FDR's Catastrophic, Horrendous, and Treasonous Handling of WW II in Europe

[Flash]

FDR was a terrible President. He really prolonged the Depression by failed big government interference.

FDR’s policies prolonged Depression by 7 years, UCLA economists calculate - Frontiers of Freedom

Then I don't understand why it was that the Japs attacked the US that we spent most of our war resources fighting in Europe. Kinds of reminds you of Bush's decision to invade Iraq after 911 when Iraq had nothing to do with 911.

FDR was the typical failed Democrat President. Lousy in domestic policy and lousy in foreign policy,

 

[rightwinger]

FDR was a terrible President. He really prolonged the Depression by failed big government interference.

FDR’s policies prolonged Depression by 7 years, UCLA economists calculate - Frontiers of Freedom

Then I don't understand why it was that the Japs attacked the US that we spent most of our war resources fighting in Europe. Kinds of reminds you of Bush's decision to invade Iraq after 911 when Iraq had nothing to do with 911.

FDR was the typical failed Democrat President. Lousy in domestic policy and lousy in foreign policy,

FDR wasn’t as interested in ending the Depression as much as easing the suffering of the people

His policies put food in their bellies and got them jobs

 

[rightwinger]

FDR was a terrible President. He really prolonged the Depression by failed big government interference.

FDR’s policies prolonged Depression by 7 years, UCLA economists calculate - Frontiers of Freedom

Then I don't understand why it was that the Japs attacked the US that we spent most of our war resources fighting in Europe. Kinds of reminds you of Bush's decision to invade Iraq after 911 when Iraq had nothing to do with 911.

FDR was the typical failed Democrat President. Lousy in domestic policy and lousy in foreign policy,

If FDR could have ended the Depression 7 years earlier then what year do you think the Depression should have ended?

 

[regent]

How in the world can America survive if the people are allowed to vote for the president of their choice? Thank God, Republicans stopped that kind of nonsense by changing the Constitution. Now for Republicans to stop the historians from making historical evaluations of presidents and politicians. and then the biggie, remove the impeachment clause and American will roll along roll.

 

[rightwinger]

How in the world can America survive if the people are allowed to vote for the president of their choice? Thank God, Republicans stopped that kind of nonsense by changing the Constitution. Now for Republicans to stop the historians from making historical evaluations of presidents and politicians. and then the biggie, remove the impeachment clause and American will roll along roll.

Republicans think Historians, Scientists, Economist and the media are conspiring against them

 

[mikegriffith1]

In his 600-plus-page book The New Dealers' War: Franklin D. Roosevelt and the War Within World War II, award-winning historian Thomas Fleming documents in sickening detail how FDR needlessly prolonged WW II in Europe by several months and cost hundreds of thousands of American and European lives. FDR did this by insisting on “unconditional surrender” and by refusing to even consider the substantive peace offers made by the German resistance leaders, even though those leaders included high-ranking German officers such as Admiral Canaris, the head of the Abwehr, Germany’s military intelligence agency.

Fleming provided an extensive summary of the evidence of FDR’s catastrophic handling of the war in Europe in a long 2009 article titled “FDR Writes a Policy in Blood” in MHQ: The Quarterly Journal of Military History. The article is now available on historynet.com. Below are extracts from the article:

FDR’s blind insistence on unconditional surrender prolonged World War II and cost hundreds of thousands of lives. . . .​

Inwardly, Churchill was dumbfounded by Roosevelt’s announcement [of the policy of unconditional surrender]—and dismayed by its probable impact on the conduct and outcome of the war.​

The prime minister’s British colleagues were even more alarmed. The chief of British intelligence, Maj. Gen. Sir Stewart Graham Menzies, considered unconditional surrender disastrous, not only to certain secret operations he already had in progress, but also because it would make the Germans fight “with the despairing ferocity of cornered rats”. . . .​

That consternation was shared by not a few Americans in the ranks of VIPs standing behind the two leaders. Gen. Dwight D. Eisenhower thought unconditional surrender was idiotic—it could do nothing but cost American lives. Later, he said: “If you were given two choices, one to mount a scaffold, the other to charge twenty bayonets, you might as well charge twenty bayonets.”​

Lt. Gen. Albert Wedemeyer, who was the architect of the strategy for D-Day, was even more appalled. He decried the idea from the moment he heard it. Just before the war, he had spent two years in Germany attending the Berlin War College and he knew firsthand the deep divisions between Hitler and the German General Staff. An unconditional surrender policy would, he accurately predicted, “weld all the Germans together”. . . .​

Since the war began, British intelligence chief Menzies and the Abwehr’s Admiral Canaris, two seeming opponents in the art and science of black warfare, had been in shadowy touch with each other through emissaries who shuttled from Berlin and London to the borders of the Nazi empire. In 1940 the Abwehr leaked Hitler’s planned assault on Holland, Belgium, and France. The British and French dismissed it as a ruse and discovered, too late, that its details were excruciatingly authentic. While the admiral went briskly about the business of intelligence, running spy networks throughout Europe, evidence accumulated suggesting the astonishing possibility that the head of the Abwehr was a secret enemy of the Nazi regime.​

Around Canaris was grouped a loose confederation of Hitler opponents in the German Foreign Office, the army, and the political world. They included Ulrich von Hassel, a career diplomat whose diaries are a main source of information about the resistance; Gen. Ludwig Beck, former chief of the general staff, who resigned in protest when Hitler threatened to invade Czechoslovakia in 1939 in violation of the Munich agreement; and Count Helmuth von Moltke, great-grandnephew of the general who had defeated France in 1871 and made Germany a world power. Another important figure was Karl-Friedrich Goerdeler, the former mayor of Leipzig, whom the Nazis dismissed from his post when he refused to remove a monument to the great German-Jewish composer, Felix Mendelssohn.​

Beck, the key figure, was still deeply admired by many generals on active duty. Through him, the conspirators hoped to persuade the army to stage a coup d’état to remove and, if necessary, kill Hitler. . . .​

Before Casablanca [where FDR announced the policy of unconditional surrender], Field Marshal Erwin von Witzleben, Germany’s supreme commander of the West, had told Canaris that he loathed Hitler and was ready to do everything in his power to overthrow him. After Casablanca, Witzleben said: “Now, no honorable man can lead the German people into such a situation.” Gen. Hans Guderian, the inventor of panzer warfare, declined to participate in the plot for the same reason, when Col. Hans Oster, second in command to Canaris, approached him. Col. Gen. Alfred Jodl, chief of the German armed forces operations staff, said at the Nuremberg War Crimes trials that unconditional surrender had been a crucial element in his refusal to join the conspiracy. Nevertheless, Canaris redoubled his efforts to reach out to the United States. . . .​

In June 1943, Helmuth von Moltke journeyed to Istanbul to talk to the U.S. naval attaché, George Earle, a Balkans expert who wanted to rescue Eastern Europe from Soviet domination. Earle persuaded William Donovan, head of the U.S. Office of Strategic Services, to come to Istanbul. There, the Germans offered to fly a member of the German general staff to London to arrange for a peaceful surrender of the western front—if unconditional surrender were modified. Donovan rushed to the White House, only to discover FDR had no desire to negotiate with “these East German Junkers.”​

Around the same time, Canaris developed a seemingly more fruitful contact in Berne, where Allen Dulles had become the Office of Strategic Services station chief. Here the messenger was Hans Bernd Gisevius, also an Abwehr agent, disguised as the German vice consul in Zurich. To bolster his bona fides, Canaris leaked reams of secret information about the German war effort to Dulles, who forwarded it to Washington with strong recommendations to cooperate with the resistance movement, which he code-named “Breakers.” From the White House came only silence. Nothing came of a similar initiative in Stockholm, also launched by the German Foreign Office in 1943. . . .​

With mounting desperation, Canaris himself took to the field in Spain. With the help of the Spanish Foreign Office, in August 1943 he arranged a meeting between himself, Menzies, and Donovan at Santander. It was surely one of the strangest and most fateful encounters of the war. Menzies was disobeying the orders of his putative commanders, the Foreign Office bureaucrats, and Donovan was acutely aware by now that Roosevelt was equally hostile to his presence. But Canaris charmed and convinced both men of the logic of his proposal to work out an arrangement whereby the Anglo-Americans would support a coup d’état and peace on the basis of the German borders of 1939—surrendering all Hitler’s conquests. One of Canaris’s deputies, who was present at the meeting, said it was the most exciting experience in his secret service career.​

When the two Allied intelligence chiefs reported to their superiors, however, the reception was, if possible, even more venomously negative. For Canaris, the disappointment was crushing— and it soon became doubly depressing when his enemies in the Nazi hierarchy, who had long suspected the Abwehr of treason, began to strike at some of his most trusted subordinates.​

First, Oster and one of his cohorts were caught aiding escaping Jews. Next Moltke attended a garden party at which a number of indiscreet things were said about the regime. After one more futile trip to Ankara in the last weeks of 1943 to try to contact the American ambassador to Cairo, who was an old friend, Count von Moltke, too, was arrested. Investigators from several branches of the Nazi apparatus threatened Canaris and his grip on the Abwehr.​

While the German resistance struggled to win recognition from Roosevelt, his antipathy toward them and the German people was hardening. In May 1943 Churchill came to Washington for a conference, code-named “Trident.” Probably reacting to the attempts by Canaris to reach him through Donovan, Roosevelt told the prime minister he wanted to issue a declaration that he would refuse to negotiate with the Nazi regime, the German army high command, or any other group or individual in Germany. Churchill, once more demonstrating his dislike for taking such an intransigent public stand, managed to talk him out of it. . . .​

Shortly after Sicily fell, Italy’s King Victor Emmanuel III dismissed Benito Mussolini and appointed Field Marshal Pietro Badoglio premier. Badoglio immediately opened secret negotiations with American emissaries to get Italy out of the war. Everything seemed to be moving toward a stunning capitulation, which would have opened a huge gap in Hitler’s Festung Europa. But Roosevelt insisted that he would accept only unconditional surrender—and the removal of the king and the field marshal. Badoglio angrily withdrew from the negotiations and for over six weeks the talks were stalled while Eisenhower, Churchill, and others desperately tried to persuade the president to let them cut a deal that would have saved thousands of British and American lives.​

By the time Roosevelt relented and permitted the king and the marshal to remain in power, the Germans had poured 24 divisions into Italy, and the Italians had no country to surrender.​

Unbeknownst to the German conspirators, they were acquiring allies on the other side. As British and American planners contemplated the harsh realities of at- tacking the 1.5 million–man German army in France, doubts about the policy of unconditional surrender escalated. It soon became evident that virtually no one in either Allied government supported the policy except Roosevelt and those in his White House circle.​

On March 25, 1944, Gen. George Marshall and the Joint Chiefs of Staff submitted a memorandum to the president, urging “that a reassessment of the formula of unconditional surrender should be made…at a very early date.” The chiefs proposed a proclamation that would assure the Germans the Allies had no desire to “extinguish the German people or Germany as a nation.”​

On April 1, 1944, Roosevelt replied with an outburst that revealed as never before the extent of his disdain for Germany.​

Eisenhower was drawing on his experience in Italy, reasoning that if the Allies had proposed installing an Italian field marshal as premier, what was wrong with the same approach for Germany? In his cable to Hull, Stettinius, obviously quoting Eisenhower, said they should try to encourage the emergence of a German Badoglio. The cable also added the suggestion that after the beachhead was established in France, Eisenhower should call on the German commander in the West to surrender.​

From the White House, in response to this extraordinary message, came another bout of silence. . . .​

While this charade played out in Washington, some 500 leaders of the German resistance were being tortured by the Gestapo and tried before a so-called People’s Court, packed with Nazi party members who jeered and hooted at them. Field marshals and generals, colonels and former officials of the Foreign Office and the Abwehr were forced to wear clothes that were either ridiculously large or small, to make them look as much like buffoons as possible. Yet they managed to defend themselves with calm dignity, boldly testifying that they had tried to overthrow Hitler because Nazism filled them with moral and spiritual revulsion.​

Neither Churchill nor Roosevelt, nor any of their spokesmen, uttered a public word of sympathy or regret for these men. Instead, the Anglo-Americans showered Germany with mocking leaflets, sneering that the conspiracy was a sure sign of imminent collapse.​

....hey buddy--the Germans started crap a SECOND time BECAUSE there wasn't unconditional surrender the first time ..so if we didn't totally destroy them and get unconditional surrender, they would do the same crap again...

That's nonsense. Germans were embittered after WW I because of the draconian conditions of the Versailles Treaty and because of England's starvation blockade after Germany had stopped fighting.

I notice you didn't attempt to deal with a single fact presented in the OP, such as the fact that even Stalin recognized that FDR's unconditional surrender policy was deadly and idiotic, such as the fact that FDR passed up a chance to kill Hitler in 1943 because he refused to abandon unconditional surrender, and such as the fact that even Marshall and Eisenhower urged him to abandon unconditional surrender.

 

[rightwinger]

In his 600-plus-page book The New Dealers' War: Franklin D. Roosevelt and the War Within World War II, award-winning historian Thomas Fleming documents in sickening detail how FDR needlessly prolonged WW II in Europe by several months and cost hundreds of thousands of American and European lives. FDR did this by insisting on “unconditional surrender” and by refusing to even consider the substantive peace offers made by the German resistance leaders, even though those leaders included high-ranking German officers such as Admiral Canaris, the head of the Abwehr, Germany’s military intelligence agency.

Fleming provided an extensive summary of the evidence of FDR’s catastrophic handling of the war in Europe in a long 2009 article titled “FDR Writes a Policy in Blood” in MHQ: The Quarterly Journal of Military History. The article is now available on historynet.com. Below are extracts from the article:

FDR’s blind insistence on unconditional surrender prolonged World War II and cost hundreds of thousands of lives. . . .​

Inwardly, Churchill was dumbfounded by Roosevelt’s announcement [of the policy of unconditional surrender]—and dismayed by its probable impact on the conduct and outcome of the war.​

The prime minister’s British colleagues were even more alarmed. The chief of British intelligence, Maj. Gen. Sir Stewart Graham Menzies, considered unconditional surrender disastrous, not only to certain secret operations he already had in progress, but also because it would make the Germans fight “with the despairing ferocity of cornered rats”. . . .​

That consternation was shared by not a few Americans in the ranks of VIPs standing behind the two leaders. Gen. Dwight D. Eisenhower thought unconditional surrender was idiotic—it could do nothing but cost American lives. Later, he said: “If you were given two choices, one to mount a scaffold, the other to charge twenty bayonets, you might as well charge twenty bayonets.”​

Lt. Gen. Albert Wedemeyer, who was the architect of the strategy for D-Day, was even more appalled. He decried the idea from the moment he heard it. Just before the war, he had spent two years in Germany attending the Berlin War College and he knew firsthand the deep divisions between Hitler and the German General Staff. An unconditional surrender policy would, he accurately predicted, “weld all the Germans together”. . . .​

Since the war began, British intelligence chief Menzies and the Abwehr’s Admiral Canaris, two seeming opponents in the art and science of black warfare, had been in shadowy touch with each other through emissaries who shuttled from Berlin and London to the borders of the Nazi empire. In 1940 the Abwehr leaked Hitler’s planned assault on Holland, Belgium, and France. The British and French dismissed it as a ruse and discovered, too late, that its details were excruciatingly authentic. While the admiral went briskly about the business of intelligence, running spy networks throughout Europe, evidence accumulated suggesting the astonishing possibility that the head of the Abwehr was a secret enemy of the Nazi regime.​

Around Canaris was grouped a loose confederation of Hitler opponents in the German Foreign Office, the army, and the political world. They included Ulrich von Hassel, a career diplomat whose diaries are a main source of information about the resistance; Gen. Ludwig Beck, former chief of the general staff, who resigned in protest when Hitler threatened to invade Czechoslovakia in 1939 in violation of the Munich agreement; and Count Helmuth von Moltke, great-grandnephew of the general who had defeated France in 1871 and made Germany a world power. Another important figure was Karl-Friedrich Goerdeler, the former mayor of Leipzig, whom the Nazis dismissed from his post when he refused to remove a monument to the great German-Jewish composer, Felix Mendelssohn.​

Beck, the key figure, was still deeply admired by many generals on active duty. Through him, the conspirators hoped to persuade the army to stage a coup d’état to remove and, if necessary, kill Hitler. . . .​

Before Casablanca [where FDR announced the policy of unconditional surrender], Field Marshal Erwin von Witzleben, Germany’s supreme commander of the West, had told Canaris that he loathed Hitler and was ready to do everything in his power to overthrow him. After Casablanca, Witzleben said: “Now, no honorable man can lead the German people into such a situation.” Gen. Hans Guderian, the inventor of panzer warfare, declined to participate in the plot for the same reason, when Col. Hans Oster, second in command to Canaris, approached him. Col. Gen. Alfred Jodl, chief of the German armed forces operations staff, said at the Nuremberg War Crimes trials that unconditional surrender had been a crucial element in his refusal to join the conspiracy. Nevertheless, Canaris redoubled his efforts to reach out to the United States. . . .​

In June 1943, Helmuth von Moltke journeyed to Istanbul to talk to the U.S. naval attaché, George Earle, a Balkans expert who wanted to rescue Eastern Europe from Soviet domination. Earle persuaded William Donovan, head of the U.S. Office of Strategic Services, to come to Istanbul. There, the Germans offered to fly a member of the German general staff to London to arrange for a peaceful surrender of the western front—if unconditional surrender were modified. Donovan rushed to the White House, only to discover FDR had no desire to negotiate with “these East German Junkers.”​

Around the same time, Canaris developed a seemingly more fruitful contact in Berne, where Allen Dulles had become the Office of Strategic Services station chief. Here the messenger was Hans Bernd Gisevius, also an Abwehr agent, disguised as the German vice consul in Zurich. To bolster his bona fides, Canaris leaked reams of secret information about the German war effort to Dulles, who forwarded it to Washington with strong recommendations to cooperate with the resistance movement, which he code-named “Breakers.” From the White House came only silence. Nothing came of a similar initiative in Stockholm, also launched by the German Foreign Office in 1943. . . .​

With mounting desperation, Canaris himself took to the field in Spain. With the help of the Spanish Foreign Office, in August 1943 he arranged a meeting between himself, Menzies, and Donovan at Santander. It was surely one of the strangest and most fateful encounters of the war. Menzies was disobeying the orders of his putative commanders, the Foreign Office bureaucrats, and Donovan was acutely aware by now that Roosevelt was equally hostile to his presence. But Canaris charmed and convinced both men of the logic of his proposal to work out an arrangement whereby the Anglo-Americans would support a coup d’état and peace on the basis of the German borders of 1939—surrendering all Hitler’s conquests. One of Canaris’s deputies, who was present at the meeting, said it was the most exciting experience in his secret service career.​

When the two Allied intelligence chiefs reported to their superiors, however, the reception was, if possible, even more venomously negative. For Canaris, the disappointment was crushing— and it soon became doubly depressing when his enemies in the Nazi hierarchy, who had long suspected the Abwehr of treason, began to strike at some of his most trusted subordinates.​

First, Oster and one of his cohorts were caught aiding escaping Jews. Next Moltke attended a garden party at which a number of indiscreet things were said about the regime. After one more futile trip to Ankara in the last weeks of 1943 to try to contact the American ambassador to Cairo, who was an old friend, Count von Moltke, too, was arrested. Investigators from several branches of the Nazi apparatus threatened Canaris and his grip on the Abwehr.​

While the German resistance struggled to win recognition from Roosevelt, his antipathy toward them and the German people was hardening. In May 1943 Churchill came to Washington for a conference, code-named “Trident.” Probably reacting to the attempts by Canaris to reach him through Donovan, Roosevelt told the prime minister he wanted to issue a declaration that he would refuse to negotiate with the Nazi regime, the German army high command, or any other group or individual in Germany. Churchill, once more demonstrating his dislike for taking such an intransigent public stand, managed to talk him out of it. . . .​

Shortly after Sicily fell, Italy’s King Victor Emmanuel III dismissed Benito Mussolini and appointed Field Marshal Pietro Badoglio premier. Badoglio immediately opened secret negotiations with American emissaries to get Italy out of the war. Everything seemed to be moving toward a stunning capitulation, which would have opened a huge gap in Hitler’s Festung Europa. But Roosevelt insisted that he would accept only unconditional surrender—and the removal of the king and the field marshal. Badoglio angrily withdrew from the negotiations and for over six weeks the talks were stalled while Eisenhower, Churchill, and others desperately tried to persuade the president to let them cut a deal that would have saved thousands of British and American lives.​

By the time Roosevelt relented and permitted the king and the marshal to remain in power, the Germans had poured 24 divisions into Italy, and the Italians had no country to surrender.​

Unbeknownst to the German conspirators, they were acquiring allies on the other side. As British and American planners contemplated the harsh realities of at- tacking the 1.5 million–man German army in France, doubts about the policy of unconditional surrender escalated. It soon became evident that virtually no one in either Allied government supported the policy except Roosevelt and those in his White House circle.​

On March 25, 1944, Gen. George Marshall and the Joint Chiefs of Staff submitted a memorandum to the president, urging “that a reassessment of the formula of unconditional surrender should be made…at a very early date.” The chiefs proposed a proclamation that would assure the Germans the Allies had no desire to “extinguish the German people or Germany as a nation.”​

On April 1, 1944, Roosevelt replied with an outburst that revealed as never before the extent of his disdain for Germany.​

Eisenhower was drawing on his experience in Italy, reasoning that if the Allies had proposed installing an Italian field marshal as premier, what was wrong with the same approach for Germany? In his cable to Hull, Stettinius, obviously quoting Eisenhower, said they should try to encourage the emergence of a German Badoglio. The cable also added the suggestion that after the beachhead was established in France, Eisenhower should call on the German commander in the West to surrender.​

From the White House, in response to this extraordinary message, came another bout of silence. . . .​

While this charade played out in Washington, some 500 leaders of the German resistance were being tortured by the Gestapo and tried before a so-called People’s Court, packed with Nazi party members who jeered and hooted at them. Field marshals and generals, colonels and former officials of the Foreign Office and the Abwehr were forced to wear clothes that were either ridiculously large or small, to make them look as much like buffoons as possible. Yet they managed to defend themselves with calm dignity, boldly testifying that they had tried to overthrow Hitler because Nazism filled them with moral and spiritual revulsion.​

Neither Churchill nor Roosevelt, nor any of their spokesmen, uttered a public word of sympathy or regret for these men. Instead, the Anglo-Americans showered Germany with mocking leaflets, sneering that the conspiracy was a sure sign of imminent collapse.​

....hey buddy--the Germans started crap a SECOND time BECAUSE there wasn't unconditional surrender the first time ..so if we didn't totally destroy them and get unconditional surrender, they would do the same crap again...

That's nonsense. Germans were embittered after WW I because of the draconian conditions of the Versailles Treaty and because of England's starvation blockade after Germany had stopped fighting.

I notice you didn't attempt to deal with a single fact presented in the OP, such as the fact that even Stalin recognized that FDR's unconditional surrender policy was deadly and idiotic, such as the fact that FDR passed up a chance to kill Hitler in 1943 because he refused to abandon unconditional surrender, and such as the fact that even Marshall and Eisenhower urged him to abandon unconditional surrender.

Was Stalin willing to surrender the territory the Soviets fought and died for?

Sure, he didn’t care what happened to Western Europe

 

[harmonica]

In his 600-plus-page book The New Dealers' War: Franklin D. Roosevelt and the War Within World War II, award-winning historian Thomas Fleming documents in sickening detail how FDR needlessly prolonged WW II in Europe by several months and cost hundreds of thousands of American and European lives. FDR did this by insisting on “unconditional surrender” and by refusing to even consider the substantive peace offers made by the German resistance leaders, even though those leaders included high-ranking German officers such as Admiral Canaris, the head of the Abwehr, Germany’s military intelligence agency.

Fleming provided an extensive summary of the evidence of FDR’s catastrophic handling of the war in Europe in a long 2009 article titled “FDR Writes a Policy in Blood” in MHQ: The Quarterly Journal of Military History. The article is now available on historynet.com. Below are extracts from the article:

FDR’s blind insistence on unconditional surrender prolonged World War II and cost hundreds of thousands of lives. . . .​

Inwardly, Churchill was dumbfounded by Roosevelt’s announcement [of the policy of unconditional surrender]—and dismayed by its probable impact on the conduct and outcome of the war.​

The prime minister’s British colleagues were even more alarmed. The chief of British intelligence, Maj. Gen. Sir Stewart Graham Menzies, considered unconditional surrender disastrous, not only to certain secret operations he already had in progress, but also because it would make the Germans fight “with the despairing ferocity of cornered rats”. . . .​

That consternation was shared by not a few Americans in the ranks of VIPs standing behind the two leaders. Gen. Dwight D. Eisenhower thought unconditional surrender was idiotic—it could do nothing but cost American lives. Later, he said: “If you were given two choices, one to mount a scaffold, the other to charge twenty bayonets, you might as well charge twenty bayonets.”​

Lt. Gen. Albert Wedemeyer, who was the architect of the strategy for D-Day, was even more appalled. He decried the idea from the moment he heard it. Just before the war, he had spent two years in Germany attending the Berlin War College and he knew firsthand the deep divisions between Hitler and the German General Staff. An unconditional surrender policy would, he accurately predicted, “weld all the Germans together”. . . .​

Since the war began, British intelligence chief Menzies and the Abwehr’s Admiral Canaris, two seeming opponents in the art and science of black warfare, had been in shadowy touch with each other through emissaries who shuttled from Berlin and London to the borders of the Nazi empire. In 1940 the Abwehr leaked Hitler’s planned assault on Holland, Belgium, and France. The British and French dismissed it as a ruse and discovered, too late, that its details were excruciatingly authentic. While the admiral went briskly about the business of intelligence, running spy networks throughout Europe, evidence accumulated suggesting the astonishing possibility that the head of the Abwehr was a secret enemy of the Nazi regime.​

Around Canaris was grouped a loose confederation of Hitler opponents in the German Foreign Office, the army, and the political world. They included Ulrich von Hassel, a career diplomat whose diaries are a main source of information about the resistance; Gen. Ludwig Beck, former chief of the general staff, who resigned in protest when Hitler threatened to invade Czechoslovakia in 1939 in violation of the Munich agreement; and Count Helmuth von Moltke, great-grandnephew of the general who had defeated France in 1871 and made Germany a world power. Another important figure was Karl-Friedrich Goerdeler, the former mayor of Leipzig, whom the Nazis dismissed from his post when he refused to remove a monument to the great German-Jewish composer, Felix Mendelssohn.​

Beck, the key figure, was still deeply admired by many generals on active duty. Through him, the conspirators hoped to persuade the army to stage a coup d’état to remove and, if necessary, kill Hitler. . . .​

Before Casablanca [where FDR announced the policy of unconditional surrender], Field Marshal Erwin von Witzleben, Germany’s supreme commander of the West, had told Canaris that he loathed Hitler and was ready to do everything in his power to overthrow him. After Casablanca, Witzleben said: “Now, no honorable man can lead the German people into such a situation.” Gen. Hans Guderian, the inventor of panzer warfare, declined to participate in the plot for the same reason, when Col. Hans Oster, second in command to Canaris, approached him. Col. Gen. Alfred Jodl, chief of the German armed forces operations staff, said at the Nuremberg War Crimes trials that unconditional surrender had been a crucial element in his refusal to join the conspiracy. Nevertheless, Canaris redoubled his efforts to reach out to the United States. . . .​

In June 1943, Helmuth von Moltke journeyed to Istanbul to talk to the U.S. naval attaché, George Earle, a Balkans expert who wanted to rescue Eastern Europe from Soviet domination. Earle persuaded William Donovan, head of the U.S. Office of Strategic Services, to come to Istanbul. There, the Germans offered to fly a member of the German general staff to London to arrange for a peaceful surrender of the western front—if unconditional surrender were modified. Donovan rushed to the White House, only to discover FDR had no desire to negotiate with “these East German Junkers.”​

Around the same time, Canaris developed a seemingly more fruitful contact in Berne, where Allen Dulles had become the Office of Strategic Services station chief. Here the messenger was Hans Bernd Gisevius, also an Abwehr agent, disguised as the German vice consul in Zurich. To bolster his bona fides, Canaris leaked reams of secret information about the German war effort to Dulles, who forwarded it to Washington with strong recommendations to cooperate with the resistance movement, which he code-named “Breakers.” From the White House came only silence. Nothing came of a similar initiative in Stockholm, also launched by the German Foreign Office in 1943. . . .​

With mounting desperation, Canaris himself took to the field in Spain. With the help of the Spanish Foreign Office, in August 1943 he arranged a meeting between himself, Menzies, and Donovan at Santander. It was surely one of the strangest and most fateful encounters of the war. Menzies was disobeying the orders of his putative commanders, the Foreign Office bureaucrats, and Donovan was acutely aware by now that Roosevelt was equally hostile to his presence. But Canaris charmed and convinced both men of the logic of his proposal to work out an arrangement whereby the Anglo-Americans would support a coup d’état and peace on the basis of the German borders of 1939—surrendering all Hitler’s conquests. One of Canaris’s deputies, who was present at the meeting, said it was the most exciting experience in his secret service career.​

When the two Allied intelligence chiefs reported to their superiors, however, the reception was, if possible, even more venomously negative. For Canaris, the disappointment was crushing— and it soon became doubly depressing when his enemies in the Nazi hierarchy, who had long suspected the Abwehr of treason, began to strike at some of his most trusted subordinates.​

First, Oster and one of his cohorts were caught aiding escaping Jews. Next Moltke attended a garden party at which a number of indiscreet things were said about the regime. After one more futile trip to Ankara in the last weeks of 1943 to try to contact the American ambassador to Cairo, who was an old friend, Count von Moltke, too, was arrested. Investigators from several branches of the Nazi apparatus threatened Canaris and his grip on the Abwehr.​

While the German resistance struggled to win recognition from Roosevelt, his antipathy toward them and the German people was hardening. In May 1943 Churchill came to Washington for a conference, code-named “Trident.” Probably reacting to the attempts by Canaris to reach him through Donovan, Roosevelt told the prime minister he wanted to issue a declaration that he would refuse to negotiate with the Nazi regime, the German army high command, or any other group or individual in Germany. Churchill, once more demonstrating his dislike for taking such an intransigent public stand, managed to talk him out of it. . . .​

Shortly after Sicily fell, Italy’s King Victor Emmanuel III dismissed Benito Mussolini and appointed Field Marshal Pietro Badoglio premier. Badoglio immediately opened secret negotiations with American emissaries to get Italy out of the war. Everything seemed to be moving toward a stunning capitulation, which would have opened a huge gap in Hitler’s Festung Europa. But Roosevelt insisted that he would accept only unconditional surrender—and the removal of the king and the field marshal. Badoglio angrily withdrew from the negotiations and for over six weeks the talks were stalled while Eisenhower, Churchill, and others desperately tried to persuade the president to let them cut a deal that would have saved thousands of British and American lives.​

By the time Roosevelt relented and permitted the king and the marshal to remain in power, the Germans had poured 24 divisions into Italy, and the Italians had no country to surrender.​

Unbeknownst to the German conspirators, they were acquiring allies on the other side. As British and American planners contemplated the harsh realities of at- tacking the 1.5 million–man German army in France, doubts about the policy of unconditional surrender escalated. It soon became evident that virtually no one in either Allied government supported the policy except Roosevelt and those in his White House circle.​

On March 25, 1944, Gen. George Marshall and the Joint Chiefs of Staff submitted a memorandum to the president, urging “that a reassessment of the formula of unconditional surrender should be made…at a very early date.” The chiefs proposed a proclamation that would assure the Germans the Allies had no desire to “extinguish the German people or Germany as a nation.”​

On April 1, 1944, Roosevelt replied with an outburst that revealed as never before the extent of his disdain for Germany.​

Eisenhower was drawing on his experience in Italy, reasoning that if the Allies had proposed installing an Italian field marshal as premier, what was wrong with the same approach for Germany? In his cable to Hull, Stettinius, obviously quoting Eisenhower, said they should try to encourage the emergence of a German Badoglio. The cable also added the suggestion that after the beachhead was established in France, Eisenhower should call on the German commander in the West to surrender.​

From the White House, in response to this extraordinary message, came another bout of silence. . . .​

While this charade played out in Washington, some 500 leaders of the German resistance were being tortured by the Gestapo and tried before a so-called People’s Court, packed with Nazi party members who jeered and hooted at them. Field marshals and generals, colonels and former officials of the Foreign Office and the Abwehr were forced to wear clothes that were either ridiculously large or small, to make them look as much like buffoons as possible. Yet they managed to defend themselves with calm dignity, boldly testifying that they had tried to overthrow Hitler because Nazism filled them with moral and spiritual revulsion.​

Neither Churchill nor Roosevelt, nor any of their spokesmen, uttered a public word of sympathy or regret for these men. Instead, the Anglo-Americans showered Germany with mocking leaflets, sneering that the conspiracy was a sure sign of imminent collapse.​

....hey buddy--the Germans started crap a SECOND time BECAUSE there wasn't unconditional surrender the first time ..so if we didn't totally destroy them and get unconditional surrender, they would do the same crap again...

That's nonsense. Germans were embittered after WW I because of the draconian conditions of the Versailles Treaty and because of England's starvation blockade after Germany had stopped fighting.

I notice you didn't attempt to deal with a single fact presented in the OP, such as the fact that even Stalin recognized that FDR's unconditional surrender policy was deadly and idiotic, such as the fact that FDR passed up a chance to kill Hitler in 1943 because he refused to abandon unconditional surrender, and such as the fact that even Marshall and Eisenhower urged him to abandon unconditional surrender.

...Stalin--hahahahhahahahahahh..Stalin talking about ''deadly'' policies --hahahahah
.....most of yours and everyone's ''alternate'' histories are big IFs=bullshit..if this if that if hitler had 3 hands/etc.....if hitler had a UFO ship/etc

....let me say it again--the Arab-Israeli wars/crap went on and on and on--because there was no unconditional surrender and no country got devestated ....the Germans and Japanese only realized war was terrible when they got the ciites destroyed....

hitler and the nazis committed genocide and YOU want conditions????!!!!!?????

 

[harmonica]

In his 600-plus-page book The New Dealers' War: Franklin D. Roosevelt and the War Within World War II, award-winning historian Thomas Fleming documents in sickening detail how FDR needlessly prolonged WW II in Europe by several months and cost hundreds of thousands of American and European lives. FDR did this by insisting on “unconditional surrender” and by refusing to even consider the substantive peace offers made by the German resistance leaders, even though those leaders included high-ranking German officers such as Admiral Canaris, the head of the Abwehr, Germany’s military intelligence agency.

Fleming provided an extensive summary of the evidence of FDR’s catastrophic handling of the war in Europe in a long 2009 article titled “FDR Writes a Policy in Blood” in MHQ: The Quarterly Journal of Military History. The article is now available on historynet.com. Below are extracts from the article:

FDR’s blind insistence on unconditional surrender prolonged World War II and cost hundreds of thousands of lives. . . .​

Inwardly, Churchill was dumbfounded by Roosevelt’s announcement [of the policy of unconditional surrender]—and dismayed by its probable impact on the conduct and outcome of the war.​

The prime minister’s British colleagues were even more alarmed. The chief of British intelligence, Maj. Gen. Sir Stewart Graham Menzies, considered unconditional surrender disastrous, not only to certain secret operations he already had in progress, but also because it would make the Germans fight “with the despairing ferocity of cornered rats”. . . .​

That consternation was shared by not a few Americans in the ranks of VIPs standing behind the two leaders. Gen. Dwight D. Eisenhower thought unconditional surrender was idiotic—it could do nothing but cost American lives. Later, he said: “If you were given two choices, one to mount a scaffold, the other to charge twenty bayonets, you might as well charge twenty bayonets.”​

Lt. Gen. Albert Wedemeyer, who was the architect of the strategy for D-Day, was even more appalled. He decried the idea from the moment he heard it. Just before the war, he had spent two years in Germany attending the Berlin War College and he knew firsthand the deep divisions between Hitler and the German General Staff. An unconditional surrender policy would, he accurately predicted, “weld all the Germans together”. . . .​

Since the war began, British intelligence chief Menzies and the Abwehr’s Admiral Canaris, two seeming opponents in the art and science of black warfare, had been in shadowy touch with each other through emissaries who shuttled from Berlin and London to the borders of the Nazi empire. In 1940 the Abwehr leaked Hitler’s planned assault on Holland, Belgium, and France. The British and French dismissed it as a ruse and discovered, too late, that its details were excruciatingly authentic. While the admiral went briskly about the business of intelligence, running spy networks throughout Europe, evidence accumulated suggesting the astonishing possibility that the head of the Abwehr was a secret enemy of the Nazi regime.​

Around Canaris was grouped a loose confederation of Hitler opponents in the German Foreign Office, the army, and the political world. They included Ulrich von Hassel, a career diplomat whose diaries are a main source of information about the resistance; Gen. Ludwig Beck, former chief of the general staff, who resigned in protest when Hitler threatened to invade Czechoslovakia in 1939 in violation of the Munich agreement; and Count Helmuth von Moltke, great-grandnephew of the general who had defeated France in 1871 and made Germany a world power. Another important figure was Karl-Friedrich Goerdeler, the former mayor of Leipzig, whom the Nazis dismissed from his post when he refused to remove a monument to the great German-Jewish composer, Felix Mendelssohn.​

Beck, the key figure, was still deeply admired by many generals on active duty. Through him, the conspirators hoped to persuade the army to stage a coup d’état to remove and, if necessary, kill Hitler. . . .​

Before Casablanca [where FDR announced the policy of unconditional surrender], Field Marshal Erwin von Witzleben, Germany’s supreme commander of the West, had told Canaris that he loathed Hitler and was ready to do everything in his power to overthrow him. After Casablanca, Witzleben said: “Now, no honorable man can lead the German people into such a situation.” Gen. Hans Guderian, the inventor of panzer warfare, declined to participate in the plot for the same reason, when Col. Hans Oster, second in command to Canaris, approached him. Col. Gen. Alfred Jodl, chief of the German armed forces operations staff, said at the Nuremberg War Crimes trials that unconditional surrender had been a crucial element in his refusal to join the conspiracy. Nevertheless, Canaris redoubled his efforts to reach out to the United States. . . .​

In June 1943, Helmuth von Moltke journeyed to Istanbul to talk to the U.S. naval attaché, George Earle, a Balkans expert who wanted to rescue Eastern Europe from Soviet domination. Earle persuaded William Donovan, head of the U.S. Office of Strategic Services, to come to Istanbul. There, the Germans offered to fly a member of the German general staff to London to arrange for a peaceful surrender of the western front—if unconditional surrender were modified. Donovan rushed to the White House, only to discover FDR had no desire to negotiate with “these East German Junkers.”​

Around the same time, Canaris developed a seemingly more fruitful contact in Berne, where Allen Dulles had become the Office of Strategic Services station chief. Here the messenger was Hans Bernd Gisevius, also an Abwehr agent, disguised as the German vice consul in Zurich. To bolster his bona fides, Canaris leaked reams of secret information about the German war effort to Dulles, who forwarded it to Washington with strong recommendations to cooperate with the resistance movement, which he code-named “Breakers.” From the White House came only silence. Nothing came of a similar initiative in Stockholm, also launched by the German Foreign Office in 1943. . . .​

With mounting desperation, Canaris himself took to the field in Spain. With the help of the Spanish Foreign Office, in August 1943 he arranged a meeting between himself, Menzies, and Donovan at Santander. It was surely one of the strangest and most fateful encounters of the war. Menzies was disobeying the orders of his putative commanders, the Foreign Office bureaucrats, and Donovan was acutely aware by now that Roosevelt was equally hostile to his presence. But Canaris charmed and convinced both men of the logic of his proposal to work out an arrangement whereby the Anglo-Americans would support a coup d’état and peace on the basis of the German borders of 1939—surrendering all Hitler’s conquests. One of Canaris’s deputies, who was present at the meeting, said it was the most exciting experience in his secret service career.​

When the two Allied intelligence chiefs reported to their superiors, however, the reception was, if possible, even more venomously negative. For Canaris, the disappointment was crushing— and it soon became doubly depressing when his enemies in the Nazi hierarchy, who had long suspected the Abwehr of treason, began to strike at some of his most trusted subordinates.​

First, Oster and one of his cohorts were caught aiding escaping Jews. Next Moltke attended a garden party at which a number of indiscreet things were said about the regime. After one more futile trip to Ankara in the last weeks of 1943 to try to contact the American ambassador to Cairo, who was an old friend, Count von Moltke, too, was arrested. Investigators from several branches of the Nazi apparatus threatened Canaris and his grip on the Abwehr.​

While the German resistance struggled to win recognition from Roosevelt, his antipathy toward them and the German people was hardening. In May 1943 Churchill came to Washington for a conference, code-named “Trident.” Probably reacting to the attempts by Canaris to reach him through Donovan, Roosevelt told the prime minister he wanted to issue a declaration that he would refuse to negotiate with the Nazi regime, the German army high command, or any other group or individual in Germany. Churchill, once more demonstrating his dislike for taking such an intransigent public stand, managed to talk him out of it. . . .​

Shortly after Sicily fell, Italy’s King Victor Emmanuel III dismissed Benito Mussolini and appointed Field Marshal Pietro Badoglio premier. Badoglio immediately opened secret negotiations with American emissaries to get Italy out of the war. Everything seemed to be moving toward a stunning capitulation, which would have opened a huge gap in Hitler’s Festung Europa. But Roosevelt insisted that he would accept only unconditional surrender—and the removal of the king and the field marshal. Badoglio angrily withdrew from the negotiations and for over six weeks the talks were stalled while Eisenhower, Churchill, and others desperately tried to persuade the president to let them cut a deal that would have saved thousands of British and American lives.​

By the time Roosevelt relented and permitted the king and the marshal to remain in power, the Germans had poured 24 divisions into Italy, and the Italians had no country to surrender.​

Unbeknownst to the German conspirators, they were acquiring allies on the other side. As British and American planners contemplated the harsh realities of at- tacking the 1.5 million–man German army in France, doubts about the policy of unconditional surrender escalated. It soon became evident that virtually no one in either Allied government supported the policy except Roosevelt and those in his White House circle.​

On March 25, 1944, Gen. George Marshall and the Joint Chiefs of Staff submitted a memorandum to the president, urging “that a reassessment of the formula of unconditional surrender should be made…at a very early date.” The chiefs proposed a proclamation that would assure the Germans the Allies had no desire to “extinguish the German people or Germany as a nation.”​

On April 1, 1944, Roosevelt replied with an outburst that revealed as never before the extent of his disdain for Germany.​

Eisenhower was drawing on his experience in Italy, reasoning that if the Allies had proposed installing an Italian field marshal as premier, what was wrong with the same approach for Germany? In his cable to Hull, Stettinius, obviously quoting Eisenhower, said they should try to encourage the emergence of a German Badoglio. The cable also added the suggestion that after the beachhead was established in France, Eisenhower should call on the German commander in the West to surrender.​

From the White House, in response to this extraordinary message, came another bout of silence. . . .​

While this charade played out in Washington, some 500 leaders of the German resistance were being tortured by the Gestapo and tried before a so-called People’s Court, packed with Nazi party members who jeered and hooted at them. Field marshals and generals, colonels and former officials of the Foreign Office and the Abwehr were forced to wear clothes that were either ridiculously large or small, to make them look as much like buffoons as possible. Yet they managed to defend themselves with calm dignity, boldly testifying that they had tried to overthrow Hitler because Nazism filled them with moral and spiritual revulsion.​

Neither Churchill nor Roosevelt, nor any of their spokesmen, uttered a public word of sympathy or regret for these men. Instead, the Anglo-Americans showered Germany with mocking leaflets, sneering that the conspiracy was a sure sign of imminent collapse.​

....hey buddy--the Germans started crap a SECOND time BECAUSE there wasn't unconditional surrender the first time ..so if we didn't totally destroy them and get unconditional surrender, they would do the same crap again...

That's nonsense. Germans were embittered after WW I because of the draconian conditions of the Versailles Treaty and because of England's starvation blockade after Germany had stopped fighting.

I notice you didn't attempt to deal with a single fact presented in the OP, such as the fact that even Stalin recognized that FDR's unconditional surrender policy was deadly and idiotic, such as the fact that FDR passed up a chance to kill Hitler in 1943 because he refused to abandon unconditional surrender, and such as the fact that even Marshall and Eisenhower urged him to abandon unconditional surrender.

..you obviously do not know your history:
....hey---hitler is NOT surrendering!!!!!! he's not giving up--not giving in and he has the power to keep the power --this means giving the Germans less than unconditional surrender to end the war is not a SURE thing .....per my previous post = if IF IF IF IF --you people have a lot of ifs--nothing for sure

 

[rightwinger]

In his 600-plus-page book The New Dealers' War: Franklin D. Roosevelt and the War Within World War II, award-winning historian Thomas Fleming documents in sickening detail how FDR needlessly prolonged WW II in Europe by several months and cost hundreds of thousands of American and European lives. FDR did this by insisting on “unconditional surrender” and by refusing to even consider the substantive peace offers made by the German resistance leaders, even though those leaders included high-ranking German officers such as Admiral Canaris, the head of the Abwehr, Germany’s military intelligence agency.

Fleming provided an extensive summary of the evidence of FDR’s catastrophic handling of the war in Europe in a long 2009 article titled “FDR Writes a Policy in Blood” in MHQ: The Quarterly Journal of Military History. The article is now available on historynet.com. Below are extracts from the article:

FDR’s blind insistence on unconditional surrender prolonged World War II and cost hundreds of thousands of lives. . . .​

Inwardly, Churchill was dumbfounded by Roosevelt’s announcement [of the policy of unconditional surrender]—and dismayed by its probable impact on the conduct and outcome of the war.​

The prime minister’s British colleagues were even more alarmed. The chief of British intelligence, Maj. Gen. Sir Stewart Graham Menzies, considered unconditional surrender disastrous, not only to certain secret operations he already had in progress, but also because it would make the Germans fight “with the despairing ferocity of cornered rats”. . . .​

That consternation was shared by not a few Americans in the ranks of VIPs standing behind the two leaders. Gen. Dwight D. Eisenhower thought unconditional surrender was idiotic—it could do nothing but cost American lives. Later, he said: “If you were given two choices, one to mount a scaffold, the other to charge twenty bayonets, you might as well charge twenty bayonets.”​

Lt. Gen. Albert Wedemeyer, who was the architect of the strategy for D-Day, was even more appalled. He decried the idea from the moment he heard it. Just before the war, he had spent two years in Germany attending the Berlin War College and he knew firsthand the deep divisions between Hitler and the German General Staff. An unconditional surrender policy would, he accurately predicted, “weld all the Germans together”. . . .​

Since the war began, British intelligence chief Menzies and the Abwehr’s Admiral Canaris, two seeming opponents in the art and science of black warfare, had been in shadowy touch with each other through emissaries who shuttled from Berlin and London to the borders of the Nazi empire. In 1940 the Abwehr leaked Hitler’s planned assault on Holland, Belgium, and France. The British and French dismissed it as a ruse and discovered, too late, that its details were excruciatingly authentic. While the admiral went briskly about the business of intelligence, running spy networks throughout Europe, evidence accumulated suggesting the astonishing possibility that the head of the Abwehr was a secret enemy of the Nazi regime.​

Around Canaris was grouped a loose confederation of Hitler opponents in the German Foreign Office, the army, and the political world. They included Ulrich von Hassel, a career diplomat whose diaries are a main source of information about the resistance; Gen. Ludwig Beck, former chief of the general staff, who resigned in protest when Hitler threatened to invade Czechoslovakia in 1939 in violation of the Munich agreement; and Count Helmuth von Moltke, great-grandnephew of the general who had defeated France in 1871 and made Germany a world power. Another important figure was Karl-Friedrich Goerdeler, the former mayor of Leipzig, whom the Nazis dismissed from his post when he refused to remove a monument to the great German-Jewish composer, Felix Mendelssohn.​

Beck, the key figure, was still deeply admired by many generals on active duty. Through him, the conspirators hoped to persuade the army to stage a coup d’état to remove and, if necessary, kill Hitler. . . .​

Before Casablanca [where FDR announced the policy of unconditional surrender], Field Marshal Erwin von Witzleben, Germany’s supreme commander of the West, had told Canaris that he loathed Hitler and was ready to do everything in his power to overthrow him. After Casablanca, Witzleben said: “Now, no honorable man can lead the German people into such a situation.” Gen. Hans Guderian, the inventor of panzer warfare, declined to participate in the plot for the same reason, when Col. Hans Oster, second in command to Canaris, approached him. Col. Gen. Alfred Jodl, chief of the German armed forces operations staff, said at the Nuremberg War Crimes trials that unconditional surrender had been a crucial element in his refusal to join the conspiracy. Nevertheless, Canaris redoubled his efforts to reach out to the United States. . . .​

In June 1943, Helmuth von Moltke journeyed to Istanbul to talk to the U.S. naval attaché, George Earle, a Balkans expert who wanted to rescue Eastern Europe from Soviet domination. Earle persuaded William Donovan, head of the U.S. Office of Strategic Services, to come to Istanbul. There, the Germans offered to fly a member of the German general staff to London to arrange for a peaceful surrender of the western front—if unconditional surrender were modified. Donovan rushed to the White House, only to discover FDR had no desire to negotiate with “these East German Junkers.”​

Around the same time, Canaris developed a seemingly more fruitful contact in Berne, where Allen Dulles had become the Office of Strategic Services station chief. Here the messenger was Hans Bernd Gisevius, also an Abwehr agent, disguised as the German vice consul in Zurich. To bolster his bona fides, Canaris leaked reams of secret information about the German war effort to Dulles, who forwarded it to Washington with strong recommendations to cooperate with the resistance movement, which he code-named “Breakers.” From the White House came only silence. Nothing came of a similar initiative in Stockholm, also launched by the German Foreign Office in 1943. . . .​

With mounting desperation, Canaris himself took to the field in Spain. With the help of the Spanish Foreign Office, in August 1943 he arranged a meeting between himself, Menzies, and Donovan at Santander. It was surely one of the strangest and most fateful encounters of the war. Menzies was disobeying the orders of his putative commanders, the Foreign Office bureaucrats, and Donovan was acutely aware by now that Roosevelt was equally hostile to his presence. But Canaris charmed and convinced both men of the logic of his proposal to work out an arrangement whereby the Anglo-Americans would support a coup d’état and peace on the basis of the German borders of 1939—surrendering all Hitler’s conquests. One of Canaris’s deputies, who was present at the meeting, said it was the most exciting experience in his secret service career.​

When the two Allied intelligence chiefs reported to their superiors, however, the reception was, if possible, even more venomously negative. For Canaris, the disappointment was crushing— and it soon became doubly depressing when his enemies in the Nazi hierarchy, who had long suspected the Abwehr of treason, began to strike at some of his most trusted subordinates.​

First, Oster and one of his cohorts were caught aiding escaping Jews. Next Moltke attended a garden party at which a number of indiscreet things were said about the regime. After one more futile trip to Ankara in the last weeks of 1943 to try to contact the American ambassador to Cairo, who was an old friend, Count von Moltke, too, was arrested. Investigators from several branches of the Nazi apparatus threatened Canaris and his grip on the Abwehr.​

While the German resistance struggled to win recognition from Roosevelt, his antipathy toward them and the German people was hardening. In May 1943 Churchill came to Washington for a conference, code-named “Trident.” Probably reacting to the attempts by Canaris to reach him through Donovan, Roosevelt told the prime minister he wanted to issue a declaration that he would refuse to negotiate with the Nazi regime, the German army high command, or any other group or individual in Germany. Churchill, once more demonstrating his dislike for taking such an intransigent public stand, managed to talk him out of it. . . .​

Shortly after Sicily fell, Italy’s King Victor Emmanuel III dismissed Benito Mussolini and appointed Field Marshal Pietro Badoglio premier. Badoglio immediately opened secret negotiations with American emissaries to get Italy out of the war. Everything seemed to be moving toward a stunning capitulation, which would have opened a huge gap in Hitler’s Festung Europa. But Roosevelt insisted that he would accept only unconditional surrender—and the removal of the king and the field marshal. Badoglio angrily withdrew from the negotiations and for over six weeks the talks were stalled while Eisenhower, Churchill, and others desperately tried to persuade the president to let them cut a deal that would have saved thousands of British and American lives.​

By the time Roosevelt relented and permitted the king and the marshal to remain in power, the Germans had poured 24 divisions into Italy, and the Italians had no country to surrender.​

Unbeknownst to the German conspirators, they were acquiring allies on the other side. As British and American planners contemplated the harsh realities of at- tacking the 1.5 million–man German army in France, doubts about the policy of unconditional surrender escalated. It soon became evident that virtually no one in either Allied government supported the policy except Roosevelt and those in his White House circle.​

On March 25, 1944, Gen. George Marshall and the Joint Chiefs of Staff submitted a memorandum to the president, urging “that a reassessment of the formula of unconditional surrender should be made…at a very early date.” The chiefs proposed a proclamation that would assure the Germans the Allies had no desire to “extinguish the German people or Germany as a nation.”​

On April 1, 1944, Roosevelt replied with an outburst that revealed as never before the extent of his disdain for Germany.​

Eisenhower was drawing on his experience in Italy, reasoning that if the Allies had proposed installing an Italian field marshal as premier, what was wrong with the same approach for Germany? In his cable to Hull, Stettinius, obviously quoting Eisenhower, said they should try to encourage the emergence of a German Badoglio. The cable also added the suggestion that after the beachhead was established in France, Eisenhower should call on the German commander in the West to surrender.​

From the White House, in response to this extraordinary message, came another bout of silence. . . .​

While this charade played out in Washington, some 500 leaders of the German resistance were being tortured by the Gestapo and tried before a so-called People’s Court, packed with Nazi party members who jeered and hooted at them. Field marshals and generals, colonels and former officials of the Foreign Office and the Abwehr were forced to wear clothes that were either ridiculously large or small, to make them look as much like buffoons as possible. Yet they managed to defend themselves with calm dignity, boldly testifying that they had tried to overthrow Hitler because Nazism filled them with moral and spiritual revulsion.​

Neither Churchill nor Roosevelt, nor any of their spokesmen, uttered a public word of sympathy or regret for these men. Instead, the Anglo-Americans showered Germany with mocking leaflets, sneering that the conspiracy was a sure sign of imminent collapse.​

....hey buddy--the Germans started crap a SECOND time BECAUSE there wasn't unconditional surrender the first time ..so if we didn't totally destroy them and get unconditional surrender, they would do the same crap again...

That's nonsense. Germans were embittered after WW I because of the draconian conditions of the Versailles Treaty and because of England's starvation blockade after Germany had stopped fighting.

I notice you didn't attempt to deal with a single fact presented in the OP, such as the fact that even Stalin recognized that FDR's unconditional surrender policy was deadly and idiotic, such as the fact that FDR passed up a chance to kill Hitler in 1943 because he refused to abandon unconditional surrender, and such as the fact that even Marshall and Eisenhower urged him to abandon unconditional surrender.

..you obviously do not know your history:
....hey---hitler is NOT surrendering!!!!!! he's not giving up--not giving in and he has the power to keep the power --this means giving the Germans less than unconditional surrender to end the war is not a SURE thing .....per my previous post = if IF IF IF IF --you people have a lot of ifs--nothing for sure

The hypothetical history says that Canaris would have led a coup against Hitler and taken control of the government and arranged a surrender.

Know what would have happened to Canaris?

 

[Deplorable Yankee]

Yeah the soviets would of never went for anything less than unconditional ......on the other hand if the west accepted then insisted on it Patton may of got his wish of rolling across eastern europe and pushing the Russian back.

 

[harmonica]

In his 600-plus-page book The New Dealers' War: Franklin D. Roosevelt and the War Within World War II, award-winning historian Thomas Fleming documents in sickening detail how FDR needlessly prolonged WW II in Europe by several months and cost hundreds of thousands of American and European lives. FDR did this by insisting on “unconditional surrender” and by refusing to even consider the substantive peace offers made by the German resistance leaders, even though those leaders included high-ranking German officers such as Admiral Canaris, the head of the Abwehr, Germany’s military intelligence agency.

Fleming provided an extensive summary of the evidence of FDR’s catastrophic handling of the war in Europe in a long 2009 article titled “FDR Writes a Policy in Blood” in MHQ: The Quarterly Journal of Military History. The article is now available on historynet.com. Below are extracts from the article:

FDR’s blind insistence on unconditional surrender prolonged World War II and cost hundreds of thousands of lives. . . .​

Inwardly, Churchill was dumbfounded by Roosevelt’s announcement [of the policy of unconditional surrender]—and dismayed by its probable impact on the conduct and outcome of the war.​

The prime minister’s British colleagues were even more alarmed. The chief of British intelligence, Maj. Gen. Sir Stewart Graham Menzies, considered unconditional surrender disastrous, not only to certain secret operations he already had in progress, but also because it would make the Germans fight “with the despairing ferocity of cornered rats”. . . .​

That consternation was shared by not a few Americans in the ranks of VIPs standing behind the two leaders. Gen. Dwight D. Eisenhower thought unconditional surrender was idiotic—it could do nothing but cost American lives. Later, he said: “If you were given two choices, one to mount a scaffold, the other to charge twenty bayonets, you might as well charge twenty bayonets.”​

Lt. Gen. Albert Wedemeyer, who was the architect of the strategy for D-Day, was even more appalled. He decried the idea from the moment he heard it. Just before the war, he had spent two years in Germany attending the Berlin War College and he knew firsthand the deep divisions between Hitler and the German General Staff. An unconditional surrender policy would, he accurately predicted, “weld all the Germans together”. . . .​

Since the war began, British intelligence chief Menzies and the Abwehr’s Admiral Canaris, two seeming opponents in the art and science of black warfare, had been in shadowy touch with each other through emissaries who shuttled from Berlin and London to the borders of the Nazi empire. In 1940 the Abwehr leaked Hitler’s planned assault on Holland, Belgium, and France. The British and French dismissed it as a ruse and discovered, too late, that its details were excruciatingly authentic. While the admiral went briskly about the business of intelligence, running spy networks throughout Europe, evidence accumulated suggesting the astonishing possibility that the head of the Abwehr was a secret enemy of the Nazi regime.​

Around Canaris was grouped a loose confederation of Hitler opponents in the German Foreign Office, the army, and the political world. They included Ulrich von Hassel, a career diplomat whose diaries are a main source of information about the resistance; Gen. Ludwig Beck, former chief of the general staff, who resigned in protest when Hitler threatened to invade Czechoslovakia in 1939 in violation of the Munich agreement; and Count Helmuth von Moltke, great-grandnephew of the general who had defeated France in 1871 and made Germany a world power. Another important figure was Karl-Friedrich Goerdeler, the former mayor of Leipzig, whom the Nazis dismissed from his post when he refused to remove a monument to the great German-Jewish composer, Felix Mendelssohn.​

Beck, the key figure, was still deeply admired by many generals on active duty. Through him, the conspirators hoped to persuade the army to stage a coup d’état to remove and, if necessary, kill Hitler. . . .​

Before Casablanca [where FDR announced the policy of unconditional surrender], Field Marshal Erwin von Witzleben, Germany’s supreme commander of the West, had told Canaris that he loathed Hitler and was ready to do everything in his power to overthrow him. After Casablanca, Witzleben said: “Now, no honorable man can lead the German people into such a situation.” Gen. Hans Guderian, the inventor of panzer warfare, declined to participate in the plot for the same reason, when Col. Hans Oster, second in command to Canaris, approached him. Col. Gen. Alfred Jodl, chief of the German armed forces operations staff, said at the Nuremberg War Crimes trials that unconditional surrender had been a crucial element in his refusal to join the conspiracy. Nevertheless, Canaris redoubled his efforts to reach out to the United States. . . .​

In June 1943, Helmuth von Moltke journeyed to Istanbul to talk to the U.S. naval attaché, George Earle, a Balkans expert who wanted to rescue Eastern Europe from Soviet domination. Earle persuaded William Donovan, head of the U.S. Office of Strategic Services, to come to Istanbul. There, the Germans offered to fly a member of the German general staff to London to arrange for a peaceful surrender of the western front—if unconditional surrender were modified. Donovan rushed to the White House, only to discover FDR had no desire to negotiate with “these East German Junkers.”​

Around the same time, Canaris developed a seemingly more fruitful contact in Berne, where Allen Dulles had become the Office of Strategic Services station chief. Here the messenger was Hans Bernd Gisevius, also an Abwehr agent, disguised as the German vice consul in Zurich. To bolster his bona fides, Canaris leaked reams of secret information about the German war effort to Dulles, who forwarded it to Washington with strong recommendations to cooperate with the resistance movement, which he code-named “Breakers.” From the White House came only silence. Nothing came of a similar initiative in Stockholm, also launched by the German Foreign Office in 1943. . . .​

With mounting desperation, Canaris himself took to the field in Spain. With the help of the Spanish Foreign Office, in August 1943 he arranged a meeting between himself, Menzies, and Donovan at Santander. It was surely one of the strangest and most fateful encounters of the war. Menzies was disobeying the orders of his putative commanders, the Foreign Office bureaucrats, and Donovan was acutely aware by now that Roosevelt was equally hostile to his presence. But Canaris charmed and convinced both men of the logic of his proposal to work out an arrangement whereby the Anglo-Americans would support a coup d’état and peace on the basis of the German borders of 1939—surrendering all Hitler’s conquests. One of Canaris’s deputies, who was present at the meeting, said it was the most exciting experience in his secret service career.​

When the two Allied intelligence chiefs reported to their superiors, however, the reception was, if possible, even more venomously negative. For Canaris, the disappointment was crushing— and it soon became doubly depressing when his enemies in the Nazi hierarchy, who had long suspected the Abwehr of treason, began to strike at some of his most trusted subordinates.​

First, Oster and one of his cohorts were caught aiding escaping Jews. Next Moltke attended a garden party at which a number of indiscreet things were said about the regime. After one more futile trip to Ankara in the last weeks of 1943 to try to contact the American ambassador to Cairo, who was an old friend, Count von Moltke, too, was arrested. Investigators from several branches of the Nazi apparatus threatened Canaris and his grip on the Abwehr.​

While the German resistance struggled to win recognition from Roosevelt, his antipathy toward them and the German people was hardening. In May 1943 Churchill came to Washington for a conference, code-named “Trident.” Probably reacting to the attempts by Canaris to reach him through Donovan, Roosevelt told the prime minister he wanted to issue a declaration that he would refuse to negotiate with the Nazi regime, the German army high command, or any other group or individual in Germany. Churchill, once more demonstrating his dislike for taking such an intransigent public stand, managed to talk him out of it. . . .​

Shortly after Sicily fell, Italy’s King Victor Emmanuel III dismissed Benito Mussolini and appointed Field Marshal Pietro Badoglio premier. Badoglio immediately opened secret negotiations with American emissaries to get Italy out of the war. Everything seemed to be moving toward a stunning capitulation, which would have opened a huge gap in Hitler’s Festung Europa. But Roosevelt insisted that he would accept only unconditional surrender—and the removal of the king and the field marshal. Badoglio angrily withdrew from the negotiations and for over six weeks the talks were stalled while Eisenhower, Churchill, and others desperately tried to persuade the president to let them cut a deal that would have saved thousands of British and American lives.​

By the time Roosevelt relented and permitted the king and the marshal to remain in power, the Germans had poured 24 divisions into Italy, and the Italians had no country to surrender.​

Unbeknownst to the German conspirators, they were acquiring allies on the other side. As British and American planners contemplated the harsh realities of at- tacking the 1.5 million–man German army in France, doubts about the policy of unconditional surrender escalated. It soon became evident that virtually no one in either Allied government supported the policy except Roosevelt and those in his White House circle.​

On March 25, 1944, Gen. George Marshall and the Joint Chiefs of Staff submitted a memorandum to the president, urging “that a reassessment of the formula of unconditional surrender should be made…at a very early date.” The chiefs proposed a proclamation that would assure the Germans the Allies had no desire to “extinguish the German people or Germany as a nation.”​

On April 1, 1944, Roosevelt replied with an outburst that revealed as never before the extent of his disdain for Germany.​

Eisenhower was drawing on his experience in Italy, reasoning that if the Allies had proposed installing an Italian field marshal as premier, what was wrong with the same approach for Germany? In his cable to Hull, Stettinius, obviously quoting Eisenhower, said they should try to encourage the emergence of a German Badoglio. The cable also added the suggestion that after the beachhead was established in France, Eisenhower should call on the German commander in the West to surrender.​

From the White House, in response to this extraordinary message, came another bout of silence. . . .​

While this charade played out in Washington, some 500 leaders of the German resistance were being tortured by the Gestapo and tried before a so-called People’s Court, packed with Nazi party members who jeered and hooted at them. Field marshals and generals, colonels and former officials of the Foreign Office and the Abwehr were forced to wear clothes that were either ridiculously large or small, to make them look as much like buffoons as possible. Yet they managed to defend themselves with calm dignity, boldly testifying that they had tried to overthrow Hitler because Nazism filled them with moral and spiritual revulsion.​

Neither Churchill nor Roosevelt, nor any of their spokesmen, uttered a public word of sympathy or regret for these men. Instead, the Anglo-Americans showered Germany with mocking leaflets, sneering that the conspiracy was a sure sign of imminent collapse.​

....hey buddy--the Germans started crap a SECOND time BECAUSE there wasn't unconditional surrender the first time ..so if we didn't totally destroy them and get unconditional surrender, they would do the same crap again...

That's nonsense. Germans were embittered after WW I because of the draconian conditions of the Versailles Treaty and because of England's starvation blockade after Germany had stopped fighting.

I notice you didn't attempt to deal with a single fact presented in the OP, such as the fact that even Stalin recognized that FDR's unconditional surrender policy was deadly and idiotic, such as the fact that FDR passed up a chance to kill Hitler in 1943 because he refused to abandon unconditional surrender, and such as the fact that even Marshall and Eisenhower urged him to abandon unconditional surrender.

..you obviously do not know your history:
....hey---hitler is NOT surrendering!!!!!! he's not giving up--not giving in and he has the power to keep the power --this means giving the Germans less than unconditional surrender to end the war is not a SURE thing .....per my previous post = if IF IF IF IF --you people have a lot of ifs--nothing for sure

The hypothetical history says that Canaris would have led a coup against Hitler and taken control of the government and arranged a surrender.

Know what would have happened to Canaris?

maybe---ahhhh--hanged?

 

[22lcidw]

There is another alternate history. The new world order globalists needed to reorganize the world. World War 1 started it. World War 2 pushed it closer. And over the last 75 years or so we have been careening closer to global governance. The U.S. is used for its massive resources to give to others and as the policeman of the world in this scenario. We must be weakened and are to be incorporated into the global entity. Germany was picked as the sucker to take the hit. Hitler even believed that the globalists were on his side and screwed him over. Russia was an early experiment on communism as the globalists pushed it on them. We are all pawns in these games. Do you lose your humanity to attain power?

 

[harmonica]

Yeah the soviets would of never went for anything less than unconditional ......on the other hand if the west accepted then insisted on it Patton may of got his wish of rolling across eastern europe and pushing the Russian back.

Patton wouldn't be rolling the Russians back too far--they had better/bigger tanks/etc ..the OstFront made the Western Front look very tiny
..yes, you never would've be able to get all the Aliies to agree to certain-different-etc terms

 

[rightwinger]

Yeah the soviets would of never went for anything less than unconditional ......on the other hand if the west accepted then insisted on it Patton may of got his wish of rolling across eastern europe and pushing the Russian back.

Patton would have suffered a hundred thousand dead
They weren’t afraid of the German tanks, they would not fear Patton’s tiny Sherman’s

 

[mikegriffith1]

Really? With Germany occupying Western Europe, do you think he could have politely asked them to leave? Give me a date of when you think the Nazis would have just packed up and gone home

After losing tens of million of people, you think Stalin was going to just go home and surrender his captured territory?

Huh? We're talking about early 1943, when the Germans still held Eastern Europe. If FDR had assured the German resistance that he would allow them to set up a non-Nazi government in exchange for killing Hitler and overthrowing the Nazis, and if the resistance had killed Hitler and seized the reigns of government later that year, the vast majority of Eastern Europe would have been spared Soviet tyranny and millions of lives would have been saved, including the lives of several million Jews.

By mid-1942, most German Wermacht generals were fed up with Hitler's catastrophically bad micromanagement of the war. If the resistance had killed Hitler, deposed the Nazis, and set up a non-Nazi and U.S.-recognized government, Stalin would not have dared to continue the war on the Eastern Front but would have felt compelled to stand down.

 

[Syriusly]

German Generals were no more likely to actually revolt against HItler than the Republican Senate is likely to vote to impeach Trump.

I don't approve of everything that FDR did- he certainly made many mistakes- but I think it is way too easy to be a Monday night quarterback now- and say how things would have turned out if FDR had just done this or just done that.

We do know what did happen. The United States emerged at the end of WW2 as the most powerful country in the world- the most powerful country the world has ever known. Our economy was thriving, we had the most powerful military in the world. And both Germany and Japan ended up as future American allies.

Anything done differently would have had different results- and they might have been worse.

With that I leave the FDR haters to spew forth again about how much they hate the guy who led America to victory in WW2.

 

[bodecea]

Of course, the GOP was heeping praise on the European fascists and selling scrap metal to that Japanese.

 

[regent]

So did America and it's allies win or lose WWII? Sure gets confusing.

 

[rightwinger]

Really? With Germany occupying Western Europe, do you think he could have politely asked them to leave? Give me a date of when you think the Nazis would have just packed up and gone home

After losing tens of million of people, you think Stalin was going to just go home and surrender his captured territory?

Huh? We're talking about early 1943, when the Germans still held Eastern Europe. If FDR had assured the German resistance that he would allow them to set up a non-Nazi government in exchange for killing Hitler and overthrowing the Nazis, and if the resistance had killed Hitler and seized the reigns of government later that year, the vast majority of Eastern Europe would have been spared Soviet tyranny and millions of lives would have been saved, including the lives of several million Jews.

By mid-1942, most German Wermacht generals were fed up with Hitler's catastrophically bad micromanagement of the war. If the resistance had killed Hitler, deposed the Nazis, and set up a non-Nazi and U.S.-recognized government, Stalin would not have dared to continue the war on the Eastern Front but would have felt compelled to stand down.

And if the Nazis had crushed the German resistance?

Early 1943, Hitler was very popular
What would make you think the German people would support an overthrow?

You still haven’t answered what would happen to the death camps after your surrender