BHR-137

Brit-Am Historical Reports (5 December 2016, 5 Kislev, 5777)

Contents:
1. What year did Great Britain effectively stop being a superpower?
2.  General Montgomery and the Invasion of France after D-Day
Did General Montgomery ever win a battle through any other tactics than attrition with superior numbers?
3. Will France ever have a king/queen again?
4. Major Jewish Group: By Threatening to Prosecute Holocaust Scholar, Poland Attempting to 'Rewrite History Through a Political Lens'  by Barney Breen-Portnoy
5. Notes on the Nazis, Germany, and Christianity by Yair Davidiy
(a) What Percentage of Germans Were Nazi-sympathizers before 1933?
(b) Social Class Considerations.
(c) Christians and the Nazis.
(1) Catholics
(2)  Calvinists
(3) Lutherans
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1. What year did Great Britain effectively stop being a superpower?
https://www.quora.com/What-year-did-Great-Britain-effectively-stop-being-a-superpower/answer/Dan-Holliday
I've read it was 1914, 1918, 1939,1945,1946, and 1956 with the sued canal crisis. So which year was it

Dan Holliday, I read.
1945. Within a few months of the war's end, Britain had decommissioned a lot of ships and rolled most of its men in uniform back into civilian life. One might be tempted to say 1947, when India gained independence. But that's a hard argument to make. In 1945, Britain needed to negotiate how it would pay its debt to the US, India, Canada and Australia. It was so hefty that the empire was all but dismantled.
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2. General Montgomery and the Invasion of France after D-Day
Did General Montgomery ever win a battle through any other tactics than attrition with superior numbers?
Graeme Shimmin, Amateur military historian.
https://www.quora.com/
Extracts:

General Montgomery was in command of the entire western allied force that landed in Normandy on D-Day. And this huge endeavour was based on a plan originally produced by General Frederick Morgan, but altered substantially by General Montgomery.

D-Day and the subsequent Normandy Campaign up to the approach to the Rhine were not battles of attrition, and for much of the period the Allies didn't have superior numbers on the ground, though they did have naval and air supremacy.

The initial landing was not a battle of attrition, it was an air and seaborne invasion, using all the available power of the Western Allies.

There was then a period which could to an extent be called a battle of attrition but was really more a consolidation as the Allied force seized enough territory to build up a force capable of breaking out and defeating the German Army.

The American part of the force seized the Cotentin Peninsula, including the vital port of Cherbourg, while the Canadians advanced past Bayeux and the British attacked Caen. Parts of the advance were not rapid, but that's due to two factors: the terrain, which is not at all suited to 'blitzkrieg' and the Germans. We need remember that these were very good troops: well equipped and well led veterans. And during much of this period the forces available to Germany to oppose the landing outnumbered the Allied forces on the ground (though many were not committed, due to the Allied deception plan, which again is not indicative of an unimaginative, war of attrition mind-set).

The British/Canadian/Polish force then drew the bulk of the German armoured divisions onto their wing of the battle with a series of attacks that could be described as a battle of attrition, but again we need to give the credit for slowing the advance to the people it belongs to, the Germans, who committed the bulk of their armour to stopping the advance in that sector as it seemed to be the most dangerous.

And while the British, Canadians and Poles pinned the Germans, the American wing of the army was preparing to break out, which it duly did in Operation Cobra - leading to the closing of the Falaise Gap, the total collapse of German resistance, the liberation of France, and Allied forces advancing at blitzkrieg-plus speeds.

General Montgomery remained in command of the entire Allied Force on the ground in France until the 1st September when General Eisenhower took command of the by now much expanded Allied force.

During the entire period of the invasion and liberation of France, General Montgomery faced some of the most difficult challenges a military commander ever has to deal with, including:

An airborne and seaborne invasion.
A hard slog battle through difficult terrain.
An immense logistical build up 'race'.
Several hard-fought armoured battles.
An encirclement battle.
Exploitation and blitzkrieg-style advance.

That the invasion and liberation of France succeeded should be credited to the entire Allied armed forces, but General Montgomery played a key role and played it well.
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3. Will France ever have a king/queen again?
https://www.quora.com/Will-France-ever-have-a-king-queen-again/answer/Jim-Wayne-6
Jim Wayne

Among the reasons France will probably not re-establish a monarchy is that they have three different families who can put in a legitimate claim to it, represented by three different royal pretenders. A royal pretender is a person with a legitimate claim to a throne that is either already occupied (Perkin Warbeck and Lambert Simnel were pretenders to the throne of Henry VII of England), or to a throne that has been abolished, as that of France has.

The Orleans family, a branch of the Bourbons, has this guy, who is the descendant of the last king of France:

The Bourbon family has this guy, who is a descendant of Louis XVI:

And the Bonaparte family has this guy, who is a descendant of the last Emperor of France, Napoleon III:

Even prior to World War I, the three families contended for the nonexistent throne, and had organizations within France to back them up. These were formidable enough that the Republic banned any pretender to the throne from entering the borders of France. By the end of World War II, enthusiasm for royalty had diminished to such a degree that the ban was rescinded.
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4. Major Jewish Group: By Threatening to Prosecute Holocaust Scholar, Poland Attempting to 'Rewrite History Through a Political Lens'
 by Barney Breen-Portnoy
https://www.algemeiner.com/2016/11/02/major-jewish-group-by-threatening-to-prosecute-holocaust-scholar-poland-attempting-to-rewrite-history-through-a-political-lens/
Extracts:

By threatening to prosecute a prominent Holocaust scholar for claiming that Poles killed more Jews during World War II than they did Germans, the Polish government is 'apparently attempting to intimidate researchers and to rewrite history through a political lens,' an official with a leading US-based Jewish human rights organization said in a statement on Tuesday.

Mark Weitzman, the director of government affairs for the Simon Wiesenthal Center, was referring to the case of Polish-born American historian Jan Tomasz Gross, who is facing a renewed investigation by a Polish state prosecutor for the alleged crime,  punishable by up to three years in prison, of 'publicly insulting the nation.'

In an interview with The Algemeiner in August, renowned antisemitism expert Manfred Gerstenfeld said there was no doubt that Poles have not yet come to terms with their country's Holocaust history.

'On one hand, Poles saved Jews,' Gerstenfeld said. 'On the other hand, they killed Jews. The Jews were put in ghettos. Jews fled from the ghettos, and some of those Jews fought with the resistance, and others were murdered by the resistance or delivered to the Germans.'                                                                                                                                

The issue of the murder of Jews by Poles was first focused on by Gross a decade and a half ago, with his publication of Neighbors: The Destruction of the Jewish Community in Jedwabne, Poland. The book details a July 1941 incident in which at least 340 Polish Jews were murdered by a group of non-Jewish Poles.

Since the publication of that book, Gerstenfeld said, Gross has found evidence that the Jedwabne massacre was   'not the exception.' 

'There were massive killings, of which we do not know the number, of Jews by Poles,' Gerstenfeld said. 'The Poles have not faced up to their history and they have not been able to disprove what Gross has said.'
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5. Notes on the Nazis, Germany, and Christianity by Yair Davidiy
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(a) What Percentage of Germans Were Nazi-sympathizers before 1933?

The degree of support the Nazis received from the German people at different stages before and during WW2 is a matter for discussion. Here we consider how much support they enjoyed just before taking control.
 There was another party, the German National People's Party (DNVP) usually referred to as simply the Nationalists.  The Nationalists  were a smaller, more conservative, more respectable party than the Nazis. They were strong mainly in Protestant East Germany. They were also against the Jews. Nationalist propaganda as far as the Jews are considered was not more moderate than that of the Nazis.Unlike the Nazis however hatred of the Jews however was not necessarily their main consideration.]
Separate elections were held for the presidency in March 1932. Hitler personally received 36.8% of the vote which was not enough to give him the post. There was a run -off election  in April 1932 in which Hindenburg won with 53% of the vote thanks to support from Catholics, socialists and liberals though he himself despised them. Hindenburg was an old-style aristocratic militarist who opposed Hitler more out of personal antipathy than ideology.
Federal elections were held in Germany on 6 November 1932: Nazis 33.09%, Nationalists 8.34%, together 41. 43%.
Social Democrats 20.3%, Communists  16.86 %,  Centre Party (Catholics) 11.93%.
 Most of the other smaller parties appear to have been anti-Jewish to some degree or other.  The Nazis and their sympathizers therefore had a little bit less than 50% of the votes.
Hitler gained power when the Nationalists and Centre part turned themselves over to him. 
In January 1933, Adolph Hitler became Chancellor of Germany. He consolidated his gains in March 1933. At first he was merely the senior member of a coalition but he soon managed to arrogate to himself absolute power and make himself dictator.  Evidence indicates that support for the Nazis INCREASED throughout Germany prior to WW2 due to the Nazi success in increasing employment, bettering social conditions, re-armament, retaking control of the Ruhr and the Rhineland, unification with Austria, and overtaking and dismembering Czechoslovakia, etc.
See Also:
What percentage of German people voted for Hitler prior to him coming to power? by Kenneth Reese
https://www.quora.com/What-percentage-of-German-people-voted-for-Hitler-prior-to-him-coming-to-power/answer/Kenneth-Reese
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(b) Social Class Considerations.

In Berlin it is claimed that more Jews were saved than in any other city. Nevertheless on the whole East Germans and Ost Germans from outside of Germany (Poland, Lithuania, etc) were worse than the others.
Amongst the aristocracy and the officer class there were those who despised Hitler but still served him faithfully.
The petit bourgeoise (minor middle class) were often faithful Nazis. Working class people were less so, especially in the west.
After 1933, business people especially those who bought up expropriated Jewish businesses etc helped consolidate support for Nazism.
So too, German lawyers, judicial workers,  and doctors benefited from the removal of Jewish competition and were often firm Nazi supporters.
German academics and teachers were imbued with Darwinism and old-time racial notions that they considered to be scientifically acceptable. They were overwhelmingly fanatical Nazis.
Many leading Nazis were sexual perverts and criminal types. They still are.
Big business and German banks also backed the Nazi enterprise. So did Henry Ford in the USA.
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(c) Christians and the Nazis.

(1) Catholics
In the 1930s, Catholics constituted a third of the population of Germany.  The Catholic areas of Germany were the least Nazi though many leading Nazis were of the Catholic Faith.
[It may be that the Catholic areas of Germany were of different ethnic origins than the Protestant ones?]
During WW2, in Germany thousands of Catholic clergy were incarcerated. In Poland tens of thousands of Catholic clergy were killed in an attempt to wipe out the Catholic Faith in that country.
Nevertheless, at the end of the War Vatican personnel with apparent connivance from the Pontiff ran "rat-lines" enabling Nazi War criminals to find safe havens in Spain, and Latin America, and elsewhere.
The attitudes of Catholics in  other countries seems to have reflected the ethnicity of the peoples involved more than their faith, e.g. in Belgium they were often pro-Jewish but in Lithuania they were pro-Nazi.
Nuns seem to have been more helpful towards Jews than priests and monks were.

(2)  Calvinists
Calvinists including Huguenots in France and Calvinist offshoots in the Netherlands could also be anti-Jewish BUT on the whole they were much, much more likely to sympathize with the Jews and to help save them.

(3) Lutherans
Lutherans in Germany seem to have been much more pro-Nazi than the others though there may have been exceptions.