Ecrits révisionnistes (1974-1998) BY ROBERT FAURISSON Chapter 13: DID THE GERMANS WANT WAR?

Hitler [was] born at Versailles: that sentence serves as the title of a work by the late Léon Degrelle. The 1919 Versailles Diktat for it was not really a treaty was so harsh and dishonourable for the defeated nation that the American senate refused to recognise or adopt it (20 November 1919); thenceforth, little by little, it was discredited. It dismembered Germany, submitted it to a cruel military occupation, starved it. In particular, it obliged the defeated nation to cede to the newly created state of Poland the regions of Posen, Silesia, and part of West Prussia. The four hundred and forty articles of the Treaty of peace between the Allied and associated powers and Germany (together with its annexes) signed at Versailles on 28 June 1919 constituted, along with the related treaties (Trianon, Saint-Germain, Sèvres), a monumental iniquity which, if anything, only the fury of a recently ended war can explain. It is easy enough to find fault with the Germans for not having respected Versailles. Their duty of honour as Germans was, first, to get round it and then to tear it up, just as that of the French was to maintain it(42).

Twenty years after that crushing humiliation, Hitler would wish to recover some of the territory given to Poland, just as France, after its defeat in 1870, had wished to recover Alsace and a part of Lorraine.

Unless he elects to speak flippantly, no historian is in a position to state who in fact is mainly to blame for a world-wide conflict; thus it will be wise not to make Hitler bear the exclusive responsibility for the 1939-1945 war under the pretext that, on the 1st of September 1939, he went to war against Poland. On the other hand, the attempt to justify the entry into war, two days later, of Great Britain and France by their need, in the name of a treaty, to come to the aid of Poland seems rather unfounded since, two weeks afterwards, the USSR in its turn invaded Poland and occupied a good part of its territory, without prompting any military reaction on the part of the Allies.

World-wide conflicts resemble tremendous natural disasters which cannot accurately be predicted even if, sometimes, one feels them coming. It is only after the fact that they can be explained, laboriously and, too often, not without recourse to hoardings of bad faith in the form of mutual accusations of negligence, blindness, ill will, or irresponsibility.

It can nonetheless be remarked that in Germany in the late thirties, the pro-war camp urging military action against the western powers was, to all intents and purposes, non-existent; the Germans envisaged only a push towards the East (Drang nach Osten). On the other hand, in the West, the anti-German hawks were powerful. The coterie de guerre wanted a democratic crusade, and got it.

Among these new crusaders figured, with a few noteworthy exceptions, the whole of American and European organised Jewry.