Hitler, 1939 (From LIFE Magazine)
If you live near Rockport , Massachusetts
Every meeting is a new adventure for
us all. We are quite a diverse group---
not a bunch of serious scholars, trying to impress each other with what we
know…
Instead, we are people who are
interested in history, and thinking and talking about how it intersects with
our lives, and with our world.
From time to time, interested people
drop in and share their life experiences, and their interests, with us, and
then they disappear! We’d love them to
return, and continue with us on our journey.
When we’ve discussed Russia
This past Wednesday (Nov. 28, 2012),
we discussed books about Germany
in the Twentieth Century, and two bright ladies who had been born and grew up
in Germany
If learning about our world, and
what went on, and how it relates to you and your world interests you, come join
us!
Our next meeting will be at the end
of January, on Wednesday, Jan. 30th, 2013. We’ll be discussing books about China China China
Here’s our report of
our most recent meeting:
The History Book Club
met at Rockport Library’s Trustees’ Room at 7 p.m.
Regular members present were Beverly and Dick Verrengia,
Rick Heuser, Glen Nix and Sam Coulbourn.
We were joined by Ms. Waltraut (Trautel) Brown of Manchester, Sandra
Stolle of Wenham and Doug Hall of Rockport.
Trautel and Sandra were both born in Germany before World War II and came to the U.S. after the
war. Doug received an advanced degree in German history.
Dick Verrengia was
first to report on The Coming of the
Third Reich, by Richard Evans, 2004.
Dick started with William Shirer’s well-known account, but
soon found that other historians found it very inaccurate, so he chose Evans’
book. Amazon blurb: “There is no story
in twentieth-century history more important to understand than Hitler’s rise to
power and the collapse of civilization in Nazi Germany. With The Coming of the
Third Reich, Richard Evans, one of the world’s most distinguished historians,
has written the definitive account for our time. A masterful synthesis of a
vast body of scholarly work integrated with important new research and
interpretations, Evans’s history restores drama and contingency to the rise to
power of Hitler and the Nazis, even as it shows how ready Germany was by the
early 1930s for such a takeover to occur. The Coming of the Third Reich is a
masterwork of the historian’s art and the book by which all others on the
subject will be judged.”
Doug Hall noted
that the Weimar Republic Germany after World War I in such a
way that made the rise of Hitler more likely. Sandra Stolle stated that Versailles
was awful. She also noted that many
“myths” were attached to this era. One,
Americans have been told that at the 1936 Berlin Olympics Hitler refused to
shake hands with Jesse Owens, the black runner from the U.S. Hitler did shake his hand, she said. Also Sandra said that the number of Jews killed by the Germans
was grossly overstated—it was less than 200,000. Others present disputed that. Sam Coulbourn
said that his roommate at the Naval Academy had spent WWII in Auschwitz
as a child, saw his mother murdered by the Nazis, and always had stood by the
number of about six million Jews exterminated in the Holocaust.
Sandra Stolle
next gave a brief report on three books. She was born in 1933 and grew up in Hanover . All
Things Nature's Blessed, A Woman’s Story of War and Peace (1988) was her
most important book, because it was written by her mother, Ruth Beumann
Mahler. It is her mother’s personal
account of the war years in Nazi Germany.
Sandra also reported briefly on Typische
Ossi, Typische West, a book in German about East and West Germany , and the
contradictions of Germans living in both parts from 1945 to 1989. She also
mentioned Katyn, a book describing
the massacre of some 8000 Polish officers by the Soviet NKVD.
Jürgen Habermas
Rick Heuser delivered
a comprehensive report on Jürgen
Habermas, including these books by the famed German sociologist and
philosopher:
The Divided West,
2004
A Berlin Republic :
Writings on Germany
The Philosophical
Discourse of Modernity, 1987
Moral Consciousness
and Communicative Action, 1990.
No one else in the meeting had heard of Habermas. Rick described this 83-year old philosopher’s
brilliant work, championing international post-national societies. He said that Habermas had been opposed to the
1989 East-West Reunification. He is perhaps best known for his theory on the
concepts of communicative rationality and the public sphere. His work focuses
on the foundations of social theory, the analysis of advanced capitalistic societies
and democracy, the rule of law in a critical social-evolutionary context, and
contemporary politics, particularly German politics.
Rick noted that Habermas especially favored strengthening of
the United Nations, and saw the actions of President George W. Bush as ending U.S. effective
cooperation in the U.N. Rick also
observed that the Pentagon looks at the world in a unipolar way. Sam agreed
that the Pentagon was most comfortable with the old bipolar world, and is yet
ill-equipped to envision the world as it appears today. There is always the
tendency to create an “opponent” for the
U.S. and today that is China .
Trautel Brown
gave a detailed account of her book, the story of her life as a young girl in Germany . She was born in Hamburg
in 1927 during the era of the Weimar
Republic Vienna , but
then after a year she was returned to Hamburg ,
where she remained for the rest of the war.
Trautel met a German who had already come to the United States . In order to become a citizen her prospective
husband joined the U.S. Marine Corps. She and he were married in Milwaukee and then moved to Camp Pendleton , CA
Beverly Verrengia
reported that she had begun reading Hitler
by A.N. Wilson, but then shifted to Hitler,
Germans and the Final Solution, 2009 by Ian Kershaw.
This book, written in rather abstruse form with very long
sentences, wraps up more than three decades of meticulous research on Nazi
Germany by one of the period’s most distinguished historians. The book brings
together the most important and influential aspects of Kershaw’s research on
the Holocaust for the first time. Kershaw provides an explanation of the
uniqueness of Nazism.
Members discussed the destructive dynamic of the Nazi
leadership and of the attitudes and behavior of ordinary Germans as the
persecution of the Jews turned into total genocide.
Glen Nix reported
on Weimar Germany by Eric D. Weitz,
2007. Glen observed that
Sam reported on Payne, Robert, The Life and Death of
Adolf Hitler, 1973 New York ,
NY
I was
fascinated to read Robert Payne’s book, but now I find that he used some
questionable sources, and so a part of this book has been discredited since
1973. Payne died ten years later.
The
material in question was about Adolf Hitler’s visit to Liverpool , England
Let me home
in on one of the more mystifying episodes of Hitler’s conduct of World War
II.
On November
12, 1940 a train bearing Soviet officials steamed into Berlin ’s Anhalt Station. There were red hammer-and-sickle flags flying
amidst the red, black and white Nazi banners.
Leader of
the Soviet delegation was Vyacheslav Molotov, People’s Commissar for Foreign
Affairs of the Soviet Union . He was met by Joachim von Ribbentrop, Foreign
Minister of the Greater German Reich.
Molotov was being invited to discuss with Hitler how the world would be
divided up among the four totalitarian powers—Germany ,
Japan , Italy and the USSR .
That
morning Ribbentrop and Molotov met in the German Foreign Office. Ribbentrop launched into a series of speeches
about the imminent downfall of England and the need for closer relations
between Russia and Japan . He urged the Russians to turn their faces to
the south, to acquire warm water ports, not in the Dardanelles, but in the
Persian Gulf and the Arabian Sea . He hinted at Russia being invited to acquire
that country from the British, whose empire was now in the last stages of
disintegration.
In the
afternoon, the meeting shifted to Hitler’s Chancellery. Molotov was surprised to be greeted by Hitler
with Hitler’s “Heil” salute. Hitler then gave him a limp handshake, but gazed
piercingly into Molotov’s eyes. One
member of the Soviet delegation recounted that Hitler’s sharp nose was pimply,
and his clammy palm felt like the “skin of a frog”.
Immediately,
Hitler launched into an hour-long speech about the imminent downfall of England and the soon-to-be complete destruction
of her armies in Africa .
When the
speech was over, Molotov asked why a German military mission had been sent to Rumania without consulting the USSR ; he asked what German troops were doing in Finland .
Hitler was
polite, but gave meaningless answers to Molotov, and went on to call upon the
Soviet Union to consider a Soviet-German war on the United States . He considered that the U.S. would
eventually imperil the freedom of other nations. Not by 1945, of course, but perhaps by 1970
or 1980.
As it grew
dark, Hitler looked at his watch and remembered that a British air raid might be
expected shortly, and they should adjourn until the following day.
The talks
continued all the next day, and that evening the Soviets hosted Ribbentrop and
the other senior Germans (Hitler was absent) at their embassy, which had once
been the palace of the Tsarist ambassador.
Vodka flowed and there was plenty of caviar and then a fine dinner,
until it was interrupted by an air raid.
Ribbentrop
suggested they all go to shelter, and the servants loaded the food and drinks
onto trays.
Ribbentrop
was still talking about the urgent need to divide up the British Empire, now
that England
had been so decisively beaten.
“If England
In the days
that followed, Stalin studied the German proposal for a four-part pact, and
appeared to believe that Hitler was leveling with him.
Molotov
sent a memorandum back to Hitler agreeing to the pact, with minor conditions,
including German withdrawal from Finland ,
access to ports close to the Black Sea, and recognition of a Soviet area of
influence in the direction of the Persian Gulf .
On December
18, 1940, Hitler issued Directive No. 21, ordering that, even before the
conclusion of war with England ,
the Soviet Union be crushed in a rapid
campaign.
This operation
became Barbarossa, named after a 12th century German emperor. Planning went into high gear, and the word of
invasion of Russia
leaked everywhere. A spy in the German embassy in Tokyo
sent word to Moscow . Churchill informed his ambassador in Moscow , who passed the
word to Molotov. The State Department in
Washington
informed the Soviet ambassador. But
Stalin dismissed all these warnings and went off to spend a quiet summer at his
estate at Sochi on the Black
Sea .
It is hard
for us to imagine the absolute white-hot hatred Hitler had for the Soviet Union . Moscow and Leningrad were to be
wiped from the face of the earth—no buildings, no people--- nothing! The order
to advance was given at 0300 on the morning of June 22, 1941. One hundred
fifty-four German divisions, 18 Finnish, 14 Rumanian divisions swung into
action.
The story
of Stalin’s complete inability to understand that Hitler had turned on him is
one of the most amazing stories of this period.
For the first several days after the start of Barbarossa, Stalin
remained incommunicado. His staff,
frantic as German divisions raced across Russia , could not reach him.
And the
story of Hitler, who fixed his mind on something to the exclusion of everything
else, wrote his own death sentence.
Imagine if he had maintained his pact with Stalin and concentrated on
finishing off England .
Imagine if
the U.S.
had remained in isolation and not entered the war.
Imagine!
The next meeting of
the History Book Club will be Wednesday, January 30th at 7 p.m., at
the Library. The topic will be China
Submitted:
Samuel W. Coulbourn
