Was the Holocaust inevitable?

Patrick J Buchanan believes Britain lost its empire and acted as a catalyst for the Holocaust by engaging with Germany in two unnecessary world wars. He lays much of the blame at the doorstep of Winston Churchill, but for whom it could all have been so different.

In an article for Human Events he alleges:

“That Hitler was a rabid anti-Semite is undeniable. Mein Kampf is saturated in anti-Semitism. The Nuremberg laws confirm it. But for the six years before Britain declared war, there was no Holocaust, and for two years after the war began, there was no Holocaust.

Not until midwinter 1942 was the Wannsee Conference held, where the Final Solution was on the table.

That conference was not convened until Hitler had been halted in Russia, was at war with America and sensed doom was inevitable. Then the trains began to roll.”

This article stems from a book Buchanan wrote entitled Churchill, Hitler and the Unnecessary War.

Regarding World War II and Britain’s part in it, he says:

“What of World War II? Surely, it was necessary to declare war to stop Adolf Hitler from conquering the world and conducting the Holocaust.

Yet consider. Before Britain declared war on him, Hitler never demanded return of any lands lost at Versailles to the West. Northern Schleswig had gone to Denmark in 1919, Eupen and Malmedy had gone to Belgium, Alsace and Lorraine to France.

Why did Hitler not demand these lands back? Because he sought an alliance, or at least friendship, with Great Britain and knew any move on France would mean war with Britain — a war he never wanted.

If Hitler were out to conquer the world, why did he not build a great fleet? Why did he not demand the French fleet when France surrendered? Germany had to give up its High Seas Fleet in 1918.

Why did he build his own Maginot Line, the Western Wall, in the Rhineland, if he meant all along to invade France?

If he wanted war with the West, why did he offer peace after Poland and offer to end the war, again, after Dunkirk?”

And his conclusion:

“The Holocaust was not a cause of the war, but a consequence of the war. No war, no Holocaust.

Britain went to war with Germany to save Poland. She did not save Poland. She did lose the empire. And Josef Stalin, whose victims outnumbered those of Hitler 1 000 to one as of September 1939, and who joined Hitler in the rape of Poland, wound up with all of Poland, and all the Christian nations from the Urals to the Elbe.

The British Empire fought, bled and died, and made Eastern and Central Europe safe for Stalinism. No wonder Winston Churchill was so melancholy in old age. No wonder Christopher rails against the book. As TS Eliot observed, ‘Mankind cannot bear much reality.'”

Christopher Hitchens writes a rebuke in his review of the book and certain of its propositions in Newsweek entitled “A war worth fighting”.

He says that Buchanan, twice a candidate for the Republican nomination, has now condensed all the anti-war arguments into one via the book Churchill, Hitler and the Unnecessary War.

Hitchens sets forth that Buchanan suggests:

“That Germany was faced with encirclement and injustice in both 1914 and 1939.

Britain in both years ought to have stayed out of quarrels on the European mainland.

That Winston Churchill was the principal British warmonger on both occasions.

The United States was needlessly dragged into war on both occasions.

That the principal beneficiaries of this were Joseph Stalin and Mao Zedong.

That the Holocaust of European Jewry was as much the consequence of an avoidable war as it was of Nazi racism.”

I don’t propose to enter the debate prior to the events leading up to World War II circa 1939 onwards, all the while acknowledging that World War I and the Treaty of Versailles did play a significant role in the latter war. In terms of rendering the German people destitute and open to fascism they are a sina qua non to what happened next.

Having said that, I would however point out that Buchanan’s selective memory in respect of Germany’s history post-1871 casts serious doubts over his work. It seems to me as though he reaches conclusions that sit well with his overall design and then goes shopping for those bits and pieces which confirm them.

Unfortunately, when you build a jigsaw puzzle, if you leave out pieces you don’t get the true picture. You may get a picture, perhaps even the one desired, but not the full picture — without which, when recounting history, you have nothing.

I would urge you to read the articles in full but leave the decision on the book over to you. I do read revisionism, if only to point out to the authors the errors of their ways. It also helps when arguing your points to know what it is that these people are actually saying.

For example, as Hitchens points out:

“Actually, no soldier of any nation ever lost so much as a fingernail in the service of the League, which was in any case doomed by American abstention, and it’s exactly that consideration which invalidates the second half of Buchanan’s argument, which is that a conflict with Hitler’s Germany both could and should have been averted. (There is a third Buchanan sub-argument, mostly made by implication, which is that the democratic West should have allied itself with Hitler, at least passively, until he had destroyed the Soviet Union.)

Again, in order to believe his thesis one has to be prepared to argue that Hitler was a rational actor with intelligible and negotiable demands, whose declared, demented ambitions in Mein Kampf were presumably to be disregarded as mere propaganda. In case after case Buchanan shows the abysmal bungling of British and French diplomacy-making promises to Czechoslovakia that could never have been kept and then, adding injury to insult, breaking those promises at the first opportunity.”

My problem with Buchanan’s proposition on Britain uniting with Germany, even passively, until the Soviet Union was destroyed, is that it ignores the events that were unfolding prior to Operation Barbarosa. Even if Britain had ignored the ongoing claims made by Hitler, abandoned Poland and allowed the Germans to pursue the desired war against the communists, what of the events in Spain, as pointed out by Hitchens? Would Buchanan seriously suggest that Hitler would have restricted his targets to those deemed desirable by the West?

Hitler’s major problem, as it later turned out, was fighting the war on two fronts. Had he been allowed to sort out the Eastern question, he would have turned his undivided attention to Western issues with devastating results. Fortunately for “America First” Buchanan he wasn’t advising American presidents at that time. The result of the inevitable war, rather than the war of choice as he would suggest, might have seen Hitler’s tanks rolling through American towns and cities.

On the question of the Holocaust, Hitchens says:

“As the book develops, Buchanan begins to unmask his true colours more and more. It is one thing to make the case that Germany was ill-used, and German minorities harshly maltreated, as a consequence of the 1914 war of which Germany’s grim emperor was one of the prime instigators. It’s quite another thing to say that the Nazi decision to embark on a Holocaust of European Jewry was ‘not a cause of the war but an awful consequence of the war’.

Not only is Buchanan claiming that Hitler’s fanatical racism did not hugely increase the likelihood of war, but he is also making the insinuation that those who wanted to resist him are the ones who are equally if not indeed mainly responsible for the murder of the Jews! This absolutely will not do.

He adduces several quotations from Hitler and Goebbels, starting only in 1939 and ending in 1942, screaming that any outbreak of war to counter Nazi ambitions would lead to a terrible vengeance on the Jews.

He forgets — at least I hope it’s only forgetfulness — that such murderous incitement began long, long before Hitler had even been a lunatic-fringe candidate in the 1920s. This ‘timeline’ is as spurious, and as sinister, as the earlier dates, so carefully selected by Buchanan, that tried to make Prussian imperialism look like a victim rather than a bully.”

Buchanan also conveniently forgets that at the time of the conference at Wannsee in 1942, Germany was, on every scorecard available, winning the war. In other words — to me this is the critical point — Germany, while believing they would win the war, embarked on the Final Solution.

If Germany thought they were losing the war, then this would tie in with Buchanan — because it is then an act of spite aimed at punishing the Jews who brought about this war. The death throes of a madman: if I can’t win the war, I’ll slaughter the Jews.

But it was anything but that. On top of the war, it was the next item on Hitler’s list; something that meant diverting huge amounts of men, hardware, rolling stock and everything else required for this insanity. Yet it was deemed necessary enough to commit a massive amount of his resources even while he was right in the middle of a war on two fronts and winning.

Something that had to be done was always going to be done … something that was halted by the end of World War II. If that war had not been fought, in terms of the Holocaust, at least 11-million Jews would probably have died. That’s if Hitler didn’t finish off the rest of the planet as well. The Holocaust was limited in scope by the war and not, as suggested by Buchanan, a consequence of it.

It was a case of when, not if. The fact that the Nazis diverted vital resources while on top during World War II means that the war delayed it. The risks they took in denying their forces vital provisions in order to implement the Final Solution, while they were winning the war, shows just how high a priority they placed on it.

If the war hadn’t intervened, they would have got to it much sooner with many more lives forfeit as a result.

The worst part of Buchanan’s approach is that in order to come to his conclusions, he seeks to attribute motives and characteristics to Hitler that even Hitler did not claim to possess. It’s best in cases like this at least to take the people you are describing at their word.

Buchanan appears to subscribe to the why-let-the-facts-get-in-the-way-of-a-good-story approach.

I have no problem with that, as long as he doesn’t try to pass this drivel off as history.

Please note
Differing views on this debate may be found on Google.

Another column you may find interesting was the one written by Peter Hitchens for the Daily Mail entitled “Was World War Two just as pointless and self-defeating as Iraq?”.