Fascinating bit of history...

...and useful for those today who would judge what people thought then.

I have found some articles in the New York Times from 1942 that reported the use of gas to kill 100,000 jews in Poland.

After that, the gassing stories disappear until the liberation of the camps in 1944.

Knowledge is not the same thing as comprehension or acceptance.

History Buff Stuff. 

We often forget that the USSR was the partner of Nazi Germany in 1940.

//On August 24, 1939, the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany signed a 10-year non-aggression treaty, called the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact. The pact contained a secret protocol, revealed only after Germany's defeat in 1945, according to which the states of Northern and Eastern Europe were divided into German and Soviet "spheres of influence".[2] The secret protocol placed the Romanian province of Bessarabia in the Soviet "sphere of influence."[2] Thereafter, both the Soviet Union and Germany invaded their respective portions of Poland,[3] while the Soviet Union occupied and annexed Lithuania, Estonia and Latvia in June 1940,[4][5] and waged war upon Finland (1939–1940).

On June 26, four days after France sued for an armistice with the Third Reich, the Soviet Union issued an ultimatum to Romania, demanding the latter to cede Bessarabia and Bukovina.[6] After the Soviets agreed with Germany that they would limit their claims in Bukovina, which was outside the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact's secret protocols, to northern Bukovina, Germany urged Romania to accept the ultimatum, which Romania did two days later.[7] The Moldavian Soviet Socialist Republic was thereafter created following the entrance of Soviet troops on June 28, 1940.

Amazon Book Review

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			Priest, Politician, Collaborator: Jozef Tiso and the Making of Fascist Slovakia by James Mace Ward Edition: Hardcover Price: $32.15		20 used & new from $32.15
Proving, again, that good intentions pave the road to Hell, April 29, 2013 Amazon Verified Purchase(What's this?) This review is from: Priest, Politician, Collaborator: Jozef Tiso and the Making of Fascist Slovakia (Hardcover) Czechoslovakia and Jozeph Tiso are the Rosencranz and Guildenstern of World War II. They are trotted on and off stage to make some plot point, but then whatever happens to them, happens to them off-stage. James Mace Ward's Priest, Politician, Collaborator: Jozef Tiso and the Making of Fascist Slovakia remedies this imbalance by placing Tiso and the pre-World War I history of central Europe on center stage. Prior to reading this book, the only thing I knew about Tiso was that he was a Catholic priest and that he had collaborated with the Nazis by deporting Jews to Germany. He was therefore a stock villain, the prototypical fascist. The truth is much richer, more educational and far more nuanced than the stock phrases make out. Tiso was born in the kingdom of Hungary, which was part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. As such, he was part of the "Magyarization" of the Slavic Slovak population, by which the ascendent Hungarians, aka Magyars, were attempting to reduce the diversity of their share of the empire. Tiso seems to have gotten along fine with this project - being thoroughly Magyarized - until the fall of the Austro-Hungarian Empire at the end of World War I, at which point the possibility of an independent Slovakia presented itself. Tiso joined that program and never looked back, albeit to protect himself and Slovakia from Hungarian irrenditism, he had to place Slovakia under the protection of the numerically and economically more powerful Czeks. Tiso himself was a priest and pastor. Throughout his life, he attended to his pastoral duties of saying mass and hearing confession. He also seems to have been a stock type in the fascist playbook - an opportunist - long before fascism ever existed. Thus, he seems to have zig-zagged between certain positions depending on political need. For example, Tiso was not known as an anti-Semite, until immediately after World War I, when he played the anti-Semitic card against those who opposed his political party, the Ludaks, then when he became an establishment politician, and received push-back for having traded in hateful anti-Semitic stereotypes, Tiso dropped the antisemitism for a long period of time, until, again, it was useful as a Nazi collaborator. According to Ward, Tiso had two fundamental "good intentions" that colored his politics. First, he wanted to provide social welfare to all Slovaks. Second, he wanted to protect Slovak identity from foreigners, particularly the Slovak Catholic identity. Although these were partial "goods," as Tiso who was a Thomist should have recognized, they were partial "goods" that would lead Tiso into making compromises that eventually led him into a position where he materially, if not formally, another Thomistic distinction, had abandoned his principles. The personality of Tiso remains unclear to me, even after reading the book. Ward does an excellent job of preventing the facts and not intermixing his opinions into the facts, but people are complicated. Tiso was motivated by his desire - his feeling of an obligation to do the good contained in his two principles - but he also seems to have been an ambitious and vain man. His politics thwarted his desires to rise in the Catholic Church, and therefore led him to focus on politics. His involvement in politics was problematic with his religious commitments, particularly after he assumed leadership of the Slovak Republic. Tiso held himself out to be a devout and obedient Catholic, but he disobeyed both his own bishop and the Pope (and appears to have lost his monsigneurship because of his disobedience.) Pius XII advised Tiso to resign as head of state, castigated Tiso for the injustices committed during his rule, and refused to lift a finger to help Tiso when he was captured after the war. Interestingly, one reason for concern that arose when Tiso assumed the position of head of state was that he - a priest - would be collecting loyalty oaths from his ecclesiastical superiors, the bishops. Ward's examination of Tiso also sheds a light on the snake-pit of international relations during the inter-war period. I'm sure that I wasn't alone in being puzzled at how easily Czechoslovakia dissolved in 1991. The fact is that relationships were never good between the Central European Slav populations. Slovakia went from forced Magyarization policies to forced "Czechisation" policies in the new republic. The Czechs outnumbered the Slovaks two to one and had the same incentives to bring diverse populations into conformity as had the Hungarians. Further, the Czechs were secularists and their anti-clerical impulses did not make a good mix with the heavily Catholic Slovak population. Then there was the issue of "bubble populations" and irredentism. Large portions of Slovak territory had sizable Hungarian and Polish populations, and those governments wanted those territories with those populations under their control. Likewise, The Czechs had set themselves up in their area as a kind of "master race" over the Sudeten German populations in the same way that the Austrians had been the "master race" over the Czechs in the old empire. I was surprised to find that the Sudeten Germans comprised as much as 20% of the Czech region, and didn't have political input commensurate with their numbers. I have never understood the "justice demands" that were felt by Chamberlain and others as supporting the Munich Accord, but this book gave me a sense of what the people at the time were thinking, as opposed to what we now know they should have been thinking. The result was that as the Germans under Hitler were biting off bits of Czech territory, Hungary and Poland were biting off bits of Slovak territory. Tiso's final rise to power happened because of the opportunity provided by Hitler's desire to destabilize the Czechs. Tiso went back and forth between possible protectors before deciding that the Germans looked like the winner. Tiso then declared Slovak independence and was appointed head of state, in a series of political moves that are complicated and bear examination. However, after making Germany the protector of the Slovak Republic, Tiso learned that he had made a deal with the devil. He was pressured into declaring war on another Catholic Slav state, i.e., Poland, he was forced to send Slovaks to Germany as virtual slave labor, he was forced to deport the 40,000 or so Jews in Slovakia, and, finally, after attempting to save some Jews from deportation, he was forced to send the remaining Jews to Germany. Ironically, a fair percentage of the "Jewish" population who were deported to Germany were actually Catholics whose parents or grand-parents had converted. Tiso was captured after the war, tried and executed. Slovaks and others still argue about the legacy of Tiso. Ward points out the anomalous fact that Tiso never had anyone executed and he was never protected by a corp of bodyguard, but seemed to have been loved by his fellow Slovaks for his attention to them. Nonetheless, one hopes that there came a moment when the Catholic priest Jozeph Tiso realized that the fact that he, a Catholic priest was deporting Catholics to their death at the hands of a regime condemned by the Catholic Church, was a sure sign that he had made a wrong turn somewhere in his quest to bring his good intentions to reality. This is a well-written book. It was written as a dissertation. I liked the way that Ward summarizes the points of his chapter. I think that it did fill in a big hole in my knowledge about Catholicism and fascism as well as the history of Central Europe. I recommend it, albeit with the caveat that perhaps it will be more appreciated by readers who have a more general knowledge of the general subject area.  Comment | Permalink

History Buff Stuff - Why Japan lost the war.

If you like charts, then check out this site which is chock-a-block full of charts comparing American and Japanese economic production during WWII.

Check this out:

In other words, even if it had lost catastrophically at the Battle of Midway, the United States Navy still would have broken even with Japan in carriers and naval air power by about September 1943. Nine months later, by the middle of 1944, the U.S. Navy would have enjoyed a nearly two-to-one superiority in carrier aircraft capacity! Not only that, but with her newer, better aircraft designs, the U.S. Navy would have enjoyed not only a substantial numeric, but also a critical qualitative advantage as well, starting in late 1943. All this is not to say that losing the Battle of Midway would not have been a serious blow to American fortunes! For instance, the war would almost certainly have been protracted if the U.S. had been unable to mount some sort of a credible counter-stroke in the Solomons during the latter half of 1942. Without carrier-based air power of some sort there would not have been much hope of doing so, meaning that we would most likely have lost the Solomons. However, the long-term implications are clear: the United States could afford to make good losses that the Japanese simply could not. Furthermore, this comparison does not reflect the fact that the United States actually slowed down it's carrier building program in late 1944, as it became increasingly evident that there was less need for them. Had the U.S. lost at Midway, it seems likely that those additional carriers (3 Midway-class and 6 more Essex-Class CVs, plus the Saipan-class CVLs) would have been brought on line more quickly. In a macro-economic sense, then, the Battle of Midway was really a non-event. There was no need for the U.S. to seek a single, decisive battle which would 'Doom Japan' -- Japan was doomed by it's very decision to make war.