Matt Cavanaugh wrote:
Thank for clearing things up. You definitely know jack shit about the German anti-Hitler resistance movement.
* Yes, the Western Allies thought the entire German military leadership was complicit in "Prussian Aggression". They were stupidly wrong about that;
* No, Rommel was fully on-board by early '43. And don't fucking quote if you aren't gonna cite your source;
* Blomberg was a dilettante and Hitler had Kompromat (a.k.a., a pee-pee tape) on him. He was ousted in '38, so I'm not sure why you're even bringing him up;
* Halder was part of a fully-developed plot among a most of the General Staff to depose Hitler in 1938 the instant he issued orders to invade Czecho-Slovakia. You wusses put the kabosh on that in Munich. I recommend Terry Parssinen's The Oster Conspiracy of 1938;
* Plotting to depose Hitler and overthrow the Nazis never ceased. The attempts in March, 1943 were not "too little too late", and in any case, the Allies knew nothing about them specifically. Had they succeeded, of course, that naif, Roosevelt, and that drunkard, Churchill, would've continued the war until they were deposed;
* Reluctance to throw in with the conspiracy was primarily due to the insane Unconditional Surrender declaration. Why weaken Germany with civil war during a world war, when your opponents would still seek to annihilate you no matter what?
* Calling the NSDAP "the most popular party in Weimar Germany" is prima facie true for one election, but exceedingly disingenuous. The SPD was the most popular party throughout the Weimar era, and the Nazi's high water mark was 32% of the vote;
* "... the apparent acceptance of and direct support for genocide" - by whom? The senior military command? For the most part, they were abhorred by it, and many were spurred to act against Hitler because of it. Plus, they'd only seen the sporadic round-ups and shootings behind the front, and were not aware of the full extent of the death camp machine.
You're just regurgitating a big glob of post-war rationalization and British jingoism, plus some snippets you may have read in a lightweight popular history book And I'm not really interested in continuing this discussion if you aren't willing to actually inform yourself about the topics you're bloviating about.
Matt, I love your faux-scholarly arrogance coupled to emotional hoof stamping. Your problem here is that you don’t know what you are arguing.
Is it “that it was a reasonable proposition for the allies to jump into bed with the non-Nazi Germans at some point and it was an obvious mistake at the time to pass on that option”
Or is it that “it’s all so unfair that the dedication and honour of the non-Nazi ‘movement’ didn’t / couldn’t shine through, though the allies probably would have shat on it anyway"?
Or is it something else? ‘Cause you flip and flop.
……………………………..
The only time there was meaningful (semi) organised resistance was when the Generals were scared or threatened. Consequently, it rarely amounted to a cup of piss. They were jealous of the SA in 1934 so they allowed their independent loyalty to be prostituted. They were scared in 1938 that they would lose against Czechoslovakia (the Munich Agreement sealed rather than initiated Halder’s and Brauchitsch’s weakness). They were scared going into France. They were scared after Stalingrad that they would lose the war – quite rightly.
They were just never scared enough to find common ground and joint resolution. To act on principle. Instead the ‘movement’ formed pockets, elevated brave individuals, puffs of smoke. Punctuated inertia.
But consider from the Allied perspective:
There had been a close outward facing alliance / détente between the Army and Hitler dating back at least to the 1934 oath. The ‘resistance’ had shown itself in 1938 to be incompetent, unworthy of serious attention. Goerdeler didn’t communicate a plan - just jazz hands of disquiet.
The leaders of the ‘resistance’ were themselves implicated in the war crime of waging aggressive war – later enshrined at Nuremberg “To initiate a war of aggression, therefore, is not only an international crime; it is the supreme international crime differing only from other war crimes in that it contains within itself the accumulated evil of the whole”.
Rommel is often presented as a best-case member of the German alt-right. Yet there is a whole discipline that disputes his White Knight reputation. All of which is irrelevant in any case because from the 1944 Allied perspective he presented as a dickhead Nazi to be tried and probably jailed.
Moreover the German electorate had (within the context of Weimar elections) provided the Nazis with the closest thing you could get (in the 1930s environment) to a mandate. Apart from snotty uni students and a bunch of picketing frauleins there wasn’t any outward indication this support had waned during the glory years (or beyond really).
And the broader society was implicated in Genocide. Whether it be indifference to ‘just outside the gate’ Dachau-esque camps, or the involvement of industry in slave labour / camp creation or the participation of the Wehrmacht in the Russian cleansing operations in Russia-Balkans or the acquiescence of the High Command to the Commissar Order or the logistical integrations between the Army and SS or …. Your claim that real Germans only knew of scattered round ups is a historical and moral lapse.
But even if this wasn’t the case there was no practical basis for a negotiated peace. Ethnic redistributions, massive border realignment, war crime trials and that little matter of the Russians being unlikely to stop their advance had to be resolved. Or is it your POV that the Allies should have joined with the Germans to drive the Bolsheviks back to the steppe?