My Amazon Review of Benjamin Carter Hett's "The Nazi Menace............"

 

Hitler Starts a World War

This book is a follow up to Benjamin Carter Hett’s 2018 “The Death of Democracy” that I reviewed here two years ago. ( See: https://shulmaven.blogspot.com/2018/06/my-amazon-review-of-benjamin-carter.html  ) In this instance Hett jumps ahead from Hitler’s rise to power in 1933 to the 1937-1941 period. This territory has been covered by numerous authors and I have reviewed many of the recent books on the period including the works of Todman, Boverie, Roberts, Kershaw, Ulrich, Olson, Dunn, Kotkin and even “The Maisky Diaries.” As a result Hett’s task to come up with something new is a difficult one.

 

He succeeds with his discussion on the post-1937 dissatisfaction with Hitler in the upper reaches of the German General Staff and its officer corps who feared a German defeat in a future world war. There were many half-hearted plots to depose Hitler with the most active being at the time of the Munich conference. Chamberlain’s appeasement makes Hitler a hero and the plot falls apart. As they say nothing succeeds like success. It is not clear that any coup would have been successful given Hitler’s mass popularity, but if he were killed history might have taken a hairpin turn.

 

His discussion on the methods of war of England and Germany helped drive diplomacy is intriguing. The Germans, following the theories of Heinz Guderian, become expert on the offensive potential of tank warfare. The use of tanks changes the dynamic of the set piece artillery battles of World War I to a war of mobility. By contrast England develops radar and the Spitfire fighter plane to fend off air attacks. That along with its navy prepares England for a long war. Thus in order for Germany to win it has to do so quickly otherwise it would and did lose slowly.

 

Hett starts each chapter with a series of vignettes including the 1939 German-American Bund rally in 1939 and to me one very poignant one was that on the life of Clare Tisch who was one of the few great female economists of the era. She was a student of Schumpeter and her widely cited Ph.D. thesis was on the economics of a planned socialist economy. She could have gotten out of Germany, but stays to work with orphaned Jewish children. She is deported and dies in Russia in 1941.

 

Where I would disagree with Hett is that he is way too kind to Neville Chamberlain. He calls Chamberlain a realist who understands England’s residual weakness from the Baldwin years by rebuilding its defenses especially with respect to air defenses and the reintroduction of conscription in still peacetime 1939. Chamberlain also understands that economic strength is a cornerstone of military strength and therefore over-spending on defense could wreck the economy. All to the good, but Chamberlain is not really a realist because he does not understand that Hitler does not represent the Kaiser’s Germany, but rather he represents a revolutionary power seeking to overturn the international order. Simply put, he can’t be reasoned with. Further given the Hitler threat, Chamberlain was unwilling to cut domestic spending to fund the needed military expansion. It is up to leaders to change public opinion, not follow public opinion. In this regard Chamberlain was a failure.

 

One last point is that Hett ignored the infamous Hitler-Molotov meeting in December 1940. Although Hett argued that Hitler started planning his attack on Russia in the summer of 1940, the real planning didn’t begin until after that meeting. Remember from “Mein Kampf” on Hitler was always planning to attack Russia.

 

There is far more to Hett’s book than what I have commented on particularly his discussions on Roosevelt, Stalin and Churchill. However he does put to rest the view that Roosevelt was ready to challenge Hitler early on in his administration. That challenge didn’t take shape until his Quarantine Speech in 1937. Hett offers up a world similar to ours in the sense that the law based international order featuring democracy and free trade was under challenge by autarkic dictators. Scary!

For the full Amazon URL see: https://www.amazon.com/review/R3AEQTO5HB44WI/ref=pe_1098610_137716200_cm_rv_eml_rv0_rv