Would giving Danzig to the Nazis have prevented World War II?

“[Regarding the appeasement at Munich,] there is a deep well of ignorance about what happened that September, 70 years ago.”
— Pat Buchanan

I’m really beginning to be concerned by what we’re hearing from Pat Buchanan. As I’ve stated previously, I have a lot of respect for the man. He usually displays a strong, incisive ability to cut through the clouds of political bull that often surround a situation and ask questions that really need answering, not just those that people feel comfortable asking. Unfortunately, in his most recent book he may damage his platform and credibility seriously. If the significant historical and analytical errors he presents in his latest article for Human Events, “Munich, 1938,” are at all representative of Mr. Buchanan’s recent book (which I have not yet had a chance to review), it seems that he has in fact discovered that when one peers into a “well of ignorance,” one is most likely to see only his own reflection.

I have already addressed a number of Mr. Buchanan’s historical errors in my previous article on the subject, and so won’t retread that ground. Instead, I would like to focus on two much more serious issues that emerge from his unspoken presumptions: First, Mr. Buchanan seems to be assuming that Germany, France, Britain, and the United States all occupied a similar moral standing in 1938, and second, that World War II was an “unnecessary war.”

Before going farther, let me state that Mr. Buchanan is right that the serious misapplication of the Treaty of Versailles proved to be a significant catalyst to the outbreak of World War II. That has never been in dispute. Woodrow Wilson more or less forced the Fourteen Points Peace Plan (which the Germans assumed would be the basis of treaty negotiations) down the vengeful throats of the British and French, both of whom wanted to castigate Germany and make it pay for the war. So, we should not be surprised to see them almost immediately vomit up portions of the treaty mixed with their own punishing bile. That resulted in the sadly unjust treatment of World War I Germany, which, after all, was essentially just one of a number of powers pulled into the war spontaneously.

As the old cliché goes, the easiest lies to swallow are those coated with truth. Scholarship discovered decades ago that Hitler and the Nazis exploited these complaints and used them to legitimatize their program with the German people and as leverage against the bleeding hearts in the West. 

Mr. Buchanan, however, disagrees. He seems to imply that Hitler, due to the Versailles’ failures, held the moral high ground, and therefore Chamberlain wasn’t “appeasing” anyone at Munich.  He was simply returning “the Sudeten Germans to Berlin's rule, where they wished to be,” and thereby saving the British Empire from “suicide.”

This error seems to emerge from Buchanan’s apparent presumption that Nazi Germany enjoyed some form of moral equivalency with the Allies. More likely, he is adopting an impractical “pragmatic” approach to diplomacy that claims ethical concerns need not apply. Every country is treated in terms of power and position, making Germany in 1938 comparable to the Allies, especially given its scurvy treatment in the Versailles Treaty. So, in terms of diplomacy we should treat Nazi Germany as just another run-of-the-mill nation.

While Mr. Buchanan (wisely) makes no explicit statement to this effect, he leaves a number of distinct clues in his articles. For the sake of time and space, I’ll mention the three strongest:

· In neither of his latest two articles (1-2) does he offer any significant criticism of Hitler’s actions or even imply the proven psychosis that drove them. This is, at least, a passive implication placing Germany on parity with the British and French.

· In both articles he positively defends Hitler by claiming that the Nazis did not want war in 1938 or '39, and that they were only pushed into one by Polish intransigence and the unconditional nature of the British war guarantee. So, he in fact absolves Hitler of much of blame for starting World War II. 

· In his second article, it is notable that he avoids using the term “Nazi” to refer to the German government, even when it is really a synonym for it by 1938. 

Perhaps he clears these matters up in his book, but the implication seems very clear in the articles. The end result, of course, is to remove the question of morality from the diplomatic picture in 1938. Without any ethical qualms to consider, he can then start toying with the idea that maybe Chamberlain shouldn’t have second-guessed himself after Munich. Perhaps Hitler was after limited ends (i.e., only Danzig and an alliance with Poland). Perhaps it wasn’t appeasement, and it should have been continued.

Certainly, it’s a load of rot.

As to the claim in his book that World War II was “unnecessary,” one only need ask what would have likely happened if the war had indeed been postponed (as long as an Hitler was in power, it could never have been completely avoided). If the British and the French were unprepared for war in 1939, so were the Germans. Despite its reputation as a mechanized monstrosity, in 1939 up to a third of the Wehrmacht was still horse-drawn and 90% of its infantry still traveled on foot. They had not produced nearly the numbers of planes and panzers that all of Germany’s generals agreed would be necessary to win the wars Hitler planned. Mussolini was even less prepared and had asked for several more years of peace in which to arm his country for war.

Would giving Danzig to the Nazis have prevented World War II? In all likelihood, it would not. What it would have done (barring more immediate aggression by Hitler or Japan) is give all of the Axis powers a chance to strengthen their armies significantly. Hitler, in particular, would have been able to consolidate his hold over the various peoples he had conquered and exploit them to support his already massive efforts to build up and modernize the German armed forces. Further, he would have been able to purse his murderous and oppressive civilian policies (a sort of proto-holocaust) unconcerned by the need to fight a war. When the war finally came, Nazi Germany would probably be in a much better position than it was in 1939. 

The result, in the end, would have been more death, more destruction, and possibly Nazi domination of a significant part of the globe, the very thing that Mr. Buchanan hoped to avoid. So, while Chamberlain could not have known it then, World War II was in all probability very necessary.

I am certainly not in favor of America being the “world’s policeman,” running around intervening in every little squabble, but the simple fact is that there are times when intervention has been shown to be a moral and historical necessity.  Despite Mr. Buchanan’s claims, World War II was definitely one of those moments. If his historical judgment is any indicator, we should think twice before we heed his advice on dealing with Iran.