fuser wrote:1.There is absolutely no guarantee that Britain would had hold on to her Empire without an European war.
2. There was absolutely no Guarantee that a Super Power Germany would not had looked at British Empire after neutralizing Poland and France. Even if Hitler liked Britain, that was not guaranteed with his successors.
Well, the Third Reich accepted the ultimatum of the Brits, Hitler promised to withdraw the troops from Poland and pay reparations to Poland for the inflicted damage.
He sent the ambassador Hesse to Chamberlain on 2. September 1939 to communicate this proposal.
If the UK had agreed to this proposal, that was made on 2. September 1939, then Poland would have remained an independent state, there would be no declaration of WWII, no invasion of Soviets into Poland, no invasion of the Wehrmacht into France, etc. etc.
In other words, the Third Reich would not have become a superpower, the only thing that would have happened - the reunification of Danzig with Germany and a rail-road from Germany to Danzig.
That was the proposal of the Third Reich that was rejected by the UK.
fuser wrote:3. Fighting Germany 1939 would had been more easier than a superpower hegemonic Germany.
I think Britain did the right thing from the pov of their interests.
Well, you basically say that Great Britain waged a preventive war against the Third Reich, because Germany could at some time in the future become a hypothetical threat to the interests of the UK.
And that is why UK allied with the Soviet Union, a state that promoted World Revolution, and the USA, a state that pushed for World domination.
Was it not idiotic to start a preventive war because of some imaginable hypothetical threat?
No, that was not a rational behaviour.
If there was a chance to prevent WWII, then it should have been prevented.
That is what rational thinking people do.
This was a devastating World War that claimed about 50 million human lives, and Great Britain killed herself because she was afraid of death.
Irrational thinking people kill themselves and millions of others, because they are afraid of a hypothetical threat.
That is what experts call paranoia.
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wat0n wrote:
No, Danzig wasn't German...
Of course it was German, because more than 90% of population of this city were Germans with German citizenship.
wat0n wrote:... it was an autonomous city-state within Polish territory under League of Nations protection.
It was an independent state that had borders with Poland, nothing else. It is idiotic to say that Danzig was within Polish territory, dude.
wat0n wrote:Germany's forcible annexation of it was a land-grab...
It was not a forcible annexation, because the population of this German province ALWAYS wanted the reunification with Germany.
Following Germany's defeat in World War I, the Allied powers in the Treaty of Versailles (1919) decided to create the Free City of Danzig (under a commissioner appointed by the League of Nations) covering the city itself, the seaport, and a substantial surrounding territory. The League of Nations rejected the citizens' petition to have their city officially named as the Free Hanseatic city of Danzig (Freie Hansestadt Danzig).[41] The citizens of Danzig received a separate citizenship of the Free City and thus lost their former German citizenship.
According to the official census of 1923 3.7 percent of city population was Polish (13,656 out of 366,730 citizens of the Free City). In the 1920s and 1930s the city's population was over 90% German.[42][43] However Polish claims range up to around 22.000, or around 6% of the population, and increased to around 13% in the 1930s.[44] In the elections to the Free City of Danzig's Parliament the results of Polish Parties declined from 6.08 percent of votes in 1919 to 3.15 in 1927 and 3.53 in 1935.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Gdańsk#Monastic_State_of_the_Teutonic_Knights_.281308.E2.80.931454.29
As we see, the non-German population of Danzig was ALWAYS a small minority, and in any poll the majority of the population was ALWAYS in favour of reunification.
The German Wikipedia is even more outspoken:
Die Gründung der Freien Stadt erfolgte durch die Siegermächte des Ersten Weltkrieges unter Protest eines großen Teiles der Danziger Bevölkerung, da dieser Maßnahme keine Volksabstimmung vorausging.
http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Freie_Stad ... .B6lkerung
The separation of Danzig from the rest of Germany was done without the approval of the population of this city. It was a violation of the principles, declared in Versailles.
The population of Danzig was forcibly deprived of their German citizenship, that was immoral, and any party in the Weimar Republic promised their voters that it will fight for the reunification of Danzig with Germany.
This policy was nothing special, it did not originate with the National Socialism. In fact, National Socialists had to follow the demands of the German people and adopt the policy of the Weimar Republic in this issue.
wat0n wrote:And by extension it follows that the Nazi leadership didn't act in the best interests of their people, or their own for that matter.
As already told, the reunification of Danzig with the rest of Germany was in the program of ALL German parties, there was a total consensus in this issue, this policy was not new.
That was the wish of German people. The German parties just represented the desires of German people for reunification.
What to declaration of WWII by the UK, this was not the wish of the British people.
wat0n wrote:After all, they started a war they lost for the sake of Danzig, if we are to follow your own arguments.
Well, Germany was dismembered after WWI and tried to reunite parts of its own territory.
The reunification of own territory is rational and moral, and this did not threaten the security or the interests of Great Britain.
wat0n wrote:Oh wait, that didn't make sense! Of course the British didn't participate in the war to lose their empire, in fact it's ridiculous to claim so.
The USSR and USA were the real rivals of Great Britain, not the Third Reich!
USSR pushed the World Revolution via the Comintern, and USA pushed for World Domination.
It was predictable that a war against Japan would mean the end of the British Empire, because English colonies were threatened by Japan, and England was unable to protect them.
Britain's declaration of war against Nazi Germany in September 1939 included the Crown colonies and India but did not automatically commit the Dominions. Australia, Canada, New Zealand, Newfoundland and South Africa all soon declared war on Germany, but the Irish Free State chose to remain legally neutral throughout the war.[152]
...
In December 1941, Japan launched, in quick succession, attacks on British Malaya, the United States naval base at Pearl Harbor, and Hong Kong.
Churchill's reaction to the entry of the United States into the war was that Britain was now assured of victory and the future of the empire was safe,[156] but the manner in which the British rapidly surrendered irreversibly harmed Britain's standing and prestige as an imperial power.[157][158]
Most damaging of all was the fall of Singapore, which had previously been hailed as an impregnable fortress and the eastern equivalent of Gibraltar.[159]
The realisation that Britain could not defend its entire empire pushed Australia and New Zealand, which now appeared threatened by Japanese forces, into closer ties with the United States, which after the war eventually resulted in the 1951 ANZUS Pact between Australia, New Zealand and the United States of America.[154]
Decolonisation and decline (1945–1997)
Though Britain and the empire emerged victorious from the Second World War, the effects of the conflict were profound, both at home and abroad.
Much of Europe, a continent that had dominated the world for several centuries, was in ruins, and host to the armies of the United States and the Soviet Union, who now held the balance of global power.[160]
Britain was left essentially bankrupt, with insolvency only averted in 1946 after the negotiation of a $US 4.33 billion loan (US$56 billion in 2012) from the United States,[161] the last instalment of which was repaid in 2006.[162]
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/British_Empire
As we see, it was easy to predict the future of Great Britain, and if Churchill's brain was not poisoned by alcohol, he would not have pushed for WWII, even before he got the whole power.
Who could predict that Great Britain would behave so foolishly and start a World War with all the millions of human losses, in order to get bankrupt and lose its empire?
If somebody is a rational thinking person, then he expects that other people also behave rationally.
Do you understand what I mean?
Would you expect that somebody will kill himself, even if he has no need to do this, only because he has an irrational desire to harm you?
That was precisely the behaviour of Great Britain before WWII.
Today Great Britain is just a joke, and even what was left of Germany after WWII has more significance in Europe, that the UK.
They tried after the WWII to starve about 20 Million Germans to death (Morgenthau Plan) and reduce Germany to an agrarian state, but then they realised that the death of Germany will lead to the death of Europe, because Germany is the motor of Europe and the European economy cannot exist without Germany.
So they abandoned their genocidal plan, and after the collapse of the SU the artificial separation of East- and West Germany could not be maintained any more. They had to permit the reunification of Germany and the re-creation of Slovakia, and agree that Czechoslovakia is an artificial creation that cannot survive without brutal force.
The German territories, that were ethnically cleansed by Poles and Soviets, are now backward provinces.
Königsberg is today a backward province of Russia, and so is Danzig and other former German cities and provinces.
Germany is today the motor of the EU, without German money Poland cannot survive, even with the ethnically cleansed German provinces. The same with the rest of Europe. If German taxpayer stops to pay, the whole project, called EU, will immediately collapse.
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