Reply #13: This is the most outrageous twisting of history I've ever heard. [View All]

Hitler didn't want a war? Bollocks. He spelled it out in Mein Kampf that he wanted a war of conquest in the East, a war for Lebensraum that would destroy Bolshevism and enslave what remained of the Slavic race to serve good ethnic Aryans.

He was frustrated when he wasn't able to take over Czechoslovakia by force. He was itching to try out his new toys - the Wehrmacht and the Luftwaffe. Britain and France at that time still felt the Versailles treaty was unfair to Germany - it's very difficult now to make a case that it wasn't - and that the remilitarisation of the Rhineland, the Anglo-German naval treaty, the Anscluss with Austria and the takeover of the Sudetenland were seen as justifiable ways to remove causes of tension and lead to peace in our time. They would have treated any other German leader in the same way. There is also a case for saying they were buying time for rearmament.

Hitler didn't want a war with Britain and France (don't forget that the French declared war about six hours after the British) because he saw Britain in particular as a force for civilisation in the world and didn't want to see the fall of the British Empire. He convinced himself and some of his closest entourage that he wouldn't get involved in a general European war (I can recommend Guido Knopp's excellent biography of Goering for anyone wanting to do further reading on this). He wanted a war with Russia. No doubt. His natural ideological enemy and occupier of the lands he coveted in the East. Also a rapidly industrialising economy that was threatening to overtake Germany.

He didn't demand the French fleet because he was still clinging to the hope of making Britain see reason - a significantly swollen German fleet would have threatened Britain's supply lines and made the British determined to win or go down fighting - anything rather than rely on Hitler's word. As it was the British solved the question of the French fleet themselves.

As for the Holocaust, we will never know if it would have developed in the way it did if Britain had not declared war in 1939 (or made peace in 1940), but it is certain that Hitler viewed Jews as subhuman vermin who were a threat to society and that he saw poison gas as a means of dealing with his enemies (see again Mein Kampf).

Britain and France fought to try and prevent Europe being dominated by Fascist militarism and Pat Buchanan's views are historical revisionism of the shallowest and most juvenile sort.