𝝥𝝰𝘇𝗴𝝻𝝸
🕵️
𝕲𝖊𝖍𝖊𝖎𝖒𝖕𝖔𝖑𝖎𝖟𝖊𝖎
Posts: 1,457 
|
Post by 𝝥𝝰𝘇𝗴𝝻𝝸 on Mar 14, 2023 21:38:32 GMT
The fall of tsarism in March 1917 was greeted by Russian Jews as an event that marked the end of their suffering and the beginning of a new era of liberation. One of the first measures adopted by the provisional government was the suppression of the anti-Semitic legislation in force under the old regime. This was a total of 650 antisemitic laws mentioned by Trotsky in his "the History of the Russian Revolution",
The Jews appeared as the true architects of the Russian Revolution, denounced by the world News Papers of the time.
In 1918, the People’s Commissariat of Nationalities, led by Stalin, established a Jewish section. Its leader was Simon Dimanshtein, an old Bolshevik who spoke Yiddish.
Jews were highly influential in the Russian Revolution (not all however); whether this influence can be classed as Jewish Bolshevism is a rabbit hole.
|
|
|
|
Post by wheelbarrow on Mar 15, 2023 2:15:12 GMT
Luxemburg was a sensitive woman who was pained to think of how German youth were now going to throw their lives away. Specifically, their lives are to be thrown away as fuel for Luxemburg's worldwide revolution.
Luxemburg was a self-conscious (not that it matters) member of group A seeking to modify the behavioral phenotype of members of group B. It's unlikely to do wonders for the latter. Pages of arguing from communist premises don't inspire confidence you'll ever get past the hurdle.
Introduce your other creeps like Gustav Landauer, Ernst Toller, Paul Levi, Eugen Levine, Martha Ruben-Wolf, Kurt Eisner, and so forth and it just becomes that much less likely that, by some fluke, they're doing it all for the Germans.
|
|
|
|
Post by patricksmcnally on Mar 16, 2023 15:53:34 GMT
"The fall of tsarism in March 1917 was greeted by Russian Jews"
There's no question of that. It's also a fact that the overwhelming majority of Russians greeted the event with enthusiasm. Cossack soldiers were sent out to confront the early demonstrators in the streets at the time of the February Revolution. The Cossacks made it clear to the protestors that they wouldn't do anything to stop them. Do you somehow believe that these events in the streets of Petrograd were managed by Jews? That's absurd. Jews obviously welcomed the events. But they didn't have much to do with the real ground level acts that toppled the Czarist monarchy.
"The Jews appeared as the true architects of the Russian Revolution, denounced by the world News Papers of the time."
Lots of newspapers said all sorts of things, most of it totally meaningless. The reality remains that the February Revolution broke out in the streets because Russians were fed up and there isn't the slightest evidence that was in any way orchestrated by Jews. If the Czarist autocracy had been smart, they would have resolved in 1906 to steer away from any wars for the next quarter-century, while accepting constitutional parliament and concentrating on industrializing the country at large. If this had been followed, then by the early 1930s a new Russia might have emerged that would be closer to Britain in nature. But the dismissal of the Duma by Stolypin in 1907 really augured the future downfall of the monarchy.
|
|
|
|
Post by patricksmcnally on Mar 16, 2023 16:01:04 GMT
"Specifically, their lives are to be thrown away as fuel for Luxemburg's worldwide revolution."
That's more like Hitler's view than Luxemburg's. As I said, there are some obvious parallels between the views of Hitler and Lenin on the outbreak of war in 1914. But your picture of Luxemburg is just a fantasy image in your brain. Luxemburg became depressed over the war because she had always adhered to a maternal attitude towards German workers. The idea of casually accepting huge numbers of deaths for the sake of advancing a goal was something which both Hitler and Lenin easily accepted.
|
|
|
|
Post by patricksmcnally on Mar 16, 2023 16:51:14 GMT
With regards to the Bavarian Soviet that was temporarily set up in 1919, it's worth recalling that Hitler himself served on it:
"Even two days after the Soviet Republic had been proclaimed, Hitler stood for election again, when the new regime conducted an election among Munich's soldier councils to ensure support for the Soviet Republic by Munich's military units. Hitler was now elected Deputy Battalion Representative and remained in the post for the entire lifespan of the Soviet Republic. His task included liaising with the Department of Propaganda of the new Socialist government."
-- Thomas Weber, Hitler's First War, p. 251.
That accounts for why Hitler has nothing at all to say about the Bavarian Soviet in Mein Kampf. In that book, Hitler makes lots of preposterous claims that the November Revolution which caused Kaiser Wilhelm II to resign and go into exile was part of a planned Jewish conspiracy. But he has nothing to say about Bavaria in 1919. The explanation is that Hitler knew that if he had written in 1925 about the Bavarian Soviet then witnesses would have recalled his own participation in it.
In fact, the Soviet Republic was able to mobilize around 30,000 soldiers in its service. You'd be crazy that these were mostly Jews. The uprising in Bavaria was driven by real popular discontent. Of course, that doesn't mean that the leaders handled it well. It's too bad that Rosa Luxemburg was not alive at this time. From what one can put together, if Luxemburg had been alive then she would have sympathetic with Kurt Eisner and critical of Eugene Levine. But it's an open question what her exact position would have been.
|
|
𝐒𝐜𝐨𝐭𝐭
🦅
𝐈𝐦𝐩𝐞𝐫𝐚𝐭𝐨𝐫 𝐞𝐭 𝐑𝐨𝐦𝐚𝐧𝐮𝐬
Posts: 209
|
Post by 𝐒𝐜𝐨𝐭𝐭 on Mar 17, 2023 5:42:36 GMT
The Kaiser and the European monarchies generally abdicating late in 1918 was one of the Allied pre-conditions for a Wilsonian Armistice. The requirement was effectively Unconditional Surrender ─ immediately laying down arms and demobilizing the German Army and evacuating foreign lands still held by German armed forces, plus complete regime-change. The Social Democrats gleefully accepted this and went on to sign the blank-check to be cashed later at Versailles where ancestral and organic German lands were formally carved up by the Victors, ancestral German populations consigned to hostile foreign rule, and Germany itself made a vassal state to the Entente with, among other things, an open-ended War Guilt clause. This is why Hindenburg (not Ludendorff) called it a " Dolchstoss" or Dagger Stab in the Back. The Marxist Socialists and Weimar Republicans threw the dice with Armistice and revolution and then acted surprised when the Wilsonian virtues of democracy and the equality of nations before the world bar were completely ignored as far as the Germans and most of their former allies were concerned. It is much easier to say that Hindenburg lied ─ or that it was Ludendorff or Hitler that invented this "Legend" and not the venerable Field Marshal and elected Weimar President Paul von Hindenburg himself. The United States after President Wilson's demise saw the light and tried to get out of this international crusading reptilian mess. The U.S. Senate did not ratify the Versailles Treaty nor the League of Nations ─ a vision of Democracy-Capitalist world order whereby the Windsor monarchs remained the good guys, as were Czech and Polish dictators. Later the Roosevelt Trust even recognized the Soviet Union in 1933 and sent technocrats and engineering experts to develop formerly Tsarist lands and bring them into the modern world with a strange Kosher amalgam of Capitalism and Communism. The Weimar regime, though it often and usually ruled by emergency decree/dictatorship, was at least not as dysfunctional in governance as the Red Terror. The Stalin regime recognized this and commenced an arms-ace against Germany beginning in 1928. If it had not been for the Great Depression scuttling the Dawes and Young Plans for the reworking of the intolerable war-guilt/war-debt financial restructure left from Versailles, the vassal Weimar regime might have survived without a revolution or a German instauration. This would be a situation not unlike today where the Germans have been some of the biggest toadies of postwar Globalism, ultimately any nation's nationalism tolerated only so far as they can successfully keep the balance of power from unduly tipping over global financial markets, and with European balkanization tendencies encouraged just enough to be kept in a quiescent or at least stochastic state. There is not much that can be done once the well is sufficiently poisoned. The Big Lie of course (per Hitler explaining it in Mein Kampf) was the Republican/Marxist claim that it was General Ludendorff himself who was responsible for the German defeat and the postwar aftermath, wherein the reality was that he had done the most to try to save the situation.  |
|
|
|
Post by patricksmcnally on Mar 18, 2023 16:37:36 GMT
"went on to sign the blank-check to be cashed later at Versailles"
No German government had any choice about signing the Allied peace terms as they were dictated. Ludendorff himself resigned in 1918 because he knew very well that if he had remained at the head of government then he would have been forced to sign whatever the Allies handed him. Instead, he turned the government over to the Social Democrats and Catholic Centrists (a liberal party, despite the conservative-sounding name) and subsequently accused them of a stab-in-the-back when they signed the peace which any German government would have had to sign. Hindenburg and Ludendorff were both liars on this point. Neither one of them had any alternative to signing the peace.
"The Marxist Socialists and Weimar Republicans threw the dice with Armistice and revolution and then acted surprised"
There was certainly no alternative to signing the peace terms. According to Scott Christianson, Fatal Airs, pp. 38-41, the Allies were preparing to bomb German cities with poison chemicals when the war ended. No valid purpose would have been served by prolonging what was clearly a lost war. The way that shysters like Hindenburg, Hitler and Ludendorff subsequently tried to pretend that they knew what to do better was all a fake act.
"the Republican/Marxist claim that it was General Ludendorff himself who was responsible for the German defeat and the postwar aftermath, wherein the reality was that he had done the most to try to save the situation."
Total rubbish. Although debates continue to go on about whether or not it would have been possible to negotiate a peace in 1916, Ludendorff was completely against abandoning German conquests. Bethmann-Hollweg had drawn up the original September Program in 1914 which envisioned German expansion in Europe, but at least by 1916 he seemed to be becoming wary of the risks of US entry into the war on the side of the Allies. Although one shouldn't make too much of the gestures which Bethmann-Hollweg made in 1916 about a possible peace, the record is clear that Ludendorff was never willing to abandon German territorial ambitions. For that reason, all of Bethmann-Hollweg's timid attempts to suggest a possibility of peace were probably doomed from the start.
|
|
|
|
Post by wheelbarrow on Mar 18, 2023 21:20:05 GMT
That accounts for why Hitler has nothing at all to say about the Bavarian Soviet in Mein Kampf. In that book, Hitler makes lots of preposterous claims that the November Revolution which caused Kaiser Wilhelm II to resign and go into exile was part of a planned Jewish conspiracy. But he has nothing to say about Bavaria in 1919. The explanation is that Hitler knew that if he had written in 1925 about the Bavarian Soviet then witnesses would have recalled his own participation in it. Hitler's bid for a position of influence proves his allegiance to the regime? I guess when he later spied on the right wing workers' party he sure did a number on them. (Also, NSDAP didn't shy from the Bavarian Debacle, it in fact created a testimonial archive of stories of Old Fighters battling the foreign regime.)
Rosa Luxemburg posited that Germany was a crucial stepping stone for the socialist revolution because of its advanced industrial development and the powerful Marxist tradition in the German working-class movement. She argued that the German working class had the intellectual and organizational capacity to take on the capitalist system and create a socialist society that had the potential to inspire and support workers' struggles in other countries, leading to a global socialist revolution. Luxemburg also saw Germany as an important link between Western and Eastern Europe, making it a key player in the international socialist movement. By her own account, she was in the crucial battlefield for the struggle between reformist social democracy and revolutionary socialism.
Thus, Luxemburg infiltrated and then worked a location that was deemed crucial for Luxemburg's ideology. Luxemburg became depressed over German workers because of their supposed temporary role in history - after which the mere idea of German nationality being ground to fine dust by the engines of progress would be a-ok. Gurus like Luxemburg can become emotionally invested in their flock as part of their psychodrama. It's how they're best effective. It's still a foreign alien dispensing foreign instructions to an outgroup that are not adequate for the outgruop's survival and long-term prosperity, and if foreign alien Luxemburg had any qualms about treating Germans as pets/property/fuel she'd simply accept a humble role in the location she infiltrated and not do that. Why take communist Luxemburg at her word, but not Hitler's many statements decrying the casualties of the First World War on both sides and making it a long-standing topic of conversation? Was it casual when Third Reich Germany immediately became veteran-centric in its governance, from social policy to veteran care to propaganda and social status? |
|
|
|
Post by patricksmcnally on Mar 20, 2023 16:27:50 GMT
"allegiance"
Not allegiance. The point of Hitler's activity there is simply that it illustrates how his politics were still in flux at the time. When he wrote Mein Kampf, Hitler invented a story which claimed that as the armistice was announced he was seized with a vision of Germany's enemies that pointed to what he must do. Biographers have argued before that this was an embellishment imposed after the fact. That is what his activity in the Bavarian council illustrates.
"She argued that the German working class had the intellectual and organizational capacity to take on the capitalist system and create a socialist society that had the potential to inspire and support workers' struggles in other countries, leading to a global socialist revolution."
Exactly. My point was that she never adopted a Bolshevik program because she regarded the events in Russia as having been shaped by the social backwardness in Russia. Hence, while she could appreciate the need for some kind of revolution in Russia, she was also firm that this was not a model for Germany. Unfortunately, her execution led many of the new generation of Leftists to conclude that she had made a mistake by not following Lenin's path. After the July Uprising had been broken out in 1917, there were calls in the Provisional Government for Lenin's arrest. Lenin went into hiding because he was used to these methods in Russia. But Luxemburg never did so because she thought the German proletarian revolution would be different from Russia. That got her killed, and also drove many KPD-members to turn to Zinoviev for advice. A bad outcome overall.
"accept a humble role in the location she infiltrated and not do that."
The revolutionary uprisings were breaking among German soldiers and workers on their own without Luxemburg doing anything.
"The revolt of the sailors at Wilhelmshaven and Kiel began on October 30, when a report circulated that the German fleet had been assembled to make a dash at the British fleet in the North Sea as a last heroic stand. The morale of the sailors was already quite low by this time... Now that armistice negotiations were under way, the order for a naval offensive seemed a useless gesture... The authoritarian discipline hitherto maintained in the German military machine could no longer hold. ... a mass demonstration of the men on November 3 was fired on, resulting in eight dead and twenty-nine wounded... The Kiel workers seized the opportunity on November 4 to create a Workers' and Soldiers' Council..."
-- Koppel Pinson, Modern Germany, pp. 355-6.
All of this occurred without needing any "alien" influence.
"Hitler's many statements decrying the casualties of the First World War on both sides"
Hitler's most notable statements were about claiming that Germany could still have won as late as the summer of 1918, a totally absurd suggestion.
|
|
|
|
Post by wheelbarrow on Mar 20, 2023 17:45:42 GMT
Hitler jockeying for a position of influence proves his political ambitions, and this is precisely the main claim he made, whether gripped by his full vision immediately or not. National Socialism itself had a struggle for ideological clarity in the run-up to winning the country, despite Hitler outlining something pretty early on. Of course all politicians generally embellish and claim that the latest stance was their old idea all along, but Weber has not made his case Hitler was that flaky at that time. Regarding "nothing at all to say about the Bavarian Soviet in Mein Kampf," Hitler ends Chapter 7 of his political propaganda book with his infamous decision: "Ich aber beschloß, Politiker zu werden." The next chapter starts as follows: English: web.archive.org/web/20221126093805/https://hitler.org/writings/Mein_Kampf/mkv1ch08.htmlOf course he avoided saying something that could be used as electoral ammunition against him by concern trolls, of which there were many in Germany. Gaining influence immediately is consistent with his decision to become involved in politics, even if just to test-run leadership. It was good election politics. |
|
𝐒𝐜𝐨𝐭𝐭
🦅
𝐈𝐦𝐩𝐞𝐫𝐚𝐭𝐨𝐫 𝐞𝐭 𝐑𝐨𝐦𝐚𝐧𝐮𝐬
Posts: 209
|
Post by 𝐒𝐜𝐨𝐭𝐭 on Mar 22, 2023 6:45:22 GMT
General Erich von Ludendorff was Field Marshal Paul von Hindenburg's chief-of-staff or officially his Quartermaster General. In late September 1918, he told the Kaiser that the war could not be won by military means. This means that negotiations must commence whilst one still has some cards to play for diplomatic leverage. The General Staff recommended an immediate ceasefire and on October 3rd the Liberal Prince Maximilian of Baden replaced Graf Georg von Hertling as Reich Chancellor and sent a Liberal Zentrum Catholic, Matthias Erzberger to negotiate the Armistice beginning with the principles outlined by President Wilson's vaunted Fourteen Points. The Allies were not going to negotiate with German Liberals either. Wilson and Gen. Foch made it clear that the terms for an armistice were the abdication of the Kaiser, evacuating occupied lands, and demobilizing the Army and the Navy while the Allied starvation blockade was to be maintained until a full peace treaty was signed. Germany was to release its prisoners-of-war and interned civilians but German prisoners were not to be released. Germany was to surrender warships, military materiel, armaments and fortifications intact, allowing the complete occupation of the Rhineland, and surrender control of German bridgeheads to the East with the later peace treaty deciding final German borders and reparations. Ludendorff recovered his nerve a bit in that such an unconditional surrender was impossible and that military operations must be continued. Gen. Ludendorff was replaced on October 26th by General Wilhelm Groener to execute demobilization and a few days later Marxists organized a naval mutiny at Kiel. The Kaiser abdicated on November 9 and Reichskanzler Max von Baden was replaced by the leader of the Social Democratic Party, Friedrich Ebert ─ whose envoy, Matthias Erzberger signed the Armistice in the railway carriage at Compiègne on November 11, 1918. Erzberger was assassinated as a traitor by a Right Wing Death Squad in 1921. Not all of the November Kriminals actually faced justice. Only traitors could sign treaties establishing unilateral War-Guilt and open-ended Reparations. The Center-Left are Marxists and traitors, whereas the Center-Right are "controlled opposition" at best. Once the Zentrum was discredited in the Reichstag after the Great Depression scuttled the Dawes/Young Plans ─ which attempted to rationalize and to amortize the Reparations debts ─ the NSDAP began to make huge gains in the Reichstag and became the party with the plurality of seats. Hermann Göring of the NSDAP was elected in 1932 as the Reichstag President (a post similar to Speaker of the House in the British Parliament). |
|
|
|
Post by patricksmcnally on Mar 22, 2023 17:07:50 GMT
"Only traitors could sign treaties establishing unilateral War-Guilt and open-ended Reparations."
There was no choice about signing Allied peace terms at the time, and scoundrels like Hindenburg and Ludendorff knew this very well. According to Augustin Prentiss, Chemicals in War (1937), "Our offensive in 1919 would have been a walk to Berlin, due to chemical warfare. The campaigns of 1919 would have been largely a chemical war." The plans were to start bombing Berlin with gas if the war went on into 1919. More details are in Scott Christianson, Fatal Airs. There was certainly no other option to signing the treaty, and Hindenburg and Ludendorff would have had to do the same thing if they had remained in office.
|
|
|
|
Post by patricksmcnally on Mar 22, 2023 17:24:47 GMT
"It was good election politics."
It reflects well on the German citizens of that time that they didn't fall for it. Hitler's popularity started to rise after the Great Depression hit and he mainly focused his messaging on attacking the Versailles reparations and tying this into the economy. But the claim that Germany was potentially able to avoid defeat as late as the summer of 1918 just encouraged the worst delusions among the German leadership, more so than among the populace. There isn't any sign that German voters en masse ever bought into the idea that defeat was avoidable in summer 1918. The surge of voting for the NSDAP which allowed it to reach 37.4% of the vote in July 1932 (falling to 33.1% by November) was over the economy, not illusions about how the war could have gone.
|
|
|
|
Post by wheelbarrow on Mar 22, 2023 21:01:00 GMT
"Only traitors could sign treaties establishing unilateral War-Guilt and open-ended Reparations." There was no choice about signing Allied peace terms at the time, and scoundrels like Hindenburg and Ludendorff knew this very well. According to Augustin Prentiss, Chemicals in War (1937), "Our offensive in 1919 would have been a walk to Berlin, due to chemical warfare. The campaigns of 1919 would have been largely a chemical war." The plans were to start bombing Berlin with gas if the war went on into 1919. More details are in Scott Christianson, Fatal Airs. There was certainly no other option to signing the treaty, and Hindenburg and Ludendorff would have had to do the same thing if they had remained in office. Making the war costly for the European Allies, whose home front was on the verge of collapse as well - despite some confidence boost due to United States entry in the war - could have granted the German Empire the ability to sue for peace on better terms, especially if they wanted to salvage the 'We are the good guys' universalist propaganda they got very high on.
Striking while the iron is hot was required for image-conscious politicians like Clemenceau, otherwise a tough operator. He wanted to end the war at the height of his prestige before adoring French crowds; it was the bad move to just give it to him for free.
Many citizens became disillusioned with their governments as they recognized the manipulation and dishonesty of their propaganda tactics in their bid to control public opinion of the war effort.
The war had already been raging for several years and many people were tired of the constant fighting and loss of life. Many soldiers were experiencing fatigue and weariness, which led to low morale and a decrease in the quality of the soldiers' performance on the battlefield.
Medical supplies and personnel were stretched very thin due to the war. Limited resources meant that soldiers and citizens who were injured had limited options for medical care, increasing both risk and mortality rates.
Additionally, industrial production was disrupted and businesses collapsed. As the war continued, the governments of the countries started taking on war-related debt that resulted in an inflation of prices. Many civilians were suffering from shortages of basic necessities such as food and fuel as resources were diverted toward the war effort. This led to increasingly unbearable hardship and suffering for many Allied citizens.
In your complaints about European governments accurately observing communist nutjobs and commenting on the realistic danger of being pulled into their world revolution you ignore the nexus to the catastrophic home fronts across Europe.
Discrediting the November Criminals and the regime Germany inherited from their betrayal and associating his opposition with the regime was absolutely the right political move for any serious reformist. Whoever is capable will take the nuanced points from this, if that's something you faint over.  The so-called stab-in-the-back notion was more popular than Hitler was for a long time. The system was just good at managing people's discontent into multiple ineffective parties. You're overemphasizing a compressed slogan that for political effect was best delivered in knowingly exaggerated form, because the other side disputing it means throwing in with an unpopular cause.
It is undeniable that Germany's war effort was hampered by internal divisions. The German Empire was a patchwork of different regions, each with its own political and cultural identities. This issue was particularly amplified by your beloved socialist movement, which was the largest and most active in the world at the time. Thanks to the freaks, many German socialists saw the war as a capitalist venture and refused to support it, leading to strikes and other forms of civil disobedience. This dissent, along with the related food shortages and inflation, severely weakened German morale.
Like the Tsar, the politicians chose not to act in unison to crush the problem. The result was national devastation.
It is obvious that the Hitler administration took everything that led to November 1918 seriously, from disunity to ensuring a good home front morale when war broke out. The British were devastated their old tricks failed to work on the new old enemy. In this regard, they praised the National Socialist government and the new German mindset in military reports.
During World War I, the German government was plagued by political infighting, with different groups vying for power and influence. Bethmann-Hollweg's ambitious plans, for instance, did not enjoy the support they would have needed to go forward and they were not seriously acted on as a blueprint, but it would have been advantageous to even have something worked towards rather than paralysis. Even Hitler never managed to fix the unitary executive problem, leading to a botched invasion of the Soviet Union.
Anyway, this infighting and the social upheaval contributed to the overall sense of chaos and instability that characterized the end of WWI in Germany, and the political argument was easy to make. The munition workers’ strike towards the end was emblematic of the government's betrayal of the armed forces. The timeline may have compressed in order to emphasize it for effect instead of explaining each of the thousand cuts the government perpetrated, culminating in the November betrayal.
The preamble statement to the 1940 armistice that Keitel read for Hitler with Hitler in the room, possibly drafted by Hitler, is pretty much Hitler's position on the matter, even if criticism of the German politicians was muted on this occasion. The statement mentions the "enormous superiority" ("ungeheurer Übermacht") of the opposing forces at the end of the war. A translation is available here: www.kbismarck.org/forum/viewtopic.php?t=2991 |
|
|
|
Post by patricksmcnally on Mar 24, 2023 16:27:20 GMT
"Making the war costly for the European Allies, whose home front was on the verge of collapse as well - despite some confidence boost due to United States entry in the war - could have granted the German Empire the ability to sue for peace on better terms"
Certainly Hindenburg and Ludendorff never seriously entertained such ideas. They knew that the jig was up by November 1918. Their goal was simply to hand the mess over to the Social Democrats and Catholic Centrists, then lambast them for signing a peace which Hindenburg and Ludendorff would otherwise have been forced to sign. It was similar to the way that when it seemed like the US might have to withdraw from Iraq, the Republicans ducked out of the way and gave it to Obama. The Democrats sort of did the same thing with Nixon and Vietnam. But nobody had any real practical alternative that would have involved prolonging the war while US forces took over more of the task of running the Allied campaign.
As I said, the most likely outcome would have the use of poison gas against German cities. In a way, that might have been better in the long run if it destroyed the myth of the stab in the back. No one was able to dispute after 1945 that Germany had been militarily crushed by overwhelming force, and that probably did a lot to maintain peace in the future. Perhaps if a million German civilians had been gassed to death by Allied warfare in 1919 then the later war might not have occurred.
"The so-called stab-in-the-back notion was more popular than Hitler was for a long time."
Undoubtedly. It was a lie which originated from Hindenburg and Ludendorff. Hitler jumped on it and used it for his own purposes. But he was not the first scoundrel to put that hoax in circulation. It was a popular delusion on the Right, although one shouldn't exaggerate the degree to which German workers bought into such nonsense.
"It is obvious that the Hitler administration took everything that led to November 1918 seriously, from disunity to ensuring a good home front morale when war broke out."
Mostly the differences were simply in the nature of the war as determined by technology. World War One happened at a time when defensive tech (e.g., machine-gun nests) was well developed, but offensive tools (e.g., tanks, planes) were just in the stages of infancy. The war easily became bogged down in trenches on a stable front for a long time. It was like Korea after 1951. When a war is stuck like that for so long, people get tired of it. If this had happened to Hitler, there isn't much reason to think that he could have avoided the problem.
But World War Two was a war where offensive tech was now working at full speed. For the first 3 years of war, Germany seemed to ride from one victory to the next. On the Allied side this caused some anger, but there was never a loss of willingness to fight. Dunkirk was much less demoralizing than the Somme had been. After 1942, the tide turned and now it was a steady Allied advance for the rest of the war. Now it was the turn of the Germans to dig in and fight with the intent of halting the enemy advance. But something like the Battle of the Bulge was not as depressing as Verdun had been. Either side could see that somehow or other the war was grinding ahead. These differences counted for more than any specific administrative measure by either side, Allied or Axis.
|
|
The so-called stab-in-the-back notion was more popular than Hitler was for a long time. The system was just good at managing people's discontent into multiple ineffective parties. You're overemphasizing a compressed slogan that for political effect was best delivered in knowingly exaggerated form, because the other side disputing it means throwing in with an unpopular cause.