The storm of war

The Storm of War – Andrew Roberts(2009)
Annihilation of Germany – for the Good of Mankind (Part 1)

The book is about the Second World War.

It is an amazing book, as the author has been able to cover the entire canvas of the war in his concise 700 page book. Roberts does not accept any dogma or hearsay. All facts are checked and sources confirmed and only balanced opinions expressed.

But you know what they say – the book is after all the ‘victors’ version. What would history read like if Hitler or the Japanese had subdued the allies? Its difficult to say- but it is not too far fetched to believe that in all possibility, before the turn of the 20th century we would have had the mother of all wars –‘the Third World War’ with nuclear pyrotechnics thrown in for our entertainment.

Amongst the multitude of figures churned out by the author, the one figure that stuck my mind was this- a staggering 50 million people perished in the war.

27 million Russians alone died in the conflict – more than the population of present day Australia.

The first world war saw a mere trifling 16 million deaths in comparison.

For the good of mankind- annihilation of Germany

The root cause of the war was not Hitler alone as one has been brought up to believe – but the state of the German nation since the mid 19th century.

Germany/Prussia had unleashed no fewer than five wars of aggression since 1864.

Under Bismarck’s policy of ‘Blood and Iron’, first it was Denmark(1864) then Austria(1866) and finally the humiliating loss of France of its territories Alsace and Lorraine(1871).

Kaiser Wilhelm goaded the Military commanders and the aristocracy into the Great War in 1914, followed by Hitler –the prime architect of the Second World War.

Why did Germany produce so many war mongerers?

Post the Franco-Prussian war of 1871, the Germans came to believe themselves to be a “Civilization superior to all other civilizations; and hence it was the duty of Germany to civilize and Germanize the world”

"God has called us to civilize the world," declared Kaiser William "we are the missionaries of human progress."

So for people believing themselves to be superior beings, they found it hard to digest the fact that they did not possess colonies like France and Great Britain.

Systematically they began preparing for war. Post 1871, the German schools mutilated facts of history and taught their children that :-

France was a nation of weaklings;

Russia a nation of slaves;

England, a nation of tradesmen, where war was not glorified, a "colossus with feet of clay," whose world empire would crumble before the German might.

America, peace-loving, idealistic, defenseless America, was to be taught her proper and subordinate place in a world ruled by German power.

The powerful military leaders, aided by the German press, preached the doctrine that war is a necessity, "an ordinance of God for the weeding out of weak and incompetent individuals and States."

In 1918 even after the surrender of Germany in the First World War, the German Army (at the lower level) and the German people strongly believed that the surrender was a sellout by the Kaiser and the German nation was not defeated.

This aspect was carefully cultivated by Hitler to cultivate the myth of the supremacy of the German race. The roots of militarism had not been weeded out and the German people thirsted for a war to avenge their humiliation in 1918. Hitler understood this and he nurtured and stoked this thirst.
The only way to have a lasting peace would be a total, comprehensive and humiliating defeat to be inflicted on Germany.
And that is exactly what happened when the end came for Germany. They had their backs to the wall with both the allied and the Russian forces at their doorsteps when Hitler committed suicide. Almost all German towns were pulverized in air raids and a million civilians perished. After six long years the people who carved for the war were saying ‘enough is enough’.
The hunger for power and war had been extricated from the roots and the defeat was total in all respects. And that is the reason we see the Germany of today – a pacifist, democratic and peaceful Germany- who are saying no to bombing Libya and other adventures undertaken by US & co.
If you have seen the movie ‘Valkryie’ starring Tom Cruise, then you would have been amongst those who bemoaned as to how Hitler escaped the assassination attempt by Strauffenberg (portrayed by Tom Cruise) in 1944.
Actually, in retrospect, it was good fortune that Hitler survived the assassination attempt in 1944 by Col Von Strauffenberg. If Hitler had not survived the attempt and a negotiated peace reached with Germany, the myth that the German nation was not defeated but been sold out by a clique of Aristocrats, Capitalists, Jews, defeatists etc would have been propagated as had happened at the end of the first world war. It would have laid the foundation for a third world war, which would have finished all of mankind.
In any case Strauffenberg was hardly the ‘ideal democrat’ or the ‘bravest of the best’ as Churchill believed. Far from it – he despised the lie that ‘all men are equal’ ,believed the polish to be ‘an unbelievable rabble of Jews and Mongrels’. He even got married carrying his steel helmet. He would have been an ideal replacement for Hitler and we would not have noticed the difference.
Its times like this ,when you read history, is when you actually start believing that maybe ‘God does not move in mysterious ways’ and everything is a part of a grand design revealed only in retrospect.
Read history and not religious books, I say , and maybe you will have a more healthy opinion on the existence of the almighty.