The War of Goebbels' Czech Mistress

Our introductory history textbooks sometimes highlight some of the strange and amusing stories of the past. I think that most students must have cracked a smile when they read their chapter on eighteenth century European history and came across “The War of Jenkins’ Ear.”

As its comprehensive Wikipedia article explains, that major conflict fought between Britain and Spain from 1739 to 1748 had been prompted by the mutilation of an alleged British smuggler by Spanish authorities a few years earlier, a brutal act that greatly outraged both the British people and their parliamentary representatives.

That military struggle soon merged into the much larger conflict known to history as “The War of the Austrian Succession,” lasting from 1740 to 1748 and involving nearly all the major European powers. Although both the forces involved and the human losses were absolutely trivial by twentieth century standards, the war lasted most of a decade and was one of the most important during the first half of the eighteenth century. The bulk of the fighting took place in Europe, but the forces of Britain, Spain, and France also battled each other across the Indian subcontinent, North America, the Caribbean, and on the high seas, arguably making it one of the first “world wars” long before any such term ever came into common usage. The outcome had a considerable impact on the balance of world power, as well as the futures both of India and of what ultimately became the United States.

Although we often assume that such trivial causes of a major war might only have occurred in the days of the bewigged courts of European monarchs, that is actually not the case. During my historical readings of the last few years I’ve discovered that the important chains of causation in much more modern times have also sometimes been driven by very similar minor events, although these reconstructions were often totally omitted from all of our standard histories.

Everyone knows that World War II was the most colossal military conflict in all of human history, resulting in many tens of millions of deaths and the destruction of most of Europe, while it became the shaping event of our entire modern world. But none of our history books have ever hinted that one of its crucial triggers may have been an incident just as obscure and trivial as the one that led to the war that had broken out almost exactly two hundred years earlier.

Although Chinese and Japanese forces had been fighting a large but undeclared war since the Marco Polo Bridge incident of 1937, nearly all our history books always cite September 1, 1939 as the date that World War II began. On that day, Germany invaded Poland, very soon followed by the British and French declarations of war. But as far as I know, none of our historical accounts of the last 85 years have ever properly connected all the dots, thereby fully describing what had actually happened and why, something that I have briefly sketched out on a couple of occasions.

One major reason that both mainstream and revisionist historians have failed to present the full chain of events is that nearly all those individuals have remained unaware of certain crucial elements, and a jigsaw puzzle that is missing one or more large pieces can never be properly completed.

The most important starting point for analyzing the outbreak of World War II is to establish the identity of the key figure who was responsible for the conflict, and few of our historical accounts have correctly done so.

Our country fought and defeated Adolf Hitler, so for obvious reasons our standard histories have almost invariably blamed him as the guilty party. But The Origins of the Second World War published in 1961 by renowned Oxford historian A.J.P. Taylor very persuasively challenged that conclusion, and although that seminal work provoked a major political backlash, it had been widely praised at the time:

As most of us know from our standard history books, the flashpoint of the conflict had been Germany’s demand for the return of Danzig. But that border city under Polish control had a 95% German population, which overwhelmingly desired reunification with its traditional homeland after twenty years of enforced separation following the end of the First World War. According to Taylor only a dreadful diplomatic blunder by the British had led the Poles to refuse that reasonable request, thereby provoking the war. The widespread later claim that Hitler sought to conquer the world was totally absurd, and instead the German leader had actually made every effort to avoid war with Britain or France.

…the glowing cover-blurbs suggested some of the immediate acclaim the work had received. The Washington Post lauded the author as “Britain’s most prominent living historian,” World Politics called it “Powerfully argued, brilliantly written, and always persuasive,” The New Statesman, Britain’s leading leftist magazine, described it as “A masterpiece: lucid, compassionate, beautifully written,” and the august Times Literary Supplement characterized it as “simple, devastating, superlatively readable, and deeply disturbing.” As an international best-seller, it surely ranked as Taylor’s most famous work, and I could easily understand why it was still on my required college reading list nearly two decades after its original publication.

…Despite all the international sales and critical praise, the book’s findings soon aroused tremendous hostility in certain quarters. Taylor’s lectures at Oxford had been enormously popular for a quarter century, but as a direct result of the controversy “Britain’s most prominent living historian” was summarily purged from the faculty not long afterwards. At the beginning of his first chapter, Taylor had noted how strange he found it that more than twenty years after the start of the world’s most cataclysmic war no serious history had been produced carefully analyzing the outbreak. Perhaps the retaliation that he encountered led him to better understand part of that puzzle.

Although Taylor’s historiography had always been noted for its strong hostility to Germany, the facts of what had actually happened in 1939 were so plain that he set them out unflinchingly and suffered the personal consequences. Since then, many others have come to similar conclusions and have sometimes managed to get their books into print:

Decades after Taylor’s pioneering volume, an outstanding historical analysis reaching very similar conclusions was published in German by Gerd Schultze-Rhonhof, who had spent his career as a fully mainstream professional military man, rising to the rank of major general in the German army before retiring. A couple of years ago I finally read the English translation of 1939 – The War That Had Many Fathers, which appeared in 2011, released exactly a half-century after Taylor’s seminal work.

The author considerably extended Taylor’s analysis, with his 700 pages describing in great detail the enormous efforts that Hitler had taken to avoid war and settle that boundary dispute, even spending many months on fruitless negotiations and offering extremely reasonable terms. Indeed, the German dictator had made numerous concessions to Poland that none of his democratic Weimar predecessors had ever been willing to consider. But these proposals were all rejected, while Polish provocations escalated, including violent attacks on their own country’s sizeable German minority population, until war seemed the only possible option.

Magisterial works such as Hitler’s War and Churchill’s War by British historian David Irving came to very similar conclusions. Drawing upon his massive use of documentary evidence, his former volume concluded that Hitler certainly did not want or expect the war that broke out in 1939. Meanwhile, his latter work argued that Winston Churchill played a crucial role in pushing Britain into the conflict, likely doing so under the secret financial influence of the Czechs and the Jews who funded his extremely lavish lifestyle and therefore largely controlled his political actions.

Although many of Irving’s claims about Churchill’s outrageous financial misbehavior were extremely controversial when he originally made them in 1987, three decades later that remarkable picture was fully confirmed and even extended by David Lough in No More Champagne, published in 2015 and produced with full access to Churchill’s personal papers. Irving’s riveting public lectures on the topic are certainly worth watching:

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Other notable works coming to rather similar conclusions included The Forced War, an extremely detailed 320,000 word volume by David Hoggan, largely based upon his 1948 Harvard doctoral dissertation in diplomatic history. That massive work remained unavailable in English for decades before being eventually being released in 1989, with an HTML version found on this website and a 2023 edition now finally available for sale on Amazon.

Patrick Buchanan’s 2008 bestseller Churchill, Hitler, and the Unnecessary War provoked a great deal of controversy when it appeared, and was probably the first time that most Americans had ever encountered such ideas. The book by the conservative commenter and former presidential candidate attracted numerous reviews, both favorable and critical, and was featured on C-SPAN’s Book TV.

All these writers argued that Britain had been responsible for the outbreak of the war. Taylor suggested that the cause had been a terrible but unintentional diplomatic blunder by the government of Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain, while Irving, Buchanan, and Hoggan argued that the outbreak of the war had been deliberate, with the first two authors fingering Churchill as the primary culprit and the last focusing upon Foreign Minister Lord Halifax.

A different but highly credible perspective was provided by Prof. John Beaty, a well-regarded mainstream academic who had held a crucial wartime role in American Military Intelligence from 1941 onward, being responsible for producing the daily briefing reports distributed to the White House and all our other top political and military leaders.

After resuming his peacetime university career and undertaking considerable additional research, he published The Iron Curtain Over America, a huge 1951 conservative bestseller that was strongly endorsed by many of our top generals. In that work Beaty argued that American Jews and the Roosevelt Administration that they dominated had gotten our country into an entirely unnecessary war on behalf of Jewish and Communist interests.

Prof. Revilo P. Oliver had been a former wartime colleague of Beaty, running one of our most important code-breaking operations. Oliver subsequently became a leading conservative figure during the 1950s and 1960s at National Review and the John Birch Society, and in 1981 he published America’s Decline, with his memoirs presenting a description of the origins of World War II that was very similar to that of Beaty.

Both Beaty and Oliver have been almost entirely purged from all our mainstream and conservative histories, and the same has been true of the books that they published. But given their crucial wartime positions, we should take their views on World War II quite seriously.

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