German Reparations: Far From a ‘Carthaginian Peace’

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Winston Churchill was “a chief villain of world war 2?” Well, that’s the view (neatly filleted by Andrew Roberts, Churchill’s finest contemporary biographer, National Review’s Mark Wright, and others) of Darryl Cooper, the podcaster recently interviewed by Tucker Carlson. Carlson described Cooper as possibly the “best and most honest popular historian in the United States,” which would be both alarming and remarkable were it true. Cooper takes a revisionist view of the second world war that goes far beyond a continuing reexamination of the past — a basic part of any historian’s work — or even an exaggerated contrarianism into far darker territory.

This is the Capital Letter, not the History Letter, but there was one comment which marched into Capital Matters territory. It appears at the end of a tweet in which Cooper refers to the Treaty of Versailles. “The terms,” he wrote, “would keep Germany in destitution for another decade.”

But did they?

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Portraits of the Reich

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Re-examining the Third Reich remains, even now, essential. Its lessons are too important to be deemed safely settled. But when Richard Evans argues that the task has “gained new urgency and importance” due to the emergence of “strongmen and would-be dictators” within the world’s democracies “since shortly after the beginning of the twenty-first century,” he risks trivializing past horrors by wielding them as a weapon in the current debate over populism. That’s unless he has Vladimir Putin in mind, which would make for a very different discussion…

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Remembering the Nameless

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If there were to be only one symbol of the Holocaust, it would be of a concentration camp dedicated solely to industrialized killing. A total of 2.7 million Jews were murdered at Belzec, Sobibor, Treblinka, Chelmno, and, within the Auschwitz complex, Birkenau. The extermination camps were the logical endpoint of Nazi genocide, a “solution” that was not only final but also efficient and, to a degree, out of sight…

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Occupational Hazards

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The Collaborators, the dark, engrossing, and occasionally brilliant new book by the Dutch writer Ian Buruma is not about collaboration—at least not in the way it’s implied in the book’s subtitle. Not really. To be sure, a good portion of its narrative unfolds in countries or territories under foreign occupation during the Second World War (or its Asian preamble), societies reset where new rules had, as well as new rulers, replaced the old, creating undeserved opportunities for, or forcing unwanted choices on, those who lived in them. Buruma draws up a taxonomy of the types of collaborator and touches on the reasons they behaved in the way they did. Some were on the make, others were ideologues, still others told themselves they were the lesser evil, and the list goes on….

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The EU's China Conundrum

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America’s support for Ukraine has removed any remaining doubts that the Cold War’s two leading adversaries are embarked on a new version of that contest. And Beijing is now in a very different position. After China’s break with the USSR in the early 1960s, the relationship between Moscow, Washington, and Beijing evolved into an intricate triangular dance in which the distance between the three vertices was always shifting.

Forty years on, the nature of that dance has changed, and not to America’s advantage. Thanks to its growing economic, technological, and military power, China has now emerged as America’s most formidable challenger…

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Germany’s folly: Berlin has miscalculated on Russia and China

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The notion that closer trade connections with the West will necessarily set less enlightened nations on a course toward prosperity and liberty is nonsense, but convenient nonsense. Germans have a phrase for it — Wandel durch Handel, change through trade — often given as a justification for their business dealings with Russia and China. Unfortunately, the change they triggered was in Germany. In one case it has been for the worse; in the other it appears to be headed that way…

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Berlin as the Unreal City

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Berlin has too much [history].” Sinclair McKay cites this rueful observation in the preface to his new book about the city. Given that he is not simply discussing Berlin between the wars, or during the second of those wars, or in the Cold War that followed, but all of it, this may come off as a cry for help. History may — in those words attributed to, well, take your pick — be “one damned thing after another,” but when it came to Berlin, those things hurtled through time in a horde, colliding, overlapping and refusing to form an orderly line. And, in Berlin’s case, they had a way of mattering. Not for nothing does this book’s subtitle refer to Berlin as “the city at the center of the world.” Bad news for a writer aiming, presumably, at a degree of concision.

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Our Enemy’s Enemy

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After Nazi Germany attacked the USSR, Winston Churchill had no qualms about entering into an alliance with Stalin, whose regime he understood all too well: “If Hitler invaded Hell, I would make at least a favorable reference to the Devil in the House of Commons.”

Similar thinking does much to explain the enlistment of former (and not so former) Nazis by the Western allies in intelligence work against the Soviets after 1945…

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Surviving The Time Of Wolves

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“Eight Days in May,” a gripping, immaculately researched retelling of the Nazi Götterdämmerung, is the story of an intermission, a phase, as the German author Erich Kästner wrote in his diary, between the “no longer” and “not yet.” But during this intermission the action rarely paused. Written by Volker Ullrich, a German journalist and historian perhaps best known for his impressive two-volume biography of Hitler, this book is structured as the day-by-day chronicle implied by its title. That said, Mr. Ullrich also looks further backward and forward in time to add the context that a study confined to eight days alone could not provide.

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"Too Busy Saving the World"

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To label Kati Marton’s biography of Angela Merkel a hagiography would not be fair—not entirely. That said, when she writes of the chancellor being “too busy saving the world” to have much time for strolling in the woods, the expression may be less of a rhetorical flourish than it should. “The Chancellor” is an impressively researched but, in many respects, devotional work—the reflection of a worshipful establishment consensus that will eventually seem absurd.

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