How the events of 50 years ago shaped the world of today A conversation between Chairman Sheldon Hackney and historian Gerhard Weinberg
SHELDON HACKNEY: We are approaching the fiftieth anniversary of the end of the Second World War. There already is a good bit of interest, but other than the fact that fifty is a nice round number, are there reasons we should be particularly interested now in World War II?
GERHARD WEINBERG: In one way it's also an end to the postwar era: the coincidence of the collapse of the Soviet Union following immediately upon its release of control over Eastern Europe made possible the end of the Cold War and the unification of Germany. One could argue forty-nine or forty-eight is as good as fifty, but it does seem to be a useful time to think about the events.
HACKNEY: So, this is really the end of the international structure that came out of the Second World War. What is to take its place? Or will we still in some way be implicated in the system that came out of the Second World War?
WEINBERG: The question of what will take its place is very, very difficult to answer. Certain aspects of the impact of the war are still with us: the new boundaries, the concern as to the future of Russia as a major power. Regardless of what happens, the demographic and economic factors are significant. After all, the Russians are the most numerous people in Europe, and certainly among the most talented, and what they do in the future will have enormous repercussions on the balance of the continent, on Asia where territorially the majority of Russia is located, and on the rest of the world. Certainly, in important ways, the world created by World War II remains with us and is going to remain with us.
HACKNEY: You're right. In your magnificent book, A World At Arms, you write that this was a war about a total reordering of the globe, or that was the intention of Nazi Germany. Do you think of World War II as being therefore different from previous wars?
WEINBERG: In significant ways, yes. There is the factor of scale: No war has ever caused such casualties and destruction over so wide a scale. But beyond the hardware and numbers, one really has to go back a very long way to look for a war in which so much was at stake. If I might make a contrast, there had been a whole series of earlier wars which had spread outside Europe; the wars in which, for example, the French and British fought over North America and India. There had been wars like the First World War, which had spread out across the globe.
But there was, it seems to me, one very significant difference between all of these earlier wars and World War II. In all of these earlier wars the basic assumption was that the major participants would be around afterwards, with the winners having grown at the expense of the losers, either within Europe or by having gained or lost colonial possessions outside the European continent. The extraordinary difference of World War II as compared with these others was that it was not a matter of shifting this province, or that island in the Caribbean, or this colony in Africa, or that slice of Europe from one power to another. In this particular war, the Second World War, not only was the whole globe to be restructured, and the people living on that globe subjected to control that was different, but certain categories of people, primarily non-Germans, were simply going to be exterminated. And even in the groups of people which were going to be allowed to survive, certain categories were to be killed off.
To put this, if I may for a moment, into very concrete terms: Even if an allegedly Germanic-background portion of the population of the United States was to be allowed to live alongside the German settlers, individuals like the young woman who was just selected to be Miss America would be killed because of their handicap.
HACKNEY: It is a particularly demonic vision of a new world. It's always difficult to come to terms with it or even how it had some appeal at the time. Do you think it was technologically feasible for Germany to have subjugated the world?
WEINBERG: Technologically, all kinds of things are feasible, and one of the things that is frightening about the advance of technology is that there is no guarantee that people will use it for good purposes. Technology is in a peculiar way neutral in that it can be used to enhance people's lives, raise their standard of living, open cultural opportunities, and all kinds of other things, but it can also be used--the same technology--to destroy and to kill on a previously unimaginable scale.
HACKNEY: Let me ask you a biographical question. Many historians, including myself, got interested in history as a way of learning a bit more about who we are or were drawn into history by a desire to study our own national past or, in my case, a regional past. You were born in Germany. Is that what drew you into your interest first in German diplomatic history and then into World War II?
WEINBERG: Yes, in a series of very indirect and peculiar ways. I had to leave Germany as a boy and was very graciously and generously accepted--that's how I got out--into a public school in England. It wasQ what we would call a private boarding school, and as an eleven- and twelve-year-old I was so impressed by the teachers that I decided I was going to be a teacher.
I was originally going to teach Latin in the secondary school, but then derided that I would make social studies my major and Latin my minor, and went to New York State College for Teachers in Albany, as it was then called, now SUNY-Albany. It was service in the Army after the war, when I was eighteen, that opened up the possibility of graduate work. And it was in that context that I decided to concentrate on history. I was most intrigued by the way in which the modern world had gotten itself into the calamities of the twentieth, century, and therefore wanted to study the diplomacy of the 1870s, the new Germany, and the Eastern question. But when I went to graduate school at the University of Chicago, I discovered that the man I was going to work with, Professor Hans Rothfels, had views on Bismarck which were so far from mine that I had to decide either to change centuries or to change universities. I certainly couldn't afford to change universities, so I changed centuries. I became a twentieth-century diplomatic historian working with Professor Rothfels rather than a nineteenth-century one. Those are the kinds of happenstances, I'm sure not unique to myself, which leads one into whatever one ends up doing.
HACKNEY: That's true. How old were you when you went to England?
WEINBERG: Just before my eleventh birthday. My eleventh birthday would have been on the first of January 1939, and I got there a day before.
HACKNEY: So you came out of Germany just before the start. How aware were you as a boy of what was happening in Europe?
WEINBERG: I won't say I was that aware of what was happening in Europe as a whole, but I was very much aware of the persecution of Jews. My father had been thrown out of his job; several members of the family had left; we were waiting to leave the country; my brother had to leave school because he couldn't put up with all the beatings, and my parents had to send him to a private school; I got beaten up in school regularly, but I guess I had a slightly thicker skull and therefore stayed in the public school system until I was kicked out of the fifth grade. When you get kicked out of school in the fifth grade because of your religion, you know what's going on. The place in Hanover where we had regularly gone to worship was burned down. My father was arrested, but then fortunately released. As a boy of seven, eight, nine, and ten, I did not know all the details, but that things were pretty grim was rather obvious.
HACKNEY: How does that affect your historical scholarship?
WEINBERG: It's very hard to say. I was then, you see, in a school where nobody spoke a word of German, and when we came to this country in 1940, never spoke German at home, so, ironically, I had to learn the language again in high school and college.
HACKNEY: Is that right?
WEINBERG: And really couldn't speak it again until I had gotten back to Germany on a research trip in 1962, long after the war, in other words. It slowly came back, partly from work in German sources, partly from speaking it again on research trips over there. Even today when I write in German, I have to have it fixed up because there are Americanisms and other peculiarities. I used to entertain my late father when I would show him something I had tried to write in German.
I suppose it affected me in another way. I was in England during the first year. of World War II, and hearing the firing across in the Normandy peninsula. We were on the south coast. And then being in London during the very first part of the Blitz. Being in England in May, June, July, and August of 1940 provided, if you will, firsthand introduction to modern warfare. That again, did not mean full comprehension, but a sense of the dangers in the world and the fragility of life. That stays with you.
HACKNEY: That would be both an advantage and something of a challenge. You come to the study of the Second World War with personal experience that must give you some intuitive sense of what it felt like to have been a civilian and affected by it. Does it ever get in the way emotionally of your being able to understand? In A World At Arms, you write from various points of view, where you look at the motivations of the various actors. Is it difficult to get into the minds of the German general staff or of Hitler?
WEINBERG: One has to develop quite consciously a distance, because otherwise there are so many things which are so awful that one loses all perspective and ability to be reasonably fair to the individuals one is dealing with.
The other one is a constant immersion into materials. From 1951 to 1954, I worked with the captured German documents when they were in this country, having earlier worked with the collected material from the Nuremberg trials that had been shipped by somebody to the law library of the University of Chicago. I got immersed in this material, and in one way or another, continued to work with it.
In effect, for over four decades, I have been in one way or another involved with and immersed in the materials of this period. I've spent a great deal of time in American and British archives on the Second World War. More recently, while working on this big book on World War II, I've looked at the huge runs of intercepts of Japanese material--thoughtfully translated into English, since I do not read Japanese--but running into tens and even hundreds of thousands of documents that are in the National Archives. That kind of continued immersion does provide one with an added sense of things. I believe, that one doesn't get by looking at snippets in a few documents.
HACKNEY: Yes, that must be true. Is it a little ironic that the German records were more open to you earlier than American records? In fact, there are some American documents that are still classified, are there not?
WEINBERG: Oh, yes. There were lots of German records, of course, which were not accessible at first either, because the Russians and other East Europeans had them. Some of those are only now going to come out over the next decades. But there are German records of World War II, in U.S. hands, which are still classified. One of the things that periodically I have been involved in is efforts to persuade, kick, shove, or otherwise move the controlling agencies into releasing them.
HACKNEY: You have a little note in your end notes to that effect in A World At Arms.
WEINBERG: Yes.
HACKNEY: If you were the national archivist, let us say, what would you do? Would you just simply go strictly by a rule of age, that is, when documents are--what is the rule now, a general rule of thirty years?
WEINBERG: There are probably a few things which either for technical reasons or privacy reasons, need to be kept dosed for very long periods of time. And, of course, the archivist of the United States does not have full authority in certain areas. It is the Congress and the President who have to make decisions. But it does seem to me ridiculous to argue that World War II documents today are likely to affect the security of the United States, or any other country, and therefore cannot be declassified. The areas where the argument was advanced, and continues to be advanced, is in our breaking of German codes and German efforts to break Allied codes. Now that it's fifty years in the past, anybody who's using the World War II code systems is asking everyone else to read the stuff, anyway. It just strikes me, quite frankly, as preposterous.
Beyond that, I think it's a dangerous thing in two ways. Number one, using the argument of national security, where it is clearly inappropriate, serves to devalue the concept and make people cynical. There are some things that ought to be kept secret, and if one stretches the notion to cover everything on the face of the earth, one makes it very difficult to get people to take the concept seriously.
The other reason why I think it's dangerous is that, if one tries to keep a hundred million secrets as opposed to one million secrets, the likelihood is that anybody who really wants to get in is going to succeed, because you stretch your resources too thin. I do not believe it is a coincidence that the most serious breaks into United States security since 1945, things like the Walker spy ring and the Ames case, have come during the very years that the most restrictive Executive Order on security classification has been in effect; that is to say, President Reagan's Executive Order 12356. If you stretch your security resources over everything, you almost guarantee that a determined country, agent, or individual will find a way to get at where they want to break through the screen.
HACKNEY: I see the argument. It's very interesting.
WEINBERG: So if you reduce the number of secrets you're trying to protect from some preposterous num-ber-which through the recent decade has been increasing at the rate of between seven and ten million pages annually--what you are in effect doing is not only devaluing the concept, but creating practical impossibilities for your security apparatus.
HACKNEY: As you think about the records that are still in the former Soviet archives and perhaps others in the East, are there big questions that you have a hunch will be put in a different light when those records are seen by historians? Or do you think that it will mainly confirm the broad outlines that you have put down in your work?
WEINBERG: We're really dealing with two sets of records. We're dealing with the material which Russian and Russian satellite armies captured in World War II and which were not returned to the East German state when it existed, and which are now slowly becoming available. That set includes all kinds of very important records which, in my opinion, will give us much clearer details about any number of issues. They will tell us vastly more about German occupation policy in Eastern Europe. Some of the older stuff that they seized will shed some light on nineteenth-century European history and parts of early twentieth-century German history. They will tell us a good deal more about the Holocaust. They will tell us a great deal more about the details of German military operations. On the whole, I am not convinced--I will be happy to be surprised--but I am not convinced that that's going to change our picture drastically, but it will fill in a great many bits and pieces, and I'm looking forward to people doing that work. There are going to be interesting additions.
The other is, of course, the records of the former Soviet Union itself. I think that there are major areas where we may get some new information and, quite possibly, some changed perspectives, and where up to now we have been forced to do some guessing, extrapolation, and so on.
Unfortunately, I've learned from some individuals who have worked with these records, that the higher up one goes, the thinner the record.
HACKNEY: Oh, really?
WEINBERG: As yet, to the best of my knowledge, very little has turned up that gives extensive dues to Stalin's views and thinking in specific critical areas. But over a period of time, it should be possible that we construct some of that on the basis of material pertaining to the implementation of policy by people who had to be told what to do in terms of what the leadership desired. It is quite possible that on a number of significant issues we will get substantial new light from the Soviet side.
HACKNEY: Are there any particular areas where you feel the absence right now, or do you just need to get into them and see what turns up?
WEINBERG: It's a question of people seeing what they can turn up. Unfortunately, the archives are in great confusion: They don't have money to keep things properly, the archivists are not being paid, many of the documents are being, to all intents and purposes, sold to individual scholars and institutions. The situation is very much in flux and in a very big mess. One hopes it straightens itself out, and hopes that the paper is micro filmed before it all vanishes physically.
HACKNEY: That's a real danger, isn't it?
WEINBERG: Very much so. All countries prided themselves on using the worst possible papers during the war in order to conserve resources for other things. But we are now paying the price for this in that the paper is disintegrating everywhere. Microfilming, that is, microreproduction, is the only sensible long-term solution. Any digitization or tapes or disks or whatnot guarantees disappearance over twenty, forty, fifty years.
HACKNEY: Do you think of A World At Arms as being something of a new brand of history? As I read it, it is not traditional diplomatic history nor traditional military history. It has a lot about the home front in it; it is about strategy and tactics of the war. It seems to me to be a bit different from what one has read before.
WEINBERG: I should perhaps explain. After I finished my study of the origins of World War II--back in 1978--I had to decide what to do next. I was so dissatisfied with the existing literature on World War II that I decided, perhaps foolishly, to try to do it in a way different from the existing works, which I thought were seriously defective. I must say--this may sound terribly arrogant--but those tendencies that I deplored then do not seem for the most part to have changed; that is to say, the people who look upon the war as a sort of dangerous chess game, concentrating on fighting as if the participants had armies that they didn't quite know what to do with one weekend, so they decided, why not have a war. No sense of purpose and plan or intent. I started this project with an NEH fellowship in '78-'79, one of those senior research fellowships, and that's when I started the book.
Another aspect that bothered me with the then-existing literature--and not much has changed since--is the national concentration: The Germans didn't know where the Pacific was; the British thought the Second World War took place primarily in North Africa; the Americans thought they won it all; the Russians assumed nobody else was fighting. Now, that's an exaggeration, I will concede, but--
HACKNEY: I know what you mean.
WEINBERG: The books seem to reflect that.
A further aspect that bothered me a great deal was the compartmentalization. There would be a discussion of the war here, and then as an appendix, a discussion of the war elsewhere. The notion that people had to make choices and decisions about all kinds of things all over the globe simultaneously, and that developments in one portion of the war had all kinds of repercussions, anticipated or unanticipated, elsewhere, was completely lost.
Let me give you an example that always struck me then and strikes me now. One would think that the battle for Stalingrad and the campaign in Tunisia took place, not on different continents, but on different planets. One finds today, in the literature on the encircled German army in Stalin-grad and the German efforts to relieve them, no reference to the fact that the Germans were building up an army in Tunisia in those very days. At the same time the Germans were trying to supply their isolated garrison in Stalingrad by plane, they were using an enormous proportion of their transport planes to fly supplies and weapons to North Africa. When you read a discussion of the Tunisian campaign, the American defeat at Kasserine Pass, the subsequent victory of the Allies in Tunisia, there's no reference to the fact that one of the reasons the Germans couldn't do certain things was that they were fighting for Stalingrad.
HACKNEY: Right.
WEINBERG: While this is a particularly dramatic example, there were numbers of them. Furthermore, in part I suppose because the records were classified, the German post-World War II memoirs came to dominate the literature. Many, if not the vast majority, of these memoirs are extraordinarily mendacious, both in telling fairy tales and in omitting critical things.
HACKNEY: I see.
WEINBERG: That gave a distortion that one still sees. Then there has been the tendency of most literature on World War II--that's beginning to ebb, but it's still there in part--to look at the war through the prism of the Cold War. And, of course, that's nonsense. The people who were running the war were not anticipating the fifties, sixties, and Vietnam. They were influenced by the First World War. That not only distorted histories and perceptions of the war in the sense that people were asking the wrong questions or coming up with answers beforehand and imposing them on their writing, but it led them to reshuffle things in terms of the contemporary Cold War perceptions.
We ought to be very careful, now that we're through the Cold War, in substituting a new set of irrelevant criteria. Let me illustrate this briefly.
HACKNEY: Please do.
WEINBERG: The silly notion which one very often hears that an atomic bomb was dropped on the Japanese because they were Oriental and wouldn't have been dropped on the Germans. The fact is, we and the British killed vastly more German civilians in air raids than Japanese. That's not because we wanted to kill whites.
HACKNEY: Right.
WEINBERG: In current discussion, certain kinds of categories are projected, the way the Cold War and Vietnam concepts have been projected, onto World War II where they don't make any sense, and where, in fact, they distort rather than enlighten. That doesn't mean new questions shouldn't be asked--I think that's all to the good--or new concerns shouldn't be raised and different questions and different approaches. But there's always the danger of projecting current concerns onto a basis in the past that in fact cannot support it.
And so much of the literature ignored the new evidence that was becoming available in the sixties and seventies.
HACKNEY: From declassified documents?
WEINBERG: Yes. As material was becoming declassified and available, so many things had already become accepted that nobody took the trouble to look at the new records to see whether the accepted views were correct.
HACKNEY: Well, you have gone a long way toward restoring that balance.
WEINBERG: At least that's what I tried to do--let's put it that way.
HACKNEY: It's a monumental achievement.
What do you say to commentators who look at the current state of the world--this is to pursue your anachronism example--and say that in the long run it was Japan and Germany who were the winners of the war because the USSR and Britain, and France in particular, came out weakened and declined over time, whereas Germany and Japan did not.
WEINBERG: It depends on what you mean by winning. Obviously, the Germany that has emerged is not the Germany that fought World War II.
HACKNEY: That's a good point.
WEINBERG: I'm not sure that the British would have been very happy to be annexed by the Germans. The arrest lists which the Germans had already printed up are very extensive. It's been reprinted by the Imperial War Museum recently and it's a big book. I think it was Rebecca West who wrote to somebody, Noel Coward maybe, "Just think what wonderful people we would have been buried alongside of."
The notion of a France under German control being better off in some fashion seems to me kind of weird. The Japanese certainly have economic importance. I don't know why they shouldn't. But the people of Burma and of Malaya and of other parts of Southeast Asia and the Chinese are not under Japanese control. And while there are some problems--I don't mean to suggest there aren't real problems left in the world--there has been a monumental set of changes.
HACKNEY: Yes. And wars do have consequences.
WEINBERG: Wars have very big consequences. Certainly one of the great consequences of the German defeat in World War II is a fundamental reorientation of Germans and Germany. Let me put this into a historical context.
Once upon a time, Swedish armies rummaged all over Europe, Spanish armies ran all over Europe, French armies ran all over Europe. If you were to ask the people of the Ukraine today if they think there's a Swedish army coming, they would look at you as if you'd lost your last marble. But that did happen. If one were to ask people in northern Germany whether they're afraid that the Spanish armies are coming again, they would look astonished. It isn't that long ago that Europe was restructured to keep French armies from spilling all over the continent.
Now, obviously, it's going to take a long time. It's a process of interaction of the non-Germans to accept and recognize the fact that the Germans have changed. But they have. If you were to go to Europe tomorrow and ask people in Luxembourg, Germany's smallest neighbor, whether they think the Bundeswehr is about to march in, well, they would look at you: Good heavens, why, no. There has been a significant change.
If one looks back to the beginning of this century, when Germans talked about a place in the sun, they meant a bigger slice of Africa and islands in the Pacific and more influence in Europe and all kinds of other things. If you hear Germans today talking about a place in the sun, what they're talking about is a winter vacation on the coast of Spain or some other warm place. The point I'm trying to make is that this is a very, very significant, fundamental outcome of World War II: The reordering of the globe that was intended did not take place, but a very different change did take place.
HACKNEY: I think that's absolutely right. Even among the victors of the war, war has unintended consequences. But perhaps decolonization would have happened anyway.
WEINBERG: In the Philippines, at least, the United States had decided during the thirties to get out. We were finally going to clear out in 1944 and move out our last bases and troops in 1946.
In Africa, the war had the effect, it seems to me, of slightly hastening the process of decolonization. It led to the restoration of an independent Ethiopia, whose independence had been destroyed in what one would have to call the last of the colonial wars, Mussolini's conquest.
That and the collapse of French prestige certainly raise the issues. It is not a coincidence, in my opinion, that the first violent uprising in the French colonial empire at the end of World War II takes place on the island of Madagascar, and the next one in Algeria--in those areas where French authority had been destroyed. Similarly in the Pacific. It is ironically the Japanese who destroy what is left of the French colonial administration in Indochina in March of 1945, and that opens the way, of course, to the Viet Minh, who at that point are our allies and being helped by the OSS (Office of Strategic Services). One could argue, in other words, that in certain places the war speeds up the process of decolonization; in other places it slows it down. But it was well on the way before 1939.
HACKNEY: What about the war as the vehicle that brought the United States more quickly onto the world stage as a major power?
WEINBERG: That is certainly one of the major results. To some extent, that had already happened in the First World War, but the American people then decided that the thing to do was to stop the globe and get off. We then learned, if you will, the hard way at Pearl Harbor that getting off is not so easy. We ended up having to project power across the two oceans, which earlier we had imagined isolated us from the rest of the globe. Having done that, and done it rather successfully, we decided that, it seems to me quite wisely, that trying to get off was not a very smart approach.
HACKNEY: Would you say that is one of the major lessons of World War II for the United States?
WEINBERG: Very much so. This is one area that people looked at very consciously during World War II. We forget how soon World War II came after World War I. The people who led this country, and much of the population remembered the earlier experience--Franklin Roosevelt had been the second person in the Navy Department. People like Cordell Hull, our secretary of state, Alben Barkley, the majority leader in the Senate, Sam Rayburn, the Speaker of the House--these people, as well as our military men, had all been involved in the war and the turmoil and the decision of the United States to repudiate the peace treaty, and, as I said, to get off the world. Many of them felt that the Second World War, coming twenty years later--as Woodrow Wilson had predicted if the U.S. did what they did do--suggested that they should very deliberately try to do something different this time. It is not a coincidence, I think, that Roosevelt insisted that the preparatory meeting for the organization of the United Nations be at Dumbarton Oaks in this country, that the organizing conference be at San Francisco in this country, and the headquarters in New York. Now, it's true he was dead by the time of these last two of these three took place. But the UN was preprogrammed, if you will. And one of the reasons that Harry Truman was willing to take that over and continue that portion of Roosevelt's policies, essentially the way that President Roosevelt had wanted to, was because, of course, he himself had been a captain in the artillery on the western front in the First World War and had been happy to get home to Bess, but realized that was perhaps a mistake and we should do it differently the next time around.
HACKNEY: Roosevelt was ahead of the American public in recognizing the United States' interest in the European situation and wanting to get America involved before it was politically feasible.
WEINBERG: Well, I don't read it that way.
HACKNEY: Then, how do you read it?
WEINBERG: He was certainly very much aware of what was going on and very concerned, but hoped until the very last minute, or even after the last minute, that it would be possible to avoid American military involvement in the war. What is interesting--and it relates to the point I made a moment ago about the new material becoming available--is that now that we know about the breaking of German submarine codes in 1941, the Ultra business, it is very clear--and a German scholar has demonstrated this beyond any question whatever--that the Americans and British very carefully used this information, which could have been used to create incidents every day in 1941, used it systematically to avoid incidents, to steer the American and British ships around the U-boats to minimize the possibilities and the risks. Obviously, when the Administration was being attacked for trying to provoke the Germans, it couldn't very well release this information. Unfortunately, too many people, twenty years after the information has become available in the National Archives, have still not bothered to look at it and see that, in fact, the government was trying very hard to avoid direct active involvement in the war.
HACKNEY: In your view, given Germany's intent, America was going to have to be involved in the war sooner or later.
WEINBERG: Well, only if we couldn't help the British and the Russians defeat the Germans. Hitler himself was already arguing in the summer of 1928 that one of the major functions of his government would be to prepare for war with the United States. Starting in 1937, specifications were going to the German air force and to the German navy for what it would take to defeat the United States. There was no question in his mind, even if there was in the minds of some isolationists in this country, that when the time came, war with the United States was essential for Germany.
HACKNEY: The question is whether it was ever possible for Great Britain and the Soviet Union, even with American logistical help, to defeat Germany.
WEINBERG: We didn't find out because the Germans were not going to wait, you see. They assumed they could beat us, too. Again, one has to see this from their perspective. The German leadership was fully and seriously convinced that they had lost the First World War because of the stab in the back by the German home front in forcing Germany to sue for an armistice. The converse of this--that the United States' entry turned the war against Germany--becomes the legend. That is to say, the American role in aiding Britain and France in holding the German armies in the west in 1918 and turning to the offensive in the summer and fall of 1918 becomes unimportant if you believe that Germany was defeated on theQ home front. In that context, defeating the Americans isn't so difficult. It's a weak country, it didn't play an important part in the last big war, it can't play an important one in this issue.
HACKNEY: I see, I see. That's an interesting bit of reasoning.
WEINBERG: It remained the Germans' reasoning till the end of the war. We recently commemorated the fiftieth anniversary of the Battle of the Bulge. If one asks, why did the Germans, in late 1944, throw their last big reserves of men, tanks, guns, and planes against the Americans, of all their enemies, the answer is, well, that's the country they thought would crack first. Now, you and I may realize that of the three major enemies Germany was fighting, America had been weakened least, but that's not the way they saw it. And they made their decisions and allocated troops and tanks and guns on the basis of their assessments.
HACKNEY: One last question about Hitler himself. Would the war have turned out very differently if he had not.been in control of German strategy,but one or more of the professional military leaders?
WEINBERG: It depends on which professional leader one takes. The German navy's commander in chief, Erich Raeder, was arguing for war with the United States already in October of 1939. If the German government had done that, they would probably have lost sooner, because the United States would have cranked up faster and earlier. It always depends on whose advice one is talking about. This assumption that all German military leaders had one view and Hitler had a different one is quite erroneous. They differed among themselves most of the time.
I mentioned Stalingrad earlier. One of the people who was frequently referred to as the most brilliant of Germany's military men in World War II, Field Marshal Erich von Manstein, was the only top military leader who agreed with Hitler that they should hold Stalingrad. Then afterwards, in his memoirs, he faked it up because he was concerned about his reputation, since it didn't work out quite the way he had expected.
HACKNEY: Yes.
WEINBERG: And at other times, specific things might very well have gone differently. But one always has to ask the question, which of his military advisors is one talking about in substituting their choices and decisions for his?
HACKNEY: Well, this has been enormously interesting and fascinating, and I'm delighted that you've taken the time to talk to us a little bit. I will look forward with greater anticipation to the anniversary of the end of the war.
PHOTO: Planes from the USS Essex drop bombs on Japan, July 1945.
PHOTO: WHEN ENDOWMENT CHAIRMAN SHELDON HACKNEY SPOKE RECENTLY WITH HISTORY PROFESSOR GERHARD WEINBERG, THEY TALKED ABOUT THE FIFTIETH ANNIVERSARY OF THE END OF WORLD WAR I AND HOW THE WAR RESHAPED OUR HISTORY. WEINBERG IS WILLIAM RAND KENAN, JR., PROFESSOR OF HISTORY AT THE UNIVERSITY OF NORTH CAROLINA AT CHAPEL HILL. HE IS THE AUTHOR OF THE TWO-VOLUME FOREIGN POLICY OF HITLER'S GERMANY, AND A WORLD AT ARMS: A GLOBAL HISTORY OF WORLD WAR II. HIS MOST RECENT BOOK, GERMANY, HITLER, AND WORLD WAR II, WAS PUBLISHED EARLIER THIS YEAR.
PHOTO: DECEMBER 1941 The USS Shaw exploding during the Japanese raid on Pearl Harbor.
PHOTO: NOVEMBER 1942 Mechanics check an airplane engine at Kingsville Field, Corpus Christi, Texas.
PHOTO: FEBRUARY 1943 Two residents of an almshouse in Newbury, England, survey the ruins of their home, destroyed by German bombs.
PHOTO: SEPTEMBER 1944 Men of the U.S. Eight Infantry Regiment are pinned down by German fire near the Belgian town of Libin.
PHOTO: AUGUST 1945 Waving U.S., British, and Dutch flags, Allied prisoners of war at the Aomori camp near Yokohama, Japan, cheer rescuers from the U.S. Navy.
PHOTOS FROM NATIONAL ARCHIVES
