Spin-off from the
holocaust thread.
So who started WW1 and WW2? 'Easy', the average Anglo will say, 'The Germans!'... and he will continue to chew on his bagel and listen to the monotonous rap on his iPod.
I don't think anybody claims that Germany started WW1. The flashpoint for the war was the assassination of Archduke Ferdinand, heir to the Austrian throne, by terrorists of the Serbian "Black Hand" organisation, who were seeking to create a greater Serbia or "South Slavia" (Yugo means South in Serbian). Austria wanted to punish Serbia for the assassination, but Serbia was protected by Russia through pan-slavicism. The network of alliances that had been built up across Europe meant that Austria's and Russia's allies were drawn into the conflict, which should otherwise have been a relatively localised dispute in the Balkans.
Hitler admired Britain. He sincerely thought that the English were on the same level as the Germans (a colossal blunder)
I'm not clear what you mean by this. In Hitler's monumentally turgid tome "Mein Kampf" I recall him discussing possible allies for Germany and named England as one of them, but he did not say much in admiration.
In his phantasy [sic] he had plans to extend and prolongue European rule. Hitler wanted colonies or Lebensraum as he called it in the East and he was perfectly willing to let Britain keep the 25% of the planet it already had acquired as their Lebensraum. He was even prepared to deliver troops in the support of the Empire. Hitler never wanted to attack Britain.
That much is true, his interest was, as you say, expanding Germany westward and clearing Poland and the Ukraine of Slavs, who he regarded as sub-human, and colonising these areas with Germans.
But note that it was Hitler's expansionist ideas that started the war.
It was sheer stupidity of Chamberlain to hand out a blanque [sic] cheque to the Poles that whatever they would do the Brits would come to their aid in case of an attack by Germany. What Chamberlain should have done was put pressure on the Poles to make concessions in the Danzig case. Danzig was a 97% German city and wanted to return to the Reich. But the Poles refused to cooperate with the British garantee in their pocket. Then there was increased border tension and next the Germans decided to take back what they considered theirs after they had made an agreement with the Soviets.
Okay, let's step back a little, shall we. By the time of the invasion of Poland, Germany had already engaged in three acts of aggression.
(1) The "Anschluss", in which German forces invaded Austria. Austria was engaged in a plebiscite to determine whether to remain independent, but Hitler wasn't in a mood to wait for a result or accept a "No" to union with Germany.
(2) The annexation of the Sudeten lands. This is an interesting episode, because Chamberlain and the French PM bent over backwards to guarantee peace, and he allowed Hitler to take over the Sudeten lands, in return for a "guarantee" from Hitler that he was not interested in war. Of course, Hitler had no intention of stopping at the Sudetenland. He went on to occupy the whole of Czechoslovakia.
Thus the French and British realised that they could not avert war with Germany by appeasement, and gave guarantees to Poland that they would defend it from German aggression.
(3) When the Germans invaded Poland in their third act of aggression, Britain and France honoured those agreements and went to war with Hitler. Nevertheless it was Hitler's persistent policy of aggression in pursuit of his idea of a greater Germany, that caused the war.
Bu hey, what's a few pesky facts for "historical revisionists"?
And Sudetenland had been part of the Lands of the Bohemian Crown going back to the 900s.