I'm over half-way through this six hour documentary about Adolf Hitler, and so far it's absolutely superb. There are two sides to every story, and I'd only heard one side. Despite its title, more than half of the material actually has nothing to do with Hitler, and is more like a thorough recitation of the war itself-- but not framed through a "History Channel" absolutely unquestioning, blindly trusting, uncritical pro-West perspective. I've learned a lot about the various battles, and the geopolitics involved.
All of the below may be true. None of it may be true. There are a hundred claims-- fifty each from "The Allies" and the documentary makers-- which would need to be fact-checked one at a time. Since we've all heard the Western take a million times, as a counterbalance let me provide a tiny sampling from the other side of the story. I'll let you evaluate which sets of facts seem more plausible.
Sampling of the Documentary
To begin with, and one thing the makers emphasize-- this is nothing new to me incidentally, as I've done extensive independent research into this area myself-- is just how evil Stalin was. He must have been one of the top three or five most evil people to have ever walked the face of the planet. The fact that "The Allies" were siding with him, sending him billions of USD in aid, is not a good look. Winston Churchill repeatedly called genocidal maniac Stalin "Uncle Joe". Don't forget, Churchill also fought in the Boer War. Look that one up sometime. Want to know where the Germans got the layouts for their Concentration Camps?
More on Churchill: declassified documents from Britain show that Hitler repeatedly offered peace terms to that country, and that Churchill turned them down over and over. Why? Because Britain had interests in Indo-China, and the Japanese had struck a deal with the French-- if I recall correctly-- to take over some of that that country's Indo-China territory. So Churchill was dead-set on pulling the US into the war, on that basis-- to get the US embroiled in the Pacific, to indirectly protect British interests there from the Japanese. If he'd accepted a peace deal with Germany, he would have lost his leverage over the US.
Meanwhile, Roosevelt-- not Stalin levels of evil, but still a highly duplicitous and conniving figure-- desperately wanted the US to enter the war as well, but polls overwhelmingly showed that the public did not want to get involved in what they saw as an internal European matter. Thus, Roosevelt repeatedly provoked both Germany and Japan via sanctions, oil embargos, and so forth. I'd always heard that he basically knew Pearl Harbor would be attacked, ahead of time. But it was even crazier than that: in the documentary, they show several newspaper headlines: "Japan may attack this weekend." Common knowledge!
Truth, as it turns out, is stranger than fiction.
Other interesting notes: several of Hitler's highest ranking Generals were Jews, as was one of his closest friends, who was also his chauffeur. He had nothing against Jews, per se, but as a group they had plunged Berlin into total, nauseating hedonism, controlling over fifty percent of the media, most of the banks, and all of the media interests, despite being two percent of the population. The first thing he did when he consolidated power was take all pornography plus Communist literature, and toss it into huge bonfires. Next thing he did was negotiate an exchange program, so that German Jews could voluntarily transfer themselves and their wealth to Palestine.
The next thing he did was make usury illegal: in fact, that's one of the twenty five planks of the Nazi platform.
The result was that Germany went into an unprecedented golden age, not just in terms of material prosperity, but in terms of moral standards as well. About his racial views, he had no issues with non-Germanic people at all: rather, his view was "let the German race reach its peak mental, moral, and physical strength-- and let's hope the other races do the same thing for themselves." If true, it reminds me of how Communists twisted Ayn Rand's words and philosophy, because she was politically inconvenient.
Much of Hitler's army were non-Germanic people. He had significant contingents of Muslims, for example, in the SS. In fact, the documentary makers show photographs of special Qurans he'd sent them, with beautiful metal covers, emblazoned with the Nazi and SS emblems.
Hitler didn't "invade" Austria. Austria was part of Germany, and got ripped away as part of the Treaty of Versailles. Hitler was invited into Austria, and was greeted with huge parades, everyone throwing flowers at him. Symbolically, he had Austrian armies move the other way into German cities, to show a two-way unification. The reason he invaded Poland was because Germans were being slaughtered in East Prussia, and he needed to reconstitute the land bridge-- another set of territory taken away after the first World War.
He was a big believer in pre-emptive strikes: he went into France because "The Allies" were massing for an imminent invasion, right on his border. Later, he attacked the Soviets for the same reason: Stalin was obviously preparing to invade Europe from the East, and Hitler saw it as his duty to keep the Bolsheviks out. Where Hitler rewarded and was adored by his men, the demonstrably blood-thirsty Bolsheviks were so brutal that, under Stalin's orders, if anyone was caught retreating even one step, no matter the circumstances, they would be shot in the head on the spot.
As the Germans progressed into Soviet territory, villagers were blessing them, thrilled to no end to be liberated from the brutal Bolsheviks, who had confiscated their crops, farming equipment, and who consequently caused forty million of them to die of starvation, with many having resorted to cannibalism.
Similarly, after the disasters on the Eastern front, during retreat the Germans took as many refugees with them as possible. The documentary has first-hand written, actor-narrated commentary from some of them, explaining how to the refugees, Hitler and the Germans were like angels from heaven, saving them from the hellish, unbelievably brutal Soviet reign of terror.
One of these refugees explained that the scariest part about the retreat was the massive Typhus outbreak which occurred. She explained that when she and the other refugees arrived at camp-- I believe she said it was Auschwitz, but I may have that wrong-- the Germans shaved all of the refugees' heads, put them in showers, and then ran their clothes through delousing chambers, using Zyklon B as the agent.
After the war, she was totally confused by the stories of "gas chambers" and mass murders: "The shower heads they showed on television were immediately familiar to me: they were showers, identical to the one I was in! And the 'gas chambers' were just where they deloused the clothes. Clothes which were still contaminated after delousing, they would burn away in a series of ovens. Yes, they had us crammed into bunk beds-- it was either that or sleep outside."
This is just one woman's testimony of course-- but it rings more true to me than the "gas chamber" stories, which seem incredibly implausible to me. There is an excellent article here explaining how the delousing rooms worked, in great detail. It's all right in the open. The rooms even had signage, labeling their purpose. The whole story seems like a 1940s-equivalent of "Assad's chlorine bombs".
Tentative Conclusions
And maybe this is the point where we need to circle back to what I said in the opening paragraphs of this blog post: I don't know what the truth is. But based on the digging I have done, and based on what I've seen in my forty years with my own eyes and ears regarding real-time evolving contemporary events, the documentary take rings much more true to me than what I was taught in school as a child.
I was taught that Hitler was a maniacal, batshit crazy mad man-- no evidence presented-- who was indiscriminately throwing people into ovens for fun, and who wanted to take over the entire world for no stated or explained purpose at all. And if it weren't for the noble United States and Great Britain, he would have succeeded. The documentary, by contrast, paints Hitler as being a complex individual, with varied motives easily articulated in his own writings, and plausibly based on his own life's experiences.
It's like reading a "Sesame Street" children's book written for two year olds, versus a reference work written for adults. Maybe the toddler book is a more accurate reflection of reality-- and I reserve the right to change my mind later as I continue to come into new knowledge. But the comparison isn't flattering, as I sit here typing right now.
From what I can see, Hitler was a phenomenal and extraordinarily popular leader, who had the interests of his own people in mind. He was surrounded on one side by shady, double-dealing Western leaders, and by the brutal Stalinists on the other. These forces conspired to goad him into a well-meaning war, which he would ultimately lose. These forces then bombed Germany into oblivion, then bombed the rubble into more rubble, then turned around and wrote the "Sesame Street" history books.
To me, it seems like the same thing is going on with the West and Putin today.
Just like Germany before them, the Soviet Union was stripped of its ethnic territory by the West. Repeatedly provoked and falling under abuse, Putin finds himself in the identical position as Hitler before him: re-constitute land bridges to save his countrymen. Meanwhile, Russia and Putin himself is the target of an arm-waving, absolutely hysterical character assassination propaganda campaign, painting him as a one-dimensional paper-thin mad man, with no plausible human motives or nuance. This campaign consists of a combination of outright lies, lies of omission, and the mixing of facts with fictions.
I even read today that Beijing Biden brought back the Lend-Lease Act-- you can't make this stuff up! It's like the West is using the exact same playbook which they followed in the 1930s. Except this time, the target of their manipulations has the world's largest arsenal of nuclear weapons.
This isn't to say that Hitler and Putin are guiltless: they are both police state dictators. And it's easy to poke holes in some of the Nazi platform planks, such as the expansionism to which they claimed they were entitled (from where do they derive the authority?). But the truth is more complicated than a "My Little Pony" episode. The claims made against them are truly sensational. Meanwhile, the Western leaders are undoubtedly even worse: they are intellectually bankrupt, and seem to relentlessly hide their true motives.