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Wednesday, May 3, 2017

Mark Weber : Straight Talk About Zionism: What Jewish Nationalism Means


Straight Talk About Zionism: What Jewish Nationalism Means

By Mark Weber


April 14, 2009

It’s important to understand Zionism, not just because it’s an influential ideology and a powerful social-political movement, but also because there’s a lot of ignorance, confusion and deliberate misinformation about it.

If you look up the word “Zionism” in a standard American dictionary, what you’ll find is likely to be inaccurate, or least misleading. For example, a popular and supposedly authoritative American dictionary in my office defines Zionism as “A movement formerly for reestablishing, now for supporting, the Jewish national state of Israel.” / 1 This definition, which is typical of American reference works, is more than just misleading. It’s deceitful.

The founder of the modern Zionist movement was a Jewish writer named Theodor Herzl. In the 1890s he was living in Paris, where he was a journalist for a major newspaper in Vienna. He was deeply troubled by the widespread anti-Semitism, or anti-Jewish sentiment, in France at the time. He thought a lot about the pattern of tension, distrust and conflict between Jews and non-Jews that had persisted through the centuries, and he hit upon what he believed is a solution to this age-old problem.
Herzl laid out his views in a book, written in German, entitled The Jewish State (Der Judenstaat). Published in 1896, this work is the manifesto or basic document of the Zionist movement. A year and a half later, Herzl convened the first international Zionist conference. Fifty one years later, when the “State of Israel” was solemnly proclaimed at a meeting in Tel Aviv, above the speakers’ podium at the conference was, appropriately, a large portrait of Herzl.
In his book Herzl explained that regardless of where they live, or their citizenship, Jews constitute not merely a religious community, but a nationality, a people. He used the German word, Volk. Wherever large numbers of Jews live among non-Jews, he said, conflict is not only likely, it’s inevitable. He wrote: "The Jewish question exists wherever Jews live in noticeable numbers. Where it does not exist, it is brought in by arriving Jews ... I believe I understand anti-Semitism, which is a very complex phenomenon. I consider this development as a Jew, without hate or fear." / 2

In his public and private writings, Herzl explained that anti-Semitism is not an aberration, but rather a natural response by non-Jews to alien Jewish behavior and attitudes. Anti-Jewish sentiment, he said, is not due to ignorance or bigotry, as so many have claimed. Instead, he concluded, the ancient and seemingly intractable conflict between Jews and non-Jews is entirely understandable, because Jews are a distinct and separate people, with interests that are different from, and which often conflict with, the interests of the people among whom they live.

A prime source of modern anti-Jewish sentiment, Herzl believed, was that the so-called “emancipation” of Jews in the 18th and 19th centuries from the confined life of the ghetto into modern urban society brought them into direct economic competition with non-Jews in the middle classes. Anti-Semitism, Herzl wrote, is “an understandable reaction to Jewish defects.” In his diary he wrote: “I find the anti-Semites are fully within their rights.” / 3

Herzl maintained that Jews must stop pretending -- both to themselves and to non-Jews -- that they are like everyone else, and instead must frankly acknowledge that they are a distinct and separate people, with distinct and separate goals and interests. The only workable long-term solution, he said, is for Jews to recognize reality and live, finally, as a “normal” people in a separate state of their own. In a memo to the Tsar of Russia, Herzl wrote that Zionism is the “final solution of the Jewish question.” / 4

Over the years many other Jewish leaders have affirmed Herzl’s outlook. Louis Brandeis, a US Supreme Court justice and a leading American Zionist, said: “Let us all recognize that we Jews are a distinctive nationality of which every Jew, whatever his country, his station or shade of belief, is necessarily a member.” / 5
Stephen S. Wise, president of the American Jewish Congress and of the World Jewish Congress, told a rally in New York in June 1938: "I am not an American citizen of the Jewish faith. I am a Jew ... Hitler was right in one thing. He calls the Jewish people a race, and we are a race." / 6

Israel’s first president, Chaim Weizmann, wrote in his memoirs: “Whenever the quantity of Jews in any country reaches the saturation point, that country reacts against them ... [This] reaction ... cannot be looked upon as anti-Semitism in the ordinary or vulgar sense of that word; it is a universal social and economic concomitant of Jewish immigration, and we cannot shake it off.” / 7

In keeping with the Zionist worldview, Israeli prime minister Ariel Sharon told a meeting of American Jews in Jerusalem in July 2004 that all Jews around the world should relocate to Israel as soon as possible. And because anti-Semitism was especially widespread in France, he added, Jews in that country should immediately move to Israel. French officials quickly, and predictably, responded by rejecting Sharon’s remarks as “unacceptable.” / 8

But imagine if the leaders of France, the United States, and other countries were to respond to those remarks by Sharon, and similar ones by other Zionists, by expressing agreement. Imagine if an American president were to respond by saying: “You’re right, Mr. Sharon. We agree with you. We agree that Jews do not belong in the United States. In fact, we are ready to show our support for what you say by doing everything we can to promote and encourage all Jews to leave our country and move to Israel.”

That would be the logical and honest attitude of non-Jewish political leaders who say that they support Israel and Zionism. But the political leaders of the United States, France, Britain, and other such countries today are neither honest nor consistent.

During the 1930s, one European government that was honest and consistent in its attitude on this issue was the government of Third Reich Germany. Jewish Zionists and German National Socialists shared similar views about how best to handle what Herzl called “the Jewish question.” They agreed that Jews and Germans were distinctly different nationalities, and that Jews did not belong in Europe, but rather in the so-called "Jewish homeland” in Palestine.

On the basis of their shared views, Germans and Jews worked together for what each community believed was in its own best national interest. The Hitler government vigorously supported Zionism and Jewish emigration to Palestine from 1933 until 1940-41, when the Second World War prevented further extensive collaboration. / 9

(During the war years attitudes hardened, and policy shifted drastically. The German policy of collaboration with Zionists and support for Jewish emigration to Palestine gave way to a harsh “final solution” policy.)
During the 1930s, the central SS newspaper, Das Schwarze Korps, repeatedly proclaimed its support for Zionism. An article published in 1935, for example, told readers: / 10

“The recognition of Jewry as a racial community based on blood and not on religion leads the German government to guarantee without reservation the racial separateness of this community. The government finds itself in complete agreement with the great spiritual movement within Jewry, the so-called Zionism, with its recognition of the solidarity of Jewry around the world, and its rejection of all assimilationist notions. On this basis, Germany undertakes measures that will surely play a significant role in the future in the handling of the Jewish problem around the world.”

In late 1933, a leading German shipping line began direct passenger service from Hamburg to Haifa, Palestine, providing "strictly kosher food” on board.
In September 1935, the German government enacted the “Nuremberg Laws," which prohibited marriages and sexual relations between Jews and Germans and, in effect, proclaimed the country’s Jews an alien minority group. / 11 A few days after the Nuremberg Laws were enacted, the main German Zionist newspaper, the Jüdische Rundschau, editorially welcomed the new measures. It explained to readers: / 12

“Germany ... is meeting the demands of the World Zionist Congress when it declares the Jews now living in Germany to be a national minority. Once the Jews have been stamped a national minority it is again possible to establish normal relations between the German nation and Jewry. The new laws give the Jewish minority in Germany its own cultural life, its own national life. In future it will be able to shape its own schools, its own theater, and its own sports associations. In short, it can create its own future in all aspects of national life ...”
During the 1930s, Zionist groups, working together with Third Reich authorities, organized a network of some forty camps and agricultural centers throughout Germany where prospective settlers were trained for their new lives in Palestine.
The centerpiece of German-Zionist cooperation during the Hitler era was the Transfer Agreement, a pact that enabled tens of thousands of German Jews to migrate to Palestine with their wealth. The Agreement, also known as the Ha’avara -- Hebrew for "transfer" -- was concluded in August 1933 following talks between German officials and an official of the Jewish Agency, the Palestine center of the World Zionist Organization. / 13

Between 1933 and 1941, some 60,000 German Jews emigrated to Palestine through the Ha'avara and other German-Zionist arrangements, or about ten percent of Germany's 1933 Jewish population. Some Ha'avara emigrants transferred considerable personal wealth from Germany to Palestine. As Jewish historian Edwin Black has noted: "Many of these people, especially in the late 1930s, were allowed to transfer actual replicas of their homes and factories -- indeed rough replicas of their very existence." / 14

The Transfer Agreement was the most far-reaching example of cooperation between Hitler's Germany and international Zionism. Through this pact, Hitler's Third Reich did more than any other government during the 1930s to support the Zionist movement and Jewish development in Palestine.
The essence of Zionism, or Jewish nationalism, is that Jews everywhere -- regardless of where they live, regardless of their religious outlook, and regardless of their citizenship -- are members of the Jewish “people” or “nation,” to whom all Jews owe a primary loyalty and allegiance.

The overwhelming majority of Jews in the United States today identify with and support Israel, and are affiliated with Zionist groups and organizations. Every significant Jewish group or association in the United States, and every prominent Jewish American political or community leader supports Israel and Zionism, in most cases fervently so. With very few exceptions, even American Jews who are critical of some of Israel’s more embarrassing policies nonetheless express support for Israel and the nationalist ideology upon which the Zionist state is based.
A Zionist Jew, by definition, owes his primary loyalty to the Jewish community and to Israel. Zionism is not compatible with patriotism to any country or entity other than Israel and the world Jewish community. That’s why it’s difficult to accept as sincere or honest the pious assurances of Jewish leaders in the United States that American Jews are just as loyal to the US as everyone else.

In the United States, nearly every prominent political leader -- Jewish and non-Jewish, Democrat and Republican -- ardently supports Israel and the Jewish nationalist ideology upon which it is based. In Washington, political leaders of both major parties insist on US support for Israel as an ethnically Jewish state. They fervently support, and eagerly seek the favor of, influential Jewish-Zionist groups, such as the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) and the Anti-Defamation League (ADL).

Everyone -- whether Jewish or non-Jewish -- who claims to support Israel should, if he is honest and consistent, endorse the view of Israeli prime minister Sharon, and other Zionist leaders, and support the migration of Jews everywhere to Israel. But of course that’s not what happens.

With regard to Zionism and Israel, the attitude and policies of nearly all American political leaders, Jewish and non-Jewish, is characterized by hypocrisy and deceit. To put it another way, Zionist Jews and their non-Jewish supporters embrace a blatant double standard. Jewish-Zionist organizations, along with their non-Jewish allies, support one social-political ideology for Israel and the world Jewish community, and a completely different one for the United States and other non-Jewish countries. They insist that ethnic nationalism is evil and bad for non-Jews, while at the same time they vigorously support ethnic nationalism -- that is, Zionism -- for Jews.

They insist that Israel is and must be a Jewish nationalist state, with a privileged status for its Jewish population, including immigration laws that discriminate against non-Jews. At the same time, Jewish-Zionist groups and leaders, and the non-Jews who support them, insist that in the United States, Britain, France, Germany and other countries, there must be no privileged status for anyone based on race, ethnicity or religion.

Our political leaders tell us that American Jews should be encouraged to think of themselves as a distinct national group with an identity and community interests separate from those of other Americans. At the same time American politicians insist that Zionist Jews be given all rights as full and equal US citizens. On the basis of this double standard, Jews are given a privileged status in American political and cultural life.

Americans are led to believe that Zionism is a benign outlook of altruistic and righteous support for a so-called Jewish homeland. In fact, Zionism is an ideology and movement of ethnically-based Jewish nationalism that reinforces the identity and self-image of Jews as a distinct and separate community with interests different from those of non-Jews, and which strengthens the already powerful world Jewish community.


Notes

  1. New World Dictionary of the American Language, Second College Edition (1978?), p. 1654.
  2. Th. Herzl, Der Judenstaat. ( http://de.wikisource.org/wiki/Der_Judenstaat/Einleitung / http://www.zionismus.info/judenstaat/02.htm )
    Also quoted in: M. Weber, “Zionism and the Third Reich,” The Journal of Historical Review, July-August 1993, p. 29. ( http://www.ihr.org/jhr/v13/v13n4p29_Weber.html )
  3. Kevin MacDonald, Separation and Its Discontents (Praeger,1998), pp. 45, 48.
  4. Memo of Nov. 22, 1899. R. Patai, ed., The Complete Diaries of Theodor Herzl (New York: 1960), Vol. 3, p. 888.
  5. Louis D. Brandeis, “The Jewish Problem and How to Solve It.” Speech of April 25, 1915. ( http://www.pbs.org/wnet/supremecourt/personality/sources_document11.html / http://www.law.louisville.edu/library/collections/brandeis/node/234 )
  6. “Dr. Wise Urges Jews to Declare Selves as Such,” New York Herald Tribune, June 13, 1938, p. 12.
  7. Chaim Weizmann, Trial and Error (1949), p. 90. Quoted in: Albert S. Lindemann, The Jew Accused (1991), p. 277.
  8. “French Jews Must `Move to Israel’,” BBC News, July 18, 2004 ( http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/middle_east/3904943.stm )
    See also: “Sharon Urges Jews to Go to Israel,” BBC News, Nov. 17, 2003. ( http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/middle_east/3275979.stm )
  9. M. Weber, “Zionism and the Third Reich,” The Journal of Historical Review, July-August 1993 (Vol. 13, No. 4), pp. 29-37.
    http://www.ihr.org/jhr/v13/v13n4p29_Weber.html )
  10. Das Schwarze Korps, Sept. 26, 1935. Quoted in: Francis R. Nicosia, The Third Reich and the Palestine Question (Univ. of Texas, 1985), p. 56-57.
  11. These days the Nuremberg Laws are routinely portrayed as imposing outrageous and inhumane discrimination against Jews. But to put this in perspective, it’s worth mentioning two points. First: the Nuremberg Laws ban on marriage between Jews and non-Jews is consistent with the law in Israel today, where such marriages are not permitted, as well as with the prohibition on such marriages as laid out in the Hebrew scriptures. (See, for example: Numbers 25: 6-8; Deuteronomy 7:3; Ezra 9: 12; 10: 10-11; Nehemiah 10: 30; 13: 25.)
      Second, in 1935 less than one percent of the population of Germany was Jewish, which meant that the Nuremberg laws ban on marriage between Jews and non-Jews was irrelevant for the vast majority of the country’s population. By contrast, in the United States during the 1930s, most of the American states had laws in place that prohibited marriage between people of different races. Because the portion of the American population that was racially non-majority was much larger than in Germany, the US racial laws impacted a much larger portion of the US population at the time than the Nuremberg laws affected the German population.
  12. Jüdische Rundschau, Sept. 17, 1935. Quoted in: Y. Arad, and others, Documents on the Holocaust (Jerusalem: 1981), pp. 82-83.
  13. W. Feilchenfeld, “Ha’avara,” New Encyclopedia of Zionism and Israel (Herzl Press, 1994), pp. 535-536; M. Weber, “Zionism and the Third Reich,” The Journal of Historical Review, July-August 1993, pp. 33-34.
  14. Edwin Black, The Transfer Agreement (1984), p. 379.


http://www.ihr.org/zionism0409.html

Mark Weber : Was Hiroshima Necessary?


Was Hiroshima Necessary?
Why the Atomic Bombings Could Have Been Avoided

By Mark Weber


On August 6, 1945, the world dramatically entered the atomic age: without either warning or precedent, an American plane dropped a single nuclear bomb on the Japanese city of Hiroshima. The explosion utterly destroyed more than four square miles of the city center. About 90,000 people were killed immediately; another 40,000 were injured, many of whom died in protracted agony from radiation sickness. Three days later, a second atomic strike on the city of Nagasaki killed some 37,000 people and injured another 43,000. Together the two bombs eventually killed an estimated 200,000 Japanese civilians.
Between the two bombings, Soviet Russia joined the United States in war against Japan. Under strong US prodding, Stalin broke his regime's 1941 non-aggression treaty with Tokyo. On the same day that Nagasaki was destroyed, Soviet troops began pouring into Manchuria, overwhelming Japanese forces there. Although Soviet participation did little or nothing to change the military outcome of the war, Moscow benefitted enormously from joining the conflict.
In a broadcast from Tokyo the next day, August 10, the Japanese government announced its readiness to accept the joint American-British "unconditional surrender" declaration of Potsdam, "with the understanding that the said declaration does not compromise any demand which prejudices the prerogatives of His Majesty as a Sovereign Ruler."
A day later came the American reply, which included these words: "From the moment of surrender the authority of the Emperor and the Japanese Government to rule the State shall be subject to the Supreme Commander of the Allied Powers." Finally, on August 14, the Japanese formally accepted the provisions of the Potsdam declaration, and a "cease fire" was announced. On September 2, Japanese envoys signed the instrument of surrender aboard the US battleship Missouri in Tokyo Bay.

A Beaten Country


Apart from the moral questions involved, were the atomic bombings militarily necessary? By any rational yardstick, they were not. Japan already had been defeated militarily by June 1945. Almost nothing was left of the once mighty Imperial Navy, and Japan's air force had been all but totally destroyed. Against only token opposition, American war planes ranged at will over the country, and US bombers rained down devastation on her cities, steadily reducing them to rubble.
What was left of Japan's factories and workshops struggled fitfully to turn out weapons and other goods from inadequate raw materials. (Oil supplies had not been available since April.) By July about a quarter of all the houses in Japan had been destroyed, and her transportation system was near collapse. Food had become so scarce that most Japanese were subsisting on a sub-starvation diet.
On the night of March 9-10, 1945, a wave of 300 American bombers struck Tokyo, killing 100,000 people. Dropping nearly 1,700 tons of bombs, the war planes ravaged much of the capital city, completely burning out 16 square miles and destroying a quarter of a million structures. A million residents were left homeless.
On May 23, eleven weeks later, came the greatest air raid of the Pacific War, when 520 giant B-29 "Superfortress" bombers unleashed 4,500 tons of incendiary bombs on the heart of the already battered Japanese capital. Generating gale-force winds, the exploding incendiaries obliterated Tokyo's commercial center and railway yards, and consumed the Ginza entertainment district. Two days later, on May 25, a second strike of 502 "Superfortress" planes roared low over Tokyo, raining down some 4,000 tons of explosives. Together these two B-29 raids destroyed 56 square miles of the Japanese capital.
Even before the Hiroshima attack, American air force General Curtis LeMay boasted that American bombers were "driving them [Japanese] back to the stone age." Henry H. ("Hap") Arnold, commanding General of the Army air forces, declared in his 1949 memoirs: "It always appeared to us, atomic bomb or no atomic bomb, the Japanese were already on the verge of collapse." This was confirmed by former Japanese prime minister Fumimaro Konoye, who said: "Fundamentally, the thing that brought about the determination to make peace was the prolonged bombing by the B-29s."

 

Japan Seeks Peace


Months before the end of the war, Japan's leaders recognized that defeat was inevitable. In April 1945 a new government headed by Kantaro Suzuki took office with the mission of ending the war. When Germany capitulated in early May, the Japanese understood that the British and Americans would now direct the full fury of their awesome military power exclusively against them.
American officials, having long since broken Japan's secret codes, knew from intercepted messages that the country's leaders were seeking to end the war on terms as favorable as possible. Details of these efforts were known from decoded secret communications between the Foreign Ministry in Tokyo and Japanese diplomats abroad.
In his 1965 study, Atomic Diplomacy: Hiroshima and Potsdam (pp. 107, 108), historian Gar Alperovitz writes:
Although Japanese peace feelers had been sent out as early as September 1944 (and [China's] Chiang Kai-shek had been approached regarding surrender possibilities in December 1944), the real effort to end the war began in the spring of 1945. This effort stressed the role of the Soviet Union ...
In mid-April [1945] the [US] Joint Intelligence Committee reported that Japanese leaders were looking for a way to modify the surrender terms to end the war. The State Department was convinced the Emperor was actively seeking a way to stop the fighting.

A Secret Memorandum


It was only after the war that the American public learned about Japan's efforts to bring the conflict to an end. Chicago Tribune reporter Walter Trohan, for example, was obliged by wartime censorship to withhold for seven months one of the most important stories of the war.
In an article that finally appeared August 19, 1945, on the front pages of the Chicago Tribune and the Washington Times-Herald, Trohan revealed that on January 20, 1945, two days prior to his departure for the Yalta meeting with Stalin and Churchill, President Roosevelt received a 40-page memorandum from General Douglas MacArthur outlining five separate surrender overtures from high-level Japanese officials. (The complete text of Trohan's article is in the Winter 1985-86 Journal, pp. 508-512.)
This memo showed that the Japanese were offering surrender terms virtually identical to the ones ultimately accepted by the Americans at the formal surrender ceremony on September 2 -- that is, complete surrender of everything but the person of the Emperor. Specifically, the terms of these peace overtures included:
  • Complete surrender of all Japanese forces and arms, at home, on island possessions, and in occupied countries.
  • Occupation of Japan and its possessions by Allied troops under American direction.
  • Japanese relinquishment of all territory seized during the war, as well as Manchuria, Korea and Taiwan.
  • Regulation of Japanese industry to halt production of any weapons and other tools of war.
  • Release of all prisoners of war and internees.
  • Surrender of designated war criminals.
Is this memorandum authentic? It was supposedly leaked to Trohan by Admiral William D. Leahy, presidential Chief of Staff. (See: M. Rothbard in A. Goddard, ed., Harry Elmer Barnes: Learned Crusader [1968], pp. 327f.) Historian Harry Elmer Barnes has related (in "Hiroshima: Assault on a Beaten Foe," National Review, May 10, 1958):
The authenticity of the Trohan article was never challenged by the White House or the State Department, and for very good reason. After General MacArthur returned from Korea in 1951, his neighbor in the Waldorf Towers, former President Herbert Hoover, took the Trohan article to General MacArthur and the latter confirmed its accuracy in every detail and without qualification.

Peace Overtures


In April and May 1945, Japan made three attempts through neutral Sweden and Portugal to bring the war to a peaceful end. On April 7, acting Foreign Minister Mamoru Shigemitsu met with Swedish ambassador Widon Bagge in Tokyo, asking him "to ascertain what peace terms the United States and Britain had in mind." But he emphasized that unconditional surrender was unacceptable, and that "the Emperor must not be touched." Bagge relayed the message to the United States, but Secretary of State Stettinius told the US Ambassador in Sweden to "show no interest or take any initiative in pursuit of the matter." Similar Japanese peace signals through Portugal, on May 7, and again through Sweden, on the 10th, proved similarly fruitless.
By mid-June, six members of Japan's Supreme War Council had secretly charged Foreign Minister Shigenori Togo with the task of approaching Soviet Russia's leaders "with a view to terminating the war if possible by September." On June 22 the Emperor called a meeting of the Supreme War Council, which included the Prime Minister, the Foreign Minister, and the leading military figures. "We have heard enough of this determination of yours to fight to the last soldiers," said Emperor Hirohito. "We wish that you, leaders of Japan, will strive now to study the ways and the means to conclude the war. In doing so, try not to be bound by the decisions you have made in the past."
By early July the US had intercepted messages from Togo to the Japanese ambassador in Moscow, Naotake Sato, showing that the Emperor himself was taking a personal hand in the peace effort, and had directed that the Soviet Union be asked to help end the war. US officials also knew that the key obstacle to ending the war was American insistence on "unconditional surrender," a demand that precluded any negotiations. The Japanese were willing to accept nearly everything, except turning over their semi-divine Emperor. Heir of a 2,600-year-old dynasty, Hirohito was regarded by his people as a "living god" who personified the nation. (Until the August 15 radio broadcast of his surrender announcement, the Japanese people had never heard his voice.) Japanese particularly feared that the Americans would humiliate the Emperor, and even execute him as a war criminal.
On July 12, Hirohito summoned Fumimaro Konoye, who had served as prime minister in 1940-41. Explaining that "it will be necessary to terminate the war without delay," the Emperor said that he wished Konoye to secure peace with the Americans and British through the Soviets. As Prince Konoye later recalled, the Emperor instructed him "to secure peace at any price, notwithstanding its severity."
The next day, July 13, Foreign Minister Shigenori Togo wired ambassador Naotake Sato in Moscow: "See [Soviet foreign minister] Molotov before his departure for Potsdam ... Convey His Majesty's strong desire to secure a termination of the war ... Unconditional surrender is the only obstacle to peace ..."
On July 17, another intercepted Japanese message revealed that although Japan's leaders felt that the unconditional surrender formula involved an unacceptable dishonor, they were convinced that "the demands of the times" made Soviet mediation to terminate the war absolutely essential. Further diplomatic messages indicated that the only condition asked by the Japanese was preservation of "our form of government." The only "difficult point," a July 25 message disclosed, "is the ... formality of unconditional surrender."
Summarizing the messages between Togo and Sato, US naval intelligence said that Japan's leaders, "though still balking at the term unconditional surrender," recognized that the war was lost, and had reached the point where they have "no objection to the restoration of peace on the basis of the [1941] Atlantic Charter." These messages, said Assistant Secretary of the Navy Lewis Strauss, "indeed stipulated only that the integrity of the Japanese Royal Family be preserved."
Navy Secretary James Forrestal termed the intercepted messages "real evidence of a Japanese desire to get out of the war." "With the interception of these messages," notes historian Alperovitz (p. 177), "there could no longer be any real doubt as to the Japanese intentions; the maneuvers were overt and explicit and, most of all, official acts. Koichi Kido, Japan's Lord Privy Seal and a close advisor to the Emperor, later affirmed: "Our decision to seek a way out of this war, was made in early June before any atomic bomb had been dropped and Russia had not entered the war. It was already our decision."
In spite of this, on July 26 the leaders of the United States and Britain issued the Potsdam declaration, which included this grim ultimatum: "We call upon the government of Japan to proclaim now the unconditional surrender of all Japanese armed forces and to provide proper and adequate assurance of good faith in such action. The alternative for Japan is prompt and utter destruction."
Commenting on this draconian either-or proclamation, British historian J.F.C. Fuller wrote: "Not a word was said about the Emperor, because it would be unacceptable to the propaganda-fed American masses." (A Military History of the Western World [1987], p. 675.)
America's leaders understood Japan's desperate position: the Japanese were willing to end the war on any terms, as long as the Emperor was not molested. If the US leadership had not insisted on unconditional surrender -- that is, if they had made clear a willingness to permit the Emperor to remain in place -- the Japanese very likely would have surrendered immediately, thus saving many thousands of lives.
The sad irony is that, as it actually turned out, the American leaders decided anyway to retain the Emperor as a symbol of authority and continuity. They realized, correctly, that Hirohito was useful as a figurehead prop for their own occupation authority in postwar Japan.

Justifications


President Truman steadfastly defended his use of the atomic bomb, claiming that it "saved millions of lives" by bringing the war to a quick end. Justifying his decision, he went so far as to declare: "The world will note that the first atomic bomb was dropped on Hiroshima, a military base. That was because we wished in this first attack to avoid, insofar as possible, the killing of civilians."
This was a preposterous statement. In fact, almost all of the victims were civilians, and the United States Strategic Bombing Survey (issued in 1946) stated in its official report: "Hiroshima and Nagasaki were chosen as targets because of their concentration of activities and population."
If the atomic bomb was dropped to impress the Japanese leaders with the immense destructive power of a new weapon, this could have been accomplished by deploying it on an isolated military base. It was not necessary to destroy a large city. And whatever the justification for the Hiroshima blast, it is much more difficult to defend the second bombing of Nagasaki.
All the same, most Americans accepted, and continue to accept, the official justifications for the bombings. Accustomed to crude propagandistic portrayals of the "Japs" as virtually subhuman beasts, most Americans in 1945 heartily welcomed any new weapon that would wipe out more of the detested Asians, and help avenge the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor. For the young Americans who were fighting the Japanese in bitter combat, the attitude was "Thank God for the atom bomb." Almost to a man, they were grateful for a weapon whose deployment seemed to end the war and thus allow them to return home.
After the July 1943 firestorm destruction of Hamburg, the mid-February 1945 holocaust of Dresden, and the fire-bombings of Tokyo and other Japanese cities, America's leaders -- as US Army General Leslie Groves later commented -- "were generally inured to the mass killing of civilians." For President Harry Truman, the killing of tens of thousands of Japanese civilians was simply not a consideration in his decision to use the atom bomb.

Critical Voices


Amid the general clamor of enthusiasm, there were some who had grave misgivings. "We are the inheritors to the mantle of Genghis Khan," wrote New York Times editorial writer Hanson Baldwin, "and of all those in history who have justified the use of utter ruthlessness in war." Norman Thomas called Nagasaki "the greatest single atrocity of a very cruel war." Joseph P. Kennedy, father of the President, was similarly appalled.
A leading voice of American Protestantism, Christian Century, strongly condemned the bombings. An editorial entitled "America's Atomic Atrocity" in the issue of August 29, 1945, told readers:
The atomic bomb was used at a time when Japan's navy was sunk, her air force virtually destroyed, her homeland surrounded, her supplies cut off, and our forces poised for the final stroke ... Our leaders seem not to have weighed the moral considerations involved. No sooner was the bomb ready than it was rushed to the front and dropped on two helpless cities ... The atomic bomb can fairly be said to have struck Christianity itself ... The churches of America must dissociate themselves and their faith from this inhuman and reckless act of the American Government.
A leading American Catholic voice, Commonweal, took a similar view. Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the magazine editorialized, "are names for American guilt and shame."
Pope Pius XII likewise condemned the bombings, expressing a view in keeping with the traditional Roman Catholic position that "every act of war directed to the indiscriminate destruction of whole cities or vast areas with their inhabitants is a crime against God and man." The Vatican newspaper Osservatore Romano commented in its August 7, 1945, issue: "This war provides a catastrophic conclusion. Incredibly this destructive weapon remains as a temptation for posterity, which, we know by bitter experience, learns so little from history."

Authoritative Voices of Dissent


American leaders who were in a position to know the facts did not believe, either at the time or later, that the atomic bombings were needed to end the war.
When he was informed in mid-July 1945 by Secretary of War Henry L. Stimson of the decision to use the atomic bomb, General Dwight Eisenhower was deeply troubled. He disclosed his strong reservations about using the new weapon in his 1963 memoir, The White House Years: Mandate for Change, 1953-1956 (pp. 312-313):
During his [Stimson's] recitation of the relevant facts, I had been conscious of a feeling of depression and so I voiced to him my grave misgivings, first on the basis of my belief that Japan was already defeated and that dropping the bomb was completely unnecessary, and secondly because I thought that our country should avoid shocking world opinion by the use of a weapon whose employment was, I thought, no longer mandatory as a measure to save American lives. It was my belief that Japan was, at that very moment, seeking some way to surrender with a minimum loss of "face."
"The Japanese were ready to surrender and it wasn't necessary to hit them with that awful thing ... I hated to see our country be the first to use such a weapon," Eisenhower said in 1963.
Shortly after "V-J Day," the end of the Pacific war, Brig. General Bonnie Fellers summed up in a memo for General MacArthur: "Neither the atomic bombing nor the entry of the Soviet Union into the war forced Japan's unconditional surrender. She was defeated before either these events took place."
Similarly, Admiral Leahy, Chief of Staff to presidents Roosevelt and Truman, later commented:
It is my opinion that the use of the barbarous weapon at Hiroshima and Nagasaki was of no material assistance in our war against Japan ... The Japanese were already defeated and ready to surrender because of the effective sea blockade and the successful bombing with conventional weapons ... My own feeling was that in being the first to use it, we had adopted an ethical standard common to the barbarians of the Dark Ages. I was not taught to make war in that fashion, and wars cannot be won by destroying women and children.
If the United States had been willing to wait, said Admiral Ernest King, US Chief of Naval Operations, "the effective naval blockade would, in the course of time, have starved the Japanese into submission through lack of oil, rice, medicines, and other essential materials."
Leo Szilard, a Hungarian-born scientist who played a major role in the development of the atomic bomb, argued against its use. "Japan was essentially defeated," he said, and "it would be wrong to attack its cities with atomic bombs as if atomic bombs were simply another military weapon." In a 1960 magazine article, Szilard wrote: "If the Germans had dropped atomic bombs on cities instead of us, we would have defined the dropping of atomic bombs on cities as a war crime, and we would have sentenced the Germans who were guilty of this crime to death at Nuremberg and hanged them."

US Strategic Bombing Survey Verdict


After studying this matter in great detail, the United States Strategic Bombing Survey rejected the notion that Japan gave up because of the atomic bombings. In its authoritative 1946 report, the Survey concluded:
The Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombs did not defeat Japan, nor by the testimony of the enemy leaders who ended the war did they persuade Japan to accept unconditional surrender. The Emperor, the Lord Privy Seal, the Prime Minister, the Foreign Minister, and the Navy Minister had decided as early as May of 1945 that the war should be ended even if it meant acceptance of defeat on allied terms ...
The mission of the Suzuki government, appointed 7 April 1945, was to make peace. An appearance of negotiating for terms less onerous than unconditional surrender was maintained in order to contain the military and bureaucratic elements still determined on a final Bushido defense, and perhaps even more importantly to obtain freedom to create peace with a minimum of personal danger and internal obstruction. It seems clear, however, that in extremis the peacemakers would have peace, and peace on any terms. This was the gist of advice given to Hirohito by the Jushin in February, the declared conclusion of Kido in April, the underlying reason for Koiso's fall in April, the specific injunction of the Emperor to Suzuki on becoming premier which was known to all members of his cabinet ...
Negotiations for Russia to intercede began the forepart of May 1945 in both Tokyo and Moscow. Konoye, the intended emissary to the Soviets, stated to the Survey that while ostensibly he was to negotiate, he received direct and secret instructions from the Emperor to secure peace at any price, notwithstanding its severity ...
It seems clear ... that air supremacy and its later exploitation over Japan proper was the major factor which determined the timing of Japan's surrender and obviated any need for invasion.
Based on a detailed investigation of all the facts and supported by the testimony of the surviving Japanese leaders involved, it is the Survey's opinion that certainly prior to 31 December 1945 and in all probability prior to 1 November 1945 [the date of the planned American invasion], Japan would have surrendered even if the atomic bombs had not been dropped, even if Russia had not entered the war, and even if no invasion had been planned or contemplated.

Historians' Views


In a 1986 study, historian and journalist Edwin P. Hoyt nailed the "great myth, perpetuated by well-meaning people throughout the world," that "the atomic bomb caused the surrender of Japan." In Japan's War: The Great Pacific Conflict (p. 420), he explained:
The fact is that as far as the Japanese militarists were concerned, the atomic bomb was just another weapon. The two atomic bombs at Hiroshima and Nagasaki were icing on the cake, and did not do as much damage as the firebombings of Japanese cities. The B-29 firebombing campaign had brought the destruction of 3,100,000 homes, leaving 15 million people homeless, and killing about a million of them. It was the ruthless firebombing, and Hirohito's realization that if necessary the Allies would completely destroy Japan and kill every Japanese to achieve "unconditional surrender" that persuaded him to the decision to end the war. The atomic bomb is indeed a fearsome weapon, but it was not the cause of Japan's surrender, even though the myth persists even to this day.
In a trenchant new book, The Decision to Drop the Atomic Bomb (Praeger, 1996), historian Dennis D. Wainstock concludes that the bombings were not only unnecessary, but were based on a vengeful policy that actually harmed American interests. He writes (pp. 124, 132):
... By April 1945, Japan's leaders realized that the war was lost. Their main stumbling block to surrender was the United States' insistence on unconditional surrender. They specifically needed to know whether the United States would allow Hirohito to remain on the throne. They feared that the United States would depose him, try him as a war criminal, or even execute him ...
Unconditional surrender was a policy of revenge, and it hurt America's national self-interest. It prolonged the war in both Europe and East Asia, and it helped to expand Soviet power in those areas.
General Douglas MacArthur, Commander of US Army forces in the Pacific, stated on numerous occasions before his death that the atomic bomb was completely unnecessary from a military point of view: "My staff was unanimous in believing that Japan was on the point of collapse and surrender."
General Curtis LeMay, who had pioneered precision bombing of Germany and Japan (and who later headed the Strategic Air Command and served as Air Force chief of staff), put it most succinctly: "The atomic bomb had nothing to do with the end of the war."

From The Journal of Historical Review, May-June 1997 (Vol. 16, No. 3), pages 4-11.


http://www.ihr.org/jhr/v16/v16n3p-4_Weber.html

Tomislav Sunic : The Destruction of Ethnic Germans and German Prisoners of War in Yugoslavia, 1945-1953


The Destruction of Ethnic Germans and German Prisoners of War
in Yugoslavia, 1945-1953


Tomislav Sunic


From the European and American media, one can often get the impression that World War II needs to be periodically resurrected to give credibility to financial demands of one specific ethnic group, at the expense of others. The civilian deaths of the war's losing side are, for the most part, glossed over. Standard historiography of World War II is routinely based on a sharp and polemical distinction between the "ugly" fascists who lost, and the "good" anti-fascists who won, and few scholars are willing to inquire into the gray ambiguity in between. Even as the events of that war become more distant in time, they seemingly become more politically useful and timely as myths.
German military and civilian losses during and especially after World War II are still shrouded by a veil of silence, at least in the mass media, even though an impressive body of scholarly literature exists on that topic. The reasons for this silence, due in large part to academic negligence, are deep rooted and deserve further scholarly inquiry. Why, for instance, are German civilian losses, and particularly the staggering number of postwar losses among ethnic Germans, dealt with so sketchily, if at all, in school history courses? The mass media -- television, newspapers, film and magazines -- rarely, if ever, look at the fate of the millions of German civilians in central and eastern Europe during and following World War II. [1]

The treatment of civilian ethnic Germans -- or Volksdeutsche -- in Yugoslavia may be regarded as a classic case of "ethnic cleansing" on a grand scale. [2]  A close look at these mass killings presents a myriad of historical and legal problems, especially when considering modern international law, including the Hague War Crimes Tribunal that has been dealing with war crimes and crimes against humanity in the Balkan wars of 1991-1995. Yet the plight of Yugoslavia's ethnic Germans during and after World War II should be of no lesser concern to historians, not least because an understanding of this chapter of history throws a significant light on the violent breakup of Communist Yugoslavia 45 years later. A better understanding of the fate of Yugoslavia's ethnic Germans should encourage skepticism of just how fairly and justly international law is applied in practice. Why are the sufferings and victimhood of some nations or ethnic groups ignored, while the sufferings of other nations and groups receive fulsome and sympathetic attention from the media and politicians?

At the outbreak of World War II in 1939, more than one and a half million ethnic Germans were living in southeastern Europe, that is, in Yugoslavia, Hungary, and Romania. Because they lived mostly near and along the Danube river, these people were popularly known "Danube Swabians" or Donauschwaben. Most were descendants of settlers who came to this fertile region in the 17th and 18th centuries following the liberation of Hungary from Turkish rule.

For centuries the Holy Roman Empire and then the Habsburg Empire struggled against Turkish rule in the Balkans, and resisted the "Islamization" of Europe. In this struggle the Danube Germans were viewed as a rampart of Western civilization, and were held in high esteem in the Austrian (and later, Austro-Hungarian) empire for their agricultural productivity and military prowess. Both the Holy Roman and Habsburg empires were multicultural and multinational entities, in which diverse ethnic groups lived for centuries in relative harmony.

After the end of World War I, in 1918, which brought the collapse of the Austro-Hungarian Habsburg empire, and the imposed Versailles Treaty of 1919, the juridical status of the Donauschwaben Germans was in flux. When the National Socialist regime was established in Germany in 1933, the Donauschwaben were among the more than twelve million ethnic Germans who lived in central and eastern Europe outside the borders of the German Reich. Many of these people were brought into the Reich with the incorporation of Austria in 1938, of the Sudetenland region of Czechoslovakia in 1939, and of portions of Poland in late 1939. The "German question," that is, the struggle for self-determination of ethnic Germans outside the borders of the German Reich, was a major factor leading to the outbreak of World War II. Even after 1939, more than three million ethnic Germans remained outside the borders of the expanded Reich, notably in Romania, Yugoslavia, Hungary and the Soviet Union.

In the first Yugoslavia -- a monarchical state created in 1919 largely as a result of efforts of the victorious Allied powers -- most of the country's ethnic Germans were concentrated in eastern Croatia and northern Serbia (notably in the Vojvodina region), with some German towns and villages in Slovenia. Other ethnic Germans lived in western Romania and south-eastern Hungary.

This first multiethnic Yugoslav state of 1919-1941 had a population of some 14 million people of diverse cultures and religions. On the eve of World War II it included nearly six million Serbs, about three million Croats, more than a million Slovenes, some two million Bosnian Muslims and ethnic Albanians, approximately half a million ethnic Germans, and another half million ethnic Hungarians. Following the breakup of Yugoslavia in April 1941, accelerated by a rapid German military advance, approximately 200,000 ethnic Germans became citizens of the newly established Independent State of Croatia, a country whose military and civil authorities remained loyally allied with Third Reich Germany until the final week of the war in Europe. [3]  Most of the remaining ethnic Germans of former Yugoslavia -- approximately 300,000 in the Vojvodina region -- came under the jurisdiction of Hungary, which during the war incorporated the region. (After 1945 this region was reattached to the Serbian portion of Yugoslavia.)

The plight of the ethnic Germans became dire during the final months of World War II, and especially after the founding of the second Yugoslavia, a multiethnic Communist state headed by Marshal Josip Broz Tito. In late October 1944, Tito's guerilla forces, aided by the advancing Soviets and lavishly assisted by Western air supplies, took control of Belgrade, the Serb capital that also served as the capital of Yugoslavia . One of the first legal acts of the new regime was the decree of November 21, 1944, on "The decision regarding the transfer of the enemy's property into the property of the state." It declared citizens of German origin as "enemies of the people," and stripped them of civic rights. The decree also ordered the government confiscation of all property, without compensation, of Yugoslavia's ethnic Germans. [4]  An additional law, promulgated in Belgrade on February 6, 1945, canceled the Yugoslav citizenship of the country's ethnic Germans. [5]

By late 1944 -- when Communist forces had seized control of the eastern Balkans, that is, of Bulgaria, Serbia and Macedonia -- the German-allied state of Croatia still held firm. However, in early 1945, German troops, together with Croatian troops and civilians, began retreating toward southern Austria. During the war's final months, the majority of Yugoslavia's ethnic German civilians also joined this great trek. The refugees' fears of torture and death at Communist hands were well founded, given the horrific treatment by Soviet forces of Germans and others in East Prussia and other parts of eastern Europe. By the end of the war in May 1945, German authorities had evacuated 220,000 ethnic Germans from Yugoslavia to Germany and Austria. Yet many remained in their war-ravaged ancestral homelands, most likely awaiting a miracle.

After the end of fighting in Europe on May 8, 1945, more than 200,000 ethnic Germans who had remained behind in Yugoslavia effectively became captives of the new Communist regime. Some 63,635 Yugoslav ethnic German civilians (women, men and children) perished under Communist rule between 1945 and 1950 -- that is, some 18 percent of the ethnic German civilian population still remaining in the new Yugoslavia. Most died as a result of exhaustion as slave laborers, in "ethnic cleansing," or from disease and malnutrition. [6]  Much of the credit for the widely-praised "economic miracle" of Titoist Yugoslavia, it should be noted, must go to the tens of thousands of German slave laborers who, during the late 1940s, helped to build the impoverished country.

Property of ethnic Germans in Yugoslavia confiscated in the aftermath of World War II amounted to 97,490 small businesses, factories, shops, farms and diverse trades.

 The confiscated real estate and farmland of Yugoslavia's ethnic Germans came to 637,939 hectares (or about one million acres), and became state-owned property. According to a 1982 calculation, the value of the property confiscated from ethnic Germans in Yugoslavia amounted to 15 billion German marks, or about seven billion US dollars. Taking inflation into account, this would today correspond to twelve billion US dollars. From 1948 to 1985, more than 87,000 ethnic Germans who were still residing in Yugoslavia moved to Germany and automatically became German citizens. [7]

All this constitutes a "final solution of the German question" in Yugoslavia.

Numerous survivors have provided detailed and graphic accounts of the grim fate of the ethnic German civilians, particularly women and children, who were held in Communist Yugoslav captivity. One noteworthy witness is the late Father Wendelin Gruber, who served as a chaplain and spiritual leader to many fellow captives. [8]  These numerous survivor accounts of torture and death inflicted on German civilians and captured soldiers by Yugoslav authorities adds to the chronicle of Communist oppression worldwide. [9]
Of the one and a half million ethnic Germans who lived in the Danube basin in 1939-1941, some 93,000 served during World War II in the armed forces of Hungary, Croatia and Romania – Axis countries that were allied with Germany – or in the regular German armed forces. The ethnic Germans of Hungary, Croatia and Romania who served in the military formations of those countries remained citizens of those respective states. [10]

In addition, many ethnic Germans of the Danubian region served in the "Prinz Eugen" Waffen SS division, which totaled some 10,000 men throughout its existence during the war. (This formation was named in honor of Prince Eugene of Savoy, who had won great victories against Turkish forces in the late 17th and early 18th centuries.) [11]  Enlisting in the "Prinz Eugen" division automatically conferred German citizenship on the recruit.

Of the 26,000 ethnic Danubian ethnic Germans serving in various military formations who lost their lives, half perished after the end of the war in Yugoslav camps. Particularly high were the losses of the "Prinz Eugen" division, most of whom surrendered after May 8, 1945. Some 1,700 of these prisoners were killed in the village of Brezice near the Croat-Slovenian border, while the remaining half was worked to death in Yugoslav zinc mines near the town of Bor, in Serbia. [12]
In addition to the "ethnic cleansing" of Danube German civilians and soldiers, some 70,000 Germans who had served in regular Wehrmacht forces perished in Yugoslav captivity. Most of these died as a result of reprisals, or as slave laborers in mines, road construction, shipyards, and so forth. These were mostly troops of "Army Group E" who had surrendered to British military authorities in southern Austria at the time of the armistice of May 8, 1945. British authorities turned over about 150,000 of these German prisoners of war to Communist Yugoslav partisans under pretext of later repatriation to Germany.

Most of these former regular Wehrmacht troops perished in postwar Yugoslavia in three stages: During the first stage more than 7,000 captured German troops died in Communist-organized "atonement marches" (Suhnemärsche) stretching 800 miles from the southern border of Austria to the northern border of Greece. During the second phase, in late summer 1945, many German soldiers in captivity were summarily executed or thrown alive into large karst pits along the Dalmatian coast of Croatia. In the third stage, 1945-1955, an additional 50,000 perished as forced laborers due to malnutrition and exhaustion. [13]

The total number of German losses in Yugoslav captivity after the end of the war -- including ethnic "Danube German" civilians and soldiers, as well as "Reich" Germans -- may therefore be conservatively estimated at 120,000 killed, starved, worked to death, or missing.
What is the importance of these figures? What lessons can be drawn in assessing these postwar German losses?
It is important to stress that the plight of German civilians in the Balkans is only a small portion of the Allied topography of death. Seven to eight million Germans -- both military personnel and civilians -- died during and after World War II. Half of those perished during the final months of the war, or after Germany's unconditional surrender on May 8, 1945. German casualties, both civilian and military, were arguably higher in "peace" than in "war."

In the months before and after the end of World War II, ethnic Germans were killed, tortured and dispossessed throughout eastern and central Europe, notably in Silesia, East Prussia, Pomerania, the Sudetenland, and the "Wartheland" region. Altogether 12-15 million Germans fled or were driven from their homes in what is perhaps the greatest "ethnic cleansing" in history. Of this number, more than two million were killed or otherwise lost their lives. [14]

The grim events in postwar Yugoslavia are rarely dealt with in the media of the countries that emerged on the ruins of communist Yugoslavia, even though, remarkably, there is today greater freedom of expression and historical research there than in such western European countries as Germany and France. The elites of Croatia, Serbia and Bosnia, largely made up of former Communists, seem to share a common interest in repressing their sometimes murky and criminal past with regard to the postwar treatment of German civilians.

The breakup of Yugoslavia in 1990-91, the events leading to it, and the war and atrocities that followed, can only be understood within a larger historical framework. As already noted, "ethnic cleansing" is nothing new. Even if one regards the former Serb-Yugoslav leader Slobodan Milosevic and the other defendants being tried by the International War Crimes Tribunal in The Hague as wicked criminals, their crimes are trivial compared to those of Communist Yugoslavia's founder, Josip Broz Tito. Tito carried out "ethnic cleansing" and mass killings on a far greater scale, against Croats, Germans and Serbs, and with the sanction of the British and American governments. His rule in Yugoslavia (1945-1980), which coincided with the "Cold War" era, was generally supported by the Western powers, who regarded his regime as a factor of stability in this often unstable region of Europe. [15]

The wartime and postwar plight of Germans in the Balkans also provides lessons about the fate of multiethnic and multicultural states. The fate of the two Yugoslavias -- 1919-1941 and 1944-1991 -- underscores the inherent weakness of multiethnic states. Twice in the 20th century, multicultural Yugoslavia fell apart amid needless carnage and a spiral of hatreds among its constituent ethnic groups. One can argue, therefore, that it is better for diverse nations and cultures, let alone different races, to live apart, separated by walls, than to pretend to live in a feigned unity that hides animosities waiting to explode, and leaving behind lasting resentments.

Few could foresee the savage inter-ethnic hatred and killings that swept the Balkans following the collapse of Yugoslavia in 1991, and this among peoples of relatively similar anthropological origins, albeit different cultural backgrounds. One can only speculate with foreboding about the future of the United States and western Europe, where growing interracial tensions between the native populations and masses of Third World immigrants portend disaster with far bloodier consequences.

Multicultural Yugoslavia, in both its first and second incarnations, was above all the creation of, respectively, the French, British and American leaders who crafted the Versailles settlement of 1919, and the British, Soviet Russian and American leaders who met at Yalta and Potsdam in 1945. The political figures who created Yugoslavia did not represent the nations in the region, and understood little of the self-perceptions or ethnic-cultural affinities of the region's various peoples.

Although the deaths, suffering and dispossession of the ethnic Germans of the Balkans during and after World War II are well documented by both German authorities and independent scholars, they continue to be largely ignored in the major media of the United States and Europe. Why? One could speculate that if those German losses were more widely discussed and better known, they would likely stimulate an alternative perspective on World War II, and indeed of 20th century history. A greater and more widespread awareness of German civilian losses during and after World War II might well encourage a deeper discussion of the dynamics of contemporary societies. This, in turn, could significantly affect the self-perception of millions of people, forcing many to discard ideas and myths that have fashionably prevailed for more than half a century. An open debate about the causes and consequences of World War II would also tarnish the reputations of many scholars and opinion makers in the United States and Europe. Arguably, a greater awareness of the sufferings of German civilians during and after World War II, and the implications of that, could fundamentally change the policies of the United States and other major powers.

Notes

1. Mads Ole Balling, Von Reval bis Bukarest (Copenhagen: Hermann-Niermann-Stiftung, 1991), vol. I and vol. II.
2. L. Barwich, F. Binder, M. Eisele, F. Hoffmann, F. Kühbauch, E. Lung, V. Oberkersch, J. Pertschi, H. Rakusch, M. Reinsprecht, I. Senz, H. Sonnleitner, G. Tscherny, R. Vetter, G. Wildmann, and others, Weissbuch der Deutschen aus Jugoslawien: Erlebnisberichte 1944-48 (Munich: Universitäts Verlag, Donauschwäbische Kulturstiftung, 1992, 1993), vol. I, vol. II.
3. On Croatia's armed forces during World War II, and its destruction after 1945 by the Yugoslav Communists, see, Christophe Dolbeau, Les Forces armées croates, 1941-1945 (Lyon [BP 5005, 69245 Lyon cedex 05, France]: 2002).
On the often critical attitude of German military and diplomatic officials toward the allied Ustasha regime of the Independent State of Croatia ("NDH"), see Klaus Schmider, Partisanenkrieg in Jugoslawien 1941-1944 (Hamburg: Verlag E.S. Mittler & Sohn, 2002). This book includes an impressive bibliography, and cites hitherto unpublished German documents. Unfortunately, the author does not provide precise data as to the number of German troops (including Croat civilians and troops) who surrendered to British forces in southern Austria, and who were subsequently handed over to the Yugoslav Communist authorities. The number of Croat captives who perished after 1945 in Communist Yugoslavia remains an emotion-laden topic in Croatia, with important implications for the country's domestic and foreign policy.
4. Anton Scherer, Manfred Straka, Kratka povijest podunavskih Nijemaca/ Abriss zur Geschichte der Donauschwaben (Graz: Leopold Stocker Verlag/ Zagreb: Pan Liber, 1999), esp. p. 131; Georg Wildmann, and others, Genocide of the Ethnic Germans in Yugoslavia 1944-1948 (Santa Ana, Calif.: Danube Swabian Association of the USA, 2001), p. 31.
5. A. Scherer, M. Straka, Kratka povijest podunavskih Nijemaca/ Abriss zur Geschichte der Donauschwaben (1999), pp. 132-140.
6. Georg Wildmann, and others, Verbrechen an den Deutschen in Jugoslawien, 1944-48 (Munich: Donauschwäbische Kulturstiftung, 1998), esp. pp. 312-313. Based on this is the English-language work: Georg Wildmann, and others, Genocide of the Ethnic Germans in Yugoslavia 1944-1948 ( Santa Ana, Calif.: Danube Swabian Association of the USA, 2001).
7. G. Wildmann, and others, Verbrechen an den Deutschen in Jugoslawien, 1944-48, esp. p. 274.
8. Wendelin Gruber, In the Claws of the Red Dragon: Ten Years Under Tito's Heel (Toronto: St. Michaelswerk, 1988). Translated from German by Frank Schmidt.
In 1993 the ailing Fr. Gruber returned to Croatia from exile in Paraguay, to spend his final years in a Jesuit monastery in Zagreb. I spoke with him shortly before his death on August 14, 2002, at the age of 89.
9. Stéphane Courtois, and others, The Black Book of Communism: Crimes, Terror, Repression (Cambridge: Harvard Univ. Press, 1999).
10. G. Wildmann, and others, Verbrechen an den Deutschen in Jugoslawien (cited above), p. 22.
11. Armin Preuss, Prinz Eugen: Der edle Ritter (Berlin: Grundlagen Verlag, 1996).
12. Otto Kumm, Geschichte der 7. SS-Freiwilligen Gebirgs-Division "Prinz Eugen" (Coburg: Nation Europa, 1995).
13. Roland Kaltenegger, Titos Kriegsgefangene: Folterlager, Hungermärsche und Schauprozesse ( Graz : Leopold Stocker Verlag, 2001).
14. Alfred-Maurice de Zayas, Nemesis at Potsdam: The Expulsion of the Germans From the East. (Lincoln: Univ. of Nebraska, 1989 [3rd rev. ed.]); Alfred-Maurice de Zayas, The German Expellees: Victims in War and Peace (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1993); Alfred-Maurice de Zayas, A Terrible Revenge: The "Ethnic Cleansing" of the East European Germans, 1944-1950 (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1994); Ralph F. Keeling, Gruesome Harvest: The Allies' Postwar War Against the German People (Institute for Historical Review, 1992).
15. Tomislav Sunic, Titoism and Dissidence: Studies in the History and Dissolution of Communist Yugoslavia (Frankfurt, New York: Peter Lang, 1995)

Tomislav Sunic holds a doctorate in political science from the University of California, Santa Barbara. He is an author, translator and former professor of political science in the USA. Tom Sunic currently lives with his family in Croatia. An interview with him, "Reexamining Assumptions," appeared in the March-April 2002 Journal of Historical Review (http://www.ihr.org/jhr/v21/v21n2p15_sunic.html). His most recent book is Homo americanus: Child of the Postmodern Age (2007), which can be obtained through Amazon books (http://www.amazon.com/Homo-americanus-Child-Postmodern-Age/dp/1419659847). For more by and about him, see his website (http://www.tomsunic.com/).
This article is adapted from Dr. Sunic's address on June 22, 2002, at the 14th IHR Conference, in Irvine, California.

http://www.ihr.org/other/sunic062002.html

Mark Weber : Iraq: A War For Israel


Iraq: A War For Israel

By Mark Weber

The U.S. bombing and invasion of Iraq in March-April 2003, and the occupation that followed, cost more than four thousand American lives and hundreds of billions of dollars, and brought death to many tens of thousands of Iraqis.
Why did President Bush decide to go to war? In whose interests was it launched?
In the months leading up to the attack, the President and other high-level US officials repeatedly warned that the threat posed to the US and world by the Baghdad regime was so grave and imminent that the United States had to act quickly to bomb, invade and occupy Iraq.

On Sept. 28, 2002, for example, Bush said:
"The danger to our country is grave and it is growing. The Iraqi regime possesses biological and chemical weapons, is rebuilding the facilities to make more and, according to the British government, could launch a biological or chemical attack in as little as 45 minutes after the order is given... This regime is seeking a nuclear bomb, and with fissile material could build one within a year."

On March 6, 2003, President Bush declared:
"Saddam Hussein and his weapons are a direct threat to this country, to our people, and to all free people... I believe Saddam Hussein is a threat to the American people. I believe he's a threat to the neighborhood in which he lives. And I've got good evidence to believe that. He has weapons of mass destruction... The American people know that Saddam Hussein has weapons of mass destruction."
These claims were untrue. As the world now knows, Iraq had no dangerous "weapons of mass destruction," and posed no threat to the US. Moreover, alarmist suggestions that the Baghdad regime was working with the al-Qaeda terror network likewise proved to be without foundation.

So if the official reasons given for the war were untrue, why did the United States attack Iraq?
Whatever the secondary reasons for the war, the crucial factor in President Bush's decision to attack was to help Israel. With support from Israel and America's Jewish-Zionist lobby, and prodded by Jewish "neo-conservatives" holding high-level positions in his administration, President Bush - who was already fervently committed to Israel - resolved to invade and subdue one of Israel's chief regional enemies
.
This is so widely understood in Washington that US Senator Ernest Hollings was moved in May 2004 to acknowledge that the US invaded Iraq "to secure Israel," and "everybody" knows it. He also identified three of the influential pro-Israel Jews in Washington who played an important role in prodding the US into war: Richard Perle, chair of the Pentagon's Defense Policy Board; Paul Wolfowitz, Deputy Defense Secretary; and Charles Krauthammer, columnist and author. [1]
Hollings referred to the cowardly reluctance of his Congressional colleagues to acknowledge this truth openly, saying that "nobody is willing to stand up and say what is going on." Due to "the pressures we get politically," he added, members of Congress uncritically support Israel and its policies.

Some months before the invasion, retired four-star US Army General and former NATO Supreme Allied Commander Wesley Clark acknowledged in an interview: "Those who favor this attack [by the US against Iraq] now will tell you candidly, and privately, that it is probably true that Saddam Hussein is no threat to the United States. But they are afraid at some point he might decide if he had a nuclear weapon to use it against Israel." [2]


Six months before the attack, President Bush met in the White House with eleven members of the US House of Representatives. While the "war against terrorism is going okay," he told the lawmakers, the United States would soon have to deal with a greater danger: "The biggest threat, however, is Saddam Hussein and his weapons of mass destruction. He can blow up Israel and that would trigger an international conflict." [3]

Bush also spoke candidly about why the US was going to war during a White House meeting on Feb. 27, 2003, just three weeks before the invasion. In a talk with Elie Wiesel, the well-known Jewish writer, Bush said: "If we don't disarm Saddam Hussein, he will put a weapon of mass destruction on Israel and they will do what they think they have to do, and we have to avoid that." [4]

Fervently Pro-Israel


President Bush's fervent support for Israel and its hardline government is well known. He reaffirmed it, for example, in June 2002 in a major speech on the Middle East. In the view of "leading Israeli commentators," the London Times reported, the address was "so pro-Israel that it might have been written by [Israel prime minister] Ariel Sharon." [5]  In an address to pro-Israel activists at the 2004 convention of the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC), Bush said: "The United States is strongly committed, and I am strongly committed, to the security of Israel as a vibrant Jewish state." He also told the gathering: "By defending the freedom and prosperity and security of Israel, you're also serving the cause of America." [6]
Condoleeza Rice, who served as President Bush's National Security Advisor, and later, as his Secretary of State, echoed the President's outlook in a May 2003 interview, saying that the "security of Israel is the key to security of the world." [7]

Long Range Plans


Jewish-Zionist plans for war against Iraq had been in place for years.
In mid-1996, a policy paper prepared for then-Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu outlined a grand strategy for Israel in the Middle East. Entitled "A Clean Break: A New Strategy for Securing the Realm," it was written under the auspices of an Israeli think tank, the Institute for Advanced Strategic and Political Studies.

Specifically, it called for an "effort [that] can focus on removing Saddam Hussein from power in Iraq, an important Israeli strategic objective in its own right..." [8]
The authors of "A Clean Break" included Richard Perle, Douglas Feith, and David Wurmser, three influential Jews who later held high-level positions in the Bush administration, 2001-2004: Perle as chair of the Defense Policy Board, Feith as Undersecretary of Defense, and Wurmser as special assistant to the Undersecretary of State for Arms Control. The role played by Bush administration officials who are associated with two major pro-Zionist "neoconservative" research centers has come under scrutiny from The Nation, the influential public affairs weekly. [9] The author, Jason Vest, examined the close links between the Jewish Institute for National Security Affairs (JINSA) and the Center for Security Policy (CSP), detailing the ties between these groups and various politicians, arms merchants, military men, wealthy pro-Israel American Jews, and Republican presidential administrations
JINSA and CSP members, notes Vest, "have ascended to powerful government posts, where... they've managed to weave a number of issues - support for national missile defense, opposition to arms control treaties, championing of wasteful weapons systems, arms aid to Turkey and American unilateralism in general - into a hard line, with support for the Israeli right at its core... On no issue is the JINSA/CSP hard line more evident than in its relentless campaign for war - not just with Iraq, but ‘total war,' as Michael Ledeen, one of the most influential JINSAns in Washington, put it... For this crew, ‘regime change' by any means necessary in Iraq, Iran, Syria, Saudi Arabia and the Palestinian Authority is an urgent imperative."

Samuel Francis, author, editor and columnist, also looked into the "neo-conservative" role in fomenting war. [10] "My own answer," he wrote, "is that the lie [that a massively-armed Iraq posed a grave and imminent threat to the US] was fabricated by neo-conservatives in the administration whose first loyalty is to Israel and its interests and who wanted the United States to smash Iraq because it was the biggest potential threat to Israel in the region. They are known to have been pushing for war with Iraq since at least 1996, but they could not make an effective case for it until after Sept. 11, 2001..."

In the aftermath of the 2001 Nine-Eleven terror attacks, ardently pro-Zionist "neo-conservatives" in the Bush administration - who for years had sought a Middle East war to bolster Israel's security in the region - exploited the tragedy to press their agenda. In this they were backed by the Israeli government, which also pressured the White House to strike Iraq.
"The [Israeli] military and political leadership yearns for war in Iraq," reported a leading Israeli daily paper, Haaretz, in February 2002. [11] The Jerusalem correspondent for the Guardian, the respected British daily, reported in August 2002: "Israel signalled its decision yesterday to put public pressure on President George Bush to go ahead with a military attack on Iraq, even though it believes Saddam Hussein may well retaliate by striking Israel." [12]
Three months before the US invasion, the well-informed Washington journalist Robert Novak reported that Israeli prime minister Sharon was telling American political leaders that "the greatest US assistance to Israel would be to overthrow Saddam Hussein's Iraqi regime." Moreover, added Novak, "that view is widely shared inside the Bush administration, and is a major reason why US forces today are assembling for war." [13]

Israel's spy agencies were a "full partner" with the US and Britain in producing greatly exaggerated prewar assessments of Iraq's ability to wage war, a former senior Israeli military intelligence official has acknowledged. Shlomo Bron, a brigadier general in the Israel army reserves, and a senior researcher at a major Israeli think tank, said that intelligence provided by Israel played a significant role in supporting the US and British case for making war. Israeli intelligence agencies, he said, "badly overestimated the Iraqi threat to Israel and reinforced the American and British belief that the weapons [of mass destruction] existed." [14]
The role of the pro-Israel lobby in pressing for war has been carefully examined by two prominent American scholars, John J. Mearsheimer, professor of political science at the University of Chicago, and Stephen M. Walt, professor of international affairs at Harvard University. [15] In an 81-page paper, "The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy," they wrote:
"Pressure from Israel and the [pro-Israel] Lobby was not the only factor behind the decision to attack Iraq in March 2003, but it was critical. Some Americans believe that this was a war for oil, but there is hardly any direct evidence to support this claim. Instead, the war was motivated in good part by a desire to make Israel more secure... Within the United States, the main driving force behind the Iraq war was a small band of neoconservatives, many with close ties to Israel's Likud Party. In addition, key leaders of the Lobby's major organizations lent their voices to the campaign for war."
Important members of the pro-Israel lobby carried out what professors Mearshiemer and Walt call "an unrelenting public relations campaign to win support for invading Iraq. A key part of this campaign was the manipulation of intelligence information, so as to make Saddam look like an imminent threat."
For some Jewish leaders, the Iraq war is part of a long-range effort to install Israel-friendly regimes across the Middle East. Norman Podhoretz, a prominent Jewish writer and an ardent supporter of Israel, was for years editor of Commentary, the influential Zionist monthly. In the Sept. 2002 issue he wrote:
"The regimes that richly deserve to be overthrown and replaced are not confined to the three singled-out members of the axis of evil [Iraq, Iran, North Korea]. At a minimum, the axis should extend to Syria and Lebanon and Libya, as well as ‘friends' of America like the Saudi royal family and Egypt's Hosni Mubarak, along with the Palestinian Authority, whether headed by Arafat or one of his henchmen."
Patrick J. Buchanan, the well-known writer and commentator, and former White House Communications director, has been blunt in identifying those who pushed for war: [16]
"We charge that a cabal of polemicists and public officials seek to ensnare our country in a series of wars that are not in America's interests. We charge them with colluding with Israel to ignite those wars and destroy the Oslo Accords. We charge them with deliberately damaging US relations with every state in the Arab world that defies Israel or supports the Palestinian people's right to a homeland of their own. We charge that they have alienated friends and allies all over the Islamic and Western world through their arrogance, hubris, and bellicosity...
"Cui Bono? For whose benefit these endless wars in a region that holds nothing vital to America save oil, which the Arabs must sell us to survive? Who would benefit from a war of civilizations between the West and Islam?
"Answer: one nation, one leader, one party. Israel, Sharon, Likud."
Uri Avnery - an award-winning Israeli journalist and author, and a three-time member of Israel's parliament - sees the Iraq war as an expression of immense Jewish influence and power. In an essay written some weeks after the US invasion, he wrote: [17]
"Who are the winners? They are the so-called neo-cons, or neo-conservatives. A compact group, almost all of whose members are Jewish. They hold the key positions in the Bush administration, as well as in the think-tanks that play an important role in formulating American policy and the ed-op pages of the influential newspapers... The immense influence of this largely Jewish group stems from its close alliance with the extreme right-wing Christian fundamentalists, who nowadays control Bush's Republican party. ... Seemingly, all this is good for Israel. America controls the world, we control America. Never before have Jews exerted such an immense influence on the center of world power."
In Britain, a veteran member of Britain's House of Commons bluntly declared in May 2003 that Jews had taken control of America's foreign policy, and had succeeded in pushing the US into war. "A Jewish cabal have taken over the government in the United States and formed an unholy alliance with fundamentalist Christians," said Tam Dalyell, a Labour party deputy and the longest-serving House member. "There is far too much Jewish influence in the United States," he added. [18]

Summary


For many years now, American presidents of both parties have been staunchly committed to Israel and its security. This entrenched policy is an expression of the Jewish-Zionist grip on America's political and cultural life. It was fervent support for Israel - shared by President Bush, high-ranking administration officials and nearly the entire US Congress - that proved crucial in the decision to invade and subdue one of Israel's greatest regional enemies.
While the unprovoked US invasion of Iraq may have helped Israel, just as those who wanted and planned for the war had hoped, it has been a calamity for America and the world. It has cost many tens of thousands of lives and hundreds of billions of dollars. Around the world, it has generated unmatched distrust and hostility toward the US. In Arab and Muslim countries, it has fueled intense hatred of the United States, and has brought many new recruits to the ranks of anti-American terrorists.
Americans have already paid a high price for their nation's commitment to Israel. We will pay an ever higher price - not just in dollars or international prestige, but in the lives of young men squandered for the interests of a foreign state - until the Jewish-Zionist hold on US political life is finally broken.

Notes

1. Remarks by Ernest F. Hollings, May 20, 2004. Congressional Record - Senate, May 20, 2004, pages S5921-S5925. See also: M. Weber, ""Iraq Was Invaded to Secure Israel," Says Senator Hollings..."
(http://www.ihr.org/news/040716_hollings.shtml)
2. The Guardian (London), August 20, 2002.
3. Bob Woodward, Plan of Attack (Simon & Schuster, 2004), p. 186. See also p. 188
4. Bob Woodward, Plan of Attack (Simon & Schuster, 2004), p. 320.
5. R. Dunn, "Sharon Could Have Written Speech," The Times (London), June 26, 2002.
6. Bush address to AIPAC convention, Washington, DC, May 18, 2004.
7. A. S. Lewin, "Israel's Security is Key to Security of Rest of World," Jewish Press (Brooklyn, NY), May 14, 2003. Rice's interview with the Israeli daily Yediot Aharnonot is quoted.
8. Text posted at  http://www.israeleconomy.org/strat1.htm  See also: J. Bamford, A Pretext for War (Doubleday, 2004), pages 261-269; B. Whitaker, "Playing Skittles with Saddam," The Guardian (Britain), Sept. 3, 2002.
9. J. Vest, "The Men From JINSA and CSP," The Nation, Sept. 2, 2002
(http://www.thenation.com/doc/20020902/vest).
10. S. Francis, "Weapons of Mass Deception: Somebody Lied," column of Feb. 6, 2004
(http://www.vdare.com/francis/wmd.htm).
11. A. Benn, "Background: Enthusiastic IDF Awaits War in Iraq," Haaretz, Feb. 17, 2002. Quoted in J. J. Mearsheimer, Stephen M. Walt, "The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy," March 2006, p. 30, and p. 68, fn. 146.
12. Jonathan Steele, "Israel Puts Pressure on US to Strike Iraq," The Guardian (London), August 17, 2002.
13. Robert Novak, "Sharon's War?," column of Dec. 26, 2002.
(http://archives.cnn.com/2002/ALLPOLITICS/12/26/column.novak.opinion.sharon/).
14. L. King, "Ex-General Says Israel Inflated Iraqi Threat," Los Angeles Times, Dec. 5, 2003.; See also: J. J. Mearsheimer, Stephen M. Walt, "The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy," March 2006, p. 29, and p. 67, fn. 142.
15. John J. Mearsheimer, Stephen M. Walt, "The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy,"  March 2006, pages 29, 30, 32.(http://ksgnotes1.harvard.edu/Research/wpaper.nsf/rwp/RWP06-011/$File/rwp_06_011_walt.pdf). A shorter version appeared in the London Review of Books, March 23, 2006. (http://www.lrb.co.uk/v28/n06/mear01_.html). The two authors followed up their paper with a detailed book, The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy (New York: Farrar, Straus, Giroux: 2007).
16. P. J. Buchanan, "Whose War?," The American Conservative, March 24, 2003.
(http://www.amconmag.com/03_24_03/cover.html).
17. Uri Avnery, "The Night After," CounterPunch, April 10, 2003
(http://www.counterpunch.org/avnery04102003.html).
18. F. Nelson, "Anger Over Dalyell's 'Jewish Cabal' Slur," The Scotsman (Edinburgh), May 5, 2003; M. White, "Dalyell Steps Up Attack On Levy," The Guardian (London), May 6, 2003.

About the Author

Mark Weber is director of the Institute for Historical Review. He studied history at the University of Illinois (Chicago), the University of Munich, Portland State University and Indiana University (M.A., 1977).


http://www.ihr.org/leaflets/iraqwar.shtml

Daniel W. Michaels : Examining Stalin's 1941 Plan to Attack Germany

Book Review
Examining Stalin's 1941 Plan to Attack Germany
  • Unternehmen Barbarossa und der russische Historikerstreit ("Operation Barbarossa and the Russian Historians' Dispute"), by Wolfgang Strauss. Munich: Herbig, 1998. Hardcover. 199 pages. Illustrations. Source references. Bibliography. Index.
Reviewed by Daniel W. Michaels


No two peoples suffered more during the Second World War than the Russians and the Germans. In the carnage of that great global conflict, nothing matched the massive destruction of life and property wrought on the Eastern front by Russian and German forces fanatically driven by irreconcilable ideologies.
Now, more than 50 years after the end of the "clash of the titans," free Russian and German historians are collaborating to ascertain the historical decisions and actions that led to that bloodiest of all conflicts. Wolfgang Strauss, a respected German Slavicist and political analyst, explains this clarifying historical process in "Operation Barbarossa and the Russian Historians' Dispute," his most recent work.[note 1] He examines here the research of revisionist scholars in Russia and Germany on Stalin's role in igniting the German-Russian conflict and his efforts to expand the Soviet empire across Europe. Perhaps most importantly, he also shows how a shared understanding of the war is contributing to reconciliation between these two great European peoples.
Strauss affirms the view of German historian Ernst Nolte that Hitler's militant anti-Communism was an understandable reaction to the looming Soviet threat to Europe and humanity. Put another way, the militancy of the "fascist" movements that arose in Germany, Spain, Italy and other European countries in the 1920s and 1930s was, in essence, a response to the undisguised Bolshevik goal of dominating Europe.[note 2] This view, Strauss contends, has now largely been embraced by Russian revisionists and the French historian François Furet.[note 3] It is basically irrelevant whether one regards the war that broke out in June 1941 between Germany and Soviet Russia as a war of aggression, a preventive war or a counterattack. For each side, Nolte and others contend, this was a life or death struggle to decide which world view and way of life would prevail in Europe -- atheistic, internationalist Communism or the bourgeois Christian civilization of the West.

The Black Book

In no way does Strauss dismiss or whitewash Hitler's brutal excesses. He also holds that Hitler's racist concept of the inferiority of the Slavic peoples and his attempt to colonize their lands was not only wrong but doomed his military campaign, and ultimately the Third Reich, to failure. At the same time, Strauss stresses the monumental brutality of Soviet and international Communism. In this regard he cites The Black Book of Communism: Crimes, Terror and Repression, a recent 860-page work by French scholar Stéphane Courtois and others.[note 4]
As Courtois stresses, many American and European scholars have upheld a morally peculiar view of history that fervently condemns National Socialist Germany while maintaining a meretriciously non-judgmental "objectivity" toward Soviet Russia. But there is no hierarchy of death and suffering. As Courtois writes: "The death of a Ukrainian peasant child, deliberately exposed to starvation by the Stalinist regime, is just as important as the starvation of a child in the Warsaw Ghetto."
As Strauss relates, Courtois finds that 1) some 100 million human beings lost their lives as a result of Communist policies in the Soviet Union, Red China and other Communist states 2) The Communists made mass criminality an integral part of their governmental system; 3) Terror was part of the Soviet regime from the outset, beginning with Lenin; 4) Class and ethnic genocide, begun by Lenin and systematized by Stalin, preceded Hitler's dictatorship by years; 5) Stalin was unquestionably a greater criminal than Hitler; and 6) Stalin's joint, if not primary, responsibility for the outbreak of Russo-German War is undeniable.[note 5]
It is often forgotten that the Russian people were the first victims of Communism. Citing evidence from British, Russian and other sources, Strauss shows that those who imposed Communist despotism on the Russians were primarily non-Russian and non-Christian aliens -- above all, Jews.[note 6] Their goal was nothing short of eradicating Christianity and European civilization, at whatever the human cost. Many Russians place the primary responsibility for the crimes of Communism, particularly in the first ten years of Soviet rule, on the Bolshevik party's non-Russian elements. For example, Strauss notes, the Russian press has referred to the execution of Tsar Nicholas II and his entire family as a "Jewish ritualistic murder."[note 7] In a similar context, Strauss cites from Solzhenitsyn the names of the ruthless Soviet secret police (NKVD) chiefs -- all of them Jews -- who put tens of thousands of slave laborers to death under appallingly inhumane conditions in building the White Sea Canal.[note 8]
One should not, however, get the impression that Slavs were the exclusive victims of Stalin's terror, or that the murderers were all non-Russians.[note 9] During the Great Purge of 1937-39, Strauss points out, Stalin executed many Jews who had played a prominent role in the early Soviet regime. In 1940 Stalin succeeded in killing his greatest rival, Lev Trotsky (Bronstein), who had once been the second most powerful figure in the Soviet state. And when Stalin installed the Russian Nikolai Yezhov as head of the NKVD, replacing the Jewish Genrikh Yagoda, thousands of Yagoda's followers and their families, mostly Jews, were murdered or committed suicide.

Pioneering Russian Revisionists

One of the earliest Russian revisionists of World War II history was Pyotr Grigorenko, a Soviet Army Major General and highly decorated war veteran who taught at the Frunze Military Academy. Already in the early 1960s, during the Khrushchev era, he was a "dissident," publicly supporting civil rights for oppressed ethnic minorities. (Authorities committed him to a mental asylum.) In 1967, Strauss relates, he was the first leading Soviet figure to advance the revisionist arguments, which became well known during the 1980s and 1990s, on Stalin's preparations for aggressive war against Germany. In an article submitted to a major Soviet journal (but rejected, and later published abroad), Grigorenko pointed out that Soviet military forces vastly outnumbered German forces in 1941. Just prior to the German attack on June 22, 1941, more than half of the Soviet forces were in the area near and west of Bialystok, that is, in an area deep in Polish occupied territory. "This deployment could only be justified" wrote Grigorenko, "if these troops were deploying for a surprise offensive. In the event of an enemy attack these troops would soon be encircled."[note 10]
The best known Russian historian to advance revisionist arguments on Stalin's preparations for a first-strike against Germany has been Viktor Suvorov (pen name of Vladimir Rezun). Strauss recapitulates his main arguments (which have been treated in detail in the pages of this Journal).[note 11]
Strauss examines three significant speeches by Stalin (which have also been dealt with by Suvorov, as well as in the pages of this Journal):[note 12] 1. In his address of August 19, 1939, shortly before the outbreak of war, Stalin explained why a temporary alliance with Germany was more beneficial to Soviet interests than an alliance with Britain and France. 2. In his speech of May 5, 1941, Stalin explained to graduate officers of military academies that the impending war would be fought offensively by Soviet forces, and that it would nonetheless be a just war because it would advance world socialism. 3. In the speech of November 6, 1941, some four months after the outbreak of the "Barbarossa" campaign, Stalin stressed the importance of killing Germans. (This speech helped to "inspire" the Soviet Jewish writer Ilya Ehrenburg to make his notorious contribution to the war effort in the form of murderously anti-German propaganda.)

Recent Russian Revisionist Historiography

A radical revision of World War II history, Strauss contends, became possible only after the collapse of the multinational Soviet Union (1991), when some 14 million previously classified documents dealing with all aspects of Soviet rule were finally open to free examination. This book's greatest contribution may well be to highlight for non-Russians the research of Russian revisionists. Strauss is very familiar with this important work, which has been all but entirely ignored in the United States. The most important publications cited by Strauss in this regard are two Russian anthologies, both issued in 1995: "Did Stalin Make Preparations for an Offensive War Against Hitler?," and "September 1, 1939-May 9, 1945: 50th Anniversary of the Defeat of Fascist Germany."[note 13] The first of these contains articles by revisionist scholars as well as by critics of revisionism. (The "Russian historians' dispute" referred to in the subtitle of Strauss' book echoes the "German historians' dispute" of the 1980s, in which Ernst Nolte played a major role.)
As Strauss notes, the most prominent critic of the revisionist view of Suvorov and others has been Israeli historian Gabriel Gorodetsky, who teaches at Tel Aviv University. (Strauss suggests that he is an long-time apologist for Stalin.) Gorodetsky is the author of a 1995 Russian-language anti-Suvorov work, "The 'Icebreaker' Myth," and a detailed 1999 study, Grand Illusion: Stalin and the German Invasion of Russia.
In his discussion of "Did Stalin Make Preparations for an Offensive War Against Hitler," Strauss writes (pages 42-44):
Even though revisionists as well as the critics of revisionism have their say in this book, the end result is the same. The anti-Fascist attempts to justify and legitimize Stalin's war policy from 1939 do not hold up. The view that the Second World War was "a crime attributable solely to National Socialist Germany" can no longer be sustained. The historical truth as seen by Russian revisionists is documented in this collection of articles published by Bordyugov and Nevezhin as well as by the renowned war historian Mikhail Melitiukhov, academic associate of the All-Russian Research Institute for Documentation and Archives.
This most recent compendium of Russian revisionist writings deepens our understanding of Stalin's preparations for a military first-strike against Germany in the summer of 1941. The strategic deployment plan, approved by Stalin at a conference on May 15, 1941, with General Staff chief Georgi Zhukov and Defense Commissar Semen Timoshenko, called for a Blitzkrieg:
Tank divisions and mechanized corps were to launch their attack from the Brest and Lviv [Lemberg] tier accompanied by destructive air strikes. The objective was to conquer East Prussia, Poland, Silesia and the [Czech] Protectorate, and thereby cut Germany off from the Balkans and the Romanian oil fields. Lublin, Warsaw, Kattowice, Cracow, Breslau [Wroclaw] and Prague were targets to be attacked.
A second attack thrust was to be directed at Romania, with the capture of Bucharest. The successful accomplishment of the immediate aims, namely, to destroy the mass of the German Army east of the Vistula, Narev and Oder rivers, was the necessary prerequisite for the fulfillment of the main objective, which was to defeat Germany in a quick campaign. The main contingents of the German armed forces were to be encircled and destroyed by tank armies in bold rapid advances.
Three recurrent terms in the mobilization plan of May 15 confirm the aggressive character of Stalin's plan. "A sudden strike" (vnyyzapni udar), "forward deployment" (razvertyvaniye), and "offensive war" (nastupatel'naya voyna). Of the 303 [Soviet] divisions assembled on the western front, 172 were assigned to the first wave of attack. One month was allotted for the total deployment -- the period from June 15 to July 15. Mikhail Melitiukhov: "On this basis it appears that the war against Germany would have to have begun in July."
This anthology also devotes much attention to analyzing Stalin's speech of May 5, 1941, delivered to graduates of Soviet military academies. In this speech Stalin justified his change of foreign policy in connection with the now decided-upon attack against Germany. From the Communist point of view even a Soviet war of aggression is a "just war" because it serves to expand the "territory of the socialist world" and "to destroy the capitalist world." Most important in this May 5 speech was Stalin's efforts to dispel the "myth of the invincible Wehrmacht." The Red Army was strong enough to smash any enemy, even the "seemingly invincible Wehrmacht."
Strauss lists (pages 102-105) the major findings and conclusions of Russian revisionists, derived mostly from the two major works cited above:
  • Stalin wanted a general European war of exhaustion in which the USSR would intervene at the politically and militarily most expedient moment. Stalin's main intention is seen in his speech to the Politburo of August 19, 1939.
  • To ignite this, Stalin used the [August 1939] Soviet-German Non-Aggression Pact, which: a) provoked Hitler's attack against Poland, and b) evoked the declarations of war [against Germany] by Britain and France.
  • In the event Germany was defeated quickly [by Britain and France], Stalin planned to "Sovietize" Germany and establish a "Communist government" there, but with the danger that the victorious capitalist powers would never permit a Communist Germany.
  • In the event France was defeated quickly [by Germany], Stalin planned the "Sovietization" of France. "A Communist revolution would seem inevitable, and we could take advantage of this for our own purposes by rushing to aid France and making her our ally. As a result of this, all the nations under the 'protection' of a victorious Germany would become our allies."
  • From the outset Stalin reckoned on a war with Germany, and the [Soviet] conquest of Germany. To this end, Stalin concentrated on the western border of the USSR operational offensive forces, which were five- to six-times stronger than the Wehrmacht with respect to tanks, aircraft and artillery.
  • With respect to a war of aggression, on May 15, 1941, the Red Army's Main Political Directorate instructed troop commanders that every war the USSR engaged in, whether defensive or offensive, would have the character of a "just war."
  • Troop contingents were to be brought up to full strength in all the western military districts; airfields and supply bases to support a forward-strategy were to be built directly behind the border; an attack force of 60 divisions was to be set up in the Ukraine and mountain divisions and a parachute corps were to be established for attack operations.
  • The 16th, 19th, 21st, 22nd and 25th Soviet Armies were transferred from the interior to the western border, and deployed at take-off points for the planned offensive.
  • In his speech of May 5, 1941, to graduate officers of the academies, Stalin said that war with Germany was inevitable, and characterized it as a war not only of a defensive nature but rather of an offensive nature.
  • Stalin intended to attack in July 1941, although Russian historians disagree about the precise date. Suvorov cites July 6, [Valeri] Danilov [a retired Soviet Colonel] gives July 2, while Melitiukhov writes: "The Red Army could not have carried out an attack before July 15."

Hitler's Proclamation

In an appendix of documents, Strauss includes portions of Hitler's "Operation Barbarossa" directive of December 18, 1940. Also here, in facsimile, is a German press announcement of June 22, 1941, that gives Hitler's reasons for Germany's attack against the Soviet Union:
This morning the Führer, through Reich Minister Dr. Goebbels, issued a proclamation to the German people in which he explains that after months-long silence he can finally speak openly to the German people about the dangerous machinations of the Jewish-Bolshevik rulers in Soviet Russia. After the German-Russian Friendship Treaty in the Autumn of 1939, he hoped for an easing of tensions with Russia. This hope, however, was crushed by Soviet Russia's extortionist demands against both Finland and the Baltic states as well as against Romania.
After the victory in Poland the Western powers rejected the Führer's proposal for an understanding because they were hoping that Soviet Russia would attack Germany. Since the Spring of 1940 Soviet troops have been deploying in ever increasing numbers along the German border, so that since August 1940 strong German forces have been tied down in the East, making any major German effort in the West impossible.
During his [November 1940] visit to Berlin, [Soviet foreign minister] Molotov posed questions regarding Romania, Finland, Bulgaria and the Dardanelles that clearly revealed that Soviet Russia intended to create trouble in eastern Europe. To be sure, the Bolshevik coup attempt against the [Romanian] government of Antonescu failed, but, with the help of the Anglo-Saxon powers [Britain and the United States], their putsch in Yugoslavia succeeded. Serbian air force officers flew to Russia and were immediately incorporated in the Army there.
With these machinations Moscow has not just broken the so-called German-Russian Friendship Treaty, it has betrayed it. In his proclamation the Führer stressed that further silence on his part would be a crime not only against Germany, but against Europe as well. On the border now stand 160 Russian divisions,[note 14] which have repeatedly violated that frontier. On June 17-18 Soviet patrols were forced back across the border only after a lengthy exchange of fire. Meanwhile, to protect Europe and defend against further Russian provocations, the greatest build-up of forces ever has been assembled against Soviet Russia. German troops stand from the Arctic Ocean to the Black Sea, allied in the north with Finnish troops and along the Bessarabian border with Romanian forces.
The Führer concluded his proclamation with the following sentences: "I have therefore decided to once again lay the fate and the future of the German Reich and of our people in the hands of our soldiers. May the Lord God help us especially in this struggle!"

Coming to Terms With the Past

Even though more and more independent Russian, German and other European historians support the revisionist arguments of Suvorov (and others), it still seems impossible, especially in Germany, to reapportion historical responsibility from Hitler to Stalin. In this regard, Strauss recalls (pages 45-46) a discussion in May 1993 at the Military History Research Office in Freiburg involving German historian Dr. Joachim Hoffmann, decades-long associate of the Research Office, and Russian historian Viktor Suvorov. Hoffman told of conversations on the "preventive war" issue he has had with prominent Germans, including President Richard von Weizsäcker, the influential journalist Marion Gräfin Dönhoff, and political figures Egon Bahr and Heinrich Graf von Einsiedel. In every case he was told that even if Suvorov is correct, and Hitler's attack indeed preceded Stalin's by weeks, this must not be acknowledged publicly because it would exonerate Hitler. This is typical, says Hoffmann, of the immoral attitude that prevails in Germany. In their egotism, he adds, these Germans do not realize that they are, in effect, demanding that Russians accept the propaganda lies of the Stalin era.
Strauss contrasts the very different attitudes of Germans and Russians toward 20th century history, and the role of historical revisionism. Whereas Germans are imbued with a national masochistic guilt complex about their collectively "evil" past, which was instilled during the postwar occupation as part of Allied "reeducation" campaign, and reinforced ever since in their media and by "their" political leaders, Russians are much more free and open about their Communist past, largely because they have not been occupied by foreign conquerers, and their media and educational system has not come under the control of outsiders.[note 15] Although die-hard Communists try to uphold the historiography of the Soviet era, most Russians want to know the truth about their past. After all, Strauss points out, one out of every two Russian families suffered under the Stalinist tyranny. For the time being, anyway, nothing is taboo in Russia, including the role of Jews in the Communist movement. (By contrast, Germans are forbidden by law to say anything derogatory about the political activities of Jews in the first half of the 20th century.)
The term "genocide" is used to refer particularly to the World War II treatment of Europe's Jews. Without in any way minimizing the sufferings of innocent Jews caught up in that maelstrom, one should not forget that Stalin's Soviet regime inflicted a much more ruthless and widespread genocide against the Russian and Ukrainian peoples. It is estimated that in the Soviet Union about 20 million people, the vast majority of them Slavs, lost their lives as a result of Soviet policies, either executed or otherwise perished in the Gulag prison network or as victims of imposed famine, and so forth. Millions of Germans were also victims of genocide. It is estimated that some four million Germans were killed or otherwise perished during the 1944-1948 period, victims of Allied-imposed "ethnic cleansing," starvation, slave labor in the USSR, and in inhumane POW camps administered by the victorious Allies.[note 16]
In promoting greater understanding of the calamitous German-Russian clash of 1941-1945, German and Russian revisionist scholars foster reconciliation between these two peoples. Strauss cites recent developments that attest to this process. In Volgograd, victors and vanquished have joined to erect a monument dedicated to all the victims of the Battle of Stalingrad. Its inscription, written in Russian and German, reads: "This monument commemorates the suffering of the soldiers and civilians who fell here. We ask that those who died here and in captivity will rest in eternal peace in Russian soil." On the outskirts of St. Petersburg a German soldiers' cemetery and memorial was recently dedicated. Across Russia today, it is not unusual for Russian women to tend the graves of German soldiers. (Because the Soviet government did very little to help identify and provide decent burials for their war dead, few Russian women have had any idea where their own sons, brothers, and husbands fell.)
In the book's epilogue, Strauss describes the fervent indignation and rage of Russians over the criminal capitalism that has taken hold in their country. The inequities between the nouveau riches and the mass of Russian working class people are now greater than under Soviet rule. Many Russian revisionists see an intrinsic resemblance and affinity between capitalism and Communism. Given that many former Soviet officials still hold office or otherwise wield power in the "new Russia," everyone readily sees how easy it has been for members of the old Soviet elite -- the Nomenklatura -- to reemerge in Russia's predatory capitalism as racketeers, gangsters, money speculators, bank frauders, extortionists and mafiosi. On the ruins of the Soviet system, writes Strauss, has emerged a new dictatorship of pitilessness, corruption, criminality, social division, poverty and despair. Resentment against the "reformist" policies advocated by the United States is widespread.
In this regard Strauss cites the views of Spanish writer Juan Goytisolo, who asserts that if this social pathology endures in Russia, then Karl Marx's analysis will be proven correct, at least in part. While Marx was wrong about the promised virtues of Communism, writes Goytisolo, events seem to confirm his critique of capitalism, especially of unrestrained monetarism that knows only one value, namely, maximum profits regardless of human cost.[note 17]

'Strong and Free'

Whether they call themselves "Reformers" (Westernizers), Communists or nationalists ("Eurasians"), Russians today, writes Strauss, overwhelmingly reject all forms of internationalism, whether Communist or capitalist. They want a Russia that is strong and free.
Toward this goal, many look to geopolitics, an outlook built on the Eurasian "heartland" theory expounded by 20th-century British geographer Halford Mackinder and promoted in Third Reich Germany by Karl Haushofer. (According to this theory, Russia has the potential for great power and prosperity because it is the core of the vast, resource-rich Eurasian heartland.) The leading exponent in Russia today of this view is Alexander Dugin, whose book, "The Basics of Geopolitics: Russia's Geopolitical Future," has been influential with both old Communists and new nationalists in a grouping sometimes referred to as the "national Bolshevik alliance," and whose adherents are known as "Eurasianists." Dugin is a close associate of Gennady Zyuganov, head of the country's largest political party, the Russian Communist Party (which, in spite of its name, is much more nationalist than Marxist). Zyuganov himself is the author of a recent book, "The Geography of Victory: The Bases of Russian Geopolitics."
Russia's parliament, the Duma, has established a Committee of Geopolitical Affairs, chaired by Alexey Mitrofanov, a member of Vladimir Zhirinovksy's Liberal Democratic Party. (Zhirinovsky proposes the formation of a Berlin-Moscow-Tokyo axis, and has been quoted as saying: "Today, the United States of America is the major enemy of our country. All our actions and dealings with America from now on should be undertaken with this in mind.")

Notes

     
  1. Strauss, born in 1931, was arrested for anti-Communist activities as an Oberschuler (secondary school student) in East Germany (DDR) and imprisoned, 1950-1956. He is the author of several other notable books on Russia, including Russland wird leben: vom roten Stern zur Zarenfahne (1992), Drei Tage, die die Welt erschutterten (1992), Burgerrechtler in der UdSSR (1979), and Von der Wiedergeburt slawophiler Ideen in Russland (1977). He is also a frequent contributor to scholarly journals. He currently lives in Bavaria, where he works as a Slavic affairs specialist.
  2. See: Ernst Nolte, Der Europäische Bürgerkrieg 1917-1945: Nationalsozialismus und Bolschewismus (Munich: 1997 [5th ed.]). Nolte has strongly suggested that Hitler's wartime treatment of the Jews might legitimately be regarded as a defensive response by Hitler to the threat of Bolshevik mass murder of the Germans. In a 1980 lecture he said: "It is hard to deny that Hitler had good reason to be convinced of his enemies' determination to annihilate long before the first information about the events in Auschwitz became public." See also the interview with Nolte in the Jan.-Feb. 1994 Journal (Vol. 14, No. 1), pp. 15-22, and "Changing Perspectives on History in Germany: A Prestigious Award for Nolte: Portent of Greater Historical Objectivity?," July-August 2000 Journal, pp. 29-32.
  3. François Furet and Ernst Nolte, Feindliche Nähe: Kommunismus und Faschismus im 20. Jahrhundert: Ein Briefwechsel (Munich: 1998).
  4. The Black Book of Communism: Crimes, Terror, Repression, by Stéphane Courtois and others (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1999). Original edition: Le livre noir du communisme: Crimes, terreur, répression (Paris: 1997). Earlier works by Courtois include Histoire du parti communiste français (1995), L'etat du monde en 1945 (1994), Rigueur et passion (1994), 50 ans d'une passion français (1991), and Qui savait quoi? (1987).
  5. Courtois has also written: "I am fighting for a reevaluation of Stalin. He was to be sure the greatest criminal of the century. But at the same time he was the greatest politician -- the most competent, the most professional. He was the one who understood most perfectly how to put his resources at the service of his goals."
  6. Russian nationalists are fully aware, just as were the anti-Bolshevik "White Russians," that the leaders of Russia's Marxist movement -- Mensheviks and Bolsheviks alike -- were predominantly not Russian at all. As evidence of the alien character of the Bolshevik revolution and of the early Soviet regime, Russian nationalists (along with many others) often cite The Last Days of the Romanovs, a work by British writer Robert Wilton (and now translated into Russian). In an appendix to the 1993 IHR edition of this work (pp. 184-190), Wilton also notes: "According to data furnished by the Soviet press, out of important functionaries of the Bolshevik state... in 1918-1919 there were: 17 Russians, two Ukrainians, eleven Armenians, 35 Letts [Latvians], 15 Germans, one Hungarian, ten Georgians, three Poles, three Finns, one Czech, one Karaim, and 457 Jews." See also: M. Weber, "The Jewish Role in the Bolshevik Revolution and the Early Soviet Regime," Jan.-Feb. 1994 Journal, pp. 4-14.
  7. A special 1996 edition of the Moscow newspaper Russkiy Vestnik lists the names of the executioners: Yankel Yurovsky, Anselm Fischer, Istvan Kolman, A. Chorwat, Isidor Edelstein, Imre Magy [?], Victor Grinfeld, Andreas Wergasi and S. Farkash. The article concludes: "All of this attests to the non-Russian origin of the murderers."
  8. According to Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, the six directors were Semyon Firin, Matvei Berman, Naftali Frenkel, Lazar Kogan, Yakov Rappoport, Sergei Zhuk. The Head of the Military Guards was Brodsky, the Canal Curator of the Central Executive Committee was Solts, the GPU and NKVD heads were Yagoda, Pauker, Spiegelglas, Kaznelson, Sakovskiy, Sorensen, Messing and Arshakuni. As the names indicate, all were non-Russians. Stalin awarded most of these murderers the honorary title "Hero of Labor." See: Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, The Gulag Archipelago, III-IV, Book Two (New York: Harper & Row, 1975), pp. 79, 81, 82, 84, 94, etc.
  9. This generalization is mostly valid for the first 20 years of Soviet rule. However, following the Great Purge (1937-1939), and except for several years after World War II in East Europe where Stalin used Jewish Communists to instal puppet regimes, the dictator until his death actively opposed elements he referred to as cosmopolitans, parasites, and so forth.
  10. Grigorenko originally submitted his article to the Soviet journal Voprosy istorii KPSS, which (of course) rejected it. It was published in 1969 by Possev, a Russian emigré publishing house in Frankfurt am Main.
  11. Suvorov's first three books on World War II have been reviewed in The Journal of Historical Review. The first two, Icebreaker and "M Day," were reviewed in Nov.-Dec. 1997 Journal (Vol. 16, No. 6), pp. 22-34. His third book, "The Last Republic," was reviewed in the July-August 1998 Journal (Vol. 17, No. 4), pp. 30-37.
  12. See the review of Stalins Falle ("Stalin's Trap"), by Adolf von Thadden, in the May-June 1999 Journal, pp. 40-45.
  13. Gotovil li Stalin nastupatel'nuyu voynu protiv Gitlera ("Did Stalin Make Preparations for an Offensive War Against Hitler?," by Grigoriy Bordyugov and Vladimir Nevezhin (Moscow: AIRO XX, 1995), and, 1 sentyabrya 1939-9 maya 1945: Pyatidesyatiletiye razgroma fashistkoy Germanii v Kontekste Nachala Vtoroy Mirovoy Voyny ("September 1, 1939-May 9, 1945: the 50th Anniversary of the Defeat of Fascist Germany in the Context of the Beginning of the War"), edited by I.V. Pavlova and V. L. Doroshenko (Novosibirsk Memorial, 1995). The latter work was briefly cited in the Nov.-Dec. 1997 Journal, pp. 32-34.
  14. The German High Command greatly underestimated the number of Soviet divisions, as well as the quality and quantity of Soviet tanks. Hitler and the Wehrmacht were to find not 160 divisions on their doorstep, but more than 300. See: David Irving, Hitler's War (New York: Viking, 1977), pp. 205-206, 297. On the correlation of forces in June 1941, see also Joachim Hoffmann, Stalins Vernichtungskrieg 1941-1945 (Munich, 1995), Chapter 1, and esp. pp. 31, 66.
  15. Ominously, however, the "oligarchs," most of them Jewish, exercise considerable control over the Russian media. See: Daniel W. Michaels, "Capitalism in the New Russia," May-June 1997 Journal, pp. 21-27, and, "A Jewish Appeal to Russia's Elite," Nov.-Dec. 1998 Journal, pp. 13-18.
  16. See: Alfred-Maurice de Zayas, The German Expellees: Victims in War and Peace (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1993), Alfred-M. de Zayas, Nemesis at Potsdam: The Expulsion of the Germans From the East (Lincoln: Univ. of Nebraska, 1989 [3rd rev. ed.]), James Bacque, Other Losses (Prima, 1991), J. Bacque, Crimes and Mercies (Little, Brown, 1997), Ralph Keeling, Gruesome Harvest: The Allies' Postwar War Against the German People (IHR, 1992).
  17. Juan Goytisolo, La Saga de los Marx (Barcelona: Mondadori, 1993). Although Goytisolo was undoubtedly one of Spain's foremost 20th century novelists, both his political views and private life were highly controversial. Expelled from Spain by Franco, he lived most of his life in France.
     

From The Journal of Historical Review, November/December 2000 (Vol. 19, No. 6), page 40.
About the author
Daniel W. Michaels is a Columbia University graduate (Phi Beta Kappa, 1954), and a former Fulbright exchange student to Germany (1957). He is retired from the US Department of Defense after 40 years of service.