From the Washington Post website:
In a provocative comparison, Rice said on "Fox News Sunday" that adopting a Senate resolution that repeals the 2002 authorization for war in favor of one that restricts the military's role and orders a start to withdrawal, "would be like saying that after Adolf Hitler was overthrown, we needed to change ... the resolution that allowed the United States to ... [create] a[See transcript at http://www.foxnews.c...
stable environment in Europe."
Uh, Condi, new legislation WAS needed to do the Marshall Plan
Secretary of State George Marshall publically proposed that we fund the rebuilding of Europe, what became known as the Marshall Plan, at Harvard University on June 5, 1947. Within a few weeks, almost every country in Europe was invited to discuss the plan. Some parties declined (e.g., the Soviet bloc).
Turning the plan into reality required negotiations both among the participating nations, and also to get the plan through the United States Congress. Thus sixteen nations met in Paris to determine what form the American aid would take, and how it would be divided. The negotiations were long and complex, with each nation having its own interests. France's major concern was that Germany not be rebuilt to its previous threatening power. The Benelux countries, despite also suffering under the Nazis, had long been closely linked to the German economy and felt their prosperity depended on its revival. The Scandinavian nations, especially Sweden, insisted that their long-standing trading relationships with the Eastern Bloc nations not be disrupted and that their neutrality not be infringed. Britain insisted on special status, concerned that if it were treated equally with the devastated continental powers it would receive virtually no aid. The Americans were pushing the importance of free trade and European unity to form a bulwark against communism. The Truman administration, represented by William Clayton, promised the Europeans that they would be free to structure the plan themselves, but the administration also reminded the Europeans that for the plan to be implemented, it would have to pass Congress. The majority of Congress was committed to free trade and European integration, and also were hesitant to spend too much of the money on Germany.http://en.wikipedia....Agreement was eventually reached and the Europeans sent a reconstruction plan to Washington. In this document the Europeans asked for $22 billion in aid. Truman cut this to $17 billion in the bill he put to Congress. The plan met sharp opposition in Congress, mostly from the portion of the Republican Party that advocated a more isolationist policy and was weary of massive government spending. This group's most prominent representative was Robert A. Taft. The plan also had opponents on the left, with Henry A. Wallace a strong opponent. Wallace saw the plan as a subsidy for American exporters and sure to polarize the world between East and West. This opposition was greatly reduced by the shock of the overthrow of the democratic government of Czechoslovakia in February 1948. Soon after a bill granting an initial $5 billion passed Congress with strong bipartisan support. The Congress would eventually donate $12.4 billion in aid over the four years of the plan.
Note from this brief history that the U.S. consulted with its allies, and with all affected governments in the region. Congress had to approve the funding, and eventually a bi-partisan majority was forged. The Economic Cooperation Administration (ECA) was created to administer the program. Soon after, the participating countries and the United States signed an accord establishing a master coordinating agency, which became the current Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, OECD.
Condi might learn something from this history instead of mischaracterizing it as merely an extension of our 1941-era war policy. She might learn about consulting regionally, getting real input, and establishing a new bi-partisan consensus in Congress.
OUCH.
An interesting side note, Condi apparently believes there WAS a Nazi insurgency. From an article writing in September 2003 . . .
Toward the end of this grim summer in Iraq, National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice compared the attacks on American and British soldiers there to the violence supposedly carried out by diehard Nazi fanatics known as "Werewolves" after 1945. Dr. Rice rightly noted that the period of 1945 to 1947 was a terribly difficult one. Four of the sixty million people killed in the Second World War around the globe were Germans. The German economy had collapsed. Millions of refugees flooded in from the East. Germany's cities and transportation networks were in ruins. Much of the political opposition was dead or in exile.Before the end of the war, there had been rumors of possible guerilla war by diehard elements of the Nazi regime after the formal end of hostilities. Yet of all the many problems facing the occupying powers, a guerilla war was not one of them. The "Werewolves" had a scary name but no presence and did not become a serious security issue for the occupation. Instead of any heroic last stands, many Nazi leaders became the butt of bitter jokes as their promises of enduring heroism culminated instead in hundreds of suicides. The length and severity of the Second World War itself combined with the severity of Allied occupation made postwar guerilla resistance a fantasy.
In the for what it's worth category, this professor actually endorses the Iraq/Nazi analogy on some levels (this was written in 2003).
Somehow though I suspect the distinguished professor's specialty is not in Middle Eastern or Iraqi history. I would be curious to see if his current expectations for the flourishing of democracy are as optimistic as they were back in 2003.
It's also worth noting that the White House spin machine started pushing this narrative in the summer of 2003--right about the time that we first started noticing signs of an insurgency inside Iraq (there are other articles that popped up around this time on the topic including one in the NRO--the History Channel even did a "documentary" on the topic).
This was at the same time that the White House was publicly denying the existence of an insurgency (Rumsfeld saying it was a bunch of "dead-enders"--probably caught once again in the misapplied lessons of WWII). Another sad angle to a sad tale.
Speaking to the same group on the same day, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld noted,"One group of those dead-enders was known as "werewolves." They and other Nazi regime remnants targeted Allied soldiers, and they targeted Germans who cooperated with the Allied forces. Mayors were assassinated including the American-appointed mayor of Aachen, the first major German city to be liberated. Children as young as 10 were used as snipers, radio broadcasts, and leaflets warned Germans not to collaborate with the Allies. They plotted sabotage of factories, power plants, rail lines. They blew up police stations and government buildings, and they destroyed stocks of art and antiques that were stored by the Berlin Museum. Does this sound familiar?"
The Salon author disagrees:
Well, no, it doesn't. The Rice-Rumsfeld depiction of the Allied occupation of Germany is a farrago of fiction and a few meager facts.
Werwolf tales have been a favorite of schlock novels, but the reality bore no resemblance to Iraq today. As Antony Beevor observes in The Fall of Berlin 1945, the Nazis began creating Werwolf as a resistance organization in September 1944. "In theory, the training programmes covered sabotage using tins of Heinz oxtail soup packed with plastic explosive and detonated with captured British time pencils," Beevor writes. "? Werwolf recruits were taught to kill sentries with a slip-knotted garrotte about a metre long or a Walther pistol with silencer. ?"
In practice, Werwolf amounted to next to nothing. The mayor of Aachen was assassinated on March 25, 1945, on Himmler's orders. This was not a nice thing to do, but it happened before the May 7 Nazi surrender at Reims. It's hardly surprising that Berlin sought to undermine the American occupation before the war was over. And as the U.S. Army's official history, The U.S. Army in the Occupation of Germany 1944-1946, points out, the killing was "probably the Werwolf's most sensational achievement."
Indeed, the organization merits but two passing mentions in Occupation of Germany, which dwells far more on how docile the Germans were once the Americans rolled in-and fraternization between former enemies was a bigger problem for the military than confrontation. Although Gen. Eisenhower had been worrying about guerrilla warfare as early as August 1944, little materialized. There was no major campaign of sabotage. There was no destruction of water mains or energy plants worth noting. In fact, the far greater problem for the occupying forces was the misbehavior of desperate displaced persons, who accounted for much of the crime in the American zone.
The Army history records that while there were the occasional anti-occupation leaflets and graffiti, the GIs had reason to feel safe. When an officer in Hesse was asked to investigate rumors that troops were being attacked and castrated, he reported back that there had not been a single attack against an American soldier in four months of occupation. As the distinguished German historian Golo Mann summed it up in The History of Germany Since 1789, "The [Germans'] readiness to work with the victors, to carry out their orders, to accept their advice and their help was genuine; of the resistance which the Allies had expected in the way of 'werewolf' units and nocturnal guerrilla activities, there was no sign. ?"
Werwolf itself was filled not so much by fearsome SS officers but teenagers too young for the front. Beevor writes:
In the west, the Allies found that Werwolf was a fiasco. Bunkers prepared for Werwolf operations had supplies "for 10-15 days only" and the fanaticism of the Hitler Youth members they captured had entirely disappeared. They were "no more than frightened, unhappy youths." Few resorted to the suicide pills which they had been given "to escape the strain of interrogation and, above all, the inducement to commit treason." Many, when sent off by their controllers to prepare terrorist acts, had sneaked home.
That's not quite the same as the Rumsfeld version, which claimed that "Today the Nazi dead-enders are largely forgotten, cast to the sidelines of history because they comprised a failed resistance and managed to kill our Allied forces in a war that saw millions fight and die."
It's hard to understand exactly what Rumsfeld was saying, but if he meant that the Nazi resisters killed Americans after the surrender, this would be news. According to America's Role in Nation-Building: From Germany to Iraq, a new study by former Ambassador James Dobbins, who had a lead role in the Somalia, Haiti, Bosnia, and Kosovo reconstruction efforts, and a team of RAND Corporation researchers, the total number of post-conflict American combat casualties in Germany-and Japan, Haiti, and the two Balkan cases-was zero.
So, how did this fanciful version of the American experience in postwar Germany get into the remarks of a Princeton graduate and former trustee of Stanford's Hoover Institute (Rumsfeld) and the former provost of Stanford and co-author of an acclaimed book on German unification (Rice)? Perhaps the British have some intelligence on the matter that still has not been made public. Of course, as the president himself has noted, there is a lot of revisionist history going around.
Further, the one book (Biddiscombe) that claims more power behind the resistance has this as its publisher's summary:
Werwolf violence failed to mobilize a spirit of national resistance. Biddiscombe argues that the group was poorly led, armed, and organized, and that it was doomed to failure given the war-weariness of the populace and the hesitancy of young Germans to sacrifice themselves on the funeral pyre of the regime.http://search.barnes...
"Condi is an intellect with the understanding of a 5 year old."
Besides the embarrassment, is it not dangerous that our top foreign policy envoy has little respect for history? This may shed some light on the administration's actions that seem to fly in the face of the historical lessons of reckless imperialistic adventures. Apparently to Secretary Rice the ship of State sails in a fantasy world that is within her power to exploit. Unfortunately, while the ship is sinking she is taking us all down with her. The Secretary should resign if only to avoid further embarrassment.
At least on the gridiron battlefield, no one would dream of sending them out without the finest protective gear and a well-memorized playbook.
As Daniel Benjamin, a senior fellow at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, discussed in an August 29, 2003, Slate.com article, the most notable instance of this "guerrilla unit" assassinating a German official occurred on March 25, 1945 -- nearly two months before the war in Europe ended. Benjamin wrote: "Werwolf [Werewolf] tales have been a favorite of schlock novels, but the reality bore no resemblance to Iraq today." He went on to explain:In practice, Werwolf amounted to next to nothing. The mayor of Aachen [a Germany city] was assassinated on March 25, 1945, on [SS Chief Heinrich] Himmler's orders. This was not a nice thing to do, but it happened before the May 7 Nazi surrender at Reims. It's hardly surprising that Berlin sought to undermine the American occupation before the war was over. And as the U.S. Army's official history, The U.S. Army in the Occupation of Germany 1944-1946, points out, the killing was "probably the Werwolf's most sensational achievement."
An August 26, 2003, Los Angeles Times article also disputes Sowell's claim that the guerrilla group terrorized Germans after the war:
The Werewolves were founded in September 1944 by SS chief Heinrich Himmler, who saw them as a special force that would work behind U.S. lines to sabotage equipment and kill U.S. troops ... But according to Perry Biddiscombe, a historian of postwar Germany who wrote a 1998 book on the Werewolves, the force was designed only to assist the German army in winning the war. It was not created to be an underground movement after a German defeat.
[...]
"After the end of the war there's a lot more ambiguity," said Biddiscombe.
[...]
It's possible, Biddiscombe said, that some isolated Werewolf cells or officers may have continued to operate for a few months after the war. Guerrilla-style attacks did take place against U.S. soldiers -- wires strung across roads to decapitate soldiers or sand poured in gas tanks, for example -- and there were several suspicious deaths of U.S.-appointed mayors. In some towns, leaflets and posters threatened Germans who cooperated with the U.S. occupiers. But none of that activity can be directly attributed to the Werewolves, historians say.
[...]
"The Army put bars on jeeps to prevent decapitation by wires, but that was the only action taken by the Army," said [Lt. Col. Kevin] Farrell [a historian at the U.S. Army Command and General Staff College at Fort Leavenworth, Kansas]. "There's very little evidence of the Werewolves offering effective resistance." Moreover, historians say, the comparison between postwar Germany and postwar Iraq is questionable because of the scale of events taking place now in Iraq.
An October 12, 2003, Dallas Morning News article noted that apart from the "Werewolves," there were a few instances of attacks, but their scope was not remotely comparable to the Iraqi insurgency:
...the Werwolf largely consisted of teenage Hitler Youth members. They were trained to make bombs using soup cans packed with plastic explosive and taught to kill sentries using a garotte, as recounted by historian Antony Beevor in The Fall of Berlin 1945 (Viking, 2002).
[...]
By implying that the catalog of sabotage he recited occurred after the German surrender of May 8, 1945, Mr. Rumsfeld's speech was misleading, said Mr. Biddiscombe, a professor at the University of Victoria in British Columbia.
[...]
Almost all incidents of the sort Mr. Rumsfeld described occurred before the war ended, as Allied forces fought their way across Germany, and Werwolf quickly fell apart after the surrender, Mr. Biddiscombe explained. "There's no doubt about the fact that if you look at it objectively, the intensity of these actions diminished after the war," he said.
Attacks on U.S. troops in the American sector of occupied Germany were so rare that some who were there deny any took place.
"It's a lot of baloney," scoffed Albert G. Silverton, 85, a Californian who was an Army Counter Intelligence Corps officer stationed near Heidelberg in 1945-46. "It sounds very intriguing and very romantic and sensational, but believe me, the Werwolf was a totally ineffective joke," Mr. Silverton said. "I don't know of one case where any of our men were ever shot like is happening in Iraq."
The "Notebook" section of the September 8, 2003, edition of The New Republic also contained an item refuting this claim:
To be sure, few would argue that rebuilding Germany was easy. But that's where the comparison [with Iraq] ends -- in fact, postwar Germany was marked by a surprising lack of guerrilla violence. "There was basically no violence directed at us or allied servicemen after capitulation," says Peter Fritzsche, professor of German history at the University of Illinois. Most Nazi officers were busy trying to save their own skins, and the vast majority of Germans were only too glad to see the war end and the Hitler regime toppled.