EDITORS' CORNER
Key Takeaways
- Cornell professor David Collum controversially suggested the U.S. should have allied with Hitler against Stalin during WWII, a claim he shared in a recent interview with Tucker Carlson.
- Critics like National Review's Rich Lowry argue that such an alliance would have legitimized Nazi territorial gains and potentially resulted in a more powerful adversary than the Soviet Union.
- Collum's assertions about American military decisions and the Holocaust are described as historically inaccurate, with Lowry emphasizing the moral and practical implications of siding with the Nazis.
OPINION/ANALYSIS
One of my favorite literary genres is alternative history, stories that typically alter a pivotal moment in time and pontificate on what could have happened as a result.
As you’d probably expect, some of the most popular tales involve the Axis winning World War II (“The Man in the High Castle,” “Fatherland“), and the South defeating the North in the Civil War (“Guns of the South“).
These are supposed to be thought-provoking, but they are fiction. Unfortunately, there are plenty of supposedly educated people out there who’ll try to convince you that certain historical truths are anything but.
For example, around every Aug. 6 people pop out of the woodwork to declare the U.S. dropping the atomic bomb on Hiroshima (and later, Nagasaki) was totally unnecessary. The arguments often are followed by cherry-picked facts and selected opinions.
At least in the matter of The Bomb, there is a distinct moral argument one can make against its first wartime use.
Which brings us to a Cornell chemistry professor.
According to his faculty page, David Collum researches “how aggregation and solvation dictate the reactivity and selectivity of organolithium and organosodium compounds commonly used by synthetic chemists in both academia and the pharmaceutical industry.”
That esoterica aside, Collum has some interesting thoughts about World War II, the most disturbing of which is that the U.S. should have sided with Hitler against Stalin.
He recently shared this (and other thoughts) with former Fox News Channel host Tucker Carlson on his new interview network. (Another recent Tucker guest, podcaster Darryl Cooper, also had some rather, er, “interesting” thoughts on WWII.)
“Well, it turns out, I think the story we got about World War II was all wrong,” Collum told Carlson. “[W]e should have been, one can make the argument, we should have sided with Hitler and fought Stalin. Patton said that. And maybe there wouldn’t have been a Holocaust, right?
“You know, but Stalin was awful by any metric and we weren’t his ally. The story is that there were a few missing American soldiers at the end of World War II in Russian territory. 15 to 20,000 were missing. And we left them there.”
Sadly, Carlson did not even attempt to push back against these claims. In fact, he responded “I think that’s right” to Collum’s assertion about how we got the “story” of WWII all wrong.
National Review’s Rich Lowry does a masterful job shredding Collum’s contentions. First, when should the U.S. have formed the alliance with the Nazis? After the invasion of “Czechoslovakia in March 1939, the invasion of Poland in September 1939, the invasion of Denmark and Norway in April 1940, the next month’s Blitzkrieg in the West, or the Battle of Britain beginning that summer?”
Any of these might have been problematic, of course, since at the time Germany had a non-aggression pact with the USSR.
Lowry says the most opportune time for the U.S. to jump in on behalf of the Third Reich would have been the beginning of Operation Barbarossa, Germany’s surprise invasion of the Soviet Union in June of 1941.
But at the time, it sure didn’t seem like the Nazis needed any U.S. help, “put[ting] aside the moral question of opportunistically joining an attack that was conceived from the beginning as a war of annihilation.”
What’s more, allying with Hitler would have meant “ceding to the Nazis all that they had grabbed in Western and Central Europe and — assuming the war in Russia would have gone better for them — Ukraine and swaths of the western Soviet Union.”
Such a Third Reich “would have inevitably become an even more formidable adversary than the Soviet Union ever proved to be,” Lowry argues.
Lowry also corrects Collum’s other “jaw-dropping idiocies”: General Patton did not want to ally with Hitler (he wanted to go after the USSR after defeating Hitler); it is “rank nonsense” that the U.S. left behind up to 20,000 POWs in the USSR after the war; it is a “witless conspiracy theory” that the U.S. knew in advance about Pearl Harbor; and lastly, how in the world would a U.S.-Germany alliance prevent the Holocaust (“never mind that German forces were slaughtering Jews as early as the invasion of Poland”)?
Since we’re talking about alternate history here, allow me to posit a scenario much more likely than Collum’s had the U.S. allied with Hitler: Philip Roth’s 2004 novel “The Plot Against America.”
In the book, the Hitler-sympathizing Charles Lindbergh ends up winning the 1940 presidential race. He signs treaties with Germany and Japan pledging not to interfere in their empires’ expansions, but most sinister are the machinations of the new U.S. “Office of American Absorption” which, among other things, takes young, urban Jewish boys from their homes to spend time in rural areas in order to “Americanize” them.
In a time when modern conservatives are labeled “Nazis” over the silliest of perceived offenses (ironically, Roth himself isn’t beyond such), the last thing the Right needs is the granting of a microphone to quirks like Collum. Shame on Tucker.
