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Blame Churchill for World War 2. Not Hitler

By Mike Whitney • Unz Review • August 25, 2026

Winston Churchill, for all his triumphs and successes, was probably the man most responsible for the early and rapid collapse of the British empire….What brought the British empire down as rapidly and terribly as it did was world War 2. In my opinion, WW2 was exactly what Churchill called it “The Unnecessary War”. And the fatal blunder was the decision in panic of the British government after Czechoslovakia fell apart in March, 1939, was to give an unsolicited war guarantee to a collection of Polish colonels who had a romantic view of their own warlike capacities , who participated in the breakup of Czechoslovakia, and Britain gave them this guarantee to back them in a cause –control of Danzig– where they thought the Germans were fundamentally right. And that war guarantee which stiffened the Polish spine, gave the Poles the backbone to stand up to Hitler who now had no way out but to take Danzig. Hitler attacked Poland, Britain declared war on Germany, and that six year war brought down the British empire. And the man who was driving hardest for war with Germany was Winston Churchill Pat Buchanan Interview, You Tube (:29 seconds)

Video Link

“We must recognize that many of the fundamental ideas that dominate our present-day world were founded upon a particular understanding of that wartime history, and if there seems good reason to believe that narrative is substantially false, perhaps we should begin questioning the framework of beliefs erected upon it.” Ron Unz, Editor The Unz Review

I have long thought that our over-simplified, “cartoonish” portrayal of Adolf Hitler as ‘the embodiment of all evil’ has distorted our understanding of the events leading up to the Second World War. Hitler may have been a tyrant and a monster, but his strategic objectives do not appear to align with what we are told by western analysts and historians. Hitler’s invasion of Poland was not the first step in a broader campaign aimed at world domination nor did he plan to conquer all of western Europe. His goals were much more modest and reasonable. He simply wanted to recapture the territory that had been seized from Germany under the terms of the universally reviled Versailles Treaty. The Treaty –which arbitrarily partitioned Germany, stole its material assets, slashed the size of its army, and imposed reparations so big that the nation would remain a permanent colony of western bankers and financiers– also left 8 million German nationals marooned in countries outside of their own sovereign borders. Poland was one of those countries and Hitler intended to ‘put it right’. Here’s how Ron Unz summed it up:

Hitler’s final demand, that 95% German Danzig be returned to Germany just as its inhabitants desired, was an absolutely reasonable one, and only a dreadful diplomatic blunder by the British had led the Poles to refuse the request, thereby provoking the war. The widespread later claim that Hitler sought to conquer the world was totally absurd, and the German leader had actually made every effort to avoid war with Britain or France….

(Hitler) hoped to finally settle the Polish border dispute, offering concessions far more generous than any of his democratically elected Weimar predecessors had ever considered. But Poland’s dictatorship instead spent months rejecting his attempts at negotiations and also began brutal mistreatment of its German minority, finally forcing Hitler into declaring war. Why Everything You Know About World War II Is Wrong, Interview Ron Unz

So, the dominant narrative that we all learned in grade school is (as Unz says) “substantially false” which calls into question the “framework of beliefs erected upon it”, particularly that WW2 was the “good war”, a Manichean struggle between the forces of good and evil. But it wasn’t a struggle between good and evil, because as Unz points out, Hitler’s claims were “reasonable” and legitimate. Versailles was a catastrophe from the get-go and Hitler set out to roll back its demands as would any German patriot. Imagine if the US went to war with Mexico and foreign politicians decided that the US must hand over Texas, Arizona and California as part a final settlement. The public outcry would be so ferocious that eventually a politician would emerge (like Hitler) who would promise to retake the stolen territories by hook or crook. That same rule applies to Hitler. He was just doing what he was elected to do.

The whole idea that Poland was just the first steppingstone in a broader campaign for world domination is laughable. There’s no evidence to support that at all. Hitler wanted to rebuild post-Versailles Germany and put as many of the 8 million German nationals who found themselves outside the country, back under German rule. This wasn’t a global power-grab, it was a firm but responsible way to reach a just outcome, which is evident by the way he pursued his goal, through negotiation. Once again, most educated people in the west seem to think that Hitler overpowered Czechoslovakia and then marched into Poland the next day. Wrong. Hitler pursued a diplomatic path for nearly a year. Negotiations with Poland lasted roughly 10 months, from late October 1938 until the invasion on 1 September 1939. In other words, Hitler showed great restraint and patience. So why would an impulsive, tyrannical hothead look for a diplomatic solution when he could simply deploy the Wehrmacht and crush the anemic Poles beneath his tank-tracks without batting an eye?

Maybe because he wasn’t an impulsive, tyrannical hothead after all. Maybe that’s just more of the same hyperbolic narrative that has colored our understanding of Hitler from the very beginning.

Video– Historian Darryl Cooper on Churchill — “Churchill Is the Chief Villain in WWII. ..Churchill is a terrorist… Hitler didn’t war with England.”

Here’s where it gets interesting, because Poland is not some little blip on the radar. The whole history of WW2 rests on our understanding of who started the war and who is ultimately responsible for the war. And that honor goes to England not Germany. It wasn’t Germany that declared war on England. It was England that declared war on Germany on September 3, 1939, two days after Germany invaded Poland.

But if Germany invaded Poland than Germany must be responsible for starting the war.

No, because as Buchanan points out in the opening statement, Poland regarded Chamberlain’s “unsolicited war guarantee” as an insurance policy against a German invasion. As the author says, “that war guarantee which stiffened the Polish spine, gave the Poles the backbone to stand up to Hitler”. In other words, Polish leaders were duped into believing that they could thumb their nose at Hitler because the Brits ‘had their back.’ They didn’t need to negotiate or be reasonable because big brother would bail them out. Of course, big brother couldn’t bail them out because England had no combat troops, no military bases, no airfields, and no naval bases anywhere near Poland. So there was no way they could rescue Poland if Hitler attacked. Even so, they ignored all of that, shrugged off Hitler’s demands, and forced Hitler to invade. Poland fell in two weeks and Chamberlain never lifted a finger to help. (So much for British guarantees) In fact, it’s worse than that, because Hitler had formed an alliance with Stalin to divide Poland between themselves (The Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact) thinking that the alliance would deter Chamberlain from declaring war. But Chamberlain wasn’t deterred. He stood firm and declared war anyway offering up Poland as a sacrificial lamb in order to drag all of continental Europe into a World War with Germany.

Buchanan describes Chamberlain’s war guarantee to Poland the “greatest blunder in British history” worse than the Munich Agreement. It provided a “blank check” to the Polish government who then refused to negotiate over Danzig (an overwhelmingly German city) and the Polish Corridor, issues that many British leaders believed should have been resolved in Germany’s favor. The guarantee transformed a limited German-Polish border dispute into a general European war that pitted Germany against the Allied Forces in western Europe and US. The eventual outcome of the conflict would be the destruction of Poland, the fall of France, the Blitz, and tens of millions of deaths, outcomes that were entirely avoidable.

So, Chamberlain’s war guarantee was the proximate cause of World War 2, not Hitler’s invasion. The guarantee not only ensured that Poland would be destroyed but also that a large swath of countries in eastern Europe would fall under the iron grip of Soviet Russia after the war ended. Apparently, none of the geniuses in Chamberlain’s cabinet were able to anticipate that dreary outcome.

Historian David Irving reveals Hitler’s secret peace offering to Churchill in June, 1940 (while Churchill was bombing Berlin)

“I will withdraw all German forces from everywhere in Europe except for the provinces which had always been German and which had been taken away from Germany at the end of the first world war… I have the greatest admiration for the British and the British empire and I want the empire to survive into perpetuity and grow larger and larger. If the British empire at any time should threatened by some outside force,.. I guarantee that I will provide to the British whatever forces they may ask for to throw these aggressors out of the empire.”

And the consequences for England were equally dismal due largely to Churchill’s zealous commitment to a conflict in which Britain never should have participated. This is part of the story you will never find in the western histories where “bulldog” Churchill is regularly lionized as a symbol of moral fortitude and true grit. What’s lost in these glowing panegyrics is that the dissolute PM’s “incurable bad judgement” precipitated the end of the Empire and the sharp decline of Britain’s role in the world order. Churchill was given a prosperous and prestigious state to oversee, and left it a broken, bankrupt shambles requiring the handouts from foreign creditors.

Keep in mind, England was the world’s biggest creditor state when the war began but wound up as the world’s biggest debtor by war’s end. Take a look:

Grok– Before the Second World War began in 1939, the United Kingdom was still one of the world’s leading creditor nations (often described as the largest or among the very largest in terms of accumulated overseas investments and net external assets). British holdings of foreign securities, direct investments, and related income streams remained very large. By the end of the war in 1945, Britain’s position had been reversed:

Large volumes of overseas assets had been sold or liquidated to pay for essential war supplies. Britain had accumulated massive external liabilities, particularly the “sterling balances” owed to Commonwealth countries, India, Egypt, and others, plus obligations linked to American assistance. Net income from overseas investments fell sharply… Contemporary official assessments stated that Britain had “ceased to be a large-scale creditor country” and faced a severely weakened external financial position, ranking among the world’s major debtors relative to its pre-war standing.

By 1945, Britain’s external financial position had reversed dramatically: it faced large net liabilities, reduced investment income, and dependence on American financial support…. This shift from global creditor to major debtor was a direct consequence of the enormous cost of the wars and the need to finance them by drawing down assets and accumulating obligations. Grok

So, the war’s biggest cheerleader (Churchill) was, in reality, an incompetent, drunken buffoon who dragged his country to ruin in order to engage in a conflict which he later admitted was “unnecessary”. Shocking.

August 25, 2026 - Posted by aletho | Militarism, Timeless or most popular, Video | UK