Radio War Nerd EP #470 — Operation Bagration, Pt. 4: WWII Myths, feat. Annibale
Guest: Annibale
Recorded: September 12, 2024
Annibale returns to discuss WW2 myths and distortions, from the revisionist-right ramblings of Darryl Cooper about the war's origins, to the controversy over Lend-Lease's role in the Red Army's successes up to Operation Bagration.
*Listen to Annibale's Operation Bagration series:
-EP #453 - Background
-EP #454 - Battle Begins
-EP #462 - Wehrmacht Terror & Collapse
Total time: 1:35:31
Direct link to this episode's mp3 here
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Comments (45)
Can you cite the books that you reference in the show in the post description more often? I am very interested in the book that was brought up earlier about Hitler's motivation for invading eastern Europe, the seizure of the Ukraine, Baku oil fields, etc. Was the author Miller or Mueller?
Yes, you're right; I should post a bibliography. Otherwise, it's difficult for listeners to dive deep into the subject. Rolf-Dieter Muller wrote "Enemy in the East," which is an excellent history of Barbarossa's prehistory and planning. Another terrific recent book on this topic is David Stahel's "Operation Barbarossa."
The wealthy "zionist" who rescued Churchill that was mentioned, was, I believe, Bernard Baruch, who was quite an interesting character - though I don't know how much of a zionist he was. He was a speculator, industrialist and goldbug and a southern Wilsonian democrat who was put in charge of the War industries Board in WW1 and is credited with organising American industry in support of the American war effort. Baruch's father was a medical doctor who served in the Confederate ranks during the Civil War and could apparently still do the rebel yell into his old age. Baruch (Fils) was considered to be one of Churchills closest friends.
More Eastern front myth-busting with Annibale would be amazing! or just a general Eastern front Q&A
Great idea
Annibale has been the only guest that I have struggled to understand through his accent and usually turn off before the show is finished out of frustration. Which is a shame because he is so knowledgeable.
Really? They have definitely had guests with thicker accents/weaker grasp of English than Annibale.
I actually prefer his pronouncement of 'probably' to the original
I think my biggest question for Eetlehr (and Napoleon, for that matter) is why he didn't invade England. In both cases the worst-case scenario is your whole army drowns in the Channel. It's still better than losing your army AND antagonizing Russia. Or, if they don't want to get their feet wet, invade India and conquer/liberate the Raj. I mean, what is Europeans' sick obsession with murdering Slavs?
My understanding is that following the disasters at Trafalgar, Copenhagen, etc. Napoleon couldn't defeat the Royal Navy so long as it was able to import Russian hemp. The invasion of Russia was supposed to be a punitive expedition to force Russia to abide by the Continental System. The problem was that hemp was Russia's main export, and France being a hemp producer itself was unable to act as a substitue market.
After many years I no longer think Hitler's declaration of war on US is all that puzzling or, possibly, decisive. In the same 24 hours as Pearl Harbor, the Japanese Empire also started war with Britain. Germany was at war with Britain. The US was Britain's main backer. Hitler would have been right to think the US desired to have Europe as its main war focus. He had a pact with Japan, they both were at war with same enemy. Not making the state of war official, or thinking that US would feel constrained about Europe if Germany did not declare war, seems to be too subtle a line of thought for Hitler. I'd think he'd think a declaration would strengthen Japanese resolve to go all the way (and help collapse British Empire). Whether Hitler could have delayed US action in Europe by not declaring war seems dubious to me. Would no declaration have stopped US from building the AEF in Britain? There were no US engagements in theater until Oct 1942 (North Africa). US govt had the propaganda and moral high ground at home. I think they would have easily been able to portray Germany as Japan's brother and equal enemy to US, just as esential to attack. With the war on and in total mode dissenters would have been muted.
Now the counter to that is, Why didn’t Japan declare war on the USSR? Because they knew it was a huge tactical and strategic mistake. Germany under the Nazis were not thinking longterm at all.
Dustoevsky amirite
eetluhr
Have you guys ever though about having Dan Carlin from Hardcore History?
To mock?
Had hoped there would have been a more serious discussion about Coopers analysis and works… should one want to understand in the slightest he explains himself better in this interview https://podverse.fm/episode/R3CXFh3O- His body of work speaks for itself… obviously most people won’t take the time, why when one can jump on the trope wagon…
Like you said. It speaks for itself.
Great epsisode as always. Annibale always great.
It's so funny how many hitler simps start from the position that he wasnt a lying sack of shit "I love peace and I'm a socialist" "Well he said it so it must be true"
Man I hate looking at this thumbnail Classical liberalism had some good ideas but it also gave us this hyper focus on people's inner thoughts and motivations that is so powerful that a moron can say "hitler was a pacifist" and 100% mean it because hey, doesnt matter what the killer did, all that matters is what his intentions were Cop argument
America: words count, actions are irrelevant.
heyo can you guys do a series on WW1 on the eastern front .. specifically on brest-litowsk and operation "Faustschlag" in early 1918? pretty please 🙏🏼🙏🏼🙏🏼 id really would like an analysis of how much trotzky fucked up at these peace talks
The Nazis did do some agricultural reform. Most importantly, they changed inheritance laws so that farms would go to the oldest son only. This prevented fragmentation, built loyalty among oldest sons, and freed up the labour from younger siblings for the war machine.
But it was still took something like 11x labor to produce the same as mechanized farms in the US and Britian
Can't wait for the FUBU episode!
My favourite part reading up on the delusions around Barbarossa planing was some of the details around logistics frankly an entire episode could be spent on everything from french trucks who's spare parts supply chains the Germans had cannibalized to German trains that were too small to make it between soviet refueling stations.
On the Lend Lease discussion, I've tended to come around to the idea that the war really was a team effort. Because while the overwhelming advantages of the allies probably meant victory was inevitable once the big three were all onboard, there were deficiencies that might have prevented them from getting such a complete victory if you removed any one For the USSR, lend lease (plus the resources the other fronts drew away from the Germans) meant primarily that they were able to maintain momentum once you get to 1944. And this was potentially crucial, because the USSR was scraping the bottom of its manpower reserves by that point, and it was only by mobilizing the manpower/resources of the land they took back that they could keep moving. If the advance stalled out, it would have been a lot harder to get going again, and the mechanization Lend Lease allowed was a big help to that. But the flip side of Lend Lease was that the US had a surprisingly shallow manpower pool for mobilization. The US had the same tradeoffs with industrial labor that Germany had, and potentially even severe in the sense that they were producing for all their allies and didn't have a slave labor force to try to sub in. This is to say that the 14 million or so that were mobilized by the US were about as much as they could pull before it affected production. They simply couldn't have taken the sort of losses the Russians were taking. So in a very literal sense, Lend Lease only worked with Russian blood. And as for Britain, for better or worse, the supply lines and raw material that the British empire provided were necessary for projection and logistics. Mostly for the US, of course, but as mentioned, Iran was a huge artery for moving supplies to the USSR, and Britain was a crucial part of that. So rather than bicker about who won the war, people should really focus on how the Allies were able to hold together as well as they did.
As an American, I always tend to view history from an American-centric perspective, and so I can't help but compare FDR's leadership vs. Hitler's as analogous to Lincoln vs. Davis. FDR's ability to coordinate the Allied war effort and manage all the various actors' competing agendas is borderline-miraculous, I think. When you talk about "the Big Three" I think there's really just Roosevelt, and then Stalin and Churchill were there too. Hitler, by contrast, much like Jefferson Davis, was a huge liability to his own side. Maybe the Axis would have lost anyway even with someone else as der Führer, but as Annibale pointed out in an earlier episode, Hitler had a unique talent for mistreating his own allies and alienating people who might have been useful to his cause. He really was a ruddy-faced little ignoramus, as J.R.R. Tolkien called him.
This episode had me wanting you guys to go deeper into the anti-communist right’s flirtation with holocaust revisionism — ran into this totally cracked ww2 “history” book called “Stalin’s War” by some guy named McMeekin at my local bookstore. Couldn’t believe that this kind of damn near holocaust denial was occupying the shelves of a left-lib establishment.
Great episode! Sadly, this WW2 knowledge is becoming topical thanks to the rightward turn of X and western politics. Seeing NATO’s performance in Ukraine and the outright embrace of the Ukrainian far right, one gets a sickening feeling. Knowledge is the best to turn that nausea into something useful!
This would’ve been great to solder to until 3am. Parallel or series; it affects the resistance.
Eetler did want Britian on his side, and thought they would come to view germany as an ally against the US in the coming decades of economic struggle. But dipshit cooper has no idea what he’s talking about
Stick shifts AND no power steering. Imagine if they had had dashcams back then
It was a huge wake up call to me that Wolfenstein 3D was produced largely referencing the memoirs of Friedrich Wilhelm von Wolfenstein - and didn’t include any Soviet archival material, despite it being the 90s. Wolfenstein was clearly trying to put distance between himself and the actual events. The suggestion that Eetler was wearing a large mechanical exoskeleton at the time of his death came from Wolfenstein’s memoirs. It has very little basis in fact. The account of Castle Wolfenstein’s strange 1-story plan - with maze like corridors, low ceilings, incompetent Sturmabteilung security guards, and randomly placed food and ammunition - does not appear to have been exaggerated though. People have tried to link it to the architectural influence of Eetler and Speer but according to Richard J Evans, it looks more like Wolfenstein just wanted it built that way.
I think I’m going to slightly disagree with Annibale- I think there was a very strong imperative for Germany to acquire more resource regions of the Soviet Union in their attack, the trouble was that they were getting their ideological reasons mixed into that as well. I don’t doubt that they thought they’d be a pushover, though
A little confused now - Annibale, do you mean that the long term Nazi goal was to collapse the Soviet Union, but the short term goal of Barbarossa was to capture Ukraine and the caucuses?
Hearing Annibale mention Operation Fugu and possibly doing an episode on Manchuria is interesting. Just doing an episode on the puppet state, Manchukuo, established by the Japanese would open up so many topics. So many things happened there before the end of ww2. The process of Japan building a puppet state out of China from scratch through brutal oppression is a pretty grisly story. That is the place where the Pan-Asian propaganda the empire spread was strongest. Looking at posters made from that era and how they promote a false picture of Chinese, Japanese, and Manchu unity is unnerving, knowing what was really going on. The Russian Fascist Party was also headquartered there, and those are some awful characters it is still interesting to read about. Finally, you have Unit 731 which is still a huge topic in current China/Japan relations.
Hey now, the Japanese absolutely played a malevolent role in Chinese politics of that era, but we shouldn't let the Qing monarchists or the nationalists off the hook. One thing I've learned from Annibale is that all politics is local. Japan and the West certainly contributed a lot to the Century of Humiliation, and committed a lot of atrocities that they have yet to really answer for. They were all just opportunists profiting from the corruption and weakness of the late Qing dynasty and the resulting political turmoil and upheaval as nationalist, warlord, and communist forces coalesced to challenge the faltering emperors, however. Much like how the CIA and MI6 certainly played a role in the Years of Lead in Italy, but the real movers and shakers of the events were Christian Democracy and other Italian factions.
Playing second banana!
Earlier in the 1930s, when the Nazi project was about “defeating unemployment”, the war industries were great for soaking up unemployed specialized labor, putting money in people’s pockets, but without creating commodities gluts that would ultimately crash prices and lead to layoffs in a capitalist economy. Ships are incredibly complicated machines, (as are aircraft) and both take huge networks of contractors and subcontractors to produce in any amount. eetler was probably also partially motivated by internal politics within the armed forces to give the navy its share of funding. I also get the impression that there wasn’t some grand overarching strategy driving Nazi war goals, just resource needs like annibale mentions, so they probably didn’t think it was dumb to be putting money into a blue water navy at the time
Additionally the surface fleet from what I’ve read can be seen as part of a diplomatic gambit. As it became clear that Great Britain didn’t want an alliance with Hitler (as he for a long time sought) he then thought that they could be convinced to accept basically a great power leveraged buyout where they could keep the British empire in exchange for german dominance. Hitler knew he probably couldn’t directly challenge the empire overseas in combat but felt as though if he posed a serious enough threat, the British might be more willing to back down against Germany on the continent. The building of a surface fleet was another gamble, that its threat would suffice to strengthen Germanys negotiating position, since Hitler knew actually putting it to use full force against Britain would be an uphill battle to say the least. Many of these calculations happened in the mid 1930’s, years before the specifics of Barbarossa had been contemplated, with the navy taking years to build up. While the drive to the east was always part of Hitlers plan, he first wanted to neutralize the threats in the west. The limbo state of war that existed between the fall France and the invasion of Barbarossa infuriated Hitler, since he had assumed he would have been able to bargain with the British. After it became clear that the threat of a naval/ overseas action against Britain wasn’t going to bring them to the table, he saw the next best thing was the invasion of the Soviet Union, since he assumed that Britain only stayed in the war because of the hope the Soviet Union would enter at some point. A preemptive knockout blow the Soviets would finally make Britain realize it had to negotiate (in Hitlers view). Thus the surface fleet wasn’t a completely thoughtless action, just another strategic gamble by Hitler that didn’t pan out. Its fundamental flaw of course was completely misreading British grand strategy and interests. I think it’s interesting that Hitlers assumptions and reasoning were quite similar to the reasons the Kaisers navy was built with the same results. It highlights how Hitler was not altogether a break from traditional German strategic thinking and how many of “crazy” Hitlers mistakes were rather indicative of the parochial and blinkered strategic perspective of German leadership broadly throughout the 19th and 20th centuries
Hitler, by his own writings I believe, was ultimately motivated to create an economic block equal to the US, so they wouldn’t become economic vassals
He saw what was happening in England and wanted to avoid it. However, some domestic considerations also had to be taken into account. Hitler, much more than Mussolini, was obsessed with "consensus," the idea that the German people could be really united behind him. He thought the conquest of a large land empire would have sealed his role as a guiding light for Germany (and, to some extent, "German culture", but that's a tricky business). He wanted resources but coveted "land" (in the most physical form) more than resources.
Hitting the download button. Cheers!