World War II Behind Closed Doors - Plot & Excerpts
Which is a polite way of asking whether we were partly to blame for what happened and all the resultant misery.In practical terms, the only way of preventing the physical occupation of eastern Europe by the Red Army would have been for someone else to have occupied this territory first. That would have meant either bringing forward the date of the second front and D-Day by at least a year, to 1943, or to have entered into some kind of partnership with the Germans towards the end of the war – conditional, presumably, on Hitler and the rest of the Nazi leadership having first been removed.The second of these two options is the easier to dismiss – even though at the time there were people on the Allied side who seriously thought the threat from the Soviet Union so great that we should have enlisted the German army against them. George Earle, the former Governor of Pennsylvania who appeared earlier in this book when he protested to Roosevelt about Katyn, even met Baron Kurt von Lersner, a close friend of Franz von Papen, the former Chancellor of Germany, to discuss this possibility1 Von Lersner visited Earle in secret in Istanbul in 1943 and proposed – on behalf of a group of well-connected conspirators – that the Western Allies accept only ‘conditional’ surrender from the Germans.
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