US Ambassador Richard Grenell has not made a lot of friends during his
time in Germany, where he has repeatedly issued demands, usually to
increase military spending. On Friday, he did so again, threatening to withdraw US troops from Germany if the Germans don’t start spending more on their military.
Grenell said it was “offensive” for the US to keep troops in Germany
while Germans “get to spend their surplus on domestic programs.” The US
Ambassador to Poland suggested the US troops should move to Poland.
German officials have consistently made clear they have no intention of
meeting US demands to spend 2% of their GDP on their military,and see no
need to attempt to do so. This has been consistent despite the US
repeatedly threatening repercussions for not meeting that demand.
There’s no reason to think this will be any different. Last year, a
major poll by Germany’s DPA news agency showed German voters not only
oppose increases in military spending, but actually prefer that US troops leave the country.
I would guess many in Germany would welcome a U.S. military pull out.
Please do, the US has been „threatening“ to do this for years, please do it and stop getting everybody’s hope up only to pull back.
Greetings from Germany
RMS, Yes, we need to get the H out of Germany!! When it becomes an 100% Sharia Law country they are going to kick our azz out anyway!!
Don’t know about that – could become 100% Halakha Law the way the Germans can never seem to get over their guilt.
The US soldiers in Heidelberg will not like their move to Poland. Our soldiers love Germany.
dieter, So did the Russian’s in WW-2, they loved raping all those pretty German women, and they just could not get enough of it!! Prime example of “blow back”. 🙁 USA, be careful about your support for the GHOULS of DC, or the day may come you will find your wives, daughters, sisters, on the receiving end of this kind of luve fest!!
But of course we won’t bring them home if we did remove them from Germany.
Germany should give the US one week to get their troops and their weapons out of Germany..
When we withdraw our troops, Germany could invite Russian troops in to provide a rear guard action against the predicted build-up of US forces in Poland.
What a joke! The U.S. is not going to leave Germany, or Italy, no matter what Germans or Italians want, and everyone knows it.
usa military should recross the Rubicon and go the F*** home
Shame on Germany for actually spending their monies on the public welfare.
For Germany’s sake, I hope the US does pull its troops out of Germany and send them up to Poland.
Considering that Poland was the country that instigated WWII the US should be quite happy having our troops stationed there…
Poland didn’t exist as an independent country during WWII, much less “instigated” anything.
You are ignorant of the inter-war diplomatic histories. Go study them and then come back to me…
If you can come back with a reliable source indicating anything I said is false, do so. Just to be clear, you said Poland *started* WWII. I’m sure that’s news to many, not just me. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Poland_(1939%E2%80%931945)
I suppose *this* is where your “history” starts? Russia’s accusation? https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/europe/russia/5445161/Russia-accuses-Poland-of-starting-Second-World-War.html
Far be it from me to deny that sometimes Russia is right and the rest of us are wrong *but* don’t tell me I’m ignorant when “Western historians largely recognise that Poland would have lost its independence had it acceded to the demands, pointing to Hitler’s policies of Lebensbraum and the creation of a Greater Germany as evidence.” (ibid.) Given Poland was invaded from two fronts by Nazis on one side and Soviets on the other, and prior to that had been off the map officially for about a hundred years, forgive me for not seeing them as the villains of the piece. Point us toward your reliable sources, and there’d better be a lot of them, or I’m forced to say “that’s, um, just like, your opinion, man.”
Brian…
Poland began provoking war with Germany as early as 1936 when she started oppressive policies on the German nationals in her country. This increased in intensity and violence until 1938 when Adolph Hitler started negotiations to reduce the tensions between Germany and Poland over the Polish German nationals and Danzig (a German city under the League of Nations) where Poland was increasingly causing severe problems. Hitler attempted negotiations with Poland up until the last minute on September 1st, 1939 when he ordered Operation White to commence in limited form, thus only allowing for the attack on Polish troops near German borders as well as only Polish military airfields.
Hitler was unaware at that time of the British guarantee to Poland that Britain would come to Poland’s aid under any circumstances with Germany. This included repeated attempts by German diplomacy to avoid a war at all costs.
Josef Beck, the foreign minister of Poland wanted a war with Germany and Polish military leaders firmly believed that a war with Germany would be quite easy and decisive in Poland’s favor. It was Lord Halifax in England (the British Foreign Secretary) who was pushing Poland to the extreme to initiate provocative actions against Germany with the US’ FDR cheer-leading right behind him.
All of this is well documented in David Hoggan’s, “The Forced War”, probably the definitive study in diplomatic history in the inter-war period. Udo Walendy’s, “Who Started World War II”, is also an excellent diplomatic history of the inter-war period and somewhat easier reading than Hoggan’s book. A third treatise on the subject is, “The War with Many Fathers”. However, I have not read that book yet, though it is my library…
Now that’s a lot better than saying “you are ignorant…” which made you sound less than civil etc. Taking everything you say at face value (for the sake of argument and giving you every benefit of the doubt), your own analysis indicates there were multiple actors at play here: the British, for one, so how you end up with “WW2 is all Poland’s fault” and completely excuse Hitler even in the face of everything else he did (the annexation of Austria for a start and … well, everything else) after all that is quite beyond me. Leaving that aside, borders went back and forth throughout the history of Europe. The League of Nations was a failure, I don’t know by what authority they could rule on whether a city “should” be German or Polish, anymore than I know how the Balfour Declaration is legitimate or how carving up the Ottoman Empire into European principalities was legitimate. Regardless of what you claim to be Hitler’s intentions (I’m going to say we can’t know, but German maps from the period indicating Poland was part of Greater Germany, including the Baltic Port and the entire rest of Poland would seem to at least suggest Hitler’s intentions probably aligned with what he actually did, and was not something he was “forced into”–which is a moral cop out anyway: the Israelis are not forced into demolishing homes either. Attacking “only” Polish territory “a bit inside” their borders or Polish airfields “a bit across” the border is an act of war. That would be like, oh I don’t know, Israelis buzzing over Lebanese territory, causing sonic booms. It’s a violation of sovereign territory and others’ lives. I’m not doubting there was ethnic violence in Poland, as there was and is all over, but you cannot use that as an excuse for Hitler’s actions, nor lay all of WW2 at the feet of Poland. That is simplistic analysis at best.
I came back with that reply as you sounded rather arrogant in your own response. But my apologies then to you.
Poland was the country that started it all in WWII. However, to understand this you have to understand the political issues in Poland after WW1. This is what Hoggan demonstrates very well in his book.
Yes, The League of Nations was an abject failure, mostly because as with the current UN, the victors of WWI were making all the rules. Most observers after WWI thought the making of Danzig as League of Nations protectorate was the most ridiculous thing that came out of the Versailles Treaty among a host of other issues.
However, this, along with the Polish Corridor, which went through I believe East Prussia was done to placate the Poles who the Allies brought back to life to create a buffer area and ally that would keep an eye on Germany. But the Poles were quite greedy and terribly delusional about their place in Europe after WWI. Their delusions harnessed their greed and set the fuse, which eventually ignited WWII.
My view on Poland’s part in starting WWII is not a simple analysis as you suggest. The factors that moved Poland in this direction were quite complex and mixed with the foreign policy priorities of both Britian and the United States.
As to Austria, Adolph Hitler did not simply annex her. Austria was a war torn mess after WWI and fell into dictatorship like several other countries (ie: Poland, Hungary, Czechoslovakia). The last Austria Head of State, a guy named Schussnig (I believe that is the correct spelling), was so bad that the Austrians in general very much wanted to reunite with the Reich in order that order and sound economics could be re-established in Austria. When Germany went into Austria, they were welcomed with open arms.
However, in the end, you will believe what you want. But if you do not study the books I recommended, you will never have a chance at widening your perspectives…
I’ll accept your apologies, but I think if you re-read my original comment, though brief, it was not arrogant. You just didn’t like it, and since you likely hear it a lot, that can be irritating. I know what that’s like because I get the same way about stuff I “know” is true but “everyone else” is wrong about. It’s frustrating because there really is a lot of disinformation and propaganda out there on all kinds of subjects and probably none of us can successfully navigate through all of it. So I can’t blame you for believing something I don’t, but I won’t call you arrogant or ignorant for believing it (and you really shouldn’t call people ignorant for not knowing about a historian so out in left field as Hoggan). But nor do I have to demur from saying “you’re wrong” if I believe it strongly enough and am familiar enough with reliable sources to back it up. That’s what civil discourse is all about, but all too often people online never even get here. What I said was nothing more than a statement of what most historians would say. I don’t know all the authors you’ve cited, but I’m definitely with Mr. Knapp on David Hoggan, seeing the reliably sourced rebuttals made rather long ago by Spencer et al. (summarized here https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_L._Hoggan). If you’re going to accept Hoggan as a reliable source, I’m left wondering about the rest. But kudos for coming back and engaging. You’re right, I’m not likely to read that material, I tend to read secondary and tertiary articles rather than full length books (lack of time, I’m not a professional historian of WWII). I’d advise you to do the same thing (assuming you haven’t already): read those rebuttals for yourself and decide for yourself who’s right: you have an interest in doing so–if it doesn’t change your mind, you’ll be in a stronger position to make your argument than you are now.
Brian… I am not sure how to respond to your last note. You say that you read secondary and tertiary articles on history since you either do not have the time or patience to read books. So who writes the articles you read and what are their sources? Though some articles are written using “primary” sources, to find them you also have to take the time to understand such sources to know if they are actually “primary” sources.
“Popular History”, as it is called, is nonsense and propaganda to maintain the disinformation campaigns that surround them. As far as WWII is concerned, the US disinformation campaign was a combined effort of FDR and Winston Churchill. As to the former, it is well accepted knowledge now that FDR, like all presidents recently, lied the US into WWII.
However, getting to David Hoggan, his major treatise, “The Forced War” is based primarily and solely on “primary” sources since he was fluent in 6 languages and could read such source material in their native languages. He relied heavily on Polish primary sources for his work but also used British and German primary sources.
It is easy to call such work “fiction” if you have not done the studies I have on the subject. So what about Udo Walendy’s work? Suvrov’s work? Mosier’s work? And Pat Buchannan’s book, “The Unnecessary War”, which was warmly received by the historical community and supports Hoggan and Walendy in their contentions.
And last but not least, lets not forget David Irving, the preeminent WWII military historian until he published, “Hitler’s War”, which was derided for the singular reason that he did not include anything regarding the precious Holocaust of Zionists and Israel Firsters.
So exactly who should I believe; some main stream historian who uses secondary and tertiary sources and simply regurgitates what has been written before?
Look, if you want to retain your beliefs in the materials you read, that is your prerogative.
But to say or imply that what I have studied over the years is simply unreliable or fiction is unacceptable. If you believe that Hoggan’s work for example is simply fiction than prove it to me. Give me a single treatise that relied on similar “primary” sources that David Hoggan used so I can read through it and understand an alternative viewpoint (such sources include the Polish and German White books; the French Yellow Book, to name a few).
I am doing that right now with James McPherson’s magisterial study on the American Civil War, “Battle Cry of Freedom”. I am doing this as I have become convinced in my studies that the South was correct in the reasons for secession from the Union. However, I do accept McPherson’s contention that slavery played a larger issue in the tensions that gave the eventual conflict its grist than many Southern historians want to admit. Nonetheless, McPherson is also showing that it wasn’t exactly slavery per say but the role it played in disturbing the balance of power between the North and South regions after Polk’s Mexican-American War that brought into the US the largest acquisitions of territories in the history of the nation.
“But to say or imply that what I have studied over the years is simply unreliable or fiction is unacceptable.”
I’m shocked — shocked! — that you find reality unacceptable.
Yeah, well don’t have a heart attack or anything over it…
Hey Thomas my most recent response to Steve got marked as spam, can you find it?
Yep, got it approved. Sorry it took so long, I got busy with non-Antiwar.com stuff.
First, you’re confusing some of what I said with what Mr. Knapp said. Let’s say he’s more succinct, plain-spoken, and quite possibly more familiar with the topic (let’s call it “who’s really responsible for WWII, now, the Holocaust”) than I am. Second of all, I didn’t say I lacked patience. What I said was, I’m not a historian of WWII. It’s not one of the main focuses of my life, as it may be yours (and perhaps similar contrarian pursuits). I agree with you that there’s a great deal of popular history which is flat out wrong and prone to nationalistic bias, but most of that is not actually what is taught in tertiary education institutions around the world. Students of history do not aver that D-Day happened as portrayed in Saving Private Ryan or that the Americans were responsible for cracking the Enigma code as in U-571. But to go from that premise to saying “only one book on WWII got it right” is a pretty big leap of logic: and for Irving himself to have said that about his own work was perhaps a sign of his scholarship becoming tainted by delusions of grandeur. He actually said that at a conference. Those of his critics who granted that he was a scholar in earnest nevertheless pointed out that many of his *conclusions* were not actually supported by his research and that his personal bias in favour of Hitler was evident – and Irving *himself* admitted this for example when called on it that his contention that Hitler did not know about the Holocaust *because* of a single order concerning a single train out of Berlin, didn’t stand up; see this and other exchanges at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hitler%27s_War. For the same reason that I accept the scientific consensus that climate change is real and likely (at least significantly) anthropogenic, versus assertions by tiny minorities of scentists who say it isn’t, it goes against common sense to say that the singular scholar saying “Hitler didn’t know” was right based on such flimsy evidence. And anyway, you know what? It doesn’t matter. Whether Hitler personally knew or not does not excuse him from the actions of his ministers and similar ones done by the Nazis under his watch, and, as though we need spell it out, *in his name*. “Heil Hitler” was literally the standard closing statement in official correspondence. He founded Nazism and he wrote Mein Kampf for goodness’ sake. So what was Irving trying to say, exactly? That Hitler was this political naif who, in 1941-45, was being led by the nose? That all the overtly anti-semitic policies, the confiscations of property, “deportations”, etc., would’ve been okay as long Hitler thought people were “only” being sent to work as slaves rather than simply murdered? Do you understand how this sounds? Getting stuck on how many angels can dance on a pin like this blinds you to the fact there is a pin and that it’s sharp and that it is stained by the blood of the millions of people it skewered, all of whom were non-combatant minorities, many of them from other countries, many of them children. So, no, my studious friend, I really don’t *care* who started WWII. What I care about is all its innocent victims, be they Jews, homosexuals, Slavs, Japanese civilians fire-bombed and nuked out of existence, European women and children on and off the continent, or all the other innocents around the world. And for all that, there is plenty of blame and shame to go around. But you just keep worrying about how things looked from Hitler’s own point of view, for all the good it does anyone, rather than working towards something that will actually make a difference here and now, if it suits you.
Brian… It is very interesting that you believe that David Irving is not a credible historian, yet military historians have consistently found him to be one of the most preeminent historians of WWII. As to his Holocaust Denials, I am not sure where this is coming from as I have listened to many of his lectures and never once heard him state such a position directly. However, that does not mean he has not taken such a position.
In general, however, I find that none of what you have discussed has any credibility since you have provided absolutely no refutation based on your own sources of information except for the one link to Wikipedia, which has been widely reported to support inaccuracies and falsehoods. I only use such a source for general information for more in depth research but never use such material as a basis for argumentation andor debate.
Look, if you want to believe what you do, I have no issue with that but before you discredit another person’s views you should be at least be able to support your views with reference materials of your own. Until you can, I see no reason to continue responding…
Look mate, I see where this goes. You always get to “win” every one of your arguments online by rejecting the only sources most readily available online. The alternative is no argument at all because no one is going to come back a week later. I’m only doing this because I’m sick at home. You think you’ve “won” because I’m not going to go out and find David Irving’s book and point to a specific passage for you, or the book cited in the Wikipedia article and its page number for you. I could do all that but it’s not up to me to spoon feed you. A Wikipedia article is as reliable as the sources it cites to back up what it states. Some are more reliable than others, and they are subject to change and vandalism on any given day, but are generally a lot better than they were when it started. I don’t cite a Wikpedia article until I check its sources myself. I have not cited one but at least two.
You keep putting words in my mouth and then argue with the straw man (I never said he had not been a good historian EVER, I said he drew impossible conclusions from scant or non-existent evidence, which are clearly not the hallmarks of a great mind – you say I don’t cite sources, so what, you think I made it up?). You don’t seem to understand that the onus is actually on you to prove that what Irving said LATER is actually correct, not that what he said at the beginning of his career was correct. There are literally dozens of rebuttals of his conclusions. You have to explain why they’re all wrong because that’s what it means when you want to replace the status quo. Just like it’s not up to me to tell you the earth isn’t flat, it’s up to you to prove to me that it is. It’s not up to me to debunk his conclusions, those other people already did it and the rest of the world moved on. I just pointed that out to you by pointing you to Wikipedia, which is reporting to you what he said and what they said. And he admitted in at least one case they were right. If you think it’s all made up that’s your problem, not mine. You, on the other hand, now consistently fail to address/engage with the many things I have pointed out to you by dismissing any other interpretation of sources but those of one or two men whose views are presumably so in line with your own (“their precious Holocaust” is a rather telling sneer from an earlier post) that you refuse to even consider that hey, maybe a dozen other pre-eminent scholars of history might actually be at least as authoritative as one or two who disagree with them. And while you and Irving and others are entitled to your interpretations of facts (opinions), as American liberals like to say, you’re not entitled to your facts.I shall repeat myself: Irving denied the Holocaust based on reading a report written by a non-scientist that no cyanide was present in the gas chambers. That’s like the first thing on his WP page (perhaps unfairly, but it’s sourced, and I read the source, just didn’t bother to cite it). That doesn’t make him a non credible historian in the past, it makes him a human being with impaired judgement at that moment, and for whatever period of time he continued to hold that view. I don’t need yet another a source to come to that conclusion because I’m pretty damn clever myself, certainly a lot cleverer than he was at that moment in time. Was he a poor scholar? No. Was he God? No. He was human and he made human errors. So are you and so are you.
P.S. (my first response is awaiting moderation) Further to David Irving, the book you refer to is, of course, a bit before he blatantly lost the plot (but as I already said, the signs were already there in that book), as he became a full-blown Holocaust denier after reading a report by a self-described engineer (the man had a B.A. in history yet somehow claimed to “act” as an engineer) asserting that no residual cyanide could be found in the gas chambers at Auschwitz, despite Polish studies showing the exact opposite. Speaking charitably, Irving may well have been a good scholar once, but he clearly lost the ability to discern what was and what was not likely to be a reliable source at some point. I’m afraid you have too, and I sympathize. I’ve been where you are, not on this topic in particular, but in my own field, once upon a time, for a while I was not sure what to believe on a few topics and it took a great deal of effort and weighing of argument and evidence before I changed my mind. Once you start pulling at these threads, the entire thing falls apart. Look, if you’re going to assert that no one died in a concentration camp by murder, but do not dispute they entered and died, you have to at least explain how and why they did die, or else explain what happened to them if they didn’t, which is where all this stuff becomes more and more disconnected from anything approaching scholarship and more and more into the realm of speculative and fanciful imagination, to the point where it simply cannot be taken seriously by anyone with a modicum of critical thinking in them. It is curious that you consider my lack of knowledge of these sources to be a form of ignorance and that to read them would “broaden” my horizons: in fact, being so beholden to these particularly credulous, easily-rebutted and self-evidently unreliable sources and against the consensus of essentially all the rest of the world’s historians on these narrowest of micro-topics has made you precisely what you accuse me of, only wilfully so. You choose to limit what you think can be true by limiting what you consider to be reliable to so narrow a spectrum of scholarship.
“All of this is asserted in David Hoggan’s, ‘The Forced War,’ one of several works of fiction featuring plots too stupid to achieve suspension of disbelief among the literate, including The Myth of the Six Million, which even Hoggan found too embarrassing to put his name on.”
Fixed, no charge.
YES- Please do, immediately. I was stationed over there for three years and although I loved Germany and its people I knew we had no business still being there- and this was back in the mid-late 80’s during reunification.
End the occupation.
The Sovjet kept their promise…leaving east Germany in 1994.
Don’t let the US leave without cleaning up the PFAs. And don’t let them back into the US until they clean up the PFAs here.
Pentagonians are at war with humanity, democracy and Cosmos.
Promises, promises, promises. I hope Germany calls our bluff.
They should call our bluff, maybe they can raise the rent?