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In his post below David Beito quotes Franklin Roosevelt as saying "We have got to be tough with Germany and I mean the German people not just the Nazis. We either have to castrate the German people or you have to treat them in such a manner so they can't go on reproducing." This quotation has elicited two comments of defense from Craig J. Bolton. In the first he recalls “only two recorded incidents of opposition by the German people” and he ends the second one with the adage; “Ideas have consequences. Bad ideas have bad consequences.” I agree with this line and the notion expressed in the above Roosevelt comment was a bad idea with bad consequences for both Germans and Americans.
While Craig Bolton may or may not be correct about there being only two overt incidents of opposition to the Nazis there certainly was a great deal of high level covert support for internal regime change including a very famous assassination attempt in East Prussia. According to Fleming Admiral Wilheim Canaris head of the German Military intelligence organization, the Abwehr, met secretly in Spain, during the summer of 1943, with the heads of American and British intelligence. They hammered out a peace plan which included a cease fire and the elimination of Hitler. Roosevelt rejected this offer refusing to negotiate with “these East German Junkers” and all other overtures from Germans yearning for the Nazis’ downfall.
In fact, when Roosevelt unexpectedly announced, against the opposition of Churchill and his own military commanders, that unconditional surrender was the only acceptable end to the war, he created a great obstacle for those Germans who wished Hitler gone and the carnage over. The policy proved to be a big unifier of the Hitler’s people. We can never know if some Allied encouragement and a different set of demands might have been enough for the success of Admiral Canaris and like minded Germans in their goal of ending the war sooner. However it is not unreasonable to say that FDR’s hatred and determination to punish may very well have cost tens of thousands of Americans their lives.
The Allied policy on unconditional surrender was announced at the Casablanca conference at the beginning of 1943. It applied to all the Axis powers, including, of course, Italy. In September 1943 the Allies cut a deal with Badoglio's post-Fascist Italian government.
If the Allies had been confronted by a post-Nazi German government at some time when Germany still had ample means to wage war can we be so sure that they would have insisted on unconditional surrender? What if the new German government agreed to turn over the Nazi leaders who survived for trial? I'm not at all sure the insistence on unconditional surrender would not have fallen by the wayside as it did with Italy.
And, given that the Emperor was allowed to retain his throne, Japan didn't really surrender unconditionally either. So, although all 3 major Axis powers were told that only unconditional surrender would be accepted from them at Casablanca, in the end only Germany actually surrendered unconditionally.
Robert Higgs -
7/5/2006
If the word "hence" in the preceding paragraph is intended to signify logical entailment, I respectfully submit that it does not.
The usual way to dislodge a government's leadership in such circumstances is to cut a deal with well-placed parties who may have the capacity to dispatch that leadership, promising them enough to induce them to sign on, for the sake of their own skins, if for no other reason.
As for the Nazis "not being held to account for what they had done," yes, even AFTER the unconditional surrender, the overwhelming preponderance of them were not held to account. Only a handful went to trial. Many more were quickly taken onboard by the United States as intelligence agents, scientists, technologists, and so forth considered helpful in U.S. efforts against the USSR, inter alia.
Presumably all such Germans might have been potential participants in an arrangement to overthrow Hitler and his chiefs at some point prior to May 1945, had a serious attempt been made to strike such a deal with them. Roosevelt, however, would not even consider it.
Craig J. Bolton -
7/5/2006
In the case of the Japanese some real distinction might be made between conditional and unconditional surrender, since the Emperor was considered to be divine and "unconditional surrender" was generally believed to be a codeword for "put the Emperor on trial for war crimes." That the allies failed to make the distinction was a real problem in ending the war before it in fact ended.
The same cannot be said for the Germans. The Nazi leadership knew it was going on trial for war crimes long before the war ended, and they knew the results of any such trial given what they had done and given the fact that the Russians were a part of the allies and would be a part of the judges at the trial. Hence, surrender of any sort was simply unacceptable for them while they could remain in power.
I am yet to see any of you demonstrate or even plainly suggest that the Nazis could be dislodged internally. We can see, however, the results of the one attempt to do so. Hence, the only possible "compromise" would have been to allow the Nazis to continue to exercise some degree of power after the surrender - at least to the point of not being held to account for what they had done. Is that what is being suggested?
Keith Halderman -
7/5/2006
Admiral Wilheim Canaris the most influential, resourceful, and powerful member of the anti-Hitler faction was specifically motivated to some degree by what was happening to the Jews. The Jewish Virtual Library reports that “Admiral Canaris was an eye-witness to the killing of civilians in. At Bedzin, SS troops pushed 200 Jews into a synagogue and then set it aflame. They all burned to death. Canaris was shocked.” They also relate that “The Nuremburg Trials reveal Canaris's strenuous efforts in trying to put a stop to the crimes of war and genocide committed in Russia by Reinhard Heydrich's Einsatzgruppen forces. It is also revealed that Canaris prevented the killing of captured French officers in Tunisia just as he saved hundreds of Jews during the war.” I think the idea that a faction replacing Hitler would have continued the costly militarily useless policy of genocide is absurd. It was the SS who did the actual killing and my first move after replacing Hitler would have been to disband that group and arrest its leaders.
Keith Halderman -
7/5/2006
The power of an unconditional surrender demand to motivate people to continue to fight can be measured by the fact that a considerable faction of the Japanese leadership wanted to continued to fight even after two atomic bombs had been dropped on their country.
Robert Higgs -
7/4/2006
The advantages to be gained by a conditional surrender obviously depended on what the conditions were. To have negotiated a conditional end of the war does not imply that the Germans or the Japanese would have been given a completely free hand after the settlement; on the contrary.
The major advantage of a conditional surrender, however, which seems to be getting lost in this discussion of how the Jews in particular were treated, is that many, many fewer people on both sides would have been killed, wounded, or otherwise harmed if the war had been ended sooner. Demanding unconditional surrender prolonged the willingness of the Germans and the Japanese to go on fighting, for obvious reasons.
Robert Higgs -
7/4/2006
So, to avoid making THAT mistake again, they chose to make an even worse mistake. Bully! Bully!
Craig J. Bolton -
7/4/2006
As to why the Junkers wanted to negotiate, I suspect it would be so they could defect and not be treated as those who remained loyal to the Nazis. [As I recall, the Russians, at least, were calling for war crime trials rather early on.]
I don't quite take your point about the Holocaust. Was the mass killing of Jews a unique situation? Sure wasn't. Ask the Polish Jews AFTER "liberation" for instance, to say nothing of decades of Russian progroms before anyone heard of a holocaust.
Were the Junkers antisemites. Sure were. Further, their use of the Jews as scapegoats for their own failures after WWI paved the way for Hitler and his public psychosis.
Given that the Western Powers didn't even publically acknowledge the existence of the holocaust until after the defeat of the Nazis, I fail to understand just how making another Kaiser-like partial surrender deal with the Junkers would have immediately and unconditionally ended the mass killings of Jews. What is the possible reasoning behind such a position?
A similar chain of events occurred at the end of the First World War, with the German army defeated but still on French and Belgian soil. This led to the myth later fostered by Hitler that the German army had not been defeated by the Allies but, rather, had been "stabbed in the back" by cowardly politicians. Because the myth facilitated Hitler's actions that eventually led to World War II, the Allied leaders of that war were determined not to make the mistake of their predecessors. The result was the Allied policy of unconditional surrender.
Keith Halderman -
7/3/2006
If help from the Allies and a change to the unconditional surrender demand were not important to the native opposition to Hitler why did they try so hard to obtain them? Also there may have anti-semitism among the Junkers but if they were trying to negociate a peace stopping the slaughter of the Jews would have been one way to differentiate themselves from the Nazis. You make the Holocaust sound as if it were an everyday event instead of the product of an especially evil system.
Craig J. Bolton -
7/3/2006
As I recall the "junkers" [including some of the leading Generals of the German armed forces] tried to forcibly remove Hitler with or without Roosevelt's cooperation and we're exactly successful. Why is there any reason to believe that they would had been successful if Roosevelt had been concilatory?
As for saving Jews, my recollection is that the previous war ended with the German General Staff claiming that "the Jews" had "stabbed Germany in the back, when the military was on the verge of victory." Doesn't exactly sound like a group of pluralists who were going to dismantle the killing camps as soon as they got Hitler out of the way.
Robert Higgs -
7/3/2006
Inasmuch as counterfactuals are inherent in all causal thinking, I do not see why indulgence in them poses any special deterrent to our thinking about various possible offers of conditional surrender--and some high-placed individuals in Japan and Germany certainly desired such a settlement.
In fact, insistence on unconditional surrender was so manifestly disastrous for almost everybody that it is difficult to understand what sustained this policy except, first, the Americans' and the Brits' national and racial hatred and, second, and probably most important, Roosevelt's lust for world-embracing power.
Keith Halderman -
7/3/2006
You are right. I used "Americans" because Roosevelt was their president and supposed to be looking out for their welfare. Also, let us not forget all of the Jews who died in the Holocaust between 1943 and the end of the war.
Jonathan Dresner -
7/3/2006
Similar arguments have been made about the Pacific theater -- that unconditional surrender demands extended the fighting -- but it's hard to see how an offer of conditional surrender would have succeeded in either case. Perhaps something like the Potsdam Declaration for Germany (and earlier summits might well have produced something equivalent, but I know the Pacific War better than the Atlantic one) would have satisfied you, but we're deep in the realm of counterfactuals here....
Sudha Shenoy -
7/3/2006
"...may very well have cost tens of thousands of Americans their lives."
WWII involved British, Canadian,French, Polish, Dutch, Indian, ANZAC....soldiers,not to speak of British, German, Dutch,Belgian,French,Polish...
civilians. And not to speak of Asian & Japanese soldiers & civilians. Scores of thousands of these also died when the war was prolonged.
