February 28, 2025
‘Germans are either at your throat or at your feet,’ quipped old war lover Winston Churchill.
Today, Germans are at our feet – an astounding 80 years after the end of World War II. Though mostly reunited, Germany remains an occupied nation reduced to second class status and afflicted with war guilt. Japan – also occupied – remains in a similar status,
The recent German federal elections brought the moderate, polite Christian Democratic Union to power, ousting the feeble, namby pamby Socialists whose primary goal was not to offend anyone. Many younger Germans, fed up with Germany’s subservient behavior, voted for the new AfD, a moderately conservative party. But AfD was blocked from the coalition leadership after a chorus of howls from the press and rivals that it was a neo-Nazi party. AfD’s leader is a big-boned woman whom German media claims is a lesbian who lives with a south Asian younger lady. Hardly a reincarnation of the Third Reich.
The liberal German and US media kept running reports on Auschwitz and other wartime atrocities. No one took time to mention the Soviet concentration camps or the 27 million killed by Stalin in the USSR. No one mentions that ‘Nazi’ stands for ‘National Socialist.’ The feeble US-dominated German press never mentions that World War II was begun by France and Germany, or how many times Chancellor Hitler tried to make peace with London and Paris. Or how much German territory was detached in 1945-1948.
The most significant point is that Germany remains under US military occupation. This happened as result of what we believe was the Soviet threat in 1945 and after. General George S. Patton understood this well and said that the US should have attacked the Soviet Union, instead of Germany. He was killed soon after in a mysterious vehicle crash. Pavel Sudoplatov, a former KGB general, claimed in his very interesting book, ‘Special Tasks,’ that the Roosevelt administration had many high-level Soviet agents.
Today, of the 84,000 US troops in Europe, 39,000 are permanently based in Germany, 10,000 in Britain, 14,000 in Poland and 13,000 in sunny Italy, more in Turkey and the Baltic states. Many are air force personnel maintaining America’s control of the skies over Europe.
Of course, one must ask why 80 years after the end of WWII the US still maintains such large forces in Europe – not to mention Japan. The US says it is defending against a possible Russian invasion. But three years of war have shown that Russia is no longer the military juggernaut it was in the post-war years when its military forces numbered in the millions.
Russia’s Vlad Putin is a convenient bogeyman. Claims he intends to invade Western Europe are nonsense. He might try to reclaim the Baltic states. US claim’s that Putin wants to annex parts of the world are pretty rich considering the US invasions of Panama, Grenada, the Dominican Republic, Iraq, Somalia and, most lately, Trump’s territorial claims on Canada and Greenland.
The point is – how can a nation that has been occupied by a foreign army since 1945 be truly independent? When it was revealed the US National Security Agency was tapping the cellphone of former German Chancellor Angela Merkel, all the red-faced Germans dared do was huff and puff a little.
Germans should resume acting like a strong and proud people instead of beaten dogs. Germany is the locomotive of Europe. For Europe to reassume its key world role, Germany must lead the way instead of awaiting email instructions from Washington.
And it’s high time to forget about WWII.
Copyright. Eric S. Margolis 2025
This post is in: Germany
Eric. I’m concerned about your cognitive function.
Example 1: how many times Chancellor Hitler tried to make peace with London and Paris?
Really? The occupation of Czechoslovakia started with the false premise that Germans in Sudentenland were being mistreated. Chamberlain pulled down his pants when Hitler then demanded he should be allowed to occupy the entire country.
Example 2: Russia’s Vlad Putin is a convenient bogeyman. Claims he intends to invade Western Europe are nonsense. He might try to reclaim the Baltic states. Seriously? The Baltic states? While he’s currently trying to annex Ukraine?
Your post is a rambling hash that makes about as much sense as Trump when he starts riffing vs following the teleprompter.
I get you have an axe to grind against the hawks in the Democratic party but this article deserves, from you, a good look in the mirror. I used to respect you as a knowledgeable straight shooter but man oh man have you lost your game.
Did you live in Czechoslovakia in the 1930s and 1940s? Then how would you know what happened there? Czechoslovakia was created by stealing the territory from the Austrian Empire, renamed the Austro-Hungarian Empire in the 19th century, in 1919. None of the people that made up the new country, including over 3 million Germans (Austrians), were asked if they wanted to become a new country. The Germans did not want to be torn from the Austro-Hungarian Empire to be part of a new country that the allies invented to put a new enemy (Czechoslovakia) on Germany and Austria’s borders to weaken them.
The name Czechoslovakia is deliberately misleading. It’s a lie. The Czechs were the largest ethnicity, The 3 million plus Germans were the second largest ethnicity. The Slovaks were the third largest ethnicity. Tensions began immediately. The Slovaks didn’t like being part of the new country either. The Czech leadership treated the Slovaks and Germans as second class. The Slovaks allied with Germany during WWII and as soon as they could, demanded to be a separate country. That happened in the 1990s. The country was a failure from the beginning because none of the people forced into the new country were asked if they wanted to belong to it.
The allies did the same thing with Yugoslavia. They tore Slovenians and Croatians from Austria and combined the territories with Serbs, to create another enemy of the Germans and Austrians. During WWII the Slovenes and Croatians allied with Germany (and Austria) and Serbs were their bitter enemies. In the 1990s Yugoslavia became an inferno again, with the different people’s killing each other, thanks to the WWI allies who could not care less about those peoples. They only wanted to create new enemies for the Germans.
Like the Croats and Slovenes, many Czechs were also German friendly. The peoples had lived together forever.
In 1942, after the British arranged to have Heydrich murdered, rallies were organized across Czechoslovakia.
At a mass meeting in Prague, 200,000 Czechs pledge loyalty to their homeland and to the German Reich. This rally in Wenceslas Square, near the historic statute of St. Wenceslas, is on July 3, 1942 — four weeks after the murder of Reinhard Heydrich, SS General and Deputy Reich Protector of Bohemia-Moravia.
Emanuel Moravec, Czech Minister of Education and National Enlightenment, addresses the crowd. He concludes with an expression of confidence in a better future for the Czech people, and of appreciation for the “new Europe,” the “National Socialist revolution,” “our leader, Adolf Hitler,” and “our state president, Dr. Hacha.”
Emil Hacha, Czech State President, is present, along with the Mayor of Prague and the mayors of many other cities and towns of the Protectorate of Bohemia-Moravia. The meeting concludes with the vast crowd singing the Czech national hymn. From a Czech newsreel report, July 1942. In Czech. No subtitles.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9wiB1fwR6Tw
Something else I’m sure you are not aware of is that Prague was a German city, meaning a German speaking city, until the 19th century when Czechs became the majority.
After the Sudetenland seceded, the Slovaks did too. Then Poland grabbed a peace of Czechoslovakian territory, and Czechoslovakia turned to Germany for protection. That’s right.
Ron Unz explains.
Help me understand Munich. We’ve all been taught that Britain’s Neville Chamberlain caved in to Hitler’s demands on the annexation of Czechoslovakia’s Sudetenland which, in turn, fueled Hitler’s lust for global conquest. But was that really what happened? And was “appeasement” really such a bad idea or should the European leaders have accepted that Versailles was a disaster from the get-go and agreed to Hitler’s demands to restore Germany’s original borders?
Ron Unz—The First World War had led to the collapse of the multi-ethnic Austro-Hungarian, Czarist, and Ottoman empires, each of which had been politically dominated by one ethnic group at the expense of all the others. President Woodrow Wilson’s Fourteen Points and the Versailles Peace Conference had elevated the principle that nationalities should be given freedom and ruled by their own leaders, and this had served as the logical basis for most of the successor states thus created.
However, there was a blatant double standard in the political application of this policy, with the creation of the new country of Czechoslovakia being one of the most obvious examples. Like the much larger Austro-Hungarian Empire, Czechoslovakia was stitched together from several entirely different nationalities, with roughly half the population being the ruling Czechs and the other half being Germans, Slovaks, and Ukrainians, who had little political power and deeply resented the domination of the Czechs, who completely controlled the government and its administration.
Czechoslovakia had been established as an important strategic ally for France to use against Germany, geographically serving as an ideal staging area for bombing attacks, almost amounting to an unsinkable aircraft carrier directly jutting into the heart of its German neighbor. Since the country was intentionally designed to threaten Germany, the overwhelmingly German Sudetenland region had been included so as to strengthen its geographical border defenses. The Germans were actually the second largest nationality within Czechoslovakia, so the very name amounted to dishonest propaganda, and something like Czecho-Germania might have been a little more accurate.
One of Hitler’s main goals was to free the suppressed German populations of Central Europe and reunite them with their German homeland and this included the more than 3 million Sudeten Germans. The Czech government was also quite friendly with Stalin’s Soviet Union, and therefore seemed a particularly menacing potential military threat, a possible future base for Soviet attacks against Germany.
Hitler gradually rebuilt Germany’s strength and by March 1938 managed to reunite his country with the Germans of Austria, accomplished with the overwhelmingly enthusiastic support of the latter. He then demanded that the Sudeten Germans be freed by the Czechs and allowed to unify with Germany as well, being willing to potentially risk a wider European war with the British, French, and Soviets on that issue. To avoid this, the leaders of Germany, Britain, France, and Italy together negotiated an agreement at Munich, allowing the Sudeten Germans to secede and join Germany. This peace agreement was wildly popular across nearly all of Europe.
However, once the Germans had been allowed to secede from Czechoslovakia, the Slovaks soon also did the same, establishing their own independent state of Slovakia (just as happened once again in 1993), and the entire country fell apart. At that point, Poland also grabbed a piece of disputed territory and the Hungarians threatened to do the same, so according to most accounts that I’ve read, the desperate Czech president turned to Hitler for support, and what was left of the country became a German protectorate.
Although anti-German propaganda soon portrayed the loss of Czech independence as a flagrant violation of the Munich Agreement, proof that Hitler couldn’t be trusted to keep his promises, the situation was really not so clear-cut since Czechoslovakia had already fallen apart and no longer existed. Furthermore, the Czechs had only been fully independent for twenty years after having previously spent nearly 700 years under German suzerainty, so in many respects, this merely restored the the traditional geopolitical arrangements in that part of Europe, doing so far more peacefully than when the Soviets invaded and occupied the Baltic States the following year.
From https://www.unz.com/runz/hitler-churchill-the-holocaust-and-the-war-in-ukraine/