Here's an article by American Nationalist/Conservative leader Patrick Buchanan... Please try to excuse his use of the word "hordes" when talking about the Red Army. Keep in mind, he's an American Nationalist, not a Russian Nationalist. I am sure some Russian leaders have used less than friendly language to describe Americans.
Also Buchanan makes an exaggeration when he says that Germany had "no surface fleet" since they technically had about 2 dozen surface warships... However, they only had 2 battlecruisers [Scharnhorst and Gneisenau], the heavy cruser Admiral Hipper, and the pocket-battleships/heavy cruisers Deutschland, Admiral Scheer, and Graf Spee, two or three light cruisers, and about a dozen or so destroyers. Strictly speaking, it was not much of a surface fleet and the entire German surface fleet would not have been able to withstand a day's combat against a single American carrier-battle group or a British battleship-group.
The classic British-American line is "Hitler was planning a war from day one, anybody who read Mein Kampf would know this." Well I've read Mein Kampf and I don't know that, because it isn't in there and his actions from 1933-1936 are not consistent with somebody planning a massive war with the world's greatest powers. If Hitler had been planning a war he would have started laying the ground work for a massive surface fleet in 1933 to prepare to challenge Britain... Even if he were not willing to tip his hand and do something as provocative as laying the hulls for a dozen battleships, he would have expanded the capacity of the shipyards so that many capital ships could be built simultaneously. It takes anywhere from 2-4 years from the day you say "lay the hull" and the hull is laid, to the time the ship is commissioned into the navy, for a battleship. If Hitler figured he wanted a war in the near future, he would have expanded the shipyards between 1933-1935 and started producing large numbers of capital ships no later than 1935-1936.
The total lack of four engine heavy bombers, or really any sort of heavy bombers, also suggests that there was no longer-term plan for a war.
Germany entered the war with only five panzer divisions and less than 20% of their infantry formations were motorized or mechanized, most marched on foot and their supply trains were moved by horse.
If Germany had been planning a war, they might have thought about switching from civilian car production and tractor production, to military truck, military half-track, and tank production, around 1934-1936, and producing enough vehicles to motorize at least half or more of their armed forces.
Britain on the other hand wound up with a fully motorized army by 1940! Yes, that's right! Every British infantry formation was motorized or mechanized. They motorized all of their formations during the 1930s! It was almost as if Britain was planning for a war or counting on war!
http://buchanan.org/blog/did-hitler-want-war-2068
On Sept. 1, 1939, 70 years ago, the German Army crossed the Polish frontier. On Sept. 3, Britain declared war.
Six years later, 50 million Christians and Jews had perished. Britain was broken and bankrupt, Germany a smoldering ruin. Europe had served as the site of the most murderous combat known to man, and civilians had suffered worse horrors than the soldiers.
By May 1945, Red Army hordes occupied all the great capitals of Central Europe: Vienna, Prague, Budapest, Berlin. A hundred million Christians were under the heel of the most barbarous tyranny in history: the Bolshevik regime of the greatest terrorist of them all, Joseph Stalin.
What cause could justify such sacrifices?
The German-Polish war had come out of a quarrel over a town the size of Ocean City, Md., in summer. Danzig, 95 percent German, had been severed from Germany at Versailles in violation of Woodrow Wilson’s principle of self-determination. Even British leaders thought Danzig should be returned.
Why did Warsaw not negotiate with Berlin, which was hinting at an offer of compensatory territory in Slovakia? Because the Poles had a war guarantee from Britain that, should Germany attack, Britain and her empire would come to Poland’s rescue.
But why would Britain hand an unsolicited war guarantee to a junta of Polish colonels, giving them the power to drag Britain into a second war with the most powerful nation in Europe?
Was Danzig worth a war? Unlike the 7 million Hong Kongese whom the British surrendered to Beijing, who didn’t want to go, the Danzigers were clamoring to return to Germany.
Comes the response: The war guarantee was not about Danzig, or even about Poland. It was about the moral and strategic imperative “to stop Hitler” after he showed, by tearing up the Munich pact and Czechoslovakia with it, that he was out to conquer the world. And this Nazi beast could not be allowed to do that.
If true, a fair point. Americans, after all, were prepared to use atom bombs to keep the Red Army from the Channel. But where is the evidence that Adolf Hitler, whose victims as of March 1939 were a fraction of Gen. Pinochet’s, or Fidel Castro’s, was out to conquer the world?
After Munich in 1938, Czechoslovakia did indeed crumble and come apart. Yet consider what became of its parts.
The Sudeten Germans were returned to German rule, as they wished. Poland had annexed the tiny disputed region of Teschen, where thousands of Poles lived. Hungary’s ancestral lands in the south of Slovakia had been returned to her. The Slovaks had their full independence guaranteed by Germany. As for the Czechs, they came to Berlin for the same deal as the Slovaks, but Hitler insisted they accept a protectorate.
Now one may despise what was done, but how did this partition of Czechoslovakia manifest a Hitlerian drive for world conquest?
Comes the reply: If Britain had not given the war guarantee and gone to war, after Czechoslovakia would have come Poland’s turn, then Russia’s, then France’s, then Britain’s, then the United States.
We would all be speaking German now.
But if Hitler was out to conquer the world — Britain, Africa, the Middle East, the United States, Canada, South America, India, Asia, Australia — why did he spend three years building that hugely expensive Siegfried Line to protect Germany from France? Why did he start the war with no surface fleet, no troop transports and only 29 oceangoing submarines? How do you conquer the world with a navy that can’t get out of the Baltic Sea?
If Hitler wanted the world, why did he not build strategic bombers, instead of two-engine Dorniers and Heinkels that could not even reach Britain from Germany?
Why did he let the British army go at Dunkirk?
Why did he offer the British peace, twice, after Poland fell, and again after France fell?
Why, when Paris fell, did Hitler not demand the French fleet, as the Allies demanded and got the Kaiser’s fleet? Why did he not demand bases in French-controlled Syria to attack Suez? Why did he beg Benito Mussolini not to attack Greece?
Because Hitler wanted to end the war in 1940, almost two years before the trains began to roll to the camps.
Hitler had never wanted war with Poland, but an alliance with Poland such as he had with Francisco Franco’s Spain, Mussolini’s Italy, Miklos Horthy’s Hungary and Father Jozef Tiso’s Slovakia.
Indeed, why would he want war when, by 1939, he was surrounded by allied, friendly or neutral neighbors, save France. And he had written off Alsace, because reconquering Alsace meant war with France, and that meant war with Britain, whose empire he admired and whom he had always sought as an ally.
As of March 1939, Hitler did not even have a border with Russia. How then could he invade Russia?
Winston Churchill was right when he called it “The Unnecessary War” — the war that may yet prove the mortal blow to our civilization.
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