WWII with a conditional surrender

Was it possible to end WWII with a conditional surrender?

Better yet what would the terms have been?

Phlegethon99 has suggested elsewhere that the wisest course would have been:

negotiating a conditional surrender in 1943 and 1944.

I don't see how the Germans and the Nazi party were ready to stop in 1943, with a return to the Borders of 1935 for Germany, as the basis of negotiation. The USSR had a big battle to fight that summer at Kursk, only after which were the Germans getting an inkling that the war wasn't going well. The Italians were ready to quit in the fall of 1943, and tried to do so, but that wasn't a complete success.
The USA had fought WWI on the basis of "The War to End Wars" and that policy hadn't worked out, so they fought WWII on the basis of "We really Meant to settle all this by 1918, and now we are really putting down our enemies, for good !" The Russians also believed that they could consolidate their gains of 1940, and improve on them so keep on fighting! The Japanese had gone to war deliberately looking for a negotiated peace, but they could see that the Americans would demand the dismantling of their empire so the elite kept fighting, and the populace had no voice.
There was no offer made for a negotiated peace until late 1944, when the Western Allies and the Soviets saw the rest of the war as a trade-off for length of peace. The more people killed, the longer the post war peace would be, and the elites of the Axis were going to trial and possible execution. Then there would be no reason for negotiation, and the terms would be seen as a measure of Allied good will, not an understanding that the Axis powers had legitimacy as governments.
Remember what what happened to the "Valkyrie " group. Adolf and the Nazis were not admitting the slightest opening for a peace that did not mean they continued in power.

1-Well i guess Rudolf Hess gave it a shot in '41, but it doesn't seem as if either side was willing at that time.

2-The concentration camps started in '36 but I am not sure how that topic would be negotiated at the peace table in 43 or 44. Hitler would give up some of the camps and keep others? I don't think so. Are you serious?

3-And after Pearl Harbor, I don't think the American people would have settled for less.

4-I thought the whole problem with WWI was the Armistice; that it was never fought to conclusion.

5- I have a father in law who was in one of the Camps, and I don't believe he thinks a negotiated settlement was possible.

6-Can you honestly imagine yourself sitting across from Hitler and having a calm and coherent discussion on how to divide all the lands up?

7- I read repeatedly of his flying into rages and falling on the ground in rages when he did not get his way when debating with his friend Neville Chamberlain. No, I don't think debating and compromise was in AH's DNA.

8-Negotiation after the Rape of Belgium? I don't think so. And that was the second time into the same French territory in less than 10 years.

Although I do find your theory most interesting;I never heard of it before. Are there books out on this theory?

And AJP Taylor said the West was the aggressor and started WWII and some believe him. Historians say the darndest things......

Interesting yes; plausible no.

The carpet-biting Hitler is a product of the not so subtle American and British war propaganda.

And the negotiation would have been with those who had the command over the army. Those who actually fought the war had a pretty good insight of what was achievable militarily and what was not. Due to Allen Dulles' inept handling of secret negotiations as Swiss Director of the OSS, his betrayal of the group around Col. Stauffenberg and his massive fuck-up of Operation Sunrise hundreds of thousands still had to die in a war that had already become pointless.

But wasn't that in March 1945, well after the 43-44 time frame you previously alluded to?

Am I wrong?

Your topic of a negotiated peace to WWII intrigues me, primarily because I have never heard it mentioned before.

For a listing of WWII battles see:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_World_War_II_battles#Eastern_Front

I don’t think wars are something that one can fight for 5-6 years and then suggest a halt to. I don’t believe the dynamics work that way. In suggesting it you imply it is a bit like a movie that having gotten half way through you would prefer to walk out on because you know the ending.
I believe war has its own dynamic and that for multiple reasons they cannot be concluded with a “negotiated surrender.”

Look for instance at the battles below-all of which are within your stated time frame- and think to yourself how you would have felt if you had been on the receiving end of the German aggression:

-Invasion of Poland: September–October 1939

-The Battle of Britain air campaign waged by the German Air Force (Luftwaffe) against the United Kingdom during the summer and autumn of 1940

-Siege of Sevastopol (1941–42)

-The Battle of Stalingrad (23 August 1942 – 2 February 1943)

When Germany mounted military assaults such as the above, a country is not capable afterwards of just sitting down at the table and negotiating.
War is horrific and much more so than it is portrayed as being.

I have read a good number of books on the American Civil War and I can tell you that one was fought to an unconditional surrender. The South simply ran out of men, and food, and material and had nowhere else to run. But they would not have stopped fighting unless they were totally forced to do so. Trust me it was an unconditional surrender or the South would have kept going on……….and yes of course it still does continue politically.

Same with WWII, Germany, the aggressor for the second time in less than a decade, just would not stop until it was pounded into submission. After WWI there was the Armistice which created serious domestic problems for Germany. To have expected the Allies to go through yet another Armistice after WWII is not a realistic expectation. Would you agree?

And finally, I would love to have you outline a scenario with dialogue as to what would have taken place around the peace table. Like AH started his concentration camps as early as ’ 36. What concentration camps would he be permitted to keep at the table? And could Russia ever forget what had been done to them and the violation of the Nazi-Soviet Non-Aggression Pact, 1939? I think not.

As you know, war is what happens when diplomacy fails. Turning loose the dogs of war is never pretty and once done all hell breaks loose. America has shown that time and again in Iraq and Afghanistan. It is horrific. I mean if the Blackwater mercenaries aren't the dogs of war no one is.

Actually most wars in the history of manking were not fought to an unconditional surrender of one side. The whole history of Europe is a history of regional conflicts, smart alliances, and rule through intermarriage. Even today it is still visible if you look at the bloodline of current European monarchs. Your ex cathedra statements above is what you believe, or rather what you were made to believe. Especially Americans were made to believe the craziest things during World War II and for some reason a lot of it stuck till today.

Neither the U.S. nor Britain really gave a damn about concentration camps although it was used for propaganda reasons. It was the British who invented concentration camps in the Boer War, and the U.S. had their own concentration camps for Japanese-Americans and German-Americans.

Rudolf Hess was only declared insane when the British refused to negotiate. The documents he carried with him on his flight mysteriously disappeared and Hess spent 46 years in jail, sentenced on ridiculous charges while some real war criminals were sent to work in the U.S. (Operation Overcast / Operation Paperclip). NASA would never have gotten off the ground without them and it would have been the Russians to first walk on the moon.

Re: Concentration camps

http://simple.wikipedia.org/wiki/Concentration_camp#History_of_concentration_cam...

Also I think of the Armenian genocide and how there was the forced marching and that reminds me of the US and the Cherokee Trail of Tears.

The idea that countries that could not talk or negotiate and went to war will after 5-6 years of war start diplomatic discussions for a negotiated peace is a bit of a stretch.

I see war as an emotional and not intellectual exercise and I think that your suggestion supposes the parties capable of rational discourse and that they can just pull back and discuss dispassionately.

Are there books out on your topic?

>9 Urquhart: There are some books on the possibility of negotiated peace. WWII:Behind the closed Doors by Lawrence Rees ISBN-13: 978-0307389626 for example.
The Germans made peace between their shattered states in 1648, after fighting for thirty years, not just for six. I call the Thirty years war the "Great German Burndown" because the devastation all over the country was so close to total, that it was a sort of laboratory test for nuclear war. After that, they didn't fight very much for the next fifty years.
About Concentration camps, the British did care about them, and had several discrete camps where obvious Axis sympathizers, and enemy aliens were held. Canada also had those, and we also did ship our Japanese immigrants to camps for the duration of the war. They are used in every war since Napoleon introduced the idea of locking up civilians of countries that he was at war with in 1802.

I can imagine a conditional surrender in Europe, if things had come out differently at various points. But the US wasn't going to stop against Japan after Pearl Harbor—popular sentiment was just too strong. In the end they did get a sort of conditional surrender—the person on the Emperor himself was to be untouched. They might have gotten a little more, but not much.

There were a few German leaders that would have negotiated, Hitler was not one of them. Some realized that and spoke about the need to be rid of him. One died at the hands of British trained commandos and others were executed after failing to assassinate Hitler. By the time that Hitler was out of the equation things were so bad that the only thing any German could hope to preserve was their own lives so the government melted away and the few lucky ones ended up in South America and Asia. Some also managed to find positions with Allied governments leading research.

The really lucky ones didn't end up in South America, they went to work for the various ancestors of NASA and then NASA itself. As a former German soldier said to me, "I won WWII, my four brothers didn't. They are buried from Russia to Brittany." Luck in a war of that scale, is your only defense. The North Americans were spared the real impact of the war, and can be happy they did. But a negotiated peace was a pipe dream after the fall of France, and maybe even then.

Negotiating peace is always possible, and bringing the most destructive war in history to an earlier end would have been a good thing in itself. One of the most shocking facts, to me, about the Second World War is the vagueness, even today, in how many millions of lives it cost.

50 million? 60 million? 80 million? Whatever the actual number is, it's far beyond comprehension.

I am an American, and I acknowledge that my national culture has generated too many silly caricatures of Hitler, often expressing a childish and somewhat disturbing obsession with him. But none of that changes the fact of Hitler's recalcitrance, violent moods, and preference for war as the presumed best means to achieve his policy aims. Or if I am mistaken in this, so are his biographers.

I suppose this is where Phleg…99 posits an academic conspiracy against The Truth about the Führer and the Third Reich. Now there's <sarcasm>something to look forward to<\sarcasm>.

Edited to adjust deaths estimates — higher than I thought

From 1942 on Hitler was practically a meth addict with chronical fatigue or a burnout syndrome, as we would call it today. Around that time the lucks of war starting turning around. Nevertheless it was the same man Time Magazine had chosen as Man of the Year in 1938. Most historiography works retroactively these days, far from Leopold von Ranke's dictum that historians should represent the past "wie es eigentlich gewesen" (as it actually happened). This isn't helpful, because it assumes a teleology and fades out everything that contradicts this constructed stream.

Surely there could be no negotiated peace as long as Hitler was alive.

Actually it works the other way around: After a negotiated peace Hitler could have been dead within minutes.

>15 Phlegethon99:

Your error seems to be in assuming that everyone who does not subscribe to your value judgments concerning the war and its outcomes is imposing improper value judgments concerning the war and its outcomes. It's not the most compelling argument I've ever heard.

Few if any people who subscribe to this group think of the past in simplistic good-vs.-evil terms, as you should know. And while I agree that a lot of nonsense still gets written about World War II (although most of it is at least labeled as fiction), I cannot agree that "most historiography" about the war is just overly biased junk that "works retroatively" and "assumes teleology." On the contrary, even the most conventional 21st-century history of WW2 is likely to be an improvement on the cant, propaganda, and self-justifying memoirs that appeared during the war and for the next two or three decades after it ended, from participants on all sides.

I've saved a remark by historian A.B. Gaunson, a student of the Mideast theater in WW2. The literature left by contemporaries, he wrote, "contains its fair share of sins, but a slavish deference to historical facts is not one of them." The more distance we get, the more rigorous the history tends to be. Sorry if that doesn’t suit you.

The problem with most academic historians is that thinking outside of the box is a very dangerous pastime. In the U.S. you may lose your tenure, here in Germany you will get ostracized and most liekly physically assaulted (like Ernst Nolte, Rainer Zitelmann, Werner Maser in the 90s). Had you witnessed the agitprop circus orchestrated by useful idiots going apeshit over Christopher Clark's academic lecture circuit in Germany after the publishing of the German tranlation of both "Iron Kingdom" and "The Sleepwalkers: How Europe Went to War in 1914" you'd understand why most historians prefer to play it safe and stay on the trodden path, redigesting the output of everyone else who preferred to play it safe and not rock the boat.

OK, let's begin with Ernst Nolte, author of The Three Faces of Fascism or, closer to the German, Fascism in Its Epoch (1963). He likes to make comparisons between fascism and communism, and more recently between fascism and Islamism. He was a protégé of Martin Heidegger's and his training was in the classics and philosophy.

I admit to not having read any of Nolte's work, and most of what I know of his career is from Wikipedia. One reason I've never felt impelled to take him seriously is that he's a "big ideas" man, claiming to have almost mystical insight into the immaterial forces that drive history. Or as Wikipedia puts it:

In Nolte's opinion, only those with training in philosophy can discover the "metapolitical dimension", and those who use normal historical methods miss this dimension of time.

Whatever. An assertion like that might as well be a religious creed, because it cannot be falsified. Historians who come at their work with such lofty convictions are the most susceptible to assuming a "god's-eye" view of the past, from which confidently expressed errors of fact often ensue. I like my historians more modest.

Anyway, Nolte's analysis of fascism as a middle-class response to "Bolshevist peril" is in essence a repeat of National Socialist propaganda. It is not uncommon for historians to carry on like this; in fact, it reminds me of Andrew Jackson fans in the United States, including one or two history professors, who still justify "Indian removal" in the same discredited terms Jackson's partisans used in 1830. People like that are interesting from a psychological standpoint, but they contribute precious little to history.

I won’t say that Nolte's work has no value. Almost anyone who has worked as a scholar for a whole lifetime is bound to produce something worth preserving. And when he has been attacked for making comparisons between, say the Holocaust/Shoah and the Armenian Genocide, I side with him against those who insist that the Shoah is a transcendent event that must not be compared to anything in human history. (I also lack patience with people who erect card-houses of nihilism atop the death camps. If you survived the camps, you have an excuse; if not, shut up.)

Other than that, Nolte appears to be a tiresome controversialist who likes to suggest that fascism is criticized, not because there's something inherently wrong with fascist ideology, but because the fascists didn't win. Only a fascist or a cynic could rest comfortably on that argument.

The problem with Wikipedia is that there is no peer review and lots of nonsense gets through.

I recommend checking out Nolte's works. Much of it has been translated into many languages. Fascism in its Epoch was published in 1963 but is still relevant today. Like me Nolte is a classical philologist as well as a historian and therefore not really a friend of today's quantitative methods in historical sciences. His metahistorical and metatheoretical approach isn't en vogue these days, which makes it even more interesting to those who are familiar with the omnipresent academic ivory tower autism.

Well, there is peer review. The problem is the peers.

I hope others are reading this thread as well.

Just because it has now passed beyond my skill set doesn't mean I don't try to read on...

>21 Phlegethon99:

The problem with Wikipedia is that there is no peer review and lots of nonsense gets through.

Don’t assume that I only know about Nolte through Wikipedia. I did consult Wikipedia to help my memory, and I learned some things that were new to me; for instance, his tutelage under Heidegger.

Wikipedia is in my view the finest encyclopedia ever produced, but that's all it is. There never was an encyclopedia that did not both reproduce and introduce obvious errors of fact, usually by accident. The main difference is that there was no way for a reader to correct errors in the Britannica or Brockhaus.

Like me Nolte is a classical phililogist as well as a historian and therefore not really a friend of today's quantitative methods in historical sciences.

Quantitative methods are certainly subject to abuse, especially when placed in the service of ideology. For instance, I’ve enjoyed dissecting the tragicomic career of the "cliometricians" in U.S. history, the quantitative zealots who succeeded in monopolizing economic history (ca. 1960-1980). Their greatest crime was probably to take incomplete records of past data and fill in the gaps based on what their ideological convictions told them the numbers should be. Their own students eventually rebelled against their narrow-minded theory and methods, resulting in more sophisticated use of quantitative data in tandem with other sources.

Past abuses don't change the fact that quantitative information helps keep historians and other scholars honest. If a historian makes a sophisticated case for a certain historical change, but the surviving data contradict it or indicate a different trend, the historian had better reconsider. The data might be flawed, but it is necessary to explain how and why.

His metahistorical an(d) metatheoretical approach isn't en vogue this days, which makes it even more interesting to those who are familiar with the omnipresent academic ivory tower autism.

Whereas to me, Nolte seems to peer down from an ivory tower with a whitewashed gate. I've already mentioned not sharing your pessimism about the general state of history scholarship.

It interests me that you have chosen a philologist (Ernst Nolte), a business executive who turned his back on history writing (Rainer Zitelmann) and a historian with no academic post (Werner Maser) as exemplary.

But then you mention Christopher ("Chris") Clark, an Australian academic whose The Sleepwalkers seems to have been more harshly received in German translation than in English. Yet Clark's earlier history of Prussia, Iron Kingdom, won the German Historians' Prize, which was remarkable both because of Clark's youth and his not being German.

Clark is also the only one you mention who doesn’t seem to wear his politics on his sleeve. Nolte and Zitelmann are public conservatives who contended on the same side in a famous media controversy about Nazism. In spite of this, Zitelmann's histories in particular have been well received by the supposedly benighted, "teleological," "ivory tower" academic establishment. Maser gets a lot of credit for exposing the alleged "Hitler diaries" published in 1993 as forgeries, but one of his later books, comparing Stalin and Hitler, has been panned as an unfocused pastiche that dishonestly minimizes Nazi offenses.

I'm not seeing much evidence of persecution. But maybe you can enlighten us further.

Zitelmann used to be a Maoist, then a Marxist. Maser was Ernst Niekisch's assistant in East Berlin. Niekisch used to be the intellectual head of National Bolshevisms. Nolte was professor at the two most far-left universities in Germany in the late 60s and early 70s. Therefore I question the term "staunch conservative", especially as the use of term "conservative" has been totally perverted in the U.S. (as well as "liberal" and "progressive"), unless one considers them as convalescent leftists. As a German I have learned not to be too concerned about where they come from. All that matters to me is where they are headed. Academia is going nowhere fast since the last 30 years of neoliberal experiments in the education sector. And those professor who step outside the herd are being left to die.

>24 Muscogulus:

I had not heard of Zitelmann until you mentioned him on this thread. In reading about him online I find his scholarly work very interesting and convincing. It has obviously been well received by colleagues and journals. Whether Zitelmann is a Maoist, a Marxist, or a rightist (a role he played in the 1986-87 Historikerstreit that played out in German newspapers), I don't share his politics. But that doesn’t determine my response to his work, and I'm obviously not alone in that.

So where is the persecution? Who is "being left to die" for parting with the herd?

Regarding Maser, you seem to be implying (because I can't make any clear sense out of your sentences) a guilt-by-association argument to play down his rightism. He was assistant to a guy who "used to be the intellectual head of National Bolshevisms" — whatever that means. I've worked closely with many people whose opinions I don't share. And Maser was "in East Berlin" for the simple reason that the Hitler archive was located there at the time, not out of any affinity with Marxism-Leninism.

I admit that "staunch conservative" is a cliché. That's why I amended it, while you were composing your reply, to "public conservatives." I considered "rightists" instead, as that's more traditional and less subject to present-day overuse.

I'm still waiting for evidence of a historian of World War II who has been fired, intimidated, subjected to an "agitprop circus," much less "left to die," simply for publishing unpopular views. Negative book reviews do not count.

The point I was trying to make it all these ostracized historians have different personal and political backgrounds, despite a left-wing and conformist propaganda campaign claiming something else. The vilification as "revisionist", even if totally unsubstantiated can end careers as quickly as under Stalin and Dzerzhinsky, the only difference that you only get professionally killed - not physically (despite of both anarchist and Islamist squadrism in the lecture halls) and silenced through self-censorship of academical journals. Nolte, Zitelmann and Maser were just three example from the top of my head but there are dozens more of non-streamlined academics losing their tenure or being denied one in the first place. The university system here - other than the American one - is partisan and subsequently biased towards the state government that controls and funds them. This so blatantly contradicts Alexander von Humboldt's ideal of education that after a couple years in that mined treadmill posing as institute of higher education I decided to do the right thing and become an independent scholar.

And with that, the troll stamped his way down to his lair under the bridge.

I know many of you do not believe counter-factuals have any place in discussions of history, but I ran across this excerpt from an author interview at Huffington Post which might shed some light on what could have been a different Nazi Germany.

http://thecounterfactualhistoryreview.blogspot.com/2015/04/a-more-economically-r...

>15 Phlegethon99:

According to Wikipedia, Time's Man of the Year is supposed to go to "a person, group, idea or object that 'for better or for worse...has done the most to influence the events of the year'". How does Hitler's 1938 designation in any way counter Muscogulus's description of Hitler in #14?

> 29

The article is about a book, Hitler's Shadow Empire, but it is not a review. It's an interview with the author, Pierpaolo Barbieri, who says in essence: "Had Schacht not been forced from the party in 1938, Nazi Germany's European expansion might have played out quite differently than it did."

OK, but this strikes me as similar to speculating that the era of U.S. postwar dominance would have been very different if Henry Wallace, rather than Harry Truman, had succeeded FDR as president. It's certainly true, but it was all but politically impossible. The same goes for Hjalmar Schacht continuing to play a prominent role in Hitler's regime, rather than being ousted and eventually imprisoned at Dachau.

A no less likely counterfactual, but still incredibly implausible, would be for Leni Riefenstahl to have replaced Joseph Goebbels as minister of propaganda and Hitler's pal.

>19 Phlegethon99:

Controversial books in the States typically get a lot of 1-star reviews at Amazon.com. At amazon.de, Die Schlafwandler has 7 1-star reviews out of a total of 165, and Preussen has 0 1-star reviews out of 41, so those whom Clark angered must have chosen some other way to vent their displeasure. Any links to news accounts of protests, etc.?

>32 cpg:

It should be clear by now that Phlegethon99 does not answer questions or take part in discussion. He writes merely in order to fish for emotional reactions. You’ve probably heard of this; it's called trolling.

This group is not a very rewarding venue for that kind of behavior.

This group is not a very rewarding venue for anyone who does not want to take part in an Anglo-American circle jerk.

Peace out.

I haven't got a clue about the original topic, but the view from the peanut gallery has been highly entertaining!

Nevertheless, perhaps it's time for a cup of tea and a nice lie down...

Counter-factuals are useful because they force very careful examination of circumstances under discussion. They are most interesting when they were courses of action that were under discussion at the times of the decision. that way they also invite further examination as to why the prime-time action took place, not viewed with revisionist eyes and 20-20 hindsight. I love a counterfactual that broadens the base of discussion, but am less enamoured of those that are redolent of setting up more even sides for a war-game.