This is a very thought-provoking essay. I hope that a lot of people read it.
Last summer I posted an essay on my own Substack called "The Poland Paradox: How Faraway Allies Make Small Countries Less Safe." The scope was a bit narrower than yours - I talked about how Poland's pact with Britain ended up worse than useless in World War II, and how that should be a lesson for small countries with big, aggressive, neighbors tempted to rely overmuch on distant allies who talk a big talk but, at the end of the day, have only a marginal interest in the small country's preservation. https://twilightpatriot.substack.com/p/the-poland-paradox
Anyhow, it's certainly good to get people talking about how (1) WWII wasn't actually much of a victory for the free world, what with communists ruling more people and territory in 1945 than 1939 (and vastly more in 1949!) and (2) this tragic outcome ("Let’s never do that again!") was the result of a lot more people than just Hitler and Mussolini making bad decisions.
This is an good essay! I was just talking to a friend of mine that an "EEU" (Eastern European Union) would be much better than the current gay EU and could be a better deterrent to Russia. I don't know how true that would be though, given that most of the Eastern European countries have been contributing pretty significantly in Ukraine, and not really moving the needle.
' was the result of a lot more people than just Hitler and Mussolini making bad decisions.'
This is true, but the people who made these bad decisions are those who were actually in power 1933-39, whereas DR lolvisionists just want to blame Churchill. The whole conceit that it is some sort of new and original idea to say WW2 was an avoidable tragedy is obvious bullshit. The only novel thing is that DR lolvisionists argue it could have been avoided by a policy of capitulation to Hitler on literally everything.
> Last summer I posted an essay on my own Substack called "The Poland Paradox: How Faraway Allies Make Small Countries Less Safe." The scope was a bit narrower than yours - I talked about how Poland's pact with Britain ended up worse than useless in World War II,
Bingo Bobbins' thesis seems to be that it would have (since without the illusion of security it provided, Poland would have had a chance of just giving up Dresden rather than getting invaded & partitioned.)
You don't understand. No-one has any agency except maybe Churchill who is bad because boomers like him and was responsible for decisions made when he was not in the government. The allies are bad because they were allied with Stalin, even tough at the outbreak of war Hitler was allied with Stalin. Just look at this one incident from the 1930s and none of the other history because this is the only one that fits my narrative. This is very smart and incisive because it is based.
1) Hitler proved he was inherently an aggressive expansionist when he violated Munich and annexed the Czechs.
2) Hitler was clearly expanding the German military at a rate that necessitated war long before the war started, and told people in his government he wanted war
3) he wrote a book about how his goal was expansionary war
4) his subsequent actions proved what a bloodthirsty tyrant he was
5) Hitler died in a bunker having taken his own life after he ran out of German children to throw under Soviet tank treads so that he could get high on meth and order Speer to destroy the entire country out of spite.
Now, if you want to say “not every leader is Hitler and not every situation is Munich” that’s a fine enough statement. One need only look at the First World War to see “always escalate” is a bad strategy. And I have no problem saying that “nazism proof racism cause world war 2” is poor reasoning. I can even buy that “guaranteeing Poland was strategic blunder”.
But yeah, war was inevitable and it was hitlers fault.
The correct criticism of the Polish guarantee is not that it brought war, but that it brought war at the point most favourable to Hitler, and thus led directly to the military humiliation of Britain and France. The most important criticism of Chamberlain is less that he was an appeaser and more that he was just totally outclassed at every step by Hitler in strategy.
Chamberlain had a tough hand to play, incomplete information, and some bad luck. He correctly surmised that a deal with Stalin was both impossible and would end similarly to how ww2 ended (communists in Central Europe). Geography made defense of Eastern Europe impossible and politics made earlier interventions impossible. I always try to remind people that the occupation of the Ruhr was a giant failure in the 1920s, people weren’t going to try that again in hitlers early years.
He was also given some really bad intelligence about German air power (which in fairness all powers overestimated strategic air power, especially early in the war).
If Germany doesn’t get lucky in France in 1940 chamberlain doesn’t go down in history the same way.
Stalin played ww2 “the best” diplomatically and it got his whole country wrecked.
I just feel like France falling is such a weird and improbable event that it upends all judgements about the Second World War. Nobody planned for it.
Germany really wasn’t the “stronger power” on paper and it’s not clear to me is got net stronger vis a vis uk/france between 1938 and 1939.
Chaimberlain had a bad hand, for sure. Churchill was always consistent in saying that Baldwin was principally to blame, and - being a cool guy - always treated Chaimberlain with respect. It was Labour propaganda that turned Chaimberlain into the principal villain.
But with all that said, he still didn't play his hand very well.
I do not agree that it was a favorable point for Hitler. It became a favorable point because the French and British chose not to try to make use of their overwhelming military superiority on the Western Front in September 1939, with every German division that was worth a damn off in Poland.
Put it this way. Britain and especially France did not consider themselves ready for war. Maybe they should have, but they didn't. And making the timing of the war dependent on Hitler' action gave him the advantage.
War was inevitable. That is not the same as saying that every decision resulted in the same outcome. I think it's a fair reading that more people died because of the way the war was waged than might have with a set of different choices. It is rare to find any decision that just accepted a fait accompli before a bunch of people got ground into the grave. If you were going to live under Nazi occupation for 4 years or so, you might have been better off letting it happen without resistance, thinking say the Greeks and the Yugoslavs here. The Hungarians, Finns and Bulgarians all had some form of resistance to fighting the Soviets, so those are good counterexamples.
The Dutch choosing to side with the Allies is pretty persuasive here. They got treated less harshly than some countries, but still suffered horribly. Just surrendering to Hitler without a fight would have been better perhaps.
The Poles totally blew it. No matter what their aversion to Hitler, getting invaded from both sides, partitioned and then treated as a killing ground during the war was not an improvement.
I find it telling that you barely mention Czechoslovakia and the Munich conference in this essay, even though it is very relevant to the issue in question. Specifically, how it demonstrated that Hitler couldn't be trusted to restrain himself, and that any cession of territory to Germany would only wet its appetite for more.
I never said anything about might makes right. I don't subscribe to that idea. I think that strength and ability to survive is incidental. My evaluation is qualitative. I'm say that I prefer Germany and its culture.
Anyone who is literate and not literally a faggot knows that Churchill was not a drunk retard. His criticism of the Polish guarantee is, like most of his observations of British policy in the 1930s when he was excluded from influence, is accurate. De-escalation is about knowing when to be tough, and when not to be tough. The British government 1933-39 got that balance wrong multiple times in both directions. The main flaw of the Martyr Made school of WW2 revisionism is that, because it is fundamentally driven by homosexual nazi fascination, it just criticises British policy for not consistently giving into Germany all the time. The actual story is much more complicated, but overall it erred more on the side of accomodation than confrontation. This essay is an attempt to sanewash homsexual nazi fetishism, but it doesn't really quite come off. Overall C+.
Yeah, I don't see how it makes sense to view the Polish crisis in complete isolation from Czechoslovakia, and Hitler's previously expressed views and subsequent behavior in Eastern Europe.
Furthermore, I thought the premise of DR foreign policy realism was contempt for Wilsonian pieties; however, taking Hitler's (of all people's) statements appealing to Wilsonian principles regarding Austria, the Sudetenland, and Danzig/Polish Corridor apart from broader strategic issues also seems quite silly.
Most DR types are all for blood and soil nationalism AND self determination. Which is why they (we?) want every non member of this nation sent back to their nation
Although the picture was complicated, I don't see how Churchill comes out looking like anything but a weasel on the inside considering the lengths he went to to give the British state the appearance of dogmatic resistance while privately signing the country over to sinister American interests behind the scenes. It may not have been within his power to seek a separate peace in 1940, but a man of good character would have resigned rather than gave the government a good face.
Defending the Empire from threats to it from any European nation was the policy of GB for well over a century. But it was tossed away by Churchill in return for American support in the fight against Nazi Germany which posed minimal threat to it.
Stalins Soviet Union had taken nearly a third of Poland and the Baltic States by June 1940.
Churchills apparent obsession with Hitler have a number of reasons and being half American a reason he was loosely attached psychologically to the Empire
Since Churchill didn’t toss away the empire, your post is just more drivel. One of the sillier characteristics of the Nazi-adjacent is that they impute uniquely to Churchill and Roosevelt feelings (like strong opposition to Hitler) that were in fact near-universal in Britain and strong in the USA.
He absolutely did toss away the Empire. Near the end of the war in the Far East the US administration was adamant that the British shouldn't be let take control of Hong Kong again....until the communist threat became clear. There were crystal clear political sentiments at play-America's anti European colonialism and Churchills Hitler obsession.
He didn’t sign Britain over to American interests, sinister or otherwise. And because he wasn’t a scoundrel or a fascist, he had no interest in a separate peace with Nazis. Neither did his countrymen.
FDR's goal in helping the UK was clear: the colonies would go, starting with India. After the war, decolonization happened. Decolonization itself would not have been so bad for Europeans today, except that it was tied to progressive anti-white ideology. Hmmm!
A separate peace from the Nazis would have put Britain in the same scenario as Franco's Spain or Portugal after the war: possessing a government capable of resisting leftism for some more time. As a country that fully gave into American progressive interests, one can confidently say that the UK has done much worse for itself leading into the present day.
He was a scoundrel and an anti white racist when it suited him-the concentration camps for the Boers. It never took much for either the US or GB public opinion to see an enemy on the continent of Europe that must be defeated.....
Yes, this is the view that I have also come around to. Specifically, especially without the benefit of hindsight (and even perhaps with it), the Anglo-French guarantees to Poland in 1939 were rather stupid. After all, a new World War could have been extremely bloody for the Anglo-French and by giving the Poles this guarantee, the Anglo-French encouraged the Poles in their stubborn obstinancy and refusal to compromise. Even the ultimatum that Hitler gave Poland right before the start of WWII should have been accepted:
Also, especially without the benefit of hindsight, one could have argued that letting Hitler expand into Poland (if the Poles would have still refused any deal with him) and, had he wanted to, into the Soviet Union would have given Hitler a gigantic headache for many decades to come due to the fact that he would have been ruling over a huge number of people who would have been restive and hostile towards Nazi rule. (Think of the situation in Austria-Hungary, but on steroids.) At the very least, a prolonged Kosovo 1980s-style situation would have been very possible in a Nazi-occupied Eastern Europe. And without the West waging an existential war of destruction against the Nazi regime, the Nazi regime might have been less radicalized, still preferring mass deportations to mass murder, especially considering that it might have still wanted to preserve a semblance of relatively normal relations with the West.
It also wasn't obvious without the benefit of hindsight that Hitler would have been a worse master for the USSR's population relative to Stalin. After all, as you correctly pointed out, pre-WWII, Hitler had killed much less people than Stalin did. Indeed, a hypothetical Anglo-French observer in 1939 might have reached the conclusion that even if Hitler would have conquered the Soviet Union, such an outcome might not have been worse for the Soviet people themselves (Indians in India under British rule were probably treated better, all things considered, relative to people in Stalin's USSR), and indeed might even be a boon for humanity due to it inflicting a severe blow to Communism and the ideology that it relies upon.
And of course there would have been more scientific research and technological development in a no-Holocaust world because Ashkenazi Jews are, on average, extremely smart.
Good stuff. Nothing happened in German concentration camps that deserves a proper name though. The inflation of casualties there and causal distortion thereof should be regarded the same way as man-made global warming: A guiltmongering apocalypse cult whose purpose is to shake down white people.
I haven't read David Irving or anything yet, so I don't know but I'm open to being convinced. Either way, I think as a "Centrist" starting point accepting the figures but explaining how they could have been avoided is rhetorically more persuasive.
That's not an admission by Churchill in 1948 as he was not in power when the bad decision was made. It's his criticism of those (not him) who made the decision.
Well, yes and no. Chamberlain was Prime Minister but Churchill was supportive of it in Parliament. It was only after the fact that he acted like he hadn't supported it, much like Dems condemning the war in Iraq, when in fact they all voted for it.
Either way, in the popular imagination, Chamberlain is the weak appeaser and Churchill is the tough guy, so my intention was more to point out that "even" Churchill criticized the war guarantee.
'but Churchill was supportive of it in Parliament.'
Great point, except it's not true and you just made it up.
'Either way, in the popular imagination, Chamberlain is the weak appeaser and Churchill is the tough guy, so my intention was more to point out that "even" Churchill criticized the war guarantee.'
Right, so no concern with building an accurate picture of what led to war, just rhetorical point scoring and the manipulation of evidence to create the 'framing' that feels right. Like a woman.
The reality is that if you view WW2 - correctly - as an avoidable tragedy, then the man who himself coined the term 'the unnecessary war' and wrote extensively about how the war could easily have been avoided with different policies should obviously be someone you sympathise with. But many people burn with delirious rage against Churchill. In most cases, it is just because they are homosexual misfits who engage in performative political extremism as a way of presenting as masculine and thus naturally empathize with Hitler who was the prototype for this behavior, whilst recoiling in horror at an example of unfeigned Anglo Saxon masculinity. In other cases, it is because they wish to build in-group solidarity with said homosexual misfits, since they are the majority of Dissident Right writers. Maybe there are some other reasons too, like they get offended by eugenics or something, idk.
> In most cases, it is just because they are homosexual misfits who engage in performative political extremism as a way of presenting as masculine and thus naturally empathize with Hitler who was the prototype for this behavior, whilst recoiling in horror at an example of unfeigned Anglo Saxon masculinity.
Something I noticed is that the people who talk toughest about the Nietzschean transcendent power of violence are the first to come up with excuses to avoid getting in situations which might entail actual violence, be it foreign wars or simply showing up to protests that might turn violent.
Another day, another bold iconoclast who turns out to be a rehash of Pat Buchanan.
No one who knows anything thinks the British and French went to war to “prevent the Holocaust.” They went to war, or rather they agreed to accept war if Hitler invaded Poland, because they correctly determined that Hitler intended aggressive war against them, and did not want to wait until circumstances had shifted further in his favor. This article says nothing about the events that led the British and French to that conclusion: the reoccupation of the Rhineland, German rearmament, the Aunschluss with Austria, the Sudentenland crisis, or the occupation of the rest of Czechoslovakia.
It was the last of these, the occupation of Czechoslovakia in March 1939, that caused the British and French to finally draw their line in the sand in the form of the Polish guarantee. Since Hitler had solemnly promised that he would respect what was left of Czechoslovakia after getting the Sudentenland at Munich, this occupation proved that his word was not worth a piece of soiled toilet tissue; since there were very few ethnic Germans in what remained of Czechoslovakia after Munich, his occupation showed that his goals were larger than regathering Germans left outside Germany’s borders after Versailles. It, along with Kristallnacht, also caused a violent anti-appeasement and anti-Nazi shift in public opinion in Britain and France. Like all bold iconoclasts, the author of this piece never mentions the occupation of Czechoslovakia or its relationship with the Polish guarantee.
In fact, Hitler had been furious that Mussolini’s last minute intervention and Chamberlain and Daladier’s subsequent caving at Munich in October 1938 deprived him of the war he wanted so badly right then. But he got it a year later.
Bold iconoclasts always treat the guarantee as senseless. It wasn’t; the British hoped it would dissuade Hitler from going to war, and if he had been sane it would have. What the British and French can and should be blamed for was not invading immediately at the beginning of the war, in which case they would have won a crushing victory. General Gamelin, meeting with Polish army officers in the spring of 1939, stated that, in the event of war, the French armed forces would ”unleash an offensive action against Germany with the bulk of its forces, 15 days after mobilization."
France did not, obviously, do that. But it could have. Germany invaded Poland on September 1, 1939. By September 6, the Maginot Line was fully manned with 75 mostly high-quality divisions in position opposite Germany or along the French and Belgian borders, along with 3,200 tanks and 115 air groups, as well ten squadrons of British bombers.
Opposite them were 30-40 German divisions composed mostly of second- or third-line troops with little training. No tanks, little artillery, and not even adequate supplies of horses and wagons. General Leeb, the German commander, rated German defenses before Belgium and Luxembourg as extremely weak. He deemed the Siegfried Line as little more than a facade.
There was no chance that the French and British were going to launch a massive offensive in September 1939. Gamelin was opposed, Gen. Georges was opposed, Daladier would have been opposed if anyone had asked him, the British were opposed.
But the fact remains that the French and British had the capacity to launch a large offensive in the opening weeks of the war, and that such an offensive would have had a very high probability of obtaining a crushing victory.
"A French attack on the weak German defensive front on the Siegfried Line [in September 1939]...would, as far it is humanly possible to judge, have led to a very quick military defeat of Germany and therefore a quick end of the war." _Hitler's Strategy_, Andreas Hillgruber (1965).
No offensive occurred, of course. The Germans moved their army back West and embarked on a crash training and armaments program, and in 1940 they conquered France, Belgium, and the Netherlands. Hitler was given a free hand for Barbarossa and, in the fullness of time, the Holocaust. If you want to blame Britain (and France) -- don't! The blame lies with the aggressors, not the people who had to deal with their aggression. But if you insist on blaming Britain (and France), the place to look is not the Rhineland or the Polish guarantee. It's the failure to invade Germany at the beginning of the war.
This piece makes the argument, heard so often, that nothing could have been worse than what actually happened in World War II. Not so fast. We can't rerun history and check, but I think that war in the East would have come anyway, and Hitler would have been much more likely to win it. Based on his "Second Book," his table talk, and his conversations with the military, we pretty much know that genocidal expansion in the East, making the Volga "Germany's Mississippi" was always the long-term plan. And if the Germans had conquered the USSR...
1. Hitler planned to starve the cities of Western Russia in order to seize the Soviet grain surplus. Thirty million people would starved or fled (or likely first fled, then starved) if he had succeeded.
2. The next thing that would have happened would have been German resettlement of the East, i.e. Poland and the western USSR. There was a plan for this, Generalplan Ost. About ten million Germans would have been resettled in the conquered territories. In the short term, the Slavs would be reduced to the status of slaves or near-slaves. But a permanent, large Slav population was inconsistent with longer-term German plans, pursuant to which there would be a further massive depopulation in the former USSR and Poland. 80-85% of the population of Poland, 75% of White Russia, 62% of people in the Ukraine. The area around Leningrad would have been completely emptied.
3. The Holocaust would have been much more total than it was.
However you calculate it, a massive share of the people in Poland and the USSR, perhaps 100 million people or more (the prewar population of just the USSR was 170 million, most of them in the western part of the country) would have been wiped out.
This article makes the stupid argument that the British and French should have gone to war with Stalin along with Hitler. Why would they do something so utterly retarded? (Amazingly, they came pretty close in early 1940.) It is a fact that a lot of the world’s military potential wound up in the hands of totalitarians by 1939, and so it was never in the cards that the war would result in a general defeat for totalitarianism. But at least it was the less virulent kind that survived, and eventually burned itself out (which Naziism could never do).
Madagascar keeps getting brought up in articles like this, like it was some kind of great Nazi humanitarian program thwarted by the British. False. First: it wasn’t real. Yes, there was genuine enthusiasm for the idea of shipping all the Jews in Europe to Madagascar in portions of the German bureaucracy for a few months after the Nazis had conquered France. But this enthusiasm never manifested in so much as a proposal, public or private, to the British (or anyone else). Neither Hitler nor any prominent Nazi even floated the idea in a speech.
Second, it was by no means a humanitarian gesture. Quite the contrary, as you could guess by its sponsorship, at various points, by the likes of Eichmann. As Christopher Browning put it in The Origins of the Final Solution, it was genocidal in its implications and an important psychological step on the Final Solution that emerged a year later. Rounding up all the Jews in Europe, pulling them out of their homes, factories and offices, storing them somewhere, and then shipping and dumping them in an undeveloped island off the coast of East Africa would have made the Trail of Tears or the Bataan Death March look like Sunday excursions.
I’ll leave all you charming people with the following Hitler quote from 1922, before the hyperinflation and the Beer Hall putsch. 'Once I really am in power, my first and foremost task will be the annihilation of the Jews. As soon as I have the power to do so, I will have gallows built in rows - at the Marienplatz in Munich, for example - as many as traffic allows. Then the Jews will be hanged indiscriminately, and they will remain hanging until they stink; they will hang there as long as the principles of hygiene permit. As soon as they have been untied, the next batch will be strung up, and so on down the line, until the last Jew in Munich has been exterminated. Other cities will follow suit, precisely in this fashion, until all Germany has been completely cleansed of Jews.'
Fuck Bingo Bobbins, and fuck every moron in this comment thread babbling about how well-reasoned this ahistorical piece of shit essay is.
I think the problem in your well-reasoned analysis is that many nations were not operating in the pursuit of their self-interest, and were also not acting in a straightforward manner. The way in which, for example, the Soviet Union changed its foreign policy on a dime as the necessity demanded, suggests that the actual geographical lines and boundaries, the actual suffering of people, was far from the decision-matrix of most WW2 leaders.
What if Danzig was a pretext for Hitler? What if Poland was a pretext for Churchill?
Perhaps war was inevitable but for different, more opaque, reasons.
Like! Hopefully the USA can come to a grand bargain with the Russians and China and prevent more bloodshed. To each their own sphere of influence and the Europoors can keep on grandstanding until they hopefully come to their senses.
The point was that Poland came after the the Czechoslovakian annexation. Germany had a reasonable request for the transfer of Sudetenland territories back to Germany, but this removed the defensive forts of the rump Czech state which was then occupied. Having tried to negotiate a peace with the Hitlerite state France and the British now felt they had to be tough. It probably wasn’t wise to give the Poles false hope with no prospect of an intervention in the event of a German attack and it also made them less likely to make any move towards negotiations. But the issue with Czechoslovakia and Austria before it should not be forgotten. Had a different regime been in place in Berlin maybe peaceful transfer of packets of land or redrawing of borders would have been possible. Not sure that it would have been under a Hitler lead regime.
«Note also that most of Germany’s Jewish population (75%) had emigrated prior to the outbreak of WWII. Hitler’s original solution to the “Jewish Question” was forced emigration.»
Of the 550k jews, 100k emigrated to places we later occupied and ethnically cleansed, though. The majority of the jewish victims were in occupied countries, who had very little warning of what's coming and then almost no opportunity to react.
«But, we have to ask ourselves if the Holocaust was inevitable, or if a different course of action on the part of the West could have led to a preferable outcome.»
Whoever believes that the Holocaust was inevitable, has never seriously looked into Third Reich history and how the Nazi regime actually worked. They think fascism and totalitarianism and assume, that means there's a set of coherent goals and grand strategy. But it's just anarcho-tyranny, but without any restraints and with little institutional predictability. Imagine participating in a session of Werewolf, with a set of intelligent, ambitious and fanatical people. And everyone involved has a Saw trap on their head, whilst Hitler laughs and cheers you on. You'd be gaming out of your mind! That's the part that the "Man in the High Castle" show actually got very right.
Any number of Hitler near-successful assassinations could have worked, causing unpredictable reorganization. Georg Elser's assassination attempt in particular would have taken out the entire Nazi leadership! The entire Nazi regime was defined by high ranking Nazis defining newly made-up offices and politicking, denunciating or maneuvering to give themselves more power. SS vs SA. Gestapo vs SD. SS vs Wehrmacht. Himmler vs Heydrich. Himmler vs Göring. Martin Bormann vs everyone. Goebbels vs everyone. Albert Speer whinging about "Stop mass-murdering my forced labor, guys!". Summer uniforms vs Russian winter. Hitler's ideas vs reality.
Now, if we release a butterfly in 1933, then the Holocaust is probably a somewhat likely attractor basin. 3 million genocided or more? A 30% chance, sure. If someone like Heydrich wouldn't have taken the opportunity to secure power and purity-spiral into the Holocaust, someone else likely might have.
This is a very thought-provoking essay. I hope that a lot of people read it.
Last summer I posted an essay on my own Substack called "The Poland Paradox: How Faraway Allies Make Small Countries Less Safe." The scope was a bit narrower than yours - I talked about how Poland's pact with Britain ended up worse than useless in World War II, and how that should be a lesson for small countries with big, aggressive, neighbors tempted to rely overmuch on distant allies who talk a big talk but, at the end of the day, have only a marginal interest in the small country's preservation. https://twilightpatriot.substack.com/p/the-poland-paradox
Anyhow, it's certainly good to get people talking about how (1) WWII wasn't actually much of a victory for the free world, what with communists ruling more people and territory in 1945 than 1939 (and vastly more in 1949!) and (2) this tragic outcome ("Let’s never do that again!") was the result of a lot more people than just Hitler and Mussolini making bad decisions.
This is an good essay! I was just talking to a friend of mine that an "EEU" (Eastern European Union) would be much better than the current gay EU and could be a better deterrent to Russia. I don't know how true that would be though, given that most of the Eastern European countries have been contributing pretty significantly in Ukraine, and not really moving the needle.
' was the result of a lot more people than just Hitler and Mussolini making bad decisions.'
This is true, but the people who made these bad decisions are those who were actually in power 1933-39, whereas DR lolvisionists just want to blame Churchill. The whole conceit that it is some sort of new and original idea to say WW2 was an avoidable tragedy is obvious bullshit. The only novel thing is that DR lolvisionists argue it could have been avoided by a policy of capitulation to Hitler on literally everything.
> Last summer I posted an essay on my own Substack called "The Poland Paradox: How Faraway Allies Make Small Countries Less Safe." The scope was a bit narrower than yours - I talked about how Poland's pact with Britain ended up worse than useless in World War II,
Would Poland have been better off without it?
Bingo Bobbins' thesis seems to be that it would have (since without the illusion of security it provided, Poland would have had a chance of just giving up Dresden rather than getting invaded & partitioned.)
Sort of how giving up the Sudetenland stopped Czechoslovakia from being invaded and partitioned.
You don't understand. No-one has any agency except maybe Churchill who is bad because boomers like him and was responsible for decisions made when he was not in the government. The allies are bad because they were allied with Stalin, even tough at the outbreak of war Hitler was allied with Stalin. Just look at this one incident from the 1930s and none of the other history because this is the only one that fits my narrative. This is very smart and incisive because it is based.
The other irony is that they're recycling old hippie anti-war tropes while claiming to be against Boomers.
Danzig, not Dresden :)
1) Hitler proved he was inherently an aggressive expansionist when he violated Munich and annexed the Czechs.
2) Hitler was clearly expanding the German military at a rate that necessitated war long before the war started, and told people in his government he wanted war
3) he wrote a book about how his goal was expansionary war
4) his subsequent actions proved what a bloodthirsty tyrant he was
5) Hitler died in a bunker having taken his own life after he ran out of German children to throw under Soviet tank treads so that he could get high on meth and order Speer to destroy the entire country out of spite.
Now, if you want to say “not every leader is Hitler and not every situation is Munich” that’s a fine enough statement. One need only look at the First World War to see “always escalate” is a bad strategy. And I have no problem saying that “nazism proof racism cause world war 2” is poor reasoning. I can even buy that “guaranteeing Poland was strategic blunder”.
But yeah, war was inevitable and it was hitlers fault.
The correct criticism of the Polish guarantee is not that it brought war, but that it brought war at the point most favourable to Hitler, and thus led directly to the military humiliation of Britain and France. The most important criticism of Chamberlain is less that he was an appeaser and more that he was just totally outclassed at every step by Hitler in strategy.
Chamberlain had a tough hand to play, incomplete information, and some bad luck. He correctly surmised that a deal with Stalin was both impossible and would end similarly to how ww2 ended (communists in Central Europe). Geography made defense of Eastern Europe impossible and politics made earlier interventions impossible. I always try to remind people that the occupation of the Ruhr was a giant failure in the 1920s, people weren’t going to try that again in hitlers early years.
He was also given some really bad intelligence about German air power (which in fairness all powers overestimated strategic air power, especially early in the war).
If Germany doesn’t get lucky in France in 1940 chamberlain doesn’t go down in history the same way.
Stalin played ww2 “the best” diplomatically and it got his whole country wrecked.
I just feel like France falling is such a weird and improbable event that it upends all judgements about the Second World War. Nobody planned for it.
Germany really wasn’t the “stronger power” on paper and it’s not clear to me is got net stronger vis a vis uk/france between 1938 and 1939.
Chaimberlain had a bad hand, for sure. Churchill was always consistent in saying that Baldwin was principally to blame, and - being a cool guy - always treated Chaimberlain with respect. It was Labour propaganda that turned Chaimberlain into the principal villain.
But with all that said, he still didn't play his hand very well.
I do not agree that it was a favorable point for Hitler. It became a favorable point because the French and British chose not to try to make use of their overwhelming military superiority on the Western Front in September 1939, with every German division that was worth a damn off in Poland.
Put it this way. Britain and especially France did not consider themselves ready for war. Maybe they should have, but they didn't. And making the timing of the war dependent on Hitler' action gave him the advantage.
War was inevitable. That is not the same as saying that every decision resulted in the same outcome. I think it's a fair reading that more people died because of the way the war was waged than might have with a set of different choices. It is rare to find any decision that just accepted a fait accompli before a bunch of people got ground into the grave. If you were going to live under Nazi occupation for 4 years or so, you might have been better off letting it happen without resistance, thinking say the Greeks and the Yugoslavs here. The Hungarians, Finns and Bulgarians all had some form of resistance to fighting the Soviets, so those are good counterexamples.
The Dutch choosing to side with the Allies is pretty persuasive here. They got treated less harshly than some countries, but still suffered horribly. Just surrendering to Hitler without a fight would have been better perhaps.
The Poles totally blew it. No matter what their aversion to Hitler, getting invaded from both sides, partitioned and then treated as a killing ground during the war was not an improvement.
I find it telling that you barely mention Czechoslovakia and the Munich conference in this essay, even though it is very relevant to the issue in question. Specifically, how it demonstrated that Hitler couldn't be trusted to restrain himself, and that any cession of territory to Germany would only wet its appetite for more.
But didn't Slovakia exist separately as a fascist state somewhat like Croatia?
Germany was the superior nation. It was entitled to what it took.
In that case the USA and USSR were entitled to conquer it, partition it, and turn the partitions into client states.
Nothing more pathetic than "might makes right" amoralists whining about how their preferred side lost.
I never said anything about might makes right. I don't subscribe to that idea. I think that strength and ability to survive is incidental. My evaluation is qualitative. I'm say that I prefer Germany and its culture.
Anglo culture was far superior to German.
In money and power, but definitely not in beauty, good, or truthfulness.
The Germans were developing philosophies that denied the very possibility of objective truth.
Anyone who is literate and not literally a faggot knows that Churchill was not a drunk retard. His criticism of the Polish guarantee is, like most of his observations of British policy in the 1930s when he was excluded from influence, is accurate. De-escalation is about knowing when to be tough, and when not to be tough. The British government 1933-39 got that balance wrong multiple times in both directions. The main flaw of the Martyr Made school of WW2 revisionism is that, because it is fundamentally driven by homosexual nazi fascination, it just criticises British policy for not consistently giving into Germany all the time. The actual story is much more complicated, but overall it erred more on the side of accomodation than confrontation. This essay is an attempt to sanewash homsexual nazi fetishism, but it doesn't really quite come off. Overall C+.
Oy vey shut it down!
Yeah, I don't see how it makes sense to view the Polish crisis in complete isolation from Czechoslovakia, and Hitler's previously expressed views and subsequent behavior in Eastern Europe.
Furthermore, I thought the premise of DR foreign policy realism was contempt for Wilsonian pieties; however, taking Hitler's (of all people's) statements appealing to Wilsonian principles regarding Austria, the Sudetenland, and Danzig/Polish Corridor apart from broader strategic issues also seems quite silly.
Blood and soil are Wilsonian?
National self-determination is.
Most DR types are all for blood and soil nationalism AND self determination. Which is why they (we?) want every non member of this nation sent back to their nation
Although the picture was complicated, I don't see how Churchill comes out looking like anything but a weasel on the inside considering the lengths he went to to give the British state the appearance of dogmatic resistance while privately signing the country over to sinister American interests behind the scenes. It may not have been within his power to seek a separate peace in 1940, but a man of good character would have resigned rather than gave the government a good face.
Churchill said that he wasn't going to preside over the dissolution of the British Empire but he signed it away with lend lease from Roosevelt
He signed it away by agreeing to receive what turned out to be $31 billion in free military equipment?
Congratulations, though, the intellectual level of your analysis is about average for this thread, and well above that in Bingo's piece.
Defending the Empire from threats to it from any European nation was the policy of GB for well over a century. But it was tossed away by Churchill in return for American support in the fight against Nazi Germany which posed minimal threat to it.
Stalins Soviet Union had taken nearly a third of Poland and the Baltic States by June 1940.
Churchills apparent obsession with Hitler have a number of reasons and being half American a reason he was loosely attached psychologically to the Empire
Since Churchill didn’t toss away the empire, your post is just more drivel. One of the sillier characteristics of the Nazi-adjacent is that they impute uniquely to Churchill and Roosevelt feelings (like strong opposition to Hitler) that were in fact near-universal in Britain and strong in the USA.
He absolutely did toss away the Empire. Near the end of the war in the Far East the US administration was adamant that the British shouldn't be let take control of Hong Kong again....until the communist threat became clear. There were crystal clear political sentiments at play-America's anti European colonialism and Churchills Hitler obsession.
The British Empire persisted into the 1960s. Heck, it even have been salvageable without Labourite post-war mismanagement.
He didn’t sign Britain over to American interests, sinister or otherwise. And because he wasn’t a scoundrel or a fascist, he had no interest in a separate peace with Nazis. Neither did his countrymen.
FDR's goal in helping the UK was clear: the colonies would go, starting with India. After the war, decolonization happened. Decolonization itself would not have been so bad for Europeans today, except that it was tied to progressive anti-white ideology. Hmmm!
A separate peace from the Nazis would have put Britain in the same scenario as Franco's Spain or Portugal after the war: possessing a government capable of resisting leftism for some more time. As a country that fully gave into American progressive interests, one can confidently say that the UK has done much worse for itself leading into the present day.
He was a scoundrel and an anti white racist when it suited him-the concentration camps for the Boers. It never took much for either the US or GB public opinion to see an enemy on the continent of Europe that must be defeated.....
What are you babbling about now?
Yes, this is the view that I have also come around to. Specifically, especially without the benefit of hindsight (and even perhaps with it), the Anglo-French guarantees to Poland in 1939 were rather stupid. After all, a new World War could have been extremely bloody for the Anglo-French and by giving the Poles this guarantee, the Anglo-French encouraged the Poles in their stubborn obstinancy and refusal to compromise. Even the ultimatum that Hitler gave Poland right before the start of WWII should have been accepted:
https://randommusingsandhistory.substack.com/p/why-poland-should-have-accepted-hitlers
Also, especially without the benefit of hindsight, one could have argued that letting Hitler expand into Poland (if the Poles would have still refused any deal with him) and, had he wanted to, into the Soviet Union would have given Hitler a gigantic headache for many decades to come due to the fact that he would have been ruling over a huge number of people who would have been restive and hostile towards Nazi rule. (Think of the situation in Austria-Hungary, but on steroids.) At the very least, a prolonged Kosovo 1980s-style situation would have been very possible in a Nazi-occupied Eastern Europe. And without the West waging an existential war of destruction against the Nazi regime, the Nazi regime might have been less radicalized, still preferring mass deportations to mass murder, especially considering that it might have still wanted to preserve a semblance of relatively normal relations with the West.
It also wasn't obvious without the benefit of hindsight that Hitler would have been a worse master for the USSR's population relative to Stalin. After all, as you correctly pointed out, pre-WWII, Hitler had killed much less people than Stalin did. Indeed, a hypothetical Anglo-French observer in 1939 might have reached the conclusion that even if Hitler would have conquered the Soviet Union, such an outcome might not have been worse for the Soviet people themselves (Indians in India under British rule were probably treated better, all things considered, relative to people in Stalin's USSR), and indeed might even be a boon for humanity due to it inflicting a severe blow to Communism and the ideology that it relies upon.
And of course there would have been more scientific research and technological development in a no-Holocaust world because Ashkenazi Jews are, on average, extremely smart.
Good stuff. Nothing happened in German concentration camps that deserves a proper name though. The inflation of casualties there and causal distortion thereof should be regarded the same way as man-made global warming: A guiltmongering apocalypse cult whose purpose is to shake down white people.
I haven't read David Irving or anything yet, so I don't know but I'm open to being convinced. Either way, I think as a "Centrist" starting point accepting the figures but explaining how they could have been avoided is rhetorically more persuasive.
Your article is consistent with an centrist appeal and certainly succeeds that way. I haven't read David Irving either but Ron Unz has an excellent summary: https://www.unz.com/runz/american-pravda-holocaust-denial/
That Murray Rothbard, who was an outstanding historian in his own right, was of a similar view to Irving is something I found highly persuasive.
Here is an interview I did on the topic during my time as a video creator: https://drive.proton.me/urls/YG9C9824RW#DM6GCUoT86ZC
Ron Unz got rekt on this.
https://www.takimag.com/article/holocaust-denial-triumphant/
'That Murray Rothbard, who was an outstanding historian in his own right, was of a similar view to Irving is something I found highly persuasive.'
That's literally just saying you have poor reasoning skills.
In other words, you're a Holocaust denier, but you feel safer Not Going There and just blaming everything on Winston Churchill.
Was Himmler inflating the casualty figures in order to shake down white people? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Korherr_Report
6 million jews in peril goes back to the days of the Russian tsar at the end of the 19th century
I can find nothing else of any consequence to disagree with in this article.
That's not an admission by Churchill in 1948 as he was not in power when the bad decision was made. It's his criticism of those (not him) who made the decision.
Well, yes and no. Chamberlain was Prime Minister but Churchill was supportive of it in Parliament. It was only after the fact that he acted like he hadn't supported it, much like Dems condemning the war in Iraq, when in fact they all voted for it.
Either way, in the popular imagination, Chamberlain is the weak appeaser and Churchill is the tough guy, so my intention was more to point out that "even" Churchill criticized the war guarantee.
'but Churchill was supportive of it in Parliament.'
Great point, except it's not true and you just made it up.
'Either way, in the popular imagination, Chamberlain is the weak appeaser and Churchill is the tough guy, so my intention was more to point out that "even" Churchill criticized the war guarantee.'
Right, so no concern with building an accurate picture of what led to war, just rhetorical point scoring and the manipulation of evidence to create the 'framing' that feels right. Like a woman.
The reality is that if you view WW2 - correctly - as an avoidable tragedy, then the man who himself coined the term 'the unnecessary war' and wrote extensively about how the war could easily have been avoided with different policies should obviously be someone you sympathise with. But many people burn with delirious rage against Churchill. In most cases, it is just because they are homosexual misfits who engage in performative political extremism as a way of presenting as masculine and thus naturally empathize with Hitler who was the prototype for this behavior, whilst recoiling in horror at an example of unfeigned Anglo Saxon masculinity. In other cases, it is because they wish to build in-group solidarity with said homosexual misfits, since they are the majority of Dissident Right writers. Maybe there are some other reasons too, like they get offended by eugenics or something, idk.
> In most cases, it is just because they are homosexual misfits who engage in performative political extremism as a way of presenting as masculine and thus naturally empathize with Hitler who was the prototype for this behavior, whilst recoiling in horror at an example of unfeigned Anglo Saxon masculinity.
Something I noticed is that the people who talk toughest about the Nietzschean transcendent power of violence are the first to come up with excuses to avoid getting in situations which might entail actual violence, be it foreign wars or simply showing up to protests that might turn violent.
Looks like everything you say about every topic you address is wrong.
In the Authorization for Use of Force resolution, in the House, 81 Democrats voted yes and 126 voted no. In the Senate, 29 voted yes and 21 voted no.
This is not classified information.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Authorization_for_Use_of_Military_Force_Against_Iraq_Resolution_of_2002
That is the polar opposite of what Churchill did in Parliament. He was firmly opposed to the Munich agreement.
https://www.nationalchurchillmuseum.org/disaster-of-the-first-magnitude.html - seven days after the agreement came into effect.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_total_and_unmitigated_defeat - he lost the vote in the Commons by a wide margin. There was no appetite for war.
Fair enough!
Explaining this to baby boomers and watching their brains seize up is comedy gold.
thanks for a good essay trying to tie it all together without tying it to one personality.
Another day, another bold iconoclast who turns out to be a rehash of Pat Buchanan.
No one who knows anything thinks the British and French went to war to “prevent the Holocaust.” They went to war, or rather they agreed to accept war if Hitler invaded Poland, because they correctly determined that Hitler intended aggressive war against them, and did not want to wait until circumstances had shifted further in his favor. This article says nothing about the events that led the British and French to that conclusion: the reoccupation of the Rhineland, German rearmament, the Aunschluss with Austria, the Sudentenland crisis, or the occupation of the rest of Czechoslovakia.
It was the last of these, the occupation of Czechoslovakia in March 1939, that caused the British and French to finally draw their line in the sand in the form of the Polish guarantee. Since Hitler had solemnly promised that he would respect what was left of Czechoslovakia after getting the Sudentenland at Munich, this occupation proved that his word was not worth a piece of soiled toilet tissue; since there were very few ethnic Germans in what remained of Czechoslovakia after Munich, his occupation showed that his goals were larger than regathering Germans left outside Germany’s borders after Versailles. It, along with Kristallnacht, also caused a violent anti-appeasement and anti-Nazi shift in public opinion in Britain and France. Like all bold iconoclasts, the author of this piece never mentions the occupation of Czechoslovakia or its relationship with the Polish guarantee.
In fact, Hitler had been furious that Mussolini’s last minute intervention and Chamberlain and Daladier’s subsequent caving at Munich in October 1938 deprived him of the war he wanted so badly right then. But he got it a year later.
Bold iconoclasts always treat the guarantee as senseless. It wasn’t; the British hoped it would dissuade Hitler from going to war, and if he had been sane it would have. What the British and French can and should be blamed for was not invading immediately at the beginning of the war, in which case they would have won a crushing victory. General Gamelin, meeting with Polish army officers in the spring of 1939, stated that, in the event of war, the French armed forces would ”unleash an offensive action against Germany with the bulk of its forces, 15 days after mobilization."
France did not, obviously, do that. But it could have. Germany invaded Poland on September 1, 1939. By September 6, the Maginot Line was fully manned with 75 mostly high-quality divisions in position opposite Germany or along the French and Belgian borders, along with 3,200 tanks and 115 air groups, as well ten squadrons of British bombers.
Opposite them were 30-40 German divisions composed mostly of second- or third-line troops with little training. No tanks, little artillery, and not even adequate supplies of horses and wagons. General Leeb, the German commander, rated German defenses before Belgium and Luxembourg as extremely weak. He deemed the Siegfried Line as little more than a facade.
There was no chance that the French and British were going to launch a massive offensive in September 1939. Gamelin was opposed, Gen. Georges was opposed, Daladier would have been opposed if anyone had asked him, the British were opposed.
But the fact remains that the French and British had the capacity to launch a large offensive in the opening weeks of the war, and that such an offensive would have had a very high probability of obtaining a crushing victory.
"A French attack on the weak German defensive front on the Siegfried Line [in September 1939]...would, as far it is humanly possible to judge, have led to a very quick military defeat of Germany and therefore a quick end of the war." _Hitler's Strategy_, Andreas Hillgruber (1965).
No offensive occurred, of course. The Germans moved their army back West and embarked on a crash training and armaments program, and in 1940 they conquered France, Belgium, and the Netherlands. Hitler was given a free hand for Barbarossa and, in the fullness of time, the Holocaust. If you want to blame Britain (and France) -- don't! The blame lies with the aggressors, not the people who had to deal with their aggression. But if you insist on blaming Britain (and France), the place to look is not the Rhineland or the Polish guarantee. It's the failure to invade Germany at the beginning of the war.
This piece makes the argument, heard so often, that nothing could have been worse than what actually happened in World War II. Not so fast. We can't rerun history and check, but I think that war in the East would have come anyway, and Hitler would have been much more likely to win it. Based on his "Second Book," his table talk, and his conversations with the military, we pretty much know that genocidal expansion in the East, making the Volga "Germany's Mississippi" was always the long-term plan. And if the Germans had conquered the USSR...
1. Hitler planned to starve the cities of Western Russia in order to seize the Soviet grain surplus. Thirty million people would starved or fled (or likely first fled, then starved) if he had succeeded.
2. The next thing that would have happened would have been German resettlement of the East, i.e. Poland and the western USSR. There was a plan for this, Generalplan Ost. About ten million Germans would have been resettled in the conquered territories. In the short term, the Slavs would be reduced to the status of slaves or near-slaves. But a permanent, large Slav population was inconsistent with longer-term German plans, pursuant to which there would be a further massive depopulation in the former USSR and Poland. 80-85% of the population of Poland, 75% of White Russia, 62% of people in the Ukraine. The area around Leningrad would have been completely emptied.
3. The Holocaust would have been much more total than it was.
However you calculate it, a massive share of the people in Poland and the USSR, perhaps 100 million people or more (the prewar population of just the USSR was 170 million, most of them in the western part of the country) would have been wiped out.
This article makes the stupid argument that the British and French should have gone to war with Stalin along with Hitler. Why would they do something so utterly retarded? (Amazingly, they came pretty close in early 1940.) It is a fact that a lot of the world’s military potential wound up in the hands of totalitarians by 1939, and so it was never in the cards that the war would result in a general defeat for totalitarianism. But at least it was the less virulent kind that survived, and eventually burned itself out (which Naziism could never do).
Madagascar keeps getting brought up in articles like this, like it was some kind of great Nazi humanitarian program thwarted by the British. False. First: it wasn’t real. Yes, there was genuine enthusiasm for the idea of shipping all the Jews in Europe to Madagascar in portions of the German bureaucracy for a few months after the Nazis had conquered France. But this enthusiasm never manifested in so much as a proposal, public or private, to the British (or anyone else). Neither Hitler nor any prominent Nazi even floated the idea in a speech.
Second, it was by no means a humanitarian gesture. Quite the contrary, as you could guess by its sponsorship, at various points, by the likes of Eichmann. As Christopher Browning put it in The Origins of the Final Solution, it was genocidal in its implications and an important psychological step on the Final Solution that emerged a year later. Rounding up all the Jews in Europe, pulling them out of their homes, factories and offices, storing them somewhere, and then shipping and dumping them in an undeveloped island off the coast of East Africa would have made the Trail of Tears or the Bataan Death March look like Sunday excursions.
I’ll leave all you charming people with the following Hitler quote from 1922, before the hyperinflation and the Beer Hall putsch. 'Once I really am in power, my first and foremost task will be the annihilation of the Jews. As soon as I have the power to do so, I will have gallows built in rows - at the Marienplatz in Munich, for example - as many as traffic allows. Then the Jews will be hanged indiscriminately, and they will remain hanging until they stink; they will hang there as long as the principles of hygiene permit. As soon as they have been untied, the next batch will be strung up, and so on down the line, until the last Jew in Munich has been exterminated. Other cities will follow suit, precisely in this fashion, until all Germany has been completely cleansed of Jews.'
Fuck Bingo Bobbins, and fuck every moron in this comment thread babbling about how well-reasoned this ahistorical piece of shit essay is.
You're being far too rational for these people.
I think the problem in your well-reasoned analysis is that many nations were not operating in the pursuit of their self-interest, and were also not acting in a straightforward manner. The way in which, for example, the Soviet Union changed its foreign policy on a dime as the necessity demanded, suggests that the actual geographical lines and boundaries, the actual suffering of people, was far from the decision-matrix of most WW2 leaders.
What if Danzig was a pretext for Hitler? What if Poland was a pretext for Churchill?
Perhaps war was inevitable but for different, more opaque, reasons.
Like! Hopefully the USA can come to a grand bargain with the Russians and China and prevent more bloodshed. To each their own sphere of influence and the Europoors can keep on grandstanding until they hopefully come to their senses.
Bingo, Bobbins! And for that matter: Yahtzee, checkmate, bullseye, and Gin (for Churchill).
The point was that Poland came after the the Czechoslovakian annexation. Germany had a reasonable request for the transfer of Sudetenland territories back to Germany, but this removed the defensive forts of the rump Czech state which was then occupied. Having tried to negotiate a peace with the Hitlerite state France and the British now felt they had to be tough. It probably wasn’t wise to give the Poles false hope with no prospect of an intervention in the event of a German attack and it also made them less likely to make any move towards negotiations. But the issue with Czechoslovakia and Austria before it should not be forgotten. Had a different regime been in place in Berlin maybe peaceful transfer of packets of land or redrawing of borders would have been possible. Not sure that it would have been under a Hitler lead regime.
«Note also that most of Germany’s Jewish population (75%) had emigrated prior to the outbreak of WWII. Hitler’s original solution to the “Jewish Question” was forced emigration.»
Of the 550k jews, 100k emigrated to places we later occupied and ethnically cleansed, though. The majority of the jewish victims were in occupied countries, who had very little warning of what's coming and then almost no opportunity to react.
«But, we have to ask ourselves if the Holocaust was inevitable, or if a different course of action on the part of the West could have led to a preferable outcome.»
Whoever believes that the Holocaust was inevitable, has never seriously looked into Third Reich history and how the Nazi regime actually worked. They think fascism and totalitarianism and assume, that means there's a set of coherent goals and grand strategy. But it's just anarcho-tyranny, but without any restraints and with little institutional predictability. Imagine participating in a session of Werewolf, with a set of intelligent, ambitious and fanatical people. And everyone involved has a Saw trap on their head, whilst Hitler laughs and cheers you on. You'd be gaming out of your mind! That's the part that the "Man in the High Castle" show actually got very right.
Any number of Hitler near-successful assassinations could have worked, causing unpredictable reorganization. Georg Elser's assassination attempt in particular would have taken out the entire Nazi leadership! The entire Nazi regime was defined by high ranking Nazis defining newly made-up offices and politicking, denunciating or maneuvering to give themselves more power. SS vs SA. Gestapo vs SD. SS vs Wehrmacht. Himmler vs Heydrich. Himmler vs Göring. Martin Bormann vs everyone. Goebbels vs everyone. Albert Speer whinging about "Stop mass-murdering my forced labor, guys!". Summer uniforms vs Russian winter. Hitler's ideas vs reality.
Now, if we release a butterfly in 1933, then the Holocaust is probably a somewhat likely attractor basin. 3 million genocided or more? A 30% chance, sure. If someone like Heydrich wouldn't have taken the opportunity to secure power and purity-spiral into the Holocaust, someone else likely might have.
Inevitable though? Absolutely not.