User talk:Intelligent Mr Toad

Messenger and von Rundstedt

Hi. Looks like a nice re-write. I've a request re the Messenger edition you're using. The article was listing a Brassey's/ ISBN 978-0-08-036707-1 edition as further reading but you seem to have a Pen and Sword Books edition. Could you please give the ISBN of your edition so that the page numbers are will be sure to match your edition? The cite definition is now in the Bibliography section. And remove Brassey's, of course. Thanks, Br'er Rabbit (talk) 03:55, 14 June 2012 (UTC)

Thanks; I thought it might be a later edition. Br'er Rabbit (talk) 04:09, 14 June 2012 (UTC)

Hi, again. I saw your other comment; we've met before. I've had other accounts (we got along fine, as I recall). Best wishes, Br'er Rabbit (talk) 13:44, 17 June 2012 (UTC)

Beck

Dear Mr. Toad. Thanks for the advice, through to be frank with you, there are few things in the article dealing with Rundstedt pre-1940 career that I would prefer to see phrased somewhat differently. But for the moment, I'll leave that alone, and perhaps we can have a dicussion about that later. On Beck, at the risk of sounding repetitive, I really don't think that the term "active opponent" is a correct one for Beck in early 1938. There has been a great deal of nonsense written about Beck in the 1930s, which been mostly caused by the fact that people are assuming that what Beck's views about the regime in the 1940s were the same in the 1930s. A perfect example of what I'm talking about is Patricia Meehan's book The Unnecessary War, which presents the thesis that the Nazis were a small criminal gang that the vast majority of Germans wanted to overthrow, and it was all the fault of the British that they didn't. Apparently Whitehall just failed to give the necessary encouragement that would had allowed an anti-Nazi putsch to succeed-which is an odd claim given that Meehan insists that the heroes in her book were motivated by the highest possible moral motives, which makes one wonder why they needed the right signal from London to get them to overthrow the regime. Just ignoring Meehan's preposterous thesis for the moment, she presents the men involved in impossibly idealised terms, as pure and noble in a way that nobody can ever be in real life. On Beck, she claims that he was opposed to the Nazi regime and aggression right from the get-go, which does beg the question: if that was the case, then what did Beck think he was doing working as hard as possible to build the Nazi regime's war machine? The general quality of Meehan's book can be seen that is a question that she does even pose, let alone answer. That's a wider point that can be applied to all of Beck's fans.

What did Beck actively oppose prior to 1938? Nothing. He loyally served the regime, working as hard as possible to create Hitler's war machines. He never said a word of protest in either public or private against the destruction of democracy, the concentration camps, the anti-Semitic laws, etc. On the contrary, Beck approved of all those things. In September 1930, when the Nazis made their electoral breakthrough in the Reichstag elections of that year, Beck threw a party to celebrate. Later that month, at the trial of two of Beck's junior officers who tried to set up an illegal N.S.D.A.P. cell in the Reichswehr, Beck tesified in their defense, describing the accursed in glowing terms, and coming very close to endorsing the N.S.D.A.P. When Hitler finally did come to power in January 1933: "I have wished for years for the political revolution, and now my wishes have come true. It is the first ray of hope since 1918" (May, Ernest Strange Defeat page 35.). If Beck was such an opponent of the regime, then why was he appointed Chief of the Truppenamt/General Staff, and just why did he accept? If Beck really didn't like that regime, why didn't he just retire than go serving it. Of course, it could be claimed that he stayed on to try to overthrow it, but he didn't nothing of sort for the next five years. My understanding of the Third Reich is that people who were "active opponents" of Hitler went off to concentration camps, and not given high military positions like Chief of the General Staff. Are we really to believe that Hitler was so daft as to give an "active opponent" control of a key position like Chief of the General Staff?

Through it is true that at times that Beck clashed with Hitler over the Army's "state within a state" position and foreign policy, but turning to the latter first, that can in no way be seen as questioning Hitler's right to rule, as some of Beck's fans like Meehan try to claim. By the same logic, the frequent clashes between Churchill and his generals during World War II must had meant that much of the British Army leadership was committed to overthrowing Churchill. Moreover, were Beck's protests against foreign policy actually a form of loyalty? Beck made it quite clear that he approved of Hitler's plans for aggression and expansion, and what he was concerned about was a "premature war", namely that Hitler would start a war before Germany was fully rearmed. What Beck was stating in his endless memoranda was something along the lines "Yes, let's start a war, but let's just wait until we are fully rearmed before doing it". Is that not a form of loyalty rather than disloyalty? Trying to save Hitler from himself would suggest that this was a man who was deeply committed to the survival of the Nazi regime. Turning to the former, defending the Army' "state within a state" position was a just a turf battle in that people like Beck greatly prized the traditional institutional autonomy of the German Army, but again that he was not questioning the right of the regime to rule. On the contrary, Beck like everybody else in the Army had in the 1920s become convinced that to win the next war, Germany would have to become the Wehrstaat (military state); a latter-day Sparta; a totalitarian, militarized state that would ruthlessly crush all dissent and moblized German society for total war. Given these beliefs, it is no surprise that Beck should welcome Nazi Germany. What Beck fail to recognise until it was very late in the day was that a totalitarian state would also subject the military to its control.

Finally, at no point before 1938 is there any sign that Beck was interested in overthrowing the Nazis. Even in 1938, Beck at first believed that the rush to war with Czechoslovakia was caused by a bad command system, in which Hitler was getting bad advice from people like Keitel, and his solution was to reorganise the command structure so that Hitler would get advice from people like himself. It was not until May 1938 until Beck recognised that the rush to war was coming from Hitler. Even then, Beck made it very clear that he supported the idea of aggression against Czechoslovakia, and his only problem was with the timing of the said war. Beck believed that an attack on Czechoslovkia would cause a war with France, and probably also Britain, and that Germany was not ready for such a war. In Beck's viewpoint, the best time for attacking Czechoslovkia would be in 1943, and had Hitler listened to his advice, Beck would had been happy to stay on as Chief of the General Staff. Beck only embraced the idea of a pustch in July 1938 as part of a desperate attempt to stop a war that he believed that Germany was going to lose. Even then, what he wanted was a "housecleaning" of the regime, not the overthrowal of Hitler. Beck believed that Hitler was essentially a force for the good, and wanted him to stay on; all that Beck wanted to do was get rid of some of the people like Himmler whom Beck believed were giving Hitler bad advice. It was not until September 1938 that Beck in a half-hearted sort of way decided that it was also necessary to overthrow Hitler. There is a quite brilliant German historian by the name of Klaus-Jürgen Müller, whom I would very much recommend reading. In particular, there are two essays by Müller dealing with the planned putsch of 1938 that I would highly recommend: namely "The Structure and Nature of the National Conservative Opposition in Germany up to 1940" pages 133–178 from Aspects of the Third Reich edited by H.W. Koch, Macmillan: London, 1985 and “The German Military Opposition before the Second World War” pages 61–75 from The Fascist Challenge and the Policy of Appeasement edited by Wolfgang Mommsen & Lothar Kettenacker, George Allen & Unwin: London, 1983. With Koch's book, just read the essay by Müller, and try one's best not to get offended by Koch's frankly malevolent pro-Nazi agenda. Most of, thorugh not all of the essays in Aspects of the Third Reich are good; unfortunately they were just put together by Koch, a man who was a proud Hitler Youth member in his younger days, and whose own essays are apologias for the Third Reich. Koch's agenda was to put together the best revisionist essays on the Third Reich (in the good sense of the term), then piggy-backed on to them certain obnoxious essays by himself and Ernst Nolte, where we learn such new information like the Jews declared war on Germany in 1939, thus Hitler was justified in "interning" Jews. But back to Müller. Müller divides the putsch plotters of 1938 into two camps; one fraction whom he calls the "anti-war fraction" was mainly concerned with avoiding a war in 1938 that they believe they would lose, and another fraction who he calls the "anti-Nazi fraction" who were more interested in overthrowing the Nazis. Beck belonged to the former, not the latter.

There is another German historian named Hans Mommsen, who sometimes goes way off the rails, but at other times, makes quite good points. Mommsen has written about "resistance as a process", namely that with a great many of the men involved in the 1944 putsch came to oppose the Nazi regime gradually, in stages, as part of a process that led them from being regime supporters into men working for the destruction of the regime. And moreover, there were people who started turn that road, but did not complete it (Ernst von Weizsäcker cames to mind here). I think that is an excellent way of understanding people like Beck. He started out as a supporter of the Nazi regime in 1933, and gradually over the years, become more and more disillusioned until by 1943 he was working for the overthrowal of the regime that he once so warmly supported. In other words, 1938 was the turning point, in which Beck who had been travelling down one road and turned onto another. But it was not until sometime later that Beck reached his designation of full resistance. It is wrong to claim that Beck of 1944 was the same Beck of 1938, which is a mistake that many people make. Or to give just another example; a great many of the Eastern European dissidents who were opposed to Communism started out as very ardent Communists, indeed Stalinists. Again, one can speak of in a great many of these cases, of "resistance as a process" in which these people gradually come to oppose the system they once supported. But it would be downright silly to claim that these people were always anti-Communists right from the get-go. For more information about Beck, I would recommend volume two of Ian Kershaw's biography of Hitler, Alternatives to Hitler by Hans Mommsen, and if you find in English (or German if can you read it), the biography of Beck by Müller.

I'm sorry about the length of this post, but I would just like to set out my reasons for why I believe it is wrong to be calling Beck in early 1938 an "active opponent of the regime". At most, he had a few doubts about the Nazi regime at period. I hope that I offered some convincing reasons for my viewpoint, but of course, if you think that I'm all wrong, please say so. Please accept my apologies if I came across as somewhat cranky-nothing personal, and no offense intended, but I just gotten home from another terrible day at my rotten job. I noticed your work over the years, and I think you are a force for the good around here. Please keep up the good work, and have a wonderful day! ----A.S. Brown (talk) 22:31, 15 June 2012 (UTC)

Dear Mr. Toad Thank you for your thoughful and interesting comments. Just doing things in an oppostite order, at present my biggest suggestion for improving the Rundstedt article would be mentioning the fact that he like every other senior officer in the Wehrmacht was taking huge bribes from the Nazi regime, namely 3, 000 Reichmarks/per month and an exemption from paying income tax plus a 250, 000 Reichmark cheque given as a "birthday gift" by Hitler. That is an aspect of the Wehrmacht that does get the attention it deserves (certainly not on Wikipedia where there was nothing about this until I brought it in), but it certainly goes a long way to explain why he despite having some doubts about the Nazi regime and the course it was taking, he stayed loyal to th end. For more information about this, check out the article by Norman Goda "Black Marks: Hitler's Bribery of his Senior Officers During World War II" pages 413–452 from The Journal of Modern History, Volume 72, Issue # 2, June 2000, which is reprinted on pages 96–137 in Corrupt Histories edited by Emmanuel Kreike and William Chester Jordan, Toronto: Hushion House, 2005. Rundstedt is mentioned as one of the bigger bribe-takers in the Wehrmacht, through also an inept one who didn't have a clue as to how to mangage his money and was urged by Hans Lammers, who ran the Konto 5 slush fund for bribing Wehrmacht officers as being an urgent need to get some investement advice. As a rule, those officers who some doubts about Hitler's leadership like Rundstedt were offered and acceptd bigger bribes than the ones who were not. That is hugely important for understanding why despite his distaste for aspects of the regime, the "old gentleman" never broke with the regime.

You are correct that just because somebody stays on does not mean that they were loyal to the regime. You are of course righg that having a position in the state apparatus could and did offer a better chance for overthrowing the regime that not having one. But one has to be careful about this-there were far too many German officials who after the war, claimed that they stayed on because they were to be "sand in the machine", namely that they wanted to sabotage the regime. A prime example would be the diplomat Curt Prufer, whose diaries show he was totally opposed to the Nazi regime and to anti-Semitism, that he only stayed as a diplomat to sabotage its evil work, and complained all the time that the only thing that kept the German people from overthowing Hitler was the Allied demand for "unconditional surrender". The only problem with Prufer's diaries is he forged them after the war. Prufer's real diaries show that he was supported the regime, that he was a nasty anti-Semitic who welcomed the news of the Holocaust, and made no mention of "unconditional surrender" as a factor keeping Hitler in power. As it was, after his death, his son found his real diaries, and there is a fascinating book called Rewriting History: The Original and Revised World War II Diaries of Curt Prufer, Nazi Diplomat, where the real and forged diaries are compared to side by side. Let make this clear, I don't disagree with you, but one has to be really careful when assessing these claims that somebody stayed on to work for the overthrow of the regime because there were thousands of Curt Prufers out there. Curt Pfuer just got caught out, and only then because his children hated him because he abandoned them and their mother for a younger woman.

Having said all that much, I don't think that Beck stayed on to being "sand in the machine". Like you said, it really was not until 1938 that Beck started to get estranged from the regime. Anyhow, working very hard to build Hitler's war machine is not really compatible with being opposed to Hitler. I understand your point about Beck being opposed to certain policies without necessarily being opposed to the regime per se, but I think that the term "active opponent" is too confusing. One would have to stop the article, and offer a full exposition of what is being meant here, which might getting slightly off-topic. Ian Kershaw, a historian that I respect very much, would wrote that there were three sorts of non-conformity in the Third Reich, namely:

• 1) Dissent, which would doing things that the regime didn't want you to do like listening to an illegal jazz record or the BBC.

2) Opposition, which was being opposed to certain policies while accepting the legitimacy of the regime. Something like the Confessing Church fits in here, which was opposed to the imposition of the "Aryan paragraph" on Jewish converts to Lutheranism while at the same time making it very clear that they accepted the Nazi regime and supported the all of the anti-Semitic laws. 3) Resistance, which were people who rejected the regime root and branch, and were working for its overthrowal. At most, I would consider for most of 1938 to be in opposition rather resistance. The "anti-war" group to which Beck belonged to were more concerned about stopping a war that they believed Germany was going to lose than with overthrowing the regime. In other words, it is a certain foreign policy choice as opposed to what the regime was and was doing that motivated them. It was only later that Beck finally made the transition over to resistance. I believe that the phrase "active opponent" suggests that Beck was more in category 3 than in category 2. I appreciate and understand your point, but I'm glad that you see my reasons for why I'm opposed to using the phrase "active opponent". For once, an editor who is both intelligent and reasonable! After arguing with assorted cranks and fanatics for so many years, it is so refreshing to talk to somebody who is reasonable.

You did a very good job on German resistance, Mr. Carr I presume. The historiography section is my work, which I did because another editor on the talk page called for it. The historiography sections on Wikipedia are discouraged, which I for one think is a bad policy. Historians do not agree on a great many issues, and that is especially the case with German resistance, like do you define as resistance? There are some historians who claim that anything that was contrary to the Nazi regime was "resistance". Personally, I don't think that is right. Is listening to the BBC late at night really in the same category as putting a bomb in Hitler's conference room? Anyhow, a great many of the people who listened to BBC were not necessarily opposed to the regime; they were just curious about what was going on on the other side of the hill, in the same way that most of the people in Britain who listened to Lord Hee-Haw were curious about what was happening on the other side of the hill. But there are a great many historians who do claim that, and it is rather POV-ish just to exclude what a great many historians are saying just because you think that they are wrong. Anyhow, when I was a history student, I was always told to start one's paper with a summary of the historiography, so that is a habit that I have picked up. Moreover, the fact that historians usually have differing interpretations of the same events and people is something that makes nonsense of Wikipedia's NPOV rule. In the sense that I use the interpretation of historians that seem to make the most sense to me while the rejecting the ones that don't, then I am guilty of POV-pushing. But I don't know what else to do. That book I already mentioned, The Unnecessary War presents the thesis that most people in Germany wanted to overthrow the Nazis, that the failures of all the attempts to do so was caused by British officials not offering enough support, and the said British officals after the war then re-wrote history to falsely claim that most Germans supported National Socialism as part of a plot to cover up their failure. It is clearly a nonsense thesis, but if somebody really wanted to, you could use The Unnecessary War to prove that it was the British Foreign Office who caused the failure of the July 20th putsch, and that the widespread belief that most Germans supported the Nazis is a lie created by Sir John Wheeler-Bennett to cover up his failure to support the July 20th putsch. To be fair, that is a very extreme example (almost all historians reject Meehan's thesis-I first hear it about as an undergrad when one of my professors went apoplectic with rage after a TV documentary based on Meehan's book was aired), but there are sorts of things where historians do have very different interpretations. Wikipedia would actually be more honest if there were more historiography sections and articles made it clear what historians' interpretations that they were following and why. That is something that we never happen, but I wish it would. Which is brings us back to German resistance. It is probably POV-pushing to a certain extent to be using Kershaw's three categories, but I would like it if that were included in the intro, and then if that were used as criterion in the article to break things up. To use an example, Bishop Galen's protests against the T4 program should properly be seen as opposition rather than resistance. In the same sermons blasting the T4 program, Galen also made clear his support for the Nazi regime and went out of his way to praise Germany's genocidal war against the Soviet Union. That is not resistance, through I know that there are a great historians who presumably did not read the full texts of Galen's sermons who say otherwise. Those historians who classify Galen as a part of the opposition rather than resistance to Hitler are more closer to the mark, in my books. I suppose that is POV-pushing, but it seems to be me, to be more accurate. Almost everybody who writes about the Third Reich wants it to be all black and white with heroes and villians. History is not like that, and there all sorts of shades of grey. Is Galen a hero for denouncing the T4 program, or a villian for not denouncing the Holocaust? Again, I favoring a certain historical intrepration over another in the sense that I would put Galen in the grey rather in the white, which is POV-pushing in a certain way, but the people who drafted the NPOV rule were clearly not familiar with history when they did it. But enough of my musings. Thank you for your interesting and polite response, and please have a wonderful day!--A.S. Brown (talk) 22:50, 16 June 2012 (UTC)

Referendums in Australia

The paradox of the upcoming Aboriginal referendum is that it has to be progressive enough to pass in the big states but at the same time, conservative enough to pass in the small states which have a built-in veto in any referendum which cannot be removed without their consent. Paul Austin (talk) 06:47, 19 June 2012 (UTC)

Unpleasant edit summary. Runstadt article.

"No, I don't like any of those changes. Please leave it until I have finished the rewrite, then you can mess it up any way you want."

This is not WP:AGF nor WP:CIVIL. You do not WP:OWN the article. Please conduct yourself in a less obnoxious manner. (Hohum ^@) 11:25, 15 July 2012 (UTC)

Branch Stacking

You have my total support in your statement that branch stacking is an indigenous Australian term. A WP administrator did a great deal of work on this topic, but unfortunately he rid the article of all references, which is unfortunate. There are no Victorian references, for example. The references that were deleted ought to be looked at and perhaps at least the more important and largely cited references ought to be re-instated. The WP administrator has issues with two of the authors, both of whom he claims are biased.58.170.244.216 (talk) 07:41, 8 September 2012 (UTC)

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Precious

good explanations
Thank you for quality contributions and articles, such as Tom Dougherty (union official) and Gerd von Rundstedt, and for looking intelligently at the essential, providing good explanations, - you are an awesome Wikipedian!

--Gerda Arendt (talk) 08:39, 18 May 2013 (UTC)