Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SUNDAY, May 7, 1995 TAG: 9505100002
SECTION: HORIZON PAGE: D-1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: BERNARD D. KAPLNA/HEARST NEWSPAPERS
DATELINE: LENGTH: Long
Would Col. Claus von Stauffenberg have had more support in his plot against Hitler if the Allies hadn't decreed an unconditional surrender?.
WOULD THE COLD WAR have been as long if Eisenhower had agreed with Montgomery about taking Berlin? Would the world war have ended sooner if Roosevelt and Churchill had been more diplomatic? Historians may debate those and other questions for generations to come.
|By BERNARD D. KAPLAN| |HEARST NEWSPAPERS|
PARIS - As the world prepares to celebrate Monday the 50th anniversary of the allied victory over Nazi Germany, debate still rages about some events relating to the most destructive war in history, in which 20 million died.
Half a century hasn't been long enough to still the controversy over questions such as whether the Allies' insistence on Germany's unconditional surrender needlessly lengthened the war and whether they could have captured Berlin before the Soviets, thus decisively changing postwar politics in Europe.
``Its terrible human cost aside, the 1939-1945 war in Europe was an episode of unprecedented military and political complexity,'' French war historian Pierre Michelet points out. ``Even today, some aspects of the war cannot be fully explained.''
One debate that has never lost its fascination for students of the war is whether a 1944 plot to overthrow Nazi dictator Adolf Hitler might have succeeded if President Franklin Roosevelt and Prime Minister Winston Churchill had not proclaimed Germany's ``unconditional surrender'' a basic war aim.
``The demand for unconditional surrender was sprung on the world at the 1943 Casablanca conference without advance discussion or consideration,'' Michelet notes. ``Its immediate purpose was to appease Stalin. He was demanding the immediate opening of a second front in Europe and suspected - or pretended to suspect - that the Americans and British were planning to make a separate peace with Hitler.''
Nazi propaganda chief Joseph Goebbels relentlessly hammered at the ``unconditional surrender'' theme to persuade the Germans they had no alternative but to go on fighting even after it became apparent the war was lost, Michelet says. As a result, most Germans thought the Allies would accept nothing less than total capitulation.
The July 1944 plot involved a few dozen senior army officers and anti-Nazi civilians who sought to end the war by trying to assassinate Hitler and form a peace government.
The conspirators acquired only limited backing in the German high command. A bomb planted by Col. Claus von Stauffenberg, a decorated war hero, at Hitler's military headquarters failed to kill him. Von Stauffenberg and the other plotters were quickly rounded up and executed.
``The plot would have attracted greater support if the Germans had believed there was any advantage in suing for peace,'' Michelet insists. ``In that case, the war might have ended 10 months earlier than it did.''
An issue even more hotly debated is whether Gen. Dwight Eisenhower, the Allied commander, threw away an unparalleled opportunity to change the course of history by failing to take Berlin ahead of the Soviet Union's army.
During the final weeks of the war as Nazi resistance on the western front collapsed, the question of staging an all-out drive on Germany's capital sparked a sharp argument between American and British commanders.
With Churchill's support, Gen. Bernard Montgomery, commanding a mainly British army in northern Germany, urged Eisenhower to scrap his strategy of a broad frontal assault on the retreating enemy in favor letting the British forces lead a concerted push toward Berlin. The British then - late March 1945 - were closer than the Soviets to the city .
Eisenhower, whose relations with the prickly Montgomery were poor, rejected the idea, dismissing Berlin as no longer of military significance.
British historian Allan O'Neill points out that if the Allies had taken the city, the Cold War would have been far different.
``West Berlin wouldn't have been physically separated from the West by 100 miles of Communist-held territory because all of that area would have been under western control,'' O'Neill explains. ``In such circumstances, it is conceivable that Stalin would have abandoned his plan to create a separate East German communist state.''
As a consequence, the historian contends, the Soviet grip on the rest of Eastern Europe would have been weaker and less enduring.
``Instead of lasting 40 years,'' O'Neill suggests, ``the Cold War might have been over in half that time.''
Eisenhower's refusal to let Montgomery's army race for Berlin continues to rankle the British. The dispute has been revived in several British newspapers in the run-up to Monday's 50th anniversary commemoration of VE (Victory in Europe) Day.
``It's not so much the missed opportunity of taking Berlin that still upsets many (British) military experts,'' according to O'Neill, ``but their belief that [Eisenhower and the Americans] preferred to let the Russians capture the city rather than allow the British to have the glory.''
Some controversies arising from the war color present-day international relations much more than the U.S.-British dispute.
For example, Pope Pius XII's persistent silence in the face of the Nazis' extermination of 6 million European Jews remains a sore point between the Vatican and Israel.
Vatican officials have long insisted that the wartime head of the Catholic Church decided against speaking out after painfully reaching the conclusion that his intervention would merely provoke Hitler's wrath and worsen the peril for Jews and Catholics alike.
The church notes that, following the Germans' occupation of Italy in 1943, Vatican clergy helped to hide thousands of Italian Jews threatened with deportation to the death camps.
Some critics have continued to accuse Pius XII of, at best, indifference in confronting a monumental tragedy.
``The debate won't go away,'' explains Italian Catholic historian Alesandro Guigno, a critic of Pius XII. ``In recent years, it has been exacerbated by revelations of the extent to which Catholic clergy in Germany and Italy helped Nazi and Fascist war criminals go underground after the war.''
by CNB