The Holocaust: A Warning From History

Ludwig August Theodor Beck was a German general who served as Chief of the German General Staff from 1933 to 1938. He had no moral objection to the idea of a war of aggression to eliminate Czechoslovakia as a state. However, Beck felt that Germany needed more time to rearm before starting such a war. In Beck's assessment, the earliest date Germany could risk a war was 1940, and any war that was started in 1938 would be a "premature war" that Germany would lose. Most of the generals felt that the idea of starting a war in 1938 was highly risky, but none of them would confront Hitler with a refusal to carry out orders since most of them thought that Beck's arguments against war in 1938 were flawed. In a June 1938 General Staff study, Beck concluded that Germany could defeat Czechoslovakia but that to do so would leave western Germany empty of troops, which could allow the French to seize the Rhineland with little difficulty. Beck maintained that Czechoslovak defenses we...

"In war," writes Ian Kershaw, "Nazism came into its own. The Nazi Movement had been born out of a lost war. As with Hitler personally, the experience of that war and erasing the stain of that defeat were at its heart. 'National renewal' and preparations for another war to establish the dominance in Europe which the first great war had failed to attain drove it forwards. The new war not brought the circumstances and opportunities for the dramatic radicalization of Nazism's ideological crusade. Long-term goals seemed almost overnight to become attainable policy objectives. Persecution which had targeted usually disliked social minorities was now directed at an entire conquered and subjugated people. The Jews, a tiny proportion of the German population were not only far more numerous in Poland, but were despised by many within their native land and were now the lowest of the low in the eyes of the brutal occupiers of the country." But I am getting ahead of ...