The World War Two Series: Episode 6-10 w/ Thomas777 - 2/4

Summary

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The Pete Quiñones Show

World War Two Series: Episodes 6-10 w/ Thomas777, Parts 2/4 (Aug 2, 2026)

Host: Pete Quiñones
Guest: Thomas777 (historian, author)

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Episode Overview

This segment of the World War Two revisionist series continues Pete and Thomas’s deep dive into the years 1936–1945, focusing on the political intrigues and strategic calculus leading up to, and into, the war. Topics include Churchill’s ascendancy, diplomatic maneuvering between Germany and the UK, the myth of appeasement, the rationale for Barbarossa, and the role of ideology and war atrocities on the Eastern Front. Thomas brings detailed revisionist critiques regarding standard narratives on WWII’s origins and operations.

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

1. Churchill, British Politics, and the Pre-War Context (01:30–46:00)

Feedback and Deplatforming:

• Both hosts discuss positive feedback and their experiences being “deplatformed” for controversial views. Thomas reflects on the importance of providing longer-form, uncensored content.

Churchill’s Role and Biases:

• Focus on Churchill’s shift:
  • In 1936–1938, Churchill was seen as a perpetual critic in Parliament, especially against appeasement and toward Germany, heavily favoring anti-German and pro-Soviet positions.
  • Churchill’s alliances with the "Focus" group (wealthy, largely pro-Zionist, anti-German financiers) made him a polarizing public figure.
• Quote:
  “...it's more acceptable to support a figure like Franco than...some kind of ideologically committed fascist, but at the same time there was a certain perfidy to Churchill coming out in support of the nationalists, meanwhile...declaring it essential to stay with the Soviet Union against Germany...” (Thomas, 04:00)

The Spanish Civil War and Europe’s Polarization:

• The Spanish Civil War acted as a microcosm of the broader ideological conflict between Communism, Fascism, Monarchists, and National Socialists.
• Soviet NKVD brutality, attacks on clergy, and sexual violence were significant, and Churchill’s equivocation was emblematic of the wider British elite’s ambivalence.

British Foreign Office & German Overtures:

• Despite repeated diplomatic overtures from Berlin and many gestures of transparency regarding the strength of the Luftwaffe, the British Foreign Office consistently rejected German “good faith” sharing of military data.
• Ribbentrop's 1936–1938 mission seeking an Anglo-German alliance is emphasized as evidence of Berlin’s genuine intent to avoid conflict with the UK.
• Quote:
  “There was literally not a single mention of the UK or the RAF (Royal Air Force) in [Milch’s] strategic survey...it was exclusively focused on France as the probable adversary.” (Thomas, 06:30)

The Role of British Establishment Antipathy

• Thomas claims the Foreign Office’s entrenched anti-German sentiment emboldened Churchill’s faction (“the Focus”) and helped prevent any rapprochement with Germany.

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2. The "Appeasement Myth" and Munich (44:50–69:00)

Chamberlain and “Appeasement”

• The “appeasement” label is regarded by Thomas as a propagandistic mischaracterization—Chamberlain, despite being seen as weak, had clear strategic reservations about committing Britain to a continental war it was unprepared to fight.
• Britain’s practical military limits (e.g., “only 2 divisions, 7 modern RAF squadrons,” shortage of anti-aircraft defenses) in 1938 made full confrontation impossible.
• Continuing financial support to Churchill (“totally owned by the Focus”) is cited as a turning point in Churchill’s policy and rhetoric.

Czechoslovakia’s Composition and Crisis

• Czechoslovakia described as an “artificial state,” with a significant German Sudeten population and underlying ethnic tensions.

• The Munich Agreement and subsequent collapse of Czechoslovakia seen not as a result of “fascist expansion” but of inherent instability and outside manipulation.

• Hitler’s actions are positioned as calculated and responsive, not driven by irrational aggression.

• Quote:
  “...the reason why Chamberlain, after the Munich summit, was so congratulated is because, for twenty years, people were convinced there was going to be a war over this issue.” (Thomas, 66:31)

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3. The Road to War—Alliances, Churchill’s Rise, and the Outbreak (73:54–124:41)

The Churchill "Media Machine"

• After 1938’s Munich crisis, Churchill’s political and financial comeback orchestrated via coordinated media campaigns and funding from figures like Henry Strakosch. Sandwich boards, billboards, and press coverage create the perception of inevitable Churchillian leadership (“man-made weather”).
• Quote:
  "This is kind of the first instance of an NGO ... literally manufacturing a climate of public opinion where one man’s ascendancy seems inevitable." (Thomas, 90:00)

Formation of War Policy—American Connections

• Encounters with US officials (Felix Frankfurter, Joe Kennedy) show emerging Anglo-American cooperation guided by shared anti-fascist rhetoric.
• Churchill’s speeches and public posture increasingly parrot American New Deal and Jewish political verbiage (e.g., “freedom and peace”), often not his own words.

The Outbreak of War—Poland and Beyond

• The UK guarantee to Poland is critiqued as a catastrophic overreach. Churchill, now Lord of the Admiralty, begins to pivot the conflict as a moral crusade, despite the vast imperial double standards of the British Empire.
• Quote:
  "Churchill was the one always going around claiming other people lacked integrity—well, Churchill ... was probably one of the most corrupt major political figures (of) the twentieth century and he was certainly a traitor to his own people." (Thomas, 103:30)

Double Standards with the Soviet Union

• Kennedy questions why Britain overlooks Soviet aggression and atrocities while focusing solely on Germany.
• Thomas notes the British leadership acknowledged no intention (or realistic ability) to “restore Poland” or prevent Soviet conquest.

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4. Operation Barbarossa: The German-Soviet War (137:55–269:32, two episodes)

Ideological Clash—The European Civil War

• The invasion of the Soviet Union (“Barbarossa”) is explained as an inevitable confrontation in the dialectic between National Socialism and Communism.
• Thomas repeatedly returns to the ideological roots—quoting "Mein Kampf" and referencing German fear of “Marxism as existential annihilation.”
• Germany’s “preemptive” assault is presented as the only path to victory; waiting would have meant being destroyed by Soviet mobilization.
• The idea that Hitler sought to “rule Europe” à la the Soviets is specifically rejected.

Soviet Offensiveness and Mobilization

• Stalin’s Demands (Nov 1940):
  • USSR demands influence or annexation over Romania, Bulgaria, Hungary, Greece, Yugoslavia, and all of Finland—evidence of Soviet expansionism.
• Soviet military doctrine and deployments: Massive Soviet build-up for offensive war; not “defensive” as per mainstream narrative.
  • “The Red Army... was an offensive army, the most offensively oriented of all armies.” (Thomas, 186:39)
• Stalin’s May 1941 graduation address setting the tone for armed global revolution.

Early Barbarossa—Strategic Analysis

• Wehrmacht achieves stunning early successes; blitzkrieg is not a doctrine but a product of operational innovation and German tactical flexibility.

• The critical error: Hitler halts Army Group Center’s drive on Moscow, diverting forces to Ukraine, allowing Soviet defenses to stiffen at Moscow as winter sets in.

• Despite popular myths, German defeat hinges on key operational decisions, not hubris or underestimation.

• Quote:
  “If Germany vanquished the Soviet Union, any posture the British took—even keeping the whole Empire—would be meaningless… You win the Second World War by becoming a superpower; that is how you win.” (Thomas, 231:50)

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5. European Identity and Atrocities on the Eastern Front (271:32–320:06)

The “European Army” Concept

• As the Eastern Front grinds on, the Waffen SS becomes increasingly pan-European, integrating large contingents of Dutch, Baltics, Balkan, and other volunteers.
• The existential threat of Bolshevism to “European man” becomes a key element animating resistance far beyond Germany.

Atrocities—Nemmerdorf & Red Army Brutality

• Thomas details the massacre at Nemmersdorf (East Prussia, Oct 1944) as emblematic of large-scale sexual violence and killings by the advancing Red Army—insisted as both a real event and independently verified by neutral observers.
• The Soviets' doctrine and propaganda encouraged acts of vengeance and genocidal violence, according to Thomas.

The Morgenthau Plan and German Postwar Fate

• The US wartime Morgenthau Plan (supported by FDR's Treasury Sec.) would have “deindustrialized” and effectively allowed the starvation of tens of millions of Germans—saved from implementation only by geopolitical needs of the Cold War.

Comparative Atrocities and Legal Morality

• Thomas is critical of modern moralizing about German atrocities—placing them in the context of atrocities (planned and spontaneous) by all sides. Invokes the US in Vietnam (My Lai), Allies’ firebombing of German cities, and Soviet pre-war genocide.
• The “Commissar Order” and German SS crimes are discussed, but Red Army brutality is presented as having both ideological and historical (Spanish Civil War, Soviet-Polish War) precedents.

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Notable Quotes & Moments (with Timestamps)

• “It’s more acceptable to support a figure like Franco than...some committed fascist, but at the same time there was a certain perfidy to Churchill coming out in support of the nationalists, meanwhile...declaring it essential to stay with the Soviet Union against Germany...” (Thomas, 04:00)
• “This idea of appeasement is a myth—it does not reflect what was underway.” (Thomas, 44:50)
• “This is the first instance of an NGO... literally manufacturing a climate of public opinion...” (Thomas, 90:00)
• “Churchill... was probably one of the most corrupt major political figures... and he was certainly a traitor to his own people.” (Thomas, 103:30)
• “The Red Army... was an offensive army, the most offensively oriented of all armies.” (Thomas, 186:39)
• “If Germany vanquished the Soviet Union, any posture the British took—even with the whole Empire—would be meaningless.” (Thomas, 231:50)
• “By 1944, the Waffen SS was sight unseen since the Crusades—a truly pan-European force.” (Thomas, 281:29)
• “No matter how much you hate your enemy, it’s not normal to rape old women and little children—that’s not something you just spontaneously do.” (Thomas, 303:10)

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Episode Structure (Key Sections & Timestamps)

• Chamberlain, Churchill, and Prewar politics: 01:30–46:00
• The "Appeasement" Debate & Munich: 44:50–69:00
• Churchill’s rise, media, and the outbreak of war: 73:54–124:41
• Operation Barbarossa—origins, ideology, and strategy: 137:55–269:32 (spanning two episodes)
• European Army, identity, and Eastern Front at scale: 271:32–320:06

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Tone and Style

• The conversation is highly analytical, polemical, and openly revisionist, with Thomas granting little deference to mainstream historiography.
• Both Pete and Thomas are candid (sometimes sarcastic), deliberately provocative, and prone to long explanations and asides, often referencing lesser-known historical figures and documents.
• Humor and dark irony are present, especially when referencing propaganda or comparing current events.

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For Further Exploration

• Thomas777’s writing: realthomas777.substack.com
• Telegram: t.me/the7homas777
• Future topics tease: Strategic bombing, the Nuremberg Tribunal, Q&A on peripheral theaters like North Africa, and deeper dives into propaganda and the evolution of the “European” political concept.

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This summary is intended as an accessible and thorough guide to the substance, arguments, and style of the episode, preserving speaker intent and significant moments for listeners and newcomers alike.

Transcript

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[Pete Cano (Host)]

to welcome everyone back to the pete cano show we are continuing the series hey thomas how are you doing hello

[Thomas (Historian/Host)]

i'm very well man thanks again for continuing this series i'm very pleased not just with how it's developed in terms of our content but i i think the response has been incredible and i want to thank everybody sincerely for being so kind in that regard i i that kind of feedback's essential and it's been very constructive and it's been overwhelmingly positive and that means a great deal and it also means we're doing things properly and that's great so i'm very very very pleased yeah you have to

[Pete Cano (Host)]

be doing something right when people are like getting mad if you don't put

[Thomas (Historian/Host)]

out an episode yeah yeah when it's all go too like this is i mean this is literally the fifth time i've been deplatformed from twitter like and like anytime it seems like i'm making an impact like they deplatform me so there's that too but yeah it's it's quite a bit more positive that that people are clamoring for more episodes and like i said that that that means a great deal to me man like i'm very honored by that because

[Pete Cano (Host)]

well i gotta catch up because i've only been deplatformed on twitter four times so

[Thomas (Historian/Host)]

oh you'll get there my friend no no we like kidding aside though it you know i plan to kind of transition to longer form anyway so you know i'll drop where people can find me at the end of the show not because i'm trying to be a shill but you know you're i you've got a wide audience and i'd it's just an easy way for me to reach people or who are interested and you know it's about half the content i drop on there is is totally free so there's that too but okay

[Pete Cano (Host)]

i'll link to anything you want me

[Thomas (Historian/Host)]

to link to yeah yeah no i'll thank you pete and i'll i'll drop that at the conclusion of this okay but i think i think yeah i think i think we finished off in nineteen thirty six we were talking about you know mister churchill getting access to baldwin i mean quite literally and uh you know how how the focus had come to be and how churchill became kind of a permanent thorn in the side not just of baldwin but you know in in in that of any establishment figure like tory labor or liberal who opposed the you know rearmament and a confrontational posture with germany so i think what i think where we left off was i pointed out that you know churchill despite his kind of by this point which is nineteen thirty six despite his constant apologia for the soviet union and it's kind of fervent increasingly shrill you know hostility to germany and these these confabulated figures and statistics that the focus group were submitting as as actual data like always from under undisclosed intelligence sources well all this was going on of course and i i i don't want to derail us into a tangent but it's a matter of material significance to what was underway within the uk you know the the spanish civil war was raging hard at this point and you know that was a real that that impacted every culture on the continent political culture i mean in a in a way that really can't be overstated it wasn't just a military quagmire for the for the spaniards and for the to the iberian peninsula generally or you know for the the the or for security in the mediterranean i mean it truly it truly was a velton chong's creek i'm sure i butchered that pronunciation but you know that's really that's really where that's really there was there was a collision of world views between between you know the communists and and and their opponents all in sundry you know some of these people were fascists in the flange you know there was iron guard volunteers from romania you know you even had like carlos like you know monarchist types in the ranks you had you had out now you know national socialists deployed with condor legion from germany and you know you had you obviously had a at a whole population of italian volunteers but uh also i mean basically anybody one of the reasons why uh i don't want to get into the intrigues that led franco to being kind the the the frontman of the of the nationalist cause but franco was somewhat apolitical i mean even then even even well before you know he became this kind of cold war intriguer who who who was kind of all things to all people you know he franco the man himself like much as he might have been laun a crude figure common to the kind of you know latin american world as we would think of it here you know like it it the way he was viewed in europe would be kind of the way we people would have viewed peron but aside from all that i mean it it was more acceptable to support a figure like franco than it you know it would have been some some kind of ideologically committed fascist but at the same time there was a certain perfidy to churchill coming out in support of the nationalists meanwhile you know declaring it essential to stay with the soviet union against germany and what he suggested was german irredentism part of this was the republican government under one negative negron again i i butcher pronunciations please don't declare in the comments that i'm a cretan i know that i do it i i can't help it okay but negron had support from the soviet chicka and you know all kinds of police and military elements from the soviet union including a young eric milka who went on to who went on to you know be the stasi honcho for decades but incredible brutality was carried out in the name of the you know republican cause which was really just the the red cause and in a in a in a fancy dress particularly clergy men and women were targeted you know it sounds i'm not being flippant about such things but it sounds like a propaganda cliche but you know nuns really were revealed to systematic rape and things and you know the cemeteries were clergy people were buried were subject to destruction and their remains were dissentered and and desecrated just horrible horrible stuff so you know churchill went on record in parliament as well as in his very at that to that thereto four still lucrative newspaper contracts as an editorial writer you know in support of franco and that was that was kind of an early example i think of these kinds of competing of these kinds of competing loyalties that he was he was forced to forced to contend with you know i mean even i realize in modern political life even a man whose sympathies are quite literally bought has got to perform something of a delicate mini what in that regard but this was unusual even considering the man in question and even even considering the realities of modern political life this was a bizarre circumstance is what i'm getting at and that the terms of debate and discourse were not normal at all even even the even the shenanigans the focus notwithstanding forgive that big stretch i said i just had to shut the door to the office now bringing it back it's the year nineteen thirty six and what's happening in berlin at this time earhart milch who we raised in the last episode and i come back to him a lot not just he was a prolific diarist and after the war milch was very open he he he was he was he kept very he allowed very few people into his intimate circles but those that he did he was very open with them about his wartime activities and about what was underway in berlin and the years leading up to the onset of hostilities and particularly as we established milch was something of a go between with you know the uk and and berlin unofficially miltz was an unusual guy as we as we raised to his his father was jewish so he was you know mixed blood he was the ceo of lufthansa he was a he was a he was something of a military genius and he he uh was one of the first truly he was the first military man who demonstrated true aptitude for the potential of air power and its utility and particularly as as regards ground assault and and its utility in in terms of combined arms okay well mills did in nineteen thirty six he submitted to gehring you know who was chief of the luftwaffe he submitted what was kind of his own strategic vision moving forward of what germany's defense needs were in terms of the luftwaffe which you know air forces were new then okay they truly were nascent so it was it was kind of a statement of what you know they should take to the furor in terms of what should be allocated for them to for them to develop and sustain the forces and being necessary to you know to credibly project power but also it was a strategic survey of of of what the next war would look like and it was it was exhaustive it was titled thoughts on air war quite literally there's not a single mention of the uk or the royal air force in it it's exclusively focused on france as a probable probable adversary there's plenty of mentions of the soviet union but at this point there was relations between berlin and moscow were at times frosty there was always kind of a damocles sword hanging above it because the the governing ideologies were were truly like dialectically you know violently at odds with one another that's part of where both derived their legitimacy but at the same time the there there was an outward diplomatic courting of the soviet union this is one of the reasons why strasser had been done away with in my opinion but that's a tangent we can take up later but nor there was a scrupulous avoidance that that that that came from hitler that that provocation over provocation of the soviet union should be avoided unless it's a matter of essential security however again there was literally not a single mention of the uk or the raf and this this was an eyes only study it sounds like millitz is doing this for diplomatic reasons because he you know he was concerned about you know british eyes being honest and then and then somehow developing an idea that they were being set up as a as as as you know the opposing force and all but name and war gaming or something now this is contrasted when the you know not just with churchill's sort of germanophobia and these in these confabulated statistics about about german rearmament and forces and being and capability and and intention but the foreign office the british foreign office it had most notably lord vance authorities you know kind of become infamous not just in revisionist circles but i i think he's a rather ugly character just you know on his regardless where one's politics fall you know he he had a he was the permanent chief of foreign office for all practical purposes who had a quasi view of power over whoever happened to be the foreign minister at any given in any given administration but also you know he was able to set the tenor of of the diplomatic core and he and really is these these permanent these men with permanent sine cure in the foreign office almost to a man they were profoundly hostile to germany and that's a complicated issue and some of it's attributable to the same motive the animated the men associated with the focus but most of them it preceded that it had more to do with the kind of antipathy of the to the germans that was characteristic of king george's era you know it was kind of a long hangover of the great war and you know we talked a bit about you know incidents like when wilhelm you know congratulated kruger on his victories against the crown on the everian cape there was a lingering and sharp hostility to germany in the foreign office that preceded the focus that becomes important later and it's just it's important if you want to understand the british establishment at this time i believe this is one of the things that despite the great power and wealth at its disposal and its ability to kind of create propaganda infrastructure where there wasn't any despite all that i believe the foreign office and its orientation towards germany i believe that's something that emboldened the focus to kind of develop in the first place now this gets really interesting this gets really interesting if we look at the backdrop of what happened from nineteen thirty five to nineteen thirty seven well first of all let's let's first of all let it be said too around the same time that mills submitted his thoughts on the aerodynamic gearing okay i mean a lot of revisionists posit that including irving including myself i'm obviously not the same league as irving but it must be stated that the reason i raised that is because it's it's it's it's it's persuasive testimony about the intention of of the german regime okay and as of nineteen thirty six and as we established before mills would be in a position to know not just know but he was in a position to directly impact policy by his evaluations and his recommendations so his thoughts on air war does not a single mention of the uk as a as a probable adversary also in nineteen thirty six hitler himself deployed von ribbentrop to london as a ambassador this is before ribbentrop became foreign minister now his instructions were literally hitler said to ribbon trump bring me an alliance with the united kingdom you know ribbentrop is he's kind of his ribben trob was not a particularly complex figure but he's he's he's unfairly lampoon and disdained as this kind of foppish ignorant like rich man he wasn't he spoke very fluent english he lived in canada he was he he was something of a globe trotting businessman when that was rather rare you know for men in that role it was rare even for men in government prior to you know about mid century but i mean so ribbon trap was very worldly there's a reason hitler had his shortcomings and his judge ability to judge character but in ribbentrop's case this was not one of them and ribbentrop actually got ribbentrop actually got on reasonably he actually got on reasonably well with his counterparts churchill deliberately sought him out to insult him a couple occasions and irving's made irving's made irving's made much of that but it's even chamberlain himself he he and ribbon trapped in that particularly warm relations but they were amiable okay but again this isn't i raise this again because it's an example of executive intention of berlin and its disposition to london now this was part of an ongoing effort by germany to court the uk that was obviously the above board aspect of it in the preceding summer summer of nineteen thirty five owing to this kind of ongoing you know rapport that erhard milch had with the british air ministry he authorized gearing through milch to submit actual intelligence data and luff off of forces and being and capabilities to london on the condition that their counterparts in the air ministry not disclose this info to any other state and that it not be announced in parliament or anything like that basically it you saw it it was a good faith gesture so as not to be on condition and not be exploited for political purposes now the foreign office intercepted it and demanded ambassador eric phipps to reject it which is incredible i mean think about that even if this data was even if this data was submitted in bad faith even if it was confabulated which it wasn't for the record it was entirely it was what it appeared to be but you don't reject any any from a potential adversary you know or other great power i mean because data is data you know and it's that's you needed to build a conceptual picture of of the strategic landscape so that gives like the fact of the foreign office they were unwilling to entertain anything that appeared to be you know a good faith diplomatic overture in in any sense that's incredible okay so milch himself who in many ways was more effective than gearing probably mills bypassed the foreign office entirely he directly approached the committee of imperial defense which as we talked about was you know the counterpart in many respects to the the general staff in germany or the american joint chiefs he presented his figures and the both the committee of imperial defense and the air ministry they they they validated them as accurate in part because they reflected what you know british intelligence and particularly the air ministry's intelligence arm had compiled so in other words this is this was the this would be the equivalent of say like a regime that was suspected of of of cultivating you know radioactive material for a for a military purpose you know granted open access to the nuclear reactors okay that's an imperfect analogy but it it was what it appeared to be it was a good faith gesture to demonstrate you know we're not you know we're not developing a strategic capability with you know london in mind and you know we're we're certainly not aiming to develop an era arm to you know terrorize the uk and submission either by threat of force or you know by the application of it's and like i said even even if it was not a even if it were disingenuous yeah maxing is

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[Pete Cano (Host)]

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[Thomas (Historian/Host)]

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[Thomas (Historian/Host)]

ledger main which it was not it's incredible that it was just you know utterly rejected outright by the foreign office but it's to match what of what they had in mind and as well as the focus you know again we come back to what we come back to the focus statement of purpose which was you know to to counter any any inference or any suggestion or any any any appearance that anything that berlin demands or anything it suggests or anything it claims to desire is is legitimate in on any front in any capacity and that's exactly the way to understand that particular that that that that particular situation but the and what was now of course this this this dad is fed to mister chamberlain just before he becomes uh or just uh just this day after he becomes a prime minister because uh churchill in the focus as well as uh you know a lot of chamberlain's opponents who aren't particularly associated with mister churchill or the focus but are always eager to you know find a way to impeach the credibility of the sitting prime minister you know they seized upon you know chamberlain as one you know leaving the uk vulnerable based upon you know based upon german ambitions so when chain one becomes pm you know and he's he's very quickly advised of you know the the the air ministries you know unofficial meetings with milch and the figures that they were available to the only response from lord vance atari the only response from churchill the only response from the focus is merely that mills was lying nothing more nothing less you know germans can't be trusted the germans are lying you know oh hitler also said that you know he the german army would not exceed half a million men you know basically saying you know the germans are liars because they claim to be compliant with the versailles treaty which we later acknowledged was an unjust treaty and not sustainable you know and when they when they didn't avail themselves you know sanctioned by either by occupation or by further you know instrumental reparations you know that means that they they simply can't be trusted in any statement that they make i mean which is the most tortured form of reasoning one can imagine but again the figures that were submitted by milch were validated by the air ministry and the office of imperial defense independently of anything milch said but again if one yells things loud enough from proverbial rooftops and you know has the as the means and the will and the kind of bottomless coffers to generate a bully pulpit it really doesn't matter if the things one is saying are completely fabricated and that's exactly what happened particularly because chamberlain did not have a particularly strong mandate now the plot thickens a bit the air ministry indicating a kind of admirable streak of independence in october of nineteen thirty seven and reciprocity for the kind of good offices as it were like demonstrated by milch and their counterparts in the luftwaffe milch himself and and and the german air force delegations invited to tour the air ministry prime return to berlin militia summoned by by hitler himself and which is unique or it's remarkable rather you know melcha's a guy who was he was he was friendly with hitler certainly hitler followed his career closely you know but it's not as if they had regular briefings or something hitler took a a peculiar interest because he wanted mil everything that he could about his impressions of of of his counterparts and of the political climate in in in london at the time and what mil attested to irving as well as in his own diaries is that hitler reiterated doing that alliance with the uk is absolutely essential so i mean there if this is yet more kind of direct testimonial evidence of of what berlin's intentions were as of nineteen thirty seven i emphasize this because we're going to get into the what i consider to be the appeasement myth momentarily and as a framing as the context it's kind of necessary to establish that foundation i'm not just trying to bore people with details or minutiae that happens to interest me now november nineteen thirty seven the focus has its has its kind of greatest coup as regards officials obviously you know with the exception when mister churchill himself became prime minister but they foreign secretary anthony eden formally joins the focus what his motivations were i'm not an expert on eden i think i think eden had certain insights not so much into the international situation that we had some of those too but i think he believed that chamberlain was weak i think that he believed that i think he was worldly enough to realize that there was something of a title title shift underway in in the uk as to what kinds of factions and what people became you know we're gonna become the true power brokers moving forward i think he preferred to have the focus as a friend rather than an enemy because he he saw the writing on the wall and he believed at some point that you know churchill and the focus were going to get their way and he wanted to survive that corrupt that's just my own opinion i mean i'm sure there's going to be guys particularly englishmen who know far more about eating the man than i do in british politics who will probably disagree and they may all be right that is my own take it around around the same time a few months later nineteen thirty eight the international situation is heating up churchill meets with joe p kennedy which as everybody knows was ambassador to the uk and he'd been an early kennedy the senior he'd been an early new dealer until he and roosevelt became bitter enemies owing in part to roosevelt's appointment of morgan though know who we we we we dealt with the person and character at morgan thou a couple episodes ago but kennedy found himself very much at loggers with churchill not just because kennedy was a you know a millionaire boss and irishman and you could tell that churl just kind of disdained him owing to his race and pedigree as it were but fdr quite clearly directed and he was not prone to this kind of micromanagement at least in the case of kennedy roosevelt quite clearly had directed kennedy to take you know these kinds of friendly luncheons with churchill in order to get a sense of what exactly churchill's intentions were as regarded the international situation because it seemed it was clear to anybody who had an understanding of the deep politics at play like what their intentions were when i say they i mean church on the focus but it wasn't clear how exactly they were going to insinuate their ambitions into policy so kennedy took note of churchill's kind of perfidy the topic of discussion was the man of ribbentrop and kennedy said well did ribbentrop not offer that germany would not only make no claim on the british empire but would all but guarantee its continued existence so long as the british were willing to furnish germany once again with its colonies and that the uk would not interfere in its you know germany's policy in the east and included in that was a was a guarantee that you know the wehrmacht would not move one inch westward it should be noted that hitler had no interest in the issue of colonies but ribbentrop and the foreign ministry did but that's kind of that deserves a treatment on its own but much like vanceittart kind of lamely replied when confronted with the figures submitted by milch the gesture of good faith like churchill merely declared that these were all lies that ribbentrop was lying and this was all german ledgered main and kennedy was so much shocked by this and i mean kennedy was kind of the he was kind of the king of dirty tricks but it's it's it's i mean it's telling that it was i guess kind of the single singular focus on suing for war is what is is what is telling here i mean it's not telling that that was you know churchill's intention and his his kind of inner sense of the situation but i that i i this is interesting too because moving forward we will probably get into this in the next episode but joseph b kennedy became convinced that that that that that that churchill might actually have him arrested on some kind of trumped up charges or even have him murdered i i can't speak to that the likelihood of that but it i only raised that because this is one of the things that this is one of the catalysts that led to a lot of direct communication between churchill and fdr himself you know fdr was not a particularly accessible man and that we'll get into that later probably not in this episode but i want to drop that for foundation and i realize also i'm throwing a lot of unfamiliar personages at people and i think joe kennedy kind of ties like you know the distant past to the kind of less remote paths in people's minds if that makes any sense plus i just find it interesting now we're gonna move on to some more interesting sexy stuff i hope no one's asleep yet but the the anschluss the merger with austria not only was that you know one of the key ambitions of hitler and the national socialists and the third reich but this was kind of the this was the big foreign policy coup that set many things in motion including what happened at munich months later okay this was a game changer you know the berlin was clamoring for the unification of austria and germany proper the austrian chancellor schusnick oppose this at all cost okay it and one of the great kind of follies of power politics and the gamesmanship they're in kurt schusnig on march twelfth he announced that there'd be a plebiscite on independence march thirteenth okay it was taking a page from the book of adolf hitler schusnig was gonna he said that you know the the austrians would fight to the last man and would never you know accept being a part of germany and you know will you know to disabuse anybody of any notion that there could be a peaceful assimilation of austria into germany you know he's going to hold his plebiscite to see what the austrian people favor moving forward whether it's independence you know a yes votes for independence or whether they favor subjugation by the you know under the boots of the german reich now what did schisnick do he only printed up he ordered that only ballots containing the yes option be printed up he also announced that voting against austrian independence was a form of sedition and was a crime he also upon learning that the average age of austrian national socialist party members was twenty three he arbitrarily raised the voting age to twenty four if you ask me that's a kind of electioneering worthy of of america in twenty twenty adolf hitler saw it was underway it he as everybody knows he he preempted the ash loose um or he preempted this plebiscite and he preempted uh schusnik declaring martial law by you know deploying forces across the austrian frontier and the wehrmacht is welcomed by the people and on april tenth hitler held a referendum on the same day as you know german elections and lo and behold ninety nine point seven percent of austrians voted in favor of anschluss now it must be stated that jews romans and gypsies and communist party members were not extended to vote okay otherwise though even life magazine which was certainly no friend of the third reich right off hitler they ran on may second nineteen thirty eight the election was certified as quote basically fair like in other words this was like a legitimate reflection of public opinion of ethnic germans in austria now i can only imagine this brings to mind the the kind of the kind of abject lunacy of the anglo sphere and its moral cant like do you realize if i mean the uk was not in a position to do so and and and neither was france but suppose there'd been some kind of expeditionary force of of a british and friends the british and french army in congress with the like schusing's kind of secret police you know assaulting austria you know to liberate them from you know a position that ninety nine point seven of voting adults favored i mean it's it's crazy it defies imagination but it it kind of made me think of like what mearsheimer said about oh you know particularly the united states and the uk but pretty much the entire eu which is under you know american dominion in terms of its values among other things you know all regimes lie but when when literally all you stand on is a moral cant that's totally at odds with reality it can lead to bizarre outcomes you can find yourself at war based upon some kind of mythology that that that that that that that has that does not reflect strategic circumstances one iota and there's really no other kind of regime like that like dysfunctional as the east bloc was that that wasn't something that that there wasn't a risk of such things but i just i find that fascinating can i ask you

[Pete Cano (Host)]

something about austria absolutely let's go back a few years yeah why did they assassinate dolphus

[Thomas (Historian/Host)]

dolphus was a national catholic basically something of a clerical fascist i mean i don't like that term but that's one way to understand it and he'd very much he very much he very much opposed what i think of any kind of any kind of secular union with what had been habsburg lands he he wanted an austrian national state i think of him as almost kind of like a tito figure i mean yeah he was presiding over a homogenous population but he was a sworn enemy of the national socialists the austrian national socialists were particularly violent particularly revolutionary in their disposition that almost tanked the concord with hitler and mussolini i believe that's one of the things that prompted hitler to unconditionally cede the tyrol to fascist italy the tyrol region because hitler was quite literally meeting with mussolini when the news came in that dolphus had been had been unceremoniously murdered you know gangland style that's why it and schusnick i think dolvis is more of a genuine patriot than schusting but he was just as kind of pigheadedly uncompromising as in in terms of in terms of political realities like that's why it's like it's a complicated issue but the the main thing is dolphus seemed to think he could seem to believe that he could stay his own course and with the backing of the vatican with the backing of mussolini you know he could keep he could he could keep the national socialism down he could keep the uk and france out and he could keep austria you know independent as if if admittedly within you know the italian orbit that's why hitler was infuriated that he was murdered you know not seeing any left for dollfus but it the austrian the austrian national socialists were kind of were kind of wild guys you know they quoted themselves very well on the battlefield the kaltenbruner you know who succeeded heydrich he was one of the austrian national socialists and as were as were a lot of especially in the later regime a lot of them emerged in powerful roles but that's the short answer okay power power politics yeah yeah indeed indeed yeah and just the the when when the when the when the habsburg empire you know or the austro hungarian empire but i mean it's more probably the habsburg regime you know when it when it was shattered you know in the aftermath of nineteen eighteen i mean it caused there's a lot of real dysfunction there you know and even in states that were actual you know national communities that weren't just you know kind of hodgepodge pastiches of competing ethnic groups in arbitrarily drawn you know within arbitrarily drawn borders there was there was a problem of authority and there was a problem of you know what what was the correct political trajectory not in power political terms but in terms of sustaining any kind of legitimacy i mean that's that's part of it too and that's one of the reasons for such a small country the it it took on outside significance and that's one of the reasons too the austrian national socialist you know made this big impact it's not just because they were violent there was a lot of violent non state actors in the interwar years it didn't make that kind of impact there was weird

[Pete Cano (Host)]

stuff that mises wrote about how border towns would be overrun by the neighboring population so it was like you had a border town that would be austrian and then all of a sudden it's

[Thomas (Historian/Host)]

not yeah yeah stuff like that real yeah a real a real a real anarchic political situation and his his

[Pete Cano (Host)]

answer to that was just give the town up yeah better to just give the town it's better to just give the town up and not have to deal with that in your polity yeah yeah

[Thomas (Historian/Host)]

yeah at that point and at that point too it's just a fiction you

[Pete Cano (Host)]

know i mean yeah so you want to talk about you want to get into churchill's

[Thomas (Historian/Host)]

yeah i'm leading i wanted to lean in a bit to yeah the the munich situation because it's okay

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[Thomas (Historian/Host)]

discount it's so immediately to the edge we church on the focus they've been clamoring that chamberlain must go you know is his unwillingness to hold fast on austria shows that he you know he doesn't have the backbone to defend the empire and this was ironically and perversely you know this is the way the focus sold their perspective in public is that this is a threat to the empire you know germany's a threat to the empire i mean that was strategically absurd but also i mean the one thing britain could not do was fight a world war and keep its empire but so during this time he this you know the owing to conditions i'll dive into in a moment you know people identify czechoslovakia as the next great you know diplomatic and potential military catastrophe you know in the wake of austria you know court historians claim it's because you know hitler was this madman who was just on the march and just taking over places with hostility and you know that's why i referred at the outset of our discussion to the appeasement myth because it really is a myth it's not me putting shade on a term owing to my own political prejudices it really does not reflect what was underway now chamberlain you know like i've said before chamberlain is something of a dull personage and that that harmed him in public life obviously but he did have a good sense of things

[Ryan Seacrest]

i

[Thomas (Historian/Host)]

mean in purely strategic terms he understood the limitations of military power and when as churchill developed something of a quorum around himself not just of the focus but of hostile opposition figures chamberlain's rebuttal was okay you know if we were to guarantee guarantee czechoslovakia you know the check the czech frontier is essentially undefended okay so there's not forces in being there that you know that that any any british deployment would be kind of beefing up at most the uk could deploy at that time as of nineteen thirty as of summer nineteen thirty eight two divisions the raf had only seven viable modern fighter squadrons you know the uk itself to that point it had no heavy to medium anti aircraft capability and the big i mean the big menace frankly is regardless of how combat resolved on the continent if japan and italy joined the fray the british empire was going to be i mean it was it was open to assault on half a dozen fronts you know again it would be the definition of insanity to undertake those kinds of risks for czechoslovakia and it was around this time too interestingly you know we talked a great deal about churchill's dire financial strays and how he was bailed out with huge sums of money by you know wealthy benefactors who came to constantly the core the focus now it's it it's got to be noted that at the in december thirty seventh january thirty eighth churchill lost a huge amount of money in in american stocks and wall street was still quite volatile even though it had largely recovered structurally from the nineteen twenty nine crash hitler or hitler churchill had not reigned in his spending

[Pete Cano (Host)]

his

[Thomas (Historian/Host)]

prodigal his son was a true prodigal of the local sort you know couldn't be reined in churchill found himself once again nearly destitute lord beaverbrook who was kind of a who was kind of churchill's last remaining you know patron in in in the newspaper in the publication business you know who who wasn't quite literally you know paying out to him for charity like the the focus was in order to corral him into you know being the frontman of their position beaver brooks simply got sick of his warmongering and the beaver broke among other publications ran the evening standard he banned churchill's content canceled his contract you know deprived him among other things of substantial income and who churchill found himself in such dire straits that is his family's ancestral estate at the chartwell was literally listed for sale but then what happens on march twenty eighth nineteen thirty eight a man in a moravian jew with close ties to the czechoslovak government named sir henry strakos is a south african gold mining magnate chairman of the union corporation limited he pays all of churchill's debts sees with that he can hold on to his estate and infuses him according to some accounts with a one million dollar quote alone but you know alone that would not accrue interest and would never have to be paid back so i you know a gift and this is the moment at which churchill was truly owned by the focus in my opinion okay because how do you i mean how do you i don't think one could foreseeably come back from you know as an independent political figure after you know that the patronage of baruch and these other figures who were you know so solidly in you know the camp of an ethno sectarian ideology that was you know completely at odds with the national interest but i mean if if there was ever any question i think this it was at this point churchill had sold his soul it was sounding melodramatic but let's let's return to czechoslovakia and why why it it's it's why the munich issue is is so grossing mischaracterized okay czechoslovakia was actually it was forty seven check okay more germans and slovaks actually lived there about twenty five german that most of those germans were concentrated in the sudeten region the borderland you know on the frontier with germany but they were insinuated throughout the entirety of the country it was also home to poles ruthenes magyars you know this these people had never existed in under a common polity okay and this this idea of a czechoslovak state was absurd and it's heard on it was it was it was a contrivance of of the of the chaos and the the misguided sort of redrawing of the map in the wake of versailles and it was it was solidly under czech domination and i'm not gonna sit here and say negative things about czech people but they're a very proud nationalistic people not unlike the poles not unlike most of these ethnic groups in central europe okay and they if you were if you were non czech under this regime you were not able to freely practice your culture and and pursue your own cultural existence other than as a very much a kind of get a wise minority figuratively and literally the sudeten germans were quite well off comparatively but they were very very much resented there were there was a the threat waxed and waned but there was a genuine threat of them being ethnically cleansed in event of you know an event that's kind of ongoing social hostility reached the point of real violence this this is a bosnia kind of situation okay if somebody wants a comparative model well within living memory the this is what's so ironic because people like churchill people like the focus people advance the tart head they'd held czechoslovakia as if like his integrity is essential to the principle of self determination it's like well you know you can't on the one hand demand the austro hungarian empire be dismantled as was the case in nineteen these discrete ethnic groups you know do not have homogenous states wherein they can pursue their own political cultural destiny but then declare that this you know contrivance of a state this frankenstein kind of pastiche of ethnicities ruled by czechs is somehow you know a reflection of self determination really the only reason came into existence was owing to certain intrigues now france the immersal folk in nineteen nineteen what one of the things he declared adversaries is that germany or that france had to occupy the rhineland and this was non negotiable you know and clemenceau also had said we need a buffer state you know absent absent the ability to defend in depth you know we're just too vulnerable the uk and the us denied the claim what wilson offered in in its stead was he said look create a collective security pact of the us the united kingdom and france you know where in a france comes under assault you know the us and uk are obligated to come to its aid the us senate correctly refused to ratify and when the us refused to ratify the uk then backed out okay so what was what was the how how were the how are the speaking of appeasement this is a case of real appeasement how was the french delegation appeased they were appeased by the creation of yugoslavia and czechoslovakia in part okay a little entente if you will this would you know choslovakia literally struck into the territorially into the north german plain availed it availed france you know an eastern ally state that it could mobilize and event of war and you know compromise germany's ability to kind of like germany's ability to defend in depth by forcing a two front conflict and it created a it in a yugoslavia it created a second continental ally that theoretically was was was was bound to you know to fight in common if france went to war it seems i mean it seems incredibly foolish to suggest that you know anyone would go to war for czechoslovakia yugoslavia but it i believe the idea was that some kind of that that if the strategic situation deteriorated enough like fear of a an iran is german reich would kind of bind people in common cause i don't think that's realistic either because in a lot of ways that's exactly what happened and you know it in large part worked in the axis favor but that's that's the background this idea i mean i europeans are watching this forgive me for being pedantic a lot of americans even who aren't total dummies like don't know about czechoslovakia and the fact that it's totally fake that's why i spent so much time there now as of nineteen thirty eight the president czechoslovakia is edward bennis or bennis now something very very conspiratorial happened immediately after the anschluss and it wasn't clear initially what was underway so we're gonna have to jump back we're gonna have to jump forward a little bit and then back again okay march nineteen thirty eight immediately after the ain schloose you know there's a there's this uproar among you know germany's enemies and the focus as well as in the british foreign office and in france which is a very very different political culture in the uk you know the france and germany's conventional enemy in a conventional european enemy like rival power you know obviously obviously there's not the kind of bitterness and ethnic racial overtones as in the east but you know i don't think people need to be educated elaborately on the or in depth about you know the fact that franco german hostility is like a thing okay so france obviously is alarmed by the anscheloos they they've got very close relation blum's government has very close relations with bennys immediately after the anch loose a a rumor emerges and uh it becomes more than a rumor almost immediately it becomes a genuine war scare bennis issues a statement that a german invasion of czechoslovakia was imminent and that the vermont was massing forces on the north german plain and and throughout the the czech frontier and that they were poised for assault venice then orders a general mobilization paris and moscow both of them declare that they will come to czechoslovakia the aid of the vermont crosses the frontier even chamberlain realizing that he can't you know sit idly particularly after you know this kind of concerted assault in the court of public opinion by churchill by the ford office upon his decision making and now you know anthony eden's in on the act chamberlain issues a somewhat cryptic statement that you know he that london will not sit idly while an invasion is staged by germany of any sovereign state now hitler was genuinely kind of dumbfounded by this because there there there was no intention to assault shoslovakia and there had been no deployment on onto the frontier hitler is convinced that you know this might be some kind of ledger domain originating in moscow he doesn't know what to think yodel jennifer oberst i'm sure i butchered that pronunciation too you know yodel was by this point was not a particularly close ally of hitler although subsequently he became very close he he ended up becoming a very powerful figure on the general staff we know a lot about what transpired here because of what he relayed and he really had no reason to lie he he knew nothing was going to spare him from a death sentence or anything so on on on may twenty third what hitler does is hitler orders the foreign office and the the you know the the the diplomatic delegation in czechoslovakia you know to approach bennis as well as the the as well as you know he he you know his own foreign office people in berlin you know to approach the czech ambassador and tell them in no uncertain terms that germany has no aggressive intention you know when they the germans disclose has been there's been no change in deployments on the on the frontier there's been no concentration of forces you know hitler is basically scrambling to avoid a war by by misunderstanding or by rumor now you know benny's to hitler benny's representatives to the foreign to the german foreign ministry they act they react with apparent gratitude you know but immediately thereafter within forty hours venice addresses his country and he said that he has called the bluff of the coward and bully hitler and that by demonstrating his will to fight and you know the will of the democracies to fight in the face of fascism you know hitler has been brought to his knees and was at this coward now hitler hit the goddamn roof you know for a few reasons because first of all he realized bennis himself was the source of this rumor you know and he was basically he staged a war scare for the sake of as a flex essentially you know in order to see exactly you know how he could manipulate you know france and moscow as well as london you know to come to his aid to preserve his government which frankly had no real mandate anyway but also you know he he was just you know he he wanted to he wanted to try and put on a mussolini act and act like some kind of strong man you know hitler responded publicly and something keep in mind too you know what bennis was doing during the great war he was you know kind of gallivanting around one of the reasons he became the president of czechoslovakia is because he was an intruder you know by today's standards we consider him to be some kind of globalist liberal he wasn't in the trenches he was you know making he was organizing committees to you know fund you know fund the czechoslovak government after the war in which you know he'd have a he'd had some kind of plum sinecure and hitler in a statement said you know i i spent four and a half years at the front fighting for my country you know while bennis was intriguing conspiring and you know living lavishly is you know we fought and died in the trenches and there's a lot to be said for that like he basically you know you know you don't if you're a guy like bennett you know you don't you don't impugn the manhood of a man like hitler like whatever you think about him that's i mean that's ridiculous okay that and it in those days especially especially then you know things like masculine honor were like really mattered you know so what hitler then said to keitel who was another general officer who who came to a very hype preeminence on the on the on on the on the german general staff later he were entitled to implement a gradual mobilization of the german army and prepare for case green and case green was the code for war against czechoslovakia not an immediate mobilization not one that would be noticed by you know france and certainly not want to be noticed by prague but hitler realized that at some point you know if this was a disposition of ben ace he was he was he was quite obviously at least you know i i think it's clear as you know he was quite he was quite obviously hoping for a scenario that would trigger a general war before germany was in any position to see such a conflict due to victory there's a lot of guys and i i'm not a military vet and i don't know a lot about military science okay guys go back and forth and they gave me scenarios could germany have won a general war with czechoslovakia in nineteen thirty eight and it becomes people becoming better in their perspective i i don't have an opinion on that but perception was that germany would i have no doubt that if it would have thought it was critical to do so under primitive assault he would have gone to war czechoslovakia hey it is ryan

[Ryan Seacrest]

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[Thomas (Historian/Host)]

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[Thomas (Historian/Host)]

good participation may vary but could germany have won head moscow had paris had the uk come to fight could germany have won that war i don't know and i'm not taking an opinion on that i'm just talking about the perception as it was vis a vis forces in being and everything else but it's got to be said too you know what brought this to a head these tensions were in czechoslovakia i mean from nineteen twenty to nineteen thirty eight which is our you know now present the sudan germans had been agitating to be free of czech rule and everybody you know the british the french the moscow you know everybody the polls like everybody realized that this was like a bad this was a bad decision it was a bad decision to you know to hand the sudan germans to to prague like nobody thought this was sustainable nobody thought this was a good idea so like the idea that czechoslovakia was a stable country that that had some kind of organic heritage you know politically or culturally you know and had and had you know enjoyed like strong legitimacy that's completely false and everybody the reason why chamberlain after the munich summit like the reason why he was like you know so congratulated is because for twenty years people were convinced there was going to be a war over this issue you know it wasn't it wasn't because hitler was just invading places for no reason and you know and and and chamberlain just kissed his ass and like everybody just you know decided to kiss chamberlain's ass for being a or something or whatever they think you know i mean even roosevelt congratulated chamberlain you know it's like what sort of no like fdr like love hitler now like i don't it's completely asinine and the the whole you know and what happened what happened when this land was seated to germany you know the several nationalities including you know slovakia slovakia declared independence you know and the czechs essentially invaded you know the czech state imploded and so we're supposed to believe the state that collapsed that had no legitimacy it was some crime that it ceased to exist i mean should should should the united states have invaded germany in nineteen eighty nine because when east germany just must exist i mean i and it sounds like i'm being funny but i i mean

[Pete Cano (Host)]

and and it sounds so familiar as to something that's happening right now yeah

[Thomas (Historian/Host)]

exactly and that's kind of what i wanted to you know draw in the into the into the equation it i mean the whole thing is too what i kind of wanted to conclude on for this episode and i i don't want to go too far afield but i know that and anytime you raise these kinds of revisionist issues there's what people say is they say like well okay fine you know there was there's all these political intrigues underway and and always comes to competing all these kinds of competing ambitions but well you know the the the the german reich was just this evil state and it came into existence for the sole purpose of murdering people you can't look at it that way and if you look at the new york times interestingly after the kristallnacht which was a really crummy thing to do i mean i don't need to get into specifics of it you know that's there was you know there's there's basically nothing cleansing operation and major german cities you know where a lot of jews were you know beat up a few were lynched and you know jewish property was destroyed i mean these kinds of things happen okay these things kind of things happen wherever there's hostility between ethnic groups but the way goebbels ministry handled it was grotesque and i i don't think anybody would say otherwise but when when these interventionists in the aftermath of that started clamoring for war you know the new york times which by no means what it is today and certainly in then it wasn't in america first paper or anything but they pointed out they said you know mister stalin's soviet union has arbitrarily executed exponentially more jews than the third reich has and that i mean that was true the before shot was fired in the second world war the soviet union annihilated approximately ten million people so when you're looking at what happened in the second world war whether you're talking about you know the the annihilation of jewish civilians or any other kind of grotesque violence against civilian populations you're talking about effect you're talking about consequences of the war not causes so saying that saying you know the uk had to assault germany because germany was going to do bad things to minority groups that's like saying like japan had to attack the united states because the united states was going to wage a nuclear war on them i mean like it doesn't i'm not being up twos it's you know people have a completely warped sense of of how history actually developed and what the motives were the players involved and what was a cause and what was an effect but it because yeah we've gone over an hour here this is the last episode i want to dedicate just to mister churchill i want to get into the war in the next episode we dealt with the assault on poland already because we dealt with the new deal regime i gave mister churchill so much time because it's it's a very very complicated issue i want to get into we're going to start just next time with a little bit about churchill's you know his actual ascendancy the office of prime minister but then we're going to get right into the war and from there i want a dedicated episode barbarossa and one on the aftermath of nuremberg if that sounds good to you sounds good to me great i hope everybody got a lot out of the content and if i could just plug like my sub stack peak that would be great awesome please yeah you can find me at real thomas seven seven seven dot substack dot com and i'm active on telegram periodically i render a private if i'm under assault by crazy people or antifa or it does happen i'm not being a martyr but you can find me on telegram it's a public channel it's t dot me slash the t h e number seven h o m a s seven hundred seventy seven and i'll link to it thank you pete that's great and thanks again for hosting me i can't i really appreciate it i really appreciate everybody's support and kind words i i really mean that i'm not i'm not being polite

[Pete Cano (Host)]

well yeah a lot of people are missing you on twitter that's for sure

[Thomas (Historian/Host)]

i i gotta catch up a lot i i owe poor mike and imperium press a whole lot of material i gotta and steel storm two is gonna drop imminently and i i'll make a decision mid summer about social media i just i haven't i honestly haven't decided yet i'm not trying to build a hype or be a jiggle if i honestly have not decided if i want to get back on social media but i will and i will always be on substack i will always be on

[Pete Cano (Host)]

telegram all right i appreciate it until the next time thank you pete i want to welcome everyone back to the pete canyones show we are continuing the series thomas how are you doing i'm

[Thomas (Historian/Host)]

very well thank you pete it's a pleasure once again to be continuing as we are and like we talked about is this before we went live here i think this should be the last dedicated episode to mister churchill when his ascendancy and just to reiterate for the listeners i'm not i'm not trying to be a pedantic bore by focusing so much on churchill like nor do i have some kind of ax to grind with certain historical personages like some historians do i mean if you don't believe me you like read mister ker on what he wrote about adolf hitler it's like it's kind of there's like a there's a there's a personal hostility invested there that is not dignified in addition to it not being good scholarship but that's not why i focus so much on churchill there's a political aspect to mister churchill's career and ascendancy that is something of a missing piece of the conceptual puzzle to understanding world war two and what is wrong with court history narratives as well as understanding you know how how churchill was able to procure the kind of mandate that he was and what its purpose was that's far more mysterious and intrigue laden than say mister roosevelt or even or even stalin crazy that might be but i i figure well excuse me i figure we'll we'll dive right back in we finished off last time you know talking about the uh the munich um the the munich crisis which was a genuine crisis you know as we talked about characterizing it as appeasement and and and and characterizing it as you know a line in the sand being drawn by mister chamberlain but that he you know but that he could not back up with force you know when when hitler was on some sort of aggressive rampage of of conquest that that's a gross mischaracterization it's not it's not me just putting shine on adolf hitler or something it's it's a grossly inaccurate characterization it's a propaganda characterization and it doesn't have anything to do with with history as it developed and it was a crisis but it was a crisis that was entirely confabulated by the intrigues of of of mister bennis in in czechoslovakia and elements of the focus and and other and other interested parties who who had the the means and the resources and the deep pockets proverbially speaking the to facilitate a crisis but they they got far more than they bargained for because you know hitler was hitler was a very serious individual and he was not somebody who could just be you know who could just be rooked or sandbagged in in the court of public opinion and and and could thereby be deprived of his mandate you know he whether you love hitler hate hitler don't have an opinion on on on on adolf hitler he he was a historical personage of of incredible gravity and that's another thing that's important for us to keep in mind it's not a political judgment it's an objective historical judgment but moving on as nineteen thirty eight it became nineteen thirty nine winston churchill was somewhat quiet he was biting his time probably i mean definitely i mean in hindsight this is clear the munich crisis really caused some issues for the focus they realized that they had to do a couple of things you know they realized they had to take hitler more seriously in geostrategic terms you know the focus was singularly committed to to getting rid of hitler by any means necessary and you know regime change in germany even if that meant handing germany over to the communists they didn't care okay so they they realized that germany was essential to the political culture of the continent and its internal situation and they always took that seriously they did not however take hitler seriously as a potential conqueror i'm not using that term punitively but hitler was a a modern conqueror that's not all he was and all of his conquests weren't accomplished through hostility but that that's in part what he was and and he was a historical phenomena and to himself like somebody like cromwell was or like a man like muhammad was that can't be denied and they were hitler's enemies particularly mister churchill and the focus they this became very clear with al munich result now the focus came to understand that this met it was critical to really insinuate their cause into you know american policy as in a formal capacity now you know we talked about the new dealer revolution and mister roosevelt and we talked about a lot of these partisan figures around him you know like morgan thou and and and bullet and some of these other figures so i mean it was fertile ground obviously for the focus to kind of to kind of intrigue allies into their orbit however you know relations between the united states and the uk were somewhat frosty during this era this is a little outside the scope of what we're talking about here but we take for granted that you know the the uk is as as you know as oral characterized at airstrip one as you know american executives from you know really eisenhower onward you know they talk about a special relationship well i mean this is this is the legacy of mister churchill's you know installation into the premiership and and and and him availing you know the resources and of the uk unconditionally to america and and it becoming you know quite literally a client state of america you know this was this was not the case from from from you know the entirety of the twentieth century until until nineteen forty really i mean yes you know america collaborated with the uk in the great war but you know a lot of and that was disastrous in its own right and that was conspiratorial in its own right but there were very different reasons for that and i'd even argue that america had warmer feelings towards paris than it did london even even into the you know early twentieth century but so that's important to keep in mind too what i'm getting is that even though there was parallel policy goals and a dogmatic antifascism characteristic of the new deal regime and the focus regime which it was not yet formally singled into power but was coveting that but just because these goals are parallel does not mean they'd intersected yet or that they formally entered into alliance yet and you know mister roosevelt certainly wasn't going to take orders from mister churchill who at this point you know didn't even have formal office you know despite the fact that he become you know a very significant personage in in in british political culture so moving on in in nineteen thirty nine in the summer churchill's visited by felix frankfurter felix frankfurter was he he was a a roosevelt appointee to the supreme court very long serving judge you know he was he was jewish and he was very involved in jewish causes you know and zionist causes he had an unusual career and he ended up i can't remember exactly but drew mcintyre here from wwe wielding the claymore can be a

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participation may vary he was unceremoniously disbarred at least for a time this was much later i can't remember if he was indicted or not or just sanctioned but it was very strange and it was strange for a man of his profile to be involved in this in this kind of what amount of penny anti sort of corruption okay so he he was a he was a man of of questionable character you know aside from politics aside from his ethnicity all that you know just based upon his conduct this can't be disputed okay and it's interesting that felix frankfurter is the man from roosevelt's administration who came to visit churchill and for the purpose of establishing good offices you know like we talked about joseph t kennedy you know who was who was the father of john f kennedy and robert kennedy you know it was roosevelt had appointed him as ambassador united kingdom both because kennedy was an enemy of roosevelt's you know after roosevelt took the oath of office they very much had it falling out but also you know roosevelt obviously this was part of the kind of lingering antagonism of the uk that a lot of us associated with establishment had you know sending this kind of millionaire boss and irishman you know who to london that that was a highly antagonistic move you know and that was very deliberate but you know so if if if if if churchill was gonna make inroads into the the new dealer regime it wasn't going to be through mister kennedy you know and vice versa if the new dealers wanted to reach out to mister churchill they weren't going to do it through mister kennedy you know just off the table but you know it's telling that you know it's not clear to me and i've tried to find out i've dug deep into the record of mainstream historians of revisionists i don't know who initiated contact i don't know if churchill solicited frankfurter's visit i don't know if he wrote to roosevelt and you know behooved him to to send some sort of emissary unofficially i don't know if frankfurter took it upon himself then reported back to roosevelt this isn't clear all it's clear is that you know they met and this was very significant and you know frankfurter among other things he was a very important man in the american jewish committee okay now the american jewish committee they weren't formally part of the focus but they were only one or two steps removed if that makes any sense you know we talked about samuel untermeyer who was the new york lawyer who was a key player in the world jewish economic federation which was then incorporated into the anti nazi council which was the across the atlantic kind of alliance that that gave the focus you know representation in the united states and vice versa gave you know zionist power zionist ngo's you know power in london or at least representation you know this was done to sam utremeyer and sam utremeyer was one of the key players as it is said the american jewish committee and he also you know had been utilizing the american jewish committee you know he he incorporated the world jewish economic federation which had been which had been the driving force behind the embargo on german goods and manufacturers you know that proceeded even the kristallnacht when when when the when the national socialist regime became you know as a matter of law like like highly anti jewish you know these ngo's like went into action know immediately and so this is the way to understand frankfurter in my opinion is you know he was very much he was very much acting as a as an ambassador of of of this of this of this faction you know the world jewish economic federation the american jewish committee you know men like samuel untermeyer but frankfurter because he was a jurist you know he actually was friendly with roosevelt you know and he he was an important man you know even today you know even though government doesn't have the kind of prestige it did and it's populated by fools that we all kind of lampoon you know a supreme court justice has a lot of power you know i'd say today the supreme court has even more power than the presidency but in those days you know certainly the presidency was a seat of sovereignty but if you were any federal judge let alone a supreme court justice i mean you you were a man with serious clout you know so this was this this is highly significant this wasn't just frankfurter saying you know i like i like mister churchill and you know i like his style and his hats and even though he's a fat i like the fact that he wants to you know set the jewish people free so i'm gonna go visit him no you know this was obviously like very very official you know it was it was it was he was he was a heavy that frankfurter was a boss you know i i'd argue that he was the most powerful jewish political figure in the united states at the time okay so frankfurter immediately before his appointment you know when he and fdr were kind of articulating trying to feel each other out about about common policy ambitions and goals frankfurter written fdr admonishing him to always emphasize the nazi threat his words the quote nazi threat you know he said you know you you've always got to emphasize that the nazi threat is responsible you know for you know not just for threatening freedom and peace on the planet you know it's another catchphrase of of frankfurter's and that the focus later took on and churchill himself took on you know we talked earlier about a churchill you know he's he's he's he's he's praised as being this brilliant order churchill didn't write a lot of his own speeches you know a lot of this stuff was propaganda copy you know put out you know by guys like baruch by guys by wickham like wickham steed you know by by organizations and ngo's you know like the like those headed up by you know men like unto meyer and by frankfurter you know so these the the these phrases appear again and again it's highly or william okay if you'll forgive the kind of over adjective but he you know frankfurt was big his big idea in terms of you know what we consider to be like information warfare or perhaps disinformation or you know more benignly perhaps you know his idea for you know kind of selling the narrative of the new deal was you know you've got to you've got to present domestic policy efforts as and and priorities as being inextricably bound up with foreign policy issues you know particularly the threat you know to our freedom and to you know not just our national security but our prosperity you know and the ability you know of people in america you know to you know to live freely and you know all enjoy due process under the law you know we've got to present we've got we've got to present you know berlin and hitler and the national socialists as this existential threat to you know to our way of life you know and if people say that you know well you know they're a bulwark against the communists we've got to just shout them down and churchill was very receptive to this you know and churchill having been silent after the you know in large part after the munich fiasco you know he he started he started agitating in earnest you know once again you know as as nineteen thirty eight became nineteen thirty nine you know he started saying like look you know like chamberlain chamberlain took a knee because chamberlain's weak you know and he's not a man who can stand up to we can stand up to the nazi threat you know and and churchill literally said in nineteen thirty nine springtime you know on the floor of parliament you know he said you know the nazi threat is is represents a mortal danger to our quote freedom and peace you know that's him literally invoking you know the phraseology of frankfurter and fdr you know which is interesting and you gotta you gotta keep in mind in these days you know we're talking about nineteen thirty nine you know we're talking about when there's not even a radio in every home okay like it's not it's not like today where like memes you know hop across the ocean within minutes or you know you've got people on you know three different continents who all kind of have common reference points in terms of their their political vernacular or their propaganda phraseology or advertising slogans you know this is you know a man like particularly a personage of this status at churchill like literally parroting what some you know jewish supreme court justice from america said who himself kind of borrowed you know the phraseology from the president united states you know that's that's that's notable okay and it it's indicative of very much a relationship of patronage and it's indicative of of a very managed career you know and churchill being the managed quantity here okay now immediately after frankfurt's departure from london you know a a this massive media campaign was unleashed okay you know like we talked about you know churchill become persona non grata with lord rothermere and lord beaverbrook you know they rothermere you know he was was in some ways actually positive about adolf hitler and close to mosley beaverbrook i i don't believe there's anything that could insinuate any such inf you know insinuate him into any that same milieu but beaver brook was very anti war and you know he he he he recognized that church was a warmonger and he was a cynic you know but other than other than other than rothermere and beaverbrook you know essentially refusing to give churchill a platform every other major newspaper outlet was was was was was you know giving churchill as much copy as as they could muster without it you know to be a a literal organ of some ngo to it coalesce to install him in office i mean they should have been in by by to modern eyes this is obvious but again this was you know nineteen thirty nine but the daily telegraph led this charge okay pretty much overnight you know premium ad space was purchased you know declaring that you know churchill's the only man who can protect us from the german threat you know and lambasting chamberlain you know on chamberlain wrote to one of his intimates i can't remember if it was i can't remember if it was a female cousin or just a female friend but there's this chamberlain maintained a a voluminous correspondence you know like a lot of englishmen of the day did and he wrote kind of in shock that one day this massive billboard appear on the strand you know just saying you know churchill our man in giant letters you know and that this was kind of things that i heard of in those days you know this kind of uh like mussolini had pioneered some of that and adolf hitler you know he he'd campaigned by aircraft you know hopping around germany but this kind of full court press you know full full spectrum utilization of print media of movie house visual media of you know street billboards they've been hired they there was there was women who were hired to wear sandwich boards you know like you know dozens sometimes as many as a few hundred women to just you know appear outside parliament wearing sandwich boards you know saying churchill our man you know they were all hired they were paid to do this but it appeared spontaneous and people hadn't seen this kind of thing before you know so even even people who weren't particularly sold on churchill you know or even people who hadn't even followed his career particularly closely you know like working people weren't all that sophisticated you know this kind of climb a conceptual environment was created where it just seemed churchill this inevitable churchill had this inevitable momentum and i mean use this this is even though it's coming up on a century into our past this remains kind of the default tactic for you know manufacturing a a mandate you know at the ballot box okay crudes it might seem that's there's only a limited number of ways you can accomplish this you know even as diversified as media platforms are you know today the more things change want to stay the same so this is kind of the first instance of an ngo with tremendous you know cloud in media and a tremendous amount of money you know creating quite literally a climate of public opinion where one man's ascendancy seems inevitable you know and that's that's kind of the ultimate bandwagon intrigue okay you know it's it's almost like it's almost like man made weather is a way to think about it you know the oliver stone movie natural born killers that's the one of the anti heroes player woody harrelson he's talking about media and how media crates are like individually and collectively it it literally manufacture image of public figures and because it's like man made weather he says well that's actually poignant you know it's it's not just something something dropped in a in a lurid movie now churchill finds that you know as time goes on you know as nineteen thirty nine drags on it the focus finds fertile ground because chamberlain there's a lot of people are not happy with chamberlain for all kinds of reasons you know a lot of these have nothing to do with munich other than the fact that they feel he botched the entire affair you know not even people didn't have any animus towards germany you know he just did not seem competent to manage the power political landscape and the tremendous stakes that were involved and with some of these people like archie sinclair was the leader of the liberal party he he just hated chamberlain you know and he declared which is incredibly stupid he declared that if parliament convened earlier you know in the in nineteen thirty eight and and mobilized you know the you know some come to some kind of agreement and develop some kind of quorum of of of you know a war party in essence you know they could have deployed the royal navy and establish a concord moscow and then assaulted germany and then you know defeated you know germany would have gone down in defeat and they would have saved shoslovakia which is completely preposterous and why would he want to save czechoslovakia anyway it was it was it was a it was a complete contrivance that's like saying you want to save east germany but the fact is you know churchill like he churchill began repeating this like a mantra so you had these people for cynical reasons you know not just important personages like sinclair you know who hated you know every man was you know whether it was liberal whether he was tory whether it was labor you know if he had an extra grind with chamberlain you know this this became his mantra you know churchill ran with it you know and churchill had more exposure than a lot of these guys even though he's still at this point even was about to like he still didn't have you know he still didn't have a formal role in government so rightly or wrongly you know the this this anxiety written public who increasingly you know however unfair it may have been you know they viewed chamberlain's a failing pm and they all these important people from you know different positions in the proverbial aisle you know we're calling we're calling for chamberlain to go and churchill kind of became you know the the proverbial you know grand marshal leading that parade you know it didn't matter that this was a completely cynical effort you know churchill's the church was everywhere you know like i said you know he had this tremendous media apparatus behind him so it what matters is perception not reality and eventually perception becomes reality you know i don't need to tell anybody that after what we went through with you know twenty twenty twenty twenty two at least i don't think so but maybe maybe i'm going old and senile but i i don't think so yet but in nineteen thirty nine what what what happens what happened september third nineteen thirty nine well you know the vermont crosses the polish frontier and one of the first episodes in this series you know we got into that so i i don't think we need to deep dive back into the causes of that and the kind of and the kind of detailed battlefield details of that but you know it obviously you know as we know the you know london had it granted a war guarantee the polish military you know which which was incredibly foolish and it was probably exponentially more foolish than the the the overtures they'd made towards czechoslovakia but that that doesn't matter anymore because now war is underway now baldwin to his credit you know who'd who'd been who'd you know who'd been really coming fairly lambasted as a lame duck foreign policy executive this only this stuck in my head and david david irving's sympathetic to baldwin and i am too i i ramsay mcdonald and baldwin are i think are very compelling figures and both very honorable in their own right baldwin's declared quote that rhetoric is the harlot of discourse and he said that church was a master of of rhetoric and fasting uneducated masses of people with rhetoric and that's true that says that's exactly what he was and churchill despite still you know despite still uh still being only equivalent administrator portfolio he uh he gives his first uh wartime speech okay i mean it's the day of september third by eleven am if germany london gave germany an ultimatum that if they did not retreat back over the german frontier and end all offensive operations by eleven am the war would be declared so obviously that came and went you know and the uk is now at war so churchill takes the opportunity to respond to baldwin and he declares that baldwin should be ashamed for putting party before country now this is really offensive coming from mister churchill i don't think character evidence generally is is a good is a good way to analyze the the performance or the integrity of of of a statesman but in churchill's case he opens the door to that kind of thing okay because churchill was the one who's always going around claiming other people lacked integrity well church was a man who switched his party allegiance every few years according to what you know direction the wind was blowing in terms of policy preferences voting public he had literally been bought off by a zionist ngo pursuing a policy of war at all costs and agitating for war at all costs without regard to you know the lives that would be sacrificed without regard to the impact on you know the flower of of british youth without regard you know what this would do to the fortunes of the empire moving forward but you know oblivious to anything approaching self awareness he goes on record declaring that you know well you know we've got a sue for war and anybody who disagrees with me like baldwin just putting party before country is a man who literally has been bought by zionists like many many of whom don't even have formal residency in the united kingdom let alone allegiance to you know churchill's country that he supposedly is you know so so so devoted to that he's willing to sacrifice anything just to stick it to berlin now this is characteristic of churchill something that roosevelt who frank i mean we'll get into this when we get into the episode on the warriors roosevelt confided when frankfurter returned i don't know his exact words but he said that churchill had the audacity to try and talk to him and other heads of state like he was their peers you know and roosevelt's notion was that this this is this indicates a complete obliviousness to the way diplomacy is conducted that particularly a man of churchill's kind of station and background whatever his problems are however much he may be drinking however long he's been out of formal office this is a big faux pas you won't behave that way it's an embarrassment and beyond that being a consummate machiavellian fdr what he's really saying is this kind of shakes my confidence in this fat bastard you know because he's got to you know basically shore these things up i believe this is one of the reasons why churl stopped being the master of his own copy in terms of speeches it wasn't just this incident but you can find a dozen incidents like this okay where churchill engaged in some serious faux pa and alienated some key personage whether it's roosevelt whether it's

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[Thomas (Historian/Host)]

casino whether it was the the whether it was lord simon this happens again and again okay and like i said i'm sure some people are gonna say that that's me taking a page from the playbook of mister crucial and just putting shade on a historical personage i don't like but i that's not what i'm doing this this is relevant because churchill's held out as this almost divinely you know without flaw kind of figure who sacrificed for his country and for humanity against this kind of unspeakable evil you know when in reality not not only was churchill you know a politician and a very corrupt man he was probably one of the most corrupt major political figures the twentieth century and he was certainly a traitor to his own people you know he was literally a judas you know however anybody feels about the third reich or zionism or anything else you know that can't be denied you know there's not there's not there's not any way you can put a gloss on on on treason to one's own kith and kin and that's exactly what churchill did now moving on he he i i we talked before about how churchill really most of what he spoke when he when speaking of germany he he mostly spoke in terms of moral can't you know when when people would challenge him you know including baldwin but also in more direct terms you know people like beaver broke and challenged him he simply declared that you know the barbarity of dictatorships you know would you know call for you know call for resistance by any means necessary but what exactly was churchill talking about here churchill was the guy who in the immediate in the immediate aftermath of the easter rising he said that you know we need to dispense with you know normal kind of customs and laws of warfare and start you know treating non combatants as hostiles and he was basically talking about ethnically cleansing the irish and just killing them until they stopped misbehaving you know he spoke of the indian he spoke of the subcontinent populations generally is just kind of subhuman you know and he he declared that german anti semitism was quote a crime against all men but churchill didn't care a wit when the poles were ethnically cleansing jews when they passed the nationality act in nineteen thirty eight you know demanding a demanding a territorial concessions from the baltic under threat of military assault when they were ethnically cleansing germans on their frontier you know when they were doing essentially the exact same thing that the germans did in the passage of the nuremberg laws i'm not saying this to say bad things about polish people or poland that's not the point like the point is if you're going to strike these moral postures there's got to be some sort of consistency or it's just absurd and buffoonish and i mean this has echoes today you know i'm not saying that even if churchill had a you know even if the country represented had a resume that was kind of more in line with these reported values that they would have you know some kind of some kind of weight i'm not saying that at all but i'm saying that there's got to be at least a modicum of consistency otherwise you're not to be taken seriously you know otherwise you're obviously engaged in a kind of game you know in a kind of ledgered mane that appeals only to the most kind of foolish but the the you know to that to that to that end churchill finally got his way or not completely but with the uh with the assault uh on poland uh chamberlain had a real serious problem i mean paul chamberlain had more problems than anybody thought chamberlain was actually dying of cancer and we'll delve into that in a minute but he i mean that's one of the things that kind of i think warrants a bit of sympathy for him considering what he was enduring but regardless about chamberlain it felt about you know the prospect of war with germany you know they for better or worse you know london was at war with germany now and it was done okay and he needed a war cabinet now the he brings churchill into the government as lord of the admiralty once again you know which which churchill you know the church will not enjoy that post in twenty years and so he was ecstatic because you know we talked like we talked about i think in the first episode dealing with the churchill we he seemed he seemed to be most happy when when when when he was in a when he was in a position to play warlord you know despite his his his naked ineptitude in in the role you know it's now once again back to churchill's moral cant and this this this is going to tie back together when we get into the when we get into the addendum episode dealing with nuremberg i'm not just i'm not taking a page from the from the outrage manual of the woke and and try to list you know kind of like you know bad acts or crimes of the british empire or something but considering the claims presented by churchill and the focus and his reported raison d' etre for his war on germany these things are relevant now churchill publicly endorsed would have been agreed upon it with respect to the panama treaty the panama treaty declared that in the americas the united states and you know in central and south america all countries that were not combatants you know and there were non combatant states and also were not colonies or dominions of combatant states you know there would be no hostilities within three hundred miles of territorial waters well churchill issued a memo immediately after publishing publicly endorsing the idea of a three hundred mile neutral zone extending from you know territorial territorial waters in the americas he he issued an order of admiralty that the world navy was to completely disregard this okay so this is a man who did not have respect for the laws and customs of war or treaty law when it did not serve his purposes okay he recommended mining norwegian territorial wars you know he when when a when a german u boat was forced to surface by a british battleship in the north sea uh the uh the men who abandoned ship were uh over the course of twelve hours were retrieved from the water and they were executed and dumped overboard and uh churchill declared that this would be odious if uh the appear it would be odious in appearance of a hostile media actor got hold of the story but you know mind you he had no problem with these men you know being summarily executed at sea not even available to a drum and court martial this is the kind of man he was okay churchill believed in the law of churchill he he didn't believe in anything else and he would literally say anything or do anything for money and he had a certain i i'm rather gonna use the term audacity because sometimes that indicates balls or kind of dash and recklessness that is charming there's nothing charming about this it was it was just a pitiable man who had no principles literally just saying whatever he had to in the moment in order to in order to rationalize what what he was doing in his own is in his own naked self interest churchill issues a radio address the first week in october in it he declares that poland has an unquenchable spirit it will rise again poland is like a rock tightly submerged but you know if if if the great democracy poland is not somehow re established you know our peace and freedom will be threatened there's that same verbiage again from but frankfurt and mister roosevelt like how like a basically racialist like military junta like in in central europe is is you know the the kind of polestar of you know western freedom i have no idea but apparently according to mister churchill and and the focus this this was the case now mind you and this is the last just for context once again you've got to look at the world in nineteen thirty nine okay i mean it's just as obnoxious in twenty twenty two when the european union goes around handing out moral report cards to people you know about their racism or about not not treating the developing world equitably enough but think about this okay in nineteen thirty nine the british empire it was sovereign over just under four hundred fifty million people there's approximately a quarter of the population of this planet okay now just over four hundred million of those people were non whites because the first number of classified people in in the following paradigm you're either white and european you're colored you were a negro or you were a native and like native entailed all different kinds of racial groupings it was kind of like not black like not white not mixed race you're you're a native but pretty much none of these people had any political rights okay so you're gonna sit here and say that you know because the nerve of our laws and because germany which at this point is basically at war with the jewish diaspora for better or worse i mean that that's a fact they're the epitome of evil because they're not taught of their fellow man like meanwhile you serve you serve a monarchy hey

[Ryan Seacrest]

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[Thomas (Historian/Host)]

has subjugated twenty five percent of this planet and you've done so on grounds that they're not white now that doesn't bother me any because i don't approach history in those kinds of terms but like think about mister churchill you know declaring these things and think about like how this was received on the continent you know i mean think about like the raw cynicism of that and you kind of you kind of understand why you gotta understand that the germans came to realize that what what they were contending with was a was a an enemy element that was going to sue for war at all costs okay i mean that it it much like not entirely and not nearly as intense for thank god but it's somewhat like russia is dealing with today vis a visa nail now interestingly what adding to this kind of a stew of iniquity and hypocrisy on september seventeenth nineteen thirty nine the soviet union invades poland or had invaded poland okay now this was done pursuant to the molotov ribbentrop pact which was a secret it was kind of the final example of secret diplomacy which was so maligned i mean properly i'm not i'm not saying it's a good practice in the inner warriors and nobody knew that germany and that that berlin and moscow it divided up spheres of influence and not only had them stalin demanded the eastern half of poland but he he demanded that germany pursue a hands off posh on the baltic states and moscow proceeded demand the baltic states plus finland uh abide what the euphemistically called mutual assistance treaties that meant that they had to tolerate a red army presence in their territorial waters you know across their across their borders they were expected to assist in ongoing hostilities in poland and anywhere else within theater it was you know it was it was it was the equivalent of having a gun to one's head and then being asked to sign on the dotted line out of your own free will but you know joe kennedy during immediately after churchill's radio speech he he confronts mister churchill because kennedy was you know still ambassador of the united kingdom he was he was quite friendly with sir john simon was chance chancellor of the exchequer and simon was another kind of not particularly dynamic personage but he i believe he was a realist and i believe he was basically patriotic okay and he he realized in some basic sense what was underway as did halifax and if you notice anybody who's seen the film darkest hour which is ironically titled because yes when when winston churchill ascended to the premiership that was the darkest hour but so i it's it's it's it's i i thought i thought it was funny but and then even halifax is portrayed as the villain in that film i'm not going to sit here and say halifax was some great man or that he was like you know some great great friend of the white race or something but he he definitely had a lot more integrity than than most of his peers as did simon and joe kennedy had a good rapport with both these men well primarily with simon so kennedy puts it to simon he says you know this is in the wake of the of the soviet assault on poland you know what exactly are you fighting for you can't restore poland to the polls and why would you want to do that anyway and simon just kind of agreed lamely saying no no we couldn't so kenny's like okay well how are we discussing aggression while we're tacitly endorsing russia's conquest of poland as well as allowing it to insinuate its its its dirty bolshevik claws into the baltics and simon had no answer to that he said that he said that he and halifax you know stood by their government and they hope for a speedy resolution and that to me is indicative assuming kennedy was adamant this other conversation developed and i i don't see why he would have lied about this after the war because there's only relayed this and that wouldn't exactly make him look good in the court of public opinion but he stated that if if you fight this war if you see it through if you wage a total war on the continent against germany you will destroy your country and and you will become a shadow of your former self if you even you know even if you even retain sovereign dominion over over your over the home territories owing to the idea that you know kennedy said no uncertain terms of roosevelt if adolf hitler goes germany will become a garrison communist state and after that so will france and if you think the uk is just going to somehow you know be able to to retain some sort of sovereign independence and missed amidst this bolshevik super state that extends from lady vlastock to the atlantic ocean you're you're deluding yourself halifax said he shared this view kennedy returned to washington he wrote a telegram to fdr immediately upon return saying it's imperative that as the president united states he assist britain in any way possible to end the war while she still could i mean that shows you how out of the loop kennedy was and i'm not saying that but shade on him but it shows you how he he he just completely shut out it's not just that he wasn't a fellow traveler with the new dealers and he'd been for all practical purposes banished from the beltway where he could conspire against you know roosevelt who was fast becoming his political nemesis you know and our worst nemeses are former friends if at least in political life but it he was in london and he was in you know moving in the same circles as churchill the fact that the fact that i mean it shows you how unthinkable it was that the new dealers were literally planning from inception to wage a war of annihilation against europe that even kennedy who did not really have illusions about the man of roosevelt or his inner circle like couldn't even fathom this i mean kennedy was basically a gangster okay he's not like he was some thief rich guy or you know some watching an insider you're the self made man and the way he made his fortune was not any way nice but i want to conclude here soon because i i want us to be able to kind of leapfrog into the war years and leave mister churchill as a dedicated topic behind but i do want to pull up something that i think is fascinating and i think the listeners will appreciate it okay churchill's october broadcast that we referenced and you know how i talked about a moment ago we talked about how i don't believe churchill's copy really originated with mister churchill okay listen to what churchill said this is word for word now he stated of all the wars that men have fought in their hard pilgrimage none was more noble than the great civil war in america nearly eighty years ago all the heroism of the south could not redeem their cause from the stain of slavery just as all the courage and skill with the germans always show in a war will not free them from the reproach of nazism with its intolerance and brutality now why the hell was a leaving something out there well why the hell is a british admiralty lord in nineteen thirty nine talking about the confederacy and how bad it is i'll tell you who's

[Pete Cano (Host)]

very fixed because it's answered it's already entered the zeitgeist of the of the

[Thomas (Historian/Host)]

focus yes but not but not of like some limey you know in in london in nineteen thirty nine i mean the civil war to him what's this what's the american civil war what's the south and this didn't this did not go over well and in in in in london people didn't know what he was talking they didn't get the reference a lot of them okay and in america people started out of left field but the the anti defamation league had literally been founded in the aftermath of leo frank being lynched and they're they viewed the south you know the reactionary you know anti semitic south as as their mortal enemy and there's i guarantee there's no way that churchill carted up this boogeyman of the confederacy of the united states like why why would churchill even be why would that be within within his his contemplation but it's provincialism and the kind of direct control of the focus over him and over everything he said you know this this was not twenty twenty two i mean even today i think that would be strange if boris johnson made some reference like that but in nineteen thirty nine it was just bizarre

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[Thomas (Historian/Host)]

and it i've listened to part of the speech it sounds like weird and stilted like churchill he usually sounds almost conversational his language is this kind of faux soaring language but it's not stilted you know that this it's a really weird speech this whole this whole speeches you know but it but that was you know this was this was the the twilight of churchill's wilderness years though because like we we mentioned a minute ago poor chamberlain you know not even a year later or right about a year later he he dropped dead you know the uk was a was yeah and i mean the war the sitskrieg had had been underway but i mean real hostilities were were unfolding in earnest the situation was collapsing it looked at that point to outsiders even though they said nothing even though the internal situation between moscow and berlin was reaching critical mass outside of that milou people thought that there's a genuine conqueror between moscow and in berlin the uk was actually losing the war churchill really got the nod replaced chamberlain because there was nobody else and he was probably the only man you know that voters really would have accepted without their you know being without their you know without without there being a you know some kind of internal crisis confidence crisis in parliament so the perfect storm of conditions you know namely it was because bus two would labor labor you know the tories and and then liberals ready to those throats and believe me the tories i don't believe that they wanted anything to do with churchill because they thought highly of him it was again he was the only man who who could who could it would fill the role and i mean again that owes to this unprecedented kind of full court press media campaign that sort of insinuated him as the as the as the the man of the hour even though he hadn't done anything but issue a lot of moral moral cant and and strange radio addresses referring to the anti semitism of the american south and you know palling around with with with jewish movie moguls in the mediterranean like but but again perception is reality and eventually perception becomes reality i know i know this episode was a a little less heavy than some but i again i i think it was i churchill's career is essential to understanding the revisionist argument and i i don't think i could have done it in less than three episodes and i i didn't want to just dramatically kind of jarringly change focus and get into the war in the same episode but i promise we'll get into the nitty gritty when we record again this week of you know world war two and how it developed and specifically we'll start off next session with with operation barbarossa and the the the war between the national socialists and and and the and the communists and i know that that's something that turns everybody on including myself

[Pete Cano (Host)]

yeah that sounds great since we got a couple minutes i got a question okay so you've brought it up a bunch of times paul and i talked about it a little bit yesterday when we were talking i think privately the nuremberg regime yes sir how did huac happen during the nuremberg

[Thomas (Historian/Host)]

regime what do you mean specifically well

[Pete Cano (Host)]

i mean it seems like it would go counter like that that kind of thing would be shut down you know searching for communists in the you know in hollywood in society in the government

[Thomas (Historian/Host)]

okay okay yeah i understand way to understand is two things okay the many aspects of the new deal were permanent okay i mean owing to a few things only the fact that that's just what you know remain the priority of the federal system but a lot of things particularly the concord with moscow that completely fell apart in nineteen forty nine okay the cold war was not supposed to happen and truman number one hated the russians even if he hadn't wrote stalin was not going to take a knee and be the junior partner in this kind of in literally this world regime of you know the united states you know in moscow with moscow as the junior partner like i just said you know kind of managing the planet and with the united states as having a monopoly on nuclear weapons and and you know with okay you know the the soviet union has a they got a permanent seat in the security council but you know they can they can always be they can always be over they can always be vetoed de jurean de facto by you know the united states uk france they weren't going to tolerate that and stalin stalin as you and paul got into i mean and i still gotta listen to your impulse show but i he i've got a sense of what you probably talked about you know yaki was onto something when he talked about the prague trials okay i people misconstrue that yaki wasn't saying and this and that you know oh you know the the eastern bloc is this great thing and they're becoming fascist what he was saying is that you know the the kind of primitives not not primitive and punitive terms primitives just speaking in the developmental terms you know this primitive kind of peasant population of slavs they had a common hatred of this cosmopolitan romanov type regime that like the jewish merchant class did they collaborated to kill it okay but once that threat was gone and then once like the vermont was no longer you know literally kicking in the door and slaughtering them like what what what reason do they have to collaborate they were totally at odds and obviously you know the the jewish element which was not better in moral terms or in terms of aptitude but was better situated in practical and power political terms to rule the soviet union the the majority wasn't going to tolerate that anymore and these these jewish these eastern jewish people like saw the writing on the wall okay so they threw their lot in with the united states and that's one way to understand it but just in pure power political terms you know the the despite the marshall plan despite the kind of anti colonial overtures of eisenhower which i think in this case were genuine in a lot of ways you know what what was called the colored world in less sensitive times they they weren't really with the program they they went to the moscow poll you know so it's so you've got america you got this nuremberg world system and it created a you know this is fading too because like there's a great biography of yak and piper you know he was under a death sentence and something happened in nineteen fifty six first his death sentence gets commuted and then he suddenly just gets like he suddenly gets clemency and they cut loose piper they cut loose all these dudes who had heavy who who commanded troops and heavy action against the red army like suddenly they're getting cut loose and suddenly you're seeing movies in hollywood about you know erwin rommel the great desert fox and he fought those dirty reds but he was he was a good german not one of those dirty nazis you know if you're gonna if it looks like you're gonna have to fight a total war that's going to go nuclear at some point with ivan and you're gonna need the germans to fight on literally the front line of the inner german border like you're gonna have to scale back a lot of your nuremberg at least for a time and that's what happened yeah you know this kind of this kind of give and take endured until the reagan administration man i mean you know because you're you're you're a little older than me i mean the bitburg moment reagan had okay it was nineteen eighty four man reagan was going to bitburg cemetery because he wanted to like stir or because he really really wanted to do he's like okay well i i i expect these guys like basically absorb the first probably nuclear blow from warsaw pack they i better not go around on their war dead you know i better say some nice things about him sometimes you know at least better not come off like some you know dogmatic anti fascist dude that was the reaction

[Pete Cano (Host)]

to that was insane oh yeah yeah i mean the ramones wrote a song

[Thomas (Historian/Host)]

about it yeah yeah yeah yeah we'll go to big bird or whatever yeah

[Pete Cano (Host)]

i mean it's like i mean that was i remember that was probably one of the first things i remember as a kid of being like wow people really do not i mean well of course they tried to kill him three years earlier but people really do not but people really do not like this

[Thomas (Historian/Host)]

guy no they made my dad really really livid you know my dad really liked reagan and my dad my dad doesn't like germany nearly as much as i do but you know my dad gets mad when you know because my dad's a military vet and also he was a you know he was a he was a big cold warrior and he no i mean i mean he was in the he was a military economist he and a nuclear game theorist he he actually waged the cold war albeit from a desk but he he got mad when people tried to put shade on the german army and stuff you know he's like even even though he's a lot more kind of conventional in his views but yeah it that's why it hey it's ryan seacrest here

[Ryan Seacrest]

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[Thomas (Historian/Host)]

conditions twenty one plus boston what was a strange you know why did he the you know roy cohn there's a reason why roy cohn got picked to prosecute the rosenberg because roy cohn wasn't just he wasn't just this kind of hotshot like young jewish lawyer like cone was like this in your face kind of jewish guy like i'm not saying that to be crass he was you know but i mean it so it's like then we're gonna have some irish catholic guy like mccarthy or like bobby kennedy you know sending these jewish people the electric chair you know they're gonna have wise ass like obviously ethnic roy cone do it it was a delicate minuet you know i mean that's why yaki very early on he wrote a few speeches for mccarthy now yaki had no trouble like birchers or like the mccarthy perspective but his idea was like well you know if this is gonna draw if this is going to raise anyone consciousness among these you know white ethnic catholic types about you know the truth like the true face of you know subversion and it's not that moscow was you know the the loci of all evil like some kind of sort of satanic force incarnate it's in fact in large part not exclusively but in large part you know the the impulse of this kind of hostile ethno sectarian diaspora i mean yeah it's a complicated issue but that that's the short answer i mean we could do a whole show about that if you want to sure sure but yeah that's a short answer and i got to i just yeah i just thought of all over text i gotta i gotta listen to your guys show tonight and i'll give you i'll give you full feedback okay paul is paul is great he's a great friend of mine and he's a

[Pete Cano (Host)]

really brilliant kid yep do your plugs

[Thomas (Historian/Host)]

and we'll end okay you can find me if if for some ungodly reason you want to no i about half my content is free on my sub stack that was not free it's only five bucks a month and even hobos can afford that and i i know because i've been a hobo it's real thomas seven seven seven dot substack dot com you can find me on t gram and the t grand mob has been growing exponentially and that is dope it's i'll share the link to it yeah yeah yeah yeah it's a t me slash the number seven h o m a s seven hundred seventy seven i got a couple weeks actually more like four weeks like my next steel storm novel will be dropping do imperium press check them out they're great not just because they publish my stuff but all their titles are great they got incredibly talented authors on staff and they're friends of ours so please support them and not amazon or some outlet like that and yeah i want to thank everybody sincerely for being so kind in their compliments i really mean that i'm very very honored and humbled by it and thank you very much pete no

[Pete Cano (Host)]

problem and next time we'll get into the hostilities i want to welcome everyone back to the p can yana show thomas is back how you doing thomas

[Thomas (Historian/Host)]

i'm very well pete thanks and again as always i'm sure people are getting tired of me repeating myself but i i really appreciate the positive comments and and support for this ongoing series it's really great and i mean that's the whole point you know i i know what my own ideas are and things and i mean i i i like having conversations with you pete and i'm always game for that but the reason we record these conversations is a for the benefit of people who might not be familiar with you know the body of a scholarship that we're talking about today i wanted to deep dive into operation barbarossa which probably most people know though some may not that was the code name for the for the german assault on the soviet union you know on june twenty second nineteen forty one and there's an absolute cataclysmic event you know a clash of literally millions of men on both sides across you know a thousand mile front you know utterly catastrophic losses the the kind of kind of clash of arms and men that without exaggeration has never been seen before and probably will never be seen again and at least not for a thousand years this has been on my mind a lot you know like i just like we were talking about right before we began recording i'm certainly not a military historian but you know it's a military dimension to revisionism because it it's you know it's a huge amount of it is pouring through conflict literature and dealing with you know dealing with the the entirety of the political horizon and there's obviously there's there's there's a major military dimension to that but as these this this unfortunate ukraine war that did not have to happen that is underway now you know these place names and these battle spaces these these were the same settings of hostilities you know during barbarossa and that's kind of fascinating to me i'm not a ghoul i'm not you know saying oh this is exciting i'm happy to you know there's some kind of remote spectator of of hostilities but it is fascinating how you know these places that have been quiet for you know three quarters of a century or once again a flame with the by the the dogs of war but yeah i want to deep dive into that today but first i i think this is such a huge topic and i don't think we're going to need to dedicate quite as much time to it as we did the career of mister churchill but we need to dive deep into the the theoretical foundations of the ideologies that created this clash you've got to look at the second world war i mean depending on where you're located in terms of your nationality you're going to approach the second world war differently like not just in terms of the narrative but what you emphasize like if you're to talk to a russian person you know he or she'd tell you about the great patriotic war and to them it didn't really ensue until june forty one you know because that was the war you know he taught some englishmen and you know he's if he's kind of accepted the the narrative of of court history and and you know as presented from the bully pulpit he'll probably drop some kind of hero narrative of mister churchill on you where he'll talk about dunkirk or something like that you know americans generally people you know i got introduced to the second world war as a little little kid because my mom's brother he was he was twenty two years older than her because he was her half brother and her her father was something of a a ladies man and he you know when he when he sired my mom he was supposed to fifty years old and his wife was twenty one okay which is which is great props to him i hope i hope uh as i age i can still attract pretty ladies if if it comes to uh if it comes to seeming like it it's time for me to sire an error but they had aside biogo herald who who's i my my middle name is his namesake he fought on tarawa against the japanese and you know when i was a little little kid he talked to me about fighting the japanese you know and not in an inappropriate way i mean but you know that that that was common you know like you you had a grandpa you had an uncle who you know fought the japs or something that was kind of front and center right which is why it was strange to me in school how you know owing to the owing to the demographics where i grew up and and the political climate of the of the nineteen eighties you know we'd hear all about this you know quote unquote holocaust theology and things because that that didn't really feature loom large you know and but my point is that you know as with all conflicts and historical apocalypse events you know different things are emphasized but in revisionist terms like objectively i agree a lot with ernst nolte he talks about he talked about the european civil war you know spanning from nineteen fourteen to nineteen forty five you know he looked at it like the thirty years war okay um if the listeners are familiar with that you know it's kind of terrible ongoing sectarian conflict between kingdoms and duchies characterized by shifting alliances and and kind of conflicts within conflict and things like that i don't wholly accept nolte's i accept nolte's metaphysical description of the the concepts and kind of the you know because he's very much a hegelian or he was he's dead now in terms of in terms of the kind of for like a better to characterize it metaphysical causes you know the kind of human causes in terms of ideas and how ideas animated people to work i i accept basically what he posits entirely but i diverge somewhat from him describing it as a conflict basically analogous to the thirty years war i think of world war two basically as a war between hitler roosevelt and stalin okay the nazi soviet war as is known kind of in the anglo sphere with america even you know entering on the side of the soviet union very early on prior to that there was a there was a kind of typical of the modern era power political collision between france and germany you know owing to kind of conventional geopolitics and that's one of the reasons france after being defeated militarily basically made real peace with germany you know we'll get into that later in the series too but some people might be surprised to learn that when the americans landed in north africa in forty three the first forces that engaged them were french who were fighting on the side of the axis okay the uk the uk's war against germany which ensued in nineteen thirty nine at you know when when the uk declared declared war on berlin i view the uk as having been defeated at dunkirk and i mean after that the war was basically over until the the terror bombing was was initiated you know by by by the british bomber arm and but that really i i look at the uk it's kind of liquidating it's not just its assets but its sovereignty to the united states and becoming quite literally a client regime you know and then so i look at the uk as losing its war against germany just as france lost its war in nineteen forty and in the

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[Thomas (Historian/Host)]

becoming a client of the united states in this truly global war of the soviet union united states against the german reich which by that point you know had a million non germans under arms in the us and become had become really kind of a truly european army leon de talks about this and a lot of right wing guys who are who are into you know third reich history and things you know know a lot about leon de grill okay so that that's my perspective i wouldn't bore people to death with that kind of elaborate introduction but that was great what i want to get into now is what was the origin of the german soviet war and why did it happen and first i want to tackle some myths that have to be sort of dealt with before i get into it there's kind of this fool's canard that a lot of kind of pop history deals with and you'll even hear people like barstool types and even you know even some you know even some people who should know better you know like history teacher types they'll say things like oh well hitler's big mistake was assaulting the soviet union the only way germany wins world war two is defeating the soviet union that's how you defeat churchill that's how you defeat roosevelt that's how you create fortress europe that's how you make europe a superpower that can compete on the world stage in the era of great space politics okay whatever you consider to be the primary war ambition in objective terms whatever you consider to be you know what should have been the correct orientation military and political of berlin the only way to accomplish that is the soviet union goes down okay so this idea that hitler was just kind of looking at a menu of where should i attack and oh this was the wrong decision to attack here that's not really a meaningful understanding of the strategic landscape okay now why do i say that a few reasons first of all everything about the third reich in military terms and the way it structured itself and the way its doctrine became progressive to the the you know the the sort of anticipated deployment of of of forces to uh you know to hitler's geostrategic vision of what of what would secure uh europe um and and enable it to compete on the world stage in power political terms everything about that calculus owes to the reality of the soviet union being a bargaining superpower and its productive capacity outstripping every other state on this planet except potentially the united states but even for a

[Pete Cano (Host)]

second okay so i even i saw this on a comment on twitter yesterday you're saying it sounds like what you're implying is is that hitler was fighting for basically all of europe where a lot of people will say hitler just wanted to take every country in europe and make it part of germany he wanted to make europe all basically under his power so that's when you say it like that it can sound like that and that's not at all what

[Thomas (Historian/Host)]

happened well there's a couple here's the thing i made the point before that you know hitler was a habsburg austrian as everybody knows but he thought like a prussian yet somehow he also appealed to these kind of munich bavarian types hitler had to be somewhat cosmopolitan in order to facilitate his ascendancy and i don't think that was just a cynical ploy i think he believed that but it's also hitler made the point again and again that nationalism was dead you know cabinet warring is you know was dead it was it was a dead end it wasn't going to lead anything you know and he was constantly talking about great space paradigms as as being the future of power political hegemony but also with the exception of poland which the soviets and and the and the and the the german reich just just destroyed as a political and cultural or as attempted destroy as a cultural entity and destroyed as a political entity other than the independent state of croatia which really was kind of a mirror of of the of the national socialist state albeit with its own indigenous characteristics hitler very much opposed exporting some kind of national socialist paradigm to other political cultures that's why romania we were talking about you know i made the point that antonescu was i believe hitler's best ally in a lot of ways he he wasn't as close personally as to the furor as mussolini was but romania committed relative to the size of the population romania committed a huge contingent of men to the eastern front antonescu was a war hero in his own right he was a holder of the knight's cross he had a great understanding of of military and strategic matters hitler favored antonescu over the iron guard he's like he did not want some radically fascist or fascist story regime or some national socialist type regime taking power in romania you know nor did he in in in the in in slovakia nor did he in bulgaria in order to be in you know you could you know outside of out and and in france too i know people talk about vichy france you know the it's notable that until it became clear that there was going to be no concord and no peace between the uk and germany that uh you know the uh the germans uh scrupulously avoided occupying uh occupying uh france outside of the essential coastal areas i mean they didn't do that because they were nice guys but it you know the point being that if the germans were hell bent and you know kind of dest destroying europe and restructuring it in the image of of the furor of national socialism they that's not the way you go about that and you

[Pete Cano (Host)]

can say and franco and salazar would have had something to say about that

[Thomas (Historian/Host)]

just using two examples yeah exactly so i mean it's more complicated you know it's not it's not a question of whether hitler was a good guy or not i mean in but in objective terms that's not that that's not really the the sensibility that guided him and i mean yeah there were men in the okw and there certainly were men in the in the national socialist party who had a very chauvinistic view of things you know in in racial terms and in ethnic terms but i mean that's that's just characteristic of europe and you know regardless even germany today which is you know this rump state shadow of its former self you know europe it orbits around berlin i mean that's inevitable you know i mean in some basic sense so yeah i if the germans got their way when i say the germans i mean the the third reich definitely nothing would have happened on the continent within their sphere of influence and dominance without their say so by this idea that they would have just created puppet regimes everywhere like you know characteristic of the warsaw pact vis a vis the soviet union like that's not the case and that i you know what i'm going to dive into in a moment is how it wasn't just military exigencies that you know the reality of power politics that that led the fur and and and the party as well as you know the military apparatus and the and the kind of industrial national economic elite to kind of structure the state and its productive capacities the the combat the soviet union in material terms but really even if you're not a hegelian like i am you've got to understand the emergence of national socialism it can only be understood as in dialectical conflict with communism and what animated people to fight against the soviet union wasn't that you know they loved the furor so much or they loved berlin or they all wanted to be dominated by germany it was because they didn't view another path to european survival as a discrete cultural form and way of life you know to say nothing of of of of politically sovereign and independent states within what could be considered a european you know structure without you know without confederation yeah yeah for better or worse but it the point is that you know you wouldn't have had you would not have had millions of literally you know a million non germans in the waffen ss a good portion of which were volunteers if you know if if they were just fighting for you know the on behalf of of of you know bringing the german boot heel down on their neck or something you know i mean it's not that that's a gross oversimplification and you know german racialism we might find it off putting in the twenty first century if i make the point again and again that's the way everybody on the planet thought okay not everybody thought in terms of you know we're not so aggressively and dialectically hostile to jews and what they viewed as jewish power but you better believe that in america eugenics was what everybody thought was you know the correct kind of application of anthropology you better believe everybody in the uk and everybody in japan viewed a hierarchy of racism okay so it's not it's not weird that the germans viewed nationality in terms of race or had this kind of strange idea that you know your blood or in our terms you know dna but in those days obviously you know that the human genome hadn't been mapped and people didn't understand those kinds of things but the even people who are relatively traditional minded and even people who had some affinity still for religion and believe me religion took a huge hit in the twentieth century thankfully that has abated and that's a subject for another show but you know it's another thing that's mischaracterized this idea that oh the germans were these crazy guys who who had this kind of biologically determinist view of human behavior that's that's the way everybody thought you know i'd argue the germans were somewhat less fixated that way than the americans like america literally had like francis galton and and guys like lothrop stoddard who was a journalist you know they they were literally fixated on this idea that you know morphological characteristics are indicative of behavior and potential like don't get me wrong i believe like race is a significant biological characteristic i'm not saying otherwise but they were foolish about it and they they talked about it in ways that don't make sense you know like your your culture is not biologically programmed or something you know it's not that's that's that's nonsense but so that's important to understand but getting back to there's a quote i wanted to drop it's about one of the only things that i think is kind of remains timely about minecamp i made the point before in our own discussions as well as i think on the record minecamp is was really an election year screed it's not supposed to have this perennial enduring significance hitler didn't really get into either metaphysics or kind of deep historicism it was it's really kind of a an appeal of the you know an election year appeal to weimar voters that's why the national socialists are gonna you know pursue policy that's the correct path forward but there is there is and was i think in most editions it's on page sixty if i'm wrong with the addition you or anybody has like forgive me that but i'm gonna read this in a moment and i try and avoid like direct quoting text but here i think it's it's it's timely let me let me find what i'm looking for okay it something nolte talked about was fear of what he called practical transcendence i mean that's somewhat there's not so much loss in translation as there's not a deep metaphysical tradition in american political theory i mean owing to the owing to the fact that you know america is so kind of bound up with the rationalist tradition and and such that america does have kind of a a metaphysical tradition and it's in its indigenous philosophy it's it's basically aristotelian and bible protestant which is my own heritage i'm not in any way suggesting that's bad but it's not it doesn't really shed light on the european mind okay practical transcendence and the term nolte was talking about it's kind of a heideggerian concept it refers to conceptual horizons of the past kind of being destroyed by collision with modern institutions and ideas and ways of interpreting and experiencing the world around us you know so whether we're talking about beloved institutions of culture or you know or or social organization or of of labor you know becoming outmoded and man being kind of ripped out of these environments that's provided them not just with an identity but with a kind of historical rootedness and and and and consciousness that you know indoors across generations you know the process by which that sort of thing is becomes remote if not out and out abolished is referred as practical transcendence and within noltes and to some lesser degree heidegger's paradigm now hitler was not a philosopher and in purport to be but he he acknowledged in some basic sense that some of this is inevitable because that's just you know one of the crosses proverbially european man is the bear not just as you know he experiences hyper modernity but european man you know kind of being enamored with you know the you know the the faustian ethos and spirit and being enamored with technics and technology it he he runs a real risk of losing himself in these things okay but of course to hitler one of the most insidious iterations of of this tendency towards radical transcendence was marxism and you know marxism was a perversion of these things deliberately and a kind of weaponized iteration of these things because it came out of the jewish world of social existence now hitler wasn't saying this is a conspiracy but he was saying that there's an intrinsic hostility of the jewish culture as an end it the way it expresses itself politically is always in in a form of hostile discourse okay tyler reddick here

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[Thomas (Historian/Host)]

so the way hitler described marxism and what it represents to european man in mein kampf he said and i quote the jewish doctrine of marxism rejects the aristocratic principle of nature and replaces the eternal privilege of power and strength by the mass of numbers and their dead weight weight thus it denies the value of personality in man it contests the significance of nationality and race and thereby withdraws from humanity the premise of its existence and culture as a foundation of the universe this doctrine would bring about the end of any order intellectually conceivable to man and as in the greatest of all recognizable organisms the result of an application of such a law could only be chaos on earth it can only be the destruction it could only be destruction of the inhabitants of this planet if with the help of his marxist creed the jew is victorious over the other peoples of the world his crown will be the funeral wreath of humanity and this planet will as it did thousands of years ago move through the ether devoid of men that sounds very melodramatic and it is you can even say it's overwrought language but adolf hitler believed this one hundred percent and that is the end result of the marxist enterprise even if you don't accept that it's a jewish idea or that it was born of you know a jewish world of social existence i'm not here to argue for that point or unpack that but it is indisputable that the removal of man from history marxism by its own postulate seeks to literally end history and you know remove man from the kind of intellectual slavery in their view of these conceits of metaphysics or of god or of anything because in the marxist wilderness paradigm these things are all contrivances of of of the the rationalized power dynamics you know relating to labor and capital and authority and hierarchy that's imposed you know to to satisfy the demands of those things you know it's it's it's it's an ideology of cultural annihilation masquerading in some basic sense as an economic science you know now that's not to say that marxists all you know rubbing their hands together and saying oh i want to destroy europe or i want to destroy white christian civilization certainly some of them did think that but probably most of them didn't but we're talking about the way man instinctively responds to a lot of them still do yes indeed and i'd say more so do now in terms of raw percentage than before but you know the problem the reason why ideas develop this kind of monumental power to animate people is because people are taken in by them in apocalypse terms and when people are confronted by by crises you know particularly you know not just a physical mortal crisis but at the same time you know a kind of a kind of a kind of psychological a psychological crisis of their conceptual horizon you know not just to them personally but the entire culture which they're mired you know this this whole kind of conceptual horizon imploding on itself and you know values that preceding generations could take for granted you know no longer having a context and man no longer having any pole stars to orient himself within his life individually or among a community in which he lives you know this people people become desperate to to make sense of of these chaotic you know circumstances and they get they get very much taken in by by paradigms that seem to make sense and seem to reflect you know the the concrete circumstances in which they're they're found so that's that's essential that's essential to to understand why you know the national socialists were not just making a boogeyman of marxism or something and they weren't just they weren't they weren't just trying to rationalize what amounted to like a racial or tribal prejudice against the eastern slavs under the under a veneer of of ideology or something now there may have been an aspect of that because there certainly wasn't love lost between the germans and the eastern slavs and particularly a man like adolf hitler who would have viewed serbia essentially as responsible for the great war you know and opposite hitler within his coalition these prussian officer types you know who would have viewed the eastern slavs not unlike you know the way like a white man in the west would have you the apache or something you know in in the frontier days i i'm not saying that to put shade on either indians or slavic people i'm talking about how they were viewed as this fearful other that was you know somehow savage and dangerous but the the if you want to understand national socialism i mean yes there was positive characteristics i don't mean positive like this is laudable i i'm not issuing a value judgment i mean proactive spontaneous characteristics that gave rise ideology but you know an equal percentage of its content was like ethically i mean and conceptually was reactive and owed to the the the conceptual challenge posed by communism and this was not just something remote like we talked about in one of our first episodes that it you know quite literally you know in in berlin and munich especially you know where the the bavarian munich bavarian soviet you know actually for a brief period was was the reigning government i mean albeit they captured sovereign power through violence but you know this you know and and to say nothing of what happened in the baltics where you know you had many many german refugees you know who owing to fear of being ethnically cleansed when the when the the bolsheviks exported attempt to export the revolution there but so i mean this was very this is something that german people had first hand knowledge of you know it's not just a question of them becoming fearful about something remote or that they read in the papers or whatever but moving on to the kind of concrete circumstances one of the big myths is of the of the german soviet war and and stalin's intentions opposite adolf hitler's was this idea that while the soviet union was this inward looking kind of state and it you know the soviets were just you know the russians were just kind of primitive and you know stalin declared socialism in one country because he had no interest in a truly global power politic and and also like within that kind of fatuous narrative there's a claim that like well you know germany was this aggressive was this aggressive power that was assaulting all its neighbors you know like austria czechoslovakia and poland and you know the soviet union was pursuing a a path of relative peace over badly it treated people within its own borders that that's a bold face lie and we're going to talk about that as of nineteen forty owing to aggressive invasion and conquest as well as as was the case being of the baltic as was the case with the baltic in romania by by coercion and threat by nineteen forty the soviet union had expanded its territory by four hundred and twenty six zero zero zero square kilometers okay if you want for reference that is the size of the entire service area of what the german reich had been as of nineteen nineteen this is a huge amount of territory okay the soviet union spontaneously invaded finland it invaded poland you know days weeks after the vermont did and i mean as we talked about last episode when joe kennedy posed to john simon like why why why doesn't it bother you you know mister churchill or mister chamberlain that the soviet union assaulted assaulted poland too like nobody can answer this question but you know so you have in addition to the kind of uh foundation that we already established with respect to the you know the german political mind for better or worse you know viewing not just germany but the entire european way of life coming under threat from marxist leninism you had quite literally what was becoming the world's first superpower in the soviet union okay and germany despite the fact that they had pretty soundly you know defeated the the british army at dunkirk germany still was engaged in a state of war with the uk which still had an incredibly powerful navy in relative terms they still had you know a product capacity to reconstitute a strategic air arm which they certainly did do to devastating effect we're going to get into that in a later episode but by nineteen forty you know not only to have the soviet union which as we just discussed you know had aggressively annexed a huge amount of territory germany was engaged essentially they had a hostile front to defend that stretched from norway to the pyrenees as a potential aspect as a potential battle space okay they were in grave danger of losing access to romanian petroleum which is really their only source of of petrol if you know to fuel their war machine as any modern war machine is fueled by if if stalin had given the order to you know formally annex romania and proceed to embargo any you know any access germany would have to essential commodities therein like what i'm getting at here is that you know germany was in a position of abject inferiority in a material terms and military terms and geostrategic terms so not only this idea that the soviet union was benign laughable but it's it's you know germany was in a very critical position now something interesting happened not just interesting but critical in my opinion in on november twelfth and thirteen nineteen forty stalin transmitted a series of demands to molotov as i think people probably know molotov was not just a man who invented a particular kind of cocktail that people light on fire and throw it you know the british police and northern ireland and things but it he he was the soviet he was the soviet foreign minister and he was within within the paradigm of uh the soviet power you know until from from nineteen seventeen until you know the fall of the berlin wall there was very very little leeway that that people had in in the foreign in the foreign policy establishment you know to to to negotiate on their own terms or according to their own instincts you know and particularly stalin he very rigidly controlled what was said what was guaranteed what official terms were from moscow so what i'm getting is that whatever molotov conveyed to berlin you know whether he was talking to ribbon tro whether he was talking to you know the right chancery whoever he was talking to it was as good as coming from stalin okay that's that's not a myth it's it's not me simplifying circumstances to sh up a point or something it's inarguable and pretty much everybody agrees on that revisionist or not the demands that stalin transmitted were basically this the non aggression pact that hitler had signed that ribbentrop and molotov had signed at hitler's behest you know the ten year non aggression pad between the soviet union and berlin stalin periodically was issuing demands as to what it would require for it to be honored now of course he was very sly about the way he phrased this he wasn't saying okay you'll either abide these demands i have or willing to attack you but the inference was obvious and it was the only inference that could be drawn and this will become clearer as i we get more into this conversation but on november twelfth and thirteen what the demands were was molotov said that in order for the soviet union to be able to peaceably you know coexist you know with germany as well as well as provide for its own security and and as well as the facilitate its ability to deploy in depth you know it would need to increase its sphere of influence to include bulgaria romania hungary greece yugoslavia and all of now all of finland not just archangel but all of finland and hitler had albeit frosty but reasonably friendly relations with gustav mannerheim the marshal of finland and obviously this was stalin basically demanding that you know germany abandon any any any pretension of of finland as some sort of you know line in the sand against soviet expansion all right this is incredibly brazen and you've got to ask yourself okay if supposedly stalin was this man kind of year of the third reich or if at all you know if the soviet union was was somehow weak immaterial terms you know enforces and being relative to the third reich you know how could he be issuing these demands that doesn't make any sense and also if if hitler was this kind of reckless maniac who just gave attack orders you know without thinking i mean why wouldn't this be inviting an immediate assault like none of this makes sense obviously unless one's willing to kind of reject reject the kind of prevailing areas now obviously this molotov these molotov demands which you know the fact that we're stalin demands obviously i mean there's really only two options here i mean germany could have opted to fight and in the case of germany that would have meant and did mean a preemptive assault or simply accept soviet hegemony and in in in the twentieth century with the advent of strategic arms not just not just nuclear weapons which of course didn't exist yet but there was not a full understanding in nine hundred forty of how strategic arms could be applied but and then what these what the outcome would be in military terms but it was understood that the battlefield techniques were going to be able to create absolutely devastating catastrophes for the state under assault if they did not have adequate countermeasures okay i mean so what i'm getting at is that a if germany had remained dormant and and just kind of demurred to soviet demands the soviets not wouldn't i think the soviet i wrote out my mind the soviets plan to assault germany and we're going to get into that in a minute but even if the soviets had did not just by virtue of the fact that they would have been so exponentially more powerful then their next strongest strategic rival in germany like it wouldn't have it wouldn't have mattered they would have you know in in power political terms moscow would have dictated what was going to transpire in in europe and in europe's orbit now i rely a lot on direct testimony i think people have noticed now i've been told that that's a conceptual bias of mine because i was a lawyer i don't think that's the case i think that direct testimony is one of the only ways we can get inside the minds of people who lived in these apocalypse moments and it's and and and and and understand what their perceptions were okay obviously there's an issue of how credible the declarant is but if you're discriminating and i i think over time when you see patterns and it kind of quorum emerges of what people in in governmental roles thought we can get to the truth of what perception was and joachim hoffman he corralled he's a german historian very heterodox historian i highly recommend a book he wrote called stalin's war of extermination but interspersed with that book are a lot is a lot of testimony from people in the soviet government and the soviet military apparatus and people from all walks okay everybody from apparatus who are primarily political commissars to you know officers and ncos in the red army the people who are defectors to the dharma and it's there's a basic agreement here there's a woman named i'm i'm probably butchering this pronunciation i know i always add that caveat and i'm sorry if that's the case once again but a woman named wanda vasilevska she was the chairwoman of what was called euphemistically the union of polish patriots now this was the expat communist league in the ussr okay after the during the polish military junta and after okay and like a lot of these people went on to form kind of the core of the you know warsaw pet client state after after the war now what she attested to in nineteen sixty four i believe the first historian she discloses to is robert conquest but it's become you'll find this in a lot of different treatments okay not just revisionist treatments but her statement was this about the orientation on the eve of barbarossa within moscow she said i remember that we communists regardless go ahead no no no she says i remember that we communists regardless of the regardless of the official position of the soviet government we were all of the opinion that the apparent friendly attitude towards germany was only a tactic of the soviet government that in reality the situation was entirely different after all let's not forget that it was already clear to us even at that time that a german soviet war was approaching regardless the official announcement we believed the war was drawing near and we waited for it every day ready to

[Ryan Seacrest]

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[Thomas (Historian/Host)]

stalin told me at that time there would be war with the germans sooner or later this means that indeed at that time i already had the assurance of and confirmation from the highest authority that we were right to expect war there's like i said there's there's i'm not gonna endlessly relay all these testimonials but you know like i said there's there's probably half a dozen declarations you know from everybody from men in in molotov's orbit to you know like i said some of the defectors from who went down a servant was called the vlasov army you know these were not this was a very diverse coterie of people okay and it's obviously not itself i mean it's not absolutely persuasive but what i think is what i think is indisputable in in terms of its persuasive weight is what deployments were as of june twenty second nineteen forty one or the date of barbarossa okay what the red army had deployed on june twenty second nineteen forty one in offensive deployment on the western frontier and deployed in depth you know behind that front it was twenty four zero zero zero tanks over eighteen hundred of which were t thirty four s which i believe everybody stipulates was the best all around tank platform of the war fifteen hundred those t thirty four s are manufactured in the first six months of nineteen forty one okay that that's an incredible production schedule frankly for the time okay they had twenty three two hundred and forty five military aircraft amassed since nineteen thirty eight and that's incredible too close to four thousand of which were of latest design and inarguably not obsolescent okay they had one hundred forty eight thousand artillery pieces they close to three hundred submarines you know which is i realized that i realized the distinction between offensive and defensive wars is dubious and we'll get into that a little bit too but i don't think anybody can claim that submarines are are a defensive measure i mean i mean i i and towards that end the the t thirty even the even the soviet models that were viewed as inferior and again i'm not a military expert at all and it's not my forte but platforms like the t thirty five and the t twenty six they were specifically designed as countermeasures to earlier german panzer models and they were categorically categorically superior to panzer three if not superior to the panzer four and they all had heavy armament that was tailored to kill vermont tanks you know i mean this this is why they were developed the total armed strength in the weeks immediately prior may fifteenth nineteen forty one the soviets had three hundred three divisions two hundred fifty eight of those infantry armored artillery in other words ground combat element were arrayed offensively deployed on the frontier against the german reich they were supported by one hundred and sixty five flight regiments mobilized in direct support of of the ground element the general staff reported after the onset of hostilities the general staff of the red army that is this is august nineteen forty one

[Ryan Seacrest]

even

[Thomas (Historian/Host)]

with even with the losses incurred which were catastrophic in the opening weeks of barbara so keep that in mind soviet forces and beings were between three hundred thirty and three hundred fifty divisions they were facing off against just over eighteen hundred non obsolescent german tanks and silver pelled assault guns and the luftwaffe threw essentially everything it had at the soviet union and we'll get into this later too i mean the german again i don't want to get too much into the nitty gritty of military hardware and minutia but it's relevant as the perception and forces in being and what we can extrapolate from those forces being to intent the the reich deployed twenty five hundred com already german aircraft but overwhelmingly i mean and then the luftwaffe was not did not have a strategic capability it really did not that's one of the reasons why the battle of britain even though it's talked about in these catastrophic terms was nothing compared to the the area bombing raids you know that that killed tens of thousands in one day you know of the allies and the it was a completely different orientation towards towards air war and it was almost exclusively dedicated to ground attack and in tactical exigencies but what i think is more significant is red army doctrine i i think it is in some ways and i'm not trying to be corny i think it was in some ways as the original revolution in military affairs the red army beginning with lenin you know lenin fancied himself a political soldier and he really was he wasn't just you know some he wasn't just some partisan type who who kind of declared himself a general or something he he had great aptitude for certain kind of warfare and what became red army doctrine you know from nineteen seventeen eighteen the revolutionary days you know until the last days of the soviet union came from lenin and lenin declared that you know the red army was it's the function of the red army was was it was it was literally the armed element of the party you know and it its purpose was to was to bring about socialist aims by by armed force that's the only reason it existed you know because within the marxist paradigm you know warfare is just you know a means by which capitalists either profit or sustain their dominance or or or or sacrifice you know surplus labor and and lump and proletariat elements that you know can't can't be disposed of in in more profitable ways so congress with that particular claim about history anyway you know the the only the only correct use of of a standing army would be to implement revolutionary aims and to aggressively export those aims towards that end what became official soviet military doctrine theory rather which translated doctrine was was the assumption that modern war is just no longer declared you know not only is this a capitalist contrivance and why why should we participate in these fictions you know relating to you know treaties and and the appearance of lawfulness but you know the the nature of of of of combined arms and technology driven warfare surprise has a paralyzing effect that's what the red army field duty regulations declared in nineteen in the nineteen thirty nine edition it said literally surprise is a paralyzing effect on the enemy therefore all military action must be carried out with the greatest concealment and greatest rapidity and if you want to know if you want if you want an example about this translated to doctrine both the soviet attack on poland and the soviet assault on finland in nineteen thirty nine there was no declaration of war there was no communication of a diplomatic nature there wasn't even an announcement by which you know finisher polish you know representatives were banished from moscow or something it was just a massive assault both from the blue okay so there you go i mean this wasn't something that was put to paper as you know by you know fevered revolutionary types but didn't have any real world precedent so what everybody learned real quick is that when the red army assaults it it is a bolt from the blue assault you know they there's not going to be early warning you know there's not there's not going to be a formal declaration there's not going to be some community some cryptic communique even that you know says there's no longer good offices between us diplomatically you know you're going to know you're at war with them because they're going to be assaulting and mass numbers across your border you know the way yakim hoffman translated a lot of this literature not just in the field duty regulations but from other official dispatches of the red army high command and i don't speak or read russian but miss her hoffman certainly did he's dead now and what he translated was these five points the first was the red army is an offensive army the most offensively oriented of all armies them speaking of themselves always conduct the red army will always conduct war on enemy territory with fewest possible friendly casualties and it will always aim to annihilate the enemy completely politically and militarily the proletariat in the hostile country is always a potential ally of soviet power and they will support the struggle of the red army through a bolts in the rear of the enemy army and this will be called this must be cultivated war preparations are preparations for attack defensive measures serve solely to protect preparations for attack and the execution of an offensive attack in the facing direction and finally the red army must at all cost preclude any possibility of the penetration of hostile forces into the territory of the ussr now again this isn't just minutiae of interest you know military sociologists or people who who like to study the the soviet union of history if this is your declared military doctrine taken together with all these other variables i mean what how probable is it how credible is it this claim that you know the soviet union was this kind of fearful garrison state that would just wait was waiting for the germans to attack but hoping they would not i mean that would never happen i know this is a cliche and i it's not as a cliche because it bears out somewhat in truth operationally the reputation of the prussians and later the germans was that they jumped the gun and assault too soon the rep the cliche or reputation of this other russians and later the soviets was that they wait too long and i'd argue this bore out in the ukraine situation but that's not what we're talking about the claim basically of court history is that you know stalin was some sort of you know he may have been a bad man and he may have been an intriguer and a machiavellian brute but he somehow had no designs on aggressive conquest of europe despite these you know despite this these massive swaths of territory that the soviet union is similar to hostility you know the claim is that he was somehow fearful of adolf hitler both as a historical personage and as and as well as you know fearful of germany despite the fact that it was it was it was grossly disadvantaged in terms of you know forces and being and material assets and resources but and also at most kind of incredibly is the claim that well you know yeah maybe the soviets were anticipating war but they were just waiting to be attacked i mean that that's totally at odds with with not just their stated doctrine but with the entire organization organizational structure and ideological culture the soviet union at the time to say nothing of their deployment and again i don't sorry i don't want to get too deeply into military minutia not because it's not interesting but it's first of all i'm not the guy to do that it's not my wheelhouse but also does have to be said though even accounting for that you know one of the reasons the soviets were so devastated in the early weeks of of barbarossa i mean yeah they had problems with command and control you know they they had they had they had some officers they had some general officers who owed their role to the political reliability rather than aptitude i mean yes the vermont and the waffen ss were incredibly tough incredibly game and incredibly brutal but the the red army wasn't was an offensive deployment they they weren't arrayed to absorb a heavy you know killer combined arms blow across a massive front from the vermont they just were not you know and that's one of the reasons this happened i mean if the soviets were you know hunkered down and dug in and and and and fearfully awaiting a bear mocked assault i mean we know how the russians deploy when that's what they're anticipating and they deploy like they did at kursk and it's it's textbook deep battle and it's devastating to the attacker you know i mean that's you don't need to be a military man or some kind of armchair general to perceive this it

[Pete Cano (Host)]

and you could have saw some of that from history i mean just look at the spanish civil

[Thomas (Historian/Host)]

war yeah yeah yeah

[Pete Cano (Host)]

franco's forces were that were killing commies the communists were killing everyone they're flaying priests and nuns i mean they are basically they're not while they're trying to take over they're

[Thomas (Historian/Host)]

also trying to punish yeah definitely awful stuff was was carried out and yeah that's not not to go too often a tangent but that's one of the things that really stiffened world opinion particularly in europe against you know the communist or euphemistically laws in spain is because the it sounds like it it sounds like propaganda stuff but the nuns really were being raped and you know the you had these checker types going into cemeteries were clergy people were interred and and defacing the remains i mean like disgusting stuff that would only occur to somebody if they were animated by a real hatred of of the national culture and yeah so there's not i mean that's that's a hugely important point i mean not only as we're talking about earlier not only was a where the germans not not only was communism and revolutionary communism not this remote thing that they only knew of kind of as this abstraction that might threaten them you know they these these guys in the party is like like like rosenberg and like shooting a richter who fell at at munich in twenty three like these guys basically were refugees from the baltic because they were being ethnic cleansed you know these guys who constituted the kind of backbone of the of the of the most dedicated free core elements that you know ended up taking up the national socialist banner in the sa they they they fought they fought the kpd in the street and they fought against the the the munich soviet and yeah the the the war in spain i mean it wasn't some mystery as to how how the red army fights you know i mean they these these spanish republicans they were you know they they were communists they weren't republicans they no matter what you know some of the literature was that was promoted in english speaking newspapers and things or english language newspapers but the they were they were trained and outfitted by by checkers and by red army officers and cut their teeth you know fighting czarus and things you know so there wasn't this big mystery as the as to how the red army fights and what their what their doctrine was and the fact that their doctrine to your point you know ideological commitment was wasn't separable from their tactical orientation but it i'll i'll i'll wrap up soon and realize or coming up on an hour but the something that something too that i think nearshire got into this in one of his more recent books i i like mirror shine right i don't know the man i mean i like his work product and i yeah but i think he's i think some of his stuff is kind of middlebrow deliberately because he's trying to appeal to a more mass audience than some political scientists are buddy there's some pretty heavy stuff even that said in some of his even in some of his more polemical works and one of his books is called why leaders lie and he made the point that you know states that are regardless of political regardless their formal political apparatus whatever it's declared structure is whether it holds itself out as a democracy you know whether you're talking about you know a fascist state of old when you're talking about you know one of these retrograde arab monarchies whatever kind of state you're talking about states that are approaching states that are mired in in existential emergencies you know conditions approaching out and out war or states that are actually mired in conditions of of total war one thing leaders really don't do is just tell lies publicly or to their where you can particularly rely upon the truth of the matter asserted is when they're talking to people who constitute a control group either the military or the political apparatus because they tell lies in that circumstance not only could it lead to grave consequences of in terms of existential national security outcomes but it also means that you know it's it's self defeating you know because a man who's not a man who's not going to tell the truth in in in in life and death conditions is is not a man who's fit for leadership so you can rely pretty much on what hitler and stalin hey it's bubba wallace from twenty three eleven racing you know what feels like forever sitting on a plane waiting for takeoff good thing i've got jumba casino with daily boost and social casino games on tap this is the kind of fun that makes time fly why not turbocharge your downtime play now and at chumbac casino dot com let's

[Ryan Seacrest]

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[Thomas (Historian/Host)]

apply said on the eve of barbarosa and certainly when it was underway and on may fifth nineteen forty one i don't know exactly how this was organized and i'm sure some russian fellas or ladies who are listening if they want to weigh in in the the comments later i believe there was a unitary military academy in the early soviet days that everybody went to okay whether they were navy or whether they were army i don't know that for certain so whatever the whatever the whatever the red army military academy was where army officers went stalin appeared to much fanfare at the graduation ceremony on may fifth nineteen forty one and obviously that's only a few days after you know mayday was the big you know gala day for communists the so stalin addresses a speech to this to this graduating class now mind you it's this is all like young officers about to get a commission and and and a bunch of party honchos and generals so i mean it's not it's not properly secret but it's not stalin's not you know addressing you know the soviet people and he's certainly not going on the radio he stated that these men were a stride history these young officer graduates because the because the r doctrin was now to quote abandon defensive tactics and adopt a military policy of attack operations and he came back to this point again and again throughout the speech that you know you are the spear point as it were of the party and you know we're you know we we we are exclusively a revolutionary apparatus you know we are not a defensive army you know so you met our strike history because you're literally gonna you know bring you're gonna bring socialism to the planet essentially you know and this is not hyperbole this is not you know some kind of motto that appears under the heraldic hammer and sickle in the poet bureau i mean this this was something that was taken very seriously you know and this this this was really validated and i'll wrap up with this kind of final testimony and again forgive me if i'm butchering the name zelenkov i believe the pronunciation gn zillinkov he was a communist party official of some prominence he rose pretty rapidly in the hierarchy he became a commissar in the red army he then became commander in chief of the thirty second army on the ground and finally he ended up defecting to the vermont and he served with the vlasov army vlasov was a lieutenant i believe he was equivalent of lieutenant general but the point is he he was a big defector and that's there's some hardline orthodox people who consider him a hero and almost a saintly figure obviously people sympathetic the soviet union of history like consider him a terrible individual in a benedict arnold other russian people i've talked you've seen that mixed feelings about him but blasov defected vlasovic he led a kind of doomed force of russians who to their credit these guys are very game and they they fought at the end and they they got slaughtered to a man and blaspheme stealth was was executed but zelenkov who served under the the committee to liberate the peoples of russia i believe is what it translated to the the political apparatus attached to the vlasov army he recalled that at the onset of barbarossa you know june twenty second he was in moscow and when news first arrived that war was underway he said the rumor was oh of course you know finally you know we've gotten the attack order you know how far are people from warsaw you know how far are they from bucharest you know he said without exaggeration the impression of everybody was that we have assaulted you know we finally you know struck the blow against the fascists you know we're finally moving on europe and you know god be with our people and you know proverbially and you know what's the news from the front you know are are we winning and what kind of you know how are we advancing i mean i know you could say that zyland golf was i mean i mean the rebuttal to all this is like oh those guys were liars but it's like but i but why why would they say these things you know particularly a guy who knows he's going to the gallows or i mean particularly a guy who had no particular truck with either you know the national socialists or the the soviet union that he defected from like why i mean maybe maybe i'm naive i just you know i maybe i'm just worldly in all the worst ways i most of the people i know don't just like lie about stuff of that kind of importance okay i mean why why would they you know i mean so it's i i consider it basically credible if particularly because again i this kind of testimony it comes up again and again and again and we're not talking about from hapless you know privates in in the red army or or some you know random villagers in in ukraine that you know that vermont stopped and interviewed on the spot these are general officers and the the you know people who were political commissars of who were you know had an audience with stalin i mean it i i can't see that i can't see that all these people are lying and that somehow stalin was just kind of trying to you know what they said somehow matches up with what lenin declared was you know red only military doctrine you know and then but he was only kidding or then stalin you know what he said about the red army being an exclusively offensive apparatus of revolution but oh he was just trying to rile up his these young officers like that's not how reality works you know i mean but it i hope that this wasn't too dry for people i this foundation is fundamentally great okay great no thank you i i will get into more kind of we'll get into more kind of the the the nuts and bolts of the next episode i want to deal with stolfi and like how the third reich lost in the east i'm in them i'm in the minority i agree with the late mister stolfi i i believe that world war two was decided at the gates of moscow in december forty first and we'll get into what i mean by that next time we record and ukraine features essentially in this in this entire story so i think it's timely also but yeah i i hope you were happy with what i laid down and i hope the listeners got something positive out of this i think this was really important i i don't i know we can't leave no stone unturned in terms of establishing foundation but it's essential in order to present history correctly to establish the context so that was my reasoning sounds good so great plug plugs thank you you can find me on substack real r e a l thomas t h o m a s seven hundred seventy seven one word dot substack dot com there's a whole lot of my long form there that's where you can access my podcast about half of what's on there is free but for only five bucks a month you can access everything and like i'm always saying like even if you're a hobo you can afford that at some point i'm hoping i can make even more stuff free but we're not quite there yet but it will always it will never be more than five bucks a month you can find me on telegram we got a really cool gang of people there who you know just drop some serious knowledge and and you know promote their own content and you know drop their own work product it's really a great community it's t me slash the t h e number seven h o m a s seven hundred seventy seven those are the best places to find me if you want to reach out if you want or need to reach out to me personally i behoove you to do so on telegram and dm me if for some reason you're not coming with it or can't do that you can reach out to pete and he will put you in touch with me oh yeah i'm always accessible and available so don't ever be shy i love you know meeting people and conversing with people on topics of mutual interest and thank you again for all the incredible support and compliments everybody's been very kind and it's really incredible and thank you pete very much for this ongoing series no problem at all

[Pete Cano (Host)]

until the next time thanks i want to welcome everyone back to the picanono show we continue the series thomas how

[Thomas (Historian/Host)]

are you doing today i'm very well thank you pete i want to continue today i mean it's a huge topic and i mean i realize that in this format you know we don't want to we don't want to just go through some kind of encyclopedic reading effects and that wouldn't really cops what we're trying to trying to get done anyway you know we're among other things in addition to presenting you know an accurate history of the conflict another third reich generally you know we we want this to be a basically revisionist exercise and i mean a lot of what what that entails is you know kind of addressing the most common myths promulgated by court historians that sort of corrupt the conceptual picture people have of things and so today i i think the way to proceed is to deal with adolf hitler and his role as warlord quite literally you know and and his strengths and weaknesses therein in that command role

[Ryan Seacrest]

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[Thomas (Historian/Host)]

plus some of the challenges he faced you know both within the control group of the third reich you know particularly his conflicts with you know military leadership and the general staff you know as well as the the political situation which was you know in some ways more delicate than than people think you know and also you know deal with the the deal with the you know the misconception people have about about the war against the soviet union both that it was this you know just kind of example of naked aggression you know i mean we dealt with that last episode you know and correcting the record on that in large part but also there's this idea is promulgated including by some people who should know better you know people who have a background as general military officers you know this idea that the way the war was perpetuated or even you know deigning to launch the operation itself was was somehow this chaotic impossible mission that was doomed to failure that that it could not that is not the case at all and germany practically won the second world war in in autumn of nineteen forty one and we're going to get into that and i want to get into some context first as to you know how operational doctrine developed in in terms of the general the german general staff's outlook as well as that of hitler himself and some at times these viewpoints between the furor and the general staff converged at times they were very much at odds but just to frame kind of the the core issues and and i'm going to dive deeper into these as we go along but just in order to frame what we're going to talk about this episode june to july nineteen forty one okay the first weeks of barbarossa the vermont had for all practical purposes defeated the soviet union's field armies okay they utterly devastated the soviet union's military capability to the point that it it was a foregone conclusion in the minds of essentially everybody on both sides that the soviet union was defeated okay specifically and or of specific significance to the revisionist as well as anybody who just wants an accurate picture of about combat resolved in the east the the period of august to october nineteen forty one was absolutely critical and the third reich could have not just vanquished the soviet army but they could have defeated the soviet union okay why this didn't happen owes to a titanic error or actually a couple but one in particular we'll get into you know a decision a decision at at the level of supreme operational command that sabotaged that possibility

[Carl's Jr. Spokesperson]

you

[Thomas (Historian/Host)]

know it the short answer is that army group center which was the sverpunk of the entire assault in the soviet union on july twenty ninth adolf hitler for all practical purposes halted army group center's advance diverted it in an eccentric attack posture into ukraine in order to annihilate reserve forces there that he feared could be utilized to outflank the vermont and why and this delayed the assault on moscow for critical days and which allowed the red army to reconstitute you know allowed permitted the weather to become totally unfavorable to to mechanized forces and and essentially halted the assault at the gates of moscow okay and this is something that's that's deliberately overlooked and even people who don't have a particularly charitable view of the wehrmacht again within six months the wehrmacht was literally at the gates of moscow so that alone should kind of raise suspicions that you know court history and its description of this of this of this massive operation as some again some crazy ketic effort that was doomed to failure i mean that that should smash that misconception to pieces and finally we got to get into the what i think is the myth of blitzkrieg okay blitzkrieg does describe something but it's not there's not some school of warfare called blitzkrieg okay basically what it describes is it describes a break with precedent owing to owing to a a a dramatic innovations in mobility and specifically you know the ability of the ability of assaulting armies to gain advantage in ways that theretofore was not possible okay now why what what was blitzkrieg diverting from in terms of its precedence interestingly and this shouldn't be a surprise anybody the really the the primary german contribution in political terms to what you know in kind of you know linear history is mainstream history is called the enlightenment the primary contribution in in in pure political terms as a body of theory was clausewitz okay and clause it was the theory of warfare was a theorist of warfare now clausewitz declared you know a lot of things both about the nature of polit the politics of warfare and he considered politics and military activity to be basically synonymous and that is significant and it's all you know not just generally but it's significant to how how hitler approached military problems it didn't owe to just eccentricities of of within the mind of hitler himself and and and features of his own personality but clausewitz also in in in strategic terms and how he described you know the the battle space the modern battle space he declared in no uncertain terms that there's no shortcut to victory like what he meant was that you know okay there's going to be technological innovation you know there's going to be adaptations to you know changing conditions owing to these innovations but that basically in the clouds of its view you know the only way that you know what wins wars is you know victory and set peace battles you know that emphasize you know where victors emphasize the advance of fire you know and when possible substituting firepower for manpower to mitigate you know attrition and through this process you know just you know kind of a gradual weakening weakening of the defender and subsequently exploiting you know holes that are punched quite literally in the main line of resistance resistance you know basically killing enemy armies through you know this process of you know brutal application of firepower in terms most likely to create opportunities to to breach resistance lines okay patterns of deployment you believe are constant again you know the only thing that changes is the ability to apply to apply fire in terms of you know the this destructive force as well as its you know as well as its targeted accuracy but you know the clouds witching mantra is that firepower saves lives the strength of an army you know is is estimated in multiplying the mass by velocity which was also a napoleon axiom and napoleonic axiom rather now this basically characterized combat until nineteen eighteen what happened was the advance of armor which you know arrived on the battlefield in the great war but hadn't really been utilized to deliberate effect other than as a kind of you know way of other as a kind of mobile firepower what changed in the inner war years was that people like von c to was somewhat people like rommel for context and von manstein where the theories of unseat and von seats he didn't have a he didn't he didn't he didn't have opportunity to view the concrete particulars of armored combat but he had a sense of how it would resolve how armored combat did resolve the textbook example is the battle of france okay and what happened there was that armored columns were able to strike so deeply through french lines that essentially even where even where the french were deployed in depth they were constantly having to regroup and try to reestablish the main line of resistance they were unable to do that because they kept on getting smashed and they literally could not keep up with the advancing panzers and when they could they'd find themselves often in reverse lines so this caused like utter chaos and on top of that because the armored columns overshot the infantry which at that point was still on foot you know mechanized infantry didn't exist yet as we know it as they were trying to reconstitute the mainline resistance they'd get hit by supporting infantry which would smash them again so basically it's you know the coup de gras was you know vermont infantry after this kind of devastating punishing blow okay now this is just kind of how battle developed okay if you've got a dedicated armored element in your in your ground forces it's not like somebody sat down you know whether it's not like erwin rommel or yodel or or von manstein sat down and said okay the theory of warfare it's called blitzkrieg and like this is what it entails and you know this is its doctrinal uh

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[Thomas (Historian/Host)]

sponsored by chumba casino features it's nothing like that and on top of that the german army despite the myth that there's this really really idiotic myth that's promulgated by people who are i they've got to be conceptually illiterate or they or they just aren't interested in presenting a true and accurate picture of the vermont and and and kind of the german way of war germans practice what's called mission oriented tactics okay general orders are issued all the way down to the company level and commanders are given broad leeway and how to accomplish those objectives okay it's really kind of the opposite of how the russian army today and previously the soviet army does things where uncertainty is attempts at eradicating uncertainty is there's an attempt to eradicate uncertainty by by by treating doctrine almost like regulation you know and giving commanders very very little leeway that's changing but that's outside the scope what we're talking about but so what i'm getting is that you have these german armored commanders and they're smashing through the main line of resistance at rapid pace and they're not being told to stop they're being told basically to chase the enemy down and kill him and that's what they're doing and before they know it they find themselves you know traversing three hundred miles like beyond you know the initial objective you know and and and and chasing chasing enemy armies you know deep deep into into into territory beyond the initial objective you know and their their flanks are secure because they quite literally outran every supporting element of the opposing force and even if they weren't you know again like they're backed up by this inventory that's you know gonna arrive fresh and smash whatever whatever forces might be trying to uh trying to perform an encirclement maneuver which by that point wouldn't matter anyway a lot of time because again you know they'd be dealing with reversed lines which caused all kinds of havoc in those days particularly before you know what we consider to be you know with the kind of commanding control we take for ran it was present so so there's not there's not a school of battle called blitzkrieg where what it is is it's describing what it described in the moment was you know how combat was resolving in ways that theretofore like had not been experienced because the technology was not available for any such thing like that to you know to to be decisive on the battlefield so as the as the general staff and sitler observed this that changed the way they approach strategic problems and they came to realize as it hitler himself that the soviet union unlike the western front in world war one which created bottlenecks was this vast step okay it's basically you cannot ask for a better or a more ideal a more ideal kind of terrain to wage armored warfare you know particularly if you have particularly if you have certain advantages which in large part the germans did so that's important because it owes the conceptual mindset of of of hitler himself and and the general staff on on the eve of battle so this kind of brings us to an overarching matter in revisionism this idea that hitler was this reckless gambler in military and political terms and that you know he some you know he he he he he was emboldened by these successes that he had early on and he pursued this kind of chaotic crazy you know he unleashed this this this irrational kind of war on the and the and on the soviet union that was devoid of strategic logic that's totally at odds with precedent in my opinion we talked in the last episode about hitler holding back forces from the rhineland in nineteen thirty six rather than risking war with the uk and france i mean that that was characteristic of hitler hitler didn't assault czechoslovakia despite the kind of myth of munich and they say and and the fact that it's kind of become synonymous with you know nazi aggression hitler very adeptly was able to you know discredit not just benis but the entire enterprise the czechoslovakian regime you know and by the time by the time uh it would have been uh opportune to give an assault order you know slovakia already seceded the sedate and germans for all practical purposes it you know had become an independent protectorate you know the polish and ruthanian minorities were demanding their own independence like czechoslovakia had ceased to exist owing to hitler's you know intrigues okay if heller was just as a gambler who you know favored favored favor the gun proverbially over you know over over the conspiratorial option i mean that this this would not have happened when hitler finally did give an out and out assault order it was against poland and that was only after the molotov ribbentrop pact had been put to paper okay and essentially by that by by doing so and by securing the the cooperation of the soviet union at least for that limited purpose there was no chance that germany would get you know forced into a war with the soviet union for the prepared before they were prepared but that also meant there was no chance that you know the uk and france would be able to deploy in theater you know and and and and and turn the tide of turn the tide of war so essentially hitler not only was he not you know a reckless gambler on strategic questions he waited until quite literally the fix was in before pulling the proverbial trigger and based on those instincts you know militarily cautious but politically bold i mean what did by july by july nineteen forty what had hitler done he defeated poland denmark norway luxembourg holland belgium and france he'd occupied virtually all those states and defeated the british army i mean like that a gambler doesn't win one hundred of the time okay like you can't that's ridiculous it's and it was in july nineteen forty that's when hitler decided that the germans were going to preemptively assault the ussr i know people are going to take exception to that in the comments and probably other places like what do you mean preemptively okay we dealt with that last episode i'm happy to argue the point with anybody you know who wants to take it up but i'm not going to reiterate everything we covered because that's not fair to the listeners and i i worry i'm going sino island repeating myself already i don't need to do it on purpose but hitler's decision to sell the us summer nineteen forty that was really the only way that germany wins the second world war okay in strategic terms it was the correct decision you know i'm not saying in moral terms i it i'm not going to weigh in on that i'm not you know i'm not i'm not saying i'm not coming out swinging in in in defense of of the third reich's political ambitions or maybe some kind of chauvinistic point about germany i'm speaking in realist strategic terms it was the right decision had germany vanquish the soviet union any posture the british took even if they still had the empire intact it would be meaningless okay germany would have had control of the entire continent from the atlantic to the earls they would have had all the fuel all the iron ore all the agricultural resources of the entire continent and part of central asia okay i mean even in the even the best of all possible worlds under that under those circumstances even if britain was was to marshal all of its resources available from the empire which again are presuming to be totally intact they would have been at fundamental disadvantage you know against germany and in north africa it you know it germany could abided its time and and in defeating them piecemeal or they could have staged simply a mass invasion you know with the assistance of italy and they would have had you know they could have they could have knocked the royal navy out of the mediterranean with really without with you know without having to worry about you know sacrificing resources that were needed in any secondary theater okay i mean you would have been looking at a situation where germany again with the resources of an entire continent could have mobilized and devoted all of its capabilities to total war against the uk okay not just that but the reason i raised nolte last episode is because there is a strongly political dimension to the second world war i mean not just the obvious but this was an epochal moment okay had the soviet union been annihilated you know not only would that have you know destroyed for all practical purposes the international communist movement it would have put the nail in the coffin of this you know kind of new deal democracy ideology like all these things we take for granted as the as the kind of conceits of the victors and their their political values and you know the way they structure the world you know ethically these things would not exist you know any more than you know monarchy would exist or any more than you know any other kind of any other kind of vanquished ideology would would have you know animating power to you know to mobilize other people or or or or determine the you know the the configuration of states and that war at peace or anything like that so that they can't be overemphasized like the third reich wins the second world war if the soviet union is defeated you know the alternative is you know the third reich remains a second rate power you know on a european continent that itself is kind of failing and you know it becomes a it becomes either a client state of the soviet union because you know the the ussr completes its full mobilization potential which again was rivaled by no state other than the united states and it you know either just conquers germany you know by force of arms or it it just you know absorb kind of becomes the pivot of the continent politically because it's so much more powerful than its next strongest neighbor that you know there's just no there's no way that it can be resisted by by force immoral will or arms or any other way so it's it's it's asinine when people act like you know the germans should have just kind of sat on their hands and done nothing i mean it indicates a lack of understanding of power politics but also specifically the strategic situation of of of nineteen forty forty one and that brings us to the kind of common the kind of common refrain of court historians is that hitler assaulted the ussr owing to the you know some kind of hair brain scheme to defeat britain because you know that would have precluded not just you know the the open you know the the the burning in germany of having to fight a two front war but also it you know what it sapped it would have sapped churchill's regime of any if any confidence that you know they they they could have had the benefit of of soviet arms and and resources under perpetuate their own war like that's nonsense too again the hitler did not want to conquer the united kingdom there was nothing to be gained from that i don't think it was possible in operational terms because the forces in being weren't there and even even if they were germany did not have a deepwater navy that could have accomplished that so it's just it's it's a non i wanted to preempt that before anybody raised that in the comments or something it's a non issue but so on july twenty first that's when hitler gave the order to von brauchic to begin drafting preparation for operation barbarossa you know again it was immediately after the defeat of france it was after you know what in hindsight and in the epoch as it was as it developed was viewed as blitzkrieg it was this game changing sort of sort of development you know the advent of armor on the modern battlefield you know and that that is what emboldened not just hitler but the general staff to pursue the assault then in addition to the fact that again as we got into last episode you know the it it it was critical that you know the germans preempt what amounted to a massive soviet mobilization that was underway the purpose of which the evidence is clear was you know to assault and conquer europe and with germany as the kind of jewel in that geostrategic prize and i want to make i want to make point i wanted to make the point too and this is not just a matter of semantics or something being lost in translation hitler's incessant return to the concept of lebensraum like literally living space you've got to understand that in context you've got to understand that that term is utilized because of the polemical weight that carries hitler was not suggesting that germany's overcrowded or something or that you know it's got this burgunding population like china or something what he was saying was a more correct term probably would have been gross rom but again hillary flare for the dramatic and he was utilizing polemic germany had to become a superpower otherwise its political ambitions its existential destiny its survival in their own view would have been compromised okay you you win the second world war by becoming a superpower okay that is how you win you know you don't win it just by surviving or by hanging on by a thread or by becoming some client state of the soviet union and people don't understand this only have to look at the look at the political map of the planet today you know and ask themselves you know why why globally we're in this mess that we are with this ryan seacrest

[Ryan Seacrest]

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[Thomas (Historian/Host)]

with this american regime that you know although it's losing this ability you know as has the capacity to project power anywhere in the world and slate you know other societies for annihilation that it you know does not view as sufficiently compliant with its ideological regime with its ideological ambitions okay i mean it's we're not talking about something academic here we're talking about what happened you know the europe was annihilated japan was annihilated the united states and the soviet union divided up the world you know the soviet union capitulated owing to you know the burdens of the strategic challenge in the later nuclear age and you were left with a with a with a unipolar political military ideological regime so that this is not academic you know i don't see how people can argue otherwise but this brings us kind of the next big point germany did not underestimate the soviet union okay the kaiser reich had fought for four years against the russian empire just as they did on the western front there was a huge percentage of german general officers who had fought the russian army okay they they knew the russian character they knew that the russian people were very game or very tough they knew that fighting in russia was an incredibly arduous and brutal experience they nobody this was not some remote thing okay and these were not this was not some this was not some second rate army you know that that had no experience of of of of the enemy and the terrain that they were planning to wage war on you know so that's franz halder he was the chief of the general staff of the here and halder's an interesting guy for a lot of reasons and he a i mean this man alone could dedicate could warrant a dedicated podcast or episode but we're not going to get into the kind of various intrigues of howler what what we what is important about his character is that he was kind of the consummate reserved you know german officer of the year okay he was not particularly ideologically inclined he was kind of calculating he was not a man who had much in common with hitler but he wrote in his diary he kept a war diary which is incredible because i mean it's like a historical treasure trove of testimony about what was in the minds of general staff he kept a diary dedicated exclusively to preparation for operation barbarossa from july nineteen forty when hitler gave the order of preparation until june twenty second forty one when the assault commenced and he wrote he wrote about the coming operation with confidence but discernible trepidation okay there's not a single remark in there that indicates he'd on you know he was underestimating the soviets or the rigors or the brutality or the severity of the coming war in the east like quite the contrary but nonetheless he had absolute confidence that combat would resolve in the so against the soviet union within six to ten weeks okay on july third forty one heller stated in his diary and let me call it up here quote after two weeks of war the soviets have been beaten okay now why did halder say that it's there was a i mean it's hard to drive home the the kind of devastation that the vermont was able to wreak upon the red army part of this was because in some of the theaters they were fighting in i mean this this was a massive front you know divided into three army groups i remember north as assaulted through the baltics the despite this kind of myth that the germans were just you know acting like genghis khan and brutalizing the indigenous people everybody went that's not true at all the germans had a huge number of allies among people conquered by the soviets you know thousands upon thousands of these men joined the boffin ss and nor was the sympathy more kind of sharp than in the baltics and army group north as it kind of smashed through the baltics en route to its objective of leningrad you know the people in the baltic states you know they rose up against the red army you know so the red arm was fighting not just the vermont it was fighting you know people in places like belarus people in the baltic states people in ukraine you know who had risen up against their communist overlords okay like a lot of what people claim about what was happening in the eastern front in the early days was totally at odds what actually happened the the german in terms of in terms of aircraft the exchange attrition rate was something insane like you know one to one hundred thirty one favoring the germans you know they you know you're talking about armored column striking literally hundreds of miles deep behind the main line of resistance you know within days you know this was unprecedented so what exactly happened to change this momentum we'll get to that in a minute but i want to i want to reemphasize too you know we talked last episode about the on the eve of barbarossa the intelligence estimates and figures of soviet deployment you know that were presented to hitler himself by you know the the the high command of the army of the navy you know the luftwaffe okay these numbers were accurate you know i mean it was they were verified after the cessation of hostilities you know hitler was hitler helder the okw commanders in the field you know subordinate to that executive structure they were proceeding based upon accurate numbers i mean so it's you know you've got you've got a holiday who's you know optimistic but you know exhibiting a lot of trepidation in his own personal writings you know you've got hitler and the okw who are planning this operation with remarkably accurate numbers which is a credit to german military intel the the ab there was a disaster for all kinds of reasons but and raw military intelligence that came from the here and came from the kriegsmarine and aloof off it was actually quite it's quite incredible that they were able to render such a such a you know a factual picture of reality and and you know with the technology that they that's difficult even today with you know kind of the panoptic vision that we have but in those days were truly extraordinary so i mean in material terms the germans were at all levels were calculating victory odds based on actual forces and being and finally and this is a huge point and i the only person i've ever heard refer to this was leon degrel in any detail i said okay if the germans underestimate you know underestimated the soviet union why did it take one hundred and ninety five weeks for the soviet union to defeat germany with this with the you know with like labs assistance from the united states with terror bombing day and night by the united states and the royal air force with a massive invasion of western europe by the united states and the uk like that doesn't sound like an underestimation at all okay if the soviet union was a juggernaut i mean shouldn't have turned the tide of marching on berlin within within within weeks or months i mean like think about that it's it's not it's not a political point or a middling point you know it should have if there was if there was parity between the vermont and between the red army and the defeat levied against the right was this result of gross underestimation or hubris i mean we just established that you know modern warfare with with armor as the as the kind of as the primary variable in ground combat i mean the soviet union should they should they should have turned the tide and you know smashed smashed the german army within weeks you know as basically the germans had done to them like once they reconstituted obviously but so why did this happen we're going to return we're going to return to clause it was for a moment hitler basically was a siege commander okay you know emboldened as hitler was by blitzkrieg as much as you know this kind of figured into his calculus for what the correct strategic decision was hitler was a man who was born in the nineteenth century you know hitler was a guy who fought on the western front you know when warfare essentially i mean it the the body count was was was horrendous owing to the machine gun and owing to some other innovations but you know world war one combat was basically a napoleonic era combat you know set piece battles that resolved essentially according to like clausewitz's dictum almost you know to a t you know you can't escape these formative experiences and how they inform your conceptual horizon that's the way hitler thought of things okay at where the rubber meets the road in terms of operational execution hitler was also a political leader okay and i mean i there's this you know there's this kind of court history claim like well hitler was constantly interfering with his generals his generals you know the generals know better you've got a serious problem if you're a civilian chief executive and you're simply handing policy to your generals i mean that's called a military junta okay i mean even kind of one of the tragedies of of of any man of any civilian executive at war whether you're talking about mister putin and the president whether you're talking about adolf hitler you know in nineteen forty one whether you're talking about john f kennedy trying to stare down mister lemay and the joint chiefs during the cuban missile crisis there's always a critical tension between the armed forces and civilian leadership and this this this has this corrodes operational effectiveness because there are times when a civilian leader needs to put the brakes on military decisionism simply to salvage his own political mandate and prevent himself from being bulldozed even if that harms the rapid execution of orders in the field and that's a military sociology question but it's it bears out in all times and all epics and hitler was very much a civilian okay his role as world lord is kind of his critical contribution to history but you know hitler was not some career military officer a prussian general you know he was he served with this with distinction as an nco but that was the extent of his of his of his military life you know and that the that that's fundamentally important in understanding why he made the decisions he did at critical junctures and finally you know in one of the reasons i'm going to bring this back but this is an important point okay we were talking about blitzkrieg it more reflects a way that combat develops through the application of technology and the technology of violence that's really characteristic of the twentieth century and there's a parallel in strategic nuclear war planning where things got to the point that command and control structures to sustain the capacity to wage nuclear war were so complicated and so insinuated into into oblique features of of the national state civilian and military that that actually makes you more vulnerable than in more in more primitive phases of development historically one of the reasons blitzkrieg or what's perceived as blitzkrieg wreak such havoc is that if you do penetrate deep behind enemy lines you can wreak utter devastation on his logistics on his command and control you're literally traveling faster than information okay then is now although now like i mean you know in in true strategic planning during the cold war that the the the window of decision was reduced to minutes to reduce two minutes but you know think about a man adolf hitler was born in eighteen eighty nine you know i mean the fact that he he didn't he hadn't fully adapted to the new way of warfare i i think that i think that describes every chief of state of a combatant nation in the war you know i mean i don't i don't think i don't i don't i i i think that that neither puts you know any kind of shine on hitler in in his command attitude nor nor is it some kind of gross sort of strike against them it but what is significant is that any man who's a student of clausewitz and basically every german executive of the modern era including hitler's hero frederick ii you know who's kind of the consummate dynamic prussian officer you know of that type the the the the ethos was you know to rapidly capture objectives but to reduce to limit those objectives to what to what can be effectively managed and defended and what's telling is that hitler paced operation barbarosa very deliberately towards the objective of capturing and seizing leningrad you know and the capture leningrad in the opening days and weeks in his estimation would allow a siege line to be created where in german command and control would be in the most advantageous position available for an eventual assault at moscow like meanwhile the soviet baltic fleet could be dealt with and knocked out what happened is army group north proceeded to moscow or proceeded to leningrad is hitler ordered elements of army groups army group center to be diverted to back up army group north because his idea was that like well you know resistance is gonna is going to be too great to be rapidly overcome and you know we've got to create our main line of resistance you know backed up by forces enough that you know if we get bogged down we can deploy in depth you know and establish you know a defensive perimeter you know this totally cuts against this kind of picture of hitler as like reckless warlord who you know who who who who who pulls a trigger before loading the proverbial gun and eventually what happened is as army group center did move on moscow hitler ordered stopped in its tracks he ordered critical elements that were the that enjoyed the most mobility to be diverted to ukraine in order to encircle and annihilate the red army strategic reserves that were based there that cost days and weeks that allowed moscow to be fortified it allowed strategic reserve elements from siberia to be called upon and transported to reconstitute forces to defend moscow and by that time it was too late to breach the gates of the city because the weather had turned i mean this is what happened okay it was key decisions that one being the most damning but it that's what cost germany the war which will cause the victory of the soviet union which would cost them the war altogether you know it's it was not uh it was not underestimation of the enemy it was not you know that the uh the german general staff didn't know what it was doing it was not that hitler was crazy and the german general staff basically invented war gaming okay i mean they gamed the scenario of attacking the soviet union for an entire year before you know the assault was implemented you know the idea that these men weren't drawing upon data or they were flying by the seat of their pants i mean it's it's incredibly it's it's incredibly stupid it's almost as foolish as people claiming i i had i i had a guy who actually he told me with a straight face and this was a guy who like held himself out as i don't name him because i think people know him he's like this british guy he does like youtube videos about about the second world war he actually dropped the canard about you know oh germans didn't even you know manufacture you know winter uniforms forms it's like okay if you're gonna assault the soviet union in june and you're trying to provide your you know you're fitting to provide your army with winter gear you're preparing to literally lose that campaign you know i mean it's you don't you don't you don't set about in campaigns that you know to say like well we're gonna get bogged down at the gates for objective then we're gonna hunker down to the winter and then we're gonna wait for spring and we're gonna try and assault again and see if it works that time like it's not military operations like succeed or it or it's it's disaster you know you don't plan for these like you know losing contingencies you know and if you do as lincoln said about mcclellan you know you're you're you're literally like you're literally planning to lose and i mean i i i don't i don't think a general's planning to lose is is worth a lot to to uh to anybody in uh in warfare it i kind of wanted to well i

[Pete Cano (Host)]

mean there's also that the whole myth of that operation barbarossa started in the winter yeah people say that all the

[Thomas (Historian/Host)]

time yeah it's totally well people i think people too and i don't go too far afield but it's it's relevant there's two things that i know and one of these things is something somebody raised in the comments to me that i wanted to take up but first and foremost people pretty much everybody alive today like nobody remembers like twentieth century general wars okay they remember these like weird managed conflicts that don't have real stakes and that and i mean any more these days and the pentagon goes to war it's like it's a make work enterprise well yeah they're not wars for power yeah and they don't realize they don't realize too that you know if you're an actual like full blown military operation it it it's it it resolves rapidly you know you don't go to war to say like yeah we're gonna you know we're gonna muck around in south vietnam for a decade or you know we're gonna we're gonna we're gonna occupy afghanistan for no particular reason because you know girls can't go to school there and people grow opium and we're gonna stay there for twenty years and you know we're getting this ngo money and then you know we're gonna run around and yeah these guys are the taliban we're gonna we're gonna tell them to stop doing what they're doing but it's not a military operation it's some weird make work like operations war that you know is on that spectrum but doesn't really have any strategic objective i mean if you're you know there's the fact that the fact that but again i mean that's why it shows you how i mean i made the point before that tyler redick here from

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[Thomas (Historian/Host)]

you know second world war was actually a few different conflicts and you know the soviet union the soviet union fighting the the vermont to a stalemate that could have actually resolved a few different ways you know had had had had kind of the fix not already been in between mister roosevelt and stalin and say like you know that you had an american regime that even if inclined to go to war with the third reich was not really willing to you know to to generate this kind of operational independence with the soviets you're gonna very easily gonna come to the soviets you know saying like we'll accept a piece as long as you withdraw to white russia or something you know or like you know withdraw like within thirty kilometers of ukrainian border or the ukrainian russian border and like you know we'll we'll set that as you know kind of like the the the treaty line but it's by you know this was by no means like set in stone and you know like i said the fact that the fact that you know if if germany just were if if the germans were these fools and these guys who weren't drawing upon any real data and hadn't gained you know possible scenarios adequately you know it's like okay then why did it take one hundred ninety five weeks for moscow to reach berlin you know like they should have there should have been okay the german assault failed here's the army counter attack three months later you know there's you've got you've got the red army like smashing across like the odor river you know i mean that's that so that's important too i mean it was political conditions that and and you know america literally you know providing life support you know and in in in the form of you know really whatever whatever was necessary was ever whatever was necessary to sustain the campaign that kept them in in the game and it you know the it's also it's a testament too you know the reason why the germans were so it's i people who claim too looking at the raw numbers of of uh opposing forces that the wehrmacht was facing a lot of the red army was incredibly tough incredibly game a lot of it wasn't okay simply having piles of weapons you know or simply having armored vehicles you got to train people to fight in a modern war okay you've got to integrate your operational elements you know to actually be cohesive enough that you know they can act operationally in the way that they need to you know piles of hardware don't decide wars that's why it is totally insane that you know okay america's just gonna send fifty billion dollars in military hardware to ukraine like to do what like what's that gonna do you know i mean like it's it's not you you can't just drop weapons on people and suddenly they become like train trained like you know tankers or you know suddenly they become like competent like inventory and ceo's you know you can't even there's a lot of people running around don't even know how to like fire a gun okay you know like it's it and even even if they're confident with weapons they're certainly not like comfortable with like some freaking knockoff nato like ar fifteen i mean why would they be you know like if you never if you haven't been habituated to that i mean that's i mean it's all these things but it's the the the you know and it's not just uh what decided the war was uh was was what happened in in august and then you know the the failure of the assault on moscow but you know the germans also they reached leningrad within weeks you know there's this horrible siege it was like medieval in character for years like what happened in leningrad's like horrifying you know and then it was months later but you know the germans not only did they reach stalingrad they breached the gates of stalingrad you know the stalingrad defenders were fighting within stalingrad you know like it was not so i mean it's they lost the war but you know they they reached they reached all of their objectives territorially i mean i realize that that's not decisive in terms of victory metrics but you know that that that that's that in them itself imagine if the calculus was basically correct i mean goes it should go without saying but another thing i wanted to raise like a couple of guys in the comments they hear this a lot they're like well you know the vermont lost the war because they were just killing everybody and they were doing these racist things and they were like ethnically cleansing people that did happen particularly incident to the commissar order and other things but you know my rebuttal of that man is that i and i don't want to go too much outside the scope of the second world war particularly the os front but you know i read a lot about pinkville which is where my life four was located and i don't want to get into some really detailed discussion of what the rules of engagement were in vietnam and what military law says about about free fire zones but the life four was located in the free fire zone the people there had refused to evacuate that was an operational hub of the national liberation front you know aka the viet cong when americal division arrived there they arrived there with the intent to annihilate that village and that's what they did and this was above board and stars and stripes you know the us army newspaper they ran a story about it america division you know assaulted me life for a big victory hell yeah you know we we struck a blow against victor charlie you know it wasn't until it wasn't until you know a year and some months later that you know kind of the truly gruesome details got released by a couple guys who were there you know who began writing the to a couple anti war senators about it that it was splash across the evening news but my point is that this was kind of the face of modern war you know like romanian and german infantry going into a a belarusian village and and and you know and killing every killing every commissar and every jewish military age male that's pretty horrible but i can give you just as many examples that the french army carried out in algeria the us army did in south vietnam i mean i there's not some like outlandish thing and frankly too you know people in kazakhstan people in tajikistan people in ukraine people in belarus people in latvia lithuania estonia they joined the baffin ss they joined the access cause you know the with this people forget this because now the regime is pretending that you know the ukrainians are you know george washington and and the the continental army or whatever but for the last fifty years before that you know what we heard was that ukrainians are a bunch of awful brutes and nazis and they collaborated with you know the third reich so i mean it's depending on how people were treated in theater it depends on the people you were talking about it depends on what german formation was operational there you know it depends on what year and month you were talking about i mean there's not just one way this is the way that germans treated civilian population you know they treated they treated some civilian populations just like they would german people some populations yeah they they they slaughtered them like animals but that's that's not strange and it's you know it does bear repeating as i've said and we'll get into this in the nuremberg episode but you know so this is documented and these you know after the soviet archives were thrown open in ninety one you know the soviet like by conservative estimate the soviet union annihilated ten million people before a shot was fired in the second world war i mean yeah i'm not gonna say like you know that that's a good thing that the vermont and the and the ss sd were were slaughtering people including women and kids but i mean it's kind of it's you know emphasizing you know the instances of german brutality and and just kind of redacting the rest of it i mean that okay that that seems a bit cynical and dishonest but you know that's that's my take on that and i mean plus it was i mean it was a total war i i was reading about i was preparing some of my notes for our our next episode on the area bombing you know within literally fifty zero zero zero people died in hamburg you know all them civilians over the course of two days like that's insane like america was berserk of a couple thousand people die on nine hundred eleven and i'm not that that's terrible okay i'm not saying that that's nothing or something but i mean can you imagine a country like a third the size of america losing fifty zero zero zero people in one day like just by literally having them like burned to death by incendiaries that's completely insane you know i mean that's not there's not any difference between you know what the germans were on the eastern front and what what the royal air force and u s army air corps were doing to people in places like hamburg and dresden there's not and frankly in fact i mean i'd rather get shot in the face by the ss than like be burned to death like in in some basement mean frankly you know if given a choice which i really really hope i would never be over such a choice but it that's that's all that's all i got for this episode and i didn't mean to get bogged down so much in like minutia of like military science because it's not my wheelhouse but it's important and i think for context it that's kind of the evidence one must present in order to rebut the popular myths so i hope that people found it informative and not too kind of you know boring and bogged down

[Pete Cano (Host)]

with minutia no there was a lot of meat in there and yeah i

[Thomas (Historian/Host)]

appreciate that but next we'll if it's okay with you it's your show and it's not for me to dictate the programming but what do you think the next next episode i'd like to finish up barbarossa and deal with you know the western allies war against the right and we'll get into things like hamburg and dresden then if that's agreeable that

[Pete Cano (Host)]

sounds good to me yeah it sounds good to me all right give your

[Thomas (Historian/Host)]

plugs okay you can find me at real thomas seven hundred seventy seven one word dot substack dot com that's what my podcast is that's what my lawn form is about half of it's free

[Ryan Seacrest]

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[Thomas (Historian/Host)]

not it's only five bucks a month so don't be a hobo you can afford it i just joined mister trump's social media truth social knox i love mister trump i mean i don't hate mister trump either but it some dear friends of mine are there i i'm hoping that might develop into something but if you're there you can follow me i'm the real thomas seven hundred seventy seven there you can find me on gab at real thomas seven hundred seventy seven and if you want to contact me directly reach out and substack i'll drop an email on you and we will talk about things and thank you

[Pete Cano (Host)]

again pete i appreciate it until the next time i want to welcome everyone back to the pican yena show thomas returns we're going to continue okay yeah

[Thomas (Historian/Host)]

thank you pete and i want to reiterate my gratitude to everybody who supported the series and there's just been incredible support and feedback and i i that i find i'm very moved by that and that encourages me to keep going with this endeavor and and again i appreciate you giving me a platform this has been really really great but i wanted to talk a bit about today we got into kind of the technical aspects of barbarossa and and and rebutting some of the myths about the military situation and how it resolved and i as i indicated i'm certainly not an expert on military matters at all and i've no i've got no military background or anything like that what i wanted to talk about today i wanted to kind of deep dive more into questions of zeitgeist i'm not i can't think of a there's not like a term that's kind of less exotic or or cumbersome to describe what we're talking about than zeitgeist you know like literally the spirit of the age or you know like the the kind of the kind of animating elements of of the epoch in which people live that that that that that kind of serves to confrance conceptually you know the way people view events and their role in events and you know what what what kind of what kind of comes to inform you know values and particularly we're talking about conditions of crises conditions of crisis you know the most kind of the most kind of punctuated and and mortality iteration of a political crisis being general war that's that's kind of the most that's kind of the most intense example of you know people being caught up in in apocal events that you know in terms of symbolic psychology you know in terms of in in terms of people's collective ambitions and fears you know uh can it can be said to constitute a sort of cohesive you know like essence you know or spirit of of that epoch and you've gotta you've got to understand even if you're not a hegelian or like like i am and and even if you're kind of like a dyed in the wool like secularist you you know to understand to understand the the german soviet war you've really got to understand the this kind of collision of worldviews okay and and you know even if even if you're the even if you're the consummate like secular humanist you probably wouldn't be watching this series but if you are it's like okay you know you can you can attribute what i what i'm talking about to the you know to to to phenomena of psychology okay you know but it there there is such a thing as you know mass psychology and if you want to if you want to view it that way fine but you know what i'm talking about is a real phenomenon and the fact that things like you know the the war between the reich and the soviet union happened or a testament to that and what i want to get into today is is you know how how how the government of the third reich became a truly european government in part because there was apocal changes underway in in the manner in which you know people politically organize and it was the the epoch of the superpower was nascent and looming but also you know the challenge presented by the soviet union you know which was both a burgeoning communist superpower you know this ideology was was in dialectical it was in violent dialectical opposition to europe as an idea and as a civilization but also ethnically and racially if you want to think about it in those terms you know the the soviet union represented kind of the oriental other you know and it's a catalyzing force for unity obviously for in conceptual in broad conceptual terms if you know a if a people are are confronted by by the other you know in in political and cultural and and ethnic terms you know like if you want like an ancient example you know the greek city states you know what like a catalyzing element for them to you know to come to view themselves as greeks you know was uh was uh was the challenge posed by the persian empire you know that that's i know that that's something that you know uh military sociologist types like to invoke a lot but so we're gonna we're gonna we're gonna we're gonna dive into it a little bit forgive that kind of long winded prologue but i i think it was i i think i think it's essential the the idea of the idea of a european man you know kind of in lieu of you know people politically identifying with with petted nationalisms this wasn't something that that just came about you know in nineteen forty one as german armies were fighting we're fighting the communists you know in the eastern front or something i mean this underscores all kinds of cultural artifacts and and activity you know in europe you know going back centuries you know like there's there's there's there's a there's there's echoes of that and everything from beethoven and wagner to you know to go to you know to hagel and like nietzsche like overtly talked about it you know what kind of suits a good european and conceptual political terms and what does this mean for the future moving forward and of course you know the the these kind of seminal personages in the in the modern age you know like first and foremost napoleon you know and then napoleon started you know as a corsican became you know or sardinian rather like he he became a frenchman and then you know he began thinking in you know european civilizational terms and and like adolf hitler you know he commanded armies you know to the east you know and is is under the under the banner of of of of a european imperialism you know not not not not not just under the under the flag of france or or for the glory of you know the french monarch or anything like that you know you know pauline was the emperor of europe i mean what what would he what do you aspire to do so that this wasn't some sort of contrivance you know if you can motivate if you can motivate hundred thousands of men to like march march eastward to conquer moscow like napoleon did you know you're not you're not dealing in something that's not deeply felt by people or some kind of fiction that you just contrived at a convenience okay the as i said i think that during transitional phases historically apocally that's when these that's that that's that's when these kinds of symbolic aspects of zeitgeist you know and especially in terms of identity like become most poignant and powerful and that's that's what's fascinating about the third reich like i made the point in one of our earlier episodes that if you want to understand the character of adolf hitler politically you've gotta you've got to sort of unpack his december eleventh speech to the reichstag which among other things the speech in which he asked for a declaration of war against the united states you know because it's in the wake of pearl harbor just a few days subsequent and one of these hitler said you know hitler was the habsburg austrian catholic but when he was talking about the situation on the eastern front where you know army group center was being halted at the gates of moscow you know he said we meaning the german people you know like we faced you know these these dire straits before in eighteen twelve well what happened in eighteen twelve you know the prussian army was fighting with napoleon at the gates of moscow and they were the only german principality or kingdom you know that that sided with napoleon okay so hitler the hat for austrian you know he was invoking a he was invoking a prussian a prussian historical approach in a store a seminal prussian historical event and he was you know he was he was assimilating that into you know the the identity of germanness and that's remarkable and that wasn't contrived hitler really believed that you know he really believed that there was like a german identity that that superseded these these these petty regionalisms and and even more than that as time went on he like napoleon he came to he came to consider himself you know a european a european warlord you know a european would be like emperor like a common man who ascended to those heights albeit he he didn't have any he didn't have uh he didn't have the same kind of pretensions as napoleon but he did have certain messianic retentions and uh that can't be denied um in more in more in more concrete terms if you look at the if you look at the kind of the military leadership of the third reich and if you look at its military culture as time went on there was there was kind of these there's these kind of oppositional tendencies you know you had the old you had the old prussian officer corps and you had the old kind of you know bavarian like junker elite you know that that that that had incredible sway over the general staff and still an incredible cultural power but then you also had you had you had the voff and ss which was very egalitarian and very much modeled like a modern army okay you know like it was it was very much merit based you know there was battlefield commissions were very common people could be promoted rapidly if they excelled in combat and ultimately as we'll get into in a minute the waffen ss was a european army you know it truly was and if you look at the if you look at the tensions within national socialist ideology you know like we talked about before like one of the ironies of of of when people talk cast cast aspersions on on the kind of biological racialism of the third reich that was really kind of an emulation against precedent of of of the anglophone world you know there's a kind of darwinist rationalist like defining race as this kind of biological phenomenon and describing politics and and hey it's

[Ryan Seacrest]

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[Thomas (Historian/Host)]

conditions twenty one plus and aesthetic preference and culture in terms of things that are reducible to you know rationally quantifiable things you know stemming from biology like that's that's not a german or a continental tendency okay that's that's very much a like i said very much an anglophone rationalist tendency but opposite that you know you had you had this very kind of metaphysical tradition that in the case of germany you know goes back to to to it's a theologian like heterodox theologians like meister record i consider a heidegger to have been like in that vein you know the idea of you know what what this kind of ontological idea of you know what it would like what their being is like literally their being you know like this that sensual that sensuous presence of of of life and how and how that and how that is transmitted across generations you know to form a kind of a kind of conceptual core of consciousness that's that's not that's not restricted to individual lives you know like it it it's literally like an ongoing kind of stream of consciousness it's it's difficult to describe these things and some things you lost in translation but it doesn't matter we don't need to we don't we don't we don't need to really concisely define that for purposes here like what the point is that you know it's an example of these kind of like oppositional tendencies within the same political culture that over the over the fact that you know the juncture at which national socialism emerged and and and and the point at which you know the the the third reich and specifically the hitler regime emerged you know this was a period of a profound apocalypse transition and and these punctuated kind of upheavals and things that richard landever i he's a guy who's right he's kind of a the seminal historian of the waffen ss and i cannot remember the damn name of it but he had this publication that was dedicated to you know unit histories and all kinds of things of the waffen ss with a particular emphasis on the foreign legions of it then he actually he actually had some kind of role official role in in the prime in the in the preeminent boffin ss veterans organization until it you know became defunct going to the fact that there just you know weren't weren't any members left owing to old age and things but he's a he's aggregated a huge amount of data about the waffen ss and if people think i'm overstating the fact there's a european army like i pulled land there's data and western european in in in western europe there was fifty five zero zero zero volunteers from holland alone you know the baltic states and the soviet nationalities there's a hundred thousand volunteers you know ethnic germans from outside of the right proper it was three hundred zero zero zero men you know from the balkans and uh and uh and other slavic ethnicities you know there's over a hundred thousand uh volunteers you know if that's not a you know of course like you know the bulk of of of of of forces and being by the war's end were still germans from the reich it was you know four hundred thousand you know plurality not a raw majority of men in in wearing the uniform of of the ss they're often assessed but you know they can't it can't be said that that was that that was anything but a european force you know and that and that was sight unseen since the crusades and that's that's that's an interesting spanglerian point that i i know some of the some of the some of the subscribers will find really poignant you know spangler made a big point of you know the the era the crusader era you know as as being you know kind of when the idea when when europe has a kind of self conscious culture form you know ossified you know and gradually this kind of gradually this broke down over time and uh it reached kind of the zeal of its fracturing you know with with the enlightenment and the kind of rationalist you know the preeminence of rationalist political political and cultural tendencies you know that's when these that that's that that that's when these kinds of that's when this kind of petty statism became uh became uh became paramount over european identity i mean it's a gradual process but that uh it's most people have kind of the opposite conception of how this develops helped but you know the it really is kind of an effort to pigeonhole identity into into the kind of rationalist was failing structure you know there's something in tried about that you know if anything's been tried it's not going to pet it nationalism it's not it's not it's not the idea of a of a european man as a historical as as historically present you know personage anyway moving on so that's the way to character you know that's the way you got to understand the the way the germans viewed the soviet threat and the way europeans viewed their situation in the world in geostrategic terms as well as an existential cultural terms you know they they viewed correctly in my opinion i don't see how this can be denied they they're they're they were under existential threat like their form of life was was was being threatened with annihilation you know part of this was kind of the the the the ideologies that were becoming dominant you know of the kind of rationalist you know capitalist ideology which you know in the in the national socialist view went hand in glove with uh with uh with with with with with the jewish world of intellectual existence which was axiomatically you know hostile in the most in the most uh and most aggressive terms to europe you know and opposite that was you know this this this tendency towards bolshevism which sought to quite literally like eradicate you know the past in full and remove man from history entirely you know and and uh and and and and and and create a new and create it and create a new kind of modality of life that that that was not encumbered in their view by by any trappings of culture or uh or historical existence the the ultimate ambition of bolshevism was literally to end history and that's the as the the ultimate consequence of that is is essentially the murder of culture and like if you murder culture and you remove people from from from from these kinds of forms of culture like you're you're basically marooning them in a in in in a kind of spiritual sense in their own in their own individual lives and you're kind of you're robbing their lives of meaning as well as their deaths of meaning and i mean that's a little bit outside of the scope of what we're talking about but this is very very deeply felt by people by europeans okay and this is also important because we the one of the tasks of the revisionist is is the is the is to disabuse people this idea that you know by invading and waging this annihilation war against europe america was liberating europe like what was it liberating itself from was it liberating it from itself like what you know that doesn't make any sense but beyond that you know where this isn't just some kind of high fluting idea that you know revisionists have or something like european people didn't view it that way you know and in very concrete terms you've got to understand what exactly was happening as the red army got the upper hand on the battlefield and began their began their their counter offensive into europe proper now it's it's i'm not going to sit here and the point of what i'm going to relay here is is not to cast some kind of shadow on on russian people or to say that oh well you know the third reich you know you call the third reich evil the soviet union was way more evil it's not what i'm talking about okay i mean perhaps that's true but what we're talking about is we're talking about people's conceptual horizon in that historical moment and what they what what what what they were facing you know not just not not just in in what they feared coming to to to pass but what actually was coming to pass in in in the most you know mortally critical terms imaginable now because as people probably know you know a lot of what is now poland was uh was was germany you know at the time of the third reich you know in east prussia was which no longer exists that was always the easternmost garrison of of of germany this is going back six hundred years you know it this wasn't just a modern a modern contrivance nemersdorf east prussia was uh was uh was was was a garrison city within a garrison state okay and the gal writer of membersdorf was a man named eric coke and he was a very very hardline national socialist and i mean which made sense because the man that would be appointed for that role would obviously have to be a man who's very committed to the national socialist vision owing to geostrategic situation now on october twentieth the red army the red army penetrated the third reich proper for the first time when they assaulted nemmersdorf and eric coke he declared that no true german would allow himself even the thought that he's russia could fall into russian hands those are his exact words and any able bodied male civilian who civil civilian or or or military who tried to flee or retreat or evacuate eric k imposed a uh a penalty of a death sentence for that okay i mean this was how critical things were like this was literally the line in the sand and after several days of intense combat berlin had lost contact with membersdorf and you know this was the time when information only traveled as fast as a radio or a telegraph could convey it and if those if those command and control lines were down nobody nobody was aware of the they couldn't build a conceptual picture or know what was happening now this early is intense combat the fairmont they were able to regroup counter attack and they drove the red army back across the east prussian frontier you know this was a great victory and coming as it did tyler reddick

[Ryan Seacrest]

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[Thomas (Historian/Host)]

casino at the fall of nineteen forty four it was a much needed it was a much needed morale booster okay because what what what lay ahead was the vermont was char you know vermont that had been utterly hollowed out but still had a handful of crack units they they were charged with fending off the the entirety of the red army as well as doing everything they could to to force uh at least some kind of impass with the western allies who you know in the preceding summer had assaulted and and and invaded france and we're now pushing their way through belgium to the pierce the heart of the reich itself now back to nerdsdorf what did the third reich or what did the vermont uncover when they when they when they liberated nemmersdorf uh they found uh an orgy for lack of a better way to characterize it of mass homicide and torture um the heinrich amberger he was a junior officer and he was he was a physician with the german army and his testimony because he was in he was a pretty prolific diarist and and he maintained war journals and being that he was a doctor some people considered him to be you know more of a respectable witness than others he testified the fact that when they entered neverstore proper quote in a farmyard further down the road stood a cart to which four naked women were nailed through their hands in a cruciform position beyond to the barn into each of its two doors a naked woman was nailed through the hands in a crucified posture in the dwelling we found a total of seventy two women including children and one old man all dead all murder in a beastial manner except only a few who had bullet holes in their neck some babies had their heads bashed in in one room we found a woman eighty four years old sitting on a sofa as with half of whose head had been sheared off with an ax every female including girls as young as eight had been raped now the purpose of that that's a very horrible thing and that testimony is very disgusting and horrible but the reason i'm dropping it is not because again i want to put shade on on the russians or something or because i i want to fetishize you know war crimes but this was not what amber found this this was not an isolated incident as would be revealed this effort there was literally a a purposeful campaign of of mass rape and homicide like numbering in instances the millions okay

[Pete Cano (Host)]

they had done this they had done this in the spanish civil war too

[Thomas (Historian/Host)]

oh yeah yeah yeah but to scale i've researched this and it's not any fun because you know to go down this kind of rabbit hole of of sexual violence at scale it's i mean it's it's taxing on the on the emotions but i've tried to find precedent of of of this conduct carried out at scale in official terms and i can't find anything even remotely close there was a it was so in amber further attested there was a there there was a there was a a grouping of french and british pows who were housed there and they in polish and and and and and and and and and polls who had been impressed into the labor service and and these guys they they tried to protect these these women and girls who are being raped to death in many cases by the assaulting red army and and they were massacred too you know it was it was literally a barbarian invasion in nemmersdorf and it was so when berlin got word of what had happened they were so staggered by the scope and scale of of the viciousness the the foreign ministry contacted spain sweden and switzerland now this is fascinating okay they they because all all all three states were officially neutral and they they asked them to to uh to to deploy uh investigators on a fact finding mission and to document what had happened and to publicize this to the world you know now if germany was if germany was this country that was just you know singularly and solely engaged in in in in kind of criminality you know like battlefield criminality like why would they be inviting that'd be the equivalent of inviting un inspectors into you know kind of pull the curtain back okay and at that stage of the war i mean germany was not in any position to truly control the flow of information you know that was a that was leaving the the right proper or the battle spaces in which they at least have nominal control so i that's very fascinating that cuts against the kind of the kind of dominant narrative which we'll get into in the next episode about nuremberg but these these independent investigators from spain sweden and switzerland they documented what had happened and what was attested to just now and the kind of horrible testimony that i just relayed and they found it to be accurate it was true that this happened you know this was not rumor this was not something that was staged you know this the evidence was right there plain as day and they tried to publicize it to the world and it was intercept you know of course like any information that was going to reach the english speaking world was basically going through the office of war information in america and they they simply refused to to relay anything like that and grounds that you know going to harm the war effort and the uk the the uk was in full blown propaganda mode i mean there's a reason why orwell in nineteen eighty four you know like the the five minute hate like that that was literally the kind of that that was kind of how primitive and and single minded you know british propaganda had become you know we think of the uk as being you know this kind of hyper civilized place it it was really really primitive in in in terms of its in terms of its media narratives and propaganda like far more so than america or the third reich in my opinion in that regard but that's so what i'm getting at is that there's no way that what had happened here was going to be was going to reach was going to reach a world audience and it it was it was just quickly quashed because as also too i mean this this would have there's no way in hell that that roosevelt or churchill we're gonna but particularly roosevelt we're gonna we're gonna we're gonna say or do anything or or bring attention to you know any any kind of atrocities that that that might harm the concord of stalin you know and on the heels of this kind of thing you know we talked about the morgan th plan in one of our earliest episodes okay and the mor it was named for you know the the roosevelt secretary of the treasury henry morgenthau who had conceived with his top aide harry dexter white you know both of them were ethnic jews and radical new dealers and and and men with radical zionist sympathies what the morganale plan was it was never formally implemented but we'll get to why i raised this again in a moment okay on september fifteenth forty four this is when roosevelt this is when roosevelt approved the morgan plan because initially it was approved you know roosevelt died in office you have to remember okay with the morgan's health plan constituted it called the complete destruction of germany okay it called for the dismantling of it into four essentially micro states where all we're all heavy industry you know the only economic activity or productive activity would be subsistence farming this was almost like khmer rouge like and i say that without resort to hyperbole okay it they called the permanent closure of the mines it called for it called for the reduction of of the rights overall land area by half you know to be seated to the soviet union and you know the what was slated to be you know a polish client state of the soviet union george c marshall uh he uh he calculated you know of uh he calculated that that roughly two thirds of the german population which would have come out in nineteen forty five to approximately fifty million people would die of starvation in the immediate aftermath of the morgan now plan and this was considered acceptable and not as acceptable i believe that this was this was essentially the raise on detra for the war okay it was the it was the annihilation of the germans as a people on on categorical racial grounds you want to look at it like that and the reason why this was not implemented roosevelt died truman truman became president united states as a consequence of that and other intrigues you know the the the washington moscow concord fell apart divided germany became what everybody believed would be a future battleground of world war iii america needed the bundesvere to constitute the front line of that effort quite literally okay in the buddhist republic with you know the west german army the bundes bear constituting its armed element that's what defeated the morgan now plan okay i believe some iteration of the memorial plan was implemented and your friend e michael jones has written extensively about that that's a little bit outside the scope of what we're talking about here but the social engineering regime aimed at you know kind of breaking down the german moral core and you know the whole theory of the the the authoritarian personality and the the the idea that uh you know the like assaulting sexual moors and restraint could both sabotage fertility and and and communitarian bonds of family but also you know was a way of kind of like derassing people like this all stems from this epoch okay that is you know like sexuality and the perversion of sexuality is as a weapon of warfare that is the aspect in spirit of the morgan out playing that was implemented real large among many other things but this was just on my mind because i know that you and i know that you and doctor jones doctor jones like i

[Pete Cano (Host)]

kept thinking that the whole time we're

[Thomas (Historian/Host)]

like nobody yeah forgive me for being for me for being juvenile but but it was uh it was estimated uh

[Ryan Seacrest]

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[Thomas (Historian/Host)]

and conditions apply more himself that the idea was within two generations germany would cease to exist those are his words not mine and if anybody thinks i'm i'm just being partisan or resorting to kind of lurid hysterical metaphors by suggesting that the you know the new dealers were waging a genocidal war of annihilation against europe i i submit to you their own words you know just now i i i i i think that the common defense of what happened in terms of this this this mass outbreak of sexual violence and homicide and brutality i i the common claim of apologists as well these you know there's a discipline problem in the red army and and you're talking about a terrible you're talking about a terrible war that cost the lives of twenty million soviet people so these are just men you know kind of without without correct military leadership just like acting out barbarically i got everything to say about that first of all no matter how much you hate your enemy it's not normal to rape old women and little children that's just not something you do okay that just spontaneously happens you don't just say like you know me and my squad me if we're gonna rape an eighty year old none to death i mean that doesn't that's just not a spontaneous thing that happens okay elliot ehrenberg was a chief he was a chief propagandist of who worked hand in glove with the nkvd and and had the favorite style himself and he uh he he published extensively in addition to his radio broadcasts you know and both party radio and armed forces radio which reached the red army in the field he published extensively in the red star newspaper which is the red army newspaper as well as the pravda as well as he was one of the main authors of these mass these these these leaflets that were saturated you know throughout battle spaces in the front you know to both bolster the the morale of the red army or to strike fear into them so that they would not desert but also to you know try and try and demoralize the the vermont but he he consistently a consistent theme of uh his propaganda was that you know this is a racial war against the german people the germans are swine and the way and and you should rape the german women because you deserve to because they're the spoils of war they're not humans anyway look at them like cattle but also you know you you've got you've got to rape german women because then the next generation will be russian and you know they're there they'll be no more germans so you're doing you know you're you're being you're you're being a good communist as well as a good soldier to you know to to to take these women and and you know force your seat into them i know it's like gross i'm trying to phrase it as delicately as i can but i mean this is what happened there's no way to put shine on it or just make make it something that it wasn't but early on the other the other kind of the other the other kind of rebuttal that i've come across a lot not just in in guys and some girls who i've debated against in more or less formal circumstances about the war but also even other revisionists who aren't quite i guess as as knowledgeable on the topic as i am they suggest that the commissar order changed everything and you know then in kind you know the the red army ceased abiding you know the rules and customs of war and then because of because of german brutality and you know the the the exterminationist activities the einstein's group and you know they you know they the red army just responded in kind i don't accept that because turns cause and effect on its head like the commissar order that was that that was the furor order from june sixth nineteen forty one so just a little eve of barbarossa it declared that commissars when found you know when commissars when captured not only they're not entitled to any any any any convention protections but they should be eliminated you know they're not even entitled to drum heads court drum head courts marshal these men are criminals they're the they're the ideological enforcers of the soviet state the the reason for their presence at the platoon level is to is to make sure that is to make sure that the red army continues to fight and then it continues to fight specifically in accordance with with with the edicts of uh of the red army and of marxist leninism now why did hitler issue this order and wanted to make it formal well that's an interesting question and it's not as simple as you think of just oh hitler was this kind of wild man who hated ivan it's the soviet union made a big show of refusing to sign the geneva convention in nineteen twenty nine because like we talked about last episode or two episodes ago red army doctrine was inseparable from from communist ideology and you know as we talked about the as a as a matter of formal as a matter of formal protocol the red army declared you know it was it was declared by the high command you know the red army is a purely offensive army you know uh the red army does not formally declare war because you know their mandate is a historical mission to liberate the proletariat you know across this entire planet you know the the the laws and customs of war are are contrivances of capitalism in order to favor a system that is propped up by by the needs of capital i mean all of these things okay so the russian empire had had signed the hague conventions of eighteen ninety nine and nineteen oh seven but the soviet union came into existence by literally murdering that government and declaring that it had been a criminal regime and had no legitimacy so we can't claim that the soviet regime is entitled to the protections equity the reciprocal protections acquiesced to by the tsar's regime when they turned around and murdered literally the czar who had put put pen to paper on that convention now the letter of article eighty two of the geneva convention claims that you know the fact that a state is not a party signatory to it does not mean that one can escape liability from you know not honoring the protection is that their personnel are are entitled to be afforded under the convention i it's not how treaties work treaties are always permissive not compulsory because they are contracts you know there's not some higher authority no matter what rachel maddow might tell you or whatever mister biden might mumble about in between you know soiling is depends or what or what some you know or some berkeley professor might tell you about you know kind of the universality of of human rights there is no sovereign authority that's higher than a the government of a national state and national states become parties to treaties based upon a meeting of the mind just like people who you know just like people who agree to to to a contract if there's no meaning in the minds it's because there's no moral consensus there's no moral consensus there there's no willingness to abide the strictures of a treaty that only exists when when such a meeting of minds exists so this i this is this was the origin of the commissar order and beyond that i mean it kind of went without saying anyway because you know the the the soviet union had had in a lot of ways was a rejection of the of the of the kind of peterism you know the peter the great a preceding couple centuries it was seceding from europe just outright okay in addition to the marxist leninist ideology that you know underlay it the idea that you were obligated to extend you know geneva convention protections to the soviet union was somewhat ridiculous okay but the the the the commissar order and the the activities the einstein's group and like make make a mistake i mean that was a that was incredibly i mean incredibly brutal stuff was carried out under the offices of that but it's not as if you know that's what prompted the red army's brutality the first instance i have found of reported atrocities on the eastern front july first nineteen forty one now mind you this is just weeks after this is just weeks after barbarosa they're broniki ukraine i'm sure i'm butchering that pronunciation i'm sorry about that don't say snarky stuff i realize i'm bad with these things but i i cannot enunciate slavic stuff it's too constant heavy i just i don't speak these languages near bruniki the red army captured one hundred sixty german lancers a junior waffen ss officer candidate named hans volterstorff he he attested to the fact that all these men with the exception of a few who'd been quite literally gutted and and hadn't yet expired had been severely tortured before being murdered by having their throats cut or their heads bashing the rice rifle bus these men had their eyes gouged out they were castrated i mean all these things they were alive okay and obviously this inflamed the passions and kind of of these of these bobbin assessment bear troopers and i you know moving forward in the conflict as early as august as as a you know as as all the army groups close on their objectives i mean there was there's myriad reports of categorical you know massacres by by the vermont ss the same under the united states group and like i'm not i'm not claiming otherwise i invoke the testament of of of walter storf because it again it rebuts the idea that like well the red army was fighting a clean war or was behaving like a normal military force and i know you know the commissar order began was was implemented at scale and well that all bets were off that's that's nonsense i mean there there was a unique brutality to the red army is what i'm getting at okay and again this isn't what about ism but i i it's this is something that's missing from the the court history record okay or it's something just not dealt with at all in part because there's they're it's imperative in order to substantiate the court history narrative to posit that the vermont and the boffin ss was was uniquely was was was uniquely brutal and and and had contempt for the laws and customs of war in a unique way that that stands apart from all other conduct of all combatants in the war war that's why i raised this as well as like i said that it from the outset of this discussion it's essential to understand in concrete terms the the european view of the war against the bolsheviks it's essential you know this wasn't this was stuff that was being encountered by landers in the field and and and was ubiquitous this was not this was not comparable to like you know horror stories of you know of of of nineteen seventeen of you know oh america must intervene in in the great war because you know the dirty hunt is crucifying french boys like that's not we're not talking a kind of thing at all we're talking about documented acts of horrendous brutality outside of any any any kind of normal combat operation um but it's also what i gotta say too because again i'm sure that there's going to be a lot of russians and maybe just other slavic people who are going to think that i'm being bigoted or just trying to be mean or something that is not the case at all and i will say this and von manstein in his who people have mixed feelings about but i it's important to pay attention to to his testimony whether you love or hate the guy or think he was a great man or think he was a traitor to his fur and to his people that's not important for about to drop von von manstein dropped consistently that the red army russian soldier he loomed large in the minds of all europeans under arms just because he was incredibly game and incredibly tough there's endless there's as many there's just as many anecdotes and eyewitness testimony about the incredible gameness and toughness and ability to endure pain and hardship and deprivation and still fight effectively of other red army trooper as there is about his propensity for you know horrible horrible violence against against vulnerable populations whether pows or female non combatants or what have you so that's not our purpose here is to just bash the russians or you know suggest that they're inferior or something at all i just wanted to make that clear and the fact they were the fact that they were and are so tough in game is one of the reasons why you know they were such a feared adversary you know it's anybody can be brutal in fact often like brutality is the recourse of of the weakling but i i yeah i think i think i think it's maybe a good point to kind of stop because i the rest of my notes and the rest of them what's on my mind that i kind of be jumping into stuff that i want to cover in the next episode because it deals specifically with what was alleged at nuremberg for the testimony therein if i drop it now that's kind of gonna confuse the narrative what i'd like to talk about next though i'd like to talk about the war in the west in terms of how it resolved in terms of combat kind of like we did last episode with barbarossa but also the strategic bombing campaign by raf and u s army air forces because that's important and that and it bears not just on the context of how combat developed in the western front but it also comes to bear on how the nuremberg indictment was structured and crafted and what was redacted and what was not and then after that episode we'll we'll probably be two episodes to deal with the nuremberg tribunal because it's such a huge topic and then it's totally up to you because it's your show i wanted to do kind of a final episode of this series where we could just like field questions that people want to know about i mean we'll take a question beforehand obviously but like some of the like some of the some of the british studs who follow you and follow my stuff like like these english and scottish dudes they want us to talk about like north africa and that would be a great freaking topic and like other guys want to talk a little bit more about about you know about kind of the the hillovers of stress or like intrigues and things and that i mean that'd be great too i mean it's totally up to you but i think that might be worthwhile and it would kind of get people a little more involved i look forward to it yeah yeah hell yeah okay yeah but that's that's i think this is a good stopping point all right well

[Pete Cano (Host)]

you're working plug what you want to

[Thomas (Historian/Host)]

plug and yeah okay i'm happy to report my manuscript for the next steel store is practically finished this is about two weeks late later than i wanted it to be but that's going to be dropping imminently this summer that makes me very happy so that'll soon be available you can find me at i'm on i'm on t gram t me slash the number seven h one a s seven hundred and seventy seven you can find me on substack real thomas seven hundred and seventy seven dot substack dot com you can find me on gab at real thomas seven hundred seventy seven i'm actually on truth social now uh not not because i've gone like mega or something but it i i've got a couple friends there and i'm interested to see what mister trump is saying because there's been as far as i can tell like no real coverage of it election season which is strange at this stage in the game but you can find me there i mean the real thomas seven hundred seventy seven i i'm not real active there but any of my content like this i posted up there i posted on gab you can always find it on t ram but that's that's how to find me and if you want to get hold of me personally hit me up on t gram by direct message i'll give you an email or a phone

[Pete Cano (Host)]

number i appreciate it man until the

[Thomas (Historian/Host)]

next time yeah thank you pete looking

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