WWII Revisionists Went Too Far With ‘We Should’ve Sided With Hitler’ Claim

Editor’s note: This is a lightly edited transcript of today’s video from Daily Signal Senior Contributor Victor Davis Hanson. Subscribe to our YouTube channel to see more of his videos.

Hello, this is Victor Davis Hanson for The Daily Signal. Recently, there’s been more revision about World War II. Tucker Carlson had on his show the other day a chemistry professor from Cornell University, David Collum, that was sort of resonating what a prior blogger, Darryl Cooper, had said about World War II, in the vein of Diana West, Pat Buchanan, all the way back to Herbert Hoover.

The gist of it was: We should have never allied with the Soviet Union, and we should have either let Adolf Hitler and Josef Stalin fight it out or, in the case of David Collum, he suggested that we might have wanted to fight with Hitler, or, in other words, he said we were on the wrong side. But he gave three examples—that’s all I wanna look at—three examples that I think disprove his thesis.

No. 1, he said the Soviets had killed 15,000 to 20,000 prisoners of war when they inherited them after freeing them—American POWs—from German prisoner of war camps in the East. That’s not true. There was a joint Soviet-American commission. There were agreements that the Soviets would return American prisoners.

There were disagreements about whether the Allies would return Russian prisoners to Russia because some of them had been captured fighting, most of them, for Germany, and Stalin wanted to kill them or work them to death, and they wanted asylum.

But other than that, eventually, most of the Americans found their way back to Allied lines and were repatriated.

Were there some that we don’t know about today? Yes. But over a four-year period, there were a lot of Americans that were captured and held in German prisoner of war camps, were shot on the battlefield, were blown—we didn’t know what happened to them. But the idea that we would allow 15,000 to 20,000 American POWs in Russian hands to die is not true. It can’t be substantiated. It’s just a suggestion. Another reason why we shouldn’t have allied, according to Collum, we shouldn’t have allied with Russia.

The other thing he said, very interesting, was Gen. George Patton wanted to fight with Hitler against Stalin. He did not.

At the end of the war on May 9, 1945, George Patton was exhausted. He’d been up every single day for almost a year, with about three hours of sleep. He was tired. He had been fighting over the Falaise Gap. He’d been fighting over the Bulge. Everything he fought—for gas, for food, for Third Army—didn’t come easy.

And he said at various times, as proconsul of Bavaria and in charge of a whole state of Germany that was near starvation, that “I can’t operate as a proconsul unless I use German bureaucrats to run the power, to run the water, to run the electricity, to run the sewage. And they’re, no doubt, all Nazis. But I’m going to do it anyway.”

That led to further statements. He said—as the Red Army violated the Yalta agreements and the Potsdam agreements and did not hold free elections or free communications and transportation and intercourse between occupied Russian territory and occupied allied territory. A new proto—I guess you would call it—a proto-Iron Curtain had already emerged.

And Patton, at one point, said to President Dwight D. Eisenhower and others, “I know we’re going to be in a war, cold or hot, with the Soviet Union. We’re here. Let’s not go back the United States. Let’s confront them, militarily, to make them honor their agreements. And if we don’t have the manpower or the wherewithal”—Russia had 500 divisions, the Allied had about 200—“we can always use veterans from the German army.”

That’s about as close to lunacy as he said. It was an unfortunate remark. But he didn’t say, “While Hitler was alive, we should have joined the Nazis to fight Stalin.”

The other thing that he said, Mr. Collum, was that we in the United States should have allied—or we had the wrong ally. We should have joined Hitler. And that might have precluded the Holocaust.

I don’t think anybody in the United States—Stalin was a monster. He killed 20 million people. We understood that he was the enemy of our enemy. We made a real politic decision to help Stalin kill Hitler, and then we’d deal with Stalin later. You could argue it was an Iran-Iraq 1980-1989 war dilemma. That we armed Saddam Hussein to stop the Iranians. Except, these are not good things to do, but they’re part of real politics. But Hitler was a special case.

As far as the Holocaust, the moment he went into Poland, Day One, he started rounding up and killing Jews. There were probably, in occupied Europe and Poland, somewhere between 50,000 to 80,000 Jews that were rounded up and killed, as the ghetto system started to emerge. Hitler killed 50,000 people who had cognitive debilities, they had mental debilities. They were what the Nazis called “retarded.” Fifty thousand killed. When he went into Russia in June 1940, the first thing he did was unleash the Einsatzgruppen to kill Jews.

My point: Well before the organized death camps at Auschwitz or Breitenau or Treblinka, he was killing Jews. They were the logical succession to this ad hoc Holocaust, before it was the formal Holocaust that industrialized the mass death project.

So, the idea that we would ally ourselves with Hitler, and if we did ally ourselves with Hitler, it would’ve stopped the Holocaust, is absurd.

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