Talk:Hossbach Memorandum

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[edit] Clean-Up

Through it is good to see a history page that takes account of historiographical disputes, this page is somewhat misleading. To believe with, it lumps the dispute between A.J.P. Taylor and Hugh Trevor-Roper in with the dispute between functionalist and intentionalist historians. Neither Taylor or Trevor-Roper were functionalists. Second, the functionalist position is badly phrased here; the functionalist view is Hitler was not encouraged by appeasement to move forward, but rather Hitler was not really running the show . The functionalist view of Nazi foreign policy as expressed by historians such as Timothy Mason, Hans Mommsen or Martin Broszat is that the Nazi movement possessed intrinsic and inherent radical dynamism fuelled by intense disputes within the Nazi movement that recklessly and relentlessly drove the Third Reich onto a path of expansion without limit and direction; or alternatively in the case of Mason, it was all that plus a internal structrual economic crisis that led the Nazis to engage in a “flight into war” as a “barbaric variant of social imperialism”. Third, most of the information is correct, but some of the information is dead wrong; the Hossbach memorandum says absolutely nothing about attacking Poland; instead it speaks of Poland as a possible German ally against the Soviet Union, and refers to the possibility of running the Ukraine as a joint German-Polish colony (through it also makes clear that Germany was to be the senior partner and the Poles the junior partner in this enterprise). Nothing came of that suggestion as the Poles were not interested in a alliance with the Germans, instead preferring a policy of balance and playing off the French, the Germans and the Soviets against one another. The Hossbach memorandum is not as this article implies here a precise statement of everything Hitler planned to do over the next two years, but rather should be understood as Trevor-Roper argued as a general statement of Hitler’s intentions, and not as some sort of “blueprint for aggression”. --A.S. Brown 19:21, 6 June 2007 (UTC)

In addition, I have removed the following as it is quite wrong.

"The intentionalists would contend that Britain and France's appeasement of Hitler (in his remilitarization of the Rhineland in March 1936 and the Anschluss of Austria in March 1938) had given Hitler the confidence to exploit the situations and to move on to Czechoslovakia and Poland - thus making the content and intentions expressed in the memorandum more likely to be attempted. Appeasement only seemed to have ended when Britain and France declared war on Hitler on 3 September 1939.". First, off, the Anschluss occured in March 1938, and the Hossbach Memo was written in November 1937, thus it is illogical to describe Hitler in November 1937 as being influenced by somewhat that had not happened yet. Two, we have no idea about what was precisely going through Hitler's mind at any moment, but the claim that appeasement had given the "confidence" to stage aggression is rather wrong in my opinion. First, Hitler's relative moderation in his foreign policy during his early years was caused by the fact that Germany needed time to re-arm beyond the levels imposed by the Treaty of Versailles, not by any sort of self-confidence on his part. Given everything that is known about Hitler's personality, I would argue that if Hitler felt Germany was strong enough to wage aggression in 1933, he would have done so, and the only reason why he didn't was because he understood very well, the need for time to re-arm. By 1937, at the time of the fateful meeting in November 1937, Hitler expressed the certainity that the Reich was now sufficiently re-armed enough for war, hence the time for war had come (or more accuratly, wars so what Hitler in the Hossbach Memoe had envisioned was a series of limited wars in Central Europe). Finally, the counter-factual claim implict here that if London and Paris had not pursued appeasement, then Hitler could have been detered from war in the long run is very dubious one. To put it bluntly, Hitler was the only sort of person who believed what he wanted to believe, and nothing could have detered from war in the end. In 1938, Hitler was very reluctantly detered from attacking Czechoslovakia, but in 1939, despite receiving a barrage of warnings from both London and Paris about were the results of attacking Poland would be, he went ahead and attacked Poland anyhow. --A.S. Brown (talk) 15:54, 19 April 2008 (UTC)