Why did Germany go to war ?

never mind him he has indigestion

no, he's saying that germany's aggression, anger, and sense of oppression caused them to elect a power-hungry dictator who said all the right things to all the right people.

The media often (deservedly) gets a bad rap but it was much easier to control information back then. Not to mention no internet. People will always be misled, but it's harder to do it at such a complete level. Although, N Korea is giving it a shot.

No one mentions the Hitler Youth? Uber indoctrination. Couple that with the poverty and wounded national pride and a strong public speaker might start to sway you. Not trying to justify, it but if you think the whole country was just stupid, well you know what they say about history repeating itself.

Thank God it didn't happen a few years later. It was bad enough but imagine Axis with ballistic missiles and nuclear weapons.

While the Jews were in concentration camps across eastern europe, there were Japanese Americans in their own concentration camps in the US. no one ever draws the parallels between German Concentration camps and American Social camps for the Japanese Americans in the US. no one talks about the shit that went on in these camps and i'm sure if the shit that GWB is trying to sweep under the rug in his administration is true, than i'm sure some bad stuff went on in the US after we rounded up all of the Japanese and stuck em into work camps. I don't understand how we can be seen as the good guys of WWII when we had our japanese citizens coralled and held in internment camps simply for being japanese and us not trusting them. they were dangerous, just like the jews were dangerous to the Germans.

pretty good wrote:

in fact truth be known i'm not old enough to vote.

Gee, who'd a thunk that?

It's not true that "no one" talks about the Japanese Americans in camps. You can argue that it's not talked about *enough* but I bet very few people reading this are hearing about it for the first time in your post.

And while I won't defend the treatment of Japanese Americans as unambiguously right, nor argue their treatment wasn't informed by racism, it was certainly not the same as the Germans' treatment of Jews and other groups. Japanese Americans were wronged, yes; but there were no extermination camps, no program of genocide.

One account:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Japanese_American_internment

curious about wrote:

What was the reason for Germany going to war in ww2 ?

I am looking for the German perspective, like , what did the everyday German think the reason was ?

Your question is somewhat flawed to begin with.

Germany didn’t ‘go to war’ in 1939.

Germany, or Hitler, the two were indistinguishable at that time, attacked Poland ostensibly over access to the German enclave of Dazing - but in reality as part of Hitler’s plan to acquiring "living space" (Lebensraum) for the German people.

That space was only available in Eastern Europe and Hitler had no interest or desire in engaging in hostilities with any country in Western Europe.

It was Britain and France that declared war on Germany in response to his invasion of Poland that was really the catalyst that turned a local conflict into a major conflagration.

Ironically, as the invasion got under way and was seen to have been successful, Stalin invaded from the East and as they’d arranged beforehand, Germany and the Soviet Union each occupied half each of that country, wiping Poland (temporarily) off the map

Both Britain and France diplomatically ignored Stalin’s activities.

In the light of what happened subsequently to Britain and the Empire - declaring war on Hitler was one of the most foolish decisions ever taken by a British government.

Whereas our so-called (belated) ally - The USA, set out with the intention of destroying British power and her Empire, Hitler considered the British Empire as essential to world stability.

google "Lebensraum."

hitler's concept of that played a big role.

hitler was a very bad man, but also a genius, very thriven man and very good speaker.

I meant driven man. :)

Realy good subject and one that wants to live in all our memories.

Having said that some of the posts are amazing.

I like the quote about Germany invading Poland as a "local conflict"

Hitler wanted to rule the world Poland was just an "aperitif".

A quote by a german on why they folowed Hitler (ref The World at War video collection 1974)

"Hitler promised us bread and water ,that does not seem a lot as i speak to you now but in the Germany of the 1930s this was everything,"

I can't stand the naive assumption that Versailles was "too harsh." The indemnity wasn't all that much harsher than the one imposed on the French after the Franco-Prussian war (which the French promptly paid off in full), and it didn't involve draconian military occupation. Moreover, the Germans actually ended up better off, because they just inflated away their payments by printing more money; in fact, foreign creditors ended up bearing more of the indemnity burden than Germany itself. Britain suffered far more from America's insistence upon war debts being repaid in full than Germany did from indemnities.

I think the "harsh" factor of Versailles was that Germany lost territory, which ignited a sense of national indignation. Mind you, much of these territories were non-German (Polish East Prussia, Alsace, Lorraine, Bohemia), but German-Czech, German-Polish angst had been growing at least since the 1860s. Moreover, the fact that the Germans won the WWI Eastern War didn't exactly help the Germans reconcile themselves to territorial concessions in the east.

We were much better. There were no Jpanaese Americans exterminated in our internment camps. And there was one incident that happened in Kuwai immediately after the Pearl Harbor attack which convinced FDR that there was considerable support for the Japanese Empire among Japanese Americans.

Essentially, Kuwai had been picked by the Japanese as a rendezvous point for any of their planes that were too damaged to get back to their carriers and there were some Japanese emigrants living there who had taken over the island at gunpoint. It was a feeble and short lived coup and FDR probably over reacted pretty badly, but that episode was evidently a major reason for the camps. If you want to say we were as bad maybe you could compare the per cent of people living in the US camps who walked out at the end of the war and went home with the percentage of those living in the German camps who did the same.

As to the original question, after WWI there were significant populations of Germans living in regions that had been taken from Germany and given to its neighbors, the Rhineland had been given to France, the Sudentenland to Czechoslovakia, Austria had never been part of Germany but there were many people in both countries, remember, Hitler was an Austrian, who thought it should be part of Germany, and the Danzig Corridor, a stretch of coastal land along the Baltic between Germany proper and East Prussia which had a large German population but which had been given to Poland.

The Germans managed to acquire the first three regions peacefully but cedeing the Danzig Corridor meant that Poland would have been land locked. Germany invaded Poland when they were convinced there was no chance of getting the Corridor peacefully and that the Soviet Union would not support Poland militarily.

The big parallel between that situation and the Iraq War is that Hitler managed to convince the German people that Poland repreaented a threat to German security. He actually had Wehrmact units stationed on the Polish side of the German-Poland border dressed in Polish uniforms stage an "attack" on Germany allowing him to portray his invasion of Poland as a response to aggression rather than as aggression itself.

And now I'm off to read the thread about Dieter Baumann in the Frankfurt Marathon. Seems fitting.

There's a lot more evidence to support the Bush/Hitler comparison than you would think. Problem is Fox News doesn't really *highlight* that in their coverage.

Google 'Germany 1930' and read a bit about what comes up. Read about the Reichstag fire, read about Hitler's *legal* consolidation of power, read about how *fear* was used to brainwash the public and the parliament.

The mainstream media outlets like to report on how Iran is less than five years away from building a nuke. They should be reporting on how our country is less than five years away from becoming the Nazi Germany of the 21st century.

I suspect that after our economy is bankrupted by this war, our dollar is worthless, our homes have been foreclosed on, and our dignity and former status as a great nation are memories, we, too, will be happy with promises of bread and water. What will we Good Germans go along with?

By the way, my running is going great. I hope the Marathon Trials still exist in 2012, because I have a good shot at a qualifier.

...that article WILL include the words 'Usama bin Laden' and '9/11 confusion' right?

Won't it?

WON'T IT????

the 2 atomic bombs were our version of Nazi genocide.

and i agree i heard about the japanese internment camps in middle school, and barely in highschool history.

just because these japanese we had in internment camps weren't being mass murdered, doesn't mean that it didn't happen, there are a lot of things that happened in our history, that your highschool text books and even the college text books left out. Lots of things happened in American history that no one wants to mention, because it doesn't show us in a favorable light. but America was no shining light of hope and justice.

just look at our treatment of "suspected terrorists" at guantanomo and look at how the Army tried to cover up Pat Tillman's death, you can't acknowledge all the secrets that have been uncovered and expect that there aren't more things that have happened that we didn't know about. maybe the japanese weren't being sent into chemical showers or the incinerators, but i'm sure there were examples of enhanced interrogation going on.

Hitler was brain-diseased and started to believe his own BS.

To REALLY stretch the point: if he had stopped at NOT killing so many people, including the victims in the death camps and others, had not attacked Poland (let alone WWII) or had died in say 1936, he might well have gone down in the History books as a German political genius and 'great' leader having gotten his nation off the mat after the Versailles Treaty. BUT...

As it is the reality is brutally obvious: he was a vicious mass murderer and psycho who intimidated a partially willing nation that went along with him and his thugs. He also wasn't prepared to face the consequences and shot himself in the end.

What did Napoleon say? History is written by the victors.

What if Hitler had sidestepped the Tripartite Pact and NOT declared War on the US? Suppose the US actions were limited SOLELY to the Pacific theater? How different would the world be?

What if he had NOT attacked the USSR?

This is the stuff of alternative history.

What sh*t are they teaching you kids in schools these days?

Damn. Find a WWII vet or someone of that age group and ask them what happened.

Hindsight is 20-20. Your hindsight is terrific.

Will future generations ask why American Youth got fixated on iPODS and HALO 3 Games and text messaging and driving Mommy & Daddy's SUV?