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 Thomas777 is a revisionist historian and a fiction writer 
  Thomas returns to the show to explain why Germany invaded Poland in 1939, the pact that followed, and America's entrance into the war
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I want to welcome everyone back to the Pete Quiglione Show, returning for the third time in less than a month, Thomas777.

It's always a pleasure and I'm very grateful.

Last time we tried to explain what was happening in Germany that was leading up to, we went from Treaty of Versailles, even back a little bit to the Bolshevik revolution and came forward to what would lead up to World War II.

But before we started that, I wanted to ask you a question because this is a question that I've heard arguments on and debate on and watched lectures on for 5, 6 years now, the National Socialists in Germany, would they be considered left wing or right wing?

I mean, the problem is that in America, and part of this owes to part of the 2 things, part of it was the Keynes and the kind of ideological baggage of Keynes and part of it owes to the subsequent Cold War.

Americans, into a lesser degree, You find this in the UK as well as the rest of the kind of Anglophone cultural sphere.

You know, this idea that the right-left wing divide has something to do with economics or it has something to do with, you know, people's view of, you know, how the government interfaces with the free market or what purportedly is the free market.

I mean, everybody knows there's no such thing as a kind of purely free market that just exists in stasis, like Newtonian physics just exists or something.

But I mean, that's a bit too abstract for what we're talking about here.

But the you know the way the Europeans if you want to understand what the right left divide originally meant like conceptually you've got to look at the French Revolution and what gave rise to those clefts.

It has to do with what you consider, like how you view authority, how you view the legitimacy of authority, and what you view as the proper domain of the state and of culture, and Where the dominion of 1 begins and the other ends and what the content of those things is, okay, it's not When you find these libertarian types who claim like Oh Adolf Hitler was a left-winger because he believed in high taxes or something.

I mean, that's either deliberately obtuse and kind of an effort to sabotage the conversation on purpose, or it's just really, really provincial and ignorant.

You know, the only way to understand National Socialism is, I mean, there's something to the AJB Taylor's view of it as Sonderweg is, you know, owing to the kind of peculiar, like, dialectical course of Germany that gave rise to it, like it would it wouldn't really have emerged in another state, I believe that.

And that's also why it's important to distinguish it from fascism and other kinds of autocratic movements that that developed kind of comitantly with it.

But it you know the the fact of the matter is it it was it was it was an effort to salvage culture from what Heidegger called practical transcendence.

And when Heidegger said transcendence, he didn't mean like we think about in a Christian sense or like in a Platonist sense.

He meant that modern life and the challenges of it and particularly the emergence of technology and other things and the kind of tensions and tensions inherent therein, you know, 1 of which was class warfare or 1 of which culminated in class warfare rather.

It's not a spontaneously occurring thing, despite what Mr.

This leads to the destruction of certain practices, values, a prolonged ability to phrase it or characterize it, orientation points for the way people live their lives individually and in common with others in communitarian ways.

So the National Socialism had, if we were going to boil it down to say, like 3 principles, it was, you know, to restore German sovereignty, you know, and to liberate it from the, from, you know, being yoked by its enemies.

You know, to preserve the German culture and guarantee the posterity of its people and the German race, if you want to characterize it that way, as people in the 20th century tended to think about things in biological material terms, and to eradicate communism for all time And basically all iterations of left-wing thought and praxis that, you know, were facilitating those first 2 things that I mentioned.

The idea that there's a check, like it's the same thing, not like Americans talk about democracy, like there's a checklist.

And if you identify certain factors, like, oh, that's democracy or this is not democracy.

You know, it's like, let's look at Adolf Hitler and the National Socialist German Workers Party.

You know, if I check off, I know off in the socialist box, that means it's left wing.

Or if I check off on up here, it's right wing.

That's not really the way political theory develops.

And that's not the way, that's certainly not the way people conceptualize it in Europe.

So you know, the only way to look at national socialism is as a radical right-wing tendency, kind of like the ultimate radical right-wing tendency in Hegelian terms.

And whether you accept Hegel's view of things or not and his, you know, his idea about the cunning of reason in history.

All that aside, even if you reject his metaphysics outright, you know, the Germans themselves, I'm talking about, you know, people like ordinary men involved in political life, not just high-flying academics, they basically accepted Hegelian paradigms.

And they thought of politics itself as a dialectical process.

So there weren't even national socialists on the Strasser side who had a conciliatory view of the Soviet Union in relative terms and who, you know, incorporated a lot more of kind of class antagonism sorts of paradigms into their program.

They viewed themselves as radically right-wing and as the radical right-wing response to subversive elements from the other side, and the other side being the left.

So in that sense, you're talking about people who, in existential terms, look at themselves as the right-wing vanguard.

So it can't be anything other than right-wing.

Like if that's what you view yourself as in political terms, that's what everybody else views you as, you know, the enemy is who is willing to kill you and who you're willing to kill in kind, like views you as that, that's what you are.

So I mean, that's the best way I can characterize it.

There's no argument there, in my opinion.

But like I said, it becomes convoluted, because part of this is people view their left-right divide in America.

Like I said, Keynes is really toxic in all kinds of ways.

I think he was a fraud and a pseudo-intellectual at base as much as Marx but there's ideological baggage, the Keynes, and the demand side paradigm.

It's basically, it's got what we would consider to be today like a social justice ethos baked into it that is essentially hostile to everything that came before it and that suggests that the role of government is to resolve certain inequalities that are just inherently unjust and need to be remedied.

But that's not what socialism at base is, OK?

I mean, Spengler himself made the point that, you know, Prussia particularly, you know, and particularly like Bismarck's model of good government was highly socialistic.

I mean, if you think that, if you think that, you know, Bismarck had something in common with, you know, like the 1970s Labour Party in the UK, you have something wrong with you or you're an idiot.

Or if you think that the Prussian ethos held something in common with Euro-communism that came later, that's absurd too.

I don't see how anybody could think otherwise, but you know, that's the way to understand it.

If you want to understand right-wing socialism such that it is, that's probably the wrong way to characterize it, but if you want to understand socialism not of the Marxist left, you should read Wernher Sombart.

You should probably read Oswald Spengler.

But I don't even think you need to get that esoteric.

I mean, all socialisms are kind of European, axiomatically, because the origins of Europe as a kind of cultural socio-political form develops out of the medieval mind.

And there was an interdependence between castes there that was shattered by the modern age.

Part of this was deliberate, but part of it just was inevitable, owing to emergent modalities of labor, of production, but also of just patterns of living and what people and the authority, what people recognize as authority and like what authority they appeal to for justice and things like that.

You know, when there's no more Lord of the Manor, and there's no more subsistence agriculture, that changes everything.

And the whole theory of socialism, wherever you peg it on the political spectrum, and whatever iteration you're talking about, it's basically an effort to restore the social capital that was shattered by the emergence of modern life.

It's more complicated than that, but that's kind of the basic brass tacks of it.

Well, Poland was essentially ruled by a military junta that was somewhat unstable, not just in the way that, I mean, conditions that lead to any military junta kind of taking power are unstable, but there was a kind of great power intrigues destabilize that situation you know like I raised before and on on Bronze Age Perverts podcast we deep dive into this What became to be known as the Polish documents Are something people need to pay attention to if they want to understand why Poland did what it did In terms of refusing to come to terms with Germany Essentially what Germany demanded of Poland was they demanded dedicated access to Danzig.

They demanded you know that their people be guaranteed certain rights of self-determination, what was called the Polish Corridor.

And they wanted some kind of guarantee that they could deploy to accomplish defense in depth on Polish soil in common with Poland, like an event that, you know, the Soviet Union mobilized with hostility.

But they were willing to let the Poles, you know, retain sovereign control over Danzig as long as the Germans had dedicated access and so long as the, so long as the, so long as the ethnic Germans there had, you know, had a formal political rights.

And I believe Poland would have come would have accepted those terms because they were entirely reasonable and they were precedented.

At that point, the Germans weren't even demanding that, you know, the territories that had been ceded to Poland ever the Great War be decoupled from Poland and given back to them.

I mean, this was a very moderate set of demands, frankly, and These demands owed to basic national security exigencies that whatever regime was in Berlin would have basically demanded the same thing.

A couple of things happened to frame this in context as to why war kind of became inevitable in my opinion.

Like I said, the Polish documents, after the invasion of Poland by the Wehrmacht, an SS battalion seized these documents from, I can't remember if it was the foreign ministry or if it was somewhere else.

But in any event, the crux of these documents was that there've been diplomatic overtures to Poland, wherein Roosevelt through William Bullitt had given Poland a formal guarantee that if they held out against Germany, they would support them in event of war.

And that, I believe, probably stiffened their resolve even more than Chamberlain's guarantee did.

I mean, obviously, Chamberlain's guarantee was above board, and the Roosevelt, the New Dealers' guarantee was not.

But you've got to consider in context what had been going on between the New Dealers and Poland leading up to that point.

Ambassador Petoskey, Petoskey, I always butcher the pronunciation of these Slavic names, but when he'd been in Washington several months before the outbreak of hostilities, you know, late

early 1939, I think it was around holiday season

William Bullitt was ambassador to France, but he was something of a minister without portfolio in Roosevelt's administration.

He was kind of the defective secretary of state.

Like Cordell Hall, it was always kind of sidelined, but it was understood even at the time that Bullitt wielded disproportionate power.

He was considered not a ridiculously serious guy.

He was kind of this foppish guy, like a man about town.

You know, he was 1 of Roosevelt's kind of aristocratic conceits came out in some of his associations he maintained, and nor was that more evident than with William Bullitt.

But when Petovsky ran across Bullitt, He said that he relayed back to Warsaw, Opitowski did, that Bullitt was characterizing the Soviet Union in completely benign terms.

Roosevelt was speaking in Germany in such jingoistic language that it was having the effect of facilitating a crisis where there didn't necessarily have to be 1.

Basically, what Potosi said was that the New Dealers were facilitating a kind of war fever by their vilification of Germany.

And on top of that, they were kind of, you know, they were placing Poland in a very precarious position vis-a-vis the Soviet Union, Because they were essentially demanding that Poland start looking at the Soviet Union as a strategic ally when according to Piotrowski, like these people, meaning the Soviets, were a greater threat essentially to Poland than the Germans were.

And it indicated a real contempt for Roosevelt and the entire foreign policy apparatus in Washington.

In Petoskey's view, he said that Jews and their financiers, these are his words, not mine, were trying to orchestrate a crisis and at the same time, you know, build a war coalition against Germany, just, you know, for the sake of smashing Germany without regard to, you know, what that would do to the geo-strategic landscape in Europe.

And the fact that there'd be no, there'd be no bulwark against Soviet power, which was increasingly being asserted by Stalin, both directly and implicitly at the same time.

I mean, so in other words, you had natural conditions of tension and extent between Germany and Poland.

I mean, they go back probably a millennia.

And the Polish government was doing basically nothing to stop what amounted to a bargaining kind of race war on the ground.

The Polish majority was ethnically cleansing Jews, Russians, Germans, other people that they didn't like.

You know, you had some moderates in Warsaw within the military government.

You had others who were incredibly jingoistic and were looking for any opportunity to, you know, essentially sue for war in order to grab even more land from Germany on top of that, which had already been ceded to them.

You even had some elements who believed that Germany's back had been broken so much by the defeat in

and by the subsequent sanction of Versailles and everything else that if it came to war, there were even those who believed that the Polish army would be able to march on Berlin within weeks.

I mean, which seems totally insane, but there's a history in the rearview mirror, and it's amazing what people can convince themselves of when they're convinced of the rightness of their cause, as it were.

So I mean, basically all of those reasons.

And it's, I believe, too, what was always within the contemplation, and both John Tolan and David Irving make this point, neither of whom are military historians, but they're both were incredibly, I mean Irving's still alive but Irving's kind of the seminal historian of the Third Reich, whoever anybody feels about him and Toland as unique, had unique insight into the personage of Hitler, I believe.

I think he's probably the best documentarian of Hitler's relationship with the OKW and, you know, the general staff, rather.

The very much within the contemplation of of of Hitler was the Soviet Union and its power projection potential.

And 1 of the reasons Hitler was so eager until it became clear that this was just totally off the table to sue for peace with the Western allies is because, you know, like AJB Taylor, to, you know, bring up him again, as I did about the Sunderweg point a moment ago, Hitler didn't really have any interest in the West.

I mean, yeah, like any kind of German superpower was going to dominate Europe as a little pivot politically and militarily of the continent.

But this idea that, you know, the this idea like the German had some sort of designs on France or something, I mean, what in naked geostrategic terms, you know, what exactly would that accomplish?

You know, Nothing really as of 1939, 1940.

So if you want to understand the Polish situation too, like aside from all these intrigues and just intrinsic tensions, You've also got to understand what the Soviet Union was doing.

The Soviet Union was amassing the largest military force the world, the planet had ever seen.

It was a bargaining superpower as much as the United States was in military terms, obviously not in productive terms.

And in terms of economic wealth and the ability to translate its natural bounty into value-added manufacturers, obviously that wasn't there.

But its capacity to make war and project power was absolutely at a par with the United States, potentially.

But anything Germany wanted to do, if Germany could not reach some sort of concord with Poland in the form of a mutual defense pact, or at least some kind of right of parley in terms of, you know, deploying in depth across the Polish frontier in common with the Polish army.

If that couldn't be achieved, Germany would not be able to come to terms with Poland because that would mean that they were just constantly essentially at risk of assault by the Soviet Union with no naturally defensible boundaries between them and the Soviet Army.

And Poland would have been in a position too where they could essentially and definitely play off the Soviet Union against Germany and vice versa in order to get what they wanted.

I mean, it would not be a tenable situation.

like several weeks into the invasion, William Rhodes Davis, who was this kind of industrialist type, he was not a new dealer, but nor was he an America firster.

He made overtures to Berlin at the behest of Department of State to see what, as a civilian, which is not in any official capacity, this is very unofficial diplomacy.

But Davis approached Hitler through Weizsäcker at the foreign ministry in Berlin and asked what Germany was willing to offer if America was willing to step in and try and, you know, negotiate some sort of peace.

And Germany said that they'd allow Poland to remain sovereign so long as it became a, so long as it adopted a formal neutrality vis-a-vis Germany and the Soviet Union, so long as the territories that had been lost during the Great War were decoupled and incorporated back into the German Reich, so long as the Germans got Danzig, and, you know, so long as, so long as, you know, so long as those conditions were met, basically, like they would withdraw, you know, they would withdraw beyond, you know, what would be the new German borders, which are basically what they'd been in 1914.

Okay, which is not a great deal for the Poles, but it's better than what became of the Poles.

And frankly, the Germans didn't have to offer anything.

And then when, apparently when Davis returned to Washington, Roosevelt refused to meet him, Cordell Hull refused to meet him, and he was basically stonewalled, and everybody in Roosevelt's regime pretended as if these conversations never happened.

Now the cynic in me wants to believe that Roosevelt was trying to hedge his bets, looking forward to his re-election.

What he said was, it was pretty well documented by Tom Fleming and the New Dealers War as well as by Marco Weber at IHR, he's, what a drop in this forest that people can look it up if they want to.

They don't need to just take my word for it.

But I mean, this was, the Polish situation was very, very murky, in other words.

Okay, that's what, but it was, you know, the primary catalyst was, you know, the power political paradigm between Germany and the Soviet Union, which is why, I mean, that's, what did Berlin do?

What did Berlin slash Adolf Hitler do before, before even the assault order?

I mean, he sat down with Ribbentrop and Stalin's delegates with authority to negotiate in such capacities and divvied up what the map would look like after the cessation of hostilities of Poland.

I mean, that wasn't just Germany being a good neighbor in power political terms.

I mean, that was this was a catalyst for the war.

I mean, you know, it was it was a geo strategic contest between the Reich and the Soviet Union and the Poles thought that they could gamble and somehow profit.

But like I said, it was an unstable regime.

He made the point that 1 of the more bizarre things is, I mean, yeah, okay, I realize that there's always, there's always a fictions that are confabulated in order to rationalize intervention and things in these power political affairs.

There's never honesty afoot when America decides to go to war, but holding out the Polish regime of 1939 as some sort of beacon of democracy or some kind of, you know, or some sort of, or some sort of victim of the intrigues of authoritarian states.

You know, like I said, this was literally a military junta that was ethnically cleansing people that it didn't think belonged in its national state.

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Can you talk a little bit about the fact that we are taught nowhere when we're growing up, when we're in school, that the Soviet Union and communism at that point was a great threat to Europe?

We talked about the last time the Spanish Civil War, all the stuff that was happening in Spain, and all these fascist movements Rising up in certain countries because they felt the heat of this Germany Germany being right there did Germany really feel like the Soviet Union was going to push forward and Basically take Europe if they wanted oh

Yeah, definitely and I mean Germany's problem going back and during some longer centuries was always Russia Okay, I mean just if you take communism out of it.

That would have changed everything OK in terms of the world situation and the ideological persuasion of the state actors involved and everything else.

But Germany always had a geo-strategic existential problem vis-a-vis Russia.

That's just inevitable, Okay, because that's the tragedy of great power paradigms, and particularly Europe, where, I mean, 1 of the problems of Europe is that, Europe is basically a peninsula, if you look at it, I mean, in geographic terms, I mean, you know this, you've looked at maps and you're a learned guy.

Yeah, and there's no natural way to defend it.

You know, and then you have this, there's nothing standing between, there's nothing standing between Europe and, and you know, the barbaric East if you want to look, I don't look at it that way, but that's the view and that's the mythology of Europe and its existential concerns and fears.

The communists had gone on the march immediately after the great war and they basically got stopped in their tracks, you know, by the polls.

And that's 1 of the reasons why, you know, the Polish army had this kind of misplaced confidence as people might view it.

You know, intrinsically communism, as I made the point last time we spoke, communism is not just intrinsically homicidal, it's intrinsically internationalist.

And it's kind of like the praxis of it is to tear down national borders and frontiers and expand almost like a plant germinates its surroundings or something.

I mean, I'm not trying to sound shrill or resort to lyrid hyperbole.

But I mean, there was all these considerations.

There was like the apocryphal reality that Bolshevism truly had this kind of this momentum, this dialectical momentum that's difficult for people to identify with these days because there's nothing comparable.

But on top of all those things too, Stalin was mobilizing a massive military force that, as I said, was the largest that up to that point had ever existed.

They were situated in offensive deployment by the time of Barbarossa, 2 years subsequent, just shy of 2 years subsequent, to the assault on Poland.

I mean, what exactly was the Soviet Union planning on doing with this?

I mean, you never, you never, a state never, I mean, even aside from all these other variables we just mentioned, a state never mobilizes, particularly a state with superpower potential like the Soviet Union was, the state ever mobilizes for benign purposes.

You know, it's the equivalent of drawing down on somebody and saying, well, don't worry, I'm only pointing this weapon at you for defensive purposes.

I mean, that's great, but it, You know, it doesn't change the fact it's an existential menace.

And it's also too, I mean, I believe that was part of the problem with, there was, I don't want to, we can deep dive into this at some other time if you want, but like the Hitler-Strasser cleft, which in some ways is the radical rights equivalent to the Trotsky-Stalin cleft, it's an imperfect metaphor, but I'm kind of intrigued by it, the parallel.

I mean, there was an international aspect to that because I mean Strasser was certainly no friend of the Russians or of communism of the Soviet Union But he realized you know, we've got to somehow come to terms with these people.

And the response to that, like the Hitler faction's view, was basically the Prussian view, which was like, okay, I mean, even if you come to some kind of concord with Stalin and with the Russians, just by a kind of osmosis, Germany is gonna become a fiefdom of Russia slash Soviet Union.

You're gonna be junior partner just in existential terms in any kind of a, in any, in any sort of diplomatic, political concord of that nature, you know, so it's not going to matter because, you know, whatever, whatever Germany does in terms of power projection or in terms of existential political decisions of a military nature is gonna be dictated by Moscow.

And if not dictated, Moscow is gonna have the ultimate veto over it in existential, like realist terms.

And finally, I write a lot of my long form as people who read me, I'm sure have gleaned about the fact that I believe that Roosevelt in the United States was Germany's primary existential enemy.

I mean, yeah, I realized there was a Manichaean kind of ideological collision between the German Reich and the Soviet Union and the, you know, Bolshevism and National Socialism emerged out of a, you know, a common dialectical process and they can't be overstated, the significance of that.

But in terms of the true kind of enemy of the German Reich, I'd say that was America.

And looking forward, that definitely was in Hitler's contemplation.

Like I said, just read the text of the December 11th speech.

And if you're gonna, if you're looking forward, you know, and the Germans did think in millennial increments, okay?

I mean, you can say that it's grandiose and crazy, but it's really not.

That's the way ancient peoples view the world.

And at a historical time in the 20th century people began to think in these kinds of gargantuan terms okay I mean that's all the major all the major powers did okay it wasn't just the Europeans wasn't just Hitler's kind of you know artist romanticism taking hold of his fascinations.

But if you're gonna if you're gonna steer yourself for some ongoing kind of Cold War with the United States or some kind of great power competition with America, I mean, you've got to become a superpower yourself.

And we're back to the Hitler-Stressor problem like we just mentioned.

You can either become a fiefdom of the Soviet Union, or you can smash it, and you can create a European superpower that stretches from the Atlantic coast to the Urals, and is basically the United States of Europe like replete with you know comparable population and a power productive capacity and and bounty of natural wealth and you know and petroleum and energy and farmland and everything else.

So either way, Germany doesn't survive unless it becomes a superpower.

And it becomes a superpower by smashing Ivan.

So there's that, even taking, like I said, even taking the ideological aspect out of it, and the dialectical process that gave rise to the kind of intractable murderous tension between Berlin and Moscow out of it and taking the race war aspect out of it.

So Germany goes in in 1939 into Poland and what do they start setting up to as a cudgel against the Soviets?

Well, I mean, there was the non-aggression, it was the non-aggression, there was the 1939 non-aggression pact, which, and people, you know, the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact, and I mean, people who like to put shade in the Third Reich You know, they like a sale like oh what you know, Hilton was this horrible man for you know, breaching the non-aggression pact, you know less than 2 years later, but You don't sign non-aggression pact with your friends.

You sign non-aggression pacts with your enemies.

And I mean, like I said, the Reich had approached Stalin and Ribbentrop's Ministry and established what the demarcation lines would be.

And the Wehrmacht literally met the Red Army in Poland Central.

I mean, you still have the Red Army on your frontier.

And Poland's not a small country, but in the terms we're talking about, and with the mobilization potential of the Soviet Union, and with the way modern combat resolves with combined arms, I mean, that still doesn't constitute a hell of a lot of defense in depth.

If you're facing off against the Soviet Union in the center of Poland, rather than...

I mean, it's certainly better than having them on the North German plane or something, but it's certainly less than ideal, but that's why Barbarossa happened when it did.

I don't want us to get ahead of ourselves, but looking eastward, that's exactly what the Germans saw.

That's what, I mean, I believe Victor Suvorov wrote a book.

He's a controversial guy, not just, core historians dislike him because they don't like the fact that he's basically a revisionist.

A lot of revisionists don't like him because they just they disagree with some of his takes because they think he's an eccentric kind of Russian and then there's yet other people don't like him because he was a GRU defector and there's always people who, I mean, defectors really don't, people don't look favorably upon that.

I mean, regardless of how they feel about the regime from whence the person in question came, but-

I always question defectors because the first thing that they do is they get debriefed by the State Department of whatever country they're defecting to.

And they always end up having housing and transportation out of nowhere.

No, and it's just not I I'm not saying people should.

I mean, every every circumstance is different, but yeah, I understand the suspicion people have for Mr.

But in very particular terms, what Suvorov said about what was in Stalin's contemplation in the weeks and months leading up to Operation Barbarossa, I think is inarguable.

The people today, they, we take for granted the way that combined arms, modern combat resolves rapidly.

We take for granted that France's back was broken in political terms by the Great War and they weren't really situated and politically they were fractured.

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Episode 728: The Invasion of Poland and the U.S. Enters the War w/ Thomas777