@Der:
http://www.wintersonnenwende.com/scriptorium/english/archives/articles/stalwarplans.html
Articles like this show evidence that it was Stalin who was planning to strike first. He wanted to wait until the French/English and Germans bled themselves dry, and then invade a war weary Germany in order to dominate Europe. Huge amounts of Soviet equipment were being assembled on the borders of Germany in 1941 - for offensive reasons.
Hitler did not cooperate and launched a pre-strike - capturing huge amounts of Russian men and material. This helped delay the communist domination of Eastern Europe, but Germany was just not strong enough to fight the major powers on its own.
Hitler was no fool - he simply had no real heart to fight the English. He considered them racial brothers - this is why he held his panzers back at Dunkirk, enabling them to escape. He hoped for peace with the West, but Churchill would have none of it. Hitler’s real fight was always with the Bolsheviks to the East.
On 25 August 1939 Hitler stated to British ambassador Neville Henderson: “The allegation that Germany wants to conquer the world is ridiculous. The British Empire has 40 Million Square Kilometers, Soviet Russia has 19 Million and the U.S.A. has 9.5 Million, whereas Germany has not even 600,000 Square Kilometers. From this it can be seen who has as tendency to conquer."
Winners write the history books and this is why we all grew up believing history happened just as the Allies wrote it.
Articles like this show evidence that it was Stalin who was planning to strike first.
It wasn’t a question of if Stalin would strike. It was a question of when.
I personally believe that Stalin intended to wait several years before invading Germany. His 1940 winter invasion of Finland proved the Red Army was not yet ready for war. Germany’s conquest of France during that same year proved Germany was.
Moreover, Stalin had invested enormously in infiltration efforts directed against the United States. Those efforts had yielded enormous dividends. Stalin appears to have believed that Soviet influence in America, in combination with FDR’s own pro-Soviet, anti-Nazi thinking, would be sufficient to get the United States into the war regardless of Germany’s actions. From Stalin’s perspective, why let Soviet soldiers die fighting the Germans, when American soldiers could fill that role just as easily? After Germany and the Western democracies had bled themselves white in a war which did not benefit either Germany or the democracies, then and only then would the Red Army begin its push west.
Huge amounts of Soviet equipment were being assembled on the borders of Germany in 1941 - for offensive reasons.
This is true, but not in itself proof that Stalin planned to launch his offensive in 1941. At the time, Soviet doctrine called for using offense as the best form of defense. While all that equipment may have looked very threatening to the Nazis, there is a strong chance Stalin planned to delay for a few years, in order to let the Western democracies bear most of the blood cost of destroying Germany’s military.
He hoped for peace with the West, but Churchill would have none of it.
Traditionally, British foreign policy had been based on creating balance on the Continent. If one power became too strong, Britain would side with that power’s enemies, in order to restore balance. Hitler had expected Britain to continue this kind of foreign policy; in this case by favoring balance between Germany and the Soviet Union. Instead, it completely abandoned that line of thinking. It favored (and eventually achieved) the complete destruction of the German military. This created a power void in Europe–a void inevitably filled by the Soviet Union. Given that the long-term objective of Soviet foreign policy was world conquest, Hitler could not understand why the British would abandon their traditional foreign policy in favor of a war which did not serve British interests.
On 25 August 1939 Hitler stated to British ambassador Neville Henderson: “The allegation that Germany wants to conquer the world is ridiculous."
Hitler was correct as far as that went. The allegation was pro-communist propaganda and an outright lie.
“Germany has not even 600,000 Square Kilometers. From this it can be seen who has as tendency to conquer.”
This part of Hitler’s statement was a little disingenuous, given that his long-term foreign policy objective was to conquer the European portion of the Soviet Union. However, he was correct to imply that the Soviet Union and the Western democracies had a taste for conquest. After WWI, Britain helped itself to most of the Ottoman Empire. Around the turn of the century, it had conquered Dutch nations in south Africa, because it wanted their gold. After the Dutch launched guerrilla operations against British tyranny, the British responded by putting the Dutch civilian population in concentration camps. (See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:LizzieVanZyl.jpg for a picture of one of the victims.)
During WWI, Britain and France imposed a food blockade against Germany and Austria. According to one government estimate, this food blockade resulted in the deaths of 700,000 civilians. It certainly played a role in the collapse of Germany’s war effort in 1918. Prior to the end of hostilities, France had agreed to Wilson’s 14 points. Britain had agreed to 13 of the 14 points, with the one point of disagreement being freedom of the seas. When Germany laid down its arms, it expected an honorable peace treaty based on Wilson’s 14 points.
After Germany laid down its weapons, the Allies decided that instead of the 14 points, they would impose a harsh, vindictive peace which bore no relation at all to anything they had promised. Britain continued its food blockade against Germany into 1919, to force it to agree to these new peace terms. The Versailles Treaty was so harsh that Germany could not afford to purchase the food imports it needed. This meant that during the '20s and early '30s, most Germans faced periods of prolonged and insatiable hunger. One of the reasons Hitler wanted Lebensraum was so that Germany could feed its people regardless of Allied food blockades or anti-German economic measures. He’d also pointed out that no one had ever succeeded in imposing a Versailles Treaty on the Unites States. He felt that if Germany conquered the western Soviet Union, it would achieve the same position of strength relative to Europe that the United States had in North America. This would protect Germany from hunger, from hostile foreign invasion, and from peace terms dictated by hostile outside parties.
