If ever the history of our times comes to be written by scholars free of national prejudices, the “crimes against humanity” committed by the victors of the Second World War of the twentieth century A.D., will appear as equal to those committed by the Nazis. For an objective observer of the “crimes, follies, and cruelties of mankind” cannot deny that the expropriations and expulsion from their homes of millions of people for the sole crime of belonging to the German “race” was an atrocity comparable with the extermination of the Jews and the massacres of the Poles and Russians by the Nazis. The women and children who died of hunger and cold on the long trek from Silesia and the Sudetenland to what remained of the German Reich, may have thought that a quick death in a gas chamber would have been comparatively merciful.

So wrote the irrepressible Freda Utley in her The High Cost of Vengeance published in 1949. [1]

While many of the “national prejudices” of 1949 no longer exist for the bulk of the American and European populations, an objective presentation of what happened during World War II and its aftermath is still a taboo subject. In fact, it might even be more difficult to present a truthful picture today than it was in the early postwar era. For in the more than half-century that has transpired since Miss Utley penned these words, the Nazi genocide against the European Jews, now given the name “Holocaust,” has become interpreted as the greatest crime in history-a uniquely evil event, overshadowing everything else that took place in that conflagration. To imply that whatever suffering the German people underwent in the aftermath of World War II was in any way similar to the Holocaust is now designated as the great evil of “moral equivalence”-an actual crime in many European democracies.

But even if one does not go so far as to claim that the maltreatment of the Germans could approximate that of the Jews in the Holocaust, its very mention is considered an implicit effort to diminish the magnitude of the Holocaust or somehow show sympathy for Nazism. It is presumably essential to sustain the Manichaean contrast of the Good War of the spotless Allies against the totally evil Nazi Germans. Because the German people were collectively evil as a group, this thinking goes, their suffering does not even deserve to be mentioned.

While there have been several good works on the subject of Allied war crimes against the Germans (and Allied war crimes in general), these have generally been ignored or, like the works of James Bacque or the late John Sack,[2] viciously lambasted. It should be said at the outset that After the Reich offers little significant information that has not been covered in these other, often little known, works. There is nothing wrong about this, however, because only by constant repetition can ideas enter the public consciousness.

In After the Reich, British author Giles MacDonogh acknowledges the taboo nature of the subject and thus provides his moral position in the preface of the book in an effort to protect himself from any intentional misinterpretation as pro-Nazi: “The book is not intended to excuse the Germans,” he writes, “but it does not hesitate to expose the victorious Allies in their treatment of the enemy at the peace, for in most cases it was not the criminals who were raped, starved, tortured, or bludgeoned to death but women, children, and old men” (p. xiii).

MacDonogh covers the numerous crimes committed by the Allies against the Germans and, to a lesser extent, other peoples. In chronological terms, he begins with the advance of the Red Army in the last part of the war as it plundered, murdered, and raped its way through a vanquished Germany.

The mass rapes were perhaps the most appalling of these actions, in both the physical and psychological effects on the victims. All women, no matter of what age, faced rape, with gang rapes being commonplace. “Canny Berlin women,” the author writes, “learned quickly that it was wisest to give in and receive Russians one at a time than to have to put up with terrifying gang rapes.” The “wisest” gave themselves to Soviet officers, “as high-ranking as possible,” who could provide protection from the worst types of treatment (p. 101). As a result of the forcible sex, ten percent of German women were infected by venereal diseases, and, because of the scarcity of medicines in the war-torn country, lacked antibiotics for treatment. Abortion was rampant, and was often self-performed. Nevertheless, 150,000 to 200,000 babies fathered by Soviet soldiers were born. The psychological trauma of the rapes was immense, not only for the women but also for German men, who felt emasculated because they were helpless to stop these barbarities. The only way for women to avoid rape altogether was suicide, an option many of them took.

The inhuman invasion of the Red Army was only the beginning of the nightmare for many Germans on the country’s eastern periphery. For as the war ended, and for up to three years thereafter, they were forced to flee from their historical homelands, either from the eastern parts of Germany proper or from German-settled areas in Poland, Czechoslovakia, and other neighboring countries. The alternative was the possibility of death from vengeful Russians, Poles, and Czechs.

Many Germans were arrested and incarcerated in the same concentration camps that had housed Jews and other victims of the Nazi state. In Czechoslovakia, the allegedly saintly Edvard Beneš directed the retribution against Germans and alleged Czech collaborators. MacDonogh provides numerous tales of the barbarity of the Czechs. For example, in the town of Landskron, as the fighting stopped in mid-May 1945:

All the male German inhabitants were hunted into the main square. By the early afternoon there were as many as a thousand. The Czechs amused themselves by drilling them, forcing them to lie down and get up, all the while walking among them, spitting and kicking them in the groin and shins. Those who fell during this humiliation were taken to a water tank and drowned. Any who bobbed up were shot. Meanwhile a “People’s Court” had been established with a jury composed of local Czechs. The Germans had to crawl to the bench. Most of the men then had to run a 50-60 metre gauntlet. Many fell and were beaten to pulp. The next day the survivors were reassembled. One man was strung up from a lamppost. (pp. 138-39)

Other brutalities involved tossing hand grenades among German refugees and the mutilation of sexual organs.

After this brutal mistreatment, the Germans were expelled from Czechoslovakia. MacDonogh writes that in 1946, 586,000 Germans were shipped out of Czechoslovakia “packed in box cars like sardines” (p. 159). Ultimately, an estimated 240,000 Germans died as a result of their brutal mistreatment by the Czechs (p. 159).

The expulsions were sanctioned by Article 13 of the Potsdam Accord, although it stipulated that the expulsion of civilians should take place in the most humane manner possible. Such a stipulation was more honored in the breech than in the observance.

The treatment of the Germans by the Russians in East Prussia, which was made part of the Soviet Union, was equally horrendous. The author writes that there were “striking similarities between the way the population of East Prussia was handled and the deliberate starvation of the Ukrainian kulaks in the early 1930s” (p. 163). The author describes the condition of the German inhabitants of Königsberg as a veritable living hell: “As no water was available,” MacDonogh writes, “the Königsberger drank from infected wells and bomb craters and fed on sparrows and mice when they could, or on discarded potato peelings and trash from Russian kitchens; boiled ox bones and cattle pelts, glue and the carrion of dead and buried animals” (p. 164). Of the 73,000 Königsberger alive in June 1945, only 25,000 would survive (p. 167). In 1947 Königsberg’s remnant German population fled to Germany. Very soon there would be no Germans in that city which had been German for 700 years, and its very Germanism would be wiped off the map in the change of its name to Kaliningrad in 1946.[3]

The author writes that the Poles were even more ferocious in their mistreatment of the Germans than the Russians because of their desire for vengeance. Many were refugees from the eastern section of pre-war Poland that had become part of the Soviet Union, and they seized the homes and property of the German inhabitants. The Poles moved to completely Polonize areas that had been historically German, changing German names to Polish. For instance, the old German city of Breslau was renamed Wroclaw.[4] The German residents were ghettoized and treated in a genocidal manner.[5] “As the Poles came in,” writes MacDonogh, “Germans were evicted and resettled in the cellars of ruined houses in what were ghettos in all but name. Typhus and diphtheria raged, killing many children. Medicine to deal with the epidemic was made prohibitively expensive to the Germans.” A Polish quasi-doctor “was injecting typhus cases with carbolic. When asked why, she said it was because they were going to die anyhow” (p. 179). Ultimately, the Germans would be expelled, but even in their effort to leave the Germans were not safe, often being attacked by groups of Polish militia who would rob and beat them (p. 191).

As prisoners of war, German soldiers also suffered untold misery in total violation of the rules of war. German prisoners of war were kept in terrible conditions, and it is not clear how many died from the lack of food and sanitation. And the United States was culpable here, as well as the Soviets. Americans, British, and Russians used old concentration camps to house prisoners. Prisoners captured by the United States were often sent to work in other countries. The Soviet Union kept large numbers of prisoners as slave laborers into the 1950s.

The West German government produced a study of the treatment of the German prisoners, which it refrained from releasing to avoid angering the Soviet Union and Poland. MacDonogh tends to agree with much of what James Bacque said in his controversial work Other Losses about the maltreatment of German war prisoners.[6] But like most of Bacque’s critics, he questions his statistics, which indicated a staggering death total. MacDonogh contends that the American military’s term “other losses” did not simply include deaths-”deaths, yes, but also deserters” (p. 396)-implying that Bacque greatly exaggerated the total losses of life. However, it should be pointed out that Bacque has offered more substantial proof than what MacDonogh acknowledges. Bacque has written:

The math is simple: about 1.5 million German prisoners alive in allied prison camps at the end of the war never came home, nor were their deaths reported to the German government, their families, the International Red Cross, or the UN. The figure was determined by the Adenauer government in Germany, submitted to the UN, and has never been disputed by anyone. Thus, when Other Losses came out in 1989, alleging deaths of about one million in French and American camps, that left about 500,000 to be accounted for. They could have died only in the KGB camps, because there were not half a million prisoners in any other camps in the world. Thus, in effect Other Losses was predicting that when the communists opened the KGB archives, they would show deaths of about 500,000. And lo and behold, when Gorbachev brought down the communist rule, and the archives were opened, I went there, and found the Bulanov Report which showed that 356,687 Germans died in Soviet captivity, plus another 93,900 civilians taken as substitutes for dead or escaped prisoners for a total of 450,587.[7]

One wonders how the evidence on that subject compares to the documentary evidence for the well-known genocidal activities of Nazi Germany.

From the American standpoint, the entire German population was considered collectively guilty for the war. JCS 1067, the directive guiding the American occupation, provided for a punitive peace in line with the Morgenthau Plan, the Carthaginian postwar plan for Germany put forth by Secretary of Treasury Henry Morgenthau,[8] which sought to de-industrialize Germany. MacDonogh writes that, “JCS 1067 was Morgenthau’s last legitimate child and survived long after Truman formally relinquished the Plan. It proposed to tear down, rather than rebuild, and to help Germans only when it was necessary to avoid disease or disorder” (p. 344).

The author vividly describes the extreme shortages of food in postwar Germany, including instances of people subsisting on rats, frogs, and wild plants such as cattails. The food situation remained desperate even as late as the winter of 1948. However, MacDonogh does not go over the extent of the starvation in statistical terms, as James Bacque does in his Crimes and Mercies,[9] where the latter claims that 5.7 million German residents died from Allied policies (this does not include the captured soldiers and expellees). MacDonogh does not mention this study by Bacque even to refute him.

It would seem that MacDonogh tends to ignore or downplay the claims of an immense German death toll. In fact, the work is meager on statistical analysis overall, while providing extensive anecdotes of Allied mistreatment of the Germans. This is not to say he uses no statistics, but they are used sporadically, and little real summarization or analysis is provided. It is likely that MacDonogh took this non-statistical approach in order to avoid any statistical comparisons with the much better known Nazi genocidal activities, which, if the figures for German deaths would be considered too high, could lead to considerable trouble.

MacDonogh’s intent would seem to be to emphasize the gross moral injustice of collective punishment by showing that many innocent Germans suffered in the postwar period whether they had voluntarily served the Nazi government or not. In fact, he brings out cases of numerous anti-Nazi Germans, who had been punished by the Nazis, being mistreated by the Allies for the sole reason that they were German.

Since MacDonogh makes his living as a mainstream writer on topics from history to gastronomy, it is understandable that he would avoid treading on too many taboos. But while his reliance on anecdotes does well to set the tone for the brutal era, still it would have increased the understanding of the events to focus more on statistics. In any tragedy, natural or man-made, one wants to know not simply that people died or were otherwise injured, but the actual number so affected. It is the numbers of people involved that give any tragedy its importance. And such statistics have been analyzed much better in other works on this subject by Bacque and also by Alfred de Zayas.[10]

Another flaw in MacDonogh’s account is his failure to sufficiently bring out the utter hypocrisy of the Allies-a hypocrisy of Orwellian proportions. For the full story should not simply point out how the Allies treated the defeated German people in a barbarous manner, but that the Allies did so while fighting in the name of the ideals of democracy, freedom, and racial harmony.

Ultimately, the United States and the Western Allies would stop their genocidal mistreatment of the Germans, not because of any moral scruples, but because of the realization that the United States was facing a new enemy-the Soviet Union. A strong Germany was seen as essential in preventing the Sovietization of Western Europe. It is interesting here that MacDonogh takes the questionable position that Stalin actually did not threaten to control Europe, but only sought limited security needs, and that hence there was no need for the Cold War. Of course, had the United States not seen an overriding need to resist the Soviet Union, the destruction of the German people could have continued unabated. In short, the Germans were saved by the Cold War.

All in all, MacDonogh has written a book that pushes the envelope within the confines of Political Correctness. However, he often espouses what are largely PC positions because he probably doesn’t know the contrary views. Although the book really does not offer much significant information that has not been presented better in previous books, it has the merit of presenting the full range of Allied crimes-rapes, expulsions, starvation, brutal treatment of prisoners-and not simply focusing on one type. And since the work is produced by a major publishing house, which enables it to be reviewed in the mainstream media, it brings a whole new picture to those “respectable” people who have grown up with nothing other than the “Good War” mythology.

Of course, some have vested interests in maintaining this mythology. Thus After the Reich has been smeared by the defenders of the “Good War,” largely on the grounds of its alleged failure to put the Allies’ brutal actions in context. In short, if one is to mention these things at all, it is necessary to diminish their significance, and even justify them, by constantly mentioning the Holocaust.

Returning now to Miss Utley’s “objective observer,” if such an individual has emerged (and some actually have), his or her writings have not reached the general public. Perhaps, if numerous books similar to After the Reich appear, the educated public could be prepared for even stronger stuff, and historians would be able to look at all the events of World War II in a more objective manner. And this is needed now more than ever, since the “Good War” paradigm is being used to justify an ever more expansive American war of aggression in the Middle East.

From TOQ vol. 8, no. 3 (Fall 2008)

[2] John Sack, An Eye for an Eye: The Untold Story of Jewish Revenge Against Germans in 1945 (New York: Basic Books, 1993).

[3] The name was in honor of the Soviet leader, Mikhail Kalinin, who died the same year. Unlike Leningrad, and many other Russian cities, the name Kaliningrad remains still, and the city is still under Russian control, an isolated outpost now wedged between Poland and Lithuania.

[4] Although correct on the Polish takeover of historically German areas, MacDonogh is off the mark in one of his illustrations. In changing the German name of “Danzig” to the Polish “Gdańsk,” MacDonogh refers to the latter “as a name so obscure it was new even to the most fanatical Polish nationalists” (p. 177). However, it would seem that Poles historically called it by that name and actually founded the city shortly before 1000 AD.

[5] According to the 1948 Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide, the term “genocide” would apply to the treatment of the German population in the eastern regions. According to Article II of the Genocide Convention: “In the present Convention, genocide means any of the following acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial, or religious group, as such:  (a) Killing members of the group; (b) Causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group; (c) Deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part.”

[6] James Bacque, Other Losses: the Shocking Truth Behind the Mass Deaths of Disarmed German Soldiers and Civilians under General Eisenhower’s Command (New York: Prima Publishing, 1991).

[7] James Bacque, “Why is Wikipedia Censoring Me?”, http://serendipity.li/hr/bacque_on_wikipedia.htm, accessed April 4, 2008.

[8] As Secretary of the Treasury, Henry Morgenthau, who was a friend and neighbor of Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s, sought to influence war policy. As an American Jew, Morgenthau might have sought retribution for the genocidal German treatment of his co-religionists. The major architect of the Morgenthau Plan was Harry Dexter White, later identified as a Soviet agent. See Anthony Kubek, “The Morgenthau Plan and the Problem of Policy Perversion,” Journal for Historical Review 9 (Summer 1989), 287, http://www.ihr.org/jhr/v09/v09p287_Kubek.html, accessed April 4, 2008. In Kubek’s view, the purpose of the draconian Morgenthau Plan was to drive the German people toward Soviet Communism.

[9] James Bacque, Crimes and Mercies: The Fate of German Civilians under Allied Occupation, 1944-1950 (Toronto: Little, Brown and Co., 1997).

[10] Alfred de Zayas is the author of Nemesis at Potsdam: The Expulsion of the Germans from the East (Lincoln: University of Nebraska, 1989) and A Terrible Revenge: The Ethnic Cleansing of the East European Germans (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1994).

Churchill, Hitler, and “the Unnecessary War”
How Britain Lost Its Empire and the West Lost the World
Patrick J. Buchanan
New York: Crown Publishers, 2008

Many reviewers of the respectable class become unhinged upon seeing the words “unnecessary war” in the title of a book dealing with World War II—in their minds, the “Good War” to destroy the ultimate evil of Hitler’s Nazism.[1] And, of course, Buchanan was already in deep kimchi on this issue since he had expressed a similar criticism of American entry into World War II in his A Republic, Not an Empire.[2]

With this mindset, most establishment reviewers simply proceed to write a diatribe against Buchanan for failing to recognize the allegedly obvious need to destroy Hitler, bringing up the Holocaust, anti-Semitism, and other rhetorical devices that effectively silence rational debate in America’s less-than-free intellectual milieu. However, Buchanan’s book is far more than a discussion of the merits of fighting World War II. For Buchanan is dealing with the overarching issue of the decline of the West—a topic he previously dealt with at length in his The Death of the West.[3] In his view, the “physical wounds” of World Wars I and II are significant factors in this decline. Buchanan writes: “The questions this book answers are huge but simple. Were these two world wars the mortal wounds we inflicted upon ourselves necessary wars? Or were they wars of choice? And if they were wars of choice, who plunged us into these hideous and suicidal world wars that advanced the death of our civilization? Who are the statesman responsible for the death of the West?” (p. xi). Early in his Introduction, Buchanan essentially answers that question: “Historians will look back on 1914–1918 and 1939–1945 as two phases of the Great Civil War of the West, when the once Christian nations of Europe fell upon one another with such savage abandon they brought down all their empires, brought an end to centuries of Western rule, and advanced the death of their civilization” (p. xvii).

Buchanan sees Britain as the key nation involved in this process of Western suicide. And its own fall from power was emblematic of the decline of the broader Western civilization. At the turn of the twentieth century, Britain stood out as the most powerful nation of the West, which in turn dominated the entire world. “Of all the empires of modernity,” Buchanan writes, “the British was the greatest—indeed, the greatest since Rome—encompassing a fourth of the Earth’s surface and people” (p. xiii). But Britain was fundamentally responsible for turning two localized European wars into the World Wars that shattered Western civilization.

Contrary to the carping of his critics, Buchanan does not fabricate his historical facts and opinions but rather relies on reputable historians for his information, which is heavily footnoted. In fact, most of his points should not be controversial to people who are familiar with the history of the period, as shocking as it may be to members of the quarter-educated punditocracy.

Buchanan points out that at the onset of the European war in August 1914, most of the British Parliament and Cabinet were opposed to entering the conflict. Only Foreign Minister Edward Grey and Winston Churchill, then First Lord of the Admiralty, held that it was necessary to back France militarily in order to prevent Germany from becoming the dominant power on the Continent. In 1906, however, Grey had secretly promised France support in the event of a war with Germany, which, Buchanan implies, might have served to encourage French belligerency in 1914. However, it was only the German invasion of neutral Belgium—the “rape” of “little Belgium” as pro-war propagandists bellowed—that galvanized a majority in the Cabinet and in Parliament for war.

Buchanan maintains that a victorious Germany, even with the expanded war aims put forth after the onset of the war, would not have posed a serious threat to Britain. And certainly it would have been better than the battered Europe that emerged from World War I. Describing the possible alternate outcome, Buchanan writes:

Germany, as the most powerful nation in Europe, aligned with a free Poland that owed its existence to Germany, would have been the western bulwark against any Russian drive into Europe. There would have been no Hitler and no Stalin. Other evils would have arisen, but how could the first half of the twentieth century have produced more evil than it did? (p. 62)

As it was, the four year world war led to the death of millions, with millions more seriously wounded. The utter destruction and sense of hopelessness caused by the war led to the rise of Communism. And the peace ending the war punished Germany and other members of the Central powers, setting the stage for future conflict. The Allies “scourged Germany and disposed her of territory, industry, people, colonies, money, and honor by forcing her to sign the ‘War Guilt Lie’” (p. 97). Buchanan acknowledges that it was not literally the “Carthaginian peace” that its critics charged. Germany “was still alive, more united, more populous and potentially powerful than France, and her people were now possessed of a burning sense of betrayal” (p. 97). But by making the new democratic German government accept the peace treaty, the Allies had destroyed the image of democratic government in Germany among the German people. In essence, the peace left “Europe divided between satiated powers, and revisionist powers determined to retrieve the lands and peoples that had been taken from them” (p. 95). It was “not only an unjust but an unsustainable peace. Wedged between a brooding Bolshevik Russia and a humiliated Germany were six new nations: Finland, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Poland, and Czechoslovakia. The last two held five million Germans captive. Against each of the six, Russia or Germany held a grievance. Yet none could defend its independence against a resurrected Germany or a revived Russia. Should Russia and Germany unite, no force on Earth could save the six” (p. 98). It should be noted that Buchanan’s negative depiction of the World War I peace is quite conventional, and was held by most liberal thinkers of the time.[4]

Buchanan likewise provides a very conventional interpretation of British foreign policy during the interwar period, which oscillated between idealism and Realpolitik and ultimately had the effect of weakening Britain’s position in the world. Buchanan points out that Britain needed the support of Japan, Italy, and the United States to counter a revived Germany, but its diplomacy undercut such an alliance. To begin with, Britain terminated its alliance with Japan to placate the United States as part of the Washington Naval Conference of 1922. Buchanan contends that the Japanese alliance had not only provided Britain with a powerful ally but served to restrain Japanese expansionism.

Britain needed Mussolini’s Italy to check German revanchism in Europe, a task which “Il Duce” was very willing to undertake. However, Britain drove Mussolini into the arms of Hitler by supporting the League of Nations’ sanctions against Italy after it attacked Ethiopia in 1935. “By assuming the moral high ground to condemn a land grab in Africa, not unlike those Britain had been conducting for centuries, Britain lost Italy,” Buchanan observes. “Her diplomacy had created yet another enemy. And this one sat astride the Mediterranean sea lanes critical in the defense of Britain’s Far Eastern empire against that other alienated ally, Japan” ( p. 155).

America, disillusioned by the war’s outcome, returned to its traditional non-interventionism in the 1920s, so it was not available to back British interests. Consequently, Britain would only have France to counter Hitler’s expansionism in the second half of the 1930s.

Buchanan provides a straightforward account of Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain’s and Foreign Minister Halifax’s appeasement policy. The goal was to rectify the wrongs of Versailles so as to prevent the outbreak of war. “They believed,” Buchanan points out, “that addressing Germany’s valid grievances and escorting her back into Europe as a Great Power with equality of rights was the path to the peace they wished to build” (p. 201). Buchanan asserts that such a policy probably would have worked with democratic Weimar Germany, but not with Hitler’s regime, because of its insatiable demands and brutality.

Munich was the high point of appeasement and is conventionally considered one of the great disasters of British foreign policy. Buchanan explains Chamberlain’s reasoning for the policy, which was quite understandable. First, morality seemed to be on Germany’s side since the predominantly German population of the Sudetenland wanted to join Germany. Moreover, maintaining the current boundaries of Czechoslovakia was not a key British interest worth the cost of British lives. Finally, Britain did not have the wherewithal to intervene militarily in such a distant, land-locked country.

Churchill, who represented the minority of Britons who sought war as an alternative, believed that support from Stalinist Russia would serve to counter Hitler. Of course, as Buchanan points out, the morality of such an alliance was highly dubious because Stalin had caused the deaths of millions of people during the 1930s, while Hitler’s victims still numbered in the hundreds or low thousands before the start of the war in 1939. Moreover, Communist Russia would have to traverse Rumania and Poland to defend Czechoslovakia, and the governments of these two countries were adamantly opposed to allowing Soviet armies passage, correctly realizing that those troops would likely remain in their lands and bring about their Sovietization. It should also be added that it was questionable whether the Soviet Union really intended to make war on the side of the Western democracies, because Stalin hoped that a great war among the capitalist states, analogous to World War I, would bring about their exhaustion and facilitate the triumph of Communist revolution, aided by the intervention of the Soviet Red Army.[5]

Buchanan concludes that Chamberlain was right not to fight over the Sudetenland but “was wrong in believing that by surrendering it to Hitler he had bought anything but time,” which he should have used to rearm Britain in preparation for an inevitable war (p. 235). Instead, Chamberlain believed that Hitler could be trusted and that peace would prevail.

While Buchanan faults Chamberlain for not properly preparing for war after the Munich Agreement, he does not believe that Munich per se brought on the debacle of war. What did bring about World War II, according to Buchanan, was the British guarantee to defend Poland in March 1939. This guarantee made Poland more resistant to compromise with Germany, and made any British decision for war hinge on the decisions made by Poland. Moreover, as Buchanan points out, “Britain had no vital interest in Eastern Europe to justify a war to the death with Germany and no ability to wage war there” (p. 263).

Buchanan, while citing several explanations for the Polish guarantee, seems to give special credence to the view that Chamberlain was more of a realist than a bewildered naïf. Buchanan holds that a clear analysis of Chamberlain’s words and intent shows that in the guarantee the Prime Minister had not bound Britain to fight for the territorial integrity of Poland but only for its independence as a nation. “The British war guarantee,” Buchanan contends, “had not been crafted to give Britain a pretext for war, but to give Chamberlain leverage to persuade the Poles to give Danzig back” (p. 270). Chamberlain seemed to be “signaling his willingness for a second Munich, where Poland would cede Danzig and provide a road-and-rail route across the Corridor, but in return for Hitler’s guarantee of Poland’s independence” (p. 270). Hitler, however, did not grasp this “diplomatic subtlety” and believed that a German effort to take any Polish territory would mean war. The Poles did not understand Chamberlain’s intent either, and assumed that Britain would back their intransigence and thus refused to discuss any territorial changes with Germany. Buchanan, however, seems to reverse this interpretation of Chamberlain’s motivation when discussing his guarantees to other European countries in 1939, writing that “Chamberlain had lost touch with reality” (p. 278).

In the end, Britain and France went to war with Germany over Poland without the means to defend her. Poland’s fate was finally sealed when Hitler made his deal with Stalin in August 1939, which, in a secret protocol, offered the Soviet dictator the extensive territory that he sought in Eastern Europe.

Some reviewers have claimed that Buchanan excuses Hitler of blame for the war, but this is far from the truth. Buchanan actually states that Hitler bore “full moral responsibility” for the war on Poland in 1939 (p. 292), in contradistinction to the wider world war, though even here the charge of “full responsibility” would seem to be belied by much of the information in the book. For Buchanan points out that the Germans not only had justified grievances regarding the Versailles territorial settlement, but that, despite Hitler’s bold demands, the German-Polish war might not have happened without Britain’s meddling in 1939. Buchanan’s analysis certainly does not absolve Hitler of moral responsibility for the Second World War (much less palliate his crimes against humanity), but it does show that there is plenty of blame to go around.

Buchanan writes that “had there been no war guarantee, Poland . . . might have done a deal over Danzig and been spared six million dead” (p. 293). It is quite possible that after any territorial deal with Poland, Hitler would have consequently made much greater demands against her. Perhaps he would have acted no differently toward Poland and the Polish Jews than he actually did—but the outcome could not have been worse for the Polish Jews, almost all of whom were exterminated during the World War II. And Polish gentiles suffered far more than the inhabitants of other countries that resisted Hitler less strenuously. In short, a war purportedly to defend Poland was an utter disaster for the inhabitants of Poland. It is hardly outrageous to question whether this was the best possible outcome and to attempt to envision a better alternative.

Buchanan shows how World War II was hardly a “Good War.” The Allies committed extreme atrocities such as the deliberate mass bombing of civilians and genocidal population expulsions. The result was the enslavement of half of Europe by Soviet Communism. “To Churchill,” Buchanan writes, “the independence and freedom of one hundred million Christian peoples of Eastern Europe were not worth a war with Russia in 1945. Why, then, had they been worth a war with Germany in 1939?” (p. 373).

Buchanan holds that had Britain not gone to war against Germany, a war between Soviet Russia and Nazi Germany would have been inevitable, and that such a conflict would have exhausted both dictatorships, making it nigh impossible for either of them to conquer Western Europe. Although this scenario would not have been a certainty, a military stalemate between the two totalitarian behemoths would seem to be the most realistic assessment based on the actual outcome of World War II. Certainly, the Soviet Union relied on Western support to defeat the Nazi armies; and Germany was unable to knock out the Soviet Union during the lengthy period before American military began to play a significant role in Europe.

Buchanan contrasts the lengthy wars fought by Britain, which gravely weakened it, and the relative avoidance of war by the United States, which enabled it to become the world’s greatest superpower. In Buchanan’s view, the United States “won the Cold War—by avoiding the blunders Britain made that plunged her into two world wars” (p. 419). In the post-Cold War era, however, the United States has ignored this crucial lesson, instead becoming involved in unnecessary, enervating wars. “America is overextended as the British Empire of 1939,” Buchanan opines. “We have commitments to fight on behalf of scores of nations that have nothing to do with our vital interests, commitments we could not honor were several to be called in at once” (p. 423). Buchanan maintains that in continuing along this road the United States will come to the same ruinous end as Britain.

Buchanan’s British analogy, unfortunately, can be seen as giving too much to the position of the current neo-conservative war party. Although I think Buchanan’s non-interventionist position on the World Wars is correct, it should be acknowledged that Britain faced difficult choices. Allowing Germany to become the dominant power on the Continent would have been harmful to British interests—though the two World Wars made things even worse. In contrast, today it is hard to see any serious negative consequences resulting from the United States’ pursuit of a peaceful policy in the Middle East. No Middle East country or terrorist group possesses (or possessed) military power in any way comparable to that of Germany under the Second or Third Reichs, and, at least, Iran and Iraq do (did) not have any real interest in turning off the oil spigot to the West since selling oil is the lifeblood of their economies.

Another important aspect of the book is Buchanan’s attack on the cult of Winston Churchill, who has served as a role model for America’s recent bellicose foreign policy, with President George W. Bush even placing a bust of Churchill in the Oval Office. Buchanan maintains that Churchill, with his lust for war, was the individual most responsible for the two devastating World Wars.

In contrast to the current Churchill hagiography, Buchanan portrays the “British Bulldog” as a poor military strategist who was ruthlessly indifferent to the loss of human life, advocating policies that could easily be labeled war crimes. Churchill proposed both the incompetent effort to breech the Dardanelles in 1915, ending with the disastrous Gallipolli invasion, and the bungled Norwegian campaign of April 1940. Ironically, the failures of the Norwegian venture caused the downfall of the Chamberlain government and brought Churchill to power on May 10, 1940.

Churchill supported the naval blockade of Germany in World War I, which in addition to stopping war materiel prevented food shipments, causing an estimated 750,000 civilian deaths. Churchill admitted that the purpose of the blockade was to “starve the whole population—men, women, and children, old and young, wounded and sound—into submission” (p. 391). He successfully proposed the use of poisonous gas against Iraqi rebels in the interwar period and likewise sought the use of poison gas against German civilians in World War II, though the plan was not implemented due to opposition from the British military. Churchill was, however, successful in initiating the policy of intentionally bombing civilians, which caused the deaths of hundreds of thousands. Equally, if not more, inhumane, Churchill’s support for the forcible “repatriation” of Soviet POWs to the Soviet Union and the “ethnic cleansing” of Germans from Eastern and Central Europe involved the deaths of millions of people. And, of course, Churchill was willing to turn over Eastern Europe’s millions to slavery and death under Stalinist rule.

Overall, the Buchanan thesis makes considerable sense—though in some cases it assumes a foresight that would not be possible. For example, the pursuit of containment by the United States in the Cold War period, which Buchanan praises, was a policy largely rejected by the contemporary American Right, of which Buchanan was a member. The American Right held that the policy of containment was a defensive policy that could not achieve victory but instead likely lead to defeat—a position best expressed by James Burnham. And, at least up until Reagan’s presidency, the power of the Soviet Union greatly increased, both in terms of its nuclear arsenal and its global stretch, relative to that of the United States. While Buchanan touts Reagan’s avoidance of war, what most distinguished Reagan from his presidential predecessors and the foreign policy establishment was his willingness to take a harder stance toward the Soviets—a difference that terrified liberals of the time. Reagan’s hard-line stance consisted of a massive arms build-up, and, more importantly, an offensive military strategy (violating the policy of containment), which had the United States supporting a revolt against the Soviet-controlled government in Afghanistan. (The policy was begun under President Carter but significantly expanded under Reagan.) Perhaps, if the United States had launched such a policy in the early years of the Cold War, the Soviet Empire would have unraveled much earlier and not been such a threat to the United States. The Soviet Union was obviously the first country that could destroy the United States, and it achieved this lethal potential during the policy of containment. To this reviewer, it does not seem inevitable that everything would have ultimately turned out for the best.

While Buchanan makes a good case that the two World Wars were deleterious to the West, it would seem that they were only one factor, and probably not the primary one, in bringing about the downfall of Western power—a decline that was observed by astute observers such as Oswald Spengler prior to 1914.[6] (Buchanan himself is not oblivious to these other factors but gives a prominent place to the wars.) Moreover, it is questionable if Britain would have retained its empire any longer than it did, even without the wars, given the spread of nationalism to the non-Western world and the latter’s greater rates of population increase compared to Europe. Also, the growing belief in the West of universal equality obviously militated against European rule over foreign peoples.

In sum, Buchanan’s work provides an excellent account of British diplomacy and European events during the crucial period of the two world wars, which have shaped the world in which we now live. It covers a host of issues and events that are relatively unknown to those who pose as today’s educated class, and does so in a very readable fashion. While this reviewer regards Buchanan’s theses as fundamentally sound, the work provides a fount of information even to those who would dispute its point of view.

Forthcoming in TOQ vol. 9, no. 1 (Spring 2009).