Happy Fall Weiß Day!

[Syt]

http://www.dw.de/marking-the-75th-anniversary-of-the-outbreak-of-world-war-ii/a-17891943

Marking the 75th anniversary of the outbreak of World War II

Ceremonies are being held to mark the 75th anniversary of the outbreak of World War II. This comes at a time of heightened concerns about security among the European Union's eastern states in particular.

German President Joachim Gauck is to join his Polish counterpart, Bronislaw Komorowski , on the Westerplatte peninsula in Gdansk on Monday, for the main ceremony to mark the beginning of World War II.

The two heads of state are to place candles at the graves of soldiers who lost their lives in the battle that marked the outbreak of the war, before laying a wreath at the memorial to the defenders of the Polish coast at Westerplatte.

In keeping with the spirit of friendship between the two former foes, Gauck and Koromoski are also to take part in discussion session with a group of students.

Fighting breaks out

The fighting began in the early hours of September 1, 1939, when the German battleship Schleswig-Holstein fired on the Polish fort of Westerplatte. The first battle of the Second World War quickly ensued.

The attack on Poland by Adolf Hitler's Nazi regime led Britain and France to declare war on Germany two days later.

The fewer than 200 Polish soldiers posted to Westerplatte fought bravely, holding out for a full week before their commander surrendered to the German forces.

Prior to the attack on Westerplatte, the Nazi's had staged a number of operations aimed at creating the illusion of Polish aggression on Germany as a pretext for attack. The best know of this was the "Gleiwitz incident," an operation by Nazis posing as Poles on the German radio station "Sender Gleiwitz" in Gliwice, which was then part of Germany.

Remembrance in Gliwice

On Sunday, German and Polish Roman Catholic bishops gathered in Gliwice to mark the outbreak of war between their two countries 75 years earlier.

The chairman of the German Bishops' Conference, Cardinal Reinhard Marx, joined his Polish counterpart, Stanislaw Gadecki in a ceremony to remember the death, suffering and destruction that Hitler's Nazis imposed on the Polish people.

In view of the events of 1939 and the five years that followed, Cardinal Marx said the fact that Germans and Poles were now friends and allies was a "miracle of the mercy of God."

Current security concerns

The ceremonies to remember the outbreak of World War II come at a time when fighting between pro-Russia separatists and government forces in eastern Ukraine has raised concerns about security in Europe, particularly for eastern members of the European Union and the Western military alliance NATO.

Representatives of Russia, Ukraine and the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe were to hold talks in the Belarusian capital, Minsk on Monday, in the latest effort to bring an end to the bloodshed. This comes after EU leaders agreed on the weekend to direct the European Commission to prepare tougher sanctions that could be imposed on Russia within the next week for its alleged role in the conflict.

[Syt]

http://www.dw.de/how-nazi-policies-of-expansion-led-to-world-war-ii/a-17889233

How Nazi policies of expansion led to World War II

On September 1, 1939, the Wehrmacht invaded neighboring Poland without warning. Hitler had been planning the Blitzkrieg since 1933. DW takes a look at the events leading up to WWII.

The war did not come as a surprise. Hitler was not secretive about his aggressive expansion policies.

But again and again, says Klaus Hesse from the Topography of Terror Documentation Center in Berliner, he maintained publicly that he was taking the peaceful route.

The war did not come as a surprise. Hitler was not secretive about his aggressive expansion policies, although he did time and again maintain he was taking the pacifistic route, points out Klaus Hesse from the Topography of Terror Documentation Center in Berliner.

"Everything Hitler did was geared toward war ever since he came to power in 1933. From the very beginning, his aim was to revise the post-war order ordained in the Treaty of Versailles - to regain hegemony in Europe through an enlarged Germany. Everything was aimed at creating a large-scale economy that would allow Germany to wage a vast and long-term war in Europe."

Domestic war

The Treaty of Versailles in 1919 forced Germany and its allies to accept sole responsibility for causing the First World War and committed it to making territorial concessions, disarming and paying reparations. As Hitler saw it, this was a great humiliation, and he made it his mission to rectify it.

The so-called "stab-in-the-back" conspiracy theory was particularly convenient for Hitler's plans. And it wasn't very difficult to convince the public that the Social Democrats and the Jews had "stabbed the Reich in the back." And so a new war began within the country's own boundaries.

Just a few days after he gained power, Hitler called for a country-wide boycott of Jewish shops on April 1, 1933. After that he passed the "Law for the Restoration of the Professional Civil Service," which forced all non-"Aryans" and those not loyal to the National Socialist (NS) Party to retire from civil service.

From the very beginning, it was also about securing the financial means to wage war. Before the Nazis created a legal framework to regulate the pillaging of Jewish property and possessions, Jewish businesspeople were put under pressure to make profits off others fleeing the country. Emigrants had to pay 25 percent of their taxable assets to the German government, which in the first two years of NS rule alone earned the government 153 million reichsmark. On all bank transfers abroad, there was a fee that had to be paid to a state banking institution, the "Deutsche Golddiskontbank."

By September 1939, that fee had risen to 96 percent of the transfer sum.

Berlin 1936 - Olympic Games and war plans

Up to 1939, the majority of Germans saw Hitler as someone who could fix the country. His dictatorship brought about a positive change in the economic situation for many people. Unemployment sank, consumerism increased.

"So in this sense, Hitler was quite a populist - he knew you had to give the people butter along with guns," Hesse told DW.

But weapons were, in fact, more important for the government.

While Berlin was hosting the Olympic Games, Hitler was busy solidifying his war plans. In four years, the Nazi armed forces, the Wehrmacht, were to be fit to carry out the war in the east. Hitler's plan as noted in his classified "Four-Year Plan" was to make Germany self-sufficient in many areas so it could isolate itself from the world market and invest all its resources in arms and military buildup. Soon, half of the state's expenditures were going towards weapons.

The same year, the Wehrmacht occupied the demilitarized Rheinland in the west of the country - in clear violation of the Treaty of Versailles. In November 1937, Hitler told his secret plans to a select circle of the Wehrmacht's top generals: Germany needs more space, or "Lebensraum," for the "preservation and growth of the German people."

September 1938 - war postponed

In the year 1938, Hitler annexed his birth country Austria. Shortly thereafter, he threatened to invade Czechoslovakia because the local German population there supposedly suffered from discrimination.

British and French politicians feared a European war - and tried to avoid one through politics of appeasement. By giving Hitler what he understood to be his nation's right, he would calm down - that was the hope.

In the Munich Agreement, the Sudetenland, the German-speaking border regions of Czechoslovakia, were ceded to Germany.

"Chamberlain let Hitler get away with a whole lot of territorial expansion without letting it come to war," says historian Antony Beevor.

As for the what would have happened had an anti-appeasement Winston Churchill already been prime minister at the time, the historian can't say.

"Would the British and the French have been in a stronger position in September 1939? We will never know."

Hesse says the fear of war was palpable in Germany in 1938. "It became evident that the transformation from a weak Germany to a strong one was not going to be possible without war."

The Munich Agreement was packaged by Nazi propaganda and sold to the German public as one of Hitler's successful peace policies. But in reality, Hitler was upset about the agreement because he would have preferred to go to war then.

In September 1939 - no coup

What is tragic about the events around this time in history was that, as of September 1938, Hitler was very alone with his plans for war. His generals wanted to avoid a war at any cost. Chief of the German General Staff Franz Halder, who was a top commander in and around Berlin, along with Berlin's chief of police had already formed a new government with civil service workers critical of the NS and former Social Democrat politicians. A secret brigade of assault troops was prepared to overrun the Reich Chancellery as soon as Hitler declared war.

But a year later, a coup was no longer on the agenda. Though no one cheered on September 1, 1939, most Germans stood behind Hitler nonetheless. And they were prepared to wage war for their "Führer."

Sixty million people lost their lives in the Second World War. The National Socialists killed six million Jews. For Antony Beevor, the Second World War was the "biggest disaster caused by man in all of history."

[Syt]

And one more ...

http://www.dw.de/moral-choice-explains-fascination-with-wwii/a-17881948

'Moral choice explains fascination with WWII'

On the anniversary of Hitler's invasion of Poland in 1939, DW spoke with English historian Antony Beevor. He explains Hitler and Stalin's impact on the individual, the global nature of the war, and the morality debate.

DW: Mr. Beevor, on September 1, 1939 - 75 years ago - Hitler's Wehrmacht invaded Poland. Was this the beginning of the Second World War?

Antony Beevor: I don't think it is entirely, because the point about the Second World War was, of course, that it was a conglomeration of many different conflicts. One of the most important in many ways was the Sino-Japanese War, of which we don't know nearly enough in the West.

I in fact start the book with the battle at Chalchin Gol [Eds: in May 1939]. Although this wasn't a very big battle, the Japanese defeat had a huge effect on the cause of the war not just in the Pacific but also on the war on the eastern front because it meant that the Japanese were not going to help Hitler in his advance on Moscow. This shows that it was very much a global war, rather than just a European war.

You're right; we tend to look at the Second World War as a European War. I was surprised that your book "The Second World War" starts with the example of a young Korean soldier, Yang Kyungjong. Why did you pick him? What does he stand for?

He stands for two things: One is the truly global aspect of this war. Here is this young Korean, forced into the Chinese army in Mongolia, captured by the Russians, forced into a Soviet uniform, captured by the Germans, forced into German uniform, and then he is finally captured by the Americans in Normandy and dies in America. He's gone all around the world. But the other important aspect is that he underlines how the ordinary person had no control over their own fate. And those two aspects struck me very much.

Who started the war? Wasn't it Hitler?

Well, Hitler would have started - and he did - the war in Europe, but he didn't necessarily start the war in the Far East. No, far from it. Obviously the European war was a very important part of it and the way that Hitler was so determined to have a war characterized the extreme cruelty of the conflict.

How important were the politics of appeasement? There was, for example, no response when Hitler sent troops into the demilitarized zone of the Rhineland, and no response when he marched into Czechoslovakia. What role did Chamberlain play?

He played an important part in the sense that he allowed Hitler to get away with the various territorial aggrandisements that he wanted and achieved, in fact, without actually having gone to war itself. We know that Hitler felt angry that he didn't get a war in September 1938. But if one tries to say, "What if Churchill had been prime minister and he had faced up to Germany earlier," would the French and the British have been in a stronger position in 1938 against the Wehrmacht than they were in September 1939? I think all of these questions are important to pose but will never get an answer.

In Germany we tend to think that the Second World War was about Hitler against the rest of the world. Who were the enemies according to your research?

It's so difficult in many ways to make it absolutely clear. One has to remember: Stalin was Hitler's ally when it came to the partition of Poland. Then that changed. And that's why I think it's important to understand all of these different conflicts coming together as opposed to trying to portray it as a simple ideological battle. To think that Britain and America were there purely to defend democracy in the rest of the world is far too simplistic.

Britain had traditional strategic imperatives in Europe, which was to prevent any single power dominating the rest of the region. America had a slightly more ideological one, but it was also a question of self-interest knowing that the American trade would suffer in the long term if a dictatorship dominated the whole of Europe. So motives were not always presented later in terms of national myths. The implication that we went to war to save the Jews is strictly wrong because at that particular stage nobody ever imagined that Hitler would carry out the Final Solution and even he at that stage had not fully decided it.

If we speak about the Second World War, we also have to speak about the Holocaust. How does the Holocaust fit into the history of the Second World War? Is this a history of its own - or is it connected to the other events?

That's a very important question because what we've seen too much in the recent past, particularly in the United States, is that the Holocaust was almost created into a separate story apart from the Second World War and that, I think, was a big mistake. Two years ago, I was involved in a big conference at Yad Vashem and I was very encouraged in the way that they were trying to reintegrate the Holocaust into the history of the Second World War. Without the military context you cannot actually understand important aspects of the Holocaust itself.

So it was part of Hitler's warfare?

There is no doubt. One has to remember that originally the final solution - die Endlösung - was going to be very much an act to be carried out once victory had been achieved. And this is the important aspect of that period of 1941 where many historians have argued with great intensity over when exactly the decision was made to move from what is called "the Shoah by bullets" to the Shoah by gas.

I don't know if we will ever have a definitive answer to that particular question, but there was no doubt that it was linked in to the inability of the Wehrmacht to achieve victory on the eastern front. Hitler, I think, was desperate to make sure the Jews did not escape. And that is why he encouraged or even ordered the switch to industrial murder from the mass murder of the Einsatzgruppen [Eds: special units tasked with murdering Jews and other people deemed undesirable by the Nazi regime].

In total, 60 million people died in the Second World War. You call it "the greatest man-made disaster in history." What are the dimensions of the war? How did these five-and-a-half years - if we count from September 1939 to May 1945 - change our world?

It certainly changed our world, but not just politically. It wasn't just the number of people who were killed, but everybody's lives were changed or profoundly effected by it. That's why at the end of the book I tell the story of a German farmer's wife who had fallen in love with a Frenchman. None of these things would have happened if there hadn't been that war. And one of the points of the book is the attempt to integrate history from above with history from below. Because certainly in that way you can really convey the affects of Stalin and Hitler on the lives of absolutely everybody.

What ended the Second World War?

Two separate answers: What ended the Second World War in Europe was of course the final exhaustion of German resources and the destruction of its army on the eastern front. In Japan, it is no doubt that it was the atomic bombs. The Japanese military were determined to fight on even after the atomic bombs had been dropped. They had never allowed any soldier to surrender to the enemy. Of course there is a big debate about the morality of dropping the atomic bomb, but somebody has estimated between two and eight million, counting the number of Japanese who would have died if the atomic bombs had not been dropped.

So - and this is one of the fascinating aspects of the Second World War - there is the question of moral choice. And moral choice, let's face it, is the basis of all human drama, which is perhaps why the Second World War is still of such extraordinary fascination even today - 75 years on.

Antony Beevor is an English historian and a former officer with the 11th Hussars. He served in England and Germany for five years before resigning his commission. He has published several books on the Second World War, including "Stalingrad" and "D-Day." His latest publication, "The Second World War," is now also being released in Germany.

[Admiral Yi]

Does Germany have any celebrations in which it's the good guy?

[Syt]

Does Germany have any celebrations in which it's the good guy?

Reunification Day, I think, and maybe 9th November (Fall of the Wall, not Hitler Putsch 1923 or Pogrom Night 1938). And perhaps 23rd May as anniversary of our constitution.

We used to have June 17th in the West in memory of the East German uprising, but that one was replaced b Reunification Day.