1939 Berlin Diary. Compare to today in Bush's PNAC USA.

[protect freedom impeach bush now]

ompare and contrast today in USA -

With this excerpt from William L. Shirer's Berlin Diary.


August 10, 1939:
How completely isolated a world the German people live in. A glance at the newspapers yesterday and today reminds you of it. Whereas all the rest of the world considers that the peace is about to be broken by Germany, that it is Germany that is threatening to attack Poland over Danzig, here in Germany, in the world the local newspapers create, the very reverse is being maintained. (Not that it surprises me, but when you are away for a while, you forget.) What the Nazi papers are proclaming is this: that it is Poland which is disturbing the peace of Europe; Poland which is threatening Germany with armed invasion, and so forth. ...


"POLAND? LOOK OUT!" warns the B.Z. headline, adding "ANSWER TO POLAND, THE RUNNER-AMOK (AMOKLAUFER) AGAINST PEACE AND RIGHT IN EUROPE!"

Or the headline in Der Fuhrer, daily paper of Karlsruhe, which I bought on the train: "WARSAW THREATENS BOMBARDMENT OF DANZIG -- UNBELIEVABLE AGITATION OF THE POLISH ARCH-MADNESS (POLNISCHEN GROSSENWAHNS)!"

... But the German people can't possibly believe these lies? Then you talk to them. So many do.

But so far the press limits itself to Danzig. ... Any fool knows they don't give a damn about Danzig. It's just a pretext. The Nazi position, freely admitted in party circles, is that Germany cannot afford to have a strong military power on her eastern frontier, that therefore Poland as it is today must be liquidated, not only Danzig .... Then when Hungary and Rumania and Yugoslavia have been similarly reduced (Hungary practically is already) Germany will be economically and agriculturally independent .... Germany can then turn on the West and probably beat her.


http://search.barnesandnoble.com/booksearch/isbnInquiry.asp?isbn=0801870569

[Clete]

1. Shirrer was living in the Reich up to our entry into WWII

The invasion of Poland was accomplished by operation "canned goods". SS soldiers were dressed as Polish soldiers and pretended to attack German radio stations on the Polish border. Concentration camp prisoners were drugged and then killed as Germans in the radio stations. The staged photo op for the media gave the Nazis the excuse they need to invade Poland. Schirrer writes about it in detail in his book "The Rise And Fall Of The Third Reich".

It sort of reminds me of the babies thrown from incubaters in Kuwait set up for Gulf War I and the more recent WMD excuse for invading Iraq this time.