(Look for the latest edition to be published by the Institute of Historical Review later this year.)

The conflict between Warsaw and Berlin became the pretext in 1939 for the implementation of the antiquated English balance of power policy. This produced a senseless war of destruction against Germany. As it turned out, each Allied soldier of the West was fighting unwittingly for the expansion of Bolshevism, and he was simultaneously undermining the security of every Western nation. Never were so many sacrifices made for a cause so ignoble.
— David Hoggan, The Forced War

INTRODUCTION

The best litmus tests for today’s Dissident Right should include only one question: did the right side win the Second World War in Europe?

If you answer yes, most likely you’re not a dissident. If you answer no, most likely you are. In this case, degrees don’t matter—neither does intent. One can profess the saint-like innocence of the Nazis in the face of their genocidal enemies, or one can cop to all the atrocities ascribed to the Nazis and support them anyway. Dissident. On the other hand, one can carefully weigh the actions of both sides and conclude that the Nazis were slightly more in the right than the Allies. Doesn’t matter. Dissident.

To be sure, similar questions about similar wars can become similar litmus tests. Soviet citizens who believed the Whites should have beaten the Reds in the Russian Civil War were one example. Present-day Southern Nationalists who believed the wrong side won the American Civil War are another. But the most meaningful question involves the Second World War because that conflict was the most destructive, affected the most people, and has had the profoundest impact on Western Civilization.

Thus, to be a dissident one most likely needs a level of historical understanding that goes far deeper (although not necessarily broader) than that of the average educated person. David Hoggan’s 1961 work The Forced War: When Peaceful Revision Failed provides this historical understanding so comprehensively that it should be nearly impossible for anyone to subscribe to his thesis and not wind up a dissident.

The Forced War effectively offers the German point of view during the lead up to the Second World War. More specifically, it demonstrates the paucity of good reasons (and indeed the plethora of bad reasons) why England and Poland in particular resisted Adolf Hitler’s dogged attempts to peacefully revise the map of central Europe. Hitler’s purpose was to right the wrongs of the Treaty of Versailles, and in so doing serve the legitimate interests of the German people. The Forced War concerns itself only with the events culminating in Germany’s invasion of Poland, which can be seen as a conflict separate from the worldwide conflagration which followed.

The story amounts to a series of decisions and actions made by men in Berlin, London, and Warsaw, with Rome, Washington, Moscow, Prague, and Paris acting more or less from the sidelines. One action impacts another and another, and so on. In a sense, The Forced War is a broader and deeper version of A.J.P. Taylor’s landmark 1961 volume The Origins of the Second World War, which Hoggan references often. Both these works refuse to demonize Adolf Hitler and the Nazis (or psychoanalyze them into insanity). Instead they show them as rational, ethnonationalist fascists who, to be sure, made mistakes, but more often than not got things right and had justice on their side. Much is made in both works of Hitler’s peaceful revision of central Europe during the 1930s.

While Taylor reserves some space for moral criticisms of Hitler, Hoggan offers nearly none. Instead, he focuses on the one person whom he believes was most to blame in unnecessarily bringing about the most destructive war in history: British Foreign Secretary Lord Halifax. Described by Hoggan as “one of the most self-assured, ruthless, clever, and sanctimoniously self-righteous diplomats the world has ever seen,” Halifax emerges from the pages of The Forced War as the villain par excellence of the twentieth century and beyond. As the dominant personality in Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain’s government, he seemed to have harbored a malignant hatred for Germans and for Germany. He was also dead set upon war as soon as Hitler began expanding his nation’s borders and influence on the continent, starting with the Anschluss of Austria in March 1938. War, Halifax felt, was inevitable, which justified every underhanded tactic he employed to goad Germany and Poland into it. Indeed, if Hoggan’s analysis is even partially correct, it is nothing less than a travesty that Halifax is not being vilified the way Hitler continues to be 80 years after the war.

Of course, one man’s hatred would not have amounted to much had the European map not been muddled by the Treaty of Versailles in 1919. The treaty violated everything we know about nationalism and rearranged borders to make them both ethnically inorganic and ultimately unworkable. The sorest point, of course, turned out to be the majority-German Free City of Danzig, which was now surrounded by Polish territory and under the tenuous control of the League of Nations. Hitler dearly wanted to reincorporate it into the Reich:

The ultimate treaty terms gave Poland much more than she deserved, and much more than she should have requested. Most of West Prussia, which had a German majority at the last census, was surrendered to Poland without plebiscite, and later the richest industrial section of Upper Silesia was given to Poland despite the fact that the Poles lost the plebiscite there. The creation of a League protectorate for the national German community of Danzig was a disastrous move; a free harbor for Poland in a Danzig under German rule would have been far more equitable. The chief errors of the treaty included the creation of the Corridor, the creation of the so-called Free City of Danzig, and the cession of part of Upper Silesia to Poland. These errors were made for the benefit of Poland and to the disadvantage of Germany, but they were detrimental to both Germany and Poland. An enduring peace in the German-Polish borderlands was impossible to achieve within the context of these terms.

Sadly, Polish Foreign Minister Józef Beck seemed to take these gifts a little too much to heart. According to Hoggan, Beck was swayed by the false notion that the regions the Versailles Treaty had grafted onto Poland had always belonged to Poland—despite their German majorities and centuries-long German presence. This led him to defend these acquisitions at all costs, despite Hitler’s generous offers and attempts at peaceful revision. Of course, it would have been suicidal for Beck to do this alone, since by the time Germany had re-armed in 1935, Poland had approximately half of Germany’s population, was less industrialized, and would have stood no chance against her in a war. It was only due to promises of military support from Halifax in the event of a German invasion that Beck felt brazen enough to defy Hitler.

Polish defiance of Hitler on the Danzig question did not occur until the British leaders had launched a vigorous encirclement policy designed to throttle the German Reich. It is very unlikely that the Polish leaders would have defied Hitler had they not expected British support. The Polish leaders had received assurances ever since September 1938 that the British leaders would support them against Hitler at Danzig.

Another, albeit secondary, element of the story is how US president Franklin Delano Roosevelt and his warmongering half-Jewish ambassador William Bullitt lurked in the background, constantly making the political atmosphere favorable for war against Germany—but as discreetly as possible since the American public had no appetite for a second forceful intervention in Europe. As early as November 7, 1937 FDR had declared to the French Chargé d’Affaires Jules Henry that he was interested in overthrowing Hitler.

A year later, the Polish diplomat in Washington Jerzy Potocki reported that Bullitt had informed him that

. . . President Roosevelt was determined to bring America into the next European war. Bullitt explained to Potocki at great length that he enjoyed the special confidence of President Roosevelt. Bullitt predicted that a long war would soon break out in Europe, and “of Germany and her Chancellor, Adolf Hitler, he spoke with extreme vehemence and with bitter hatred.” He suggested that the war might last six years, and he advocated that it should be fought to a point where Germany could never recover.

Potocki did not share the enthusiasm of Bullitt and Roosevelt for war and destruction. He asked how such a war might arise, since it seemed exceedingly unlikely that Germany would attack Great Britain or France. Bullitt suggested that a war might break out between Germany and some other Power, and that the Western Powers would intervene in such a war. Bullitt considered an eventual Soviet-German war inevitable, and he predicted that Germany, after an enervating war in Russia, would capitulate to the Western Powers. He assured Potocki that the United States would participate in this war, if Great Britain and France made the first move.

As would be expected, The Forced War dives into a great many diplomatic and political details of the late 1930s. Not every tit in the book leads to a tat, but most do, demonstrating the veritable gym floor of diplomatic dominoes which was in place at the time. Hoggan thankfully keeps historical encounters and correspondence as brief, punchy, and to-the-point as possible, and with very few tangents. This allows him to pack his book with enough day-by-day and down-to-the-minute detail to make it a real page turner. Two-thirds of the way through this 320,000 word history (that’s nearly Don Quixote length, by the way), Hoggan is still discussing the events from mid-August, 1939. This means he dedicated about one-third of his magnum opus to the final two weeks before the German invasion of Poland.

This is an eventful book, to say the least. And it’s good stuff too—the scheming, the backstabbing, the heroics, the cold feet, and the histrionics are all there. So are all the lies and blunders. Some of this amounts to fallible human beings practicing politics as usual (such as Italy’s dithering support for Germany in August 1939), but much amounts to what Hoggan ascribes to foul play. And the prime perpetrator was the Halifax-Beck-Roosevelt tripartite, which forced the war upon an comparatively innocent Nazi Germany.

What follows in parts 2 and 3 of this review is less an evaluation of the entirety of The Forced War than a presentation of the evidence which supports Hoggan’s thesis—evidence which will prove invaluable to the dissident case today. This evidence falls into three categories:

1. Lord Halifax deviously manipulated both Poland and Germany into war.


2. Poland deserved to be invaded by refusing to negotiate over Danzig and by abusing her German minority.


3. Hitler wanted peace and sincerely cared about the German people.

Hoggan asserts early in The Forced War that Lord Halifax, despite nominally being the British foreign secretary, in fact controlled British foreign policy on the European continent—not Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain. Further, Halifax from the beginning had contempt for Hitler’s revisionist aims for the German people, who were clearly wronged by the 1919 Treaty of Versailles. In a March 1938 meeting with German ambassador Joachim von Ribbentrop, Halifax inaptly compared the Anschluss—the peaceful reincorporation of the ethnically German people of Austria into the Reich—to a hypothetical British declaration of war against Belgium.

The fact that Austria had been part of Germany for more than one thousand years, and that the legislators of Austria had voted to join Germany after World War I, carried no weight with him. Consequently, he did not recognize the Anschluss as an act of liberation for the Austrian people from a hated puppet regime.

During the leadup to Germany’s annexation of the Sudetenland in Czechoslovakia in autumn 1938, the official British attitude began to shift against Germany and in favor of the far more oppressive and murderous Soviet regime. William Strang of the British Foreign Office justified this when stating that, unlike Nazism, Communism “springs, however remotely, from a moral idea, the idea namely that man shall not be exploited by man for his own personal profit.” This mistake—of taking Communists at their word rather than their deed—would be repeated often by Halifax, who saw the greater danger in an ascendent Germany which hadn’t killed millions during peacetime than in an ascendent Soviet Union, which had. In August 1938, Halifax . . .

. . . assured the Poles that Great Britain was interested in supporting them to prevent changes at Danzig. It was evident to the Poles that this volte face was an indication of British determination to organize a coalition against Germany at some date after the Czech crisis, and that, in the British mind, Poland would be very useful in forming such a front.

In the fall of 1938, Strang had also invented a false rumor about Hitler’s bellicose designs on Poland in order to undermine any rapport forming between the two nations. But it wasn’t just Poland. Hoggan recounts how Halifax sought to prevent peaceful relations between Germany and France, Italy, and Czechoslovakia as well. This with the full knowledge—as recorded in his discussion with American ambassador Joseph Kennedy in October 1938—that Hitler did not desire war against England. Yet, throughout 1938 Halifax and Chamberlain pushed for the production of thousands of long-range heavy bombers with the singular intent of bombing German civilian targets.

Further, it wasn’t just Strang who was spreading false rumors. In a second conversation with Kennedy, Halifax

. . . painted a somber picture of Hitler’s attitude toward Great Britain . . . and he also gave Kennedy a great quantity of unreliable information about Hitler’s alleged attitudes toward a number of current continental problems. A few weeks later he claimed to Kennedy that Hitler was consumed by passionate hatred of England, and that he had a plan to tear the Soviet Union to pieces in the Spring of 1939. The purpose of these deceptive tactics was obvious. Halifax was exercising his diplomatic talents in preparation for a British attack on Germany. He was also indulging in the easy task of adding fuel to the dislike of the American leaders for Germany.

Halifax’s strange concern for the welfare of the Soviet Union befuddled Italian Premier Benito Mussolini enough to make him question its wisdom in direct conversation with Chamberlain during the British Prime Minister’s January 1939 visit to Rome. Il Duce believed, quite rightly, that the fall of Communism would be a good thing for the Russian people. Chamberlain apparently disagreed and used much of his time in Italy to intimidate the Italians into not siding with Hitler in the event of war.

After incessant rumormongering about the warlike ambitions of Hitler during the Czech crisis (and ignoring that Poland had also invaded Czechoslovakia and acquired the district of Teschen during this time), Halifax privately admitted to British ambassador Neville Henderson in early 1939 that “. . . rumors and scares have died down, and it is not plain that the German Government are planning mischief in any particular quarter.” This, Halifax noted, amounted to “a negative improvement of the situation.” Reacting to Halifax’s disappointment over Hitler’s ability to acquire territory peacefully, Hoggan wryly notes that:

[t]he British were ruling over millions of alien peoples throughout the world on the strength of naked conquest. It was evident that the British leaders failed to appreciate Hitler’s ability to solve difficult problems without bloodshed. Apparently they preferred their own methods. Halifax told German Ambassador Dirksen on March 15, 1939, that he could understand Hitler’s taste for bloodless victories, but he promised the German diplomat that Hitler would be forced to shed blood the next time.

This was around the time when Halifax prepared a speech for Chamberlain in which the Prime Minister declared fallaciously that Hitler intended to conquer the world. Also around this time, Halifax hatched what became known as the “Tilea hoax” in which Virgil Tilea, an unscrupulous Romanian minister in London was effectively bribed to spread lies that Hitler intended to “seize control of the entire Romanian economy.” Shortly after, Halifax brazenly used this hoax as an excuse to court the Soviets to join an anti-German alliance.

Fortunately, the hysteria caused by Tilea died down fairly quickly, but the tensions over Danzig lingered. After the war, Halifax advisor Sir Samuel Hoare admitted that Halifax had needed a pretext to oppose Germany other than the nonexistent need for a defensive front, and that Poland and her claims on Danzig were it. Strang himself admitted that any good argument against embroiling Europe in a war over Poland would have fallen on deaf ears in Halifax’s cabinet, since “our people had made up our minds.”

If this is not evidence of Halifax’s desire for war against Germany, I don’t know what is.

The Chauvinism of Józef Beck

As fantastic as it seems, the vast web of deceit spun by such a powerful individual as Lord Halifax would not have sunk Europe into a self-destructive war had it not been for the obstinacy and ego of Polish Minister of Foreign Affairs Józef Beck.

Hoggan begins The Forced War with a discussion of the various strains of Polish nationalism during the interwar period. What set Beck’s predecessor Józef Piłsudski apart from other thought leaders of the time was his contention that Poland was potentially a great power and still needed to develop into one. This sought a happy medium between national pride and realism. After the First World War, Poland was in fact not a great power, but a middling one, which had the trappings of greatness—at least in a geographic sense—thrust upon her by the Treaty of Versailles. Piłsudski seemed to recognize this and pursued a comparatively prudent foreign policy vis-à-vis Germany during his tenure as de facto head of state. From 1933 to 1935, he planned for preemptive war against a still-disarmed Germany, even to the point of sending a warship to disembark Polish soldiers into Danzig in March 1933 (a little over a month after Hitler’s ascension to power) and concentrating troops in what’s known as the Polish Corridor, the strip of land separating northern Germany from East Prussia. Sensing the growing strength of Germany and questionable support from the other continental powers, however, his last policy decision before his death was not to oppose Hitler’s move to defy the Treaty in March 1935.

Piłsudski protégé Józef Beck, however, lacked this good sense and resisted all of Hitler’s attempts at rapprochement over Danzig once he felt he had the British blank check in his back pocket. In his mind, Poland was already a great power, which needn’t be pushed around by Germany like Austria and Czechoslovakia had been. Beck also did little as his people, from the government on down, oppressed, intimidated, and at times brutalized their German minority. In The Forced War Hoggan describes many of the insults and outrages leveled at Germany and Germans by the Poles from 1933 to 1939—to say nothing of Beck’s outright diplomatic betrayal of Germany—to the point of justifying Hitler’s eventual invasion.

When Hitler announced the remilitarization of the Rhineland in March 1936, Beck’s first move was to promise the French he’d invade Germany if the French declared war. While at the time Danzig was under the shaky authority of the League of Nations—which meant that legally Poland had as much claim to the city as Germany did—Beck had sent Colonel Marjan Chodacki to Danzig to publicly announce Polish designs to absorb the city. In the meantime, Poland exercised punitive economic measures (such as excessive excise taxes) against the German Danzigers, prompting them to want to be reunited with Germany all the more.

By 1938, tension had been built up to a point where incidents of violence played an increasingly prominent role. Meetings of protest, more frequently than otherwise about imaginary wrongs, were organized by pressure groups in surrounding Polish towns. They invariably ended with cries of: “We want to march on Danzig!” and with the murderous slogan: “Kill the Hitlerites!”

And it did not end with Danzig. The one million-plus Germans in Poland had to deal with various forms of prejudicial discrimination, including a hostile press, mass arrests, boycotts, land appropriations, and the “de-Germanization measures of Polish frontier ordinances.” Beck refused to lift a finger to stop any of this.

Another thorn in the sensitive paw of Poland was their being excluded from the Munich conference in September 1938. Beck saw this as a slight and held a grudge over it for a long time. Nevertheless, shortly after discussing conditions under which Poland would attack Germany, he had the unmitigated gall to ask German ambassador Hans Moltke for German support in the event of a Soviet invasion from the east. Hitler, still optimistic for peace, complied.

The following paragraphs exemplifies Hoggan’s assessment of the complications plaguing German-Polish relations in 1938:

Hitler had difficulty at this time in preventing a major German-Polish crisis because of the brutal treatment of Germans by the Polish occupation authorities in the Teschen district. Most of the German leaders believed that the Poles had claimed too much German ethnic territory in the vicinity of Teschen. Marshal Göring had advised State Secretary Weizsäcker that the territory beyond Teschen, along the southeastern German Silesian frontier, should not go to Poland unless Poland agreed to support the return of Danzig to Germany. He favored acquiring the territory for Germany or retaining it for Czecho-Slovakia, if the Poles refused. The German Foreign Office experts were inclined to agree with Göring and it was decided to make an effort to keep the Poles out of the industrial center of Witkowitz, and out of poverty-stricken little Oderberg near the source of the Oder River. Göring was closely interrogated by Weizsäcker concerning all of his recent conversations with Polish representatives.

Polish Ambassador Lipski was angry when he discovered the attitude of the German Foreign Office in the Oderberg question. He insisted to Ernst Wörmann, the head of the Political Division in the German Foreign Office, that both Hitler and Göring had promised this strategic town to Poland. Wörmann, who was familiar with Göring’s attitude, refused to believe this and he reminded Lipski that Oderberg was preponderantly German. Lipski refused to be impressed. He warned Wörmann that an official report on this conversation would complicate German-Polish relations, and he added that he would write Beck a private letter about it. Copies of official reports went to President Moscicki, and through him to other Polish leaders. The implication was clear. Poland was determined to make a stand on the Oderberg issue.

Hoggan also makes it clear that throughout 1938 and until March 1939 (when he was confident of British support) Beck had instructed Lipski to dissemble before the Germans when it came to Danzig; he never for a moment intended to negotiate in earnest over it. Then, on March 20, Beck partially mobilized the Polish army and threatened Germany with war to prevent Danzig from falling into German hands. Plans for invading Germany were distributed among the armed forces. Meanwhile, Hitler made no military response at all.

Hoggan notes how the ego and insecurity of Beck played into this decision. He had made his move prior to signing the Anglo-Polish agreement because he did not want to seem like a pawn of the British. If anything, the deluded minister was harboring dreams of conquest, having once admitted to Ribbentrop that he hoped one day to retake Kiev and reach the Black Sea. By May, he was declaring that Germany was the deadly enemy of Poland. On August 4, his government issued an ultimatum which threatened to starve Danzig and seize it from League control. Also in August, it was revealed in the Polish press that “Polish units were constantly crossing the German frontier to destroy German military installations and to carry confiscated German military equipment into Poland.” Polish forces illegally occupied several Danzig installations, fought directly with Danzigers, and fired upon three German passenger planes as well.

The final straw was Beck’s termination of all negotiation over Danzig and the full mobilization of Poland’s armed forces by end of August.

If there is one shortcoming of the Forced War it is Hoggan’s slightly less than conclusive coverage of the “brutal treatment of Germans” by the Poles. He mentions it often, but too often delves into it without hard numbers, which could be useful for dissidents today. Perhaps the numbers were not available to him?

Here is some of what Hoggan does offer:

• “A wave of persecution against the Germans living in Poland culminated in ‘Black Palm Sunday’ at Lodz on April 9, 1933. German property was damaged, and local Germans suffered beatings and humiliations.”


• In a September 1938 report on the impact of the Anschluss in Poland, Ambassador Moltke noted that “an increasing number of Germans were being sentenced to prison by Polish courts for such alleged remarks as ‘the Führer would have to straighten things out here,’ or ‘it would soon be Poland’s turn.’”


• In early October 1938, “. . . the Poles began to wage a virtual undeclared war against the German inhabitants of the Teschen region.” This included forcing German parents to send their children to Polish schools, threatening German-Polish professionals with unemployment if they did not conduct business in Polish, freezing German bank assets, arbitrary dismissals of German workers, and reducing pensions and state salaries of German Poles.


• In February 1939, the Polish government confiscated approximately 32,000 hectares of land (~79,000 acres) from its German citizens under a new law which did not penalize Polish landowners nearly as much. Hoggan believes that this law was “a convenient instrument to produce impoverishment among the Germans.”


• By the time of Germany’s invasion of Poland in September, Hoggan states that “many thousands” of German Poles (whom he refers to as “helpless hostages”) were killed in Poland as a result of the anti-German hysteria enveloping the country. There were increased cases of mutilation, torture, and mass arrests. Germans were being forcefully deported from the German frontier and marched towards the Polish interior. Massacres of Germans took place after the invasion as well.

Perhaps in hindsight one can say it was a blunder for Adolf Hitler to order the invasion of Poland. Based on the overabundance of evidence, however, one cannot say it was an unreasonable course of action. If anything, The Forced War prompts us to ask what took Hitler so long to do it.

The Optimism of Adolph Hitler

The common thread linking most if not all of Adolf Hitler’s actions and statements throughout The Forced War is ethnocentrism. He harbored a deep identification with the German people, and, to a lesser extent, an appreciation of distinct, non-German (or non-Aryan) European peoples. From the beginning, Hitler sought to undo the injustices to the German people committed by the framers of the Treaty of Versailles. This meant that in 1933 over ten million ethnic Germans in the political nation-states of Czechoslovakia, Austria, Poland, and Lithuania had been robbed of self-determination and were made to suffer foreign rule. Aside from shepherding Germany’s economic recovery during the Great Depression and reestablishing Germany’s status as a great power, bringing these people back into the Reich where they belonged (and in most cases wanted to be) was of paramount importance to Hitler.

But Hitler sought to do this peacefully and by stepping on as few toes as possible. In The Forced War, Hoggan allows for the historical record to speak for itself in order to exonerate Hitler from the charge that he wished to conquer the world. The Sudeten Germans, the Germans in Austria and Poland, and in Memel, which was seized by Lithuania in 1920 in violation of the League of Nations, did suffer oppression and indignities as second-class citizens under hostile rule. Hitler was addressing a pressing problem for his people, and had no interest in incorporating outgroup members such as Poles, Czech, and Slovaks under his rule. He said this numerous times. Is this what a power-mad conqueror would say?

Further, in January 1937, Hitler had instructed Marshal Hermann Göring to insist to Polish Minister of Foreign Affairs Beck that Germany had no designs on the Polish Corridor or any other part of Poland for that matter, and would not form an alliance with the Soviet Union as Germany had done in 1922 in Rapallo, Italy. In return he had hoped for similar concessions from the Poles (such as Danzig, which was not even officially part of Poland). Now, either this was a wise move or it wasn’t, given how the Poles were not being honest and were abusing their German minority. Either way, it makes the reader ask if Hitler’s behavior was consistent with that of a modern-day Genghis Khan.

Nearly every time Hitler’s name appears on the page (which is often), Hoggan forces us to ask such questions. And every time, it gets harder and harder to answer in a manner harmonious with the accepted narrative, which paints Hitler as evil and insane.

If there are any criticisms of Hitler lurking in The Forced War, they are exceedingly mild—praise by faint damnation, if you will. Yes, Hitler underestimated the military capabilities of the Soviet Union. Then again, so did almost everybody in Western and Central Europe. After all the bloody purges and terror famines of the 1930s, who could have envisioned the Red Army as the colossus it turned out to be? Hoggan has a few choice things to say about some of Hitler’s diplomats as well, especially Hans Moltke, German ambassador to Poland.

Hoggan’s most consistent criticism, however, deals with Hitler’s character. Der Führer was optimistic almost to the point of naïveté. He didn’t realize until it was too late that Lord Halifax was a snake in the grass intent upon encircling Germany. He also didn’t realize that Józef Beck had been an enemy all along and never once negotiated in good faith over Danzig. Hitler, in Hoggan’s view, simply assumed that everyone wanted peace as much as he did. This is why he instructed Göring not to haggle with the Poles over Teschen. This is why he renounced German claims to territory in France, Denmark, Italy, and Poland. This is why he continually suppressed stories of Polish anti-German atrocities in the German press. This is why he made the Poles a very generous offer in return for Danzig. This is why he instructed Danzig Senate President Artur Greiser to capitulate to the August 4 Polish ultimatum, which threatened to starve the city. This is why mere days before the invasion of Poland, he halted all military operations when there appeared a glimmer of hope that the Poles might negotiate after all. This is why he never stopped trying until the moment Poland made her belligerent intentions clear by fully mobilizing.

Here are the terms Hitler offered the Poles:

Germany would request Poland to permit her to annex Danzig. She would ask permission to construct a superhighway and a railroad to East Prussia. Lipski was assured that these carefully circumscribed suggestions represented the total of German requests from Poland.

It was clear that there had to be a quid pro quo basis for negotiation and Germany was prepared to offer many concessions. Poland would be granted a permanent free port in Danzig and the right to build her own highway and railroad to the port. The entire Danzig area would be a permanent free market for Polish goods on which no German customs duties would be levied. Germany would take the unprecedented step of recognizing and guaranteeing the existing German-Polish frontier, including the 1922 boundary in Upper Silesia.

Sadly, Beck preferred subterfuge, inflated national prestige, and a disastrous war over solving the Danzig crisis and acquiring a steadfast ally against the Soviet Union, of whom the Poles were rightfully wary. He also unwittingly preferred being a pawn in Lord Halifax’s grand scheme for crushing Germany, and being ruthlessly sacrificed in the process. Not realizing this caused Hitler and his government to waste time and resources being more conciliatory towards Poland than they should have been. With 20/20 hindsight, Hoggan avers that Hitler’s diplomatic efforts in the days leading up to the invasion, earnest as they were, “left very little to be desired.”

Hoggan assesses this melancholy situation quite well:

Hitler had stressed with unerring aim the importance of the British attitude toward Germany. His optimism about avoiding an Anglo-German war would have been justified to a greater extent had German-Polish relations been as solid and friendly as Hitler had indicated. Hitler was not aware of the extent to which Great Britain had fostered an anti-German policy in Poland, and he had been misled by the friendly attitude of Beck at Berchtesgaden. Hitler was disappointed by the failure of the Ribbentrop mission to Warsaw, but he remained confident that the Poles could be induced to cooperate, if they were handled with tact and patience. Hitler had made a formidable attempt to convince the foreign groups hostile toward Germany that another World War would be a disaster. It is surprising that it was necessary, after the experience of World War I, to expend so much eloquence to make such an obvious point, and it is depressing to note that the war enthusiasts of Great Britain were impervious to every such eloquent argument.

Still, Hitler never wanted war, and in an April 1939 Reichstag speech declared that despite his deep admiration for Britain, “love cannot be provided from one side if it is not received from the other.” On the eve of the invasion, he wrote to the Duke of Windsor, who was living in France at the time, “you may rest assured that my attitude toward Britain and my desire to avoid another war between our peoples remain unchanged.”

Astonishing things for a German patriot like Hitler to say a mere 20 years after Britain had helped starve to death 800,000 German children and old people during the Allied Hunger Blockade of the First World War. Even after the invasion, Hitler stated he would stop all military action if only the Poles would finally negotiate.

If only.

The Absence of Jews

There are many fascinating aspects of this crucial history not discussed at length in this review—most notably, Hoggan’s evaluation of the historical and ideological backdrop to the events of the late 1930s, his thorough coverage of the Czech crisis, his biting appraisal of Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s ignorance and cynicism, his tart dismissals of rival mainstream historians such as Martin Gilbert, Richard Gott, and William Shirer, and his moving depiction of French Foreign Minister Bonnet and his government’s slow, tragic, and entirely unnecessary capitulation to Lord Halifax.

But one curious aspect of The Forced War must be discussed to make this review complete for today’s dissidents and revisionists: Hoggan pretty much kept the Jews of out it. On balance, there is barely a whiff of counter-Semitism in the entire book. Yes, he characterizes William Bullitt as a warmonger, but he ignores his Jewish roots and at best construes him as a junior partner to Lord Halifax. Nor does he mention that Gilbert and Gott were Jewish, while he does mention the Jewish roots of historians Lewis B. Namier and T.L. Jarman whom he finds more able and honest. There are also a small number of Jews or half-Jews who turn up from time to time to enflame the war hysteria in Britain and the United States, such as “tory warmonger” Leopold Amery. But one must go to Wikipedia and not David Hoggan to discover this.

The closest Hoggan gets to taking a stand regarding the Jews is his evenhanded (some would say approving) estimation of Hitler’s Jewish policy, as exemplified by the following two passages:

Hitler believed that the policy of granting full legal and political equality to the Jews, which had been adopted in Germany and Great Britain during the previous century, had been a great mistake for Germany. He believed that inter-marriage between Germans and Jews harmed the German people and should be discontinued. He shared the conviction of Roman Dmowski in Poland that the Jews were harmful in the economic and cultural spheres. He also believed that the Jewish influence on German politics had weakened Germany. Hitler worked for the day when there would be no more Jewish subjects in Germany, just as Abraham Lincoln in his last years had worked for an exodus of Negroes from America.

. . . and . . .

He charged that the Jews had monopolized the leading positions in German life, but he wanted his own people in those positions. He desired German civilization to remain German and not to become Jewish. Foreign spokesmen often claimed that Germany was driving away her most valuable cultural asset, and Hitler hoped that they were sufficiently grateful that Germany was making this asset available to them. He knew that there was ample room in the world for Jewish settlement, but he believed that it was time to discard the idea that the Jews had the right to exploit every other nation in the world. He urged the Jewish people to form a balanced community of their own, or to face an unpredictable crisis.

Of course, I am not in a position to challenge Hoggan’s neutrality on this issue. According to two Jewish sources I have read, Benjamin Ginsburg’s How the Jews Defeated Hitler and Edwin Black’s The Transfer Agreement, influential anti-German Jews did warmonger throughout the 1930s and did have a tremendous impact upon the events leading up to the war. Yet this makes almost no appearance in The Forced War. For one thing, Hoggan outclasses both Ginsburg and Black as a historian. For breadth and depth of information as well as scholarly objectivity there really is no comparison. So that must be taken into consideration.

Secondly, I spotted some glaring inconsistencies between The Forced War and these two other sources. In The Transfer Agreement Black strongly implies that the outrage of Polish Jews over Hitler’s ascension to power is what drove Polish intransigence when dealing with Germany. Hoggan, on the other hand, stresses Polish “cruel and audacious” anti-Semitism—which was stronger than Hitler’s—and lays this intransigence squarely at the feet of Beck and his subordinates. The Jews, according to Hoggan, had nothing to do with it. Ginsburg, on the other hand, paints Roosevelt as a great ally and benefactor of the Jews who was greatly influenced by Jews in his administration such as Felix Frankfurter, Henry Morgenthau, and Samuel Cohen. Yet Hoggan insists that Jews had little to no influence on Roosevelt’s anti-German belligerence, and that FDR had “no strong pro-Jewish feelings.” Germany’s Jewish policies never amounted to more than a pretext for FDR; as evidence, Hoggan demonstrates how Jews were treated worse in Poland than in Germany.

Considerable attention was given to the problem of encouraging Jewish emigration from Germany in the years from 1933 to 1938, but far more Jews departed from Poland than from Germany during these years. An average 100,000 Jews were emigrating from Poland each year compared to 25–28,000 Jews leaving Germany annually. From September 1933 to November 1938 a special economic agreement (Havarah agreement) enabled German Jews to transfer their assets to Palestine, and the German authorities were far more liberal in this respect than Poland. There were also special arrangements for wealthy Jews in Germany to contribute to the emigration of others by capital transfers to various places. 170,000 Jews had left Germany by November 9, 1938, compared to approximately 575,000 who had departed from Poland during the same years. It was noted that thousands of Jews who left Germany in 1933 returned to the country after 1934, and that scarcely any of the Polish Jews returned to Poland during the same period.

If it was all about the Jews for FDR, then why not support war against Poland, or stay out of the fight altogether?

I don’t know who is correct about this, but I suspect there are elements of truth on both sides. History, as we all as know, can be quite messy, and historians have been known to grind axes. While Ginsburg and Black can be criticized for their anti-German biases, the same can be said for Hoggan’s apparent pro-German bias. In any case, Hoggan’s work is valuable in that he discusses the devastating harm that White gentiles can undoubtedly do to themselves. Such analysis can help prevent or limit future blunders as well as understanding the Jewish Question can.

There is, however, one personage in The Forced War who does challenge Hoggan, and Hoggan, to his credit, gives him ample airtime—even as he dismisses him outright. It seems that nearly every time Polish Ambassador Jerzy Potocki’s name appears on the page, he’s blaming the Jews for something:

Potocki overestimated the Jewish question because of his own intense prejudices against the Jews, which were shared by the entire Polish leadership. He was highly critical of the American Jews. He believed that Jewish influence on American culture and public opinion, which he regarded as unquestionably preponderant, was producing a rapid decline of intellectual standards in the United States. He reported to Warsaw again and again that American public opinion was merely the product of Jewish machinations.

Hoggan states further that . . .

Potocki continued to exaggerate the importance of the Jews in American policy, and he ridiculed prominent American Jews, who claimed that they were “desirous of being representative of ‘true Americanism’,” but were, “in point of fact, linked with international Jewry by ties incapable of being torn asunder.” He complained that the Jews hid their Jewish internationalism in a false nationalism, and “succeeded in dividing the world into two warlike camps.”

Far be it for this reviewer to give greater weight to Potocki’s position on the Jews than Hoggan’s. But considering all the scholarship and revelations of the post-Soviet period, which include the crucial works of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, Kevin MacDonald, Andrew Joyce, Ron Unz, Brenton Sanderson, and Igor Shafarevich (among others), as well as the fact that Potocki’s analysis acc ords very closely with those of Jewish writers like Ginsburg and Black, one cannot help but suspect that David Hoggan may have had a bit of a blind spot when it came to the Jews.

Conclusion

David Hoggan’s The Forced War is an invaluable work of history and a crucial touchstone for modern dissidence. Appreciating the justice and truth behind the German perspective during the Second World War is the first step we all must take to have a balanced and accurate understanding, not only of history, but of the crippling ideological conformity of our own times—which springs directly from the smoldering ruins of 1945 Berlin and the Nuremburg Trials which followed.

But the book’s own story is fascinating as well.

First published in West Germany in 1961 under the title Der erzwungene Krieg, the book engendered much hostility in the press and from establishment scholars, who dubbed it a work of “right-wing extremism.” According to historian Kurt Glaser, this was due less to the few errors Hoggan had committed and more to his “heresy against the creed of historical orthodoxy.” Naturally, patriotic German citizens, especially those who had lived through the war, praised Hoggan. His popularity was such that the German edition of The Forced War went through over a dozen printings of more than 50,000 copies.

Efforts to publish an English-language edition stalled due to disputes between Hoggan and publisher Devin-Adair. Eventually, the Institute for Historical Review obtained the rights to the book. But disaster struck in 1984. As IHR publisher Mark Weber explains in the Foreword of the book’s forthcoming 2023 edition:

But a devastating arson attack on the IHR’s offices in July 1984, which destroyed the book’s layout and proof sheets, art work and other key files, delayed publication several more years. (No one was ever arrested for the crime. Only years later did law enforcement authorities reveal that the perpetrators had been activists of the “Jewish Defense League,” an organization identified by the FBI as a major terrorist group.)

Fortunately, IHR persevered with The Forced War. This book should be read carefully and with great urgency by as wide an audience as possible. As pure history, it is as entertaining as it is enlightening. The sheer breadth of Hoggan’s scholarship makes us ask important questions and inspires high confidence in his thesis. Any atrocities, actual or purported, committed by the Germans during the Second World War must be counterbalanced by the wealth of exonerating evidence found in The Forced War. And none of this diminishes the irony that a work which scrupulously shielded Jews from blame had nearly been done in by them forty years later.