Adolf Hitler, in addition to being a notorious moral monster, was profoundly stupid about history. He believed that World War I had been sparked by a Jewish conspiracy. In January 1939, in a speech to remember six years of Nazi power, he lied again. “If financial Judaism again pushes peoples to war, instead of the Bolshevization of the world there will be the extermination of the Jewish race.”
So many atrocities committed in so few words: Jewish bankers were not Bolsheviks, Jews are not race, and worst of all, Hitler was counting down the Holocaust.
In July of the previous year, the Evian Conference in France had already shown indifference to Jewish refugees, and in November the Crystal Night had anticipated the tragedy with 91 anti-Semitic murders, the burning of synagogues and the destruction of Jewish businesses. Such facts are the subject of long and numerous compendiums on the criminal nap of ethics in the years 1939-1945.
The call to memory is one of the merits of “Brief History of the Second World War”, by the German journalist Ralf Georg Reuth, which Nevertheless has just translated in Brazil. Brief in terms. There are 400 pages of a seductive narrative, which does not exactly bring factual news, but works, with austerity, as an outburst about a conflict that, between civilians and military, caused 55 million deaths.
Another of its merits lies in not hanging the umbilical cord of the Second World War in the previous conflict, in the Versailles Conference and in the “slavery” conditions that it imposed on Germany, which had to sink 74 vessels to resize its Navy by imposition of former enemies. French-British.
The fact is that Hitler rearmed his country from 1933 onwards, installed arsenals on the banks of the Rhine and threw out the imposition of limiting the army to 100,000 men. He had explicit plans to expand the Third Reich, but through small conquests — such as Austria’s — or the submission of Czechoslovakia to the protectorate. He believed that a real war would not break out until 1943.
Germany was to become, for the Nazi establishment, the great European power, without this having to do with the defeat of the Axis in the carnage of 1914-1918. Poland was invaded in September 1939, which broke out the conflict, and then Hitler also invaded Ukraine and Russia, with Operation Barbarossa, whose turnaround, in 1944, marked the beginning of the German retreat, which would end in 1945 with Marshal Russian Georgi Zhukov geographically conquering Berlin.
Reuth argues that the war on Soviet soil was Hitler’s great experimental field, in which he risked everything and lost everything. He didn’t get the wheat fields or the oil reserves. And, above all, he was left without the capitulation of Leningrad. The metropolis of Catherine the Great, where she moved the Russian capital in the 18th century, remained besieged between November 1941 and January 1944. One million Russian civilians died during the 872-day siege, driven by starvation and related disease. of malnutrition.
The German journalist’s book, paradoxically, does not reserve a separate chapter for Leningrad, according to epic versions of the Second World War that talk about Soviet heroism and the occurrence of cannibalism with corpses dug up to survive with some protein.
Nor does the author produce an exclusive chapter on June 6, 1944, when the Allies landed in Normandy and began to eat the German occupation from the edges, until the liberation of Paris (August) and the march towards Germany. Long before that, another important date was December 7, 1941, when the Imperial Japanese Navy destroyed the US fleet at Pearl Harbour.
The USA finally entered the war — Franklin Roosevelt brought the weight of pacifism built by Woodrow Wilson to his feet, which got in the way of his plans. Stalin and Churchill were now in the company of the country that would assume world economic, political and military leadership. That simple.
Reuth’s work at no point pulls the narrative towards his home country, Germany. Hitler has more than justifiable centrality, with all the evil he deserves. Next, the history of World War II is exhaustive. It ends with the bombing of Nagasaki and the surrender of Japan. Finally, it is a very well written book. It awakens a feeling of pleasure, although the subject is sometimes between bitter and sour.
