Pat Buchanan did an interview on 07/23/08 with Scott Horton of Antiwar Radio, in which he gives a pro-Hitler-Germany "revisionist" version of the beginning of the Second World War.
I won't try to refute his points here. But I will mention four books that address the history that Buchanan blatantly distorts and provide reality-based versions of events. Jeffrey Record's The Specter of Munich: Reconsidering the Lessons of Appeasing Hitler (2007) discusses the European political situation in 1938 and the outlooks of the various international players. This gives a non-Goebbels version that contrasts dramatically with Buchanan's. I keep citing that Jeffrey Record book because it's just plain good on several levels.
Much of the material is available online in Record's August 2005 paper for the US Army's Strategic Studies Institute (SSI), Appeasement Reconsidered: Investigating the Mythology of the 1930s. He also deals with a subject in the current Summer 2008 issue of Parameters, Retiring Hitler and "Appeasement" from the National Security Debate.
Starting around 26:00 in the interview, Buchanan offers his own version of Holocaust revisionism, which turns on a pure propagandistic discussion of the initial phase of the mass killing in 1941 and makes the Wannsee Conference into a key turning point in initiating the Final Solution, as distinct from organizing and implementing it. Christopher Browning's The Path to Genocide: Essays on Launching the Final Solution (1992) addresses the origins of that event. On the timing of the decision-making, the chapter, "Beyond 'Intentionalism' and 'Functionalism': The Decision for the Final Solution Reconsidered", is particularly useful on dating the decision-making process. (More recent documentation has further strengthened the base timeline he lays out.)
Gaming the timing of the original decision on initiating the Holocaust is a favorite trick of Holocaust deniers. In fact, I heard Browning say in a public lecture a number of years ago that it was David Irving's frivolous claim that Hitler didn't know about the Holocaust that spurred real scholars to pinpoint more precisely what they could definitively say about that decision point.
Any good history of the Holocaust would also show how Buchanan's characterization of German policies in the conquered territories (including Austria) is ludicrously benign. Raul Hilberg's The Destruction of the European Jews, originally published in 1961 and revised in a 1985 edition, is one of many such good histories.
On the question of Hitler's long-range intentions on both the killing of the Jews and on the need for Lebensraum (living space), Hitlers Weltanschauung by Eberhard Jäckel, originally published in German in 1969, has become a classic. Those two goals, gaining Lebensraum in "the east" (Russia) and removing the Jews from Europe, were the two key goals to which Hitler held throughout his political career. Buchanan denies that the Lebensraum concept was important to Hitler's foreign policy, and at least calls into question the intensity of Hitler's hostility toward Jews. His arguments on both are ridiculous.
Two essays by Jäckel in English addressing those topics are available online: Refutation of the absurd thesis that "Hitler Is innocent in the murder of Europe's Jews" and Once More: Irving, Hitler and the Murder of the Jews. The copyright date shown at the Table of Contents page is 1993.
(The display of those essays at the cited links is a bit confusing; you have to select "Next" after the end of the text to go to the next page. The first essays has six pages, the second only one, which immediately follows the first essay.)
Tags: pat buchanan, second world war
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