It is 5:46, September 1, 1939

[DFW]

Hitler told the people of the Third Reich over the radio, "Seit 5:45 Uhr wird zurückgeschossen!" Since 5:45 this morning, fire is being returned!

Of course, it was a total fantasy, since nobody had shot at Germany from the Polish side of the border. There was no fire to return. Hitler was planning to invade Poland all along, and he just made up a simple pretext for doing it. He didn't care who believed it or not.

Putin is following Hitler's playbook exactly. Make up a fictitious provocation, and then "retaliate." "Denazifying Ukraine" my ass. The European Obernazi himself is pointing fingers at the mirror. As for getting his people to go along with the operation, just read what Hitler's sidekick, his Luftwaffe boss, Hermann Göring, had to say about making that happen:

“Why of course the people don't want war. Why should some poor slob on a farm want to risk his life in a war when the best he can get out of it is to come back to his farm in one piece? Naturally the common people don't want war: neither in Russia, nor in England, nor for that matter in Germany. That is understood. But after all it is the leaders of a country who determine the policy and it is always a simple matter to drag the people along, whether it is a democracy or fascist dictorship, or a parliament or a communist dictatorship. Voice or no voice, the people can always be brought to the bidding of the leaders. That is easy. All you have to do is tell them they are being attacked, and denounce the peace makers for lack of patriotism and exposing the country to danger. It works the same in any country.”

Again, broken down:

“Why of course the people don't want war." Really? Ya think?

"Naturally the common people don't want war: neither in Russia, nor in England, nor for that matter in Germany. That is understood."
And yet, you started one anyway.

"But after all it is the leaders of a country who determine the policy and it is always a simple matter to drag the people along, whether it is a democracy or fascist dictatorship, or a parliament or a communist dictatorship."
As you are proving yet again.

"Voice or no voice, the people can always be brought to the bidding of the leaders. That is easy. All you have to do is tell them they are being attacked, and denounce the peace makers for lack of patriotism and exposing the country to danger. It works the same in any country.” It certainly works in the Russian Federation.

Read it again, because these are not the words of some armchair internet warrior of today, but of someone who, in the 1930s, actually DID JUST THAT, and is telling his captors in 1946 exactly how it was done. Putin is fluent in German, by the way.

[SheltieLover]

1. Of course he is following Hitler's play book

Last edited Thu Feb 24, 2022, 07:17 AM - Edit history (1)

I'll bet tensions are high all across Europe. I hate that this is happening!

[DFW]

2. So do we on the ground here!!

The Ukrainian border is less than a 2 hour flight from our house. This is our back yard.

All Europe is yelling WTF

[SheltieLover]

3. I'll bet!

Precisely the response I expected. Europeans remember...

Someone needs to stop this madman!

Stay safe!

[Irish_Dem]

4. Stay safe DFW.

Thank you for your posts, they are always insightful.

Yes indeed it is right out of Hitler's playbook.

Putin has been emboldened by his ability to weaken western democracies and his partnership with China. They wish to be global superpowers and must exert regional control to prove their strength.

Putin is threatening the US with severe retaliation if we get involved. I think it could get ugly fast if we are not careful.

[Meowmee]

5. Also in a police state you have no choice but to go along

Although I don’t think that was the case in nazi G. This is terrible. Stay safe.

[DFW]

6. My father in law was drafted off his farm at age 17

All he wanted to be was a farmer. He was sent as cannon fodder to Stalingrad in the winter of 1942. He returned at age 19, minus a leg, and thus his farming life over. He hated anything military, and prayed that all his grandchildren would be girls, so that they would never be forced to take up arms against someone else.

[Meowmee]

12. Terrible that happened to him at least he survived

[DFW]

13. He was in constant pain for the rest of his life

The only time he really smiled and forgot his pain is when he was playing with his granddaughters. That really returned joy to his life.

At Stalingrad, his unit was mostly comprised of city boys. They all froze to death. He was used to working outside in the harsh winter, but after an artillery shell blew off the lower part of his leg, he couldn't move. A retreating unit noticed he was still alive, and brought what was left of him along with them. He got gangrene, and the surgeons in the field hospitals had to keep amputating pieces of his leg higher and higher up until the infection was halted. Finally, when the doctors were confident he could be moved, he returned, a 19 year old cripple, to a farm where he was now useless. He ended up learning banking, and got a job with a local agrarian bank. His whole career was spent as a loan officer, helping framers in the area with financing so they could either start up, or else keep their heads above water if in difficulty. He was smart, and a nice enough guy, but you could tell there was something of extreme horror he was keeping bottled up inside him the whole time.

[Meowmee]

16. So terrible

I can’t imagine the trauma of that and I am so sorry of those that happened to. My family who did not leave were all murdered except one, his wife and 3 year old daughter and the whole stetl were bayonetted by German soldiers at the outbreak of the war, he returned after leaving for work to find them all slaughtered, he escaped into the Russian army and lived there the rest of his life, never being allowed to leave or to have visitors, my father tried to visit him when he was in Poland on a conference.

My paternal grandmother's father and one of her brother’s who would not leave were murdered by their neighbor of 24 years, shot in the back of the head, also at the outbreak. No one was ever held accountable for that. So their property was stolen for the second time, being taken by the Germans in ww1, they became indigents traveling around in a cart digging up potatoes for food. Many of them died of illness then including her mother, she told me that was when she decided to leave and came to Canada at 16 with three of her sisters.

[DFW]

17. Canada was apparently a popular place of refuge

A relative of my mother-in-law fled to Canada at the time of the Nazi takeover, and never got in touch again. They tracked down one of his (sons? nephews? I don't recall), and he came here for a visit over 30 years ago. He lived in Toronto, and spoke no German at all. I was told what flight he was on. It was an Air Canada flight that, in those days, went from Toronto to London to Düsseldorf. I had something to do in London then, and was able to use points (or whatever) to get myself a first class round trip. I had no clue what this guy looked like, so when I got on, I told the Air Canada crew the story of the lost lost relative from before the war, and they were so excited by it, that they paged him while we were still boarding, had him come forward, and had him sit next to me in first class for free.

[Meowmee]

19. Wow amazing you found him!

I am confused he was on that flight? Did he work for air Canada? My father’s family were from Romania, and came earlier in 1910, his mom, my baba came later due to everything and they ended up in Winnipeg. The coldest place there prolly 😹 I am not sure how they got there, but by boat and train. My brother knows more about it. I wish we had stayed in Canada. My mom was from Scotland.

[DFW]

23. Someone from the family had been on vacation in Canada

They saw a shop with the family name, and stopped in to ask if by any chance…?

That is what started the whole ball rolling. He let us know in advance what flight he was going to be on.

[Meowmee]

24. Oh, ok

That is fanatastic. I wonder if we have any relatives elsewhere but we will never know. My grandmother’s brother never had more children as far as we know, he had a longterm gf really a common law wife for the rest of his life.

[DFW]

25. One of my MIL's family picked up and left for Canada during the early years of the Third Reich

He was never heard from again, but word had somehow filtered back that he ended up in Toronto. They weren’t Jewish, but my wife’s distant cousin—the one on the Air Canada flight—was gay, so everyone was speculating. Gays did’t fare very well under the Nazis, and maybe this guy left without a word so as not to leave something behind that could have been used against the rest of the family. At this point, only speculation is left, since we’ll never know.

[Meowmee]

26. Yes that could be the case

It’s a good thing they left.

[uponit7771]

7. K&R, Pootin LITERALLY used Hitlers excuse to attack the Sudetenland on Monday speech

[Tom Rinaldo]

8. I'm sorry this horror's happening so close to you but I much appreciate the perspective it gives you

This is all so maddening, frightening, and deeply sad. The clock has rolled back nearly a century. Thank you for any and all thoughts that you find time to share with us from inside of Germany. We are fortunately blessed that the Germany of today is so fundamentally different than when Hitler ruled it. The same can't be said about Russia under Putin today compared to the Soviet Union under Stalin.

[DFW]

14. The Germans go bonkers when they hear calls for them to "step up" and get aggressive

Completely aware of the history of the last century, no one knows better than the Germans what it would mean for German military units to be once again rolling across Poland for action in the Ukraine. Maybe armchair warriors in North America aren't aware, but you can bet the Germans and everyone east of here remembers.

There is NO bigger pacifist sentiment in Central Europe than in Germany, and we have the good old USA to thank for that. Rather do a repeat performance of 1919 and squash them, Marshall and Eisenhower figured it out: let them understand what they had wrought, and show them what was done in their name. Let the cry of "never again!" come not only from outside of Germany, but from WITHIN Germany. It worked. My two girls, both born here and grown up as Germans, went to the Anne Frank Elementary school here in our town. It was so named because the town thought it appropriate. The building housing the school was the local Gestapo headquarters during the war. What better transformation? The kids learned not only the name, but who Anne Frank was, what happened to her, and why.

Nazi sentiment and militarism has not been fully stamped out here, and the socialist part didn't help in the East. They washed their hands of all guilt by saying "now we're all good socialists here, not a Nazi in sight." So when the wall fell, guess where neo-Nazi sentiment resurfaced in the biggest concentration?`DUH! There, where it was denied to exist for decades. But by and large, it remains truly an outlier. German participation in ANY military action is hotly debated, and usually voted down. Only videos of Taliban beheading women publicly in town squares were able to convince them to have even the slightest participation with us there. After what their military did in Poland and the Ukraine after the invasions of 1939 (Poland) and 1941 (the Soviet Union), it's not just Putin that wants no part of the German military marching around there. The German military shares the sentiment completely.

[Tom Rinaldo]

18. The transformation in Germany has truly been profound

And, as I think you implied in what you wrote, if perhaps Germany has been a bit extreme in their hesitation to engage in even the most defensible, or even righteous, deployment of military assets, that hesitation is not only justifiable but deeply wise in the light of their not so distant past.

While no society ever reacts perfectly in making amends for their prior wrongs, I can think of no nation that has made a more determined effort to do so than Germany as a whole. As you know I once was married to a German woman, so I also have a little first hand experience also of how Germans responded to their Nazi past. They have my admiration in that regard.

[WarGamer]

22. The Germans have permanent and fresh scars.

Being a history buff, on one of my visits to Berlin (several trips during the 00's for work)

I went to a section of Berlin called Neukolln, I'm sure DFW is familiar with it.

I was SMACK DAB in the center of the Battle of Berlin. You had the SS, including the European Volunteers from Denmark, Norway and France defending an area centered around the City Hall (Neukolln Rathaus)

Heading North was what seemed like half the freekin' Russian Army, maybe 100 tanks and these soldiers from SS Charlemagne stacked up 30 Russian tanks, blocking the roads and stopping the Russians dead in their tracks... delaying them for hours.

And sure enough... the scars are still there. ALL OVER the City Hall you can see the scars on the facade of the building from small arms fire. You can see the rebuilt areas that were patched with cement.

It's emblematic of the German psyche... still deeply scarred by a horribly violent era that impacted nearly every family in Germany.

"Madmen" and their evil followers suck.


To add:

It was really an odd scene. It's an immigrant area with a lot of Turks. They have Kebab stands with the smell of yummy roasted lamb and beef... squint your eyes and you might be in Istanbul. Berlin has changed sooooo much but the scars persist.

[CaliforniaPeggy]

9. Thank you for this tremendous perspective on history, my dear DFW. It is needed.

He is a madman and how do we stop him?

It's a very scary and sad situation.

[Lionel Mandrake]

10. I applaud your historical narrative.

We Americans need to remember history as best we can.

A slightly different comparison would be with something Hitler did in 1938-39: invade Czechoslovakia, claiming that ethnic Germans in the Sudetenland needed protection. This is just like Putin claiming that ethnic Russians in eastern Ukraine need protection.

[dalton99a]

11. Kick

[PatSeg]

15. Kick

[WarGamer]

20. What do they say? "History doesn't repeat... but it rhymes"??

--- Mark Twain

[Hekate]

21. Stay safe, DFW. We need your voice of experience here.

🌻🌻🌻🌻🌻🌻🌻🌻🌻🌻🌻🌻🌻🌻🌻🌻🌻🌻🌻🌻🌻🌻🌻🌻🌻🌻🌻🌻🌻🌻