Pat Buchanan generally slips through his anti-Semitism and sympathy for the Nazis in an even more subtle manner than in this column. Per Buchanan, that poor misunderstood Fuhrer never really wanted to go to war:
Now one may despise what was done, but how did this partition of Czechoslovakia manifest a Hitlerian drive for world conquest?
Comes the reply: If Britain had not given the war guarantee and gone to war, after Czechoslovakia would have come Poland’s turn, then Russia’s, then France’s, then Britain’s, then the United States.
We would all be speaking German now.
But if Hitler was out to conquer the world — Britain, Africa, the Middle East, the United States, Canada, South America, India, Asia, Australia — why did he spend three years building that hugely expensive Siegfried Line to protect Germany from France? Why did he start the war with no surface fleet, no troop transports and only 29 oceangoing submarines? How do you conquer the world with a navy that can’t get out of the Baltic Sea?
If Hitler wanted the world, why did he not build strategic bombers, instead of two-engine Dorniers and Heinkels that could not even reach Britain from Germany?
Why did he let the British army go at Dunkirk?
Why did he offer the British peace, twice, after Poland fell, and again after France fell?
Why, when Paris fell, did Hitler not demand the French fleet, as the Allies demanded and got the Kaiser’s fleet? Why did he not demand bases in French-controlled Syria to attack Suez? Why did he beg Benito Mussolini not to attack Greece?
Because Hitler wanted to end the war in 1940, almost two years before the trains began to roll to the camps.
Hitler never really wanted to go to war in Buchanan’s fantasy world. If not for the evil British the Holocaust would have never happened. Therefore it makes sense that so much of Buchanan’s career has been spent defending Nazi war criminals since to Buchanan it was the British, not the Nazis, who were the true villains of World War II.
Buchanan has learned the wrong lessons from history. His reading of the Thirty Years War, the various chapters of the Austrian-Prussian conflict before the unification of Germany (including the Napoleonic Wars), and the era immediately post-WWI and immediately post-WWII have led him to believe that ethnic differences among the citizenry make it impossible to maintain a united nation-state. The break-up of former multi-ethnic Communist states, post-Cold War and the ethnic violence that coincided with some of those break-ups has only confirmed his ideas.
On this theory, Buchanan believes that the annexation of Austria, the ‘Sudetenland’, and of Danzig (Gdansk) and the ‘Danzig Corridor’ was entirely justified because these were ‘ethnic German regions.’ Thus uniting them with Germany was the proper course. He also appears to seriously believe that if there had not been a Munich guarantee, Germany’s expansion would have stopped with a ‘united Germany.’
Unfortunately, Buchanan ignores some historical facts: the Sudeten Germans were an ethnic minority outnumbered by the Czechs even in what Hitler called the ‘Sudetenland.’ The ratio of Germans to Czechs, Slovaks, or Slovenians was roughly the same over the whole of the country as it was in the ‘Sudetenland.’ Hitler did not settle for the ‘Sudetenland’, he annexed all of Czechoslovakia. Nor did he settle for Danzig and the corridor, he signed the partition treaty with the USSR and the two powers divided all of Poland between them. These are not the acts of someone who ‘just wanted to reverse the Versailles treaty.’
Buchanan claims this was the result of the war… but Hitler annexed all of Czechoslovakia against the League of Nations decree before any war broke out. So there is no reacon to believe he would not have done the same to all of Poland. If one reads Mein Kampf (in which Hitler advocates the complete annexation of Austria, Czechoslovakia, and Poland to form an enlarged ‘Greater Germany’ and the control of both the Rumanian oil fields and the traditional Russian ‘breadbasket’ in the South Ukraine and a military readjudication of the Franco-German border) then one understands just how silly Buchanan’s view of WWII is.
One can have a certain degree of sympathy for Germany during and after WWI without approving of WWII. WWI was the last of the old European political wars, fought largely over the basic questions of territory and dynastic questions that had always motivated the old European wars. WWII was a very different animal. Hitler had a very specific blueprint that involved, at the necessary minimum, war with multiple Central European states, France, and the USSR. While Hitler’s plan called for an ‘Anglo-Saxon alliance’ between Germany, the UK, and the USA, such an alliance was impossible under prevailing political conditions short of military defeat of the UK and the US.
Buchanan’s understanding of history is thus entirely too poor for a man whose foreign policy theory is entirely built on his understanding of history. Buchanan’s views of ethnic incompatibility are not terribly far from the Aryan Nations’ theories of race warfare and it is really frightening just how ‘mainstream’ the man is.