Word: hitlers
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...citizens of Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania love to watch grainy black- and-white documentary films of what it was like 50 years ago, before their lands were seized by Stalin, invaded by Hitler, then colonized by the Kremlin. They remember themselves as having been self-reliant yet outward looking. These are among the virtues that Gorbachev is now preaching for the Soviet Union as a whole. He is a Westernizer, in the tradition of an enlightened but ultimately frustrated school of 19th century Russian reformers. The Baltics are already the most Westernized of the 15 Soviet republics, and they...
...NIGHTMARE YEARS (TNT, Sept. 17-20, 8 p.m. EDT). William Shirer's memoir of Hitler's Germany in the 1930s is re-created in an eight-hour mini-series...
...even then, when the Soviets stopped the Wehrmacht just outside Moscow, Hitler still controlled vast territories in the western U.S.S.R. What if he had negotiated a settlement that let him keep his gains? He had predicted such a possibility in the fall: "The recognition that neither force is capable of annihilating the other will lead to a compromise peace." Stalin actually began sending out peace feelers as early as October 1941, and, according to Liddell Hart, Foreign Ministers Molotov and Ribbentrop finally met secretly in 1943 to seek a settlement. But the Germans wanted a new boundary on the Dnieper...
...question in any such speculation about a partial or complete Hitler victory is whether peace would have brought any kind of stability. Could Hitler have established a continental network of satellite states under German domination, like that in Vichy France? And could such a network of satellites have lasted as long as the one created by Stalin after the war? It was partly wartime hysteria that led to the savagery of Nazi rule in the occupied lands, not only against the Jews but also against the Slavs, some of whom had originally welcomed the Wehrmacht for liberating them from Stalin...
That suicidal impulse may have been what inspired his last major political error, declaring war on the U.S. after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor. There was no treaty with the Japanese that required him to do so, and Hitler never saw a treaty he couldn't break. It is quite likely that the U.S. would have eventually joined the European war anyway, but it is also possible that if Hitler had professed neutrality, the U.S. war effort would have been turned against Japan. And if Hitler had succeeded in establishing some kind of peace with Britain and the Soviets...