By Alex S. Perry Jr. If anyone deserved the Nobel Peace Prize, it was Adolf Hitler. Hitler did not want war. World War II was forced on Germany. Poland was encouraged to attack Germany by the promises of British Ambassador Sir Howard William Kennard and French Ambassador Leon Noel.
They promised unconditionally that England and France would come to Poland’s immediate aid should she need it in case of war with Germany; therefore, no matter what Poland did to provoke Germany’s attack, Poland had an assurance from England and France. With this guarantee, Poland began acting ruthlessly. In addition, Kennard and Noel flattered Poland into thinking she was a great power. As the Chinese proverb says, “You can flatter a man to jump off the roof.” They sabotaged the efforts of those Polish leaders who wanted a policy of friendship with Germany.
Poland delivered the first blow, and Hitler announced, “Since dawn today, we are shooting back,” when he spoke to the Reichstag on September 1, 1939. “Shooting back” is not the statement of an aggressor. When Hitler attacked, Donald Day said, Poland got exactly what she deserved. None of Poland’s immediate neighbors felt sorry for her. Poland had conducted a policy of terror. Ethnic Germans living on German soil that had been given to Poland at the end of WorldWar I by the Versailles Peace Treaty had been so mistreated that 2 million left the area for Germany and elsewhere. They were driven from what had been their homeland long before WorldWar I. Leon Degrelle, a young Belgian political leader in the 1930s, and who later joined Hitler’s hardest fighting unit, the Waffen SS, with over 400,000 other non-German European volunteers, says, “Of all the crimes of World War II, one never hears about the wholesale massacres that occurred in Poland just before the war. Thousands of German men, women and children were massacred in the most horrendous fashion by press-enraged mobs. Hitler decided to halt the slaughter and he rushed to the rescue.” Young German boys, when captured by the Poles, were castrated. [Read the entire article as PDF…]
Taken from
The Barnes Review, July/August 2004: Hitler: An Overlooked Candidate for the Nobel Prize
VOLUME X, NUMBER 4