WW2 the big questions: the early years of the conflict | HistoryExtra
"'Britain and France declare war because they've given guarantees to Poland. What's interesting about that is the British gave guarantees to Poland without any ability to protect Poland. We couldn't stop any of this happening. We didn't send armies to Poland'...
'People talk about, uh, the Germans conquer Poland. They don't. They only conquer half of Poland because on September the 17th 1939, the Red Army invades from the East and takes half of it. Actually, they split it. And what you see from the documents is the the Germans and the and the Soviets got on swimmingly for the most part because they both come from these totalitarian cultures, they both understand each other, they both want to um oppress many of the people in the countries they're in, and they split Poland between them as part of the Nazi- Soviet pact which has been agreed in August 1939. So actually Poland split up.
And the final irony of all this is, what Hitler actually wanted was for many many years, he wanted an alliance with the British. Actually that was his dream I think in many ways in the early to mid 30s. Was that there would be some arrangement with the British. And the reason being that the British Empire he admired. And we forget it now and it's also very controversial the idea that we had an Empire but it wasn't to many people then. That we we controlled British-controlled India and Australia. We had Canada and so on. And it's a maritime Empire and Hitler said this would work out because we had a maritime Empire and they wanted a land-based Empire, so it's compatible...
He ends up with from his perspective the wrong war. Because he ends up in a pact, an alliance in many ways in all but name but a pact with the people who he actually intended to fight with and at war with with the people who originally he had thought might be his allies... he is compelled as he sees it to invade Western Europe. He's compelled to invade Western Europe because he can't possibly turn East as long as you've got the huge French army and you've got the British Army in, in France…
Many of his generals think he's crazy. In fact one of them said this is a mad plan and the reason they think it's a mad plan is because in their memories that they they all know what happened in the First World War which is Germany moves into Western Europe and stalemate happens and then the trauma of the trenches, eventual loss and so on... [Hitler] comes up with this, what we might think is is bizarre logic, is bizarre logic. But it was the logic he tried to use on his um generals, which is this. Britain's only hope in this war is that Stalin and the Soviet Union, will break their pact with us and ally themselves with them. If we invade, the Soviet Union and destroy, that threat, Britain's last hope's gone and Britain will make peace. So you defeat Britain by invading the Soviet Union. I mean the reason it's Bonkers is because Britain's great hope was demonstrably not the Soviet Union. Britain’s great hope was America.'"
WW2 the big questions: the ‘Big Three’ | HistoryExtra
"‘What Stalin understands is that diplomacy and all this, just all talk. All that matters is who has the power. So you find that they're shocked, Anthony Eden is shocked at the first meeting he has with him in December 1941. He's shocked because in December 1941 the Germans are just outside Moscow, it's dark dark days for Stalin and the Soviet Union and yet the first thing, what's the first thing Stalin brings up in the meeting, first thing is to say we need an agreement that at the end of the war I get to keep the portion of Eastern Poland that was given to me under the Nazi Soviet pact…
Churchill writes this wonderful memo back saying you got this land in, what's the word, shameful collusion with Hitler… two years later Churchill was going to suggest to Stalin that he has the land back... Churchill recognizes he can't just go, let's face facts. Things have changed. And what's changed, in practical terms, is the Red Army has proved itself to be a formidable fighting force. And has defeated the Germans at Stalingrad, is fighting them back and there's a recognition that the Red Army is going to occupy all this land. And what we're going to do? We're never going to go to war for that. And in practical terms what are we going to do?...
What Churchill suggests is the solution, and this is incredible. What Churchill suggests is the solution to get out of this problem is for the whole of Poland to move left, roughly the idea Poland would roughly remain the same size but shifts so as to incorporate chunks of Germany. And the reason it can do that is because the Germans have lost, so bad luck. They can, you know, so so the map of, if you look at a map of Poland today and a map of Poland in August 1939, you'll see they’re radically different countries, in terms of territory. The middle bit stays the same but the whole thing's moved. So for example um uh Lwów as it was called under, in eastern Poland, that one town had I think it had, I can't remember how many names it had during the the 20th century. It was called Lemberg by the Germans, it was called Lwów by the Poles, it was called Lviv by the Ukrainians and so on. It was called something else I think, different pronunciation, by the Russians...
One of the first, General Anders, who was the Polish General who ended up commanding Polish units in the British army, he met with Stalin and said where are our officers? And and Stalin, basically, it's an extraordinary minutes of that meeting and if you want to understand about power politics I recommend anyone to read the minutes of that meeting. Because Stalin's toying with them. He recognizes he has to, he's got certain areas he's got to be careful of with Churchill and Roosevelt but the Poles? The Poles are not a threat to me and he's, and Stalin, Stalin and Hitler shared one thing. One thing. They both hated Poles. And Stalin in this meeting, I think is just toying with these people and he's toying with them because he knows he's killed them and he's just saying well I don't know and he was saying, it's almost turning to people saying well I must look for these, but where are they? And at one point he says oh I think they escaped. And Anders said where. And Stalin goes Manchuria, try looking for them'"
WW2 the big questions: the Holocaust | HistoryExtra
""‘If you'd been asked I think at the turn of the century to say which country in in Europe will provoke this absolute horror, you probably would have said Russia, because at the turn of the 20th century there was a number of pogroms in Russia. There was attacks and Russians, Russian Jews were fleeing. Some Russian Jews fleeing to Germany. And then you have the First World War. And it's during the First World War that you begin to find a great deal of scapegoating of the Jews...
Even in its own terms it became nonsensical because because obviously they didn't have a test for Jewish blood. They had to define who was Jewish by how many of their, how many of your grandparents practiced the Jewish religion. To try and answer how important was in his rise to power, it was important in his early speeches, it's important in his attempts to grow the Nazi party in the early 1920s but when he is actually moving forward and gaining power as Chancellor from about 1928 to 1933 you see that he mentions Jews much much less in his speeches and I think that's because he recognizes that this kind of vitriolic, horrendous anti-Semitism that he possesses is not going to get him huge numbers of votes. So he just tones it back. He never pretends that he likes Jews, he doesn't pretend that he doesn't have this hatred, but nonetheless he's toning it down and focusing much more on saying he wants to create a national Community, this Volksgemeinschaft, much more of a kind of feel-good idea...
People, they get confused about the origins of concentration camps in that they think well okay a camp like Dachau, terrible, infamous place, was created in 1933 pretty much straight after Hitler comes to power so, and it was created in a place that wasn't hidden. So he thought well oh well the Germans must have known about, the the killing of the Jews. But of course, firstly it was mostly not Jews who were sent in those days to Dachau and secondly they weren't places of mass killing, yet. What they were were places of horrible political oppression, where some people did die, some people were murdered, but the majority of people who were sent to a camp like Dachau in the 1930s, maybe a year or a year and a half or so on and then they were released. They were never given a, a determinate sentence. Part of the torture of these places was that you were taken there for what they called preventative detention. Meaning you didn't even have to commit a crime to go there. Anyone the Nazis didn't like they could send there. And then they never told you when you were leaving...
There are more doctors in the Nazi party than any other profession from memory, I think that's right. Why? Because the Nazis massively valued doctors. Because if you're involved in selection of race and racial identities, these are all, as they see it, the Nazi phrase for it was racial hygiene. Keeping the race pure is is the the absolute number one aim. And how the doctors are involved in this absolutely rationalized it, was that you have a responsibility to an individual for their health. But a bigger and more important responsibility is the health of the state, the health of the nation. And I think there's again some quote from a doctor saying something like, just as I would take out your diseased appendix so that you can live, I have to take out the diseased appendix that is the Jews from the body of the state, to let the state live... at Auschwitz they are conducting the most horrendous medical experiments. But they believe that what they're doing is, well you may die but the benefits of that will go to other people...
Most historians would would now say there was no one moment. The Holocaust was an evolutionary process characterized this one historian said by moments of radicalization. And one of the moments of radicalization was undoubtedly the invasion of Soviet Union in June 1941. Because as they're invading the Soviet Union they know they're going to encounter, first of all large numbers of of Jews.
Um secondly Hitler has already declared this war a war of extermination and that's to say they, the Nazis want this territory. They just don't want the people who are on it. Himmler, head of the SS just before that war starts in June 1941, he says to his senior colleagues, the purpose of the war is to kill millions of the people there and take their land. Paraphrasing him but that's what he's saying. He's saying they know they're going to kill millions of innocent civilians. Not just Jews but, their overall plan is tens of millions of people. An extraordinary thing is, we look on the holocausters and I certainly do as the greatest crime in the history of the world, but actually it was going to be the core of an even, of a bigger crime in terms of numbers which is killing large numbers of the population of the Soviet Union as well.
But their immediate task as they see it is to go into the Soviet Union and deal with the most dangerous elements first. And the dangerous elements are, they're going to shoot the commissars, the political uh leaders of the Red Army, and they're also going to kill, initially they talk about killing Jews in the service of the party or state. That is the bare minimum they're looking at. Actually, within a few weeks and months, in the June July August September, they move into killing essentially all the Jews they're coming across. They're either ghettoizing them in horrendous situations or very often just shooting and killing them...
The reason that all of the death camps end up being made in Poland isn't as some disgraceful commentators who didn't know much about this said at one point, oh the Poles are anti-semitic. I mean the reason that the Nazi death camps are in Poland is because that's where the largest number of Jews they wanted to kill by this method were... [A misconception] is thinking that an absolutely horrendous, a big big significant event has a big significant moment of cause. That's not quite how it works with this'"
The joys of public health and justifying violating human rights for the public good
WW2 the big questions: final stages of the conflict | HistoryExtra
"''[The atomic bombs] also has another I think unintended consequence. Which is that it allowed some Japanese after the war to to begin this argument that they're the victims. I met this Japanese historian who sort of said to me, not in the formal interview we did but just sort of chatting afterwards. He said well of course you know isn't it funny that the two greatest crimes against humanity each begin with the letter h? I said really? He said yes. The Holocaust and Hiroshima.
And I thought well that's jolly interesting because um actually in terms of crimes, the Japanese crimes we talked in another podcast, we talked about the Japanese horrendous medical experiments they were doing against the Chinese. I I met Japanese soldiers who were personally torturing Chinese civilians. I met Japanese soldiers who were taught to bayonet, bayonet practice by practicing on live Chinese farmers. And if you visit um, the uh the museum in Hiroshima, it's a very interesting museum, it's a very good museum in many many ways but that couldn't help but get the sort of sense of it, of magnanimity. It was almost, we've forgiven you. You did a terrible thing here but we've forgiven. You you know and you think well well actually is that really how we should see it?
When the Japanese launched this war of aggression, they launched this war to create an empire in China. They were the ones who launched the attack on the Americans to destroy the American Fleet, they were the one who were responsible for horrendous treatment of not just Allied prisoners of War but also the the rape of Nanking, the terrible, you know. So you've got that background of horrendous Japanese militaristic action. But, the focus on the nuclear bomb in Hiroshima was a sort of sense of, of victimhood in some quarters...
There's an argument to be made that the world had a lucky break… supposing all of this had happened 20 years later… if Adolf Hitler had had access to nuclear weapons do you think he would have thought a nanosecond about using them?’"