Sunday 27 November 2022

Ribbentrop is the reason the Second World War broke out

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Ribbentrop was the only member of the Travellers' Club to be hanged and was the main reason England, France and Germany went to war.

He was one of the most stupid men to have been Ambassador to the Court of St James. That's when he was elected to the club, like all ambassadors. 

He cultivated King Edward VIII, whose political views were similar to his own, and whom he thought dictated foreign policy. He even went to bed with Mrs Simpson. 

He told Hitler the abdication was caused by a Jewish-Masonic cabal.

Come to think of it,  the King may have thought the same. He told Hitler in1937 that he had been forced out because of his pro-German sympathies. 

I wonder what Mrs Simpson thought. 

In 1939, now Foreign Minister, Ribbentrop reassured Hitler that Britain would never go to war again, whatever the provocation, though it was very clear that it was probable that we would, after the annexation of Czechia and the guarantees to Poland and Romania. 

The latter was based on a deceit by the Romanian Ambassador, Viore Tilea, acting on Bob Boothby's suggestion. Tilea told the British Foreign Secretary Lord Halifax that Germany had issued an ultimatum to Romania - when in fact she had issued an economic ultimatum, which is very different.

Hitler, who thought Ribbentrop a “genius . . . a second Bismarck”, invaded Poland.

When war was declared on Germany on 3rd September 1939, Hitler looked at Ribbentrop and asked him, 'What do we do now?"

Goering, who did not want a war, was right: “This war is Ribbentrop's doing.”

In the summer of 1936 Austen Chamberlain, the former Tory party leader, supported by Winston Churchill, requested a secret session of Parliament to discuss German rearmament but the Prime Minister, Stanley Baldwin, refused. He instead met Austen Chamberlain, Lord Salisbury and Churchill for two days, on 28 and 29 July, a meeting he considered a waste of time because they greatly exaggerated the extent of German rearmament.

On the second day, Baldwin said 

"Were the public to understand that Germany was arming to fight Britain? ‘We all know the German desire to move east.....And if he should move
east I should not break my heart.

"...I am not going to get this country into a war with anybody for the League of Nations or anybody else or for anything else. There is one danger, of course, which has probably been in all your minds—supposing the Russians and Germans got fighting and the French went in as the allies of Russia owing to that appalling pact they made; you would not feel you were obliged to go and help France, would you? If there is any fighting in Europe to be done, I should like to see the Bolshies and the Nazis doing it.”

How prescient Baldwin was and how unwise Britain and France were not to encourage a deal between Poland and Germany, allowing Germany to turn her attention to the USSR.

Had Baldwin still been in office during the Czechoslovakian crisis in 1938 how would he have handled it?

On the other hand, had Hitler kept his promise to Chamberlain to make no further territorial demands in Europe, Germany might still have a National Socialist government. 

That is assuming that Bolshevik Russia had not attacked Germany, as Victor Suvorov and recently two other historians have suggested was Stalin's plan, and defeated Hitler.

How interesting the might have beens of history are.

3 comments:

  1. A "deal between Germany and Poland"? The National Socialists regarded the Poles, indeed all Slavs, to be subhuman - fit only to be slaves. As for Mrs Simpson - the lady is not around to defend her character.

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    1. Hitler had no problem with his Slovak or Croatian allies. It's about power politics. Poland had no choice, pincered as she was between the Bolsheviks and the Germans. Mrs Simpson was married to Mr Simpson in 1936.

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  2. People who engage in heavy balls-out savage warfare always blame it on others. George W Bush did it and now Putin is doing it. Putin is extracting a much higher domestic death toll than George ever did, though.

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