So do you think that Hitler rage called Tojo on December 8th 1941 and said "I told you to attack the USSR not the USA!"

Tojo probably hadn't put his glasses on when he got the order.

http://static.comicvine.com/uploads/...6621-tojo2.jpg
"SR? Chikushō!"

Well not to be blunt but the cause of WWII....
http://i2.kym-cdn.com/photos/images/...29/9189283.jpg

Well, in Doctor Who, Hitler is both possessed by an alien (until Dunkirk) and encouraged by the Doctor to persevere after the Munich pustch, so you could be on to something.

http://www.forumsig.org/images/smili...pic-929432.gif

We are talking about historical facts, not about movies.

Wait, now you want to switch to historical facts? Topic complete. :cool:

Could it be ??
That WW2 was just an episode of a conflict between the UK and Germany for world dominance that started with the German unification in 1870 :hmmm:

Just look at it, WWI started due to colonial tensions and an industrial age arms race which peaked* in 1914-1918 and then reached a conclusion in 1945 when Germany and Britain both lost to the USSR and USA.


*peaked as when the bubble finally burst, WW2 was the peak of death and destruction

1871.:know:

After Sedan it was just a matter of signing the papers and placing the crown :03:

You could argue that way, although I'd slip France in there too, after all, one of the few things that Fahn has got right in this thread is when he pointed out the British and French rivalry. Before the unification of Germany the biggest threat to British dominance was France and vice versa, but Germanys sudden unification and crash course in industrialisation, not to mention its desire to try and get its own piece of the colonial pie despite arriving to the party when it had pretty much ended.

I remember a while ago I had a thought, that some wars can be seen as the end of empires, the First World War was definitely the end of Great Britains empire, although it took until the end of the Second World War for it to really start collapsing. Before that, one could say that the Napoleonic wars curbed the era of French domination, and the Thirty Years War saw the end of Spanish and Italian dominance which had risen during the Renaissance.

Didn't they end their rivalry earlier after the Crimean war?

They ended mutual hatred.
Rivalry persisted to 1914 but the more Germany grew, the more the rivalry got friendly.

France had a large colonial empire and the British were somewhat threatened by it, while Germany had a sausage factory in Tanganyika. I think they saw Germany capable of taking on the Royal navy more than France and Germany being capable of forcing France to cede colonial territory to further threaten Britain.
I may contradict myself here but I hope you got the idea.

?

I tend to agree with you, except on the world dominance. No nation has ever claimed to rule the world.

And about WW1, the panslavisme was the true origin of it (I have also documents about that).

Panslavism.
Do tell.
I'm a slav and I really want to hear about his one.

Unofficially you could say that the rivalry ended after the Napoleonic wars, but it wasn't put on to paper until the signing of the Entente Cordiale in 1904. The Cordiale probably would have been signed earlier but we were too busy arguing over who got what in Africa, we did dabble briefly with the idea of joining the Triple Alliance with Germany but in the end sided with France.
Then, of course there was the Russio-Japanese war which involved an ally from both France and Britain going to war with the other, which should have resulted in a war between France and Britain, but both of them decided that such a war would just strengthen Germany and so signed the Entente Cordiale to make sure that such a thing did not happen.

OK, give me your mail adress, and I will send you the documents (in french).

Or maybe should I make them public ? Oh, Sailor Steve, I think we need another thread, haha !

Make them public. In English.

Tell me, would you consider the atrocites committed at Oradour-sur-Glane in June 44 to be a part of post-war propaganda?

Let me first focus on the thread's subject : the origins and responsibilities of WWII.