Enlarged version
The True Story of World War II
Paul Craig Roberts
“We must recognize that many of the fundamental ideas that dominate our present-day world were founded upon a particular understanding of that wartime history, and if there seems good reason to believe that narrative is substantially false, perhaps we should begin questioning the framework of beliefs erected upon it.” — Ron Unz
The extraordinary lies that have been woven into a false history of World War II have been decimated principally by David Irving’s books–Churchill’s War and Hitler’s War and also by Pat Buchanan’s The Unnecessary War, John Wear’s Germany’s War, and by articles by Ron Unz, myself, and Mike Whitney. Whitney has just revived the assault by truth and the actual facts on a fictional WW II history that has institutionalized war propaganda as official history: https://www.lewrockwell.com/2026/08/mike-whitney/blame-churchill-for-world-war-2-not-hitler/
Historians have lied to us about everything, not only WW II but also WW I, the so-called US “civil war” which was an invasion of the Confederate States of America by what Lincoln called the Union, not a fight over who controlled the government in Washington, slavery, the hoax “War on Terror,” the hoax “Covid pandemic,” 9/11 and every other major event. False history is created, because historians are boxed in by the war propaganda and official narratives. To be successful, historians have to produce accounts acceptable to the elites and to readers who desire confirmation that the sacrifice was worth it. To go against the narrative is to forego a career.
I will briefly summarize the salient facts about WW II.
World War II was caused by a British guarantee to Poland and a declaration of war by Britain and France against Germany. These events themselves have roots in the Versailles “Treaty” that dismembered Germany and left millions of Germans under the rule of hostile governments. Hitler’s goal was to reconstitute the German nation, which he proceeded to do without violence as was Germany’s unity with Austria achieved without violence. The British made themselves hysterical about these developments and created in their minds the narrative of a German expansionist state that would conquer Europe. Today Western governments have done the same in their response to Russia’s defense of Russians.
The Versailles “Treaty” at the end of WW I had given the German provinces of West Prussia and Posen to a new Polish state. When Germany opened negotiations with the Polish military government about the return of German provinces as desired by the citizens of those provinces, the British government gave Poland a guarantee against German violence. This guarantee, clearly unenforceable, nevertheless encouraged the Polish government to refuse negotiating the fate of Germans under Polish rule. One result was the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact signed on August 24, 1939, which split Poland between Germany and the Soviet Union. Germany invaded Poland on September 1, and the Soviet Union invaded Poland on September 17.
The British government and their French ally declared war on Germany for invading Poland but did not declare war on the Soviet Union for invading Poland. The war quickly ended in German victory with France’s surrender and the British driven off of the European continent.
Hitler, who had made it completely clear that he did not want or intend war with the British and French offered the British government extremely generous terms for a peace agreement. The terms included German military protection of the British Empire, which Hitler regarded as essential for the protection of the vastly outnumbered European ethnicities. Churchill kept the terms of the agreement secret from the British people and, if memory serves, also from his own cabinet.
The record is clear. The British started the war and then continued the war by refusing a peace treaty.
John Maynard Keynes, the British government Treasury representative at the Versailles peace conference in 1919 denounced the treaty as “one of the most outrageous acts of a cruel victor in civilized history.” He predicted, correctly, that it would “sow the decay of the whole civilized life of Europe” and lead to another war.
When Germany agreed to the armistice that ended World War I on November 11, 1918, German armies occupied large amounts of the territory of Germany’s enemies. Germany was not militarily defeated. Germany was defeated by an internal revolution that began on October 29 when the German Navy mutinied. By November 9 the German emperor, Wilhelm II, had fled, and a republic was declared. These conditions made continuation of war implausible. US President Woodrow Wilson promised Germany no territorial loss and no reparations, but the Versailles “Treaty” violated the American president’s pledge. The British took advantage of the situation and imposed a food blockade on a self-disarmed Germany that starved Germany into submission at Versailles.
At Versailles the French demanded that Germany sign the “treaty” without discussion. The consequence was to brand the German Weimar government as a traitor to Germany in the eyes of German citizens. The subsequent communist Spartacus uprising in January, 1919, which was put down by the patriotic Freikorps, created the milieu for the rise of National Socialism and Hitler.
In the two decades between the two world wars, German intellectuals and writers emphasized the importance of thenation. A nation required a people who felt as one. It was not a racial concept as propagandists posing as historians latter made it. Even German communists spoke of themselves as National Bolsheviks.
As Oswald Spengler put it, a nation is not the libertarian one of a collection of individuals. “There is no I but a We, a collective feeling to which everyone commits their entire existence.” The Prussian idea is that freedom consists in obedience to the interests of a people and their survival, not to self-interest. This is not a racial concept as it applies to all peoples.
German intellectuals and writers saw the rise of National Socialism as the reconstitution of Germany from despair, humiliation, and disunity. Hitler was seen not as a demagogue, but as a restorer of national confidence, a leader confronting the moral degeneracy and disintegration of a nation and not merely an economic, political, and social crisis.
The Prussian aristocracy, the backbone of the German officer corps, looked down on the commoners who comprised political party membership and became involved in assassination plots against Hitler. The intellectual and writers turned against Hitler, because the National Socialist political party was elevating a political party above the nation as represented by the state. Their concept of unity was not unity under a political party. It was the unity of the people under the nation.
Hitler was not the violent and racist person portrayed by historians. When the World War I German war hero Ernst Junger turned against the National Socialists for elevating the party above the nation, Goebbels ordered his arrest. Hitler countermanded the order: “Leave Junger alone.” How was a nation to be reconstituted when it arrested its own war heroes. According to Dominique Venner’s biography of Ernst Junger, not only did Hitler shield Junger, but also members of the SS and Gestapo protected Junger by watching over him.
Historians seem to vie for who can demonize Hitler the most. This has created a false portrait. As David Irving and John Wear have documented, Churchill and Eisenhower were worst war criminals than Hitler. At the onset of WW II war was still civilized. Wars were supposed to be between armies, not between an army and civilians. Despite attacks on civilians being considered war crimes, Churchill’s orders to the British Air Force were to focus on bombing civilian housing, especially working class housing as it is closer together and the fires spread easier. Churchill ordered the Air Force to first use bombs that created fires and then when firemen appeared to control the fires to switch to high explosives. Churchill then added that the Air Force should include poison gas. As the British Air Force already expected to be tried as war criminals in mass should Britain lose the war, the Air Force refused to comply with the order. Churchill kept it a secret from the British people that Britain was bombing German civilian housing. He was relying on Hitler to respond in kind and then present it as the beast Hitler bombing British civilians. He wanted public support for the war and might have been afraid that it would come out that he had kept secret Hitler’s generous terms for peace. The German military eventually convinced Hitler that unless he bombed Britain in reply, the British would continue bombing German civilians. Thus, Churchill eventually got his grandstanding opportunity to blame Hitler for what Churchill had long been doing. All of this is documented in David Irving’s histories.
As for Eisenhower, John Wear holds him accountable for the intentional deaths of one million German POWs due to starvation and exposure. American and British war propaganda created such a monstrous picture of Germans that the victorious allies did not think of Germans as human. The predominance of the English language over German meant that the Anglo-Americans controlled the narrative. Some Jews advocated a German holocaust in which German men would be castrated in order to bring about the destruction of the German people. President Roosevelt’s Treasury Secretary Henry Morganthau devised a plan to completely deindustrialize Germany which would have caused mass starvation in Germany.
The Nuremberg Trials were a travesty of justice. The “trials” served to put all war crimes, including the Soviet ones, on the Germans. I exposed the criminality of the Nuremberg Trials in a previous article on this website: https://paulcraigroberts.org/tyranny-at-nuremberg-2/
Kristallnacht was a Brownshirts operation. David Irving reports that when Hitler heard of it he was furious. Irving provides the actual documentation. But when I ask AI, the false answer I get is that “it was explicitly orchestrated by top Nazi leadership and approved by Hitler.” I trust David Irving, not a polluted AI data base containing a vast number of lies written by court historians.
Hitler disapproved of the SA (Brownhirts) and destroyed them.
As for the Holocaust, Europe has laws prohibiting any examination of the alleged Holocaust. The Zionist allegations must be accepted irrespective of any evidence. This is very curious, because if the narrative is true scholarly investigation would support the narrative. Generally speaking, matters that cannot be investigated are matters that truth does not support.
David Irving reported that after a half century of research, he had not found one word of a Holocaust in any official documents in German, Israeli, Soviet, British, American official archives or in any memoirs, diaries, letters. He even offered a monetary prize to anyone who can offer him some evidence. If memory serves, neither Churchill’s nor Eisenhower’s memoirs mention a Holocaust.
Think about this for a minute. An operation as large as the alleged Holocaust would have required an organization with its own administration, with its own stationary, headquarters, insignia and uniform, but no signs of such an organization exists.
It would have required enormous budget expenditures, but no signs of such a budget entry exist.
In the last days of the war it would have required special fuel permission overriding the needs of the German Army, but no such orders exist.
Evidence is conclusive that the so-called “death camps” were in fact work camps where synthetic fuel and rubber were made for the German Army. In Germany all labor was valuable, including Jews, as the German work force had been severely reduced to provide the Eastern Front with troops attempting to stop the Red Army’s advance on Germany. The notion that six million highly valuable workers would be deprived the hard pressed German labor force is difficult to accept.
There is no doubt that Jews in National Socialist Germany suffered discrimination and harsh treatment, both official and ad hoc. Rightly or wrongly, Jews were associated with the internal revolution and Germany’s WW I defeat. Many members of the National Socialist Party advocated and acted against them. But it doesn’t seem to be correct that there was an over-arching official policy from Hitler to exterminate the Jews. David Irving documents occasions when Hitler orders that Jews are not to be harmed, and states that “the Jewish question” will be settled after the war. Hitler’s original plan was to deport them to Madagascar. With the initial success of Germany’s invasion of the Soviet Union, Hitler decided that he would send the Jews to the rump of Russia behind the Urals that he would leave for Stalin. This announcement resulted in Nazi organizations sending Jews into the occupied Russian territories in advance of the expected victory, for which the administrators of the territories had no provision. David Irving says he can document 200,000-300,000 Jews being executed despite Hitler’s orders to the contrary by administrators who had no place to put them. Irving condemns these executions, and I join him in the condemnation.
The Waffen SS was a large military force of tank and infantry divisions fighting in German front lines. They were often used to open or close breaches in the lines of combat. They were not an organization for the extermination of Jews. As David Irving and others have reported, some 150,000 Germans of Jewish descent, some being full-blooded Jews, served in the Wehrmacht, many as officers including officers in the SS. The last commander of the Luftwaffe was Helmuth Wilberg, a German officer of Jewish descent. https://www.tabletmag.com/sections/arts-letters/articles/ellen-feldman-nazi-germany
The father of Goering’s subordinate, Luftwaffe Field Marshal Erhard Milch, was a Jew. When the Gesapo investigated Milch, Goering told them: “I decide who is a Jew in the Luftwaffe.” Goering wanted Milch as a top leader in the Luftwaffe more than he wanted to kill Jews. Goering had Milch’s non-Jewish mother sign an affidavit that Milch’s biological father was her uncle. Hitler used this concocted story of incest and adultery to grant Milch a German Blood Certificate.
Germany’s post-WW 2 Chancellor Helmut Schmidt was one-quarter Jewish. During the war he fought bravely on the Russian front and was awarded the Iron Cross and 6 other medals.
Everything Hitler did has been interpreted as racist, even his invasion of the Soviet Union. A few independent-minded historians concluded that Hitler thought that Britain’s refusal of peace terms reflected hopes that Stalin would join the war against Germany and that Hitler decided that the way to squash such hopes was for Germany to take out the Soviet Union. I don’t think this interpretation got much traction. In two astonishing books published in the 21st century the Russian historian, Viktor Suvorov, documents that unbeknownst to one another Hitler and Stalin were simultaneously preparing invasions and that Hitler’s preparations were completed three weeks before Stalin’s. Suvorov attributes the initial easy success of the German invasion to the fact that the Soviets had abandoned their defensive positions and were caught unprepared in the process of reorganizing as an offensive force. The Russians have not welcomed this account, because Russian steadfastness in the face of German aggression is a great mainstay of Russian pride. It is unlikely that Suvorov has had much support from Western historians as his account diverges fundamentally from the official narrative.
Hitler spoke of the “Aryan race.” Aryan was a linguistic concept, not a racial concept. French 19th century racial theorists such as Arthur de Gobineau turned the term into a racial or biological concept. The Nazis adopted this use of “Aryan” and defined Germans as Aryans. Whether Hitler understood the broader meaning of the word I do not know.
The fact that Hitler, estimated to have an IQ in the 120-140 range, did not want a war with France and England, together with his offer to Churchill to defend the British Empire with Germany’s military, suggests that he understood that the German people were not confined to Germany. Great Britain and the majority of Europe consisted of German people.
Germany was settled by the Germanic tribes: Franks, Saxons, Alemanni, Thruingians.
France was settled by the Germanic tribes: Franks, Burgundians, Alemanni, Normans (Norse Germans).
England was settled by Angles and Saxons–thus the familiar term “Anglo-Saxon” into which another Germanic tribe was later mixed–the Normans.
Scandinavia was settled by German tribes: Goths, Danes. Scandinavia was a core region for the development of Proto-Germanic culture and language. Proto-Germanic includes English, German, Dutch, and Old Norse.
Spain was settled by the Germanic tribe, the Visigoths, in the 5th century. However the Germanic content of the Spanish people was watered down when the Muslims early in the 700s defeated Visigothic King Roderic and brought most of Spain under Muslim–Arab at that time–control which lasted until 1492.
The Vikings were North Germanic peoples who settled along major rivers in Russia connecting the Baltic Sea to the Black Sea, so even some Russians are of German descent.
If Hitler was claiming racial superiority for Germans, the claim included England, France, the Dutch, Denmark, and Scandinavia.
As court historians have simply assumed that Hitler was a racist, we do not know if Hitler’s claims for the “Aryan race” were efforts to bring Germans out of the despair of defeat and humiliation by the Versailles Treaty and the degeneracy of the Weimar Republic so that he could put Germany back together again, or whether he intended to eliminate non-Aryans. What was Hitler’s agenda? To restore Germany or to eliminate others? This and every other relevant question has been buried by history that consists of war propaganda.
Like every other lie we have been taught, the official narrative of World War II is a lie. Indeed, I cannot identify a single important event in which Americans have been provided with the truth. Americans live in false narratives that serve agendas and the careers of court historians.
The Jews Who Fought for Nazi Germany
By Ellen Feldman
“What was the safest place for a Jew in Hitler’s Germany? A cellar or an attic? A forest? At home with a well-connected Aryan spouse? The answer was in Hitler’s military.”
https://www.tabletmag.com/sections/arts-letters/articles/ellen-feldman-nazi-germany