If the objective of the West was the destruction of Nazi Germany, it was a "smashing" success. But why destroy Hitler? If to liberate Germans, it was not worth it. After all, the Germans voted Hitler in.
Ummmm... we didn't really care if the Germans were killing Germans. What we did care abiut was that Germany was eating all the Europeans countries. Britain was on the verge of falling. So we fought the Europeans from to save Brittan and France, not to liberate the German people. (Only later in the war did we find out that the Jews were being killed.)
This article starts off good, talking about how the USSR killed many people, so we didn't really win anything during WWII, since one killer was replaced by another. But for the most part, we are fine with nations killing themselves, as long as they don't invade other countries. And when USSR covertly invaded other countries is when the Cold War started.
I donno, the article is a good read, but in the end I think it is wrong.
4 comments:
The New York Times was reporting the Halocaust several years before the United States entered the war. There were huge rallies in New York city, with hundreds of thousands of supporters, protesting Germany's treatment of the Jewish population. IBM was making millions selling Hollerith Machines and punch cards to the Nazi's. Hollerith machines allowed the Nazis to identify, transport, and eventually execute 12 million people, and IBM designed special equipment to facilitate the Nazi's in this purpose. If the largest corporation in our country at the time, had initmate knowledge of the Nazi's plans for the Jews, then it is unreasonable to think that no one in this country knew what was happening. To say that we didn't know Jews were being killed is wrong and it dishonors their memory.
It's not to say that no one knew that Jews were being killed, it just was not a driving factor in going to war.
On "May 18, 1942 The New York Times reports on an inside page that Nazis have machine-gunned over 100,000 Jews in the Baltic states, 100,000 in Poland and twice as many in western Russia." this is soon after the declaration of war on Germany.
We knew that Jews were being rounded up, that not argued. But i do not think that it was wide spread knowledge that they were being killed. And Jews being rounded up was not a good reason to go to war, because during the war the US was rounding up Japanese and putting them in camp. Although the Japanese camps were defiantly not death camps as the concentration camps were.
I understand your point about the US rounding up Japanese and putting them into camps, but is it really reasonable to claim that we didn't know what the Nazi's intentions for the Jews were? I mean, Hitler was comparing Jews to rats, and preaching about how glorious the day would be when Germany was free of them a decade before the first camps opened. They also contracted with IBM, to design punch cards that clearly were meant to segregate the European population based on religion and race. They (IBM) also designed cards to keep track of freight trains carrying deported Jews across Europe. When a train full of Jews goes from Germany to a camp Poland, and returns empty, and repeats the whole process again and again, someone (at IBM, US Govt, etc.) must have asked where did those people go. The Nazi's were meticulous about keeping records of everything, and so historians can look at Hollerith punch cards and read the truth for themselves. Its easy to become apologetic and make believe that we didnt know this was happening because the reality is that many American corporations were making a lot of money doing business with Nazi Germany, and the Alled Nations at the same time. This was not the instant information age we have today, but make no mistake, the world knew what the Nazis were saying, and once they started the deportations could we have drawn any other conclusions? Even if it wasn't widespread knowledge, our government most certainly knew, IBM most certainly knew, and anyone in the US who read the newspapers had to have known. The real reason the US entered the war (late as we did), in my opinion, was to guarantee our barganing position afterwards. Once Hitler turned on Stalin, and the Russians became Allies, the U.S. had to join the war, or allow Communist Russia to possibly become the leader at the peace talks with the U.S. left out in the cold.
Right, so we entered the war to save France and Brittan, (the article implies not just from the Nazis but also from USSR). Not to free the Germans.
But i do agree with what you are saying. It i think would be somewhat obvious what the Nazi's were doing, but with such a media lockdown in Germany the truth did not really get out for a while.
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