The Truth About Adolf Hitler and the “Rules-based World Order”

Yesterday was International Holocaust Remembrance Day and there was quite a bit of chatter about the killing of ethnic Germans in Poland. Some people were mentioning this historic fact honestly to point out that, contrary to how Polish nationalists portray themselves, they weren’t innocent during World War II. Some trolls also suggested that Nazi Germany and the Russian Federation are the same (how creative). It’s unfortunate, because the well of WWII history has been so thoroughly poisoned, it’s almost impossible to have an honest conversation about the role of the western allies in provoking Hitler and starting WWII. That’s why I felt I needed to talk at length about the subject. In this answer, I’ll explain the historical context of the feud between Germany and Poland, including the deaths of ethnic Germans, and how this history was falsified in the Cold War to erase traces of British meddling, and how they manipulated Hitler and Germany into their brutal attack against the Soviet Union.

Ultimately, much of the falsification of WWII hinges on one lie: the reason Hitler was bad. Hitler wasn’t bad because he annexed territory. If annexing territory was the worst thing Hitler did, there would still be statues and schools dedicated to him in Berlin. Hitler was bad because he systematically killed millions of people, and would have killed millions more if he had won. Western media deliberately conflates war and genocide like they’re the same thing. But at the same time, maintain cognitive dissonance to justify approved western wars as heroic and humanitarian. This all boils down to the “moral high ground” of repeatedly provoking other regimes until they attack – and also feigning weakness so these other regimes are led to believe that they can win quickly and easily.

This deliberate and grotesque distortion of WWII history is designed to teach the false narrative that war is good and negotiation is bad. Hitler was our enemy, therefore all our enemies are like Hitler. You shouldn’t negotiate with Hitler, therefore you shouldn’t negotiate with anyone. If somebody suggests negotiating, that means he literally wants to appease Hitler. See how that works? Hitler was evil, the Soviets negotiated with Hitler, so they were evil too. Yes, the West also repeatedly negotiated with Hitler and gave him gold and other material support, but that was, uh…. appeasement. Yes.

Back to the provocations that prompted Hitler to invade Poland. Back then, British (and now NATO strategy) is similar to a “Karen” who walks up to a store employee or her neighbor and gets in his face, insulting and harassing him. Basically daring him to do something, and absolutely confident in her own invulnerability. The problem with this strategy is that sometimes Karen gets her nose broken. So it’s better to trick someone else into being the Karen, so you can swoop in to defend her after she successfully provokes her target into throwing the first punch.

That again brings us back to the ethnic Germans in Poland. NATO propaganda insists that because Hitler responded to these provocations, he was evil. No. Germany would have attacked regardless of who was in power, even if Hitler had never been born. I cannot say this enough – war and genocide are not the same thing, and starting a war isn’t why Hitler was evil.

That is why there are striking similarities to the circumstances to the German invasion of Poland, the Russian intervention in Ukraine, the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, and just about every other “unprovoked war of aggression” in recent western history. NATO propagandists leap on these similarities to prove that all of their enemies are like Hitler, and Russian apologists are reluctant to deal with these similarities directly. They get evasive and come across as weak and dishonest.

But we should acknowledge these similarities exist, and what caused them. It’s not that all these countries are the same and evil. It means the same provocation tactics were used on them. Note that what these countries do all have in common is that they were/are major world powers confident enough to enter a war, believing they could win. With smaller, weaker countries, provocations tend to not work because they have the self-awareness to know they couldn’t possibly win a war against the USA/NATO. So they eat the humiliation and refuse to attack. In these cases, an attack has to be fabricated, like the Gulf of Tonkin incident or the “Syrian chemical weapons” that Assad conveniently decides to use whenever NATO-backed rebels are losing and need more outside help. Here’s a video after one of the alleged attacks of CNN reporters sniffing a contaminated article of clothing.

Obviously, if that clothing was actually contaminated with sarin, those reporters would have fallen ill immediately and probably died.

But with a nation that is more or less the equal of the USA, it’s generally not necessary to fake an attack like in Vietnam or Syria. A proud and strong world power doesn’t tolerate being bullied and humiliated. Incidentally, keep this fact in mind when people compare Russia and China. Russia has demonstrated the willingness to use force to protect their interests and their people. They thrashed Georgia in 2008, they took back Crimea in 2014, and they started their special military operation in 2022. Every NATO action and provocation has to be done with the knowledge that Russia will respond to it, and the response might be unpleasant. Meanwhile, NATO is flooding Taiwan with weapons and openly boasting about their plans to “decolonize” China, and the Chinese have done nothing except issue stern warnings that they don’t follow through on. I’m not saying this as a moral judgement, just an observation that China isn’t quite strong enough to be considered a world power like Russia.

For the perfect example of dishonest western provocations in action, look no further than the other major theater in WWII – the Pacific. Imperial Japan aggressively expanded for years with no western opposition. Then suddenly, out of the blue, the USA and allies slapped them in the face with a devastating embargo. What’s easier to believe – that Anglo politicians suddenly started caring about Chinese people – or that they needed a war with Japan for some other reason? How could anyone look at this proud and militaristic regime and think they would willingly accept such humiliation without a fight? How could American politicians do something so provocative that would inevitably cause a war, but leave their Pacific fleet totally undefended, and thousands of American troops in isolated garrisons that could be easily defeated?

Of course Japanese war hawks looked at the situation and believed they could solve their economic crisis with a lightning campaign and the silly white man would be forced to ask for a truce. In hindsight that was a stupid thing to believe, but the American government gave them every reason to think that by pretending to be weak and unprepared.

Instead of slapping Japan with sanctions that were inevitably going to cause a war, why not try honest diplomacy instead? It might have failed, but it might have also succeeded.

So what was the real reason for all this to happen? Why tolerate or arguably even enable Japanese expansion for years then suddenly provoke a war with them? For the same exact reason the West enabled Hitler for years then suddenly went to war with him.

But first, some background:

The Treaty of Versailles humiliated and crippled Germany and this was deliberate. The French were bitter about their horrendous loss of life throughout the war and wanted to punish the Germans out of spite. The British encouraged and enabled this behavior because they have historically feared a continental power becoming strong enough to challenge their own empire. US President Wilson’s dream of a league of nations and world peace was dead on arrival.

So even if Hitler had never been born, sooner or later, Germany would become strong enough to start demanding the return of their territory and the ethnic Germans who lived on it. And it is important to understand that there is nothing wrong with this idea in of itself. Germany had every right to reassert themselves as a world power and not allow the Brits and French to continue walking all over their necks indefinitely.

Now, consider what was happening in the former Russian Empire. A European monarch had been dethroned and then killed in a successful revolution. Like the French Revolution and rise of Napoleon prompted William Pitt to declare France an existential enemy, the Russian revolution(s) terrified the Brits enough that they formed a coalition to invade Russia to prevent the Bolsheviks from seizing power. This might have worked with enough effort behind it but British, Canadian, and American populations were unconvinced by the idea, and loudly advocated for the boys to come home. Though the coalition forces had a large technological and training advantage over the peasant soldiers of the Red Army, fighting was extremely fierce and everyone quickly became demoralized. There were other problems as well. British officers were famously cruel to their “subhuman” colonial troops, but in this case, those colonial troops were White Russian conscripts and they weren’t putting up with Anglo bullshit. They had a tendency of murdering their British officers and going home, or even defecting to the Red Army. The invasion and attempted regime change of Russia ended in failure.

However, the diplomatic aftermath of WWI saw the creation of independent states in Poland and Finland. The British enthusiastically supported these states, particularly Poland, as useful wedges against the bad commies in Moscow. The Poles quickly proved their worth, defeating Trotsky’s army in 1921 and seizing a considerable amount of Soviet territory. But this new Polish nation outlived its usefulness. The Soviet Union industrialized to the point that Poland was no longer a serious threat.

Then Hitler came to power, and Germany became the British Empire’s #1 candidate as a useful puppet to destroy the Soviet Union. During the Cold War western media painted Hitler’s expansion as “appeasement” by cowards like Neville Chamberlain but this story makes no sense, as the French and British armies were vastly larger and more mechanized than Nazi Germany and could defeat it with almost no effort at all. Even if we accept the idea that German generals were all geniuses and their soldiers all superhuman, wars are won by superior economic might. Even if Germans initially inflicted more casualties on the western allies, it would turn out the same as the Winter War between Fins and Soviets. Germans would run out of bullets first, and their obsolete tanks and horse wagons would get clobbered by their superior French counterparts. So no, the “appeasement” of Germany had nothing to do with the West being scared, and it’s ridiculous to even say that.

In reality, the opposite is true. Hitler spent his entire reign trying to appease the West. As outrageous and offensive as this statement might sound at first, really think about it.

Hitler was allowed to expand because his fascism seemed like the perfect antidote for Soviet Bolshevism. Allowing Hitler to illegally grow his war machine and then proceed to gobble up his neighbors were the ideal carrot on a stick to encourage his militarism, on the condition that this militarism eventually led him to war with the Soviet Union. Of course the Soviets weren’t idiots and saw this coming. Stalin was particularly angered by Hitler annexing Czechoslovakia – however – the Poles refused to allow the Soviets to pass through their territory to stop the Germans, and their motivation for this should be fairly obvious, as Poland gobbled up a piece of the Czechoslovakia pie for themselves. Any temptation there might have been to steamroll Poland was out of the question, as they had a mutual defense treaty with France and Britain. The USSR could not risk fighting a united West. So for the time being, Hitler could expand and no one did anything about it.

However, there was one fly in the soup: ironically, Poland. American historian Pat Buchanan said, completely correctly, that a direct war between Germany and the USSR was impossible while Poland still existed. No direct border between Germany and USSR = no war.

Poland had to go, and that required provoking Hitler into annexing them. Aside from the territorial and political motivations for annexing them, it also helped that the Polish regime was really racist and xenophobic, so abused and killed ethnic Germans with the same enthusiasm as they did to Jews and Russians.

Hitler had everything he needed to justify cancelling Poland, and this was no different than all the previous times he crossed red lines. But, he made a very serious mistake that would end up costing him his regime. He secretly negotiated a deal with the Soviets. It must be understood that, despite the mutual defense pacts, it wasn’t Hitler’s act of annexing Poland that stirred the wrath of the West, it was him making peace with Stalin. Consider this quote from Lord Lloyd of Dolobran:

For all the other acts of brutality at home and aggression
without, Herr Hitler had been able to offer an excuse, inadequate
indeed, but not fantastic. The need for order and discipline in Europe,
for strength at the centre to withstand the incessant infiltration of
false and revolutionary ideas – this is certainly no more than the
conventional excuse offered by every military dictator who has ever
suppressed the liberties of his own people or advanced the conquest
of his neighbors. Nevertheless, so long as the excuse was offered
with sincerity, and in Hitler’s case the appearance of sincerity were
not lacking over a period of years, the world’s judgement of the man
remained more favorable than its judgement of his actions. The faint
possibility of an ultimate settlement with Herr Hitler still, in these
circumstances, remained, however abominable his methods, however
deceitful his diplomacy, however intolerant he might show himself of
the rights of other European peoples, he still claimed to stand
ultimately for something which was a common European interest, and
which therefore could conceivably provide some day a basis for
understanding with other nations equally determined not to sacrifice
their traditional institutions and habits on the bloodstained altars
of the World Revolution.

The conclusion of the German-Soviet pact removed even this faint
possibility of an honorable peace.”

Is Ukraine the New Poland?

So the problem wasn’t that Hitler was an enemy. He wasn’t. The problem was that he could no longer be trusted. He needed to invade the Soviet Union, but after he expressed a willingness to negotiate with them once, there was nothing to guarantee that he wouldn’t keep doing that. It’s quite ironic when one thinks about it. Today, western pundits say “Soviet Union bad because they made a deal with Hitler,” and yet back then, western pundits were saying the opposite, “Nazi Germany bad because they made a deal with Stalin.”

Consider the War of 1812. Napoleon invaded Russia largely out of desperation due to the failure of his continental system and the economic harm of the British blockade, which was further compounded by Nelson’s crushing victory over the French fleet at Trafalgar.

Now imagine the same scenario, but with Hitler. He clearly wanted to avoid a protracted war with the British. He spared their army at Dunkirk, which was very generous of him. One might dare call it noble. Even this incident was laughably twisted around into a largely fabricated story of civilian fishermen rescuing soldiers (in reality most of them were rescued by normal military transports). The “miracle” of Dunkirk. No, it wasn’t a miracle. The German panzers just stopped, and that was pretty clearly an order that came from the top. The British army was retreating without their heavy equipment so was no longer a threat. It made sense for Hitler to spare them to make negotiations less awkward.

Here’s what I’m sure is the most controversial statement in this article: there was no rational reason for Churchill to refuse peace with Hitler at this point UNLESS it was a deliberate provocation to goad him into a war with Russia like with Napoleon in the previous century. The emotional reasons for continuing the war with Hitler we only know now with hindsight. At this point, he hadn’t done anything particularly awful yet, at least as far as anyone in the outside world knew. If the nazis’ purges of communists and ethnic minorities was a justification for war, that begets the obvious question of why no one in the West had done anything to stop him before this point. And mind you, the vast majority of holocaust victims were Soviet, and that particular conflict had literally not started yet. The early stages of the holocaust in Germany had absolutely nothing to do with Churchill’s motivation to crack down on Hitler. His reasons were purely political, and those reasons most likely had something to do with provoking a nazi attack on the Soviets.

Here’s Churchill’s famous “We shall fight on the beaches” speech. How can anyone claim that the holocaust was a motivation for Churchill when Churchill himself didn’t mention it? But he did mention Napoleon, and Hitler’s threat to “British soil.” So by Churchill’s own admission, the war was a political necessity, and an entirely self-inflicted one.

Now consider what might be the largest “what if” in history. In the absence of years of British provocations and brinkmanship, would Hitler still have invaded the Soviet Union and killed tens of millions of people? Maybe. Or maybe Lord Lloyd was right to not trust him. Maybe Hitler would have been happy with being the dictator of Germany and not taken the huge risk of starting wars he might not win.

To really understand this “what if,” we need to dismiss the other oft-repeated lie. Hitler was insane and stupid, therefore, all our other enemies are insane and stupid, and can’t be negotiated with. No. Our enemies are not insane and stupid, and Hitler wasn’t insane and stupid either.

The myth of Hitler being insane and stupid is largely the post-war handwork of his surviving generals who wanted to paint themselves as heroic warriors against the Soviet Union, but were obstructed by the crazy delusions of a madman. In reality, the opposite is most likely true. His general staff was delusionally optimistic about their chances of winning against the Soviet Union (and they were equally delusional about winning against the USA, which is telling). Hitler was clearly the most realistic person in the room, and this trait shows in the alleged disputes between him and his staff. Guderian believed conquering Moscow would be enough to win the war. Instead, Hitler insisted on an attack along three axises, aimed at Leningrad, Donbass, and Moscow in that order of priority. Hitler believed he only stood a chance of winning if he successfully crippled the Soviets’ industrial capacity immediately.

Now look at how Hitler and Guderian are portrayed in modern western media. Hitler is portrayed as an idiot and Guderian as a saintly anti-Soviet hero. Aside from the fact that it is disgusting to claim the most senior nazi generals were innocent in the Holocaust, the statement is completely false from a logical standpoint too. Hitler had a good grasp of military strategy and Guderian was a moron. Hitler fired him because he sucked at his job and Guderian spent the rest of his life crying about it like a little baby. As I wrote in a previous column:

Nazi writers for the US Army wildly exaggerated their battlefield successes, and blamed their defeats on the weather. In this same period, American and British military intelligence analysts were forbidden from publishing anything overtly negative about Nazi Germany. These lies are collectively known as the Myth of the Clean Wehrmacht. The chief architects of the Holocaust like Heinz Guderian are openly celebrated as heroes up to the present day, and most Americans don’t know about the German war crimes in the Soviet Union.

The Sound of Music, the Cold War, and the Clean Wehrmacht

Like Napoleon, it is very well possible that if he hadn’t been painted into a corner, he might not have invaded the Soviet Union. By the same logic, if the British and Polish hadn’t gone to absurd lengths to provoke him, he might not have invaded Poland or France either.

We should take a page from the Soviets’ book. Or look at their movies. Soviet media did not depict nazis as subhuman monsters. They’re portrayed as logical and competent human beings. Humanized villains are simply better story telling, since there’s no glory in defeating a bumbling ogre. And it’s also a much more effective moral lesson, that even normal, everyday people are capable of extremely cruel crimes.

But western stories do the opposite. We have the cartoonishly evil nazi characters, and all other villains are equally evil and senseless. That’s why basically every Hollywood villain has that stereotypical scene when he shoots one of his own men for no reason just to show the audience how evil he is.

There is only one way out of this thinking trap. Diplomacy is always an option and should always be tried, and yes, that includes with Hitler. After making this realization, Soviet diplomacy with Hitler makes a lot of sense, and it had a fair chance of working. Their truce with Japan worked. It worked so well, Imperial Japan became useless to Anglo anti-Soviet policy and they literally had to invent an excuse to go to war with them. If the Soviet/German pact had lasted a couple of years longer than it did, it’s entirely possible Hitler would have decided an invasion was too risky and not tried it at all. That’s why it’s very important for NATO propaganda to paint Hitler as a delusional mad man, the Soviets evil for negotiating with him, and Chamberlain a coward for “appeasing” him.

Why Did Hitler Declare War on the USA After Pearl Harbor?

Ian Kummer

Support my work by making a contribution through Boosty

• Facebook
• VK
• LinkedIn

All text in Reading Junkie posts are free to share or republish without permission, and I highly encourage my fellow bloggers to do so. Please be courteous and link back to the original.

I now have a new YouTube channel that I will use to upload videos from my travels around Russia. Expect new content there soon. Please give me a follow here.

Also feel free to connect with me on Quora (I sometimes share unique articles there).

---

---