Who set Hitler against Stalin?. Nikolay Starikov

      What this book IS:

      This book IS about those who made this dreadful war at all possible.

      This book IS about those who financed Hitler and his party.

      This book IS about those who helped them to their power.

      This book IS about those who gave them ammunition, new territories, and confidence in their strength —

      about those who can and must spend their lives behind bars, sharing the responsibility for their unspeakable villainy with the Nazi leaders.

      This book IS about the true creators and masterminds of the most terrible war in human history.

      Why is the World War II history still full of riddles?

      This war, like the next war, is a war to end war.

      I have dealt with the history of wars many a time, and all these times I have seen the same thing: contemporaries would refer a war to some time in the future, while it already stood at their countries’ frontiers.

      The many years that have passed since the end of the Second World War have produced thousands of books relating to it. It might seem there should have been left no gaps in this bloodiest and most horrifying conflict in the history of mankind. As it is, quite the opposite is true. Historians have done well calculating the exact number of tanks, cannons, aircraft, and troops that belonged to each of the involved countries, but have failed to answer the simplest questions. Such “inconvenient” questions invariably come to mind when reading books on this period in history. No sooner does one give more thought to the elementary explanations provided by these venerable scholars and investigators, than their absolute inconsistency strikes the eye.

      You will, for example, read on one page that Adolf Hitler planned to conquer the entire world, while a next one will tell you, quite unexpectedly, that Germany proved totally unprepared for the war that broke out in September 1939. The Nazi only wished to attack Poland, they say, and speculated that Great Britain and France would not ally with it. That accounted for Germany’s unpreparedness for a full-scale war. They state that the Wehrmacht was petering out of drop bombs, and after the routing of France (which in fact took Germany only six weeks) the army had run out all ammunition[1].

      Is that the kind of preparation for a global conquest? In order to occupy the whole planet a two-month ammunition reserve is obviously quite insufficient. Our blue ball of a planet has much space. And space, as we know, abhors a vacuum. To establish your sovereignty on some territory, you will first need to liquidate the current one. Now let’s recall what countries were the greatest powers at that time. It was not Poland, which Hitler was prepared to fight against. The main players on the political map of that period were Britain, France, and the United States of America. It is these countries that Germany was not prepared to fight against.

      To land in England and to subjugate America across the ocean, Germany would need a large fleet. Hitler did start building one, but the large-scale shipbuilding programme was to wind up as late as mid-1944[2]. Besides, Hitler himself would often tell his marines that the war with Britain would not start before that year.

      Why then did Germany engage in war in 1939, some four years before the date it would be prepared for it? What an odd way to embark on a global conquest for the head of the German Reich! He must have known, must he not, that starting a war before one is prepared for it guarantees one’s defeat. Why then did he make such a terrible blunder? Why fight unprepared?

      Two years later, though, Hitler made a still graver blunder by attacking the Soviet Union. The countdown for the Third Reich began on that day – June 22, 1941. Notwithstanding its initial phenomenal success, Germany rolled down to its imminent ruin, for it now found itself fighting on two fronts. As unanimously held by historians and military experts, this simultaneous war on the Eastern and Western fronts doomed the German military power to total destruction. Could Adolf Hitler have failed to foresee this?

      He couldn’t – in fact, he knew everything perfectly well. In his famous memoirs The Voice of Destruction (aka Hitler Speaks), Hermann Rauschning cites a number of conversations of the Führer on various subjects, including his war plans. Interestingly, when asked about the possible result of a triple alliance of Russia, France and Britain against Germany, Hitler replies point blank, “That would be the end”. But the glib Führer doesn’t stop there. “But that stage will never be reached”, he adds. “It would only happen if I failed in all my undertakings. In that case I should feel I had wrongly usurped this place”[3].

      November 23, 1939, sees Hitler delivering a speech at a Wehrmacht high command council, putting forth plans and drawing conclusions. And here again he rides his hobbyhorse – the First World War and the importance of no second front. “In 1914, a war on several fronts began. It did not solve the problem. Today, the second act of this drama is being written. We must state for the first time in these 67 years: we do not have to wage a two-front war! What we have been dreaming of since 1870[4], and have considered nearly impossible, has now happened. For the first time in history we have to fight only on one front, there is none other to bind us. <…> The situation now is such as we used to think unachievable”[5].

      But what happens then? Something quite inconceivable – the Führer deliberately changes the situation for the worse by attacking the USSR while engaged in a war with Britain! Adolf Hitler, realising the crucial importance of no second front for Germany, knowing that such a war would be doomed to failure, with his own hands adds the Eastern front to the existing Western front.

      Let us see how this seemingly absurd act on the part of Hitler is explained by historians. They say that Hitler did that to destroy the last potential ally of Britain on the continent.

      Mark these words. Look at the map. Summon your knowledge of history.

      Hitler attacks the Soviet Union to secure a total destruction of Britain!

      Now if the present-day United States is worried by Iraq, it attacks Iraq and not Pakistan. And a threat from Tehran will hardly be addressed by the Americans by bombing, say, Beijing. When one country is seen as a threat by another, the latter will normally campaign against the source of the threat. Can there be any exceptions? Indeed; in that case, the targets for the attack will be the rival country’s closest allies and associates, without whose assistance it will no longer pose a threat. Now what was the Soviet assistance to Britain in 1941? Did the Soviets ship ammunition, weapons, foodstuffs or raw materials there? Nothing of the kind. The only thing ever sent from Moscow to London was some hearty communist salutations, submitted, besides, to the Soviet embassy. The Soviet Union never was Britain’s ally; never exported any arms or ammunition to it; never leased any of its territory for British military bases. Quite on the opposite,