WW2: German Intellectuals Tells It Like It Is

[jimmy olsen]

What was the other option?  Invade a recalcitrant Poland and fight Germany east of Warsaw, getting absolutely slaughtered because their army was in complete disarray?

Ask and you shall receive 

http://www.amazon.com/Hitlers-War-Harry-Turtledove/dp/0345491823

I did not ask for a Harry Turtledove novel, Tim.

From what I hear the Soviets "Invade a recalcitrant Poland and fight Germany east of Warsaw, getting absolutely slaughtered because their army was in complete disarray."

[Razgovory]

And there will be eight books in the series and the last one will be released in 2031.

[Ideologue]

What if the Russians invaded a recalcitrant Poland, but it turned out the Poles were really aliens?

Makes Katyn Forest seem more reasonable, I guess.

Was it truly BS?

Haw. :p  No, but it could've been better if I could've found some translated Soviet documents (or alternatively actually learned how to read Russian)... and a lot better if the translated documents I did get, a three-volume set of important documents from the Soviet foreign ministry that was supposed to include everything vital from 1920-something to 1941, had actually had all three volumes, like the listing said, instead of just the first.

Not too terribly much about the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact in the Soviet documents from 1927.

Unfortunately, I had to rely almost entirely on the German and British documents, and make inferences about the Soviet side from various memoirs and secondary sources.

[Razgovory]

What if the Russians invaded a recalcitrant Poland, but it turned out the Poles were really aliens?

Makes Katyn Forest seem more reasonable, I guess.

What would the position of the Giant Ants of Brest-Litovsk be?

[Ideologue]

What if the Russians invaded a recalcitrant Poland, but it turned out the Poles were really aliens?

Makes Katyn Forest seem more reasonable, I guess.

What would the position of the Giant Ants of Brest-Litovsk be?

That Resistance was a fun a game?

[Razgovory]

I miss Hamilcar.

[Josquius]

By the way it was no political decision to sit behind the Maginot line that was Gamelin's "strategy" (until France and Britain had mobilized their Empires supposedly) and not one that his Prime Minister endorsed or wanted and he spent most of the phony war desperate to fire Gamelin. 

On the Maginot line- I remember reading recently (can't remember where at all) that the French fully planned for the Germans to flank the Maginot line through the low countries (what with them having done this before).
The entire reason for the Maginot line was to encourage this flanking- thus causing the heavy fighting to tear up Belgium rather than France.
Anything to this?

To be completely honest I tend to agree with this,

So Stalin thought that moving the Germans closer and giving their Army, still rebuilding from the Versailles treaty, time to rebuild itself was actually advantageous to the Soviet Union?  With the German economy being far larger so they could increase their forces far faster than the Soviets?  Wow what an idiot.

That is the worst excuse I have heard since some Western Allies apologists claimed giving the Germans the Czech lands, along with the Skoda works, bought them time to...I don't know...fall further behind the German war machine.

I find it really hard to believe that everybody thought it was far preferable to let the Germans get stronger than to attack them when they were still weak.  Maybe a sense of fairplay and sportsmanship was dominating the minds of European leaders in the 1930s.

With Britain they certainly DID buy time with appeasment.
The UK was in absolutely no shape to fight a war and its better economy and industry meant it benefitted more from preperation time than Germany.
Consider also falty intelligance that painted Germany as stronger than it was and its quite understandable.

This may or may not be factually accurate, but it has the flavour of a post facto reason. Chamberlin was I think quite sincere in believing he could buy peace.

On its face, and lacking hindsight, it wasn't a totally unreasonable point of view. The notion was that Hitler and the Germans were rightly pissed off by the mishmash made of Germany by the post WW1 settlement, that all of his master race stuff was puffery for domestic consumption, and that if he was allowed a "fair settlement" he'd settle down and behave like Franco and Mussolini

Hmm, I dunno.
The idea that Chamberlin was a machivelian genius skillfully buying time for the inevitable war is of course wrong but equally false I think is the traditional widespread view that he was a ignorant moron who fell for Hitler totally.
I'd tend in the middle, he hoped Hitler could be true to his word and thought there was a chance of this but he certainly wasn't placing any bets on that.

[Admiral Yi]

On the Maginot line- I remember reading recently (can't remember where at all) that the French fully planned for the Germans to flank the Maginot line through the low countries (what with them having done this before).
The entire reason for the Maginot line was to encourage this flanking- thus causing the heavy fighting to tear up Belgium rather than France.
Anything to this?

No.  There was a gap left on purpose in the French defenses in Alsace in WWI called the Trouee des Charmes into which they hoped to funnel a German attack.  Perhaps you're confusing the Maginot line with that.  The three reasons I've read about the incompleteness of the Maginot Line are: lack of funds, the high water table, and the urban density on the French/Belgian border.

[Valmy]

On the Maginot line- I remember reading recently (can't remember where at all) that the French fully planned for the Germans to flank the Maginot line through the low countries (what with them having done this before).
The entire reason for the Maginot line was to encourage this flanking- thus causing the heavy fighting to tear up Belgium rather than France.
Anything to this?

That is absolutely true.  All of France's best armies were on the Belgian border.  The plan was the Germans would attack the Netherlands and Belgium and then the French would swoop in and the Belgians and Dutch would join the cause and swell the Allied ranks.  There were three problems that the French didn't consider:

1. That the Dutch would surrender in 24 hours thus taking 20 divisions out of the total the French were counting on almost immediately.  This was not too surprising though as the Dutch Army was ridiculously under-funded, poorly trained, and poorly equipt.  Still the French expected to be able to make it there to engage the Germans before the Dutch gave up.

2. That the huge and state of the art Belgian fortress of Eben Emael, which was expected to hold out for over a week, was taken by a handful of glider troops in just a few hours.

3. That the German main attack would be in the French center, where they had placed their weakest reserve troops.

The result of this was that the French sent in their reserves in the north to counter-act the disasters in Low Countries and did not have anything to help when the center collapsed.

The primary problem for the French, though, was not that the Germans outflanked the Maginot Line, it was they outflanked it at a place the French did not think they would.

[Valmy]

No.  There was a gap left on purpose in the French defenses in Alsace in WWI called the Trouee des Charmes into which they hoped to funnel a German attack.  Perhaps you're confusing the Maginot line with that.  The three reasons I've read about the incompleteness of the Maginot Line are: lack of funds, the high water table, and the urban density on the French/Belgian border.

Well it was French policy to fight the war on Belgian and not French soil if they could manage it.

You are forgetting the most obvious reason: the French did not want to basically announce to the Belgians that in the event of a German attack the French planned to desert them.

[Admiral Yi]

You are forgetting the most obvious reason: the French did not want to basically announce to the Belgians that in the event of a German attack the French planned to desert them.

I think the most obvious reason was lack of money.

[Razgovory]

But Munich was needed, from a British perspective, because we'd only started re-arming in 36/7.  If it had come to war in 38 Britain would barely have an RAF.

That was what the French airforce said as well.  It was nonsense, the combined forces of Czechoslovakia, France, and the UK were a better match for Germany than the situation the west would find itself in in 1939.

Plus the Soviets would have protected the Czechs who were one of the few pro-Russian peoples on Eastern Europe.

Not the to mention the possibility of getting the little Entente on board.  With out Romania in the Axis camp the Germans would have some serious problems with oil.

[Valmy]

I think the most obvious reason was lack of money.

Well the whole thing was a waste of money that should have been spent on better weapons, training, armor, and the tragically neglected air force.  If they had extended it to the Channel the French military would have been just that much more neglected for the things it really needed.

The Maginot Line was not worth a sous in my opinion.

[Valmy]

Not the to mention the possibility of getting the little Entente on board.  With out Romania in the Axis camp the Germans would have some serious problems with oil.

Well...I would like to think they would have helped.

[Neil]

...is 100% unadulterated, pure, pristine bullshit. The end of Czechoslovakia did show to everyone what meeting Hitler's 'moderate' demands meant, i.e. unmoderate demands barely half a year later.

Is dismantling Czechoslovakia really all that 'unmoderate' though?  After all, it was created as part of the illegitimate settlement after the Great War.  Nazi foreign policy before the war seemed to focus on the reconsolidation of the empires of the East, a laudable goal really.