Pat Buchanan, Propagandist for Adolf Hitler

Pat Buchanan has written a history-blind piece which paints Adolf Hitler as reluctantly leading his nation into war.

Dday has a personal smackdown:

In 1939, in a small town named Averduct on the German-Polish border, practically every member of my family was rounded up by Nazi authorities, herded into a local synagogue, and burned alive inside. This would fall in Buchanan's revisionism as part of the supposedly honest and forthright effort by Hitler to annex Danzig and restore the German homeland (hey, Hitler just wanted some Lebensraum - why not let him annex whatever he decided was part of Germany, right? Don't you want to save lives?). But my dead ancestors didn't live in Danzig (now Gdansk). They had nothing to do with such a conflict. Maybe that was the work of a few bad apple Nazis acting alone. That and the other 6 million incidents.

So does Fixer:

I learned about the rise and fall of the Nazis as close to first hand as someone can while not being alive and living in Germany at the time. I heard the stories from Germans who were virulently against Hitler (they even wrote a book about it - Hauenstein gegen Hitler). I know, from people who witnessed first hand, the horrors and atrocities committed in the name of the fascist leadership. I know what they did to resist, to save lives when it seemed the rest of their nation was in the tank for the Nazis.

Hitler himself came to deliver a speech in my town and none of the townspeople showed up (they all went into their houses and drew the shutters), the Nazis having to bus people in from other places to have a crowd for der Fuehrer to address. The people of my town were some of the first in Germany to see American troops (we're 10 minutes from the French border) and greeted them like liberators. From the time I can remember, I was taught how to spot a fascist in seconds by their words and deeds. It's why I'm so anti-'conservative'. The only difference between them and the Nazis is their intensity. I could write 20 pages on the similarities.

Even worse, to my mind, is Buchanan's pathetic attempt to blame the death camps of the Holocaust on the British and the French, for, in his mind, if they had not stood up for Poland, then there would have been far less Jews for the Germans to kill. As DCap noted, the Germans were happily using small arms to massacre Jews until it came to pass that there were so many Jews to kill that they had to adopt industrial-type means of slaughtering because rifle fire was too inefficient.

Don't hold your breath waiting for the Right to denounce Buchanan as a Nazi sympathizer.