Winston Churchill and the years of appeasement

Nazi Germany was a monstrous country. Even pre-war as they prepared for the big cleansing.

Pre-war Germany started sterilising all the disabled people for instance and prepared to kill them (T4) as soos as war begun, and removed all the previous police leaders and university leading people if necessary and replaced them with pro-nazi-people. When Hitler came to power there were SA men behind every German Parliament member in the Reichstag who were not pro-Hitler to make sure they would vote "correctly". Every block started having a person who informed the police about anti-Hitlerite speak or action plans and got money for it. Thus Hitler had the country by and by under his thumb. After the Reichstag fire Hitler had power to do anything according to the new law which was never removed. ( The day after the fire, at Hitler's request, President Hindenburg signed the Reichstag Fire Decree into law by using Article 48 of the Weimar Constitution. The Reichstag Fire Decree suspended most civil liberties in Germany, including habeas corpus, freedom of expression, freedom of the press, the right of free association and public assembly, and the secrecy of the post and telephone.)

Also, After Reichstag Fire Decree was passed The Nazi Party used the fire as a pretext to claim that communists were plotting against the German government, which made the fire pivotal in the establishment of Nazi Germany.

Nazi propaganda in the form of posters, news-reels and cinema films portrayed disabled people as "useless eaters" and people who had "lives unworthy of living". The propaganda stressed the high cost of supporting disabled people, and suggested that there was something unhealthy or even unnatural about society paying for this. One famous Nazi propaganda film, Ich Klage An (I Accuse), told the story of a doctor who killed his disabled wife. The film put forward an argument for "mercy killings". Other propaganda, including poster campaigns, portrayed disabled people as freaks.

After the propoganda came action. On the grounds that disabled people were less worthwhile and an unfair burden on society, a widespread and compulsory sterilisation program took place. This began in 1933, as soon as the Nazis came to power.

Law for the Prevention of Hereditarily Diseased Offspring - Wikipedia

Child euthanasia in Nazi Germany - Wikipedia

Aktion T4 - Wikipedia

 

Revealed: women's role in Nazi crimes - Telegraph

A book by the historian Kathrin Kompisch has revealed a very different reality. .

Most "Blockwaerts" - apartment house snoops who reported on un-Nazi activities to the party - were women, who denounced their neighbours to the Gestapo if they suspected them of being ideologically unsound or Jewish.

The surviving files of the Gestapo in the city of Duesseldorf noted that women "try to change the power balance of the household by denouncing their husbands as spies or Communists or anti-Nazis.".

 

Isaac Leslie Hore-Belisha,

1st Baron Hore-Belisha, PC (September 7, 1893 – February 16, 1957) was a British Liberal, then National Liberal Member of Parliament and Cabinet Minister. He later joined the Conservative Party.

Having succeeded at the Ministry of Transport, in 1937 he was controversially appointed by Neville Chamberlain as Secretary of State for War replacing the popular Alfred Duff Cooper, who later resigned from the government over Chamberlain's policy of appeasement.

With the knowledge that war was looming, Hore-Belisha sought permission to introduce conscription in 1938 but was rebuffed by Chamberlain, who would not agree to increased defence spending. Senior Conservatives believed that Hore-Belisha was more concerned about the fate of Jewish people abroad than of Britain itself, such that he wanted Britain to wage war against Germany with the sole intention of protecting European Jews. Undeterred, Hore-Belisha sought to reshape the armed forces with modernising programmes similar to those he had implemented at the Ministry of Transport, improving pay, pensions and promotion prospects for working-class soldiers, whose advancement could often be blocked by nepotism amongst the upper classes. He improved barrack room conditions, installing showers and recreation facilities and giving married soldiers the right to live with their families. In early 1939, he was finally allowed to introduce conscription to meet the threat of Nazi Germany.

As part of his modernisation of the British armed forces, he sacked three prominent members of the Imperial General Staff, replacing them with fresher minds. His attitude alienated seasoned campaigners such as Field Marshals John Dill and John Gort, the latter of whom, it was reported, could not bear to be in the same room with the Minister. Hore-Belisha's changes infuriated the military establishment and this sentiment was passed down to the lower ranks. In the early months of World War II, he banned a popular yet anti-semitic song which had been widely sung by the armed forces, to the tune of "Onward, Christian Soldiers":

Onward Christian Soldiers,
You have nought to fear.
Israel Hore-Belisha
Will lead you from the rear.
Clothed by Monty Burton,
fed on Lyons pies;
Die for Jewish freedom
As a Briton always dies.

In January 1940, Hore-Belisha was dismissed from the War Office in a shock move that many did not understand at the time. Once again, he was accused of having dragged Britain into the war in order to protect Jewish people on mainland Europe, and was considered a warmonger who did not have Britain's interests at heart.

Leslie Hore-Belisha, 1st Baron Hore-Belisha - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

 

Alfred Duff Cooper, 1st Viscount Norwich, GCMG, DSO, PC (22 February 1890 – 1 January 1954), known as Duff Cooper, was a British Conservative Party politician, diplomat and military and political historian.
He served in the Cabinet as Secretary of State for War and First Lord of the Admiralty. In the intense political debates of the late 1930s over appeasement, he first put his trust in the League of Nations, and later realised that war with Germany was inevitable. He denounced the Munich agreement of 1938 as meaningless, cowardly, and unworkable, as he resigned from the cabinet.

Duff Cooper - Wikipedia

Great Contemporaries: Alfred Duff Cooper - The Churchill Project - Hillsdale College

 

Maybe something to read :

Prisms of British Appeasement: Revisionist Reputations of John Simon, Samuel Hoare, Anthony Eden, Lord Halifax & Alfred Duff

Of these five major political figures from the National Governments of the 1930s, three were condemned in a famous 1940 pamphlet as major 'Guilty Men' -- appeasers responsible for Britain's failure to contain Hitler and Mussolini. Anthony Eden and Duff Cooper were excused since they had resigned from office in 1938

https://www.amazon.co.uk/Prisms-British-Appeasement-Revisionist-Reputations/dp/1845194225

 

At that time (and later), on this planet compulsory sterilization was mainstream.
The US sterilized 60,000, Sweden 21,000.
There are entire books on this subject (e.g., War Against the Weak: Eugenics and America's Campaign to Create a Master Race)

In Germany, euthanasia happened during the war so it doesn't count.
The earlier cases were mostly parents asking for "mercy killings", to stop immense incurable sufferings of their children.

I wrote:
In my opinion, Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy were markedly more free than the USSR.
You could travel abroad, the media were freer, religion was allowed, independent judiciary existed.
Till the Holocaust German Jews were better treated than Russians by their own regime.

meaning that from to point of view, for example, a worker Germany wasn't that bad. Certainly, Britain, Belgium, Sweden were better.
Were the US and France with up to 20 percent unemployment and malnutrition among the poor better? You decide.

What else? All the other countries were plainly forgeted it.

 

In Germany the communist threat was painfully real.
Given a chance the communists would trigger a revolution and violently created a totalitarian state no different from the Nazi one.
They tried once in 1923 and failed. In 1932 their slogan was after Hitler we will come. They seriously expected a victory.

This is why so many reasonable people supported the coalition government led by Hitler, not because they loved Hitler, not because they wanted gas chambers and wars of annihilation (they actually expected Hitler would uphold the constitution).
They were convinced the communist threat was real and Germany's days were numbered.

See In Stalin's Secret Service: Memoirs of the First Soviet Master Spy to Defect by Russian Jew Walter G. Krivitsky.
The German communists were Stalin's puppets, they didn't even dare to think for themselves. And Krivitsky was one of the people keeping watch on them, and organizing the revolutions.

 

Of Course sterilisation took place in Many countries but how come planning killing your own country's people does not count in war ? Germany was preparing to kill all people who were different and the propaganda started in the early 1930's. Must say Hitler, Himmler,Göring, Bormann etc all liked like perfect aryans

If we come to that lobotomies were made in the 60's to cure psychiatric diseases with big death figures due to complications and infections. Nobody cared for a long time. Also cold showers and insulin induced hypoglycemias.

 

Who was afraid of the communists? The owners of factories who financed Hitler when he had told them in a meeting ( Hossbach?) He would take care of communists.

You are correct the communists were Stalin's puppets. When Hitler attacked France Stalin sent them a message that they are not to resist the attack.

 

By 1941 the communists were obviously crushed. One of the reasons Stalin believed why Germany would not attack was that the German communists would start a revolution. Well they did not.

 

" The nazi party did not adopt work creation as a key part of its programme until the late spring of 1932, and it retained that status for only 18 months, until December 1933, when civilian work creation spending was formally removed from the priority list of Hitler´s government. Despite the claims of Goebbel´s propaganda and despite the preoccupations of later commentators and historians, civilian work creation measures were clearly not a core agenda item for the nationalist coalition that seized power in January 1933. In fact, amongst the coalition partners of January 1933, work creation was highly divisive."

Wages of destruction by Tooze

PS. I warmly suggest this book. It tells alot of interesting facts of the Germany under Hitler´s rule. Hitler used the money to the army not the people. The highways did not change anything, actually the German family true income was lower in 1939 than 1933.

 

http://www.ww2f.com/threads/hitler-and-murder-order-signed.7978/

In case the euthanasia discussion continues I hope we will use the thread above or make a new one and keep this for appeasement next.

 

The point is the numbers vary greatly.
Of course, you will "poison the well", by citing the highest estimation.

Correction, you portray pre-war Nazi Germany as a quite pleasant place.

Well, not so much.

Again, not so much.

Not only are you divining "facts" out of thin air. You proceed to "poison the well" by twisting them around to suit your POV.

Of course not, or else you would have provided information to substantiate your POV.

Yes, you have done your utmost to "poison the well", but I am still willing to discuss it.

 

This is unemployment in Germany:


as can be seen, they were able to reduce it almost to zero. Such feats can't be achieved in a year or two. It takes time.
More importantly the unemployed were adequately taken care of. They weren't, for example, in the US.

I'm comparing pre-war Germany with other countries at the same time because that was what Churchill and the appeasers saw. And that's the reason for this thread.

They didn't see gas chambers or burning cities.
The saw a peaceful country that organized the Summer Olympics and was represented by a Jewish athlete there (additionally ten Jewish athletes participated too).
Of course, bad things happened in pre-war Germany, but in comparison with the rest of the world, they weren't that bad.

The saw a country that was worthy to be given a chance, especially that Hitler skilfully manipulated their desire for peace, and didn't betray his ambitions to the very end.

 

German economy and Hitler

Economy of Nazi Germany - Wikipedia

The changes included privatization of state industries, autarky (national economic self-sufficiency), and tariffs on imports. Although weekly earnings increased by 19% in real terms[2] in the period between 1932 and 1938, average working hours had also risen to approximately 60 per week by 1939. Furthermore, reduced foreign trade meant rationing in consumer goods like poultry, fruit, and clothing for many Germans.[3]

Almost immediately after coming to power, nazis embarked on a vast program of military rearmament. This was funded mainly through deficit financing before the war, and the Nazis expected to cover their debt by plundering the wealth of conquered nations during and after the war.

Hjalmar Schacht created a scheme for deficit financing, in which capital projects were paid for with the issuance of promissory notes called Mefo bills, which could be traded by companies with each other.[20] When the notes were presented for payment, the Reichsbank printed money. Meanwhile, Schacht's administration achieved a rapid decline in the unemployment rate, the largest of any country during the Great Depression.[16] By 1938, unemployment was practically extinct.

As early as June 1933, military spending for the year was budgeted to be three times larger than the spending on all civilian work-creation measures in 1932 and 1933 combined.[5] Nazi Germany increased its military spending faster than any other state in peacetime, with the share of military spending rising from 1 percent to 10 percent of national income in the first two years of the regime alone.

The enormous military buildup was financed to a large extent through deficit spending, including Mefo bills. Between 1933 and 1939 the total revenue of the German government amounted to 62 billion Reichsmarks, whereas government expenditure (up to 60% of which consisted of rearmament costs) exceeded 101 billion, thus causing a huge deficit and rising national debt (reaching 38 billion marks in 1939).[30][31] Joseph Goebbels, who otherwise mocked the government’s financial experts as narrow-minded misers, expressed concern in his diary about the exploding deficit.

In June 1933, the "Reinhardt Program" for infrastructure development was introduced. It combined indirect incentives, such as tax reductions, with direct public investment in waterways, railroads and highways.[35] It was followed by similar initiatives resulting in great expansion of the German construction industry. Between 1933 and 1936, employment in construction rose from only 666,000 to over 2,000,000.

The month after being appointed Chancellor, Hitler made a personal appeal to German business leaders to help fund the Nazi Party for the crucial months that were to follow..
In exchange, owners and managers of German businesses were granted unprecedented powers to control their workforce, collective bargaining was abolished and wages were frozen at a relatively low level.[61] Business profits also rose very rapidly, as did corporate investment.

The Nazis granted millions of marks in credits to private businesses.[63] Many businessmen had friendly relations to the Nazis,[59] most notably with Heinrich Himmler and his Freundeskreis der Wirtschaft[64] Hitler’s administration decreed an October 1937 policy that “dissolved all corporations with a capital under $40,000 and forbade the establishment of new ones with a capital less than $200,000,” which swiftly effected the collapse of one fifth of all small corporations.[65]

The Nazis were hostile to the idea of social welfare in principle, upholding instead the Social Darwinist concept that the weak and feeble should perish.[73] They condemned the welfare system of the Weimar Republic as well as private charity, accusing them of supporting people regarded as racially inferior and weak, who should have been weeded out in the process of natural selection.[74] Nevertheless, faced with the mass unemployment and poverty of the Great Depression, the Nazis found it necessary to set up charitable institutions to help racially-pure Germans in order to maintain popular support.

The Nazis banned all trade unions that existed before their rise to power, and replaced them with the German Labour Front (DAF), controlled by the Nazi Party.[81] They also outlawed strikes and lockouts.[82] The stated goal of the German Labour Front was not to protect workers, but to increase output, and it brought in employers as well as workers.[83][83] Journalist and historian William L. Shirer wrote that it was "a vast propaganda organization...a gigantic fraud.

So in August 1936, Hitler issued his "Memorandum" requesting from Hermann Göring a series of Year's Plans (the term "Four-Year Plan" was coined only later, in September) in order to mobilize the entire economy, within the next four years, and make it ready for war: maximizing autarchic policies, even at a cost for the German people, and having the armed forces fully operational and ready at the end of the four years period.

Hitler went on to write that given the magnitude of the coming struggle that the concerns expressed by members of the "free market" faction like Schacht and Goerdeler that the current level of military spending was bankrupting Germany were irrelevant. Hitler wrote that: "However well balanced the general pattern of a nation's life ought to be, there must at particular times be certain disturbances of the balance at the expense of other less vital tasks. If we do not succeed in bringing the German army as rapidly as possible to the rank of premier army in the world...then Germany will be lost!"[101] and "The nation does not live for the economy, for economic leaders, or for economic or financial theories; on the contrary, it is finance and the economy, economic leaders and theories, which all owe unqualified service in this struggle for the self-assertion of our nation".

Speaking to a meeting of his main economic advisers in 1937, Hitler insisted that Germany’s population had grown to the point where the nation would soon become unable to feed itself, so war for the conquest of Lebensraum in Eastern Europe was necessary as soon as possible. Therefore, if the rearmament drive caused economic problems, the response would have to entail pushing even harder in order to be ready for war faster, rather than scaling back military spending

 

Wow! Put several million men into the armed forces and war armaments industries, and unemployment disappears...Who would have thought.

 

In reality, it was about 600,000 men.

 

Women were told to have babies or be housewives. Single working women were pushed to give their work to men. Also there was the RAD. and anyway Germany lived on debts which Hitler thought to pay By what he gets with future wars.

 

You mean they were ordered to have babies?
Because actually married couples got loans of 1000 Reichsmarks (roughly ¾ of a year salary). For each child, the loan was reduced by a quarter.