Professor Gerhard L. Weinberg's work (born 1928) is devoted to presenting a imagination of the postwar planet and war goals of the leaders of six states active in planet War II: Adolf Hitler, Benito Mussolini, Tojo Hideki, Chang Kaj-shek, Józef Stalin, Winston Churchill, Charles de Gaulle and Franklin D. Roosevelt. The analysis of the views of each statesman is devoted to a separate chapter, while the work is tantamount to the introduction, introduction and conclusion. The text is accompanied by 7 sketch maps, extended footnotes and bibliography.
Prof. G. L. Weinberg himself is simply a hebrew of German origin, whose household fled from the German national socialists governed first to the UK and then to the US. In his youth, he served on the Yankee business forces in Japan to then begin his academic career. The selection of materials cited in the bibliography shows that he speaks at least German and English. In his technological work, he specialized in German abroad policy under the regulation of national socialists and in the past of planet War II, which he devoted to monumental studies. His historical thesis and interpretations seem to have placed him in the "reżimowy" stream of western historiography.
In this work there is simply a deficiency of volume and substantive balance of the various chapters, the broadest and most detailed of which is devoted to F. D. Roosevelt, W. Churchill and J. Stalin, while the descriptions of the another leaders' concepts are clearly more general.
In fact, the dedication of the Tojo Hidek chapter is already raised by doubt, as the literature of the subject is alternatively in a position with the collective political and military leadership of Japan of a period of militarism, in which Tojo was only 1 of the wider groups. This is confirmed by prof. G. L. Weinberg himself, in which the basis of the analysis is prepared in December 1941 by a squad of experts led by Tojo of the nipponese Ministry of War a paper entitled "Plan of the device of the Earth in the region of common prosperity of large East Asia". As prof. G. L. Weinberg admits, there are fundamentally no another meaningful written sources for the reconstruction of Tojo's views. The choice of Tojo Hideki as a ‘representative’ of Japan's leadership so seems somewhat to have grown.
An interesting fact, which may interest the reader, is the claims about nipponese plans to include besides Caribbean countries specified as Cuba, Venezuela and Haiti in the fresh order of East Asia. A small bit more is known for the fact that nipponese diplomacy powerfully pressed during the war Germany to enter into separatist peace with the USSR and to concentrate on the war on Anglo-Saxon powers.
However, according to the author of this work, specified actions were due to the ignorance of nipponese leadership regarding A. Hitler's actual war goals. The second is worth reminding, due to the fact that they undermine the visions of the anti-Soviet German-Polish alliance, especially in fresh years. specified a fundamental goal of German national socialistism was to replace the native populations of east Europe by German colonies. The author speculates that Germany may have utilized the results of sterilization experiments conducted in concentration camps to lead to the extinction of Polish ethnos and Russian peoples after a generation, but admits that there is no evidence to support these speculations.
Professor G. L. Weinberg may be accused of utilizing hyperbole about anti-slavism of German national socialists, while noting their support for Slavic Slovaks and Croats and comparatively bloodless dominance of Slavic Czechs and Moravia and Bulgaria. However, this argument can be repudiated by the example of Jews whose emigration to Palestine was supported by the Nazi regime, at the same time promising anti-Jewish large Mufti Jerusalem's killing of all Jews in the mediate East erstwhile this is mastered by the Axis States. The relations between the German occupier and the collaborators and nationalists from Ukraine and the Baltic countries were no different.
A. Hitler's views on the planet after Germany's national socialist triumph hit with primitiveism. This is due to the fact that the proposed demarcation with Japan on the ruins of the USSR was planned simply to carry out a line of 70o east longitude (the fact that this proposal came from the Japanese). A more geopolitically established position of the General Command of the Wehrmacht is here, proposing to base the future border on Jenisej, the Tien-Szan Mountains and Hindukush so that the German side of the coal forge can be found.
However, prof. G. L. Weiberg's message is besides clearly besides vague, rife with expressions specified as "the scraps of territory lost to Belgium" (p. 31), "the scrap of north-western Italy" (p. 195), or "some parts of Greece" (p. 32), which is all the more disappointing that it concerns facts commonly known. However, besides much generality is besides repeated elsewhere – where details would clearly enrich our cognition – erstwhile it refers, for example, to “territory ceded (by French Indochina) to Thailand” (p. 193), or to “the confederate part of the Italian colony in Libya” (p. 194), which de Gaulle wanted to incorporate into French estates; since in the book on specified territories it is worth mentioning their names and giving even modest characteristics.
The author displays a amazing cognition of Polish affairs for an Anglo-Saxon researcher, correctly recalling different variants of the Polish east and Western border. This cognition of Polish issues allows him to identify the right causal links of individual events – while Anglo-Saxon historiography frequently duplicates German propaganda about the “exiles” of Germans from east Europe, prof. G. L. Weinberg rightly notes that the logic of the “matching” of the demographic map to the political map was first applied by Germany itself, and only to the lost war the logic turned against them.
The Polish reader may besides be curious in the intention to transfer Poland by the US and the UK of the city of Lviv, even with the Borisian-Drohobytsky oil area, which was thwarted by J. Stalin, who sought to unite all Ukrainians under Moscow. Prof. G. L. Weinberg besides writes about Lviv as a "Polish city", which would most likely embarrass president Andrzej Duda himself, who has late been dreaming about the pre-war Galicia talks about "Poles surviving in western Ukraine". We can add here that taking Poland from Lviv, as Juliusz Mieroszewski pointed out, was J. Stalin's biggest mistake, due to the fact that he enabled the anti-Russian Polish-Ukrainian alliance and gave Ukrainian nationalism a "slip" to the (present) derusification of the full Ukraine.
The Polish reader should besides draw attention to the analysis of the concept of handing over Poland after the end of the war of East Prussia: ultimately, alternatively of them, we received Szczecin on the left bank of the Oder, while Russia took the northern part of Prussia to check out the Baltic republics, whose annexation did not recognise the Anglo-Saxon states (and which, ultimately, were the first in the erstwhile USSR to break out from the domination of Moscow). It is besides worth noting that in Anglo-Saxon concepts, the Polish emigration government was to be installed in Warsaw in exchange for designation of the territorial "shift" of Poland to the west. Even if it would not save the country from sovietization (Czechoslovakia did not save), it is an asumpt to consider the realism of the implacable attitude of the emigration government towards the Russian business of the Polish East Borders.
In a review written from the Polish perspective, it is worth recalling another component highlighted by Prof. G. L. Weinberg: presented at the Quebec conference on 12-16 September 1944, the concept of post-war deindustrialisation Germany and its transformation into a prosperous agricultural state, like the Netherlands and Denmark of the time, by U.S. Treasury Secretary Henry Morgenthau assumed to have left vast lands in the east, now part of Poland. due to the fact that you could either push out 5 million. Germans working in manufacture or 11 million. Germans with lands in the east – both were not feasible at the same time. besides in Polish historiography, the map accompanying the Morgentau Plan, which papers specified a situation, is frequently not included.
Prof. G. L. Weinberg's work, as we mentioned, kept in the stream of "official" Western historiography, besides has a polemic value towards the late popular "revisionist" historiography about "attracting Germany and Japan into war by the Anglo-Saxon conspiracy". Prof. G. L. Weinberg's message is ruthless here: A. Hitler wanted the war to start in 1938, and its resumption, in connection with the conclusion of the Munich Agreement on the Partition of Czechoslovakia, considered his top diplomatic defeat; Germany intended to gain control of the planet through successive wars in which it would successively get a "lifespace" in east Europe, defeated the Anglo-Saxon states, and yet besides disbanded Japan; F. D. Roosevelt, in turn, made diplomatic efforts to convince Japan not to affect an alliance with the doomed Germans, and possibly if the nipponese had waited respective weeks longer – erstwhile the Germans were stopped at Moscow and El-Alamejn, they would have revised their plans for an attack.
Prof. G. L. Weinberg wrote his book comparatively recently, due to the fact that in 2005 it was a time erstwhile the revisionist trend with respect to the explanation of planet War II grew in Polish and Anglo-Saxon historiography. Those who compose these words do not hide that this trend accepts with certain hopes. At the same time, however, it considers that it is always essential to "get out of the comfort zone" (in this case, the idea-intellectual) and to face the other interpretations sympathetic to each other.
This book belongs to specified "opposite interpretations" and to those who read it can work soberingly, given the overly one-sided enthusiasm for the thought of Polish-German alliances or the shift of work for the outbreak of war from Germany and Japan to the states attacked by them. In prof. G. L. Weinberg's interpretation, both post-war visions of governance fed by Axis leaders and visions of planet War II fed by today's revisionists would deserve – in the light of the available cognition of historical and factual facts – to be named detached from reality.
Thus, although prof. G. L. Weinberg's work is simply a work, 1 could say, "directive" – 1 can see this peculiarly in the ending, which is the circumstantial apology of F. D. Roosevelt and demoliberism – it is, however, the expertise of the investigator and an awesome cognition of literature (English and German) that makes it possible to scope for a balance of revisionist work. Even if any of prof. G. L. Weinberg's interpretations may be questionable, while in many places his speech is besides vague, the work defends itself as well-written.
Ronald Lasecki
(Gerhard L. Weinberg, Visions of Victory. The Hopes of 8 planet War II Leaders, Book and Knowledge, Warsaw 2007, from the English-born Polish-born R. Dymek).
