary to organize the conference on the issue of Sudetenland. 

Meeting in Munich on September 29, Hitler, Mussolini, Chamberlain and Daladier agreed to relegate to the Czechoslovak government a demand to cede 75% of its territory to Germany in 10 days. The country was to lose a quarter of its population, a half of industrial potential, strong fortifications at the German border which now was to be moved to the suburbs of Prague. 

The negative attitude of the Czech government to the policy of imposed settlement was ignored; its representatives were not even invited to Munich. 

 So, the Western democracies opened the way for the policy of coercion. But there was the Soviet Union that could have frustrated the plans of the Munich Four being a party (the same way as France was) to the Czechoslovak-Soviet Treaty of Alliance signed on May 16, 1935. A protocol on the signing of the treaty stipulated that that the treaty would go into force only if France gave assistance to the victim of aggression. However, France did not support Czechoslo-vakia in 1938; it betrayed this country having signed the Munich Pact instead. Moscow could have acted unilaterally to defend Czechoslovakia. But there was one condition more to it: the Red Army had to cross the territory of Poland. But the government of this country sided with London and Paris. Juliusz Lukasiewicz, Polish Ambassador to Paris, told his American counter-part William C. Bullitt that his country would immediately declare war on the Soviet Union if it tried to bring its troops to Czechoslovakia crossing the territory of Poland. Warsaw was antici-pating with pleasure the would-be dismemberment of its neighbor harboring plans to take ad-vantage of the situation and have something for itself. In May of the same year French Foreign Minister Georges Bonnet told the French Ambassador that the plan to divide Czechoslovakia between Germany and Hungary with Teschen Silesia (Cieszyn Silesia or Těšín Silesia) going to Poland had ceased to be a secret a long time ago. What gullibility! The telegram that was sent to Mussolini (in early April) listed the «Polish corridor» along with Sudetenland as the problems to be solved in the near future. Grabbing the Polish territory that divided Eastern Prussia from the Reich’s mainland would have sparked a war sooner or later as it really did in a year. But being carried away by prospects of taking part in the division of Czechoslovakia and the would-be ac-quisition of Teschen Silesia, Poland never noticed the threat posed by the shade of the eagle with swastika in its paws approaching the country from the West. 

The hyena of Europe, as Chamberlain tactlessly called Poland, was one of the first to be sorry for being nearsighted; it was to become another victim of Nazi Germany in the world war that started on September 1, 1939. France and Great Britain were the next. But were they not the ones who gave a green light to the war in Munich? 

The Munich Pact had the following specific features: first, it was a coordinated dictate of Germany and England (France and Italy followed the tide); second, Hungary and Poland were the accomplices in the collusion aimed at dismemberment of Czechoslovakia: the last one occu-pied Teschen Silesia, Hungary got territories in the southern part of Slovakia; third, the Soviet Union ended up in isolation. 

The steps it undertook to support Czechoslovakia (the concentration of troops at the western borders) were of no avail. 

By ceding the lands that belonged to Czechoslovakia, England and France tried to appease Germany and direct away its aggressive aspirations. The Soviet intelligence re-ported to Moscow that before flying from Munich Chamberlain had met Hitler one more time to be candidly told that Germany had enough planes to attack the USSR, especially once the Soviet aviation was not able to use the landing strips on the Czechoslovak territory. 

In a few moments the Munich Pact destroyed the European collective security system that had taken so much effort to create with the Soviet – French and Soviet – Czechoslovak mutual assistance treaties as its core pillars. Having occupied Czechoslovakia, Hitler could clearly see that no Western state, or a group of states, was intent to obstruct his plans of territorial revision. So, on April 3, 1939 he issued a top secret directive defining the precise date of attacking Poland – September 1 the same year. 

Under the circumstances there was nothing left for the Soviet Union but to evade the pro-spect of being left alone confronted by a coalition of Western states by signing a non-aggression treaty with Germany in August 1939. 

Today the Western politicians try to shake the responsibility for trying «to appease» Hit-ler that resulted in the world fire, so they apply efforts to put the blame on the Soviet Union for inciting the Second World War. In reality, they cannot forgive the Soviet leadership for its ingen-ious diplomatic maneuver that allowed the USSR to escape the trap. It managed to do it thanks to the non-aggression treaty with Germany that allowed to do away with the prospect of going to war with the united front of Western nations and let the Anglo-Saxon and the French, who did their best in an attempt to pacify Hitler and direct him to the East, prove their worth standing up against Wehrmacht. 

Alas, many who reflect on historical themes, ranging all the way from yellow journalists to some pedigreed historians, do so less than carefully, sometimes far less. The conscious or unconscious temptation to bend historical memory to the service of contemporary causes is ineradicable, because the influence of historical memory on current events can be so significant, especially as concerns momentous, ongoing struggles between nations, or social classes, or races. The temptation to steer historical memory is all the greater in the case of June 22^nd, 1941, given the war's enormous geopolitical and ideological stakes, and given the emotional burdens so many people bear from the conflict.

Bluntly put, many people have axes to grind against the Soviet Union, against contemporary Russia, and against socialism. As a result, in recent years a good number of prominent publications have tried to reverse the long-standing historiographical consensus regarding the responsibility for the German-Soviet war, its necessity, and its geopolitical meaning. Some decline to accept the notion that Hitler's attack was unprovoked, and assert that Hitler attacked just a few weeks ahead of the Soviets (1); some insist that Stalin was set on attacking Germany and its allies in Eastern Europe within a year or two; some portray the USSR as an expansionist, tyrannical, and murderous scourge, and imply or proclaim that the German invasion was to a significant degree a defense of Western civilization (2). Others, more subtly, portray Nazi Germany and Stalin's USSR as two sides of the same, totalitarian, anti-human coin, and demand we blacken both sides with a full measure of guilt for the horrors of the whole period in Central and Eastern Europe (3). Let us deal with these accusations in turn.

A Preemptive Attack?

To begin with, the accusation that Stalin was preparing an imminent attack on Germany and its allies in the summer of 1941 comes up very short. Stalin's celebrated mention of offensive warfare in a May 5^th, 1941 speech to military academy graduates tells us nothing. The leader was obliged to bolster the morale of his officers, and also to imply for domestic and foreign consumption that his army was well prepared for war. Indeed, on May 15^th Stalin declined to approve Chief of the General Staff Zhukov's proposal to launch an offensive strike in the upcoming summer. Planning for such an offensive must have been mature, therefore, but planning is what war ministries do. The Soviet Commissariat of Defense had defensive plans too, naturally. The important point is that Stalin did not feel the Red Army would be prepared for war with Germany before the spring of 1942, at the earliest. He went to great lengths to avoid war in 1941, refusing even to put the army on alert when German preparations for war became more apparent, lest his units do anything that could serve to provoke the Germans or legitimize a planned attack from their side (4). To quote historian Jonathan Haslam, the notion of Stalin preparing to attack Germany in the summer of 1941 “…would be comical if it weren't taken so seriously {by the broader public—DK}.” (5)

A Nefarious, Expansionist USSR?

Operation Barbarossa was unprovoked in the summer of 1941. But might we nevertheless understand the German offensive as a natural, preemptive campaign against a Soviet Union that harbored aggressive, imperial intent against Germany and the West? So argue some apologists for Operation Barbarossa. But the argument is crude. Does it ever occur to such critics of Soviet foreign policy that Stalin only ordered planning for offensive operations against Germany in August 1940, well after Hitler revealed his imperial designs and changed the face of geopolitics in 1939? Having faced invasion from a dozen or more countries after its revolution in 1917, should anyone expect the Communist regime to have sat back and waited to be attacked again, this time by a bloodthirsty Nazi Germany? Soviet deliberations regarding possible offensive operations against Hitler were nothing but common sense, given the extraordinary likelihood of hostilities.

The same context helps us to understand Stalin's annexation of eastern Poland, Bessarabia, and the Baltic states, and also the Soviet-Finnish war of 1939-40. Neither these annexations nor planning for a large-scale westward offensive testify to any nefarious, expansionist essence of the USSR. Realpolitik is quite sufficient to explain them, just as it explains Stalin's decision to sign the Molotov-Ribbentrop Non-Aggression Pact in August 1939. As we explained in an earlier piece, the Soviets did everything they could to formalize a military alliance with France and Britain against Germany in 1939. It was the Western Allies who torpedoed the alliance, essentially forcing the USSR to seek a rapprochement with Hitler, lest it wind up facing Germany on its own (6).

None of this, we hasten to add, is meant to imply Stalin's mastery or consistency as a diplomat. Historian Kenneth Slepyan's recent characterization of Stalin in this dimension convincingly captures the elements at work:

Stalin was a scared and delusional practioner of realpolitik…. Stalin's foreign policy before, during, and especially after the war… was hardly indicative of a fomenter of world revolution. Of course, Stalin's foreign-policy decisions were shaped by ideological concerns and visions, but the range of choices within his ideological framework permitted policies of relative accommodation with the West in order to preserve Soviet security, even if those relations were also marked by extreme suspicion and hostility. Then, too, it is important to remember that even pragmatists can be self-delusional, and can make mistakes(7).

An Ahistorical, Existential Threat to Civilization, or a Society in Motion?

Last, might the domestic crimes of the Stalinist regime in the 1930s somehow justify the German invasion? The essential callousness and brutality of the Stalinist system at its height are unmistakeable to a trained historical eye, even if one takes into account the many genuine achievements of the early Soviet period (a perspective we must raise, even if we have no time to elaborate on it here). Soviet reality in the 1930s was gruesomely distorted from the regime's advertised ideals—featuring a massive famine, an enormous gulag system, mind-bending Orwellian propaganda, pathological purges of leaders and highly-qualified personnel, and even some ethically-charged repressions. But is this really grounds for equating Stalinism and Nazism? The contrasts between the Stalinist system and its ideology on the one hand with Nazism on the other hand are simply too stark to be ignored. On an ideological-psychological level, the Stalinist period could not eradicate Marxism's roots in Enlightenment values of reason and justice, and these values remained latent in the Soviet experience. Likewise, on a practical-administrative level, Stalinist methods of despotic rule throughout society inevitably lost their usefulness and credibility inside the USSR, and quickly–a process historian Moshe Lewin traced convincingly in a number of works (8). The peremptory, despotic, command style of rule that predominated seemingly at all levels in the Stalin period would markedly recede in the 1950s. Well before that, in fact, the powerful economic ministries were ironing out methods of managing themselves and working together to run the country. They had no use for a tyrant in the Kremlin.

Nor did the economic ministries have any use for a secret police super ministry that could ravage whatever it pleased, and on whatever scale. The secret police's gulag empire had lost economic and penal effectiveness by the late-1940s, and so it would have to be abandoned. (9) Not coincidentally, the secret police was soon stripped of the power to judge and to punish people by themselves. The category of “counter-revolutionary” crime was abolished, and the secret police was brought under control. Consequent adjustments followed throughout society, with major ramifications, as Lewin summarized: “It is one thing when a worker cannot leave his job or legally protest against injustice in the workplace; it is quite another when he can do so. A system denying all rights was supplanted by a system of laws, rights, and guarantees.” (10)

Last, the system seemed even to be outgrowing and bypassing the Communist Party itself. This is not the place to describe and discuss the process in detail, but the power that accrued to economic ministries in a centralized economy on the scale of the Soviet Union must be obvious. And it should not surprise us to learn from recently unearthed documents that by the late 1940s top officials in the Central Committee of the Communist Party were concluding that they (the Party) had lost power (11).

Did this country really represent the ultimate threat to Western civilization?

The USSR, in other words, was a society and a system in fast historical motion, not the totalitarian caricature its critics so chronically and ahistorically imagine. Consequently, portrayals of Stalin's USSR as an imminent and mortal danger to Western civilization are laughable—all the more so for Stalin having done so much to rein in communist revolutionary agitation on many occasions in the 1930s, and again after signing the Non-Aggression Pact with Germany in 1939. Can any sober assessment of the threats to Western civilization in 1941 really compare the USSR to the overt, full-throated barbarism of Nazism with its intrinsic marriage of rabidly racist, expansionist nationalism and genocide?

____________________________________

(1) The flag-bearer here is Viktor Suvorov, with many publications, most famously Icebreaker: Who Started the Second World War? Hamish Hamilton, 1990. There are many others, including Joachim Hoffman, Stalin's War of Extermination, 1941-45: Planning, Realization, Documentation, Capshaw, Ala., Theses and Dissertation Press, 2001.

(2) Open advocates of this line are not especially hard to find. See, e.g., Daniel W. Michaels, “Revising the Twentieth Century's 'Perfect Storm'”, in The Journal of Historical Review, Sept.-Dec. 2001 (Vol. 20, No. 5-6), pp. 59 ff. Michaels laments “The failure of the British, French, and American leaderships to perceive that the Soviet Union was by far the deadlier threat, even in 1939, was a mistake that has taken half a century to rectify, at the cost of countless millions of lives.”

(3) For example, such is the thrust of a recent bestseller, Timothy Snyder's, Bloodlands, Europe between Hitler and Stalin, Basic Books, New York, 2010.

(4) Memoirs of some Soviet officers do mention receiving of a package of sealed instructions in June 1941, and receiving orders to open them just after midnight on June 22^nd. No one has uncovered an order from Moscow to attack Germany at this time, however. And even if they did, it would only testify to a vigorous response to the German invasion, which was already getting underway (inflitrators were cutting communication lines that evening, etc.).

(5) Jonathan Haslam, combined review of R. Raack, Stalin's drive to the West, 1938-1945: The Origins of the Cold War, and G. Roberts, The Soviet Union and the Origins of the Second World War: Russo-German Relations and the Road to War, 1933-1941, inThe Journal of Modern History, vol. 69, no. 4 (Dec. 1997).

(6) David Kerans, “Crude Stereotypes and Western Foreign Policy Blunders: Enduring Lessons from the Anglo-French Mishandling of 1939,” Strategic Culture Foundation, August 2009.

(7) Kenneth Slepyan. Review of Gorodetsky, Gabriel, Grand Delusion: Stalin and the German Invasion of Russia. H-Russia, H-Net Reviews. June, 2003.

(8) See especially Moshe Lewin, The Soviet Century, Verso, London-New York, 2005.

(9) On which see Marta Kraven and Oleg Khlevniuk, “Krizis ekonomiki MVD – konets 1940ykh-1950ye gody”, Cahiers du Monde Russe, XXXVI (1-2), January-june 1995.

(10) Lewin, op. cit., pp. 198-99.

(11)Lewin, op. cit., p. 135-36.