Posted on 03/18/2008 8:38:04 AM PDT by Homer_J_Simpson
WASHINGTON, March 17. – A firm foreign policy which involves no retreat in the face of disruptive events in Europe and the Far East was presented to the nation today by Secretary Hull in an address at a luncheon of the National Press Club. He strongly urged arming to command respect for the United States as a force for peace at a time when “international anarchy” threatens world order.
Delivering his first formal pronouncement on “Our Foreign Policy” since the resignation of Anthony Eden as Foreign Minister and the absorption of Austria by Germany, Mr. Hull spoke before an audience of more than 500 newspaper correspondents, editors and government officials.
The address was broadcast in the United States by the National, Columbia and Mutual Broadcasting systems. It was also delivered to the Canadian and the British Broadcasting Corporations. Later it was rebroadcast to the world over international short-wave stations in translations of Spanish, Portuguese, German, French and Italian, directional antennae pointing the broadcasts toward Europe and South America.
Mr. Hull made clear that fundamental American policy had not been changed. He strongly condemned international lawlessness and reoffered to the nations his peace proposals of last July, which contemplate a world of law and order, and of good-will.
Another is that before the war, Poland was only marginally less antisemitic than Nazi Germany of that time. And after the war picked up where they left off with the few Jews who tried to return.
That I had heard about.
In 1938, US defense spending was about the same as today = 4% of GDP, as was the US Army of around 500,000. If I remember, it was ranked 16th (20th?) in the world of that time.
During W.W.II, defense spending rose to about 40% of a much larger GDP, and total military to over 12 million, or about 10% of the population.
US deaths in W.W.II were around 400,000 (depending on how you count), which seems inconceivable to us today. But total deaths are said to have been 35 million in Europe, and another 20 million in Asia.
Today we can't even begin to imagine the high cost of failing to act before things spiral out of control.
When Hitler took the rest of Czechoslavakia, Poland and Hungary took pieces of the country with German acquiescense.
Yup.
The Hungarians continued as German allies till late in the war.
The Poles didn’t have that option, for reasons of geography and Nazi racial ideology. It’s quite possible the Polish government would have been glad to collaborate if they’d been allowed to. They might have been quite happy to invade USSR along with Germany, as the Romanians and Hungarians, among others, did.
Actually, the Germans offered the Poles a junior partnership in the Axis. The price? The Corridor, Danzig, and free passage for the Wehrmacht to the Soviet Union.
Whether or not the Poles would have considered it, Chamberlain’s [and France’s] guarantee of their borders stiffened their spine, and they turned the Germans down. Bad miscalculation on their part.
I doubt it would have made any difference in the long run. Nazi ideology made alliance with inferior Slavs, especially the Poles, a real problem.
Although they did manage to rub along well enough with Slavic puppets/allies in Croatia, Slovakia, Bulgaria, etc.
Once I read that they used to add Jewish blood to the sausage.
It’s as bad as that? Yikes.
Pure propaganda, no doubt.
Things were bad enough — but discrimination and pogroms were the worst of it. There was nothing I know of going on in Poland before the war that even remotely resembled the horrors of the Holocaust.
Indeed, some have argued (I don't agree) that Jews before the war were treated no worse than Blacks in America at the same time. But the point is: that's the level of mistreatment we're talking about.
Now, further east, in the Soviet Union, Stalin had long established every element of the Holocaust, except the actual gas chambers. Of course, Stalin was more than happy to see millions die in his gulags, but he didn't want to gas them. Instead, he wanted to be sure he'd extracted the last possible work out of them, before they gasped their last breaths. And of course, Stalin was not particularly concerned with Jews, but with anyone who opposed him.
Historians estimate that before Hitler even got started on his “final solution to the Jewish question,” Stalin had already murdered six million of his own people.
“Before the war Poland was only marginally less semetic than Nazi Germany of that time”
Utterly unknow is the effect of the waves of penniless, illiterate, often diseased who, fleeing from the ghettos of Russia, {now Poland}, through the porous, illogical Versailles borders into the remnants of a prostate, democratic Germany, bore on the eventual rise of Nazism.
Cincinnati, eh?
Hmmmm... are you suggesting that Germans after 1919 could not control their new borders? I think we can easily find numbers for what the Jewish populations of Eastern European countries were before the war.
Those numbers show a few hundred thousand Jews amongst a German population of circa 70 million. Poland, by contrast, had 3 million Jews in a population of 35 million.
So there's no way to reasonably argue that the higher the number of Jews, the more the Nazis.
But this much at least is absolutely true: after the First World War, millions of ethnic Germans were left scattered around Eastern Europe as far away as the Volga in Russia, and they felt threatened and vulnerable.
They wanted strong leadership in Germany to protect and support them.
And they liked what they learned of that young spell-binder, Adolf Hitler.
“Hmmm/ are you sugesting that Germans after 1919 could not control their new borders?”
Of course I am..
Firstly the borders were not even decided for several years, and the only real military authority in the east for a while were the private armies, the infamous “friekorps”. The German military had been dispatched by the Allies and then later limited to what? 100,000? Even the formerly prosperous native German jews were frightened by the effect of the waves of new immigrants fleeing the new Poland into a newly poverty sticken Germany with no jobs, food or prospects.
1938 + 70 = 2008. These events occurred (thus, real time) in 1938.
"Isn’t this real time MINUS 70 years, Homer?"
I waffled:
"I have struggled with that question. I think you are correct. I guess I will change my descriptions going forward."
But then Michael81Dus chimed in with:
"I think Homer is right. It´s real time (1938) + 70 years. We should not confuse “real time” with “present time”."
I decided to go with that. The point of reference for real time is not the present but the actual time the events occurred. Or, in this case, the actual time the newspaper reported the events.
Yes, I'm pretty sure some of this did happen. But even more suspect the extent of it was grossly exaggerated by the Nazis for their own political purposes.
And I've never seen statistics to demonstrate there was an "explosion" of the Jewish population in Germany after 1919.
Remember, we're talking here about less than one half of one percent of the German population, for crying out loud!.
"Waves" indeed.
Can you provide a reference?
Lol, I don’t know how to provide links and such, but in 5 minutes using google I learned that in 1910 93% of German jews were native born, in 1925 only 80% were. i.e the pecentage of foreigners in the jewish population thereby had tripled.
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